Directed by Nathan Winkelstein
Featuring Tina Benko, Ro Boddie, Madeline Calais-King, Robert Cuccioli, Carson Elrod, Manoel Felciano, Mister Fitzgerald, Rami Margron Laila Robins, Lily Santiago, Socorro Santiago, Michael Stewart Allen, and more to be announced.
The captivating story of a young man seeking to avenge the murder of his father with the help of a diabolical servant. He joins the household of his enemies, enacting convoluted plots of deceit, betrayal, poisoning and violence to pursue his ends. But unchecked vengeance has a way of catching up with you. This is a gripping tale of revenge, and betrayal that sweeps an audience along to a conclusion not to be missed.
This reading is produced in association with The Acting Company.
THE CAST
ABOUT THE PLAY
Chettle’s one acknowledged play, The Tragedy of Hoffman, or A Revenge for a Father, was printed belatedly in 1631 but probably dates from around 1603. It belongs in a vital, violent, and distinctly interconnected series of plays on the theme of revenge, which drew in writers including Shakespeare, Kyd, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Thomas Middleton. All these works present personal revenge for a murdered family member as a morally compromised but utterly inexorable duty.
In The Tragedy of Hoffman, the titular hero seeks revenge for his vice-admiral father, who was betrayed by the state he served, turned pirate, and executed. He finds, shipwrecked, the heir to his enemies, promptly murders him with a burning crown, and assumes his identity at court. Assisted by his servant Lorrique, he is adopted as heir by the Duke, meaning that a mere handful of other murders will secure his place at the head of the state. His gleefully amoral malignity carries the play, but he is ultimately subject to the law not of Prussia, but of the revenge plot itself: his comeuppance awaits.
Chettle has clearly read Hamlet and he riffs on it self-consciously - in his subtitle ‘A Revenge for a Father’ and in a number of allusions which echo Shakespeare’s tragedy. Lucibella’s madness and her songs are a version of Ophelia’s; there are shared references to Wittenberg and to Niobe; the play is also set in the Northern Baltic close to Norway. Hoffman’s relation to Martha is a perverse, disinhibited version of Hamlet’s with Gertrude. Hoffman sexualises his ‘new-made mother’, announcing ‘ there’s another fire burns in this liver: lust and hot desire, which you must quench’. In other ways, too, Hoffman takes Hamlet a step further: the Danish prince is famously prompted by the Yorick’s disinterred skull, but Hoffman carries his father’s entire skeleton around as a talisman and reminder of his bloody duty. In the first twenty or so minutes of Chettle’s play, Hoffman has achieved what it takes Hamlet five full acts to accomplish, and in beginning ‘Hence [be gone], clouds of melancholy’, it is as if he turns his back on the stage cliché of the melancholic and hesitant avenger Shakespeare had presented. Hoffman revisits and revitalises the revenge tragedy genre: if this is what Chettle could do, it’s a pity so little of his work survives.
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ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
Henry Chettle is a mysterious figure: even his dates of birth and death are unknown, although he does appear in the historical record as both a writer and printer during the 1590s and the turn of the seventeenth century. In 1598 a contemporary lists him ‘one of the best for comedy amongst us’, and the account books of the theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe record Chettle’s involvement in almost fifty plays in the repertory. The majority were co-authored (and of these, most have been lost); of the sole-authored plays credited to Chettle by Henslowe, The Tragedy of Hoffman is the only one that was ever printed. He is thus an embodiment of the collaborative, anonymous, performance-rather-than-print-directed theatre of the late Elizabethan period – or to put it another way, the opposite of his most famous contemporary, William Shakespeare.
Outside the playhouse, Chettle was associated with popular prose pamphlets and with other opportunistic forms of publishing: apparently cashing in on the celebrity author Robert Greene’s notoriety in editing – perhaps writing – a posthumous pamphlet under his name, bringing out pastoral poetry mourning the dead Queen Elizabeth, writing for two rival theatre companies despite being bound to one. One further detail from Henslowe’s papers may explain this: Chettle seems to have been constantly impoverished, borrowing money to get out of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, and bail to avoid further arrests. The only personal description of him comes from an account in 1607 when he is a popular arrival to Elysium among other dead Elizabethan writers including Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, George Peele and Thomas Kyd. He is described as ‘sweating and blowing, by reason of his fatnes’.
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-Emma Smith | Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford