und Anordnungen in den Shakespeare-Ausgaben (1904, E. S. xxxiv. 1), The documents printed by Arber are so fundamental as to justify a short description. Each of his vols. i-iv gives the text, or most of the text, of four books, lettered A-D in the Company's archives, interspersed with illustrative documents from other sources; vol. v consists of indices. Another series of books, containing minutes of the Court of Assistants from 1603 onwards, remains unprinted (ii. 879). Book A contains the annual accounts of the wardens from 1554 to 1596. The Company's year began on varying dates in the first half of July. From 1557 to 1571 the accounts include detailed entries of the books for which fees were received and of the fines imposed upon members of the Company for irregularities. Thereafter they are abstracts only, and reference is made for the details of fees to 'the register in the clarkes booke' (i. 451). Unfortunately this book is not extant for 1571-6. After the appointment of Richard Collins in place of George Wapull as clerk in 1575, a new 'booke of entrances' was bought for the clerk (i. 475). This is Book B, which is divided into sections for records of different character, including book entries for 1576-95, and fines for 1576-1605. There are also some decrees and ordinances of the Court, most of which Arber does not print, and a few pages of miscellaneous memoranda at the beginning and end (ii. 33-49, 884-6). Book C, bought 'for the entrance of copies' in 1594-5 (i. 572), has similar memoranda (iii. 35-8, 677-98). It continues the book entries, and these alone, for 1595-1620. 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.[1] 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.[2] 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
