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.[1]
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.[2] 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.[3] 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';[4] and still more so when the note occurs at the point when the property has to be brought from the tire-room,ae'; Nashe, Summer's Last Will and Testament, 1813, 'You might haue writ in the margent of your play-booke, Let there be a fewe rushes laide in the place where Back-winter shall tumble, for feare of raying his cloathes: or set downe, Enter Back-winter, with his boy bringing a brush after him, to take off the dust if need require. But you will ne're haue any ward-robe wit while you live. I pray you holde the booke well, that we be not non plus in the latter end of the play.']
