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Notes
Quotations are from F1. Line numbers are those of an edition of the play in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, genl. ed. Fredson Bowers, VI (Cambridge: CUP, forthcoming). Numbers in square brackets refer to material excluded from the text of the edition but printed in an appendix. Asterisked lines are also excluded from the text.
Other conceivable explanations of F1's two interviews need to be considered: (1) That both, except the passage nearly exactly duplicated, were intended to stand. F2, followed by all later editions, deals with the situation in this way, but I think it impossible not only because roughly the same territory is twice traversed but because Valerio's second appearance is unmotivated. (2) That the first version should stand, it having been written to replace the second which was thought too long. If F1's sequence of Frederick's two conversations—with Valerio, first version, and with Cassandra—is right, this will not do, for Cassandra's exit would fall at the end of IV.ii and she would immediately reenter to begin IV.iii. Possibly, however, the short version of the Frederick-Valerio interview was inserted out of order, in which case we should have Podramo sent for Valerio, the Cassandra interview, and then the Valerio interview, short version. This seems highly unlikely, however, because it severely disjoints the dialogue—Cassandra's exit would be followed unnaturally by Frederick's soliloquy (lines [1]-[8]), and after his dialogue with Valerio Frederick would have no exit speech. The reason why the rewriting seems to be a part of the original composition rather than a later revision is that were it the latter, it would follow that Fletcher initially left the scene as in (2), against which supposition the same objections may be raised.
On this and other discoveries managed at the Blackfriars by the drawing of a curtain, see Irwin Smith, Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse (1964), p. 345.
In this play as in others Fletcher at first gave some of his characters generic names and did not invent personal names for them until later. I do not know at what point the King became Frederick, but the play's opening stage-direction begins Enter King Frederick, a form which suggests that Frederick may be an addition. His speech-prefixes in I.i are Fre(d). In II.vi, however—the present scene—his two speech-prefixes are King. Tony seems to have been the Fool at first, and he remains so here and there in the play. Cassandra may originally have been Old Lady; cf. Enter Cassandra, an old Lady passing over (II.iv.50; 6G3). Similarly Castruchio, the captain of the castle, may have been Captain; he is once taken off by Exit Cap. (V.iii.39; 6I1), yet he has been addressed by his title just before. The Queen was given a personal name, but what Fletcher intended is a mystery. From I.i.181 to 218 (6F4v-6G1) her speech-prefixes are Mar; the name, however, is never spelled out. Some editors plausibly call her Maria.
"The Copy for 'Hamlet,' 1603," The Library, 3rd ser., 9 (1918), 173. As W. W. Greg points out, however, the repeated lines are here more likely to result from memorial error than from an addition ("A Question of Plus or Minus," Review of English Studies, 6 [1930], 300).
W. W. Greg, "Plus or Minus," pp. 300-304; rpt. in Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1966), 201-206.
The Shakespeare First Folio (1955), pp. 165-166. J. Gerritsen, ed., The Honest Man's Fortune, Groningen Studies in English 3 (1952), believes the brackets in that play to have originated with cues noted before cut passages as an aid to the scribe who was to copy parts.
Bibliographical Studies in the Beaumont & Fletcher Folio of 1647, Supplement to the Bibliographical Society's Transactions, No. 13 (1938), pp. 80-81.
See Fredson Bowers, ed., The Woman's Prize in Dramatic Works, IV (1979), 11-12. Bald's passages are at II.iii.3-4 and II.iii.34; to these II.iv.85-6 and III.v.124 are added. See also Bowers, ed., Beggars' Bush, in Works, III (1976), 232-233. Bald's passage is at V.i.84-6; to this III.iv.130 is added.
This situation is paralleled in Beggars' Bush, where the repetition-brackets, one in F1 and one in the MS, occur because of the misplacing of revised material written on separate pieces of paper with a line of the basic text heading the revision. See Bowers, "Beggars Bush: A Reconstructed Prompt-Book and Its Copy," Studies in Bibliography, 27 (1974), 123-125.
That lines 120 and 121 are transposed was first pointed out by Colman in The Dramatick Works of Beaumont and Fletcher (1778), V, 308. Henry Weber in Works (1812), VIII, 189, disagrees: "Valerio kneels to Heaven, not to the angels of Heaven." Dyce in Works (1843), IX, 337, thinks Colman is right, and so do I. In line 119 Valerio means "if Heaven be not angry, I have some hope yet." He then kneels to the angels of pity who may both allay his miseries and control the wills of princes.
"The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (I)," Studies in Bibliography, 8 (1956), 141, and Cyrus Hoy, ed., Bonduca in Dramatic Works, IV, 151-152. R. C. Bald, struck by the specification of a chair in the stage-direction at III.i.o.2, remarked, "The addition of the chair is surely due to the prompter's regard for the details of stage production, and not to the author . . ." (p. 109). His judgment was hasty: the direction is probably authorial, and there are no other signs of connection with a prompt-book. See Bentley, p. 424.
Regarding Knight's prompt-book transcript of Beggars' Bush as evidenced in a subsequent copy, the Lambarde manuscript, Bowers observes, "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" ("Beggars Bush: Prompt-Book," p. 131).
In the Dyce MS of The Honest Man's Fortune theatrical cuts never interfere "to any serious extent with legibility." The omission sign "usually takes the form of a vertical line either outside the speech-prefixes or between them and the text. At top and bottom this line is marked off by short rules, and where a cut begins or ends in the middle of a line a longer stroke of the pen usually shows its exact length. Occasionally light hatching is resorted to, and in the case of single line cuts a simple vertical stroke between the speech rules usually suffices" (Gerritsen, ed., pp. xx-xxi).
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