George Buck - Master of The Revels

Master of The Revels

Upon the start of the new Stuart dynasty in 1603, Buck was knighted (on 23 July) and formally received the reversion to the office of Master of the Revels with an appointment as Deputy Master, by a royal patent (on 23 June). He worked as Tilney's assistant until his predecessor's death in 1610, when Buck assumed the office. Unfortunately for posterity's knowledge of English Renaissance theatre, neither Tilney nor Buck kept the detailed records that would be produced by their successor, Sir Henry Herbert. Buck did record that he consulted Shakespeare about the authorship of one old anonymous play, George a Greene. Shakespeare could only remember that it was written by a clergyman.

The Master of the Revels was responsible for supervising and censoring the plays performed in the public theatres, and for arranging performances of those plays at Court. (Curiously, he had relatively little to do with the sumptuous performances of masques that were such noteworthy features of the Stuart court.) Scholars have disagreed about Buck's role during the years he was Tilney's assistant, 1603–10. It has been argued that Buck had no role in censoring plays prior to 1610. Yet starting in 1606, Buck licensed plays for publication, a function that had not previously been the responsibility of the Master's office. George Chapman's The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) was censored when it appeared on the stage, and caused a scandal when the players violated that censorship; Buck has been associated with the scandal, and it is certainly true that Buck licensed the publication of the censored text later in that year.

Once he assumed the full office in 1610, Buck clearly was the primary censor for public drama. The extant manuscript for The Second Maiden's Tragedy (1611) shows censorship notes in Buck's hand, as do a few other surviving manuscripts from the era, like that of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619).