Queenʼs
Men Editions

Para1Selimus’s early fortunes on the stage are incredibly difficult to track. Other than the 1594 title page’s advertisement that the drama was playd by the Queenes Maiesties Players, no direct evidence exists documenting the play in production. Peter W.M. Blayney (Publication) has argued that the boom in professional play publication in 1594 was part of a marketing strategy by the professional playing companies after the London theatres had been closed by the plague in 1592 and 1593. As such, Selimus’s initial appearance in print may have been directly linked to an early theatrical run. The play’s prologue and conclusion each situate the drama in the theatre (e.g. Which if with patience of you shall be heard, / We have the greatest part of our reward (Prologue Sp1); If this first part, Gentles, do like you well Epilogue Sp1) as do Bullithrumble’s frequent audience addresses, but none of them is necessarily a vestige of a past performance. Henslowe does not list the play in his diary which runs from 1592 to 1609, and we have no references to productions of the play in contemporary manuscripts or print titles. Moreover, the ascriptions to Ralegh in the 1603 manuscript versions of Selimus’s long speech in the second scene suggest that the play had not been performed for many years and had fallen into obscurity. Crooke and Sergier’s re-issue of the play might have been in part sparked by a theatrical revival, but the 1638 quarto makes no mention of the play in performance; indeed, in excising the prologue and conclusion, Crooke and Sergier removed all suggestion of a past theatrical run from their offering.

Para2Scott McMillin has argued that Selimus may very well have been part of the Queen’s Men touring repertory in the 1590s. In a 1984 article, he established that Queen’s Men plays The True Tragedy of Richard III, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and Selimus can each be played by a cast of fourteen performers: three leading men, four very capable men, four lesser men; a leading boy, and two lesser boys. Seven of the play’s parts would have been undertaken by boy actors. As he lays out, the doubling requirements in such a scheme would have been heavy and pragmatic, the kind of thing one would have encountered in a company dedicated primarily to touring as the Queen’s Men were in the early 1590s. He concludes that by his method, these three texts appear to have a similar provenance, which is theatrical and production-oriented (69). McMillin’s sense of the theatrical provenance of the play is supported not just by the 1594 quarto’s prologue and conclusion but by a smattering of practical stage directions in the play and by Bullithrumble’s frequent audience addresses.

Para3Along with requiring a relatively large cast size, the play also has stage directions that presume doors on either side of a central playing space, a curtained central discovery space, and an adjoining raised playing space for its siege scenes. As Nada Mohamed Riad points out (40), these stage directions might suggest that the play was originally intended for a London amphitheater playhouse like the Theatre, the Curtain, or the Rose. The only props called for by the play are a chair, two coffins, a cup, letters, a crown, some meat (20) and—gruesomely—Aga’s severed hands. Two mourning-cloak costumes are also described. Sound features prominently in the play as well. As a historical drama with many battle scenes, alarums are frequently called for, and these would have been produced by a drum, trumpet, bell, or some other instrument. There are also sounds and music within (i.e. behind the stage), the latter played by Eunuchs (Sc10 Sp1) in order to lull Bajazeth to sleep.

Para4As far as dramaturgy goes, Selimus’s is mostly consonant with its company. In their foundational The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean described the Queen’s Men’s style as literalist and emblematic. Clowns were a mainstay of this form of theatre, their costumes and routines an essential engine. Bullithrumble’s appearance late in Selimus, then, would have felt long overdue to audiences familiar with the Queen’s Men, but among other things his spirited entrance, song, and visual enactment of his wife’s beatings (i.e. his whole alphabet of faces Sc20 Sp1) would have felt very familiar. Also recognizable would have been the play’s many large entrances where processions of janissaries and soldiers would have signified mood, power, and purpose. As McMillin and MacLean argue, for the Queen’s Men procession is speech (131). The beginning of the play even includes an opening procession that is immediately dismissed, underscoring its visual significance. Akin to this are the openings of scene 2 and 21 where large processionals function as preludes to Selimus’s asides. Though it does not contain the dumb shows and sequences of pantomime of other Queen’s Men plays, Selimus does contain recurrent patterns of prediction within its narrative; this, says McMillian and MacLean, is a consequence of the Queen’s Men’s commitment always to tell their stories as truly and plainly as possible. Examples can particularly be found at the ends of a number of scenes, from Selimus’s looking ahead to the return of his messenger Occhiali in scene 2, to Bajazeth’s sending a letter to pacify (Sc10 Sp15) Acomat (which we see Acomat reading in scene 11), to Mustaffa’s sending a letter of warning to Aladin and Amurath to fly (Sc23 Sp14) to escape Acomat’s wrath (which we see them reading in scene 24 (24)).

Para5Remarkably, after the early modern period, there is not a single record of Selimus being produced either by professional or amateur performers, this even as the play’s east-meets-west proceedings have become especially relevant over the past two decades.