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The Stukeley plays: 'The Battle of Alcazar' by George Peele and 'The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley
Sir Thomas Stukeley, the notorious English courtier, pirate, adventurer and soldier, died at the Battle of Alcazar in Morocco in 1578, while serving in the army of King Sebastian of Portugal. This volume comprises the first modern-spelling, annotated edition of two plays in which he is a major George Peele's 'The Battle of Alcazar' (c.1588), and the anonymous 'Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley' (c.1596).
In his extensive introduction and commentary, Charles Edelman discusses the plays' authorship, their many textual problems, and what they reveal about Elizabethan performance practices. He also challenges most of the traditional assumptions about them. This edition shows that both works, long held to be unperformable, are instead fascinating and worthwhile representatives of the most exciting age in the history of the theatre.
In his extensive introduction and commentary, Charles Edelman discusses the plays' authorship, their many textual problems, and what they reveal about Elizabethan performance practices. He also challenges most of the traditional assumptions about them. This edition shows that both works, long held to be unperformable, are instead fascinating and worthwhile representatives of the most exciting age in the history of the theatre.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published July 22, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 4, 2026
Rating/review only for The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley. The edition is excellent, it's just that the play sucks.
Read for random play June (#3) and WOOF. Preeettyyy rough read. Act I is tolerable, in the sense that it's on par with, say Middleton's tenth best city comedy, and the first author (Edelman thinks it might be T. Heywood) is a decent dramaturge. This author also did Act III which is incredibly uneven, but at least he attempts metaphor sometimes. The bits written by the other author are more interesting, but only in a meta, editorial way (they have various textual cruxes and contain stage Irish and clearly the author's been reading his pamphlets; EXCELENT job by Edelman, by the way, tracking the contemporary sources and giving full, old-spelling quotes. LOVED that). Author 2 is terrible at writing verse and at writing drama. You can practically hear the pages creaking from how stiff everything is. Scenes 9 and 11 both have Stukeley below the walls and Harbert or his regent above. Scene 21: "Enter Muly Mahamet drawn in his chariot"; He talks a bit, a messenger comes in, then, "he leaps from his chariot" and meets with the king of Portugal, and the chariot just sits there on stage. Just so stupid man.
Overall there was potential for this to work and be funny but no. No no no. Clearly the authors were trying to follow Peele, who's following Marlowe, but Stukeley is at times a roaring boy, at times a braggart, at times a tyrant, at times a realpolitik voice of reason, and not only does it not cohere into a character but there are just better examples of all these stock types.
The text is infamous for being corrupt and Edelman persuasively talks down just how corrupt it is, but I think he's still understating the case for coherence. The Chorus says some things that don't make sense, and the play ends in a big mess chronologically. Big whoop. Similarly Edelman emends when the grammar of the text requires it, which is kind: if any lay reader stumbles into a Revels Companion Library and skips the Peele and goes straight to the Stukeley and skips all the notes, they won't be confused! But we are all big boys here, I think, and can deal with grammatical incoherence from an author so stylistically vacuous that the leading contenders for his identity are playwrights with NO surviving plays.
Anyway here's the one good excerpt (from the Heywood portion):
Read for random play June (#3) and WOOF. Preeettyyy rough read. Act I is tolerable, in the sense that it's on par with, say Middleton's tenth best city comedy, and the first author (Edelman thinks it might be T. Heywood) is a decent dramaturge. This author also did Act III which is incredibly uneven, but at least he attempts metaphor sometimes. The bits written by the other author are more interesting, but only in a meta, editorial way (they have various textual cruxes and contain stage Irish and clearly the author's been reading his pamphlets; EXCELENT job by Edelman, by the way, tracking the contemporary sources and giving full, old-spelling quotes. LOVED that). Author 2 is terrible at writing verse and at writing drama. You can practically hear the pages creaking from how stiff everything is. Scenes 9 and 11 both have Stukeley below the walls and Harbert or his regent above. Scene 21: "Enter Muly Mahamet drawn in his chariot"; He talks a bit, a messenger comes in, then, "he leaps from his chariot" and meets with the king of Portugal, and the chariot just sits there on stage. Just so stupid man.
Overall there was potential for this to work and be funny but no. No no no. Clearly the authors were trying to follow Peele, who's following Marlowe, but Stukeley is at times a roaring boy, at times a braggart, at times a tyrant, at times a realpolitik voice of reason, and not only does it not cohere into a character but there are just better examples of all these stock types.
The text is infamous for being corrupt and Edelman persuasively talks down just how corrupt it is, but I think he's still understating the case for coherence. The Chorus says some things that don't make sense, and the play ends in a big mess chronologically. Big whoop. Similarly Edelman emends when the grammar of the text requires it, which is kind: if any lay reader stumbles into a Revels Companion Library and skips the Peele and goes straight to the Stukeley and skips all the notes, they won't be confused! But we are all big boys here, I think, and can deal with grammatical incoherence from an author so stylistically vacuous that the leading contenders for his identity are playwrights with NO surviving plays.
Anyway here's the one good excerpt (from the Heywood portion):
A kingdom's thirst hath to dispense, my lord,
With any rigor or extremity,
And that which in mean men would seem a fault,
As leaning to ambition or suchlike,
Is in a king but well beseeming him.
July 13, 2023
This is a review of the Battle of Alcazar:
Strangely, the book that this play from the 1590s most reminded me of was Emma Sky's The Unravelling, about the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, because it had so many similarities: a young, inexperienced leader invading a completely unknown country, because he'd been told by an unscrupulous fantasist that everyone would come out in support the invasion, whose main justification for the action was the God was on our side, and He would sort everything out, and everything goes to shit quite quickly; and this is despite the people who understood stuff, saying "Are you sure? This looks a bit dodgy to me". And foreign rulers saying "Sure we'll support the war effort, but we've just got this other thing to do first. And this. And this. Tell you what, you go ahead, and we'll join in later".
Sure, George W Bush didn't bring boat loads of laundresses and courtesans to Iraq, and to be fair he was trying to overthrow the child-killer, as opposed to innocently supporting and trying to reinstate him (as Sebastian of Portugal was doing), and his totally inept military action didn't destroy the entire ruling class of his own country and cause civil upheaval in Europe (though Tony Blair's support for it did destroy the British Labour Party for a generation), but this play really does show that we learn absolutely nothing from history.
This is a really good Early Modern play, if one could get over the (sort of half-hearted but in a sense that makes it so much worse) racism, against the "black Moor" Muly Mahamet, who is constantly (and unnecessarily) referenced as black. Charles Edelman says George Peele (in the Revels edition, the one I read) is having a practice run for Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus (which most scholars now seem to think is at least half George Peele's work these days), but whereas Aaron is a fully rounded Machiavel (and in many ways the most coherent character in that play) Muly Mahamet is simply evil.
Still, mostly pretty darn good.
The second play, though:
This is one of those plays where, while quite good in itself, you do wonder: "Why was it so popular?" Stukeley himself, the titular hero, is a grade-A prick who, while charismatic, is a complete wanker to everyone around him, persuading his best mate to ditch his rich girlfriend so that he (Stukeley) can marry her, pay off his debts with her father's money, and then desert her two days after the wedding; he goes to Ireland for military victory and gets in a sword fight with the military governor, jeapordising England's victory; seduces a married woman into betraying her husband, and then being tricked by the biggest shit of them all, Phillip of Spain, into taking part in a clearly doomed military adventure in Morocco. There is some redemption at the end, but mercy: it comes a bit late.
Edelman has done some excellent editing, so the play rattles along, and he reckons it's by Heywood (in whole or in part), which means it's bound to have great scenes.
But Stukeley himself: arsehole.
Strangely, the book that this play from the 1590s most reminded me of was Emma Sky's The Unravelling, about the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, because it had so many similarities: a young, inexperienced leader invading a completely unknown country, because he'd been told by an unscrupulous fantasist that everyone would come out in support the invasion, whose main justification for the action was the God was on our side, and He would sort everything out, and everything goes to shit quite quickly; and this is despite the people who understood stuff, saying "Are you sure? This looks a bit dodgy to me". And foreign rulers saying "Sure we'll support the war effort, but we've just got this other thing to do first. And this. And this. Tell you what, you go ahead, and we'll join in later".
Sure, George W Bush didn't bring boat loads of laundresses and courtesans to Iraq, and to be fair he was trying to overthrow the child-killer, as opposed to innocently supporting and trying to reinstate him (as Sebastian of Portugal was doing), and his totally inept military action didn't destroy the entire ruling class of his own country and cause civil upheaval in Europe (though Tony Blair's support for it did destroy the British Labour Party for a generation), but this play really does show that we learn absolutely nothing from history.
This is a really good Early Modern play, if one could get over the (sort of half-hearted but in a sense that makes it so much worse) racism, against the "black Moor" Muly Mahamet, who is constantly (and unnecessarily) referenced as black. Charles Edelman says George Peele (in the Revels edition, the one I read) is having a practice run for Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus (which most scholars now seem to think is at least half George Peele's work these days), but whereas Aaron is a fully rounded Machiavel (and in many ways the most coherent character in that play) Muly Mahamet is simply evil.
Still, mostly pretty darn good.
The second play, though:
This is one of those plays where, while quite good in itself, you do wonder: "Why was it so popular?" Stukeley himself, the titular hero, is a grade-A prick who, while charismatic, is a complete wanker to everyone around him, persuading his best mate to ditch his rich girlfriend so that he (Stukeley) can marry her, pay off his debts with her father's money, and then desert her two days after the wedding; he goes to Ireland for military victory and gets in a sword fight with the military governor, jeapordising England's victory; seduces a married woman into betraying her husband, and then being tricked by the biggest shit of them all, Phillip of Spain, into taking part in a clearly doomed military adventure in Morocco. There is some redemption at the end, but mercy: it comes a bit late.
Edelman has done some excellent editing, so the play rattles along, and he reckons it's by Heywood (in whole or in part), which means it's bound to have great scenes.
But Stukeley himself: arsehole.
December 19, 2022
I only read the Battle and honestly I will probably never read the rest
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews