1122
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Oxford University Press, Amen House, London £.€.4
GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA CAPE TOWN SALISBURY NAIROBI IBADAN ACCRA KUALA LUMPUR HONG KONG
FIRST EDITION 1930
REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY IN GREAT BRITAIN
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
FROM SHEETS OF THE FIRST EDITION
1951, 1963
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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
A STUDY OF FACTS AND PROBLEMS
BY E. K. CHAMBERS
VOL. I
'O K&apos M
FRAGU. DEMOCRITI
OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
N. C.
PREFACE
IN these pages I return, divers* per aequora vectus> to the point from which I started in the last century. I then set out to write of Shakespeare, and of the English stage as a background for Shakespeare; and this has been throughout my theme, although I have not found it pos- sible to use quite that brevity of words which the confident surmise of youth anticipated. My remaining purpose is threefold. The present volumes complete the design of The Elizabethan Stage by a treatment of its central figure, for which in that book I had no space proportionate to his significance, .1 collect the scanty biographical data from records and tradition, and endeavour to submit them to the tests of a reasonable analysis. And thirdly, I attempt to evaluate the results of bibliographical and historical study in relation to the canon of the plays, and to form a considered opinion upon the nature of the texts in which Shakespeare's work is preserved to us. In so doing, I am led to a confirmation of the doubts expressed in my British Academy lecture of 1924 on The Disintegration of Shakespeare^ as to the validity of certain drifts of specula- tion, which tend to minimize at once the originality of that work and the purity of its transmission. I am not so much perturbed as some of my critics seem to think that I ought to be, by finding that my conclusions do not differ essentially from those which have long formed part of the critical tradition. That is itself the outcome of study through many generations by men of diverse tempers, starting from diverse standpoints. They have no doubt left something for modern scholarship to contribute, especially as regards the causes of major textual variations. But I do not think that revolutionary results really emerge from the closer examination of contemporary plays, or
viii PREFACE
of theatrical conditions, or of the psychology of misprints. Shakespeare, as a dramatist, remains something more than the life-tenant of a literary entail,
I have been on well-trodden paths, and my debt to others is heavy: among the earlier writers to Malone, Halliwell-Phillipps, and Dowden beyond the rest; and among my own contemporaries above all to Dr. W. W. Greg, whose published studies I cite on page after page, and upon whose generosity in counsel and information I have constantly drawn during the progress of this book. I have learnt much also from those accomplished biblio- graphers, Professor A. W. Pollard and Dr. R. B. McKer- row, and from Professor J. Dover Wilson, perhaps most where he most stimulated me to reaction. I have had help on various points from many others, to all of whom my thanks are due: Miss Eleanore Boswell, Miss M. St. Clare Byrne, Dr. H. H. E. Craster, Mr. F. H. Cripps- Day, Mr, P. J. Dobell, Mr. F. S. Ferguson, the Rev. W. G. D. Fletcher, the Rev. E. I. Fripp, Professor E, G. Gardner, Mr. S. Gibson, Mr. M. S. Giuseppi, Father W. Godfrey, the Hon. Henry Hannen, Miss M. Dormer Harris, the late Dr. J. W. Horrocks, Sir Mark Hunter, the Rev. P. J, Latham, Mr. E. T. Leeds, Dr. J. G. Milne, Professor G. C Moore Smith, Professor D. Nichol Smith, Professor Allardyce Nicoll, Mr. A, M. Oliver, Mr. S. C. Ratcliff, Mr. V. B. Redstone, Miss M. Sellers, Mr. Percy Simpson, Mr. K. Sisam, Professor C. J. Sisson, the late Professor E. A. Sonnenschein, Mr. A. E, Stamp, the Rev. W. Stanhope-Lovell, Mr. A. H. Thomas, Mr. F. C. Wellstood, Dr. C. T. Hagberg Wright. To the Pierpont Morgan Library of New York I owe permission to use the Holgate manuscript of Francis Beaumont's poem.
At the end of my pilgrimage I have yet older memories to set down. The unfailing sympathy, encouragement
PREFACE ix
and patience of my wife have been my mainstay through- out. To her, Artemis of the Ways, these volumes, like their predecessors, are dedicated.
ov TroAAi] 8* TJ x&pis* &M' oofy*
And I should indeed be an ingrate if I did not now recall the succession of those who have done so much, one after another, for the presentation of my work at the Clarendon Press. They have among them borne with my script and my divagations for well over a quarter of a century; and those who survive must share my feeling of relief, if not its intermingled regret, that the last of many chapters is now closed.
E. K. C. EYNSHAM, July 1930.
CONTENTS
VOLUME I I. SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN . II. THE STAGE IN 1592 III. SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY IV* THE BOOK OF THE PLAY V. THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO VI. PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE VI L THE PROBLEM or AUTHENTICITY . VIII, THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY IX. PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO , i, ii, iii. Henry the Sixth . iv. Richard the Third v. The Comedy of Errors vi. Titus Andronicus vii^The Taming of the Shrew . viii. The Two Gentlemen of Verona ix. Love's Labour 's Lost . x. Romeo and Juliet xi. Richard the Second xii. A Midsummer-Night's Dream xiii. King John
xiv. The Merchant of Venice . xv, xvi. Henry the Fourth
xvii. Much Ado about Nothing xviii. Henry the Fifth xix. Julius Caesar . xx. As You Like It XXL Twelfth Night . xxii. Hamlet . • . xxiii. The Merry Wives of Windsor xxiv. Troilus and Cressida . xxv. All's Well that Ends Well . xxvi. Measure for Measure . xxvii. Othello .
xxviii. King Lear . . * xxix. Macbeth ....
xii CONTENTS
xxx. Antony and Cleopatra .... 476
xxxi. Coriolanus 478
xxxii. Timon of Athens 480
xxxiii. Cymbeline ...;.. 484
xxxiv. The Winter's Tale .... 487
xxxv. The Tempest 490
xxxvi. Henry the Eighth 495
X. PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO . . . 499
i. Sir Thomas More 499
ii. Edward the Third 515
iii. Pericles 518
iv. The Two Noble Kinsmen . . . 528
v. Plays Ascribed in the Third Folio . . 532
vi. Other Ascribed Plays .... 537
XI. THE POEMS AND SONNETS .... 543
i. Venus and Adonis .... 543
ii. The Rape of Lucrece .... 545
iii. The Passionate Pilgrim .... 547
iv. The Phoenix and Turtle . . . 549
v. A Lover's Complaint .... 550
vi. Ascribed Verses 550
vii. The Sonnets 555
VOLUME II
NOTE ON RECORDS xiii
PRINCIPAL DATES xiv
PEDIGREE OF SHAKESPEARE AND ARDEN xvi APPENDICES —
A. RECORDS i
i. Christenings, Marriages, and Burials . . i
ii. The Grants of Arms 1 8
iii. Henley Street 32
igrThe AdblJ^hgjapt^u *_ ...t* ^ *^-~<~**~ **3f
v. Shakespeare's Marriage . . 7" . 41
vi. The Clayton Suit 52
vii. Shakespeare's Interests in the Globe and Black- friars ....... 52
viii. Shakespeare and his Fellows . . . . 71
ix. Shakespeare's London Residences . . 87
x. The Belott-Mountjoy Suit .... 90
xi. New Place ...... 95
CONTENTS ziH
xii. Shakespeare as Maltster .... 99
xiii. The Quiney Correspondence . . . 101
xiv. The Old Stratford Freehold ... 107
xv. The Chapel Lane Cottage . . . in
xvi. Court of Record Suits . . . .113
xvii. The Stratford Tithes 118
xviit. The Combe Family 127
xix. The Welcombe Enclosure .... 141
xx. The Highways Bill 152
xxi. A Preacher's Thirst 153
xxii. Lord Rutland's Impresa . . . .153 xxiiL The Blackfriars Gate-House . . .154
xxiv. Shakespeare's Will 169
xxv. Shakespeare's Epitaphs . . . .181
B. CONTEMPORARY ALLUSIONS 186
G. THE SHAKESPEARE-MYTHOS .... 238
D. PERFORMANCES OF PLAYS 303
E. THE NAME SHAKESPEARE 354
F. SHAKESPEAREAN FABRICATIONS .... 377
G. TABLE OF QUARTOS 394
H. METRICAL TABLES 397
LIST OF BOOKS 409
SUBJECT-INDEX ....... 426
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME I
I. South Warwickshire and Neighbourhood, from the tapestry map (Bodleian, Gough collection) made by the Sheldon weavers of Weston, late in the 1 6th century . . . Frontispiece
II. Neighbourhood of Stratford-on- A von . facing p. 4
III. Town of Stratford-on- A von . 6
IV. Ferdinando, Earl of Derby, by permission from
the portrait in the possession of the Earl of Derby, K.G., at Knowsley Hall ... 46
V. Edward Alleyn, from the picture at Dulwich
College, by permission of the Governors . 48
VI. The Lords Chamberlain 64
(a) Henry, Lord Hunsdon, from a print in the British Museum.
(b) George, Lord Hunsdon, by permission from a miniature in the possession of the Duke of Buccleuch and reproduced from a print supplied by the Victoria and Albert Museum.
VII. Richard Burbadge, from the picture in the Gallery of Dulwich College, by permission of the Governors 76
VIII. William Sly, from the picture in the Gallery of Dulwich College, by permission of the Governors 78
IX. John Lowin, from the picture in the Ashmolean 80
. X. Nathan Field, from the picture in the Gallery of Dulwich College, by permission of the Governors 82
XL Henry Peacham's Illustration of Titus Andromcus^ by permission, from the Harley Papers in the possession of the Marquis of Bath at Longleat 312
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XII A. Shakespeare's Signatures, to—
(a) The Deposition in Eelott v. Mountjoy^ from the Public Record Office. Photograph, by Messrs. Monger & Marchant.
(b) The Conveyance of the Blackfriars Gate- house, from the Guildhall Library of the City of London.
(c) The Mortgageof the Blackfriars Gate-house,
from the British Museum . . facing p. 504
XII B. Shakespeare's Signatures, to—
W> W> (/) The WM (first, second, and third pages), from the Probate Registry of the Pre- rogative Court of Canterbury at Somerset House 504
XIII. Hand D in Sir Thomas More^ from British
Museum Harleian MS. 7368, fol. 9 a . 508
XIV. William Earl of Pembroke, from the brass
statue by Hubert le Soeur in the Bodleian,
based on a picture by Rubens . . . 566
XV. Henry Earl of Southampton, from the picture in
the National Portrait Gallery . . . 568
VOLUME II
XVI. John Davenant's Painted Chamber, at 3 Corn- market, Oxford, by permission of Mr. E. W. Attwood ..... Frontispiece
XVII. Richard Quiney's Letter to Shakespeare, from the Birthplace Museum at Stratford-on- Avon, by permission of die Trustees . facing 102
XVIII. Memoranda of Thomas Greene, from the Birthplace Museum at Stratford-on-Avon, by permission of the Trustees . , . 143
XIX. Shakespeare's Will (First Sheet), from the Pro- bate Registry of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. . . . . .170
XX. Shakespeare's WiU (Second SheetJ, as above . 172
XXI. Shakespeare's Will (Third Sheet;, as above.
Photographs, R. B. Fleming & Co. . . 174
3 142- 1
XVI
XXIII. XXIV.
between pages 196-7
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
XXII. Shakespeare's Monument, from Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon. Photograph, Frith & Co. . . facing 182. Shakespeare's Bust, from the monument.
Photograph, Frith & Co. . 184
Cover of the Northumberland MS. (Reduced Facsimile), from intensified negative, with the background, and incidentally the last two letters of Dyr- month's name, eliminated
XXV. Cover of the Northumberland MS. (Transcript). The facsimile and the transcript from F. J. Burgoyne, Collo- type Facsimile and Type Transcript of an Elizabethan MS. at Alwwlck Castle (Longmans, Green & Co., Ltd.), by permission of His Grace the late Duke of Northumberland, K.G.
XXVI. Droeshout Engraving (First State),' from the title-page of the First Folio (Bodleian Arch. G. c. 8) I between
XXVII. Droeshout Engraving (Second State), \ pages 240-1 from the title-page of the First Folio (Bodleian Arch. G. c. 7)
XXVIII. Memorandum of John Aubrey, from
Bodleian Aubrey MS. 8, f. 45V , facing 252 XXIX. Memoranda of William Fulman and Richard Davies, from C.C.C. (Oxford) MS. 309, p. 22 . . . 257
XXX. Warwickshire in 1610, from map by Jodocus Hondius in John Speed, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (i 6 1 1) . 354
CHAPTER I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN
\Bibliographical Note. Most of the comprehensive treatises upon Shake- speare and the editions of the plays (ch. ix) deal with his personal biography side by side with his career as a dramatist. The Lives by S. Lee (1898, 1925) and J. Q. Adams (1923) are full in this respect. Many documents collected by Malone and his predecessors are to be found in the revised Life of the Variorum Shakespeare (1821), ii, and its appendixes. Some additions were made by Collier and others, but more by Halliwell-Phillipps in his Liv.es of 1848 and 1853, which are still of value, and in a number of smaller works, often issued in limited editions and now rare. Most, but not all, of these were brought together in his Outlines of the Life of Shake- speare which was often enlarged and took its final form in the seventh edition of 1887. Since his time the chief new discoveries have been those of C. W. Wallace, mostly published in Nebraska University Studies, v, x (1905, 1910). Selections of documents are in D. H. Lambert, Cartae Shakespeareanae (1904), and T. Brooke, Shakespeare of Stratford (1926). The papers at Stratford are calendared in F. C. Wellstood, Catalogue of the Books, Manuscripts, etc. in Shakespeare's Birthplace (1925). I give the most important documents and extracts from others, as far as possible from originals or facsimiles, with references to some minor dissertations, in Appendix A. These are supplemented by the contemporary allusions in Appendix B and the traditions in Appendix C.
Books of primarily biographical interest are J, Hunter, New Illustrations ofSh. (1845); G. R. French, Shakespeareana Genealogica (1869); J. P. Yeatman, The Gentle Sh. (1896; 1904, with additions); C. C. Stopes, SJt's Family (1901), Sh.'s Warwickshire Contemporaries (1907), Sh.'s Environment (1914, 1918), SA.'s Industry (1916); C. I. Elton, William Sh. His Family and Friends (1904); J. W. Gray, SA.'s Marriage and Departure from Stratford (1905); A. Gray, A Chapter in the Early Life ofSh. (1926); J. S. Smart, Sh. Truth and Tradition (1928).
There is no adequate history of Stratford-on-Avon. Dugdale's Anti- quities of Warwickshire (1656; ed. W. Thomas, 1718) is valuable on the origins. The Victoria History covers the college, gild, and school, but has not yet reached the parochial volumes. The Corporation archives are voluminous. H.P. provided a Descriptive Calendar (1863) and printed Extracts from the Council Books (1864), Extracts from the Subsidy Rolls (1864), Extracts from the Festry Book (1865), The Chamberlain? Accounts, i59°-97 (1866), Extracts from the Chamberlain? Accounts (1866-7), Extracts from the Registry of the Court of Record (1867). These are being largely replaced by R. Savage and E. I. Fripp, Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation and other Records (1921-9, Dugdale Society, 4 vols. to 1592 issued). R. Savage has printed tie Parish Registers (1897-1905, Parish Register Soc.) and G. Arbuthnot the Festry Minute Book (1899), J. H.
3I42-I B
2 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
Bloom's Shakespeare's Church (1902) is unsatisfactory. He has also edited the Register of the Gild of Holy Cross (1907). Other special studies are R. B. Wheler, Historical Account of the Birthplace (1824, 1863); G. Arbuthnot, Guide to the Collegiate Church (c. 1895); H. E. Forrest, The Old Houses of S. A. (1925). Early summary accounts are R. B. Wheler, History and Antiquities of S. A. (1806), and J. R. Wise, Sh.'s Birthplace and its Neighbourhood (1861); more recent S. Lee, S. A. from the Earliest Times to the Death of Sh. (1885, 1907), and E. I. Fripp, Sh.'s Stratford (1928). The surrounding neighbourhood is described in E. I. Fripp, Sh.'s Haunts near Stratford (1929); earlier guide-books are C. J, Ribton- Turner, Sh.'s Land(i%<)$)\ B. C. A. Windle, 8k.9 s Country (1899); W. S. Brassington, Sh.'s Homeland (1903).
Practically all the available information about John Sh. is collected in H.P.'s Outlines. Traditions of the poet's Stratford life are discussed in C. F. Green, The Legend of Sh.'s Crab-Tree (1857, 1862); C. H. Brace- bridge, 8A. no Deer-Stealer (1862); his grammar school in a Tercentenary Volume (1853); by A. F. Leach in 7.H. ii. 329, English Schools at the Reformation (1896), Educational Charters and Documents (1911); and by A. R. Bayley, Sh.'s Schoolmasters (10 N.Q. viii. 323; 12 N.Q. i. 321); J. H. Pollen, A Sh. Discovery: His School-master afterwards a Jesuit (1917, The Month, cxxx. 317); W. H. Stgrenson, 8k! s Schoolmaster and Hand- writing (1920, Jan. 8, T.L.S.)-> and'rts curriculum by T. S. Baynes, What Sh. Learnt at School (1894, 8k. Studies, 147); F. Watson, The Curriculum and Text-Books of English Schools in the Seventeenth Century (1902, Bibl. Soc. Trans, vi. 159); S. Blach, Sks Lattingrammatik (1908-9, J. xliv. 65; xlv. 51); J. E. Sandys, Education (Sh.'s England, i. 224). More general works on Sh.'s literary acquirements are H. R. D. Anders, Sk!s Books (1904); H. B. Wheatley, Sh. as a Man of Letters (1919, Bill. Soc. Trans. xiv. 109); R. Farmer, Essay on the Learning of Sh. (1767; Far. i. 300); A. H. Cruickshank, The Classical Attainments ofSh. (1887, Noctes Shake- spearianae9 45); P. Stapfer, 8k. and Classical Antiquity (1880); J. C. Collins, Essays and Studies (i 895) ; R. K. Root, Classical Mythology in Sh. (1903); M. W. McCallum, Sh.'s Roman Plays and their Background (1910); L. Rick, Sh. and Ovid (1919, J. lv. 35); E. R. Hooker, The Relation ofSA. to Montaigne (1902, P.M.L.A. xvii. 3 1 2) ; J. M. Robertson, Montaigne and Sh. (1909); G. C.Taylor, Sh.'s Debt to Monta igne(i<)2 5); C. Wordsworth, Sh.'s Knowledge and Use of the Bible (4th ed., 1892); T. Carter, 8k. and Holy Scripture (1905); J. A. R. Marriott, English History in Sk. (1918); H. Green, Sh. and the Emblem- Writers (1870); R. Jente, Proverbs ofSh. (1926 Washington Univ. Studies xiii. 391). On the specificsources of the plays are: J. Nichols, Six Old Plays (1779) ; K. Simrock and others, Quellen des Sh. (1831); J. P. Collier, Sh.'s Library (1844; «<*. W. C. Hazlitt, 1875); I. Gollancz and others, 8k. Classics (1903-13); F, A. Leo, Four Chapters of North's Plutarch (1878); A. Vollmer, 8k. and Plutarch (1887, Archiv, Ixxvii. 353; Ixxviii. 75, 215); W. W. Skeat, Sh.'s Plutarch (1892); R. H. Carr, Plutarch's Lives (1906); W. G. BosweU-Stone, 8k.'s Holinshed (1896); A. and J, Nicoll, Holinshed's
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 3
Chronicles as Used in Si.'s Plays (1927). On Shakespeare's knowledge of country life are H. Loewe, Si. unddie Waidmannskunst (1904, J. xl. 51); D. H. Madden, The Diary of Master William Silence (1897); C. Brown, Sh. and the Horse (1912, j Library, iii. 1 52); H. N. Ellacombe, Si. as an Angler (1883), Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Sh. (3rded. 1896);?. G. Savage, Flora and folk-Lore of Sh. (1923); A. Geikie, The Birds of Sh. (1916). On his medical knowledge are J. C. Bucknill, Medical Knowledge of Si. (1860), Mad Folk of Sh. (1867); J. Moyes, Medicine and Kindred Arts in the Plays of Sh. (1896). On his legal knowledge and conjectured training as a lawyer are J. Lord Campbell, Si.9s Legal Acquirements (1859); W. L. Rushton, Si. a Lawyer (1858), Si's Legal Maxims (1859, 1907), Si.'* Testamentary Language (1869), Si. Illustrated by the Lex Scrip fa (1870); J. Kohler, Si. vor dem Forum der Jurisprudenz (1883, 1919); W. C. Devecmon, In re Si.'s Legal Acquirements (1899); C. Allen, Notes on the Sh.-Bacon Question (1900) ; G. G. Greenwood, Si.9s Law and Latin (1916), Si.'s Law (1920); A. Underhill, £^(1917, 1926, Si.'s England, i. 381); D. P. Barton, Si.'s Links with the Law (1929). On other occupa- tions ascribed to Shakespeare are W. J. Thorns, Was Si. ever a Soldier? (1865, Three Notelets on Si.)i W. Blades, Si. and Typography (1872); W. L. Rushton, Si. an Archer (1897).]
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was born of burgess folk, not un- like those whom he depicts in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Stratford-on-Avon, however, had not grown up in the shadow of a royal castle. It was a provincial market town, and counted with Henley-in-Arden after the city of Coventry and the borough of Warwick among the business centres of Warwickshire. It stood on the north bank of the Avon, where a ford had once been traversed -by a minor Roman thoroughfare. A medieval wooden bridge had been replaced at the end of the fifteenth century by the stone one which still survives. The great western highway, following the line of Watling Street to Shrews- bury and Chester, passed well to the north through Coventry. But at Stratford bridge met two lesser roads from London, one by Oxford and under the Cotswolds, the other by Banbury and Edgehill; and beyond it ways radiated through Stratford itself to Warwick, Birming- ham, Alcester, and Evesham. 'Emporiolum non in- elegans' is the description of the place in Camden's Britannia , and Leland, who visited it about 1540, records that it was 'reasonably well buyldyd of tymbar', with
B 2
4 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
'two or three very lardge stretes, besyde bake lanes'. Topo- graphers give the name of Arden to Warwickshire north of the Avon and distinguish it as the Woodland from the cultivated champaign of the Feldon to the south. But even on the north bank of the river there were open corn- fields, as well as many enclosed pastures, and frequent hamlets tell of early clearings on the fringe of Arden. The lord had his boscus at Stratford in the thirteenth century and later a park, but Leland says that little woodland was visible there in his time.
The town of Stratford only occupied a small part of a large parish which bore the same name. This ^ was ten miles in circuit and had i,5oohouseling people in 1546. Mercian kings had made wide grants to the bishops of Worcester, with a 'hundredal' jurisdiction independent of the sheriff over the liberty of Pathlow, for which they held wayside courts at Pathlow itself and at Gilleputs in Strat- ford. There was a monastery, afterwards discontinued, for the bishop and his household. Much of the dominion, even in Saxon times, had passed from the bishops by devolution to thanes and in other ways, and in the six- teenth-century parish there were several manors. The hamlet of Clopton was held by the family of that name; Luddington by the Convays of Arrow; Drayton by the Petos of Chesterton; Bishopston by the Catesbys of Lapworth and afterwards by the Archers of Tan worth; part of Shottery by the Smiths of Wootton Wawen. But the principal manor still remained with the bishop up to 1549. In this lay the borough itself, the 'Old Town* which divided it from the parish church of Holy Trinity on the southern outskirts, and a considerable stretch of agricultural land in the fields of Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Shottery.1 The bishop had also the distinct township of Bishop's Hampton, to the east of Stratford. On the south side of the river were the Lucy manor of Charlecote, the Greville manor of Milcote, and the Rainsford manor of Clifford Chambers in Gloucestershire. The hamlet of Bridgetown beyond the bridge was partly in the borough
1 Cf. plan (Plate III).
PLATE II
Office
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 5
and partly in Alveston. To the north-east and north-west of Stratford were the villages of Snitterfield and Aston Cantlow. They had been 'Warwickslands', lordships of the dominant families of Beauchamp and Neville, and had reverted to the crown on attainder. For all these places Stratford was the natural urban centre,1
The borough had come into existence under Bishop John de Coutances (i 195-8), who had laid out part of his demesne in quarter-acre plots of uniform frontage and depth. These were held as burgages, practically on a free- hold tenure, subject to shilling chief rents, and with rights of division and disposition by sale or will. A separate manor court was presided over by the bishop's steward, but the burgesses probably chose their own bailiff and sub-bailiffs as executive officers. The court sat twice in the year, for 'leets' or 'law days' near Easter and Michael- mas. At these officers were appointed, transfers of burgages were recorded, small civil actions for debt and the like were heard, by-laws for good order were made, and breaches of these, with frays and infringements of the 'assizes' of food and drink and other standards for the quality of saleable articles, were punished. Side by side with the manorial jurisdiction had grown up the organization of the Gild of Holy Cross, which ministered in many ways to the well-being of the town. It dated from the thirteenth century. Early in the fifteenth it absorbed smaller gilds, and thereafter an almost con- tinuous register preserves the admissions of brothers and sisters, and the payments for the souls of the dead, whose masses were sung by the priests of its chapel. The members of the gild were bound to fraternal relations and to attendance at each others funerals in their Augustinian hoods. Periodical love-feasts encouraged more mundane intercourse. The gild had accumulated much property, in and about Stratford, from pious gifts and legacies. It helped its poorer members and maintained an almshouse. A school, which had existed in some form as far back as 1295, was one of its activities. This had an endowment
Cf. map (Plate II).
6 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
from Thomas Joliffe for the gratuitous teaching of gram- mar by one of the priests. The gild buildings, which stood just within the borough, owed their latest form to Sir Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor of London in 1492. He, too, had built the bridge. The affairs of the gild were in the hands of a Master and Aldermen, with two Proctors as financial officers. It was at the height of its reputation in the middle of the fifteenth century, and attracted members of distinction from far beyond the limits of Stratford. Later it suffered a decline, perhaps due in part to the rise of trade gilds, in which the craftsmen of the town were linked for business purposes. Probably the gild chapel counted for more in the religious life of the borough than the comparatively distant church. This belonged to a college of priests under a warden, which also had acquired much landed property, in addition to the ample tithes of the large parish. Two chapels in the hamlets of Bishopston and Luddington were under its control.
The reign of Edward VI was a period of considerable change for Stratford. The gild and the college were both dissolved under the Chantries Act of 1547, and their revenues went to the crown. Provisional direction was given for the continuance of the school. In 1 549 Bishop Nicholas Heath was driven, apparently for inadequate compensation, to transfer his manor, with that of Bishop's Hampton, to John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and after- wards Duke of Northumberland, who aspired to restore the old domination of the Beauchamps and Nevilles in the county. It passed from him in the same year and back to him in 1553 by exchanges with the crown. On his at- tainder in 1553 Mary granted it to the duchess, and after her death in 1555 to the hospital of the Savoy. But this grant was almost immediately vacated, and the manor remained with the crown until 1 562, when Elizabeth gave it to Northumberland's son Ambrose Dudley, now in his turn created Earl of Warwick. On his death in 1590 it again reverted to the crown, but was sold and acquired by Sir Edward Greville of Milcote.1 Another event of 1 553
1 Cf. App. Ay no. xix.
Scok qf yonts
0 ]00 200 300 400
% doited line is the borouqh boundoru
o u
Oxford University Press
TOWN OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 7
had, however, reduced the importance of the manor and its court in local affairs. The inhabitants, perturbed by the^loss of valuable elements in their civic life, petitioned for incorporation as a royal borough; and this, presumably through the influence of Northumberland, then in power, was accorded by a charter of 28 June 1 553. The govern- ment of the borough was entrusted to a Bailiff and a Council of fourteen Aldermen and fourteen Capital Burgesses, with powers to provide for good order and the management of corporate property, to fill vacancies in their number, and to make annual election of the bailiff, Serjeants at the mace, constables, and such other officers as might prove .necessary. The Council was to have the return to royal writs within the borough, to the exclusion of the sheriff, and the bailiff to hold crown office as escheator, coroner, almoner, and clerk of the market. With a chosen alderman, he was to act as justice of peace. Authority was given for a weekly market and for two annual fairs, with a court of pie-powder. There was also to be a court of record under the bailiff, with jurisdiction in civil causes, where the amount in dispute was not more than £30. To meet the municipal expenses, the charter granted the property of the late gild, worth about ^46, and the rever- sion of a lease of the parish tithes granted by the college, with the reserved rent of £$+.1 The rest of the college property remained with the Crown. The funds granted were charged with the maintenance of the almshouse, and with salaries for the schoolmaster, the vicar, and his curate. A general reservation, which afterwards led to trouble, was made for the rights of the lord of the manor, and in particular the election of the bailiff was to be sub- ject to his approval, and he was to have the appointment of the schoolmaster and vicar. For some years from 1 553 the records leave it rather difficult to disentangle the activities of the bailiff and his brethren from those of the court leet. But soon after a recognition of the charter by Elizabeth in 1560, the Council was regularly at work, holding its meetings at 'halls' every month or so in the
1 Cf. App. A, no. xvii.
8 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
buildings of the old gild, making its by-laws, surveying its property, approving leases, ordering the market, the fairs, and the almshouse, and raising small levies for public or charitable purposes to supplement its regular funds.
It had at first a town clerk and afterwards a steward, who assisted the bailiff at the court of record.1 This, in addi- tion to its jurisdiction between civil litigants, chiefly in cases of debt, took over the imposition of penalties for breaches of by-laws or of the assize. Frays may be assumed to have fallen to the justices of peace. The leet, although shorn of many of its functions, continued to be held. It presumably dealt with matters peculiar to the manor, such as the transfer of burgages. The constables, although chosen by the Council with other officers at Michaelmas, were sworn in at a leet. Disputes arose with the lords of the manor, about toll-corn, about commoners' rights, about the approval of bailiffs. Internal discipline also gave trouble. The aldermen and principal burgesses did not always attend halls regularly, and some of them were inclined to shun the responsibilities of office when their turns came. Towards the end of the century the Council was much occupied with affairs in London.2 The in- dustries of Stratford were decaying and there had been disastrous fires. Suits were made to the Crown for ex- emption from subsidies, and for an enlarged charter. One was in fact granted by James in 1 6 10, which extended the boundary of the borough to include the Old Town. The minutes of council meetings are not very full. Rather more illuminating are the accounts of the Chamberlains, who had succeeded the proctors of the gild as financial officers. These were made up annually after each year of office and presented to the Council for audit about Christmas. The chamberlains collected the rents and dues, and kept a detailed record of their expenditure upon salaries, repairs to property, gifts, generally in wine and sugar, to distinguished strangers, and rewards to players. The accounts throw many sidelights on town history and on local personalities. Religious changes for example are
x Cf. App. A, no. xvL » Cf. App. A, nos. xii, xiii.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 9
traceable in payments of 1562-3 for defacing images in the chapel, and of 1563-4 for taking down the rood-loft, and in a council order of 1571 for the sale of copes and vestments.1
Stratford has been represented as a dirty and ignorant town, an unmeet cradle for poetry. There is some want of historical perspective here. No doubt sanitary science was in its infancy. But, after all, penalties for the breach of by-laws, if they are evidence that the by-laws were some- times broken, are also evidence that they were enforced. Nor was contemporary London, with the puppy dogs in its Fleet and its unsecured Moorditch, in much better case. Stratford had its paved streets and much garden ground about its houses. It was embosomed in elms, of which a survey of 1582 records a vast number in .closes and on the backsides of the burgages.2 And all around was fair and open land with parks and dingles and a shining river. There was much give and take between town and country-side. The urban industries, weaving, dyeing, tanning, shoe-making, glove-making, smithing, rope- making, carpentry, were such as subserve or are fed by agriculture. Many of the burgesses were also landholders in the parish or in neighbouring villages. There was much buying of barley, for the making and sale of malt, which was a subsidiary occupation of many households.3 Sheep, cattle, ducks, and ringed swine ran on the common pasture called the Bank Croft. Although remote, the town was not out of touch with a larger civilization. Access to Oxford was easy, and to London itself, by roads on which carriers came and went regularly, and the burgesses journeyed on their public and private business. Nor was it entirely bookless. Leading townsmen could quote Latin and write a Latin letter if need be. Critical eyes may have watched the Whitsun pastoral which David Jones produced in 1 5 8 3 .4 The Grammar School was probably of good stand- ing. The schoolmaster's salary, which Joliffe fixed at £ I o,
1 M.A. i. 128, 1385 ii. 54. 4 M.A. w. 137 : Tayd to Davi Jones
* M.A. lii. 10$. and his companye for his pastyme at
3 Cf. App. A) no. xii. Whitsontyde xiij8 iiija.'
io SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
was increased to £20 by the charter. This was much more than the £12 $s. paid at Warwick or than the amounts usual in Elizabethan grammar schools, outside West- minster, Eton, Winchester, and Shrewsbury. It was better than the emoluments of an Oxford or Cambridge fellowship. And from Oxford or Cambridge came William Smart (1554-65), Fellow of Christ's, John Browns word (1565-7), a Latin poet of repute, John Acton (1567-9), Walter Roche (1569-71), Fellow of Corpus, Oxford, Simon Hunt (1571-5), afterwards a Jesuit at Douai and English penitentiary at Rome, Thomas Jenkins (i 575-9), Fellow of St. John's, Oxford, who came from Warwick, John Cottam (1579-81), and Alexander Aspinall (1581- 1624). The actual curriculum of the school is unknown; it was probably based on those planned by Colet for St. Paul's in 1518 and Wolsey for Ipswich in 1529, and not unlike that in force at St. Bees in 1583. Colet required an entrant to be able to 'rede and write Latyn and Eng- lisshe sufficiently, soo that he be able to rede and wryte his owne lessons'.1 But London had its sufficiency of elementary schools, and the easier standard of Stratford was content if a child was 'fet for the gramer scoll or at the least wyez entred or reddy to enter into ther accydence & princypalles of gramer'.2 Even the preparation seems at first to have been given by an usher attached to the gram- mar school, whom the chamberlains paid 'for techyng ye chylder'. But by 1604 an independent teacher had for some time taught reading and his wife needlework, 'whereby our young youth is well furthered in reading and the Free School greatly eased of that tedious trouble'^ In the grammar school itself there would be little but Latin; the grammar of Colet himself and William Lilly, revised and appointed for use in schools under successive sovereigns; some easy book of phrases, such as the Sen- tentiae Pueriles of Leonhard Culmann or the Pueriles Confabulatiunculae of Evaldus Callus; Aesop's Fables and the Moral Distichs of Cato; Cicero, Sallust, or Caesar, Ovid in abundance, Virgil, perhaps Horace or Terence; pro-
1 J. xUv. 66. * M.A. i. 34. a M.A. i. 128$ iii. ».
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN n
bably some Renaissance writing, the Bucolica of Baptista Spagnolo Mantuanus or the Zodiacus Vitae of Marcellus Palingenius. There is not likely to have been any Greek. About sixteen a boy was ripe for the University. Sir Hugh Clopton had left six exhibitions to Oxford and Cambridge; it is not known whether the Corporation continued them.1 Such was the environment of the youthful Shakespeare. His father, John Shakespeare, was not of native Stratford stock; there are no Shakespeares in the gild register. John makes his first appearance in Stratford at a leet of 29 April 1552, when he was fined one shilling for having an unauthorized dunghill in Henley St. He may reasonably be identified with a John Shakespeare of Snitterfield, who administered the estate of his father Richard in 1 561.2 Richard had held land on two manors at Snitterfield, in part as tenant to Robert Arden of Wilm- cote in Aston Cantlow. He is traceable there from 1 528- 9, and may possibly have come from Hampton Corley in Budbrooke. But his ultimate origin has eluded research. When grants of arms to John Shakespeare were applied for, the heralds recited ancestral service to Henry VII and a reward of lands in Warwickshire. No confirm- ing record has been found. Shakespeares were thick on the ground in sixteenth-century Warwickshire, par- ticularly in the Woodland about Wroxall and Rowington to the north of Stratford.^ A Richard Shakespeare was in fact bailiff of Wroxall manor in 1534, but his after- history is known, and excludes a suggested identity with Richard of Snitterfield. Other affiliations have been tried in vain. There was some cousinship between the poet and a family of Greene in Warwick, which may one day yield a clue. John Shakespeare, as administrator to his father, is called agrlcola or husbandman. Later his brother Henry is found holding land at Snitterfield, where he died, much indebted, in 1596. Other documents call John a yeoman. Technically a yeoman was a freeholder of land to the annual value of fifty shillings, but the description was often applied to any well-to-do man short of a gentleman.
1 Leach 243. a Cf. App. A, no. ii. * C£ App. E.
iz SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
A more precise designation is that of 'glover1 or *whit- tawer'. A whittawer cured and whitened the soft skins which were the material of the glover's craft. There can be little doubt that John Shakespeare combined these oc- cupations, and was a freeman of the Mystery of the Glovers, Whittawers and Collarmakers, which was one of the Stratford trade gilds. It does not weigh for much against the contemporary use of these terms that John Aubrey called him a butcher in 1681, and that Nicholas Rowe, who made the first attempt at a systematic bio- graphy of the poet in 1709, called him a wool-dealer.1 Likely enough, he had subordinate activities; he is men- tioned as selling both barley and timber. It is possible that he is the John Shakespeare who was tenant of Ingon meadow in Bishop's Hampton about 1570. He is clearly distinct from a John Shakespeare of Clifford Chambers, traceable there from 1560 to his death in 1610, and from a second John Shakespeare of Stratford, a corvizer who dwelt in the town from 1586 to about 1595, and whose progeny early biographers confused with his,2 The poet's father married Mary Arden, daughter of that Robert from whom the grandfather had held land. He was of the ancient house of the Ardens of Park Hall, although the precise degree of relationship is uncertain.3 Mary was a co-heiress in a small way. Robert left her some land in Wilmcote called Asbies by his will of 1556, and had probably already settled other property there upon her. She was also entitled to a share in a reversionary interest of his Snitterfield estate,-* The marriage must have taken place between the date of the will and i$ September 1558, when a daughter Joan was christened at Stratford. She must have died early. There followed Margaret (c. 1562, b. 1563), William (c. 26 April 1564), Gilbert (c. 1566), a second Joan (c. 1569), Anne (c. 1571, b, 1579), Richard (c. 1574), and Edmund (c. 1580). The
' App. C, nos. xiii, xxv. The wool- > Cf. App. A, no. i (a), fc).
dealer tradition established itself at ' Cf. App. A, no. ii.
Stratfordj cf. App. A, no. iiij App. Q 4 Cf. App. A, no. iv. nos. xlvi, liv.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 13
actual day of William's birth is unknown. A belief that it was April 23, on which day he died in 1616, seems to rest on an eighteenth-century blunder.1 In 1556 John Shakespeare bought two houses, one in Henley St. and one in Greenhill St. In 1575 he bought two other houses, the locality of which is not specified. In 1590 he owned two contiguous houses in Henley St. Of these the westernmost is now called the 'Birthplace' and the eastern- most the ' Woolshop'. But this tradition does not go back beyond the middle of the eighteenth century. Certainly the 'Woolshop1 was the purchase of 1556. But whether John was living in the 'Birthplace* in 1552, or whether he was then living as a tenant in the 'Woolshop1, and bought the 'Birthplace' in 1575, has not been established.2 However this may be, the purchases suggest that John Shakespeare prospered in business. And he became prominent in municipal life.a Between 1557 and 1561 he appears as juror, constable, and 'affeeror' or assessor of fines at the court leet, and was himself again fined for leaving his gutter dirty and for not making presentments as ale-taster before the court of record. In 1561 and 1562 he was chosen as one of the chamberlains, and it is perhaps evidence of his financial capacity that he acted, quite exceptionally, as deputy to the chamberlains of the next two years. Probably he was already a capital burgess by 1561, although his name first appears in a list of 1 564. His subscriptions to the relief of the poor during that year of plague-time are liberal. In 1565 he was chosen an alderman, and in 1568 reached the top of civic ambition as bailiff. In view of contemporary habits, it is no proof of inability to write that he was accustomed to authenticate documents by a mark, which was sometimes a cross and sometimes a pair of glover's dividers.4 But it is unfortunate, because it leaves us igno- rant as to how he spelt his name. The town-clerk, a constant scribe, makes it 'Shakspeyr' with great regularity;
1 Cf. App. A, no. i(a). 4 C. Sisson, Marks as Signatures
* Cf, App. Ay no. iii. (Z928> 4 Library, ix. 22), is sceptical.
' CLM.A. passim.
14 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
but some twenty variants are found in Stratford docu- ments.1 After a customary interval John, like other ex- bailiffs, was again justice of the peace as chief alderman in 1571. A few years later there are indications of a decline in his fortunes. Throughout his career there had been suits by and against him for small sums in the court of record. These, however, appear to have been part of the ordinary routine of business transactions as conducted in Stratford. An occasional appearance in the High Courts involved larger sums. In 1571 John proceeded against Richard Quiney, the son of an old colleague Adrian Quiney, for ^50. In 1573 he had himself to meet the claim of Henry Higford, a former steward of Stratford, for j£3°- He failed to appear and a warrant for his arrest, and if not found, outlawry, was issued. He was still in a position to spend £40 on house property in 1575. But at the beginning of 1577 he suddenly discontinued at- tendance at the 'halls' of the Corporation, and never again appeared, except on one or two special occasions. In the following year he was excused from a levy for the relief of the poor, and rated at an exceptionally low amount for the expenses of the musters, which still remained unpaid in 1 579. His wife's inheritance was disposed of. The small reversion in Snitterfield was sold for ^4. Asbies was let at a nominal rent, probably in consideration of a sum down. The other Wilmcote holding was mortgaged to Mary's brother-in-law Edmund Lambert for ^40, to be repaid at Michaelmas 1580. It was not repaid. John Shakespeare afterwards claimed that he had tendered payment, and that it was refused because he still owed other sums to Lambert. This he does not seem to have established. He also maintained that Lambert's son John, to whom posses- sion passed in 1587, agreed to buy the property outright from the Shakespeares and their son William, and failed to keep his agreement. This John Lambert denied. There was litigation in 1589 and again in 1597, but the property proved irrecoverable.2 A singular incident of 1 580 still lacks an explanation. John Shakespeare and one
1 Cf. App. E, no. iii. a App. A, no. iv.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 15
John Audley, a hat-maker of Nottingham, were bound over in the Court of Queen's Bench to give security against a breach of the peace. They failed to answer to their recognizances and incurred substantial fines. That of Shakespeare amounted to £20 for his own default and £20 more as surety for Audley.1 In 1587 an entanglement with the affairs of his brother Henry seems to have added to his embarrassment. And in the same year the patience of the Corporation was exhausted, and a new alderman was appointed in his place, 'for that Mr Shaxspere dothe not come to the halles when they be warned nor hathe not done of longe tyme'.2 Further court of record suits suggest that he was still engaged in business. On 25 September 1592 he was included in a list of persons at Stratford 'hearetofore presented for not comminge moneth- lie to the churche according^ to hir Majesties lawes' ; and to his name and those or eight others is appended the note, 'It is sayd that these laste nine coom not to churche for feare of process for debtte'.3 As arrest for debt could be made on Sundays in the sixteenth century, the explana- tion seems, in the light of John Shakespeare's career since 1577, extremely probable. But the notion of a religious romance in the drab life of a town councillor has proved too much for his biographers, and much ingenuity has been spent in interpreting what little is known of John's personal and official life on the theory that he was in fact a recusant. The theorists differ, however, as to whether he was a Catholic or a nonconforming Puritan, and I do not think that there is much to support either contention. So far as the recusancy returns of 1592 are concerned, the positron is clear. They had nothing to do, as has been suggested by a confusion of dates, with the anti-Puritan legislation of 1593. In 1591 England was expecting a renewed Spanish attempt at invasion, and county com- missions were issued and announced by proclamations of
1 M.A. iii. 6Z, from CoramRege Roll, M.A. iv. 148, 159. S topes, Cont. 31,
AngUa 2ob, 2ia, Trin. 22 Eliz. suggests that this was the corvizer (cf.
* M.A. lii. 170. vol. ii, p. 3) of whose religion, as of his
3 S.P.D. Ettz. ccxliii. 76; Grevttie debts, we know nothing. Papers (Warwick Castle) 26625 texts in
16 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
October 18,* The instructions to the commissioners are known. They were to collect the names of those who did not attend church, not to 'press any persons to answer to any questions of their conscience for matters of religion', but if they found wilful recusants, to examine them as to their allegiance to the Queen, their devotion to the Pope or the King of Spain, and any maintenance of Jesuits or seminary priests. Clearly Catholics alone, and not Puritans, were in danger. Beyond the return itself, the only document which may bear upon John Shakespeare's religion is the devotional will or mtamentum animae found in the roof of one of his Henley St. houses in the eighteenth century.2 I do not think that this is a forgery, but if the John Shakespeare who made it was the poet's father, it pro- bably dates from his early life, and carries little evidence as to his religious position under Elizabeth. Of his per- sonality there may be some genuine reminiscence in a seventeenth-century report of how a visitor, as to whose identity there must be some blunder, found in his shop 'a merry cheeked old man that said "Will was a good honest fellow, but he durst have cracked a jest with him at any time'".3 Although no longer a member of the Corporation, John was called upon to advise them on some difficulties with the lord of the manor in 1601. And on September 8 of that year he was buried. No will or administration is known, but of all the property which passed through his hands, only the Henley St. houses are found in those of the poet.
Of William Shakespeare's own early days there is but little on record; and it is no part of my object to compete with those gifted writers who have drawn upon their acquaintance with Stratford and with the plays for the material of an imaginative reconstruction. We are told by Rowe, presumably on the authority of inquiries made by 'Thomas Betterton at Stratford, that his father bred
1 Proctl. 837, 839; Dasent, xxii. 138, nals (i824),iv. 78; St. G. K. Hyland, A
174, 1 8 1, 205, 21 1, 227, 245, 3 16, 324, Century of Persecution (1920), 196, 407.
3*5> 33*> 34°> 34*> 365> 3*9? ¥>*> 4»7> * Cf. App. F, no. vi.
5435 xxiii. 163, 188, 1915 Strype, An- 3 App. C, no. vii.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 17
him at a free school, but withdrew him owing to 'the narrowness of his circumstances, and the want of his assistance at home',1 There is no reason to reject this, which agrees with what we know of John's financial history, or to look for a free school other than that of Stratford itself. It is unfortunate that no early lists of pupils are preserved there. Rowe's words suggest a some- what premature withdrawal. From Stratford also comes the earlier report of one Dowdall (1693) that the poet had run away from apprenticeship to a butcher.* He does not say that his master was also his father. But the story shows that Aubrey was not alone in his belief as to John Shakespeare's occupation, which he confirms by saying that William followed his father's trade and 'when he killM a calfe, he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech*.3 Perhaps this really points to some early exercise of mimic talent. 'Killing a calf seems to have been an item in the repertory of wandering entertainers.4 Rowe also learnt of Shakespeare's early marriage and departure from Stratford as a result of deer-stealing. The docu- ments concerning the marriage involve a puzzle.5 It took place towards the end of 1582, not in the parish church of Stratford, or in any of the numerous likely churches whose registers have been searched; possibly in the chapel at Luddington, where an entry is said to have been seen before the register was destroyed. A licence for it was issued from the episcopal registry at Worcester on Novem- ber 27, and a bond to hold the bishop harmless was, given by two sureties on the following day. The procedure was regular enough, and carries no suggestion of family dis- approval. But the register of licences gives the bride's name as Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton and the bond as Anne Hathwey of Stratford. Once more, romantic
1 App. C, no. xxv. grace behynde a clothe'. J. Raine,
3 App, C, no. xviii. Priory of Tinchde (Surtees Soc.)»
3 App. C, no. xiii. ccccxli, cites a 'droll performance*
4 Collier, i. 90, from Account of called 'killing the calf* by an eigh- Pracess Mary for Christmas 1521, teenth-century entertainer.
*Itm pd, to a man at Wyndesore, for * App. A, no. v. kylling of a calffe before my ladys
18 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
biography has scented a mystery. The probable solution is that the bond, as an original document, is correct, and that the clerk who made up the register blundered. Rowe, who certainly never heard of the bond, knew the name as Hathaway. There were several Hathaways in the parish of Stratford, and Anne's parentage is not quite clear. She may have been of Luddington, but more likely of Shottery, where one Richard Hathaway, of a family which bore the alias of Gardner, occupied the tenement of Hewland, now known as Anne Hathaway's cottage, and in 1581 left money to a daughter Agnes, then unmarried. That Agnes and Anne, in common usage although not in strict law, were regarded as forms of the same name is unques- tionable. If there was any element of haste or secrecy in the affair, it may have been due to the fact that Anne was already with child. A kindly sentiment has pleaded the possible existence of a pre-contract amounting to a civil marriage. A daughter Susanna was baptized on 26 May 1583, and followed by twins, Hamnet and Judith, on 2 February 1585. Guesses at godparents are idle where common names, such as Shakespeare's own, are con- cerned. But those of the twins, which are unusual, point to Hamnet or Hamlet Sadler, a baker of Stratford, and his wife Judith.
The story of deer-stealing has been the subject of much controversy. Rowe's account has the independent con- firmation of some earlier jottings by Richard Davies who became rector of Sapperton in Gloucestershire in 1695.* Probably, like Rowe, he drew upon local gossip. Rowe says that the exploit was in the park of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, that in revenge for prosecution by Lucy Shakespeare made a ballad upon him, and that as a result of further prosecution he was obliged to leave Stratford. Davies says that he was whipped and imprisoned by Lucy, and that in revenge he depicted Lucy as a justice with 'three lowses rampant for his arms'. There is an obvious reference here to Merry Wives of Windsor, i, i, in which Justice Shallow complains that Falstaff has beaten his
1 App. C, nos. OT, xjnr.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 19
men, killed his deer, and broken open his lodge, and threatens to make a Star Chamber matter of it as a riot. He is said to bear a 'dozen white luces' in his coat, and Sir Hugh Evans makes the jest on louses. The Lucy family had held Charlecote since the twelfth century, and bore the arms Vair> three luces hauriant argent.1 The Sir Thomas of Shakespeare's day was a prominent justice of peace, and represented Warwickshire in the parliaments of 1571 and 1 584-5 .2 It has been held that the whole story is nothing but a myth which has grown up about the passage in the Merry Wives of Windsor itself. But I do not think that, so far as the essential feature is concerned, we are called upon to reject it. Deer-stealing was a common practice enough, and was regarded as a venial frolic, even for young men of higher standing than Shakespeare's, Details are another matter. Lucy cannot have whipped Shakespeare, if he proceeded under the ruling game law of 1563, in which the only penalty prescribed was im- prisonment. Possibly, if the affair could be regarded as a riot, it might bear a more serious complexion. Nor does Lucy appear to have had a 'park', in the legal sense, at Charlecote. At his death in 1600 he had only a free- warren. It is true that the learned lawyer Sir Edward Coke included roe-deer, but not fallow deer, among beasts of warren, and although other authorities appear to dis- sent, it was certainly so decided in 1339.3 It is also true that the Act of 1563 appears to give protection to deer in any enclosure then existing, whether it was a legally en- closed park or not, and the free-warren at Charlecote may well have come under this provision. If the deer was not in
1 The coat is repeated in four quar- indeed, seems to have been concerned
tarings, making a dozen luces, on a with pheasants and partridges, not
Lucy tomb at Warwick (Dugdale, deer (S. D'Ewes, Journals of Partia-
. 348). mcnts, 321, 327, 363, 366, 369, 373,
* He led a Committee (4 Mar. 374).
1585) for considering a Bill for the * G. J. Turner, Select Pleas of the
preservation of game and grain, which Forest (1901)9 x, from decision of
did not become law, but he was King's Bench, 'Caprioli sunt bestiac
replaced on a later Committee, and de warenna et non de foresta eo quod
there is no reason to assume that he was fugant alias feras de foresta*. an active promoter of the Bill, which,
C 2
20 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
an enclosure protected by the game law, any foray upon it would have been no more than a trespass, to be remedied by civil action, and neither whipping nor imprisonment would have been possible. Rowe, however, only speaks of prosecution, and of a ballad, which may have amounted to a criminal libel. A single stanza, claimed as the opening of this ballad and containing the jest on lousiness, came into the hands both of William Oldys and of Edward Capell in the eighteenth century, with a history ascribing it to information derived from inhabitants of Stratford by a Mr. Jones who died in 1703.* If so, it represents a third tradition as old as those of Davies and Rowe. A complete version produced in 1790 by John Jordan, an out-at-elbows poet and guide for strangers in Stratford, was probably not beyond his own capacities for fabrica- tion.2 There is, however, yet another alleged fragment of the ballad, in a different metre, said on very poor authority to have been picked up at Stratford about 1690 by the Cambridge professor Joshua Barnes.3 Its jest on deer horns carries the familiar Elizabethan insinuation of cuckoldry against Lucy, whose monument to his wife at Charlecote lauds her domestic virtues. Obviously the fragments are inconsistent, and neither is likely to be genuine. But some weight must be attached to the four- fold testimony through Davies, Rowe, Jones, and Barnes to a tradition of the deer-stealing as alive at Stratford about the end of the seventeenth century. There is later embroidery which need not be taken seriously.4 A writer in the Biografhia Eritannica (1763) ascribes Shakespeare's release from imprisonment to the intervention of Eliza- beth; another in 1862, professedly on the authority of records at Charlecote, to the Earl of Leicester, who died in 1588, but to a pique of whom against Lucy the inspiration of the Merry Wives of Windsor is none the less attributed. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, perhaps owing to the discovery that there was no park at Charlecote, the
1 App. C, nos. xxxiv, xliv. * App. C, nos. xli, xlvi, xlix, li, liv,
2 App. C, no. xlvi. Ivii, Iviii.
3 App. C, no. xvi.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 21
story was transferred to the neighbouring park of Fulbrook. This, however, had been disparked by 1557, was not in the hands of the Lucy family during Shakespeare's boy- hood, but was bought by them in 1615 and subsequently re-emparked. Some hit at Sir Thomas is probably involved in the Merry Wive$ of Windsor passage. But it would not be a justifiable inference that the presentment of Justice Shallow as a whole, especially in Henry IF, is in any way meant to be a portrait' of the worthy justice. Such por- traiture seems, to me at least, quite alien from the method of Shakespeare's art. A belief, once established, that a distinguished citizen of Stratford had enjoyed a wildish youth, may have encouraged the later tales of Shake- speare's drinking exploits, for which no origin other than the inventiveness of innkeepers need be sought.1
We cannot give any precise date to the Hegira. A story current at Stratford in 1 8 1 8 that the venison was stolen to grace the marriage feast is obviously part of the em- broidery. Children can be baptized but not begotten without a father, and it is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare was still in Stratford during 1584.* We do not know whether his wife was at any time the companion of his absence. There is no record of her in London, and none in Stratford until after the purchase of New Place. But the boy Hamnet was buried at Stratford-on 1 1 August 1596. On the other hand it is no proof of Shakespeare's continuance in Stratford that according to his father's allegation he concurred in the offer to sell the Wilmcote property to John Lambert about 1587.3 This seems to have been only an oral transaction, and wherever William was, there is no reason to suppose that he was beyond communication with his family. The words of Rowe's deer-stealing narrative and of Dowdall's parallel story of an escape from apprenticeship imply a migration direct
1 App. C, nos. xl, xlvi. Dwell at London. W. S. was a Will',
2 James Yates, servingman, in The but the date is too early, and there are Holds ofHumititie, 17, printed with his indications in the book which suggest Castell of Courtesie (1582), has colour- a Suffolk author.
less Verses written at the Departure of 3 App. A, no. iv. his friende W. S. When he went to
22 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
to London. But these can hardly be pressed. We have no certainty of Shakespeare's presence in London before 1 592, when a scoffing notice by Robert Greene shows that he was already an actor and had already begun to write plays.1 This is no doubt consistent with some earlier sojourn, which may have been of no long duration. A supposed earlier allusion to him as 'Willy* in Spenser's Tears of the Muses (1591) is now, I think, universally rejected.2 We have therefore a very considerable hiatus in his history, extending over a maximum of eight years from 1584 to 1592, to take into account; and it is obvious that many things may have occupied this interval, of which we are ignorant. Tradition, apart from some statements as to his introduction into theatrical life, has done little to fill the gap. It was the actor William Beeston who told Aubrey that he had been a schoolmaster in the country.3 Beeston's memory might well go back to Shakespeare's own lifetime, and the statement is not in itself incredible. The course at Stratford, even if not curtailed, would hardly have qualified him to take charge of a grammar school; but his post may have been no more than that of an usher or an abecedarius. Nor need we suppose that his studies, even in the classics, terminated with his school-days. The most direct contemporary evidence is that of Ben Jonson, who ascribed to him but 'small Latin, and less Greek7, writing naturally enough from the stand- point of his own considerable scholarship.4 There has been much argument on this subject from the time of Richard Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), and much enumeration of the books, ancient and modern,- erudite and popular, which may, directly or in- directly, have contributed material to his plays. The in- ferences have not always been discreet. The attempt, for example, of Professor Churton Collins to establish a familiarity with the Greek tragedians rests largely upon analogies of thought and expression which may have had a natural origin out of analogous situations. A saner
1 App. B, no. iiij cf. p. 58. 3 App. C, no. xiii.
8 App. B, no. i. 4 App. B,.no. xxii.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 23
judgement is that of Professor Henry Jackson, who after a careful survey of the evidence found no exceptional learning, but merely an example of a familiarity with classical themes, more widespread in Elizabethan days than in our own, and not indicative of anything beyond a grammar-school education.1 One may reasonably as- sume that at all times Shakespeare read whatever books, original or translated, came in his way. It has been asked where he found them in the absence of public libraries. Did he borrow from the Earl of Southampton, or from • Jonson or from Camden, or did he merely turn over their leaves on the stationers' stalls? These are foolish questions, to which I proposeno answers. We do not know what library he had of his own. Many volumes bear his signatures, and they are mostly forgeries. Some claim has been made for an Aldine Metamorphoses of 1502, for a translated Mon- taigne of 1603, and for a translated Plutarch of i6i2.2 Sceptics point out that he named no books in his will; there was no reason why he should, unless he wished^to dispose of them apart from his other chattels. As with Shakespeare's general learning, so with his law.. His writ- ing abounds in legal terminology, closely woven into the structure of his .metaphor. Here, again, the knowledge is extensive rather than exact. It is shared by other dramatists. Our litigious ancestors had a familiarity with legal processes, from which we are happily exempt. But many have thought that Shakespeare must have had some professional experience of a lawyer's office, although this was not the final opinion of the much-quoted Lord Camp- bell; and there are those who will tell you by which Stratford attorney he was employed. This is only one instance of the willingness of conjecture to step in where no record has trod. On similar grounds Shakespeare has been represented as an apothecary and a student of medi- cine. That he was a soldier rests on a confusion with one of many William Shakespeares at Rowington; and that he
' Was Shakespeare of Stratford the Jackson O.M. (1926). Author of Shakespeare's Plays and * Cf. p. 506. Poems? in R. St. J, Parry, Henry
24 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
was a printer on the fact that Richard Field, who issued his poems, came from Stratford. In a sense, these con- flicting theories refute each other. However acquired, a ready touch over a wide space of human experience was characteristic of Shakespeare. For some of this experience we need look no farther than Stratford itself; the early acquaintance with hunting and angling and fowling; the keenly noted observation of rural life, mingling oddly with the fabulous natural history which contemporary literature inherited from the medieval bestiaries. For the rest, we cannot tell where it was garnered. But we are entitled to assume a roving and apperceptive mind, conversant in some way with many men and manners, and gifted with that felicity in the selection and application of varied knowledge, which is one of the secrets of genius. What has perhaps puzzled readers most is the courtesy of Shake- speare; his easy movement in the give and take of social intercourse among persons of good breeding. We have not, indeed, to think of the well-to-do inhabitants of Stratford as boors; but the courtesy of a provincial town is not quite the courtesy of a Portia. Probably the true explanation is that, once more, it is a matter of appercep- tiveness, of a temper alive, not only to facts, but to human values. A recent writer has suggested, with no support either from records or from probability, that Shakespeare did not grow up at Stratford at all, but was carried off in childhood to learn both his courtesy and his Latin, like Drayton, as a page in the household of Sir Henry Goodere of Polesworth near Coventry.1 No such guess is needed, nor can a similar one reasonably be based on a statement of a not very reliable writer that Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, the son of Sir Fulke Greville, of Beauchamp's Court, Alcester, claimed to have been the 'master' of both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Greville was a patron of poets, but there is nothing to show to what period the claim, if it was made, related.2
A sprinkling of Shakespearfcs in the southern Cotswolds
1 A. Gray, A Chapter in the Early * App, C, no. x. Life of Shakespeare (1926).
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 25
and a 'tradition* cited in 1848 of a residence by the poet at Dursley have led to the supposition that he may there have found a temporary refuge. Justice Shallow is asked to countenance William Visor of Woncote against Clement Perkes of the hill; and it is pointed out that a Vizard was bailiff at Dursley in 1612, and that neighbouring families of Vizard of Woncot or Woodmancote and Perkes of Stinchcombe Hill long survived.1 The conjunction of names might be more than a coincidence. But Perkes itself was a common name in Warwickshire and Worcestershire as well as in Gloucestershire, and in fact a Clement Perkes was born at Fladbury, Worcestershire, in 1568. Many Shakespearean names occur in Stratford documents. On most little stress can be laid. It is intriguing to find a Fluellen and a Bardolfe in the same list of recusants as Shakespeare's father, although Shakespeare knew Bar- dolfe as the title of a nobleman, and a Stephen Sly of Stratford z to match the Christopher and Stephen Sly of The Taming of the Shrew> although 'Slie' and 'Don Christo Vary' were already given by the source-play of A Shrew. Christopher Sly, however, calls himself of Burton Heath, presumably Barton-on-the-Heath, where the Lamberts dwelt; and Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, must belong to the Wincot which lies partly in Clifford Cham- bers and partly in Quinton, where a Sara Hacket was baptized in 1 59 1 .3 It is perhaps only a fancy that Clement Swallow, who sued John Shakespeare for debt in 1559, may have contributed with Sir Thomas Lucy to the making of Justice Shallow of Clement's Inn.4 It seems to have been a Restoration stage-tradition that a ghost scene in Hamlet was inspired by a charnel-house in Stratford churchyard; one would have thought the setting more appropriate to the grave-digger scene.5 Possibly the drowning of a Katherine Hamlet at Tiddington on the Avon in 1579 may have given a hint for Ophelia's end.6
1 Madden, 86, 372. 4 10 N.Q. x. 286.
2 H.P. ii. 296, says 'Christopher* in s App. C, no. xxi. error. 6 M.A. iii. 50.
« Cf. App. C, no. viii.
26 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
All this amounts to very little. Whatever imprint Shake- speare's Warwickshire contemporaries may have left upon his imagination inevitably eludes us. The main fact in his earlier career is still that unexplored hiatus, and who shall say what adventures, material and spiritual, six or eight crowded Elizabethan years may have brought him. It is no use guessing. As in so many other historical investiga- tions, after all the careful scrutiny of clues and all the patient balancing of possibilities, the last word for a self- respecting, scholarship can only be that of nescience.
4 Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul, When hot for certainties in this our life!'
CHAPTER II THE STAGE IN 1592
[Bibliographical Note. The earlier part of this chapter is based on the discussions in The Mediaeval Stage (1903) and The Elizabethan Stage (1923). In the latter part I have attempted to track more closely the downfall of Queen Elizabeth's company from 1588, and to restate my conjectures as to the relations of the companies of the Lord Admiral, Lord Strange, the Earl of Pembroke, and the Earl of Sussex during 1589-94 in the light of criticisms of The Elizabethan Stage by W. W. Greg in R.E.S. i. 97, 257, and of the revival of an older view as to the origin of Strange's men in T. W. Baldwin, The Organisation and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (1927). Most of the records of London and pro- vincial performances from 1 5 88 are in Appendix D. Those for the Queen's and Sussex's men must be supplemented from J. T. Murray, English Dramatic Companies (1910), subject to some corrections and additions from sources named in Eliz. Stage, ii. i and the Bibl. Note to Appendix D.]
I HAVE elsewhere described, with such elaboration of detail as the envious wallet of time would allow, the gradual establishment of a habit of dramatic representa- tion in this country; tracing its analogies to certain mimetic elements in the customs of the folk, its remark- able emergence in the ritual of a church traditionally hostile to the histrfoneS) its relations to outstanding features of medieval society, to the communal celebrations of religious and trade gilds, to the ludi of courtly halls, to the varied repertory of the wandering minstrels. And I have endeavoured to show how the medieval passed into the Tudor stage; how humanism brought a new interest in the drama as an instrument of literary and moral education and even of theological and political contro- versy; how a special class of minstrels, the servants of the Crown or of noble lords, made acting an economic pro- fession and built the permanent London theatres; and how the theatres, buttressed on one hand by a paying pub- lic and on the other by court patronage, held their own against puritan opposition, until the Tudor polity itself went under in the civil and religious dissensions of the seventeenth century.
Any intelligible study, however, of the life and work of
28 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
the playwright Shakespeare must have its own prelude in a retrospect of the state of theatrical affairs, as they stood at the opening of the last Elizabethan decade, when that playwright made his first appearance. The story may be- gin with the year 1583, which was something of a turning- point in the history of the playing companies. In that year Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, was called upon by Sir Francis Walsingham, the Secretary of State, to select a body of players for the direct service of the Queen, Probably Walsingham was acting in the illness of the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Sussex, within whose department the oversight of court revels properly fell. The Queen's men were taken from the most important of the existing companies, those of the Earl of Sussex himself, of the Earls of Leicester and Oxford, possibly of the Earl of Derby and Henry Lord Hunsdon. All these had made recent appearances at court. They received the rank of Grooms of the Royal Chamber, probably without fee, and were entitled to wear the royal livery and badge. The reasons for the appointment must be matter for con- jecture. An old royal company of interlude players, in- herited from the Queen's father and grandfather, had been allowed to die out some years before. In a sense the new men took their place. But it was not the practice of the economical Elizabeth to multiply household officers merely as appanages. And it may be suspected that the departure of 1583 was an incident in the endeavour of the government to assert a direct control of the London stage against the claims of the City corporation. If so, it was not the only such incident. A power to regulate public entertainments within their area belonged to the traditional privileges of the City, as of other incorporated towns. Moreover, a proclamation issued early in Elizabeth's own reign, on 16 May 1559, had specifically imposed upon mayors of towns, as upon justices of peace elsewhere, the duty of licensing plays, and had instructed them to dis- allow such as handled 'matters of religion or of the gouernaunce of the estate of the common weale'. Ob- viously many of the circumstances of plays were proper
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 29
matter for local control. A local authority was best quali- fied to fix suitable times and places, and to take precautions against disorder, structural dangers, and infection. The plan would work well enough, so long as the authority was reasonable, and did not, as is sometimes the temptation of licensing authorities, try to convert a power of regula- tion into a power of suppression. Whether mayors and justices were equally well qualified to act as censors of the subject-matter of plays may be doubted; and even if qualified, they might not always see eye to eye with the central government. In any case the City of London had not, from the point of view of Elizabeth's government, proved altogether reasonable. The Queen required plays for her Christmas 'solace' at court; and, in order that these might be economically provided, it was desirable that the players should have an opportunity of making their living through public performances. The Corporation was com- posed of heads of households and employers of labour, who found that plays distracted their servants and ap- prentices from business and occasionally led to disorder. Moreover they were not uninfluenced by a growing puritan sentiment, which was hostile to plays in the ab- stract as contrary to the word of God, and found them in the concrete, even if they did not touch upon religion and state, full of ribaldry and wantonness. There had been friction for some years before 1583. The Privy Council had made more than one attempt to persuade the City to delegate the licensing -to independent persons, no doubt such as would be acceptable to the Privy Council itself. This had been refused, and a hint of the royal prerogative had been given in a patent to the Earl of Leicester's men in 1 574, which gave them authority to perform, in London and elsewhere, such plays as had been allowed by the Master of the Revels. The City responded in the same year with a complete code of play-regulations for their area. These need not have been oppressive, if not applied oppressively. But the players probably had their mis- givings; and they contributed perhaps more than the Privy Council itself to the defeat of the City, by setting up
30 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
theatres just outside its boundaries, where they came under the control of county justices, less active and interfering than the mayor and his brethren. It was not a complete remedy. In summer the apprentices flocked to the plays even farther from their masters' doors, but in winter the comparative inaccessibility of the new houses made re- course to the City inn-yards still inevitable. Meanwhile the puritan sentiment gprew, and a spate of controversial sermons and treatises lifted the City into an attitude of complete opposition to the stage. Short epidemics of plague, during which the Privy Council and the City were agreed that plays must be inhibited, brought a complica- tion. It proved easier to get restraints established than to get them withdrawn when the plague was over. In 158 1 the patience of the Privy Council was exhausted, and the precedent of 1574 was followed and extended in a new commission to the Master of the Revels, giving him a general power over the whole country, not merely to license individual plays, but to 'order and reforme, auctorise and put down* all plays, players, and playmakers 'together with their i "
ana ma) ancient
necessary, be overruled. No doubt the Master of the Revels, while carrying out the wishes of the Privy Council as to a general toleration for the players and as to censor- ship, would still normally leave details of times and places to local control. Perhaps, in exasperation, the City now committed a tactical blunder. An order was sent to the gilds, requiring all freemen to forbid the attendance of their 'sarvants, apprentices, journemen, or children* at plays, whether within or without London. It was a brutum fulmen, which could not possibly be made effective, par- ticularly beyond the liberties. But the City would not accept defeat, and it was probably during 1582 that, in defiance of the Master of the Revels and his commission, an ordinance was passed, replacing the regulations of 1574 by a simple prohibition of plays within the area. The establishment of a company with the status and dig-
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 31
nity of royal servants may reasonably be regarded as a counter-move on the side of the government. The City was overawed to the extent of appointing two inn-yards for the Queen's men in the winter of 1583. In the follow- ing year they again proved recalcitrant. The players brought their case before the Privy Council, and there was an elaborate exchange of arguments and proposals, as to which no formal decision is upon record. But it is clear from events that the City were defeated. They had obtained a small concession in a standing prohibition of plays on Sundays. But on the main issue they had to submit to the power of the royal prerogative, and to content themselves with showing cause for restraints of plays as often as pos- sible, and pressing for the extension of such restraints to the Middlesex and Surrey suburbs.
The Queen's men remained the dominant London com- pany for several years after 1583. They did regular service at court during each Christmas season, according to an old routine, in plays carefully chosen by the Revels officers and rehearsed before the Master. Seventeen plays are credited to them for the five winters from 1583-4 to 1587-8. It may have been a subsidiary object of their formation to reduce the number of companies which the City was called upon to tolerate. If so, it was partly counteracted by the fact that the Queen's men proved strong enough to occupy more than one playhouse. There was a protest against this in the negotiations of 1584, and it may explain an arrangement by which the Curtain was taken for a term of seven years from Michaelmas 1585 as an 'easer' to the Theatre.1 But the relations between companies and playhouses during this period are very obscure. James Burbadge, the owner of the Theatre, who had been a member of Leicester's company, was not chosen for the Queen's, and seems to have entered the service of Lord Hunsdon. Certainly, however, the Queen's made some use of the Theatre, and some use of various inn-yards during the winter. And in the hot days of summer a section of them, or perhaps the whole com-
1 Nebraska Univ. Studies, xiii. 125.
32 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
pany if plague was sporadic, travelled the provinces, where their livery generally secured them exceptionally liberal rewards. The older companies, robbed of their best men, became insignificant. Derby's disappear from the records; Leicester's, Sussex's, Oxford's, and Hunsdon's survived in the provinces. There were occasional visits to London. One play was given at court by Leicester's, one by a new company under the Lord Admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham, and one by the same men in combination with those of Hunsdon, who had become Lord Chamberlain in 1585. There were also several performances of Activities', vaulting and tumbling, led by one John Symons, whose patron seems to have been generally Lord Strange, but in one year the Earl of Oxford. The chief rivals of the Queen's men at court were, however, the boy players. They were to some extent a survival. In the earlier Tudor dramatic annals the great choirs of St. Paul's and the Chapel Royal had been at least as conspicuous as the professional companies. In 1576 a playhouse had been constructed in an old building of the Dominican priory at Blackfriars, and this seems to have been occupied about 1 583 by boys drawn from both these choirs, together with others from the private chapel of the Earl of Oxford. The boys followed the classic and literary tradition which humanism had brought into the drama, and their Masters employed academic scholars, such as George Peele and John Lyly. No doubt this served them better at court, than with the general London public. Lyly seems to have been the moving spirit of the Blackfriars combination, and soon after it broke down in 1585, he began a new series of plays for Paul's. The Queen's men, on the other hand, probably contented themselves with pieces of more old- fashioned and popular types. To this period may belong the early chronicle histories of The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third. The titles of the lost Phillyda and Choryn and Felix and Phitiomena carry more suggestion of literary influence. But evidently the Queen's relied largely on the pens of their own .members. One of these was Robert Wilson.
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1-592 33
He is described in 1581 as capable of writing a 'librum aliquem brevem, novum, iucundum, venustum, lepidum, hilarem, scurrosum, nebulosum, rabulosum, et omni- modis carnificiis, latrociniis et lenociniis refertum*. His extant plays are of the nature of 'moralities'. Another was Richard Tarlton, of part of whose Seven Deadly Sins a *plot' or tiring-house outline is preserved. It shows an attempt at utilizing classical themes. But Tarlton's con- siderable reputation was evidently in the main that of a joyous jester and buffoon.
The death of Tarlton in September 1588 probably shattered the fortunes of the Queen's men; and with it begins a very difficult phase of company history. Matters were complicated through the controversy aroused in 1 589 by the anti-ecclesiastical tracts published under the name of Martin Marprelate, In this both the Queen's men and the Paul's boys took part, possibly at the instigation of Richard Bancroft, afterwards Bishop of London. If so, Bancroft's action was officially disapproved, and the players suffered. The Paul's company was suppressed. The Queen's was not, but was probably required to leave London for a time. 'Vetus Comedia hath been long in the country', says a pamphlet of October 20. It will be as well to track the Queen's men to their end. Wilson had ap- parently left the company before Tarlton's death, and among its leaders were now John Laneham and John Dutton, two of the original members, and John Button's brother Laurence. Moreover, John Symons had entered the Queen's service, possibly bringing with him some or all of Strange's troop of acrobats. This had presumably taken place before 14 August 1588, when *the Quenes plaiers' and 'the Quenes men that were tumblers' were rewarded together at Bath.1 How far Symons maintained an organization independent of the older company it is impossible to say, in view of the habit of dividing forces, which evidently still continued. The travels of 1 58 8 were prolonged until the end of the year, and extended as far
x Wardle in, from Account from dale of August xvij.s, more given by c. Whitsun 1588 to c. Whitsun 1589, M* Mayour to the Quenes men that 'given to the Quenes plaiers the xiiij"1 were tumblers z.s*.
3142*1 D
34 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
north as Lancashire, where Queen's men were at the Earl of Derby's house of New Park on October 16. The next day came 4Mr Button*. He was probably John Button of Button in Cheshire, but the actor Buttons may have been kinsmen of that house. On November 6 Queen's men were at Leicester, on Becember 10 at Norwich, on Becember 17 at Ipswich, evidently returning London- wards. There were Queen's plays at court on 26 Becem- ber 1588 and 9 February 1589, and an entry in the Revels Accounts of a pair of hose for 'Symmons the Tumbler' suggests that he contributed 'activities'.1 The travels of 1589 were long and widespread; the Marprelate episode was no doubt a factor. The movements of more than one group seem to be involved. A tour started at Maidstone in January, and went by a southern circuit through Canter- bury (c. Feb. 2), Bover, Winchester (Mar. 10), Glouces- ter (Apr. 17), Leicester (May 20). Here the reward was to 'others moe of her Mayestyes playars', distinct therefore from the 'certen of her Maiests playars' whose reward for 6 November 1588 appears in the same account. It may have been this or another group who are found moving northwards on an eastern circuit, at Ipswich (May 22), Aldeburgh (May 30), and Norwich (June 3). And either from Leicester or from Norwich Queen's men made their way into the north. They were at Lathom in Lancashire, another of Lord Berby's houses, on July 12 and 13. Then track is rather lost of them. But they are more likely to have stayed in the north than to have returned to London, since Queen's men were again visit- ing Lord Berby, this time at Knowsley in Lancashire, on September n to 13, and on September 22 Lord Scrope wrote to the English ambassador in Scotland that they had been for ten days in Carlisle. He had sought them out from 'the furthest parte of Langkeshire', on hearing that King James wished them to visit Scotland, and they had
1 I abandon the conjecture (Elix. the Queen's, but it does not follow that
Stage, ii. 119) that Simons was tern- the Queen's gave none, and they already
porarily with the Admiral's. It is true had tumblers at Bath (cf. supra} on
that the Chamber Account ascribes 14 August 1588. (App.D) 'activities' to them and not to
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 35
returned to Carlisle, where they had evidently already been. Perhaps they never visited Scotland, as a projected royal wedding was deferred. These dates show that it must have been a second or third group who started an autumn tour, again on the southern circuit, through Maidstone (Aug. 2), Canterbury, Dover, Winchester (September), and Bath (November). Less precisely dated visits to Coventry, Oxford, and Reading may belong to either of these tours, or even to the winter of 1588, but the Nottingham ac- counts for 1588—9 clinch the argument for the duplication of companies, by recording separate payments to 'Symons and his companie beinge the Quenes players' and to 'the Quenes players, the two Buttons and others'. By the Christmas of 1589 the Queen's must have purged their summer's offence, since they played at court, under John Dutton and Laneham, on December 26 and March i. There is no mention of Symons, or of 'activities' by the Queen's. The provincial visits of 1 5 90 are mainly undated. We may conjecture a summer tour, by Ipswich to Norwich (Apr. 22), then perhaps by Leicester and Nottingham to Knowsley (June 25-6) where 'Mr Dutton' was again a visitor, thence through Shrewsbury (July 24), Bridgnorth and Ludlow (July), and home by Coventry and Oxford. An autumn tour may have included Faversham, Can- terbury (Aug. 10), Winchester, Marlborough, Exeter, Gloucester, and Leicester (Oct. 30). And that Symons was a participant in the summer tour may perhaps be inferred from the numerous records of 'activities'. At Ipswich the reward was for 'the Torkey Tumblers', at Norwich for 'the Quenes men, when the Turke wente vpon Roppes at Newhall', at Leicester for 'certen playars, playinge uppon ropes at the Crosse Keyes', at Bridgnorth for 'the Quenes players at the dancing on the rop', at Coventry for 'the Queenes players and the Turk'. From Shrewsbury we have a fuller account of the rope-dancing by 'the Queen's Majesty's players and tumblers', and here the Turk be- comes an 'Hongarian'.1 The Christmas of 1590 seems to
1 Owen and Blakeway, Hist, of in I Shropshire Arch. Soc. Trans, iii. Shrewsbury, i. 385; W, A. Leighton 318, from Taylor MS.
D 2
36 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
give new evidence of division. Two separate warrants were issued on 7 March 1591; one to the Buttons for
four plays from December 26 to February 14; the other to Laneham for a single play on January i.1 And on the day after Laneham's performance a group of Queers men was already starting at Maidstone for the southern circuit. It can be tracked through Faversham, Canterbury (Jan. n), Dover, Southampton (Feb. 14), Winchester, Bath, Gloucester, perhaps Shrewsbury, Coventry (Mar. 24), and Oxford. And at Southampton, Gloucester, and Coventry, probably already at Faversham, it was working in com- bination with the Earl of Sussex's men.2 By May it had crossed to the eastern counties, and here it was possibly reinforced by a second group, for at Ipswich rewards were paid to 'the Quenes players' on May 15 and to 'another company of the Quenes players' on May 28. The two groups may have gone on together to Norwich (June 23), where they pass out of sight. Meanwhile, as in 1590, a fresh tour set out on the familiar round by Maidstone (May 28), Faversham (June 2), Southampton (June 29), Winchester, and Bath. At Southampton *Mr Button' is noted as the leader. Then the records fail, but Queen's men visited the Earl of Rutland at Winkburn in Notts on August 1 8, and were at Coventry both on August 24 and October 20, coming and going, maybe, from the marches or the north. The Shrewsbury visit may belong here. They were only called upon for one court play, on 26 December 1591, but they are not traceable on the road again until March 30 at Canterbury. An allusion in Nashe's Sum- mer's Last Will and Testament suggests that at some time in 1592 a Queen's 'vice' was to be seen at the Theatre. Several tours are again probable during this year, but one can only definitely link dates for Ipswich (May i), Nor- wich (May 27), and Leicester (June 10); then Southamp- ton (Aug. 3) and Bath (Aug. 22); then Cambridge (c. Sept. i) and AldeburgH (Oct. 1 1), where the Queen's were rewarded 'at the same time' with Lord Morley's men; and
1 Efa. Stage, iv, 163.
* The Faversham entry says Essex's, but I suspect an error.
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 37
finally Canterbury (Nov. 17) and Southampton (Nov. 26). But they were also at some time during 1591-2 at Maid- stone, Rochester, Winchester, Gloucester, Stratford-on- Avon, Coventry, Worcester, Nottingham, and again at Aldeburgh. At Cambridge they got into trouble with the University authorities, who feared infection from the plague then raging in London, and 'one Dutton* is again mentioned as their leader.1 A letter from the Vice-Cham- berlain in December indicates that they would be pre- vented by the plague from, playing at court, and in fact they did not play, although other companies did.2 Their provincial records for 1593 are comparatively few; the plague had made visitors from London unwelcome in the country. A tour seems to have started in a new direction by Oxford (Feb. 25). Queen's men were at Leicester (June 20), York (September), and Norwich (Oct. 1 8), and at some time in 1592—3 at Ipswich, Maidstone, Ply- mouth, Coventry, and Stratford-on-Avon.* They made their last appearance at court on 6 January 1594, and an attempt to maintain a footing in London is indicated by a season which they began, with their old associates of 1591, the Earl of Sussex's men, at the Rose or perhaps Newington Butts on April i. It only lasted eight days. Henslowe's diary records a reconstruction on May 8, 'when they broke and went into the contrey to playe' ;4 and for the rest of the reign they are merely a provincial com- pany. No more is heard of the Buttons, or of Laneham.5 How long the relations of Symons with the Queen's, what- ever they were, lasted is uncertain. But there were still 'tumblers that went on the Ropes' at Coventry in 1592-3, and 'a wagon in the pageant for the Turke* at Gloucester in 1594-5. These notices do not specifically name the Queen's.
There is, of course, a strong element of conjecture in all this mapping of travels, and the disclosure of new
1 M.S.C. i. 190. belongs to August 1594.
2 M.S.C. L 198. 4 Henslowe ii. 277.
3 A Southampton visit ascribed by 5 A forged reference to him is in the Murray, ii. 399, to August 1593 really MS. of Sir Ttomas More (cf. p. 512).
38 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
records may easily supplement or modify its details. But I think it is clear that, from the death of Tarlton onwards, the Queen's men were gradually losing their hold of London. Their court performances only number eleven for 1588-94 against the seventeen for 1583—8. In the country their livery served them better. But they had to split their forces, to join up with stray companions of the road, and to diversify their entertainments with acrobatic tricks. They were reverting to the hand-to-mouth exis- tence of the medieval minstrels. It is perhaps signifi- cant that in 1592 the City took advantage of the situation to suggest that public plays were no longer necessary, and that the Queen's service might be adequately provided for by 'the privat exercise of hir Maiesties own players in convenient place'. They approached Archbishop Whit- gift, and the cynical ecclesiastic advised them to bribe the Master of the Revels. But the money was not forth- coming, and other players took the place of the Queen's. The disorganization of the hitherto dominant company was, indeed, an obvious opportunity for new men. Two companies come to the front. One is the Lord Admiral's; the other Lord Strange's. The Lord Admiral's have the clearer origin. In 1583 a provincial company of the Earl of Worcester's men included Robert Browne, James Tun- stall, Edward Alleyn, Richard Jones, and Edward Browne. The last notice of Worcester's men is in March 1585, the first of the Admiral's in June 1585; and the connexions in which some of these names recur later make it a safe con- jecture that, when Lord Howard became Lord Admiral in 1585, some or all of Worcester's men entered his service. The Admiral's played at court, both indepen- dently and in conjunction with Lord Hunsdon's, in the winter of 1585-6. They travelled in 158 6, were in London by January 1587, but not at court, travelled again in 1 58 7, and returned to London by November. About Novem- ber 1 6 they were unfortunate enough to kill a woman and a child during a shooting scene, which must have been the execution of the Governor of Babylon in 2 Tamburlaine^ v. i. They now disappear from the provincial records
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 39
until 1588-9, when a visit to Cambridge is recorded. Possibly they found retirement discreet; possibly they merely gave up travelling. They were at court on 29 December 1588 and n February 1589 with plays, and also with 'feates of activity and tumblinge'.. Symons had no monopoly of these. About this time there was probably some reconstruction of the company, for on 3 January 1589 Edward Alleyn purchased from Richard Jones his share of a stock of play-books and apparel which the two had held jointly with John Alleyn and Robert Browne. John Alleyn was a brother of Edward. He is described as 'servant* to the Admiral in 1589. Other purchases of theatrical apparel by the Alleyns took place between 1589 and 1591, and to two of these James Tunstall was a wit- ness. It is possible that Robert Browne was also bought out, since he was at Leyden in October 1590, and was accompanied by Jones on a second foreign expedition in February 1592. Conceivably their companions, John Bradstreet and Thomas Sackville, may also have been Admiral's men, but there is no proof of it.
The origin of Strange's men is a more difficult problem. It is natural, at first sight, to regard them as a development from their lord's earlier players of Activities' ; and this, indeed, they may to some extent have been. Symons did not necessarily take the whole troop with him when he joined the Queen's. A reward was paid to Strange's at Coventry during the year ending on All Saints' Day 1588, but this may have been either before or after Symons's departure. Something is known of the pre-history of four men who were ultimately members of or associated with the later company. John Heminges is stated in his grant of arms to have been a servant of Queen Elizabeth, pre- sumably as an actor. He is not, however, in a list, perhaps not quite complete, of 30 June 1588. William Kempe was almost certainly the 'Will, my Lord of Lester's jesting plaier', mentioned in a letter from Utrecht of 24 March 1586. A performance half dramatic, half acrobatic, of The Forces of Hercules was given before Leicester at Utrecht on April 23, and in August and September
40 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
'Wilhelm Kempe, instrumentist' was at the Danish court of HelsingSr. Here too were George Bryan and Thomas Pope, with three other 'instrumentister och springere', Thomas Stevens, Thomas King, and Robert Percy, of whom there is no English record. A sixth, Thomas Bull, killed one of his fellows in a brawl, and presumably met his own end as a result.1 The five, but not Kempe, went on to Dresden and were there until 1 7 July 1587. This is doubtless the 'company of English comedians' which Heywood says that Leicester com- mended to the King of Denmark.2 Their less dramatic acquirements were naturally prominent abroad. It does not of course follow that these comedians, except perhaps Kempe, had anything to do with Leicester's own long- lived English company. The Earl may have picked them up on the Continent itself. Thomas Bull, at least, had already paid a visit to Denmark in 1579-80.3 Moreover, Leicester's men were playing at court and elsewhere in England during the period of the continental travels. TJiey went on appearing in the provinces up to and after the Earl's death on 4 September 1 58 8, and if a Faversham record of 1 58 9-90 can be trusted, they were not even then disbanded.4 Possibly they continued for a time in the service of the Countess, who had in fact similarly retained the com- pany of her first husband, the Earl of Essex, for some years after his death. There is not therefore much support for the theory that Leicester's men passed in a body to Strange, It has been recently revived by Professor Baldwin, who thinks that the continental travellers of 1586-7 were not Leicester's players but his musicians, and that on their return they amalgamated with his players under the pat- ronage of Strange. Leicester no doubt had musicians, who were at Oxford in 1 5 8 5-6, possibly before he went abroad.*
1 J. L. E. Dreyer in T.LS. for Soc. Trans, i. 218) extracted the entry
21 January 1926, citing C. Thranc, (0.1869). I have not been able to con-
Fra Hofuiolemes Tid (1908)5 V. C. suit them.
Ravn, Engehker Instrument r (1870). 5 Boas, St. and the Universities, 19.
* Eltz. Stage, iv. 52. 3 Ibid. ii. 272. Baldwin, 76, confuses them with the
4 The accounts were in a bad con- players and musicians of Edward Lord
dition when J. M. Cowper (j R. Hist. Dudley, who were at Coventry (Mur-
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 41
I do not think that the evidence allows us to say more than that as early as 10 June 1592 Kempe, who had probably been a Leicester's man, had joined either Strange's or, as will be seen, the Admiral's ; l and that, at some time before 1590-1, Bryan and Pope, who had been on the Continent, had done the same. There are too many possibilities for confidence. Hunsdon's, who disappear after 1589—90, may have contributed an element, as well as the Queen's and Strange's tumblers. And some or all of the conti- nental company may have taken service on their return with Leicester's brother, the Earl of Warwick, or may even have been his men before they went abroad. Warwick's tumblers were at Bath in 1587-8, just about the time of the return, and Warwick's players at Ipswich in 1592. The real patron must then have been the Countess, since Warwick died on 20 February 1590, and left no heir.
Strange's were not at court for the 1588-9 season. But on the following November 5 both they and the Admiral's were playing in the City. Perhaps one or both companies had failed to take warning from the fate of the Queen's and to keep their tongues off Martin Marprelate, for the Lord Mayor made an attempt to suppress plays, on the ground that Tilney 'did utterly mislike the same'. The Admiral's submitted, but Strange's showed contempt and performed at the Cross Keys, with the result that some of them found themselves in prison, 'Admiral's' are named as at court during the following winter, giving a play on 28 December 1589 and 'activities' on 3 March 1590, 'Strange's' are not, nor are any provincial visits ascribed to them during 1590. 'Admiral's', however, did an autumn tour, perhaps by Ipswich, Maidstone, Winchester, Marlborough (July 25), Gloucester (Sept. 17), Coventry, and Oxford.2 In the following winter there were plays at James Burbadge's house, the Theatre, and here events occurred about which John Alleyn was afterwards called
ray, ii. 238) in 1582-3. There is of six men in 1572 (Ettz. Stage, ii. 86).
course nothing in his point that five z Jfewaaind Knack to Know a Knave.
men were at Dresden and that the same * Possibly some of these visits may
'taUsmanic' number are in the patent to have been late in 1589. There were
Leicester's men of 1574. Leicester had two to Ipswich.
42 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
upon to give evidence in a Chancery case.1 The dispute was between Burbadge and one Mrs. Brayne, who claimed a share in the profits of the house, and charged Burbadge with contempt of court in disregarding an order which she considered to be in her favour. She paid several visits to the Theatre to demand her rights. One of these was in November 1590, and a deposition by John Alleyn on 6 February 1592 suggests that it was on this occasion that James Burbadge spoke words of contempt, and his youngest son Richard beat one of Mrs. Brayne's supporters about the legs with a broomstick. Alleyn claims that he 'did as a servaunt wishe the said James Burbage to have a conscience in the matter'. Burbadge, however, said that *yf ther wer xx contempts and as many iniunccions he wold withstand them all'. And then Alleyn goes on to relate that 'when this deponent about viij daies after came to him for certen money which he deteyned from this deponent and his fellowes, of some of the dyvydent money betwene him & them, growinge also by the vse of the said Theater, he denyed to pay the same. He this deponent told him that belike he ment to deale with them, as he did with the poor wydowe, meaning the now complainant, wishing him he wold not do so, for yf he did, they wold compleyne to ther lorde & Mr the lord Admyrall, and then he in a rage, litle reuerencing his honour & estate, sayd by a great othe, that he cared not for iij of the best lordes of them all/ Alleyn was, however, called upon to make a second deposition in reply to interrogatories on behalf of Burbadge, in which he was pressed as to the date of these events, and on 6 May 1592 he said that they took place 'about a yere past'. The words about the Ad- miral were spoken in the 'attyring house' in the presence of James Tunstall. I think that we must take this as Alleyn's most considered dating, and treat the tenure of the Theatre by the Admiral's as lasting to at least about May 1591. The court records for the winter of 1590-1 are on the face of them rather odd. The Privy Council
' Cf. JSltx. Stage, ii. 389. The de- Wallace in Nebraska University positions cited are printed by C. W. Studies, xiii. i.
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 43
Register notes the issue of a warrant for plays and 'ac- tivities' on December 27 and February 16 by the * Ad- miral's'; the Chamber Accounts show payments for these days to 'George Ottewell and his companye the Lord Straunge his players'. It is difficult to resist the inference that the two companies whose names are thus treated in official documents as equivalent had in fact appeared at court together. And if so they had probably been 'exer- cising' their court plays together in public performances, under an arrangement with James Burbadge which put the Theatre at their disposal. They may also have had the Curtain, since the lawsuit already cited tells us that it still served as an 'easer' for the Theatre. But the relations with Burbadge indicated by John Alleyn's evidence could hardly fail to bring any such arrangement to an end. Pro- vincial notices suggest an autumn tour of 'Admiral's' men in 1591, closely resembling that of 1590, by South- ampton, Winchester, Bath, Gloucester, and Oxford. 'Strange's' seem also to have been at Bath. And there is some reason to suppose that by the summer of 1 59 1 a new London head-quarters had already been found at Philip Henslowe's Rose on the Bankside. The Alleyn papers at Dulwich contain an order by the Privy Council with- drawing a previous one which had restrained 'Strange's' men from playing there and had enjoined them to play- three days a week at Newington Butts. With it are peti- tions from the company and from Henslowe and the Thames watermen asking for the concession. Unfor- tunately neither order is recorded in the Privy Council Register, and the documents themselves are undated. The players' petition, however, was written 'nowe in this longe vacation'. It recites that 'oure companie is greate, and thearbie our chardge intollerable, in travellinge the coun- trie, and the contynuance thereof wilbe a meane to bringe us to division and seperacion'. Henslowe's petition begs that he may have leave 'to have playinge in his saide howse duringe such tyme as others have'. It does not look, therefore, as if there had been any general inhibition of plays. This seems to point to 1591 rather than to 1592,
44 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
the only other possible year. In 1592 there was such a general inhibition on June 23, and it was to last to Michaelmas, and therefore through the 'longe vacation'. If I am right in supposing that 'Strange's' as well as the 'Admiral's' had broken with James Burbadge in the spring of 1591, it seems necessary to refer to some earlier date two tiring-house 'plots' or book-keeper's outlines of plays, since both of them show Richard Burbadge as a performer, and he is not likely to have gone with the com- panies when they left his father.1 One, now at Dulwich, is of The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins. It gives an almost complete cast, which includes, as players of male characters, Mr, Brian, Mr. Phillipps, Mr. Pope, R. Bur- badg, R. Cowley, John Duke, Ro. Pallant, J. Holland, John Sincler, Tho. Goodale, W. Sly, Harry, Kitt, and Vincent; and as players of women, T. Belt, Saunder, Nick, R. Go., Will, and Ned. Two speakers and some others, probably mute, have no names assigned; the speakers, who are presenters, may have already been cast in a plot for the first part. The other plot, also probably once at Dulwich, is of The Dead Man's Fortune. Unluckily, it is not completely cast. The actors named are Robert Lee, Darlowe, 'b. Samme', and Burbage, who possibly played a messenger, but more probably a substantial part. To the inferences to be drawn from these plots I shall return. No less than six court plays are credited to 'Strange's' during the winter of 1591-2, on December 27 and 28, January I and 9, and February 6 and 8 ; none to the 'Ad- miral's'. The Queen's and Sussex's also appeared, once each, and a little-known company of the Earl of Hertford's men. On February 1 9 Henslowe begins a daily record for 'Strange's' which lasts to June 23, Then came the inhibi- tion provoked by some recent disorders, probably arising from an agitation (cf. p. 511) against alien artisans in London; and before its termination at Michaelmas plague had broken out. 'Strange's' were at Canterbury by r3> aad are ako traceable at Gloucester, Coventry,
1 Dr. Greg is revising the texts of Henslowe Papers, 127, for his Dramatic Documents.
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 45
Cambridge, and Oxford (Oct. 6). Notices of 'Admiral's* men during this year are scanty. There is a possible one at Aldeburgh and a certain one at Ipswich on August 7. But here the Admiral's were not alone. The payment is apparently a joint one to the Earl of Derby's and to the Lord Admiral's players. By Derby's I think we must as- sume Strange's to be here meant. The Earl does not seem to have had a company after 1583. Strange's men would naturally have worn the Stanley badge, and a mistake is intelligible.1 Late in the year, on December 19, 'Ad- miral's' men were at Leicester. The plague, however, lulled a little about Christmas, and plays at court became possible. Two were given by a company which at this juncture makes a rather surprising first appearance in dramatic annals, that of the Earl of Pembroke, and three by 'Strange's'. These men also got another month's season with Henslowe. But fresh plague led to a fresh inhibition on 28 January 1593, and on January 31 or February i the season ended. 'Admiral's' men were al- ready on the road as far afield as Shrewsbury on February 3. Apparently they were weak in numbers, for at York (April) they were performing with a company described as Lord Morden's, possibly an error for Lord Morley's; at Newcastle (May) certainly with Lord Morley's; at Ips- wich with Lord Stafford's. Their name appears alone at Norwich and Coventry. 'Strange's1 seem to have remained idle for a time, perhaps hoping for the plague to subside. Edward Alleyn was at Chelmsford with companions on May 2, and a record of 'Strange's' at Sudbury in 1592-3 may perhaps identify them. On May 6 a special travelling warrant was issued by the Privy Council in favour of 'the bearers hereof, Edward Allen, servaunt to the right honorable the Lord Highe Admiral, William Kempe, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillipes and Georg Brian, being al one companie, servauntes to our verie good Lord the Lord Strainge'. It is a little uncertain
1 A recusant list of 1592 (Bowden, coat with the eagle and child on his Religion of Shakespeare, 79) includes a sleeve*. priest, who 'uses to travel in a blue
46 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
whether or not the 'being al one companie' is meant to cover Alleyn; in any case he was maintaining some personal relation to the Admiral, For a tour which fol- lowed, and in which Alleyn took part, his correspondence enables us to eke out the provincial records; and to learn that members of the company not named in the warrant were Richard Cowley, a boy of Alleyn's called John Pyk, and a 'Mr Douton', who is less likely to be one of the Duttons, than Thomas Downton, who was later an Ad- miral's man. The route was by Maidstone, Southampton, Bath, Bristol (Aug. i), Shrewsbury, Leicester, and Coventry (Dec. 2). Alleyn, writing from Bristol, con- templated visits to Chester and York, and a return to London about All Saints' Day. Possibly the prolonged plague caused a change of purpose. The letters show that the company was travelling as 'Strange's'. It is Derby's at Leicester and Coventry, but on September 25 Strange had succeeded to the earldom. At Shrewsbury the payment was to 'my 1. Stranges and my 1. Admyralls players'. Prob- ably the two tours crossed here. The 'Admiral's' appear to have gone on to Bath and to have found fresh associates in Lord Norris's men. Again an error for Morley's is possible. Two other companies of interest to us were also on the road in 1593. One was Sussex's, who like 'Strange's' ob- tained on April 29 a special travelling warrant from the Privy Council. They went far afield, to Sudbury, Ipswich, York (August), Newcastle (September), and Winchester (Dec. 7). The other was Pembroke's, the new court as- pirants of the preceding Christmas. They made for their Lord's quarters in the Welsh marches, covering Rye, Bath, Ludlow, Bewdley, Shrewsbury, York (June), Coventry, Leicester, Ipswich. At Bath the careful chamberlains record a receipt of two shillings for a bow that Pembroke's men had broken. It is an allegory, for soon Pembroke's were themselves broken. There are no precise dates, and it is possible, although not very likely, that some of the visits may belong to the end of 1592. But that Pembroke's were in the provinces during 1593 we learn from a letter of September 28 in that year from Henslowe
PLATE
FERDINANDO EARL OF DERBY
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 47
to Alleyn. They had by then, he says, been at home for five or six weeks, because they could not save their charges with travel, and had been obliged to pawn their apparel. The only company at court for the Christmas of 1 593-4 was the Queen's. But there was a short cessation of plague, and Henslowe's book records a short season from Decem- ber 26 to February 6 by Sussex's men. This had been purely a provincial company from 1585 up to its appear- ance at court on 2 January 1 592. But we found it working with a travelling group of Queen's men in 1591, and after a fresh outbreak of plague and a consequent inhibition on February 3, this relation was now renewed in a second short season with Henslowe from I to 9 April 1594. Meanwhile 'Derby's' men were at King's Lynn, Ipswich (May 8), and Southampton (c. May 15) where in their turn they had combined with Morley's. The Earl had in fact died in the north on April 1 6, and although this does not appear to have been known at Southampton, when the company reached Winchester on May 16 they were described as the Countess of Derby's. 'Admiral's' men were with Henslowe from May 14 to 1 6. The plague was now really over, and a reorganization of the companies became possible. Already on May 10 and again on June i the City were considering some 'cause' concerning plays recommended to them by the Countess of Warwick.1 It is just conceivable that she had contemplated maintaining a London company. If so, nothing^cameofit On June 5 a company of Chamberlain's men is heard of for the first time since 1588-9. It was playing with Admiral's men, probably on alternate days, for Henslowe at Newington Butts. The arrangement seems only to have lasted until June 1 5. The companies then parted, and to the end of the reign shared the supremacy of the London stage. On October 8 Lord Hunsdon was negotiating with the City for the housing of 'my nowe companie* at the Cross Keys.2 Most of the men named as 'Strange's' on 6 May
* The first record is in Elix. Stage, shortly be printed in M.S.C, iv. 3155 the second has been recently * EKx. Stage, iv. 316. found by Miss A. J. Mill, and will
48 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
1593, William Kempe, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, and George Bryan, became Chamber- lain's men. So did others of whom we have heard, Richard Burbadge, Richard Cowley, John Duke, William Sly, John Sincler. Edward Alleyn, on the other hand, continued or resumed his service with Charles Howard, the Lord Admiral, and with him went Richard Jones, now back from the Continent, James Tunstall, and Thomas Downton. John Alleyn is not traceable as a player after 1591. There is some slight evidence connecting George Ottewell or Attewell with the Queen's in 1595.
This complicated chronicle raises some problems which are perhaps beyond solution. What was the precise nature of the association between the Admiral's and Strange's men, and what period did it cover? My im- pression is that the court documents of 1590-1 enable us to put its beginning not later than 1590, and that from that year to 1594 it amounted to an amalgamation. It may have begun a little earlier, with the expulsion from the City in November 1589. It is of course only for 1590-1 that the identity at court of the 'Admiral's' and 'Strange's' is demonstrated, but the reputation of Edward Alleyn about 1592 renders it almost incr'edible that he was never .called upon to appear before the Queen between 1590-1 and 1594-5; and if he did so appear, it can only have been as a 'Strange's' man in 1591-2 and 1592-3. In these years 'Strange's' are at least as predominant at^ court as the Queen's men had been in their day. In 1593* there is the clearest evidence that Alleyn, although retain- ing a personal status as a servant of the Admiral, was travelling as a 'Strange's' man. I take it that the Ad- miral's, weakened by the loss of Jones and Browne, and perhaps later of John Alleyn, were numerically a sub- ordinate element in the amalgamation. Possibly only Edward Alleyn and James Tunstall were left of the nucleus which came from Lord Worcester's service. Obviously the personal gifts, histrionic and financial, of Edward made him the effective manager of the company. I think it best to call it 'the Alleyn company'. Officially, in Lon-
PLATE V
EDWARD ALLEYN
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 49
don at least, it seems to have been known as 'StrangeY. The provinces are another matter. The records of 1590 and also, but for an isolated visit of 'StrangeY to Bath, those of 1 59 1 are for the 'Admiral's'. Both names are used in 1592 and 1593, and during these years probably two groups were travelling. There are distant records for 'Ad- miral's' at dates when 'Strange's' cannot have been far from London, Sometimes the paths of the tours intersect, and the groups play together. This is not in itself proof of corporate unity, since both groups also play on occasion with outside companies, such as Morley's. I interpret the facts as follows. At the beginning of the amalgamation, the best of the old Admiral's and Strange's men remained continuously in London. But at certain seasons a group, perhaps largely composed of hired men, was sent on tour. One may guess at either James Tunstall or George Otte- well as the leader. The arrangement is closely analogous to that of the Queen's men during the same period. Probably Queen's men could always pass in the provinces as Queen's men. I do not know what evidence of identity travelling royal servants had to carry with them. Noble- men's players certainly required a warrant from their lord. Probably the amalgamated company still held the Ad- miral's warrant, as well as Lord Strange's, and could use this for a travelling group. The London group, at the time of the petition of 1591 or 1592, were a 'greate' com- pany, and feared 'division and separation' if they travelled. They had the example of the decaying Queen's men before them. But plague drove them to form a second travelling group, and I think it also drove them to still further 'division and separation'. The sudden appearance in a time of plague of Pembroke's men, only to be extinguished after a brief career, is perhaps best to be explained as a budding off from the great amalgamation. A third travel- ling warrant was thus secured. Again, either Ottewell or Tunstall, neither of whom is named in the travelling warrant for 'StrangeY, may have taken charge. Probably some play-books, formerly in use by the Alleyn company, were handed over as an outfit for the new venture, and in-
3X42.1
50 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
eluded Titus Andronicus> not necessarily in the extant ver- sion, and 2, 3 Henry 71. The stage-directions to the latter preserve the names of five actors, Gabriel, Humfrey, Sinklo, John Holland, and Bevis. The first two names, not very usual, may point to Gabriel Spencer and Humfrey JefFes, of whom we have later record. All five may have been written into the books either before or after the transfer to Pembroke's, and the only one who can be shown to have gone with that company is Bevis, who is traceable in a gag found only in the reported version of 2 Henry VI as given by them.1 Holland and Sincler are in the 'plot' of Seven Deadly Sins already described. It is even conceivable that the names may have been added by the Chamberlain's on a revival, although Sincler alone or the five men is known to have passed to them. If so it must have been an early one, since Spencer and JefFes were with the later Admiral's by 1597. In any case the Chamberlain's revived the plays before 1599 and left the names standing.2 If they then used the
original prompt-book, Sincler may have taken his old part, and the other names may have been allowed to pass as character-names. There is nothing to suggest that Pem-
broke's, once constituted, did not form a distinct company. Henslowe's letter of September 1593 suggests that they were financially independent. But indeed we know nothing of the financial conditions under which the amalgamation itself worked. The fate of Pembroke's after September 1 593 is obscure. I formerly thought that there was an unbridged interval of three or four years before a company of the same name reappeared in I597-3 But visits traced at Ipswich on 7 April 1595 and in 1595-6, and at Oxford in 1595-6, may point to some continuity of existence.* It may be significant that Gabriel Spencer and probably Humfrey JefFes belonged to the Pembroke's company of 1597.
An earlier statement of these views has met with some
1 Cf. p. 288. * Cf. p. 289. sites, 20. The Ipswich notices, found
3 Eliz. Stage, ii. 131. by Mr. V. B. Redstone, will be printed
4 Boas, Shakespeare and the Unwer- in M.S.C.
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 51
demur from Dr. Greg, than whom no scholar is better acquainted with the evidence or brings more acute powers of criticism to its analysis.1 The main point at issue is as to the date at which the amalgamation, which Dr. Greg prefers to call an alliance, began. He notes that in the Burbadge lawsuit John Alleyn spoke of the Admiral as the 'lord' of the players at the Theatre, and that the only names mentioned are those of Alleyn himself and of Tun- stall, both previously Admiral's men. And he thinks that, although the Admiral's and Strange's gave joint per- formances at court during 1590-1, they remained in- dependent away from the court; that the Admiral's used the Theatre and Strange's the Curtain; that James Bur- badge had some control of both houses; that Richard Burbadge played indifferently for both companies; and that a closer association between them only began at the Rose in 1 59 1 . I doubt whether there is sufficient material for any confident decision between these conflicting hypo- theses. I will therefore only comment that I know no other contemporary example of an actor playing concurrently for two companies; and that there is an a priori probability that the joint performance of plays at court had been preceded by joint 'exercise' in public. It is true, however, that in 1611-12 the King's and Queen's men, certainly distinct companies, seem to have combined for two plays at court.2 The date of the amalgamation is not without importance, since it bears on the interpretation of the plots. These, from the presence of Richard Burbadge, should be earlier than the breach with his father. On Dr. Greg's theory each must represent the self-contained personnel of one of the constituent companies of the later amalgamation. If so, he is probably right in assigning the Deadly Sins to Strange's, whom he assumes to have been at the Curtain, while the Admiral's were at the Theatre. The cast in this plot is nearly complete, and it does not include Edward or John Alleyn or Tunstall from the Ad- miral's. It is true that two important parts, those of Henry VI and Lydgate, are not cast, and two of these ' R.E.S. i. 257. Cf. App. D.
E 2
52 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
actors might have filled them. Dr. Greg suggests that they were filled by Heminges and Kempe. Neither part, how- ever, looks like such a jesting part as Kempe would naturally have taken. There is, as it happens, a 'Will foole' in the plot, but it was taken by John Duke. More- over, if this was a play of 1590-1, one would expect George Ottewell, the court payee for that year, to have appeared in it, and one of the vacant parts should on any theory have been his. It weighs, I think, a little against Dr. Greg's view that the plot, which in that view belongs to a performance with which Alleyn was not concerned, was found at Dulwich. This he puts down to an 'accident' during the later amalgamation. The Dead Man's Fortune plot, on the other hand, Dr. Greg ascribes to the Admiral's at the Theatre. I am not sure that this follows very rigidly, even from his own premisses. Besides Burbadge's, only three names of minor actors occur. They are not in the Deadly Sins plot, but might have taken the uncast Sins. One of them, Robert Lee, had a business transaction with John Alleyn and Thomas Goodale in 1 593 (cf, p. 5" 1 3), which proves nothing as to his origin, and recurs in the next century as a Queen Anne's man. No one of them is found in the later Admiral's company, unless *b. Samme' is Samuel Rowley. On my theory, which puts the amal- gamation earlier than the parting with the Burbadges, it is not possible to say more of the plots than that they represent performances either by the Admiral's or by Strange's or by the Alleyn company, and that they carry no evidence as to which members of that company, as we find it in 1593, had originally been Admiral's and which Strange's men. We are left without any ground for as- suming that the formation of the Chamberlain's and the later Admiral's men in 1594 represents a segregation of elements which had already been distinct before the amal- gamation. And we cannot tell at what dates, by 1592 and 1593 respectively, Kempe and Heminges had joined one of the companies concerned.
Finally, something must be said of the surviving dramatic texts which can be related to the companies
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 53
operative in 1583-94. During the greater part of the period only a few were printed. The vicissitudes of the Chapel probably account for Lyly's Sappho and Phaon (1584) and Campaspe (1584) and Peele's Arraignment of Paris (l$*4)\ the suppression of Paul's certainly does for Lyly's Endymion (1591), Galathea (1592), and Midas (1592). From the Queen's came The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591) and presumably Wilson's Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590); from the Admiral's Tamburlaine (i 590). The Spanish Tragedy (S. R. 1592) had been played by Alleyn's company at the Rose just before its publication, although, like Arden ofFaversham (1592) and Soliman and Perseda (S. R. 1592), it was printed without any indication of its origin. New conditions were evidently brought about by the reactions of the plague upon theatrical finance and organization. From the close of 1592 to the spring of 1595 about thirty plays, certainly or probably from the companies of 1583-94, were registered or printed. Most of these are extant in contemporary prints; some only in prints of rather later date; some not at all. A few were probably rescued by the companies; thus the Admiral's Dr. Faustus (1604) and Jew of Malta (1633) were re-entered on the register before their ulti- mate publication; and so was King Leir (1605) which had been played by Sussex's and/or the Queen's for Hens- lowe in 1594. Several plays, again, carry no evidence of their company. Title-pages or register entries ascribe to the Queen's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594), True Tragedy of 'Richard III (i 594), Selimus (1594), Old Wive's Tale (1595), Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (1598, S.R. 1594), Clyomon and Clamydes (1599), and the lost Valentine and Orson (S, R. 1595 and 1600). We can pro- bably add Wilson's Cobbler's Prophecy (i 594), and possibly James IV (i 598, S, R. 1 594) in which John Adams, trace- able as a Queen's man in 1588 but not in any company thereafter, seems to have been an actor. To the 'Admiral's* belonged Orlando Furioso (1594), Wounds of Civil War (1594), Battle of Alcazar (1594), Two Angry Women of Abingdon (i599)> and Massacre at Paris (n. d.); to
54. THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
'Strange's' Fair Em (n. d.)> to 'Ned Allen and his Com- panie' A Knack to Know a Knave (1594)- From these companies probably also came A Looking Glass for London and England (1594), played by 'Strange's' at the Rose in 1592. To Pembroke's are ascribed Edward II (1594)* Taming of a Shrew (1594), and 2 Contention of York and Lancaster (1595). Presumably i Contention (1594) had a similar origin. To Sussex's are ascribed George a Greene (*599> S. R. 1599) and Titus Andronicus (1594). But the title-page of Titus Andronicus is exceptionally full, and claims performance of the play by Derby's, Pembroke's, and Sussex's. The evidence from a single name on a title- page must not be pressed too far. It is probably that of the last company which performed the play before it was printed. But this was not necessarily the company for which it was written. Play 'books' might be sold, either by a company as a whole, or by individual actors to whom they had fallen on a division of a joint stock. In some such way we must suppose that the Alleyn company acquired the Queen's play of Seven Deadly Sins\ possibly also the Looking Glass, since this, like James IV, seems at one time to have had John Adams in its cast. A company, again, might obtain permission to perform a play, of which the 'book* was not their own property. Bacon and Bungay bears the name of the Queen's. They had played it, alone or with Sussex's, at one of Henslowe's houses in 1594. And in the same season had been played Jew of Malta, Ranger's Comedy, and King Leir. But Strange's had already played both Bacon and Bungay and Jew of Malta at the Rose, and both Jew of Malta and Ranger's Comedy certainly remained in the hands of the later Admiral's men. Probably, therefore, the Queen's and/or Sussex's only gave these three plays under some arrangement with Alleyn. To whom Leir belonged we cannot say. On the other hand, I do not think that performance by a company of a play already printed is proof at this period of ownership by that company before publication, although it is obvious that the possession of parts and properties would facilitate a revival. A definite protection of acting rights in pub-
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 55
lished plays by the Lord Chamberlain seems to have been a seventeenth-century development. Alleyn's company had not, therefore, necessarily possessed Edward I (1593), which the later Admiral's possibly revived; nor do I think that the Chamberlain's had any special rights in Titus Andronicus> A Shrew, Famous Vic- tories^ Troublesome Reign, Leir, or Mucedorus. If so, a company could not very well sell a play both to another company and to a bookseller. It is likely that the book- sellers did not get all their 1593-5 stock in the same way. The ruin of the Queen's and Pembroke's may have led to the dispersal of their repertories in bulk or of the shares of dis- banded individuals. Titus Andronicus probably passed from Pembroke's to Sussex's and 2, 3 Henry PI from Pembroke's to the Chamberlain's. Even solvent companies may have parted with plays to meet temporary financial needs, or because they had become obsolete. In particular, versions adapted to the reducedpersonnelof travelling groups may not have been thought suitable for the London theatres. And some of the printed texts appear to rest, not upon tiring- house 'books', but upon surreptitious sales by actors or book-keepers of versions reconstructed from memory.
The fragmentary nature of the evidence makes a dramatic history of the period extremely difficult. The work of even the best-known writers is uncertain in extent and chronology, and much of it has come down in muti- lated form. Marlowe's authorship of Tamburlaine is a matter of inference; it is only by an accident that we know the Spanish Tragedy to be Kyd's. Some at least of the anonymous plays are probably due to untraced pens. No satisfactory attribution of so remarkable a piece as Arden ofFaversham has been arrived at. We know that Thomas Watson was an active playwright, but nothing passes under his name, Henslowe was paymaster in the later 'nineties to many penmen whose earlier careers are ob- scure. Henry Porter, for example, is now known to have been at work by 1589.* One may venture the suggestion that the rise of Alleyn was due, not only to his own powers
' H. C. Hart, 3 Hen. VI (Arden), xlii.
56 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
as an actor, but also to his early employment of better dramatists than the Queen's could boast. All of Marlowe's known work, except Dido and possibly Edward //, seems to have been for companies with which he was associated. The Spanish Tragedy may have been written for him; if not, he made use of it later. Peele, Lodge, Greene, Porter, all contributed to his repertory. He carried on the tradi- tion of the literary drama, which Spenser mistakenly be- lieved to have perished with Lyly. I do not doubt that the Queen's, in their post-Tarlton days, attempted to follow suit. It is only an impression that they put their money on Greene as against Marlowe. I do not suggest that Marlowe, or Greene, or any other writer not himself an actor, was tied to a particular company. We know that Greene's university education did not prevent him from selling Orlando Furioso first to the Queen's, and then, when the Queen's were in the country, to the Admiral's.
CHAPTER III SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY
[Bibliographical Note. I have dealt fully with the Chamberlain's-King's men and their theatres in chh. xiii, xv, xvi, and xvii of The Elizabethan Stage (1923). Later books of importance are T. W. Baldwin, The Organi- zation and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (1927); G. Hubbard, On the Site of the Globe Playhouse of Sh. (1923); W. W. Braines, The Site of the Globe Playhouse, Southwark (2nd ed. 1924). Some theatrical documents are collected and discussed in Appendix A, nos. vii, viii, and Appendix D. The books of wider range noted for ch. i are relevant for this chapter also. On Shakespeare's conjectured travels are K. Elze, Shs muthmasslicheReisen.(i%T$, J.viu.tf; Essays, 254); Tk.JLlz^Italienische Skizzen zu St. (1878-80, J. xiii. 137; xiv. 156; xv. 230), Venezianische Skizzen zu SL (1899); G. Sarrazin, Sh. in Mantua? (1894, J. xxix.249), Neue italienische Skizzen zu Sh. (1895-1906, J. xxxi. 165; xxxvi. 95; xxxix. 62; xiii. 179), St. in Mailand? (1910, J. xlvi. 114); E. Koppel, War Sh. in Italien? (1899, J. xxxv. 122); W. Keller, Zu Shs italie- nischer Reise (1899, J. xxxv. 260); E. Sullivan, Sh. and the Waterways of North Italy (1908, Nineteenth Century, Ixiv. 215), Sh. and Italy (1918, ibid., Ixxxiii. 138, 323); J. S. Smart, Sh.9s Italian Names (1916, M.L.R. xi. 339); J. Stefansson, St. at Elsinore (1896, Contemporary Review., Ixix. 20); H. Logeman, Sh. te Helsingor (1904, Melanges Paul Fredericy)\ W. J. Lawrence, Was SL ever in Ireland? (1906, J. xiii. 65). Shake- speare's personal relations to other writers are discussed in R. Simpson, The School of Sh. (1878); J. H. Penniman, The War of the Theatres (1897); R. A. Small, The Stage Quarrel between Ben Jonson and the So- called Poetasters (1899); G. Sarrazin, Nym and Ben Jonson (1904, J. xl. 213); G. G. Greenwood, Ben Jonson and Sh. (1921); A. Gray, How Sh. 'Purged' Jonson (1928); A. Acheson, Sh. and the Rival Poet (1903), Mistress Davenant (1913), Sh.9s Lost Tears in London (1920), Sh.'s Sonnet Story (1922); J. M. Robertson, Sh. and Chapman (1917). Theories as to his 'topical* handling of contemporary history, and in particular the lives of James I and the Earl of Essex, must be sought in the literature of the plays (ch. ix), especially Mid. N. Dr., Rich. II, Hen. V, Ham., Oth., Macb., K. Lear, Timon, Temp., and of the Sonnets (ch. xi). C. C. Slopes has written The Life of Henry, Third Earl of Southampton (1922). There is none of the Earl of Pembroke, beyond tike D.N.B. Conflicting views on Sh/s religion may be found in J. Carter, Sh. Puritan and Recusant (i 897), and H. S. Bowden, The Religion of Sh. (1899). A pleasant estimate of his character is that of H. C. Beeching, The Benefit of the Doubt (1916, Sh. Homage, 120).]
THE intricacies of the last chapter have at least shown that 1592 to 1594 were years of theatrical disorganization. It
58 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
is during this period of hasty seasons broken by ^ plague, of the setting up and ruin of ephemeral companies^ that Shakespeare first emerges as player and playwright. Robert Greene, from his squalid death-bed on 3 Septem- ber 1 592, left a literary testament. It foreshadows the end of an epoch, that of the domination of the stage by Uni- versity pens. Greene's eclipse was shortly to be followed by that of Marlowe on 30 May 1593. But Marlowe and two others, probably Peele and either Nashe or Lodge, were the objects of Greene's address To those Gentlemen his Quondam Acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plaies.1 It is a bitter attack upon the companies, who have been beholden to him for the lines they have spoken and have now deserted him. They will desert his friends like- wise, since they have now a writer of their own.
Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.
The invective was printed in Greene's Groats-worth of Wit, shortly after the author's death, and Henry Chettle, who prepared it for the press, made something of an apology for it in his own Kind-Harts Dreame, itself registered before the end of 1592.2 The letter had been 'written to divers play-makers' and was 'offensively by one or two of them taken*. With neither of these was Chettle acquainted when he worked on the Groats-worth, and with one of them he does not desire to be. But he thinks that he might well have moderated the reference to the other.
That I did not, I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene rny fault, because my selfe have scene his demeanor no lesse civill than he exelent in the qualitie he professes: Besides, divers of wor- ship have reported his uprightnes of dealingwhich argueshis honesty, and his facetious grace in writting, that aprooves his Art.
It is probable that the first play-maker here referred to is
1 APP- B» n<>- «»• * App. B, no. iv.
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 59
Marlowe and the second Shakespeare, although this im-
Elies some looseness in Chettle's language, since Greene's stter was obviously not written to Shakespeare. But there is nothing in the letter as we have it which could be offensive to any play-maker except Marlowe, who is spoken of as an atheist and Machiavellian, and Shake- speare, who is openly attacked. The others, presumably Peele and Nashe, *y°ung luuenall, that byting Satyrist, that lastlie with mee together writ a Comedie', are handled in a more friendly spirit. However this may be, Greene's letter in itself is sufficient to show that by September 1592 Shakespeare was both a player and a maker of plays. And it is a fair inference from Greene's tone that he was only just taking rank as a serious rival to the University men. How far back are we to put the beginnings of his dramaturgy? Probably as far as 1591, if he is responsible, as their inclusion in Fi suggests, for 2, 3 Henry VL Greene's letter parodies a line from 3 Henry VI^ which must therefore itself have existed as early as 1592. The relation of these parts to i Henry VI \ produced by Alleyn's company on 3 March 1592, is best explained by regarding them as earlier productions of the same company, and since they were not being played in 1 592, they had presumably been laid aside. As, moreover, the supplementary play is likely to have followed after no long interval, we may conjecturally put them in 1591. That, then, is the earliest year to which there is ground for ascribing any dramatic work by Shakespeare that we know of. And even as a player his career may not have begun long before 1592. It is a mere fantasy that he was enlisted by Leicester's men on a visit to Stratford-on-Avon in 1586—7; and Professor Baldwin's conjecture that he may have then begun a seven-year period of formal apprenticeship in a company rests upon a complete mis- apprehension of the nature of theatrical training.1 Tradi- tion tells us, through the mouth of Dowdall (1693), that Shakespeare 'was received into the playhouse as a ser- viture', and through that of Rowe (1709) that he was *at
* Malone in Var. ii. 1665 Baldwin, 286; cf. vol. ii, p. 82.
60 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
first in a very mean rank'.1 Both imply a direct trans- ference from Stratford, which I take to be a foreshortening of events; and both probably mean the same thing, that he was at first a hired man and not a sharer, which is likely enough.2 Malone (1780, 1790) had heard from the stage that he was originally employed as*a prompter's attendant or call-boy, but the statement is dropped from his revised Life. It commends itself to Professor Baldwin.3 A story not given by Rowe, but apparently known to him and originally, derived from Sir William Davenant, tells how before Shakespeare became an actor he occupied himself in taking charge of horses at the playhouse door, and showed dexterity in the employment.* For what it is worth, the story points to the Theatre or Curtain, as these were the only houses reached by horseback. Both were in the hands of Alleyn's company or its component elements in 1590-1, and this company may well have seen his first beginnings, alike as actor and as writer. He is not, how- ever, traceable in the cast of the Seven Deadly Sins about I59°j unless we arbitrarily assume that he took one of the unascribed parts. The 'Will' of that cast was a boy, who took a woman's part,5
After Greene's outburst of 1 592, Shakespeare's position becomes shadowy again, up to the regrouping of the com- panies in 1594. We certainly cannot have any assurance that he was with Alleyn's company during their wander- ings. He is not named in the warrant of 6 May 1593, which probably gives only sharers, or in Alleyn's corre- spondence. He may have been with Pembroke's, if that was formed by a division of Alleyn's company, or with the group which travelled as the Admiral's, or even with Sus- sex's.6 Or he may for a time have dropped acting, and become an unattached playwright. The only plays that can very well be assigned to this period are Richard ///, Titus AndronicuSy and Comedy of Errors. Of these Richard
1 App. C, nos. xviii, xxv. * App. C, nos. xxxvi, xxxviii, xlii.
2 Cf. vol. ii, p. 80. s Cf. p. 44.
3 App. C, no. xlviiij cf. Baldwin, 6 Cf. App. D for the performances 293. of the companies in 1592-4.
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 61
»
/// is certainly a continuation of 2, 3 Henry VI. It is not in Henslowe's list of performances by the Alleyn com- pany, but it Seems clear that 2, 3 Henry VI must have passed to Pembroke's, and Richard III may have been done for them. Perhaps it reappears as the Buckingham given by Sussex's men in 1593-4, although the name would also fit a play on Henry the Eighth. The title-page of Titus Andronicus suggests that it was played successively by Alleyn's company, Pembroke's, and Sussex's, and any touches put to it by Shakespeare might have been for either, the last most plausibly, of these. The Comedy of Errors may have been 'the Gelyous comodey' produced by the Alleyn company on 5 January 1593, but about this I am far from certain. It is at any rate possible, however, that Shake- speare may have been writing for three companies during 1592-4. Much research has been devoted to a conjecture that he spent part of this period in northern Italy. It is certainly true that when the plague was over he began a series of plays with Italian settings, which were something of a new departure in English drama; that to a modern imagination, itself steeped in Italian sentiment, he seems to have been remarkably successful in giving a local colouring and atmosphere to these; and even that he shows familiarity with some minute points of local topography. But the evidence is inconclusive, in view of what he may have learnt through books and the visits of others, or through converse with some of the many Italians resident in London. Supposed travels, now or at another time, to Ireland or to Denmark, are even more speculative. One is on safer ground in pointing out that the plague years gave opportunity for the development of literary ambitions outside the range of the drama, which took shape in the narrative poems of Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594). Each was dedicated with an elaborate epistle to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, a young noble- man of Catholic antecedents, who was just beginning to make a figure at court. A super-subtle criticism detects a great advance in the poet's intimacy with his patron between the two addresses, which I am bound to say is
62 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
not apparent to me. In the first Shakespeare offers 'the first heire of my inuention', that is, his first published work, and will 'take aduantage of all idle houres, till I haue honoured you with some grauer labour*. In the second, 'What I haue done is yours, what I haue to doe is jours, being part in all I haue, deuoted yours/ Each is sub- scribed 'in all dutie'. The phrasing in both cases seems to fall well within the normal scope of dedicatory formulas. Not many idle hours would have been at Shakespeare's disposal, had he done all the revisionary work and early drafts or fragments of plays, with which some writers credit his pupil pen; and if such theories were sound, which I do not believe, we should certainly have to ante- date 1591 for the beginning of his dramatic career.1 If one can trust the apparent testimony of WilhUe his Avisa, he had at any rate sufficient leisure, in or shortly before 1594, for an unsuccessful love affair.2
An Elizabethan patron was expected to put his hand in his pocket. Rowe tells us that Shakespeare met ^with 'many great and uncommon marks of favour and friend- ship* from Southampton, and on Davenant's authority that the Earl 'at one time, gave him a thousand pounds, to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to'.3 The sum named is quite incredible. The aggregate of Shakespeare's known purchases in real estate and tithes throughout his life does not reach £1,000. Probably a cipher has been added to the figures during the transmission of the story; and some such amount as £100 Shakespeare may have spent on acquiring a share in the Lord Chamberlain's company, when it was formed during 1594. There is no ground for supposing that he was the William Shakespeare who had enough spare cash to lend one John Clayton £7 in May 1592, and had to sue for it in 1 6oo.4 At any rate Shakespeare comes before us on 15 March 1595 with an assured theatrical status as a payee on behalf of the Chamberlain's men for plays given at court in the winter of 1 594, and therefore doubtless a sharer
1 Cf. ch. vii. » App. C, no. xxv.
2 Cf. p. 569. « App. A, no. vi.
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 63
in the company.1 The Chamberlain's men, as we have seen, established themselves, like the Admiral's men who were destined to become their principal rivals, on the break-up of the Alleyn combination in the spring of 1594. Ferdinando Earl of Derby died on April 16. On May 16 men under the protection of his widow were playing at Winchester, and 'Admiral's' men were playing for Hens- lowe in London. Very shortly afterwards the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Lord Hunsdon, must have been obtained. But the parting with Alleyn may not yet have been quite complete, since on June 5 Henslowe began to record performances by 'my Lord Admeralle men & my Lorde Chamberlen men' at Newington Butts.2 The plays given included Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and Taming of A Shrew. It may be that A Shrew was already The Shrew, but the Hamlet was certainly not Shake- speare's. Probably this arrangement terminated on June 15, when Henslowe drew a line across the page of ac- counts, after which these three plays no longer appear.3 Thenceforward the two companies may be taken to have been quite distinct. The Chamberlain's were at Marl- borough about September.* On October 8 Lord Hunsdon was negotiating with the Lord Mayor for the use by 'my nowe companie' of the Cross Keys inn for the winter season.5 It is best to assume that as a business organiza- tion the Chamberlain's company, unable to rely on finan- cial support from Alleyn, made a fresh start, and that its capital was contributed by the sharers. No doubt there was some apportionment of the 'books* belonging to the old combination, and in some way all those for Shake- speare's earlier plays, including any which had been per- formed by Pembroke's or Sussex's, seem to have passed into the hands of the Chamberlain's. Titus Andranicus, however, was already in print. The membership of the new company included the five men who had been named with Alleyn in the warrant for 'StrangeY of 6 May 1593.
1 Cf. vol. ii, p. 319. 4 For all their provincial appear-
2 Cf. App. D. ances cf. App. D.
3 Greg, Henstowe, ii, 84. s Etiz. Stage, iv. 316.
64 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
They were William Kempe, Thomas Pope, John Hem- inges, Augustine Phillips, and George Bryan. It also included Shakespeare and Richard Burbadge, who became its leading actor. Its history, first under the designation of the Chamberlain's men, and then under that of the King's men, is continuous throughout Shakespeare's career, and there is nothing to show that he ever wrote for any other company. It became dominant at court, giving thirty-two performances during Elizabeth's reign to tweftty by the Admiral's and thirteen by other com- panies.1 And during this period its run of prosperity seems to have been substantially unbroken.2 Plague only threatened once, for a short period in 1596.* In the same year there was a hitch, owing to the death of Lord Huns- don, and the appointment as Lord Chamberlain of William Lord Cobham, who was less favourable to the stage than his predecessor, and under whom the Corporation secured the exclusion of players from the City inns, while the in- habitants of Blackfriars successfully protested against the opening of the new house which James Burbadge may be presumed to have planned for the use of his son and his son's fellows. Curiously enough, one of the protestants was the new Lord Hunsdon, formerly Sir George Carey, and now the patron of the company.4 But when he him- self became Lord Chamberlain on 17 March 1597, his players had once more the advantage of an official pro- tector. They had of course to face the restraint of 28 July 1597, when offence was given by The Isle of Dogs, for which they were not responsible, and in August and
tour between 1594 and the end of the reign.5 But they stood to gain by the settlement at the end of the restraint, under which only two companies were to be tolerated, and although a Privy Council order of 22 June 1600 limited each company to two performances a week, it is clear
1 EKz. Stage, iv. 164. 4 #/</.
» A fuller history of the company * Visits to Cambridge and Ipswich
than I^have here room for is in £tix. may belong either to the autumn of
Stage, 11. 192. I594 or to
* Elan. Stage, iv. 319.
PLATE V!
(«) GEORGE LORD HUNSDON
(b) HENRY LORD HUNSDON THE LORDS CHAMBERLAIN
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 65
that the restriction was not long enforced. On the other hand they had to face fresh competition from the revival of the boy companies in 1599 and 1600, which for a time hit them pretty hard, and from the toleration of a third company of men in I6O2.1 Some ruffles there were from time to time with the censorship. Richard II was printed in 1597 without the abdication scene, which had probably been thought unsuitable for an Elizabethan public. Fal- staff had to be substituted for Oldcastle in Henry IV and Broome for Brooke in Merry Wives of Windsor. Brooke was the family name of the Lords Cobham, who also claimed an hereditary interest in Sir John Oldcastle. In 1 598 there were complaints in Scotland that 'the comedians of London should scorn the king and the people of this land in their play'.2 We do not know that these comedians were the Chamberlain's men. The Scots are hardly treated in Edward Illy printed in 1596, which may be theirs, and it is conceivable that the absence of the Captain Jamy episode (iii. 2. 69—153) from the 1600 quarto of Henry V •may be due to censorship, although other explanations are also possible. There is no sign, however, that these inci- dents brought any trouble upon the company. It is even more remarkable that they suffered nothing on account of the performance of Richard //, which they gave at the behest of some of the followers of the Earl of Essex, as a prelude to his misguided outbreak of 8 February i6oi.3 Elizabeth grumbled at the popularity of the play, but showed no resentment against the poet or the players. It may be that during 1600-1 they were absent for a short time from London. There are no certain provincial notices of them, but there is a possible one at Oxford, and the title- page of the Qi of Hamlet records that it had been played at Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere, as well as in London itself, before it was published in 1603. But it is not clear that the journeying, if it took place, was due to Richard Ily and the company was at court on 24 February 1 60 1, only a fortnight after the Essex affair, and again as usual during the following Christmas. Perhaps we may
1 Elba. Stage, i. 298, 380$ iv. 321-34. * £#«• Stage, i. 323. 3 App. D- 3142,1 F
66 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
credit Elizabeth's leniency, at least in part, to her personal liking for Shakespeare's art. Of this we are informed both by Ben Jonson's lines and by the tradition of her im- patience to see Falstaff in love. The alleged interchange of royal courtesies over her dropped glove, when the poet was enacting a king upon the stage, must, I fear, be abandoned.1 No doubt the Tudor lady had moods in which she was capable of scourging those whom she most favoured. But the Lord Chamberlain was never far from the royal chair. The Hunsdons, father and son, were Elizabeth's nearest cousins and her close personal ad- herents. Of all the court, they could least be suspected of sympathy with seditious tendencies. It was easy enough to slip in a word to save honest men from the consequences of their indiscretions. After all, the company had only been a cat's-paw for the conspirators. It is impossible to suppose that Shakespeare, in writing Richard //, deliber- ately intended to suggest the analogy between Richard and the queen, which from a matter of jest at court became an mstrument of serious intrigue. The play is one of a series of studies in abstract kingship, which culminate not in the coup d'etat of Henry Bolingbroke, but in the coming to his own of Henry of Monmouth, a legitimate king both by right of birth and as a typical representative of the English nation. That while portraying Henry's kingship Shakespeare became a little doubtful about the ultimate fineness of his humanity, does not affect the main dramatic issue. The political philosophy of the plays, from Sir Thomas More, perhaps, to Ulysses, always lays its stress on degree, order, and unity. Imaginative biography, bent on its search for the topical, delights to represent Shakespeare as obsessed by the career of Essex and making that picturesque and second-rate personality the theme of play after play. His is the unstable mind of Hamlet, and Burghley, whom Essex hated, becomes his foil in Polo- mus. His is the ill-requited generosity of Timon, deserted by Ventidms as Essex was deserted by Bacon. Along such a way of thinking, Essex may also become Henry Boling-
* App. C, no. Ivi.
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 67
broke, or Henry of Monmouth, for all the difference between them, according to taste. There are, however, conflicting speculations. For some, Hamlet is not Essex but James, or both Essex and James, and the adventures of Mary of Scots and Bothwell, under the guise of Lord and Lady Macbeth, were chosen for the delectation of Mary's son. And the minor personages of the time, seen by us, not as their contemporaries saw them, but ill- focused through the fragmentary revelations of private papers, must all be brought into the picture. Most of these cobwebs are too flimsy to bear touching. One can- not be expected to argue whether Lord Buckhurst was or was not Sir Toby Belch.1 I do not myself believe that, apart from some passages of obvious satire in comic scenes, there is much of the topical in Shakespeare, whose mind normally moved upon quite another plane of relation to life. What little there is, probably remains for the most part irrecoverable. Of course he had to build up his characters, consciously or subconsciously, and with the help of traditional stage types, from the Dualities of men and women he had known, or had read of in books. There was no other material for him or any other dramatist. But this is a very different process from the making of por- traits. For topics of political controversy, in particular, there was no room in the Elizabethan theatre, although the position was somewhat altered under the laxer and less popular administration of James. You could beat the patriotic drum against the Spaniards, of course. You could flout the Scots, at least under cover of an historical play. Even here there might be a risk, as the wind of diplomacy veered. But you could not ventilate the griev- ances of the subject, of which indeed there were few except the monopolies, or touch upon ecclesiastical affairs, or champion the conflicting views of Essex and Burghley as to bringing the war to an end, or above all meddle with the dangerous arcana of the succession problem. Least of all could you do this, if you were in a company which, since the Queen's men were never in London, had practically
1 T.L.S* for 28 March 1929. F2
68 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
become an official part of the royal household with a privileged and remunerative position, the preservation of which depended entirely on the avoidance of offence. I do not know what the topical theorists suppose that the censorship was about. They have a dilemma to face. Either the portraits must have been so veiled as to be unrecognizable, alike to the naked Elizabethan eye and through the microscope of modern research. Or alterna- tively the playwright would have tasted the Marshalsea and the players would have gone to pad the hoof in the provinces.
Essex had a popularity which failed him lamentably when the critical moment came; and of this there is an echo in a chorus to Henry 7. The theorists, however, assume that Shakespeare was linked to his fortunes
Essex led to his ruin. And the disaster is sometimes held to account for the critical attitude to society which be- comes apparent in Hamlet. How far Shakespeare's rela- tions with Southampton outlasted the early dedications is very uncertain. The only external fact which might con- nect them is a letter of 1599 from Lady Southampton to her husband in Ireland, in which she jests on the birth of a son to Sir John Falstaff and Dame Pintpot.1 It is most unlikely that by Sir John Falstaff she meant Shakespeare himself. There are the Sonnets, and Southampton has been very generally accepted as the friend to whom, over a long period of years, many of these were written. I am quite sceptical about it. The identity of the friend may have eluded us. But if we are to find him in a known patron of Shakespeare, some at least of the facts point to William Lord Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke, rather than to Southampton. The earlier supporters of this identi- fication did not get all the evidence.2 And although Southampton was still alive when the First Folio was pub- lished, it was to Pembroke and his brother that Heminges and^Condell dedicated it. If Shakespeare was indeed writing for the company of Pembroke's father in 1592-3,
1 App. B, no. xviii. a Cf. p. $66f
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 69
he may already have been in touch with the Herberts, and a projected marriage in 1595 between the son and Eliza- beth Carey, granddaughter of the first and daughter of the second Lord Hunsdon, would be an adequate explana- tion for the earliest sonnets. Elizabeth Carey ultimately married Sir Thomas Berkeley, and it is quite possible that Midsummer-Night's Dream celebrated the occasion. It is reasonable to assume that the services of players to the lords of their companies were not merely nominal.
The only fellow-poet to whom Shakespeare directly refers in his plays is Marlowe: 1
Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, Whoever loved, that loved not at first sight?
His relations to others have been the subject of much wild writing. Probably nobody now believes that Greene's attack of 1 592 was only the last shot of a five-year pamphlet campaign, or that Shakespeare was the Post-hast ofHistrio- mastix, or that Ben Jonson pursued him with malignity, and made him the Poet-Ape of his epigrams.2 These fancies have long gone to the limbo of critical aberrations. And with them should go Mr. Acheson's theory of a con- tinuous duel between Shakespeare and Chapman from Sir Thomas More, in which he supposes Shakespeare to have revised Chapman's work, to Troilus and Cressida? Some jesting at Chapman there may be in Love's Labour *s Lost, and if he was the rival poet of the Sonnets, which is not assured, Shakespeare treated him there with a courtesy touched by irony. But Mr. Acheson's attempt to trace a prolonged give and take of offence and retort between the writings of the two men is singularly far-fetched. There is more material to go upon with Ben Jonson.4 Rowe (1709) had heard that the poets were 'profess'd friends', and that the acquaintance between them began with *a remarkable piece of humanity and good nature', when
1 As You Like It, iii. 5. 81. A. Acheson, £§., Chapman anJS.T.M.
2 Simpson, ii. xx, 339; W. Gifford (Revue Anglo-Amtricaine, iiL 428, in Jonson's Works (ed. Cunningham), 514).
I. brad; cf. Epig. Ivi. * Cf. App. B, no. xxii; App. C,
3 A. Acheson, Sh. and ike Rival nos. iii, vi, vii. Poet (1903), &c.; F. L. Schoell and
70 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
Shakespeare commended a play of Jonson's to the con- sideration of his company.1 One would gladly think that Shakespeare is the Virgil of Jonson's Poetaster.
That, which he hath writ. Is with such judgement, laboured, and distilPd Through all the needful uses of our lives, , That could a man remember but his lines, He should not touch at any serious point, But he might breathe his spirit out of him.
I do not in fact think that Virgil was any one but Virgil, or that Shakespeare was the 'so happy a Genius' who collaborated in the lost first version of Sejanus. Jonson's considered judgement of Shakespeare is to be found in his First Folio lines and in his later Timber. It shows both admiration for the poet and affection for the man. It does not detract from the genuineness of the admiration that it was not uncritical. Jonson had a critical mind, and Shake- speare's way of writing did not altogether answer to his theory of what dramatic structure should be. Therefore he told Drummond that Shakespeare 'wanted Arte'. He censured a line in Julius Caesar, which Shakespeare appa- rently altered. He disliked the solutions of continuity in the action of Henry V. He thought that some of the in- cidents in the Tempest and Winter's Tale made 'nature afraid', and that Pericles was a 'mouldy tale', which in some respects it was. Perhaps he found 'horror' in Macbeth. All this is legitimate criticism by one poet of another. And if Jonson smiled at Shakespeare's 'small Latine, and lesse Greeke', his judgement chimes precisely with the refer- ence, so full of admiration and discriminating kindliness, in the recently recovered lines of Francis Beaumont: 2
Here I would let slip, If I had any in me, scholarship, And from all learning keep these lines as clear, As Shakespeare's best are, which our heire shall hear Preachers apt to their auditors to show How far sometimes a mortal man may go By the dim light of Nature.
*App.B,no.xliv.
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 71
In private talk Jonson may have adopted a more slighting tone towards his friend's erudition. He. is said thus to have incurred the resentment of John Hales. But if he chaffed Shakespeare's assumption of a motto in E.M.O. he became in return, according to repute, the mark for Shakespeare's epigrams. Friends need not spare each other, writing in the same tavern, and over the same quart pot. Is Jonson in Shakespeare's plays? About 1599 he became involved in the Poetomachia.1 This started as a quarrel between him and Marston, and there is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare's was one of the 'petulant stiles' with which Jonson complained that for three years he had been provoked on every stage. But while he was preparing his Poetaster (1601) against Marston, he seems to have learnt of the intended production by the Chamber- lain's men of Dekker's Satiromastix. Dekker, therefore, as well as Marston, appears in Poetaster, together with a company of players, whose personalities are treated in no friendly spirit. There are doubtless some hits at the Chamberlain's men here. Professor Baldwin, with much ingenuity and little to go upon, has endeavoured to dis- tribute the parts.* But even he does not find Shakespeare, and if Jonson made any allusion to Shakespeare in this controversy, it can only be in the Apologetical Dialogue written after the appearance of Satiromastix later in 1601. Here, after defending his 'taxation' of some of the players, he adds:
Onely amongst them, I am sorry for Some better natures, by the rest so drawne, To run in that vile line.
A contemporary notice does, however, connect Shake- speare's name with the Poetomachia. In 3 Parnassus, a Cambridge play, probably produced in the winter of 1 60 1-2, William Kempe, talking of academic writers, is made to say,
'Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, ay and Ben Jonson too, O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he 1 Etiz. Stage, i. 381; iii. 293, 365, 428. a Baldwin 232.
72 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shake- speare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit.' '
The 'pilP is in Poetaster, the 'purge' has been sought in various plays of Shakespeare. It is often taken to be the description of Ajax in Troilus and Cressida, i. 2. 19, which seems unnecessarily elaborate for its place, refers to 'humours', and has not much relation to the character of Ajax as depicted in the play. Professor Sarrazin argued at length for Nym in Henry Fand Merry Wives of Windsor, and the suggestion has been revived by Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch.2 Mr. Arthur Gray has recently suggested the censorious and libertine Jaques ofds Tou Like 7/.3 I dare say there may be glances at Jonson in all of these, parti- cularly in Nym, who rarely speaks in Henry 7, and never in Merry Wives of Windsor, without using the word humour'. But I do not think that any one of them was the 'purge1. All the plays concerned, except Troilus and Cressida, are too early in date, since the writer of 3 Par- nassus clearly regarded the 'purge' as an answer to the 'pill'. Probably the 'purge* was Satiromastix itself. Horace is promised one in i. 2. 294, although there is none of a literal kind in the play. The Cambridge writer may have thought that Shakespeare was responsible for it, since he introduces Kempe as a fellow of Burbadge and Shake- speare, although Kempe had left the Chamberlain's men in 1599, and Danter, who was long dead, as a printer.
Shakespeare's success as a playwright appears to have terminated all other literary ambitions. His free handling of the dramatic form gave him ample scope for a wide variety of poetic expression. The narrative poems, if we may judge by the frequency of allusions to them and the number of reprints, won an early and lasting popularity. But they had no successors. The only occasional verses which bear Shakespeare's signature are the set on The Turtle and Phoenix, contributed to a volume in honour of
1 App. B, no. xx; cf. Etiz. Stage, Wilson), xxxi.
v, 38. 3 A. Gray, How Sk. 'Purged* Jon-
2 J. 3d (1904), 2135 Merry Wives son (1928). of Windsor (ed. Quiller-Couch and
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 73
one Sir John Salisbury in 1601. No dirge for Elizabeth or paean for James came from his pen. He stood aloof from the practice of commendatory writing, with which most of his contemporaries vaunted each other's wares. Professor Minto thought that he found him in a sonnet by 'Phaeton* prefixed to John Florio's Second Fruits of 1591. It is or merit, but does not compel a recognition of Shakespearean authorship, and in any case antedates Venus and Adonis.1 If any of his lyrics are among the anonymous work of the song-books, they were probably written for the stage. The few pieces ascribed to him in manuscript anthologies, like those in The Passionate P/7- grimy carry little authority. The authenticity of A Lover's Complaint, printed with the Sonnets, is gravely doubted.2 The Sonnets themselves are an exception. They continue the poetic impulse of the early work, and their composition covers a period of three years and more, probably from 1595 to 1599 or 1600. One must suppose that some at least of them were originally intended for publication. How else could the immortality in verse promised to the poet's friend be secured? Shakespeare was known to Meres as a sonneteer in 1598. But unless a volume of 1602 has been lost, the Sonnets remained in manuscript to 1609, when they were printed without any token of oyer- sight by the author. To whomsoever written, William Herbert, or Henry Wriothesley, or an unknown, or a group of unknowns, the Sonnets give us glimpses of a soul- side of Shakespeare imperfectly revealed by the plays. A perturbed spirit is behind the quiet mask. Here is a record of misplaced and thwarted affections, of imperfections and disabilities, inseparable perhaps from an undesired way of life, which clog a mind conscious enough of its own power. Shakespeare, the myriad-minded, is
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope.
He is tired of life before his time, conscious of 'tann'd antiquity' in the full tide of years, brooding on the decay of beauty and the passing of friends, letting his imagination
' Cf. p. 555. a <*• P- 55°-
74 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
play freely around thoughts of death. One must not take too literally a way of writing which has some elements of traditional convention in it, or attempt to construct a complete personality from the transient utterances of in- dividual moods. But when all such allowance is made, there is some disharmony between the tone of the Sonnets and that of the vivid comedies, abundant in their rendering of the surface of things, which were contemporary with them. They lead up more naturally to the questionings of Ham- let and to the distasted essays in disillusion which followed. A reasonable measure of worldly prosperity came to Shakespeare. We do not know that he ever let go alto- gether of Stratford. The boy Hamnet died in 1596. Sentiment would trace a reflection of the event in the sym- pathetic treatment of Arthur in King John, which chrono- logy at least does not forbid. The two daughters, Susanna and Judith, remained. There had been no more children. About 1596 Shakespeare may have begun to pick up the broken threads of family life. His father survived to 1 60 1 . No will or administration is known, but it is evident that the Henley St. houses, all that was left of John's property, came into his son's hands, subject no doubt to a life- interest for the widow.1 Probably it was the poet's money which financed an unsuccessful attempt of 1597 to recover the lost Arden inheritance at Wilmcote, as well as an application to the Heralds1 Office in 1596 for a grant of family arms, which John had contemplated and dropped when he was bailiff of Stratford in 1 568-9,2 The grant was duly made, and the arms Or on a bend sable a spear of the first steeled argent, with a falcon bearing a spear as the crest, adorn the poet's monument. In 1599 there was a second application for leave to impale the arms of Arden, but if this grant too was made, neither Shakespeare nor his descendants appear to have availed themselves of it. The responsible heralds incurred some criticism for as- signing arms to a person of base degree, and defended themselves by reciting John's substantial position and civic dignities. In 1597 Shakespeare established himself in his
« App. A, nos. iii, xxiv. a App. A> no
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 75
native town through the purchase3 for £60 if the sum named in the fine can be trusted, of the substantial free- hold house of New Place.1 This stood opposite the Gild Chapel, at the angle formed by Chapel St. and Chapel Lane, and had a large garden. It had been built at the end of the fifteenth century by Sir Hugh Clopton, and had passed by purchase through other hands. There was a curious hitch in the transaction with Shakespeare. William Underbill, the vendor, was poisoned by his son Fulke, and Shakespeare had to secure warranty through a fresh fine with another son Hercules, to whom the felon's estate had been granted. About 1 540 New Place was described as *a praty howse of brike and tymbar'. But in 1 549 it was out of repair, and that Shakespeare may have had to put it in order is suggested by the sale of a load of stone from him or his father to the Stratford corporation in 1598. In the same year he had in Stratford a store of ten quarters of malt, a commodity in which the well-to-do inhabitants of the town largely dealt, somewhat to the impoverishment of their neighbours in a time of dearth.2 In 1598 also the correspondence of Richard Quiney of Stratford shows Shakespeare in friendly relations with a fellow-townsman, who applied to him for a loan to meet expenses in London, and at the same time in search of an investment.3 Oldys has a stage tradition that he drew Falstaff from a land- owner who had refused to sell to him.* He ultimately, in 1602, bought for £320 from the local family of Combe a freehold property in the open manorial fields of Old Stratford, extending to a hundred and seven acres of arable land, with twenty acres of pasture and rights of common.5 This he probably let for tillage by the exist- ing tenant occupiers. And in the same year he acquired, for the use of his gardener, one may suppose, a cottage in Chapel Lane, which was copyhold of the manor of Row- ington.6 He cannot as yet have dwelt much at New Place, although he is not known to have leased it. In London
1 App. A, no. xi. * App. C, no. xxxiv.
* App. A, no. xii. 5 App. A, no. xiv.
3 App. A, no. xiii. 6 App. A, no. xv.
76 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
he is traceable in 1597 as living in St. Helen's, Bishops- gate, where, like other poets, he neglected to pay his taxes. But by the end of 1 599 he had moved to the liberty of the Clink on the Surrey Bankside.1 In both places he would have been in close proximity to his playhouse, at first the Theatre or Curtain, then the Globe.
So Shakespeare stood, when Elizabeth made way for James. He too, no less than his predecessor, was 'taken', according to Ben Jonson, with the flights of the 'Swan of Avon' ; and there is no reason to doubt that Shakespeare remained a. persona grata after the change of reign. Several of his older plays were chosen to appear with new ones at the court performances of 1604-5. * am not so sure as was Sir Sidney Lee that the letter, said to have been once at Wilton, in which Lady Pembroke invited the king to see a representation of As Tou Like If in 1 603, is to be put down as ^ mythical. It certainly cannot now be found, but its existence was recorded by a competent historian in 1 8 6$.2 An anonymous writer about 1709 speaks of an 'amicable' letter, already also lost, but once in Sir William Davenant's hands, from James to the poet himself.s Commentators have not refrained from guessing that it was in acknow- ledgement of the honour paid to the new royal house in Macbeth.
The status Q{ the former Lord Chamberlain's men suf- fered no diminution under James. On the contrary it was enhanced. They now became King's men and sworn officers of the royal household as Grooms of the Chamber in ordinary without fee.* Here the oversight of them still rested with the Lord Chamberlain, no longer Lord Huns- don, who retired early in the reign and died shortly after, but successively Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk ( 1 603- 14), Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset (1614-1?), and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (1615-26). The appointment did not entail any regular household duties, other than those of players. But there was an exception in August 1604, when grooms were needed to attend the
.. App. D, /.*. 1603. ' Etix. Stage, i. 311
RICHARD BURBADGE
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 77
Constable of Castile, who came as an ambassador from Spain, and Shakespeare with eleven fellows waited in their red liveries during the peace negotiations. They acted now under the authority of a royal patent, which entitled them to appear both in London and in any city, university, or other town throughout the realm.1 We have no great certainty as to the playhouses used by the Chamberlain's men at the beginning of their career.2 They had the Theatre in 1596 and probably from 1594, and they may also have occupied city inns during the winter until that practice was stopped in 1596. In 1598 they were at the Curtain, The Theatre in fact was in bad repair, and after long disputes between the Burbadges and the ground landlord, its timbers were pulled down and carried to the Bankside. Here in the course of 1599 was opened the Globe. This is the house named in the patent to the King's men, and it remained in their possession throughout. In 1608 they acquired the lease of the Blackfriars, and this they began to occupy in the autumn of 1609. Being a roofed house, it was more convenient for winter per- formances than the Globe, which it seems to have gradually displaced as the head-quarters of the company. The court performances under James were more frequent than had suited the economical disposition of Elizabeth, and during 1603-16 a hundred and seventy-seven fell to the lot of the King's men. This was far more than half the total number given.3 But there were difficulties to be faced. The rivalry of the boys was continued by other young aspirants, and there were now generally four and some* times five companies playing in London. Even the King's men themselves did not steer quite clear of troubles with the censor, and there was a restraint in 1608, for which they were not responsible, but which threatened a per- manent suppression, and had to be bought off at con- siderable expense. More serious, however, was the effect
1 This would overrule the bar of cf. T.L.S. for 21 Feb. to 2 May 1929.
1593 against performances in the uni- a Cf. Etiz. Stage, chh. xiii, xvi, xvii,
versities of Oxford and Cambridge for a more detailed history of the com-
(Etix. Stage, ii. 113; Dasent xxiv. 427; pany and its houses.
M.S.C. i. 200) if it had been maintained ; 3 Cf. App. D, passim.
78 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
of plague. The epidemic, from which London had been practically free for a decade, broke out again in 1 603. The theatres had been closed in March, when Elizabeth's ill- ness became dangerous, and hopes of a season on the arrival of James in May were frustrated. The King's men had to travel. The plague had subsided by the next spring, and the theatres were opened on April 9. The rest of the year was free from infection, but there were recrudescences in each of the next three summers, and a worse visitation in that of 1608, which lasted to nearly the end of 1609. It is probable that plays were more or less automatically suspended, at first when the weekly deaths from plague reached thirty, and from 1 608 when they reached forty over a rather wider area. On this basis there would have been closures during the greater part of October to December 1605, July to December 1606, July to Novem- ber 1607, and from the end of July 1608 to the end of November I6O9.1 During all five years the King's men travelled. Theatrical profits must have been badly hit, in spite of special royal subsidies to the company, in 1603-4 for their 'maintenance and relief, and in 1608-9 an^ 1609-10 to enable them to undertake 'private practice' for the King's service at Christmas.2 Possibly this did not exclude the admission of spectators to one of the 'private' theatres. The Whitefriars seems to have been available in 1608-9, although we do not know that the King's men occupied it. In 1609-10 they had the Blackfriars. After 1609 Aere was no serious plague until 1625. But there was generally a little travelling in the summer.
The company, in the strict sense, consisted of 'sharers', who were bound together by some deed of association, and divided the profits, after setting aside the proportion allocated to the owners of the playhouse, and meeting the current expenses.* But there were also hired servants, some of whom may have been primarily actors, while others were musicians, and others again stage attendants.
' Ofe. Stage, iv. 345? F- P. Wilson^ » EKx. Stage, iv. 168, 175, I76. The Plague <* ShaketpearS* Limdm 3 Cf. App! A, no. vii, and jfffe. (X9*7)- Stage, ch. xi.
PLATE VIII
WILLIAM SLY
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 79
We hear of the stage-keeper, the tireman, and the book- keeper or prompter, who was an important personage.1 Probably all, except the book-keeper, were available upon occasion to take minor parts. There were also boys, who took the female parts. They seem to have been bound, perhaps for three years, to individual sharers, who under- took to give them training.2 The names of only a few of the hired men and boys have come down to us, but of the sharers it seems possible, from patents and other official documents, from wills, and from actor-lists printed with plays, to construct a fairly continuous chronicle for the period of Shakespeare's career.3 The First Folio itself gives us the names of twenty-six Trincipall Actors in all these Playes', and as twenty-four of them certainly became sharers, it is likely that they all did. Discrepancies with other records, however, make it difficult to regard the order of this list as that of seniority in the company. The patent of 1 603 shows eight sharers, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbadge, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, Henry Condell, William Sly, Richard Cowley, and Robert Armin. There are nine names in the patent, but Lawrence Fletcher, who heads the list, had already been 'comediane serviture' to James in Scotland, and it is probable that his position was only honorific, and that, although appointed a groom of the chamber, he did not become a sharer. Shakespeare and Burbadge stand first in the Folio list, and are followed by Heminges, Phillips, William Kempe, Thomas Pope, and George Bryan. These five had been of Alleyn's company. We do not know the number of sharers in the Chamberlain's company; it may already have been eight. Cowley was a sharer by 1601. On the other hand Kempe, Pope, and Bryan had dropped out by 1603. Bryan was then an ordinary groom of the chamber with household duties. Kempe left the company early in 1599 and was replaced then or a little later by Armin.-*
x Cf. p. 105; vol. ii, p. 80. Jester (M.L.N. xxxix. 447), suggests
* Cf. vol. ii, p. 82. that, as 'Clonnico de Curtanio' is on a Cf. vol. ii, p. 71. the t.ps. of two pamphlets of 1600 to
* T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare's be ascribed to Armin (£//*. Stage, iii.
80 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
The dates at which Condell and Sly became sharers are uncertain; they were 'principal comedians' in 1598. So were Christopher Beeston and John Duke. But these are not in the Folio list, and by 1602 they and Kempe, who had travelled in the interval, had joined the Earl of Worcester's men* They may never have become sharers of the Chamberlain's, Conceivably they did, but left as a result of some disagreement, which also led to the omis- sion of their names from the Folio list.1 The patent of 1603, therefore, seems to represent the company much as it had stood in the later Elizabethan days and to a great extent from 1594 onwards. Its terms leave room for the admission of fresh 'associates', who were doubtless sworn of the Chamber as they joined. In the summer of 1 604 the number of grooms was increased to twelve. This is still the number in a patent of 1619; by 1625 one more had been added. Two of the new places of 1604 were probably filled by John Lowin and Alexander Cooke, who were already principal actors in 1603. I conjecture that the third fell to Samuel Crosse, of whom nothing is known outside the Folio list. He probably died almost at once and was replaced by Nicholas Tooley; one must expect early deaths in plague-time. The death of Phillips in 1 605 left room for Samuel Gilburne; the deaths of Sly and Fletcher in 1608 for William Ostler and John Under- wood. About the same time William Eccleston and pos- sibly Nathan Field were with the company, but not at this date as sharers, since they are soon found elsewhere, and rejoined the King's as sharers later. Of Gilburne no more is heard. Cooke and Ostler died in 1 6 14, Armin in 1 6 1 5, Shakespeare in 1 6 1 6, and Cowley in 1 6 1 9, Gilburne was probably succeeded, not later than 1611, by Robert Gough, and the other five respectively by Eccleston, Robert Benfield, John Shank, Field, and Richard Robin- son. The patent of 1619 gives the names thus arrived at,
300), he must have been there with and one at least seems to have been
some other company after the Cham- -written in 1599. berlain's left for the Globe in 1599. * Cf. vol. ii, p. 79. Is it possible
^But the pamphlets are unregistered, that they sold the company's plays ?
PLATE IX
JOHN LOWIN
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 81
and here Burbadge, Heminges, and Condell are the only survivors of the old Chamberlain's men. And while it was passing through its stages, Burbadge, long the histrionic mainstay of the company, died. His place was taken by Joseph Taylor, and that of Field, who died in 1 6 1 9-20, by John Rice. His is the last name in the Folio list. It is clear that the company was recruited in two ways; partly by taking in some of its own hired men and boys, partly by enlisting the most talented actors available from outside, some of whom had been trained as boys in the private theatres. Armin, Lowin, Ostler, Underwood, Eccleston, Benfield, Shank, Field, and Taylor all came from other companies. Gilburne, Robinson, and Rice had been boys with the King's; Gough, Tooley, and Cooke either boys or hired men. It is possible that these three and also Condell and Beeston were with the Alleyn company, as Sly, Cowley, and Duke certainly were, although not as sharers. The cast of Seven Deadly Sins has a Harry and a Kit, and a Ro. Go,, a Nick, and a Saunder, who were boys. But it is not safe to rely very much upon personal names.1
A distinction must be drawn amongst the sharers them- selves. Some of them were also 'housekeepers', having acquired an interest in the ownership of the Globe or the Blackfriars or of both houses. One of these was Shake- speare. When the Globe was built in 1599, Burbadge and his brother Cuthbert, who seem to have had an option on the site from the ground landlord, kept a half-interest for themselves and portioned the other half among Shake- speare, Phillips, Pope, Heminges, and Kempe. The housekeepers were responsible, perhaps for the erection, and certainly for the maintenance, of the fabric, and divided the proportion of takings paid over by the body of sharers as rent. Similarly when a lease of the Black- friars was surrendered to Burbadge by the Queen's Revels in 1608, he made new ones, under which Shakespeare, Heminges, Condell, and Sly each received an interest. Both at the Globe and the Blackfriars the holdings were redistributed from time to time, as housekeepers went out
» Cf.p-44-
3142.* G
82 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
or it was desired to admit additional ones, and conse- quently the value of Shakespeare's interests fluctuated. We do not know how long he retained them. The tenancies were 'in common', and therefore alienable to persons who were not members of the company. But they do not seem to have passed under his will, and therefore he may have parted with them before his death; that of the Globe very likely in 1 6 1 3, when the fire made a heavy expenditure on rebuilding inevitable.1
Analysis of Shakespeare's plays, with an eye to the pos- sibilities of doubling parts, shows that, as indeed might have been taken for granted, they were within the compass of the company.2 The practice of doubling certainly existed; it is not necessary to assume that it was always carried to the full extent theoretically feasible, or on the other hand that every regular actor in the company per- formed in every play. The number of persons described in London parish registers as players suggests that there must always have been some 'resting', who could be called upon for occasional jobs, if need arose. From three to five boys would normally have been sufficient for the female parts; some special arrangement may have been required for Midsummer-Night's Dream and Merry Wives of Wind- sor. When the company was travelling, there would be advantages in keeping down the 'personnel^ but of course the less heavily parted plays could be chosen. Some texts, however, show indications of cuts, with the apparent object of reducing the cast.3 Professor Baldwin has some ingenious speculations as to the 'lines' or types of part provided for each of the principal men and boy actors. I think that they are vitiated by a misconception as to the nature of theatrical apprenticeship, by a chronology which I believe to be erroneous, and still more perhaps by the complete absence of any data adequate to support so elaborate a superstructure. The printed actor-lists, of which there are none for Shakespeare's plays, rarely allot parts. The ascriptions of Restoration writers naturally relate to the Caroline period. Thus John Downes tells us
1 Cf. App. A, no. vii. * Cf. vol. ii, p. 86. 3 Cf. pp. 229, 235.
PLATE X
NATHAN FIELD
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 83
that Taylor acted Hamlet and Lowin Henry VIII and that both had their instructions from Shakespeare himself. This cannot be true of Taylor, who only joined the com- pany after Shakespeare's death. It might be of Lowin, but Falstaff, which James Wright gives him, was certainly not his from the beginning. Burbadge was doubtless the leading actor in his lifetime. We know that he did Richard III, Lear, Othello, 'young Hamlett', 'ould Heir- onymoe', probably in The Spanish Tragedy, Ferdinand in The Duchess ofMalfi> and this list, together with the general descriptions of him, suggests a versatility which is charac- teristic of 'repertory' companies and makes any assign- ment of 'lines' very problematic. Lowin probably became Burbadge's chief support in later days. The Fool was a familiar figure in every theatre, and we can trace the suc- cession of Kempe, Armin, and Shank, and even note a change of method, when Kempe's serving-men fools gave place to Armin's court fools. Pope is spoken of as a clown. Heminges seems to have followed Phillips as the business manager of the company. He is described as 'stuttering' in 1613 and appears in no actor-list after 161 1. The will of Phillips suggests that he was primarily a musician. So may have been Cowley, whose name is not in the actor- lists at all, although stage-directions show that he played Verges to Kempe's Dogberry. He had appeared as a musician in Seven Deadly Sins. It is likely enough that the boys were paired, to give a contrast of tall and short, dark and fair, lively and tender among the women. We must assume that Shakespeare, as a practical playwright, had some regard in plotting his plays to the material available for their interpretation. But I cannot believe with Professor Baldwin that he meticulously fitted the ages and complexions of his characters to those of their in- tended representatives. Here the argument as to a practi- cal playwright tells the other way. He would know that a repertory meant the periodical revival of plays, with changes in the cast and changes of age. And he would not be unfamiliar with the uses of 'make-up'. As to Shake- speare's own acting, we have little to go upon, except late
G 2
84 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
and rather conflicting hints through stage tradition. He 'did act exceedingly well' says Aubrey. But Rowe got the impression that he was no 'extraordinary* actor, and that 'the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet*. A story, dubious in its details, describes him as playing the very minor part of Adam in As Tou Like It.1 Chettle, desiring to be courteous, reported him as 'exelent in the qualitie he professes', and 'qualitie' is a term more than once applied to the occupation of an actor. Davies of Hereford speaks of his kingly parts.* It is hazardous to infer that he played the king in Peele's Edward I from the lines (761-2):
Shake thy speres in honour of his name, Vnder whose roialtie thou wearst the same.
We may gather from Richard III and again from Hamlet that he was interested in the technique of his profession, and perhaps from the Sonnets that he found its practice irksome.3 He, too, drops out of the actor-lists after E.M.I. (1598) and Sejanus (i 603), and it may be that after a time his plays, together, perhaps, with the oversight of their production, were accepted as a sufficient return for his share in the company. If so, he presumably did not get any special payment for them, although at an earlier date he may, as Oldys apparently learnt, have received £5 for Hamlet. I feel sure that Sir Sidney Lee has much over- estimated his theatrical income at more than £700. The evidence is complicated, but I do not see how, as sharer and housekeeper, he can ever have earned more, even in the best years, than about ^200. This of course would make him quite well-to-do by Jacobean standards.4
We may think, then, of Shakespeare, early in the reign of James, as still making his head-quarters in London, but more free than of old tor occasional sojourn in Stratford. Here he brought small actions in the Court of Record against one Phillip Rogers for the value of malt supplied and for a money debt in 1604, and against one John Addenbroke and his surety Thomas Horneby for a money
1 App. C, nos. xiii, XSY, xxriv, xliv. 3 Cf . p. 560.
* App, B, no. xxvii. * cf. App. A, no. vii.
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 85
debt in 1608— 9. l And here he added to his investments in 1605 by purchasing for ^440 the lease of a parcel of local tithes which had once belonged to the Stratford col- lege.2 Malone thought he had evidence, not now forth- coming, that Shakespeare's London abode was still on the Southwark Bankside in i6o8.3 Professor Wallace, how- ever, discovered a lawsuit which showed that in 1604 he was lodging in the house of Christopher Mountjoy, a Huguenot tire-maker, in Cripplegate ward, and became in- volved in the family affairs of his landlord.4 Some informa- tion obtained by Aubrey from the actor William Beeston, a son of Christopher, indicates that at some time he also lived in Shoreditch.s Aubrey tells also of annual visits to Stratford, of the humour of Dogberry picked up from a constable at Grendon, which was in fact out of the road, and of lodging in Oxford at the house of John Davenant, a vintner who kept a tavern afterwards known as the Crown. This must have been much later than the days of Dogberry. Davenant is not known to have had the tavern before 1613, although he may have had it in 1 60 1 . A tavern was not normally a place for the reception of travellers, and if Shakespeare did not really lodge at the adjoining Cross inn, which seems also to have been at one time in Davenant's hands, he must have been a private guest. The house still stands in the Cornmarket St., and we may, if we like, fancy Shakespeare occupying a room in which some inter- esting mural decoration of the sixteenth century has recently been uncovered.6 A gloss on the story, over which Aubrey hesitated, made Shakespeare the father of Sir William Davenant, born in 1606. It has not much authority and may owe something to Davenant's willingness to be sus- pected of more than a literary affiliation to the greater poet.7 The temper of Hamlet and Troths and CressiJa'lezds up, naturally enough, to the long unrolling of the Jacobean tragedies. These are not without evidence of mental strain
1 App. A, no. xvi. s App. C, no. riii.
2 App. A, no. xvii. 6 Cf. Plate XVI.
3 App. A, no. ix. 7 Cf. p. 573.
4 App. A, no. x.
86 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
and sometimes exhaustion. Shakespeare's spirit must have been nearly submerged in Lear, and although the wave passed, and he rose to his height of poetic expression in Antony and Cleopatra, I think that he went under in the unfinished Timon of Athens. The chronology of the plays becomes difficult at this point, and it is therefore frankly a conjecture that an attempt at Timon of Athens early in 1608 was followed by a serious illness, which may have been a nervous breakdown, and on the other hand may have been merely the plague. Later in the year Shake- speare came to his part of Pericles with a new outlook. In any case the transition from the tragedies to the romances is not an evolution but a revolution. There has been some mental process such as the psychology of religion would call a conversion. Obviously the philosophy of the tra- gedies is not a Christian philosophy, and in a sense that of the romances is.1 Richard Davies, a Gloucestershire clergyman of the end of the seventeenth century, stated that Shakespeare 'dyed a papist'.2 He may or may not have been misinformed, but I am not so certain as was Sir Sidney Lee that we can, without more ado, 'dismiss as idle gossip the irresponsible report', or that it 'admits of no question' that Shakespeare 'was to the last a conforming member of the Church of England'.a How did Sir Sidney know that Davies was irresponsible or a gossip ? What little is recorded of him suggests that he was a man of scholarly attainments. It was by no means unusual for a seventeenth- century Catholic to be buried in his parish church.4
It was perhaps about this time that Shakespeare's thoughts began to turn to New Place as a permanent habitation. If so, he deferred his purpose for a time, since his cousin Thomas Greene, the town clerk of Stratford, who appears to have been living jjn the house, noted in connexion with a transaction of 1609 that he had found he could stay there for another year.* We may put there- fore in 1610 the beginning of Shakespeare's final years
1 Cf. Sh.: a Survey, 229, 241, 275, 4 Stratford Register, s.a. 1606, 1611,
284, 290, 307. 1613.
* App. C, no. xy. * App. A, no. ri.
* Lee, 487.
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 87
at his native Stratford, spent, according to Rowe, 'as all men of good sense will wish theirs may be, in ease, retire- ment and the conversation of his friends'. Even at Strat- ford time had brought some changes. His elder daughter Susanna had married John Hall, a local physician of some note, in 1607, and had herself a daughter Elizabeth. His younger daughter Judith was still unmarried. His mother had died in 1608. His brother Edmund had, like himself, become an actor in London, although not, so far as we know, in his company, and his death in 1607 had followed that of a base-born son. Two other brothers, Gilbert and Richard, were still alive in Stratford, and died, apparently unmarried, in 1612 and 1613 respectively. His sister Joan had married William Hart, a hatter, and had three sons.1 Shakespeare's breach with London was not a complete one. He still wrote his plays for the King's men. But the intervals between them became longer, and in 1613, when the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth meant a period of theatrical pressure, he seems to have fallen back upon some kind of collaboration with the younger pen of John Fletcher. After 1613 he wrote no more. Occasionally he visited his old haunts. He was in London on n May 1612, when he made a deposition in Christopher Mountjoy's lawsuit, and showed a rather imperfect memory of events which had taken place eight years before.2 He was there in March 1613, when he designed an impresa for Burbadge to paint, and for Francis Earl of Rutland to parade at the annual Accession tilt.3 He was there on 17 November 1614, when Thomas Greene discussed Stratford business with him and his son- in-law Hall.* And it was in London property that during 1613 he made his last investment, buying for £140 and immediately mortgaging for nearly half its value an old building in the Blackfriars, which had once been a gate- house to a lodging for the Prior of the Dominicans, and at later dates a head-quarters, of Catholic intrigue.5
1 App. A, no. L 4 App. A, no. acbc.
a App. A, no. x. 5 App. Ay no. xariii.
• App. A, no. xxii.
88 SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY Chap. Ill
But our imaginative setting for the last days of Shake- speare must be the open fields and cool water-meadows and woodland of Stratford, and the great garden of New Place, where the mulberries he had planted were yet young. He seems to have taken no part in municipal affairs. He made his contribution to the expenses of pro- moting a Bill for the better repair of highways, and gave hospitality to a preacher of one of the annual sermons founded by pious legacies.1 Tradition and his will show that he lived upon friendly terms, not only with the leading citizens, but with well-to-do gentry of the town and its neighbourhood.2 Prominent among these were a family of Combes.3 Thomas Combe, whose grandfather had been a spoiler of the monasteries and his father appa- rently a Catholic, occupied the mansion of the dissolved college. He had died in 1609 and left two young sons. Upon his brother John, who was a rich money-lender, Shakespeare is credited by repute with exercising his epi- grammatic wit. If so, a legacy which he received under John's will of 1613 shows that kindly relations endured. In 1614 young William Combe, who was a freeholder at Welcombe on the Stratford manor, was drawn into a scheme for enclosing some of the open fields, and a con- troversy arose, which disturbed the peace of Stratford for some years. Shakespeare had himself no rights of common in the area affected, but both he as a tithe-holder and the Corporation, who owned the reversion of the tithes, might suffer loss, if the enclosure led to the conversion of arable land into pasture. So far as Shakespeare was concerned, an agreement for indemnification was made, and he seems to have taken no further interest in the matter.* If he had troubles in these years, they were concerned with his daughters. Susanna Hall in 1613 had to bring an action in the ecclesiastical court for the protection of her character from a slander of incontinence.* Judith, on 10 February 1616, married Thomas Quiney, and the ceremony, which
' nos- ** 3Dd- 3 APP- A, no. rviii.
App. A, no. xnrj App. C, nos. « App. A, no. MX.
* Iv- * App. A, no. i.
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 89
took place in a season prohibited by canon law, led to the subsequent excommunication of the pair.1 By the time the sentence was pronounced, the poet may have been already dead. John Ward tells that 'Shakespear, Drayton, and Ben Jhonson, had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted'. There is no reason to reject this report. Ward had been a student of medicine, and became vicar of Strat- ford in i662.2 Drayton is known to have been in the habit offending his vacations at 'the Muses* quiet port' of Clifford Chambers near Stratford, where dwelt Sir Henry Rainsford, whose wife Anne had been Drayton's Idea.* Attempts have been made to determine the precise nature of Shakespeare's medical history, mainly upon the basis of tremors in the signatures to his will.* But the diagnoses of doctors are even less reliable when the patient is not before them than when he is. The will itself was probably drafted in January 1616, but interlineated and partly re- written later, and finally signed, without the formality of a fair copy, on 25 March.* There are small bequests to the poor, to various Stratfordians, and to Shakespeare's 'fellows' Burbadge, Heminges, and Condell, who are to buy rings. Thomas Combe, the brother of William, is to have Shakespeare's sword. The widow, amply provided for by legal dower on the Stratford property, although that on the Blackfriars house had been barred, gets the second best bed by an interlineation. Jo^n Hart is to occupy her present house, which was ofJe of those in Henley St., for life, and to have ^20 and the poet's wearing apparel. Each of her three sons gets £5. Subject to certain contingencies, Judith Quiney is to have a marriage portion of £150, and another ^150 later. She is also to have a silver and gilt bowl. The rest of the plate is for Elizabeth Hall ; the other chattels and the leases for her parents. The real property in Stratford and London is entailed succes- sively upon Susanna and her heirs male, Elizabeth and
1 Ibid. * Cf. p. 507.
* App. C, no. ix. * App. A, no. xriv.
3 O. Elton, MichaelDrcyton, 10, 1 28.
90 SHAKESPEARE AND &IS COMPANY Chap. Ill
her heirs male, Judith and her heirs male, with remainder to the poet's right heirs.
Death took place on April 23. The little that was mortal of Shakespeare lies under the chancel of Stratford church. A doggerel curse on the stone above, locally believed to be from his own pen, has fortunately prevented exhumation. From the chancel wall a bust by Gheerart Janssen watches quietly. Above is the coat of arms ; below a laudatory inscription. The face is full and heavy, with a dome-like head; the modelling may have been from a mask. The present colouring dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, and as tor some time ^before that the bust was whitewashed, it cannot be relied upon.1 The engraving by Martin Droeshout in the First Folio gives no more attractive presentment, and none of the innumer- able portraits which pass as Shakespeare's carry any guarantee of authenticity.2 Aubrey asserts that the poet was 'a handsome well shap't man: very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt'. There is no other reference to his personal appearance, but suffi- cient testimony to his manners. Rowe had gathered that he was held in esteem for his 'exceeding candor and good nature', but may be only echoing Ben Jonson, who wrote in verse of 'my gentle Shakespeare' and in prose described him as 'honest, and of an open, and free nature'. We can- not, I think, ascribe to Shakespeare that rigid propriety of sexual conduct, the absence of which in more modern poets it has too often been the duty of their family bio- graphers to conceal. The indications of the Sonnets and perhaps Willobie his dvisa, John Manningham's contem- porary talk of a more ephemeral intrigue, the gossip about Mistress Davenant, do not leave an impression of com- plete fidelity to^ Anne Hathaway.3 But as to the normal sobriety of his life we may be content to accept the report of William Beeston to Aubrey that 'he was not a company keeper' and that he 'wouldnt be debauched, & if invited
1 App. A, no. xxv$ cf. Plates XXII, XXVI, XXVII. ni- ... J Cf. pp. 560, 569, and App. B,no.
Cf. vol. u, p. 340, and Plates xriv.
Chap. Ill SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY 91
to, writ, he was in paine'.1 The hope, apparent in Shake- speare's will, of founding a family was not destined to fulfilment.2 Susanna Hall had no sons. Elizabeth Hall, who married successively Thomas Nash of Stratford and John, afterwards Sir John, Bernard of Abington in Northamptonshire, had no children. Judith Quiney had, but the last died in 1639. Shortly afterwards steps were taken to terminate the entail. Lady Bernard left the Henley St houses to the Harts in 1670, and the last remnants of Shakespeare's property were sold by a distant kinsman as her residuary legatee after Sir John's death in 1674. There are no existing descendants of Shake- speare.
1 App. C, no. xiii. 2 App. A, no. xxiv.
CHAPTER IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY
[Bibliographical Note. A list of manuscripts of plays datable up to 1616 is in £/iz. Stage 9 iv. 404. Many of these represent court or academic plays for amateur performance, or purely literary compositions, or translations, or are too fragmentary or of too early date to throw light upon the practice of the professional companies. The Malone Society Reprints include admirable type-facsimiles, edited with full palaeographical descriptions by W. W. Greg or under his supervision, of Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber (1923, ed. M. St. C. Byrne from Mostyn, now Huntington MS.), Sir Thomas More (1911, ed. W. W. Greg from HarL MS. 7368), The Second Maiden's Tragedy (1909, ed. W. W. Greg from Lansd. MS. 807), The Welsh Embassador (1920, ed. H. Littledale and W. W. Greg from Phillipps MS. 8719, now in Cardiff Public Library), Massinger's Believe as Ton List (1927, ed. C. J. Sisson from Egerton MS. 2828), Edmond Ironside (1927, ed. E. Boswell from Egerton MS. 1994), The Parliament of Love (1928, ed. K. M. Lea from Dye MS. 39), Richard Hoi Thomas of Woodstock (1929, ed. W. P. Frijlinck from Egerton MS. 1994). Similar in character is Sir John Fan Olden Barnavelt (1922, ed. W. P. Frijlinck from Addl. MS. 18653). There are also photographic facsimiles of John a Kent (1912), Sir Thomas More (1910), and Believe as You List (1907) in J. S. Farmer's Tudor Facsimile Texts. Two of the above plays are drawn from the collection of William Cartwright the younger (ob. 1687), in Egerton MS. 1994. This is described by F. S. Boas in Shakespeare and the Universities (1923), 96. It contains twelve other plays, besides a mask, several of which are in hand for M.S.R. Three represent plays also extant in early prints, Nero (1624), Fletcher's Elder Brother (1637), Daborne's Poor Man's Comfort (1655; cf. Eliz. Stage, iii. 271). One, Calisto or The Escapes of Jupiter, is put together from Heywood's Golden Age (1611) and Silver Age (1613), and is described by W. W. Greg in Anglica (1925), ii. 212. Four are available in more or less modernized texts, Dick of Devonshire and The Lady Mother (i 883, ed. A. H. Bullen in 0.£. Plays, ii), Charlemagne or The Distracted Emperor (1884, ilia1, iii; 1920, ed. F. L. Schoell; cf. Ettx. Stage, iv. 5), Heywood's The Captives (1885, ibid, iv; 1921, ed. A. C. Judson), as well as J Richard II (1899, ed. W. Keller, J. xxxv. 3; cf. EBx. Stage, iv. 42). The Fatal Marriage or A Second Lucreatya, The Two Noble Ladies, Loves Changelinges Change, and The Lanchinge of the Mary or The Seamans Honest Wife are unprinted, but the last is very fully studied by Boas. The manuscripts of Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune (Dye MS. 9) and Bonduca (AddL MS. 36758) and of Middleton's The Witch (Malone MS. 12) are described by W. W. Greg (4 Library, vi. 148); that of Beaumont and Fletcher's The Humourous Lieutenant (Lord Harlecffs MS.\ here called Demetrius and Enanthe, by F. P. Wilson
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 93
(ibid. vii. 194); the five of Middleton's Game of Chess in R. C. Bald's edition (1929). The account of The Faithful Friends (Dyce MS. 10) in E. H. C. Oliphant, Beaumont and Fletcher, 526, needs revision. Manu- scripts of Middleton's Mayor of Quinborough and Beaumont and Fletcher's Beggar's Busk require description. The latter is said by F. Marcham, The 'King's Office of the Revels (192 5), 6, to be in a hand like that of The Witch. The late manuscripts of Hen. IF, Twelfth Night, and Merry Wives of W. are noted in ch. ix. Valuable dissertations on the nature of the manuscripts are W. W. Greg, Prompt Copies* Private Transcripts^ and the Play-House Scrivener (1925, 4 Library, vi. 148); C. J. Sisson, Bibliographical Aspects of some Stuart Dramatic Manuscripts (1925, R.E.S. i. 421); F. P. Wilson, Ralph Crane, Scrivener to the King's Players (1926, 4 Library, vii. 194) ; W. J. Lawrence, Early Prompt Books and What they Reveal (1927, Pre-Restoration Studies],
The relations of the Master of the Revels to the stage are described in Eliz. Stage, chh. iii, x, and xxii, and the working of the Jacobean and Caroline censorship may be further studied in V. C. Gildersleeve, Govern- ment Regulation of the English Drama (1908), F. S. Boas, Shakespeare and the Universities (1923), E. M. Albright, Dramatic Publication in England, 1580-1640 (1927), S. R. Gardiner, The Political Element in Massinger (1875-6, N.S.S. Trans. 314), T. S. Graves, Some Affusions to Religious and Political Plays (1912, M.P. ix. 545), The Political Use of the Stage during the Reign of James I (1914, Anglia, xxxviii. 137). The hand- writings of the Masters are in W. W. Greg, English Literary Autographs,
1 (1925), xxx. The fragments of Sir Henry Herbert's Office Book are col- lected from Malone (Fariorum, iii) and G. Chalmers, Supplemental Apology (1799), in J. Q. Adams, The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert (iw). A few additional ones are given from books annotated by Malone in W. J. Lawrence, New Tacts from Sir Henry Herbert9 s Office Book (1923, Nov. 29, T.L.S.), and by F. P. Wilson (4 Library, vii. 209). Adams also reprints many of the papers collected by Herbert for his Restoration lawsuits, as given from AddL MS. 19256 in H.P., A Collection of Ancient Documents Respecting the Office of the Master of the Revels (i 870). The end of Herbert's career is traced in A.Nicoll, History of Restoration Drama (ed. 2, 1928),and L. Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (1928). There is much on the book-keeper and his fellows in T. W. Baldwin, The Organ- ization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (1927). W.W. Greg collected the 'plots' in Henslowe Papers (1907) and is re-editing them in his coming Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses. He discussed the conclusions to be drawn from them in The Evidence of Theatrical Plots for the History of the Elizabethan Stage (1925, R.E.S. i.
2 57). He also printed the 'part' of Orkndo in Henslowe Papers* and edited it fully, in a parallel-text with the corresponding passages of the 1 594 Quarto of Orlando Furioso, in Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements (1923).]
SHAKESPEARE may be read, to profit and delight, in the barest of unannotated texts, and the plays may be taken
94 THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
in any order. Nor does their power to evoke mirth and emotion fail upon the stage, even through such distant ap- proximation to Elizabethan methods of presentment as the habits of modern producers and modern actors impose. But that bare unannotated text is already a reconstruction, due to generations of scholars, working by patient comparison and less patient conjecture upon the discrepant and often dubious versions handed down from the seventeenth cen- tury. And the unquiet spirit of criticism is still urgent with questions, for which the conscientious student will feel his obligation to attempt answers. These are the problems of transmission, of authenticity, of revision, of chronology. How far can the reconstructed text, after all, be accepted as a faithful rendering of the form in which Shakespeare left the plays? Was he the sole author of what passes under his name, or is his work, through adaptation or collabora- tion, entangled in the traditional canon with that of other men ? Did he himself alter or rewrite what he at first composed? Can we arrange the plays in an order of time, and so arrive at some nearer knowledge of the develop- ment of a personality, left obscure by the colourless facts of biographical record, the fragmentary notices of con- temporaries, the doubtful stories of a younger age, and the enigmatic self-revelation of the Sonnets ? The four prob- lems are closely interwoven, and their solution can best be approached through some consideration of the conditions under which Elizabethan plays were prepared for the stage and passed into print.
The material available, although it is fairly abundant, has to be pieced together from many sources; and if it is occasionally necessary to draw upon Caroline, rather than Elizabethan or Jacobean, evidence, it must be borne in mind that the occupations, alike of actor and of printer, were hereditary and conservative, and that, while allow- ance must be made for changes in detail, the death of Shakespeare did not constitute a break in traditions which seem to have been fairly continuous from the middle of the sixteenth century to the closing of the theatres in 1642. The plays of the earlier professional companies, so
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 95
far as we can judge, came mainly from the pens of the actors themselves, and did not as a rule get into print. The independent playwrights appear in the course of the 'eighties, when the University wits were turning to popu- lar literature as a refuge from the scanty and uncertain rewards of patronage. Thereafter they were the chief sources of supply, although the older practice was not entirely abandoned, and was in particular continued by Shakespeare for the Chamberlain's and King's men and by Thomas Heywood for Worcester's and Queen Anne's. Both were actor-playwrights, holding shares in individual companies and writing for these alone. The literary play- wrights, on the other hand, were free lances, finding no doubt their ordinary markets in accustomed quarters, but not tied to these, except, as in the cases of Henry Porter and Henry Chettle, under some temporary pressure of economic disadvantage.1 Their relation to the boy com- panies may have been slightly different, since here they are sometimes found as members of the syndicates by which the companies were financed and controlled.2 The records kept by Philip Henslowe throw light upon the procedure followed in the purchase of new plays from poets by the companies for whom he was the agent.3 Jonson submits a 'plot' of a play, but never writes it. It is taken up by Chapman, who sends in two acts, and apparently.no more. 'We haue heard their books and lyke yt' writes an Ad- miral's man to Henslowe, directing payment to the authors. Another notifies, 'I haue hard fyue shetes of a playe & I dow not doute but it wyll be a verye good playe' ; Henslowe is to take 'the papers' into his own hands, as the authors have promised to finish it by Easter. A play of Richard Hathway's falls through. He is to 'haue his papars agayne' and to give security for the amount he has received. Robert Daborne enters into a bond to write a play by a given date, but his 'papers' come in slowly, and some of them are 'not so fayr written all as I could wish'.
„ > i- 374- 1945 Greg, Henslawe Papers, 49, 55,
* Ibid. i. 378. 56, 65-84.
3 Ibid. i. 373$ ii. 161, 167, 2525 iii.
96 THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
He is ready to read instalments to Alleyn, and the whole play to the company when it is ready. When pressed for the last scene of another play, he writes, 'I send you the foule sheet & y6 fayr I was wrighting as yr man can testify*. He 'will not fayle to write this fayr and perfit the book'. Evidently the companies watched closely the pro- gress of the plays which they commissioned. And the system of instalments was often applied to the payments as well as to the delivery of sheets. An 'earnest* was generally given at an early stage; there might be further advances later; and a payment 'in full' was made when the work was complete. The total amounts paid ranged from £4 to j£io los. towards the end of the sixteenth century. About 1613 Daborne was getting from j£io to £20, and boasted that the King's men would give him £25. A successful play might bring the author a gratuity, and a second or third night's 'benefit' seems to have be- come customary in the seventeenth century.1 The plays were carefully preserved by the companies, and repre- sented a considerable capital value as part of their 'stock'. If a company was disbanded, they were divided among the 'sharers', and old plays thus got upon the market. Alleyn seems to have acquired plays of the original Admiral's men in 1589, and he and other actors are found selling old plays to the later Admiral's at £2 each.2
The author's 'papers', which figure so largely in Henslowe's correspondence, come before us again in the epistle to the First Folio. 'Wee haue scarse receiued
from him a blot in his papers', say Heminges and Condell, in commendation of their dead fellow's facility. Another term appears on the title-page, which describes the plays as 'Published according to the True Originall Copies', and in the head-tide, where they are 'Truely set forth, according to their first Originall'. This recurs in Hum- phrey Moseley's epistle to the first Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647. He claims to give 'the Originalls from such as received them from the Authours themselves', and says that the readers would appreciate his difficulties if
1 EliK' Sta8*> *• 373- * Ibid. I 3725 ii. 165, 167, 179.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 97
they 'knew into how many hands the Originalls were dis- persed'. And he explains more fully:
When these Comedies and Tragedies were presented on the Stage, the detours omitted some Scenes and Passages (with the Authour's consent) as occasion led them; and when private friends desir'd a Copy, they then (and justly too) transcribed what they Acted. But now you have both All that was Acted^ and all that was not; even the perfect full Originalls without the least mutilation; So that were the Authours living (and sure they can never dye) they them- selves would challenge neither more nor lesse then what is here published.'
This term 'original' is of common use in the records of the medieval stage, and there it seems to represent the authoritative copy of a play by which the performances were governed, and to replace the earlier Ordo of the liturgical drama. It often appears in some such form as 'regenall', and it is difficult to resist the conviction that in the mind of medieval writers it was connected with regere.1 Moseley does not use it in the medieval sense. It is perhaps so used when we learn that the Master of the Revels reallowed an old play, 'the originall being lost'.2 But it is clear that the ordinary Elizabethan term for an authoritative stage-copy was simply 'the book'.3 This appears in the titles of play-manuscripts, and Dr. Greg points out that from these it sometimes made its way into titles as recorded in the Stationers' Register.-* Certainly the 'book' was not in all respects identical with the 'original' as handed in by the author. Moseley indicates that pas- sages were omitted. But 'cuts' were only one feature of the adaptation which the 'original', even of a writer familiar with stage conditions, might require in order to make it a safe and adequate guide to actual performance. And
1 Mediaeval Stage, ii. 143. book described by H. Granville-
* Herbert 30. Barker in R.E£. iv (1928), 233, as
3 Modern writers often call the 'begun at rehearsals* and containing
'stage-copy' the 'prompt-copy*, and notes of 'interpretation as well as
no doubt this was one of its uses; cf. mechanism* is an elaborated type.
p. 121. The earliest use of the term * 4 Library, vii. 3845 cf. the S. R.
'prompt-book* in Q.E.D. is of 1809, entries for Mer. of Fen. and Per.
and probably the modern prompt-
3 142. i w
9g THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
indeed, although Moseleymayhave restored 'cut' passages, it is clear from his texts that apart from these he was often printing from 'books' which had undergone such adapta- tion. We may distinguish various kinds of adaptation. The author's intentions, as indicated in his original, might have to be accommodated to the stage-structure, properties, and actors of a given theatre at a given date, as well as to the time available for representation, and perhaps to the taste of a given audience. But, also, the expression of these intentions in the manuscript might itself require some cor- rection; speeches might be wrongly distributed, or stage- directions insufficient. A stage-copy must be precise. Further, before a play could be presented, it had to receive the allowance of a censor, by an endorsement on the stage- copy, and this might entail the alteration of passages likely to be objectionable to the censor, or in fact disapproved of by him. It is necessary to consider the operation of the agencies through which such adaptation was carried out and their effect upon the 'book'.
I have already devoted much space to the question of Elizabethan stage-censorship, and need not repeat the whole story here.1 The main agent was throughout the Master of the Revels, a Household official, working under the direction of the Lord Chamberlain, or in matters of higher importance under that of the Privy Council, the High Commission, or even the sovereign. His original functions included the review of plays given at court. Tentatively under a patent for Leicester's men in 1 574, more directly under a commission issued to him in 1581, and effectively, as overruling a claim to censorship by the London corporation, about 1589, they came to cover all plays given in public. A special arrangement for the Queen's Revels in 1604 proved unsatisfactory, and was not of long duration. The requirement of the Master's endorsement 'at the latter end of the said booke they doe play' is already recorded in 1 584. An Act to Restraine Abuses of Players^ which had effect from 27 May 1606, forbade the jesting or profane use in plays of 'the holy Name of
» 317-3*5 ii- 48-54, 2215 iii. 168-70, 191.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 99
God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghoste or of the Trinitie'; and although the Master is not specifically re- ferred to, he naturally kept an eye on its observance.1 From about 1607 onwards he seems also to have acted as licenser for the printing of plays, on behalf of the High Commission. Edmund Tilney was Master from 1579 to his death on 20 August 1610. But under James he had a deputy in his nephew Sir George Buck, who held a rever- sion of the post and became his successor. Buck lived to 20 September 1623, but by 29 March 1622 he was mad, and Sir John Astley or Ashley, who in his turn held a reversion, was sworn in as Master. He did not officiate long. On 20 July 1623 he granted a deputation, for a consideration of j£ 150 a year, to Henry Herbert, brother of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and of the poet George Herbert, and kinsman of William Herbert, Earl of Pem- broke, then Lord Chamberlain.2 Herbert was knighted and accepted by the king as Master on August y.3 Technically he long remained a mere deputy, but on 25 August 1629, he obtained a reversion, with one Simon Thelwall, for their joint lives. A prior reversion had been granted to Ben Jonson on 5 October 1621.-* But Ashley outlived him, and from Ashley's death on 1 3 January 1 64 1 Herbert held the Mastership in his own right. His duties lapsed at the closing of the theatres, and although he resumed them at the Restoration, it was only to incur serious embarrassment owing to the conflicting rights granted by Charles II to the patentees of the leading theatres. He died on 27 April 1673. Simon Thelwall was still alive in 1662, but does not appear at any time to have acted as Master. One William Blagrave collected fees for Herbert, and licensed a play as his deputy in 1635.5
* Text in EKx. Stage, iv. 338. Court in 1629 and payee in 1635 *°r
a Cunningham xlix, from enrol- court plays given by the King's Revels
ment of indenture in Audit Office. from there (Adams, Sh. Playhouses,
3 R. Warner, Epistolary Curiosities, 3695 L.C. v. 134, p. 39. The pedigree
3 . in Harl. Soc. Ixv. 83 does not show him
« Works, i. 237, from Patent Roll. a son of Thomas Blagrave, the Eliza-
s Boas, Sh. and the Universities, 98. bethan Clerk of the Revels. He might
Blagrave was a lessee of Salisbury be a grandson. I take this opportunity
H 2
ioo THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
Another deputy, Thomas Herbert, allowed the printing of a play in 1 63 y.1 It is during Herbert's administration that we get the dearest view of the working of the censorship. He kept an Office Book, which seems also to have con- tained a few initial entries by Sir John Ashley. This was left at Herbert's death in his house at Ribbesford in Wor- cestershire. It was used by Malone in 1789 and by Chalmers before 1799. It was then in bad condition and has since disappeared. A statement of Halliwell-Phillipps in 1880 that it was in the possession of the Earl of Powis cannot be verified.2 The extracts, however, made by Malone and Chalmers, although certainly not complete, enable us to get a fair notion of Herbert's activities; and further light is thrown upon them by a collection of papers relating to his post-Restoration controversies.3 The Office Book contained dated entries of plays or alterations of plays and of other entertainments licensed for perform- ance by Herbert, and of plays and masks given under his supervision at court.* Here, too, he recorded such events as inhibitions for plague and the setting up of new theatres and companies. Only a few entries of licences for printing are among the extracts, and the publications concerned are generally not plays. Possibly, therefore, the citations of licences by Herbert and other Masters in the Stationers' Register normally refer to their licences for performance, and these were regarded as covering printing. Herbert is careful to note the fees he received, and the supplementary exactions m the way of 'benefits' and payments for 'Lenten dispensations' which he levied upon the companies. His brother, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, tells us that he made a great fortune out of court employment. But his losses after the Restoration were considerable. More interesting in the present inquiry is a group of entries showing the disallowances which he felt called upon to make. The
of correcting the statement in EKz. ' Arber, iv. 376
Stage, i. 99, that Thomas Blagrave * W. W. Greg in Gentleman's
bved to the end of Elizabeth's reign. Magazine, ccc (1906)^2.
He , nu buried at St. James's, derken- 3 AddL MSf A 'rf Bm N
7\ °* i ^ I59° (HarL SoC* 4 For ="** notices of Sha£- Registers, xvu. 41). spearean revivals, cf. App. D.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 101
object of censorship, says one of the post-Restoration memoranda, 'is, that all prophaneness, oathes, ribaldry, and matters reflecting vpon piety and the present governe- ment may bee obliterated, before there bee any action in a publique Theatre'.1 Possible interventions by players in civil or foreign politics called for constant vigilance. Her- bert 'reforms' The Duchess of Suffolk, which was full of 'dangerous matter'. He refuses to allow a play of Mas- singer's, which we can identify as an early form of Believe as You Listy because it too had 'dangerous matter, as the deposing of Sebastian king of Portugal by Philip the Second, and ther being a peace sworen twixte the kings of England and Spayne'.2 Another play of Massinger's, The King and the Subject, he only passes, with 'reforma- tions' and under an altered name, on express warrant from the king, who had read the book at Newmarket and marked a passage 'This is too insolent, and to bee changed'. In 1640 William Beeston is committed to the Marshalsea for giving a play without licence. 'The play I cald fof, and, forbidding the playinge of it, keepe the booke, because it had relation to the passages of the K.s journey into the Northe, and was complaynd of by his M.*3* to mee, with commande to punishe the offenders.' Other disallowances were due to the Aristophanic satire of prominent per- sonages. 'Abusive matter' in The Widow's Prize is re- formed. Shirley's The Ball must be purged from its personation of 'lords and others of the court*. Inigo Jones is protected against The Tale of the Tub and *Mr Sewster' against The City Shuffler. A care for piety requires the committal of a broker 'for lending a church-robe with the names of Jesus upon it, to the players in Salisbury Court, to present a Flamen, a priest of the heathens'. Herbert was alive to profanity, and even, odd as it appears to us after reading the Caroline drama, to indecency. The Plantation of Virginia can only be tolerated, 'the profane- ness to be left out*. The Tamer Tamed is stayed and 'purgd of oaths, prophaness, and ribaldrye'. A play re- ceived from Mr. Kirke is burnt by Herbert, after taking
1 Herbert 125. * Cf. p. no.
102 THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
his fee, cfor the ribaldry and offense that was in it*. Even Winter's Tale is not allowed without an assurance that there is 'nothing profane added or reformed'. On the other hand, Shirley's The Toung Admiral receives a special commendation for its freedom from 'oaths, prophaness, or obsceanes'. As to profanity, Herbert sometimes went too far. His reformation of Davenant's The Wits resulted in a protest to the king, and the king called Herbert into the window of his withdrawing chamber, and with great courtesy overruled him. Whereupon Herbert noted in the Office Book, 'The kinge is pleased to take/^V/z, death) slight, for asseverations, 'and no oaths, to which I doe humbly submit as my masters judgment; but, under favour, conceive them to be oaths, and enter them here, to declare my opinion and submission/ On the other hand, Herbert's vigilance sometimes failed him. It is true that, when Jonson's The Magnetic Lady came before the High Commission, he was absolved of blame. Presumably the players had foisted in something objectionable which he had not allowed. But we know from sources other than the Office Book that early in his career he was called to account for licensing a distinctly political play in Middle- ton's Game at Chess.1 Professor Gardiner, moreover, has shown that some of Massinger's extant plays do in fact contain obvious political matter. Possibly Herbert had a blind eye for Massinger. They were both adherents of the Earl of Pembroke, whose politics were often in opposition to those of the Duke of Buckingham,
^ Herbert, of course, was only just in office before the First Folio was published. But his objections to political matter can be abundantly paralleled from the earlier his- tory of the stage, and some protection had been given to persons of importance as far back as i6oi.2 A tendency to criticism of society in general, and of the frailties of gallants and ladies in particular, was, however, a growing
1 Cf.p. 125, James recalled 'acorn- date of this is unknown, but may be
mandment and restraint given against 1604, when Cowry gave offence (Etiz.
the representing of any modern Christ- Stage, i. 327).
ian kings in those stage-plays'. The » &Kx. Stage, iv. 332.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 103
feature of the seventeenth-century drama. Heywood,in his Apology for Actors, says: J
Now, to speake of some abuse lately crept into the quality, as an inveighing against the state, the court, the law, the citty, and their governements, with the particularizing of private men's humors (yet alive) noble-men and others, I know it distastes manyj neither do I in any way approve it, nor dare I by any meanes excuse it.
Similarly John Chamberlain writes to Dudley Carleton in 1620: 2
Our pulpits ring continually of the insolence and impudence of women; and to help forward, the players have likewise taken them to task; and so to the ballads and ballad-singers; so that they can come nowhere but their ears tingle.
An inevitable sequel drew the irony of Ben Jonson in Bartholomew Fair: 3
It is finally agreed, by the foresaid hearers, and spectators, that they neyther in themselues conceale, nor suffer by them to be con- cealed any State-decipherer, or politique Picklocke of the Scene, so solemnly ridiculous, as to search out, who was meant by the Ginger- bread-woman, who by the Hobby-horse-man, who by the Costard- monger, nay, who by their Wares. Or that will pretend to affirme (on his owne inspired ignorance) what Mirror of Magistrates is meant by the lustice, what great Lady by the Pigge-woman, what conceal* d States-man, by the Seller of Mouse-trappes, and so of the rest. But that such person, or persons so found, be left discouered to the mercy of the Author, as a forfeiture to the Stage, and your laughter, aforesaid. As also, such as shall so desperately, or ambi- tiously, play the foole by his place aforesaid, to challenge die Author of scurrilitie, because the language some where savours of Smith- field, the Booth, and the Pig-broath, or of prophaneness, because a Mad-man cryes, God quit you, or blesseyou.
Piety had been emphasized by the Act of Abuses. This can
1 Heywood, Apology, 61. The date They make a libell, which he made
is probably 1607 or 1608. Cf. Eliz. a play.
Stage, iv. 250. ^ Earlier criticism of informers, not
* Birch, Jamest 11. 200. necessarily concerned with plays, is
3 /«^.i4o. Cf.theapologeticaldia- cited by Albright 198 from Nashe,
logue to Poetaster and the prologue to Wor^ L a6o. ^ l82. ^ 2I3.
Epicoenei
104 THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
hardly be set down to the personal predilections of James, who 'would make a great deale too bold with God in his passion, both in cursing and swearing, and one straine higher verging on blasphemie'.1 Possibly it was a relic of a more general Bill for Reformation of the Common ^ Sin of Swearing and Blasphemy, which was passed, not with unanimity, by the House of Commons in 1 604, but did not become law.* In any case the personal austerity of Herbert pressed its very limited provisions rather far. That he regarded it as his duty to tighten up a rather lax administration is clear from his elaborate entry of 21 October 1633 in the case of The Tamer Tamed. This was an old play, and in dealing with it he took occasion to lay down that old plays as well as new must be submitted for his allowance, 'since they may be full of offensive things against church and state; y* rather that in former time the poetts tooke greater liberty than is allowed them by mee'. He made two other requirements. One was that 'The players ought not to study their parts till I have allowed of the booke' ; the other that 'The Master ought to have copies of their new playes left with him, that he may be able to shew what he hath allowed or disallowed'. It is not perhaps quite clear whether this was entirely new doctrine of 1633, or the revival of an older practice which had been allowed to lapse. Some old plays had been sub- mitted to Herbert before 1633. In a few cases they had undergone alteration. Most of the rest had been licensed by Sir George Buck. The allowed books of two at least of these, Winter's Tale and The Honest Man's Fortune, were missing, and that of Jugurth had been 'burnt, with his other books'. This was a Fortune play, and the burning might have been at the destruction of that theatre by fire in 1621, when in fact the play-books were lost.3 It has been thought that books of the King's men might have perished similarly at the fire of 1613. But Winter's Tale had been revived since then, and the original Honest Man's Fortune seems to have turned up in time for the Folio of
1 A. WeUdon, The Court and Char- ii. 9). * Cf. p. 238
acter of King James (Secret History, » Etix. Stage, ii. 442.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 105
1647. Moreover, Herbert also reallowed two old books of Buck's time for Prince Charles's men at the Red Bull and the Lady Elizabeth's at the Cockpit, and we can hardly assume unrecorded fires at their houses. It is possible, therefore, that Buck had been in the habit of keeping 'fair copies' of plays submitted to him, and that it was these which were burnt.
When Herbert had done his worst for The Tamer Tamed on 21 October 1633, he returned it to the King's men, with an endorsement 'directed to Knight, their book- keeper', of which he recorded a copy.
M* Knight,
In many things you have saved mee labour; yet wher your judg- ment or penn fayld you, I have made boulde to use mine. Purge ther parts, as I have the booke. And I hope every hearer and player will thinke that I have done God good servise, and the quality no wronge; who hath no greater enemies than oaths, prophaness, and publique ribaldrye, whch for the future I doe absolutely forbid to bee presented unto mee in any playbooke, as you will answer it at your perill.
It was 'of Knight' that he received a fee for The Magnetic Lady on 12 October 1632. In allowing The Launching of the Mary for another company on 27 June 1633 he wrote,' 'I command your Bookeeper to present me with a fairer copy herafter'.1 It is unfortunate that we know so little about the men who were employed as stage book- keepers. A protection of 27 December 1624 for twenty- one 'musitions and other necessary attendantes', clearly including hired actors, employed by the King's men, gives the names of Edward and Anthony Knight,2 One or other was presumably the book-keeper of 1633. Neither is in a later protection of 12 January 1637.3 John Taylor, the water poet, tells in a story of Thomas Vincent, who was 'a book-keeper and prompter at the Globe playhouse',4
1 Boas, St. and the Universities, * Herbert 74. 184. Adams (Herbert 35) prints 3 L.C. v. 134, p. 142. 'faire', which recalls the new require- * Taylor's Feast (1638) in Third Col-
xnent of 1633. But Herbert also noted lections of Spenser Soc. 70; cf. Baldwin
of a play in 1624 that it was 'not of 124. a legible hand*.
io6 THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
It involves John Singer, the Admiral's man, who left acting in 1603, and was probably dead by 1607. This maybe the same Vincent who appears in the 'plot' of Seven Deadly Sins.1 According to Cavalier scandal, Hugh Peters, the Independent divine, had been a book-holder at the Red Bull.2 After the Restoration, John Downes was 'book-keeper and prompter' at Lincoln's Inn Fields.^ Many references to the book-keeper, book-holder, or prompter can be collected.4 They do not tell us, as could be wished, where he was posted in the theatre. Obviously he must have been able both to make himself audible at the front of the stage, and to communicate with the tiring- house behind. The allusion in Cynthia's Revels suggests that he was in the tiring-house itself, but this, or even a place between the hangings and the stage-wall, seems rather far back. One would be glad to believe with Mr. Granville-Barker that he may have used a grated opening which Mr. Lawrence conjectures to have existed on the
book prologue, faintly spoke After the prompter, for our entrance'; Cynthia's Revels (1601) ind. 158, *We are not so officiously befriended by him, as to have his presence in the Tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stampe at the Booke-holder, sweare for our Proper- ties, cursse the poore Tire-man, rayle the Musique out of tune'; Oth. (1604), i. 2. 83, 'Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it Without a prompter'; Every Woman in her Hu- mour (1603-8), 'He would swear like an Elephant, and stamp and stare (God blesse us) like a play-house book- keeper when the actors misse their en- trance'; Maid in the Mill (1623), ii. 2, 'They are out of their parts sure, It may be 'Tis the Book-holders fault: I'll go see*; lady Alimony (c. 1630-40), i. 2, 'He has been book-holder to my revels for decades of years ... Be sure that you hold not your book at too much distance. The actors, poor lap- wings, are but pen-feathered; and once out, out for ever*.
' Cf.p.44-
2 Hotson 15.
3 Roscius Anglicanus (1708), A2.
* John Palsgrave, Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (1530), 199, 4Boke bearer in a ploye, prottocolle'; John Higgins, Nomenclator (1585), 501, 'He that telleth the players their part when they are out arid have for- gotten, the prompter or bookeholder'; Spanish Tragedy (c. 1589), iv. 4. 9, 'Heere, brother, you shall be the booke-keeper: This is the argument of that they shew'; Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592), 1813, *You might haue writ in the margent of your play-booke, Let there be a fewe rushes laide in the place where Bad- wmter shall tumble, for feare of raying his cloathes: or set downe, Enter Back- winter^ with his boy bringing a brush after him, to take off the dust if need require. But you will ne're haue any ward-robe wit while you liue. I pray you holde the booke well, we be not«o« phis in the latter end of the play'; Rm. &Jul. (1595), i. 4. 7, 'Nor no without-
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 107
ground-floor near one of the stage-doors, and Mr. Gran- ville-Barker himself thinks may have survived in a little latticed and curtained window, now or formerly cut in the prompt side ' tormentor ' in every theatre*1 This would be convenient enough, especially if, as seems possible, there were doors set more forward than the back wall.2 But Mr. Lawrence's grounds for his conjecture are not strong.3 No doubt it was one of the functions of the book-keeper Knight in 1633 to prompt. But he had others. He pre- pared the 'book' for the Master of the Revels and the parts' for the actors. The protection of 1624 names a John Rhodes, taken by Professor Baldwin to have been, before Knight, book-keeper to the King's men. He might be a musician who died in 1636, but more likely the 'Mr Rhodes, a bookseller, being wardrobe-keeper formerly (as I am informed) to King Charles the First's company of commedians in the Blackfriars', to whom Thomas Betterton was apprenticed.-* This John Rhodes was born about 1606 and was free of the Draper's Com- pany. He became a bookseller in Little Britain (1628, 1641) and St. Martin-in-the-Fields (1656). But he did not give up the stage. He was arrested by the Lord Chamberlain on a dispute with a Prince's man (i 632) and for selling the King's men's plays (i 639). He was then of the Fortune. In 1644 he kept the Cockpit, and in 1660 had a lease of this house, where he maintained Betterton and others as players, ultimately becoming a stroller.5 I doubt whether we can assume that a 'wardrobe-keeper'
1 R.ES. iv. 234. Lieutenant, iv. 4, 16, but these were
2 EKx. Stage, iii. 84, 100. not necessarily side-doors. They might
3 Physical Conditions of the Eltxa- be before the alcove, where any desired bethan Public Playhouses^ 67. The frontage (Etiz. Stage, iii. 83) could be 'grate* in 2 Antonio and MelKda, ii. 2. arranged.
127, was quite clearly not at a door, 4 Downes, Roscius AngKcanus, 17.
but at a vault below the stage (cf. 5 Baldwin 1285 McKerrow, Die-
ii. i. 44; iv. i. 2715 v* i. i). The tionary, 227; A. H. Johnson, Drapers'
setting of Eastward Hoe (v. 3. 6j v. 5. Company, iv. 155$ Nicoll 270-9;
1 60) is uncertain and probably ab- Hotson 90, 99, 197, 205, 216; B. M.
normal (£#«. Stage, iii. 149). More- Wagner, John Rhodes and Ignoramus
over these are both 'private' theatre (R.E.S. v. 43). G. E. Bentley in
plays. There is certainly action at a P.M.L.A. xliv. 8175 £•& v- I32>
ground -floor window near a door in p. 310$ 134, p. 345. Greg (R.E.S.vi.
Woman's Prize, iii. 5, and Humourous 359) shows him wH.M.Fortune (1625).
io8 THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
is the same as a 'book-keeper'. He is more likely to be the same as the 'tireman', whom we find employed by the Admiral's and Worcester's men, as well as in the private theatres.1 But the passage in Cynthia* s Revels shows that the book-holder was distinct from the tireman. Moreover, the tireman was available as a 'super', which the book- holder could not be. The book-holder was also distinct from the stage-keeper, since the pair, represented of course by actors, converse in the induction to Bartholomew Fair. On the other hand, the tireman and the stage-keeper might, for all we know, be the same. The tireman brings on stools and in a private theatre lights; the stage-keeper brings on chairs.2 Who was responsible for communicating the book- holder's calls for actors, properties, and machines ? He must have had some help. Malone made and withdrew a con- jecture that this was Shakespeare's first duty as a 'servitor' or 'necessary attendant'.3
Some light is thrown upon the habits of censors and book-keepers, as well as upon those of authors and scribes, by a study of the few extant manuscripts of plays belong- ing to the professional companies which have been pre- served.* Nine of these have been reproduced in type- facsimiles, with full descriptions and annotations by palaeo- graphical experts and photographic facsimiles of sample pages. Of three full photographic facsimiles are also available.^ John a Kent is in the hand of Anthony Munday, and has his autograph signature at the end, A second hand has made some theatrical alterations. A date ' — Decem- bris 1596' is probably in a third, and may have been appended to a memorandum lost through the mutilation
. Stage, i. 371; ii. 149, 226, me S* suggests stage-keeper. Stage-
54i- keepers appear as 'supers' in the MSS.
* Sir John Fan Olden Barnavelt, of The Captives and The Two Noble
2584 (s.d.), '2 Chains S**: [Mf Sir.'. Ladies, and apparently a corn-
Probably Bir. is the actor George pany, to whom these belonged, had
Birch. The editor does not interpret more than one (Boas 103). On the
S«, and says that the reading is academic stage the stage-keepers were
doubtful; 'it is possible that gtr (Le. stewards (G. C. Moore-Smith, College
gatherer) may be meant'. No doubt Plays, 46).
gatherers were occasionally used as * App. C, no. xlviii.
•supers' (W&. Stage, i. 371). But to * Cf. Si bUografMcal Note.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 109
of the final leaf. The play itself may be of much earlier date. The company is unknown. Sir Thomas More raises a Shakespearean problem, and is more fully dealt with elsewhere.1 This, too, is in the hand of Munday. It has been submitted for censorship to Tilney, who has made and required alterations. No 'allowance' is endorsed. The original scenes have been partially cancelled, and new or rewritten ones added on inserted leaves or on strips pasted over old matter. These are in five hands, known as A, B, C, D, E. Hand D has been claimed as Shakespeare's. Hand A is Chettle's and E Dekker's. Hand B remains unknown, but may conceivably be Heywood's. Hand C is that of a stage-reviser. He transcribes and fits in addi* tions, but probably contributes none himself. And he makes corrections and alterations, both in the original scenes and in the additions, particularly D's. John a Kent and S.T.M. must at some time have been preserved to- gether. The same leaf of a vellum manuscript has been used to make covers for them, and the title on each cover is apparently in C's hand. A 'V thomas Thomas* on that of John a Kent is an unassignable scribble. But the second hand of that manuscript may be C's. He also wrote the plots of Seven Deadly Sins and Fortune's Tennis.2 The Second Maiden's Tragedy is in the hand of a professional scribe. He inserted some small additions on slips, and there are corrections in a second hand, probably the author's, and stage-directions in a third. There are also a few corrections by Sir George Buck, whose allowance of the play 'with the reformations' is endorsed. Some conjectural ascriptions of authorship, which follow, are of much later date.3 The play belonged to the King's men. Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt is also in a professional hand, identified by^ Mr, F. P. Wilson with that of Ralph Crane, who claims in his Worker of Mercy (1621) to have had employment for his pen from the King's men. He seems to have acted as a stage-reviser, making alterations and additions, and not merely as a scribe. The history of the play is known. It was produced in August 1619, prohibited
1 Cf. p, 499. * Cf. p. 124. 3 EB». Stag?) iv. 45,
i io THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
by the Bishop of London, but finally sanctioned. The company was the King's.1 The authorship has been con- jecturally ascribed to Fletcher and Massinger. It is pos- sible, therefore, that the manuscript represents a version revised to meet criticism. One cancel leaf and two additional slips, in the scribe's hand, have been inserted. Some passages, however, are marked by the censor, and one of these is initialled G[eorge] B[uck]. There is no allowance endorsed. The Welsh Embassador seems to be wholly in one hand, although the punctuation has been corrected and some marginal additions made after the text was written. The chronology of a prophecy suggests a date about 1623. The same main hand, probably that of a scribe, recurs in The Parliament of Love, and the condi- tion of the manuscripts indicates that they have been pre- served together. Both may have been written for the Lady Elizabeth's men, for whom Herbert licensed the Parlia- ment on 3 November 1624. This also has some correc- tions, of a literary character. An endorsed allowance has evidently been cut away. Believe as Tou List was dis- allowed by Herbert on 1 1 January 1631 and allowed for the King's men, according to the Office Book, on May 7. The manuscript is in Massinger's hand. He has evidently revised the play in the interval, partly transcribing and partly rewriting the original text. Some names left stand- ing in error show that the plot has been ingeniously trans- ferred from Sebastian of rortugal to Antiochus of Syria. A second writer, evidently a stage-reviser, has made a few alterations and appended a prologue and an epilogue in an English hand, and has added other alterations, a title on a wrapper, and a list of properties in an Italian hand. Only one passage, unfortunately mutilated in the manu- script, was 'reformed' by Herbert, whose allowance, here dated May 6, is endorsed. The stage-reviser was also the scribe of The Honest Man's Fortune and B.onduca, but Professor Baldwin's inference that he was John Rhodes can only be regarded as extremely hazardous.2 The
1 Gfldersleevc 114, from S.PJ)om. Joe. I, ex, 18, 37. * Cf. pp. in, 125.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY in
manuscripts of Edmond Ironside and Thomas of Woodstock may belong, as the composition of the plays more clearly does, to the sixteenth century. The main hand of each is probably that of a professional scribe, with stage correc- tions and additions of different dates and in more than one hand, which point to seventeenth-century revivals. Edmond Ironside carries no evidence of submission to the Master of the Revels, Thomas of Woodstock seems to have been marked by him, and a lost final leaf may have borne an allowance.
A few other manuscripts, although not fully repro- duced, have received some expert examination. The Honest Man's Fortune is one of the transcripts allowed by Herbert for the King's men in place of lost 'books', and has his endorsement of 8 February 1624, and a few 'reformations'. Another hand has made a few alterations for stage pur- poses. At the end is written what may be a mere scribble, but may be the signature 'Jhon' of the main scribe.1 The Faithful Friends is in the hand of a scribe. There are corrections and alterations in more than one hand. One seems to have been concerned to meet the views of a censor, but no allowance is endorsed. An in- serted scene has been ascribed without justification to the hand of Massinger. The company is unknown and the date uncertain, but probably not earlier than i62i.2 Edmond Ironside and Thomas of Woodstock come from a collection of fifteen pieces, probably made by^ the younger William Cartwright, who had been an actor in the King's Revels company of 162 9-3 7.* He became a bookseller during the Civil War, and may have obtained plays^from various sources. Several plays of the collection are linked by revising hands and actor-names, but too obscurely to
1 EUx. Stage, iii. 227; A. Dyce, Oliphant, Beaumont and Fletcher, 360,
Beaumont and Fletcher, iii. 331$ C. J. 526; W. W. Greg in 4 Library ix.
Sisson in R.E.S. i. 422 and Believe as 207.
Toil List, xvi; W. W. Greg in 4 » F. S. Boas, Sh. and the Uniwer-
Library, vi. 150; cf. p. 107. sities, 107; E. Boswell, Toung Mr.
* EKx. Stage, iii. 232,- A. Dyce, Cartwright (1929, M.L.R. xxiv. 125)5
Beaumont and Fletcher, iv. 1995 C. J. cf. Bibl. Note. Sisson in R.E.S. L 427$ £. H. C.
ii2 THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
determine a common stage-history for them. Some of the actors are found among the Revels company in 1635. The Two Noble Ladies was played by an ephemeral Revels company in 1622-3. The Captives was licensed for the Lady Elizabeth's by Herbert in 1624. The Lady Mother has an endorsed licence of 15 October 1635 by William Blagrave. An allusion to a 'boy at the Whyte-
, were at Salisbury Court in 1635. Herbert himself en-
dorsed The Launching of the Mary with a licence on 2 7 June 1633, but made considerable 'reformations*. This manu- script and that of The Captives appear to be in the hands of the authors; those of The Lady Mother and Dick of Devonshire are probably, and that of The Poor Man's Comfort Certainly, in those of scribes.1 The Escapes of Jupiter is in Heywood's hand, and represents a revision in one play of his own Golden and Silver Ages. Some broken lines and other irregularities are the result. The direction 'A song Iff you will' shows that the author had the stage in mind. The Dering manuscript of Henry IV and those of Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night formerly owned by Halliwell-Phillipps probably rest on the printed texts. They may have been prepared for use in performances, but they have not been subjected to recent expert examination. In that of Twelfth Night the names of characters were marked at points where the actors were needed to be ready.
All the manuscripts so far considered were intended to serve a theatrical purpose. They have many features in common, but the earlier ones suggest that a distinctively theatrical style was a matter of gradual development.* The fully reproduced plays are all written on both sides of folio paper, in fairly even columns, with wide side-margins. I he number of lines to a page varies considerably, as be- tween play and play, and sometimes within a play. The
V*' r* I!?"™*"* a Thmas of Weodstoc* was issued
u. ax*.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 113
paper has sometimes been lightly folded before use, to facilitate alignment. Prose and long verse lines often ex- tend into the right margin. The original .stage-directions are either centred, or placed in a margin. This is most usually the right margin, as in prints. But sometimes entrances are kept by themselves in the left margin. Mar- ginal directions are often enclosed, wholly or partly, by rules, or marked off from the text by a dash or virgule, or brackets. In Bamavelt an inverted virgule in the left mar- gin seems to call attention to them. The speeches are separated by rules of varying length. In Ironside, they are an addition, and only continue through part of the play. The speech-prefixes are placed in the left margin. The names are given in full in John a Kent, and generally in Believe and Ironside. In the other plays they are more often abbreviated and followed by a colon or full stop. Ironside sometimes adds a virgule. The main script is always English, although it may have an admixture of Italianized forms. But personal names and foreign words are normally, although far from consistently, written in Italian script. This is used also, in Barnavelt and 2 M.T., for some other important words. The practice with regard to stage-directions and speech-prefixes varies. English script is normal for both in John a Kent and Ironside, al- though the latter often substitutes Italian. In S.T.M. the stage-directions are English. The prefixes are irregular; the generic names tend to be English, and the personal names Italian. In most of the other plays Italian is nor- mal, both for directions and prefixes. Believe is excep- tional, in that Massinger makes no use of Italian script for any purpose. The writing, of authors, as well as professional scribes, is generally careful and legible. Hey- wood's hand in Captives, as elsewhere, is bad. The initial letters of verse lines are minuscule, with some admixture of majuscule in John a Kent, S.T.M., and Ironside. Massinger generally begins a fresh sentence within a line by a minus- cule, but this is abnormal. Abbreviations are employed, mainly for very common words. The ampersand is used sparsely in John a Kent, 2 M.T., and Barnavelt, and more
3142- I
H4 THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
often in Welsh Embassador, Parliament of Love, and Be- lieve \ the £ in Ironside, 2 M.T., Welsh Embassador, and Parliament of Love\ and old conventional signs for -us in Ironside and for -que in Believe. In 2 M.T. such signs survive as mere flourishes. The amount of punctuation varies. There is hardly any in Ironside, Welsh Embassador, and Parliament of Love; it is light in Believe, heavy in John a Kent, adequate in the rest. The period ends com- plete and self-contained sentences; the colon clauses, but also, rather more freely than in modern writing, sentences linked in sense to what follows. The semicolon is rare in the earlier plays, probably more common than the colon in Believe. In John a Kent and S.T.M. a colon often sug- gests a pause, longer than the sense would justify, at the end of the penultimate line of a speech. Normally there is a tendency to omit stops at the ends of lines. In 2 M.T. a turned comma is used as an exclamation mark, and is difficult to distinguish from the interrogation mark. In S.T.M., Ironside, and Welsh Embassador, a heavy stop is sometimes replaced or supplemented by a virgule. A dash is preferred in 2 M.T., which also uses the dash freely at changes of address and speech-ends. Round brackets serve as parentheses, to enclose vocatives and explanatory phrases. They are rare in the earlier plays, but tend to become excessive, from a merely literary point of view, later. Passages intended for omission are generally in- dicated by a vertical line down the left margin. It may or may not have a short arm-piece between the lines at top and bottom, turning it into a bracket. Sometimes they are, concurrently or alternatively, scored over with vertical, diagonal, or horizontal lines. For the most part, they remain legible. Small corrections, if not made currente calamo, are interlineated, often but not always with a caret mark. For longer additions or alterations two methods are available. They may be written in the right margin. Here there is room for from one to four verse lines, placed at full length and at right angles to the main text.1 Some- times, however, the writing is parallel to the text, and then
1 John a Kent, 1525 Barntwelt, 724, 2334.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 115
verse lines have to be divided, and look like prose.1 Alter- natively, the writing may be upon separate pieces of paper. These, if complete leaves, are inserted between the original leaves.2 If mere slips, they are fastened over these.3 The exact place at which they are to be read in may be indicated by a hand, asterisk, or similar sign, or by a 'cue1. Small crosses in the left margin seem to be indications, generally by the censor, that particular lines require alteration or at least reconsideration.
The censor's dealings with the manuscripts are con- sistent with our other records of his activities. Six of the plays bear or bore his allowance at the end, in three cases with warnings for the observance of his 'reformations'. Barnavelt, on the other hand, although it has been before him, has no allowance. I think we must infer that a further submission would have been necessary. And surely this would have been so with Sir Thomas More> if the revision had ever been completed. It is hardly pos- sible to hold with Dr. Greg, that Tilney's note at the beginning was even *a very conditional licence*. It must be added that in some of the six and also in some other plays there are passages which, although not clearly marked in the censor's own hand, seem to have been altered in order to obviate his objections. It is of course not always possible, unless there is a recognizable differ- ence of ink, to say to whom a mere deletion should be ascribed. The censor's main preoccupation is naturally with politics. Believe a$ Ton List had undergone such careful revision that there was practically nothing left for him to do. Barnavelt, too, may have already been revised. The original version may have laid more stress on Barna- velt's Arminianism than the Bishop of London could ap- prove. But in the later one Sir George Buck found that the Prince of Orange, as in effect a foreign sovereign, was 'too much presented', and required a not very effective
1 S.TM. 610, 638, 6475 2 M.T, Faithful Friends, iv. 4. 2260; Barnavelt, 1028, 1063, 1106. » S.T.M. Additions III, V$ 2 M.T.
* S.T.M. Additions I, II, IV, VI5 238, 248, 1700, 1724, 21885 Launching Barnawelt% 763, 1403, 1536, 2919$ of the Mary.
I 2
n6 THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
toning down of passages which criticized or barely named him, or exalted his opponent.1 One of these might per- haps have been taken to be an indirect reflection upon James.2 In Sir Thomas More Tilney was mainly concerned to eliminate any encouragement to contemporary agita- tion against French and Dutch settlers in London. But More's reasons for resigning the Lord Chancellorship must also be 'all altered', although one would have thought that the original author had left them obscure enough. The Launching of the Mary offended, because of allusions to a Dutch injustice towards English subjects in Amboyna and to increases in the English navy and munitions of war, at a moment when Charles desired to show a fair face towards Holland, in order to cover his veering in the direction of a Spanish alliance. Attacks on Catholics and on a 'vicious vicar* must go out, presumably to avoid offence to Henrietta Maria and to the ecclesiastics. But the censor will also curb the licence of dramatists in criticizing social abuses. That, in view of the proclivities of James, a wicked king in The Faithful Friends had better not have a favourite, was perhaps obvious enough, even before the play was submitted. But both in The Second Maiden's Tragedy and The Honest Man's Fortune there is a constant excision, not merely of reflections upon kings and their ministers, but of allusions to the follies of gallants, the lusts of women, and the corruptions of lawyers and officials, which shows a growing sensitiveness in high places.3 Milton was not perhaps much concerned to defend the pens of dramatists, who too often made capital of what they professed to condemn. But the time for the protest of the Areopagitica was coming. The Act of Abuses itself probably left little real profanity for the Master of the Revels to tackle* Herbert seems to have thought Buck lax, and indeed some increase of rigidity is apparent. In The Second Maiden's Tragedy, 'Troth' and 'Faith' are allowed to stand, while 'Life' is meticulously cut out. In The
1 Barruwelt, 36, 51, 281, 679, 724, s Many of the deletion-marks in - the MSS. of F.F. and H.M.F. are un-
Ibid. 2434. noted in Dyce's edition.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 117
Launching of the Mary, according to Dr. Boas, both 'Yfaith* and 'Troth', as well as ' 'Slife' are banned, together with 'every religious reference or expression, however inno- cent'. A comparison of the manuscript of The Honest Man's Fortune with the Folio texts of the play proves- rather interesting in this respect. The word 'God' occurs rather often in the text of 1647, which presumably rests upon the author's original. In anticipation of Herbert, the scribe of the manuscript has almost always replaced it by 'Heaven', and the same substitution is even more scrupu- lously carried out in the text of 1 679. On the other hand, many minor asseverations, such as 'By my troth', to which Herbert does not here seem to have taken exception, remain in the manuscript, but are represented, together with some coarse but not exactly profane expressions, by dashes in both the printed texts.
It is upon the operations .of the stage-reviser that the manuscripts are most illuminating. One may reasonably identify him with the book-keeper, carrying out, maybe, on some points, instructions received from the company or an authoritative member of it. He appears in nearly all the manuscripts, to a varying extent; perhaps most con- spicuously in Believe as Tou List. And the services which he renders are multifarious. In Welsh Embassador and Honest Man's Fortune he may himself be the scribe. In Sir Thomas More he certainly copies additions by divers hands, and fits them to their places in. the original text. He may add a title-page or a prologue and epilogue.1 One would infer from Herbert's Office Book that it was his special function to observe the requirements of the censor- ship. This is less obvious from the manuscripts. Mere deletions, as already noted, are difficult to assign, and sub- stantial 'reformations' seem to be generally the work of the censor himself or of the author. Nor is it clear whether the book-keeper's general overhaul of a play preceded or followed its submission to the Master. Here his object is to bring the manuscript into a state in which it can serve as an effective guide to an actual performance. Authors
' J. a K., S.T.M. (t.ps.)j BeUeve (t.p. and pro!., epil.)-
ii8 THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
are not always very practical persons. The book-keeper may have to add missing speech-prefixes or alter erroneous ones.1 Incidentally, he sometimes revises what he takes, rightly or wrongly, to be oversights in the text itself,2 He applies deletion-marks to passages which it has been de- cided to cut. He looks to the intervals by which the action is to be broken. Here the practice of the authors is not uniform. Sir John Van Olden Barnaveltznd Believe as Ton List are fully divided into acts and scenes. Second Maiden's Tragedy, Welsh Embassador, and Parliament of Love have acts only. So has John a Kent, with an indication at the be- ginning of each act that it is scena prima. Sir Thomas More and Edmond Ironside have no original divisions. The book- keeper does not seem to be interested in scenes; it looks as if they were only literary divisions and of no importance in representation. But he is in acts. He marks them for himself in Edmond Ironside \ and in Believe as Tou List, while he sometimes cuts out the scene indications, he keeps those for acts, and notes two of them as 'long*, evidently thinking of an 'act' as an interval, rather than as a section of a play. 3
As one might expect, the book-keeper is much con- cerned with the stage-directions. These are clearly in the main the work of the authors. Unless they are mere sub- stantival, participial, or adverbial marginalia, they are generally couched in the indicative mood. Very rarely they are in the imperative.4 I do not think one need regard the imperative as a special note of the book-keeper. The habits of authors differ, but in the manuscripts the stage- directions tend to be pretty full, perhaps particularly in the earlier plays. The fullest of all are in Sir Thomas More. Processional entries, spectacular episodes, and fights are often described with much elaboration. The author has a double purpose to serve by his stage-directions. They are not all strictly necessary for the conduct of an actual per-
1 E.g. Be&ve, 704, 709, 1989, > C. J. Sisson in Belteue, xxiii.
2023, 2081. 4 y, a jf.f 73$, 'look in his g
E.gr, S.T.M. (cf. p. 502); BtUtaf, EJ. 955, 'Sound Drufe w* in'. > *335-
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 119
formance. They are in part designed to explain the struc- ture of his play to the company and to make clear the way in which he wishes it to be staged. When his characters first enter, he often adds to their names indications of their social status, or of their relationships to other characters, such as we find in a modern theatre-programme. Some- times even an important character is left with a mere generic description and no name at all.1 He makes notes of the costumes to be worn and the properties to be carried.2 He gives the ordering of his entries. Personages must come in 'severally' or 'aloofe', and when a number enter together, he is careful to prescribe a grouping.3 He provides for the use of the structural features of the stage; for 'one door* and 'the other door", for 'discoveries' by the alcove, for appearances 'above* and 'on the walles'.4 More rarely he specifies the locality of a scene.s And to a greater or less degree he gives directions, often in the margin, for the movements and gestures of the actors; even for their attitudes and facial expressions.6 Many of the points with which he is dealing will of course be settled in the tiring- room or at the rehearsals, long before the performance
1 E.g. the Tyrant and the Lady (as in Sessions) sit the L. Maior,
in 2 M.T. Justice Suresbte, and other Justices,
a E.g. J.aK. 214, 'Enter lohn a Sheriffe Moore and the other Sherife
Kent like an aged Hermit', 369, 'one sitting by, Smart is the Plaintife,
drest like a Moore, wtt a Tun painted Lifter the prisoner at the barre'. with yellow oker, another with a * E.g. ?. a K. 137, 848, S.T.M.
Porrenger full of water and a pen in 1862, E.I. 813 (doors); J.aK. 780,
it', 780, 'Enter an antique queintly w&, S.T.M. i (ends of stage) 5 S.T.M.
disguysde'; S.T.M. 410, 'Enter ... 104 (arras); Barnawelt, 1883 (study);
DollinashirtofMaile, a head piece, 2 M.T. 1725 (tomb discovered);
sword and Buckler', 955, 'the Lady Barnatuelt, 2144, Believe, 1958, 1983
Maioresse in Scarlet'; 2 M.T. 1879, (above); Barnawelt, 887, E.I. 872
'Enter Gouianus in black, a booke in (walls).
his hand, his page carrying a Torche * S.T.M. 1412, 'as in his house at
before hym'; Barnavelt, 2810, 'Enter Chelsey', 1729, 'as in his chamber in
. . . w*h a Coffin & a Gibbett'; Believe, the Tower'.
i, 'in philosophers habits', 2322, 'his 6 E.g. S.T,M. 240, 'shrugging
head shaude in the habit of a slaue'. gladly', 1068, 'florishing his dagger',
3 E.g. J. a K. 604, 'Enter the 1237, 'with great reference', 1575,
Earle of Chester in his night gowne, 'pondering to him selfe' ; 2 M.T. 821,
and Shrimpe Mowing aloofe of, 'Enter . . . sadly', 1657, 'Enter . . ,
some seruaunts wto him'; S.T.M. 104, wondrous discontedly'; E.I. 512,
'An Arras is drawne, and behinde it 'hee shewes his tongue'.
120
THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. TV
takes place. On the other hand, he is often lacking in
gecision, particularly with regard to supernumeraries, e asks for 'lords' or 'officers' or 'attendants', and does not specify how many. He may give a deliberate option.1 Crowds, even when their members are elsewhere specified, come and go under a group designation.2 Quite important characters may be handled in this vague way.3 Evidently much is left for the management to dispose as it will or can.
The book-keeper revises the author's directions freely. He is careful to add missing entries. He does not trouble about exits, and many, clearly required by the action, re- main unnoted. Actors might be trusted to find their own way off the stage. But it was important that they should enter at the right moment. The author may fail to secure this. It is his tendency to place an entry just before the first speech of the character concerned. The cautious book-keeper sometimes shifts it to an earlier point, so as to allow time for the character to cross the stage,4 He makes additional notes for the introduction of properties.5 And he provides much more fully than the author for the musical and other noises to be made behind the stage, often specifying^ the nature of the movement to be sounded, or the instruments to be used.6 By the time he has got to work, the play has been cast, and the resources of the theatre wardrobe explored. He can therefore clear up the author's uncertainties, and be explicit as to the number of supernumeraries. He tends to economy, appointing one or two only, where the author would have liked more,7 And for the same reason he occasionally
: S.T.M, 453, 'Enter three or foure Prentises*, 954, 'so many Aldermen as may*; y.aK. 1098, 'pkying on some instrument*.
> E.g. y. a K. 334, 'Enter . . . w* his crewe of Clownes1, 554, 'w^ their Consort', 648, 'his trayne'j S.T.M. 411, 'a crewe attending*; 2 M.T. 1657, 'nobles afarr of; E.L 104, 'Enter a Companye of cuntrymen makeinge a noyse*.
3 y. a K. 581, 'the Bridegroomes come foorth'; Believe, 1176, 'exevnt Carthaginians*.
* J. a K., Barnavelt, Believe show this feature.
* Barnavelt, 1184, 1610, 2159, 2810; Believe, i, 301, 1185, 1793, 2367.
6y. aK., 2 M.T., Barnavelt, Believe, EJ. show this feature. 7 Barnavelt, 334, 864.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 121
cuts out a small part for which the author has definitely provided.1 When he has to rewrite a stage-direction, he often abbreviates it, leaving out the descriptive notes of relationship, costume, and the like, which are by now superfluous.2 There are various indications that the book- keeper is considering the manuscript as one to be used for a prompt-copy. He notes the points at which properties and the like are required. But sometimes he also marks the points in advance, at which he must call for them to be made ready in the tiring-room.3 Calls for particular actors, perhaps elsewhere occupied, to be brought to the door of entry, or for stage attendants to take up the post assigned to them, are similarly inserted.4 It is also note- worthy, that while author's directions are generally in the right margin, those of the book-keeper are generally in the left, as if that was the place in which they would most easily attract attention during a performance.5 The ex- ceptionally meticulous book-keeper of Believe as You List seems to have transferred some directions in this way, when there was no other obvious reason for altering them. In Welsh Embassador> where book-keeper and scribe may have been one, the original directions are in the left mar- gin. A similar care for practical convenience must explain the pains with which the book-keeper of Believe as You List transfers a bit of dialogue relating to a song from the top of one page to the bottom of another overleaf, so that it may be all before him at a glance.6 Finally, and again
1 J. a K. 608, 1295$ Barnavelt, 231, (for 830), 1824, 'Gascoine: & Hubert
333, 459, 601, 820, 1182, 1215, 1817, below: ready to open the Trap doore
2159, 2540; Believe, 618. for M* Taylor (for 1931), 1877,
* E.g. Believe, 1985, 'Ent: laylor 'Antiochus ready: vnder the stage' (w«* bread & water)' for 'Enter laylor, (for 1931), 1968, 'Harry: Willson: & with browne bread, & a woodden Boy ready for the song at y« Arras' dishe of water'. (for 2022), 2823, 'Be ready: y« .2.
3 Believe, 654, 'Table ready: & .6. Marchantes: wm Pen: Curtis: &
chaires to sett out' (for 732), 982, 'the Garde' (for 2862). In Welsh Emb.
great booke: of Accomptes ready' nearly all entries have a marginal 'bee
(for 1115), 2378, 'All the swords redy', normally from twenty to thirty
ready' (for 2717 and 2722); Welsh lines before they occur.
Smb. 1934, 'sett out a Table' (for * J. a K., S.T.M., 2 M.T., Believe,
1962). E.I. show this feature.
* Believe, 662, 'Mr Hobs: calld vp' 6 Believe, 2023.
122 THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. V
to a varying extent, the casting of a play gets noted in the manuscript. Against the name of a character, the book- keeper writes the name, or more often an abbreviation of the name, of the actor who is to play it. As a rule only the smaller parts are so treated, and often by no means all of these.1 It is very convenient for the modern scholar, since evidence for the dating of plays, or the assignment of them to the right companies, is thus furnished. But the book-keeper was not thinking of posterity. We must sup- pose that these notes, too, were made to help him in securing the smoothness of entries, and that he did not trouble to make them when he felt able to trust his memory as to the casting.
The book-keeper does not trouble about the author's marginal directions for action and gesture. If they were valuable, they were probably transferred to the actors' 'parts'. These were important subsidiary documents, to which there are many references.2 We learn from Her- bert that the oversight of their preparation rested with the book-keeper. Unfortunately only one Elizabethan 'part' has survived. This is the part of Orlando, as played by Edward Alleyn, possibly in 1592, in Robert Greene's Orlando Furioso. It has been reproduced and carefully studied by Dr. Greg.3 It is now mutilated, and preserved in separate leaves, without a tithe. About three-quarters of it survive. According to Dr. Greg's reconstruction, it originally formed a continuous roll, some 17 feet long and 6 inches wide, made up of 14 half-sheets of paper divided lengthways, and pasted together by the narrow ends of these strips. At the heads of some of the strips is written Orlando'. The careful script is mainly in an Eng- lish hand, probably that of a professional scribe, A few contractions are used. Some blanks have been filled in and some corrections made in Alleyn's own hand. The
1 S.T.M. (i only, in an addition), (5), Captives (3), Thomas of Woodstock 2 M.T. (2 only, not minor characters), (3), H.M.F. (3). Bamafveb (n), Believe (ir, with 6 a Eliz. Stage, ii. 44; iii. 194, and major characters incidentally and z in many plays of Shakespeare.
» Cf. Bibl Note.
Chap. IV THE BOOK OF tHE PLAY 123
speeches assigned to the actor are transcribed successively, and separated by long rules, at the end of which are written the closing words, from one to four in number, of the foregoing actor's speech. These are the 'cues',' to which also there are many references.1 Orlando's de- partures from the stage are sufficiently indicated by further rules and generally an 'exit'. There are some directions in the left margin, for action by Orlando himself, or for fights and other episodes during which he is silent. The verse is occasionally mislined; the initial letter of each line is in minuscule. The punctuation is slight; the comma is a stop of all work; stops are often omitted at the ends of lines; a comma, otherwise superfluous, sometimes marks the so-called caesura. Prose is written in lines of irregular length, but with no attempt to let the end of a clause be also the end of a line.
The conduct of a performance involved, besides the parts, certain other subsidiary documents. The most im- portant was the 'plot', a skeleton outline of the action, with notes of entrances and exits, and of the properties and noises required. The plot was written in double columns, mounted on a sheet of paste-board, and pierced with a square hole to fit a peg. Seven plots, some only frag- mentary, are known, and of six the manuscripts survive. All have been reproduced, and studied in the minutest detail, by Dr. Greg.2 Those of The Dead Man's Fortune and The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins were pro- bably used by Strange's men and the Admiral's, separ- ately or in combination, about 1590; those of Frederick andBasilea, The Second Part of Fortune's Tennis, Troilusand Cressida, The Battle of Alcazar, and The First Part of Tamar Cam by the Admiral's during 1597-1602. The Deadly Sins and Fortune's Tennis are in the hand of the book-
1 Etiz. Stage, ii. 541 ; iv. 367, and in '.q.*, *qu'. Seventeenth-century writers
several plays of Shakespeare. O.E.D. derived it from qualis or quando. The
rejects a derivation from queue, which latter seems more plausible, but pro-
the arrangement at the end of a rule bably in its Italian use. In Locatelli's
may have suggested. The French Scenari (cf, p. 493) each episode
term is replique. In early texts the is ended by an 'in q°', introducing the
word often appears as *Q', *qf, 'q.', "«*• a
THE BOOK OF THE PLAY Chap. IV
keeper concerned with Sir Thomas More. In the plots, as in some of the play manuscripts, the names of actors are appended to those of the personages whom thejr repre- sented. But they are more fully given, amounting in most cases to a complete or nearly complete cast for the play. Dr. Greg has pointed out that the phrasing of the descrip- tions of action often recalls that of the stage-directions supplied by authors, and suggests that the plots were abstracted from prompt-copies. They have their own characteristic in the frequent linking of successive entries by the words To them'.1 They differ rather curiously from the extant play manuscripts in that more attention seems to be paid to scene-division, than to act-division. The scenes are always carefully separated by rules. In Dead Man's Fortune crosses placed upon some of them, together with accompanying directions for music, indicate act-divisions. Elsewhere there is no special sign for these, although they can sometimes be inferred from the in- cidence of dumb-shows, choruses, or the interventions of presenters. As in the plays, exits are often disregarded. We do not know exactly where the plots were hung; per- haps rather in the centre of the tiring-house, for the general use of the company, than at the prompter's corner, since he had a duplicate of the material at his disposal. A title— 'The Booke and Platt of the Second part of The 7 deadly Sinns' — suggests that, when not in use, book and plot were preserved together. Less im- portant than the plots were what we may call the 'scrolls'. These were copies of letters and the like, written out on separate pieces of paper, to be read by the appropriate actor, who was thus saved from having to commit them to memory. Their existence may be gathered from a schedule of them appended by the book-keeper to Believe as Tou List. Verses read by Orlando do not appear in his 'part'.2 One general remark on the theatrical manuscripts will help in a subsequent discussion. While they are some- times in the hand of the author and sometimes in that of the book-keeper or another scribe, it is clear that the same
1 I find this formula in J. a K. 368. a Orlando Furioso, 648.
Ckap. IV THE BOOK OF THE PLAY 125
copy might serve both as the official 'book* endorsed by the Master of the Revels, and as a working stage-copy, probably an actual 'prompt-copy', for the ordering of per- formances. And in Believe as Tou List and Launching of the Mary, at least, we have evidence that this copy might be the author's own original.
Besides the theatrical manuscripts there are extant a few others of a different type. They are careful and some- times even calligraphic transcripts, evidently intended for private reading. Some have dedicatory epistles to patrons. Those which have been fully described are all rather late. Bonduca is in the hand of the book-keeper of Believe as Tou List, but Dr. Greg says that it has 'none of the usual stigmas of the prompt copy'. Similar manuscripts were prepared by Ralph Crane, the scribe of Sir John Barnavelt. Of these The Witch has an epistle, also in Crane's hand, from Middleton to Thomas Holmes. The Humourous Lieutenant is dedicated by Crane himself to Sir Kenelm Digby, and dated 27 November 1625. Of The Game at Chess he made two copies. One has no epistle; the other, which is an abridged version, has one to Thomas Ham- mond, in Middleton's own hand. Here the entries are massed at the beginning of each scene, as in some Shake- spearean texts.1 The play had been suppressed for rather audacious political references in 1624, and was naturally dear to collectors.2 Three other copies exist, for which Crane was not responsible. One is wholly, another partly, in Middleton's hand. Naturally manuscripts of this class do not tell us much about theatrical conditions. But there is an interesting note in Bonduca. When the transcript came to be made, part of the necessary material was miss- ing, and the book-keeper wrote in apology:
The occasion, why these are wanting here, the booke where by it was first Acted from is lost: and this hath beene transcribd from the fowle papers of the Authors w°h were founde.
Unfortunately, he does not say whether the 'fowle papers' were preserved at the theatre or in the hands of the author or his representatives.
1 Cf.p. 154. * M^.C.i.379j Bald 159$ B.M. Wagner in P.M.L«A.iliv. 827.
CHAPTER V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO
\BibliographicalNote. I deak fully with the general history of Elizabethan publishing in ch. xxii of The Elizabethan Stage (1923) and need not repeat the list of books and dissertations there given. Of recent additions, the most comprehensive is E. M. Albright, Dramatic Publication in England, 1580-1640 (1927). The review by W. W. Greg in R.E.S. iv (1928), 91, will show that it requires handling with some caution. It has itself a full bibliography. Other contributions are A. W. Pollard, The Stationers* Company's Records (1926, 4 library, vi. 348); W. W. Greg, Some Notes on the Stationers' Register (1927, 4 Library, vii. 376), The Decrees and Ordinances of the Stationers' Company, 1576-1602 (1928, 4 Library, viii. 395)5 E. Kuhl, The Stationers' Company and Censorship (1929, 4 Library, ix. 388). Fresh light may be expected from the text of the Decrees and Ordinances, excluded from Arber's edition of the Stationers' Registers, but now under preparation by W. W. Greg for the Bibliographical Society. A full bibliography of early drama from the same hand is also still expected. On the Shakespearean prints themselves the fundamental work is A, W. Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos (1909). It is supplemented for the Quartos by A. W. Pollard and H. C. Bartlett, A Census of Shake- speare's Plays in Quarto (1916); by H. R. Plomer, The Printers of Shakespeare's Plays and Poems (1906, 2 Library, vii. 149); H. Farr, Notes on Shakespeare's Printers and Publishers (1923, 4 Library, iii. 225). The literature of the First Folio is considerable. S. Lee prefixed an elaborate introduction to the Clarendon Press Facsimile (1902) and added A Census of Extant Copies with Some Account of their History and Condition. To this he made additions in 2 Library, vii (1906), 113, and in A Survey of First Folios contributed to Studies in the First Folio (1924, Shakespeare Association). Others are made by R. M. Smith and H. S. Leach in Lehigh University Publications^ i (1927). An example of special interest is de- scribed in F. Madan, G. M. R. Turbutt, and S. Gibson, The Original Bodleian Copy of The First Folio of Shakespeare (1905). The Shakespeare Association volume of 1924 also includes, besides papers elsewhere named, an Introduction by I. Golkncz, and a study of The First Folio and its Publishers by W. W. Greg, which supplements his The Bibliographical History of the First Folio (1903, 2 Library, iv. 258). Other dissertations are J. Q. Adams, Timon of Athens and the Irregularities in the First Folio (1908, 7.E.G.P. vii. 53); W. Keller, Shakespeares literarisches Testament V9,. *, , x'' Die Anordmn& ™* ^akespeares Dramen in der ersten Foho-Ausgabe (1920, J. Ivi. 90); R. C. Rhodes, Shakespeare's First Folio (1923); F. P. Wilson, The Ja&ards and the First Folio of Shakespeare (1925, Nov. 5, 12, rjt.*.)s E. E. WiUoughby, An Interruption in the
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 127 Printing ofFi (1928, 4 Library, ix. 262). C. A. Smith discusses Tie Chief Differences between the First and Second Folios of Shakespeare (1901, E.S. xxx. i).
The Quartos of 1619 are studied from various angles in A. Wagner, Eine Sammlungvon Sh.-Quartos in Deutschland (1902, Anglia, xxv. 518); A. W. Pollard, Sh. in the Remainder Market (1906, June 2, Academy), Sh. Tf and Q? (1909), On the Supposed False Dates in Shn. Qf (1910-1 i, 3 Library, i. 46; ii. 101), Sh's Fight with the Pirates (1917, 1920); W. W. Greg, On Certain False Dates in Shn. Qf (1908, 2 Library, ix. 1 13, 381); S. Lee and others (1908, May 9 to 1909, Jan. 30, Athen*um)\ W. Jaggard, False Dates in Shn. Q? (1909, 2 Library, x. 208); A. H. Huth, On the Supposed False Dates in Shn. Qf (1910, 3 Library, i. 36); W. J. Neidig, The Sh. Qf of 1619 (1910, M.P. viii. 145), False Dates on Si. gf (1910, Century Mag., 912).
A. W. Pollard's theory of the surreptitious or 'Bad* Quartos is set out in his Folios and Quartos and Shakespeare's Fight, and elaborated (cf. ch. vii), with the help of J. D. Wilson, in The 'Stolne and Surreptitious9 Shn. Texts (1919, Jan. 9, 16, March 13, Aug. 7, 14, T.L.S., with dis- cussion, Aug. 21, 28), and by Wilson in The Copy for Hamlet, 1603, and the Hamlet Transcript, 1593 (1918)- The 'shorthand' theory and the systems of shorthand on which it is based are discussed in M. Levy, Sh. and Shorthand (\W>£), William Sh. and Timothy Bright (i<)io)\ C.Dewi- scheit, Sh. und die Anfange der englischen Stenographic (1897), Sh. und die Stenographie (1898, J. xxxiv. 170); O. Pape, Uber die Entstehung der Qi von Shs Rich. HI (1906); A. Seeberger, Zur Enstehung der Q des i Jeronimo (1908, Arch.f. Stenographie, lix. 236, 257); W. J. Carlton, Timothe Bright Doctor ofPhysicke (191 1); P. Friedrich, Timothy Bright9s Characterie (1914, Arch.f. Schriftkunde, i. 88); A. Schottner, Ober die mutmassliche Stenographische Entstehung der Qi von Shs R.J. (1918); H. T. Price, The Text of Hen. ^(1920); H. Roloff, Zu Ford's Neudruck von Brighfs Stenographiesystem 'Characterie* 1588 (1922, Archiv9 cxliii. 47); M. Forster, Zum Jubilaum der Sh.-Folio (1924, Z.f. Bucherfreunde, N. F. xvi. 53). I have not seen W. Kraner, Die Entstehung der ers ten Q von Shs Hen. V (1923). A study of the 'memorization' theory must start from W. W. Greg's edition of Qi of Merry Wives of W. (1910) and his Bad Quartos Outside Sh. (1919, j Library, x. 193) and Two Eliza- bethan Stage Abridgements: Alcazar and Orlando (1923). L. B. Wright has an interesting Note on Dramatic Piracy (1928, M.L.N. xliii. 256).
A classification of the 'Good' texts must rest largely on the collations in the Cambridge Shakespeare. Parallel-texts and the analyses by P. A. Daniel and others in the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles and by J. D. Wilson in the New Shakespeare are valuable. Dissertations bearing on the subject are A. W. Pollard and J. D. Wilson, Wkrt Follows if Some of the Good Q Editions of Sh.'s Plays were Printed from his Autograph MSS.? (1920, Bit/. Soc. Trans, xv. 136, in summary); A. W. Pollard, The Foundations of SL's Text (1923, Brit. Acad)\ J. D. Wilson, The Task of Heminge and Condell (1924, &f . Ass. Studies, 53) ; P. Simpson, The Bibliographical
128 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V
Study of SL (1923, Proc. Oxford Bibl. Soc. i. 19); B. A. P. van Dam, Textual Criticism ofSh.'s Plays (1925, English Studies, vi. 97); W. W. Greg, Principles of Emendation in Bh. (1928, Brit. Acad!)\
MUCH has been written about the regulation of the London book-trade. It is not necessary to repeat here the story of its beginnings in the characteristic Tudor desire to control the expression of opinions hostile to the estab- lished order of things, from time to time, in church and state,1 Earlier procedure had been regularized, before any play of Shakespeare could come in question, by an Order in the Star Chamber of 23 June I586.2 This pro- vided for limiting the number of printers and of their presses, and put the licensing of books in the hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London. It was in fact delegated to correctors, most of whom were epis- copal chaplains or prebendaries of St. Paul's. On the business side, the detailed administration was in the hands of the Company of Stationers, who in their turn were sub- ject to the linked supervision of the Privy Council and the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission. All the London booksellers, some 250 in number with their journeymen, and the great majority of the twenty or so printers, many of whom exercised the double trade, were freemen of the Company. Elected officers, a Master, two Wardens, and a Court of Assistants, governed its affairs. Most of our knowledge of the system is due to the well-preserved records of the Company. A few of these, as yet unpub- lished, may still give fresh light. The most important document is the Register, by the entry of his 'copy' in which a stationer might secure the sole right of selling a book, other than such as were held by the Company itself or by the crown printer, or by individuals, who were not always freemen of the Company, under privileges granted by letters patent. The privileges, however, did not affect plays; small affairs commercially, and generally handled by the less important stationers. The Company imposed severe penalties upon breaches of copyright. A great many plays were never entered in the Register at all, for
* Cf. Etiz. Stage, ch. xxii. * Arber, ii. 8075 extract in Eliz. Stage, iv. 303.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 129 reasons which remain obscure. In some cases a desire to save the sixpenny fee on entry may have operated; in others the manuscript may have been illegitimately ob- tained, although it is not clear how far, if at all, the Com- pany concerned itself with such matters.1 An unentered book presumably carried no copyright. But transfers of books from one stationer to another were also registered, and it seems that such a transfer might secure copyright, even when there had been no original entry. Sometimes stationers went out of business without disposing of their copyrights, and in such cases the books became derelict, and available for reprinting by others.2 Whether copy- right also lapsed, when a book had been entered, but never published, is uncertain. In theory, it must be supposed that the Company were expected not to enter a book with- out seeing the allowance of the licenser upon the manu- script or a print. Practice did not always follow theory, where insignificant or obviously safe publications were concerned. But in 1599 special instructions were given by the archbishop and bishop 'that noe playes be printed excepte they bee allowed by suche as haue aucthoritye';3 and thereafter in making entries, the Company's clerk generally recited the name of the licenser by whom, in addition to a warden, the authority was given, or added a note that printing was not to take place until proper authority was obtained. Presumably such conditional entries gave provisional protection to the copyright.4 The entries suggest that about 1607 an arrangement was made by which the Master of the Revels normally acted as the official for licensing plays.5 It is possible that, if the manu- script produced already bore the Master's allowance for
1 Cf. EKz. Stage, iii. 176. record of a transfer of 21 Nov. 1606
* Sometimes (Arber, V. 1) the Court (Arber, iii. 333). He licensed sixteen required a fee of 6d. in the £ for the alone in Apr.-Oct. 1607. Rhodes 29 benefit of poor stationers. suggests that these had been held up by
3 Arber, iii. .677$ Etix. Stage, iii. a dispute as to procedure. But eight
168. * of the plays represent the repertory of
* EUz. Stage, iii. 169; cf. p. 146. Paul's thrown on the market by their
* The first licence by the Master closure in the latter part of 1606 (Etix. was perhaps a joint one with an ordi- Stage, ii. 225 iv. 390).
nary episcopal licenser, noted in the 3142.1 K
1 3o THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V acting, no further reference to him was necessary.1 After Sir John Ashley became Master of the Revels in 1622, a letter was sent by the Lord Chamberlain to the Company concerning the licensing of plays, and was read to the master printers.2 Some further restrictions on the entry of plays belonging to the acting companies will be dis- cussed later.s It must not be assumed that, because a play was not registered for copyright, it had not been licensed.
The publication of Shakespearean plays, in separate issues known as the Quartos, was first approached by a group of publishers, among whom shifting business rela- tions seem to have existed, and some of whose proceedings, from a literary and probably also from a commercial point of view, were discreditable. John Danter, a printer, registered and published Titus Andronicus in 1594, and entrusted it for sale to Edward White and Thomas Mil- lington. In the same year Millington registered and pub- lished 2 Henry W, describing it as the first 'part of The Contention of York and Lancaster, and followed it in 1595, apparently on the strength of the same registration, with 3 Henry VI, as The True Tragedy of Richard Luke of Tork. In 1597 Danter published Romeo and Juliet without registration. In 1600 Millington, now conjoined with John Busby, published Henry Ft This again was un- registered, but copyright was established by a transfer in the same year to Thomas Pavier. In 1602 Busby regis- tered Merry Wives of Windsor and transferred it on the same day to Arthur Johnson, who at once published it. Finally, also in 1602, Millington transferred to Pavier, 'saluo iure cuiuscunque', not only The Contention, now
1 Herbert, 105, 112, notes that Buck v. Iv, says that an entry in the Sta-
licensed A King and No King 'to be tioners' Register without licence led to
Acted in i6n, and the same to be an order to the Clerk 'at the instigation
printed', but it is not quite dear of Sir Henry Herbert' not to enter
whether these were two licences or one. *plays, tragedies, tragic comedies, or
* Noted by Malone from the Sta- pastorals' without the authority of the
tioners' Company's Cmrt Boot, C. 76, Master of the Revels. This was ap-
in his annotated Shakespeare (1790), parently after the Restoration.
i. 2. 132 (BodL Malme, 1046). Arber, 3 Cf. p. 135.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 131
described as the first and second parts of Henry VI^ but also Titus Andronicus. This had been Danter's, but Danter, who had been more than once in trouble with the Company for infringing privileges, was now dead, and possibly Edward White, who had reissued the play in 1600, and Millington were able to claim it under the arrangement by which they sold it. The 'saluo iure cuius- cunque' must have been a reservation for the interest of White, who reissued it again in 161 i. So much for this group. With the exception of Titus Andronicus^ all their plays appeared in extremely bad texts, the nature of which will presently require examination.1 Meanwhile, other publishers had got to work with better texts, Cuthbert Burby published Love's Labour's Los fin 1598 and Romeo and Juliet in 1599. This, which is described on its title- page -as 'newly corrected, augmented, and amended', was evidently meant to replace Danter's text, and as Love's Labour ys Lost bears a similar description, it is extremely likely that of this too there had been an earlier bad version. Danter, having failed to register, could be ignored; it is not so clear why Burby himself did not register either play. A more substantial contribution than Burby 's was that of Andrew Wise, who duly registered and published Richard II (1597), Richard III (1597), and I Henry IV (1598) by himself, and somewhat later 2 Henry IP '(1600) and Much Ado About Nothing (1600) in conjunction with William Aspley. He transferred the first three to Matthew Law in 1603, and is not heard of again. No doubt the other two remained with Aspley. Midsummer-Night 's Dream was registered and published by Thomas Fisher in 1 600. Of him, too, nothingis known after 1 60 1 . Probably the book became derelict. Some doubt hangs about the activities of James Roberts, a printer who had acquired by marriage in 1593 a special right of printing bills for players.2 In 1598 he registered Merchant of Venice^ sub- ject to an unusually worded condition that he should first obtain licence from the Lord Chamberlain. No publica- tion by him is known, but in 1600 he transferred the play
1 Cf. p. 156. * Etix. Stage, ii. 548$ McKerrow, Diet. 229,
K2
I32 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V to Thomas Heyes, for whom he then printed it. In 1602 he registered Hamlet. This was published in the next year by Nicholas Ling and John Trundell. The printer was not Roberts, but Valentine Simmes. The text was a^bad one, much like those already noted. A good one, claiming on its title-page to be According to the true and perfect Coppie', was substituted in 1604. The publisher was again Ling, acting alone, and now Roberts was the printer. In 1607 Ling acquired Burby's copyrights of Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet, and transferred them, together with Hamlet, to John Smethwick. An unregistered transfer of Hamlet from Roberts to Ling must be assumed. In 1 603 Roberts registered Troilus and Cressida, after the exceptional procedure of a 'full court' held'by the Company, and with the proviso that 'sufficient aucthority' must be obtained. He never published the
-
y the end of Elizabeth's reign, therefore, ^ fifteen Shakespearean texts had appeared. Of these six, and probably seven (2, 3 Henry FI, Romeo and Juliet, Henry 7, Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, Love's Labour's Lost?}, were originally in bad texts, although of two and probably three (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Love's Labour's Lost?) good ones were substituted. Of eight (Titus Andronicus, Richard II, Richard III, i, 2 Henry 'IF, Much Ado About Nothing, Midsummer-Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice] the original texts were good. A note in the Register sug- gests that at one time the publication of As Tou Like It, as well as Troilus and Cressida, had been contemplated.1 But these, with Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, John, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, and All's Well That Ends Well, probably all of Elizabethan date, remained unprinted. There was little more fresh
Sublication before the time of the First Folio. In 1607 usby and Nathaniel Butter registered King Lear and Butter published it in 1608. Edward Blount registered both Anthony and Cleopatra and Pericles in 1 608. He pub- lished neither of them. But Pericles was published in the
'Cf.p.145-
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 133 next year by Henry Gosson, to whom no transfer is recorded. King Lear and Pericles cannot be called good texts, although they are not of the same type as the bad texts of the early publishers.1 Busby had been one of these, and both he and Butter were concerned with plays of Heywood, to the publication of which the author took exception.2 In 1 609 Richard Bonian and Henry Walley registered and published a good text of Troilus and Cres- sida, with the unusual feature, in Shakespearean quartos, of an epistle, in which they complained of the unwilling- ness of 'the grand possessors' to allow publication. Either the earlier registration by Roberts had been overlooked, or his copyright had lapsed through failure to publish be- fore he left business about 1608. Finally, on the eve of the First Folio, Thomas Walkley registered Othello in 1621 and published it in 1622.
Meanwhile several of the plays had been reprinted from time to time, notably those in the hands of Law (Richard //, Richard Illy i Henry If^) and Smethwick (Romeo and Juliet^ Hamlet]. A scene omitted from the Elizabethan editions of Richard II was added in 1608. With this exception, there is not much to be said about the reprints. The distribution of them may be a measure either of the popularity of the plays or of the energy of the copyright- owners.3 There was, however, one reprinting enterprise, the nature of which it has been left to the acuteness of recent bibliographers to establish. Examples have been preserved together, in half a dozen different collections, of ten plays which have certain features in common. They are rather taller than most Quartos, and their imprints are exceptionally short. They are as follows:
2, 3 Henry VI (The Whole Contention betweene . . . Lancaster and
Torke). Printed at London, for T. P. Pericles. Printed for T. P. 1619. A Torkshire Tragedy. Printed for T. P. 1619. Merry Wives of Windsor. Printed for Arthur Johnson, 1619. Merchant of Venice. Printed by J. Roberts, 1600,
1 Cf. p. 154. * A table of prc-i623 Quartos is in
* Cf. p. 47. App. G.
134 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V
King Lear. Printed for Nathaniel Butter 1608.
Henry V. Printed for T. P. 1608.
Z Sir John Oldcastle. London printed for T. P, 1600.
Midsummer-Night's Dream. Printed by lames Roberts, 1600.
The Contention and Pericles have continuous signatures and were clearly designed for issue together. It will be ob- served that two of the plays are not Shakespeare's. Both had been registered and published by Thomas Pavier; Sir John Oldcastle in 1600 and A Yorkshire Tragedy in 1608, The latter, but not the former, which was in fact written by Drayton and others for the Admiral's men as an answer to Henry IV ^ Pavier had at the time ascribed to Shakespeare.1 Successive investigations by Professor Pol- lard, Dr. Greg, and Mr. Niedig have demonstrated that, in spite of the apparent variation in the dates, all the ten reprints really appeared in 1619. They came from the press of William Jaggard, the publisher, in 1599, of The Passionate Pilgrim.2 Only the heads of the complicated bibliographical evidence, by which this conclusion is reached, can be given here. The type used for Merchant of Venice differs from that of the same size used by Roberts, who is not likely to have had a duplicate fount not trace- able in any other book printed by him. It was used by Jaggard. The ten plays are all linked by the watermarks on their paper, and the ordinary life of a 'make' of paper was too short to allow of the assumption that one used in 1600 could still be available in 1619. Paper with similar watermarks was used by Jaggard, both before and after the latter date. Still more convincing grounds are to be found in the title-pages. The date-numerals are of a large size, not found elsewhere before 1610. All the plays, with one exception, bear the same printer's device (McKerrow 283) of three flowers on a stalk with the motto Heb Ddieu heb ddim. This is not known to have been used by Roberts, but was used by Jaggard, both before and after 1619. The Midsummer-Night's Dream bears another (McKerrow 136), the arms of Geneva, with the motto Post Tenebras Lux. This was once used by Roberts, but also by Jaggard
1 Cf. p. 535. a Cf. p. 547.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 135 before 1619, Finally, it has been shown, by accurate measurements and by recurrent flaws in the letters, that the lower parts of all the title-pages, except that of Mid- summer-Night's Dreamy must have been printed off from the same setting of type, which remained undistributed, while the actual titles were altered above it. The argu- ments as to dating seem to me conclusive. The other aspects of the transaction leave more room for conjecture. William Jaggard succeeded to the printing business of James Roberts about 1608, and by 1617 had associated in it his son Isaac Jaggard, whose imprint is on a book of that year.1 The reprinting of 1619 was no doubt done in concert with Pavier who owned the copyright of five of the plays, and whose friendship with Jaggard may be inferred ifrom the fact that the latter named him as overseer in his will.2 Presumably licence was obtained from Johnson for the use of Merry Wives of Windsor, and from Butter for that of King Lear. Of the other three, Midsummer-Night's Dream was probably derelict, and Merchant of Venice may have been believed to be so. Blount's registration of Pericles had already been overlooked, and there is nothing to show that Gosson had any copyright. The shortened imprints suggest that the title-pages were originally meant for half-titles in a comprehensive volume, which would naturally begin with a general and more explicit title-page. So far, there is nothing which points to any deliberate trade irregularity. On the other hand, the absence of continuous signatures after Pericles and the obsolete dates 4i6oo' and '1608* seem to bear witness to departures from the original purpose. And the most plausible explanation of at least one of these departures is, I think, to be found in an intervention by the King's men. It was nothing to Pavier and Jaggard that they were reprinting bad texts and ascribing to Shakespeare plays that were not his. Perhaps Shakespeare's fellows viewed
1 Heywood's A Woman Killed with * Greg, Emendation, 41, 4$, notes
Kindness. It is interesting to note that that in Contention and Hen. V (both
W. Jaggard had (cf. vol. ii, p. 365) a Pavier's) the texts of 1619 show some
Warwickshire Shakespeare as an ap- unexplained anticipations of Fi. pientice*
136 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. V such proceedings with less equanimity. On 3 May 1619 a letter was addressed by the Lord Chamberlain to the Stationers' Company directing that none of the King's men's plays should be printed 'without some of their con- sents'. Its exact terms are not preserved. But they appear to be recited in a later letter of similar import written on 10 June 1637 by Philip Earl of Pembroke, then Lord Chamberlain, and brother of William Earl of Pembroke, who was Lord Chamberlain in 1619. It had been re- presented to Earl Philip's brother that by the printing of plays of the King's men 'not only they themselves had much prejudice, but the books much corruption, to the injury and disgrace of the authors', and the Stationers' Company had been advised 'to take notice thereof, and to take order for the stay of any further impression of any of the playes or interludes of his majesties servants without their consents'.1 It is certain that in the language of the printing trade the term 'impression' covered a reprint as well as a first publication. We do not know how far Pavier and Jaggard had gone before this bombshell fell They
1 Earl William's letter is recorded entered for printing, that notice there- by Malone under the date 1619 alone of be given to the king and queenes from the Stationers' Company's Court servants, the players, and an enquiry Book, C. f. 55*, in his annotated Shake- made of them to whom they do be- sfeare (1790), i. 2. 132 (BodL Malone, long; and that none bee suffered to be 1046). Earl Philip's is printed in full printed untill the assent of their ma- from P.R.O. Ld. Chamberlain's Re- jesties' said servants be made appear to cordsj V. 95, f. 178, in 7ariorum, iii. the Master and Wardens of the com- 160. He adds: 'I am informed that pany of printers and stationers, by some copies of playes belonging to the some certificate in writing under the king and queenes servants, the players, bands of John Lowen, and Joseph and purchased by them at dear rates, Taylor, for the kings servants, and of having been lately stollen or gotten Christopher Beeston for the king and from them by indirect means, are now queenes young company, or of such attempted to be printed; which, if it other persons as shall from time to should be suffered, would directly tend time have the direction of these corn- to their apparent detriment ana pre- panics.' A confirmation of 7 August judice, and to the disenabling them to 1641 by Robert Earl of Essex, then do their majesties service: for preven- Lord Chamberlain, for the King's tion and rediesse whereof, it is desired men, is printed from P.R.O. Ld. that order be given and entered by the Chamberlain's Records, V. 135, p. 135, master and wardens of the company of in MS.C. i. 364. It contains a printers and stationers, that if any list of sixty plays belonging to the playes be already entered, or shall here- company, none of which were yet in after be brought unto the hall to be print.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 137
may have issued all the ten plays. It is perhaps more likely that they had already abandoned the continuous sig- natures and perhaps the idea of a comprehensive volume, had separately issued those dated '1619', and had the rest ready in print. If so, rather than sacrifice their material, they took the rather hazardous course of altering the dates on these to agree with those of the last impressions, so that they might pass as not new at all.1 The explanation is not wholly satisfactory, since it would have been safer to substitute fresh title-pages more exactly agreeing in detail with the old ones. But it seems to be the best available.2 It is true that Henry V is given the date 1608 and that the last impression now extant is of 1602. It is also true that the extant Midsummer-Night's Dream of 1600 does not bear the name of its printer, and that that printer is not likely to have been Roberts. It is con- ceivable, in both cases, that an edition, known to Jaggard, may have disappeared. But it is also possible that the *i6o8> for Henry 7 may be due to a failure to alter the lower part of the type, as it had stood for King Lear. The affair of 1619 had one other repercussion. Merchant of Venice was not derelict after all. Thomas Heyes had left it to his son Laurence. He was then a boy, but he now put in a claim, and Merchant of Venice was adjudged to him in a full court on 8 July 1619. It remains to add that no further reprints in fact appeared, befof e the Com- mon wealth put an end to the Lord Chamberlain's authority, of any of the bad or unauthentic texts, except in so far as Pericles^ of which the history is throughout obscure, can be reckoned as one of these.
Whatever the events of 1619, they can have left no enduring malice between the King's men and the Jag- gfards, since it was again from their press that the collec- tion of Shakespeare's plays known as the First Folio came,
^ x McKerrow, 203, notes a probable throw my explanation out. Greg ap-
similar antedating of an edition of proves his technical argument; if it is
Heywood's Love's Mistress. sound, it is difficult to see why '1619*
2 Neidig thinks that the Mer. of was allowed to appear on Merry Wives
Fen. t.p. was printed before that of of W.t unless by a sheer oversight. Merry Wives of W.9 which would
I38 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. V with the active co-operation of Heminges and Condell, in 1623. This contained eighteen of the nineteen plays al- ready published in Quarto. Pericles was omitted. Good texts of 2, 3 Henry VI> Henry V> and Merry Wives of Windsor appeared for the first time. Eighteen plays were added, and of these sixteen were covered by the following registration entry: I
8° Nouembris 1623.
MrBlounte Isaak Jaggard. Entred for their Copie vnder the hands of Mr Doctor Worrall and Mr Cole, warden, Mr William Shak- speers Comedjres Histories, and Tragedyes soe manie of the said Copies as are not formerly entred to other men. viz*. Comedyes. The Tempest The two gentlemen of Verona. Measure for Measure. The Comedy of Errors. As you Like it. All 's well that ends well. Twelft night. The winters tale. Histories. Thethirde parte of Henry the sixt. Henry the eight. Coriolanus. Timonof Athens. Julius Caesar. Tragedies. Mackbeth. Anthonie and Cleopatra. Cymbeline.
The licenser was here not the Master of the Revels, but one of the episcopal delegates, Thomas Worrall, a pre- bendary of St. Paul's.2 The title-page of the Folio runs :
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies Published according to the True Originall Copies. [Portrait, signed Martin Droeshout sculpsit London] London. Printed by Isaac laggard, and Ed. Blount. 1623.
There is a head-title:
The Workes of William Shakespeare, containing all his Come- dies, Histories and Tragedies: Truely set forth, according to their first Originall.
By 8 November 1623 Isaac Jaggard had succeeded his father, who was dead before November 4.3 The book, however, apart from its title-page and preliminary matter,
1 Arber,hr. 107. A facsimile is in FJT » W. W. Greg in 4 Library, vii. 381.
Studies xix. A 'G. S.' in the margin is * Bibl. Soc. Trans, xiv (19x0), 1045
modern and may stand for '00116101118 F. P. Wilson in T.L.S. 5, 12 Nov.
Shakespeare* or 'George Steevens'. 1925.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 139 must have been printed during William Jaggard's life- time, since his name is in the colophon, which runs:
Printed at the Charges of W. Jaggard, Ed. Blount, I. Smith- weeke, and W. Aspley, 1623.
The first evidence of actual publication is the binding of a copy for the Bodleian on 17 February 1624. It may be assumed to have taken place in 1 623, as the date indicates. It can hardly have preceded registration, in spite of the inscription 'Ex dono Willelmi laggard Typographi. A°. 1623' on the copy once belonging to the herald Augustine Vincent. This is in Vincent's hand, not Jaggard's, and may only commemorate a lifetime promise. It has been shown that the date of '1622', said to have been found on a single example, is a fabrication.1 But that earlier publica- tion was at first contemplated is shown by a Frankfort list of books published between the marts of April and Octo- ber 1622, which includes the entry Tlayes, written by M. William Shakespeare, all in one volume, printed by Isaack laggard, in fol.'.2 Mr. Willoughby has an ingenious argument, based on recurrent flaws in a tail-piece, which makes it probable that printing began as far back as 162 1, and was suspended at an early stage in the composition of the histories, owing to the pressure of other work which there is reason for thinking that the Jaggards were regard- ing as urgent towards the end of that year,3 If so, the initiation of the enterprise may have followed pretty closely upon the abandonment of that of 1619.
The colophon shows that publication was undertaken by a syndicate of stationers. Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard held the new copyrights. The play described in the Register as 'The thirde part of Henry the sixte' is clearly i Henry FL The transfer of the Contention
1 Lee, Introd. to Foes, xxxiij Census, Catalogue for Oct. ifos-Apr. 1624 has 24. the corresponding entry 'Master Wil-
2 F. P. Wilson (1925, Nov. 5, Ham Shakespeares workes, printed for T.L.S.) from Catalogus Universal^ pro Edward Blount, m fol.\
Nundinis Franc ofurtensibus . There are 3 4 Library, ix. 262. The actor-
other English books in this list, which list (cf. vol. ii, p. 78) also points to
did not appear before 1623, and the 1621.
140 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V in 1602 had made 2, 3 Henry VI the first and second parts, as viewed by the trade. Jaggard had no earlier copy- rights. Blount, who was not a printer as the title-page suggests, but a publisher of better standing than most of those who concerned themselves with Shakespeare's plays, may have forgotten that he had already registered Anthony and Cleopatra, together with the absent Pericles, in 1608. But possibly his right had lapsed through failure to pub- lish, or the object of the re-entry was to give Jaggard an interest. Smethwick contributed Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour's Losty and Hamlet, and Aspley Much Ado About Nothing and 2 Henry IV. The syndicate could use the derelict Midsummer-Night's Dream. But for other plays already in print they must have made arrangements with outside owners of copyrights; with Pavier for Titus An- dronicuS) 2, 3 Henry FI, and Henry V\ perhaps with White also for Titus Andronicus\ with Law for Richard II, Richard III, and i Henry IV \ with Heyes for Merchant of Venice \ with Johnson for Merry Wives of Windsor\ with Butter for King Lear, with Bonian and Walley for Troths and Cres- sida\ and with Walkley for Othello. Walkley, indeed, publishing after the Lord Chamberlain's letter of 1619, may himself have had no more than a conditional assent to his use of the play from the King's men. Two of the added plays, which are not in the registration entry, remain to be accounted for. The Taming of the Shrew and King John must have been allowed to pass as reprints of the old plays, The Taming of A Shrew and The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, on which they were founded. A Shrew had been registered and published by Peter Short in 1 594, and sold for him by Burby. Dr. Greg thinks that Humfrey Lownes, who married Short's widow, might have claimed it But Burby had transferred it to Ling in 1607 and from Ling it had passed to Smethwick. The Troublesome Reign had been successively issued by Sampson Clarke, John Helme, and Thomas Dewes. It had never been registered, and there seems to have been no copyright. We are left to speculate why Pericles was excluded, Pavier appears to have had as good a claim to
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 141 it as any one, except perhaps Blount himself. At any rate, his widow transferred his 'right in Shakesperes plaies or any of them' to Edward Brewster and Robert Bird in 1 626, and Bird transferred Pericles to Richard Cotes in 1 630. It can hardly be that a more satisfactory text than that of the Quarto was not available, for there were revivals in 1619 and 1 63 1.1 No doubt it was known to be only in part Shakespeare's, but Henry VIII^ which was in like case, to say nothing of some earlier plays, whose history may have been forgotten, were not excluded. The Two Noble Kins- men, however, was, and was published in Quarto, as by Fletcher and Shakespeare, in 1634.
The Folio is arranged in three separately paginated sections, for comedies, histories, and tragedies respectively. Troilus and Cressida and Cymbeline rank as tragedies. The histories are in chronological order, but there may have been some half-hearted attempt to put comedie"s and tragedies not previously printed at the beginnings and ends of their sections. There are no half-title-pages for the sections or for the individual plays. No sufficient reason has been shown for supposing that the three sec- tions were set up concurrently, or that any presses other than those of the Jaggards were normally used. The types and most of the ornaments recur in other books printed by them. There are 908 pages in all, of which a few are blank. Misprints, both in the pagination and in the sig- natures, complicate the collation.2 Some of these, and others in the text, were corrected during the course of the printing, and are not found in all examples.3 Minor ir- regularities have affected the treatment of 2 Henry IV and Winters Tale** Something more important must have happened in the case of Troilus and Cressida. Apparently the original intention was to put it in the middle of the tragedies, but the printing was suspended, and at the last moment, possibly after the preliminary matter had been
1 Cf. App. D. loughby adds others in RJ&.S. iv. 343;
* Pollard, F. Q. 108, gives one, to- v, 198, and 4 Library, be. 385.
gether with many bibliographical de- * Cf. p. 174-
tails not necessary here. E. E. Wil- * Cf. pp. 380, 4**-
H2 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V printed, it was inserted at the beginning of that section.1 Some hitch in the negotiations for the copyright may have arisen. The preliminary matter itself is differently ordered in different examples. But Professor Pollard has shown, upon the evidence of signatures, conjunct leaves, and the presence and absence of watermarks, that the intended order was probably that found in the Grenville copy in the British Museum, This gives (a) verses to the reader, on the portrait, by Ben Jonson ; (£) the title-page and por- trait on an inserted leaf; (c) an epistle to the Earls of Pem- broke and Montgomery, by Heminges and Condell; (cT) an epistle to the readers, by the same; (<?) commendatory verses by Ben Jonson and Hugh Holland ; (/) a 'Catalogue' of the plays, from which Troilus and Cressida is omitted; (g) commendatory verses by Leonard Digges and an un- known I. M.; (K) a head-title and 'The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes',2 The portrait is found in more than one state.3 Steevens called attention to some parallels between the epistle to the readers and the works of Ben Jonson, and suggested that he wrote part of it and revised the rest. Professor Pollard offers an alternative in Blount, who showed some literary facility iri epistles to his editions of Marlowe's Hero and Leander (1598) and Lyly's Sixe Court Comedies (1632). Jonson's claim seems to me on the whole the better.* The research of Sir Sidney Lee has located over 1 80 extant examples of the First Folio, of which only fourteen are in a perfect state of preservation. As a rule, leaves have gone at the beginning and end. The Grenville example in the British Museum is as good as any. The largest known measures I3fx8f inches. The only example of which a continuous history can be traced is now in the collection of Mr. H. C. Folger. It was originally bought in 1628 by William Sheldon of Weston in Warwickshire, The example owned by the
' Cf. p. 441. between (J) and (*). This would put
* McKerrow, 162, suggests that con- all the commendatory verses together.
fusion may have been caused by fold- » Cf. vol. ii,, p. 240, and Plates
ing the sheet containing (g) and (A) the XXVI, XXVII.
wrong way round, and that possibly *' The epistles and commendatory
they should come, in reverse order, verses are in App. B, nos. 1-liii.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 143
Bodleian in 1624 was sold when the Third Folio appeared in 1 663, and has recently been recovered. Various guesses have been made as to the probable size of the edition; Dr. Greg points out that a sale of less than 1,000 copies would hardly have repaid the publishers, unless the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery showed munificence.1 Jaggard's interest in Shakespeare's plays was transferred by his widow to Thomas and Richard Cotes about 1 9 June 1627, and Blount's to Robert Allot on 16 November i630.2 The Second Folio was printed by Thomas Cotes for Allot, Smethwick, Aspley, Richard Hawkins, and Richard Meighen in 1632. Hawkins had acquired the copyright of Othello and Meighen that of Merry Wives of Windsor. The Third Folio was printed for Philip Chet- winde, who had married Allot's widow, in 1663, and to a second issue of 1664 were appended reprints of Pericles and of the 'apocryphal' London Prodigal, Thomas Lord Cromwell, i Sir John Oldcastle, Puritan, Yorkshire Tragedy, and LocrineJ The Fourth Folio was printed for a syndi- cate of booksellers in 1685. These later Folios and the post-i623 Quartos are of little value for textual criticism. Upon the nature of the copy which reached the pub- lishers, first for the Quartos and afterwards for the First Folio, the amount of%authority to be attached to the tradi- tional texts, as representative of what Shakespeare actually wrote, must in the last resort depend. I have already cited the claim of the First Folio, on its title-page and in its head-title, that its plays are derived from the author's 'originals'.* And this receives some expansion in the epistle to the readers, where Heminges and Condell profess —
so to haue published them, as where (before) you were abusM with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors, that expos'd
1 The price of the Folio may have * Arber, iv. 182, 243.
been about £i and that of a Quarto 3 Cf. ch. x.
about 6<£, but the question is obscure; 4 Cf. p. 96. c£. McKerrow, 133.
144 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V them: euen those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he concerned them.
An epistle, like a title-page, is an advertisement, rather than an affidavit. But while a desire to exalt the merit of the Folio is apparent, it would be unreasonable to ignore altogether the stress laid upon the fidelity of the texts to the original intentions of the author. The eighteenth- century editors, impressed by corruptions and signs of stage manipulation, took the statement of Heminges and Con- dell rather lightly. Johnson in 1765 wrote of the plays:
They were immediately copied for the actors, and multiplied by transcript after transcript, vitiated by the blunders of the penman, or changed by the affectation of the player; perhaps enlarged to introduce a jest or mutilated to shorten the representation; and printed at last without the concurrence of the author, without the consent of the proprietor, from compilations made by chance or by stealth out of the separate parts written for the theatre: and thus thrust into the world surreptitiously and hastily, they suffered another depravation from the ignorance of the printers, as every man who knows the state of the press in that age will readily conceive.
Modern research, based upon a closer evaluation of the texts themselves, a wider knowledge of the methods of players and printers, and in particular a study of the manuscripts described in Chapter IV, has brought many qualifications to this judgement. But the doctrine of multiplied transcripts has died hard, and it was still pos- sible for Sir Sidney Lee to maintain in 1925, as regards the Quartos, that 'the publication of separate plays was deemed by theatrical shareholders, and even by dramatists, injurious to their interests', and that 'as a rule, the pub- lisher seems to have bought of an actor one of the copies of the play wl^ch it was necessary for the manager to provide for the company1; and as regards the Folio, that 'external and internal evidence renders it highly impro- bable that Shakespeare's autographs were at the printer's disposal', that the existing theatrical manuscripts were destroyed at the Globe fire in 1613, that the library was
Chap. V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 145 'replenished* from transcripts in the private possession of actors or from 'fair copies' which had been presented to friends and patrons, and that these were the foundation of the new texts of I623.1 There are several statements here which invite comment. It is true that there are many indications of a desire on the part of acting companies to control the transmission of plays to the press. They are most frequent, as it happens, in the case of the Chamber- lain's and King's men. They begin with Roberts's entry of Merchant of Venice in 1597, made conditional on a licence from the Lord Chamberlain. This certainly sug- gests that the company were using the influence of their patron to protect themselves against publishers who hard not come to terms with them. And perhaps a similar inference is to be drawn from the following memoranda, which appear on a spare page of the Stationers' Register?
My lord chamberlens metis plaies Entred
viz.
27 May 1600 A moral of clothe breches and veluet hose To master Robertas
27 May AUarum to London
Tohym.
4 August!
As you like yt, a booke Henry the ffift, a booke
Every man in his humour, a booke
to be staied
The Commedie of muche A doo about nothing a booke
Of the four 'staied' plays, Every Man In His Humour and Much Ado About Nothing were regularly registered later in August 1600 and published in good texts. There was no Quarto of As Tou Like It. But the stay, whatever its nature, did not prevent the appearance in 1600 of a bad text of Henry Vwc the acknowledgement of copyright when it was transferred on August 14 of that year. Professor
1 Lee, ioo, 548, 559. "further aucthoritie*. A Larum for
* Arber, iii. 37. The marginal notes London was printed in 1602 (Etisc.
refer to Roberts's entries (Arber, iii. Stage, iv. z). No edition of Clothe
x6x), both of which were subject to Breches is known. 3142.1 L
146 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V Pollard thinks that the Chamberlain's men, perhaps un- willing to invoke their patron too often, fell back upon a plan of employing Roberts to make conditional blocking entries, which were not to be acted upon, but would keep out other publishers, and that Blount's entries of 1608 were meant to serve a similar purpose.1 If so, the plan was not particularly successful, since it did not stop the bad texts of Hamlet and Pericles, or of Merry Wives of Windsor which Roberts did not enter, or prevent Bonian and Walley from publishing Troilus and Cressida in spite of the opposition of the 'grand possessors'. I agree with Professor Pollard that there is no reason to regard the operations of Roberts as fraudulent. But that he was an agent of the players seems to me very disputable. The terms of the Merchant of Venice entry do not suggest that they were relying on him. That his other entries, except in the case of Hamlet, were conditional, is hardly relevant. They are not, like that for Merchant of Venice, distinguish- able in form from many entries by other publishers, in which the further authority required was pretty clearly the allowance of an episcopal licenser.2 Moreover an uncon- ditional entry would have served Professor Pollard's as- sumed purpose just as well. Roberts was a printer, and his object in making the entries may well have been to transfer them to another stationer in return for the printing rights. Perhaps it was not always attained. But he did print Merchant of Venice for Heyes in 1600, if not earlier; and although he did not print Qi of Hamlet, he did print Q2 for Ling in 1604. And we must surely assume that the copyrights of Heyes and Ling, acknowledged later, were derived by transfer from Roberts. One way or another, the King's men seem to have been successful in safe- guarding most of their Shakespearean plays during the m reign ofjames, and from 1619 onwards th^y had, as has already been shown, protections from successive Lords Chamberlain*3 Whether other companies shared these before 1637 is uncertain. But they had the same problem
« Pollard, S. F. 36, 42. » EUx-Stage, in. 169.
3 a. p. 135.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 147 to face, and did their best to protect themselves. We find the Admiral's in 1600 giving the printer 40,?. *to staye the
ginting of Patient Gresell'. The agreement of the King's evels syndicate in 1608 contains a clause forbidding the individual partners to print the play-books. Heywood, in the epistle to his English Traveller of 1633, tells us that some of his plays 'are still retained in the hands of some Actors, who thinke it against their peculiar profit to haue them come in print'.1 He is no doubt referring mainly to Christopher Beeston, who held most of the plays of Queen Anne's men, for whom Heywood had written. The state- ment in the First Folio that some 'surreptitious' plays did get into print can also be confirmed from Heywood.2 In the epistle to his Rape of Lucrece (1608), he takes credit for not being one of those who 'have used a double sale of their labours, first to the Stage, and after to the presse', and says that he now only prints because 'some of my plaies have (unknown to me, and without any of my direction) accidentally come into the Printers handes and therfore so corrupt and mangled (copied onely by the eare) that I have bene as unable to knowe them, as ashamde to challenge them*. So, too, in a late prologue for a revival of his If Tou Know notMe^ Tou Know Nobody, he 'taxeth the most corrupted copy now imprinted, which was published without his consent', by Nathaniel Butter in 1605, and says that —
Some by stenography drew The plot: put it in print: (scarce one word trew:)
Various reasons have been offered for the reluctance of the players to allow printing. Perhaps they thought^ as some managers are said still to think, that the competition of a book would diminish their takings.3 It is often held that what they feared was the appropriation of their plays for acting by other companies. About this I am rather scep- tical. It is, of course, impossible to hold, with Miss Al- bright, that there was a common law stage-right, which would have prevented appropriation.4 A common law
1 Eli*. Stage, ii. 645 iii. 183, 292, 3 19. 3 McKerrow, 143. 3 Ibid. Hi. 342, 344. 4 Albright, 2x7.
L2
148 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V right, laid down by no court, cannot be improvised for argumentative ends. A recorded action for a wrongly withheld 'book* in Downton v. Slater was merely for the value of the corporeal book and for damages arising from its detention, and in fact the court only awarded the value of the book.1 But it is reasonable to suppose that there was some comity among the London companies in the matter.2 Very likely this would not cover plays acted by a company which had dropped out of the London theatres. Shake- speare seems to have been able to use the old Troublesome Reign of John, Famous Victories of Henry V> and King Leir, two certainly and the third probably Queen's plays, and the old Taming of A Shrew, a Pembroke's play, at any rate as sources. The company which originally produced The Spanish Tragedy is unknown. The Admiral's revived it with 'adicyons' in 1 602. But the Chamberlain's must also have played it, and probably about the same time, since the authentic version of the elegy on Burbadge names *ould Heironymoe' as one of his parts, and in 3 Parnassus he is represented as trying a novice in it.3 It is even pos- sible that the edition of 1602 may contain the version of the Chamberlain's and not the Admiral's men. For in- vasion by one company of the legitimate repertory of another there is very little evidence. I do not think that the case of The Malcontent can be so accounted. It was originally a Blackfriars play, but was given also by the King's men, with 'additions', including an induction, in which comes this dialogue: Sly. ... I would know how you came by this play. GondelL Faith, sir, the book was lost; and because 'twas pity so
good a play should be lost, we found it and play it Sly. I wonder you would play it, another company having interest
in it. CondelL Why not Malevole in folio with us, as Jeronimo in
decimo-sexto with them? They taught us a name for our play 5
we call it One for Another.
1 ESx. Stage, ii. 157. they did, I am not sure that it would
* Greg suggests (&&£ iv. 96) that hurt the London companies very
provincial companies may have made much.
up their repertories from prints, but if 3 EU&. Stog', ii. 309,
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 149 Surely this is chaff; one does not advertise a real theft in an induction. I take it that the King's and the Queen's Revels shared The Malcontent by arrangement, just as the King's and Paul's shared Satiromastix.1 But of course a mere comity leaves room for abuses, and ultimately the Household officers stepped in to protest stage-rights as well as printing-rights. Heminges paid Sir Henry Herbert ^5 in 1627 'to forbid the playing of Shakespeare's plays to the Red Bull company', and the Lord Chamberlain in 1639 issued a mandate to rival companies not to 'inter- meddle* with William Beeston's repertory at the Cock- pit.2 One of the plays named in this is Beaumont and Fletcher's Father's own Son> which was in fact printed in the same year, under the alternative title of Monsieur Thomas^ as 'Acted at the Private House in Blacke Fryers', where the King's men must have given it. Miss Albright thinks that these documents merely record arbitrations on disputes as to acting-rights, which arose when players changed companies.3 But whether this is so or not, they had authority behind them. If we set nervousness as to stage-rights aside, the attitude of the players towards printing remains completely intelligible. It was mainly determined by financial considerations. They had a valu- able property in their manuscripts, and they did not in- tend, either that these should be used except when it was convenient to them, or that the purchase money paid by the stationers should pass into other hands. This may not have been much. The fee for a pamphlet — and a play would rank as no more — is said to have been about £2.* But it was some offset against the £6 or j£io which the author had received. Philip Herbert's letter of 1637, carefully read, seems to put the whole matter on a financial
1 EUx. Stage, iii. 293, 431. Jero- * Herbert, 64; Far. iii. 159. The
nmo here is probably The First Part order of 1639 is in P.&O. Ld.
oflerommo (EE&. Stage, iv. 22), per- CAamberlatn's Records,*?. 134, p. 337,
haps written for the Chamberlain's as and has 'Cockpitt Playes appro-
an introduction to Span. Trag.9 but pried* in the margin; cf. M.S.C. i.
printed in 1605 in a corrupt and pro- 364.
bably 'reported* form, which suggests ' Albright, 230.
performances by boys. * Pollard, S.F. 24.
ISO THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V basis. The players had bought 'at dear rates*. They would have 'detriment and prejudice* if their plays were 'stolen', and His Majesty's service would suffer, which was Herbert's reason for intervention. The fluctuations in the output of printed plays also suggest the prevalence of economic considerations. It was greatest in 1 594 when the companies were in straits owing to the plague; in 1600, when the Chamberlain's and Admiral's had had to face the cost of new theatres; in 1607 when the stock of the ruined King's Revels came on the market. Apart from the bad texts, there is really no a priori reason to suppose that copy for the Elizabethan Quartos of Shakespeare reached the stationers in any other way than through a normal process of sale by the companies. Let us credit these with a higher motive in the desire to replace the bad texts of Love's Labour V Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet by more commendable versions. Whether Shakespeare himself had anything to say in the matter, we cannot tell. But the prefatory epistles by other authors, which accom- pany so many plays, suggest that some concession had to be made by the companies to literary ambition, and pro- vide further evidence in favour of regular publication.1 It is true that a large proportion of these were plays from the boys' companies, where the authors may have had some share of control.2 It is true, also, that the authors them- selves sometimes complain that their hands were forced by the fear of unsupervised printing.3 But this was largely a convention, inherited from the courtiers, who affected to write for their friends alone.
I have been elaborate about the relation of the com- panies to the publishers because, if Sir Sidney Lee were right, the textual authority of the Quartos would be seri- ously diminished. His theory that the Folio texts were derived from dopies belonging to actors or private persons and collected after the fire at the Globe depreciates these in their turn. But here it is possible to be more brief. There is no proof that any manuscripts were destroyed at
, ao& gives a partial list. * Ibid. iii. 344, 44x5 Albright, zo8- 13.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 151 the Globe fire. The numerous accounts of this say nothing about them. For what they are worth, one tells us that the silken flag was burnt, and another that 'nothing did perish but wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks*. Very likely this means no more than that no lives were lost. Sir Sidney cites as his sole evidence the fact, which is recorded, that at the Fortune fire in 1621 the Palsgrave's men lost their play-books,1 But to argue thus, without any regard for the rules of logic, from the known separable accidents of one case to the unknown separable accidents of another, is not permissible. The books of the King's men may quite well have been saved, or, as has often been sug- gested, they may have been at the Blackfriars. The Al- lowed' book of Winter's Tale> that of Honest Man's Fortune, and the stage-copy of Bonduca were all at one time or other missing. The two latter must have been recovered before the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1 647 was printed, and when a transcript of Bonduca was wanted, it was supplied, not from the sources indicated by Sir Sidney, but from the author's 'foule papers'.2 And certainly the loss of Winter's Tale can hardly have been due to the fire, as a revival in 1618 and possibly another in 1619-20 had intervened. The study of the extant theatrical manuscripts, a small sample indeed out of the many hundreds that must have been written, gives no support to Sir Sidney's statement that it was 'necessary* for the manager to provide copies for the company. A priori, one might perhaps have ex- pected that the author's original would have been laid up for ultimate reference in the theatre archives, and tran- scripts made for submission to the Master of the Revels and for the use of the prompter. It is clear that in fact the original itself sometimes became both the 'allowed' copy and the prompt-copy. The individual actors needed no copies except their 'parts'. On the other hand, the manuscripts give hardly less support to the notion of 'con- tinuous copy', which dominates the reconstructions of Professor Wilson; the notion, that is, of 'the long-lived manuscript in the tiring-house wardrobe, periodically
1 Etiz. Stage, ii. 419* 44*- * Cf. p. 125.
152 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V taken out for a revival and as often worked upon by fresh hands, abridged and expanded, recast to fit the capabilities of new performers, brightened with current topical allu- sions, written up to date to suit new tastes in poetic diction'.1 Certainly transcripts were used for prompt- copies as well as originals; and indeed it stands to reason that the more a book-keeper had annotated a manuscript with the names of supernumeraries and other jottings for use in one series of representations, the more advantage there would be in making a transcript at a revival. A prompt-copy had above all things to be clear and easy to consult at a glance. We do not, for example, find sub- stituted names of fresh supernumeraries in the extant manuscripts. The same consideration would point to transcription in the event of substantial textual revision, in so far as that ever took place.2 When Massinger had to recast Believe as Tou Li$t> he wrote out the old matter with the new; and the textual marginalia and slipped in- sertions which we do find in the manuscripts are, with one exception, of very limited extent. The exception is Sir Thomas More, and on a generalization from this obscure and probably abnormal case the doctrine of continuous copy is mainly founded. Professor Wilson's point that transcription would cost time and money cannot weigh much against obvious convenience; and it is safer to allow for the possibility that there may have been a good deal of it in the theatres, even if the career of Ralph Crane does not give us a glimpse of that recently banned ghost, the stage scdvener. On the other hand, there is no reason whatever why some, both of the Quarto and the Folio texts, should not have been set up from Shakespeare's auto- graphs; and a use of these for the Folio is the natural interpretation both of the epistle to the readers and of the stress laid on originals in the title-page and head-title. It would be taking the language too literally to argue that transcripts were in no case substituted, and where there are parallel texts, we are often driven by their disagree- ment to conclude that one or other, if not both, must be
1 Disintegration of Shakespeare, 18; cf. Wilson, Temp, xxriii, 79. * C£ ch. vii.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 153
derived from such a source. In any case it would be pressing Heminges and Condell too hard to infer that the originals had been completely purged from the results of after-touching. Both in Folio and in Quarto texts, it is often possible to find traces of musical or spectacular elaboration, or of the book-keeper establishing his prompt- copy. In mere stage-directions it is difficult, where there is only one text, to distinguish his hand from that of an author writing, as Shakespeare wrote, in full knowledge of stage conditions, although a modification may sometimes be suspected from the form of the wording or from a duplication of substance. Where there are two texts, the book-keeper may show himself in additional notes for music or other noises, in divergence from the author's details, and perhaps most unmistakably in 'cuts'.1 One cannot even altogether exclude the possibility of occasional recourse to a transcript made not as a prompt-copy, but expressly for the printer, or for the satisfaction of a private owner. Most of the extant examples of private manu- scripts, however, may be late, and the reference to them in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 certainly is.2 They may not have become usual before 1619, when the Lord Chamberlain's protection made the multiplication of copies less risky.
One other possibility must be considered. Malone's theory of the construction of copy for the printers from actors' 'parts' has received some recent favour, notably from Professor Wilson.3 A loss of prompt-copy, through fire or other cause, is generally assumed, together with reliance upon a 'plot' to help in the reconstruction. A generation obsessed by machinery calls the method 'as- sembling'. One would suppose, however, that both parts and plot, if preserved, would be kept with the prompt- copy, and that the loss of one would mean the loss of all. Certainly the 'book' and 'plot* of Seven Deadly Sins were at one time kept together/ The case for assembling is
1 Cf. p. 235. * Cf. p.' 125. Texts in the First Folio (1922, Jan. 12,
s He is supported by Rhodes, 96. T.L.S.). W. J. Lawrence dissents in Assembled * Cf. p. 124.
154 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V primarily based upon the Folio texts of Two Gentlemen of Verona and Merry Wives of Windsor. These have a com- mon feature in the complete or almost complete absence of stage-directions, except for an initial entry for each scene, in which all the characters taking part in that scene are named, more or less in the .order of their appearance.1 Somewhat, but not quite analogous, is Winter's Tale. Here are the same comprehensive initial entries, except in two scenes (iv. 3 ; v. 2), but in some cases the successively entering characters or groups of characters are marked off from each other by colons. Moreover, there are some later stage-directions, including some repetitions of entries al- ready given.2 On the theory the initial entries are taken from plots. These could of course provide them. It is not the case, however, that either the extant plots or the one extant part, that of Orlando, are witHbut stage-direc- tions other than entries; nor do the texts in question use the characteristic phrase 'to them' with which the plots link their entries. Professor Wilson uses three subsidiary arguments in support of assembling. One is the freedom of Two Gentlemen of Verona from textual difficulties, since a part must be made clear, even if the prompt-copy is confused; although he is not at a loss for an explanation when the text of Merry Wives of Windsor turns out to be far from lacking in textual difficulties. The text of Or- lando's j>art is by no means always clear. The second is the printing of prose in capitalized lines of varying length, rather like verse, which is certainly curious, and which he thinks may have been a practice in writing out parts.3 The third is the appearance of gag, or what Professor Wilson thinks may be gag, but whether gag would get into parts, and on the other hand would not get into prompt-copy, I am not sure. Professor Wilson also finds assembling in As Tou Like It and Measure for Measure, which have not grouped entries, but have a paucity of stage-directions,
'IM not sure that the «itriesin * Rhodes, 99, gives the facts very
Tw Gent . of Ver. iv. 2 and Merry inaccurately. JTivetofjr.v. 5 stricdy follow the *Cf.p.i8x. order of appearance.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 155 and on special grounds in Comedy of Errors and Merchant of Venice.1 There would be no substance in these cases, unless a practice of assembling could be better established elsewhere. I do not think that assembling is inconceivable, as a last resort for recovering a text, when no original or foul papers or transcript was available. But surely it would be a very laborious and difficult business. Cues, at any rate in Orlando^ do not give the names of the speakers, and they often consist only of a word or two, which might occur at more than one speech-ending. All would perhaps go well in dialogue between a couple of speakers, but if many were concerned, the book-keeper would be con- fronted with a considerable puzzle, as he peered in search of the cue-words from one to another of half a dozen rolls or strips cut from rolls on the table before him. I should expect tp find in a text so produced two kinds of error, of which examples have not in fact been brought forward. One would be a false sequence of speeches and another the accidental inclusion of cues in the following lines. An alternative explanation of the grouped entries is to be found, as pointed out by Dr. Greg, in the influence of the 'classical' method of scene-division adopted by Ben Jonson and some other playwrights. Here each new grouping of characters begins a new scene, and the names of the char- acters head it. Whether the adaptation of this arrange- ment to Two Gentlemen of Verona and Merry Wives of Windsor and in part to Winter's Tale was due, as Dr. Greg thinks, to a printer's devil, or to a freak of the author, must be matter for conjecture.2
The possibilities left open make it necessary to consider the origin of the printers' copy for each pla^ as a separate problem, in the light of such literary, scenic, and biblio- graphical indications as it may yield. A summary treat- ment, inevitably based to a large extent on the work of others, is alone feasible in such a book as this, but in the upshot, some classification of the texts may be attempted.3
1 Cf. ch. ix. 3 Cf. the discussions of individual
a Greg, Merry Wives ofW. xvij cf. plays in ch. ix. p. 125 and Etix. Stage, iii. 200.
156 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V An isolated group is formed by the corrupt editions of the early publishers, 2, 3 Henry VI (the Contention)^ Romeo and , Juliet '(Qi\HenryP,Hamlet(Qi),Merry Wives of Windsor. Professor Pollard has conveniently designated these as 'Bad Quartos', They differ in detail, and each presents features of special difficulty. But they have in common a measure of textual corruption, far beyond anything which a combination of bad transcription and bad printing could explain. Many passages are only intelligible in the light of the better texts which followed. There are constant omissions leaving lacunae in the sense, constant para- phrases, constant inversions of the order of sentences, and dislocations in the sequence of dialogue and episodes. The metre is bungled; verse lines are wrongly divided; prose is printed as verse and verse as prose. The diction betrays a substitution of synonyms or loose verbal equivalents or of variant inflections, for the wording intended by the author. The-total effect is one of perversion and vulgariza- tion. To emend is futile; it is incredible that Shakespeare should have written or the Chamberlain's men presented such texts.1 It cannot be doubted that these are primarily the versions which Heminges and Condell stigmatized as 'surreptitious'. Whether a surreptitious origin is indicated by the circumstances of publication seems less clear. There was due registration of 2 Henry VI r, which may per- haps be taken to have covered 3 Henry VI> and of Merry PPives of Windsor and Hamlet^ but the transactions be- tween stationers as to Merry Wives of Windsor and Hamlet look rather unusual, and copyright for Romeo and Juliet and Henry 7 was only established through transfers. The omission of the publisher's address from the imprint of Romeo and Juliet is also exceptional, but one can hardly suppose that the authorities would not know where to find Danter, and books whose promoters really feared pursuit were apt to bear such addresses as 'Middleburg' or 'ouersea in Europe', or to have no imprint at all.2 Certain
' Hubbard's 'edition' of the Qi of (Nashe, iii. 339) and the 'at the signe
Haw.shows the futility. of the crab tree cudgell in thwack-
* The 'at a place, not fane from a coate lane' of Pappe with en hatchet
Place* of An Almond for a Parrot (Lyly, iii. 393) are burlesques.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 157 other features of some or all of the bad texts suggest that the copy for them was obtained, not by transcription from originals, but from stage performances by some pro- cess of reporting. There are errors which may be due to mishearing, although these are not unlike some which are made by printers and transcribers.1 There are unmetrical ejaculations and connective words, such as actors intro- duce to accompany their gestures and demonstrate their indifference to the blank verse. There are bits of gag. The confusion tends to be greatest in bustling episodes _or in the rapid interchange of dialogue between a number of. speakers. In Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet there are stage- directions which look like the attempts of a spectator to describe the action seen on the stage. In Hamlet^ con- versely, bits of action seem to have been translated into dialogue. One naturally asks what kind of reporter can have been at work. A note-taker in the audience would almost inevitably have attracted attention. Moreover, there is one singular feature, apparent in all the texts except Henry 7y which by itself seems to exclude such a note- taker. The dislocation of matter extends to the incorpora- tion in scenes of phrases which really belong to earlier scenes or even to later scenes. A long interval may separate these from their rightful positions. Such 'anti- cipations and recollections' imply a reporter who Has throughout some knowledge of the play as a whole, and point to a process, not of direct note-taking, but of reproduction from memory. The exhaustive analyses Jby Dr. Greg of Merry Wives of Windsor and of the analogous case of Orlando Furioso have explored the possibilities of memorization as a method of textual transmission, and have shown them to be fully equal to the production of such results .as the bad Quartos exhibit.2 Speculation remains open as to the status and identities of the reporters. Obviously the members of the company which had per- formed a play would have better opportunities of becoming roughly familiar with its course and wording than would
xCf. p. 180. the practice of the seventeenth-century
* Albright, 311, gives parallels from Spanish stage.
158 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V mere spectators, even after repeated visits. The precise method may not have been the same in all cases. Dr. Greg inclines to think that Orlando was collectively reported by a group of actors, each in his turn dictating his part, and that the primary object was to reproduce a lost prompt- copy, rather than to furnish material for the printers.1 This theory implies conditions which could hardly apply to the Chamberlain's men's plays. Sometimes certain scenes are better reported than the rest and are linked by a common character, that of Marcellus in Hamlet^ that of the Host in Merry Wives of Windsor. Naturally the actors of these characters have incurred suspicion of treachery. .It is a hardly tenable view that it would be possible to prevent individual actors from obtaining, at performances or rehearsals, knowledge of scenes during which they were not themselves on the stage or waiting their calls at the stage-door. But no doubt they would be most successful in rendering dialogue in which they had shared. Where there is no such outstanding character, I have thought it possible that the reporter may have been a prompter. And in some cases there is reason to think that the help of a written 'part' (3 Henry 7I\ Hamlet) or of a 'plot' (2, 3 Henry 71) may have been available. A report does not, except perhaps in Henry 7> wholly account for the differ- ences between the bad and the good texts. The per- formances reported or later performances represented by a prompt-copy may have been subject to variations in scenic detail or by cuts. There have been changes in nomenclature of characters in Hamlet and Merry Wives of Windsor. A little rewriting of bits of 2, 3 Henry 71 is not unlikely. Most of the bad Quartos contain passages of non-Shakespearean verse which amount to rather more than the ordinary padding of the reporter. This has led to a theory that the texts underlying them were not the completed work of Shakespeare, but earlier versions
* Fynes Moryson (Etiz. Stt%e, i. L. B. Wright (M.L.N. xUii. z$6) gives
343) describes the travelling companies examples of plays reproduced from
on the Continent as *pronowncing parts and memory for performance in
pceces and patches of English playes'. the eighteenth century.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS 'AND THE FIRST FOLIO 159 of the plays by other hands, only partially revised by him.1 There are, however, two other possibilities to be con- sidered. In the first place, a lapse of memory may have been remedied by sheer faking; and for this we need not call in a hack playwright, since many actors, as Henslowe's records show us, were capable of putting together a pky at need. In the second place, the vagrant memory or the reporter did not stop short at its 'anticipations and recol- lections' of scenes or a play other than that under reproduc- tion. It went so far as to bring in matter from alien plays. This is clearly to be traced in 2 Henry VI, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Hamlet, and in view of the number of plays now lost with which every actor and book-keeper must have been familiar, who shall say what limit is to be set to borrowings of this nature? I do not know that it js possible to say for what exact purpose the reporting of a play was undertaken. The amount which a bookseller would pay for 'copy* is not likely to have been very tempting. Dr. Greg is, I believe, inclined to think that the primary object was to enable a company to perform a play, the 'book* of which they had parted with or never possessed. But a company which performed a play without having the allowance of the Master of the Revels endorsed on the 'book' would be running a risk.2 I do not say that it was one which a provincial company in straits would never take. Perhaps these were the 'peeces and patches of English playes' performed abroad, and were sold to the stationers when the companies came home, as useless in this country.
The counter-theory to reporting from memorization is reporting by shorthand. This art was in its infancy during the sixteenth century. The first system since Roman times appeared, after some private experiments of his own, in Timothy Bright's Characterie, an Arte of shone, swift and Secrete writing by Character (i588).3 It was a very cumbrous one. Each letter had a symbol, but except in
1 Cf. p. 226. a A reprint by J. H. Ford (1888) is
* Etix. Stage, iL 222. shown by Roloff to be inaccurate.
160 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V spelling out proper names, these were mainly used as parts of more complex symbols or 'characters', representing complete words. The characters were short bars, placed in various positions and modified at either end by angular or curved hooks. There were 570 of them, and to them corresponded a vocabulary of 570 words, the characters for which the scribe had to learn by heart. But a character might stand not only for a 'primitive' word, such as a noun, but also for its 'derivatives', such as verbs and ad- jectives, and for all inflexions both of the primitive and the derivatives. The discrimination was left to the intel- ligence of the note-taker and the transcriber, with the help in a few cases of diacritical marks in the form of one or more dots disposed around the characters. Further, a character might also stand, by what Bright called the 'consenting' or 'dissenting1 method, either for an equiva- lent to its proper word or for a word of opposite sense; and in these cases the note-taker was expected to write the symbol for the initial letter of the word really intended to the right or left of the character, as the case might be. Finally, the student was instructed that unless the very express words were necessary, the sense only need be taken with the character; that is to say, he might omit words and employ paraphrases. It is clear that a use, and in particular a bungling use, of this system might produce some of the features of our bad texts; the paraphrases, the confusion of inflexions, above all the substituted equivalents. A diacritical mark is easily omitted, or neglected in transcription. It might explain the omission of out-of-the-way words, for which even the consenting and dissenting methods made no provision. It would not, unless the bungling was very exceptional, explain the numerous cases in which Bright's vocabulary gives a simple character for the right word and the re- porter substitutes the wrong one. And it would not, any more than any other process of direct note-taking, explain the anticipations and recollections at all. A more sub- jective impression is that the system was altogether too cumbrous to be applied to anything so difficult as a play.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 161 There are examples of its use in reporting sermons. But the regular, even if impassioned, utterance of a preacher, with the reporter sitting in a strategical position among a quiet audience, is one thing. The give and take of several speakers, in the hubbub of a theatre, complicated by the need for noting speech-prefixes and the fear of detection, is quite another. It is fair to admit that German students of stenography, on the other hand, believe that the thing could be done and was done, although I do not know whether they have put their view to the test of practical experiment.
Peter Bales in The Writing Schoolmaster (1590) and The Arte of Brachygraphy (1.597) has a system very much like Bright's.1 Something more workable seems to emerge in John Willis's Art of Stenography (1602). This is too late for any of the bad texts under discussion, but it is earlier than Heywood's complaint of Stenography', or than any recorded allusion to 'brachygraphy' in the theatres.2 Bright does not use either term. That there was at some time reporting of plays by some kind of shorthand we must take from Heywood. His If Tou Know not Me, you^ Know Nobodyy is not a good text, but it is not as bad asT the memorized bad texts of Shakespeare. Possibly the method of Willis was fairly efficient. It has not, so far as I know, yet received the expert examination in relation to play-texts which has been devoted to that of Bright. Professor Pollard suggests that the recovered scene of Richard 77, as it appears, badly mislined and showing lacunae^ in the Qj of 1608, may be due to shorthand.3 This may very possibly also be a factor in King Lear (1608) and Pericles (1609). Both have long continuous passages of verse printed as prose, and in King Lear these, although
1 I have not seen his New Tears acted and uttered in the instant.' It is Gift for England. The Art of New a trial and not a play that is in ques- Brachygrapty (1600). The only copy tion in Webster, The Devil's Law Case is in the Bihtiotheque Nationale. (c. 1620), iv. 2. 28, 'Doe you heare,
2 Sir G. Buck, Third Vniwrsitie of Officers? You must take speciaU care, England (1612), 'They which know it that you let in no Brachigraphy men, [brachygraphy] can readily take a to take notes/ For Heywood, cf. Sermon, Oration, Pky, or any long p. 147.
speech, as they are spoke, dictated, 3 Pollard, Rich* tt, 64. 3142.1 M
162 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Cliap.V fairly adequate textually, are almost entirely punctuated by commas. They look to me like the result of shorthand notes well taken, but not properly worked upon at the stage of transcription. Punctuation and metre are of course always the weak points of a report. It is perhaps relevant that all these texts are very much of the date of Heywood's complaint.
There are fourteen plays for which we have parallel Quarto and Folio texts. They include at least two, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet \ for which the Quartos had replaced reported ones. Love's Labour *s Lost may be a third. All the fourteen Quartos may reasonably claim Professor Pol- lard's epithet 'Good', in contradistinction to the six ad- mittedly 'Bad' ones. They are not all of equal merit, and Heminges and Condell would probably have claimed that ^Troilus and Cressida and King Lear, if not also Othello, fell within the category of 'stolne and surreptitious' texts. There is no reason to suppose that the eleven others were not issued with the assent of the company. It is the exis- tence of parallel texts in these fourteen cases which gives us our closest insight into the nature of the copy which reached the printers. I discuss the relations of the texts in chapter ix, so far as is possible within the limits of brief disquisitions and without the opportunities for tabulation and illustration which an editing of the plays would afford. Here I can only set out summary conclusions. Of the fourteen Quartos, I take King Lear to rest upon a report, Richard III upon a theatrical transcript of a cut version, and Troilus and Cressida and Othello also upon transcripts, which may, however, have been made tor private col- lectors, and not for stage purposes. Othello, but not Troilus and ' Cressida, again represents a cut version. Love's Labour V Lost and Romeo and Juliet may rest in the main on originals, but it is possible that the former and probable that the latter was in part set up on a corrected example of a bad Quarto, and if so, an element of transcription is involved. The text of Romeo and Juliet is not good enough to exclude the possibility of more extensive transcription. The other eight may all be from originals. Titus Androni-
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 163
cus is not very likely to have been in Shakespeare's hand throughout. The rest — Richard II, j, 2 Henry IP \ Mid- summer-Nights Dreamy Merchant of Venice^ Much Ado About Nothing^ Hamlet — all might have been. I do not think that it is possible to say more than this in any case. The probability is highest for Hamlet^ since the Q version shows no signs of adaptation for the stage, and it is there- fore difficult to see why a transcript, at any rate for theatrical purposes, should ever have been made. Stage- directions of the type which suggest an author's hand might of course be preserved by a transcriber.1 So too, although with less justification, might duplications of matter, such as we find in Love's Labour *j Lost and Romeo and Juliet^ as well as in Midsummer-Night's Dream. Nor can I attach much importance to the presence of abnormal spellings, analogous to those in the part of Sir Thomas More claimed for Shakespeare. These, too, might survive a transcriber, since ex hypothesi they must have survived a compositor. Could we' be sure that Shakespeare's hand is in Sir Thomas More, the recurrence of the spellings in some of the Quartos would be consistent with his hand being also in the copy for these. It would not be proof, for we could not in any event take it for granted that he had a monopoly of such spellings. At the same time, we know that originals, as well as transcripts, were used for stage 'books' ; and there is no reason to assume that tran- scripts'"were made without need.2 Hamlet is apart, but although all the other six texts in question bear the evidence of intrusive actor-names or of cuts and other stage alterations, that their manuscripts had been used as prompt copies, there is nothing which could not be pro- vided for on the originals, at the most with the help of an additional leaf for Midsummer-Night *s Dream and an ap- pended slip for Merchant of Venice. Transcripts, for any- thing that we can trace, would be quite superfluous.
From a comparison of the fourteen Good Quarto texts with their Folio counterparts two generalizations emerge. The first is that, in spite of the apparent wholesale re-
1 Cf. pp. 118, 201. * Cf. pp. 1249 151.
M 2
164 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V pudiation of the Quartos by Heminges and Condell, nearly all the Folio texts were in fact set up from examples of the Quartos. As a rule, the Quarto used was the latest that had been issued. The evidence for this consists partly in a general resemblance of orthographical and typo- graphical detail, and partly in the repetition of obvious errors. It is at its strongest where the errors have been introduced in Quartos later than the first. It is less conclusive where there is only one Quarto, and a possibility remains that the common errors may derive from a common manuscript source. It has indeed been doubted whether Quartos were used for 2 Henry IV and Troilus and Cressida, although I think that in Troilus and Cressida the argument from general resem- blance is strong. The only certain exceptions are Othello and Hamht. The Quarto (1622) of Othello indeed may hardly have been in existence when the copy for the Folio was prepared. Here the texts are independent, but clearly represent the^same original, with cuts in the Quarto and accidental omissions in the Folio. In Hamlet, on the other hand, the Folio gives a cut version, in which theatrical alterations have been made. The second generalization is that most and probably all of the reprinted texts have undergone some modification beyond what can be attri- buted to the compositors. Even where there is no general textual divergence, there is theatrical alteration. Passages are^cut or added; stage-directions and speech-prefixes are revised; actor-names, which must be due to the book- keeper, make their appearance.1 Invariably there seems to be some elimination, often very slight, of profanity, as a result of the Act of Abuses of 1606. I shall discuss this later on, and give reasons for supposing that its objective was theatrical rather than literary.2 The total amount of departure from the Quarto basis varies considerably. There is very little in Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour 's Lost, Midsummer-Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and i Henry 17, and in these it may be regarded as wholly theatrical. To Titus Andronicus a whole
1 Cf. p. 122. a Cf. p. 238.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 165 scene, possibly of late origin, has been added. In Richard II cuts have been restored and the scene which was re- covered by a bungling reporter for Q4 is regularly printed. But in this play textual differences also begin to occur. There is a reversion to some readings of Qi departed from by its successors. The changes in 2 Henry IV also include the restoration of cuts, but although numerous, they are again mainly theatrical. Textual divergence, however, is persistent in Richard III, TroilusandCressida&ndi KingLear, in all of which we get independent versions of a common original, analogous to those of Othello. In these cases at least we must assume that the Quarto used as a basis was altered from a theatrical manuscript which was regarded as authoritative. It does not, of course, follow that the alteration was always complete and accurate. The question arises as to whether the Quartos used for the Folio had been specially prepared to provide its copy, or had been originally altered for use as prompt-copies. Dr. Greg pertinently asks for more evidence that printed texts were ever, in ordinary circumstances, so used. I know of none, although a closer acquaintance than mine with late Jacobean and Caroline stage-history might perhaps fur- nish it. It is obvious that the substitution of a print for a manuscript would mean a gain in legibility for the book- keeper. But if this were the motive, one would expect an early Quarto, rather than a late one, to be used. Moreover, while the book-keeper's own alterations for revivals could as easily be made on a print as on a manuscript, the gain in legibility would largely disappear if such substan- tial variants as we find in Richard ///, Troilus and Crestida, and King Lear had to be incorporated. Other probabilities are rather conflicting. On the one hand, it is difficult to see why a transcriber, deliberately preparing a Quarto for the press, should take in those actor-names which a com- positor might very easily preserve through inadvertence, if he found them in a prompt-copy. On the other, the sporadic nature of the elimination of profanity is rather in- explicable on the assumption that the texts were primarily meant for theatrical purposes. I must leave it at that.
166 THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.V There is less to be said about the eighteen plays for which the only texts are in the Folio, and the four for which the only alternative is a bad Quarto. There is no obvious reason why most of them should not have been set up from originals. That of J Henry VI is not likely to have been for the most part in Shakespeare's hand. Both this and 2, 3 Henry VI may contain some scenes of com- paratively late date. There are probably some theatrical interpolations in As Ton Like It and Cymbeline, and per- haps Tempest^ and both interpolations and cuts in Macbeth. An original ending may have gone from Taming of the Shrew. On the other hand, I do not suppose that Timon of Athens was ever staged. The known history of Winter's Tale makes it likely that it was printed from a transcript, and this is confirmed by some typographical features. The badness of the text in Measure for Measure and All's Well suggests that here too transcripts may have intervened. I have already considered the theories which ascribe Winter's Tale, Two Gentlemen of 'Verona, and Merry Wives of Windsor to Assembling1. The plausibility is greatest in the case of Two Gentlemen of Verona.1
We come back to the claim of Heminges and Condell and the Folio publishers to have given the plays 'according to the True Originall Copies' and 'absolute in their numbers, as he concerned them'. It is clear that this can- not be quite literally pressed. It may reasonably be ad- mitted that genuine pains were taken, according to the standard of the times, to secure reliable texts. The bad Quartos were (quite properly disregarded. The labour spent on glossing good Quartos from manuscripts must have been considerable. We could wish that First Quartos and not later ones had been chosen, but perhaps Heminges and Condell were not so familiar as we are with the pro- gressive deterioration of successive reprints. Doubtless the use of transcripts was sometimes inevitable; we know that the original of Winter's Tale was lost. Perhaps we could hardly expect that interpolations should have been removed; still less that they should have been placed in
* Cf. pp. 153, 329.
Chap.V THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO 167 square brackets. Some hint might have been given of the occasional presence of non-Shakespearean scenes. A fuller text of Macbeth would have been welcome; that tf Romeo and Juliet could probably have been improved. Something must have gone wrong with the directions for the treat- ment of cuts, as a result of which Richard II and King Lear show lacunae in the Folio which are not in the correspond- ing Quartos. The greatest lapse is of course the complete failure to make any use of the full Second Quarto of Hamlet.
CHAPTER VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE
[Bibliographical Note. Much of the writing on Shakespeare's publishers (cf. Bibl. Note to ch. v) deals also with -his printers. R. B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927), gives an admirable survey of Elizabethan printing-house methods. Special studies by the same writer are The Use of the Galley in Elizabethan Printing (1921, 4 Library, ii. 97) and Elizabethan Printers and the Composition of Reprints (i<)2$9 4 Library, v. 3 57). Other vajuable dissertations are B. A. P. van Dam and C, Stoffel, Chapters on English Printing, Prosody and Pro- nunciation (1902); W. W. Greg, The First Edition of Sen Jonson's EM.O. (1920, 4 Library, i. 153), An Elizabethan Printer and his Copy (1923, 4 Library, iv. 102), Massinger's Autograph Corrections (1923, 1924, 4 Library, iv. 207; v. 59), Tie Riddle of Jonson's Chronology (1926, 4 Library, vi. 340), and P. Simpson, Proof-Reading by English Authors of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1928, Proc. Oxford Bib/. Soc. ii. 5).
The special problems of the relation of Shakespearean texts to Shake- spearean 'copy* are dealt with by A. W. Pollard, King Richard IL A New Quarto (1916); in the discussions of Sir Thomas More (cf. p. 499); by J. D. Wilson in the Textual Introduction (1921) to Temp. (New Shake- speare) and Spellings and Misprints in Qz <?/7/<0ar. (1924, Essays and Studies, x. 36); and by W. Blades, Common Typographical Errors, with especial Reference to the Text of Shakespeare (1872, Jan. 27, Athenaum) ; B. A. P. van Dam, William Sh.: Prosody and Text (1900), The Text ofSh.'s Ham. (1924), Textual Criticism of Sh.'s Plays (1925, English Studies, vi. 97) ; L, Kellner, Restoring Sh. (1925), on which W. W. Greg's review (R.E.S. i. 463) should be read.
Useful works of general reference are E. A. Abbott, A Shn. Grammar (1869); W. Victor, SJL's Pronunciation (1906); W. Franz, Sh.-Grammatik (3rd ed. 1924); H. C. Wyld, History, of Modern Colloquial English (3rd ed. 1925). Elizabethan script is analysed in the books on S.TM. and in that of Kellner, and by H. Jenkinson, English Current Writing and Early Printing (1915, BUI. Soc. Trans, xiii. 273), The Later Court Hands in England (i<)zffc M. St. C. Byrne, Elizabethan Handwriting for Beginners (1925, R.£.S. i. 198); R. B. McKerrow, The Capital Letters In Eliza- bethan Handwriting^^.-], R.E.S. iii. 28). W. W. Greg's English Literary Autographs (1925, 1928, in progress) give examples of many Elizabethan hands. On Orthography are A. Lummert, Die Orthographic der Fi der Shn. Drama (1883); T. Satchell, The Spelling of Fi (1920, June 3, T.L.S.); A. W. Pollard, The Variant Settings in 2 Hen. 17 and their Spellings (1920, Oct. 21, T.L.S.), Elizabethan Spelling as a Literary and Bibliographical Clue (1923, 4 Library, iv. i); M. St. C. Byrne, A. Munday's Spelling as a Literary Clue (1923, 4 Library, iv. 9), Thomas Churchyard's Spelling (1924, 4 Library, v. 243);
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 169
W. Marschall, Sis Orthographic (1927, Anglic, Ii. 307). On Elisions are W. E. Farnham, Colloquial Contractions in Beaumont, Fletcher, Malinger and SA. as a Test of Authorship (1916, PM.L«d. xxxi. 326); J. D. Wilson, A Note on Elisions in the Faerie Queene (1920, M.L.R. xv. 409). M. A. Bayfield, A Study of Shakespeare's Versification (1920), represents an extreme theory as to the treatment of elisions by the printers, which may be compared with that equally extreme in Van Dam's writings. A correspondence on the subject is in T.L.S. (1920, Sept.-Dec.). On Punctuation are P. Simpson, Si*. Punctuation (1911); R- M. Alden, The Punctuation of S&.'s Printers (1924, PM.L-4. xxxix. 557); C. C. Fries, Shn. Punctuation (1925, Michigan Studies in Sh.y Milton and Donne); H. Jenkinson, Notes on the Study of English Punctuation of the Sixteenth Century (1926, R.E.S. ii. 152); J. Isaacs, A Note on Dramatic Punctuation (1926, R.E.S. ii. 461); E. M. Simpson, A Note on Donne9 s Punctuation (1928, R.E.S. iv. 295). The structure of Acts and Scenes is discussed by T. S. Graves, The Act-Time in Elizabethan Theatres (1915, S.P. xii. 103); M. Hunter, Act- and Scene-Division in the Plays of SL (1926, R.E.S. ii. 295); J. D. Wilson, Act- and Scene-Divisions in the Plays of Si. (1927, R.E.S. Hi. 385), They Sleepe all the Act (1928, R.E.S. iv. 191); W. J. Lawrence, Act-Intervals in Early Shn. Performances (1928, R.E.S. iv. 78) ; W. W. Greg, Act-Divisions in SA. (1928, R.E.S. iv. 152).]
THE printers of Shakespeare's plays, other than Danter, Roberts, and the Jaggards, may be taken to have been em- ployed by the publishers who owned the copyrights. Of those concerned with the first editions, the most prominent are Valentine Simmes, who did Richard //, Richard III, 2 Henry T77, Much Ado About Nothing, and the bad Hamlet^ and Thomas Creede, who did the bad 2, 3 Henry VI, Henry V^ and Merry Wives of Windsor^ and the good Q2 of Romeo and Juliet. William White did Love's Labour *s Lost and Pericles^ Peter Short did i Henry IV^ George Eld Troilus and Cressida, and Nicholas Okes Othello. The printers of three plays are not named on the title-pages, and can only be guessed at on the doubtful evidence of the ornaments used. The bad Hamlet is thus assigned to Simmes and King Lear to Okes or to George and Lionel Snowden whose business he acquired about 1608. Midsummer-Night's Dream remains doubtful The orna- ments suggest Richard Bradock rather than Roberts, but Edward Allde is also a possibility.1 The best work is that
* Cf.p. 356. The ornaments recur a printer's ornaments are not so dis- in the editions of Marlowe's Ed tinctive as his 'devices'. ward II, printed by Bradock. but
I7o PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
of Simmes, the worst that of Eld. Simmes, who was often in trouble for trade disorders, had been an apprentice to Henry Bynneman, a good printer according to Eliza- bethan standards, which were not high. Creede put good workmanship into some of his books, but his plays are nothing to boast of. One would gladly know more of these men and of their journeymen and apprentices, on whose equipment of intelligence, experience, sobriety, and attention much of the quality of Shakespearean texts depends. A practice of dividing work between different printing-houses does not seem to have affected the Quartos, except possibly Qi of Romeo and Juliet l, where the character of the setting-up changes half-way through theplay.1
The technique of Elizabethan printing has been care- fully studied by Dr. McKerrow, who finds that there was little advance in essentials between 1 500 and 1 800, and is able therefore to draw upon the descriptions in Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises (1683). The main points from Dr. McKerrow's lucid and detailed account will serve as preliminary to a consideration of printing-house errors. It is necessary to distinguish between the functions of the compositor, the pressman, and the corrector. These may not, indeed, in a small establishment, have been separate individuals. In particular, although the earlier printers, especially those concerned with classical texts, employed competent scholars as correctors, it may be suspected that pamphlets and plays often had no supervisor but the master-printer himself, Irregularities in the make-up of a book may sometimes be due to the concurrent employ- Aient of more than one compositor or pressman on dif- ferent parts of it.2 Probably there was little preliminary examination to ensure that the copy for the Quartos was complete and in order. It was handed, with directions as to the size of paper and type required, to the compositor, who fixed it in a stand on the desk or table at which he worked. A theory that it was dictated to him is now
1 C£» p. 339. a McKerrow 128; cf. pp. 141, 339.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 171
generally abandoned.1 There is little support for it, be- yond a tradition first recorded in the eighteenth century, that the practice, which would have been both incon- venient and expensive, was followed at Basle, and a few very singular 'auditory' errors, of which one or two sug- gest^ the incorporation of guttural noises or instructions coming from a reader. It is of course possible that dicta- tion may have occasionally been resorted to when the light was bad. Before the compositor were also ranged trays or 'cases', divided into compartments to hold the types. These were separately cast on metal bodies, with the letters or other symbols in relief on their upper faces. Moxon shows a pair of cases, as used together in his time. The lower case holds the small letters, with the odd excep- tion of 'k', the punctuation marks, and the 'spaces', which had no reliefs; and the sizes of its main compartments are varied in proportion to the frequency with which each type is likely to be needed. The upper case, sloped at an angle above the lower one, holds the capitals, the numerals, and the more rarely used symbols. An Elizabethan printer, however, made considerable use of italic type, and either the arrangement of his cases must have been some- what ^different to Moxon's, or he must have had access tp_ additional ones for this purpose. In his left hand the compositor held the 'composing-stick', a short tray capable of holding six or eight lines of type, and adjustable to the required length of line. He memorized a line or so of matter from the copy before him, and with his right hand picked out the types from the cases in due order, and transferred them to the stick, putting the faces upside- down, since the outlines of the reliefs would be reversed in printing-off. Between the words he set spaces. If his matter did not fit a line, he 'justified' it by varying the width of the spaces, but for this he had less need than a modern compositor, since he could also modify the spelling.2 When the stick was full, he slipped the contents into a larger tray or 'galley', which held just sufficient type
1 McKerrow 241; Pollard, Rich. II, 345 Albright 326. * Cf. p. 186.
i72 .PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
for a page, and when this was full, he laid it aside for the pressman.
At the stage of actual printing, the page-blocks of type were removed from the galleys, and placed in frames or 'chases', each of which took enough pages to occupy one side of a sheet of paper. These constituted a 'forme*. There was an outer forme for one side of the sheet, and an inner forme for- the other, and the blocks were so ar- ranged that, when the sheet was folded, the pages would follow each other in the proper order. Plays had not, as a rule, pagination numbers, but a clue to the order was provided by setting-up the first word of each page as a 'catchword' at the foot of that preceding it. Similarly the first page of each sheet bore a letter at the ^foot as a 'signature', and the signatures ran in an alphabetical series. If four blocks of type were printed on each side of a sheet and it was folded twice it became a 'quarto* sheet of four leaves and eight pages. The signatures of a quarto were generally repeated with differentiating numbers on the first pages of the second and third leaves. An 'octavo' sheet was folded three times and had eight leaves and six- teen pages.1 A 'folio' sheet was folded once only and had two leaves and four pages. But folio sheets were generally placed within each other in 'gatherings' of three sheets, six leaves and twelve pages. The first three leaves of such a gathering had a common signature letter, with a dif- . ferentiating number. The chase was packed between the blocks of type with larger spaces or 'furniture', corre- sponding to the margins of the pages when the sheet was folded, and firmly 'locked up' by wedges or 'quoins'. It was then placed on the bed of the press. This slid back- wards and forwards, and to its front was hinged a frame or *tympan', holding two sheets of parchment with pad- ding between them, on which the sheet of paper to be printed was laid. The type was inked with pads or 'balls' of cotton or hair covered with leather and fixed at the ends of short sticks. The ink did not reach the small spaces, but as it inevitably got upon the furniture of the chase, a
1 The Qi of 3 Hen. VI* although classed with the Quartos, is really an Octavo.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 173
second frame or brisket', hinged in its turn to the free end of the tympan, held a protective sheet of paper, in which rectangular spaces, corresponding to the positions of the blocks of type, had been cut. The frisket was turned over the sheet on the tympan, and both frisket and tympan were turned over the chase. The bed of the press was then slid back under a screw, which brought down over tympan, frisket, paper, and chase a heavy wooden board or platen, and effected an impression of the inked type on the paper. Each sheet, of course, required two impressions, one for each side, before it could be folded, and had to be laid across a string to dry between them. All the copies of each sheet were printed on one side, before the other side was taken in hand. When the print- ing was complete, the type was 'distributed', probably by the compositor, who put a few lines into his left hand, took out a word or two at a time in his right, read them, shook the types apart, and dropped them into their compart- ments in the cases.
Press-correction must often have been a very casual business. There is plenty of evidence that authors could, as now, see 'proofs', and even for the use, by the Jaggards and others, of 4reviewes', or as we call them 'revises'.1 The modern slip-proofs, specially printed in 'long' galleys, had not, however, come into use, and what the author got would be an ordinary sheet, in which, if one side only had yet been printed, the pages would not be continuous. As a rule authors seem to have been expected to visit the printing-house daily, for the purpose of making their cor- rections; and they sometimes apologize for errors, on the ground that they could not do this. But there are cases in which proofs were sent out by messenger. Jonson, no doubt, saw proofs. There is nothing to indicate that Shakespeare did, and in view of the number and character .of the errors in the Quartos, it is unlikely. Nor can we suppose that, even if the copy was supplied rather by his company than by himself, any other member of it took the
* McKerrow 65, 3055 Albright 3485 P. Simpson in Trans* Oxford Bibl. Soc. ii (19^8), 5.
i74 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
responsibility. Whether the Folio had ^ any editor is a rather more complicated question.1 Failing an author to 'oversee' the work, all rested with the press-corrector, and his operations were often perfunctory. Presumably he ought to have read the proof with the copy, or had the latter read to him, as was the practice in Moxon's day. But frequent erroneous corrections show that, even in reprints, he was apt to proceed by guess-work. Nor does it seem that printing-off was suspended until the proof had been considered. Different examples of the same edi- tion of a play often exhibit variant readings. Occasionally this may be due to the accidental displacement and wrong replacement of type.2 But many variants can only be ex- plained on the assumption that corrections were made at a late stage, and that the incorrect sheets already printed were not scrapped, but used indiscriminately with the •corrected ones when the book was put together. Different examples, therefore, may contain incorrect and corrected sheets in various combinations, and indeed one side of a sheet may have been corrected and not the other. This makes the work of a modern editor extremely arduous.
The title-page and other preliminaries, such as epistles by an author or publisher, were generally printed, at any rate in first editions, after the body of the book. The * A' signatures might be reserved for them, or special signa- tures, such as asterisks, used. The title-page itself does not bear a signature. It is of the nature of an advertise- ment, and separate copies were struck off as hand-bills. Nashe complains that his Pierce Penniless bore a 'tedious Mountebanks Oration to the Reader'.* Title-pages were probably prepared in the printing-house. This accounts for the frequent laudatory terms and the elaborate des- criptive titles, which are not always -accurate. The Welsh parson of Merry Wives of Windsor appears as 'Syr Hugh the Welch Knight', and the Marina of Pericles as Mariana. The author's own wording is more likely to be found in a head-title at the beginning of the text. Advertisement
1 Cf. p. 198. » Cf. p. 176. 3 Works (ed. McKeirow), i. 153.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 175
"may also be traced in the mention of court performances (Love's Labour's Lost, KingLear\ and in the claims, some- times but not always justified, of reprints to be 'corrected' or 'augmented'. The engraved emblematic or other 'device* of the printer or publisher or some ornamental design often follows the title. At the foot of the title-page is the 'imprint', which generally gives the name of the printer, of the publisher 'for' whom the book was printed, if dis- tinct from the printer, and the publisher's address. Some- times the printer's name is omitted, or only indicated by initials. And sometimes the address is that of a stationer, who had not himself financed the book, but was selling it on commission.1 Imprints may show variants when two stationers were publishing jointly. In early books the imprint was at the end of the text in a 'colophon', but colophons are rare in plays.2 To the imprint is usually appended the date of publication. Dr. Greg thinks that plays were dated according to the calendar year beginning on January I, and not according to the year beginning on March 25, which was generally followed both in private letters and in official documents, including the Stationers' Register.* A second 'issue' of an edition, from the original stock of sheets, may have a new title-page on an inserted leaf or 'cancel' replacing the old one, and a serious error in the text, discovered late, may be similarly corrected.-* It is uncertain whether, after printing, copy was restored to the owner, or destroyed as printing-house waste. If the Chamberlain's men sent their 'allowed' copies to the printers, they must, one thinks, have recovered them for their own protection in case of a revival. Only two bits of used copy are known, and they are not plays. One is a fragment of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity (1597), printed by John Windet. It has author's corrections, which have been observed in the print, although additional ones seem afterwards to have been made.5 The other is the greater
1 W. W. Greg in Studies, 130. * Cf. pp. 349, 380, 438.
* McKerrow 95. s Bodl. AddL MS. C. 1655 cf. P.
a Studies, 154, and The "Kiddle of Simpson (Oxford Bibl. Soc. Trans.
Jonsorfs Chronology (1926, 4 Library* ii. 20). vi. 340).
i?6 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
part of Sir John Harington's translation (1591) of Ari- osto's Orlando Furioso, printed by Richard Field.1 Here also the print shows that the author made many alterations in proof. There are some special directions to the printer on the copy, and the printer himself has added symbols indicating where fresh pages should begin, and in one case where a particular ornament should be inserted. Such supervision is likely to have been more careful in Field's office than in those of inferior printers* This manuscript was probably returned to the author^ many of whose papers are preserved.
The errors of printers must be looked at both qualita- tively and quantitatively. The causes of misprints are various. Some may be called mechanical, some psycho- logical. Mechanical errors may arise at several stages. Type may drop out of the stick or an ill-locked chase, or be pulled out by the inking balls, and be put back in the wrong order, even if loose type lying on the floor is not picked up instead. The paper on the frisket may be unevenly cut or may shift, and prevent the type at the ends of lines from printing. A space-type may project and leave an impression. A letter may be badly cast or broken, and its impression may look like that of some other letter. Thus a broken V may be indistinguishable from a *c'. But the most prolific source of mechanical error is what is known as 'foul case' ; that is, the presence of types in the wrong compartment, either because they have slipped from an overfull compartment into that below it, or more usually because they have been wrongly distri- buted. Many 'literal' misprints, which make no sense, may have this origin. Whether the very common but not textually important substitution of a 'turned n' for a V or vice versa is due to foul case seems doubtful.2
Most misprints, however, are psychological, and arise during composition, which must be taken to include the subsequent carrying out of corrections. They may be
1 B.M.AddL MS. 189205 cf.W.W. » McKerrow 2555 Greg in Greg, An Elizabethan Printer and his i. 466. Copy (1923, 4 Library, iv. zoz).
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 177
further classified as due to failures either of vision, or of attention, or of memory, or of automatism, or of judge- ment. The classification is a rough one, since human faculties are not isolated. In particular, want of attention is to some extent a factor in all misprints, and may itself be the result either of stupidity or carelessness or self- confidence or haste or fatigue or drink or talkativeness or absorption in alien ideas. Similar misprints may result from different causes, and further many errors such as compositors make are also made by transcribers, and some even by authors in writing down their thoughts, so that, especially when transcription may have intervened, it is not always possible to be sure where the fault lies. The methods of transcribers have not been so closely investi- gated as those of printers. The manuscript of Alleyn's part of Orlando shows an example of careful transcription for the theatre.1 But one may perhaps assume that a tran- scriber would often be less of a trained expert than a com- positor, and would be more likely to alter passages which he found difficult to read or understand.2
A failure of vision means, of course, a misreading of the copy. Professor Wilson tells us:
It is a cardinal principle of critical bibliography that when any- thing is wrong with the text, the blame should be laid rather on the 'copy' than on the compositor.3
It may be doubted whether critical bibliography has any cardinal principle, other than the obvious one that every effect has a cause, and that the distribution of ink-marks on pieces of paper is no exception to the rule. However that may be, there are certainly competent bibliographers who do not accept Professor Wilson's principle. Thus Professor Pollard writes of
the ease with .which errors were introduced in the process of printing and the extreme danger of assuming that the faultiness of a printed text involves a corresponding faultiness in the manuscript which it follows.4
* Greg, Abridgments, 271. ' Wilson, Temp. xl.
* Cf. pp. 440, 460. * Pollard, Etch. IT, 3*.
3I42.X V
i78 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
And Dr. Greg says:
It must now be abundantly evident that other causes besides misreading are at work in the production of misprints; indeed, that these other causes are probably more widely operative than errors of the eye. Nothing could in feet be more misleading than the dogma that 'Misprints must be accounted for by the Handwriting'.1
The antithesis of 'copy' and 'compositor' is, indeed, in itself misleading; what we are concerned with is the relation between the compositor and his copy. But the manuscripts described in chapter iv are as a rule well written, and it is reasonable to suppose that, in Elizabethan times as now, the best workmen were set to handle the most difficult material. Moreover, there are abundant errors in reprints, where the complications of manuscript copy had not to be faced. Nevertheless failure of vision is a factor in misprinting, and Pro- fessor Wilson has furnished valuable analyses of the types of 'literal9 error to which it might lead. His basis is
primarily the hand of D in Sir Thomas More, and this, whether Shakespeare's or not, is at any rate a very normal Elizabethan hand, not unlike his, and at the same time such as any transcriber might employ. We have to en- visage an 'English' hand, in which most of the letter- forms differed from those of the 'Italian' hands now fol- lowed, which were then only just beginning to come into popular use. Some intermixture of Italian forms there may have been, and some differentiation, probably very in- complete, of foreign words, proper names, speech-prefixes, and perhaps stage-directions by Italian script.2 Normally an italic fount of type provides a corresponding differentia- tion in print. The use of capitals for the word 'God' in Merchant of Venice (Qq), ii. 2. 75, is exceptional. Abnormal spellings in the copy might lead to misunderstanding.3 Or again it might show contracted forms, although these do not seem very frequent in theatrical manuscripts.4 A *p', with a loop to indicate the omission of letters, is easily misread, and a ^ looks much like an V, although it
' JLJSJS. 1 47*. * Cf. p. 113. 3 Cf. p. 187. 4 Cf. p. 113.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 179
stands for V or *es'. The commonest confusions in re- producing an 'English* hand are due to the similarities between V and 'd', between V and V, between V and V, between 'c' and Y, and among 'm*, 'n', *uf, V, V, V, T (if undotted), and a particular form of V, all of which are or, unless very carefully formed, may be constructed of short downward strokes or 'minims'. It is clear, how- ever, from Professor Kellner's tables of misprints that there may be transmutation between almost any pair of letters, even where the production of a veritable word seems to exclude the probability of a cause, such as 'foul case', alternative to an error of vision. Obviously, long- tailed and long-stemmed letters are only likely to replace others with similar features. But letters, individually dis- tinct, may none the less be confused when they appear in combination. Many misprints involve more than one wrong letter within the same word; an initial error once made often tends to persist and to help in the misinter- pretation of its context. Beyond this, an inexperienced reader of manuscript will get a word wrong, by contenting himself with a mere general impression of it, without following the outlines of the letters at all. Possibly a tired or careless compositor might do the same, although it would be contrary to his training. It is a blunder which one would rather expect from a transcriber. Failure of vision may also be responsible for the misdividing of words. A word is split into two, or two words are merged in one. Of course the 'hand* of a manuscript is often a contributing factor in visual errors. A writer may easily degrade the rather elaborate forms of the 'English* letters. Concave and convex curves may not be properly dis- criminated. The Ts may be undotted. Tops of letters which should be closed may be left open. The minims may be superfluous or deficient. The spacing may be bad. Linking strokes may be made between words, or omitted between the letters of words.
Failures of attention cause many errors. The com- positor, misled perhaps by the recurrence of the same word at the ends of neighbouring lines or clauses, starts
N 2
i8o PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
at the wrong point in memorizing a bit of copy, and leaves out a line or even a considerable passage. The parallel texts reveal some serious mutilations of this nature.1 On the other hand, cancelled matter, such as a duplicate ver- sion, is sometimes inserted, through the neglect of a dele- tion mark.2 Single words and letters are often omitted. When this is due to overlooking a repetition of them in the copy, it is called haplography. Words and letters are also unduly repeated, and that is called dittography. A whole line may be repeated, perhaps at the turn of a page. The order of letters, words, and lines may be dislocated, either through an initial error or through a careless at- tempt to correct one.
Some of the most subtle and baffling misprints probably arise from failures of memory. The compositor reads more of his copy at once than his memory is able to carry, and reproduces it inaccurately. Thus, too, transpositions may occur. Prefixes and word-endings get altered. Much more considerable perversions may take place. The subcon- scious mind, through some association, substitutes for the right word an equivalent word, or even a contrasting word. If the compositor's apprehension of read matter works through auditory rather than visual representations, the substituted word may be one similar, not in sense, but in sound. Such results are much like those which the loose memories of actors and reporters also yield.3 Or again, a past word, just leaving the threshold of consciousness, may be echoed, or a coming word, just entering it, may be anticipated. Authors themselves are very prone in writing to the same trick. Parallel texts often reveal the existence of memory errors; in the absence of these they may well remain 'cruces'. The human mind is a fallible instrument. There is further a kind of muscular memory due to habit. The compositor's reaching out for type becomes auto- matic. If he is tired, the automatism may fail, and he may take a type from the wrong compartment. Here is a third origin, besides foul case and the confusion of outlines, for literal misprints and erroneous spacing.
* Cf. pp. 440* 459> 4*7- a Cf. pp. 331* 235. 3 Cf. P- 157-
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 181
Finally, the compositor may fail in judgement where there is, or where he thinks there is, anything in his copy which requires regulating. He may mistake a parenthesis- bracket for a deletion mark.1 He may insert a marginal addition at the wrong point. He may misinterpret an ambiguous contraction. He may expand an abbreviated speech-prefix incorrectly. He may attach a speech-prefix, written rather high or low, to the wrong line. He may incorporate a speech-prefix or a stage-direction in the text. He may, perhaps excusably, retain a book-keeper's note of an actor's name or other warning.2 Errors of judgement must play some part in the complex phenomena of mis- lineation. Blank verse is often wrongly divided, and more- over verse is often printed as prose, and prose, perhaps less often, as verse. Again Professor Wilson must be quoted:3
If there is one lesson to be learnt from a bibliographical study of the Good Quartos, it is that compositors had no means of distin- guishing between prose and verse except by line-division in their copy.
This dogma, too, needs some qualification. It may be assumed that, in an age when there was much popular poetry, and a compositor was constantly setting-up both prose and verse, he acquired some knowledge of scansion. Normally he was called upon to capitalize the beginnings of verse lines and not those of prose lines, although both, unless Shakespearean manuscripts were unlike the extant manuscripts, began with minuscules in his copy. No doubt he often followed the lineation of the copy, but certainly he sometimes used his intelligence to regulate it according to what he believed to be the author's intention; and either method might bring him out. The confusion of prose and verse in the bad Quartos belongs to the reporter's muddled paraphrasing. But it is also a feature of good texts, particularly in scenes in whidii Shakespeare's rapid transitions between verse and prose are frequent, and which are sometimes complicated by the habit which
1 Cf. p. 197. * Cf. p. »37. * Wilson, Earn. 50.
1 82 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
Shakespeare shares with many other writers of letting his prose fall into blank verse rhythms. For example, Pistol's intrusions of bombastic verse into prose scenes regularly appear as prose in the Quarto 2 Henry IV and the Folio Henry V and Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare cannot have written them so. There are many other instances. Professor Wilson is apt to regard the transitions as evi- dence of rewriting, and to treat misprinted verse as due to irregular arrangement in a margin.1 But the transitions themselves are often of high literary value, and give no reason to suppose that they are not deliberate. It is diffi- cult not to attribute ,the misprinting to failures of the compositor's judgement. In other cases, where he has not the same ground for confusion, a blind following of the copy becomes more plausible. A marginal insertion might be written parallel with the main text, and in half-lines for lack of space. There are such insertions in extant manu- scripts, and others .where the lines are at full length and at right angles to the text.2 Or again, as Professor Wilson has himself suggested, a writer, near the end of passage or scene, and also near the foot of a page, might crowd his matter and write two or three lines continuously. Sir Thomas More furnishes an example.3 Either of these arrange- ments might result in the setting-up of short passages of verse as prose. But some other cause is required to account for the long passages so misprinted in the Quarto of King Lear. There are many of them and the text throughout the play varies much from that of the Folio, I conjecture that they are the notes of a shorthand reporter, which he has taken down with approximate fidelity, but has not felt able, or has not troubled, to arrange as verse. There is some confirmation of this in the fact that they are almost entirely punctuated with commas. Pericles has. some similar passages, especially in Acts iii-v, but they are better punctuated. On the other hand, the admittedly bad Quartos of Hamlet, Henry V^ and Merry Wives of Windsor have much more prose, capitalized and in irregular lengths like those of verse, than we can well ascribe to the com-
1 Cf. p. 233. * Cf. p. 114. 3 Cf. p, 510.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 183
positor. Professor Wilson, who finds the same feature in A SArew, the Quarto Richard III, and the Folio Merry Wives of Windsor — he might have added the Famous Victories — thinks that the arrangement may represent the practice of some company, which liked to have its parts written so.1 The Folio Merry Wives of Windsor and Richard III passages seem to me cases of ordinary mis- judgement. The Merry Wives of Windsor irregularities are trifling, and there is only one prose scene in Richard 7/7, which might easily upset the compositor.2 In the other plays concerned there is a more or less marked tendency for the lengths to coincide with grammatical clauses. Per- haps parts might be written so, to facilitate memorizing, although the scanty prose in the Orlando part, while somewhat irregularly written, does not follow the clause- structure. I have noticed three rather similar bits of prose arrangement in the Folio, which come at the bottoms of pages, and may have been deliberately spaced out to cover some error discovered in a passage of composition which had progressed too far to make regular resetting prac- ticable.a Blank verse, even when printed as such, is often wrongly divided. Again a marginal insertion may some- times be responsible.4 In the bad Quartos an initial omis- sion throws the reporter out, and the verse runs wrongly but plausibly, as verse sometimes will, from a medial pause of one line to one in the next, until another error or the end of a speech recovers it. In the better texts, a compositor may be similarly misled by an omission, per- haps due to a cut. In some of the later plays, such as Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, it is noticeable that mislineation particularly affects the beginnings and ends of speeches. And here it looks like a result of misjudge- ment working upon irregularities in the copy. In the later plays Shakespeare tended more and more to end a speech and begin a new one in the middle of a line. The
1 Wilson, Ham. 51. I/, ii. 65 iii. 4. 1-15. Dr. McKcrxow
a Merry Wives of W. ii. i. 20-32, tells me that he too would attribute
121-3; &• 3* 8 7~92 > &f£* Iff* i* 4* these examples of irregularity to the
101-56. compositor rather than the 'copy*
3 Ham. ii. 2* 211-18$ As Tou Like 4 Cf. e>g. pp. 360, 481.
1 84 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
half-lines should no doubt have been written out separ- ately. But it may be suspected that in Shakespearean copy they were in fact often written continuously with the fore- going or subsequent lines. The compositor sometimes followed the copy and sometimes tried unsuccessfully to adjust the context. Finally, a single verse line is often split and printed in two half-lines. In the Folio, this is generally due to the narrow space available in the columns. It be- comes almost normal in the opening lines of speeches, where speech-prefixes have to be accommodated, and com- positors acquired a habit of splitting these lines, even where it was not absolutely necessary. Mr. Simpson sug- gests that other lines were deliberately split, to indicate a substantial pause in utterance.1 This may very likely be so. There is often a change of subject or address, or a gesture or interval for reflection is conceivable. My treat- ment of mislineation is necessarily tentative. The whole subject needs more investigation than it has yet received or can receive here*
It is difficult to measure the amount of divergence from Shakespeare's originals caused by misprinting, even where alternative versions are available. The general standard of typographical accuracy was not high, and is likely to have been at its lowest in such books as plays, especially if they were not 'overseen' by the authors.2 The proportion of emendations adopted by modern editors is no safe guide, since the adoption is often superfluous, and on the other hand parallel texts disclose misprints which no editor would suspect and omissions which no emendation could recover. These may also exist in the single texts. For what it is worth, Dr. Furness calculated, without taking account of 'stage-directions, metrical division of lines, mere punctuation, and immoment changes of spelling, that the Cambridge editors adopted 60 emendations in the 3,064 lines of the single Folio text of Antony and Cleo- patra. The Globe edition obelizes about 130 lines as cor- rupt and incapable of emendation, or as bearing witness
1 Simpson, Punctuation, 695 cf. p. * Albright 356 cites contemporary 459. complaints and apologies by printers.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 185
to lacunae, in the plays and poems as a whole.1 Dr. Greg thinks that, in view of the clearness of extant theatrical manuscripts and the probability that the best compositors were put upon manuscript copy, we may expect the errors of first editions to have been 'of the same order of mag- nitude* as those appearing in reprints.2 The accuracy of reprints we can measure, since each Quarto at least seems to have been normally set up from its immediate pre- decessor, with some conjectural corrections, but without further reference to copy. The continuance of old mis- prints is itself one proof of this. Professor Pollard has traced the process of degeneration in the five Quartos of Richard IL* He assumes, for the purposes of the analysis, the authority of the Cambridge text, and lists divergences from it by way of the omission, transposition, addition, and substitution of words and letters, but not errors in 'line- arrangement, speakers, spelling, and punctuation', or a few others which he considers 'negligible'. On this cal- culation Qq2-£ between them make 214 errors which were not in Qi. Their contributions vary from .the 123 of Q2 to the 1 8 of Q4. The Folio, reprinting from the Quarto of Much Ado About Nothing, introduces 122 errors.4 On the other hand, Q2 of Jonson's Every Man Out of his Humour is an almost exact reprint of Qi.5 Jonson, how- ever, 'oversaw' his own plays with extreme care. A little direct evidence as to first editions id furnished by some manuscript alterations made by Massinger in prints of his plays. In a presentation copy of The Duke of Milan, of which he does not seem to have seen proofs, he corrected 33 errors and overlooked perhaps a dozen more. In a collection of eight plays he made between 200 and 300 corrections, many of them merely in punctuation. Some had already been made during printing in variant examples. Of course he may have introduced a few afterthoughts.6 The conclusions to be drawn as to the purity of the Shake- spearean texts will differ for the pessimist and the optimist.
1 Pollard, F.Q. 129. « Wilson, Much Ado, 154.
* Greg, Abridgements, 271. 5 Greg ia 4 Library, i. 153.
* Pollard, Rich. II, 38. « Greg, ibid. iv. 207; v. 59.
186 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
The influence of the printing-house upon the texts is not confined to verbal misprints and mislineation. Pro- bably from the beginning, certainly in some of the re- printed Quartos, and more markedly in the Folio, there is a small amount of conjectural emendation intended to remove errors or presumed errors in the copy. Thus the later Quartos of Richard 11^ while accumulating misprints, also correct 25 out of 69 slips in Qi. There are some puzzling changes in the Henry V and the 2, 3 Henry VI of 1 6 1 9, which may even point to a source of amelioration more authoritative than conjecture. On the other hand, there are certain subsidiary matters, in which we have to recognize the probability of considerable departures from the originals. The most important of these are ortho- graphy, elision, punctuation, and capitalization. Ortho- graphy in the sixteenth century was in a state of transition and indeed of chaos. Private letters, even when written by well-educated men and women, show an extreme of in- dividualism. Grammarians, such as Richard Mulcaster, put forward systems on more or less scientific lines, but the modern standard spelling, as it gradually established itself during the seventeenth century, took its own way, without much regard for science.1 Printed books display a uniform- ity much greater than that of popular usage, but within the limits of this there was still room for a great deal of variation. Many vowel-sounds could be represented either by a single vowel, a double vowel, or a diphthong. A mute 4e' could be added or omitted at will. The *y' was con- vertible with T and with *ie\ The variation affected the length of words, and it has already been pointed out that compositors made use of it in 'justifying' their lines.2 This would not much affect blank verse, except in the Folioj where the double columns cramped the space. Individual compositors had probably their own tendencies.3 It is
1 R. Mulcaster, Ekmentarie (1582, the mute V, but adds, 'the Printers in
ed. E. T. Campagnac, 1925), chh. xvi- consideration for the Justifying of the
xxiv, with a table of spellings (ch.xxv). lynes, as it is sayde gf the makers to
* Cf. p. 171. William Salesbury, make vp the ryme, must be borne
Plain Introduction teaching how to pro- wythalT. nounce . . . Wekh (1567), complains of 3 T. SatcheU (1920, June 3, T.L.S.)
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 187
clear that they were not normally expected to follow the spellings of their copy, and indeed to do so would largely increase the time taken in setting-up, and therefore the cost. Field's treatment of Harington's Ariosto furnishes good evidence, since Harington was in many respects particular about the printing. Of 136 variants from the modern standard Field normalizes 84, alters but leaves variant 29, and keeps 23. He adds 8 variants.1 Similarly some habitual spellings found in the manuscripts of Gabriel Harvey do not appear in his printed work,2 It is true that others by Anthony Munday and Thomas Churchyard do sometimes so appear.3 Possibly an author, as now, could get his eccentricities respected if he made a point of it. But in any case one must not suppose that a compositor w;as always on his guard against the influence of his copy. He would be likely enough to follow it in an unusual word, or one which obviously represents a deliber- ate mispronunciation by Fluellen or another, or even else- where through inadvertence. And in fact 'occasional' abnormal spellings are common enough, and may some- times represent an author's spellings slipping through. There are a good many abnormal spellings in the con- troverted addition to Sir Thomas More, and some of these or of similar types recur in Shakespearean Quartos. Professor Wilson gives some valuable lists.4 Of such things one writer could rarely have had a monopoly. Moreover, a compositor might himself have abnormal spellings at the back of his mind. Scime at least of those relied upon by Professor Wilson to link Shakespeare with Sir Thomas More are to be found in texts not at all likely to have been set up from originals or even transcripts of these.5
seems to show that two compositors, (Essays and Studies of the English As-
with different tendencies, worked on sociarian, x. 36).
Macbeth. s T1"is a fa*** or a **auen (for
« 4 Library, iv. no. eleven) is not 6nly in S.T.M. and in
» McKerrow 247. Mfr. of 7en., Love's Lab. Lost, and
3 M. St. C. Byrne in 4 Library, Ham. (Qi), but also in Troil. & Ores. iv. o: v. 243. (Qi)> and in the reported Rom. V Jul.
4 Sh.Hand, 1& Spellings and Mis- (Qi). This also has kudvsinckt, prints in the Second Quarto of Hamlet twiacUe, incke, senceks, dartenes,
1 88 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
Elisions are important in that they affect the metre, since the presence or absence of them means the difference between disyllabic and trisyllabic feet.1 Dr. McKerrow suggests that it was the business of the actors to know how to speak verse, and that possibly the author, no more than the compositor, would take much pains about the textual form, so that we may 'exercise our own judgement in its interpretation'.2 Shakespeare's measure of confidence in the actors is shown by Hamlet's warning to them to speak 'trippingly on the tongue', which can only mean not to slur the trisyllables.3 Dr. McKerrow's doctrine is a comfort- able one for editors, but highly dangerous. It would justify Dr. Van Dam in adding innumerable elisions of his own and reducing the text of Hamlet to a strictly decasyllabic basis. And it would justify Mr. Bayfield in his constant disregard of apostrophes in the interests of trisyllabic rhythm. The methods are equally perverse. No doubt Spenser's frequent apostrophes show that he clung to the decasyllable.4 But dramatic blank verse may reasonably approach nearer to the manner of common speech than epic. Shakespeare certainly used both elisions and trisyllabic feet, and distributed them with a growing delicacy of ear. The ingenuous Mr. Bayfield, after argu- ing at length that the elisions were foisted in by tran- scribers and printers, arrived at the afterthought that they were probably legitimate but only indicated a light pro- nunciation of syllables. For this he conceived himself to find support in Jonson's use of apostrophes. Jonson, how- ever, knew perfectly well that an apostrophe normally meant the 'rejecting' of a vowel.5 Professor Pollard be- lieves that elided syllables 'should almost always be pro- nounced, but so lightly as not to interfere with the rhythm of the verse'.6 I have something of the same feeling myself. One retains some consciousness of the elided
singlenest chaples, Uktnes, drudg, ttapp, + J. D. Wilson, A Not* on EMons
bin (been), and other spellings regarded in the Faerie Queene (M.L.R. xv. 409).
by Wilson as 'significant*. 5 Jonson, English Grammar, ii. i;
1 Cf. p. 262. cf. Herford-Simpson, ii. 428.
« McKen-ow 250. 6 Pollard, Rich. //, 75-
3 Ham, Hi. 2. x.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 189
sound, but it does not amount to a metrical syllable. This is, however, a subtlety which we cannot expect typography to recognize. It is true that, in the poems of Spenser and Donne, in Jonson's plays with some.frequency, and occa- sionally in the later Shakespearean Quartos and the Folio, wejjet a fully printed word followed by an apostrophe.1 This probably indicates not an elision, but merely a light pronunciation of what is still a syllable. It was an abnormal device, which has not endured. Ordinarily an apostrophe means an elision.2 But often there is no apostrophe, and the elision is indicated merely by the omission of a vowel, or by its transference to the end of a word.3 Often there is an accompanying consonantal modification.4 An elided word may be merged with the next.5 The elision of pro- nouns yields some special forms.6 The prefixes of nouns and verbs may be dropped without an apostrophe. A rather minute examination of the elisions in the Qi of Merchant of Venice leaves the impression that in that text at least the copy was followed with some fidelity. Its elisions and trisyllables generally supply a satisfactory rhythm. One or two are clearly wrong, and a score or so of others may be doubtful. But even if these are misprints, the proportion is not a high one. Other First Quartos, even good ones, may very possibly be less correct. And certainly there is a tendency in reprints, and notably in the Folio, to alter readings in the direction of eliminating trisyllabic feet.7 One cannot, therefore, feel much con- fidence in the elisions of plays which are only preserved in
1 Bayfield 300; Herford-Simpson, trap. This is also found in S.T.M.
ii. 430; Wilson in M.L.R. xv. 412. There is a discussion in T.L3. (1924,
The Folio has to9 th* (Ant. & Cleo. ii. i. Aug. 2i-Oct. 16) around the emenda-
115 ii. 2. 25) and Qi of Oth. i. i. 67, tion of tie eft for theft in Love's Lab.
carrf et. Last, iv. 3. 336.
a Jonson says 'though it many d e.g. tis, twill, t&wolt, ist, Ile,ylet
times, through the negligence of theyle, week, youle> ant, ont, ons, itk%
writers and printers, is quite omitted*, yfoitk. I do not find Im or Fm in
3 e.g. in Mer. of Ven.y ashamde, Mer. of Fen. I am easily runs into a
tride, eyde> stolne. trisyllabic foot.
e.g. voorshipt, *tmlockt> drest, crost, i Many examples are in Bayfield
ie, tone, waft. 52 sqq. e.g. thcyiernoQn^ tmnteTt<jur% tyn-
I9o PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
the Folio.1 On the other hand, consonantal elision becomes more prominent in the later plays, and this may perhaps indicate a change in Shakespeare's own habit.2 The ap- pearance of elisions in prose, where they have no metrical value, is rather puzzling. They often suggest a colloquial utterance, but are not used with any uniformity.3 They may have come naturally to a pen accustomed to use them freely in verse.
'Punctuation affords a difficult and much controverted problem. That of Elizabethan manuscripts is unprin- cipled and generally scanty. Harington's, in his transla- tion of Ariosto, is mechanical and pays little regard to the sense. His printer used great freedom in regulating it* Dr. McKerrow is no doubt right in thinking that any rules which existed are more likely to have been observed in the printing-houses than elsewhere.5 Such rules had been formulated by Aldus Manutius in 1561, on principles which do not differ essentially from modern usage; and these may have introduced the semicolon, the function of which is still imperfectly established in our texts.6 It is not recognized by such of the sixteenth-century gram- marians as discuss punctuation at all.7 But even in the printing-houses there can have been little consistency of practice. The punctuation of the Quartos varies very much, and in some it is extremely bad. The Folio, when reprinting, makes many alterations, generally in the direc- tion of heavier stopping. Clearly different minds have been at work, and as clearly it is impossible to ascribe to Shakespeare much of what we find. This did not deter
1 The tendency of the F printer a Cf. Bayfield 262 sqq.
sometimes leads him to put '/ where 4 4 Library, iv. 115.
the metre clearly requires it. 5 McKerrow 250.
* The commonest are in such com- 6 Interpungendi Ratio in Qrtkogra-
binations as o* tV and ? th\ but I find phiae Ratio (Venice, 1561), 525 cf. H.
i* th* rears' our Birth (Wtnt. Tale, iv. Jenkinson in R.E.S. ii. 152.
4. 592) and of Wallace (Wint. Tale, * John Hart, A Methode or com-
iv. 4. 731), where whole words go. In fortable beginning for all unlearned
Mer. of Fen. ever and never become (1570)5 R. Mulcaster, Elementarie
ere and nere, but even is not elided, (1582), ch. xxij [G. Puttenham?] Arte
except once, in the odd form in (iii. of English Poesie (1589), ii. 5.
dtp. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 191
Professor Wilson from writing at the outset of his editorial work on Shakespeare:
The old texts were prompt-copy, more akin to operatic score than to modern literary drama. This explains the ungrammatical punctuation which, hitherto neglected or despised by editors, is now recognized as of the highest dramatic importance. The stops, brackets, capital letters in the Folio and Quartos are in fact stage- directions, in shorthand. They tell the actor when to pause and for how long, they guide his intonation, they indicate the emphatic word, often enough they indicate 'stage-business'.1
This principle, so far as stops are concerned, Professor Wilson regarded as a 'discovery* of Mr. Simpson's Shake- spearian Punctuation (1911). He departs from it con- siderably in his detailed treatment of some individual plays. Thus in Much Ado About Nothing he discerns Shakespeare's careful punctuation mainly in set speeches, and elsewhere a light punctuation 'largely supplied by the compositor, who tound little guidance in his copy'. And in Love's Labour 's Lost he thinks that we get, again with some exceptions, a punctuation 'not only frequently ab- surd but greatly overweighted throughout, especially in the matter of full-stops'. The 'operatic score' has receded into the background. No doubt in the interval Professor Wilson has been influenced by a new study of Professor Pollard's theory, as set out in his Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates and his edition of Richard II. This also assumes that Shakespeare was normally a rapid writer, who did not trouble about punctuation, but occasionally became more careful, when he wanted a speech delivered in a particular way, and that the printers, while perhaps adopting* his stops when there were any, were obliged to do the best they could for themselves when there were not. As to Shakespeare's main habit, Professor Pollard may very likely be right. If he wrote the scene claimed for him in Sir Thomas More> the inadequate punctuation of that would be a confirmation.* The belief in his occasional interven-
1 Temp, xxix, xxxviL Professor composed of dots and dashes, like a Wilson disfigures his own text by in* feminine novel* troducing a new punctuation, largely * Cf. p. 510.
1 92 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
tion to control the actors is more open to dispute. This also is at least in part derived from Mr. Simpson's in- vestigation, the object of which was to show that 'English punctuation has radically changed in the last hundred years', and that, while modern punctuation attempts to be logical, 'the earlier system was mainly rhythmical'.1 Even if it were so, it would hardly bear out Professor Wilson's initial pronouncement, since Mr, Simpson was primarily analysing the punctuation of the Folio. This is largely its own, and we surely cannot suppose that its compositors, or indeed those of the Quartos, were undertaking the task of providing shorthand stage-directions. Mr. Simpson himself appears to be now content with Professor Pollard's view, although some phrases in his original statement were open to misconstruction on this point.2 His main theory has had to stand the fire of much criticism, some of it ill- conceived. The term 'rhythmical' was not altogether a happy one, since it suggested a habit of regularly punc- tuating the end of every line, or each of those mid-line pauses which the Elizabethans and some modern metrists inaccurately call 'caesuras'. Such a habit is apparent in some contemporary printed verse, but not to any great extent in the Shakespearean texts.3 On the contrary, stops, which would have been required in prose, are often omitted at line-ends; and this is intelligible, since an 'end- stopped' line by itself entails a pause quite equal to that of a comma. Professor Pollard's 'dramatic' expresses the meaning better, and perhaps 'rhetorical' is better still. When Mr. Simpson calls his collection of Folio uses a 'system', he is putting it rather high. He contents himself with bringing together positive instances, and does not pay much attention to negative ones; and even then he has to acknowledge alternative uses. There are three ways, for example, of treating the vocative, and five- ways of treating the break in an uncompleted sentence. Neverthe- less, the collection is an illuminating one. It is a more fundamental criticism that the antithesis between a logical punctuation and a rhetorical punctuation is not really
1 Simpson 8. * Proc. Oxford BibL Soc. i. 39. ? Cf. however, p. 123.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 193
sound. All punctuation has elements both of logic and of rhetoric. It has its origin in spoken utterance. Mr. Simp- son points out that 'distinction', which was an Elizabethan term for a 'stop', was used by classical grammarians in the sense of a 'pause'.1 For the matter of that, a 'stop' also means a 'pause'. Pauses are primarily for taking breath in speech. On the other hand, the terms for individual stops, 'period', 'colon', and 'comma', indicate in the language of the grammarians, not pauses, but sentences or parts of sentences.2 The Elizabethans were conscious of the spoken aspect of pronunciation. Mr. Simpson quite rightly quotes Mulcaster and Heywood to show this.3 But Mulcaster and Heywood could not have said anything different, if they had had modern usage before them. In spoken utterance, however, the main pauses for breath come at the syntactical junctures which determine the logical structure. Were it not so, the utterance would be unintelligible. And if a written language uses stops, these naturally follow suit. The primary dominance of logic, however, still leaves a great deal of room for rhetorical variation of effect. Pauses can be lengthened or shortened, or additional ones introduced. Thus we may indicate the solemnity of emphasis, the affected hesitation which awakes attention, the rapidity of impassioned appeal. Stops can be similarly manipulated. Modern usage does not here differ essentially from Elizabethan usage. We divide sen- tences by full-stops, sometimes inserting a conjunction when the sentences are logically related. We link in- dependent but closely related clauses within a sentence by semicolons, some of us also by colons, or like Professor Wilson by commas. We link co-ordinate clauses and phrases and attach subordinate clauses and phrases by
1 Ibid. i. 36. to the right and tunable vttering of
a Fries 80 cites Aristotle, Cicero, our words and sentences/ Heywood,
and Quintilian on the point. Apology* C3V» «9» that academic plays
3 Mulcaster, Elementarie, ch. xxi, taught a student 'to speak well, and
'This title of distinction reacheth verie with iudgement, to obserue his com-
far, bycause it conteineth all those ma's, colons, & full poynts, his paren-
characts, and their vses, which I call theses, his breathing spaces, and dis~
before signifying, but not sounding tinctions'. which help verie much, naie all in aU
3X42.1
194 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
commas or semicolons, or without stops. And these variations depend, not only on the length of the sentences, clauses, and phrases, but also upon deliberate rhetorical purpose. The divergence of the Folio from modern usage, which Mr. Simpson's examples illustrate, is in detail rather than in principle. Much of it is merely a matter of the use of symbols. A colon is put where we should put a full-stop, or where we should put a comma. The difference is in the value attached to the colon, not in the length of pause intended. A comma is often put where we should put a semicolon. Clearly the use of the semicolon was not yet fully appreciated. Mr. Simpson has a list of independent clauses linked by commas, but the actual length of pause required in utter- ance varies considerably.1 A more free use of semicolons would have made a finer rhetorical differentiation prac- ticable. The colon is independently used, not only as now to introduce a quotation, but also, indifferently with the interrogation mark, to supply the want of an exclamation mark. There are differences to be observed also in the distribution of commas. Professor Pollard says that the Elizabethan usage was nearer to normal speech than ours, which 'balances comma by comma with a logic intolerable in talk'. I do not altogether agree. Modern usage has some superfluous commas, marking off vocatives and im- peratives and very short clauses and phrases. But often, if a pause is required for intelligibility at the end of such a clause or phrase, one is required at the beginning also; and the Folio habit of omitting an initial comma in such cases does not make for good utterance. What, however, strikes one most about the Folio is the frequent excess of its commas. They come, for example, according to Mr. Simpson, at the end of a composite subject, or again be- tween an accusative and a dative. Frequently, and in a most irritating way, they supplement a conjunction in linking nouns, verbs, and adjectives, which have a common position in a sentence. But surely, as so used, they are logical or grammatical, rather than rhetorical,
1 Simpson if.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 195
devices. You do not want a rhetorical pause in such lines as—1
The Cowslips tall, her pensioners bee, or "
I could haue giuen my Vnkles Grace, a flout, or —
Your brother, and his louer haue embrac'd; or —
Th' extrauagant, and erring Spirit, hyes
This last line has two commas, one superfluous and the other clearly wrong. And indeed the constant intrusion of a comma directly between subject and predicate is one of the most disturbing features in the Folio punctuation.2 Here, and in commas between. object and complement, and in similar intrusions of colons and even full-stops, Mr. Simpson often discerns a rhetorical purpose. It may some- times be there. There are parallel cases in the works of Donne, who seems to have punctuated more carefully than most of his contemporaries.3 And there is no reason why the Elizabethans should not have handled the possibilities inherent in the system of punctuation rather more freely than we do. This would not constitute it a different system. But I cannot believe that any intention of Shake- speare is represented by the second stop in the line from Hamlet quoted above or by
To each of you, one faire and vertuous Mistris; Fall when loue please, marry to each but one.4
Curiously enough, the Restoration found the punctuation bequeathed to it inadequate in just what Mr. Simpson regards as its distinguishing characteristic. In 1665 John Evelyn proposed that the Royal Society should invent some 'new Periods and Accents, to assist, inspirit, and modifie the Pronunciation of Sentences, & to stand as markes beforehand how the voice & tone is to be governed ; as in reciting of Playes, reading of Verses, &c. for the
1 Mid. N. Dr. ii. x. 105 'Rich. Ill, Sonnets.
ii. 4. 245 Meets, for Meas. i. 4. 405 * Grierson, Poems of Donne, n. Ham. i. i . 154. ocxii; E. M. Simpson in R.E.S. iv. 295.
2 It recurs in the badly printed 4 All's WeU, ii. 3. 63.
o 2
196 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
varying the tone of the vo^ce, and affections, &c\x For- tunately nothing came of it. In one respect, indeed, we are ourselves more rhetorical than the Elizabethans. They made little use of the dash; an unpleasing device which, as in this sentence, I try to avoid. Where there are pos- sible rhetorical stops in the Shakespearean texts, the general character of the punctuation must make us hesi- tate before ascribing them with any confidence to Shake- speare himself. There are obvious exceptions in such passages as Pistol's gabble while he eats the leek or the pace of Margaret's tongue in Much Ado About Nothing.2 Here the compositor may have preserved an intention of the author, as he sporadically preserved dialectic pronun- ciation. Clearly it is so with Quince's prologue.3
The parenthesis is on rather a different footing. It is not properly a punctuation mark, and primarily it encloses something which breaks the run of the sentence; an aside, a qualification, an afterthought. Here it may be regarded as rhetorical, and a change of intonation may be appro* priate.4 But the use of it gets much extension in the Shake- spearean texts, and brackets merely replace commas, to enclose vocatives, exclamations, short appositions, ad- jectival or adverbial phrases, and the like. They also in- troduce quotations. Professor Wilson thinks that in Q2 of Hamlet they generally imply 'some kind of mental or spiritual disturbance'. There are only thirteen examples, and most of them are quite colourless.5 One may there- fore suspect a misapplied subtlety, when Professor Wilson quotes —
My fathers spirit (in armes) all is not well, and adds that 'the brackets simply vibrate with the tones
1 Cf. J. Isaacs in R£.S. ii. 462. so not fullie coincident to the sentence,
2 Hen. 79 v. i. 49; Much Ado, iii. which it breaketh, and in leading 4. 93 . waxneth vs, that the words inclosed by
3 Mid. N. Dr. v. i. 119, 'He hath them, ar to be pronounced with a rid his prologue like a rough colt; he lower & quikker voice, then the words knows not the stop'. either before or after them.'
* Mulcaster, Elementorie, ch. xxi, * In i. 5. 170-8 the brackets excep-
'Parenthesis is expressed by two half tionally include a divagation of nine
circles, which in writing enclose some lines, perfit branch, as not mere impertinent,
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 197
of mystery and amazement'. And when he finds 'a wild hysterical chuckle' in Qi's —
(My tables) meet it is I set it down,
it is we who chuckle with the reporter.1 The frequency of brackets varies. There are only thirteen pairs in Merchant of Venice and forty-four in Midsummer-Night's Dream. In both cases the Folio, reprinting, follows the Quartos, which looks as if the printers were normally guided by their copy in this respect. On the other hand, in i Henry IV) the Folio doubles the seventeen examples of the Quarto. Brackets are exceptionally common in Winters Tale\ there are even brackets within brackets. They seem to have become mere flourishes, and may confirm the con- jecture that Winter's Tale was printed from a calligraphic transcript. The Quarto of Othello omits two lines, which in the Folio are bracketed.2 Did a transcriber take the brackets for deletion-marks? Inverted commas occa- sionally seem to call attention to gnomic passages. Pro- bably they came from copy. They are occasionally to be found in printed books of non-dramatic poetry, as well as in plays.3 I do not see why the reporter could not have introduced them into the Qi of Ham Jet.4 We may assume that the printers capitalized the beginnings of sentences, including some which follow a colon or semicolon, and of verse-lines, when they did not happen to be short of capital type.5 Individual words, mainly but not wholly nouns, also receive capitals. Very likely some of these are due to the author. The use is comparatively sparing in the Quartos, being commonest in tides and designations, names of classes of mankind, and personifications. The Folio considerably extends it, often capitalizing the names of animals, plants, and other natural objects, and of craft products. But there is no uniformity anywhere. Of course many of the words are important, but it is rather an
1 Wilson, Ham. 9. 3 They are common, e. g. in
a Oth. i. 2. 655 3. 63. If Qi of Sir John Dme^NosceTeipsum (1599).
K. Lear is reported, its omission of 4 Wilson, Ham. n.
i. i. 50-1 cannot be similarly ex- * Cf.p. 370.
plained.
198 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
exaggeration to speak of 'emphasis-capitals*. A 'slight exaltation of tone* is often fanciful, even apart from conventions like 'Lord', 'Madam', and 'Sir'.1 The frequent capitalization of C may be due to a scribal distaste for the insignificant minuscule, and that of M to the resemblance of the majuscule and minuscule forms.2 Italics are used, both in the Quartos and the Folio, for proper names, but not quite systematically, and for speech-prefixes. The Folio regularly uses them for stage-directions throughout.3 This is also the commonest practice in the Quartos. But sometimes the body of a stage-direction is in roman type and only the names or some of them in italics, and sometimes this arrangement is reversed. The variant methods may appear side by side in the same Quarto. It is notably so in Qi of Merchant of Venice. Broadly these uses of italics answer to those of Italian script in theatrical manuscripts, but the printers may well have done some regularization.4 There is an exceptional appearance of italics for ordinary dialogue both in Qi and Q2 of Romeo and Juliet. They are also used normally for songs, letters, inscriptions, and the like. These were read from scrolls on the stage, but the scrolls were presumably extracted, like parts, from the originals. In the textsr it is not always clear by whom matter is read. It may merely have some such heading as *A letter1, without a speech- prefix. And if it is inserted in a speech, and a comment by the speaker follows, there is sometimes a second speech- prefix for the comment. This is so in Q2 of Hamlet ^ which is not likely to rest on a stage-copy. There is therefore no reason to think with Professor Wilson that elsewhere the same arrangement shows that a scroll formed part of the copy.5
It has been held that the Folio received, from Heminges
1 Simpson 1035 Pollard, St. F. 93, other exceptions. '
Rich. IT, 30, 71. 4 Jonson's MS. Mas* of Queens,
a Cf. McKerrow in R.E.S. iii. 29. Dr. Greg tells me, like a non-dramatic
3 Some stage-directions in TV^u. MS. noted by McKerrow 251, has
2, iv. i, v. i, !T«w Gent, offer, ii. 5, 6, 7, words underlined, as if for italicization.
andMfr^J^w«o/JP.i.i,ii. 1,2 have * Ham. ii. 2. 1255 iv. 6. 325 7. 505
the names in roman type; there may be cf. Wilson, Me r. of Ven. 96.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 199
and Condell, or Ben Jonson, or Edward Blount, or an- other, some sort of editing beyond what a printing-house would naturally supply. The evidence is not very strong. The process of sophistication, already noticed in the ortho- graphy and in the smoothing out of metre with the help of elisions, is perhaps also traceable here and there in the diction. There may be some tendency to eliminate dialectic, colloquial, or merely unusual words and archaic inflexions. The use of 'a* for 'he', 'of ' or 'on' seems to meet with particular disapproval. Even puns are mis- understood or disliked. Trifling grammatical solecisms in moods and cases are removed. Adverbial adjectives give way to adverbs. There are substitutions of 'thou' for 'you' and of 'mine' for 'my' and of 'my' for 'mine* before a vowel or consonant respectively. I have noticed about a score of possible examples in Merchant of Venice? There are others in Professor Pollard's lists of variants for Richard II, in Professor Wilson's for Much Ado About Nothing^ and in Dr. Van Dam's for Hamlet, although here a transcript has doubtless intervened. It is not at all clear that we need look beyond the compositors. Indeed, the interchanges, especially between 'my' and 'mine', are not always in the same direction. Nor is it clear that the sophistication is deliberate; it may be merely due to sub- conscious misprinting.2 One way or another, those of our texts which rest on the Folio alone are probably somewhat farther from Shakespeare's originals than the others. In the Quartos, except partially for Othello, and for some typographical devices in Pericles and part of the bad edi- tion of Romeo and Juliet^ the plays are not divided by acts and scenes. This is the commonest arrangement in prints
1 Mer. of Vert. i. 2. 7 small < meane hand < cosin, hands, iv. i. 22 exacts* t
(pun), 18 then be < then to be, 25 < exacts, 77 fretted < fretten, 123 soale
whom < who, 47 afraid < afeard, 55 to < soule (pun), 14* endlesse < curelesse,
be < be, 69 should < shall, i. 3. 123 258 should < doe, 290 whom < who,
should < can, 152 it pleaseth < pleas- 334 thee < you, 379 Gods sake < God-
eth, ii. 9. 7 thou < you, iii. i. 32 sake, v. i. 209 mine honour < my
fledg'd < flidge (a good dialect word), honour, 233 my bedfellow < mine
iii. 2. 93 makes < maketh, 160 nothing bedfellow. < something (pun), iii. 4. 50 cosins a Cf. p. 180.
200 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
of plays belonging to the public theatres,1 The Folio introduces such divisions, but very incompletely. Each play begins with the heading Actus primus, Scena prima, or in three cases Actus primus alone. The typography sug- gests that headings, with their enclosing rules, were set-up for blocks of plays, and transferred successively from one to another of them.2 Seventeen plays are also fully divided by acts and scenes throughout, two imperfectly by acts and scenes, eleven by acts alone, while six remain undivided. These variations cannot be correlated at all exactly, either with the chronological order of the plays, or with Professor Pollard's theory that special care was spent upon those disinterred for the Folio. It is perhaps noteworthy that the four latest written plays are all fully divided, and that of the eight earlier plays of which revivals during 1610-23 are traceable, five are fully and three partially divided.3 It is therefore at least possible that, while the division was imperfectly carried out, the information for it came from the theatre. Professor Wil- son's conjecture that the King's men came to pay more attention to act-intervals after they occupied the Black- friars in 1609 is an attractive one,4 The curious stage- direction at the end of act iii of Midsummer-Night's Dream — 'They sleepe all the Act' — is an addition of the Folio. Here 'Act' means the act-interval. Mr. Lawrence's argu- ment that the parody, if it is one, of the device in Histrio- mastix iii. 299 shows the act-interval to be of old standing is inconclusive, since Histriomastix itself may have received an addition before the print of i6io.5 -The Malcontent shows that long act-intervals were not in use at the Globe in 1 6c>4.6 It does not follow that there were no breaks at all. Shakespeare himself uses the terms 'act' and 'scene'
1 EUx. Stage, iii. 1995 W. W. Greg Wilson (iv. 191).
in R.E£. iv. 152. 6 Ind. 89, on the additions made 'to
2 £. £. Wfiloughby in R.E.S. iv. entertain a little more time, and to 323. abridge the not received custom of
3 Cf. 5. The plays are J, 2 Hen. music in our theatre*. But 'abridge' 17, Much Ado, Jtd. Goes., Ham., is not found in the sense of 'bridge Twelfth Nigte, Oth., Macb. over*, and only means 'shorten'; cf.
4 RJ2S. iii. 385. Elix* Stage, iii. 125, 132.
5 Lawrence in R.E.S. iv. 78$ cf.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 201
rather indifferently, and with no clear technical signi- ficance. On the other hand, the evidence of the plots and the extant manuscripts seems to show that some account was taken both of act and scene divisions in the public theatres generally, and there is no obvious reason to sup- pose that the Globe was an exception.1 A scene division, no doubt, need not have implied more than a momentary pause in the continuity of a performance. Whatever their origin, the Folio divisions can hardly be correct, or at least Shakespeare's, in j Henry 71, Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, King John, and Henry 7. Modern editors have frequently altered the scene divisions unnecessarily, in- troducing a new scene where there is no change of time or locality, or even a real clearance of the stage, but only a shift of action from the outer stage to the alcove or gallery, or a fresh 'excursion' in a battle.2 The Folio supplies lists of 'actors', that is, of Dramatis Personae, for six plays, with indications of 'The Scene' for two of them. The object may be to fill up blank pages or half-pages. Professor Pollard traces editing in another feature of some of the special Folio plays. There is, he thinks, a 'substitution of literary for theatrical stage-directions, i.e. of notes helping - a reader to understand the play for memoranda reminding the prompter and actors of what had to be done'.3 I once accepted this view, but have now come to regard it as extremely dubious.4 Certainly the directions or the Tem- pest, Henry Fill, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus are un- usually elaborate; but they are not more so, although they are more elegant, than those of 2, 3 Henry FI\ and these cannot be editorial, since they are substantially reproduced, perhaps through the medium of a plot, in the reported Contention. Of course the descriptive directions in some other 'reported' texts are not comparable.5 I believe the stage-directions throughout the plays to be substantially Shakespeare's. They were no doubt modified by the addi- tions, eliminations, and alterations of the book-keeper, and
1 Cf, pp. 118, 124. 4 Elix. Stage, iii. 196.
2 M. Hunter in R.E.S. ii. 296. 5 Cf. p. 157. J SL F.Q. 125.
202 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
to this point I shall have to return.1 But in origin they seem to me to be the suggestive notes to the management of an author familiar with theatrical conditions, rather than theauthoritative instructions of the management to the prompter and actors. Looking at the matter chrono- logically, I conceive Shakespeare to have begun by writing stage-directions rather fully. When he settled down with the Chamberlain's men, and thereafter during the greater part of his career, they became comparatively slight. He was on the spot and was able to take his share in planning and rehearsing productions. In the late plays named above they are full again. It is an ingenious and probable sug- gestion by Professor Wilson that these plays may have been written in the country, for production during his absence.2 The Tempest and Henry VIII^ in particular, are full of spectacular episodes, for which the dialogue by it- self would be an inadequate guide. Descriptive touches are natural here. But throughout the plays the general character of the directions is the same. They show fami- liarity with the technical resources of the theatre. And they contain notes for incidental action on the stage. But they also include others for apparel and the use of properties, for the grouping of entries, even for the bearing of the actors. Sometimes they indicate the relationship of char- acters; sometimes the scope of a scene, and very rarely its locality.3 Thus they deal with points many of which had to be considered and settled in the tiring-house, long before the opening of performances. The suggestive element is especially noteworthy in directions which leave for later decision such details as the number of supernumeraries to be employed in a scene. These are precisely the features which we find in the directions written by the main hands in extant play-manuscripts, and which are freely altered by the book-keepers there.-* I think they are to be discerned
» Cf.p.236. 3 2Hen.IP(Q)>iv.i.i, 'Enter...
« Wilson, Temp. 80: CorioL fees. I within the fonest of Gaultree'j Hen. V
do not suppose Timon to have been (F),iii. i. i, 'Scaling Ladders at Har-
actuafly produced, and presumably flew*,
many of the Hen. 7IU stage-directions + Cf . p. 1 1 8. are not Shakespeare's.
Chap. VI PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE 203
in the four late plays, as well as in the earlier ones.1 It is not inconsistent with what we may suspect of Shake- speare's temperament that many of his directions are written in an off-hand manner. The characters are desig- nated, now by individual, now by generic names.2 When a group which has been once seen, returns, it often gets a summary description. Here again the extant manu- scripts provide parallels, as well as for the frequent omis- sion of entries and exits. The book-keeper should have supplied the former, if not the latter.3 Sometimes the Folio and even the reprinted Quartos do, but only, one supposes, by inference from the text. I have an impression that Shakespeare sometimes wrote the initial direction to a scene before he had thought out the dialogue, and some- times, as a result, left the name of a character standing there for whom, after all, he had provided no speech.4 There is a casual aspect, also, about the speech-prefixes. They are often much abbreviated, and not consistently in the same form. Lords and servants may be differentiated only by a V, V, '3'. Dr. McKerrow thinks that the
1 e.g. CorioL i. i. 227 'EnteraMes- theatrical structure i. i. 47 'Showts
senger hastily', 231 'with other Sena- within', i. 4. 13 'on the Walks', i. 8. i
tours*, i. 3. i 'Volumnia and Virgilia, 'at seueral doores', v. 5. i 'passing
mother and wife to Marcius*, i. 4. i x>uer the Stage' j Temp. ii. i. i 'Enter
"as before the City Corialus', 30 'Mar- ... and others', iii. 3. i 'Enter . . . &c*,
cius Cursing', i. 6. i 'Cominius as it 17 'seuerall strange shapes . . . inuiting
were in retire', i. 9. i 'Martius, with the King, &c. to eate*, 53 'with a
hisArmeinaScarfe',ii. 2. i 'Officers, quient deuice', iv. i. 139 'certaine
to lay Cushions, as it were, in the Reapers (properly habited)'— not a
Capitoll', 41 'Enter the Patricians, description, but a warning to have
and the Tribunes of the People, Lie- 'wardrobe wit'— 194 'Ariell, loaden
tors before them: Coriolanus, Mene- with glistering appareU, &c.';^and for
nius, Cominius the Consul: Scicinius theatrical structure, i. z. 63 'A con-
and Brutus take their places by them- fused noyse within', iii. 2. 48 'Enter
selues: Coriolanus stands', iii. i. i 'all Ariell inuisible' (a stage convention;
the Gentry', 181 'a rabble of Pie- cf. £#*. Stage, iii. 108), iii. 3. 17
beians', 186 'They all bustle about 'Prosper on the top (inuisible)'— cf.
Coriolanus', iv. i . i 'the young Nobi- J Hen. VI for the only parallel to 'the
lity of Rome', iv. 4. i 'Coriolanus in top'— -v. i. 171 'Here Prospero dis-
meane Apparrell, Disguisd, and couers Ferdinand and Miranda'. But
muffled', iv. 6. 20 'three or foure v. i. 255 'Enter Ariell, driuing in
Citizens', 128 'a Troope of Citizens*, Caliban . . .* inverts theatrical usage, v. 2. i 'to the Watch or Guard', v. 3. * Cf. pp. 119, 232. 182 'Holds her by the hand silent', » Cf. p. 120. v. 6. 9 '3 or 4 Conspirators'; and for 4 Cf. p. 231.
204 PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE Chap. VI
compositors treated the prefixes in their copy freely, tending to unify the use of a form throughout a page.1 Sometimes a prefix has got attached to the wrong line. If Shakespeare, like the writer of the addition to Sir Thomas More> wrote the text first, and added the prefixes afterwards, they may well have occasionally, in spite of speech-rules, been placed too high or too low.2
1 4 Library, ii. 102. a Cf. p. 510.
CHAPTER VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY
Bibliographical Note. I have gone over much of the ground of this chapter in The Disintegration of Shakespeare (1924, British Academy) and The Unrest in Shakespearean Studies (1927, Nineteenth Century and After, ci. 255). Dramatic collaboration is discussed in E. N. S. Thompson, Eliza- bethan Dramatic Collaboration (1908, E.S. d. 30); 0. L. Hatcher Fletchers Habits of Dramatic Collaboration (1910, Anglia, xxxiii. 219); F. E. Pierce, The Collaboration ofDekker and Ford (1912, Anglia, xzzvi! 141, 289); L. Wann, The Collaboration of Beaumont, Fletcher and Mas- singer (1916, Wisconsin Studies, 147); W. J. Lawrence, Early Dramatic Collaboration: a Theory (1927, f re-restoration Studies, 340); C. Sisson, Keep the Widow Waking (1927, 4 Library, viii. 39, 233); E. H. C. Oli- phant, Beaumont and Fletcher (1927), Collaboration in Eliz. Drama ( 1020 PhiL Q. viii). ^ V V
My Disintegration lecture summarizes the earlier theories as to elements of unauthenticity in the Shakespearean canon. For later material I must refer to the Bit/. Notes to cL ix, and notably to J. D. Wilson's views as set out in the New Shakespeare. More general treatments are in E. H. C. Oliphant, Shakespeare's Plays: An Examination (1908-9, M.L.R. iii. 337; iv. 190, 342) and W. Keller, Sh. als UberarbeiterJremderDramen (1922, J. Iviii. 68). Many, but not all, of J. M. Robertson's studies are in his Sh. and Chapman (1917), The Shakespeare Canon (1922-30), Introduction to the Study of the Shakespeare Canon (1924). Some special points dealt with in this chapter are studied in F. H. Hoffmann, Uber die Beteuerungen in Shs Dramen (1894); J. M. Manly, Cuts and Insertions in Sh.'s Plays (1917, S.P. riv. 123); A. Gw, Actors' Names in Basic Shn. Texts (1925, PM.L.A. 3d. 530); W. J. Lawrence, SJL's Lost Characters (1928, Sh.'s Workshop, $<j),ANev> Shakespearean Test (ibid. 48); R. C. Bald, Macbeth and the 'Shorf Plays (1928, R.E.S. iv. 429).]
THE canon of Shakespeare's plays rests primarily on the authority of title-pages. Thirty-six are included in the First Folio. Quartos, good and bad, of fifteen of these also bear his name; it is not on those of Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, or. Henry 7. Quartos also ascribe to him Pericles and a share in Two Noble Kinsmen, which are not in the Folio. The registration entries of 2 Henry 77 and King Lear, which name^him, probably themselves rest on the title-pages. There is confirmation for some of the plays in contemporary references. The most important is the list given by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia of 1598.
206 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
This, on the assumption that Love Labours Won is an alternative title for Taming of the Shrew, contains twelve plays, but not Henry 7I> which must be early work.1 John Weever in 1599 speaks of Romeo and Juliet and either Richard II or Richard Hits Shakespeare's, Gabriel Harvey in or before 1601 of Hamlet ', Ben Jonson in 1619 and later of Julius Caesar and Winter's Tale* The Revels Accounts of 1604-5 ass*gn to him Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors, and Merchant of Venice^ but leave the Moor of Venice^ Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Love's Labour 's Lost anonymous.3 This evidence is of a kind which is ordinarily accepted as determining the author- ship of early literature. It is better than anything which we have for many of Shakespeare's dramatic contem- poraries. The Spanish Tragedy, for example, is only at- tributed to Kyd on the basis of a casual reference by Nashe, and of Marlowe's authorship of- Tamburlaine there is no direct contemporary record at all.4 But of course title- pages are capable of rebuttal, on sufficient external or internal grounds shown. Publishers are not always well- informed or even honest. Shakespeare's name is also in the registration entry and on the title-page of A Torkshire Tragedy and on those of The London Prodigal 'and Jaggard's reprint of Sir John Oldcastle, and the initials 'W. S.' are on those of Locrine (1595), Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602), and The Puritan (1607); and these six plays, with Pericles^ were added as his to the Third Folio in 1664. All s*x can be safely rejected from the canon. But the reason for the appearance of the name may not be the same in all cases. It is conceivable that Shakespeare or another W. S. 'over- saw' the printing of the old court play Locrine. Three of the other plays belonged to his company, and the pub- lishers may have been ignorant of their authorship. The same charitable supposition will not cover The Puritan or Sir John Oldcastle, a distinct play from Henry IP \ which also sometimes went under that name. The *W. S.' is simi- larly found on the Q2 of the Troublesome Reign, Shake-
1 App. B, no. xiii. s App. D.
* App. B, nos. xvii, xix, xxii. 4 Eliz. Stage, iii. 396, 421.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 207
speare's source-play for King John. This never got into a Folio. Other misascriptions are due to Commonwealth and Restoration booksellers.1 The only bit of external evidence against the authority of the First Folio itself is the statement of Edward Ravenscroft in 1687 ^at Shake- speare only touched up Titus Andronicus? But the inclu- sion of an individual play under the comprehensive title of that collection must not be pressed too far. Heminges and Condell and their publishers were not attempting a modern 'critical' edition, and no doubt their methods were imperfect. It is quite possible that they saw no harm in including without comment a play which Shakespeare had only revised, one or two for which he had a collaborator, and one to which he had contributed little, but which had long been linked to other 'parts' of an historical series. It follows, of course, that alien matter may be present in other plays than Titus Andronicus^ Taming of the Shrew> Henry VIII) and i Henry VI. Contrariwise the possibility that Shakespeare may have had a hand in some uncollected plays cannot be wholly disregarded. Nevertheless the Folio must be regarded as the chief authority for the main range of Shakespeare's dramatic responsibility, and it re- quires deference as coming from men who were in the best position to know the facts. A desire to do justice to a dead fellow' and some care taken in the work are ap- parent enough in the epistles. Mr. J. M. Robertson, who attempts to impugn the external evidence for the canon, tells us that the players ascribed to Shakespeare work that was not his 'in order to maintain their hold on the copy- rights',3 They had no publishing copyrights, but were
1 Cf. ch. x. every piece in their repertory in which * Cf. p. 316, and App, C, no. xiv. they had proprietary rights was for 3 Canon n. xvii, *We may pardon Heminge and Condell a way of main- the players for obstinately specifying taining their own interest.' Mr. Ro- as Shakespeare's works— in order to bertson protests (Canon in. 3) that he maintain their hold on the copyrights has not charged Heminges and Con- about which they are so obviously and dell with 'commercial fraud*. It may so naturally anxious— a collection of be so$ I do not know what degree of plays as to which they knew and we misrepresentation in one's own finan- know that much of the writing is not cial interest amounts to commercial Shakespeare's at all'; cf. Introd. 66, 70, fraud. 76, 80-1, 'To father on Shakespeare
208 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
protected against stationers before 1623, and certainly an author's name on a print could not help them. If Mr. Robertson means stage-rights, his case might be better.1 But the corroborative testimony of Meres can- not be disposed of by the repeated assertion that his list was 'derived from the theatre'.2 We do not know whence he derived it. He was a literary clergyman, resident in London, and evidently interested in writers for the stage, about whom he tells us other things not recorded elsewhere. Many sources of information may have been open to him. His style tends to parallelism, and he balances six comedies of Shakespeare against six tragedies. He does not mention Henry VI. It would have upset the balance. But Meres did not complete his university career until 1593, and Henry VI may not have been played in London between his arrival and the compilation of his list. In so far as the authority of the Folio is departed from, it must, except for the isolated case of Titu$ Andronicus, be on grounds of internal and not external evidence. It has often been departed from. A chronicle of the earlier scepticisms need not be set forth here.s They rested in part on an imperfect knowledge of the order in which the plays were written, which made the variations of style puzzling, and they were largely modified by the chrono- logical investigations of Malone. Some oracular utter- ances of Coleridge bridge a gap. Modern essays at dis- integrating the canon start from Fleay, whose own theories were ingenious if kaleidoscopic, but who called attention to many features of the texts, both stylistic and biblio- graphical, which are still receiving study. It is at present held by ihany students, and with varying degrees of stress on the different issues, that the Quarto and Folio texts- have often been altered or abridged by other hands than Shakespeare's; that he revised his plays, with the result that variant texts, and even a single text, may contain fragments of different recensions; that he also revised the
1 Cf. pp. 136, 149. » Cf. The Disintegration of Shake-
* Introd. 19, 59, 62, 65; Canon n. speare.
21, 139.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 209.
work both of predecessors and contemporaries, whose writing remains entangled with his in the texts. There are certain practices of Elizabethan dramaturgy, which have helped to create a prepossession in favour of such theories. Collaboration and revision are both verae causae. Col- laboration, rarely found in other forms of contemporary literature, was very common in drama. This can be estab- lished on records alone, without regard to the findings of conjecture. It begins with the courtly and legal amateurs of the 'sixties. Gorboduc> Tancred and Osmund, Jocastay and later Locrine and The Misfortunes of Arthur had all from two to seven collaborators.1 It is traceable among the University wits. The Looking Glass bears the names of Greene and Lodge; Dido those of Marlowe and Nashe. Greene, in 1592, addresses a 'young Juvenal, that biting satirist, that lastly with me together writ a Comedy'.2 Probably we find the practice at its maximum in Hen- slowe's accounts for the Admiral's and Worcester's men during 1597-1604, Fees were paid for about 130 new plays, and of these well over half were written in collabora- tion by from two to as many as five hands. Of the more important contributors Webster and Wilson never stood alone, Chettle only in 12 plays out of 44, Dekker in 9 out of 41. An exception is Chapman, all of whose five plays were unaided, but for the use of a plot which Jonson had abandoned.3 Jonson himself wrote one play alone and shared in three others. We may speculate as to the reasons for a method which cannot have made for good workman- ship, and we hardly get beyond speculation. Many of the plays were ephemeral productions. Plays did not have long runs. One which did not draw was quickly discarded, and a new one called for, often at short notice. Even for the court, Munday had to bind himself to furnish a play within a fortnight.4 The playwrights themselves were needy, and presumably small but frequent returns suited
1 Cf. p. 536 and Etix. Stage, iii. 320, 364. The ascriptions in Etiz. Stage,
348, 456, 514. ch. xxiii, differ in some details} the
* Ibid. iii. 451. facts are not always dear.
3 Cf. Greg's tables in Henslowe, ii. * Henslowe, i. 93.
3X42.1 p
210 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
their purses. We have little information as to the men, other than Shakespeare and Jonson, who wrote for the Cham- berlain's company. Probably they were the same who wrote for Henslowe. There is no reason to suppose that, as a rule, a playwright, who was not himself an actor, was anything but a free lance. The special arrangements, by which Henslowe tied the impecunious Chettle and Porter to write for the Admiral's only, carry this implication.1 Jonson wrote two unaided plays for the Chamberlain's, but for his Sejanus of 1603 he had a collaborator, whose work, with a compliment, he replaced by his own, before it went to press.2 There is no recorded parallel to this proceeding, which must be set down to Jonson 's conscious pride of artistry. In the seventeenth century we get the familiar and enduring partnership of Beaumont and Fletcher, although certainly Fletcher and probably Beau- mont also wrote independently. The contemporary testi- mony of Sir Aston Cokain informs us that Massinger also had a hand in some of the plays printed as Beaumont and Fletcher's in 1647, Chapman, Jonson, and Marston joined in Eastward Ho, and there were various shifting combinations, in which Dekker, Middleton, Rowley, and Webster are conspicuous. In Eastward Ho and in the Beaumont and Fletcher plays, the literary difficulties of collaboration are fairly well surmounted. Much has been written as to the way in which labour was divided in joint plays. It is not necessary to assume that the same method was always followed. Presumably an outline was agreed upon and some sort of & scenario prepared. Thereafter the actual writing might be distributed according to the inter- weaving of a plot and sub-plot, of which one might be tragic and the other comic. Or each author might follow up particular characters, which would come to much the same thing. Or one author might start all the main themes, and the rest carry them forward on his lines. There are certainly cases of a rough-and-ready partition by
1 Eliz. Stage, i, 374. Sheppard's age makes it impossible
2 Ibid. iii. 368. It has been shown for him to have been the collaborator. (cf. App. B, no. xrii) that Samuel
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 211
acts. Daborne gave Tourneur an act of his Arraignment of London to write, and Dekker contributed the first act of Keep the Widow Waking and one speech in the last act.1 There is no evidence at all for anything of the nature of a line-by-line collaboration, which certainly would not have made for expedition.
Clearly there need be no reason for surprise if Shake- speare occasionally had a collaborator. The problem of revision is more complicated. Plays which had been laid aside were often revived. A stock favourite was called a 'get-penny'.2 I have collected the notices of Shakespearean revivals.3 The Admiral's men bought old plays in order to reproduce them.4 When the Chapel resumed their activities in 1 600, it was complained that 'the vmbrae, or ghosts of some three or foure playes, departed a dozen yeeres since, haue bin seen walking on your stage heere'.5 And revival was sometimes accompanied by revision. Even with a familiar play, it was a fairly obvious device to increase the attraction. And sometimes a forgotten play was passed off as new.6 It may be that higher entrance fees could be charged for a play called new. Revision does not seem to have been regarded as very exalted dramatic work. Dekker speaks of 'a Cobler of Poetrie called a play- patcher', and in Jonson's Poetaster Demetrius Fannius, who is probably Dekker himself, is *a dresser of plaies about the towne, here'.7 It is difficult to estimate the extent of the practice. Again, it will be best to begin with recorded cases. Conceivably three or four plays marked 'ne* in Henslowe's accounts for 1594-7 may have 'been revived and not strictly new; the significance of *ne' is not quite clear. During 1597-1603 the Admiral's men appear to have revived at least 23 old plays. The latter
1 Henslauoe Papers, 72$ C. Sisson in London and the Countrey Carbonadoed 4 Library* viii. 243. and Quartered (1632), 'The pkyeis
2 Ettx. Stage, i. 372. are as crafty with an old pky, as bauds
3 App. D. with old facesj the one puts on a new
4 Etiz. Stage, ii. 167, 179. fresh colour, the other a new face and
5 Ibid. ii. 43. name.'
6 Beaumont and Fletcher, The False 7 Dekker, News from Hell (1606, One (c. 1620), prol., 'New Titles war- Works, ii. 146)$ Jonson, Poetaster, iii. rant not a Pky for new'j D. Lupton, 4, 367.
p 2
2i2 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
must have been popular, since 1 1 of them have come down to us in print, a quite disproportionate number, in view of the oblivion which has overtaken most of the 300 or so plays named by Henslowe. If one may judge by the fees paid to the poets, only four of the revivals entailed sub- stantial revision and two others small alterations. There were also small' alterations to five recent plays, and new prologues and epilogues were written for three revivals.1 In several cases the plays concerned were being prepared for court, and alterations may have been due to the special scrutiny by the Revels officers required for court per- formances. The total amount of revision for the Admiral's men during a period of six years was therefore very slight. As to its nature we are not wholly in the dark. Three of the four substantially altered plays are extant. Of Old Fortunatus we have only the later text; it seems probable that the original play was in two parts and that the revision compressed them into one. Both Dr. Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy survive in duplicate versions. The earliest (1604) of Dr. Faustus is corrupt, and the textual history of the play is therefore difficult to reconstruct. But it is at least possible to trace, both here and in a later version of 1616, the progressive introduction of farcical prose scenes alien to Marlowe's design,2 The Spanish Tragedy is in, somewhat similar case. Some alterations in the version of 1 602 amount to the insertion of new scenes into an otherwise unaltered text. It is, however, most improbable that these particular scenes represent the revision for the Admiral's men.3 There are parallels elsewhere both to the compression of Fortunatus and to the expansion of Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy by added passages. Heywood,
1 Henslowe, i. 94, 99, 114-16, 124- unspecified play (5^.)$ Jonson altered
5, 143, 149, 153, 164-8, 171-3. Dek- the old Spanish Tragedy (£2 and part
ker altered the old Tessa's Melancholy of £io)j Bird and Rowley altered the
(£4), Fortunatus (£9), and Phaethon old Dr. Faustus (£4)5 Middleton did
(£2), and did a prologue and epilogue a prologue and epilogue for Friar
for Pontius Pilate (10* .); Chettle altered Bacon (5;.).
the old Fayvode (£i) and recent j, 2 * Cf . P. Simpson in Essays and
Robin Hood (to/, each), j, 2 Cardinal Studies^ vii (1921), 143.
Wolsey(£i each), and Friar Rush (ios.), * Cf. p. 148 and W. W. Greg in
and did a prologue and epilogue for an M.S.R. reprint, xviii.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 213
at some uncertain date, constructed an Escapes of Jufiter out of scenes taken from his series of Ages.1 An allusion in Satiromastix suggests a possible counter-device of expanding one play into two.2 Histriomastix appears to have been rehandled by the insertion of passages, some long and some short.3 Chapman's Bussy D*Ambois was touched up, at some unknown date before 1641, possibly to improve its effectiveness on the stage.4 Two plays of the King's men, The Malcontent and Mucedorus, received additional scenes, the former to lengthen the performance, the latter for a revival at court. The original conclusion of Jonson's Every Man Out of his Humour was altered because it had given offence. It is not certain whether the variants at the beginning and end of the corrupt Qi of Philaster indicate a revision.5 No doubt there are later examples, and no doubt, as time went on, a tendency to bring revived plays into accordance with new dramatic fashions is likely enough to have developed.6 But Sir Henry Herbert's documents of 1622—42 do not disclose any great change of conditions. The extracts made by Malone and Chalmers from his Office Book include notices of licences for some 1 30 plays. Of these only fifteen were old, and seven of them had been revised. One was a play of Fletcher's 'corrected* by Shirley; one had under- gone 'renewing' and one 'alterations'; four had had one or more scenes added.7 There is throughout little evidence, so far as the records go, for any widespread theatrical prac- tice of what may be called stylistic revision, the systematic
1 Greg in Anglica, ii. 212. not one pleases, and therefore they are
2 Satiromastix, 980. Horace says driven to furbish over their old, which that Demetrius Fannius 'cut an inno- stand them in best stead, and bring cent Moore i' the middle, to serue him them most profit.' Heywood apolo- in twice; & when he had done, made gizes in 1637 for the out-of-date rhyme Poules-worke of it*. of his Royal King and Loyal Subject, to
3 Eliz. Stage, iv. 17. which 'strong -lines' had come to be
4 T. M. Parrott in M.L.R. iii. 126. preferred,
8 EUx. Stage, iii. 222, 360, 43x5 iv. 7 Herbert may have missed some re-
34.- vivals, although normally (cf. p. 104}
6 Chamberlain writes in 1615 (Birch, he required old plays to be submitted
James, i. 290), 'Our poets' brains and to him, and the extracts we have are
inventions are grown very dry, inso- not (cf. pp. 93, 100) complete. A list
much that of five new plays there is of revivals is in Albright 253.
2H THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
line-by-line correction or rewriting of old dialogue, either by the original author or by another. Examples of this may be found in Wilmot's recast of Gismond of Salerne as Tancred and Gismund^ and in some of Ben Jonson's re- handling of his own work, notably Every Man In his Humour.1 But these were of the nature of literary rather than theatrical enterprises. The nearest approach to the same sort of thing in a theatrical text is the rewriting of parts of Sir Thomas More. It probably came before production, if there was a production. The rewriting of Believe As Tou List for the satisfaction of the censor is, of course, not in point. When, therefore, one finds stylistic revision brought forward again and again, as a con- jectural factor in the literary history of one after another in a series of plays, one is justified in expressing a profound scepticism as to whether the practice, if it existed at all, can have been anything like so universal as the theorists assume. And indeed all the probabilities are against it. The ordinary Elizabethan audience is not likely to have been very critical of style, and it is difficult to see how the process contemplated could have resulted in any increase of drawing power commensurate with the cost and trouble involved. Even if the rewriting could be done on the margins of an existing prompt-copy, which I do not be- lieve, the reviser would have to be paid and new parts made out. These any actors already familiar with the old version would learn with reluctance. Minor alterations or even the addition of scenes would not cause quite the same inconvenience, and no doubt some adaptation to changing conditions of cast, theatre, and audience may be taken for granted. . There are, of course, texts which have not come down to us in their original form. Some are reported; some have been interpolated; some have been abridged. Abridgement, like interpolation, is a form of revision, and it may involve consequential adjustment of context. Again we must assume that' it would not be lightly undertaken. The motives which prompted it are obscure. It has been held that plays were abridged for court performance.
1 £&. Stage, iii. 359, 514$ Herford-Simpson, i. 358.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 215
There is no obvious reason why this should have been so. Court entertainments often lasted for three hours, and a full-length play of 3,000 lines would not require more.1 It is true that in Elizabethan, although not in Jacobean days, a mask often followed. For the matter of that, a jig often followed on the public stage.2 Some of the shorter plays may have originally been written to go with an afterpiece. It has also been held that abridgement was for provincial performance. But again, while we do not know much about provincial conditions, it is a mere assumption that a country audience would want a particularly short enter- tainment. There is plenty of leisure in the country. It is true that, if a travelling company was a small one, the cutting of superfluous parts and spectacle might incidentally lead to shortening. But such companies were often ten or more strong, and probably many London plays could be found to fit them without going to the trouble and expense of extensive adaptation.3 It is just possible that conditions of lighting tied the London public theatres themselves to shorter performances in the winter than in the summer, and that this may be one explanation of abridgement,4
I return to the topic of stylistic revision. Mr. Robertson questions the analogy suggested by the rarity of payments for alterations in the accounts of the Admiral's men; and of course such an analogy is not conclusive. It overlooks, he says:5 —
the cardinal fact that Shakespeare's company had in him what no other company possessed — a gifted member who could revise for them any play that came into their hands, lending to other men's work new qualities of beauty and strength where he would or could, pruning redundances, and rewriting or planing down Chapmanese rhodomontade.
Mr. Robertson's 'cardinal fact* is neither Cardinal1 nor a
1 Etix,* Stage, i. 225. To the evi- Between our after-supper and bed-
dence there given may be added Mid. time?
N. Dr. v. i. 32, a EHx. Stage, ii. 551.
what masques, what dances shr'l 3 Ibid. L 3^2$ cf. W. J. Lawrence
we have, in T.LJS. (1919, Aug. 21).
To wear away this long age of three * Elfa. Stage, ii. 543.
hours 5 Canon, iii. 76.
2i6 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
'fact'; it is a conclusion, not a starting-point, and it is a conclusion from Mr. Robertson's own long series of con- jectures. The only fact behind it, other than the inter- pretation of internal evidence for which it is treated as axiomatic, is the isolated statement of Ravenscroft about an exceptional play. I do not altogether reject that state- ment, but it is not much on which to establish a conception of Shakespeare's habitual method of work, so divergent as Mr. Robertson's from what we are told and what we can gather for ourselves of his temperament. 'His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with easiness', say Heminges and Condell. 'He flowed with facility', says Ben Jonson. The last man, one would suppose, in the absence of rigid proof, to tie himself to the painful following up and meticulous correction of the thoughts and words of another. So far as facts go, it is the Admiral's and not the Chamberlain's company which we know to have had cobblers of poetry ready to hand, in Chettle and in Dekker, the 'dresser of plaies' chaffed by . Jonson, who between them did most of the small amount of revision required.1 I doubt whether many critics think with Mr. Robertson that Shakespeare went on dressing up alien plays well into his mid-career, even if they believe him to have had a fancy for rewriting his own work. It is, however, very commonly held that such was the occupa- tion of his apprenticeship. Even this is hardly a certainty. Two things, besides Ravenscroft's statement, seem to have contributed to form the notion. One is the long-standing belief in the derivation of 2, 3 Henry ^/through a line-by- line revision of the Contention. That support must go, when it is realized that the Contention is a reported text, and could never have been written as it stands. The other is the reference to Shakespeare in Robert Greene's address of 1592 to his fellow dramatists,2
Base minded men all three of you, if by my miserie you be not warnd: for vnto none of you (like mee) sought those burres to
1 Cf. p. in. It TOS Dekker also Worcester's men (Henslowe, i. 181). who altered Sir John Qldcastie for * Cf. App. B, no. iii.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 217
cleaue: those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange, that I, to whom they all haue beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all haue beene beholding, shall (were yee in that case as I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken ? Yes trust them not: for there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute lohannes fac totum^ is in his own conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. O that I might intreat your rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses: & let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and neuer more acquaint them with your admired inuentions.
The phrase 'beautified with our feathers', helped by the parody of 3 Henry VI, i. 4. 137, has been regarded as a charge of appropriating the plays of Greene and his fellows, and in particular the Contention^ by rewriting them.1 With the fall of the Contention^ this interpretation at once becomes less plausible. And a closer examination of the passage shows that there is really no charge of appropriation at all. It is an attack by a disgruntled poet on the players who have profited by him and now have no further use for his services, and one of whom thinks that he can do every- thing himself, and is taking the job of writing out of the mouths of better men. There is a charge of imitation at the end, no doubt, but imitation is not rewriting. The 'beautified with our feathers* cannot be dissociated from the 'garnisht in our colours' applied just before to the actors as such, of which it is a mere variation. The line of attack, the use of the feather metaphor, the comparison of an actor to a crow, were none of them new. Nashe wrote in 1589 of gentlemen poets who had 'tricked up a company of tafFata fooles with their feathers*.2 Greene himself in 1590 had made Cicero speak of Roscius as 'proud with Esops Crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers'.3 There is a conflation of themes drawn ultimately from Aesop, Martial, and Macrobius, all used
' R. B., no doubt, so took it, when Stage, iv. 234.
he echoed the Groat's-Worth in his 3 Francescoes Fortunes; cf. J?/r«.
Greene's Funeratls (App. B, no. vi). Stage, iv. 236.
* Epistle to Menaphon-, cf. Eliz.
218 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
to point the gibes of playwrights against their paymasters.1 It was Greene's prospect .of further employment, not his property in what he had already » written, that he bewailed.
Shakespeare did not as a rule invent his plots; that is to say, the narratives to which he gave dramatic form. This we know, because for many plays we have his direct sources, although for others we may suspect that we have •only more remote sources which reached him in inter- mediate versions, perhaps themselves dramatic. The direct sources he handled very freely when they were romance, and rather less so when they were history. Often, especially in the histories, he adopted words and phrases from what lay before him. Shakespeare is not revising Holinshed and Plutarch, and he is not merely pruning and planing down A Shrew, The Troublesome Reign, and King Leir. He is taking a story, using so much of it as appeals to his sense of dramatic values, altering what does not, and giving it literary form through his command of language. The habk of stylistic revision, if it was his at all, must be established elsewhere, and on internal, not external, grounds. The observed use of sources does not reveal it. The task has been approached from two angles, that of style itself and that of bibliography. Mr. Robert- son is the most prominent of many writers who find dis- parate styles in the plays of the canon. His conviction of these leads him to seek 'clues- to other dramatists, whose work it is historically possible that Shakespeare might have revised; and after he has framed to his satisfaction canons of their plays, the conviction is confirmed. Here are styles consonant to those which he repudiates for Shakespeare. As a result he transfers the primary re- sponsibility for Richard III, Richard II, Henry F, Julius Caesar, and Comedy of Errors to Marlowe, for Romeo and Juliet to Peele, for Two Gentlemen of Verona to Greene, for Troilus and Cressida, All's Well that Ends Well, and Measure for Measure to Chapman. There has been much collaboration between some of these and possibly with Kyd
1 ER%. Stage> i. 377.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 219
and others. Shakespeare has rehandled all these, some more, some less, 'with a view, first and last, to making them serve the company's ends'. Of the plays as a whole, 'the great majority are simply not of Shakespeare's draft- ing'.1 Here, of course, common sense revolts. After all, we have read the plays for ourselves, and have learnt to recognize in them, through all their diversities, a continu- ous personality, of which style is only one aspect. A single mind and a single hand dominate them. They are the outcome of one man's critical reactions to life, which make the stuff of cdmedy, and of one man's emotional reactions to life, which make the stuff of tragedy. Something must be wrong with the methods which have led to such devas- tating conclusions.
Everything indeed is wrong with them. It would be both tedious and unprofitable to follow Mr. Robertson's painstaking investigations in detail, when one's starting- point is a complete rejection of the axioms by which they are governed. And it is perhaps superfluous to stress the remarkable diversity between his reconstructions and those of other students who work, broadly speaking, upon the same lines. The variant distributions of Julius. Caesar among Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Chap- man, and Drayton furnish a noteworthy example.2 No doubt a method may be sound, and may be more skilfully applied by one practitioner than by another. .But the con- flicts do not inspire any great confidence in the critical principles which underlie them. The fundamental error lies in a misconception of the limits within which the dis- crimination of styles, as applied to the particular subject- matter of the Elizabethan drama, must operate. The per- cipience of style is a very real quality. It has its origin, I suppose, in the same natural feeling for the value of words and the rise and fall of rhythm, which is the starting-point of literary expression itself; and it may be trained, half-unconsciously, through reading and reflec- tion and comparison into a valuable instrument of criticism. A quasi-intuitive sense is developed. It becomes effective
1 Canon> iii. zoo, aoo. a Cf. p. 398.
220 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
in the presence of a writer who has a characteristic style and has room and inclination to give that style free play. It enables one, for instance, to dismiss some of the apocry- phal plays ascribed to Shakespeare without more ado. It helps at least to disentangle collaborators, if their styles are sufficiently distinct, and their separate contributions of sufficient length. It must make allowance, of course, for many things; for the gradual evolution of styles, for influences, for experiments, for variations of interest and temper, for the adaptation of manner to subject-matter. It will be at a loss when a writer, as sometimes happens with Shakespeare, is bored, or in haste, or merely careless, and fails to hold his style. Moreover dramatic writing, and Elizabethan dramatic writing in particular, contains many bits of undistinguished joiner's work which may help the action along, but are in themselves colourless. One man might have written them as well as another. The most percipient critic cannot reasonably claim to have acquired a faculty which is fine enough to identify commonplace . passages or very short passages. And he will be wise if he refrains, so far as possible, from detecting the small touches of a reviser. Now and then a phrasing seems to stand out in startling distinctness from its context,- like the 'poor worm* which 'casts copp'd hills towards heaven' in the normally unShakespearean part of Pericles.1 But even in such cases attributions can rarely be made with conviction. It is said that the ultra-violet rays will reveal over-painting in pictures through different effects upon different jngments. The sense of style does not work like an ultra-violet ray. It must be added that the sense of style is itself ultimately dependent upon external evidence. There is no way of getting at the characteristics of an in- dividual writer, except from work of which his authorship is acknowledged. And if the acquired sense is then used to discredit the canon wholesale, a vicious circle is set up, of which the inevitable result is chaos.
The scholarly mind seeks to confirm its intuition by an analysis of the concrete features of style. A writer forms
1 Per. i. 1. 100.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 221
his own rhetorical habits in the building of lines and the linking of line to line, in the use of exclamation, antithesis, iteration, and cumulation, in the balance of noun against noun and verb against verb. He has his own small man- nerisms of locution; his recurrent catch-phrases; his ellipses and inversions; his superfluous auxiliaries; his archaisms, it may be, and grammatical solecisms. These are the more characteristic, because they become uncon- scious, and are often at first sight unnoticeable. Such things can be observed and tabulated, with due regard to the risk of assuming monopolies in them. It is a matter of degree; one man may prefer 'you* and another 'ye'j one "em' and another 'them', if printers can be persuaded not to interfere. It is so too with rhythm. The normal iambic blank verse is capable of a great deal of variation, both in the structure of individual lines and in the grouping of lines into paragraphs. Stresses can be inverted; additional syllables can be introduced; pauses can come at the ends of lines or can break their flow; rhyme can be employed, sporadically, or with a clinching effect. Alliteration may be obvious or restrained. Writers acquire different habits of verse-manipulation, and many, like Shakespeare, follow different habits at different stages of their development.1 Many metrical variations can be expressed in statistics, but not all, and not the interplay of variations upon which the resultant rhythmical effect largely depends. Metrical analysis requires ample space, if it is to be significant, since a rhythmical habit is itself varied according to sub- ject-matter, and these variations only average out over long stretches of verse. Comparative figures for complete plays, perhaps for complete acts, may be of value, but not for single scenes and still less for single speeches. The method has proved useful in dividing the results of col- laboration. The rhythm of Shakespeare's later verse, for example, differs markedly from that of Fletcher's; less so from that of Beaumont's or of Massinger's. Naturally each writer has also his individual range of thought, of dramatic situations, of imagery, of allusion, of vocabulary.
* Cf.cluviii.
222 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
But here there is much give and take, and there is nothing more dangerous than the attempt to determine authorship by the citation of parallels. Authors repeat their predeces- sors; their successors repeat them; they repeat themselves. Shakespeare's self-repetitions are innumerable. They are commonest between plays of approximately the same date, but common also between plays remote in time, especially when analogous themes recur. His younger contem- poraries also repeat themselves freely and they repeat him just as freely. Parallels, therefore, are always open to a double interpretation, if chronology and lack &f ascription permit; they may be from one pen or from two. It could hardly be otherwise. All literature is full of parallels, but especially the literature of the Elizabethans, because they had a far more restricted tradition behind them than the moderns, and especially the literature of the dramatic writers, because they were men of the theatre. Even if they were not actors themselves, they lived in a world of representations and rehearsals, and their minds were filled with auditory images of spoken words, which naturally came to the surface when they wrote. Parallels are of all degrees; they descend from elaborate passages involving a combination of common elements, through dramatic motives, similes and metaphors, historical and mytho- logical allusions, special collocations of words, mannerisms, down to the mere occurrence of unusual words. They are in fact constantly brought forward by critics as evidence of common authorship. This they rarely can be. Where anonymous work is in question nothing better may be available, but conclusions so formed should at the most be held as possibilities. Probably the most striking parallels are the least evidential; it is the vivid idea or phrase which catches the imagination of another. There is a nega- tive value in comprehensive collections of parallels, how- ever slight, to a doubtful play. If none are found to a given writer, he is not likely to have written it. The converse does not hold true, but it may chime with other evidence. The collections made for Pericles and Henry VIII confirm distributions of shares arrived at on other grounds. It is,
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 223
however, difficult, even when a concordance is available, to be sure that a collection is complete.
The history of Shakespeare's writing is one of the gradual development of a characteristic style or series of styles. In its matured flights it is often unmistakable. Its beginnings belong to a period in which the difficulties of style-discrimination are at their maximum. The dramatists of the 'eighties may reasonably be called a school.1 They have largely a common style and a common vocabulary, which owe much to Spenser, to the Elizabethan translators of the classics, to Seneca and his court imitators. Marlowe is the dominant figure, with Peele, Greene, Lodge, and Nashe as his satellites; Kyd stands a little apart. There is a mass of anonymous work. There were other prolific writers, such as Thomas Watson, of whose plays we know nothing. Probably we should be able to differentiate some of the personalities a little better, if we had reliable canons. Even now, Marlowe's is more distinct than the rest. But there are no such canons. Only from two to seven plays are ascribed to any one man, and of these many have been transmitted in such corrupt texts that they are valueless. The style of non-dramatic work may be compared; the translations of Marlowe, the pamphlets of Greene, the ceremonial poems of Peele. But these only give limited help in judging the handling of dialogued verse. It is illegitimate to follow Mr. Robertson in expanding the canons by adding first one anonymous play, and then on the basis of this another, and then again another. There is no certainty in this process, which mainly rests on parallels, and the chain becomes weaker at every link. This school was Shakespeare's early environment, and his first plays were inevitably in its manner. The influence of Marlowe is discernible until well on in his career. Mr. Robertson, who has all the arts of the debater, except perhaps that of lucidity, abounds in pejorative terms for what he calls the 'Imitation theory'. He represents it as charging Shakespeare with a 'passion for plagiarism', with 'tranced' or 'slavish' mimicry, with 'abject parodies'. If he
1 Cf. The Unrest in Shakespearean Studies (1927, Nineteenth Century).
224 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
repeated the phrase of a predecessor, he must have been an 'avid copyist* or possessed by an 'overwhelming im- pulse of apery'. This is only beating the air. Young writers, even when they have done good work, do remain subject to influences, especially if they are of receptive, as well as creative, temperaments. There is no reason why Shakespeare should have been an exception. Very likely there was some deliberate imitation at first of admired models, but the issue is not primarily one of imitation. I have written above of parallels and repetitions. Psycho- logically, these may mean anything from plagiarism to quite unconscious echoing. A writer's mind is a well of subliminal memory, into which words and images sink, and to the surface of which they arise again, unbidden, in the act of composition.1 I do not think it would be possible to assert Shakespeare's authorship of 2, 3 Henry VI on internal evidence alone. They are school work and full of school echoes. There are many images drawn from coun- try life, which set them a little apart, and may be marks of Shakespeare. Those which recall the sea are also note- worthy. Links of style with the plays to come, especially Richard ///, are not wanting. Double endings are much more often used to vary the blank verse rhythm than in any of the ascertainable plays of Marlowe and his fellows, and Mr. Robertson does not really meet this point, either by citing the higher proportion of double endings in Mar- lowe's non-dramatic translation of Lucan, or by the a priori argument that towards the end of their careers Marlowe, Kyd, and Greene must all have felt the need of some relief to the monotony of their earlier systems.2 Metrical evolution is not a Zeitgeist which all poets are alike bound to follow. We are not, however, left to in- ternal evidence for 2, 3 Henry VI, and there is certainly no such disparity of style as need compel us to abandon the authority of the First Folio. Ravenscroft's testimony puts Titus Andronicus upon a rather different footing. It may be
1 Cf. the admirable study of the (1927)*
working of Coleridge's imagination in * Canon, ii. 24; Introd. 275 cf. p. J. L. Lowes, The Eoad to Xanadu 260,
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 225
that further study of the dramatic style of the 'eighties in relation to its origins will disclose lines of demarcation which are not at present apparent. At present it is tangled country, in which it is not much use to run like a hound through the undergrowth, catching a scent of Marlowe here, and whimpering there at a suspicion of Kyd or Peele. Complicated theories of collaboration and revision cannot be based upon such findings.
Critical bibliography, or applied bibliography, as Pro- fessor Pollard prefers to call it, is a valuable and com- paratively new instrument of textual research. It begins with the observation of irregularities in the texts which are not capable of being explained by printing-house opera- tions, and ascribes them, reasonably enough, to the condi- tion of the copy brought to the printers. And it finds reasons for this condition in the vicissitudes through which plays may have passed at the theatre itself. It attempts, in fact, to reconstruct their stage-histories. In the hands of its initiators, this process has generally involved the assumption of one or more revisions; revisions by Shake- speare of earlier work, revisions of Shakespeare's work by later adapters, revisions by Shakespeare of his own work; and on occasion, since these are intrepid researchers, who do not quail before intricate conclusions, revisions of all three types successively. All this is not pure bibliography, although bibliographical facts are its starting-point. His- torical allusions in the plays are drawn upon to furnish support for suggestions of double or treble dating. Judge- ments of style are also involved, and incur the hazards of style-discrimination already considered, although these are diminished when it is only a question of comparison be- tween the phases of Shakespeare's own style, the general course of which is fairly well established. I must not be taken as implying that the judgements are always sound; they seem sometimes to rest upon work which is not fully characteristic. There are some anticipations of the biblio- graphical method in the unsystematic writings of Fleay. But it came to the front in two notable papers by Professors Pollard and Wilson on The 'Stolne and Surreptitious*
3142.1 0
226 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
Shakespearian Texts.1 These are the bad Quartos of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V^ Merry Wives of Windsor > and Hamlet \ and the papers offer a common theory as to their origin. A factor or reporting by a pirate actor is admitted. But this is held not to explain all the facts. It is supposed that the pirate could only report scenes to which he had special access. Moreover, there are obvious cuts; there is non- Shakespearean, as well as Shakespearean matter, especially towards the end of each play; and there are 'bibliographical links* between the bad and good texts, in identical mis- prints, punctuation, spelling, capitals, and lineation, which imply 'some kirid of organic connexion* between the manuscripts used. The theory is that the plays existed in non-Shakespearean versions before 1593; that by that year Shakespeare had made a beginning with the revision of them all; that from the manuscripts in this condition abridged transcripts were 'hastily* taken for the provincial tour of 'Strangers' men which began in May 1593; that Shakespeare subsequently retouched and completed his revisions on the original manuscripts; and that when these were performed, the bad Quartos were printed from the transcripts, which had been brought by the pirate actor into 'some kind of conformity* with the final versions. These papers were followed by separate studies of Romeo and Juliet^ Henry 7, and Merry Wives of Windsor^ and had been anticipated in a more elaborate dissertation by Professor Wilson on Hamlet? Here the same theory was developed, except that Shakespeare was eliminated from the earlier revision of Merry Wives of Windsor^ and a revision of Hamlet^ anterior to his, by one or more drama- tists for an unknown company was introduced. There is much in the theory which I do not find it possible to accept. I do not think that the hypothesis of a memorizing reporter, who could do a little 'faking', is inadequate to account for the bad Quartos.3 I do not accept the evidence for an early Merry Wives of Windsor or for traces of early
1 T.L£. (9 and 16 Jan. 1919). 1603, and the Hamlet Transcript,
* Ibid. (13 Mar., 7, 14 Aug. (1918). 1919); Wilson, The Ccfyfor Hamtet, * Cf. p. 157.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 227
dates in the others. My imagination boggles at the pic- ture of Shakespeare concurrently revising three or four different plays. The 'bibliographical links' are, I believe, confined to Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, and they seem to me to point most naturally to some use made of the bad Quartos in setting-up the good ones. Here, indeed, is a particularly weak point in the theory. The transcripts, to accord with it, must have been, as Professor Wilson admits, 'meticulous', and what Elizabethan transcriber, working 'rapidly', is likely to have been meticulous about spelling, punctuation, and capitals? Two prepossessions appear to have had great influence upon the theorists. One is that of Shakespeare as essentially a 'play-patcher', for which I have endeavoured to show that there is little foundation. The other is that of 'continuous copy', which I suspect to be nothing but an illegitimate generalization from the anomalous case of Sir Thomas More, aided by a notion that the cautious and economical companies wanted above all things to avoid the multiplication of transcripts, although they did not, if the views of Profes- sors Pollard and Wilson are sound, take any care to keep them out of the hands of pirates when they were made. In order to fit Professor Wilson's reconstruction, Shake- speare's two revisions of Hamlet, if not also that of the anterior dramatists, must all have been done on the manu- script of the original play, and this must still have existed in 1604, and have served as copy for the Second Quarto. Newly written sheets may have replaced part of it, but on part the old matter must still have been standing, scored out and transformed by the superimposed results of at least two rehandlings on its margins and on appended slips. There is no room for a fair copy, because the 'bib- liographical links' between the two Quartos have to be preserved. Yet the Second Quarto does not show any obvious signs of the considerable textual disturbance which one would expect in such circumstances.
Professor Pollard ias also made a study of the Yorkist plays, which may perhaps require reconsideration, if it is admitted that the texts of The Contention are re-
£2
228 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
ported.1 Professor Wilson has dealt bibliographically with most of the comedies in full-dress editions. Here, too, the doctrine of 'continuous copy' is apparent, although many of the reconstructions involve transcripts at some stage or other. There are few plays which are not suspected, some- times on the faintest of indications, of having originated in therehandlingofolddramaticmaterial. Part of this material is here and there supposed to have been retained.2 Fairly drastic adaptations by later hands are inferred.3 But per- haps the most noteworthy feature of the treatment is its frequent resort to hypotheses of self-revision.4 Even if one is unconvinced by Professor Wilson's reconstructions, one must be impressed by the alertness of his mind, the keenness of his observation, and the ingenuity with which he fits the details of complicated theories together. He has certainty called attention to many points which require explanation. I think that he often overlooks the possibility of alternative explanations. Still more I think that he and I take different views of Shakespeare's temperament. I am prepared to accept some very poor work as Shakespeare's. He must have 'been subject to moods, which were not all compatible with concentration on what he was writing. During a considerable period he was under the shadow of some preoccupation or disillusionment, the cause of which remains obscure; and the life and subtlety of his style suffered. But throughout he was often careless, and often perfunctory. He composed easily, and his artistic con- science did not impel him to be scrupulous in avoiding inconsistencies of time, action, and characterization. No doubt he was aware how very easily dropped threads pass unnoticed on the stage. I do not suppose that he had a very high opinion of the intelligence of his audiences. I am not essaying here a complete appreciation of Pro- fessor Wilson's contribution to Shakespearean scholarship. Much of it, especially on the strictly textual side, is ad-
1 T.LS. (19, 26 Sept. 1918). 4 Love's Lab. Lest, Mid. N. Dr.,
a Com. of Err ^ Tarn. of Shrew, Mer. Men of 7en., As You Like It, Much
ofVen^ Merry Wvoes of W. Ado, Temp. 3 Two Gent, of Fer^Meas. for Meets.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 229
mirable. Some of his views on major problems have been referred to,1 and others, directly concerned with re- vision, now demand consideration. I will begin with 'cuts'. We know that cutting was a theatrical practice, since authors themselves have told us so.2 That Shake- speare's plays were not immune is shown both by the condition of the bad Quartos and by some of the omissions in parallel-text plays, for which cuts are the most plausible explanation^ The latter are not extensive; they do not amount to the replacement of a three-hour play by a two- hour play.4 Two or three hundred lines go, to prevent normal limits from being exceeded, or merely to prevent particular scenes or speeches from dragging. Probably Hamlet was always too long for performance as a whole. Shakespeare may have been more intent upon his poetry, than upon getting it over the stage-rails. One hopes that he remained unperturbed when some of his best lines were sacrificed. Cutting may be suspected also in plays for which we have not parallel-texts. The very short Macbeth possibly represents a substantial abridgement. In Professor Wilson's reconstructions abridgement appears as a factor subsidiary to revision.^ Old motives have been omitted or given less importance in1 order that new ones may be introduced, and traces of the process remain. Among these he is apt to cite the presence of short lines. These may very well in some cases indicate cuts, especially when they are abrupt or harsh, or are accompanied by textual disturbance or some hiatus in the sense. But a great many of those called in aid by Professor Wilson do not pre- sent these features, and more plausible reasons can be found for them. Shakespeare made constant use of short lines for exclamations and interjections, for formulas of
1 Cf . pp. 153, 1 8 1, 187, 191, (as some of the Pkyers pretended).'
198. * Rich. Ill (Q), Tit. Andr. (Q),
a £/fc. Stage, iii. 192. W. J. Law- Rich. II (F), 2 Em. IV (Q), Ham. (F),
rence (T.L£. 21 Aug. 1919) adds Oth. (Q), K. Lear (F).
R. Brome, The Antipodes (1640), 'You * Cf. p. 214.
shall find in this Booke more than was s Two Cent, of Per., Much Ado,
presented on the stage, and left out of Meas.for Meas., Temp. the Presentation for superfluous length
230 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
welcome and dismissal, and for changes of address. To a growing extent he tended to end his speeches in mid-line. The beginning of the next speech does not always com- plete the line. Short lines occur also in mid-speech, and often with fine rhythmical effect. There is a pause for meditation or gesture, or for reversion to the business in hand. The cadence of a broken line seems to have pleased Shakespeare's ear. Professor Wilson knows all this very well, but these are alternatives which he commonly dis- regards when he is hot on the scent of a revision. He finds further evidence for abridgement in the dropped threads, and particularly in 'ghosts' who appear once and do not recur, and in personages to whom reference is made, but who do not appear at all. He supposes that these must have been given more prominence in lost scenes. The 'kitchen vestal' Nell in Comedy of Errors is a ghost, whom 'the young Shakespeare must surely have felt an almost irresistible temptation to make something more of than has come down to us'.1 It is difficult to take such a priorisms very seriously. . Every dramatist has to resist the temptation to over-elaborate his minor characters. They serve the purpose of an episode and vanish. A good example of a personage, whom we should naturally have looked to see but do not, is Petruchio's cousin Ferdinand in Taming of the Shrew.2 Petruchio, when he gets home, sends for Ferdinand to make Katharina's acquaintance, and he never comes. Perhaps the audience were not exactly on the tip-toe of expectation for him, but it is a badly dropped thread, all the same. In the Tempest, the Duke of Milan's **brave son* is said to have been seen in the wreck.* He does not appear with the other rescued travellers, and there is no lamentation for him. An in- troduction of Maudlin Lafeu would seem obvious in the last scene of All's Well that Ends Well> but she remains absent.^ In these and in countless other cases, I think we have a deliberate dramatic device. Persons and incidents are alluded to, but kept out of the action. The effect is
1 Wilson, Cm. of Err. 76. 3 Temp. i. a. 43&.
a Tom. of Shrew, iv. 1. 154. 4 All's Well* v. 3.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 231
one of solidity, as if life were passing on all the time behind the stage. Characters, again, are sometimes named in initial stage-directions, but have no share in the dialogue. Violenta enters with Diana in a scene of All 's Well that Ends Well) and is forgotten throughout.1 Juliet is un- expectedly dumb on her first appearance in Measure for Measure? We must of course allow for mutes, especially in court or processional scenes. But sometimes the silence is clearly unnatural. Leonato is accompanied by 'Innogen his wife* at the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing.* She recurs in one later scene, but has not a word through- out the play. A lady, whose daughter is successively be- trothed, defamed, repudiated before the altar, taken for dead, and restored to life, ought not to be a mute. It is not motherly. Abridgement is a possible explanation. But did Shakespeare sometimes write down initial entries before he had thought out the dialogue, and omit through care- lessness to correct them by eliminating characters for whom he had found nothing to say, and ought to have found something to say, if they were to be on the stage at all ?
To establish abridgement would not of itself serve to establish any further revision. Professor Wilson has been successful in pointing to mislineations which can be best explained as due to the incorporation in the text of pas- sages irregularly written in margins, or in one case on an appended slip with a catchword.4 These may well be later additions. Some of them only amount to interpolations of clowning or spectacle. The most notable are in the last act of Midsummer-Night's Dream, and that act has, I think, been revised. Many other mislineations, to which he would assign a similar origin, may be better put down to different causes, such as the printer's confusion between prose and verse.* There are textual duplications also, where one may agree with him in thinking that corrected and uncorrected versions have been left standing together, through the absence or disregard of deletion marks.6 This
* Ibid. iii. 5. « Wilson, Mer. vfVen* 106.
* Meas.for Mcas\ i. 2. 120. * Cf. p. 181.
3 Much Ado, i. x. i; ii. x. x. Some 6 Wilson. Love's Lab. Lost, 107. modern editions omit her.
232 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
indicates revision, no doubt, in a sense, but by no means necessarily the wholesale revision of a play. The altera- tions may be mere afterthoughts at the time of original composition. We cannot, on this hypothesis, take quite literally the statement of Heminges and Condell that they had scarce received a blot in Shakespeare's papers. It would be absurd to take it quite literally. But it certainly does not suggest any constant habit of self-revision. An- other feature upon which Professor Wilson frequently relies is the variation of nomenclature. In so far as this is merely a matter of spelling, whether in text, stage-direc- tions or speech-prefixes, little importance can be attached to it. The orthographic vagueness of the Elizabethans reaches its maximum with proper names. The same name will have different spellings in a single letter or other docu- ment. Some men do not even spell their own names consistently; it seems that Shakespeare did not.1 .The most one can say is that, if one spelling is habitually used in one batch of scenes and another in a second batch, the two batches are not likely to have been written at the same sitting. But Professor Wilson is more concerned with the variations in stage-directions and speech-prefixes between personal and descriptive or 'generic' names, and he has evolved a theory that generic names 'may be taken as clues suggesting revision'. He even goes so far as to conjecture that Dogberry and Verges may be designated as Con- stable and Headborough in a scene of Much Ado About Nothing because these, of all names, Shakespeare 'could not be bothered' to remember.2 I do not believe a word of it* Such variations occur in nearly every play. Pro- fessor Wilson sometimes weaves them into his argument, and sometimes leaves them unnoticed. He lets Abner by and spots Melchizedek. Any attempt at a uniform application of his theory would indeed land him in chaos. Probably Shakespeare wrote Dogberry and Verges when •he was conscientious before dinner, and Constable and Headborough when he was relaxed afterwards. It did not matter. He was not following the precise tradition of the
* Cf. p. 506. * Wilson, Itntt Lab. Lost, naj Much Ado, 96.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 233
literary drama. The personal and the generic names would be alike intelligible to the players and their book- keeper. Similar variations are to be found in play manu- scripts and 'plots*, and here too we get summary notes for the return of groups, although it is with 'something of a gasp' that Professor Wilson comes in Love's Labour's Lost upon the 'bald* direction 'Enter the Ladyes'.1 Re- vision, according to Professor Wilson, sometimes took the form of rewriting verse scenes in prose, and of this traces remain in the presence of lines still recognizable as verse. Terse-fossils' he calls them. I do not think that these rhythms have any such significance. They are a constant feature of Shakespeare's prose. They are most frequent in the comedies of his mid-career, such as As Tou Like //and Twelfth Night. But there are many also in Coriolanus and Winter's Tale, and no j>lay is altogether without them. Often they form single line speeches, and here it may be uncertain whether prose or verse is intended. But they also occur sporadically in the middle of speeches, and some- times in groups. Professor Wilson is far from noticing them all. The number might be much increased i^ with Professor A. E. Morgan, one took into account not only regular decasyllabic rhythms, but others which could be carried as such in a blank verse passage by substituting a verse intonation for a prose one and allowing for tri- syllabic feet.2 These, however, when they come in a prose passage, do not really read as anything but prose. A dramatic value is sometimes involved. The rhythm cor- responds to a rise in the emotional scale of utterance. It is often so in single lines of As Tou Like It. And Shake- speare was not unconscious of the device. Orlando enters in a prose scene with 'Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind', and Jaques departs with the comment, 'Nay, then, God be wi' you, an you talk in blank verse'.3 More generally, a writer, who makes habitual transitions be- tween prose and verse, may naturally have had the instinct
i Wilson, Love's Lab. Lost, 1135 cf. SA.'t Henry W (1924). p. 119. 3 As You Like It, iv. 1-30.
* A, E. Morgan, Some Problems of
234 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
that the use of a rather rhythmical type of prose served to bridge the line of demarcation. But the feature is not at all one peculiar to Shakespeare. Verse rhythms are com- mon enough in prose or all kinds. The most austere modern taste, based on eighteenth-century models, tends to reject them from ordinary straightforward discourse. But they are freely used in imaginative writing, especially to give a final grace to a period. Landor has them and Walter Pater. Stevenson is fond of them. Ruskin ends a decorative passage of The Crown of Wild Olive with one decasyllabic and two octosyllabic rhythms. There are no doubt places in Shakespeare where, with what Professor Wilson calls 'a little innocent faking', several prose lines together could be turned into blank verse. The rhythms here may be a little overdone, but I do not feel that, without the faking, they are so obtrusive as to necessitate a theory of revision.1 Professor Pollard, who has noticed the same characteristic of the middle comedies, realizes the difficulty of crowding Shakespeare's early years with too many first versions of plays, but thinks that he may have written some fragmentary scenes in verse, laid them aside, and utilized them for the prose of later plays.2 The sug- gestion is one which there is evidence neither to confirm nor to refute.
Internal evidence makes it necessary to accompany a general acceptance of the traditional Shakespearean canon with certain qualifications, which may be set out in sum- mary form.3 Collaboration must be admitted in Henry Fill and probably in Taming of the Shrew, as well as in the uncanonical Pericles and Two Noble Kinsmen, and pos- sibly in Edward III. Of replacement of the work of a collaborator, which figures in some of the speculations of Fleay, and was presumably suggested by Ben Jonson's treatment of Sejanus, there is no sign.4 Apart from the touching-up of Titus Andronicus, which rests primarily on external evidence, and the insertion of two late scenes into
* Wilson, As To» Like If, 945 cf. my 4 Library, v. 374. comment in Year's Work> vii. 125. 3 For details, cf. ch. ix.
* Pollard, Foundations, 14, and in * Fleay, L.W. 180, 2045 cf. p. 210,
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 235
the heterogeneous structure of i Henry VI \ there is nothing substantial which points to the dressing-up of alien plays. Some afterthoughts written into Low's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Troilus and Cressida, are revealed by failures to delete the original wordings. Mislineations in The Shrew and Timon of Athens may indi- cate others. But such alterations are no proof of complete rewriting, and for this the evidence is of the scantiest. An exception may be made for Midsummer-Night's Dream, which looks as if it had been converted from a wedding entertainment into a play for the public stage, by some changes in the last act and the provision of an alternative ending. Some passages in 2, 3 Henry VI may owe their origin to a revival. We know, again on external evidence, that a line not now found in Julius Caesar met with criticism from Jonson. It would be absurd to lay down categorically that there has been no touching-up anywhere else. But that the great majority of the plays are Shake- speare's from beginning to end, and that, broadly speak- ing, when he had once written them, he left them alone, I feel little doubt. These are propositions which, so far, disintegrating criticism has entirely failed to shake.
That most of the texts have undergone some adaptation for theatrical purposes is obvious. Here, again, I do not believe in any substantial rewriting. There has clearly been some shortening, and although the existence of alternative versions sometimes makes it possible to restore the omitted passages, this is not so for all the plays. Whether Shakespeare himself exercised any discretion as to the cuts we cannot tell ; they are not all equally judicious. A few interpolations can also be traced; bits of spectacle, a
.ike It, Cymleline, Tempest, and notably Macbeth; bits of
clowning in Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, and pos- sibly Othello.1 It is not always certain that the songs used
1 Cf., however, Gildon's tradition bad Qq show evidence, would pre- (App. C, no. xxi) as to Shakespeare's sumably not get into the prompt- responsibility for incongruous clown- book, unless it was exceptionally suc- ing in Qtfatto. Sheer gag, of which the cessful.
236 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
were Shakespeare's own. Altered stage-directions tell of casting decisions and of the activities of the book-keeper in giving effect to these and in clearing up uncertainties. The methods followed are already familiar to us in the theatrical manuscripts.1 Again the parallel texts come to our aid. The Folio directions for i Henry IV almost exactly repeat those of the Quarto. In 2 Henry IV the basis is the same, but there has been a minute revision, which indicates a careful study of the text. Many directions are shortened by the omission of notes for apparel and the like. Errors are corrected, although a few new ones are made. Over- looked entries are marked. Indefinite numbers are re- placed by specific ones. Superfluous supernumeraries are eliminated. The same features are apparent in the Folio versions of Hamlet \ Othello, and King Lear, and to a lesser extent in other plays. The speech-prefixes may be checked, and the musical notes altered or varied. Mr. Lawrence thinks that the King's men did not use cornets until they acquired the Blackfriars and took on the musical tradition of that house. If he is right, the appearance of cornets in a Folio stage-direction would be evidence of production or revival in or after 1609. Such a revival would not of course necessarily imply textual revision, as Mr. Lawrence assumes.2 Even where there are no parallel texts, the hand of the book-keeper may be suspected in directions so worded as to suggest a gloss or to leave a duplication.* It is not necessary to ascribe to him the placing of entries in advance of lines spoken by the entrants; or references to properties familiar in the tiring-house but not to the audience, such as 'Enter Piramus with the Asse head'; or technicalities such as 'for' in the sense of 'disguised as'.*
1 Cf. p. 118. v. x. 190, 'Enter... E. Dromio of
* W. J, Lawrence, Sh.*s Workshop, Ephesus'j Mer. of Ven. ii. 5. i, 48. Lawrence doubts whether a simi- 'Enter lewe and his man that was the lar significance attaches to the mention Clowne'j As Tou Like It, ii. 4. i, of hautbois; cf. T.L3. (1929, June 13, 'Enter . . . Clowne, alias Touchstone's July 18, 25). Much Ado, ii. x. i, 'Enter Leonato, his
* Com. of Err. iv. 4. 43, 'Enter . . . brother, ... and Beatrice his neece, a Schoolemasier, caU'd Pinch'5 149, and a kinsman*, with similar examples •Runne all out*, duplicating 150, *Exe- at ii. i. 89, 218; iii. 4. i j Hi, 5. i. unt omnes, as fast as may be, frighted'j * MM. N. Dr. iii. x. 106 (F)j As Tou
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 237
An actor-author, thinking in terms of the theatre, might quite well so write. Norareimt- ^" J* •" * "
the book-keeper's, although the form would be natural for him.1 I do not think that warnings for the preparation of properties in advance occur in the canonical plays. They do in Two Noble Kinsmen. But the book-keeper is clearly revealed in several places where the printer has preserved the name of an actor written beside or in sub- stitution for that of the character which he played.2 Generally this occurs in stage-directions, and the analogy of the theatrical manuscripts rules out the alternative ex- planation of Professor Gaw, who finds here the mind of Shakespeare unconsciously identifying the part with the personality of its representative^ The case is perhaps not so simple where, as in Much Ado About Nothing, the actor- names run through a series of speech-prefixes. But pro- bably Shakespeare wrote inadequate prefixes, in the form of mere numerals, and the book-keeper glossed them. A guard must be kept against the attempts of Fleay and others to find the names of actors in those assigned textually to servants and other members of crowds.4 The book-keeper could have no occasion to trouble about textual names, and the author, writing in advance of cast- ing, would certainly not know to whom such small parts would be given.
Traces of the censorship must also be expected in the texts. They are not very numerous. The Chamberlain's and King's men were, of all companies, in the closest relation to the court through their patrons, and the least likely to run counter to authority, except by inadvertence. An episode capable of political misrepresentation was removed
Like It, ii. 4. i, 'Enter Rosaline for stage-hand.
Ganimed, Celia for Aliena'j Dead * Cf. chh. ix, x (2, 5 Hen. PI, Tarn.
Man's Fortune, plot 12, 'Exit Eschines of Shrew, Rom. & Jul., Mid. N. Dr.,
and enter for Bell veille'. 2 Hen. IP, Hen. P, Much Ado, AlTs
* His 'Ring the bell* seems to have Well, T.N.K.),
got into the text of Macb. ii. 3. 85. 3 A. Gaw, Actors' Names in Basic
I do not know that we need ascribe the Shakespearean Texts (P.M.Ljt. xl.
frequent 'Knocke* to him. In fact we 530); cf. p. 122.
do not know whether knocking was 4 Fleay, L.W. 265 ; Wilson, Tarn.
done by an in-coming actor or by a of Shrew, 118.
238 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
from Richard II before it was printed, and restored in Jacobean editions. Possibly two passages, at which Anne of Denmark might be likely to take offence, were similarly removed from Hamlet. These point to press censorship, rather than stage censorship. Indiscreet nomenclature has been reformed in Henry IV and Merry Wives of Wind- sor', and possibly in Hamlet. A jest on German and Spanish costume has disappeared from the Folio version of Much Ado About Nothing, and one on a Scottish lord from that of the Merchant of Venice. An intervention of the censor may also account for the absence of the 'four nations' scene, with its Captain Jamy, from the reported text of Henry V. We know that James resented the girding at Scotland in English plays.1 Conceivably the absence of Shallow's 'dozen white louses' from the reported Merry Wives of WindsorTR&y be no mere accident. There seems to have been some pruning of social and political criticism in King Lear, which has differently affected the Quarto and the Folio; of pathological details, with a similar divergence, in Troilus and Cressida; and of an unpatriotic sentiment and some bits of indelicacy in 2 Henry IF. All this comes to very little. The treatment of profanity is something of a puzzle. Dr. Greg, discussing the oaths in Merry Wives of Windsor^ suggests that they may not have been altered before the text was prepared for press in 1623, 2 This is possible, but it does not seem to me very probable. The Act of Abuses survived the wreck of more comprehensive measures against profanity, which were debated in Parlia- ment during 1604 and 1605-6, but proved controversial and never got upon the Statute-book.3 It was of very limited application. No person may 'in any Stage play, Interlude, Shewe, Maygame or Pageant jestingly or pro- phanely speake or use the holy Name of God or of Christ Jesus or of the Holy Ghoste or of the Trinitie'.4 Lam not
1 Cf. p. 65. 251, 270, 286, 294, 300; Lords Jour-
* Greg, Merry Wvws of W* xxxvi, nats, ii. 338, 340, 354, 365, 368,
with a comparative table (liv) for Q 369, 381, 400, 4x2, 414, 4x6, 436,
and F. Similar tables would be valu- 446.
able for other plays. * Full text in Eliz. Stage, iv. 338.
' Commons Journals, i. 247, 250,
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 239
lawyer enough to know whether the courts were ever called upon to interpret the Act. Presumably it would bar the dimi- nutive oaths in which the divine names are corrupted or implied, but not those by the Virgin, or the saints, or the rood, or the mass, or mere imprecations.1 Sir Henry Herbert, as we have seen, was inclined to press it hard, and was overruled by Charles I.2 If the king had been a better etymologist, he would have realized that, while ' Faith' was an asseveration, 'Death* and 'Slight* were, at least in origin, oaths. 4By God's death* is said to have been the favourite oath of Elizabeth.3 But whatever degrees of profanity the Act covered, it clearly only related to words spoken on the stage, and not to words put into print. One does not see, then, why the publishers of the First Folio should have gone to the pains of expurgation. There is certainly none in the Quarto reprints between 1606 and 1623. Whether there is any evidence for Dr. Greg's sug- gestion outside Shakespeare, I am unable to say. The Honest Man's Fortune was reformed when Herbert re- allowed it in 1625, but printed with its oaths in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1 647, and again reformed for that of 1 679. On the whole it looks as if the expurga- tion of Shakespeare must date from stage revivals of 1606 or later. Whatever its genesis, it is nowhere complete and in most plays quite perfunctory. My notes as to this are far from exhaustive, but perhaps sufficient to give a fair picture. The plays which have suffered most are J, 2 Henry 17. Here 'God', 'Lord*, 'Jesus', even when seri- ously used, are generally omitted, or replaced by a sub- stitute. On the other hand, they are sometimes kept, even when profane. 'Christ* remains, but the epithet is dropped from 'christen names*. Of other forms, 'God's body', 'God's light', "Sblood*, and 'Zounds* go, but 'Cock and pie' is kept. So, as a rule is 'Marry', but *By*r Lady* and 'By
1 Examples of profanity are oaths Zounds, Gogs wouns, 'cock and pie*,
by God's blood (plud), body, bodykins, by Gis, 'ods heartlings, lifelings, me,
bread, lady, lid, liggens, lugges, light, my little life, my will, nownes, pilli-
mother, sonties, wounds; God's my kins, plessed will.
life$ and the corrupt forms, 'sblood, 2 Cf. p. 102.
sdeath, 'sfoot, 'slid, 'slight, 'swounds, » Speed, Chronicle, f. 1200.
240 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap. VII
the mass', which one would have thought equally outside the danger of the Act, generally go. Even imprecations and asseverations are not always spared. Here the treat- ment is quite inconsistent, since 'Faith', 'By my troth', and 'By this hand', while sometimes altered, are also intro- duced as substitutes. Similarly, although 'Heaven* nor- mally replaces 'God', there is at least one omission of 'By heaven'. 'The devil' and even 'Hang yourself are also omitted. Two scriptural citations are cancelled.1 But it is amusing to notice that Hotspur's advice to his wife to leave 'in sooth' and swear 'a good mouth-filling oath' remains unaltered, except for the omission of 'Heart!'.2 One is tempted to think -that Herbert must have been at work on Henry IV \ possibly also on Othello, where the pruning, although less stringent, follows much the same lines. Elsewhere the asseverations are usually left alone, and even the revision of oaths proper is lightly taken. There is a fair amount of it in Hamlet. These plays give a little support to the theory that the expurgation took place at revivals, since there is some evidence for the performance of them all during 1606-23. On the other hand, the same is true of Much Ado About Nothing and Titus Andronicus. But Much Ado About Nothing has only lost a single passage, with four 'Gods' in it, and Titus Andronicus only the word 'Zounds'.3 Of the other plays for which good parallel texts are available, alterations are not infrequent in Richard II and Richard ///, but Love's Labour V Lost, Midsummer-Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Merchant of Venice show only one or two apiece. There is more variation between the Folio and the bad Quartos of Henry ^and Merry Wives of Windsor, but here- we cannot tell how much profanity the reporters may have contributed. Fluellen in the one and Sir Hugh Evans and Doctor Caius in the other are, however, hard swearers, only equalled by Mrs. Quickly. The commonest feature throughout is the substitution of 'God' by 'Heaven'. In
1 j Hen. IV, i. 2. 995 2 Hen. 17, 3 MuckAdo,\v.i. 19-**$ Tit.Andr. iii. 2. 41. iv. 2, 71.
* i Hen. IF, iii. x. 252.
Chap. VII THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY 241
Love's Labour 9s Lost 'Jove' takes its place.1 'The dickens' for 'The devil' in Merry Wives of Windsor is the earliest known example of that euphemism.2 For some reason 'Zounds' is an expletive particularly selected for reproba- tion. Nearly all the plays written after 1 606, as well as the earlier Julius Caesar, Troilus and CressiJa, and King Lear, have pagan settings, and to swear by heathen deities was safe enough. There are of course a few anachronisms. On the other hand, pagan asseverations, particularly by 'Jove', also appear in plays whose setting is not pagan. Among the later plays Henry VIII has still a moderate amount of profanity. How far the early plays, for which we have only Folio texts, have been altered can only be matter for conjecture. In Twelfth Night, of which there were certainly late revivals, Sir Toby Belch swears less and more mildly than one would expect, and the use of 'Jove* is common. In King John the examples of 'Heaven' markedly outnumber those of 'God'. But it must remain doubtful whether such indications, or the slighter changes in some of the Folio texts already noted, can be taken as evidence of revivals. It certainly cannot be assumed that when "Rosalind swears 'by my troth, and in good earnest, and so God mend me, and by all pretty oaths that are not danger- ous', she was thinking of the Act of Abuses.* Quite apart from the use of 'God', profanity was 'dangerous', long before a Jacobean Parliament made it so. On the other hand, with the case of Much Ado About Nothing before us, it is equally impossible to assume that the preservation of numerous oaths in the Folio means that there was no late revival. The sporadic nature of the expurgation where any is traceable, remains perplexing. Professor Wilson suggests that it may have been more completely done in 'parts' than in prompt-copies.4 But if so, why should it have been done in prompt-copies at all ? It is an alternative possibility that marginal expurgations on prompt-copies were not always observed by the printers or perhaps were not thought worth the trouble of carrying to examples of
1 Love's Lab. Lost, v. 2. 3x6. 3 As You Like It, iv. x. 194.
1 Merry Wvues of W. iii. 2. 19. 4 Wilson, Love's Lab. Lost, 190.
3142*1 »
242 THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY Chap, VII
the Quartos when these were used as copy for the Folio, It certainly cannot be assumed that, even under the com- paratively mild regime of Sir George Buck, there was not more expurgation in the actual representation of revived plays, especially at court, than the state of the Folio texts reveals.
CHAPTER VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY
[Bibliographical Note. Malone's Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays of Shakspeare were Written first appeared in the 2nd ed. (1778) of the Works by Johnson and Steevens. Its final form is in Variorum, ii. 288. G. Chalmers accumulated additional 'topical9 allusions, many of which were far-fetched, in his Supplemental Apology (1799), 266, and others have been detected by later commentators. A collection is in H. P. Stokes, An Attempt to Determine the Chronological Order of Shakespeare9 s Plays (1878). The successive chronologies of F. G. Fleay are in his Si. Manual (1876, 1878), 22, C. M. Ingleby's Sh. the Man and the Book, ii. (1881), 99 sff., and his Life and Work of Sh. (1886), 175. That of E. Dowden is in his Shakspere, His Mind and Art (1875, &c.), and as a table in his Shakspere Primer (1877), 56. That of F. J. Furnivall, in its fullest form, is in his Introduction to the Leopold Shakespere (1877) and in the revision of that, with the help of J. Munro, for the Century Shakespeare (1908). Naturally most biographies and systematic com- mentaries deal with the subject. Among German contributions are W. Konig, Ueter den Gang von Shs dichterischer Entooickelung (1875, J. x. 193); H. Conrad (Isaac), Z« den Shs Sonn. (1878-9, Archiv, lix. 155, 241; Ix. 33; Ixi. 177, 393; Ixii. i, 129), Die Son.-Periode in ShsLeben (1884, J. xix. 176), Die Ham.-Periode in Shs Leten (1885-6, Arch. Ixxiii.i63,37i; lxxiv.45; Ixxv.i, 269), ShsSelbstbekenntniss(i%<yj\Eine neue Methode der chronologischen Sh.-Forschung (1909, Germ.-Rom. Monats- schrift, i. 232, 307); B. T, Strater, Die Perioden in Shs dichterischer Entwickelung (1881-2, Archiv, Ixv. 153, 383; Ixvi. 121, 273; Ixvii. i, 129, 417); G. Sarrazin, Zur Chronologie von Shs Jugenddramen (1894, J. xxix. 92), Zur Chronologie von Shs Dichtungen (1896, J. xxxil 149), W. Shs Lehrjahre (1897), Wortechos bet SA (1897-8, J. xxxiii. 120; xxxiv. 119), Aus Shs Meisterwerkstatt (1906); E. Ekwall, Die Sh- Chronologie (1911, Germ.-Rom. Monatsschrift, iii. 90).
On vocabulary are R. Simpson, Sh.'s Once-Used Words (1874, N.S.S. Trans. 1 1 5), J. D. Butler, Once- Used Words in Sh. (i 886, N.r. SA. Soc.). Tables of such words for individual plays are in the Henry Irving Shake- speare. On Sh's. prose are H. Sharpe, The Prose in Sh!s Plays (1885, N.S.S. Trans. 523); V. F. Janssen, Die Prosa in Shs Dramen (1897); G. Bordukat, Die Aigrenzung zwischen Fers und Prosa in den Dramen Shs (1918). The special treatises on metre are given in the BibL Note to Appendix H. On other stylistic features are G. Kramer, Ueber Stichomythie und Gleichklang in dem Dramen Shs (i 889) ; L. Wurth, Da s Wortspielbei Sh ( 1 89 5) ; F. G. Hubbard, Repetition and Parallelism in the Earlier Elizabethan Drama (1905, P.M.LA.m. 360),^ Type of Blank
R2
244 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
Perse Line Found in the Earlier Elizabethan Drama (1917, PM.L.A. xzxii. 68); W. Hflbner, Der Pergleick bei Sh (1908); H. Earth, Das Epitheton in den Dramen des Jungen Sh und seiner Porganger (1914).
Theories about Love's Labour's Won are in R. Farmer, Essay on the Learning of Sh. (1767, Par. i. 314)5 J. Hunter, Disquisition on Tp. (1839, New Illustrations of Sh. i. 130, 359); G. L. Craik, The English of Shake- speare (1857), 7; A. E. Brae, Collier, Coleridge and Sh. (1860); P. A. Daniel, Q. Facs. ofM.A. (1886), v; R. Boyle, A.W. and L.L.W. (1890, £.$. xiv. 408); F. v. Westenholz, SAs L.L.W. (1902, Beilage zur Allge- meinen Zeitung)*, A. H. Tolman, Shs L.L.W. (1904, Views about Ham. 243); H. D. Gray, L.L.L. with a Conjecture as to L.L.W. (1918).]
A RECOGNITION of the substantial homogeneity of most of the plays simplifies the approach to the problem of chrono- logy, since it makes it reasonable to assume, in the absence of any special ground for suspecting an insertion, that datable allusions have not been added by a reviser, and that the mention of a play by name implies its existence much in the form in which it is preserved to us. It will again be well to attach primary weight to external evi- dence, and a convenient starting-point is provided by the list of plays in the Palladis Tamia of Francis Meres, which was presumably compiled before the registration of that book on 7 September I598.1 This at once enables us to segregate a considerable group of comparatively early works. There are six comedies, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, 'Loue labours wbnne', Midsummer-Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice\ four histories, Richard II, Richard III, Henry 17, King John\ and two tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet. Meres names them in the order here followed, but it is not necessary to suppose that he paid attention to their respective dates of production. On the other hand, the list is so^long as to suggest that it includes all that were known to him, and that it was only bjr a happy accident that he was able, by treating the histories as tragedies, to balance six of these against six comedies in accordance with his artificial manner of writing. Meres took his M.A. degree at Cambridge in 1591 and by incorporation at Oxford on 10 July 1593. It was probably after that date that he
1 App, B, no', xiii.
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 245
came to London, where he was dwelling in Botolph Lane by 1597, and if so, Henry VI or any other play not on the stage between 1593 and 1598 may have been unknown to him. His mention of Henry IV leaves it uncertain whether he knew both parts, and the identity of Love Labours Won must for the present be left aside.
Terminal dates before which production must have occurred can be established for a good many plays. The commonest sources are entries in the Stationer? Register^ or the title-pages of printed editions. The former give precise dates, the latter years only, which are best taken as calendar years.1 Twice the Register specifically notices a court performance during the preceding Christinas. The lists of such performances for 1604-5 anc^ 161 1-12 give some help. So does the Diary of Philip Henslowe. A few performances at the Inns of Court or in public theatres are independently recorded in contemporary documents. And there are a few literary notices, some of which are not capable of very exact dating. Echoes cannot be relied on, but Jonson's quotation of Julius Caesar in E.M.O., 'Reason long since is fled to animals, you know*, is more than an echo. Only one play carries its own evidence. This is Henry V, where a chorus indicates not only a ter- minal date, but also an initial date, after which the pro- duction can be placed. As a rule the initial dates are much less certain than the terminal ones. Henslowe's 'ne's are fixed, but it is only the earliest of Shakespeare's plays with which Henslowe can have been concerned. An account of the Globe fire shows that Henry VIII was then a new play. For the rest we can only rely upon the dates at which 'sources' became available, in most cases too remote to be helpful, and upon allusions in the plays themselves to datablehistorical events. These require handlingwith great caution. Few are so definite as to be primary evidence; others at the most come in as confirmatory, after a pro- visional date has been arrived at on safer grounds. We can be pretty sure that the references to Scottish kings of England in Macbeth are Jacobean, and if so, the reference
' Cf.p.17*
246 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
to equivocators in the same play is likely to be to the equivocators of the Gunpowder Plot, We can be a little less sure that the bit about the currish wolf in Merchant of Venice reflects the Lopez conspiracy, but if so, a phrase about a coronation may echo that of Henri IV. Yet both equivocation and coronations were common phenomena, to which any dramatist might refer at any date. So, too, were the plague and tempests and even eclipses, although an allusion is fairly plausible in Midsummer-Night's Dream to the rather unusual bad weather of 1594-5, which im- pressed the chroniclers, and an allusion in King Lear to the double eclipse of sun and moon in 1605, which was heralded by the astrological prophets. But Shakespeare does not seem to have been greatly given to 'topical' allu- sions, and the hunt for them becomes dangerous, especially if it is inspired by a desire to link the plays with con- temporary literary controversies in which he may have taken but little interest, or with incidents in the chequered careers of the Earls of Southampton and Essex, revealed to us by the ransacking of political archives, but of doubt- ful familiarity to the Elizabethan populace or its play- wrights.1
It is, however, possible, on external evidence alone, to draw up a trial-table of primary indications limiting initial and terminal dates for nearly but not quite all of the plays. They are not all equally convincing, but I have excluded a good many others which are less so. I put them in columnar form, the 'initial' indications on the left, the 'terminal' indications on the right. The order, for con- venience of reference, is that of my final table.2
2 Henry 71.
Registration (12 March 1594). Print (1594).
3 Henry VI.
Parody by Greene (ob. 3 Sep- tember 1592). Print (1595). * Cf. p. 67. * Cf. p. 269.
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 247
I Henry PL
Production (ne) by Henslowe Production by Henslowe (3 'March 1592). (3 March 1592).
Allusion by Nashe in Pierce Penilesse (8 August 1592).
Richard III
Registration (20 October 1597). Print (1597).
Comedy of Errors.
Performance at Gray's Inn (28 December 1594).
Titus Andronicus.
Production (ne) by Henslowe Production by Henslowe (24 January 1 594). (24 January 1 594).
Registration (6 February 1594). Print (1594).
Two Gentlemen of Verma.
Notice by Meres (7 September
Love*s Labour *s Lost.
Allusion to Chapman's Shadow Performance at court (Christ* of Night (1594). mas 1597-8 at latest).
Print (1598).
Romeo md Juliet.
Print (1597).
Richard II.
No use in ist edition of Daniel's Use in 2nd edition of Daniel's Civil Wars (1595). Civil Wars (1595).
Performance for Sir Edward
Hoby (9 December 1595). Registration (29 August 1597). Print (1597).
Midsummer-Nighfs Dream.
Allusion to weather of 1594. Notice by Meres (7 September Allusion to baptism of Henry of 1 598). Scotland (30 August 1594)*
248 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
King John.
Notice by Meres (7 September 1598).
Merchant of Venice.
Allusion to death of Lopez Use of Gobbo as nickname for (7 June 1594). Sir Robert Cecil (27 October
• 1596).
Registration (22 July 1598).
1 Henry 17.
Registration (25 February
1598). Print (1598).
2 Henry IV.
Survival of name Oldcastle (abandoned by 25 February 1598).
Much Ado About Nothing.
No notice by Meres (7 Septem- 'Stay' in Stationers' Register ber 1598). (4 August 1600).
Registration (23 August 1600). Print (1600).
Henry 7.
Allusion to campaign of Essex Allusion to campaign of Essex in Ireland (begun 27 March in Ireland (ended 28 Septem- 1599). ber 1599).
No notice by Meres (7 Septem- ber 1598).
Julius Caesar.
No notice by Meres (7 Septem- Performance seen by Thomas ber 1598). Platter (21 September 1599).
Quotation in Jonson's E.M.O.
(1599)- Echo in Weever's Mirror of
Martyrs (1599).
As You Like It.
No notice by Meres (7 Septem- *Stay* in Stationers9 Register ber 1598). (4 August 1600).
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 249
Twelfth Night.
Use of Robert Jones's First Book Performance at Middle Temple of Airs (1600). (2 February 1602).
No notice by Meres (7 Septem- ber 1598).
Hamlet.
Allusion to revival of boy actors Notice by Gabriel' Harvey (be- (1599). fore 25 February 1601).
No notice by Meres (7 Septem- Registration (26 July 1602). ber 1598). Print (1603).
Merry Wives of Windsor.
No notice by Meres (7 Septem- Registration (18 January 1602). ber 1598). Print (1602).
Trot/us and Cressida.
Echo in prologue of Jonson's Registration (7 February 1 603).
Poetaster (1601). No notice by Meres (7 Septem- ber 1598).
fMeres names no later plays, but his list is getting too remote to be worth citation.]
Measure for Measure.
Performance at court (26 De- cember 1604).
Othello.
Performance at court (i No- vember 1604).
King Lear. Registration of source-play Leire Performance at court (26 De-
(8 May 1605). cember 1606).
Allusions to eclipses (27 Septem- Registration (26 November ber and 2 October 1605). 1607).
Print (1608).
Macbeth. Allusion to equivocation of Performance seen by Foraian
Gunpowder conspirators (20 April 1611).
(Jan.-March 1606). Allusion to reign of James I
(25 March 1603).
250 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
Antony and Cleopatra.
Registration (20 May 1608).
Pericles.
Performance seen by Venetian ambassador (5 January 1 6o6< > 23 November 1608).
Print of derivative novel (1608).
Print (1609).
Cymbelme.
Performance seen by Forman (2i<>29 April 1611).
Winter's Tale.
Performance seen by Forman (15 May 1611).
Performance at court (5 No- vember 1611).
Tempest.
Performance at court (i No- vember 1611).
TJ -^ TJTT f T
jnienry riii*
Performance, as *new' play (29 Performance (29 June 1613). June 1613).
Two Noble Kinsmen. Use of dance from mask by Beau- mont (20 February 1613).
The table is a mere scaffolding. Four plays, Taming of the Shrew, All's WellThatEnds Well, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens, do not appear in it at all; and for many others, especially in the Jacobean period, a considerable range of dating remains open* On the other hand, it provides confir- mation of the Palladis Tamia list for the early years, except as regards the Two Gentlemen of Verona and King John. It establishes fixed points for i Henry | VI, Titus Andronicus, Henry V, and Henry VIII\ and fairly narrow limits for Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, Merry Wives of Windsor, As Tou Like It, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet, on
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 251
the reasonable assumption that if these had existed when Meres wrote, he would have named them. It points to an early run of Yorkist histories and a later run of Lancastrian histories. And it at least suggests several other tentative groupings. There is a common lyrical quality in Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer-Night's Dream, and Richard II, which are all in Meres's list. There is a common vein of realistic comedy in Henry IF and the Merry Wives of Windsor, which are further linked by the recurrence of identical characters. There is a com- mon vein of courtly comedy in As Tou Like It and Twelfth Night. Both of these groups must come very near the end of the sixteenth century. Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida again must all be late Elizabethan tragedies, and Othello seems to begin a series of Jacobean tragedies, to which King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleofatra, coming in no certain order, belong. Finally Cym- beline, Pointer's Tale, and Tempest, which emerge in rapid succession at the tail-end of the list, have again a common quality of romantic tragi-comedy, which makes it probable that they were not far apart in origin. These are not all equally valid inferences, since some of them rest, not so much upon positive indications, as upon the absence of earlier indications. But if they are provisionally accepted and the plays studied in accordance with the time-order of the groups, it is possible to arrive at an outline concep- tion of Shakespeare's development, as regards both drama- tic temper and the use of language, which in its turn makes a starting-point for further progress. This is not a book of aesthetic criticism, and I do not propose to retrace an argument which has been already worked out by many writers. Instead I will draw upon the admirable treatment of Professor Dowden. He distinguishes four stages in Shakespeare's career, which he calls respectively 'In the workshop', 'In the world', 'Out of the depths', and 'On the heights'. The first is the period of 'dramatic apprenticeship and experiment', the 'second that of the later historical plays and the mirthful and joyous comedies, the third that of grave or bitter comedies and of the great
252 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
tragedies, the fourth that of 'the romantic plays, which are at once grave and glad, serene and beautiful poems'. He has a corresponding 'impression* of changes in diction.
In the earliest plays the language is sometimes as it were a dress put upon the thought — a dress ornamented with superfluous carej the idea is at times hardly sufficient to fil! out the language in which it is put; in the middle plays (Julius Caesar serves as an example) there seems a perfect balance and equality between the thought and its expression. In the latest plays this balance is disturbed by the preponderance or excess of the ideas over the means of giving them utterance. The sentences are close-packed; 'there are rapid and abrupt turnings of thought, so quick that language can hardly follow fast enough; impatient activity of intellect and fancy, which, having once disclosed an idea, cannot wait to work it orderly out'; 'the language is sometimes alive with imagery'.1
Of course Professor Dowden has a great deal more to say about Shakespeare's mental and stylistic history than this; I have only given so much as I think can be justified from a grouping of the plays on external evidence alone. A full literary and psychological analysis can only follow and not precede the establishment of a chronology. And in the meantime we are bound to a circular process. A pre- liminary dating sets up impressions of temper and style, and the definition of these helps to elaborate the dating. This is inevitable, once we depart from the external evi- dence. The chronology can only become a complex hypo- thesis, pieced together from materials not in themselves conclusive, and depending for its acceptance on the success with which it combines convergent and reconciles con- flicting probabilities. General impressions, such as Pro- fessor Dowden formulates, make it at once possible to give some expansion to the groups already realized. Two Gentlemen of Verona finds its natural affinities with the experimental plays, King John with the later histories, All 'j Well That Ends Well with Measure for Measure^ Coriolanus
1 Dowden, Shakespeare Primer, 37, mances too, the intricate weaving of
47. My own feeling is that the balance clauses is a closely fitting vesture for
of thought and expression is recovered the involutions and qualifications of
in the magnificent phrasing of Antony the ideas. and Cleopatra\ and that in the ro-
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 253
and Timon of Athens with the Jacobean tragedies, Pericles with the romances. Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing approximate, perhaps rather less closely, to the joyous comedies.
Obviously the mere grouping of plays is only the first stage of the chronological problem. There remain the more difficult tasks of determining an order of succession within the groups and between the members of over- lapping groups, and of fitting this order into the time allowed by the span of Shakespeare's dramatic career. Here it is legitimate to make some cautious use of minor topical allusions and echoes forwards and backwards, which were rejected as not sufficiently convincing to fur- nish primary evidence. An attempt is made to assemble these, play by play, elsewhere.1 The cumulative results can at the most only support conclusions of higher or lower degrees of probability. The main effort ot recent scholarship has been to supplement external evidence by a closer analysis of style, and to establish chronological 'tests' analogous to those which have already been dis- cussed as determinative of authorship.2 The outcome is not without value, although a doubt must be expressed at the outset whether it is ever possible to determine an order for work of more or less level date upon stylistic considera- tions alone. The style of every writer has its intelligible development, no doubt. But it is not always a matter of smooth progression. Subject-matter has its reaction upon style. During all the first half of Shakespeare's career, he moves more freely in comedy than in history. Moreover, allowance has to be made for the influence of moods and for deliberate experiment. The resultant leaps forward and set-backs become apparent when a chronological order is already known, but may be very misleading as material from which to reconstruct one. Certainly particular aspects of style can be singled out and studied in isolation, and by such a process the general impression of charac- teristic style and of its phases is naturally both strengthened and refined. There is the aspect of structure, for example,
' Cf. ch. ix. *' Cf. p. 220.
254 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY CHap.VIII
in the types of character employed and the choice of dramatic situations. One may note that in the earlier plays comic relief is often afforded by the use of a lout and that in the later plays a court fool takes his place; or again that a rather artificial balancing between pairs of young men or young women tends to disappear after the experi- mental stage. On the other hand, such features are not always purely stylistic; they depend in part on the nature of the story adapted for the plot, and probably in part also on the succession of actors available. Nor are they all significant of period. The favourite device of concealed identity runs through the plays from beginning to end, One may take, again, Shakespeare's imagery, and compare its range at different periods. No doubt similes and meta- phors from country sights and sounds prevail in his earliest and perhaps his latest plays and those from urban life in his middle plays, although it must not be forgotten that the unconscious memory is a reservoir, giving up from its store things both new and old. There are aspects of dic- tion too, to be observed; an early habit of ringing the changes upon some particular word, a later habit of coin- ing new words, and so forth. All such investigations make for a closer and more confident grouping of plays, but they do not really help us to get beyond the grouping.
I do not think that anything different can be said of the particular features of style out of which it has in fact been attempted to construct 'tests'. Of these there are three: parallels, vocabulary, metre. The parallel test is the inven- tion of the late Professor Conrad,1 He proposed to deter- mine the time-relation of plays, not on the basis of conspicuous parallels, but by enumerating all the parallels,- both of thought and sentiment, which he regarded as the more significant, and of verbal expression, between each pair of plays, and forging a chronological chain in which each play would be linked on either side with those to which its parallels were most frequent. Professor Conrad, so far as I know, never published his full enumeration. A sample prepared for Twelfth Night was very far from
. i. 232.
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 255
complete.1 And it is difficult to see how completeness could be secured. Verbal parallels can no doubt be traced by the patient exploitation of a concordance. But what scholar can claim the gifts of observation and memory required to assemble out of thirty-six plays all the parallels of thought and sentiment for which verbal clues are lack- ing ? Even if an exhaustive enumeration were available, it could not be stated in statistical terms. The units would not be convertible counters. They might be anything from mere repetitions of commonplaces to significant pas- sages pointing to some kind of association of ideas between the passages concerned. There is no valid criterion for demarcation of the two categories. Moreover, when an association of ideas exists, it may be due to some other cause than a common date of origin. It may arise from a similarity of situation, or a revival may have recalled old work to Shakespeare's mind. Broadly speaking, it is probably true that parallels are most frequent between contemporaneous plays. But this, again, does not take us beyond grouping. To some extent the same criticisms apply to Professor Sarrazin's vocabulary test; but not wholly, because recurrent words are much more nearly convertible counters than parallels of thought and phrase, and Professor Sarrazin limits his field to what he calls 'dislegomena' and 'trislegomena', that is, words only used twice or thrice by Shakespeare.2 In other respects his method is much like Professor Conrad's. The words listed include many rare or invented words, and also some which are not unusual, and the incidence of which is determined by the need for expressing the ideas which they connote. The latter are hardly significant. Once more, the recur- rences are commonest in plays of more or less the same date, although by no means confined to these. And once more we do not get beyond grouping*
A great deal of work has been done upon what are roughly called Verse' or 'metrical' tests. Differences in the handling of blank verse afford units which readily
1 y. xxxi. 177; cf. Sarrazin's criti- a y. xxxiii. 120$ xxxiv. 119. cism in J. xxxii. 163.
256 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
lend themselves to statistical treatment. Variations in the length of lines, in the number of syllables carried by lines, in the value given to unstressed vowels, in the distribution of stresses and pauses, can all be enumerated and tabu- lated.1 The extent of departure from the blank verse form by the introduction of prose and rhyme can also be measured. An intermixture of mediums is characteristic of Shakespeare from an early stage. Only about two-thirds of the hundred thousand lines or so occupied by the plays are in blank verse. The modification of blank verse itself is on the whole progressive. It culminates in the Jacobean tragedies, and in some of the more excited scenes of these, where transitions between prose and verse are also com- mon, the blank verse norm hardly remains recognizable. These metrical phenomena first attracted attention in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Richard Roderick noted the frequency of inverted first-foot stresses and 'redundant* final syllables as characteristic of Henry VIII. Little use of them was made as a guide to chronology by Malone, except that he took a high proportion of rhyme as being a sign of early work.2 The study was resumed nearly a hundred years after its initiation, notably in an essay by Charles Bathurst, in which the gradual changes in Shakespeare's manner, as regards both the employment of redundant final syllables and the coincidence of rhyth- mical pauses with line-endings, were well brought out. Much of the earliest work of the New Shakspere Society was also devoted to the subject. The chief contributor was F. G. Fleay. He was primarily concerned with 'tests' of authorship rather than of chronology. But he prepared a table, based upon the Globe text, in which he enumerated for each play the total lines, those of blank verse, prose, and rhyme, the abnormally short and long lines, and the redundant syllables, which he called 'double endings'. This was reprinted, with little alteration, in his Shake- speare Manual of 1876. Such a table, accurately done, would have been of great value as a basis for statistical
1 I give what seem to me the most * Far. ii. 3*7. useful tables in Appendix H.
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 257
analysis. Unfortunately Fleay's was extremely inaccurate, as may be seen from the fact that his totals often do not add up to anything like the Globe lines and sometimes diverge to the extent of hundreds. It is not very creditable to modern scholarship that these figures have been con- stantly reproduced down to Professor Tucker Brooke's Shakespeare of Stratford in 1926. Fleay in fact revised them, and printed new tables in C. M. Ingleby's Shake- speare the Man and the Book of 1 8 8 1 . Here he made some slight alterations in the basis, gave details for each scene, as weir as for each play, and claimed to have 'detected several errors' in the earlier version. The new figures are, however, still very far from accurate.1 Other students, both English and German, now took up the investigation, and made an advance upon Fleay's methods by relating their results in percentage form to the total number of blank- verse lines in each play, and thereby making a statistical comparison between play and play possible. Professor K5nig, for example, thus dealt with several 'tests' in his Der Vers in Skaksperes Dramen of 1888. In more recent years a number of new tests have been worked out by Professor Conrad. Neither of these scholars gives the counts from which his tables of proportions are calculated, and Professor Conrad's tables ao not cover all the plays. Counts are supplied, however, in the dissertations, written under his influence, of Dr. Kerrl on King Juhn and Julius Caesar and of Dr.Norpothon Two Gentlemen o/Perona,znd for important features the lines counted are cited and some- times even quoted. This is, of course, the better method, as it facilitates checking, and makes it feasible to estimate the personal equation of the investigator.
Some survey of the ground covered and of the diffi- culties to be faced may be attempted. There are no per- centage tables for the distribution of prose, and probably none would be helpful. It is used throughout the plays, except in two or three of the histories, and appears to have no chronological significance. If it is commonest in the second period, the reason is that comedies, to which it is
1 Cf. vol. ii, p. 406.
3X42.1 o
258 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
particularly appropriate, then come most thickly. Merry Wives of Windsor is almost entirely, and 2 Henry IP \ Much Ado About Nothing, As Tou Like It, Twelfth Night, and All 's Well That Ends Well are predominantly, in prose. Hamlet has a great deal; Julius Caesar \ not far removed in date, less than almost any other play. King Lear, Coriolanus, and Winter's Tale have much more than their respective neighbours Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Tem- pest. In scenes where prose and verse are mingled, it is not always easy to say whether a short sentence. should be treated as prose or truncated verse, or whether a rhythmic phrase in a prose environment is intended to be metrical or not.1 Counts will differ according to the judgement of the counters on these points. For rhyme, Professor Konig gives percentages of rhymed decasyllabic lines to all lines, and Professor Conrad percentages of all rhymed lines to blank-verse lines. Probably alternate rhymes and certainly sonnets, songs, other short rhymes, and doggerel rhymes should be kept apart from the ordinary heroic couplets, since they are generally introduced for special purposes. Professor Heuser gives independent figures for heroic couplets. Doggerel, except for a few lines, some of which may be of doubtful authenticity, is only found in quite early plays. From the point of view of chronology, con- tinuous passages of rhymed dialogue should be distin- guished from sporadic couplets. The former rarely appear after Twelfth Night, and as a rule with some deliberate intention, such as the enunciation of sententious comment by choric elders. The latter are used throughout, but with diminishing frequency towards the end, as 'tags' to clinch long or significant speeches, or the final speeches of scenes. Here again counts may differ through uncertainty as to whether sporadic rhymes are intended as such, or are merely accidental.
Chronologically, the departures from blank verse are of less importance than the variations within the blank-verse cadre itself. ^And among these again there is not much to be said about the abnormally short or long lines. Like all
Cf.p.233.
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 259
irregularities, they tend to increase, and reach a maximum in the Jacobean tragedies. But there is no even progres- sion* Richard III and Richard II alike show a con- siderable excess of both over many plays which follow them. The actual numbers have probably been perverted both by printers' errors and by the editorial rearrangement of lines, and some at least of the short lines may be the result of cuts.1 Some writers distinguish between Alex- andrines with six marked stresses and other lines which they treat as five-foot lines carrying two redundant sylla- bles after the final feet. This seems to me unnecessary, since an ordinary five-footer often has no marked stress in the final foot. Professor Conrad has a percentage table for all six-footers, but the smallness of the total number deprives it of value.2 In calculating, metrical variations generally, six-footers are best grouped with five-footers as normal blank verse.
Variations of stress have not so far received much study. The investigation is a difficult one, because there is often much uncertainty as to where stress is intended to fall. The stress in disyllabic words and at least the main stress in longer words is fairly fixed, although in some words the Elizabethan was not quite the same as the modern usage. But monosyllables can be stressed or unstressed, according to a rhythmic intention. Actually, of course, there are degrees of stress, and upon this much of the finer modula- tion of verse depends. But for metrical analysis, one can hardly get beyond the distinction of relatively stressed and relatively unstressed syllables. The normal iambic line consists of five feet, in each of which an unstressed is fol- lowed by a stressed syllable. A continuous succession of such lines is rare in Shakespeare. There are many 'pyrrhic' feet in which both syllables are unstressed, and some 'spondaic' in which both are stressed. Here we get level stress. There are also 'trochaic* feet, in which the stressed syllable precedes the unstressed syllable, instead of fol- lowing it. Here we get inverted stress. Shakespeare made progressive use of level stress, and up to the end of the
1 Cf. p. 229. * Conrad, Maebet&> xxviiij cf. p. 266.
s 2
260 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
tragedies of inverted stress, as part of a general instinct to vary the iambic norm. Inverted stress is already fre- quent in Marlowe, chiefly in the first feet of lines, since trochees come most naturally after pauses. Shakespeare, as naturally, introduced them after his mid-line pauses, and occasionally elsewhere, although fifth-foot trochees remain exceptional throughout. Professor Conrad gives some figures as to these and as to trochees after the mid- line pause, and also as to what he calls 'Doppeljamben'.1 But these are no more than particular cases of level stress, in which a pyrrhic is followed by a spondee. I do not attach much weight to these figures, since I find myself constantly at variance with the scansion of foreign ob- servers and doubt whether they fully appreciate the inci- dence of English stress. In reading Shakespeare, I feel that there is a great deal of level stress, and that in many lines there are very few strong stresses. These features may vary at different periods, but the subject still wants working out. How far the actors emphasized stress, where it was optional, we cannot say. Polonius commended the 'good accent* of a highly stressed speech; but he was no judged
The most easily recognized type of syllabic variation is the use of the 'redundant* final syllables demonstrated by Bathurst. They make what are called 'feminine* or 'double* or 'hendecasyllabic* endings. As a rule they are the unstressed final syllables of words, but include an increasing number of personal pronouns and even other unstressed monosyllables, Fletcher often employs stressed monosyllables, but Shakespeare very rarely. Percentage tables are given by Professors Kdnig, Hertzberg, and Conrad. Their results do not quite agree. Professor K6nig includes not only the ordinary double endings, which he calls 'klingende*, but also, as 'gleitende', the final feet of those six-foot lines, which do not form regular Alexandrines. And he excludes not only final syllables in -ed± -est) and -ear, where these are capable of elision, but also those of a number of words, such as 'heaven*, 'devil',
1 C6nrad, Macbeth^ mx, xxxv. * Ham. ii. 2. 489.
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 261
'spirit', 'prayer', 'fire', 'hour', 'power', and the like, which can be pronounced either as monosyllables or disyllables. This he does on the ground that the monosyllabic pro- nunciation is predominant, although not invariable, when such a word comes in the middle of a line. My own feel- ing is that at the end of a line, where the line-break leaves room for an open utterance, the effect is disyllabic. One cannot here, I think, rely upon differences of spelling as a guide, since forms in -ier^ -ire and in -ower, -owre rhyme together in the poems.1 On the other hand, I do not feel that word-endings in -ton and -ious, although these are also sometimes treated as disyllabic in the mid-verse at any rate of the earlier plays, make double endings. And so too with -ed iand -est. But clearly there is the possibility of divergent computations. Double endings are not always the result of an instinct for metrical variation. Sometimes they are due to the need for accommodating a refractory personal name within a line. Sometimes they emphasize a ringing of the changes upon words. The large number of them in King John, i. I, as compared with the rest of the play, comes from the recurrence of 'father', 'mother', and 'brother'. And it is curious to notice how often 'money' and 'dinner* make double endings in the Comedy of Errors. Moreover, double endings are not felt by Shakespeare to be equally appropriate to all kinds of subject-matter. They are more frequent both in excited dialogue and soliloquy and in the give and take of social conversation, than in meditative or imaginative passages, or in (continuous narrative, or in grave oratory.2 Redun- dant-syllables also occur before a mid-line pause, and Professor Conrad gives a percentage table for these; but they never become numerous.3 More important is the 'resolution' of feet by the insertion of additional unstressed syllables, whereby iambs become anapaests and trochees dactyls. These trisyllabic feet add much to the grace and flexibility of blank-verse rhythm, and a careful enumera-
1 W. Victor, Shakespeare** Prwitm- (1874), 75> Mayor, 174; D. L. Cham- ciation, L 154, 264. bers, 44.
* Cf. E, Abbott in N.S.S. Trans. 3 Conrad, Macbeth, xxvii.
262 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
tion would probably show that Shakespeare made a pro- gressive and at times considerable use of them. Here, too. Professor Conrad has a table, for anapaests alone, which are by far the greater number.1 I mistrust it, be- cause foreign students have a habit of treating as 'slurred* or elided many syllables which I should certainly sound, although lightly. The proportion of feet counted as tri- syllabic is thus much reduced.
Variations in stresses and syllables affect the internal structure of lines. But the linking of line to line is also capable of variation. In the blank verse which Shake- speare inherited, the pauses almost invariably coincided with breaks between the lines. It was 'end-stopped' verse. There was a juxtaposition of clauses, principal and sub- ordinate, each occupying its full line, and it was by a suc- cession of such lines that Marlowe built up his rolling periods. Shakespeare escaped from the tyranny of the 'drumming decasyllabon' by altering the incidence of pausation and introducing shorter clauses; and this was the main factor in the conversion of blank verse into a plastic medium, which both came nearer to the run of ordinary speech, and furnished a sensitive instrument for registering the rise and fall of emotion and following the turns of an intricate thought. The sense, in Milton's words, was now Variously drawn out from one line to another*. Statements that Shakespeare substituted the verse paragraph or the rhythmic phrase for the line as the unit of composition require some qualification. Just as the iambic norm of the individual line remains recog- nizable through the overlay of resolved feet and level or inverted stresses, so the recurrence of equivalent units, while modified by the manipulation of pauses, is not for- gotten. Such recurrence is of the essence of verse'. The form still controls the patterns which it comes to support. An obvious element in pause-variation is a reduction in the number of end-stopped lines. There are overflows of sense from one line to another. Some scholars speak of fr, or of *run-on* or offene lines. Where over-
1 Conrad, Macbeth, anrix.
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 263
flows occur, there can be no marked pause at the breaks between the lines. I agree with Dr. Bradley that a slight impression of pause always survives, but it is reduced to a minimum. The definition and valuation of overflows have been the subject of many discussions, and it cannot be said that there is any agreed basis. It is usually accepted that to constitute an overflow the sense of a single clause and the voice must run on together. But here are involved both the objective criterion of grammar, which analyses the sense, and the subjective criterion of elocutionary feeling, which rules the voice, is largely individual, and sometimes disregards grammar. Attempts have been made to rely for statistical purposes wholly upon the objective or wholly upon the subjective criterion. I think that the elocutionary feeling must have the last word. But there is clearly a large class of necessary overflows, in which the voice and the sense can hardly help coinciding. They occur when the line-break directly divides parts of a single clause placed in their logical order; a subject and the verb of its pre- dicate, the elements of a compound subject, a noun and its epithet adjective, a preposition and the noun it pre- cedes, a verb and its direct or indirect objective, an auxi- liary and a main verb, a relative or conjunction and the rest of the subordinate clause which it introduces. There are other cases in which there is still some running-on of the sense and no room for a marked pause, but in which more account may be taken of the line-break. An inver- sion of order diminishes the connexion between the divided parts of the clause. Or a vocative or short ad- verbial or adjectival qualification intervenes between one of these and the break. Or what is divided oflF may itself be such a qualification. Or a dependent noun clause may be divided from its governing verb. Or the division maj come between co-ordinate words occupying the same posi- tion in the clause. The treatment of such casqs as over- flows is largely optional. It is a matter of degree. The length of the divided-oflF member becomes a factor. Over- flow is encouraged by a mid-line pause shortly before the break and discouraged by a stress on the final syllable. In
264 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
the following passage from the Tempest^ I have marked with one and two asterisks the lines in which overflow seems to me respectively optional and necessary, and of the former, in a solemn invocation I should only be sure of taking as overflows the second, fourth, eleventh, twelfth, and fourteenth, should reject the third and seventeenth, and should feel doubtful about the seventh, thirteenth, and sixteenth. I might, indeed, accept them at one reading and reject them at another.1
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
* And ye that on the sands with printless foot
* Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
* When he comes bade; you demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
** Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime '
* Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
** Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimmed The noontide sun, calTd forth the mutinous winds, And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder Have I gjven fire and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up The pine and cedar: graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let *em forth By my so potent art
I believe that my conception of an overflow and certainly of a necessary overflow is more restricted than those upon which Professors Kdnig and Conrad have based tables. Professor Conrad's percentages are the lower of the two. I find that Professor D. L. Chambers and Dr. Bradley also regard Professor Kfoig's net as cast too wide. He claims, however, only to include schrofe overflows, where the metrical pause is overridden, and not milde ones, where some account is taken of it. Professor Conrad's kichte overflows seem intended to be the equivalent of Professor Kdnig's schnffe* and his schwtre overflows the
r. x. 35-50.
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 265
equivalent of the 'light' and 'weak' endings studied by Professor J. K. Ingram. These are unstressed final mono- syllables. The light endings, upon which Professor In- gram thinks that the voice can very slightly dwell, are mainly pronouns and auxiliaries. The weak endings, which he thinks essentially proclitic, are prepositions and con- junctions. There are few of either class, and the weak endings only appear in the latest plays. Both represent, I think, nothing more than extreme cases of necessary overflows. A calculation of overflows is not by itself a complete measure of pause-variation. There are some of them, even necessary overflows, in pre-Shakespearean blank verse. But they do not much affect the character of the rhythm, because when the sense passes the line- break, it generally runs on, not to a mid-line pause, but to the end of the next line. Shakespeare's mid-line pauses grow in number. To the end there are more of them in broken dialogue, than in long speeches. Their incidence is greatest after the second and third feet. Pauses after the first or before the fifth foot, or even in the middle of these, are a comparatively late feature. One aspect of the development is a tendency to end a speech in mid-line. Professors Pulling and K6nig have tables for such end- ings, relating their percentages to the number of speeches, of which Professor Pulling gives a count. Professor Con- rad's table for divided lines is not on the same basis, since the line in which a speech ends is often not taken up by the next speaker, but remains short. There has not been much systematic study of internal mid-line pauses, although their importance was long ago pointed out by Sped- ding.1 Drs. Kerrl and Norpoth count the pauses which require more than a comma to punctuate them in the special plays they study, and relate those in mid-line to the total number. Possibly a table showing the proportion of lines containing such strong pauses to the total lines would be a better guide. I have attempted to construct a rough one.2 The distribution of lighter pauses, of course, also affects the rhythm, but these it is less easy
. Trans. (1874), 26. * App. H, Tahk V,
266 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
to be sure of. In any case one is dependent upon the punctuation of modern editors, which may not always faithfully represent Shakespeare's intention.1
Professor Conrad has a few miscellaneous tables. One of these attempts to represent the proportion of irregular to regular lines; and by an irregular line he means one which contains two trochees or two of his 'Doppeljamben', or a trochee elsewhere than in the first foot or after a mid- line pause, or one of the few anapaests he allows, or a one- syllable foot. It is a rather arbitrary distinction. Another table is for 'amphibious sections', the cases in which a half-line serves both as the end of one full line and the beginning of the next. Others bear upon pronunciation rather than upon metre, and show the gradual disuse of the unelided word-ending in -ed.z
The verse-tests are by no means all of equal value, and much caution is required in drawing inferences from them. In the first place the variations occur discontinuously, and the law of averages must be respected. The greater the number of variations, and the greater the number of opportunities for variation, the more reliable an average figure, such as a percentage, is likely to be. In the present investigation, the measure of opportunities for variation is generally the number of lines, sometimes the number of speeches, taken into account. Percentages for total plays are therefore far more comparable than those for single acts; those for individual scenes or shorter passages have little meaning, because they do not leave room for the discontinuities to average out. Some passages in a play may show a continuous or nearly continuous series of overflows or double endings; in others there may be none over a considerable stretch. It is futile to point out that the former show an exceptionally high percentage of the variations, and to use this as an argument in favour of a diversity of authorship or a diversity of date, Mr. Robert- son^ handling of metrical evidence is much open to this criticism. For the same reason, one must look with sus- picion upon the attempts of Professor Conrad and his
1 Cf. p. 190. * Comad, Macbeth, xxviii, xxx.
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 267
followers to establish intervals between the composition of different acts of plays upon metrical grounds, and to isolate particular passages as metrically of later date than the rest. Even where complete plays are in question, the metrical tables are very likely to be misleading as to those in which the total amount of blank verse is small. Simi- larly, comparative figures are of little value, when the variations upon which they are based are only of rare occurrence. Accident may be too great a factor in these to make averaging reliable. Such are six-foot lines, extra syllables before mid-line pauses, anapaests as reckoned by Professor Conrad, light and weak endings. Nor must importance be given to small percentage fluctuations. The Conradist tables are expressed in per-mills instead of j>er-cents. This obscures the issue. In a play of 3,000 lines, three occurrences of a variation make the difference of a whole unit in the per-millage. Even where percentages are used, they should be rounded off, and not calculated to decimals, which give an appearance of scientific pre- cision far from justified by the nature of the material.
A second caution is that variations which become part of the unconscious or subconscious instinct of a writer are more likely to be significant of a chronological develop- ment than those which involve deliberation. Fleay, like Malone, was impressed by the abundance of rhyme in some of the early plays, and assumed that the proportion of rhyme was a measure of earliness. He went so for as to make Midsummer-Night's Dream the first of the comedies, and others have given the same position to Love's Labour fs Lost. But no man can substitute rhyming for blank-verse dialogue without realizing what he is doing, and it is most reasonable to suppose that at some date Shakespeare de- cided to make a deliberate experiment in lyrical drama. A very natural stimulus would be afforded by his experi- ence of lyrical work in the narrative poems. The actual percentage of rhyme in the plays affected by such an experiment is of no importance. There seems to have been a notion that rhyme was a characteristic of the pre- Shakespearean drama, which Shakespeare gradually dis-
268 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
carded. It is true that mid-Elizabethan popular plays were written in various forms of doggerel. These, and not heroic couplets, were the 'iygging vaines of riming mother wits', which Marlowe .repudiated. There is little use of the heroic metre in the plays of Shakespeare's immediate predecessors. Marlowe has only a few sporadic couplets, , including some curious ones in which a line of blank verse interrupts the rhyme. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy has one con- tinuous scene, and there are some passages in Greene's James IV^ in Greene and Lodge's Looking-Glass^ and in scenes of i Henry VI^ which may not be Shakespeare's. There is more in the anonymous Selimus, and by Peele, mainly in Arraignment of Paris. But this is a court play for boys, and so, if it is of early date at all, is the anonymous Maid's Metamorphosis^ which only uses heroics. Sub- stantially, the medium of Shakespeare's models was blank verse. The rhyme of the lyric plays represents a fresh start and not a looking backwards. And it seems to bear some relation to a feature in his use of double endings. The growth of these does not follow a very smooth curve at any point. But it is particularly noticeable that, while he begins with a fairly high proportion, there is a marked drop, not only for the lyric plays, but also for King John and I Henry IF \ which must follow them pretty closely. Heroics them- selves, of course, have rare double endings. But it looks as if the constant recurrence of final stress, which is normally entailed by English rhyme, had reacted upon the manner of Shakespeare's blank verse. And the sudden rise in the per- centage for 2 Henry IF can only suggest that here too there is, an element of deliberate purpose. Conscious variation of metre is further illustrated by prologues and epilogues, by inserted plays and masks, and by the characteristic bombast of Pistol. These are meant to contrast with the ordinary dialogue, and should be left out of account in computing the variations of its blank verse.
JProbably the variations that most easily become uncon- scious are those of pausation. But here a third caution must be observed. A test, to be reliable, must be uni-
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 269
formly applied throughout, and this is difficult, unless it is objective; rests, that is to say, upon units which can be identified and enumerated with certainty. But we have seen that the overflow test is extremely subjective; much depends upon the personal equation of the enumerator. It may be thought that this does not much matter, so long as the enumerator is the same throughout, since only one personal equation can be in question. It is not really so. Nothing can be more difficult, as any one who has dealt with large batches of literary examination papers will know, than to maintain a continuous subjective standard through a long series of qualitative judgements. Even Rhadamanthus has his moods. And there is the effect of environment to be reckoned with. The same man may very well be impressed by an overflow in a play com- paratively free from them, which he would certainly pass over where they come more thickly.
In view of all the uncertainties attaching to the metrical tests, I do not believe that any one of them or any com- bination of them can be taken as authoritative in deter- mining the succession of plays which come near to each other in date; and I have chiefly used them as controls for the indications of external evidence. In the following table I have attempted to bring together the results of chapter ix and to fit them into the facts of Shakespeare's dramatic career as given in chapter iii. There is much of conjecture, even as regards the order, and still more as regards the ascriptions to particular years. These are partly arranged to provide a fairly even flow of production when plague and other inhibitions did not interrupt it. It is on the whole more practicable to take theatrical seasons, roughly from early autumn to the following summer, rather than calendar years, as a basis. I assume some slackening towards the end of Shakespeare's career, and do not treat literally Ward's statement that he supplied his company with two plays a year.1
1 Cf. App. C, no. ix.
27o THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
1590-1.
2 Henry VI.
3 Henry 71.
1591-2. i Henry VI.
Richard III. Comedy of Errors.
1593-4-
Titus Andronicus. Taming of the Shrew.
1594-5-
Two Gentlemen of Verona. Love's Labour's Lost. Romeo and Juliet.
1595-6. Richard II. Midsummer-Night's Dream.
1596-7. King John. Merchant of Venice.
1597-8. j Henry IV. 2 Henry IV.
1598-9.
Much Ado About Nothing. Henry V.
1599-1600. Julius Caesar. As You Like It. Twelfth Night.
1600-1, Hamlet. Merry Wives of Windsor.
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 271
1 60 1-2. Troilus and Cressida*
1602-3. All 's Well That Ends Well
1603-4.
1604-5.
Measure for Measure. Othello.
1605-6. King Lear. Macbeth.
1606-7. Antony and Choftatra.
1607-8. Coriolanus. Timon oj Athens.
1608-9. Pericles.
1609-10. Cymbeline.
1610-11. Winter** Tale.
1611-12. Tempest.
1612-13.
#**ry Fill.
Two Noble Kinsmen.
Something may be added about the main points of difficulty. The first is as to the position of Taming of the Shrew. It has often been put nearer to 1 598 than to 1 594, because of the resemblance of its provincial environment to that of 2 Henry IV. The neighbourhood of Stratford
272 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
must, however, always have been within the scope of Shakespeare's memory. The problem is complicated by that of identifying the Love Labours Won of Meres's list. It is most natural to take this as an alternative title for some extant play. Such alternative titles, which may sometimes be no more than unofficial descriptions, are not uncommon, although the only ones which have got into the prints of the plays are The Contention of Tork and Lancaster for 2, 3 Henry VI and What Tou Will for Twelfth Night. But elsewhere we get, certainly or prob- ably, Robin Goodfellow for Midsummer-Night's Dream, Old- castle, Fahtaff and Hotspur for Henry IV, Benedicte and Eetteris for Much Ado About Nothing, Malvolio for Twelfth Night, All is True for Henry VIIL1 Claims have been made for the equation of Love Labours Won with Love's Labour 's Lost, Midsummer-Night's Dream, Twelfth Nighty Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Tempest, and Taming of the Shrew itself. The two first may be at once dismissed; they assume that Meres meant to attach a second title to the entries which follow and precede that of Love Labours Won, and this his wording makes impossible. There is little to go upon, except the implications of the title itself, and the possibility of finding a play of early date not otherwise named by Meres. The titles of Shakespeare's comedies have rarely any significance; As Tou Like It and What Tou Will are floutingly vague. Almost any love comedy might bear the title in question; it is least appropriate to Much Ado About Nothing, which is, however, on the border of Meres's range, and might fall within it The wit- combats between Benedick and Beatrice, resembling those between Berowne and Rosaline in Love's Labour V Lost, have been called in aid, and the references which the two plays have in common to Cupid as the god of love and to Hercules, who no doubt performed labours. Similarly, it is pointed out that the resemblance of twins is a motive common to Twelfth Night and the Comedy of Errors. But is it not more likely that an interval would have been
1 Cf. vol. i, pp. 329, 343, 344, 346, 347, 382. .
Chap. VIII THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY 273
allowed to expire before such situations were repeated? The 'labours' found in The Tempest are Ferdinand's athletic wrestlings with the logs. There is really no reason for assuming an early version of Twelfth Night or of The Tempest. It is upon the assumption of such a version that the case for All 's Well That Ends Well has been defended, and this also I reject. A suggestion of an old as well as a new title might indeed be found in 'All is well ended, if this suit be won', and in Helena's statement just before that Bertram is 'doubly won'. Taming of the Shrew also has several references to winning, although more obviously the winning of Petruchio's wager than of his wife's love.1 If we set aside Much Ado About Nothing as too remote in theme from the title, Taming of the Shrew is the only comedy which, as it stands, could fill a gap in Meres's list. And the stylistic evidence, so far as one can judge it through the uncertainty as to the extent of Shakespeare's authorship, is in favour of a quite early date. With some hesitation I have put Merry Wives of Windsor at a little distance from the other Falstaff plays, and I think that this is justified by the borrowing from Hamlet in a report which must rest on early performances, since the ob- noxious name Brooke still survived. And if an explanation is necessary for the continuance of light-hearted comedy after the period of gloom had begun, the need to obey a royal behest may supply it. The time-relation of King Lear and Macbeth is not very clear. The verse-tests, as shown by Dr. Bradley, confirm the priority I have given to King Lear •, but I cannot put much confidence in their application to a play like Macbeth^ which can hardly be in its original form. Nor am I at all clear about the dating of Timon of Athens. This Dr. Bradley would place between King Lear
to that of King Lear ) and partly again on metrical grounds*2 But an unfinished play is even less likely than an abridged
1 All's Wel^ v. 3. 315, 336$ Tom. If haply won, perhaps a hapless gain;
cf Shrew, iv, 5. 23; v, 2. 69, 112, 116, If lost, why then a grievous labour
1 86. But the winning of love's labour won.
connotes an unsuccessful suit in Two * Bradley, 443, 470. Gent, of Per. i. x. 32,
3X42.1 T
274 THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY Chap. VIII
play to answer to the metrical tests, and it would be hard to find room for Timon of Athens in the already rather full year 1605-6. I agree as to the temper. Both King Lear and Timon of Athens seem to show symptoms of mental disturbance. But mental disturbance may come in waves* It may very likely only be a whimsy of my own that during the attempt at Timon of Athens a wave broke, that an illness followed, and that when it passed, the breach between the tragic and the romantic period was complete.
CHAPTER IX PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO
[Bibliographical Note. Facsimiles of Fi were edited by H* Staunton (i 866), H. P. (i 876), and S. Lee (1902, Cl. Press), and a series of all four Folios was issued (Methuen) in 1 904-10. A series of single plays, edited by J. D. Wilson, is in progress. For many purposes the very accurate reprint byL.Booth(i862-4)willserve. TheSAalespeart Quarto Facsimiles (i&$o- 9, 43 vols.), supervised by F. J. Fumivall, replace the lithographic series ( 1 862-71, 48 vols.) done by E. W. Ashbee for H.P. But the photographic reproduction is not always satisfactory. Only the more important of the critical editions can here be named. Many of them underwent reprints and revisions, and a list of these and of other editions of less critical sig- nificance is in W. Jaggard, Shakespeare Bibliography (iqii),^. The best eighteenth-century work is surveyed in T. R. Lounsbury, The First Editors ofSL (1906); H. B. Wheatley, Sfs. Editors (1916, BiM. Soc. Trans, xiv. 145); A.Nicoll, TheEditorsofSLfromFitoMalone(ig2^StudiesinFi9 157); D. Nichol Smith, Sh. in the Eighteenth Century (1928). The first edition was that of Nicholas Rowe (1709, 6 vols.). It was followed ;by those of Alexander Pope (1723-5, 6 vok); Lewis Theobald (1733! 7 vols.), who had criticized Pope in his Si. Restored (1726); Sir Thomas Hanmer (1743-4* 6 vols.); William Warburton (1747, 8 vok); Edward Capell (1767-8, 10 vols.), who added separate Notes andFarious Readings^ of which vol. i appeared in 1774, and was withdrawn, to be reprinted in 1779 and reissued in 1783, with additions printed in I78o,andavol.iii,not directly concerned with the plays, called The School of Shakespeare. Capell had been preceded by Samuel Johnson, whose first edition (1765, 8 vok) underwent a series of revisions. The first (1773, 10 vols.), but for a little help from Johnson himself, was by George Steevens, who had already published his Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare (1766, 4 vok) from Quartos. The second (1778, 10 vols.) was also by Steevens, not, as is sometimes said, by Isaac Reed. Edmund Malone contributed to it his first Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays of Shakespeare were Written, and added a Supplement (17*0, 2 vols.) with notes, the first draft of his History of the Stage> and the poems and doubtful plays. To this he issued an Appendix (1783). The third revision was by Isaac Reed (1785, ro vols.). The fourth was again by Steevens (1793, 15 vok), and the fifth (1803, 21 vols.) and sixth (1813, 21 vok) by Reed. A few notes given by Malone to the edition of 1785, and critical of Steevens, led to an enduring feud, and Malone's Dissertation on the Three Parts of Henry 71 (1787) was followed by an independent edition (1790* 10 vok). A revision occupied Malone to his death in 1812, and was published, so far as complete, by the younger James Boswell (1821, 21 vok). The book-
T2
276 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
sellers have chosen to call the 1803 and 1813 editions of Johnson and Steevens the First and Second Variorum Shakespeare;, and the 1821 edition of Malone, although of different origin, the Third Variorum. This does, however, incorporate many prefaces and notes of Malone's predecessors, and may be regarded as the final word of eighteenth-century scholarship on Shakespeare. Of the earlier nineteenth-century editions may be noted those of S. W. Singer (1826), C. Knight (1838 ?-43), J. P. Collier (184.2-4, revised 1858), G. C. Verplanck (1847, N.Y.), H. N. Hudson (1852-7, Boston, revised 1881), J. O. Halliwell [-Phillipps] (1853-65, Folio), N. Delius (1854-65, Elberfeld), A. Dyce (1857, revised 1864-7), R. G. White (1857-66, Boston), H. Staunton (1858- 60). But another term was reached in the Cambridge edition of W. G. Clark, J. Glover, and W. Aldis Wright ( 1 863-6, 9 vols., revised by Wright, 1891-3), with minute collations, which are still the basis of textual study, although modern scholarship looks for a closer genetic analysis of the rela- tions between the texts. This is in part supplied by the introductions of F. J. Furnivall, P. A. Daniel, and others to the Sh. Q. Facsimiles. The conception of a parallel-text edition by J. Appleton Morgan and others (1886-1906, BanksideyN^f.9 22 vols.) is better than its execution. More scientific parallel-texts for individual pkys are noted separately. The most useful current edition for general commentary is the Arden (1899-1924, 39 vols.) under the successive general editorship of W. J. Craig and R. H. Case, but the volumes, by various hands, are also of various merit. The New Variorum edition (1871-1928, 19 plays issued) by H. H. Furness and his son of like name, is overloaded with dead matter, and the earlier volumes pass out of date more rapidly than the kter ones are added. Other editions of note are by F. A. Marshall and others (1887-90, Henry Irving, 8 vols.}, I. Gollancz (1894-6, Temple, 40 vols.), C. H. Herford (1899, Everslej> 10 vols.), A. H. Bullen (1904-7, Stratford Town, 10 vols.). The Tale edition (1918-28, 40 vols.) is by various American hands. The New edition of A.T. Quiller Couch and J. D. Wilson (1921-30, 13 pkys issued) is good on textual criticism and interesting but speculative on textual history. It is unfortunate that many editions, attractive to readers, sys- tematically follow the Folio text for all pkys. A text in Elizabethan spelling is still a desideratum. The Old Spelling edition of F. J. Furnivall, W. G, Boswell-Stone, and F, W. Clarke (1907-1 2, 17 pkys issued) remains in- complete. Much valuable commentary is also to be found in grouped editions of selected pkys for students, the Clarendon Press by W. G. Ckrk and W. A. Wright, the Pitt Press by A. W. Verity, an unnamed series (Ckr. Press) by G. S. Gordon, and the Falcon and Warwick editions by various hands. The latter are cited under the pkys concerned. Of angle-volume texts, the standard is the Globe (1864) by W. G. Ckrk and W. A. Wright, not so much for its readings, which are sometimes opea to question, as for its line-numeration, which is generally used for references. Some original errors in this were tabukted in N.S.S. Transactions (1880-6) 3 f , and appear to have been corrected in kter issues. This numeration is
Chap. IX HENRY THE SIXTH 277
preserved in the Eversley edition, from which, in view of its greater con- venience to the eyesight, my references are taken. Other single-volume editions are by W. J. Craig (1892, Oxford), W. A. Neilson (1006, Cam- bridge, U.S.A.).
I have given for each pky a list of monographs and other dissertations, especially recent ones. These lists must not be taken as exhaustive. They exclude papers of aesthetic discussion, and probably some others of value, unknown to me, in foreign periodicals. They include some which I have not consulted, particularly on sources. I give these to supplement my own very slight treatment of Quellenforschung^
I, II, III. HENRY THE SIXTH
[S.R. 1594.] xij°Marcij. Thomas Myllington. Entredfor his copie vnder the handes of bothe the wardens a booke intituled, the firste parte of the Contention of the twoo famous houses of York and Lancaster with the deathe of the good Duke Humfrey and the banishement and Deathe of the Duke of Suffolk and the tragicall ende of the prowd Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable rebellion of Jack Cade and the Duke of Yorkes ffirste clayme vnto the Crowne vjd (Arber, ii. 646).
[Qi. 1594.] The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banish- ment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of lacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorkes first claime vnto the Crowne. [Creede's device (McKerrow 299).] London, Printed by Thomas Creed, for Thomas Millington, and are to be sold at his shop vnder Saint Peters Church in Corn wall. 1594. [Head-mh^artin caps.] The First Part of the Contention of the two famous Houses of Yorke & Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey. \Running-title\ The first part of the conten- tion of the two famous Houses, of Yorke and Lancaster. [As Colophon, device and imprint repeated.]
[Qi. 1595.] ThetrueTragedieof Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and
278 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Yorke, as it was sundrie times acted by the Right Honour- able the Earle of Pembrooke his seruants. [Millington's device (McKerrow 302).] Printed at London by P(eter) S(hort) for Thomas Millington, and are to be sold at his shoppe vnder Saint Peters Church in Cornwal. 1595. [Head-titley under ornament with Stationers' arms] The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the good King Henry the Sixt [Running-title'] The Tragedie of Richard D. of Yorke, and Henrie the sixt. [In8°,not4.t0.]
Facsimiles. C. Praetorius (1889, Sh. Q. xxxvii, ed. F. J. Furnivall; 1891, Sh. Q. xxxviii, ed. T. Tyler).
Reprints. ]. O. HaUiwell (1843, Sh. Socji W. C. Hazlitt (1875, Sh*s. Library, v. 379; vi. i); W. A. Wright (Cambridge Sh. ix. 507).
[Qa. 1600.] The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragical end of the prowd Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of lacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorkes first chyme to the Crowne, [Simmes's device (McKerrow 1 42).] London Printed by Valentine Simmes for Thomas Mil- lington, and are to be solde at his shop vnder S. Peters church in CornewalL 1600. [Head-title] The first part of the Contention of the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey. \Runmng-title'] The first part of the contention of the two famous houses, of Yorke and Lancaster. [An alleged issue printed for Millington by W. W. in 1600 rests only on a MS. tp. pre6xed, together with one reproducing the Simmes's imprint, to one of Malone's examples (Bodl. Mai 36), which has lost its printed tp. Probably Malone was guessing.]
[Q2. 1600.3 T&e True Tragedie of Richarde Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the sixt: With the whole contention betweene the two Houses, Lancaster and Yorke; as Jt was sundry times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruantes. [Orna-
Chap. IX HENRY THE SIXTH 279
ment] Printed at Londou (sic) by W(illiam) W(hite) for Thomas Millington, and are to be sold .at his shoppe vnder Saint Peters Church in Cornewall. 1600* {Head- title.'] The True Tragedie Of Richard Duke Of Yorke, And The Good King Henrie The Sixt. [Running- title] The Tragedie of Richard D. of Yorke, and Henrie the Sixt.
[S.R. 1602.] 19 Aprilis . . . Thomas Pavier. Entredfor his copies by assignement from Thomas Millington these bookes folowinge, Saluo Jure cuiuscunque viz. . . . The firste and Second parte of Henry the vj* ij bookes xijd — Entred by warrant vnder master Setons hand (Arber, iii. 204).
[Q3- i6i9«] The Whole Contention betweene the two • Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke. With the Tragicall ends of the good Duke Humfrey, Richard Duke of Yorke, and King Henrie the sixt. Diuided into two Parts: And newly corrected and enlarged. Written by William Shakespeare, Gent [W. Jaggard's device (McKerrow 283).] Printed at London, for T(homas) P(avier). [A2 Head-title] The first part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humfrey. [I Head-title^ under orna- ment with royal arms] The Second Part. Containing the Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the good , King Henrie the Sixt. [Running-title, for both parts'] The contention of the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster. .
[Datable by continuity of signatures with those of Pericles (1619).] Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1886, Sh. Q. xxiii, xxiv, ed. F. J. Furnivall).
[S.R.I623.] Mr William Shakspeers Comedyes His- tories, and Tragedyes soe manie of the said Copies as^are not formerly entred to other men. viz* . . . The thirde parte of Henry ye Sixt . . „
[For full entry, cf. p. 138. (This must be I Henry VL There is no original entry of 3 Henry VI* but the transfer of 1602 must have been relied upon.]
28o PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] The First part of King Henry the Sixt. . . . The Second part of King Hen. the Sixt. . . . The Third part of King Henry the Sixt. [Histories, pp. 96-172, sign. k2v-q4\ Head-titles] The first Part of Henry the Sixt. . , The second Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Good Duke Humfrey. . . The third Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Duke of Yorke. [Running-titles'] The first Part of Henry the Sixt . . The second Part of Henry the Sixt. . . The third Part of King Henry the Sixt.
[j Henry VI. Acts and sec. I, and in iii and iv all sec. marked (altered in modern eds.) 2, 3 Henry VI. Act i, sc. i marked for each.]
Parallel-Texts. [2 Henry VI] C. W. Thomas; [3 Henry VI] A. Morgan (1892, Bankside, xix, xx).
Modern Editions. H. C. Hart (1909, j Henry VI\ 1909, 2 Henry Vh 1910, 1925, 3 Henry Vl\ Arden}\ C. F. T. Brooke (1918- 23, Tale\
Dissertations. E. Malone, Dissertation on H. VI (1787, repr. Par. xviii. 553); C. Knight, Essay on H. VI and R. 7//(i838?-43, Pict.SA.vii. 399); R. G. White, On the Authorship of H. VI (1859, repr. 8k. vii. 403); F. G. Fleay, Who Wrote H. VI? (i 875, Macmillan's) ; J. Lee, The Author- ship of 2, 3 H. VI anil their Originals (i ZfaN.S.S. Trans. 2 19) ; N. Delius, ZurKiitik der Doppeltexte des Sh*s. 2, 3 H. VI (1880, J. xv. 21 1 ; Abl. "• 95)? J- B. Hennemann, The Episodes in i H. VI (1900, P.M.L.A. xv. 290); W. J. Courthope, On the Authenticity of Some of the Early Plays Assigned to Sh. (1903, H.E.P. iv. 455); K. Schmidt, Margareta von Anjou vor und lei Sh. (1906); H. Conrad, Entstehung des 2, 3 H. VI (1909, Z.f.fi>anz. undengl. Unterricht, viii.48i); C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Authorship of 2, 3 H. 71 (1912, Tram. Connecticut Acad. xvii. 141); P. Seyferth, In welchem Verhaltnis Steht 2 H. Pisa Cont. und 3 H. FI zu True Tragj (i<)i69AngIia9&. 323); H. D. Gray, The Purport of Sh.'s Contribution to i H. VI (1917, PM.L^f. xxxii. 367); A. W. Pollard, The Tork and Lancaster Plays in the Sh. Folio (1918, Sept. 19, 26, r.Z.$.); E. v. Schaubert, Drayton's Anteil an 2, 3 H. VI (1920); P. Alexander, 2 H. VI and the Copy for Cont. and 3 H. VI and True Trag. (1924, Oct. 9, Nov. 13, ZVtA)» WA H. VI and R. Ill (1929); C. L. Kingsford, Fifteenth Century History in Sh.'s Plays (1925, Prejudice and Promise in Fifteenth Century England, i); I. Gourvitch, Dray ton and H. VI (1926, N.Q. cli. 201, 219, 239, 257); A. Gaw, The Origin and Development of i H. VI (1926, Univ. South Carolina Studies, i); E. K. Chambers, The Relation of Cont. to 2, 3 Hen. VI ^(1926, Proc. Oxford Bill. Soc. ii. i, in summary), Actors' Gag in Elizabethan Plays (1928, Mar. 8, *
s
Chap. IX HENRY THE SIXTH 281
(a) 2, 3 Henry VI.
The tradition of scholarship from the time of Malone has, with occasional dissent, regarded The Contention (Q) as an original two-part play, afterwards revised as 2, 3 Henry VI (F). I formerly accepted this view,1 but a recent study, suggested by Alexander's papers and Greg's work on Merry Wit}e$ of Windsor and Orlando Furioso^ has convinced me that it is wrong. Q and F compare as follows. The main structure, in plot, order of episodes, distribution of characters, even succession of speakers, is, subject to cer- tain lacunae and dislocations, the same* Q is in both parts the shorter by about a third, and omits a good deal of the best poetry in F. The purport of what is left agrees, but the differences of phrasing are very notable; especially in 2 Henry VI> where Q throughout diverges far more from F than in 3 Henry VL Misprints in both texts must of course be allowed for. Sometimes the speeches are iden- tical. Sometimes the identity is only broken by the in- troduction of equivalent words, variant inflexions, variant minor parts of speech, variations in the order of words. In these passages there is often not much to choose between the two versions from a literary point of view. Sometimes, again, the versions are little inore than paraphrases of each other, with an occasional phrase in common, and some- times complete paraphrases. There are passages in Q which look like mosaics of scraps from F. Prose in Q may represent verse in F. A Q line often appears in an earlier or even later speech or scene or even part of F, and may be repeated there in Q. Thus in 2 Hen. VI^ iii. 49 of Q is from ii. 3. 29; vi. 55 from i. i. 254; x. 14-15 from iii. i. 69-71 ; in 3 Hen. VI, v. 52-3 from i. 2. 33—4; x. 30—1 from v. 3. 1—2; xii, 107 from v. 7. 22; xxiii. 19-21 from iv. 8. 60-1 ; also in 2 Hen. VIy ix, 1 1 8 from 3 Hen. VI \ i. 4. 102; xxii. 64 from 3 Hen. VI^ ii. 5. I35.2 Metrically, Q is inferior to F; it has more harshly irregular lines and many collocations of ten syllables,
1 Eliz. Stage, ii. 130, 200$ ££., a Survey, 4.
3 I cite the lineation of the Sh. Quarto Facsimiles.
282 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
which pay no regard to stress. The pronunciation of in- dividual words is more archaic in Q than in F. The linea- tion of Q constantly goes astray, and this often seems due to the omission of F words or to the presence of superfluous Connective' phrases (cf. p. 157) not in F, after which the verse lines follow regularly but are wrongly divided, until a broken line or a fresh error leads to recovery. Broadly speaking, Q is often halting and barbarous, where F is logical and rhythmical.
Much of this can be explained and has been explained on the theory that a reviser took an old play in hand, wrote it up almost speech by speech, smoothed out metrical irregularities and obsolete pronunciations, replaced prose by verse, expanded throughout, added many poetical pas- sages, but at the same time took pains to use every shred of the old text which could be made to suit his purpose, either in its original or in an altered position. Against this theory there are two a priori objections. Firstly, there is no evidence (cf. p. 2 1 3) for any such practice of meticulous stylistic revision in the Elizabethan theatre. Secondly, who could ever have written such a text as Q, which in some places shows the hand of a competent dramatist, and in others is too bad for the veriest stage hack, to say nothing of the competent dramatists to whom it has been ascribed? It must anyhow have undergone corruption, and in fact the stylistic differences from F can be explained just as well by the corruption of a memorizing reporter (cf. p. 157) as by revision. Many of the features of Q, indeed, recur in the 'bad* Qq of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Henry 7, where also a reporter seems to be wholly or in part responsible. Moreover, a report is the best explanation of the mislineations, as due to 'connective' phrases picked up from the mouths of actors, of certain historical confusions whicli appear in the Q text, and one at least of which cannot have been due to the plotter of the play, and perhaps of numerous 'auditory* errors, although the compositor may (cf. p. 1 80) be responsible for some of these. And it is the only satis- factory explanation of the transference of lines, often from
Chap. IX HENRY THE SIXTH 283
later passages of the text, which a reviser is not likely to have studied in advance, but which the imperfect memory of a reporter, having already his knowledge of the whole play, may well have dislocated. The same imperfect memory will account for the unevenness of the reporter's work. Sometimes he attained fair precision. Often he for- got lines to the detriment of sense, grammar, and dramatic effect; often he misplaced lines or speeches; often he was only able to recover broken phrases; often he was driven to piece out a general recollection of purport with poor verse or prose of his own. As to who the reporter is likely to have been, there is room for difference of opinion. A shorthand writer (cf. p. 159) would not transfer remote lines. Alexander conjectures for 2 Henry Vl&n actor who had played Suffolk and Cade, perhaps with the aid of a fragmentary transcript, and for 3 Henry VI an actor who had played Warwick and Clifford, perhaps with the aid of 'parts'. I do not see any evidence for a fragmentary tran- script, or know why any such document should come into existence. Conceivably the reporter had the short 'part' of the Citizen.1 But I doubt whether the characters named by Alexander are so much better rendered than the rest throughout, as to point to actors. On the whole I am inclined to suggest that the reporter was a book-keeper, who would be in a good position to get a general but in- exact knowledge of the whole course of a play which he had often prompted. Perhaps he did 3 Henry VI better than 2 Henry VI because it had been more recently on the stage. And I think he may have retained a 'plot', which would not help him for the dialogue, but would for the ordering of the scenes, and for the stage-directions. These, in both F and Q, are exceptionally full and descriptive, with many notes on the purport of scenes, the relation of characters, grouping, apparel, properties, and both at entries and in the margin for action and the address of speeches. They differ by omissions and additions and in details. But they have dearly a common origin. The longest is identical in the two texts.* The hand of an
. 3- 59-
284 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
author is discernible, especially in part 2, in vagueness as to numbers and the like, left to the discretion of the management. The directions of F might well be the author's, perhaps expanded by a book-keeper; those of Q an adaptation for a 'plot'. Q, but not F, has the common 'plot* formula for the entry of characters 'to* each other.1 Musical notes and a few directions in the imperative mood suggest that both sets were primarily for the guidance of stage action rather than a reader.
In two scenes, however, of part 2 (i. 4; iii, 2) a different staging appears to be contemplated by Q and F, and this is not the only indication that the intervention of a re- porter does not by itself completely account for the relation of the versions. The basis of Q must have been a produc- tion for which the original text had been cut. Two or three short episodes may have been omitted. Sections of long speeches in F, which should have been the easiest to remember, have disappeared without leaving any traces upon Q. The object of the cutting is not quite clear. Probably a reduction in the time required for presentation was alone in view; there is no reduction in the number of actors needed for the most crowded scenes. It is not, of course, possible to say how much of the difference in length between F and Q is due to cuts, and how much to the reporter's lapses. The method of the cuts is interest- ing. Much of the poetry goes out, the similes, the classical allusions; all the Latin. This is noticeable even in short lacunae, which one would otherwise put down to the reporter. There is a process of vulgarization. If there was an adaptation by cutting for the stage, a few differences in the order of speeches and episodes may also be due to adaptation, rather than to the reporter. There is one pretty clear case. In part 3, iv. 6 has been cut, but a bit about Henry Tudor, too interesting to an Elizabethan audience to be lost, has been salvaged by attaching it to iv. 8.
A few passages in both parts, while written in fairly good blank verse, are not in F or so unlike those in F as to require some buttressing of the 'report* theory. I do not suppose
1 2 Htn. PI, ii, 3. i; 3 Hen. H, v. 6. i.
Chap. IX HENRY THE SIXTH 285
that the same^ explanation is applicable to them all. One or two scenes in F (cf. infra) may have been rewritten after the Q production. Similarly, some highly coloured Q lines in i. 4 of part 2 may have been removed when the staging of that scene was altered. There are other special Q pas- sages, which are so featureless that perhaps they may reasonably be ascribed to the reporter. But there are two which betray the singular fact that his capricious memory has not stopped short of bringing in lines from another play altogether. He takes his vii. 10 and ix. 134-6 of
2 Henry VI from Marlowe's Edward II 265 1, 965-6. On the other hand, Massacre of Paris 952-3, 1376-9, are pro- bably themselves taken from 3 Hen. VI, v. 3. 1-2 and
3 Hen. VI, ii. i. 68-9.' There are similar transfers in the reported Qq of Hamlet and Merry Wives of Windsor (q.v.}. And if a play known to us has been so drawn upon, other comparatively striking Q lines may belong to plays not known.2 Finally, Q probably incorporates some small theatrical interpolations and gags. Occasionally the men- tion of a place-name at the end of a scene helps the audience to locate a coming scene. The Cade episodes of Q chiefly differ from those of F by an unusual amount of dislocation and several gags. Such are the knighting of Dick Butcher (2 Hen. VI, Q xiii. 77) and others (xviii. 17-21, 71-7) less decent.
Discussions of authorship have been much complicated by the revision theory. Most of those who have found the hands of Marlowe, Kyd, Peele, Greene, Lodge, and Nashe, as well as of Shakespeare, in the plays, have held it, and have been dispensed by it from putting their theories to the test of indicating where one hand ended and another began. A partial exception is Fleay, who recognized the surreptitious character of Q, and in 1886 modified an earlier view by assigning 3 Henry VI substantially to Marlowe, and dividing 2 Henry VI between Greene (i. i), Peele (most of i. 2-ii. 4), Kyd (ii, i. 59-153), Mar- lowe (i. 3. 45-103; iii. i-iv. i), and Lodge (iv. 2-v. 3).
1 Cf. Greg in M.S.R. Massacre, viii.
* E.g. xxi. 52-4, inserted after 2 Hen. PIt v. i. 70.
286 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Shakespeare he only brought in about 1600, as revising 2 Henry VI considerably and 3 Henry VI slightly. In 1 59 1 he substituted Drayton as reviser. Von Schaubert also finds Drayton in several scenes, but this has been sufficiently refuted by Gourvitch. The external evidence of F and the 1619 title-page of course tells substantially for Shake- speare, Meres does not name the plays as Shakespeare's in 1598, but while the presence of a name in his list has great weight, the absence of one has much less. There may, moreover, have been no revival between his coming to London and the compilation of his list. The plays, as they stand, are loosely constructed, especially part 2. The Cade scenes are naturally differentiated by their cornic subject-matter. Clifford's speech in 2 Hen. 7Iyv. 2. 31- 65, seems to me clearly of later style than the rest. It is certainly Shakespearean, although the unfortunate Miss Lee, pressed by Furnivall to be precise in her attributions, gave it to Marlowe, in spite of the internal pausation. The pastoral of j Hen. VI^ ii. 5, may also be later Shakespeare, although not so late. Otherwise I find no obvious sutures either of style or structure. The careless substitution of Elinor, Elianor and Nell for Margaret as the Queen's name in 2 Hen. VIy iii. 2, is odd, and would be odd on any theory of authorship. Pollard, a revisionist, thinks that the character of Richard has undergone transforma- tion; that he was originally conceived by Marlowe as a valiant hunchback, and afterwards altered by another writer, with a prospective Richard III play in his mind, into an ambitious hypocrite. And he supposes the Q version of the soliloquy in 3 Hen. VI r, iii. 2. 124-95, to be an afterthought indicating this change of intention, and inconsistent with the rest of his presentment in Q until almost the last scene, where it is clearly being linked up with the coming Richard III. On the assumption that F is the original text, this view can hardly stand. Richard only takes hold of the play, naturally enough, after his father's death, but his ultimate character is already ap- parent in ii. i. 41-2; iii. 2. 1-117; iv- *• 83> 124-6. And he is still valiant at the end of Richard III. If,
Chap. IX* HENRY THE SIXTH 287
as I hold, Richard III is Shakespeare's, the continuity of Richard's character is strong ground for his authorship of 3 Henry VI. The internal evidence of style I find difficult to handle. I do not think that we have adequate criteria for distinguishing with any assurance from the style of his contemporaries that of a young writer still under their influence. Most of the rhetorical features of Richard III are also to be found in 3 Henry VI^ but less continuously, among straightforward spaces of unornamented writing. The same is true, perhaps in a minor degree, of 2 Henry VI. I do not see anything improbable in the stylistic development which the historical succession of the plays suggests. The large proportion of feminine endings in both parts tells for Shakespeare. Certainly there are many parallels of vocabulary and phrase to the work of other men, notably that of Marlowe and Peele; many also to Shakespeare's own plays and poems. But I think weight must be given to the numerous similes and metaphors from natural history and country life, some of them literary, but others testifying to direct observation. I do not find these in any of the contemporaries who.have been called in question. They are very common in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. On the other hand, there are scraps of Latin, and many classical allusions. Richard III has not the erudition and not much natural history, except for the purposes of vituperation. Did Shakespeare take warning From the extent to which both features were *cut' by the actors in adapting 2, 3 Henry VII
Greene's Groafsworth of Wit parodies 3 Hen. VI, i. 4. 137. This does not in my view give us any information about the authorship of the line, but is certainly not in- consistent with Shakespeare's. But it shows that the play, and naturally also 2 Henry VI> were in existence before Greene's death on 3 September 1592. As the theatres had probably been closed since June 23, we may put them a little farther back. The title-page of the Q of 3 Henry VI makes it a play of Pembroke's men* Of these there is no trace before the winter of 1592-3, and some other com- pany may have been the original producers. The plays are
288 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
not in Henslowe's list of 1592 for 'Strange's* men, and if theirs (cf. infra) can hardly be later than 1591. The stage- directions of 3 Hen. VI, i. 2. 48; iii. i. i, have 'Gabriel' for a messenger and 'Sinklo* and 'Humfrey' for two keepers. These are probably the actors Gabriel Spencer, John Sincler, and Humphrey Jeffes. There is a similar substitution in the stage-directions to 2 Hen. VI, iv. 2. i. Here among Cade's followers are 'Beuis' and 'lohn Hol- land'. They are not named in the text, although editors have chosen to take thence the Christian name of 'George' for Bevis, But John Holland, like John Sincler, is an actor in the cast (cf. p. 44) for 2 Seven Deadly Sins, as played by Strange's or the Admiral's or the Alleyn com- pany about 1590. Spencer and Jeffes are not in that cast. Of Bevis I know nothing, but probably he too was a minor actor. In 2 Hen. VI, ii, 3. 92, the Armourer says, 'there- fore, Peter, have at thee with a downright blow!', and Q adds, *as Bevys of South-hampton fell upon Askapart*. Surely Bevis played the Armourer as well as a rebel, and this is a bit of his gag. These names, interesting as they are, prove rather elusive, when one attempts to draw any inference from them as to the original ownership of 2, 3 Henry VI. All the five actors may have been together in the Alleyn company; and again all of them may have passed from that to Pembroke's in 1592. That Bevis was in Pembroke's we can be sure, since his gag comes from a reported performance by them. Neither he nor Holland is heard of later. Sincler probably joined the Chamber- lain's men in 1594, as he is in Taming of the Shrew, and was certainly with them in 1597-8 and in 1604. But Spencer and probably Jeffes were in the Pembroke's com- pany of 1597, and thereafter both were in the Admiral's company. I formerly thought x that they might have been Chamberlain's men during 1594-7, but the recent dis- coveries (cf. p. 50} of evidence for a Pembroke's company in 1595-6 makes this now seem less likely. All that we can say with certainty is that the F texts may rest upon prompt-copy either for the Alleyn company about 1 59 1 or
Stage, ii. 200.
Chap. IX HENRY THE SIXTH 289
for the Pembroke company about 1593, and that the Q texts must rest on performances by the Pembroke com- pany about the same time. I suspect that the report was made for sale to the printers after the company broke down in the autumn of 1593. Dr. Greg suggests to me that it may have been made for performances earlier in 1 593, and I am content to leave that as a possible alterna- tive. Somehow, the legitimate prompt-copies must have passed, from the Alleyn company on Dr. Greg's theory, or from Pembroke's on mine, to the Chamberlain's, who left the old actor-names standing in them. If Sincler did not change his part, they could pass as character names, or be disregarded, as the original directions and prefixes would be still legible. A revival by the Chamberlain's is pointed to, both by the alterations incorporated in the F text and by the reference in the epilogue of Henry V to Henry the Sixth:
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France, and made his England bleed:
Which oft our stage has shown.
It may have been later than the record of Meres. The plays, as revived, seemed old-fashioned to Jonson, but the date of his reference (App. B, no. xxii) is not certain. There is no evidence of a Jacobean revival. The F text shows no changes due to the Act of Abuses. I cannot explain a few passages in which Q3 varies the Qi text in the direction of that of F. Whether derived from a per- formance, or from the information of the author or the theatre, they hardly justify the 'newly corrected and en- larged' of the title-page.
The historical matter seems to be mainly from Holin- shed, but Halle, Fabyan, Grafton, and Stowe may also have been consulted.1
This is a very different problem. There is no Q. F has again elaborate stage-directions. Those in i often have the unusual opening 'Here'. The scene-division is confined
1 Bos-well-Stone, xL 253. 3142.1 u
29o PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
to iii and iv, and while iv is twice the length of i and ii, v is a single scene of 108 lines. As F does not divide 2y 3 Henry VI into scenes at all, these indications may have been taken over from heterogeneous 'copy', perhaps in more than one hand. Moreover, there are certainly several styles in the play. Various attempts have been made to disentangle and identify them, but none are quite satis- factory. I group the scenes, as divided in modern editions, in the following sections: (a}\. i, 3; ii. 5; iii. i,4;iv. 1,4; v. i,4.94-end;(^)i.2,4-6;ii. i-3;iii. 2-3; iv.7.33-end; v. 2, 3. 1-44, 4. 1-93; (0 iv. 3, 5, 6, 7. 1-32; (d) v. 3. 45~end, 5; (e) ii. 4; (/) iv. 2. Sections (a) and (£) contain the bulk of the play, and are by distinct hands. In (a) the matter is of English politics, the quarrels of Gloucester and Winchester and of Somerset and York; it looks for- ward to 2> 3 Henry VI^ and the style more nearly resembles theirs than anything else in the play. In (£) the matter is of fighting in France and Joan of Arc. It is in a very inferior style, with many flat and some absurd lines, much tautology, and a tendency to drag in learned allusions. There is room for doubt as to whether a few colourless passages about Talbot (i. i. 103—47; iii. 4. 1—27; iv. i. 9-47; iv. 4) belong to (a) or (£). But I do not understand how Pollard and others fail to appreciate the very clear differentiation between (a) and (£) during the greater part of i and ii. And I think that the same hands continue throughout. Gaw, however, who has made the fullest study of the play, thinks that the (£) matter passed in iii-v to two fresh hands. This view is largely based upon differences in the F spelling, of proper names, as to which (c£ p. 232) the Elizabethan practice was very loose. Certainly 'Gloster* and 'Glocester' appear within a few lines of each other in a perfectly homogeneous passage of iii. i. I cannot therefore attach much importance to the differences between 'loane'and *Ione*, TuzeTancTPucelP, *Burgundie' and 'Burgonie', merely because they are used in different scenes. Section (r) consists of the Talbot death- scenes, which are largely in heroic rhyme, They are often claimed for Shakespeare, but on the whole I think it is
Chap. IX HENRY THE SIXTH 291
more likely that they are by the author of (b\ and the duplication of a tasteless comparison of Talbot and his son to Daedalus and Icarus favours this. But if so, the (£) man was a better hand at rhyme than at blank verse. Section (*/), containing the Suffolk and Margaret scenes, also points forward to 2, 3 Henry VI. I think it is by a third hand. Shakespeare's presence is only clear to me in (i), the Temple garden scene, and (/), an unrhymed Talbot scene leading up to (c). These I take to be new scenes, written in or later than 1594. Probably both replaced scenes of the original play; almost certainly (e) did, as later pas- sages carry on the motive of the roses. Some would add ii. 5, the scene with Mortimer in the Tower, but this I take to be the best of the (a) scenes. It has very few double endings, although that is not conclusive against Shakespeare in a single scene. As to the authorship of the original play, I feel no assurance. If Shakespeare is in it at all, it must be in (a). The evidence of F is not very strong here, since clearly by 1 623 the piece was regarded as an integral part of his Henry VI. The style of (a) might be a first stage in the development (cf. supra) up to Richard III. It is Marlowesque, and might also, as some think, be Marlowe's, The percentage of double endings (8 %) is high for Marlowe, and lower than that of 2, 3 Henry VI. If, however, as seems likely (cf. infra), i Henry VI followed these, an attribution of (a) to Shakespeare is much less plausible. In any case I do not think it necessary to as- sume, with Gaw and others, that he touched up' the work of other men in the play, merely because a few lines here and there are better or more like him than the rest. Hart, who disregards the distinction between (a) and (£), finds Greene predominant in i and ii. This I much mistrust. The parallels quoted are very slight, and Greene's only extant history-play, James IV^ is of a very different type. If Greene is in the play, (<?) seems more like him. But I should be surprised to find him writing for Alleyn's company after the Orlando Furioso swindle,1 and in the Groatsworth he seems aloof from his fellow dramatists
n. 325.
U 2
292 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
as well as from the players. Gaw finds Peele in some of the (£) scenes, and I see no obvious reason why he should not have written them all, with the Talbot scenes. He uses rhyme in other plays, and the nationalist tone is like him. On the other hand, some of his characteristic mannerisms are not very apparent. Nashe, Lodge, and Kyd have also been speculated upon, and of course Chap- man by Robertson.
Nashe, in his Pierce Penniless, registered on 8 August 1592, records the triumph on the stage of *braue Talbot (the terror of the French)1, whom the spectators beheld 'fresh bleeding'.1 I do not think that any inference can be drawn for or against his own share in the authorship. But the date helps to identify the play with the *Harey the vj* produced by Strange's men for Henslowe (App. D) on 3 March 1592. It was *ne' and probably therefore either actually new, or substantially remodelled. Evidently the death of Talbot was already a prominent feature. Pollard thinks that behind i Henry VI^ as we now have it, is an original Joan of Arc play by two hands, altered at a first stage by the insertion of the Talbot death-scenes, and at a later by the garden, tower, and Margaret scenes, as links to an already existing York and Lancaster. It may be so. But the rivalry between York and Somerset is wanted in the play itself to explain the abandonment of Talbot (iv. 3, 4). And there are passages in other scenes than those named by Pollard which seem closely linked to 2, 3 Henry VI\ bits about the roses (iii. 4; iv. i); the disputes of Gloucester and Winchester (i. i, 3; iii, i; v. i), which lead to little here, but seem suggested by the 'ancient bickerings' of 2 Hen. VI^ i. 1. 144, although indeed this might be argued either way as to priority; a passing allusion (i. i. 39) to the duchess of Gloucester, so promi- nent in the later play; the prophecies (i. I. 48 ; iii. 1.187; iv. i. 182; iv. 3. 47) of the choric Bedford, Exeter, and Lucy. It is at least as tenable a theory that the whole thing, except Shakespeare's two later scenes, was put to- gether in 1 592, to exploit an earlier theme which had been
1 Cf. £#5. Stagf> iv. 238.
Chap. IX HENRY THE SIXTH 293
successful. Even so the Admiral's men in 1599, after producing three parts of The Civil Wan of France > wound up with an Introduction to the Civil Wars of France.1 A multiplicity of authors is sufficient to account for the odd scening of the 'copy* for F, as well as for the numerous inconsistencies of action in the play, even if some of these authors were not individually careless. Tentatively, there- fore, I ascribe 2, 3 Henry VI to 1591 and i Henry VI to 1592. Presumably i Henry VI shared in the revival in- dicated by the epilogue to Henry V> for which the present ii. 4 and iv. 2 may have been written.
There is an interesting bit of staging in the use of the 'top' in i. 4 and iii. 2,2 but I do not accept Gaw's elaborate argument to show that this was a new structural feature first invented at the Rose in 1592, or think with him that it was the loft from which the theatre's flag waved and its trumpet was blown. Nothing here could come into the action of a play, in view of the intervention of the project- ing 'heavens'. The 'top' must have been over the stage balcony, on a level with the upper row of galleries, as the balcony itself was on a level with the middle row. Halle, Holinshed, and Fabyan seem all to have been drawn upon for the historical matter.* The recital of Talbot's dignities in iv. 7 comes from his epitaph at Rouen, of which there are later printed versions in R, Crompton's Mansion of Magnanimitie (1599), and R. Broke's Catalogue and Succession of the . . Earks . . of England (1619).* But travellers went to Rouen, although Essex and his soldiers failed to take it in 1591, The chronology throughout the play is much perverted. Foreshortening was inevitable, since Henry could not well be presented on the stage as a child at the beginning of the play and marriageable at the end.
1 EB&. Stage, ii. 169. Boswell-Stone, xi.
* Cf. ibU. iii. 98. #«£ 233-
294 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
IV. RICHARD THE THIRD
[S.R. 1597.] 20 Octobris. Andrewe Wise. Entred for his copie vnder thandes of master Barlowe, and master warden Man. The tragedie of kinge Richard the Third with the death of the Duke of Clarence vjd (Arber, iii. 93).
[QI-I.597-] [Ornament] The Tragedy Of King Richard the third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence : the pittiefull murther of his iunocent (sic) nephewes: his tyrannicall vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death. As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. [Ornament] At London IT Printed by Valentine Sims, for Andrew Wise, dwelling in Paules Chuch-yard (sic}y at the Signe of the Angell. 1597. [No Head-title. Running-title} The Tragedy of Richard the third.
Facsimiles. W. Griggs (1886, Sh. Q. », ed. P. A. Daniel); J. S. Farmer (1913, T.F.T. from Ashbee).
[Q2- ?5980 The Tragedie of King Richard the third. Conteining his treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pitiful murther of his innocent Nephewes: his tyrannicall vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death. As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamber- laine his seruants. By William Shake-speare. [Creede's device (McKerrow 299)] London Printed by Thomas Creede, for Andrew Wise, dwelling in Paules Church- yard, at the signe of the AngelL 1598. [No Head-title. Running-title'} The Tragedie of Richard the third. [Q3- 5602.] The Tragedie of King Richard the third. Conteining his treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittifull murther of his innocent Nephewes: his tyrannical vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death. As it hath bene lately Acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Cham- berlaine his seruants. Newly augmented, By William Shakespeare. [Creedes device (McKerrow 299)] London. Printed by Thomas Creede, for Andrew Wise, dwelling
Chap. IX RICHARD THE THIRD 295
in Panics Church-yard, at the signe of the Angell. 1602. [No Head-title. Running-title} The Tragedie of Richard the Third.
[There are no augmentations]
Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1888, Sh. Q. xlii, ed. P. A. Daniel). [S.R. 1603.] 25. Junii Mathew Lawe. Entred for his copies in full courte Holden this Day. These ffyve copies followinge ijs vjd viz. iij enterludes or playes. The ffirst is of Richard the .3. ... all kinges . . all whiche by con- sent of the Company are sett ouer to him from Andrew Wyse. (Arber, iii. 239.)
[Q4. 1605.] The Tragedie of King Richard the third. Conteining his treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittifull murther of his innocent Nephewes: his tyrannicall vsurpation : with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death. As it hath bin lately Acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Cham- berlaine his seruants. Newly augmented, By William Shake-speare. [Creede's device (McKerrow 2 9 9)] London, Printed by Thomas Creede, and are to be sold by Mathew Lawe, dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the Signe of the Foxe, neare S. Austins gate, 1 605. [No Head-title. Run- ning-title'} The Tragedie of Richard the third.
[£5. 1612.] The Tragedieof King Richard The Third
As it hath beene lately Acted by the Kings Majesties seruants ... 1612. [Otherwise the same as Q[4.]
[Q6. 1 622.] The Tragedie Of King Richard The Third. Contayning his treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: The pittifull murder of his innocent Nephewes: his tyrannicall Vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death. As it hath been lately Acted by the Kings- Maiesties Seruants. Newly augmented. By William Shake-speare. [Ornament] Lon- don, Printed by Thomas Purfoot, and are to be sold by Mathew Law, dwelling In Pauls Church-yard, at the Signeof the Foxe, neere S» Austines gate, 1 622. [No Head- title. Running-title'} The Tragedie of Richard the Third. Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1889, Sh. Q. xliii, ed. P. A. Daniel).
296 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue} The Life & Death of Richard the Third. [Histories, pp, 173-204, sign, q £-t 2V. Head- title] The Tragedy of Richard the Third: with the Landing of Earle Richmond, and the Battell at Bosworth Field. [Running-title'] . The Life and Death of Richard the Third.
[Acts and sec marked (altered in modern eds.).] Later Quartos. 1 629 (John Norton, sold by Mathew Lawe); 1634 (John Norton).
Parallel-Text. E. A. Calkins (1891, Bankside). Modern Editions. W. A. Wright (1880, O.U.P.)', G. Macdonald (i 896, Warwick), A. H. Thompson (i 907, Arden}\ . H. H. Furness, jun. (1908, New Var.}\ J. R. Crawford (1927, Tale).
[Dissertations. W. OechelhaOser, Essay uterR. ///(i 868, J. iii. 27; 1 894, Shakespeareana}\ N. Delius, Vberden ursprilnglichen Text des R. Ill (1872, J. vii. 124; Abl. i. 234); F. G. Fleay, Who Wrote Hen. 71 ? (1875, Macmil- lan*s)\ J. Spedding, On the Corrected Edition ofR. 7/7(1875, N.S.S. Trans. i); E. H. Pickersgill, On the Q and the F ofR. Ill (1875, N.S.S. Trans. 77); R. Koppel, Textkritische Studien iiber Bhs R. Ill und Lear (1877); A. Schmidt, gf und F. von R. Ill (1880, J. xv. 301); K. Fischer, Sis CharakterentwickelungR. 777 (2nd ed. 1889); G. B. Churchill, R. Ill up to 8k. (1900); K. Schmidt, Margareta von Anjou> vor und bei Sk. (1906); O.Pape, UberdieEntstehungderQivonR.IH(i^6), Die QivonR.III ein stenographist Rau&druck (1906, Arch. f. Stenographic, Ivii. 1 5 2, 1 86, 241); R, A. Law, R. 777, /. 4 (1912, P.M.L.4. xxvii. ir7); W. D. Moriarty, The Bearing on Dramatic Sequence of the Paria in R. Ill and Lear (1913, M.P. x. 451); 0. J. Campbell, A Dutch Analogue ofR. Ill (1916, Wisconsin Studies, 231); A. W. Pollard, The Tork and Lancaster Plays in Fx (1918, Sept. 19, 26, T.Z.&); J. M. Robertson, The Authorship of R. Ill (1922, Si. Canon, i. 155); P. Alexander, S&.'sH. /7and R. 7/7(1929).]
Each Q, other than Q$y is reprinted from its immediate predecessor. There are occasional corrections, not involv- ing reference to a manuscript, and a progressive accumu- lation of errors. Q$ appears sometimes to follow £4 and sometimes £3. The use of both, or of a copy made up of sheets from each, has been suggested* It seems also possible that the sheets of £4 may have been corrected during printing, and some form, not collated, used as copy for Q5. Fi repeats many errors of the later Qq and one of them must have been used to print from; doubtless Q6, as several of these errors are not in the other Qq.
Chap. IX RICHARD THE THIRD 297
On the other hand, the differences between Fi and all the Qq are so great as to point clearly to alteration of the Q6 basis from a manuscript source. Q i and Fi must therefore be regarded as distinct texts. The main differences are as follows. F has about 230 lines which are not in Q. Of these about half are in six considerable passages (1.2.1 56- 67; ii. 2. 89-100, 123-40; iii. 7. 144-53; iv. 4. 221-34, 288—342). They form parts of long speeches or long sections of dialogue, do not differ in style from the rest of the play, fit in without awkward joints, and in some cases leave the context abrupt or less effective when omitted. The other special F lines form short dispersed passages, often single lines. Q has about forty lines not in F, simi- larly dispersed, except one passage (iv. 2. 101-19), which again fits well into its context. A few passages show small transpositions of order, and the prose of Clarence's mur- derers in i. 4. 84—161, most of which is correctly given in F, is capitalized throughout as verse in Q. But in the main the texts, agree in arrangement, speech for speech, and even line for line. There is, however, much divergence in phrasing, which, after allowing for numerous misprints in both texts and the influence of Q6 on Fi, disappears from iii. i. 1—157 and from v. 3. 79 onwards. A word of one text is often represented in the other by a synonym or the same word in a different number, case, mood, or tense. Often a word is repeated in Q and another is substituted for the repetition in F. There is some tendency to uni- formity in variation. The which^ betwixt^ whilst of Q are several times replaced by tkat^ between^ while, or when in F. The same words are differently ordered within a line. Or the wording of one text is a complete paraphrase of the sense given in the other; A metrically normal ten-syllable line in F often represents one in Q which has one or more extra syllables. Shakespeare, of course, uses trisyllabic feet and six-foot lines, but many of these in Q are harsh, and occasionally the abnormality seems due to the intru- sion of an exclamatory or other 'connective' word, such as actors introduce to accompany their gestures. These facts are capable of more than one explanation, and there are
298 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
broadly two views as to the relation between Q and F which they may indicate. It has been held that Q repre- sents the original text of the play, and F a later revision by Shakespeare or some other hand. And it has been held that F represents the original text and Q either a revision for stage purposes or a corrupt report of the play as staged. It generally goes with the first theory that the special F passages were added on revision and with the second that they were 'cut1 in representation. I do not suppose that any very simple formula will explain every- thing. But substantially I regard the second theory as sound. In particular the suggested stylistic revision seems to me out of the question. There has been much incon- clusive discussion as to the respective literary merits of bits of Q and F wording. On balance, I think that F is the better of the two; and so it might well be on either theory. But the difference of value, for stage purposes at least, is negligible. And I cannot reconcile with any reasonable conception of Shakespeare's methods of work a revision limited to the smoothing out of metre and the substitution of equivalent words, without any incorporation of any new structure or any new ideas. Nor can I think that either Shakespeare or any one else at the theatre would have • thought it either worth while or practicable to make actors relearn their parts with an infinity of trivial modifications. Still less can I, with Pollard, suppose that Shakespeare revised the F into the Q form.
The history of the text must, I think, be somewhat as follows. The play, as written by Shakespeare, was slightly altered for stage purposes. It was shortened by cutting six long passages. Minor alterations were made to enable certain scenes (u 4; iL i, 4; iii. 4, 5; v. i, 2, 3) to be played with a reduced number of minor parts. Incidentally these account for a few of the lesser passages omitted in Q, and in connexion with them some small corrections of nomen- clature and topography (i. 3. 333; ii. I. 7, 66) seem to have been made in the text. Qi was based on this stage- version. I do not think that it was 'surreptitious', in the sense of being printed without the consent of the Chamber-
Chap. IX RICHARD THE THIRD 299
Iain's men. There is nothing in the circumstances of the publication to suggest irregularity. Certainly some of the textual features — omissions, paraphrases, substitution of equivalent words, incorporation of actor's 'connectives' — are such as appear in 'reported' plays, and there are some 'auditory' errors. But the text, and in particular the lineation, is so much better than that of the accepted 'bad' quartos, as to suggest the use of a transcript from the original. It must, of course, have been a bad transcript, to explain the verbal divergences from F. I suggest that it was specially prepared by the book-keeper for the printer. Possibly the original was required at the time for represen- tations. The book-keeper adopted the alterations marked on the original for stage purposes. His transcription, except for accesses of conscience at iii. I. I and'v. 3. 79, was done carelessly. He was familiar with the play, which he had prompted, and although he generally checked the succession of lines, in writing them out he often allowed himself to follow their purport as he had heard them, thus vulgarizing the style, and producing in a minor degree the features of a reported text. An occasional transference by memory from some other part of the play (ii. 2. 24 from i. 4. 252 ; iv. 4. 507 from iv, 3. 48 ; iv. 4. 235 from iv. 4. 398) is particularly significant. Responsibility for the omis- sion of stray lines the transcriber must perhaps share with the Q printer. Shakespeare's original remained at the theatre, marked perhaps for the stage adaptation, but without further alteration, except the usual perfunctory excision of some of the profanity for a Jacobean revival. In 1623 it was made available for the correction of a Q6 as copy for F, with instructions to restore the passages cut or altered for the stage, but not the oaths. The correction was not perfectly done, and the result was not perfectly printed. Among the errors were the omissions of a few Q lines, including iv. 2. 101-19* Possibly an editor, or no more than a press-corrector, may have made a few altera- tions, by conjecture, as printers of the successive Qq had done, or to bring into conformity with what he regarded as current usage. A substitution, perhaps only by mis-
300 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
print, of -'Pursuing' for 'Ensuing' in ii. 3. 43 has left a trace in a catch-word. The respective stage-directions of Q and F are consistent with this view of the relation between the texts. Those of F are rather more elaborate than is usual in Shakespearean texts, although less so than those of 2, 3 Henry FL They include some for attiring or the use of properties, some indicating the scope of an opening scene, and some in the margin for details of action. These look to me more like the work of an author familiar with the stage than of a producer. But a producer may have added the numerous notes for the use of musical instru- ments. The directions of Q are clearly related to those of F, but vary in detail. Generally, but not always, they are shorter. Thus at iii. 5. i F has 'Enter Richard, and Buck- ingham, in rotten Armour, maruellous ill-fauoured', but Q merely 'Enter Duke of Glocester and Buckingham in armour'. I think the transcribing book-keeper has abridged. It is certainly less likely that an editor of F added descriptive touches for readers. An exceptionally literary note is at v. 3. 237, where the first line of Richmond's speech is followed by the heading 'His Ora- tion to his Souldiers'. But this is in Q as well as F, and in fact it is F, not Q, which omits at v. 3. 314 the corre- sponding heading in Richard's speech, 'His Oration to his army*. Ferhaps something should be said of the curious note 'Newly augmented' on the title-page of Q3. There are no augmentations. It may be merely a publisher's lure. I do not think it can be pressed as meaning that when sheet A, containing the title-page, was printed in 1602, the publisher knew of a recent revision, new pas- sages from which he hoped, but afterwards failed, to get. He may just as well have contemplated an augmentation not of the play, but of his book, by adding passages of the original known to have been omitted from earlier Qq. The 'new additions* to £3 of Richard II were of such original matter. It has also been suggested that the words added in 1 602 ought to have appeared in 1 597, as an indi- cation that Richard III as a whole was Shakespeare's aug- mentation of an earlier pky. This seems to me desperate
Chap. IX RICHARD THE THIRD 301
'Newly* could not be so used for the first time in 1602, although if it had appeared on an earlier title-page it might have been repeated without alteration.
If a hand other than Shakespeare's is to be found in Richard III, it must be upon different grounds. Coleridge once, but not consistently, doubted the genuineness of the play. But the scepticism of some recent writers seems to be traceable to the influence of Fleay, who in 1 875 thought that the play was left unfinished by Peele and completed and revised by Shakespeare, in 1881 substituted Marlowe and Peele for Peele, in 1886 substituted Marlowe alone, but did not 'think it possible to separate Shakespeare's work from Marlowe's', and in 1891 added Drayton as a reviser for F. The theory in all its phases is but slightly argued. It is largely a matter of subjective impression. But stress is laid upon variations of nomenclature in text and speech-prefixes as evidence for two hands. Such variations seem to me (cf. p. 232) a constant feature of Shakespeare's work. Pollard thinks the incorrect use of 'Derby' for 'Stanley' in certain scenes evidential. But his two hands are not Marlowe's and Shakespeare's; they are those of Peele, to whom he ascribes at least iii. I. 1—157, and of a 'dull' man, found also in the True Tragedy. Shake- speare, besides revising the F form into the Q form, added the opening soliloquy, with i. 2 and perhaps the Mar- garet scenes, as audacious and splendid afterthoughts. If I have understood the view rightly, it is difficult to reconcile it with the obvious presence of these passages in the manuscript used for Fi. Robertson is a thorough-going sceptic. For him the play is Marlowe's, with 'primary collaboration' by Kyd in certain scenes. Heywood did *a good deal of later eking out and expanding'. But Shakespeare, 'however much he may have revised, con- tributes only some six or seven speeches, some of them very short'* The denial of Shakespeare is again based upon subjective impressions that the style and psychology are too 'primitive* to be his, and so different from that of such other plays as Robertson is prepared to allow him, as to exclude a common authorship. There are constant
302 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
assertions, not convincing to me in detail, that such and such lines cannot be Shakespeare's. There is a theory, which I think quite unfounded (cf. p. 224), that Marlowe is more likely than Shakespeare to have written, at the date of 'Richard III \ a play with so large a proportion of double endings. Similarly, it is stylistic impression, with the help of the unreliable 'clues' afforded by echoes, mainly verbal, from other plays, which directs Robertson to his substitutes. There is no attempt to disentangle completely the contributions of Marlowe, Kyd, and Heywood. We are invited to see the hand, now of one, now of another. It is pointed out that Heywood duplicates certain episodes of Richard Him Edward IF. He is called a 'docile imitator', and it is indeed probable that he is here docilely imitating. I do not myself think (cf. p. 223) that we have any assured criterion for distinguishing on internal grounds between the diction, about 1593, of Shakespeare on the one hand, and those of Marlowe, Peele, and Kyd on the other; and it is therefore unsafe on such grounds to disregard the strong external evidence for his authorship. Nor do I see any adequate reason for assuming two hands. There are 'dull* scenes, but the style is uniform throughout. It is a highly mannered rhetorical style, extravagant in utter- ance, with many appeals and exclamations. There is much violent and vituperative speech; the word 'blood' runs like a leit-motif through the play. Epithets, and sometimes nouns, are piled up, in pairs, with or without a conjunction ; in triplets or even greater numbers* Types of line- structure tend to recur. One is based on such a triplet; another is the 'balanced* line, of noun and epithet against Goun and epithet. A 'clinching' line at the end of a speech is also common. There are 'cumulative* passages of parallel lines with parisonic beginnings or ending. Words and phrases are repeated for emphasis. There is much 'ringing of the changes* on individual words, between line and line and speech and speech. Sometimes this is progressive, as new words are introduced. Sometimes it takes the form of a bitter pun. There is rhetorical struc- ture, in antithesis antiphon, stichomythia. Some of it is
Chap. IX RICHARD THE THIRD 303
ultimately of Senecan origin. All these features occur in- dividually in pre-Shakespearean plays and recur in later Shakespearean plays, with diminishing frequency. But I do not think that they are quite so massed and multiplied elsewhere. I find nothing here which might not be Shakespeare, at an early stage of development, and while he is still much under the influence of his predecessors. Perhaps I should make a qualification. I am not certain that the extremely ineffective speeches of the ghosts (v. 3. 1 1 8-76) may not be a spectacular theatrical addition^ Certainly the psychology is 'primitive', as compared with that of later plays. It is in the key and at the distance from life of melodrama, not tragedy. But its resemblance to that of Marlowe is not close. The concentrated remorselessness of Richard recalls him, of course, and so does the choric Margaret, in his earlier work rather than in Edward //, which must be the nearest in date to Richard III. But his presentation of character offers no parallel to the vivid analysis of the many-sided Richard, with his grim humour of introspection, his audacities and levities of speech, his irony and mock humility, his plausibility and adroitness, his histrionics and sense of dramatic effect. Nor is Mar- lowe's the give and take of the dialogue, in which speeches are not merely juxtaposed but articulated, as the ideas of one disputant provoke and determine those of the next. It is a natural and improvised, rather than a prepared, dialogue.
The play has been variously dated. There are several contemporary allusions to it and to Burbadge's playing of Richard (App. B, nos. xiii, xvi, xix, xx, xxiv), but all are later than Qi, with the possible exception of one by Weever, which is itself of uncertain date, and may refer to Richard II. Both style and psychology point to an early period in Shakespeare's work, and the links with Henry VI suggest that it followed that play after no long interval. I do not think it inconceivable that it was the Buckingham performed, not as a new j>lay, by Sussex's men on I Jan. 1594 (App. D). Certainly Buckingham is not the chief character, but Henslowe was not precise
304 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
in his use of titles. The historical facts are almost all from the chronicles of Halle and Holinshed, themselves based mainly on Polydore Vergil's Anglicae Historiae (i 534) and the Life of Richard generally ascribed to Sir Thomas More. Holinshed substantially follows Halle, but each has some special features represented in the play, and pro- bably both were consulted. Possibly a hint or two came from A Mirror for Magistrates. It is not very likely that Shakespeare knew Thomas Legge's academic Richardus Tertius1 although both have a wooing scene for Richard. Churchill 497 enumerates many parallels of incident and phrasing, not given by the chronicles, but often very slight, to The True Tragedy of Richard the Third? and thinks that Shakespeare used it. Hart points out that in this play, as in 3 Henry Fla&dRichardlll, Richard is given to the use of proverbial expressions. Its date is uncertain. It was regis- tered on 1 9 June 1 594, and printed in the same year as a Queen's play. The text is so bad as to render any inference hazardous. It seems to be a reported text, in which much of the verse has been paraphrased in prose. Even if the play itself was earlier the reporter may have incorporated reminiscences of Richard IIL Law notes a rather close resemblance between the handling of Rich. ///, i. 4, and that of sc. xix of LeirJ This was entered on 14 May 1 594, but apparently not printed until 1 605, as it was then re-entered. It was played by the Queen's or Sussex's or both, not as a new play, in April 1 594, and may therefore be either older or younger than Richard IIL
There was probably a Jacobean revival of Shakespeare's play, as the oaths are somewhat pruned in Fi, tut the first seventeenth-century performance on record was at
court on 1 6 Nov. 1633 (App. D). There were rival plays on the theme of Richard IIL Robert Wilson wrote a second part of Henry Richmond for the Admiral's in 1 599, and a fragment of its scenario is at Dulwich. Jonson at least began a Richard Cwokback for the same company in 1602 (Greg, Henshwt) iL 207, 222). Heywood'sP/easant Dia- logues and Dramas (i 637), 247, have lines headed 'A young
i E8& Stage, iii. 407. » md. nr. 43. » IbM. iv. 25.
Chap. IX RICHARD THE THIRD 305
witty Lad playing the part of Richard the third : at the Red Bull : the Author because hee was interessed in the Play to incourage him, wrot him this Prologue and Epilogue'. This would be a play of Queen Anne's men. To one of these must belong the story in R. Chamberlain's A New Booke of Mistakes (1637) of an actor who had to speak the lines,
My leigej the Duke of Buckingham is tane, And Banister is come for his reward.
and by a slip inverted the names. Banister is no character in Richard 777, but is in the Chronicles, the True Tragedy^ and the scenario of Henry Richmond. The first line is identical with Shakespeare's iv. 4. 533, but is of a type which two dramatists might be capable of hammering out indepen- dently. The Dutch De Roode en Witte Roos of Lankaster en Jork (1651) of Lambert van den Bosch is more likely to have had a source in one of these later plays than in a hypothetical early version of Richard III, which it does not appear to resemble, structurally or in language.
V. THE COMEDY OF ERRORS.
[F 1. 1 62 3.] [Catalogue'] The Comedy of Errours. [Come- diesy pp. 85-100, sign. H i-1 2V. Head-title] The Come- die of Errors [Running-title'] as head-tide. [Acts and sec. I marked.] Parallel-Text. A. Morgan (1894, Bankside). Modern Editions. H. Cuningham (iq^Ardtn)\ A, Quiller-Couch and J. D. Wilson (1922, C.U.P.) ; R. D* French (1926, Yah}. Dissertations. H. v. Friesen, Bemerkungen zu den Altersbestimmungen JfureinigeStuckevonSh. (1867,7.11, tf)\?.Ww^u&,Zmineuenta'eckte Sh.-quellen (i 879, J. xiv. 87); H. Isaac, Sis CJS. unddie Menachmen des Plautus (1883, Archlv, Ixx. i); J. Gr6ne, Zwei neuentdecke Quellen zu ''~Sif CJ£. (1894, J. xxix. 281); K. Roeder, Menechmi und Amfhitruo im englischen Drama bis zur 1661 (1904); F. Lang, Sfo C.E. in engllsche Sukntnarbeitung (1909); W. H. D. Rouse, The Mcnaechmh the Original ofSffs €.£. (1912, &l. Library); J. M. Robertson, The Authorship *fC.E. (1923, SA. Canon, ii. 136); E. Gill, A Comparison of the Characters ofCJE. with those in the Menaechmi (1925, Texas Studies, v. 79); A. Gaw, The Evolution ofCJS. (1926, PMJL-4. xli- 620). The text is a fair one, with a few mislineations, some of
3X42.1
306 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
which are probably due to confusion by the sudden transi- tions between blank verse, prose, and doggerel in certain scenes. I see no obvious reason why a manuscript by Shakespeare should not have been the basis. Wilson, however, sees one in the absence of such abnormal spel- lings as he finds in some quartos, and takes to be author's spellings which have escaped the normalization of the printing-house. But whatever positive inference may follow from the presence of such spellings in one text, it is surely impossible to base a negative one upon their absence from another, in which the normalization may have been more vigilant. Wilson's own theory of the Comedy of Errors text involves (a) dictation to a scribe in the play house from (£) players* 'parts*, with the aid of a 'plot' for a few brief stage-directions, and (c) subsequent expansion by a second scribe imperfectly familiar with the text as it stood in the 'parts', who also touched up the speech-prefixes.
A ' JL JT JL
For (a) he relies upon certain textual errors which might be due to mishearing, but such errors can also be made (cf. p. 1 80) through the subconscious operations of a com- positor's mind. Such a process of 'assembling* as (£) con- templates, although not inconceivable, would be attended (cf. p. 1 55) by serious difficulties. For (c) I find no sufficient ground. The stage-directions are mainly of a practical kind ; occasionally they contain a note of the relationship of charac- ters, or for attire or properties, or action ; occasionally some- thing is left by a 'three or foure' (iv«4. 109) or *as fast as may be* (iv. 4. 1 50) to the discretion of the theatre. I think that they are primarily author's directions. But in places (iv. 4, 43, 149 ; v, i . 1 90) a superfluity or error points to expan- sion, either in printing F or more likely by the book- keeper, who is probably also responsible for the first speech-prefixes after entrances, which as suggested by Greg, the author seems habitually to have left blank. The substitution of Juliana for Luciana (iii. 2. i) both in stage- direction and speech-prefix is probably a mere printers error. There are variations in the spelling of proper names, in the text as well as the stage-directions and speech-prefixes, which do not seem to me evidence of any-
Chap. IX THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 307
thing but a want of uniformity in spelling-habits. The speech-prefixes show the tendency to substitute descrip- tions for personal names, which is common in Shakespeare's plays, and represents, I think (cf . p. 2 3 2), an idiosyncrasy of his. They are also much abbreviated. Probably this was also so in the original stage-directions and the book-keeper has expanded them, not always correctly. Thus Antipholis appears for Antipholus until an occurrence of the name in the text serves as a guide to correction. An off-hand writer, a book-keeper, and a printer seem to me to explain all the facts, without recourse to any process of dictation. The play (1,777 lines) is Shakespeare's shortest, and was probably meant to precede a mask, jig, or other afterpiece. A few abrupt short lines and passages of textual corrup- tion may point to cuts, not necessarily of great length. But again I cannot follow Wilson in the theory that there has been substantial abridgement, perhaps by the excision of dinner scenes at the Phoenix and the Porpentine, which might have expanded the sketchy characters of the Courtesan, Balthazar, and the kitchen vestal, or in the further suggestion that this abridgement was for a pro- vincial tour. Any shortness of personnel would surely have led to cutting out Balthazar altogether. Nor do I think with Wilson that the transitions between blank verse, doggerel, and prose imply any rewriting of verse as prose. The staging of the play is interesting. The stage-direction (v. i. 10), 'Enter Antipholus^ and Dromio againe' sug- gests that the action was continuous throughout and the F division into acts uncalled for, since these characters left the stage at the end of Act iv. There are some unusual stage-directions indicating entries and exits 'from the Courtizans' (iv. i. 14), 'from the Bay* (iv. i. 85), 'to the Priorie' (v. i. 37), 'to .the Abbesse' (v. i. 281). Probably the stage was set in the same way throughout. At the back of the stage three houses or doors represented to the right and left the Priory with some religious emblem over it, and the Courtesan's house with the sign^ of the Por- pentine, and in the centre the house of Antipholus with the sign of the Phoenix. As Wilson points out^ Adriana
X2
3o8 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
and Luce must here appear 'above' in iii. i. There is no other action above and none within ; all is either at the doors of the houses, or in an open place, often referred to as the 'mart'. The mart scenes were played at the front of the stage, and the side entrances were supposed to lead to the bay and to the town respectively. But while characters sometimes seem to move direct from the mart to the houses, there are also passages which suggest that they go off the stage on the way between these. Such inconsistencies would probably not be much felt in a bustling action.
Ritson suggested that the doggerel was taken aver by Shakespeare from an earlier writer, and the same view is held by many recent critics.1 Some of it is in short pas- sages from the mouths of the Dromios, but most of it in the first part of iii. i, where several more serious characters share it with them; and this is taken as a scene retained by Shakespeare from a hypothetical earlier form of the play. Why it should have been so retained requires a more satisfactory explanation than it has received. Wilson says that Shakespeare 'thought it good enough to pass muster as it stood'; Gaw that he was so 'inexperienced' that he 'left the scene as hopeless*. I will present the advocates of the retention theory with the fact that the word 'morne' (iiL i. 32), not used elsewhere by Shakespeare, is a com- mon vituperative term in the drama of Uaall's time, and add that it seems to me just as easy to suppose that here and in Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labour's Lost, where there is also a substantial use of doggerel, Shakespeare was consciously experimenting with an archaistic form for comic effect. There are other stylistic experiments in the play, comic stichomythia, rhyme, and lyric quatrains for the sentimental matter of iii. 2 and iv. 2, Nor can I attach much importance to the suggestion of an old text derived from the Paul's court play of 'The historie of Error' in 1577, perhaps through Sussex's court play of *A historie of fferrar* in i$%3*z We know nothing about these pkys except their names. Obviously Paul's might have adapted a Plautine play and called it Error. But there
1 rar,b. 147. a £/«. Stags, iv. 151, 159.
Chap. IX THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 309
are many kinds of error. They might also, for example, have produced a moral with Error as a character. A Paul's play is not likely to have proved very suitable for Sussex's men, even if Paul's, who continued active up to 1589, wanted to part with it in 1583. And Sussex's 'fferrar' looks to me very much like Terrara*. I see no reason to suppose that the Revels Clerk made up his accounts from dictation. The kitchen vestal is called Luce in iii. i. 53 and Nell in iii. 2. 1 1 1, and this has been held to confirm the alien origin of the earlier passage. She is also called Dowsabel in iv, I. no, but that is a joke. I think that Shakespeare altered his name, either to get his pun on *an ell' or to avoid confusion with Luciana, and forgot to correct iii. i. 53. On either supposition . he left an inconsistency. There are others in the play. The age of the twins is differently given, unless there is a mis- print, by the various indications of i. i. 125, 133 and v. i. 309, 326, 400. The goldsmith at iii. 2.178 has forgotten what he was told about the chain at iii. i. 117.
The theory of continuous play-copy over a long span of years has proved so exciting as to lead more than one writer to suggest the intervention of yet another hand in an evolution from Error to Errors. The episodes dealing with the history of Egeon and -Emilia (i. i and parts of v. i) are written in a formal narrative style which contrasts with the more boisterous manner of the greater part of the play. Percentages are valueless in dealing with so small a num- ber of lines, but there are many grammatical overflows, although little pausation within the lines, several examples of the 'balanced' line, and few double endings. A touch or two here and there (i. i. 32, 64) may come from classical reminiscence. There is no reason why Shake- speare should not have thought a difference of style appro- priate to a difference between tragic and comic subject- matter. But Wilson tentatively suggested the hand of Greene, and Gaw would substitute Kyd. I think the pas- sages too weighty for the one and too dignified for the other. Robertson leaves them to Shakespeare, and in deed he leaves little else except the lyrical matter in iii. 2> regarding
3 io PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
the play in the main as a comedy by — Marlowe. This view is largely based on stylistic impression, helped out by very slight vocabulary 'clues' and an unfounded theory (cf. p. 224) as to Marlowe's supposed late addiction to double endings. In the absence of any evidence as to Marlowe's manner in comedy, for which Robertson sub- stitutes another hypothesis that he wrote in A Shrew, it is difficult to discuss it seriously.
As to date, the first clear record of the play is the per- formance at Gray's Inn on 2 8 December 1594. Fleay-L./ir. 178 is of course wrong in supposing that the hit at the barrenness of Scotland (iii. 2. 123) motived the protest of James against the scorning of himself and his people in London plays, since this was not, as he says, in 1595, but in I598.1 But the corresponding hit (iii. 2. 126) at France, 'armed and reverted, making war against her heir', takes us a little farther back, as Henri IV became entitled to the crown on 12 August 1 589, and the struggle of the League against him was ended by a truce of 19 July 1593. So far as this goes, the Comedy of Errors might quite well be 'the gelyous comodey' produced as a new play by 'Strange's' men on 5 January 1593 (App.D). lamnotsure that it was not. Jealousy is a sufficiently prominent motive (ii. 2; iii. I ; iv. 2; v. i) to justify such a description from the inexact pen of Henslowe. On the other hand, it is a prominent motive in many comedies, and there were no further performances of the comedy during the season, unless it was identical with that of Cosmo. This would have been unusual. Moreover, there are two apparent echoes of the Comedy of Errors which seem to point to an earlier date than 1593. Wilson noted the resemblance to iv. 4. 88—9 of the phrase 'heart and good will, but neuer a ragge of money* in Nashe, Four Letters Confuted f registered on 12 January 1593 and published with the imprint * 1 592', which Greg thinks would not, in a popular pamphlet, mean 1593. Gabriel Harvey's Foure Letters, to which Nashe replied, was itself registered on 4 December 1 592. The description of a villain in 4rde& of Faversham,
* £les» Stage, i. 323. * ed, McKerrow, i. 301.
Chap. IX THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 311
ii. i. 51, registered on 3 April 1592 and printed in the same year,1 links the epithets 'leane faced* and 'hollow eied'. much as they are linked in that of Pinch in v. i. 237-40. Of course echoes may go either way or have a common origin, but Arden has many from contemporary plays, and Nashe, earlier in his chaff of Gabriel Harvey in Four Letters Confuted $. 271) quotes Spanish Tragedy i. 2. 172, and adds 'Memorandum: I borrowed this sentence out of a Play. The Theater, Poets hall, hath many more such prouerbes to persecute thee with.' If, therefore, Nashe echoed Shakespeare we must put the Comedy of Errors back to at least December 1592. A private perform- ance then might -be compatible with a public produc- tion on the following January 5. But if Arden also echoed him, which I think the less certain of the two, we must put the Comedy back to at least the spring of 1592. The stylistic development, with its beginnings of lyric comedy in iii. 2, is in favour of the later date, after Shakespeare's work on Venus and Adonis. I must leave it at that. There was a revival at court on 28 December 1604 (App.D).
The main source, direct or indirect, is the Menaechmi of Plautus, but iii. i is probably due to his Amphitruo, in which a husband is locked out from his own house while a substitute eats his dinner, and this may also have sug- gested the addition of twin servants to the twin masters. The Comedy of Errors has elaborated and varied the intrigue and added the enveloping tragic action. Possibly the story of Apollonius of Tyre, used for Pericles (c£ p. 527) may have given a hint for this. Suggested parallels with Chaucer's Knighfs Tale and Sidney's Arcadia are very slight. A translation of the Menaechmi by W(illiam) W(arner) was registered on 10 June 1594; the only print known is dated 1595. The verbal resem- blances of this to the Comedy of Errors are trifling, and may well be accidental, but preliminary verses by Warner claim 'much pleasant error'. If Shakespeare used this, it was probably in manuscript, and in fact a printer's preface
1 B&&. Stagey iv. 3.
312 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
states that it was one of 'diverse of this Poettes Comedies Englished, for the use and delight of his private friends' by the translator. The Amphitruo might have been another. But I see no reason to doubt that Shakespeare could have read Plautus in the original. A puzzle is afforded by the appearance in the earlier stage-directions of the Comedy of Errors of the designations Antipholis Erotes (i. 2. i) and Errotis (ii. 2. i) for Antipholus of Syracuse, and Antipholis Sereptus (ii. i. i) for Antipholus of Ephesus. These look like misprints for Surreptus and Erraticus or Errans, although I do not accept the suggestion that the Plautine name for the Courtesan, Erotium, has contributed. Both in Plautus and in Warner the twins are Menaechmus and Sosicles, but Warner also calls them the Citizen and the Traveller, and the Plautine prologue, which Warner does not translate, speaks of the Citizen as surreptus\ while in the Comedy of Errors the Abbess (v. i. 351) says that 'rude fishermen of Corinth* took Antipholus of Ephesus from her. Possibly, there- fore, Shakespeare had access to a Latin text, such as the Plantin edition of 1566, which included the prologue.
VI. TITUS ANDRONICUS.
[S.R. 1594.] vjto die ffebruarii. John Danter. Entred for his Copye vnder thandes of bothe the wardens a booke in- tituled a Noble Roman Historye of Tytus Andronicus. vjd. John Danter. Entred also vnto him by warraunt from Master Woodcock the ballad thereof. vjd. (Arber, ii. 644). [Q1 • . J 594*] The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus: As it was Plaide by the Right Honourable the Earleof Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Seruants. [Banter's device (Mc- Kerrow 281)] London, Printed by lohn Danter, and are to be sold by Edward White & Thomas Millington, at the little North doore of Paules at the signe of the Gunne. *594* [Head-title^ under ornament with initials I. D.] The most Lamentable Roman Tragedie of Titus Andro- nicus: As it was Plaide by the Right Honourable the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex
I I
o fc
8
Chap. IX TITUS ANDRONICUS 313
their Seruants. [Running-title] The most Lamentable Tragedie of Titus Andronicus.
[Collection of H. C. Folger. Photographs of the tp. and four other pages are BodL Malone Adds.) 48, f. i.]
[MS. 1595.] Harley Papers (Marquis of Bath's MSS. at Longleat) i. f. 159*. Calligraphic copy of i, i. 104-21 (first half of line) and v. i. 125-44, linked by two and a half lines not in Qq F. There are slight textual and many orthographic variants, of which 'haystackes* (v. i. 133) agrees with F, where Qi has 'haystalkes' and Q2 and Q3 'haystakes*. At the end is a speech-prefix for Alarbus, who has no speech in Qq F. Above is a drawing of Tamora and two sons in supplication to Titus, and Aaron standing with a sword drawn. In the margin is 'Henricus Peacham Anno m°q° 9 q°', and a spare page is endorsed 'Henrye Peachams Hande 1595*. Facsimile. E. K. Chambers (1925, 4 Library, v. 3263 cf. Plate XI).
[Q2. 1600.] The most lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus. As it hath sundry times beene playde by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke, the Earle of Darbie, the Earle of Sussex, and the Lorde Chamberlaine theyr Seruants [Ornament], At London, Printed by I(ames) R(oberts) for Edward White and are to bee solde at his shoppe, at the little North doore of Paules, at the signe of the Gun. 1600. [Head-title] The most lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus: As it was plaid by the Right Honorable the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex theyr Seruants. [Running-title] The most lamentable Tragedie of Titus Andronicus.
Facsimiles. E. W. Ashbee (1866); C. Praetorius (1886, Sh. Q. xxix, ed. A. Symons).
[S.R. 1602.] 19 Aprilis . . . Thomas Pavier. Entred for his copies by assignement from Thomas Millington these bookes folowinge, Saluo Jure cuiuscunque viz ... A booke called Titus and Andronicus vjd Entred by warrant vnder master Setons hand (Arber, iii. 204), [Q3- 1611.] [Ornament] The most Lamentable Tragedie
3H PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
of Titus Andronicus. As it hath sundry times beene plaide by the Kings Maiesties Seruants [Allde's device (McKerrow 284)] London, Printed (by Edward Allde for) for Eedward {sic} White, and are to be solde at his shoppe, nere the little North dore of Pauls, at the signe of the Gun. 1 6 1 1 . [Head- and Running-titles^ nearly as in Q2 .]
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue"] Titus Andronicus. [Tragedies, PP- 3 1-52 5 s^Sn* cc 4"^e 2*- Head-title.'] The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. [Running-title'] The Tragedie of Titus Andronicus. [Acts i, sc. i, ii-v marked.]
[S.R. 1624.] 14 Decembris, 1624 Master Pavier John Wright Cutbert: Wright Edward. Wright John Gris- mond Henry Gosson. Entred for their Copies at a full Court holden 6° Novembris, last, The Copies of the Ballades hereafter perticulerly menconed. Provided that this entrance shall not preiudice any other man that have any Interest to any of them by any former Entrance or otherwise xx8. (128 titles, including) Titus and Audcon- mus (Arber, iv. 131).
[S.R. 1626.] 4° August 1626. Edward Brewster Robert Birde Assigned ouer vnto them by Mistress Pavier and Consent of a full Court of Assistantes all the estate right title and Interest which Master Thomas Pavier her late husband had in the Copies here after mencioned . , viz* . . Master Pavier's rights in Shakesperes plaies or any of them. His parte in any sorts of Ballads . . (18 items) . . . Tytus and Andronicus (Arber, iv. 164). Parallel-Text. A. Morgan (1890, Bankside). Modern Editions. H. B. Baildon (1904, Arden)\ A. M. Wither- spoon (1926, Tale],
German Version. Eine sehr Udgliche Tragcedia von Tito Andronico undder kaffertigen Kayserin (1620, Engelische Comedien und Trage- £en}\ repr. W, Creizenach, Die Schattspiele der Englischen Komo- dianttn(i%%()}y i; tr. Cohn 161,
Dutch Version. Jan Vos, Aran en Titus * ofWraak en Weerwraak
(1641, &c).
\Diuertoti0KS. H.P^ Memoranda m... T~d. (i 879); J. Appleton Morgan
Chap. IX TITUS ANDRONICUS 3 r 5
in Shakespeareana, vi (1888); M. M. A.Schroer, VttrT.4.(i$Qi); E Koppel, T.A. (1892, E.S. xvi. 365); H. Varnhagen, Zur Forgeschichte der FahlvonShs T.A.(i S<)3,E.$.xix.i6ft G.Svmzm,GermanischeHeldensage in SL's T.A. (i 896, Archiv, xcvii. 373); A. B. Grosart, Was Robert Greene substantially the Author of T.A. (i 896, E.S. xxii. 389); C. Crawford, The Authenticity <?/T.^.(i9OO,7.xxxvi. IO9); H.deW. Fuller, TheSourcesof T.A. (1901, P.M.L.A. xvi. i); G. P. Baker, Tittus and Fespacia and Titus andOndronicus (1901, PM.L.A. xvi. 66); J. M. Robertson, DidSh. Write T.A.? (1905, revised 1924, as Introduction to the Study of the Shakespeare Canon}-, W. Keller, Die neuaufgefundene Q des T.A. von 1594 (1905* J- xli. 2 1 1); C. J. R. Schreckhas, Utter Enstehungszeit und Ferfasser des TJi. (1906); W. W. Greg, TJ*. (1908, Henslowe, ii. 159), T.A. (1919, M.L.R. xiv. 322); W. Dibelius, Zur Stoffgeschichte des T.A. (1912, y. adviii. i); H. D. Gray, The Authorship ofTJi. (1916, Ltland Stanford Jun. Univ. Flugel Memorial Vol. 114), T.A. Once More (1919, M.L.N. rxxiv. 214), The T.4. Problem (1920, S.P. xvii. 126), Sh.'s Share in T.A. (1926, P.Q. v. 166); C. F. Tucker Brooke, T7^. and SL (1919, M.Z.AT. xxxiv. 32); T. M.Parrott, Sh.9s Revision ofTji. (1919, M.L.R. xiv. 16);
F. Granger, 8 A. and the Legend of Andronicus (1920, Apr. r, T.L.S., followed by discussion); R. C. Rhodes, Titus and Vespasian ( 1 924, Apr. 1 7, T.L.S., followed by discussion);. E. K. Chambers, The First Illustration to Sh. (1925, 4 Library, v. 326); E. G. Clark, Titus and Pespasian (1926, M.L.N. xli. 523); A. K. Gray, Si. and T^i. (1928, S.P. xxv. 295); J. S.
G. Bolton, The Authentic Text of TJ*. (1929, PM.Lji. xliv. 765).
Qi was known in 1691 to Langbaine, who copied 'Essex* in error for 'Sussex' from its title-page. The only copy now known was found in Sweden in 1905. It has not been reprinted, but Keller gives a collation by E. Ljung- gren, which shows that its text was substantially that of £>2, except that Q2 omitted 3^ lines after i. i. 35, evidently as inconsistent with the action later in the scene, and made a few less intelligible alterations in v. 3. Sub- ject to this, Qa was printed from Qi, £3 from Q2, and Fi from Q3, with the addition of iii. 2, which is in none of the Qq. The collation does not show whether in Qi, as in Q2, the speech-prefixes of i. 1. 1-56 and v. 1. 121-4 are, exceptionally, centred. If they are, it may point to excisions during printing-off. The fragment in the LongleatMS. is on the whole more likely to be a perversion from Qi than to rest on an independent text. The Q stage-directions are rather full and suggest an author's hand. They are slightly varied in F, and at the beginning of Act ii F substitutes 'Flourish. Enter Aaron alone' for
3i6 PLAYS OF THE FIRST POLIO Chap. IX
the 'sound trumpets, manet Moore* of the Qq, which appa- rently contemplated no act-interval. Possibly the use of An. for Titus throughout the speech-prefixes of iii. 2 and here alone and the spelling 'Tamira' for 'Tamora* in the text point to a distinct scribal origin for this added scene. The following data, in addition to those given in the bibliographical history, bear on the date and authorship of the play, (a) 'Strange's' men produced Titus and Ves- pasian as 'ne' for Henslowe on n April 1592 and played it to 25 January 1593; (£) Sussex's men produced Titus Andronicus as *ne' for Henslowe on 24 January 1594 and played it to 6 February 1594; (*) the Admiral's and/or Chamberlain's men played Andronicus for Henslowe on 7 and 14 June 1 594 (App. D) ; (d) Jonson in 1 6 14 implied that Andronicus, like the Spanish Tragedy, had been on the stage 'these fiue and twentie, or thirtie yeeres' (App. B, no. xxii); (e) In A Knack to Know a Knave, produced by 'StrangeY as 'ne' on 10 June 1592 and registered on 7 January 1594, is the allusion (F2*):
As Titus was vnto the Roman Senators, When he had made a conquest on the Goths;
(/) Meres included Titus Andronicus among Shakespeare's plays in 1598 (App. B, no. xiii); (g) Ravenscroft in 1687 reports a stage tradition that Titus Andronicus was by a 'private author', and Shakespeare 'only gave some master- touches to one or two of the principal parts or characters' (App. C, no. xiv). This is the only bit of external evidence against the authenticity of any play in Fi. Partly as a result of it, and partly on stylistic grounds, Shakespeare's original authorship has been very generally doubted from the days of Malone onwards. Dissentients have tended to regard the play as very early work. Most of the doubters have assumed some measure of revision by him, but with no great agreement as to its nature and extent. There have been many attempts to find an alternative author, or alternative authors* amongst dramatists known to us. The latest is that of Robertson, who brings an elaborate and discursive investigation to the conclusion that there
Chap. IX TITUS ANDRONICUS 317
have been two, or, if I understand him aright, possibly three collaborations, and that while the final form is due mainly to Peele and partly to Marlowe, both of these, with Kyd and Greene, may have worked at earlier stages. Of course, if anything of this kind has happened, there is no solvent for the amalgam; and all that Robertson can do is to go through the scenes, pointing here to a passage in which he discerns the rhythm of one writer, there to a structural device, or a bit of characterization, or a 'clue* of vocabulary or phrase, which hints at another, and often finding that the clues conflict and that no conclusion is possible. The methods employed inspire me (cf. p. 223) with very little confidence, in view of the amount of 'common form' in plays of the period and the number of little-known writers who may have been at work. In particular 'parallels', whether 'echoes* or not, are insecure evidence. There are many in Titus Andronicus to both plays and poems of Shakespeare, Those to Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and others seem to me slight. But there are many also to Peele, and some, chiefly to his Edward I and his poem The Honour of the Garter, both printed in 1593, go rather beyond a repeated use of out-of-the-way words or of short collocations of words. As a whole the play does not very strongly remind me of any of Peek's known plays, although I think that he wrote with different degrees of care at different times. It has not the long pedestrian passages so common in Edward /and Alcazar ', or the passages of rhyme with which Peele generally varies his blank verse. The proportion of double endings is about the same as in i Henry 71, appreciably less than that in 2, 3 Henry VI. Whether the play can be very early work by Shakespeare, at some date before we have any standard for comparison, I cannot say. The subject-matter is imita- tive, but the actual writing is fairly competent, and does not obviously suggest a beginner. It cannot, as a whole, be Shakespeare's at a date later than Richard III and the Comedy oj Errors.
If, then, one could be sure that the play was really new on 24 January 1594, 1 should be inclined to accept
318 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Ravenscroft's tradition much as it stands, and to suppose that the author, whether 'private' in the Restoration sense or not was some one unknown to us. He took his notions of plotting from Kyd, and outwent him in his use of realism, of horrors, of mystifications, of maniacal episodes; his notions of character-drawing from Marlowe and out- went him by representing Aaron as obsessed by a lust, not for power through conquest, or gold, or knowledge, but for abstract villainy. He had learnt to write from Peele and others, and made very free use, consciously or unconsciously, of the common stock of diction, and per- haps consciously of Edward I and the Garter. On this theory the difficulty would really be to lay a finger on any passages which Shakespeare could reasonably be supposed to have contributed. Here, as elsewhere, parallels afford little guidance. The mere out-of-door feeling of such passages as ii. 2. i~6; ii. 3. 10-29 is not special to him. The touches of closer natural observation in ii. 4. 54 ; iii. r . 1 37 ; v. i. 14 are too slight to lay stress upon. The highly coloured descriptions of ii. i. 1-25; ii. 3. 226—36; ii. 4. 1 1-57; iii. i. 220-34 — like the rhetoric of iii. i. 267-79; iv. 2. 87-105 — seem of a piece with the play as a whole. The clown of iv- 3. 77-121 compares poorly with Jack Cade. Driven to a choice, one would fall back on a few comparatively dignified and far from showy speeches, such asL 1. 104-20, 148-56, 187-200; iii. 1. 1-47; iv. 4. 81- 93 * v- 3- 67-95, I59~7 J * ^ ^ee^ no confidence about them. Moreover, there is some reason to suppose that Titus Andronicus was not altogether new in 1 594. I do not attach much importance in this connexion to the German and Dutch versions of 1620 and 1641. They are late and there were apparently other continental versions ; a trace of one, probably related to the source of Vos, is in a German programme of 1699.* Fuller has compared them minutely with each other and with Titus Andronicus, finds that they have certain common incidents not in Titus Andronicusy and on the other hand, that, while all the incidents of Titus Andronicus are in one or other of them, some are
Chap. IX TITUS ANDRONICUS 319
only preserved in the German and the other in the Dutch. He infers that they derive from two distinct English plays, identifies these with the Titus and Vespasian and Titus Andronicus of Henslowe, and regards the extant Titus Andronicus as a conflation of the two. I do not accept the inference. The facts are quite consistent with the natural hypothesis of divergence from a common source in an adaptation of Titus Andronicus for continental travel, It is true that in the German version Lucius is renamed Vespasian, which might point to Titus and Vespasian. But nearly all the characters are renamed and the Goths turned into Moors, and in this process Vespasian might naturally suggest itself. On the other hand, it is not so clear, on the English evidence alone, that some form of Titus Andronicus did not exist before 1 594, and if so, that it was not Titus and Vespasian. In itself this title of course suggests a play on the siege of Jerusalem, but Strange's men had already a Jerusalem in 1592. That Qi repre- sents the play of 1594 is certain from the mention of Sussex's men on its title-page. The same title-page sug- gests earlier performances, not of necessity from precisely the same text, by Derby's and Pembroke's, and presum- ably in this order. We can hardly take Q2, which puts Pembroke's first on its title-page, but not in its head-title, as a better authority on the point than Q I . 'Derby's' in 1 594 probably means Alleyn's company, which was 'Strange's' in 1592, when it gave Titus and Vespasian. Further, the allusion in Knack to Know a Knavey also a 'StrangeV play, points to a knowledge of Titus and the Goths, not Moors, in 1592, and no such combination is known outside Titus Andronicus. It may be then, after all, that 'StrangeY did produce a form of Titus Andronicus as Titus and Vespasian in 1592, and that it was transferred by them to Pembroke's, and by Pembroke's to Sussex's, who revised it as the extant Titus Andronicus. The appearance of a Titus and Vespasian in a Revels list of plays^about 1619 (App, D) gives some confirmation to the view that the tides are equivalent. If we pressed Jonson's rather vague dating, we should have to put the origin of Titus Axdro-
320 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
nicus as far back as 1589, but I do not know that we need press it. It must be added that the theory of a play written, or conceivably revised, in 1592, and then revised in 1594, is not without its own difficulties. It is a short interval for a play to become out of date in. Henslowe's *ne', what- ever its precise significance, is certainly a mark attached to a play "the fyrst tyme yt wasse playde'.1 Generally it seems to have been a new play in the full sense. It is pro- bable that it was sometimes a revised play, and possible that it was sometimes an old play, given by a particular company for the first time.2 But there is no -clear case of this last type, and there are several clear cases in which such a performance was not marked *ne'. We come back to authorship. If Titus Andronicus was not new in 1 594, we cannot of course say how much revision then took place, or whether Peele or another, as well as Shakespeare, helped in it. All that can be assigned to Shakespeare at that date seems very little to justify a 'ne'. And, again, if the play was originally written in 15*92, and still more if in 1589, the stylistic case against Shakespeare as an original writer is weakened, and as the Garter poem did not exist, that for Peele as an original writer is, so far as the parallels to it have any weight, strengthened. I am sorry to be so inconclusive, but the complicated data are themselves so. It remains to notice a theory put forward by Greg, It is this. The play was originally Pembroke's. They made a variant version for travelling. This did not include iii. 2. When they were in straits during 1 593, the variant version came into the hands of Sussex's, who played it for Henslowe, and then allowed it to be printed. The full version they sold to Alleyn. It was played by 'Derby's/ and passed to the Chamberlain's, who played it for Hen- slowe. This version was revised by Shakespeare, which accounts for the mention by Meres. It was afterwards burnt in the Globe fire. The King's men replaced it by a^copy of Q3, derived from the variant version, but added iii* 2, which they were accustomed to play, from memory. Shakespeare's revision is therefore lost, except in so far
1 Henskwe, i. 4$, 50. « Ibid. ii. 148 ; E8z. Stage, ii. 145.
Chap. IX TITUS ANDRONICUS 321
as anything of his may be in iii. 2. This is ingenious, and reconciles Meres with the difficulty of finding Shake- speare's hand in the extant text. But it assumes a con- siderable concatenation of unusual incidents, and involves the acceptance of the Q2 title-page as against that of Qi for the order of the performing companies.
There were probably Jacobean revivals. The 'Kings' of the Q3 title-page might merely bring up to date the 'Chamberlains' of Q2. But Jonson's reference of 1614 and the Titus and Vespasian record of c. 1619 both suggest that the play held the stage, and F, although retaining 'God', substitutes (iv. 2. 71) 'Out1 for 'Zounds', a word which seems to have been especially within the danger of the Act of Abuses. If iii. 2 was not added at this or an earlier revival, it must have been in some way recovered from the original text, in which a mark of deletion may have excluded it from Qi. This seems less likely. The scene does not advance the action. The earlier part, no doubt, is not unlike the rest of the play. I have sometimes fancied that the fly episode might be Webster's. I see no clear signs of f
The ballad registered by Danter in 1594 may, in view of the rather complicated ownership disclosed by the S.R. entries of 1624 and 1626, be that printed by A. Mathews for T. Langley in Richard Johnson, The Golden Garland oj Princely Pleasures (1620), and also in a broadsheet by Edward Wright. If so, it rested on the play as we have it. It was also appended to a chapbook version of the story, undated but printed by C. Dicey at Northampton in the eighteenth century, and described by HJP,,1 and pre- sumably the same as one noted by Farmer.2 It claims to be 'newly Translated from the Italian copy printed at Rome*, but H.P. says nothing to suggest that it has any other source than Titus Andronicus* According to Steevens Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1566-7) speaks of the story of Titus as well known, but this must be due to a con- fusion.3 There are analogous themes in romance literature
1 Rarities, 77; Memoranda m All's * Var.icd. 381. Well, £fc ., 73. 3 /&& and. 258$ Anders, 266.
3142.1 7
322 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
of rape and murder by a revengeful Moor and of love relations between a Moor and a European lady, but they do not come very close to the play. The studies of Morgan, Dibelius, and Granger make it likely that an ultimate source existed in some perversion of Byzantine chronicles dealing with the twelfth-century emperor Andronicus Comnenus and the more or less contemporary Thamar, Queen of Georgia.
VII. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
[S.R. 1594.] Secundo die Maij. Peter Shorte. Entred vnto him for his copie vnder master warden Cawoodes hande, a booke intituled A plesant Conceyted historic called the Tayminge of a Shrowe yjd (Arber, ii. 648).
[1594.] A Pleasant Conceited Historic, called The
taming of a Shrew. As it was sundry times acted by the
Right honorable the Earle of Pembrook his seruants.
[Short's device (McKerrow 278)] Printed at London by
Peter Short and are to be sold by Cutbert Burbie, at his
shop at the Royall Exchange. 1 594.
Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1886, Sh. Q. xv, ed. F. J. Furnivall).
Modem Edition. F. S. Boas (1908).
[i 596.] P.S., sold by Cuthbert Burbie.
[S.R. 1607.] 22. January. Master Linge. Entred for his
copies by direccon of A Court and with consent of Master
Burby vnder his handwrytinge These, iij copies, viz, . . .
The taminge of A Shrewe (Arber, iii. 337).
[1607.] V<alentine> S<immes) for Nicholas Ling.
[S.R. 1607.] 19- Novembris. John Smythick. Entred
for his copies vnder thandes of the wardens, these bookes
followmge Whiche dyd belonge to Nicholas Lynge .viz.
. . . , 9 The taminge of A Shrewe vjd (Arber, iii. 365).
[Fi. 1623.] \Catak%ue\ The Taming of the Shrew. \Cemedie$y pp. 208-29; sign. Sav-Vi. Head-title and Running-titfe] as in Cat. [Acts L sc i, iii, hr. sc, i, and v marked; altered in modern eds.]
Chap. IX THE TAMING OF THE SHREW 323
[Q- i63iO A Wittie and Pleasant Comedie Called The Taming of the Shrew. As it was acted by his Maiesties Seruants at the Blacke Friers and the Globe. Written by Will. Shakespeare [Smethwick's device (McKerrow 376)] Printed by W. S. for lohn Smethwicke, and are to be sold at his Shop in Saint Dunstones Churchyard vnder theDiall. 1631.
Parallel-text (F. and A Shrew). A. R. Frey (i 888, Banbide). Modern Editions. R. W. Bond (1904, 1929, j/n&»); H. T. E. Perry (1921, Tale)-, AT. Quiller-Couch and J. D. Wilson (1928, C.Uf.).
.[Dissertations. S. Hickson, T.S. (1850, 1 N.Q. i. 345); R. K8h!er, Zu Shs T.S. (1868, J. iii. 397); F. G. Flea/, On the Authorship of T.S* (1874, N.S.S. Trans. 85; Sh. Manual, 175); A, v. Weilen, SAs Porspielzu T.S. (1884); R. Urbach, Das Ferhaltniss des Shs T.S.zuseinen Quellen (1887); J. Bolte, Eine Parallel zu Shs T.S. (i 892, J. xrvii. 1 30); A. H. Tolman, Si. and T.$. and SA.'s Love's Labour's Won (1904, Piews About Hamlet, 203); E. H. Schomburg, T.S. (1904); E. P. Kulil, SA.'s Purpose in Drop- ping Sly (1921, M.LJt. rsxvi. 321), The Authorship of T.S. (1925, PM.LA. xl. 551); J. M. Robertson, Marlowe and Comedy (1923, SA. Canon, ii. 134); P. Alexander, The Taming of A Shrew (1926, Sept. 16, T.£.&)> F- H. Ashton, The Revision of the W Text ofT.S. (1927, P.g. vi. 1 5 1); B. A. P. van Dam, A .S. and T.S. (1928, English Studies, x. 97, 16 1).
The bibliographical data up to 1 607 relate to The Taming of A Shrew J but it is clear that A Shrew and The Shrew were regarded commercially as the same, and that the copyright acquired by Smethwick in 1607 covered both Fi and the Q of 1631, which was printed from it Fi has the full author's stage-directions usual in Shake- speare's earlier work. I see no reason to think with Wilson that they were added by a second hand to a dictated tran- script. Doubtless, however, the manuscript had been used as stage-copy. There is an obvious addition at Ind. i. i, 'Enter Begger and Hostes, Christophero Sly', which may be due to the book-keeper. At Ind. i. 88, the name of the actor Sincklo has been substituted for flayer. He is known as a hired man of the Chamberlain's company. Other possible actor-names in stage-directions or speech- prefixes are Nicke (iii. i. 82), Par (iv. 2. 7i),^F<?/(iv. 3. 63), reter (iv. 4. 69). They are not all certain and, unless
324 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Nicke is Nicholas Tooley, we cannot identify them. It is unsafe to assume that this Nicke and this Peter played the similarly named servants in iv. i. They are two out of five who appear and speak. There are six others who are named, but do not appear. One of these is Gabriel, whom it is still less safe to take as the actor Gabriel Spencer. These are all textual names, and the book-keeper cannot (cf. p. 237) be responsible for them. Gabriel can never have been cast. The act-divisions of F are not good, and the beginning of Act ii is not marked.
The relation of A Shrew to The Shrew is a matter of dispute. I adhere to the older view that it was used as a source-play, and think that in basing The Shrew upon it Shakespeare had, exceptionally for him, the assistance of a collaborator. I assign to Shakespeare Ind. i, ii; ii. I. 1-38, ii5-326;iii. 2. 1-129, 15 1-2 54; iv. i,3,5;v. 2. 1-181. Possibly he also contributed to the Petruchio episode in i. 2. i— 1 1 6. Some critics give him less than I have done. On my view his share amounts to about three-fifths of the play, and includes all the Sly and Petruchio-Katharina scenes. The other writer is responsible for the sub-plot of Bianca's wooers. I do not know who he was. Lodge, Greene, and Chapman have been suggested on very slight grounds. His work, although not incompetent, is much less vigorous than Shakespeare's. He has many awkward lines, which disregard stress or contain unmanageable trisyllabic feet. He uses double endings in much the same proportion (i 7 %) as Shakespeare ( 1 9 %). The numerous scraps of Latin and Italian and the doggerel belong to his part. *He makes less use than Shakespeare of phrases from A Shrew. Kuhl has argued for Shakespeare's sole author- ship, largely on the ground that the characterization, especially of Petruchio, is consistent throughout. He finds the stylistic differences inconclusive. Some of them are, individually, but collectively they are less so, and bear out a general stylistic impression from which I cannot escape. The collaborators may well have agreed upon a common conception of Petruchio.
A Shrew furnished the main structure of both plots,
Chap. IX THE TAMING OF THE SHREW 325
with their characters and entanglement, and of the in- duction. Shakespeare in particular follows its details pretty closely, and although his dialogue, as well as that of his collaborator, is new, the recurrence of stray words and phrases and of half a dozen practically identical blank-verse lines (iv. 3. 171-3; v. 2. 114, 130-1) shows that the old text was continuously before him, There is a still closer resemblance in iv. 3, where many points in Grumio's jesting with the tailor are taken over from A Shrew. This is not sufficient to justify the sug- gestion that Shakespeare himself contributed to A Shrew, and Sykes has made a fair case for assigning the comic prose of that to Samuel Rowley. The rest of the play is mainly written in pedestrian verse, often neglectful of stress, but this is varied by some highly wrought sections or speeches, full of classical allusions, and much in the manner of Marlowe. Robertson and others have taken them to be Marlowe's, but the parallels to Tamburlaine zndDr.Faustus collected by Boas leave this hardly possible. Some of these might be mere echoes, but in others from two to four lines are reproduced, exactly or approximately, from Marlowe in a way which must exclude his author- ship. Nor does any known dramatist elsewhere use him in this fashion. It looks as if some one, conscious of his own poetic insufficiency, had attempted to heighten his style by deliberate imitation and even plagiarism. He may also have drawn from other plays, learnt or heard on the stage, but not preserved. If this is so, the date of A Shrew must remain uncertain. Lines in it seem to be satirized in Greene's Menaphon (1589) and Nashe's epistle thereto, but these may be among the borrowings. If the play is as old as 1589, it cannot have been originally written for Pembroke's men. Saunder, who is a player in^the induc- tion, probably only bears a character name, as it is textual in the main plot, where Saunder is the prototype of Grumio. In any case he can hardly be the Saunder of the Seven Deadly Sins plot (c. 1590), who was then still a boy taking women's parts.
A somewhat different view from mine is put forward by
326 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Herford, who thinks that the conversion of A Shrew into The Shrew was done by the 'other hand', and that Shake- speare revised him. Similarly Miss Ashton would find traces of revision in the sub-plot. Wilson, who does not (cf. infra) regard A Shrew as a source, suggests revision by Shakespeare of a hypothetical play, from which he thinks that some clown-dialogue by Nashe may have been preserved. I do not find much evidence of -disloca- tion in F i to bear out such views. It is a fairly clean text. As Wilson points out, there is a tendency, more marked in some scenes than others, to drop or add small words, which may be that of an incompetent compositor or, as he thinks, a transcriber. Some speech-prefixes (iii. i . 46— 58; iv. 2. 1—8; iv. 4. 5—6) are incorrect or wrongly placed. There is no extensive mislineation. Hereand there a few lines are wrongly printed as prose, doggerel, or blank verse respectively. One longer passage (iii. 2. 169-85) is in prose instead of verse throughout, and may have been written in a margin. The 'Enter Peter' at iv. 4. 69, if it does not yield an actor's name, may mean that the Petruchio scene (iv. 5) had been started upon here, and then deferred for the addition of another 41 lines to the sub-plot scene iv. 4. There are some slight inconsistencies of action, such as Petruchio's call (iv. i. 154) for a 'cousin Fer- dinand', who never appears. I see nothing here which a compositor might not produce from careless or hasty copy, which incorporated some afterthoughts, and in which (cf. p. 204) the speech-prefixes had been written later than the text.
The use of a collaborator may in itself point to haste. The play has been variously dated* It is sometimes put about ^1598, because Meres does not name it, and the induction has affinities of matter with Henry IV. But its metrical features are consistent with 1594, and it ifiay quite well be the Love Labours Won of Meres. This is largely an application of the method of exclusions, since there is no other extant comedy, at any rate in its present form, available (cf. p. 272). The title itself might fit almost any sentimental plot. Perhaps the fourfold refer-
Chap. IX THE TAMING OF THE SHREW 327
ence (v. 2. 69, 112, 116, 186) to Petruchio's winning of his wager is relevant. The title-page of A Shrew shows that it was played by Pembroke's men, who emerge late in 1 592, and were broken by September 1 593.1 A perfor- mance (App. D) for Henslowe on 13 June 1594 was pre- sumably by the Chamberlain's, and Henslowe's *A Shrowe* need not prejudice opinion as to which version was then used. On the whole I think it probable that A Shrew originally belonged to the Alleyn company, that it was handed by them to Pembroke's in 1592 and recovered in 1593, that it was allocated to the Chamberlain's on the reconstitution of companies in 1594, and that they rather hastily based The Shrew upon it, sold the old book to the printers in May, a;id played the new one in June. About the exact details of this I should not like to be dogmatic. Henslowe does not mark the piece cne' and it is possible that the Chamberlain's began by playing A Shrew and revised it a little later in 1594.
A quite distinct theory of the relation between A Shrew and The Shrew has been outlined by Alexander2 and accepted by Wilson. According to this, A Shrew is not the source of The Shrew, but a 'bad Quarto* of it, due to an attempt of Pembroke's, after owning The Shrew and selling it in 1593, to reproduce it from memory, with the aid of a good deal of rewriting, and to resume playing it in the winter of 1593-4* I am quite unable to believe that A Shrew had any such origin. Its textual relation to The Shrew does not bear any analogy to that of other 'bad Quartos' to the legitimate texts from which they were memorized. The nomenclature, which at least a memorizer can recall, is entirely different The verbal parallels are limited to stray phrases, most frequent in the main plot,
A Shrew. He picks up phrases from Holinshed and North in just the same way. It is true, as shown by Hick- son long ago, that some of these phrases have more point in The Shrew than in A Shrew. But this might be the case on either hypothesis, and the A Shrew versions are
1 £&. Stage, XL 128$ cf. p. 46. » T.LS. for 16 September 19*6.
328 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
not unintelligible as they stand. Alexander's strongest argument is that the sub-plot of The Shrew comes closer than that of A Shrew to the ultimate source in Ariosto's / Suppositi. This again is true, and I take it that Shake- speare's collaborator made use of I Suppositi or its transla- tion in Gascoigne's Supposes, as well as of A Shrew.1
Shakespeare himself probably used no other literary source than A Shrew, which had already incorporated widespread story-motives in the 'taming* itself and the transformed drunkard. He worked Warwickshire reminis- cences into the induction. Christophero Sly is in A Shrew, but Stephen Sly (Ind. ii. 95) figures in the enclosures controversy; Marion Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot,2 came from just over the Gloucestershire border (App, C, no. viii); and Burton Heath3 is presumably Barton- on-the-Heath, where dwelt Shakespeare's cousins, the Lamberts (App. A, no. iv). A note in the records of the Stationers' Company for 1596 of a suppressed ballad called 'The taminge of a shrewe' is untrustworthy (App. F, no. xi (^)).
The 1631 title-page shows that the play held the seventeenth-century stage, and a court performance of 26 November 1 633 is on record (App. D). A Jacobean revival may be pointed to by the counterblast in Fletcher's The Womarf3 Prize or the Tamer Tamed, of which, how- ever, the date is very uncertain,4 and by an allusion in S. Rowlands, Whole Crew of Kind Gossips (1609):
The chiefest Art I have I will bestow About a worke cald taming of the Shrow.
The divisions in F are very irregular. A heading for ii has probably been omitted by accident. But v consists of only one scene of 189 lines, and the whole play is rather short. Possibly a final Sly scene has been excised for some reason of staging. There was one in A Shrew, and The Shrew seems rather incomplete without one.
* EHx. Stage, w. 321. 4 Eltx* Stage, iii. 222; Oliphant, 9 Ind. ii. 22 . Beaumont and Fletcher* 151.
* Ibid. ii. 19.
Chap. IX 329
VIII. THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] The two Gentlemen of Verona. [Comedies, pp. 20-38 ; sign. B 4V-D iv. Head-title] The Two Gentlemen of Verona [Running-title] The two Gentlemen of Verona. [At end] The names of all the Actors.
[Acts and sec marked. The names of all the Actors' at end. Pages 37 and 38 have the running-tide for M.W* in error.] Modern Editions. R. W. Bond (1906, Arden)\ A. T. Quiller- Couch and J. D. Wilson (1921, C.U.P.)-, K. Young (1924, Yale}. [Dissertation. F. G. Fleay, On the Date and Composition of T.G. (1874, N.8.S. Trans. 287, with comment by F. J. FurnivaU); J. Zupitza, V&er die Fabel in Shs T.G. (1888, J. xxiii. i); H. F. BrOndel, Shs T.G. in englischen Buhnenbearbeitung (1909); H. Norpoth, Mctrisch-chronolo- gische Untersuchung von Shs T.G. (1916); J. M. Robertson, The Author- ship of T.G. (1923, Sh. Canon, ii. i); O. J. Campbell, T.G. and Italian Comedy (1925, Michigan Studies)*, T. P. Harrison, Concerning T.G. and Montemayo/s Diana (1926, M.L.N. xli. 251).
The F text is fairly free from misprints and mislineations. All the entries and nearly all the exits within the scenes are unmarked, and there are no stage-directions, except final exits and entries at the beginning of each scene for all its characters in the order, doubtfully correct for iv. 2, of their appearance. Wilson draws the inference that the text was 'assembled' from 'parts' with the aid of a 'plot*. There are considerable difficulties (cf. p. 153) about any theory of 'assembling', but perhaps the case for it is stronger in Two Gentlemen than elsewhere. In a few passages prose is printed in irregular capitalized lines. Wilson also thinks that the play has been abbreviated and added to by an adapter. I do not accept the mingling of prose and verse in certain dialogues, or the presence of blank- verse rhythms in prose, or mentions of personages who do not appear, as evidence of this. They are common features (cf. pp. 1 8 1, 230-4) of Shakespeare's plays. There may have been some abbreviation. The text is rather short, and some of the scenes (ii. 2 ; v. i ; v. 3) are summary, and there are a few abrupt short lines and corruptions which may indicate 'cuts'. But I do not think that any scenes or
330 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
incidents have been omitted. Time is foreshortened here and there, but this easily passes on the stage. Nor do I see the hand of an adapter. There are inconsistencies of action and nomenclature, but these need point to no more than careless original work. Milan, Verona, and Padua are hopelessly confused. Apparently Shakespeare at first meant the main action to be at an emperor's court at Milan; then altered it to a duke's court at Verona, and forgot to make the indications uniform. Verona is nowhere said to be the home of Proteus, Valentine, and Julia; in fact they go from home by sea. Padua (ii. 5. i) must be a slip, any- how. Wilson suggests that the part of Speed is inter- polated, but it seems inextricable from that of Launce in ii. 5 and iii, I, and i. 2. 38 shows that Valentine had a page. There is some poor writing towards the end of the play, especially in iv. i and in v. 4, which is also bad in senti- ment. But the badness is not necessarily un-Shakespearean,
Robertson thinks that Two Gentlemen is a comedy by Greene, and that Shakespeare only altered the opening and inserted or retouched some later passages. He lays stress on the poverty of much of the comic relief and on the end- stopped iambic versification. It is true that the iambic norm is less varied by trochees and pyrrhics than is usual with Shakespeare, and possible that, as a beginner in romantic comedy, he was influenced'by Greene, as he certainly was by Lyly. But Greene did not write the play ; if for no other reason, because he never used so many double endings.
The date can hardly be fixed with precision. There is no external evidence beyond the mention by Meres in 1598. Two allusions to Hero and Leander (i. i. 21; iii. 1. 1 19) are not necessarily later than Marlowe's poem of 1593. Allusions to 'the wars' and travels to dis- cover islands (L 3. 8), to pestilence (ii. i. 22), and to the winning and losing of love's labour (i. i. 32) are even more inconclusive. The 'print' in which Speed found ii, i. 171-4 has not been traced. The play has affinities of motive, manner, and vocabulary to the Comedy of Errors, to Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, and others riper than itself, and to some of the Sonnets. This, together with
Chap. IX THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA 331
the inequality of workmanship, led Fleay to conjecture that it is of two dates. According to one of several forms which his theory took, Shakespeare only finished the play after an interval; according to another it was written about 1591 with a collaborator, whose work Shakespeare replaced by his own in 1595. The notion of a diversity of dates has received some support, but I think that a single date, early in the season of 1594-5, really meets all the conditions, and that the outset of the career of the Cham- berlain's men was a not unlikely time for hasty composi- tion. No performance of the play is on record.
The only clear source is the story of Felix and Felis- mena in Jorge de Montemayor's Diana Enamorada. If Shakespeare could not read Spanish, he may have used the translation of Bartholomew Yonge, printed in 1598 but finished sixteen years earlier, or the French translation of Nicolas Collin (1578, 1587), or the play of 'Felix & Philiomena' given at court by the Queen's men in I585-1 Montemayor's story is varied and elaborated in Two Gentle- men, especially .by the introduction of Valentine, and with him the motive of the conflict of love and friendship. Shakespeare is obsessed by this theme in the Sonnets, and it is so common in Renaissance literature that slight analogies to Two Gentlemen in Lyly's Euphues and Endi- miony Barnabe Rich's Apollonius and Silla (cf. p. 407), Fedele and Fortunio* and elsewhere become of little im- portance. There is a rather closer resemblance in the German play of Julio and Hyppolita> printed in Engelische Comedien und Tragedien (1620). But this is a tragedy, and its relation to Two Gentlemen or any possible forerunner is quite uncertain. Campbell notes that many features of Two Gentlemen are commonplaces in Italian comedy.
IX. LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST [Q 1. 1598.] [Ornament] A Pleasant Conceited Comedie Called, Loues labors lost. As it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented By W. Shakespere. [Ornament] Imprinted
1 £/&. Stage, iv. 160. 2 1WA fr. 13.
332 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
at London by W<illiam> W<hite> for Cutbert Burby. 1598. [No Head-title. Running title'} A pleasant con- ceited Comedie: called Loues Labor's Lost. Facsimile. W. Griggs (1880, Sh. Q. v, ed. F. J. Furnivall). [S.R. 1607.] 22 January. Master Linge Entred for his copies by direccon of A Court and with consent of Master Burby vnder his handwrytynge These, iij copies, viz. ... Loues Labour Loste . . . (Arber, iii. 337). [S.R. 1607.] 19 Novembris. John Smythick. Entred for his copies vnder thandes of the wardens, these bookes follow- inge Whiche dyd belonge to Nicholas Lynge. viz. . . . 1 1 Loues Labour Lost. vjd . . . (Arber, iii. 365).
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue'] Loues Labour lost. [Comedies, pp. 122-44; sign- L iv-M 6V. Head- and Running-titles] Loues Labour's lost. [Acts marked, with iv repeated for v.]
[Q2. 1631.] Loues Labours lost. A Wittie And Pleasant Comedie, As it was Acted by his Maiesties Seruants at the Blacke-Friers and the Globe. Written by William Shake- speare. [Smethwick's device (McKerrow 376)] London, Printed by W. S. for lohn Smethwicke, and are to be sold at his Shop in Saint Dunstones Church-yard vnder the Diall. 1631. \Head- and Running-titles'] Loues Labour's lost. Parallel-Text. I. H. Platt (1906, Bankside^ xxi). Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (1904, New Variorum^f}\ H. C. Hart (1906, Arden}\ H. B. Charlton (1917, Heath)\ A. T. Quiller-Couch and J. D. Wilson (1923, C. U.P.)\ W. L. Cross and C. F. T. Brooke (1925, Yale}.
[Dissertations. S. Lee, A New Study ofL.L.L. (1880, Gentleman** Mag.)\ F. G. Fleay, Si. and Puritanism (1884, Anglia, vii. 223); G. Sarrazin, Die Entstehungszeit von L.L.L. (1895, J. xxxi. 200); J. de Perott, Eine tfanucht Parallels zu L.L.L. (1908, J. xliv. 151); J. Phelps, Father Parsons in SL (1915, Archiv, czxxiii. 66); H. B, Charlton, A Dis- puted Passage in Z.L.Z. (1917, M.L.R. xii. 279), A Textual Note on L.L.L. (1917^ 3 Lilarary9vw. 355), Tie Date of L.L.L. (1918, AfJLfc.xiii. 257, 387);]. M. Robertson, LJ.J,. (1917 ,Sh* and Chapman, 107); H. D. Gray, Tie Original Version of L.L.L. (1918); A. Lefranc, L.L.L. (1919, Sous Le Masque de Si. 5. 17); A. K. Gray, Tif Secret ofL.L.L. (1924, PM,LJi. xsxix. 581); O. J. Campbell, L.L.L. Re-studied (192$, Michigan Studies)^ A. R. Bayley, OrMtms, tie it// (192$, N.Q. cxlviii. 399, 417).
Chap. IX LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 333
Qi is a badly printed text, with many 'literal' and other errors and blundering punctuation. It preserves a number of abnormal spellings. There are slight variants in the extant examples. Fi was set up from a Qi in which there may have been others. But the F printer has made many corrections and introduced as many fresh errors, of which Greg gives an interesting analysis in R.E.S. i. 471. Wilson shows that the example used had already been altered in the theatre by a revision of the stage-directions and speech-prefixes. Q2 was set up from F. The absence of. an original entry in the Stationers' Register and the 'Newly corrected and augmented' on the title-page of Qi suggest that it may, like the Q2 of Romeo and Juliet where the same conditions recur, have been preceded by a surrepti- tious print. If so, the title-page is not in itself evidence of anything more than revision of the printing, as distinct from a rewriting of the play. But a rewriting has been suspected on other grounds. Two passages, iv. 3. 296- 317 and v. 2. 827-32, are clearly duplicated by what follows in each case, and Wilson is probably right in sug- gesting that they were marked for deletion and the marks disregarded by the printer. But it is by no means so clear that these changes were made at a rewriting of the play; the cancelled passages can be just as well interpreted as false starts at the time of the original writing. A half-line left in Q before iv. 3. 3 17, but omitted in modern editions, looks like an abandoned first attempt to amend that line, before the fresh start was made. Similarly, the first line of the rejected Berowne-Rosaline dialogue in v. 2. 827- 32 was immediately used to open a Dumaine-Katharine dialogue, and the opening of a new Berowne-Rosaline dialogue deferred to 847. Something has also gone wrong with ii. i. Here Berowne is clearly meant to be paired with Rosaline throughout, Longaville with Maria, Dumaine with Katharine. But the arrangement is not consistently followed. Possibly Shakespeare has been careless; possibly confusion has arisen through an attempt to set up Love's Labour 'j Lost like Romeo and Juliet fav^ by correcting a bad Quarto. I do not think that Wilson
334 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
has given a satisfactory explanation in terms of a rewriting. He finds, however, further evidence of this in (a) small typographical variations and dislocations in Q, which are capable of several explanations; (£) a supposed difference in the character of the stage-directions in different places, which seems to me imaginary, as the stage-directions are comparatively slight throughout; and (c) the use, here of personal, and there of generic, descriptions in stage- directions and speech-prefixes. And he assigns to a first 'draft', more or less altered on revision, i. i, 2 ; ii. i ; iii. i. 69-end; iv. 2, 3; and to a revised version, with traces of the first draft, iii. i. 1-68; iv. i; v. The variations of nomenclature, frequent enough in other plays, are more conspicuous in Love's Labour's Lost than elsewhere. We get, in full or abbreviation, Navarro and King for Ferdi- . nand, Braggart for Armado, Pedant for Holofernes, Curate for Nathaniel, Wench and Maid for Jaquenetta, Clown for Costard, Constable for Anthony or Dull, and i, 2, 3 Lady for Maria, Katharine, and Rosaline. Wilson uses some of these; others, which he does not use, do not square with his theory that the use of generic names points to rewriting. But this theory I do not (cf. p. 232) accept. Somewhat exceptional are the variations of Duke for King and Queen for Princess, since these appear in the text, and are inconsistent, except that the Princess apparently becomes Queen of France on her father's death in v. 2, and is thereafter addressed as 'Maiestie* instead of 'Grace'. H. D. Gray has made an independent attempt to trace the lines of a rewriting. He supposes that the original play ended with a complete rejection of the lovers; that Rosaline was transformed from a fair into a swarthy beauty; that Holofernes and Nathaniel were only intro- duced at the rewriting; and that this explains the differ- ence between the planning and performance of the Worthies* The view seems to me quite fantastic. Love- comedies do not end with rejections, Rosaline is through- out white-skinned; only her hair and brows are black; there is a similar difference between the planning and the performance of the play in Midsummer-Night's Dream.
Chap. IX LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 335
Both Wilson and Gray find their new matter mainly at the end. The great length of v. 2 is not, I think, relevant. Love's Labour *s Lost does not fall into acts. F might have divided better than it did, but probably there were no intervals in the play as originally given. It is possible that, if a 'surreptitious* early Q ever turns upy some of the supposed evidence for revision and other features of the text may prove to be due to an attempt, as in Romeo and Juliet^ to use a heavily corrected example of that as 'copy' for Qi.
So far as style is concerned, I see no evidence for two dates, and no evidence for a very early date. The versifica- tion is extremely adroit, and certainly not that of a begin- ner. I regard the play as the earliest of the lyrical group which includes Midsummer-Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard 77, and I put it in 1595. The variety entertainment at the close links it with Midsummer-Night's Dream and the black-browed and black-eyed Rosaline with the Sonnets. Nor are the numerous topical and literary allusions inconsistent with this date. The 'Mon- archo' (iv. I. 101) can in any case be a tradition only, as his epitaph in T. Churchyard, Chance (i 580), shows him then dead. Charlton has traced the 'first and second cause' in duelling (i. 2. 183) to Segar's Book of Honor and Arms (1590). The 'dancing horse' (i. 2. 57) of John Banks was travelling from 1591 until long after 1595* There is no reason whatever to suppose that Elizabeth shot a deer with a bow (iv. i) for the first or the last time at Cowdray in 1 59 1 . 'Lord have mercy on us' ^.2.419) was a formula used in theplague of 1592-3, but by no means for the first time.1 There may be a reference in 'saved by merit' as a 'heresy in fair, fit for these days' (iv. i . 2 1) to the conversion of Henri IV on 25 July 1593. There must be a reference in 'piercing a hogshead' (iv. 2. 89) to the wit- exchange between Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, begun by Harvey's Pierce' s Supererogation (i 593). If, as seems prob- able, iv. 3. 346-7 echo Chapman's Shadow of Night, that was printed in 1 594. The Muscovite mask (v. 2) can have
1 F. P. Wikon, The P&gut in SA.*f Lmu&n, 63.
336 PLA.YS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
nothing to do with the wooing of Lady Mary Hastings for the Emperor of Muscovy in 1583, but does reflect an English interest in Russian affairs, and perhaps derives from the similar use of Russian apparel on 6 January 1595 in the Gray's Inn revels which were also adorned by Comedy of Errors. Robert Southwell, in prison from 20 June 1592 and executed on 21 February 1595, wrote some lines on eyes (App. B, no. xi) which have been supposed to echo Berowne's disquisition in iv. 3, but it is probable that they are of earlier date. There is an analogy to the jest on 'guerdon' and 'remuneration* (iii. i. 170) in J, M., A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Servingmen (S.R. 15 May 1598), sign. I, but nothing to determine priority. Obviously, if Love's Labour's Lost was revised, some of these passages may belong to the second version. But I find nothing which is necessarily later than 1 595. The jest on* Ajax and the lion sitting on a close-stool (v. 2. 579) is based on the arms of Alexander, as given in Gerard "L&^Accedens ofArmorie (i 563, r 59 1), and is more likely to have given a hint to than taken one from Haring- ton's Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596). Shakespeare, if the borrower, would have worked in 'metamorphosis'. There may be other topical allusions in an obviously satirical play over which time has drawn a veil. Many attempts have been made to trace portraits in the exponents of the Worthies. Armado has been identified with the Mon- archo, Antonio Perez, Lyly, Philip of Spain, and Sir Walter Raleigh; Holofernes with John Florio, Bishop Cooper, Thomas Harriot, Chapman, and one Richard Lloyd, who wrote lines on the Worthies in 1584; Moth with La Mothe-F&ielon, a French ambassador, as far back as 1 568-75, and with Nashe ; and so forth. Most of this is mere beating the air. As Campbell points out, this underworld of Love's Labour 's Lost represents the stock masks of Italian comedy, the capitano and his zanni, the fedante or dottore^ the parasite or affamato, the clown, the magistrate. It does not follow that there may not be personal touches in the reproduction of them. Moth, like Nashe by Greene and Meres, is called (iii. i . 67) a 'Juvenal'.
Chap. IX LOVE'S LABOUR 'S LOST 337
Holofernes gets his name from Rabelais, and Rombus in Sidney's May Lady, an entertainment of about 1578, is a rather remote analogy.1 Both Chapman and Gabriel Harvey may have contributed something to Holo- fernes^ but it is pressing the thing too far to speak of portraits'. If the Q reading in iv. 3. 25$ *Schoole of night' is correct, there may be a further allusion to Chap- man's Shadow of Night> in which learning is called upon to shun the day, and perhaps also to Sir Walter Raleigh's alleged 'School of Atheism,' which Chapman seems to laud in his epistle, although apparently only knowing of it through Matthew Roydon. But if he was right in regarding Sir George Carey as a member, there could be no 'attack' by Shakespeare, since Carey was son of Lord Hunsdon, and later himself the patron of Shakespeare's company. No source is known for the main plot. If there was one, it may have helped to account for the Ferdinand, Duke, and Queen. No Ferdinand was ever King of Navarre. But Ferdinand is given (ii. i. 163) a father Charles and the dispute as to an inherited debt of 200,000 crowns, for which Ferdinand holds part of Aquitaine, bears some analogy to financial transactions between a historic Charles of Navarre and the King of France about 1425. Probably, however, the visit of the Princess to Ferdinand rests upon something more recent than 1425, in a visit to Henri IV at N£rac in 1578 by his wife Marguerite de Valois, a princess of France. They were separated, and questions of dowry, involving towns in Aquitaine, were at issue. Marguerite describes the visit and its festivals in herMemoires. She was accompanied by a troop of ladies, and temporarily renewed amorous relations with her husband. The Memoires also tell the pathetic
story of the death, two years before, of HS&ne de Tournon, which seems to be alluded to in v. 2. 1 3-1 7. It took place in Brabant (ii. 1.114), whither Marguerite went after a visit to her brother, the Due d'Alen^on (ii. I. 61) in 1578. Shake-
her brother, the Due d'Alen^on (ii. I. 61) in 1578. Shake- speare can hardly have known all this at first hand. Neither the Memoires nor the accounts of Henri and Marguerite by
1 E&c. Stage, ili. 491.
3I42.X Z
338 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Brantdme and others were yet available in print. Unless there was a source-play, some English or French traveller must have been an intermediary. On the other hand, the names of Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine would be well enough known in England from events of later date. Armand and Charles Gontaut, successive Dues de Biron, and Henri, Due de Longueville, were supporters of Henri IV inhiswarsof 1589-93 for the crown of France. Charles, Due de Mayenne, was his opponent. He has probably been confused with another supporter, Mar&hal D'Aumont.
Love's Labour's Lost suggests a courtly rather than a popular audience. Wilson, who puts his first version in 1593, supposes it played at the Earl of Southampton's house in plague-time. A. K. Gray relates it to the Titch- field visit in the progress of 1591, x and thinks that South- ampton hoped to hint by the denouement at the desirability of a twelve-months' respite before his marriage to Elizabeth Vere. Southampton is the ready deus ex machina of Shakespearean speculation. If the title-page of Qi does not merely repeat an earlier one, the court performance to which it refers must, on Greg's view as to the dates on play title-pages (cf. p. 175), have been in 1597-8. The abrupt ending, 'The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo', which was altered in F, looks like the beginning of an epilogue or of a presenter's speech for a following mask. Mercury has nothing to do with what precedes. There was a revival in January 1 605 and a per- formance at Cranborne's house or Southampton's (App. D). F alters 'God' into 'loue' in one only (v. 2. 316) of twenty cases. The 1631 title-page shows that the play held the stage after the King's men acquired the Black- friars*
X. ROMEO AND JULIET
[Q 1. 1597,] [Ornament] An Excellent conceited Trage- die of Romeo and luliet. As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon Ms Seruants. [Danter's device (McKerrow
Chap. IX ROMEO AND JULIET 339
281)] London, Printed by lohn Danter. 1597 [Head-title] The most excellent Tragedie of Romeo and luliet. [Run- ning-titles] The most excellent Tragedie, of Romeo and luliet. (sign. A-D) ; The excellent Tragedie of Romeo and luliet. (sign. E-K)].
[A different type begins with sign. E at ii. 3. 82, and from the begin- ning of iii. 5 the text is divided by ornaments, apparently marking off scenes.]
Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1886, Sh. Q. xxv> ed. H, A. Evans). Reprints. P. A. Daniel (1874, N.S.S.); W. A. Wright (1893, Cambridge Sh. ix. 639). Modern Edition. F. G. Hubbard (1924, Wisconsin Univ. Studies).
[Q2. 1599.] The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, or Romeo and luliet. Newly corrected, aug- mented, and amended: As it hath bene sundry times publiquely acted, by the right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants. [Creede's device (McKerrow 299)] London Printed by Thomas Creede, for Cuthbert Burby, and are to be sold at his shop neare the Exchange. 1599. [Head-title] The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and luliet. {Running-title'] The most lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and luliet. Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1886, Sh. Q. xxvi, ed. H. A. Evans). Reprint. P. A. Daniel (1874, N.S.S.). Modern Edition. P. A. Daniel (1875, N.S.S.). [S.R. 1607.] 22 January Master Linge Entred for his copies by direccon of A Court and with consent of Master Burby vnder his handwrytinge These .iij copies, viz. Romeo and Juliett . . . (Arber, iii. 337). [S.R. 1607.] 19 Novembris John Smythick. Entred for his copies vnder thandes of the wardens, these bpokes
followinge Whichedydbelonge to Nicholas Lynge. viz
10 Romeo and Julett vjd (Arber, iii. 365). [£3. 1609.] The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Juliet. As it hath beene sundrie times publiquely Acted, by the Kings Maiesties Seruants at the Globe. Newly corrected, augmented and amended: [Ornament] London Printed for lohn Smethwick, and
Z2
340 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
are to be sold at his Shop in Saint Dunstanes Church- yard, in Fleete streete vnder the DyalL 1 609. [Head- and Running-titles, nearly as in Q2.]
[£4. n.d] Titky with Smethwick's device of 1612-37 (McKerro w 3 7 6), Head- and Running-titles^ nearly as in Q3 ,
[In some copies 'Written by W. Shake-speare' precedes 'Newly corrected . * .]
Facsimile. C. Pmetorius (1887, Sh. Q. xxxvi, ed. H. A; Evans). [Fi, 1623.] [Catalogue] Romeo and Juliet. [Tragedies, PP- 53-79 (omitting 77-8); sign. ee3-gg2, Gg. Head- and Running-titles] The Tragedie of Romeo and luliet. [Act i, sc. i, marked.]
[Q4- 1637.] Title, with Written by W. Shake-speare', Head- and Running-titles, as in £3. Printed by R. Young for John Smethwicke, . . . 1637. Parallel-Texts. T. Mommsen(i859); P. A. Daniel(i874, N.S.S.); B. R. Field (1889, Bankside, v).
German Persian. Rondo und Ju/ietta (Cohn 309, with tr., from Vienna Hofbibliothek M S. 13107).
Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (1871, 1909, New Variorum)\ E. Dowden (1900, Arden}\ W. H. Durham (1917, Tale], [Dissertations. G. Pace-Sanfelice, The Original Story of R.J. (1868); P. A. Daniel, Brooke's Romeus and Juliet and Painter*: Rhomeo and 7«&/fe(x875,&&£.); K.P. &\m]zt,DieEntwickelungderSagei>onR.J. (1876, 7. xi. 140), The Jolly Goshawk (1878, J. xiii. 205); F. G. Fleay (1877, Uacmttlaits Uag^ T. A. Spalding, On the First Quarto ofR.J. (i%7$,N.S.S. Trans. 58); R. Gericke, R.J. nach Shs MS. (1879, J. xiv. 207); N. Delius, Brookis episches und Shs dramatisches Gedicht von R.J. (1881, J. xvi. 213; Ml. ii. 135); K. Lentzner, Zu R.J. (1887, Anglia, x. 601); E. Dowden, R.J. (1888, Transcripts and Studies); A. Cohn, Adrian Sevin** Bearbeitung der Sage von R.J. (1889, J. xxiv. 122); L. Frankd, Untersuckungen zur Entwickelungsgeschichte des Stoffes von R.J. (i 890-1, Z. /. vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte, N.F. iii. 171; iv. 48), Sh. und das Tagelied (1893), Neue Beitrage zur Geschichte des Stoffes von Shs R.J. (1894, E.S. xix. 183); L. H. Fischer, Die Sage von R.J. in deutschen Prosa^Darstellungdes 17 Jahrhunderts (1890, J. xxv. 124); R. Davidsohn (1903, Deutsche Rundschau, cxvii. 419); C. F, McClumpha, Shs Sonn. und R.J. (1904, J. xl. 187); H. de W. Fdler, Romeo and Juliette (1906, M.P. iv. 75); W. Smith, A Comic Version of R.J. (1909, M.P. vii. 217); M. J. Wolff, Ein BeitragzurGesch. des Stoffes'von R.J. (1909, Z. /. ver- tfeichende Litteraturgeschichte, N.F. xvii. 439); S. B. Hemingway, The
Chap. IX ROMEO AND JULIET 34I
Relation 0/M.N.D. to R.J. (1911, M.ZJV. zxvi. 78); H. D. Gray, Romeo, Rosaline, and Juliet (1914, M.LJf. and*. 209); A. Schottner, Okr die mutmassliche stenographist Entstehung der gj von Shs R.J. (1918); J. D. Wilson and A. W. Pollard, R.J. (1919, Aug. 14, T.L.S.); R. Fischer, Quellen zu R.J. (1922); J.M.Robertson, R.J. (1925, Si. Canon, Si. 113); M. P. Tilley, 4 Parody ofEuphues in R.J. (i<)i6,M.LJf.di. i); G. Hjort, TAeGoodandBadQqofR.J.andL.L.L.(i<)i,6,M.L.R.Tai. 140); B.A.P. van Dam, Did Sh. Revise R.J.? (1927, Anglia, li. 39).]
Qi is one of the bad Quartos (cf. p. 156), but it preserves many readings better than those of £2, which, although 'Newly corrected, augmented, and amended', contains many errors. The fairly full stage-directions of Q2, with notes for the use of properties, suggest an author's hand supplemented in the theatre, of which there is a clear sign in the substitution (iv. 5. 102) of 'Enter Will Kemp' for 'Enter Peter'. Several entries and exits areunmarked. £3 is printed from Q2, and F and the undated Q independently from Q3. Each introduces some corrections, apparently from conjecture. As originally set up, Romeo and Juliet ended on p. 77 of the Tragedies, and Troilus and Cressida began over- leaf on p. 7 8 . When Troilus and Cressida (q.v.) was for a time withdrawn, the end of Romeo and Juliet was reprinted as p. 79 and Timon of Athens begun on p. 80 overleaf. The can- celled leaf with pp. 77-8 is accidentally preserved in two examples. ^ The relation of Qi to Qs has been the subject of much discussion. Qi is certainly a 'reported' text, and its derivation from an original more closely resembling Q2 is apparent. Lines necessary to explain the sense of what is left are omitted (i. i. 1 15-22; i. 2. 1-3 ; iii. 2. 45- 51 ; 102-6). Points are lost through alterations of order (i. i . 1 9-37 ; 5 1-8 ; i. 2. 38-45). Passages are represented by mere paraphrases, or by scattered lines, with or without connective padding. The reporter tends to break down in bustling scenes, with much action and confused speech. The fight in i. i. 69-87 is only indicated by a stage-direc- tion, and the stage-directions generally vary from Q2 and often read like descriptions of action seen on the stage. Except a short dialogue of servants in i. 5, 1—17, no episode of Q2 is entirely omitted. There are many small mislineations, and a good deal of irregular metre* Even
342 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
well-reported passages contain alternatives of syntax or vocabulary to the language in corresponding lines of Q2. Actor's ejaculations are occasionally introduced. There is a gag (ii. 4. 21). Most evidential of a reporter are trans- positions of lines and phrases from one place to another (i. i. 1 20 to iii, i. 172; ii. 4. 25 to iii. i. 104; ii. 6. 21 to ii, 3. 31 ; iii. 2. 88 to ii. 5. 26; iii. 4. 6-7, 33 to i. 5. 126; v. i. 64-5 to ii. 5, 5; v. 2. 6-8 to v. 3. 251). The reporter, however, is more competent than some others, and suc- ceeds in working his fragments into a fairly continuous text. The best-done scenes are perhaps i. i. 88-end; i. 2 ; i. 3. 1-48 ;i. 4; i. 5. 18-146; ii. 1-4; iii. 3; iii. 5. 1-59; iv. i. On the whole the work deteriorates from ii. 6 onwards, and towards the end the divergence from Q2 is considerable. It does not seem possible to identify the reporter. If he was an actor, Capulet, the Nurse, Benvolio occasionally suggest themselves, but no part is consistently well rendered. Conceivably more than one hand has con- tributed. Several words look like errors of mishearing, but neither these nor the Equivalents' can be taken (cf. pp. 156— 61) as evidence of shorthand.
A report does not account for everything. Very possibly the report is of a text shortened for performance. Qi has 2,232 lines and Q2 has 3,007. It is hardly possible to distinguish the reporter's omissions from others, but several lacunae in long speeches or dialogues may be 'cuts9. Other features of the relation between the texts have been explained on a theory of revision. Such a theory is stated by Wilson and Pollard. Q2 was printed from the author's MS. A transcriber would not, unless 'slavishly faithful*, preserve numerous careless slips, and notably a duplication of ii. 3. 1-4 in a passage inserted before the last two lines of ii. 2. Moreover, Q2 'teems with evidences of revision*, examples of which are in long passages of verse printed as prose, such as the Queen Mab speech in *• 3- 54~9 *• This must have been written in a margin without line divisions, or so heavily corrected in a margin that the compositor *cut the Gordian tangle by resorting to a prose arrangement*. If, then, Q2 was 'derived from*
Chap. IX ROMEO AND JULIET 343
a revised MS., Qi must be 'derived from' this same MS. 'at an earlier stage of its development1. The evidence for this is in the close typographical resemblance of Qi and Q2, as regards spelling, punctuation, and the use of capi- tals and italics, in certain passages, of which ii. 4. 39-46 and iii. 5. 27-31 are examples. Qi contains 'pre-Shake- spearian' passages *of the Greene-Lodge school*. The MS. was twice handled by Shakespeare. At a first revision he brought Acts i and ii very nearly to their final state, but only rewrote iii-v here and there. At a second revision he altered iii-v less thoroughly, omitting to pre- fix sonnets, as he had done for i and ii, and leaving the spelling 'Capolet' in place of 'Capulet'. Qi represents 4an abridged version of Shakespeare's first revision of an older play eked out by what a pirate could remember of the later version'. I do not find mis theory satisfactory. The term 'derived from' is vague. Wilson and Pollard cannot mean that the actual MS. partly revised by Shakespeare was first altered by the reporter as copy for Qi and was then passed back to the theatre, further revised by Shakespeare, and used as copy for Q2. They must mean that what the reporter handled was a transcript; and this is consistent with their general theory (cf. p. 226) that Shakespeare, early in his career, made partial revisions of several old plays, of which abridged transcripts were prepared for provincial performance during the plague of 1 592-4. But if so, the typographical resemblance of parts of Qi and Q2, upon which they rightly lay stress, remains unex- plained. Wilson has himself made it probable, in dealing with other plays, that Shakespeare's orthography was individual, and was normalized, with his punctuation, in varying degrees by different printers. How could two printers, one perhaps working from the original, but the other from a transcript, itself certainly not literally true to the original, have produced the typographical resem- blance. This, moreover, is not confined to i and ii, but extends to clearly Shakespearean writing later, to which, on thetheory, Qi had only access through the reporter and not from a MS. The resemblance is certainly striking, and the
344 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
only plausible explanation of it seems to be that some parts at least of Q2 were set up from corrected pages of Q i . To this also point cases (ii. 2. 54; iii. 3. 102) of common mis- lineation in Qi and Q2. I find a similar view taken by Greg, Emendation, 19, 49, and by Hjort and Van Dam. If it is sound, the alterations from £2 were them- selves transcribed, either in margins or on attached slips and sheets. I do not share the difficulty which Wilson and Pollard feel about this. If the duplication at the end of ii. 2 and beginning of ii. 3 was not due to the transcriber himself, the first version was not necessarily more than a false start by Shakespeare, such as we find in Love's Labour's Losty left undeleted or inadequately deleted. It would not take a particularly 'slavish* transcriber to copy- it as it stood. There is another duplication in Q2 of iii. 3. 41. Certainly these are not evidence of a general revision of the play. Nor is the prose for verse of the Queen Mab passage, as this may merely represent cor- rections transcribed on a page of Qi. Prose for verse in Qi one may generally put down to the reporter. The only other long' passage of this kind in Q2 is, I think, i. 3. Here Q2 follows Qi, and both texts have another odd feature which has not been explained. In the dialogue between Lady Capulet and the Nurse, all the Nurse's speeches, but not Lady Capulet's, are italicized in Qi. The italics are carried on in Q2 and extended to one of two speeches omitted by Qi. The Nurse's speeches are also italicized by Qi, although not by Q2, in i. 5, but not in later scenes. One would suppose that the Nurse's 'part', written in Italian script, was available for Qi, but the relation to Q2, although too close to leave room for revision, is not one of identity, and Qi also italicizes a speech (i. 3. 100-4) by another servant* I do not accept Robertson's suggestion that the lines in question may have been left behind him by a dead contributor to the play, and printed in italics as 'a way of paying a small tribute to his memory*. This is scientific criticism with a vengeance.
On the whole, given the circumstances in which Qi
Chap. IX ROMEO AND JULIET 345
and Q2 respectively were printed, I do not see sufficient reason for supposing either that Shakespeare retained dialogue from a pre-Shakespearean play, or that he re- wrote his own work. Robertson regards Romeo and Juliet as 'a composite play, drafted before Shakespeare by several hands, merely revised and expanded by him in the version preserved in Qi, and further modified by his and other hands in the version preserved in Q2*. Even in Q2 he finds much of Peele, whom he thinks the main 'draftsman', and of Marlowe, Greene, and Kyd, although Shakespeare is allowed 'far more, alike of revision and of fresh writing, than he did in Titus'. I do not suppose that Wilson and Pollard would go as far as this, and I do not propose to take it seriously. The whole essay reads like a burlesque of Robertson's own theories upon earlier plays. Certainly there is some non-Shakespearean matter in Qi, especially towards the end. The most consecutive passages are ii. 6 ; iii. 2. 57-60; iv. 5. 43-64; v. 3. 12-17, and parts of v. 3. 223-67. I do not see that we need look for an author beyond the reporter. If he was an actor, as is probable enough, we know from Henslowe's records that many actors, without becoming habitual playwrights like Shakespeare and Heywood, were able to turn out a play upon occasion; and the style of 'the Greene-Lodge school' is just what such men mig;ht be expected to use, after better poets had grown out of it.
As to date, 1591 has been favoured, usually for a 'first version1, because the Nurse (i. 3. 35) makes it eleven years since an earthquake, and there was a real earthquake in London in i^So.1 This is pressing the Nurse's interest in chronology — and Shakespeare's — rather hard* The style of the play is that of the -lyrical group, and I should put it in 1595, preferably before Midsummer-Night* $ Dream, as its theme seems to be parodied in that of Pyra- mus and Thisbe, and its wall (ii. 1, 2) in Snout's wall. This and another point of staging are discussed in ESz. Stage, iii. 94, 98, Weever's mention of Romeo (App. B, no. xix) has been put as early as 1595, but may be as late as 1599.
' EG*. Stage, iv. 208.
34.6 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
A ballad on the story was registered on 5 August 1596.* The plague is recalled (v. 2, 9). The 'first and second cause* (ii. 4. 25) are from Segar's Book of Honor (1590). Rosaline (ii. 4. 4, 14) recalls her namesake of Love's Labour *s Lost. There is a general resemblance of phrase and imagery to much in the Sonnets. All this fits well enough with 1595. The company was then the Cham- berlain's, but the Qi title-page uses the designation which it bore when that was printed. We learn from Marston (App. B, no, xv) that the play was at the Curtain about 1598. There is no evidence of a Jacobean revival, beyond two alterations of 'Zounds' (iii. i. 52, 104) in F, which retains the rest of the profanity.
The theme of escape from marriage through a sleeping- draught is as old as the Ephesiaca of Xenophon of Ephesus (4th cent. A.D.?). It came to Shakespeare through an Italian channel. Masuccio of Salerno told the story, much in its later form, of Sienese lovers in his IlNovellino (1476). Luigi da Porto's Istoria di due Nobili Amanti (c. 1524) transferred it to Romeo and Giulietta at Verona, and con- nected it with the noble families of Dante, Purgatorio, vi. 1 06, 'Vieni a veder Montecchi e Cappelletti', although the Cappelletti seem to have been really of Cremona. From Da Porto it passed to the Infelice Amore (1553) of G. Bolderi, the Novelle (1554) of Matteo Bandello, and the Hadriana (1578) of Luigi Groto. It was treated as serious Veronese history by Girolamo de la Corte(i 594—6), who followed Bandello in placing it during the rule (c. 1303) of Bartolomeo della Scala. There were various offshoots, including the Castehines y Monteses of the Spanish Lope de Vega. Pierre Boaistuau translated Ban- dello in the Histoires Tragiques (1559), and was in turn translated in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1565- 7), and more freely handled in Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragical/ History* o/Romeus and Juliet (i 562). Of this Bernard Garter's Two English Lovers (i 563) is an imitation, with other names. A Romeo et Juliette by C6me de la Gambe, dit Chasteauvieux, was being played in France
1 Arber, iii. 68.
Chap. IX ROMEO AND JULIET 347
about 1581, birt is not preserved.1 Shakespeare had probably read Painter, and not very successful attempts have been made to show that he used Luigi Groto and Lope de Vega. But substantially his source, so far as we know, was Brooke. Brooke, however, says, *I saw the same argument lately set foorth on stage with more com- mendation, then I can looke for: (being there much better set forth then I haue or can dooe)'. He does not tell us whether this play was Latin or English, popular or academic, and we cannot say whether it accounts for any of Shakespeare's divergences from Romeus and Juliet. A fragmentary Romeus et Julietta in Shane MS. 1775 dates from about 1615.* But Brooke's statement has naturally encouraged those who believe that Shakespeare rewrote an earlier play. Fuller has attempted to trace one behind the Dutch Romeo en Juliette of J. Struijs (1634), but does not convince me that this had any source other than Boaistuau, who was translated into Dutch by 1618. A Romeo and Juliet was played at N5rdlingen in 1 604 and at Dresden in 1626 and 1646.3 Robertson unjustifiably assigns to 1626 the MS. of the extant German Romio und Julietta^ which according to Creizenach, Schauspiele der Englischen Komddianten, xli, is shown by dialect and local allusions to have been written in Austria during the second half of the seventeenth century. It is based upon Shake- speare in the £2 form, since it uses passages (iii. 1. 157- 80 ; v. 3. 1 2-1 7) as there given and not in Qi . But it has a preliminary scene in which the Prince reconciles Monta- gue and Capulet, and this, according to Robertson, must go back to England in 1562 when 'the dangers of civil strife are seriously dwelt upon', and 'is inexplicable as a German recast*. I cannot imagine why. The dangers of civil strife have been obvious to all peoples in al! ages. There were German renderings of Boaistuau from 1615 onwards.
1 E. Lanson in Revue tTHut. Lift. * EBx. Stage, ir. 378. x. 199; G. H. White in N.Q. cliv. 95. 3 Ibid. it. 283; Hen 86.
348 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap, IX
XL RICHARD THE SECOND
[S.R. 1597.] 29° Augusti. Andrew Wise. Entredforhis Copie by appointment from master Warden Man, The Tragedye of Richard the Second vjd (Arber, iii. 89).
[Qi. 1597.] The Tragedie of King Richard the second. As it hath beene publikely acted by the right Honourable the Lorde Chamberlaine his Seruants. [Simmes's device (McKerrow 142)] London Printed by Valentine Simmes for Androw Wise, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules church yard at the signe of the Angel. 1597. [No head- title. Running-title] The Tragedie of King Richard the second.
Facsimiles. C.Praetorius(i888,5A. Q.xviii, from Huth, now B.M., copy, ed. W. A. Harrison). W. Griggs (1890, Sh. Q. xvii, from Devonshire, now Huntington, copy, ed. P. A. Daniel).
[Qa. 1598.] The Tragedie of King Richard the second. As it hath beene publikely acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. By William Shake-speare. [Simmes's device (McKerrow 142)] London Printed by Valentine Simmes for Andrew Wise, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules churchyard at the signe of the Angel. 1598. [No head-title. Running-title] The Tragedie of King Richard the Second.
[Q3 • r 598 •] The Tragedie of King Richard the second. As it hath beene publikely acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. By William Shake-speare. [Simmes's device (McKerrow 142)] London Printed by Valentine Simmes, for Andrew Wise, and are to be solde at his shop in Paules churchyard, at the signe of the AngeL 1598. [No head-title. Running-title] The Trzgedie of King Richard the Second. [W. A. White collection.] Facsimile. A. W. Pollard (1916).
[S«R. 1603.] 25 Junij. Mathew Lawe. Entred for his copies in full courte Holden this Day. These ffyve copies folowinge ... viz iij enterludes or playes . . . The second of Richard the .2. . . . all kinges ... all whiche by consent
Chap. IX RICHARD THE SECOND 349
of the Company are sett over to him from Andrew Wyse (Arber, iii. 239).
[Q4. 1 608.] The Tragedie of King Richard the second. As it hath been publikely acted by the Right Honourable the LordChamberlainehisseruantes. By William Shake-speare. [White's device (McKerrow i88b)] London, Printed by W(illiam) W<hite) for Matthew Law, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the Foxe. 1608. [No head-title. Running-title'] The Tragedie of Richard [or King Richard] the Second.
[Cancel t.p. in some copies.'] The Tragedie of King Richard the Second: With new additions of the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of King Richard, As it hath been lately acted by the Kinges Majesties seruantes, at the Globe. By William Shake-speare. [White's device (McKerrow i88b)] At London, Printed by W. W. for Mathew Law, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the Foxe. 1 608. Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1888, Sh. Q. xix, ed. W. A. Harrison).
[Qj. 1615.] The Tragedie of King Richard the Second: With new additions of the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of King Richard. As it hath been lately acted by the Kinges Maiesties seruants, at the Globe. By William Shake-speare [Ornament] At London, Printed for Mathew Law, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the Foxe* 1615. [No head-title. Running-title'] The Tragedie of Richard the Second.
[Fi. 1623.] {Catalogue] The Life & death of Richard the second. [#/j/0H>j,pp.23--45,sign.b6-d5. Head-title^Tte life and death of King Richard the Second. [Running-title*] The life (Life) and death (Death) of Richard the second, [Acts and sec. marked.]
[Q6. 1634.] By lohn Norton.
Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1887, Sh. Q. xx, ed. P. A. Daniel).
Parallel-Text. A. Waites (i 892, Banksidey Qi +F i).
Modtrn Editions. E. K. Chambers (1891, Falcon)-, C, HL Herford
3so PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
(1893, Warwick}-, I. B. John (1912, 1925, Arden}\ LL M. Buell (1921, Tale).
Dissertations. A. Schmidt, Q$ and F von R. // (1880, J. xv. 301); H. R. Plomer, An Examination of Some Existing Copies ofHayward's King Henrie 7^(1902, 2 Library, iii. 13); F. W. Moorman, SA.'s History Plays and Daniel's Civile Wars (1904, J. xl. 69); J. M. Robertson, The Author- ship ofR. II (1923, Sh. Canon9 ii. 45); E. M. Albright, Sh.'s R. II and the Essex Conspiracy (1927, PMJL-A. xlii. 686) ; E. P. Kuhl, SA. andHayward (1928, S.P. xxv. 312).
The interrelation of the texts is minutely examined in Pollard's admirable introduction to £3. Qi is a good text, and may very possibly have been printed from the author's manuscripts. Modern editors find on an average one error of wording to a page. Seventeen corrections were made during printing, and the extant examples contain corrected and uncorrected sheets in various combinations. The punctuation is generally careless and inadequate, but be- comes more elaborate in set speeches; and here Pollard (cf. p. 191) is inclined to trace the author's hand. A few mislmeations are generally due to the merging of short with full lines. I think there may be some textual dis- turbance in York's speech of ii. 2. 98-122, which reads very unmetrically. A variant spelling of 'Martiall* for 'Marshall' in three out of four cases in i. 3 may have no significance. The stage-directions are of the short type, which now becomes normal in Shakespeare's plays. The later Qq were successively set up from each other, with some correction of errors, and a progressive accumulation of new ones, to which Q2 is the chief contributor. The 'abdication* or 'deposition* scene (iv. i. 154-318) first appears in £4; it is in all extant examples, but all have not the cancel title-page calling attention to it. Some omis- sions and much xnislineation, partly due to these, suggest that the copy was derived from a shorthand report. F is shown by the retention of some Q errors to have been set up from a Q, This was probably £5, but just possibly £3. Many fresh errors are introduced, and there are some colourless verbal variants, which are probably best ascribed (cf. p. 1 80) to the subconscious operations of the compositor's mind. But many Qi readings are also re-
Chap. IX RICHARD THE SECOND 351
stored, and there are a few corrections, including two on points of historical fact, which are perhaps beyond the normal capacity of a press corrector. Moreover, the stage-directions are elaborated; there is a general substitu- tion of 'Heaven' for 'God'; the 'abdication' scene is pro- perly lined; and the omission of passages amounting to about 50 lines in all (i. 3. 129-33, 239-42> 268-93 ; &• 2- 29-32 ; iv. i. 52-9) may be due to a desire for shortening or the removal of obscurities. Pollard thinks that the example of Q$ used had been imperfectly collated with one of Qi altered to serve as prompt-copy.1
Some evidence for a date of production in 1595 is fur- nished by Samuel Daniel's CMl Wars between Lancaster and York. This was registered on 1 1 October 1 594. Two editions appeared in 1595, and the second of these con- tains parallels to Richard //, which are not in the first. Obviously both might have preceded the play, but on the whole it seems more likely, especially on the analogy of Daniel's handling of his Cleopatra (cf. Antony andClevpatra)) that he made these alterations after seeing it. And there is some confirmation of a 1595 date in a letter (App. D) from Sir Edward Hoby, apparently inviting Sir Robert Cecil to a performance of Richard II on December 9 of that year. This again is not quite conclusive, as one cannot be certain that the play was new. And although the style and lyrical tone of the scenes in which Richard figures would fit well enough with 1595, there is much poor and bombastic matter, especially in Acts i and v, which recalls the period of 2, 3 Henry VI and Richard III. Certainly Shakespeare is still under the influence of Marlowe in his handling of chronicle-history. Robertson, indeed, boldly claims the whole play as one by Marlowe or by Marlowe and Peele, 'substantially preserved' in an adaptation by Shakespeare. I do not think that such parallels of vocabulary and diction as he produces are in the least capable of proving this; or that there is any clear evidence of Marlowe's hand, as dis- tinct from his influence; or that it is plausible to argue that Marlowe is likely to have made a use of continuous
1 C£, however, p. 165.
35* PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
rhymed dialogue, which is markedly absent from his known plays. Nor do I think that Peele writing poor matter under Marlowe's influence can be discriminated with any assurance on purely internal grounds from Shake- speare writing poor matter under the same influence. The conception of Richard's tragedy, as well as its detailed presentation, seems to me clearly Shakespearean and not Marlowean; and it is safest to assume that in the inferior scenes Shakespeare, completely uninterested in chronicle- history as such, allowed himself to slip into a perfunctory and traditional treatment of all that was not directly con- cerned with that tragedy. It is quite possible that he had an older source-play before him, and conceivably he may have preserved rather more of a predecessor's phrasing than he did in the almost contemporary King John. If so, it probably dealt, perhaps in a first part, with the murder of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, a knowledge of which seems assumed in the play as it stands. Certainly there were other Elizabethan plays on the reign, besides Shake- speare's. There was the old Life and Death of Jack Straw, printed in 1593, but this does not cover the murder.1 There was the play, sometimes called Thomas of Woodstock^ preserved in Egerton MS. 1 994.2 This, although the manu- script has probably been used for a seventeenth-century revival, seems to be of sixteenth-century composition. It might conceivably be a first part of Shakespeare's source, if he had one. There are some slight verbal resemblances to Richard //, and the subject is die death of Gloucester, although this is not treated exactly as we should expect from the references in Richard //, since Mowbray is not among the characters. Neither Jack Straw nor Thomas of Woodstock can be definitely assigned to any company with which Shakespeare was concerned. But we do know from Simon Forman (App. D) that in 161 1 the King's men had a Richard II other than Shakespeare's, the description of which does not answer to either of them, but which covered Straw's riot, the death of Gloucester, on lines inconsistent with Richard //, and a plot of John of Gaunt
*a. » IKd. iv. 4*5 cf. p. in.
Chap. IX RICHARD THE SECOND 353
to make his son king. Whether it also covered the actual deposition of Richard is not clear. Perhaps it is even more likely than Thomas of Woodstock to represent the first part of a source-play used by Shakespeare.
There are many indications of an analogy present to the Elizabethan political imagination between the reign of Richard II and that of Elizabeth herself. A letter of Sir Francis Knollys on 9 January 1578 excuses himself forgiv- ing unwelcome counsel to the queen.1 He will not *play the partes of King Richard the Second's men'; will not be a courtly and unstatesmanlike flatterer. Clearly the phrase was familiar. Henry Lord Hunsdon similarly wrote at some date before 1588, 'I never was one of Richard IFs men'.z More cryptic is a letter from Raleigh to Robert Cecil on 6 July 1597, 'I acquainted my L: generall (Essex) with your letter to mee & your kynd acceptance of your enterteynemente, hee was also wonderfull merry att yc consait of Richard the 2. I hope it shall never alter, & whereof I shalbe most gladd of as the trew way to all our good, quiett & advancement, and most of all for her sake whose affaires shall therby fynd better progression/3 All these allusions are of course in perfect loyalty, the utterances of devoted, if critical, officials. In 1 597 Cecil, Raleigh, and Essex were for once on friendly terms. The publication of Richard //, without the abdication scene, came shortly after Cecil wrote. In 1598 a disgruntled Essex drifted into an attitude of political opposition, and the government became, or professed to become, aware of an unfriendly parallel drawn between Elizabeth herself and the deposed Richard.-* John Hayward's prose history of The First Part of the Life andRaigne of King Henrietta was registered on 9 January 1599 and published with a dedicatory epistle to Essex, which contained a dangerous description of him as 'magnus et presenti iudicio et futuri temporis expectatione'. Apparently Essex took alarm and, after' keeping the book by him for a fortnight, moved the Archbishop of Canterbury to require the cancellation of the
1 Wright, i£. 74. * Strickland $53, nenbaum, Problem, 209, * Edwards, ii, 1695 facs. at Tan- 4 Cf, vol. ii, p. 323.
3142.1 A a
354 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
epistle. A second edition of the book was suppressed altogether. At the trial of Essex on 5 June 1 600 for his proceedings in Ireland, his relation to the book, which the queen had come to regard as seditious, was made one of the charges against him. In July Hayward and Samuel Harsnett, who had given the licence for publication, were called before the Star Chamber; and Hayward was im- prisoned. An official note of evidence against Essex com- piled at this time lays stress not only on the offending epistle to the book, but also on 'the Erie himself being so often present at the playing thereof, and with great applause giving countenance and lyking to the same', A few months later, on 8 February 1 60 1 , Essex attempted re- bellion. On the day before some of his supporters had gone to the Globe, where they had persuaded Augustine Phillips to revive an old play of Richard II. Evidence of this was given at their arraignment for participation, in Essex's treason, and was used with Hayward's book to suggest that the earl, who had some remote claim to the crown through a descent from Thomas of Woodstock, had planned to play the part of Henry Bolingbroke to Eliza- beth's Richard. On all this several interesting points arise. In the first place, there can surely be little doubt that the play of 7 February was Shakespeare's. It was given by the Chamberlain's men. A play produced in 1595 and laid aside might well be 'stale', from the theatrical point of view, by 1 601 . It dealt with the deposing and killing of the king, and although we know from Forman that the company had another play of Richard II in 1 6 1 1, it is on the whole improbable that its subject-matter overlapped with Shakespeare's. That some of the references speak of a play of *Henry IV is immaterial. The frequent performances which Essex was accused in 1 600 of having attended must of course have been earlier than that of 1 60 1, at which indeed he was not present. They are no doubt those which the Queen spoke of to Lambarde in 1 60 1 as given '40*^ times in open streets and houses*. And they may reasonably be placed about 1595, in view of a statement in some Directions for Preachers of 1601 that
Chap. IX RICHARD THE SECOND 355
Essex had^ been plotting treason for six or seven years.1 The deposition scene was evidently given at the 1601 per- formance. I think it was probably given in 1595 also. That it was part of the original writing is quite clear. The lines immediately preceding it have been altered in Qi to square with the excision, but this has left without point the Abbot's subsequent comment 'A woeful Pageant haue we here beheld*. Pollard, however, thinks that it may have been cut in representation, partly because the Chamber- lain's men thought that there was 'too much Richard' in the play, and partly because of the Pope's bull of deposition in 1596. There was (cf. p. 366) no such bull, and it seems to me more likely that the interest taken by Essex in the play led to some popular application of the theme to current politics, and this in turn to the intervention of the censor, perhaps at the theatre, but more probably when the play came to be printed. That it was written with any Seditious intent is of course most unlikely, and indeed only an unreasonably sensitive instinct of suspicion could re- gard the deposition scene in particular as encouraging resentment against Richard. The Hunsdons, whom the company served, were always loyal supporters of Eliza- beth, and in no way entangled with the fortunes of Essex, even if Essex himself can be supposed to have had any notion of aping Henry of Bolingbroke as early as 1595. Nor is Sir Edward Hoby likely to have invited Cecil, of all men, to witness a disloyal play. And Shakespeare's own supposed attachment to Essex is a merely speculative theory. Even in 1601, little blame seems to have fallen upon the Chamberlain's men. A passage in Hamlet (q.v.) may imply that they travelled for a time. But they were at court a few days after the trial of Essex and several times in the following winter. Under James, who had an affectionate remembrance of Essex, the deposition scene could safely be printed. The 1608 title-page and the attention paid to the Act of Abuses in the F text indicate a Jacobean revival. Probably Shakespeare's was the Richard II given at sea (App. D) by Keeling's sailors in
1 Cheyney, ii. 535.
3j6 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
1607. They are not likely to have used anything but a printed play. There was a revival at the Globe in 1631 (App. D). ^
The mam source of Richard II was the Chronicle of Holinshed, in the second edition of 1587, since ii. 4. 8 uses a passage not in that of 1577. For a few historical points other chroniclers may have been drawn upon. Two features not in Holinshed, the introduction of Queen Isabel, and the attribution of a soliloquy to Richard just before his murder, are common to Richard II and the first edition of Daniel's poem, but the treatment, both of these topics and of the rest of the action, is so different as to make an influence either way unlikely. Miss Albright's suggestion that Shakespeare may have used Hayward's history in manuscript is perverse, in view of the relative dates of the prints. She rests it on a statement by Hayward that he had contemplated handling the subject a dozen years back, and neglects his further statements that he had told no one of this, and only began to write the book a year before it was published. There are parallels, but they may best be explained through use by the historian of the play.
XII. A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM
[S.R. 1600.] 8 Octobris. Thomas Fyssher. Entred for his copie vnder the handes of master Rodes and the Wardens. A booke called A mydsommer nightes Dreame vjd. (Arber, iii. 174).
[Qi. 1600.] [Ornament] A Midsommer nights dreame. As it hath beene sundry times publickely acted, by the Right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. [Fisher's device (McKerrow 32 1)] 1T Imprinted at London, for Thomas Fisher, and are to be soulde at his shoppe, at the Signe of the White Hart, in Fleetestreete. 1600. [Head-title'] A Midsommer Nights Dreame. [Running-title] A Midsommer nightes dreame. [The printer may be Allde or Bradock. An elaborate ornament at the end recurs qn the t.p. of Edward II (i 594), and that is linked by its final ornament to Edward II (i 598), which Bradock printed.] Facsimile. W. Griggs (1880, Sh, Q. Hi, ed J. W. Ebsworth).
Chap. IX A MIDSUMMER-NIGHTS DREAM 357
[£2.1619.] [Ornament.] A Midsommer nights dreame. As it hath beene sundry times publikely acted, by the Right Honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants Written by William Shakespeare. [W. Jaggard's device formerly Roberts's (McKerrow 136)] Printed by lames Roberts, 1600, [Head-title] A Midsommer Nights Dreame. [Running-title'] A Midsommer nights Dreame. [On the misdating cf. p. 133.]
Facsimile. W. Griggs (1880, Sh. Q. iv, ed. J. W. Ebsworth). [Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] Midsommer Nights Dreame. [Comedies, pp. 145-62, sign. N-O 3V. Head-title] A Mid- sommer Nights Dreame. [Running-title] A Midsommer nights Dreame. [Acts marked.]
Parallel-Text. W. Reynolds (1890, Bank$ide> Qi + Fi). Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (1895, New Pariorum); E. K. Chambers (i 897, Warwick)-, H. Cuningham (1905, Arden^ W. H. Durham (1918, Yale}-> A. T. Quiller-Couch and J. D. Wilson
(1904, a OP.).
Dissertations. J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Introduction to MJf.D. (1841), Illustrations of tie Fairy Mythology ofMM.D. (i 845, Sh. Soc.), Memoranda on MJf.D. (1879); N. J. Halpin, Giants Vision in MJf.D. (1843, Sh. Soc.); C. C. Hense, Sis MJf.D. Erlautert (1851); K. Elze, 2am MJT.D. (1868, y.iii. 150; Essays, 30); H.Kuiz9ZumMJt.D.( 1869,7.17. 268); F. Krauss, Eine Quelle zu Shs MJfJ). (1876, J. xi. 226); B. ten Brink,
..,.....,
0/MJV.D. (1878); A. Schmidt, Diealtesten4usgal>cndesMlf.D. (1881); Dr. Finkenbrink, The Date, Plot and Sources of MJf.D. (1884)-, K. Gaedertz, Zur Kenntniss der altenglischen Buhne (1888); E. FlQgel, Pyramys and Tyste (1889, Anglia, xii. 13, 631); G. Hart, Die Pyramus- und-TMsbe Saga (i 889-91) ; A. Wiirzner, Die Orthographie derteiden Qq von ShsMJtf.D. (i 893) ; G. Sarrazin, DieAtfassungszeitdcsMJfJ).(i 895, Archiv, xcv. 291), Scenarie und Sta/age im MJV.D. (1900, Archiv, civ. 67); L. Frankel, 7or-Shakespearesches Pyramus und This&e-Stuck? (1897, J. xxxiii. 275); R. Tobler, Sis MJf.D. und Montemayor>s Diana (1898, J. xxxiv. 358); W. Vollhardt, Die Beziehungen a*erMJt.D. zum italic- niscken Schaferdrama (i 899) ; F. von Westenholtz, Sis Gewonnene Lieks- mUk (1902, Jan. 14, Beilage zur Allgemeim Zeitung); H, Reich, Der Mann mit dem Eselskopf(i^ J. xl. 108) ; F. Sidgwick, Sources and Analogues of
,
. (1908, SJt. Classics^ S. B. Hemingway, The Relation ofMJf.D. to R.J. (191 1, MJLM. xrvi. 78) ; E. K, Chambers, The Occasion ofMMD. (1916, St. Homage, 154); W. J, Lawrence, St. from a New Angle (1919,
3J8 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Studies, viii. 442), Date cfMJf.D. (1920, Dec. 9, T.L.S.), A Plummet for Bottom's Dream (1922, Fortnightly, cxvii. 833;' Sh.'s Workshop, 7 5) ; A. Lefranc, Le TMalitl dam MJfJ). (1920, Melanges Bernard Bouvier)\ E. Rickert, Political Propaganda and Satire /*MJV.Z>.(l923,M./>.xxi, 53, 133); A. Eichler, DasHoflwhnenm&sige inShsMM.D. (1925, J. hi. 39) ; H. Spencer, A Nice Derangement (1930, M.L.R. xxv, 23).
Qi is a fairly well-printed text, with some abnormal spell- ings, and may be from the author's .manuscript. The stage-directions are not elaborate. Q2 is from Qi, and Fi from Q2, but Wilson's analysis points to the incorporation of notes for a revival. The clearest indication is the stage- direction at v. i. 128, 'Tawyer with a Tmmpet before them'. A division into Acts has been superimposed upon a text written for continuous performance, resulting in the stage-direction at the end of iii, 'They sleepe all the Act', by which is meant the act-interval.
The hymeneal character of the theme has led to the reasonable conjecture that the play was given at a noble wedding, and various writers have suggested the weddings of (i) Robert Earl of Essex and Frances Lady Sidney in April or May 1590, (2) Sir Thomas Heneage and Mary Countess of Southampton on 2 May 1594, (3) William Earl of Derby and Elizabeth Vere at Greenwich on 26 January 1595, (4) Thomas Berkeley and Elizabeth Carey at Blackfriars on 1 9 February 1 596, (5) Henry Earl of Southampton and Elizabeth Vernon about February or August 1598, (6) Henry Lord Herbert and Anne Russell at Blackfriars on 16 June 1600. There is obvious flattery of Queen Elizabeth as the 'fair vestal throned by the west' (ii. i. 148—68), and a possible allusion to the bride in the 'little western flower' on which Cupid's bolt, harmless against the 'imperial votaress', fell. The imagery of this passage has been regarded as a reminiscence of the entertainment of Elizabeth at Kenilworth in 1575, and more plausibly of that by the Earl of Hertford at Elvetham in 1591,* although there is a generic quality about such pageants, and the special feature of *a mermaid on a dol- phin's back9 does not belong to either occasion. The
1 Efa. Stage, i. 122.
Chap. IX A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM 359
flattery does not of course prove that Elizabeth was present at the wedding celebrated
at tut wituxuiig *^i^L/j.en.^ij. \s^ Midsummer-Night s x^/cw/^, although it is likely enough. She was in fact at weddings (3) and (6), and very possibly at (4), since the bride was her god-daughter, and the grand-daughter of her cousin and Lord Chamberlain. It may be assumed that she was not at (i), (2), and (5), all of which brought the bride- grooms into disfavour, while (5) was in secret, and not likely to have received the publicity of a play. Considera- tions of date also make (i), (5), and (6) improbable, and the effective choice lies between (3) and (4). I have de- scribed the circumstances of these in SA. Homage, 154, but should add that the Derby wedding was certainly at Greenwich, although the Queen seems to have accom- panied the bride to Burghley House a few days later, and a play might have been given at either place.1 Of the Berkeley wedding, unfortunately, no details are known. The Queen was at Richmond, but could easily have come to Blackfriars by river. The use of the Chamberlain's company would be natural enough on this occasion, since the bride's grandfather and father were its successive patrons; and Sir George Carey's musical establishment (cf. vol. ii, p. 86) could perhaps supply any additional boys needed to impersonate fairies. Some of the Chamber- lain's men had of course formerly been the men of Derby's brother and predecessor, Ferdinando, Earl of Derby. Earl William, however, had a company of his own, although, so far as we know, only a provincial one.2 A family chronicler tells us that affection between Thomas Berkeley and Elizabeth Carey began in the autumn of 1595. Wil- liam Stanley and Elizabeth Vere might possibly have met at Elvetham in I59i> but a conceivable reflection of that in the 'little western flower' is too slight a clue to lay stress upon. Either wedding would fit such indications of date as the play yields. It belongs to the lyric group of 1 59476- I do not think that the proposed show of Muses mourning for the death of learning in beggary (v. i . 52) is an allusion to the death of Robert Greene in 1592, It was to be a
Cf. Eliz. Stage, iv. 109. * J«* »
360 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
'satire, keen and critical', which suggests something on the lines of Spenser's Tears of the Muses. Greene, although a University man, could hardly stand for a typical repre- sentative of learningin such a connexion. If any particular death was in mind, Tasso's, on. 30 April 1 595, seems more plausible. The bad weather described in ii. i. 8 1— 1 17 is probably that which began in March 1594, prevailed during the greater part of that year, and ushered in a long period of corn shortage (cf. App. A, no. xii). The alarm of the clowns (iii. i. 33) lest that 'fearful wild-fowl' the lion might scare the ladies recalls the abandonment of a projected lion at the baptismal feast of the Scottish Prince Henry on 30 August 1594, A True Reportarie of which was registered on 24 October 1594.* This allusion, as well as that to the weather, would be more up to date in January 1595 than in February 1596. On the other hand, if Pyramus and Thisbe parody Romeo and Juliet (q.v.), Midsummer-Nights Dream is likely to be the later play of the two. Moreover, there are allusions (i. 2. 31, 42; v. i . 47) to the labours of Hercules, and, while this is nothing in itself, the last appears to confuse his fight against the Centaurs with that of Theseus, and may echo the similar confusion in Heywood's Silver Age? which again may be the 2 Hercules produced by the Admiral's on 23 May I595-3 The labours of Hercules, however, had been dramatized before I592.4
There remains the question whether Midsummer- Nights Dream is all of even date. In v. i, 1-84 correctly lined passages alternate with others which are mislined, and I agree with Wilson that the latter probably represent additional matter written without lineation in the margin of the manuscript. They are a little more freely written than the original lines which they supplement. This hardly excludes the possibility that they were afterthoughts at the time of original composition. Wilson, however, also points out that the fairy mask of v. i. 378-429 and the epilogue of 430-45 look very much like alternative endifigs to the
1 Arbcr, H. 662. s Etix. Stage, iii. 344.
* ed. Pearson, iii, 141-4. « Ibid. ir. 241.
Chap. IX A MIDSUMMER-NIGHTS DREAM 361
play. On the whole I think that there has probably been some revision in v. I take the epilogue as the later ending, and conjecture that children used for a mask at the wed- ding were not available on the public stage; and that possibly some personal allusions to the bride and bride- groom were also replaced by other matter, in order to adapt the play for theatrical use. Others, however, carry the notion of revision a great deal farther. Wilson himself conjectures an original writing in 1592 or earlier and an intermediate revision in 1594, both possibly hymeneal, as well as a final revision, which he believes to have covered the fairy scenes as well as the last act, and to have been for the Southampton wedding of 1598. His case for the first revision rests mainly upon differences of style between the lover scenes and the fairy scenes, which, such as they are, seem to me sufficiently explained by the difference of subject-matter; and that for the revision of the fairy scenes themselves upon the appearance of generic for personal names in the stage-directions and speech-prefixes of certain passages, which also I find unconvincing (cf. p. 232). I have discussed this reconstruction more fully in M.L.R. xx. 340. Lawrence thinks that the play was written in 1 598 to gratify a popular taste for 'nocturnals', and that Thibbus car' (i. 2. 37) is a gird at Dekker's lost Phatthm of that year.1 This hardly seems to need refutation. He assigns a revision to the Herbert wedding of 1600, and takes the death of learning to be the death of Spenser in 1599. But we have an account of the Herbert wedding, which tells of a mask of eight, not nine, Muses, but of no play.2 Miss Rickert supposes that the play was planned by the Earl of Hertford in 1595, as a political move, en- couraged by the Cecils, in support of his son's claim of succession to the crown; that this son is the changeling (ii. I. 21, 120); that the rival claim of James of Scotland and his offers of marriage to Elizabeth were satirized in Bottom; that Hertford dropped the scheme; and that the play was adapted for the public stage about 1598 by a revision 'by which both the allegory and the satire were
iii. 30*.
362 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
almost obscured'. The notion is worked out with great ingenuity, and is quite incredible. No doubt plays in deri- sion of James were given in England;1 and if the traits of resemblance noted by Miss Rickert seem rather far- fetched, much can be done by make-up. But Hertford and the Cecils could never have conceived that a presentation in which it is Titania who is enamoured of Bottom, rather than Bottom of Titania, would make a satire attractive to Elizabeth. Equally impossible is the assumed adaptation of the discarded skit for theatrical use, since if the allegory and satire are there at all, they are not so far 'obscured' as not to be still apparent, at any rate to Miss Rickert.
But I am breaking a butterfly. It is an amusing com- ment that Midsummer-Night's Dream was probably one of the first plays chosen for revival before James, on i January 1604. *We had', writes Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, *a play of Robin goode-fellow.'2 F only expunges a single profanity (v. i. 326), but it was probably a later revival than that of 1 604 in which Tawyer (cf. supra) played, and there is a curious story (App. D) of what appears to have been yet another for the Sabbath delectation of Bishop Williams in 1631. A common- wealth droll of The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottom the Weaver was printed in 1661 and in Francis Kirkman's Witsy or Sport upon Sport (1672).
There is no comprehensive source. Shakespeare was presumably familiar with fairies and with Robin Good- iellow in Warwickshire folk-lore. There is much of Robin in R. Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), together with a version of the story, as old as Lucian and Apuleius, of transformation into an ass. W. Adlington's translation (1566) of Apuleius was more than once reprinted. There is no ground, other than forgeries (cf. App. F, no. xi, »), for assuming a sixteenth-century version of Robin Good- fellowy his Mad Prankes and Merry Jests, registered on 25 April 1627, or of the ballad of The Mad Merry Prankes efRoten Goodfellow, registered on 23 March 1631. The nature of a play of The King of Fairies, mentioned by
« £&. Stage, i. 323. a #£/. ft. 279.
Chap. IX A MIDSUMMER-NIGHTS DREAM 363
Nashe in 1 589 and Greene in 1592, is unknown.1 Oberon comes ultimately from the romance of Huon of Bordeaux, and an old play with this title was given by Sussex's men in 1593-4 (App. D). Oberon is the fairy king in Greene's James IV? ana Auberon in the Elvetham entertainment. Here the queen is Aureola, and in a Woodstock entertain- ment of 1575 Eambia.3 Ovid, Met. iii. 173, but not his translator Golding, uses Titania as a synonym for Diana. In W. Bettie's Titana and Theseus, registered on 1 3 August 1 608, she is not a fairy, but a mortal princess. A hint for the love-juice might have been taken from Chaucer, Mer- chant's Tale, 2258, where the fairies are Pluto and Proser- pine, or from Montemayor, Diana Enamorada (cf. T.G.). Chaucer's Knightes Tale or North's Plutarch (1579) would furnish the Theseus matter, and the Merchant's Tale, 2128, happens also to have one of many allusions to the well- known story of Pyramus and Thisbe. A book of Tefymus and Thesbye' was registered by William Griffith in 1562- 3, but is unknown,4 Nor can statements b)r Warton, H.E.P. iv. 297, and Collier, Stationers' Registers, ii. 80, that it was printed for Thomas Racket, be verified. T. More, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (Tottell, 1553), has an engraved representation of the story on its title- page, which can hardly have been originally designed for that book. It recurs in J, Brende's History of Quintus Curcius (Tottell, 1553), according to Gaedertz 25, who traces it to a German engraving of 1526, which he ascribes to Lucas Cranach. There are some verbal resemblances to Shakespeare'streatmentinapoem by LThomsonin Clement Robinson's Handef ull of Pleasant Delites (i 584). A play on
thethemebyN(athaniel?)R{ichards?) indddLMS. 15227, f . 5 6V, is of seventeenth-century origin. The repertory of a company, possibly of English actors, at NOrdlingen and Rothenburg in 1 604, included a Pyramus and Thisbe* but Herz 79 shows that the story was well known on the Con- tinent, and had been dramatized in Germany by 1601.
« Ibid. iv. 236, 241. 4 Arber, i. 21
» JW<*.iH.330. *MBz. Stage,*
3 Ibid. iii. 402; iv. 66.
364 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
[1 lan
XIII. KING JOHN
1591.] The Troublesome Raigne of lohn King of Eng- nd, with the discouerie of King Richard Cordelions Base sonne (vulgarly named, The Bastard Fawconbridge): also the death of King lohn at Swinstead Abbey. As it was (sundry times) publikely acted by the Queenes Maiesties Players, in the honourable Citie of London. [Thomas Orwin's device (McKerrow 273)] Imprinted at London for Sampson Clarke, and are to be solde at his shop, on the backeside of the Royall Exchange. 1591. [Head-title, under ornament with Stationers' arms and W. D., and Running-title'] The troublesome Raigne of King lohn.
[1591.] The Second part of the troublesome Raigne of King lohn, conteining the death of Arthur Plantaginet, the landing of Lewes, and the poysning of King lohn at Swinstead Abbey. As it was (sundry times) publikely acted by the Queenes Maiesties Players, in the honourable Citie of London. [Ornament] Imprinted at London for Sampson Clarke, and are to be solde at his shop, on the backeside of the Royall Exchange. 1591. [Head-titley under ornament as in Part i] The Second part of the troublesome Raigne of King lohn, containing the en- traunce of Lewes the French Kings sonne: with the poysoning of King lohn by a Monke. [Running-title'] The troublesome Raigne of King lohn. Facsimiles. C. Praetorius (1888, Sh. Q. xi, xli, ed. F. J. Furnivall)j
Modern Edition. F. J. Furnivall and J. Munro (i 9 1 3, Sh. Classics). [1611.] The First and second Part of the troublesome Raigne of John King of England. ... As they were (sundry times) lately acted by the Queenes Maiesties
Players. Written by W. Sh Valentine Simmes for
lohn Helme 1611.
[Separate head-tide for Part ii, but continuous signatures.] [1622.] The First and second Part of the troublesome " -'- ne of John King of England. ... As they were
Chap. IX KING JOHN 365
(sundry times) lately acted. Written by W. Shakespeare. . . . Aug. Mathewes for Thomas Dewe . . . 1622. [Separate tp. for Part ii, but continuous signatures. Dewe seems (Arber, iv. 190) to have had some partnership with John Helme, who died in 1616.]
[1623.] [Catalogue] The Life and Death of King John [Histories, pp. 1-22; sign. a-b5v. Head- and Running- titles'] The life and death of King John. [Acts and sec. marked, with iv repeated for v (altered in modern editions).]
Parallel-Text. A, Morgan (1892, Bankside, xviii).
Modern Editions. F. G. Fleay (1878); G. C. Moore Smith (1900,
Warwick)\ I. B. John (1907, Ardm}\ H. H. Furness, jun. (1919,
New Variorum^ S. T. Williams (1927, Tale).
Dissertations. E. Rose, Sh. as an Adapter (1878, Macmtilan's Mag^
G. H. E. Kopplow, Sis K.J. und seine Quelle (1900); G. C. Moore
Smith, Bh's K.J. and tie T.R. (1901, Furnivall Misc. 335); A. Kerrl,
Die Metritchen Unterschiede von Shs K.J. und J.C. (1913); F. Lieber-
mann, Si. als Bearbeiter des K.J. (1921-2, Arckiv, cxlii. 177; cxliii. 17,
190).
The bibliographical entries up to 1622 relate to the source-play, The Troublesome Reign of King John,1 but the absence of King John from the S.R. entry for Fi suggests that, like Taming of the Shrew, it was regarded as com- mercially identical with its predecessor. Sampson Clarke is not traceable as a publisher beyond 1598, and it may be that thereafter T.R. was a derelict, and that neither John Helme nor Thomas Dewe could claim copyright against the F stationers. F is fairly well printed, with normal slight stage-directions. There are some variations in the speech-prefixes. 'Actus Secundus' has only y^-lines, at the end of which Constance is left on the stage. But the following iii. I. I gives her a fresh entry. Modern editors attempt to cure this by turning *Scaena Secunda' of F's 'Actus Primus* into ii and merging F's 'Actus Secundus' in iii. I. It is not satisfactory. The juncture at iii. i. 75 is very abrupt, and i in its turn is reduced to 276 lines. Possibly an original ii. 2 has been cut.
1 Efa. Stage, iv. 23.
366 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
There is practically no external evidence to fix the date of the play before its mention by Meres in 1598. T.R. was available in print by 1591. Basilisco (i. i. 244) is in Soliman and Perseda (c. 1589-92). Little stress can be laid on suggestions that the Lopez plot of 1594 (cf. s.v. M.F.) recalled the poisoning of John, that repeated references (ii. i. 335; v. i. 17; v. 2. 48; v. 4. 53) to tempests and inundations reflect the weather of the same year (cf. s.v, M.N.D.), and that the 'choice of dauntless spirits' in 'English bottoms* (ii, i. 7 2) made its appearance at the Cadiz expedition of 1 596 ; perhaps not much more upon a possible echo of the death of Hamnet Shakespeare (August 1596) in Constance's laments for Arthur. The Arden editor speaks of a papal bull of 1596 as .making regicide 'meritorious' (iii. i . 1 76). He must have misread Malone's reference to the bull of 1 570. There was another in 1 58 8, the terms of which are unknown. On internal grounds, however, the winter of 1596-7 is not an unlikely date for the play. It has a general stylistic resemblance to Richard II, and is sometimes dated before it, on the ground that Shakespeare would not break the sequence of the Lancastrian tetralogy with another historic play. But Richard II belongs to the experiment in lyric drama, which the comparative paucity of rhyme in King John shows to have been abandoned, although its aftermath in an ab- stinence from double endings (cf. p. 268) is shared with i Henry IV. There are some fairly close phrasal echoes with Merchant of Venice. Kerrl regards i as written some time before the rest, and iii, 2, 3 and iv. i as revised con- siderably later; but this is on the basis (cf. p. 266) of verse-tests, which- cannot be safely applied to sections of no more than 276 and 216 blank-verse lines. There are certainly more double endings in i than elsewhere, but this is due to the constant recurrence of the words 'brother', 'mother*, 'father* in final positions during the Bastard episode, and this is for emphasis on the theme, rather than for variety of rhythm. There is no evidence of a Jacobean revival. One can hardly suppose with W. W. Lloyd that *Now these her princes are come home again' (v/7. 115)
Chap. IX KING JOHN 367
refers to the return of Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham from Spain in 1623.
The principal source was T.R. which is followed pretty closely as regards historical events, the selection of scenes, and even the logical run of many of the dialogues. The writing itself is all new, but Shakespeare must have kept the old book before him. Only one line (v. 4. 42) is in common, but in some 150 places a few words from T.R. are picked up and used, by no means always in the saine context. Where the structure is altered, there is generally a dramatic intention. There is less comedy. Although T.R. is in two parts, King John is only shorter by about 300 lines. Shakespeare does not appear to have made any substantial use of chronicles. But some trifling variations from T.R. may be due to these. And somehow Shakespeare came to say (iv. 2. 120) that Eleanor died on April i. That is an historic fact, but was not in any available chronicle. Liebermann suggests that Shakespeare saw it in a calendar at the Earl of Southampton's house of Beaulieu, where Eleanor founded an abbey. But I incline to think, with Moore Smith, that he arrived at it by accident, having noticed April i as the date of a meteor, recorded by Holinshed on the same page as the death*
There is nothing to bear out the suggestion of Pope that T.R. itself was by Shakespeare and William Rowley.1 Malone ascribed it to Marlowe, Sykes, Sidelights on Sh^ 99, has made out a fair case for Peele, largely on the ground of small recurrent tricks of padding, which are more evidential (cf. p. 221) than echoes. The strong nationalist and anti-papal tone is consistent with Peele. Robertson, Introduction, 278, 400, weakens some details of the case, and argues for Marlowe in the stronger pas- sages, finding also some inconclusive 'clues' to Greene and Lodge.
1 Var. acr. 193.
368 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
XIV. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
[S.R. 1598.] xxij° Julij. James Robertas. Entred for his copie vnder the handes of bothe the wardens, a booke of the Marchaunt of Venyce, or otherwise called the Jewe of Venyce, Prouided, that yt bee not prynted by the said James Robertes or anye other whatsoeuer without lycence first had from the Right honorable the lord Chamberlen vjd (Arber, iii. 122).
[S.R. 1600.] 28 Octobris. Thomas Haies. Entred for his copie under the handes of the Wardens and by Consent of master Robertes. A booke called the booke of the merchant of Venyce vjd. (Arber, iii. 175).
[Qi. 1600.] The most excellent Historic of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreamecrueltie of Shylockethe lewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his flesh: and the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests. Asithathbeenediuers times acted by the Lord Cham- berlaine his Seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. [Ornament] At London, Printed by I(ames) R(oberts) for Thomas Heyes, and are to be sold in Paules Church- yard, at the signe of theGreeneDragon. 1600. [Head-title] The comicall History of the Merchant of Venice. [Running- title] The comicall Historic of the Merchant of Venice. [Cited by Cambridge and other eds. as Q2.] Facsimile. C. Praetorhis (1887, Sh. Q. xvi, ed. F. J. Furnivall). [Q2. 1619.] The Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreme cruelty of Shylocke the lew towards the saide Merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his flesh. And the obtaining of Portia, by the choyse of three Caskets. Written by W. Shakespeare. [William Jag- gard's device (McKerrow 283)] Printed by J. Roberts, 1600. [Head-title, under ornament with royal arms] The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice. [Running- title] The Comicall History of the Merchant of Venice. [Cited by Cambridge and other eds. as Qi. On the misdating cf. P- 1330 Facsimile. W. Griggs (1880, Sh. Q. vii, ed. F. J. Furnivall).
Chap. IX THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 369
[S.R. 1619.] 8° Julxj 1619. Laurence Hayes. Entred for his Copies by Consent of a full Court theis two Copies following which were the Copies of Thomas Haies his fathers viz*. A play Called The Marchant of Venice, . . . (Arber, iii. 651).
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] The Merchant of Venice. [Comedies, pp. 1 63-84, sign. O 4-$ ^\ Head- and Run- ning-titles] The Merchant of Venice. [Acts marked.]
[Q3- l637-] M. P. for Laurence Hayes. ['Actors' names' <Dramatis Personae) on back of t.p.J [£4. 1652.] for William Leake. [Sheets of Q3 reissued.]
[S.R, 1657, Oct. 17.] Transfer from Bridget Hayes and Jane Graisby to William Leake (Eyre, ii. 150). Parallel-Text. W. Reynolds (i 888, Banhide^ Qi+Fi). Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (1888, New Variorum}-, C K. Pooler (1905, 1927, Arden}\ W. L. Phelps (1923, Tale}\ A. T. Quiller-Couch and J. D. Wilson (1926, C.t7,P.).
Dissertations K. Elze, Zum M.7. (1871, J. vi, 129; Essays, 67); L. Toulmin Smith, The Bond-Story in M.V. (1875, N.S.S. Trans. 181); S. Lee, The Original of Shy lock (i 880, Gent. Mag.), Elizabethan* England and the Jews (1888, N.S.S. Trans. 143); H. Graetz, Shytock in den Sagen, in den Dramen, und in der Geschichte (1880); J. Bolte, Jakob Rosefeldfs Moschus (i 886, J. xxi. 1 87), Der Jude von Fenetien (i 887, J. xxii. 1 89), ZurShylockfabel( 1 892, J. xxvii. 22 5); W. A. Clouston, Shylockandhis Pre- decessors (1887, June 1 8, Aug. 6, Academy)\ E. K6ppel, M.7. (1892, E.S. xvi- 372); J- W. Hales, $L and the Jews (1894, E.H.R. ix. 652); A. Dimock, The Conspiracy of Dr. Lopez (1894, E.H.R. ix. 440); E. Moiy, Ms Jude von Malta und Shs M.7. (1897); R. Eberstadt, Der Shylock- vertrag und sein Urbild (1908, J. xliv. i); F. Brie, 2ur Entstehung des M.7. (1913, J. xlix. 97); B. A. P. van Dam, The Text of M.7. (1927, Neophilologus, xiii. 33); A. Tretiak, M.7. and the Alien Question (1929, R.E.S. v. 402).
Qi is a good text, and requires very little emendation, so far as the wording goes, except for a few literal misprints. A bad one at iv. i . 73-4 was corrected while sign. (£4 was being printed off and does not appear in all examples. Some departures from Qi in modern editions are due to
3X42.1 B b
370 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
the erroneous belief of the Cambridge editors that Q2 was the earlier version. The mislineations are slight, and generally caused by a wrong treatment of short lines. The author's intention as regards elisions seems, as a rule, to be carefully regarded. The punctuation is less good; full stops or colons are occasionally omitted or inserted in error. There are some odd typographical features. A tem- porary shortage of type may perhaps explain the-frequent appearance of lower-case initials at the beginnings of lines. It is difficult to believe, with Van Dam, in an aberration through which the compositor followed the minuscules which he probably found in his copy. There is a variant use of roman and italic types for stage-directions. These are normal. One entry and several exits are left unmarked. A theatrical hand has probably added some definition, glossing, for example (ii. 5. i), 'Enter lewe and his man that was' with the final words 'the Clowne'. Lancelot is often 'Clowne' and Shylock 'Jew' in stage-directions and speech-prefixes. Wilson, who generally finds evidence of revision in such variants, here suggests the type-shortage as the cause, but the feature is common (cf, p. 232) in Shakespearean texts. Abbreviated speech-prefixes have led to some confusion among minor characters of similar names. Wilson may be right in thinking that Shakespeare only provided a Solanio and a Salerio, and that a Salarino has emerged from the confusion. The 'Dramatis Per- sonae* of the 1637 Q include Salanio and Salarino, but not Salerio* This may only rest on inference from the stage-directions. There is some irregularity in the use of speech-prefixes before and after letters and inscriptions read (cf. p. 198) from 'scrolls'. I see no clear reason why the copy used for Qi should not have been in Shake- speare's hand. The features just described seem charac- teristic of him, and the compositor has passed some abno'rmal spellings analogous to those (cf. p. 1 87) in other plays. I do not, therefore, find sufficient evidence for the element of 'assembling' in Wilson's elaborate reconstruc- tion of the textual history of the play. As pointed out by Greg, the phrase 'A booke called the booke of in the S.R.
Chap. IX THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 371
entry of 28 October 1 600 suggests the use of official copy from the theatre.1
Pollard, F. and Q. 98> and Wilson have sufficiently shown that Q2 and F were set up independently from Qi. Some misprints have in both cases been corrected and others made, and in both cases there has been some attempt at a revision of stage-directions and speech-pre- fixes, and at conjectural emendation, generally erroneous, of sense, grammar, metre, and spelling. I do not know that most of this is beyond a printing-house corrector, and Jaggard is not very likely to have had access in 1619 to theatrical manuscripts. But the Qi used for F prob- ably represented prompt-copy. Musical notes have been added. Two profanities (i. 2. 121; v. i. 157) have been removed, and the substitution (i. 2. 83) of an 'other' for a 'Scottish' lord points to Jacobean censorship. What is more puzzling is that some of the Q2 and F alterations agree, and that a few of these are not very likely to have been independently arrived at. Possibly the corrector of F glanced from time to time at a copy of Q2 preserved in Jaggard's printing-house.
I return to Wilson's reconstruction. This I have dis- cussed more fully in M.L.R. xxii. 220. It involves (a) the prompt-book of The Jew (v. infra) ; (£) several probable intermediate handlings by various dramatists; (r) a revi- sion by Shakespeare early in 1594; 00 ^e addition of a passage after the execution of Lopez in June 1594; (i) a further revision by Shakespeare at an unknown date; (/) the presumable loss of the prompt-book; (g) the tran- scription by one scribe of the dialogue from players' 'parts', with abbreviated speech-prefixes to form a new prompt-book; (K) the addition of stage-directions by an- other scribe; (*) the insertion of theatrical interpolations.
I agree with Greg and Wilson that v. i. 34-48 is prob- ably a theatrical interpolation in the interests of the clown, disclosed by the misplacement of a catchword intended to connect it with the text. But its existence hardly justifies the assumption that one (iii. 2. 216) of several indelicacies
» 4 Library, vii. 384$ cf. p. 97* Bb2
372 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
is also an interpolation, and still less the treatment by Wilson of iii. 5, with its beautiful laudation of Portia from Jessica's mouth, as a scene in which 'Shakespeare had no hand whatever'. Nor do I find adequate evidence for the supposed double recension by Shakespeare, either in the fact that the mask planned in u. iv-vi is^never given; or in the obscurity as to the cause of Antonio's melancholy, which to me as to Wilson seems sufficiently explained by his prevision of the loss of a friend through marriage; or in the frequent short lines, which are all, except possibly ii. 6. 46, intelligible enough without recourse to the sup- position of cuts.
As to the date of the play, there is not much external evidence to go upon. Some reference to the execution of the Jew Roderigo Lopez on 7 June 1 594 for the attempted poisoning of Elizabeth and of Don Antonio of Portugal (confused by Lee 134 and others with Antonio Perez) is probable; especially, as Wilson points out, in the Pytha- gorean description (iv. I. 134) of Shylock as inhabited by the spirit of a wolf (lupus) 'hang'd for human slaughter'.1 But the analogy of Shylock to Lopez is not very close, and there is obviously little, beyond the name, between the Merchant and Don Antonio. There may also be an allusion (iii. 2. 49) to the coronation of Henri IV on 27 February 1594, although presumably every coronation has its flourish. In any case such allusions are not neces- sarily quite contemporary. On the other hand, the Gobbo of the play seems likely to have inspired two malicious references by Francis Davison in letters of 1596 to an unnamed enemy of the Earl of Essex, who can only be the hunch-backed Robert Cecil.2 On October 27 he writes, 'If he be vanquished ... all the world shall never make me confess, but that bumbasted legs are a better fortification than bulwarks, and S* Gobbo a far greater and more omnipotent saint than either S* Philip or S1 Diego'. And on November 10 he writes, evidently with reference to Cecil's appointment as Secretary of State, of 'the late
1 Cf. Donne, Progress of the Soul, 401.
2 T. Birch, Elizabeth, ii. 185, 204.
Chap. IX THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 373
instalment and canonisation of the venerable saint'. If I am right, Merchant of Venice can hardly be later than the autumn of 1 596, although of course it might have furnished Cecil's nickname some time before. On general grounds of style and links with other plays and the Sonnets^ the autumn of 1 596 is a very probable date for the play, which is certainly more mature than the comedies of i $94-5. There was a revival for the court in the winter of 1 604-5 (App- D)» The two main elements of the plot, .the bond-motive and the casket-motive, have been traced as old and wide- spread story themes. So far as the bond-motive is con- cerned, it is unnecessary to go farther back, in seeking an ultimate source for Merchant of Venice^ than // Pecorone, iv. i, of Ser Giovanni of Florence, written c. 1378, but first printed in 1558. This combines the lover and his older friend, the wooing of a lady at Belmont, the friend's bond to a Jew for a pound of flesh, the intervention of the lady dressed as a lawyer, and the ring begged as a fee. It does not bring in the theft of the usurer's daughter, which is, however, found in another bond story, yielding several points of resemblance to Shakespeare's, in Anthony Mun- day's Zelauto (1580). And the test by which the lady is won is other than that of the casket-motive. This may have been substituted from the 66th story of Richard Robinson's version, apparently first printed in 1577, of the Gesta Romanorum.1 Possibly Shakespeare did not him-
self link the two themes. Stephen Gosson's Schoole of Abuse (1$ 7 9) mentions a 'lew . . . showne at the Bull . . . representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers, and bloody mindes of usurers: . , . neither with amorous gesture wounding the eye : nor with slouenly talke hurting the eares of the chast hearers'.2 We know no more of this
There may conceivably be an allusion to it in fcreene's Mamlttia (1583), 32, 'He which makethchoyce of bewty without vertue commits as much folly as Critius did, in choosing a golden boxe filled with rotten bones' ; and less probably, in view of the date, in a letter (c. 1573)
1 S. J. H. Herrage, Early English a Etiz. Stage, iv. 204. Versions of the G.R. xxii.
374 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
of Gabriel Harvey to Edmund Spenser, describing him- self as 'He that is faste bownde unto the in more obliga- tions then any marchante in Italy to any Jewe there'.1 There is of course nothing to show that Merchant of Venice had any closer relation to the Jew than that of theme. As it stands, it certainly does not justify the ethical com- mendation of the puritan Gosson. Wilson does not go far towards establishing a textual continuity between plays of different companies, fifteen or twenty years asunder, with several probable intermediate handlings by various dramatists, by pointing to a Shakespearean inconsistency as to the number of Portia's wooers, to another as to the precise political effect which a refusal of justice to Shylock would have upon the state of Venice, and to the presence in the play of a scrap of doggerel and some passages of inferior workmanship. There are traces of euphuism in i. 2, but so there are elsewhere in Shakespeare.
Merchant of Venice probably owes something to the Jew of Malta, but nothing to Wager's Cruel Debtor* or to Gerontus the Jew and the Mercatore in R. Wilson's Three Ladies of London,* or to the bond-story in the ballad of the Northern Lord.* There are some verbal parallels in that of Gernutus.* Whether this is the 'ballad called the vserers rewarde* registered on 19 June 1594 must be uncertain.6 Those in the 9^th declamation? of The Orator (1596), a translation by L(azarus) P(iot) from the Histoires Tra- giques (1588) of Alexandra Vandenbushe or Sylvain, are very slight, and it is doubtful whether the translation, which had still to be made when the book was registered on 1 5 July 1 596, is not later than Merchant of Venice itself.8 Piot was at one time identified with Anthony Munday, but H. Thomas, Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry (1920), has distinguished them. An earlier and apparently only partial translation of the Histoires Tra- giques by E. A. was registered on 25 August 1590, but is
1 G. Harvefs Letter-Book, 78. » Jttf. i. x. 375.
* Arber, ii. 654.
.,...* , . .
EB*. Stop, Si. 515. * Hazlitt, $h. Library, i. i. 355.
Haditt, Si. Library, i. i. 367. * Arber, iil 67.
Chap. IX THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 375
unknown.1 The names Shylock (cormorant) and Jessica (looker-out) are shown by Gollancz to be of Hebrew origin. Gobbo is traceable as a family name at Titchfield, Hants.2
English actors in Germany, probably the company of John Green, played The Jew or The Jew of Venice at Passau (1607), Griz (1608), Halle (161 1), and Joseph the Jew of Venice at Dresden (i626).3 Possibly this is also the play called at Gr£z A King of Cyprus and a Duke of Venice^ and in part at least the foundation of a later German play by the actor Christopher Bliimel (born 1630) of which MSS. are at Vienna and Karlsruhe. This contains elements from both Merchant of Venice and Jew of Malta, but cannot be called a version of either. A King of Cyprus, a Duke of Venice, a Venetian Jew, called both Barabbas and Josephus, and a French Doctor are among the charac- ters. It must remain uncertain whether the compilation also drew upon Dekker's lost Jew of Venice^ registered on 9 September i6$3,4 and whether this bore any relation to the Admiral's play or plays of the Venetian Comedy and the French Doctor in 1 594.5 But it is safe to say that no ground has been shown for the suggestion of Fleay, L. and W* 30, 1 97, that Merchant of Venice was founded on a Jew of Venice written by Dekker c. 1592,
XV, XVL HENRY THE FOURTH
[Parti]
[S.R. 1598.] xxvto die February. Andrew Wyse. Entred for his Copie vnder thandes of Master Dix: and master Warden Man a booke intituled The historye of Henry the inj* with his battaile of Shrewsburye against Henry Hottspurre of the Northe with the conceipted mirthe of Sir John Ffalstoff vjd (Arber, iii. 105). [H.P. had (Rarities^ 19) a fragment (sign. C, 4 leaves) of an edition which he thought earlier than Qi. It is now in the collection of H. C. Folger (Bartlett 25).]
x Ibid. ii. 560. 3 Etiz. Stage, ii. 281.
* L. G. Thompson in T.LJS. 17 4 Ibid. iii. 301. Sept. 1925. s Cf. Greg, Henslowe, ii. 170.
3?6 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
[Qi. 1598.] The History of Henrie the Fourth; With the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the King and Lord Henry- Percy, surnamed Henrie Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir lohn Falstalffe, [Short's device (McKerrow 278)] At London, Printed by P(eter) S(hort) for Andrew Wise, dwelling in Paules Church- yard, at the signe of the Angell 1598. [Head-title] The Historic of Henry the fourth. [Running-title'] The Historic of Henrie the fourth. Facsimile. W. Griggs (1881, Sh. Q. viii, ed. H. A. Evans).
[Q2. 1599.] The History of Henrie the Fourth; With the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henry Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir lohn Falstaffe. Newly corrected by W, Shake-speare. [Stafford's device (Mc- Kerrow 281)] At London, Printed by S(imon) S(taf- ford) for Andrew Wise, dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the Angell. 1599. [Head- and Running- titles] The Historic of Henry the fourth.
[S,R. 1603.] 25 Junij. Mathew Lawe. Entred for his copie in full courte Holden this Day. These ffyve copies followinge . . . viz iii enterludes or playes . . . The Third of Henry the .4 the first parte. all kinges ... all whiche by consent of the Company are sett ouer to him from Andrew Wyse (Arber, iii. 239).
[Q3. 1604.] The History of Henrie the fourth, With the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the King, and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henry Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir lohn Falstaffe. Newly corrected by W. Shake-speare. [Ornament] London Printed by Valentine .Simmes, for Mathew Law, and are to be solde at his shop in Paules Churchyard, at the signe of the Fox. 1604. [Head- an4 Running-titles] The His- toric of Henry the fourth.
[£4. 1608.] The History of Henry the Fourth, With the battell at Shrewesburie, betweene the King, and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henry Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceites of Sir lohn Falstalffe. Newly
Chap. IX HENRY THE FOURTH 377
corrected by W. Shake-speare. [Ornament] London, Printed for Mathew Law, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules Churchyard, neere vnto S. Augustines gate, at the signe of the Foxe, 1608. [Head-title] The Historic of Henry the fourth. [Running-title'] The History of Henrie the fourth.
[Q£. 1613.] The History of Henrie the fourth, With the Battell at Shrewseburie, betweene the King, and Lord Henrie Percy, surnamed Henrie Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceites of Sir lohn Falstaffe. Newly corrected by W. Shake-speare. [White's device (McKer- row i88b)] London, Printed by W(illiam) W(hite> for Mathew Law, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules Church-yard, neere vnto S. Augustines Gate, at the signe of the Foxe. 1613. [Head-title'] The Historic of Henrie the fourth. [Running-title] The Historic of Henry the fourth. [Q6. 1622.] T(homas) P(urfoot) for Mathew Law.
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] The First part of King Henry
the fourth. [Histories, pp. 46-73, sign, d 5v-f 6. Head-title]
The First Part of Henry the Fourth, with the Life and
Death of Henry Sirnamed Hotspur. [Running-title] The
First Part of King Henry the Fourth.
[Acts and sec. marked.]
[Q?- J632'] lohn Norton, sold by William Sheares.
[Q8. 1639.] John Norton, sold by Hugh Perry.
Parallel-Text. W. H. Fleming (1890, Bankside).
Modern Editions. R. P. Cowl and A. E. Morgan (1914, 1923,
Arderi)\ S. B. Hemingway (1917, Yah}.
\PartII]
[S.R. 1600.] 23 Augusti. Andrew Wyse William Aspley. Entred for their copies vnder the handes of the wardens Two bookes, the one called . . . Thother the second parte of the history of Kinge Henry the mf* with the humours of Sir John Falstaff: Wrytten by master Shakespere. xijd (Arber, iii. 170).
378 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
[Q. 1600.] The Second part of Henrie the fourth, con- tinuing to his death, and coronation of Henrie the fift. With the humours of sir lohn Falstaffe, and swaggering Pistoll. As it hath been sundrie times publikely acted by the right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. [Ornament] London Printed by V(alentine) S(immes) for Andrew Wise, and William Aspley. 1600. [Head-title] The second part of Henry the fourth, continuing to his death, and corona- tion of Henry the fift. [Running-title] The second part of Henry the fourth.
[In some examples a cancel sheet E, with six leaves in place of four,
adds iii. I, originally omitted.]
Facsimile. W. Griggs (1882, Sk. Q. ix, ed. H. A. Evans).
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue'] The Second part of K. Henry
the fourth. [Histories, pp. 74-100+2 pp. unnumbered,
sign.f6v-gg8v. Head-title] The Second Part of Henry the
Fourth, Containing his Death: and the Coronation of King
Henry the Fift. [Running-title] The second Part of King
Henry the Fourth.
[Acts and sec ^ marked. ^ The Actors Names' at end. Pollard,
^•0* X3^j Scribes some irregularities in the printing.]
Parallel-Text. W. H. Fleming (1890, Bankside).
Modern Editions. S. B. Hemingway (1921, Tah)\ R. P. Cowl
[Parts I and II] Dering MS.
[A compilation, in a seventeenth-century hand, of scenes from Q5 of Part i and Q of Part 2, probably for private performance, with alterations in the hand of Sir Edward Bering (1598-1644) of Surrenden, Kent, where the MS. was found.] Edition. J. O. Halliwell-[Phillipps] (1845, Sh. Soc.). Dissertations. ]. Gairdner, Historical Elements in SA.'s Falstaff (1873, Fortnightly)^ K. Hagena, Remarks on the Introductory Scene of 2 Hen. 17 (1878, tt*A Tram. 347); F. Solly-Flood, The Story of Prince Henry of Monmouth and Chief- Justice Gascoign(i%*6, 2 R.Hist.Soc. 7JwRf.iii.47); G. Sanazm, Falstaff, Pistol, Nym und ihre Urbilder (1902, Kleine SL Studien}9Nym.undBenJ<mson (1904, 7,xl.2i2); F. W. Moorman, SL9s History Plays and Daniel's Civile Wars (1904, J. xl. 69); W. Baeske, Oldcastle-Falstaff in der engtttchen Literatur bis zu SA. (1905); L. W.
Chap. IX HENRY THE FOURTH 379
Harcourt, The Two Sir John Fa/staffs (1910, 3 R. Hist. Soc. Trans, iv. 50); C. L. Kingsford, The First English Life of Henry ^(1911); H. Ax, The Relation of Sh.'s Hen. 17 to Holinshed (19 1 2) ; A. W. Pollard, The Parian* Settings in 2 Hen. IV and their Spellings (1920, Oct. 21, T.L.S.)\ J. Monaghan, Falsta/ and his Forbears (1921, S.P. xviii. 353); A. E. Morgan, Some Problems of Sh.'s Hen. 7^(1924,^.^1.); R. P. Cowl, Some Literary Allusions in Hen.IV(i<)2$9 Mar. 26, T.L.S.), Echoes of Henry IV in Eliz. Drama (1925, Oct. 22, T.L.S.), Some Echoes in Eliz. Drama of Hen. 7/^(1926), Hen. IV and Other Plays: an Experiment with Echoes (1927), Notes on the Text of Hen. 7/^(1927), Sources of the Text of Hen. IV (1929); J. E. Morris, The Date of Hen. 7^(1926, Jan. 28, T.L.S.); W. G. Bowling, The Wild Prince Hal in Legend and Literature (1926, Washington Univ. Studies, xiii. 305); R. A. Law, Structural Unity in the two Parts of Hen. 7/^(1927, S.P. xxiv. 223); J. Dawtrey, The Falstaff Saga (1927).
The successive Qq and Fi of Part i are regularly set up from each other, with the usual misprints and conjec- tural alterations. Nothing more than these justifies the 'Newly corrected* of the Q2 title-page. The Cambridge editors thought that Qq earlier than Q$ were probably consulted for Fi, but the few cases in which F seems to revert to these are all capable of explanation as conjec- tures. Profanity has, however, been excised from Fi with exceptional thoroughness. The normal stage-directions of Q i are preserved by F I . Q I is therefore the sole authority for the text. This is somewhat rough metrically, owing partly to the difficulty of manipulating proper names, and partly to misprints as to elisions and the like, which editors might perhaps emend more freely than they do.
The Q and Fi of Part 2, on the other hand, although representing substantially the same text, show much greater variation in detail. The Q stage-directions are normal, and some disagreements (i. i . i , 34, 1 6 1 ; i. 3 . i ; ii. 4. 2 1 ; iv. 3. 27, 8 1 ; iv. 4. i) between stage-directions and text as to the personages introduced are best explained as the result of changes of intention by the author during composition. Thus in i. I. Lord Bardolf has replaced Sir John Umfreville through a belated historical correction, not fully carried out. There are some abnormal spellings, such as 'Scilens' for 'Silence*, which may also (cf. p. 187) point to the author's hand. The MS. has probably been used as prompt-copy, since at v. 4. i the name of the
38o PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
actor Sincklo is given to the Beadle whom he played. When Q was first set up, iii. i was omitted, and Pollard's
employed in partly resetting sheet E with two additional leaves to allow of its introduction* Some examples of Q retain the unrevised sheet. Slighter corrections are also found in other sheets. The main differences between Q and F are as follows. There are many small textual variants. These do not indicate constant subconscious substitutions, such as some plays (cf. p. 180) exhibit. Many look like alternative readings of a difficult copy, and many like sophistications in F or wording and grammar. Some short lines are perhaps needlessly filled out. Pro- fanity has again been meticulously removed. There are several passages, aggregating 168 lines, not in Q (i. i. 166-79, 189-209; i. 3. 21-4, 36-55, 85-108; ii. 3. 23-45 ; iv. i. 55-79, 103-39), and as the absence of some of these leaves lacunae in the sense, they may all be taken as 'cuts' in Q. On the other hand, F omits about forty lines found in Q. These are mostly short passages not likely to be cuts. They are probably not all to be explained in the same way. Some may be due to slips of the F printer, and others (i. 1. 161 ; iii. i. 53-6 ; iv. i. 93, 95) to emendation. But a few suggest that the censorship of profanity has been extended to passages of indelicacy (ii. 1. 126-7; "• 2. 26— 30; ii. 4. 159-62; iii. 2. 337-9, 340-3) and in one case (i. 2. 240-7) anti-patriotic criticism. They are not suffi- ciently detached from their contexts to be 'gags' in Q, The F stage-directions and speech-prefixes show, unlike those of Part 2, careful revising, with close attention totheindica-. tions of the text, although with some slips, e.g. the omis- sion of an exit and re-entry at iii. 2. 234, 258. 'Suggestive* stage-directions and non-speaking personages have been eliminated and entries unmarked in Q added. It seems clear that Ffollows inthemain a theatrical manuscript. This may, indeed, have been thesamemanuscriptwhich was used for Q, but if so it had undergone subsequent overhauling by the book-keeper, and the intention of Q must have been to observe, and that of F to disregard, the cuts shown upon
Chap. IX HENRY THE FOURTH 381
it. It is not equally clear that no use was made of Q in printing F, There are several cases of common error, which would at least be consistent with such use. But these, between F and a single Q, have not the evidential value which attaches to common errors between F and the derivative Qq of other plays.
Morgan thinks that, apart from the 'cuts' in the Q of Part 2, both parts have been abridged. His evidence for this consists mainly of short lines. So far as Part i is con- cerned, the explanation is quite superfluous; but Part 2 has some abrupt short lines, left imperfectly corrected by F, in the King's speech at iv. 5. 60-82. However this may be, I cannot (cf. p. 233) accept Morgan's further view that the prose scenes have been rewritten from an earlier metrical version, at the time when Shakespeare substituted Sir John Falstaff as his leading humorist for Sir John Oldcastle. As to the fact of this substitution there can be no doubt. Tradition from as early as about 1625 (App. C, nos. i, iv, v, xxxiv) records it, and it has left traces in the texts. In Part i, it has left the jesting address 'my old lad of the Castle* (i. 2. 47) pointless,, and ii. 2. 115 unmetrical. In Part 2, Old. still stands for Fal as speech-prefix to i, 2. 137 in Q, and the Epilogue, originally short, as the prayer for the Queen left in error by Q at the end of the first paragraph shows, has been extended by two other paragraphs, of which one intro- duces a dance, and the other an apology, 'Olde-castle died Martyre, and this is not the man'. F completes the revision, by transferring the prayer to the end of the third paragraph. There is an echo in the rival Admiral's play of i Sir John Oldcastk,1 produced in November 1599, where the prologue has — '
It is no pamperd glutton we present,
Nor aged Councilor to youthfull sinne,
Let fair Truth be grac'te,
Since forg'de inuention former time defac'te.
A reason for the change can readily be found in the fact that Sir John Oldcastle married an ancestress of the Lords
1 Etix. Stage, iii. 306.
382 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Cobham, who were prominent at the Elizabethan court. It had clearly been made before Part 2 was registered on 25 February 1598, and almost equally clearly not before the play was originally produced, since 'Oldcastle' lingered in popular usage as the name of the character. Henry IV must have been the Sir John Old Castett with which the Lord Chamberlain entertained an ambassador on 8 March 1600, since the players were his men and not the Admiral's;1 and it is alluded to in Field's Amends for Ladies (1618), iv. 3, as —
The Play where the fat Knight, hight Old-castle, Did tell you truly what his honour was ?
There is a similar reference as late as Hey for Honesty (1651), iv. i, and even in an official document (App. D) the play seems to be called Quid Castel in 1638. Perhaps, therefore, the Cobham intervention came when i Henry IV was specially reviewed by the Revels officers for court performance.2 It may not only have been Oldcastle's name that went. At i. 2. 181 of Part i, Prince Henry's thieving companions are 'Falstaffe, Haruey, Rossill, and Gadshil', and at ii. 4. 193, 195, 199, are speech-prefixes for Ross. F here eliminates him by a conjectural redistribution of speeches, but it is clear from other parts of this scene and from ii. 2 that Bardolph and Peto were among the thieves. In Ettz. Stage, iii. 196, I took Rossill and Harvey for actors' names; wrongly I think, since 2 Hen. IP \ ii. 2. i, has the stage-direction 'Enter the Prince, Poynes, sir lohn Russel, with others'. F substitutes 'Enter Prince Henry, Pointz, Bardolfe, and Page'. This cannot be right, since Bardolph and the Page enter later at 75. But apparently Peto has replaced Sir John Russell and Bardolph Harvey, with the awkward result of having two Bardolphs in the plays. Both Russell and Harvey were familiar names at the Elizabethan court. Possibly a desire to advertise the purging of the offence led to the publication of j Henry IF unusually soon after its production. This can hardly have been earlier than
'Cf.App.D. * /*/</. i. 224.
Chap. IX HENRY THE FOURTH 383
1597. A few historical allusions, which have been held to a date later than 1596, are indeed unconvincing. But obviously the play was later than Richard //, and its relative maturity of style makes it reasonable to put it after John. And I think that Part 2 must have followed pretty quickly. It is true that Meres' notice in the autumn of 1598 might cover either one or two parts, but Justice Silence is named in Jonson's E.M.O. of I599,1 and the survivals of Oldcastle and Russell suggest that the writing had begun before these names were censored. Cowl's derivation of Pistol's 'Cannibal' for 'Hannibal' (ii. 4. 1 80) from a passage in Brandon's Virtuous Octavia of 1 598 2 has not much weight against this. It may well be originally Pistol's, and echoed both by Brandon and by Jonson in E.M.I. (1598) iii. 4. 53. If I am right as to date, the offended Cobham was probably Henry Brooke, the eighth lord, whose susceptibilities had perhaps also to be consulted in Merry Wives (q.v.), and not his father William, the seventh lord, who was Lord Chamberlain from 8 August 1596 to his death on 5 March 1597. Court revivals of one or other or both parts of the play are traceable (App. D) in 1612-13, c. 1619, 1625, and 1638.
The historical source of Henry 17 was Holinshed's Chronicle. This only touches lightly upon the Prince's youthful wantonness, and for an elaboration of the theme, the introduction of Oldcastle, and the naming of a minor character Gadshill after the scene of his exploits, Shake- speare probably drew upon The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth) an old play of the Queen's men. This was registered on 14 May 1594, but the first extant edition is dated 159 8. 3 The text, wholly in prose, is probably an abridged one, perhaps from a two-part play. But there is little ground for Morgan's theory that the original was in verse, that it passed to the Admiral's men and was pro- duced by them in a revised form, as their Henry ^ of 1 5 9 5-6, and that it was then transferred by them to the Chamber- lain's, and became Shakespeare's source for Henry IV
1 Ibid. iii. 360. * Ibid. iii. 236. * Ibid. iv. 17.
384 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
and Henry V. Conjecture for conjecture, it is much more likely that an edition of the Famous Victories^ as we now know it, was issued about 1594, but is now lost, and that this was used as a source by Shakespeare, and perhaps independently by a writer for the Admiral's. There is no evidence, and little probability, that the Chamberlain's and the Admiral's ever interchanged play-books. I have considered the possible Gloucestershire local colouring of Part i in ch. i. Oldys (App. C, no. xxxiv) has a tradition that Falstaff was drawn by Shakespeare from a Stratford neighbour. Dawtrey would find in him a ruffianly and portly Captain Nicholas Dawtrey, who served in Ireland, and was later a persistent suitor at court. But if Shake- speare wanted a model for his elaboration of a familiar stage type, there must have been many out-at-elbows soldiers of fortune available.
XVIL MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
[S.R. 1600?]
4 August!
* * * * * * * I + 1*. 4> * /4
The Commedie of muche A doo about > ?* ? s aA . N nothing a booke j(Arber, m. 37).
[On the significance of this entry cf. p. 145.]
[S.R. 1 600.] 23 Augusti, Andrew Wyse William Aspley. Entred for their copies vnder the handes of the wardens Two bookes, the one called Muche a Doo about nothinge . . . Wrytten by master Shakespere. xijd. (Arber, iii. 170).
[Q. 1600.] [Ornament] Much adoe about Nothing. As it hath been sundrie times publikely acted by the right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. [Ornament] London Printed by V(alentine) S(immes) for Andrew Wise, and William Aspley. 1600. [Head- and Running-titles] Much adoe about Nothing.
Fac&mle. C Praetorius(i886, Sh. Q. xiv5ed. P, A. Daniel). [Fi, 1623.] [Catalogue'] Much adoo about Nothing.
Chap. IX MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 385
[Comedies, pp. 101-21, sign. I 3~L i, Head- and Running- titles] Much adoe about Nothing. [Acts i, sc. i, ii-v marked.] Parallel-Text. W. H. Fleming (1889, Bankside). Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (1899, New Variorum); F. S. Boas (1916); F. Tucker Brooke (1917, Yale)\ A. T. Quiller- Couch and J. D. Wilson (1923, C.I7.P.); G. R. Trenery (1924, Arden}\ A. G. Newcomer (1929).
Dissertations. J. P. Collier, Dogberry and his Associates (1844, St. Soc. Papers, i. i); A. E. Brae, Collier, Coleridge and Sh. (1860); J. Bolte, Deutsche Ferwandte von Shs M.A. (1886, J.xxi. 310); K. Weichberger, Die Urquelle von Shs MA. (1898, J. xxxiv. 339); G. Sarrazin, Die Abfassungszeit von M.A. (1899, J. xxxv. 127); M. A. Scott, The Book of the Courtyer: a Possible Source for Benedick and Beatrice (1901, PM.LA+ xvi. 475); F. Holleck-Weithmann, Zur Quellenfrage von Shs Lustspiel MA. (1901) ; J. Le G. Brereton, MA. iv. 1. 145-60 (1928, R.E.S. iv. 84).
Q is a good text, with a few abnormal spellings and light punctuation, especially in the prose scenes. A passage (iv. i : . 1 57—60), originally omitted by the compositor and added with difficulty, has crowded the foot of a page. The stage-directions and speech-prefixes are more than usually casual, although the relations of the characters are often indicated. A good many entries and exits are unmarked. Characters are introduced who do not speak (i. i. i, 96, 206; ii. 2. i), and one of these, Innogen, Leonato's wife, occurs twice. Other characters appear with generic instead of personal names; Don John as 'Bastard', Anthonio as 'Old' or 'Brother'. The irregularity is greatest with Dog- berry and Verges. They are so named in iii. 3, and Dogberry is called 'maister Constable'. In iii. 5 they enter as 'the Constable, and the Headborough', and in some of the speech-prefixes Dogberry is 'Const. Dog' or 'Con. Do,'. In v. i they both enter as 'Constables' and are respectively 'Const' and 'Con 2' in speech-prefixes. These scenes remain intelligible. In iv. 2 they also enter as 'the Constables'; in the speech-prefixes Dogberry is variously Andrew (i.e. Clown), 'Kemp', 'Kern', 'Ke', 'Keeper' (a mere misprint), and only once 'Constable' ; Verges is 'Cow- ley', 'Couley', 'Const'. Obviously the names ofactors have been substituted for those of their parts. Wilson thinks
3I42.I C C
386 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
that this was done by Shakespeare who in revising (cf. infra) could not remember the names of his characters. These, however, he must have invented with some pains, and it is more plausible to suppose that he wrote 'Con i' and 'Con 2', and that the book-keeper, finding that in iv. 2 'Con* also stood for Conrade, indicated the actors' names for clarity. He may also have made some additions to the speech-prefixes, notably at ii. i. 89, where a scribbled 'and Balthaser, Bor(achio) dun lohn' has been read by the printer as 'and Balthaser, or dumb lohn'.
F was set up from Q, with a few corrections and more misprints and sophistications, well analysed by Wilson. The example followed must have been used as, or cor- rected by, a prompt-copy, since at ii. 3. 39 the name of a singer 'lacke Wilson' replaces the 'Musicke' of Q. Musical notes have been added at ii. i, 89, 161, and there has been an inadequate and sometimes incorrect revision of stage-directions and speech-prefixes. The elimination of profanity is exceptionally perfunctory; one passage only (iv. 2. 19-22) has gone. The removal of a hit at German and Spanish costume (iii. 2. 34—7) suggests censorship, perhaps at the time (cf. infra) of the Palsgrave's visit in 1612-13.
Much of the stage-direction and speech-prefix con- fusion can be cleared up by realizing that the singer Bal- thaser is also Anthonio's son and Leonato's 'cousin' and kinsman (i. 2. i ; ii. i. i s.-d.), and at i. i. 96 enters, pro- perly enough, as a mute; and that in ii. i Don Pedro dances with Hero, Benedick with Beatrice, Balthaser with Margaret, and Claudio, otherwise unpartnered, with Ursula, while Don John and Borachio look on. But Wilson supposes that old inappropriate stage-directions have survived from an earlier version from Shakespeare's hand, which he has revised by abridging the verse scenes and turning the Benedick and Beatrice matter from verse into prose. This theory, which I cannot accept, is supported by pointing to short lines, which are in tact few and not markedly abrupt; to a very few only of the many deca- syllabic rhvthms which the Drose. as in all Shakesneare's
Chap. IX MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 387
plays of about this date (cf. p. 233), contains; to two possible but not certain traces of alteration in particular passages (iv. i. 157-60; v. i. 106-8); to features of style, such as quatrains, 'reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet and Two Gentlemen of Verona^ which need mean no more than that Shakespeare had not quite abandoned his 'lyrical' manner in comedy; and to some obscurities as to the assignation of Borachio and Margaret, which are in part entailed by the use of a conventional plot-motive, and after all, as Wilson himself says, leave the business 'sufficient for the purpose' of the stage, although it provokes inquiry in the study.
The date of Much Ado about Nothing is pretty closely fixed to the winter of 1598-9, by Kempe's disappearance from the Chamberlain's company (cf. p. 79) early in 1599, and the absence of the play from Meres' list (App. B, no. xiii), unless indeed, which is not likely (cf. p. 272), it is Love Labours Won. With this date the evidence of the style is consistent; it seems to me to be nearest to that of Merchant of Venice. There is little else to take account of. Sarrazin's suggestion that the love- stories reflect those of the Earls of Southampton and Rut- land may safely be disregarded. The passage (iii. i . 9) on —
favourites
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride Against that power that bred it:
has been compared with the arrogance of the Earl of Essex to Elizabeth about July 1598 ; but such a topical allusion would be very dangerous, and the observation may be quite general. There was a Jacobean revival in 1612-13 (App. D), and an allusion by Digges (App. B, no. Iii) shows that the play still held the stage about 1640.
The main theme, of a lover deceived by an impersona- tion of his mistress, has been traced back to the Greek Chaereas and Kallirrhoe of Chariton (c. 400). Less remote sources were available in the story of Timbreo and Fenicia, as given in Matteo Bandello's Novelle (1554), xxii, and translated therefrom in F, de Belleforest's Histoires Tra-
ce
388 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
giqueS) iii (1569), and in that of Ariodante and Genevra in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516), canto v. Probably both were drawn upon, since Belleforest has the names of Peter of Arragon and Leonato and Messina as the locality, but does not, like Ariosto, make the heroine's waiting-maid the decoy. The Orlando was translated by Sir John Harington in 1591, but there had been earlier versions of the Ariodante story, which was used by Spenser in the Faerie Queene (1590), ii. 4, and presumably in the Ario- dante and Genevora given at court by the Merchant Taylors' boys in 158 3.1 It has been thought that the title Panecia of a play, rehearsed and probably given by Leicester's men in 1574, may be an error for Fenicia, and that Bandello's story may have then been dramatized.2 Bandello was also the main source of Jacob Ayrer's Die Schdne Phdnicia (c. 1595), printed in his Opus Theatricum (1618). Ayrer was not uninfluenced by the plays of English travelling companies, but no dramatic link be- tween this piece and Shakespeare's has been established. It has been suggested that the wit-combats of Benedick and Beatrice may have been inspired by those of Gaspare Pallavicino and Emilia Pia in Baldassare Castiglione's // Cortegiano (1528), translated by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561. Aubrey (App. C, no. xiii) says that Shakespeare picked up the humour of the constables in journeying from Stratford to London through Grendon in Bucks, although this is a little off the direct road.
XVIII. HENRY THE FIFTH [S.R. 1600?]
4 August!
• • * . • i
Henry the ffift, a booke \ to be staled (Arber, iii. 37).
• • * • .1
[On the significance of this entry, c£ p. 145.]
[Qi. 1600.] The Chronicle History of Henry the fift,
1 Efa. Stage, iv. 159. a ibid. iv. 149.
Chap. IX HENRY THE FIFTH 389
With his battel fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with Auntient Pistoll. As it hath bene sundry times playd by the Right honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. [Creede's device (McKerrow 299)] London Printed by Thomas Creede, for Tho. Millington, and lohn Busby. And are to be sold at his house in Carter Lane, next the Powle head. 1600. [Head-title] The Chronicle Historic of Henry the fift: with his battel fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with Auncient Pistoll, [Running-title] The Chronicle Historic of Henry the fift. facsimile. C. Praetorius (i 886, Sh. Q. xxvii, ed. A. Symons). Reprints. B. Nicholson (1875, N.S.S.); W. A. Wright (1893, Cambridge Sh. ix. 461).
[S.R. 1600.] 14 Augusti. Thomas Pavyer. Entredforhis Copyes by Direction of master White warden vndcr his hand wrytinge. These Copyes followinge beinge thinges formerlye printed and sett over to the sayd Thomas Pavyer. viz. . . . The historye of Henry the Vth with the battell of Agencourt vjd . . . (Arber, iii. 169).
[Q2. 1602.] The Chronicle History of Henry the fift, With his battell fought at Agin Court in France. To- gether with Auntient Pistoll. As it hath bene sundry times playd by the Right honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. [Creede's device (McKerrow 299)] London Printed by Thomas Creede, for Thomas Pauier, and are to be sold at his shop in Cornhill, at the signe of the Cat and Parrets neare the Exchange. 1602. [Bead-title] The Chronicle Historic of Henry the fift: with his battel fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with Ancient Pistoll. [Running-title'] The Chronicle Historic of Henry the fift.
[Q3- 1619.] [Ornament] The Chronicle History of Henry the fift, with his battell fought at Agin Court in France. Together with ancient Pistoll. As it hath bene sundry times playd by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants. [William Jaggard's device (McKerrow 283)] Printed for T(homas) P(avier) 1608. [Head-title'] The Chronicle Historic of Henry the fift: with his battell fought at Agin Court in France. Togither with
39o PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Ancient Pistoll. [Running-title-] The Chronicle History of Henry the fift. [On the misdating, cf. p. 1 33.]
Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1886, Sh. Q. xxviii, ed. A. Symons). [Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue-] The Life of King Henry the Fift. [Histories, pp. 69 ta-95 ins, sign, h-k 2. Head- and Run- ning-titles-] The Life of Henry the Fift. [Acts i, sc. i, ii-v marked (altered in modern eds.).] Parallel-Texts. B. Nicholson and P. A. Daniel (1877, N.S.S.); H. P. StokesfiSga, Bankside); E. Roman (1908). Modern Editions. W. G. Boswell-Stone (1880, N.S.S.); G. C. Moore Smith (1896, Warwick); H. A. Evans (1903, Jrden); R.D.French(i9i8,r<7/-0.
Dissertations. B. Nicholson, The Relation of the Q « the F of Hen . 7 (1870 NS.S. Traas.77); G.Sarrazin,JVyw undSenJotuon(\y>ip7.^.
*12)?LDW^^
Hi i 3, 241); J- Le G.Brereton, BL's Wild Irishman (1917, ML.R ru. «oV AW Pollard and J. D. Wilson, The 'Stolne and Surreptitious1 Shn. L5 '-' "M>(i9io, Mar. 13, T.L.S.-); K.T. Pri«- The Text of Hen. 7
E. M. Albright, W» F /V»to «/ft PJtfX^.iliii.722)- Fi is a fairly regular text, with few mislineations, except that Pistol's bombastic verse, occurring in prose scenes, is printed as prose. Editors have adopted a good many emendations; in the French and dialectic passages it is not always clear whether an error is a misprint or an intended blunder by a speaker. The stage-directions are normal. There are some summarized entries for crowded scenes, and some musical notes. They may represent prompt- copy, contributed to by author and book-keeper.
Qa and Qs were probably set up independently from Qi, since £3 reverts to many Qi readings altered by Q2. The common divergences of Q2 and Q3 from Qi are limited to corrections of obvious misprints, with one or two possible exceptions which may be accidental agree- ments in conjectural amendment. Greg, Emendation, 41, 45, notes that Q3, like the Contention of 1619, seems occasionally to anticipate a reading of Fi .
Chap. IX HENRY THE FIFTH 391
If Qi is read side by side with Fi, it is impossible to regard it as anything but a continual perversion of the same text. Some of the verse-lines are truly rendered; others contain words related to those of Fi as variants of inflexion or indifferent alternatives, or words which read like mishearings. Many phrases are omitted, resulting in mislineations. Line after line is bungled metrically, by a writer incapable of handling blank verse. Larger omis- sions cause lacunae in the sense. Sometimes Q gives a mere paraphrase of the substance of F. The prose scenes are even more fragmentary, and are throughout in lines of irregular length and capitalized as verse. As a paradoxical result, Pistol's speeches resume verse form. There are some transpositions in the order of the dialogue, especially in the prose scenes. Two scenes (iv, 4, 5) change places. One passage, at the end of iii. 7, appears in F at iv. 2. 62-3. There is at least one phrase, at the end of ii. 3, of indecent 'gag'. This corruption is far beyond what can be attributed to errors of transcription and printing, and can only be explained by some process of reporting. It in certain respects differs from that to be observed in Henry VI> Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. There is no introduction of un-Shakespearean verse; practically every- thing is related to F. Price has argued for the use of shorthand, but mainly on grounds, such as the mishear- ings and alternatives, which do not (cf. p. 157) exclude memorization. Some unevenness of demerit suggests that the reporter may have been an actor. The best-rendered scenes are those in which Exeter, Gower, and the Governor of Harfleur appear. Conceivably the 'part' of one or more of these may have been available, and conceivably^ 'plot', since a few marginal notes for action (ii. I. 103; iv. 8. 9; v. i . 30) are common to Qi and F. But if so it was a very skeleton one. The Q stage-directions are even slighter than those of F, There are no long descriptive stage- directions comparable to those in Qi of Romeo and Juliet. On the other hand, the omissions of Q point to a per- formance for which much of the F text had been 'cut'. It is hardly possible to distinguish short cuts from the
392 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
reporter's lapses, but there is no representation at all in Q of the prologue, the four other choruses, and the epi- logue; or of three scenes (i, i ; iii. I ; iv. 2); or of sub- stantial passages (e.g. i, 2. 115-35; ii. 2. 105-42; iii. 2. &9-1 53 • &• 3- I I-4* ; &• £• 27-68 ; iii. 7. 140-69; iv. i. 1-34, 118-39, 247-301; v. 2. 307-58, 387-400) in others. Cutting may be estimated to have reduced the 3,381 lines of the play by about 1,000, making a per- formance in two instead of three hours possible. Eleven speaking parts are saved by the process, and this may point to a provincial performance. Some good Shakespearean matter goes, but it is of poetic rather than dramatic value. In any case compression in the basis of the Q text is more plausible than expansion for that of F, and there are ana- logies in the theatrical treatment of other long plays (cf. p. 229). The attempts of Nicholson and Craig to trace a literary revision fail to appreciate sufficiently the extent and nature of the Q corruption. As in other reported texts it entails vulgarization. And the historical corrections attributed to Q by Daniel are also illusory. It is true that, while F is in general closer to Holinshed than Q, its intro- duction of the Dauphin at Agincourt is a departure, inconsistent with the King's order (iii. 5. 64) for him to stay at Rouen, whereas Q leaves him out at Agincourt and gives his speeches there to Bourbon, But the incon- sistency is nothing to Shakespeare; the Dauphin must come into dramatic conflict with Henry; and I can only suppose that the reporter has failed to disentangle the French lords. He also brings in among them (iii. 7 ; iv. 5), apparently for the Rambures of F, a Gebon, possibly an actor's name. Price suggests a corruption of that of Samuel Gilburne, or less plausibly a Thomas Gibborne, only known as a Fortune 'housekeeper' in 1624.! Prob- ably the only change in F from the original text was the very incomplete excision of profanity. That it is un- abashed in the rather pointless episode (iii. 2. 69-153) of the English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh captains, which is not in Q, tells against the suggestion that this is an inter-
1 Murray, i. 214.
Chap. IX HENRY THE FIFTH 393
polation motived by the Jacobean policy of a union of kingdoms. But although it is not altogether appropriate to Elizabethan conditions, Holinshed does in fact give Henry Scottish mercenaries. Moreover, while Captain Jamy is not unsympathetically drawn, would the king have altogether approved the selection of the name for a comic character? An alternative and perhaps more plausible con- jecture is that the passage was censored in 1599, because of earlier offence given to James by theatrical references to Scotland.1 If so, we cannot suppose that it was restored when he saw the play on 7 January 1 605 (App. D), but the F printer may, quite properly, have ignored a deletion mark.
The omission or the choric matter from Q may be only part of the abridgement, but it is also possible that -the performances reported took place after the unsuccessful return of Essex from Ireland on 28 September 1599 made the reference to him in the chorus before Act v unsuitable. The last two lines of that to Act ii must be an afterthought, intended to correct the suggestion of 34-5 that the locality at once shifted to Southampton. This may be due to the Folio editor, who may have had the choruses on loose scrolls, and should have inserted this one and begun Act ii a scene later. In fact his supplementary lines probably re- placed an act heading already set up, and he then put in Acts ii and iii where Acts iii and iv should be, and an Act iv, for which he had no chorus left, at random. 'Topical' specula- tion reaches its maximum of absurdity in Miss Albright's suggestion that the choruses belong to a special perform- ance given at the Globe to further the interests of the Essex conspiracy and that the phrase 'bringing rebellion broached on his sword' was meant to foretell a return to broach the cask of rebellion.
A double Shakespearean handling is an element in Pol- lard and Wilson's interpretation of Qi as one of a group of old plays (cf. p. 226), partly revised by Shakespeare, and then transcribed in an abridged form for provincial use in 1593, and finally printed partly from this transcript and partly from an actor's report of a performance of the
1 Eliz. Stage, i. 323.
394 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
play as further revised by Shakespeare on the original manuscript. As in other plays of the group, a meticulous substitution of colourless equivalents is entailed. Pollard and Wilson's study is based mainly upon an examination of Act ii. In the verse scenes they take the metrical lines as derived from the transcript and the bungled lines as attempts of the reporter to fill the gaps. The metrical or tolerably metrical lines amount, so far as I can judge, to about 500 for the whole play, and would give a very sketchy outline of the plot, with many solutions of con- tinuity in the dialogue. But I suppose that Pollard, and Wilson think that this would be good enough for a pro- vincial audience. Surely, however, they give an obviously illiterate reporter an impossible task, in going through an apparently complete manuscript and determining, as he must have done with considerable accuracy, the exact points at which expansion from a very imperfect memory of the later version was required. There must of course have been more than 500 lines in the provincial play, but I understand the theory to be that for certain scenes the transcript was entirely abandoned and a report of Shake- speare's later prose scenes substituted. It is suggested that in these scenes the reporter played either Bardolph or Mrs. Quickly, but surely neither part is consistently well reproduced. The original play rehandled by Shakespeare is taken to have been itself a revision of the Famous Victories (cf. s.v. Hen. IF), and to have left traces in the choruses and historical scenes of the F text.
This intermediate1 Henry V is also assumed by Robert- son, as a play written about 1590 by Marlowe, probably with the collaboration of Peele and Greene, if not also of Kyd; revised for the Admiral's in 1 595, probably by Peele, although Munday, Chettle, Heywood, Drayton, and Dekker are also conceivable; revived with comic relief by Chapman; transferred by the Admiral's to the Chamber- lain's; and finally revised by Shakespeare and perhaps Chettle, Such a string of hypotheses, involving the pos- sible interaction of about a dozen writers at five stages is of course incapable of demonstration and would not repay
Chap. IX HENRY THE FIFTH 395
systematic refutation. An example of Robertson's method is to be found in the suggestion that the reference to Essex may in an earlier version have been to some other episode in his career, such as his expedition to France in 1591. So far as Marlowe is concerned, the attempt to find his hand here is less plausible even than Robertson's attempt to find him in Richard II \ and the 'clues' of supposed un- Shakespearean words and phrases are extraordinarily thin. Shakespeare's historical source is again mainly Holins- hed, and for anything borrowed from the later scenes of Famous Victories it is not necessary to look further than the version left to us, which had become available in the 1598 edition, even if there was (cf. p. 383) no earlier one. I think we must take the 'Ireland' of the chorus as meaning 'Ireland', and therefore as datable between Essex's de- parture thither on 27 March 1599 and his return on September 28. Nor do I see sufficient reason for sup- posing the choruses to be of different date to the play as a whole. They are naturally written in a somewhat arti- ficial and old-fashioned manner. The metrical tests, for what they are worth, consist well enough with 1599, and the play must of course follow the promise in the epilogue to 2 Henry 17 to 'continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France : where, for any thing I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat'. It is true that the general literary quality does not show any marked advance upon Henry IV itself. One may even trace a reversion, in spite of some fine rhetorical passages, to a more traditional way of handling chronicle matter, there less conspicuous. Perhaps Shakespeare was again, as in Richard //, imperfectly interested in epic themes. Nor are the added 'humorists' quite on the level of their pre- decessors. Wilson has made a fair case for finding traits of the Welsh soldier Sir Roger Williams in Fluellen; and Sarrazin for regarding Nym, with his jerky style and constant repetition of the word 'humour', as a satire of Ben Jonson's early dramatic manner; although I do not think (cf. p. 72) that it is the 'purge' which Shakespeare is said to have given him. Jonson's prologue to EMJ. (App. B,
396 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
no. xxii), probably of later date than the play itself, in turn satirizes the chorus wafting the action overseas. The names of William Fluellen and George Bardolfe appear as those of fellow recusants (cf. p. 25) with John Shake- speare in 1592. Those of Bate, Court, and Williams are also found (French 327) in Stratford records.
XIX. JULIUS CAESAR
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] The Life and death of Julius Caesar. [Tragedies^ pp. 109-30, sign. kk-ll5v. Head- and Running-Titles] The Tragedie of Julius Caesar. [Acts i, sc i, ii-v marked.] Facsimile. ]. D. Wilson (1929).
Modern Editions. A. D. Innes (1893, Warwick}\ M. Hunter (1900), F. H. Sykes (1909); M. Macmillan (1902, Arden}\ H. H. Furness (1913, New Variorum}\ L. Mason (1919, Tale). Dissertations. F. G. Fleay, J.C. (1874, N.S.S. Trans. 357; Sh. Manual, 262); N. Delius, Shs J.C. und seine Quellen in Plutarch (1882, J. xvii. 67; Abl.\\. 153); P. Simpson, The Date ofSh.'s J.C. (1899,9 AT.Q.iii. 105, 216); E. Koeppel, Shs J.C. und die Entstehungszeit des anonymen Dramen The Wisdom of Dr. Dodypoll (1907, J. xliii. 210); P. Kannen- giesser, Eine Doppelredaktion in Shs J.C. (1908, J. xliv. 51); W. Keller, Zwei Bemerkungen zu J.C. (1909, J. xlv. 219); M. W. MacCallum, Sh.'s Roman Plays and their Background ( 1 9 1 o) ; H. M. Ayres, Sh.'sJ.C. in the Light of Some Other Versions {1910, PJfJL^t.m. 183); H. C. Bartlett, Quarto Editions of J.C. (1913, 3 Library, iv. 122); G. Sarrazin, Sh. und Orlando Pescetti (1913, E.S. xlvi. 347); A. Boecker, A Probable Italian Source of Sh.'s J.C. (1913); A. Kerrl, Die metrischen Unterschiede von Shs K.J. und J.C. (1913); A. de V. Tassin, J.C. (1916, Columbia Studies, 255); J. M, Robertson, The Origination of J.C. (1922, Sh. Canon,i.66)i W. Wells, TAr Authorship of 'J.C. (1923); M. H. Shackford, J.C. and Ovid (1926, M.LJT. xli. 172); F. Wolcken, Shs J.C. undMar- lowes Massacre at Paris (1927, J. kiii. 192); E. H. C. Oliphant, J.C. (1927, The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, 316), E. *WF. (192 8, Feb. 2 3, T.L.S.).
Julius Caesar is one of the best printed of the F additions, with only trifling dislocations. The stage-directions are normal. The^ spellings Antony, and occasionally in early scenes Antonio, diverge from the Anthony regularly used by Shakespeare elsewhere. There is a trace of a revision in iv, 3, not necessarily more than an afterthought at the
Chap. IX JULIUS CAESAR 397
time of composition. Brutus and Cassius discuss (143- 58, 1 66) Portia's death. Thereafter (181-95) Messala announces that death to Brutus, who is apparently ignorant of it. Probably the first passage is an insertion, and the second has been left undeleted or imperfectly deleted in the manuscript. The play is a very short one, and a few abrupt short lines may be evidence of cuts.
The date of production can be fairly definitely fixed by Platter's visit (App. D) to a Julius Caesar play on 21 September 1599. He does not name the Globe, but the theatre was south of the river, and the Swan was probably not in regular use.1 The Rose no doubt was, but as the Admiral's had new Caesar plays (cf. infra) in 1 594—5 and again in 1 602, they are not very likely to have been staging one in 1599. Platter's 'at least fifteen characters' agrees fairly with Julius Caesar, on the assumption that he dis- regarded a number of inconspicuous parts. The date of 1599 fits in well with other evidence. Weever clearly refers to the play in his Mirror of Martyrs (App. B, no. xix), which he says was fit for the print two years before 1 60 1, even though it may have been added to in the inter- val. There is an obvious quotation of iii. 2. 109 in Jon- son's E.M.O. (iS99\ 0"- 4- 33X 'Reason long since is fled to animals, you know', as well as a less indicative repetition (v. 6. 79) of 'Et tu Brute' (iii. i. 77). The Wis- dom of Dr. Dodipoll^ printed in 1 6oo,2 also quotes iii. 2. 109, .and 'Et tu Brute' is in S. Nicholson's Acolastus his Afterwit (1600). On the other hand, if there are echoes in iii. i. 113 of Daniel's Musophilus and in i. 2. 52 of Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum, these were registered on 9 January and 14 April 1599 respectively. The play held the stage in the seventeenth century. Court performances are recorded (App. D) ih 1612-13, 1636, and 1638.
Jonson tells us (App. B, no. xxii) that iii. 1.47 origin- ally ran —
Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause,
and glances at the same passage in Staple of News (1626), ind. 36, 'Cry you mercy, you neuer did wrong, but with iust
* Cf. EKx. Stage, ii. 413. * Ibid. iv. 54.
398 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
cause*. Incidentally Jonson gives testimony, if that were
needed, to Shakespeare's authorship of the play; and so
does Digges (App. B, no. Hi) in 1640. Yet in no play of
the canon have recent critics more persistently sought
other hands. Fleay regarded it as an abridgement of
Shakespeare's work, due to Jonson himself. Abridged it
may be, but the evidence produced for any incorporation of
Jonsonian matter, unless he suggested an alternative for
iii. i. 47, is negligible. Robertson, Wells, and Oliphant all
find a considerable substratum of Marlowe. Thereafter
they diverge. Robertson supposes that Marlowe, perhaps
with Kyd, although he only hints (i. 1 15) at this, wrote
a play in three parts, dealing successively with the struggle
of Caesar and Pompey, with Caesar's death, and with
Philippu Part i was revived by the Admiral's as Caesar
and Pompey in 1 594, x and Part 2, revised by Chapman and
Dray ton and perhaps (i. 142) Heywood, as the second
part of Caesar in I595*2 Part 3 was revised as Caesar's
Fall or The Two Shapes, also for the Admiral's, by
Drayton, Dekker, Middleton, Munday, and Webster in
1602, although of this Robertson does not seem very
certain, and he makes no attempt to trace any of these
writers except Drayton in Julius Caesar as we have it.3
However, Part i was then laid aside, until Chapman
handled it in his Caesar and Pompey^ while Parts ii and iii
were transferred by the Admiral's to the Chamberlain's,
and revised by Shakespeare about 1 603. It may be noted
that such a transference between rival companies is far
from plausible, and also that Robertson is not accurate in
stating that Henslowe does not record the plays of 1594
and 1595 as *ne'. The writers of 1602 also got full value
for a new play. Finally, according to Robertson, Jonson
compressed Parts 2 and 3 into the present form of Julius
Caesar either about 1607 or after Shakespeare's death.
Wells thinks that a play, apparently a single play, by
Marlowe was given for revision to Shakespeare, who
abandoned it after completing the first 57 lines, and that
1 Etix. Stage, ii. 143. 3 Ibid. ii. 179.
2 Ibid. ii. 144. 4 Ibid. iii. 259.
Chap. IX JULIUS CAESAR 399
the rest of Julius Caesar is a revision by Beaumont, who disregarded Shakespeare's opening, slid the triumph into the feast of Lupercalia, and made no further use of the tribunes and their mob. Oliphant is surprised that Wells should find Beaumont's hand continuously throughout the play, and would reduce his share, if any, to little more than portions of iv. 3, regarding the rest as the work of an early writer, probably Marlowe, revised by Shakespeare. These conflicting theories may perhaps be left to cancel each other out. I believe them to be all equally misconceived, and to rest partly upon characteristic Shakespearean inconsistencies in the handling of detail, and partly upon two special features of the play. One is that, while Shake- speare's later tragedies move in a single curve to a catas- trophe in the death of the title-character, the action of Julius Caesar has two peaks, one in the Capitol and the other at Philippi, and the psychological interest is at least as much in Brutus as in Caesar. The effect of a double theme is therefore given. The other is that Shakespeare is deliberately experimenting in a classical manner, with an extreme simplicity both of vocabulary and of phrasing. This has already been noted by Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 85. It is often admirably telling, but sometimes it leads to a stiffness, perhaps even a baldness, of diction, which may awake reminiscences of pre-Shakespearean plays, I do not see any special resemblance to Marlowe; the constant use of mid-line speech endings and mid-line pauses is not pre-Shakespearean at all. As for Beaumont, it is merely a matter of verbal parallels, and the derivation of Beaumont's diction from Shakespeare's has long been recognized. The element of simple dignity in the style of Julius Caesar, although we have no particular reason to suppose that he knew it otherwise than on the stage, seems to have made a special appeal to him.
Of course there were Elizabethan plays on the Caesar story before Shakespeare's, and before those which Hens- lowe records. It was a favourite Renaissance subject. Marc Antoine Muret's Latin Julius Caesar (1544) had been followed by Jacques Grain's Cesar (1561) and
400 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Robert Gamier 's Cornelie (1574)) of which a translation by Kyd appeared in 1594.* An entry in Machyn's Diary ', which may record an English play as early as 1 562, seems to be in part a forgery.2 The Paul's boys played a Pompey at court in i^Si,3 and Gosson notes a Caesar and Pompey, possibly, although his words are not quite clear, at the Theatre, in his Plays Confuted of 1582.4 Richard Edes produced a Latin Caesar Interfectus at Christ Church in 1582, of which the epilogue alone survives.5 On these or others many early literary allusions, some of which lay special stress on Caesar's triumph, may rest, although by themselves they would prove no more than a knowledge of the classical story. They are particularly numerous in Shakespeare's own early plays, continue to Hamlet, where there are three, All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Othello, and then disappear, except in Corio- lanus and Cymbeline, where Caesar is historically appro- priate, Shakespeare had purged his imagination or the theme. There are several also in Marlowe. But I find nothing to indicate that Marlowe ever wrote a Caesar play. Wells quotes Greene, Orlando Furioso, 457, where Sacrepant —
(like to Cassius)
Sits sadly dumping, ayming Caesars death,
Yet crying Ave to his Maiestie,
combines it with Greene's Francescos Fortunes, where Cicero says to Roscius, 'if the Cobler hath taught thee to say Aue Caesar, disdain not thy tutor',6 and decides that the cobbler must be Marlowe, and that the * Aue Caesar' is not from Edward III, i. 1. 164, but from a play by Marlowe with Cassius in it. But I hope to have shown 7 that the cobbler and his crow who cried * Ave Caesar', not to Julius but Augustus Caesar, came, like Roscius, from Macrobius. More interesting are the passages in Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, 1 220, 1 246, where the Guise before his death says
1 Blix. Stage* Iii. 397. 5 Ibid. iii. 309.
* Cf. vol. ii, p. 386. 6 Ibid. iv. 236.
* EHx. Stage, iv. 158. 7 Ibid. i. 377.
Chap. IX JULIUS CAESAR 401
of himself, 'Yet Caesar shall goe forth', and again, 'Thus Caesar did go foorth, and thus he dyed'. The first phrase repeats JuL Caes. ii. 2. 28. Here it is in place, and Shake- speare's Caesar habitually speaks of himself in the third person. The Massacre, although written in I593> only exists in an undated edition, possibly as late as 1599. It is corrupt and may have an element of 'reporting' in it. Perhaps this brought the phrases in. But even if Marlowe wrote them, and took them from an earlier play, it would not prove that the play was his, still less that, as Wells thinks, he meant Caesar for a covert representation of the Guise, about whom, indeed, he showed no hesitation in writing openly.
Shakespeare mainly derived his material from Plutarch's Lives of Brutus, Caesar, and Antony, as translated by Sir Thomas North (1579) from the French (1559) of Jacques Amyot. He often borrows North's actual wording. Individual passages have been compared with others in Lucan'sPA#rj£#0, Cicero's Letters, Pliny's Natural History, Appian's Civil Wars, Dion Cassius's dnnals, Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars, and Orlando Pescetti's // Cesare (1594), but how far he drew directly upon these, it is difficult, in view of the lost earlier English plays, to say. The famous 'Et tu Brute' is probably in its origin an adaptation of the icol ov, rcWv of Suetonius* It has only been traced once in English literature before Julius Caesar, in the True Tragedy, xxi. 53; it is not in 3 Hen. VI, v. i. 77-80, of which the passage in the True Tragedy is a cor- ruption. A play of Julius Caesar was given by John Green's company at Dresden in 1626,* It may or may not have been Shakespeare's.
XX. AS YOU LIKE IT [S.R. 1600?]
4 Augusti As you like y*, a booked to be staid
/ (Arber, iii. 37).
[On the significance of this entry, cf. p. 145.]
1 Ibid. ii. 286. ana.! D d
4.02 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Cliap. IX
[F 1. 1623.] [Catalogue] As you Like it. [Comedies, pp. 185-207, sign. £3-82. Head-title} As you Like it. [Running-title'] As you like it. [Acts and sec. marked.] Facsimile. ]. D. Wilson (1929).
Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (1890, New Fariorum); ]. W. Holme (1914, Arden}\ J. R. Crawford (1919, Yale}\ A. T. Quiller- Couch and J, D. Wilson (1926, C.U.P.).
Dissertations. N. Delius, Lodges Rosatynde und Shs A.Y.L. (1871, J9 vi. 226; Abl i. 206) ; W. G. Boswdl-Stone, Sh.'s A.r.L. and Lodge's Rosalynde Compared (1882, N.S.S. Trans. 277)5 J. Zupitza, Die mlttelenglische For- stufe zu SAs A.Y.L. (1886, J. xxi, 69); C. H. Herford, Sh.'s Masters and A.Y.L. (1890); A. H. Thorndike, The Relation 0/A.Y.L. to Robin Hood flays (1902, J.E.G.P. iv. 59); W. W. Greg, Lodges Rosalynde: being the Original of&hls A.T.L. (1907, St. Classics); H. Conrad, Die ErzaUung von Gamelyn als Quelle zu SAs A.YJL. (1910, J. xlvi, 120); A. Grayf How Sh. * Purged* Jonson (1928) ; B. H. Newdigate, Harington, Jayues and Touchstone (1929, Jan. 3, 10, T.L.S.).
F is a fair text, with only small typographical disturbances, chiefly due to rapid transitions between verse and prose. The stage-directions are slight, and only occasionally sug- gest the hands of the author (iL i. I ; ii. 4. i ; iii. 2. 131) and the book-keeper (L 2. 1 58, 224, 227 ; ii. 4. i ; ii. 5. 40; iv. 2. 1 1 ; v. 5. 1 14). Wilson suggests, without elaborating the point, that the copy may have been assembled from 'parts'.
The entry in the Stationers' Register and the absence of the play from Meres* list of 1598 give limits of date, within which it is difficult to be more precise. On grounds of style a grouping with Twelfth Night, a little after Much Ado about Nothing^ in 1599 seems reasonable. The 'lover and his lass' song (v. 3. 17) is probably original here, as it echoes one at the same point in the source. There is a setting in Thomas Morley's First Book of Airs, or Little Short Songs (1600), of which the only known copy is in the collection of H. C. Folder. The forest theme may have been selected in rivalry with the Admiral's Robin Hood plays of I598.1 The quotation (iiL 5. 81) of a line from Marlowe's Hero and Leander would come most naturally
Chap. IX AS YOU LIKE IT 403
after the publication of that poem in 1598. Some other historical and literary echoes which have been suggested are too vague or too remote in date. If 'Diana in the fountain* (iv. i. 154) was the image in Cheapside, that was set up in I596.1 One cannot seriously, with Chalmers, relate the antithesis of court and country to the troubles of the Earl of Essex in 1599, or, with Aldis Wright, Rosa- lind's chaff about 'pretty oaths that are not dangerous' (iv. i. 193) and a magician who tenders life dearly (v. 2. 77), to the Act against witchcraft in 1603 or that against abuses of players in 1606. Of the earlier parallels, Wilson stresses a close one at iii. 2. 103, 1 19, and one less striking at ii. 2. 8, to passages in Nashe's Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters of 1592 or 1593,* and thinks this unlikely to have been read by Shakespeare in 1599. He also supposes that Shakespeare knew Hero and Leander in manuscript before it was published, which is of course possible, and that a reference to the death of Marlowe in a quarrel about a tavern bill, as well as to the 'Infinite riches in a little room' of Jew of Malta, i. i. 72, is to be found in Touchstone's complaint (iii. 3. 14) that a lack of understanding 'strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room'. Such an allusion, which would surely have been rather heartless, does not seem to me plausible, and Wilson's points cannot of course weigh against the general evidence for 1598-1600. Indeed, he accepts this date, but only for a revision of an earlier version of 1593, which largely took the form of rewriting verse scenes in prose. For this he finds evidence, partly in textual inconsistencies as to the relative heights of Rosalind and Celia (i. 2. 284; i. 3. 1 17; iv. 3. 88) and as to the nomenclature or the Dukes (i, 2, 87, 246; v. 4. 160), both of which are more easily explained by misprints, and as to the period of the elder Duke's sojourn in the forest (i. i. 120; i. 3. 73; ii. 1.2), which is too Shakespearean to need explanation at all; but mainly upon a theory, sug- gested to him by Pollard, that certain prose passages, unusually full of scannable lines (cf. p, 233), had originally
1 Stowe, Survey, i. 266. a Works^ i. 275, 324.
Dd 2
404 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
been written as verse. They make very good prose, how- ever, and in fact it is just as easy (cf. my criticism in Tear's Work for 1926) to rewrite as verse, with what Wilson calls 'a little innocent faking', passages which he does not believe to have been revised.
As Tou Like It has been claimed, on the authority of a document not now verifiable (App, D), as the play given by the King's men at Wilton on 2 December 1 603. Nothing else is known of its after-history. It is quite possible, how- ever, that the verses of Hymen in v. 4. 1 14-52, markedly inferior in style to the rest of the play, may be a specta- cular interpolation not due to Shakespeare. There is no textual disturbance in F, but the scene would run well enough without them. A stage tradition (App. C. nos. xxxiv, xliv) represents Shakespeare himself as playing the part of Adam.
The source is Thomas Lodge's prose novel ofRosalynde, orEuphues9 Golden Legacy (1590), which itself owes some- thing to the Tale of Gamelyn, found, although not Chaucer- ian, in some manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. It is pos- sible, although not very probable, that a further reference to this motived some small departures by Shakespeare from Rosalynde. But it was not in print until 1721. On A. Gray's theory that Jaques was Shakespeare's 'purge' to Jonson, cf. p. 72. Newdigate's suggestion that he stands for Sir John Harington is even less plausible. Harington was not that sort of man.
XXI. TWELFTH NIGHT
MS. H:P., Reliques, 115, describes a copy from F2 appar- ently made for a seventeenth-century performance, and marked with the names of characters at their points of entry. It was afterwards at Warwick Castle.
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue'] Twelfe-Night, or what you will. [Comedies, pp. 255-75, sign. Y 2-Z 6. Head-title] Twelfe Night, Or what you will. [Running-title'] Twelfe Night, or, What you will. [Acts and sec marked.]
Chap. IX TWELFTH NIGHT 405
Facsimile. J. D. Wilson (1928).
Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (1901, New Variorum)-, A. D. Innes (1895, Warwick); M. Luce (1906, 1929, Arden); G. H. Nettleton (1922, YaU)\ A. T. Quiller-Couch and J. D. Wilson (1930, C.U.P.)
Dissertations. F. G. Fleay, On the Date and Composition of TJN. (1874,
f ' - 9 — — //»—"— — • •— "w»*fc».j -w**. « »•. v**v +rjL**ff I A U / U,
#.£.$. 7>a». 88) and in f*y«(*s *W /F0r& */ >$» £**//, Ixxxv (1880, HakluytSoc. lix); H. Conrad, VberdieEntstehungszeit von TJf. (1805, 7. xxxi, 177), Z* ^» e^//«r m* Air TJK (1912, £.5. xlvi. 73); H. Meiss- ner, Die Quellen zu Shs TJf. (1895); H. Logemann, Johannes de Witt's Visit to the Swan Theatre (1897, Anglia, xix. 1 17); J. de Perott, Noch eine eventuelle Quelle zum TJf. (1910, J. xlvi. 118); I. Gollancz, Malvolio (1916, Sh. Homage, 177); J. D. Wilson, TJt. and the Gunpowder Plot (1929, June 1 3, T.L.S.).
F is a good text, with normal stage-directions, including notes for the introduction of music and a misnaming (i. 5. 177) of Viola as Violenta; it may rest on prompt-copy.
The earliest notice of the play is John Manningham's record (App. B, no. xxiv) of a performance in the Middle Temple on 2 February 1 602. It was evidently then new to him. But it is so akin in style and temper to As Tou Like It that a somewhat earlier date appears probable; and if this is put in 1600-1, it is fairly consistent with such literary and historical clues as are not too tenuous to deserve con- sideration. We must, however, assume that if the song at ii. 3. 40 is Shakespeare's, which it may well be, it may not have been originally written for the play, since music for an air called 'O mistress mine* appears, without words, in Thomas Morley's First Book of Consort Lessons (1599). It is, however, not clear (Noble 8 1) that this setting was for Shakespeare's song, and one of Mistress Mine in Morley's Short Book of Airs (1600), now in the Folger collection, is said to be distinct from his. But the song-scraps in ii. 3. 109-21 are from Robert Jones's First Book of Songs and Airs (i 600). Logemann's identification of the scene (iii. 4) where Malvolio appears cross-gartered with the action represented in De Witt's Swan drawing of 1596 must in any case be rejected; Twelfth Night can hardly have been played at the Swan. The satire of 'cross-wooing' in EM. O.
406 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
(1599), iii. 6. 195, is too general to carry a special applica- tion to the play. On the other hand, the *fat fool', who will 'rore out his barren bold iests, with a tormenting laughter, betweene drunke, and drie* in Poetaster (1601), iii. 4. 345, sounds very much like an echo of Sir Toby Belch. Sir Robert Shirley, returning enriched from Persia in 1599, perhaps inspired the allusion (ii. 5. 197) to 'a pension of thousands to be paid by the Sophy'; and the 'new map with the augmentation of the Indies' (iii. 2, 85) was probably the 'Hydrographical Description' prepared about 1598-9 by Emerie Molyneux. Examples are sometimes bound up with Hakluyt's Principal! Navi- gations (1598-1600). Orsino,Duke of Bracciano, visited London during the winter of 1 600-1 .x The rather vague reference discovered by Wilson in iii. i. 24—35 to *ke Jesuit doctrine of equivocation (cf. s.v. MacbetK]^ already avowed by Robert Southwell at his trial in 1595, cannot weigh in favour of a date after the Gunpowder Plot against the evidence for one in or before 1602.
Fleay thought that the Viola-Orsino-Olivia plot, fairly detachable from that of Malvolio, was. a revision of earlier work, chiefly because i. 2. 57 and ii. 4. 2 suggested to him that the songs were originally given to Viola; but this is very slight ground. Conrad found more parallels to early than to late work in this part of the play, and Sarrazin showed that this argument was based on inadequate observation.2 It is open to any one to produce a fresh case for revision on the basis of the many scannable lines (cf. p. 233) in the prose scenes.
The play was revived at court in 1 61 8 andagain underthe title MafooKo in 1 62 3 (App. D), and Digges (App. B, no. Iii) records its-pofmlarity in 1 640. The mildness of Sir Toby Belch's profanity may be due to Jacobean expurgation.
The motive of a lady disguised as a page to the man she loves is widespread, and had been combined before Twelfth Night with that of the resembling twins and their separa- tion by a shipwreck. Shakespeare had already used one in Two Gentlemen of Verona and the other in Comedy of Errors.
1 Chamberlain, Efix. 99. » y. xxxii. 164.
Chap. IX TWELFTH NIGHT • , 407
Manningham compared the play to the Italian Inganni. Perhaps he meant the Inganni of Nicolo Secchi (1562); perhaps that of Curzio Gonzaga (1592), which has the name Cesare; perhaps the earlier Ingannati (1537) of the academy of Intronati, which comes nearer to Shake- speare's handling, and has in the induction a Fabio, a Malevolti, and a mention of 'la notte di Beffana' (Epiphany). This was perhaps the source of a story in Matteo Bandello's Novelle (1554), ii. 36, translated in P. de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, iv (1571) 59; and this in its turn the source of the story of Afolonius and Silla in Barnabe Riche's Farewell to the Military Profession (1581). Shakespeare probably used this, as it adds the shipwreck theme, but his debt was not very great. He may also have read of the disguised lady in Giraldi Cin- tio's Ecatommiti) v. 8, or Sidney's Arcadia (1590), or the play of Sir Clyomon and Clamydes (1599), or Emanuel Forde's Parismus (1598), which also has a shipwreck and the names Olivia and Violetta.
Riche's story became also the source of the German play Tugend- und Liebes-Streit (1677), of which an earlier form may have been the King of Cyprus and Duke of Venice^ played by Green's company of travelling English actors at Graz in 1608 and Dresden in 1626.* Creizenach, who prints Tugend- und Liebesstreit in Schausfiele der Eng- lischen KomSdianten (1889), 53, thinks that some common divergences from Riche here and in Twelfth Night may point to a lost English play as an intermediary. Riche says that some of his stories had been 'presented on a stage*.
There is no clear source for the Malvolio episodes. Gollancz 2 has suggested an analogue to the misrule of ii. 3 in a quarrel at court between the Earl of Southampton and Ambrose Willoughby, and I have suggested another in a story told of Sir William Knollys and Elizabeth's maids of honour.3
« Efa. Stage, ii. 281, 286. * U. .- A Survey, 178.
2 SL Homage, 177.
408 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
XXII. HAMLET
[S.R. 1602.] xxvjto Julij. James Robertas. Entred for his Copie vnder the handes of master Pasfield and master Waterson warden A booke called the Revenge of Hamlett Prince Denmarke as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne his servantes. vjd. (Arber, iii. 212).
[Qi. 1603.] The Tragicall Historic of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke By William Shake-speare. As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse seruants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cam- bridge and Oxford, and else-where [Nicholas Ling's device (McKerrow 301)] At London printed (by Valen- tine Simmes) for N(icholas) L(ing) and lohn Trundell.
1603. [Head-title] The Tragicall Historic of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke. [Running-title] The Tragedie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke,
Facsimle. W. Griggs (1880, Sh. Q. i, ed. F. J. Furnivall). Reprints. W. A. Wright (1893, Cambridge Sh. ix. 697); G. B. Harrison (1923). Edition. F. G. Hubbard(i92o).
[Q2. 1604.] The Tragicall Historic of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. By William Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, accord- ing to the true and perfect Coppie. [Nicholas Ling's device (McKerrow 301)] At London, Printed by I(ames) R(oberts) for Nicholas) L(ing) and are to be sold at his shoppe vnder Saint Dunstons Church in Fleet-street.
1604. [Head-title j under ornament with royal arms, and Running-title] The Tragedieof HamletPrinceof Denmarke. [In some copies the tp. is dated 1 605.]
Facsimle. W. Griggs (1880, Sh. Q. ii, ed. F. J. FurnivaU).
[S.R. 1607.] 19 Novembris. John Smythick. Entred for his copies vnder thandes of the wardens, these bookes followinge Whiche dyd belonge to Nicholas Lynge. viz. ... 6 A booke called Hamlett . , . (Arber, iii. 365).
. 1 6 1 1 .] The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke.
Chap. IX HAMLET 409
By William Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was according to the true and perfect Coppy. [Smethwick's device (McKerrow 376)] At London, Printed for lohn Smethwick, and are to be sold at his shoppe in Saint Dunstons Church yeard in Fleetstreet. Vnder the Diall. 1611. [Head-title} The Tragedie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke. [Running-title'] The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke.
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] The Tragedy of Hamlet [Tragedies, pp. 152-6, 257-80, sign, nn 4v-qqv. Head- title*] The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. [Running-title'] The Tragedie of Hamlet. [Acts and sec. marked to ii. 2.]
[£4. n.d. (161101637)] W(illiam) S(tansby) for lohn Smethwicke,
[Q5- 1637,] R. Young for John Smethwicke.
Parallel-texts. E. P. Vining (1890, Bankside, Qi+Fi); W. Victor (1891, Qi+Q2+Fi).
German Version. MS. Library of Gotha, with title Tragoedia Der bestrafte Bruder-mord oder: Prinz Hamlet aus Dannemark, dated Tretz <Preetz in Holstein), den 27 October 1710*.
Editions. H. A. O. Reichard (1781, OllaPotrida^ ii. 18)5 A. Cohn (1865, Sh. in Germany); W. Creizenach (1889, Schauspiele der Englischen Komodianten^ 125).
Translations. G. Archer (with Cohn's ed.5 under tide Fratricide Punished); H. H. Furness (1877, Hamlet, ii. 121).
Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (1877, New Variorum); E. K. Chambers (1894, Warwick); E. Dowden (18199, 1928, Arden).
Dissertations. T. Mommsen, Eeurtheilung Uber den Deliufschen #.(1855, Neue Jahrbuchf. Philolo&e und Psdagogik, Ixxii. 57, 107, 159); R. G. Latham, Two Dissertations on the H. ofSaxo Grammaticus (1872); F. A. Marshall, A Study ofH. (1875); K. Silberschag, SAs H., seine Quellen und folitischen Beziehungen (1877, J. xii. 261); B. Nicholson, Kemp and the PlayofH.—Torickand Tar/to* (iSSo, N.S.S. Trans. 57); C.H.Herford and W. H. Widgery, The Qi of H. (i 880) ; G. Tanger, The Qi and Qs andFi, of H. (1880, N.S.8. Trans. 109), H. nach Shs Manuscript (1881, Anglia, iv, 211), DerB3. und sein Verhaltniss zu Sis H. (1888, J. xadii. 224); H. Conrad (Isaac), Hs Familie (1881, J. xvi. 274), Die H.-Periode
4io PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
in Shs Lcben (1885-6, Archiv, Ixxiii. 163, 371; Ixxiv. 45; Ixxv. i. 269), H. und sein Urbild(i^9 Shs Selbst-bekenntnisse)\ F. G. Fleay, Neglected Facts on H. (1884, £.$.vii. 87); W. Creizenach, Die Tragodie B.B. und ihre Bedeutungfur die Kritik des SKschen H. (1887, Berichte der Phil.- Hist. Classe der Sachsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschafteri), B.B. and its Relation to SL's H. (1904, M.P. ii. 249), H.-Fragen (1906, J.xlii. 76); G. Sarrazin, Die Entstehung der H. Tragodie ( 1889-91, Anglia,*&. 143; xu'L 117; xiv. 322), Thomas Kyd und sein Kreis (1892), Das Personal von Shs H. und der Hof Friedrichs II von Danemark (1895, E.S. xxi. 330), Der Name Ophelia (1895, E.S. xxi. 443); F. A. Leo, Rosenkrantz und Guldenstern (1890-1, J. xxv. 281; xxvi. 325); R. Loening, Die H.- Tragodie Shs(i 892) ; O. Elton, Sh.9s H. ( 1 894, with Trans/. ofSaxo Gram- mattcus)\ J. Corbin, The Elizabethan H. (1895), The German H. and the Earlier English Persians (1896, Harvard Studies and Notes, v. 247); I. Gollancz, Hamlet in Iceland (1898), The Name Polonius (1914, Archiv, cxxxii, 141), Polonius (1916, Sh.Homage, 173); The Sources of 'H. (1926) ; M. W. MacCallum, The Authorship of the Early #. ( 1 90 1, Furnivall Misc.) ; J. Schick, Die Entstehung des H. (1902, J. xxxviii. xiii), Corf us Hamleti- cum (1906) ; A. H. Thorndike, The Relation ofH. to Contemporary Revenge Plays (1902, PM.L.A. xvii. 125); M.B. Evans, B.B.,seinFerhaltnisszu ShsH. (1902, K)io),B.B.undShsH. (1905,^.^.^.433); A.H.Tolman, The Flews about H. ( 1 904) ; H. Logeman, St. te Helsingor ( 1 904, Melanges Paul Fredericy)\ F.P.v. Westenholz, .D/V ^.-(37(1904, ^.^.xxxiv. 337); R. Zeckex,Boeve-4mlethus ^(1905); A. E. Jack, Thomas Kyd and the Ur- H. (1905, P.M.L.4. xx. 729); E. E. Stoll, SL, Marston and the Malcontent Type (1906, M.P. iii. 281), &., a Comparative Study (1919); J. W. Cun- liffe, Nash and the Earlier H. (1906, P.M.L-J. xxi. 193); C. M. Lewis, The Genesis of H. (1907); ^.^i^^S97ersucheinerpraktischenH^Kritik (1907, Anglia, xxx. 56); R. B. McKerrow, Note on Preface to Menaphon (1908, Works ofNashe, iv. 444); J. Allen, The Lost H. of Kyd (1908, Westminster Reviezo)\ C. Meier, Zum Ur-H. (1909, Anglia9Beiblatt9-xL. 1 19); J. D. Fitzgerald, The Sources of the H. Tragedy (1909), Qi ofH.: a Literary Fraud (1910), Qi ofH. (1919, Aug. 7, T.L.S.); E. B. Reed, The College Element in H. (1909, M . P. ^.453); J. Huizinga, Rosenkranz und Guldenstern (1910, J. xlvi. 60); W. W. Greg, TheH. Q? (1910, M.L.R. v. 196), The H. Texts and Recent Work in SA. Bibliography (1919, M.L.R. xiv. 380), Principles of Emendation in Sh. (1928), 23, 54; W. v. Gersdoff, 7om Ursprung des deutschen H. (1912, J. xlviii. 148); M. J. Wolff, Zum Ur-H. (1912, E.S. xiv. 9), Italienisches bet St. (1920, E.S. liv. 473); G. G. A. Murray, H. and Orestes (1914, 1927, The Classical Tradition in Poetry, 205); H. D. Gray, Qz ofH. (1915, M.L.R. x. 171), Did Sh. WriteaTragedy ofDia*o?(i<)2o,M.l.R.xr. 217), Thomas Kydand Qiof H. (1927, PM.L~d. xlii. 721), Reconstruction of a Lost Play (1928, P.Q. vii. 254); }±.k*?.VB&T3*m,ArethereInterpolationsintheTextofH.(iQi69 Sh. Homage, 473), The TextofSh.'sH. (1924); J. D. Wilson, The Copy for H. 1603 and the H. Transcript 1593 (1918, from 3 Library, ix. 1 53, 217), Spellings and Misprints in Q* ofH. (1924, Essays and Studies, x. 36);
Chap. IX HAMLET 411
F. G. Hubbard, rA?M*w/^ ^
The Readings o/Qi ofH. (1923, PM.L.A. xxxviii. 792) ; J. M. Robertson, The Problem ofH.(i<)i<j),H. OnceMore (1923); V.0sterberg, Studierover H.-Texterne (1920); L. Winstanley, H. and the Scottish Succession (1921), H. and the Essex Conspiracy (1924-5, Aberystwyth Studies, vi. 47; vii. 37); A. Glutton-Brock, Sh.'s H. (1922) ; W. Pod, Q i ofH. (1922, 12 N.Q. zi. 301); W. S. Fox, Lucian in the Grave-Scene ofH. (1923, P.Q. H. 132); K. Malone, The Literary History ofH. (1923), On the Etymology ofH. (1925, P.Q. iv. 158), Etymologies for H. (1927, R3.8. iii. 257), More Etymologies for H. (1928, R.E.S. iv. 257); H.de Groot, H.9 its Textual History (1923), De Geschiedenis van het Hamletprobleem (1928, Neophilo- logus, xiii. 282); H. Farr, Notes on SA.'s Printers and Publishers (1923, 4 Library, iii. 225); E. Seligman and others, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1926, Jan. 7, 14, 21, 28, T.L.S.); W. J. Lawrence, #. as Sh. Staged It (1927, Pre-Restoration Studies, 102). W* Z>*/* of Sh.'s H. (1928, W// Workshop, 98), FA? Aty//<?ry 0/1 />fe H. Qi (1928, /W. no); J. M. Murry and others, A Sh. Problem (1928, July 12, Aug. 2, 16, 7M.S.); W. Marschall, Welchen Dialekt spricht Hamlet? (1928, Anglia, Iii. 362);
G. F. Bradby, The Problems ofH. (1928).
A play, not indicated as 'ne', of Hamlet was given by the Admiral's or Chamberlain's or both (App. D) for Henslowe at Newington Butts on n June 1594. Probably it belonged to the Chamberlain's, and later performances by them are recalled in T. Lodge, Wif$ Miserie (1596), 56, 'the Visard of ye ghost which cried so miserably at y* Theater, like an oister wife, Hamlet, re- venge'. In Dekker, Satiromastix, iv. i. 150, Tucca says, 'my name's Hamlet revenge: thou hast been at Parris garden hast not ?' I This seems to suggest performance at the Swan in Paris Garden, as well as at the Theatre, but - the Chamberlain's men are not known to have used the Swan. The Ghost does not call 'Hamlet, revenge' in the Shakespearean texts, although the demand for revenge is in i. 5. 7. The old play is not likely to have survived Shakespeare's, but is still echoed in S(amuel) R(owlands) The Night-Raven (1620), sign. D 2, 'I will not call Hamlet Revenge my greeves'. It is uncertain whether it is quoted in Robert Armin, Nest of Ninnies (1608), 55, 'Ther ar, as Hamlet saies, things cald whips in store',2 The passage is not in the earlier editions (i 600, 1 605) of Armin's work. The phrase 'things called whippes' is found both in
1 Cf. Elisc. Stage, iii. 293. 2 Cf. ibid. ii. 300.
412 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
2 Hen. VI) ii. i. 136 and in the additions to Spanish Tragedy (1602), 1904, but Armin's version suggests con- tamination by Ham. iii. i. 70, 'the whips and scorns of time*. Probably the old play already existed in 1589, and is referred to in Nashe's Efistle to Greene's Menaphon of that year,1 'English Seneca read by Candlelight yeelds many good sentences, as Blood is a l>egger> and so forth; and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, hee will affoord you whole Hamlets^ I should say handfuls of Tragical speeches'. The whole passage is an attack on 'a few of our triuiall translators*, who are also imitators of Seneca. Allusions to 'the trade of Noverint) whereto they were borne* and to 'the Kidde in /Esop', suggest that one of these was Thomas Kyd, but do not, in view of Nashe's plurals, necessarily carry the inference that he wrote the Hamlet.
It will be simplest, before describing the versions, to state my general conclusion, that Q2 substantially repre- sents the original text of the play, as written once and for all by Shakespeare, and that Fi, Qi, and Der bestrafte Brudermord (B.B!) are all in various ways based upon derivatives from that text. The literature of the play is un- wieldy, but the tabulation and analyses of structural and textual variants by Tanger, Wilson, De Groot, and Van Dam provide adequate material for a departure from many of their conclusions.
Q2 is the fullest version, being longer by over 200 lines than Fi, and much more than half as long again as Qi, but it omits some 8 5 lines found in F i . It is a fair text, with little mislineation, light punctuation, and a good many abnormal spellings, and may very possibly be from the author's manuscript, but if so, numerous misprints suggest that this was not very legible. There is no evidence that it had been used as prompt-copy. The stage-directions are normal. There are some variations of nomenclature be- tween 'Queene* and 'Gertrard*, 'King' and 'Claudio', and 'Courtier' and 'Ostricke'. The later Qq were set up successively from Q2 and each other.
1 EKz. Stage, iv. 234.
Chap. IX HAMLET 413
The greater part of the F text is close enough to that of Q2 to show a common origin. But the absence of any typographical resemblance and of any but trifling and pro- bably accidental concurrence in error does not suggest that it was set up from that or any Q, even with the aid of an independent manuscript, such as must have supplied, not only the substantial passages lacking in Q2, but also a number of smaller omissions. Many of these are repeti- tions of words and phrases. This is an easy kind of mis- print, and a theory that these repetitions were inserted by the actors, or in particular by Burbadge, is quite super- fluous. They are not confined to one part, and in fact there are some in Q2, which F in its turn omits. The same trick of repetition is found in other plays, notably Richard III. Nevertheless, the manuscript underlying F, presumably in its origin a transcript from that underlying Qa, had no doubt been used as -a prompt-copy. The nomenclature has been unified, and the stage-directions, although still bearing a resemblance to those of Q2, have been revised, by clearing up indefiniteness, and omitting or varying the provision for music and properties. These changes may be ascribed to the book-keeper; but it is not obvious that some fresh notes for action, especially in the graveyard and duel scenes, would be required by him. Some of the numerous verbal variants in F from Q2 bear a similar explanation ; they are sophistications of vocabu- lary or grammar, such as we find in other F texts. Others are due to misprints on one side, or in the case of F mis- transcriptions. The subconscious mind of the transcriber is probably seen in the substitution of synonyms or other associated alternatives for Q2 words, and he may have emended occasionally to make sense of matter he could not read. The concurrence of Qi and F against Q2 points, on my view (infra) of Qi, to the responsibility of the F transcriber for a variant; that of Q2 and Qi against F to the responsibility of the F printer. There remain a few variants which it is difficult to explain. Wilson has shown that a combination of literal misreadings may lead to some odd transformations. Greg thinks that a few deliberate
4i4 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
alterations were introduced into the transcript by or with the authority of Shakespeare.1 The punctuation of F tends to be heavier than that of Q2.
I come now to the substantial omissions of the two texts. There are only two in Q2 for which a reason other than printing-house carelessness must be sought; ii. 2. 244-76, a depreciatory account of Denmark as a prison, followed by a dialogue on ambition, and ii. 2. 352-79, where the travelling of the players is ascribed (cf. p. 65) to the success of 'an ayrie of children'. Both passages must have been part of the original text; the excision in the first case has left an awkward duplication of 'But' at the beginnings of two consecutive sentences, and in the second has ob- scured the point of the reference to the King's 'picture in little'. Perhaps the best explanation is that of De Groot, that by 1604 Anne of Denmark was Queen of England, and had taken the criticized company of children under her special protection. If so, we have an unusual example of cutting, not for stage purposes, but as a result of dis- cretion or censorship at the time of printing. One cannot always be sure whether the F omissions are due to accident or to cutting. But I think that the latter is responsible for i. i. 108-25; i. 4. 17-38, 75-8; iii.4, 71-6, 161-5, 167- 70, 202-1 o;iv. i. 4 i~4;iv. 4.9-665^.7.69-82, 115-24; v. 2. 110-41, 144-50. One or two of these passages the players may have found obscure or undramatic, but they are mostly digressions, which do not advance the action, and their removal shortens long speeches or long sections of dialogue. They only amount to less than 200 lines and leave the play still a very long one. Probably iv. i. 4, although only a single line, was also cut, to save the intro- duction of two actors. There are other traces of similar savings, A lord drops out of v. 2, and one recorder (Hi. 2), one sailor (iv. 6), one ambassador (v. 2) were thought sufficient, where the author's stage-directions contem- plated more. A little of this cutting (cf. infra) may be later than the preparation of the transcript, and possibly F in- corporates other slight theatrical modifications. Thus
1 Emendation* 24* <6.
Chap. IX HAMLET 415
there may be a bit of interpolated clowning ('Get thee to Yaughan' for 'Get thee in' of Q2) at v. 1 . 67. One would like to think that the 'O, o, o, o', which follows Hamlet's dying The rest is silence' at v. 2. 369, is another example, and its recurrence in the reported Q of Lear, v. 3. 309, but not in F, gives some encouragement. Profanity has been expunged, but only perfunctorily.
Qi is a very difficult problem. It is generally accepted that many of its features are due to a reporter, introducing, as in 2, 3 Henry 71, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, and Merry Wives of WindsoTy 'gross corruption, constant mutilation, meaningless inversion and clumsy transposition*. The attempt of Hubbard to 'edit' it, on the assumption that the corruption is only a matter of misprinting, leaves a quite incredible text. A comparison with Q2 and F, wherever the substance is the same, is a continuous revelation of the reporter. He makes omissions, causing lacunae of sense and grammar. He gives the beginnings and ends of speeches without their middles. He paraphrases. He merges distinct speeches. He makes a mosaic of recol- lected fragments. He catches vigorous words without their context. He makes double use of phrases. He shifts the order of bits of dialogue within their scenes. Above all he uses or echoes in one scene passages which really belong to an earlier or later one. Thus vii. 53 of Q i is from iii. 2. 354, ix. 211-21 from iv. 2. 12-23, xi. 34-5 from i. 5. 49-50, xi. 46 from iii. 3. 90, xv. 8 from iv. 5. 137; while i. i. 173 is echoed inii. 25 gf Qi, iii. 2. 138 in ii. 33, i. 2. 193 in iii. 12, iii. i. 160 in v. 38, i. 5. 185-7 in viii. 18. The process entails much vulgarization. Many lines are unmetrical or bald. Many words are represented by weak synonyms; others by words of similar sound but different sense or no sense, which point to errors of hearing. By hearing, too, many 'connective' words introduced by actors have been incorporated. These, with omissions and failures to recognize Shake- speare's short lines, have led to much mislineation. Nearly all the prose is printed in capitalized lines of irregular length. A few exceptions may be due to the
4i6 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
occasional realization of the compositor that he is deal- ing with prose. I do not think that the reporter was wholly ignorant of blank verse, in spite of his metrical lapses. He fakes up a good many lines, and when he comes on a couplet and has forgotten a rhyming word, he is often capable of substituting another. But he evidently fought shy of reconstructing imperfectly recollected long speeches, and left them incoherent. The stage-directions must be his own; they are of a descriptive character, although not so elaborate as some in Romeo and Juliet. And in two places (xi. 7, 115) he puts into words what he has merely seen as dumb action on the stage. Some portions of the play are better reported than others. The scenes (i. I ; i. 2. 1 60- 258; 1.4; i. 5. 113—91)) in which Marcellus occurs, are notably good, although not perfect, and it is quite possible that the reporter was the actor of this part. The single long speech (ii. 2. 60-80) of Voltimand agrees almost exactly with F. The reporter can hardly have played this himself, or he would not have corrupted the name into Voltemar. It may be that a manuscript of this small part was available.
Some concurrences between F and Qi against Q2 suggest that the text of the performances reported in Qi was derived from the same transcript which underlies F. Moreover, most of the passages cut in F find no representa- tion in Q i . There are, however, traces in a stage-direction at xi. 1 1 1 and a speech at xviii. 30 of iv. i . 4 and v. 2. 203- 1 8. F must, therefore, at these points have diverged from the transcript. Q i , antedating the Act of Abuses > of course retains some profanity expunged from F. But it also has diverged. Two important structural changes have been made. One of these concerns the order of the tests by which the court endeavours to ascertain the reason of Hamlet's strangeness. There are three, in interviews with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (the Schoolfellow scene), with Polonius (the Fishmonger scene), with Ophelia (the Nunnery scene). The sequence in Q2 and F is as follows. The King plans the Schoolfellow test (ii. 2. 1-39). Polonius plans the Ophelia test (ii. 2. 85-
Chap. IX HAMLET 417
167). Hamlet appears reading, andPolonius improvises his own test (ii, 2. 168-223). The Schoolfellow test is carried put (ii. 2. 224-323). Then the arrival of the players intervenes (ii. 2. 324-634). The failure of the Schoolfellow test is reported (iii. i. 1-28). Finally, the Ophelia test is tried (iii. i. 28-196). In Qi on the other hand, the Ophelia test is put much earlier, and immedi- ately follows its planning. We can hardly ascribe the difference to the reporter. He generally gets the succes- sion of his episodes right, and the link-passages in Qi indicate a careful modification to fit the new order. In particular Ophelia, absent from ii. 2 in Q2 and F, enters with her father at the point (vi. 19) corresponding in Q i to ii. 2. 40, and is thus available when Hamlet appears reading. Why the change should have been made is not so clear. It abridges the interval between the planning and execution of the Ophelia test, but lengthens the interval before the Schoolfellow test. Possibly it was an attempt to remove an original inconsistency, characteristic enough of Shakespeare, by which Ophelia is bidden to accompany her father to the King in ii. i, but left out in ii. 2. The second change is towards the end of the play. Here Qi omits altogether iv. 6, in which Horatio receives Hamlet's letter about his voyage, and v. 2. 1-74, in which Hamlet and Horatio discuss the same matter, and sub- stitutes in the place of iv. 6 a different scene, in which Horatio, after Hamlet's return, tells the story of the voyage to the Queen. Here the original version must be that of Q2 and F, since v. 2. 1—74 is represented in B.B.
Two other divergences in Qi are noteworthy. For the names of Polonius and his servant Reynaldo we get Corambis and Montano. It is impossible that these should, as Tanger thought, be mishearings of the reporter. Many students have assumed that Corambis and Mon- tano were the earlier names, but there is nothing to show this, and if I am right in supposing Qi dependent on Q2, the chances are that it was the other way round. Shake- speare used the name Corambus in All's Well^ iv. 3. 185.
3I42.I * c
4i 8 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
There are two rather curious stage-directions in Q2, which may conceivably be relevant. At i. 2. i comes 'Enter , . . Counsaile : as Polonius, and his Sonne Laertes', and at ii. i.i, 'Enter old Polonius, with his man or two*. These may be mere examples of indefiniteness, although Laertes would make an odd councillor. But it is also possible that, when the change was made in an acting version, the new names were roughly noted in the original manuscript, and were there misread by the compositor. Again the motive for the change is quite obscure. One can only suspect censorship, or the fear of censorship. Gollancz has suggested that Polonius and his worldly maxims may be a reflection of the Polish statesman Laurentius Grimalius Goslicius, whose De Optimo Senatore was translated as The Counsellor in 1598. If so, this is another reason for regarding Polonius as the original name. It has often been thought that Polonius may glance at Lord Burghley, who wrote Certaine Preceftes, or Directions for the use of his son Robert Cecil. These were printed (1618) 'from a more perfect copie, than ordinarily those pocket manuscripts goe warranted by'. Conceivably Shakespeare knew a pocket manuscript, but Laertes is less like Robert Cecil than Burghley's elder son Thomas. And if the Chamber- lain's men feared that Polonius would be taken for Burghley and Reynaldo for Robert Cecil, why should a change of name but not of character make a difference. Can 'Polonius' have resembled some nickname of Burghley? I do not profess to solve the mystery. But some theatrical allusion to Polish affairs seemed to me a possible element in the trouble about The Isle of Dogs in I597,1 and there might have been some reason for avoiding the appearance of another at any time during 1 600-3, when negotiations with regard to the Baltic trade were taking place, on the one hand with Denmark and on the other with the Hanseatic towns, in some of which Poland had an interest in 1597.* Lastly, there is a passage in Qi which can
1 Etix. Stage, iii. 455. passim\ cf. Dasent, xxx. 1955 Hatfield
* N. R. Deardoff, Early Trade in MSS. xii. 283, 645. the Baltic duringthe Reign of Elizabeth,
Chap. IX HAMLET 419
only be a theatrical interpolation. Hamlet's advice to the players is in the main a report. But this is followed by a series of clownish witticisms which are not in Qa or F, and two of which Wilson has traced to the 1611 edition of Tarlton's Jests, 5, 12. There was probably an earlier edition.1 But in any case the witticisms were doubtless traditional, and their introduction here of the nature of 'gag'. Rhodes (Folio, 79) suggests that, as the reference to Hamlet's fatness (v. 2. 298) is not in Qi, and the interval since Yorick's death is given (v. i. 190) as a 'dozen* instead of '23' years, the part had been adapted to an actor of nineteen. This is ingenious, but hazardous.
How far, apart from these alterations, does the theory of a report account for Qi, as we have it ? I think that it accounts for most of it, and will here quote Greg's com- ment that his study of Merry Wives of Windsor had led him 'to doubt whether any limit can be set to the possible perversion which a text may suffer at the hands of a repor- ter'.2 But in Hamlet^ as in other bad Quartos, we have to reckon with a certain amount of blank verse, which does not rest upon anything in Q2 and F, and is plainly un-Shake- spearean. To call these passages *pre-Shakespearean' is to beg a question, but they are not in Shakespeare's manner, although they might still be in that of others, when he was writing Hamlet. They are mostly short passages distri- buted amongst the reported matter, especially in the latter part of the play. And they are often difficult to distinguish from the reporter's fakings. One is certainly tempted to find patches of an alien hand or hands in the whole or parts of ill 65-70, ix. 50-6, 100-9, x. 1-12, xi. 37-41, 51-8, 90-5, 104-7, 155-60, xiii. 41-4, xvii, xviii. 109-23, and perhaps in smaller fragments elsewhere. The Horatio- Queen scene (cf. supra} may be disregarded. That is no doubt un-Shakespearean, but due to an alteration. It is no doubt arguable that both in this scene and in xL 90-5, 104—7, the Queen's denial of complicity in the murder and ranging of herself on Hamlet's side put her character in a
1 Eliz. Stage, ii. 344. * M.L.R. v. 197.
£62
420 . PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
different light to that of Q2 and F. But I doubt whether this is more than an accidental emphasizing of Shake- speare's own intention. There is certainly nothing in Q2 and F to show that she had any part in or knowledge of Claudius's crime. In fact she shows no sign of disturbance in the play-scene, and she was certainly not a Lady Macbeth.
The un-Shakespearean matter in Qi and the know- ledge which we have for Hamlet, as we have not in the cases of the other bad Quartos, that an earlier play on the subject has been lost, are the main supports to an alterna- tive reconstruction of the textual history, which has its most elaborate statement in Wilson's papers of 1918. He thinks that the reporter did no more than make additions to an early Hamlet text. This was an abridged transcript for provincial use from the old play as partly revised by Shakespeare. The revision 'had not extended much beyond the Ghost-scenes'. The original manuscript remained available for a subsequent further revision by Shakespeare into the Hamlet of Q2 and F. In this the reporter acted not only Voltimand and Marcellus, but also other small parts, perhaps a Player, the Second Grave- digger, Reynaldo, the Priest, Fortinbras's Captain, and the English Ambassador; and from his memories of the scenes in which these occur and such other fragments as he could pick up at the stage-door, he attempted to supply the gaps left by abridgement in the manuscript. Of other scenes he knew nothing, and here we get in Qi bits of the old play not reached by Shakespeare's first revision. This is of course all on the lines of Wilson and Pollard's general theory (cf. p. 155) as to the genesis of the bad Quartos. Apart from the general difficulties which I feel about that theory, I think that the application of it to Hamlet is in- adequate, in that I find constant traces both of the reporter and of Shakespeare in scenes, such as those of Ophelia's madness, which, according to Wilson, Shakespeare had not yet revised, and the reporter could not get at. Nor do I believe that, what with performances and what with rehearsals, a company could in fact effectively prevent an
Chap. IX HAMLET 421
actor from seeing any part of a play that he wanted to see. I have not space to follow here all the details of Wilson's ingenious argument. But he is clearly right in calling attention to the typographical resemblance, especially as regards orthography, between the earlier pages of Qi and Q2 . I do not find the same cogency in his arguments from a similar use, but at different points, of quotation-marks and brackets, or from a concurrence in misprints, which do not seem to me to be misprints. Wilson explains the resemblance by a 'meticulous* care in the writer of the early transcript to follow exactly the copy before him. But was an Elizabethan transcriber ever 'meticulous* about spelling? Possibly an attempt to begin the setting- up of Q2, as in the case of Romeo and Juliet^ upon an ex- ample of Qi, is the more plausible conjecture. If so, the attempt was probably very soon abandoned.
I have no desire to be dogmatic upon a very obscure question, and even if one does not accept Wilson's view as it stands, some contamination of Qi by the old play is of course a possibility. The un-Shakespearean element rather predominantly affects scenes in which the Queen is present. I have sometimes thought that the reporter might have been the Queen, as a boy, in the old play, and helped himself out with memories of that. Certainly one ought not to bring in an expensive hack-poet for a surreptitious enterprise, of which the profits could not be great. But there is another alternative. The belief that Kyd wrote the old Hamlet has led to much search for Kydian parallels in Qi, and even in Q2. They do not amount to much, except in the case of the Spanish Tragedy. Those to i Jeronimo are irrelevant. The searchers have taken it for Kyd's in error, and the play only exists in a text, itself probably reported, of 1605.* There is only one to Sfanish Tragedy in Q2, and that is not a mere echo. In iii. 2. 304 Hamlet's
For if the King like not the Comedie, Why then belike he likes it not perdy.
1 Ettz. Stage, iv. 23.
422 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
is clearly deliberate burlesque of Spanish Tragedy^ iv. i. 196,
And if the world like not this Tragedie,
Hard is the hap of olde Hieronimo,
just as iii. 2. 264 'The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge* is deliberately burlesqued from True Tragedy of Richard III, 1892,
The screeking Rauen sits croking for reuenge. Whole heads of beasts comes bellowing for reuenge.
But in Qi, ix. in is comparable to Sp. Tr. ii. i. 26; xi. 106-7 to iv. i. 46-7; xiii. 122 to ii. 4. 20; xv. 13 to iv. i. 178; xv. 14-15, 37toiv. 1.74, 126; xv. 53 to 11.5.23; xv. 54 to ii. 5. 41 ; xvi. 1 64 to iii. 14. 148 ; xvii. 8-9 to iii. 14. 1 54—5. These are not all very close, but in bulk they seem to establish some echoing of Spanish Tragedy in Qi. But other plays, not Kyd's, are also echoed, Hen. V^ ii. 2. 12, 58 in xi. 156, 159, and Dekker's Satiromastix, ii. 2. 29 in xviii. 8, 35. Is not the explanation the same in all these cases, that the reporter, especially towards the end of the play, when he was growing tired or impatient, has helped out his failing memory with scraps from recent pieces familiar to him on the stage? And if so, of course, he may also have drawn upon plays not known to us. Henry Fand Satiromastix were Chamberlain's plays of 1599 and 1601 respectively. Spanish Tragedy was revived by the Admiral's men in 1 602, but also, in all probability (cf. p. 148), by the Chamberlain's about the same time.
B.B. has only come down in a text of 1710, but it may be derived from a Tragoedia von Hamlet einen printzen in Dennemark, played by John Green's company at Dresden in 1626, and possibly at Danzig in I6I6.1 I believe that it throws no light on the early Hamlet^ being founded on an acting version of Shakespeare's play closely related to that underlying Qi. It cannot be from Qi itself, since it echoes many passages which are in Q2 and F, and must have been missed by the Qi reporter. Its source had diverged slightly less from the common trans-
1 ESz. Stagey ii, 286; Herz 92.
Chap. IX HAMLET 423
cript than that of Qi. It had the name Corambus, but it also had still the Hamlet and Horatio episode from v. 2. i- 74 of the original. B.B. itself has been much perverted by the introduction of German themes and a farcical wooing of Ophelia by a Phantasmo, who represents Osric. A Senecan prologue has been prefixed, which is inappro- priate to the play as it stands, since it introduces a motive of jealousy between the King and Queen not there used. There are only two or three passages on which any reasonable case for a pre-Shakespearean origin could be based. In iii. 10, Hamlet bids the King send him 'to Portugal, so that I may never come back again*, and this has been held to be an allusion to the disastrous English expedition of 1589.* But it may just as well be of much later origin. Germany had been interested in Portugal, for example, during the war of Portuguese independence in 1 66 1 and that of the Spanish succession in 1704. It has also been suggested that Hamlet's reference (ii. 5) to his father's guards as an obstacle stands nearer to Belleforest (cf. infra) than to Shakespeare, and that his '.crocodile's tears' (iii. 5) are Belleforest's 'pleur dissimule*. But it is not possible to build an argument for a source upon such obvious ideas.
There is not much evidence as to the precise date of Hamlet. The reference by Harvey (App. B, no. xvii) justifies putting it after the publication of Speght's Chaucer (1598) and almost certainly before the death of Essex in February 1601. Although 'innovation' may mean a political uprising, I do not think (cf. p. 65) that it does in ii. 2, 348, or that there is any allusion here to the Essex revolt. Lawrence 2 may be right in thinking that in 'the humorous man shall end his part in peace' (ii. 2. 335) we have one to the trouble caused by the original ending of Jonson's E.M.O. late in 1599.* The citation of a phrase in Qi of Merry Wives of Windsor (q.v.) gives us reason to suppose that Hamlet preceded that play. To put Hamlet in 1 600 would not be counter to any indication of style or allusion, and would bring it near Julius Caesar as a
1 Cheyney, i. 153. 2 SASs WorlsAop, 101. 3 EIxz. Stage^aL 361.
424 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
companion study of tragic idealism. The performances at Oxford and Cambridge mentioned on the title-page of Qi are likely, in view of the date of the S.R. entry, to have been earlier than 1603-4, when the King's came to Oxford. An unnamed company came in 1599—1600, and three in 1600-1. A revival at court seems to have been contemplated about 1619 and there was another in 1637 (App. D).
A vast deal of erudition has been devoted to the source, but most of it bears upon the Scandinavian, Irish, and con- ceivably Greek origins of the story of Hamlet, as found in the twelfth-century Historiae Danicae (pr. 1514) of Saxo Grammaticus. Thence it came into P. de Belleforest, Histoires Tragiques, v (1576), and from this version the play derives. It was translated in The Hystorie of Hamblet (1608), which has a tag or two clearly from the play itself. No earlier edition is known, but in any case it is likely that the old play was intermediate between Belleforest and Shakespeare, and some writers have suspected that an Italian tragedy may also have intervened. Whether the old Hamlet was by Kyd, it seems to me impossible to say; Nashe's reference is quite inconclusive and the verbal parallels are still more so. There are clearly resemblances of dramatic technique between Hamlet, as we have it, and the Spanish Tragedy. Both use a ghost, a play within a play, madness, a pair of sons seeking revenge for their fathers, a woman's suicide. This duplication or motives may really be held to point to the probability either of a single plotter or of two different plotters, according to taste. Nor can we say how far the divergences from Belleforest are due to the old play and how far to Shakespeare. All that we know about the old play is that there was a ghost in it, who called 'Hamlet, revenge!' Robertson, who makes little of the reporter, finds a considerable Kyd element both in Qi and Q2, and thinks that Chapman rewrote the inter- lude and the scene (ii. i. 1-74) between Polonius and Reynaldo, and perhaps contributed the Pyrrhus speech (ii. 2. 474-519) from an early classical tragedy of his own. This speech has also been claimed both as early work of
Chap. IX HAMLET 425
Shakespeare's own and as a parody of Marlowe and Nashe's Dido.1 It is simpler, and equally plausible, to regard both it and the interlude as written with the rest of Hamlet^ in styles deliberately differentiated from that of the ordinary dialogue. They are, of course, not completely serious. It is only by accident (cf. vol. ii, p. 3) that the name Hamlet coincides with one familiar in Warwickshire, but of different derivation, but one may fancy (cf. p. 35) that the setting of Ophelia's death owed something to that of Katharine Hamlett in the Avon on 17 December 1579. The names Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been much discussed. They are those of well-known sixteenth- century Danish families, who were connected by marriage. Both are said to be found in the official documents of the University of Wittenberg, and both appear, in the forms Rosenkrans and Guldensteren, among the ancestral names on a portrait of the astronomer Tycho Brahe, en- graved by Jacob de Gheyn at some date earlier than 1602 from a painting of 1586. I cannot verify the statement of a descendant, that representatives of both families came to England on a diplomatic mission 'in the last decade of the sixteenth century'.2 There seems to have been no such mission. There was, however, one in 1 603 for the corona- tion 3 and in May and June of that year a Laxman Gyldenstiern was travelling in England.4 This, however, is too late to affect Hamlet. Shakespeare may have heard the names from the players who went to Denmark in 1 586.5 There is no evidence for the conjecture that he himself visited HelsingSr.
XXIII. THE MERRY WIVES OF -WINDSOR
MS. H.l?.,ReKques, 72, described a copy which he believed to have been written 'during the Commonwealth for some private playhouse', and possibly to record stage-readings, not in Fi. It was afterwards at Warwick Castle.
Etix. Stage, iii. 426. * R.O. Deputy Keeper's Reports, xlvi,
T.L.S. 28 Jan. 1926. App. ii. 69; P.P. x. 47.
s Efa. Stage, ii. 272$ cf. p. 39.
1 T.L
. x. 77
426 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
[S.R. 1602.] 1 8 January. John Busby. Entred for his copie vnder the hand of master Seton, A booke called An excellent and pleasant conceited commedie of Sir John Faulstof and the merry wyves of Windesor vjd. Arthur Johnson. Entred for his Copye by assignement from John Busbye, A booke Called an excellent and pleasant conceyted Comedie of Sir John Faulstafe and the merye wyves of Windsor. vjd. (Arber, iii. 199).
[Greg (4 Library, vii. 378) notes that the original entry and that of the assignment are written in different hands.]
[Qi. 1602.] A Most pleasaunt and excellent conceited Comedie, of Syr lohn Falstaffe, and the merrie Wiues of Windsor Entermixed with sundrie variable and pleasing humors, of Syr Hugh the Welch Knight, Justice Shallow, and his wise Cousin M. Slender. With the swaggering vaine of Auncient Pistoll, and Corporall Nym. By William Shakespeare. As it hath bene diuers times Acted by the right Honorable my Lord Chamberlaines seruants. Both before her Maiestie, and else-where. [Ornament] London Printed by T(homas> C(reede) for Arthur lohnson, and are to be sold at his shop in Powles Church-yard, at the signe of the Flower de Leuse and the Crowne. 1602. [Head-title] A pleasant conceited Comedie of Syr lohn Falstaffe, and the merry Wiues of Windsor. [Running-title'] A pleasant Comedie, of the merry wiues
£ TTT* J
of Windsor,
Facsimile. W. Griggs (1881, Sh. Q. vi, ed. P. A. Daniel).
Type-Facsimile, W. W. Greg (igio>
Reprints. J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps (1842, Sh. Soc.)\ W. C. Hazlitt (1875, Sh. Library, Pt. n. ii)5 W. A. Wright (1893, Cambridge Sh. ix. 421),
[Q2. 1619/1 A Most pleasant and excellent conceited Comedy, of Sir John Falstaffe, and the merry Wiues of Windsor. With the swaggering vaine of Ancient Pis- toll, and Corporall Nym. Written by W. Shakespeare. [William Jaggard's device (McKerrow 283)] Printed for Arthur Johnson, 1619. [Head-title] A Pleasant conceited Comedie of Sir John Falstaffe, and the merry Wives of
Chap. IX THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 427
Windsor. [Running-title'] A pleasant Comedy, of the
merry Wives of Windsor.
[On the misdating, cf. p. 1 33.]
Reprint. G. Steevens (1766, Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare).
[F i. 1623.] [Catalogue] The Merry Wiues of Windsor. [Comedies, pp. 39-60, sign. D 2-E 6V. Head- and Run- ning-titles] The Merry Wiues of Windsor. [Acts and sec. marked.]
[S.R. 1630.] 29 Januarii 1629. Master Meighen. Assigned ouer vnto him by master Johnson and Consent of Master Purfoote Warden, All the said master Johnsons estate in the 4 Copies hereafter menconed . . . The merry Wives of Winsor (Arber iv. 227).
[Q3- 1630.] T. H. for R. Meighen. Parallel-Text. A. Morgan (1888, Bankside). Modern Editions. H. C. Hart (1904, Arden}\ A. T. Quiller-Couch and J. D. Wilson (1921, C.C7.P.); G. van Santvoord (1922, Yale}. Dissertations. J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, An Account of the only known Manuscript of SA.'s Plays (1843), The U.W. (1850, New Boke, 82); W. Vollhardt, Ein italienischer Falstaff (1907, Studien zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte, vii. no); J. D. Bruce, Two Notes on M.W. (1912, M.L.R. vii. 239); J. M. Robertson, The Problem ofM.W. (1917, Bh.Ass^\ A. W. Pollard and J. D. Wilson, The 'Stolne and Surreptitious* Shn. Texts. M.W. (1919, Aug. 7, !F.I.£.); R. S. Forsythe, A Plautine Source ofM.W. (1920, M.P. xviii. 401).
All discussions of Merry Wives relate it to certain historical incidents which were brought to light in W. B. Rye, England as seen by Foreigners (1865), Iv. In 1592 Frederick, Count of Mompelgart, and heir-presump- tive to his cousin Lewis, Duke of Wiirttemberg, visited England. Rye translates the relevant part of his Baden- fahrt as written by his secretary Jacob Rathgeb and printed in 1602. He was in the country from August 9 to September 5, saw London, spent August 17-19 with the Queen at Reading and visited among other places Windsor (Aug. 19-21), Uxbridge (Aug. 25-6), Oxford (Aug. 26-8), and Cambridge (Aug. 29-30). At Oxford he was delayed because his post-horses werewornout, andcould not be replaced, even at double the normal cost. When he
428 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
finally left London, however, he had a passport from the Lord Admiral, directing that he should be furnished with post-horses and shipping and 'pay nothing for the same'. Apparently the Queen gave him hopes of the Garter, and after his return to Germany he wrote several letters re- minding her of this, to which she returned characteristic and evasive answers. On 8 August 1593 he became Duke of Wttrttemberg. In 1 59 5 he sent an ambassador, John Jacob Breuning von Buchenbach, to urge his claim. Rye quotes Breuning's narrative of his mission at second-hand, but it was printed by A. Schlossberger,1 and is translated in V. von Klarwill, Queen Elizabeth and Some Foreigners (i 92 8), 3 57. Breuning was in England from March 26 to May 23. He was at St. George's Feast on April 23, and visited Windsor and other places during May 6-8. The duke had in- structed him to buy some horses, but he found them expensive, and was nearly cheated with a spavined grey. He was much embarrassed by a certain John Henry Stamler, who had been for nearly a year in England, trying to obtain remission of export duty on a thousand bales of cloth. It was thought an unworthy request and had caused much comment. Stamler told Breuning that he was not a regular agent of the duke, but had a special mission. Here the duke notes on the report, Tut a rope round his neck*. Breuning suspected a fraud, and warned Essex against Stamler. Stamler produced copies of a ducal letter of 20 February 1 594 (now in Cott. Vety. F. iii, f. 97) asking for the export, and others of 12 December 1594, naminghimas the agent, and offering Burghley (LansJ. MS. Ixxvi, 68), a gold chain for his support. Essex obtained the original of the letter of February 20 and the date proved to have been altered from 1593 to 1 594. Ultimately Stamler admitted that his own commission was only from the ducal paymaster at Emden, and that the letters were not directed by the duke, but written and sealed by his secre- tary, who hoped himself to profit by the cloth. H.P. ii. 266 says that Stamler was also engaged in 'nefarious equine transactions', but I think this only rests on a state-
Stuttgart, Bibliothd des Litterarischen Verewy Ixxxi.
Chap. IX THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 429
ment by Breuning that, as he heard that Stamler was try- ing to buy a horse, he suspected that he meant to take flight, and had him watched. The duke got no satisfaction from Breuning's mission. He wrote further letters and did his best to explain the Stamler affair. He was in fact elected to the Order on 23 April 1597, and sent a second embassy in 1598 to express his gratitude.1 But in spite of a protest in January 1599 and a third embassy in 1600 he still could not get his insignia, and the investiture was left for James to grant in November 1603.
The relation between Q and F has been minutely examined in the admirable study by Greg. F is 'a distinctly good, though demonstrably not perfect text'. There is nothing to show whether the manuscript used was of a playhouse or a literary type. The stage-directions are very slight. Only the final exits of each scene are noted, and except for a single 'Enter Fairies' (v. 5. 41), all the charac- ters of each scene are listed in initial stage-directions, according to the order in which they enter, but not that in which they speak. Greg explains this as an unhappy application by a 'devil charged with the duty of preparing the play for press' of 'the Jonsonian method of character indication to the English method of scene division'. Wilson regards it as a case of 'assembling' from 'parts' (cf. p. 153),
Q is obviously a 'garbled and corrupt' text. The most obvious thing about it is the presence of a reporter. 'The playhouse thief reveals himself in every scene', bringing about 'gross corruption, constant mutilation, meaningless inversion and clumsy transposition'. Scenes iv. i and v. 1-4 of F are omitted altogether, and there are consider- able omissions in other scenes, some of which cause sense- lacunae. Scenes iii. 4 and iii. 5 appear in inverted order. Particularly significant of a reporter are numerous 'anti- cipations and recollections' (cf. p. 157) of passages from earlier and later scenes. Moreover, there are similar transferences from other plays (sc. v. 352 from i Hen. IVy ii. 4. 366; sc. v. 363 from 2 Hen. I7y v. 3. 124; sc. xiii.
1 G. F. Bdtz, Memorials of the Garter, clxxxiii.
430 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
1 1 88 from Ham. v. i. 312 in its Q2 and F form). The report degenerates from iii. 3 onwards and in iii. 4; iv. 4 and v. 5 are passages of un-Shakespearean verse. Daniel tKought that the reporter may have been the same who was responsible for Henry V> but that is of a rather different type, and the common abnormal spellings cited by Daniel pro- bably point to the press of Thomas Creede. Greg has shown that in Merry Wives the reporter was almost cer- tainly an actor who played the Host, and reconstructed the play from memory. He appears in eight scenes, and in six of these not only his own part, although he was evidently not word perfect, but also the parts of others on the stage with him, are in unusual agreement with F. In iv. 5, 6, however, he is (cf. infra] less successful. Act v, in which he does not appear, shows the maximum divergence from F. Wilson agrees that the Host had a hand in Q, but thinks that bits of the text must be from a transcript, on account of some typographical resetnblances, which he perhaps exaggerates, in punctuation and capitalization to the corresponding bits of F; and that the transcription may have been from 'parts,' because of the repeated, although not invariable appearance of prose in capitalized lines of irregular length. But if 'parts', as is possible (cf. p. 183), were written in this way, the Host would have been familiar with it, and might quite well adopt it in writing out his report. In F Dr. Caius has (i. 4) a room with a closet behind it. In Q this becomes a shop with a counting- house behind and a stall in front. Perhaps it was so repre- sented on the stage. The Q stage-directions are full and often descriptive of action, and do not show the abnor- mality of those in F.
Greg considers the possibility of cutting and perhaps consequent adaptation for the performance represented by Q, and so far as the greater part of the play is concerned, finds no satisfactory evidence for it. Some of the 'anticipa- tions and recollections' are from scenes omitted by Q, and as there are no obvious reasons why an adapter should transfer the passages, it seems likely that the scenes were in fact played. The parts of Robin in ii. 2 and iii. 2, 3,
Chap. IX THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 431
and of William in iv. I may, as Greg thinks, have been deliberately cut out. But Robin's part is very small any- how, and I think an oblivion of him by the reporter not impossible. The reporter may also have fought shy of William's Latin. But it is quite possible that this scene was only intended for the court performance, where it would please Elizabeth's pedantry. The omissions in i. i, where Q does not give the bit on the Lucy arms, and at the beginning of Act v are considerable. But these scenes precede or follow the concern of the Host with the play.
On the other hand, Greg finds traces of more than one revision of the play. The most important of these he thinks to have been antecedent to both the Q and the F text, and to have involved two factors. One was an attempt 'to modify and largely to remove' a horse-stealing plot, of which traces remain, and which had some con- nexion with the Count of MOmpelgart. The motive appears in iv. 3 ; iv. 5. 64-95 > anc* *v- 6- i~5« All we learn is that three Germans, who had lodged for a week at the Garter Inn, borrowed three horses from the Host to meet their duke who was coming to court; that subsequently the Host was informed by Bardolph, Evans, and Caius that there was no duke, and that the Germans were cozeners who had run off with his horses, and had also tricked all the hosts of Reading, Maidenhead, and Cole- brook; and that he was left with a heavy loss. Here, as elsewhere, Q is a mere perversion of F, with the exception that Evans substitutes (iv. 5. 79) 'cosen garmombles' for the *Cozen-Iermans' of F. The meaning of 'garmomble' is 'confusion* or in a literal sense 'bruise', but it is reason- able to see a pun on Mdmpelgart's name.1 Greg thinks that there must have been more in it, that the plot must have originally contributed to the denouement of v. 5, and that the horses arrested for FalstafFs debt (v. 5. 1 18) and the 'postmaster's boy* found in the guise of a fairy (v. 5. 199) must have had some connexion with it A revision left the story in mid-air, and if the actors learnt the altered
1 J. D. Bruce in MJ.JL vii. 240.
432 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
matter badly, may also explain the comparative breakdown of the Host in reporting iv. 5. I am bound to say that I am very sceptical about this. Falstaff's horses were not the Host's, and it was the wives who plotted (ii. I.-96) to keep him dangling in Windsor until he had pawned them, Windsor must have been full of postmaster's boys. If the censor intervened, why did he allow the Germans and their duke to remain in the play at all ? There they are, quite recognizable, and no doubt they added considerably to the amusement of any Garter knights present at the court performance and familiar with the Duke of Wiirttem- berg's efforts to get his insignia. 'Garmombles' may be a bit of 'gag* in any case; there are probably others (sc. vii. 704 ; sc. ix. 8 1 9-20 ; sc. xviii. 1 522) in the Q text. Certainly the episode is left in the air. So also is that of Shallow and his stolen deer. The play was written in haste and its struc- ture suffered. Of this haste, or of Shakespeare's careless- ness, there are other indications in the time confusion of iii. 5 and in the variant personal names of Thomas (i. i . 46) and George (ii. 1.153; v. 5. 213) for Page. Imagina- tions less bridled than Greg's have essayed to recover his lost story. Hart thinks that Evans and Caius plotted a revenge on the Host for the mock duel into which he had led them, and that the horse-thieves were really Pistol, Nym, and Rugby. This proves acceptable to Wilson, who adds that it looks as if Ford and Shallow arranged that the loss should ultimately fall upon Falstaff. I cannot imagine why all this should have been suppressed.
The second factor in Greg's supposed revision is that the playwright, obviously not Shakespeare, who carried it out, was instructed to provide two alternative endings, one for the court, the other for the common stage, and that this accounts for the divergence between the Q and F versions of v. £. This is no doubt substantial. The 'Garter' passage (v. 5. 60-77) of F, particularly appropriate to a court performance, is not in Q, and instead we get a long passage of octosyllabic dialogue, certainly not of Shake- speare's writing. Part of it echoes the F version, but Falstaff is absurdly described as a 'metamorphised youth',
Chap. IX THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 433
and there is a completely irrelevant passage about Serjeants and proctors, which reads like a scrap from some popular London poem. But Greg's theory would apparently make the F version also un-Shakespearean, and this I hesitate to accept. The Q has un-Shakespearean verse also in place of iii. 4. 1-2 1 and iv. 4 of F, and I take it that the explana- tion is the same in all three cases, namely that the Host had forgotten too much, and that an attempt was made to fill the lacunae. If the Host was incapable of faking some verse for himself, some one else was called upon. I find it easier to suppose this, than to believe that the same play- wright did both the divergent versions in v. 5, which are of very different degrees of merit.
Greg finds some traces of further alteration in the F text, at later dates. One is of course a partial excision of oaths. A few passages containing minor variants between Q and F, he thinks that Shakespeare may have touched up at random on the theatre copy. The strongest case for this is at ii. 2. i, where Falstaff says 'I will not lend thee a penny', and Pistol replies in .Q, 'I will retort the sum in equipage', but in F —
Why then the world 's mine Oyster, Which I with sword will open.
that Q has omitted one and F the other. But ir so, both must also have omitted some intermediate words of Fal- stafF, probably 'Not a penny', which he repeats in the next line. This would have been an odd combination of coincidence and diversity in error, but Q does seem here and there to retain an original phrase missed by the F printer. In one respect there has clearly been revision at some stage. In Q, the disguised Ford takes the name of Brooke, and the connexion of meaning shows that this was the original name. In F, it is altered consistently to Broome. This is, I think, a bit of cautious censorship. Brooke was the family name of that Lord Cobham to whose intervention the extrusion of Oldcastle from Henry IF was probably due. Some writers, and Greg among them, have found allusions to Oldcastle in Merry Wives itself. At
3H2.I p f
434 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
iv. 5. 6 the Host says of Falstaff, 'There 's his chamber, his house, his castle, his standing-bed and truckle-bed*. This has a good enough meaning, without any such allusion. At i. 3. 2 the Host calls Falstaff 'bully-rook', and no doubt in chess a 'rook' is, and was by the time of Guillim's Heraldrie (i 6 1 1), a 'castle'. But the Host applies the same term successively in ii. i to Page, Shallow, and Ford.
If Oldcastle were in Merry Wives, we should have to put the date close to that of Henry IP \ as the Chamberlain's men are not likely to have gone out of their way later to provoke a memory of their indiscretion. But Q contains a transference (cf. supra) from Hamlet, and at the same time it must rest on a report of some of the earliest per- formances, since Brooke could hardly have survived the special review of the play by the Revels officers for the court.1 It seems, therefore, that Merry Wives must be later than Hamlet, in spite of the difference of its tone from that of the comedies which immediately followed. I put it, therefore, in 1600-1. If the death of Sir Thomas Lucy (7 July 1600) became known about when it was ready, that may be the reason why the 'louses' do not appear in Q. That the play is in any case later than Henry V is likely, because the description of Nym as 'corporal' would be meaningless, if he had not already made his appearance on the battle-field. It is of course an . irrelevant tact that in the biography of Falstaff the adven- tures of Merry Wives must precede those of Henry 7, where he dies and Pistol has married Mrs. Quickly. I think we may accept the story of Elizabeth's request, and suppose it motived by Shakespeare's failure to redeem in Henry V the promise of a reintroduction of Falstaff suggested by the epilogue to 2 Henry IV. The Garter passage suggests a performance at Windsor, where a choir of boys would be available for the fairies. Elizabeth does not seem to have been much at Windsor during the later years of her life, although the rather scrappy notices of her movements for some of those years forbid one to be positive. A short
* Cf.£/&. Stage, 1.22$.
Chap. IX THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 435
visit is recorded in August 1601, but the Chamber Accounts show no payment for a play.1 There was a Garter installa- tion on 26 May 1601, but the Queen was not ordinarily present at such ceremonies.2 The play was given at court on 4 November 1604 and again in 1638 (App. D).
For Greg, as for me, there is no suggestion or the original version of Merry Wives having been by another hand than Shakespeare's. But this is not so for Wilson or for Robert- son. They adopt the notion of Fleay that the Jealous Comedy produced by the Alleyn company for Henslowe on 5 January 1593 (App. D) may have been an early form of Merry Wives. It may, of course, have been any play with jealousy as a prominent motive in it. Comedy of Errors (q.v.) or another. But the notion fits in with the general theory of Pollard and Wilson (cf, p. 225) as to a group of early plays abridged in 1593 for provincial use, and con- tributing, with a pirate actor, to the bad Quartos. The particular application of this theory to Merry Wives^ so far as I can piece it together from Wilson's edition, which is not very explicit on the point, and the articles of 1 9 1 9, is as follows. The horse-stealing plot must go back to MOmpel- gart's visit of 1592 and a scandal due to his 'trick of commandeering horses under the Queen's warrant'. As to this it must be pointed out that there is no evidence of any such scandal, unless it is to be found in an allusion in Nashe's Summers Last Will and Testament of 1592 to 'the horses lately sworn to be stolne'.3 This is possible, but Nashe does not connect the matter with Mfimpelgart. The count had a difficulty in getting post-horses at Oxford on August 27. He had presumably no warrant for their impressment then, but on September 4 he received one from the Lord Admiral for his return to Gravesend. On the whole, the clue may just as well lie in the horse- dealing transactions of Breuning or Stamler in 1595. In the development of the play, eight stages are suggested : (i) The Jealous Comedy > a piece of unknown authorship on London citizen-life, with a befooled lover, who was not a
1 Ibid. iv. 114. * G. F. Beltz, Memorials of the Garter > clxxxiii.
3 Etiz. Stage, iii. 452.
Ff2
436 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
fat knight, but a 'simpering lady-killer', with the charac- teristics of Joseph Surface; (ii) a provincial abridgement, without, in this case, any handling by Shakespeare; (iii) a possible revision, still not by Shakespeare, into an 'Old- castle* play; (iv) a further revision by Shakespeare, 'per- haps with help from others', to meet Elizabeth's command; (v) an abridged playhouse version of this ; (vi) a further revision of (iv), involving alteration of the verse scenes; (vii) a further revision of (vi) at the time of the command performance; (viii) a possible abridgement of (vii) for the Jacobean revival of 1604. This is very elaborate, but I do not think that stages (iv) to (viii) are meant to differ essentially from Greg's reconstruction. F was based on 'parts' of (vi), (vii) or (viii), and Q, if I understand Wilson correctly, upon a report of (v) by an actor, who had 'parts' of (iii) to fall back upon when his memory gave out. But I do not quite understand why, if this was so, he speaks (p. 96) of the 'higher authority than has hitherto been sus- pected' of the Q version. Moreover, one of the passages (ii. 2. 4-13), upon the typographical character of which (cf. supra) he relies as evidence for the use of 'parts', contains a reference to Nym, and if so, Nym must have been in the Jealous Comedy^ which is hardly consistent with Wilson's acceptance of the view (cf. s.v. Hen. V} that he is a satire on Ben Jonson. However, the main issue is that, on Wilson's theory, there are un-Shake- spearean elements from the Jealous Comedy still surviving after the revisions in F, and still more, owing to the reporter's use of the 1 593 text, in Q. His 'bibliographical' evidence of revision in F consists partly of bits of verse printed as prose, largely, I think, as in Henry P, due to the confusion of the printer by Pistol's verse intrusions into prose scenes; partly of the familiar feature (cf, p. 233) of verse-rhythms in |>rose, which as usual he interprets as a result of rewriting in a fresh medium; and partly in the blending in some scenes of prose and verse, on which I will quote his collaborator, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who says, 'Shakespeare has everywhere a most delicate sense of the separate capacities of verse and prose, and alternates
Chap. IX THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 437
them with an easy tact quite superior to rule'. On literary rather than bibliographical grounds, Wilson ascribes to the Jealous Comedy some language (i. 3. 2; ii. i. 57-62; ii. 2. 186, 247-50; v. 5. 128-35) used by or of Falstaff, which suggests a 'sententious philanderer' and euphuistic scholar, somewhat out of keeping with the main concep- tion of him. This seems to me rather hypercritical, given the haste of the play. Wilson does not, as he might have done, call in aid the 'metamorphised youth' (supra) of Q. But presumably the double dose of the Jealous Comedy in Q accounts in his mind for those sections of un-Shakespearean verse which I put down to the reporter of his assistant.
Wilson does not attempt to identify his un-Shake- spearean author or authors. Robertson is less reticent. He takes Merry Wives for the first of the Falstaff plays, on the ground that both Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly seem to him to be comparatively young in Q, and I understand him to identify the version there represented with the Jealous Comedy itself. It was probably the work of several colla- borators, among them Shakespeare and possibly Chap- man. And Chapman had a larger hand than Shakespeare in the revision which produced the F version. This claim for Chapman is mainly based on the frail evidence of vocabulary clues.
On the source of the plot there is not much to be said. The lover concealed in household stuff appears in several Italian stories. In Giovanni Straparola's Le Tredeci Piace- voti Notte (1550-3), iv. 4, followed in Richard Tarlton's Newes Out of Purgatory (1590) the vehicle is 'a greate driefatte full of feathers'; in Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's // Pecorone (1558) it is *un monte di panni di bucato', which is nearer to the buck-basket. Henry Julius of Bruns- wick employs a linen-basket in his Tragedia Hibeldeha von Einer Ehebrecherin (1594), the resemblance of which to Merry Wives is very slight, although it introduces an English clown (Cohn xliii, xlvii). The names Ford, Page, Evans, Herne, and Brooke have been traced in Elizabethan records of Windsor,1 but they are mostly common names,
1 R. R. Tighe and J. £. Davis, Annals of Windsor, i. 666.
438 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
and all but Brooke are noted by French 3 14 at Stratford. Later Windsor tradition pointed to the houses of Ford and Page, and a FalstafFs oak, which was also that of Herne the Hunter. I have considered the relation of the play to Sir Thomas Lucy and Shakespeare's deer-stealing in Ch.L
XXIV. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA [S.R. 1603.] yfebruarii. Master Robertes. Entred for his copie in full Court holden this day to print when he hath gotten sufficient aucthority for yt, The booke of Troilus and Cresseda as yt is acted by my lord Chamber- lens Men vjd (Arber, iii. 226),
[S.R. 1609.] 28*° Januarii. Richard Bonion Henry Walleys. Entred for their Copy vnder thandes of Master Segar deputy to Sir George Bucke and master warden Lownes a booke called the history of Troylus and Cressida. yjd (Arber, iii. 400).
[Q (first issue) 1 609.] The Historic of Troylus and Cres- seida. As it was acted by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe. Written by William Shakespeare. [Ornament] London Imprinted by G. Eld for R. Bonian and H. Walley, and are to be sold at the spred Eagle in Paules Church-yeard, ouer against the great North doore. 1 609. [Head- and Running-titles'] The history of Troylus and Cresseida.
[Q (second issue} 1609.] The Famous Historic of Troylus and Cresseid. Excellently expressing the beginning of their loues, with the conceited wooing of Pandarus Prince of Licia. Written by William Shakespeare. [Ornament, imprint, and head- and running-titles, as in first issue.] [For this issue, the original leaf Ai was cut away, and two new leaves substituted ; the first unsigned, with the amended title on the r° and the v° blank 5 the second signed ^[2, with an epistle (App. B, no. xxxii) not in the first issue.] Facsimile. W. Griggs (1886, Sh. Q. xiii, ei H. P. Stokes). [Fi . 1 623.] [No entry in Catalogue. Between Histories and Tragedies, pp., two unpaged, 79, 80, twenty-five unpaged,
Chap. IX TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 439
followed by one blank page; sign, two blank, ^MWWTa, Head-title] The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida. [Running-title*] The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida on ff. 79, 80, thereafter Troylus and Cressida. [Act i, sc. I marked.]
Parallel-Text. A. Morgan (1889, Bankside). Modern Editions. K. Deighton (1906, Arderi)\ ]. S. P. Tatlock (1912, Tudor)\ N. B. Paradise (1927, Tale). Dissertations. K. Eitner, Die Troilus-Fabel in ihrer Literatur-geschicht- lichen Entwickelung (1868, J. iii. 252); W. Hertzberg, Die Quellen der Troilus-Sage in ihrem Ferhaltniu zu Shs T.C. (1871, J.vi. 169;) F. G. ¥leay,OntAe Composition of T.C. (1^7^, N.S.S. Trans. 304.; Manual, 232); H. Ulrici, 1st T.C. Com'edy oder Tragedy oder History? (1874, J. ix. 26); C H. Herford, T.C. andEuphues, his Censure to Philautus (1888, N.S.S. Trans. 186); E. Stache, Das Ferhaltniss von Shs T.C. zu Chaucers gleich- namigen Gedicht (1893); R. A. Small, T.C. (1899, Stage-Quarrel, 139); R. Boyle, T.C. (1901, E.8. xxx. 21); A. Acheson, Sh. and the Rival Poet (1903); E. Koeppel, StudienuberShs Wirkungauf zeitgenossische Drama- tiker (1905); J. Q. Adams, Timon of Athens and the Irregularities in Fi (1908, J.E.G.P. vii. 53); K. Young, The Origin and Development of the Story ofTroilus and Criseyde (1908, Chaucer Soc!)\ N. E. Griffin, Un- Homeric Elements in the Story of Troy (1908, J.E.G.P. vii. 32); J. S. P. Tatlock, The Siege of Troy in English Literature, especially Sh. and Hey- wood (191 5, PM.L^A. xxx. 673), The Welsh T.C. and its Relation to the Elizabethan Drama (1915, M.L.R. x. 265); The Chief Problem in Sh. (1916, Sezoanee Review) ; W. W. Lawrence, The Love Story in T.C. (1916, Columbia Studies, 187); H. E. Rollins, The T.C. Story from Chaucer to Sh. (1917, PM.LJI. xxxii. 383); J. M. Robertson, T.C. (1917, Sh. and Chapman, 193); P. K. Guha, The Problem of Sh.'s T.C. (1926, Dacca Univ. Bull. ix. 23); P. Alexander, T.C. 1609 (1928, 4 Library, ix. 267).
Q and F represent substantially the same text. Q is cer- tainly a good Quarto. Pollard, F.Q., 58, says that it was not used by the Folio editors. But I am inclined to think that F was set up from a copy of Q, not so much because of a few misreadings and abnormal spellings which they have in common, since these might be derived from a common original, as because of a traceable resem- blance in orthography and the like, of which ii. 2. 1 63-1 93 afford a good illustration. Greg, Emendation, 12, and Alexander have independently criticized the view adopted by Pollard. The example of Q used must of course have been corrected from a manuscript, F has many better
440 PLAYS' OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
readings, although some worse, and it restores several passages omitted by Q. Most of these omissions (i. 3. 3 1 5 ; **• 3- 59~65, 96; iii. i. 124; iv. 4. 79, 146-50; iv. 5. 206; v. 2. 68; v. 3. 20-2, 58; v. 10. 2 1-2) are probably mere printer's errors; thus in ii. 3 the repeated phrase 'Patroclus is a fool ' caught the printer's eye at 65 instead of 58. On the other hand, i. 3. 354-6 and iii. 3. 161-3, both of which are accompanied by corruptionin the neighbouringtext, and possibly also iv. 5. 132, 165-70, rather look like deliber- ate excisions of, or bungling attempts to emend, passages found unintelligible in a manuscript. I think that i. 3. 70- 4, including the line 'When rank Thersites opes his mastic jaws' was probably also an accidental omission ; it has also been explained both as a dropped personal allusion (cf. infra) in Q, and as an addition in F. Finally, there is ii. 3. 80-2, with its characteristic reference by Thersites to 'the dry serpigo'. The only reason for not regarding this as an error is that F in its turn abbreviates Thersites' medical details, as given by Q, in v. i. 20-8, but why Q should bowdlerize one passage and F another is not clean Either passage might be a gag, but two independent stage-ver- sions of this play do not (cf. infra) seem likely. F, like Q, makes some minor omissions (i. 2. 300; ii. i. 31-3; iii. i. 95> "i- 3- 105-6; iv. 5, 29), which must be accidental; at iii. 3, 105-6, the occurrence of lines with identical endings is again the cause. At iv. 5. 96, F inserts unmetrically the words 'they call him Troylus'. These recur at 108, where they are metrical and Q has them. I can only suppose that Shakespeare originally wrote them at 96, then reserved them for a point later in the speech, replacing them by 'a true knight', and made a mark of deletion, which the printer failed to observe. A repetition at v. 10. 33-5 of three lines already used at v. 3. 1 1 3, where modern editors omit them, looks at first sight like a similar case, but here (cf. infra) the real explanation may be different. If I am right as to iv. 5. 96, the manuscript used for F was probably the author's original, and the variations between Q and F are intelligible on the assumption that this was so and that Q was printed from a transcript, perhaps made for a
Chap. IX TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 441
private owner. The epistle implies that it was not obtained from 'the grand possessors'; that is, the King's men. There are a good many verbal variants between the two versions, but given two printers, and for F the usual sophisticating editor, and for Q a scribe, less expert at reading manuscript and more inclined to cut or emend what he did not understand than a printer, they do not make it necessary to resort to Furnivall's hypothesis that F incorporates some trivial alterations by Shakespeare of later date than the Q text. I do not agree with Alexander that Q is shown, by abnormal spellings, Rhetorical' stops, and misprints which the S.T.M. script might explain, to rest directly on copy in Shakespeare's hand. In so far as he had a monopoly in such things, they might show through a transcript as well as a print. And some of the stops which Alexander cites are palpable errors. The alternative possibilities of divergence in both Q and F from the original inevitably entail some eclecticism in the adoption of readings. The F editor seems to have revised the Q punctuation and made it heavier. The stage-direc- tions evidently have a common basis, but Q abbreviates the names in a way not usual, and lacks some entries and musical notes found in F. This might be due either to omission or to addition, but there is nothing which points clearly to a book-keeper rather than an author, and one cannot be sure from the texts alone that either rests on stage-copy.
The bibliographical record of the play presents several difficulties. There is the double entry in S.R. That to Roberts in 1 603, given with the formality of 'a fall Court1, suggests that some matter of doubt had required discus- sion, presumably the need for 'sufficient aucthority' re- quired by the entry itself. Pollard, F. Q. 66, suggests that it may have been a 'provisional' or 'cautionary' entry as an obstacle (cf. p. 146) against piracy. But for whatever reason, perhaps the lapse of time without printing, it does not in fact seem to have afforded any obstacle to the later entry and subsequent publication by Bonian and Walley in 1609. The preservation of a cancelled leaf in two
442 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
examples of Fi (cf. p. 341) seems to show that a start was made with setting-up the play after Romeo and Juliet; that then a hitch arose, possibly, as Pollard suggests, owing to trouble with Bonian and Walley over the copyright, and Timon of Athens took its place; and that finally, after the Catalogue had been printed without it, it was thrust in, partly on single leaves, and partly on unpaged sheets with special signatures, in a new place. This is a more plausible explanation than any doubt whether it could be properly classed as a tragedy, even although the description of it as such was left out of the running-titles on most of its pages. It might have been classed as a comedy, but certainly not as one of the English histories, and in its new place it can still have been regarded as a tragedy. It is in fact a tragedy, having no kindly ending, as all the comedies have. Then there is the conflict between the entry of 1603, which records performance by the Cham- berlain's men, and the confirmation of this, with a merely formal change of the description to King's men, in the first title-page of r 609, and on the other hand the omission of any such record from the revised title-page and the definite declaration in the epistle that the piece was 'neuer stal'd with the Stage*. We are bound to assume that Bonian and Walley had come to this belief. It does not follow that they were right. On the face of it a statement of 1 603 is better evidence, as nearer to the date, than one of 1609. But it is just possible that the only performance had been at court, or as Alexander suggests, at an Inn of Court, and that this was not thought to amount to staling with the stage. It is possible, to cite Pollard again, that Roberts made his entry in anticipation of an intended performance which, for whatever reason, never came o£F. But I think there is sufficient, although not much, evidence to indicate that Troilus and Cressida was known by about 1 604, and if known, it must have been performed. Mere allusions to the Troilus-Cressida-Pandar story, such as that in Dekker and Webster's Westward Ho (c. 1 604), of course prove nothing, in view (cf. infra) of the Admiral's play. Marston, Dutch Courtesan (c. 1603— 4), ii. 1. 154, 'Much o*
Chap. IX TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 44.3
your worship's brain lies in your calves', and iv. i. 93, 'Sometimes a falling out proves falling in', may echo ii. i. 1 08 and iii. 1.112, respectively. More convincing are the lines in I. C. SaintMarieMagdalensConversion^iSo^A.^ — Of Helens rape and Troyes beseiged Towne, Of Troylus faith, and Cressids falsitie, Of Rychards stratagems for the English crowne, Of Tarquins lust, and Lucrece chastitie, Of these, of none of these my muse nowe treates,
Here both of the Troilus and Cressida themes are touched, and linked with two others, both Shakespearean.
The S.R. entry gives one limit of date for Troilus and Cressida. The other is less clear. The story of the fool and the ice, alluded to in iii. 3. 215, is probably that in Armin's Foole vpon Foole (I6OO).1 This Shake- speare may have heard personally from Armin. But the 'prologue arm'd' of Troilus and Cressida clearly refers to that of Jonson's Poetaster, produced in i6oi.2 Such a. reference would have little point after an interval, and I incline to put the play in 1602. Of course the ^ prologue^ might be later than Troilus and Cressida itself, and a date as early as 1599 has been inferred from the play-scrap on Troilus and Cressida, recited by Sir Oliver Owlet's men in Histriomastix, ii. 269, with its reference to the knight who 'shakes his furious Speare'. Histriomastix was very likely revised in 1599, perhaps by Marston, although I am not sure that this passage belongs to the revision.3 In any case, although the coincidence with Shakespeare's name may be an odd one, it is not really necessary to assume that there is an allusion to him. The phrase 'shake a spear' is common in Elizabethan poetry. Robert- son has collected a number of examples from Spenser onwards. And if any real play is mocked in the Histrio- mastix passage, it may well be that written for the Admiral's by Dekker and Chettle about April 1599, of which a fragmentary 'plot' survives.4 The temper of Troilus and Cressida, in so far as it is humorous, does not at
' H.P. i. 321. 3 Cf. ibid. iv. 19.
a Eliz. Stage, iii. 365. 4 Ibid. ii. 1695 iv. 51.
444 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
all suggest 1599. Even in 1602, although it is consonant with that of the comedies All's Well and Measure for Measure which follow, it represents a great break away from that of the earlier series which ends with Merry Wives. But if the play is thought of as tragedy rather than comedy, it falls into place as a development of the critical attitude to life already apparent in Hamlet. The formal tests of style are not inconsistent with 1 602. But Shakespeare's thought is becoming more analytic and his expression of it more involved. And there are some stylistic qualities, which, in degree rather than in kind, give Troilus and Cressida a place apart. The language is highly Latinized, and there is a marked tendency to the use of out-of-the-way words, and in particular to the replacement of ordinary words by variant forms with terminations, themselves sometimes showing a Latin influence, such as -/0#, -urey -ive, -ate^ -ance. These features can of course be paralleled to a less extent from other plays, especially plays of near date. In Troilus and Cressida they are most frequent in the argumentative discourse of Ulysses and his fellows. But they pervade the play throughout, and must, I think, be held to indicate something of a deliberate stylistic experi- ment. It remains to add that the entry of 1 603 does not in itself preclude the possibility of alteration between 1602 and 1609. One cannot tell whence Shakespeare got the statement (ii. 2. 165) that Aristotle thought young men unfit to hear moral philosophy. It is found in Bacon's Advancement of Learning (i 605), bk. ii, but rests (Lee 653) on a common and quite justifiable Renaissance rendering of Ttj$ iroXiriKfjs axpoar^s in Nic. Eth. i. 3. 5, In ii. 3. 22, Thersites'says, 'I have said my prayers and devil Envy say Amen'. This is generally taken as a second reference to Poetaster^ in which Envy is crushed by the Prologue. But it comes much nearer to Mucedorus^ epil. 79, where Envy does in fact say 'Amen* to the praise of James. This is not in the 1598 and 1606 editions, where it is Comedie who calls upon the audience to 'saie amen*; it is in the 1610 edition, representing a recent revival. The date of this cannot be exactly fixed, especially
Chap. IX TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 445
as^ an edition of 1609, although not now known, is cited by Collier.1 But it is more likely to have followed than preceded the publication of Troilus and Cressida. Much weight cannot, therefore, be attached to either of these points. To me Troilus and Cressida seems in the main to be all of one piece, with the probable exception of the epilogue. This may very well not be Shakespearean at all, and to speak it Pandarus, over and done with at the end of v. 3, is incongruously brought back, on to the battle-field of all places, and introduced with the lines borrowed (cf. supra) from v. 3. 1 1 3-1 5. The Q transcriber must have spotted the duplication, and cut out the first appearance of the passage.
Troilus and Cressida has, however, been the happy hunting-ground of disintegrators, who have dwelt upon the slight connexion — surely not unlike Shakespeare — between the Trojan and camp plots, and the inconsistency —due, I think, to the use of different sources — between the continuous warfare of the former and the truce of the latter; and have attempted to trace corresponding differ- ences of style, pointing to different dates or to different hands, Fleay in 1 874 thought that Shakespeare wrote the Troilus-Cressida scenes in 1594-6, added the Hector- Ajax combat and death of Hector a little later, and the plan of Ulysses to substitute Ajax for Achilles as late as 1606-7; and that parts of the last act were made up of debris from the Dekker-Chettle play. It is difficult to see how a play can be built up like this, or how the Ajax story in particular can be so split up, Fleay seems to have recognized these points, and in 1886 produced a new theory, according to which a complete play was written by Shakespeare and an unknown coadjutor at a date now put back with Romeo and Juliet to about 1593. Most of the coadjutor's work was replaced by Shakespeare about 1602, but the prologue and v. 4-10 are still his. There is now no addition of 1606-7. This, however, still rules with Boyle, for whom Shakespeare wrote an early play on the love-story at the time of Romeo and Juliet > began to
* Cf. B&x. Stage, iv. 34.
446 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
recast it about 1606 by introducing the Ulysses story, but did not get beyond Act iii, and left the completion to Marston, who added the Hector story, and the prologue and epilogue. Small contented himself with regarding v. 7-10 as un-Shakespearean and the prologue and v. 4-6 as only partly Shakespearean. Robertson breaks new ground. Dekker and Chettle's play was rehandled successively by Chapman and Shakespeare, and to Chapman much of the vocabulary and the 'ratiocina- tive discussions', but not the present versification, are due. As usual, these conflicting theories may largely be left to cut each other's throats. They all seem to me to raise more difficulties than they solve. There is no evidence that Shakespeare ever rewrote the work of a coadjutor or that an Admiral's play was ever transferred to the Chamberlain's. No doubt Chapman made much use of far-fetched and invented words and of Latinisms in his poems and prefaces; but not to any great extent in his plays. Nor can the attitude of Troilus and Cressida to the Homeric heroes conceivably be Chapman's. Marston, too, liked out-of-the-way words, and Boyle finds his bluster in the speeches of Hector and Aeneas and Dio- mede, and his coarseness in Thersites. But the arrogance of the heroes belongs to the temper of the play, and if, as Boyle thinks, Shakespeare wrote the earlier Thersites scenes, why not all of them ? Nor do I find anything in the style which need be early. The echoes to and from other plays reach back to Romeo and Juliet and forward at least to Lear. The use of rhymed couplets does not tell against Shakespeare in 1602; there are a good many still in Macbeth. It is not unnatural, in view of the similarity of theme in the love-story, that a passage here and there should recall the manner of Romeo and Juliet nn&Merchant of Fenice. That most relied upon isL 1. 101—7. There is not much to back it up, and the Shakespeare of 1595-7 certainly never wrote the speech of Troilus in iv. 4. 35-50. I do not even think that Small is right, except as regards the epilogue, when he finds a second hand in v. 4-10. The double-ending test, on which he largely relies, cannot
Chap. IX TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 447
properly be applied to a group of scenes, in which the blank verse amounts to no more than 42 lines. These are huddled scenes, with some poor work in them, ^ but Shakespeare did sometimes scamp his work, especially at the end of a play. And the Margarelon bit and v. 10. 22 — 'Hector is dead; there is no more to say* — are surely his. On this point Small has no doubt supporters, even outside the ranks of professed disintegrators. I believe them to have been misled by the notion that the first occurrence of the repeated lines (cf. supra} marks the original end of the play. It does not; it only marks the end of Pandarus. The other story must always have in- volved the death of Hector, which is already foreshadowed in v. 3. Nor can one easily suppose that a collaborator was brought in for the first time at the tag-end of the play. As to the prologue, I see nothing to exclude Shakespeare. Some differentiation between the style of a prologue ^and that of its play is usual enough. And the specialized Troilus and Cressida vocabulary is there. I have dealt else- where (cf. p. 72) with the possible relations of Troilus and Cressida to the 'stage-quarrel', and need only add here that if Marston was Thersites, he certainly was not also the author.
Directly or indirectly, Troilus and Cressida draws upon four sources. The first is Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, itself derived ultimately, not from Homer, but from two Latin pseudo-Homeric narratives, the Ephemeris Belli Troiani of Dictys Cretensis (4th cent. A.D.) and the De Excidio Troiae Historia of Dares Phrygius. On these were based the Roman de Troie (c. 1160) of Benoit de Saint- Maure; on Benoit the Historia Troiana (1287) of Guido delle Colonne ; and on both Benoit and Guido, with borrow- ings from his own Filocolo and from medieval romance, the Filostrato (c. 1339) of Boccaccio. Chaucer in his turn followed the Filostrato^ and added something direct from Benoit, Guido, and the Filocolo. Secondly, material for the camp-scenes, which mostly lie outside the Chaucerian story, come from one of two derivatives from Guido, either Lydgate's Sege of Troye (c. 1412-20) or Caxton's
448 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1475); probably the latter, to which the spelling of names in Troilus and Cres- sida is closer than to the Sege* Thirdly, although not much use is made of it in the play, the Elizabethans were familiar with the tragic development of Cressida's story to an end in a lazar-house, as given to it in Robert Henry- son's Scottish Testament of Cresset^ printed as Chaucer's in the edition of 1532. And fourthly there was Homer, to whom much of the presentation of the Greek heroes, as well as the introduction of Thersites, must be due. Chap- man's Homeric translations began with Seaven Books of the Iliades (i, ii, and vii-xi) and Achilles Shield (xviii) both in 1598, and probably suggested the theme of Troilus and Cressida. The other books came too late for use in the play. Arthur Hall's Ten Bookes of Homers Iliades (i-x) was of 1581: These selections would not have told Shake- speare that it was not Troilus, as in the pseudo-Homeric versions, but Hector, who was dragged at the heels of the horse of Achilles. He may have known the full French translation of Hugues Sale! and Amadis Jamyn (1584, 1597). But such questions are hardly worth pursuing, since a general contemporary knowledge both of the Homeric story and of the Sophoclean presentation of Ajax may be assumed. An outline of the latter, for example, was given in Peele's Tale of Troy (1589). The earlier Shakespearean plays contain many references to the classical personages, as well as to Troilus and Cressida themselves* Moreover, there was already a stage-tradition. A 'story of Troylous and Pandar' was played by the Chapel as far back as 1 5 1 6.1 Bale records a comoedia of 'Troilum ex Chaucero' by Nicholas Grimald about i£4Q-7.2 The Windsor Chapel gave an Aiax and Vlisses at court in 1 572 3 and Oxford's boys an Agamemnon &? Vlisses in 1584^ The Admiral's produced a Troy on 25 June 1596 as well as Dekker and Chettle's play (cf. supra) of 1 602, 5 Troy has sometimes been regarded as an early form of Heywood's
1 Med. Stage, ii. 205; Brewer, ii. 2. 3 Etix. Stage, £v. 146. 1205. 4 Ibid. iv. 160.
2 Med. Stage, ii. 450. * Ibid. ii. 144.
Chap. IX TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 449
Iron Age> printed in two parts in 1 632. This is, of course, a mere conjecture. But Tatlock has argued that the Iron Age was written before Heywood's narrative Troia-Britannica of 1609, and explains some passages, which are too close to Troilus and Cressida to be altogether independent of it, as due to the use by Heywood and Shakespeare of a com- mon dramatic source. His main ground is that Iron Age repeats lines from two poetical' epistles between Paris and Helen which are in a different metre to the rest of Troia- Britannica and may be of earlier date, and makes no similar use of the rest of Troia-Britannica, which he there- fore thinks not to have been yet in existence. This is in- genious, but it can hardly stand against the clear inference From the epistles to Heywood's earlier Ages that the Iron Age^ whether based upon earlier work or not, had not yet 'aduentured the Stage' in 161 1, although it was con- templated 'by Gods grace' in i6i3.J And I think we must ascribe the parallels with Troilus and Cressida to borrow- ings by Heywood from Shakespeare.
XXV. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue} All is well, that Ends well. [Comedies, pp. 230-54, sign. Viv-Yv. Head- and Run- ning-titles] All 's (Alls) Well, that Ends (ends) Well. [Acts i, sc. i, ii-v marked.]
Modern Editions. W. O. Brigstocke (1904, 1929, Arderi)\ A. E. Case (1926, Yale}\ A. T. Quiller-Couch and J. D. Wilson (1929, C.U.P.).
Dissertations. H. v. Friesen A.W.(\ 867, J. ii. 48)5 F. G. Fleav, On A.W. (1874, N.S.S. Trans. 285; Manual, 224); H. v. d. Hagen, Vber die alt- franzosische Forstufe des Bhs A.W. (1879); N. Delius, SA.'s A.W. and PaynteSs Giletta ofNarbonne (1887, y. xxii. 27; AbL ii. 283); R. Boyle, A.W.andLove'sLabour's Won (1890, E.S. xiv. 408); L. Frankel, Z« A.W. (1892, Anglta, xiv. 457); W. W. Lawrence, The Meaning of A.W. (1922, PM.L.A. xxxvii. 418); J. M. Robertson, A.W. (1925, Sh. Canon, iii. 28).
F is not a satisfactory text, and requires a good deal of emendation. The mislineations are not extensive, and seem mainly due to the transitions between verse and
1 Ibid. iii. 345.
3I42.X G g
450 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
prose. The stage-directions are mainly normal, but a few (ii. i . i ; ii. 3. 1 9 1 ; iv, i . i) indicate the nature of the scenes they introduce. There is much variation of nomenclature, especially for the Countess and for Bertram, and the F editor can have made no attempt at unification. These features suggest nearness to the author's copy. But the book-keeper has probably added the letters G, and E. to the i . and 2. by which the author discriminated the brothers Dumain, who are indifferently described (i. 2; ii. i; iii. i, 6; iv. i, 3; v. i) as Lords, Captains, or Frenchmen, and are apparently also the Gentlemen of iii. 2. The letters may indicate the names of actors; Gough and Ecclestone have been guessed at. The 'Enter a gentle Astringer' of v. i. 7 is a well-known crux. An astringer was an officer of falconry, and probably F so interpreted the stage-direction. But such an officer would be out of place in the scene, and I have a suspicion that Shakespeare wrote *Gentle(man) Usher', and that again the book-keeper added over it the initial *T' of an actor.1 There may be some indication of cutting in the long dashes printed at i. i. 61 and i. 3. 159, the two successive short lines at iii. 5. 42, the abrupt change of sub- ject at i. i. 1 79. Violenta is a mute in iii. $. A statement is ascribed to Diana at v. 3. 199, which she has not made, as the text stands.
There is little external evidence on the date of the play. There was an earthquake (i. 3. 9 1) on 24 December 1 60 1 .2 Parolles is chaffed for his exploit with the drum, as 'Torn Drum' (v. 3. 322) and as getting 'John Drum's entertain- ment1 (iii. 6. 40). But the phrase 'Tom Drum's enter- tainment' is cited in a proverbial sense by Holinshed, and one cannot therefore be sure of an allusion to the Paul's play, probably written by Marston in 1600, of Jack Drum's Entertainment, and printed in 1601.3 But Lafeu's *Lustique, as the Dutchman saies* (ii, 3. 47) must clearly come from Jacob van Smelt's repeated 'lustick' in The Weakest Goeth to the Wall^ 943-6, and there is no reason
1 Prof, Wilson teHs me that a sloven- » Chamberlain, E&K. 124; Stowe, ly 'usscher* might become 'astrtger* Annales, 1412. without the T*. 3 £&>. Stage, iv. 21.
Chap. IX ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL 451
to regard this play as much older than its publication in I600.1 There are no very clear early references to All's Well itself; the title may be echoed in Marston's Dutch Courtesan, iv. i. 16; iv. 2. 48; iv. 4. 1—4; v. 3* 150, 170. This is a play of about 1 603-4,* There are some fairly close echoes in All V Well of Hamlet (i. i . 1 70), Troilus and Cressida (ii. i. 100), and As Tou Like //(iv, i. 45), and the names Corambus, Jaques, Sebastian, Violenta are used in Hamlet, As Tou Like It, and Twelfth Night, although Capilet and Dumain point back to Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour 9s Lost. Such faint indications are at least consistent with a date in 1 60 1 —4, and I put All 9s Well tenta- tively in 1 602-3, between Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure. These are the plays to which it has the closest affinity in temper, and on the whole in style. The Latin- ized vocabulary of Troilus and Cressida does not recur to any marked extent. Throughout the play one gets the impression that Shakespeare's mind and pen are not moving easily, and there is a rather more considerable use of rhyme for substantial sections of dialogue than is typical of his work at this period. Explanations have been given which seem to me .to raise more difficulties than they solve. Boyle thinks that the rhyme and some of the prose have survived from earlier work, and argues, with the help of some slight Shakespearean inconsistencies in the plot, that All's Well is a revision of Love Labours Won, and cites Helena's 'Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?' (v. 3. 315) as an echo of that inconclusive title. I do not, however, believe that the rhyme is early at all. The passages in which it occurs do not in other respects differ much from the neighbouring blank verse; like that, they are broken up by internal pauses and run- on lines. Sometimes, although not always, they can be read as having a dramatic intention; to mark a change of mood (i. i. 231—44), to convey sententious comment (i. 3. 135-41; ii. 3. 132-51), to create an atmosphere of exaltation in preparation for a miraculous cure (ii. i. 133- 2 1 3), Robertson, perturbed by the comparative weakness,
1 Ibid. iv. 52. * Ibid. iii. 430.
Cg2
452 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
which must be admitted, of the play as a whole, boldly claims that it is substantially by Chapman, possibly revising work of Greene, and only slightly worked over in his turn by Shakespeare. The suggestion of Greene seems to me quite ill-founded. Nor do I agree that the episode of Parolles and his drum is quite so irrelevant and inane as to require attribution to Chapman, or that the patches of continuous rhyme are in his manner, or that (cf. p. 222) Robertson's clues to his vocabulary will bear analysis. On the other hand, I think that in certain pas- sages of the blank verse (e.g. i. 2. 24-48 ; i. 3. 226-36; ii. i . 1 06-3 1 ;. ii. 5. 59-76), which are stiffly written and seem struggling to express more than is there to be expressed, there does emerge a quality which for whatever reason approximates to that of the blank verse of Chapman. But to read the play as a whole in the light of Robertson's theory is, for me, at once to be confirmed in the conviction that, however much it may be unlike Shakespeare's more normal manner, it is even more unlike any of the ingenious but empty comedies of Chapman. On the whole, there- fore, I do not see that any other assumption helps to make this difficult play more intelligible than the assumption of Shakespeare working in an abnormal mood.
The source is Boccaccio's tale of Giglietta di Nerbona* as translated in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, i (i 566), 38. Shakespeare uses Painter's 'Senois' for Viennese'. There is no reason to suppose that he knew Bernardo Accolti's Firginia(i$i$y 1535), also based on Boccaccio's story. The substitution of one woman for another in bed, common to All's Wett and Measure for Measure^ is, of course, a commonplace of romantic literature.
XXVI. MEASURE FOR MEASURE [Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] Measure for Measure. [Come- dies, pp. 61-84, sign. F-G 6\ Head-title] Measure, For Measure. [Running-title] Measure for Measure. [Acts and sec marked. The Scene Vienna' and The names of all the Actors* at end.]
1 Decameron, iii. 9.
Chap. IX MEASURE FOR MEASURE 453
Modern Editions. H. C. Hart (1905, 1925, Arden}\ A. T. Quiller- CouchandJ.D. Wilson(i922,C.[7.P.); W. H. Durham(i926,r^ Dissertations. K. Foth, Shs MM. und die Geschichte von Promos und Cassandra (1878, J. xiii. 163); L. L. K. The Plot of MM. (1893, 8 N.Q. iv. 83); G. Sarrazin, Herzog Fincentio in MM. undsein Urbild (1895, J. xxxi. 165); E. Law, The First-Night Performance of MM. (1910, Dec. 26, Times)\ ]. M. Robertson, The Problem of MM. (1923, 8A. Canon, ii. 158). The textual confusions and mislineations of F are so . frequent as to give plausibility to the conclusion of Wilson that a transcriber has intervened between the original copy and the printer; and the extreme slightness of the stage- directions, which often omit entries and exits, lead him to think that the transcriber was, at least to some extent, 'assembling' (cf. p. 153) from 'parts'.
The play was given at court on 26 December 1604 (App. D). Allusions (L i. 68 ; ii. 4. 26) to a royal dislike of crowds may reflect an idiosyncrasy of James, but the proclamations of 2 9 May and 6 July 1 603 restraining access to London and the court,1 which are sometimes cited in confirmation of this, were merely normal precautions against the spread of plague. Fleay2 cites other possible indications of 1604, some of which are rather thin, while one, the supposed allusion in 'Like doth quit like' (v. i. 416) to the name of a play by Heywood and Chettle rests on a forgery by Collier.3 Wilson finds in the black masks (ii. 4. 79), which proclaim an 'enshelled' (F. 'en-shield') beauty, an allusion to Jonson's coming Mask of Blackness on 6 January 1605.4- It may be so, but although the maskers entered in a shell, they were painted black and wore no masks. The style of the play is not inconsistent with 1 604, and the temper is consonant with that of Troilus and Cressida and All 'j Well. There is better poetry than in Airs Wel^ but, as in that, a good deal of ineffective verse and humourless prose, while the structure still indicates the same uncertainty of dramatic intention. The only marked early echo, which has been traced, is of ii. 4, 24—6 in William Barksted's Mirrha (1607).
Wilson scents a later date than 1604 ^n the reference
1 Prod. 951, 961. 3 Henslowe, i. xliii.
a L. and W. 234. 4 £/&. Stage, iii. 375.
454 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
(i. 2. 5) to the King of Hungary's peace. This he takes to be a disgraceful peace made against the will of the Emperor by the Archduke Matthias, King of Hungary, with the Turks at Zsitva-Torok on 1 1 November 1 606. But surely it may as well be the peace made and treacherously broken by Sigismund of Hungary in 2 Tamburlaine, i. 2 ; ii. i. 2. However, the double date so arrived at serves Wilson as the starting-point for an elaborate and even statistical reconstruction of a complicated stage-history for Measure for Measure. It may have been originally a six- teenth-century play, perhaps with a long history behind it, going back to Promos and Cassandra (cf. infra), and only revised by Shakespeare. In any case the text used in the performance of 1604, for which Shakespeare 'scribbled' the topical court passages, was a drastic abridgement in some 2,000 lines, carried out, not by him but by a 'second- rate collaborator', on the 'parts'. Later than 1 1 Novem- ber 1606, a longer version was required for the public stage. But the original copy was lost. Somebody therefore, again not Shakespeare, took the parts, hastily transcribed 1,604 blank verse, 20 rhymed, and 241 prose lines of Shakespeare's work as cut, scrapped 135 more lines of blank verse and expanded their material into 430 lines of prose, added on his own account 364 more lines of prose and 46 of iambic and trochaic rhyme, and thus produced the extant text, amounting, in the numeration of Wilson's edition, to 2,705 lines. It 'takes a brave man to produce so precise a result from an admittedly corrupt text. It is quite possible that there may be some cutting in Measure for Measure as we have it. The total number of short lines is not out of the way for a play of this period, and many of them are normal. A few, however, read awkwardly, and may indicate gaps. Moreover, although Shakespeare does (cf. p. 231) intrbduce mute or almost mute personages, there are several in this play; a Friar Thomas, if he is not the same as^ Friar Peter, in i. 3; a Francisca in i. 4; a Justice, if he is not the same as the Provost, in ii. i ; a Varrius in iv. 5, where also a Flavius, who never appears, is sent for, It is possible that some of these parts may once
Chap. IX MEASURE FOR MEASURE 455
have been longer. Varrius and Flavius, in particular, occur in one of two very scrappy scenes at the end of Act iv, where they are involved in some rather unintelli- gible manoeuvring by the Duke. It is less easy to be sure that the Duke's reflections in iv. i. 60-5 have been trans- ferred, as Wilson thinks, from an original place contiguous to those in iii. 2. 196-200, in order to cover a textual gap. If they stood together, there would be a very awkward repetition of the word 'greatness'. However this may be, the analogy of other plays shows us that cuts often came far short of a 'drastic abridgement*. Nor do I think that Wilson is safe in resting upon the length of Tempest a theory that court performances were normally limited to some 2,000 lines. Some on record lasted late enough to allow for three hours, or about 3,000 lines.1 If there has been any cutting, then it need not have been extensive, and need not have been as early as 1 604. And if there has also been any interpolation, that may have accompanied the cutting itself. The song at iv. I. i is good enough for any one. If not Shakespeare's, one could fancy it Cam- pion's. The statement in Munro, i. 202, that Isaac Walton ascribed it to Marlowe is an error. But it recurs, with a less good second verse, more clearly within Fletcher's compass, in The Bloody Brother, which several experts on Beaumont and Fletcher place before 1623; and in this form it is reproduced in the 1640 volume of Shake- speare's Poems (cf. p. 557). A musical interpolation in a Jacobean revival is always possible. Certainly, the Duke's unusual trochaic rhymes at iii. 2. 275, not unlike those in the Gower choruses of Pericles^ are not much like Shake- speare. But I feel little confidence in Wilson's stylistic reasons for assigning 24 decasyllabic rhymed lines, and 794 lines of prose to a reviser. There is no continuous rhyme, as in AITs WelL The 24 decasyllabics are couplets of dismissal, mostly in the mouth of the Duke, who is choric, like the old folk in AIVs Well^ and they do not seem to me markedly inferior to some at least of those which Wilson leaves to Shakespeare. As for the prose,
1 Eliz. Stage, i* 225$ iv. 122.
PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Wilson's strongest point is on i. 2, in one section of which Mrs. Overdone knows of Claudio's offence, while a few lines later she seems to receive it as news. Either Shake- speare has been unusually careless, even for him, or there has been some alteration. But in the literary quality of this and other ribald scenes of Pompey and his fellows, I can- not see any marked difference between the 'sheer mud, dreary, dead' of what Wilson gives to the reviser and the 'full Shakespearean flavour* of what he spares. Of course he has picked out the best bits (i. 2. 83-1 1 8 ; ii. i. 41-201 ; iv, 3. 1-59) for Shakespeare. But there is little of that full flavour anywhere, and even in the muddiest passages an occasional sniff of it may be caught. The reviser is credited also with some scraps of prose alternating with verse, mainly from the mouth of Lucio, whose part Wilson thinks that he considerably expanded. Such transitions from one medium to another are common enough (cf. p. 182) in the plays, and it is hardly justifiable to assume a second hand, merely because they are carried to an extreme here and the reason for a change of mood is not always obvious. So far I have been dealing with sup- posed additions of the reviser's own. The rest of the prose, much of it colourless and merely concerned with the machinery of the plot, is on Wilson's theory an expansion of 135 lines of lost Shakespearean verse. Here the evi- dence offered is different. There are numerous circum- locutory phrases, such as 'Let me desire to know', or 'This • I can let you understand', which 'seem absurd in prose', but 'would be quite natural in verse'. And there are Verse-fossils' embedded in the prose. I think that a glance at the concordance, where the word 'desire', for example, occupies more than three columns, would have shown Wilson that the complimentary circumlocutions are very common indeed in Shakespeare's prose. He bur- lesques them himself in Merry fPives, i. 2. 9, where Evans says, 'The letter is, to desire and require her to solicit your master's desires to Mistress Anne Page'. And of course the 'verse-fossils* are (cf . p. 2 3 3) an equally common feature. Moreover, in Measure for Measure they are not confined,
Chap. IX MEASURE FOR MEASURE 457
as the theory requires, to the passages where it suspects an expansion of verse, but are foundalso in the original prose ascribed to Shakespeare and to the reviser respectively.
Robertson, with Wilson's theory before him, produces his inevitable alternative. Measure for Measure is 'a working recast by Shakespeare of a play drafted by Chapman on the basis of the older play of Whetstone, or perhaps of an earlier condensation of that two-part drama into a single one'. Greene is only slightly hinted at as a possible pre- decessor of Chapman. I need not discuss Robertson's case in detail. It is closely analogous to that for All's Well^ although I think even less plausible. Those who accept the one are likely to accept the other.
The substantial source of Measure for Measure was George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra (1578). This was apparently designed for the stage, but had not, when Whetstone published his Heftameron in 1582, been per- formed.1 It was itself based upon Giraldi Cintio's Ecatom- miti (1565), viii. 5, and this perhaps in its turn upon an historical incident of 1 547 near Milan, in which the course of the Duke was taken by Fernando Gonzaga, the governor of the province. Sarrazin finds analogies between Shake- speare's Duke and a later Vincentio Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua from 1587 to 1612.
XXVII. OTHELLO
[S.R. 1621.] 6° Octobris, 1621. Thomas Walkley. Entred for his copie vnder the handes of Sir George Buck, and Master Swinhoe warden, The Tragedie of Othello, the moore of Venice. yjd (Arber, iv. 59). [Qi. 1622.] The Tragoedy of Othello, The Moore of Venice. As it hath beene diuerse times acted at the Globe, and at the Black-Friers, by his Maiesties Seruants. Writ- ten by William Shakespeare. [Okes's device (McKerrow 316)] London, Printed by Nicholas) O(kes) for Thomas Walkley, and are to be sold at his shop, at the Eagle and Child, in Brittans Bursse. 1622. [Head-title} The Tragedy
1 Elix. Stage, iii. 512.
458 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
of Othello the Moore of Venice [Running-title] The
Tragedy of Othello The Moore of Venice.
[Epistle (App. B, no. xlix) headed The Stationer to the Reader',
signed Thomas Walkley'. Acts ii. i, iv, v marked.]
Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1885, Sh. Q. xxxi, ed. H. A. EvansJ.
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] Othello, the Moore of Venice. [Tragedies,pp. 310-39, sign, ss 3v-w 6r. Head-title'] The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice. [Running-title'] The Tragedie of Othello the Moore of Venice. [Acts and sec. marked. The Names of the Actors' at end.] [S.R. 1628.] imo Marti 1627. Master Richard Hawkins. Assigned ouer vnto him by Thomas Walkley, and Con- sent of a Court holden this Day all the estate right title and Interest which he hath in these Copies following . . viz1 . . Orthello the more of Venice. (Arber, iv. 1 94.)
[Q 2. 1630.] The Tragcedy of Othello, The Moore of
Venice. As it hath beene diuerse times acted at the Globe,
and at the Black Friers, by his Majesties Seruants.
Written by William Shakespeare. [Mathewes's device
(McKerrow i88b)] London, Printed by A(ugustine)
M(athewes) for Richard Hawkins, and are to be sold at his
shoppe in Chancery-Lane, neere Sergeants-Inne. 1630,
[Head- and Running-titles] The Tragedy of Othello the
Moore of Venice.
[ii. i; iii. i; iv. i; v. i marked.]
Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1885, Sh. Q. xxxii, ed. H. A. Evans).
[S.R. 1638.] 29°Maij 1638. Master Mead and Master Meredith. Entred for their Copies by order of a full Court held the fifth day of June Last (1637) according to the request of Vrsula Hawkins widdow (late wife of Richard Hawkins deceased) then present in Court All these Copies and parts of Copies following which did belong vnto her said husband as followeth . . . Orthello the More of Venice a play . . . (Arber, iv. 420).
[S.R. .1639.] 25th of January 1638 Master William Leake. Assigned ouer vnto him by vertue of a warrant vnder the hands and scales of Master Mead and Master
Chap. IX OTHELLO 459
Meredith and with the Consent of a full Court of Assis- tants holden this day. All the Estate Right Title and Interest which the said Master Mead and Master Mere- dith haue in these Copies and partes of Copies following which were Entred vnto them from Mistris Hawkins the 29th of May last . . . viz* . . . Orthello the More of Venice a Play , . . (Arber, iv. 452).
[Q3- l655-] • • • Tlie fourth Edition . . , Printed for Wil- liam Leak . . . 1655.
Parallel-Texts. T. R. Price (1890, Bankside); M. M. A. Schrder (1909).
Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (1886, New Variorum); H. C. Hart (1903, 1928, Arden)\ L. Mason (1918, Yale); C. H. Herford (1920, ffarwick).
Dissertations. R. O'Connell, Desdemona in the Flesh (1885, 6N.Q. xi. 147); W. R. Turnbull, 0., A Critical Study (1892); E. Engd, Zur Urge- schichte des O. (1899, 7-XXXV.27I); A. C. Bradley, The Additions in the Folio Text ofO.(i 904, 8 A. Tragedy, 429); E. Law, 0. on All Hallows Day, '1604 (1910, Oct. 31, Times); C. Nolte, Die Vterlieferung von Shs 0. (1923); L. Winstanley, O.as the Tragedy of Italy (1924); A. H.Krappe, A Byzantine Source ofSh's O. (1924, MJ*Jf. xxxix, 1 56); W. A. Bullock, The Sources of 0. (1925, M.L.N. xL 226).
Q and F are both good and fairly well-printed texts; and they clearly rest substantially upon the same original. A feature of this seems to have been the occasional writing of lines of verse, perhaps (cf. p. 184) for emphasis, as two separate half-lines. Q and F have generally preserved this at different points, but at i. I. 53-4 they concur. The variations between the texts throw some light on their origins. F has eliminated, more rigorously than usual, profanities which stand in Q, Each text contains passages not found in the other. The F omissions are trifling and doubtless due to error. So are many of those in Q. Twice (i. 3. 194; iv. 2. 73-6) the cause is obvious, in taking off from the second instead of the first of two lines with identical last words. Twice (i. 2. 65; i. 3. 63) Q seems to have regarded parenthesis brackets in the original as marks for deletion. Some longer omissions in Q require to be explained otherwise. Some of these passages have
460 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
been taken for later Shakespearean additions in F, There is, however, no example in which this can be proved to be so, and on the other hand in most cases (i. i. 122-38 ; i. 2, 72-7; i. 3. 24-30; iii. 3. 383-90; iv. 3- 3i~53> 55~7> 60-3, 87-104; v. 2. 246-8, 266-72) the omission is accompanied by alteration in neighbouring lines, or leaves the sense of the context abrupt or inadequate. Q is pretty clearly cut here. It is true that the omissions in iv. 3 include the Willow Song, and that a song forms a natural interpolation. But an interpolator would not have added the scraps of dialogue with which Desdemona's is broken, or the reference back to it in v. 2. 246-8. There is no reason why the other longer Q omissions (iii. 3. 453-60; iv. i. 38-44; iv. 2. 151-64; v. 2. 151-4, 185-93) should not be cuts also. If so, the cutting amounts to 125 lines; and, as usual, it mainly affects long speeches or sections of dialogues. Of course the song may have been omitted, not to shorten a performance, but because the actor could not sing. The purely verbal variants between Q and F are very numerous. The great majority are due to different readings of the same word in the original, and generally, although by no means always, F has the better. But sometimes the divergence is greater than mere misreading will explain. There are some 'equivalents' probably due (cf. p. 180) to subconscious substitution. There are some traces of sophistication by the F editor. But I think there must be perversion in Q. There are a good many passages in which more than one word is varied, and here Q often seems to have attempted an emendation of language or metre, or of a phrase found unintelligible, or to have started (iii. 4. 74-5; v. i. 86) with a misreading and altered the context to suit it. These features suggest a transcriber rather than a printer, and the relation becomes intelligible if we regard F as printed from the original and Q from a not very faithful transcript, without a few passages cut in representation. It must have been an early transcript, in view of the profanities. Whether it was made for stage purposes or for a private collector one can hardly say. The F stage-directions seem to have been altered from those in
Chap. IX OTHELLO 461
Q, which are normal. They tend to be shorter; they have fewer notes for properties and the like; the order of the names in entries differs. The only notable addition is at v. 2. i where, for the 'Enter Othello with a light' of Q, F has 'Enter Othello, and Desdemona in her bed*. But the bed is elsewhere (v. 2. 198) in Q. The Q stage-directions may well be the author's, but the transcriber might have added some marginal notes for action, not in F. It is per- haps noteworthy that Q regularly spells Emillia, Roder- igo, Montanio, for the Emilia, Rodorigo, Montano of F. Q2 seems to have been set-up from Qi, but corrected and the omissions supplied, either from F, or as the Cambridge editors, perhaps unnecessarily, suggest, from a manu- script closely resembling that used by F.
I do not think there are any cuts common to Q and F. A few short lines seem abrupt, but short lines have become very common in plays of this period. There is an odd patch of prose at i. 3. 221—9, probably deliberate, to introduce a change of subject and tone, and led up to by the last line of the foregoing speech, which is prose, although Q turns it into verse. Similarly, the rhyme of i. 3. 202—19, which Robertson * claims as an interpola- tion by Chapman, is appropriate to the sententious com- ments which it conveys; the Duke calls his contribution 'a sentence'. Gildon (App. C, no. xxi) had been told that Shakespeare put some words and expressions 'perhaps not so agreeable to his Character' into the part of lago, for the benefit of a comedian who played it. This may refer to the ribald rhymes of lago's discourse with Desdemona of ii. i. i o 1-6 1, which Hart, who finds parallels with Nicholas Breton's Choice^ Chance and Change (i 606), would like to regard as an interpolation. But it is in both texts, and Breton probably borrowed. The passage, like the dull Clown in iii. i, 4, reads like a survival of the manner of All Js Welltt\& Measure for Measure from which Shake- speare has for the most part purged himself in Othello.
A court performance on i November 1604 (App. D) gives one limit of date, and this was no doubt the 'indis-
1 Sk. and Ch. zi6.
462 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
putable evidence' which led Malone, who formerly thought Othello one of the latest plays, to put it in i6o4.x A later date has been claimed for iii. 4. 47, 'our new heraldry is hands, not hearts,' on the ground that it alludes to the adoption of 'the bloody hand of Ulster' as a badge for the new order of baronets in 1 6 1 1 . But the antithesis of hands and hearts is widespread, and there are close parallels to Shakespeare's use of it in Peele, Polyhymnia (1590), 190, where also it takes an heraldic form, and Sir William Corn- wallis, Essayes (1600-1), xxviii. Collier (App, F, xi, c, <?) forged entries in Egerton and Dulwich manuscripts to support earlier dating. A production in 1 604 is consonant with the stylistic evidence, and would give time for an apparent echo of the Moor's murder in Dekker and Middleton's i Honest Whore^ i. 1 , 37, of that year.2 Othello held the stage well; performances are traceable in 1610, at court in 1612-13, in 1629, in 1635, anc^ at court on 8 December 1636 (App. D). Burbadge and Swanston played Othello and Taylor lago.3 Collier has an epigram, of doubtful authenticity, ascribing Othello also to Field (App. F, xi, K).
The source is Giraldi Cintio's Ecatommiti (i 565), iii. 7, but here the Moor and the Ensign have no names. lago is the ordinary Italian form of James; it is not known where Othello came from. A ballad on the story cited by Collier is (App. F, xi, c) a forgery, O'Connell cites from P. G. Molmenti, Vecchie Stone (1882), 77, a case of an actual wife-murder by a Venetian noble in 1602. The Willow Song (iv. 3. 41) may be borrowed. A text with musical notation is printed in Noble 152 from Addl. MS. 15117, f. 1 8 (c. 1 6 1 5), and the music by itself is in a lute-book by Thomas Dallis of Cambridge, dated I583.4 A play given before James, just after a treaty with Spain, obviously cannot be, as Miss Winstanley thinks, a symbolical alle- gory, at once of the domination of Italy by Spain, and of the relations of Philip II (Othello) with his wife and his
x Var. ii. 404; Edition (1800) of 3 Ibid. ii. 309; iv. 371. Dryden'a Grounds of Criticism, 458. * T.CJ). MS. 410.
* EUz. Stage, iii. 294.
Chap. IX OTHELLO 463
minister Antonio Perez (lago). If such an intention had been intelligible, the censor would not have passed the play; if not, it would have been pointless.
XXVIII. KING LEAR
[S.R. 1607.] 26 Novembris. Nathanael Butter John Busby. Entred for their Copie under thandes of Sir George Buck knight and Thwardens A booke called. Master William Shakespeare his historye of Kinge Lear, as yt was played before the Kinges maiestie at Whitehall vppon Sainct Stephens night at Christmas Last, by his maiesties servantes playinge vsually at the Globe on the Banksyde vjd (Arber, iii. 366).
[Qi. 1608 j M. William Shak-spcare: His True Chronicle Historic or the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters. With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam : As it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall vpon S. Stephans night in Christ- mas Hollidayes. By his Maiesties seruants playing vsually at the Gloabe on the Bancke-side. [George and Lionel Snowden's or Nicholas Okes's device (McKerrow 3 1 6)] London, Printed for Nathaniel Butter, and are to be sold at his shop in Pauls Church-yard at the signe of the Pide Bull neere S*. Austins Gate. 1608 [Head-title] M William Shak-speare His Historic, of King Lear, [Running-title'] The Historic of King Lear. [Sheets D, E, F, G, K are found in corrected and uncorrected forms (cf. p. 174). There is a note on the variants by W. W. Greg in R.E.S. i. 469.] Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1885, Sh. Q. xxxiii, ed. P. A. Daniel).
[Q2. 1619.] M, William Shake-speare, His True Chronicle History of the life and death of King Lear, and his three Daughters. With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Glocester, and his sullen and assumed humour of Tom of Bedlam, As it was plaid before the Kings Maiesty at White-Hall, vppon S. Stephens night, in Christmas Hollidaies. By his Maiesties Seruants,
464. PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
playing vsually at the Globe on the Banck-side. [William Jaggard's device (McKerrow 283)] Printed for Nathaniel Butter. 1608, [Head-title, under ornament with royal arms, used by John Roberts and William Jaggard] M. William Shake-speare His History, of King Lear. [Run- ning-title] The History of King Lear. [On the misdating, cf. p. 1 33.] Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1885, Sh. Q. xxxiv, ed. P. A. Daniel).
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] King Lear. [Tragedies, pp. 283- 3°9> s*gn- qq 2~ss 3r- Head- and Running-titles] The Tragedie of King Lear. [Acts and sec. marked.]
[Q3- l655-J • • • Dinted by Jane Bell, and are to be sold at the East-end of Christ-Church. 1655. Parallel-Texts. A. A. Adee (1890, Bankside)-, W. Victor (1892). Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (1880, New Variorum}\ W. J. Craig (1901, 1927, Arden}\ D. Nichol Smith (1902, Warwick}\ W. L. Phelps(i9i7,r*/4
Dissertations. N.Delius, fiber die urspriingtichen Textdes K.L. (1875, J. x. 50; tr. 1875, N.S.S. Trans. 125); H. von Friesen, fiber Shs Quellen zu K.L. (1877, J. xii. 169); R. Koppel, Textkritische Studien iiber Shs R. Ill und X.L. (1877); F. G. Fleay, The Date and the Text of K.L. (1879, Aug. I, Robinson's Epitome of Literature)^ A. Schmidt, Zur Text- kritikdesK.L.(i%%Q,4nglia,i\\. i); E.Richter,£/w Altportugiesische Ver- sion der K.L.-Sage (1901, E.S. xxix. 208);. M. W. Sampson, On the Date of K.L. (1902, M.L.Q. v. 71); A. C. Bradley, Notes on K.L. (1904, Sh'n. Tragedy, 443); E. Bode, Die Learsage vor Sh. (1904); W. Perrett, The Story ofK.L.from Geoffrey ofMonmouth to Sh. (1904); R. A. Law, On the Date of K.L. (1906, PM.LJI. xxi, 462); R. B, Merriman, On the Date ofK.L. (1908, May 23, Athen^ R. H. Cunnington, The Revision of K.L- (1910, M.L.R. v. 445); W. D. Moriarty, The Bearing on Dramatic Sequence of the Varia in R. Ill and K.L. (1913, M.P. x. 45 1); R. Fischer, Quellen zu K.L. (1914); L. Winstanley, Macbeth, K.L. and Contemporary History (1922); E. Sievers, Shs Anteil am K.L. (1925, Anglica, ii. 173).
Most of the sheets of Qi are found both in corrected and uncorrected states, variously combined in the existing examples; sheet C is in three states. Some of the correc- tions suggest further reference to copy; others are clearly due to erroneous conjecture; and it is possible that in carrying them out some further blunders were .made by
Chap. IX KING LEAR 455
the compositor, Qa was set-up from a Qi containing uncorrected sheets D, G, H, with some further con- jectural corrections. Fi mainly rests upon an indepen- dent manuscript, but it too is shown by a continuance of errors and a general orthographic resemblance to have been set up from a Qi containing uncorrected sheets
E, H, K. The stage-directions like the text, have been revised. They are normal, in both cases. But F omits a good many Q notes for properties and action, and adds a few, together with many 'noises1. The texts are sub- stantially derived from the same original. There are a good many verbal variants, and where one is clearly wrong, the better reading, except for a dozen or score of cases, is in
F. Subject, therefore, to its usual sophistications, F must have the preference where the variants are indifferent. Q seems to contain some 'connective* phrases by actors, and many of its misreadings might well be due either to actors' blunders or to mishearing. There is not a great deal of mislineation in F, and most of what there is may be explained by the setting-up from Q, or by the rapid transitions in several scenes between verse and prose. On the other hand, mislineation is a constant feature in Q. The verse is often put wrong by an initial error, and runs from central pause to central pause, until another error or the end of a speech recovers it. Occasionally it is altogether unmetrical. Prose is printed as verse. Still more often is verse printed as prose, throughout long passages, in a way which cannot be explained either by errors of composition or by marginal insertions in copy. Moreover, Q has practically no punctuation except com- mas, even in places where both logic and enunciation require heavier stops and these are supplied by F. I think that the characteristics of Q point to a reported text. It is, of course, a much better version than the bad Quartos of 2, 3 Henry FI, Romeo and Juliet^ Henry V, Merry Wives^ and Hamlet. In particular it does not mis- place bits of dialogue within a scene, or bring in bits from other scenes or other plays. Possibly it was produced (cf. p. 1 6 1 ) by shorthand and not memorization. The reporter,
3X42.1 H H
466 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Cliap. IX
except for subconscious substitutions by himself or the actors, has not got his words badly. The failure is in put- ting his continuous notes into metre, and in punctuating them. And these tasks he seems to have largely shirked, If reported, the Q text was presumably surreptitious. There is nothing irregular about the registration of the play, but it is worth noting that it was Nathaniel Butter
although corrupt enough, has not the long passages of prose for verse or the peculiar punctuation of Lear.
. Apart from stray words and phrases, Q omits about i oo lines found in F, and F omits about 300 lines, including the whole of iv. 3, found in Q. These differences have been much discussed, and several writers have regarded them as due to deliberate revision of the play. Thus Koppel argues that the passages special to Q represent a series of added touches, as a result of which the play became too long, and required the abridgement shown by the F omis- sions. The arguments used carry no conviction to me. No doubt 'the play is better with the special Q passages than without them, but so it would be on any reasonable hypothesis of their nature. Similarly the reasons given for regarding some of the F omissions as improvements in the interests of dramatic clarity and directness seem to me highly subjective. The play, as pointed out by Bradley, is in any case unusually full, even for Shakespeare, of inconsistencies and obscurities of action, and it is impos- sible to stress the resultant effect of an addition or an omission upon some one of these. I take it that, both in Q and in F, more than one cause has operated. Practi- cally all the special passages I believe to be part of the original text. The only exception I should make is F's Merlin prophecy by the Fool in iii. 2. 79-95, which is generally, and I think rightly, taken as an incongruous theatrical interpolation. I see no sufficient reason for regarding the Fool's couplet at i. 5. 55-6 as another, since
1 Etiz, Stage, iii. 342.
Chap. IX KING LEAR 467
it is in both texts. And Edgar's rhymed couplets in iii. 6. 109—22, omitted by F, contain sententious matter, such as Shakespeare still rhymes even in late plays. Apart from iii. 2. 79-95, most of the Q omissions might well be errors. They leave lacunae of sense or action at i. i. 41-6, i. 2. 118—24, ii. 4. 142—7, iv. i. 6-9, iv. 6. 169—74, In a reported text, actors, reporter, and printer may all have contributed. Identical line-ends have led to mistakes at i. i. 90 and iii. 4. 18. Probably the reporter's lapses of attention are mainly responsible, and some linked omis- sions (ii. 4. 99—100, 104; iii. 4. 26-7, 37-8) and small contextual alterations suggest that he was sometimes aware of these, and attempted to cover them up. On the other hand, there is some political and social criticism in the play, and it is conceivable that the omission of i. 2. 1 18— 24 and iv. 6. 169-74 and also of iii. i. 22—9 may have been directed by a censor. F omissions in turn leave lacunae at i. 4. 154-69, i. 4, 252-6, iv. 2. 31-50, v. 3. 204—21. Here also there are probably some printer's errors, while a censor may have operated on i. 2. 157—66, i. 4. 153-69, iii. 6. 18-59. But in the main we pro- bably have to do with ordinary theatrical cutting. It is not unintelligent, affecting chiefly narratives of episodes in France and elsewhere away from the main action (iii. i. 30-42; iv. 2. 53-9; iv. 3; v. i. 23-8; v. 3. 204-21), some dialogue between servants (iii. 7. -99-107; iv. 7. 85—98), a bit of poetic description (iii. i. 7-15)5 Edgar's sententious rhymes (iii. 6. 109-22), some interchanges of amenities between Albany and Goneril (iv. 2. 31-50, 62- 9). The chief loss is in iv. 3, where the introduction, if only in narrative, of Cordelia is important to bridge the interval between her earlier and later appearances. It is idle to ask whether Shakespeare himself or a colleague made these cuts. They point, of course, to the use of ' stage-copy for F. I can make nothing of the attempt of Sievers to distribute the play between three authors by the method of ' Schallanalyse*.
It is difficult to fix the date of Lear with precision. The probable borrowing of the devil names (iv. i. 62) from
468 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Popish Impostures (i 603) and the use (iii. 4. 189) of 'British' for 'English' may per- haps confirm, if that is needed, the stylistic evidence that it is a Jacobean play. It was performed at court on 26 December 1606, and the natural, if not absolutely impera- tive, inference from the particularity of that record would be that this was the first court performance of a new play. The eclipses referred to in i. 2. 112 must be the nearly total eclipse of the sun on 2 October 1605 and the partial eclipse of the moon on 27 September 1605.; and although it is true that these had been anticipated as far back as John Harvey's Discoursive Probleme concerning Prophesies (1588), they are spoken of by Gloucester as 'these late eclipses'. The reference to 'machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders' (i. 2. 122) is hardly specific enough to bear pressing as a reminiscence of the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605. There is a fairly palpable imitation of i. 4. 9-42 in Edward Sharpham's The Fleir, i, ad fin. This was probably produced after 30 January 1606, registered on May 13, and printed in ifioy.1 So far a date of production in the earlier part of 1606 would fit best for Lear. Aldis Wright's suggestion that the colouring of ii and iv points to composition in winter and summer respectively and the storm of iii to that of March 1606 seems to limit the poet's imagination rather unduly by climatic conditions. The difficulty about 1606 is that the earlier part of 1606 seems also to fit best for Macbeth, and that the time-table left available by plagues (cf. p. 78) makes it unlikely that two Shakespearean plays appeared almost concurrently at this date and none at all in 1 605, which was clearer from sickness, On the whole, perhaps Lear is the easier play to put back to 1605. Bradley has argued strongly for its priority to Macbeth on the basis of metrical tests, and no doubt the statistics of these give him support, although I doubt whether much reliance can be placed upon them in determining the sequence of contiguous plays, especially when the text of one pf them, like that ol Macbeth, may only be before us
EKx. Stage, iii. 490.
Chap. IX KING LEAR 469
in a much abridged form. Bradley also thought he saw signs of the influence of Lear on Marston's Dutch Courtesan (1605). I cannot find any very plausible parallel except a bit (iii. 2. 44) about taking butter 'd shrimps from horses, which recalls Lear, ii, 4. 126. It may be doubted whether the jest was original in either play. Moreover, the Dutch Courtesan, although registered on 26 June 1605, probably goes back to 1 603-4. 1
The matter is complicated by the relation of the play to the old Leir. The history of this is obscure, but it pro- bably remained unprinted until 1605, when it was registered for a second time on May 8, apparently in dis- regard of an existing copyright, and issued as 'lately acted*.2 A facsimile of the entry given in H.P., Folio, xiv. 354, shows, as Arber (iii. 289) does not, that it was originally entered as a 'tragedy' and the description altered to 'tragecall historic'. On the title-page it is 'chronicle history'. There is not much in this; the action is tragic, although it has not a tragic ending. But it has been suggested that Shakespeare's play was already on the stage, and that the publication was an attempt to pass off the old play as his. This rather disregards the fairly obvious use made by Shakespeare of the old play. It is true that the story of Lear, originally due to the inventive genius of Geoffrey of Monmouth, was available for him in several other versions ; in Holinshed, in a contribution by John Higgins (1574) to the Mirrourjor Magistrates, in Spenser's Faerie Queene, ii. 10. 27-32. All these he may have consulted, as well as a variant of the story, attributed to the Saxon Ina, in Camden's Remaines (1605). A ballad in Richard Johnson's Golden Garland (1620) is likely to be later than Lear. Spenser probably gave him the form of the name Cordelia. Whatever his sources he handled them very freely. But certainly Lear bears a closer resem- blance to Leir than to any of the other versions. It is not so much discernible in echoes of phrase and situation, although there are some of these, as in the foreshadowing of the characters of Kent and Oswald by the Perillus and
Ibid. iii. 430. Ibid. iv. 25.
470 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
less markedly the Messenger of Leir. On the whole I think it is likely that Leir had been 'lately acted1 shortly before Lear was written, and gave suggestions for it. There is no great probability that the King's men them- selves possessed a manuscript of Leir> and any reminis- cences of the 1 594 performances (cf. p. 53) would be rather remote. On the other hand, the resemblances are not such as to make it necessary to suppose that the printed Leir itself was before Shakespeare. Indeed, it is conceivable that the play as 'lately acted' may not have been quite in the form of the printed book. H.P. ii. 338 inferred from the mention of 'Kentes woden leage' in an Admiral's inven- tory of 1 598, that they had a play on the Lear theme with Kent and his stocks in it,1 There is no wooden leg in Munday1 s John a Kent and John a Cumber? as we have it, and although there is a mutilation near the end of the manu- script it cannot have held such an episode.* It is, of course, not very likely that the King's would use as a source an unprinted play belonging to another company.
Tentatively I conclude that Lear was written in 1605, possibly not finished before the eclipses of the autumn, and for some reason, conceivably the need for censorship, not performed at court until 1606. Of course the theory of Miss Winstanley that Lear is symbolical mythology, repre- senting at once the Darnley murder and the massacre of St. Bartholomew, is not worth serious examination. Such a play could never have been performed at court at all. The Gloucester story is not in Leir or in any other of the early versions. It was based on that of a Paphlagonian king in Sidney's Arcadia (1590), ii. 10. A Tragoedia von Lear KMg von Engelandt in John Green's Dresden repertory of 1626 may have been derived either from Lear or from Leir.*
1 Hensfowe Papers, 117. 3 cf. M. St. C. Byrne in M.S.R.
a £&, Stage, iii. 446 j cf. p. 108. 4 Eliz. Stage, ii. 286.
XXIX. MACBETH
[Fi. 1623.] {Catalogue} The Tragedy of Macbeth. \Tragediesy pp. 131-51, sign. 11 6-11114, Head- and Running-titles] The Tragedie of Macbeth. [Acts and sec. marked.] Facsimile. J. D. Wilson (1928).
Modern Editions. W. G. Clark and W. A. Wright (i 869, 0. C7.P.); H. H. Furness (1873, New Variorum); E. K. Chambers (1893, Warwick); J. M. Manly (1896); M. H. Liddell (1903); H. Con- rad (1907)5 H. Cunningham (1912, 1928, Ar<Leri)\ C. M. Lewis (1918, Yale).
Dissertations. N. Ddius, M. (1841); J. W. Hales, On the Porter in M. (i 874, N.S.S. Trans. 2555 Notes and Essays, 273); F. G. Fleay, M. (i 874, N.S.S. Trans. 3 39; Manual, 245), Davenanfs M. and Sh.'s Witches (i 884, Anglia, vii. 128)5 G. Sarrazin, Sis M. und Kyds Sp. Tr. (1895, E.S. xri. 328); C. C. Stopes, Sh.'s Materials for M. (i 896, Alien, ii. 138), The Scot- tish and English Macbeth (1897, Sh.'s Industry, 78); D. L. Chambers, The Metre ofM. (1903)5 A. C. Bradley, Notes on M. (1904, Shn. Tragedy, 466); E. Kroger, Die Sage von M. bis zu Sh. (1904); A. Brandl, Zur Forge- schichteder Weird Sisters inM.(i92i,Lie6ermannFestgate,2$2)',L.'WirL- stanley, M., King Lear, and Contemporary History (1922); W. J. Lawrence, The Mystery ofM. (1928, SA.'s Workshop, 24)5 R. C. Bald, M. and the 'Short* Plays (1928, R.E.S. iv. 429).
Macbeth is doubtless printed from a prompt-copy. The
3-85- cases brought forward by Bald.
The text is unsatisfactory, not so much on account of verbal corruption, as of a rehandling to which it bears evidence. This seems to have been most obviously a matter of abridgement. The play, as it stands, is shorter than any other except Comedy of Errors, and its 2,106 lines, even if allowance is made for the spectacular scenes, would furnish little more than a two-hours' performance. More- over, although many of its short lines are otherwise explic- able, a few (i. 2. 20, 51 ; ii. 3. 109; iii. 2. 32, 51 ; iii. 4-.4J iv. 3. 28, 44) are abrupt or accompanied by obscurities, and may indicate cuts. Any substantial cutting may have involved partial transcription, and this may, as Wilson
472 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
thinks, explain the mislineated passages, which are rather numerous in i-iii, although rare thereafter. There seems also to have been some manipulation of the rather scrappy final battle-scene (v. 7, 8). Here the present action gives no opportunity for the removal of the dead Siward, re- cited at v. 8. 44, and the stage-direction 'Enter Fighting, and Macbeth slaine', placed between two others at 34, is inconsistent with the more dramatic 'Enter Macduffe; with Macbeths head* at 53. Cutting and some consequen- tial adaptation may perhaps also explain the inconsistency which has troubled editors in the accounts of Cawdor in i. 2, 3, the apparent reference at i. 7. 47 to an episode in which Macbeth breaks the enterprise of murder to his wife, and the mysterious Third Murderer (may-be Macbeth himself) of iii. 3.
Probably there has also been some interpolation. I be- lieve this to be confined to three passages (iii. 5 ; iv. 1 . 39— 43, 125-32) in the witch-scenes, which can be distin- guished from the genuine text by the introduction of Hecate, by the use of an iambic instead of a trochaic metre, and by prettinesses of lyrical fancy alien to the main conception of the witches. Songs are introduced at iii. 5. 34 and iv. i. 43, but their content is only indicated by the opening words in the stage-directions. But the full texts occur at iii. 3.39 and v. 2. 60 of Thomas Middleton's The Witch. This has some echoes of genuine passages in Macbeth, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that its author was also the interpolator of the Shakespearean text. Many writers have carried the theory of interpola- tions in Macbeth much farther than I am prepared to do. Coleridge held the Porter scene (ii. 3. 1-47) not to be authentic, and probably now has few adherents. Others — Clark and Wright, Fleay (although he hesitated in 1 876), Conrad, and Cunningham — have doubted the whole or parts of i. i ; i. 2; i. 3. 1-37; iii. 4. 130-44; iv. I ; iv. 3. 140-59 ; y. 2 ; v. 5. 47-50 ; v. 6 ; v. 8. I have given reasons for rejecting such views in the Warwick edition, and am not convinced by anything which has been written since. Conrad's attempt to isolate v. 6 and arbitrarily chosen
Chap. IX - MACBETH 473
sections of i. 2 and v. 8 by metrical analysis is particularly futile (cf. p. 266), since he has only about 100 lines upon which to base an induction. The Witch has only come down to us in manuscript and is of uncertain date. Law- rence would put it as early as the autumn of 1608. Pro- bably he meant to write 1 609, as he thinks that Middleton was utilizing the vogue of the witch-dances in Jonson's Mask of Queens on 2 February 1 609.* And he supposes the interpolated version of Macbeth to have been that which Simon Forman saw at the Globe in April 1 6 10. Forman 's visit was, however, pretty clearly on 20 April 1 6 1 1 (cf. App. D). I do not find Lawrence very convincing, since Shakespeare himself had furnished the witch motive. For- man gives an outline of the plot, much as we have it, except that there is nothing in the text or stage-directions to confirm or refute his statement that Macbeth and Ban quo came riding through a wood in i. 3. The play was not, of 'course, new in 1611, even if it was new to Forman. The style and metre are not so late as this, and there is a good deal of cumulative evidence for an earlier date. There are topics of special interest to King James; it is, of course, merely a fancy that the royal letter to the poet, said (App. C, nos. xxvii, xxxiv) to have been once in the possession of Sir William Davenant, was in return for Macbeth. Some of these allusions would have been appro- priate from the beginning of the reign. The King's interest in witchcraft was of old standing. The 'two-fold balls and treble sceptres' of iv. i. 121 can have nothing to do, as suggested by some commentators, with the triple style of King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, adopted by Prod. 1003 of 20 October 1604. The earlier English style was triple, and there were no sceptres for France and Ireland. The 'two-fold' balls must be the 'mounds' borne on the English and Scottish crowns, and the 'treble sceptres' the two used for investment in the English coronation and the one used in the Scottish coronation. James was 'touching' for the 'king's evil' (iv. 3. 141) as early as 6 November 1604.* The bestowal of
* EUx. Stage, iii. 382. * Venetian Papers, x. 193.
474 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Cawdor's honours upon Macbeth is in Holinshed, and can hardly have been inspired, as Hunter thought, by the investiture of Sir David Murray, who had for some years held the lands and honours of the attainted Gowrie family, as Lord Scone on i April 1605. ^ *s true &&* tite King's men got into trouble through a play on the Gowrie con- spiracy in December I6O4,1 but Macbeth cannot very plausibly be regarded as an apology for this. On the other hand, it is likely enough that a hint for the witches came from Matthew Gwinrie's show of 'tres Sibyllae', with which James was greeted, when he visited Oxford on 27 August 1605.2 Subject to the doubts as to the authenticity of ii. 3 1-47, a slightly later date is probably given by the 'equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven'. No doubt the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation had been familiar, at least since the trial of Robert Southwell in 1595. But here it is associated with treason, as it was at the trial of Father Henry Garnet for complicity with the Gunpowder Plot on 28 March 1606. The passage does not, however, oblige us to put the play quite as late as this, since an exposure of equivocation by Lord Salisbury is said to have been 'greedily read' before 5 February i6o6»3 The reference is to his Answer to Certain Scandalous Papers (1606), which deals inter alia with equivocation and cites St. Augustine's disallowance of it. Two other allusions in the same episode do not help very much. A tailor is damned 'for stealing out of a French hose*. This suggests some tem- porary fashion of wearing tight instead of round hose. But this cannot be dated. A passage often cited from A. Nixon's Black Tear, registered on 9 May 1 606, seems only to refer ^ to a new fashion of wearing lace on hose. A farmer is damned because he 'hang'd himself on the expectation of plenty'. But Malone's evidence for the low price of corn in 1606 is good also for 1605 and 1607, when it was only a little higher, and in fact the suicide of a disappointed engrosser of corn was an old notion, and had
« E&z. Stage, i. 3*7. a Ibid. i. 130$ iii. 332. » S.PJ). Joe. I, xviii. 66,
Chap. IX MACBETH 475
been staged by Ben Jonson in E.M.O., i. 3 ; iii. 7, 8, origin- ally produced in 1599 and revived at court on 8 January 1605.! A date late in 1605 or early in 1606 would be consistent with some echoes, not individually conclusive, in other plays. The prick of ambition's spur (i. 7. 25-8) is in the anonymous Caesar's Revenge, 1468-9, but this, although registered on 5 June 1606, may very likely be Elizabethan.2 In The Puritan, iv. 3. 89, registered on 6 August 1607, but probably a play of 1606, comes 'in stead of a Tester, weele ha the ghost ith white sheete sit at vpper end a'th Table'.3 The 'ghost' is a personage in the play, but an allusion to iii. 4 may none the less be possible. Another may be in Knight of the Burning Pestle, v. i. 20- 30, almost certainly a play of 1 6o7.4 It may not be a mere accident that William Warner put an account of Macbeth into his Continuance of Albion's England (1606). Some still earlier echoes are traced by Bradley 47 1 in Marston's Sophonisba (1606). They are slight, but taken together suggest a knowledge of Macbeth. Sofhonisba was registered on 1 7 March 1 6o6,5 and we must therefore suppose that the equivocation passage, if it forms part of the original text, was written earlier than the actual trial of Garnet. The matter is complicated by the corresponding uncer- tainty as to the date of Lear (q.v.) and as to the time- relation of its metre to that of Macbeth. It is, therefore, only tentatively that I put Macbeth early in 1 606.
Shakespeare's source was the Chronicle of Holinshed, itself based, for the Scottish matter, upon the Scotorum Historiae (1527) of Hector Boece; and this in turn, with much imaginative elaboration, upon the Scotichronicon (c. 1384) of John Fordun and the Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland (c. 1424) of Andrew Wyntown. Holinshed pro- bably used a' translation of Boece by John Bellenden (1536). Another, by William Stewart (1535) remained in manuscript to 1858. There is not much substance in the suggestions that some of Shakespeare's departures from
1 EKx. Stage, iii. 3605 cf. App. D. 4 Ibid. iii. 220. * Ibid. iv. 4. s Ibid. iii. 433.
3 Ibid. iv. 41.
476 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Holinshed are due to this or to Wyntown. We do not know whether Macbeth was the theme of a tragedy of The Kinge of Scottes given at court : in 1 567-8, or of a Malcolm King of Scots bought by the Admiral's men from Charles Massey in i6o2,2 A 'ballad of Macedbeth' seems to have been before the Stationers' Company in 1596, but Greg rejects the genuineness of the record, which was pub- lished by Collier (cf. App. F, xi, /). William Kempe, however, in Nine Dates Wonder (i6oo\ 21, speaks of 'a penny Poet, whose first making was the miserable stolne story of Macdoel, or Macdobeth, or Macsomewhat, for I am sure a Mac it was, though I neuer had the maw to see it'. It is unlikely that Shakespeare ever visited Scotland,3 and no importance need be attached to Miss Winstanley's theory (cf. p. 67) that Macbeth is a symbolical allegory, based upon the Gunpowder Plot, St. Bartholomew's Day, the Darnley murder, and the relations of James with Francis Hepburn, fifth Earl of Bothwell.
XXX. ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
[S.R. 1608.] 20 May. Edward Blount. Entred for his copie under thandes of Sir George Buck knight and Master Warden Seton A booke called. The booke of Pericles prynce of Tyre. vjd.
Edward Blount. Entred also for his copie by the like Aucthoritie. A booke Called Anthony, and Cleopatra. vjd. (Arber, iii. 378).
[S.R. 1623, with other plays for Fi: cf. p. 138.] The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra,
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] Anthony and Cleopater. [Trage- dies, pp. 340-68, sign, v v 6v-z z 2V. Head-title] The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra. [Running-title"] The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra. [Act i, sc. i marked.] Facsimile. ]. D. Wilson (1929).
1 Eltz. Stage, iv. 144. a Ibid. ii. 269.
a Ibid. ii. 179; iii. 435.
Chap. IX ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 477
Modern Editions. R. H. Case (1906, 1930, Arden): H. H. Furness (1907, New Variorwn}\ H. S. Canby (1921, Yale}. Dissertations. T. Vatke, A.C. und Plntarchs Biographie des Antomus (i 868, J. iii. 301); F. Adler, Das Ferhaltniss von SAs A.C. zu Plutarcks Bio- graphie des Antonius (1895, J. xxxi. 262) A. C. Bradley, A.C. (1909, Oxford Lectures on Poetry)\ M. W. MacCallum, SL's Roman Plays and their Background (1910).
F gives a fair text, so far as verbal corruption goes, although there are a good many literal misprints. But there is also a good deal of mislineation, perhaps especially in the first half of the play. This chiefly affects short speeches and the beginnings and ends of long ones. Several short speeches are printed in prose instead of verse throughout. The trouble often starts with a failure to keep distinct an initial half-line of a speech. Similarly a final half-line is sometimes printed continuously with the last full line of a speech. Probably these features derive from the copy, and Shakespeare did in fact, in this play, merge his numerous halt-lines, and wrote his shorter speeches, or some of them, continuously. At the same time, he often split a line, to indicate a long pause, and this feature also the compositor reproduced. The interior of the longer speeches is generally free from mislineation. The stage-directions are not markedly full, but there are occasional notes for action or for the grouping and attitude of personages.
There is no reason to doubt that the S.R. entry of 20 May 1608 relates to the play, although Blount appears to have forgotten it when the entry for Fi was made. This gives a limit of date. But there is reason for putting Antony and Cleopatra earlier than 1608. In 1607 Samuel Daniel issued a new edition of his Certain Small Workes, and herein made considerable changes in his Cleopatra of I594.1 These, as carefully analysed by Case, seem to me clearly to show the influence of Shakespeare's play. There are some parallels of idea and phrase. Dialogue often replaces narrative or soliloquy. Dircetus and Dio- medes are introduced for the first time. Charmian, Iras,
Eliz. Stagey iii. 275.
478 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
and Callus are elaborated. A new scene relates, through the mouth of Dircetus, events leading up to the death of Antony, as given by Shakespeare. One may recall a
¥-obable similar use by Daniel of Richard II (cf. supra). he metrical character of Antony and Cleopatra forbids us to put it before Macbeth or Lear. But it may have been produced early in 1607, and of this there is confirmation in Barnes's Devil's Charter (1607), 2546-69, where Alex- ander Borgia uses asps, which he calls 'Cleopatraes birds', to poison two boys. Devil's Charter was given at court as early as 2 February 1607, but thereafter 'reuewed, cor- rected and augmented' for the reader, and registered on October I6,1 Parallels to iv. 14. 2 in Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois, iii. i. 23 and to i. 4. 20 in the anonymous Nobody and Somebody ', 36, may be left out of account. Pro- bably both plays are earlier than Antony and Cleopatra and the ideas are in both cases of still older standing.2
The main source is Plutarch's life of Antony. Possibly Appian's Bella Civilia was also used; and Shakespeare may have read Daniel's Cleopatra in its earlier form, or Lady Pembroke's Antonius of 1 592,2 or Samuel Brandon's Virtuous Ottawa of I598,4 but hardly Lord Brooke's Antonie and Cleopatra, which he burnt.5
XXXI. CORIOLANUS
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] The Tragedy of Coriolanus.
[Tragedies, pp. 1-30, sign, a a-c c 3V. Head-title'] The
Tragedy of Coriolanus. [Running-title] The Tragedie of
Coriolanus,
[Acts i, sc. i, ii-v marked.]
Facsimile. J. D. Wilson (1928).
Modern Editions. E. K. Chambers (1898, Warwick); G. Gordon'
(1912, 0.17.?.)$ W. J. Craig and R. H. Case (1922, Arden)\
C. F. Tucker Brooke (1924, Yale); H. H. Furness (1928, New
Dissertations. J. O. HaJliwdl-Phillipps, A Hint on the Date of Cor. (i 874, 1 SB*. Stage, iii. 214. 4 /$$/. ft. 23$.
* Ibid. iii. 253; iv. 37. * Life of Sidney, 155.
3 Ibid. iii. 337.
Chap. IX. CORIOLANUS 479
N.S.S. Trans. 367); N. Delius, Sts Cor. in seinem Verhfltniss zum Corio- lanus des Plutarch (1876, J. xi. 32; AbL i. 388); R. Buttner, Z« Car. und seiner Quelle(i<)Q$, 7.xli-45); M.W. MacCallum, Sh.'sRoman Plays and their Background (1910); A. C. Bradley, Cor. (1912, British Academy).
F is again not a satisfactory text, less on account of verbal corruptions, as of frequent mislineations. These are very similar in character to those in Antony and Cleopatra^ and probably the explanation is the same in both cases. The stage-directions to Coriolanus are more elaborate than those to Antony and Cleopatra and give many notes for position, movement, and even gesture on the stage. They suggest the author's hand. Wilson also finds Shakespearean spelling.
There is practically no concrete evidence as to date, and the attempts to find some have been far-fetched. Mul- berries (iii. 2. 79) were known to Shakespeare r before James issued instructions to encourage the growth of them on 19 January i6c>9.2 There was a dearth of corn (i, i . 69) in 1 608 and 1 609, but Plutarch gives the Roman dearth. There is no reason to suppose that Volumnia was inspired by Shakespeare's mother, who was buried on 9 September 1608. The character of Raleigh has been traced in that of Coriolanus, and the struggles of James with his Parliaments in the politics of the play. Both views are highly speculative, and neither would yield a precise date. Rather more plausible is the suggestion that 'the coal of fire upon the ice* (i. i. 177) derives from the great frost of 1607-8, described in a contemporary pamphlet.3 The Thames was frozen over, for the first time since 1564-5, and on January 8 'pans of coals' were burning on it. Shakespeare may, of course, have seen the same thing before, on a smaller river. There may be an echo of ii. 2. 105 in Jonson, Epicoene, v. 4. 227, 'you haue lurch'd your friends of the better halfe of the garland*. This is a play of late 1 609 or early 1 6 1 o.4 The evidence of style and metre puts Coriolanus between Antony and Cleo-
« Mid. N. Dr. iii. 1. 170; v. 1. 1495 Stowe, Annaks, 891; Birch, James, i.
Fen. & Ad. 1103. 70, 71? Lodge, «i- «4-
» Harleian Misc. ii. 218. 4 EKx. Stage, iu. 370. 3 A. Lang, Social England, 163$ cf.
480 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
fatra and Pericles. It may have been produced early in 1608.
The source of the play was Plutarch's life of Coriolanus. Shakespeare may also have known the version of the fable of the belly and the members (i. i. 99) in Camden's Remaines (i 605) or that in Livy, ii. 32. It has been argued that he used the 1612 edition of North's Plutarch, on the ground that it could give him 'unfortunate', instead of the 'unfortunately' of earlier editions, for v. 3, 97. But the metre would in any case dictate 'unfortunate', and that Coriolanus should be as late as 1 6 1 2 is inconceivable.
XXXII. TIMON OF ATHENS
[F i. 1623.] [Catalogue] Timon of Athens. \Tragedies, pp. 80-2, 8 1 &V-98+one unnumbered page, sign. G gv- hh 6. Head-title] TheLife of Tymon of Athens. [Running- title'] Timon of Athens. [Act i, sc. i marked. 'The Actors Names' at end.] Modern Edition. K. Deighton(i905, 1929, Arden}. Dissertation*. N. Delias, Ueter Shs Tim. (1867, J. ii. 335; AbL i. 46); B.Tschischwitz,T/«r. Ein kritischerVersuch (1869,7.^.160); A. Miiller, fiber die Quellen aus denen Sh. Tim. entnommen hat (i 873); F. G. Fleay, On the Authorship of Tim. (1874, N.S.S. Trans. 1 30, 242, with discussion by F. J. Furnivall and B. Nicholson; Manual, 187); G. Kullmann, Sks Antheil an dem unter seinem Namen veroffentlichten Trauerspiel Tim. (1882, Arch.f. Litteraturgeschichte, xi); W. Wendtlandt, 8 As Tim. (1888, J. xxiii. 109); H. Conrad, SAs und Bulthaupts Tim. (i 894, J. xxix. 1 10); A. C. Bradley, King Lear and Tim. (i 904, Shn. Tragedy, 443, 477); W. H. demons, The Sources of Tim. (1904, Princeton Univ. Bull, xv); J. Q. Adams, Tim. and the Irregularities in Fi (1908, J.E.G.P. vii. 53), The Timon Mays (1910, J.E.G.P. ix. 506); H. Conrad, Shs Tim. Urheberschaft, Abfassungszeit, und Enstehung (1909, Z.f. Fergleichende Litteraturgeschichte, N.F. xvii. 337); E. H. Wright, The Authorship of Tim. (1910); J. M. Robertson, Tim. (1917, 8k. and Chapman, 121); W. Wells, Tim. (1920, 12 N.Q. vi. 266); T. M. Parrott, The Problem of Tim. (1923, Sh.Ass^\ H. D. Sykes, The Problem of Tim, (1923, 13 N.Q. i. 83, sqq; Sidelights on Eliz. Drama, i); D. Wecker, 8k! s Purpose in Tim. (1928, PM.L^i. xliii. 701).
Timon was placed in F between Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar to fill the gap left (cf, p. 442) by the tern-
Chap. IX TIMON OF ATHENS 481
porary withdrawal of Troilus and Cressida and does not completely do so. There is much mislineation in the text. Lines are irregularly divided; prose speeches are printed as verse, and verse speeches as prose. The passages affected are mostly short. Many verse lines are split, and the splitting is often not explicable as due to considera- tions of space or a desire to indicate major pauses. It is very likely that there were frequent marginal insertions in the copy. There are some elaborate stage-directions re- sembling those in Coriolanus. Occasionally (i. 2. i ; iii. 1. 1, 3. 1,4. i ; v. 3. i)a touch seems superfluous for theatrical purposes, but in the main there is nothing which an author, wishing to give careful directions for the ordering of his groups, might not write. Two entries (i. i. 173; i. 2. 120), in anticipation of the intervention of the entrants in the dialogue, show practical knowledge of the stage.
The literary quality of the play is somewhat unusual.1
There is much fine Shakespearean poetry and the general
conception is clearly Shakespeare's, in a mood of highly
strained tragic exaltation resembling that of Lear. On
the other hand, there are dull business scenes and humour-
less comic scenes, which in their turn recall the unin-
terested manner of All's Well. And there are several
scenes (i. 2; iii. i, 2, 3, 4. 1-79, 5; iv. 2. 30-50; iv. 3.
1-47, 464-543; v. i. i-i 1 8) in which the verse at least
cannot be the complete and jointed work of Shakespeare.
This is particularly noticeable in the longer speeches.
These contain Shakespearean ideas, sometimes inchoate,
and scattered Shakespearean phrases. But they are not
constructed as articulated paragraphs at all. They
consist of j-uxtaposed sentences, now in blank verse, now
in rhyme, now in wording which can most easily be
read as prose, There are many short lines, occasionally
successive, for which no rhythmic or dramatic justification
is apparent. There are unmetrical long lines. It must be
added that the structure of Timon as a whole is incoherent.
There are many small confusions and inconsistencies. The
' Cf. Sk. a Survey* 268.
3x42.1 i
482 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
dramatic relation of some of the characters to Timon and his tragedy is obscure. Even the identity of some of the subordinate personages becomes uncertain. The nomen- clature shows much orthographic variation.
These features have naturally evoked theories, whose chief common element lies in the assumption of a second hand. They differ as to the extent of the work regarded as un-Shakespearean, and as to whether Shakespeare was the originator or a reviser of the play. And they differ as to their selection of a second hand. Thus a draft or frag- mentary play by Shakespeare is held to have been re- handled by Heywood (Verplanck), Tourneur (Fleay in 1874)5 Wilkins (Fleay in 1886), Chapman and perhaps Field (Parrott), Middleton (Wells). And again Shake- speare is held to have rehandled the work of Wilkins (Delius), Chapman (Robertson), Day and Middleton (Sykes). Some of the writers are discreet enough to leave the second hand anonymous. None of the theories seem to me convincing in detail, and their very multiplicity sug- gests that their exponents are on the wrong tack. More- over, most of these are compelled to admit that the revision, by whomsoever accomplished, was itself blunder- ing or incomplete. One does not see why the King's men should have dealt with their plays in this way, Fleay, in- deed, was driven to conjecture that the revision was undertaken, not for theatrical purposes, but to enable Timon to be printed in Fi . I do not doubt that it was left unfinished by Shakespeare, and I believe that the real solution of its 'problem', indicated long ago by Ulrici and others, is that it is unfinished still. The passages of chaotic verse, in particular, look very much like rough notes, hastily jotted down to be worked up later. I do not think that any reputable playwright, such as the King's men would have employed, wrote like this, or that the 'cutting' contemplated in Parrott's theory could have pro- duced quite this result. Other Shakespearean plays were certainly more intelligently cut. Shakespeare seems to have worked chiefly on the beginning and end of the play, and to have left the middle acts in a very imperfect state.
Chap. IX. TIMON OF ATHENS 483
Timon, as it stands, is of course very short, and it may be that some scenes are lacking altogether. One may reason- ably guess that ultimately some at least of the inconsis- tencies would have been removed, and Alcibiades and the whores more definitely linked with Timon 's fortunes. I do not suggest that Timon throws much light upon Shake- speare's normal methods of working. It is, perhaps, a sub- jective view that he dealt with it under conditions of mental and perhaps physical stress, which led to a break- down. In any case he seems to have abandoned it, and never to have taken it up again.
Timon clearly belongs to the tragic period, but there is little to fix its exact date. No Jacobean representation is recorded. There almost certainly was none. The only possible contemporary allusion, noted by Sykes, is in iv. 3 of John Day's Humour out of Breath^^j of I6O7-8,1 where one is as mad 'as the lord that gave all to his followers, and begged more for himself. But this is far from conclusive. Jacobean extravagance could easily fur- nish'prototypes from real life. Bradley argues, on the basis of metrical tests and the points of contact between Timon and Lear, for placing it between that play and Macbeth. But the time-table of 1605 and 1606 leaves little room for it, and the metrical tests cannot be applied with much confidence to a play of which no part may be quite in its final form. On the whole, I incline to put the work on Timon between Coriolanus and Pericles in 1608.
The story of Timon is told briefly in Plutarch's life of Antony, and referred to again in that of Alcibiades, and from Plutarch the version in Painter's Palace of Pleasure (i 566), i. 28, is taken. It is told again, with greater detail, in Lucian's Misanthropos, which was the main source, direct or indirect, of the anonymous Timon preserved in Dyce MS. $2.2 Shakespeare certainly used Plutarch, but he has also some points, which are in Lucian and the Dyce Timon, but not in Plutarch, and two, the faithful steward and the mock banquet, which are in the Dyce Timon, but not in either Lucian or Plutarch. Deighton cites some
'» Etiz. Stage, iii. 287. * Md. iv. 49.
li 2
484 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
passages, in which Shakespeare seems to follow the actual wording of Lucian pretty closely. There was no English translation of the dialogue available, but there were Italian ones, and a French one by Filbert Bretin (1582). The Dyce Timon also is not very likely to have been accessible to Shakespeare, since it reads like an academic play, and has only been preserved in manuscript. It is not an improbable conjecture that one or more unknown versions may have mediated between Lucian and both the Dyce Timon and Shakespeare's, Possibly the stage-direc- tion (iv, 3. 399) 'Enter the Bandetti' may indicate an Italian source. It does not appear to be the Timone of Matteo Boiardo or that of Galeotto del Caretto, both of which are plays of the late fifteenth century. The specta- cular Triumph of Time in Beaumont and Fletcher's Four Plays in One is also based on the Lucianic dialogue, but this has little of Shakespeare's detail and its date is un- certain.1 Most students of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays make it later than Timon.
XXXIIL CYMBELINE
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue'] Cymbeline King of Britaine. [Tragedies, pp. 369-99, sign, z z 3-b b b 6. Head-title"] The Tragedie of Cymbeline. [Running-title] The Tra- gedie [or Tragedy] of Cymbeline. [Acts and sec marked.] Reprint. W. J. Cmig (1883, N.S.S.)
Modern Editions. A. J. Wyatt (1897, Warwick)-, C. M. Ingleby (1886)5 E. Dowden, 1903, Arden)\ H. H. Furness (1913, New Fariorum)\ S. B. Hemingway (1924, Tale).
Dissertations. K. Schenkl (1864, Germania, ix. 458); B. Leonhardt, Gter die Quellen Cys (1883, Anglia, vi. i), SMusswort zu Cy. (1885, Anglia, viii. 455); S. Levy, Sine neti Quelle zu Sis Cy. (1884, Anglia, vii. 120), Noch Einmaldie Quellen Cys (1885, Angli*, viii, 197) ; K. Elge, A Letter to C. M. Ingleby on Sh!s Cy. (i 885) 5 B. ten Brink, Z* Cy. (i 886, AngB*. ix. 267); R. W. Boodle, The Original of Cy. (1887, 7 N.Q. iv. 404); E. Yardley, Si. and Calderon (1889, 7 N.Q. viii. 26); R. Ohle, SAs Cy. und
1 EHz.Stage> iii. 231.
Chap. IX CYMBELINE 485
seine romanischen Ferlaufer (i 890) ; H. Reich, Zu Quelle Jes Cy. (1905, 7. xli. 177); F.Brie, EineneueQueUexumfy.(i<)rt9J.'&v. 167); J.dePerott, Der Prinzenraut aus Rac&e (1909, J. xlv. 228); J. M. Robertson, The Interlude in Cy. (1917, St. and Chapman, 218); W. W. Lawrence, The Wager in Cy. (1920, PM.Ljt. xxxv. 391); P. Reyher, The Date ofCy. (1925, June, Rev. Anglo-Amtricaine^ L. Kdlner, Cy. Sine text-kritische Studie (192-5, Anglica> ii. 1 50).
The F text is regularly lined, but leaves some room for emendation. The stage-directions are as a rule slighter than in Coriotanus.
Forman (App. D) saw Cymbeline> probably between 20 and 30 April 16 1 1, and in any case before his death on 12 September 1611. A date of production in 1609-10 would fit the evidence of metre and style, which links the play with Winter's Tale and Tempest. The source of Cymbeline also yielded a passage (iv. 4, 812) in Winter's Tale. Reyher finds a parallel in the relations of Posthumus and Imogen to those which brought William Seymour and Arabella Stuart to imprisonment in July 1610. Ob- viously the motive in Cymbeline need have no such origin, and in so far as there is an analogy, it tells in favour of a date before July, since discretion would have avoided it just afterwards. The plot has a close resemblance to that of Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, but it is im- possible to say with which play the priority rests, Philaster cannot be shown to have existed before 8 October 1610, when John Davies of Hereford's Scourge of Folly> which contains a mention of it, was registered.1 The theory that Shakespeare was inspired to write romantic tragi-comedy by the example of Beaumont and Fletcher can hardly be substantiated. The name Belarius recalls the Bellario of Philaster> but Shakespeare may well have adapted it from Bellaria, the prototype of Hermione in Pandostoy his source for Winter's Tale^ and if so, it is in favour of his priority. Fleay thought that the historical scenes (iii. 5; iv. 2-v. 3) were written earlier than the rest, about 1606, because Shakespeare was then using Holinshed, because the scenes contain some parallels to Macbeth^ and because he thought that the- character of Cloten, as a brave prince
x Ibid. iii. 222.
486 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
and counsellor to his father, was inconsistent with that shown in the more romantic episodes. Ingleby accepted the same, date for v. 2-5, and also for iii. i, and for ii. 2 which belongs to the romantic plot, but in which he also found Macbeth parallels. Oliphant1 has withdrawn a suggestion2 that Beaumont and Massinger succes- sively revised the play, although he still believes in the double date. Robertson has adumbrated a theory that Chapman had a share in recasting a pre-Shake- spearean play, perhaps partly by Peele. This can wait until it is expounded. I see no grounds for a double date. Parallels do not necessarily mean proximity of date. A brave prince may none the less prove a boor in love. The questioned scenes have their fair share of the light and weak endings characteristic of Shakespeare's latest work. The separate writing of detached scenes, apart from the framework to which they belong, is a priori most unlikely. On the other hand, the vision in v. 4 is generally, and I think rightly, regarded as a spectacular theatrical inter- polation. Dowden would limit the extent of this to 30-92, leaving the dumb-show, with 97-126, and possibly 93-6 as genuine. But it seems to me that the whole passage must stand or fall together. And with it must of course go the reference to the vision in v. 5. 425—59. The song in iv. 2, 258—81 has also been questioned, partly because it does not name Fidele, which is thought inconsistent with
237-
use like note and words Save that Euriphile must be Fidele.
No doubt songs lend themselves to interpolation, but this is an exquisite one. Staunton distinguished himself by finding the last couplet of each stanza inferior to the rest. God knows why! Disintegration is a constant itch in some minds. Cymbeline was performed at court in 1674 (App.D).
The wager theme is widespread in romantic literature. Stray coincidences of detail are insufficient to show that Shakespeare used any other version of it than the story of * B. and?. IOL » M.L.R. iii. 349.
Chap. IX CYMBELINE 487
Bernabo of Genoa in Boccaccio's Decameron, ii. 9 . They are closest in a story called Westward for Smelt$y but this, although dated by Steevens in 1603, was not registered until 15 January I62O.1 Boccaccio's story was translated into English as Frederick of Jennen, andprinted by Jan van Doesborgh at Antwerp in 1518. The cave-life of Belarius and Imogen has also, of course, many analogues. Shakespeare is less likely to have got hints from a German tale of Sneewitchen or a second novel of Boccaccio (ii. 8) than from Fairfax's translation of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liber ata in Godfrey of Boulogne (1600) or The Mirrour of Knighthood (1601) or the old play (1589) of The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, which has the name Fidelia, as well as that used in Winter's Tale of Hermione.2 The substitution of a sleeping-draught for poison might come from the Golden Ass of Apuleius or Richard Johnson's Tom of Lincoln or elsewhere. The historical material is in Holinshed, and here too most of the other names could be picked up. It is curious that Forman calls the heroine Innogen and not Imogen. Shakespeare had an Innogen as a mute in Much Ado about Nothing. Lawrence says that he found it in Locrine.* As a matter of fact, unless he saw that in manuscript (cf, p. 537), he could only have found (1. 240) lunoger, since the printer thought that he knew more Latin than the writer. Holinshed has Innogen, which is the normal form of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who makes her wife of Brutus, not daughter of Cymbeline. Are we to infer that the name Imogen is only due to persistent minim misprinting in Fi ?
XXXIV THE WINTER'S TALE
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue.] The Winters Tale. [Comediesy
pp. 277 [304 in CWJ-3O3, sign. Aa-Cc2, Head- and
Running-titles] The Winters Tale.
[Acts and sec. marked. 4The Names of the Actors' at end.]
Facsimile* ]. D. Wilson (1929).
1 Var. xiii, 2, * £#*: Stage, iv. 28. 3 Shakespeare's Workshop, 44.
488 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (1898, New Variorum}\ F. W. Moorman (1912, Arden) ; F. E. Pierce (1918, Tale}. Dissertations. ]. Caro, Die historischen Elemente in SAs Tf. und W.T. (1879, E.S.u, 141); N. Delius, Greats PandostoundShs W.T. (i88p, J. xv. 22; Abl. ii. 68); R. Boyle, Sis W.T. und Tf. (1885); J. Bolte, Zur Schlusscene des W.T. (i 891, J. xxvi. 87) ; C. D. Mount, Sir Philip Sidney and Sh. (1893, 8N.Q. iii. 305); K. Fries, Quellenstudien zu Sis W.T. (1900, Neue Jahrbucherfur Padagogik, vi. 557); P. G. Thomas, Greene's Pandosto (1907, St. Classics); ]. ]. Jusserand, W.T. (1907, 1924, School for Ambassadors, 229); S. A. Tannenbaum, Textual and other Notes on W.T. (1928, S.P. vii. 358).
Herbert (App. D) allowed a fresh copy for the play on 1 9 August 1 62 3, because 'the allowed booke was missinge'. This may have been in view of the court performance (tfiV/.) on 1 8 January 1624, As there had been a similar performance in 1618 and probably another about 1619 (ibid?), we cannot suppose that the old book perished in the Globe fire of 1 6 1 3. It may have been mislaid during the printing of F i . But it is more likely that F i itself rests on the fresh copy. The text is remarkably clean typogra- phically, and has peculiarities of its own in the great num- ber of its parentheses and in the occasional (e.g. ii, 3. 148 ; iv. 4. 592, 731) meticulous use of apostrophes to supply the place of ellipsed words. A blank page precedes it, and it has a special set of signatures. It seems probable that there was some delay in obtaining the copy and that it was not set-up^ until some progress had already been made with the Histories, which follow it.1 R. C, Rhodes, Shakespeare's First Folio, 99, regards the text as 'assembled' (cf. p. 153) from 'parts', and no doubt Herbert's entry gives some plausibility to this view. But Rhodes gives a very inexactand incomplete account of the stage-directions. These contain little more than entries and exits, and the latter are often omitted. The entries are normally given in iy. 3 and v. 2, but for the other scenes all the characters taking part, whether they are present from the beginning or not, are grouped in an initial entry. This follows the order of their appearance, and in ii. i, iii. 2, v. i, 3, but not elsewhere, the successively appearing characters or
1 Pollard, F.g. 135; E. E. Wffloughby in RJE.S. iv. 326.
Chap. IX THE WINTER'S TALE 489
groups of characters are marked off by colons in the stage-directions. These stage-directions might come from a plot. The case*differs from that of Two Gentlemen of Verona in that some of the entries are given again in i. 2, ii. 3, iii. 3, and iv. 4 at their proper places in the text, and here too the dancers at iv. 4. 165, 352, who are not in the initial stage-directions, and some of the exits are noted. The text itself would generally indicate these,
The play was seen by Forman on 15 May 1611 and given at court on 5 November 1611 and in 1612-13. Besides the later Jacobean court performances already cited, there was a Caroline one in 1634 (App. D).
The style and metre group Winter's Tale with Cymbeline and Tempest^ and it may reasonably be placed between them. A date early in 1 6 1 1 is suggested by the probability that the bear of iii. 3 and the dance of satyrs at iv. 4. 352 were both inspired by those in Jonson's mask of Oberon on i January I6H,1 The bear perhaps came originally from Mucedorus. I once suggested that this also followed Oberon. But this was an error.2 The bear is in the original edition of 1598, although he gets an additional scene in that of 1610, and I was probably wrong (cf. p. 175) in thinking that the Shrove Sunday court performance, for which that scene was written, can have been in 1611. The reference in i. 2. 357 to the fate of those who 'struck anointed kings' is too general to bear pressing as an allusion to the murder of Henri IV by Ravaillac on 14 May 1 6 10. Jonson glances at Winter's Tale with Tempest in his Bartholomew Fair of 1 614 and at its sea-coast for Bohemia in his Conversations of 1619 (App. B, no. xxii).
The main source was Greene's novel of Pandosto or The Triumph of Time, (1588) reprinted (1607) as Dorastus and Fawnia. Greene himself may have drawn, directly or indirectly, upon an incident of the fourteenth-century history of Poland and Bohemia, as well as upon motives, such as the oracle, derived from Greek erotic romance. There is not much to suggest that Shakespeare used a deri- vative from Greene in Francis Sable's Fisherman's Tale
1 Eli*. Stage* i"- .185. * Md. iv. 3$
49o PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
(1595). He took some names from Sidney's Arcadia, Florizel probably from Amadis de Gaule, bk. ix, and Auto- lycus from Odyssey, xix. 394. The episode of the living statue, which is not in Greene, may have been suggested by Lyly's Woman in the Moon (159?) or Marston's Pygma- lion** Image (1598). A resemblance of the return of Hermione to that of Alcestis is surely remote, and Shake- speare is not likely to have known the fifteenth-century Dutch play ofEsmoreit, as thought by Fries. 'Recognition7 themes are of course widespread in romantic literature.
XXXV. THE TEMPEST
[Ft. 1623.] {Catalogue} The Tempest [Comedies, pp. i- 1 9, sign, A-B4r. Head- and Running-titles} The Tempest. [Acts and sec. marked. 'The Scene, an vn-inhabited Island' and 'Names of the Actors' at end.] Facsimile. J. D. Wilson (1928).
Modern Editions. H. H. Furness (i 892, New Variorum}\ F. S. Boas (1897, Warwick}; M. Luce (1902, 1926, Arden}\ G B. Tinker (1918, Yah}\ W. Vickery (1911, Rowfant Club); A. T. Quiller- Couch and J. D. Wilson (1921, C.U.P.).
Dissertations. E. Malone, An Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of Sh.'s Tp. were Derived, and its True Date Ascertained^ 808 ; Far. xv. 377); G. Chalmers, Another Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of Sh's Tp.were Derived (1815); J. Hunter, A Disquisi- tion on the Scene, Origin, Date, etc. ofSh.'s Tp. (1839) ; J. Meissner, Unter- suchungen uber Shs Tp. (1872); A. E. Brae, Prospers Clothes-Line (1874, Trans.RoyalSoc.ofLit.T$£.^M.lA&fai9I*F
Nuova Antolo&a, ii) ; J. Caro, Die historischen Elemente in Bhs Tp. und W.T. (1879, E.$. ii. 141); R. Boyle, Sis W.T. *und Tp. (1885); R. W. Boodle, The Original of Cy. and possibly ofTp. (i 887, 7 N.Q. iv. 404) ; R. Garnett, The Date and Occasion of Tp. (1889, Universal "Review, iii. 556); A. E. H. Swaen, Caliban (1895, E.S. xxi. 326); W. W. Newell, The
The Probable Sources of the Plot ofSh's Tp. (1905, Publ. of Clark Univ. Library,!. 209), D ie MageKnen- und die Stumf abet (i<)ii,J.xkni. 128); G. Sarrazin, Die Vertreibung des Htrxogs Prospero (1906, J. xlii. 179); G. Becker, Zur Quellenfrage von Shs Tp. (1907, J. adiii. 155); S. Lee, The Call of the West (1907, ScribneSs Mag.), The American Indian in Elizabethan England ^1907, Scnbner*sMag. xlii. 313), Caliban's Pistes to England (1913, Comhill Mag. 338); F. Neri, Scenari delle Maschere in
Chap. IX THE TEMPEST 49i
Arcadia (191 3) ; R. M. Kelsey, Indian Dances In Tf. (1914, J.E.G.P. xiii. 98); C. M.Gayley, St. and the Founders of Liberty in America (1917); J. M. Robertson, The Masque in Tf. (1917, St. and Chapman, 210), The Masque in Tp. (1921, Mar. 31, T.L.S^ J. D. Rea, A Source for the Storm in Tp. (1919, Af.P. xvii. 279), A Note on Tf. (1920, M.L.N. xxxv. 313); A. W. Ward, St. and the Makers of Virginia (1919, Proc. of British Academy, 141); W. J. Lawrence, The Masque in Tp. (1920, Fortnightly, cxiii. 941), St. avrebbe tratto il soggetto di La Tempesta da Scenari Italiani (1923, La Lettered 3); H.D. Gray, The Sources ofTp.(i<)2o,M.L.N.xxxv. 321), Some Indications that Tp. was Revised (i 92 1, tf.P. xviii. 1 29) ; C. Still, 8t.'s Mystery Play (1921); A Lefranc, UOrigined' Ariel (1921, Cinquantenaire de I'Ecole Pratique des Hautes £tudes) ; E, Law, Si.'s Tf. as Originally Pro- duced at Court (1922, St. Assn.); E. K. Chambers, The Integrity of Tp. (1925, R.E.S. i. 129); M. Longworth-Chambrun, Influences Franfaises dans la Tp. de Sh. (1925, Rev. de Litt. Comparte)-, A. Eichler, Sis Tp. als Eofauffuhrung (1925, Die Neueren Sprachen, Beiheft 6); R. R. Cawley, 8i.'s Use of tie Poyagers (1926, PM.L.A. xli. 688).
F is a very fair text, with careful punctuation. The stage- directions, especially for the spectacular episodes, are more elaborate than in any other play. They may be, in the main, the author's.
The play was given at court (App. D) on i November 1 6 1 1 and again during the winter of 1 6 1 2-1 3. Malone's statement that it 'had a being and a name in the autumn of 1 6 1 1 ' probably rests only on a knowledge of the Novem- ber date.1 His promise to show in a revision of his Chrono- logical Order that it was performed before the middle of 1611 was never carried out.2 That it cannot have been written much earlier than 1 6 1 1 is clear from the use made of the narratives describing the wreck of Sir George Somers at the Bermudas during a voyage to Virginia on 25 July 1609. With Somers were, among others, Sir Thomas Gates, William Strachey, Sylvester Jourdan, and Richard Rich. They escaped from the island and reached James Town in Virginia on 23 May 1610. On July 15 Gates, Jourdan, and Rich started for England with a dispatch of July 7 from the Governor of Virginia, Lord Delaware, and a narrative dated July 15 by Strachey. A ballad of News from Virginia (1610) by Rich was registered on October i. But the first full description of
1 Var. xv. 4*3. * 7^.414.
492 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
the island life to be issued seems to have been Jourdan's A Discovery of the Barmudas (1610). The dedication of this is dated October 13. It was followed by an official publication of the London Council of Virginia, A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (1610), registered on November 8. Strachey's narrative was cir- culated to the Council, but is not known to have been printed before 1625, when it appeared as A True Repor- tory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight in Samuel Purchas's Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, iv. 1 734. Strachey himself returned to Eng- land late in 1611 and was in the Blackfriars on Decem- ber 1 3. Shakespeare doubtless used the prints of 1 6 1 o, but numerous verbal parallels make it clear that his main authority was the True Repertory, and this it seems that he can only have seen in manuscript. Malone's date of 1 6 1 1 for Tempest remains reasonable. It has been suggested that the play was revised in 1 6 1 2-1 3 and the mask in iv. I inserted, to make it more appropriate to the celebrations attending the wedding of the Elector Palatine and the Princess Elizabeth on 14 February 1613; and the mask has been claimed by Fleay for Beaumont and by Robertson for Chapman or Heywood. Wilson has a more elaborate theory, which involves an early rhymed or partly rhymed play by Shakespeare, two distinct recasts, and at least one and possibly two abridgements, as well as the introduction of the mask. I will not repeat here my detailed criticism of these views in R.E.S. i. 129. The play is short, but the songs and dumb-shows would eke it out. The long passages of exposition, which Wilson regards as replacing matter originally shown in action, are due to an attempt, unusual with Shakespeare, to secure unity of time. The rest of the supposed evidence for recasting and abridge- ment consists mainly of very small points, such as incoher- encies and obscurities, the presence of mutes, broken lines, misdivided lines, accidental rhymes, a scrap of doggerel, transitions between verse and prose, for most of which alternative explanations seem to me more plausible. At two places, however, i. 2. 298-304, 317 and ii. i. 297-
Chap. IX THE TEMPEST 493
305, it is just possible that there may have been some theatrical expansion of the spectacular and musical elements. Conceivably the song of Juno and Ceres (iv. i. 1 06- 1 7) in the mask may be another example; the rest of the mask is, I think, fully Shakespearean.
The notion of an early date for Tempest in some form has been encouraged by its analogies to the play of Die SchSne Sidea, which forms part of the Of us Theatricum (1618) of Jacob Ayrer of Nuremberg, who died in 1605. Here, too, are a prince and magician, with a familiar spirit, a fair daughter, and an enemy's son, whose sword is held in thrall by the magician's art, who must bear logs for the lady, and who wins release through her love. Use of a common source is a more plausible explanation than borrowing on either hand. But it has not been found. A play of Celinde and Sedea was given in 1604 and 1613 by English actors in Germany, but Ayrer has no Celinde.1 William Collins, the poet, told Thomas Warton that he had found the Tempest story in the Aurelio and Isabella of Juan de Flores, of which there is an English translation (1556), but it is not there.2 Die SchSne Sidea has no storm and no enchanted island. Some analogues to these have, been found in various novels of Spanish and Italian origin, but in no case does a direct relation to Tempest seem likely, -Probably we get nearer in the scenari for commedie delVarte printed by Neri from Casana- tense MS. 1212 at Rome. Of these there are four; La Pazzia di Filandroy Gran Mago> La Nave, Li Tre Satin. In all of these shipwrecked crews land upon an island, and there are love-intrigues between the nobles and the native girls, and comic business in the hunger and greed of the sailors. These are complicated by the action of a Mago who controls the island. The resemblances to Tempest are closest in Li Tre Satiri> where the foreigners are taken for gods, as Trinculo is by Caliban, and the Pantaloiie and Zanni steal the Mago's book, as Trinculo and Stephano plot to steal Prospero's. The Mago appears also in other scenari not printed, and in one of these,
1 Eliz. Stage, ii. 284, 289. a Var. xv. 2.
494 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
PantaloncinO) he abandons his arts at the end, as Prospero does. The scenari are from the second of two manuscript volumes dated in 1618 and 1622 respectively. They were prepared for the press and for acting by Basilio Locatelli, but it is clear from the preface that his is merely a rifad- mento. How old the scenari themes may be, one can hardly say, but Neri points to a very similar plot of a shipwreck and a Mago in Bartolomeo Rossi's fully written pastoral comedy oiFiamme/la (1584). Rossi performed in Paris during the same year. He is not known to have come to England. And of course we cannot assume that the scenari were used for performances there, although, since writing EKz. Stage, ii. 261-5, I have found a trace of the presence of an Italian comedian, possibly Daniell by name, in 1 6 1 o, x An historical basis for Prospero's political fortunes has been suggested in those of a fourteenth- century Lithuanian Witold, which got into English chronicles, and with those of a fifteenth-century Prospero Adorno, whose deposition from his duchy of Genoa is told of in William Thomas's Histme of Italic (1549, 1561). But neither parallel is at all close. A Ferdinand II suc- ceeded his father Alfonso as King of Naples in 1495. Whatever Shakespeare's romantic source, if any, was, he worked into it the details of the Bermudas adventure, and he has probably used earlier travel-books, particularly Richard Eden's History of Travayle (1577), which would have given him Setebos, as the name of a Patagonian god. Caliban appears to be derived from the Gipsy cauliban, 'blackness'. Ariel is a Hebrew name, variously used in magical writings for one of the spirits who control the elements or the planets. Gonzalo's Utopian disquisition (ii. i. 143-68) is borrowed from the essay Of the Cani- baks in Florio's Montaigne, ch, xxx. A ballad of The Inchanted Island is (App. F, no. xi, </) one of Collier's forgeries.
« &&& 1.133.
Chap. IX 495
XXXVI. HENRY THE EIGHTH
[Fi. 1623.] [Catalogue] The Life of King Henry the Eight. [Histories, pp. 205-32, sign. t3~X4v. Head-title] The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight, [Running-title] The Life of King Henry the Eight [Acts and sec. marked.]
Modern Editions. D. Nichol Smith (1899, Warwick); C. K. Pooler (1915, Arden}\ J. M. Berdan and T. Brooke (1925, Yale). Dissertations. R. Roderick, On the Metre of Hen. Fill (c. 1756, T. Edwards, Canons of Criticism* \ i874,tf.tf.$.2>ww.66*); J. Spedding, On the Several Shares of Sh. and Fletcher in the Play of Hen. Fill (1850, Gent. Mag. 115; 1874, N.S.S. Trans. I*); S. Hickson, A Confirmation of Mr. Spedding s Paper on the Authorship of Hen. FIII(i 8 50, i N.Q. ii. 198 ; 1 %H,N.S.S. Trans. 1 8*) ; N.V&\K,FletchersangeUicheBetheiligungan Shs Hen. FIII(i 879, J. xiv. 1 80 ; Abl. ii. 3 5) ; W. Zeitiin, SAs Hen. VIII und Rowleys When You SeeMe, Tou Knoz0Mt(iWi,4nglia9iv.j$)i R. Boyle, Beaumont> Fletcher, and Massinger (1887, E.S. x. 393), Hen. Fill, An Investigation into the Origin and Authorship of the Play (i 88 5, #.&£. Trans. 443); F. G. Fleay, Mr.Boyle's Theory as to Hen. PHI (iW$, Ath.i. 355); E.H.COliphant, The WorksofB.andF.(ityi9E.S.™. 326), Hen.FIII (1927, B.F. 302) ; A. H. Thorndike, Hen. Fill (1901, Influence ofB. and F. on Sh. 35); H.Conrad, Hen. Fill. Fletchers Werk> uberarbeitet von Sh. (1918, E.S. lii. 204); H. D. Sykes, KingHen. PIII(i<)i<)9 Sidelights on Sh. 1 8); K. Ege, Shs Anteilan Hen. 7IH(i<)229 J. Iviii. 99); M. H, Nicokon, The Authorship of Hen. Fill (1922, PM.LJ[. xxxvii. 484); B. Maxwell, Fletcher and Hen. Fill (1923, Manly Studies, 104), Review of Sykes (1926, M.P. xxiii. 365).
The text is a good one, with unusually elaborate stage- directions for the spectacular episodes. A clear date is given by the notices of the Globe fire of 29 June 1613 during a performance of the play.1 It is called by Howes and Lorkin 'the play of Henry the Eighth'. Wotton gives an alternative title All is True, which is echoed by three references to truth in the prologue. But he also says that 'some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VHP were represented, and specifies the mask scene, from the dis- charge of chambers in which (i. 4. 49) the fire arose. And he calls the play a 'new' one. There is no reason to sup- pose that it differed in any way from the extant version,
1 App.D; EUz. Stage, ii. 419.
496 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
merely because a ballad mentions 'the Foole' among the actors in the house. He was a familiar member of the company, even if he had no part in Henry VIII. Nor need the references in the prologue to 'the first and happiest hearers of the town' and to a shilling admission fee point to a performance at the Blackfriars. There were shilling seats in the public theatres during the seventeenth century, and probably increased prices for new plays.1
Modern scholarship has generally adopted the view of • Spedding that there are two hands in Henry VIII, of which the first only wrote i. i, 2; ii. 3, 4; iii. 2. 1-203; v. i. Spedding took the first hand to be Shakespeare's and the second Fletcher's ; and I see no reason to dissent. A general impression of stylistic difference is confirmed by the tests of double endings, overflows, and speech-endings, and, for what it is worth, by Thorndike's test of the variant uses of 'cm and them, although the possible intervention of printers must be borne in mind here. Conrad has shown that the proportion of parallels to Shakespeare's diction elsewhere is considerable in the scenes ascribed to him, and slight elsewhere. Boyle and Sykes have attempted to substitute Massinger for Shakespeare, again mainly on the basis of parallels, but those to Massinger certainly do not outweigh the Shakespearean ones. Moreover, Massinger is full of Shakespearean echoes. Maxwell points out that he has as many to Hamlet, Othello, and Corivlanus as to Henry VIII, and also, which is significant, that such echoes are most frequent in the plays which he wrote after the appearance of F i * I doubt whether Boyle and Sykes are on any stronger ground in also finding sections of Massinger in the non-Shakespearean scenes. The occasional dis- cernment of him by Oliphant as touching-up both parts here and there seems to me quite subjective. It is, I think, easier to make out a case against Fletcher than against Shakespeare. Maxwell shows that the second hand keeps closer to his sources, and uses more overflows, parentheses, and sententious maxims, and fewer repetitions of words than are usual in Fletcher's work, and concludes that, if he
1 Eliz. Stagey ii. 532.
Chap. IX HENRY THE EIGHTH 497
was the second hand, 'either he was revising another's work, or the peculiarities of his style and method were modified by a collaborator'. I should agree that Henry VIII is not very characteristic Fletcher, and should add that it is not very characteristic Shakespeare-either. Shake- speare must have been writing in a tired vein and with some loss of concentration. Fletcher is clearest in the lighter scenes, i. 3 and v, 4, and here the superabundance of double endings, often with stressed final syllables, and the linking of contiguous or nearly contiguous words by cheap alliteration must be his. I think that the revels scene (i. 4), the comparatively colourless state scenes (ii. 2 ; iv. i ; v. 2, 3), the final rhetoric (v. 5) and the pathetic scenes (ii. i ; iii. i ; iii. 2. 2O3~end; iv. 2) may be his also. There is some very good writing for him in the pathetic scenes, and the play as a whole is a little out of his ordinary line. He may well have been working under the influence of Shakespeare. Some kind of collaboration, even if Shake- speare was at a distance, is more plausible than revision, for which there is no clear evidence. The other indications of collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher about 1613, in T.N.K. and perhaps the lost Cardenio (cf. p. 539), cannot be left altogether out of account. Shake- speare starts most of the themes. He deals pretty fully in i. i, 2 with Wolsey 's greatness and the ruin of his opponent Buckingham. He introduces Anne (ii. 3), He does the trial of Katharine, evidently leaving a gap, as there has been nothing to lead up to it. He begins the fall of Wolsey and leaves its ending to Fletcher. He introduces Cranmer, Cromwell, and Gardiner. He does the birth of Elizabeth. It is an epic, rather than a tragic scheme. Per- haps Fletcher upset the intended balance, by stressing the pathos of Katharine and Wolsey. Obviously in a Jacobean play there must be something of James, to follow Elizabeth. The reversion to the epic chronicle at the very end of Shakespeare's career is odd. I have some- times thought that an earlier plot may have been adapted. Sussex's men played a Buckingham in i593~4> although, if this is one of Henslowe's loose titles for a Shakespearean
3142.1 K k
498 PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. IX
play, it is perhaps more likely to be Richard III than an early Henry VIIL There is no early language, of course, in Henry VIIL Downes say* that Lowin played Henry, and was instructed in the part by Shakespeare himself.1 According to the comedy of Knavery in All Trades (i 664), Taylor and Pollard acted with Lowin in the play,2 They were not King's men in Shakespeare's lifetime, but there was a revival (App. D) in 1628. The historical incidents are pieced together from Holinshed and Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Possibly the writers had also Samuel Rowley's When Tou See Me, Tou Know Me (i 605) before them.3 A reprint of 1613 may have been due to the production of Henry Fill. We may fancy, if we like, that it was the 'merry bawdy play' of the prologue.
1 EUz. Stage, ii. 329. * H.P. ii, 295. 3 £//«. Stage, iii. 472.
CHAPTERX PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO
[Bibliographical Note. Pericles, but not as a rule Two Noble Kinsmen, forms a part of most recent editions of Shakespeare. The most convenient collection of other plays ascribed to him in the Third Folio or elsewhere is C T. Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha (1908), Others are by N. DeKus (1854-74); K. Warnke and L. Proescholdt (1883-8); A. F. Hopkinson (1891-1914). A fuller and more detailed list is in Ettz, Stage, iii. 204. Dissertations are R. Sachs, Die Sh. zugeschriebenen zwetfel- haften Stiicke (1892, J. xrvii. 135; A. F. Hopkinson, Essays on Sh.'s Douitful Plays (1900).]
I. SIR THOMAS MORE
[Bibliographical Note. The play is preserved in HarL MS. 7368. It must have passed into the Harleian library from that of John Murray, who lent it to Thomas Hearne (Collections, ix. 393) in 1727. Editions were published by A. Dyce (1844, Sh. Soc.), A. F. Hopkinson (1902), and C. F. Tucker Brooke (1908, Sh. Apocrypha), and a photographic fac- simile by J. S. Farmer (1910, T.F.T.). The foundation of modern study is W. W. Greg's type-facsimile edition (1911, M.S.R.). Shakespeare's participation in the pky was first suggested by R. Simpson, Are there any extant MSS. in S&.'s Handwriting (i 871, 4 N.Q. viii. i) and J. Spedding, Sh.'s Handwriting (1872, 4 N.Q. x. 227), On a Question concerning a Sup- pose J Specimen of Sh.'s Handwriting (i 879, Reviews and Discussions}. The theory was revived with great pakeographical learning by Sir E. M. Thompson, Sh.9s Handwriting (igi6),B&d$\ippoitedinSA.'s Hand in the Play ofS.TM. (1923), with contributions by A. W.Pollard, W. W. Greg, E. M. Thompson, J. D. Wilson, and R, W. Chambers. Much controversy
in E/iz. Stage, iv. 32. The palaeographical issue has been summed up by W. W. Greg in SA.'s Hand Once More (1927, Nov. 24, Dec. i, T.L.S.). Other discussions are: B. Nicholson, The Plays ofS.TM. and Ham. (i 884, 6 N.Q. x. 423); A. Hall, Sh!s Handwriting ^1899); C. R. BaskerviU, Some Parallels to Bartholomew Fair (1908, M.P. vi. 109); W. W. Greg, Auto- graph Plays fy J. Munday (1913, M.L.R. viii. 89), T. Goofal in S.TM. (1929, PM.L.A. xliv. 633); L. L. SchGcking, Das Datum des pseudo-Sh. S.TM. (1913, E.S. xlvi. 228), Sh. and S.TM. (1925, R.E.S. i. 40); P, Simpson, The Play ofS.TM. and Sh.'s Hand in It (1917, 3 Library, viii. 79), A. Green, The Apocryphal S.TM. and the Sh. Ho/ograpA (1918, ^».7.?&/<7/^,x^
xviii. 226); W. H. Stevenson, W.V Schoolmaster and Handwriting (1920, Jan. 8, T.L.S.); M. St. C. Byrne, A. Munday and his Books (1921, 4 Library,
Kk2
Soo PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap X
i. 225); G. G. Greenwood, The Sh. Signatures and S.TM. (1924)- B. A. P '.van Dam, ,The Textof Sh.'s Ham. (I924), 369; S. A. Tannenbaum Sh. s Unquestioned Autographs and the Addition to S.TM. (192 5, S P xxii I33S fnUau. »79); The Book of S.TM. (1927, p.p., reviewed by R. B. McKerrow in R.E.S. iv. 237 and W. W. Greg in 4 Library, is. 202), More About the Booke of S.TM. (1928, PM.lJl. ifin. 767); E. Severs, ff.r.M. (1925, Anglica, ii. 173); G. B. Harrison, The Date of S.TM (1925, R.E.S. i. 337); A. W. Pollard, Ferse Tests and the Date of S.TM. (1925, R.E.S. i. 441); A. Acheson, SA., Chapman and S.TM. (1926, Rev Anglo-AmMcaine, iii. 428, 514); T. W. Baldwin, The Organisation and ^sonnet of the S An. Company (1927), 1315 E. M. Albright, Dramatic Publication in England (1927), 128; W. Marschall, Das S.TM. Mann- stnpt unddie englische Comntedia dell' Arte (1928, Anglia, Iii. 103); S R G^^Robert Wilson andS.TM.(i<)z*,N.Q.<-&v. 237, 2595^.237')! There has also been much correspondence, to which many of the above writers, with M. A. Bayfield, J. A. Fort, and W. J. Lawrence, have contri- buted, in T.L.8. (1919, Apr. 24-June 19, Nov. 6, Dec. 18; 1920, May 27-July i, Aug. 12, 19; 1921, June 30, Aug. 4, 18; 1922, Nov. 23, 30; 1923, Oct. i8-Dec. 20; 1924, Aug. 24-Nov. 6; 1925, Jan. 15-29, Au*. 27-Nov. 12). 7 e
Much of the discussion on S.TM. covers Shakespeare's handwriting as shown in his signatures. Other dissertations are: F. Madden, Observa- tions on an Autograph of Sh. (1838, from Arch, xxvii. 113); W. D. Macray Annals of the Bodleian (1868, 1890), 379; A. P. Paton, North's Plutarch: Notes, as to a Copy Supposed to have been Sh.'s (1871); W. W. Skeat, ,U. sP/utarcA(iS75\vii F. A. Leo, Sh.'sOvidintheBodleianM^ J. wi. 367)5 J. F. Nisbet, The Insanity of Genius (i 89 1); F. J. Furnivall, On Sh. s Signatures'^; S.Lec,SA.'sHandwriting(i 899); E.M.Thompson, An Analyst, of Sh.'s Signatures (1917, I026, Sh.'s England, i. 299), Two Pretended Autographs of Sh. (1917, 3 Library, viii. 193); F. Madan, A Sup- posed SA. Autograph (1918, 3 Library, ix. 97); G. G. Greenwood, SA.'t Handzoriting(i<)zc>), Sh.'s Handwriting and the Northumberland Manuscript (1925)5 R. W. Leftwich, Sh.'s Handwriting and Other Papers (1921); W Thompson, Sh.'s Handwriting (1925, Quarterly, ccxliii. 209); C. L. Dana, The Handwriting in Nervous Diseases, with Special Reference to the Signa- tures of William Sh (1925, Essays for M. Prince); S. A. Tannenbaum, " S&-8i>'t 925. S.P. xxii. w\ANew Study of
'
. .
^•^"^i' S'P- XDU- "7)5 tnH** i»Sh.'s Penmanship (1927); G. C. Taylor, The Date of Edward Capell's Notes and Farious Readings (1929, R.E.S. v. 317). I give facsimiles (Pkte XII) of the accepted signa- tures. Others are in the books of E. M. Thompson and S. A. Tannenbaum *or general treatises on Elizabethan handwriting, cf. p. 168.]
THE title of the play is given on a vellum wrapper, in- scribed 'The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore'. It has no divisions, but the original text, in so far as it is now pre-
Chap. X SIR THOMAS MORE 501
served, makes seventeen scenes, which can be grouped into three sections, dealing respectively with the Rise, Greatness, and Fall of More. The first section (Sec. i-vii) was devoted, except for the description of an isolated early prank of More in Sc. ii, to the events of '111 May- Day', 1517. More was represented as taking a leading part (Sc. yi) in quelling the riot against the Lombard and French aliens in London. The second section (Sec. viii and ix) was mainly occupied with a visit of Erasmus to More, and with a play, in which More took an impromptu part. The third gave the closing episodes of his life, from his resignation of the Chancellorship (Sc. x) to his execution (Sc. xvii). The manuscript has undergone alteration. There are two lacunae in the original text. Probably one leaf, containing the end of Sc. v and beginning of Sc. vi, has 'been removed, and the whole of Sc. iv and beginning of Sc. v on the verso of the preceding leaf, with a few lines of 'Sc. vi on the following leaf, have been marked for deletion. Into this lacuna have been inserted four leaves, of which the first contains a passage (Addition I) clearly intended for the third section and here misplaced, and the others (Addition II) contain (a) a revised Sc. iv, (b) a new scene to replace Sc. v, (c) a new beginning for Sc. vi. Probably two leaves, containing the central part of Sc. viii, have also been removed, and the beginning and end of that scene on the preceding and following leaves marked for deletion. This second lacuna has been filled by two inserted leaves (Addition IV) containing a revised Sc. viii. Further, a slip (Addition III) bearing a single speech, probably intended as an introduction to this scene, has been pasted over part of the deleted matter on the leaf preceding the lacuna . Some additions have also been made to the later scenes.. Another slip (Addition V), pasted over deleted matter on the leaf following the second lacuna, bears an introductory speech to Sc. ix,, and this introduction has itself been expanded by lines written partly on the slip and partly on the leaf which holds it. A leaf (Addition VI) has been inserted before that containing the ciriginal end of Sc. ix, and contains a new episode to be appended to that
5o2 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
scene. And at the end of this inserted leaf is found a draft for the expanding lines in Addition V. Finally, a reference sign against a speech by More marked for deletion in Sc. xiii indicates that the misplaced Addition I was meant to come in here.
The original matter is written throughout in a single hand. The Additions are in five other hands, known as A, B, C, D, and E. The contributions of A, D, and E are confined to single scenes. A wrote Addition I, D wrote Addition II(c), the revised part of Sc. vi, in which More's oratory quells the riot. E wrote the last 3 1 lines of Addi- tion IV. Hands B and C range more widely. B wrote Additions II(a) and VI. He also added a few speeches for the Clown in the margins of the latter and original part of Sc. vi and of Sc. vii. And he is possibly responsible for the marginal words 'This must be newe written', at the open- ing of the deleted Sc. viii, C wrote Additions II(b), III, IV (except E's 31 lines), and V. He also made many alterations in the speech-prefixes and a few in the text of D's contribution, similarly but more slightly corrected B's II(a), added stage-directions to his VI, and revised some of the directions in those parts of the original text which were to be retained, partly to adapt them to the Additions, and partly, it would seem, to get important directions in the left margin.1 Dr. Greg reasonably con- jectures that B and C shared the general responsibility for the revision of the play. Moreover, while it is reasonable to suppose that A, B, D, and E were themselves the authors of what they wrote, C was clearly copying in part of V the draft by B at the end of VI, and it is therefore possible that he was nothing but a copyist elsewhere. In fact, his ser- vices seem to be those of a book-keeper; and of this there is confirmation in the facts that his hand reappears on the wrappers, both of Sir Thomas More itself and of John a Kent, for which the same piece of vellum was used, in some stage-directions added to John a Kent, and in the 'plots' of 2 Seven Deadly Sins and 2 Fortune's Tennis.*
The play has been submitted for censorship to Edmund
1 Cf. p. xai. * Cf. pp. 109, 124.
Chap. X SIR THOMAS MORE 503
Tilney, as Master of the Revels. He has written no 'allowance* upon it, but he has made some 'reformations' and given instructions for others. His main attention was directed to the '111 May-Day' scenes in the first section. Here, in Sec. i and iii he has marked long passages for deletion, put crosses against individual lines, and altered several words, apparently with the idea of suggesting that the aliens concerned were only Lombards and not of any other nation. Even the non-committal word 'straunger' has to go. Against a passage referring to 'daungerous times' and 'the displeased commons of the Cittie', he has written 'Mend y48'. With Sc. iii the 'reformations' stop, and although Tilney's ink seems to be rather blacker than that of Hand C or that of the main scribe, the difference does not make it possible to assign the marks for the deletion of the original Sc. iv and the remnant of Sc. v. My im- pression is that when Tilney had finished with Sc. iii he realized that piecemeal reformation of this section of the play was hopeless, and that he then turned back to the first page, and wrote the note 'Leaue out y* insurrection wholy & y* Cause ther off & begin w* Sr Tho: Moore att y° mayors sessions < = Sc. ii) w* a reportt afterwardes off his good service don beinge Shriue off London vppon a mutiny Agaynst y6 Lumbardes only by A shortt reportt & nott otherwise att your own perrilles E. Tyllney*. He did not interfere with the harmless second section of the play, but in Sc. x he crossed out the episode of More's resignation, and wrote in the margin what appears to be All Altr'.
Dr. Greg has identified the original hand with Anthony Munday's and Hand E with Thomas Dekker's, accepts Dr. Tannenbaum's identification of Hand A with Henry Chettle's, but decisively rejects that of Hand C with Thomas Kyd's. Nothing indeed that we know of Kyd's life, except perhaps that his father was a scrivener, suggests that he is likely to have been a book-keeper as well as a dramatist; and there is a high probability that the plot of 2 Fortune's Tennis, which C wrote, belongs to 1597 or 1 598, when Kyd was long dead. Hand B may possibly be
$04 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
Thomas Key-wood's, but that is far from certain. Pre- sumably Munday was himself the author of at least part of the original play. The substitution in his hand of an alternative ending for that first written to the last scene looks like the work of an author. So do some of the cur- rente calamo corrections in the text. Others, however, might be those of a scribe. Attempts have been made to trace original work by Chettle, Heywood, Dekker, and even Chapman, on literary grounds, and similarly.to distri- bute responsibility for the additions m Cs hand. These lie outside the scope of the present study. But the question of Shakespeare's participation must be faced. Hand D is claimed as his, and if the claim is sound, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that he was also the author of Addi- tion II(c), in that hand. Both palaeographical and literary considerations are relevant. But the discussion starts with palaeography, in the theory of Sir E. Maunde Thompson that the hand is the same as that found in the few undis- puted fragments of Shakespeare's script. Of these there are six, all, with one small exception, limited to signatures. The earliest (Plate XII, fig. a) is attached to the Deposition of 1 1 May 1 6 1 2 in the case of Belott v. Mountjoy (App. A, no. x). It is abbreviated in the form
Wdhn Shaksp
Conceivably the baptismal name reads 'Wihn'; if not, the *m' has not its three minims and is little more than a flourish. The *p' has been read as an Italian long V. More probably it is the contraction for 'per', with a cross- bar joined by a left-hand loop to the root of the letter. Here it may serve as a more general contraction for 'sper' or 'spere'. The *k' is badly blotted, There is an ornamental dot in the final loop of the W, which can be paralleled from other lay hands, as well as those of scri- veners. Next come the signatures to the Conveyance (Fig. 3) of 10 March and Mortgage (Fig. c) of u March 1 6 1 3 (cf. App. A, no. xxiii). They are both on parchment strips passed through slits in the parchment of the deeds. That to the Conveyance is in two lines, which is again not
fv^tsu
(a) DEPOSITION
(b) CONVEYANCE
(c) MORTGAGE SHAKESPEARE'S SIGNATURES
(/) WILL (3) SHAKESPEARE'S SIGNATURES
Chap. X SIR THOMAS MORE 505
unusual in Elizabethan writing. It is also abbreviated, and reads
William
Shakspe
The writing is close to the right-hand edge of the strip, and there are some supplementary ink marks on this edge and on the body of the deed which suggest to Sir E, M. Thompson an attempt to add an V, which would pre- sumably have left the contraction mark to stand for a final V only. The *W' is blotted and has the ornamental dot The Mortgage signature is again abbreviated, reading
Wm Shakspe
It is disjointedly written, probably because the parchment was greasy. There is no dot in the 'W. The contraction mark is angularly shaped and apparently blotted in the centre. It has been read as a superscribed V, but that would leave the name incomplete. Dr. Tannenbaum con- jectures that Shakespeare was not present at the legal completion of the purchase transactions, that he signed the strips before they were inserted in the deed, and that, in trimming them to fit the slits, the scrivener mutilated the ends of the signatures. This does not sound plausible as legal procedure. Moreover, there was plenty of room for trimming on the left-hand side of the slips. It is surely a lame suggestion that 'the clerk may have had a "supersti- tion" against widening a prepared slit or trimming a label on the left side*. Finally, there are the signatures (Figs. </-/) on the three sheets of the WilltA 25 March i6i6(App. A, no.xxiv). That on the first sheet is again in two lines. It is now much worn and faded, and the surname is ^unde- cipherable without the aid of old facsimiles, which justify the reading
William
Shakspere
The signature on the second sheet is legible enough as
Willft Shakspere But the descending bow of an 'h' in the line above has led
506 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
to the supposition that the first V was followed by an Y, and to the erroneous reading 'Shakspeare'. The 'W in these two signatures has no dot, but this recurs in the final and legally the most important signature on the third sheet of the Will. Here, too, the spelling differs. The reading is
By me William Shakspeare
Sir E. M. Thompson thinks that the signature originally ended with a contraction, and that the last three letters were then added. They are, in any case, worse written than the rest.
Innumerable other examples of Shakespeare's hand- writing, mostly inscriptions in books, have been brought forward, and practically all of them are unauthentic. Dr. Tannenbaum has collected facsimiles of 108, including 79 Ireland forgeries.1 A recent attempt to ascribe to Shake- speare the jotting on the Northumberland MS. (App. B, no. xvi), in which his name and the titles of some of his plays occur, is negligible. A copy of Ovid's Metamor- f hoses (1502, Aldus, Venice) in the Bodleian has the inscription ' W* Shr' or 4Wm Sh"' on the title-page, and opposite it on the front cover 'This little Booke of Ovid was given to me by W, Hall who sayd it was once Will Shakesperes. T. N. 1 6 8 2*. A copy of John Florio's transla- tion (1603) of Montaigne's Essayes, now in the British Museum, has and already had before 1780 the inscrip- tion 'Willm Shakspere' on a fly-leaf, since used as a lining paper to the cover. Thompson rejects both of these. Madan states some points in favour of the Ovid. Tannenbaum argues for the authenticity of the Mon- taigne, and Taylor adds that there would be no motive ftJr a forgery before Capell had called attention for the first time in 1780 to Shakespeare's use of Montaigne.
Only the six legal signatures can be regarded as avail- able for comparison with the Hand D in Sir Thomas More. They can be relied upon, in spite of some rather amateur attempts to suggest that some of them may have been
1 Some are reproduced in his Problems.
Chap. X SIR THOMAS MORE 507
written by the scriveners concerned. The nature of the documents makes this most improbable a priori, except perhaps as regards the 'By me* on the will, which, however, is not in the hand of the main scribe, or of Francis Collins. It has every appearance of continuity with the signature. And the six signatures themselves, although differing in some details, present sufficient common features to justify, if that were needed, ascription to the same hand. They are not the work of an illiterate writer, although they may seem so to those unfamiliar with the 'English' type of hand in which, with some admixture of 'Italian' letters and notably the long medial V, they are written. Sir E. M. Thompson accepted the theory that they show signs of writer's cramp or some other nervous disorder. This is repudiated by Dr. Tannenbaum, who is, I believe, an expert in such disorders. No doubt Shakespeare may have shared the usual uncertainty of a layman, when called upon to execute a legal document. The will, in particular, he may have signed in a condition of physical infirmity, and exhaustion may account for the comparative badness of the second signature and the close of the third. It is not possible to be certain in what order these signatures were made. Later legal practice would suggest that the opera- tive signature on the last sheet was given first, and that afterwards the testator turned back to the first and second sheets and signed them for identification. It must be added that signatures are not always fully typical of a man's ordinary script, that a good many years must have intervened between Sir Thomas More and the earliest signature, and that the Shakespearean examples only give eleven out of the twenty-six minuscule letters of the alphabet and only three majuscules. The basis for com- parison with Hand D (Plate XIII) is therefore slight. Moreover, both hands are of a very normal kind. Hand D was indeed at first taken to be identical with Hand C. Sir E. M. Thompson, however, was able to discern certain minor peculiarities distinctive alike of Shakespeare and of Hand D, which confirmed his general impression that the two hands were the same. He found them using similar
5o8 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
abnormal forms of 'a', V, 'p', V, and other letters, of which one at least, the so-called 'spurred a', does not seem to have been exactly paralleled elsewhere. He found them also using the same two normal varieties of V, *h', and 'p', and the same three of 'a* and 'k\ And they have in common the dotted 'W, the looped per symbol, and a habit of beginning certain initial letters with a long, fine upstroke, to the similar formation of which an example in each hand of a needle-like eye at the base bears witness. The most elaborate criticism of Sir E. M. Thompson's theory has come from Dr. Tannenbaum, who questions the validity of some of his points, and calls attention to dissimilarities, not only in individual letter-forms, but also in general features, such as the distribution of light and heavy strokes, the shaping of contractions, and the linking of letter to letter. Shakespeare's pen, he thinks, moved stiffly, and D's with facility. D, again, generally dots his Vs' ; Shakespeare, in his signatures, never does. I am no palaeographer, but so far as a layman can judge, I am content to adopt the cautious conclusions of Dr. Greg, who thinks that, while some of the specific tests are doubtful, weight must be attached to the effect of 'numerous hardly definable traits of resemblance' on the mind of so experienced a student as Sir E. M. Thompson at the end of an exhaustive investiga- tion; that the case for Shakespeare's authorship must rest on 't$ie convergence of a number of independent lines of argument — palaeographic, orthographic, linguistic, stylis- tic, psychological — and not on any one alone'; and that although the palaeographic case does not approach com- plete proof, it may be sufficient, in the absence of any more plausible candidate for D among dramatists whose hands are known, to 'incline the balance of probability in favour of identification'.
The problem has, of course, been approached along the other lines indicated by Dr. Greg. I do not think it can be said that the quality of the scene is such as to make an ascription of it to Shakespeare imperative on purely literary grounds. On the other hand, I think that it might have passed well enough as his in any Elizabethan play of
Chap. X SIR THOMAS MORE 509
the canon* Professor R. W. Chambers has shown that
its combination of sympathy for the psychology of the
mob with a strong sense of order and degree, as maintainers
of the social system against anarchy, is consonant with the
political temper, not only of the early Cade scenes, but
also of Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus.
Technical considerations of style, again, certainly do not
rule out Shakespeare. Professor J. D. Wilson has listed
'abnormal' spellings analogous to those which seem (cf.
i, p. 187) in some of the Quartos to have escaped the
vigilance of the compositors. The vocabulary and diction
justify themselves, on comparison with the concordance,
'as quite reasonably Shakespearean, in spite of the stric-
tures of Professor Schticking. There are, no doubt, words
and uses of words which do not precisely recur, but that is
so in every one of the plays. I find nothing obviously
rebellious to Shakespeare's manner.1 The same is true of
the metre. A statistical comparison with a single scene is,
of course, valueless, but More's long speech shows a good
deal of internal pausation and other variation from the
early blank-verse norm.2 What one does not find is that
absence of 'blots' for which Heminges and Condell especi-
ally lauded Shakespeare. There are a score of places which
show alterations made either currente calamo or as after-
thoughts. And even then there were some oversights
left for Hand C to correct. Perhaps the writer did not take
the play he was tinkering very seriously. I do not take the
statement of Heminges and Condell very seriously. If
the scene is Shakespeare's, we get some useful hints to-
wards the interpretation of the Quarto and Folio texts.
We should expect to find there a writer who used very little
' Schticking suggests Heywood as lines misunderstood by C restored,
a poSble aLnatL, and Pollard yield » double ^dmgs (mducLng
(SVs Han* 14) would agree, were not runs of 5 and 4), 4 ^ J™™
Lywood 'ruled out by his hand- ^j^* „ ££.£
The 77 lines of More's speech, not syllabic feet (of which one is tub),
LmanytySaswemayconoeivethatthe does not suggest the earhest author meant them to wad, with two speaw.
jio PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.X
Binctuation and attached his speech-prefixes — perhaps, as r. Greg thinks, after completing the texts, — carelessly and with many abbreviations,1 D's pages run to 46, 50, and 52 script-lines respectively. At the foot of the second page, he runs four verse-lines into two script-lines. Similarly, he merges a final half line with a full one at the foot of the third. Professor Wilson regards a knowledge of D's hand as help- ful in detecting the causes of misprints in Shakespearean plays. But it is, after all, a fairly ordinary 'English' hand, and play manuscripts seem to have been usually written in 'English* hands.
The clues to date and to the company concerned with the play are very uncertain. The changes in Munday's script put the original text earlier than his Heaven of the Mynde (1602) and later than John a Kent, but as the 4 1 596' on the John a Kent manuscript is not held to be his, and therefore does not necessarily date the play, this may be early. • Munday may quite well have been writing by 1 580, although it is not necessary to go so far back as this,2 The relation, if any, of John a Kent to the Admiral's Wise Man of West Chester in 1594 is obscure. Tilney was Master of the Revels from 1579 to 1610; Buck cannot be shown to have deputized for him before 1603. The mention of 'Mason among the Kings players' (i 1 5 1) is in- conclusive ; none is known in the companies of Henry VIII or James, So are those ( 1 006, 1 1 4 8) of Ogle as a theatrical furnisher; Ogles were so occupied from 1571 to 15853 and in 1 6oo.4 So is that to the scouring of Moorditch, which is, moreover, in an Addition (IV, 2 1 5). It was scoured in 1595, Jsut the allusion would have been as much in place while it wanted scouring. The back-sword men Garret and George Philpots (458) are unknown. More is to be learnt from Tilney's dealings with the play, which show that he was nervous of references to the question of aliens,
1 In the 77 lines cited above, the MS. Of the 16 strong internal ones, i has a
has only 25 commas and 2 semi-colons, full-stop, 2 semi-colons and 9 commasj
none of either at line-ends. There arc 4 are unstopped.
4 full-stops, 3 at line-ends. There are * MX. Stage, iii. ^1-
no colons. Interruptions have no stops. 3 Feuillerat, Elix. passim.
Many necessary pauses are unstopped. * Henslowe, i. 1 18.
Chap. X SIR THOMAS MORE 5 1 1
This had become a subject for agitation in London, as a re- sult of the competition with native handicraftsmen of Dutch and Flemish immigrants since 1561 and of French Hugue- nots since 1580. It is noticeable that, while only Lombards and French were concerned in More's day, both Munday (420, 687) and the writers of Additions (II, 19, 40, 55, 250) bring in the Dutch and Flemish. Tilney does not seem to mind much about the Lombards, but dislikes mention of the French or of Strangers' generally. The agitation was more or less chronic, but active in 1586, when there were mutterings of another *Y11 May Daye', in 1592-3, and in 1 59 5, x Any one of these dates would fit the original play. The theatrical conditions were not, however, favourable (cf. ch. ii) for new productions between 23 June 1592 and April 1594; nor is there any sign of Sir Thomas More in Henslowe's lists of performances by Strange's and Sussex's men during that period. The Additions have, of course, to be considered, as well as the original. It is unfortunate that we cannot say with certainty whether they were made before or after the submission of the manuscript for censorship. Dr. Greg thinks that they must have been made before, on the ground that most of the alterations are of a literary character, and that nobody could have seriously supposed that those in the riot scenes in any way carried out Tilney's instructions. The argument is a strong one. On the other hand, it obliges us to suppose that the play was sent to Tilney in a most untidy and in places almost unintelligible condition; in a variety of hands; with long passages only marked for deletion by marginal lines; with Addition I fitted into the wrong scene; with Addition VI so fitted in as to break the continuity of Sc. ix, and still containing a draft of part of Addition V. If Tilney was prepared to stand this, he must have been very easy- going. Moreover, why should a playjust written have been subjected to so much literary revision? I think it is just possible that Sir Thomas More was laid aside when
' Documents are in Dasent, P.C. Oveyney, ii. 25* 5 J- S- Burn, Hist. Acts, xxii. 506 (2 June 159*) and of foreign Protestant tofagets (1846), M.'J Hand, 33 ('5*6, '593* *595) * <*• I0> "•
512 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
Tilhey sent it back, and taken up later by new writers, with different literary notions from Munday's, in the hope that the political cloud had blown by and that Tilney might now be persuaded to allow the main original struc- ture to stand. If so, probably the hope proved fallacious and the revision was never completed. I do not pretend to decide between the alternatives. The matter would be set at rest if Tilney's hand or ink could be identified in the Additions. But it is not so, and although Dr. Greg thinks that a passage (II, 68-75) introducing Sir John Munday has been scored out on political grounds, and therefore by Tilney, my own impression is that this was done to save a once-speaking character by persons less interested than Anthony Munday in his namesake, whom he had probably introduced in the original Sc. iv. As it stands, the manuscript seems inadequate for prompt-copy. Be- sides perfecting the insertionsy the book-keeper has still to supply a few missing entries and speech-prefixes. Many exits are unmarked, but about these book-keepers do not appear (cf. p. 120) to have troubled much. In the text itself, many ragged edges left by deletions have still to be joined. The name of an actor, T. Goodal, written against the entry of a Messenger in Addition V suggests that at least the casting had been done. It is true that there are many very small parts in the play, and one would expect a book-keeper, if he wanted a reminder (cf. p. 122) for one of these, to want it for others. But there is equally sparse casting in other plays. Dr. Tannenbaum treats the name as a forgery by Collier, and links it with what looks like a marginal 'Laneham' (in) in apparently modern ink. Dr. Greg, however, is clear that, while 'Lane- ham' is to be suspected as Collier's, a forgery of the Goodal note is out of the question.1 He tells me that the hand is doubtless Cs, and that tests of the ink have disclosed no difference. Collier did in fact state, as early as 1835, that a Goodale acted with Laneham in Sir Thomas More.2 He called him Bapti$te Goodale, and included him in
1 P.M.LJi. xliv, 63. Tannenbaum defends his view (ibid. * N*u> Facts, 12. V
Chap. X SIR THOMAS MORE 513
a forged list of Queen's men at the Blackfriars in 1589,* Thomas Goodale had been one of Lord Berkeley's men in 1 58 1.2 He played in 2 Seven Deadly Sins (cf, p. 44) for Strange's, or the Admiral's, or the combined Alleyn company about 1590. He was a mercer and had a business transaction with John Alleyn and Robert Lee, who had both also been connected with those com- panies, in I593-3 He was alive and a player in 1598 and perhaps 1599, but we do not know what company he was then of.4 Hand C was book-keeper to the 2 Deadly Sins company about 1590, and to the later Admiral's in 1597 or 1598 (cf. p. 124). We do not know when he joined them or how long he stayed with them. If Shakespeare wrote the Addition, these facts would perhaps fit best with a date in 1592-3. But we are first certain of Heywood (born, as Professor Sisson kindly tells me, in 1573) as a playwright in 1596, and of Dekker (born c. 1572) in 1598; and 1592-3 would be rather early for either of them. On the hypo- thesis of a second attempt to produce Sir Thomas More^ the recrudescence of anti-alien agitation in 1 595 might explain a second abandonment. On grounds of style and parallels, this or even a later date for Shakespeare's intervention would not particularly surprise me. Schticking would group Sir Thomas More as a whole with the Chamber- lain's Thomas Lord Cromwell (cf. p. 534), 'lately acted* in 1602 and the Admiral's Wolsey plays of 1601-2,* but that seems too late for the stage of development reached by Munday's script. I am afraid that the date, or dates, must remain undetermined. Some evidence tending to suggest that the play did ultimately get performed is not very conclusive. Baskerville cites parallels which make him think that Jonson borrowed from Sc. ii for the purse- cutting scene (ii. 6) in Bartholomew Fair, but the source, whatever it was, may have been open to Jonson, Golding, perhaps more pertinently, notes a double echo in Munday
1 App. F. xi (6). 4 P.M.LJI. xii. 100.
a Ibid. ii. 103. 5 EB*. Stage, ii. 1785 iv. 8.
» Warner, DulwicA MSS, iv. 29. 9142.1 L 1
514 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
and Chettle's Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (1598), iv. i, of the long-haired ruffian and the Lady Vanity in S.T.M. 797, 1080. But obviously Munday, if not also Chettle, was familiar with the play, whether it was per- formed or not. Of course, it might have been further revised and licensed on a fair copy, but why then should the rough copy be carefully wrappered and preserved as The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore1 ?
One more point. If Shakespeare wrote Addition II(c), is it not possible that he also wrote Addition III, although it is in C's hand ?
It is in heaven that I am thus and thus
And that wch we prophanlie terme or fortuns
Is the provision of the power aboue
fitted and shapte lust to that strength of nature
wch we are borne <? withal;) good god good god
that I from such an humble bench of birth
should stepp as twere vp to my Countries head
And give the law out ther <;> I in my fathers lif
to take prerogative and tyth of knees
from elder kinsmen and him bynd by my place
to give the smooth and dexter way to me
that owe it him by nature, sure thes things
not phisickt by respecte might turne or bloud
to much Coruption. but moore. the more thou hast
ether of honor office wealth and calling
wch might accite thee to embrace and hugg them
the more doe thou in serpents natures thinke them<,>
feare ther gay skinns wth thought of ther sharpe state
And lett this be thy maxime, to be greate
Is when the thred of hazard is once Spun
A bottom great woond vpp greatly vndonn.
My attention was first called to the passage by the parallel in the first line to Oth. i. 3. 322 :
'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.
But the whole is at least as good as anything in Addi- tion II(c), The vocabulary is consistent with Shake-
Chap. X SIR THOMAS MORE 5 1 5
speare's.1 The coupling of words, especially of the English 'smooth' with the Latin 'dexter' is like him. Even the pun in the fourteenth line is characteristic.
II. EDWARD THE THIRD
[S.R. 1595.3 primo die Decembris Cutbert Burby Entred for his copie vnder the handes of the wardens A booke Intitled Edward the Third and the Blacke Prince their warres with kinge John of Fraunce vjd. (Arber, iii. 5 5).
"Q i • i $ 9 6 .] The Raigne of King Edward the third : As it iath bin sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London. [Ornament] London, Printed for Cuthbert Burby. 1596, 'Head- and Running-titles] The Raigne of K, Edward The third.
[Q2. 1599,] [Ornament] The Raigne of King Edward the Third. As it hath bene sundry times played about the Citie of London [Stafford's device (McKerrow 281)] Imprinted at London by Simon Stafford, for Cuthbert Burby: And are to be sold at his shop neere the Royall Exchange. 1599. [Head- and Running-titles] The Raigne of King Edward the third.
[S.R.] Transfers by Mrs. Burby to William Welby on 1 6 October 1609, Welby to Thomas Snodham on 2 March 1618, Mrs. Snodham to William Stansby on 23 February 1626. Mrs. Stansby to George Bishop on 4 March 1639 (Arber, iii. 420, 621 ; iv. 152, 459).
Modern Editions. E. Capell (1759-60, Prolusions)} K. Warnke and L. Proescholdt (1886); G. C. Moore Smith (1897)5 C F. Tucker Brooke (1908, Sh. Apocrypha, 67).
' W.T. i. 2. 313, 'whom I from IV, T.N., Lear), 'dexter' of a cheek .
meaner form Have bench'd and rear'd (T.C. iv. 5. 128), 'accite' in this sense
to worship'; T.C. i. 3. io6,'The primo- (2 Hen. IV, ii. 2. 64), as well as that of
genitive and due of birth, Prerogative 'summon* (2 Hen. IF, v. 2. 1415 T.A.
of age'. Shakespeare is rather fond of i. x. 27). 'Respect' has many shades of
'prerogative', 'physic' (vb.), 'hazard', meaning; that of 'reflection' is not un-
and the thread* of life, which is common; e.g. Ham. iii. i. 68, There s
'spun' in 2 Hen. VI, iv. 2. 3 1 . He has the respect, That makes calamity of so
the 'bottom' of thread (T.S., T.G., long life'. I do not find 'tithe' in the
M.N.D.), 'corrupt' blood (K.J., 2 Hen. general sense of 'tribute .
til
5i6 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
Dissertations. H. v. Friesen, Ed. Ill, angeblich dn Stuck von Sh. (1867, J. ii. 64); J. P. Collier, Ed. Ill, A Historical Play by Sh. (1874); A. Teetgen, Ai.V Ed. Ill (1875); A. C. Swinburne, On the Historical Play of Ed. 7/7(1879, Gent.Mag.; 1880, &c., Study <?/&*.); E.Phipson, Ed.III (1889, N.S.S. Trans. 58*); G. Liebau, K.Ed. Ill von England und die Grafin von Salisbury (1900, 1901), K. Ed. 777 von England im Lichte EuropaischerPoesie (1901) ; R. M. Smith, Ed. 777 (191 1, J.E.G.P. x. 90); A. Platt, Ed. 777 and Sh's Sonnets (1911, M.L.R. vi. 5 1 1); S. R. Golding, The Authorship of Ed. 777 (1928, N.Q. cliv. 313).
There is no external evidence for ascribing any part of Edward III to Shakespeare, since we can hardly account as such its inclusion with Edward II and Edward IV as his in Rogers and Ley's play-list of 1 656.1 Capell's claim for Shakespeare on internal grounds was blessed by the poetic judgement of Tennyson and condemned by that of Swin- burne. As a whole the play continues, if only as a belated survivor, the manner of the early school, and stylistic dis- crimination is therefore (cf. p. 223) difficult. But prob- ably modern criticism is right in finding two hands, of which one only requires serious consideration as Shake- speare's. This begins in i. 2, not I think before 1. 94, and goes on to the end of Act ii, taking a complete episode of the wooing of the Countess of Salisbury by Edward, which delays the main progress of the chronicle history. Its literary quality is higher than that of the bulk of the play, and it makes a comparatively free use, about 12 per cent., of feminine endings. This alone would not be conclusive, since feminine endings are much affected (cf. p. 261) by differences of subject-matter. But these scenes are also marked by a constant habit of ringing the changes on individual words, which often run through longish speeches or sections of dialogue. This feature is not apparent in the rest of the play, except in iv. 4, and as this scene is also of better quality than the rest and again has a fairly large number of feminine endings, it may possibly be due to the hand of Act ii. Confidence in dealing with work of this character, when we do not know either its precise date or the company for which it is done, would be absurd. But it is quite possible that these sceiies may be Shake-
1 Greg, Masques, kiv.
Chap. X EDWARD THE THIRD 517
speare's. The ringing of changes is like him, and the light handling in ii. i of Lodwick's love-poetry. Moore Smith notes his 'battledore play of thought'. Some weight, moreover, must be given to the appearance of the line
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds both as ii. i. 451 and in Sonn. xciv. 14, and in a less degree to the use of 'scarlet ornaments' for blushes in ii. i. 10 and for sealing lips in Sonn. cxlii. 6. I am not much impressed by the arguments which would find these phrases more appropriate in one or the other connexion. But the repetition of the first at least is something more than an echo, and on the whole it seems less plausible to suppose that Shakespeare borrowed from another man's play, than that he made a double use, once in public and once in poems for which he probably did not, when writing them, contemplate publicity. If the Edward III scenes are Shakespeare's, the relation to the Sonnets, and possibly also the allusion (ii. 2. 153) to Hero and Leander may suggest a date in 1594—5. So does a comparison of the Countess (ii. 2. 193) to Lucrece as
her, whose ransacked treasury hath task'd The vain endeavour of so many pens.
This allusion might, of course, have come either from Shakespeare himself, or from another. The proportion of feminine endings is not too low for that period, outside comedy. Shakespeare had more in Richard III, but about as many in 2, 3 Henry VI, if those are his, and as a whole the play rather recalls that early period. I do not feel able to attempt any serious identification of the second hand. Peele, much given to patriotic writing, was available at any likely date. But we do not know by what writers the tradition of the old school may have been continued after 1 5 9 3 • I£ however, the play is of earlier date, Greene may be also a possibility. Robertson is confident that Marlowe was the original writer, and that there was rehandling, especially of the Countess episode, by Greene; and thinks that he can trace contributions by both Peele and Kyd. If there is any such amalgam, we have no tests sufficient to dissolve it.
5i8 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.X
But I do not see any evidence of revision. The Countess episode is linked to the rest by references at iii. 3. 1 55^and iii. 5. 100, and R. M, Smith points out that both writers use Froissart for incidents not in Holinshed. For the Countess episode Painter, who repeats additions made to Froissart by Bandello, is also drawn upon. Robertson's treatment does not sufficiently keep apart the problems of the two sections. In that claimed for Shakespeare, the feminine endings are dead against both Marlowe and Greene. Robertson attempts to get over this by assuming that in plays later than those known to IDC theirs, they both increased their use of this metrical variation. But this is merely a priori.
III. PERICLES
[S,R. 1608.] 20 Maij. Edward Blount. Entred for his copie vnder thandes of Sir George Buck knight and Master Warden Seton A booke called, the booke of Pericles prynce of Tyre (Arber, iii. 378).
[Qi. 1609.] The Late, And much admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true Relation of the whole Historic, aduentures, and fortunes of the said Prince: As also, The no lesse strange, and worthy accidents, in the Birth and Life, of his Daughter Mariana. As it hath been diuers and sundry times acted by his Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side. By William Shakespeare. [Ornament] Imprinted at London (by William White) for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold at the signe of the Sunne in Pater-noster row, &c. 1609. [Head-title] The Play of Pericles Prince of Tyre, tec. [Running-title] Pericles Prince of Tyre, [or] The Play of rericles Prince of Tyre,
[Rules before Gower speeches introducing Acts ii,.iii.] Facsimiles. C. Praetorius (1886, Sh. Q. xri, ed. P. Z. Round; S. Lee
[Q2. 1609.] [Title-page and Head-title] As in Qi. [Running-title] The Play of Pericles Prince of Tyre.
Chap.X PERICLES 519
[Differentiated from Qi by 'Eneer Gower' for 'Enter Gower' on sign. A 2 and other variant readings.]
Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1886, Sh. Q. xxii, ed. P. Z. Round). [£3. 161 1.] The Late And much admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true Relation of the whole History, aduentures, and fortunes of the sayd Prince : As also, The no lesse strange and worthy accidents, in the Birth and Life, of his Daughter Mariana. As it hath beene diuers and sundry times acted by his Maiestyes Seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side. By William Shakespeare. [Ornaments] Printed at London by S(imon> Stafford), 1611. {Head-title} The Play of Pericles Prince of Tyre, &c. [Running-title] The Play of Pericles Prince of Tyre.
[Q4. 1619,] The Late, And much admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true Relation of the whole History, aduentures, and fortunes of the saide Prince. Written by W. Shakespeare. [Jaggard's device (McKerrow 283)] Printed for T(homas) P(avier) 1619. [Head-title'] The History of Pericles Prince of Tyre. [Running-title] Pericles Prince of Tyre.
[One of the Jaggard reprints (cf. p. 133). The signatures continue those of Q3 of 2, 3 Hen. 7L]
[S.R. 1626.] 4° August 1626. Edward Brewster Robert
Birde Assigned ouer vnto them by Mistris Pavier and
Consent of a full Court of Assistantes all the Estate right
title and Interest which Master Thomas Pavier her late
husband had in the Copies here after mencioned. xxviij8
viz* ... Master Pavier 's right in Shakesperes plaies or
any of them . . . (Arber, iv. 164).
[Q5* 1630.] I<ohn> N<orton> for R. B.
[Two issues.]
[S.R. 1630.] 8°Nouembris 1630 Richard Cotes. Assigned
ouer unto him by master Bird and Consent of a full Court
holden this day All his estate right and interest in the
Copies hereafter menconed. iiijs . . . Pericles (Arber, iv.
242).
[Arber's Tersiles' is a misreading ; cf. W. W. Greg, Emendation^ 32.]
5zo PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
[Q6, 1635.] B7 Thomas Cotes.
[F3, 2nd issue, 1664.] . . . And unto this Impression is added seven Playes, never before Printed in Folio, viz. Pericles Prince of Tyre. . . . [Additional plays, pp. 1-20] The much admired Play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre, With the true Relation of the whole History, Adventures, and Fortunes of the said Prince. Written by W. Shake- speare, and published in his life time. Parallel-Text. A. Morgan (1891, Ban&sideyXLv). Modem Editions. K. Deighton (1907, 1925, Arderi)\ A. R. Bellinger (1925, Yale}.
Prose Version.
[1608.] The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of
Tyre. Being the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it
was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet lohn
Gower. [Woodcut of Gower] At London Printed by
T. P(urfoot) for Nat. Butter, 1608.
[Only examples known in B.M. and in Zurich Stadtbiblio-
thek. Epistle to Henry Fermor, J.P. of Middlesex, signed George
Wilkins.]
Edition. T. Mommsen (1857).
Dissertations. N. Delius, Vber Shs P. (1868, J. iii. 175; Abl. i. 77); F. G. Fleay, On the Play of P. (1874, N.S.S. Trans. 195 ; Manual, 209) ; R. Boyle, P.(i882,£.£.v. 363), On Wilkinfs Share in the Play called Sh.'s P. (1882, N.S.S. Trans. 323); A. H. Smyth, Bk.'s P. and Afollonius of Tyre (1898); H. T. Baker, The Authorship of P. v. j. j-joi (1907, M.LJt.xxii,222), TheRelation ofSh.'s P. to George Wilkinf V Novel '(1908, PM.L.A. xxiii. 100); D. L. Thomas, On the Play P. (1908, E.S. xxxix. 210); R. M. Garrett, Gower in P. (1912, J. xlviii. 13); T. S. Graves, On the Date and Significance of P. (1916, M.P.xiii. 545); K. Steinhafiser, Die Neueren Anschauungen uber die Echtheit von Shs P. (1918); H. D. Sykes, Wilkins and Sh.'s P. (1919, Sidelights on Sh. 143); G. Crosse, P. on the Stage (1921, 12 N.Q. viii. 361); H. D. Gray, Heywood's P. Revised fy Sh. (1925, PM.LA. xl 507); V, 0sterberg, Grevinden af Salisbury og MarinaafSh. (1926); R.P. Cowl, The Authorship of P . (1927); P. Allen, Sh., Jonson and Wilkins as Borrowers (1928).
The priority of Qi to Qa is determined on small typo- graphical points. A misprint ofEneer for Enter in the first stage-direction serves to distinguish £2. The text is extremely corrupt and even in the free rearrangement of
Chap. X PERICLES 52I
modern editions many lines remain unrhythmical Long sections of verse, especially in Acts iii-v, are printed as prose, or are irregularly divided. This prose is not quite like that in Lear, because it has more punctuation, but it suggests a report, possibly with the aid of shorthand. There may have been some omissions. This condition of the text complicates both the problem of authorship and that of date. The most obvious thing about the play is that, as it stands, it cannot all be by one writer. It may be divided into (a) the main substance of Acts i-ii, (£) that of iii-v, (c) the brothel scenes, iv. 2, 5, 6, chiefly in prose, (d) the prologues and epilogue spoken by Gower, with their dumb-shows. These include iv. 4 and v. 2, which divide the last two acts into sections. There is an unmistakable difference of style between (a) and (i). The latter is clearly Shakespeare's in the temper and manner of his late romances, and the best passages are sufficient to dispose of Cowl's suggestion that a deliberate imitator has been at work. On the other hand (a) does not read like Shake- speare at any stage of development. It is fairly competent verse, but without distinction. Many rhymed couplets are awkwardly interspersed, and there are only two-thirds as many feminine endings as in (£). One might be tempted to ascribe to Shakespeare i. i. 100:
The blind mole casts
Copp'd hills towards heaven, to tell the earth is throng'd By man's oppression; and the poor worm doth die for't
No weight, however, can be attached to such an isolated passage. Attempts have been made to ascribe (c) to a third hand, but in view of the similar scenes in Measure for Measure, there is no reason why they should not go with (£), and several phrases seem very Shakespearean. Of the Gower passages (d) those before the first four acts and also v. 2 are in octosyllabic couplets of intended archaism. This quality is not so obvious in the decasyllabic couplets of the others, but they are probably by the same hand and not Shakespeare's.
In some form the play must have existed before Blount's
522 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
registration entry of 20 May 1608. This is clearly for a play, as Buck was the licenser. We do not know why Blount never published a Quarto, or why he did not take the play into Fi. It is of course possible that he made an unregistered transfer to Gosson, but he is not very likely to have been concerned with surreptitious copy. Pollard (cf. p. 146) suggests that his was a 'blocking' entry, but if so it was singularly futile, since, so far as we know, he did not intervene when Gosson published, A per- formance of Pericles was seen (cf. App. D) by the Vene- tian ambassador Zorzi Giustinian at some date between 5 January 1606 and 23 November 1608. The prose novel by Wilkins was printed in 1608, and it is safest (cf. p. 175) to regard this as a calendar-year date. The relation of the novel to the play is obscure. Wilkins, in the epistle, offers 'a poore infant of my braine' and this does not necessarily refer to anything but the novel itself. In an 'Argument7, he entreats the reader 'to receiue this Historic in the same maner as it was vnder the habite of ancient Gower the famous English Poet, by the Kings Maiesties Players excellently presented*. He makes no other reference to Gower except on the title-page and in a heading to ch. i. The incidents narrated by Gower as presenter of the play come in the ordinary run of the novel. But in the novel as in the play the names of the characters are substantially from Gower's Confessio Aman- tis, although in both much use is made of Laurence Twine's The Patterne of Paynfull Adventures, the title of which that of the novel echoes. This was registered in 1 576.1 A later undated edition and one of 1 607 are extant. The names Pericles and Marina, neither in Gower nor in Twine, are also common to the novel and the play. It has often been held that the second hand of the play is that of Wilkins himself. The case is most fully put by Sykes, on the basis of a stylistic comparison with other work of Wilkins. There is, however, little to go upon. Beyond the novel itself and a prose pamphlet on The Miseries of Barbary (1603) the recorded and independent
1 Arber, ii. 301.
Chap. X PERICLES 523
writing of Wilkins is limited to his Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607), for the King's men.1 He shared with Day and William Rowley in The Travels of Three English Brothers (1607) for the Queen's,2 and with Dekker in the pamphlet Jests to Make Ton Merrie ( 1 607). Conjecture has assigned to him A Yorkshire Tragedy (cf. p. 535), and shares in Timon of Athens and Day's Law Tricks (i 608), probably produced in 1604.3 The often repeated state- ment of Fleay, L.PP. 302, that he 'left the King's company for the Queen's in 1607' means nothing. He was not an actor or tied to any company. I do not myself feel any very strong conviction for or against a common style between Pericles i, ii on the one hand, and the Miseries and Travels on the other. It is part of Sykes's case that the novel was written before the play and formed its basis. I do not think that there is anything in the title-page or the pre- fatory matter to disprove or to prove this. Structurally the two follow much the same lines. There are some differ- ences in the detail of incidents, and some inversions of order. These are most marked in iii-v. Two episodes, a musical performance by Pericles at Pentapolis and a blow given by him to Marina at Mitylene, are fully dealt with in the novel, but only obscurely alluded to in ii. 5. 25 and v, i. 1 01, 127. Both belong to the traditional story. It must be remembered that we do not know what the reporter of the play may have omitted. Verbally the novel is much less close to the play than one 'would expect if the writer were merely paraphrasing, and especially if he were paraphrasing his own dramatic work. Here and there throughout, and rather more in i-ix than in iii-v, there are small equivalences of expression, often no more than a single word or pair of words, but enough to testify to some connexion. On the other hand, the greater part of the play dialogue, even where it is striking, is not reflected at all in the novel, but is represented by some- thing much more commonplace. The novel, again, makes far more use than the play of Twine, and reproduces con-
' Cf. EB*. Stage, iii. 513. 3 Md. iii. 285.
2 Ibid. iii. 286.
524 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
siderable passages verbatim. So far one would gladly think that it stood intermediate between Twine and the play, and that the dramatists, whether Wilkins*was one of them or not, used it as their source, and picked up from it a stray phrase here and there. The difficulty is that some of the common phrases, as well as some other phrases in the novel, read like blank verse. No doubt Wilkins, like Shakespeare himself (cf. p. 233), might let his prose run into verse rhythms. Some of the bits in question may be of this type. But such an explanation can hardly cover those which do in fact occur in the same or almost the same form in the play. One cannot suppose that two distinct playwrights followed the practice of incorporating these. They are not many, but have to be accounted for. I will give them.
(i) A gentleman of Tyre; my name Pericles; My education been in arts and arms; Who, looking for adventures in the world, Was by the rough seas reft of ships and men And after shipwreck driven upon this shore (ii. 3. 8 1-5).
Pericles . . . thus returneth what hee is, that hee was a Gentleman of Tyre, his name Pericles, his education beene in Artes and Armes, who looking for aduentures in the world, was by the rough and vnconstant Seas, most vnfortunately bereft both of shippes and men, and after shipwrecke, throwen vpon that shoare (Mommsen 32).
(2) I came unto your court for honour's cause,
And not to be a rebel to her state (ii. 5. 61-2).
Pericles . . . replyed, That . . . euen in his bosom he would write the lie: affirming, that he came into his Court in search of honour, and not to be a rebell to his State (Mommsen 39).
(3) Thou art the rudeliest welcome to this world
That ever was princess' child. Happy what follows!
Thou hast as chiding a nativity,
As fire, air, water, earth and heaven can make,
To herald thee from the womb:
Even at the first, thy loss is more than can
Thy portage quit, with all thou canst find here:
Now the good gods throw their best eyes upon't (iii. I. 30-7).
Chap. X PERICLES 525
Poore inch of Nature (quoth he) thou arte as rudely welcome to the worlde, as euer Princesse Babe was, and hast as chiding a natiuitie, as fire, ayre, earth, and water can affoord thee (Mommsen 44).
Here the reporter may have omitted Toore inch of Nature* from the play. It would fit well enough into the fifth line, the incompleteness of which is obscured by rearrangement in the Globe text, Sykes thinks that it might be Wilkins's phrase, but surely in its setting it is Shakespearean, and there are analogous uses of 'inch' in Ant. 6? Cleo. i. 2. 59 Wlnt. Tale> ii. i. 137; iv, 4. 460. It is difficult to resist the conviction that, in these passages at least, the novel rests on the play, and on the play with Shakespeare's contribu- tion in it. Of this last point, there is confirmation ifi the following:
Her eyelids, cases to those heavenly jewels
Which Pericles hath lost,
Begin to part their fringes of bright gold;
The diamonds of a most praised water
Do appear, to make the world twice rich. (iii. 2. 99-103).
Hee perceiued ... the golden fringes of her eyes alitle to part . . . lifting vp those now againe pricelesse diamonds of her eyes (Mommsen 48).
Here the 'now againe' can only be a clumsy rendering of Shakespeare's 'twice rich*. Given a borrowing of verse from the play in the examples already cited, one may legitimately suspect it in one or two other places. Perhaps the most notable are:
(1) I traytour, quoth the king, that thus disguised, art stolne into my Court, with the witchcraft of thy actions to bewitch, the yeeld- ing spirit of my tender Childe (Mommsen 38).
(2) A stragling Theseus borne we know not where (Mommsen 39)-
(3) But daughter (quoth Simonides) equalles to equalles, good to good is ioyned, this not being so, the tauine of your minde in rash- nesse kindled, must againe be quenched, or purchase our displeasure. And for you sir (speaking to prince Pericles) first learne to know, I banish you my Court (Mommsen 40).
(4) It shall become you still to be euen as you ares a peece of good-
526 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
ness, the best wrought vppe, that euer Nature made, and if that any shall inforce you ill, if you but send to me, I am your friend (Mommsen 67).
The rhythms of (i) (2) (4) are not from the corresponding passages at ii, 5, 49, 78 ; iv. 6. 1 1 8-23, and there is no pass- age corresponding to (3). Again we must keep the reporter and his perversions in mind. It is, however, conceivable that the writer of the novel was here quoting a version of the play which is not quite ours. A rather elaborate theory is required to reconcile the evidence of the verse snippets with the structural resemblance of play and novel, their general remoteness from each other in wording, and their increasing divergence in Acts iii-v. And where all is dark, I incline to find a solution in the view that there was an earlier play, that a new version was written by Shakespeare and another, and that the novel was not the source of the play, but was put together by Wilkins, not directly from any dramatic text, but from reminiscences of both versions, with the help of a liberal resort to Twine. I do not think it is inconceivable that Wilkins was Shakespeare's colla- borator, although the textual remoteness of the novel from the play is rather against it. But I see no reason to sup- pose that he had anything to do with iii— v, unless he sup- plied the Gower passages, or that any part of the older version survives in our text. An analogy for the complete Jacobean rehandling of an old dramatic theme is afforded by Lear, and the addition of scenes to the old Mucedorus about 1610 may also be noted. The hypothesis here adopted is helpful chronologically, because it enables Shakespeare's work to be put late in 1608, instead of before Blount's entry in the previous May. It would be difficult to find room for it earlier, since it must be later than Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, for both of which we seem driven to 1607-8. On the other hand, we have nothing else for 1608-9. I ta^e it that the old play had been revived, that it proved sufficiently popular in topic to justify a rewriting, and that Blount meant to print it, but desisted on learning that rewriting was contemplated. The reprinting of Twine's story in 1607 possibly dates the
Chap. X PERICLES 527
revival. Giustinian may have seen -either the old or the new version. Little importance, however, can be attached to the attempt of Graves to find 1 606 by analogies, in i. i to the alleged plot to shoot James I, and in i. 4 to Gius- tinian's negotiations for the export of grain to Venice. The incidents in the play come from the traditional story. Marina need not be the Princess Mary (1605-7) and the success of Pericles in the tourney would be an imperfect consolation to James for his failure against Christian of Denmark.1 Perhaps some hints of antiquity may be found in the linking of Pericles with Shore* in the Pimlyco of 1609 (App.^ B, no. xxxiii), although the writer has also a 'new play' in mind; in Jonson's scoff at the 'mouldy tale* (App. B, no. xxii); and even in Dryden's obviously mistaken notion that Pericles was Shakespeare's first play (App. C, no. xii). Collier forged an entry to suggest a performance at the Rose about 1598 (App. F, no. xi, <?). Baker conjec- tured that two early English plays might underlie two seventeenth-century Dutch ones which he had not seen. But the description of these, which were by Pieter Bor Christiaenz, in Smyth 35 does not suggest an English origin. Some relation between Twine's Patterne of Payn- full Adventures and the Paynfull Pilgrimage played at court in 1567-8 has also been conjectured.3 Pericles itself was revived in 1619 and 1631 (App. D).
The evolution of the story is admirably traced by Smyth. It is that of Apollonius of Tyre, probably of Greek origin, but first known in a fifth- or sixth-century Latin form, of which manuscripts are widespread. It got into all the European tongues. Gower took it from the Pantheon (c. 1 1 86) of Godfrey of Viterbo, and Twine from the Gesta Romanorum. The name Pericles, as a substitute for Apol- lonius, is generally regarded as derived from the Pyrocles of .Sidney's Arcadia and not from the Athenian statesman. But Smyth points out (69) that Perillie is in a fifteenth-century French version, and Philemon, as the name of Cerimon's servant, seems (71) only to be paralleled by the Philominus of Heinrich von Neustadt's fourteenth-century Apollonius
1 £#«. Stage, i. 146. a Ibid. iv. 10. 3 IMd. iv. 144,
J \
$28 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
von Tyrland. Unless these are mere coincidences, there may have been some unrecorded channel of transmission. An Apolonius and Camilla was registered by John Perrin on 9 October 1587.!
IV. THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN
[S.R. 1634.] 8° Aprilis Master John Waterson Entred for his Copy vnder the hands of Sir Henry Herbert and master Aspley warden a Tragi Comedy called the two noble kinsmen by John ffletcher and William Shakespeare. vjd. (Arber, iv. 316).
[Q. 1634.] The Two Noble Kinsmen : Presented at the Blackfriers by the Kings Maiesties servants, with great applause: Written by the memorable Worthies of their time;
Mr. John Fletcher, and M'. William Shakspeare.
[Cotes's device, formerly Jaggard's (McKerrow 283)]
Printed at London by Tho. Cotes, for lohn Waterson:
and are to be sold at the signe of the Crowne in Pauls
Church-yard. 1634.
[Prologue and epilogue.]
Facsimile. J. S. Farmer (1910, T.F.T.).
Reprint. H. Litdedale (1876, N.S.SJ.
[S.R. 1 646.] The 3 Ith of October 1 646. Master Moseley. Assigned over unto him by vertue of a note under the hand & scale of Master Waterson and both the wardens, all the Estate, right, title & interest which the said Mr Waterson hath in these Playes following (viz*) The Elder Brother, his parte. "| , Mr Mounsieur Thomas. I ST ^
The Noble kinsman. J *lesher<
(Eyre, i. 250).
[Moseley advertised the play in 1653 and 1654 (Greg* Masques, xxvi, xxviii), and was perhaps sdHng Waterson's stock. I cannot find a transfer from him or his estate to the F2 publishers.] 1 Arber, ii. 476.
Chap. X THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN 529
[F2, 1679.] Fifty Comedies and Tragedies. Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen, All in one Volume. Published by the Authors Original Copies, the Songs to each Play being added. [Motto] London, Printed by J. Macock, for John Martyn, Henry Herring- man, Richard Marriot, M.D.CLXXIX. Modern Editions. W. W. Skeat (1875)5 H. Littledale (1876-85 N.S.S.); W. J. Rolfe (1891); C. H. Herford (1897)5 C. F. Tucker Brooke (1908, Sh. Apocrypha).
Dissertations. W.Spalding, A Letter on Sh! 5 Authorship ofTJf.K.(i*M ? 1876, N.S.S.} ; S. Hickson, The Shares of Sh. and F. in Tlf.K. (1847, Westminster Review, xcii. 59; 1874, N.S.S. Trans. 25*, with additions byF. G. Fleay and F. J.Furnivall); N. Delius, Die angebliche Sh.-F.Autor- schaft des Dramas TJV.K. (1878, J. xiii. 16 ; Abl. ii. i); R. Boyle, Sh. und T.N.K. (1881, E.S. iv. 34), On MassingerandTJt.K. (1882, N.S.S. Trans. 371); L. C. T. Bierfreund, Palemon ogArcite (1891); E. H. C. Oliphant, T.N.K. (1891, E.S. xv. 323), T.N.K. (1927, B.F. 325); A. H. Thorndike, TJf.K. (1901, Influence of B. and F. on Sh. 44); W. Y. Durand, Notes on Richard Edwardes (1902, J.G.P.iv. 348) ; B. Leuschner, V&erdas Ferhaltniss von TJtf.K. zu Chaucers Knightes Tale (1903); O. Petersen, TJf.K. (1914, Angtta, xxxviii. 213); H. D. Sykes, T.N.K. (1916, M.L.R. xi. 136; Sidelights on Sh. i) ; W. J. Lawrence, New Light on T.N.K. (1921, July 14, T.L.S., followed by correspondence); A. H. Cruickshank, Massinger and TJI.K. (1922); H. D. Gray, Beaumont and T.N.K. (1923, P.Q. ii. 112); K. Ege, DerAnteil Shsan TJX.K. (1924, J. lix. 62),
The Q text is a good one, requiring little emendation. Most of the prose (ii. 2 ; iv. 3) is in capitalized lines of irregular length, and occasionally a passage of verse is printed as prose. The known examples show some variants. The stagd-directions are elaborate for the spectacular episodes. Evidently the manuscript had been used as prompt-copy, since some book-keeper's notes, printed in roman type and generally (cf. p. 121) in the left margin, are distinguishable from the italicized stage-directions. Some are additional stage-directions; others notes to have actors and properties ready in advance. Thus '2. Hearses ready, with Palamon: and Arcite: the 3. Queenes. Theseus: and his Lordes ready* (i. 3. 58) is for i, 4; '3. Hearses ready* (i. 4. 26) is for i. 5; 'Chaire and stooles out' (iii. 5. 66) is for iii. 5. 3x42.1 M m
530 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap.X
102. A book-keeper must have also added Curtis after Messengers in the stage-direction to iv. 2. 71, and T. Tucke: Curtis after Attendants in that to v, 3. i. The F text is reprinted from Q with many conjectural alterations. The clearest indication of date is the use in the morris- dance (iii. 5) of characters from one of the anti-masks in Beaumont's Inner Temple and Gray's Inn Mask of 20 February 1 6 1 3.1 There may be a confirmation of 1 6 1 3 in Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (i 614), iv. 3 :
Quarlous. Well my word is out of the Arcadia^ then: Argalus. Win-wife. And mine out of the play, P demon.
The Arcadia here is Sidney's. A Palaemon, however, is also in Daniel's play of The Queen's Arcadia (1606). A parallel between i. i. 1 18 and The Honest Man' $ Fortune of 1613, iii. i , 1 5 1 , is perhaps too much of a commonplace to be indicative.2 There is certainly no reason to accept the suggestion that the Doctor's cures for love-melancholy (iv. 3 ; v. 2) come from Burton's very derivative Anatomy (i 62 i), ii. 3. 5, The Globe fire of 1 6 1 3 need not, of course, be the explanation of prol. 30:
If this play doe not keepe A little dull time from us, we perceave Our losses fall so thicke, we must needs leave.
In fact the prologue is probably of later date than the play, since it speaks of 'a writer', although there are clearly two. There was probably a court performance about 1619 (App. D). But Littledale's inquiry for a date at which the King's men's losses fell so thick as in 1613 maY Per~ haps point us to 1625, whefi the death of James was followed by a heavy plague, and the theatres were closed.3 The actor names in the stage-directions point to a revival of about 1 625-6. Curtis Greville left'the Lady Elizabeth's men for the Palsgrave's in 1622 and was of the King's by ii October 1626. Thomas Tuckfield is only known as a hired man of the King's in i624.4
, Stage, iii. 233. London* 170.
Ibid, iil 227. 4 Murray, i. 172, 214, 216: Herbert
F. P. Wilson, Plague in Ms 74.
Chap. X THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN 531
The categorical ascription of the play on its title-page to Fletcher and Shakespeare is not much affected by Moseley's later treatment of it as Fletcher's. A 'tradition* that it was Shakespeare's, mentioned by Pope, may only rest on the title-page.1 Clearly there are at least two hands in the play. Fletcher's is unmistakable in the verse of ii. 3-6, iii. 3-6; iv. 1-2; v. 2. Most of that in i. 1-3; iii. i ; v. i, 3, 4 cannot possibly be his. The short Sec. i. 4, 5 and iii. 2 may be a little more doubtful. Metrically, the non- Fletcherian verse agrees with that of Shakespeare, in its latest stage, and most precisely with that of the scenes generally ascribed to him in Henry Fill, and the con- verging evidence for the two plays, with the slighter indication for the lost Cardenio (cf. p. 539), all pointing to 1613, is strong for some collaboration between Shake- speare and Fletcher in that year. Stylistic features, other than metrical, are confirmatory; the constant use of coined words, of archaistic words, of vigorous unliterary words; the characteristic involutions of the sentence-structure. This is perhaps less noticeable in Act v than in Act i, and I have sometimes thought that a distinction might be made. But probably the impression of style in v is affected by the formal character of the great invocations. Moreover, no other than Shakespeare, certainly hot Tourneur, Row- ley, or Chapman, who have been loosely talked of, can be supposed capable of these invocations, except possibly Beaumont, and Beaumont is excluded by the metre. They are quite outside the imaginative range of Massinger, whom Boyle and Sykes, regardless of the title-page, would substitute for Shakespeare on the ground of parallels. These, as in Henry Fill, are poor evidence for such a derivative writer as Massinger; and even on their merits they are not so strong as those to Shakespeare's own work collected by Littledale. It is noticeable that while these are naturally closest to his late plays, there are also several to Midsummer-Night's Dream, associations with which the resumed handling of Theseus may well have evoked. Part of the scepticism as to Shakespeare's presence
M m 2
532 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
rests upon the inadequate characterization, especially of Emilia and of the Gaoler's Daughter. But here it is Fletcher, rather than Shakespeare, who is at fault, and Fletcher, especially if he was collaborating with Shake- speare at a distance, may well have failed to hold the pitch. The distribution of the Shakespearean matter shows that it is a case of collaboration and not of the completion by Fletcher of a Shakespearean fragment. In fitting the scenes together, Fletcher may possibly have added a few lines to Shakespeare's. The most likely are i. i . 2 5—8 ; L 4. 32-8 ; v. i . i-i 7 ; v. 4. 2 3-3 8 . I incline to give i. 5 and iii. 2 to Fletcher and i. 4 on the whole to Shakespeare. Either might have written the song in i, i . But on these minor points there can be no certainty. Both Littledale and Oliphant think that Beaumont might have helped Fletcher a little. Oliphant suggests that the burlesque at the end of iii. 5 is more in his vein than Fletcher's, and of course it is his mask that is drawn upon. It is not clear that he was still writing in 1613. There is not mucK room for him in the play, but if he is there at all, the prose of ii. i and iv, 3 might be his, rather than Shakespeare's. Either is more likely than Fletcher, who did not make much use of prose. I do not find any evidence of revision.
The source is, of course, Chaucer's Knightes Tale. An academic play ofPalamon andArcite by Richard Edwardes in 1566 is only known by description.1 It had some characters and episodes other than those of Two Noble Kinsmen. A Palamon and Arcite was also produced, not as Oliphant says by the Chamberlain's, but by the Admiral's, in i$94-2 Petersen would link both the early plays with Two Noble Kinsmen in a wonderful and fearful stage history involving five revisions.
V. PLAYS ASCRIBED IN THE THIRD FOLIO
The four plays already discussed are the only ones, outside Fi, which can be seriously thought of as, in whole or in part, the work of Shakespeare. Philip Chetwinde, who
, iii. 3I i.
Chap. X PLAYS ASCRIBED IN THE THIRD FOLIO 533 added Pericles to the second issue (cf. p. 520) of the Third Folio in 1664, accompanied it with six others. Shake- speare's authorship of them all had already been asserted or suggested in Quartos, and in bookseller's lists, which may, as Pollard, F.Q. 162, thinks, have influenced Chet- winde. The record of the Quartos is as follows:
(a) Locrine.
[S.R. 1594-] xx° die lulij. Thomas Creede. Entred for his Copie vnder thandes of the Wardens. The lamentable Tragedie of Locrine, the eldest sonne of Kinge Brutus, discoursinge the warres of the Brittans &c vjd. (Arber, ii. 656).
[Q. 1595.] The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine, the eldest sonne of King Brutus, discoursing the warres of the Britaines, and Hunnes, with their discomfiture: The Britaines victorie with their Accidents, and the death of Albanact. No lesse pleasant then profitable. Newly set foorth, ouerseene and corrected, By W. S, [Creede's device (McKerrow 299)] London Printed by Thomas Creede. 1595*
(£) i Sir John Oldcastk.
[S.R. 1600.] 1 1 August!. Thomas Payier. Entred for his copies vnder the handes of master Vicars and the war- dens. These iij copies viz The first parte of the history
of the life of Sir John Oldcastell lord Cobham. (Arber, iii. 169).
FOi 1600,] The first part Of the true and honorable historic, of the life of Sir John Old-castle, the good Lord Cobham. As it hath been lately acted by the right honor- able the Earle of Notingham Lord high Admirall of Eng- land his seruants [Simmes's device (McKerrow 142)] London Printed by V. S. for Thomas Pauier, and are to be solde at his shop at the signe of the Catte and Parrots neere the Exchange. 1600.
TQ2. 1619,] The first part Of the true & honorable history, of the Life of Sir lohn Old-castle, the good Lord
534 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
Cobham. As it hath bene lately acted by the Right honorable the Earle of Notingham Lord High Admirall of England, his Seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. [Jaggard's device (McKerrow 283)] London printed for T. P. 1600. [On the misdating, cf. p. 133.]
(c) Thomas Lord Cromwell.
[S.R. 1602.] 11° Augusti. William Cotton. Entredfor his Copie vnder thandes of master Jackson and master Waterson warden A booke called the lyfe and Deathe of the Lord Cromwell, as yt was lately Acted by the Lord Chamberleyn his servantes vjd. (Arber, iii. 214).
[Qi. 1602.] The True Chronicle Historic of the whole life and death of Thomas Lord Cromwell. As it hath beene sundrie times publikely Acted by the Right Honor- able the Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants. Written by W. S. [Richard Read's ( ?) device (McKerrow 320, without initials)] Imprinted at London for William lones, and are to be solde at his house neere Holburne conduict, at the signe of the Gunne. 1 602 .
[S.R. 1611.] i6toDecembris. John Browne. Entredfor his Copyes by assignement from William Jones and vnder master warden Lownes his hand . . , and one other booke called, the lyfe and death of the Lord Cromwell, by W: S. xijd. (Arber, iii. 474).
[Q2. 1613.] The True Chronicle Historic of the whole life and death of Thomas Lord Cromwell. A.S it hath beene sundry times publikely Acted by the Kings Maiesties Seruants. Written by W, S. [Snodham's device (McKerrow 2 2 7)] London : Printed by Thomas Snodham. 1613.
(d} The London Prodigal
[Q. 1605.] The London Prodigall. As it was plaide by the Kings Maiesties seruants. By William Shakespeare, [Creede's device (McKerrow 299)] London, Printed by T. C. for Nathaniel Butter, and are to be sold neere S Austins gate, at the signe of the pyde Bull. 1 605.
Chap.X PLAYS ASCRIBED IN THE THIRD FOLIO 535 (e) The Puritan.
[S.R. 1607.] 6 Augusti. George Elde Entred for his copie vnder thandes of Sir George Bucke knight and the wardens a book called the comedie of the Puritan Widowe vjd (Arber, iii. 358).
[Q. 1607.] The Puritaine Or The Widdow of Watling- streete. Acted by the Children of Paules. Written by W. S. [Eld's device (McKerrow 320, without initials)] Imprinted at London by G. Eld. 1607. [Head- and Running-titles] The Puritaine Widdow.
(/) A Torkshire Tragedy.
[S.R. 1608.] 2do die Maij. Master Pavyer Entered for his Copie vnder the handes of master Wilson and master Warden Seton A booke Called A Yorkshire Tragedy written by Wylliam Shakespere vjd. (Arber, iii. 377). [Qi. 1608.] A -Yorkshire Tragedy. Not so New as Lamentable and true. Acted by his Maiesties Players at the Globe. Written by W. Shakspeare. [Bradock's device (McKerrow 280)] At London Printed by R. B. for Thomas Pauier and are to bee sold at his shop on Cornhill, neere to the exchange. 1608. \Head-title\ All's One, Or, One Of The Four Plaies In One, Called A York-shire Tragedy As It Was Plaid by the Kings Maiesties Haiers. [Running-title] All's One, or A Yorkshire Tragedy. [02. I £19.] A Yorkshire Tragedie. Not so New, as Lamentable and True. Written by W. Shakespeare. (Jaggard'sdevice(McKerrow283)] Printed forT.P. 1619: [One of the Jaggard reprints; cf. p. 133.] •; ; '•
These six plays are conveniently reprinted in C, F; Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha (1908). I will not repeat my notices of them from Eliz. Stage, m. 306; iv. 8, 26, 27, 41, 54. The ascriptions now receive no critical support, except that Ward, ii. 23:, finds Shakespeare s hand in a few passages of A Torhhire Tragedy. I do not concur. This is claimed as Shakespeare s throughout its bibliographical history. But Paviers name does not inspire confidence (cf. p. 135). ™& even lf
536 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
Henry IF was sometimes (cf. p. 382) called Sir John Oldcastle, it can hardly have been through a legiti- mate confusion that he allowed a second edition of the Admiral's play by Drayton and others to be reprinted with A Torkshire Tragedy as Shakespeare's in Jaggard's enter- prise of 1619. Nor does anything we know (cf. pp. 133, 147) of Nathaniel Butter encourage belief in his bona fides, when he printed The London Prodigal without registration, In these three cases Shakespeare's name was used in full. A charitable construction would find in the W. S. of The Puritan, again not even a Chamberlain's play, and of Thomas Lord Cromwell some other writer than Shakespeare; a Wentworthor more dubious William Smith,1 or in the case of Thomas Lord Cromwell William Sly. But it looks as if Shakespeare's reputation had 'publicity' value. The play- lists of Archer (1656) and Kirkman (1661, 1671) expand both sets of initials into his name (Greg, Masques, Ix, c). The W. S. of Locrine stands on a different footing. Here the only claim is that the play was 'newly set foorth, ouer- seene and corrected' by him. I must add to Eliz. Stage, iv. 26, that the example with a marginal note by Sir George Buck, there discredited, exists, and is now in the possession of Mr. A. S. W. Rosenbach. It is recorded in the cata- logues of E. D. Church (1909) and J. L. Clawson (1924), and attention was called to it by T. S. Graves in T.L.S. for 8 January 1925. A facsimile is given by S, A. Tannenbaum, Sh. Forgeries, 77, 79, 94. Greg would read the note, which is slightly clipped at the edge:
Char. Tilney wrot<e a> Tragedy of this mattr <wch> hee named Estrild: <& wch> I think is this, it was <lost?> by his death. & now(?) <some> fellow hath published <it> I made dube shewes for it. wch I yet have. G. B< >
Tannenbaum thinks this a forgery. But according to Greg it is probably genuine, and in the rough scribble used
1 ElJz. Stage, iii. 493.
Chap. X PLAYS ASCRIBED IN THE THIRD FOLIO 537 by Buck for his annotations on Barnavelt.* The last two lines were inserted after signature. The play might well, if not written for the public stage, be as early as Tilney's death in September 1586, and it has clearly been 'ouerseene and corrected' before publication, at least to the extent of inserting a reference to Elizabeth's thirty-eighth regnal year, ending on 16 November 1596. If the author was dead, it is not inconceivable that Shakespeare or some other W. S. may have been asked to 'oversee* the printing.
VI. OTHER ASCRIBED PLAYS .
Chetwinde did not take into F3 all the plays which had been ascribed to Shakespeare on title-pages. As he had King John, he was not likely also to print The Troublesome Reign, to Q2 (1611) of which John Helme had added 'Written by W. Sh.'.2 Perhaps he could not obtain Two Noble Kinsmen or the following: — [Q. 1662.] The Birth Of Merlin: Or, The Childehath Found his Father, As it hath been several times Acted with great Applause. Written by William Shakespear, and William Rowley. Tho. Johnson for Francis Kirkman and Henry Marsh. 1 662.
Rowley is generally accepted as author or reviser,3 and although Oliphant, Beaumont and Fletcher, 410, claims to detect 'one or two lines that seem of a Shakespearean coinage', the suggestion need not be taken seriously.
If Chetwinde had recourse to the booksellers' play-lists,* he did not use the anonymous Edward III, Edward IF, i Jeronimo, Leir, Merry Devil of Edmonton, and Muce- dorus, or the Beaumont and Fletcher Chances, or Chettle's Hoffman, or Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, or Marlowe's Edward II, or Massinger's Roman Actor, or Middleton's Trick to Catch the Old One, or Peele's Arraignment of Paris \ all of which were attributed to Shakespeare either in that of Richard Rogers and William Ley (1656) or in that of Edward Archer (1656), or in those of Francis Kirkman
1 Eng. Lit. Autographs, I. xxx, and 3 Elix. Stage, iii. 474. RJ5.S, v. 351. a Cf. p. 364. 4 Greg, Masques, xli, sqq.
538 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
(1661,1671), or in more than one of these. The Merry Devil of Edmonton, although it had been in print since 1608, was registered as Shakespeare's by Humphrey Moseley on 9 September 1653. No edition from him is extant. Examples of this play, and of Mucedorus and the anonymous Fair Em, now separately preserved in the British Museum, were once bound up together in the library of Charles II, and lettered 'Shakespeare, Vol. I'.1 Speculative .criticism has occasionally attempted to find Shakespeare's hand in these three plays, or parts of them, and in others, particularly Arden ofFaversham, selected by conjecture. But these views now receive little support, and deserve none. Moseley, alone or in co-operation with Humphrey Robinson, was active in collecting plays during the Commonwealth. His more important entries are printed in Greg's Bakings of Betsy.2 Many never got into print, and are now lost. At the Restoration he seems to have claimed the acting rights for his collection.3 Among the lost plays which he registered on 9 September 1 6 5 3^ are
The History of Cardennio, by Mr. Fletcher. & Shakespeare, and
Henry ye. first, & Hen: ye 2d. by Shakespeare, & Dauenport.
Others of 29 June i6oos include:
The History of King Stephen. "] Duke Humphrey, a Tragedy. I by Will: Iphis & lantha, or a marriage | Shakespeare, without a man, a Comedy. J
John Warburton (1682-1759) left a list of play-manu- scripts, most accurately printed from Lansdowne MS. 807 by Greg,6 which he says were 'unluckely burnd or put under Pye bottoms* by a servant, after he had been many years collecting them. Here recur, among many other of Moseley's titles,
Henry ye ist by Will. Shakespear & Rob. Davenport. Duke Humphery Will. Shakespear.
* Var. ii. 6825 Lee 264. 4 Eyre, i. 428.
a 3 Library, ii. 225. s Ibid. ii. 271.
3 Herbert 90. * 3 Library, ii. 230.
Chap. X OTHER ASCRIBED PLAYS 539
The list also has —
APlaybyWillShakespear.
This last entry may be the source of the attribution of The Second Maiden's Tragedy (cf. p. 109) to Shakespeare, in a writing later than Warburton's time. That play is a survivor from his collection, but his list assigns it to Chap- man. Greg is inclined to doubt whether Warburton really ever had the bulk of Moseley's unprinted plays, and thinks that he may have forgotten the nature of a list of titles which he had compiled from the Stationers' Register. However this may be, nothing further is known of King Stephen, Duke Humphrey (a subject, one would think, sufficiently treated in Henry 77), or Iphis and lantha. Ob- viously no reliance can be placed on Moseley. Robert Davenport's History of Henry the First was licensed (Herbert 27) for performance by the King's men on 10 April 1624. An Iphis by Henry Bellamy (c. i623)survives in MS. (Hazlitt, Manual 1 16).
Cardennio is another matter. A play of Cardenno or Cardenna was given by the King's men at court in the winter of 1612-13, and again on 8 June 1613.* The source was probably the story of Cardenio and Lucinda, as given in Thomas Shelton's translation (1612, S.R. 19 January 161 1) of Don Quixote; and this, although with altered names, was in fact the source of Double Falsehood, produced at Drury Lane on 13 December 1727 by Lewis Theobald as an adaptation from Shakespeare. The career of Theobald may be studied in J. C. Collins, The Porson of Shakespearean Criticism;2 T. R.Lounsbury, The First Editors of Shakespeare (1906); R. F. Jones, Lewis Theobald: His Contribution to English Scholarship (1919); E. B. Koster, Lewis Theobald.* A not very successful dramatist, he had already adapted Richard II in 1 7 1 9. His power as a textual scholar had been shown in his Shake- speare Restored (1726) and he had made enemies by his criticism of Pope's edition of the plays. His own was to follow in 1734. Doubts were thrown upon the bona fides
1 Eliz. Stage, iv. 128, 180. » 1922, English Studies, iv. 20, 49.
* 1895, Essays and Studies, 263.
540 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap X
of Double Falsehood. It was printed in 1728 with the following title-page:
Double Falshood; Or, The Distrest Lovers. A Play, As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane. Written Originally by W. Shakespeare; And now Revised and Adapted to the Stage By Mr. Theobald, the Author of Shakespeare Restor'd. Quodoptanti Divum promittere nemo Auderet, volvenda Dies, en! attulit ultra Virg. London: Printed by J. Watts, at the Printing-Office in Wild-Court near Lincolns-Inn Fields. MDCCXXVIII.
A preface contained the following statement.
It has been alledg'd as incredible, that such a Curiosity should be stifled and lost to the World for above a Century. To This my Answer is short; that tho' it never till now made its Appearance on the Stage, yet one of the Manuscript Copies, which I have, is of above Sixty Years Standing, in the Handwriting of Mr. Downey the famous Old Prompter; and, as I am credibly inform'd, was early in the Possession of the celebrated Mr. Betterton^ and by Him design'd to have been usher'd into the World. What Accident pre- vented This Purpose of his, I do not pretend to know: Or thro* what hands it had successively pass'd before that Period of Time. There is a Tradition (which I have from the Noble Person, who supply'd me with One of my Copies) that it was given by our Author, as a Present of Value, to a Natural Daughter of his, for whose Sake he wrote it, in the Time of his Retirement from the Stage. Two other Copies I have (one of which I was glad to purchase at a very good Rate), which may not, perhaps, be quite so old as the Former; but One of Them is much more perfect, and has fewer Flaws and Interruptions in the Sense . . . Others again, to depreciate the Affair, as they thought, have been pleased to urge, that tho' the Play may have some resemblances of Shakespeare^ yet the Colouring^ Diction^ and Characters come nearer to the Style and Manner of Fletcher. This, I think, is far from deserving any Answer.
The explanation did not quell scepticism; and while some students have been content to take the play as of old, but non-Shakespearean origin, others have treated it as a fabrication, for which the phrase 'ironical mystification* seems inadequate.1 Recent studies by G. Bradford, The History of Cardenio, by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare* R. Schevill, Theobald's Double Falsehood* W. Graham, The
1 Lee 439. « 1910, M.L.N. xxv. 51. 3 191 x, M.P. k. 269.
Chap. X OTHER ASCRIBED PLAYS 541
Cardenio-Double Falsehood Problem* E. H, C. Oliphant, Double Falsehood: Shakespeare^ Fletcher and Theobald* show on balance a tendency to rehabilitate the theory of Shakespearean authorship at least in part, which is most clearly expressed by Oliphant in his Beaumont and Fletcher (i 927), 282. He finds, much overlaid by Theobald's, two original hands, with habits as regards metrical variation, which differ alike from each other's and from those of Theobald in his admitted plays. One of these he takes to be undisputably Fletcher's, and the other, 'a firmer, stronger hand', he accepts as Shakespeare's. He finds it in i. I, 2; ii. I, 2, 3; iii. I, 2; iv. I ; v. 2, but only free from Theobaldian admixture in parts of iv. i and v. 2. The view is founded partly on thoughts and phrases which seem to him Shakespearean, partly on the statement of Moseley, partly on the evidence for other collaboration of Fletcher and Shakespeare in 1613, when Cardenio, which he supposes to be the original play, appeared. He admits that the divergence of metrical habit between his two hands does not correspond very closely to that between the parts ascribed to Shakespeare and Fletcher respectively in Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, but this he ascribes to the levelling effect of Theobald's adaptation. I do not myself think that much can be made of the metrical evidence in such conditions. It is, of course, most unlikely that Theobald knew anything of the Cardenio record, and to some extent, therefore, that supports his story. Similarly, he cannot have known of Moseley's entry, since he repudiates Fletcher. There are many queer points about Theobald's own account of the matter. One can hardly find a support for the tradition of the natural daughter in Rowe's unexplained statement (cf. App. C, no. xxv) that Shakespeare left three daughters ; and indeed it is absurd, not so much because of any great improbability in Shakespeare's having a natural daughter, as because he did not write his plays under conditions which left him any property in them to transmit, and in any case a play would have been an inadequate provision
i 1916, M.P. xiv. 269, 568. » 1919* » X-Q-
542 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
for the poor girl. It is odd that nobody else appears to have seen the three (or was it four?) manuscripts which Theobald claimed to possess, and that they should all have disappeared at or before his death. There is no item which looks at all like them in his sale catalogue of 23 October 1 744. It is odd that, if Betterton contemplated a produc- tion, there should be no signs of the play in Restoration theatrical records or in the writings of Downes. It is perhaps oddest of all that Theobald, as a Shakespearean scholar, although he still asserted the poet's authorship in his edition of 1734 (iv, 287), made no attempt to publish the unadapted text. But, on the whole, with the Gardenia record and Moseley's statement to go upon, it seems to me less likely that Theobald was responsible for a fabrica- tion, than that he had an old play of some sort and a stage tradition about it varying from Moseley's own. It does not follow that Shakespeare had anything to do with the play. I cannot share Oliphant's confidence in Moseley on this point. The play itself, as it stands, is a very poor one. And while I can see traces that may well be Fletcher's, I cannot find a single passage which compels a belief in Shakespeare. Here and there are lines which might be his in no inspired mood. But what possible criterion can dis- tinguish, through the veil of adaptation, second- or third- rate work of Shakespeare from that of a contemporary dis- ciple, or even from what Theobald himself, with his mind steeped in Shakespeare, might write. I will not go into the possibility of alternatives, Malone seems to have thought of Massinger, Farmer of Shirley. Oliphant him- self hints at Beaumont.
CHAPTER XI THE POEMS AND SONNETS
[A full treatment of the problems raised by Shakespeare's non-dramatic writings does not fall within the scope of this work. I have confined myself in the main to points bearing on the biography and the plays. Fuller bibliographical data will be found in H. Farr, Notes on Shakespeare's Printers and Publishers (1923, 4 Library, iii. 225), R. Sachs, Shakespeare* Gedickte (1890, J. xxv. 132), and for the Sonnets in the editions of Dowden and Alden.]
I. VENUS AND ADONIS
[S.R. 1593.] xyiii0 Aprilis. Richard Feild Assigned ouer to master Harrison senior 25 Junii 1594. Entred for his copie under thandes of the Archbisshop of Canterbury and master warden Stirrop, a booke intituled, Venus and Adonis, vjd S. (Arber, ii. 630).
[Q i. 1593*] [Ornament] Venus and Adonis Vilia miretur vulgus : mihi flauus Apollo Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua. [Field's device (McKerrow 192)] London Im- printed by Richard Field, and are to be sold at the signe of the white Greyhound in Paules Church-yard. 1593. [A 2 has
To the Right Honorable Henrie Wriothesley, Earle of Southampton, and Baron of Titchfield. Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my vnpolisht lines to your Lordship, nor how the worlde will censure mee for choosing so strong a
6oppe to support so weake a burthen, onelye if your onour seeme but pleased, I account my selfe highly F raised, and vowe to take aduantage of all idle houres, till haue honoured you with some grauer labour. But if the first heire of my inuention proue deformed, I shall be sorie it had so noble a god-father: and neuer after eare so barren a land, for feare it yeeld me still so bad a haruest, I leaue it to your Honourable suruey, and your Honor to
544 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
your hearts content which I wish may alwaies answere your owne wish, and the worlds hopefull expectation. Your Honors in all dutie,
William Shakespeare.]
Facsimiles. W. Griggs (1886, Sh. Q. xii, ed. A. Symons); Clarendon Press (1905, ed. S. Lee).
[Q2. 1594.] R. Field.
[S.R. 1594, June 25.] Transfer to John Harrison (Arber,
ii. 655).
[Octavo i. 1595?] R- Field for J. Harrison? [fragment].
[O2. 1596.] Field for Harrison,
[S.R. 15963 June 25.] Transfer to William Leake (Arber, iii. 65).
[°3- T599-] (Peter Short) for Leake.
Type-Facsimile. C. Edmonds (1870).
[04. 1599.] (Richard Bradocke) for Leake.
[05. 1602 ?] (Bradocke for Leake}.
[T.p. missing.]
[O6. 1602.] (Robert Raworth) for Leake. [Oy. 1602.] (Humphrey Lownes) for Leake.
[O8. 1 602.] for Leake. [T.p. only known.]
[S.R. 1617, Feb. 1 6.] Transfer to William Barrett (Arber, iii. 603).
[Og. 1617,] (William Stansby) for Barrett. [Five other editions were printed before 1640, including one at Edinburgh in 1627. H. Farr, who identified the unnamed printers in^E Library, iii. 225, called attention to the apparent absence of editions between 1602 and 1617, and suggested that Venus and Adonis was in disfavour as licentious, and that as a result some of the editions dated in 1602 were really printed later with unaltered dates. Raworth in fact only took up his freedom as a stationer in 1606 and ceased printing in 1608. According to one statement in the notes on London printing collected by Sir John Lambe in 1 635 he was 'supprest for printing another's copy'; according to another he 'forfeited for Venus and Adonis'. Lambe calls him 'an Arrant
Chap. XI VENUS AND ADONIS 545
Knave' (Arber, iii. 701, 7035 iv. 528). I do not see any very clear evidence here of a belated treatmentof K»«^7»^^fl»waslicentious.]
.
Modern Editions. G. Wyndham (i 898)5 C. K. Pooler (1911, 1927, Arden}\ A. Feuillerat (1927, Yale).
Dissertations. J. P. Reardon, 8Jk.'s 7ji. and Lodge's Sci/Ja's Metamorphosis (i 847, 8k. Soc. Papers, iii. 143); A. Morgan, Vji. a Study of Warwickshire Dialect (1885, 1900); A. Wuerzner, Die Orthographie derersten Q Aus- gabe von 7ji. und L. (1887); M.Dfirnhofer, SJb 7ji. im 7erhaltnis zu Qvids Metamorpkosen und Constables Schafergcsang (1890) ; G. Sarrazin, Die Abfassungszeit von Bhs-7.A. (i 894, E.S. xix. 352); W. Marschall, Sis Orthographic (i 927, Anglia9 li. 307).
A fancy that Shakespeare came from Stratford-on-Avon with Venus and Adonis in his pocket still lingers, and rests mainly on the abundance of rural imagery in the poem, This is, of course, readily to be paralleled in Lucrece and the earlier plays, and indeed throughout the work of a writer, whose imagination, while it assimilated town life, never became oblivious of the country. It is more natural to refer Venus and Adonis to the 'idle hours' of its epistle, which the plague year of 1592 would afford. The writer is in the full literary tide of Renaissance narrative poetry initiated by Spenser, and even if Marlowe's Hero and Leander was not yet known to him, not improbably owed at least his metre to Thomas Lodge's Sdllaes Meta- morphosis (1589). In calling Venus and Adonis 'the first heir of my inuention', he need mean no more than that it was his first published work. No inference can reason- ably be drawn as to whether he had or had not previously written for 'the stage. Lee 142, however, finds in these words 'reason to believe that the first draft lay in the author's desk through four or five summers and under- went some retouching before it emerged from the press in its final shape'.
II. THE RAPE OF LUCRECE
[S.R. 1594.] 9Maij Master Harrison Senior Entred for Ids copie vnder thand of Master Cawood Warden, a booke intituled the Ravyshement of Lucrece vid C (Arber, ii. 648).
3X42.1 N n
546 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
[Q. 1594.] [Ornament] Lucrece [Field's device (Mc- Kerrow 222)] London. Printed by Richard Field, for lohn Harrison, and are to be sold at the signe of the white Greyhound in Paules Churh-yard (sic). 1594. [Head- and Running-titles] The Rape Of Lucrece.
[A 2 has
To the Right Honourable, Henry Wriothesley, Earle of Southhampton, and Baron of Titchfield. The loue I dedicate to your Lordship is without end: wherof this Pamphlet without beginning is but a super- fluous Moity. The warrant I haue of your Honourable disposition, not the worth of my vntutored Lines makes it assured of acceptance. What I haue done is yours, what I haue to doe is yours, being part in all I haue, deuoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duety would shew greater, meane time, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship; To whom I wish long life still lengthned with all happinesse.
Your Lordships in all duety. William Shakespeare.]
Facsimiles. C. Praetorius (1886, Sh. Q. xxxv, ed. F. J. Furnivall); Clarendon Press (1905, ed. S. Lee).
[Octavo i. 1598.] P(eter) S(hort) for Harrison, [O2. 1600.] 'London,' I(ohn) H<arrison> for Harrison. [03.1600.] 'London/ I(ohn) H<arrison) for Harrison. [04. 1607.] N(icholas) O(kes) for Harrison.
[S.R. 16-14, March i.] Transfer to Roger Jackson (Arber, iii.542).
1616.] T{homas) S(nodham) for Jackson. [Two other editions were printed before 1 640.]
Modern Editions. G. Wyndham (1898)5 C. K. Pooler 1927, jfrden).
Dissertations. A. Wuerzner, Die Orthographic der ersttn Q Ausgabe w»
%?•<£* k £18A W' Ewi&" SAs Z" <J*99, Anglia. xxii i, 343, 393); W. MarschaU, SJb Orthographic (1927, Angha, li. 307).
Lucrece may reasonably be taken to be the 'graver labour'
Chap. XI THE RAPE OF LUCRECE 547
of 'idle hours' promised to Lord Southampton in the epistle to Venus and Adonis and can safely be dated in
1593-4-
III. THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
[Octavo i. 1599-] The Passionate Pilgrime. By W.
Shakespeare. [Ornament] At London Printed (by
Thomas Judson) for W. laggard, and are to be sold by
W. Leake, at the Greyhound in Paules Churchyard. 1599.
[Second title on C 3] Sonnets To sundry notes of Musicke.
[Same imprint].
Facsimile. W. Griggs (1883, Sh. Q. x, ed. E. Dowden); Clarendon
Press (1905, ed. S. Lee).
[O2. ? date.] A fragment, bound up with one of Oi in
the Folger collection, may belong to a second edition.
[03. 1612.] The Passionate Pilgrime Or Certaine -Amorous Sonnets, betweene Venus and Adonis, newly corrected and augmented. By W. Shakespeare. The third Edition. Where-unto is newly added two Loue- Epistles, the first from Paris to Hellen, and Hellens answere backe againe to Paris. Printed by W. laggard. 1612.
[The Bodleian copy (Malone 328) contains two tps., one of which omits the ascription to Shakespeare.] Modern Edition. C. K. Pooler (1911, 1927, Arderi). Dissertations. A. Hoehner, Shs P.P. (1867); J. O. HalKweU-Phillipps, The P.P. (1890, Outlines, i. 401); E. P. Kuhl, 8k. and the P.P. (1919, M.LJI. xxxiv, 313).
There are twenty short poems in The Passionate Pilgrim since those usually numbered as xiv and xv are con- tinuous. The double title might suggest an intention to attribute i-xv but not xvi-xxi to Shakespeare. In fact there is a little of his work in both sections; i and 11 are versions of Sonnets cxxxviii and cxliv; iii, v, and xvn are the poetic missives of Lovis Lab. Lost, iv. 2. 108-22; 3. 60- 77, 101-20. There are textual variants, and those in i are so considerable as to indicate either a different form or a loose memorization. It is very doubtful whether any of the
548 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
other items are by Shakespeare. Richard Barnfield's Poems in Divers Humours (1598) had already included yjii and xxi, and xviii is assigned to the same Ignoto as xxi in England's Helicon (1600). Part of xviii had appeared m Thomas Weelkes, Madrigals (i59?)> but Weelkes did not necessarily write the words as well as the music. England's Helicon also has xx as Marlowe's, with the reply, usually ascribed to Raleigh, from which the Passionate Pilgrim takes its last quatrain. Bartholomew Griffin's Fidessa (i 596) had included xi, and the use of the same Venus and Adonis theme in iv, vi, and ix suggests that these may be his, although they have sometimes been accepted as Shake- spearean variations on Venus and Adonis. A longer version of 'Crabbed age and Youth' (xii) is in Thomas Deloney's Gar- land of Goodwill {1631). This was registered in i629as 'the new garland of Goodwill* ', and perhaps this phrasing may give some support to the very dubious evidence, set out in F. O. Mann, Works ofDeloney, 562, for an earlier edition. But if it existed, we do not know that 'Crabbed age' was in it. There must at least have been a ^ good ^deal of new matter to make a fresh registration desirable in 1629, and there can be no assurance that this was all by Deloney, who died about 1600. Perhaps xii is the only doubtful item in the Passionate Pilgrim that one would much care to salve as Shakespeare's. Of the rest, xvi cannot be his, and those who think that vii, x, xiii, xiv-xv, and xix may be do not express themselves with much confidence. ^
The two epistles noted as 'added' on the 1 6 1 2 title-page are from Thomas Heywood's Troia Britanica, 197, 215. This was printed by W. Jaggard in 1609. Heywood (App. B, no. xxxvi) tells us of his annoyance at the use of them, and says that it was shared by Shakespeare. Possibly, therefore, a protest led to the alteration in the 1612 title-page, Malone notes in his copy that, besides the two epistles, there are six other 'added' pieces on D 5- H 7 from Troia Britanica, 1 1 3, 1 52, 239, 254, 328. Lee, P.P. 49, has missed this. All the borrowings from Hey- wood seem to be Ovidian translations or adaptations.
1 Arber, iv. zax.
Chap. XI 549
IV. THE PHOENIX AND TURTLE
[Qi. 1 60 1.] Loves Martyr: Or, Rosalins Complaint. Allegorically shadowing the truth of Loue, in the constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle. A Poeme ... by Robert Chester. , , . To these are added some new compositions of seuerall moderne Writers whose names are subscribed to their seuerall workes, vpon the first subiect: viz. the Phoenix and Turtle. . . . London Imprinted (by Richard Field) for E(dward> B(lount). 1601. [Second title on Z] Hereafter Follow Diuerse Poeticall Essaies on the former Subiect; viz: the Turtle and Phoenix. Done by the best and chiefest of our moderne writers, with their names sub- scribed to their particular workes: neuer before extant. And (now first) consecrated by them all generally, to the loue and merite of the true-noble Knight, Sir lohn Salis- burie . . . [Ornament^ with Field's motto] MDCI. [Z 3V has verseswithout title,beginning 'Let the bird of lewdest lay', and introducing a Threnos, signed 'William Shake-speare*.]
Reprint. A.B. Grosart (1878, ^.5.5.).
[Q2. 161 1.] The Anuals of great Brittaine . . . [Allde's device (McKerrow 310)] London Printed for Mathew Lownes. 1611
Dissertations. ]. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Some Account of Chester's Love's Martyr (i 865); A. H. R. Fairchild, The P. and T. (1904, E.S. xxxiii. 337); C. Brown, Sir John Sa/usfary and Robert Chester; Poems (1914)-
Love's Martyr is a rambling collection of poems by Robert Chester which, so far as they have any unifying theme, find it in the celebration, under the symbols of the phoenix (Love) and the turtle (Constancy), of the wedded love of his patron, Sir John Salisbury or Salusbury of Lleweni, Denbighshire, himself a poet and Esquire of the Body, and
seems (Brown xxii) to have been an adherent of Cecil, and unfriendly to Essex. The added poems by Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, Vatum Chorus, and Ignoto
s So THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
mostly pay some compliment to the phoenix theme. That of Shakespeare cannot rest upon any deep study of Chester's work, since it laments the childless death of the phoenix and turtle. A son or other relative of Salisbury wrote verses on the First Folio (App. B, no. liv).
V. A LOVER'S COMPLAINT [For Bibliographical History, see Sonnets] Modern Edition. G. Wyndham (1898).
Dissertations. R Delius, A.L.C. (1885, J. xx. 41; AM. ii. 223); G. Sarrazin, ttber Shs Klage der Litbendcn (1902, Kleine SA. $tudien)\ ]. W. Mackail, 4.L.C. (1912, Essays and Studies of English Assn. iii. 51); J. M. Robertson, A.L.C. (1917* Si. and Chapman, 7).
The Shakespearean authorship of A Lover's Complaint is open to much doubt. Mackail points to many features of diction, syntax, and phrasing which, in their cumulative effect tell against him, and finds 'a certain laboriousness, a certain cramped, gritty, discontinuous quality' in the writing as a whole. He rejects the idea that the poem is the work of a beginner, and thinks that the echoes of Shakespeare may be due to imitation, perhaps by the Rival Poet of the Sonnets. Robertson argues at length for the authorship of Chapman, and perhaps this is more plausible than some of his other ascriptions to that writer.
VI. ASCRIBED VERSES
The manuscript anthologies and commonplace books of the seventeenth century sometimes contain, not only extracts from Shakespeare, but also miscellaneous poems under his name or initials. Little reliance can be placed on such ascriptions. A few are noted in Var. ii. 48 1, 507 ; W. J. Thorns, Anecdotes and Traditions (1839, C.S.), 49; H.P. Marriage of Wit and Wisdom^ 93, Rarities, 52, 237. There is no complete collection and I will not attempt one. A special group is studied in J, Q. Adams, Sh. as a Writer of Epitaphs.1 I discuss elsewhere the 'tombstone' verses (App. A, no. xxv) and the epigrams on Combe (App. A,
1 1923, Manly Studies, 78.
Chap. XI ASCRIBED VERSES 55I
no. xviii) and Jonson (App. B, no. xxii), and will here note two others.
(a) Epitaph on Elias James.
An
Epitaph
When god was pleas'd y° world vnwilling yet Elias James to nature payd his debt And here reposeth; as he liv'd he dyde The saying, in him strongly verefi'de Such life such death y** ye known truth to tell He liv'd a godly life and dy'de as well.
Wm: Shakespeare.
This is from Bodl. Rawlinson Poet. MS. 160, f. 41, It is dated in the Cat. 'about 1640', and I note poems of 1630 (f. 30V) and 1633 (£55).
(#) Epitaphs on the Stanleys.
Shakspeare An Epitaph on Sr Edward Standly.
Ingraven on his Toombe in Tong Church. Not monumental! stones preserves our Fame; Nor sky-aspiring Piramides our name; The memory of him for whom this standes Shall out live marble and defacers hands When all to times consumption shall bee given, Standly for whom this stands shall stand in Heaven.
On Sr Thomas Standly
Idem, ibidem
Ask who lies heere but doe not wheepe;
Hee is not deade; Hee doth but sleepe;
This stony Register is for his bones,
His Fame is more perpetuall, then these stones, And his owne goodnesse w* him selfe being gone, Shall live when Earthly monument is ftonne.
This is given in facsimile by H.P. Folio, i (1853), 162, from a manuscript which is more fully described in H.P. Reliques, 32, and was later at Warwick Castle. H.P. as- cribes the hand to the early part of the reign of Charles L
552 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
If he is right, the manuscript is a much earlier authority than Sir William Dugdale, who copied the epitaphs, with slightly different spelling and punctuation, in a collection appended to his Visitation of Shropshire in 1 664.* Hence it was communicated by Sir Isaac Heard, Garter, to Malone who printed it.2 It was again given from the manuscript by Mrs. Esdaile in The Times tor 22 April 1929, with a discussion of the date and authenticity, which was supple- mented by Mr. C. G. O. Bridgeman in a letter of May 22. Dugdale heads his copy 'Shakespeare. These following Verses were made by William Shakespeare, the late famous Tragedian', and notes the 'Ask' set as 'Written upon the East end of this Tombe' and the 'Not* set as 'Written upon the West end thereof. The tomb is still at Tong. It originally stood on the north side of the chancel, but is now at the east end of the south aisle. Descriptions are in G. Griffiths, History of Tong (1894), and D. H. S. Cranage, Architectural Account of Churches in Shropshire, i (1901), 42. Four arches bear a canopy, and on this lie, rather cramped between four pyramids at its corners, a man in heavy plate-armour and a woman, and beneath it another man wearing, according to Mrs. Esdaile, 'lighter armour of a later type'. On the south face of the tomb is the inscription:
Thomas Stanley Knight second soone of Edward Earle of Derbie Lord Stanley and Strange desended from the familie of the Stanleys married Margaret Vernon one of the daughters and cohaires of Sir George Vernon of Nether Haddon in the countie of Derbie Knighte By whom he had issue two soons Henri and Edw. Henry died an infant and Edw survived to whom thos Lordshipes de- sended and married The La. Lucie Percie second daughter to Thomas Earl of Northumberland by her he had issue seaven daughters and one soone shee and her 4 daughters 18 Arabella 16 Maie 15 Alis and 13 Priscilla are interred under a monument in yc church of Waltham in ye countie of Essex. Thomas his soone died in his mfancie and is buried in y* parishe churche of Winwicke in ye countie of Lancary* other three Petronella Francis and Venesie are yet Livinge. Bead mortui qui in Domino moriuntur.
« College of Arms MS. C. 35, f. 20. * 1790, i. i. 130 j Far. ii, 507.
Chap. XI ASCRIBED VERSES 553
The Stanley pedigree, so far as relevant, is as follows:
Edward, 3rd Earl of Derby ob. 1572
|
Henry, 4th Earl ob. 1593 |
| Sir Thomas • ofWinwick ob, 1576 |
• Margaret Vernon ob. 1596 |
Sir Edward i ob. 1609 |
Ferdinando, 5th William, 6th Henry Sir Edward ii -y Lucy Percy
Earl Earl ob. inf. n. 1562
ob. 1594 ob. 1642. K.B. 1603
ob. 1632
|
The ob. |
mas inf. |
Arabella o.s.p. |
May o.s.p. |
Alice o.s.p. |
Prise O.S.] |
1 c. 1613 ilia Frances = Sir John J. Fortescue |
|
1625 |
Venetia = Sir Petronilla n. 1600 Kenelm alive ob. i May Digby 1632
1633 o.s.p.
The monument bears no record of its own date, and the only direct indication is an unsupported statement in Every, Etchings of Tong Church (1841), that this was 1612, Such a date would be consistent with Mrs. Esdaile's opinion that the style 'suggests the developed Jacobean work of 1 610-25', an^ w^k Mr. Bridgeman's observation that the inscription would probably have given the mar- riage (c, 1613) of Frances Stanley, if it had taken place. On the other hand, 1612 would be rather late to put up a monument to persons who died in 1576 and 1596 respec- tively, and the absence of any description of Sir Edward ii as a knight would of itself suggest that the inscription fell between 1 603 and Venetia's birth in 1600. The deaths of his wife and children, to which it refers, have not been dated. But then, again, on what Sir Edward was the verse epitaph written, and whose is the lower figure, which clearly occupies the chief place on the monument ?
5 $4 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
Mrs. Esdaile, probably influenced by the different types of armour, makes the upper figures Sir Thomas and Margaret, and the lower their son. But Sir Edward ii died, according to his brass at Eynsham, on 18 June 1632 (not 1 8 January 1 633, as Mr. Bridgeman has it), and therefore his figure, if it is his, and the verses on him must have been added to the tomb after that date, and incidentally after Shakespeare's death. This seems to me the most likely solution, and the fact that Tong was sold about 1623 would be no obstacle if the monument, with a vacant place, already existed. The burial was at Eynsham. The alternative is to suppose that the lower figure is Sir Edward i, who according to the D JV.5. died in 1 609. But he had nothing to do with Tong. He is, indeed, a very obscure personage. The anonymous History o/ the House of Stanley (1767), 51, confuses him hopelessly with Sir William Stanley of Hooton. Shaw, ii. 70, gives his knighting on 2 January 1560, as brother instead of son to the then Earl of Derby. Dugdale in his Visitation of Lancashire in 1664— 5 (Chetham Soc.), iii. 282, makes him second instead of third son to the Earl, and describes him as *of Eynsham'. This he certainly was not, since Eynsham, with the other Stanley manors in Oxfordshire, were settled (Seacome 52) upon Sir Thomas and his son, afterwards Sir Edward ii, in 1562. Mrs. Esdaile, I fear, rates Dugdale's accuracy, considerable antiquary though he was, altogether too highly, and if the case for Shakespeare's authorship of the verses rested on him, it would not be worth much. Cer- tainly it was no part of his heraldic duty, as she thinks, to record church monuments. The case does not really rest upon him, in view of H.P.'s manuscript, and it was pro- bably from some similar source, directly or indirectly, that the ascription reached him. But such a manuscript is in itself far from being a good authority. It is clear that one set of the verses cannot be Shakespeare's, if it relates to the Sir Edward who owned Tong, and on internal evidence there is no temptation to accept either of them as his. Malone, however, thought them 'of a better leer' (not, as Mrs. Esdaile says, 'better beer') than the James epitaph.
Chap. XI ASCRIBED VERSES 5 5 5
(<:) The Phaethon Sonnet.
Some anonymous poems have also been attributed to Shakespeare on mere conjecture. The only one worth consideration is a sonnet prefixed to John Florio's Second Fruits (i 591, S.R. 30 April 1591), which was put forward by W. Minto, Characteristics of English Poets (i 885), 371.
Phaethon to his Friend Florio.
Sweet friend, whose name agrees with thy increase,
How fit a rival art thou of the Spring!
For when each branch hath left his flourishing, And green-locked Summer's shady pleasures cease, She makes the Winter's storms repose in peace
And spends her franchise on each living thing:
The daisies sprout, the little birds do sing; Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release. So that when all our English wits lay dead
(Except the Laurel that is ever green), Thou with thy fruits our barrenness overspread
And set thy flowery pleasance to be seen. Such fruits, such flow'rets of morality, Were ne'er before brought out of Italy.
I do not find the conjecture very convincing, although the sonnet has merit. And we are rather in the dark as to the possibilities of any association between Shakespeare and Florio as early as April 1591.
VII. THE SONNETS
[S.R. 1600.] 3 January. Eleazar Edgar Entred for his
copye vnder the handes of the Wardens. A booke called
Amours by J D. with certen of sonnetes by W S. vjd
(Arber, iii. 153).
[The book and its authorship are unknown. Lee 672 says that the
Amours were 'doubtless' sonnets by Sir John Davies, and that it is
'probable' that the Sonnets were by William Smith, who published
some as Chloris (1596). But this is very confident guessing, where
there is nothing but commonplace initials to go upon.]
[S.R. 1609.] 20 Maij Thomas Thorpe Entred for his
copie vnder thandes of master Wilson and master
5$6 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
Lownes Warden a Booke called Shakespeares sonnettes vjd. (Arber, iii. 410).
[Q. 1609.] [Ornament] Shake-speares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted. At London By G. Eld for T. T. and are to be solde by Iphn Wright, dwelling at Christ Church gate. 1609. \Head-title\ Shake-speares, Sonnets. [Run- ning-tit Je to Ki] Shake-speares Sonnets. [Head-title on Kiv] A Louers complaint. By William Shake-speare. [Running-title from K 2] A Lovers Complaint.
[Some copies of the t.p. end 'and are to be solde by William Aspley. 1609'. On A 2 is
TO . THE . ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF.
THESE . INSVING . SONNETS. ;,'[, J Mr. W. H. ALL . HAPPINESSE. : ^ „ AND . THAT . ETERNITIE. ^ *
PROMISED. ^ ^
BY- OVR . EVER-LIVING . POETr '-
WISHETH.
THE . WELL-WISHING. ty ADVENT WER.,JN. » ; "" SETTING. ' '> FORTH. c
T.T. ]
Facsimiles. C. Praetorius (1886, Sh. Q. xxx, from EM. C. 2 1, c. 44, ed. T.Tyler); Clarendon Press (1905, from Eodl. Malone^ 34, ed. S. Lee); Jonathan Cape (1925, from EM. G. 11181)5 Noel Douglas (1926).
S.R. 1639.] 4°Nouembris 1639 . . . John Benson Entred or his Copie vnder the hands of doctor Wykes and Master Fetherston warden An Addicion of some excel- lent Poems to Shakespeares Poems by other gentlemen. viz*. His mistris drawne. and her mind by Beniamin: Johnson. An Epistle to Beniamin Johnson by Francis Beaumont. His Mistris shade, by R: Herrick. &c. vjd. (Arber, iv. 487).
[1640.] Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent. [Cotes's device (McKerrow 283)] Printed at London by
[ f
Chap. XI THE SONNETS 557
Tho. Cotes, and are to be sold by lohn Benson, dwelling in S*. Dunstans Church-yard. 1 640.
[Sign. * 2 has
To the Reader.
I Here presume (under favour) to present to your view, some excel- lent and sweetely composed Poems, of Master William Shakespeare, Which in themselves appeare of the same purity, the Authour him- selfe then living avouched; they had not the fortune by reason of their Infancie in his death, to have the due accommodation of pro- portionable glory, with the rest of his everliving Workes, yet the lines of themselves will afford you a more authentick approbation than my assurance any way can, to invite your allowance, in your perusall you shall finde them Seren^ cleere and eligantly plaine, such gentle straines as shall recreate and not perplexe your braine, no intricate or cloudy stuffe to puzzell intellect, but perfect eloquence; such as will raise your admiration to his praise: this assurance I know will not differ from your acknowledgement. And certaine I am, my opinion will be seconded by the sufficiency of these ensuing Lines; I have beene somewhat solicitus to bring this forth to the perfect view of all men; and in so doing, glad to be serviceable for the continuance of glory to the deserved Author in these his Poems. I- B.
This is followed by verses on Shakespeare by Leonard Digges (App. B no. lii) and John Warren. Besides the Sonnets, the text contains (a) the full contents of the Passionate Pilgrim of 1612, partly interspersed among the Sonnets; (b) A Lover's Complaint; (c) the Replies by Raleigh (now in full) and Ignoto to Marlowe's lines (P.P. xx) from England's Helicon (1600); (d) the Song from M.M. iv. i. I, in the longer version found in Beaumont and Fletcher's Bloody Brother (1639); (*) The Phoenix and Turtle; (/) Orlando's verses from 4.Y.L. iii. 2. 133; (g) Milton's Elegy (App. B, no. Iv); (h) Basse's Elegy (App. B, no. xlvi); (i) an^anonymous Elegy* beginning 'I dare not do thy memory that wrong'. Sign. L 2 is headed 'An Addition of some Excellent Poems, to those precedent, of Renowned Shakespeare, By other Gentlemen'. I have not . attempted to trace these fully, as they are not claimed for Shake- speare. But they include poems by, or elsewhere ascribed to, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Carew, Herrick, Strode, Richard Clarke, and one I. G.] Reprint. A. R. Smith (1885).
5$8 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
Modern Editions. E. Dowden (1881), T, Tyler (1890, 1899), G, Wyndham (1898, with Poems)) S. Butler (1899), C. C. Stopes (1904), H. C. Beeching (1904), A. H. Bullen (1905), W. H. Hadow (1907), C. M. Walsh (1908), R. M. Alden (1916, Variorum ed.), C. K, Pooler (1918, Arden\ E. B. Reed (1923, Tale), T. G. Tucker (1924).
Dissertations (selection). J. Boaden, On the S. of Si. (i%32,Gent.Magt 1837); C. A. Brown, Si's Autobiographical Poems (1838); N. Delius, UeberShs S. (1865, J. i. 18; AM. i. i); G. Massey, St.'s S. Never Before Interpreted (1866), The Secret Drama of Si's S. (1872, 1888); .H. v. Friesen, Ueber Sis S. (1869, y. iv. 94); H. Brown, The S. of Si Solved (1870); K. Goedeke, Ueber die S. Sis. (1877, Deutsche Rnndschau, 386); W. Hertzberg, Eine griechische Quelle zu Sis S. (1878, J. xiii. 158); T. A. Spalding, Sis. S. (1878, Gent. Mag^ H. Conrad (formerly Isaac), Ztt den S. Sis (1878-9, Archiv, lix. 155, 241; Ix. 33; IxL 177, 393; Ixii. r, 129), PFie weitgeht die Abhangigkeit Sis von Daniel als Lyriker? (1882, J. xvii. 165), Die S.-Periode in Sis Leben (1884, J. xix. 176), Sis Selbstbekenntnisse (1897); E. Stengel, Bilden die ersten 126 S. Sis einen Sonettencyclus? (i 88 1, E.S. iv, i); F. Krauss, Die schwarze Schone der Si-S. (1881, 7. xvi. 144); C. C Stopes, Si's S. (1890, J. xxv. 185), The Date of Si's S. (1898, March 19, 26, Athenaeum), Mr. W. H. (1900, Aug. 4,-^.); G. Sarrazin, Die Entstehung von Sis L.L.L. (1895, J. xxxi. 200), Wortechos bet Si. (1897, 1898, J. xxxiii. 120; xxxiv. 119), Die Jugend-S. (1897, W.8JL. 149), Zu S. civ (1898, J. xxxiv. 368), Die Freundschaftssonette (1906, A.S.M.jf); W. Archer, Si.'s S. (1897, Fortnightly9lm. 817); Lady Newdigate Newdegate, Gossip from a Muni" ment-Room (1897, 1898); T.Tyler, The Herbert-Fitton Theory ofSi.'sS. (1898); C. F. McClumpha, St.'s S. andL.L.L. (1900, M.L.N. xv. 335% Si.9s S. andMJf.D. (i<)Oi,M.LJf. xvi. 328), 8t.'sjS. and It.J. (1904, J. xl. 187); A. Acheson, Si. and the Rival Poet (1903), Mistress Davenant, TheDarkLady of Si.9sS. (1913), 8t.'s8. Story (1922); C. Hughes, Willobie hisAvisa (1904); E.S. Bates, The Sincerity ofSiJs £.(1910, Af.?.viii. 87); A.Pktt,£i IIIandSi:s S. (191 1, M.L.R. vi. 51 1); J, W.Mackail, SA.'sS. (1911, Lectures on Poetry, 179); R, M. Alden, The Q Arrangement of Si's S. (1913, Kittredge Anniversary Papers)9 Tie 1640 Text ofSi.'s S. (1916, M.P. xiv. 17); H. D. Gray, Tie Arrangement and Date of Si's S. (i9i5,AAf.Z.^.xxx. 629); yL.]Wd8,PetrarkismusundAntipetrarkismu$ in Sis S. (1916, E,S. xlix. 161); H. Ord, Chaucer and the Rival Poet in Sh's S. (1921)5 W. Poeland others, Si and the Davenants (1921, June 2- Aug. 4, T.L.S.)\ O. F. Emerson, Si.'s Sonnetteering (1923, S.P. xx. 1 1 1); H. T. S. Forrest, Tie Five Authors ofSh.'s Sonnets (1923); J. A, Fort, The Two Dated S. of Si. (1924), Thorpe's Text of the S. (1926, R.E.S. ii. 439), Tie Story Contained in tie Second Series of Si's S, (1927, R.E.S. iii. 406), Further Notes on Si's S. (i 928, 4 Library, ix. 30 5), Tie Date ofSi.'s 107* S. 1929, 4 Library, ix. 381), A Time Scheme for Si's S. (1929); Sir D. Bray, The Original Order of Si.'sS. (1925), Tie Art-Form of tie Elizabethan S.
Chap. XI THE SONNETS 559
Sequence and SL's 8. (1927, 7. Ixiii. 1 59); R. Fischer, Sir $.(1925); G. B. Harrison, WlttMe his Avtsa (1926), The Mortal Moon (1928, Nov. 20, T.L.S.)i J. M. Robertson, The Problems c/AfcW.S. (1926)5 W.MarschaS, Aus SAs poetischen Bnefwechsel (1926), Das Zentralproblem der St. S. (1927, Anglia, li. 31); E. Beckwith, The Chronology of Si's S. (1026, J.E.G.P. xxv. 227).
The 1609 text of the Sonnets is not a very good one. It may rest upon a fairly authoritative manuscript, but there are sufficient misprints, including misprints of punctuation not explicable upon any theory (cf. p. 195) of rhetorical punctuation, to make it clear* that the volume cannot have been 'overseen', as Venus and Adonis and Lucrece may have been, by Shakespeare. The absence of any author's epistle is a further indication of this. The 1640 text does not rest upon any fresh reference to a manuscript, although the sonnets, of which eight are omitted, have been regrouped in a new order under fancy headings, and the pronouns altered so as to suggest that those really written to a man were written to a woman. In this respect at least they cannot be, as Benson claimed, *of the same purity, the Authour himselfe then living avouched'. For what it is worth, however, the phrase seems to imply a belief that the original publication was not contrary to Shakespeare's desire, and perhaps the same inference might be drawn from William Drum- mond's statement about 1614 (App. B, no. xl) that Shake- speare had lately published his works. Drummond may not have been in a position to know much about it.
Shakespeare was known to Meres (App. B, no. xiii) as a writer of 'sugred Sonnets among his private friends' in 1 598, and versions of two (cxxxviii, cxliv) of those in the 1609 volume had already appeared in the Passionate Pilgrim (1599). It does not follow that all those now extant were already written. A traditional interpretation, from the days of Malone, has taken the arrangement of the 1609 volume at its face value, and treated the bulk of its contents (i-cxxvi) as forming a single continuous series, written to a single recipient If so, this recipient was a man, since the pronouns show that some of the
560 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
sonnets were certainly written to a man. He was a 'lovely boy', whose hair recalled buds of marjoram and his face the lovely April of his mother's prime; and he was of higher social position than the poet's own. The earliest sonnets (i-xvii) urge him to marriage and progeny. The rest take on a more personal note. The boy is at once a patron, to be immortalized by the poet's verse, and an object of close affection, to be spoken of in language which, but for the pronouns, one would have taken to be addressed to a woman. In some of the sonnets he is called * You' ; in others the more intimate Thou* is used. I do not think that there is any significance in this. There are many fluctuations of mood. Sometimes the boy is reproached for scandal and wantonness. Sometimes the poet is con- scious of his own unworthiness, his 'tann'd antiquity', his 'disgrace with fortune and men's eyes', his 'bewailed guilt', a 'brand' upon his name, due to 'public means which public manners breeds'. He is lame; a literal criticism takes this for autobiography. He is tired of life and obsessed with thoughts of death. There are estrange- ments and neglects on both sides. Some of these themes are dropped and recur again. At an early stage the friend steals the poet's mistress and is forgiven. Other poets compete in praising the boy. One in particular is a serious rival. The remaining sonnets (cxxvii-cliv) are less homogeneous. They have been called 'a disordered appendix'. But several of them record the poet's love for a dark beauty, who is faithless to him, and who is not unreasonably supposed to be the stolen mistress of the main series. It is in favour of the traditional theory that there is evidently some grouping in the sonnets, and that, if they are read in the light of the theory, there is no obvious lack of coherence. It is certainly not imperative to accept the theory as a whole. The unity of the sonnets is one of atmosphere. The thread of incident is a frail one. Each sonnet is generally self-contained. A few are linked. On the other hand, there is occasionally a jar in the con- tinuity^which may suggest misplacement. There is room for subjective interpretations; and the licence has been
Chap. XI THE SONNETS 561
freely used. It has been held that the sonnets of the main series were not all written to the same person; that some of them were after all to a woman, Elizabeth or Anne Hathaway or another; that they were written for another man to give to a woman, or for a woman to give to a man ; that their intention is dramatic and not personal; that they are a dialogue between 'You* and 'Thou* ; that they are allegorical; that they are mere literary exercises in the Petrarchan convention. There is much absurdity injjaaay* of these views. More folly has been written about thej sonnets than about any other Shakespearean topic.™ o doubt there is a convention. The attitudes and larifuage of the sonnets can be abundantly paralleled from other Renaissance poems, Italian, French, and English. But the use of a convention is not inconsistent with the ex- pression of personal feeling. The level of poetic value is tar from even. It has been thought that the work of other "men has been intermingled with Shakespeare's. Mackail rejects or doubts, perhaps justifiably, seven sonnets (cxxviii, cxxxv, cxxxvi, cxliii, cxlv, cliii, cliv) in the second series. Robertson regards about fifty throughout as spurious, and offers as alternative writers Barnes and Chapman. Forrest thinks that Barnes, Warner, Daniel, and Donne all con- tributed. A claim has been made for Raleigh, who was no doubt at one time lame from a wound. Again, Thorpe's order has been doubted, and attempts made to revise^ it. Here, too, subjectivity has had full swing. But an objective criterion is proposed by Bray, who thinks that an original order can be determined by rhyme-links between sonnet and sonnet. These are sometimes the same words and sometimes merely words that rhyme together, and they may come in any line of a sonnet. According to the theory, the 'Thou* sonnets were written first on this prin- ciple, and the 'You' sonnets dovetailed in later by similar, links. It is difficult to think of Shakespeare as occupying himself through a span of years with an exercise of such profitless ingenuity. Moreover, there are many recurrent rhymes in the sonnets, and different arrangements could be worked out on Bray's lines. Much would depend upon
3I42.I O O
562 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
the arbitrary selection of this or that sonnet for a starting- point. It is impossible, I think, to be dogmatic on the evidence available. But on the whole, it does not seem to me likely, in view of the character of some of the sonnets in the second series, that .the whole collection can have been kept together by any one but Shakespeare himself. And if so, it is most likely that the arrangement of 1 609 was his. It does not, of course, follow that in putting them together he made no departure from the chronological order of composition. One might suppose, for example, that cxxvi, which now ends the first series, originally ended the group i— xvii. But clearly, if it was so, the strict chrono- logical order is irrecoverable. Nor does it much matter, so far as the very slight indications of external biography are concerned. And indeed these would remain unaltered, even if it could be shown that some of the sonnets were not Shakespeare's, and that some of the first series were written to a woman. The boy would still be there, and the stolen mistress, and the rival poet. And we should still know little more about them than that they existed, and for a time counted for much in Shakespeare's personal life. It is not surprising that great pains have been spent upon attempts to identify them. The date of the sonnets is, of course, material. Their wording does not give us much help. In xxvii-xxviii, and again in xlviii and 1-li the poet is travelling. It is rather futile to relate these absences to the known provincial tours of the Chamberlain's men. Shakespeare may have had many other opportunities of leaving London. In Ixvi he speaks of 'art made tongue-tied by authority'. If the reference is to theatrical art, the troubles of 1596 or 1597 (cf. p. 64) are more likely to be in point than those of 1600, by which the Chamber- lain's men at least did not stand to lose much. In c we learn that there has been some interval in the sonnetteering ; in civ that three years have elapsed since the 'fair friend' was first met. In cxxiv is a very vague allusion to
thralled discontent, Whereto the inviting time our fashion calls.
Chap. XI THE SONNETS 563
There should be something more specific in cvii. Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come. Can yet the lease of my true love control. Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom. The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assured And peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rime, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes: And thou in this shah find thy monument, When tyrants* crests and tombs of brass are spent.
But even this proves difficult to date. There can be no reference, as has been thought, to anybody's imprisonment. The 'confined doom' can only be the limited duration to which a lease is subject. The 'mortal moon' is doubtless Elizabeth, and the sonnet has been placed in 1603, when James succeeded to the throne, without the opposition which had been anticipated, in the balmy days of spring, and a prospect of peace with Spain opened. Apart from the lateness of the date, an objection to this is that, while death may be called an eclipse, it is not so easy to think that to 'endure' an eclipse can mean to die. G. B. Harrison suggests 1596 when an illness of Elizabeth, in the year of her 4grand climacteric', had caused some alarm at court, which seems to have soon been dispelled, and when a fresh alliance with Henri IV was ratified at Rouen in October, with a royal entry in which Henri was presented by an angel with a sword of peace. He may have been, but the whole object of the alliance was to avoid peace and keep Henri at war with Spain.1 The augurs, no doubt, had been busy at the end of 1595, and a Prognostication printed by Abel Jeffes was suppressed. It seems to have foretold a sea- battle, rather than any special danger to Elizabeth's life.2 Nor can we suppose that the 'peace' of the sonnet was the Peace of Vervins, made between France and Spain in 1598,
1 Cheyney, ii. 148, 157. a Cf. E. F. Bosanquet in 4 Library, viii. 460.
O02
564 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
since this when it came was still contrary to English interests.1 A more plausible date is 1599-1600. In August 1599 there was an alarm of Spanish invasion. Elizabeth was again ill, and the gathering of troops led to Vilde conjectures' that her life was in danger and even that she was dead.2 Negotiations for peace had already been opened. They soon became matter of public know- ledge, and continued to 28 July 1600, when they broke down at Boulogne.3 This sonnet cvii comes late in the first series, and for the dating as a whole we are thrown back upon internal evidence. This mainly consists of a large accumulation of parallels. Many of these, of course, are individually slight; it is the mass effect (cf. p. 254) which is relied upon. Alden 447 reduces to statistics the studies of Conrad and H. Davis. Averaged out, these find the greatest number of parallels to the sonnets to be in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. Each has about 50. Of the plays, it is naturally only those with a strong love- interest which are relevant. But it seems significant that Two Gentlemen, Love's Labour 's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and Midsummer-Night's Dream account between them for about 150, and Merchant of Venice, Much Ado, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night for only about 50. McClumpha's examination of Love's Labour *s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and Midsummer-Night's Dream con- firms these results. Unfortunately Davis's list remains in manuscript and Conrad's is not fully given. I have an impression that the parallels to the second group of comedies and to Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and other later plays increase in number towards the end of the first sonnet series. The chronological inferences appear to be that the sonnets began as a continuation of the lyrical impulse represented by Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, in the former of which the invitation to marriage theme is already, rather inappropriately, found; that the three-
1 Cheyney, ii. 447. 3 Cheyney, ii. 448, 559, citing
* Chamberlain, Efa. 625 Sydney N. G, Goodman, Efforts for Peace be-
Papers, ii. 114; Hatfield MSS. ix. 277, tween England and Spain, 1597-1603
302, 428; HM.C. xv, App. v, 88, 94. (1925).
Chap. XI THE SONNETS 565
years' range of civ was probably 1593-6; that the bulk of the sonnets belong to this period; and that others were added more sparsely up to 1599 or so. Some reflection of the sentiments which occupied the poet's mind may be traceable in the structure of the plays of 1595 and 1596. It has been generally assumed that the boy-friend was some young noble to whom Shakespeare was devoted. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, William Lord Herbert, from 1601 Earl of Pembroke, have had their champions. Essex, born in 1 566 and married in 1 590, is chronologically impossible. The careers of Southampton and Herbert show curious analogies. Both are known (pp. 62, 68 ; vol. ii, p. 228) to have shown favour to Shakespeare. Both were good-looking and had beautiful mothers. Both were much in the public eye. Both were the subjects of early negotiations for marriages which came to nothing. Both had amorous rela- tions with ladies of Elizabeth's court and suffered disgrace and imprisonment as a result, although Southampton married his Elizabeth Vernon in 1598, whereas Herbert declined to marry his Mary Fitton in 1601. Neither of these can, of course, be the Dark Lady, a married woman, who broke her bed-vow (clii) to take first Shakespeare and then his friend. Southampton, born in 1573, was per- haps young enough to be called a 'boy' by Shakespeare in 1593-6, and to him Venus and Adonis and Lucrece were dedicated. The case for him as the friend of the sonnets is now very generally accepted, and has been well put recently by Fort. I do not think it a convincing one. If it were sound, one would expect to find some hints in the sonnets of the major interests of Southampton's early life; his military ambitions, his comradeship with Essex, the romance or his marriage. Therearenone. It has, of course, been apparent that the volume of 1 609 is dedicated to *Mr W. H.', and that Southampton's initials were H. W.
inspirer , riend but to the person who fiirnished Thorpe with copy.
566 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
If so, perhaps the best guess which has been made at a *Mr W. H.' by the believers in Southampton is Sir William Harvey, who married his mother in 1598. Lee 68 1 offered William Hall. He found a W. H. who wrote a dedication to the Foure-fold Meditation printed as Robert Southwell's in 1 606, assumed that both were the William Hall, who was a printer in 1609, but did not print the Sonnets, and gave a blessing to a further assump- tion that this was also a William Hall who married at Hackney in 1608 and might therefore be congratulated on the birth of a child in 1 609. He did not go so far as to suggest with Fort and others that *Mr. w. H. ALL . HAPPI- NESSE' might be read in a double sense by the omission of a full stop. But all his equations seem to me quite un- warrantable, in view 'of the commonness of the initials W. H. and the name HalL And there is some unconscious humour in the notion of Thorpe's dedicating the volume to a printer whom he had not employed. To me it seems more difficult, every time I read the dedication, to believe that, even in Thorpe's affected phrasing, the person to whom he wished eternity was any other than the person to whom the 'ever-living poet* promised eternity. Nor do I feel that in such a document there would be anything very out of the way either in the inversion of initials or in the suppression of an actual or courtesy title. If South- ampton was meant by 'Mr W. H.' both these things have been done; if Herbert, one only. The case for Herbert was elaborately argued by Thomas Tyler and others thirty years ago, and I think that it was mishandled. Obsessed by Mary Fitton, they put the bulk of the son- nets in 1598-1601, after Herbert had come to live in London, and related the early group, urging marriage upon the friend, to an abortive match between him and Lady Bridget Vere, which was under discussion in 1597. If the sonnets are of 1593-6, it might well be thought that Herbert, born in 1580, was too young to be their subject, even though he was more naturally to be called a 'boy* at that time than Southampton. But oddly enough, although Tyler used the Sydney Papers, he failed, so far as
WILLIAM EARL OF PEMBROKE
Chap. XI - THE SONNETS 567
I can discover, to notice the evidence which they contain that an attempt, probably due to his father's failing health, had already been made as early as 1 595 to betroth Herbert at the tender age of 15. On October 8 Rowland Whyte writes to Sir Robert Sydney (i. 353):
My Lord <Pembroke> hymself, with my Lord Harbart, <is>come vp to see the Queen, and (as I heare) to deale in the Matter of a Marriage with Sir George Careys Daughter.
The visit was in fact put off, but had taken place, probably by October 29 and certainly by November 3 (i. 355, 356, 357> 36l)> and on December 5 Whyte reports (i. 372):
Sir George Carey takes it very unkindly, that my Lord of Pem- broke broke of the Match intended between my Lord Herbart and his Daughter, and told the Queen it was becawse he wold not assure him i ooo1- a Yeare, which comes to his Daughter, as next a Kinne to Queen Ann Sullen. He hath now concluded a Marriage between his Daughter and my Lord Barkleys Sonne and Heire.
I will not lay stress upon the doubtful possibilities of an earlier connexion between Shakespeare and Lord Pem- broke through the company of 1592-3 (cf. p. 46) or through Fulke Greville, who served under the Earl in his Presidency of Wales (App. C, no. x), or on Shake- speare's alleged visit to Wilton in 1603 (App. D). But it is, I think, relevant that Sir George Carey was son to the patron of the Chamberlain's men in 1595, and that the ultimate marriage of Elizabeth Carey to Thomas Berkeley is perhaps at least as likely as any other to have been honoured by the production oi Midsummer-Night's Dream. And I am rather struck by the fact that, although South- ampton was still alive, it was not to him, but to Herbert and his brother, that Fi was dedicated. On the whole, therefore, I think that, if we are to look in the ranks of the higher nobility, it is Herbert, rather than Southampton, who affords the most plausible identification for Shake- speare's friend. I am not clear that the conditions might not be satisfied by some young man of good birth and breeding, but of less degree than an earl. But I have no candidate to propose. The Rival Poet, from whom we
$68 THE POEMS AND BONNETS Chap. XI
should desire light, only adds to the obscurity. The 'precious phrase b^ all the Muses filed' (Ixxxv) and 'the proud full sail of his great verse* (Ixxxvi) ought to mean Spenser, or failing him, Daniel or perhaps Drayton. Marlowe's death in 1593 probably puts him out of ques- tion. Daniel, who was Herbert's tutor at Wilton, dedi- cated more than one book to his mother Lady Pembroke, but nothing to Herbert himself before his Defence of Rhyme of 1 603. He is perhaps as likely as any one to have praised him in unpublished verse. His Epistles of 1603 include one to Southampton. There are no extant poems by Spenser or Drayton either to Herbert or to Southamp- ton. Indeed, Southampton was not a great mark for dedi- cations until he came into favour under James. There are sonnets, in which he is only ranked with others, by Barnabe Barnes (1593), Gervase Markham (1595), Henry Lok (1597), and John Florio (1598). It is difficult to agree with Lee 201 that 'all the conditions of the prob- lem are satisfied' by Barnes. Nashe addresses to South- ampton his prose tale of The Unfortunate Traveller (i 594). The same writer's indecent Choise of Valentines were for a 'Lord S', but Southampton had no claim to be addressed as the 'fairest bud the red rose euer bare'.1 W. Minto, Characteristics of English Poets (1885), 221, suggested an identification of the rival with Chapman, and his Shadow of Night (1594) has phrases about his inspiration which might be echoed, although not very closely, in the rival's 'affable familiar ghost' and 'compeers by night' (Ixxxvi). Only the courtesy of a rival, however, could represent the uncouth manner of his 'hymns' as a 'proud full sail'. Some hint of Chapman there may also be in Love's Labour 's Lost (cf. p. 337), but Acheson's attempts to find traces of a standing feud between Shakespeare and Chapman throughout both the sonnets and Chapman's poems are very far-fetched. And Chapman again dedicated nothing Elizabethan to Herbert, or to Southampton, or to a 'Mr W. H.'. One other clue proves equally elusive. A poem called Wilkbie his Avisa was registered on
1 McKerrow, iii. 403.
HENRY EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON
Chap. XI THE SONNETS 569
3 September 1594 and printed in the same year. In fluent but undistinguished verse it describes the succes- sive and fruitless assaults upon the virtue of Avisa by 'a Nobleman' before her marriage, and after by 'a Caveleiro', by 'D. B. a French man', by 'Dydimus Harco, Anglo- Germanus', and finally by 'Henrico Willobego, Italo-His- palensis'. The last of these has (cf. App. B, no. viii) a 'familiar friend W. S. who not long before had tryed the curtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recouered of the like infection', and who Vewing afar off the course of this louing Comedy, determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor than it did for the old player'. The 'like passion' does not, I think, mean a passion for Avisa herself. There is a dialogue between W. S. and H. W. in which W. S. says (cf. Sonn. xli ; i Hen. VI) v. 3. 78 ; Tit. Andr. ii. i . 83 ; Rich. ///, i. 2. 229):
She is no Saynt, She is no Nonne, I thinke in tyme she may be wonne.
It seems natural to see some sort of allusion to Shake- speare's love affair here; the more as his Lucrece is cited (cf, App. B, no. ix) in a set of commendatory verses, mysteriously subscribed 'Contraria Contrarijs : Vigilantius: Dormitanus'. Another set by Abell Emet tells us nothing. Henry Willobie is said in an epistle, subscribed 'Hadrian Dorrell', and dated at Oxford on an October i , to be himself the author of the poem. I will .not draw any inference from the fact that his inverted initials would make W. H. We know very little about him. Dorrell says that he was his 'chamber fellow* and 'a scholler of very good hope', who had 'departed voluntarily to her Maiesties service' to see other countries. Dorrell had found the poem in his friend's study. He thinks Avisa 'a fained name', but one A. D. in the west of England can rival her virtues. Pre- sumably A. D. isDorrell'sown wife. There are later editions of the poem in 1605 ('The fourth time corrected and augmented'), 1609, and 1635 ('The fifth time corrected'). Obviously some have been lost, probably because, when the High Commission were condemning satirical books in
570 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
1599, they directed 'Willobies Adviso to be Called in'.1 One of these may have been in 1596, as the edition of 1 635 has a fresh epistle by Dorrell, again from Oxford, but evidently misdated as '30. of June. 1 569', Here he seems to imply that Avisa was only an imaginary personage. A statement that the poem was written 'thirtie and fiue yeeres since' cannot, however, date from 1596. The 1635 edition has an added poem in which one Rogero judges a contention on chastity. It is subscribed 'Thomas Willoby Prater Henrici Willoby nuper defuncti'. Finally, it may be noted that Dorrell's later epistle refers to the poem of one P. C. This is Penelope's Complaint (1596), which has an epistle by Peter Colse to Edith, wife of Sir Ralph Horsey, and verses by S. D. to Colse, discrediting Avisa's virtue in comparison with Penelope's, and calling her *conjux cauponis, filia pandochei'. I see no reason to reject Willobie's authorship of Avisa. Hughes pointed out that Henry Willobie of Wilts, and not Hadrian, but Thomas Darell of Berks., matriculated together, the former from St. John's and the latter from B.N.C. on 1 9 December 1591. Willobie migrated to Exeter, whence he took his degree, presumably on his return from abroad, in February 1595. With his brother Thomas he is in the pedigree of the Willoughbys of West Knoyle, Wilts.2 There are some topographical indications in the poem itself which Harrison has satisfactorily interpreted as showing that Avisa was born at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, 'where Austine pitcht his Monkish tent', and dwelt after marriage at an inn of St. George in the neighbouring town of Sherborne, 'where hanges the badge of England's Saint'; Both places are within reasonable reach of West Knoyle. The belated condemnation of 1599 shows that there was some element of scandal in the poem. Probably it is beyond recovery. The suitors, other than Willobie, as yet throw no light, although Harco should stand for Harcourt I do not think that Harrison is justified in transferring the authorship of the poem from Willobie to Matthew Roydon, the friend of Chapman, and
1 Arber, iii. 678. » G. W. Marshall, Visitation of Wilts, 58.
Chap. XI THE SONNETS 571
treating it as an attack on the morals of Southampton in the interests of Raleigh. It is true that in 1592 Raleigh had acquired the estate of Sherborne, and that in March 1594 Cerne Abbas was the scene of an inquiry into charges of atheism against him, held by Viscount Howard of Bindon, Sir Ralph Horsey, and others at the direction of the High Commission. It is not known that anything came of it, or that Southampton was in any way concerned. No doubt, as a friend of Essex, he may not have been on good terms with Raleigh. Peter Colse's lucubration may imply some interest of the Horsey family in Avisa. One of the three extant poems ascribed to Roy- don uses the same stanza-form as Auisa. It is, I think, more pedantic and cumbrous in style. Roydon was with the King of Scotland in the autumn of 1593, and it is not known when he returned. Even more tenuous are the speculations of Acheson, by whom the claim for Roydon as the author of Avisa was originally made. Avis or Avice is a known Christian name, of which Hughes found several examples at Mere, close to West Knoyle. Acheson treats it as standing for a surname Bird, ^ assumes that Avisa's Christian name was Anne, and identifies her, certainly in error, with the A. D. of Dorrell's epistle. At Bristol, connected, like Cerne Abbas, by tradition with St. Augustine, he finds a William Bird, who was mayor in 1576 and died in 1590. He left five 'natural' children. A daughter Mary married Miles Jackson and a daughter Anne married John Dowle. This Anne will not do for Acheson. Bird also left legacies to Anne and Mary, daughter of one William Sachfeilde, mercer. These Acheson conjectures to have really been Birds own 'natural' children, taking the term not in its ^normal Elizabethan sense of children by blood, but in its later one of 'bastards', of which the first O.EJX example, and that a quibbling one, is of 1586. In 1616 Miles Jackson left a legacy to 'my sister Hatton'. She is put down as Mary Sachfeilde. And now, by an astonishing leap, Anne Sachfeilde is transferred to Oxford, and becomes a hypo- thetical first wife of John Davenant, who is assumed to
572 THE POEMS, AND SONNETS Chap. XI
have lived, although he did not, at the sign of St. George. And according to Acheson, it was with this wife that Shakespeare had an amour, which tradition has trans- ferred to Davenant's blameless second wife Jane. The link is in Davenant's will of 1622, in which he makes a John Bird overseer, and invites *my sister Hatton* to live with his daughters.1 I have only set out this romance, because it gives a convenient opportunity of stating what is known of John Davenant. The facts are mainly collected from the documents in A. Acheson, Shakespeare's Sonnet Story (1922), especially the valuable excursus by E. T. Leeds on the Crown Inn and Tavern, contributions by W. H. Hutton .and E. T. Leeds to the Catalogue of the Bodleian Shakespeare Exhibition (1916), and H. E. Salter, Oxford City Properties (i 926, O.H.S.\ Oxford Council Acts (1928, O.H.S.}. G. Matcham's pedigree in The Hundred of Frustfield) 85, contributed to R. C. Hoare, Modern History of South Wilts (i 844), v, does not seem to be quite correct. John Davenant's will shows an interest in the Merchant Taylors of London, at whose school three of his sons, but not William, were educated.2 It is reasonable to identify him with the son of a John Davenett who became free of the Merchant Taylors in 1563, was warden of the company in 1592,3 and was probably of an Essex family, from which also came John (1576-1641), Bishop of Salisbury. His son John was born in 1565, himself went to the Merchant Taylors' School in 1575, was apprenticed in 1 5 8 1 , and became free of the Merchant Taylors in 1 58 9,4 Thereafter he disappears from London ; there is nothing to connect him with Bristol. At Oxford, 'Mr John Davenauntt vintener' took out his freedom by purchase and obtained a city licence to sell wine on 4 June 1 604.5 He passed through the various stages of the municipal hierarchy, became mayor in 1621, and died during his mayoralty on 19 April 1622.* The earliest
1 H.P. ii. 46, from P.C.C. Saville, History of the Merchant Taykrs, ii. 343. IZ3« 4 Robinson, i. 23.
a C. J. Robinson, Register ofMer- * O.C.A. 160. chant Taylors9 School, i. 85, 97, 98. « Ibid. -?o8.
3 Acheson 61 15 C. M. Clode, Early
Chap. XI THE SONNETS 573
traces of him in Oxford are the christenings in St. Martin's chjirch of his children Jane (n Feb. 1602), Robert (14 March 1603), Alice (30 Dec. 1604), William (3 March 1606). Here the name is Dennant, Devenet, and Daven- annt, and in the entry of 1603 John is already a vintner. His wife, buried a few days before him, was a Jane. Matcham calls her Jane Shepherd of Durham. Verses, once preserved at Warwick Castle, call her 'a vertuous wife', and bid the pair 'Sleepe ondisturb'ed as in your marriage- bed'.1 Their second son, William, became the well-known playwright and theatrical manager of Caroline and Res- toration days. It is not necessary to go to Bristol for the John Bird and 'sister Hatton' of Davenant's will, A John Bird, mercer, was his colleague on the city council, and had himself been mayor in 1615-16. He is traceable from 1 60 1 to 1625, and therefore survived Davenant.2 A Timothy Hatton, embroiderer, was also of the council. He took a lease of a house at Eynsham, which the city had recently purchased, on 29 February 1616 and was buried on 5 November i6i6,3 His widow may well have been Davenant's 'sister Hatton'. The tradition of Shakespeare's relations with the Davenants is given in 1681 by Aubrey (App. C, no. xiii), in part at least from Robert Davenant and Samuel Butler, and in 1692 by Wood (App. C, no.
• •\ j 1 t_ _ . 1 T_T — / A _.»* /"* «** wt»»M^ -rwr\\f\ n-e\+ 1+ At
XXX, XXXIV, XXXVy, WilU gut 11 uuwwgii -M. vy ">«." ~~..
Rowe does not mention it. Wood is discreet, but the rest all know the rumour that William Davenant was the natural son of Shakespeare, which was first put in print by Chetwood (App. C, no. xxxvii) in 1749. The scandal, whether there was any ground for it or not, includes, from Hearne onwards, a jest, which is first found in John Taylor's Wit and Mirth (1629). Here it is anonymous, but according to Oldys Taylor picked up other jests in his collection at Oxford.
A boy, whose mother was noted to be one not overloden with
H P ii. 48.
574 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
honesty, went to seeke his godfather, and enquiring for him, quoth one to him, Who is thy godfather ? The boy repli'd, his name is goodman Digland the gardiner. Oh, said the man, if he be thy godfather, he is at the next alehouse, but I fear thou takest God's name in vain.
It is likely enough that Shakespeare sojourned with the Davenants on his way between London and Stratford, and that William was his godson. And it is, one fears, not unlikely that William, desirous to be thought Shake- speare's poetic son, was tolerant to the ascription of a more literal paternity. But the story, such as it is, is a seven- - teenth-century one, and can have nothing to do with WilloUe his Avisa in 1594. John Davenant certainly lived at some time in the house known in Wood's day as the Crown Tavern, the history of which has been traced by E. T. Leeds. It survives, refronted, as 3 Cornmarket St., Oxford, and here, in an upper room, probably once a bed- chamber, was discovered in 1927* the interesting mural decoration of flowers and vines and pious utterance, reproduced as Plate XVI. The house stood in St. Martin's parish, and seems to have been contiguous at the back to the Cross (now Golden Cross) Inn, from which a small intervening tenement separated it on the street front. It was the property of New College, in whose books a series of leases of it are recorded. There were, however, evidently sub-leases from time to time to actual occupiers. Vintry in Oxford was subject to licence, and the juris- diction was disputed between the university and the city, each of which appears to have issued three licences.2 One John Tattleton had a college lease of No. 3 from 1564 to his death in 1581. He may have been a vintner, but no licence is on record. In 1583 John Underhill had a lease, but Elizabeth Tattleton was still occupier. In 1592 William Hough junior had a lease, and William Hough, furrier, was resident. A William Hough died about 1596, and his son, also a William, about 1606. The elder William had college leases of the Cross Inn in 1574, 1 583, and 1592, but the actual occupier here up to 1583
1 Oxford Times for 6 July 1928. * O.C.P. 347.
Chap. XI ' THE SONNETS 575
was John Waklin. Hough's widow Joan remarried with John Staunton and still occupied No. 3 in 1601, She was then for the second time a widow, but her husband had conveyed the Cross Inn to her brother Pearse Underbill, who died as innholder there in 1604, and in 1605 Andrew Leigh had a college lease of the inn. Pearse Underbill had obtained university licences both for an inn and a wine-shop in 1596. At an earlier date (1583-92) he had held a college lease of the small tenement between No. 3 and the Cross. Joan Staunton bought a garden behind No. 3 in 1 60 1 and was still alive in 1622, when she gave it to her son Daniel. But she cannot then have been still resident at No. 3, since on i August 1613 a college lease had been granted to Walter Payne, and in this the house is described as in the occupation of 'John Davenett, vintner, late Elizabeth Tattleton widow', Davenant was still in 'my house, the taverne' at the time of his death in 1622, and his lease had then another five or six years to run.
He left the house to his son Robert, but with a right to his apprentice Thomas Hallom, in the event of his marrying one of his daughters, to use the wine-shop. There is a little puzzle about this, since provision is made for the pay- ment of a rent to *Mr Huffe', and the New College leases suggest that the Houghs had no interest at this time in No. 3, although Daniel Hough obtained such a lease in 1627. Conceivably a rent was due to him in 1622 for the garden, which was not the property of New College until 1 638 when he sold it to them. But one would expect also to find a rent due for the house to some inheritor of Walter Payne, who died in I6I9-1 Conceivably, again, Daniel Hough acquired Payne's interest. In any case Thomas Hallom did marry Jane Davenant in 1622, and they remained as occupiers and vintners at least to 1636. Up to this date the house seems to have had no sign but a bush. It is still called 'Tattleton Y in 1627. By 1648 it was the Salutation and by 1675 the Crown. A Crown from which a burial is noted in 1622 was presumably another house.* John Davenant's tenancy of No. 3 from
'A. Wood, City of Oxford, w.w » C. ].
576 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
1613 overlaps with Shakespeare's lifetime. It is not so clear that it existed earlier and covered the date of William Davenant's birth in 1606. Walter Payne had a city wine licence in 1595, with a proviso that he was not to appoint a substitute without consent. He also held a city inn or victualling licence in 1596, and is still described as an innholder in i6i7.x He was, however, also a cordwainer, and long acted as scrutator of leather for the city.2 Salter suggests that he surrendered his wine licence, and that it is this which was granted to Davenant in 1 604.3 It may be so, but this would not bring Davenant to No. 3 Cornmarket St. Moreover, holders of city licences had to be freemen,4 and John was already a vintner by 1 603. Probably, therefore, he then held a university licence, and apparently he still had one in 1611—12, and probably in 1620 when he surrendered his city one. If this was that granted to Pearse Underhill in 1596, Davenant might have obtained with it the occupation of No. 3 at some time after 1601. I must leave it at that, but it is necessary to add that a wine-shop was not a place of accommodation for travellers, and that if Shakespeare stayed there, it was presumably as a private guest of the Davenants. On the other hand, a Christ Church lease of property adjoining the Cross Inn in 1619 is said by Acheson, 655, on the authority of Salter, to show John Davenant, vintner, as then occupying the inn under Walter Payne. This, of course, suggests that Shake- speare may have sojourned there, but not before 1605. There is no reference to the inn in Davenant's will.
1 Wood, City of Oxford, iii. 35. a O.C.P. 349.
* O.C.A. x, 92, 105, 106, 114, 152. 4 O.C.A. 84.
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SALISBURY . Baker Avenue
572 THE POEMS, AND SONNETS Chap. XI
have lived, although he did not, at the sign of St. George. And according to Acheson, it was with this wife that Shakespeare had an amour, which tradition has trans- ferred to Davenant's blameless second wife Jane. The link is in Davenant's will of 1622, in which he makes a John Bird overseer, and invites 'my sister Hatton' to live
Chap. XI THE SONNETS 573
traces of him in Oxford are the christenings in St. Martin's chjirch of his children Jane (n Feb. 1602), Robert (14 March 1603), Alice (30 Dec. 1604), William (3 March 1606). Here the name is Dennant, Devenet, and Daven- annt, and in the entry of 1603 John is already a vintner. His wife, buried a few days before him, was a Jane.
566 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
If so, perhaps the best guess which has been made at a 'Mr W. H.' by the believers in Southampton is Sir William Harvey, who married his mother in 1598. Lee 68 1 offered William Hall He found a W. H. who wrote a dedication to the Foure-fold Meditation printed as Robert Southwell's in 1 606, assumed that both were the William Hall, who was a printer in 1609, but did not print the Sonnets, and gave a blessing to a further assump- tion that this was also a William Hall who married at Hackney in 1608 and might therefore be congratulated on the birth of a child in 1 609. He did not go so far as to suggest with Fort and others that *Mr. w. H. ALL . HAPPI- NESSE' might be read in a double sense by the omission of a full stop. But all his equations seem to me quite un- warrantable, in view 'of the commonness of the initials W. H. and the name Hall And there is some unconscious humour in the notion of Thorpe's dedicating the volume to a printer whom he had not employed. To me it seems more difficult, every time I read the dedication, to believe that, even in Thorpe's affected phrasing, the person to whom he wished eternity was any other than the person to whom the 'ever-living poet' promised eternity. Nor do I feel that in such a document there would be anything very out of the way either in the inversion of initials or in the suppression of an actual or courtesy title. If South- ampton was meant by 'Mr W. H.' both these things have been done; if Herbert, one only. The case for Herbert was elaborately argued by Thomas Tyler and others thirty years ago, and I think that it was mishandled. Obsessed by Mary Fitton, they put the bulk of the son- nets in 1598-1601, after Herbert had come to live in
PLATE XIV
550 THE POEMS AND SONNETS Chap. XI
mostly pay some compliment to the phoenix theme. That of Shakespeare cannot rest upon any deep study of Chester's work, since it laments the childless death of the phoenix and turtle. A son or other relative of Salisbury wrote verses on the First Folio (App. B, no. liv).
V. A LOVER'S COMPLAINT
[For Bibliographical History, see Sonnets.] Modern Edition. G. Wyndham (1898).
Dissertations. N. Delius, A.LC. (1885, J. xx. 41; AbL ii. 223); G. Sarrazin, Vbtr Shs Klage der Litbenden (1902, Kleine 8h. $todieii)\ J. W. Mackail, A.L.C. (1912, Essays and Studies si English Assn. iii. 51); J. M. Robertson, A.L.C. (1917, 8k. and Chapman, 7).
The Shakespearean authorship of A Lover's Complaint is open to much doubt. Mackail points to many features of diction, syntax, and phrasing which, in their cumulative effect tell against him, and finds 'a certain laboriousness,
Chap. XI ASCRIBED VERSES 55I
no. xviii) and Jonson (App. B, no, xxii), and will here note two others,
(a) Epitaph on Elias James.
An
Epitaph
When god was pleas'd f world vnwilling yet Elias James to nature payd his debt And here reposeth; as he liv'd he dyde The saying, in him strongly verefi'de Such life such death f* ye known truth to tell He liv'd a godly life and dy'de as well.
Wm: Shakespeare.
This is from BodL Rawlinson Poet. MS. 160, f. 41. It is dated in the Cat. 'about 1640', and I note poems of 1630
(£) Epitaphs on the Stanleys.
Shaksoeare An Epitaph on Sr Edward Standly.
528 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
von Tyrland. Unless these are mere coincidences, there may have been some unrecorded channel of transmission. An Apolonius and Camilla was registered by John Perrin on 9 October
IV. THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN
[S.R. 1634.] 8° Aprilis Master John Waterson Entred for his Copy vnder the hands of Sir Henry Herbert and master Aspley warden a Tragi Comedy called the two noble kinsmen by John ffletcher and William Shakespeare. vjd. (Arber, iv. 316). [Q. 1634.] The Two Noble Kinsmen: Presented at the
Chap, X THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN 529
[Fa, 1679.] Fifty Comedies and Tragedies. Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen. All in one Volume. Published by the Authors Original Copies, the Songs to each Play being added. [Motto] London, Printed by J. Macock, for John Martyn, Henry Herring- man, Richard Marriot, M.D.CLXXIX.
Modern Editions. W. W. Skeat (1875); H. Littledale (1876-85, N.S.S.); W. J. Rolfe (1891); C. H. Herford (1897); C. F. Tucker Brooke (1908, Sh. Apocrypha).
Dissertations. W. Spalding, A Letter on Sh.'s Authorship of TJOT.(i833; 1876, N.S.S.) ; S. Hickson, The Shares of SA. and F. in TJf.K. (1847, Westminster Review, xcii. 59; 1874, N.S.S. Trans. 25*, with additions by F. G. Fleay and F. J.Furnivall); N. Delias, Die angebliche SA.-F. Autor- schaft Jes Dramas T.N.K. (1878, J. xiii. 16; AbL ii. i); R. Boyle, St.
Si8 PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO Chap. X
But I do not see any evidence of revision. The Countess episode is linked to the rest by references at iii. 3.155 and iii. 5. 100, and R. M. Smith points out that both writers use Froissart for incidents not in Holinshed. For the Countess episode Painter, who repeats additions made to "RYoissart bv Bandello, is also drawn upon. Robertson's
Chap.X PERICLES 519
[Differentiated from Qi by 'Eneer Gower' for 'Enter Gower' on sign. A 2 and other variant readings.] Facsimile. C. Praetorius (1886, Sh. Q. xxii, cd. P. Z. Round). [Q3. 161 1.] The Late And much admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true Relation of the whole History, aduentures, and fortunes of the sayd