The Good Men Do: An Indecorous Epilogue (1917)

Hubert Osborne

The Good Men Do: An Indecorous Epilogue was part of a series of plays produced by The 47 Workshop, which developed out of English 47, a course in playwriting offered at Harvard University. As George P. Baker's introduction to an anthology of plays devoted to The 47 Workshop makes clear: “ The 47 Workshop … [was] not in the usual sense a theatre. It [had] no wish to revolutionize anything. It masks no scheme for a civic or community theatre. Its main purpose [was] to try out interesting plays written in the courses in Dramatic Technique at Harvard University and Radcliffe College” (vii). The 47 Workshop was founded in 1912 and in its inaugural year, for the sum of 500 dollars, was able to stage three plays with six performances in total. Based on a basic principle of collective work to carry out the author's vision of the play, The 47 Workshop further distinguished itself by involving the audience and members of the Workshop in critiquing the play with the end result that “a large portion of the audience annually cooperate in the work of producing plays” (xiv). The 47 Workshop explicitly aligned itself with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (founded by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory) and saw itself as the progenitor of similar companies, including The Theatre Workshop of New York, The Playshop in Chicago, The Vassar Workshop, and so forth. Moreover, it saw its activities as a crucial aspect of creating a national theatre by enabling the work of young American playwrights. Ironic, then, that of the three plays published in its anthology, one should have been written by a Canadian, Hubert Osborne, on a Shakespearean (read “colonial”) topic.

The typewritten title page of The Good Men Do: An Indecorous Epilogue makes the following claim:

The author wishes to emphasize the historical accuracy of the following play … Nearly all of the known incidents in the life of one of the greatest figures of all times is touched on …. Many authorities have written at length in an attempt to disprove the Mistress Whatley incident, but the fact remains that there is documentary proof in the British Museum of the betrothal …. The final incident, while purely imaginary, is in strict accordance with the spirit of the times and offers a possible explanation of a long disputed point …. [indent]

Interestingly, this passage hints at many of the key issues that circulate in Shakespearean adaptations: authenticity, historical veracity, the solving of historical lacunae in the hopes of explaining artistic legacy, the power of the adaptor to impose a view of authentic history by virtue of the adaptation, and so forth.

The play takes place on April 23, 1616 shortly after Shakespeare's death (on that same day if the inscription on his monument in the Church of the Holy Trinity where he was buried is accurate) and deals with the immediate emotional and literary legacy of that death––as such, it is likely a sequel to Laurence Eyre's and Osborne's Shakespearean adaptation, The Shakespeare Play: A Drama in Rhythmic Prose (also anthologized in the CASP Online Anthology), thus explaining the sub-title, “an indecorous epilogue.” The Good Men Do received 16 performances at the Fulton Theatre in New York (on Broadway), opening on May 20, 1918, with a cast that included Grace Fisher, Albert Gran, Grace Griswold, Victoria Montgomery, Maxwell Ryder, Hilda Spong, H. Ashton Tonge, and Mrs. Thomas A. Wise.

One of the more interesting features of this adaptation is the way in which it imagines the lives of the women in Shakespeare's life, especially his wife Anne Hathaway, and their daughters Judith and Susanna, and the woman Shakespeare supposedly truly loved, Mistress Anne Whatley. The play posits a confrontation between Anne and Mistress Whatley, an older woman with whom Shakespeare supposedly had an affair (according to Osborne's play) when he was seventeen (Anne Hathaway was also an older women, eight years Shakespeare's senior).

The so-called Whatley incident revolves around the fact that on November 27, 1582 an entry in the Episcopal Register at Worcester issued a marriage license for William Shaxpere and Anne Whatley of Temple Grafton. The next day Fulk Sandells and John Richardson of Stratford agreed to pay 40 pounds––then a considerable sum––in signing a Bond of Sureties should legal considerations arise to prevent the marriage of Anne Hathwey of Worcester to William Shagspere (a bond of sureties was required because Shakespeare was legally a minor at the time––and Anne Hathaway was already pregnant with Susanna when the bond was signed).

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare's entry on Anne Whately (Whateley) summarizes the current state of scholarship in relation to the marriage problem: Anne Whately was “the name of Shakespeare's bride according to his marriage licence. Though almost certainly the result of clerical error, it has stimulated fantasies. In The Man Shakespeare (1909), Frank Harris … supposed that Shakespeare was persuaded to jilt a woman of this name in favour of Anne Hathaway; Ivor Brown and Anthony Burgess are among those who followed suit” (518). Osborne's play (like Tom Stoppard's and Marc Norman's adaptation Shakespeare in Love) also hinges on this murky scenario, part of the early twentieth-century Shakespearean zeitgeist, which imagined various machinations, intrigues, and manipulations behind Shakespeare's marriage.

Further, Osborne takes the mysterious codicil in Shakespeare's will that left to Anne Hathaway his “second best bed with the furniture,” as a firm indicator of the truth of the Whatley love affair. As G. Blakemore Evans argues in his notes to the Shakespeare will, published as an appendix in the Riverside Shakespeare, “much ink has been spilled needlessly by those who read into this inserted bequest Shakespeare's animosity against Anne. Actually no mention of Anne was necessary, since she was fully provided for, as his widow, by existing law, and a bed, with all its furnishings, was an item of considerable value, and in this case perhaps of sentiment” (1834).

The play's climactic scene involves a confrontation between Anne Hathaway and Anne Whatley in which Osborne imagines some of the dialogue that may have transpired between Whatley and Hathaway, Whatley stating, “You tricked him into marrying you knowing that he did not love you … you made no home for him, who loved the little niceties of life, but made him live in squalor … you drove him from you by your nagging tongue to taverns and low company … your jealous tantrums made banishment a happy liberty …” (19).

The play ends with Susanna and Judith burning their father's manuscripts including an unfinished play, something that Osborne hints at as well in the conclusion of his prequel to The Good Men Do, The Shakespeare Play. The theatrical solution to an imagined historical mystery surrounding Shakespeare's personal life hints at the extent to which adaptation figures as an arbitrary genre. In that adaptive genre, the collision between the adaptor's imagination and historical lacunae produces speculative results that, however fanciful or truthful, tell us more about wishful thinking on the adaptor's part than anything else.

The Good Men Do begs the question of why the intimate details of Shakespeare's life remain so tantalizing, possibly linked to the mysteries surrounding the problem of locating some essential source to explain Shakespeare's artistic motivations. In this last regard, Osborne's play is completely conventional because it reinforces the notion of Shakespearean genius married to personal events that can only be imaginatively reconstructed through the adaptor's vision. In so doing, the adaptor links his or her own production to the very “genius” being promulgated in the adaptation, a way of building on the artistic capital guaranteed by association with the Shakespearean legacy. In Osborne's case, the imaginative vision of Shakespeare's lost works intensifies Osborne's association with not only the known corpus of Shakespeare's works but also the unknown, a sly way of using adaptation to enter into the company of canonical writers like Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Daniel Fischlin

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