Transmutation of History into Drama : Observing the treatment of historic sources in Thomas Middleton's Renaissance Drama "A Yorkshire Tragedy"

Thomas Middleton’s 17th-century play A Yorkshire Tragedy enthralled the Jacobean audience for its dramatization of a murderous tragedy similar to how today’s real-life crime thrillers capture engagement among their viewers. Its popularity, after being first published in 1608, can be accounted for by the early modern audience’s interest in theatrical portrayals of real-life incidents that included scandalous affairs, lurid murders, circulating gossip, and other subjects of popular sensational fancy. All of these, along with the subject matter dramatically built around family members, are ascribed to the genre of the domestic tragedy, which Middleton’s A Yorkshire Tragedy belongs to. The strain of realism in the plays of this genre, along with their style and presentation, becomes an immediate source of aesthetic pleasure for the modern audience (Sturgress 15). Middleton’s play, appreciated for its craftsmanship of poetry and characterization, presents the story of a man whose uncontrolled riotous revels and aggression led to an abusive marital household where his wife is beaten, his sons killed, and him ending up as the overly dramatic tragic villain. This is typical of the main character in a domestic tragedy, who is usually a man belonging to a middle-class English family, far removed from other generic Elizabethan heroes in powerful circles or castles, and fits well in an intensified household drama and other domestic conventions like those found in Thomas Kyd’s Arden of Feversham (1592), one of the most renowned and earliest known dramas of this genre, or in Thomas Heywood’s A Warning for Fair Women (1573). 

The ways in which the material details of household life in the English provinces are presented in domestic tragedies make them distinguished and useful for social history. In the case of A Yorkshire Tragedy, the source story on which it is based is a certain incident that took place in Yorkshire on April 23, 1605. A young man from a good family named Walter Calverley, heir to the manor of Calverley and Pudsey in York, was reported to have murdered two of his three young sons and also wounded their mother, his wife. When charged with the crime the following day, he admitted to it in front of the justices present, claiming that he had done the deed because he had found his life endangered by his wife, who had apparently, through several signs, speeches, and signals, made him believe that his sons were not his own but someone else’s. In the subsequent trial, Calverley refused to plead against his wife, and the whole of his estate would pass onto his only living heir. On 5th August of the same year, he was pressed to death. 

Following this, a number of publications came out that narrated the jarring incident. First came an anonymous pamphlet Two Most Unnatural and Bloody Murders (1605) which besides being journalistic had its very own literary merit of using dramatic narration. The beginning lines read, 

There hath happened of late within the county of York, not far from Wakefield, a murder so detestable, that were it, not it desires record for example sake, humanity could wish it rather utterly forgot than any Christian heart should tremble with the remembrance of it. 

The figure of Calverley was given “the motivation of a dramatic villain” and already undergoing transmutation of history into drama became far more apparent from this point onwards (Wells 452). 

The next publication came in the form of a ballad, after the execution of Calvarley in August 1605. Then came a prose publication called The Arrangement, Condemnation, and Execution of Master Calverley at York in August 1605. Both the ballad and the prose publications were lost and left undiscovered. The story however appeared again in John Stow’s Summary of English Chronicles in 1607. In addition to these publications, two other plays based on the Calverley case were entered in the Stationer’s Register shortly after. These were George Wilkins’s The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607) and Thomas Middleton’s A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608). A Yorkshire Tragedy was however entered under the name of “William Shakespeare” possibly because it was performed by the King’s Majesty’s players in the Globe Theatre (wells 452). This was however eventually declared false in C. F. Tucker Brooke’s The Shakespeare Apocrypha, a book that listed all the plays falsely published under Shakespeare’s names. One among these apocryphal works was also the previously mentioned Arden of Feversham by Kyd, to which many elements of the genre of domestic tragedy in Middleton’s age are ascribed. The Shakespeare tag nonetheless helped both the plays to be discussed more widely among Shakespeare scholars than the other publications of the Calverley case, consequently helping them to reach heights of popularity even among the contemporary audience. 

As observed, Wilkins takes the basic situation of the Calverley case as depicted in the pamphlet and produces it in his work The Miseries of Enforced Marriage. A young man Scarborough, although contracted to a girl he loves, is forced into a loveless marriage of convenience which leads to a series of miseries. The trajectory of the story is however far from the actual horror of the case. The characters are way more fictional than their real-life counterparts- the husband representing Calverley is shown sympathetically, his beloved, unlike the story in the pamphlet, kills herself, and the new marriage is tempestuous but there are no murders that take place. In fact, the play adopts a comic perspective and ends with a happy fate for Scarborough, much unlike Calverley who ended in a sentenced execution. 

Middleton’s A Yorkshire Tragedy, on the other hand, sticks very closely to the real-life Yorkshire incidents. Each of the characters deliberately left nameless and called in simple terms like “Husband”, “Wife”, “Master”, “Maid” and so on, remain faithful to their real-life counterparts. Besides being the playwright’s masterful skill to indulge the audience in mystery, this characterization with nameless figures could perhaps also be an indication that the playwright did not want to offend the Calverley family involved in the actual tragedy. As long as the audience was familiar with the real incidents, names were “neither desirable nor necessary” (Cawley and Gaines 1). It is only in the opening scene of the play that there is a presence of three fictitious characters- the serving men; from the second scene onwards, the play borrows its characters, speeches, and plot mostly from the original pamphlet. The first scene’s distinctive quality from the rest of the play has been studied by critics over the ages and observed to be “only slightly indebted to the pamphlet” for its treatment of the action with “relaxed expansiveness, a freedom of invention, more akin to the manner of Wilkins’s full-length play than to anything in the rest of A Yorkshire Tragedy” (Wells 454). This is unlike the signature Middleton style of compact, fast-paced action sequences that in fact follow right from the second scene. This allows consideration of the play’s first edition which held the subtitle “ALL'S ONE, OR, ONE OF THE FOUR PLAYS IN ONE, CALLED A YORK-SHIRE TRAGEDY AS IT WAS PLAYED BY THE KING'S MAJESTY'S PLAYERS”, suggesting that A Yorkshire Tragedy was possibly part of a four-part act where more plays were performed together. This would make more sense for its short length- almost one-third the size of contemporary early modern plays. The anomaly of the first scene is often justified by saying that the playwright might have just added it later to make the play understandable as a standalone production when the other plays were separated from the four-part sequence (Cawley and Gaines 14). Unlike Wilkins, Middleton keeps the focus of the play largely tragic, with the feeling of great suffering and an impending catastrophe right from the opening scene. 

From the second scene onwards, the course of action remains more or less the same. The account of the Wife in the pamphlet, where she visits her uncle in London at a point corresponding to an exit in the second scene, is only slightly advanced by Middleton to form the episode of the third opening scene, thus making the action more concentrated. The Husband, who represents the character of Walter Calverley, follows the same drill of abuse, unwarranted aggression, murder, and finally accusations, except for the conspirations against him towards the end. A speech by the Wife in the third scene of the pamphlet used as an example by Wells reads: 

My friends are fully possessed your land is mortgaged. If you think I have published anything to him with desire to keep the sale of my dowry from you, either for mine own good or my children’s, though it fits I have a motherly care of them, you being my husband, pass it away how you please, spend it how you will, so I may enjoy but welcome looks and kind words from you 

Middleton, keeping the content intact, transforms the passage into a blank verse in his own play, thus presenting the scene with “greater clarity, with more measured pace, and with a dignified pathos with which a performer can do much” (Wells 453). The lines read: 

Only my friends Knew of your mortgaged lands, and were possessed Of every accident before I came. If thou suspect it but a plot in me To keep my dowry, or for mine own good Or my poor children’s—though it suits a mother To show a natural care in their reliefs— Y et I’ll forget myself to calm your blood. Consume it as your pleasure counsels you, And all I wish e’en clemency affords. 

In the course of almost the entire play, Middleton thus borrows words from the pamphlet and presents them through its nameless characters. While sticking faithfully to the original incident, he also plays into a “sustained investigation of the moral and affective power of drama” (Hopkins n.p.). Unlike Shakespeare, who liked to make long meditations, digressions in themes, and development of the action at a leisurely pace, Middleton’s work usually showed his artistic merit of handling a plot, no matter how short the size, delineated with action to its best effect. His dramatic poetry does not dilute the concentration of fast-paced action or take away the thrill of a forward thrust. Middleton also inserts lyrical meditative speeches from time to time which makes it complete in its essence. In A Yorkshire Tragedy, the soliloquies and the speeches of lamentation are written with the intention of making the play more dramatic and also to characterize the original figures from the pamphlet in a much more sympathetic way. The laments help in raising the emotional tone of the play. The unvoiced griefs and anxieties of the characters articulated in these long speeches are once again the playwright’s skill to reinforce the theme of tragedy successfully. In the last scene of the pamphlet, Calverley is described in the pamphlet to have “melted into hot water and had not power to take any farewell of them but only in tears” on seeing his dead children. Just as the pamphlet stands true to life, Middleton’s handling of the play stands true to drama (Sturgess 26). 

Besides this, one more individualistic inclusion by Middleton is made in the play thematically. A Yorkshire Tragedy differs from the source material in the playwright’s suggestion that the husband’s actions result from a demoniac possession, probably suggested by the illustration on the title page of the pamphlet where a dark figure of an old man, with long claws on his hands and feet, stands beside the murderous Husband. This demon is not explained in the pamphlet narration but is hinted at multiple times in the course of the play. In her opening dialogues, the Wife calls him “half mad”, as if some “vexed spirit” had taken over him. The hint of “diabolic possession” continues when the Servingman then assures the Wife “If he should not now be kind to you and love you and cherish you up, I should think the devil himself kept open house in him” (Hopkins n.p.). The husband himself, towards the end of the play, recognizes his tendencies to be brought by “the devil” and a supernatural agency that led him to his madness and the ultimate bloodbath. Although this theme runs like an undercurrent through the entirety of the play with the mention of “the devil” in a number of speeches, Middleton seems to not know exactly what to do with it and hence leaves it in a conspicuous shape. 

Therefore, to say that Middleton’s dependence on the source text of the pamphlet “slavish” is not justified by any means. With the maintenance of its thematic originality, action-packed sequences, and use of a heightened Faustus-like language in the lamentations, the dramatist proves his height of dramatic power, typical of Middleton himself (Wells 454). It is undoubtedly genius to have maintained the “moral clarity of domestic tragedy” through the play’s didactic pattern of “sin, retribution, and repentance” (Lieblein 196), while also faithfully drawing upon a real-life heinous incident and successfully fighting for authorship merely through the dramatist’s literary mastery