University of Virginia Library

This article is an expansion of a paper read in the Bibliographical Evidence section at the 1955 meeting of the Modern Language Association.

"Entrance, Licence, and Publication," The Library, 4th series, XXV (1945), 14.

Cf. Frank Marcham, The King's Office of the Revels, 1610-1622 (1925), and review by E. K. Chambers, RES, I (1925), 479-484.

Quotations are taken from the University of Chicago's copy of Q, and line numbers are those of G. L. Kittredge's edition in The Complete Works of Shakespeare (1936).

G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (1941), II, 451.

Ibid., II, 607.

Similar directions, with asterisks or raised italic letters, appear in IV.v of The Captain, in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647; the scene is of disputed authorship but is probably not Fletcher's. Here the directions are clearly authorial: e.g., "Ang. makes discontented signes", or "Maid lais her finger crosse her mouth to him". These and other features point to some sort of authorial draft as copy for The Captain.

Cf. J. Gerritsen, ed., The Honest mans Fortune (1952), pp. xxv-xxvi.

Quotations are taken from Gerritsen's edition of the manuscript text of HMF and from the Malone Society Reprint of Believe, ed. C. J. Sisson (1928).

The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (1942, 2nd edn., 1951), n. 2, p. 39.

It is quite possible that a number of other directions for music, flourishes, or the use of particular instruments were added by the annotator. Like the example given above, several appear to have been added to original directions; see the direction for "Still Musicke of Records", shown below.

It may be pertinent to point out that of eight King's men's plays first published by Waterson, three show some signs of playhouse origin, in addition to the Kinsmen. They are Massinger's The Unnatural Combat (1639), D'Avenant's The Cruel Brother (1630), and Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas (1639).

On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists (1955), p. 21.

The Shakespeare First Folio, p. 142.

Op. cit., p. 21.

In the masque, the He-Fool and He-Baboon are different characters. The quarto Kinsmen provides for a total of six males: the four countrymen, the "Bavian" or Baboon, and the taborer. It has been argued by various critics that in the play the Bavian and the Fool are the same, there being thus only five male dancers and the taborer. Cf. Helge Kökeritz, "The Beast-Eating Clown, The Two Noble Kinsmen, 3.5.131," Modern Language Notes, LXI (1946), 532-535. But this reckoning leaves one of the women uncoupled: either Q's stage-direction erred in the number of countrymen supposed to be present, as it manifestly did for the wenches; or one of the women did not have a partner after all, which renders absurd the Schoolmaster's command to couple; or the taborer danced, which is hardly likely.

John Stowe, Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of England, continued and augmented by Edmund Howes (1631), p. [914], sig. 3H2v.

The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakspere (1901), p. 46.

The scene divisions are removed in the editions of Weber, Dyce, and Skeat. Other modern editors get around the problem by a series of scene locations which would be feasible in the movies but hardly on the Jacobean stage: thus, II.i is placed in "a garden, with a castle in the background", with Palamon and Arcite entering "at a window, above"; then II.ii is laid in "a room in the prison", with Emilia and her woman entering "below". All this would require that in II.i the audience's point of view be outside looking at the garden and the prison, but for II.ii inside the prison looking out at the garden below. Obviously, the audience's orientation must be the same in both scenes: outside the garden and prison tower.

I.i is not numbered and Acts II and III are misnumbered as follows: II.i, ii, iii, iv, iv, vi; III.i, ii, iii, iv, vi, vii. So far as can be determined from an analysis of the play's structure, the errors do not seem to have resulted from an alteration of the play's original order of scenes.

The three are D'Avenant's The Cruel Brother and The Just Italian, both King's plays published in 1630, and The Valiant Scot, an anonymous "Red Bull-King's" play published in 1637.

Since the quarto was set up by two compositors, the possibility arises that the errors came about as one compositor left off and the second took over, getting mixed up in the count in the process. But their work was not so divided as to make this likely.

Cf. W. W. Greg, Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses . . . Commentary (1931), p. 207.

"The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (I)," Studies in Bibliography, VIII (1956), 138-142.

The count is my own but the tabulation is based upon various tests first developed by R. B. McKerrow, ed., The Spanish Curate, in the Variorum Beaumont and Fletcher, vol. II (1905); A. H. Thorndike, op. cit.; W. E. Farnham, "Colloquial Contractions in Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, and Shakespeare as a Test of Authorship," PMLA, XXXI (1916), 326-359; and A. C. Partridge, The Problem of "Henry VIII" Reopened (1949); see also Cyrus Hoy's article in Studies.

Op. cit., n. 8, p. 113.

It may be instructive to glance at the other Fletcher texts printed by Thomas Cotes, whose shop produced the Kinsmen. It was Cotes, of course, who printed the second Shakespeare Folio of 1632; his reprint therein of Henry VIII reproduces all the ye's from the First Folio text, in the scenes assigned to Fletcher. In 1639 he printed Wit Without Money, a play traditionally attributed to Fletcher alone, but one which, because of the linguistic pattern it exhibits, Dr. Hoy suggests was revised or rewritten by another hand. Wit Without Money shows only one ye, printed as yeare; the form may mean that while a systematic effort was made to remove Fletcher's ye's, in this instance a copy ye are was passed over because it was misread as year (e). But otherwise, the linguistic pattern is pretty clearly Fletcher's, even to the consistent spelling 'um for 'em, a form which Dr. Hoy cites as Fletcher's. Cotes's final Fletcher quarto is The Night Walker, printed in 1640. There is external evidence that it was revised by Shirley in 1633, and the greatly reduced number of ye's the play shows may undoubtedly be attributed to Shirley's hand; furthermore, a number of spellings which appear to be Shirley's, such as wonnot or wo'not, are distributed throughout the text. The known fact of Shirley's revision and the additional fact that neither Wit Without Money nor The Night Walker were King's plays make it impossible, of course, that the quartos could have had a common scribal background. The variations in the linguistic patterns of the three plays also remove the printing house as a likely factor in the diminution of Fletcher's ye's.

Most of the play's unusual or archaic spellings also appear in the non-Fletcherian scenes; see below.

Actually, Chambers puts the passage at lines 23-38, rather than 22-38. The points of division Chambers indicates apparently go back to William Spalding's "Letter on Shakspere's Authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen" of 1833, reprinted in Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, Series VIII, No. 1 (1876), 1-109, and Harold Littledale's introduction to his edition of the play, also published in the Transactions, Series II, No. 15 (1885), 9-82. Line 23 is the second line of a new speech, and Spalding put the point of division in the very middle of the line without explaining why; since there is nothing particularly un-Fletcherian about line 22, there is no reason why Fletcher should not be given the whole of the speech with which the passage begins, and, as is shown below, there is reason to assign it all to him.

In an article on the authorship of the play which appeared in Modern Philology, XXXVI (1939), 255-276, Theodore Spencer also suggests that the disappointing qualities of Shakespeare's scenes are due to the author's lack of attentive care, although he attributes the lapse to psychological causes as well as the company's pressure: "It is the dramatic writing of a man to whom action has lost importance, but who is trying to recapture, for the immediate necessity of writing a money-making play, the devices and the lost enthusiasm of a forgotten intensity. It is the writing of a man who has come out on the other side of human experience, and who, looking back, can no longer be interested in what he has once seen so vividly and so passionately felt" (p. 264).