The Spanish Viceroy - The Facts

The Facts

1624
In December 1624 the King's Men got into trouble with Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, because they performed a play, The Spanish Viceroy, without first obtaining Herbert's license. This step was bound to get them into trouble: Herbert's job was to oversee and censor every play acted in the London theatres, and he was zealous in doing his job, maintaining his authority, and collecting his fees.

The outcome was unsurprising, given the way the system of control worked. On 20 December 1624 the King's Men provided Herbert with a "submission," a written apology, signed by each actor who had taken part in the offending performance. The cast included Robert Benfield, George Birch, John Lowin, Thomas Pollard, John Rice, Richard Robinson, William Rowley, John Shank, Richard Sharpe, Eliard Swanston, and Joseph Taylor. (Herbert copied the submission into his office book in 1633, a sign of the importance he assigned to it.)

1628
On 6 May 1628, another Massinger play was duly licensed, a work titled The Honour of Women. This second play had no immediately obvious connection with The Spanish Viceroy; the connection between them would only appear a quarter-century later. The Honour of Women is one of the plays that was destroyed in the kitchen of John Warburton. (His cook mistook his manuscript collection for scrap paper, and used it up lighting fires and lining pie pans. Some 50 manuscripts, many of them unique copies of plays, were destroyed.)

1653
On 9 September 1653 stationer Humphrey Moseley entered a large number of plays into the Stationers' Register; one of the dramas he registered on that date was titled The Spanish Viceroy, or the Honour of Women. This would appear to indicate that Massinger reworked his 1624 Spanish Viceroy into a new form, which was licensed for performance in 1628 as The Honour of Women.

Moseley, however, had a habit of skimping on registeration fees by deliberately confusing titles and subtitles, and registering two plays for the price of one. He did this for The Lovers' Progress, The Bashful Lover, The Guardian, and A Very Woman, other plays in the Massinger canon. So there is no guarantee that Spanish Viceroy and Honour of Women were the same play after all. Scholars have been divided on the issue of whether these titles refer to one play, or two.