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'.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] Mr. Pollard's interpretation of the facts appears to be influenced by the conditional character of four out of Roberts's five entries
- ↑ Fleay, L. and W. 40; Furness, Much Ado, ix.
- ↑ Pollard, F. and Q. 66; Sh. F. 44.
- ↑ Roberts did not print the 1603 Hamlet, although he did that of 1604: but it must have been covered by his entry of 1602, and this makes it a little difficult to regard him (or Blount in 1609) as the 'agent' of the Chamberlain's.
