Book D

continues them for 1620–45. Arber’s work stops at 1640. Eyre prints a transcript by H. R. Plomer of the rest of D and of Books E, F, and G, extending to 1708.]

A historian of the stage owes so much of his material to the printed copies of plays, with their title-pages, their prefatory epistles, and their stage-directions, that he can hardly be dispensed from giving some account of the process by which plays got into print. Otherwise I should have been abundantly content to have left the subject with a reference to the researches of others, and notably of that accomplished bibliographer, my friend Mr. A. W. Pollard, to whom in any event the debt of these pages must be great. The earliest attempts to control the book-trade are of the nature of commercial restrictions, and concern themselves with the regulation of alien craftsmanship.[513] But when Tudor policy had to deal with expressions of political and religious opinion, and in particular when the interlude as well as the pamphlet, not without encouragement from Cranmer and Cromwell, became an instrument of ecclesiastical controversy, it was not long before the State found itself committed to the methods of a literary censorship. We have already followed in detail the phases of the control to which the spoken play was subjected.[514] The story of the printed play was closely analogous; and in both cases the ultimate term of the evolution, so far as our period is concerned, was the establishment of the authority of the Master of the Revels. The printing and selling of plays, however, was of course only one fragment of the general business of book-production. Censorship was applied to many kinds of books, and was also in practice closely bound up with the logically distinct problem of copyright. This to the Elizabethan mind was a principle debarring one publisher from producing and selling a book in which another member of his trade had already a vested interest. The conception of a copyright vested in the author as distinct from the publisher of a book had as yet hardly emerged.

The earliest essay in censorship in fact took the form of an extension of the procedure, under which protection had for some time past been given to the copyright in individual books through the issue of a royal privilege forbidding their republication by any other than the privileged owner or printer.[515] Three proclamations of Henry VIII against heretical or seditious books, in 1529, 1530, and 1536, were followed in 1538 by a fourth, which forbade the printing of any English book except with a licence given ‘upon examination made by some of his gracis priuie counsayle, or other suche as his highnes shall appoynte’, and further directed that a book so licensed should not bear the words ‘Cum priuilegio regali’ without the addition of ‘ad imprimendum solum’, and that ‘the hole copie, or els at the least theffect of his licence and priuilege be therwith printed’.[516] The intention was apparently to distinguish between a merely regulative privilege or licence to print, and the older and fuller type of privilege which also conveyed a protection of copyright. Finally, in 1546, a fifth proclamation laid down that every ‘Englishe boke, balet or playe’ must bear the names of the printer and author and the ‘daye of the printe’, and that an advance copy must be placed in the hands of the local mayor two days before publication.[517] It is not quite clear whether these requirements were intended to replace, or merely to reinforce, that of a licence. Henry’s proclamations lost their validity upon his death in 1547, but the policy of licensing was continued by his successors. Under Edward VI we get, first a Privy Council order of 1549, directing that all English books printed or sold should be examined and allowed by ‘M^r Secretary Peter, M^r Secretary Smith and M^r Cicill, or the one of them’, and secondly a proclamation of 1551, requiring allowance ‘by his maiestie, or his priuie counsayl in writing signed with his maiesties most gratious hand or the handes of sixe of his sayd priuie counsayl’.[518] Mary in her turn, though with a different emphasis on the kind of opinion to be suppressed, issued three proclamations against heretical books in 1553, 1555, and 1558, and in the first of these limited printers to books for which they had ‘her graces speciall licence in writynge’.[519] It is noteworthy that both in 1551 and in 1553 the printing and the playing of interludes were put upon exactly the same footing.

Mary, however, took another step of the first importance for the further history of publishing, by the grant on 4 May 1557 a charter of incorporation to the London Company of Stationers.[520] This was an old organization, traceable as far back as 1404.[521] By the sixteenth century it had come to include the printers who manufactured, as well as the stationers who sold, books; and many, although not all of its members, exercised both avocations. No doubt the issue of the charter had its origin in mixed motives. The stationers wanted the status and the powers of economic regulation within their trade which it conferred; the Government wanted the aid of the stationers in establishing a more effective control over the printed promulgation of inconvenient doctrines. This preoccupation is clearly manifested in the preamble to the charter, with its assertion that ‘seueral seditious and heretical books’ are ‘daily published’; and the objects of both

## parties were met by a provision that ‘no person shall practise or

exercise the art or mystery of printing or stamping any book unless the same person is, or shall be, one of the society of the foresaid mystery of a stationer of the city aforesaid, or has for that purpose obtained our licence’. This practically freed the associated stationers from any danger of outside competition, and it immensely simplified the task of the heresy hunters by enlisting the help of the Company against the establishment of printing-presses by any but well-known and responsible craftsmen. Registration is always half-way towards regulation. The charter did not, however, dispense, even for the members of the Company, with the requirement of a licence; nor did it give the Company any specific functions in connexion with the issue of licences, and although Elizabeth confirmed her sister’s grant on 10 November 1559, she had already, in the course of the ecclesiastical settlement earlier in the year, taken steps to provide for the continuance of the old system, and specifically laid it down that the administration of the Company was to be subordinate thereto. The licensing authority rested ultimately upon the _Act of Supremacy_, by which the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction for the ‘reformation, order, and correction’ of all ‘errors, heresies, schisms, abuses, offences, contempts, and enormities’ was annexed to the Crown, and the Crown was authorized to exercise its jurisdiction through the agency of a commission appointed under letters patent.[522] This Act received the royal assent on 8 May 1559, together with the _Act of Uniformity_ which established the Book of Common Prayer, and made it an offence ‘in any interludes, plays, songs, rhymes, or by other open words’ to ‘declare or speak anything in the derogation, depraving, or despising’ of that book.[523] In the course of June followed a body of _Injunctions_, intended as a code of ecclesiastical discipline to be promulgated at a series of diocesan visitations held by commissioners under the _Act of Supremacy_. One of these _Injunctions_ is directly concerned with the abuses of printers of books.[524] It begins by forbidding any book or paper to be printed without an express written licence either from the Queen herself or from six of the Privy Council, or after perusal from two persons being either the Archbishop of Canterbury or York, the Bishop of London, the Chancellor of Oxford or Cambridge, or the Bishop or Archdeacon for the place of printing. One of the two must always be the Ordinary, and the names of the licensers are to be ‘added in the end’ of every book. This seems sufficiently to cover the ground, but the _Injunction_ goes on to make a special reference to ‘pamphlets, plays and ballads’, from which anything ‘heretical, seditious, or unseemly for Christian ears’ ought to be excluded; and for these it prescribes a licence from ‘such her majesty’s commissioners, or three of them, as be appointed in the city of London to hear and determine divers causes ecclesiastical’. These commissioners are also to punish breaches of the _Injunction_, and to take and notify an order as to the prohibition or permission of ‘all other books of matters of religion or policy, or governance’. An exemption is granted for books ordinarily used in universities or schools. The Master and Wardens of the Stationers’ Company are ‘straitly’ commanded to be obedient to the _Injunction_. The commission here referred to was not one of those entrusted with the diocesan visitations, but a more permanent body sitting in London itself, which came to be known as the High Commission. The reference to it in the _Injunction_ reads like an afterthought, but as the principal members of this commission were the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, there is not so much inconsistency between the two forms of procedure laid down as might at first sight appear. The High Commission was not in fact yet in existence when the _Injunctions_ were issued, but it was constituted under a patent of 19 July 1559, and was renewed from time to time by fresh patents throughout the reign.[525] The original members, other than the two prelates, were chiefly Privy Councillors, Masters of Requests, and other lawyers. The size of the body was considerably increased by later patents, and a number of divines were added. The patent of 1559 conferred upon the commissioners a general power to exercise the royal jurisdiction in matters ecclesiastical. It does not repeat in terms the provisions for the ‘allowing’ of books contained in the _Injunctions_, but merely recites that ‘divers seditious books’ have been set forth, and empowers the commissioners to inquire into them.

The _Injunctions_ and the Commission must be taken as embodying the official machinery for the licensing of books up to the time of the well-known Star Chamber order of 1586, although the continued anxiety of the government in the matter is shown by a series of proclamations and orders which suggest that no absolutely effective method of suppressing undesirable publications had as yet been attained.[526] Mr. Pollard, who regards the procedure contemplated by the _Injunctions_ as ‘impossible’, believes that in practice the Stationers’ Company, in ordinary cases, itself acted as a licensing authority.[527] Certainly this is the testimony, as regards the period 1576–86, of a note of Sir John Lambe, Dean of the Arches, in 1636, which is based wholly or in part upon information derived from Felix Kingston, then Master of the Company.[528] Kingston added the detail that in the case of a divinity book of importance the opinion of theological experts was taken. Mr. Pollard expresses a doubt whether Lambe or Kingston had much evidence before them other than the registers of the Company which are still extant, and to these we are in a position to turn for confirmation or qualification of their statements.[529] Unfortunately, the ordinances or constitutions under which the master and wardens acted from the time of the incorporation have not been preserved, and any additions made to these by the Court of Assistants before the Restoration have not been printed.[530] We have some revised ordinances of 1678–82, and these help us by recording as of ‘ancient usage’ a practice of entering all publications, other than those under letters patent, in ‘the register-book of this company’.[531] It is in fact this register, incorporated from 1557 to 1571 in the annual accounts of the wardens and kept from 1576 onwards as a subsidiary book by the clerk, which furnishes our principal material. During 1557–71 the entries for each year are collected under a general heading, which takes various forms. In 1557–8 it is ‘The entrynge of all such copyes as be lycensed to be prynted by the master and wardyns of the mystery of stacioners’; in 1558–9 simply ‘Lycense for pryntinge’; in 1559–60, for which year the entries are mixed up with others, ‘Receptes for fynes, graunting of coppyes and other thynges’; in 1560–1 ‘For takynge of fynes for coppyes’. This formula lasts until 1565–6, when ‘The entrynge of coopyes’ takes its place. The wording of the individual entries also varies during the period, but generally it indicates the receipt of a money payment in return for a license.[532] In a very few cases, by no means always of divinity books, the licence is said to be ‘by’, or the licence or perhaps the book itself, to be ‘authorized’ or ‘allowed’ or ‘perused’ or ‘appointed’ by the Bishop of London; still more rarely by the Archbishop of Canterbury or by both prelates; once by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York; once by the Council.[533]

Richard Collins, on his appointment as Clerk of the Company in 1575, records that one of his duties was to enter ‘lycences for pryntinge of copies’ and one section of his register is accordingly devoted to this purpose.[534] It has no general heading, but the summary accounts of the wardens up to 1596 continue to refer to the receipts as ‘for licencinge of copies’.[535] The character of the individual entries between 1576 and 1586 is much as in the account books. The name of a stationer is given in the margin and is followed by some such formula as ‘Receyved of him for his licence to prynte’ or more briefly ‘Lycenced vnto him’, with the title of the book, any supplementary information which the clerk thought relevant, and a note of the payment made. Occasional alternatives are ‘Allowed’, ‘Admitted’, ‘Graunted’ or ‘Tolerated’ ‘vnto him’, of which the three first appear to have been regarded as especially appropriate to transfers of existing copyrights;[536] and towards the end of the period appears the more important variant ‘Allowed vnto him for his copie’.[537] References to external authorizers gradually become rather more frequent, although they are still the exception and not the rule; the function is fulfilled, not only by the bishop, the archbishop, or the Council, but also upon occasion by the Lord Chancellor or the Secretary, by individual Privy Councillors, by the Lord Mayor, the Recorder or the Remembrancer of the City, and by certain masters and doctors, who may be the ministers mentioned by Felix Kingston, and who probably held regular deputations from a proper ecclesiastical authority as ‘correctors’ to the printers.[538] It is certain that such a post was held in 1571 by one Talbot, a servant of the Archbishop of Canterbury. On the other hand the clerk, at first tentatively and then as a matter of regular practice, begins to record the part taken by the master and wardens. The first example is a very explicit entry, in which the book is said to be ‘licensed to be printed’ by the archbishop and ‘alowed’ by the master and a warden.[539] But the formula which becomes normal does not dwell on any differentiation of functions, and merely states the licence as being ‘under the hands of’ the wardens or of one of them or the master, or of these and of some one who may be presumed to be an external corrector. To the precise significance of ‘under the hands of’ I must return. Increased caution with regard to dangerous books is also borne witness to during this period by the occasional issue of a qualified licence. In 1580 Richard Jones has to sign his name in the register to a promise ‘to bring the whole impression’ of _The Labyrinth of Liberty_ ‘into the Hall in case it be disliked when it is printed’.[540] In 1583 the same stationer undertakes ‘to print of his own perill’.[541] In 1584 it is a play which is thus brought into question, Lyly’s _Sapho and Phao_, and Thomas Cadman gets no more than ‘yt is graunted vnto him yat yf he gett ye commedie of Sappho laufully alowed vnto him, then none of this cumpanie shall interrupt him to enjoye yt’. Other entries direct that lawful authority must be obtained before printing, and in one case there is a specific reference to the royal _Injunctions_.[542] Conditions of other kinds are also sometimes found in entries; a book must be printed at a particular press, or the licence is to be voided if it prove to be another man’s copy.[543] The caution of the Stationers may have been motived by dissatisfaction on the part of the government which finally took shape in the issue of the Star Chamber order of 23 June 1586. This was a result of the firmer policy towards Puritan indiscipline initiated by Whitgift and the new High Commission which he procured on his succession to the primacy in 1583.[544] It had two main objects. One, with which we are not immediately concerned, was to limit the number of printers and their presses; the other, to concentrate the censorship of all ordinary books, including plays, in the hands of the archbishop and the bishop. It is not clear whether the prelates were to act in their ordinary capacity or as High Commissioners; anyhow they had the authority of the High Commission, itself backed by the Privy Council, behind them. The effect of the order is shown in a bustle amongst the publishers to get on to the register a number of ballads and other trifles which they had hitherto neglected to enter, and in a considerable increase in the submissions of books for approval, either to the prelates themselves, or to persons who are now clearly acting as ecclesiastical deputies.[545] On 30 June 1588 an official list of deputies was issued by the archbishop, and amongst these were several who had already authorized books before and after 1586. These deputies, and other correctors whose names appear in the register at later dates, are as a rule traceable as episcopal chaplains, prebendaries of St. Paul’s, or holders of London benefices.[546] Some of them were themselves members of the High Commission. Occasionally laymen were appointed.[547] The main work of correction now fell to these officials, but books were still sometimes allowed by the archbishop or bishop in person, or by the Privy Council or some member of that body.

The reaction of the changes of 1586–88 upon the entries in the register is on the whole one of degree rather than of kind. Occasionally the wording suggests a differentiation between the functions of the wardens and those of the ecclesiastical licensers, but more often the clerk contents himself with a mere record of what ‘hands’ each book was under.[548] Some shifting of the point of view is doubtless involved in the fact that ‘Entered vnto him for his copie’ and ‘Allowed vnto him for his copie’ now become the normal formulas, and by 1590–1 ‘Licenced vnto him’ has disappeared altogether.[549] But a great number of books, including most ballads and pamphlets and some plays, are still entered without note of any authority other than that of the wardens, and about 1593 the proportion of cases submitted to the ecclesiastical deputies sensibly begins to slacken, although the continuance of conditional entries shows that some caution was exercised. An intervention of the prelates in 1599 reversed the tendency again.[550] As regards plays in particular, the wardens received a sharp reminder, ‘that noe playes be printed except they be allowed by suche as haue authority’; and although they do not seem to have interpreted this as requiring reference to a corrector in every case, conditional entries of plays become for a time numerous.[551] They stop altogether in 1607, when the responsibility for play correction appears to have been taken over, presumably under an arrangement with the prelates, by the Master of the Revels.[552] Henceforward and to the end of Buck’s mastership, nearly all play entries are under the hands not only of the wardens, but of the Master or of a deputy acting on his behalf. Meanwhile, for books other than plays, the ecclesiastical authority succeeded more and more in establishing itself, although even up to the time of the Commonwealth the wardens never altogether ceased to enter ballads and such small deer on their own responsibility.

A little more may be gleaned from the ‘Fynes for breakinge of good orders’, which like the book entries were recorded by the wardens in their annual accounts up to 1571 and by the clerk in his register from 1576 to 1605.[553] But many of these were for irregularities in apprenticeship and the like, and where a particular book was concerned, the book is more often named than the precise offence committed in relation to it. The fine is for printing ‘contrary to the orders of this howse’, ‘contrary to our ordenaunces’, or merely ‘disorderly’. Trade defects, such as ‘stechyng’ of books, are sometimes in question, and sometimes the infringement of other men’s copies.[554] But the character of the books concerned suggests that some at least of the fines for printing ‘without lycense’, ‘without aucthoritie’, ‘without alowance’, ‘without entrance’, ‘before the wardyns handes were to yt’ were due to breaches of the regulations for censorship, and in a few instances the information is specific.[555] The book is a ‘lewde’ book, or ‘not tolerable’, or has already been condemned to be burnt, or the printing is contrary to ‘her maiesties prohibicon’ or ‘the decrees of the star chamber’.[556] More rarely a fine was accompanied by the sequestration of the offending books, or the breaking up of a press, or even imprisonment. In these cases the company may have been acting under stimulus from higher powers; in dealing with a culprit in 1579, they direct that ‘for his offence, so farre as it toucheth ye same house only, he shall paye a fine’.[557]

Putting together the entries and the fines, we can arrive at an approximate notion of the position occupied by the Stationers’ Company as an intermediary between the individual stationers and the higher powers in Church and State. That it is only approximate and that many points of detail remain obscure is largely due to the methods of the clerk. Richard Collins did not realize the importance, at least to the future historian, of set diplomatic formulas, and it is by no means clear to what extent the variations in the phrasing of his record correspond to variations in the facts recorded. But it is my impression that he was in substance a careful registrar, especially as regards the authority under which his entries were made, and that if he did not note the presence in any case of a corrector’s ‘hand’ to a book, it is fair evidence that such a hand was not before him. On this assumption the register confirms the inference to be drawn from the statements of Lambe and Kingston in 1636, that before 1586 the provision of the _Injunctions_ for licensing by the High Commission for London was not ordinarily operative, and that as a rule the only actual licences issued were those of the Stationers’ Company, who used their own discretion in submitting books about which they felt doubtful to the bishop or the archbishop or to an authorized corrector.[558] That books licensed by the Company without such reference were regarded as having been technically licensed under the _Injunctions_, one would hesitate to say. Licence is a fairly general term, and as used in the Stationers’ Register it does not necessarily cover anything more than a permit required by the internal ordinances of the Company itself. Certainly its officials claimed to issue licences to its members for other purposes than printing.[559] What Lambe and Kingston do not tell us, and perhaps ought to have told us, is that, when the master and wardens did call in the assistance of expert referees, it was not to ‘ministers’ merely chosen by themselves that they applied, but to official correctors nominated by the High Commission, or by the archbishop or bishop on its behalf. Nor must it be supposed that no supervision of the proceedings of the company was exercised by the High Commission itself. We find that body writing to the Company to uphold a patent in 1560.[560] It was upon its motion in 1566 that the Privy Council made a Star Chamber order calling attention to irregularities which had taken place, and directing the master and wardens to search for the offenders.[561] And its authority, concurrent with that of the Privy Council itself, to license books, is confirmed by a letter of the Council to the company in 1570.[562] So much for the period before 1586. Another thing which Lambe and Kingston do not tell us, and which the register, if it can be trusted, does, is that the effective change introduced by the Star Chamber of that year was only one of degree and not of kind. It is true that an increasing number of books came, after one set-back, to be submitted to correctors; that the clerk begins to lay emphasis in his wording upon entrance rather than upon licence; that there are some hints that the direct responsibility of the wardens was for a kind of ‘allowance’ distinct from and supplementary to that of censorship. But it does not appear to be true that, then or at any later time, they wholly refused to enter any book except after taking cognizance of an authority beyond their own.

In fact the register, from the very beginning, was not purely, or perhaps even primarily, one of allowances. It had two other functions, even more important from the point of view of the internal economy of the Company. It was a fee-book, subsidiary to the annual accounts of the wardens, and showing the details of sums which they had to return in those accounts.[563] And it was a register of copyrights. A stationer brought his copy to the wardens and paid his fee, in order that he might be protected by an official acknowledgement of his interest in the book against any infringement by a trade competitor. No doubt the wardens would not, and under the ordinances of the company might not, give this acknowledgement, unless they were satisfied that the book was one which might lawfully be printed. But copyright was what the stationer wanted, for after all most books were not dangerous in the eyes even of an Elizabethan censorship, whereas there would be little profit in publishing, if any rival were at liberty to cut in and reprint for himself the result of a successful speculation. It is a clear proof of this that the entrances include, not only new books, but also those in which rights had been transferred from one stationer to another.[564] Obviously no new allowance by a corrector would be required in such cases. And as regards copyright and licence alike, the entry in the register, although convenient to all concerned, was in itself no more than registration, the formal putting upon record of action already taken upon responsible authority. This authority did not rest with the clerk. In a few cases, indeed, he does seem to have entered an unimportant book at his own discretion.[565] But his functions were really subordinate to those of the wardens, as is shown by his practice from about 1580, of regularly citing the ‘hands’ or signed directions of those officers, as well as of the correctors, upon which he was acting. These ‘hands’ are not in the register, and there is sufficient evidence that they were ordinarily endorsed upon the manuscript or a printed copy of the book itself.[566] Exceptionally there might be an oral direction, or a separate letter or warrant of approval, which was probably preserved in a cupboard at the company’s hall.[567] Here too were kept copies of prints, although not, I think, the endorsed copies, which seem to have remained with the stationers.[568] I take it that the procedure was somewhat as follows. The stationer would bring his book to a warden together with the fee or some plausible excuse for deferring payment to a later date. The warden had to consider the questions both of property and of licence. Possibly the title of each book was published in the hall, in order that any other stationer who thought that he had an interest in it might make his claim.[569] Cases of disputed interest would go for determination to the Court of Assistants, who with the master and wardens for the year formed the ultimate governing body of the company, and had power in the last resort to revoke an authority to print already granted.[570] But if no difficulty as to ownership arose, and if the book was already endorsed as allowable by a corrector, the warden would add his own endorsement, and it was then open to the stationer to take the book to the clerk, show the ‘hands’, pay the fee if it was still outstanding, and get the formalities completed by registration.[571] If, however, the warden found no endorsement by a corrector on the copy, then there were three courses open to him. He might take the risk of passing an obviously harmless book on his own responsibility. He might refuse his ‘hand’ until the stationer had got that of the corrector. Or he might make a qualified endorsement, which the clerk would note in the register, sanctioning publication so far as copyright was concerned, but only upon condition that proper authority should first be obtained. The dates on the title-pages of plays, when compared with those of the entries, suggest that, as would indeed be natural, the procedure was completed before publication; not necessarily before printing, as the endorsements were sometimes on printed copies.[572] Several cases of re-entry after a considerable interval may indicate that copyright lapsed unless it was exercised within a reasonable time. As a rule, a play appeared within a year or so after it was entered, and was either printed or published by the stationer who had entered it, or by some other to whom he is known, or may plausibly be supposed, to have transferred his interest. Where a considerable interval exists between the date of an entry and that of the first known print, it is sometimes possible that an earlier print has been lost.[573]

I do not think that it can be assumed that the absence of an entry in the register is evidence that the book was not duly licensed, so far as the ecclesiastical authorities were concerned. If its status was subsequently questioned, the signed copy could itself be produced. Certainly, when a conditional entry had been made, requiring better authority to be obtained, the fulfilment of the condition was by no means always, although it was sometimes, recorded. Possibly the ‘better authority’ was shown to the warden rather than the clerk. On the other hand, it is certain that, under the ordinances of the Company, publication without entrance exposed the stationer to a fine, and it is therefore probable that entrance was also necessary to secure copyright.[574] Sometimes the omission was repaired on the occasion of a subsequent transfer of interest. So far as plays are concerned, there seems to have been greater laxity in this respect as time went on. Before 1586, or at any rate before 1584, there are hardly any unentered plays, if we make the reasonable assumption that certain prints of 1573 and 1575 appeared in the missing lists for 1571–5.[575] Between 1584 and 1615 the number is considerable, being over fifty, or nearly a quarter of the total number of plays printed during that period. An examination of individual cases does not disclose any obvious reason why some plays should be entered and others not. The unentered plays are spread over the whole period concerned. They come from the repertories of nearly all the theatres. They include ‘surreptitious’ plays, which may be supposed to have been printed without the consent of the authors or owners, but they also include plays to which prefaces by authors or owners are prefixed. They were issued by publishers of good standing as well as by others less reputable; and as a rule their publishers appear to have been entering or not entering, quite indifferently, at about the same date. To this generalization I find an exception, in Thomas Archer, who printed six plays without entry between 1607 and 1613 and entered none.[576] The large number of unentered plays is rather a puzzle, and I do not know the solution. In some cases, as we shall see, the publishers may have preferred not to court publicity for their enterprises by bringing them before the wardens. In others they may merely have been unbusinesslike, or may have thought that the chances of profit hardly justified the expenditure of sixpence on acquiring copyright. Yet many of the unentered plays went through more than one edition, including _Mucedorus_, a book of enduring popularity, and they do not appear to have been particularly subject to invasion by rival publishers. I will leave it to Mr. Pollard.

These being the conditions, let us consider what number and what kinds of plays got into print. It will be convenient to deal separately with the two periods 1557–85 and 1586–1616. The operations of the Company under their charter had hardly begun before Mary died. The Elizabethan printing of plays opens in 1559 and for the first five years is of a retrospective character. Half a dozen publishers, led by John King, who died about 1561, and Thomas Colwell, who started business in the same year, issued or entered seventeen plays. Of these one is not extant. One is a ‘May-game’, perhaps contemporary. Five are translations; four are Marian farces of the school of Udall, one a _débat_ by John Heywood, and five Protestant interludes of the reigns of Henry and Edward, roughly edited in some cases so as to adapt them to performance under the new queen.[577] One more example of earlier Tudor drama, _Ralph Roister Doister_, in addition to mere reprints, appeared after 1565.[578] And with that year, after a short lull of

## activity, begins the genuine Elizabethan harvest, which by 1585 had

yielded forty-two plays, of which thirty-nine are extant, although two only in the form of fragments. On analysis, the greater number of these, seventeen in all, fall into a group of moral interludes, often controversial in tone, and in some cases approximating, through the intermingling of concrete with abstract personages, on the one hand to classical comedy, on the other to the mediaeval miracle-play. There are also twelve translations or adaptations, including two from Italian comedy. There is one neo-classical tragedy. And there are nine plays which can best be classified as histories, of which seven have a classical and two a romantic colouring.[579] It is of interest to compare this output of the printing-press with the chronicle of Court performances over the same years which is recorded in the Revels Accounts.[580] Here we get, so far of course as can be judged from a bare enumeration of titles, fourteen morals, twenty-one classical histories, mainly shown by boys, twenty-two romantic histories, mainly shown by men, and perhaps three farces, two plays of contemporary realism, with one ‘antick’ play and two groups of short dramatic episodes. It is clear that the main types are the same in both lists. But only one of the printed plays, _Orestes_, actually appears in the Court records, although _Damon and Pythias_, _Gorboduc_, _Sapho and Phao_, _Campaspe_, and _The Arraignment of Paris_ were also given at Court, and the Revels Accounts after all only cover comparatively few years out of the whole period.[581] And there is a great discrepancy in the proportions in which the various types are represented. The morals, which were obsolescent at Court, are far more numerous in print than the classical and romantic histories, which were already in enjoyment of their full vogue upon the boards. My definite impression is that these early printed morals, unlike the prints of later date, were in the main not drawn from the actual repertories of companies, but were literary products, written with a didactic purpose, and printed in the hope that they would be bought both by readers and by schoolmasters in search of suitable pieces for performance by their pupils. They belong, like some similar interludes, both original and translated, of earlier date, rather to the tradition of the humanist academic drama, than to that of the professional, or even quasi-professional, stage. There are many things about the prints which, although not individually decisive, tend when taken in bulk to confirm this theory. They are ‘compiled’, according to their title-pages; sometimes the author is declared a ‘minister’ or a ‘learned clerke’.[582] Nothing is, as a rule, said to indicate that they have been acted.[583] They are advertised, not only as ‘new’, ‘merry’, ‘pretty’, ‘pleasant’, ‘delectable’, ‘witty’, ‘full of mirth and pastime’, but also as ‘excellent’, ‘worthy’, ‘godly’, ‘pithy’, ‘moral’, ‘pityfull’, ‘learned’, and ‘fruitfull’, and occasionally the precise didactic intention is more elaborately expounded either on the title-page or in a prologue.[584] They are furnished with analyses showing the number of actors necessary to take all the parts, and in one case there is a significant note that the arrangement is ‘most convenient for such as be disposed, either to shew this comedie in priuate houses, or otherwise’.[585] They often conclude with a generalized prayer for the Queen and the estates of the realm, which omits any special petition for the individual lord such as we have reason to believe the protected players used.[586] The texts are much better than the later texts based upon acting copies. The stage-directions read like the work of authors rather than of book-keepers, notably in the use of ‘out’ rather than of ‘in’ to indicate exits, and in the occasional insertion both of hints for ‘business’ and of explanatory comments aimed at a reader rather than an actor.[587] It should be added that this type of play begins to disappear at the point when the growing Calvinist spirit led to a sharp breach between the ministry and the stage, and discredited even moral play-writing amongst divines. The latest morals, of which there are some even during the second period of play-publication, have much more the look of rather antiquated survivals from working repertories.[588] The ‘May-game’ of _Robin Hood_ seems to me to be of a literary origin similar to that of the contemporary ‘morals’.

Towards the end of the period a new element is introduced with Lyly and Peele, who, like Edwardes before them, were not divines but secular scholars, and presumably desired a permanent life for their literary achievements. The publication of Lyly’s plays for Paul’s carries us on into the period 1586–1616, and the vaunting of their performance before the Queen is soon followed by that of other plays, beginning with _The Troublesome Reign of John_, as publicly acted in the City of London. During 1586–1616 two hundred and thirty-seven plays in all were published or at least entered on the Stationers’ Register, in addition to thirteen printed elsewhere than in London. Of many of these, and of some of those earlier published, there were one or more reprints. It is not until the last year of the period that the first example of a collective edition of the plays of any author makes its appearance. This is _The Workes of Benjamin Jonson_, which is moreover in folio, whereas the prints of individual plays were almost invariably in quarto.[589] A second volume of Jonson’s _Works_ was begun in 1631 and completed in 1640. Shakespeare’s plays had to wait until 1623 for collective treatment, Lyly’s until 1632, Marston’s until 1633, and Beaumont and Fletcher’s until 1647 and 1679, although a partial collection of Shakespearian plays in quarto has been shown to have been contemplated and abandoned in 1619.[590] Of the two hundred and thirty-seven plays proposed for publication two hundred and fourteen are extant. Twenty-three are only known by entries in the Stationers’ Register, and as plays were not always entered, it is conceivable that one or two may have been published, and have passed into oblivion. Of the two hundred and fourteen extant plays, six are translations from the Latin, Italian, or French, and seven may reasonably be suspected of being merely closet plays, intended for the eye of the reader alone. The other two hundred and one may be taken to have undergone the test of actual performance. Six were given by amateurs, at Court or elsewhere, and eleven, of which three are Latin and eight English, are University plays. So far as the professional companies are concerned, the repertories which have probably been best preserved, owing to the fact that the poets were in a position to influence publication, are those of the boys. We have thirty-one plays which, certainly or probably, came to the press from the Chapel and Queen’s Revels boys, twenty-five from the Paul’s boys, and eight from the King’s Revels boys. To the Queen’s men we may assign eleven plays, to Sussex’s three, to Pembroke’s five, to Derby’s four, to Oxford’s one, to Strange’s or the Admiral’s and Henry’s thirty-two, to the Chamberlain’s and King’s thirty-four, to Worcester’s and Anne’s sixteen, to Charles’s one. Some of these had at earlier dates been played by other companies. Fifteen plays remain, not a very large proportion, which cannot be safely assigned.[591] There are twenty-seven manuscript English plays or fragments of plays or plots of plays, and twenty-one Latin ones, mostly of a university type, which also belong to the period 1586–1616. There are fifty-one plays which were certainly or probably produced before 1616, but were not printed until later, many of them in the Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher folios. And there are some twenty-two others, which exist in late prints, but may be wholly, or more often partially, of early workmanship. The resultant total of three hundred and seven is considerable, but there is reason to suppose that it only represents a comparatively small fraction of the complete crop of these thirty pullulating dramatic years. Of over two hundred and eighty plays recorded by Henslowe as produced or commissioned by the companies for whom he acted as banker between 1592 and 1603, we have only some forty and perhaps revised versions of a few others.[592] Thomas Heywood claimed in 1633 to have had ‘an entire hand, or at least a maine finger’, in not less than two hundred and twenty plays, and of these we can only identify or even guess at about two score, of which several are certainly lost. That any substantial number of plays got printed, but have failed to reach us, is improbable. From time to time an unknown print, generally of early date, turns up in some bibliographical backwater, but of the seventy-five titles which I have brought together under the head of ‘Lost Plays’ some probably rest upon misunderstandings and others represent works which were not plays at all, while a large proportion are derived from late entries in the Stationers’ Register by Humphrey Moseley of plays which he may have possessed in manuscript but never actually proceeded to publish.[593] Some of the earlier unfulfilled entries may be of similar type. An interesting piece of evidence pointing to the practically complete survival at any rate of seventeenth-century prints is afforded in a catalogue of his library of plays made by Sir John Harington in or about 1610.[594] Harington possessed 129 distinct plays, as well as a number of duplicates. Only 9 of these were printed before 1586. He had 14 out of 38 printed during 1588–94, and 15 out of 25 printed during 1595–99. His absence in Ireland during 1599 probably led him to miss several belonging to that year, and his most vigorous period as a collector began with 1600. During 1600–10 he secured 90 out of 105; that is to say exactly six-sevenths of the complete output of the London press. I neglect plays printed outside London in these figures. There is only one play among the 129 which is not known to us. Apparently it bore the title _Belinus and Brennus_.

It is generally supposed, and I think with justice, that the acting companies did not find it altogether to their advantage to have their plays printed. Heywood, indeed, in the epistle to his _English Traveller_ (1633) tells us that this was sometimes the case.[595] Presumably the danger was not so much that readers would not become spectators, as that other companies might buy the plays and act them; and of this practice there are some dubious instances, although at any rate by Caroline times it had been brought under control by the Lord Chamberlain.[596] At any rate, we find the Admiral’s in 1600 borrowing 40_s._ ‘to geue vnto the printer, to staye the printing of Patient Gresell’.[597] We find the King’s Revels syndicate in 1608 entering into a formal agreement debarring its members from putting any of the play-books jointly owned by them into print. And we find the editor and publisher of _Troilus and Cressida_, although that had in fact never been played, bidding his readers in 1609 ‘thanke fortune for the scape it hath made amongst you; since by the grand possessors wills I beleeue you should have prayd for them rather than beene prayd’. The marked fluctuation in the output of plays in different years is capable of explanation on the theory that, so long as the companies were prosperous, they kept a tight hold on their ‘books’, and only let them pass into the hands of the publishers when adversity broke them up, or when they had some special need to raise funds. The periods of maximum output are 1594, 1600, and 1607. In 1594 the companies were reforming themselves after a long and disastrous spell of plague; and in

## particular the Queen’s, Pembroke’s, and Sussex’s men were all ruined,

and their books were thrown in bulk upon the market.[598] It has been suggested that the sales of 1600 may have been due to Privy Council restrictions of that year, which limited the number of companies, and forbade them to play for more than two days in the week.[599] But it is very doubtful whether the limitation of days really became operative, and many of the plays published belonged to the two companies, the Chamberlain’s and the Admiral’s, who stood to gain by the elimination of competitors. An alternative reason might be found in the call for ready money involved by the building of the Globe in 1599 and the Fortune in 1600. The main factor in 1607 was the closing of Paul’s and the sale of the plays acted there.

Sometimes the companies were outwitted. Needy and unscrupulous stationers might use illegitimate means to acquire texts for which they had not paid as a basis for ‘surreptitious’ or ‘piratical’ prints.[600] A hired actor might be bribed to disclose his ‘part’ and so much as he could remember of the ‘parts’ of others. Dr. Greg has made it seem probable that the player of the Host was an agent in furnishing the text of the _Merry Wives_.[601] A player of Voltimand and other minor parts may have been similarly guilty as regards _Hamlet_.[602] Long before, the printer of _Gorboduc_ had succeeded in ‘getting a copie thereof at some yongmans hand that lacked a little money and much discretion’. Or the poet himself might be to blame. Thomas Heywood takes credit in the epistle to _The Rape of Lucrece_ that it had not been his custom ‘to commit my playes to the presse’, like others who ‘have vsed a double sale of their labours, first to the stage, and after to the presse’. Yet this had not saved his plays from piracy, for some of them had been ‘copied only by the eare’ and issued in a corrupt and mangled form. A quarter of a century later, in writing a prologue for a revival of his _If You Know not Me, You Know Nobody_, he tells us that this was one of the corrupt issues, and adds that

Some by Stenography drew The plot: put it in print: (scarce one word trew).

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

[Sidenote: 27 May 1600 To Master Robertes]

A moral of ‘clothe breches and velvet hose’

[Sidenote: 27 May To hym]

Allarum to London

4 Augusti As you like yt, a booke } Henry the ffift, a booke } Every man in his humour, a booke } to be staied The commedie of ‘muche A doo about } nothing’, a booke }

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]

XXIII

PLAYWRIGHTS

[_Bibliographical Note._--The abundant literature of the drama is more satisfactorily treated in the appendices to F. E. Schelling, _Elizabethan Drama_ (1908), and vols. v and vi (1910) of the _Cambridge History of English Literature_, than in R. W. Lowe, _Bibliographical Account of English Theatrical Literature_ (1888), K. L. Bates and L. B. Godfrey, _English Drama: a Working Basis_ (1896), or W. D. Adams, _Dictionary of the Drama_ (1904). There is an American pamphlet on _Materials for the Study of the English Drama, excluding Shakespeare_ (1912, Newbery Library, Chicago), which I have not seen. Periodical lists of new books are published in the _Modern Language Review_, the _Beiblatt_ to _Anglia_, and the _Bulletin_ of the English Association, and annual bibliographies by the _Modern Humanities Research Association_ (from 1921) and in the Shakespeare _Jahrbuch_. The bibliography by H. R. Tedder in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (11th ed.) s.v. Shakespeare, A. C. Shaw, _Index to the Shakespeare Memorial Library_ (1900–3), and W. Jaggard, _Shakespeare Bibliography_ (1911), on which, however, cf. C. S. Northup in _J. G. P._ xi. 218, are also useful.

W. W. Greg, _Notes on Dramatic Bibliographers_ (1911, _M. S. C._ i. 324), traces from the publishers’ advertisements of the Restoration a _catena_ of play-lists in E. Phillips, _Theatrum Poetarum_ (1675), W. Winstanley, _Lives of the Most Famous English Poets_ (1687), G. Langbaine, _Momus Triumphans_ (1688) and _Account of the English Dramatick Poets_ (1691), C. Gildon, _Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets_ (1698), W. R. Chetwood, _The British Theatre_ (1750), E. Capell, _Notitia Dramatica_ (1783), and the various editions of the _Biographica Dramatica_ from 1764 to 1812. More recent are J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, _Dictionary of Old English Plays_ (1860), and W. C. Hazlitt, _Manual of Old English Plays_ (1892); but all are largely superseded by W. W. Greg, _A List of English Plays_ (1900) and _A List of Masques, Pageants, &c._ (1902). His account of Warburton’s collection in _The Bakings of Betsy_ (_Library_, 1911) serves as a supplement. A few plays discovered later than 1900 appeared in an Irish sale of 1906 (cf. _Jahrbuch_, xliii. 310) and in the Mostyn sale of 1919 (cf. t.p. facsimiles in Sotheby’s sale catalogue). For the problems of the early prints, the _Bibliographical Note_ to ch. xxii should be consulted.

I ought to add that the notices of the early prints of plays in this and the following chapter lay no claim to minute bibliographical erudition, and that all deficiencies in this respect are likely to be corrected when the full results of Dr. Greg’s researches on the subject are published.

The fundamental works on the history of the drama are A. W. Ward, _History of English Dramatic Literature_ (1875, 1899), F. G. Fleay, _Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama_ (1891), F. E. Schelling, _Elizabethan Drama_ (1908), the _Cambridge History of English Literature_, vols. v and vi (1910), and W. Creizenach, _Geschichte des neueren Dramas_, vols. iv, v (1909, 1916). These and others, with the relevant periodicals, are set out in the _General Bibliographical Note_ (vol. i); and to them may be added F. S. Boas, _Shakspere and his Predecessors_ (1896), B. Matthews, _The Development of the Drama_ (1904), F. E. Schelling, _English Drama_ (1914), A. Wynne, _The Growth of English Drama_ (1914). Less systematic collections of studies are L. M. Griffiths, _Evenings with Shakespeare_ (1889), J. R. Lowell, _Old English Dramatists_ (1892), A. H. Tolman, _The Views about Hamlet_ (1904), C. Crawford, _Collectanea_ (1906–7), A. C. Swinburne, _The Age of Shakespeare_ (1908). The older critical work of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and others cannot be neglected, but need not be detailed here.

Special dissertations on individual plays and playwrights are recorded in the body of this chapter. A few of wider scope may be roughly classified; as dealing with dramatic structure, H. Schwab, _Das Schauspiel im Schauspiel zur Zeit Shakespeares_ (1896), F. A. Foster, _Dumb Show in Elizabethan Drama before 1620_ (1911, _E. S._ xliv. 8); with types of drama, H. W. Singer, _Das bürgerliche Trauerspiel in England_ (1891), J. Seifert, _Wit-und Science Moralitäten_ (1892), J. L. McConaughty, _The School Drama_ (1913), E. N. S. Thompson, _The English Moral Plays_ (1910), R. Fischer, _Zur Kunstentwickelung der englischen Tragödie bis zu Shakespeare_ (1893), A. C. Bradley, _Shakespearean Tragedy_ (1904), F. E. Schelling, _The English Chronicle Play_ (1902), L. N. Chase, _The English Heroic Play_ (1903), C. G. Child, _The Rise of the Heroic Play_ (1904, _M. L. N._ xix), F. H. Ristine, _English Tragicomedy_ (1910), C. R. Baskervill, _Some Evidence for Early Romantic Plays in England_ (1916, _M. P._ xiv. 229, 467), L. M. Ellison, _The Early Romantic Drama at the English Court_ (1917), H. Smith, _Pastoral Influence in the English Drama_ (1897, _M. L. A._ xii. 355). A. H. Thorndike, _The Pastoral Element in the English Drama before 1605_ (1900, _M. L. N._ xiv. 228), J. Laidler, _History of Pastoral Drama in England_ (1905, _E. S._ xxxv. 193), W. W. Greg, _Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama_ (1906); with types of plot and characterization, H. Graf, _Der Miles Gloriosus im englischen Drama_ (1891), E. Meyer, _Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama_ (1897), G. B. Churchill, _Richard the Third up to Shakespeare_ (1900), L. W. Cushman, _The Devil and the Vice in the English Dramatic Literature before Shakespeare_ (1900), E. Eckhardt, _Die lustige Person im älteren englischen Drama_ (1902), F. E. Schelling, _Some Features of the Supernatural as Represented in Plays of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James_ (1903, _M. P._ i), H. Ankenbrand, _Die Figur des Geistes im Drama der englischen Renaissance_ (1906), F. G. Hubbard, _Repetition and Parallelism in the Earlier Elizabethan Drama_ (1905, _M. L. A._ xx), E. Eckhardt, _Die Dialekt-und Ausländertypen des älteren englischen Dramas_ (1910–11), V. O. Freeburg, _Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama_ (1915); with _Quellenforschung_ and foreign influences, E. Koeppel, _Quellen-Studien zu den Dramen Jonson’s, Marston’s, und Beaumont und Fletcher’s_ (1895), _Quellen-Studien zu den Dramen Chapman’s, Massinger’s und Ford’s_ (1897), _Zur Quellen-Kunde der Stuarts-Dramen_ (1896, _Archiv_, xcvii), _Studien zur Geschichte der italienischen Novelle in der englischen Litteratur des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts_ (1892), L. L. Schücking, _Studien über die stofflichen Beziehungen der englischen Komödie zur italienischen bis Lilly_ (1901), A. Ott, _Die italienische Novelle im englischen Drama von 1600_ (1904), W. Smith, _The Commedia dell’ Arte_ (1912), M. A. Scott, _Elizabethan Translations from the Italian_ (1916), A. L. Stiefel, _Die Nachahmung spanischer Komödien in England unter den ersten Stuarts_ (1890), _Die Nachahmung spanischer Komödien in England_ (1897, _Archiv_, xcix), L. Bahlsen, _Spanische Quellen der dramatischen Litteratur besonders Englands zu Shakespeares Zeit_ (1893, _Z. f. vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte_, N. F. vi), A. S. W. Rosenbach, _The Curious Impertinent in English Drama_ (1902, _M. L. N._ xvii), J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, _Cervantes in England_ (1905), J. W. Cunliffe, _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_ (1893), O. Ballweg, _Das klassizistische Drama zur Zeit Shakespeares_ (1909), O. Ballmann, _Chaucers Einfluss auf das englische Drama_ (1902, _Anglia_, xxv), R. M. Smith, _Froissart and the English Chronicle Play_ (1915); with the interrelations of dramatists, A. H. Thorndike, _The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare_ (1901), E. Koeppel, _Studien über Shakespeares Wirkung auf zeitgenössische Dramatiker_ (1905), _Ben Jonson’s Wirkung auf zeitgenössische Dramatiker_ (1906).

The special problem of the authorship of the so-called _Shakespeare Apocrypha_ is dealt with in the editions thereof described below, and by Halliwell-Phillipps (ii. 413), Ward (ii. 209), R. Sachs, _Die Shakespeare zugeschriebenen zweifelhaften Stücke_ (1892, _Jahrbuch_, xxvii), and A. F. Hopkinson, _Essays on Shakespeare’s Doubtful Plays_ (1900). The analogous question of the possible non-Shakespearian authorship of plays or parts of plays published as his is too closely interwoven with specifically Shakespearian literature to be handled here; J. M. Robertson, in _Did Shakespeare Write Titus Andronicus?_ (1905), _Shakespeare and Chapman_ (1917), _The Shakespeare Canon_ (1922), is searching; other dissertations are cited under the plays or playwrights concerned. The attempts to use metrical or other ‘tests’ in the discrimination of authorship or of the chronology of work have been predominantly applied to Shakespeare, although Beaumont and Fletcher (_vide infra_) and others have not been neglected. The broader discussions of E. N. S. Thompson, _Elizabethan Dramatic Collaboration_ (1909, _E. S._ xl. 30) and E. H. C. Oliphant, _Problems of Authorship in Elizabethan Dramatic Literature_ (1911, _M. P._ viii, 411) are of value.

To the general histories of Elizabethan literature named in the _General Bibliographical Note_ may be added _Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature_ (1901–3), E. Gosse, _Modern English Literature_ (1897), G. Saintsbury, _Short History of English Literature_ (1900), A. Lang, _English Literature from ‘Beowulf’ to Swinburne_ (1912), W. Minto, _Characteristics of English Poets from Chaucer to Shirley_ (1874), G. Saintsbury, _Elizabethan Literature_ (1887), E. Gosse, _The Jacobean Poets_ (1894), T. Seccombe and J. W. Allen, _The Age of Shakespeare_ (1903), F. E. Schelling, _English Literature during the Lifetime of Shakespeare_ (1910); and for the international relations, G. Saintsbury, _The Earlier Renaissance_ (1901), D. Hannay, _The Later Renaissance_ (1898), H. J. C. Grierson, _The First Half of the Seventeenth Century_ (1906), C. H. Herford, _The Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century_ (1886), L. Einstein, _The Italian Renaissance in England_ (1902), S. Lee, _The French Renaissance in England_ (1910), J. G. Underhill, _Spanish Literature in the England of the Tudors_ (1899).

I append a chronological list of miscellaneous collections of plays, covering those of more than one author. A few of minimum importance are omitted.

(_a_) _Shakespeare Apocrypha_

1664. M^r William Shakespear’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Published according to the true Original Copies. The Third Impression. And unto this Impression is added seven Playes, never before printed in Folio, viz. Pericles Prince of Tyre. The London Prodigall. The History of Thomas L^d Cromwell. Sir John Oldcastle Lord Cobham. The Puritan Widow. A Yorkshire Tragedy. The Tragedy of Locrine. _For P[hilip] C[hetwinde]._ [A second issue of the Third Folio (F_{3}) of Shakespeare. I cite these as ‘The 7 Plays’.]

1685. M^r William Shakespear’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.... The Fourth Edition. _For H. Herringman, E. Brewster, and R. Bentley._ [The Fourth Folio (F_{4}) of Shakespeare, The 7 Plays.]

1709, 1714. N. Rowe, _The Works of Sh._ [The 7 Plays in vol. vi of 1709 and vol. viii of 1714.]

1728, &c. A. Pope, _The Works of Sh._ [The 7 Plays in vol. ix of 1728.]

1780. [E. Malone], _Supplement to the Edition of Sh.’s Plays published in 1778 by S. Johnson and G. Steevens_. [The 7 Plays in vol. ii.]

1848, 1855. W. G. Simms, _A Supplement to the Works of Sh._ (New York). [_T. N. K._ and the 7 Plays, except _Pericles_.]

N.D. [1851?]. H. Tyrrell, _The Doubtful Plays of Sh._ [The 7 Plays, _T. A._, _Edward III_, _Merry Devil of Edmonton_, _Fair Em_, _Mucedorus_, _Arden of Feversham_, _Birth of Merlin_, _T. N. K._]

1852, 1887. W. Hazlitt, _The Supplementary Works of Sh._ [The 7 Plays, _T. A._]

1854–74. N. Delius, _Pseudo-Shakespere’sche Dramen_. [_Edward III_ (1854), _Arden of Feversham_ (1855), _Birth of Merlin_ (1856), _Mucedorus_ (1874), _Fair Em_ (1874), separately.]

1869. M. Moltke, _Doubtful Plays of Sh._ (Tauchnitz). [_Edward III_, _Thomas Lord Cromwell_, _Locrine_, _Yorkshire Tragedy_, _London Prodigal_, _Birth of Merlin_.]

1883–8. K. Warnke und L. Proescholdt, _Pseudo-Shakespearian Plays_. [_Fair Em_ (1883), _Merry Devil of Edmonton_ (1884), _Edward III_ (1886), _Birth of Merlin_ (1887), _Arden of Feversham_ (1888), separately, with _Mucedorus_ (1878) outside the series.]

1891–1914. A. F. Hopkinson, _Sh.’s Doubtful Plays_ (1891–5). _Old English Plays_ (1901–2). _Sh.’s Doubtful Works_ (1910–11). [Under the above collective titles were issued some, but not all, of a series of plays bearing separate dates as follows: _Thomas Lord Cromwell_ (1891, 1899), _Yorkshire Tragedy_ (1891, 1910), _Edward III_ (1891, 1911), _Merry Devil of Edmonton_ (1891, 1914), _Warning for Fair Women_ (1891, 1904), _Locrine_ (1892), _Birth of Merlin_ (1892, 1901), _London Prodigal_ (1893), _Mucedorus_ (1893), _Sir John Oldcastle_ (1894), _Puritan_ (1894), _T. N. K._ (1894), _Fair Em_ (1895), _Famous Victories of Henry V_ (1896), _Contention of York and Lancaster_ (1897), _Arden of Feversham_ (1898, 1907), _True Tragedy of Richard III_ (1901), _Sir Thomas More_ (1902). My list may not be complete.]

1908. C. F. T. Brooke, _The Sh. Apocrypha_. [The 7 Plays except _Pericles_, _Arden of Feversham_, _Edward III_, _Mucedorus_, _Merry Devil of Edmonton_, _Fair Em_, _T. N. K._, _Birth of Merlin_, _Sir Thomas More_.]

(_b_) _General Collections_

1744. _A Select Collection of Old Plays._ 12 vols. (Dodsley). [Cited as _Dodsley_^1.]

1750. [W. R. Chetwood], _A Select Collection of Old Plays_ (Dublin).

1773. T. Hawkins, _The Origin of the English Drama_. 3 vols.

1779. [J. Nichols], _Six Old Plays_. 2 vols.

1780. _A Select Collection of Old Plays._ The Second Edition ... by I. Reed. 12 vols. (Dodsley). [Cited as Dodsley^2.]

1810. [Sir W. Scott], _The Ancient British Drama_. 3 vols. (W. Miller). [Cited as _A. B. D._]

1811. [Sir W. Scott], _The Modern British Drama_. 5 vols. (W. Miller). [Cited as _M. B. D._]

1814–15. [C. W. Dilke], _Old English Plays_. 6 vols. [Cited as _O. E. P._]

1825. _The Old English Drama._ 2 vols. (Hurst, Robinson, & Co., and A. Constable). [Most of the plays have the separate imprint of C. Baldwyn, 1824.]

1825–7. _Select Collection of Old Plays._ A new edition ... by I. Reed, O. Gilchrist and [J. P. Collier]. 12 vols. [Cited as Dodsley^3.]

1830. _The Old English Drama._ 3 vols. (Thomas White).

1833. J. P. Collier, _Five Old Plays_ (W. Pickering). [Half-title has ‘Old Plays, vol. xiii’, as a supplement to Dodsley.]

1841–53. _Publications of the Shakespeare Society._ [Include, besides several plays of T. Heywood (q.v.), Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton’s _Patient Grissell_, Munday’s _John a Kent and John a Cumber_, Legge’s _Richardus Tertius_, Norton and Sackville’s _Gorboduc_, Merbury’s _Marriage between Wit and Wisdom_, and _Sir Thomas More_, _True Tragedy of Richard III_, _1 Contention_, _True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York_, _Taming of A Shrew_, _Timon_, by various editors. Some copies of these plays, not including Heywood’s, were bound up in 4 vols., with the general date 1853, as a _Supplement_ to Dodsley.]

1848. F. J. Child, _Four Old Plays_.

1851. J. P. Collier, _Five Old Plays_ (Roxburghe Club).

1870. J. S. Keltie, _The Works of the British Dramatists_.

[Many of the collections enumerated above are obsolete, and I have not usually thought it worth while to record here the plays included in them. Lists of the contents of most of them are given in Hazlitt; _Manual_, 267.]

1874–6. _A Select Collection of Old English Plays_: Fourth Edition, now first Chronologically Arranged, Revised and Enlarged; with the notes of all the Commentators, and New Notes, by W. C. Hazlitt. Vols. i-ix (1874), x-xiv (1875), xv (1876). [Cited as Dodsley, or Dodsley^4; incorporates with Collier’s edition of Dodsley the collections of 1833, 1848, 1851, and 1853.]

1875. W. C. Hazlitt, _Shakespeare’s Library_. Second Edition.

## Part i , 4 vols.; Part ii , 2 vols. [ Part i is based on

Collier’s _Shakespeare’s Library_ (1844).