Field’s Nevill: Friendship, Disguise and Shakespeare

Appendix F

Nathan Field’s comedy A Woman Is a Weathercock, staged around 1609–10 and published in 1612, gives an important role to a gentleman called Nevill. He helps a friend marry the woman he loves despite her father’s choice of another husband, disguises himself as a priest, and arranges a performance in which another man appears under his name. The priestly disguise is especially significant: in 1599 Sir Henry Neville had described an agent who would assume a priest’s dress and duties to gain trust. Field’s play also contains several echoes of Shakespeare.

Field was an actor as well as a playwright. His title page records performances before the king at Whitehall and by the Children of the Queen’s Revels at Whitefriars, a London indoor playhouse. The cast list names “Neuill,” the contemporary printed spelling of Nevill, without a first name or title. This appendix uses Nevill for Field’s character and Neville for the historical man.¹

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The 1612 title page records performances at Whitehall and Whitefriars and names Nathan Field as the author.

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The cast list, sig. A2r, with “Neuill” circled in red (annotation added). Both images are cropped from the original printed edition cited in note 1.

A friend who makes the plot work

Scudmore loves Bellafront, but her father, Sir John Worldly, has arranged for her to marry Count Frederick. Nevill comes to Scudmore with news of the wedding. Scudmore’s distress draws him into an effort to recover Bellafront, and Nevill supplies the practical means.

First, Nevill persuades and pays the intended priest to let him take his place. Wearing the priest’s appearance and clothing, he performs an apparent marriage ceremony. The substitution prevents Bellafront’s marriage to the Count from becoming binding within the play’s resolution. Nevill explains his plan to the theatre audience beforehand; Scudmore and the wedding party do not know who is under the disguise.²

Next comes a masque, a costumed entertainment with dancing, to celebrate the wedding. Nevill is expected to lead it and dance with Bellafront. He instead exchanges clothes with Scudmore, who has entered disguised as the craftsman supplying the masks. Scudmore takes Nevill’s place in the dance, tells Bellafront who he is, and leaves with her to marry before the real priest. Nevill, now dressed as the craftsman, can leave without attracting the wedding guests’ attention.

The instructions are precise. Nevill tells Scudmore:

Tonight by promise, I do give a masque,
As to congratulate the bridal day,
In which the Count, Pendant, and the wise knight,
Will be most worthy dancers; sir, you shall
Learn but my part, which I will teach you too,
As nimbly as the usher did teach me,
And follow my further directions.

Scudmore accepts his friend’s control:

I am your property, my enginer.³

“Enginer” means a deviser or contriver. Nevill gives directions; Scudmore learns and performs his part. The stage direction “Change habit” makes the exchange of costumes explicit. During the dance, the wedding guests believe that “young Nevill” is leading, although the dancer is Scudmore. The theatre audience has seen the substitution.

At the end Nevill returns in his priestly disguise. He removes it to reveal a devil’s robe, then removes that too and is recognized. The joke gives a visible form to his argument that forcing Bellafront to marry the wrong man would have been a devilish act under a priest’s cloak. Scudmore and Bellafront are now married, and Scudmore closes his part in the comedy with:

And may all true love have like happy end,
Women forgive me; Men, admire my Friend.⁴

Nevill’s ingenuity has made the lovers’ marriage possible. He does not, however, direct every intrigue: another character, Strange, separately exposes a slander against Bellafront’s sister Katherine. Field gives more than one character a hand in bringing about the ending.

A priest’s habit: Field, Neville and Shakespeare

Nevill’s assumption of a priest’s role has a particular connection with Sir Henry Neville’s diplomatic work. On 16 September 1599, Neville wrote to Robert Cecil about a prospective agent for a mission to Spain. The man had been a priest, had become Protestant and married, and proposed using his former occupation as cover. Neville explained:

he will take upon him the habit, and for need the function of a priest, which will also give him credit and trust there, and means thereby to do the better service.⁵

The point is the authority gained through the disguise. Neville’s agent would wear a priest’s clothes and, when necessary, perform the priest’s duties to secure confidence and access. Field’s Nevill likewise assumes both appearance and function: he takes the priest’s place and performs the wedding ceremony before people who accept his religious authority. The letter concerns an intelligence mission; the comedy turns the same means of gaining trust into a device for managing a marriage.

Nevill’s role also invites comparison with the Duke in Measure for Measure. Before assuming a friar’s disguise, the Duke asks Friar Thomas:

Supply me with the habit, and instruct me
How I may formally in person bear
Like a true friar. More reasons for this action
At our more leisure shall I render you.

Nevill likewise obtains a real priest’s cooperation and assumes his appearance. Both men use religious dress to move through a marriage plot under a concealed identity, directing events while other characters misunderstand who they are. Both disclose their identities in the final settlement. The audience, unlike the people deceived on stage, knows about the disguise beforehand.

Their purposes are different: the Duke investigates his deputy’s conduct and governs Vienna; Nevill helps a friend recover the woman he loves. Field’s counterfeit wedding and masque exchange are his own plot’s particular devices. The comparison concerns the dramatic role of a concealed director who brings about the marriage resolution.⁶

The same letter is compared with Feste’s impersonation of Sir Topas in Chapter 24. In Twelfth Night, costume and the performance of a religious office again become instruments of deception.⁷

“Thou hast spoke my heart in twain”

When Nevill first announces Bellafront’s impending marriage, Scudmore answers:

Oh! that this stroke were thunder to my breast,
For Nevill thou hast spoke my heart in twain,
And with the sudden whirlwind of thy breath,
Hast ravished me out of a temperate soil,
And set me under the red burning zone.

The addressed construction, “thou hast … my heart in twain,” closely resembles Gertrude’s words to Hamlet. The second quarto, with a 1604 title page, reads:

O Hamlet thou hast cleft my hart in twaine.⁸

Field replaces the physical verb “cleft” with “spoke”: Nevill’s announcement itself divides Scudmore’s heart. The line addresses Nevill by name; it is Scudmore’s speech, not Nevill’s. The comparison does not depend on the First Folio’s publication in 1623. The image is already present in the first quarto of Hamlet (1603), which reads “Hamlet, thou cleaues my heart in twaine,” and the closer “thou hast cleft” construction appears in the second quarto.

Field uses the image again later in the comedy. Mistress Wagtail, coached by the Count’s follower Pendant, is flattering Sir Abraham Ninnie:

Oh, thy very name,
Like to a hatchet cleaves my heart in twain.

Here “thy very name” refers to Abraham, not Nevill. The extravagant compliment turns the earlier language of injury into comic courtship. The two uses show Field adapting the same expression to different speakers and situations.

Shakespearean influence on Field has an established scholarly history. In his 1950 article “Shakespeare and Nathan Field,” William Peery examined both verbal echoes and larger dramatic similarities, including Scudmore’s later confrontation with Bellafront beside Hamlet’s confrontation with Gertrude. Peery also pointed to Field’s explicit recollection, in Amends for Ladies, of the play in which the fat knight Oldcastle explains honour—a reference to the speech now associated with Falstaff in 1 Henry IV.⁹

Further Shakespearean echoes

The “heart in twain” passages belong to a wider set of correspondences. They occur in different characters’ speeches, often in scenes of courtship or persuasion.

Pendant flatters Count Frederick, Bellafront’s intended husband, by imagining Nature falling in love with the man she has made:

Nature herself having made you, fell sick
In love with her own work, and can no more
Make man so lovely, being diseased with love.

Peery compares this with Sonnet 20:

Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,

In both passages, Nature becomes enamoured of her own creation. Peery presents the resemblance as a possible Shakespearean echo.¹⁰ The same flattery speech continues with another Shakespearean phrase:

Oh foot, oh leg, oh hand, oh body, face,
By Jove it is a little man of wax.

In Romeo and Juliet, the Nurse similarly recommends Paris as a husband for Juliet:

A man, young lady—lady, such a man
As all the world—why, he’s a man of wax.

The expression praises a man as perfectly formed, like a wax model. Both passages advertise a desirable bridegroom; Field makes the praise part of Pendant’s extravagant flattery of his employer.¹¹

Later, Pendant finds Sir Abraham occupied with a foolish love poem and remarks, “Oh, this love will undo us all.” The same words occur in Troilus and Cressida, when Helen asks Pandarus to sing:

Let thy song be love. “This love will undo us all.”

The setting strengthens the verbal comparison: Field’s exchange concerns a suitor’s poem and its possible musical setting, while Shakespeare’s concerns a song of love. The wording may also draw on a circulating song or refrain.¹²

Scudmore’s confrontation with Bellafront supplies another resemblance. Angry at her apparent betrayal, he insists:

I’ll make you sure first: I am come to speak,
And speak I will freely, and to bring back
Your letters, and such things you sent; and then,
I’ll ne’er see those deceiving eyes again.

Katherine, resisting Petruchio’s attempts to silence her in The Taming of the Shrew, says:

Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak,
And speak I will. I am no child, no babe.

Both speeches turn the declaration of an intention to speak into an emphatic assertion. The speakers’ positions differ: Katherine demands a hearing, whereas Scudmore has threatened Bellafront.¹³

Finally, when Pendant coaches Mistress Wagtail to entrap Sir Abraham, he begins, “They say every woman has a springe to catch a woodcock.” A springe is a snare, and the woodcock represents an easily deceived person. In Hamlet, Polonius dismisses Hamlet’s professions of love to Ophelia:

Ay, springes to catch woodcocks. I do know,

Both uses turn courtship into a trap. This expression was proverbial—Field himself introduces it with “They say”—but its presence adds another point of contact with Hamlet in the scene that also contains Wagtail’s “heart in twain” compliment.¹⁴

Talent without employment

Nevill also gives a speech about intellectual ability denied an adequate outlet. He begins by judging Scudmore’s behaviour:

How well does Scudmore speak, ill for himself,
Wit’s a disease, that fit employment wants,
Therefore we see, those happiest in best parts,
And under-borne fortunes under their merits,
Grow to a sullen envy, hate, and scorn
Of their superiors; and at last, like winds,
Break forth into rebellious civil wars,
Or private treasons; none so apt for these,
As melancholy wits fettered with need.¹⁵

“Wants” means lacks; “parts” are abilities. The speech describes talented people whose circumstances fall short of their merits, and the danger of that frustration turning into resentment or political violence. Scudmore answers that wit governed by discretion can avoid these faults. He then accepts Nevill’s guidance, and Nevill gives his abilities a practical task: learning the part he will perform in the masque.

The political frustration has a point of contact with Sir Henry Neville’s correspondence. Writing to his regular correspondent, the diplomat Ralph Winwood, on 4 June 1606, he complained:

For my own business I am at a stand, if I go not backward. This Parliament hath done me no good, where not only speeches and actions, but countenances, and conversation with men disliked, hath been observed. But in these points I cannot betray my own mind, speed as it will.¹⁶

The letter records Neville’s sense of stalled progress and scrutiny of his political associations. Field’s speech concerns unused ability and its consequences.

The name and the evidence

The conjunction is worth recording: a character named Nevill directs a marriage intrigue through disguise and performance; his priestly impersonation uses the means of gaining trust described in Neville’s own diplomatic letter; he is addressed in language closely resembling Hamlet; and he speaks about talent, frustrated advancement and political danger. The play identifies him only as Nevill, “Master Nevill” and “young Nevill.” Nothing in the play directly identifies him as Sir Henry Neville. The possible personal allusion therefore remains a question alongside the directly observable dramatic and verbal correspondences.