Modern critics have sought in shorthand the source of other ‘bad’ and probably surreptitious texts of plays, and one has gone so far as to trace in them the peculiarities of a particular system expounded in the Characterie (1588) of Timothy Bright.[603] The whole question of surreptitious prints has naturally been explored most closely in connexion with the textual criticism of Shakespeare, and the latest investigator, Mr. Pollard, has come to the conclusion that, in spite of the general condemnation of the Folio editors, the only Shakespearian Quartos which can reasonably be labelled as surreptitious or as textually ‘bad’ are the First Quartos of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, and Pericles, although he strongly suspects that there once existed a similar edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost.[604] I have no ground for dissenting from this judgement.

The question whether the actors, in protecting their property from the pirates, could look for any assistance from the official controllers of the press is one of some difficulty. We may perhaps infer, with the help of the conditional entries of The Blind Beggar of Alexandria and The Spanish Tragedy, and the special order made in the case of Dr. Faustus, that before assigning a ‘copy’ to one stationer the wardens of the Company took some steps to ascertain whether any other stationer laid a claim to it. It does not follow that they also inquired whether the applicant had come honestly or dishonestly by his manuscript.[605] Mr. Pollard seems inclined to think that, although they were under no formal obligation to intervene, they would not be likely, as men of common sense, to encourage dishonesty.[606] If this argument stood alone, I should not have much confidence in it. There is a Publishers’ Association to-day, doubtless composed of men of common sense, but it is not a body to which one would naturally commit interests which might come into conflict with those of members of the trade. It would be another matter, however, if the actors were in a position to bring outside interest to bear against the pirates, through the licensers, or through the Privy Council on whom ultimately the licensers depended. And this in fact seems to have been the way in which a solution of the problem was gradually arrived at. Apart altogether from plays, there are instances upon record in which individuals, who were in a position to command influence, successfully adopted a similar method. We find Fulke Greville in 1586 writing to Sir Francis Walsingham, on the information of the stationer Ponsonby, to warn him that the publication of the Arcadia was being planned, and to advise him to get ‘made stay of that mercenary book’ by means of an application to the Archbishop or to Dr. Cosin, ‘who have, as he says, a copy to peruse to that end’.[607] Similarly we find Francis Bacon, in the preface to his Essayes of 1597, excusing himself for the publication on the ground that surreptitious adventurers were at work, and ‘to labour the staie of them had bin troublesome and subiect to interpretation’. Evidently he had come to a compromise, of which the Stationers’ Register retains traces in the cancellation by a court of an entry of the Essayes to Richard Serger, and a re-entry to H. Hooper, the actual publisher, ‘under the handes of Master Francis Bacon, Master Doctor Stanhope, Master Barlowe, and Master Warden Lawson’.[608] The actors, too, were not wholly without influence. They had their patrons and protectors, the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Admiral, in the Privy Council, and although, as Mr. Pollard points out, it certainly would not have been good business to worry an important minister about every single forty-shilling piracy, it may have been worth while to seek a standing protection, analogous to the old-fashioned ‘privilege’, against a series of such annoyances. At any rate, this is what, while the Admiral’s contented themselves with buying off the printer of Patient Grissell, the Chamberlain’s apparently attempted, although at first with indifferent success, to secure. In 1597 John Danter, a stationer of the worst reputation, had printed a surreptitious and ‘bad’ edition of Romeo and Juliet, and possibly, if Mr. Pollard’s conjecture is right, another of Love’s Labour’s Lost. He had made no entry in the Register, and it was therefore open to another publisher, Cuthbert Burby, to issue, without breach of copyright, ‘corrected’ editions of the same plays.[609] This he did, with suitable trumpetings of the corrections on the title-pages, and presumably by arrangement with the Chamberlain’s men. It was this affair which must, I think, have led the company to apply for protection to their lord. On 22 July 1598 an entry was made in the Stationers’ Register of The Merchant of Venice for the printer James Roberts. This entry is conditional in form, but it differs from the normal conditional entries in that the requirement specified is not an indefinite ‘aucthoritie’ but a ‘lycence from the Right honorable the lord chamberlen’. Roberts also entered Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose on 27 May 1600, A Larum for London on 29 May 1600, and Troilus and Cressida on 7 February 1603. These also are all conditional entries but of a normal type. No condition, however, is attached to his entry of Hamlet on 26 July 1602. Now comes a significant piece of evidence, which at least shows that in 1600, as well as in 1598, the Stationers’ Company were paying particular attention to entries of plays coming from the repertory of the Chamberlain’s men. The register contains, besides the formal entries, certain spare pages upon which the clerk was accustomed to make occasional memoranda, and amongst these memoranda we find the following:[610]

My lord chamberlens menns plaies Entred
viz
A moral of ‘clothe breches and velvet hose’

There are possibly two notes here, but we may reasonably date them both in 1600, as Every Man In his Humour was entered to Cuthbert Burby and Walter Burre on 14 August 1600 and Much Ado about Nothing to Andrew Wise and William Aspley on 23 August 1600, and these plays appeared in 1601 and 1600 respectively. Henry V was published, without entry and in a ‘bad’ text by Thomas Millington and John Busby, also in 1600, while As You Like It remained unprinted until 1623. Many attempts have been made to explain the story of 4 August. Mr. Fleay conjectured that it was due to difficulties of censorship; Mr. Furness that it was directed against James Roberts, whom he regarded on the strength of the conditional entries as a man of ‘shifty character’.[611] But there is no reason to read Roberts’s name into the August memorandum at all; and I agree with Mr. Pollard that the evidence of dishonesty against him has been exaggerated, and that the privilege which he held for printing all play-bills for actors makes it prima facie unlikely that his relations with the companies would be irregular.[612] On the other hand, I hesitate to accept Mr. Pollard’s counter-theory that the four conditional Roberts entries were of the nature of a deliberate plan ‘in the interest of the players in order to postpone their publication till it could not injure the run of the play and to make the task of the pirates more difficult’. One would of course suppose that any entry, conditional or not, might serve such a purpose, if the entering stationer was in league with the actors and deliberately reserved publication. This is presumably what the Admiral’s men paid Cuthbert Burby to do for Patient Grissell. Mr. Pollard applies the same theory to Edward Blount’s unconditional entries of Pericles and Antony and Cleopatra in 1608, and it would certainly explain the delays in the publication of Troilus and Cressida from 1603 to 1609 and of Antony and Cleopatra from 1608 to 1623, and the absence of any edition of Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose. But it does not explain why Hamlet, entered by Roberts in 1602, was issued by others in the ‘bad’ text of 1603, or why Pericles was issued by Henry Gosson in the ‘bad’ text of 1609.[613] Mr. Pollard’s interpretation of the facts appears to be influenced by the conditional character of four out of Roberts’s five entries during 1598–1603, and I understand him to believe that the ‘further aucthoritie’ required for Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose and A Larum for London and the ‘sufficient aucthoritie’ required for Troilus and Cressida were of the same nature as the licence from the Lord Chamberlain specifically required for The Merchant of Venice.[614] It is not inconceivable that this may have been so, but one is bound to take the Roberts conditional entries side by side with the eight similar entries made between 1601 and 1606 for other men, and in three at least of these (The Dutch Courtesan, Sir Giles Goosecap, The Fleir) it is obvious that the authority demanded was that of the official correctors. Of course, the correctors may themselves have had a hint from the Lord Chamberlain to keep an eye upon the interests of his servants, but if the eleven conditionally entered plays of 1600–6 be looked at as a group, it will be seen that they are all plays of either a political or a satirical character, which might well therefore call for particular attention from the correctors in the discharge of their ordinary functions. I have already suggested that the normal conditional entries represent cases in which the wardens of the Stationers’ Company, while not prepared to license a book on their own responsibility, short-circuited as far as they could the procedure entailed. Properly they ought to have seen the corrector’s hand before adding their own endorsement. But if this was not forthcoming, the applicant may have been allowed, in order to save time, to have the purely trade formalities completed by a conditional entry, which would be a valid protection against a rival stationer, but would not, until the corrector’s hand was obtained, be sufficient authority for the actual printing. No doubt the clerk should have subsequently endorsed the entry after seeing the corrector’s hand, but he did not always do so, although in cases of transfer the transferee might ask for a record to be made, and in any event the owner of the copy had the book with the ‘hand’ to it. The Lord Chamberlain’s ‘stay’ was, I think, another matter. I suppose it to have been directed, not to the correctors, but to the wardens, and to have taken the form of a request not to enter any play of the Chamberlain’s men, otherwise entitled to licence or not, without satisfying themselves that the actors were assenting parties to the transaction. Common sense would certainly dictate compliance with such a request, coming from such a source. The plan seems to have worked well enough so far as As You Like It, Every Man In his Humour, and Much Ado about Nothing were concerned, for we have no reason to doubt that the subsequent publication of two of these plays had the assent of the Chamberlain’s men, and the third was effectively suppressed. But somehow not only Hamlet but also The Merry Wives of Windsor slipped through in 1602, and although the actors apparently came to some arrangement with Roberts and furnished a revised text of Hamlet, the other play seems to have gone completely out of their control. Moreover, it was an obvious weakness of the method adopted, that it gave no security against a surreptitious printer who was in a position to dispense with an entry. Danter, after all, had published without entry in 1597. He had had to go without copyright; but an even more audacious device was successfully tried in 1600 with Henry V. This was one of the four plays so scrupulously ‘staied’ by the Stationers’ clerk on 4 August. Not merely, however, was the play printed in 1600 by Thomas Creede for Thomas Millington and John Busby, but on 21 August it was entered on the Register as transferred to Thomas Pavier amongst other ‘thinges formerlye printed and sett ouer to’ him. I think the explanation is that the print of 1600 was treated as merely a reprint of the old play of The Famous Victories of Henry V, which was indeed to some extent Shakespeare’s source, and of which Creede held the copyright.[615] Similarly, it is conceivable that the same John Busby and Nathaniel Butter forced the hands of the Chamberlain’s men into allowing the publication of King Lear in 1608 by a threat to issue it as a reprint of King Leir.[616] Busby was also the enterer of The Merry Wives, and he and Butter, at whose hands it was that Heywood suffered, seem to have been the chief of the surreptitious printers after Danter’s death.

The Chamberlain’s men would have been in a better position if their lord had brought his influence to bear, as Sidney’s friends had done, upon the correctors instead of the Stationers’ Company. Probably the mistake was retrieved in 1607 when the ‘allowing’ of plays for publication passed to the Master of the Revels, and he may even have extended his protection to the other companies which, like the Chamberlain’s, had now passed under royal protection. I do not suggest that the convenience of this arrangement was the sole motive for the change; the episcopal correctors must have got into a good deal of hot water over the affair of Eastward Ho![617] Even the Master of the Revels did not prevent the surreptitious issue of Pericles in 1609. In Caroline times we find successive Lord Chamberlains, to whom the Master of the Revels continued to be subordinate, directing the Stationers’ Company not to allow the repertories of the King’s men or of Beeston’s boys to be printed, and it is implied that there were older precedents for these protections.[618]

A point might come at which it was really more to the advantage of the actors to have a play published than not. The prints were useful in the preparation of acting versions, and they saved the book-keepers from the trouble of having to prepare manuscript copies at the demand of stage-struck amateurs.[619] The influence of the poets again was on the side of publication, and it is perhaps due to the greater share which they took in the management of the boys’ companies that so disproportionate a number of the plays preserved are of their acting. Heywood hints that thereby the poets sold their work twice. It is more charitable to assume that literary vanity was also a factor; and it is with playwrights of the more scholarly type, Ben Jonson and Marston, that a practice first emerges of printing plays at an early date after publication, and in the full literary trappings of dedicatory epistles and commendatory verses. Actor-playwrights, such as Heywood himself and Dekker, followed suit; but not Shakespeare, who had long ago dedicated his literary all to Southampton and penned no prefaces. The characteristic Elizabethan apologies, on such grounds as the pushfulness of publishers or the eagerness of friends to see the immortal work in type, need not be taken at their full face value.[620] Opportunity was afforded on publication to restore passages which had been ‘cut’ to meet the necessities of stage-presentation, and of this, in the Second Quarto of Hamlet, even Shakespeare may have availed himself.[621]

The conditions of printing therefore furnish us with every variety of text, from the carefully revised and punctuated versions of Ben Jonson’s Works of 1616 to the scrappy notes, from memory or shorthand, of an incompetent reporter. The average text lies between these extremes, and is probably derived from a play-house ‘book’ handed over by the actors to the printer. Mr. Pollard has dealt luminously with the question of the nature of the ‘book’, and has disposed of the assumption that it was normally a copy made by a ‘play-house’ scrivener of the author’s manuscript.[622] For this assumption there is no evidence whatever. There is, indeed, little direct evidence, one way or other; but what there is points to the conclusion that the ‘original’ or standard copy of a play kept in the play-house was the author’s autograph manuscript, endorsed with the licence of the Master of the Revels for performance, and marked by the book-keeper or for his use with indications of cuts and the like, and with stage-directions for exits and entrances and the disposition of properties, supplementary to those which the author had furnished.[623] Most of the actual manuscripts of this type which remain in existence are of Caroline, rather than Elizabethan or Jacobean, date.[624] But we have one of The Second Maid’s Tragedy, bearing Buck’s licence of 1611, and one of Sir Thomas More, belonging to the last decade of the sixteenth century, which has been submitted for licence without success, and is marked with instructions by the Master for the excision or alteration of obnoxious passages. It is a curious document. The draft of the original author has been patched and interpolated with partial redrafts in a variety of hands, amongst which, according to some palaeographers, is to be found that of Shakespeare. One wonders that any licenser should have been complaisant enough to consider the play at all in such a form; and obviously the instance is a crucial one against the theory of scrivener’s copies.[625] It may also be argued on a priori grounds that such copies would be undesirable from the company’s point of view, both as being costly and as tending to multiply the opportunities for ‘surreptitious’ transmission to rivals or publishers. Naturally it was necessary to copy out individual parts for the actors, and Alleyn’s part in Orlando Furioso, with the ‘cues’, or tail ends of the speeches preceding his own, can still be seen at Dulwich.[626] From these ‘parts’ the ‘original’ could be reconstructed or ‘assembled’ in the event of destruction or loss.[627] Apparently the book-keeper also made a ‘plot’ or scenario of the action, and fixed it on a peg for his own guidance and that of the property-man in securing the smooth progress of the play.[628] Nor could the companies very well prevent the poets from keeping transcripts or at any rate rough copies, when they handed over their ‘papers’, complete or in instalments, as they drew their ‘earnests’ or payments ‘in full’.[629] It does not follow that they always did so. We know that Daborne made fair copies for Henslowe;[630] but the Folio editors tell us that what Shakespeare thought ‘he vttered with that easinesse, that we haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers’, and Mr. Pollard points out that there would have been little meaning in this praise if what Shakespeare sent in had been anything but his first drafts.[631]

The character of the stage-directions in plays confirm the view that many of them were printed from working play-house ‘originals’. They are primarily directions for the stage itself; it is only incidentally that they also serve to stimulate the reader’s imagination by indicating the action with which the lines before him would have been accompanied in a representation.[632] Some of them are for the individual guidance of the actors, marginal hints as to the ‘business’ which will give point to their speeches. These are not very numerous in play-house texts; the ‘kneeling’ and ‘kisses her’ so frequent in modern editions are merely attempts of the editors to show how intelligently they have interpreted the quite obvious implications of the dialogue. The more important directions are addressed rather to the prompter and the tire-man; they prescribe the exits and the entrances, the ordering of a procession or a dumb-show, the use of the curtains or other structural devices, the introduction of properties, the precise moment for the striking up of music or sounds ‘within’. It is by no means always possible, except where a manuscript betrays differences of handwriting, to distinguish between what the author, often himself an actor familiar with the possibilities of the stage, may have originally written, and what the book-keeper may have added. Either may well use the indicative or the imperative form, or merely an adverbial, participial, or substantival expression.[633] But it is natural to trace the hand of the book-keeper where the direction reduces itself to the bare name of a property noted in the margin; even more so when it is followed by some such phrase as ‘ready’, ‘prepared’, or ‘set out’;[634] and still more so when the note occurs at the point when the property has to be brought from the tire-room, and some lines before it is actually required for use.[635] The book-keeper must be responsible, too, for the directions into which, as not infrequently happens, the name of an actor has been inserted in place of that of the personage whom that actor represented.[636] On the other hand, we may perhaps safely assign to the author directions addressed to some one else in the second person, those which leave something to be interpreted according to discretion, and those which contain any matter not really necessary for stage guidance.[637] Such superfluous matter is only rarely found in texts of pure play-house origin, although even here an author may occasionally insert a word or two of explanation or descriptive colouring, possibly taken from the source upon which he has been working.[638] In the main, however, descriptive stage-directions are characteristic of texts which, whether ultimately based upon play-house copies or not, have undergone a process of editing by the author or his representative, with an eye to the reader, before publication. Some literary rehandling of this sort is traceable, for example, in the First Folio of Shakespeare, although the hearts of the editors seem to have failed them before they had got very far with the task.[639] Yet another type of descriptive stage-direction presents itself in certain ‘surreptitious’ prints, where we find the reporter eking out his inadequately recorded text by elaborate accounts of the details of the business which he had seen enacted before him.[640] So too William Percy, apparently revising plays some of which had already been acted and which he hoped to see acted again, mingles his suggestions to a hypothetical manager with narratives in the past tense of how certain actors had carried out their parts.[641]

It must not be assumed that, because a play was printed from a stage copy, the author had no chance of editing it. Probably the compositors treated the manuscript put before them very freely, modifying, if they did not obliterate, the individual notions of the author or scribe as to orthography and punctuation; and the master printer, or some press corrector in his employment, went over and ‘improved’ their work, perhaps not always with much reference to the original ‘copy’.[642] This process of correction continued during the printing off of the successive sheets, with the result that different examples of the same imprint often show the same sheet in corrected and in uncorrected states.[643] The trend of modern criticism is in the direction of regarding Shakespeare’s plays as printed, broadly speaking, without any editorial assistance from him; the early quartos from play-house manuscripts, the later quartos from the earlier quartos, the folio partly from play-house manuscripts, partly from earlier quartos used in the play-house instead of manuscripts, and bearing marks of adaptation to shifting stage requirements.[644] On this theory, the aberrations of the printing-house, even with the author’s original text before them, have to account in the main for the unsatisfactory condition in which, in spite of such posthumous editing, not very extensive, as was done for the folio, even the best texts of the plays have reached us. Whether it is sound or not—I think that it probably is—there were other playwrights who were far from adopting Shakespeare’s attitude of detachment from the literary fate of his works. Jonson was a careful editor. Marston, Middleton, and Heywood all apologize for misprints in various plays, which they say were printed without their knowledge, or when they were urgently occupied elsewhere; and the inference must be that in normal circumstances the responsibility would have rested with them.[645] Marston, indeed, definitely says that he had ‘perused’ the second edition of The Fawn, in order ‘to make some satisfaction for the first faulty impression’.[646]

The modern editions, with their uniform system of acts and scenes and their fanciful notes of locality—‘A room in the palace’, ‘Another room in the palace’—are again misleading in their relation to the early prints, especially those based upon the play-house. Notes of locality are very rare. Occasionally a definite shift from one country or town to another is recorded;[647] and a few edited plays, such as Ben Jonson’s, prefix, with a ‘dramatis personae’, a general indication of ‘The scene’.[648] For the rest, the reader is left to his own inferences, with such help as the dialogue and the presenters give him; and the modern editors, with a post-Restoration tradition of staging in their minds, have often inferred wrongly. Even the shoulder-notes appended to the accurate reprints of the Malone Society, although they do not attempt localities, err by introducing too many new scenes. In the early prints the beginnings of scenes are rarely marked, and the beginnings of acts are left unmarked to an extent which is rather surprising. The practice is by no means uniform, and it is possible to distinguish different tendencies in texts of different origin. The Tudor interludes and the early Elizabethan plays of the more popular type are wholly undivided, and there was probably no break in the continuity of the performances.[649] Acts and scenes, which are the outward form of a method of construction derived from the academic analysis of Latin comedy and tragedy, make their appearance, with other notes of neo-classic influence, in the farces of the school of Udall, in the Court tragedies, in translated plays, in Lyly’s comedies, and in a few others belonging to the same milieu of scholarship.[650] Ben Jonson and a few other later writers adopt them in printing plays of theatrical origin.[651] But the great majority of plays belonging to the public theatres continue to be printed without any divisions at all, while plays from the private houses are ordinarily divided into acts, but not into scenes, although the beginning of each act has usually some such heading as ‘Actus Primus, Scena prima’.[652] This distinction corresponds to the greater significance of the act-interval in the performance of the boy companies; but, as I have pointed out in an earlier chapter, it is difficult to suppose that the public theatres paid no regard to act-intervals, and one cannot therefore quite understand why neither the poets nor the book-keepers were in the habit of showing them in the play-house ‘originals’ of plays.[653] Had they been shown there, they would almost inevitably have got into the prints. It is a peculiarity of the surreptitious First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet, that its later sheets, which differ typographically from the earlier ones, although they do not number either acts or scenes, insert lines of ornament at the points at which acts and scenes may be supposed to begin. It must be added that, so far as an Elizabethan playwright looked upon his work as made up of scenes, his conception of a scene was not as a rule that familiar to us upon the modern stage. The modern scene may be defined as a piece of action continuous in time and place between two falls of a drop-curtain. The Elizabethans had no drop-curtain, and the drawing of an alcove curtain, at any rate while personages remain on the stage without, does not afford the same solution of continuity. The nearest analogy is perhaps in such a complete clearance of the stage, generally with a shift of locality, as enables the imagination to assume a time interval. A few texts, generally of the seventeenth century, are divided into scenes on this principle of clearance; and it was adopted by the editors of the First Folio, when, in a half-hearted way, they attempted to divide up the continuous texts of their manuscripts and quartos.[654] But it was not the principle of the neo-classic dramatists, or of Ben Jonson and his school. For them a scene was a section, not of action, but of dialogue; and they started a new scene whenever a speaker, or at any rate a speaker of importance, entered or left the stage. This is the conception which is in the mind of Marston when he regrets, in the preface to The Malcontent, that ‘scenes, invented merely to be spoken, should be enforcively published to be read’. It is also the conception of the French classicist drama, although the English playwrights do not follow the French rule of liaison, which requires at least one speaker from each scene to remain on into the next, and thus secures continuity throughout each act by making a complete clearance of the stage impossible.[655]