Early British Drama in Manuscript (British Manuscripts) 9782503575469, 2503575463

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Early British Drama in Manuscript

British Manu­scripts General Editor A. S. G. Edwards, University of Kent

Volume 1

Early British Drama in Manuscript

Edited by

Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

© 2019, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2019/0095/4 ISBN: 978-2-503-57546-9 e-ISBN: 978-2-503-57547-6 DOI: 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.113206 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements xiii Transcription Conventions

xiv

Abbreviations xv Introduction Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill

1

Production The Brome Abraham and Isaac and Impersonal Compilation Joe Stadolnik

The Coventry Playbooks Pamela M. King

The Towneley Plays: Huntington Library MS HM 1 Alexandra F. Johnston

Un-Dating the Chester Plays: A Reassessment of Lawrence Clopper’s ‘History and Development’ and MS Peniarth 399 Matthew Sergi

19 33 55

71

Contents

vi

Noting Baiazet, the Raging Turk

Kirsten Inglis and Mary Polito

John of Bordeaux: Performance and the Revision of Early Modern Dramatic Manu­scripts James Purkis

James Compton and Cosmo Manuche and Dramatic Manu­scripts in the Interregnum William Proctor Williams

103

123

137

Performance The Play of Wit and Science: Evidence for the Performance of a Choir School Manu­script Louise Rayment

Sixteenth-Century Courtly Mumming and Masking: Alexander Montgomerie’s The Navigatioun Sarah Carpenter

Speech and Silence in an Actor’s Part Jakub Boguszak

‘In witnes here of I set to my hand’: Early Modern Actors’ Offstage Textual Rituals Kara J. Northway

Comedy, Clowning, and the Caroline King’s Men: Manu­script Plays and Performance Lucy Munro

Unfolding Action: Locked Letters as Props in the Early Modern Theatre Daniel Starza Smith and Jana Dambrogio

153

165 183

197

213 229

Contents

vii

Reception Remediating Sixteenth-Century Drama: Gismond of Salerne in Script and Print Tamara Atkin

The Early Manu­script Reception of Shakespeare: The Formation of Shakespearean Literary Taste Jean-Christophe Mayer

Comedies and Tragedies ‘read of me’ and ‘not yet learned’: Dramatic Extracting in Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson D 952 Beatrice Montedoro

Seeing is Believing: External vs. Internal Evidence in the Controversy over the Ireland Forgeries Antonia Forster

The Macro Plays in Georgian England Gail McMurray Gibson

‘Unseen things seen’: Digital Editing and Early Modern Manu­script Plays Matteo Pangallo

Mongrel Forms: Print-Manu­script Hybridity and Digital Methods in Annotated Plays Rebecca Munson

249

267

279

297 311

329

345

Index of Manuscripts

363

General Index

365

List of Illustrations

Joe Stadolnik Figure 1.1. Abraham and Isaac in the Book of Brome. New Haven, CT, Yale Uni­ver­sity, Beinecke Rare Book & Manu­script Library, MS 365, fol. 20r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Pamela M. King Figure 2.1. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/1, fol. 1r. . . . . . . . . . 35 Figure 2.2. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol. 2r. . . . . . . . . . 37 Figure 2.3. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol. 6v. . . . . . . . . 38 Figure 2.4. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol. 17r. . . . . . . . . 40 Figure 2.5. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, front cover. . . . . 42 Figure 2.6. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol. 11v. . . . . . . . . 45 Figure 2.7. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol. 17v. . . . . . . . . 46 Figure 2.8. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, flyleaf iiir. . . . . . . 49 Figure 2.9. Digital reconstruction of the original positioning of Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, flyleaves iiv, ir, and fol. 1r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Figure 2.10. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol.11r. . . . . . . . 52

x

list of iLLUSTRATIONS

Matthew Sergi Figure 4.1. Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 399, fol. 5v. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Figure 4.2. Chester Mayors’ Books 1487–88, Chester, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, ZMB 7, fol. 1r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Table 4.1. Harmonized Clopper timeline, with Mills disputes . . . . . . . . . 76–79 Table 4.2. Development of the Chester plays, revised timeline. . . . . . . . . 94–97 Kirsten Inglis and Mary Polito Figure 5.1. Hands A–J in Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A415. . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Table 5.1. Rewording: Comparative lines from Baiazet (MS A415) and The Raging Turke (1631). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Appendix 5.1. Sample Plot Differences between MS A415 and The Raging Turke (1631) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 William Proctor Williams Table 7.1. Comparison of variants in the Huntington Library and British Library copies of The Banished Shepherdess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Sarah Carpenter Figure 9.1. The opening lines of Montgomerie’s presenter’s speech, The Navigatioun: Edinburgh, Edinburgh Uni­ver­sity Library, MS Drummond De.3.70, fols 53v–54r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168–69 Figure 9.2. Treasurer’s Accounts listing expenditure on ‘mask claithis’. Edinburgh, National Records of Scotland, E22/3 fol. 86v. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Jakub Boguszak Figure 10.1. Dashes indicating Mute’s silent responses to Morose in Jonson’s Epicene (London: William Stansby, 1616), p. 539. Folger Shakespeare Library call no. STC 14751, copy 2 (folio). . . . . . . . 191

list of iLLUSTRATIONS

xi

Lucy Munro Appendix 12.1. Roles Assigned to Thomas Pollard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Appendix 12.2. Roles Assigned to John Shank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 Daniel Starza Smith and Jana Dambrogio Figure 13.1. Letter no. 1, a bundle of letters from Bassanio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Figure 13.2. Letter no. 2, Jessica’s heart seal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Figure 13.3. Letter no. 3, Antonio to Bassanio (opened, with lock cut from corner of substrate). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Figure 13.4. Letter no. 4, Portia to Dr Bellario (letter-packet recto). . . . . . . 239 Figure 13.5. Letter no. 5, Dr Bellario to the Court (letter-packet verso). . . . 240 Figure 13.6. Letter no.6, Dr Bellario to Bassanio (same locking method used for letter no.7). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Table 13.1. Letters in The Merchant of Venice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Tamara Atkin Figure 14.1. From Google Books digitization of Philip Henry Delamotte, A Progressive Drawing Book for Beginners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250 Figure 14.2a. London, BL, MS Hargrave 205, fol. 9r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 Figure 14.2b. London, BL, MS Lansdowne 786, fol. 7r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Figure 14.3. London, BL, MS Hargrave 205, fol 21v. Detail showing lines 6–8 of the last of three sonnets to the Queen’s maids. . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Figure 14.4. Detail showing printed and handwritten commonplace marks on sig. B1v of BL 161.k.71, a copy of Tancred and Gismund (London: Thomas Scarlet for R. Robinson 1592). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262 Table 14.1. Textual witnesses to Gismond of Salerne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Table 14.2. Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.198, section 3 contents (modern foliation). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

xii

list of iLLUSTRATIONS

Appendix 14.1. Handwriting Samples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Appendix 14.1a. Detail from London, BL, MS Hargrave 205, fol. 21v showing ‘A Sonett of the Quenes maides’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Appendix 14.1b. Detail from Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Lib­ rary, MS V.a.198, fol. 11v showing ‘A Sonett of the Quenes maides’. . . . . 266 Beatrice Montedoro Figure 16.1. ‘Comedyes not yet learned’ and ‘Comedies read of me & tragedyes’. Oxford, Bodl., MS Rawlinson D 952, fol. 1r. 1630s–50s. . . . 283 Table 16.1. List of works extracted, or mentioned, in Oxford, Bodl., MS Rawlinson D 952. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 Table 16.2. A complete list of the headings in Oxford, Bodl., MS Rawlinson D 952. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290 Matteo Pangallo Figure 19.1. Detail of a sequence of revisions in Walter Mountfort’s  The Launching of the Mary (1632–33). London, BL, MS Egerton 1994, fol. 330r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 Rebecca Munson Figure 20.1. Network analysis, correlating author with annotation level in playbooks surveyed in Common Readers, Phase 1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354 Figure 20.2. Scatterplot of annotation levels over time, 1590–1660, in Common Readers, Phase 1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354

Acknowledgements

W

e wish to thank our contributors for developing their chapters through the various stages of collection, submission, and revision. We would also like to thank the series editor, Tony Edwards, for his thoughtful comments and suggestions. Guy Carney has supported this project from the outset, and we are very grateful for his help in marshalling this book from proposal to completion. We are also grateful for financial assistance from Queen Mary Uni­ver­ sity of London and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Canada Research Chair program. Special thanks is due also to Douglas Matthews for help with indexing, Shannon Cunningham for eagleeyed copyediting, and to Martine Maguire-Weltecke for careful typesetting. All errors are, however, our own.

Transcription Conventions

E

xcept for essays that have a note to explain otherwise and where quotations are taken from published editions, all transcriptions follow the following conventions: With the exception of excessive scribal pointing, manuscript punctuation has been retained. The spelling and capitalization of the original has been preserved. The letters ‘ff ’ have been retained for ‘F’; the standard and elongated forms of ‘s’ are uniformly transcribed as ‘s’. Material struck through in the original has been retained and struck through in transcription. Text interlined in the original is indicated with superscript characters in transcription. Abbreviated words have been expanded with italics to indicate letters supplied by the contributor. Where manu­scripts yield insufficient evidence to judge individual scribal habits, abbreviations are expanded to classical forms in Latin and modern British forms in English. First names have been expanded wherever possible. Abbreviations that are easily understood today (‘s.’, ‘d.’, ‘viz.’, and ‘etc’ or ‘&c’), and abbreviations cumbersome to expand, including those typical for weights and measures are retained. ‘Mr’ is expanded only when used as a noun or when occurring before another title (for example, Master Mayor); it is left unexpanded when introducing a proper name.

Symbols lost or illegible letters in the original []

conjectured letters or words supplied by the contributor

^

caret mark in the original

[...] ellipsis of original matter |

line break or change of folio

Abbreviations

Annals

Annals of English Drama, 975–1700: An Analytical Record of All Plays, Extinct or Lost, Chrono­logically Arranged and Indexed by Authors, Titles, and Dramatic Companies, ed. by Alfred Harbage and S. Schoenbaum, 3rd edn, rev. by Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London: Routledge, 1989)

Arber

A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A. D., ed. by Edward Arber, 5 vols (London: Privately printed, 1875–77)

BL

British Library, London

Bodl.

Bodleian Library, Oxford

Briquet

Briquet, C. M., Les filigranes: dictionnaire historique des marques du papier (Geneva: Jullien, 1907)

CELM Peter Beal, Catalogue of English Literary Manu­scripts CSP: Scot

Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots, 1547–1603, ed. by Joseph Bain, 12 vols (Edinburgh: H. M. General Register House, 1898)

DEEP

Database of Early English Playbooks, ed. by Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser (2007)

EEBO

Early English Books Online (Chadwyck-Healey)

EEBO-TCP Early English Books Online – Text Creation Partnership

Abbreviations

xvi

EETS

Early English Text Society

Folger

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC

Greg W.  W. Greg, Biblio­g raphy of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols (London: Printed for the Biblio­g raphical Society at the Uni­ver­sity Press, Oxford, 1939–59) NIMEV

The New Index of Middle English Verse, ed. by Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (London: British Library, 2005)

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Bio­g raphy (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004–16)

OED

Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2019)

PMLA

Publications of the Modern Language Association

REED

Records of Early English Drama

SBTRO Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Records Office STC

A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, ed. by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd edn, ed. by W.A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and K. F. Pantzer, 3 vols (London: Biblio­graphical Society, 1976–91)

TNA

The National Archives

t. p.

title-page

USTC

Universal Short Title Catalogue

Wiggins

British Drama, 1533–1643: A Catalogue, ed. by Martin Wiggins in association with Catherine Richardson, 9 vols (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011–)

Wing

Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, ed. by Donald Goddard Wing, 2nd edn, ed. by John J. Morrison and Carolyn W. Nelson, 4 vols (New York: MLA, 1972–98)

Introduction Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill

T

he study of British drama poses a particular set of challenges for scholars of premodern literature, since it relies on textual evidence to reveal truths about performance, which is by its own nature ephemeral. This book is concerned with one type of textual evidence: the manu­script. This seemingly monolithic category, however, is actually a catch-all for a variety of types of evidence: playtexts, actors’ parts, onstage props, records, and other accounts that can be used to adduce performance. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, each kind of manu­script evidence is like a piece of a puzzle. Unfortunately, with the low rate of manu­script survival, we will never have a complete puzzle; however, the more pieces we have, the better we can see the shapes and colours of the original picture of early dramatic composition, performance, and reception. In Britain, dramatic performance predates printing. Though never precisely co-terminous with their first performance, the earliest witnesses to British plays are therefore handwritten, and even for some early modern drama, the only extant texts are manu­scripts. For, as Alexandra Walsham and Julia Crick note, well after the coming of print to British shores, ‘unprinted texts occupied a fundamental place in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English life’.1 Nonetheless, after the introduction of print to the British Isles, the decision to 1 

Walsham and Crick, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.

Tamara Atkin is Senior Lecturer in Medi­eval and Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary Uni­ ver­sity of London. Laura Estill is Tier 2 Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier Uni­ver­sity in Nova Scotia.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 1–15 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116441 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill

2

communicate in a scribal medium became a choice, often determined by a range of different and sometimes competing factors: personal preference, intended function, economic cost, or even some combination of these and other variables. As many of the essays in this volume show, the relationship between script and print remained one of deep and dynamic interaction. As the longstanding and important Records of Early English Drama (REED) project demonstrates, the bulk of our knowledge of early performance necessarily comes to us from manu­script sources. Indeed, for some plays, the only evidence we have that they once existed derives from manu­scripts such as the Stationers’ Register, probate, or other kinds of inventories occasionally made of private libraries. Focusing on the production, performance, and reception of manu­scripts of plays and related documents made in Britain between 1400 and 1700, the essays in this book shed new light on the role of dramatic manu­scripts in different social and literary spheres. As Leah Marcus explains, for decades, perhaps even centuries, scholars have longed for Shakespeare’s manu­scripts, ‘whether fair copy or foul papers’, in order to ‘be brought considerably closer to the plays as the author intended them’.2 Marcus shows that manu­script evidence, contrary to these expectations, does not reify a single interpretation of the text, nor does it answer the modern desire for a single, stable idea of authorship; rather, it highlights drama’s polysemous nature. As extant manu­scripts attest, early dramatic works could be revised for different readers, adapted for print publication or republication, and altered for performances or revivals. Early British Drama in Manu­script brings into conversation medi­eval and early modern plays, and observes their textual reception from their original moments until today. While it is the case that there are some early witnesses to medi­eval drama, in many instances the manu­scripts that survive belong to a later period, copied down for reasons and in circumstances quite different to their original auspices.3 In this regard, Theresa Coletti and Gail McMurray Gibson are right to note not only that much medi­e val drama survives because of the efforts of Tudor and Stuart antiquarians and recusants, but also that ‘these same antiquarians and recusants defined [, …] structured and [, …] made what we now consider the medi­eval English dramatic corpus’.4 From extant manu­scripts 2 

Marcus, ‘The Veil of Manu­script’, p. 116. For instance, all five complete witnesses to the Chester cycle were written down between 1591 and 1607 by members of Chester’s ecclesiastical community with known antiquarian interests. On this cycle of plays, see Matthew Sergi’s essay in this volume. 4  Coletti and Gibson, ‘The Tudor Origins’, p. 228. 3 

Introduction

3

of England’s mystery cycles to miscellanies kept by seventeenth-century readers, the manu­scripts that are treated in this volume reflect a culture of producing and using drama in ways that have been overshadowed by the recent critical focus on drama and print by early modern theatre historians and literary critics. At the same time, bringing together a range of premodern witnesses to drama, this book purposefully interrogates the way that drama has been historicized, arguing not only for contiguities in terms of performance practice but also in the ways that dramatic performance has been remediated for manu­script transmission. Showing the various continuities, exchanges, lendings, and borrowings between medi­eval and early modern scribal practices, as well as between manu­ script and print practices, the volume offers new insights into the origins, performance, reception, and afterlives of premodern drama. In doing so, it offers a revaluation of the role of manu­scripts in discussion of premodern drama and creates a new dramatic landscape in which previously overlooked plays, such as Tudor interludes, are given their rightful place in literary and theatrical history. Many early manu­scripts shed light on the history of British drama; a comprehensive study of this material is beyond the scope of this volume if, indeed, it is even possible. Recent mono­graphs by Grace Ioppolo, Tiffany Stern, Simon Palfrey, Paul Werstine, Laura Estill, and James Purkis have proven how valuable it is to consider specific kinds of dramatic manu­scripts, such as full-text plays and playhouse documents, yet these are necessarily limited in their scope and focus.5 At the same time, while medi­e val dramatic scholarship is inevitably underpinned by its awareness and treatment of the manu­script situation, book-length studies that make this situation their stated focus are rare.6 The essays collected in this volume showcase a range of methodo­logical approaches to different kinds of manu­scripts: we offer multiple voices and viewpoints, just like the early manu­scripts themselves. As the following chapters demonstrate, manu­scripts can be evidence of playwrighting, of performance, of readership, of repertory…the list goes on. Before turning to the manu­scripts analyzed by each chapter, here we offer two brief examples that demonstrate how attending to these sources furthers our understanding of both early drama and manu­ script culture. * * * 5 

See biblio­graphy for details. Much of the important work in this area is therefore found in articles, such as those written for the dedicated medi­e val drama journal Medi­eval English Theatre, or in the scholarly introductions that typically accompany critical editions. 6 

Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill

4

As a ‘folio composite volume, chiefly of English and Latin verse, in various hands’, Oxford, Bodl., MS Rawlinson poet. 26 is not an unusual early modern miscellany.7 The para­g raph-long description in the Bodleian’s summary catalogue highlights some of the ‘Miscellaneous poems, speeches, ballads, lampoons, &c’, including poems by Ben Jonson and Henry King, a letter by Archbishop Laud, and a copy of a 1597 speech by Queen Elizabeth. Omitted from the catalogue entry, however (as all too often happens), is the half-page dramatic extract from Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister that was copied into this manu­script. Ralph Roister Doister is a play that draws on established manu­script poetry tradition; that shows the imbricated print and manu­script transmission of dramatic materials; and that demonstrates the importance of manu­scripts to assessing a play’s reception history. Ralph Roister Doister was written before 1553 (possibly for performance at Eton) and first published c. 1566 (STC 25408), when it was entered into the Stationers’ Register.8 In 1553, Thomas Wilson published a selection from Udall’s play in the third edition of The Rule of Reason (STC 25811), which did not appear in earlier editions: a love letter from Roister Doister to Dame Custance.9 The letter is a version of the early modern punctuation poem: a piece that, read with different punctuation, has the opposite meaning. In iii.4, Matthew Merrygreeke purposefully misreads the letter so that it offers a cruel dismissal of Dame Custance; yet, when the audience hears the letter read again in iii.5, they realize that it was indeed a love letter. The audience is led to agree with the Scrivener that ‘Then was the fault in the readyng, and not in writyng’ (iii.5.86). Ultimately, part of the drama of Udall’s play revolves around how characters read and respond to an onstage manu­script letter. Wilson’s printed version of this letter (1553) predates its publication in the full play and provides the terminus ad quem for the play’s composition. To wit, a printed copy of a staged manu­script taken from a manu­script copy of the play provides key evidence in dating the play. Wilson titles the letter ‘An example of soche doubtful writing, whiche by reason of poincting maie haue double sense, and contrarie meaning, taken out of an entrelude made by Nicolas Udal’ and, on the facing page, presents ‘The contrarie sense of the same in the same 7 

See CELM. For more on the play’s dating, see Udall, Ralph Roister Doister, ed. by Child, esp. pp. 31–32. 9  See Pittenger, ‘Nicholas Udall, Master of Revels’, for an in-depth analysis of the importance of letter as well as Wilson and Udall’s relationship. 8 

Introduction

5

woordes’ (fols 66v–67r). The double meaning revolves around punctuation, as the letter’s opening lines attests: the meaning of ‘Sweete mistresse, where as I love you, nothing at all | Regarding your richesse and substance’ (iii.5.49–50) is predicated on where the commas are placed. Udall was, of course, not the first person to invent English punctuation poetry: he was drawing on a genre that thrived in manu­script before and after he wrote Roister Doister.10 Peter Beal’s Catalogue of English Literary Manu­scripts claims that Roister Doister’s letter in Bodl. MS Rawl. poet. 26 is copied from Wilson’s guidebook and not the play, although there are few substantive differences between these texts on which to base this claim. Regardless of its direct source-text, this manu­ script demonstrates that in the seventeenth century (c. 1615–60, according to the Summary Catalogue), Udall’s punctuation game continued to circulate separately from the play itself. In the Bodleian miscellany, the letter is recontextualized as part of the manu­script genre from which it emerged: it appears below another unidentified punctuation-game letter, titled in manu­script ‘This letter consists of contrary senses in the same wordes’ (fol. 16v) and beginning, ‘Such is my love that by noe meanes I can induce yee out of my sight, nay I loath my life if I but thinke I love thee’ (fol. 16v). The anonymous punctuation-game letter, whose source we cannot trace, is presented in much the same way as Udall’s. When it appears in Wilson’s book, the dramatic origins of the punctuationgame letter are clearly marked: ‘taken out of an entrelude made by Nicolas Udal’. The final lines of the letter similarly point to their specific origin: ‘Thus good maistresse Custance the Lorde you save & kepe, | From Roisterdoister whether I wake wake or slepe’ (The Rule of Reason, fol. 67r); in manu­script, however, Roisterdoister’s name is changed to ‘In Fleetestreete’ (fol. 17r). On stage, in the printed full-text play, and in Wilson’s Rule of Reason, there would be no mistaking the letter’s source and imagined author, Roister Doister. It is only in a manu­script copy of a printed source (itself typeset from manu­script) that the dramatic origins are obscured. The importance of manu­script texts cannot be overstated for that ‘landmark of English drama,’ Ralph Roister Doister.11 Other manu­scripts constructively challenge what we mean when we talk about drama. London, BL, MS Harley 367 is a folio composite volume of miscellaneous papers, in verse and prose, in various hands, including that of the London historian John Stow (d. 1605). It contains, between fols 110r and 10  Kreuzner, ‘Some Earlier Examples’. Marotti lists further examples in Manu­script, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, pp. 56 and 284 n. 146. 11  Tudor Plays, ed. by Creeth, p. xxxi.

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6

119r, the sole copy of John Heywood’s Witty and Witless. Though it is not clear when the manu­script was first bound, there is evidence that the section containing Heywood’s text was incorporated into the collection before Robert Harley acquired it from the library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (d. 1650). The text is untitled in the manu­script, and its name derives from the one given it by Humphrey Wanley in his catalogue of Harley’s manu­scripts: ‘John Heywode Poetical Dialogue concerning Witty (i.e., Wise,) & Witless’.12 Though Wanley was careful to label it a poetic dialogue, Witty and Witless was edited as one of John Heywood’s plays in Richard Axton and Peter Happé’s collected edition, and today it is routinely included in surveys of Heywood’s dramatic works. But unlike Heywood’s other five plays, which were all printed in his lifetime, Witty and Witless was never printed, and it is unclear whether the ‘pleye of wytles’ entered to Thomas Hackett in 1560–61 is a reference to the present text, or another work altogether.13 The play’s modern editors tentatively date the manu­ script copy to c. 1544, but suggest ‘on grounds of style and subject matter’ the play is the earliest of all Heywood’s dramatic works, composed around 1525.14 The text is subscribed, ‘amen qd Iohn heywood’ (fol. 119v), and while it has been shown not to be auto­graph, there is no reason to doubt the attribution; as Reed long ago accounted, ‘the manu­script play […] in laborious closeness of debate resembles [A Play of] Love, and has many affinities of style with that play and [The Play of the] Weather’.15 At some point between the compilation of Wanley’s catalogue and the publication of Reed’s account of early Tudor drama, the text ceased to be a poetic dialogue and became a play. What is interesting about the manu­script’s mise en page is the extent to which it supports this generic ambiguity. Lines are ruled between speeches in a fashion consistent with late medi­eval dramatic manu­scripts, and speech-prefixes for the three speakers are routinely given in the right margin following the model of liturgical manu­scripts.16 So far, so dramatic. But the manu­script contains just one stage direction: ‘Thes thre stave 12 

London, BL, Additional MS 45702, fol. 50r. Our emphasis. Arber, i, 154. 14  Heywood, The Plays of John Heywood, ed. by Axton and Happè, p. 33. 15  Reed, Early Tudor Drama, p. 123. Our emphasis. 16  There are four exceptions: where speeches begin at the top of the page, as they do on fols 116r, 117v, and 118v, the speech-prefix occurs both as a catchword on the previous page, and centred above the speech itself; the play also begins with a centred speech-prefix at the top of fol. 110r. Catchwords are not otherwise used in the copy of the play. 13 

Introduction

7

next folowyng in the | Kyngs Absens, are voyde’ (fol. 118v). Stage directions in Heywood’s printed plays are rare, but when they do occur they mark essential actions, or entrances and exits. They are, in other words, concerned with onstage movement. But the stage direction in Harley 367 is not about movement at all, and instead suggests how the text should be abridged to suit different auspices; only in the king’s presence should the penultimate three stanzas (‘staves’) be recited. The stage direction supports the view that the text was performed, perhaps more than once (both before the king and ‘in his absence’), but the kind of performance implied is curiously undramatic. And as a disputation on the theme of folly, it seems closer to Erasmian dialogue than anything intended for the stage. As a performed dialogue, Witty and Witless contributes to the broad definition of drama employed by this volume. But it also points up the productive two-way exchange between manu­script and print in the presentation of late medi­e val and early modern drama. For while the arrangement of the text is indebted to medi­eval scribal conventions, the explicit clearly echoes contemporary print practice. Similar explicits occur at the end of no fewer than eight early printed playbooks.17 The earliest of these, Lusty Juventus, was printed around 1551 but the remaining seven — including two subsequent editions of Lusty Juventus — were all printed between 1565 and 1570. They include the third edition of Heywood’s play The Four P’s (1569), where the Explicit ‘FINIS q Ihon Heywood’ replaces the title-page attribution found in the earlier two editions. While the copy of Witty and Witless in Harley 367 has been cautiously dated to the mid-1540s, it might be that the explicit suggests a later copying date, perhaps closer to the Stationer’s Register entry in 1560–61. Certainly, the note brings the manu­script in line with a number of plays printed during the 1560s. But it is equally clear that the articulation of attribution as a speech act — ‘quod’ comes from the Middle English quethen, ‘to say, speak’ — itself derives from an earlier scribal convention (though one typically used to identify scribes rather than authors), and the phrase may have been adopted by printers of plays as a deliberately archaicizing trope, a way of signalling the age or old-fashioned style of a given play. In Harley 367 the play’s presentation as a dialogue voiced by John Heywood is therefore shaped by contemporary print practice, which is in turn a product of medi­eval scribal convention. 17 

Here taken to mean before 1577, by which time permanent purpose-built theatres were established in London. A number of playbooks printed after that date adopt a similar formation, but not after 1587.

Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill

8

The Roister Doister and Witty and Witless manu­scripts, like those explored in the chapters of this book, show how important it is to nuance the critical categories on which we so often rely, including genre, medium, and chrono­logy. There was not a break in how medi­e val and early modern manu­scripts were written, yet so often our scholarship treats one without the other. Furthermore, drama in manu­script is a function not just of transcribing a performed text: it relies on the textual practices of manu­script culture, which, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, interacted with and was inflected by print. * * * This volume is divided into three sections: Production, Performance, and Reception — although, of course, these categories overlap in practice. Within each section, the essays are presented in a roughly chrono­logical order, though naturally many of these pieces challenge simple teleo­logies. What is a ‘playbook’? What relationship do scribal copies of plays bear to performance, whether historical, future, or imagined? Such questions lie at the heart of the essays in the first section of this volume, which share an interest in the mental and material conditions of playbook production. As a textual medium, manu­scripts challenge and interrogate the categorical identification of drama, and Joe Stadolnik’s essay on the Brome Abraham and Isaac play begins by asking ‘What kind of book is the Book of Brome?’ Identifying the manu­script as an impersonal compilation, copied and assembled by a professional scribe, his essay presents the idea that as early as the late fifteenth century, drama could exist as a textual genre, copied for private, leisure-time reading, rather than as a witness to performance. The Book of Brome famously includes the scattered notes of one of its early owners, Robert Melton, and recent scholarship has tended to situate the play in the context of Melton’s personal affiliations, but as evidence of dramatic compilation, Stadolnik suggests the Brome Abraham and Isaac may represent the once widespread place of drama in late medi­e val miscellanies. Other chance survivals also testify to the lost richness of medi­eval English drama. In her essay, Pamela M. King offers a codico­logical description of two manu­script witnesses to the pageant of the Presentation of the Virgin and Christ’s Debate with the Doctors originally presented by the Coventry Weavers’ guild. Unlike the Book of Brome, which includes its dramatic material for private study, King shows that the texts of the Coventry Weavers’ pageant were functional playbooks, written for and used continuously by the guild with which they are associated. So, unlike surviving manu­scripts of other pageants, which serve, in different ways, as a record of past performance,

Introduction

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these manu­scripts testify the function of scripted drama to enable future performance. And unlike printed playbooks, produced in multiple copies, these single, authoritative copies reflect the special relationship between the known players, location, and audience of these plays. A number of the volume’s essays explore the implications of the codico­logical evidence for the redating of certain manu­scripts. Alexandra Johnston’s essay on the Towneley plays, San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 1, offers a new context for the plays as a legal document prepared for the Ecclesiastical Commission of the North. Exploring the consequences of Malcolm Parkes’s definitive redating of the manu­script to the mid-1550s, Johnston suggests it functioned as a single authoritative copy used as evidence for the suppression of all Catholic plays in the North. So, where earlier scholars have tended to judge this particular book by its cover, its elegant nineteenth-century binding, Johnston shows that it bears many of the marks of a legal document drawn up in haste. Matthew Sergi also revisits the dating for a major witness to medi­ eval drama, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 399, a fragmentary copy of the Chester Antichrist play. Scholars have regularly dated Peniarth 399 to the late fifteenth century, but revising the generally accepted findings of Lawrence Clopper’s seminal 1978 article on the dating of the Chester cycle, Sergi makes a case for a radically undatable manu­script tradition in which the late fifteenthcentury text of the Antichrist play is preserved in both Peniarth 399, but also later antiquarian full-cycle copies made in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Positing the idea of a ‘collage’ exemplar made up of early unrevised texts as well as revisions and additions in order to account for these later full-cycle witnesses, Sergi demonstrates the extent to which the anachronistic divide between the medi­eval and early modern does not apply to the Chester plays. But rather than lament their undateability, he celebrates the remarkable resistance to dates that allowed them to survive so long in performance. Other essays in this section consider the manu­script life of plays that also survive in printed versions. Building on their published work on the relationship between the seventeenth-century play in manu­script in the Uni­ver­sity of Calgary’s Osborne Collection and the miscellany of plays at Arbury Hall, Warwickshire, as the scribal work of John Newdigate, Mary Polito and Kirsten Inglis investigate Newdigate and his circle for evidence of the circulation of manu­scripts in the Caroline period. Taking as their focus another unscrutinized play manu­script from the Newdigate archives, they show that the study of certain dramatic manu­scripts allows for deeper insight into the working relationships between professional, amateur, and hobbyist playwrights. Arbury 415 contains a copy of a play called Baiazet, which was written by Thomas

10

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Goffe and printed in 1631 as The Raging Turk. The manu­script version of the play contains no fewer than ten separate hands, but the chief transcriber — and presumptive amender — seems to have been Newdigate himself. Developing Tiffany Stern’s work on noted texts, Polito and Inglis show that the manu­script was a product of a team of note-takers who must have attended an early performance of the play at Oxford. The manu­script history of drama is often one of loss, but sometimes loss, absence, or lack can be instructive. In his chapter on the manu­script copy of John of Bordeaux held at Alnwick Castle, James Purkis shows how manu­script lacunae provide occasion for rethinking how playbooks functioned in theatrical production. Generally accepted as a theatrical abridgement, the extant manu­ script is missing speeches, dumb shows, and at one point, an entire scene. These omissions can be explained in a variety of ways, but as Purkis shows, they offer a valuable reminder of the tenuousness of the relationship between performance and the copying of early modern plays in manu­script. The relationship between text and performance is also at the heart of William Proctor Williams’s chapter on members of the circle of James Compton, the third earl of Northampton, and the plays written, revised, and performed by them during the Interregnum. Though in many ways atypical, this circle was not unique, and it was made up of actors, playwrights, and theatre owners, among them those associated with both the Queen’s and King’s Men: Compton’s circle affords important insight into theatrical activity at a time when public performance was banned. While a number of essays in the volume attest the role of manu­script in the dissemination of drama for leisure-time reading, the essays in the second section share a concern with issues of performance. In the first essay of this section, Louise Rayment takes as her focus a manu­script miscellany: London, BL, Additional MS 15233, a mid-Tudor collection of keyboard music, drama, song lyrics, and poetry that contains the sole witness to John Redford’s Play of Wit and Science (c. 1540). Like other manu­scripts discussed in the volume, the play is incomplete, but it nonetheless includes interesting scribal additions, insertions, and marginalia that suggest the copy was actively used as a performance text in the middle of the sixteenth century. And, examining the relation between the play and the other items in the miscellany, Rayment shows that the manu­script is best understood as a performance document from a mid-sixteenth-century London choir school. In her essay, Sarah Carpenter examines two presenters’ speeches by the Scots poet Alexander Montgomerie for a mask or mumming performed at the court of the young James VI in the late sixteenth century. Like Stadolnik, Carpenter fruitfully explores the possibility that the chance survival of these speeches might reflect the wider, if

Introduction

11

still fragmentary, context for manu­script witnesses to this elite genre of performance in late medi­e val and early modern Britain. Bringing these speeches together with other scripted examples — John Lydgate’s presenter’s speech for a Twelfth Night mumming (c. 1430) and George Gascoigne’s presenter’s speech for a wedding mask (1572) — Carpenter is able to identify shared generic features: scripts that do survive tend to be for presenters rather than performers and are more likely to describe the journey to court than summarize the performance to come. Examining this evidence in the light of financial records, the essay shows that even as other forms of spoken drama were increasingly taking printed form, this elite theatrical form continued to flourish. Jakub Boguszak turns to actors’ parts, those manu­scripts that underpin professional performance, perhaps even more so than the ho­lograph play. Boguszak performs a close reading of the acting part that would have been seen by the actor playing Trapdoor in The Roaring Girl, showing how the manu­ script creates the ‘connective tissue’ needed to build character. Most importantly, however, Boguszak demonstrates how an actor’s part can also showcase silences, both mid-speech and between lines. Kara Northway shows how offstage manu­scripts, notably witnessed debts, were just as pivotal in facilitating performance as script-based documents like actors’ parts. As Northway convincingly describes, actor-sharers regularly served as witnesses for debts and also borrowed money, as evidenced by extant letters and Philip Henslowe’s diary. Northway’s para-dramatic manu­scripts demonstrate how acting companies functioned as both communities and businesses. Lucy Munro similarly turns to manu­script evidence to reveal acting company practices: in this case, how clowns were cast. Munro’s analysis of the manu­scripts of The Soddered Citizen, The Swisser, and Believe As You List reveals how comic roles were tailored for their actors, without relying simply on typecasting. Munro establishes how early modern playwrights modified clowning roles to highlight each clown’s linguistic ability and facility for performing solo or as part of an ensemble. In their chapter, Daniel Starza Smith and Jana Dambrogio describe the recently developed field of letterlocking : how early letters were folded, sealed, and sent. Smith and Dambrogio conjecture about what early letter props would have signalled to the audience before showing how they designed letters for a modern production of Merchant of Venice (performed in Venice in 2016). As their essay shows, early plays were self-consciously concerned with on-stage manu­scripts, which should be reflected in both our scholarship and performance practices. The final section of this book shows how manu­script evidence is key to understanding the reception of early plays, from their original moments of

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composition, performance, and sometimes publication to modern moments of editing or digitization. The essays in this section turn to evidence such as marginalia, provenance, and forgery as signals of how early plays have been read, valued, and perceived. The final section begins with an essay in which Tamara Atkin shows how some dramatic manu­scripts mimic the conventions of print dramatic texts with their mise en page. Atkin demonstrates how a fragment of the Inns of Court play Gismond of Salerne is found in new contexts with new paratexts, creating meaning distinct from the full-text of the play. As Atkin observes, as it stands now, this witness to Gismond is unperformable; however, this textual transmission is evidence of the how the play became a primarily written commodity designed to be read and, indeed, used. Jean-Christophe Mayer offers a survey of readerly responses to Shakes­ pearean plays, demonstrating that early critical opinions about the plays were just as divided as they are today. Mayer considers how William Scott’s The Model of Poesy positions Shakespeare’s works as aesthetic texts to be emulated. This chapter traces how early annotators and commentators — including the unknown annotator of the Meisei folio, William Johnstoune, and Abraham Wright — value Shakespeare’s plays for plot, characterization, and artistic merit. Complementing Mayer’s broad approach to extant evidence, Beatrice Montedoro concentrates on a single early reader who kept the earliest known commonplace book filled with selections from plays. This hitherto overlooked manu­script reveals the tastes of a reader interested in academic drama as well as recent Caroline plays. Montedoro reveals how this reader commonplaced parts of plays, organizing them under headings that direct interpretation. As Montedoro demonstrates, this reader was interested in plays not only as a source of rhetorically well-phrased wisdom, but also as a quarry of practical and current language, applicable especially to social situations. Antonia Forster and Gail McMurray Gibson both show the continued importance of early manu­scripts into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Forster details the uproar provoked by William Henry Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries, demonstrating how invested the public was in the value and meaning of a Shakespearean manu­script: ‘people believed in the documents because they wanted them to be real’. As Forster demonstrates, the Georgian sensibilities and scholarly impulses mirror some we still see today. Gibson similarly treats the Georgian reception of early drama, in this case, however, turning to real historic documents that preserve the texts of the Macro Plays: Wisdom, Mankind, and The Castle of Perseverance. Gibson shows how Dawson Turner and Hudson Gurney were instrumental in the plays’ preservation. Gibson relates how the Macro Plays, now considered established parts of the canon

Introduction

13

of medi­eval drama, came to be known because of an antiquarianist impulse to collect early texts. The volume’s final two essays, by Matteo Pangallo and Rebecca Munson respectively, look to the reception of early dramatic manu­scripts today. Using his forthcoming edition of The Launching of the Mary as a case study, Pangallo outlines how manu­script plays strain the conventions of print textual studies and can be fruitfully presented in digital editions. Pangallo points to the relative scarcity of early full-text manu­script plays to suggest that digitization (including transcription, photo­graphing, and editing) is feasible but will require collaboration. Munson similarly advocates for collaborative, digital work to facilitate new research on early archival sources; the focus of her project, Common Readers, is on annotated copies of early modern printed plays. Munson contends that the compilational approaches of digital humanities are best suited to represent the compilational tendencies exhibited by early annotators of plays. Munson concludes by suggesting that new digital projects will continue to broaden our understanding of early dramatic manu­scripts. Indeed, the research for many of the chapters in this volume would not be possible without existing digital resources: from biblio­graphic projects such as the Catalogue of English Literary Manu­scripts (CELM) and the Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP) to digitization projects such as British Literary Manu­scripts Online (BLMO) and Early English Books Online (EEBO). Even onsite archival research has changed as a consequence of online library catalogues and call systems. To facilitate the next generation of researchers, we must be purposeful in the digital tools we develop for the study of early British drama and manu­ script. For while digital resources remain poor surrogates for the originals, they can often enliven study in new and excitingly unpredictable ways. The studies in this volume highlight the importance of manu­script evidence to our understanding of early British dramatic texts, paratexts, and contexts. There is yet more work to be done: there are more manu­scripts to be discovered, examined, and re-evaluated.

14

Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill

Works Cited Manu­scripts London, BL, MS Additional 45702 —— , MS Harley 367 Oxford, Bodl., MS Rawlinson poet. 26

Primary Sources Heywood, John, The Plays of John Heywood, ed. by Richard Axton and Peter Happè (Cam­bridge: Brewer, 1991) Tudor Plays: An Antho­logy of Early English Drama, ed. by Edmund Creeth (New York: Norton, 1966) Udall, Nicholas, [Ralph Roister Doister] ([1566?], STC 24508) —— , Ralph Roister Doister, ed. by Clarence Griffin Child (Boston: Houghton MifflinRiverside, 1912) Wilson, Thomas, The Rule of Reason, 3rd edn (1553, STC 25811)

Secondary Sources Coletti, Theresa, and Gail McMurray Gibson, ‘The Tudor Origins of Medi­eval Drama’, in A Companion to Tudor Drama, ed. by Kent Cartwright (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 228–45 Estill, Laura, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manu­scripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays (Newark: Uni­ver­sity of Delaware Press, 2015) Kreuzner, James R., ‘Some Earlier Examples of the Rhetorical Device in Ralph Roister Doister (III. iv. 33ff.)’, Review of English Studies, o.s, 14.55 (1938), 321–23 Ioppolo, Grace, Dramatists and their Manu­scripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton (New York: Routledge, 2002) Marcus, Leah, ‘The Veil of Manu­script’, Renaissance Drama, 30 (1999–2001), 115–31 Marotti, Arthur, Manu­script, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995) Palfrey, Simon, and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007) Pittenger, Elizabeth, ‘Nicholas Udall, Master of Revels’, in Queering the Renaissance, ed. by Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke Uni­ver­sity Press, 1994), pp. 162–89 Purkis, James, Shakespeare and Manu­script Drama: Canon, Collaboration, and Text (Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2016) Reed, A. W., Early Tudor Drama: Medwall, the Rastells, and the More Circle (London: Methuen, 1926) Stern, Tiffany, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009)

Introduction

15

—— , ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers: Hamlet Q1 as a “Noted” Text’, Shakespeare Survey, 66 (2013), 1–23 Walsham, Alexandra, and Julia Crick, ‘Introduction: Script, Print, and History’, in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, ed. by Alexandra Walsham and Julia Crick (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003), pp. 1–26 Werstine, Paul, Early Modern Playhouse Manu­scripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013)

Production

The Brome Abraham and Isaac and Impersonal Compilation Joe Stadolnik

W

hat kind of book is the Book of Brome? Lucy Toulmin Smith, who studied the manu­script in situ at Brome Hall, calls it a ‘commonplace book’ in the title of her 1886 edition. But in her introduction, the Book of Brome is only called a ‘small paper manu­script’, in which an early owner — one Robert Melton of nearby Stuston in Suffolk — ‘wanted to put down his notes of manorial duties and other matters […] and finding this volume only half filled with poetry, used it for his purpose’.1 Thomas E. Marston ventures too that Brome might ‘best be described as a commonplace book’ when it was acquired by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­script Library in 1967 (where it is now MS 365). Yet Barbara Shailor’s catalogue entry on the manu­script ventures nothing beyond ‘book’, ‘codex’, or ‘manu­script’.2 Recently scholars have classed the Book of Brome more consistently as a miscellany rather than commonplace book (now understood to mean a compendium of short, sententious notes, excerpted in reading, as practised by early modern humanists). As Carol M. Meale observes, Robert Melton jots down his varied notes on commercial transactions and useful recipes into only part of the book, and these jottings-down are not the standard aphoristic fare copied out into

1  2 

A Commonplace Book, ed. by Toulmin Smith, p. 2. Marston, ‘The Book of Brome’; Shailor, Catalogue, pp. 210–14.

Joe Stadolnik is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Instructor at the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 19–32 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116442 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

20 Joe Stadolnik

what we would call commonplace books today.3 Meale, then, prefers to call the Book of Brome an amateur miscellany and, alternately, a personal compilation.4 Yet much of the miscellaneous material of the book predates Melton’s amateur additions to it, notes of transactions made between 1499 and 1508. Poetry, as Toulmin Smith could readily see, had half-filled this book beforehand, and among that poetry was a dramatic piece, a play of Abraham and Isaac, written by an anonymous East Anglian scribe. Abraham and Isaac was of a kind with the pageant-plays, each dramatizing one episode of salvation history, performed in sequence in the cycle dramas of late medi­eval English towns.5 This first scribe writes, as Toulmin Smith puts it, in the ‘small close neat hand of a professional writer’. Shailor describes the hand as a ‘small well formed Anglicana script’. The hand ‘looks professional’ to Davis, too.6 And though Meale is primarily interested in Brome as an amateur miscellany and personal compilation, she readily acknowledges that its first scribe was ‘professionally trained’ and ‘commercially motivated’, and that the book ‘as it was originally conceived […] was never intended as a personal manu­script compilation’.7 The Book of Brome is a composite production, the combined work of this first scribe with a professional hand (who I will refer to here as the Brome scribe) and the amateur Melton coming along later. Since the text of Abraham and Isaac was copied down by that first Brome scribe, this instance of early drama was committed to paper as 3  For Toulmin Smith, commonplacing here might entail copying out texts in full into books collecting various articles and notes for apparently personal use. This sense of ‘commonplace book’ was current at the time of her edition’s publication. 4  Meale, ‘Amateur Book Production’, pp. 157–58. Meale attaches a proviso to the amateur label, that ‘such scribes are amateur only in relation to their lack of formal involvement as producers within the commercial manu­script book trade’, but I take this comment to refer to Melton. No evidence suggests that the first scribe of Brome lacked formal involvement in book production. 5  Middle English took ‘pageant’ from the Latin pagina, to mean the wagon upon which these plays were performed, as well as the dramatic performance. On the definition of ‘pageant’, see Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, p. 130. 6  A Commonplace Book, ed. by Toulmin Smith, p. 10; Shailor, Catalogue, p. 213; Non-cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Davis, p. lix. 7  Meale, ‘Amateur Book Production’, p. 165. There is some tentative evidence that this scribe made a little money upon the sale of the book on 1 May 1492. There is a record of payment made in his well-formed hand on the inside front cover, though whether this receipt is for the book is unclear. Kahrl is rather sure it records a payment for the book in ‘The Brome Hall Commonplace Book’, p. 159. Meale posits, however, that this may be a model of a receipt, rather than a receipt itself.

The Brome Abraham and Isaac and Impersonal Compilation

21

part of a process of impersonal compilation undertaken by this Brome scribe prior to the book’s use in the Melton household, rather than one of amateur, personal compilation. To better understand the pageant play’s manu­script context, I will ask here what the kind of book Brome was first made to be, with a focus on the manu­script’s earlier stage of production rather on its later additions or on its readers in a Suffolk gentry household.8 Melton makes his later additions for the purposes of personal reference: how to treat jaundice, and who paid him how much for corn. But the purposes of Brome’s first scribe are less apparent, and rather less studied, than Melton’s: why copy these particular texts into this book, and why copy of a play of Abraham and Isaac among them? Like the purposes of so many anonymous scribes who produced medi­eval books, the Brome scribe’s purposes are legible, if at all, only by the light thrown by the small implications of the book’s structure and design, which might point to some operative scribal priorities. His choices in production necessarily responded to material circumstance: the availability of exemplar texts from which to copy, say, or his stock of paper at hand. His choices responded to more abstract notions of textual fashion, too: what kind of texts would his reader likely want to have in a book? How should they look, and how arranged? Due to this responsiveness to forces both material and cultural, an anonymously and professionally made miscellany such as the Book of Brome becomes an imperfect index of a literary culture in the place and moment of its production. It is a picture of that culture warped and cropped according to those limiting material conditions and its compiler’s idiosyncratic impressions of which texts would appeal to a local readership, and in what arrangement. The Book of Brome indexes, however imperfectly, a moment when a pageant play like Abraham and Isaac could be thought fitting and fashionable material for compilation along with its miscellaneous poetry and legal templates. In this, the manu­script affords us a glimpse — albeit a peculiar one — of its local East Anglian literary culture featuring a pageant play and drama in the foreground of that picture. Though he left no personal signature or informative colophons, the Brome scribe did leave a few clues in the book’s structure and design to suggest how he went about making the volume half-filled with poetry that later came into Melton’s possession. We begin with some observations about its collation. The manu­script is made up of five quires, still bound in an original cover of limp parchment. The Brome scribe’s texts never span the gaps between these five 8 

For the latter approach, see MacDonald, ‘Fragments of (Have Your Desire)’.

22 Joe Stadolnik

gatherings. The disposition of his texts across the book’s quires — compartmentalized within quires as they are — suggests that the scribe set to work filling each of them separately, each a conceivably discrete scribal production. He copied Abraham and Isaac into the first of these five quires. The play is the last of a motley assortment of texts in quire I: preceding it are short poems of advice in conduct, some misogynistic cipher texts and satirical pieces, a dice poem, and a dialogue on Christian virtues, Ypotis.9 The scribe then left three pages blank (fols 3v–4v), on which Melton jotted down a few words later (on fol. 4r).10 A devotional emblem, depicting the sacred monogram (IHC) with a heart pierced by a spear, is drawn onto fol. 14v, on the half-page below the closing lines of Ypotis. Across the opening from the monogram, Abraham and Isaac begins on fol. 15r, running until fol. 22r, before its blank verso completes quire I. The Brome scribe begins quire II with Fifteen Signs of Doomsday, followed by a blank leaf (later filled by Melton) on fols 27r–27v. The purgatory narrative Owayne Miles and an atelous copy of The Life of St Margaret follow.11 Melton then fills out the last two folios of quire II with purchase notes. Quires III and IV of the book are entirely the work of Melton. The Brome scribe then halffills quire V with miscellaneous matter: Latin and English conveyance forms, a carol of annunciation, and more moral verse in the form of a truncated Seven Wise Counsels.12 (Those looking for the full complement of seven counsels in this book, however, must settle here for only four of them.) To review some salient facts of collation: the Brome scribe begins all three of his quires with a new text on the first leaf, occasionally leaves pages blank within them, and never copies texts begun in one quire into the next. Melton then jots down his notes around these texts, and into the book’s two quires unencumbered by the first scribe’s material. Julia Boffey and John J. Thompson call this neat disposition of Brome’s texts within the physical book its ‘sectional structure’. They propose that Brome originated as a ‘collection […] of unbound 9  In Boffey and Edwards, NIMEV, these conduct poems are numbered 2064 (fol. 1r) and 324 (‘Precepts on -ly’, fol. 1v). On the ciphers on fol. 1r (NIMEV 3256.3), see Johnson, ‘Xpmbn’. The satirical poem is NIMEV 3372.6 (fol. 1v). The dice poem is NIMEV 3694.3 (fol. 2v); the dialogue of Ypotis is NIMEV 220 (fols 5r–14v). 10  The notes ‘Harry Cade’ and ‘At Stuston’. Two Cades — Thomas and John — appear in Melton’s accounts on fol. 48r. 11  Fifteen Signs of Doomsday is NIMEV 1823 (fols 23r–26v); Owayne Miles is NIMEV 1767 (fols 28r–38r); The Life of St Margaret is NIMEV 2673 (fols 39r–44r). 12  These model conveyance forms are on fols 68r–77r; the carol is NIMEV 3738 (fol. 79v); Seven Wise Counsels is NIMEV 576 (fols 80v–81r).

The Brome Abraham and Isaac and Impersonal Compilation

23

and unnumbered blank page gatherings which began to be used for different writing purposes and so were gradually filled up with a very varied body of written material’.13 Boffey and Thompson assert, as I do above, that the book ‘suggest[s] at least two quite different stages’ of production. They characterize this production as underwent in a ‘very informal style’. But the Brome scribe and Melton had very distinctly informal styles of production, practised in two stages. Melton’s style is hastier and practical, eschewing decorative accents. The Brome scribe’s style is more deliberate and ornate, if in its own humble way. For while Melton never went out of his way to ornament his text, the Brome scribe did so consistently. His small neat professional hand is everywhere decorated in red ink: red touches on the initial capitals of verse lines; scrollwork on the two-, three-, and four-line initials beginning new texts; long, braided ascenders for the play’s first line; irregular underlining of single words; and brackets to indicate rhyme on select pages (fols 5r–15r, 28r, 40r–44r). He also took care to correct his texts, striking out faulty words with a red stroke throughout the book and supplying the correct word in black within the text line (on fols 13r, 33r, and 76r, for instance). This immediate revision suggests that the Brome scribe worked in both red and black, all in scribal stride. The Brome scribe aspires to some formality with all his calli­g raphic decoration and to fidelity to his exemplars through his textual correction. The devotional emblem of the sacred monogram, especially, is no feature of very informal book production; its fills half of its page with its cleanly limned letters on a carpet background of red and black pencilwork.14 Production proceeded with some care in making these neat, professional quires of Brome, with some concern for its visual impact. The Abraham and Isaac play, however prized above its neighbours by modern scholars, inspires little extraordinary embellishment, adorned with the same rhyme brackets, occasional underlining, and decorated ascenders on top lines as its quire-fellows. The scribe decorates the wide variety of texts in quires I and II similarly, regardless of genre. This consistency of decoration of verse and drama in the Book of Brome has led Jessica Brantley and others to conclude that the playtext was intended for private reading as much as for performance. The strongest evidence for this intention lies in its treatment of stage directions which, as Brantley notes, ‘are written within the playtext, seemingly a part of the characters’ speeches’.15 The 13 

Boffey and Thompson, ‘Antho­logies and Miscellanies’, pp. 293–94. On the sacred monogram, see Lutton, ‘“Love this name that is IHC”’. 15  Brantley, ‘Forms of Reading’, p. 23. 14 

24 Joe Stadolnik

Brome scribe provides no visual cues that stage directions were not to be read aloud.16 Indeed, these stage directions are lineated on the page like verse, broken off at the approximate length of the poetic line, as in: ‘Her abraham drew hys stroke | And þe angell toke the sword in hys hond soddenly’ (fol. 20r, ll. 5–6; see Figure 1.1). Given the scribe’s indifference to this text’s utility as stage script, Brantley contends that the underlining of select words was unlikely to serve a purpose in performance; rather, underlining had some meaning important for its reading. Brantley persuasively argues for some formal and typo­logical purposes motivating this underlining in Abraham and Isaac. Some underlined words begin stanzas, marking a facet of poetic form; others are perhaps underlined to evoke correspondences in the Old Testament episode with the Passion and Resurrection of the Gospel (e.g., ‘sacrifice’, ‘hill’, and ‘blood’).17 But whatever the specific principles motivating the scribe’s underlining, any such principles — whether formal, typo­logical, or dramatic — attest to a degree of scribal care and concern for the visual aspect of the playtext absent from Melton’s amateur contributions elsewhere in the manu­script. Paying more mind to these small attestations of scribal production in Brome’s earlier formation helps us to see this early dramatic manu­script as a modest but carefully constructed vernacular compilation that became an amateur miscellany only later. While the Brome scribe put to paper the only copy of this version of Abraham and Isaac, his other texts in the book survive elsewhere, in other manu­script compilations. These too were the work of scribe-compilers who, in response to whatever pressures of material circumstance and textual fashion, included a few of the same texts in their own miscellaneous manu­scripts. This concurrence of shared texts between Brome and other vernacular compilations testifies to a coincidence of scribe’s access to exemplars and those more abstract reasons to copy them — similar notions of textual fashion. These cognate miscellanies offer cases in which another scribe’s purposes and practices aligned with the Brome scribe’s; absent other surviving witnesses to Abraham and Isaac, we might look to them to shed light upon the impersonal compilation of drama in the Book of Brome. I will focus here on one such cognate compilation, London, BL, MS Cotton Caligula A II (c. 1460), in which fashion and pragmatism collude to produce a manu­script of substantial textual overlap with Brome’s first two quires. 16  The scribe includes three instances of stage directions disguised as dialogue: one on each of fols 19v, 20r, and 21r. 17  Brantley, ‘Forms of Reading’, pp. 32–34.

The Brome Abraham and Isaac and Impersonal Compilation

Figure 1.1. Abraham and Isaac in the Book of Brome. New Haven, CT, Yale Uni­ver­sity, Beinecke Rare Book & Manu­script Library, MS 365, fol. 20r. Image courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­script Library, Yale Uni­ver­sity.

25

26 Joe Stadolnik

MS Cotton Caligula A II (hereafter ‘Ca’) has attracted scholarly attention largely for its singular collection of Middle English romances, but it can boast of broader generic variety: the biblical thriller Pistill of Susan; an armchair pilgrim’s guidebook in Stations of Rome; hagio­g raphy in the lives of Jerome and Eustace; and didactic poems like Lydgate’s Stans puer ad mensam and Dietary.18 Among all this variety are three texts also copied by the Brome scribe into the first two quires of the Book of Brome: the dialogue Ypotis (fols 79va–83ra in Ca), the prophetic Fifteen Signs of Doomsday (fols 89ra–91rb), and the purgatorial narrative Owayne Miles (fols 91va–95rb).19 Ca, like Brome, is no lavish manu­ script, but it shows signs of programmatic and careful production. Its one scribe writes in a neat, professional secretary hand and has outfitted the manu­script with running titles on recto and verso as finding aids to the reader. Red and ochre touches adorn line heads for some unassuming decoration. This scribe corrects his texts, with strikethroughs for deletion and carets for insertion. The best evidence of meticulous compilation by the scribe of Ca, however, lies in the arrangement of its texts, which consistently begin and end flush with column or page breaks. For example, Ypotis begins on fol. 79v and ends at the bottom of the left column of fol. 83r; Stations of Rome begins at the top of the right column and ends flush with last column, fol. 86va. On fol. 70v, the scribe pads the twenty-eight text lines of a Passion lyric with a bit more interlinear space between each, so that the poem sprawls enough to fill the entire page.20 Text columns vary in length, and so the scribe could lengthen or shorten in order to end his texts cleanly.21 18  The romances are Sir Eglamour, the Southern Octavian Imperator, Sir Launfal, Lybeaus Desconus, Emaré, Siege of Jerusalem, Chevalier Assigne, and Sir Isumbras. On this manu­script, see Thompson, ‘Looking Behind the Book’; and White, ‘BL Cotton Caligula Aii’. 19  Middle English verse indexes assign the versions of Owayne Miles in Brome and Caligula different numbers. The text in Ca is NIMEV 982, appearing elsewhere only in fragmentary form, in Oxford, Bodl., MS English Poetry d. 208. Brown and Robbins call Brome’s version a ‘later recension’ without further comment in Index of Middle English Verse, p. 157. Easting, however, argues that they are texts of the same version in his A Vision of the Other World, p. 60. 20  On fol. 1r a later hand attributes the title ‘A prayer or bywar’ to the poem, which is NIMEV 1701. 21  Ypotis, for instance, is written in columns of thirty-six lines (fol. 82vb), thirty-eight lines (fol. 82va), forty lines (fols 79va, 80rb, 81ra–b, 81va–b), and forty-two lines (fols 79vb, 80ra, 80vb, 82ra–b). The final column (fol. 83ra) has thirty-eight lines. Its final line, ‘Sayth all Amen for charyte’, is followed by blank space and then a gratuitous Explicit on the fortieth line. Perhaps, as the poem neared its close, the scribe shortened his penultimate column by a handful of lines such that the text ends evenly on its final one.

The Brome Abraham and Isaac and Impersonal Compilation

27

An exception to this scribal policy of flush columns proves the rule. Fifteen Signs of Doomsday terminates a mere fourteen lines into the right column of fol. 91r. The scribe writes in the next line, ‘Amen for charity’.22 This added benediction serves as the closing note of Fifteen Signs (as it does for Ypotis and other texts in Ca), but it also introduces a twenty-eight-line Marian lyric to fill the remainder of the column, ‘Upon a lady my love ys lente’.23 The poem’s last line recapitulates its titular benediction: ‘Amen we say for charyte’. The scribe appends that lyric for the purposes of columnar symmetry, but in the process, he records the only surviving witness to it. This lyric supplement to Fifteen Signs is evidence of a thoroughgoing scribal concern for the look of the page that is the invisible to the quick glance — unlike an easily spotted finely wrought initial or an ample carpet border — but perceptible upon closer inpection of the scribe’s wider programme. Here, ‘Upon a lady’ indexes the literary and visual purposes of this compiler simultaneously. Yes, he thought this lyric fashionable enough as a text to include in this book of romances and devotional material. But it was also a useful makeweight for the page. The choice to tack it on to Fifteen Signs participated in a sustained effort to make a book that looks a certain way. Both material and literary purposes coincide in motivating the attachment of this lyric; the poem passes muster as fashionable, for how it will read as well as how it will look. Scribal designs are harder to discern in the physical construction of this compilation. To start, collating Ca confidently is impossible, as its pages were guarded when it was rebound in 1957; as Thompson explains, ‘its individual folios were mounted on modern paper strips’.24 The manu­script lacks catchwords and quire signatures, and it had not been collated prior to being guarded. Thompson, however, has proposed a quire structure based on the physical evidence of the watermarks, mould sides, and presumed folding patterns of its paper. His proposed first quire, with copies of the Pistill of Susan and Sir Eglamour, might be thought of as a ‘booklet’ unto itself, with a ‘kind of semidetached relationship to the rest of the manu­script’; quires 2–4 record romances with minor Lydgate poems and other smaller fare for filler.25 Thompson’s quire 22  The Visio Tundale also ends halfway through a column on fol. 107vb; the religious lyric that follows — Veni coronaberis (NIMEV 3225) — is made to measure, occupying the remaining half-column and all of fol. 108ra. 23  This poem in seven quatrains rhyming abab is NIMEV 3836. 24  Thompson, ‘Looking Behind the Book’, p. 173. 25  Thompson, ‘Looking Behind the Book’, p. 180. Quire 4 of Ca poses what Thompson

28 Joe Stadolnik

5 (fols 82–101) records the last two pages of Ypotis, Fifteen Signs of Doomsday, and Owayne Miles (i.e., the texts Ca shares with Brome). He arrives the tentative conclusion that Ca ‘once consisted of a series of unbound, blank and partly filled quires in which items were not necessarily copied in the order in which they now survive’, before being compiled into a whole book.26 (Texts like Ypotis and Lybeaus Desconus span the boundary between quires, implying that these texts were copied after the compiler had committed to an order of these quires.) This mode of miscellany production — unbound quires filled piecemeal with texts of various genres, then bound — corresponds with the mode of Brome’s production during the first ‘professional’ stage. And as the consistently flush-with-the-page texts of Ca prove, its scribe was preoccupied throughout with visual presentation when copying these texts into constituent quires, and compiling them into a book; like the Brome scribe, he strove to produce a visually appealing miscellany, within his means and according to his own peculiar notions of visual appeal. Brome in its first stage and Ca were the same kind of book: modest late fifteenth-century vernacular miscellanies prepared by scribes with professional competence, and some care for the visual aspect of their products. Two scribe-compilers, working likewise, selected a few texts likewise. As forces both material and cultural mutually informed the shape of miscellany manu­scripts during production, they culminated in products with affinities both material and literary, like in the double conjunction of both textual taste and compilatory process between Ca and Brome. As a professionally produced vernacular compilation, the Book of Brome in its first stage is something of an outlier among the manu­scripts recording medi­eval English dramatic texts. The Brome scribe did something rather exceptional when he copied a pageant play into a miscellany outside of the context of a larger cycle. For one, it attests to an exceptional, textual portability of the Abraham and Isaac episode, as appealing dramatic material for compilation. The episode was a mainstay of pageant drama, with analogues of the Brome version appearing in the four surviving Creation-to-Judgement cycles.27 Another calls a ‘seeming intractable collation problem’ (p. 179). The manu­script shows signs of textual loss between fols 58 and 59, on which a Lydgate poem entitled ‘The Nyghtynghale’ begins acephalously. This loss of an unknown number of leaves makes any proposed collation for this section based on watermarks, folding patterns, and mould sides extremely tenuous. 26  Thompson, ‘Looking Behind the Book’, p. 180. 27  The York cycle survives in London, BL, Additional MS 35290; Towneley in San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 1; Chester in a number of postmedi­e val manu­scripts as well as in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 399; and the N-Town plays in

The Brome Abraham and Isaac and Impersonal Compilation

29

dramatization of the Abraham and Isaac story appears without a cycle in a manu­script now bound as part iii of Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, MS 432 (fols 74v–81r).28 The manu­script is a miscellany, recording a copy of Chaucer’s Lack of Steadfastness, a number of political poems, and lists of English kings and civic officers of Northampton. On the evidence of these political poems and its local political interest, it is thought to have been written in 1461 in that city. Yet unlike the Brome scribe, the Northampton scribe has produced a playtext of an Abraham and Isaac play that invites and abets performance. Red horizontal lines divide the speaking parts of its dramatis personae, whereas Brome’s characters are only indicated by speaker-tags in the left margin. Stage directions are cordoned off from text with lines, and even further distinguished from dramatic speech by virtue of being in Latin.29 The scribe, meanwhile, shows little interest in visual presentation, like the Brome scribe does. The playtext lacks any decorative initials or scrollwork. Those horizontal lines meander at points, and some rhyme brackets are traced over inexactly, all of this giving many pages of the playtext a clumsy aspect. Whether this manu­script was compiled by this scribe for personal use or profit, the Trinity Abraham and Isaac text was designed to look like a performance script and be useful as one. In this, it has more in common with the other pageant plays surviving apart from larger cycles than with the Abraham and Isaac in Brome.30 In compiling a pageant play so seemingly useless as a performance script, the Book of Brome uniquely indexes a textual fashion for playtexts in professionally produced miscellanies, primarily intended for reading; for such dramatic texts to be decorated with initials and calli­graphic embellishments and a typo­logically evocative devotional emblem; for such a readers’ pageant play to enrich the mixture of devotional and narrative reading material typically found London, BL, MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII. On HM 1, see Alexandra F. Johnston’s essay in this volume; on Peniarth 399, see Matthew Sergi’s essay. 28  Non-cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Davis, pp. xlviii–lviii. Folios have been disordered in rebinding, and fol. 75 misbound into the play, though it records political poetry. 29  Davis prints a facsimile of the play in Non-cycle Plays and the Winchester Dialogues, pp. 36–45. 30  For example, the Norwich Grocers’ play (on the Creation of Eve) survives as edited from a now-lost eighteenth-century transcript of the also-lost Grocers’ Book, written in 1533 by the wardens of that guild for performance; see Non-cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Davis, pp. xxi–xxiv. Select pageants from the Coventry cycle survive in guilds’ playbooks and a transcription of a lost manu­script by the Coventry antiquarian Thomas Sharp; see also Pamela M. King’s contribution to this volume, immediately following.

30 Joe Stadolnik

in professionally produced vernacular compilations like it, and Ca. As a singularly impractical performance script, the Brome Abraham and Isaac is medi­eval drama as manu­script: an invitation to see the pageant play as a textual genre circulating as an article for private reading, rather than an expressly performed genre of public culture.31 The work of the Brome scribe attests to the possibility of the pageant genre’s currency as miscellany material and intimates a range of further possibilities of drama in manu­script now lost to us. It is a happy accident that scholars of medi­e val drama have this glimpse of the pageant moving in East Anglian manu­script culture as a fashionable reading text, thanks to the book’s survival through the centuries in Brome Hall. Just as the York and Chester cycles have stood in for a rich, widespread culture of cycle performance in medi­eval England lost to the historical record, so too might we let the Brome Abraham and Isaac exemplify a more widespread practice of dramatic compilation now obscured from our view.

31 

On the “anomolous connection” of a majority of medi­e val playbooks to performance, see Pamela M. King’s contribution to this volume, n. 1.

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31

Works Cited Manu­scripts Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 399 Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, MS 432 London, BL, Additional MS 35290 —— , MS Cotton Caligula A II —— , MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII New Haven, CT, Yale Uni­ver­sity, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­script Library, MS 365 Oxford, Bodl., MS English Poetry d. 208 San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 1

Primary Sources A  Commonplace Book of the Fifteenth Century, ed.  by Lucy Toulmin Smith (Norwich: Trübner and Co., 1886) Non-cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Norman Davis, EETS, s.s., 1 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1970) Non-cycle Plays and the Winchester Dialogues: Facsimiles of Plays and Fragments in Various Manu­scripts and the Dialogues in Winchester College MS  33, ed.  by Norman Davis (Leeds: Uni­ver­sity of Leeds School of English, 1979) The Siege of Jerusalem, ed. by Ralph Hanna and David Lawton, EETS, o.s., 320 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003)

Secondary Works Boffey, Julia, and John J. Thompson, ‘Antho­logies and Miscellanies’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed.  by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1989), pp. 279–316 Brantley, Jessica, ‘Forms of Reading in the Book of Brome’, in Form and Reform, ed. by Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: The Ohio State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011), pp. 19–39 Brown, Carleton, and Rossell Hope Robbins, Index of Middle English Verse (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1943) Clopper, Lawrence M., Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medi­eval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 2001) Easting, Robert, A  Vision of the Other World in Middle English (Cam­bridge: Brewer, 1997) Johnson, Ian, ‘Xpmbn: The Gendered Ciphers of the Book of Brome and the Limits of Misogyny’, Women: A Cultural Review, 18.2 (2007), 145–61 Kahrl, Stanley J., ‘The Brome Hall Commonplace Book’, Theatre Notebook, 22.4 (1968), 156–61

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Lutton, Rob, ‘“Love this name that is IHC”: Vernacular Prayers, Hymns, and Lyrics to the Holy Name of Jesus in Pre-Reformation England’, in Vernacularity in England and Wales, c. 1300–1550, ed. by Elizabeth Salter and Helen Wicker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 119–45 MacDonald, Nicola, ‘Fragments of (Have Your Desire): Brome Women at Play’, in Medi­ eval Domesticity: Home, Housing, and Household in Medi­eval England, ed. by Mary­ anne Kowaleski (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008), pp. 232–58 Marston, Thomas E., ‘The Book of Brome’, Yale Uni­ver­sity Library Gazette, 41.4 (1967), 141–45 Meale, Carol M., ‘Amateur Book Production and the Miscellany in Late Medi­eval East Anglia’, in Insular Books: Vernacular Manu­script Miscellanies in Late Medi­eval Britain, ed. by Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2015), 157–74 Shailor, Barbara A., Catalogue of Medi­eval and Renaissance Manu­scripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­script Library, ii: MSS 251–500 (Binghamton: Medi­eval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987) Thompson, John J., ‘Looking Behind the Book: MS  Cotton Caligula A.ii, part 1, and the Experience of Its Texts’, in Romance Reading on the Book, ed. by Jennifer Fellows, Rosalind Field, Gillian Rogers, and Judith Weiss (Cardiff: Uni­ver­sity of Wales Press, 1996), pp. 171–87 White, Denise C., ‘BL Cotton Caligula Aii, the Manu­script Context, the Theme of Obed­ience, and a Diplomatic Transcription Edition’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Georgia State Uni­ver­sity, 2012)

The Coventry Playbooks Pamela M. King*

A

 ‘playbook’ has a very specific function as the authorized text for performances of its content. It has an intended milieu of reception and authorization: that is, the director, prompter, and cast preparing a production.1 Unsurprisingly, very few playbooks, that is, manu­scripts demonstrably used as production scripts, survive from the period before the establishment of the London playhouses. Touring players have left no books; a better opportunity for survival was afforded by occasional plays belonging to a single location — scriptural plays associated with Corpus Christi, or seasonal household dramas. The fragment of a Robin Hood play on the dorse of one of the Paston papers belongs this the latter category of household plays,2 while the York Scriveners’ pageant,3 the Chester play of Antichrist,4 and the two Coventry manu­scripts that are the subject of this essay5 belong to the former, associated with Corpus Christi.  

* All figures in this essay are reproduced with the kind permission of the Coventry Association of Broadweavers and Clothiers to whom the author remains very grateful for free access to their manu­scripts held in the Coventry City Record Office. 1  For the purposes of this essay, the term ‘playbook’ is used in the sense specific to pre-print culture in which, as other essays in this volume demonstrate, a majority of manu­scripts containing texts written out as plays have an anomalous connection with performance culture. 2  Marshall, ‘“Goon in-to Bernysdale”’. 3  Cawley, ‘The Sykes MS of the York Scriveners’ Play’. 4  Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 399. 5  Coventry, City Record Office, Accessions 11/1 and 11/2. Pamela M. King holds a Chair in the School of Critical Studies at the Uni­ver­sity of Glasgow.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 33–54 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116443 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

Pamela M. King

34

The Coventry Weavers’ playbooks, unlike the York or Chester playbooks, are sole witnesses to the material they contain, as there is no surviving compilation of the Coventry Corpus Christi play. Other playbooks from the city did survive but were destroyed in the fire in the Birmingham Free Library in 1879. One of the losses was the Nativity pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, twice transcribed and published in 1817 and 1825 by Coventry coroner and antiquarian Thomas Sharp.6 He also made a diplomatic transcription of the Weavers’ material which shows a high level of accuracy,7 so there is reason to be optimistic that the Shearmen and Tailors’ text, which has since become an antho­logy piece, is close to the lost original. What follows presents a codico­logical description of the two Weavers’ manu­scripts and a consideration of how radically different as a manu­script and functional material object a working playbook is from the other compilations of plays received as ‘medi­eval English drama’.8 The form and function of these manu­scripts have left traces on the surface that relate to their interaction with real performance, where the text is subject to a visible process of change according to the constraints of individual productions in real time. Casual marginalia on the later of the two playbooks also offer a glimpse into its custodianship and perceived status during its ‘active’ life. The Coventry playbooks are the only texts from the city contemporary with the extended period of production of a very ambitious civic Corpus Christi cycle.9 They are versions of the Weavers’ pageant of the Presentation of the Virgin and Christ’s Debate with the Doctors in the Temple, two episodes from Luke 2. 22­­–52. The earlier is Coventry, City Record Office (hereinafter CRO) Accession 11/1, two single leaves of handmade paper containing 119 lines in secretary hand of the text of a fifteenth-century version of the Presentation, equivalent to lines 1–58 and 181–223 of editions based on the later, near-complete version.10 The later is that near-complete version, CRO Acc. 11/2. This is a book, written on sixteen folios of vellum, again in secretary hand, by Robert Croo, in 1534. 6 

The Pageant of the Sheremen and Taylors, ed. by Sharp; and Sharp, A Dissertation. The Presentation in the Temple, ed. by Sharp. 8  The codico­logical description of these manu­scripts draws on earlier work — unapo­ logetically, as the facts are the facts — in King, Coventry Mystery Plays; and in Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by King and Davidson. 9  Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by King and Davidson, pp. 20–26. 10  See Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by King and Davidson, pp. 150–53, for an edition of the text of the fragments. 7 

The Coventry Playbooks

Figure 2.1. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/1, fol. 1r. Reproduced with permission of Coventry Archives.

35

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36

Folio 10 in the original numbering is missing and was when Sharp edited the manu­script in 1836. In addition to the playbooks, there survive in Coventry a number of other manu­script witnesses to the performance context in which the playbooks were in active use which cannot be explored here.11 The two paper leaves, measuring 155 mm × 215 mm, that comprise CRO Acc. 11/1 were guarded in and rebound in 1969, restitched in 1979, and rebound again in 1987.12 They are unembellished: speakers’ names are indicated as is customary in early plays following the model of liturgical manu­scripts, in the right-hand margin, but there is no actual rubrication, as the whole is written in one hand in uniform brown ink, with fine horizontal lines separating speeches. There are thirty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-three (two lines deleted), and thirty-one lines per page. The fragments contain no extra-textual apparatus, where the equivalent section in the later text has one stage direction. The condition of the leaves is fragile and defaced, although the text is legible (see Figure 2.1). The first has rust spots and stains on the top left of the page, ink stains in the left-hand margin towards the bottom, and a doodle on the top right. Most of the marks have soaked through to the verso. There is a hole in the paper in the middle of the text, caused by the acidity of the ink. The leading edge of the page is much more worn than the bound edge, so worn in fact that the names of speakers on the recto have almost completely disappeared, especially towards the bottom. The inner edge is regularly notched, as if torn from its binding. The bottom edge of the leaf is more ragged than the top. Folio 2 also shows rust spots, some of which have gone into holes, and iron mould, if anything more pronounced than on fol. 1. These suggest a pattern, as if this sheet lay on top of a number of loose pins or similar which corroded. It also shows signs of having been crumpled up and then smoothed out, and it is smeared across the resulting flattened folds with traces of black ink. The edges of this folio also conform to a pattern commensurate with heavy use. Folds suggest that the book was closed with corners turned in, the lower corners having broken away from the binding, the lower corner of fol. 1 missing from the leading edge altogether. 11 

See REED: Coventry, ed. by Ingram and the introduction and appendices to Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by King and Davidson, pp. 1–81, 150–89. The additional witnesses are six fifteenth-century deeds pertaining to the land on which the Weavers’ pageant house was built; ordinances of the guild dated 31 Henry VI (1 September 1452–31 August 1453); account books from 1523; rent gatherers’ accounts from 1521; registers of apprentices 1550–1700. 12  Archivist’s notes on flyleaf i.

The Coventry Playbooks

Figure 2.2. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol. 2r. Reproduced with permission of Coventry Archives.

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Figure 2.3. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol. 6v. Reproduced with permission of Coventry Archives.

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The presentation of the text in these fragments indicates that they survive from a working script. Deletions in the text are contemporary with the writing of the text. There is no attempt at non-functional decoration, but guide lines divide speeches. The page size is small and easily handled, and although soft paper made from rags may seem an odd choice for a working playbook, paper is the medium on which civic muniments were recorded.13 There is, therefore, evidence on the face of the manu­script that captures its descent into obsolescence. The leaves have been separated from their binding and apparently left undisturbed in a situation which allowed rust spots to develop. Moreover, both leaves show evidence of having been crumpled and seem to have been used to wipe and blot ink. The act of redaction is animated by this probable last use of the leaves. The equivalent sections in Robert Croo’s version of the play suggest that he was working from this original. Close inspection of relevant folios in his manu­script show that he was having difficulties with his pen, notably on fol. 2r (see Figure 2.2) just after he would have finished copying fol. 1 of 11/1. He then had nib problems when he was writing fol. 5v, and wiped the nib between the bottoms of the next two pages (see Figure 2.3). The manu­script was written over a relatively short period of time, so it seems plausible that the redactor was disposing of the leaves of the old manu­script as he went along but retrieved these two and used the absorbent paper to wipe his troublesome pen.14 How these leaves then came to be flattened and preserved is probably a matter of mere chance. A speculative reconstruction of the redaction process, however, contributes to the case that playbooks were commodities with functional value as adjuncts to a performance of some status rather than in their own right. The redactor, Robert Croo, identifies himself on the penultimate page, fol. 17r, of the later playbook in a colophon written in red ink (see Figure 2.4): Tys matter nevly translate be Robert Croo In the yere of owre lord god M1vCxxxiiijte then beyng meyre Mastur palmar beddar and Rychard smythe an […] Pyxley masturs of the weywars thys boke yendide the seycond dey of marche in yere above seyde.

13 

See also, for example, the Weaver’s Account Book, CRO Acc. 100/17/1. I am grateful to Peter Meredith who first suggested to me this understanding of the condition of CRO Acc.11/1 as we examined it together in the 1980s. 14 

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Figure 2.4. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol. 17r. Reproduced with permission of Coventry Archives.

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The Weavers paid Croo five shillings for his services, recorded in their accounts.15 In the same year, he wrote the Shearmen and Tailors’ pageant. His personal connection was, however, with the Cappers’ guild, to which he was admitted as brother in 1510 and master in 1520. In 1525, the Cappers paid him twenty shillings for ‘The Golden Fleece’, possibly a playbook, but as likely to have been some other ceremonial accoutrement. He was paid twenty shillings for ‘makyng of the boke for the paggen’, by the Drapers, probably around 1556/57. He also supplied two leaves for the Smiths’ ‘pley boke’ in 1563. His activities were not confined to writing and adapting, however; in 1562 and 1566, he received three shillings and fourpence for playing the part of the Drapers’ God, and in 1562 twelve pence ‘for a hat for the pharysye’. In 1561, 1563, and 1566 he was paid three shillings and four pence for supplying three worlds which were burnt in the course of this elaborate Doomsday pageant. On another undated occasion, he received twenty pence for making a giantess for the Drapers, possibly for the city’s midsummer procession.16 Although little else of substance can be discovered about Robert Croo, his recorded activities further serve to create an understanding of the status of playbooks as friable properties associated with performance to be replaced when they wore out, whose content was copied, embellished, and adapted freely within their functional performance context. There appears also to have been a traffic in these texts not only within the same city, but across the country, as the section of the Weavers’ pageant interpreting Christ’s appearance before the Doctors overlaps widely with the York Spurriers and Lorimers’ pageant, and the related text in the Towneley manu­script, as well as the Chester Blacksmiths’ pageant.17 Coventry’s is the most elaborated version, metrically altered too to comply with Croo’s rather otiose scheme. The process by which these manu­ scripts come to share text is, for now, completely inscrutable. All the evidence suggests a book valued by its commissioning guild and requiring robust protection. Croo’s playbook retains its original binding of polished tanned calf, with a stamped pattern (see Figure 2.5). It shows evidence of heavy early use, requiring restitching — three sets, each of two thongs, plugged into three holes — and a new spine. The boards overlap very slightly with the leaves at the sides, but are flush, or actually rather scanty, at the top and bottom edges. The front board has at some stage been split vertically down the centre 15 

CRO Acc. 100/17/1, fol. 16r. REED: Coventry, ed. by Ingram, pp. 116, 123, 476, 455, 225, 221, 237, 217, 237, 237, 474. 17  See Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by King and Davidson, pp. 175–89. 16 

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Figure 2.5. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, front cover. Reproduced with permission of Coventry Archives.

and repaired. Originally there were two brass clasps, but only a hinge survives on the upper part of the back board. The manu­script is in good condition given probable use for up to fifty or so annual productions. Leaves measure 170 mm × 275 mm, collated in a way suggesting limited availability of vellum. The choice of vellum is interesting: it may say something about the changed status of handwritten books in the period after the advent of the printing press. Equally it may simply be that the guild, having seen the previous paper playbook fall apart, asked for something more robust. It is consistently collated flesh to flesh and hair to hair, and runs A4 B4 C1 — originally C2 — D5 (including three single leaves) E2 (two singles). Quires A, B, D, and E have reinforcers made of parchment supporting the stitching in the centre. As the play apparently brings together two distinct episodes, and the earlier fragments are both sections of the Presentation, it is tempting to look to the collation for evidence that Croo was copying from two

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distinct originals, but the Presentation runs into the Doctors’ episode in the middle of the first page of quire D, suggesting if not a single source, then a degree of forward planning. The ink is faded by rubbing at the leading edges of some leaves, parasites have created some dilapidation, and there is a modern repair to a diagonal tear or cut on fol. 3. The major damage is, however, the loss of fol. 10, already missing when Hardin Craig made his edition in 1902. Its stub survives at the bottom corner in quire C, bearing the speaker’s name ‘Josoff ’ in red ink. Above this by about one stanza length is the ‘se’ of Simeon, also in red, and above that, as the tear runs into the binding, there is an initial red flourish with a brown cross below it, such as is found marking the speech of some characters in the latter part of the play. Each page has a frame ruled in brown ink, though Croo sometimes overruns the margin at the bottom. Ruling is also sporadically visible, at the bottom of fols 4v, 14r, and 16v. It may have been more extensive, but show-through and Croo’s persistent and chaotic use of red rhyme-links obscures any further traces. Speakers’ names lie outside the ruled frame, as does all but the innermost vertical line in the rhyme-link bracketing. These rhyme-links, and the other apparatus written in red ink — speakers’ names and stage directions — are so visually assertive as to suggest that their purpose is more than conventional and/or decorative, that it is there to serve as prompts and delivery guidance for different performers. By the same token, there are no quire signatures nor leaf signatures in the manu­script, but new speakers’ names are always written at the bottom of a page if the end of the page coincides with the end of a speech. It seems that all the rubrication was added after the body of the text, particularly as stage directions are sometimes squeezed into inadequate space. Croo valiantly persevered with the rhyme-links too, despite employing more than one stanza form, so that the whole system was abandoned altogether towards the bottom of eleven of the thirty-one pages. He also divided speeches by means of a horizontal red line running the full width of the page, regardless of whether this coincided with a stanza division or not, and enclosed some stage directions entirely in red boxes. The overall effect testifies to a redactor trying to achieve two aims: he wants to indicate the metrical and stanzaic arrangement of his text to a reader while also assisting a director/performer with seeing where one character takes over from another and what action is involved. The attempt to combine these two functions, both executed in red ink, is, like Croo’s other evident aspirations, not wholly successful. Croo’s handwriting is a flowing, unflourished mid-sixteenth-century secretary hand, consistent in style and size, squat, and rounded with short, horizontal-leaning ascenders and descenders, and relatively easy to read. The number

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of lines on each page varies very little, being generally between thirty-eight and forty-one. There is one short page of thirty-two lines at the end of the first gathering, fol. 4v, and there are two long pages of forty-three lines in the fourth gathering just after the beginning of the Doctors’ episode (fols 11v and 13r). In general, this gathering has more lines per page, suggesting a recalculation of the proportion of remaining text to already-collated parchment. The manu­script inside the binding opens immediately with the name, in red ink, of the first character to speak, ‘primus profeta’, in the left-hand margin. The rest of the text in the manu­script contains several minor alterations, some made at the time of writing and others relating to its later use as a production script. In the first category, there are some that betray Croo’s role as primarily a copyist, working from, integrating, and adapting earlier material in one or more source texts. For example, he attributes speeches to the wrong character, then corrects, once to ‘Annis’ (Anna) on fol. 4v, and once when ‘clericus’ is written in error on fol. 8v. Others betray lapses in concentration, such as where, also on fol. 8v, ‘also mote I thryve’ has been deleted and replaced by ‘also well that ye might thrive’. On fol. 4r and 5v the last line has been scratched out as it was repeated at the top of the following page. The evident confusion of the ends of Simeon’s first two lines on fol. 9v, subsequently corrected, also speaks of the error of a copyist. On fol. 11v the series of major later corrections enters the text, beginning with the insertion of the line ‘now god’s blyssyng haue you and myne’. Also inserted are the lines ‘ye dame god shalbe orre gyde’, fifteen lines further on, and ‘ye dame lytt hym goo be fore ye and me’, near the bottom of the page (see Figure 2.6). ‘Now thys ys wyttele sayde and wyll’ is added a third of the way down fol. 12r, and ‘now mare harke what I shall say’ around fifteen lines further on. All these lines are written in black ink in the right-hand margin. All thereafter runs smoothly until fol. 15r, where the beginning of the last line is missing and uncorrected, rendering it metrically faulty. On fol. 16r, there is an illegible deletion at the end of Joseph’s last speech. These later alterations occur in the sections of the Doctors’ episode that are not held in common with York/Towneley/Chester, so, if the fifteenth-century text was the Presentation only, as suggested by the copying errors, these lines come from source or sources unknown. A final set of corrections may be attributed to the manu­script’s after-history in performance. In the latter part, there is modification to the sequence of speeches attributed to ‘doctors’ ‘i’, ‘ii’, and ‘iii’, and the scoring out of a line of dialogue, ‘now bruthir bothe the same say I’, suggesting changes in the directorial blocking of the play over the years. In addition, ‘cantant’ is written, in a

The Coventry Playbooks

Figure 2.6. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol. 11v. Reproduced with permission of Coventry Archives.

45

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Figure 2.7. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol. 17v. Reproduced with permission of Coventry Archives.

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hand different to that of the rest of the text, in the margins of fols 5v, 8v, 9r, and 9v, evidently added as songs were incorporated. The sixteen other stage directions are authorial, written in red, in Croo’s hand, as part of the original text, sometimes in red boxes, sometimes not, but extending from margin to margin with the exception of the single word ‘exceat’. They are exclusively concerned with directing positioning and movement on an elaborate set comprising multiple locations of action.18 Croo claims in the colophon that he is ‘translating’ the play, but the stage directions are surely original to him, based on knowledge of Coventry’s playing circumstances and the need to manage complex timescales and movement. Two further elements make up the formal content of the manu­script but are not attributable to Robert Croo. First, on the verso of the final folio there are two songs in sixteenth-century hands, offering a further dimension to understanding the manu­script as performance script (see Figure 2.7). The first, headed ‘Rejoyce’, is composed in eight iambic tetrameters rhyming abab caca, and has ‘Richard’ written below it. The second is written in three stanzas of the same metre and is signed ‘James hewyt’. Hewyt was leader of the city waits, the musicians retained by the civic authorities for ceremonial occasions, throughout the latter part of the sixteenth century.19 ‘Richard’ may also have been one of the waits, who included in 1566 Richard Stiff and Richard Sadler.20 But there is another Richard, intimately connected with the manu­script and one of the dynasty of Pixleys who populated the Weavers’ guild in the period. The final extra-textual element in the manu­script’s organization is what are now the extraordinary four flyleaves, two at the front, and two at the back. These were originally paste-downs, but were raised and guarded in during conservation work in 1969. They measure 140 mm × 190 mm and are from 18 

Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by King and Davidson, pp. 12–13. REED: Coventry, ed. by Ingram, p. 573 n. 231: ‘James Hewet is first mentioned in 1559 as a recipient of Sir Thomas White’s money: he is called an “organ plaier”. He played the regals in the Weavers’ plays between 1554 and 1573 (possibly longer, the name of the musician is not always given). Between 1563 and 1568, he is also named as regals player by the Drapers. It is just possible that he could have played for both plays by dint of careful planning. The fact that he seems to have done it for only a very few years suggests that the arrangement did not work satisfactorily. Hewet was paid for his services to The Destruction of Jerusalem in 1584. It is probable that all the waits aided the performances of individual Corpus Christi plays in one way or another. The plays called for singers as well as instrumentalists and the extremely scanty surviving clerical records of sixteenth-century Coventry reveal that some of the waits were also paid as singing clerks in Holy Trinity Church’. 20  REED: Coventry, ed. by Ingram, p. 566 n. 142. 19 

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a breviary printed in two parts by Richard Pynson in 1498 (STC 16113), which is extant in just four copies: Chicago, De Paul Uni­ver­s ity Library, SpCRI. 264.23 E9683e1498; Copenhagen, Royal Library, Inc. Haun., 1543 4o Inkunabelsamlingen; Göttingen, State and Uni­ver­sity Library, 8 H E RIT I, 9260 INC; and Oxford, All Souls College Library, LR.4.b. 21.21 The first, second, and fourth of these leaves correspond to fols v, ii (also signed aiij), and vii of the second part of this work.22 The third features on its recto a woodcut identical to the verso of the title-page of the first part, but is blank on the verso (the title-page to the first-part of STC 16113 features the same woodcut, but with the heading ‘Expositio hymnorum/ secundum vsum Sarum’, six millimetres above the frame of the picture). While the rest of the second part collates in sixes, the first gathering is made up of eight leaves, so it seems likely that the third flyleaf is in fact the internal title-page to the second part and therefore conjugate with fol. vii, though it is missing from the All Souls copy.23 The initials ‘R. P.’ appear on the middle brick in the third row from the top on this woodcut, but inspection reveals that they are, like the other marks in the top row, handwritten in ink. It is, therefore, more likely that they are the initials of Richard Pixley than of Richard Pynson (see Figure 2.8). Binding marks and casual marginalia on these pages suggest that they were originally pasted down side by side, with flyleaves i and iv uppermost back and front (see Figure 2.9). As all marginalia run at right angles to the print, bottom to top, it appears that the tops of these pages were innermost to the binding — that is, at the front, flyleaf i was the bottom half of the paste-down, flyleaf iv was the top; and at the back, flyleaf i was at the top, and flyleaf iv at the bottom. The horizontal tears in the front two flyleaves then correspond with the vertical fracture in the front board. Reference has already been made to casual marginalia on the manu­script. First the ubiquitous ‘Richard’. The name is written on fol. 5r in the same hand that on that page wrote ‘simeone’, in the left-hand margin. ‘Ri’ appears in the same hand in the bottom margin on fol. 8r, and ‘Richard pyxleye is my nam’ appears on the first page of the terminal raised paste-downs. Richard Pixley was 21  I am grateful to Tamara Atkin and Gaye Morgan, Librarian in Charge and Conservator at the Codrington Library, for their assistance in the correct identification of these leaves. 22  Folio v is therefore sig. avi, and fol. vii sig. aviii. 23  I have not been able to check the paste-downs against the three other copies, but the internal title-page to the second part of Pynson’s earlier, 1497 edition (STC 16112) contains a version of the same woodcut (but with a heading) and is blank on the verso, making it likely the later edition, with which it largely agrees, adopts a similar design.

The Coventry Playbooks

Figure 2.8. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, flyleaf iiir. Reproduced with permission of Coventry Archives.

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Figure 2.9. Digital reconstruction of the original positioning of Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, flyleaves iiv, ir, and fol.1r. © Pamela M. King.

a member of the Weavers’ company by 1591, but the marginal notes may be juvenilia as the evidence of the colophon suggests that the manu­script may have spent time in the Pixley household Other names appear elsewhere. An enigmatic ‘William Umpton’ is written on the first flyleaf. ‘Thomas norys’ is written on flyleaf iv — the surname was common.24 On terminal flyleaf i, ‘Thomas’ and ‘Righte Reuerente father and mother’ appear. Finally, on the last flyleaf are written ‘John’, ‘William’, ‘hayll marre’, and ‘Allin Pyxley the day of Aprill’. Alan Pixley was master of the Weavers in 1567 and 1570.25 It is, however, either Harry Pixley, who appears on 15v in the relevant account book, or William, one of the masters mentioned on fol. 41r, who is the likely ‘[blank] Pixley’ in the colophon.26 The guild accounts 24 

REED: Coventry, ed. by Ingram, p. 292 (l. 15). REED: Coventry, ed. by Ingram, p. 566 n. 142. 26  CRO Acc. 100/17/1, fol. 15v: ‘herre Pyxley’ is one of the two masters of the guild. 25 

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relating to the play in the later sixteenth century abound in persons called Pixley, generally simple ‘Mr Pixley’.27 In addition to these marginalia which suggest a wider domestic context for the custodianship of the manu­script, there are a few casual marks which relate to performance. Little crosses in the margins opposite the speeches of the second doctor, and twice opposite ‘clarecus’ suggest some particularity of attention. More informatively, however, ‘Jhesus in geare of scarlete ys put in’ is written along the top of fol. 11r, immediately after the missing leaf (See Figure 2.10). Space admits little account of the later history of these two manu­scripts. Both were continuously in the possession of the guild, latterly known as the Company of Broadweavers and Clothiers, who are still the owners, until it was deposited by Arthur Seymour, clerk of the Company, in the Coventry City Record office on 21 July 1916. It was first edited, as stated above, by Thomas Sharp.28 Two editions of the Weavers’ pageant then appeared in 1902. F. Holthausen’s emended version of Sharp’s edition in Anglia,29 and Hardin Craig’s edition for the Early English Text Society direct from the manu­script.30 Since Hardin Craig’s edition, there has been a second edition in 1957, an adaptation by Keith Miles in 1981,31 and the edition by the present author and Clifford Davidson in 2000. Some seventy years after the advent of printing, the choice to make a written book on vellum always merits a second look. Little about this book suggests luxury; it is an unembellished ho­lograph text. The relatively smart bind27 

In 1585, the Weavers paid 4d. to the minstrels on Saint Osborn’s night, ‘Payd at mr pexlees’ (REED: Coventry, ed. by Ingram, p. 312, l. 21). The intimate connection of the family with this play is demonstrated by an intrusion in the accounts for the expenses of the play on Corpus Christi Day 1574, where the sum of eightpence is paid at the burial of Mistress Pixley. CRO Acc. 100/17/1, fol. 66: l. 21 Item paid for stourringe the harnes iis. Item paid for the comennecacion of an new master ii s. l. 25 Item paid at the sealinge of the Indentures viij d. Item paide at the bureall of mistres pyxlay viij d. 28  The Presentation in the Temple, ed. by Sharp. Sharp’s unexpected discovery of the manu­ scripts demonstrate that they remained separate from the other Coventry pageants. The other materials passed into the Staunton Collection at Longbridge House, and then to the Birmingham Free Reference Library, which burned down in 1879. 29  ‘Das Spiel Der Weber Von Coventry’, ed. by Holthausen. 30  Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by Craig. 31  The Coventry Mystery Plays, ed. by Miles.

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Figure 2.10. Coventry, City Records Office, Accession 11/2, fol.11r. Reproduced with permission of Coventry Archives.

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ing is chiefly a guarantee of durability, and there is every evidence of hard use — the same hard use as caused the manu­script’s predecessor, written on paper, to wear out. The key seems to lie in the particular status and anticipated use of a playbook. There are play manu­scripts which were a matter of public record, like the York Register, and those that modern scholarship has identified as compilations for reading, or for copying individual performance texts from, like the N-Town manu­script. The manu­scripts of the Chester plays are more clearly antiquarian records of a lost tradition. None is directly related to playing. The three near-complete playbooks, this, the Chester Antichrist and the York Scriveners’ manu­script, date from the period well after printing was available, but early printed plays were clearly produced in a context where multiple copies were directed either at readers, or anticipated future performances in circumstances unknown. These three surviving playbooks from cycles, on the other hand, being associated with known players, location, and the audience of an occasional production, do not demand multiple copies, but a single authoritative one, which is durable and has documentary status as one of the guild’s muniments. It is not a playbook, but the playbook. Thus it is fitting that, like the guild’s accounts, it is written by an identified hand and bound securely. It is in every sense the ‘regynall’, as the lost master copy was called in Chester, the ‘original’. Moreover, although there is some evidence of manu­script sharing and circulation, it belongs, as is still the case with nineteenth-century Passion plays in rural Spain, to a particular community who do not necessarily want it to be played elsewhere. In this instance, there is also a snapshot of the relative perceived status of unique written civic documents and books printed in multiple copies, such as those from which the paste-downs were taken, which by their very multiplicity seem to have enjoyed a short shelf life of value. Functional playbooks, it seems, were valued by their owners while they were also treated as cultural ephemera, like private letters, papers, and shopping lists, useful only according to their relevance to the performative activities to which they were adjunct, and surviving beyond that through chance only. They, unlike the manu­scripts of cycles and compilations, are not critical editions and have nothing to do with awareness of posterity or nascent perceptions of ‘heritage’.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 399 Coventry, City Record Office, Accession 11/1 —— , Accession 11/2 —— , Accession 100/17/1

Primary Sources The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson (Kala­ mazoo: Medi­eval Institute Publications, 2000) The Coventry Mystery Plays, ed. by Keith Miles (London: Heinemann, 1981) Expositio hymnorum secundum vsum Sarum ([1497], STC 16112) Expositio hymnorum secundum vsum Sarum ([1498], STC 16113) The Pageant of the Sheremen and Taylors, ed.  by Thomas Sharp (Coventry: William Reader, 1817) The Presentation in the Temple: A Pageant, as Originally Represented by the Corporation of Weavers in Coventry, ed. by Thomas Sharp (Edinburgh: Abbotsford Club, 1836) REED: Coventry, ed. by R. W. Ingram (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 1981) ‘Das Spiel Der Weber Von Coventry’, ed. by F. Holthausen, Anglia, 15 (1902), 209–50 Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. by Hardin Craig, EETS, e.s., 87, 2nd edn (London: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1957)

Secondary Works Cawley, A. C., ‘The Sykes MS of the York Scriveners’ Play’, Leeds Studies in English, 7–8 (1952), 45–80 King, Pamela M., Coventry Mystery Plays (Coventry: Historical Association, 1997) Marshall, John, ‘“Goon in-to Bernysdale”: The Trail of the Paston Robin Hood Play’, in Essays in Honour of Peter Meredith, ed. by Catherine Batt (= Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 29 (1998)), pp. 185–217 Sharp, Thomas, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry, foreword by A. C. Cawley, facs. repr. (Wakefield: EP, 1973)

The Towneley Plays: Huntington Library MS HM 1 Alexandra F. Johnston

U

ntil the 1970s, much of the speculation about the nature of MS HM 1 in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, was based on the assumption that it dated from the fifteenth century or earlier, and that it was a coherent series of plays produced by a responsible municipal government in Wakefield and performed by local craft guilds as the plays were performed in York. However, since then, eleven items and a ‘Summa’ line that, together, described the processional performance of a play remarkably like the York plays in the Wakefield Burgess Court Roll for 1556 published by J. W. Walker in The Times Literary Supplement in 19291 have been proved fraudulent,2 and the productions of the plays as a series of related episodes in both Leeds and Toronto have found the individual plays uneven in prosodic and dramatic quality and written for various staging configurations — wagons, booth stages, and wide ranging, ‘place and scaffold’ settings with action in the central platea.3 Furthermore, twelve episodes in the manu­script have close connections with the York plays,4 and research for REED in the West Riding of Yorkshire has found several references to plays being performed in other 1 

Walker, ‘Burgess Court’. Forrester and Cawley, ‘The Corpus Christi Play of Wakefield’. 3  Two productions were directed by Jane Oakshot in Wakefield in 1977 and 1980 (twentynine out of the thirty-one pageants) and the entire cycle directed by Garrett Epp in Toronto in 1985. 4  Meredith, ‘The Towneley Cycle’, p. 161. 2 

Alexandra F. Johnston is Professor Emerita of the Department of English, Uni­ver­sity of Toronto. She was the founding director of Records of Early English Drama in 1976.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 55–70 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116444 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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towns.5 By 2000, many in the field had come to believe that this manu­script contains a collection of plays originally performed as ‘stand alone’ plays or short sequences of episodes at various locations in the West Riding from some time in the mid-fifteenth century.6 This was in contrast to the firm belief held by the editors of both the facsimile edition of the manu­script in 19767 and the new EETS edition in 1994,8 Arthur Cawley and Martin Stevens, who wrote that it was Wakefield ‘where the plays were almost certainly presented’.9 Stevens was particularly convinced that the plays were those of Wakefield and had written detailed analyses of the manu­script.10 In 2002, the argument was fully re-engaged at the International Congress on Medi­e val Studies at Western Michigan Uni­ver­sity in 2002 in a panel that I organized called ‘The Towneley Plays Reconsidered’. Garrett Epp presented a paper on the inconsistencies of the text and Barbara Palmer a paper on its possible provenance and its ownership by the Towneley family of Burnley, Lancashire.11 The third member of the panel was to be the late distinguished palaeo­g rapher and codico­logist Malcolm Parkes of Keble College, Oxford, who was to present new palaeo­g raphical and dating information. Parkes was unable to come to Kalamazoo, but, in a private letter to me, he presented several important points and asked me to share them at the Congress. He believed that the hand was that of a chancery clerk writing during the reign of Queen Mary, radically redating the physical artefact to 1553–58. He also believed that this manu­script is, in some way, a legal document intended as an official copy for reference purposes for someone in authority, possibly a member of an ecclesiastical court. The rather jumbled order of the plays suggested to him that the text was to serve as an ipsissima verba — a copy using the exact words of the original — where what was written was more important than the order of the plays.12 He pointed out that the entire manu­script was written by one 5 

Palmer, ‘Corpus Christi “Cycles” in Yorkshire’. Epp, ‘The Towneley Plays’; Palmer, ‘The “Towneley Plays”’. 7  The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile, ed. by Cawley and Stevens. 8  The Towneley Plays, ed. by Stevens and Cawley. 9  The Towneley Plays, ed. by Stevens and Cawley i, p. xv. 10  See especially Stevens, ‘The Missing Parts of the Towneley Cycle’. 11  Both subsequently published articles based on their presentations: Epp, ‘“Corectyd & not playd”’; and Palmer, ‘Recycling the “Wakefield Cycle”’. 12  Before he died, Parkes agreed to have his letter published in full. It will be part of a paper that explores the political background in greater detail than I am able to present in this essay. For a full transcription of the letter see . 6 

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scribe over a period of time and that the scribe himself was responsible for the cadellae — the elegant display script and the headings. These the scribe did first and then carefully wrote the text around them. Parkes challenged me to explain why a collection of plays might be a legal document. My own work was much engaged in the history of the Reformation in archdiocese of York, especially its deliberate suppression of the religious drama in York and Chester after 1568. The dating of the Towneley manu­script to the period 1553–58 and the suggestion that it was a legal document for an ecclesiastical court of some kind, brought HM 1 into that study. The religious authorities were very interested in the texts of the plays.13 Governing the north had long presented a problem for the government in London. Separated by significant distance and close to the troubled border with Scotland, the north was a distinct civil and ecclesiastical entity with York as its administrative centre. Edward IV recognized this when he sent his brother, Richard of Gloucester, to York to establish a royal presence there. The Council fell into abeyance with the accession of Henry VII, but after the revolt of remaining Catholics (the Pilgrimage of Grace) in 1537, Henry VIII established a new council that brought to prominence competent northerners who owed their safety to the king. Among them was Thomas Gargrave, a Yorkshire gentleman and lawyer who was to become, as F. W. Brooks has suggested, ‘perhaps the most powerful man in the North’.14 Gargrave was born in Wakefield in 1494 or 1495 and educated at the Inns of Court. He was knighted in 1549 and, in the years that followed, became ‘a near-ubiquitous presence in the government of the north’,15 serving at many levels of government including as a member of parliament for York in 1547 and for Yorkshire from 1553 to 1555. He was Speaker of Elizabeth’s first parliament in 1559. In 1546, he had been made freeman of the city of York as a token of the City Council’s gratitude to him for interceding for them in a dispute with the president of the new Council of the North. His time in London brought him the friendship of William Cecil, lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State who recognized him as being a ‘favourer of religion’, a term used in contemporary documents for those following the Protestant faith. He was appointed vice president of the Council of the North 13 

Johnston, ‘English Community Drama in Crisis’; Johnston, ‘The City as Patron’; Johnston, ‘“And how the state will beare with it I knowe not”’; Johnston, ‘William Cecil and the Drama of Persuasion’; and Johnston, ‘The Text of the Chester Plays in 1572’. 14  Brooks, The Council of the North, p. 11. 15  Brooks, The Council of the North, p. 19.

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in 1557 and remained in that office until his death in 1579. He was a ‘formative influence in the institutional development of the council’16 as it grew in power and influence and also in the development of the Ecclesiastical Commission of the North, first created in 1561. In particular, he established the administrative centre of both the Council and the Commission in York. In 1561, a provision was established ‘that the Vice-president with one or more of the legal members, a Secretary, and Pursuivant’ should always be resident in York.17 Gargrave, then, a West Riding man, was at the centre of affairs in the north. In these early years of Elizabeth’s reign, the first attempts were made to combat the stubborn Catholicism of the north. When the Protestant Henry Manners, fourth earl of Rutland, an old friend of William Cecil became president of the Council of the North in 1561, two things happened almost immediately. The first was the commission to enforce the newly passed Acts of Uniformity and Supremacy in the Church of England in the province of York that began its visitation or inquisition of each diocese and parish of the province. The second was the creation of the first permanent Ecclesiastical Commission of the North on the model of the one established in the province of Canterbury in 1559. Gargrave was a member of both the Visitation and the Ecclesiastical Commissions. Thomas Young, who became archbishop of York early in 1561, also became the head of the Ecclesiastical Commission and the president of the Council of the North after Rutland’s death in 1563. However, although he had strong Protestant credentials at the end of Henry VIII’s reign, once he became settled in the diocese of York (as one historian has put it) he ‘was notable for an absence of crusading zeal’.18 Another said of him ‘so far from enforcing religious policy, he let things slide’.19 Until his death in 1568, little progress was made towards the eradication of what David Palliser has called ‘Catholic survivalism’.20 It was only after the arrival of Matthew Hutton as dean of Yorkminster in 1567 and the reconstitution of the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1568 that reformation and the campaign to suppress religious drama began again in earnest in Yorkshire. 16 

Archer, ‘Gargrave, Sir Thomas’, ODNB. Citations to the ODNB are given only when a direct quotation is used. Except where otherwise noted, all bio­graphical details about individuals are taken from their bio­graphies in the ODNB. 17  Archer, ‘Gargrave, Sir Thomas’, ODNB. 18  Pettegree, ‘Young, Thomas’, ODNB. 19  Brooks, The Council of the North, p. 24. 20  Palliser, Tudor York, p. 243.

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However, some reforming steps were taken between 1559 and 1563. It is possible that the commissioning of HM 1 was done in this ‘false spring’ of the Reformation in the north at the direction of men who, like Gargrave, were deeply committed to the newly proclaimed Church of England. Parkes dated the hand of the manu­script between 1553 and 1558 because it seemed to him that the historic evidence pointed to the reign of Mary. However, it is possible to push the date of the hand forward from 1558 by a few years to 1561. Strap work similar to the work here appears, for example, in chancery court and parish documents as late as 1562.21 On May 16, 1559, Elizabeth had issued a proclamation about the playing of ‘Interludes in the Englishe tongue […] wherin either matters of religion or of the gouernaunce of the estate of the common weale shalbe handled or treated’ without the oversight of the civil and religious authorities.22 Long ago, Barbara Palmer wrote that the 1559 entry in the Wakefield Burgess Court Rolls to the ‘regenall’ of the Wakefield play were evidence of ‘probable suppression, or at least, its examination for popish elements’.23 The first one for that year is particularly relevant, ‘Item a payn ys layd þat Gyles Dolleffe shall brenge in or cavse to be broght þe regenall of Corpvs Christy play before þis & Wytsonday’ to be studied by ‘menne of aucthoritie, learning and wisedom’.24 1559 is also the year when the first mention appears in the York records that plays not ‘registered’ in the official town manu­script were being copied in.25 The 1559 record from Wakefield, then, should be seen in the context of what was happening in the diocese of York as the religious politics of the north were in a state of transition. Thomas Gargrave was just the person of ‘aucthoritie’ who would have arranged for HM 1 to be compiled in order to provide the reforming officials with the evidence of community religious drama in the West Riding, just as they were seeking to get all the plays from York finally registered. The Towneley manu­script has not been recognized as a legal document before because those examining it have been literary scholars and have been misled especially by two features of the book: the extensive cadellae — the elegant display script and strapwork in red — and the elegance of the 1814

21 

Jenkinson, The Later Court Hands of England. Chambers¸ The Elizabethan Stage, iv, 263–64. 23  Palmer, ‘The “Towneley Plays”’, p. 330. 24  As cited in Meredith, ‘The Towneley Cycle’, p. 161. 25  REED: York, ed. by Johnston and Rogerson, i, 330. 22 

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binding.26 These have led to a misunderstanding that, compared to other play manu­scripts, this is a deluxe production. But closer examination tells a different story. The manu­script has suffered possibly more loss of leaves than any other and shows marks of lengthy periods of neglect or abuse that have affected the legibility of many of the folios. Equally important, the vellum is not of particularly high quality. If this were a manu­script commissioned by a wealthy patron, the vellum would have been quite different. Like many legal documents in this period, the vellum seems to have been ‘recycled’ from fifteenth-century sheets from old books that had been heavily erased and already damaged from long use. Hilary Jenkinson, in a note about vellum used in legal documents in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries comments that ‘the fifteenth century saw the introduction of a great deal of coarse parchment, of a yellowish colour, or alternately of very poor, often semi-transparent skins’.27 Many leaves of this manu­ script show more than usual ‘show through’ where the writing on one side of a leaf is visible on the other often obscuring the writing. This is true of six of the nine folios containing the Second Shepherds’ Play (fols 38v–46r). Furthermore, three leaves (fols 46, 48, and 60) have holes that existed before the skins were processed and have been carefully written around. The pages were extensively cropped when it was bound during the time it was in the possession of the Towneleys of Burnley (see below) and possibly (less extensively) also at the time of the last binding in 1814. One half inch has been trimmed around the perimeter of each folio.28 Such an extensive cropping argues that the edges of the manu­script pages were badly tattered. It also means that many of the signatures are missing or only partially there, portions of the strap work have been sliced away, and later marginalia have been truncated, possibly robbing us of many clues about the manu­script. Finally, almost everywhere, the scribe shows concern to use as little parchment as possible when he is actually copying his exemplars. He extensively compresses the verses, writing couplets on a single line and quatrains on two lines, apparently to save space. Martin Stevens recognized this and provides an important discussion of this phenom-

26  This binding bears the arms of Sir Louis Goldsmid whose kinsman John Louis Goldsmid had bought it from the sale of the library Towneley Hall in 1814. The binding was done by Charles Lewis in the brief time it was in the Goldsmid library before the library was sold in 1815 to John North. It was bought back in to the Towneley family in 1819. See Wann, ‘A New Examination’. 27  Jenkinson, The Later Court Hands of England. p. 21. 28  Wann, ‘A New Examination’, p. 140; Stevens, ‘The Missing Parts’, p. 257.

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enon in the introduction to the EETS edition explaining why he has edited the so-called ‘Wakefield’ stanzas as thirteeners.29 These general features of the manu­script — the quality of the vellum and the concern on the part of the scribe to write as many lines as he can on every leaf have been discussed, sometimes extensively, by earlier scholars, but no one has tried to see if they are connected. But if we take Parkes’s suggestion that this is a legal and not a literary document prepared as a ‘document of record’ for the officials of the Ecclesiastical Commission of the North by a scribe who was skilled in strap work cadellae, then the conditions under which the plays were compiled are quite different from those that have been considered before. Parkes has emphasized that we have only one man at work here over a period of time. He was commissioned not by a patron of the arts but by government officials, and his task was not to make a work of art but an ‘approved text’ in which the ipsissima verba were the most important thing. Taking this framework and reasoning from the physical condition of the vellum in this manu­script, we can build a hypothesis that answers most of the questions presented by this baffling artefact. Because the first signature identifies fol. 5 as leaf c1 we must assume either quire a or quire b is missing. It follows that the scribe originally had twenty quires of vellum to which he assigned the signatures a to h, i, k to t, and v in the normal way (j and u are not used). At the last binding in 1814, it appears that the binder counted only seventeen quires, treating the last surviving twelve leaves (marked s1, assumed t6–8 and v1–8) as a single unit. This is clear from the numbering of the existing quires. In the bottom left-hand corner of the first leaf of each quire (not visible in the facsimile) is an Arabic number in pencil that counts the surviving gatherings.30 These numbers are no earlier than c. 1800, and so they belong to the time of the last binding. The final number is on s1 is 17.31 The last twelve leaves were stitched together to make an artificial gathering. Twenty quires would have provided 160 folios or 320 pages. The present manu­script contains 132 folios or 264 pages — an apparent loss of twenty-eight folios or 17.5 per cent of the original total. However, since there are no signatures before c1, it is possible that either quire a or quire b was not 29 

The Towneley Plays, ed. by Stevens and Cawley, i, pp. xxix–xxxi. I saw these numbers when I examined the manu­script in the Huntington. 31  Cawley and Stevens note that five of the surviving nineteen quires are incomplete: a or b (4); d(6); k(6); s(1); t(3). See The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile, ed. by Cawley and Stevens, p. viii. 30 

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used. Similarly, it is possible that either quire s or quire t was not used. Four other missing folios are accounted for by the centre bifolia falling out of quire b and quire k. The hypothesis I am suggesting is that the scribe found two of the twenty quires provided for him unusable after he had numbered them and he discarded them. Once he had done that, he was forced to find ways to fit everything he had been given to copy in to the remaining quires. He seems to have managed to achieve his goal. It is perfectly possible that what we have is a manu­script whose lacunae can all be explained by practical exigencies and neglect not malice. The first visible signature in the manu­script is c1, the fifth folio of the manu­script and the third folio of the first complete play, named by the scribe ‘Mactacio Abel, secunda pagina’. Both Wann and Stevens assume twelve leaves were missing from the first two quires. Wann assumes that the first folios, whose signatures are trimmed away, were the beginning of quire a and states that ‘twelve leaves are missing from a3 to b6’.32 However, Stevens notes that the two folios containing the incomplete Creation play are the conjugate leaves to the leaves that begin the Mactacio Abel and argues that, since the signature c1 appears on the third folio of that play, these leaves had to be b7 and b8. Stevens believes, despite the growing evidence to the contrary, that this manu­ script was the ‘Wakefield Cycle’—a coherent series of biblical plays belonging to Wakefield. The missing quires, then, had to contain text. He proposes that there was a missing first quire that had contained the banns of that cycle of plays.33 But if we abandon the concepts of both Wakefield and a cycle, then any certainty about the early leaves and the late leaves of this manu­script becomes problematic. What is indisputable is that what is now fol. 1 has long been the initial folio in this compilation. At some time, the manu­script had a binding that included a buckle and latch. This is clear from the holes that are still visible (with the surrounding rust stains) through fols 1–2 of the existing manu­script. These marks do not appear on the conjugate leaves a or b7 and 8. The clasp nail of the buckle, then, did not penetrate as far as what is now fol. 3 but would have been fol. 7 before the loss of the two centre sheets. The heading of the opening lines on fol. 1 are dirty and badly faded as if this first page of the play collection has been exposed to the air and to dust at some time in its life. Further evidence that fol. 1 has long been the beginning of this manu­script comes from the initial prayer 32  33 

Wann, ‘A New Examination’, p. 139. Stevens, ‘The Missing Parts’, p. 254.

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for assistance at the top ‘In dei nomine Amen Assit principio sancta Maria meo Wakefield’. The page also bears a seventeenth-century pressmark of whoever was responsible for the mid-seventeenth-century binding since the ‘pressmark’ in the top right-hand corner of fol. 1 is partly trimmed away and then rewritten, in the same hand, further from the edge of the leaf.34 This suggests that when a rebinding was ordered the extent of the trimming was so substantial (perhaps close to the half inch proposed by Wann) that it necessitated the re­writing of pressmark. However, since there are no surviving signatures on the early leaves of the manu­script we cannot be sure if those leaves were originally part of the quire marked a or the quire marked b. Much has been made of what is apparently another twelve leaves missing near the end of the manu­script. Stevens argues, on the analogy of the York plays, that the missing leaves must have contained the texts of plays on the death, Assumption, and Coronation of the Virgin, as in the York plays and that they ‘without question were cut out of the manu­script’ by the Elizabethan censors.35 Stevens makes much of the fact that York did not play the Virgin plays during the reign of Edward, revived them under Mary, and then did not play them again in the few performances of the cycle in the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign. But the Mary plays were not excised from the York manu­script. Playbooks were confiscated in the sixteenth century, some to vanish forever and others to be preserved for many different reasons other than an interest in drama.36 But, as the events unfolded in both York and Chester between 1568 and 1575, the records of York and the letters of Christopher Goodman in Chester speak again and again of ‘amending’ the texts not destroying them.37 If this manu­script was meant to be a legal document attesting to the plays of the West Riding as they existed, no part of the record would have been deliberately excised. Stevens notices that the Ascension play seems very close to its end on the verso of s1 and argues that the Mary plays could easily have begun on the now 34  The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile, ed. by Cawley and Stevens, p. vii. Cawley and Stevens believe that this was the press mark of Christopher Towneley (1604–1674). Palmer in ‘Recycling the “Wakefield Cycle”’ and Coletti and McMurray Gibson in ‘The Tudor Origins’ accept this identification. It is disputed, however, by Meg Twycross and the late Olga Horner. Their work will appear in a volume of essays on the Towneley plays that will also publish the text of Malcom Parkes’s letter. 35  Stevens, ‘The Missing Parts’, p. 258. 36  Johnston, “Olde playes or maskes but Imperfect & little worthe”. 37  REED: York, ed. by Johnston and Rogerson, i, 365, 378, 390; REED: Cheshire Including Chester, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, i, 143–48.

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missing s2, but there is a significant amount of the beginning of the Judgement play missing. The version of the York Judgement that this play is based on is not the version of the Mercers’ play that survives in the York register. At some point between 1415 when the Ordo Paginarum (the list of all the plays in the York cycle) was entered in the official records of the city38 and 1433 when the Indenture describing the stage properties and costumes of the Mercers’ play of Judgement was drawn up, the Mercers’ text was edited.39 The base text for this Judgement must have been the earlier text. It is perfectly possible, therefore, that what is missing from the beginning of Judgement in HM 1 was much longer than previously thought. Stevens assumes because part of the ‘s’ signature letter is still visible on the last leaf before the break (fol. 121) that that leaf began the quire s and seven leaves are missing of s and five of t making a total of twelve missing leaves. He also assumes that because Judgement ends on a leaf still clearly marked as v4 (fol. 128), the unmarked leaves containing the early part of the surviving text belonged to the end of the quire t.40 However, there is another possibility. The ‘s’ designating s1 is written in red rather than in black as are all the other signature letters except those in the quire l. The general opinion is that the signature letters are in the hand of the scribe. However, Stevens thinks that the red lettering was in another hand.41 From my examination of the manu­script, I feel that the quire l signatures could be by the scribe, but what is left of the single ‘s’ after the cropping is a much larger letter than the other signatures in what appears to be a later hand — even a seventeenth-century one. If this is true, then it is possible that there was no quire s in the completed manu­script but that what we have as s1 (fol. 121) is actually t1, and there are only four leaves missing before t6 rather than twelve. Conversely, the ‘s’ could be genuine, and the leaves at the end of the quire before quire v are s6–8 not t6–8. The scribe prepared and numbered a quire at the beginning of the manu­ script that we know is missing. He began his work with both quires s and t prepared or he would not have numbered quire v as he did. Perhaps, after he had prepared the twenty quires assigned to him, he decided after closer inspection that quires a or b and s or t were unusable — too thin or too damaged — and he discarded two full quires reducing his usable writing space by sixteen folios. 38 

REED: York, ed. by Johnston and Rogerson, i, 16–24. REED: York, ed. by Johnston and Rogerson i, 55–56. 40  Signatures appear on the first four leaves of a gathering but not on the ‘conjugate’ leaves. 41  Stevens, ‘The Missing Parts’, p. 264. 39 

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Later, someone tried to make sense of the lacuna between fols 121 and 122 and wrote a large red ‘s’ on fol. 121. Two other peculiarities of this manu­script have been considered by others in detail — the superfluous decorated ‘D’ on fol. 80r and the blank fol. 20. Both can be explained if we accept that this is a legal document of record and that the scribe was forced to discard a significant amount of the vellum sheets that were provided for him. One of the striking anomalies of this manu­script is the appearance of a stray decorated ‘D’ on what is now fol. 80r (m8r) — the recto of the last leaf in the quire m — that has nothing to do with the lines from the Flagellacio that surround it. It has been ‘boxed’ off in red, apparently by the scribe himself. Wann suggests, and his explanation is paraphrased by Cawley and Stevens,42 that the scribe broke off work at the end of the quire l (line 739 of the Conspiracio), and when he picked up his task again he started the Coliphizacio with an ornamented ‘D’ to begin the first line of that play, ‘Do io furth, io!’. Before he went any further, however, he realized that he still had forty lines of the Conspiracio to copy. Rather than simply discarding the sheet with the misplaced ornamented ‘D’, Wann argues that he took the sheet and reversed the fold so that what had been prepared and started as m1r became m8r, providing him with a new blank m1r (fol. 73r) that was enough to allow him to comfortably finish the Conspiracio and then begin the Coliphizacio at the top of m1 v (73v). He then continued on through the end of that play and the beginning of the Flagellacio on m6v (fol. 78v) and carried on simply ignoring the misplaced ornamented ‘D’ he had written on fol. 80r (that now was m8r). Given the possibility that he may have abandoned as unusable two full quires provided for him, by the time he had reached quire m he may have feared he might not have enough vellum to finish his commission. Abandoning a full sheet without replacing it would have meant the loss of four full pages of text. The editors of both editions of these plays have struggled with why fol. 20 is blank.43 The Processus Prophetarum, one of the pageants that is copied ‘out of order’, begins in the middle of fol. 17v (d7v) where its title is unceremoniously squeezed in after the explicit of the pageant of Jacob copied before it. The content of the Prophets covers the remainder of fol. 17v (d7v), fol. 18 (d8) and fol. 19 (e1). There is no explicit on fol. 19v (elv), and there is room at the bottom 42 

Wann, ‘A New Examination’, p. 147; The Towneley Plays, ed. by Stevens and Cawley, ii, 568. George England and Alfred W. Pollard of the first EETS edition in 1897; and Cawley and Stevens in their 1994 edition. 43 

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of the leaf for several more lines. The editors of both editions have assumed that the play is incomplete because the scribe has not followed his customary practice of ending each play with ‘explicit’. However, the last stanza written for Daniel is Flesh with fleshe will be boght That he lose not that he has wroght wyth hys awne hend. Of a madyn shal he be borne To saue all that ar forlorne Euermore withoutten end. (ll. 229–34)

It is possible that this is the end of the play. No ‘standard’ order or number of characters can be deduced from other extant prophet plays. This stanza, in fact, does emphasize the salvation of the world — the reason for a play of prophecies. The recto of the leaf fol. 20 has been lined in preparation for writing. The verso, which is also blank, shows signs of heavy erasure. It is possible that after he had prepared the recto for writing, the scribe decided that this leaf was too thin to use. The cognate leaf fol. 35 (e7) has greater ‘show through’ than most of the leaves indicating that it, too, is thin. It is possible that the limited number of quires supplied to this clerk was so great that he felt compelled to use e7 even though he was reluctant to write on e2. If this was a document to be used in an ecclesiastical court, as Malcolm Parkes suggested it was, it would have been important for the clerk to leave the cognate blank leaf in place to make clear that no text had been excised in the copying, rather than creating a ‘singleton’ of e7. And so, I come to the final and in many ways most puzzling of the features of this manu­script — the haphazard semi-obliteration of a substantial amount of the writing especially in the middle quires and the last one through what appears to be rubbing and other signs of neglect. The play of Caesar Augustus begins on e7v (fol. 25v). The leaves containing this play are the first to show truly noticeable signs of these phenomena. Folio e8v (fol. 26v) shows rubbing of the ink towards the bottom of the pages especially on the right-hand side in what is now the gutter, affecting the speech headings on the versos. The rubbing has peeled away some of the ink away, making many letters hard to distinguish. One might not consider this unusual because e8v is the outside of a quire, but similar problems are evident on other inner folios, such as g6v in the Secunda Pastorum section where the facing folio, g7r (fol. 40v), shows no such signs of wear. Rubbing is also evident on l3v (fol. 67v)—especially the final speech headings in the right margin — and on leaves 4r, 4v, 5r, 5v, and 6v in quire l (fols

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68–70), all interior leaves. A similar situation exists with the internal leaves of quires m through q. The position of the rubbing is consistently in the bottom half of the affected folios as if, at some point in time, the manu­script was carelessly stored in a way that crushed and twisted some of the leaves, in some cases going as far as turning pages back on themselves. This certainly seems to be the case on fol. 2, where there is the clear and now dirty mark of a vertical fold one-and-a-half inches in from the left margin and the last nine lines are badly rubbed. Quire r and the surviving singleton from quire s are, by comparison, very free of dirt and wear. The end of quire t has not been as lucky with the last nine lines of t8v are close to illegible in places. The explicit that appears at the bottom of v4v (fol. 128v) at the end of the Judicium is badly rubbed, as are the speech headings on the right margin of v5r (fol. 128). The last six pages (three folios) in the manu­script are relatively undamaged. How can such haphazard damage be explained, especially if the document was compiled for legal purposes? The years 1559–63 were a transitional period for the Council of the North as new members were appointed whose commitment to the Elizabethan settlement matched that of Thomas Gargrave. It is possible that during these years Gargrave and others, who would have known of the plays that existed in Wakefield, Doncaster, and Pontefract, were instrumental in ordering that the plays be collected to be copied. When the earl of Rutland was appointed the new president of the Council in 1561, Gargrave was appointed first to the ecclesiastical visitation of the province of York and the new ecclesiastical commission. In that same year he became deeply involved in establishing the administrative base of the Council and the commission in York. The copying of the manu­script, once commissioned, could have been begun between 1559, when the ‘regenall’ of the play performed in Wakefield was called in and 1563 when Rutland died with action on its contents awaiting the attention of a very busy man. Rutland was replaced by Archbishop Young but, as we have seen, religious reform was not pursued until he, in turn, died in 1568. It is possible that the completed manu­script was loosely bound, as many books related to the ecclesiastical courts were bound, in a soft calf binding and placed for safe keeping in a chest or press.44 The haphazard damage to the writing on scattered pages could have been caused by someone carelessly forcing the book into a confined space resting on the open edge so that pages were pushed up and over against each other and their edges frayed. 44 

As an editor for REED, I have used many such ecclesiastical court manu­scripts.

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The manu­script may have come into the possession of the Towneley family of Burnley within a few years of its compilation. John Towneley (1528–1607), despite his ‘obstinate’ recusancy,45 was a lawyer trained, as Gargrave was, at the Inns of Court. Through his mother he had connections in Wakefield. It is possible that on a visit to the West Riding for business or on family affairs he was told about this ‘book of Popish plays’ or was shown them by someone in the room where they were kept, recognized them for what they were, and quietly slipped the, by now, somewhat battered volume into his saddle bag. It would be in keeping with the way the Towneley family gathered in and preserved the vestments of Whalley Abbey.46 He may have ordered the ‘buckle and latch’ binding. From the Burnley names still legible in the margins after the trimming it is clear that several people had access to the manu­script before the rebinding in the mid-seventeenth century. The hypotheses I have presented here looks at the manu­script and its contents from a different set of assumptions from those used before. Parkes set me off on this line of reasoning with his clear-eyed knowledge of mid-sixteenthcentury legal hands and documents. From there, the evidence I have presented is all circumstantial, pieced together by educated guesses informed by my extensive research on the suppression of the York and Chester plays. For me, it makes more sense out of the artefact as it has survived than any other hypothesis that has been put forward so far. For too long we have been trapped by the seeming elegance of this manu­script in its expensive 1814 binding and by the passionate desire of earlier scholars to mould the plays it contains to a preconceived idea of what they represent. I invite others to follow me in my attempt to let the pages speak for themselves. I may not have heard everything they have to say.

45  Palmer, ‘Recycling the “Wakefield Cycle”’, p. 104. See also Coletti and Gibson, ‘The Tudor Origins’. 46  Palmer, ‘Recycling the “Wakefield Cycle”’, pp. 110–11.

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Works Cited Manu­script San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 1

Primary Sources REED: Cheshire including Chester, ed. by Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills, 2 vols (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 2007) REED: York, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, 2 vols (Toronto: Uni­ ver­sity of Toronto Press, 1979) The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile of Huntington MS HM 1, ed. by A. C. Cawley and Martin Stevens (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1976) The Towneley Plays, ed. by George England and Alfred W. Pollard, EETS, e.s., 71 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trüber, 1897) The Towneley Plays, ed. by Martin Stevens and Arthur Cawley, EETS, s.s., 13 and 14, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1994)

Secondary Works Archer, Ian, ‘Gargrave, Sir Thomas (1494/5–1579)’, ODNB [accessed 23 January 2019] Brooks, F. W., The Council of the North, 2nd rev. edn (London: Historical Association, 1966) Chambers, E. K.¸ The Elizabethan Stage: Volume iv (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923) Coletti, Theresa, and Gail McMurray Gibson, ‘The Tudor Origins of Medi­eval Drama’, in A Companion to Tudor Drama, ed. by Kent Cartwright (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 228–45 Epp, Garrett P. J., ‘“Corectyd & not playd”: An Unproductive History of the Towneley Plays’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 43 (2004), 38–53 —— , ‘The Towneley Plays and the Hazards of Cycling’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 32 (1993), 121–50 Forrester, Jean, and Arthur Cawley, ‘The Corpus Christi Play of Wakefield: A New Look at the Wakefield Burgess Court Records’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 7  (1974), 108–16 (followed by three appendices and facsimiles) Jenkinson, Hilary, The Later Court Hands of England: From the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1927) Johnston, Alexandra F., ‘“And how the state will beare with it I knowe not”’, Medi­eval English Theatre, 29.2 (2009 for 2007), 3–25 —— , ‘The City as Patron’, in Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. by Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne Westfall (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002), pp. 150–75

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—— , ‘English Community Drama in Crisis: 1535–80’, in Drama and Community, ed. by Alan Hindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 248–69 —— , ‘“Olde playes or maskes but Imperfect & little worthe”’, Yearbook of English Studies, 43 (2013), 31–47 —— , ‘The Text of the Chester Plays in 1572: A  Conjectural Re-Construction’, in The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555–1575: Religion, Drama, and the Impact of Change, ed. by Jessica Dell, David Klausner, and Helen Ostovich, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 19–35 —— , ‘William Cecil and the Drama of Persuasion’ in Shakespeare and Religious Change, ed.  by Kenneth Graham and Philip Collington (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), pp. 63–87 Meredith, Peter, ‘The Towneley Cycle’, in The Cam­bridge Companion to Medi­eval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle and Alan Fletcher, 2nd edn (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008), pp. 134–62 Palliser, David M., Tudor York (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1979) Palmer, Barbara D. ‘Corpus Christi ‘Cycles’ in Yorkshire: The Surviving Records’, Comparative Drama, 27 (1993), 218–31 —— , ‘Recycling the “Wakefield Cycle”: The Records’, Research Opportunities in Renais­ sance Drama, 41 (2002), 88–130 —— , ‘The “Towneley Plays” or “Wakefield Cycle” Revisited’, Comparative Drama, 21.4 (1988), 318–48 Pettegree, Andrew, ‘Young, Thomas (1507–1568)’, ODNB, [accessed 23 January 2019] Stevens, Martin, ‘The Missing Parts of the Towneley Cycle’, Speculum, 45.2 (1970), 254–65 Walker, J.  W., ‘The Burgess Court, Wakefield: 1553, 1554, 1556 and 1579’, Yorkshire Archeo­logical Society Records Series, 74 (1929), 16–32 Wann, Louis, ‘A New Examination of the Manu­script of the Towneley Plays’, PMLA, 43.1 (1928), 137–51

Un-Dating the Chester Plays: A Reassessment of Lawrence Clopper’s ‘History and Development’ and MS Peniarth 399 Matthew Sergi

T

he extant Chester cycle comprises twenty-five biblical plays. The text for twenty-four of those plays survives only in late manu­scripts (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 2; London, BL, Additional MS 10305; London, BL, MS Harley 2013; Oxford, Bodl., MS Bodley 175; and London, BL, MS Harley 2124), all copied down between 1591 and 1607 from a lost exemplar, itself a copy from unknown sources.1 It has proven difficult to assign a date of origin to the texts preserved in those copies. All scholars agree that the cycle must have undergone revision during transmission, as is witnessed periodically in the surviving production archives, though these provide few details about the nature or frequency of those revisions. Minor revisions would have little bearing on estimates of the plays’ date of origin. However, scholars differ over which hypothetical changes — to an individual play, or to the plays’ overall structure — were minor. Some changes may have been substantial enough to be taken as the origin of a new, distinct text. Plays that are now included among the extant texts might have been expanded, overhauled, replaced wholesale, or added for the first time, at any point before 1591. 1 

Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, pp. 40–41, 57–76. For brevity’s sake, I leave out here the unique Chester Coopers’ Guild 1599 standalone copy of the Trial play (because it is as late as the full-cycle copies) and the Manchester Fragment (Manchester, Central Library, MS 822.11C2) because it has yet to be reliably dated. Matthew Sergi is Assistant Professor of English at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto, and is currently working on his first mono­graph, Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 71–102 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116445 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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A proper origin date for the extant cycle — that is, the year in which the plays first took the essential form in which they now survive — must depend on the timing and extent of such large-scale changes. As of 2012, according to Sheila Christie, there were ‘two main perspectives on the history and longevity of the Chester cycle’: David Mills and those who follow him (largely British and Commonwealth scholars) see continuity between scriptural dramatic activity evident in Chester during the fifteenth century and the extant cycle of the sixteenth century, whereas Lawrence Clopper and those of his scholarly lineage (largely American scholars) argue for a clear break between the fifteenth-century Corpus Christi play and the sixteenth-century Whitsun plays.2

In contrast to the ongoing contention that Christie describes, the chrono­logical table that opens the Cam­bridge Companion to Medi­eval English Theatre gives a straightforward date of origin for the extant Chester plays — ‘from c. 1521’ — distinguishing them from an earlier ‘Corpus Christi play’, dating back to the 1420s, which left ‘no text extant’.3 My purpose here is to review and reassess what we do and do not know about the date of these texts’ composition. Below, I will provide a series of interpretive glosses on Clopper’s 1978 ‘The History and Development of the Chester Cycle’, the basis for the present ‘American’ approach. I will argue that while Clopper’s hypotheses refute prior ‘British and Commonwealth’ dating decisively, they cannot — and do not really claim to — provide any positive evidence that sixteenth-century revisions were extensive enough to create a clear break. Nor does Clopper’s dating take into account the survival of the Chester Antichrist in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 399, whose generally accepted fifteenth-century dating I will reaffirm with new data below. I argue that Peniarth 399 stands as crucial evidence of the ‘continuity’ of some fifteenth-century Chester texts across the sixteenth century, even as other segments may have been revised. My intention is that the present chapter, read alongside Clopper’s refutations, should leave both ‘main perspectives’ on the plays’ dating destabilized, returned to their initially tentative terms.4 Multiple Cestrian generations, as Chester’s plays and archives demonstrate, revered the earliest available texts as artefacts to preserve with nostalgic care, even as they subjected the same texts 2 

Christie, ‘The Chester Cycle’, p. 21. Beadle and Fletcher, Cam­bridge Companion, pp. xx–xxi, emphasis added. 4  I use the terms ‘American’ and ‘British and Commonwealth’ as a helpful shorthand here, though they do not always correspond well to the scholars’ actual home countries. 3 

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to anonymous adjustments of indeterminate extent. As a result, the meagre evidence for dating scattered passages points simultaneously to fifteenth-century continuity and to sixteenth-century breakage. That evidence allows no consistent rationale for dating, even a hypothetical one, to be applied to the bulk of the extant text. I propose that provably early passages like the Antichrist are informative exceptions that prove a frustrating rule: that no material in the Chester plays, and certainly not the plays taken in toto as a univocal cycle, should be tethered to either century, nor to any range of dates more narrow than c. 1421–1591. Prominent among the recent studies that follow an ‘American’ approach to the Chester plays’ dating is Theresa Coletti and Gail McMurray Gibson’s 2010 ‘The Tudor Origins of Medi­eval Drama’, which dismantles ‘still prevalent assumptions’ about ‘the borders between medi­eval and early modern cultural performances’.5 The value of revisionist work like Coletti and Gibson’s is greater than the quibble over dating and wording that I present here. That said, Coletti and Gibson claim that ‘the scriptural dramas comprising the extant Chester Cycle, in text and performance, are manifestly mid- to late-Tudor phenomena’, which ‘confound historical categories of analysis because they achieved the form in which we have come to know them only through active sixteenth-century processes of revision and transmission’.6 The plays certainly do confound historical categories. However, Coletti and Gibson’s ‘only’ here implies that the plays’ form survives exclusively in media that underwent those sixteenthcentury processes, which does not seem to be true for the Chester Antichrist; it also implies that the plays’ extant form developed exclusively within the time that those processes were underway. Other scholars’ passing reiterations of ‘American’ dating tend to proceed as though a post-1521 date is settled for the extant text (‘it now seems that the common ancestor of these late manu­ scripts […] was actually evolved at some point after 1521’), as opposed to the ‘very shadowy’ fifteenth-century plays; their underlying assumption seems at times to be that, lacking substantial evidence either way, a clear break is the safest guess.7 The trope of an abruptly rejuvenated text appears in various places, stated with similar certainty (‘The Chester cycle, once thought to be the oldest and supposed to have been written in 1325, has recently been shown to be about two hundred years younger than that [i.e., 1525], and hence one of the latest of the cycles’; ‘the Chester cycle has turned out to be two hundred years younger 5 

Coletti and Gibson, ‘The Tudor Origins’, p. 228. Coletti and Gibson, ‘The Tudor Origins’, pp. 230, 228, emphasis added. 7  Happé, Cyclic Form, p. 240, emphasis added. 6 

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than mid-twentieth-century scholars thought it was’), reinforcing the idea that the extant plays were born in the 1520s or later.8 ‘The years 1530–75’, elsewhere, comprise ‘the period corresponding to the performance of the Whitsun plays essentially as we have them today’.9 These fruitful cultural analyses do not rely on an ‘American’ date as an argumentative premise in any substantial way; meaningful resonances of mid- to late Tudor performances with contemporaneous events, as Richard Emmerson and Sheila Christie have shown, hardly necessitate that the texts being performed originated in mid- to late Tudor times.10 Rather, like the Cam­bridge Companion timeline, the ‘American’ studies present a post-1521 origin as a straightforward fact of basic historical context, and then move on. The putative fact of the plays’ late origin seems to have become more concrete over time. Citations derived from Clopper’s ‘The History and Development of the Chester Cycle’ comprise the only evidence ever provided for a clear break or for the extant texts’ post-1521 origin; other sources cited provide only references to Clopper’s work as their own evidence of that dating.11 However, the arguments that Clopper makes in ‘History and Development’, often using strategically tentative language, are subtler and more flexible than those later ‘American’ citations tend to allow.12 8  Symes, ‘The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays’, p.  824 n.  145, emphasis added; Coletti, ‘The Chester Cycle’, p. 532, emphasis added. 9  Barrett, Against All England, p. 88, emphasis added. At p. 236 n. 15, Barrett acknowledges that Mills ‘refuses to fully endorse Clopper on this point’. 10  See Christie, ‘When in Rome’; Emmerson, ‘Contextualizing Performance’. 11  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’. See also nn. 5–9, above; and Coletti and Gibson, ‘The Tudor Origins’, pp. 229–30; Happé, Cyclic Form, p. 308 n. 23; Symes, ‘The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays’, p. 824 n. 145; Barrett, Against All England, p. 236 n. 15–16; Coletti, ‘The Chester Cycle’, p. 544 n. 3; and Gibson, Theater of Devotion, pp. 3 and 179 n. 3. Some of these also cite REED: Chester, ed. by Clopper, pp. liii–liv, which reiterates ‘History and Development’ in brief without citing it expressly, or REED: Cheshire, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, pp. xxxiii and 886–97, which offers a balanced survey of current approaches, among which extensive material from Clopper’s 1978 article, often paraphrased or reproduced verbatim, provides the only support for the ‘clean break’ hypothesis. Christie offers a similar survey in ‘The Chester Cycle’, citing Clopper at pp. 33–34 nn. 1, 8, 15. Others cite Johnston, ‘What Do the Records Tell Us’, which summarizes then-current research; it does not attach a citation to the ‘radical redating’ it describes, but ‘The History and Development’ and Clopper’s REED: Chester are the only items among its list of works cited, pp. 140–41, nn. 3 and 6, that could be attached to that assertion. Beadle and Fletcher, Cam­bridge Companion, pp. xx–xxi, do not attach citations to their timeline. 12  Clopper himself may have made less flexible assertions informally later on, but ‘The His-

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The most decisive language in Clopper’s article is in its negative rebuttals of what Christie would later call the ‘British and Commonwealth’ approach, which in 1978 (according to Clopper) went so far as to assume that the cycle was ‘complete in the early fifteenth century’ and continued ‘more or less unchanged from the late fifteenth century until its demise in 1575’.13 ‘We must conclude’, Clopper writes, that the plays ‘are medi­eval only in conception and perhaps in representation, not in date of composition’.14 Yet in that conclusive statement there is much ambiguity. For early drama, there can be little clear distinction between the ‘composition’ and ‘representation’ of texts; Clopper here leaves ample room for the early circulation of informal texts among performers before they were compiled into full-cycle manu­scripts (by ‘representation’, Clopper seems to mean ‘live performance’, judging by three other uses of the verb ‘to represent’ in the article).15 Meanwhile, Clopper hints that his conceptual terminus for what counts as ‘medi­eval’ may be as early as the 1420s (‘modern scholars have called Chester’s Whitsun plays medi­eval even though they have found no evidence for their existence before 1422’), leaving open the possibility that the bulk of these conclusively post-‘medi­eval’ plays were composed in the fifteenth century, having already been circulating in performance (i.e., ‘representation’) long before.16 Beyond that, Clopper uses more tentative language: ‘The sparse evidence of the fifteenth century suggests that the Corpus Christi play was more a Passion play than a cycle; the evidence of the sixteenth century is that the cycle as we know it was largely an invention of Tudor times’.17 tory and Development’ is the only sustained argument that Clopper published on dating the Chester plays. 13  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, p. 219. 14  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, p. 241. 15  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, pp. 232, 233, 230. 16  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, pp. 219. The wording of the full sentence, like so much of the article, is strategically ambiguous. Clopper’s complaint may be taken to mean that the plays have been called ‘medi­eval’ without any evidence prior to 1422 — in the same way that Gibson resists the term ‘medi­eval’ for all fifteenth-century drama (see Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, pp. 2–3) — or that the Whitsun plays should not be called ‘medi­ eval’ because the plays were being performed on Corpus Christi Day, not at Whitsun, in the fifteenth century, a distinction that I take up below. Clopper’s overall timeline, at p. 243, allows the first major ‘growth’ period for the plays to begin in the late fifteenth century, suggesting that the post-‘medi­eval’ has already begun in 1474. 17  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, pp. 219–20, emphasis added. This is only a sampling of his tentative language; see further quotations below for more.

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Table 4.1. Harmonized Clopper timeline, with Mills disputes. YEAR

EVIDENCE (REED: Cheshire)

Clopper’s ‘Period 1: Corpus Christi Passion Play: 1422–74’ [i.e., as many as twenty-one plays composed, including Creation, Noah, Abraham, a pre-revision Nativity, two pre-revision Magi/Herod plays, and Purification up to and including Doomsday (see Clopper, p. 231)] a) 1422

REED, pp. 47–48: Bowers, Fletchers (et al.), Ironmongers’ and Carpenters’ dispute

b) 1429–30

REED, pp. 48–49: Weavers and Shearmen’s (et al.) agreement

c) 1462

REED, pp. 52–53: Bakers’ Charter

d) 1437–40 (?)   1467–68

REED, pp. 50–61: various records of guilds renting parcels of land from the city for carriage storage

e) 1472   1480–83

REED, pp. 55–56: Saddlers and Curriers’ Charter REED, p. 61: Saddlers’ carriage

Clopper’s ‘Period 2: Growth and Shift to Whitsuntide : 1474–1521’ [i.e., addition of three plays: Wives’ Assumption (lost), Cappers’ Balaam, Painters’ Shepherds (see Clopper pp. 227–28)] f ) 1489–90 or 1498–9 REED, p. 62: Assumption performed g) c. 1500

REED, pp. 65–66: Harley 2104 Guild List (in same order as later lists, leaving out Tanners, Cappers, and Painters; Wives added; Tapsters and Hostlers on line separate from Cooks)

h) 1505–21

REED, p. 67: Shepherds play, 1515–16 REED pp. 69–70: Cappers’ 1523–24 petition, about Balaam given by Mayor Smith (i.e., 1505–21)

i) 1521 (‘whitson play’) REED, pp. 68–69: Pewterers-founders’ agreement

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CLOPPER HYPOTHESIS (‘History and Development’)

MILLS DISPUTE (Essays, pp. 165–94)

3–21 play episodes (pp. 219–20): Bowers, Fletchers’ (et al.) Trial Ironmongers’ Passion Carpenters’ play (Nativity?)

Mills agrees.

4–21 play episodes (p. 230): Weavers’ play (Doomsday?)

Mills agrees.

5–21 play episodes (p. 232): Bakers’ play (Last Supper?)

Mills agrees.

10–21 play episodes (p. 220 n. 5): Fishmongers’ carriage? (Pentecost?) Tailors’ carriage? (Ascension?) Mercers’ carriage (Magi?) Drapers’ carriage (Creation?) Shearmen’s carriage (Prophets?)

Mills agrees. Mills also suggests Dyers’ Antichrist developed in 1467–68, as Shearmen’s Prophets may have been a prelude to that play, developed when the 1429–30 alliance split.

11–21 play episodes (p. 220): Saddlers’ play and carriage (Emmaus?)

Mills agrees.

p. 226: (Wives’) Assumption composed (now lost)

Mills agrees.

pp. 225­–27: The Harley List refers only to the non-dramatic Corpus Christi procession; still, it may shed light on the later Early Banns. No dates offered for the ten pageants (beyond the ≥11 aforementioned ) whose corresponding guilds are named in the Harley List but not in prior archives. Those ten seem to be part of an original ‘Corpus Christi play’, ‘the oldest stratum of the cycle’, preceding the Cappers’ play (i.e., 1505–21).

Mills takes the Harley List to represent ‘the guilds presenting pageants’. He thus gives a harder date of ‘by 1500’ for the ten pageants whose guilds are named in the Harley List but not in prior archives.

13–23 play episodes (p. 228): Cappers’ Balaam (Painters’) Shepherds pp. 230–31: Early Banns, which include those plays in consistent stanzas, first composed 1505–21.

Mills agrees.

pp. 220–21: Performances shift from Corpus Christi Day to Whitsun ‘play’, ‘sometime before 1521’.

Mills agrees.

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Table 4.1. Harmonized Clopper Timeline, with Mills Disputes (cont.) YEAR

EVIDENCE (REED: Cheshire)

Clopper’s ‘Period 3: Further Growth, Shift to Three-Day Schedule and Multiple Playing Sites: 1521–39’ [i.e., addition of Lucifer, revision of Nativity and Prophets, redistribution of Magi material from two plays into three (see Clopper, pp. 228–31)] j) 1521–39   (‘whitson playes’)

REED, pp. 71–72: 1531–32: Newhall Proclamation; Goldsmiths-vintners-dyers’ agreement REED, pp. 79–87: White Book of the Pentice (copied late sixteenth century), including Early Banns, revised Newhall Proclamation, White Book Guild List

Clopper’s ‘Period 4: Revisions and Suppressions: 1539–61’ k) c. 1548–50

New Bakers’ charter, 1552–53, with no mention of plays (Clopper, p. 232) REED, pp. 91–93: Shoemakers’ 1550–51 itemized account

Clopper’s ‘Period 5: Final Phase: 1561–72’ l) c. 1561   1561–72

Hypothetical Late Banns revisions, to be ‘read in camera before the mayor and the city council’ (Clopper, pp. 239–40)

Clopper’s ‘Period 6: Final Performance at Midsummer, One Location, Three-and-a-Half-Day Performance: 1575’ m) 1575

Differences in content from Late Banns to extant texts.

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CLOPPER HYPOTHESIS (‘History and Development’)

MILLS DISPUTE (Essays, pp. 165–94)

All twenty-five play episodes in place (p. 228): Tanners’ Lucifer (mentioned in Newhall) first composed ≥5 plays revised enough in sixteenth century to alter Banns: Prophets (p. 230); Nativity (p. 230); two old Magi plays redistributed (pp. 226–29: Magi, Presentation, Slaughter). pp. 230–31: Early Banns, with those six plays in irregular stanzas, revised 1521–32. pp. 220–23: Performance ‘sufficiently altered that it came to be designated by the plural’: shift to a three-day schedule with multiple sites.

Mills rejects hypothetical Banns revisions 1521–39 and thus dates the Tanners’ Lucifer to 1521; ‘We do not know’, he adds, ‘the Goldsmiths-Masons’ earlier arrangement for a carriage’.

pp. 235–40: 1548 is the earliest possible date for composition of the Late Banns, coming after Wives’ play was suppressed (at some point 1539–61). pp. 232–33, 240: In 1550, Bakers’ Last Supper dropped; Shoemakers’ Jerusalem expanded, absorbing some of the Bakers’ content.

Mills agrees.

Mills rejects Clopper’s timeline of Late pp. 236–40: Bakers’ Last Supper re-enters cycle, revised; Banns revisions. Shoemakers’ Jerusalem rewritten. ≥13 plays revised enough in sixteenth century to alter Banns: Lucifer (p. 236); Shepherds (p. 236); Trial and Passion (pp. 237–38); Resurrection (p. 241); Antichrist (p. 238); Doomsday (pp. 237–38); Nativity (pp. 236, 241); Last Supper, Jerusalem (pp. 236–40). Assumption deleted (?).

≥16 sixteenth-century revisions total, including thirteen plays above, and: Balaam (ll. 448–51), Purification/Doctors, Resurrection, Emmaus, Antichrist, all revised after Banns (p. 241).

Mills posits the co-existence of alternative ‘approved segments’ in the master exemplar.

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What distinguishes a cycle ‘as we know it’ from any prior iteration could be drastic, but it could also be limited to minor changes that might make one iteration seem more or less familiar than another, hardly establishing the origin of a new cycle: perhaps the entry of a couple of new plays, the modernization of spelling, the deletion of a few theo­logically troublesome stanzas. Above, the ‘cycle as we know it’ was ‘largely’ — a more equivocal modifier than later critics’ ‘manifestly’, ‘actually’, or ‘essentially’ — ‘an invention of Tudor times’, a historical range that goes as far back as 1485 (compare to ‘mid- to late Tudor’, above). In similarly cautious language throughout, Clopper offers a series of hypotheses describing various ways that playtexts might have been composed or rewritten across the 153 years of known performance (i.e., 1422–1575), based on circumstantial hints in the Chester archives. Clopper compiles those hypotheses into ‘a summary chart of the cycle’s history and development’, though the 1978 formatting of that chart makes it difficult to read in relation to the claims in the article, against which the chart sometimes seems to differ, let alone against corresponding pages in REED.18 I present a condensed and clarified version of that chart here, in which I harmonize Clopper’s chart items with the wording of the rest of his article, alongside references to REED: Cheshire and disputes brought up later by Mills (see Table 4.1).19 Clopper’s model of piecemeal development, arranging tentative termini ad quem (almost never a quo) into a timeline, does not describe a clear break, nor a cycle born after 1521. It does not differ much from the revised ‘British and Commonwealth’ timeline that Mills, working with R. M. Lumiansky and ‘particularly indebted to Clopper’s work’, would offer soon afterward, in 1983.20 According to Clopper’s hypotheses, four of the extant plays (Trial, Pentecost, Ascension, and Creation) were composed prior to 1474 with no evidence of later revision (at items a and d); seven more were also composed prior to 1474 (across items a–e), but then were subject to revisions of unknown extent after 1521 (at item j: Nativity, Magi, Prophets) or after 1561 (at items l–m: Passion, Doomsday, Last Supper, Emmaus; on the irrel18 

Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, pp. 243–44. In my condensed, harmonized chart, I remove material not immediately relevant to the dating of the plays (Clopper also includes data about the history and development of the Corpus Christi Procession of Lights, as well as Banns revisions unrelated to the plays’ content). 19  Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, pp. 165–94, at pp. 174–78, 182–84, 186, and 192 especially. See also REED: Cheshire, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, pp. 886–97. 20  Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, p. 165 n. 2.

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evance of post-1561 revisions to the origin of the extant texts, see below). Two (Balaam, Shepherds) were composed between 1505 and 1521 (item h), according to Clopper’s hypotheses, and also subject to post-1561 revisions of unknown extent (items l–m). Two (Lucifer, Presentation) may have been composed or newly separated from prior material after 1521 (item j). One (Jerusalem) may have undergone a thorough overhaul after 1539 (item k).21 Clopper offers no date of origin for that play, nor for nine other plays (Noah, Abraham, Temptation, Lazarus, Harrowing, Slaughter, Purification/ Doctors, Resurrection, Antichrist, at item g ), though he hypothesizes that four of those were also likely subject to later revisions of unknown extent: the Slaughter after 1521 (item j); after 1561, Purification/Doctors, Resurrection, and Antichrist (items l–m). Lumiansky and Mills see the c. 1500 Harley List of Guilds as evidence that those ten plays (including Jerusalem) were in fifteenth-century circulation (see item g ); as much as Clopper disagrees with their reading of the Harley List, he still includes those ten plays among an ‘oldest stratum of the cycle’.22 It is the clustering of possible late additions and revisions around Old Testament material (items h and j) that ‘suggests’ to Clopper that the fifteenthcentury ‘stratum’ was ‘more a Passion play than a cycle’.23 As Christie observes, that distinction is not drastic: Clopper implies that even during possibly grand-scale expansions of Old Testament content between 1521 and 1539, up to eighteen of the twenty-five surviving Chester plays, forming the ‘oldest stratum’ — Creation, Noah, Abraham, and ‘the sequence which runs from the smiths (Purification) through the weavers and walkers (Doomsday)’ — may have 21 

I disagree strongly with Clopper’s interpretation of the evidence here, in which the exclusion of Simon from the list of paid players, and the payment to a ‘geyler’ and ‘geylers man’ following them, suggests a significant misalignment with the extant Jerusalem text as well as the absorption of the Bakers’ depiction of Christ’s arrest. A temporary reassignment of material to the Shoemakers would not at all require that the material was rewritten; to the contrary, it suggests that the guilds strove to retain older material intact despite reassignment. In 1550, all the Apostles except Judas are also excluded from the list of paid players, as are any onlookers in Jerusalem except children; it is unlikely that Jesus dined at Martha’s house, procured the ass, and rode into Jerusalem alone. Peter (with Malchus, also unlisted) would be essential in any depiction of the arrest. It may also be possible that money given to a ‘geyler’ and his man, coming at the end of the list, may have been donations conventionally made to the prison during play preparations, donations which other guilds also include among their play expense records. 22  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, p. 227. 23  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, p. 219.

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remained unchanged.24 Nor are all of the hypothetical Old Testament additions post-1521. The first archival mention of the Shepherds play, in 1515–16 (item h) hints, but does not necessitate, that the play originated in that year.25 Balaam was almost certainly assigned to the Cappers in 1505–21 (item h), but if guild assignments were flexible, as Clopper observes they were, then the extant Balaam text might have predated that assignment.26 By virtue of being reasonably possible, Clopper’s hypotheses coalesce into a powerful argument-by-negation that demolishes the then-dominant ‘British and Commonwealth’ approach to dating, as Clopper understood it, prior to the publication of the Chester REED. His negative argument, briefly paraphrased, is as follows: if some of the Chester plays may postdate 1521 entirely, and many were subject to revisions of unknown extent as late as 1575, then no material in the playtexts — even in the plays witnessed in the earliest archives — can be taken to be fifteenth-century in composition. That negation does not mean that the plays can be taken to be sixteenth-century in composition. It cannot preclude an opposite and equally true statement about the Chester plays’ dating: if some of the Chester plays may predate 1500, and indeed may have been little changed after 1422, since the extent of revisions cannot be known, then no material in the plays can be taken confidently as being sixteenth-century in composition. What Clopper demonstrates is that ‘the plays were being revised and rewritten up to the time of their suppression’, a programme of ongoing additions and revisions of unknowable extent, of which Clopper’s list of possibilities probably offers only a taste, but none of which were necessarily substantial enough to be taken as the origin of a new, distinct text. In this case, Mills builds upon, and agrees with, Clopper’s work: The Exemplar text was derived from an earlier form of the cycle, the Pre-exemplar […]. It may be that the Exemplar was not a ‘civic master-copy’ but simply a compilation of guild texts. It may indeed have represented a collection of ‘foul papers’ […] bundles in guild files in which odd fragments of other versions of the plays remained. […] a working text, subject to further revisions.27

24  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, pp. 227, 231. See also Christie, ‘The Chester Cycle’, pp. 22–23. 25  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, p. 227 n. 27: the record ‘may indicate that the painters’ play was new’. 26  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, p. 229. 27  Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, pp. 40–41.

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Even if that palimpsest was first compiled in the 1520s, Clopper’s hypotheses allow for twenty-one of those compiled texts to have been fully or mostly formed by 1500 (item g) and indeed before 1472 (items a–e), either as ‘foul papers’ or already compiled into a previous master text, with two more entering in as additions before 1515 (item h). Alexandra F. Johnston puts it best: ‘In the Chester text we have a collage whose component pictures blur into one another. Unfortunately, we have also lost the original negatives and cannot sort out one version of the collage from another with any authority’.28 Crucially, that collage’s exposure to ongoing revisions of unknown extent does not make the composition of the extant texts datable to any particular moment of revision, even as a safest bet. It only means that no given material in those texts can be assumed to originate from the text’s initial composition. To the contrary, as Andrew Albin notes, sixteenth-century Cestrians’ ‘preservationist’ tendencies attached an ‘unexpected sense of value […] to preserving the alterity of the cycle’s outdated language’, making it likely that extensive material from ‘the original late-medi­eval text’ is preserved alongside newer content.29 Large portions of the long-winded speeches that comprise the Mercers’ Presentation, which Clopper suggests was created when two pre-existing Magi/Herod plays were reworked into three plays in 1521–32 (item j), are repurposed from the mid-fifteenth-century sermonic poetry of the Stanzaic Life of Christ.30 In the extant Smiths’ Purification/Doctors, substantial Stanzaic Life material is added wholesale alongside dialogue shared with the fifteenth-century York plays.31 The way that verifiably early poetry is reshaped in the Presentation and 28 

Johnston, ‘The York Cycle’, p. 130. Albin, ‘Aural Space’, p. 41. 30  Lines 41–43, 48–58, 68–77, 81–86, 90–102, 110–18, and 224–31 line up so closely with selections from Stanzaic Life, ll. 2038–125 that they must rightly be considered paraphrases rather than adaptations. Clopper’s hypothetical redistribution of the Magi/Herod material is based on his reconstruction of an earlier version of the Early Banns, based on metrical irregularities and interrupted rhyming pairs in the extant version (at p. 224). That reconstruction is likely faulty anyway, however, because Clopper’s reading misses a key rhyming pair — the orphaned ‘wyll’, in the Painters’ half-stanza, matches ‘skyle’ in the fourth line of the Mercers’, suggesting that the extended description of the Mercers’ carriage was appended onto a pre-existing regular half-stanza of four lines. 31  Stanzaic Life, ll. 2737–812 provides most of the material, often verbatim, for the Chester Purification/Doctors, ll. 17–109; meanwhile, ll. 215–27, 239–78, and 305–26 are shared almost word-for-word with selections from across the York Doctors; 164 lines of the 334line Chester play are thus verifiably fifteenth-century in origin. See York Plays, ed. by Beadle, pp. 157–65. 29 

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Purification/Doctors to fit the Chester plays’ rhyme, metre, and spelling, but with little significant change to its content, demonstrates the seamlessness with which other old material could have been woven together with newer revisions at any point in the cycle’s transmission.32 When Clopper’s tentative hypotheses are used to support the weight of positive probability (let alone certainty) for ‘American’ post-1521 dating rather than to undermine the certainty of ‘British and Commonwealth’ dating, they buckle. I prefer to give Clopper the benefit of the doubt: he does not seem to have intended, given the caution of his language in 1978, for his hypotheses to be used that way. Clopper’s keystone hypothesis places the transition from a oneday to a three-day performance between 1521 and 1532 (items i and j); he calls it ‘the most significant change during the hundred years from 1422 to 1532’: All the documents which include references to the Corpus Christi play use the singular form of the word; moreover, the 1521 pewterers’ agreement uses the singular for the ‘whitson playe’, whereas the Newhall Proclamation of 1531–32 and all subsequent documents use the plural.33

Mills agrees with that assessment of the records.34 The REED: Cheshire archives suddenly burst with dramatic activity starting in the 1530s, but this may have little do with any change in the performances themselves. Aside from the usual survival of younger records in greater numbers, the burst can be attributed to that decade’s modernizations of record-keeping, initiated by Mayor Henry Gee’s efforts ‘to invest the city’s government with a proper sense of dignity and order’; in his first term Gee instituted the Assembly Book, in which many REED records now survive.35 The contrast that Clopper observes 32 

Elsewhere in this volume, Joe Stadolnik describes ‘the exceptional portability’ of the fifteenth-century Brome Abraham and Isaac play; the portability of the Brome play, and its obvious similarities with passages in Chester’s Abraham, show how freely a single biblical play of any age might be woven into, or disentangled from, a guild cycle. See Stadolnik, ‘The Brome Abraham and Isaac and Impersonal Compilation’. 33  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, p. 220. At pp. 222–23 (item j), Clopper interprets the 1531–32 agreement for carriage-sharing among three guilds as a sign of sweeping changes to the performances overall; however, the connection is very circumstantial. Another of Clopper’s own hypotheses would explain the new carriage-sharing agreement equally well: if the Vintners and Mercers had just split apart their plays for the first time, then the Vintners might need a new arrangement. 34  Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, p. 169. 35  Lewis and Thacker, History of the County of Chester, p. 63.

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may, then, only reflect accidents of record-keeping. And his proposed ‘most significant change’ seems to be only from a ‘play’ comprising multiple, distinct pageant episodes to a ‘cycle’ comprising multiple, distinct ‘plays’, which seems to me a distinction more semantic than practical. If the earlier version is ‘a single play’, as Clopper argues, it still involves ‘various guilds […] responsible for individual segments of it’, each guild being required as early as 1422 ‘ludere’ (to play) and ‘esse participes’ (to be participants) in a separate component pageant (‘in Paginis suis lusi Corporis Christi’ (in their pageants of the play of Corpus Christi)), presented in succession.36 In this case, however, Clopper’s data do not really support his hypothesis in the first place. For evidence of early uses of the singular ‘play’ up to 1521, Clopper cites only six records spread across a century (items a, b, c, e, h, i). Most crucially, the latter four of those records (items c, e, h, i), seem in context to refer only to a single guild’s pageant, not to the assemblage of performances overall.37 All of Clopper’s cases 1462–1521 use the singular ‘play’ (or its Latin equivalent) to refer only to one guild’s financial or creative contribution, which the records generally expect to be contributed solely to one guild’s pageant or play episode (as in 1471–72, ‘onera & custus ludi & pagine occupatoribus eiusdem Artis & Ciuitatis Assignata’ (the burdens and the costs of the play and pageant assigned to practitioners of the same art and occupants of the same city) which thus cannot stand as evidence for the distinctiveness of Cestrians’ general perception of guild plays in toto before 1521.38 Only three of Clopper’s 36  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, pp. 221–22; REED: Cheshire, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, pp. 47–48. 37  REED: Cheshire, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, pp. 52–56, 62, 68–69. Referring to my chart, above, items c, h, i, and e (in which support and maintenance of the ‘ludi’, the ‘pcellis ludi’, the ‘pagin[a]e’ most likely refer only to the Saddlers’ production costs, playtexts, and carriages, respectively) all concern the contributions to the plays of one guild, rather than all Cestrian guilds’ plays overall; the same is true of newly available records at items c and f. The same is also true of the 1467–68 Bowyers, Fletchers, Coopers, and Stringers’ Order, cited by Clopper but left out of my chart above because it does not introduce any new relevant data. The key 1532 proclamation also uses ‘play’ once in the singular to refer to the full series of pageants; Clopper proposes that this is a reference exclusively to past iterations as opposed to the thenpresent one, though nothing else in the proclamation would suggest that the grammatical distinction is meaningful. See Clopper, ‘History and Development’, p. 221 n. 9. See also REED: Cheshire, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, pp. 71–72: the proclamation treats the tradition as continuous and assumes erroneously that it has always happened at Whitsun; that ‘play’ is later referred to as the ‘same plaiez’ or the ‘said plaiez’. 38  REED: Cheshire, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, pp. 55–56, with translation at

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six pre-1521 records (items c, h, i) survive in English; the contrasting later evidence is all in English, putting further strain on Clopper’s case for a meaningful shift in a detail of grammar.39 Early records’ use of grammatical number seems flexible: two fifteenth-century records that mention the plays also refer to the guilds’ ceremonial torch-bearing in the singular (French ‘lumeir […] de corpus christi’; Latin ‘lumine’ and ‘luminis’), though there were certainly multiple torches involved.40 If the Mayors List’s befuddled 1430–31 entry ‘in this yeare was St georges playes playd in chester’ does not sufficiently attest to the flexibility of this particular noun’s number in fifteenth-century records, then the infamous title written across the N-Town manu­script, ‘The Plaie called Corpus Christi’, demonstrates that the use of the singular to refer to an assemblage of multiple, distinct biblical plays persists well into the sixteenth century.41 Most of Clopper’s remaining sixteenth-century hypothetical revisions (items j, l, m) depend on the idea, based on prior work by F. M. Salter, that omissions or signs of change in the Early and Late Banns’ verse summaries of the plays, usually as metrical irregularities or slight misalignments of content between summary and extant play, indicate revisions, deletions, or expansions in the playtexts themselves.42 This is where Mills disagrees most strongly with Clopper. Lumiansky and Mills, offering an argument-by-hypothetical-negation of their own, describe a few of the innumerable reasons why ceremonial play summaries might be revised during the course of multiple performances, many of which have nothing to do with revisions to the playtexts, and of the innumerable reasons why metrical irregularities having nothing to do with any revision might exist in the Banns.43 The Early Banns’ crier identifies himself as someone other than the guildsmen who have participated in bringing forth the plays; 933–34. Notably, the record’s ‘Pagine ludi’, ‘the pageant of the play’, makes sense as ‘the pageant [carriage] of our play’ (compare to ‘pcellis ludi’ earlier in the record); there is no reason to take it as ‘our pageant in the city’s play’. 39  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, pp.  220–21, especially at n.  9. See also REED: Cheshire, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, pp. 503–04: the only non-English records in Clopper’s REED: Chester concerning the plays after 1532 are about storage for ‘pagentibus’ (i.e., pageant carriages); none refer to the performances themselves. 40  REED: Cheshire, ed.  by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, pp.  48–49, 54–55. See also pp. 58, 86 for descriptions of the multiple lights in the procession. 41  REED: Cheshire, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, p. 49; The N-Town Plays, ed. by Sugano, p. 335. 42  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, pp. 227–31 (especially n. 26), 235–41. 43  Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, pp. 177–81, 192.

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those Banns show little evidence of being composed by anyone involved directly with the playtexts or their preservation and revision.44 Nor are the Banns’ summaries, which resemble sixteenth-century Netflix blurbs, reliable indicators of the content of the corresponding playtexts: the summaries are never comprehensive and often focus on prestige and spectacle to the exclusion of plot. The metrically irregular Presentation summary in the Early Banns offers a colourful description of the Mercers’ ostentatious carriage, for instance, but does not mention the Magi or their gifts at all.45 Clopper cites apparent differences from the Banns’ blurbs to the extant texts (item m), but those differences, at best, seem too minor to have bearing on the origin date of any play. Some of the apparent differences are based on incomplete evidence. For instance, Clopper makes much of the Early and Late Banns’ reference to the Nativity’s Octavian as ‘a cruel tyrant’: the Octavian of the extant Nativity, he protests, ‘refuses emperor worship and prostrates himself before an image of the child’, and so the extant version cannot correspond to the Banns’ summary.46 In the extant Nativity, however, Octavian’s prostration, among the miracles in Rome at Christ’s birth, is significant because of its contrast with Octavian’s prior boasts of power; those multiple boasts of power enforced by sweeping violence, while they stop short of Herod-like delusion and look level-headed by contrast, surely qualify the preconversion Octavian as at least a little cruel and tyrannical.47 Furthermore, there is no reason to assume that the extant playtexts reflect all, or any, of whatever hypothetical revisions, deletions, and additions might have made impacts on the Banns, all but five of which Clopper dates after 1548 (items j–l), a year that likely postdates the initial compilation of the plays into the extant texts’ lost exemplar. As Clopper acknowledges, ‘neither the Early Banns, nor the List of Companies, nor the Late Banns describe the cycle as it 44 

At REED: Cheshire, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, pp. 82–87, the crier speaks to each guild as someone other than himself and then announces that he has accomplished what ‘lyeth in [him]’ regarding the continuance of the plays, suggesting that his production responsibilities end with the Banns’ completion. 45  REED: Cheshire, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, p. 83. See also Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, p. 179. 46  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, p. 241. 47  Octavian threatens to ‘destroy’ (l. 191) enemies, prohibits any man from claiming ownership of any property except by his leave (ll. 199–200), boasts of subjugating the world with ‘strenght and strokes sore’ (l. 205), calls himself ‘soe dreade a duke’ (l. 239), and of course, ‘to preeve my might and my postee’ (l. 242), exacts a flat tax from every family in the Roman Empire, enforced by his servant on Joseph under threat of ‘danger’ (l. 419).

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exists in our texts’.48 Newly included in the 2007 REED: Cheshire, Puritan protestors’ 1571 list of ‘absurdities’ in the plays also refer to content that our extant texts do not include, while citing a process of ‘corrections’ that their copy may have undergone; the extant texts’ exemplar, plainly Catholic and extra-scriptural in ways that the protestors do not identify, may have escaped many of those late ‘corrections’.49 Clopper provocatively suggests, in passing, that the presence of the oncesuspended Bakers’ play in the extant texts (item k) ‘must cause us to question whether the extant versions of the plays can safely be dated before the 1560s’.50 I propose, to the contrary, that the only way that Clopper’s hypothetical post1561 revisions (items l and m) are tenable is if they are not required to have left any visible effect on the extant texts’ exemplar. Clopper places the Antichrist play, which satisfies his criteria for likely late revision, among both stages of those latest and most sweeping revisions. Because he focuses on non-dramatic records, in this case the Late Banns, he ignores MS Peniarth 399, held by the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth, an early standalone copy of the Chester Antichrist.51 Mills does not seem to take Peniarth 399 into account in his dating, either. In 1935, W. W. Greg completed an edition of the Peniarth Antichrist alongside the Antichrist in MS HM 2, dated to 1591, in order to demonstrate that the Peniarth scribe derived their copy from a different exemplum than that used by the later full-cycle scribes.52 Taken for granted in Greg’s painstaking surveys of small variants across Antichrist copies is an obvious fact, made especially apparent in his side-by-side edition: despite its being derived from a cousin exemplar, the Peniarth version of the Antichrist play is essentially identical to the version in the full-cycle copies, and roughly as identical to the 48  The fact that the Early Banns leave out the lost Wives’ Assumption, just as the extant texts do, does not mean that the two are of similar ages: since the exempla were always subject to change and revision, any given exemplar could have included the play and then had it cancelled or ripped out later. 49  REED: Cheshire, ed. by Baldwin, Clopper, and Mills, pp. 144–48. See also Johnston, ‘The Text of the Chester Plays in 1572’. 50  Clopper, ‘The History and Development’, p. 232. 51  See The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. by Lumiansky and Mills, pp. x–xii. 52  The Play of Antichrist, ed. by Greg, pp. xiii, lxxiii–lxxxiv. At p. xx, Greg proposes that Peniarth 399 was likely a rehearsal copy, used during the preparation of plays by performers or production staff, a likelihood I discuss in my upcoming book; see Pamela M. King’s ‘The Coventry Playbooks’, elsewhere in this volume, on the rarity of playbooks for early English drama. I use the singular ‘they’ here and below, following proper practice for those whose gender, like that of the anonymous Peniarth scribe, cannot be attached accurately to ‘he’ or ‘she’.

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full-cycle copies as those five copies are identical to each other.53 In short, the same play appears in all six copies, with each copy differing from the others only in ortho­graphy and in scattered variations in word choice or stage directions. The origin of the Antichrist text as it survives in the late full-cycle copies after 1591, then, must precede the date when Peniarth 399 was copied — a date consistently placed in the late fifteenth century. Unlike the scribes of the full-cycle copies, the Peniarth scribe did not write any date on their work.54 According to Greg, the Peniarth hand is fifteenthcentury, though it ‘might be as late as 1500’, reinforcing previous comments made by George Warner of the British Museum, which date the hand ‘to the end of the fifteenth century’, positioning both paleo­graphers in slight disagreement with F. J. Furnivall’s dating of the hand to ‘1475 or a little later’.55 Greg, Warner, and Furnivall thus establish 1500 as a latest date for the text’s inscription. The Peniarth hand’s splay, the alternating width of its strokes, and most of its letterforms (see Figure 4.1) are typical secretary.56 It has a few letter forms — the reversed circular e; the sigma-shaped final s, sometimes with a high ascender — in common with early Tudor secretary hands; however, it lacks other Tudorera characteristics, including looped and curved links between descenders and subsequent letters (on which, more below). It makes good sense to date the Peniarth hand to the decades when fifteenth-century secretary forms (i.e., 1370s–1500) overlap with the earliest development of early Tudor secretary (i.e., 1480s–1540s): that is, to the last two decades of the fifteenth century, as Greg, Warner, and Furnivall have done. In 2014, in the hopes of settling the dating of the Peniarth Antichrist with more certainty, the Uni­ver­sity of Chester’s Vanessa Greatorex joined me in searching through the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies offices for dated samples of local handwriting. Among the samples we consulted from between 53  The most pronounced variations, at stanzas 84 and 85, are irregular across all of the manu­scripts, and even these only rearrange lines rather than changing their contents; according to Lumiansky and Mills, Peniarth ‘alone has the correct version’ of these; see Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, pp. 79–80. 54  See note 1. 55  The Play of Antichrist, ed. by Greg, p. xx, which cites the Furnivall and Warner dating as reported by ‘Professor Manly’. Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, p. 170, does not attach either paleo­g rapher’s comments to a particular publication, suggesting that both estimates were made in informal reports to Manly. 56  See Parkes, English Cursive Book Hands, p. xix; Petti, English Literary Hands, pp. 14–17; see also Preston and Yeandle, English Handwriting, p. vii.

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Figure 4.1. Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 399, fol. 5v. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Wales.

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1470 and 1541, the hand that seemed most closely to resemble Peniarth’s, including a rough cognate for its idiosyncratic y-descenders, was an entry in the Mayors’ Book, whose date of 1487–88 fit snugly within Greg, Furnivall, and Warner’s range (see Figure 4.2). Given early Chester’s relatively small size, we had hopes of finding another instance of the Peniarth scribe’s work, but none emerged. However, despite the likelihood that Cestrian scribes trained outside of Cheshire, an apparent trend specific to Cestrian handwriting did emerge in the way local secretary hands formed their h-descenders, even though many of the 275 samples we consulted did not adhere to true secretary form, and though their frequent use of Latin made h a relatively rare letter.57 At least across the Cheshire records we consulted, we found that a consistently looped-linking h-descender supplants other forms of h-descenders decisively within the space of one decade: between 1500 and 1509. Before 1500, those Cestrian scribes sometimes loop and link their h-descenders into the next letter, but just as often lift their pen after forming an h, starting the next letter with a new stroke. In the decade after 1500, that practice seems to change suddenly: though it has its exceptions, the local paleo­graphic shift marks a surprisingly sharp break. After h-descenders before letters other than e, Cestrian scribes seem to stop lifting their pen consistently after 1509.58 The shift is earliest, and sharpest, for h-descenders before e, as in the common and often hastily jotted word ‘the’: across the Cheshire documents dated between 1500 and 1530, scribes almost never lift their pens between an h-descender and an e; earlier years of archives show no such consistency. As early Tudor secretary develops, the distinctive looped-and-linked h-descender often becomes so cursive that the bottom half of the h loses much 57  Samples taken from Chester, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies (CALS), MSS ZMB 6–13, ZSB 3–6, ZCHD 2–3, ZCHC 11; of these, only thirty-eight were in English, while forty-two others were primarily made up of local names. We only recorded 275 in our data sets, but viewed still more samples without seeing exceptions to the trend; we privileged hands that had passing resemblance to Peniarth in the first place. Greatorex expressed some hesitance in selecting the Mayors’ Books for comparison, because their ‘administrative scribes often needed to record information as fast as possible, particularly during court sessions, and were therefore obliged to sacrifice neatness for speed’. Peniarth 399 is not particularly un-hasty, however, keeping in mind the possibility (according to Greg) that it was a production copy rather than a literary preservation; there are signs of haste throughout, including uneven ruling and letters that vary very widely across a single page in height, splay, spacing, and weight. 58  According to our data, nearly all scribes between 1500 and 1530 never lifted their pen after h-descenders preceding e; between 1509 and 1530 they rarely or never did so preceding other letters.

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Figure 4.2. Chester Mayors’ Books 1487–88, Chester, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, ZMB 7, fol. 1r. Photo Vanessa Greatorex. Reproduced with the permission of Cheshire Archives.

of its curvature, running into the next letter.59 The Peniarth scribe’s h-descenders, in contrast, form a strong stroke downward and slightly to the left, after which the pen is almost never looped and seems nearly always to have been lifted — at least where the pen-strokes remain undamaged and unfaded enough to be distinguished clearly. The stroke of the next letter begins perpendicular to the h-descender stroke; that perpendicular drag of the pen across wet ink is faintly visible in ‘the’ at the bottom line of Figure 4.1.60 The scribe does not 59 

Petti, English Literary Hands, p. 16, in distinguishing fifteenth-century secretary from early Tudor secretary, identifies the ‘looped and curved links as frequently appear on f, h, and y’ as particularly ‘marked developments’. See also Preston and Yeandle, English Handwriting, p. 39, for an example c. 1550 of the very cursive h. 60  The thinner pen-strokes in the Peniarth Antichrist’s brown ink have often faded with time; a modern antiquarian’s attempts to darken some of those areas with newer black ink have sometimes made it difficult to see the detail of whether the earlier pen was lifted. In the Peniarth Antichrist, very rare looped-linking h-descenders do appear: at the bottom of fol. 2v (in ‘the’ at l. 144), again at the bottom of fol. 4v (in ‘other’ at l. 300), and in a cluster of three more at the bottom of fol. 5r (in ‘they’ at l. 410, ‘shewyd’ at l. 411, and ‘thrughe’ at l. 412). A few Peniarth h-descenders will loop very slightly around in the direction of the next letter, as if they were going to rise and connect, as at fol. 3v (in ‘thy’ at l. 180), at fol. 6r (in ‘hye’ at l. 378), or at fol. 7r (in ‘thus’ at l. 454), but the pen still clearly lifts afterward. Those eight cases are not surprising, since many Cestrian scribes sometimes looped and linked their h-descenders before 1500; it is after 1500 that the non-looped descenders suddenly disappear. Other than those

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hesitate to link other letters together, including the long descenders in some of the old-fashioned forked rs that seem borrowed from earlier anglicana; their loops are very rarely curved. In short, the Peniarth scribe’s consistently unlooped and unlinking style of h-descender was common in Cheshire’s archives before 1500, but grew extremely rare — especially where the h-descender precedes an e — during the first decade of the sixteenth century, and all but disappeared after 1509.61 The 275 Cestrian documents we consulted, in their variable hastiness and informality, may not be a conclusive indicator of local trends, but combined with the unchallenged opinions of Greg and Warner, they can support cautious hypotheses at least as sturdy as any of those in Clopper’s ‘History and Development’: Peniarth 399 is much more likely than not to have been inscribed during 1486–1500; it almost certainly was copied before 1509. In a plain demonstration of the ‘continuity’ favored by the ‘British and Commonwealth’ school, that same text appears a century later, with very few changes, even in the youngest of the full-cycle copies, BL MS Harley 2124, dated in 1607. The case of the Antichrist thus establishes the strong possibility that any part of the Chester plays, including individual plays in their entirety, could be preserved across a century of textual transmission, if not longer, without leaving any clues in the Banns or other REED archives. It suggests that the Cestrian ‘preservationist’ tendencies of which Albin writes, perhaps combined with the efforts of sixteenth-century antiquarians to search out earlier sources than what were used in then-contemporary productions, allowed large portions of fifteenth-century text, untouched by later revisions, to survive in the extant full-cycle copies after 1590. The Antichrist in those late full-cycle manu­scripts, then, almost certainly cannot descend from an exemplar that bore the results of post-1521 revisions. The cycle in toto preserved in those manu­scripts, then, must either have been copied (with updated ortho­graphy and minor revisions) from a preserved version essentially complete in the fifteenth century or — more likely — from the exemplar ‘collage’ which Clopper, Lumiansky, Mills, and Johnston describe in various hypothetical terms. The Antichrist sheds new light on how variegated the ‘collage’ would have to be. eight cases, all of the Peniarth h-descenders are straight, either directly downward or slanting to the left, across the 726 lines of dialogue in the Antichrist. 61  ‘Overall, the evidence suggests to me’, as Greatorex put it in her final assessment, ‘that the first decade of the sixteenth century was a time of transition in handwriting styles, with the change in the formation of hs from unlooped and lifted to looped and unlifted becoming the norm in Chester from roughly 1510 onwards. This, in my opinion, supports the theory that Peniarth 399 was written before 1510 and, more probably (in view of other stylistic elements), some time between c. 1486 and c. 1500’ (email dated 19 June 2014).

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Table 4.2. Development of the Chester plays, revised timeline. YEAR

EVIDENCE

Before 1422

CONSERVATIVE CONCLUSIONS ≥2 GGAM participating in distinct episodes in a play (‘in luso’); GA and RSC for Passion matches ETs.

By 1422

REED, pp. 47–48: Bowers, Fletchers (et al.), Ironmongers, and Carpenters’ dispute ‘in luso Corporis christi’

By 1430

REED, pp. 48–49: Weavers and Shearmen’s (et al.) ‘Iwe de Corpus christi’.

≥4 GGAM involved in ARLD.

REED, p. 52 (new): Demon in Bakers’ ‘ludo pistorum’

Likely the same play as 1462.

REED, pp. 52–53: Bakers’ Charter includes ‘play […] of Corpus Christi’

≥5 GGAM involved in ARLD.

By 1468

REED, pp. 50–61: various records of Mercers, Drapers, Shearmen renting land from the city for carriage storage

≥7 GGAM involved in ARLD. Shearmen now involved in two kinds of ARLD: carriage rental and ‘Corpus christi’ play.

By 1472

REED, pp. 55–56: Saddlers’ Charter (‘ludi & pagine […] Assignata’; ‘pcellis ludi […] corpis christi’)

≥8 GGAM involved in ARLD.

1480–3

REED, p. 61: Saddlers’ carriage

Saddlers now involved in two kinds of ARLD: carriage rental and ‘corpis christi’ play.

By 1486

REED, p. 62 (new): a weaver plays a Demon in Cooks’ ‘play’; he testifies in 1487–88 that a Cook had acknowledged on Whit-Monday 1485–86 that he was owed for playing the role.

≥9 GGAM involved in ARLD.

1448 By 1462

By 1490

≥3 GGAM involved in ARLD; GA and RSC for Trial and Passion matches ETs.

≥3 GA & RSC (Trial, Passion, Harrowing) match ETs. Possible connection to Whitsun as recurring performance date.

REED, p. 62: Assumption

By 1486-c. 1500, MS Peniarth 399 of Antichrist no later than 1509 (‘Pagina xx’)

≥1 ET composed in full ~21 plays active

c. 1500

22 GGAM listed in order matching GAs in ETs; list includes named Wives’ play, and all ≥9 GGAM already involved in ARLD (above), plus Dyers (later GA for Antichrist), and Smiths (see 1521).

REED, pp. 65–66: Harley 2104 Guild List. (‘Wyfus of þe town’ listed alongside ‘assumpcion beate marie’, the subject of their assigned play, now lost.)

By 1516

REED, p. 67: Shepherds and Assumption performed

~22 plays active ≥4 RSC match ETs ≥1 ET composed in full

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SIGNS OF TEXTUAL PRESERVATION OR REVISION Preservation: Old texts can remain unchanged (i.e., secundum Originale) during changes of GA and redistribution of material among plays. Thus, any content in the ETs may precede the date at which a guild became a play producer.

Revision: No demons in ETs’ Bakers’ play. May be an old GA, but only two plays have been described in RSC so far. Most ‘Corpus Christi’ plays may not resemble ETs at all.

Preservation: Resemblance between GAs in early records and ETs hints at early origins for ETs, especially for those seven attested plays. Preservation/Revision: The Saddlers (as opposed to the mayor, 1422) are ‘sustaining and guarding’ portions, or parcels, of the play (‘pcellis ludi’). Single-play copies, in the hands of guilds, thus might be preserved or revised according to each guild’s preference, only requiring civic intervention in the case of a dispute. Preservation: There are demons in the Cooks’ Harrowing in ETs; similarity to 1448 case suggests that the same demonic content may have switched GAs since then, or been redistributed/split off from preexisting plays.

Preservation: Single-play copy of Antichrist essentially identical to ETs; any other ET (or segment) could have been preserved in such copies. Revision: Assumption deleted from all ETs with no trace; any other ET but Antichrist could thus have been replaced, preserving only title and resemblance to RSC. Only four RSC match ETs so far. In list, Cooks separate from Tapsters/Hostlers; Tanners (as Barkers) alongside Shoemakers; no Cappers or Painters.

Preservation: single plays on subjects matching ETs might exist outside the cycle, with no GA. By 1533–4, the Painters claim Shepherds ‘tyme out of minde’ (REED, p. 73).

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Table 4.2. Development of the Chester plays, revised timeline (cont.). YEAR By 1521

By 1532

EVIDENCE

CONSERVATIVE CONCLUSIONS

REED, pp. 68–69: Smiths, Pewterers (et al.) ‘whitson playe’ agreement

Earliest mention of a guild’s Whitsun play, but see 1486 (above) and 1539 (below).

REED, pp. 69–70: Cappers’ 1523–24 petition, about Balaam given by Mayor Smith (i.e., 1505–21)

~23 plays active ≥5 RSC match ETs ≥1 ET composed in full

REED, pp. 71–72: Newhall Proclamation ~24 plays active mentions Lucifer/Doomsday; Goldsmiths- ≥8 RSC match ETs (ETs for Goldsmiths vintners-dyers’ agreement et al. share similar sets and effects) ≥1 ET composed in full

By c. 1539

REED, pp. 79–87: White Book of the Pentice (copied late sixteenth century), including Early Banns (inc. Wives), revised Newhall Proclamation, White Book Guild List (leaves out Wives)

~26 plays active (inc. Wives’) 25 RSC match ETs ≥1 play’s ET composed in full Guild performances, using carriages, are occurring ‘vppon monday tuysday and wennysday’ of Whitsun week. The White Book Guild List’s reference to the Whitsun plays as ‘pagyns in pley of corpus christi’ suggests that prior references to ‘Corpus Christi’ might be referring to the genre, not the date, of performances (see 1486 and 1521, above).

1550–75

REED, pp. 91–168: Itemized play accounts for our guilds (Shoemakers, Smiths, Painters, Fletchers et al.)

1567–68

REED, p. 118: the city’s ‘originall booke of the whydson plaies’ lost; Randall Trever testifies he returned it.

1572

REED, pp. 144–48: protestors compile list of ‘absurdities’ from the ‘old originall’ text

By 1591

First extant full-cycle copy (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM2)

Abbreviations: ETs = ‘extant texts’; ARLD = ‘activity resembling later descriptions of biblical plays’; RSC = ‘roughly summarized content’; GA = ‘guild assignment’; GGAM = ‘guild groups assigned material in the extant texts’ headings’)

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SIGNS OF TEXTUAL PRESERVATION OR REVISION Preservation: by 1521, the Smiths have already been committed to their ‘whitson play’ ‘of olde tyme’. Revision: the Cappers complain of a GA given ‘of late tyme’, for them to ‘brynge forthe A playe’ of Balaam, suggesting (but not necessitating) a new composition that year.

Preservation: the plays’ continuation ‘of old tyme’ is a fundamental value attached to ongoing performance. Henry Francis presented as mythic author: the old text is thus revered nostalgically.

Preservation: The White Book’s entries match prior years’ GAs and RSCs, and Antichrist, perfectly; they cite ‘old tyme’ value very frequently. Revision: over-frequent citations of ‘old’ traditions seem a bit defensive; malleable associations with mythic authors (now Ranulf Higden) and impossible early origins (see Mills, Recycling the Cycle, pp. 121–24) put all prior ‘old tyme’ references under suspicion as fabrications, perhaps ‘aging up’ new content. Irregularities in the Early Banns hint at (but provide no evidence for) revisions.

Revision: Similarity between accounts and ETs suggests that some ETs were in use during this late period. Significant (if minor) misalignments, and guild expenditures on copying playtexts, suggest (but do not necessitate) ongoing revisions to those texts that may not be reflected in the ETs. Twenty-three plays active (protestors’ numbering differs from ETs). Revision: Trever had un-monitored access to a master copy. No record of the city’s ‘originall’ being returned; restoration likely invited changes. Protestors’ list differs from ETs; refers to ongoing ‘correction’. Preservation: The protestors suggest many of the guilds, holding their own copies, ignored official ‘corrections’ in practice. Guild copies may have been the only source for restoring the city’s lost ‘originall’. Trever’s lost ‘originall’ may have remained in circulation, out of the reach of authoritative revision, among the preservationist play-makers (who also resisted two prohibitions from the Archbishop of York). MS variance shows that all five full-cycle manu­scripts consulted a now-lost exemplar compilation. That exemplar ‘collage’ (probably not the city’s copy; see Lumiansky and Mills pp. 40–41) may have undergone major revision up to this point, but also must have preserved fifteenth-century Antichrist.

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In order to contain the extant Antichrist while post-dating the Peniarth copy, the exemplar would have had to compile late revisions or additions alongside unrevised early texts of widely varying age and length; its date of initial compilation, which could have happened at any point between 1422 and 1591, would still not provide a terminus a quo or terminus ad quem for any of its contents, since material might have been easily modified, inserted, or stricken later.62 The extant full-cycle copies made from that exemplar, meanwhile, could also have consulted any number of other older sources, including any single-play manu­ scripts that, like Peniarth 399, may have been preserved effectively against subsequent revision. The archival timelines compiled by Clopper and Mills are not irrelevant to that un-datable lost ‘collage’; to the contrary, they provide provocative hints of its irreducibly conflicted textual history, throughout which Cestrian preservationism and revisionism may have been in contention.63 The embellished hand of Peniarth’s title heading, which cannot be dated as reliably as the dialogue’s hand but which seems likely to have been written at the same time, writes ‘Incipit Pagina XX’ (here begins pageant 20). The Antichrist is an eminently penultimate play; since the Judgement play is one of the eight vaguely attested in the earliest records, we might guess — and only guess, since the dating of the Chester cycle cannot deal in certainties — that Chester’s biblical performance tradition already featured twenty-one distinct episodes well before 1500, among which at least one playtext was essentially identical to what survives in copies after 1591, as much as any other play might have been revised or rewritten later. That number would closely resemble the twenty-two guild groups (not counting the Wives) in the c. 1500 Harley List. 62 

If the Wives’ Assumption was struck from a full-cycle exemplar in 1561, for instance, it can hardly mean that the exemplar itself should be dated to 1561. The full-cycle exemplar from which the five extant full-cycle manu­scripts were copied directly may indeed have still included the Assumption, but stricken through or otherwise removed; alternately, the copy from which that exemplar was copied may have had its Assumption struck through. 63  The revised timeline I present in Table 4.2 includes two new REED items, for the years 1448 and 1486, which were not yet included in the earlier REED material to which Clopper and Mills referred in their early work. Not included in the list, however, are two very recent discoveries by Ernst Gerhardt of Laurentian Uni­ver­sity: previously unnoticed references in the Pentice Court Rolls, 1437–38 and 1444–45, to a play (in the singular) sponsored by one guild (in both cases apparently the Drawers of Dee, for whom there is no other known evidence of performance before c. 1500; the earlier record may also be the Fishmongers). Gerhardt’s exciting discovery is not yet published but should rightly increase by one all my minimum estimates for ‘GGAM involved in ARLD’ after 1438 (interview and email exchange with Ernst Gerhardt, 14 July 2018).

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It would leave five extant plays unaccounted for, which we might guess were composed anew after 1500. It is tempting to identify those five with the five that Clopper and Mills suggest were composed anew after 1505 (items h and j: Lucifer, Balaam, Shepherds, a newly split-off Presentation and Slaughter). Given how little information we have, though — information that keeps disrupting any hard dating that might be constructed from it — it seems more reasonable to admit that nearly any passage in any of these plays might originate from the sixteenth century, just as any passage of any length might not. It is Lumiansky and Mills who, following Clopper, erroneously interpret the list of kingdoms at Antichrist lines 241–44 as possible evidence of an addition ‘after the early 1530s’, because of a passing resemblance to wars underway in the 1520s and 1530s — in a passage that, being preserved in the same words in the Peniarth Antichrist, must have preceded those wars.64 Their error should give pause to all analyses, ‘American’ or ‘British’, that posit an origin for any given Chester passage in relation to a particular historical event after 1520, because of passing resemblances.65 There are absolutely no direct references to specific historically datable events in the extant Chester playtexts. Rather, they avoid datable references so consistently, across a cycle that otherwise delights in cultural anachronism, that avoidance seems like a definitive convention of the plays’ development. It seems appropriate, then, to close this study with some tentatively worded hypotheses on the temporality of the extant Chester playtexts. Following Coletti and Gibson, who have already demonstrated that the anachronistic ‘medi­eval/early modern border’ cannot apply to the Chester plays, one might argue that the apparent empiricism of dating these plays’ terminus a quo or ad quem to a given year at all is equally inapplicable — and cannot accurately comprehend the texts’ relation to time.66 To use numerical years at all to distinguish among stages of contentious community-based play development is, perhaps, to flatten local temporality by forcing it into universal terms after the fact. Perhaps calendrical history is always universalizing, always opposed to local or 64 

See Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, p. 47. Christie, ‘The Chester Cycle’, pp. 27–30, surveys a number of similar conclusions based on sixteenth-century battles and laws (most of which might be explained handily by equally resonant battles or laws across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) and putative local shifts in production schedule — including a common misreading of the final lines of the Balaam play (see also item m), in which a promise that the events of Jesus’ life will be played ‘tomorrowe nexte’ does not require that the Balaam was ever the final play of a performance day. 66  See Coletti and Gibson, ‘The Tudor Origins’, p. 230. 65 

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situational perceptions of time, especially at the temporal border of modernity. It might be fair to say that similar exertions of cultural force, as described by witnesses across REED: Cheshire, are what finally killed the Chester plays — protests against the plays often seem like demands that Cestrians catch up with the properly cosmopolitan progression of years, years that would later define an English literary history in which the Chester plays seem never to fit. Further research might explore how deeply the Chester texts’ remarkable resistance to dates is woven into the atemporal history of their development, allowing them to persist so long in local performances, which may have felt to early Cestrians at once ancient and current, both preserved and revised.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 399 Chester, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies (CALS), MS ZMB 7 London, BL, Additional MS 10305 —— , MS Harley 2013 —— , MS Harley 2124 Manchester, Central Library, MS 822.11C2 Oxford, Bodl., MS Bodley 174 San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM2

Primary Sources The Chester Mystery Cycle, Vol. i, ed. by Robert M. Lumiansky and David Mills, EETS, s.s., 3 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1974) The N-Town Plays, ed. by Douglas Sugano (Kalamazoo: Medi­eval Institute Publications, 2007) The Play of Antichrist from the Chester Cycle, ed. by W. W. Greg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935) REED: Cheshire, Including Chester, ed.  by Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence Clopper, and David Mills (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 2007) REED: Chester, ed. by Lawrence M. Clopper (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 1979) The Stanzaic Life of Christ, ed. by Frances A. Foster, EETS, o.s., 166 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1926; repr. 1971) The York Plays, Vol. i, ed. by Richard Beadle, EETS, s.s., 23 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009)

Secondary Works Albin, Andrew, ‘Aural Space, Sonorous Presence, and the Performance of Christian Community in the Chester Shepherds Play’, Early Theatre, 16.2 (2013), 33–57 Barrett, Robert W., Jr, Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656 (Notre Dame, IN: Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame Press, 2009) Beadle, Richard, and Alan J. Fletcher, eds, The Cam­bridge Companion to Medi­eval English Theatre, 2nd edn (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008) Christie, Sheila, ‘The Chester Cycle’, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, ed. by Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012), pp. 21–35 —— , ‘When in Rome: Shifting Conceptions of the Chester Cycle’s Roman References in Preand Post-Reformation England’, in The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555–1575, ed. by Jessica Dell, David Klausner, and Helen Ostovich (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 149–60

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Clopper, Lawrence M., ‘The History and Development of the Chester Cycle’, Modern Philo­logy, 75.3 (1978), 219–46 Coletti, Theresa, ‘The Chester Cycle in Sixteenth-Century Religious Culture’, Journal of Medi­eval and Early Modern Studies, 37.3 (2007), 531–47 Coletti, Theresa, and Gail McMurray Gibson, ‘The Tudor Origins of Medi­eval Drama’, in A Companion to Tudor Drama, ed. by Kent Cartwright (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 228–45 Emmerson, Richard K., ‘Contextualizing Performance: The Reception of the Chester Antichrist’, Journal of Medi­eval and Early Modern Studies, 29.1 (1999), 81–119 Gibson, Gail McMurray, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1989) Happé, Peter, Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays (New York: Rodopi, 2004) Johnston, Alexandra F., ‘The Text of the Chester Plays in 1572: A Conjectural Recon­ struc­tion’, in The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555–1575, ed.  by Jessica Dell, David Klausner, and Helen Ostovich (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 19–36 —— , ‘The York Cycle and the Chester Cycle: What Do the Records Tell Us?’, in Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference on Editorial Problems: Editing Medi­eval Drama. Special Problems and New Directions, Toronto, 1983, ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston (New York: AMS, 1987), pp. 121–43 Lewis, C.  P., and A.  T. Thacker, History of the County of Chester, Volume v, Part i, The Victoria History of the Counties of England (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2005) Lumiansky, Robert M., and David Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, with an Essay ‘Music in the Cycle’ by Richard Rastall (Chapel Hill: Uni­ver­sity of North Carolina Press, 1983) Manly, John Matthews, Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama (Boston: Ginn/Athe­ naeum, 1897) Parkes, Malcolm B., English Cursive Book Hands, 1250–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) Petti, Anthony G., English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden (London: Edward Arnold, 1977) Preston, Jean F., and Laetitia Yeandle, English Handwriting 1400–1650 (Binghamton: SUNY Binghamton/Pegasus, 1992) Symes, Carol, ‘The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medi­eval Theater’, Speculum, 77.3 (2002), 778–831

Noting Baiazet, the Raging Turk Kirsten Inglis and Mary Polito

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here was a young man from Warwickshire (no limerick, nor nod to Shakespeare) John Newdigate III of Arbury Hall (1600–1642). A great fan of the theatre and amateur dramatist himself, the massive archive from Arbury allows us to follow him and his cohort in their doings with drama in the country, in London and, as we will show in this chapter, at Oxford Uni­ ver­sity.1 We examine a dramatic manu­script bound as Arbury Hall, MS 415 in the Newdigate archive: Thomas Goffe’s play, Baiazet, named The Raging Turke in its 1631 print edition (STC 11980) and played at Oxford circa 1619, when both the eighteen-year-old Newdigate and Goffe were students there. Goffe seems to have been fully involved in the theatrical activities at Christ Church, where he wrote further drama, as well as poetry, and was known as an orator and actor. The manu­script contains the hand of John Newdigate, among a total of ten hands that transcribe this play. In fact, Newdigate’s hand appears most often, and there is evidence that he may be what Tiffany Stern calls, in her article ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers: Hamlet Q1 as a “Noted” Text”’ ‘the amender’ of the written work.2 1 

In 2005, an anonymous, undated seventeenth-century manu­script was found in the Uni­ver­sity of Calgary Special Collections. An extensive project identified the play (a later transcription of the play found in Arbury Hall 414) and its provenance. For the links between this play and Richard Brome’s The Jovial Crew, see Polito and Windle, ‘“You see the times are dangerous”’. 2  Stern, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers’, pp. 18–19. Kirsten Inglis is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Film Studies at the Uni­ver­sity of Alberta. Mary Polito is Associate Professor (Emerita) at the Uni­ver­sity of Calgary. She is an active researcher in the fields of manu­script studies and Shakespeare and governance

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 103–122 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116446 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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Stern argues that Hamlet Q1 is a product of a team of note-takers and not the product of a singular ‘pirate’. We will argue that the manu­script Baiazet was also a product of a team of note-takers, that John Newdigate and his nine fellows attended a performance of the play at Oxford and took turns taking notes in a kind of relay. We contend that the version of the manu­script found in Arbury 415 is a collated version of their notes rewritten into a legible and playable, and perhaps publishable (by circulation or print) dramatic document. Stern shows that note-taking was ubiquitous in church, often to preachers’ consternation; when sermons were published by note-takers, they often drew forth the publication of the preacher’s version, in defense of his reputation. The same skill set would be employed at the theatre, to the same response by playwrights.3 The skills and strategies of note-takers included the honing of memory and speedy writing and sometimes shorthand. One strategy of note-takers was to leave a blank space when time demanded to be filled in later from memory; another was to insert a shorter synonym for the word spoken, again to be corrected later. Clearly, the presence of blank spaces and synonyms for correct words is an indicator of the project of a note-taker. The most vivid evidence of note-taking, however, is provided by aural errors, especially the presence of homophonic or almost homophonic words substituting for what are obviously the correct words. Baiazet offers examples of all such qualities.4 The A415 Baiazet is the only known extant manu­script of the play. As noted, the play, as well as its sister play The Courageous Turke (STC 11977), was published in 1631 by Richard Meighen, two years after Goffe’s death.5 We use the 1631 edition as a comparative text in our analysis. There is plenty of evidence, however, to preclude Baiazet from being the copy text for Meighen’s edition of The Raging Turke. There are speeches present in the manu­script, but missing in print, and vice versa; the last scene of Act v is almost entirely different in print; there is much rewording, for which we will account below. However, large swaths of text are the same.

3 

Stern, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers’, p. 8. For further examples of noted plays, see Estill, Dramatic Extracts, pp.  93–94 and pp. 16–17. 5  There exist two manu­scripts related to The Courageous Turke. The Tabley House manu­ script (privately owned) is a copy of the play with some differences from the print version, and the Harvard manu­script (Harvard Theatre Collection, MS Thr 10.1) is an actor’s part in Goffe’s hand for the role of Amurath, which he likely played in February 1618/9. 4 

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Upon reading the paratextual material accompanying Meighen’s editions, it becomes clear that Goffe did not want his plays printed. Before the playtext of The Raging Turke, Meighen confesses: This Tragedy, a manu­script, with another of the same Authors, [The Courageous Turke] came lately to my hands; He that gaue them birth, because they were his Nugae, or rather recreations to his more serious and diuine studies, out of a nice modesty (as I haue learnt) allowed them scarce priuate fostering. But I, by the consent of his especiall friend, in that they shew him rather […] to his glory then disparagement: haue published them.6

The publisher also includes an apo­logy in verse preceding the playtext of The Courageous Turke introduced thus: ‘Transcribing his Book, without his knowledge I was bound by promise to stand to his pleasure to keepe it or burne it’.7 Meighen did neither. Newdigate clearly kept the transcribed version of the play; whether he also published it by circulation or performed it with his fellows is unknown.

Arbury A415: The Manu­script The manu­script is a leather-bound quarto volume bearing a 1709 bookplate of Richard Newdigate II (1644–1710). It contains two texts, one a manu­script copy of Goffe’s Baiazet/The Raging Turke (c. 1619) and the other a manu­script copy of Vox Populi, or News From Spain (first printed 1620, STC 22100). At the end of the play and preceding Vox Populi is a letter to John or Richard Newdigate from milliner Nicholas Beale. Most commentators date the composition and first performance of Baiazet/The Raging Turke to pre-1618, assuming on the basis of its structural and stylistic weaknesses (some of which are in fact more clearly rendered in the manu­script version) that it must have predated Goffe’s Courageous Turke, performed 24 February, 1618/19.8 There is no record of Baiazet/The Raging Turke’s first performance at Oxford, but the letter from Beale helps us refine the date at which the noted performance must have 6  Goffe, The Raging Turke, ed. by Carnegie, p. 2. All citations to The Raging Turke use line numbers from Carnegie’s Malone Society edition. 7  Goffe, The Couragious Turke, ed. by Carnegie, p. 3. 8  Alam-El-Deen, ‘A Critical Edition, p. 22; Carnegie, ‘A Critical Edition’, i, pp. xxv–xxvi; and Carnegie, ‘A Critical Edition’, ii, p. ii. For the performance date and manu­scripts associated with The Courageous Turke, see also REED: Oxford, ed. by Elliott and Nelson, i, 434–35 and ii, 808.

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Noting Baiazet, the Raging Turk

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Figure 5.1. Hands A–J in Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A415. Reproduced from microfilm, with permission of Warwickshire County Records Office.

occurred. The letter, dated 21 June, mentions that Beale is sending hats, bands, and a hat box to Newdigate for his consideration.9 It corresponds with an entry in the Newdigates’ undergraduate account book from November, 1619 that begins ‘Nick Beale your blacke felt hat & band’ and proceeds to itemize purchases that align with those mentioned in the letter.10 The last page of the play is written on the back of the letter or vice versa. Since the amended copy of the play was likely made soon after its performance and noting at Oxford, this gives us a window of time from spring to late fall 1619 when the performance most likely took place. The Baiazet manu­script is a clean copy of Goffe’s play with few corrections or revisions.11 The manu­script contains contemporary foliation up to fol. 36 and continues on unnumbered leaves up to fol. 55. There is no title-page or dramatis personae; the play begins with the title, Baiazet, centred, and the act and scene noted in the top left-hand corner. The manu­script has been trimmed quite aggressively at some point, resulting in occasional loss of text. Most striking is that the manu­script play is written in ten different scribal hands, 9 

Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS  A415, fols  56 v–57 r. We are tremendously grateful to Dr Louis Knafla and the editors of the present volume for their advice and suggestions concerning the transcription of this letter. 10  Larminie, Undergraduate Account Book, pp. 170–71. 11  Only in the section of the play written by Hand B do we see any extensive attempts at corrections, which perhaps indicates that Hand B was a less experienced copyist than the other scribes. This is borne out too by the fact that Hand C, the text’s amender, has written ‘this hold’ in the margin of Hand B’s section (fol. 8).

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labelled by us as Hands A–J (see Figure 5.1).12 With the exception of Hand C, the scribes use italic hands and render stage directions, speech prefixes, and entrances and exits in the same hand as they use for dialogue. Each scribe wrote out a single section of the play, with the exception of the Hand C scribe, whose writing appears in five different and non-concurrent sections of the manu­script. The scribes have not divided the manu­script into sections that correspond with act or scene endings; instead, each scribe seems to have had a set number of pages to fill, stopping at the end of his ‘page limit’ regardless of whether this corresponded with a scene ending or occurred in the middle of a speech. Generally, each hand has a section of four folios, though Hand B takes eight, and the final three sections (Hand C; Hand J; and Hand C) consist of only two, three, and two folios respectively. Each new hand begins on the recto side of the page, and again with the exception of the two anomalous final sections, always ends on a verso side, perhaps indicating that each scribe had a single, four-folio booklet to fill.13 The evidence of the hands, the construction of the manu­script, and the kinds of plot and speech differences between the manu­script and print versions of the play lead us to suspect MS A415 is the work of a team of note takers overseen by a single amender, the Hand C whose work appears throughout the manu­ script, and who is, we argue, John Newdigate III of Arbury Hall. Stern notes that texts recorded aurally by more than one noter needed an amender, someone to join the sections of text and smooth transitions between the parts. Often, she argues, these amenders were ‘fans of the original text […who…] tried to create as accurate a representation of it as possible’.14 Such a scenario fits well the theatre ‘fan’ John Newdigate, who attended plays, bought playtexts, paid to be shown behind the scenes at the Cockpit Theatre, and tried his own hand at the writing of drama.15 It also accords with Laura Estill’s assessment of Newdigate’s contributing role as ‘an author, copyist, and complier’ of Arbury MS A414, a composite volume of miscellaneous texts mainly dating from the seventeenth century.16 12  None of the hands is consistent with Goffe’s. For a discussion of Goffe’s hand and the surviving documents attributed to him, see Carnegie, ‘The Identification of the Hand of Thomas Goffe’. 13  A similar scenario has been proposed for the scribal work on The Christmas Prince, the manu­script account in multiple hands of the St John’s College Revels in 1607–08. See The Christmas Prince, ed. by Boas, p. xxiii. 14  Stern, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers’, p. 18. 15  For Newdigate’s bio­graphy, see Larminie, Wealth, Kinship, and Culture, pp. 157–74. 16  Estill, ‘Politics, Poetry, and Performance’, p. 107.

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The Newdigate hand (Hand C) is responsible for fols 13 r–16v (Act ii); 25r–28v (Act iii); 33r–36v (Act iv); 49r–50v (Act v); 54r–55r (Act v). It is the only secretary hand in the manu­script, and the scribe sometimes uses an italic hand for stage directions, entrances, and exits. The properties of Newdigate’s hand have received scholarly attention since the 1980s, when Trevor HowardHill suggested that Newdigate might be the author of a number of unpublished manu­script plays.17 Subsequent work on the plays and on the Uni­ver­ sity of Calgary’s Osborne Manu­script has confirmed Howard-Hill’s claim and uncovered numerous documents associated with Newdigate and his circle.18 Hand C in this manu­script is a clear match to that of John Newdigate’s ‘early hand’,19 which appears in texts such as his commonplace book (c. 1620s–30s), the manu­script play Glausamond and Fidelia (c. 1618–21), and the Ghismonda play in the Arbury miscellany A414 (c. 1620s).20 The manu­script appears to be the work of a group of men familiar with conventions of the public stage and with the properties of classical drama, including the division of plays into acts and scenes. There is ample evidence of John Newdigate’s own fascination with drama of all kinds, but the culture of dramatic activity at Oxford more generally helps to explain why a group of scribes might produce a text like the A415 manu­script. As scholars have long recognized, drama had a central, if ‘quasi-curricular’, place at the early modern university.21 Dramatic performance was perceived as an important training ground for the kind of humanistic skills the universities were concerned with instilling, since writing and performing plays honed such skills as rhetorical argument, memory, and oratory.22 As Jonathan Walker puts it, university drama ‘is often instructive and thus purposive, but it also provides entertainment and recreation for players and playgoers alike. In such an atmosphere of profit and delight, the educational system brings a vibrant theatrical culture to 17 

Howard-Hill, ‘Another Warwickshire Playwright’. For recent work on the Newdigate plays and John III’s role in the production and circulation of drama, see: Kidnie, ‘Near Neighbours’; Polito and Scott, ‘Introduction’; and Inglis and Johnstone, ‘“The Pen lookes to be canoniz’d”’. 19  Inglis and Johnstone trace the evolution of Newdigate’s hand over time, beginning with his early hand c. 1620s; see ‘“The Pen lookes to be canoniz’d”’, pp. 38–41. 20  Oxford, Bodl., MS English Poetry e. 112; Warwick, Warwickshire County Record Office, MS CR136 B766; Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A414, fols 77–102. 21  Elliott, ‘Plays, Players, and Playwrights’, p. 179. 22  Marlow, ‘The Performance of Learning’, pp.  2–3; Elliott, ‘Plays, Players, and Playwrights’, pp. 179–82. 18 

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life, while in the same breath the academic theater creates an interactive culture of learning’.23 The A415 manu­script is a product of the vibrant performance culture flourishing at Oxford, and it is against the backdrop of drama’s central place in the social life of the colleges that we can understand the desire to both attend and record the performance of Goffe’s Baiazet/Raging Turke. Men conditioned to listen and carefully note sermons and academic lectures would have been particularly well equipped to note, remember, and later compile in a reading copy a record of the performance of Goffe’s play.24 Such a desire would have been particularly pressing given Goffe’s professed aversion to printing his work. Manu­script A415 records a performance of the play that departs significantly from the version that ended up in the poorly printed 1631 edition. In addition to the differences of wording, lineation, and stage directions that we discuss below as evidence of note-taking in the manu­script, there are a number of individual lines or pairs of lines that are not present in the print version and significant differences in the structure and plot of the play. Goffe based his play on Richard Knolles’ description of the reign of Baiazet II in The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603, STC 15051). A dynastic struggle among Baiazet, his brother Zemes, and Baiazet’s six sons, the play concludes with Baiazet’s murder and the succession of his grandson, Solyman. The most significant difference between the print and manu­script versions of the play concerns characterization, in that the manu­script’s characters, who are drawn with complex and nuanced motivations for their actions, are flattened in print in order to more clearly represent all of the Turkish figures in the play as vicious, vengeful, and untrustworthy.25 The revision towards the more vicious image of the ‘Turk’ can perhaps be explained by an increasingly hostile stance in Jacobean England towards the Ottoman Empire.26 Certainly, the manu­script evidence suggests that the performance at Oxford in 1619 would have left its audience with a more sophisticated portrait of Ottoman history than that offered by the play printed in 1631. 23 

Walker, ‘Learning to Play’, p. 5. See also, Nelson, ‘The Universities’. Clark records in his introduction to the Register of the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford that Oxford students might even be fined should they fail to take notes at lectures (see p. 9). 25  For examples, see Appendix 5.1. 26  After her excommunication, Elizabeth I made a concerted effort to build trade ties with the Ottoman sultans (Brotton, The Sultan and the Queen). James I, however, was ‘well known for his antipathy toward the Ottoman Empire’ (Dimmock, New Turkes, p. 199). A revision of The Raging Turke after 1621 may even have taken into account some of the public hostility toward the Ottomans stirred up by the pamphlet, Newes from Poland (1621, STC 18507.35A), which perpetuated the bloody stereotype evident in the play (Rutkowski, ‘Poland and Britain’, p. 189). 24 

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Signs of Note-Taking in MS A415 It is thanks to a largely anonymous group of scribes that we have a record of this alternate version of the Baiazet play. A number of signs in the manu­script suggest the work of a group of note-takers, as opposed to a group of copyists. Our methodo­logy assumes that the print version of the play, The Raging Turke, is authorial and derives from the revised manu­script referred to by Meighen as a transcription made ‘against the author’s wishes’.27 As such, we expected to find copying errors and problems with transcription, and indeed that is the case. In his facsimile edition of the 1631 text for the Malone Society, David Carnegie lists dozens of irregular and doubtful readings that could have been introduced by the transcriber or the printer.28 Conversely, we find very few examples in A415 of copying or transcribing errors. What are the signs of note-taking in this play manu­script? As noted above, we found blank spaces and synonyms to be filled in or corrected by memory. The most plentiful sign in Baiazet is the presence of aural errors. Homophonic substitutions are common in Baiazet, but not so in the The Raging Turke. Stern finds such errors in Hamlet Q1: ‘in Q2 “course” means “corpse” while in Q1 it means “route” or “movement forward” suggesting the word was marooned and a context has later been invented to house it’.29 We find differences as well between Baiazet and The Raging Turke in act and scene divisions, stage directions, and lineation. Throughout the manu­script are divergent wordings that cannot be explained by printer error. Table 5.1 presents a small but representative sample of the dozens of such single-word errors in the manu­script, many of which represent that particular problem for noters of homophonic words. At times we witness clear homophonic pairs such as pleasing/pleasant; thee Greece/the Greeks; wrench/reach; rigour/vigour; roome/tombe; stayed/ staged, and so forth. Such words could easily be misspoken or misheard in performance and recorded incorrectly. Other words indicate synonym substitution; as Stern explains, synonyms were an essential feature of ‘swift writing’ systems, and a noter familiar with such a system may have been conditioned to substitute synonyms when writing hurriedly.30 Example 2, in which the words 27 

Goffe, The Raging Turke, p. v. Goffe, The Raging Turke, pp. xii–xiv. 29  Stern, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers’, p. 13. 30  Stern, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers’, p. 12. 28 

To reach my Kingdomes from the gripes of hell (l. 201) if the wars | Cracke not his threed of life (ll. 546–47) the reare-ward be your charge, the right wing yours, My selfe will guide the left’ (ll. 570–71) Gaping, reserue for him an empty tombe. (l. 1562) And rayling at his Fate, as if he staged The wounded Priam, or some falling King. (ll. 1676–77) Sunke faintly downe, groan’d out, I dye, I dye. (l. 1679) That with it’s vigor it may crush the bulke (l. 1788)

haue these euents moste truly prαdiuind: (fol. 2)

to wrench my kingdom from the gripes of Hell (fol. 3v)

if the warres | breake not his threade of life” (fo.l 8)

this reareward be your charge: the left wing, yours: my selfe will giude the right’ (fol. 8v)

gaping, reserue for him an empty roome. (fol. 23)

& railing at his fate, as if he stayed The wounded Priam, or some falling king. (fol. 25)

5

6

7

8

9

10 suncke faintlie groan’d out, I die, I die. (fol. 25)

11 that with its rigour it may crush the bulke (fol. 26)

(fol. 33)

Renowned Vice-roy thy perswading thoughts haue predeuin’d most truly these effects (ll. 107–08)

(Renowned Viceroy) thy prαsaging thoughts

4

Enough. That soule reuiues to see him dead (l. 1917)

Grant the reporte is true: what’s that to vs? (l. 2566) Of God and man prophan’d the holy rights (l. 2648) Mocke not my thoughts with false and painted tales (l. 2949) By furious whirle-windes rended into ragges (l. 3352) Still, still I boyle, and the continued flames (l. 3437)

14 And the reporte is true; what’s that to vs? (fol. 38 )

18 Still, still I boyle, & the continued paines (fol. 52v)

17 by furious whirlwinds rented into raggs (fol. 51)

16 Mock not my thoughts with vaine and painted tales (fol. 43v)

15 Of gods and men) prophained the holy rights (fol. 39v)

v

13 Inough that soule suruiues to see him dead (fol. 35)

And send the black Tartarians to their home, Withall averring the Hungarian foe (ll. 2199–2200)

This phrase becomes the Greekes, submissiue states (l. 94)

12

Threw a reflex of red back to the clouds, (l. 81)

threw a reflex of red back from the heauens, (fol. 2)

This phrase becoms thee Greece: submissiue stats (fol. 2)

2

The pleasant iuice of learning from their brests (l. 34)

the pleasinge iuice of learninge from theire brest (fol. 1 )

1

3

Line in Raging Turke (1631), Malone Society v

Line in Baiazet, Arbury MS A415

Table 5.1. Rewording: Comparative lines from Baiazet (MS A415) and The Raging Turke (1631).

112 Kirsten Inglis and Mary Polito

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provide a similar image (heaven/clouds), but which do not indicate an aural error, is a case in point, and there are dozens of such synonymic substitutions in A415. Other examples more clearly indicate a lapse — perhaps in attention, hearing, or memory after the fact, all to be expected if a text is the product of aural note-taking. First, we occasionally see lacunae such as that in example 12, where the writer has quite literally left space in the manu­script to fill in a word that wasn’t recorded initially. Second, errors such as that in example 7 may indicate the noter filled in ‘left/right’ after the fact, inserting the words from memory in reverse order. Finally, in example 10, the noter has simply missed the word ‘down’ in recording his line. This lapse breaks the rhythm of the pentameter and throws off the balance of the line with its (otherwise) metrically central ‘groaned out’. The act and scene divisions in Baiazet line up almost exactly with those in The Raging Turke. There are five differences, two of which point to revision after the manu­script’s performance and three of which indicate error on the part of either printer or noter. The manu­script records speeches in iv.4 and iv.5 in a different order than that in the print play; likewise, the manu­script adds a scene at iii.3 that isn’t in the print, resulting in different scene numbering from scene three on in print. The first error, of arrangement of speeches, may coincide with the kind of reordering that Stern argues was a ‘feature of noted sermons’.31 The print version proceeds from scene one to scene three in act three. The text does not differ significantly. Rather, the same text is found in iii.2 in the manu­script as is found in iii.1 in print. Similarly, the manu­script adds a scene division not in print at iv.8 and fails to indicate a change of scene where the print places v.9. In all three cases, error seems to be the source of the difference. How did our noters come so close to act and scene divisions that appear to be authorial? We can’t know for certain but can again appeal to our knowledge of their training in reading and perhaps performing in classical drama and their keen awareness of stagecraft. However, they may have had the aid of a stage ‘hung about with words written on large boards’.32 Stern finds evidence from within dramatic texts about performance and in historical references for the presence of ‘title boards’ and ‘scene boards’ at the theatre: ‘Uni­ver­sity plays, too, might use a title-board, as when the Pro­logue “TO THE UNIVERSITY” for Cartwright’s Royal Slave (Christ Church, Oxford, 1636) worries that a

31  32 

Stern, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers’, p. 15. Stern, ‘Watching as Reading’, p. 137.

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question for academic dispute might more fittingly hang in the title’s space’.33 Scene boards, too, were likely common, as Stern shows in a citation from the early playhouse play The Spanish Tragedy. When Hieronimo prepares to present his revenge play he says ‘Hang up the Title: our Scaene is Rhodes’.34 Stern actually cites Goffe’s play The Careless Shepherdess, which names the location of its scenes as they may have been written on a scene board: ‘the Scene is ARCADIA’.35 This is not to say that Goffe’s scene changes in either Baiazet or The Raging Turke announce the where of the scenes; they don’t. We can’t rule out, however, the possibility that textual clues were provided for the audience, peopled with students and perhaps residents of Oxford who would benefit from guidance through the scene shifts. This would account for the similarities in act and scene delineation in the two versions of the play. The stage directions provided in the manu­script do not offer us anything as stunningly significant as Ophelia entering with a lute in Hamlet Q1. There are many that are shared with the print. Some are more abbreviated than the print, as in the opening of Act i, Scene 2 in which the print offers ‘After some clamorous applause Enter Chersogles, and Achmetes at severall doores’,36 while the manu­script gives only ‘Enter Achmetes and Cherseogles’.37 We can imagine the relayers with their heads bobbing up and down, their ears peeled to the stage, taking the time of action to fill in the line most recently spoken. There are, nonetheless, examples in which the stage directions are strikingly similar or are provided in one version while absent in the other. The manu­script goes especially for short stage directions like ‘Exeunt’ and ‘Aside’. Occasionally, however, the manu­script provides more expansive directions than does the print version or gives directions absent in print. As the first battle between the brothers Baiazet and Zemes ensues the manu­script offers: Trumpetts sound toth battle: dumbe shews in skirmishes: Enter at one doore, one of Zemes his captains, and one of Achmete Cherseog they fight: Zemes captaine preuailes: Enter two other captains of either part: Zemes side prevails: Enter the king 33 

Stern, ‘Watching as Reading’, p. 148. Stern, ‘Watching as Reading’, p. 149. 35  Stern, ‘Watching as Reading’, p. 149. 36  Goffe, The Raging Turke, ll. 65–66. 37  Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A415, fol. 1v. 34 

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of Armenia, and Achemetes captain: Isaack Mustapha Armenia preuails, and pursues the battle: Enter Achmetes in anger: complains: as followeth, drums still sounding (fol. 8v)

The Raging Turke proceeds with the less informative direction, one of Zemes Captaines and Cherseogles meete, Zemes Captaine preuailes, his second and Mesithes meete, Mesithes retires, [t]he King of Armenia and Mustapha meete, Armenia preuailes, and pursues the battaile. Enter Achmetes with his sword.38

In Act iii in print Baiazet calls on his allies to give him a garter with which to strangle Trizham: ‘Isaack and Selymus, a garter’,39 while the manu­script transcribes a stage direction: ‘Issack and Selymus (giues them a gart:)’.40 The manu­script does give clues that it transcribes a performance when it notes that the action occurs on the ‘stage’. In Act ii, Scene 7, the MS appears to describe a scene: ‘Enter a banquet giuen about the stage all kneele’,41 while the print gives only the imperative ‘Enter a banquet, all kneele’.42 The manu­script at times gives us a vivid rendition of the immediate aural properties of the play. The following direction is not in print and again sounds like description: ‘Drums soundinge at eche end of the | stage. Confused noise with clashinge | of armor: excurrunt Baiazet & Selymus’.43 Similarly, at Act v, Scene 8, as the warriors await Selymus, only the manu­script records that the ‘clock strikes’.44 As with acts and scenes, the two versions of the play are strikingly similar. The stage directions, however, are unique enough and oriented towards the stage enough to provide evidence for the work of noters in the manu­script. Stern observes, somewhat against her argument about Hamlet Q1, that ‘a noter trying to capture rapid spoken text, would probably take down the words as spoken, without recording line-divisions at all; an actor […] is likely to have been conscious of line endings’. Q1 does provide lineation, or rather, Stern 38 

Goffe, The Raging Turke, ll. 588–92. Goffe, The Raging Turke, l. 1367. 40  Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A415, fol. 20r. 41  Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A415, fol. 13r. 42  Goffe, The Raging Turke, l. 906. 43  Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A415, fol. 37r. 44  Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A415, fol. 46r. 39 

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argues ‘frequent mislineation […] more easily traced to a noter than an actor’.45 Baiazet, as we have seen, is a lineated text. As we know, while every Oxford student was not an actor, they all studied if not translated and/or memorized Greek and Roman plays, as well as performed oratory. By 1619, most students would have some familiarity with the conventions of public theatre, at least from the point of view of audience members or readers of printed plays. It is not surprising, therefore, to find the relay team attempting to capture the performance in verse, a most difficult task, one would imagine. Finding errors in the lineation in the manu­script would point to a noted, rather than copied, text, and several such errors we do find. In Act ii, Scene 1, for example, Baiazet declares that seeing his son Corcutus in Baiazet’s robes of state must be a set of ‘apparitions’: ‘Were they not soe, black night ere this had trowne | Her sable mantle ouer all the heauens’46 while the print gives us ‘Were they not so — ere this black night | Had throwne her sable mantle ore the heauens’.47 It’s easy to see how the tetrameter line threw the noter off; he also seems to have transcribed ‘o’er’ as ‘over’ so as to give his second line five feet. In Act iv, we find Baiazet answering in the affirmative that he plans to choose Achomates to succeed him. The manu­script offers ‘Euen he vnless the voice of the whole Citty inter– | dict int my ioyes choice’,48 while the print gives a neat rhyming couplet: ‘Euen he, vnle[ss]e the voyce | Of the whole Citie interdict my choice’.49 This noter, Hand J, seems to have been having trouble with his transcription. Perhaps the most significant example of relineation occurs when Newdigate, Hand C, rewrites from memory or offers his own transcription of Hand J’s poorly transcribed section of Act v, Scene 9, in which Baiazet is killed. Hand C amends from where Hand J begins, from the stage direction given in the manu­ script by Hand J as ‘He awaketh, and riseth in furie’.50 The first seven lines are out of lineation (as they are in the print work). [Hand J] He awaketh, and riseth in furie Baiazet. yee meager deuills, and infernall hagg where are yee? ha? what vanisht? did I not 45 

Stern, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers’, p. 15. Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A415, fol. 3r. 47  Goffe, The Raging Turke, ll. 154–55. 48  Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A415, fol. 31r. 49  Goffe, The Raging Turke, ll. 2060–61. 50  Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A415, fol. 52r. 46 

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feele them teare and rack my flesh and scramble it amongst them; Heauen, and Earth, I am deluded: what thinn aery shapes durst fright my soule? I’le hunt about the world—. (fol. 52r) [Hand C] Baiazet wakes in furie, riseth. Baiaz: you meager deuills, and infernall haggs, where are yee? ha? what vanisht? am I sound? did I not feele them teare and hack my flesh and scramble it amongst them? heauen, and earth, I am deluded: what thinn aery shapes durst fright my soule? I’le hunt about the world (fol. 54r)

Hand J omits a phrase, ‘am I sound?’ which throws off his lineation for seven lines. Hand C reinserts the phrase and reconstructs each line as he has heard it, altering the lineation in the following lines. The lineation accords with that given in print. Interestingly, print gives the line missing in J as ‘am I found’, which makes less sense than the manu­script’s ‘am I sound?’ in that Baiazet has awakened from a dream in which his enemies have torn him apart. ‘[A]m I found’ is therefore most likely a copy error in print. Bajazet awakes in fury, ariseth. You meager deuils, and infernall hagges, Where are you? Ha? what vanisht? am I found? Did I not feele them teare and rack my flesh, And foreamble it amongst them? heauen and earth I am deluded, what thin ayrie shapes Durst fright my soule, I’le hunt about the world (ll. 3405–11)

That some of the lineation is incorrect in comparison with the print version points to a method of transcription in which errors occur through the ears and not the eyes; that most of the lineation is correct demonstrates how keen those ears were, how primed they were to recognize verse and perhaps how the actors emphasized the verse components of their speeches.

Conclusion Why would noters note a performance? Noters sought to print their texts for money, self-aggrandizement, and/or the education of readers, as well as for circulation and perhaps performance. Whatever the generating factor, Stern observes, ‘what was being preserved may have been captured utterance; the

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gaps, segues, and startling moments of vivid action that differentiate it from an authorial ‘literary’ text might in fact be a proud display of its performance heritage.51 Arbury 415, Baiazet, likewise displays its performance heritage. Not only is this work an example of a noted text, the existence of the revised version of the play as The Raging Turke also makes it of particular interest to scholars, allowing for the possibility of a variety of comparative studies. Performance of the versions themselves would illuminate the theatrical implications of the revisions. More broadly, the subject matter and the difference in representation of the ‘Turks’ in the two versions would benefit from postcolonial intervention. In her conclusion, Stern speculates that Hamlet Q1 is ‘the only professional play of the period to boast Oxford performance on its title-page’, and this fact may make Q1 a ‘localized version’ of that performance.52 Hamlet Q1 and Baiazet, as noted texts, signal a vibrant noting culture at dramatic performances at Oxford.

51  52 

Stern, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers’, p. 21. Stern, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers’, p. 22.

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Appendix 5.1. Sample Plot Differences between MS A415 and The Raging Turke (1631) Act Scene MS A415

The Raging Turke (1631)

i.3

Isaack’s daughter not mentioned in this scene.

Isaack states his daughter’s espousal to Achmetes is the only reason he hasn’t had Achmetes killed already.

i.4

Corcutus reluctantly crowned by the people’s will and immediately renounces the crown upon hearing of his father’s return.

Corcutus repeatedly states his desire to retain his crown and renounces it only out of fear of damnation and dishonour.

i.6

Isaack’s daughter not mentioned in this scene.

Isaack’s daughter divorced by Achmetes. Isaack rages and vows vengeance.

iii.3

Corcutus’s soliloquy reveals him to be thoughtful and studious, deeply concerned with the violence of the dynastic struggle.

No soliloquy in print. Scene iii.4 in MS is iii.3 in print.

v.8

[Must.] hunger, oppression, want & slauery:

[Must.] Hunger, oppression, want, and slauery.

110 lines of dialogue between Mesithes and Cherseogles

Mes. That struck me full. — Haue at thee: (3296–97)

[Chers.]That strooke me full — haue at thee (fols 48–49) v.10

Soldiers speak one line confirming Selimus’s death. Herald speaks 3 lines announcing Solyman’s succession.

Soldiers speak for 50 lines, vowing allegiance to the new emperor and promising in his name to ‘sheath them [their swords] in the breast / of daring Christians’ (3550-1).

v.10

Solyman, Baiazet’s grandson crowned; he speaks thirty lines praising peace and confirming the justice of lineal and uncontested succession.

Solyman, Baiazet’s grandson crowned; he has three separate speeches, totalling 168 lines, mostly concerning vengeance, memorializing his ancestors, and sacking Christendom.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts Cam­bridge, MA, Harvard Theatre Collection, MS Thr 10.1 Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A414 —— , MS A415 Oxford, Bodl., MS English Poetry e. 112 Warwick, Warwickshire County Record Office, MS CR136 B766

Primary Sources The Christmas Prince, ed. by Frederick S. Boas (Oxford: Malone Society, 1922) Goffe, Thomas, The Couragious Turke, or, Amurath the First (1632), ed. by David Carnegie (Oxford: Malone Society, 1968 [1974]) —— , Deliuerance from the Graue: A Sermon Preached at Saint Maries Spittle in London, on Wednesday in Easter Weeke last, March 28 (1627, STC 11978) —— , The Raging Turke, or, Baiazet the Second (1631), ed. by David Carnegie (Oxford: Malone Society, 1968 [1974]) Greene, Robert, The Tragical Reign of Selimus, Sometime Emperour of the Turkes (1594), ed. by W. Bang (London: Malone Society, 1909) Knolles, Richard, The Generall Historie of the Turkes from the First Beginning of that Nation to the Rising of the Othoman Familie (1603, STC 15051) Newes from Poland, Wherein is Truly Inlarged the Occasion, Progression, and Interception of the Turks Formidable Threatning of Europe (1621, STC 18507.35A) REED: Oxford, ed. by John R. Elliott and Alan H. Nelson, 2 vols (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 2004) Register of the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford, ii: (1571–1622), pt 2: Matriculations and Subscriptions, ed. by Andrew Clarke (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 1887) Scott, Thomas, Vox Populi, or Newes from Spayne, Translated According to the Spanish Coppie (1620, STC 22100) The Undergraduate Account Book of John and Richard Newdigate, 1618–1621, ed. by Vivienne Larminie (London: Royal Historical Society, 1989)

Secondary Works Alam-El-Deen, Ahmed, ‘A  Critical Edition of Thomas Goffe’s The Raging Tvrke, Or, Baiazet The Second (1631)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Virginia, 1984) Brotton, Jerry, The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (New York: Viking, 2016)

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Burton, Jonathan, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: Uni­ver­sity of Delaware Press, 2005) Carnegie, David, ‘A Critical Edition of the Turkish Tragedies of Thomas Goffe, Vol. i: The Courageous Turke’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of London, 1967) —— , ‘A Critical Edition of the Turkish Tragedies of Thomas Goffe, Vol. ii, The Raging Turke’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of London, 1967) —— , ‘The Identification of the Hand of Thomas Goffe, Academic Dramatist and Actor’, The Library, 5th ser., 26.2 (1971), 161–65 Dimmock, Matthew, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) Elliott, John R., Jr, ‘Plays, Players, and Playwrights in Renaissance Oxford’, in From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama ed. by John A. Alford (East Lansing: Michigan State Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995), pp. 179–94 Estill, Laura, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manu­scripts: Watching, Reading and Changing Plays (Newark: Uni­ver­sity of Delaware Press, 2015) —— , ‘Politics, Poetry, and Performance: The Miscellaneous Contents of Arbury Hall MS 414’, Early Theatre, 14.2 (2011), 105–42 Howard-Hill, Trevor, ‘Another Warwickshire Playwright: John Newdigate of Arbury’, Renaissance Papers (1988), 51–62 Inglis, Kirsten, and Boyda Johnstone, ‘“The Pen lookes to be canoniz’d”: John Newdigate III, Author and Scribe’, Early Theatre, 14.2 (2011), 27–61 Jenkins, Jacqueline, and Mary Polito, ‘Introduction’, in The Humorous Magistrate (Osborne), ed. by Jacqueline Jenkins and Mary Polito (Manchester: Malone Society, 2011), pp. vii–xxiii Kidnie, Margaret Jane, ‘Near Neighbours: Another Early Seventeenth-Century Manu­ script of The Humorous Magistrate’, English Manu­script Studies, 13 (2007), 187–211 Larminie, Vivienne, Wealth, Kinship and Culture: The Seventeenth-Century Newdigates of Arbury and their World (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995) Marlow, Christopher, ‘The Performance of Learning: Uni­ver­sity Drama at Oxford in 1566’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 73.1 (2008), 1–8 McJannet, Linda, The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks (London: Palgrave, 2006) Nelson, Alan, ‘The Universities’, in Contexts for Early English Drama, ed.  by Marianne  G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey (Bloomington: Indiana Uni­ver­sity Press, 1989), pp. 137–49 Polito, Mary, and Amy Scott, ‘Introduction’, in Circles and Circuits: Drama and Politics in the Midlands, ed. by Mary Polito and Amy Scott (= Early Theatre, 14.2 (2011)), pp. 15–26 Polito, Mary, and Jean-Sebastien Windle, ‘“You see the times are dangerous”: The Political and Theatrical Situation of The Humorous Magistrate (1637)’, Early Theatre, 12.1 (2009), 93–118 Rutkowski, Paul, ‘Poland and Britain against the Ottoman Turks: Jerzy Ossolinski’s Em­ bassy to King James I’, in Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795, ed. by Richard Unger (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 183–96 Stern, Tiffany, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers: Hamlet Q1 as a “Noted” Text’, Shakes­ peare Survey, 66 (2013), 1–23

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—— , ‘Watching as Reading: The Audience and Written Text in Shakespeare’s Playhouse’, in How to Do Things with Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays, ed.  by Laurie Maguire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 136–59 Walker, Jonathan, ‘Introduction: Learning to Play’, in Early Modern Academic Drama, ed. by Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert (London: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 1–18

John of Bordeaux: Performance and the Revision of ­ cripts Early Modern Dramatic Manus James Purkis

C

ritics’ ideas of early modern playhouse manu­scripts have long been shaped by the extraordinary work of W.  W. Greg. Greg’s writings repeatedly maintain that theatrical documents were routinely subjected to a process of extensive revision in the playhouse during which ambiguities would be clarified, errors would be corrected, and substantial performance details would be added. William B. Long and Paul Werstine have argued that Greg’s conception of theatrical revision is inconsistent with the evidence provided by extant theatrical manu­scripts.1 As Long observes, within the convention-heavy circumstances of early modern playing, and with the supporting presence of a plot — that is, a list of entrances, and occasionally of sound cues, exits, and props that was used backstage — the specification in the playbook of performance details was seldom required. Extant theatrical manu­scripts are therefore generally annotated only when a particular theatrical need arises, such as ensuring the timing of entrances and sound cues, the performance of unusual stage action, and the correction of errors that will affect performance. The work of Long and Werstine has consequences for scholars attempting to establish details of early modern performance. As Long notes, if playhouse revisers or bookkeepers rarely add details of stage actions or remove petitory or unfollowed 1 

See, in particular, Long, ‘Stage Directions’; Long, ‘Stage Directions’; Long, ‘John a Kent’; and Werstine’s Playhouse Manuscripts. James Purkis is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at the Uni­ver­sity of Western Ontario. He is the author of Shakespeare and Manu­script Drama and of articles on gender-debate literature, collaboration, and playhouse manu­scripts.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 123–136 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116447 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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directions, ‘it is obvious that these manu­scripts cannot be used to reconstruct a performance with the relative assurance that a modern promptbook can’.2 The manu­s cript copy of John of Bordeaux (Northumberland, Alnwick Castle, MS 507; copied c. 1592) offers an important opportunity to explore how performance details may or may not be gleaned from playhouse manu­ scripts. On the one hand, lacunae in the document offer striking examples of how different may be the text and performance of an early modern play. On the other hand, because several scholars have argued that the Bordeaux manu­ script is a theatrical abridgement, it may offer unique, if enigmatic, insight into performance. The manu­script could even document dialogue and actions that developed in performance. If such theories of the manu­script’s genesis are correct, then the text offers a fascinating and rare link between performance and textual inscription. The Bordeaux manu­script presents a sequel to Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589; printed 1594, STC12267). The play’s action picks up where its predecessor left off and introduces new characters, including the titular John and his family, to characters from the earlier drama. The play’s authorship has not been established beyond doubt, but several critics accept that it is by Greene, which would mean that the play must have been written by September 1592.3 Most critics date the manu­script to 1590–94.4 It is made up of seven sheets. The first five sheets share one watermark, while the last two share another. The sheets are folded separately to make fourteen leaves. Folio13 has been incorrectly bound between the tenth and eleventh leaves. The last leaf of Bordeaux is badly damaged, leaving lost most of its text, while a small amount of further text has been lost elsewhere through damage to the margins. At least five hands are present in the document. The main text of the play is written in brown ink in a ‘large, course, but legible secretary hand’.5 That this hand is that of a scribe rather than an author is evident from several errors, ‘especially extensive ditto­graphical ones’.6 Preparing the Malone Society Reprint of the manu­script in 1935, W. L. Renwick pro2 

Long, ‘John a Kent’, p. 126. See John of Bordeaux, ed. by Renwick, p. xii; McNeir, ‘Robert Greene’; Maguire, ‘John Holland’, p. 328. 4  In John of Bordeaux, ed. by Renwick, Renwick proposes 1590–94; Maguire, ‘John Holland’, offers c. 1590; Annals gives a date of 1592. 5  John of Bordeaux, ed. by Renwick, p. vi. 6  Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manu­scripts, p. 249. 3 

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posed that the scribe’s ‘generally phonetic’ spellings, ‘the voicing of initial p to b nine or ten times, of which seven were corrected currente calamo’, as well as ‘the persistent lowering of i to e in the Latin quotations’, indicate that ‘copy was written to dictation’.7 The annotations made to the scribe’s text by at least two bookkeepers show that the manu­script was prepared for use in the playhouse to guide performance. Some annotations are typical of the occasional markings described by Long and Werstine. The bookkeepers note sound cues (for example, ‘florish’, ‘sound’, ‘here a Chime’, ‘sound a sennett’, ‘Thunder’ [ll. 71, 183, 436–37, 448, 1133]).8 They also add missing entrances (for example, ll. 123, 612, 654) and note personnel — or at least one person, John Holland. Holland enters for the first time to deliver a letter that is required on stage. The prop is included in the annotation — ‘Iohn Holland with a letter’ — and the eminently practical and limited nature of the bookkeeper’s work is evident both in its attention to the required prop and in the absence of a named role for Holland (ll. 466–67). To whom he delivers the letter as a mute messenger is also not specified. Holland later comes on stage as Vandermast’s wife, or as the devil Asteroth impersonating her, in a speaking role, and later as the devil accompanying Vandermast, once more mute (ll. 677–78, 1159). Holland’s roles are again not specified by either bookkeeper, who seem solely concerned with the availability of players. The bookkeepers also amend faulty speech headings, including a number of instances in which the scribe gets a character’s name wrong. They also attend to the manu­script’s usefulness backstage by duplicating several stage directions to make them more immediately visible. With an economy typical of bookkeepers, they reproduce in the left margin some directions that are centred or located on the right-hand side of the leaf in the original text, such as the added ‘Enter Rossaclere’ for the centred ‘Enter yonge Rossaclere in beggour atier’ and ‘Enter Rossalin’ in the place of the original ‘Enter Rossalin with her childre[n]’ that is located on the right-hand side (ll. 838, 841–42). Similarly, the presence of entrances centred on the page are made more immediately visible through the inscription of a corresponding ‘Enter’ in the left-hand margin (for example, at ll. 408, 562, and 628) or through the marginal duplication of the entering character’s name (l. 290).

7 

John of Bordeaux, ed. by Renwick, pp. xii–xiii, xiii. John of Bordeaux, ed. by Renwick. All references to the manu­script refer to Renwick’s edition and are given after quotations in the text. 8 

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Features of the scribe’s text make the bookkeepers’ attention to legibility especially pressing. To varying degrees, over the course of making his copy the scribe appears concerned with minimizing his use of paper. The text is often very cramped, most notably around stage directions, which are often difficult to see when scanning the page. Passages of iambic pentameter are written as prose, and some passages of dialogue do not begin speeches on a new line with the speech heading in the margin, but instead present the dialogue continuously, with the ends of speeches and speech headings marked with closing parentheses. The bookkeepers draw rules around some of the speech prefixes where the scribe has run one speech after another (for example, ll. 275, 283, 581), and similarly supplement some hard-to-see stage directions. Other problems with the scribal text have occasioned further, less typical but equally practical, supplementation. The scribe’s speech headings are frequently placed a line or so too high, and in the black ink used by one of the bookkeepers are added over one hundred speech rules to mark the change of speaker. The same ink has also been used to add speech prefixes absent from the original text, including three blocks of dialogue from fols 6v to 7r where the scribe omits several consecutive speech headings. The cramped nature of the manu­script must have made it hard to use backstage, but the considerable supplementation shows that the document was prepared for such a purpose. Moreover, wear to the outer edges a quarter of the way up from the bottom, presumably caused by the bookkeeper’s thumb, suggests that the document was used on many occasions. Given its theatrical preparation, the manu­script’s incompleteness, at least by modern editorial standards, is arresting. The scribe’s text contains several lacunae. On fol. 11r, a scene’s beginning is marked by the scribe’s ‘Enter the seane of the whiper’, but no such scene follows (l. 1058). Instead, the scribe draws a line across the page and writes an entrance for the following scene immediately below. On the other side of the same leaf, the scribal text breaks off with the note ‘her Iohn of Burdiox speakes his specth’ (l. 1089). This time, the scribe leaves a gap. Near the foot of the same verso, the scribe writes a similar note, ‘her Iohn of Burdoax speckes’ (l. 1119). There is little room for anything to be added, and Bordeaux’s speech remains absent. The scribe’s text is also short on details of stage action when it comes to the play’s dumb shows. When Bacon conjures a vision of the battle at Ravenna, the scribe writes ‘Exent Bacon to bring in the showes as you knowe’ (ll. 445–46). The scribe’s note of course indicates familiarity with the play’s performance on the part of whoever is to use the text. Similarly, no further information is given for a later show than the scribe’s ‘Enter the show of Lucres’ (l. 1267). The gap left for the first of John’s missing speeches is filled by a twelve-line speech written in a grey-black ink, the last

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three lines of which have been marked for deletion. The writing is cramped but identifiable as that of Henry Chettle. A cross in the margin next to the speech in one of the bookkeepers’ inks perhaps marks a concern with filling this space, but a similar cross inscribed next to the ‘seane of the whiper’ did not result in any added text. Yet the direction is not ignored. One of the bookkeepers notes an entrance for the characters involved at least at the start of the scene in the margin: ‘Enter the Iailor and Perce’ (l. 1058). Similarly, there is no text added for John’s second missing speech, but the staging has again been attended to with a slightly unusual duplication for Bacon’s entrance located at the head of the following recto filling much of the available space. While the bookkeepers do not expand on the contents of either ‘show’, on both occasions the staging has attracted annotation in the form of a sound cue: ‘sound a sennett’ for the first, and ‘tuckett’ for the latter (ll. 455–67, 1266). The ‘shows’, apparently annotated as fully as the bookkeepers required, offer conspicuous examples of how the text of the playbook prepared for use by a professional company does not necessarily or thoroughly document performance. The unfilled lacunae may represent even more striking evidence of the difference between text and performance. Renwick suggests that the ‘seane of the whiper’ and the missing speeches for John may appeal to the sort extratextual knowledge implied by the note for the first show. 9 (He also gently speculates that some of the lines written in the unidentified secretary hand on the final, heavily damaged leaf were ‘possibly written to fill the second gap on fol. 11v’;10 so little remains that it is impossible to determine whether this is so.) Renwick’s appeal to knowledge beyond the playbook connects with more recent work on text and performance. Tiffany Stern urges scholars to think of the material for performance in terms of actors’ parts and even extra-textual material brought through the players’ extemporizing, rather than what is written in the playbook.11 It is impossible to determine whether the bookkeepers expected the two standing lacunae to be filled in the Bordeaux manu­script, as happened when Chettle added his contribution. But the absence of additional text suggests that some of the play’s material may have been expected to reside somewhere other than the playbook, most likely in the players’ parts or even in their memories or imaginations. That the missing scene features the play’s clown may be telling. As Stern insists, clowns ‘had as part of their job the abil9 

John of Bordeaux, ed. by Renwick, p. viii. John of Bordeaux, ed. by Renwick, p. vi. 11  Stern, Documents of Performance, chap. 8. 10 

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ity to speak extempore’, and Scott McMillin identifies in the Sir Thomas More manu­script (London, BL, MS Harley 7368) a scripted occasion for the clown’s extemporization where the bookkeeper has inscribed ‘Manett Clowne’.12 If the text fails to match performance in these instances, the document may nevertheless capture performance details. Here, investigation of the manu­ script must become more speculative and engage with further influential work by Greg, this time his ideas about memorial reconstruction and theatrical abridgement. It is possible that the Bordeaux manu­script’s lacunae derive from an incomplete, pre-theatrical exemplar, perhaps something like the ‘the fowle papers of the Authors’ to which Edward Knight refers to explain the missing material in his transcript of Bonduca (London, BL, MS Additional 36758).13 Most critics, though, identify the extant text as a form of abridgement. If this is the case, then the manu­script provides unique evidence of the theatrical preparation or performance of an abbreviated text and hence possible insights into theatre practice. Renwick proposes that Bordeaux was abridged when the ‘company desired a shortened version — perhaps for a touring cast, of which the clown was to be an important member, in the difficult years about 1592’.14 The ‘cutting’, he suggests, may have been ‘done during transcription’.15 The shorter version leaves ‘the clown’s part […] out of normal proportion to the rest of the play’, ‘shows signs of haste’, and may distort authorial style.16 The debt is not explicitly acknowledged, but Renwick’s description of the manu­script’s making draws on Greg’s Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: The Battle of Alcazar & Orlando Furioso. This 1923 work investigates what Greg identifies as two printed dramatic texts of plays performed by the Queen’s Men behind which are supposed to lie ‘more or less mangled versions, abridged and adapted for performance’ during the dramatic companies’ ‘wanderings during the years of plague’ that closed the London playhouses in 1593–94.17 During this period, according to Greg’s narrative, the Queen’s Men were forced to sell some of their texts and to tour with diminishing playing resources to satisfy the unsophisticated provincial audiences.

12 

Stern, Documents of Performance, p. 245; McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre, p. 80. Bonduca, ed. by Greg, ll. 2370, 2374, 2376–80. 14  John of Bordeaux, ed. by Renwick p. xiii. 15  John of Bordeaux, ed. by Renwick, p. viii. 16  John of Bordeaux, ed. by Renwick, pp. vii, viii, xii. 17  Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, pp. 1, 5. 13 

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Greg’s work provides two different models for textual abridgement that offer starting-points for consideration of the Bordeaux manu­script and its possible link to performance. The quarto texts of Alcazar and Orlando, like Bordeaux, are unusually short. In both instances, the probable abridgement of the quarto text of the play is revealed through comparison with another theatrical document that indicates that a longer version of the same play was performed: in the case of Alcazar, a theatrical plot; and for Orlando, what remains of the part prepared for the actor playing the titular character. Alcazar’s abridgement, Greg states, represents ‘a normal form’ of playhouse abridgement.18 He speculates that the ‘prompt copy’ would have been marked with ‘the more extensive omissions’, and then, during transcription, many of the ‘rough edges’ caused by the initial stage of abbreviation would be smoothed through a ‘more minute process of revision’.19 While the revisions are concerned primarily with excising text, new passages may also have been required, and Greg notes that ‘here and there it may be necessary to paste over cancelled passages of text slips of paper containing connective links’.20 As Renwick’s account suggests, the Bordeaux manu­script is broadly conformable with Greg’s description. Bordeaux’s lacunae could represent some of the gaps or ‘rough edges’ that Greg describes. The possibility that Bordeaux was written to dictation may be reconciled with the process. A messily revised document may have been dictated to speed up the copying process, perhaps by a player who knew the play well or had performed the cutting; some of the finer revisions may have been made during this stage of the process. Unlike the Alcazar text, Greg proposes that the shortened text of Orlando ‘assumed its present shape, as regards both shortening and expansion, less through any formal adaptation […] than through progressive modification in the course of performance’.21 This theatrical modification eliminated passages of ‘poetical rhetoric’ and added ‘vulgar clownage and horse-play, to suit the representation to the taste of a rougher class of spectators’.22 Greg supposes that the descent of the play is in part due to the absence of a written copy, which ‘made it impossible to check the progressive corruption’, but the ‘time came’ when the ‘absence of a prompt-copy proved too inconvenient’ and the players ‘who had a working knowledge of the play met together and, having secured the services 18 

Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, p. 5. Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, pp. 97–98. 20  Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, p. 98. 21  Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, p. 310. 22  Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, p. 310. 19 

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of a ready writer, proceeded in turn to dictate their parts as well as their memories would allow’.23 This was not very well. Greg identifies in the text ‘memorial anticipations and repetitions’, and he further suggests that ‘[t]here were probably a few speeches which failure of memory had left in an impossibly disjointed state. These [were] tidied up either by excision or improvisation’, while some cutting was possibly also performed.24 The quarto text of Orlando, then, is for Greg the product of substantial theatrical revision, and it promises to give a remarkable insight into the play as it was performed, even if the players’ failures of memory and the text’s final revision leave it an imperfect record of performance. The Bordeaux manu­script’s possible traces of dictation, what according to Renwick is a disproportionate clown’s part, and perhaps its missing text present some suggestive commonalities with Greg’s description of Orlando’s text. In 1946 Harry Hoppe presented an account of the Bordeaux manu­script strongly redolent of Greg’s analysis of Orlando. Hoppe proposed that the text is memorially derived and came about when the players, ‘perhaps a traveling company, which had been performing this play well enough without a prompt book’, were forced to make a text of the play when the actors playing Perce and John left the troupe:25 ‘This MS then represents the effort of the remaining players, by dictating from memory to one of their number, to create a passable prompt copy’.26 Hoppe thus identifies the ‘seane of the whiper’ and John’s two missing speeches as ‘places where these agents simply did not know what was spoken’.27 Indeed, so poor was the remaining players’ knowledge of the play that Hoppe attributes the play’s shortness to the manu­script’s failure to document performance ‘and not to the brevity of the original version’.28 Despite its derivation from the actors’ memories, Hoppe thus sees the Bordeaux manu­script as an extremely poor record of performance. Hoppe’s evidence for the memorial reconstruction of Bordeaux, and its supporting props from Greg’s speculations about the role of touring in the creation of abbreviated texts, have been challenged by Laurie Maguire. Included in her critique of Hoppe’s work are the useful rebuttal of Renwick’s view that 23 

Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, p. 354. Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, pp. 354, 354–55. 25  Hoppe, ‘John of Bordeaux’, p. 132. 26  Hoppe, ‘John of Bordeaux’, p. 132. 27  Hoppe, ‘John of Bordeaux’, p. 123. 28  Hoppe, ‘John of Bordeaux’, p. 123. 24 

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‘the clown’s part [is] out of normal proportion to the rest of the play’, and her calculation that the text requires a ‘company of about fifteen plus supernumeraries (approximately five)’, questioning the manu­script’s insertion into a narrative of its production by a dwindling touring company.29 Maguire instead prefers the notion, like Renwick, that it is a ‘nonmemorial abridgement’; but, freed from the Gregian narrative of touring, she suggests that ‘we must view the play as being performed in a London theater by a London company’.30 Maguire’s questioning of Hoppe’s account demands a reconsideration of the Bordeaux manu­script’s genesis and represents an important general challenge to the theory of memorial reconstruction.31 But Maguire’s conclusion is also peculiarly dependent on the binary distinction, present in Greg’s analyses of Alcazar and Orlando, between a text reconstructed entirely from memory and one deliberately abridged. Further study of Bordeaux suggests the possibility of the working of memory in theatrical revision in other ways than those assumed by Hoppe and Maguire. The process of identifying memorially derived errors in the manu­script is fraught with difficulty. Beyond its explanation of the lacunae, Hoppe’s argument for Bordeaux as a memorial reconstruction depends on the identification of anticipations. Explicitly following Greg’s assertion in Abridgements that anticipations represent especially powerful evidence of memory because they ‘can only occur where the whole of the text and not merely the immediate context is present in the mind, and are impossible in normal transcription’, Hoppe lists eight examples of ‘the memory skipping from one line to another because of similar phraseo­logy’.32 His first two examples are: ‘how can I live now selimus that my son is dead now selemus my onlie son is slayne’ (ll. 227–28) and ‘when thus she sees her that fortune gines to froune then will she chaunge her thoughtes and smill in tyme’ (ll. 330–32). Other theatrical manu­scripts, however, exhibit similar examples that presumably did arise during ‘normal transcription’. The scribal text of Edmond Ironside (London, BL, MS Egerton 1994, fols 96–118), for instance, reads: ‘and as my teares wast soe my cares consume | To dam my harte eies were but to drowne my harte’.33 Similarly, Thomas 29 

Maguire, ‘(Mis)diagnosing Memorial Reconstruction’, pp. 119, 125. Maguire, ‘(Mis)diagnosing Memorial Reconstruction’, p. 125. 31  The most important statements against memorial reconstruction remain Werstine, ‘Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts’, and Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts. 32  Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, p. 320; Hoppe, ‘John of Bordeaux’, p. 121. 33  Edmond Ironside, ed. by Boswell, ll. 1477–78. 30 

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Heywood’s ho­lograph The Escapes of Jupiter (MS Egerton 1994, fols 74–95) includes the following apparent instances of haplo­graphy or eye-skip:34 marry I serve my Lord Amphitrio, To this place I am goinge, and Com to deliuer speake wth my Lady now what art thou the wiser? nay Iff thou beest a good ffellow lett me pass to deliuer my message ffor it requires hast: (ll. 1704–08)

And less expansively, and more like Hoppe’s second example: ‘with her swift ffeete the galaxia tread weare, | and make it brighter by her often tread’ (ll. 1523–24). These examples do not of course prove that the mistakes identified as anticipations in Bordeaux cannot have a memorial aspect, but such mistakes are too common in manu­script transcription to be strong evidence for Hoppe’s position. Another instance from Heywood’s ho­lograph presents another alternative explanation for apparent anticipations. The Jupiter manu­script presents a play composed of scenes from Heywood’s already published The Golden Age (1611, STC13325) and The Silver Age (1613, STC13365). At one point in the manu­ script, Heywood writes: ‘I have my memorandaes abowte me, and as I can beare carry a pack, so I can beare a braine’ (ll. 671–72). The printed text of the play from which Heywood draws reads at this point: ‘I haue my memorandums about mee. As I can beare a packe, so I can beare a braine’.35 What may appear to be either a scribal or memorial error is probably the author taking the opportunity to improve the decade-old line by changing the repeated word. Other evidence for some sort of working of memory in Bordeaux is more suggestive. In the first scene, Vandermast recounts: ‘he seet me on a stead Jade that posted me in hast from Albion a vengeance and wherlwind brought me home’ (ll. 35–36). A full seven leaves later, Bacon threatens I lert thy master van der mast once to trot it on a corser of my on and for his sacke Ill fytt the with a stead that like a wherlwind shall convay the hence. (ll. 790–92)

Hoppe claims that the ‘common reference to the whirlwind raises the possibility that the entire passage in scene i is an anticipatory re-working of the later 34  All quotations from the manu­script are taken from Escapes of Jupiter, ed. by Janzen. Line references are given parenthetically in the text. 35  Heywood, Golden Age, sig. H2v.

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passage’.36 Less ambitiously, it appears entirely possible that the cancelled ‘stead’ in the first passage could be some sort of anticipation of the later passage. A further example sees another possible anticipation on a scale that perhaps exceeds ‘immediate context’. On fol. 6r, Perce tells his scholar acquaintances that he is about to ‘furnish’ them with meat for free and begins a routine about alehouse credit (l. 506). After three lines, the speech is aborted and struck through, and a set piece about how to blag food begins. Twenty-two lines later, once Perce has finished his long speech about ordering meat and is asked by the first scholar ‘how shall we do for monie to pay fort’ (ll. 525–26), he now appropriately begins a piece about alehouse finance, three lines into which, the cancelled lines appear. Hoppe remarks that it is ‘almost impossible to suppose that a reader-dictator would commit such a haplo­graphy […]; on the other hand, a reporter-dictator’s memory would be only too apt to skip and jump in this way’.37 Renwick, however, identifies the repetition as one of the ‘copyist’s errors’ in the text.38 Maguire sees it as a ‘false start’, an aborted revision on the part of the scribe, ‘following the complete text, abridging as he goes’.39 It is impossible to establish the cause of the repetition. That the manu­script’s repetitions may be attributed to possible lapses in memory and transcription, as well as to deliberate revision, must place in doubt whether the Bordeaux manu­script is solely the product of memorial reconstruction of the type first proposed by Greg. This does not of course mean that the play’s text must derive from all of these causes. But a more flexible approach to interpreting the manu­script’s genesis than those that reify deliberate adaptation and the accidents of memory may be a more suitable. Such an approach in itself could also turn to Greg’s work. On the way to his theory of Orlando’s making, Greg considers the possibility that ‘the adapter might himself produce the transcript, making his alterations as he went along’, as Maguire and Renwick propose is the case with Bordeaux.40 Greg continues: Supposing the work to be done by one who was himself an actor, or at least some one familiar with the play as acted, his alterations would tend to be more frequent and extensive than if he were working on an already written manu­script, and he would be tempted to introduce actors’ gag and variations that had become current 36 

Hoppe, ‘John of Bordeaux’, p. 130. Hoppe, ‘John of Bordeaux’, p. 131. 38  John of Bordeaux, ed. by Renwick, p. xii. 39  Maguire, ‘(Mis)diagnosing Memorial Reconstruction’, p. 125. 40  Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, p. 254. 37 

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on the stage. Moreover, […] there would be a tendency for him to substitute, at least subconsciously, what he had heard, or what he thought he had heard, in representation, for what was actually before him.41

Greg’s proposal brings the possibility of performance material being recorded in the text even if a manu­script of the play lay before an adapter. Memory could play a part in the textual process in other ways, too. If the adapter needed to introduce text to accommodate cuts, memory of stage performance and of other parts of the text itself could intrude, creating anticipations of the sort recognized by Hoppe. While evidence is too slight to determine how the Bordeaux manu­script came into being, its study is valuable in stimulating important questions about dramatic manu­scripts and their relationship to performance. Bordeaux’s ‘incompleteness’ offers a compelling example of how different are text and performance and may contribute to research on how material other than that inscribed in the playbook came to be played on stage. The manu­script’s resistance to identification either as ‘nonmemorial abridgement’ or memorial reconstruction should encourage flexible thinking about how texts were shortened for performance, whether they were enacted on tour or in the capital. There may indeed be more traces of performance in theatrical texts than is sometimes allowed. Detecting these traces remains a substantial challenge.

41 

Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, pp. 254–55.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts London, British Library, MS Additional 36758 —— , MS Egerton 1994 —— , MS Harley 7368 Northumberland, Alnwick Castle, MS 507

Primary Sources Bonduca, ed. by W. W. Greg (London: Malone Society, 1951) Edmond Ironside, or War Hath Made All Friends, ed.  by Eleanor Boswell (London: Malone Society, 1927) Heywood, Thomas, The Escapes of Jupiter by Thomas Heywood, ed. by Henry D. Janzen (London: Malone Society, 1976) —— , The Golden Age (1611, STC 13325) John of Bordeaux, or The Second Part of Friar Bacon, ed.  by W.  L. Renwick (London: Malone Society, 1935)

Secondary Works Greg, W.  W., Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: The Battle of Alcazar & Orlando Furioso: An Essay in Critical Biblio­graphy (Oxford: Malone Society, 1922 [1964]) Hoppe, Harry R., ‘John of Bordeaux: A Bad Quarto that Never Reached Print’, in Studies in Honor of A. H. R. Fairchild, ed. by Charles Prouty, Uni­ver­sity of Missouri Studies, 21 (Columbia: Uni­ver­sity of Missouri Press, 1946), pp. 119–32 Long, William B., ‘John a Kent and John a Cumber: An Elizabethan Playbook and its Impli­cations’, in Shakespeare and Dramatic Tradition: Essays in Honor of S. F. Johnson, ed.  by W.  R. Elton and William  B. Long (Newark: Uni­ver­sity of Delaware Press, 1989), pp. 125–43 —— , ‘Stage Directions: A  Misinterpreted Factor in Determining Textual Provenance’, Text, 2 (1985), 121–37 Maguire, Laurie E., ‘John Holland and John of Bordeaux’, Notes and Queries, n.s., 33.3 (1986), 327–33 —— , ‘(Mis)diagnosing Memorial Reconstruction in John of Bordeaux’, Medi­eval and Renaissance Drama in England, 11 (2002), 17–65 —— , Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and their Contexts (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1996) McMillin, Scott, The Elizabethan Theatre and the Book of Sir Thomas More (Ithaca: Cornell Uni­ver­sity Press, 1987) McNeir, Waldo F., ‘Robert Greene and John of Bordeaux’, PMLA, 64.4 (1949), 781–801

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Stern, Tiffany, Document of Performance in Early Modern England (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) Werstine, Paul, Early Modern Playhouse Manu­scripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012) —— , ‘Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: “Foul Papers” and “Bad” Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41.1 (1990), 65–86

James Compton and Cosmo Manuche and Dramatic Manus­ cripts in the Interregnum William Proctor Williams

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n 22 August 1642 Charles I raised the Royal Standard at Nottingham in what has always been taken as the official, or legal, opening of the Civil War, and on 2 September 1642 Parliament said that because of

the distressed Estate of Ireland […] and the distracted Estate of England, threatened with a Cloud of Blood by a Civil War, call for all possible Means to appease and avert the Wrath of God […] and whereas Public Sports do not well agree with Public Calamities, nor Public Stage-plays with the Seasons of Humiliation  […] Ordained, by the Lords and Commons […] Public Stage Plays shall cease, and be forborn.1

That appears not to have worked, since they had to come at the problem again on 22 October 1647: Common Players shall be committed to the Gaol. For the better suppression of Stage-Playes, Interludes, and common Players; It is this day Ordered by the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, That the Lord Major, Justices of the Peace, and Sheriffs of the City of London and 1 

‘September 1642: Order for Stage-plays to cease’, in Acts and Ordinances, ed. by Firth and Rait, pp. 26–27. William Proctor Williams is Professor of English Emeritus at Northern Illinois Uni­ver­sity. He has published extensively on texts and editing, including editing three plays by Shakespeare and five by Heywood.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 137–150 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116448 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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Westminster; the Counties of Middlesex and Surrey, or any two or more of them, shall and may, and are hereby authorized and required to enter into all houses, and other places within the City of London, and Liberties thereof, and other places within their respective Jurisdictions, where Stage-Playes, Interludes, or other common Playes are, or shall be acted or played, and all such common Players or Actors, as they upon view of them or any one of them, or upon Oaths by two credible witnesses (which they are hereby authorized to minister) shall be proved before them, or any two of them, to have acted or played in such Play-houses or places above said; and all person and persons so offending, to commit to any common Gaol or Prison, there to remain untill the next general Sessions of the Peace, holden within the said City of London, or Liberties thereof, and places aforesaid, or sufficient security entred for his or their appearance at the said Sessions there to be punished as Rogues, according to Law.2

It will be noted that all the verbiage about public calamities, humiliation before God, and similar moral judgements found in 1642 are absent in 1647, and that this is a straightforward attack on players and playing. However, what the 1647 proclamation does not prohibit is the publication of plays, which continued, though at a slightly slower pace, nor the writing of plays, nor the private performance of plays. It is also the case that if Parliament felt the need to issue the 1647 order, quite a lot of playing and playgoing must have been taking place in the intervening five years.3 And of course from 1642 until 1645 there was the constant fighting of the Civil War, and for at least two playwrights, James Compton4 and Cosmo Manuche,5 their time was fully taken up with the war. Compton was aged just 2  ‘October 1647: An Ordinance for the Lord Major and City of London, and the Justices of Peace to suppress Stage-playes and Interludes’, in Acts and Ordinances, ed. by Firth and Rait, p. 1027. 3  Since the 1920s this period has been studied in Leslie Hotson’s The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage; Alfred Harbage’s Cavalier Drama; Lois Potter’s Secret Rites and Secret Writing; and Dale B. J. Randall’s Winter Fruit, among many other shorter or more limited studies. 4  The best bio­g raphical information about James Compton, third earl of Northampton, is Kelliher, ‘Compton, James’. There is also information in Kelliher’s British Library Journal article, see below. 5  The standard bio­graphy of Manuche is my ‘Manuche, Cosmo’. A James, or Jacomo, Manuche, Cosmo’s grandfather, and Francis Manuche were in the service of the earl of Leicester, Sir Francis Walsingham, Edward Wooton, and the earl of Conway in France and England between 1570 and 1593 (Calendar of State Papers Domestic; London, BL, MS Cotton Caligula E VI, fols 287r–290v). Jacomo’s connection with Walsingham was such that Walsingham adopted the pseudonym Giacopo Mannucio in his correspondence with Sir Arthur Standen (London, BL,

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twenty when the war started, and Manuche was twenty-nine: Compton was the eldest son of Spencer Compton, second earl of Northampton, and had attended Eton and Cam­bridge; and Manuche was the eldest son of James Manuche, a member of the Painters’ Stainers’ Guild.6 Manuche attended Merchant Taylor’s School but appears not to have gone on to university. There was theatre experience in both families: Compton’s father, the second earl, while at Queens’ College, Cam­bridge, had, in 1615, played before James I in George Ruggle’s comedy Ignoramus, and in 1620 Manuche’s uncle, Francis Manuche, acted in a private performance of John Fletcher’s The Spanish Curate at Sir Edward Dering’s house in Surrenden, Kent. Just when James Compton and Cosmo Manuche met is not clear, but where they met could very easily have been in the west of England and in Wales, for both were engaged in combat for the Royalists in that area. Compton fought at Hopton Heath (19 March 1643), where his father died, and after commanding 1500 horses in Wales in late 1645, in February 1646 he surrendered and began the process of compounding, and his fine was finally discharged in 1651; Compton would later claim ‘to have lost £50,000 in the wars, an early sacrifice being his library of some 250 books, confiscated in 1643 from Crosby Hall, Bishopsgate, and sold for £57 3s. 6d.’7. The Comptons had acquired Crosby Hall and Canonbury House in Islington when Sir William, James’s grandfather, married Elizabeth Spencer, the only child and heir of the very wealthy, and difficult, Sir John Spencer, a merchant and lord mayor of London. After his surrender it appears that James used Canonbury House as his London residence. The Comptons also had two country residences, Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire, a Tudor building, and Castle Ashby in Northamptonshire, an Elizabethan house with Stuart additions. The former had been taken in 1644 by Parliamentary forces, and it was completely pillaged and not restored to its former state and use until the nineteenth century; the latter was taken and damaged by the Parliamentary forces but not seriously, and it became the country home of the Comptons for MS Additional 35841 (The Hardwick Papers), fols 129r–130r, 136r–144v) over matters concerning the Armada. By the early seventeenth century, the Manuches were well settled in England, particularly in London and Kent, serving in various offices of some importance. 6  An indication of the sort of skilled and important work James Manuche did comes from the beginning of October 1614 to the end of September 1615, when ‘James Monoche employed to gild 120 “Knobbes for the ceeling in the Kings Bedchamber” at 5d. the piece for Theobalds’. See ‘Office of the Works: Surveyors and Paymasters’ (1 October 1614), TNA E351/3249. 7  Kelliher, ‘Compton, James’.

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the next two hundred years. On 19 October 1645 Manuche, now a major, and a lieutenant Francis Manuche, probably a cousin, were taken prisoner by Thomas Fairfax’s army at the battle of Tiverton, Devon,8 but Cosmo was either released or exchanged, for he was back in London by 27 October 1648 when he married Frances Brewster at St Bartholomew-the-Less.9 For the next twelve years until the Restoration Compton and Manuche struggled with the physical and financial difficulties forced on them by the Commonwealth government but also wrote, together or apart, finished or partial versions of thirteen plays or translations of plays. Three of Manuche’s plays, probably written after 1648, but perhaps started earlier, were published in 1652, though we know that at least one, The Just General, was finished by 29 November 1651 for that is when Sir Nathaniel Brent licensed it for publication to Mercy Meighen, Gabriel Bedell, and Thomas Collins.10 The other two plays are The Bastard, also published by Meighen, Bedell, and Collins, and The Loyal Lovers, published by Thomas Egglesfield. There is also considerable evidence that Love in Travell (London, BL, MS Additional 60275) was written in 1654 or 1655.11 All of Manuche’s printed and manu­script plays, save for The Loyal Lovers and The Bastard, are dedicated to Compton. And, although it be would unusual and inappropriate for Compton to have made any dedication to Manuche, what Manuche says in the dedication to Love in Travell does indicate that sort of closeness one might call collaboration: The former favors I have received by your honor’s free and noble acceptation Of my weak endeavors (the productions of a disturbed brain, Through want); in point of gratitude and duty (with my soul’s Affection), could no less than present the first fruits of my last endeavor To your honor. In the consideration of the approbation it has got by Court critics, who neither give their opinions nor alms But for gain or ostentation, my Lord, my deficiency in point Of bribing them to an opinion of my endeavors encourages me To hope my play may deserve your Honor’s reading.12 8 

Oxford, Bodl., MS Ashmole 1071. Parish Register transcription, Society of Genealogists and original register, Archives, St Bartholomew’s Hospital. 10  Arber, 29 November 1651; and Greg, no. 704. 11  Williams, ‘The Castle Ashby Manu­scripts’, 398–400. I retain the spelling ‘Travell’ of the original since I believe there is wordplay here between ‘travel’ and ‘travail’, which this suggests. 12  Although this is not actually verse, it is written this way in the manu­script and I here retain that format; the text has been lightly edited. 9 

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The Restoration of Charles II made this sort of working no longer necessary, and although at least Manuche went on for three or four more years, this sort of writing appears to have stopped by 1665. And of course, it was not until the 1980s that we even knew that there were two dramatists at work at Castle Ashby and in London. In the 1760s Thomas Percy, the literary antiquarian, had noted: In Lord Northampton’s Library at Castle Ashby in Northamptonshire are 7 or 8 MS Plays of this Cosmo Manuche. They usually lie on ye shelf over the Door. They are as follows. I.  The Banished Shepherdesse (in blank verse) with a dedication inserted. To the Right Honble The Earle of Northampton, subscribed Cos. Manuche. II. The Feast a Comedy in blank verse Dedicated to James Earl of Northampton by Cos. Manuche. III. The Mandrake a Comedy in Prose in the same handwriting (no Dedication & seemingly unfinished). IV. Agamemnon, a Tragedy unfinished. V. Leontius, King of Ciprus: a Tragedy in blank verse: but this I am not sure is the Title. VI. The Captives a Comedy in prose unfinished. (I am not sure whether this is not a Comedy of Plautus.) VII. Mariamne a Tragedy in blank verse. The Copy is very much torn. VIII. another Tragedy in blank verse without a Title. Act I. begins thus, ‘Macrinus, Papinianus & Ardentius.’ ‘Pap. Severus then is numbered with the Gods.’ &c.13

At some point later in the eighteenth century, these manu­scripts were moved and effectively went missing. However, there was also a ho­lograph copy in the Huntington Library of Manuche’s The Banished Shepherdess, formerly in the Egerton manu­scripts, which was prepared as a presentation copy for Henrietta Maria, the Queen Dowager (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS E1 8395), and there was a manu­script of Manuche’s ‘The Feast’ in several hands in the Oxford, Worcester College, MS 120, Plays 9.22. But down to September 1977, when the current Lord Northampton and I made a further search of the holdings at Castle Ashby, nothing was known of those seven or eight manu­ script plays Percy mentioned. However, it emerged that Percy, doubtless working from memory, noted only manu­script volumes, not the contents of the volumes, and from Percy’s possible eight titles the list expanded to thirteen, and of these, three existed in two drafts. On 8 March 1978 as lot 293 this collection of plays was offered for sale at Christie’s and was acquired by the British Library, where it is now Additional MSS 60273-60282.14 Before the sale and after the 13 

Quoted in Williams, ‘The Castle Ashby Manu­scripts’, p. 392. These manu­scripts’ current shelfmarks are as follows. Manuche’s plays, all in auto­g raph fair copies, are: London, BL, Additional MS  60273, The Banished Shepherdess; London, BL, 14 

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collection came to the British Library, Hilton Kelliher was able to carefully examine the manu­scripts and determine that the items not by Manuche were in the hand of and were, presumably, written by James Compton, third earl of Northampton.15 All the manu­scripts are written on paper which has watermarks and binding characteristics in common with many family and estate documents at Castle Ashby, all from between 1642 and the mid-1660s. In Castle Ashby estate records is a document of the same paper stock as more than half the manu­ scripts in this collection. It is entitled ‘Copy of an Order of the Lords house to search in severall places for goods taken fro Ashby’ and is dated 26 June 1660; it appears to have been made and kept with other copies of similar documents against the loss of the original. More striking, however, are two account books, for they are not only made up of paper bearing the same watermarks as the literary manu­scripts, but they are bound, stabbed, or sewn in a manner identical to that of several of them. They are ‘The Bock of Laborors soms fr Lady day last past […] 1666’ and ‘The Book of Rents […] 1666’, both of these concerning the operation of the Ashby estate. It would appear that someone, perhaps the estate manager, obtained large quantities of this paper and had it bound up into blank books for use in keeping estate records, and so most of these manu­scripts were prepared by someone sufficiently familiar with the operation of the estate Additional MS  60274, The Feast; and BL, Additional MS 60275, Love in Travell. Compton’s plays and writings are: London, BL, Additional MS 60276, a notebook containing auto­g raph fair copies and drafts of a translation of Nicholas Caussin’s Latin prose drama Hermenigildus, verse translations of Seneca’s Agamemnon and Hercules Furens (see also London, BL, Additional MS 60277), and satirical poems ‘Cavalier’ and ‘Presbyterian’; London, BL, Additional MS 60277, a notebook containing partly auto­g raph fair copies of the Senecan translations also found in London, BL, Additional MS 60276; London, BL, Additional MS 60278, a notebook containing auto­g raph drafts and scribal fair copies of The Mandrake, an adaptation of Machiavelli’s prose comedy La Mandragola, ‘Don Sancho’, a translation into rhyming couplets of part of Act i of Corneille’s Don Sancho d’Aragon, and a scribal copy of an untitled play about Leontius, King of Cyprus (see also London, BL, Additional MS 60279); London, BL, Additional MS 60279, a notebook containing a scribal fair copy with authorial corrections of Leontius, King of Cyprus (see also London, BL, Additional MS 60278); London, BL, Additional MS 60280, a notebook containing an auto­g raph copy of a five-act tragedy about Mariamne, first wife of Herod the Great; London, BL, Additional MS 60281, a collection of auto­g raph drafts of untitled dramas including a five-act tragedy in blank verse on the emperor Antoninus Bassianus Caracalla, a translation of part of Act ii of Plautus’s Captivi, and fragments from the first two acts of a play about earl of Strafford; London, BL, Additional MS 60282 contains two prose tracts. 15  Kelliher, ‘A Hitherto Unrecognized Cavalier Dramatist’.

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office, and well enough known to those on the estate that he could go into the office and remove some of these blank books for literary uses. These people are almost certainly Manuche and Compton. But no matter how large and unusual this collection might seem, and no matter that we have discovered a previously unknown playwright, there is still a tendency to think of these plays as closet dramas. However, although there is no specific documentary evidence of performance of any of these, circumstantial and textual evidence point to them being intended for performance and to their being performed. It is certainly the case that the physical structure of Castle Ashby would serve very well for either outdoor or indoor productions.16 Also, as Hilton Kelliher has shown, the circle of theatre types around Compton and his houses would certainly have aided in such an endeavour.17 But the textual variants to be found in some of the manu­scripts are what really, in my opinion, make the case for performance. The Banished Shepherdess presents the most interesting case for here we have two distinct texts, both in the author’s own hand. He says in the dedication to the earl of Northampton in the British Library copy: ‘also [forgive], my rude transcription of it, from my sullied originall, Not being willing to Committ it to a more Commanding pen’ (fol. 2v). Both this and the Huntington copy are in the same hand, and thus we may take the readings from either copy to be authoritative. It is clear that both manu­scripts were copied from the same ‘sullied originall’. At line 35 of Act i the Huntington copy reads ‘actives’t instrewments’ while the British Library copy reads ‘greatest Actiues’. In the Huntington copy this line is five lines from the foot of the page, while in the British Library copy the two words in question are the last two words on the page, but the catchword in this copy immediately below them is ‘Instrewments’ although the first word of the next page is ‘Of ’. Clearly the page in the ‘sullied originall’ held nearly the same amount of text as the British Library copy while the Huntington copy holds nearly five lines more text. Like a good printer’s compositor, he copied the non-textual material, the catchword, he saw before him in the lost exemplar no matter how the text he copied read. A similar situation occurs in a comic scene in Act v: Huntington calls for the entrance of a devil who is driven off roaring by Arius. However, as the devil comes on stage 16  This ground plan shows just the sort of space that would have been available: [accessed 6 February 2018]. 17  Kelliher, ‘A Hitherto Unrecognized Cavalier Dramatist’, pp. 165–68.

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he shouts ‘I come to claime my due’; in the British Library copy he has no lines to speak. The action occurs midway down the page in Huntington but occurs at the very top of the page in the British Library copy. Now, although this copy provides no lines for the devil to speak and has no speech prefix for him and the page begins with the direction ‘Thunder and Lightening’, the catchword on the preceding page is ‘Diuille’. It would seem that the only way that this could have come about would be if the ‘sullied originall’ had its page break at exactly the same spot as the British Library copy and the catchword was copied in the same mechanical way as was ‘Instrewments’ in my earlier example, although Manuche had altered the text to remove the devil’s one-line speech. I assume that the only reasons for changes such as these is different performance circumstances. Two of the most striking variants are the wholesale changes in the dramatis personae and the omission of an entire scene from the British Library manu­ script. In the first instance, four ladies in waiting on the Banished Shepherdess, allegorically Henrietta Maria, are not in the British Library copy (Astrea, Caelia, Flavia, and Fronisby). They have few lines in the Huntington copy and exist primarily to enact dances, to help in the chorus of various songs, and to add, no doubt, to the imagined spectacle. Their absence from the copy destined for Castle Ashby seems only explicable if behind each text there exists a performance copy. For a real, not an imagined, performance in 1659 or early 1660, it is probable that the earl of Northampton might have had trouble raising a troupe which could contain eight ‘extra’ ladies, since four ‘Shepheardesses Attending’ (Parthenia, Althea, Artesia, and Urania) are found in both copies. I can think of no other appropriate reason for such a large variation in cast. However, Henrietta Maria, as Manuche imagined her at her court in exile in France just before the Restoration, might well have been thought to have been able to assemble a much larger cast of well-born women to take part in a bit of amateur dramatics. Even more telling is the omission from the dramatis personae of Thais and her son Sperme — she is described as ‘A Pairmours person and hostesse’ in the Huntington copy — and the omission of lines 72–220, the only scene in which Thais and Sperme appear. In this scene Lysander recounts to Thais and her son an allegorized version of the history of the Civil War and Interregnum when they question why he is as he currently is. Now such a rehearsing of the recent events of English history might be necessary for an audience in exile in France, some of whom may have already been there before some of the events happened, and the recounting does clarify the allegory. Even if the performance before Henrietta Maria is only imagined, this retelling of the events from the

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1640s and 1650s flatters and honours the Queen Dowager. But for a performance in England at the home of one of the Royalist leaders in the Civil War and before a family, and their friends, which had been universally staunch in its support of the Stuart cause, such a retelling would not have been as appropriate. Indeed, such a recounting of events might even be considered traitorous before the spring of 1660 had the wrong person got wind of the performance. A few lines from the opening of the scene should illustrate this point: Thais: Well. you haue giuen Mee Incouragement To hope well. But, to your story of the Arcadian Rebells. Which, I’le accept of though it be but short. Your haste being greate. Lysand: Then, brieffely, take it thus. The Arcadian’s: surfieting, with Ease, and plenty Thais: Of Meate, And weomen: I am afrayde of. Lysand: Both, both, landlady. Vnder, a neuer to be forgotten, vertuous Prince. (An vnfortunate shepheard: to such wooluish, And vngratefull flock) Began, vnder that Common cloake for Rebellion (Religion) To pretend Earnist desyers, to a Conformitie there in. ffinding fault, with what had no fault in it, but decency. Thais: Rogues: in Grane: I warrant you. Lysand: These, make a head. forcing their naturall prince: (By flight) to make prouision for His owne safety. (ll. 142–58, Huntington copy)

There can be no obvious literary reason for the insertion or omission of the scene, and the only likely reason is audience or available cast. But further, if the audience were only to be Henrietta Maria herself, if the play was intended only to be read, it is hardly plausible that any author would think that the Queen Dowager need have the details of this period of history recalled to her. The audience must have been intended to have been a theatrical one, many of whom might not know in any detail the events upon which the argument of the play rests. There are also several variants which indicate that different props and settings were to be employed (see Table 7.1 below). And there is the variant which more than any other indicates the differences between the audience surrounding the Queen Dowager in exile in France and a standard Royalist English audience. At v.180 the Queen’s copy (Huntington) simply reads ‘perfect’, but the earl of Northampton’s copy (British Library) reads ‘perfect. without the helpe of Lylly’. This reference to the standard Latin grammar textbook of England

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Table 7.1. Comparison of variants in the Huntington Library and British Library copies of The Banished Shepherdess. Line

Huntington

British Library

ii.424

leaden wand

lead coller’d wand

iii.22

those Rockes

that Rock

iii.344 all hide Themselues behind Bushes. [omitted] iv.4

Mony

baggs of mony

iv.674

Corilliana: sitts on a flowery banke.

She sitts:

v.311

Lookes in a booke:

Lookes in a book of red letters.

v.382

valid:

A Thin vaile over her face. A siluer wand in her hand

adds a certain zest to the speech, but it might have been incomprehensible to the audience in France, and probably to Henrietta Maria herself. The situation concerning The Feast is quite different. There is one presentation copy for the Earl of Northampton in the author’s hand (London, BL, Additional MS 60274) and another manu­script at Worcester College, Oxford, in several hands, one of them being that of William Clarke who was Secretary of War under Cromwell, Monck, and Charles II. Again, the readings in the British Library copy are without question authorial, but doubts must arise concerning the Worcester manu­script, particularly since there are several very large instances of variation between the two texts. Lines 1–177 of Act iii of the British Library copy are replaced by thirty lines in the Worcester copy. Now aside from the fact that it is highly unlikely, though not impossible, that two or three persons copying this text, or any text, might choose to invent thirty new lines to replace 177 old lines, it is worth noting that the 177 lines in the British Library copy are almost entirely taken up with dancing and dialogue and asides and music, and even one stage direction saying, ‘Musick: tunes’ (iii.61). However, the thirty lines in the Worcester copy begin: ‘Ent: Issabella: Sol: As from Dancing’ and contain no music, no dancing, no show at all. Furthermore, when at line 202 the British Library copy reads: ‘Ent: one of the Musitians with a Theorbo’ the Worcester copy reads: ‘Ent: to her a musitian with a Theorbo’. From these two variants alone it would be possible to surmise that the texts which lie behind the two surviving manu­scripts represent two different performance versions of the play: one for which it would have been possible to perform a large ball with musicians and dancers, and another where circumstances would not permit this. It does seem unlikely that the copyists of the Worcester copy would make such

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a change on their own if they were simply making a copy of the play for reading. In Act i a small variant occurs which may also say something about the audience. Shelter, the nobleman in disguise, says, in the British Library copy, ‘My Natiue place, is London (ffamous for Rebellion)’, but Worcester reads ‘Englands my natiue place’. It is as probable that this demonstrates different underlying texts rather than representing the sensibilities of the copyists. Throughout the play there are a number of stage direction variants which would seem to imply that the Worcester text was intended for, or derived from, a version of the play which had a less than professional cast. The number of directions occurring only in the Worcester copy which tell actors when to speak aside, when to draw weapons, when to put them up, when to drink, and when to perform other routine actions indicated by the actors’ speeches constitute the vast majority of all variant stage directions. Finally, there are a number of stage directions like that added at i.254, where any good actor and any sensible reader would have no problem in determining to whom the speech is addressed, but Worcester still adds, ‘Speaking to Shelter’, even though he immediately responds to the speech of Constance, and she exits after his twoline salutation. In the case of Compton’s plays, Luke Beattie has made a considerable study of them as viable theatrical pieces. He notes: between October 2009 and September 2010, I tested Compton’s plays’ viability as performance texts through a series of staged readings and full performances. The first performance dates were as follows: Sophius on 2 October 2009 (Uni­ver­sity of Exeter), Leontius on 29 January 2010 (Bath Spa Uni­ver­sity), Hermenigildus on 13 February 2010 (Mary Wallace Theatre/Richmond Shakespeare Society), Agamemnon on 27 March 2010 (Uni­ver­sity of Exeter), Hercules Furens on 16 April 2010 (Uni­ver­sity of Exeter), Mariamne on 11 June 2010 (Ballard Underground/ Outsiders’ Inn Theater, Seattle), Bassianus on 18 June 2010 (Uni­ver­sity of British Columbia), The Mandrake on 8 August 2010 (Zoo Southside Studio/Foul Papers Theatre, Edinburgh), The Captives on 7 September 2010 (Uni­ver­sity of Exeter) and Don Sancho on 7 September 2010 (Uni­ver­sity of Exeter).18

And he also says that he ‘had previously staged Bassianus for different purposes in June 2007 at Exeter; it received a reading at a symposium at the Globe in July 2008, and I gave it another reading at UBC in December 2008’.19 Beattie also 18  Beattie, ‘Theatrical Potential’, pp. 96–97. See also, his ‘How Were the Anonymous Castle Ashby Playscripts Created, and Why?’. 19  Beattie, ‘Theatrical Potential’, p. 97.

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analysed Compton’s plays concerning the number of actors required for each play, costumes and props needed, and the number of entrance doors and discovery spaces. He found that the finished, or nearly finished, Leontius and The Mandrake are plays clearly ready for, or the result of, performance. I suppose some of the other plays which are fragments or unfinished are the sort of file of drafts and working copies one might find in any writer’s files. James Compton’s circle of theatrical folk, both in London and in the country, is unusual, though I think it is probably not unique. In that circle were actors, playwrights, and theatre owners, particularly those associated with the Queen’s Men and the King’s Men, and the dedications and other allusions are probably only a small sliver of what was actually happening. However, the Restoration and the reopening of the theatres probably brought this activity to an end, and almost certainly the death of Compton’s first countess in 1661 is connected to this ending. She was Isabella (1622–1661), the younger daughter of Richard Sackville, third earl of Dorset (d. 1624), and his wife, Lady Anne Clifford. It seems likely that Isabella brought with her some of her mother’s intellectual vigor and curiosity. With the Restoration, Compton became lord lieutenant of Warwickshire and recorder of Coventry, and in May 1663 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. As the ODNB says, ‘He attended the House of Lords punctiliously until 1669, and sporadically thereafter, his most notable action there being the introduction in December 1667 of a bill calling for the perpetual banishment of Clarendon, which Pepys called “mighty poor I think, and so doth everybody else”’. Compton died at Castle Ashby on 15 December 1681 and was buried on 29 December at Compton Wynyates.20 Of Manuche after his composition of The Feast in 1664 we know little, but on 7 November 1673 a Major Mullinax is buried in the ‘Dark Cloister’21 of Westminster Abbey, and it is likely that this is Cosmo Manuche, particularly as on 11 January 1675/76 Mrs Francis Manuche (Cosmo’s second wife) is buried at Westminster Abbey, also in the Cloisters.22 It is a considerable movement from the house near the Windmill in Shoe Lane, Holborn, to Westminster Abbey, but then Cosmo seems to have had free run of Lord Northampton’s stationary cupboard. 20 

Kelliher, ‘Compton, James’. The Dark Cloister is that part of the Abbey cloisters which extends the eastern walk. A  plan is available online: [accessed 6 February 2018]. 22  The Marriage, Baptismal, and Burial Registers, ed. by Chester. 21 

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With the discovery of the Castle Ashby manu­scripts the shape of Interregnum drama was altered, expanded, and enhanced. One new and interesting dramatist was brought to light in James Compton, the then little-known Cosmo Manuche became an immensely richer and more complex dramatist, and the interaction between the two and their manu­scripts provides intriguing and thought-provoking matter for further consideration.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts Kew, The National Archives, E351/3249 London, BL, Additional MS 60273 —— , Additional MS 60274 —— , Additional MS 60275 —— , Additional MS 60276 —— , Additional MS 60278 —— , Additional MS 60279 —— , Additional MS 60280 —— , Additional MS 60281 —— , Additional MS 60282 Oxford, Bodl., MS Ashmole 1071 Oxford, Worcester College, MS 120, Plays 9.22 San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS E1 8395

Primary Sources Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, ed.  by C. H Firth and R.  S. Rait (London: H.M.S.O., 1911) The Marriage, Baptismal, and Burial Registers of the Collegiate Church or Abbey of St Peter, Westminster, ed. by Joseph Lemuel Chester (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1876)

Secondary Works Beattie, Luke, ‘How Were the Anonymous Castle Ashby Playscripts Created, and Why?’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Exeter, 2012) —— , ‘Theatrical Potential in the Cavalier Plays of James Compton, Third Earl of North­ ampton’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 33.1 (2013), 96–106 Harbage, Alfred, Cavalier Drama (New York: MLA, 1936) Hotson, Leslie, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1928) Kelliher, Hilton, ‘Compton, James, third earl of Northampton (1622–1681)’, ODNB [accessed 6 February 2018] —— , ‘A  Hitherto Unrecognized Cavalier Dramatist: James Compton, Third Earl of Northampton’, British Library Journal, 6 (1980), 158–87 Potter, Lois, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1989) Randall, Dale B.  J., Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642–1660 (Lexington: Uni­ver­sity Press of Kentucky, 1995) Williams, William Proctor, ‘The Castle Ashby Manu­scripts’, The Library, 6th ser., 2.4 (1980), 391–412 —— , ‘Manuche, Cosmo (bap. 1613, d.  1673?)’, ODNB [accessed 6 February 2018]

Performance

The Play of Wit and Science: Evidence for the Performance of a Choir School Manus­ cript Louise Rayment

I

n 1554/55 a payment of 14s. 2d. was made by the City of London parish church of St Mary-at-Hill, a church well known for its musical output, to ‘Masters Restall and Manwode’ ‘for the coppey of a play’.1 This entry in the churchwardens’ accounts is of interest not only because the name Rastell (or Restall) is strongly associated with sixteenth-century drama and its printing, but because the date coincides exactly with that of a manu­script compiled by a network of musicians, dramatists, and pedagogues centred on the church. This essay examines some of the dramatic material within this manu­script for evidence of its adaptation for and performance by the choirboys at St Mary-atHill in the middle decade of the sixteenth century, giving further insight into the performance life of the church in this period.

The Manu­script The manu­script, now held in the British Library’s collection as Additional Manu­script 15233, is a sixty-five-leaf quarto bound in black calf with blind tooling — a dark impression created by impressing dampened leather with a brass finishing tool — on the front and back. The tooled design consists of a standard decorative roll border, and a central ornament containing the initials ‘S. B’.2 1  2 

London, Guildhall Library, MS 1239/1 (pt 3), fol. 770r. ‘S. B.’ has never been satisfactorily identified.

Louise Rayment is a Visiting Fellow at the Uni­ver­sity of Southampton.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 153–164 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116449 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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The manu­script contains keyboard music, poetry, song lyrics, and fragments of plays attributed to seven named contributors: John Redford (c. 1500–c. 1547), John Heywood (c. 1497–c. 1580), Richard Edwards (1525–66), John Thorne (d. 1573), Miles Huggarde (fl. 1533–57), Thomas Pridioxe (fl. 1525–c. 1560), and Master Knyght (fl. 1525–c. 1550). There are almost certainly four different scribal hands in the manu­script, none of which have been previously identified as belonging to the authors to whom the contents are attributed. The different hands do not appear in straightforward chrono­logical order of the manu­script’s copying, and occasionally they add to and correct one another. Hand A seems to have been the main force behind the writing of the manu­script. He wrote the music, Wit and Science, the fragment which remains of a second interlude, seven poems, and the first eight stanzas of an eighth poem. Whilst part of the manu­script consists of work authored in the 1530s and 1540s, biblio­graphic evidence from the binding and the watermark demonstrates that London, BL, Additional MS 15233 was compiled and bound in its entirety during the mid1550s, with earlier work being copied in alongside newer pieces.3 The professional activities of the named contributors show that they were linked by their connections with St Mary-at-Hill, and also by their interest in performance and pedagogy.4 John Heywood was involved with dramatic performance at the choir school at St Paul’s Cathedral and is also frequently mentioned in association with performances by the children of the Chapel Royal. John Redford was organist and choirmaster at St Paul’s from the mid-1530s until his death in 1547. Richard Edwards was a musician, poet, and dramatist who became master of the Children of the Chapel Royal in the 1560s. John Thorne was choirmaster at York Minster during the 1540s and 1550s, and Master Knyght was almost certainly Thomas Knyght (fl. c. 1525–50), choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral during the latter half of the 1540s. The pedagogical interests of the named contributors to Add. MS 15233 and the type of material contained within it indicate that it was designed for use in an educational context during the middle decade of the sixteenth century. Furthermore, the connections of these men to St Mary-at-Hill, a city church which had an established choir school, makes it reasonable to suggest that this manu­script represents a repertoire for the St Mary-at-Hill schoolroom in this period.5 But what evidence is there in the manu­script to suggest the performance of the material by choirboys? 3 

Rayment, ‘A Note on the Date’. For the connections between contributors and their links to St Mary-at-Hill, see Rayment, ‘The Manu­script of Wit and Science’. 5  For a study of the choir school at the church, see Rayment, ‘The Sixteenth-Century School’. 4 

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The Play of Wit and Science BL Add. MS  15233 contains the only known text of The Play of Wit and Science, attributed to John Redford, almoner and master of the Choirboys at St Paul’s Cathedral, and almost certainly originally designed for the choirboys under his tutelage in the 1530s and 1540s.6 The plot is not complex and can be briefly summarized as follows. The young Wit helped by his page, Confidence, is determined to marry Science, the daughter of Reason and Experience. He is assisted in his suit first by Reason, who gives him a mirror of reason with which to examine his own and others’ conduct, and then by three more companions, Instruction, Study and Diligence. Wit is headstrong; refusing to apply himself to any long-term plan, and ignoring the advice of his companions, he is defeated in combat with Science’s mortal enemy, the monster, Tediousness. Revived by Honest Recreation, he is then enticed by Lady Idleness who lulls him to sleep in her lap, exchanges his clothes with those of her son, Ignorance, the fool and blackens his face. Science comes across Wit and no longer recognizes him, forcing him to examine himself in the glass of reason, where he sees the error of his ways. Science later forgives Wit and with the help of Confidence, Study, Instruction and Diligence, he eventually kills the monster Tediousness and is united with the object of his love.

Much scholarly work has been dedicated to examining the content of the play and its value as a pedagogical text, but its dramaturgical composition provides insight into the variety of talents required by those performing it and the manu­ script itself demonstrates how this copy of the play might have been used as a performance text during the 1550s.7 The play is designed for those capable of playing instruments, dancing and singing as well as acting, with places marked in the dramatic action for a galliard and for four songs, two of which are accompanied by a consort of viols —‘Gyue place gyue place to honest recreacion’, ‘Exceedyng mesure wyth paynes continewall’, ‘Welcum myne owne’ and finally, ‘Remembre me’.8 The lyrics to all but the last of the songs are found, without musical settings, later in the manu­s cript (beginning at fol. 55 r) and copied by a different scribe. To find the songs separately from the play is not unusual. As Tiffany Stern has noted, songs for plays regularly circulated in the company of pro­logues, 6 

For the text of the play, see Redford, Wit and Science, ed. by Brown. For pedagogical studies of the play, see Duffy, ‘“Wit and Science”’; Schell, ‘Scio Ergo Sum’; and Scherb, ‘Playing at Maturity’. 8  A galliard is a quick and lively dance in triple time. 7 

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epilogues, and poems in manu­s cript miscellanies, and could be ‘temporarily not permanent residents in the play in which they featured’, resulting in composite playbooks where the dialogue represents one form of text, and a song represents another form, another authorship or another moment in time.9 In fact, although the main text of the play in Add. MS 15233 indicates where a song should be inserted, and gives its title, it gives no further clue to the lyrics. None of the lyrics which appear later in the manu­script are attributed, and it may be that they were not part of the original play but were written specifically to accompany the copy in Add. MS 15233 during the 1550s. Whilst the majority of actors in this period would have had at least some singing ability, not all would have been talented instrumentalists, and often extra musicians were brought in to accompany actors in the performance of a play. T. W. Craik has suggested, however, that doubling was employed in the design of Wit and Science, which would have allowed actors who were also musicians to perform the play without the need for any extra instrumentalists.10 This arrangement of characters demonstrates that the young performers of the play were both talented actors and musicians, whilst the presence of more music in the play than the action itself requires works to display the talents of these musicians. This not only supports the theory that the 1550s copy of the play was copied for use within a school context but also that it was designed for use by multi-talented choirboys. The particular use of the viol is also interesting in this context, since by the late 1540s, the children of the Chapel Royal and the choir schools of St Paul’s and Westminster, who were already skilled in singing, were beginning to take up the instrument. Viols were the instruments of aristocrats, and by the mid-sixteenth century, playing the viol had come to be regarded as an important element in the education of choirboys, at least of those attending the larger institutions.11 If this copy of the play was designed to be performed by the boys at the St Mary-atHill school, it indicates that musical education at the church had developed to a level similar to that of the larger institutions in London by the middle decade of the sixteenth century.

9 

Stern, Documents of Performance, pp. 155–56. Craik, The Tudor Interlude, p. 47. 11  See Woodfield, The Early History of the Viol, pp. 213–14. 10 

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Wit and Science: A Scribal Copy Whilst it is clear that the play was designed with choirboys in mind, and there is circumstantial evidence that it was copied for and performed by the boys at St Mary-at-Hill, the manu­script also demonstrates the use and adaptation of this particular version of the play as a performance text. There is no reason to challenge the original attribution of the play in Add. MS 15233 to John Redford, but the dating of the paper on which the text was written to nearly a decade after the choirmaster’s death means that this must be a version of the play copied from an earlier source.12 Copying by hand, whether carried out by a professional scribe or an amateur, is inevitably subject to error, but such mistakes often allow an insight into the intention behind the copy. Copying mistakes can be placed into two main categories: mechanical errors and errors of interpretation. Both are apparent in the manu­script of Wit and Science. The simplest form of mechanical error caused by the process of copying is an ‘eye skip’, where the copyist repeats all or part of the previous line of text in the process of looking between the source and his work. There are two examples of this in the text of Wit and Science, on fols 24v and 25r. Errors can also be seen where a line or number of lines of text are missed out entirely. Hand A, the main copyist of Wit and Science, missed out odd lines on fol. 18v but later realized (or had his mistake pointed out to him), and returned to squeeze in his omissions. In addition to these mechanical errors, there are possible examples of A’s misreading of the hand in his source text; for example, the ser brevi­graph on fol. 16v. At this point in the play Wit addresses his companion, Study (who refers to him throughout the play as ‘sir’), who replies ‘here of ’. The line makes sense as ‘here syr’ (my emphasis), but little sense as what it actually reads, ‘here of’. There are also examples in the text which might suggest errors of interpretation possibly caused by the scribe copying from a manu­script that had already been altered, and being unsure which of the original directions to follow. Folio 17v has the direction ‘reson cumeth in’, added after the main text. This is apparently unnecessary since the character has already entered a few lines previously (‘Reson cumth in’) and has already spoken (‘& sayth as folowyth’). A few lines later directions are given, ‘al go out | save honest recre’, which are then repeated in a different form immediately, ‘here comfort wyt | quiknes | & strength go out’. It is evident that the play as it appears in Add. MS 15233 was copied from an earlier source during the 1550s, but for what purpose? 12 

See Rayment, ‘A Note on the Date’.

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Wit and Science as a Performance Text As the first of the literary contents of Add. MS 15233, inserted after the music, Wit and Science is the most complete of three playtexts contained within the manu­script. The inclusion of the play part way through a rather jumbled miscellany does not immediately suggest that it was a final version being prepared for print, neither is there any indication in the text itself or in the Stationers’ Register that it was ever entered for print. That the manu­script was originally designed as a boy chorister’s personal part book can be dismissed because it seems extremely unlikely that such an expensive, individualized book would have been produced for a student, but the format of Wit and Science provides further evidence to support the dismissal of this theory. The purpose of a chorister’s part book would have been to provide the owner with an individual ‘part’, whether this was musical, or dramatic. Wit and Science, however, was written into this manu­script in its entirety, not as a single ‘part’ for one actor. Two significant possibilities remain for a playtext that is clearly not an authorial draft, but which exists in almost complete form; a private copy for an individual, or a theatrical book. Distinguishing between a copy of a playtext being used for performance, and an actual ‘prompt book’ or book-holder’s copy, is often more difficult than might be expected, as Paul Werstine has noted.13 The text of Wit and Science contains numerous stage directions, indicating not only entrances and exits, but directions for music, song, and dancing and the use of various properties. Stage directions do not in themselves constitute evidence that the text was intended as a performance copy, since they may derive from the original produced by a theatrically aware author such as Redford. That the manu­script was not copied specifically as a ‘prompt book’ is indicated by the fact that the directions, whilst useful for ease of reading, would not be particularly useful to the book-holder in an acting company. They do not, for example, signal ahead for large properties, or the entrances of particular actors. Although it does not appear that the play was copied as a ‘prompt book’, there is further evidence that supports the idea that the copy might have been used as a performance text. Hand A, the scribe for the greater part of the play, seems to have made corrections to his text at a later stage, and these changes are almost exclusively concerned with stage directions and performance. For example, fol. 16r contains the direction ‘tedyousnes cumeth in with a vyser over hys hed’, which is clearly added in much larger text than the rest of the speech and directions on the page, but by the same scribe. Folio 22v has altered stage directions concerning the exit 13 

Werstine, ‘“Foul Papers” and “Prompt-Books”’.

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of characters, and the following page 23r contains nine lines which are extremely cramped and seem to have been written into a space left for them. The cramped text follows a direction for musicians with viols to enter and includes the directions for the second song, an indication that the title and nature of the song was added later, along with a few introductory lines in a gap left for a musical interlude. There are also a number of minor insertions and emendations by a second scribe, Hand C, throughout the text, which concern the correct assignment of speeches, the insertion of a stage direction (which is later crossed through) and the apparently arbitrary alteration of ‘ont’ to ‘on the’ on fol. 19r. Although it is possible that the scribes may originally have simply copied the playtext into the manu­script for reference purposes, it is evident that having made a copy, at a later point they returned to it, expanded stage directions, and corrected other performance related aspects, without making any substantial changes to the main body of the copied text. Such actions suggest that the later amenders were mainly concerned with making the play easier to read as a dramatic text, and possibly also to act, rather than changing the overall content. There are no records of the staging of Wit and Science. Nevertheless, the final folio of the play contains lines addressed ‘to our most noble kyng & queen in especiall | to ther honorable cowncell | & then to all the rest’, indicating that it was designed for performance at court during the reign of a married monarch.14 It is of course possible that these lines are a remnant from the earlier source text, copied indiscriminately by the scribe into Add. MS 15233. If the text was, in fact, adapted for performance during the 1550s, taking into consideration the fact that of the monarchs who reigned within this period, only Mary I was married, it is possible to tentatively suggest a narrower date range for this version of the text. This would place it within the four-year period of the reign of Mary and Philip II of Spain, from July 1554 to November 1558.15 Furthermore, the play has been cited as a celebration of marriage.16 The opening lines discuss the material benefits as well as the romantic ideal of marriage, as the character of Reason defends himself against the charge of marrying his daughter off ‘baselye’: If anye man now marvell that I woolde bestowe my dowghter thus baselye 14 

Add. MS 15233, fol. 30v. 15  It should be noted that 1554–58 was also the date range suggested for Add. MS 15233 by W. J. Ringler in 1992, although he cited no evidence for his theory. See Ringler, Biblio­graphy and Index, pp. 18–19. 16  Reavley Gair, The Children of St Paul’s, p. 78; Grantley, Wit’s Pilgrimage, p. 157.

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of truth I reson am of thys mynde where parties together be enclynde by gyftes of grace to love ech other there let them ioyne the tone with the toother17

As the play (and the manu­script in which it is contained) has previously been dated to the reign of Henry VIII, this marriage has been cited as referring to Henry’s union with his fourth wife, Ann of Cleves, since the event fell within the given time frame for the play (1540) and involved the use of a flattering and apparently inaccurate portrait of a future spouse, in the same manner as Wit and Science.18 Placed within the context of the 1550s, a play celebrating marriage at court could equally refer to the so-called ‘Spanish marriage’ of Mary I, which took place in July 1554. There is no firm evidence to support either the claim that Redford’s text was adapted during the 1550s for a specific new performance, or that this performance might have been for Mary I and Philip. This essay puts forward both these ideas as possibilities which have not previously been considered, and which might be useful for future research in this area.

Poetry in the Manu­script Although most scholarly attention has been paid to The Play of Wit and Science, the poems in Add. MS 15233 also indicate that the manu­script was designed with a school in mind, and their composition demonstrates how this poetry might have been taught and performed by boys in the classroom. Whilst on the page, many appear to conform to a fairly dull syllabic pattern, overall the collection demonstrates an understanding both of the written rules of poetry and its performative elements, which would have been familiar to the Tudor schoolboy. Tudor understanding of poetry was based on the understanding of Latin and Greek poetry. In these classical languages prosody was quantitative, that is, endowed with a natural ‘quantity’ or length of time for each syllable, depending on factors such as the position of the syllable in the word or the number of consonants following a vowel. In poetry, however, when a vowel was followed by more than one consonant, in the same or consecutive words, 17 

Add. MS 15233, fol. 14r. See Nunn, ‘“It lak’th but life”’. Wit and Science reverses the portrait process used by Henry VIII to select Ann of Cleves as his bride, and it is Science who decides to marry Wit because of his picture. 18 

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it was deemed long, even if its natural prose quantity was short. The length of the poetic syllable could therefore be very different from the normal prose pronunciation of the word. Schoolchildren would be taught to read a poem both for how it sounded, and how it was written. English is an analytical language, however, one which distributes meaning among many words and has a grammar dependent on prepositions and word order rather than inflected endings. The modern system of prosody in English is the ‘accentual syllabic’. This is a qualitative prosody. It disregards syllable length and is instead concerned with formal patterns of stressed and unstressed beats, the syllables on which emphatic accent is, or is not, placed. The poems in Add. MS 15233 seem to be representative of experimentation with English accentual verse. Whilst many noticeably conform to a regular syllabic pattern, occasionally those which initially appear to be regular have a number of lines which contain an odd number of syllables. If these poems are read for their natural prose rhythm, that is, if accent is given to syllables according to the prose meaning of the sentence, rather than trying to fit lines into a recognized and rigid metrical pattern, it reveals an even number of stressed syllables in the line. In these instances, the number of unstressed syllables between stresses varies, in a reflection of colloquial English prose, but nonetheless, regularity can be discerned in the poem, even if the overall number of syllables in the line makes it initially seem irregular. This experimentation illustrates that the poems in the manu­script were designed to be read out loud as well as studied as written texts, and that those performing them were being encouraged to acknowledge the tension between written poetry and the natural spoken rhythm. John Redford’s poem on the choirboys’ struggle with their cruel master, beginning, Wee have a cursyd master | I tell you all for trew so cruell as he is was never turke nor Jue he is the most vnhappiest man | that ever ye knewe, for to poore syllye boyes | he wurkyth much woe19

is a humorous inclusion in a manu­script designed for use by children and a particularly valuable example of the performative qualities of the poems in Add. MS 15233. In this example, the apparent lack of structure suggested by the varying number of syllables in each line of the poem is regularized by the prose meaning, which usually gives a five stress pattern to each line. The consecutive stresses, which are particularly evident in the words ‘poore, syllye boyes’ in 19 

The poem is in Add. MS 15233, fols 34–35.

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the final line of each stanza, encourage a speaker to slow their pace and make emphasis, a sound lesson for a schoolboy being trained for public speaking. In addition, the tone of the poem is conversational, with questions regularly being addressed to the poem’s audience: but what mynd or good consyence hath this man I pray yo^u sumtyme at our freendes desyre | he saythe to vs go play yow & by & by to scoole we must agayne is not this a shame how say you that we poore syllye boyes shuld abyde so much woe

The structure of the final three words in the first three lines of stanza eleven also suggests a playfulness which might be most effectively brought out through boyish performance. We must ever be in hys syght when yt grevyth vs sore to thinke ^ on him god wottes full often tymes when we have loe but a wynke ^ on him we wysh hym full hartelly in newgate with a lynke on him

This poem, like several others in the manu­script, also contains indications of physical performance. Sumtyme I shrynke & I stand behynd the doore I tell yow to see hym yt grevyth me ryght sore ye by thes ten bones | I woold I myght never se hym more for to poore syllye boyes he workyth much woe

The prose rhythm of the line, ‘sumtyme I shrynke & I stand behind the doore’, seems to demand pauses after ‘sumtyme’ and ‘shrynke’. These pauses seem to suggest space in the poem for actions which accompany the words: shrinking, cowering, or hiding. The content of another stanza, which describes how the boys are beaten so that from their buttocks they ‘may plucke the stumpes [splinters] yus long’, also seems to call for a demonstration of the length of the splinters caused by the beating. We have so manye lasshes to lerne thys [s]peelde songe that I wyll not lye to yow | now & then among out of our buttokes we may plucke the stumpes yus long that we poore sylye boyes abyde much woe

A second poem, also ascribed to Redford, appears to have been designed for an even more theatrical display, which might also offer a clue to its intended performance context. The poem begins with an eleven-line section which is clearly separated from the main body of the text. These lines are evidently intended to

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be the words for a song, since the main text begins with the line ‘ofte hathe this songe bene put in vre’. Following this musical beginning, the poem becomes a dramatic narrative. Like Redford’s choirboy lamentation, this poem has elements designed as direct speech, with parts shared between the characters of Man(kind), Faith, Sure Hope, Clean Conscience, and the Lord: whe man saithe faithe dost thow dowte me no no saithe man I dowte not the what dowghtest thow than saith faithe tell me myne owne vn worthynes saithe he despayre not man saithe faithe to man no no saithe man faithe gone were than20

why

The final line of the stanza above appears to be an embedded stage direction, an indication of Faith’s exit at the close of the conversation with man. There are a number of other examples of potential stage directions throughout the poem, which, in combination with the use of direct speech in parts and music, indicate that it might have been intended as a part of a masque, or court entertainment containing music and dancing, with the actions being explicated at length by the poet-narrator. Perhaps the boys at St Mary-at-Hill were performing this poetry at court entertainments.

The Evidence for Performance This essay has demonstrated that Add. MS 15233 was designed as a pedagogical aid, and that it was used and some of the material adapted specifically for performance, by choirboys during the 1550s, almost certainly the boys at St Maryat-Hill. The compilation of the manu­script and the amendments made to the material within it give an insight into the education of choirboys in this period and how performance was a key part of their schooling. It is already evident from the churchwardens’ accounts for St Mary-at-Hill that this church was an important musical centre, and the record of a payment to ‘Restall’ for a copy of a play in 1553/54 indicates that it was also involved in dramatic performance. Whether or not Add. MS 15233 was the manu­script mentioned in these accounts (and circumstantial evidence suggests it might be), the content of this manu­script provides valuable information about the range of performance related activity that was occurring at the church during the middle decade of the sixteenth century. 20 

Add. MS 15233, fols 64–65.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts London, Guildhall Library, MS 1239/1 (part 3) London, BL, Additional MS 15233

Primary Sources John Redford, Wit and Science, ed. by Arthur Brown (Oxford: Malone Society, 1951)

Secondary Works Craik, T. W., The Tudor Interlude: Stage, Costume and Acting (Leicester: Leicester Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1958) Duffy, R.  A., ‘“Wit and Science” and Early Tudor Pageantry: A  Note on Influences’, Modern Philo­logy, 76.2 (1978), 184–89 Grantley, Darryl, Wit’s Pilgrimage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000) Nunn, Hilary, ‘“It lak’th but life”: Redford’s Wit and Science, Ann of Cleves and the Politics of Interpretation’, Comparative Drama, 33 (1999), 270–91 Rayment, Louise, ‘A New Context for the Manu­script of Wit and Science’, Early Theatre, 17.1 (2014), 49–73 —— , ‘A Note on the Date of British Library, Additional Manu­script 15233’, Notes and Queries, 59 (2012), 32–34 —— , ‘The Sixteenth-Century School at St Mary-at-Hill, London’, London Journal, 41.2 (2016), 111–27 Reavley Gair, W., The Children of St Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1982) Ringler, William J., Biblio­graphy and Index of English Verse in Manu­script, 1501–1558 (London: Cassell, 1992) Schell, Edgar T., ‘Scio Ergo Sum: The Structure of Wit and Science’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 16.2 (1976), 179–99 Scherb, Victor I., ‘Playing at Maturity in John Redford’s Wit and Science’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 45.2 (2005), 271–97 Stern, Tiffany, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) Werstine, Paul, ‘“Foul Papers” and “Prompt-Books”: Printer’s Copy for Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors’, Studies in Biblio­graphy, 41 (1988), 232–46 Woodfield, Ian, The Early History of the Viol (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1988)

Sixteenth-Century Courtly Mumming and Masking: Alexander Montgomerie’s The Navigatioun Sarah Carpenter

F

rom at least the fourteenth century, courtly entertainment in Britain developed vivid theatrical forms of elaborate masking performance.1 Largely forgotten or inaccessible now, these disguisings lie behind and eventually led towards the more familiar and well-documented Stuart masque. Masking shows were spectacular but ephemeral, primarily based on costume, dance and music, existing only, as Jonson himself later famously phrased it, ‘in the gliding by’.2 The textual traces they have left tend to be fragmentary and scattered, and recovering a sense of this theatrical form depends on pursuing a variety of different, often tangential, manu­script witnesses. Disguisings offer little purchase for written preservation. Not all masking shows involved speech, and when they did the spoken texts were rarely recorded for later circulation. Surviving financial records of the often lavish expenditure on these performance events sometimes capture vivid evidence of the organization and production values of this kind of theatre. Eyewitness descriptions, in occasional private letters and dispatches from ambassadors and visitors to the 1 

For a wider discussion of the forms of disguising performances, see Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, pp. 128–88. 2  Jonson, Hymenaei, p. 94. Sarah Carpenter is a Reader in the English Literature Department of the Uni­ver­s ity of Edinburgh. She has published widely on early drama, most often on issues of performance.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 165–182 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116450 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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court, can offer fuller insights into the shows and the significance attached to them by their original audiences. Our access to masking shows through these various manu­script witnesses is generally oblique, but it is from them we can piece together some understanding of this genre of performance: its aesthetic and theatrical mode, its cultural and political purposes. This paper will focus on a late example of such an entertainment from Scotland, using it as a casestudy to explore what can be learned from its manu­script footprint.

Alexander Montgomerie: Edinburgh, Edinburgh Uni­ver­sity Library, MS Drummond De.3.70 One of our rare script survivals, from late in the disguising tradition, was composed by a Scots poet for a mask or mumming entertainment performed at the court of the young James VI of Scotland in the late sixteenth century. Two presenters’ speeches by Alexander Montgomerie, The Navigatioun and the briefer A  Cartell of the Thre Ventrous Knichts, are included in a manu­script in the Uni­ver­sity of Edinburgh’s Special Collections, Edinburgh University Library (hereinafter EUL), MS  Drummond De.3.70. Generally known as the Ker Manu­script, this quarto of poetry is a relatively modest late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century codex.3 It is best known today for two reasons, neither connected with drama. One is that it formed part of the seminal collection of books donated to the Uni­ver­sity, or as it was then known the ‘Tounis College’, by the celebrated poet William Drummond of Hawthornden in 1627.4 The other is that it is the major witness for the poetry of Alexander Montgomerie, a poet less widely known than Drummond but influential in Scotland especially at the court of James VI in the 1580s and 90s.5 The young king considered Montgomerie the ‘master of our art’ among the poets who flourished at his court, but very little of his work was printed during his lifetime. The Ker Manu­ script, which announces itself as ‘Captain Allexander Montgomeries Poëm[s]’, is an extensive collection of Montgomerie’s poetry, generally agreed to have

3 

For a full manu­script description, see Montgomerie, Poems, ed. by Parkinson, ii, 1–6. The manu­script is listed in the contemporary printed catalogue of the books donated by Drummond to the university: Auctarium bibliothecae Edinburgenae, p. 26. 5  See Jack, Alexander Montgomerie; Montgomerie, Poems, ed. by Parkinson, ii, 11–15; Lyall, Alexander Montgomerie. 4 

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been made by someone who ‘almost certainly had access to his papers’, probably not long after his death in 1598.6 Montgomerie’s most recent editor makes a persuasive case that the compiler and scribe of the manu­script may be one Margaret Ker, who has signed her name in a secretary hand on the reverse of the title-page.7 Other poetic compilations of the time suggest that women in Scotland might well be involved in such writing projects: the Maitland Quarto, for example, a substantial antho­logy of poetry by the Maitland family and their circle (including Montgomerie), is generally thought to have been compiled and copied by Marie Maitland in the 1580s.8 David Parkinson identifies the most likely Margaret Ker (c. 1570–1645) as the daughter of one Mark Ker of Newbattle, who held office at James VI’s court in the 1580s.9 The family apparently shared to some degree Montgomerie’s Roman Catholic sympathies, and Margaret was in a reasonable position to have known the poet before his death in 1598, and to have had access to his papers. The Ker Manu­script is written throughout in a careful and elegant italic hand, paying attention to the grouping of the poems, titles, and practices of versification (see Figure 9.1). This poetic antho­logy which records Montgomerie’s two speeches is clearly designed for reading. The manu­script itself plainly has no theatrical purpose, and Ker draws no attention to the dramatic nature of the texts. No attempt is made to distinguish them from Montgomerie’s otherwise entirely lyric and narrative verse except by transcribing them together, between a group of elegies and a titled section of ‘Epitaphs’. This could imply that Ker failed to recognize their theatrical nature; but their inclusion in the antho­logy more probably suggests that both poet and scribe saw a value in the reading of such texts. Montgomerie apparently preserved them among his poetic manu­scripts, and Ker’s careful shaping of the antho­logy suggests that she made a considered decision to include them alongside other poetry. This adds weight to recent critical interest in early modern reading of drama. In particular, Dermot Cavanagh’s illuminating investigation of Drummond of Hawthornden’s extensive and

6  Jack, Alexander Montgomerie, p. 37. See too Montgomerie, Poems, ed. by Parkinson, ii, 4; Lyall, Alexander Montgomerie, pp. 28–29. 7  Montgomerie, Poems, ed. by Parkinson, ii, 2–3. 8  For Marie Maitland as scribe, see The Maitland Quarto, ed. by Martin, pp. 30–31. 9  See Paul, The Scots Peerage, v (1908), 458; viii (1911), 445–46.

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Figure 9.1. The opening lines of Montgomerie’s presenter’s speech, The Navigatioun: Edinburgh, Edinburgh Uni­ver­sity Library, MS Drummond De.3.70, fols 53v–54r.

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Reproduced with permission of Edinburgh Uni­ver­sity Library.

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responsive reading of playtexts throws revealing light on his own later ownership of the Ker Manu­script.10 The two speeches themselves are, however, plainly written for performance. The Navigatioun is a long pro­logue by a presenter, directly addressing his audience, who introduces three exotic visitors — a Turk, a Moor, and an Egyptian; he explains their arrival to honour the young king James, describing their arduous journey to Edinburgh from Constantinople.11 A Cartell of the Thre Ventrous Knights, a much briefer piece, presents three ‘errant knichts […] Of forrein lands’ who have travelled to Scotland to challenge James’s knights to a ‘running at the ring’, a form of quintain game.12 The Navigatioun in particular gives us a vivid insight both into a long-standing tradition of performance and into the occasion and purpose for which it was designed. For reasons that will emerge, it appears to have been composed for performance at James’s court at Christmas 1579. This date points to its probable association with a very different example of manu­script evidence. The royal Treasurer’s Accounts for December 1579 list expenses on ‘his hienes violeris to be certane mask claithis’. These include ‘tuenty aucht elnis of reid and ȝallow taffaty […] sex elnis of touke [i.e., a cloth of silver or gold] of siluer […] ten elnis of bukrem’, along with ‘sex fensing swerdis […] sex fensing dagaris’.13 The total sum spent on what were clearly spectacular costumes was substantial, amounting to £83 Scots (see Figure 9.2). The exact relationship of these entries to The Navigatioun remains uncertain: while the entry seems associated with the occasion of Montgomerie’s mask, it does not appear to record costumes for its named characters. But this gives us a rare conjunction of two of the very different kinds of manu­script evidence. No further eyewitness evidence or even notice of the mask survives; but reading Montgomerie’s speech alongside contemporary letters enables us to understand a good deal more of its original purpose and effect. Exploring the manu­scripts of Montgomerie’s speech, the accounting records, and associated contemporary communication is revealing not only of this specific performance but of this genre of disguising as a whole. 10 

For critical interest in reading plays, and Drummond’s own wide interest in drama, see Cavanagh, ‘William Drummond’. 11  EUL, MS Drummond De.3.70, fols 53v–58v; Montgomerie, Poems, ed. by Parkinson, i, 90–97. 12  EUL, MS Drummond De.3.70, fol. 59r–59v; Montgomerie, Poems, ed. by Parkinson, i, 97–98. 13  Edinburgh, National Records of Scotland, E 22/3, fol. 86v; see also my edited performance records for REED: The Royal Court of Scotland, pp. 2–3.

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Figure 9.2. Treasurer’s Accounts listing expenditure on ‘mask claithis’. Crown copyright, Edinburgh, National Records of Scotland, E22/3 fol. 86v. Reproduced with the permission of National Records of Scotland.

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The Navigatioun The Navigatioun testifies to the long continuance of a motif of performance that had flourished for at least two centuries: disguising entertainments at court were often imagined and performed as the arrival of exotic visitors journeying from a distant land, making a spectacular entry to court festivities.14 Such masks were largely performed not by hired professionals but by members of the court themselves. Adopting a persona as mysteriously foreign, implying a long and arduous journey to reach the court and an inability to speak the language of the audience, is a playful way of ‘making strange’ the familiar and recognisable. On the one hand the motif dramatizes the global reach of the court, its openness to distant powers and cultures, its magnetic attractiveness as a centre to which all are drawn. But on the other it seems to reinforce the court’s elite and in-turned nature: exotic cultures provide fantasy disguises whereby the court can play out its own preoccupations and games of self-enhancement. This may help to explain why such scripts as survive for these entertainments are generally written for presenters rather than performers, often focusing on the adventurous journey the visitors have taken to the court rather than what the performance itself will entail.15 A manu­script record of an early fifteenthcentury presenter’s speech, although so much earlier, shows a striking similarity to Montgomerie’s Navigatioun. This was composed by John Lydgate for a Twelfth Night mumming presented by the Mercers of London to the mayor William Eastfield, probably in 1430.16 It is preserved, along with five other Lydgate mumming pro­logues, in Cam­bridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20, an antho­logy compiled by John Shirley. We do not know what the entertainment itself involved but, unlike Margaret Ker, Shirley acknowledges the performance context of the speech and clearly attempts to find a vocabulary for its genre. It is, he says, ‘a lettre made in wyse of balade by Daun Iohan [Lydgate], brought by a poursuyvaunt in wyse of mommers desguysed’.17 The terms he uses — ‘lettre’, 14 

Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, pp. 138–39, 151–68. Rare survivals of different kinds of masking speeches include presenters’ speeches for wedding masks by Thomas Pound from the 1560s (see Pincombe, ‘Two Elizabethan Masqueorations’), and ‘Pompae’ by George Buchanan for entertainments at the court of Mary Queen of Scots (Buchanan, Opera Omnia, ed. by Ruddiman and Burmann, ii, 399–404, 409–10, 418; translations in Ford, George Buchanan, pp. 139, 159). 16  See Lydgate, ‘Mumming for the Mercers of London’; for a full critical edition, see Twycross and Dutton, ‘Lydgate’s “Mumming”’. 17  Quotations are taken from Sponsler’s edition, Mummings and Entertainments. 15 

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‘in wyse of balade’, ‘in wyse of mommers’, while his running title refers to it as a ‘desgysing’ — seem to reveal the uncertain relationship such para-theatrical shows had with any written tradition. Although Shirley sounds confident and familiar with what he describes, there are no agreed terms or scribal conventions for how these performance speeches might be recorded or defined in manu­script. Lydgate’s pro­logue opens with an aureate reflection on the classical and mytho­logical geo­g raphy and literature of the Mediterranean, before, like Montgomerie’s pro­logue, moving into a detailed account of the pursuivant’s adventurous journey from the East to London. He makes no reference to the entertainment he introduces, only to the means by which it has arrived. This kind of framing clearly became widely popular; another rare survival gives insight into how such speeches might be commissioned. In 1572 the English poet George Gascoigne composed a presenter’s speech for a wedding at which a group of young male relatives had decided to ‘present a maske’. Like Lydgate’s and Montgomerie’s, Gascoigne’s presenter recounts in detail the journey taken by the maskers around the Mediterranean before arriving at the wedding. Most unusually, this speech was published in the following year, with a revealing headnote explaining how, in their excitement, the young maskers had alredy bought furniture of silks &c. and had caused their garments to be cut of the Venetian fashion. Nowe they began to imagine that […] it would seeme somewhat obscure to haue Venetians presented […]. Whereupon they entreated Master Gascoigne to deuise some verses […] to render a good cause of the Venetians presence.18

The mask itself is rooted in the silent visitation of the elaborately disguised young men; the speech is a second thought, imagining the journeying that brought them there. Montgomerie’s Navigatioun similarly gives a classic account of an arduous journey taken from Constantinople to Edinburgh by a group of foreign well-wishers. The speech is full of familiar detail. The presenter heralds his three companions ‘From Turkie, Egypt and from arabie’ (l. 20). He reports encountering the three travellers in Constantinople as they planned a voyage to Scotland, having heard of James and eager to see the ‘ȝing and godly King | A Salomon for richt and judgment’ (ll. 78–79), who has just begun his reign. They invite the presenter to join them explaining that: 18 

Gascoigne, ‘Devise of a Maske’, p. 382.

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Ȝe ar bothe welcome and richt necessar Vnto his grace our comming to declair. For ȝe haif travellit throu mony lands And eviry language also vnderstands. (ll. 85–88)

The presenter, as in so many disguisings, will act as ‘Interpreter’ for the exotic strangers. He then traces the party’s journey through the Hellespont, up the west coast of Italy, through the straits of Gibraltar, and on to the English Channel. They pass the cliffs of Dover, sail up the east coast to the Bass Rock, and on to ‘the Porte of Leith’ (l. 261), to arrive at ‘ȝour graces hall’ (l. 275). Montgomerie shows an intimate familiarity with the traditional mask form, his speech closely echoing those of both Lydgate and Gascoigne. All offer expansive accounts of a similar journey from the Mediterranean, playing on educated interests in literary and mytho­logical history and geo­g raphy. Interestingly, though, there is no clear evidence of how Montgomerie might have encountered this form in performance either in Scotland or England. During James’s early minority in Scotland there is little evidence of courtly masking entertainment. We have no record of Montgomerie visiting England, and from what we know of his bio­g raphy he seems to have spent most of his early adulthood in Europe.19 His non-theatrical poetry was strongly influenced by French models, which may suggest that his familiarity and poise in handling the form derives from France which had a flourishing mascarade tradition.20 Although surviving French mascarade speeches usually follow rather different, more allegorical and amorous patterns,21 a speech from the 1550s does introduce envoys sent from Venus’s lands of the East, for whom the presenter will act as an interpreter because he understands ‘les langues obscures’ from distant lands.22 This underlines the international nature of this kind of courtly entertainment, as well as suggesting a possible route for Montgomerie’s knowledge.

19 

For Montgomerie’s early life, see Lyall, Alexander Montgomerie, pp. 32–61. See McGowan, ‘Dance in Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century France’, pp. 98–100. 21  See, e.g., the various cartel and mascarade speeches among the ‘Opuscules’ of Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. by Stone, i, 12–92; or Desportes, Cartels et masquarades, ed. by Graham. 22  Saint-Gelais, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. by Stone, i, 88. 20 

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The Treasurer’s Accounts In every surviving presenter’s speech, the account of the journey is only the prelude to an entertainment which we know very little about. Narrative reports suggest that while relying largely on spectacle, dance, and music, they sometimes included gift-giving or game encounters such as dicing or combats. Financial records can often help to flesh out the materiality and visual effects involved. The manu­script accounts of Henry VIII’s Revels, for example, reveal much about spectacular costumes described as ‘after ye fassyon of Inde’, ‘like to the Egypcians’, or ‘lyke Morescoes’.23 Lavish expenditure on velvet and taffeta, cloth of gold and silver, spangles, sequins, masks and headdresses, along with the records of matching sets of garments for each mask, give some impression of the display involved. Revels papers can also document details of the organization of the spectacles. George Ferrers, Edward VI’s Lord of Misrule, wrote to the Revels office in 1552 explaining his ‘devise’ of arriving from ‘a place caulled vastum vacuum’ and calling for ‘nolesse then five suetes of apparrell’, enclosing a fabric sample of what he had in mind. He left it up to the Revels, however, to decide whether he should enter under a canopy, in a triumphal chair, or ‘uppon some straunge beast’.24 It is less clear what the entry in the Treasurer’s Accounts for Christmas 1579 might reveal about the entertainment for which Montgomerie composed The Navigatioun. The Accounts survive in fair-copy manu­scripts made for annual audit, where information is kept to the outlay for specified materials with little explanation of what exactly was made from them or for what purpose. The lavishness of the fabrics used for the violers’ costumes, of red and yellow taffeta cut or trimmed with cloth of silver, confirms the intention of magnificence, while the supply of fencing swords and daggers suggests an indoor combat game of the kind we find recorded elsewhere. But it is hard to trace an exact relationship between these expenses and the presenter’s speech. The number of weapons and the amount of cloth provided suggest six performers. These probably included the four brothers of the English Hudson family who had been retained at court as musicians since the time of the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to Lord Darnley in 1565, and came to play a significant part in both the cultural and political life of the court.25 The brothers 23 

Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 138; for a detailed account of early Tudor courtly entertainments of this kind, see Streitberger, Courtly Revels. Few of Henry VIII’s Revels accounts have been published, though extracts are calendared: see ‘Revels’, ed. by Brewer. 24  Documents Relating to the Revels, ed. by Feuillerat, pp. 89–90. 25  For information on the Hudson family, see Shire and Elliott, Song, Dance and Poetry,

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were multi-skilled, with several writing poetry and one acting as James’s dancing master; this suggests that a performance involving music, spectacle, dance and choreo­graphed combat would be well within their powers. However, The Navigatioun refers to only three visitors to the court, with no suggestion that they have come for combat games. It is also somewhat more likely that the roles of ‘the Turk, the more and the Egyptien’ would be taken by members of the nobility rather than the violers. Narrative reports of these kinds of entertainments suggest that they often included a programme of items;26 it may be that the violers’ ‘mask claithis’ were designed for another element of the evening’s show rather than specifically for Montgomerie’s mask. Nonetheless, the costume details in the account extend our understanding of the broader mode of the Navigatioun and its occasion. While the speech gives no clues about the visitors’ performance, it deliberately sets up their appearance as both spectacular and magnificent, drawing particular attention to their exotic costumes: the presenter is a German wearing national dress, while in their ‘contrare clething ȝour Excellence sall ken | The Turk, the more and the Egyptien’ (ll. 31–32). This was clearly a show in which the kind of spectacle suggested by the expenses on the violers would be dominant.

Political Purposes The overall aim of this kind of entertainment seems to have been to present a spectacle of magnificence to enact and enhance the splendour of the court. The trope of exotic visitation allowed the court, while playfully asserting its international status, to enact a fantasy of its own glory. But many of these shows were also read as having specific political purposes. Reports of masking and mumming in contemporary histories often signal these significances, as do the accounts of ambassadors. A striking Scots instance is found in a dispatch sent to William Cecil from the English agent at the court of Mary Queen of Scots, Thomas Randolph, in 1564.27 Randolph reflects on the vexed question of Mary’s potential marriage and the tensions it was currently creating with pp. 71–75. Montgomerie wrote a series of sonnets to one of the Hudson brothers, Robert, addressing him as ‘my best belouit brother of the band’: Montgomerie, Poems, ed. by Parkinson, i, 112–14. 26  See, e.g., the 1527 evening’s entertainment described in Streitberger, pp. 127–29. 27  CSP: Scot, ii, 46–47. For discussion of this entertainment, see Carpenter, ‘Performing Diplomacies’, pp. 212–14.

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England. He then mentions a series of ‘marvellous sights and shows, singular devices’ performed at a Shrovetide banquet; he reports that at the end Queen Mary personally presented him with copies of the verses composed by George Buchanan, which had been sung to accompany the entries of ‘blind Cupid’, a young maid representing Chastity, and a child costumed as Time. Randolph took this so seriously that he sent the verses to Cecil, asking him to present them to Elizabeth. A manu­script copy survives within a contemporary abstract of Randolph’s dispatch, revealing that the mask performed an explicit declaration of Mary’s amity with the English queen.28 This mask was clearly understood as having a direct political purpose, its manu­script verses even acting as a diplomatic communication passed between the queens through Randolph’s confidential document. Although both conventional and decorative, The Navigatioun similarly conveys some very telling political purposes. No contemporary comment survives, but close reading of the speech alongside contextual political events and documents gives us an insight into its contemporary significance. The chief reason we place its performance at Christmas 1579 is that the thirteen-yearold James VI moved from his protected childhood home of Stirling Castle to Edinburgh in September of that year, to take up more openly his personal rule. He made a royal entry in October and established his court at Holyrood. The opening of The Navigatioun explicitly honours the king in terms that relate to this new status. Montgomerie opens with an extended garden metaphor: James is hailed as the ‘bravest burgeoun [i.e., bud] brekking to the Rose’ (l. 1); his relative youth and minority is acknowledged as his Council is urged to stand like trees about him, to ‘brek the storme befor it come to the’ (1.8), and he is urged: ‘The gardene wall mak the new Testament | So sall thou grou without impediment’ (ll. 15–16). It is for wonder of this new young Solomon that ‘all lands about sall feir thy Excellence | And com fra far to do thee reverence’ (ll. 17–18). This speech would become increasingly less relevant as James settled into his mature kingship. The mask explicitly honours the moment of new personal authority, while also emphasizing the secure and protected, enclosed place of Scotland’s court to which travellers from afar are drawn. The October royal entry might seem an appropriate moment for The Navigatioun, but there is no evidence of masking entertainment at court among the public pageantry organized at this time.29 However, alongside the 28 

London, BL, MS Cotton Caligula B X, item 91, fols 259v–60r. 29  See Lyall, Alexander Montgomerie, pp. 65–66.

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December record of ‘mask claithis’ in the Treasurer’s Accounts, there is a further hint in Montgomerie’s speech of a Christmas occasion. The mask trope of exotic visitation sometimes hints at a comparison with the visit of the Magi, exotic Eastern kings, to honour the infant Christ; this adds a particular resonance to the motif, especially those staged during the Christmas period.30 Montgomerie brings this hint to the surface, as his travellers explain their purpose in visiting Scotland, echoing the gospel accounts: ‘He is the chosen vessell of the Lord. | To sie this king nou glaidly wald we go’ (ll. 82–83). If The Navigatioun is designed to mark a symbolically important step in James’s personal rule, the account of the journey taken by the maskers also picks up various issues of political significance at this moment of James’s reign. The most pointed concerns his relationship with England. As the travellers sailed past the white cliffs of Dover, the presenter reports, they asked each other: ‘Vhat if the Quene wer deid? Quha suld be nixt or to the Croun succeid?’ They follouit furth this Argument so far, Syndrie wes sibbe bot ay ȝour grace wes nar. related; nearer (ll. 229–32)

James’s hopes for the English succession are forthrightly incorporated into the fantasy of the journey. Explicit topical reference thus works with Eastern exoticism, biblical allusion, and romanticized history and geo­graphy, in the journey to honour James and his court. But there are also rather more hidden political dimensions to the show. Just before James moved to Edinburgh, his eminent French cousin, Esmé Stuart, the Sieur d’Aubigny, arrived in Scotland from France. His arrival caused some suspicion, both English and Scottish authorities fearing he would influence James towards France and Roman Catholicism.31 But the young king welcomed his glamorous cousin with enthusiasm and quickly formed a warm attachment to him. From his first arrival, D’Aubigny introduced James, who had been brought up in Protestant restraint, to the flamboyant courtly culture of France; his influence apparently shows in the striking increase in evidence of courtly performance play that can be seen over the three years he was in Scotland.32 30 

See Twycross and Dutton, ‘Lydgate’s “Mumming”’, p. 345. See Stewart, The Cradle King, pp. 51–54. 32  See my introduction to REED: Royal Court of Scotland [accessed 10 August 2017]. 31 

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Rod Lyall makes a persuasive case that Montgomerie formed an association with d’Aubigny in France, before both arrived in Scotland in late 1579.33 The visitation presented in The Navigatioun may itself tacitly parallel the arrival of d’Aubigny’s own entourage, offering flatteringly affectionate and spectacular attention from beyond Scotland. These resonances may be even more complex. James’s royal entry into Edinburgh in October was a very public step in the gradual assertion of his personal rule, which had technically begun a year earlier in 1578.34 Yet it seems to have passed without significant notice from other countries: no international embassies had been sent to take part in the ceremonial or to congratulate him. While d’Aubigny had arrived from France, the rumour was that even he had been sent primarily from the duc de Guise rather than from the king, Henri III. A report sent to England in October on ‘the present occurrentes in Scotland’ claims that he ‘brought letters to the lords from the King his master, with his commendations — but none to the King’.35 In England, Elizabeth remained cool about James’s new status, pointing out in instructions to her ambassador Nicholas Errington in December that he was not yet ‘by the laws of the realm of age to take government to himself […] he should be of more years than he is yet, not being fourteen’.36 In these circumstances it is tempting to see The Navigatioun acting as a theatrical substitute for the international notice that had not materialized. Montgomerie’s The Navigatioun, firmly based in a long-established tradition, is a rich late example of the form and purposes of a mode of courtly disguising cast in the form of an exotic visitation. It flattered and honoured the young king James by casting him as the cynosure, the magnetically attractive centre to which the world beyond Scotland is irresistibly drawn. It encouraged him and his court to appropriate to themselves the splendour, and adventurous spectacle of their imaginary visitors. The speech also reflects more instrumentally on the realities of power to which James was now committed; in the apparent absence of foreign ambassadors and dignitaries, it encouraged him to look beyond the local and familiar, to think about his role as monarch, his exercise of power, his place in a wider international world. In its theatrically spectacular playfulness it offered the adolescent king an entry into a new world 33 

Lyall, Alexander Montgomerie, pp. 38, 59, 65. See Blakeway, ‘James VI and James Douglas’, p. 13; I am grateful to Dr Blakeway for her insight into the international responses to James’s assumption of personal rule. 35  CSP: Scot, v, 356. 36  CSP: Scot, v, 363. 34 

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of festive magnificence, a decisive step away from the constraints of his minority and into new personal and political allegiances. All this is embedded in a one-off performance event. As with most shows of this kind, it existed in its moment of performance, and there seems to have been no intention at the time to preserve or record the show for circulation beyond its first audience. The Ker Manu­script which includes Montgomerie’s presenter’s speech does not signal any awareness of performance, presenting the speech as a poetic text not distinguished from others designed for reading. The entries in the Treasurer’s Accounts were intended only for the record and control of expenditure, to be read by treasury clerks and officials, while the letters and reports that cast light on the context of the performance are mostly contained in confidential correspondence concerned with political events and issues, and make no mention of the show. We are dependent on such varied and sometimes oblique manu­script witnesses to reconstruct the nature of these events, and the meanings they seem to have carried for their original spectators. Yet bringing together such fragments of written record can allow us striking insights into an important elite theatrical form, which in the later sixteenth century continued to flourish alongside a spoken drama which was increasingly finding its way into print.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts Edinburgh, Edinburgh Uni­ver­sity Library, MS Drummond De.3.70 Edinburgh, National Records of Scotland, MS E 22/3 London, BL, MS Cotton Caligula B X, item 91

Primary Sources Auctarium bibliothecae Edinburgenae, sive Catalogus librorum quos Guilielmus Drum­ mondus ab Hawthornden bibliothecae D. D. Q. Anno. 1627 (1627, STC 7246) Buchanan, George, Opera Omnia, ed. by T. Ruddiman and P. Burmann, 2 vols (Leiden: [n. pub.], 1725) Desportes, Philippe, Cartels et masquarades épitaphes, ed. by Victor E. Graham (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1958) Documents Relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary, from the Loseley Manu­scripts, ed. by Albert Feuillerat (Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1914) Gascoigne, George, ‘Devise of a Maske’, in A  Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573, STC 11635), pp. 382–94 Jonson, Ben, Hymenaei, in Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed.  by Stephen Orgel (London: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1975), pp. 75–106 Lydgate, John, ‘Mumming for the Mercers of London’, in Mummings and Entertainments, ed. by Claire Sponsler (Kalamazoo: Medi­eval Institute Publications, 2010) The Maitland Quarto: A New Edition of Cam­bridge, Magdalen College, Pepys Library MS 1408, ed. by Joanna Martin (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2015) Montgomerie, Alexander, Poems, ed. by David John Parkinson, Scottish Text Society, 4th ser., 28–29, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2000) REED: The Royal Court of Scotland, ed. by Sarah Carpenter, Pre-Publication Collection [accessed 10 August 2017] ‘Revels’, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume ii, 1515–1518, ed. by J. S. Brewer (London: H.M.S.O., 1864), pp. 1490–1518; British History Online [accessed 10 August 2017] Saint-Gelais, Mellin de, Oeuvres poétiques françaises, ed. by Donald Stone Jr, 2 Vols (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1993)

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Secondary Works Balfour Paul, James, ed., The Scots Peerage, 9 Vols (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1904–14) Blakeway, Amy, ‘James  VI and James Douglas, Earl of Morton’, in James  VI and Noble Power in Scotland, 1578–1603, ed. by Miles Kerr-Peterson and Steven J. Reid (Lo­n­ don: Routledge, 2017), pp. 12–31 Carpenter, Sarah, ‘Performing Diplomacies: The 1560s Court Entertainments of Mary Queen of Scots’, Scottish Historical Review, 82.2 (2003), 194–225 Cavanagh, Dermot, ‘William Drummond of Hawthornden as Reader of Renaissance Drama’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 66.276 (2015), 676–97 Ford, Philip J., George Buchanan: Prince of Poets (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Uni­ver­sity Press, 1982) Jack, R. D. S., Alexander Montgomerie, Scottish Writers (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985) Lyall, R.  J., Alexander Montgomerie: Poetry, Politics, and Cultural Change in Jacobean Scotland (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, 2005) McGowan, Margaret, ‘Dance in Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century France’, in Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–1750, ed. by Jennifer Nevile (Blooming­ ton: Indiana Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008), pp. 94–113 Pincombe, Michael, ‘Two Elizabethan Masque-orations by Thomas Pound’, The Bodleian Library Record, 12 (1987), 349–80 Shire, Helena M., and Kenneth Elliott, Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland under King James VI (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1969) Stewart, Alan, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003) Streitberger, W. R., Court Revels, 1485–1559 (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 1994) Twycross, Meg, and Sarah Carpenter, Masks and Masking in Medi­eval and Early Tudor England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) Twycross, Meg, and Elisabeth Dutton, ‘Lydgate’s “Mumming for the Mercers of London”’, in The Medi­eval Merchant: Proceedings of the 2012 Harlaxton Symposium, ed.  by Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2014), pp. 310–49

Speech and Silence in an Actor’s Part Jakub Boguszak

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econstructing and trying out actors’ parts in classrooms as well as theatrical venues is an excellent example of the ways in which research into manu­script circulation in early modern theatres has been informing both teaching practice and theatrical culture in the twenty-first century.1 It is one of the easier ways in which a tutor can demonstrate the idiosyncrasies of early modern performance while also giving students something they can take as their own, stimulating a kind of proprietary interest in the documents. Published research concerned with actors’ parts provides the necessary theoretical underpinning for the exercise and can prompt further discussion, just as it continues to inspire theatre practitioners to experiment with parts-based production of early modern plays.2 As the title of this chapter suggests, my aim is twofold: first, to outline what modern readers, students, and actors can do 1  The parts-based method is not unique to early modern English professionals. Medi­eval parts — both English and Continental — survive as well, though they do not yet feature cues; instead, actors seem to have relied on a visible prompter to direct the performance. Parts were also prepared for amateur actors, sometimes with more helpful details than those readied for professional companies. For an excellent overview of the history and logistics of parts-based performances, see Stern, ‘Actors’ Parts’ and Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, pp. 15–19. 2  The wide range of scholarly pursuits inspired by analyses of actors’ parts is exemplified by studies as diverse as Palfrey and Stern; Menzer, The Hamlets; Tribble, ‘Distributing Cognition in the Globe’; and McMillin, ‘The Sharer and his Boy’. For valuable insights on reintroducing actors’ parts into rehearsal practice in the last few decades, see Tucker, Secrets of Acting Shakespeare, and Weingust, Acting from Shakespeare’s First Folio.

Jakub Boguszak is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Theatre at the Uni­ver­sity of Southampton.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 183–196 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116451 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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with what a part contains (speeches); and second, to discuss how to think about that which a part literally skips over: silences. Those interested in actors’ parts tend to focus mostly on speech and examine what it reveals; I argue that this is only one half of the story. A preliminary note of caution is in order, however. There is still much uncertainty about the extent to which early modern actors relied on their parts, and about the effect of a part on performance, and there are good reasons why the confidence with which scholars and theatre practitioners reconstruct and interpret parts needs to be tempered. One reason is, of course, the uncertain status of a printed text as a witness of a text which was once used as a model for actors’ parts. Even if any given early printed edition were a perfect copy of such a document, a scribe responsible for copying out all the parts for the company could have made any number of minor deliberate or unintentional alterations (punctuation in particular seems to have been prone to change as the text proliferated), and the actors themselves might have toyed with their parts further still.3 The part of ‘Orlando’, the one extant part written for a professional actor working in early modern London, is a fine example of a text that has seen a number of revisions, possibly made by the owner of the part, Edward Alleyn, possibly by someone else.4 Those working with actors’ parts today should also bear in mind that while for a professional actor a part was almost certainly the primary source of information about the play, we still do not know whether there were enough full ensemble rehearsals to get actors sufficiently acquainted with the missing pieces of the play that were excluded from the parts. Without any solid evidence of a rehearsal schedule of any of the professional playing companies, one has to rely on circumstantial information: assuming the performance took place in the afternoon and some time had to be allowed for set-up, early arrivals, any entertainments before and after the show, and clearing the house, any rehearsals were most likely to take place in the few hours that remained in the morning.5 3 

Gabriel Egan is perhaps right, however, to be sceptical of the extent to which a text could change once the play has been licensed, arguing that any revisions would require a costly relicencing and that the evidence we have does not suggest that tampering with the text was common. Egan, ‘What Is Not Collaborative?’, pp. 20–23. 4  See Warren, ‘Greene’s Orlando’. The part itself can be accessed online; see ‘Copy of the Part of Orlando’. The Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, MS 1: Article 138 [accessed 6 February 2018]. 5  That actors were liable to miss agreed rehearsals, however, was a real concern, as Robert Dawes’s three-year contract with Philip Henslowe (signed on 7 April 1614; reproduced in

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Provided they already knew their lines, the actors were presumably free to make use of the stage then, if they wanted. It is possible that some early modern actors did not care very much to establish what else might be going on in their scenes (let alone in the scenes from which they were absent), but any speculation about the extent of their knowledge of what went on beyond the horizon of their own lines must ultimately remain just that: a speculation. To be sure, an actor would have been expected to attend any rehearsal with his lines already memorized (all rehearsals dramatized in the plays themselves assume this) and an idea about his character already formed — something the actors could do on their own, just with their parts.6 But it would be odd to assume that group rehearsals or subsequent performances in front of an audience would in no way reshape their performance. Any idea of a character an actor can form on the basis of the part is then best understood simply as a rough sketch rather than as a finished portrait. Notwithstanding the uncertainties outlined above, there are lessons to be learned from parts-based reading that are extremely valuable. As the part condenses a character’s scenes and speeches in a document which is a fraction of the entire play, it enables a series of discoveries that a study of the promptbook as a whole would be unlikely to yield. Even such a simple feature as a length of one’s part is immediately clear from the document: the actual length of the scroll would tele­graph to the actor the prominence of the character and the investment required of him. The length and number of speeches in each scene can reveal the structure of the part: does the character have more to say in his or her early scenes or later ones? Does the text suggest increasing prominence (as the part of ‘Emilia’ in William Shakespeare’s Othello might do) or slow retirement from action (as the part of ‘Corvino’ in Ben Jonson’s Volpone might do)? A single chance to steal a scene (‘Julia’ in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi), or an overbearing presence throughout (‘Lussurioso’ in The Revenger’s Tragedy)? The way a part condenses an actor’s contribution to the play also encourages a search for features that unite the part stylistically and thematically. These Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, p. 69) makes clear: Henslowe could charge Dawes one shilling for being late for a rehearsal, and two shillings for missing all of it. On the one hand, the comparatively low fine might suggest that attending a rehearsal was, on the whole, desirable but not essential to the success of the performance. On the other hand, missing one rehearsal would not have been so bad if there were at least a few more to come. 6  For an in-depth examination of the evidence of early modern rehearsals, see Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, pp. 57–73; also Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, pp. 22–123, esp. pp. 76–79.

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could be various speech mannerisms, rhetorical figures, images, or recurring ideas which might be hard to trace as distinctive characteristics of a single individual across the whole play, but which can stand in relief when telescoped in an actor’s part. These features then can help the actor establish a distinctive personality of the character (in so far as any consistent personality was required), or at least identify what the part needs to do and what the actor can focus on as he learns his lines. The part of ‘Trapdoor’ in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl can serve as an example here.7 ‘Trapdoor’ is a good supporting part contributing to eight scenes, sometimes by as many as twenty-two speeches, sometimes by as few as five. An actor could immediately notice a few things: Trapdoor speaks mostly in prose but switches to verse in his last scene.8 All of his speeches are fairly short, many of them one-liners. This part never really allows the actor to dominate the stage or draw too much attention to the character. The shape of the part indicates a series of fast-paced to-and-fro exchanges, a quick wit rather than a contemplative mind. One read-through should be enough to confirm that Ralph Trapdoor, as the name suggests, is a rather unsavoury character with a darkly comic edge who is hired to spy on Moll, the roaring girl of the title, and to lure her into a trap. It should also confirm that the crucial moment when Trapdoor switches allegiance and stands by Moll takes place in the last scene: precisely at the point where Trapdoor switches from prose to verse. A closer look reveals further interesting details: Trapdoor almost never asks questions. His 104 speeches contain only seven questions, two of which do not even serve as cues. 9 This makes Trapdoor seem self-assured, quick to respond, but also a bit slow to take an interest in others. His frequent ref7 

In the interest of maximizing the accuracy of parts reconstructed here as witnesses of the documents once given to the actors, I use transcripts of early printed editions on Literature Online [accessed 18 January 2019] rather than modern editions as my copy-texts. The part of ‘Trapdoor’ has been reconstructed from Dekker and Middleton, The Roaring Girle. 8  This assumes, of course, that the scribe would take care to preserve the prosody of the actor’s lines, and this seems to have been the case on most occasions. The extant parts that we can set against a reliable full text generally reproduce prosodic switches accurately. 9  For comparison, Trapdoor’s questions-to-speeches ratio — one-in-fifteen — is well below that of most other charcters: Sir Alexander’s is approximately one-in-six, Moll’s is onein-four, Laxton’s is one-in-five, Sebastian’s is one-in-seven, etc. The average for this play is about one-in-five; the only character who asks questions even less frequently than Trapdoor is, perhaps unsurprisingly, sergeant Curtilax, whose nineteen speeches feature only one question.

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erences to service, masters, and mistresses stress his position as a hired man, someone who might prefer not to ask too many questions. His phrasing often suggests regular attempts to ingratiate himself (variations on ‘your Worship’, ‘Lordship’, ‘Mistreship’ [sic] appear fifteen times), but his rich register of bawdy puns (‘to stand when you have occasion to use me’; ‘shee’l desire pressing’; ‘your sonne and her Moone will be in coniunction’10) and his obvious relish for the paradoxes of Moll’s gender-bending persona (‘my brave Captaine male and female’11) reveals his more unruly side, as well as his lewd sense of humour. Trapdoor is also rather fond of similes, particularly when talking to Sir Alexander, his real master. His similes, unlike his worn-out, tiresome puns, are often quite vivid, giving the actor an opportunity to make his delivery more expressive: ____________________ [be] [secret,] ha.12 As two crafty Atturneys plotting the undoing of their clyents. […] ____________________ [to] [serve] her. Zounds sir, as country wenches beate creame, till butter comes. […] ____________________ [but] [unto] me. As fast as your sole to your boote or shooe sir. […] ____________________ [Be] quicke. As the tongue of an oister wench. ____________________ [newes] [be] true. As a barbars every satterday night—mad Mol. […] ____________________ [sure] [of ] this? As euery throng is sure of a pick-pocket, as sure as a whoore is of the clyents all Michaelmas Tearme, and of the pox after the Tearme. […] ____________________ [it,] [watch] her. As the diuell doth for the death of a baud, I’le watch her, do you catch her.

10 

See ii.1.337, iv.1.24, and iii.3.23–24 in Cook’s edition of the play. iii.3.176 in Cook’s edition. 12  Having examined the part of ‘Orlando’ as well as several extant university play parts, parts from the continent, and Restoration and eighteenth-century parts, Palfrey and Stern point out that cues tend to be short, sometimes featuring only one word and rarely more than three. See Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, pp. 18–38. 11 

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Whenever Trapdoor puts his imagination to use, it leads him straight to the images of vice, poverty, and exploitable women. A  city comedy character through and through, Trapdoor might be predictable, but the consistency of his part must have been a great help to the actor trying to gain a purchase on his lines. The more echoes, ties, and connections an actor can find in the text, the more the part will seem to hold together as a cohesive whole. The connective tissue is not limited to imagery or repeated figures of speech, however. Successive speeches can be linked on a more basic, semantic level, and this helps the actor as well, if not more so. If there are enough cohesive ties — references, substitutions, and so on — between two successive speeches, the actor will find it easier to make sense of the text and his character’s place in the scene.13 However, a lack of cohesion will make it harder for an actor to gain a foothold and suggest that the character’s presence in the scene might be more marginal. Generally, the more and the longer the speeches, the better chance of finding a consistent tone and manner of performance. The accumulation of speeches written for one character puts the character’s voice — consistent or not — front and centre, while hiding away all the passages that require the character’s onstage silence. But if a part encourages simply focusing on the successive speeches and skipping over the gaps, the individual study of the part can lead to a rather idiosyncratic understanding of the text. What happens with a character in performance when its blueprint — the actor’s part — naturally draws the attention of the actor away from the character’s silences? What vision of the character does the part present? Sometimes, the effect seems to be liberating: in any Jonson play, for instance, one can find characters aplenty who love to talk, and their parts highlight just how easy it is for them to ignore others. Their cues — the only traces of the outside world of the play — can occasionally seem merely as unnecessary interruptions. Sir Glorious Tiptoe (The New Inn) has one such moment: ____________________ [my] [Ladies,] though. My Lady is a Spinster, at the Law, And my petition is of right. ____________________ [What] [is] it? It is for this poore learned bird. ____________________ [The] Fly? 13 

I discuss the usefulness of modern methods of discourse analysis for this kind of reading in more detail in my ‘“A Thing Studied and Rehearsed”’, pp. 355–56.

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Professour in the Inne, here, of small matters: ____________________ [the] [verier] flie? Heare him problematize. ____________________ [vs,] [what’s] that? Or syllogize, elenchize. ____________________ [to] [carry] it. Bird of the Arts he is, and Fly by name! ____________________ [mar] [all] else. The Soveraigne’s honor is to cherish learning. ____________________ [in] [a] Fly? In any thing industrious. ____________________ [Or] importune! Ther’s nothing more domestick, Tame, or familiar then your Flie in Cuerpo.

It would have been easy for the actor to ignore the interfering speeches and reconceive, and perhaps even perform, this passage as a mono­logue. Characters like Tiptoe are self-propelling; from the point of view of the actor, there is little to be gained by paying attention to what others speak, save for the cues. Any outside information would be simply a distraction; as Palfrey and Stern put it, ‘there are many parts that, in terms of self-motivation or self-definition, work in blissful exclusion of the rest of the play’.14 Dramatic characters such as these actually seem to realize their potential more fully in a part form. However, there are also numerous characters in early modern drama whose silences are sometimes actually more meaningful than their spoken lines. De Flores in the first scene of Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling; Hermione in the last scene of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; the Dog in the scene of Susan’s murder in Dekker, John Ford, and Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton, to name just a few examples. A part which reveals very little about the moments when the character needs to remain silent, yet still hold the attention on stage, is of limited use to the actor. A promptbook or a printed play might give a reader only a vague sense of what the characters who are present but stay silent might be up to, but it at least makes clear how long a character stays silent and what is spoken in the meantime. An actor’s part offers no such benefit: the actor knows neither how long he is to stay silent, nor to what words or events he might be silently reacting.

14 

Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, p. 122.

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Morose’s servant ‘Mute’ in Jonson’s Epicene is in many ways a perfect example of a character who contributes more through his silences. The character does not have many words to speak; in fact, these are his only lines: ____________________ [can] [this] be? It is a post from the court— ____________________ [thy] [horne,] too? Alas, it is a post from the court, sir, that sayes, hee must speake with you, paine of death —

But these lines are not what makes him potentially such a memorable cameo. Mute’s silent responses to Morose’s lines, however, have great dramatic potential, even if none of them is scripted here. They are scripted, interestingly enough, in the part of ‘Morose’, where the long dashes in parentheses indicate the need for the actor to give his colleague some time for a nonverbal response (Figure 10.1 shows the arrangement of Morose’s opening speech in the 1616 folio). The part of ‘Mute’ itself, however, if it indeed consisted merely of the two lines and cues quoted above, would not alert the actor to the importance of his silent responses. The same can be said of a more serious Jonsonian part, that of ‘Frances Fitzdottrel’, the abused wife who finds herself wooed by a dashing and resourceful gallant in Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass. She is one of many characters whose plight becomes obvious not from the few lines they do speak, but rather from the long, mute gaps between them.15 Their contributions are a matter of silent postures and gestures which are rarely anticipated by the text of the part. Does the fact that the parts draw attention away from the moments of silence mean that some actors were in fact likely to be misled by their parts? After all, the idea of ‘dumb eloquence’ was already a favourite paradox in the early modern period, and, as Robert Shaughnessy reminds us, it continues to produce powerful moments in performance to this day.16 It is possible that an 15  Commenting on the challenges of this part, as well as the part of ‘Epicene’ (Epicene) and ‘Placentia’ (The Magnetic Lady), Brian Woolland observes that ‘when staged sympathetically, [ Jonson’s] plays demonstrate a remarkably diverse understanding of silence as a theatrical signifier. Close examination of the significance and theatrical power of silence in his plays is crucial to interpreting them — as audiences and as practitioners’. This should serve as a corrective to the notion that Jonson specialized in writing characters whose incessant ranting and chatter was their most distinctive feature. Woolland, ‘The Gift of Silence’, p. 126. 16  Shaughnessy offers a fine overview of some of the most memorable pauses and silences on the modern stage in his ‘Silence’.

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Figure 10.1. Dashes indicating Mute’s silent responses to Morose in Jonson’s Epicene (London: William Stansby, 1616), p. 539. Folger Shakespeare Library call no. STC 14751, copy 2 (folio). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

ensemble rehearsal would have corrected misconceptions based on a private study of parts, but, from the little that is known about early modern rehearsals, these occasions were not meant to further what we would now recognize as character exploration: they were almost certainly intended to fix the blocking, rehearse crowd scenes, processions, dances, sword-fights, and the like. It is hard to imagine that the actors would have actively sought to analyse silences on such occasions, something that, unlike the crowd scenes, seems to require no obvious effort. Rather, I suspect, when the show was finally presented before an audience, silence was the most spontaneous, least thought-out element of performance, and all those character-defining silences had to be improvised to some degree. This improvisation can translate into a moment of exciting instability which contrasts with the premeditated, studied nature of dramatic speech. How

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exactly is the devilish Dog to behave around Frank in the murder scene in The Witch of Edmonton? How should Frances react to the scandalous denouement of The Devil Is an Ass? What exactly is Enobarbus doing while a soothsayer entertains the Egyptians in the second scene of Antony and Cleopatra? The choices can be limited, but a part does not normally lay them out in advance. Again, it would be ill-advised to assume that no rehearsal or subsequent performance could diminish this sense of immediacy, but the tension is something actors’ parts must have facilitated and actors, perhaps even playwrights with first-hand acting experience, could have appreciated. Improvising an appropriate silent response can be challenging, however, particularly when the reaction required of an actor does not logically extend any of his speeches. Antonio’s only line in the final scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is of little help as a clue to the character’s importance at this point: ____________________ [money] [buy] em? Very like: one of them Is a plaine Fish, and no doubt marketable.

Since an actor might be tempted either to maintain the mood set by the speech just spoken or prepare the ground for the speech to follow, being able to let go of what one’s own part suggests and engage with the unexpected is certainly one of the more demanding aspects of parts-based performance. There is also a different kind of silence, one over which an actor has full control: a deliberate pause in the middle of a speech, prompted, for instance, by a question mark. An actor who is familiar only with his own part can be generally quite sensitive to questions during a performance, as these, more often than not, do indeed cue others. A question in the middle of a speech cues nobody, of course, but what is the middle and what is the end of a speech might often be far less obvious on the stage than on the page. An actor whose speeches allow him to pause and wait for a reply that will never come can work up the emotion with ease, as Mendoza does in ii.5 of John Marston’s The Malcontent: ____________________ [firme] [for] me. Why tell me faire cheekt Lady, who even in teares, Art powerfully beauteous, what unadvised passion Strooke ye into such a violent heate against me? Speake, what mischiefe wrongd us? what divell iniur’d vs? Speake.

Tricking actors into believing that somebody should respond at a certain moment is a technique that can command the attention of one’s colleagues on

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stage — and so tap into that feeling of un-readiness which seems to have been symptomatic of many on-stage silences, and which was dispelled only once the actual cue words have been spoken. The scenarios get more interesting, however, when the words on which an actor chooses to pause in the middle of a speech are the same as the actual cue, and the silence becomes a trap — these are so called ‘repeated cues’, a strategy discussed in great detail by Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern in Shakespeare in Parts.17 Shakespeare was not the only playwright who has made use of this technique: Jonson seems to have been quite fond of it as well, and other playwrights have introduced such moments in their plays either deliberately or by accident. It is unlikely that all such cases were taken as opportunities for tricking fellow actors into speaking at the wrong time — as Lois Potter observes, some repeated cues work better than others18 — but an actor mindful of the importance of cues would have been unlikely to miss them. In general, pauses occurring mid-speech are likely to be more powerful stimulants in parts-based performances than in performances involving actors with good knowledge of their fellow actors’ lines. Silences in between two speeches, however, are more difficult to orchestrate. Once an actor finishes one speech, he relinquishes the control of the dialogue; it is up to the actor who has received his cue to decide whether any silence should follow (provided he remembers his lines). As Don Weingust observes, however, the second actor cannot presume to hold the audience’s attention at this point: so long as no one knows who is to speak next or whether the first actor has indeed already given the cue, all eyes tend to continue observing the first speaker.19 As such, the silence between the speeches can normally do little to flesh out the character of the actor who holds it. Only by responding to the cue can the second actor draw the attention to himself, unless the end of the preceding speech is particularly pointed in his direction (as Portia’s is in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: ‘Art thou contented Iew? what dost thou say?’). An actor’s part, then, always gives a reader both more and less than a complete playtext. It’s a seductively simple, cost-effective document that promises to highlight all things that matter while discreetly omitting all things that 17 

See Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, pp. 157–310. Potter, ‘In the Moment’. 19  ‘Knowing that his fellows will not lend him focus until he takes it by beginning his lines, the subsequent speaker is unlikely to indulge in a pause before following hard upon his cue’; Weingust, Acting, p. 124. 18 

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don’t. When it comes to making sense of one’s lines and tracing the connective tissue that ties the speeches together, a part can be immensely helpful. But when it comes to silences, a part can merely hint at a wide range of possibilities. Depending on the kind of character a part represents, the document can either prove reassuringly thorough or deceptively vague. This, ultimately, is what makes studying actors’ parts so interesting. It is a new way of reading familiar texts that helps modern readers understand — perhaps better than most other methods of close reading — how the combination of certainty and ignorance, deliberation and chance, conditioned the actors’ performances. Prone to mishaps though they no doubt were, they were conceived free from the need to commit to any universal vision, any shared expectations for the play and its characters. What the results of such an approach might have been like is something we — as scholars as well as theatre practitioners — should continue exploring.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts London, Dulwich College, MS 1, Article 138

Primary Sources Dekker, Thomas, and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl, ed. by Elizabeth Cook (Lon­ don: Black, 1997) —— , The Roaring Girle (1611, STC 17908) Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, dir. by Grace Ioppolo [accessed 6 February 2018] Jonson, Ben, Epicoene, in The Workes of Beniamin Ionson (1616, STC 14751) —— , The New Inne (1631, STC 14780) Marston, John, and John Webster, The Malcontent (1604, STC 17479) Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, in Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623, STC 22273)

Secondary Works Boguszak, Jakub, ‘“A Thing Studied and Rehearsed”: Ben Jonson in Parts’, Shakespeare, 12.4 (2016), 351–63 Egan, Gabriel, ‘What Is Not Collaborative about Early Modern Drama in Performance and Print?’ Shakespeare Survey, 67 (2014), 18–28 Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd  edn (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992) McMillin, Scott, ‘The Sharer and his Boy: Rehearsing Shakespeare’s Women’, in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed.  by Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Lon­don: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 231–45 Menzer, Paul, The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (Newark: Uni­ver­sity of Delaware Press, 2008) Palfrey, Simon, and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007) Potter, Lois, ‘In the Moment’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 Aug 2008, p. 13 Shaughnessy, Robert, ‘Silence’, in Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, ed.  by Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 199–219 Stern, Tiffany, ‘Actors’ Parts’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, ed.  by Richard Dutton (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009), pp. 496–512 —— , Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) Tribble, Evelyn, ‘Distributing Cognition in the Globe’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56.2 (2005), 135–55

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Tucker, Patrick, Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: The Original Approach, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2016) Warren, Michael, ‘Greene’s Orlando: W. W.  Greg Furioso’, in Textual Transformations and Reformations, ed. by Laurie Maguire and Thomas Berger (Newark: Uni­ver­sity of Delaware Press, 1998) pp. 67–91 Weingust, Don, Acting from Shakespeare’s First Folio: Theory, Text, and Performance (Lon­ don: Routledge, 2006) Woolland, Brian, ‘The Gift of Silence’, in Ben Jonson and Theatre, ed. by Richard Cave, Elizabeth Schafer, and Brian Woolland (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 125–42

‘In witnes here of I set to my hand’: Early Modern Actors’ Offstage Textual Rituals Kara J. Northway

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 single source, affiliated with one looming figure, has logically and necessarily dominated the critical history of manu­scripts within the context of early modern theatre history: the diary of Philip Henslowe, the banker-landlord to the Admiral’s/Nottingham’s/Prince’s Men. R. A. Foakes has rightly called this text the ‘most valuable and important source for information about the working arrangements of the Elizabethan public theatres’.1 From the diary, scholars have debated the nature of the economic relationship between, on the one hand, Henslowe and, on the other, actors and playwrights. Amanda Bailey claims that lending in the theatre was punitive,2 but many scholars, including Foakes, Carol Rutter, Luke Wilson, and Neil Carson, have found ‘a friendly and, on the whole, harmonious relationship between Henslowe and the players’.3 These scholars have agreed that note-taking and safeguarding return of the loans motivated Henslowe to keep the diary:4 The book was not used to threaten or cajole, but to provide notes  […]. Maybe Henslowe liked when necessary to be able to say ‘It’s in the book, you know’. […] Fussy he may have been, and keen to put things in writing, but mainly for his private satisfaction or as a record for the company.5 1 

Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. vii. Bailey, Of Bondage, pp. 28–29. 3  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. xxxvi. 4  Carson, A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary, pp. 10–11. 5  Foakes, ‘Domestical Matters’, p. 104; see also Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites, p. 29. 2 

Kara J. Northway is Associate Professor of English at Kansas State Uni­ver­sity.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 197–211 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116452 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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Many other contemporary hands besides Henslowe’s, however, peppered and maintained the diary; and other relevant manu­scripts besides playscripts need to be bracketed with it when studying it.6 The next step is to trace the collaborative textual activities within and around the diary in order to discover what they tell us, not merely about the two-way relationship between the actors and Henslowe, but also about the motivations and textual interactions of a broader set of theatrical community members — actors, playwrights, and others — in keeping and creating the diary. I examine the diary in a new way, analysing the function of these hands, as well as of the letters tied to the diary, and I argue that early theatre nurtured a distinctive micro-culture of witnessing documents. From 1592 to 1607, seventy theatrical contracts were validated, not by seals but by the handwritten names of thirty actors and a few playwrights offstage. Witnesses were present for moneylending agreements necessitated either by company business, for example, to give playwrights advances and to ‘b[u]y divers thinges for the playe’, or by personal distress, for example, to post bail.7 Witnessing was a vital, widespread cultural practice, a legal requirement if the informal contract went awry, but also a public communication of trust, according to economic historian Craig Muldrew. Theatrical witnessing abnormalities, therefore, merit notice. Defying contemporary advice to select male adults of good credit in the community, actors’ wives, daughters, or servants authorized loans. Sometimes letters or forged signatures circumvented lenders’ or borrowers’ absences, making witnessing actors complicit. Incredibly, thirty loans to actors, including Ben Jonson and Shakespeare’s later co-star John Lowin, lacked any recorded witnesses. Carson has found that Henslowe, while sometimes careful and sometimes mistake-prone, neither levied interest nor prosecuted defaulters;8 this benevolence actually rendered witnesses legally 6  For the observations of other hands and of external manu­scripts relevant to the diary, see Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, pp. liv and xlv; for important recent work on playscripts mentioned in the diary, see Ioppolo, Dramatists and their Manu­scripts; Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manu­scripts; and Purkis, Shakespeare and Manu­script Drama. 7  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. 105; for all of my examples of witnessing, I have drawn on the facsimile version of the manu­scripts of the diary and letters in Vo1. i of The Henslowe Papers, ed. by Foakes, as well as Ioppolo’s edition of digital images of manu­scripts from the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project; but for the reader’s ease of reference, I cite by page number throughout this essay transcriptions from Foakes’s second edition of the diary and, when material has not been transcribed by Foakes, I quote from the transcriptions in Henslowe Papers, ed. by Greg. 8  Carson, A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary, pp. 12–13.

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superfluous. So why did the theatre bother with documenting witnesses at all? As the historical studies of Charles Bazerman and James Paradis have shown, professions used texts and textual rituals to define themselves and their values.9 Epistolary and diary evidence of actors witnessing contracts illuminates how ‘backstage’ non-script manu­scripts were created, circulated, and related intertextually; spurred on dramatic production; and ostensibly delineated inter- and intra-theatrical relationships, amplifying, or perhaps overstating, the traditional witnessing functions of trust-building and moral levelling. In the century before banking began, about ten per cent of loans took the form of secure, but expensive, Shylock-style sealed bonds, also called obligations, delivered by a scrivener or lawyer, written on vellum or parchment in Latin, and read before witnesses.10 Much more popular in the cash-short culture and in Henslowe’s accounts were informal contracts also involving witnesses, which Bailey bypasses in her discussion of theatrical lending. Witnessing, therefore, was a common activity.11 Unlike bonds, informal written contracts had no legal clout as documents. If a plaintiff wanted to dispute the conditions of an informal contract, he or she had to produce original witnesses at the signing.12 Muldrew has made two relevant points on witnessing, the first that the physical presence of witnesses at informal loans was essential — legally, economically, socially, and culturally: Witnesses, rather than account books, were the most important form of security for debts and other agreements, throughout all levels of society […]. The names of friends and neighbours present as witnesses were always given […]. Few transactions were ever made privately, with only the parties engaged in the transaction present, because if a dispute occurred over what they remembered the agreement to be, witnesses were the most trusted means of ascertaining the substance of the original agreement.13

The second key point Muldrew has made is that giving credit and witnessing credit expressed verbally social and emotional evaluations, ‘a public means of social communication and circulating judgement about the value of other 9 

Bazerman and Paradis, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. Simpson, A History of the Common Law of Contract, pp. 18, 53, 88; Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, p. 109; Brooks, Law, Politics, and Society, p. 312; Jones, God and Moneylenders, p. 87; Sokol and Sokol, Shakespeare’s Legal Language, s.v. ‘debt’. 11  Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, pp. 41, 64. 12  Simpson, A History of the Common Law of Contract, p. 136. 13  Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, pp. 63–64. 10 

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members of communities’.14 Honesty was the chief value someone judged before agreeing to a contract.15 Because ‘credit was based on words’, scholars must examine the language used in these exchanges.16 Diaries interpreted the ‘world of feelings’ about others’ honesty in these dealings: ‘the fact that economic events were recorded, not as simple numeric transactions but as social exchanges between individuals shows that this was still the most important process through which people remembered transactions or contracts […] [S]uch matters were very personal’.17 Being a witness was a way of cooperating in the preservation of not just one person’s value but a whole community’s moral reputation.18 In sum, signing for someone communicated socially a judgement of moral equality and honesty; and the promises of truthfulness in the transaction constituted a ritualized performance.19 Agreeing to be a witness was therefore not a commitment taken lightly. Witnesses potentially had to testify in court to their attendance at the contractsigning, to their consent to the arrangement, and to the moral uprightness of the contracting parties. Witnesses’ signatures attested that contracts were valid, affirming that the issues that could disrupt a contract in court, such as joke contracts, forgery, or impossible conditions, would not apply.20 Such details might have required recall years later. For example, in 1620, litigation took place over the delivery of tinsel, against Christopher Beeston, who, theatre historians have concluded, was a less scrupulous theatre manager than Henslowe. Eight years after Beeston’s disputed contract occurred, witnesses had to answer whether they were present at it, what Beeston said, what its financial terms were, whether it was fulfilled as written exactly in an account book produced on site at the trial, whether Beeston had read this book, and whether the book was in fact the one the witness originally signed. One witness acknowledged this account book was not fraudulent only when he recognized his own signature at the bottom of the agreement, suggesting the legal importance of witness presence and signatures.21 14 

Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, p. 2. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, p. 127. 16  Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, p. 154; for examples, see Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, pp. 78, 213. 17  Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, pp. 64–65, original italics. 18  Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, p. 151; Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, p. 151. 19  Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language, p. 38; Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, p. 106. 20  Simpson, A History of the Common Law of Contract, pp. 534, 510, 525, 507. 21  For a transcript of witness testimonies, see Wallace, ‘Three London Theatres of Shake15 

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Because of the significance of witnessing in the courts and the culture, contemporary handbooks detailed cautionary procedures to follow if serving as a witness. In the section ‘Admonitions’ at the end of Calli­g raphia (1622, STC 3905), David Browne counselled readers to adhere to the following performed silent actions, not unlike stage directions for a dumb show: When thou art required to subscribe as witnesse in anie matter, bee not rash, but first reade, and consider the sufficiencie thereof: secondlie, see both the parties subscribe, at the least the partie unto whom thou art called to giue testimonie, and then subscribe thou: and thirdlie, howbeit the matter belongeth not unto thee, yet in so much as thou art a witnesse to the equitie thereof, fayle not immediatelie after thou hast taken thy leaue, to write some briefe memoriall of the same in thy fore-named little Booke, (which alwayes thou oughtest to carrie) that thou afterwardes revising such an article insert therein, thou mayest the more boldly and constantly abide thereat, in affirming of the trueth, if it shall happen thee to bee cited, and required to depone there anent before a Iudge.22

Browne spelt out these moves because the witness was entering a legal relationship. During the early modern period, the imperative ‘subscribe thou’ indicated both a writerly action and a pledge of a legal one. Sixteenth-century reference books, for example, Thomas Cooper’s Thesavrvs Lingvae Romanae & Britannicae (1578, STC 5688), defined the Latin legal term subscribere as ‘To wryte vnder: to subscribe’, but also formally to promise alliance, as seen in the rest of the entry: ‘To wryte that he will ioyne in suite against one’.23 Skipping Browne’s steps might get readers and their friends into legal difficulty. In addition, Browne’s time-intensive instructions emphasized the ritualistic behaviour of witnessing contracts, namely, the unhurried and methodical rate at which the witness was to conduct actions; the thoughtful reading and evaluating of the ‘equitie’ or fairness of a contract; careful observation of others’ signatures; the supplying of one’s own signature; and the additional personal log made in a separate diary to reinforce memory for future legal recall. The entire ceremony was about recording in two ways ‘the trueth’. Other contemporary writers from both satire and religion described and tried to solve the problem of borrowers who, in order to avoid complying with their agreements, abused witnesses by dishonest tactics and lack of formality. Daniel Sauter’s The Practise of the Banckrvpts of These Times (1640, STC speare’s Time’, pp. 328–31. 22  Browne, Calli­graphia, sigs O2v–O3r, original italics. 23  Cooper, Thesavrus Lingvae Romanae & Britannicae, sig. Eeeeee5v.

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21779) complained that borrowers ‘play fast and loose’ with informal contracts: they Covenant [make an informal contract], plight their troth, make mutuall promise of performance, doe it under their owne hand writing, have witnesses subscribed thereunto. But what of all this? […]  [T]hey will rather part with all shamefastnesse, than a dram of silver, and therefore esteeme witnesses a sport, and an oath as a jest.24

Sauter targeted those debtors whose shoddy credit exchanges harmed not only religion, the commonwealth, and creditors, but also professional integrity, especially tradesmen ‘who by crafty devices and ungodly courses become Banckrupts to the disgrace of their calling’.25 Likewise, a 1593 sermon (STC 4166) by William Burton located good credit relations in terms of maintaining professional reputation: ‘Thy owne estate is further to be considered in respect of thy person, and in regard of thy profession: […] Take heede what thou doest promise […]. Thou must remember that when thy person is arrested [for debt], thy profession is also arested therewithall’.26 Sauter urged virtuous and honest behaviour in transactions: ‘strive for a serious and true performance of each mans dutie’.27 Concerns about these ‘crafty devices’, as Sauter’s pun suggests, led to other contemporary books offering strong advice about whom to choose — or not — to be one’s witness for contracts. For example, William West’s Symbolaeo­graphy (1598, STC 25269) provided language for formal and informal contracts, some of which were ‘onely for the testimonie or memorie of things done’, such as ‘histories, priuate Inuentaries, [and] priuate notes’.28 West gave advice on selecting good, ‘credible’ witnesses with a view to the long-term commitment that may be needed: ‘chuse alwaies such young witnesses which can subscribe their owne names if you can get them’; historically, these witnesses represented ‘men of greatest credite & worship that could be gotten’.29 Other contemporary literature warned against choosing inappropriate witnesses, pointedly against choosing actors. For example, the book Natvral and 24 

Sauter, The Practise of the Banckrvpts of These Times, sigs C4v–C5r. 25  Sauter, The Practise of the Banckrvpts of These Times, sig. ¶4v, original italics. 26  Burton, A Caveat for Sverties, sigs Cviir–Cviiv. 27  Sauter, The Practise of the Banckrvpts of These Times, sig. H1r. 28  West, Symbolaeo­graphy, sig. A8v. 29  West, Symbolaeo­graphy, sig. B8v.

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Morall Questions and Answeres, by A. P., printed in 1598 (STC 19054.5) but entered into the Stationer’s Register in 1592, inserted among its riddles and miscellaneous philosophical dialogue standard questions like ‘What is anger?’ and ‘What is vertue?’, followed by a dismissal altogether of actors as witnesses:30 Qu[estion]. Why did the Aegyptians ordaine that common iesters and plaiers should beare no witnesse in any cause? Ans[wer]. Because such kind of people [i.e., clowns and actors] are commonly giuen to wickednesse, and for a trifle [OED, n. 5a.: ‘A small sum of money’] are ready to do a mischiefe.31

Citing the Egyptians as an ancient learned authority, A. P.’s answer switched to the present tense to offer advice for early modern readers, thereby generalizing ‘such kind of people’ as evil and corruptible contemporary actors, that is, English actors. A mere three pages later, A. P. elucidated the qualities of a good witness, pinpointing further still the type of ‘wickednesse’ to which those witnessing clowns and players previously noted might be subject: Qu[estion]. What is chiefly to bee regarded in a witnesse? Ans[wer]. His honesty […].32

Even if this exchange was meant humorously, A. P.’s questioning of the nature of actors as witnesses functioned as antitheatrical sentiment about English actors’ dishonesty, corruptibility by cheap bribes, and lack of seriousness or depth. This discourse, as Jonas Barish has pointed out, was widespread in the culture.33 While playing as a profession was stigmatized because the nature of acting was dissimulation, it is still odd that the critique was so particularized to, of all possible sins, the fact of actors witnessing. For a professional community bombarded by such contempt, the evidence of contract-witnessing by the hands of numerous actors and playwrights indicates not only outward compliance with a quotidian, legal, and cultural gesture, but also ‘very personal’ meanings indeed. Witnessing actors gave their consent to loans and, by doing so, publicly acknowledged the legitimacy of the 30 

A. P., Natvral and Morall Questions and Answeres, sig. Div. A. P., Natvral and Morall Questions and Answeres, sig. Dijr. Here square brackets are used for the expansion of abbreviations. 32  A. P., Natvral and Morall Questions and Answeres, sigs Diijv–Diiijr. 33  Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice. 31 

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informal contracts, even, as we will see, when fabrications were at times apparent. Written witnessing practices, as evidenced in Henslowe’s diary and related letters, therefore, were a means to underscore important social and emotional communications of belief, widely applied within the theatre community, in the honesty of the theatrical professions. The end leaves and other blank pages of the diary and associated letters were covered with practiced signatures by several actors, suggesting that debtors and witnesses took their roles seriously and attempted to create unblemished agreements. Beneath a thin horizontal line, two or three actors on average would write their names and often occupation, ‘player’, alongside the word ‘witness’, following the medi­eval formula teste me ipso: for example, ‘wittnes John towne | Hew daves & | Richard alleyn’; ‘wittneses to this promes of payement | EAlleyn [and] edward allenes wiffes marke’; and ‘in wittnes of the leandinge of this money is | EAlleyn’.34 Some twenty-five actors and a few playwrights borrowed money from Henslowe. Loans ranged from 5s. to £15, with the average a few pounds. Some actors witnessed their colleagues entering into legal or quasilegal contracts but did not engage in borrowing or lending themselves. Actorsharers Robert Shaa, William Birde/Borne, Thomas Downton, Thomas Towne, and Edward Alleyn regularly borrowed and witnessed. The most frequent witness in the accounts was Henslowe’s son-in-law, Alleyn, perhaps due to convenience or all-around esteem. Over the course of his twenty-six recorded acts of witnessing in the diary, Alleyn’s signature, when verifiable, changed. Of course, educated men often had both a secretary and an italic signature to indicate cultural sophistication or social ambitions.35 Yet more noteworthy than the shift between his hands is the increase of his signature’s size and ornamentation. For example, when he signed as a witness for an actor buying lace in 1600, his auto­g raph grew to two centimetres in height, with a double-barred l, a flourish following the signature, and the y with two extra loops underlining his surname.36 The signatures of the second and third most commonly employed witnesses, Birde/Borne and Shaa, were similarly prominent and elaborate in the diary. Writing master Martin Billingsley strictly forbade extra ornamentation in penmanship as too artificial: ‘to vse any strange, borrowed, or inforc’d tricks and knots, in or about writing, other then with the celerity of the hand are to be performed, is rather to set an inglorious glosse 34 

Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, pp. 7, 190, 43. Goldberg, Writing Matter, p. 239. 36  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. 165; see also pp. 174, 194. 35 

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vpon a simple peece of worke’.37 As James Daybell explains, while extravagant signatures could signify fashion in texts such as letters, ‘deviations from normal signing practices may attain significant personal meaning’.38 Large, intricate signatures required time and space to produce, elongating and making more prominent the ritual of witnessing. In essence, Alleyn added a ‘glosse’ to the shared diary and highlighted actors’ trustworthiness. As scholars have concluded, the diary is an incomplete financial record. Lacunae now appear where signatures once were, and some entries detailed informal copies of bonds and transactions presumably kept separately.39 Even so, we can still discern some activity related to witnessing informal contracts that deviated from English practices and made the theatrical community distinctive. Sometimes a named actor skipped the subscription but was recorded as a witness nonetheless, casting doubt on whether he was present. Of the witnessed loans, ten per cent were observed by wives or daughters of those in the theatre, and five per cent involved servants or boy actors, practices that defied advice to use only literate adult men as witnesses. Two witnesses marked Henslowe’s loan of 20s. to actor Edward Dutton in 1597: ‘wittnes EAlleyn & mrs Gryges’,40 while Joan Alleyn, Alleyn’s wife, alone saw the debt of actor Richard Jones: ‘wittnes mrs alleyn’.41 For a 1599 loan to actor Anthony Jeffes, the record acknowledged just a woman’s first name: ‘wittnes Beattres’.42 Boys, sometimes casually identified by their pet names or their size, also witnessed or handled various loans, such as in 1598: ‘wittnes pigge | & Jemes’.43 Henslowe loaned Birde/Borne 13s., and a boy witnessed and delivered the money: ‘wittnes thomas dowten biger boye | whome fecthed yt fore hime’.44 Henslowe sometimes placed large amounts of money lent on behalf of the company into the hands of a boy to help purchase items like properties: ‘Delyuered vnto Thomas downton boye Thomas parsones to b[u]ye dyvers thinges for the playe of the

37 

Billingsley, The Pen’s Excellencie, sig. D4r. Daybell, The Material Letter, p. 96. Daybell draws here on Jenkinson, ‘Elizabethan Handwritings’. 39  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. 265. 40  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. 238. 41  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. 32. 42  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. 68. 43  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. 119. 44  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. 75. 38 

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spencers’.45 Such witnessing by women and children communicated that players trusted the honesty of all members within the acting company’s community. Witnesses, as noted above, were indispensable for informal debts, and any witness would have been better than none. Quite unusually, however, Henslowe made many insecure loans without any witnesses: at least thirty loans went to actors Charles Massey, Jones, Towne, Lowin, Downton, Shaa, Birde/ Borne, Jonson, and Alleyn. These unwitnessed loans were made regardless of the requested amount, the borrower’s loan history, or the borrower’s affiliations with a rival acting company. In this way, moral equality was a value conveyed across the profession. Other workarounds suggest the lack of convenient access to neutral, thirdparty witnesses. A few promissory notes were handwritten by Birde/Borne, Massey, and John Duke.46 As was standard in these cases, one’s own hand testified to presence and compliance. Similarly, individual handwriting reinforced the function of a witness’s signature; in 1597, Alleyn recorded a memo for his father-in-law: ‘wittnes my self the writer | of This EAlleyn’.47 But apparently, Alleyn was not always available. Foakes cautiously points out several contemporary signatures, initials, and writings forged by Henslowe and other prominent actors in the company.48 For instance, Henslowe many times imitated Alleyn’s signature as a witness and faked Gabriel Spenser’s signature twice.49 Falsifying someone’s signature violated the 1563 ‘Act agaynst the forgying of Evydences and Wrytinges’.50 But because of ‘gray area between artful copying and artificial manipulation of texts’, Henslowe was not necessarily practising deceit;51 he possibly was only attempting to imitate Alleyn’s signature for accuracy to comply with in-house routine. Omitting a witness altogether or copying a witness signature eliminated the need to wait for a witness to be fetched or to wait for the slow ritual of a witness reading and signing, thereby making business more efficient.

45 

Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. 107. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, pp. 78, 53, 165. 47  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. 269. 48  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. lv; the forgeries by later handlers of the diary lie beyond the scope of this essay. 49  Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, pp. liv–lv. 50  Gordon, ‘Material Fictions’, p. 88. 51  Gordon, ‘Material Fictions’, p. 105. 46 

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Manu­script letters provided another quick workaround, dispensing with the physical practicalities of the witnessing ritual around the diary, but retaining the spirit of the practice. Notes in the diary refer to letters received about loans. Actor Robert Wilson records for Henslowe negotiations about a payment for a play: ‘Receaued of mr Ph: Hinchlow by a note vnder the hand of mr Rob: Shaw in full payment’, and Henslowe made a loan for a play ‘at the a poyntment of Robart shawe by his letter’.52 These letters show that actors were familiar with the practices used in Henslowe’s diary and were able to reference specific corresponding records, as in a 1601 letter from actor Samuel Rowley to Henslowe requesting on behalf of a playwright ‘the Repayemente of the monye backagayne[. H]e Is contente to gyue ye a byll of his hande to be payde at some cartayne tyme as In yor dyscressyon […] wch done ye maye […] crose It oute of yor boouke’.53 In several similar financial letters, actors and playwrights added postscripts that functioned to witness colleagues’ debts or advances. Playwright Robert Daborne acknowledged getting money from Henslowe in 1613, and at the bottom of this letter, actor John Alleyn (Edward Alleyn’s nephew) made a note witnessing the receipt and urging quick handling of the transaction: ‘This play to be delivered in to mr hinchlaw wth all speed’.54 Before appending notes of verification, the witnessing actors read these letters sent to Henslowe. For instance, Daborne wrote that a formal agreement had been completed; on the same letter, actor Thomas Foster wrote the accompanying postscript echoing Daborne’s words. Daborne’s phrase ‘aknowledged the deed’ was echoed by Foster’s ‘The deed is acknowledged’; Daborne wrote, ‘for mr Benfeeld we hav made an absolute end wth him’, and Foster repeated, ‘the end is made wth Mr Benfeild’; Daborne concluded, ‘J pray sr send me the 20s yu promysed’, and Foster reiterated, ‘J pray yu send him the monnye’.55 Postscripts legitimated colleagues’ financial transactions. Likewise, the signature on a letter provided authentication and ‘epistolary authority’.56 Unless one had a secretary, an individual wrote his or her own signature:57 ‘It acted as a textual representation of an individual’s identity, [and] 52 

Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, pp. 126, 128. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by Foakes, p. 295. 54  Henslowe Papers, ed. by Greg, p. 71. 55  Henslowe Papers, ed. by Greg, p. 126. 56  Gordon, ‘Material Fictions’, p. 101. 57  Daybell, The Material Letter, p. 96, based on Jenkinson, ‘Elizabethan Handwritings’. 53 

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was legally binding’.58 Andrew Gordon has found that within early modern culture, letters had just such a contractual nature: ‘Letters appear as both tokens of trust between suitors and forms of social bond that locate unrecognized individuals within networks of kinship and community, vouching for their behaviour. The cases also reveal the instrumental authority accorded to species of letters’.59 This legal capacity was facilitated by the fact that personally written letters from friends by their very nature, according to Erasmus, suggested presence: ‘We feel as if we were […] seeing them face to face’.60 In his letter-writing handbook The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568, STC 11476), William Fulwood was more emphatic, defining a letter as ‘nothing else but an Oration written, conteining the mynde of the Orator or wryter, thereby to giue to vnderstand to him or them that be absent, the same that should be declared if they were present’.61 An actor’s signature on a witnessing postscript simulated the subscription and presence of a witness, simultaneously acknowledging and bypassing formalities. At the turn of the seventeenth century, theatre as a burgeoning institution was initiating its own behavioural norms. According to Gerald E. Bentley, the theatre was ‘develop[ing] certain standards or customs of organization, of procedure, of remuneration, of division of labour, of conduct, of hierarchy’.62 The textual evidence of ritual witnessing — and the traces of witnessing workarounds — illuminate the establishment of these professional values. While under attack as viable witnesses, actors internally promoted mutual validation of moral equality, honesty, and trust. Witnessing flattened moral hierarchies between sharers and hired men, between masters and servants, between men and women, and between the theatre manager and actors and playwrights. In order to show how much they believed in the professional honesty of their colleagues, actors participated in or overlooked questionable witnessing protocols. Actors’ letters self-consciously supplemented Henslowe’s diary; and children and women, as well as any omitted or forged signatures, became for the professional community valid and acceptable witnesses to the inherent trustworthiness of actors’ offstage dealings. These circumventions allowed Henslowe and the actors to preserve the ethos of honesty and take for granted consent within the professional community. 58 

Daybell, The Material Letter, p. 95. Gordon, ‘Material Fictions’, p. 91; see also Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters, p. 299. 60  Quoted in Daybell, The Material Letter, p. 86. 61  Fulwood, Enimie of Idlenesse, sig. Aviir. 62  Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, p. 4. 59 

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Offstage textual witnessing protocols embraced by the early modern theatrical community also flexibly addressed the needs of a mobile workforce that was touring, performing at court, or pursuing side hustles. While frequent absences of borrowers, lenders, or witnesses presumably would have slowed down fiscal transfers, the actors’ witnessing scheme, modified from mainstream cultural practice, moved money into the theatres more quickly and pragmatically, to finance individuals and companies, so that costumes could be purchased, new plays could be bought, and drama performed. Yet even such an expedient witnessing approach — though by and large needless because Henslowe never prosecuted — took time and labour to sustain. The theatrical community believed this collaborative additional paperwork was worth going through the motions over the years, even, surprisingly, while having to navigate a court licencing system whose bureaucracy at times must have beleaguered these artists trying to make a living. The microculture of witnessing in the theatres is important to understand, therefore, because it helps us see something new about the profession: actors themselves did more paper-pushing on the job than previously thought. They were quick to pick up a pen when textual formalities symbolically bolstered professional pride.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Billingsley, Martin, The Pen’s Excellencie (1618, STC 3062.3) Browne, David, The New Invention, Intituled, Calli­graphia: Or, The Arte of Faire Writing (1622, STC 3905) Burton, William, A Caveat for Sverties (1593, STC 4166) Cooper, Thomas, Thesavrvs Lingvae Romanae & Britannicae (1578, STC 5688) Fulwood, William, The Enimie of Idlenesse: Teaching the maner and stile how to endite, compose and write all sorts of Epistles and Letters (1568, STC 11476) Henslowe, Philip, Henslowe’s Diary, ed.  by R.  A. Foakes, 2nd  edn (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002) —— , The Henslowe Papers, ed. by R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (London: Scolar Press, 1977) Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by W. W. Greg (London: Bullen, 1907) Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, dir. by Grace Ioppolo [accessed 6 February 2018] P., A., Natvral and Morall Questions and Answeres (1598, STC 19054.5) Sauter, Daniel, The Practise of the Banckrvpts of These Times (1640, STC 21779) West, William, Symbolaeo­graphy: Which may be termed the Art, Description or Image of Instruments, Extra-iudicial, as, Couenants, Contracts, Obligations, […] &c. […] Or The Notarie or Scriuener (1598, STC 25269)

Secondary Works Bailey, Amanda, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) Barish, Jonas, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1981) Bazerman, Charles, and James Paradis, ‘Introduction’, in Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities, ed.  by Charles Bazerman and James Paradis (Madison: Uni­ver­sity of Wisconsin Press, 1991) Bentley, Gerald Eades, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Prince­ ton: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984) Brooks, Christopher W., Law, Politics, and Society in Early Modern England (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008) Carson, Neil, A  Companion to Henslowe’s Diary (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1988) Daybell, James, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manu­script Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (New York: Palgrave, 2012) Foakes, R. A., ‘Domestical Matters’, Shakespeare Studies, 30 (2002), 99–105

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Goldberg, Jonathan, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1990) Gordon, Andrew, ‘Material Fictions: Counterfeit Correspondence and the Culture of Copying in Early Modern England’, in Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain, ed.  by James Daybell and Andrew Gordon (Philadelphia: Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 85–109 Gurr, Andrew, Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company, 1594–1625 (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012) Ioppolo, Grace, Dramatists and their Manu­scripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse (London: Rout­ ledge, 2006) Jenkinson, Hilary, ‘Elizabethan Handwritings: A Preliminary Sketch’, The Library, 4th ser., 3.1 (1922), 1­–34 Jones, Norman Leslie, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and the Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1989) Kerrigan, John, Shakespeare’s Binding Language (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2016) Muldrew, Craig, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St Martin’s, 1998) Purkis, James, Shakespeare and Manu­script Drama: Canon, Collaboration, and Text (Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2016) Rutter, Carol Chillington, ‘Introduction’, in Documents of the Rose Playhouse, ed. by Carol Chillington Rutter (Manchester: Manchester Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984), pp. 1–35 Simpson, A. W. B., A History of the Common Law of Contract: The Rise of the Action of Assumpsit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) Sokol, B.  J., and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare’s Legal Language: A  Dictionary (London: Blooms­bury, 2004) Stewart, Alan, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) Wallace, Charles William, ‘Three London Theatres of Shakespeare’s Time’, Uni­ver­sity Stud­ies of the Uni­ver­sity of Nebraska, 9 (1909), 287–342 Werstine, Paul, Early Modern Playhouse Manu­scripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012) Wilson, Luke J., Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) Wrightson, Keith, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000)

Comedy, Clowning, and the Caroline King’s Men: Manu­script Plays and Performance Lucy Munro

S

ince the late seventeenth century, theatre historians have been curious about the casting of early modern plays. In one of the earliest surviving theatre histories, James Wright’s Historia Histrionica: An Historical Account of the English Stage (1699, Wing W3695), written in dialogue form, Lovewit laments the dearth of full cast-lists for pre-Revolutionary plays, telling Truman, I wish they had Printed in the last Age (so I call the times before the Rebellion) the Actors Names over against the Parts they Acted, as they have done since the Restauration. And thus one might have guest at the Action of the Men, by the Parts which we now Read in the Old Plays.1

Truman acknowledges that ‘it was not the Custome and Usage of those Days’, but tells Lovewit that nonetheless ‘some few Old Plays there are that have the Names set against the Parts’. He lists eleven printed plays that include castlists in their preliminary materials, five of which were performed by the King’s Men: John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613; printed 1623, STC 25176); Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (licensed 11 October 1626; printed 1629, STC 17642); Massinger’s The Picture (licensed 8 June 1629; printed 1630, STC 17640), Lodowick Carlell’s The Deserving Favourite (c. 1629; printed 1629, STC 4628); and John Fletcher’s The Wild Goose Chase (c. 1621; revived 1632; printed 1652, Wing B1616). In themselves, these cast-lists shed a good deal of light on the performances and casting practices of the King’s Men, but Truman 1 

Wright, Historia Histrionica, p. 3.

Lucy Munro is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King’s College London.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 213–228 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116453 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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was unaware of five further plays of the King’s Men that provide information about casting because they were not printed and survive only in manu­script: two plays written by amateur playwrights, John Clavell’s The Soddered Citizen (Swindon, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, MS 865/502/2, c. 1630) and Arthur Wilson’s The Swisser (London, BL, Additional MS 36759,1631), which include manu­script cast-lists in their preliminaries; and three written by seasoned professionals: Thomas Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (London, BL, MS Lansdowne 807b, licensed 31 October 1611); John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt (London, BL, Additional MS 18653, August 1619); and Philip Massinger’s Believe As You List (London, BL, MS Egerton 2828, licensed 6 May 1631), each of which includes some information about casting in stage directions or annotations.2 This cluster of printed and manu­script plays means that more detailed information is preserved about the casting practices of the King’s Men than any other company. Moreover, the fact that six of these plays belong to the years 1629–32 enables an unusually detailed exploration not only of patterns of casting in those years but also of the ways in which casting and the demands that specific roles made on actors are recorded in surviving documents. Manu­script plays have a particularly important part to play in the preservation of information about actors’ roles because they often preserve a wider range of materials than printed plays. Printed plays can include both cast-lists and annotations indicating the casting of individual roles, the latter seemingly preserved when printed texts are based on playhouse manu­scripts. Yet manu­script plays often include more, and more detailed, annotations, and they can also include other suggestive materials. Believe As You List, for example, includes a list of hand-props such as ‘writing out of the booke wth a small peece of Siluer for Mr Swantton’, ‘·3· notes for Mr pollard’ and ‘·2· letters for Mr Lowin’.3 Manu­ script plays are also more likely than printed plays to include cuts and revisions to the text which affect the language and characterization of individual roles. Moreover, contemporary manu­script annotations in printed books often preserve information about casting. For example, a manu­script cast-list originally added by a reader to a copy of the 1634 fourth quarto edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster is now preserved in a scrapbook probably assembled by the nineteenth-century theatre historian J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, which was redis2  For overviews of these printed and manu­script plays and the information they provide, see King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays, pp. 34–40, 43–47, 50–60; Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manu­scripts, pp. 317–20, pp. 320–24; Massinger, Believe As You List, pp. v–xxvi. 3  Massinger, Believe As You List, Property Notes, ll. 1–3, 6.

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covered in the 1970s by David George.4 With the information that they provide about stage practice and revision, manuscript plays thus allow us to take a closer look at the practices of the actors and the dramatists who composed their parts, the varying forms of collaboration on which early modern performance was based. Previous scholarship on casting has often focused on general patterns of casting or doubling. This essay focuses instead on the performance of comic and clowning roles, about which the manu­scripts of The Soddered Citizen, The Swisser, and Believe As You List provide especially illuminating information.5 Drawing in particular on recent work by John H. Astington and Richard Preiss, I will look in detail at the ways these plays exploit two comic performers, John Shank and his former apprentice Thomas Pollard, exploring what the cast-lists and other aspects of the manu­script texts tell us about individual roles and the requirements that they make on the actors who play them.6 In doing so, I adopt Lovewit’s desire to ‘gues[s] at the Action of the Men, by the Parts which we now Read’, but, unlike Truman, I am able to draw on the specific information provided by manu­script plays. Richard Preiss offers a helpful summary of the characteristics of the roles of ‘clowns’ such as Richard Tarleton, William Kemp, Robert Armin, Andrew Caine, and John Shank: We know we are looking at a clown when he is speaking prose — and an intensely colloquial, carnal, oath-laden prose at that; when he is lower in rank than his interlocutors; when his name is English rather than the Greek, Latin, or Italian of his superiors; when he is tripping over his words, tripping over his feet, tripping over someone else’s feet, eating, expressing a desire to eat, being called ‘honest fellow’ by someone about to given him instructions, miscarrying the most rudimentary of these instructions, being beaten or chased for his stupidity and impertinence, complaining of his abuse, or issuing a verbal stream of self-reference whose incomprehensibility might be alleviated if we could see the physical antics that accompanied it.7 4 

Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS ART Inv 271 no. 10(e) (2); see George, ‘Early Cast-lists’. 5  See Bentley, The Profession of Player, pp. 206–33; King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays; Bradley, From Text to Performance; Astington, Actors and Acting. 6  For further discussion of the ways in which looking at individual parts draws attention to recurring textual or vocal elements within those parts, see Jakub Bogaszak’s essay in this collection. 7  Preiss, Clowning and Authorship, p.  2. For overviews of these roles, see also Wiles,

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Shank’s roles fit this pattern: he generally speaks in colloquial prose and often in an English regional dialect; he is inferior in social status and, often, intellectual capacity to most of the other characters; he is physically maladroit and is often beaten for his mistakes. In contrast, Pollard’s roles are comic leads, figures who are far more integrated into the narratives in which they appear than the freewheeling clowns or fools played by Shank. These roles do not exploit dialect or physical clowning: they instead use forms of linguistic excess and swift modulations between certain ‘humorous’ emotions or mental states, notably bravery and cowardice.8 Noting that Shank and Pollard had ‘linked careers’, beginning probably at the Fortune and continuing from around 1613 with the King’s Men, John Astington draws attention to Pollard’s ‘facility in verbal improvisation and facetious exaggeration’, arguing that while Shank clearly did not mould all of his apprentices in his own image, ‘[Pollard’s] own skills had undoubtedly been influenced by observing his master at work on stage’.9 These things are indeed true, but it is less clear that Pollard was Shank’s ‘support and successorin-waiting’, as Astington describes him.10 One important difference emerges as soon as we look at the surviving cast-lists for King’s Men plays of the late 1620s and early 1630s. Pollard appears in the cast-list of all but one of these plays; only Carlell’s The Deserving Favourite, a fervent and remarkably straightfaced Neoplatonic romance, seems not to have included a role for him.11 He often plays comic leads: he was famous for his performance in the title role of Fletcher’s The Humorous Lieutenant, and in the plays of 1629–32 with surviving cast-lists, he has the second largest adult role in one (The Soddered Citizen) and the third largest in three (The Picture, Believe As You List, and the revival of The Wild Goose Chase).12 In contrast, Shank appears in only three of the plays: Shakespeare’s Clown; Mann, The Elizabethan Player; Astington, ‘The Succession of Sots’; Tribble, Early Modern Actors, pp. 126–32. 8  For lists of these actors’ known roles, see Appendices 12.1 and 12.2. On the performance of emotions, see Bevington, Action is Eloquence, pp. 67–98; Tribble, Early Modern Actors. 9  Astington, Actors and Acting, p. 87. 10  Astington, Actors and Acting, p. 87. 11  For the King’s Men to perform a play which excluded one or even two leading actors may not have been unusual; The Soddered Citizen apparently has no role for Joseph Taylor, and the lead is instead taken by John Lowin; The Soddered Citizen and The Swisser offer no roles for another talented and apparently popular performer, Elliard Swanston. 12  See A Key to the Cabinet of Parliament, p. 8. See also King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays, Table 19, p. 122; Table 18, p. 121; Table 12, p. 111; Table 21, p. 125. For an overview of Pol-

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The Picture, The Soddered Citizen, and The Wild Goose Chase.13 This record of appearances immediately suggests that Pollard was a more flexible performer than Shank, and it is possible that there was a distinct tradition of Shank roles, drawing on a specific set of skills, within the plays of the King’s Men. Baldwin Maxwell suggests that Shank, whose leanness seems to be directly referred to in his role as Hilario in The Picture, played the ‘hungry knave’ roles in a group of plays co-authored by Fletcher.14 It is noticeable, moreover, that another comic performer, William Robins, who played Rawbone, ‘a thin Citizen’, in James Shirley’s The Wedding (Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, 1626), seems to have joined the King’s Men after Shank’s death in January 1636.15 He, rather than Pollard, probably picked up Shank’s roles. An intriguing example of a dramatist putting Pollard’s talents to use appears in The Swisser, written in 1631 by Arthur Wilson, an amateur playwright who composed three plays for the King’s Men in the early 1630s and seems to have been familiar with the composition and playing practices of the company.16 The manu­script of The Swisser, which appears to be in Wilson’s hand, is a neat transcript, probably intended as a presentation copy or for the press; although it does not appear to have been used in the playhouse, it nonetheless foregrounds its connections to performance by including a title-page stating that it was ‘acted at the Blackfriars | 1631’ and a cast-list (fol. 2r) with the names of the ‘Persons’ and ‘Actors’ and brief descriptions of the characters. Pollard’s role, Timentes, is fourth in the list, described as ‘a fearefull Generall’.17 Wilson utilizes the rapid shifts between bravery and cowardice notable in Pollard’s performances as Fletcher’s Lieutenant to create the role of Timentes. The Lieutenant begins The Humorous Lieutenant as a ferocious fighter spurred to heights of violent action by a mysterious pain from which he suffers. When he is cured, he suddenly lapses into cowardice; his disgruntled commander then provokes an attack of hypochondria by confronting him with a pair of physicians who lard’s career, see Astington, Actors and Acting, pp. 85–89. 13  Shank also has far fewer roles in the plays of the Fletcher canon that have printed actor lists in Beaumont and Fletcher, Fifty Comedies and Tragedies: see Appendices 12.1 and 12.2. 14  Maxwell, ‘The Hungry Knave’. 15  Shirley, The Wedding, sig. A2v; Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, ii, 567. 16  See Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, v, 1270–73; Itzoe, ‘Arthur Wilson’. For a detailed exploration of Wilson’s dramaturgical practices, focusing on The Inconstant Lady, see Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers, pp. 90–101. 17  Wilson, The Swisser, ed. by Itzoe, p. 29.

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give him a dubious diagnosis. His pain renewed, the Lieutenant rushes off into battle and is next seen entering ‘with Colours in his hand, pursuing 3 or 4 souldiers’.18 Similar emotional shifts can be seen in Timentes, a natural coward who at the start of The Swisser has been over-promoted owing to the influence of one of his kinsmen. On his first appearance, a stage direction requires that Timentes ‘speakes fearefully’ (i.1.72); his dialogue is at first disjointed, partly as a result of his fear and partly through the interruptions of Andrucho ( John Lowin). Then, spurred by the encouragement of the King, who comments that Timentes ‘hast our fauor still’, he works himself into a fervour: TIMENTES Then arm’d with that, I will proceed as boldly through danger As that great Macedonian, when his fortune Bred an oppinion in him that hee was Descended from the gods. ’Tis not men, now, Or numbers that I value; wo’d there were Some powers aboue men to incounter with, That I might make my valor speake my fortune, More then my fortune that. The souldiers’ bloods Burne with reuenge, and I am all a flame; Mine eyes shall now dart lightning, and my to[n]gne Speake thunder to’em what this arme shall doe; Fame’s trumpett shall put enuie’s spight to silence; Me thinkes I feele the body sturr and call For some braue head to lead them on. ANTHARIS Well spoken. ANDRUCHO [Aside to Iseas] I wo’d it were as well done. Who wo’d thinke This fellow were not valiant? Heer’s the signe Of Hercules, but some poore female spirit Inhabitts it. O’, how the man wo’d walke Without a soule if hee should vent his valor In action, not in words! (i.1.117–37)

Here, as elsewhere in the play, comedy is created through Timentes’s emotional instability and his suddenly excessive linguistic performance. In these speeches the general’s hyperbolic language — his comparison between himself and Alexander the Great, his desire to find superhuman adversaries, and his descrip18 

I quote from the manu­script, Demetrius and Enanthe, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn II.42, ed. by Cook and Wilson, ll. 2276–80, which is the earliest extant text.

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tion of his eyes darting lightning and his tongue speaking thunder — is ironically juxtaposed with his previous cowardice and lack of language. The scene’s comic effect also depends on the contrast between Timentes’s outbursts and the sardonic commentary of Andrucho, of which Timentes is mostly oblivious. This passivity can also be seen later in the play. Like the Lieutenant, who is forced by a magical potion to fall in love with the King, Timentes is manipulated by those who revive his bravery by getting him drunk. He is last seen in a comically grotesque fight with Antharis, who has run mad on thinking himself responsible for the death of his son. Rather than being a joker himself, Timentes is the butt of other characters’ jokes; the overall effect is dependent on a striking comic performance from Pollard to bring out the humour of the character’s situation. While the majority of Pollard’s known roles are comic, he is not generally cast as an autonomous star turn; instead, as the role of Timentes suggests, his performances depend on interaction with other actors. A similar process can be seen in The Soddered Citizen. Clavell, like Wilson, was an amateur playwright who seems to have known the King’s Men well,19 but the manu­script of The Soddered Citizen is rather different from that of The Swisser. Although its neatly ruled cast-list (fol. 3v) frames it as a reading text, other features of the text point to theatrical practice. It is written in a scribal hand, with annotations from Edward Knight, the bookkeeper of the King’s Men, and a series of revising hands, some of which have been associated with Clavell himself. Numerous cuts and alterations have been made to the text, allowing us to trace some changing conceptions of individual roles; if the play had been printed, much of the evidence of these processes would probably have been lost. Moreover, as Matteo A. Pangallo notes, Clavell’s stage directions include detailed instructions about onstage business and pace, ‘clues that, paradoxically, are not always recorded in such detail in professionals’ plays’.20 Pollard’s character, Brainsick, described as ‘A deboyst young gent’ & a Prisoner’, is an integrated part of the play’s narrative, paralleled with the virtuous but mentally fragile hero Witworth — a ‘young gent’ of qualitie’ played by the rising star Richard Sharpe — and eventually marrying Miniona (played by John Thompson), daughter of the villainous ‘wealthy Cittizen’ Undermine ( John Lowin).21 He is also presented as part of a comic ensemble, accompanied in almost every appearance by his page, Fewtricks 19 

See Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers, pp. 117–19. Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers, p. 120. 21  Clavell, The Soddered Citizen, ed. by Pafford, p. 3. 20 

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(Alexander Gough), and by his gaolers, Clutch (Anthony Smith) and Shackle (Nicholas Underhill). Shank’s character, in contrast, appears as a messenger in a single scene, wearing ‘buskins of hay’ (l. 1754) and bringing Brainsick his father’s will. His narrative function is negligible; Shank’s performance is instead a striking cameo aiming to entertain spectators with his south-western dialect and physical business: Hodge. Tis a marls, vinger could day, nere open an man, Chill e’ne tell yee all, Yer Vathers as dead; as a doare nayle; Brain: Hould thy hands, Ile saue thee a labour;

he claps his hands to Ketch heate Brain: strikes him

Minio: I pray thee [Captaine] [sirra], Can hee bringe thee better newes; and wilt thou beate him for it? Brain: Therefore I beate him, shall a Rogue be sent, wth soe good, hee offers soe merry newes, soe light of carriage too? & be noe t’other shifts more nimble,? Cry hee’s a could — Notwthstandinge hee has a Cartloade of hay about him, wch hee brings vpp wth him, to Smythfeild, to beare charges,, Ile pay you Sirrah, Hodge. Oh don’t [not] vese mee, Cham grevis aquert with beateinge, dou’[b]’t mell O mee noe more; thy Golls don’t vall., zoo zate, that they don’t, Brain: I would haue had ye: Rogue come breathles with hast, & haue made signes only Thus — (ll. 1758–70)22

Clavell deliberately juxtaposes and contrasts the speech patterns of Hodge, Brainsick, and Miniona, and the hostility of the verbal exchange is underlined by the physical business as Brainsick repeatedly strikes Hodge and Hodge ‘shifts’ to avoid the blows. Hodge’s dialect is marked by spellings such as ‘Chill’ (I’ll) and ‘Cham’ (I’m) and the ellision of syllables in words such as ‘marls’ (marvellous), and the contrast with the speech patterns of Brainsick and Miniona is underlined in Miniona’s snobbish comment: ‘Why sure I thinke hee speakes by signes nowe, for I vnderstand not a word he saies’ (l. 1772). The distinction between the roles played by Pollard and Shank is also highlighted in Brainsick’s own comment to Hodge, ‘Thou art a good natural, noe artificiall Clowne’ 22 

In the Malone Society editions of manu­scripts by Pafford and Sisson quoted in this essay, brackets enclose deletions in the original.

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(l. 1995): Pollard/Brainsick, who is not a clown, draws attention to Shank’s capacity to represent ‘natural’ folly. Elsewhere in the play, Brainsick is associated with various forms of bodily and linguistic excess, as in the scene which concludes the second act, in which he attempts to convert Undermine to the joys of alcohol by lecturing him fluently and drunkenly on the divine origin of wine. The manu­script preserves some of the ways in which his excessive speech was created; in Act iv, Scene 3, for example, there are a series of deletions and insertions as Brainsick attempts to justify his sexual incontinency: I haue whor’d a little I must confesse, for the good of myne yssue That is to come, [as the Pott on the fier, soe boyles Mans–nature.] [What comes first is froth & scum’d, what remaines in mee is— [pure, & perfect.,] my Youthly blood boyld high: the courser parte I allowd [an] naturall vent, what now remains is full of vigor. strength, most pure & perfect, (ll. 1943–48)23

The reviser here removes the explicit reference to the boiling pot, rendering Brainsick’s claim more abstract and pretentious. This is the young man’s characteristic mode, yet unlike Hodge, Brainsick is capable of shifting his speech and of adopting different linguistic registers; Pollard’s role demands a versatility and flexibility which is not required of Shank. A certain flexibility is also demanded of Pollard in Massinger’s Believe As You List, in which he played the profane flamen Berecinthius; like The Swisser, this is a play that does not appear to include a role for Shank. The manu­script of Believe As You List is less untidy than that of The Soddered Citizen, but it is similarly marked by processes of theatrical production; the text is in the hand of Massinger, who has also made some minor revisions to it, and it is annotated by the bookkeeper, Knight, who removes or adapts many of Massinger’s stage directions and adds the list of hand properties described above, and the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, who has written and signed his license for the play’s performance at the end of the text. Again, a Pollard character is accompanied by others, in this case the three merchants, played by John Honyman, William Penn, and Curtis Greville. Where Massinger’s earlier play, The Picture, positions Pollard’s character Ubaldo as half of a double-act with Elliard 23 

In Pafford’s transcription bold indicates an insertion, and deleted sections are in square brackets; I have used italics to indicate the expansion of an abbreviation mark in ‘perfect’. For more detailed discussion of revision, as it is preserved in another surviving manu­script, that of John of Bordeaux, see James Purkis’s essay in this volume.

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Swanston’s Richardo, Believe As You List, like The Soddered Citizen, places Pollard in an ensemble, with the merchants acting as his foils. Berecinthius’s function early in the play is to defy Lowin’s Titus Flaminius, confident that his status as a priest will protect him; he thus provides a counterpoint to the resistance of Rome’s power by the central character, Antiochus, played by the company’s leading tragedian, Joseph Taylor. As the play progresses, Berecinthias’s assurance is gradually stripped from him, and he is eventually hanged. The character’s abrupt movements between bravery and fear seem designed for Pollard who, as we have seen, is required to handle such shifts adeptly in The Humorous Lieutenant and The Swisser. Berecinthius, whose excessive speeches and confrontations with Flaminius provide comic relief, gets something closer to a conventionally tragic conclusion, complete with a death oration, something which is denied Antiochus, who ends the play alive but bound for a Roman prison in which he knows that he will probably die. But Berecinthius’s death is itself treated in a complex fashion, as the priest resolutely refuses to make a good death. He makes a series of jokes about his impeding fate, eventually leading the First Merchant to tell him, this mirth good flamen is out of season let vs thincke of elizivm yf wee dye honest men, or what wee there shall suffer from the furies. (ll. 2236–39)

Berecinthius rejects the merchant’s conventional pieties, telling him, thou art a foole to thincke there are or gods, or goddesses, for the later yf that shee had any power mine beeinge the mother of ’em woulde haue [helpd mee] helpd mee they are thinges wee make our selves. or grant there shoulde bee a hell or an Elizium, singe I cannot to Orphevs harpe in the one, nor dance in the other. but yf there bee a Cerberus yf I serue not to make three sopps for his three heades ^that may serue, for ^somethinge more then an ordinarie [a] breakefast the cur is [vengeance] Divelishe hungrie. (ll. 2240–49)

The priest’s refusal to make a good death might be deeply troubling: in extremis, the play’s only representative of religious authority — albeit a flawed one — turns atheist, and the manu­script preserves some of Massinger’s apparent concern with getting the phrasing of this speech right.

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Berecinthius refuses to lament his own death, and instead he carnivalizes it, asking the Officer to ensure that noe [needie] covetous Roman after I am dead may begge to haue my skinne flayde of, or stuffe [m] it with strawe like an aligator, & then showe it in faires, and markets for a monster, thowgh I knowe the sight will draw more fooles to gape on’t then a camell or an elephant[.] (ll. 2258–63)

Unlike Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, who imagines her reputation being traduced by Rome’s comedians, Berecinthius imagines himself after death as a prodigy to be shown in commercial spaces such as fairs and markets. The Officer tells him, ‘you shall haue buriall feare not’, and Berecinthius offers a final incongruous parallel, asking for roome enough to tumble in I pray you thowgh I take vp more graue then Alexander. I haue ill lucke yf I stincke not as much as hee, and yeelde the wormes as large a supper. (ll. 2265, 2266–70)

These lines, which seem to combine Hamlet’s disquisitions on worms and on the dust of Alexander the Great, also recall Timentes in The Swisser, who similarly invokes ‘that great Macedonian’ (i.1.119). The Merchant again provides an orthodox voice, asking Berecinthius, ‘are you not mad to talke thus?’, but the priest refuses to conform, telling him, ‘I came crijnge into the worlde, and am resolude | to goe out merrilie, therefore despatch mee’ (ll. 2271, 2272–73). Berecinthius’s final words demand an adept control of tone, as the dialogue teeters on the edge of pathos without ever becoming bathetic. His courage may finally be admirable, but any admiration from the audience is not achieved through compromises on Massinger’s part, as Berecinthius dies in as unorthodox a manner as he lived. There is also something intriguing about the way in which Massinger plays Berecinthius against Titus Flaminius. A  number of critics have compared Berecinthius with Falstaff; Roma Gill, for instance, describes him as degenerating over the course of the play into ‘a poor shadow of a Falstaff ’.24 What is less often noted is that Falstaff was a role famously played by John Lowin, the very actor who played Flaminius in Believe As You List.25 Spectators are encouraged to 24  25 

Gill, ‘“Necessitie of State”’, p. 414. See Wright, Historia Histrionica, p. 4.

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draw on their memories of actors’ earlier roles, just as Wilson encouraged spectators of The Swisser to see echoes of the Lieutenant in Timentes. Here, however, correspondences are to be drawn across actors and roles, Pollard’s debased, impoverished Falstaff being finally unable to withstand the power of the senior actor who actually inhabited that role. Massinger plays self-consciously not only with Pollard’s ‘back-catalogue’ and his established set of actorly skills, but also with the broader patterns of casting within the King’s Men. In conclusion, I  return to the statement with which I began this essay, Lovewit’s comment that with cast-lists ‘one might have guest at the Action of the Men, by the Parts which we now Read in the Old Plays’. If the roles that Pollard and Shank played in The Swisser, The Soddered Citizen, and Believe As You List are a reliable guide — and other King’s Men plays of the period, such as The Picture, suggest that they are — then the ‘action’ required of these two men was very different. Neither are type-cast, precisely: Pollard’s roles vary hugely in terms of the characters he is expected to play, and although Shank’s roles are all servants, the aspiring, relatively high-class servant Hilario in The Picture is rather different from Hodge in The Soddered Citizen or the bumptious, nameless servant in The Wild Goose Chase. However, there are continuities in terms of the technique required from the actor — such as the linguistic skill of both men, and Pollard’s ability to negotiate abrupt shifts in tone or humour — and the extent to which each is required to work with other performers, Pollard’s work as part of an ensemble requiring a different approach to the more predominantly solo turns required by Shank’s roles. More broadly, this essay has also demonstrated the utility of manu­script plays, alone and in tandem with printed plays, to shed light on early modern acting. Texts such as The Soddered Citizen and Believe As You List help us to see both the authorial adjustments that helped to create roles tailored for specific actors — evident in the quotations within the body of this essay — and the negotiations within the playhouse that helped to embody those roles on the stage. When the manu­scripts of The Swisser and The Soddered Citizen were discovered in the early twentieth century, they helped to overturn many assumptions about typecasting, acting ‘lines’, and the composition of dramatic roles.26 Manu­script plays still have much to teach us today about the casting of early modern plays and the specific talents on which early modern companies depended.

26 

See Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel; Howard, ‘A Re-Examination of Baldwin’s Theory’.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn II.42 London, BL, Additional MS 18653 —— , Additional MS 36759 —— , MS Egerton 2828 —— , MS Lansdowne 807b Swindon, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, MS 865/502/2 Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS ART Inv 271 no. 10(e) (2)

Primary Sources Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, Fifty Comedies and Tragedies (1679, Wing B1582) Carlell, Lodowick, The Deserving Favourite (1629, STC 4628) Clavell, John, The Soddered Citizen, ed. by J. H. P. Pafford (Oxford: Malone Society, 1936) Fletcher, John, Demetrius and Enanthe, ed. by Margaret McLaren Cook and F. P. Wilson (London: Malone Society, 1951) —— , The Wild Goose Chase (1652, Wing B1616) Ford, John, The Lovers Melancholy (1629, STC 1116) A Key to the Cabinet of Parliament (1648, Wing K387) Massinger, Philip, Believe As You List, ed. by C. J. Sisson (London: Malone Society, 1928) —— , The Picture (1630, STC 17640) —— , The Roman Actor (1629, STC 17642) Shirley, James, The Cardinal, in Six New Plays (1653, Wing S3486) —— , The Wedding (1629, STC 22460) Webster, John, The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy (1623, STC 25176) Wilson, Arthur, The Swisser, ed. by Linda V. Itzoe (London: Garland, 1984) Wright, James, Historia Histrionica: An Historical Account of the English Stage (1699, Wing W3695)

Secondary Works Astington, John H., Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage Playing (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010) —— , ‘The Succession of Sots, or Fools and their Fathers’, Medi­eval and Renaissance Drama in England, 20 (2007), 225–35 Baldwin, T. W., The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1927) Bentley, G. E., The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 Vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941–68) —— , The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time (Princeton: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984)

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Bevington, David, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984) Bradley, David, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992) George, David, ‘Early Cast-lists for Two Beaumont and Fletcher Plays’, Theatre Notebook, 28.1 (1974), 9–11 Gill, Roma, ‘“Necessitie of State”: Massinger’s Believe As You List’, English Studies, 46 (1965), 407–16 Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 2nd edn (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1980) Howard, Skiles, ‘A Re-Examination of Baldwin’s Theory of Acting Lines’, Theatre Survey, 26.1 (1985), 1–20 Itzoe, Linda V., ‘Arthur Wilson (1595–1652)’, in Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists, ed. by Fredson Bowers (Detroit: Gale, 1987), pp. 303–09 Kathman, David, ‘How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?’, Shakespeare Survey, 58 (2005), 220–46 King, T. J., Casting Shakespeare’s Plays: London Actors and their Roles, 1590–1642 (Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992) Mann, David, The Elizabethan Player: Contemporary Stage Representations (London: Routledge, 1991) Maxwell, Baldwin, ‘The Hungry Knave in the Beaumont and Fletcher Plays’, Philo­logical Quarterly, 5 (1926), 299–305 Pangallo, Matteo A., Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater (Philadelphia: Uni­ver­ sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) Preiss, Richard, Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2014) Tribble, Evelyn, Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatres: Thinking with the Body (London: Arden, 2017) Werstine, Paul, Early Modern Playhouse Manu­scripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013) Wiles, David, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1987)

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Appendix 12.1. Roles Assigned to Thomas Pollard Date

Play

Role(s)

Source

1619

Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt

Holderus Servant

BL Add. MS 18653

c. 1619

The Humorous Lieutenant Lieutenant Epilogue

A Key to the Cabinet of Parliament, p. 8

c. 1620–23

The Duchess of Malfi

Silvio

Q1623, STC 25176, title-page verso

Aelius Lamia Stephanos

Q1629, STC 17642, title-page verso

October 1626 The Roman Actor June 1629

The Picture

Ubaldo

Q1630, STC 17640, title-page verso

c. 1630

The Soddered Citizen

Brainsick

Wiltshire and Swinton History Centre, MS 865/502/2

c. 1630 and/ or c. 1637

Philaster

Pharamond

Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library MS ART Inv 271 no. 10(e) (2)

1631

The Swisser

Timentes

BL Add. MS 36759

May 1631

Believe As You List

Berecinthius

BL MS Egerton 2828

1632

The Wild Goose Chase

Pinac

F1652, Wing B1616, sig. a[1]v

1641

The Cardinal

Epilogue

Shirley, Six New Playes, Wing S3486, sig. F3v

1648

Rollo, Duke of Normandy, Cook or the Bloody Brother

Wright, Historia Histrionica, p. 9

Pollard also appears in actor lists for: The Queen of Corinth (c. 1618; Beaumont and Fletcher, Fifty Comedies and Tragedies [hereafter F1679], Wing B1582) The Laws of Candy (c. 1620; F1679) The Island Princess (c. 1621; F1679) The Spanish Curate (licensed 24 October 1622; F1679) The Maid in the Mill (licensed 29 August 1623; F1679) The Lover’s Progress (licensed 6 December 1623; F1679) The Lover’s Melancholy (licensed 24 November 1628; actor list printed with the play in 1629, STC 1116)

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Appendix 12.2. Roles Assigned to John Shank Date

Play

Role(s)

Source

June 1629

The Picture

Hilario

Q1630, STC 17640, title-page verso

c. 1630

The Soddered Citizen

Hodge

Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, MS 865/502/2

c. 1630?

The Scornful Lady

Sir Roger

Wright, Historia Histrionica, 4.

1632

The Wild Goose Chase

Servant

F1652, Wing B1616, sig. a[1]v; see Kathman, ‘How Old’, pp. 234–5

Shank also appears in cast-lists for: The Prophetess (licensed 14 May 1622; F1679, Wing B1582) The Lovers Melancholy (see above)

Unfolding Action: Locked Letters as Props in the Early Modern Theatre Daniel Starza Smith and Jana Dambrogio

W

An it shall please you to break up this, [handing letter to Lorenzo] it shall seem to signify.1

hat did letters look like on the early modern stage, and how might they have signified beyond their written contents? When the clown Gobbo delivers Jessica’s letter to her lover Lorenzo in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the recipient draws our attention to the physical packet, its white paper folded closed with a wax seal applied to prevent casual reading. An address is legible to the recipient, and the handwriting identifiable, but the letter must be physically broken open before Lorenzo can access the contents. The contents ‘shall seem to signify’ to him because they promise to communicate something — but perhaps the ‘break[ing] up’ of the letter itself can be understood to mean something too, as a visual, aural, and tactile occurrence. 1  Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. by Drakakis, ii.4.11–12. All quotations from the play are to this edition unless otherwise specified, although we use the more common spelling ‘Gobbo’ for the clown’s surname over Drakakis’s preferred ‘Giobbe’, since Gobbo is the clown’s name in the Venetian production discussed below.

Daniel Starza Smith is Lecturer in Early Modern English literature (1500–1700) at King’s College London, and has previously held roles at Uni­ver­sity College London, the Uni­ver­sity of Reading, and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. Jana Dambrogio is the Thomas F. Peterson (1957) Conservator for Massachusetts Institute of Techno­logy Libraries. She previously held positions at the US National Archives, the United Nations, and the Vatican Secret Archives, where she was Kress Fellow.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 229–245 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116454 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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Letters are one of the most common forms of stage property alluded to in surviving plays from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.2 As quotidian objects, they contribute to drama’s subtle web of realistic effects, although they often drive a play forward in spectacular ways. Letters contain valuable information about plots and characters, summarize off-stage action, prompt on-stage action, and can themselves operate as literary tropes. Yet despite important recent scholarship on both letters and staged ‘scrolls’ (to use Tiffany Stern’s term), scholars remain largely ignorant about the physical make-up of the documents that passed across the stage.3 Taking as a test case Shakespeare’s Merchant (written 1596–97; printed in quarto 1600 , STC 22296), we argue that a better material understanding of real early modern letters can enable scholars to speculate in new ways on those original dramatic documents. This essay thus explores not manu­scripts containing drama, but drama containing manu­scripts. It draws on a new field of study, letterlocking, to advance these questions. Letterlocking is part of a 10,000-year-old document security tradition. As a practice, it is defined as ‘the act of folding and securing an epistolary writing substrate (such as papyrus, parchment, or paper) to function as its own envelope or sending device’.4 The study of letterlocking, meanwhile, examines the evolving historical techno­logies of epistolary security and aesthetics. Without letterlocking, letters would simply not have been viable as sent messages, yet the practice is only just beginning to receive sustained attention; this essay is one of the first publications to emerge from its study. The authors of this essay have examined hundreds of thousands of archival letters, and have so far identified around sixty different letterlocking variations between the medi­eval period and the twenty-first century, with extensive further variation at a micro level. (From the 1830s, the mass-produced gummed envelope largely superseded letterlocking as a postal techno­logy.) Many locked letter-packets are easily distinguishable from one another when folded and secured for delivery; others look similar but have different internal engineering. Some letterlocking styles appear to have signalled ‘genres’ of letter (business, love, family, etc.); 2 

In 160 plays debuting on the commercial stage between 1590 and 1609, Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsh count letters in 102 plays, making them the third most common prop-types after ‘sword’ (119) and ‘money’ (116); Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama, p. 119. 3  Stern, Documents of Performance, passim, esp. Chapter 6. For recent scholarship on the material letter, see, e.g., Daybell, The Material Letter, Stewart and Wolfe, Letterwriting, and Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters. 4  Definition taken from Dambrogio and Smith, Letterlocking, a mono­graph in preparation.

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some contain elaborate built-in security devices, indicating that correspondents wanted to and knew how to protect their privacy. The premise for this essay is that on-stage letters looked more or less like ‘real’ contemporary letters: there is no point to an unrecognizable prop. Letterlocking, virtually unknown today, must have been universally recognized by early modern theatregoers, even those unable to read. Yet Elizabethan and Jacobean property-makers would have been choosing among more than a dozen letterlocking styles.5 Could the visual clues built into these props (wax seals, appended locks made of paper or bright silk floss) have been detected by an early modern audience? Unfortunately, contemporary evidence is not sufficient to answer this question to our satisfaction at present, but a related question may shed further light: can modern theatre directors and prop-makers use letterlocking to explore the plots, themes, and characters of early modern plays in new ways? Although it is not possible to recreate early modern stage practice in this respect, experimenting with carefully researched locked letters as props suggests that a better understanding of manu­scripts from the period offers practical value to modern-day directors, audiences, and readers seeking new ways to explore Shakespeare’s stage world. In Andrew Sofer’s words, prop scholarship aims ‘to make visible precisely what we as text-based critics are trained not to see: the temporal and spatial dimensions of the material prop in performance’; this essay particularly heeds Sofer’s suggestion that ‘as a prelude to reanimating the prop, we must first rematerialize it’.6 Letterlocking offers theatre scholars practical ways to rematerialize the early modern prop, and creative use of its methods can fill a gap left by the existing scholarship of stage objects. 5 

To see some Elizabethan and Jacobean styles, see our Vimeo channel, ‘Early Modern Letterlocking Variations (1450s–1640s)’. Scrolls, including letters, were presumably transcribed by the same people who wrote out the actors’ scripts. We use ‘property-maker’ here to acknowledge that a scribe whose work ended up on the stage was also involved in the creation of props. We do not know who folded and sealed letters for the stage, or if they made them to exactingly realistic standards — but it makes sense that they would at least look like real contemporary letters. 6  Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, p. vii. Harris and Korda have usefully delineated the process by which ‘dematerializations’ of the early modern stage took place from the seventeenth century onwards; Harris and Korda, ‘Introduction’, p. 11. This volume, itself heavily influenced by Arjun Appadurai’s collection The Social Life of Things (1986), underpins much of our thinking. Appadurai’s key insight is that ‘things-in-motion […] illuminate their human and social contexts’; ‘Introduction’, p. 5. Props — or ‘moveables’ as they were sometimes called in early modern England — clearly pertain to this dictum. See Harris and Korda, ‘Introduction’, p. 24. Bruster, ‘The Dramatic Life of Objects’, especially informs our theoretical thinking about props.

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Letters-as-Props: The Existing Evidence In the early modern playhouse, as now, theatregoers could see and sometimes even hear a letter passed between characters in a play, and use these stimulae to interpret the stage action. What kinds of evidence could we use to characterize the visual impacts of an early modern stage letter? Printed stage directions across a range of early modern drama are generally opaque about the visual nature of these props, even when calling for them to be opened or read. The following examples from Shakespeare are typical: ‘Reads the letter’ (King Lear iv.5, Hamlet iv.6), ‘He reades the Letter’ (Romeo and Juliet i.2, Titus Andronicus iv.4, Love’s Labour’s Lost iv.3), ‘Opens the letter’ (Merchant of Venice ii.2), ‘Opens the Letter, and reades’ (Julius Caesar ii.1).7 Occasionally characters talk about opening a letter but usually in unrevealing ways: ‘Let me unseale the letter’ (Lear Q iv.5.22, F iv.4.22).8 Characters sometimes give more away when the plot requires it. Malvolio lingers over the material evidence of the letter he finds in ii.5 of Twelfth Night, for example: the hand-writing, wax, and seal do indeed ‘seem to signify’, but he misinterprets these details with disastrous social consequences.9 Evidently, a real prop could help clarify the situation, but just one contemporary stage letter is known to have survived, now Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.190.10 Stern describes this artefact as ‘a pretend letter that formed part of the Gray’s Inn and Inner Temple revels held between Christmas 1594–95 and Shrove Tuesday and known as Gesta Grayorum’.11 The letter records a rebuke of the fictitious Henry, prince of Purpoole, to a ‘Greate 7 

Stage directions are taken here from the First Folio to ensure they are not modern interpolations. 8  Quoted from Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. by Weis. This line does tell us, at least, that the letter has been sealed. 9  For a particularly insightful material reading of this scene, see Newman, ‘“A seale of Virgin waxe at hand”’, pp. 109–11. 10  McInnis, Knutson, and Steggle, eds, Lost Plays Database; cf. the Folger’s Luna viewer [accessed 6 February 2018]. 11  Stern, Documents of Performance, p. 186. Cf. the printed Gesta Grayorum (1688, Wing C444), which does not contain this letter. As noted several times in Harris and Korda, surviving property lists, even those that gesture towards completion (e.g., ‘all the properties for my Lord Admiralles men’, emphasis added), do not list small objects such as letters or coins, even though they are ubiquitous in the drama. Addressing this point, Juana Green suggests that references to ‘things’ in Henslowe’s diary could refer to ‘the props which are so glaringly absent from theatre records’; Green, ‘Properties of Marriage’, p. 268.

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Turke’ whose use of the Islamic crescent had angered him. As Stern argues, the document is in form and content, an elegant and seemingly ‘real’ letter  […] it contains individual features that match those to be found in printed texts that contain scrolls in ‘realistic’ form. Specifically, the change of manu­script style for its salutation — here, from secretary hand into italic — directly reflects the different typeface so often used in the salutation in printed texts. Most importantly, however, having been carefully folded, the letter contains a direction written on its outside detailing to whom it is to be delivered (‘To the Greate Turke’), and a direction on the inside detailing from whom it emanates, ‘Henricus P P’.12

Scrolls could, thus, replicate their real-life equivalents with a noteworthy level of detail: the stage letter is written out formally following contemporary conventions of layout, folded practically, and addressed on the back of the second leaf as if for sending. At the same time, though, this is an extremely small sample size, and it proffers incomplete evidence, since we are not seeing the entire document. We suggest that the letter was originally sealed and torn open ‘live’ onstage, leaving a hole or jagged tear,13 but that the letter was trimmed by a later owner who found the torn edge unsightly.

Making New Evidence: The Merchant in Venice (2016) as Test Case Made for a small, private venue rather than the public stage, and probably trimmed by a later collector, the Folger Gesta Grayorum manu­script can only ever offer partial evidence about contemporary stage property. Drawing instead from an alternative corpus of evidence — real surviving letters from the period — we introduce into theatre studies the discoveries of letterlocking. Letterlocking, initiated by Jana Dambrogio in 2000, began as a technical study of late medi­eval and early modern archival records, with a particular focus on 12 

Stern, Documents of Performance, pp. 186–87. When we modelled this letter from a digital image, it soon became clear that paper was missing since the flaps made by folding did not overlap, leaving text exposed. The trimming has also removed some of the letter’s text. If the letter was indeed torn open, this would be suggestive about the stage-life of epistolary props, which might have to be actively damaged in performance to fulfil their function. The uncut edges measure 178 mm wide (widest edge, top when reading the letter) × 144 mm tall. The cut tapers down to leave 108 mm width at the shortest point on the bottom edge. Based on measurement of the address panel, when folded, it would have measured 130 mm wide × 44 mm tall. Our thanks to Elizabeth Williamson for checking the original for us. 13 

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documents’ security measures. While investigating how best to preserve archival evidence, Dambrogio realized that individuals intentionally built higher or lower security into their letters and bound records. Since 2013, we have developed the technique collaboratively as a tool for studying historical letters. We have discerned a number of personal habits, such as witty aesthetic flourishes within the locking technique, and gained a sense that certain letterlocking styles might have been more suitable for certain social situations than others. Letterlocking was initially developed as an approach to document conservation, to understand material letters better as physical artefacts, but its methods also help explain the social codes of epistolarity — and therefore, by extension, the roles that letters can play when incarnated in literary texts. An invitation to collaborate on a Shakespeare production offered the ideal opportunity to experiment. Between 26 and 31 July 2016, The Merchant of Venice was performed for the first time in Venice’s Ghetto. Famously, Shakespeare does not refer to this historically Jewish area in his play, a fact that creates a curious creative dissonance between the real and fictionalized cities. Yet, in the year that the Ghetto marked five hundred years of existence as a demarcated civic space, and Shakespeareans worldwide commemorated four hundred years since the playwright’s death, the organizers of ‘I 500 anni del Ghetto di Venezia’ (branded in English as ‘Venice Ghetto 500’) selected the work as a key event in their cultural programme. The Merchant in Venice was produced, in association with Università Ca’Foscari, Venice, by Compagnia de’ Colombari, a New York-based company with roots in Orvieto, and was directed by Karin Coonrod. Diana Henderson acted as a consultant recording this production and invited us to create potential stage properties for the director’s consideration, in the form of historically accurate models of letters. 14 We designed props based on a combination of period specificity (based on archival examples we had seen) and textual evidence (which characters were sending and receiving the letters, in what context, what the letters communicated, and what was said about them). The Merchant in Venice was the first theatrical production to feature letter-props based on our findings. In the event, not all of our models were used but designing them exposed the research potential inherent in theatrical letterlocking.15 14 

Henderson, ‘The Merchant in Venice: Shylock’s Unheimlich Return’, 161–76 Trying to anticipate the logistical needs of the actors, we made enough props for each night of the play and labelled each one with act and scene, and characters’ names for ease of 15 

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Table 13.1. Letters in The Merchant of Venice. Ref. (Arden3)

From

To

Delivered by A follower of Bassanio Gobbo

Opened Read onstage? onstage?

1

2.2.108–110

Bassanio

A bundle of letters to various business associates

2

2.3.5–8; 2.4.10–40

Jessica

Lorenzo

3

3.2.230–321

Antonio

Bassanio

Salerio

Yes

Yes

Balthazar (a servant)

No

No

No

No

Assumed Summarised yes

4

3.4.45–56

Portia

Dr Bellario, in Mantua or Padua

5

4.1.107–119, 148–165

Dr Bellario (purportedly)

Court trying Shylock

Nerissa disguised as lawyer’s clerk

Yes

Yes

6

5.1.266–270

Dr Bellario (purportedly)

Bassanio et al.

Portia

No

No

7

5.1.273–279

Unspecified

Antonio

Portia

No

No

Seven letter deliveries are shown onstage in Merchant, as Table 13.1 demonstrates. Letters are typically single, though we also see one bundle (no. 1). One letter (no. 2) makes two appearances. Each letter is delivered by someone who is not the named letter-writer (or, in the case of no. 7, by someone who conceals the source of the letter). On four occasions letters remain closed while in view of the audience, and three times they are opened and read onstage; there is no explicit instruction that no. 2 is unsealed or read, yet characters seem to know its contents, so it must have been opened.

Letters in the Play: Letter nos 1–3 The first three appearances show different kinds of epistolary exchange. First, the Venetian lord Bassanio instructs a follower to send a bundle of letters to numerous different, unspecified recipients: ‘See these letters delivered’ (ii.2.108). reference. Props were made larger than life to increase their visibility, and we used especially dark ink so that text would contrast more starkly with the paper. Handmade quills were used for good measure. On this occasion, our rationale was not entirely consistent: we did not confine ourselves to the letterlocking techniques of early modern Venice, for example. Instead, we allowed ourselves to draw on letterlocking techniques from a wider temporal and geo­graphical range in order to consider character and context more freely. Future practical research of this kind could work to more overtly specified goals and match more closely a production’s tenor.

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Figure 13.1. Letter no. 1, a bundle of letters from Bassanio.

For this prop we made six letters of different sizes, and on slightly different coloured paper so that their variousness could be detected by an audience (see Figure 13.1). We ensured that red sealing wax could be seen whichever way the packet was transmitted, and to make the packet even more visually striking we tied it with red ribbon.16 Not only will Bassanio’s faithful follower ensure the letters were delivered, the audience would ‘see’ them sent, too. Since ribbon is more expensive than string, the packet’s mixed textiles also communicate Bassanio’s conspicuous consumption and echo his attempts to embody influence in his servants’ clothing (‘Master Bassanio […] indeed gives rare new liveries’, ii.2.102–03). Letter no. 2 (see Figure 13.2) sees Jessica send Lorenzo instructions to help her escape the house of her father, Shylock; the letter is delivered by the household’s departing servant Gobbo. Uniquely in the play, we see this letter both sent and received. When Lorenzo receives the letter, he makes play on the ‘fair hand’ visible on the address panel ( Jessica’s attractive handwriting), Jessica’s own ‘fair hand that writ’, and the fairness (whiteness) of the paper itself. This model was made using bright Fabriano paper (from an Italian mill dating to the thirteenth century), a much whiter substrate than was used in the other models. We gilded the edges of the paper and used a sealing wax infused with flecks of gold leaf, specially made for us by bookbinder, toolmaker, and waxmaker Brien Beidler. In doing so, we indicated the quality of materials available to 16 

After the medi­eval period, what we refer to today as sealing wax contained little or no wax at all, in the true sense of beeswax, but rather a combination of shellac and turpentine. We use the commonly understood ‘wax’ where this does not significantly affect meaning.

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Jessica within Shylock’s house and developed Shakespeare’s own vision of gold departing the household: Jessica, after all, gives Gobbo a ducat as he leaves, symbolically anticipating the money she will take when fleeing. This model was folded into a letter-packet that communicates intimacy, the style of letterlocking known to early modern scholars as ‘pleated’.17 One notable user of pleated styles was the earl of Essex in especially close exchanges with Elizabeth  I. The pleated packet is also particularly thin, meaning that it can be passed discreetly from Figure 13.2. Letter no. 2, Jessica’s heart seal. hand to hand, enabling Gobbo to deliver the letter ‘secretly’, as instructed (ii.3.7). The packet is tied at the top with silk floss (in this case, bright red to enhance visual impact), and then sealed; because Jessica clearly trusts her bearer, we allowed her to send a letter-packet that privileged beauty over security. In our model, Jessica encoded a final material message by impressing a heart-shaped seal design into the sealing wax. In letter no. 3, the powerful merchant Antonio reveals to Bassanio, via his emissary Salerio, that his ships have sunk and he is ruined. On reading its contents, Bassanio draws an explicit link between ‘the body of my friend’ and the paper in his hand, ‘every word in it a gaping wound, | Issuing life-blood’ (iii.2.264–65). When Salerio warns that Antonio’s ‘letter there | Will show you his estate’ (iii.2.234–35), Bassanio should already see some warning signs in our model before he breaks the seal.

17 

See Dambrogio and Wolfe, ‘Letterlocking: “Pleated” Letter’. For more on flossed letters, see Wolfe, ‘“Neatly sealed, with silk”’.

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Like letter no. 2, letter no. 3 is pleated, but instead of being locked with silk floss like Jessica’s letter, it has had a security enhancement added: a triangular corner cut from the bottom of the writing paper and laced through a cut in the folded packet (see Figure  13.3).18 The high-level security points to the letter’s particularly private nature, emphasizing the social and emotional vulnerability of the sender. We used a thicker, Figure 13.3. darker paper to inLetter no. 3, Antonio to Bassanio dicate that Antonio (opened, with lock cut from corner of substrate). was no longer using the highest quality white paper available to other rich men, contrasting purposefully with the bright white paper just witnessed in Shylock’s house.19 The letter was written on a half-sheet of paper, rather than a whole sheet conspicuously displaying wealth with expanses of unused white space: Antonio has been forced to economize with brutal immediacy. The ink was made to run, as if tear-stained. The fact that a knife has made a hole through the paper adds further dramatic urgency, since we know what fate awaits Antonio in his contract with Shylock. 18  The built-in security measures of this model were inspired by letterlocking styles being used by sixteenth-century Venetians. See Dambrogio, ‘Letterlocking: The First Letterlocking Video’. 19  The paper we used, ‘Tested Conservation Laid’, was handmade by Katie MacGregor.

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Letters in the Play: Letter nos 4–7 Letters 4 to 7 all involve Portia. First, she writes to her cousin, Bellario, a doctor of law, based either in Mantua or Padua, requesting certain items of legal clothing in order to effect her disguise as Balthazar, a dazzling young lawyer.20 Figure 13.4. Letter no. 4, Portia to Dr Bellario A letter from Bellario is then (letter-packet recto). delivered to the court trying Antonio, giving his sanction to Balthazar. Finally, in the closing lines of the play, Portia reveals two letters, one puportedly from Bellario and another from an unspecified sender, and although she summarizes their contents, they will be opened by the recipients only after the play has ended. Portia’s letter to Bellario is a daring, high-risk missive. The bearer (her servant, also called Balthazar), is described as ‘ever […] honest true’ (iii.4.46), and suggestively shares his name with one of the magi, which perhaps identifies him as a particularly faithful deliverer.21 Our model of this letter was designed to have high in-built security (see Figure 13.4). Since the letter initiates a chain of disguise, we also allowed ourselves some playfulness with the letter’s shape, which mimics the standard shape of business letters in the period, yet also features internal security associated with more risky correspondence. After it has been folded, a triangle of paper cut from the writing substrate is threaded through all the panels of the folded letter to create a secure lock. A careful recipient would know if this letter had been tampered with.22 The on-stage model was made using paper from Fabriano, and the seal was impressed with 20 

Early printed texts all read ‘Mantua’, but Shakespeare later connects Bellario to Padua, where there was a famous school of law, so many editors have emended accordingly. Arden3 retains Mantua as ‘a probable instance of Shakespearean confusion’ (The Merchant of Venice, ed. by Drakakis, p. 322), without suggesting that Portia herself may have been the source of confusion. 21  See The Merchant of Venice, ed. by Drakakis, p. 164. Balthazar was the name assigned to this magus in the sixth century. 22  See the letter being made at 8:04 in Dambrogio, ‘Letterlocking: Tomaso di Levrieri’s Triangle Locks’.

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a replica of Shakespeare’s own signet,23 made for us by MIT graduate student Michael Christiansen. Letter no. 5 testifies that Balt­hazar — Portia in disguise — is capable of participating in the legal proceedings between Shylock and Antonio. A sheet of Chancery paper Figure 13.5. Letter no. 5, Dr Bellario to the Court opening out into a land(letter-packet verso). scape rather than portrait shape (i.e., wider than it is tall when the letter is being read), this letter was made to look like a cross between a letter and a legal document, and it echoes typical Venetian letterlocking styles of the sixteenth century (see Figure 13.5). It also bore marks of extreme urgency, in particular a ‘hangman’s noose’ on the address panel, used in early modern Europe to denote a matter of life and death (visually represented in case the bearer was illiterate). The seal was applied haphazardly, as if the writer was in a rush when locking the letter. In order to experiment with the potential of letters to be heard, for this model we used paper sized with gelatine,24 acquired from paper-maker and historian Timothy Barrett.25 Thanks to the gelatine sizing, this sheet made a louder crackling sound when brandished; not only does this give the letter more of a presence on stage, it aurally picks up on a line which claims that Balthazar and Bellario ‘turned o’er many books together’ (iv.1.154). The letter’s own material voice thus provides a papery soundtrack to this reassuring claim. The penultimate letter, said to be from Bellario, promises to reveal Portia’s plot after characters have regrouped off-stage, while the final letter (which is certainly sealed, v.1.275) will deliver Antonio the good news that three of 23 

Or rather, the ‘WS’ design now commonly identified as such. See Hewitt, ‘Shakespeare’s World in 100 Objects’. 24  Sizing paper involves the application of a glutinous substance to increase the substrate’s resistance to the penetration of liquids. 25  Barrett, of the Uni­ver­sity of Iowa’s Center for the Book, makes this paper specifically to replicate the thinness and strength of early modern paper.

Locked Letters as Props in the Early Modern Theatre

his supposedly sunken trading ships ‘Are richly come to harbour suddenly’ (v.1.277). The precise contents of these letters are never revealed, and the source of letter no. 7 is deliberately withheld by Portia: ‘You shall not know by what strange accident / I chanced upon this letter’ (v.1.278–79). Both letters were made to resemble the common ‘tuck and seal’ letter of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (our stage-packets were actually modelled on the correspondence of a real sixteenth-century Venetian, Tomaso di Levrieri). In other words, formed into one of the most ubiquitous letterlocking styles of the early modern period, they give no material clues as to their contents (see Figure 13.6).26

241

Figure 13.6. Letter no.6, Dr Bellario to Bassanio (same locking method used for letter no.7).

Some Conclusions Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume distinguish ‘performance analysis’, the study of a single particular historical performance, and ‘production analysis’, an ‘interpretation of the text specifically aimed at understanding it as a performance vehicle’. In the latter, what should emerge is a sense of multiple possibilities in actual performance. […] The object is to clarify possible meanings and effects, primarily for readers, critics, and theatregoers, secondarily for the interested director. The result should be improved understanding of the performance potentialities of the play at issue.27

This essay records an attempt to ‘rematerialize’ a series of props (to use Andrew Sofer’s suggestive term), using modern material instantiations of fictional stage 26  27 

See Dambrogio, ‘Letterlocking: “Tuck and Seal”’. Milhous and Hume, Producible Interpretation, p. 10.

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letters to demonstrate new potentials for production analysis. Our findings could lead in a number of directions. First, we hope this study will encourage theatre practitioners to draw on letterlocking to explore the materiality of letters in future productions. Creative, archivally informed work on epistolary props presents new interpretive space on stage, and could influence other media, too. Would a theatre audience really be able to see gold flecks embedded in sealing wax? Perhaps not, and perhaps the attractive brightness of red seals and ribbons is the best we can hope to convey at present.28 If repeating the experiment, we would make larger models more clearly visible at a distance, but historically accurate, correctly scaled models could certainly be shown in close detail in film or television productions, and in more intimate venues. Focusing on letters and letterlocking is also suggestive about literary themes in the play. Letters are already highly symbolic in a play so insistently focused on currency and exchange, whether financial, marital, sexual, or emotional. Locked letters offer rich potential to emblematize Shakespeare’s themes of interiority, dishonesty, and the difficulties of gleaning true character from external signals. Nobody who sends a letter in this play seems to be transparent or honest about their self-presentation. In particular, physically confronted with Portia’s role in the last four of the play’s seven letter exchanges, one notices the extent to which her epistolary agency is emblematic of the shift in power dynamics. Letter nos 4 to 7 expand the multiple locations in the play where emissaries and subterfuge become necessary in order to achieve action. After giving away her overt sovereignty in Belmont, Portia’s agency and authority is increasingly dependent on layered forms of communication. Taking on the disguise of a male lawyer is the most obvious of these, but her ability to manipulate the social codes of epistolary circulation is almost as important. We began to wonder whether Portia had in fact written all four of these letters, using forgery and fabrication in nos 5, 6, and 7 as covert modes of agency. If so — and the question necessarily remains open — Portia herself must understand and actively draw on the conventions of letterlocking to make her forgeries pass as authentic. As this paper shows, characters in The Merchant of Venice play with, pay attention to, and draw attention to the materiality of their correspondence. Understanding the historical practice of letterlocking, and exploring its modern creative potential, can help us unfold their meaning. 28 

Cf. Newman’s comment that, although ‘the letters and images displayed by seal-impressions would not have been visible from a distance, their bright colours made them perhaps the most stageable material aspect of dramatic documents’. Newman, ‘“A seale of Virgin waxe at hand’, p. 99.

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Acknowledgements We would like to thank Ayako Letizia and Annie Dunn at MIT Libraries for helping us make the letter-props. Caitlin Jenkins of King’s College London worked on several connected projects as a King’s Undergraduate Research Fellow. She made a large batch of ‘locked model giveaways’ (replicas of early modern letters) which were handed out at conferences where Daniel Smith discussed some ideas in this article: ‘The Material History of Writing’, Uni­ver­sity of Kent, 25–26 May 2017; and ‘English: Shared Futures’, Newcastle, 5–7 July 2017. Our thanks to conference participants and organizers, in particular Catherine Richardson and Rachel Willie. Diana Hender­son and Erica Zimmer’s enthusiasm and continued discussions made our collaboration on the Merchant in Venice a great pleasure. The field of letterlocking was initially developed by Dambrogio and first introduced at the annual conference of the American Institute for Conservation and Historic and Artistic Works (AIC), Minneapolis, MN, 2005. The Unlocking History research group was formed by Dambrogio and Smith in 2014 and is building a series of free online resources at [accessed 18 January 2019]. Letter images are taken from the Unlocking History Materials Collection, Cambridge, MA, and London, ‘Shakespeare Props’ file, and reproduced courtesy of Unlocking History. Models made by Jana Dambrogio based on original research by Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith. Photographs by Ayako Letizia.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts Cam­bridge, MA, MIT, Unlocking History Material Collection: Shakespeare Prop Archive Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.190

Primary Sources Digital facsimile of the Bodleian First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Arch. G c. 7, [accessed 6 February 2018] Gesta Grayorum ([1688], Wing C444) Shakespeare, William, King Lear: Parallel Text Edition, ed.  by René Weis, 2nd  edn (London: Routledge, 2013) —— , The Merchant of Venice, ed. by John Drakakis, 3rd edn (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010) —— , Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published according to the True Originall Copies (1623, STC 22273)

Secondary Works Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things, ed.  by Arjun Appadurai (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1986), pp. 3–63 Bruster, Douglas, ‘The Dramatic Life of Objects in the Early Modern Theatre’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern England, ed. by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002), pp. 67–98 Craig, Hugh, and Brett Greatley-Hirsh, Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2017) Dambrogio, Jana, ‘Letterlocking: The First Letterlocking Video. The Triangle Lock, Italy (2005)’, YouTube, 12 August 2015 [accessed 10 January 2019]  —— , ‘Letterlocking: Tomaso di Levrieri’s Triangle Locks and Tuck and Seal, Venice (1586–1590)’,  Vimeo, 28 October 2016  [accessed 10 January 2019] —— , ‘Letterlocking: “Tuck and Seal”, Italy (1580s)’,  YouTube, 28 June 2014 [accessed 10 January 2019] Dambrogio, Jana, and Daniel Starza Smith, ‘Early Modern Letterlocking Variations (1450s–1640s)’, Vimeo [accessed 10 January 2019] —— , Letterlocking.org  [accessed 10 January 2019] —— , Letterlocking, mono­graph in preparation.

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Dambrogio, Jana, and Heather Wolfe, ‘Letterlocking: “Pleated” Letter with Wrapped Silk Floss, England and Europe (1580s)’, YouTube, 19 June 2014 [accessed10 January 2019]  Daybell, James, The Material Letter in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Green, Juana, ‘Properties of Marriage: Proprietary Conflict and the Calculus of Gender in Epicoene’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern England, ed. by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002), pp. 261–87 Harris, Jonathan Gil, and Natasha Korda, ‘Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern England, ed. by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002), pp. 1–34 Henderson, Diana E., ‘The Merchant in Venice: Shylock’s Unheimlich Return’, Multi­ cultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation, and Performance, 15 (2017), 161–76 [accessed 4 March 2019] Hewitt, Peter, ‘Shakespeare’s World in 100 Objects: Number 64, Shakespeare’s signet ring’,  [accessed 6 February 2018] McInnis, David, Roslyn Knutson, and Matthew Steggle, eds, Lost Plays Database (Uni­ver­ sity of Melbourne, 2012–) [accessed 21 January 2019] Milhous, Judith, and Robert D. Hume, Producible Interpretation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uni­ver­sity Press, 1985) Newman, Harry, ‘“A  seale of Virgin waxe at hand | Without impression there doeth stand”: Hymenal Seals in English Renaissance Literature’, Lives and Letters, 4 (2012), 94–113 Sofer, Andrew, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: Uni­ver­sity of Michigan Press, 1991) Stern, Tiffany, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) Stewart, Alan, and Heather Wolfe, eds, Letterwriting in Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004) Stewart, Alan, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008) Wolfe, Heather, ‘“Neatly sealed, with silk, and Spanish wax or otherwise’: The Practice of Letter-Locking with Silk Floss in Early Modern England’, in In the Prayse of Writing: Early Modern Manu­script Studies. Essays in Honour of Peter Beal, ed. by S. P. Cerasano and Steven W. May (London: British Library, 2012), pp. 169–89

Reception

Remediating Sixteenth-Century Drama: Gismond of Salerne in Script and Print Tamara Atkin

A

t key moments in the mid-Tudor Inns of the Court play Gismond of Salerne, we repeatedly encounter hands bearing symbolic objects. It is by handwritten letters that the play’s lovers are able to meet, and it is hands that cause their deaths. But various other hands have made possible the play’s textual transmission. From the scribes who produced manu­script copies to the revisers who corrected them, and the compositors and other pressmen who produced printed copies to the early readers who annotated them, the textual history of Gismond is one that has been mediated by touch. ‘Hand’, to borrow Andrew Piper’s phrase, ‘was there’.1 In this essay, I explore the way these different hands have shaped the textual and material reception of this play, arguing that its remediation from script to print offers a way of understanding its legibility as drama. In their 1999 book Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin explain that all ‘media oscillate between immediacy and hypermediacy, between transparency and opacity’.2 Their meaning is neatly exemplified by an image of the ghostly remnant of an employee’s hands in the digitization of Philip Henry Delamotte’s A Progressive Drawing Book for Beginners (1869) for Google Books (see Figure 14.1). In Delamotte’s Drawing Book, it is the instinctively erasive nature of print techno­logy that produces images of hands that might ‘pass’ as drawings; in turn, the verisimilitude of these ‘drawings’ is motivated by an impulse to get past the limits of representation and achieve ‘the real’. But when the book — a handbook of hands designed to teach the user how to draw — is opened and held, the uncanny relationship between the real and the represented forces the viewer 1  2 

Piper, ‘Out of Touch’. Reprinted from Book Was There, p. 15. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, p. 18.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 249–266 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116455 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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Figure 14.1. From Google Books digitization of Philip Henry Delamotte, A Progressive Drawing Book for Beginners (London: Macmillan, 1869), pp. 40–41. Digitized 7 September 2006, from a copy in the Bodleian Library.

to acknowledge and perhaps even delight in the medium. In the act of vanishing, the hand (printed, but disguised to look drawn; sketched but intended to be lifelike) cannot but emphasize its twice-mediated state. The obtrusion of the photo­graphed hands of the library employee in the digital version of the book further underscores what Bolter and Grusin would call ‘the logic of hypermediacy’, by rendering starkly visible the many layers of representation on which the image is constructed. I begin this essay with a definition of the term ‘remediation’, since it serves as the cornerstone of my examination of the various textual and material versions of Gismond of Salerne (see Table 14.1), an Inns of Court play first performed before Queen Elizabeth I between 1566 and 1568. The three manu­script witnesses are all anonymous, but the ‘newly reuiued’ printed text ascribes each of the play’s five acts to ‘Rod. Staf.’ (Roderick Stafford), ‘Hen. No’ (Henry Noel), ‘G. Al’ (never satisfactorily identified), ‘Ch. Hat.’ (Christopher Hatton), and ‘R. W.’ (Robert Wilmot). The 1591 quarto and its 1592 variant also announce their relationship to the original performance with a note on the title-page that states, ‘COMPILED BY THE GEN- | tlemen of the Inner Temple, and by them

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Table 14.1. Textual witnesses to Gismond of Salerne. H

London, BL, MS Hargrave 205, fols 9r–22 r

Copied c. 1568 Complete manu­script witness. A commonplace book cum lexical compilation, this manu­script also contains (on fols 1r–8v) Henry Howard’s translation of Book IV of the Aeneid.

V

Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.198, fols 10r–12v

A substantial manu­script fragment Copied c. 1570 containing most of the play’s two final scenes as well all of its extra-textual apparatus, including: an epilogue, three sonnets to the Queen’s maids, an argument, and a character list. A collection of prose, verse and music. The section in which the play fragment occurs also contains verse by Thomas Churchyard and Robert Davy.

L

London, BL, MS Lansdowne 786

Complete manu­script witness. The sole text in the manu­script.

Q1a

The Tragedie of Tancred and Gismund, STC 25764

Revision of the original play by Robert Printed 1591 Wilmot, recast into blank verse

Q1b

STC 25764

A variant of the 1591 edition, printed the following year

Copied late six­ teenth/early seven­teenth century

Printed 1592

pre | sented before her MAIESTIE’.3 Though closer to the original moment of performance, the manu­script copies make no similar announcement and instead articulate their status as ‘play’ by reproducing, quite carefully, the paratextual apparatus which even by the 1560s had come to be closely associated with printed editions of ‘closet’ drama, by which I mean plays intended for private reading rather than any kind of performance. Like Jasper Heywood’s Troas (printed three times before 1563), Alexander Neville’s Oedipus (1563, STC 22225), or the further five translations of Seneca printed during the 1560s, the manu­script versions of Gismond contain a number of paratexts: a prose argument; dedicatory verses (here a series of sonnets to the Queen’s maids); and a character list. The careful insertion of what are, essentially, print features makes 3 

R. W., the Tragedie of Tancred and Gismund, title-page.

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Figure 14.2a. London, BL, MS Hargrave 205, fol. 9r. © British Library Board.

Remediating Sixteenth-Century Drama

Figure 14.2b. London, BL, MS Lansdowne 786, fol. 7r. © British Library Board. Note the very different presentational logic, apparent in the way these two manu­scripts treat the start of the play.

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it ­possible the common exemplar was a no-longer extant printed text.4 But it seems more likely that these copies were made to look like printed playbooks. Their legibility as drama is therefore not a consequence of any putative relationship to performance, but rather due to their replication of print conventions for the publication of Senecan tragedy. Of course, unlike the printed playbooks on which these manu­scripts seem to have been modelled, Gismond was written for performance. But by borrowing the kinds of paratexts associated with printed editions of Senecan drama, the manu­scripts remediate Gismond as a ‘closet’ text, authenticated as a literary rather than a theatrical production. So even as its textual survival is most likely a consequence of its performance — copied after, and perhaps as a record of its original presentation before the Queen — in its material expression in manu­script form, the play is recast as an object that has forgotten its theatrical past, designed only for a future in someone’s study. So far, I have suggested that the manu­script witnesses are similar enough to be treated as a single entity, distinct from the later printed version of the text. This is true, but on closer inspection it is clear that while the two earliest witnesses were clearly copied from the same source, the later Lansdowne copy differs in some significant ways. The earliest manu­script, Hargrave 205, is a folio volume, copied in a single, neat secretary hand (see Figure 14.2a). The play is the second item (fols 9r–22r), copied after ‘P Virgilij Muronis Æneudis Liber Quartos Britannico Sermono Donatus per Comitem S’ (i.e., Henry Howard, earl of Surrey’s translation of Book iv of the Aeneid); the rest of the volume (fols 22v–178r) is a commonplace-cum-lexical compilation. The play occupies a central column of around 100 mm, with the text aligned to the left. The writing area is unruled, but the pages have been folded to indicate the left margin. Like the Folger fragment, the title, ‘The Tragedie of gism | gismond | of | Salerne’, occurs after the text of play, here at the top of fol. 21v, which also contains the three sonnets to the Queen’s maids. The argument and character list, which appear on the facing recto, are also treated as terminal paratexts as they are in the Folger fragment. Both these witnesses also treat the play’s final act as three scenes. In contrast, the play is the only item in Lansdowne 786 and is copied in an italic hand into a carefully ruled area measuring 66 mm × 147 mm at the centre of each page (see Figure 14.2b). The left and right margins are each divided into two columns: scene divisions occur in the furthermost left column, speech prefixes are copied in either of the two innermost columns, and stage 4 

On ‘lost’ plays and survival rates, particularly for the later period, see McInnis and Steggle, ‘Introduction’, in Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England; and Steggle, Digital Humanities and the Lost Drama, pp. 1–28.

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directions appear in the outer right column. The play is prefaced by a title-page, with the title ‘GISMOND OF SALERN: in Loue’ (the last two words may be a later addition); the sonnets to the Queen’s maids (fols 3r–4r, each occupying its own folio); a ruled, but otherwise blank folio (fol. 4v); the argument (fols 5r–5v); another ruled but otherwise blank folio (fol. 6r); and a character list (fol. 6v). The play proper then begins on fol. 7r, and, unlike the Hargrave and Folger copies, the final act is divided into four scenes. One obvious consequence of these changes is that the later Lansdowne manu­ script — the only manu­script witness to this play to be copied after the printed quartos — does a rather better job of imitating print conventions than the two earlier witnesses. It follows the standard arrangement of printed playbooks by beginning with its paratextual matter, before proceeding to the text itself. So, like the printed quartos of the play, which are prefaced by a dedicatory epistle (sigs *2r–*2v), addresses to both the author and the reader (sigs *3r–*4v), commendatory verses (sigs A1r–A1v), and not one but two arguments (sigs A1v–A2v), the Lansdowne copy carefully curates the textual encounter; the reader’s entry to the text is shaped by the paratexts that precede it. By contrast, the back position used for the title, sonnets, argument, and character list in the Hargrave and Folger copies is uncommon in early printed drama; terminal character lists can be found in John Skelton’s Magnificence (1530?, STC 22607) and Henry Medwall’s Nature (1530–34?, STC 17779), but there is no precedent for placing the other paratexts in this position.5 So if the play’s two earliest witnesses were copied to look like printed playbooks, then the later Lansdowne manu­script acts a corrective, reproducing more accurately the form and layout of early printed drama.

Figure 14.3. London, BL, MS Hargrave 205, fol 21v. © British Library Board. Detail showing lines 6–8 of the last of three sonnets to the Queen’s maids. The text can be transcribed as follows: The faithfull erle, beside the like request doeth wth wishe those wealfull wightes, whom ye embrace, the cōstant truthe that lyued wthin his Brest.6 5  Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, STC 23081) would, however, go on to adopt a similar organizational logic. 6  Here and elsewhere in this chapter my transcriptions retain the abbreviations and other forms adopted by the manu­scripts.

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The idea that Lansdowne 786 represents the improved text is also evident in the striking number of textual variants in Hargrave 205 that have been corrected to agree with the later manu­script. In Figure 14.3, a revising hand distinct from the copyist has altered the text: ‘wth’ has been underlined and amended to agree with the reading ‘wishe’ preserved in Lansdowne 786 (see Figure 14.3). There are numerous other examples that follow suit. Together they suggest that whoever revised the Hargrave text had access to the Lansdowne copy or its exemplar and that they considered it to be the better version. But while these changes clearly amount to an attempt to perfect the text, the Hargrave reviser’s careful amendments also function to make visible the manu­script as medium and point to the inevitable failure of all textual witnesses to offer unmediated access to play as performance. For even as scribes and printers developed practices that were eventually adopted as conventions for making texts recognizable as drama, those very same conventions — speech prefixes, scene divisions, stage directions, and so on — served to highlight the logic of hypermediacy on which all textual iterations of drama must rely. At precisely the moment text becomes legible as play, it cannot help but encode in its material presence the distance it has travelled from any historical or even putative moment of performance. A similar point can be made about the Folger fragment of the play, which seems to have been copied around the same time as the Hargrave manu­script version, and with which it agrees almost exactly.7 The fragment comprises the play’s two final scenes, which are then followed — as they are in the Hargrave manu­script — by the epilogue, the sonnets to the Queen’s maids, the argument, and the character list. Though it has never been identified as such, it is clearly the fragment reproduced by Isaac Reed in his 1825 revised edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays, and described by him there as transcribed from ‘an ancient MS. taken out of a chest of papers formerly belonging to Mr Powell, father in law to the author of Paradise Lost’.8 Evidently lost for a number of years — when Hazlitt brought out a fourth edition of Old Plays in 1874 he bemoaned, ‘where the Powell MS. may be now, the editor cannot say’9 — it was listed for sale by Bernard Quaritch in an 1896 catalogue and at some point acquired by the liberal politician Charles Milnes Gaskell, on whose death it was purchased 7 

A terminus a quo for the copying of the Folger fragment is suggested by the inclusion elsewhere in same section of the manu­script of a poem about the tomb of Charles Valois; he died in 1574. On this and the other items in this manu­script, see below. 8  A Select Collection, ed. by Reed, ii, 160. 9  A Select Collection, ed. by Hazlitt, vii, 3.

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by Henry Folger for a sum of £285.10 A quarto-sized collection of prose, verse, and music, Folger V.a.198 is made up of four distinct sections that probably came together for the first-time c. 1809 when the volume was bound, gilded, and interleaved.11 The Gismond fragment is the first item in the third section, which was copied in its entirety by the same accomplished, possibly professional hand. Having examined its paper, watermarks, and the collation of its leaves, Janet Wright Starner has concluded that unlike the other three sections in the manu­script, the integrity of the third section as a single unit is probable.12 What is less certain is whether some gatherings have been lost; it is at least plausible that earlier in its history this section of the manu­script contained a full copy of the play. So though now a fragment, it may once have represented a further, complete witness to Gismond. In its present, fragmentary state, the excerpt is unperformable; its status as play is clearly a consequence of the legibility of its formal features rather than its relation to performance of any kind. Beginning abruptly, towards the end of the penultimate scene — the fragment begins midway through Gismond’s speech, with the line ‘But in this brest if any sparke remaine | Of this dere Loue’ — the text makes no sense as drama and is only discernable as such because its layout conforms to the expectations of dramatic mise-en-page: like the Hargrave copy, the text is copied in a single central column, scene divisions are centred, and speech-prefixes and stage directions inserted in the left margin. Moreover, as a fragment that takes its place in a poetic miscellany, the role of the play’s paratexts is violently reconstituted. In contrast to the Lansdowne manu­script, where the sonnets, argument, and character list operate — to borrow Genette’s termino­logy — as a ‘vestibule’, a threshold or portal through which the reader encounters the play, in the Folger manu­script their terminal position denies them this function.13 The same point is of course true of the Hargrave manu­ script, but the effect is heightened in MS V.a.198, where the fragmentary nature of the playtext emphasizes the failure of these paratexts to introduce the play. 10 

In his 1896 sale catalogue, Quaritch describes it as ‘formerly in the possession of [ Joseph] Haslewood, by whom some of the pieces [including the Gismond fragment] were printed in Brydges Censura Literaria’. See A Catalogue of Illuminated and Historical Manu­scripts, p. 15. Henry Folger later acquired it through the London bookseller Wheldon & Wesley, who purchased it a Hodgson’s sale on 29 February 1924. 11  Martin Wiggins is therefore wrong to suggest that this three-leaf extract was later bound into a composite volume. See Wiggins, ii, 22–26. 12  Starner, ‘“Jacke on Both Sides”’, p. 58. 13  Genette, Paratexts, p. 2.

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In fact, copied after the play, the sonnets, argument, and even the character list more closely resemble the other poetic items in this section of the manu­script, and in this way are remediated as the threshold not to the play but rather to the material copied after it, which mostly comprise short lyric poems, rarely occupying more than a single leaf. Put another way, the play’s paratexts do not pave the way for the play, but rather the poetic material that follows it. So, shorn of its beginning and its paratexts, the play fragment is denied both the theatrical and biblio­graphical contexts that might give it meaning. In MS V.a.198 at least, the play quite clearly is not the thing. That Gismond was ever copied into the pages that became the third section of MS V.a.198 presents something of a mystery. It is quite unlike the other items contained in the third section, none of which can be described as dramatic or quasi-dramatic (see Table 14.2). Accounting for the miscellany’s contents, Starner has described ‘their preoccupation with self-control’;14 certainly they adopt a similar Protestant outlook, and the anti-papal rhetoric in poems like ‘In Katherinam Mediccam Galliae Regina’ (The French Queen Catherine de’Medici) and ‘Tumulus Karoli ix. Valesii’ (The Tomb of King Charles IX) clearly seeks to link tyranny with the loss of self-restraint. Gismond of Salerne shares some of these concerns. Like the account of Charles Valois — ‘Contemptor superum, fex Regum, dedecus orbis’ (contemptuous of the gods, maker of kings, shame of the world) — the play offers a critique of the uncontrolled power associated with autocratic rule, and linking unbridled emotion with effeminacy, Tancred, as Curtis Perry has noted, is presented as an effeminate tyrant in ways that seem to evoke what Jessica Winston has described as Elizabeth I’s ‘absolutist tendencies’.15 Here then is one possible context for Gismond’s transcription in this manu­ script: ripe with possible political resonance, the play — like the other items in the manu­script — seems to engage the broader constitutional anxieties of the day even as it avoids direct topical allusion. These concerns are shared by a number of additional items, now shelved as Montreal, Quebec, Osler Library of the History of Medicine, MS 7588, that the bookseller Quaritch seems to have removed from the manu­script sometime before March 1916 when they were purchased by the Canadian physician Sir William Osler (d. 1919). Attributed in part to Roger Marbeck, a noted classical scholar, provost of Oriel College (1565–66), and later chief of Elizabeth’s royal physicians, these items were presumably excised from their original manu­ 14  15 

Starner, ‘“Jacke on Both Sides”’, p. 59. Winston, Lawyers at Play, p. 209; Perry, ‘Gismond of Salerne’.

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Table 14.2. Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.198, section 3 contents (modern foliation). 1 Fragment of Gismonde of Salerne, including part of the penultimate scene, all of the final scene, the epilogue, sonnets to the Queen’s maids, the argument, and a character list

fols 10r–12v

2 Two English poems by Robert Davy

fol. 13r–v

3 A poem by Thomas Churchyard on the reception of the Queen by Leicester

fol. 13v

4 A sonnet by Robert Davy

fol. 14r

5 An anonymous poem, ‘Jacke on Both Sides’, perhaps added in a later hand

fol. 14r

6 An anonymous Latin poem, ‘In Bibliam sacram & novum testamentum’

fol. 14v

7 Further verse by Davy

fol. 15r

8 A Latin poem ‘In Katherinam Mediccam Galliae Regina’, with an English translation

fol. 15v

9 A Latin poem, ‘Tumulus Karoli ix. Valesii’, incomplete (possibly by Richard Huett)

fol. 15v

10 The four final lines of a Latin poem attributed to ‘Richus Huettus’44

fol. 16r

11 Two poems, ‘The Lordes Praier’ and ‘The Beelief ’

fol. 16v

12 Further meditative verse by Davy

fols 17r–18v

13 A poem, ‘The thoughts of men doe daily chaunge’

fol. 19r–v

14 A ‘Dittie’ to the Queen by Ludowick Lloyd (‘to the Tune of Welsh Sydanen’) fols 19v–20r 15 A ‘Dittie’ by Davy

fol. 20v

16 A Latin acrostic

fols 21r–v

17 Poems in Latin and English

fols 23r–v

17 Further verses by Davy (including the music for one at fol. 25r)

fols 24r–26 r

18 Further English and Latin poems

fols 26r–28r

19 A poem, ‘Of loue and Fear’, incomplete

fol. 28v

script context because of their particular appeal to Osler, a known collector of material related to the history of medicine. But when imaginatively reinserted back into their original manu­script context, they help to flesh-out that manu­ script’s compositional logic.16Comprising chiefly Latin poems, including verses 16 

Since one or more leaves have been removed between fols 15v and 16r, it is hard to say if these lines conclude the poem ‘Tumulus Karolo ix. Valesii’ or if they belong to another poem altogether. On this point, see below, n. 16.

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to the Queen, on Leicester, and on Burleigh, entreating her to marry the earl, these additional items contribute to the sense that the manu­script may have been compiled in response to and as a commentary on the succession crisis of the 1560s. But they also seem to confirm the manu­script’s identity as the work of an Oxford man, thereby usefully extending what we know about the play’s early reception as an Inns of Court text. Most of the names associated with the manu­script have an Oxford connection: Marbeck was elected as a student of Christ Church in 1552; the Robert Davy who wrote much of the manu­script’s English verse is most likely the same Robert Davy who matriculated at Uni­ ver­sity College in 1583 and was made a fellow of Merton College a year later (though the Robert Davy who held property in Barnes and South Wales, and who may have obtained a Welsh borough seat in 1571, is also plausible);17 and the Richard Huett who contributed the verses on fol.16r is probably Richard Hewett (Huet) who was a fellow of All Souls’ in 1577. Moreover, at least one poem was written at Oxford. ‘Onus Angliae’ (England’s burden), which appears at fols 4v–5v in Osler 7588, is described there as ‘Oxoniae evulgatum Ao. Dni. 1577’ (published in Oxford in 1577) by ‘incerto authore’ (unknown author). Since there were no Oxford presses active during the 1570s, it seems likely that the act of publication suggested by this note is one made possible by scribal labour, possibly by the ‘G. C.’ whose initials occur on fol. 7r of the Osler manu­script.18 The published copy, in other words, is the manu­script — now dismembered — in which the poem is contained. 17  Only two of the poems ascribed to Davy in Folger V.a.198 are also found elsewhere: ‘The angry man dothe frett’ (fols 24r–24v) and ‘Of conuenient Care’ (fols 13r–13v). ‘The angry man dothe frett’ was added in a contemporary hand on the final verso (fol. 171v) of Cardiff, National Library of Wales, MS 23202B, an abridged copy of Humphrey Lhuyd’s English version of Brut y Tywysogion. Though the Davy who acquired a Pembroke borough seat in 1571 seems to have lived in London, it is none the less tempting to attribute the occurrence of ‘The angry man doth frett’ in MS 23202B to this Welsh connection. A Welsh context might also explain the inclusion in Folger V.a.198 of Ludowick Lloyd’s ditty to the tune of Welsh Sydanen (fols 19v–20r). Lloyd (c. 1545–1610) was a minor court poet of Welsh extraction. A number of Lloyd’s early works are dedicated to Sir Christopher Hatton, one of Gismond’s five authors. By contrast, the musical setting that survives for ‘Of conuenient Care’ (fols 13r–13v), bolsters the case for the Oxford Davy. William Byrd’s music for Davy’s poem is preserved in a partbook copied by Robert Dow in the 1580s (Oxford, Christ Church College, MS Mus. 984–98, no. 73). Dow was elected to fellowship of All Souls’ in 1575, making him an exact contemporary of Huett; he was Bachelor of Civil Law in 1582, a year before the Oxford Davy matriculated. On Lloyd, see below and also Harper, ‘“A Dittie to the tune of Welsh Sydannen”’. 18  The Latin poem copied in Osler 7588 on fols 5v and 7r (fols 6r and 6v are blanks) is signed ‘per me G. C.’ It is unclear whether the act ascribed is one of copying or composition.

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A further tantalizing piece of evidence both enhances and complicates what is known about the Folger fragment and its relationship to the other manu­script witnesses of Gismond of Salerne. Catchwords appear on fols 12r, 15v, 19r, 19v, 21r, 23r, and 24r.19 Catchwords are common in contemporary printed books, so their occurrence here is further evidence of scribal engagement with print practice. However, since they here occur erratically, on rectos as well as versos, and within the pages of individual quires, they have no obvious compositional function. 20 Instead, these catchwords indicate the continuation of the text overleaf and function like a modern ‘P.T.O.’ or ‘over’. So, where catchwords in contemporary printed books — including the 1591 Gismund quarto and its 1592 variant — are designed to aid both the compositor and the binder, here their inclusion serves the reader.21 For instance, in Folger V.a.198 ‘The Argument’ to Gismond begins immediately after the third sonnet to Queen’s maids, on the bottom half of fol. 12r. Since it cannot be made to fit on the remainder of that page, the catchword ‘secret’ appears in the bottom right corner, directing the reader to turn over; the text then continues at the top of fol. 12v: ‘secrett Loue, and he not espied of them, was vpon the sight’. In contrast, in Hargrave 205, the argument and character list occupy the whole of fol. 22 r, so there is no need for a catchword. In fact, in Hargrave 205 some care seems to have been taken in order to fit the play’s paratexts to the page: the epilogue occupies the bottom half of fol. 21r, and the sonnets to the Queen’s maids are copied on a single page, fol. 21v. While Hargrave 205 need not be the exemplar, one possibility is that the Folger text was copied from a version that adopted a similar layout.22 19 

They also appear on fols 4v, 5r, 5v, 7r, 7v, and 24r of Osler 7588. While they cannot have been of any particular use when the volume was assembled, they now reveal that one or more leaves were removed between the present fols 15 and 16. The catchword at the bottom of fol. 15v reads ‘barbaris’, but the verse on fol. 16r begins ‘Sic felix fortis […]’. In its present state, it is unclear how many leaves have been removed, and since the missing leave(s) do not appear in the Osler manu­script, it is hard to say whether the four lines of verse on fol. 16r that are signed ‘Richus Huettus’ complete the poem on Charles IX’s tomb, which begins on fol. 15v, or whether they belong to another poem altogether. All that can be said with any certainty is that the current leaves 15 and 16 are from the same stock of paper and share a watermark that is most like Briquet 10787. I am indebted to Abbie Weinberg at the Folger for her assistance in identifying the watermark. 21  On the regionally specific use of catchwords, see Sayce, ‘Compositorial Practices’. 22  Space does not permit further discussion here, but comparison of letterforms and other paleo­graphical features makes it plausible that the Folger fragment (and indeed the whole of the third section of MS V.a.198) was copied by the same hand responsible for Hargrave 205. See Appendix 14.1 for photo­graphic samples. 20 

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Figure 14.4. Detail showing printed and handwritten commonplace marks on sig. B1v of BL 161.k.71, a copy of Tancred and Gismund (London: Thomas Scarlet for R. Robinson 1592, STC 25764a). © British Library Board.

Its catchwords therefore articulate the failure to perfectly replicate the source’s mise en page, and in so doing lead ‘us to become aware of the new medium as a medium’.23 By drawing attention to the action of turning the page, they demand that we regard the book in our hands rather than the performance it seeks to evoke. In this short chapter, I have sought to show that it is the process of remediation that makes drama legible, but its legibility always and inevitably effaces the very idea of performance it is designed to articulate. Nowhere is this more evident than in a single copy of the 1592 variant quarto, now in the British Library, which has been marked by one early user for commonplacing (see Figure 14.4). Following the cue suggested by the book’s printed commonplace marks, this reader has added their own bespoke selections, pointing to forms 23 

Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, p. 18.

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of use suggested by but not limited to those encoded by its printed form. At the same time, subjecting this printed copy of the play to such use points to a kind of studied absorption in the book as reading matter and highlights the successful recasting of the text as lines to be written, read, printed, and rewritten, rather than to be performed in hall, court, or on the stage.24 Early modern readers and users of plays are rarely so obliging, but this reader has left his or her impression on the pages, even as we turn them. Hand — theirs, ours, and the myriad unknown — was, we might say, there.

24 

On the commonplacing of plays, see, for instance, Lesser and Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet’; and Estill, Dramatic Extracts. For a history commonplace markers in printed plays, see Hunter, ‘The Marking of Sententiae’.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts London, BL, MS Hargrave 205 —— , MS Lansdowne 786 Montreal, QC, McGill University, Osler Library of the History of Medicine, MS 7588 Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.198

Primary Sources Delamotte, Philip Henry, A Progressive Drawing Book for Beginners (London: Macmillan, 1869); original from Oxford Uni­ver­sity; digitized 7 September 2006 for Google Books A Select Collection of Old Plays, ed. by Isaac Reed, 2nd edn, 12 vols (London: Dodsley, 1821) A  Select Collection of Old English Plays Originally Published by Robert Dodsley, ed.  by Carew W. Hazlitt, 4th edn (London: Reeves and Turner, 1874–76) Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene (1590, STC 23081) W., R., The Tragedie of Tancred and Gismund (London, 1591, STC 25764), London, BL, 161.k.71

Secondary Works Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) Estill, Laura, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manu­scripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays (Newark: Uni­ver­sity of Delaware Press, 2015) Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. by Jane Lewin (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1997) Harper, Sally, ‘“A  Dittie to the tune of Welsh Sydannen”: A  Welsh Image of Queen Elizabeth’, Renaissance Studies, 19.2 (2005), 201–28 Hunter, G.  K., ‘The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances’, The Library, 5th ser., 6.3–4 (1951), 171–88 Lesser, Zachary, and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing on Professional Plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59.4 (2008), 371–420 McInnis, David, and Matthew Steggle, eds, Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Perry, Curtis, ‘Gismond of Salerne and the Elizabethan Politics of Senecan Drama’, in Gender Matters: Discourses of Violence in Early Modern Literature and the Arts, ed. by Mara R. Wade (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), pp. 279–93 Piper, Andrew, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 2012)

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—— , ‘Out of Touch: E-Reading Isn’t Reading’, The Slate (15 November, 2012) [accessed 17 January 2017) Quaritch, Bernard, A  Catalogue of Illuminated and Historical Manu­scripts (London, 1896) Sayce, R. A., ‘Compositorial Practices and the Localization of Printed Books, 1530–1800’, The Library, 5th ser., 21.1 (1966), 1–45 Starner, Janet Wright, ‘“Jacke on Both Sides”: Appropriating Equivocation’, in Anonymity in Early Modern England: ‘What’s In A  Name?’, ed.  by Janet Wright Starner and Barbara Howard Traister, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 43–80 Steggle, Matthew, Digital Humanities and the Lost Drama of Early Modern England: Ten Case Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016) Winston, Jessica, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–1581 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2016)

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Appendix 14.1. Handwriting Samples

Appendix 14.1a. Detail from London, BL, MS Hargrave 205, fol. 21v showing ‘A Sonett of the Quenes maides’. © British Library Board.

Appendix 14.1b. Detail from Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.198, fol. 11v showing ‘A Sonett of the Quenes maides’. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Early Manu­script Reception of Shakespeare: The Formation of Shakespearean Literary Taste Jean-Christophe Mayer

W

hat did early modern readers really think of Shakespeare’s works? The short answer is that we shall never know for sure. The long answer cannot be based on theoretical or pedagogical guidebooks of the time, but on the empirical evidence gleaned from the study of manu­ scripts (commonplace books and miscellanies mainly) and annotated books. They will form the basic corpus of this essay. Yet we need to bear in mind that each reader’s receptivity is unique and that aesthetic response in particular is multifaceted. Reading readers, so to speak, always represents a challenge. As Roger Chartier argues, such acts of interpretation reflect ‘the paradox underlying any history of reading, which is that it must postulate the liberty of a practice that it can only grasp, massively, in its determinations’.1 Meaning itself is constructed, and the interpretations offered are informed by what we know of the past and are never devoid of the methodo­logical concerns and biases of the present.2 In other words, defining readers’ tastes can only be a tentative venture. Moreover, readers’ preferences were shaped over time, and the notion of taste itself is always unstable and dependent on personal as well as external factors. During the early modern period, these factors could be the availability of scholarly criticism and the development of a sphere for literary discussion in particular. There is also a basic question of scale. Compared to eighteenthcentury readers, their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century forebears were neces1  2 

Chartier, The Order of Books, p. 23. Orgel, The Reader in the Book, p. 14; and Bourne, ‘Marking Shakespeare’, p. 381.

Jean-Christophe Mayer is a Research Professor at the Centre National de la Re­c herche Scientifique (CNRS). He works at Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 267–278 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116456 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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sarily more self-reliant. They had far fewer books at their disposal — not only Shakespearean editions, but also works of criticism and literary periodicals. From a social point of view, and with a few remarkable exceptions, the business of reading Shakespeare remained logically the domain of an educated and relatively wealthy elite (lay or religious scholars, the upper middle class, and the aristocracy). Furthermore, these readers were themselves a minority within the elite at the very outset of the period. Asking what sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers thought about Shakespeare can sound like an anachronism or a question mal posée. However, if we bear in mind the caveats and parameters previously mentioned, it is possible to offer some answers. In this essay, I argue that as early as Shakespeare’s lifetime and the first part of the seventeenth century, readers were sensitive to well-constructed plots, that they were interested in characters, in the expression of emotions, and that they were able to formulate critical and aesthetic comments on Shakespeare’s works. Such interests emerged well before the classification and appreciation of plays according to neoclassical standards at the Restoration and during part of the Augustan age, and prior to the elevation of good literary taste as one of the foremost public virtues in Georgian Britain. As suggested, this first generation of readers had to forge its own way through Shakespeare’s works because it could not turn to a substantial body of critical literature on the subject — hence the need to highlight part of its largely untold and fascinating journey.

Studying Works ‘For Action’ and Aesthetic Pleasure The early modern appreciation of Shakespeare is primarily associated with the tradition of studying works ‘for action’, that is, for the sake of collecting reusable extracts, which could be especially valuable to readers who were courtiers, scholars, politicians, or lawyers and who needed to master various types of rhetoric.3 Yet, in this opening section, I contend that the cult and practice of rhetoric was not incompatible with an interest in the stylistic and aesthetic qualities of Shakespeare’s texts. My focus will be on a manu­script literary treatise, The Model of Poesy. One of the earliest and lesser-known critical responses to Shakespeare’s style can be found in William Scott’s The Model of Poesy, which Gavin Alexander, 3 

For more on this tradition, see Jardine and Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”’; Sherman, Used Books, p. 5; Orgel, The Reader in the Book, pp. 16–17.

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in his recent edition of the treatise, has dated to the summer of 1599.4 Born c. 1571 and deceased in or around 1617, Scott had read Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece (1594, STC 22345) and his Richard II (1597, STC 22307). He was a law student at the Inner Temple when he wrote this treatise, a manu­script now in the British Library (Addional MS 81083). Scott’s Model of Poesy was dedicated to Sir Henry Lee and was no doubt partly an attempt to demonstrate his talents and seek future employment or patronage as well. The title of the treatise recalls Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (1595, STC 22535), but while Sidney viewed popular theatre generally as too low for his standards, Scott judged that both of Shakespeare’s works were ‘well-penned’ (pp. 45 and 53). Much of the treatise has to do with appropriateness of style and rhetoric, but it is not devoid of literary judgement for all that. Thus, it is not surprising to find The Rape of Lucrece commended for its fitting imitatio: ‘it is as well showed in drawing the true picture of Lucretia, if it be truly drawn, as in imitating the conceit of her virtue and passion’ (p. 12). Further on in the treatise, in a passage dealing with the superabundance and excess of conceits and of copia in general, one passage of Shakespeare’s narrative poem does not fare so well. Scott quotes the line ‘The endless date of never-ending woe’, describing it as ‘a very idle, stuffed verse in that very well-penned poem of Lucrece her rape’ (p. 53). Scott is mostly focused on poetry and rhetoric, but voices his opinions on what he finds aesthetically appropriate. He is also concerned by reception. One finds him quoting Shakespeare’s Richard II to illustrate a point about the power of amplification. He cites John of Gaunt’s speech in i.3.227–32, Shorten my days thou canst with sullen sorrow, And pluck nights from me, but not lend a morrow; Thou canst help time to furrow me with age, But stop no wrinkle in his pilgrimage; Thy word is current with him for my death, But dead, thy kingdom cannot buy my breath. (p. 66)

For Scott, amplification is a means of impression on ‘the mind of the reader’: ‘Sometime our amplification is by heaping our words and, as it were, piling one phrase upon another of the same sense to double and redouble our blows that, by varying and reiterating, may work into the mind of the reader’ (ibid.). For this early modern reader, what is memorable and valuable in Shakespeare (and other authors) is what is composed in a style that is easy to memorize and that 4 

Scott, The Model of Poesy, ed. by Alexander, p. xxviii. All references will be to this modern spelling edition and will be given in the text.

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mesmerizes. The rest can or should be discarded and forgotten. Incidentally, it is obvious that Scott sees Shakespeare’s Richard II with the eyes of a reader (he expressly uses the word) and not those of a playgoer. In passing, one realises that he turns Shakespeare into a literary author.

A Taste for Good Plots Nevertheless, even the most literary-minded readers could be concerned by the quality of the plots of Shakespeare’s plays. Such concerns emerged in fact decades before neoclassical critical discourses on dramatic unities and so-called adequate plotting, as will appear through the study of a thoroughly annotated First Folio and of comments in a manu­script by Abraham Wright. Indeed, inscriptions contained in a First Folio currently held by the Uni­ver­ sity of Meisei in Japan (MR774) and dating back to 1620–30 are a case in point. The annotator was possibly a Scot by the name of William Johnstoune (we shall use this name in what follows for ease of reference). Johnstoune is pleased by the way the plot is unfolding in two of Shakespeare’s comedies: he records in the margin ‘Conceiued feares and losses happilie remoued Intricassies cleered and Ioyfullie ended’ for The Merchant of Venice, or ‘good epilogue’ for As You Like It (TLN 2760–96, and Finis).5 Conversely, the plot of Shakespeare’s sometimes grotesquely bloody tragedy of Titus Andronicus is, after a while, too much to bear and loses its credibility or dramatic truthfulness for the annotator: ‘More tragicall deuices and executions nor is credible’ is Johnstoune’s response (TLN 1238–364). A good story, one that could speak to an audience as well as to readers, was what some commended. Church of England clergyman Abraham Wright (1611–1690) is famed for the notes he took on several plays around 1640–50 and for his attention to plots.6 In a manu­script now preserved by the British Library, he commends Othello for meeting both literary and dramatic high standards in the following terms: ‘A very good play, both for lines and plot, but especially ye plot’.7 Wright himself had done some acting while at Oxford in 5 

All transcriptions of MR774 are taken from The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. by Yamada who follows Charlton Hinman’s ‘Through Line Numbers’ system (TLN). References will be given in the text. For the dating of the inscriptions, see The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. by Yamada, p. xix. 6  For the dating of this manu­script, see Estill, Dramatic Extracts, pp. 84–85. 7  London, BL, Additional MS 22608, cited in Kirsch, ‘A Caroline Commentary’, p. 257.

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the 1630s, and he was the author of a play, The Reformation, which is now lost. He was a man who, in the words of Tiffany Stern, was ‘also interested in how plays worked as performance texts for he is analysing them with an eye to the audience’.8

A Liking for Characters There is a small step between comments on an actor’s part in a play and literary interest in a character. Attachment and attention to some of Shakespeare’s characters is not necessarily synonymous with a later age — the eighteenth century and some of its character-oriented criticism. Abraham Wright’s writings, William Scott’s treatise, Johnstoune’s folio annotations, as well as Charles I’s marked-up copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio all display a liking for characters. Wright remarks disparagingly: ‘Hamlet is an indifferent part for a mad­man’.9 Far from offering a dry rhetorical interpretation of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Scott was attentive to how characters dealt with their emotions and how this was conveyed to the reader: ‘Sometime the person shall be so plunged into the passion of sorrow’, wrote Scott, that he will even forget his sorrow and seem to entertain his hardest fortune with dalliance and sport, as in the very well-penned tragedy of Richard the Second is expressed in the King and Queen whilst | They play the wantons with their woes (p. 45)

Like other annotators, Scott collapsed two different passages. In the play, Richard is talking to his cousin Aumerle. It is only in the next scene that the queen comes on stage to speak words that echo Richard’s: ‘What sport shall we devise here in this garden | To drive away the heavy thought of care?’ (iii.4.1–2). Coalescence and criss-crossing are frequent phenomena among annotators. As for the annotator of the Meisei Folio, his marginalia reveal how closely engaged Johnstoune was with Shakespeare’s characters. There are some he obviPlots were in truth of paramount importance for theatre people and all performance-oriented readers. See Stern, Documents of Performance, pp. 1–35. Some readers also kept manu­script plot lists. See, for proof that this was a lasting practice, Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS S.a.9, plots of plays and romances summarized by John Howe Chedworth, 4th baron, c. 1775. 8  Stern, Documents of Performance, p. 8. 9  Kirsch, ‘A Caroline Commentary’, p. 258.

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ously dislikes. If we take his notes on Macbeth, it is clear for him that Macbeth’s wife is directly answerable for the crimes committed by her husband. His notes insist on Lady Macbeth’s responsibility: ‘but his hellish wife driues him to do it’ (sig. mm2r; TLN 457–518). Characters stir strong emotions in him.10 While Johnstoune did make clear-cut judgements on some of them, his inscriptions demonstrate that he could be aware of characters’ complexities. The following two examples are illuminating for that matter, with their use of ‘perplexitie’ and ‘perplexed’: ‘Confused perplexitie of othello Intending to | murther his wife vpon suspition’ (Othello, sig. vv4v; TLN 3220–78) and ‘perplexed separation of louers vpon necessitie’ (Antony and Cleopatra, sig. x2v; TLN 417–80). Johnstoune projects feelings onto the folio’s lines: he breathes life into Shakespeare’s characters by lending them qualities. Yet, in some cases, he goes the opposite way. Indeed, he appears to separate the characters from the play, as the repeated use of indefinite pronouns (‘a’ and ‘one’) in a number of extracts of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline indicates.11 Johnstoune transforms Shakespeare’s characters into generic figures. This shows how — already at the beginning of the seventeenth century — Shakespeare could become ‘extractable’ and how, in some cases, his characters would be almost more important than the plays themselves and began having lives of their own. A similar tendency can be perceived in Charles I’s copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. In the table of contents, the King added characters’ names against the titles of some of Shakespeare’s plays: ‘Benedick and Beatrice’ against Much Ado About Nothing; ‘Rosalind’ against As You Like It; ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ against A Midsummer Night’s Dream; ‘Malvolio’ against Twelfth Night.12 In fact, a few years later, during the Commonwealth — more than a century before Garrick’s planned parade of characters for the Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare Jubilee in 176913 — some Shakespearean characters came to lead independent lives in the drolls (short dramatic pieces) directly inspired by the dramatist’s characters: The Bouncing 10 

In some ways, Johnstoune anticipates Margaret Cavendish’s comment on the emotional powers of Shakespeare who ‘Peirces the Souls of his Readers with such a True Sense and Feeling thereof, that it Forces Tears through their Eyes’ (Letter 123, in Cavendish, ccxi Sociable Letters, p. 246). 11  See, for instance, TLN 3237–97, TLN 3298–363, TLN 3430–95, TLN 3496–561, or TLN 3628–93. 12  For details, see Birrell, English Monarchs and their Books, pp. 44–45. 13  Stern, ‘Shakespeare in Drama’, esp. p. 147.

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Knight (Falstaff ), The Grave-Makers (Hamlet and the grave-diggers); The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottom the Weaver (A Midsummer Night’s Dream).14

Rating Shakespeare Critically: No Consensus among Early Readers Shakespeare’s early readers differed in their appreciation of his style, plot, and characters. Many were appreciative, but no consensus on the value of his plays or poems emerged among them during the period. Readers’ efforts to classify, distinguish, or rank the dramatist’s works confirm this too. The endeavours represent early and mostly independent attempts to express preference and taste without the guidance of substantial printed literary criticism on Shakespeare. In this era, annotators wish to record their tastes for their personal use, or for the sake of other readers with whom they possibly shared their books, but not to concur with, emulate, or oppose some critical norm. The examples chosen in this section will range from Gabriel Harvey’s notes, early marginalia in a First Folio that once belonged to the Cary family, to Abraham Wright’s writings (once again). Famously, scholar and writer Gabriel Harvey (1552/53–1631) noted in his copy of Thomas Speght’s folio edition of Chaucer published in 1598 that ‘the younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus, & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, prince of Denmarke, have it in them, to please the wiser sort’.15 The lines, written c. 1600, are part of notes in which he cites the literary tastes of several famous figures. Harvey’s comments seem to be his own (and perhaps a reflection of what he observed) and represent an early attempt at looking at Shakespeare’s reception generically and socio­ logically (the young as opposed to older and no doubt scholarly readers like himself ). Hamlet was probably one of his personal favourites, as it also appears (‘the Tragedie of Hamlet’), together with ‘Richard 3’ in marginalia listing his preferred fifteenth- and sixteenth-century works.16 We cannot take Harvey’s tastes as completely representative of the period. Other types of readers built personal hierarchies of taste for their own use, or for the benefit of future readers. The trend would develop later with the help 14 

On drolls, see, in particular, Randall, Winter Fruit, pp. 154–55; Wiseman, Drama and Politics, p. 6 et passim. 15  Cited in Stern, Gabriel Harvey, p. 127. 16  These lines are in Harvey’s copy of Guicciardini’s Detti, et Fatti (1571, USTC 835439), see Stern, Gabriel Harvey, p. 128.

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of editors and literati, as Shakespeare’s corpus became increasingly remote and thus less easy to penetrate and appreciate. In a First Folio that once belonged to the Cary family in the first half of the seventeenth century, three comedies are rated: ‘Pretty well’ (sig. B4r) for The Tempest; ‘very good, light’ (sig. E6v) for The Merry Wives of Windsor, but ‘starke naught’ (sig. D1v) for The Two Gentlemen of Verona.17 Clearly, those who were looking for light reading in the ‘Comedies’ section of the First Folio could be disappointed. But so could those who focused on the more serious and allegedly more edifying tragedies.18 Going back to one of the more articulate commentators of the period, Abraham Wright, who compared two of Shakespeare’s tragedies — Othello and Hamlet — one notices that he concluded largely against the judgement of centuries to come. For him, Hamlet was ‘but an indifferent play, the lines but meane: and in nothing like Othello’. Wright did enjoy the gravediggers’ scene in Hamlet (‘a good scene’) but found it ‘betterd’ in Thomas Randolph’s The Jealous Lovers (1632, STC 20692).19 New work was overshadowing Shakespeare’s in the decades after his death. Around the time when Wright was taking his notes, William Cartwright talked of Shakespeare’s ‘Old fashion’d wit’ (despite having written commendatory verses about him in Shakespeare’s Second Folio (1632) more than a decade before).20 As we have seen, the critical dissecting of the dramatist’s works began before the Restoration and the Augustan age, as soon as readers wished to get ‘the best’ out of Shakespeare’s already famed but largely miscellaneous collections of works. In a period when criticism was not, as it is now, associated with literary criticism, and when the term ‘literature’ did not refer to works of imagination only,21 readers still aired their views about Shakespeare and some did so extensively. No further and better proof can be furnished than by what is no doubt the most exhaustively annotated First Folio in the world by a reader in the first few decades of the seventeenth century, Meisei Uni­ver­sity’s MR774, which we have already mentioned and with which the last section of this essay shall be concerned. 17 

Glasgow Uni­ver­sity Library, Sp Coll BD8-b. 1. For a possible dating of the annotations to the 1630s, see Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, pp. 128–29. 18  Although far less often performed than comedies or history plays, tragedies tended to be more highly considered. See Kastan, ‘“A rarity most beloved”’, esp. p. 5. 19  Cited in Kirsch, ‘A Caroline Commentary’, pp. 257–58. 20  Cartwright, ‘Upon the report of the printing of the Dramaticall Poems of Master John Fletcher’, sig. d2v. 21  Jarvis, ‘Criticism, Taste, Aesthetics’, p. 24.

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Personal Aesthetic Commenting Frequently dismissed as merely repetitive of Shakespeare’s text, William Johnstoune’s notes reveal that he did try to come to terms with the aesthetics of some of Shakespeare’s plays. In The Winter’s Tale, in the scene where the statue of Hermione comes to life, the annotator is well aware that Shakespeare is theatrically playing with fire. Indeed, according to him, what the characters are witnessing are ‘things so Incredible as may make the beholders to beleeue they are done by witchcraft’ (TLN 3254–319). Nevertheless, it is probably the marginalia in Henry V that show him working hard to understand what artistic deal Shakespeare is trying to strike with his audience. Just before the pro­ logue, he writes this perceptive note in short hand: ‘The auditours Imagination must supplie the strangenesse of Incredible representations of the stage’ (TLN 19–36 and 61–85). Moreover, it seems that the inscriber had some idea of tragedy as a literary genre.22 His reading of Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy is that it is really a ‘question whether we oughth to ouercome our | selues and our passions by extreame patience | or die seeking desperat | reuenge’ (sig. Oo5r; TLN 1651–716). In the text of Hamlet, the question is whether we ought to live or escape in death. But the annotator introduces ‘revenge’ here, which is a misreading of the passage, but actually shows what he, as a reader, was expecting, as Stephen Orgel has pointed out.23 He held the understandable view that a tragedy was supposed to be about vengeance. His most annotated play was Timon of Athens. Although it may not appear to us as one of Shakespeare’s darker tragedies, his marginalia reveal that he was sensitive to the pessimistic and tragic vision of mankind conveyed by it. He repeatedly focuses on the subject in his notes: ‘vniuersall corruption of man’ (sig. hh2r; TLN 1636–99).24 Why did the annotator of MR774 concentrate so much on the tragedies? Perhaps because he was personally touched, intrigued and stimulated by them, as the aesthetic comments he makes on the plays ostensibly indicate. Revealingly, a term commonly found in his marginalia is the adjective ‘strange’. Shakespeare’s tragedies are strange, puzzling, disconcerting worlds, posing unsolvable questions since they are about the great issues of human life. So what the annotator might have got out of his reading of these 22 

For details, see The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. by Yamada, p. xxviii. Orgel, The Reader in the Book, p. 55. 24  See also sigs hh2v (TLN 1832–97) and hh3r (TLN 1898–963). 23 

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twelve plays is a deep sense of the infinite complexity of the human condition. Or, to put it in Johnstoune’s own words, ‘Infinit questions of the circumstance of strange chances’ (Cymbeline, sig. bbb5v; TLN 3694–759).

Conclusion: Altering our View of Shakespeare’s Early Appreciation in Manu­script Shakespearean appreciation — at least in its manu­script form (that is, in those traces which have come down to us, despite the continent of documents destroyed by time and the likely extensive amount of annotated works yet to be discovered) — was naturally influenced by one of the only methods of textual interpretation available at the time. Widely taught in schools, and by the handful of academic institutions that existed then, the humanist tradition insisted on using texts, especially classical authors, to communicate or serve the needs of one’s profession. Yet it would be extremely caricatural to reduce humanism to a pragmatic method of extraction.25 Other aspects in Renaissance humanism encouraged aesthetic pleasure and appreciation, as well as readers’ curiosity about vernacular literature. As we have seen, this was a period when a limited number of Shakespearean readers enjoyed an almost unlimited degree of freedom. Not only did they read Shakespeare for ‘use’ (in partial keeping with the humanist method), but also for their own aesthetic pleasure, enjoying plots that met personal expectations, focusing on characters sometimes to the detriment of plays themselves, and inventing scales of appreciation. Some even offered sophisticated comments on the plays. Shakespeare’s early readers were less self-conscious than their Restoration or eighteenth-century counterparts. They never had to embrace, disapprove of, or try to distinguish themselves from the printed critical debates that became abundantly available as soon as Shakespeare’s place was firmly established within the public cultural sphere. This is probably what makes early readers’ forms of engagement with Shakespeare so unique and captivating.

25 

See Blair, Too Much to Know, p. 27.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts London, BL, Additional MS 22608 Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library MS S.a.9

Primary Sources Cartwright, William, ‘Upon the report of the printing of the Dramaticall Poems of Master John Fletcher, collected before, and now set forth in one Volume’, in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies, Never Printed Before (1647, Wing B1581) Cavendish, Margaret, ccxi Sociable Letters, written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (1664, Wing N872) Scott, William, The Model of Poesy, ed. by Gavin Alexander (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ ver­sity Press, 2013) Shakespeare, William, The First Folio of Shakespeare: A Transcript of Contemporary Mar­ ginalia in a Copy of the Kodama Memorial Library of Meisei Uni­ver­sity, ed. by Akihiro Yamada (Tokyo: Yushodo Press, 1998) —— , Mr William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies: published according to the true originall copies (1623, STC 22273), Glasgow Uni­ver­sity Library, Sp Coll BD8-b. 1

Secondary Works Birrell, T. A., English Monarchs and their Books: From Henry VII to Charles II, The Panizzi Lectures (London: British Library, 1986) Blair, Ann M., Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010) Bourne, Claire M. L., ‘Marking Shakespeare’, Shakespeare, 13.4 (2017), 367–86 Chartier, Roger, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans.  Lydia  G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1994 [1992]) Estill, Laura, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manu­scripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays (Newark: Uni­ver­sity of Delaware Press, 2015) Jardine, Lisa, and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30–78 Jarvis, Simon, ‘Criticism, Taste, Aesthetics’, in The Cam­bridge Companion to English Literature 1740–1830, ed. by Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004), pp. 24–42 Kastan, David Scott, ‘“A rarity most beloved”: Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy’, in A  Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, i: The Tragedies, ed.  by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 4–22

278

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Kirsch, Arthur C., ‘A  Caroline Commentary on the Drama’, Modern Philo­logy, 66.3 (1969), 256–61 Orgel, Stephen, The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2015) Randall, Dale B.  J., Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642–1660 (Lexington: Uni­ver­sity Press of Kentucky, 1995) Sherman, William B., Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) Smith, Emma, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2016) Stern, Tiffany, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) —— , ‘Shakespeare in Drama’, in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed.  by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012), pp. 141–57 Stern, Virginia F., Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) Wiseman, Susan, Drama and Politics during the English Civil War (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1998)

Comedies and Tragedies ‘read of me’ and ‘not yet learned’: Dramatic Extracting in Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson D 952 Beatrice Montedoro

A

t the turn of the sixteenth century, commonplacing, a practice until then only dedicated to the study of classical and Christian authors, started to be applied to vernacular authors, including dramatists. Most famously, in 1600 the first printed commonplace books containing English dramatic extracts were published: John Bodenham’s Belvedere and Robert Allott’s Englands Parnassus. In the following years, dramatic extracts — that is, excerpts of various length and form taken from plays — also increasingly began to appear in manu­script collections by educated figures throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, with well-known examples including the notebooks associated with Thomas Harriot, Edward Pudsey, and various notable Oxford students, such as clergyman Abraham Wright, and many other anonymous examples belonging to the Inns of Court and university environments.1 This material evidence not only shows how ‘plainly fellows and students alike were well aware of such literature’ despite the fact that ‘a study of contemporary drama, poetry and prose fiction did not figure at all in the statutory prescrip1  These are London, BL, Additional MS  64078 ( c .  1594–1602/03); Oxford, Bodl., MS English Poetry d. 3 and Stratford-Upon-Avon, SBTRO, MS ER 82/1/21 (c. 1600–10); and London, BL, Additional MS 22608 (c. 1640) respectively. For a fuller account of main examples of manu­script collections of dramatic extracts from professional plays, see Estill, Dramatic Extracts, pp. 1–42 and pp. 77–114.

Beatrice Montedoro is a doctoral candidate at the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford, where she is writing a thesis on dramatic extracting and the reception of early modern English drama under the supervision of Professor Adam Smyth.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 279–296 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116457 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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tions of university or college’,2 but also that, as Peter Beal argues, ‘the practice of keeping notebooks and commonplace books in general was one of the most widespread activities of the educated classes in contemporary England’.3 However, the practice also spread to less educated people, who saw in dramatic extracting a way to appropriate for themselves an accessible form of learning that they could use to improve their own social position, as they could adopt newly learnt language as ‘a sute of Sattin to grace themselves withall’, an image evoked by Barnabe Rich in Faultes Faults, and nothing else but Faultes (1606, STC 20983).4 The popularity of this practice was not perceived at the time without controversy and was often associated with a lack of personal wit and with ‘unsophisticated’ readers, what Mary Thomas Crane calls the ‘“common readers”, artisans and citizens, urban merchants, and the ambitious lesser gentry’.5 And even if the London-based merchant Bodenham claimed that his collection of quotations befitted Mount Parnassus, and sought approval from the universities of Oxford and Cam­bridge, he was ultimately unsuccessful, as he was publicly mocked in the Cam­bridge play The Returne from Pernassus (1606 , STC 19309).6 Despite the poor publicity that dramatic extracting received at the beginning of the seventeenth century, several scholars in recent years have seen in this practice a sign of the increased consideration given to drama. In particular, Ann Moss and Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass have claimed that by commonplacing drama, printed collections like Belvedere and Englands Parnassus gave rise to the formation of a canon of drama and promoted drama to a ‘literary’ status.7 When Lesser and Stallybrass discuss ‘literary drama’, they refer to ‘the ability of an emergent vernacular literature to reproduce the timeless and impersonal authority attributed to sententiae in classical texts’.8 The presence of extractable passages with a universal and timeless applicability is therefore crucial in this definition. However, compilers could also appreciate dramatic extracts that did not display these qualities, and that to us, who expect to find 2 

Charlton and Spufford, ‘Literacy, Society and Education’, p. 48. Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison’, p. 131. 4  Rich, Faultes Faults, and Nothing Else but Faultes, sig. B4v. 5  Crane, Framing Authority, p. 181. 6  The Returne from Pernassus, sig. B1r. 7  Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, p. 210; Lesser and Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet’, esp. p. 414. 8  Lesser and Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet’, p. 417. 3 

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some of the most ‘quotable’ and literary lines from plays, might seem insignificant and almost haphazard. Sometimes compilers simply collected dramatic excerpts for their currency, by which I mean currency of topic and language, and also currency in the sense of relevance in the present moment (‘presentness’ rather than ‘timelessness’). Nonetheless, I do not wish to deny that the emergence of the vernacular commonplace book reflects a change in attitudes towards (what we now call) English ‘literature’, and in particular drama, or that it attracted the attention of many university students (as the survival of many manu­script commonplace books and miscellanies with dramatic extracts shows). However, it is necessary to investigate what kind of ‘cultural value’ drama was actually appreciated for, not only in the early printed instances but also in subsequent examples in both manu­script and printed form. The main point I wish to make is that, through commonplacing, vernacular drama gained its own new cultural value, somewhat different from the moral and universal wisdom for which the classics were traditionally read. Current scholarship has tended to assume that how the practice was advertised in print in its early manifestations subsequently dictated the way in which dramatic extracting was performed in the following years in both manu­script and printed collections.9 While printed commonplace books could be used as models or even as quarries of material for private collections,10 the presence of prescriptions and models did not necessarily mean that compilers adhered to them blindly. As Earle Havens has pointed out, The much more extensive manu­script record reveals a considerable gap between the theoretical history of commonplace books, which was most often communicated in the medium of print, and historical practice, in the form of manu­script collections generally kept for personal reference and use.11

Adam Smyth has also lamented that ‘scholarly discussion has focused on printed prescriptions’ and that ‘this concentration on theory limits our understanding of how these rules were enacted’.12 Jean-Christophe Mayer’s essay in this volume has already hinted at how readers’ responses to plays — as recorded in the form of dramatic excerpts, 9 

See, for example, the arguments of Moss; and Lesser and Stallybrass. Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, p. vii. 11  Havens, Commonplace Books, p. 9. 12  Smyth, ‘Commonplace Book Cultures’, p. 90. Estill offers an important survey of the variety of ways in which drama was appropriated through dramatic extracting in her mono­ graph Dramatic Extracts. 10 

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annotations, and marginalia — often reflected personal taste and were influenced by how readers intended to use that material, rather than conforming to a set of rules or being ‘completely representative of the period’.13 In this essay, I seek to address the lack of discussion concerning how the rules of the practice of dramatic extracting were enacted by compilers: looking at the archival evidence can help us to redefine how compilers of these collections related to the status of drama and canon formation. In particular, I will offer an analysis of a manu­script recently rediscovered in the Bodleian Library, Oxford: MS Rawlinson D 952 (henceforth ‘D 952’). This manu­script is the earliest and one of the few known instances of a manu­script commonplace book dedicated mainly to drama,14 and, moreover, it is a pertinent example of how compilers could combine both conventional and unconventional elements of commonplacing to read drama in new ways. Until now D 952 has only received the attention of one short catalogue entry in the Rawlinson Quarto Catalogue, which describes it, very succinctly, as ‘a common-place book of sentences out of plays, under heads in alphabetical order’.15 The manu­script, a duodecimo of eighty-seven folios, seems to be bound in the original cover, which presents the embossed letters ‘CB’ in the middle of the front and back covers, very likely the initials of the original owner and compiler of the collection. However, what makes this manu­script a particularly valuable object of investigation, besides the fact that it brings together a large number of dramatic extracts (265 to be precise) organized throughout under thematic headings, is the presence, on the first leaf, of a list of titles of plays: twenty-four comedies and tragedies ‘read of me’ (as it is written on top of the central column), and a second list on the left, probably added at a later stage, of ten plays described as ‘comedyes not yet learned’ (see Figure 16.1). In my analysis of this document I ask: first, what kind of drama the compiler was interested in selecting; and, second, how he adopted, and adapted, the practice of dramatic extracting in order to appropriate drama to his own ends. 13 

See Mayer’s work on the early manu­script reception of Shakespeare in the previous chapter of the present collection, especially p. 273. 14  Estill claims that ‘the earliest extant dramatic miscellanies date to after the closure of the theatres in 1642’ (Dramatic Extracts, p. 80), and that perhaps earlier evidence has yet to be uncovered. D 952, possibly dating from the early 1630s, as it will be demonstrated in the following pages, could therefore be one of these earlier examples uncovered in the archives. 15  Macray, Catalogi Codicum Manu­scriptorum, col. 216. Note that this manu­script is not present in CELM. A fuller analysis of this manu­script will be offered in Chapter 1 of my doctoral thesis entitled ‘Dramatic Extracting and the Reception of Early Modern English Drama’.

Comedies and Tragedies ‘read of me’ and ‘not yet learned’

283

Figure 16.1. ‘Comedyes not yet learned’ and ‘Comedies read of me & tragedyes’. Oxford, Bodl., MS Rawlinson D 952, fol. 1r. 1630s–50s. Reproduced with permission of the Bodleian Library.

Beatrice Montedoro

284

Selecting Drama Before answering these questions, it will be useful to consider the identity of the compiler of D 952, as well as the context in which he created his collection.16 It is, however, seldom straightforward to determine the identity of compilers, not only because several agents could be involved in the making of manu­script and printed collections, but also because these documents could often be left anonymous, leaving only circumstantial evidence to help situate them in time and space. As noted above, one early owner of D 952 (presumably the first compiler and initiator of this collection) embossed his initials, ‘CB’, on the covers, but a lack of information concerning the provenance of the manu­script or any other precise details make the search for his identity very difficult.17 If locating the exact ‘CB’ turns out to be a fruitless process, it might still be possible to situate the origins of this collection more generally. A good starting point is a note left in the manu­script itself: Five Score barrels of beare at one vine lane I seene in the schollers buttery. without horseing. besides 4 empty places for four barrels moore. 1632. August. 21th (fol. 1v)

The date ‘1632. August. 21th’ is the only one present in the manu­script and could correspond either to the moment in which the event described took place or to the day on which the compiler wrote this note (or, of course, both). Moreover, most plays mentioned in the initial list of comedies and tragedies ‘read of me’ appeared in print, either for the first time or as a reprint, around the years 1630–33, suggesting that the activity of commonplacing was concentrated around those years. In addition to helping with dating, this note provides further clues hinting at the environment in which the compiler operated: the note implies that ‘CB’ frequented ‘the schollers buttery’ around ‘one vine lane’, where some hundred barrels of beer were kept. A scholar’s buttery suggests an academic environment, and a ‘Vine Hall Lane’ existed in Oxford in those years, so called because of Vine Hall, an academic hall situated on that street in the sixteenth century, incorporated into Christ Church College in 1547. The street came to 16  I refer to the compiler with the masculine pronoun ‘he’ here, as the compiler was almost certainly a man. See the discussion on identity later in this section. 17  I refer to the compiler throughout as ‘CB’.

Comedies and Tragedies ‘read of me’ and ‘not yet learned’

285

be known as Bear Lane in the mid-seventeenth century, because of the eponymous pub located on that street (though by 1850 that section of Bear Lane had come to be known as Alfred Street, the name it still has today).18 It is relevant to note that ‘The Bear’ is Oxford’s oldest pub (allegedly dating from 1242), and so it would have certainly been there for some time by the 1630s, when the compiler wrote this note. The compiler’s connection with an academic environment is also confirmed by his choice of plays (see Table 16.1). The compiler mentions several academic plays by Oxford students, such as Technogamia, the Marriages of the Arts (1618, STC 13617), written by Barten Holyday, a student of Christ Church, first performed at the same college in 1618 and reprinted in 1630 (STC 13618); as well as Thomas Goffe’s Amurath (1632, STC 11977) and Orestes (1633, STC 11982), both performed at the same college in the early 1620s and printed, for the first time, in 1632 and 1633 respectively. Jasper Fisher’s Fuimus Troes (1633, STC 10886), also present in the list, was performed at Magdalen College, and, not in the list, but present with extracts in the collection, is Fernando de Roja’s Spanish Bawd (1631, STC 4911), translated by James Mabbe, also a student of Magdalen College. Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity plays are equally present in this manu­script: Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua (1607, STC 24104); Samuel Brooke’s Melanthe (1615, STC 17800), the only Latin play extracted in the collection (but not mentioned in the initial list); Thomas Randolph’s Jealous Lovers (1632, STC 20692); and Peter Hausted’s Rival Friends (1632, STC 12935) are all plays associated with Trinity College, except for the latter, which was performed at Queen’s College. It can therefore be speculated that ‘CB’ was a student, perhaps at Oxford, who was a keen reader of academic plays, some of which he might have also seen performed. Still, even if academic plays by Randolph, Tomkis, and Hausted were among the most quoted in this collection (Table 16.1), they formed a minority (of only seven): ‘CB’ extracts or mentions a total of fifty different works, made up of thirty-nine plays (six of which are not mentioned in the initial list) and eleven non-dramatic works (of which only one is in the list). What factors, then, influenced the choice of the rest of the works extracted? Around half of the plays in this manu­script (seventeen) had been published, for the very first time, around the time that ‘CB’ was creating this collection, meaning that he was interested in finding material from the most contemporary Caroline drama: not only the 18 

Salter, Names of the Streets and Gelling, The Place-Names of Oxfordshire, i, 37–44, which gives derivations.

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Table 16.1. List of works extracted, or mentioned, in Oxford, Bodl., MS Rawlinson D 952. This table shows the complete list of works present in the manu­script and marks all the titles mentioned in the list of the first leaf of D 952 in bold, whereas all non-dramatic works present are marked in italics. Publication dates (date of collected works) and speculated source

no. extracts

1613, 16, 31

48

Arcadia

1593,…, 1629, 1633, 1638, 1655, etc.)

30+5#

Randolph

Jealous Lovers

1632, 34, 40, 46, 52

31

Jonson

Catiline

1611, (16), 35

21*

5

Tomkis

Lingua

1607, 15, 17, 22, 32, 57

16

6

Webster

The Devil’s Law-Case

1623

14

7

Hausted

The Rival Friends

1632

13

8

Dekker

The Honest Whore, Part 2

1630

12

9

Shackerley

Holland’s Leaguer

1632

12

Playwright

Play

1

Marston

The Insatiate Countess

2

Sidney

3 4

10 Ford

The Lovers Melancholy

1629

10

11 Massinger

The Maid of Honour

1632

9

12 Goffe

The Tragedy of Orestes

1633, 56

8

13 Greene

Philomela

1592, 1615, 31

8

14 Markham

The Dumb Knight

1608, 33

8

15 Chapman

Caesar and Pompey

1631, 52, 53

7

16 Goffe

Amurath, the Courageous Turk

1632, (56)

7

17 Jonson

Volpone

1607, (16)

7

18 Massinger

The Emperour of the East

1632

7

19 Fisher

Fuimus Troes

20 Taylor

A Very Merry Wherry-Ferry Voyage

21 Jonson

Every Man out of His Humour

1633

6

1622, 23, (30)

6

1600 3Qs, (16), (40)

5

22 Lady Mary Wroth The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania

1621

5

23 Massinger

1632

4

24 Sylvester (translator) Du Bartas his Devine Weeks and Works

1611

4

25 Mabbe (translator) The Spanish Bawd

1631

3

The Roman Actor

26 Shirley J.

Changes, or Love in a Maze

27 Heywood

The Four Prentices of London

28 Brooke

Melanthe

29 Middleton

Michaelmas Term

1632

3

1615, 32

2

1615

2

1607, 30

2

Comedies and Tragedies ‘read of me’ and ‘not yet learned’

Playwright 30 Shakespeare

Play Pericles

31 Taylor

A New Discovery by Sea

32 Anon.

Wily Beguiled

33 Baron 34 Bauhuis 35

Beaumont and Fletcher

287

Publication dates (date of collected works) and speculated source

no. extracts

1609, 11, 30, 35

2

1623, (30)

2

1606, 14, 23, 30, 35, 38, 53

1

An Apo­logy for Paris

1649

1*

Epigrammatum lib. IV

1620

1

A King and No King

1619, 25, 31, 39, 55,…(79)

1

36 Jonson

Cynthia’s Revels

1601, (16), (40)

1#

37 Jonson

Every Man in His Humour

1601, (16), (40)

1

1605, (16)

1

1631

1

38 Jonson

Sejanus

39 May

The Tragedy of Antigone

40 Quarles

Argalus and Parthenia

1629, 30, 32, 35, 47, 54

1#

41 Taylor

Jack a Lent his Beginning and Entertainment

1620, (30)

1

42 Taylor

Water-Cormorant

1622, (30)

1

43 Anon.

Swetnam, the Woman Hater

1620

NF

1615, 30, 35

NF

44

Beaumont and Fletcher

Cupid’s Revenge

45 Davenant

The Cruel Brother

1630

NF

46 Davenant

The Just Italian

1630

NF

47 Heywood

The Rape of Lucrece

1608, 09, 14, 30, 38

NF

48 Holyday

Technogamia, The Marriages of the Arts

1618, 30

NF

49 Jonson

The Alchemist

1612, (16)

NF

50 Jonson

Epicoene, or The Silent Woman

(16), 1620

NF

Total extracts in manu­script

342

Dramatic extracts

265

 

 

 

Non-dramatic extracts

65

 

 

 

Unidentified extracts

12

Extracts by hand 2*

22

 

 

 

Extracts by hand 3#

7

Plays in the list

33

 

 

Plays not in the list

6

Non-dramatic works

11

Beatrice Montedoro

288

academic plays mentioned above but also Thomas Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Part 2 (1630, STC 6506); Shackerley Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer (1632, STC 17433); John Ford’s The Lovers Melancholy (1629, STC 11163); George Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey (1631, STC 4993); Philip Massinger’s The Maid of Honour (1632, STC 17638), The Emperour of the East (1632, STC 17636), and The Roman Actor (1632, STC 17642); James Shirley’s Changes, or Love in a Maze (1632, STC 22437); Thomas May’s The Tragedy of Antigone (1631, STC 17116); and finally William Davenant’s The Cruel Brother (1630, STC 6302) and The Just Italian (1630, STC 6303). Some of these names might not be well known amongst students today; however, they were evidently relevant to this seventeenth-century student. On this point, Smyth talks about ‘an alternative literary canon of writers’ often present in these kinds of collections, highlighting the discrepancy between what was read then and what is read today.19 The other half of the dramatic material chosen for extraction by ‘CB’ belonged to plays first published in the Elizabethan or Jacobean periods. In this case, the popularity of the plays, some of which were published several times over the years (see Table 16.1 for dates of editions), seems to have influenced the compiler’s choice. All non-dramatic works extracted in the collection were also culled from very popular works in the early modern period, which were widely read and republished several times over the years, such as Sidney’s Arcadia. ‘CB’ therefore shows that his interest lies with both the most current material and the very popular. A mixture of old/popular and new/current material is quite characteristic of these collections and also reflects the market production. As Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser explain in their work on professional drama in Caroline England: ‘In the 1630s, the market for printed drama from the professional theater underwent an unprecedented division in which new plays were split from a group of “classic” plays first published decades earlier’, a division which resulted, they continue, ‘in the creation of the first canon of early modern English drama’.20 However, the consolidation of a canon of ‘classic’ plays observed in the playbook market is not corroborated by the collections containing dramatic extracts, and especially not by manu­ script collections. In fact, comparing lists of plays excerpted in these collections will scarcely highlight a canon of plays and playwrights regularly commonplaced, except, perhaps, for a few examples, such as Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare, who have a higher recurrence rate. ‘CB’ clearly favoured Jonson 19  20 

Smyth, ‘Profit and Delight’, p. 8. Farmer and Lesser, ‘Canons and Classics’, p. 18.

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in this collection­— his plays are the most numerous — and those authors who were overtly influenced by him, known as ‘Sons of Ben’, including Randolph, Hausted, Marmion, and Davenant. Whilst Jonson had a place of honour in this collection, Shakespeare, another of the most popular playwrights both in the book trade and in printed collections, was almost completely ignored here, showing how the making of a manu­ script compilation was ultimately the result of personal preferences, or, to put it another way, that emerging canons did not dominate all culture. As Peter Beal observes, ‘every commonplace book is a unique document, a unique witness to the tastes, values, and thinking of a specific person or group’.21 The personal element of these collections, and especially those in manu­script form, seems inevitable: how ‘CB’ personalized convention to make his own collection is a central aspect of this manu­script. Despite all this, however, habits of compilation are not always or inevitably personal and unique. D 952 is itself a perfect example of conventionality combined with personality, in both its structure and content; as I will show in the next section, it is not simply the product of an act of self-expression, but it is in part the result of a collective act, responding to broader contemporary trends. How the practice of dramatic extracting was adopted and adapted by ‘CB’ to suit his personal needs is the focus of the second part of this essay.

Appropriating Drama By opening his collection with a list of tragedies and comedies ‘not yet learned’ and ‘read of me’ (fol. 1r), the compiler of D 952 presented his work primarily as a collection of drama, of which he professed to be a reader and learner. At the top of fol. 2v the compiler added the heading ‘Selected English phrases’, which he might have intended as a title to his collection, but it is on the next folio (fol. 3r) that the compiler began methodically adding thematic headings, in alphabetical order, at the top of each folio. This traditional procedure, however, is very rarely followed as thoroughly as in this case. As Smyth notes in his work on commonplace book culture, ‘It is extremely common to find a manu­ script that started life as a dutiful enactment of commonplace principles […] but which proceeds to blur into different forms’.22

21  22 

Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison’, p. 133. Smyth, ‘Commonplace Book Culture’, p. 98.

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Table 16.2. A complete list of the headings in Oxford, Bodl., MS Rawlinson D 952.23 In italics are the headings added by the compiler and not copied from Farnaby; the headings with * are those with no extracts; and in bold are the most popular ones (with a full leaf of extracts).

abound | able* | abstain* | no account* | good account* | adversity* | full age* | allure* | ambitions* | anger | attires, dressing for women | eternal | B banishment* | beseige* | boast* | to be briefe* | Beautiful | barren* | bould | bury | beautiful | chast | civil | complements | careless* | challenge* | common | childhood* | country | to commend for beauty | to curse | covetous man | to court a lady etc. | cold | cuckhold | critiques | constant | darke* | day* | danger | deceive | devil* | defence* | delay* | desire* | despaire | doubt | dissemble | dull* | duty | to die | death | to disgrace | descriptions | deformed* | eloquent* | envy, envious man | end* | excell | to erre* | first | faithful | faire or beautiful | faire or beautiful | famous* | favour* | feare | to flatter | friends (marginalia: true or false) | fortune | gentrise | gift | greatness (great men) | glad | gluttony | grevie* | hair, woman hair | happy | hate | health* | hell* | heaven* | honest (woman) | hope* | hunger | humors | iealousy | idle* | ioy* | impudence | ignoble* | impossible | iests | ignorant* | iudge | imperfect | clownish conference | to kill | to kiss | kings | to laugh | learned* | light* | to love, love, Venus | to be in Love | to look merrily* | luckily, ill luck | lust | man | mad* | modesty | mourning | morning, evening | music | melancholy | naughty | never* | night | nothing | news | to obey* | old, old man, woman | old age | to overcome | oration | to punish | to take pains* | to pardon* | to please* | at your pleasure* | poor* | power* | proud | promise* | to plot | prosperity | to prayse (a woman/ a man) | to rail, slander | report* | requite* | revenge | reward* | rudely* | rule* | rich, to get rich | scholler | safe* | salutations, complements | the sea, tempest | simple, shameless | sweet | silent | sacrifice* | slavery | to be in a strayte | to speak | speedily* | to sleep | to swear | the sun | vid. constant, sooner | T to bane | to give thanks | thunder, tempest | to travel* | trusting unto | time | unthankful* | war, warlike* | to wait on | wit, of aged wit | world* | weep | write* | to wie | young | women | welcome | to woo | whores | to woe The headings chosen by ‘CB’ cover a wide range of topics, as can be seen from Table 16.2. A quick search of these headings on EEBO-TCP reveals that ‘CB’ had copied more than half of the headings for his collection (100 out of 180 total headings) from Phrases oratoriae elegantiores (1631).24 This was a popular 23 

The order and spelling of the headings is given as found in D 952. I must thank Laura Estill for pointing out this tool and helping me in identifying the source of the headings of D 952. 24 

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print collection of elegant phrases in Latin by classical and Christian writers organized under thematic headings (written in English) compiled by the wellreputed schoolteacher and grammarian Thomas Farnaby (1574/75–1647).25 What is most intriguing, and revealing of the compiler’s thematic preferences, is that of the total 180 headings present in the collection just over a third (sixty-four) were left without any extracts (marked with * in Table 16.2), the majority of which corresponded to headings taken from Farnaby’s work. Even if many of these headings were then left empty, the decision to use the work of a renowned schoolmaster as a model for his own collection is symptomatic of the studious and serious approach that this university student adopted in his commonplacing of, predominantly, contemporary drama. This decision, however, did not stop him from appropriating and adapting the print model to his needs, a process of personalization of these printed commonplace books that was not uncommon.26 ‘CB’ slightly altered some of the headings taken from Farnaby, as in the case of ‘to commend’, where ‘CB’ modified it to ‘to commend for beauty’, and also added eighty new headings (marked in italics in Table 16.2). Significant is the fact that the majority of the most popular headings in this collection were actually those added by the compiler himself, which correspond to topics concerning love, beauty, women, courting, and compliments — a preference also reflected in the popularity of plays like Marston’s The Insatiate Countess (reprinted in 1631, STC 17478), and Randolph’s Jealous Lovers (1632), the two most quoted plays in the collection. These topics receive a larger number of extracts in the collection, such that they sometimes even require a second folio. It might seem counterintuitive to use such a studious approach — originally intended for the study of elegant phrases in Latin — to nonacademic ends. Indeed, Beal suggests that the organisational system of the commonplace book made it a tool specifically for studying, in contrast to the miscellany, which was allegedly built simply for pleasure.27 However, this clear-cut distinction between the function of a commonplace book and a miscellany needs to be reconsidered in light of documents like D 952. ‘CB’ clearly shows how a studious approach 25 

The earliest surviving copy dates from 1631, and it is the sixth edition — potentially the one ‘CB’ could have referred to. 26  The same copy of Farnaby’s Phrases oratoriae elegantiores that I consulted at the Bodleian Library (Wood 43) had been bound interleaved and multiple hands had added several manu­ script extracts to it. 27  Beal, Index of English Literary Manu­scripts, i, part 2, p. ix.

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could be successfully applied to non-canonical material, not with the aim of elevating its status, but simply to make that practical information more easily retrievable and usable. As Moss shows, a commonplace book is after all a tool for reference, which over time evolved into a less exclusively scholarly tool.28 Finally, examining which kinds of extracts were selected by ‘CB’ can also help in building a better understanding of the nature of the image of drama valued and promoted in his collection. It is not enough simply to observe the method and works present in a collection in order to be able to draw conclusions about how these texts were received: it is necessary to see in which ways they were appropriated. For instance, the presence of moral university plays is no guarantee that ‘CB’ was interested in their moral teachings: an extract from Tomkis’s Lingua, which in the original could be intended as a moral reproach directed towards women, for example, illustrates how the same passage, once taken out of context and presented by the compiler under the heading ‘Attires. dressinges for women.’ (fol. 7r), simply becomes a list of garments for women which could prove to be useful vocabulary on not so moral occasions.29 Such adoe with their., Looking-glasses, pinning, unpinning, setting Unsetting, forminges and conforminges, Paintings blew vaines and cheeks, such stir with sticks and combes, cascanets, dressings purles, falls, squares, buskes, bodyes, sckarffes, neclaces, Car canetts, rebatoes Borders, Tires, fannes, Palizadoes, Puffes, ruffes, Cuffes, Muffes, pusles Fussles, partsets frislets, Bandlets, Fillets, Crosslets, pendulets, Amulets, Anulets Bracelets and soe many Lets that she is scarce Drest to the Girdle—and now there is such calling for fardingalls, Kirtlets, Buskpoints, shooties, &c that seauen pedlers shops may all Sturbridge faire will scarce furnish her: a ship is sooner ridg’d by far then a Gentlewoman made ready. (sig. I2v; fol. 7r)

28  29 

Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, p. v. For the original passage, see Tomkis, Lingua, sig. I2v.

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Here the dramatic extract is valued for its currency rather than its timelessness (it lists items of fashion relevant at that point in time, which could have ‘occasional’ use). By the same token, it is not sufficient to observe that ‘CB’ diligently went through the ‘pains’ articulated by Farnaby to commonplace vernacular drama in order to conclude that this practice promoted drama to a ‘literary’ status. Examples like the extract from Lingua mentioned here, of which there are many more in D 952 (which is in turn not an isolated case), show that some dramatic extracts were ‘quotable’ because of their occasional character, a feature which seems at odds with the ‘literary’ qualities of timelessness and universality described by Lesser and Stallybrass. ‘CB’ was a learned person who used his knowledge of the practice of commonplacing by conscientiously applying it to less conventional subjects of study. On the whole, he read and commonplaced drama for its practical and current language: plays were seen as quarries of metaphors, similes, and poetical images, and especially of hyperbolic descriptions of women and love. This kind of material became very much sought after in print handbooks and manuals teaching gentlemen how to converse with women, how to court them, and how to write letters to them, a genre that saw the pinnacle of its popularity around the middle of the century, with manuals such as John Gough’s Academy of Complements (first printed 1639, STC 19882.5). Indeed, some of the extracts collected in D 952 can also be found in some later print manuals, such as Thomas Blount’s The Academie of Eloquence (1653, Wing B3320A), Joshua Poole’s The English Parnassus, or, A Helpe to English Poesie (1657, Wing P2814), John Smith’s The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unveil’d (1665, Wing S4116A), and Edward Phillips’s The Mysteries of Love & Eloquence, or, The Arts of Wooing and Complementing (1658, Wing P2066), signifying that the dramatic extracts chosen by the compiler of D 952 were copied specifically for the purpose of courting. For instance, some extracts from The Insatiate Countess and Jealous Lovers present in D 952 (fols 27r, 32r, 58r and 57r respectively) are also to be found in later printed manuals such as those by Phillips and Poole. The popular printed commonplace books of the sixteenth century used for moral advancement were gradually replaced by the vernacular collections, more concerned with the social advancement of their readers. What ‘CB’ hoped to gain by commonplacing drama was ‘quotidian conversational or amatory devices’,30 which these later handbooks would offer in abundance to a wider readership and without the ‘paines’, to borrow Farnaby’s word, that ‘CB’ had to go through. 30 

Smyth, ‘Profit and Delight’, p. 20.

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* * * The passages selected and appropriated in the manu­script commonplace book analysed here were not those that we would consider canonical or literary today, but those that were most useful to the compiler of this collection. From drama ‘CB’ primarily learnt about women, love, and courting; he acquired a practical language that could help him in everyday life, a currency of language that he could not find in more academic books but that he found in abundance in the plays that were being published and performed on a regular basis in contemporary England. Dramatic extracting promoted the circulation and appropriation of drama, but rather than encouraging continuity and fixity, as canonization and ‘literary’ status would require, it encouraged novelty and variation. Compilers sought material in the most recent plays, selected passages that best suited their own personal interests, and were not afraid of adapting and altering the extracts when needed. This effectively made drama a ‘commodity’ to be used as one pleased, in a form that could be easily adapted to the time and needs of the compiler. This essay will have hopefully persuaded the reader, despite the limits imposed by the necessity of brevity, of how dramatic extracting did not simply mean that playwrights started to be valued as ‘classics’ — as authorities of ‘generally applicable ideas, precepts, images, or similes which pointed or illustrated universal truths’31 — or that all compilers were necessarily interested in the ‘literary’ aspects of drama. On the contrary, some adopted this practice to create collections displaying the more practical and conversational qualities of drama. Finally, the encounter between vernacular drama and the practice of commonplacing produced a variety of dramatic extracts, appreciated for a variety of reasons. Through commonplacing, vernacular drama not only gained a reputation as a quarry of moral and universal wisdom in the form of sententious phrases and proverbs, aspects for which the classics had traditionally been extracted, but it was also appreciated for its own, less traditional, cultural value, as a source of current language and topics, applicable especially to social situations. Acknowledgement I would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for the generous research funding provided through a ‘Doc.Mobility’ scholarship, which supported the writing of this article.

31 

Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison’, p. 135.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts London, BL, Additional MS 22608 —— , Additional MS 64078 Oxford, Bodl., MS English poetry d. 3 —— , MS Rawlinson D 952 Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office, MS ER 82/1/21

Primary Sources Farnaby, Thomas, Phrases oratoriae elegantiores, Editio sexta: Cui accesserunt phrases aliquot poëticae (1631, STC 10707); Oxford, Bodl., Wood 43 Marston, John, The Scourge of Villanie (1598, STC 17485) The Returne from Pernassus: or the Scourge of Simony (1606, STC 19309; 19310) Rich, Barnabe, Faultes Faults, and Nothing Else but Faultes (1606, STC 20983) Tomkis, Thomas, Lingua (1607, STC 24104)

Secondary Works Beal, Peter, Index of English Literary Manu­scripts, i: 1450–1625, 2 pts (London: Mansell, 1980) —— , ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, ed. by W. Speed Hill (Binghamton: Medi­eval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993), pp. 131–47 Charlton, Kenneth, and Margaret Spufford, ‘Literacy, Society and Education’, in The Cam­bridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. by David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003), pp. 15–54 Crane, Mary Thomas, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993) Erne, Lukas, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013) Estill, Laura, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manu­scripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays (Newark: Uni­ver­sity of Delaware Press, 2015) Farmer, Alan B., and Zachary Lesser, ‘Canons and Classics: Publishing Drama in Caroline England’, in Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642, ed.  by Adam Zucker and Alan  B. Farmer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 17–41 Gelling, Margaret, The Place-Names of Oxfordshire (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1953)

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Havens, Earle, Commonplace Books: A  History of Manu­scripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­script Library, 2001) Lesser, Zachary, and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59.4 (2008), 371–420 Macray, William Dunn, Catalogi Codicum Manu­scriptorum Bibliothecæ Bodleianæ Partis Quintæ Fasciculus Quarto Ricardi Rawlinson Codicum Classes [A-D] Complectens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898) Moss, Ann, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Salter, Herbert Edward, The Historic Names of the Streets & Lanes of Oxford: Intra Muros (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921) Smyth, Adam, ‘Commonplace Book Culture: A  List of Sixteen Traits’, in Women and Writing c. 1340–c. 1650: The Domestication of Print Culture, ed. by Anne LawrenceMathers and Phillipa Hardman (York: York Medi­eval Press, 2010), pp. 90–110 —— , ‘Profit and Delight’: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640–1682 (Detroit: Wayne State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004)

Seeing is Believing: External vs. Internal Evidence in the Controversy over the Ireland Forgeries Antonia Forster*

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arly in 1795 Samuel Ireland, a London bookseller, made public ‘the literary treasure which [had] recently fallen into his hands, forming an interesting part of the works of our divine Bard, SHAKSPEARE’ and consisting of ‘a variety of authentic and important documents respecting the private and public life of this wondrous man’.1 William Henry Ireland, Samuel’s nineteen-year-old son, had presented these documents — which included a letter from Elizabeth  I to Shakespeare, a letter and poem from Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway, a manu­script of King Lear, and a manu­script of a previously unknown play — to his father and claimed to have obtained them from a source who wished to remain anonymous. As word spread in London and around the country, excitement was immense; as the St James’s Chronicle wrote in February 1795, ‘the impatience of the Publick to participate in such treasures we need not describe’.2 The Sun’s comment that ‘if this report be authentic the literary world will have enough to talk of, for 7 years to come’3 proved true, although not in quite the way the writer might have imagined.  

* Some of the material in this chapter has already been published in Forster, ‘Shakespeare in the Reviews.’ 1  Samuel Ireland, printed proposals for publication of the documents, dated 4 March 1795, bound in London, BL, Additional MS 30347, fol. 32r [p. 1]. 2  St James’s Chronicle, 10–12 February 1795. 3  Sun, 9 February 1795. Manu­script transcription, Ireland papers, BL Add. MS 30347, fol. 3r. The identical item appears in other newspapers; see London Packet or New Lloyd’s EvenAntonia Forster is Professor Emerita of English at the Uni­ver­sity of Akron. Her publications have been mainly in the fields of eighteenth-century book reviewing, eighteenth-century fiction, and Shakespeare.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 297–310 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116458 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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Some doubts about the documents’ authenticity began to be expressed very soon, and the Morning Post of 12 February 1795 expresses amazement that ‘this hum has been swallowed by the literary gudgeons’,4 and the Oracle of the same date, while it felt no doubt, refers darkly to the fact that ‘unseen malignity has already been busy’ about the documents.5 Pamphlets and letters to newspapers multiplied rapidly, with the disbelievers mocking the others for credulity and ignorance, and the believers accusing their opponents of stubborn and unjustified scepticism. By November Samuel Ireland wrote that he had ‘an host of unbelievers to Combat with’,6 and things got worse. As months passed, doubts grew, and some influential voices changed from supporting the Irelands to opposing them — James Boaden, editor of the Oracle, was a notable example who confessed that he had been mistaken and brought out in January 1796 A Letter to George Steevens, Esq. containing A Critical Examination of the Papers Of Shakspeare; published by Mr Samuel Ireland. The True Briton might have reported on 31 December 1795 that ‘Mr IRELAND had the honour of submitting several of the Shakspeare MSS in his possession to the inspection of His Royal Highness the PRINCE of WALES, who was pleased to bestow very particular attention upon them, and to express his perfect conviction of their undoubted authenticity’,7 but three weeks later the Oracle announced that the ‘list of noble and learned unbelievers increases rapidly’ and gave some of the names, ranging from Lord Orford to George Steevens, Edmond Malone, and Isaac Reed.8 Less attention was given at the time than has been paid subsequently to the embarrassing question of how so many people allowed themselves to be deceived, if only briefly, by what were transparently obviously forgeries. The warning offered by the unmasking of Chatterton’s forgeries was only twenty years in the past, but the ever-increasing devotion to Shakespeare had created an atmosphere within which, as Francis Webb, one of Ireland’s defenders, put it, ‘every thing relating to him has been sought after with peculiar avidity and sedulous curiosity, by the unwearied expositor, the inquisitive antiquary, and ing Post, 6–9 February 1795; and The General Evening Post, 7–10 February 1795. 4  Morning Post, 12 February 1795. Manu­script transcription: BL Add. MS 30347, fol. 4r. 5  Oracle, 12 February 1795; BL Add. MS 30347, fol. 5r. 6  Draft of letter to M. H. dated 8 November 1795; London, BL, Additional MS 30346, fol. 67r. 7  True Briton, 31 December 1795, newspaper cutting; BL Add. MS 30347, fol. 32r. 8  Oracle, 21 January 1796, newspaper cutting; BL Add. MS 30347, fol. 35v.

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the enthusiastic poet’.9 People believed in the documents because they wanted them to be real. James Boaden, attempting to explain his own initial gullibility, could be speaking for many: ‘In some instances credulity is no disgrace: — strong enthusiasm is always eager to believe. I confess, therefore, that, for some time after I had seen them, I continued to think they might be genuine’.10 The publication of the documents in December 1795 was almost decisive, as they proved very unconvincing to most readers in cold print. Most of those who went to see the papers did not get much of a chance to examine them and could not make out a great deal if they did. As Bernard Grebanier has commented: ‘The spelling should have aroused suspicions perhaps; but it must be remembered that Elizabethan script was totally different from eighteenthcentury handwriting, and would have required patient study to decipher it accurately’.11 William Henry Ireland, as one nineteenth-century commentator observed, knew little of Elizabethan literature and was ‘ignorant, entirely and absolutely ignorant, of the paleo­graphy, of the manners and customs, and even of the ortho­g raphy of the period to which the papers that he produced pretended to belong’;12 as early as 1 January a correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine wrote: ‘I can scarcely glance over a page of his volume, without being checked by some glaring incongruity or manifest improbability’.13 The verdicts of Steevens and Malone were eagerly awaited. Steevens never published anything under his own name in this controversy, although several items, including Boaden’s, have been attributed to him, but Malone’s long-awaited determination, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, was published on 31 March 1796 and sold five hundred copies in two days.14 Two days later the new supposedly Shakespearean play, Vortigern and Rowena, was performed (without Shakespeare’s name) at Drury Lane and was a disaster. Malone’s 424-page Inquiry demolished the Irelands’ claims beyond almost all doubt. A few people still believed and fought, but the war was essentially 9 

[Webb], Shakspeare’s Manu­scripts, p. 1. Boaden, Letter to George Steevens, pp. 1–2. 11  Grebanier, The Great Shakespeare Forgery, p. 136. 12  White, ‘Introduction’, in Confessions of William-Henry Ireland, p. vii. 13  Letter dated January 1 and signed ‘K. S.’, in Gentleman’s Magazine, 66 (1796), p. 7. 14  Grebanier, p. 206. Malone makes this claim in an annotation at the beginning of the copy he was marking up for the second edition of An Inquiry into the Authenticity which never appeared (BL C45.e.23, p. [ii]). 10 

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over. In all but a very few minds there was no longer any way that even the most devoted adherents could believe in the genuineness of the celebrated documents. Although Malone contended that the proofs of fraud were so many and obvious at first sight as to require little effort, his long book shows that this was not the case, and, as Jack Lynch points out, ‘many readers, even some who had reason to think themselves knowledgeable in such matters, had found the papers plausible even on multiple readings’.15 There remained, however, some doubt about whether Samuel Ireland knew that his son had produced the forgeries, and Samuel persisted in arguing that if they were forgeries, of which he claimed never to have been entirely convinced, he had known nothing about this. When contemplating a suit for libel in 1797 when he was caricatured by James Gillray,16 he wrote simply: ‘The Papers in question were brought to him in detached parcels, and at different times by his Son Mr Wm Henry Ireland, with a plausible & well connected account which imposed on the Credulity of his Father’.17 When William Henry confessed in print in December 1796, he insisted that his father had known nothing: ‘I solemnly declare that my father was perfectly unacquainted with the whole affair, believing the papers most firmly the productions of Shakspear’.18 This may well be true, although Malone’s handwritten note on his copy (now in the British Library) expresses vigorous distrust in the whole book: ‘There is as much falsehood in this Rogue’s Account of his impudent forgery, as there was in the forgery itself; for scarcely a single circumstance is represented truly in all its parts’.19 The flood of publications attacking and supporting the documents or participants in the ‘great Shakespeare fraud’, as the title of a 2004 book puts it,20 gave plenty of work to reviewers. In January 1796 (published, like most periodicals at this time, on the first of the following month) the Monthly Mirror was first, leaping into print well before the specialized review journals with a joint review of Samuel Ireland’s publication of the manu­scripts, Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare, and 15 

Lynch, Deception and Detection, p. 49. He was finally dissuaded from this after learned counsel pointed out that the chief witness in his support would have to be his son, who ‘would not be considered as a witness on whose credit much reliance could be had’. W. Tidd, ‘Ex parte Ireland’, BL Add. MS 30347, fol. 37r. 17  BL Add. MS 30347, fols 35r–35v. 18  Ireland, Authentic Account, p. 42. 19  Ireland, Confessions, Malone copy, BL C.182.aa.7, t. p.–2r. 20  Pierce, The Great Shakespeare Fraud. 16 

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the opposition, Boaden’s Letter to George Steevens, Esq. containing A Critical Examination of the Papers Of Shakspeare. The Mirror’s verdict is damning, giving extracts from Boaden’s ‘irrefragable arguments against [the manu­scripts’] authenticity’ and pronouncing confidently in an upper-case bellow: ‘THE WHOLE IS A GROSS AND IMPUDENT IMPOSITION, AN INSULT TO THE CHARACTER OF OUR IMMORTAL BARD, AND A LIBEL ON THE TASTE AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATION’ (MM, 1, 1795–96, p. 170).21 The Analytical Review, still sitting on the fence, reviewing the Miscellaneous Papers in the number for March, published the day after Malone’s Inquiry, makes no definite judgement, while commenting that ‘the late discovery of a gold mine in Ireland is of less importance to the literary public, than the discovery of another play of Shakspeare; provided the fact of the latter discovery can be as decisively ascertained, as that of the former’ (AR, 23, 1796, p. 317). As the review journals normally reviewed books at least three months after publication, most of the battle was over by the time their reviews came out. Most are writing after Malone’s book was published, but they tend to approach Ireland’s Miscellaneous Papers as if their own judgement were still required. The Monthly Review, for example, in a review not published until 1 August, comments later that thanks to Malone’s ‘admirable detection of the whole affair’, the issue does not deserve much space, and the topic has already been ‘committed to oblivion’, but the review begins with the reviewer’s pronouncement: No sooner had we perused a few pages of this large and splendid volume, than the slender credit that we had been able to afford to the advertisements and rumours which, before its publication, had been circulated in support of the authenticity of its multifarious contents, vanished into air. (MR, n.s., 20, 1796, p. 343)

The British Critic, in a review published on 1 June, acknowledges that readers ‘may have been a little impatient to receive some account or opinion upon the subject’ but says that there was no hurry because ‘suspicion, from the very beginning, has hung on every part of the transaction’ (BC, 7, 1796, p. 522). If it was all over, what more was there to say? A  correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine in May 1796 recognizes that ‘after so ample a detection having been made by Mr Malone of the Shakspearian forgery, any additional observations may be deemed superfluous’ but argues that ‘though the fraud has 21 

The titles of the review journals and magazines will be abbreviated like this one and the references given in the text: AR (Analytical Review), BC (British Critic), CR (Critical Review), GM (Gentleman’s Magazine), MM (Monthly Mirror), MR (Monthly Review).

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been discovered, the enquiries of curiosity remain unsilenced’ (GM, 66, 1796, p. 363). There was indeed plenty to say about ‘the most impudent forgery that ever disgraced literary talents, or abused honest credulity’ (CR, n.s., 22, 1798, p. 177). Some reeled in astonishment — ‘A project to impose on the curiosity and credulity of the public, so singular and so daring, is a phænomenon which soars beyond our utmost ken and comprehension’ (MR, n.s., 20, 1796, p. 343) — and many were fascinated by the various issues raised by the questions of the authenticity of the documents. The external appearance of the various documents was, according to various observers, extraordinarily convincing, but that was only part of the story. The Monthly Mirror writes that ‘such is their external appearance, that many who went with the strongest inclination to doubt, returned fully convinced of their being the genuine productions of Shakspeare’ but goes on to point out that ‘it is by internal evidence that papers of this nature must be judged’ (MM, 1, 1795–96, p. 169). James Boaden, describing his own gradual disillusionment, says that the manu­scripts ‘bore the character of the poet’s writing — the paper appeared of sufficient age — the water-marks were earnestly displayed, and the matter diligently applauded’.22 To many ‘competent judges’, according to Francis Webb, ‘the paper on which they are written, both as to its various water-marks, manufacture, and other characteristics, bears evident proofs of antiquity’.23 Samuel Ireland and some of his defenders were particularly indignant that Malone and other unbelievers refused to come to examine the manu­ scripts — as one of Ireland’s supporters argued, ‘the host of erudite commentators will not see them, lest they should be convinced’,24 and the Tele­graph, writing of Vortigern, says, ‘seeing is believing’.25 The British Critic’s reviewer, who had in fact inspected the documents anyway, made it clear that the accusation of unfairness in condemning unseen is false: The whole force of deception certainly lay in the external appearance of the papers; and if it was possible for any sagacious persons to be deceived, it was only by the manual art employed in their fabrication. But this is not the part to which the critics have objected (except so far as fac simile copies of them have been published) it is to their contents; which undoubtedly may be appreciated with more ease and certainty in the printed volume than in the written papers. (BC 7, 1796, p. 523) 22 

Boaden, Letter to George Steevens, p. 2. [Webb], Shakspeare’s Manu­scripts, p. 9. 24  [Wyatt], A Comparative Review, p. 2. 25  Tele­graph, 10 July 1795. 23 

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The documents might appear ‘so antique’ (CR, n.s., 16, 1796, p. 361), but that was neither here nor there once the content had been examined; as Malone argued strongly in his peroration, ‘there is no external evidence whatsoever that can give any credibility to the manu­scripts which have been now examined, or even entitle them to a serious consideration’.26 Once William Henry Ireland’s Authentic Account surrendered and described the whole process of the production of the forgeries in fascinating detail later supplemented substantially by his 1805 Confessions, the reasons for the appearance of the documents became clear. The paper was old; it had been ripped from old documents and the blank leaves of books. The ink was faked by a process Ireland describes in detail, employing three liquids used in marbling and requiring that the documents be warmed at the fire and sometimes resulting in scorching when Ireland was impatient; the seals were old and had been stuck together again by Ireland; some threads had come from a corner ripped by Ireland from a disintegrating tapestry in the House of Lords.27 When caught out, he could be very quick and ingenious; he describes imminent disaster over the signature of John Heminges when Ireland’s belief that no signature survived was proved wrong and the real one did not resemble the one he had created. Rushing away with just the memory of the genuine signature to guide him, he created a new document with the correct signature and created a new Heminges as well to account for the difference, claiming to have been told about the tall and the short John Heminges, ‘the one connected with Shakspeare and the Globe theatre, and the other being concerned for the Curtain theatre’.28 The whole process Ireland claims to have taken only an hour and a quarter from his sight of the genuine Heminges signature. For those deceived in 1795–96 and still alive in 1805, Ireland’s contemptuous dismissal must have been extremely annoying: Now even if we for a moment grant that the penmanship had deceived, yet there is still an important question to be decided: — was the language competent to deceive the public? I answer unhesitatingly that it was not: consequently credence should not have been yielded by the believers so lightly, on the mere external appearance of the papers: they should have maturely considered the internal evidence; and then, as the spurious composition must have exposed itself, they would

26 

Malone, An Inquiry, p. 353. Ireland, The Confessions, pp. 39–40, 46–49, 56, 70–71, 97–98. 28  Ireland, The Confessions, pp. 86–93. 27 

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not have been deceived, and of consequence their mental faculties would not have been imposed upon.29

As the Oracle and Public Advertiser commented in June 1796, Ireland’s forgeries contained ‘the deepest marks of ignorance’, and this point has been made numerous times.30 The refusal of the believers to admit that the documents’ appearance was irrelevant continued, and the True Briton argued in February 1797: ‘It is not possible that Mr MALONE should have made the discovery of the SHAKSPEARE MSS being forged, for, by that Gentleman’s own confession, he never saw them’.31 One of the deceived, James Boswell, dead before Malone’s exposure, would not have enjoyed Ireland’s detailed description of his careful consideration of the documents and subsequent kneeling and exclamation: ‘I now kiss the invaluable relics of our bard: and thanks to God that I have lived to see them!’32 Malone became the focus for much of the attention paid to the controversy after its early stages, sometimes under attack and at other times being praised in the most extravagant terms. The Irelands’ most vehement defender, George Chalmers, even argued that the fraud was substantially Malone’s fault because he had encouraged people to believe that Shakespeare documents might be found: Of all others, he ought not to accuse those, whom he has himself led to the transgression. He had diligently shown that, in the archives of Shakspeare’s descendants, some of his fragments may yet be found; and from this information, the believers inferred, that these might probably be the expected fragments.33

The reviews tend to see Malone as a saviour and a warrior for truth, and the Analytical Review, for example, berates Samuel Ireland for his attack on Malone, ‘attempting to convict Mr Malone of dulness, ignorance, and malignity’, and informs him: Mr Malone is in possession of a well-earned reputation as a philo­logist and critic; on the present occasion he has rendered an important service to the republic of letters; and it will not be an easy task, to induce the public to withdraw from him that 29 

Ireland, The Confessions, pp. 303–04. Oracle and Public Advertiser, 9 June 1796. 31  True Briton, 3 February 1797. 32  Ireland, The Confessions, p. 96. 33  [Chalmers], An Apo­logy for The Believers, p. 4. 30 

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tribute of applause, which is due to the man whose talents have been successfully employed in detecting imposture. (AR, 25, 1797, p. 55)

Some even argued that the immense achievement of Malone’s work made the whole thing worthwhile, as did the Monthly Review, for example: ‘so great has been the satisfaction with which we have perused it, that we could almost forgive the forgeries, for the sake of the learned and entertaining work to which they have given birth’ (MR, n.s., 20, 1796: 344). The attitude that the public’s feelings may be as valid as factual knowledge was expressed repeatedly in the prolonged run-up to the performance of Vortigern, and is seen strikingly in Henry James Pye’s rejected pro­logue to the play as he urges the audience to follow their feelings: If at his words, the tears of pity flow, Your breasts with horror thrill, with rapture glow, If on your harrow’d souls impress’d you feel The stamp of nature’s uncontested seal, Demand no other proof — nor idly pore O’er mouldy manu­scripts of ancient lore, To see if every tawny line display The genuine ink of fam’d Eliza’s day. Nor strive with curious industry to know How poets spelt two centuries ago.34

Most critical opinion saw Malone’s efforts, aided by ‘mouldy manu­scripts of ancient lore’, as admirable, but he had to endure some abuse directed towards what Samuel Ireland called ‘the only literary quality he has, that of patient, and laborious research’,35 or Malone called his own ‘unremitting ardour’.36 The Analytical Review takes a resolute line on this subject: ‘Accurate knowledge, and recondite research, cannot be more usefully employed than in detecting imposture; and the prolific invention of impostors frequently furnishes occasion for this employment’ (AR, 23, 1796, p. 380). The Monthly Mirror, firmly on Malone’s side of the issue in general, nevertheless mocks both Chalmers and Malone gently for their ‘habit of prying into every corner where a piece of dusty paper is likely to be found’ and comments that ‘every pamphlet and book that has been written on the subject, serves only to shew the uncertainty of all 34 

Reprinted in [Ireland], Vortigern, p. viii. Ireland, Mr Ireland’s Vindication of his Conduct, p. 46. 36  Malone, An Inquiry, p. 3. 35 

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blackletter research; “the glorious uncertainty of the law” is nothing to it’ (MM, 4, 1797, p. 98). The whole Ireland fraud marks a pivotal point in attitudes to archival research in relation to Shakespeare, and we see in responses to Malone both the earlier devaluing of scholarship and the recognition of its importance. The contemptuous attitude towards the nitpicking of scholarship was perhaps best expressed by Alexander Pope in 1735 in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot: ‘Pains, reading, study, are their just pretence, | And all they want is spirit, taste, and sense’. Some of this attitude survived and indeed survives still, but many people’s views altered. As Frank Kermode commented in 2004 in connection with John Payne Collier’s nineteenth-century forgeries, the scholars of the nineteenth century were ‘working in a tradition often said to have originated with Malone’.37 Malone’s opponents during the Ireland fight, including Samuel Ireland, poured scorn on Malone for this very thing, his devotion to scholarly research and the evidence of documents. However, Philalethes, a correspondent to the St James’s Chronicle in April 1796, saw Malone’s vast opus as entirely justified because ‘independent of the amusing information the book contains, rules are laid down by which the Publick may in future be guarded against similar impostures, it has a value that will outlive the present purpose’.38 The Monthly Review wants to feel confidence that the world has changed: […] we sincerely hope that the important lesson deducible from the transaction will not be lost. When it has been found that persons, who are so much below mediocrity, in every talent belonging to good writing, have been able to pass their trash for the genuine productions of a great name, even on men of high literary reputation, it certainly ought to operate as a warning against that credulity, the offspring of enthusiastic admiration and of an appetite for wonders, which for a time obliterate judgment and confound every principle of good taste. The public, too, will have profited little by this curious experiment, if they be again so ready to catch at the bait of old deeds, books of accounts, love-letters, &c. &c. in the name of Shakspeare, or any other favourite author, though much better authenticated than these have been. (MR, n.s., 22, 1797, p. 111)

As we all know, this was a vain hope, and there were many forgery scandals to come, outstanding among them those concerning the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forgers T. J. Wise and John Payne Collier. And so it has gone on. The stellar career of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern 37  38 

Kermode, ‘Manufactured Humbug’, p. 17­. Letter signed PHILALETHES, St James’s Chronicle, 12–14 April 1796.

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History at Oxford and later Master of Peterhouse, Cam­bridge, was irrevocably tarnished by his mistaken authentication of the forged Hitler diaries in 1983, and, in a different sphere, arguments continue in print to this day over the reattribution of Shakespeare’s works to other playwrights by, most notably, Gary Taylor in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (2007) and the latest New Oxford Shakespeare (2017). ‘Seeing is believing’ may now include disputes over the results of text-analysis programmes, but the accusations of bad faith and wilful delusions are still with us. The ‘unflaggingly competitive spirit’ described by Kermode, referring to nineteenth-century Shakespeare scholars, contributed to the Ireland scandal in the preceding century and continues into the twenty-first.39

39 

A short article by Jack Malvern in the Times, 11 December 2017, p. 7 reports on Sir Brian Vickers’s founding of a committee to defend Shakespeare’s reputation against the efforts of Taylor and his cohorts to re-assign the authorship of some plays. Both sides have used computer analysis but in different ways. Insults fly.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts London, BL, Additional MS 30346 —— , Additional MS 30347

Primary Sources Boaden, James, Letter to George Steevens, Esq. containing A Critical Examination of the Papers Of Shakspeare; published by Mr Samuel Ireland. To which are added, Extracts from Vortigern. By James Boaden, Esq.  Author of Fontainville Forest, &c.  (London: Martin and Bain, 1796) [Chalmers, George], An Apo­logy for The Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers, which were exhibited in Norfolk-Street (London: Egerton, 1797) E., H., Letter dated 30 April, Gentleman’s Magazine, 66 (1796), 363–64 The General Evening Post, 7–10 February 1795 Ireland, Samuel, An Authentic Account of the Shaksperian Manu­scripts, &c.  By  W.  H. Ireland (London: Debrett, 1796) Ireland, William Henry, The Confessions of William-Henry Ireland. Containing the particulars of his fabrication of the Shakspeare Manu­scripts; together with Anecdotes and Opinions (hitherto unpublished) of many distinguished persons in the Literary, Political, and Theatrical World (London: Goddard, 1805) —— , Mr Ireland’s Vindication of his Conduct, respecting The Publication of the Supposed Shakspeare MSS being a Preface or Introduction to A  Reply to the critical labors of Mr Malone, in his ‘Enquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Papers, &c. &c.’ (London: Faulder, Robson, Egerton, and White, 1796) —— , printed proposals for publication of the documents, dated 4 March 1795, bound in BL Add. MS 30347, fol. 32r —— , Vortigern, an Historical Tragedy, in five acts; represented at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. And Henry The Second, an Historical Drama. Supposed to be written by the author of Vortigern (London: Barker, White, Egerton, and Faulder, [1799]) London Packet or New Lloyd’s Evening Post, 6–9 February 1795 Malone, Edmond, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, published Dec. 24, M DCC XCV. and attributed to Shakspeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Henry, Earl of Southampton: illustrated by fac-similes of the genuine hand-writing of that nobleman, and of Her Majesty; a new fac-simile of the hand-writing of Shakspeare, never before exhibited; and other authentick documents: in a letter addressed to the Right Hon. James, Earl of Charlemont, By Edmond Malone, Esq. (London: Cadell, 1796) Oracle and Public Advertiser, 9 June 1796 Philalethes, Letter, St James’s Chronicle, 12–14 April 1796

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Pope, Alexander, ‘Epistle VII. To Dr Arbuthnot’, The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq, Vol. ii: Containing his Epistles and Satires (London: Gilliver, 1735), p. 85 Review, ‘An Apo­logy for The Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers, which were exhibited in Norfolk-Street’, Critical Review, n.s., 22 (1798) 177–81 Review, ‘An Authentic Account of the Shaksperian Manu­scripts, &c. By W. H. Ireland’, Monthly Review, n.s., 22 (1797), 111 Review, ‘An Inquiry into the Authenticity of certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, published Dec. 24, M DCC XCV. and attributed to Shakspeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Henry, Earl of Southampton […] By Edmond Malone, Esq.’, Analytical Review, 23 (1796), 380–86 Review, ‘An Inquiry into the Authenticity of certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, published Dec. 24, M DCC XCV. and attributed to Shakspeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Henry, Earl of Southampton […] By Edmond Malone, Esq.’, Monthly Review, n.s., 20 (1796), 343–44 Review, ‘An Investigation of Mr. Malone’s Claim to the Character of Scholar or Critic […] By Samuel Ireland’, Monthly Mirror, 4 (1797), 98–99 Review, ‘Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare […]’, Analytical Review, 23 (1796), 317–2 Review, ‘Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare […]’, British Critic, 7 (1796), 522–31 Review, ‘Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare […]’, Critical Review, n.s., 16 (1796), 360–65 Review, ‘Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE […]’, Monthly Review, n.s., 20 (1796­–97), 342–43 Review, ‘Miscellaneous Papers, and Legal Instruments, under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare […]; Letter to George Steevens, Esq. containing A Critical Examination of the Papers of Shakspeare […] by James Boaden, Esq.’, Monthly Mirror, 1 (1795–76), 169–77 Review, ‘Mr. Ireland’s Vindication of his Conduct, respecting The Publication of the Supposed Shakspeare MSS’, Analytical Review, 25 (1797), 53–55 S., K., Letter dated 1 January, Gentleman’s Magazine, 66 (1796), 7 St James’s Chronicle, 10–12 February 1795 Tele­graph, 10 July 1795 True Briton, 3 February 1797 [Webb, Francis], Shakspeare’s Manu­scripts, in the possession of Mr  Ireland, Examined, respecting the internal and external evidences of their authenticity. By Philalethes (Lon­ don: Johnson, 1796) [Wyatt, John], A Comparative Review of the Opinions of Mr James Boaden, (Editor of the Oracle) In February, March and April, 1795; and of James Boaden, Esq. (Author of Fontainville Forest, and of a Letter to George Steevens, Esq. In February 1796, relative to The Shakspeare MSS By a Friend to Consistency (London: Sael, [1796])

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Secondary Works Forster, Antonia, ‘Shakespeare in the Reviews’, in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 60–77 Grebanier, Bernard, The Great Shakespeare Forgery: A New Look at the Career of William Henry Ireland (London: Heinemann, 1966) Kermode, Frank, ‘Manufactured Humbug’, London Review of Books, 16 December 2004, pp. 17–18 Lynch, Jack, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) Pierce, Patricia, The Great Shakespeare Fraud: The Strange, True Story of William-Henry Ireland (Stroud: Sutton, 2004) White, Richard Grant, ‘Introduction’, in The Confessions of William-Henry Ireland Containing the Particulars of his Fabrication of the Shakspeare Manu­scripts, Together with Anecdotes and Opinions of Many Distinguished Persons in the Literary, Political, and Theatrical World (New York: Bouton, 1874)

The Macro Plays in Georgian England Gail McMurray Gibson*

T

here is a cultural history to most of the assumptions governing medi­ eval drama scholarship. This is especially true of the unexamined premise that there was a significant medi­eval genre called a ‘morality play’ when, in fact, three untitled East Anglian plays in a single miscellany collected by a series of local antiquaries are the only complete, or nearly complete, examples of these plays surviving in manu­script.1 The three very different allegorical plays that early nineteenth-century drama scholars came to call Wisdom (which also exists in a fragment in the Digby Plays manu­script in the Bodleian Library),2 Mankind, and The Castle of Perseverance are now MS  V.a.354 in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. The three dramas are still known collectively as the Macro Plays, for their eighteenth-century owner, Reverend Cox Macro (1683–1767), a manu­script collector, art patron, and antiquary from Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.3 Two of these plays (Mankind and Wisdom) were copied by and bear the ownership inscription of Thomas Hyngham, a fifteenth 

*A longer version of this essay appears as “The Macro Manu­scripts and the Making of the Morality Play” in Papers of the Biblio­graphical Society of America, 113 (2019). 1  The little-known Winchester manu­script school drama Occupation and Idleness might be considered the lonely pre-Tudor exception. See Beadle, ‘Occupation and Idleness’. 2  For discussion of the relationship between the two Wisdom manu­scripts, see Riggio, The Play of Wisdom, pp. 6–18. 3  See the introduction to David Bevington’s 1972 facsimile edition of the plays: ‘our conception of the morality play until the beginning of the Tudor era is almost entirely dependent on the Macro collection’; Macro Plays, ed. by Bevington, p. vii. Gail McMurray Gibson is the William R. Kenan Jr. Emerita Professor of English and Humanities at Davidson College, North Carolina.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 311–327 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116459 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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century monk from the Benedictine abbey of Bury St Edmunds,4 as well as the inscribed fact of possession by a wealthy sixteenth-century recusant Bury goldsmith named Robert Oliver. At least two, possibly all three plays, were once part of a miscellany volume containing legal, scientific, and alchemical manu­scripts compiled in the seventeenth century by James Cobbes, the antiquarian husband of Robert Oliver’s granddaughter,5 and then were bound and preserved in the library of Cox Macro’s country house at Norton, Suffolk, seven miles from Bury. After the death of Cox Macro, his estate and his manu­script collection descended to his childless daughter, Mary, and then eventually to descendants of her Staniforth in-laws, the Pattesons of Norwich. In 1821 the miscellany was acquired by Hudson Gurney, a bookish, wealthy banker and MP from Keswick Hall, near Norwich, who was long-time vice president of the Society of Antiquaries. The three late medi­eval plays became known to scholars for the first time, were removed from the Cobbes miscellany, and were bound together separately in the quarto blue calfskin volume embossed with the Gurney family coat of arms that was eventually purchased in August of 1936 by the Folger Shakespeare Library.6 The title that Hudson Gurney had inscribed on the spine of the new binding was simply Old Plays Temp. Henry VI, but it might well be argued that it was Hudson Gurney who, by creating an antho­logy for these plays for the convenience of study and transcription by his medi­evalizing friends and fellows of the Society of Antiquaries, actually created the medi­eval morality play as genre. Thus, it is the Georgian Age, as much as the fifteenth century of their origins, that should be acknowledged a crucial part of the cultural history of the drama texts that we call the Macro Plays. Certainly, Hudson Gurney seems to be a major player, although before now early drama scholars have not known much about him or about the early nineteenth-century discovery of the plays that would become the primary corpus of the pre-Reformation English morality play genre. Here is all Alfred Pollard wrote in the introduction to the 1904 Early English Text Society edition of The Macro Plays, when the volume containing these three plays was still possessed by a Gurney heir, Hudson Gurney’s cousin’s son, John Henry Gurney Jr (1848–1922): Cox Macro died in 1767, and fifty-two years later his manu­scripts were in the possession of John Patteson, M.P. for Norwich, who unadvisedly sold them (it is said 4 

Beadle, ‘Monk Thomas Hyngham’s Hand’. On the Oliver family and James Cobbes of Bury St Edmunds, see Beadle, ‘Macro MS 5’, pp. 48–49 and 69–73; and Beadle, ‘James Cobbes of Bury St Edmunds’. 6  Beadle, ‘Macro MS 5’, pp. 35–40, 48–49, and 51–56. 5 

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for no more than £150) to a bookseller of that town. The following year they were put up for auction at Christie’s, and while forty-one lots were bought by Dawson Turner, the rest, including the Moralities, were bought for £700 by Mr  Hudson Gurney, in whose family they have since remained.7

Although Pollard’s two sentences have been repeated by nearly every early drama scholar since 1904 who has mentioned the provenance of the Macro Plays, almost every detail stated by Pollard is misleading if not just plain wrong. John Patteson (1755–1833) was an enthusiastic art collector and amateur historian as well as a once-successful Norwich textile magnate, brewer, banker, and politician who was MP for Norwich from 1806 to 1812. The Macro library that had circuitously come to him by inheritance was his pride and joy. But the expenses of a parliamentary career coupled with failed business ventures forced Norwich’s leading businessman to sell the early printed books from the Cox Macro library to a Norwich bookseller named Richard Beatniffe shortly before Beatniffe’s death in 1819. Finally, and only in the desperation of business losses that brought him to the brink of bankruptcy, John Patteson sold the Macro country house and estate8 and consigned most of the Macro manu­scripts to James Christie of Pall Mall, London. It has been difficult until now to know more. But in July 2012, the Norfolk Record Office in Norwich acquired a collection of the papers of the Palgrave family,9 which also includes a thick file of letters to Hudson Gurney written by his business partner and lifelong friend Dawson Turner. Returned to Turner’s heirs after Gurney’s death by the executors of Gurney’s estate, these unpublished letters had eventually ended up among the Palgrave family papers (Norfolk Record Office, MS MC 2847). The archivist, historian, and first keeper of the Public Record Office, Sir Francis Palgrave (born Francis Cohen to Anglo-Jewish parents), was a close friend of both Hudson Gurney and the banker-antiquarian Dawson Turner. After 1823, Palgrave was also Dawson Turner’s son-in-law. Turner himself paid the legal fees for Cohen’s name change 7 

Macro Plays, ed. by Furnivall and Pollard, p. ix. On the life of John Patteson, see Cubitt, Mackley, and Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in The Great Tour of John Patteson 1778–1779, pp. 1–39. 9  The Norfolk Record Office catalogue observes concerning the Turner-Gurney letters in Norwich, Nofolk Record Office, MS MC 2847 that most of Dawson Turner’s correspondence was presented to Trinity College, Cam­bridge, in 1890. Those that had been deemed private ‘family letters’, including the Turner correspondence to Gurney, remained with Sir Robert Harry Inglis Palgrave (1827–1919), the third and longest-surviving son of Sir Francis Palgrave, and then, apparently, at Henstead Hall, Suffolk, where Sir Robert had resided in his last years. 8 

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to Palgrave — Turner’s wife’s maiden name — a non-negotiable condition, as the Palgrave family letters in the Norfolk Record Office make clear, for Cohen’s marriage to Dawson Turner’s daughter Elizabeth in an Anglican ceremony.10 The Turner-Gurney letters among the Palgrave papers span nearly half a century, 1809–52, revealing a lively ongoing conversation about the business of banking and the business of antiquarian studies as well as the record of a long and remarkable friendship. Hudson Gurney underlined chief points of interest in Turner’s letters in blue ink and wrote the date of his reply on the back of the letter along with brief notes, sometimes in Greek, listing the contents: banking, new historical and antiquarian publications, family news. And those letters include an unpublished series of letters written by Dawson Turner to Hudson Gurney from 1819 to 1823 filled with precise details about their acquisition of the manu­script collection that included Christie catalogue’s Macro MS 5 — the quarto miscellany volume that contained, in addition to medi­eval works of law, science, and alchemy and sixteenth-century medical notes by Thomas Oliver of Bury St Edmunds,11 the three late medi­eval paper manu­ scripts of the Macro Plays. These plays were identified in Christie’s Macro Manu­ scripts Sale catalogue as ‘Three ancient Masques — The Masque of Wisdom — The Masque of Mercy — The Masque of the Castel of Perseverance’.12 Hudson Gurney was born in Norfolk in 1775,13 twelve years before Cox Macro’s death in Suffolk, and he died at the age of ninety in 1864. Gurney, raised a Quaker before being thrown out of meeting for supporting Britain in the Napoleonic Wars, was a prominent banker who was heir to both the brewery and banking fortune of his father Richard and the fortune of his maternal grandfather, David Barclay of the Barclay banking empire. Hudson Gurney may well, in fact, during much of his life been one of the richest men in England. As a Quaker, he had been barred from attendance at university and so was educated at his grandfather’s house at Youngsbury, Hertfordshire, by a private tutor.14 10 

NRO MS MC 2847/N1. Beadle, ‘Macro MS 5’. 12  Catalogue of Ancient Manu­scripts, p. 3. 13  For the life of Hudson Gurney see his obituary in the January, 1865 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine; Osborne, ‘Gurney, Hudson’, ODNB; and Spencer and Salmon, ‘Gurney, Hudson’. 14  The tutor was no less than the English polymath Thomas Young (1773–1829), the physician, physicist, and linguist who, among many other distinctions, was the first person in Europe to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hudson Gurney paid for the white marble memorial medallion of Thomas Young in the Chapel of St Andrew in Westminster Abbey and wrote and published, anonymously, a tribute called Memoir of the Life of Thomas Young. 11 

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Hudson Gurney, as was expected of him, joined his uncles to become a partner in the family banking business. He was also a sometime politician, of independent, even quirky, convictions. He was MP for Shaftesbury in 1812 and then MP for Newton, on the Isle of Wight, from 1816 until 1832, when the Reform Bill disenfranchised his parliamentary seat. Gurney also served stints as justice of the peace and as sheriff of Norfolk. His chief interests, however, were classical literature and historical and antiquarian studies. Gurney published several books — among them his 1799 English verse adaptation of the Cupid and Psyche episode by Apuleius and, in 1817, the first mono­graph in English on the Bayeux Tapestry. In 1818, he was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries for which he served as vice president from 1822 to 1846. During most of that time, Hudson Gurney actually functioned as president of the Society, since the titular president, the duke of Aberdeen, a long-time friend of Gurney’s (they had taken their Grand Tour together when they were still adolescents), was busy as foreign secretary, eventually as prime minister, of England.15 But it was Hudson Gurney’s banking partner Dawson Turner (1775–1858), of the Great Yarmouth branch of Barclays, a truly indefatigable entrepreneur of antiquarian studies, who was entirely responsible for Gurney’s possession of the Macro Plays. Dawson Turner was used to directing scholarly projects: his wife and his six dutiful daughters spent their days on their assignments of transcribing, cataloging, and indexing manu­scripts in the crowded library of Bank House in what the visiting painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846) described in his diary in 1817 as ‘one incessant scene of fact collecting’; Haydon observed that Turner’s library was run like a school, with his older daughters hard at work helping their father with his projects and the younger daughters busily learning the necessary skills: ‘One seized a drawing, another a French grammar, a third her spelling book, a fourth her etching needle’.16 15  On Hudson Gurney and his friendship with Lord Aberdeen, see Hingley, Visions of Antiquity, pp. 173–80. 16  [Haydon], The Diary, ed. by Pope, ii, 127–28. A cousin of Hudson Gurney’s (Anna Gurney, later Mrs Anna Backhouse) wrote a letter to her father Joseph John Gurney describing a visit to the Turner household in 1838 thus:

We spent 2nd eveng with the Turners — looking at Auto­g raphs, Prints &c — very interesting they all are […]. Mary [Mary Anne Turner, the never-married third daughter, who remained at home as her father’s faithful office assistant] does certainly seem to be pretty well work’d — by her father & looks thin enough — but she rather likes it too, I think—& seems really fond of her father — though she makes no secret of her hard work — she says her father is never cold, never ill, never hungry & never sleepy & expects the same from his family — No rest […] & no idleness […]. (London, Society of Friends Archives, Temp MSS 434/2/57).

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In the age of the cult of the auto­graph,17 Dawson Turner, who had already by the time of Haydon’s visit begun his collection of what would eventually be tens of thousands of auto­graph letters,18 learned of the Christie sale of Cox Macro’s manu­scripts — which he knew to contain a number of auto­graphs of eminent royal, literary, and scientific persons. It is clear from a Turner letter to Hudson Gurney of 29 January 1819 that the two men had already been discussing whether the British Museum would buy what they refer to as the ‘Patteson manu­scripts’: ‘The [British] Museum, you may rely upon it’, Dawson Turner writes, ‘will not buy Patteson’s MSS for they are not of a class to be national property, and they have plenty of second rate things of this kind already’.19 Turner wrote this letter to Hudson Gurney in London, at his town house at 24 Gloucester Place, Portman Square. Gurney spent most of the year in London and went reluctantly home to Norfolk only when Parliament was in recess. It was Hudson Gurney’s beloved, childless wife Margaret who liked house parties and country life, and for whom, in January 1819, he was completing the building of his new country house at Keswick, near Norwich. Gurney moved in sometime in July, 1819 and found his main solace there his spacious new library,20 so for Gurney, as Dawson Turner knew, the timing was absolutely right for considering the purchase of a major collection of manu­scripts. William Stevenson, the Norwich printer who produced the Christie’s sale catalogue, sent Dawson Turner an advance copy on 11 February 1820. On 16 February, Dawson Turner reported to Hudson Gurney that James Christie, in reply to Turner’s enquiry, had told him that he was still awaiting Patteson’s instructions about selling the Macro manu­scripts; in Christie’s opinion, wrote Turner, they would be most advantageously sold privately as a single lot. On 25 February he reported to Gurney again: Stevenson had confided to Turner that John Patteson was deeply in debt and had been disappointed by Christie’s estimate of the worth of the manu­script collection.21 The catalogue changed Dawson Turner’s mind about the collection being ‘second-rate’. And it is here that the cache of Turner letters in the Palgrave papers turns in earnest to the former Macro manu­script collection. On 24 17 

See Munby, Cult of the Auto­graph Letter, p. 1. Munby, Cult of the Auto­graph Letter, p. 37. 19  NRO MS MC 2847 N1/1/2. 20  Johnson, Keswick Hall, pp. 11–12; and Bellinger, Memories of Intwood and Keswick, pp. 96–8. 21  Munby, Cult of the Auto­graph Letter, pp. 37–38. 18 

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April 1820, Turner writes a letter to Gurney in London: ‘Patteson’s collection as shown by the catalogue’, he writes, ‘is far larger than I had supposed & of better quality’ (this sentence in Turner’s letter was underlined in blue ink by Hudson Gurney).22 By 15 November 1820, Dawson Turner, who was always himself a bit strapped for cash, has a financial scheme — and Gurney’s role in it — fully in place: He and Gurney will buy the manu­scripts together and split them. The banker-antiquarian then suggests that it would be profitable if Gurney should have his share rearranged and indexed and properly rebound, for ‘I assure you, they will be worth double what they are now. Their present state is very disgraceful’.23 By 16 January 1821, Dawson Turner has decided to buy the manu­scripts — with Hudson Gurney’s financial assistance,24 but Turner’s enthusiasm about the manu­scripts waxes and wanes. In a letter of 9 February 1821, Dawson Turner glumly writes Gurney that, after examining the Macro manu­scripts in Norwich for three days, his estimation of their worth has sunk again, but that he thinks it would be dishonourable to withdraw his offer to buy them from ‘Poor Patteson’: ‘There were at least 30 volumes’, he writes, sizing up the financial implications of the deal, ‘which I consider to be utter rubbish & worth no more than grocers or trunkmakers would give for them’. Turner finds ‘curious’, however, the part of the collection said to have belonged to the Tudor historian Sir Henry Spelman and concludes that ‘with the supposition that much of it is unpublished, I think it is well worth what you & I talked of for it. The only other valuable articles are the letters and royal auto­graphs collected by Dr Macro’.25 Many more letters concerning the Christie sale passed from Dawson Turner to Hudson Gurney before the letter of 14 March 1821 that begins: ‘Dear Hudson, At last I have bought Patteson’s M.S.S. but I have managed wretchedly’. Despite all the financial scheming, and Turner’s oft-expressed determination to Gurney that they offer ‘not more than a shilling above £500’ for the Macro manu­script collection, Turner had unexpectedly ended up in a bidding war with his chief rival, William Upcott (1799–1845),26 the librarian, anti22 

NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/2. NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/4. 24  NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/8. 25  NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/9. 26  William Upcott had been in correspondence with Dawson Turner by 1816 with proposals for exchanges of duplicate auto­graphs from their collections. See Munby, Cult of the Auto­ graph Letter, pp. 13–32, especially pp. 19–20. 23 

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quarian, and auto­graph collector who had learned about the private Macro collection sale when Turner’s own father-in-law, William Palgrave, ‘went to town and unluckily mentioned the matter’ to him. Turner was forced to offer £700 ‘and thus it was’, he mournfully writes Gurney’, that £200 is thrown away’.27 Throughout April and May 1821, Dawson Turner fumes about the sale and the wretched condition of the manu­scripts and tries, unsuccessfully, to convince Hudson Gurney to come from London to Turner’s home in Great Yarmouth to choose his share of the Macro collection. But Hudson Gurney, preoccupied by his parliamentary duties in London and all too familiar with Dawson Turner’s antiquarian enthusiasms, apparently finally replies that Turner should just decide himself which of the manu­scripts he thinks Gurney would want and proceed with the division of the collection.28 By August 1821, Gurney is at his new country house in Norfolk and has received the manu­ scripts selected for him by Turner. Turner chose Cox Macro’s extensive auto­ graph collection and the scientific and mathematical texts for himself; what he assigned to Gurney as his share included not only most of the historical texts, but also the literary texts, including a miscellany quarto containing nine medi­ eval manu­scripts — among them, on fols 98–121, 122–34, and 154–91, three allegorical medi­eval plays.29 Dawson Turner never mentions plays in this correspondence about the acquisition of the manu­scripts. It’s the auto­g raphs that he’s been eyeing all along, but to offer some historical context, the only pre-Reformation religious drama texts that had been printed by scholars before the nineteenth century were the few brief excerpts and fragments gathered by a scattered group of historically minded clerics and antiquarians like Henry Bourne, whose muddled transcription of the now-lost Newcastle Shipwrights’ play appeared in Bourne’s posthumous history of Newcastle in 1736,30 and John Croft, who published the York Scrivener’s play in his Excerpta Antiqua ‘of fugitive fragments’ of 1797.31 But, in 1821, the year that Turner stage-manages the purchase of the Macro manu­script collection, serious new antiquarian interest was suddenly starting 27 

NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/10. In a letter of 12 May 1821, Turner writes: ‘You are most kind respecting the Spelman M.S.S. & I hope I shall be able to make such a selection as will […] meet your wishes’ (NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/13). 29  For a complete list of the texts in the miscellany, see Beadle, ‘Macro MS 5’, pp. 43–44. 30  Bourne, History of Newcastle upon Tyne, pp. 139–41. 31  [Crofts], Excerpta Antiqua, Preface and pp. 105–10. 28 

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to focus on early English theatre because of the Roxburghe Club, that close network of elite bibliophiles who had inherited or collected manu­script libraries. The Roxburghe Club’s members-only edition of The World and the Child was presented in 1817 by John Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl Spencer, before he realized that the play that he’d purchased for his collection had been stolen from the library of Trinity College Dublin,32 and in 1818 the Roxburghe Club published James Heywood Markland’s pageants from the Chester Mysteries.33 It’s in 1821 that Edward Peregrine Towneley announces to the Roxburghe Club his intention of printing the next year the Judgement play from his family manu­ script (Markland’s edition apparently having convinced Towneley to buy back the play manu­script that had been sold by his father’s executors in the Towneley library sale of 1814).34 And it is not only these private Roxburghe Club editions breathlessly reported in the pages of The Gentleman’s Magazine that reveal 1821, the year of the lavish neomedi­eval coronation of King George IV, to be on the cusp of growing public interest in early English pageantry and religious drama; in that year, too, Lord Byron publishes a controversial biblical closet drama that he named Cain, A Mystery.35 In the case of the Macro manu­scripts, it will be the Society of Antiquaries that will be the crucial context for their scholarly discovery. Dawson Turner, who was responsible for Gurney’s ownership of the Macro manu­scripts, almost immediately begins to prod Gurney to organize and rebind the manu­scripts to make them easier for other antiquarian enthusiasts in the Society to examine: ‘Mr Amyot [later Treasurer of the Society of Antiquaries], who was here yesterday’,36 Turner writes Gurney in his letter of 29 August, 1821, ‘looks to you to furnish the Antiquaries with some curious matters from your volumes […]. When will you examine them for the purpose, or how will you venture to look into them in their present state?’.37 And it is instructive to see that in the same letter of 29 August 1821 encouraging Gurney to give the Society of Antiquaries access to the Macro manu­ 32 

Bigham, Roxburghe Club and its Members, p. 25. Chester Mysteries, ed. by Markland. 34  Bigham, The Roxburghe Club, pp. 31–32. 35  Everything about Byron’s verse play, however, horrified the unnamed reviewer in The Gentle­man’s Magazine, who called it ‘odious’ and ‘pernicious’; Gentleman’s Magazine, 91 (1821), 613–15. 36  Thomas Amyot was elected Treasurer of the Society of Antiquaries in 1823. 37  NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/14. 33 

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scripts, Dawson Turner reveals that he himself has already made contact with one of the pioneers of English medi­eval drama scholarship, the Coventry antiquary Thomas Sharp (1770–1841): ‘Thomas Sharp, a curious man, I think of Coventry, left me the other day a MS of his relative to the Pageants & Mysteries of that city, full of extremely interesting matter’.38 Dawson Turner had already been corresponding with Sharp on medi­eval subjects,39 and, shortly after purchasing the Macro manu­scripts in the spring of 1821, Turner invited Thomas Sharp to Yarmouth to see what he referred to in his letter as the ‘Spelman manu­scripts’ but which he pointedly omitted revealing that he actually owned jointly with his friend Hudson Gurney: I wish I may tempt you here this summer […]. I shd also now have something […] to shew; for I have just added to my collection the whole of Sir Henry Spelman’s MSS, which has lain for more than a century in a closet at Norwich without seeing the light.40

In another letter of 4 May 1821 Turner puts off eager questions about the manu­scripts from Thomas Sharp by telling him: ‘You shall hear about the Spelman MSS as soon as I have had time to look at them myself; but at present they are to me as sealed books, & so they are likely to continue for some time to come’.41 By the time Sharp finally comes to Yarmouth in August to see the manu­scripts, the miscellany manu­script containing The Macro Plays is already in Gurney’s library at Keswick. It’s doubtful, therefore, that Sharp ever directly examined the manu­script; the fact that Sharp would later describe The Castle of Perseverance stage diagram as being on the first folio (it is on the last) of the play manu­script suggests that he had not. Certainly, it was Turner who advised Sharp in the first place that he needed illustrations of some kind for his forthcoming book on the drama of Coventry (in a letter to Sharp of 3 November 1821, Turner muses: ‘I still wish we could find some g­ raphical subject for the illustration of your volume. Are there none among the mss in the British Museum?’42), and it was probably Dawson Turner who suggested the Castle of Perseverance stage drawing. It is equally likely to have been Sharp, who, in turn, told William Hone about the drawing, who 38 

NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/14. London, BL, Additional MS 23726, fols 290r–291v. 40  BL Add. MS 23726, fol. 288r. 41  BL Add. MS 23726, fol. 291r. 42  London, BL, Additional MS 43645, fol. 303r. 39 

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mentions for the first time in print — in Ancient Mysteries Described in 1823 — that in a play ‘formerly belonging to the late Dr Cox Macro’ was a ‘sort of stage direction written on the first leaf ’ and who thanks an unnamed ‘bibliopolical friend’ for notice of this, ‘which he saw in Dr Macro’s collection’.43 What is most certain, though, and attested to by several surviving letters to and from Thomas Sharp, is Sharp’s apparent lack of direct access to Hudson Gurney, and thus presumably to the play manu­script. What is even clearer is Sharp’s impatience to obtain a facsimile of The Castle of Perseverance stage drawing for his book on the medi­eval drama of Coventry. Both Francis Douce and Francis Palgrave were enlisted as intermediaries to ask this favor of Gurney, but, as usual, it was Dawson Turner who played the decisive entrepreneurial role. Turner, in a letter of 20 April 1824 bound into the extra-illustrated edition of Sharp’s Dissertation on the Pageants in the British Library, reassures Sharp that he has reminded Francis Palgrave to obtain the facsimile drawing for Sharp’s use and ‘to send it first to me, in case you might now receive it on copper’.44 The Palgrave papers reveal for the first time that it was actually Dawson Turner’s wife Mary, an accomplished engraver who had been trained by Turner’s artist-protégé John Sell Cotman, who made the stage diagram engraving for Sharp’s book on the Coventry mysteries,45 the seminal book of medi­eval drama scholarship that was finally published in 1825.46 It is especially instructive to learn just how much Dawson Turner’s encounter with the hatter-antiquarian Thomas Sharp prompted interest in the elite Turner-Gurney circle in the subject of medi­eval drama. It was in the same letter of 29 August 1821 in which Turner tells Gurney about his first meeting with Sharp and about his reading of Sharp’s ‘extremely interesting matter’ ‘relative to […] Pageants & Mysteries’, that Turner’s thoughts first turn, for example, to the archival records of early theatre: ‘Might not a great deal of light be thrown upon this same subject from the Norwich records’, Turner writes, 43 

Hone, Ancient Mysteries Described, p. 227 and p. x. BL Add. MS 43645, fol. 320r. 45  See NRO MS MC 2847/D3/2, letter 163 of 11 May 1824 to Francis Palgrave from Francis Douce, who was, like Turner, being nagged by Sharp to remind Palgrave to obtain the facsimile drawing ‘to be etched for him by Mrs Turner’. More than a month later, Thomas Sharp impatiently writes Dawson Turner again about what he calls the ‘plot’ drawing: ‘allow me to remind you of the favour you promised me in obtaining a facsimile tracing of the plot in the Macro Mystery, now belonging to Mr Gurney, and which I shall be so much gratified to receive at your convenience’ (NRO MS MC 2847/D3/1, letter 148). 46  Sharp, Dissertation on the Pageants. 44 

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or from the books of Norwich ancient companies if such be in existence? I think I remember one of these pageants, in honour of Bishop Blasius being exhibited in your town [i.e., Norwich]. In France they are still common; & in Portugal the old mysteries are also annually performed on high festivals.47

Almost surely at Dawson Turner’s urging, by 12 September 1821, Francis Cohen, not yet Palgrave, has examined Hudson Gurney’s manu­scripts from the Macro sale and is advising him about their contents. Dawson Turner writes Gurney eager to hear news of ‘what [Cohen] is doing, and particularly […] what he finds in the Spelman MSS’.48 But then, on 26 September 1821, Turner writes Gurney of his disappointment to learn from Cohen that the manu­scripts of Henry Spelman ‘make scarcely any part of our purchase […]. The whole was collected from various quarters without judgment’.49 As for Cox Macro himself, Turner has withering things to say: ‘Dr Cox Macro, of whom you will find an account in Nichol’s Literary Anecdotes, IX, 359 […] was evidently a very dull fellow, of small talents or motivation’.50 Dawson Turner underestimated Cox Macro. Macro was an important art patron and classical antiquities collector as well as a major collector of manu­ scripts. Turner’s portion of the sale included the remarkable travel journal that Cox Macro wrote in 1701 describing in more knowing detail than that of any Englishman of his time the elaborate religious processions and pageants that he witnessed in Portugal as a young man51, and the manu­script plays in his library as well as the painting of the actor David Garrick as King Lear that Macro commissioned to be painted above his parlor door argue that he had more than a casual interest in early English drama.52 But it is true that Dr Cox Macro, ensconced at Little Haugh Hall, his elegant country house near Bury St Edmunds, did not collect to share his manu­scripts with others. The letters 47 

NRO MS MC2847 N1/2/14. NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/15. 49  NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/16. 50  NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/16. The inside cover of the 1820 Macro sale catalogue, after a brief description of the life of Rev Dr Cox Macro, referred readers to the ninth volume of Nichols’ Literary Anecdotes ‘for further accounts of the above learned Person and his Collection’. 51  See the Portuguese travel diary of about 1701 jointly written by Macro and his cousin Thomas Cox (now BL Add. MS 23726). 52  Leeds, Brotherton Library, MS 295/120, p. 28: ‘Paintings from The Common Parlor. Doorpiece. King Lear, from a print of Mr Garrick’s. By Hayman’. 48 

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Dawson Turner read in Nichols’ Literary Anecdotes show Cox Macro to have been utterly obsessed by acquisition and unhelpful to requests from others to see his library;53 Macro was, in fact, an entirely different kind of manu­scripts collector than the social and networking banker-antiquarian Dawson Turner. In one of the final letters concerning the Macro manu­scripts purchase, Turner, finally cured of his buyer’s remorse, writes how pleased he is, if not with the putative Spelman manu­scripts he thought that they were buying, at least with his auto­graph manu­scripts. Whether or not he manages to make money from publishing them, he writes to Gurney on 7 December 1822, ‘I shall always be pleased that I have made this collection, which interests everybody that comes to my house vastly more than any other part of my library’.54 Turner’s New Year’s resolution in 1822, ‘now that the winter has brought with it long evenings and comparative freedom from company’, was to begin attending seriously to his share of the Macro manu­scripts ‘with the view of arranging & binding them, as well as with the intention of setting about seriously commencing my auto­graphs’ publication’.55 For whatever reason, it will be some years, not until Hudson Gurney’s own New Year’s resolution letter of 4 January 1829, that there is any further evidence of his interest in the manu­scripts from the Macro sale. In a letter sent from Keswick Hall to Francis Palgrave, Gurney writes that he is soon ‘to take up all my Macro MSS to town [i.e., London] with me — and to gather in all those Lent out. He wants, so he tells Palgrave, to find someone to transcribe some of those which ‘may give some readings to the Antiquaries’ and mentions that he wants Henry Ellis to look over the manu­scripts first to see ‘whether things have been printed or not’.56 In those eight years since Dawson Turner had first urged him to share the Macro manu­scripts with the Society of Antiquaries, Hudson Gurney had, however, no matter how informal his record-keeping concerning these loans, been casually loaning his antiquarian friends manu­scripts from the Macro collection. In an early January 1829 exchange with Francis Palgrave, Gurney frets that he needs to keep better records of who has borrowed what from the Macro manu­ scripts. He should ‘have the numbers down in my memoranda and in town’ for ‘I am very desponsary at the general state of affaires — as affecting my favorites’. 53 

See Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, especially pp. 362–64, and p. 365, n. NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/20. 55  NRO MS MC 2847 N1/2/20. 56  NRO MS MC 2847/D3/5/2. 54 

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It is surprising to learn from this letter that as of 8 January 1829, seven-anda-half years after receiving his share of the Macro collection, Hudson Gurney still had not had the manu­scripts properly inventoried or rebound. But he now intends, he writes Palgrave, to ‘have them well looked over — with Christie’s Catalogue and my name & arms—& Macros number added on the bds [bindings], before I let any out again’.57 The Gurney letter of 8 January 1829 also notes that ‘somebody’ has borrowed ‘the mystery’ followed by a dash and the name ‘James [Heywood] Markland’, either Gurney’s best memory or best guess about who the borrower might be.58 By ‘the mystery’, he must mean The Castle of Perseverance, which is the only one of the plays in the Macro 5 Miscellany that has by 1829 attracted any attention in print (from William Hone and from Thomas Sharp). It is possible that Hudson Gurney does not remember from the Christie auction catalogue that the manu­script also contained two other ‘masques’.59 But by 1831, the famous Shakespeare scholar (and notorious Shakespearean forger), John Payne Collier (1789–1883) will have finally brought the Macro Plays from their long obscurity. It is not E. K. Chambers but Collier, and thanks to Hudson Gurney’s largesse, who is, as far as the idea of the medi­eval morality play is concerned, the father of English medi­eval drama scholarship. It is Collier, who in his prefatory acknowledgements to the first volume of The History of Dramatic English Poetry, to the Time of Shakespeare, and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration, acknowledges that ‘by Mr Hudson Gurney, M.P., I was favoured with the unlimited use of three manu­script moral plays, the earliest and without dispute, the most valuable specimens of the kind in our language’.60 A footnote in Collier’s first volume reveals that these plays ‘formerly in the collection of Dr Cox Macro […] are now in the possession of Hudson Gurney, Esq., M.P., who at the instance of my friend, Mr Amyot, readily obliged me with the unrestricted use of them’.61 The entire second chapter of Collier’s second volume, entitled ‘Manu­script Moral-Plays of the Reign of 57 

NRO MS MC 2847/D3/5/6. NRO MS MC 2847/D3/5/6. 59  John Wilson’s 1766 inventory of the manu­scripts in his uncle Cox Macro’s library did not recognize these texts to be plays. Wilson described the final texts in the miscellany listed in the inventory as Folio MS 93 as ‘old Poetry by [blank space] Hyngham the monk, written on paper — an old Latin Treatise — some more old English verses, wrote on Paper’. See Leeds, Brotherton Library, MS 295/120, p. 15. 60  Collier, The History of English Dramatic Poetry, i, p. xiv. 61  Collier, The History of English Dramatic Poetry, i, 23 n. 58 

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Henry VI’, is about these three Macro Plays. It is Collier who first notices that the Macro play of Wisdom is a mostly complete version of the play fragment in the Digby manu­script in the Bodleian Library,62 who dates the plays from the reign of Henry VI63 (the date that Gurney will place on the new binding of the three plays, removed from the old Macro miscellany probably specifically for Collier’s use64), who corrects Sharp (and Hone) by describing the ‘rude drawing’ of the castle diagram as ‘on the last leaf ’,65 and, who first, Adam-like, names the third moral play ‘Mankind’ (‘The third Moral-play, which I shall call Mankind […]’).66 The initial Early English Text Society edition of these three ‘Macro Plays’ will not be printed until 1904, but now, already in 1831, John Payne Collier, protégé of Thomas Amyot and newly elected member of the Society of Antiquaries,67 has defined the scant, extraordinary corpus of the English medi­ eval morality play.

62 

Collier, ii, 235 n, 287 n. Collier, ii, 286. 64  There is certain evidence that the 1533 play manu­script of Respublica, also acquired by Gurney from the Macro sale, was taken from its miscellany and separately bound for Collier (who had it transcribed but waited more than thirty years before publishing an edition of it, in 1864, only a few months before Gurney’s death.) A note, dated 15 June, 1836 and signed ‘H. G.’ pasted onto the inside back binding of a Macro miscellany manu­script containing transcriptions and genealogical notes by Sir Henry Spelman (now Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, MS 7197) reveals that Respublica (formerly fols 360–87) ‘was taken from the end of this volume to be bound separately — for the Inspection of Mr Payne Collyer [sic]’. 65  Collier, ii, 287. 66  Collier, ii, 293. The play had been given the title ‘The Masque of Mercy’ in the 1820 Christie Macro Manu­scripts sale catalogue. 67  On the importance of his contacts in the Society of Antiquaries for John Payne Collier’s scholarly career, see Freeman and Freeman, John Payne Collier, i, 29–31, 159–62. 63 

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Works Cited Manu­scripts Leeds, Brotherton Library, Wilson MS 295 London, BL, Additional MS 23726 —— , Additional MS 43645 London, Society of Friends Archives, Temp MSS 434/2/57 Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, MS MC 2847 Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.354

Primary Sources A Catalogue of Ancient Manu­scripts chiefly Antiquarian and Historical (including the Valuable Collections of Sir Henry Spelman,[...]The Whole Formerly Collected by The Rev. Dr. Macro, of Little Haugh (Norton) in the County of Suffolk, which are to be sold by private contract, by Mr. Christie, Pall Mall (London: Stevenson, Matchett, & Stevenson, 1820), Cam­bridge, St. John’s College Library, Gg.12.23 Bourne, Henry, The History of Newcastle upon Tyne; or the Ancient and Present State of that Town (Newcastle upon Tyne: John White, 1736) Chester Mysteries: De Deluvio Noe.  De Occisione Innocentium, ed.  by James Heywood (London: Bensley, 1818) [Crofts, John], ed., Excerpta Antiqua; Or a Collection of Original Manu­scripts (York: William Blanchard, 1797) [Gurney, Hudson], Memoir of the Life of Thomas Young, M.D., F.R.S. with a Catalogue of his Works and Essays (London: John and Arthur Arch, 1831) [Haydon, Benjamin Robert], The Diary of Robert Haydon, ed. by William Bissell Pope, 3 vols (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1960–63) The Macro Plays, ed. by David M. Bevington, Folger Facsimiles 1 (Washington, DC: Fol­ ger Shakespeare Library, 1972) The Macro Plays, ed. by Mark Eccles, EETS, o.s., 262 (London: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1969) The Macro Plays, ed.  by F.  J. Furnivall and Alfred  W. Pollard, EETS, e.s., 91(London: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1904) Sotheby & Co., Catalogue of a Selected Portion of the Valuable Library and Collection of Manu­scripts, the Property of Major  Q.  E. Gurney, D.L. of Bawdeswell Hall, Norfolk (London: Sotheby’s, 1936) The Worlde and the Chylde, ed. by Clifford Davidson and Peter Happé (Kalamazoo, MI: Medi­eval Institute Publications, 1999)

Secondary Works Beadle, Richard, ‘James Cobbes of Bury St  Edmunds (c.  1602–1685) and his Manu­ scripts’, in The Medi­eval Book and the Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyki

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Takamiya, ed.  by Takami  Matsuda, Richard A. Linenthal, and John Scahill (Cam­ bridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 427–40 —— , ‘Macro MS 5: A Historical Reconstruction’, Transactions of the Cam­bridge Biblio­ graphical Society, 16 (2016), 35–77 —— , ‘Monk Thomas Hyngham’s Hand in the Macro Manu­script’, in New Science out of Old Books: Studies in Manu­scripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. by Richard Beadle and A. I. Doyle (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995), pp. 315–41 —— , ‘Occupation and Idleness’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 32 (2001), 7–47 Bigham, Clive, The Roxburghe Club and its Members 1812–1927 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1928) Collier, John Payne, The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration, 3 vols (London: John Murrary, 1831) Cubitt, D., A. L. Mackley, and R. G. Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in The Great Tour of John Patteson 1778–1779, ed. by D. Cubitt, A. L. Mackley, and R. G. Wilson (Norwich: Norfolk Record Society, 2003), pp. 1–39 De Ricci, Seymour, English Collectors of Books & Manu­scripts, 1530–1930, Sandars Lectures 1929–30 (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1930) Freeman, Arthur, and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Freeman, Janet Ing, The Postmaster of Ipswich: William Stevenson Fitch, Antiquary and Thief (London: Book Collector, 1997) The Gentleman’s Magazine, 91 (1821) Goodman, Nigel, ed., Dawson Turner: A Norfolk Antiquary and his Remarkable Family (Chichester: Phillimore, 2007) Hingley, Richard, Visions of Antiquity: The Society of Antiquaries of London 1707–2007 (London: Society of Antiquaries, 2007) Hone, William, Ancient Mysteries Described (London: William Hone, 1823) ‘Hudson Gurney’ [obituary], The Gentleman’s Magazine, 18 (1865), 108–10 Johnson, C.M. Barham, Keswick Hall 1817–1957 (Norwich: Modern Press, 1957) Munby, A. N. L., The Cult of the Auto­graph Letter in England (London: Athlone, 1962) Nichols, John, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, Vol.  ix (London: Nichols, Son, & Bentley, 1815) Osborne, Peter, ‘Gurney, Hudson (1775–1864)’, ODNB [accessed 23 January 2019] Riggio, Milla, The Play of Wisdom: Texts and Contexts (New York: AMS Press, 1998) Sharp, Thomas, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry (Coventry: Merridew and Son, 1825) Spencer, Howard, and Philip Salmon, ‘Gurney, Hudson (1775–1864), of Keswick, Norf ’, in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820–1832, ed. by D. R. Fisher (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009) [accessed 11 January 2019]

‘Unseen things seen’: Digital Editing and Early ­ cript Plays Modern Manus Matteo Pangallo*

T

he pro­logue of Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary, or, The Seaman’s Honest Wife (1632–33) expresses amazement at what the play proposes to enact: The lanchinge of a shippe? this moderne age hath seldome seene such action on a stage: Vnseene thinges seene, are most & best approude Gold, because rare, is deare, & well beloude. (ll. 2–5)

Despite the promise that the audience will see ‘such action’, the actual launching of the ship occurs offstage, out of the audience’s view. Mountfort, stymied by the incongruity between what he wanted to stage and what was technically feasible in the playhouse, ultimately resorted to a solution that contradicts the pro­logue’s terms establishing the play’s value: the spectacle of the launching of a ship on stage will remain an ‘unseen thing’. Similarly, the formal limitations of print have long compelled editors of manu­script plays to resort to technical devices such as parallel columns, enfolded texts, fonts, colours, and sigla to make ‘seene’ the valuable, but otherwise ‘unseene’ layers of composition and revision recorded in most manu­ script plays. Unfortunately, just as Mountfort encountered frustration with the limitations of his stage, the limitations of print can all too easily frustrate   * This chapter stems from work towards the forthcoming edition of The Launching of The Mary for Digital Renaissance Editions .

Matteo Pangallo is a former Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard Uni­ver­sity and is currently Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth Uni­ver­sity.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 329–344 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116460 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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users attempting to access evidence of a manu­script play’s textual history. Elena Pierazzo observes that the ‘intricate symbolism’ print editions use to represent in two dimensions the complexities of a four-dimensional text ‘may lead to an obscurity’ that prevents readers from fully exploring the ‘intricate stratifications’ in a manu­script.1 Such barriers can lead to a preference by some literary critics for editions of printed texts only, or for editions of manu­script texts that minimize, or even omit, their complexities.2 While most modern readers encounter early modern plays in print editions, the early modern playhouse was a manu­script culture in which the paradigm of textuality was fluid, dynamic, and interactive. The closest modern textual analogue to this culture is not print but, rather, the digital domain. As Hans Walter Gabler argues, ‘manu­script editing […] belongs exclusively in the digital medium, as it can only there be exercised comprehensively’.3 Digital editions make it possible to recreate the conditions of variant use and change that produced the marked-up documents typical of the early modern theatrical process. Unlike printed plays that exist in multiple versions that may or may not be related, a marked-up play manu­script always presents different but linked states of a play, each of which bears its own particular authority. In the case of ho­lographs, such as Mountfort’s, the manu­script records also the highly complex, constantly varying original state of the play created as the author wrote. Rather than seek to distil, conflate, or, more problematically, ignore these different states, editors of such manu­script plays must embrace Randall McLeod’s declaration that ‘multiple authority is richness’.4 In print editions of manu­script plays, changes made to the text are set apart through devices that imply their secondary status in relation to the ‘base text’ chosen by the editor. The digital medium, however, can give users access to those changes through its sheer capaciousness, potential for controlled animation, and flexibility in displaying any particular moment in a text’s history, all without imposing an editorially chosen hierarchy of texts upon the user. Each state of the play becomes, in effect, its own base text. As Jerome McGann argues, the ideal digital edition should not have a ‘central’ text for its authority but, rather, a hypertext structure of linked materials designed to address the particular ‘needs of the users of those materials’.5 1 

Pierazzo, ‘Digital Genetic Editions’, p. 171. Eggert, ‘Textual Product’, pp. 59–60. 3  Gabler, ‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, p. 50. 4  McLeod, ‘Marriage’, p. 421. 5  McGann, Radiant Textuality, pp. 70–71: ‘Hypertext provides the means for establish2 

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In other words, rather than think of the edition as being constructed around a single authority against which all other readings are merely ‘variants’ (readings to be ‘recorded in a critical apparatus, implying one text with alternative formulations’), the dynamic digital edition can present multiple, decentralized states without prioritizing any particular one.6 While editors working in print often seek to merge variants into a single, idealized text, imagined by the editor to be a neoplatonic authorial ‘original’ (even though, as the often extensive currente calamo revisions in ho­lographs demonstrate, no single ‘original’ state ever existed for any given play), extant marked-up manu­script plays demonstrate the importance, instead, of distinguishing versions in order to keep states distinct, as well as mapping the relationships between and within states. Distinguishing states and mapping relationships are critical activities for which digital editions are particularly well suited. Manu­script playbooks — that is, manu­scripts that bear evidence of use for performance purposes — were, like architectural blueprints, utilitarian documents aimed at producing an aesthetic object that was not an isolated and internalized experience for an individual consumer, but a social and externalized embodiment of that text for multiple users. While printed plays were (usually) teleo­logically designed for a final readerly encounter, manu­script playbooks were open-ended tools that had to satisfy the needs of various textual users, including, at times, authors, financiers, actors, patrons, censors, scribes, bookkeepers, and others. In this they resembled computer programmes or apps as coded documents aimed at generating output distinct from the document itself but also designed to be dynamically responsive to inputs from multiple agents. As a result, a single playbook manu­script varied over time, ultimately encoding more than one state of its play; though linked and sequential, those multiple states were often radically different from each other and reflective of the different needs and objectives of the different users. Manu­script plays were therefore dynamic and social texts by design, and, as such, the most promising tool for engaging with them is the dynamic and social medium of the digital edition. Just as the agents who engaged with manu­script playbooks were ‘users’ of the text rather than, as with most printed plays, ‘readers’, those who engage with digital editions are ‘users’, taking advantage of the medium to explore, ing an indefinite number of “centers” and for expanding their number as well as altering their relationships’ (p. 71). 6  Pierazzo, ‘Digital Genetic Editions’, p. 185; see also Reiman, Romantic Texts and Contexts, p. 170.

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and not just read, the text and its history.7 Dino Buzzetti and Jerome McGann imagine a scenario in which ‘a manu­script of a completely unrecorded play by Shakespeare [is] unearthed’: That document would be a record of the process of its making and its transmission. Minimal as they might seem, its user logs would not have been completely erased, and those logs are essential evidence for anyone interested in reading (or editing) such a work. We are interested in documentary evidence precisely because it encodes, however cryptically at times, the evidence of the agents who were involved in making and transmitting the document.8

While we await the discovery of a Shakespeare manu­script, we have already a number of manu­scripts of plays by other dramatists, and the ‘user logs’ they contain are by no means ‘minimal’. Indeed, their process evidence almost always reveals substantive changes made to the play serially. As with so many aspects of the study and teaching of early modern drama, Shakespeare’s tremendous influence as the centre of the canon has had noticeable effects on the kinds of digital editions upon which scholars have thus far focused. Because Shakespeare’s plays survive only in print, most scholarship on digital editions of early modern plays has focused, explicitly or implicitly, on producing such editions for plays that survive only in print. Digital editions of manu­script plays do, of course, present many of the same problems and possibilities as digital editions of printed plays, but there are also several important differences between the two. Indeed, the digital medium, with its capacity to deliver a dynamic and linked set of materials — what Peter Shillingsburg refers to as the ‘knowledge site’9 — is in many ways even more ideally suited to editions of manu­script plays than it is to printed plays. Digital editions of both printed plays and manu­script plays, for example, must be prepared at a comprehensive level of transcription; however, because manu­script plays are typically far more information-rich than printed plays, this means an increased level of labour to code not only the usual textual features (accidentals and substantives of spelling and punctuation), but also palaeo­g raphic features (hands, letterforms, abbreviations, direction and placement of writing, nonverbal marks, and so forth) and material features (changes in ink or ink tone, pencil markings, quill sharpenings, paper changes, addition slips, deliberate and acciden7 

Gabler, ‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, p. 46. Buzzetti and McGann, ‘Critical Editing’, p. 71. 9  See Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google, pp. 101–02. 8 

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tal damage, and so forth).10 As with effective digital editions of printed plays, digital editions of manu­script plays should avail themselves of the linked nature of the medium to make connections within the edition (between the edited texts, commentary, supporting materials, sources, facsimiles, and so forth) and beyond the edition (to relevant websites, multimedia materials, reference works, scholarship, and other resources), though, unlike printed editions, these materials can be updated, nested, and displayed simultaneously.11 For example, one of the more peculiar passages in Launching of the Mary (peculiar because it is unlike the rest of the poetry in the play) was taken by Mountfort directly from Thomas Shelton’s 1612 English translation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote.12 While a print edition might isolate that source passage far from its appearance in the play — probably in an appendix at the back of the book — a digital edition could display a transcription of Shelton’s translation and the passage from Launching within a shared visual field, permitting direct comparison of the two and emphasizing the textual proximity between the dramatist’s words and his sources. A link could also be provided to an online edition of the entirety of Shelton’s translation for those readers who might wish to explore further and look for additional connections between the play and the novel. As new research on the play uncovers additional sources and analogues, these too can be linked into the edition. In a similar way, digital editions of manu­script plays can provide users with access to primary materials to fill lacunae in the text — shifting the privilege, and responsibility, of emendation so that it becomes shared by both editor and user. For example, in the process of censoring Mountfort’s play for the stage, the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, physically removed one or two pages that contained a description, and critique, of the royal mint. Modern readers curious about what those lost pages contained can get a sense of them from the equivalent passages in Mountfort’s source for the main plot, Thomas Mun’s treatise, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East-Indies (1621, STC 18356). In most other places where Mountfort borrows from Mun he adheres faithfully to his source. Because of this fidelity, the dramatist likely stayed close to Discourse also in the missing pages. Users of a digital edition of the play could, upon reaching the point of the missing pages, pull up Mun’s prose 10 

On levels of transcription in digital editions, see Driscoll, ‘Levels of Transcription’. See McGann, Radiant Textuality, p. 57; Gabler, ‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, p. 49. 12  See Pangallo, ‘A New Source’, p. 529. 11 

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passages, even displaying them in a way that formally integrates them into the play (though keeping them visually distinct, through font or colour, in order to emphasize their different origin). A digital edition can also help users more accurately understand the material context within which some manu­script plays survive. For example, Launching is the final item in the famous Egerton MS 1994 collection of fifteen dramatic manu­scripts, possibly assembled around 1642 by the actor William Cartwright and given by him to Dulwich College.13 Putting a digital edition of Launching into proximity with the other texts gathered together in Egerton 1994 by producing a virtual Sammelband of linked editions would permit users to recover the mise en livre of the original manu­script and thus explore, and even perhaps discover, potential thematic, material, and theatrical connections between and across those plays and their manu­scripts. Beyond these convenience functionalities, there are three primary functions that an effective digital edition of a manu­script play should provide. First, the edition should serve as a resource for multiple users: for undergraduate students and general readers, the edition could provide a modern-spelling text with non-intrusive explanatory notes; for more advanced readers a diplomatic transcription with more detailed notes could be called up; and for specialist readers, the edition could provide high-resolution photo­graphs of the original document, showing important material details. Second, users should be able to engage with any one state of the play in any or all of the types of edited text. Third, users should be able to move dynamically through adjacent states, and compare multiple states, including those that are not adjacent. The Launching of the Mary manu­script (London, BL, MS Egerton 1994, fols 317–49) provides a good example of how a digital edition might take advantage of its medium in these three ways. The Launching manu­script is a heavily marked-up authorial draft comprising thirty-two sheets written mostly in the author’s hand (which is, for the most part, English secretary), though with additional insertions, deletions, and revisions in the hands of at least two other individuals.14 In addition to the play, the manu­script includes a character list, pro­logue, and epilogue, all written by Mountfort. Between April 1632 and April 1633, Mountfort, a clerk in the East India Company, was sailing from Persia back to London. With little to occupy 13 

Boas, Shakespeare and the Universities, pp. 96–110. On the manu­script, see Mountfort, The Launching of the Mary, ed. by Walter, pp. v–xi and Greg, Dramatic Documents, pp. 300–05. 14 

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his time on the voyage, he wrote Launching, a city comedy about the home towards which he was travelling. In the main plot, several East India Company officers recite lengthy, often tedious, defences of the Company and global trade in general to a sceptical Lord Admiral. In one subplot, two sailors’ wives take advantage of their husbands’ absence overseas to drink, seduce apprentices, brawl, and engage in petty theft, while a third sailor’s wife rebuffs the advances of a soldier, sailor, nobleman, and clergyman, and supports herself with needlework. In the second subplot, a group of labourers at the Blackwall shipyard alternate between working on the Company’s new ship, The Mary, drinking, rehearsing amateur dances, and disparaging the Dutch. When he finally arrived back in London, Mountfort supplied his play to a professional playing company, possibly the second Prince Charles’s Men. This troupe had the manu­script (not a fair-copy, but Mountfort’s original) censored and licensed by the Master of the Revels. Herbert made a number of deletions and changes, but ultimately approved it on 27 June 1633. The manu­script (again, still the original ho­lograph) went back to the players; Mountfort revised to work around the Master’s censorship and, around the same time, the players’ bookkeeper made deletions and adjustments. This sequence of textual change can be readily deduced from the nature of the changes, in conjunction with the evidence of ink colours and handwriting. Altogether, then, the extant Launching manu­script contains at least four distinct states of the play: Mountfort’s original state, written at sea (though this state itself contains currente calamo revisions as well as revisions evidently made after the whole play was written but before it was provided to the players); Herbert’s deletions and other changes; Mountfort’s revisions responding to Herbert’s censorship and making other small changes; and the bookkeeper’s final cuts and adjustments for performance. A digital edition of Launching should reproduce these linked, sequential, and variable states of the play in such a way that, like the manu­script itself, the digital text can be shaped interactively by the user. Such an edition would allow users to deconstruct, or ‘unedit’, the synoptic manu­script into its variant states, each of which represents a particular historical version of Launching. Users interested in Mountfort’s original vision could call up the first state; users interested in censorship could call up the second; users interested in authorial response to censorship could call up the third; users interested in performance needs could call up the fourth. While making such deconstruction the methodo­logical core of the edition, however, the editor must still ensure that the design of the site appropriately reflects the historical states of the play. Users’ choices in activating particular readings, for example, should be con-

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strained so only existing states of the play could be generated.15 At the same time, an alternative tool could be provided that would allow for what Michael Best terms ‘a kind of “do it yourself ” facility’ allowing users ‘to select variants from pull-down menus and compile their own eclectic version of the text’.16 Such a tool would be useful for students experimenting with alternative ideas about textual change and modern performers creating their own state of the play for the stage. Users wishing to engage with a reading comparatively across the states could be provided tools such as parallel frames, windows, mouse-over bubbles, or even dynamic hypertext to allow for concurrent encounters with the chosen reading across the different states. This last tool, visually animating changes with dynamic hypertext, presents the most vivid example of the difference between print and digital editions. Such a tool would resemble what Best proposes as a way of using ‘the capacity of the medium for animation’ to create a ‘semantic field where the text dances between variant readings’; while he suggests using such ‘visibly variant’ text to demonstrate the ‘instability […] hidden by our meticulously edited print texts’, for manu­script plays such variation would be a signal, not of ‘instability’ but, rather, the progressive and deliberate change that is inherent to the nature of a manu­script playbook.17 Best’s solution is intended to make readers aware of places where a final editorial decision would be inappropriate because of the plausibility of multiple emendations (or no emendation), but it could also be used to make readers aware of chrono­ logical changes in a marked-up manu­script.18 Not only were changes made to the text by different agents as it circulated, changes were made by the author in the process of composition. The digital medium allows for the representation of even this much finer passage of time: as Pierazzo explains, while ‘traditional diplomatic and even ultra-diplomatic editions aim at presenting texts in a format that tries to mimic the layout of the manu­script page’, that is, to represent the product of the writing process, only a digital edition has the capacity to reflect ‘the dynamic of the writing process’ itself, or what Gabler refers to as the ‘illusioning of the fourth dimension 15 

Pierazzo, ‘Digital Genetic Editions’, p. 186. Best, ‘Mutability and Variation’, p. 105. 17  Best, ‘Standing in Rich Place’, p. 34. 18  The Text Encoding Initiative was updated in November 2007 to make possible ‘timed transcriptions’, as opposed to only the print-derived system of semantic transcriptions (Pierazzo, ‘Digital Genetic Editions’, pp. 173 and 177). 16 

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of time’.19 Printed editions convey the impression of a synchronic work — the author’s ‘writing’ as a noun, fixed in space and finalized in time; digital editions, however, can present the work diachronically — the author’s ‘writing’ as a verb, moving in space and changing over time.20 The act of composition involves pausing, doubling back, correcting, touching-up, nonverbal writing, and more, all of which leave evidence providing insights into the genesis, and hence interpretations, of the manu­script and the work(s) it contains. Conceptually, the authorial draft is more like speech than it is like printed text; or, as Edward Vanhoutte argues, the draft is a ‘filtered materialization of an internal creative process (thinking)’.21 The first state of the play is thus actually multiple states, all of which exist only for a moment and only before the final ‘version’ of the first state is ultimately ‘completed’ — making them, for the conventional print edition, almost impossible to capture and convey adequately. For example, at one point in the subplot of Launching, the shipyard labourers take a break to drink and to decry the Dutch for the Amboyna Massacre. In February 1623, a Japanese mercenary on the island of Ambon (present day Maluku, Indonesia) informed agents of the Dutch East India Company that a group of English and Portuguese merchants on the island were planning a rebellion against the colonial Dutch authorities and intended to take the fortress of Victoria. In response, twenty men, including ten agents of the English East India Company, were arrested, tortured, and executed. In Launching, the shipyard workers often refer to the incident, and in ii.2 Sheathing Nail proposes a hypothetical to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the charges against the supposed conspirators (see Figure 19.1). Mountfort at first started Sheathing Nail’s speech with the lines: ‘Suppose, that wee fiue weare so simple as to vndertake | to take the tower of London’, but he made two changes: the phrase ‘so simple as’ was deleted and ‘suspected’ interlined above, and ‘tower of London’ was deleted and ‘Castle of Antwerpe’ written after it.22 The timing of the interlinear addition cannot be established precisely, though the similarity of the ink tone and quill edge with 19 

Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing, p. 30. Gabler, ‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, p. 51: ‘Manu­script editing performed in what we now may recognize and embrace as its native medium [that is, digitally] allows the experiencing of the processes, and simultaneously of the results, of writing and of texting in manu­scripts’. 20  Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google, p. 54; see also Vanhoutte, ‘Fiction and Modern Manu­scripts’, p. 175; and Pierazzo, ‘Digital Genetic Editions’, p. 169. 21  Vanhoutte, ‘Fiction and Modern Manu­scripts’, p. 176; see also Gabler, ‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, p. 51. 22  Mountfort, The Launching of the Mary, ed. by Walter, ll. 1119–20.

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the main text suggest that Mountfort made the change at the same time that he wrote the main text (as with most interlinear additions in the midst of a complete line, however, it must have been added after he had at least written the ‘to’ of ‘to vndertake’, and probably after the entire line was completed). The second change was clearly made as Mounfort wrote the line: he wrote ‘tower of London’ but then stopped, struck it out, and continued to write ‘Castle of Antwerpe’ on the same line. To borrow Pierazzo’s form for representing timed texts, the lines can be described as:23 Time 1: writing ‘Suppose, that wee fiue weare so simple as to vndertake’ Time 2: deleting ‘so simple as’ Time 3: interlineally writing ‘suspected’ Time 4: correcting or touching-up second ‘e’ in ‘suspected’ Time 5: writing ‘to take the tower of London’ Time 6: deleting ‘tower of London’ Time 7: writing ‘Castle of Antwerpe’ A further revision (Time 8) occurred a year later when Herbert struck out the entire passage within which the speech appears (ll. 1076–1126). Both changes of Times 2–4 and 6–7, however, represent substantive currente calamo alterations to the meaning of Sheathing Nail’s speech. To say that he and his companions were ‘so simple as to vndertake’ something suggests that they intended to, or even did, commit the act; this must have struck Mountfort as implicitly admitting that the victims at Amboyna were guilty, and so he altered the line to make the accusation an allegation, rather than a confession. Changing ‘tower of London’ to ‘Castle of Antwerpe’ creates more parity with the charges against the Amboyna victims by making the imagined target a Dutch fortress; it could also have struck Mountfort as minimizing the chance that the Master of the Revels might interpret Sheathing Nail’s hypothetical as an actual call for a treasonous act. Whatever the reason for the changes, both produced substantively different versions of the speech and both occurred during the time of writing (but not, crucially, simultaneously with each other), thus telling us something about Mountfort’s thought-process as he composed, but also presenting essen-

23 

Pierazzo, ‘Digital Genetic Editions’, pp. 180–82.

‘Unseen things seen’

Figure 19.1. Detail of a sequence of revisions in Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary (1632–33). London, BL, MS Egerton 1994, fol. 330r. © The British Library Board.

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tial complications for an editor seeking to display accurately the many differing states of the play. Even if an edition were to present different static, whole states of the text, then, it must also find a way to convey how the initial version of the ho­lograph was multiple and variable, changing as it was being written. Digital editions can do this by using temporal divisions, rather than the conventional spatial divisions of print editions, to visibly animate the ‘flow of authoring’ in the expression of letters, punctuation, deletions, interlinear additions, and other markings.24 Simultaneously, users can be provided with tools to ‘capture’ and hold concurrent different readings produced by that process, and to ‘pause’, ‘rewind’, or jump ahead to specific points in time in order to explore both what the dramatist wrote and how it was written. Such controls are just one way that the digital medium can put power over the display of the text into the hands of the user of the edition rather than (only) its editor; other aspects of the medium are equally as effective in doing this. Indeed, the most frequently repeated commonplace about digital editions is their great advantage in allowing users to engage in the editorial enterprise by granting access, not only to differently edited texts but also to the different materials used by the editor in preparing the edition.25 Providing users with high-quality colour imagery of the manu­script makes it possible for them to analyse the original document and come to their own conclusions about the text and the plausibility of the editor’s representation(s) of it. The increasing empowerment of users of digital editions does not necessarily mean a concurrent disempowerment of editors nor, as Peter Robinson speculates, that ‘the reader could, indeed, become the editor [and] the traditional editor could disappear altogether’.26 While users of a digital edition should have the tools needed to move through the time-scale of a marked-up manu­script, compare states, and access different types of editions, this does not mean that the editor abdicates responsibility in preparing the edition. New procedures and goals associated with the digital medium add to, rather than supplant, the kind of 24 

Pierazzo, ‘Digital Genetic Editions’, p. 169. See, for example, Robinson, ‘Collation’, pp. 92 and 94; Best, ‘Mutability and Variation’, p. 105, and ‘Standing in Rich Place’, p. 31; Price, ‘Electronic Scholarly Editions’, p. 437; Gants, ‘Drama Case Study’, p. 124; Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google, p. 82; Gabler, ‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, pp. 47–48; Pierazzo, ‘Digital Genetic Editions’, pp. 170 and 182, and Digital Scholarly Editing, p. 81. 26  Robinson, ‘Collation’, p. 92. Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google, p. 56: ‘the choice not to choose [between versions or readings] already entails an interpretive act’. 25 

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work textual editors have been doing for generations.27 Most crucially, the editor of a marked-up manu­script play will need to determine the timing and relationships of the different states. On a practical level, the editor will also need to make decisions about the appearance and functionality of the edition. Precisely how the layout should be designed to accommodate various approaches to navigating the text raises several significant problems. Best has pointed out, for example, that all digital editors need to establish the best ‘unit of viewing’ and suggests as one solution allowing users to select the number of lines they wish to view.28 Another option for editors of manu­script plays is to present text in units of writing: demarcating points when the author, or copyist, paused to refresh ink or resharpen pen — points of material suspension typically corresponding also with points of cognitive suspension — recreates the timing at which the text was produced. Beyond the value of helping users explore different states of the play, the digital medium provides other benefits as well. Online editions increase access to unique and often difficult to consult materials, democratizing scholarship by putting primary sources within reach of scholars and students at institutions that lack sufficient resources to permit consultation in person. Furthermore, digital facsimiles aid in the preservation of delicate, unique materials by reducing the need for scholars to handle the materials except for the most important of reasons.29 Digital editions of manu­script plays can also make general readers and students more aware of how plays by Shakespeare, like all other professional early modern dramatists, lived in their original theatrical ecosystem. As Pierazzo argues, for non-specialists, digital editions make the ‘complex, datarich objects’ of manu­scripts more easily available and navigable, even ‘enjoyable and fun’ to explore.30 They can even change the way users think about playtexts themselves by replacing the ‘linear’ model of textuality perpetuated by print with a ‘radial’ concept of textuality that better reflects the circular nature of manu­script play creation, revision, and use.31 Digital editions also increase the transparency of the editorial process, giving students and general readers tools to test editors’ claims and develop their own critical, editorial insights 27 

Buzzetti and McGann, ‘Critical Editing’, p. 53; Rosenberg, ‘Documentary Editing’, p. 92. Best, ‘Standing in Rich Place’, pp. 30–31. 29  On pedagogical and research-based ramifications of digital editions of manu­scripts, as well as their utility for preservation, see May, ‘All of the Above’. 30  Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing, p. 31. 31  Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google, p. 4. 28 

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and impulses. This, in turn, makes it more likely that students will learn about manu­script studies and palaeo­graphy, and thus be equipped to include in their own research those manu­scripts that have not yet been digitized. In this manner, digital editions of manu­script plays could lead an entire generation of young scholars to enter the archives, engage with fresh materials, and make new discoveries. The work of developing transcribed, edited, and photo­graphed digital editions of the manu­script materials that originated in the early modern playhouses belongs to the entire community of scholars of early modern drama, theatre history, and textual editing. Given the scarcity of these essential materials, the scale of such work, when compared to most other digital editions, is not that overwhelming, but, like most digital editions, it will nonetheless require collaboration across the field. Though perhaps ambitious, such a project would mean that these rare but essential materials could at last become available for all who want to access and understand them, making, for our own ‘moderne age’, ‘vnseene thinges seene’.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts London, BL, MS Egerton 1994

Primary Sources Mountfort, Walter, The Launching of the Mary, ed. by John Henry Walter (Oxford: Malone Society, 1933) Mun, Thomas, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East-Indies (1621, STC 18356)

Secondary Works Best, Michael, ‘Mutability and Variation: A  Digital Response to Complex Texts’, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, v: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society 2007–2010, ed. by Michael Denbo (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, 2014), pp. 91–112 —— , ‘Standing in Rich Place: Electrifying the Multiple-Text Edition or, Every Text is Multiple’, College Literature, 36.1 (Winter 2009), 26–36 Boas, F. S., Shakespeare and the Universities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1923) Buzzetti, Dino, and Jerome McGann, ‘Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon’, in Electronic Textual Editing, ed. by Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2006), pp. 53–73 Driscoll, M. J., ‘Levels of Transcription’, in Electronic Textual Editing, ed. by Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2006), pp. 254–61 Eggert, Paul, ‘Textual Product or Textual Process: Procedures and Assumptions of Critical Editing’, in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed.  by Philip Cohen (Charlottesville: Uni­ver­sity Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 57–77 Gabler, Hans Walter, ‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, Literature Compass, 7 (2010), 43–56 Gants, David, ‘Drama Case Study’, in Electronic Textual Editing, ed.  by Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2006), pp. 122–37 Greg, W. W., Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1969) May, Steven, ‘All of the Above: The Importance of Multiple Editions of Renaissance Manu­scripts’, Literature Compass, 7 (2010), 95–101 McGann, Jerome, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001)

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McLeod, Randall [‘Random Cloud’], ‘The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos’, Shake­ speare Quarterly, 33.4 (1982), 421–31 Pangallo, Matteo, ‘A New Source for a Speech in The Launching of the Mary’, Notes and Queries, 251.4, 528–31 Pierazzo, Elena, ‘Digital Genetic Editions: The Encoding of Time in Manu­script Trans­ cription’, in Text Editing, Print and the Digital World, ed.  by Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 169–86 —— , Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) Price, Kenneth M., ‘Electronic Scholarly Editions’, in A  Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed.  by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 434–50 Reiman, Donald, Romantic Texts and Contexts (Columbia: Uni­ver­sity of Missouri Press, 1987) Robinson, Peter M. W., ‘Collation, Textual Criticism, Publication, and the Computer’, Text, 7 (1994), 77–94 Rosenberg, Bob, ‘Documentary Editing’, in Electronic Textual Editing, ed. by Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth (New York: Modern Language Associ­ation of America, 2006), pp. 92–104 Shillingsburg, Peter L., From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006) Vanhoutte, Edward, ‘Fiction and Modern Manu­scripts’, in Electronic Textual Editing, ed. by Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2006), pp. 161–80

Mongrel Forms: Print-Manu­script Hybridity and Digital Methods in Annotated Plays Rebecca Munson

W

hat is the onto­logical status of an annotated printed play? Are readers’ interventions sufficient to transform it into a manu­script? Annotated books are at their very core amphibious, refusing to settle comfortably into any binary. In these objects, printed content sits alongside manu­script commentary. Visual elements are drawn or pasted in around text. A  multiplicity of historical vectors manifest, cross, and evanesce. And, more recently, they are both encoded as data and digitized as documents. They are neither fish nor fowl, and historically — in library catalogues, in criticism, and in the history of reading — we have not known where to have them. This chapter argues that annotated books in general, and annotated plays in particular, belong on the continuum of manu­script culture and can most productively be categorized and studied as compilations. In my use of the term, I follow Arthur Bahr’s definition of compilation, which does not see it as a material or empirical quality but locates it in the perception of the reader: ‘I define compilation, not as an objective quality of either texts or objects, but rather as a mode of perceiving such forms so as to disclose an interpretably meaningful arrangement, thereby bringing into being a text/work that is more than the sum of its parts’.1 This definition of ‘compilation’ as a mode of apprehension is, I will argue, equally appropriate to the Digital Humanities, 1 

Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, p. 3.

Rebecca Munson is a member of Princeton Uni­ver­s ity’s Center for Digital Humanities and the Director of Common Readers.

Early British Drama in Manuscript, ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, BM 1 pp. 345–361 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.BM-EB.5.116461 (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2019)

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which is methodo­logically compilational and thus uniquely well suited to projects involving annotated books. This chapter will move through a discussion of annotated books in general to more specific consideration of annotated plays. It will conclude with a case study from Princeton Uni­ver­sity’s Center for Digital Humanities that illustrates the methodo­logical synergy between annotated books and digital methods.

Reading without Reading: Annotated Books as Carriers of Information The dual nature of annotated books is most obvious in that they are artefacts of both scribal culture and print culture. The notion that print as an emergent techno­logy neatly supplanted the production of manu­scripts in the early modern period has been widely disproved as the scholarly community has begun to discuss not only the coexistence but the interchange between the two.2 William  H. Sherman, whose Used Books remains the foundational text for annotation studies, emphasizes this continuity by suggesting that annotated books are best viewed ‘not by looking backward from late print culture but by moving forward from medi­eval scribal culture (in which readers were, to some extent, expected to customize their books)’.3 ‘Customize’ may seem like an understatement given how frequently texts were cut, pasted, inserted, and otherwise manipulated.4 The kinaesthetic engagement in these cases more obviously recalls a scribal inheritance recognizable from its roots in the medi­eval concept of reading as ‘making’, deriving from the Middle English term maken, ‘to write or compose […] to compile’.5 Not all composition would necessitate the physical manipulation of the text, of course, but it is worth bearing in mind that early modern readers would have carried with them this sense of textual engagement that extended naturally into bodily interaction.

2  See, for instance, Love, Scribal Publication; Baron, Lindquist, and Shevlin, Agent of Change; Beal, In Praise of Scribes; Ioppolo, Dramatists and their Manu­scripts. 3  Sherman, Used Books, p. 160. 4  Smyth, in ‘Textual Fragmentation’, p. 36, reflects that although ‘handwritten additions to printed books’ have attracted considerable scholarly attention ‘the related early modern practice of inserting, pasting or binding printed pages [and other textual extracts] has been largely overlooked’. Whitney Trettien’s study of the texts produced by the Little Gidding community brings digital humanities practices to bear on an example of perhaps the most actively physical type of readership of the period in Trettien, ‘Circuit-Bending History’. 5  Middle English Dictionary, ‘maken (v.1.)’, 5a.

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The ability of annotated books to embody at once the practices of medi­ eval and early modern England illustrates a temporal side to their hybridity. As objects that move through time, annotated books are vectors for what Bahr calls an ‘assemblage of disparate historical moments’.6 Just as it is not possible to step into the same river twice, it is not possible to encounter the same physical object over time; each interaction contributes to its history and thus alters it. In this light, it makes more sense to speak of ‘users’ than ‘readers’ of books, following Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio.7 To refer to book ‘users’ broadens the scope of investigation to include interactions which do not engage the content of the text. One might reasonably ask, in this case, whether studying annotations really provides a history of reading or simply of looking, whether we are engaged in what Sherman calls ‘a history of reading without reading’.8 Reading without reading is a core materialist approach to the text that has gained recent popularity. Jeffrey Todd Knight aptly characterizes this stripe of criticism as mediating between the philo­logical practices of the early twentieth century and the reader-response criticism of the 1970s. 9 This approach offers a way of concretizing and dissecting the movement of the annotated book through time, of looking at the object both synchronically, in the moment represented by each instance of annotation, and diachronically, at collective use patterns over time.10 To date, there have been two major trends in annotation scholarship: the study of remarkable men and the study of remarkable books. The first follows Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s foundational article, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, to focus on extraordinary readers like Harvey or John Dee. This line of inquiry has been fruitful for digital projects like Archaeo­logy of Reading and The Winthrop Family on the Page that concern relatively small subsets of texts annotated by mostly identifiable groups of readers. The second major trend concentrates on extraordinary copies of wellknown texts, as with the heavily annotated copy of the First Folio held at Meisei

6 

Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, p. 10. Cormack and Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory. 8  Sherman, Used Books, p. xv. 9  Knight, ‘Shakespeare and the Collection’, pp. 179–80. 10  It is also a way of studying the evolution of patterns of cognition; annotations hold out the tantalizing promise that we might, if we look hard enough, find material records not only of cognition but of consciousness. 7 

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Uni­ver­sity, Tokyo (MR 774).11 Common Readers, the digital project I direct, stands in contrast to both these scholarly trends in its potential to illuminate the reading habits of the less extraordinary, anonymous men and women who read, marked, and commented upon texts. This empirical turn approaches the annotated book as a carrier of information or, as we are more likely to call it nowadays, data. Annotated books are rife with information — so rife, in fact, that scholars may find themselves facing many of the same problems as early modern readers who felt that they had, in Ann Blair’s words, too much to know.12 We, as digital humanists, have developed in response our own techniques to narrow our focus, most of which rely on transforming rich, confusing documents into flattened, more manageable data. Though some scholars have expressed anxiety that mining texts for data may efface their status as complex objects of intellectual inquiry, where annotated books are concerned we already exercise our ability to see double — to bear in mind all kinds of hybridity — so that it seems not just possible but natural to maintain our sense of these texts as both multidimensional cultural artefacts and repositories of data. The multiple types of hybridity associated with annotated books demand a comparably hybrid literary-critical category. Let us return to the sense of compilation as a mode of apprehension contingent on the reader’s perception, what Bahr called ‘a mode of perceiving such forms so as to disclose an interpretably meaningful arrangement’. It is in the compilation that we may find ourselves estranged from the familiar or, less frequently, familiarized with the strange. The ability to excerpt and recontextualize material was one highly valued by early modern readers and, indeed, one that our current popular culture demonstrates daily in newsfeeds, social media posts, and modes of entertainment. A Twitter feed is as much an ‘interpretably meaningful arrangement’ as a sixteenth-century commonplace book or fourteenth-century manu­script, and all exemplify the same process of information management. Undergirding the practice of compilation is the notion of the fundamental modularity of texts — the assumption that they can be broken down, repurposed, and reassembled. Sherman gives an example of one extraordinary reader in a chapter entitled ‘Sir Julius Caesar’s Search Engine’, which illustrates the way in which ‘Caesar took full advantage of the codex’s capacity as an instru11  The First Folio of Shakespeare: A Transcript of Contemporary Marginalia, ed. by Yamada. See also Mayer, ‘The Early Manu­script Reception of Shakespeare’, in this volume. 12  Blair, Too Much to Know.

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ment for discontinuous reading’, producing what Sherman calls ‘a universal relational database’.13 This characterization is not at all an exaggeration, and though Sherman does not pursue the parallel, the inevitable conclusion is that early modern annotating was its own form of markup, enabling users to build and query their own personal databases — a topic to which we will return. Just as early modern readers did, digital humanists rely on the conception of texts as modular materials able to be first de- and then re-contextualized and seek to produce new ‘interpretably meaningful arrangement[s]’ of otherwise familiar material. In both cases, productive defamiliarization enables productive meaning-making.

Modular Shakespeare: Plays and/as Compilations For scholars of early drama such defamiliarization might occur in manu­script miscellanies, commonplace books, or excerpts from plays like those discussed by Laura Estill and recently made available in the Database of Dramatic Extracts (DEx).14 In all cases, pieces of plays are detached from the printed text and repurposed for an individual manu­script just as many medi­eval compilations were. We might equally consider the practices of play collecting as itself compilational for it is in the eye of the collector that a play is placed in ‘an interpretably meaningful arrangement’. Both in collecting plays and in extracting from them, readers of early drama demonstrated their tendency to treat texts as separable, making modularity a key fact of plays’ reception history. But in fact, throughout their life cycle plays existed mainly in parts. Tiffany Stern has traced the origins of plays in separate texts and, along with Simon Palfrey, delved into parts and playhouse practices.15 Records from Philip Henslowe’s notebook document a collaborative writing process that parcelled out portions of plays and surviving manu­scripts, like that of Sir Thomas More with its famous lines in ‘Shakespeare’s hand’ bear this out. Plays were written in parts, learned in parts, and sometimes — as we know from short scenes that also appear in full-length plays, like the Dance of the Satyrs and The Winter’s Tale — performed in parts. It follows naturally that they were also read and remembered in parts. 13 

Sherman, Used Books, p. 148. See Estill, Dramatic Extracts; and Estill and Montedoro, DEx. For a case study of the practice of dramatic extracting, see Montedoro, ‘Comedies and Tragedies “read of me” and “not yet learned”: Dramatic Extracting in Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson D 952’, in this volume. 15  Stern, Making Shakespeare; and Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts. 14 

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Excerpting and collecting were two sides to the coin of constructing an assemblage from available materials, and both are necessary components in the study of annotated plays. Collecting, which has arguably exerted the greatest interpretive force on histories of reading, is simply compilation writ large. Knight calls annotation ‘one empirical subset of a larger enterprise of active response’, which relates intimately to a text’s collecting history.16 Much recent work on the early modern book trade has focused on reconstructing booksellers’ stands as a means to revise our notion of the implied reader.17 Knight suggests we also search out the ‘implied collector’ of drama, an endeavour in which annotations might prove useful given that annotators must necessarily have been either readers or collectors at some point.18 A major obstacle standing in between modern scholars and early modern readers has been the impulse toward collecting that is also, ironically, responsible for the preservation of many texts. Knight summarizes the problem succinctly when he reflects that ‘the implied collector of most extant Shakespearean texts is the nineteenth-century gentleman, not the seventeenth century reader’.19 The nineteenth century has a lot to answer for in the realm of annotation studies. This is the period that made widespread the practice of ‘washing’ sheets clear of annotations or cropping them out entirely. Heather Jackson estimates that, prior to about 1820, marginalia were actively regarded as a selling point for rare books, but since then, the opposite has been the case.20 This clean-copy bias, like most everything else, is most pronounced with Shakespeare. Just as it is easier to find less well-known plays bound in Sammelbände, it is far likelier to discover annotations in non-Shakespearean drama. Reconstructing early collecting practices provides one means of re-historicizing readers that works in concert with annotation studies. The relationship of both these approaches to the manu­script practices surrounding drama is crucial and understudied, perhaps due to the persistent separation of print and manu­script traditions in scholarship. Relating plays to annotation, and to manu­script engagements with drama, proves somewhat difficult since, in gen16 

Knight, ‘Shakespeare and the Collection’, p. 184. See, for instance, Hooks, Selling Shakespeare; Straznicky, Shakespeare’s Stationers; Brayman, Lander, and Lesser, The Book in History; Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade; Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication. 18  Knight, ‘Shakespeare and the Collection’, p. 181. 19  Knight, ‘Shakespeare and the Collection’, p. 182. 20  Jackson, Marginalia, p. 271. 17 

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eral, literary texts tend to be annotated less frequently than texts whose immediate use value is clear (such as law books) or which provoke or engage controversy (like religious tracts). Vernacular literature on the whole attracts a different type of annotator than the humanists whose marginalia are explored in depth by Archaeo­logy of Reading and The Winthrop Family on the Page. Drama falls solidly within the category of vernacular literature, and a more meaningful point of comparison — in terms of type and frequency of annotations — might be ballads, newsbooks, or other more ephemeral ‘popular’ items. Dense textual commentary, like that which Grafton and Jardine discuss in relation to Harvey, appears exceptional by any standards and almost entirely alien to vernacular texts. The types of reader interaction most often recorded in plays are of an allusive and occasional character: manicules, underlining, commonplacing marks, minor textual corrections, and many unrelated doodles. Most have no obvious connection with the text they accompany beyond signifying a point of attention. Previous critics, like Sherman, have felt some trepidation about discussing these incidental marks, since they were judged less than substantive.21 Indeed, no individual instance provides enough information to draw conclusions about readers’ habits, which is precisely why an aggregative study has the potential to contribute so much to the history of drama. I started Common Readers, a digital project that explores sparse and incidental annotations in plays, for precisely this reason. A common reader, singular, tells us little. But common readers, plural, have the potential to provide substantive empirical information about which texts, and which points within texts, attracted certain kinds of reader engagement over time. Natalie Zemon Davis has described the book as a ‘carrier of relationships’.22 Relational databases, which are favoured by the annotations projects developed at Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities, are predicated on just such juxtapositions and connections.23

21 

Sherman, Used Books, pp. xiii and 5. Zemon Davis, Society and Culture, p. 192. 23  In general, digital humanities projects on both manu­scripts and annotated books have chosen between two approaches to structuring data: TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) encoding and relational database building. Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities has employed the relational database model while many other projects, including those dealing specifically with annotated books and drama in manu­script are built on TEI. 22 

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(Un)Common Readers: Case Studies in Annotation The great advantage of digital tools and methods is that they enable a mode of analysis that toggles between the general and the particular by establishing a baseline of behaviour against which to compare individual instances of reader engagement. It is a mode of historicist scholarship that is more empirical than that favoured by New Historicism, with its tendency to generalize from the anecdotal rather than contextualize anecdotes within established parameters of behaviour. The great disadvantage of this approach, however, is that it relies on amalgamating and analysing large sets of data in order to assess the baseline practices for reading. The goal of Common Readers is to foster a community of researchers to contribute to a growing dataset of annotations in printed drama. Ultimately, the hope is to develop a searchable online database of annotations in playbooks from libraries around the globe. It will consist of two modules, one for biblio­graphic data and one for annotations data with the potential to add later modules (e.g., one for performance information). Later scholars will then be able to explore the relationships among annotation characteristics and biblio­g raphic characteristics. They might, for example, ask whether modes of reading (indicated by types of annotation) varied by publication year, book format, author, or publisher. Additionally, when relevant, annotations are recoded as being linked to an ‘anchor text’, the line or lines that are the site of the reader’s interaction. This practice expands the possibilities of analysis to invite questions like: Which lines in a given text drew the heaviest interaction? Do they vary by speaker? By scene? Are there characteristic modes of interaction associated with particular lines or characters? A database will allow the exploration of these relationships on a scale not possible for even the most industrious lone scholar. Computational methods provide a second side to the coin of traditional literary approaches by substantiating (or challenging) received impressions, which will create a solid foundation for inquiry and analysis. The remainder of this chapter will offer a case-in-point of such inquiry. As the only researcher at this point who has contributed to the dataset and analysed the results, however, I would urge you to take them with a pinch of salt. I began the project accidentally, as I searched plays for traces of early readers’ habits in the hope that there would be evidence to confirm my hypothesis that Shakespeare’s rough contemporaries read his plays for politics (answer: only sometimes). What I discovered was that plays were much more likely to be annotated than scholarly work — or even library catalogue entries — had led me to believe. I began working systematically.

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Using DEEP, I created a master survey of all the plays that were originally written in English and printed between 1550 and 1660. My initial list comprised 1,508 texts. I prepared for library visits by cross-referencing my master sheet of drama with their catalogues to create an initial census for each collection. On site, I scoured the pages for any visible marks, taking working photo­ graphs when possible and writing notes for later use. I organized my images, labelling by library, STC number, call number, and page signature so that those metadata were contained in the file name. I then categorized the level of annotation on a scale from 0–5.24 The categories I employed were: 0: Not annotated 1: Title-page only — the most common way for collectors and libraries to keep track of their plays was to write notes on the title-page, making this is the most populous category of all. I did not count paratextual notes on slips of paper or inside flyleaves as annotations. 2: Incidental — this category exists to differentiate between occasional annotations that engage with the text and those that don’t. Early modern readers frequently used plays as scrap paper for things like handwriting practice or household sums. 3: Sparse — a few scattered annotations which still showed some engagement with the content the text. 4: Moderate — these texts displayed patterns of annotation, most frequently individualized commonplacing marks. 5: Heavy — unusual and substantial engagement with the text. I gathered, cleaned, and made some preliminary visualizations of the metadata I collected from copies held at the Clark, Firestone, and Houghton Libraries.25

24  There is no getting away from the subjective nature of both this judgement and my decision about what counts as annotation in the first place. I am still assessing whether there would be a more accurate way to describe the density of annotations, perhaps with a percentage of the area covered or an average number of marks per page. 25  These preliminary visualizations likely display both selection bias and observation bias, since I began specifically looking at Shakespeare, but still give us some indication of what we might find with further research. Full-scale colour images of these visualizations and the data that they represent can be accessed via GitHub repository: [accessed 18 January 2019].

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Figure 20.1. Network analysis, correlating author with annotation level in playbooks surveyed in Common Readers, Phase 1.

Figure 20.2. Scatterplot of annotation levels over time, 1590–1660, in Common Readers, Phase 1.

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This first visualization, made with Palladio, correlates author against level of annotation (see Figure 20.1).26 I’ve pulled out the ‘Shakespeare’ node to highlight the degree to which it connects to all five categories of annotation density, suggesting that people read Shakespeare in more different ways, perhaps, than they read other playwrights. This visualization also shows the beginning of canon formation as more well-known playwrights are attached to highernumbered (and thus more engagement-heavy) nodes. Looking closely, one can observe the way in which authors who wrote new drama in the1630s attract a high level of annotation indicative of a tendency towards annotating plays that became more pronounced as the century wore on. This second visualization is a scatterplot that tracks annotation type over time and provides an overview of how annotation practices changed across the decades independent of author (see Figure 20.2). Most notably, as suggested by the first visualization, plays printed after 1630, no matter whether the play itself was new or old, attract more annotation at every level than those printed before. This may be indicative of changing attitudes towards plays as specifically ‘reading texts’, an observable phenomenon by the time of the Restoration. The results might also suggest a changing attitude towards popular literature in general and it would be interesting to compare to annotation levels in ballads or newsbooks. Both these visualizations offer hypotheses about the reading practices for drama based on data about the presence and density of annotations. Expanding the field of inquiry to include data about the annotations themselves opens the door to another level of analysis. Gathering and encoding data about annotations is, however, no small task. To begin, I used Tropy (tropy.org), a piece of open-source software that allows the user to manage and group research photos, tag them with metadata, and zoom in and take notes on individual areas of an image. As a test case, I selected all copies of 1 Henry IV for which I had images available. This group comprised eight copies from three libraries (Clark, Firestone, and Houghton). In addition to two second folios (1632), there were quartos from 1599, 1608, 1613, 1632, and 1639 (two). In these eight texts, I logged seventy-three instances of annotation, using the broadest definition to include any mark on the page even if were unlikely to be deliberate (e.g., ink trails) or more likely to be post-1800 (e.g., page numbers in pencil). Copies fell into all of the 0–5 levels of interaction. A 1608 quarto (STC 22283) at the Houghton has no discernible annotations, though a later owner 26 

Palladio is a free tool developed at Stanford that enables the uploading and visualization of complex datasets [accessed 18 January 2019].

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has written his name on the inside cover, while a 1632 quarto at the same library (STC 22286) belonged to Shakespeare editor George Steevens, whose name is written on the title-page. Copies with more annotations or multiple readers (classed at levels 3–5) encompassed a much greater range of annotation types. A reader of a 1639 quarto (STC 22287) took care to insert four act breaks and at least one stage direction. Other readers were similarly concerned with curating their editions (likely for reading), adding speech prefixes (STC 22281) and identifying and correcting misprinted words (Chrzanowski 1632s* and ExKA Oversize Special 1632Q Shakespeare). Readers of 1639 quartos at both the Houghton and the Clark regularized the stage action by adding entrances and exits, though it is likely a coincidence that these changes occurred with quartos printed the same year (STC 22287, PR2810.A1 1639*). The most widespread, though not the only, example of commonplacing was found in a second folio in Firestone (ExKA Oversize Special 1632Q Shakespeare); the marks are distinctive and systematic, occurring in every play with the (odd and notable) exception of Macbeth. Manicules, meanwhile, are found in both the 1 Henry IV copies from the Clark (Chrzanowski 1632s* and PR2810.A1 1639*) raising the possibility that they might have belonged to the same collector. Manicules are, however, fairly common; they appear frequently in the Firestone folio in plays other than 1 Henry IV as well as in other play quartos. Other types of marginal marks are prevalent in the Firestone folio (which is annotated to an unusual degree) and the Houghton 1639 quarto. Stray pen trails and other accidental marks are present in more than half of the copies surveyed, including ones that had other deliberate marks as well. After tagging all instances of annotation in this set of copies, I generated a controlled list of types of interaction, though it will need to be revised and standardized as more texts are included. Space in this chapter is not sufficient to outline the full list or to explain the categories of interaction, but the most relevant were: commonplacing mark, manicule, marginal mark, marginal comment, act break, speech prefix, stage direction, and emendation. Each of these interaction types indicated a reader engaging with the content of the text in a way that something like doodles or page numbering did not. I correlated each interaction type with its anchor text and provided both the original citation (page signature) and the modern equivalent using the New Folger Shakespeare edition of the play.27 Additionally, I recorded the speaker(s) of the anchor text,

27 

Henry IV, Part 1, ed. by Mowat and Werstine.

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the addressee (if applicable), and up to three subject tags.28 In total, I gathered this rich data from forty instances of annotation — not a large number but enough to generate hypotheses that may be tested as the dataset expands. Using RAWGraphs data visualization studio (raw­graphs.io), another opensource piece of software that enables the user to create a variety of visualizations from spreadsheets, I chose to focus on analysing interaction types for 1 Henry IV.29 The most general overview is represented in a circle packing diagram, where circles are sized according to the number of each interaction type (see Figure 20.3, online).30 We can observe that, in this sample, general notations of interest in certain passages — manicules and marginal marks, commonplacing symbols, and marginal comments — occur relatively more frequently than those interactions devoted to regularizing the text or the action — stage directions, act breaks, performance notes, speech prefixes and other textual emendations. This result raises the question of whether the difference might be attributable to another factor, whether a particular collection or even a particular edition attracted more of one sort of interaction. A quick correlation between collection and interaction type showed that the Houghton copies as a whole contained more annotations that regularized text and stage action, while the Firestone copies favoured commonplacing and other demarcating of passages (see Figure 20.4, online). One notable difference between the two is that the majority of annotations in the Firestone copies came from a second folio, while the Houghton copies were all quartos, raising the possibility that folios could have been treated more as reading texts. This is somewhat disproven, however, by the fact that the Houghton quartos exhibited some of the same kind of ‘readerly’ interactions as the folio. Overall, the diversity of annotation types in the Houghton quartos was more pronounced. A comparison of interaction types in quartos and folios substantiates this interpretation (see Figure 20.5, online). The next question I addressed was whether particular types of interaction were associated with characters or parts of the text. I added a dimension to the 28 

I have not yet generated a controlled list of subject tags; in its current state, the list has too many narrow categories and is therefore not well suited to analysis with digital tools. With the help of an advisory board, I hope to refine this aspect of my data and discuss the results in future work but will refrain from any subject analysis at this time. 29  When a single annotation qualified as more than one interaction type, I recorded only the primary type to avoid double-counting annotations. 30  The figures described here can be accessed via GitHub: [accessed 18 January 2019].

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initial diagram to coordinate interaction type with character (see Figure 20.6, online). The major characters, the Prince, King, Falstaff, Poins, and Hotspur, are all most heavily associated with commonplacing. They are also the characters whose lines draw interaction the most frequently. Rarer interactions, such as lines by Worcester, thus become most heavily associated with their one or two mentions, in this case a textual emendation. Lady Percy’s association with marginal comment is, however, somewhat more interesting, although unfortunately the comments in question are illegible in their current state. To conclude, I used the free text analysis tool Voyant (Rockwell and Sinclair) on the corpora of anchor texts. The results showed that the most frequently occurring words in the anchor texts were ‘Francis’, ‘devil’, ‘love’, ‘anon’, and ‘come’. The comedic scene with Francis, the drawer who responds only ‘anon, anon’, was very popular and accounts for three of these terms. ‘Devil’ and ‘love’ indicate the proverbial nature of what readers chose to commonplace, with one term associated with Falstaff ’s scenes in the tavern and the other with Lady Percy’s scenes with Hotspur. The word ‘cloud’ (see Figure 20.7, online) gives some idea of other frequently occurring terms. The data in the 1 Henry IV subset also demonstrate that readers interacted more with the first half of the play; out of forty interactions, twenty-seven fall in the first two acts and most of those are concentrated in i.2 and ii.4 (both tavern scenes). This behaviour on the part of readers does not differ greatly from our own, although there appears to be less interest in the parts of the play concerned with Hal’s transformation into the future king than we might expect. Tentatively, I am inclined to conclude that, according to material evidence, early readers viewed this particular play primarily, if not exclusively, as a comedy. To test this and other hypotheses, far more research is needed — an observation that seems as appropriate as any to end on.31 This chapter is in the privileged but difficult position of concluding an entire volume on early drama in manu­script. In a way, it has come full circle to suggest that annotated books, as compilations, can most appropriately be considered as artefacts of manu­script culture, and that digital humanities shares a methodo­logical synergy with these premodern reading practices; both rely on the fundamental modularity of the text and both employ structured, selfdesigned systems for information organization and retrieval. Evidence for the 31 

To give a status report on Common Readers is to invite further collaboration as it is an endeavour that has slowed or stalled depending on my own institutional position and workload. The best way to combat this situation is to build a more robust team. If you are interested, please consider this your open invitation to get in touch.

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history of reading drama can be found in many and varied manu­script sources, but I would argue it is to be meaningfully interpreted using the digital tools and methods which enable us to draw conclusions on a much larger scale than any single case study. A host of new projects are making it possible to engage in a type of reading that is not so much ‘distant’ or ‘post-material’ as compilational — itself a hybrid of old and new methods brought into meaningful convergence to offer a new interpretive perspective.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Shakespeare, William, The First Folio of Shakespeare: A  Transcript of Contemporary Marginalia in a Copy of the Kodama Memorial Library of Meisei Uni­ver­sity, ed.  by Akihiro Yamada (Tokyo: Yushodo Press, 1998) —— , The Historie of Henry the Fourth (1632, STC 22286); copy from Cam­bridge, MA, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, Houghton Library, STC 22286 —— , The Historie of Henry the Fourth (1632, STC 22286); copy from Los Angeles, Uni­ ver­sity of California, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Chrzanowski 1632s* —— , The Historie of Henry the Fourth (1639, STC 22287); copy from Cam­bridge, MA, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, Houghton Library, STC 22287 —— , The Historie of Henry the Fourth (1639, STC 22287); copy from Los Angeles, Uni­ ver­sity of California, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, PR2810.A1 1639* —— , The History of Henrie the Fourth (1599, STC 22281); copy from Cam­bridge, MA, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, Houghton Library, STC 22281 —— , The History of Henry the Fourth (1608, STC 22283); copy from Cam­bridge, MA, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, Houghton Library, STC 22283 —— , The History of Henrie the Fourth (1613, STC22284); copy from Princeton, Princeton Uni­ver­sity, Firestone Memorial Library, RHT 17th-509 —— , Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1632, STC 22274a); copy from Princeton, Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton Uni­ver­sity, ExKA Over­ size Special 1632q Shakespeare

Secondary Sources Archaeo­logy of Reading [accessed 16 February 2018] Bahr, Arthur, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medi­eval London (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 2013) Baron, Sabrina Alcorn, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin, eds, Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst: Uni­ver­sity of Massa­chu­ setts Press, 2003) Beal, Peter, In Praise of Scribes: Manu­scripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1998) Blair, Ann M., Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010) Brayman, Heidi, Jesse M. Lander, and Zachary Lesser, eds, The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manu­script Library, 2016) Cormack, Bradin, and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory, 1500–1700 (Chicago: Uni­ ver­sity of Chicago Library, 2005) Erne, Lukas, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013)

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Estill, Laura, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century Manu­scripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays (Newark: Uni­ver­sity of Delaware Press, 2015) Estill, Laura, and Beatrice Montedoro, eds, DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts (Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance) [accessed 19 January 2019] Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 3–78 Hooks, Adam, Selling Shakespeare: Bio­graphy, Biblio­graphy, and the Book Trade (Cam­ bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2016) Ioppolo, Grace, Dramatists and their Manu­scripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Mid­dle­ton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority, and the Playhouse (New York: Routledge, 2006) Jackson, H. J., Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2001) Knight, Jeffrey Todd, ‘Shakespeare and the Collection: Reading Beyond the Readers’ Marks’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed.  by Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2015), pp. 177–95 Lesser, Zachary, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Love, Harold, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1993) Middle English Dictionary, ‘maken (v.1.)’, [accessed 15 July 2017] Mowat, Barbara A., and Paul Werstine, eds, Henry IV, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d.) [accessed 15 Dec­ ember 2017] Palfrey, Simon, and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (New York: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007) Palladio [accessed 15 December 2017] RAWGraphs [accessed 15 December 2017] Rockwell, Geoffrey, and Stéfan Sinclair, Voyant [accessed 15 Decem­ ber 2017] Sherman, William, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) Smyth, Adam, ‘“Rend and Teare in Peeces”: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-Cen­ tury England’, Seventeenth Century, 19.1 (2004), 36–52 Stern, Tiffany, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (New York: Routledge, 2004) Straznicky, Marta, ed., Shakespeare’s  Stationers: Studies in Cultural Biblio­graphy (Phila­ delphia: Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) Trettien, Whitney, ‘Circuit-Bending History: Sketches towards a Digital Schematic’, in Between the Humanities and the Digital, ed. by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), pp. 181–92 The Winthrop Family on the Page [accessed 15 February 2018] Zemon Davis, Natalie, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1975)

Index of Manuscripts

Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 399: 9, 28, 33, 71, 72, 88–93, 94, 98 —— , MS Brogyntyn II.42: 218 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20: 172 Cambridge, MA, Harvard Theatre Collection, MS Thr 10.1: 104 Chester, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, ZMB 7: 91, 92 Coventry, City Record Office, Accession 11/1: 34–36, 39 —— , Accession 11/2: 34, 37–38, 40, 42–46, 49–50, 52 —— , Accession 100/17/1: 39, 41, 50, 51 Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, MS 432: 29 Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library, MS Drummond De.3.70 (Ker Manuscript): 166–70, 180 Edinburgh, National Records of Scotland, E22/3: 171 Kew, The National Archives, E351/3249: 139 Leeds, Brotherton Library, MS 295/120: 322, 324 London, British Library, Additional MS 10305: 71 —— , Additional MS 15233: 10, 153–61, 163 —— , Additional MS 18653: 214, 227 —— , Additional MS 22608: 270 —— , Additional MS 23726: 320, 322 —— , Additional MS 30346: 298 —— , Additional MS 30347: 297, 298, 300 —— , Additional MS 35290: 28 —— , Additional MS 35841: 139 —— , Additional MS 36758: 128 —— , Additional MS 36759: 214, 227 —— , Additional MS 43645: 320, 321 —— , Additional MS 45702: 6 —— , Additional MSS 60273-60282: 141–47 —— , Additional MS 64708: 295

364

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

—— , MS Cotton Caligula A II: 24, 26 —— , MS Cotton Caligula B X: 177 —— , MS Cotton Caligula E VI: 138 —— , MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII: 29. See also N-Town manuscript —— , MS Egerton 1994: 131–32, 334, 339 —— , MS Egerton 2828: 214, 227 —— , MS Hargrave 205: 251–52, 254–57, 261, 266 —— , MS Harley 367: 5–7 —— , MS Harley 2013: 71 —— , MS Harley 2124: 71, 93 —— , MS Harley 7368: 128 —— , MS Lansdowne 807b: 214 —— , MS Lansdowne 786: 251, 253–56 London, Dulwich College, MS 1: 184 London, Guildhall Library, MS 1239/1 (part 3): 169 London, Society of Friends Archives, Temp MSS 434/2/57: 315 Manchester, Central Library, MS 822.11C2: 71 Montreal, QC, McGill University, Osler Library of the History of Medicine, MS 7588: 258, 259, 260 New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 365 (Book of Brome): 19, 25 Northumberland, Alnwick Castle, MS 507: 124 Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, MS MC 2847: 313–14, 316–24 Nuneaton, Arbury Hall, MS A414: 108, 109 —— , MS A415: 9–10, 103–04, 107–08, 110–13, 118–19 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1071: 140 —— , MS Bodley 175: 71 —— , MS English Poetry d. 3: 279 —— , MS English Poetry d. 208: 26 —— , MS English Poetry e. 112: 109 —— , MS Rawlinson D 952: 282–84, 286–87, 289–91 —— , MS Rawlinson poet. 26: 4–5 Oxford, Worcester College, MS 120, Plays 9.22: 141, 146–47 San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS E1 8395: 141, 145–46 —— , MS HM 1: 9, 55 57, 59–65 —— , MS HM 2: 71, 88, 96 Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office, MS ER 82/1/21: 279 Swindon, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, MS 865/502/2: 324 Warwick, Warwickshire County Record Office, MS CR136 B766: 109 Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS ART Inv 271 no. 10(e) (2): 215, 227 —— , MS S.a.9: 271 —— , MS V.a.190: 232–33 —— , MS V.a.198: 251, 254–59, 260, 261, 266 —— , MS V.a.354: 311

General Index actors: 103, 129, 156, 158, 213–24, 226–27, 334 amateur: 144, 183 n. 1, 335 modern: 234 n. 15 as readers: 115–17, 147. See also  actors’ parts see also clowns and clowning roles; King’s Men; memorial reconstruction; Queen’s Men; witnesses actors’ parts: 127, 129, 163, 183–94 Al, G.: 250 Albin, Andrew: 83, 93 Alcazar: 128–29 Alexander, Gavin: 268 Alleyn, Edward: 184, 204–06 Alleyn, Joan: 205 Alleyn, John: 207 Alleyn, Richard: 204 Allott, Robert: Englands Parnassus: 279–80 Alnwick Castle, Northumberland: 10 amateur playwriting: 103, 214, 217, 219 Amboyna Massacre (1623): 337 Amyot, Thomas: 319, 325 Analytical Review: 301, 304–05 Ann of Cleves, Queen of Henry VIII: 160 annotation: 10, 12, 34, 48–51, 60, 271–75, 281–82, 345–59 see also title-pages Antichrist: 33 Antichrist (Chester play) see under Chester plays Arbury Hall, Warwickshire: 9, 103 Archaeology of Reading: 347, 351 Armin, Robert: 215 Astington, John H.: 215 Aubigny, Esmé Stuart, Sieur d’: 178–79 Axton, Richard: 6

Bahr, Arthur: 345 Baiazet II, Ottoman sultan: 110 Bailey, Amanda: 197 bankrupts: 202 Barclay, David: 314 Barish, Jonah: 203 Baron, Robert: An Apology for Paris: 287 Barrett, Timothy: 240 Bauhuis, Bernhard: Epigrammatum: 287 Bazerman, Charles: 199 Beal, Peter: 280, 289, 291 see also Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts Beale, Richard: 105, 107 Beatniffe, Richard: 313 Beattie, Luke: 147 Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher Cupid’s Revenge: 287 A King and No King: 287 Philaster: 214, 227 The Queen of Corinth: 227 The Scornful Lady: 228 see also Fletcher, John Bedell, Gabriel: 140 Beeston, Christopher: 200 Beidler, Brien: 236 Benfeild, Mr (witness): 207 Best, Michael: 336 Billingsley, Martin: 204 binding: 29 n. 28, 41, 43–44, 48, 59–63, 67–68, 142, 154, 312, 323–25 Birde/Borne, William: 204–06 Blair, Ann: 348 Blount, Thomas: The Academy of Eloquence: 293 Boaden, James: A Letter to George Steevens, Esq.: 298–99, 301–02

366

Bodenham, John: Belvedere: 279–80 Boffey, Julia: 23 Bolter, Jay David: 249–50 Bonduca: 128 Book of Brome Abraham and Isaac: 8, 20–25, 28–30, 84 contents and compilation: 8, 19–26, 29–30 flush columns: 26–27 physical construction: 27–29 books (printed): annotated: 234–36 Borne, William see Birde, William Boswell, James: 304 Bourne, Henry: 318 Brantley, Jessica: 23–24 Brent, Sir Nathaniel: 140 British Critic (journal): 301 British Literary Manuscripts Online (BLMO): 13 Brome, Richard: The Jovial Crew: 103 n. 1 Brooke, Samuel: Melanthe: 285, 286 Brooks, F. W.: 57 Browne, David: The New Invention, Intituled, Calligraphia: 201 Buchanan, George: 172 n. 15, 177 Burghley, William Cecil, Baron see Cecil, William Burton, William: 202 Buzzetti, Dino: 332 Byrd, William: 260 n. 17 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron: Cain, A Mystery: 319 C., G.: 260 cadellae: 57, 59, 61 Caesar, Sir Julius: 348 Caine, Andrew: 215 Calgary, University of: Osborne Collection: 9 Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, The: 72, 74 Cambridge University performance of drama at: 139, 280, 285 Canonbury House, Islington: 139 Carlell, Lodowick: The Deserving Favourite: 213, 216 Carnegie, David: 111 Carson, Neil: 197–98 Cartwright, William: 274, 334 Royal Slave: 113

GENERAL INDEX Cary family: 273–74 cast-lists: 213–17, 219, 224, 228 see also character lists; paratexts; King’s Men Castle Ashby, Northamptonshire: 139, 141–44, 149 Castle of Perseverance, The (Macro play): 12, 311, 314, 320–21, 324 Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts (CELM): 5, 13, 282 n. 15 catchwords: 6 n. 6, 143–44, 261–62 Catherine de’Medici, Queen of France: 258 Catholicism: unrest in north of England: 57–58 Caussin, Nicholas, Hermenigildus: 141–42 n. 14, 147 Cavanagh, Dermot: 167 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle: 272 n. 10 Cawley, Arthur: 56, 65 ‘CB’: 285–94, 286 Cecil, William, Baron Burghley: 57, 176–67, 260 Chalmers, George: 304–05 Chambers, E. K.: 324 Chapman, George: Caesar and Pompey: 286, 288 see also Fletcher, John, Philip Massinger, and George Chapman character lists: 29, 107, 144, 251, 254–56, 258, 259, 261, 334 see also cast-lists; paratexts Charles I, King of England: 137, 271–72 Charles II, King of England: Restoration: 141 Charles IX (Valois), King of France: 258 Chartier, Roger: 267 Chatterton, Thomas: 298 Chaucer, Geoffrey: Lack of Steadfastness: 29 Chester plays Antichrist: 9, 53, 73, 79, 88–89, 92–93, 94, 98–99 Assumption (Wives; lost): 76, 77, 79, 88 n. 48, 94, 95, 98 n. 62, 94 Bakers’ Charter: 76, 78, 94 Balaam (Cappers): 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 94, 96, 97, 99 BL MS Harley 2104 Guild List: 76, 77, 81, 94 Bowers, Fletchers, Ironmongers, and

GENERAL INDEX Carpenters’ dispute: 76, 94 Cappers’ petition: 76, 96 Clopper’s dating: 9, 71–100. See also Clopper, Lawrence contents: 71, 83 as Corpus Christi Passion play: 72, 75–77 dating: 71–100 Doomsday (Weavers): 77, 79, 80, 81, 94, 96, 98 Early Banns: 77–79, 83, 86–87, 88, 96–97 Emmaus (Saddlers): 79, 80–81 Fishmongers’ carriage: 77 full-cycle manuscripts: 53, 73, 89 n. 53, 93, 97, 98 n. 62 Goldsmiths-vintners-dyers’ agreement: 78, 96 guild carriage records: 76, 77, 83 n. 30, 87, 94 Jerusalem (Shoemakers): 79, 81 Last Supper (Bakers): 77, 79, 80, 81, 88, 94, 95 Late Banns: 78–79, 86–88, 93 Lucifer (Tanners): 78, 79, 81, 96, 99 Magi plays: 78–79, 80, 83, 87 Markland’s edition: 321. See also  Mark­land, James Heywood Nativity (Carpenters): 76–79, 80, 87 Newhall proclamation: 78, 79, 84, 94, 96 Passion (Ironmongers): 77, 79, 80, 94 performances: 30 Pewterers-founders’ agreement: 76, 84 Prophets (Shearmen): 77–79, 80 Purification/Doctors (Smiths): 41, 79, 81, 83–84 Resurrection (Skinners): 79, 81 Saddlers and Curriers’ Charter: 76, 94 Shepherds (Painters): 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 94 Shoemakers’ 1550–51 itemized account: 78 Trial (Bowers, Fletchers et al.): 71 n. 1, 77, 79, 80, 94 Weavers and Shearmen’s agreement: 76, 94 White Book of the Prentice: 78, 96, 97 as Whitsun plays: 72, 74–75, 76–77, 85, 96 see also Antichrist; Mills, David; hands; Christie, Sheila; REED Chettle, Henry: 127 Christiansen, Michael: 240 Christie, James: 313, 316

367

Christie, Sheila: and dating of Chester plays: 72, 74–75, 81 Christie’s: Macro Manuscripts Sale: 314–16 Churchyard, Thomas: 251, 259 Civil War (English): 137–78 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st earl of: 148 Clavell, John: The Soddered Citizen: 11, 214–17, 219–22, 224, 227, 228 Clopper, Lawrence: 9 ‘The History and Development of the Chester Cycle’: 72, 74–88, 93, 98 closet drama: 143, 251, 254, 319 clowns and clowning roles: 11, 127–28, 130–31, 203, 213–24, 226–27, 229, 290–94 Cobbes, James: 312 Coletti, Theresa: 2, 73, 74, 99 Collier, John Payne: 306, 324–25 Collins, Thomas: 140 Common Readers: 13, 348, 351–52, 354 commonplace books and commonplacing: 12, 19–20, 109, 251, 254, 262–63, 279–84, 290, 348, 356–58 commonplace marks: 262, 351, 353, 357 Compton, Lady Elizabeth: 139 Compton, James see Northampton, 3rd earl of Compton, Sir John: 139 Compton, Sir William: 139 Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire: 139 Coonrod, Karin: 234 Cooper, Thomas: Thesaurus Lingvae Romanae & Britannicae: 201 Cormack, Bradin: 347 Corneille, Pierre: Don Sancho d’Aragon: 141–42 n. 14 Cotman, John Sell: 321 Council of the North (England): 58, 67 Coventry Cappers’ guild: 41 Corpus Christi play: 29 n. 30, 33–34, 320–21 Draper’s guild: 41 Shearmen and Tailors’ pageant (Nativity): 34, 41 waits (musicians): 47 Weavers’ guild: 8, 41, 47, 50 Weavers’ pageant (Presentation, Doctors): 8, 34, 36, 41, 43, 51 Weavers’ playbooks: 8, 34, 36, 39, 41

368

Craig, Hardin: 43 Crane, Mary Thomas: 280 Crick, Julia: 1 Croft, John: Excerpta Antiqua: 318 Croo, Robert: 34, 39, 41–44, 47 Crosby Hall, Bishopsgate (London): 139 Daborne, Robert: 207 Dambrogio, Jana: 233–34 dance: 144, 146, 155, 158, 163, 165, 175–76, 191, 335 see also music Dance of the Satyrs: 349 Darnley, Henry Stewart, Lord: 175 Database of Dramatic Extracts (DEx): 349 Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP): 13, 353 Davenant, William: 289 The Cruel Brother: 287, 288 The Just Italian: 287, 288 Daves, Hew: 204 Davis, Natalie Zemon: 351 Davis, Norman: 20 Davy, Robert: 251, 259, 260 Daybell, James: 205 Dee, John: 347 Dekker, Thomas: The Honest Whore, Part 2: 286, 288 see also Middleton, Thomas, and Thomas Dekker Dekker, Thomas, John Ford, and William Row­ley: The Witch of Edmonton: 189, 191 Delamotte, Philip Henry: A Progressive Drawing Book for Beginners: 249–50 Demetrius and Enanthe: 218 digital analysis: and annotation: 352–57 digital editions: of manuscripts: 329–34, 338–42 Dodsley, Robert: Old Plays: 256 Dolleffe, Gyles: 59 Dorset, Anne, countess of: 148 Dorset, Richard Sackville, 3rd earl: 148 Douce, Francis: 321 Dow, Robert: 260 n. 17 Downton, Thomas: 204–06 dramatis personae see character lists Drummond of Hawthornden, William: 166, 167

GENERAL INDEX Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste: 286 Duke, John: 206 Dutton, Edward: 205 Early English Books Online (EEBO): 13, 290 Early English Text Society: 51 Eastfield, William: 172 Ecclesiastical Commission of the North: 9, 58, 61 Edmund Ironside: 131 Edward IV, King of England: 57 Edwards, Richard: 154 Egglesfield, Thomas: 140 Elizabeth I, Queen of England: 4, 59, 110 n. 26, 250, 258, 260 Ellis, Henry: 323 Emmerson, Richard: 74 epilogues: 156, 227, 251, 257, 259, 261, 270, 334 see also paratexts; prologues Epp, Garrett: 55 n. 3, 56 Erasmus, Desiderius: 208 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of: 237 Estill, Laura: 3, 108, 349 see also DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts extracts (dramatic): 279–94, 350 eye skip: 157 Falstaff (character): 223–24, 273 Farmer, Alan B.: 288 see also Database of English Literary Playbooks Farnaby, Thomas: Phrases oratoriae elegantiores: 290–91, 293 Ferrers, George: 175 Fifteen Signs of Doomsday (Book of Brome): 22, 26–28 Fisher, Jasper: Fuimus Troes: 285, 286 Fletcher, John The Humorous Lieutenant: 216–18, 222, 227 The Island Princess: 227 The Wild Goose Chase: 213, 216–17, 224, 227, 228 see also Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher Fletcher, John, and Philip Massinger The Lover’s Progress (The Wandering Lovers): 227

GENERAL INDEX Sir John Van Olden Barnevelt: 214, 227 The Spanish Curate: 227 Fletcher, John, Philip Massinger, and George Chapman: Rollo, Duke of Normandy: 227 Fletcher, John, and William Rowley: The Maid in the Mill: 227 Foakes, R. A.: 197 Folger, Henry: 257 Ford, John The Laws of Candy: 227 The Lovers Melancholy: 227, 228, 286, 288 see also Dekker, Thomas, John Ford, and William Rowley Forster, Antonia: 12 Foster, Thomas: 207 Francis, Henry: 97 Fulwood, William: The Enimie of Idlenesse: 208 Furnivall, F. J.: 89, 91 Gabler, Hans Walter: 330, 336 Gargrave, Thomas: 57, 58–59, 67–68 Garrick, David: 272, 322 Gascoigne, George: 11, 173–74 Gaskell, Charles Milnes: 256 Gee, Mayor Henry: 84, 86 Gentleman’s Magazine: 299, 301, 319 George, David: 215 Gesta Grayorum (revels): 232–33 Gibson, Gail McMurray: 2, 73, 74, 99 Gill, Roma: 223 Gillray, James: 300 Gismond of Salerne: 12, 249–51, 254–57, 261 Goffe, Thomas Amurath (The Courageous Turke): 104–05, 285, 286 Baiazet (The Raging Turke): 9–10, 103–19 The Careless Shepherdess: 114 Orestes: 285, 286 ‘Golden Fleece, The’ (?playbook): 41 Goldsmid, Sir Louis: 60 n. 26 Goodman, Christopher: 63 Gordon, Andrew: 207 Gough, Alexander: 220 Gough, John: Academy of Complements: 293 Grafton, Anthony: 347, 351 Gray’s Inn: 232

369

Greatorex, Vanessa: 89 Grebanier, Bernard: 299 Greene, Robert Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: 124 Philomela: 286 Greg, W. W.: 88–89, 91, 123, 133–34 Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: The Battle of Alcazar & Orlando Furioso: 128–31 Greville, Curtis: 221 Grusin, Richard: 249–50 Gryges, Mrs: 205 Guise, Henri, 3e duc de: 179 Gurney, Anna, (later Backhouse): 315 n. 16 Gurney, Hudson: and Macro Plays: 12, 312–25 Gurney, John Henry Jr: 312 Gurney, Margaret: 316 Hackett, Thomas: 6 Halliwell-Phillipps, J.O.: 214 hands (scribal): 47–48, 59, 64, 198, 203, 219, 249–50, 256, 260, 263, 334 anglicana: 20, 93 amateur: 20–21, 24, 157 in Arbury Hall MS 415: 10, 106–09, 112 in British Library Add. MS 15233: 157–59 in British Library MS Hargrave 205: 266 in the Book of Brome: 20–24, 28 chancery: 56, 68 James Compton’s: 142. See also  North­ampton, James Compton, 3rd earl of Robert Croo’s: 43, 47. See also  Croo, Robert in Folger MS V.a.198: 266 h-descenders: 91–93 italic: 108, 109, 167, 204, 233, 254 in MS Cotton Caligula A II: 26–28 in MS Peniarth 399: 89, 90–93, 98 Thomas Goffe’s: 108 n. 12. See also Goffe, Thomas Cosmo Manuche’s: 143, 146. See also Manuche, Cosmo Philip Massinger’s: 221. See also Massinger, Philip John Newdigate’s: 103, 109. See also Newdigate, John professional: 8, 20, 23, 26, 257

370

secretary: 26, 34, 43, 89, 91, 92, 109, 124, 167, 204, 233, 254, 334 in Trinity College Dublin MS 432: 29 various (multiple): 4, 5, 10, 103, 107–09, 116, 124, 127, 141, 146, 154, 291 Arthur Wilson’s: 214, 217. See also Wilson, Arthur see also cadellae; letters; manuscripts; signatures; witnessing Happé, Peter: 6 Harriot, Thomas: 279 Harvey, Gabriel: 273, 347, 351 Hatton, Christopher: 250, 260 n. 17 Hausted, Peter: 289 Rival Friends: 285, 286 Havens, Earle: 281 Haydon, Benjamin Robert: 315–16 Heminges, John: 303 Henderson, Diana: 23 Henri III, King of France: 179 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England: 141, 144–46 Henry VIII, King of England marriage to Ann of Cleves: 160 and Pilgrimage of Grace: 57 Revels: 175 Henslowe, Philip contracts: 184–85 n. 5 diary: 108, 197–98, 205, 232 n. 11, 349 moneylending: 198–99, 204–07, 209 Herbert, Sir Henry: 333, 335, 338 Hewyt, James: 47 Heywood, Jasper: Troas: 251 Heywood, John: 154 The Four P’s: 7, 286 Witty and Witless: 6–8 Heywood, Thomas The Escapes of Jupiter: 131–32 The Golden Age: 132 The Rape of Lucrece, 287 The Silver Age: 132 Higden, Ranulf: 97 Hitler, Adolf: false diaries: 307 Holland, John: 125 Holthausen, F.: 51 Holyday, Barten: Technogamia, the Marriages of the Arts: 285, 287 Hone, William, Ancient Mysteries Described: 320–21, 324–25

GENERAL INDEX Honyman, John: 221 Hoppe, Harry: 130–04 Hopton Heath, battle of (1643): 139 Howard-Hill, Trevor: 109 Hudson family: 175 Huett (Hewett), Richard: 259–60 Huggarde, Miles: 154 Hume, Robert D.: 241 Hutton, Matthew, dean of York Minster: 58 Hyngham, Thomas: 311 Inner Temple: 232, 250, 269 Inns of Court: 57, 58, 249–51, 260, 279 International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (2002): 56 Ioppolo, Grace: 3 Ireland, Samuel: 297–98, 300, 302, 304–05 Ireland, William Henry Shakespeare forgeries: 12, 297, 299–300, 303–06 An Authentic Account of the Shakesperian Manuscripts, &c.: 303 The Confessions: 303 Vortigern and Rowena: 299, 300, 302 Jackson, Heather: 350 James VI, King of Scotland: 166, 173, 177 Jardine, Lisa: 347, 351 Jenkinson, Hilary: 60 John of Bordeaux: 10, 124–34 Johnston, Alexandra F.: 83, 93 Johnstoune, William: 12, 270–72, 275 Jonson, Ben: 4, 165, 188, 193, 198, 206, 288–89 The Alchemist: 287 Catiline: 286 Cynthia’s Revels: 287 The Devil is an Ass: 190–91 Epicene (The Silent Woman): 190–01, 287 Every Man in his Humour: 287 Every Man out of his Humour: 286 The New Inn: 188 Sejanus: 287 Volpone: 185, 286 Kelliher, Hilton: 138 n. 4, 142–43 Kemp, William: 215 Ker, Margaret: 167, 172

GENERAL INDEX Ker, Mark: 167 Kermode, Frank: 306 King, Henry: 4 King’s Men: 10, 148 casting: 213–14, 216–17, 224 Knight, Edward: 128, 219 Knight, Jeffrey Todd: 347, 350 Knolles, Richard: The General Historie of the Turkes: 110 Knyght, Master (?Thomas; fl.1525– c.1550): 154 Kyd, Thomas: The Spanish Tragedy: 114 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury: 4 Launching of the Mary, The: 13 Latin poetry: 4, 259, 260 n. 18 Latin plays see Brooke, Samuel; Caussin, Nicholas; Plautus; Seneca Leicester, Robert Dudley, 1st earl of: 259, 260 Lesser, Zachary: 270, 288, 293 see also Database of Early English Playbooks letters: as theatrical props: 11, 229–42 Lewis, Charles: 6026 Levrieri, Tomaso di: 241 Life of St Margaret, The (Book of Brome): 22 Lloyd, Ludowick: 259, 260 n. 17 loans see moneylending London Chapel Royal: 156 playhouses: 54, 128, 131, 137–38. See also theatres St Bartholomew-the-Less (church): 140 St Mary-at-Hill (church): 153–54, 156–57, 163 St Paul’s choir school: 156 Westminster choir school: 156 Long, William B.: 123, 125 lost plays: 76–77, 88 n. 48, 94, 97, 98, 254, 318 Lowin, John: 198, 206, 219, 223 Luminasky, R. M.: 80–81, 86, 93 Lusty Juventus: 7 Lyall, Rod: 179 Lybaeus Desconus: 28 Lydgate, John minor poems in Book of Brome: 27 mumming prologues: 172–74

371

presenter’s speech for Twelfth Night: 11 Dietary: 26 Stans puer ad mensam: 2 Lynch, Jack: 300 Mabbe, James: 285, 286 MacGregor, Katie: 238 n. 19 McGann, Jerome: 330, 332 McLeod, Randall: 330 McMillin, Scott: 128 Macro, Revd Cox: 311–12, 316, 318, 321–24 Macro, Mary: 312 Macro Plays: 12, 311–15, 317–18, 320, 323 see also Castle of Perseverance, The; Mankind; Wisdom Machiavelli: La Mandragola, 141, 142 n. 14 Maguire, Laurie E.: 130–31, 133 Maitland, Marie: 167 Maitland Quarto: 167 Malone, Edmond: 298 An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments: 299–301, 303–36 Mankind (Macro play): 12, 311, 325 Manuche, Cosmo in Civil War: 138, 140 dedicates plays to Compton: 140, 143 life and career: 139 relations with Compton: 139, 149 The Banished Shepherdess: 141, 143–45 The Bastard: 140 The Feast: 141, 146, 148 The Just General: 140 Love in Travell: 140 The Loyal Lovers: 140 Manuche, Mrs Francis (Cosmo’s second wife): 148 Manuche, Francis (Cosmo’s uncle): 139, 140 manuscripts aggregates/composite volumes: 4–5, 108–09, 156 authorial: 47, 51, 132, 141, 141, 142 n. 14, 146, 330–31, 323, 335, 337, 340 damaged: 43, 60, 64–67, 124, 127, 139, 233 n. 13 designed for reading: 53, 110, 158, 167, 180, 206, 219, 251, 357. See also closet drama

372

digital editing: 330–34, 338–42 fair/foul papers: 2, 82–83, 141, 142 n. 14 lost: 29 n. 30, 34, 53, 71, 76–77, 87, 88 n. 48, 96, 143, 256–57, 333 miscellanies: 4–5, 8–10, 19–24, 28–30, 109, 155–56, 158, 257–58, 291, 311–12, 314, 318–20, 324–25, 349 as noted texts: 10, 103–05, 108, 110, 111–18. See also  Stern, Tiffany as performance aid (promptbooks), 124, 129–30, 147, 158, 185, 189 see also actors’ parts; commonplace books; hands; letters; scribes; witnessing Manwode, Master: 153 Marbeck, Roger: 258, 260 Marcus, Leah: 2 marginalia see annotation Markham, Gervase: The Dumb Knight: 286 Markland, James Heywood: 319, 324 Marmion, Shackerley: 289 Holland’s Leaguer: 286, 288 Marston, John The Insatiate Countess: 286, 291, 293 The Malcontent: 192 Marston, Thomas E.: 19 Mary I (Tudor), Queen of England: 159–60 Mary Queen of Scots: 172 n. 15, 175–77 mascarade tradition (France): 174 masking shows: 165, 173–76 Masque of Mercy, The: 314 masques: 165, 314, 324 Massey, Charles: 206 Massinger, Philip Believe As You List: 11, 214–16, 221–24, 227 The Emperour of the East: 286, 288 The Maid of Honour: 286, 288 The Picture: 213, 216–17, 221, 224, 227, 228 The Roman Actor: 5, 213, 227, 286, 288 see also hands; Fletcher, John, and Philip Massinger May, Thomas: The Tragedy of Antigone: 287, 288 Mayer, Jean-Christophe: 281 Mazzio, Carla: 347 Meale, Carol M.: 19–20

GENERAL INDEX Medwall, Henry: Nature: 255 Meighen, Mercy: 140 Meighen, Richard: 104–05, 111 Meisei, Japan: University of: First Folio Shakespeare: 12, 270–71, 274, 348 ‘memory skip’: 131 memorial reconstruction: 128–34 Melton, Robert: 8, 19–22, 24 Middleton, Thomas Michaelmas Term: 286 The Revenger’s Tragedy: 185 The Second Maiden’s Tragedy: 214 Middleton, Thomas, and Thomas Dekker: The Roaring Girl: 11, 186–87 Middleton, Thomas, and William Rowley: The Changeling: 189 Miles, Keith: 51 Milhous, Judith: 241 Mills, David: and dating of Chester plays: 72, 76–79, 81, 84, 86, 93, 98 moneylending: 198–206 Montgomerie, Alexander: 10, 166–67, 174, 179 A Cartell of the Thre Ventrous Knichts: 166, 170 The Navigatioun: 166, 168–70, 172–73, 175–78 Monthly Mirror: 300, 302, 305 Monthly Review: 301, 305–06 morality plays: 311–12, 325 Morning Post: 298 Moss, Ann: 280, 292 Mountfort, Walter: The Launching of the Mary, or, The Seaman’s Honest Wife: 329–30, 334–40 Muldrew, Craig: 198–99 mumming: 172 music: 10, 146, 153–56, 158–59, 165, 175–76, 251, 257, 259–60, 290 see also dancing Mun, Thomas: A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East Indies: 333 N-Town manuscript: 53, 86 Neville, Alexander: Oedipus: 251 New Historicism: 314, 352 Newcastle Shipwrights’ play (lost): 318 see also lost plays; manuscripts Newdigate, John III: 9, 103–05, 108–09, 116

GENERAL INDEX Newdigate, Richard II: 105 Nichols, John: Literary Anecdotes: 323 Noel, Henry: 250 North, John: 60 n. 26 Northampton, Isabella, countess of: 148 Northampton, James Compton, 3rd earl of in Civil War: 138–39 difficulty raising troupe: 144 life and career: 139, 148 manuscripts: 142 plays staged: 10, 147–48 relations with Manuche: 139, 149 translations: 147–48 Bassianus: 147 Leontius: 147–48 Northampton, Spencer Compton, 2nd earl of: 139 Norwich Grocers’ play: 29 n. 30 Norys, Thomas: 50 Oakshot, Jane: 55 n. 3 Occupation and Idleness: 311 n. 1 Oliver, Robert: 312 Oliver, Thomas: 314 Oracle (journal): 298, 304 Orford, Horace Walpole, 4th earl of: 298 Orgel, Stephen: 275 ‘Orlando’ (actor’s part): 184, 187 Orlando Furioso: 128–30, 133 Osler, Sir William: 258–59 Ottoman Empire: 110 Owayne Miles (Book of Brome): 22, 26, 28 Oxford, Vine Street (later Bear Lane): 284–85 Oxford University and manuscript circulation: 260, 279 performance of drama at: 10, 103–05, 107, 109–10, 113–14, 118, 270–71, 285 and play-reading: 116, 285 P., A.: Natvral and Morall Questions and Answeres: 202–03 Palfrey, Simon: 3, 39, 193 Palgrave family: 313 Palgrave, Elizabeth (born Turner): 314 Palgrave, Sir Francis (born Cohen): 313–14, 321–24 Palgrave, William: 318 Palladio (digital tool): 355 Palliser, David: 58

373

Palmer, Barbara: 56, 59 Pangallo, Matteo A.: 219 Paradis, James: 199 paratexts (dramatic): 12, 13, 105, 251, 254–55, 257–58, 261, 353 see also cast-lists; character lists; epilogues; prologues; title-pages Parkes, Malcolm: 9, 59, 61, 66, 68 Parkinson, David: 167 Parsons, Thomas: 205 Patteson family (of Norwich): 312 Patteson, John: 312–13, 316–17 Penn, William: 221 Pepys, Samuel: 148 Percy, Thomas: 141 Perry, Curtis: 258 Philip II, King of Spain: 159–60 Phillips, Edward: The Mysteries of Love & Eloquence: 293 Pierazzo, Elena: 330, 336, 338, 341 Pilgrimage of Grace (1537): 57 Piper, Andrew: 249 Pistill of Susan: 26, 27 Pixley, Alan: 50 Pixley, Harry: 50 Pixley, Richard: 47–48 Pixley, William: 50 Plautus: Captivi: 141–42 n. 14 poetry, 4–5, 20–22, 26–27, 83, 160–63, 166–67, 174, 177, 259, 260–61, 269, 333 and quantity: 160–61 see also Latin poetry; verse Pollard, Alfred: 312–13 Pollard, Thomas: 215–17, 219–22, 224, 227 Poole, Joshua: The English Parnassus, or, A Helpe to English Poesie: 293 Pope, Alexander: Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot: 306 Potter, Lois: 193 Pound, Thomas: 172 n. 15 Preiss, Richard: 215 presenters’ speeches see epilogues; prologues Pridioxe, Thomas: 154 Prince Charles’s Men: 335 prologues: 11, 113, 155–56, 170, 172–75, 180, 275, 305, 329, 334 props: 123, 148, 214 see also letters

374

prosody: 55, 160–61, 186 n. 8 Pudsey, Edward: 279 Purkis, James: 3 Pye, Henry James: 305 Pynson, Richard: 48 Quaritch, Bernard: 256–58 Quarles, Francis: Argalus and Parthenia: 287 Queen’s Men: 10, 128, 148 Randolph, Thomas: 176–77, 286, 289 The Jealous Lovers: 274, 285, 291, 293 Rastell see Restall Redford, John: 154–55 The Play of Wit and Science (attrib.): 10, 154–58, 161–63 Reed, Isaac: 256, 398 REED (Records of Early English Drama): and dating of Chester plays: 76, 78, 80, 82, 84, 88, 93, 100 ‘Rejoyce’ (song): 47 remediation: 249–50, 262 Renwick, W.L: 124, 127–31, 133 Restall (Rastell), Master: 153, 163 Returne from Parnassus, The: 280 Rich, Barnaby: Faultes Faults, and nothing else but Faultes: 280 Richard, Duke of Gloucester (later King Richard III): 57 Robins, William: 217 Robinson, Peter: 340 Roja, Fernando de: Spanish Bawd: 285 Rowley, Samuel: 207 Rowley, William see Dekker, Thomas, John Ford, and William Rowley; Fletcher, John, and William Rowley; Middleton, Thomas, and William Rowley Roxburghe Club: 319 Ruggle, George: Ignoramus: 139 Rutland, Henry Manners, 4th earl of: 58, 67 Rutter, Carol: 197 Sadler, Richard: 47 Saint-Gelais, Mellin de: 174 n. 21 St James’s Chronicle: 297, 306 Salter, F. M.: 86 Sauter, Daniel: The Practise of the Bankrvpts of These Times: 201–02 scene boards see title boards

GENERAL INDEX Scotland: women scribes: 167 Scott, William: The Model of Poesy: 12, 268–71 scribe of Alnwick Castle MS 507: 124–26, 133 of Huntingdon Library MS HM 1: 56–57, 60–62, 64–66 see also hands; Margaret Ker sealing wax: 236 Seneca: 251, 254 Agamemnon: 141–42 n. 14 Hercules Furens: 141, 142 n. 14 Seven Wise Counsels (Book of Brome): 22 Seymour, Arthur: 51 Shaa, Robert: 204, 206, 207 Shailor, Barbara: 19–20 Shakespeare, William annotated: 350, 352, 355–57 early reception and readership: 267–76, 288 First Folio: 270–71, 273–74, 348 Ireland forgeries: 12, 297–306. See also Ireland, William Henry Jubilee (Stratford-upon-Avon 1769): 272 neglected in manuscript list: 289 repeated cues: 193 Second Folio: 271–72, 274 use of letters as props: 232 works as aesthetic texts: 12 Antony and Cleopatra: 191, 223, 272 As You Like It: 2, 270, 272 Cymbeline: 272, 273, 276 Hamlet: 103–04, 114–15, 118, 271, 273–74 Henry IV, Part 1: 355–58 Henry V: 275 Macbeth: 272, 356 The Merchant of Venice: 11, 193, 229–30, 233–40, 242, 270 The Merry Wives of Windsor: 274 A Midsummer Night’s Dream: 272–73 Much Ado About Nothing: 272 Othello: 185, 270, 274 Pericles: 287 The Rape of Lucrece: 269 Richard II: 269–71 The Tempest: 192, 274 Timon of Athens: 275 Titus Andronicus: 270

GENERAL INDEX Twelfth Night: 272 Two Gentlemen of Verona: 274 The Winter’s Tale: 188, 275, 349 Shank, John: 215–17, 220–21, 224, 228 Sharp, Thomas: 29 n. 30, 34, 36, 51, 320–21, 324–25 Dissertation on the Pageants: 321 Sharpe, Richard: 219 Shaughnessy, Robert: 190 Shelton, Thomas: translation of Don Quixote: 333 Sherman, William H.: Used Books: 346–47, 348–49, 351 Shillingsburg, Peter: 332 Shirley, James The Cardinal: 227 Changes, or Love in a Maze: 288 The Wedding: 217 Shirley, John: 172–73 Sidney, Sir Philip Arcadia: 286, 288 Defence of Poesy: 269 signatures (personal): 204–07 Sir Eglamour: 27 Sir Thomas More: 128, 349 Skelton, John: Magnificence: 255 Smith, Anthony: 220 Smith, John: The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unveil’d: 293 Smyth, Adam: 281, 288–89 Society of Antiquaries: 319, 323 Sofer, Andrew: 231, 241 Spain: Passion plays: 53 Speght, Thomas: 273 Spelman, Henry: manuscripts: 322 Spencer, John Charles Spencer, 3rd earl: 319 Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene: 255 n. 5 Spenser, Gabriel: 206 Stafford, Roderick: 250 stage directions: 6–7, 23–24, 29, 36, 43, 47, 89, 108–11, 114–16, 125–26, 146–47, 158–59, 163: 201, 214, 218, 219, 221, 232, 256–57, 356–57 Stallybrass, Peter: 280, 293 A Stanzaic Life of Christ: 83 Starner, Janet Wright: 257 Stationers’ Register: 2, 7 Stations of Rome: 26

375

Steevens, George: 298–99, 356 Stern, Tiffany: 3, 39, 103–04, 108, 111, 114, 117–18, 127, 193, 230, 232, 271, 349 Stevens, Martin: 56, 62–64 Stevenson, William: 316 Stiff, Richard: 47 Stow, John: 5 Sun (journal): 297 Surrey, Henry Howard, earl of: 251, 254 Swanston, Elliard: 221–22 Swetnam, the Woman Hater: 287 Sylvester, Josuah: 286 Tabley House manuscript (The Courageous Turke): 104 Tancred (character): 258 Tarleton, Richard: 215 Taylor, Gary: Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works: 307 Taylor, John Jack a Lent his Beginning and Entertainment: 287 A New Discovery by Sea: 287 A Very Merry Wherry Ferry Voyage: 286 Water-Cormorant: 287 Taylor, Joseph: 222 Text Encoding Initiative (TEI): 336, 351 n. 23 theatres closures: 128, 137–38, 282 n. 14 the Globe (modern): 147 managers: 200, 208. See also  Alleyn, Edward; Henslowe, Philip in manuscripts: 8 purpose-built in London: 7 n. 17 see also title boards theatrical abridgement: 10, 124, 128–29, 131, 134 Thompson, John J.: 23, 27, 219 Thorne, John: 154 title boards: 113–14 title-pages: 48, 255, 227–28 attribution: 7 lack of: 107 and performance: 118, 217, 250–51 as place for annotation: 167, 353, 356 Tiverton, battle of (1645): 140 Tomkis, Thomas: Lingua: 285, 286, 292–93 Toulmin Smith, Lucy: 19

376

Towne, Thomas: 204, 206 Towneley family (of Burnley): 60, 67–68 Towneley, John: 67 Towneley plays: 9 Coliphizacio: 65 Conspiracio: 65 and Coventry Weavers’ pageant: 41 Flagellacio: 65 in Huntington Library MS HM 1: 41, 55–68. See also  cadellae Judgement: 64, 319 Mactacio Abel: 62 modern performances: 55–56 Second Shepherds’ Play (Secunda Pastorum): 60, 66 Trapdoor, Ralph (dramatic character in The Roaring Girl): 186–88 Treasurer’s Accounts (Scotland): 170–01, 175, 177 Trevor-Roper, Hugh: 306 Tropy (software): 355 True Briton (journal): 298, 304 Turner, Dawson: and Macro Plays: 12, 313–23 Turner, Mary: 321 Twelfth Night: mumming: 172 Udall, Nicholas: Ralph Roister Doister: 4–5, 8 Umpton, William: 50 Underhill, Nicholas: 220 Upcott, William: 317 Vanhoutte, Edward: 337 Venice: 234 verse: 117, 161, 186 Virgil: Aeneid: 254 Vox Populi, or News from Spain: 105 Voyant (free text analysis tool): 358 Wakefield: Towneley plays performed: 56 see also Towneley plays Wakefield Burgess Court Roll (1556): 55, 59 ‘Wakefield Cycle’: 62 see also Towneley plays Walker, Jonathan: 109 Walker, J. W.: 55 Walsham, Alexandra: 1

GENERAL INDEX Wanley, Humphrey: 6 Wann, Louis: 62–63, 65 Warner, George: 89, 91, 93 Webb, Francis: 298, 302 Webster, John The Devil’s Law-Case: 286 The Duchess of Malfi: 185, 213, 227 Weingust, Don: 193 Werstine, Paul: 3, 123, 124, 125, 158 West, William: Symbolaeography: 202 Westminster Abbey: 148 White, Thomas: 47 n. 19 Wilmot, Robert: 250–51 The Tragedie of Tancred and Gismund: 251, 262 see also Gismond of Salerne Wilson, Arthur: The Swisser: 11, 214–15, 217–18, 221–24, 227 Wilson, Luke: 197 Wilson, Robert: 207 Wilson, Thomas: The Rule of Reason: 4–5 Wily Beguiled: 287 Winston, Jessica: 258 Winthrop Family on the Page, The: 347, 351 Wisdom (Macro play): 12, 311, 314, 325 Wise, Thomas J.: 306 witnesses (to contracts): 199–202, 204–09 women witnesses: 205–06 World and the Child, The (play): 319 Wright, Abraham: 12, 270–71, 273–74, 279 The Reformation: 271 Wright, James: Historia Histrionica: 213 Wroth, Lady Mary: Urania: 286 York: political/religious unrest and settlement: 57–58 York plays: 28 n. 27, 30, 55, 63, 83 Doctors: 83 Judgement: 64 Ordo Paginarum: 64 playbooks: 34 Register: 53 Scriveners’ pageant: 33, 53, 318 Spurriers and Lorimers’ pageant: 41 Young, Thomas, archbishop of York: 58, 67 Young, Thomas (1773–1829): 314 n. 14 Ypotis (dialogue on Christian virtues): 21–22, 26–28

British Manu­scripts

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