ABSTRACT
The lost Cutlack, as it turns out, has divided scholarly opinion. Todd A. Borlik interprets it as having been a play about St Guthlac, the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon hermit. Cutlack is particularly interesting because its connections to Shakespeare's Hamlet would seem to go well beyond merely appearing in the same repertory as a play bearing that name. Henslowe's Diary records twelve performances of Cutlack. Sharpe's suggestion was taken up by Harbage and Schoenbaum, whose Annals of English Drama tentatively identifies Cutlack as a play about St. Guthlac. King Guthlagh is a fictitious King of Denmark described in many Renaissance English texts all deriving ultimately from the work of the twelfth-century imaginative historian Geoffrey of Monmouth. Cutlack would have been a member of the large group of early modern plays derived from Galfridian history. This makes these plays an interesting window on early British colonial thinking.
