date. To this generalization I find an exception, in Thomas Archer, who printed six plays without entry between 1607 and 1613 and entered none.[1] 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.[2] One more example of earlier Tudor drama, Ralph Roister Doister, in addition to mere reprints, appeared after 1565.[3] And with that year, after a short lull of activity, begins the genuine Elizabethan harvest, which by 1585 had yielded forty-two
- ↑ His plays were Sir Thomas Wyat (1607), Every Woman in her Humour (1609), Two Maids of Moreclack (1609), Roaring Girl (1611), White Devil (1612), and Insatiate Countess (1613).
- ↑ In Nice Wanton a prayer for a king has been altered by sacrificing a rhyme into one for a queen. The prayer of Impatient Poverty seems also to have been for Mary and clumsily adapted for Elizabeth. Wager's Enough is as Good as a Feast may be Elizabethan or pre-Elizabethan. Jacob and Esau (1568), entered in 1557-8, is pre-Elizabethan.
- ↑ Reprints of 1559-85 include Heywood's Weather and Four Ps, printed in England before the establishment of the Stationers' Register, and Bale's Three Laws and God's Promises, printed, probably abroad, in 1538. John Walley, who seems to have printed 1545-86, failed to date his books. I cannot therefore say whether his reprints of the pre-Register Love and Hickscorner, or the prints of Youth and Wealth and Health (if it is his), which he entered in 1557-8, are Elizabethan or not.
