ABSTRACT
At the Rose Theatre in March 1592 Lord Strange’s Men dramatized the career of Pope Joan, the legendary medieval woman who allegedly cross-dressed her way to the papacy. Unfortunately no copy of the play they performed, which Philip Henslowe recorded in his diary as ‘poope Jone’, has survived. At first glance this might appear to be all there is to say about this tantalizingly lost drama; however, the absence of an extant printed edition fits into a pattern that is itself significant. No copy of ‘poope Jone’ survives because, most simply, none was published, even though Henslowe’s notes suggest that the play was a commercial success, evidently performed more than once and generating receipts comparable to those of better known and subsequently published plays such as Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.1 If, as both James Shapiro and Leeds Barroll have suggested, Elizabethan authorities responsible for censorship manifested more concern for printed than for performed texts, some sensitivity to the play’s content may have prevented its publication.2 In fact Elizabethan printers seem to have been reluctant to bring out texts devoted wholly to the popess. Scholars have uncovered only two published in England during Elizabeth’s reign: a 1599 translation of a German tract, which rather cautiously uses only two initials to identify its author, and The Popes Parliament … Whereunto is annexed an Anatomie of Pope Joane (1591), whose title inaccurately implies that its appendix alone concerns the popess. In contrast to their predecessors, Stuart printers brought out at least six Pope Joan texts between 1610 and 1689, and several of these appeared in multiple editions.3 Since none of these was published during the Interregnum, the anti-ecclesiastical sentiments of Commonwealth and Protectorate governments do not account for this contrast between sixteenth-and seventeenth-century publishing practices. A possible explanation does appear, however, in the work of the French Catholic controversialist Florimond de Raemond.
