1.2 Location and Date

Dering evidently planned for his adaptation of Henry IV to be performed at his house, Surrenden House, otherwise called Surrenden Dering, half a mile or so to the east of the village of Pluckley, itself about six miles west of Ashford in Kent. This is where the manuscript was discovered in the nineteenth century. Evidence of Dering’s intent to perform is abundant in the careful attention he bestowed on stage directions and his felt need to reduce the number of actors required to take the roles as reflected in his cuts. Further testimony comes from the slip attached to the manuscript that on its recto side bears a list of roles and envisaged performers in another play, The Spanish Curate. This slip also demonstrates that Dering’s performers would have been amateurs, drawn from his friends, local community and household. They would all have been male. Such were Dering’s intentions for The Spanish Curate, and it may well be that the slip became associated with the manuscript of Henry IV because it acted as an aide-mémoire for the range of performers Dering might hope to call on for that play. 

Surrenden House as it stood in the seventeenth century no longer exists, the building having been demolished after a fire in 1952. It had been home to the Dering family since the 1480s.¹ Dering himself rebuilt the house in red brick in the 1630s. 

We cannot know whether the play was finally realised in performance, but as a text it is certainly a performance document. Stage directions inherited from the Shakespeare quartos include actions and properties such as “he drinkes”, “running”, “Falstaff hides himself”, “He searcheth his pocketts: and findeth Certaine papers”, “Enter the Prince: & Poynes: Marchinge and Falstalff meets him Playing on his Trunchion Like a fife”. Dering himself adds the direction “Exit Francis and enters with sacke and a glasse”. His retention and development of the performative aspect of the play is a strong argument against him planning a reading with seated actors. The manuscript gives no indication as to whether the production would have been outdoors or under cover, but an outdoor production in March would have been risky, and it seems much more likely that the performance would have been planned for the great hall of the house.

As Laetitia Yeandle notes, on 27 February 1623 he entered in his Book of Expenses a record of payment to his scribe:

P[ai]d mr    Carington for writing oute ye play of K: Henry ye fourth att 1d ob’ p[er] sheete and given him[?] etc[?] 00 04 00

Or, to present these words in modern English:

Paid master Carington for writing out the play of King Henry the Fourth at 1 penny obolus [halfpenny] per sheet and given him, etc, 4 shillings.

Yeandle comments “A Samuel Carington (or Carrington) was rector of Wootton in Kent, about ten miles east of Surrenden in the direction of Dover, from 1615 until his death in 1641” (225, n. 3). He is probably the Carington whom Dering paid for transcribing Henry IV. The inconvenience of this arrangement might be partly explained by the fact that Dering developed an ongoing feud with his parish vicar John Copley (Allen). If the identification of Carington as the main penman of Henry IV is correct, Carington and Dering are likely to have worked apart, because they were not close neighbours. Their alternating and separate contributions to the manuscript point to the same conclusion.

It may be added that the following page of the Book of Expenses records that Sir Thomas Wotton was entertained at Surrenden House on 13 March:

It is probably no coincidence that Dering’s principal performer listed in the Spanish Curate slip was entertained at Dering’s home just over a fortnight after Dering paid Carington for copying out Henry IV. The payment of four shillings would buy up to eight quarts (sixteen pints) of wine, and is large enough to suggest that there were considerably more guests at Surrenden than Wotton alone. The entry in the Book of Expenses probably indicates the date on which Wotton was the most prestigious of visitors among a group visiting to perform Henry IV from Dering’s new manuscript.

These records enable us to date the adaptation precisely enough to establish that Dering would not yet have had a copy of the Shakespeare Folio available to him; in February and March that volume was still with the printer Isaac Jaggard.

1. “The Kent Compendium of Historic Parks and Gardens for Ashford District”