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Henslowe's Diary and the Economics of Play Revision for Revival, 1592–1603

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Roslyn L. Knutson
Roslyn L. Knutson
Affiliation:
Roslyn Knutson is Associate Professor of English at the Universityof Arkansas at Little Rock.
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Extract

There is much evidence, it seems, that Elizabethan dramatists spent a measure of their creative energy revising old playbooks. The title pages of some quartos advertise that their contents are ‘amended’ or ‘newly corrected’, and the similarity of plays on such subjects as the Yorkist kings and tamable shrews have made it plausible that one text is a revision of the other. In the 1908 edition of Henslowe's Diary, W. W. Greg lent sanction to the idea of playhouse revision; defending the sign ‘ne’ as the mark of new plays, he offered as an exception a play ‘new in the sense that it was a revival with alterations’. In the Cambridge editions of Shakespeare's plays, J. Dover Wilson systematically identified textual variants and cruxes in the early plays as evidence of revisions, allegedly made for a revival. Over the years, editions of and monographs on plays with more than one textual version have reinforced the association of major alterations with a play's return to the stage after some period of retirement. For such an apparently widespread playhouse practice, G. E. Bentley developed a ‘rule of thumb’: ‘almost any play … kept in active repertory by the company which owned it is most likely to contain later revisions by the author or, in many cases, by another playwright working for the same company’.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 1985 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1985

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References

Notes

1. A second exception was for plays ‘new to the particular company, though not to the stage in general’, Henslowe's Diary, 2 vols. (London, 1908), I, 148Google Scholar, in the essay hereafter as Diary. In the Cambridge edition of Henslowe's Diary, 1961Google Scholar, R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert suggest that the common feature of ‘ne’ plays is licensing; new plays required a current license, but so (they presume) did ones revived ‘at least when substantial revision had been made of the play’ (xxx–xxxi).Google Scholar In the essay, I cite the Foakes-Rickert edition of the diary as HD.

2. The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton, 1971), p. 263.Google Scholar See also J. W. Lever's parallel text edition of Every Man in his Humour, Regents Renaissance Drama series (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1971); Urkowitz, Steven, Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear (Princeton, 1980)Google Scholar; Taylor, Gary and Warren, Michael, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms (Oxford, 1983).Google Scholar

3. In scholarship on the Elizabethan repertory companies, the term ‘revision’ covers many kinds of textual alterations by different agents. The argument here concerns those changes which a playwright was hired to make and which possibly took the form of additions or deletions of characters, scenes, and narrative action as well as the rearrangement of parts from the extant text. I do not presume to assess such revisions and self-corrections as a playwright may have done on his own work for artistic reasons (see Honigmann, E. A. J., The Stability of Shakespeare's Text [Lincoln, Nebraska, 1965])Google Scholar or the changes made by stationers in the printing house.

4. Chambers took the sum to equal a half-share of the gallery receipts for the day; The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923), II, 139Google Scholar, in the essay hereafter as ES; see also HD, xxiv.

5. Chambers quotes Samuel Kiechel, a European merchant who visited London in 1585 (ES, II, 358).Google Scholar Alfred Harbage offered alternative explanations for the large sums (Shakespeare's Audience [New York, 1941], pp. 26–9), and Foakes and Rickert link the receipts to the payment of the play's license (HD xxx).Google Scholar In a recent study which looks closely at the economics of playgoing, Ann J. Cook returns to Chambers’ view that ‘admission to the public playhouses was doubled for new plays’ (The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576–1642 [Princeton, 1981], p. 182).Google Scholar

6. Strange's men played at the Rose from 19 February to 22 June 1952 and from 29 December to 1 February 1592–3; Sussex's men played from 27 December to 6 February 1593–4, and with Queen's from 1–8 April 1594; Admiral's played from 14–16 May 1594 at the Rose and from 3–13 June with the Chamberlain's men at Newington Butts.

7. Once thought to be a revision of Titus and Vespasian, Tit. was new, as Henslowe marked it, according to Paul E. Bennett in Notes and Queries, 200 (1955)Google Scholar, companion articles: ‘An Apparent Allusion to “Titus Andronicus.”’, pp. 422–4; ‘The Word “Goths” in “A Knack to Know a Knave”’, pp. 462–3.Google Scholar

8. Average receipts are rounded off to the nearest shilling.

9. It would explain the single performances and low receipts of Orlando Furioso (16s. 6d.), Chloris and Ergasto (18s.), Pope Joan (15s.), Zenobia (22s. 6d.), and Constantine (12s.) if these were plays being carried over from previous seasons but now commercially exhausted.

10. Kirschbaum, Leo, ‘A Census of Bad Quartos’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 14 (1938), 40–2.Google Scholar

11. In ‘How Bad is the Text of “The Jew of Malta”?’ J. C. Maxwell summarizes the arguments of earlier critics, who explain the aesthetic and textual corruptions they believe the play to have sustained (Modern Language Review, 48 [1953], 435–8).Google Scholar In The Works of Christopher Marlowe (Oxford, 1910)Google Scholar, C. F. Tucker Brooke made typical judgements: ‘It is beyond question that the vigorous flow of tragic interest and character betrayal … wastes away amid … a wilderness of melodrama and farce’ (p. 232)Google Scholar; ‘it is probable that the extant text incorporates the results of at least two separate revisions; the first carried out before the revival in 1601, … the second that which must have been necessary before so old a work could be presented at Court and at the Cock-pit’ (pp. 231–2).Google Scholar

12. The Jew of Malta, Revels edition (Manchester, 1978), p. 40.Google Scholar See also Orgel, Stephen, ‘What is a Text’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 14 (1981), 3–6Google Scholar, for comments on the disparity of printed texts on the one hand and authorial/playhouse manuscripts on the other. Recently, D. J. Lake has presented evidence based on certain contractions not common before 1599 to argue that Q1633 is a revised text; Lake seems to favor a 1632 date for that revision (‘Three Seventeenth-Century Revisions: Thomas of Woodstock, The Jew of Malta, and Faustus B’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 30 (1983), 133–43.Google Scholar

13. In ‘“The Spanish Tragedy” – a Leading Case’, Greg conjectured that when stationers printed a ‘good’ text (that is, a legitimate, authorial playbook as the Allde-White edition is supposed to be) to replace a ‘bad’ text (that is, an illegitimate and variously corrupt script as the now-lost Jeffes edition is supposed to be), they used the formulaic claims of correction to advertise the good text (The Library, 4th series, 6 [1925], 47–56).Google Scholar In ‘Is The Spanish Tragedy a Leading Case?’ Kirschbaum challenged the part of Greg's argument that assumes the Jeffes edition to be a bad text but accepted the authenticity of the Allde-White edition (Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 37 [1938], 501–12).Google Scholar See also Edwards, Philip, ed. The Spanish Tragedy, Revels edition (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. xxviii–xx, xl)Google Scholar and Freeman, Arthur, Thomas Kyd: Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1967), pp. 115–17.Google Scholar These scholars agree that the undated Allde-White print came out in 1592, prior to White's and Jeffes's reprimand by the Stationers’ Court (ES, III, 395–6). Several plays not in Henslowe's Diary also advertise revisions on their title pages, but the claims are suspect. Freeman points out that the copies of Soliman and Perseda marked ‘newly corrected and amended’ do not differ significantly from the copies not so designated (pp. 154–5). In Studies in the Shakespeare Apocrypha ([1908, rpt. New York, 1967], pp. 26–71)Google Scholar, Baldwin Maxwell found evidence of revision in Locrine to satisfy its title-page claim of correction, as did Peter Berek in ‘Locrine Revised, Selimus, and Early Responses to Tamburlaine’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 23 (1980), 33–54, but their arguments are not based on documentary evidence. In recent Shakesperean scholarship, the claims of revision on the title pages of LLL Q1598, Rom. Q2, and Ham. Q2 have been rejected. These now are acknowledged to be in a real sense ‘good’ texts, not revisions; the title-page claims refer merely to a prior printing of an abridged text of each play. See, for one version of the argument, Burkhart, Robert, Shakespeare's Bad Quartos (The Hague, 1975).Google Scholar

14. For the joint performances of the Admiral's men and Chamberlain's at Newington Butts, 3–13 June 1594, Henslowe's share was either so small or the run itself so unsuccessful that the receipts are clearly out of line with normal business returns; consequently, figures for the Newington Butts run have not been counted into the totals and averages here.

15. Greg assigned all entries of Tamar Cham in 1592–3 to ‘part two’ (Diary, II, 155–6); I have argued differently in ‘Henslowe's Naming of Parts’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 30 (1983), 157–60.

16. The text of The Massacre at Paris has the provenance of Pembroke's men, 1593–4, according to Wentersdorf, Karl P., ‘The Repertory and Sire of Pembroke's Company’, Theatre Annual, 33 (1977), 82–5.Google Scholar Greg assigned Q1604 of Dr. Faustus to Pembroke's men, 1592–3, and Q1616 to Admiral's 1594; he did not think the play was revised for its September 1594 revival (Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, 1604–1616, a parallel text edition [1950; rpt. Oxford, 1968], pp. 60–2; 93–7). The Tamburlaine plays, Q1590, advertised on the title page ownership by the then-constituted Admiral's men.

17. Hook, Frank S., ed. of Edward I in The Life and Works of George Peele, 3 vols. (New Haven, 1962), II, p. 7.Google Scholar

18. William Ingram suggests that a company including Francis Henslowe, George Attewell, William Smyght, and Robert Nicholls were at Francis Langley's playhouse, the Swan, in the summer of 1595 (A London Life in the Brazen Age [Cambridge, Mass., 1978], pp. 115–20).Google Scholar In 1594, Francis Henslowe became one of the Queen's men (HD 7)Google Scholar; in 1598, William Smyght was one (York, eds. Johnston, Alexandra F. and Rogerson, Margaret, REED series [Toronto, 1979], p. 481).Google Scholar Reasonably, then, the men wore the Queen's livery in 1595 when they leased the Swan.

19. Dora Jean Ashe explains the provenance of Edward I in ‘The Text of Peele's Edward I’, Studies in Bibliography, 7 (1955), 169.Google Scholar

20. On 24 January 1597, Henslowe began to enter receipts in a new form. Presumably, the first two columns in the new system represent pounds and shillings and thus continue the monetary entries, 1592–6 (HD xxxiii–xxxvi).Google Scholar There is no reason to suspect that Henslowe began to receive a lower percentage of the gallery receipts at this time.

21. Five Plays in One may be new. It has been identified with the Tarleton plays merely because of a similarity of its title; there is absolutely no evidence of a genuine link. Also in early 1597, Alexander and Lodowick was marked ‘ne’ twice (HD 56).Google Scholar Foakes and Rickert suppose it to have been relicensed (HD xxxi).Google Scholar Neither they nor Greg suggested it was revised (Diary, II, 182).Google ScholarThe French Comedy, ‘ne’ on 11 February 1595, is the only play in Henslowe's Diary that the same company performed on separate stage runs, both of which had opening-day performances marked ‘ne’. It is thus the only play in the diary apparently treated in the way Bentley's rule of thumb designates a ‘common practice’ (p. 237).Google Scholar

22. Henslowe recorded that he (or the company) received £7 for The Spanish Tragedy for the 7 January performance, but for what reason he did not say (HD 51).Google Scholar

23. The ghost of Jonson has haunted The Spanish Tragedy, and every scholar who treats the play has had to placate or exorcise it. In 1925, Greg called the additions ‘far less likely to have been the additions of 1601–2 than those earlier ones which we may suppose justified the announcement of Jeronimo as a new play in 1597’ (Malone Society Reprints, xix) and the attribution of the additions to Jonson, as ‘hardly even conceivably correct’ (xviii).Google Scholar The Oxford editors of Jonson's work concurred, declaring the idea that Jonson wrote the Q1602 additions ‘strain[s] Almost to the breaking-point’ any theory of Jonson's dramatic style and maturity in 1601 (Herford, C. H. and Simpson, Percy, Ben JonsonGoogle Scholar[Oxford, 1915], II, p. 244).Google Scholar It might also be observed that Jonson is named as a reviser in the diary only in the case of The Spanish Tragedy. Philip Edwards gave the ghost renewed life by suggesting that Pavier, the publisher, had ‘obtained some of the new material’ in Q1602 from Jonson, 's additions (p. lxiv).Google Scholar While denying flatly that Jonson wrote the Q1602 additions, Arthur Freeman raised the spectre that other companies altered the playtext, claiming that the Pavier additions may ‘represent revisions at different times and possibly by different companies of the acting text’ (p. 130).Google Scholar

24. As Greg noted, the entries for the Cardinal Wolsey plays are difficult to sort out (Diary, II, 218).Google Scholar Apparently, ‘The Rising’ was also mended during its maiden run, c. December 1601, and Chettle was paid 20s. on 15 May 1602 for the alterations (HD 200).Google Scholar The time sequence of the five-month delay for revisions is unusual but does not suggest a revival with revisions. In addition to the Wolsey plays and Friar Rush, Henslowe entered a payment for alterations of 40s. to 2 Black Dog of Newgate during its maiden run (HD 224).Google Scholar

25. Other entries for Court alterations include 10s. to Dekker for a prologue and epilogue for Pontius Pilate (HD 187) and 5s. to Chettle for a rprologue and epilogue to a play, unnamed (HD 207).Google Scholar Some texts of Chamberlain's plays that were revised for Court appearances have survived. For example, Jonson, 's Every Man Out of his HumourGoogle Scholar, 1599, has variant epilogues in the quarto and folio editions, representing the books for the Court and for the London playhouse (ES, III, 360–3). According to John H. Long, the quarto and folio versions of the masque in Wiv. represent performances before Queen Elizabeth, c. 1597, and King James, c. 1604 (‘Another Masque for The Merry Wives of Windsor’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 3 [1952], 39–43).Google ScholarMucedorus, presented before James I in 1610, was published in that year (or 1611) with an advertisement that it was ‘[a]mplified with new additions’, apparently for that Court appearance. In fact, the revisions had been published in the 1606 quarto (R. Thornberry, T., ‘A Seventeenth-Century Revival of Mucedorus in London Before 1610’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 28 [1977], 362–4).CrossRefGoogle Scholar William A. Ringler and Steven W. May have found what may be an epilogue by Shakespeare for a Court presentation of one of his plays in 1599; see ‘Notes and Documents: An Epilogue Possibly by Shakespeare’, Modern Philology, 70 (1972–1973), 138–9.Google Scholar

26. In The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, Fredson Bowers echoes the opinions of Greg (Diary, II, 179)Google Scholar and Chambers, (ES, III, 291)Google Scholar that Dekker took an old two-part version of Fortunatus, the first part of which the Admiral's men had played in 1596, and turned this into a single play (4 vols. [Cambridge, 1953–61], I, 107). From the dates of Henslowe's payments, according to Bowers, , ‘the November conflation of the two old plays could have been done with court performance as the objective’ (p. 107).Google Scholar

27. The Admiral's men were paid for three Court performances, 1602–3, and Henslowe named three, not including Tasso's Melancholy. They were As Merry as May Be (HD 206), the play (unnamed) for which Chettle wrote a prologue and epilogue (HD 207)Google Scholar, and a play of ‘bacon’ (HD 207).Google Scholar Perhaps Tasso's Melancholy was prepared for a special, but not royal performance.

28. In May 1601 the company revived The Jew of Malta and followed through with such past successes as Mahomet, The Massacre at Paris, The Wise Man of West Chester, 1,2, Hercules, and Dr. Faustus.

29. In Thomas Kyd: Facts and Problems, Arthur Freeman theorizes that the September and June payments to Jonson were advances on promised work, not payments for work completed. Freeman doubts that Jonson ‘ever did fulfill his part of the bargain with Henslowe’, in which case the revival probably never took place (p. 128).Google Scholar

30. Bowers, , ‘Marlowe's Dr. Faustus: the 1602 Additions’, Studies in Bibliography, 26 (1973), 1–18Google Scholar; Kuriyama, , ‘Dr. Greg and Dr. Faustus: The Supposed Originality of the 1616 Text’, English Literary Renaissance, 5 (1975), 171–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Citations refer to Greg's parallel text edition.

32. In the same holiday programme, the King's men revived Jonson's Every Man In his Humour, to which occasion Lever has assigned the massive revision in the folio text (see n. 2, above), and Every Man Out of his Humour, which has variant epilogues (see n. 25, above).