On 3 September 1599, Henslowe recorded a loan of forty shillings to Thomas Downton ‘to lend unto Thomas Dekker, Benjamin Jonson, Harry Chettle, and other gentleman in earnest of a play called Robert the Second King of Scots Tragedy’. Dekker and Jonson had just finished working together on Page of Plymouth (see 1.231), for which they had been paid in full the previous day; Chettle and Jonson had collaborated the previous year on Hot Anger Soon Cold (see 1.110). Further payments for work on Robert II were received by Chettle on 16 September (ten shillings) and by Jonson on 27 September (twenty shillings). The ‘other gentleman’ mentioned by Henslowe was perhaps John Marston: the ‘Mr Maxton’ who received a payment of forty shillings for unspecified work on 28 September (Foakes (Henslowe, 2002, 124) counters Greg’s view that this name is a modern forgery). The play was probably completed by this time, and could well have been in performance by early October, though no record of its staging exists.

The tragedy of Robert II, King of Scots, would have had some topical interest during the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, when the possibility of James VI’s succession to the English throne was a matter of lively debate. Robert II (1316–90; King of Scotland, 1371–90) was the founder, at least in a nominal sense, of the Stuart royal dynasty. His father, Walter Stewart (c. 1296–1327), had been sixth High Steward of Scotland, or principal officer of the Scottish king, Robert I (Robert the Bruce), and had married the king’s daughter, Marjorie. The younger Robert was known consequently in his lifetime as ‘the Steward’: a name the Scottish royal family thereafter adopted, eventually favouring the spelling ‘Stuart’. At the time of Robert the Steward’s birth, his mother’s father (Robert I) had still not produced a male heir, and for a time Robert the Steward was regarded as likely successor to the throne of Scotland. The belated arrival of Robert I’s son (the future David II) frustrated Robert the Steward’s hopes for many years. At Robert I’s death in 1329, the crown passed to the infant David, and Robert the Steward served as Regent of Scotland. Relations between the young king David and his older nephew Robert remained tense for many years, until David’s unexpected death in 1371 allowed Robert at last to succeed to the throne. The story of these turbulent years of internal and cross-border feuding might have had special interest for Jonson in relation to his own family’s history in the borderlands of Annandale. How he moulded the story into the form of a tragedy remains, however, unclear.

(See also JONSON’S LOST PLAYS)