University of Virginia Library

Marginal Markings: The Censor and the Editing of Four English Promptbooks
by
T. H. Howard-Hill

Sixteen promptbooks survive of plays written for the public theatre in England before 1640.[1] One cannot overestimate the importance of these manuscripts for the understanding of Renaissance dramatic texts. In the England of Shakespeare's time plays were written not so much as a literary expression of ideas and experiences which the playwright could communicate in no other form but more as fairly conventional vehicles for cultural commonplaces, and were purveyed in public theatres for all who could afford the price of admission. The best modern analogy is not with 'art' theatre but with television situation comedies and the like; only in its decadence did

Elizabethan drama claim the status of art. An author's manuscript—or more often, a transcript of a play written collaboratively by a group of playwrights—was merely the raw material of the theatre. It was adapted to the needs of the acting company by its book-keeper, whose function in the company of actors was in some ways analogous to that of the modern director. He added notes of necessary properties, and removed superfluous mutes and characters, reallocated speeches as necessary, and cut passages unsuitable for stage presentation or the abilities of the company.[2] He cast minor roles in light of the company's personnel and supervised the rehearsals of the play with the aid of the 'book' (a technical term) from which he had prepared the 'plot' of the play and the actors' 'parts'. Into the book were entered any other adjustments which rehearsal revealed to be necessary. If the playwright was also an actor—as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were for a time—no doubt the book received authorial variants from revision during rehearsal. Consequently, the printed textual tradition of Renaissance plays has two main stems, one which proceeds from authorial drafts ('foul papers') and fair copies, the other from the theatrical promptbooks which recorded what happened to the text in performance. Not surprisingly, there are significant verbal differences between, say, the 1604-5 quarto text of Hamlet, which originated from the author's foul papers, and the 1623 First Folio text which was printed either from a transcript of the promptbook or a copy of the quarto collated with the promptbook.[3] Some 1015 titles of plays are recorded in the Harbage-Schoenbaum Annals of English Drama between 1576, when the first English theatre was built in London, and 1642, when the theatres were closed, a number so disproportionate to the sixteen extant promptbooks that it is not difficult to comprehend the intense scrutiny to which the promptbooks are subjected.[4]

Four of the sixteen promptbooks carry evidence of the censorial attentions of Sir George Buc, who, as Master of the Revels between 1603 and 1622, was encharged with the task of ensuring that the plays presented at court and played in public were free from matter offensive to the governing authorities or to public order.[5] They are: (1) The First part of Richard II

(Woodstock), written c. 1592 but censored later, probably on the occasion of a revival; (2) Charlemagne, c. 1604; (3) The Second Maiden's Tragedy, 1611; and (4) Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, 1619. The manuscripts have been edited diplomatically in the Malone Society Reprint series over a span of seventy years, yet, remarkably, little attention has been given to Buc's influence on them or, by implication, on other plays printed between 1603-22 for which manuscript evidence does not survive.[6] This neglect may perhaps be explained by the modern editorial history of one of them, The Second Maiden's Tragedy, which it is my purpose in some part to correct.

When the Malone Society was founded in 1906 by a group of prominent English scholars which included E. K. Chambers, A. W. Pollard and R. B. McKerrow, W. W. Greg was appointed Honorary Secretary and General Editor. He exercised the second function until 1939, with consequences for the scholarship of early English drama which have yet to be thoroughly appreciated.[7] In that period were gathered the first fruits of an achievement which justifies his description as the greatest editor of English literature of this century; his contribution to bibliography, textual criticism and editing requires no amplification here. Nevertheless, the Malone Society edition of The Second Maiden's Tragedy "prepared by the General Editor" and issued in 1910 is not impressive as a harbinger of Greg's later achievements. The introduction is so brief that it does not discuss topics like watermarks which are customarily described in such introductions and there were, despite Greg's disclaimers, an unusually large number of misreadings in an edition which purported to represent the original manuscript exactly.[8] More serious, and particularly significant for analysis of the censor's role in the evolution of the dramatic text, was that Greg disregarded completely a whole set of markings in the margin of the manuscript.

Greg's fastidiousness about the attribution of alterations in the manuscript was criticised shortly after the publication of the Malone Society edition by Watson Nicholson whose own edition of the play had been forestalled

("The Second Maid's Tragedy," MLN 37 (1912), 33-37). Pointing out that The Second Maiden's Tragedy is "the first licensed play in England of which we have the original manuscript and license [for performance]" (p. 33), Nicholson drew attention to Although his description of the crosses is not exact and his analysis of the process by which they were placed in the margins of the manuscript is incorrect, Nicholson performed a valuable service by mentioning the pencil crosses. "No one", he remarked, ". . . has ever before called attention to these blue pencil crosses" (p. 36) and, indeed, Greg's diplomatic edition is completely silent about them.[9] This is the more remarkable because one of the facsimiles he provides has a pencil cross quite visible next to an ink cross on f. 55v. His blindness was wilful. In his response to Nicholson, Greg (MLN 29 (1914), p. 125) replied: "There are no blue pencil marks in the manuscript that I can see. There are a number of marks in ordinary lead pencil—obviously the work of some modern reader or editor." It is not edifying to see an editor of Greg's maturity (he was aged 39 in 1914) take refuge in a quibble about the shade of pencil and then deny the significance of markings he had completely ignored before by attributing them to modern sources—without investigation, as if the crosses were of a single kind, and as if he had some scientific means to distinguish early twentieth-century from early seventeenth-century pencil. His first responsibility as the editor of a diplomatic text was to see what was in the manuscript, margins and all; the second surely was to communicate his observations to readers who, through distance from the British Museum, might not have had an opportunity to remedy the deficiencies of the edition by firsthand examination of the manuscript. For all that he mentioned one instance of a pencil cross in the discussion of the manuscript several years later in Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses (1931), the currency of the diplomatic edition was so wide, and Greg's reputation so persuasive as to the accuracy of the edition, that it is easy to believe that appropriate consideration of Sir George Buc's influence on the drama of his time was hindered rather than aided by his treatment of the marginal markings.

Neglect of pencil markings in SMT may seem trivial by comparison with the plenitude of textual data and observation which was supplied by the Malone Society edition. In fact, that edition omits mention of 17 crosses and 3 marginal lines and underscorings, and the diplomatic editions of the three

other promptbooks—all supervised by Greg—are silent about another 49 pencil marks.[10] It is reasonable to assume that the modern editors whom Greg held responsible were equally attentive to the remaining twelve promptbook manuscripts, yet only two of them show traces of pencil at all. The Honest Man's Fortune has a single word added marginally in pencil in modern handwriting. The Book of Sir Thomas More—probably the most studied of all the promptbooks, on account of its Shakespearian associations—contains 27 instances of the use of pencil (10 unremarked by Greg in his Malone Society edition of 1911), most of which are apparently recent additions.[11] Although the small apparently modern crosses in Sir Thomas More occur occasionally in SMT and other manuscripts, there is no instance even in the exceptionally heavily pencilled More manuscript of the kind of pencil crosses found in the four promptbooks associated with the censor, Buc.[12] Both in extent of pencil markings and in the kind of marking, therefore, the Buc manuscripts are exceptional.

In 1978 The Second Maiden's Tragedy was meticulously edited in modern spelling for the Revels Plays series by Professor Anne Lancashire, who provided an independent scholarly examination of the manuscript which went far to correct the omissions of Greg's edition.[13] The pencil markings were recorded and taken account of in a separate discussion, "Marginal ink and pencil crosses" (pp. 280-281), where it was mentioned that "occasional marginal square ink crosses and pencil crosses occurring together and separately, seem related to textual censorship and have been tentatively attributed . . . together with the censorship alterations they generally accompany, to the censor Sir George Buc." Professor Lancashire concluded, however, that "it is unsafe to make an attribution to Buc of any censorship change simply because it is accompanied by one or more such crosses" (p. 281). On the contrary: pencil and ink together are sure signs of Buc's censorial attentions. Her argument was simply one of uncertainty, about the

variety of forms of crosses, about their origins, and about their functions. It runs as follows: In its way, this is as distressing a refusal to confront evidence critically as Greg's refusal to acknowledge the possibility that the pencil crosses might be worth recording. Nearly every individual statement is correct; one is completely wrong, but the tendency of the argument is to show that nothing can ever be known from the evidence of the crosses. The conclusion is completely wrong. By lumping all crosses together the Revels editor could make statements which are ostensibly correct but are in fact untrue or substantially irrelevant to the crosses which are Buc's. The correct conclusion is that the marginal crosses—both ink and pencil—are the censor's, and, surprisingly, an editor has greatest grounds to be confident in the identification of the ink crosses and the proximate cause of textual alterations when they are accompanied by pencil marks. The more informal, occasional evidence gives weight to the formal and permanent marks of the censor's influence on the text.

The singlemost important observation about the crosses is that they fall into several distinct categories; not only pencil or ink, but small and large, square or slanted. Once separated on the basis of form, they can be examined in terms of function. The small slanted crosses have no apparent effect on the received text; they may be categorised as 'modern' and set aside. Since they are not peculiar to SMT, as I have noticed (note 11) their origin from the hand of a modern editor should not be too difficult to trace. Other small crosses are associated with corrections in the text. It was common for writers at this time to place small crosses in the text to mark corrections or to indicate the correct place of inserted material, and to make a correction or insertion in the margin, with the cross repeated. SMT gives an example at 1. 2, associated with a censorial correction, which deserves closer attention.

The only other kind of cross in SMT is large and square. It is necessary to attribute this form to Sir George Buc, for the following reasons:

More informative than a mere summary of the marks Buc used in the Commentary, two passages where pencil was used foreshadow events in the dramatic manuscripts. Folio 21 is an inserted slip of waste paper from the Revels Office made up of two pieces of paper pasted together, the first strip bearing eleven lines, the second three lines of text. The sequence of the corrections need not be determined now although a mere record of the alterations makes that clear enough. Opposite l. 2 there is a faint pencil cross in the right margin and in the following line "anmacro 18. Ed.1" shows 1 changed to 2 in pencil. In the right margin opposite l. 4, "20 libr" is written in pencil and the gloss in the line above is altered in ink to "xx.l.i." Even more instructive to show how Buc used his pencil is an instance on f. 26v. Upon completing the recto Buc inadvertently reversed the leaf so that the writing on the verso would run from the bottom to the top of the page when the leaf was bound in place. He discovered this after he had written two thirds of the verso and, loath to rewrite the recto as well, on the correct top half of the verso he put a pencil cross and wrote "Renvurser" opposite it. To make his intention quite clear he added "Neville" and "Latimer" between brackets above the cross in the top lefthand corner of the leaf. All these additions are in pencil. Later he pasted blank paper over the upside-down text and recopied his manuscript—not without variation—over the pencil markings in proper form.[18]

It is quite clear from the Commentary that Buc used pencil in a manner familiar to writers of later ages, as an easy, informal working tool, for records which were temporary or provisional. This impression is confirmed by its appearance in his History of the Life and Reign of Richard the Third (B.L. ms. Cotton Tiberius E.x) which is roughly contemporary with the Commentary.[19] To anticipate, it is also characteristic of the way in which the censor read a play submitted for license, pencil in hand, marking passages of text which required closer consideration and, often, the confirmation of additional marks or corrections in ink. There is no need to deal further with this manuscript or, indeed, with Buc's use of pencil in general.

Notwithstanding the weight of the evidence which identifies the pencil markings with Buc, one may contemplate the possibility that someone else, perhaps the Clerk of the Revels, marked up the plays in pencil in order to draw passages to Buc's attention and final disposition. However, that not-unreasonable notion cannot hold in the light of one passage in SMT. At l. 708, servant was pencilled in the right margin by Buc who also, presumably, underscored frend in the text; in this instance, there is a cross, a mark in the text, and an alteration in Buc's handwriting, all in pencil and all together.[20] Furthermore, this instance is particularly valuable in revealing the influence of the censor on the text which was eventually performed on the stage. That Buc was troubled by the passage in which Helvetius urges his daughter, the Lady, to allow him to select her lover appears from his alteration of "friend" to "servant" and his addition of another marginal cross beside l. 712 (II.i.76); he also drew a pencil line in the right margin from l. 699 to l. 730. Apparently as a result of the censor's intervention the corrector substituted "woman" for "courtier" in l. 712, and ll. 715-24 (to "forgotten") were marked for omission and crossed out in ink which is possibly that of the substitution. Editors can understand the relationships amongst the markings only when the marginal crosses and the marginal servant are correctly identified as Buc's.

The only refuge for anyone who wished to deny that Buc was responsible for the pencil crosses would lie, it seems, in the Revels editor's claim that "in S.M.T., at least, where pencil and ink crosses occur together the ink has preceded the pencil."[21] In the event, a footnote reveals that in only one (l. 1425) of the three places with both pencil and ink crosses does "Examination of the MS with a microscope [show] this to be the case definitely." Nevertheless, one case is enough. However, brief reflection on the physical properties of graphite and ink, or recollections of early schooldays, bring to mind that

the materials are not sympathetic. The colouring matter of the ink either coheres temporarily to the surface of the graphite (where it is thick enough to be impermeable), the fluid being absorbed in the adjacent paper, until it dries and flakes off the surface on which it has no natural site, or, on the other hand, the particles of colouring pass through a lightly-drawn pencil line and are absorbed in the paper beneath. In either circumstance the pencil appears to be superior and, on that account, posterior to the ink. The more the magnification of the microscope is increased, the greater becomes the apparent separation of the two writing materials. The independent opinion of Dr. N. J. Seeley, the head of the Department for Archaeological Conservation and Materials Science, Institute of Archaeology, University of London, supports the above description of the pencil/ink relationship.[22]

By this point a case has been made that the pencil markings in the margins of SMT have a bearing on the history of the manuscript itself and of the text it contains. When the appropriate reservation of certain distinctive 'modern' crosses is made, that Buc was responsible for the significant pencil markings in SMT and the other three promptbooks can scarcely be doubted, even though the unavoidable exigencies of space do not permit the case to be made—particularly for the other manuscripts—in complete fullness. The particular fashion in which Buc employed pencil and the local effects of its use are perhaps of more special interest to dramatic historians and to later editors of the four plays. Certainly the topic of his influence on the text and performance of the plays is too large and complicated to be entered into here, involving as it does scrutiny of the whole range of the means by which the censor made his requirements known to those who submitted texts for his approval. Nevertheless, one cannot relinquish all this marginal pother without one illustration of the advantage an editor may obtain from knowing the source of the pencil crosses. It is doubly instructive to examine an instance which is not wholly characteristic of the censor.

Opposite the first speech of SMT is a largish, square pencil cross, smeared for deletion, with the crossbar extended to touch have, the first word of the verse. Above have to the left is a smaller ink cross in the ink used by the corrector of the text. (Greg who thought he was "almost certainly the author" named him C whereas the Revels editor who thought he was merely a corrector called him A.) The original reading was hath; the corrector converted it to have by writing v over the th and adding e at the end. In the right margin, with a similar cross and in the same ink and hand, is added haue. The marginal pencil cross is not in Buc's usual form in having an extended

crossbar but another instance is the next cross to occur in the manuscript. It is used on f. 30v to point to the obvious omission of a line (l. 192) subsequently interlined by the scribe. Three instances of this style of cross in Buc's Commentary (f. 354v) confirm it as his. The sequence of events at once becomes clear. On starting to read through the manuscript the censor was immediately struck by what seemed to him to be an error of agreement and drew attention to it with the extended cross. Later, the corrector—who did not have the Revels editor's knowledge that hath was "an old form of the third person pl., present indicative" (p. 89)—altered the word to have. He botched the job. He needed to start the downstroke of the v (which he preferred to u for this purpose) so it would obscure the t beneath, but he began too far leftwards, thus prompting the Revels editor (but not Greg) to read ha've. By the time hath was converted to have it was pretty well illegible so the corrector added the ink cross and wrote the correct reading legibly to the right of the text.[23] At a later stage Buc's pencil cross was smeared for deletion. The Revels editor prints the original hath because in her view the corrections lack authority; Greg presumably would have printed the corrected reading in a modernized edition. Another editor, however, observing how the censor patently influenced the author to change from a less common to a more common construction, might well decide that the author's first intentions were best. From such marginal trivialities are editions constructed.

Notes