University of Virginia Library

Beggars Bush: A Reconstructed Prompt-Book and Its Copy
by
Fredson Bowers [*]

The play Beggars Bush in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon is known in four early documents: (1) a private-transcript manuscript in the Lambarde volume preserved in the Folger Shakespeare Library; (2) a text in the 1647 Folio; (3) a separate quarto reprint in 1661 from this Folio without authority; (4) a text in the 1679 Folio reprinted from 1647 but with a few alterations that must derive from some authoritative source, either the Lambarde manuscript or its ancestor prompt-book. The Lambarde manuscript is in the hand of the scribe who wrote a presentation copy for the king of Suckling's Aglaura before the court performance of the Christmas season 1637/38, and is presumably of about the same date.

The history of the date and composition of Beggars Bush is obscure. It has long been conjectured that more than one hand could be detected in the play. The latest and most careful study, based on the linguistic evidence of contractions and of forms like ye-you, hath-h'as-ha'-have, and doth-does, assigns Act I and V.ii.1-65 to Massinger, Acts II and V.i, ii.65-255 to Beaumont, and Acts III-IV to Fletcher.[1] Although difficulties are present in this assignment, on the whole it may serve as the basis for a working hypothesis.[2] As early as 1935 W. J.

Lawrence observed the use of periods for commas in some of the stage-directions of the 1647 Folio[3] in the manner of Massinger's holograph Believe as You List and suggested that the copy had been partly in Massinger's hand and of his composition.[4] The late R. C. Bald in his Bibliographical Studies in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 (1938), pp. 62-64, after noticing these periods remarked that the Lambarde manuscript on the other hand was manifestly transcribed from a prompt-copy and that its liberal use of colons to punctuate stage-directions suggested the hand of the scribe who wrote out the manuscript of The Honest Mans Fortune and who annotated Massinger's manuscript of Believe as You List. Called 'Jhon' by Bald, this scribe has more recently been identified as Edward Knight, who had connections with the King's Men in 1616 and is known in the early 1630's, and probably before, to have been their book-keeper.

The date of Knight's transcript of the prompt-book almost certainly cannot have approximated that of the original composition and sale of the play if it were indeed one of Beaumont's last contributions to the stage, probably in 1613-14, when Massinger was beginning to take over as Fletcher's collaborator. The stylistic evidence clearly indicates that Massinger was one of the play's original authors and his connection with it was not that of a later reviser. On the whole it is easier to interpret the evidence that Knight's prompt-book was transcribed in the early 1620's (possibly even for the court performance on December 27, 1622, or at any later date, as for court performances in 1630 or 1636) than to argue that Massinger's share in the play was that of a reviser.[5] Fortunately, the matter of the divided authorship is not of

major importance for the present enquiry since the evidence of the idiosyncratic periods in the stage-directions appears to establish that the manuscript given to the printer of the 1647 Folio was a fair copy by Massinger of substantially the whole play (possibly excepting V.ii. 65-255 in the original papers), his copy being the holograph papers of the other authors as well as his own. Similarly, the idiosyncratic colons in the directions of the Lambarde manuscript establish the presence of the book-keeper Edward Knight in its copy, although the Lambarde manuscript is of course not in his hand.[6]

The relationship between the texts of the Folio and MS has not previously been studied in detail. A multiplicity of 'bibliographical links' establishes that the copy behind each, although not identical, was relatively similar in its accidental characteristics. Only a sample need be given. If we take I.iii as an example, the work of Compositor A in the Folio after the first dozen lines, we find that in line 15 both texts spell the city as Bruges but in line 54 both have the rare variant Brugis. At line 23 both have a colon after way and follow with a capitalized But against their usual practice; both want a comma that might be expected after denyall in line 35; both have a colon after prosperity (40), a purely caesural comma after price (68), no pointing after 'em (85), parentheses at 93-95 and 105,[7] and another colon followed by an unusual capital at 103. MS spells Indico, Quitcheneel and Folio Indico, Quitchineel (120); more parentheses come at 148 and 150; at 65 both texts spell 'pric'd' as priz'd although price (as a noun) is found in both at 68 but prices in MS and prizes in F at 126; and at

157 both agree in preheminence. Elsewhere, both agree in the important matter of erroneous verse lining at I.iii.128-129; II.i.51-52, 62-63, 181-182, 200-201; III.i.144; III.ii.31; III.iv.145-146; III.v.38-39; IV.i.37-38; V.i.27-28; and V.ii.248-249. Cumulatively, the number of agreements in small details despite compositorial styling in F and double scribal styling in MS indicates that in many more cases than might reasonably have been expected, characteristics of a basic underlying copy have been preserved in both documents.

A simple conclusion can be drawn from the total evidence:[8] the original fair copy made by Massinger for the King's Men was preserved and was given to the printer of the 1647 Folio. Correspondingly, these identical papers had previously been copied by Edward Knight to make up a prompt-book; and from this prompt-book was copied the presentation Lambarde MS. The evidence permits no other ready interpretation, and no unknown intermediaries appear to exist in this transmission. Hence the Folio is at one remove from the Massinger fair copy—the closest we can get to the original authorial papers—and the MS is at two removes. The relationship thus is a radiating one in which the branch represented by MS derives from Massinger's papers through Knight's lost prompt-book.

The establishment of this relationship between the two major preserved documents offers a valuable opportunity to compare a prompt-book with its immediate source, the fair-copy manuscript given to the company by one of the authors. The opportunity is the more to be treasured in that a possible date for Knight's transcript closely approximates the printing of the Shakespeare First Folio. Many speculations about the printer's copy given Jaggard at this time, and how it can be recovered from the printed text, center on the relation of authorial manuscripts to prompt-books.

Although both Massinger's manuscript and the prompt-book may be assumed to have undergone some form of alteration in the process of typesetting and of re-inscription,[9] their common features offer trustworthy evidence about what they were like in the originals, and the causes for significant variation can usually be assigned. The MS is divided into acts only, scenes not being numbered, whereas the Folio breaks up the same acts into numbered scenes. Two and perhaps three errors in F's numbering appear. The first scene of Act I consists of 61

lines of dialogue between a Merchant and Herman. After the first half of line 61 the Merchant's exit is marked, but no exit (as is present in MS) is given for Herman after his concluding half-line although it is clear that he must leave the stage and that a change of place occurs between the first scene and the second that follows between Woolfort and Hubert. At any rate F marks no new scene here, and when the third scene comes along, it is Scœna Secunda. This third scene ends the act so that no further opportunity for misnumbering was offered. In II.iii.184 there is a general exeunt marked and a clear stage but the Folio does not mark a new scene when Florez and Hemskirk (who have just before made separate exits) return to arrange for their duel. A change of place is necessary, and indeed the exits of both of the principals had prepared for a change on their re-entrance, for otherwise they could have remained behind for their discussion after the general exeunt. The third case is less certain. In Act III a clear stage occurs after III.iii.13 when Hubert exits following the announcement of his plan to disguise himself as a huntsman. The beggars then enter to sit in justice on the captured boors and Hemskirk. The scene is the wood but not necessarily the same place, and indeed since Hubert enters to them at line 77 the most natural implication would be that he has found them in another part of the wood. However, no doubt this is an over-scrupulous view for Elizabethan staging, and thus despite the clear stage a numbered scene iv is not quite certain. On the other hand, the case seems a little more definite when after IV.iv.74 Hubert and Hemskirk exit to clear the stage but no scene number is given in the Folio before the entrance of Gerrard and the beggars, and, later, of Hubert. The later entrance of Hubert suggests a change of scene since he could have stayed behind to meet the beggars after Hemskirk's exit if the scene had remained continuous.

For Believe as You List in 1631, conjecturally eighteen years later than his manuscript of Beggars Bush, Massinger wrote out the scene numbers, which Knight then deleted when he made the manuscript into a prompt-book. It is also significant, perhaps, that in Knight's manuscript of The Honest Mans Fortune in 1624 scene numbers are not present. The lack of scene numbers is not unexpected in MS, therefore, and of itself offers no evidence about the condition of Massinger's copy. It is possible, however, that this evidence is in fact contained in the Folio. At the end of I.ii, since only the Merchant was given an exit and an exit was not marked for Herman after his concluding half line, Compositor B, if he were himself numbering the scenes, could readily have been misled into thinking that the scene

continued and the stage was not clear.[10] Similarly, at IV.iv.76 an error appears where Hubert's parting remark to Hemskirk has an exit instead of exeunt placed after it. It may be that Compositor A was misled by the faulty direction he had just set (no doubt from an abbreviation such as is found here in MS) into thinking that the stage was not clear and that the scene continued. On the other hand, given the order of setting the Folio pages as $2v:3, $2:3v, $1v:4, and $1:4v it is obvious that no compositor could in fact number the scenes as a part of his typesetting. As an illustration, Compositor B would have set 'Scœna Secunda.' for I.iii on sig. Kk2v before he had any idea whether there was or was not a scene division on Kk2. Thus if the omission of the numbering of I.ii and IV.v (and very likely of II.iv and III.iv) occurred in the printing shop in an attempt to number the scenes of an unnumbered manuscript, the blame must be laid on someone who went through the manuscript marking the scenes for the compositors but making four mistakes, two of which can be laid to faults or ambiguities in the directions of the copy. This seems to be the conclusion to which the evidence leads.[11]

The survival of authorial stage-directions in the transcript of a prompt-book is always interesting. In F the Massingerean directions are brief and business-like entrances and exits, with very few descriptive features, and so are those of MS: the scribe of the prompt-book seems to have copied directions verbatim from Massinger's manuscript. Thus whenever the text as in F expands a simple entrance or exit, the MS repeats, even in such a permissive direction as III.i.o.1, 'Enter three or foure Boores';[12] other examples are 'Enter Higgen like a Sowgelder, singing' (II.i.3.1), 'Enter Gerrard like a blinde Aquavitœ-man, and a boy singing the Song' (III.i.96.1),[13] 'Enter Hubert like a Huntesman' (III.iii.o.1), 'Enter Higgen . . . and the rest with Boores (III.iv.

0.1),[14] 'Enter with a drum Van-donck, Merchants, Higgen, Prig, Ferret, Snap' (V.ii.130.1), or 'Exeunt all but Beggars' (V.ii.130.1). In such directions the only difference between F and MS is that F may add articles or connectives that were usually wanting in the copy, such as 'and' in I.iii.62.1 and IV.vi.12.1; 'with' at V.ii.109; and 'a' at V.ii.130.1, although sometimes it is the opposite. With only one exception (V.ii. 64) where the order of two names in a group is reversed, MS repeats the exact order of the names as found in F. Some differences in directions may be laid to the account either of the F compositors or the MS scribe. At II.i.142.1 where F reads '——strike', MS has the full direction, which is necessary, 'Strike musick.' MS 'and Piper' seems to have been added in the prompt-book to Higgen's entrance at III.i.3.1, although an F omission is not impossible. The direction is correct, for the piper is addressed in line 17. At V.i.70.1 F omits Bertha's entrance, presumably from oversight. The MS also has a few errors where F is correct, these, probably, to be attributed to the scribe and not to copy. An example comes at IV.vi.12.1 where for F 'Enter Vanlock and Francis' MS reads, 'Enter Vand: M rs Fran:', but in the next line the MS speech-prefix is correctly 'Vanlok.' and it would seem only that the scribe was misled on this first appearance of a new character whose name began with Van. At IV.vi.63 where F reads 'Ser. within.' as a speech-prefix, the MS omission of 'within' could be a scribal or a prompt-book error although no entrance and exit are provided for the servant before he brings the called-for cloak at line 97.1 (this latter direction is omitted in MS). At IV.vi.69 whether the MS direction accurately reflects the prompt-book or is a result of the scribe's condensation (the only known case) is difficult to determine. The Folio reads 'Enter Bertha. Van-donck, and the rest Merchants'. This looks as though Massinger's copy had added 'Merchants' to give a precision to the general phrase 'the rest' in the foul papers on which it was presumably drawing. Oddly, MS reads 'Enter: Bertha: Vandunck &c'. Such vagueness seems odd in a prompt-book, especially when its copy had been reasonably precise, and it may not have been the original: in MS the direction, though on a separate line, was started to the right, and the '&c' hits the right margin. Hence it is possible that the scribe used this device instead of copying a second line of direction once he had begun his inscription with too little space. The MS omission of 'againe' from F's 'Holla againe' (V.i.82) may be the prompt's condensation since it was superfluous.

As expected, the Lambarde MS directions contain various additions to Massinger's fair copy as preserved in the Folio. It is more than possible, also, that not all of the prompt-book's additions have been retained in MS, since some slight evidence exists that the scribe passed over a few directions that could have appeared in the margins outside the text, like the omission of F's exit for Margaret at II.iii.43 or the final exit for the scene at III.v.48 and again at IV.i.73.[15] At I.ii.o.1 MS adds Hemskirk to the entrance direction. Some guard for Hubert is manifestly required, and—though mute—Hemskirk is the natural agent for Woolfort to have used to intercept Hubert's flight, although for all we know Massinger may have intended no more than the usual supernumerary guards. The F omission of the direction for Bertha's entrance in V.i.70.1 may be an F error and not a prompt addition preserved in the Lambarde MS, but sometimes authors' papers are not impeccable in their entrances, although this missing one is egregious. All the other additions are concerned with properties. In the margin to the left of the opening direction for II.iii, MS adds 'Table out:'. As part of the centered opening direction for III.i MS adds after the entrance, 'A table kans, and stooles sett out'. Before Higgen's entrance at III.i.3 MS reads to the left, 'Winde a Sowgelders horn within'. At III.iv.97.1 where F had read 'Enter Ferret. a letter.', MS has 'Enter Ferrett: with y e Paper'. At IV.iii.14 MS adds to the right, braced, 'Drum, flourish | Peeces discharg | Enter saylors'.[16] At IV.v.29 to F's 'Enter Hubert' MS adds the property warning 'a letter', the paper being used at line 39. At IV.vi.o.1 MS adds 'severallie' to F's 'Enter two young Merchants.' Somewhat superfluously, MS changes F 'Enter Woolfort, Hemskirke, and Attendants' (V.i.51.1) to 'Enter Woolfort: Hemskirk, Guard and Attendants:' in a direction where Massinger had seemingly thought of the attendants as comprising the guard. The MS addition '(Hubert hollowes within)' wanting in F at V.i.44.1 may just possibly be evidence for an F error of omission, for this holla is mentioned in line 82 when F reads 'Holla againe.'

A few prompt directions may perhaps be recovered from the 1679 Folio, which has clearly been compared with a theatrical copy and changes noted in the 1647 text used by the 1679 printer. For example, at II.iii.137.1 where neither 1647 nor MS has a direction, 1679 specifies 'He gets Hemskirks sword and cuts him on the head.' This specification of the kind of wound, or even that Hemskirk is wounded at all, could not have been drawn from the context. That this may not be a sophistication in 1679 but an omission by the MS scribe may be suggested because MS has a dash after the line which it should follow, this dash being customary in MS to separate the text from a direction written to the right on the same line. Thus it would appear that this is one of the marginal directions omitted by the MS scribe even though he copied the dash. A few lines before, at line 135, the 1679 direction 'Strikes him.'—though obvious from the context—is also very likely a prompt-book addition wanting in F (and MS) since in MS the text-line here is also followed by a telltale dash. On the other hand, at III.iv.36 the 1679 addition 'Beat one another.' wanting in F and MS may not necessarily have come from the prompt-book since the context would provide the direction and there is no dash in MS.

A clearcut theatrical direction appears in the MS variant from 1647, where the F direction at IV.i.40.1 'Enter Higgen. and Prig. like Porter[s]' is changed in MS to 'Enter Higg: and Prig like Boores', this no doubt on the principle of economy, or precision, since disguise as boors is required for them later at V.i.98.1. But the prompt-book seems to have omitted on several occasions to specify necessary action beyond Massinger's incomplete or ambiguous directions as found in F. The prompt-book acceptance of Massinger's 'Enter three or foure Boores' at III.i.o.1 has been noticed above. More to the point, at III.ii. 32 MS follows the F form of the direction, 'Enter Gerrard and Beggars.', without specifying that in fact they have doffed their disguises as beggars and adopted some other, for Florez does not recognize them (lines 39-41). Moreover, when at line 49.1 Gerrard returns after reassuming his disguise as Clause, no mention in either is made of this necessary change back to his customary appearance. Correspondingly, although at IV.i.40.1 the prompt-book had altered Massinger's disguise of Higgen and Prig from porters to boors, when they participate in IV.iii in the general entrance direction no disguise is specified in F or in MS, yet they must be in the same habits as in IV.i. More important is the manner in which the prompt-book does not seem to have inserted a direction that was wanting in Massinger at V.i.55 when Woolfort orders his soldiers to search out the woman

to whom the Boor had been calling. Nor is the deficiency repaired when Bertha's entrance at line 70.1 (missing in F) is added marginally —probably by Knight—merely as 'Enter: Bertha', for according to line 55 she should be brought in by the soldiers who made their exit at line 55. This appears to be a clear case of Knight's failing to make good the inadequacies of the author's copy for staging. (The soldiers are later mentioned at V.ii.64, but there they are part of the F direction as well.) Another omission in the prompt-book caused by Knight's failure to annotate his copy occurs at III.iv.42 where the simple direction 'Enter Hemskirck.' lacks the necessary addition that he was brought in by guards. More careless was the important failure to add Hemskirk, who was missing in Massinger's copy (and who should have had an exit at line 65), to the group entrance at V.ii.109 although it is clear that he musters in the captives at this point. At II.iii.164 both texts omit Bertha from the exit given Florez.

These are simple omissions caused by failure to annotate the author's copy properly in making up the prompt-book. On another occasion Knight carelessly followed his copy in reproducing positive error. In both F and MS Jacqueline is named in the general entrance at II.i.o.1 although she does not actually make her entrance until line 171. However, at 171 the true entrance is noted in both and so no harm is done, even though it was careless to leave her name standing after the right action had been observed. The most serious error of all was not caused by Knight following his deficient copy but instead by his misinterpreting the staging intended by Massinger though not specified owing to the omission of a crucial stage-direction. In IV.vi Gerrard (as Clause) orders Florez (as Goswin) to redeem his pledge and to leave his bride and the wedding to follow him. Florez' pleas are ignored until finally Gerrard tells him (lines 94-95), 'Then you must goe with me: I can stay no longer. | If ye be true, and noble——'. Both the broken-off speech (actually punctuated in F with a period but in MS with a colon) and Florez' reply, 'Hard heart, I'le follow:' indicate that Gerrard must make his exit here at line 95, but neither document has a direction. Florez then turns to address the guests, urging them to return inside the house and celebrate until his return, and in lines 100-101 he urges the host Van-dunk (though not by name), 'nay pray goe in Sir, | And take them with you, tis but a night lost Gentelmen.' Van-dunk responds by urging the guests to enter the house and promising them 'he cannot stay long from her | I am sure of that', to which Florez, completing line 104, responds, 'I will not stay; beleeve Sir.' Then in line 105 Florez turns to say farewell

to Bertha before making his exit at line 107. In F (and almost demonstrably in Massinger's copy) the simple word 'Exit.' is misplaced to follow Florez' 'I will not stay; beleeve Sir.' in line 104 (on the same line) instead of after line 103 to indicate the exit of Van-dunk and the wedding guests. The combination of the missing exit for Gerrard after line 95 and the misplaced exit in 104 in Massinger's manuscript, caused Knight to retain the faulty position and to take it that 'I will not stay; beleeve Sir' had been addressed to Gerrard; hence he amplified the copy 'Exit.' by altering it to the form found in MS in the same position, 'Ex t. Gerr:'. This is a real error since Massinger's intended staging is quite obvious.[17]

As in the above example, Massinger was by no means scrupulous in marking all necessary exits, and (again as in the above example) Knight in writing out the prompt-book did not himself provide very many of the missing exit directions. Thus both F and MS join in failing to note the exits that are required at I.ii.23; II.i.142, 187, 196, 208; III.ii.34; III.iv.40; V.i.150; V.ii.67; and V.ii.255.1, these in addition to the ones already mentioned. Exit directions missing in F are found in MS at II.ii.17 and IV.iii.40, whether added by Knight or omitted in printing F is not to be determined. The exits found in F but omitted in MS at II.iii.43, III.i.96, III.v.48, and IV.i.73 may be errors by the MS scribe.

The condition of Massinger's manuscript from which F was set and the prompt-book transcribed is a matter of some interest because comparison of the two documents enables one to recover certain unusual features of this manuscript that offer useful evidence for determining the causes of anomalies in other printed dramatic texts. At least two additions were made to Massinger's papers after he had inscribed them. The first of these occurs at III.iv.130 and concerns the position of Higgen's canting speech to Hubert. In the Lambarde MS all is in order. The disguised Hubert makes his offer to serve the beggars and is accepted by Gerrard (lines 119-120), who orders the beggars to welcome him. Higgen takes the duty upon himself, greets

Hubert, and then at line 130 is told by Gerrard, 'Now sweare him', after which appears the canting oath (lines 131-143),[18] ending 'Y'are wellcome Brother' (line 144). In F, on the other hand, Gerrard's 'Now sweare him' is followed by line 144 'You are welcom Brother', after which comes the dialogue of lines 145-157 including Hemskirk's being placed in Hubert's charge. Immediately after the part-line 157 (Hubert's 'And ye play tricks with me') occurs repeated line 130 'Now sweare him', followed by the oath, after which the text picks up again with the second half of line 157 (Gerrard's 'So, now come in'). Two points are of concern: first, material of a special interest—the canting oath—is misplaced in F; second, the misplaced oath is prefaced by the cue-line of the text, repeated, Gerrard's 'Now sweare him.' What seems to have happened is that the oath, an addition, was written on a separate piece of paper with the cue-line 'Gerrard. Now sweare him' prefixed as a key to its placement, but the position was mistaken by the F compositor. It is worth notice that the 1679 Folio, set from 1647 but with some reference to theatrical copy, places the oath correctly as in MS.

The second case is more difficult to assess. In MS at V.i.70.1 Bertha makes her entrance, is captured, and after Hemskirk and Woolfort have congratulated themselves on discovering her, Hubert hollos within as he approaches for the meeting. At this point in MS Bertha speaks three lines (lines 84-86):

after which Hubert enters with the disguised beggars. In F, on the other hand, the three lines of speech (84-86) are followed by a repetition of the first two lines with different spelling: Then comes a continuation of her lamenting speech for twelve lines (86-97), absent in MS, before she concludes with a repetition of the third line of the MS speech, after which Hubert and the beggars enter.

Once again the repetition of what appear to be the lines that key the speech in its proper place indicates that Bertha's brief three lines in Massinger's original manuscript were expanded by a dozen additional ones written on a separate sheet of paper with the cue. In this case, however, whether by accident or design, the prompt-book omitted these lines (followed again by 1679 in its treatment). Whether Knight overlooked the separate piece of paper on which they were written, or whether he rejected the expansion of the speech is not to be demonstrated. The point is that the omission of these lines in MS is not a theatrical cut of original material but either a cut or an error in treating an added passage.

Another difference between the two texts comes at III.i.42, where in F the MS song about the devil is omitted although the lines leading to it are preserved:

These lines are followed not by the song but by the resumption of the dialogue after it at line 60. Although there is some possibility that the indecency of the song led to its omission in the printing of F, the use in MS of an Italian hand for the song, as for the added canting oath, could suggest the contrary possibility—even though slight—that the play's songs were all inserted in the Massinger papers, written on separate sheets, the sheet for the devil-gelding song having been lost after transcription into the prompt-book.[19]

If Knight had annotated Massinger's fair copy in preparation for writing the prompt-book, and if the Folio printer had set these annotations, we should be completely unable to identify such markings, for F and MS would agree. Nevertheless, the various changes that Knight made in his transcription, and particularly their kind, seem to indicate that in preparation for this transcript he may have read over the play to familiarize himself with it, but he did not mark it. One piece of excellent evidence comes in the two changes that Knight introduced into the time-scheme. In the original papers, as demonstrated by the text of F, the Merchant, who in I.i receives the necessary exposition

of the antecedent action from Herman, had been absent for five years (I.i.7), during which time Woolfort's revolt had taken place followed by the flight of Gerrard bearing with him the young heir Florez. This time scheme was obviously absurd, since it allowed far too short an interval for Florez to be placed as a young child in England with Goswin, to become a man, and then to establish himself as a merchant in Bruges. Knight here altered 'five yeares absence' to ten years, as found in MS. The revision makes Florez' memory of his childhood in Flanders conveniently short, but no more than dramatic license permits, perhaps. Knight then made a consequential change in I.iii.140 that altered the period of Florez' charity to Clause from F three to MS seven years. This revision was by no means so strictly necessary and in one sense was really ill-advised since if Florez had been a merchant for seven years in Bruges he could have spent only three years in England, a complete impossibility. The virtue of the change as Knight saw it, perhaps, was to provide a longer time for the beggars to have amassed the huge sum with which they rescue Florez; but the new interval scarcely fits into Florez' personal history.

The Folio omits almost nothing from the MS text. The loss of Higgen's half-line 'I thanke your worshipps' at III.i.65 is certainly accidental. The omission at III.i.19 of 'Shees vengeance ranck o'th man' in F, coming after 'Canst thou tell me a way now, how to cut off my wives Concupiscence?' is uncertain whether simply the dropping of the last line of a speech by accident or else an act of censorship. No very serious formal censorship of oaths is evident in either text, both of which join without variation in the usual quotas of by the mass, slid, and faith. On the other hand, at III.i.131 and 132 F prints dashes to substitute for some indecency in the speech of the Second Boor. It seems possible that these dashes are not independent F censorship but instead the representation of dashes found in Massinger's manuscript, as indicated by the mildness of the MS substitutes, which in the first instance has 'Plague' and in the second, 'Pox'. Since one cannot imagine anybody deleting plague, or possibly pox, by a dash, it is reasonable to conjecture that Knight added what he thought was acceptable for the dashes he found in Massinger's papers. If so, it is likely that Massinger substituted the dashes for some indecency he found in Fletcher's original text. When F has Hubert harangue Woolfort as 'A Prince, in nothing but your princely lusts' where MS has 'beastlie lusts', censorship may have operated although compositorial memorial contamination is as possible as compositorial censorship. Only one other possible case of censorship occurs—this in MS—where the line

'No . . . impositions, taxes, grievances' (II.i.105) is omitted. This line might be taken as reflecting on the king; but another explanation for its omission is possible (see below).

In contrast to F, MS omits a number of lines. Various of these are cases of eyeskip, presumably by the MS scribe, such as the omission of 'to beleeve . . . dangerous' at I.ii.57-58, the half-line 'he . . . purveyers' (II.i.120), and the last line of two speeches (II.iii.18, IV.vi.72), 'It is not . . . from' (V.ii.89), and 'I speake . . . Hemskirck' (V.ii.133). Knight seems to have started by cutting what he considered to be repetitious parts of speeches. For instance, at I.ii.11-17 he may have felt that the sentiments in 'Who ever . . . prayers with' did not need the elaboration given them and removed the text as found in F. Similarly, later in the same scene he cut 'Despise them not . . . actions' in F I.ii. 108-114 perhaps because he found the hypocrisy was too blatant for Hubert to have swallowed. These are the only clearcut examples of Knight's editing by deletion, and it would seem that he soon gave up his initial intention to tighten the dialogue by excisions. Two other cases seem to represent Knight's omissions but for other reasons. The first is the omission of the single line 'No . . . grievances' mentioned above as a possible case of censorship. However, if F's reading 'On', which needs emendation to 'No', stood in Massinger's copy by mistake, it may have been that Knight simply omitted the line when he could make no sense of it. This is the more possible as an explanation, because something of the same sort seems to have occurred at IV.vi.9-12 in the omission in MS of '1. Merchant. No doubt on't . . . Vanlock.' Here there was no reason to delete these lines, which in fact are useful to introduce a new character just making his entrance. However, signs of textual disruption in F suggest that Massinger's copy was not clear to Knight. F omits the speech-prefix '2. Merchant.' present in MS for the first half of line 9 and prints as a separate line without speech-prefix what should have been the 1. Merchant's response (cut in MS) which started by completing line 9, followed by the remaining lines of the response. This double omission of speech-prefixes in F, connected with a passage omitted from MS, suggests a simple cut when Knight could not reconcile the text with the single prefix that was perhaps the only one present in his copy. The third example at IV.i.29-32 consisting of Florez' entire speech 'Is my misery . . . reproaches?' appears to have no reason behind its omission from MS. It usefully comes between two speeches to him by the Merchants and is not repetitious. That it was deliberately cut by Knight for such reasons as had moved him to cut in I.ii is difficult to believe. Whether there was some unknown form

of textual disruption that caused him to omit it, or whether it was left out by mistake either by Knight or the scribe of MS is not to be known. This account of Knight's small attention to questions of text with especial reference to shortening the play, suggests that he omitted Bertha's expanded speech in V.i.86-97 more because he did not have the separate sheet of paper on which it was written than because he cut the passage. However, the case is uncertain.

The Folio speech-prefixes seem generally accurate. The difficulty due to copy in IV.vi.8-12 causing the F omission of two prefixes has been noticed above. Possibly indicative of some uncertainty on Massinger's part about this scene is the mistaken F prefix for 3. Merchant a few lines later at IV.vi.17, which conflicts with the opening entrance direction specifying two Merchants and which is thus corrected by Knight (if it stood in Massinger's papers) to 2. Merchant. At II.i.194 F's assignment of the first stuttering speech to Higgen may just possibly be right if he immediately exits, for it would then be the change from his normal speech to the stutter that provoked Hubert's 'Slid they did all speak plain ev'n now me thought'. But since after this remark he addresses Snap, continuing, 'Do'st thou know this same Maid?', the MS assignment of line 194 to Snap, the only known stutterer, is very likely correct, and Hubert's wonder at the stuttering is natural enough if Snap answers. The correctness of F is not certain in several more cases of doubt. At III.i.95,96 a pair of related variants appears, suggesting in itself more Knight's intervention than F's error, although the compositor may have overlooked the manuscript prefixes in this series of short speeches. At any rate, whether all the boors chorus in lines 94-95 'I take it, take it, | And take some drinke too', or whether it is the second boor who adds 'And take some drinke too' as in MS, is uncertain. It is correspondingly uncertain whether in lines 95-96 it is Prig who has the whole speech in response 'Not a drop now | I thanke you; away, we are discover'd else', the latter an aside to Higgen, or whether as in MS it is Prig who answers the boor and Higgen who speaks the closing half-line to Prig as an aside. One would be inclined to rely on the aptness of the MS ascriptions and to treat the F assignments as oversights (difficult as double error may be here) were it not for a single clearcut case of Knight's sophistication of the text, encouraging a hypothesis for his intervention here. This sophistication comes in an entrance direction at V.ii.109.1 in F, which follows Gerrard's 'Insolent Devill!' addressed to Woolfort: the entrance is moved up a line so that Costin, who would be otherwise mute in this scene (and in the play), is given the ejaculation as his entrance line that should

obviously be assigned to Gerrard. An earlier difference in speech-prefixes in this scene, the omission of Florez' prefix before 'Is this that Traitor Woolfort?' in line 84, seems to be a simple error in MS, not an attempt to assign Florez' line to the previous speaker Gerrard. In other differences, MS is pretty clearly wrong. In III.iv.5-6 the error involves giving Prig the last line of Higgen's speech by raising his prefix one line, doubtless a mechanical error perhaps by the MS scribe. At III.i.16 F's 1. B. is correct and MS 3. Boor in error as shown by the context before and the song. It is unlikely at III.i.68 that MS 1. 2. 3. Boors for F 1. 2. B. is correct, for all other choruses from the three are prefixed by All Boors. The omission of Higgen's prefix at III.iv.39 in MS is a simple error, whether Knight's or the scribe's, apparently caused by confusion between his speech beginning 'Brother' and Prig's preceding 'A shrew'd point Brother' as if 'Brother' had been repeated by the same speaker.

With the exception of the deliberate alteration in the position of the entrance direction at V.ii.109.1 already noted in order to transfer Gerrard's line to Costin, there is no indication that Knight altered the position of Massinger's directions. However, the varying treatment given entrance directions by the MS scribe, sometimes centering them in a large hand, and at other times squeezing them in on a text line, indicates that as in Believe as You List Knight had placed some of Massinger's centered directions in the margin. The position the MS scribe chose for them gives no indication that Knight had made them at all anticipatory.

When one comes to review what can be learned from this example of a prompt-book and its copy (insofar as they can each be reconstructed from documents at one remove), the first point of interest is that Knight in fact wrote out a prompt-book from papers that on the evidence should have been Massinger's fair copy of a play by himself and two other men. That is, although there is no indication that the manuscript of Beggars Bush could not have been as clean as that for Massinger's Believe as You List, Knight treated the two differently. The suggestion may follow that Believe as You List represents an unusual case and that the normal theatrical procedure was to use an author's fair copy as the basis for the transcript of a prompt-book, not to mark it so that it became the prompt-book itself.[20]

Whether the company had criticized Massinger's play and made suggestions that resulted in authorial revision before the original earlier prompt-book was transcribed is unlikely, on the evidence, although it is true that any revisions marked in the papers would have been repeated both in the Folio and in Knight's later prompt-book and thus in MS. The two additions—the canting oath at III.iv.131-143 and the expansion of Bertha's lament at V.i.86-97—identify themselves because of the cue-lines to key them into the text after they had been written on separate sheets of paper, these cue-lines being repeated in F as if an integral part of the text. Both of these passages are additions, therefore, but whether they can be called later revisions is perhaps moot. For the first, Gerrard's 'Now-sweare him' is the cue, but this text line would seem to call for some oath not found in the text proper without the addition. This situation suggests that when III.iv was written, the oath—which required more canting language than Fletcher may have had at his command—was proposed but needed to be worked out and inserted at a later time, whether written by Fletcher or by someone else is not to be proved. Thus the oath seems a special case, prepared for in the text but temporarily passed over. Whether the same is true for Bertha's speech is less obvious, for her rhetoric would have needed no special preparation as did the canting oath. A dozen lines is an insufficient number on which to judge authorship. The passage occurs in a scene written by Massinger and is presumably his; he would scarcely have needed outside help to compose it. Hence Bertha's added lines may represent an authentic revision, but whether called for by the company to fatten Bertha's small part is difficult to say. If it was, ironically the addition was omitted from Knight's prompt-book by accident. If the addition was Massinger's own idea, then a slight chance exists that Knight cut it, although omission by accident is still the more probable conjecture. These two alterations, then, do not necessarily originate with the company; other differences between the two texts are too slight to assign to authorial revision. It would seem that Knight was ordered to make up the prompt-book from Massinger's papers as they stood but with whatever changes his professional judgment might suggest.

It is reasonably clear that if Knight read over Massinger's papers, he did not make notes about problems of casting and staging presented by the author's stage-directions before setting to work. This is the odder in that Massinger's directions for entrances, especially, and often for exits were sometimes non-existent and, as it happened, confused Knight who took less account of the context than he should have when he followed Massinger's errors of omission. A few errors of commission, also, could have been corrected by a careful consideration of the context but were, instead, slavishly copied. In fact, Knight made a minimum effort to exercise his personal judgment in straightening out various of the tangles in the directions and the action and was generally content to copy what he found with the addition only of directions for properties and noises.

The question of cuts made in prompt-books is an important one, but Beggars Bush is uninformative. The omission of a few single lines in MS appears to be accidental either in copying the prompt-book or the Lambarde transcript deriving from it. One omission of Florez' brief speech in IV.i.29-32 is inexplicable and may be accidental, and two other omissions seem to have been caused by Knight's inability to resolve textual difficulties, a problem he solved by draconian methods (II.i.105, IV.vi.9-12). Two brief cuts of repetitious sentiment he seems to have initiated on his own responsibility early in the play (I.ii.11-17, 108-114), but no more. So far as one can tell, he decided on these omissions while he was copying the papers, although in theory they could have been crossed out later. It is interesting that he made little or no attempt to reline faulty verse in the manuscript where Massinger seems to have written a beginning half-line as part of the following pentameter. A round dozen of such lines are faithfully reproduced both in F and in MS, thus suggesting that mislineation, at least of this sort, is no guide to the nature of the manuscript underlying printed copy. Indeed, MS's lineation is less correct on occasion than F, but whether this difference is caused by the F compositors improving their copy or by the MS scribe (or Knight) running two half-lines together is unknowable.

Knight seems to have accepted almost all of Massinger's directions, permissive or descriptive, only rarely making minor alterations when properties were to be specified, as changing Massinger's 'a letter' to 'ye paper', or once where precision of disguise was needed, as in his alteration of Higgen's and Prig's disguise from porters to boors (IV.i. 40.1), or his distinction between Woolfort's attendants by the addition of 'Guards' (V.i.51.1). Although he was careful to specify properties

and noises, he did little to work out the staging. If the addition of 'severallie' was his at IV.vi.0.1, he did direct the two Merchants to enter by different doors, however. It is probable that the added 1679 direction for the wounding of Hemskirk at II.iii.137.1 was Knight's interpretation of an action not clear from the text. At I.ii.0.1 he usefully introduced Hemskirk to the scene as a mute, but it is possible that he was thinking in terms of saving an actor by omitting the direction for the entrance of a servant with Florez' cloak at IV.vi.97.1 as found in F. On the other hand, his lack of imagination in interpreting the intentions of the text and providing for entrances and exits that Massinger had carelessly omitted must have led to a staging quite the opposite of what was really envisaged. Typical cases are the failure at V.ii.65 to add an exit for Hemskirk and thus to bring him back on stage with the captives at line 109, similar to the failure to provide for the guards' exit at V.i.55 and thus their absence accompanying Bertha's entrance at line 70.1. The lack of care to specify necessary disguises at III.ii.32,49.1 contrasts with the specification at IV.i.40.1. One wonders whether in the staging the beggars were indeed disguised at III.ii.32. The common failure to mark ordinary and expectable exits wanting in Massinger's papers shows that scrupulous attention to exit directions is no absolute criterion for prompt-copy. Exact directions for the staging of a scene such as the drifting off of the beggars about II.i.194 are not inserted and the situation is left as vague as in the copy. In short, if a printing shop had set copy from Knight's prompt-book or the Lambarde transcript of it had omitted the marginal directions for properties, no clue that prompt-copy had been the source could have been perceived from the print, and such matters as the false entrance of Jacqueline at II.i.0.1 would have been avouched as evidence for authorial papers. Moreover, except for one sophistication Knight seems to have retained the ordinary positions for entrance as in his copy and not to have advanced them in an anticipatory manner. The speech-prefixes in MS are sometimes more correct than they seem to have been in Massinger's papers, where it is possible that remnants of a change of mind are present, as in the use of Higgen as a prefix where MS Snap seems called for at II.i.194, or F. 3. Merchant at IV.vi.17 which Knight changed to 2. Merchant. The prefixes found in III.i.95,96 may or may not be Knight's additions. Errors in MS of course could derive from the scribe: one cannot positively assign them to Knight except for V.ii.109.

That Knight did not carefully consider the action and so failed to insert a few necessary entrances may be matched by two particular

sins of commission. First, his mistake about Gerrard's exit at IV.vi.95 not marked in copy led him to give Gerrard the exit at line 104 which Massinger had intended for Van-dunk and the wedding guests, an error that would have been difficult to assign to prompt-book origin if reproduced in print. Second, faced with a brand-new character, Costin, at V.ii.109.1, he deliberately tampered with a line by Gerrard to give this newcomer his one speech of the play and altered the position of the entrance direction in order to accommodate the change.

When a Shakespearean textual critic finds copy other than a prompt-book behind the printed text, as in All's Well That Ends Well, or Twelfth Night, or Julius Caesar, he may legitimately wonder whether when the prompt-book came to be written the scribe really resolved the various contradictions in time-schemes, or references to action that never took place (both of which appear in the false report of Helena's death by Lord G), or changes of intention not removed from the text (such as the substitution of Fabian for Feste in the letter-gulling scene with Malvolio), or alternatives for the staging of scenes such as are found in Helena's choice of Bertram or, in Julius Caesar, in the interview of Brutus and Cassius in Act IV. In short, loose ends that were not tied up in copy were perpetuated in Knight's prompt-book since he made only a feeble effort to correct them.

It would be interesting to know whether his alterations in the time scheme in I.i.7 and I.iii.140 were made at the moment of copying, like his two cuts in I.ii, or later when he may have become conscious of the difficulties involved. Something could be said for his having made the first change on the spot when he became conscious of the absurd identification in Massinger's text of a Merchant who had been absent from Flanders for five years (line 7) with one who had left Flanders before the start of a seven years' war recently concluded (line 12). If so, Knight would have been better advised to have contented himself with changing the five to ten years and not to have altered the mention of Florez' charity to Clause at I.iii.140 from three to seven years. If the alteration had been made under the influence of Bertha's seven-year residence with Van-dunk, then Knight must have reverted to it; otherwise it could have been done currently if he knew enough about the plot to recognize that three years was a short time to accumulate the treasure with which the beggars later rescue Florez. Whenever the alterations were made, the time scheme is still grossly impossible, and Knight never grappled with its intricacies. It is true that references in the text to the duration of the antecedent action could have been adjusted with relative satisfaction if Knight had troubled to work out

the necessary schedule. On the other hand, perhaps nothing could have been done about the extraordinary confusion in the timing of the action presented on the stage. In I.i the Merchant leaves Flanders for Bruges and arrives in I.iii. In I.ii Hubert and Hemskirk also leave but do not arrive until II.iii. In the interval Florez has engaged his credit to huge purchases in I.iii, is given six months to pay, and provides Clause with his daily alms. On the very next day, in II.i he chooses Clause as king of the beggars and Hubert and Hemskirk arrive outside Bruges. II.ii shows Florez, months later, apparently, depressed at the contrary winds that keep his ships from port as the day for payment approaches. In the next scene II.iii Hubert and Hemskirk arrive at Van-dunk's house in Bruges. II.iv follows immediately on II.iii, and III.i comes the same day when Hemskirk recruits the boors. In III.ii Florez is talking of bankruptcy in the vein of II.ii and has only one day left of his six months; nevertheless in this scene he is attacked by the boors whom Hemskirk had hired the very day of his arrival. In III.iii Hubert meets the beggars on the same day as III.ii although it is evident that this is the same day as the arrival in Bruges and the meeting in Van-dunk's house. Thus Hubert and Hemskirk are on one time schedule, which is the logical one, and Florez with his six months' bond is on another. II.iii, II.iv, III.i, III.iii, and III.iv are roughly contemporaneous with I.iii and II.i. But intercalated II.ii and III.ii (mixed) are six months later. The two time schemes join very abruptly in III.ii when Gerrard (as Clause) returns after the rescue of Florez which had taken place according to the time scheme of III.i and is informed of his next day's bankruptcy according to the schedule of II.ii and the start of III.ii. Very likely there was nothing that Knight could have done about this complete mixup; the schedule had been carelessly planned in the synopsis of the action divided among the three different dramatists of Acts I, II, and III, and the case was about hopeless without major surgery.

If the company—and no doubt the audience—was not much concerned about this double time scheme, it would be too much, perhaps, to have expected Knight to have troubled himself about the two different views taken of the four Merchants in I.iii and in II.ii and later in their attitude to Florez. However, since it was a question of who had to be brought on the stage and when (and the correct writing-out of the 'plot' for backstage consultation) he was careless in not recognizing that in II.i the direction (which he reproduced) for the entrance of six beggars, Higgen, Ferret, Prig, Clause, Snap, and Ginks, was inaccurate in its permissive conclusion 'and other Beggars'. From

Higgen's count in lines 57-58, 'we are seven of us, | Like to the seven wise Masters, or the Planets', it should have been clear that 'the rest of the Beggars' did not comprise various supernumeraries (never mentioned elsewhere) but some one missing and unmentioned beggar needed to make up the seven. It may have been the copy error including Jaqueline in the entrance that satisfied Knight about the question of seven, although she could scarcely be eligible for the pending election, and he should have noticed her correctly marked entrance later at line 171. At any rate, the prompt-book was never altered to bring in Costin as the seventh beggar here or later. For instance, in III.iv.0.1 it is possible that Knight brought supernumerary beggars on the stage since the direction read 'Enter Higgen, Prig, Ferret, Gynks and the rest', although properly 'the rest' comprised the mutes Snap and Costin. In IV.v.0.1 six beggars are named but not Costin. As a result, it is quite possible in the staged play that when Costin made his entrance at V.ii.109.1, after his mention only in V.i.126 as a follower of Gerrard who will be captured, the audience would never have seen him before in his disguise as a beggar. The direction in V.i.98.1 erroneously names Ginks as a disguised boor with Higgen, Prig, Ferret, and Snap. In lines 133-141 Hubert maps the plan for Woolfort to divide his soldiers into five squadrons, four under the guidance of the four boors (line 140) while he himself leads Woolfort and the fifth group to seal off the forest. Thus there are four, not five, boors present, and since in V.ii.109.1 Ginks and Costin enter with Jacqueline as captives and are identified as Lords Arnold and Costin, Ginks (Arnold) could not have been one of the disguised beggars who lead the soldiers into pitfalls and who make their triumphant entrance with Van-dunk. If the prompt-book reflected the actual staging, the company remained serenely unconscious of these various difficulties that they should have noticed in rehearsal.

If Knight's transcript of this prompt-book from Massinger's papers is at all typical, it is evident that unresolved tangles in the action and even in the casting could be transferred to print from a prompt-book or transcript. Neglected characters like Costin who ought to have appeared consistently as the seventh beggar, though mute, or characters who have no business being named in directions like Jacqueline in II.i.0.1 and Ginks in V.i.98.1, are not unexpected in an author's working papers but are surprising in prompt-books. Knight's record here as a prompt-book scribe is not a comforting one. We have no information, unfortunately, whether he was the book-keeper of the company this early. He certainly was writing-out the company's prompt-books

in 1622, if this is the date for the re-transcription of Beggars Bush, as seems quite possible, and in early 1624 he copied the book for The Honest Mans Fortune. If it is significant that he heads the list of the attendants of the King's Men in Herbert's protection order of December 27,1624, he may well have been the book-keeper then, and earlier at the time Beggars Bush was copied. And if his scribal activities extended as they may well have done, back to his original connection with the King's Men as early as 1616, it would not have been impossible for him to have had a hand in transcripts of one sort or another that were prepared as printer's copy for the Shakespeare First Folio.

Notes