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.[1] 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.[2] Most of the actual manuscripts of this type which remain in existence are of Caroline, rather than Elizabethan or Jacobean, date.[3] 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
- [Footnote: B. I. Containing more than hath been publikely spoken or acted';
Barnes, Devil's Charter (1607), 'As it was plaide. . . . But more exactly reuewed, corrected, and augmented since by the Author, for the more pleasure and profit of the Reader'; Webster, Duchess of Malfi (1623), 'with diuerse things Printed, that the length of the Play would not beare in the Presentment'.]
- ↑ Pollard, Sh. F. 57; F. and Q. 117.
- ↑ The editors of the Shakespeare F_{1} claim that they are replacing 'stolne, and surreptitious copies' by plays 'absolute in their numbers, as he conceiued them', and that 'wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers'; and those of the Beaumont and Fletcher F_{1} say they 'had the Originalls from such as received them from the Authors themselves' and lament 'into how many hands the Originalls were dispersed'. The same name 'original' was used for the authoritative copy of a civic miracle-play; cf. Mediaeval Stage, ii. 143.
- ↑ The manuscripts of Sir John Barnevelt (Addl. MS. 18653), Believe As You List (Egerton MS. 2828), The Honest Man's Fortune (Dyce MS. 9), The Faithful Friends (Dyce MS. 10), and The Sisters (Sion College MS.) appear to be play-house copies, with licensing corrections, and in some cases the licences endorsed, and some of them may be in the authors' autographs; cf. Pollard, Sh. F. 59; Mönkemeyer, 72. Several of the copies in Egerton MS. 1994, described by F. S. Boas in 3 Library (July 1917), including that of 1 Richard II, are of a similar type.
