Works
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Scripts are available for reading, performance and development. Educational use is encouraged, and amateur and charity productions are warmly welcomed. These may, by agreement, be licensed free of charge. Professional productions are subject to separate agreement. Scripts and supporting materials may be downloaded free of charge from this site, but remain protected by copyright.
The Theatre of State Cycle
The Theatre of State Cycle comprises five plays exploring power, performance and authorship through the political crisis surrounding Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, during the final years of Elizabeth I’s reign.
By early 1601, Essex had fallen dramatically from royal favour. Around him gathered friends, soldiers and political allies whose motives ranged from personal loyalty and political ambition to anxiety about the succession. On 7 February, members of his circle paid the Lord Chamberlain’s Men an additional forty shillings to perform the old play Richard II. The following day Essex led his supporters into London. The City did not rise with him, and within weeks he was tried and executed for treason.
The five plays approach these events from different perspectives: the group forming around Essex; the government responding to an uncertain threat; the interconnected world of writers, patrons and players; the investigation into the Richard II performance; and finally the courtroom in which differing actions and intentions must be reduced to legal judgement.
Running through the Cycle is a second question: how are texts actually made, transmitted and remembered? Rather than offering a single solution to the disputed authorship of the Shakespeare canon, the plays explore a wider literary ecosystem of writers, patrons, actors, scribes, revisers, printers and theatre workers, asking how work with many possible influences and origins may eventually become associated with one familiar name.
The plays combine documented historical events with imagined private conversations. Where the surviving record is clear, they follow it; where it is disputed or incomplete, the drama explores reasonable possibilities.
The full About The Theatre of State Cycle document provides the historical background, an introduction to each play, detailed political and literary chronologies, discussion of the evidence behind the authorship approach, and sources for further reading.
As You Would Have It
As You Would Have It is set during the weeks leading up to the morning of 8 February 1601. It follows the group forming around Essex as personal loyalty, political ambition, fear, honour and concern about the succession begin to pull in the same direction. The men agree that Essex should not be abandoned and that he must find some way to reach the Queen. They do not agree on what his restoration should achieve, how far they may lawfully go, or what each of them has actually consented to contribute.
The consultation held at Drury House on 3 February is recorded. Those present considered three broad options: gaining access to the court, taking control of the Tower or seeking support from the City. Essex himself was not present. The surviving evidence does not preserve a complete transcript, the exact order of the arguments or all the conversations that led to the meeting. The play therefore reconstructs the process around the known event rather than claiming to reproduce it.
Furthermore, the play does not present one hidden mastermind directing every step. It asks how a large outcome may grow through several smaller decisions made for different reasons. A warning produces a meeting, a meeting produces a list, a list creates an impression of strength, and that impression encourages further action. Its central question is how intelligent people can believe they are serving the same cause when they have never fully agreed on what that cause requires.
Format: Stage/Chamber Play
Status: Available for reading, performance and development
All’s Well That’s Measured
All’s Well That’s Measured covers the crisis from 7 to 9 February 1601 and places it before the Queen and her government as it unfolds. Elizabeth, Robert Cecil, Edward Coke and other officials receive reports that are late, partial and sometimes contradictory. They know that Essex has refused a summons and is moving through London with armed supporters. They do not yet know how many people will join him, whether violence will spread, or what he ultimately intends.
The public events are recorded, but the government conversations are dramatic reconstructions. The play does not assume that officials possessed the completed story later assembled from examinations and trial papers. It asks what responsible government looks like while the evidence is still arriving and when delay may be dangerous but certainty may be false.
Words such as grievance, disturbance, rebellion and treason are not merely descriptions. Each carries consequences for what the state may do next and for how later history will understand the event. The play therefore examines the pressure to protect public safety without allowing fear, anger or political advantage to decide the meaning of events before the whole picture can be seen.
Format: Stage/Chamber Play
Status: Available for reading, performance and development
The Writer’s Tale
The Writer’s Tale moves behind the public crisis into the connected world of writers, patrons, actors, officials and political activists. Its action runs from late 1600 to the night of 8 February 1601. Writing passes from private conversation towards public performance, changing as it moves between minds, households, messengers, companies and audiences. The play asks not only who first composed a passage, but who carried it, altered it, protected it, performed it and allowed a public name to stand for it.
The historical figures in the play had real connections to literature, theatre, law, patronage or government, but the particular meetings and exchanges shown on stage are not presented as established fact. However, Mary Sidney Herbert’s authorship, translation and patronage are well documented; Samuel Daniel was connected with the Pembroke household; Ben Jonson worked with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men; and acting companies, printers and patrons formed part of the practical world through which writing reached the public. The play brings these documented conditions into one dramatic network.
Christopher Marlowe was officially recorded as having died at Deptford in 1593. The suggestion that he survived is a dramatic probability supported by credible research, but is not currently a settled historical claim in the widest sense. In the same way, the movement of particular passages and the possible contributions of Bacon, Herbert, Daniel, Jonson, Oxford or others are used to explore an incomplete and disputed record, not to suggest a final solution.
The play’s working idea is that individual talent may remain important while writing is also shaped by conversation, revision, patronage, censorship, secrecy, performance and commercial need. It keeps the authorship question open and asks how work with several possible origins might eventually be gathered beneath one familiar name.
Format: Stage/Chamber Play
Status: Available for reading, performance and development
Much Ado About Meanings
Much Ado About Meanings is set between 11 and 13 February 1601, after the rising has failed but before the trials of Essex and Southampton. It turns from the streets to the special performance of Richard II. Who requested the play? Who paid the additional money? What did the players understand? What did the audience hear? At what point does accepting a payment, delivering a message or performing an old history become participation in the purpose of those who commissioned it?
The formal commission shown in the play is created for the stage. No surviving record establishes an inquiry conducted in exactly this form on these dates. However, the historical foundation is real. The performance became part of the government’s investigation. Sir Gelly Meyrick was questioned about it on 17 February and Augustine Phillips gave evidence for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men on 18 February. In the play, Shakspere is summoned in place of Phillips as the public theatrical name that can be made to stand for the company and its part in the performance. This is a deliberate dramatic choice, allowing questions of responsibility, attribution and authorship to be examined alongside the political inquiry. The play brings these scattered historical processes together so that responsibility can be examined in one room.
Its concern is not whether a play carries no consequences, nor whether artists are automatically responsible for every use made of their work. It asks how meaning changes through timing, setting, payment, performance and reception. Once language has entered a charged public atmosphere, responsibility may be shared among the writer, commissioner, messenger, performer, audience and authority that later decides what the event meant - but it is not necessarily shared equally.
Format: Stage/Chamber Play
Status: Available for reading, performance and development
Measure for Justice
Measure for Justice brings the Essex rising into the courtroom. On 19 February 1601, Essex and Southampton were tried for high treason before their fellow peers in Westminster Hall. The prosecution had to turn meetings, warnings, writings, armed movement and conflicting intentions into a case capable of receiving a verdict. The defendants had to answer not only for what they personally did, but for what they encouraged, authorised or allowed others to do in their names.
The trial and its outcome are recorded, but the dialogue and structure of the courtroom scenes are dramatic reconstructions. The Defence Counsel is a stage figure who gives visible form to arguments that were not presented through a modern system of independent defence advocacy. Other officials and legal voices may similarly bring together work historically performed by several people.
The play asks where loyalty ends and treason begins, whether a true grievance can excuse an unlawful method, and whether people who played unequal parts in a collective action should receive the same judgement. Law cannot leave every uncertainty open, but the need to reach a decision may compress different motives and degrees of responsibility into one legal account. The question is whether justice can make necessary distinctions without losing the human complexity of the event it judges.
Format: Stage/Chamber Play
Status: Available for reading, performance and development
Why These Plays Still Matter
The world of 1601 is not ours, but many of its pressures remain familiar. Events move faster than understanding; governments must act before every fact is known; loyalty can make doubt feel like betrayal; art may be blamed for what audiences do with it; law must turn confusion into judgement; and famous names can conceal the work of many hands.
Each play in The Theatre of State Cycle approaches one aspect of these continuing tensions.
As You Would Have It asks how people can act together without fully agreeing on what they are doing, and how different motives may gradually be mistaken for a single shared purpose.
All’s Well That’s Measured explores the danger of naming events too quickly, and the difficult balance between public safety, uncertainty, surveillance and political power.
The Writer’s Tale considers authorship and collaboration: how work may pass through writers, patrons, performers, editors and institutions before appearing under one name. Artificial intelligence now gives these questions renewed urgency, raising issues of credit, ownership, responsibility and transparency.
Much Ado About Meanings asks what happens when words leave their original setting. In an age of headlines, clips, social media and recommendation systems, meaning can travel faster than responsibility, while audiences themselves help determine which stories spread and what they become.
Measure for Justice turns to judgement, asking how law and public opinion can distinguish between leaders and followers, intention and action, explanation and excuse, while preserving fairness and proportion.
Together, the plays ask how complicated human events become simplified into stories, verdicts, reputations and history - and what may be lost in the process.
The full Why These Plays Still Matter postscript explores these contemporary connections in greater depth.
Other Works
Gaia
A geopolitical drama in which an emerging AI system begins to influence global decision-making. As institutions adapt, resist or defer, questions of control, responsibility and interpretation come into sharp focus.
Format: Screen drama (series)
Status: In development
We Reap What We Sow
A five-part radio drama rooted in contemporary social realism, exploring how influence is shaped and distributed in a world increasingly mediated by intelligent systems.
Format: Radio drama (5 × episodes)
Status: In Development