The Soddered Citizen

The Soddered Citizen is a Caroline era stage play, a city comedy now attributed to John Clavell. The play was lost for three centuries; the sole surviving manuscript was rediscovered and published in the twentieth century.

The Soddered Citizen was produced onstage, most likely in 1630, by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register in 1632, but no edition was printed in the seventeenth century. Thereafter, the play was thought to be lost; it was known only by its title, and widely attributed to Shackerley Marmion. The manuscript surfaced in 1932, when its owner, Lt. Col. E. G. Troyte-Bullock, brought it to the British Museum for examination. It was studied by scholar John Henry Pyle Pafford and published in 1936.

The manuscript, now kept in the collection of the Wiltshire Record Office, is written in the hand of a professional scribe, and bears notations in five other hands; one of them is the hand of Edward Knight, the prompter and "book-keeper" of the King's Men. John Clavell's signature occurs twice in the manuscript, providing clear clues to the author's identity; it may have been Clavell's personal copy of the work, though the manuscript also shows signs that it went through at least the initial stages of preparation for use as a theatrical promptbook. Notations indicate the identities of some actors and their roles in the King's Men's staging.

The play has thirteen speaking parts, four assigned to boy players in female roles. Clavell, the amateur or neophyte dramatist, helpfully loaded his play with copious stage directions — 80 in the text's 2826 lines. The manuscript also contains a list of dramatis personae, a rare feature in dramatic manuscripts of the era. The actors were:

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