If you Know Not me you Know Nobody

One of the persistent stories in popular culture is that of the hero from the past who is not really dead but asleep, in hiding, ready to come back to life for his people. ¹ Not long after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, she was alive again on the popular stage, in the two parts of If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, probably acted in 1605 and 1606 respectively. This was likely a production of Queen Anne’s Men; the first part may have begun its life at the Boar’s Head or the Curtain, and after the company moved the two parts would have been a mainstay of its repertoire at the Red Bull. The Prologue for a later revival of Part One at the Cockpit declares that the play was well receiv’d and well perform’d at first; Grac’d, and frequented; and the cradle age Did throng the seats, the boxes and the stage. Given that seating on the stage was unusual in the public theatre, the last line if taken literally means overflow houses. Part One went through eight editions between 1605 and 1639, making it one of the most popular plays of the period. Evidently the reappearance of the dead Queen answered an imaginative need. Pan Two, with four editions between 1605 and 1633, was relatively less popular, but only relatively. Pan One centres on Elizabeth, and it has been suggested that The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth, the subtitle of the 1605 Quano, was the original title of the play. ² Pan Two is more diffuse, but the principal character for much of its length is Sir Thomas Gresham, a citizen-hero whose achievements the play celebrates. The Gresham play may originally have been independent, and the author (almost certainly Thomas Heywood) may have grafted the two plays together by transferring to Part Two the Armada scenes that appear to have ended the original Queen Elizabeth play. ³ Part One seems to be a reponed text: according to the Cockpit prologue, ‘some by stenography drew / The plot; put it in print, scarce one word true’. The actors playing Philip of Spain, Dodds, Gage, and the Clown, may have had a hand in the piracy; because of doubling possibilities, there may have been no more than two actors involved. ⁴ If the main reporter was taking notes at a performance, this makes the text bad in one sense, but good in another. Details of language will be unreliable, but this is not a play in which details of language are of primary importance; what we have instead is an eyewitness account of the more striking theatrical effects, especially the visual effects, of the performance. ⁵