Date and Performance
In the 1653 Five New Plays (not to be confused with the 1659 Brome collection of the same name), each of the plays has its own title page. The title page of The Novella specifies that the drama was performed by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre in the year 1632.
One detail in the play offers insight into the functioning of the King's Men in the relevant period. In the play's final scene (if its stage directions are taken at face value), all the actors in the cast, eighteen men and boys, are onstage at once. Earlier in its history, the company generally did not mount such large productions: cast lists survive from two King's Men productions of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, one c. 1614 and the other c. 1621, and both show that the company used doubling of minor roles to stage the play with eleven actors. Other cast data from the Jacobean era (like the casts lists for early King's Men's productions of Fletcherian plays, found in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio) indicate productions of the same general proportions. Yet if the whole cast of The Novella was onstage in the final scene, doubling could not have been employed. It was in the early Caroline era that the King's Men peaked in personnel: the company had fifteen sharers in the latter 1620s, more than at any time before or after. (The company's 1628 production of John Ford's The Lover's Melancholy, with its cast of seventeen players, was on the same scale as the 1632 Novella staging.)
Read more about this topic: The Novella
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