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The Ms. Play, Anna Bullen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edythe N. Backus
Edythe N. Backus*
Affiliation:
Henry E. Huntington Library
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Extract

An anonymous MS. play, Anna Bullen, now at the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery [HM973] and hitherto unnoticed, offers, upon examination, interesting similarities to the play upon the same subject by John Banks, Vertue Betray'd: Or, Anna Bullen. The MS. is written upon paper bearing an eighteenth-century watermark, and is written in an eighteenth-century hand. The MS. seems to be, not an original play, but either a copy or an adaptation of some other play, as is shown: (1) by the careful noting of an hiatus of one or two lines in the first speech by Northumberland in Act i, Scene 2 [verso leaf 5]; (2) by the scratching out of occasional words and the substitution of the proper synonym, as

      Expos'd and naked to the probing light [verso leaf 25];

and (3) by the frequent complete or incomplete erasure of errors in wording, orthography, and chirography.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , September 1932 , pp. 741 - 752
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1932

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References

1 Printed in 1682, 1692, 1715, 1727 and 1735; first produced in the Dorset Garden Theatre on April 5, 1682, according to a contemporary MS. note on the separately printed broadside prologue and epilogue, now in the Bindley Pamphlet Volume at the Huntington Library; and revived at intervals until as late as 1766, according to Genest in his Some Account of the English Stage, 1660–1830.

2 This line, made meaningless by the printer, is corrected in the 1735 edition [page 21] to the line as it appears in the MS., thus:

She's Piercy's now; and Piercy is all hers.