ABSTRACT
Philip Henslowe made a payment to the playwrights Thomas Heywood and Wentworth Smith, for a play generally now referred to as Albere Galles. Nine days after Henslowe paid the writers for Albere Galles, Duke Philip Julius of Stettin-Pomerania and his entourage, visiting London, attended a play which is recorded in the diary of the Duke's secretary, Frederic Gershow. Alberegalis is one of the family of early modern variant spellings of a Latin place-name, Alba Regalis, which denotes the city of Szekesfehervar in modern Hungary, also known, in German, as Stuhlweissenberg. Such a city would seem impossible to take by military means, and indeed the True Relation makes a point of noting that the Turks did not actually storm it in. Aspects of this record remain maddeningly unclear: for instance, Dick Syferweste is and remains unidentified. Similar techniques, applied to seemingly impenetrable titles such as the mysterious tragedy of Felmelanco, may yet reveal thumbnail pictures of Henslowe plays.
