Romeo and Juliet: The Montagues, Cowdray and the Sussex Connection
Long before Shakespeare brought the Montagues and Capulets to the London stage, an English aristocratic wedding had transformed the Italian Montagues into a theatrical entertainment. The family at the centre of that occasion belonged to the Sussex world of Sir Lewes Lewkenor.
The Montagues before Shakespeare
In 1572, more than twenty years before the probable composition of Romeo and Juliet, George Gascoigne devised an elaborate entertainment for the marriage celebrations of Anthony Browne’s family, the Viscounts Montagu of Cowdray.
The entertainment, entitled A Devise of a Maske, was subsequently printed in Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres in 1573.
Its conceit was wonderfully appropriate to the family being honoured.
Gascoigne introduced visitors dressed in Venetian fashion, presenting them as Italian kinsmen of the English Montagues.
The entertainment deliberately played upon the resemblance between the English family name Montagu and the Italian Montecchi, the Montagues of the Romeo and Juliet tradition.
The Italian family feud had therefore already become a subject of English aristocratic theatrical entertainment.
And the household in which it appeared was closely connected with the Lewkenor family.
Gascoigne’s Venetian visitors
Gascoigne’s masque belongs to the sophisticated world of Elizabethan courtly entertainment.
The performers appeared in elaborate costumes and delivered speeches designed to flatter the family and celebrate the marriage.
By presenting the visitors as Italian relatives, Gascoigne transformed the family name into a theatrical fiction.
The entertainment depended upon the audience recognising the supposed relationship between the English Montagues and their Italian namesakes.
That relationship was playful rather than genealogical.
Its importance lies in the fact that the Montague name already possessed theatrical associations within an English noble household.
Shakespeare’s tragedy would later give the same name an entirely different dramatic purpose.
In Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues are one of two noble families whose ancient quarrel has poisoned the public life of Verona.
Gascoigne had used the name to celebrate aristocratic kinship.
Shakespeare used it to explore the destructive consequences of inherited hatred.
The Brownes of Cowdray
The English Montagues were the Browne family of Cowdray House in Sussex.
Anthony Browne, first Viscount Montagu, had served Mary I and subsequently maintained an important position under Elizabeth I despite his Catholic religion.
Cowdray was one of the great aristocratic houses of southern England.
Its owners maintained extensive relationships with the Sussex gentry, including the Lewkenor family.
Sir Lewes Lewkenor grew up in this world.
His family held property around Selsey and West Dean, and his father Thomas represented Midhurst in Parliament.
The Lewkenors and Brownes were connected through local politics, property, marriage and the administration of family affairs.
Sir Richard Lewkenor, Lewes’s uncle, acted in legal and financial matters for the Montagu household.
He also served as an executor of Anthony Browne’s will.
The connection was therefore substantial and longstanding.
Elizabeth I at Cowdray, 1591
In August 1591 Elizabeth I visited Cowdray during her progress through Sussex.
The visit was politically important.
Anthony Browne was a prominent Catholic nobleman, and the Queen’s reception at his household demonstrated the delicate relationship between religious difference and loyalty to the Crown.
The festivities included elaborate entertainments, speeches, displays of hospitality and carefully organised movements between the great houses of Sussex.
Lewkenor’s family participated in the preparations.
The surviving accounts record expenditure:
for making ready Mr Richard Lewkenour’s house for her ma’tie to dine at betwixt Cowdrey and Chichester by the space of two days mense Augustii 1591 as appereth by bill signed by the lord Chambleyne [mark] 39s 4d.
This is a particularly valuable document.
It establishes that a house belonging to Sir Richard Lewkenor was prepared for the Queen’s dinner during the Sussex progress.
The family was therefore directly involved in the practical arrangements surrounding Elizabeth’s visit.
Sir Lewes’s personal attendance is not named in this account, but the event belonged to the household and geographical world in which he had grown up.
West Dean and the road to Titchfield
The Queen’s journey through Sussex brought her from Cowdray towards Chichester and eventually to the Hampshire coast.
West Dean, where Sir Richard Lewkenor maintained his household, lay along the route.
The progress continued towards Portsmouth and Titchfield, where the Queen was received at the house of the Earl of Southampton.
Titchfield House had been established within the former Premonstratensian abbey and had become one of the principal residences of the Wriothesley family.
Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, would become one of Shakespeare’s most important literary patrons.
Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to him in 1593 and 1594.
The Sussex progress therefore connects three important aristocratic environments: the Montagus of Cowdray, the Lewkenors of West Dean and the Wriothesleys of Titchfield.
These households belonged to overlapping networks of kinship, politics and courtly entertainment.
Southampton and Shakespeare
Southampton’s relationship with Shakespeare is central to the literary history of the 1590s.
His patronage helped establish the young playwright’s reputation as a poet.
The dedication of Venus and Adonis describes Southampton as the recipient of Shakespeare’s first published literary offering.
In The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare expresses an even stronger sense of personal obligation.
The relationship placed Shakespeare within a circle of aristocratic patrons whose interests extended across literature, theatre, politics and foreign affairs.
The Montagus and Lewkenors belonged to the same broad world of Sussex and Hampshire gentry.
It is in that context that Gascoigne’s earlier Montagu masque becomes particularly interesting.
The English Montague name had already been transformed into theatrical material in a household closely associated with Lewkenor.
Shakespeare’s subsequent treatment of the Italian Montagues emerged within a literary culture supported by neighbouring aristocratic families.
Romeo and Juliet and the Italian tradition
Shakespeare did not invent the story of Romeo and Juliet.
Its literary history extends through Italian narratives by Luigi da Porto and Matteo Bandello, French adaptations and Arthur Brooke’s English poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, published in 1562.
Brooke’s poem supplied Shakespeare with much of the narrative structure of the tragedy.
The Montagues and Capulets were therefore already familiar literary families before Shakespeare brought them to the stage.
Gascoigne’s masque demonstrates that the Italian Montague name had also entered the world of English aristocratic entertainment.
The same family name could operate in different dramatic settings: as a compliment to an English noble household, or as the emblem of a destructive feud in Verona.
The significance of the Cowdray connection lies in the intersection of those theatrical traditions.
The masque and the tragedy
One of the most memorable episodes in Romeo and Juliet is the masked entertainment at the Capulet household.
Romeo and his companions enter the festivities disguised, despite the hostility between their families.
The masque provides the occasion for Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting.
Theatrical disguise temporarily suspends the social divisions that would otherwise prevent their encounter.
The scene belongs to a familiar Elizabethan culture of aristocratic entertainments, in which visitors appeared in elaborate costumes and delivered speeches appropriate to the occasion.
Gascoigne’s Montagu masque was an earlier example of precisely that culture.
His Venetian-clad performers adopted foreign identities to honour an English family.
Shakespeare’s masked guests conceal their family identities within an Italian noble household.
In both entertainments, costume allows the participants to cross boundaries of identity and social expectation.
The difference is that Shakespeare transforms the playful convention into the beginning of a tragedy.
The Sussex theatrical world
The Lewkenor family’s involvement with Cowdray illustrates how closely aristocratic hospitality and theatrical performance were connected in Elizabethan England.
Great households regularly commissioned entertainments for weddings, royal visits and other important occasions.
Such performances could incorporate classical mythology, Italian stories, political allegory and topical compliments.
They were designed for audiences who understood the personalities and relationships being represented.
Gascoigne’s Italian Montagues depended upon that shared knowledge.
The audience understood the joke because the English Montagus were the hosts.
Shakespeare’s plays likewise drew upon a culture in which the relationship between performer and audience could extend beyond the fictional action.
The names of noble families, foreign rulers and contemporary political figures carried associations that an informed audience might recognise.
Lewkenor’s later career as Master of the Ceremonies would place him at the centre of this world of courtly performance.
The Montagues and the cumulative case
The connection between Lewkenor and Romeo and Juliet differs from those established for Othello and Measure for Measure.
It does not depend upon a distinctive verbal borrowing from one of Lewkenor’s books.
Its strength lies in the historical relationship between a theatrical tradition and a recognisable network of families.
George Gascoigne had already staged Italian Montagues for the English Montagu household in 1572.
The Lewkenors were closely associated with that household.
In 1591 Sir Richard Lewkenor’s house was prepared to receive Elizabeth I during her Sussex progress.
The Queen’s route subsequently connected the Montagu and Lewkenor country with the household of the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s future literary patron.
These are the geographical and social circumstances that give the comparison its interest.
Shakespeare’s tragedy belongs to an established European literary tradition, but the Montague name also had a particular history within the English aristocratic culture surrounding Lewkenor.
Once again, the biography reveals a connection between the world of Shakespeare’s drama and the families, entertainments and political society of Elizabethan England.
Continue:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream — Cowdray and Courtly Entertainment →
Sources and Further Reading
George Gascoigne, A Devise of a Maske, printed in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573).
Accounts of Elizabeth I’s Sussex progress of August 1591, including the payment for preparing Sir Richard Lewkenor’s house at West Dean.
The family records of the Brownes of Cowdray, Viscounts Montagu, and the Lewkenors of Sussex.
Arthur Brooke, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562); Luigi da Porto and Matteo Bandello, Italian versions of the Romeo and Juliet story.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; dedications to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, in Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594).
The Master of the Ceremonies, manuscript of 18 October 2026, chapters on Sussex, Cowdray, the Montagus, Elizabeth I’s progress and the Southampton connections.