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A New Light on the Dramatic Works of
Thomas Killigrew
by
Albert Wertheim
Thomas Killigrew is best known through his career as the head of the King's Company, one of the two legitimate Restoration acting companies. Of equal importance, however, is his earlier career as a playwright. As a young man he began writing plays for the private theater audience and the court of Charles I, and continued writing them while in exile on the Continent during the Interregnum. Both the plays written for the Caroline coterie theater and the "closet" dramas written while the English theaters were closed are usually highly mannered and are clearly of limited appeal to a modern reader. The importance of Killigrew's dramatic output, however, cannot be overlooked in any cogent study of the continuity of seventeenth-century drama. In the past, proper assessment of Killigrew's plays has been hampered by the questions that surround the canon of his works and the dating of particular plays.[1] Some of these questions are engendered by the information appearing within the frontispiece engraving in the 1664 folio edition of Killigrew's Comedies and Tragedies and by the assumption that this engraving is an original portrait executed especially for that folio (Harbage, Thomas Killigrew, p. 144). The engraving is, however, based on a 1650 portrait in oils; and, through a comparison of the two portraits, the Killigrew canon can be established with certainty and his Interregnum plays dated with new accuracy and confidence.
Killigrew's eight extant plays — The Princess, The Prisoners, Claricilla, The Parson's Wedding, The Pilgrim, Cicilia and Clorinda, Thomaso, or the Wanderer, and Bellamira Her Dream — were all written before or during the Interregnum. These plays were all included within the 1664 folio, but only Claricilla and The Prisoners had enjoyed a previous joint publication in 1641.[2] The portrait engraving by William Faithorne (1616-1691) that accompanies the 1664 folio depicts Killigrew, his dog at his side, sitting at his writing table, above which hangs an oval portrait, possibly by Van Dyke, of King Charles I.[3] In the playwright's hand is a
Many of Faithorne's portrait engravings are based upon the paintings of Anthony Van Dyke, Sir Peter Lely, and other contemporary portrait painters.[4] In the case of the Thomas Killigrew portrait, we may read in small print outside the margin at the bottom right of the engravings: "W: Faithorne sculp:". At the bottom left, however, is printed the name of the original painter: "W: Sheppard pinx:". Of the painter William Sheppard (fl. 1650-1660) we know little more today than Horace Walpole did almost two centuries ago when he wrote of Sheppard, "An English artist, of whom I can find no record, but that he lived in this reign [Charles II], near the Royal Exchange, painted Thom. Killigrew with his dog, now at lord Godolphin's, and retired into Yorkshire, where he died."[5] The only fact we can now add to Walpole's scant knowledge is that Faithorne's engraving of Sir Henry Terne, an English admiral, is also based upon a William Sheppard portrait (Fagin, p. 63). Sheppard's portrait of Killigrew, now at the National Portrait Gallery in London, answers all the difficulties posed by the engraving.
Like the Faithorne copy, the Sheppard original depicts the playwright at his writing table.[6] In the painting, however, the manuscript in Killigrew's hand is not blank and the books on the table are marked from top to bottom: "CLARICILLA / THE PRISONERS / THE PRINCESSE / THE PILGRIM / THE Par WEDDING / Thō THE WANDERER / CICILIA or the REVENG". The margin of the painting cuts off the final letter of the last of these titles. Beneath these seven volumes, and separated from them by an untitled volume, is an eighth title: "EIKON BAΣΛIK".
Clearly, the problematic title The Revenge on the 1664 engraving is an alternate title for Cicilia and Clorinda, thus supporting Professor Bentley's speculation. It is also apparent that the title of the play shown on the painting as Cicilia was later expanded to Cicilia and Clorinda and that the subtitle The Revenge was dropped in favor of Love in Arms, the subtitle the play bears in the 1664 folio. Cicilia and Clorinda, or Love in Arms is a tragicomedy, and one might hazard a guess that perhaps the change in subtitle indicates that this play was originally conceived as a tragedy. The painting also suggests that Thomaso, or the Wanderer may once have borne the single title Thomaso the Wanderer. The apparent subtitle or the Polidor Dream, which appears on the right side of the manuscript in Killigrew's hand, must be part of an early version of a title for the play called in the 1664 folio Bellamira Her Dream, or The Love of Shadows, since the hero of that play is named Polidor. The fact that Killigrew is depicted at work on the first scene of this play and that all his other plays are stacked by his side in seemingly finished form suggests that Bellamira Her Dream was his last dramatic work. In any case the 1650 date on the painting and the indication that it was executed in Venice do bear out the folio title pages for Bellamira, which claim that it was written in Venice. It also supports the speculations that this play was written in 1650-1651 (Harbage, Thomas Killigrew, pp. 86-99).
Though the Sheppard portrait is an aid in dating Bellamira Her Dream with greater precision, it raises doubts about the dating of Thomaso, or the Wanderer. The left side of the manuscript Killigrew holds reads, "Killigre[w] Residen[t] for C[arolus] R[ex] in Venice 1650," and from the inscription on the arm of the chair we learn that Sheppard painted this portrait in Venice. Since Killigrew was in Venice from early in 1650 until his expulsion in June 1652, he almost certainly sat for this portrait in Venice during 1650. It is extremely curious, then, that among the pile of Killigrew's works appears Thomaso the Wanderer, which Professor Harbage has claimed as Killigrew's last play and which he has shown by irrefutable internal evidence to have been written during the spring of 1654 (Thomas Killigrew, pp. 218-19). One can only assume that Killigrew had at least begun work on this play by 1650 and that it was revised or completed in 1654. The title Thomaso the Wanderer on the 1650 painting for the play called Thomaso, or the Wanderer in the 1664 folio may perhaps be further evidence that Killigrew revised the work at a later date. Sheppard's inclusion of the word or in Cicilia or the Reveng, even at the
The appearance of Eikon Basilike underneath the pile of Killigrew's plays on the Sheppard portrait but not on the Faithorne engraving is a final, but minor, difficulty raised by the comparison of painting and engraving. It is highly unlikely that Killigrew could have been the author of this famous but anonymous volume, and its presence in the Sheppard portrait is almost certainly, along with the oval portrait of the late king, a symbol of Killgirew's royalist allegiance. The dropping of the title on the Faithorne engraving, particularly when that engraving appeared during the first years of the Restoration, remains an enigma unless one simply accounts for it, along with the failure to reproduce the writing on Killigrew's manuscript and the shortening of the play titles, as laziness on Faithorne's part.
Notes
See G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, IV (1956), 694-710; Alfred Harbage and S. Schoenbaum, Annals of English Drama 975-1700 (1964), p. 205; and Alfred Harbage, Thomas Killigrew (1930), p. 230n.
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