AO 3/908/21-3
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Document-specific information
Date: 1636-1637
Repository: The National Archives, Kew, UK
Call number and opening: AO 3/908/21-3
Images reproduced by permission of The National Archives, London, England.
Terms of use
The National Archives give no warranty as to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for the purpose of the information provided.
Images may be used only for purposes of research, private study or education. Applications for any other use should be made to The National Archives Image Library, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU, Tel: 020 8392 5225 Fax: 020 8392 5266.
Document-specific information
Date: 1636-1637
Repository: The National Archives, Kew, UK
Call number and opening: AO 3/908/21-3
Alan H. Nelson, "Warrants from the Lord Chamberlain of the Household enclosing a schedule of plays acted at court in the year 1636–7," Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/354.
The National Archives, AO 3/908/21-3. See Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/354.
The 1636–7 Revels Office book records that the royal court witnessed eighteen plays over the Christmas season, from November 17 to February 21, including “the moore of Venice” (December 8), “hamlet” (January 24), and “the tragedie of Cesar” (January 31). These were, evidently, Shakespeare’s Othello, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar.
While most Revels accounts survive only as summaries reported in annual Exchequer rolls, original books survive for 1636–7, in addition to two earlier accounts (from 1604–5 and 1611–12). This third surviving account was made twenty years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, and nearly 14 years after Othello, Hamlet and Julius Caesar were published in the First Folio in 1623.
Written by Alan H. Nelson
Sources
N.W. Bawcutt, ed., The control and censorship of Caroline drama: the records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623-73 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Edmund K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 331-332 .
Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 200-1.
A. E. Stamp, The Disputed Revels Accounts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930).
W.R. Streitberger, ed., “Jacobean and Caroline Revels Accounts, 1603-1642,” Malone Society Collections 13 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
David Thomas, Shakespeare in the Public Records (London: H.M.S.O., 1985), 16-19.
Last updated February 1, 2020
