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Notes
It is true that one of the more substantial pieces of evidence in favor of memorial transmission involves what appears to be knowledge in the A-text of episodes in the B-text either not used in A or else so materially altered as to represent quite independent treatment in A. If the view of this evidence is reversed and the references become not debased memorial recollection in A of the present scenes in B but instead B-text revisions, as I propose to argue, the case for A1 as a bad quarto is weakened but not, I am strongly inclined to think, destroyed. Greg himself had his moments of concern about various discrepancies in this evidence and in its direction when he contemplated seriously as an alternative the possibility: perhaps revision unknown to the A-reporter had been made in the manuscript underlying the B-text on the occasion of the conjectured purchase of a Pembroke's men promptbook in 1593 for the acting of the play by the Admiral's company in the autumn of 1594. In the end, however, he decided (pp. 95-97) that the weight of the evidence was not sufficiently in favor of such revision to warrant the complexities of hypothesis that would follow, and thus he decided to 'proceed on the assumption that the B-text is substantially of one date, and represents the play as drafted in the autumn of 1592.'
Thomas Bushell, the publisher of the 1604 quarto, entered for his copy on 7 January 1601, almost two years before the payment on 22 November 1602 to Rowley and Birde. It is a reasonable conjecture that the copy used for entrance did not differ from that in the 1604 quarto, whether or not lost editions intervened between 1601 and 1604. That is, although it might be theoretically possible for Bushell between 1602 and 1604 to have acquired a redaction of the A-text containing the additions that differed from the original copy he had entered, the consequences of this line of speculation are scarcely to be contemplated: it would follow either (a) Bushell purchased a memorial text in 1601 and then a second memorial text after 1602; or (b) Bushell purchased a good text in 1601 but published a different shortened and debased text, still without the additions, in 1604.
A Shrew, II.i.79-80, 'To seeke for strange and new-found pretious stones, | And dive into the Sea to gather pearle' from Faustus, 109-112, 'I'le have them flie to India for gold; | Ransacke the Ocean for Orient Pearle, | And search all corners of the new-found-world | For pleasant fruites, and Princely delicates' (I.i). (All quotations from Faustus and line-numbers are from my edition of Marlowe [Cambridge University Press, 1973].) Second, A Shrew, III.vi. 31-32, 'As once did Orpheus with his harmony, | And ravishing sound of his melodious Harpe' from Faustus, 579-581, 'And hath not he that built the walles of Thebes | With ravishing sound of his melodious Harpe, | Made musicke with my Mephistophilis?' (II.ii).
A Shrew, Induction,i.9-12, 'Now that the gloomie shadow of the night | Longing to view Orions drisling lookes | Leapes from th' antarticke world unto the skie | And dims the welkin with her pitchy breath', which is identical with Faustus 229-232 (I. iii) except that the A-text has 'earth' where A Shrew and the B-text read 'night'.
A Shrew, II.ii.1-4, 'Boy. Come hither, sirrha, boy. | Sander. Boy, oh disgrace to my person, sowns, boy of your face, you have many boies with such pickadevantes, I am sure'. Here the Faustus A-text, though departing slightly in other respects, reads the key word 'pickadevaunts' whereas the closer B-text (probably by the ministration of the inscriber or editor) reads 'beards.' A-text, 'Wag. Sirra boy, come hither. | Clo. How, boy? swowns boy, I hope you have seene ma-|ny boyes with such pickadevaunts as I have. Boy quotha?'; B-text, 343-345, 'Wagner. Come hither sirra boy. | Robin. Boy? O disgrace to my person: Zounds, boy in your face, you have seene many boyes with such beards I am sure' (I.iv).
With these must almost certainly be associated lines 1154.2-1203.1, the beginning of Scene xi (IV.i), which introduce Martino, Frederick, and Benvolio and detail the preparations for the entrance of the Emperor with Faustus, and no doubt lines 1316-1320, Benvolio's threats at the conclusion of the scene which prepare for the action of Scenes xii-xiii.
The variations in the Old Man's lines are also in question, as is the Scholars' discovery of Faustus' body, and will be considered later.
Greg's reasoning in this matter is almost wholly directed by his feeling that additions of this nature and extent would necessarily represent the Rowley-Birde additions, which he is unwilling to admit. He is well aware of the difficulties of his position but believes that he is choosing the lesser of two evils. Similarly, although tempted by the hypothesis for some revision in 1594, he does not concede that the weight of the evidence justifies any departure from his general position that the B-text throughout is unified and was prepared only from the original foul papers, any revision in these being confined substantially to Marlowe's second thoughts made in the promptbook itself as represented by the A-text report.
From the presence in the B-text of seemingly original lines 760-772, 774, missing from the A-text Chorus, we know that this Chorus was available in the manuscript and was not an A-text invention. The curious anomaly in B 845-846 sounds almost as if it were Mephostophilis who had been suggesting a trip through Rome and it was Faustus, not Mephostophilis, who was urging participation in the feast before seeing the sights. Some slight possibility may exist that the reviser proposed to cut or alter part of the A-text beginning the scene, as well as the Chorus, but if so it is clear that the particular original manuscript from which the B-text inscriber was working had not been adjusted to correspond with the reviser's papers. There is no dispute between the two texts, however, that the initial arrival in the Pope's palace was merely to have a pied à terre, and the decision to participate in the feast before sightseeing — no matter who proposed it — followed as a consequence.
See 868 in this scene and references below. A completed line of this sort indicated earlier in the Cambridge text at 595 may be authentic or accidental. The tendency, though more marked in the work of this reviser than in the original, is not a prominent one, however: see 889-890 and 901-902 for opportunities that he passed over.
Just possibly the reviser proposed to excise Wagner's original soliloquy as the devils carry in the banquet (1674-80) since it is not essential to the action at this point, although closer to the Historie than the revision. The new position has the virtue of associating Wagner's farewell with that of the Scholars and thus of concentrating the material.
That the visions of heaven and of hell require elaborate stage properties has been taken as evidence that these lines were omitted in the A-text although present in the original manuscript. This might provide an acceptable reason were it not that it does not apply to 1880-91 within the action — Mephostophilis' exultation over Faustus — nor to the following dialogue in 1892-1898 between the Good and Bad Angels. Moreover, if the exigencies of provincial performance had prevented a descent of the throne, only minor adjustment in the Good Angel's lines 1899-1908 would be necessary to do without it, and not much more in the Bad Angel's description of the torments in hell and his farewell (1909-25) that follows just before the clock strikes eleven and Marlowe's own great final soliloquy begins. However, once the stylistic link of the couplets and the completed part lines is made with the other sections of the play unique with the B-text, the too easy rationalization of the A-text omissions here as stemming from provincial performance loses its pertinence.
However, the two farcical scenes are by the same writer, whether or not he was the author of the other additions. One cannot be an addition and the other a fragment of the original version omitted in the A-text.
Total memorial failure is not a convincing explanation given the acceptable memorial reconstruction of other farcical scenes such as the initial one between Wagner and Robin or the Horse-courser episode, or the conjuring of Robin and Dick. As for cutting for provincial performance, one may reasonably enquire why one of the better farcical episodes would be selected for omission in both its parts.
The Historie recounted the magical erection of a castle in the air and a tour through it by the participants in the adventure, an episode that would seem to defy staging and is therefore only mentioned at the start of the scene. Thereafter the Historie furnished only the relatively thin action of the grapes.
Another A-text 'echo' is perhaps even clearer as, instead, part of the B-text's transfer of original A-text material to the new Scene xv. The slightly unusual word 'Hostry' (or 'Ostry') is first found in B-text's Scene vii (II.iii), 733, in Robin's warning to Dick not to interfere with his conjuring, although missing in the memorially transmitted combined A-text version of this scene coming later. In the B-text it is next used in Scene xv, 1552, in the Horse-courser's narrative in the tavern. Here the word seems to have been taken over by the reviser from the A-text of Scene xiv (Greg, Scene xi, lines 1214-15) when the Horse-courser promises Mephostophilis forty more dollars to release him after he has pulled off Faustus' leg: 'come to my Oastrie, and Ile give them you.' It is interesting that a discrepancy appears between Scenes xiv and xv that involves this word. In Scene xv the Horse-courser boasts of Faustus' leg: 'now 'tis at home in mine Hostry' (this the phrase taken over from the A-text lines 1214-15) although in the B-text Scene xiv he proposed in his escape 'to cast this leg into some ditch or other'. The A-text does not mention the fate of the leg; thus it is as possible that the casting into a ditch is a carelessness on the part of the B-reviser as it is a lapse in the memorial report of the A-text. However, on the evidence of the use of 'Hostry' in the B-text Scene xv borrowed from the A-text of Scene xiv, Mephistophilis was present in the original Scene xiv, as in the A-text, and it was the reviser who removed him although forgetting to delete his name from the opening stage-direction. This appears to be the true explanation for his presence in the direction, not contamination from the A-text affecting a careless editor-inscriber of Scene xiv from the original manuscript.
Allied to this, in some part, is Greg's objection that if the unique B-scenes are removed, thus taking away much of the substance of the comic action of Acts III and IV, he does not see that very much is left of the original play. This objection is overstated. The A-text Acts III and IV still hold the three essential comic actions at Rome, at the Emperor's court, and at Vanholt, plus the farcical Horse-courser scene and, combined, the farcical scenes of Robin's theft of Faustus' magic book, the affair of the silver goblet, and the conjuring of Mephostophilis. If due account is taken of the normal reduction in the length of memorially reported scenes, something of a reasonable acting version of about 2,000 lines would result.
What follows is more speculative than the case that has been presented for the identification of the 1602 additions and should not be taken as in any sense affecting the virtue of the argument for these.
This speculation reverses Greg who takes it that the re-entrance is not really continuous action but a clumsy expedient of the A-text memorial reconstruction which had united, or rather associated, the two independent scenes in the original as represented by the B-text. Not much faith can be placed in Greg's surely desperate guess that the two scenes in the A-text may have been alternatives.
A similar splitting of the continuous action of an A-scene, presumably by the reviser, occurs when the Horse-courser episode is staged as an independent scene in the B-text (this Scene xiv suggested as reworked) whereas in the A-text it was continuous with the Emperor Carolus scene.
These duplications or awkwardnesses suggest, as has been remarked in Scene viii at Rome, that he had written out his revisions and additions independently and that the B-text was set from his original papers, a conjecture perhaps assisted by the theatrical nature of his stage-directions in contrast to the non-theatrical nature of directions in the B-text set from the earlier manuscript in places where it had not been retouched save perhaps by the inscriber. In Scene viii he definitely does not seem to have reworked the basic manuscript to fit in his new material. Whatever the nature of the manuscripts available to the inscriber of the final copy sent to the printer of the 1616 quarto (and he may not have reinscribed the reviser's new and worked-over scenes but only the papers of the original manuscript that were seemingly in less clean form), it was clearly not the prompt-book.
Mephistophilis' preliminary to the offer of the book, in what is almost certainly a Marlovian passage, begins with 'Marriage is but a ceremoniall toy' and ends 'Ready to execute what thou commands' (535-549). The interpolation in the A-text (whether by the original collaborator or by actors' gag) follows in prose in which Faustus requests further books but Mephostophilis shows that all the information he wants is in the one he has presented. Then in the A-text without interruption, but in the B-text after Faustus' thanks and in a new scene, Marlowe's part resumes with 'When I behold the heavens then I repent.'
That is, it would be possible to argue that the revision of Mephistophilis' presentation of the book might be laid to the editor (or inscriber) who found that the prose continuation of lines 551.1-13 was not present in his manuscript (and thus would represent unauthoritative A-text expansion) and being at a loss how to close the scene he replaced the lines by the thanks to Lucifer from the next scene. Either speculation is not without its problems, however. Although the A-text transition without scene division is certainly abrupt and may represent some difficulty in the original play, yet a continuous action is not impossible. On the other hand, the start of a new scene in the B-text violates the stage-convention that characters who have just left the stage empty should not immediately re-enter unless the action is to be taken as continuous. It may be that the B-text's direction to Scene vi — 'Enter Faustus in his Study, and Mephostophilis' — was supposed to indicate the passage of time by a difference in locale; nevertheless, it is interesting that someone saw the need for a transition and ineptly inserted the short form of the Chorus 2. Perhaps a new Chorus was intended but was not written or else was lost and the A-text's stage production merely continued the scene. Yet if the basic manuscript the inscriber was consulting for the B-text did not contain the A-text's form of continuation, how did it end the scene; or did it, in turn, continue like the A-text and it was the editor-inscriber who marked the end of one scene and the start of another?
Greg is forced to assume that the B-text represents the version in Marlowe's foul papers which he reworked in the promptbook and thus that his own revision comes down to us in the A-text; but such authorial reworking in the prompt copy itself is unusual and an unnecessarily complex hypothesis. Moreover, in my view this part of the scene is not Marlowe's. The language associates it with his collaborator.
Greg is inclined to accept the lines as Marlowe's (p. 127). In support one may mention the merest gossamer of evidence in the phrase used at 1993 by the Third Scholar, 'At which selfe time the house seem'd all on fire,' a somewhat uncommon idiom that parallels 'Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd, | In one selfe place', 510-511, lines that are indubitably Marlowe's. Yet against this evidence could be placed the phrase 'the Doctor' in 1987, 'Pray heaven the Doctor have escapt the danger', a form of reference characteristic exclusively of the added scenes in the B-text, as in lines 1183, 1222, 1294, 1553, 1557, 1658.
Cf. in Scene viii 'State Pontificall', 870; 'Statutes Decretall', 883; 'authority Apostolicall', 923; 'blessing Apostolicall', 973; and in Scene xi, 'state Majesticall', 1233.
These pronounced Rowleyan characteristics, including a predilection for couplet writing, are confined to the unique B-scenes; hence the presence of Rowley cannot properly be argued for in the original collaboration. As for Birde, no identified specimen of his writing has been preserved. He collaborated with Rowley in a lost play called Judas late in 1601.
Little parallelism exists between the forcible abduction by the three devils of Benvolio, Frederick, and Martino, with the particular punishment of being dragged through the mud meted out to Martino, and the escape of the Germans from Bardolph. His entrance bemired may be only a sight-gag, and the association of the three Germans with the three devils of Scene xii may be fortuitous. The heart of the allusion lies in the speed with which the three Germans escaped as if they were supernatural beings, or three magical Doctor Faustuses. The reference to the magic-making of Doctor Faustus is clear enough, but not necessarily an allusion to this specific scene. Indeed, if a choice had to be made, I should prefer the supposed paraphrase in A Shrew as the more convincing, conventional as it may be with the act of mincing someone's body, or with the quite ordinary use of 'sands' for number as in Dido, III.i. 87-88, 'where Ile offer up | As many kisses as the Sea hath sands,' a parallel scarcely to be confined to Marlowe, of course.
The case certainly cannot be demonstrated, but it would be an oddity for Wright to go to the expense in 1616 of securing a new and improved text of Faustus for a revised edition and then to accept one that did not contain the Rowley-Birde additions that should have retained a prominent part in the new look given the old play and would have been current on the stage, or at least in the memory of various purchasers, in 1616. It is at least worthy of notice that although the 1616 titlepage (which was clearly set under the influence of the quarto of 1611) perhaps inadvertently did not mention the new text, Wright's next edition of 1619 advertised 'With new Additions.' In my view the delay has no significance. Similar advertisements in other dramatic quartos (when they are not false) usually refer to revisions; hence the evidential value of the 1619 titlepage as bearing on the Rowley-Birde question cannot be ignored. It is quite possible to argue that the impetus for the publication of a new text of the play in 1616 was the opportunity that had arisen for Wright to secure these 1602 revisions.
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