University of Virginia Library

Revisions and Repetition-Brackets in Fletcher's A Wife for a Month
by
Robert Kean Turner

John Fletcher's A Wife for a Month, originally performed in 1624,[1] was first published in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 where it appears as the third of the four plays in Section 6 (6F4-I2v). The quality of the F1 text varies considerably; routine printer's errors aside, much of it is orderly enough, but from time to time such aberrations occur as to suggest that somewhere behind the printer's copy lay an authorial draft heavily revised in some sections if not throughout. The irregular portions of the text are of exceptional interest for several reasons. They reveal Fletcher actually

at work on the play, revising perhaps at the actors' behest but more likely changing his mind during the original act of composition about how the action should proceed and rewriting accordingly. Some of the revised sections contain repetition-brackets—entire or partial duplications of a line at some distance from its incorrect first appearance—a characteristic of revised texts long known of but recently not much discussed. And, since the F1 text seems to have been typeset from a scribal transcript—rather than, as one would expect, foul papers—it yields additional information about an important step between a play's first draft and its acting version.

There are several instances at which with more or less clarity one can see Fletcher at work on his first draft. The most certain of these occurs in IV.ii where F1 preserves a false start followed by an amplification and new development of the same essential idea. Prior to this scene Frederick, a lustful King of Naples, finding his advances to the lovely and chaste Evanthe scornfully rejected, has maliciously ordered her to marry Valerio, her true love, on three extraordinary conditions—a month after the wedding Valerio dies, Evanthe dies a day later unless she can find another husband willing to die a month after marrying her, and, wedded though they are, Valerio cannot touch the longing bride beyond a kiss. The third condition, revealed to Valerio after the marriage but before the bridal night, is unknown to Evanthe, and Frederick hopes her frustration arising from Valerio's apparent inability to perform the conjugal duties the bride so passionately expects will throw Evanthe into his arms. IV.ii is devoted to two efforts on Frederick's part to force Evanthe's surrender. First, without much difficulty Frederick persuades Cassandra, Evanthe's pliable old waiting-woman, to become his bawd, a preparation for IV.iii, in the first part of which Evanthe, after pretending a measure of acquiescence, disdainfully rejects Cassandra's persuasions in a triumphant reaffirmation of her chaste love for Valerio. Secondly, in a piece of action preceding but obviously parallel to Evanthe's encounter with Cassandra, Frederick through threats and cajolements attempts to convert the noble Valerio into a wittol. As Evanthe does later, Valerio pretends to accede, then rises to a spirited rejection. Frederick's two interviews, the first with Cassandra and the second with Valerio, are what Fletcher finally decided to deal with in IV.ii, but the following is what stands in F1 (6H2)[2]:

• 1. Frederick sends Podramo, a servant, to fetch Valerio. Podramo exits.
• 2. Cassandra enters after line 2. She is neither addressed nor needed for the action for some forty lines.
• 3. In a brief soliloquy Frederick explains why he has sent for Valerio:
  I know he wants no additions to his tortures,
  He has enough for humane blood to carry,
  

  ---

  180

  
  

  

  Yet I must vex him further;
  So many that I wonder his hot youth
  And high-bred spirit breakes not into fury;
  I must yet torture him a little further,
  And make my selfe sport with his miseries,
  My anger is too poore else. Here he comes, Valerio.
  Now my young married Lord, how do you feele your self?
  
  Short line [3], which is substantially duplicated by line [6], marks the original end of the passage; whether he actually wrote it or not, Fletcher evidently planned line [3] to read "Yet I must vex him further; here he comes." Because that was too curt, however, he cancelled line [3] in order a bit further to develop Valerio's situation and Frederick's motive in the succeeding lines. The word Valerio, flush right on line [8], seems to be a fragment of Valerio's entrance direction.
• 4. In the thirty-three line interview that follows, Frederick sarcastically asks how Valerio likes the delights of married life which Frederick's largess has opened to him. Valerio, vehement but dignified, accuses Frederick of tyranny and injustice. Valerio then exits, although no direction is provided. His exit line is "Is there not heaven above you that sees all?" [45]. This is followed by "Come hither Time, how does your noble Mistris?" (3), a line Frederick should address to Cassandra, but which, wanting a speech-prefix, seems continued to Valerio.
• 5. Cassandra's presence is unmotivated, yet Frederick, having recognized her at line 3, proceeds to enlist her services in the seduction of Evanthe. The interview ends with Cassandra assuring Frederick that she would never attempt Evanthe's chastity were it not that the lady's acquiescence would save the lives of the lovers. Frederick answers at line 37:
  Fred.
  For that I urge it too. (good, Sir,
  
  Cass.
  A little evill may well be suffered for a generall
  Ile take my leave of your Majesty. Exit.
  Enter Valerio.
  
  Fred.
  Go fortunately, be speedy too, here comes Valerio,
  
  
  Although F1 mislines, the verse scans (. . . evill | . . . Sir, | . . . fortunately, | . . . Valerio, | ). "Here comes Valerio," of course, duplicates a part of line [8].
• 6. The contest between Frederick and Valerio ensues. The opening dialogue has no counterpart in the earlier version of their encounter:
  Fred.
  . . . here comes Valerio,
  If his affliction have allayed his spirit
  My work has end. Come hither Lord Valerio,
  How do you now?
  
  Val.
  Your Majesty may ghesse,
  Not so well, nor so fortunate as you are,
  That can tye up mens honest wills and actions.
  
  
  This, however, is followed by
  Fred.
  You have the happinesse you ever aim'd at,
  The joy, and pleasure.
  
  

  ---

  181

  
  

  

  Val.
  Would you had the like Sir.
  
  Fred.
  You tumble in delights with your sweet Lady,
  And draw the minutes out in deare embraces,
  You lead a right Lords life.
  
  Val.
  Would you had tryed it,
  That you might know the vertue but to suffer,
  If anger, though it be unjust and insolent
  Sits hansomer upon you then your scorne, Sir.
  
  
  Punctuation aside, these lines duplicate the opening lines of the dialogue summarized in paragraph 4 above except that the earlier version reads "live" for "lead" in line 50, "Your" for the incorrect "If" in line 52, and omits "Sir" in line 53. The subsequent seventy-nine lines of the conversation, however, differ from the earlier version.

From these elements it is possible roughly to reconstruct what happened. Fletcher seems to have begun the scene with only one situation in mind, a meeting of Frederick and Valerio during which the former would be further revealed as a despicable tyrant and the latter as an honorable and courageous sufferer. The idea was weak—the incident did not advance the action, and it merely reiterated aspects of character already established—yet in pursuit of it Fletcher wrote the dialogue for the encounter. He then had a better inspiration, parallel scenes of Frederick's attempt upon Valerio's honor and of Cassandra's upon Evanthe's, but to work the latter out he needed to make Cassandra Frederick's instrument. He retained Frederick's sending Podramo for Valerio, which was still serviceable; inserted Enter Cassandra beneath these lines to show that the Cassandra section was to follow; and presumably cancelled the original Frederick-Valerio dialogue, a cancellation which was not observed. Fletcher then wrote the Frederick-Cassandra section. The fact that Frederick's first speech to Cassandra ("Come hither Time," line 3) has no prefix suggests that some lines explaining her presence may have been provided; if so, they are lost. Fletcher then revised the Frederick-Valerio interview along different lines from the first version, but he naturally salvaged what he could from it, specifically lines 46-53. The first version is quite simple in its conception: Frederick taunts Valerio ("Hast thou not found a loving and free Prince . . . that has confer'd . . . such heapes of comfort on thee?") and Valerio replies by citing Frederick's enormities (you "are growne a tyrant"; you are "a shame to nature"; you have flung away my innocent life; in denying me conjugal rights, especially when my blood was high, you are guilty of "a studied and unheard of malice"). The second version is longer and more complicated: Valerio lets Frederick believe he has won ("What should I do with that I cannot use Sir [i.e., Evanthe]?"); agrees to persuade Evanthe to become Frederick's mistress in exchange for life, honors, and wealth; maneuvers Frederick into granting permission for Valerio to seduce the Queen; and finally explodes into a violent refusal to compromise his integrity or even to believe that such inhumanity as Frederick's

can exist. The second version is unquestionably more dramatic than the first.[3]

A more ambiguous instance of revision is found in II.v-vi. In II.v Valerio, happy and excited as he dresses for his wedding, explains to his friends Camillo, Cleanthes, and Menallo that he is perfectly content to die at the month's end, an early death for the love of a lady like Evanthe being far preferable to the vexations of an inglorious old age. In F1 (6G3) II.v concludes and II.vi begins as follows. Valerio is speaking:

Tony and the Fool are one and the same character. He and the three courtiers exchange twenty lines of comic dialogue mainly about the crowd seeking to press into the room where the masque will be presented. The passage concludes with "hark, the King comes" (II.vi.25; 6G3v), and this is followed by Although "hark, the King comes" implies a regular entrance, the direction is apparently for the discovery of an assembled group before which the masque will almost immediately be presented.[4] Especially remarkable is the inclusion in the group of Camillo, Cleanthes, and Menallo, who are already on stage. Listed among them is Sorano, Evanthe's despicable brother and Frederick's executive in vice, who is not.

The discrepancy involving the three courtiers provides a clue to Fletcher's first intention, which must have been to send them off to the temple and have them reappear later as members of the wedding party. Originally II.v probably ended with this pentameter:

And II.vi began with The exchange between the servants, which F1 mislines and terminates with a comma (line 4), may initially have been longer, but the next major development in the scene appears to have been the discovery of the wedding party and the performance of the masque, with Valerio's three friends properly members of the group. If something like this was the scene's original form, the dialogue from the entrance of the courtiers and Tony to the discovery direction (II.vi.4.1-II.vi.25) is an addition. The lines substantially repeat doorkeeping business already used to begin II.iv (6G2v), and they introduce no new lines of action for later development; they add to the excitement and variety of the scene, but they are essentially filler. One guesses, then, that Fletcher inserted them either to lengthen a short scene, for the masque appears to be brief, or to replace action involving the servants which he did not care for. Having done so, he should have removed the three courtiers from the wedding party. He also had to alter the end of II.v in order to get the courtiers and Tony together for the beginning of II.vi; this he managed simply by adding a pentameter line and a stage-direction—"but first we must looke to'th Doores. The King has charged us. Exeunt." The addition displaced the marginal Knocking within and rendered the exit at line 51 redundant.

Because it designates Frederick the King, the discovery direction seems to be in an early form, and it also seems that when "hark, the King comes" was written the idea of a discovery had been abandoned.[5] III.i, the scene

following II.vi, involves Alphonso, Frederick's older brother, who would have been king but for a chronic and incapacitating melancholia. III.i finds him in the monastery to which he has been confined, about to pay his daily visit to the tomb of his beloved father. For this Fletcher wanted solemn spectacle; the opening direction is Enter divers Monkes, Alphonso going to the Tombe, Rugio and Frier Marco discover the Tombe and a Chaire (III. i.o.1-2; 6G3v). As II.vi was originally conceived, the discovery space would have been occupied from the revelation of the wedding party and the beginning of the masque through nearly the rest of the scene, there being only five lines of dialogue between the end of the masque, where the curtain might be drawn, and the end of the scene itself. If the discovery space was to be employed at the opening of III.i, it may have been awkward if not impossible both to dismantle the masque scene and to install the tomb, presumably an elaborate property, in the same area despite the time afforded by the act-interval. Thus the changes in II.v-vi may have been required to solve a technical problem pointed out to Fletcher by the actors; on the other hand, when Fletcher decided to use the discovery space in III.i, he could have rewritten II.v-vi on his own initiative. Whichever may have been the case, the discovery direction evidently remained in its original state, perhaps overlooked or perhaps left as a detail for the bookkeeper to fix up.

In the first of these passages discussed, line IV.ii [6] substantially duplicates line [3], the two being close enough in meaning to constitute a repetition-bracket, and as other repetition-brackets occur elsewhere in the play it is desirable to review briefly what has been made of these textual phenomena. The term was introduced briefly and rather casually by J. Dover Wilson to give a name to the repetition of the same line in a text, the second occurrence being fairly near the first (e.g., "But what is your affaire in Elsenoure?" Hamlet, 1603, B4:35 and B4v:5). Wilson assumed that the material between the duplicated lines was added to the basic text, but he did not explain how or why the duplication occurred.[6] The mechanics of the repetition-bracket were first discussed by Greg, who, comparing bracketed passages in The Honest Man's Fortune as they appear in the printed text of 1647 and in the Dyce manuscript, made the important observation that such repeated

lines may mark not additions but cuts.[7] He later conveniently summarized his findings: The supposition that repetition-brackets normally signal cuts influenced R. C. Bald so to interpret two of them in The Woman's Prize, one in the printed text of 1647 and the other in the Lambarde manuscript, and another in Beggars' Bush.[9] Yet more recent studies of these plays do not agree. One of the passages in The Woman's Prize and two others involving brackets unnoticed by Bald are held by Fredson Bowers to be "expanded text in the copy misunderstood by the F1 compositor"; only Bald's second instance is thought possibly a deletion. Bald's example from Beggars' Bush and another bracketed passage in that play are both believed to be additions.[10] Thus it seems that brackets may not normally indicate omissions or at least that exceptions may be as common as the rule. Indeed, as appears to be the case at IV.ii. [3-6] of A Wife for a Month, repetition-brackets may arise from an authorial cancellation not observed (or made), a literary development of the material at hand, and the reintroduction of the cancelled line or an approximation of it.[11] This variety of the repetition-bracket is perfectly illustrated by a passage in II.v which occurs shortly before the alteration to that scene just examined but does not seem related to it.

Valerio has been holding forth on the delights of dying young. His peroration (6G3) is

The repeated lines, * and 47, although they look just like the brackets discussed by Greg, cannot mark a later alteration to the text, for "'twill make my blood dance too" (line 48), which falls after the repeated line, refers to the dancing mentioned within the bracket. The entire passage must have originated as a single act of composition: after Fletcher wrote line * it occurred to him to do a little more with the masque, which had been mentioned only once before and then casually (II.iv.12;6G2v); he cancelled line * (imperfectly?) and composed lines 44-46; and lastly he reused line * as line 47. The bracket, then, has the same significance as the similar bracket in IV.ii, and the alteration to the text pretty clearly occurred because a new thought struck Fletcher as he wrote.

Another repetition-bracket is found in III.ii. The lusty bridegroom, revelling in anticipation of the wedding night, is brought word by Sorano of a new prohibition—if Valerio makes love to his bride, she dies. At the end of the scene Sorano speaks sarcastically (6G4):

Here lines * and 127 establish the bracket, and because the material between them does not refer specifically to anything beyond itself one cannot at the outset tell whether it is an addition, a cut, or a change introduced during the initial stage of composition. As in II.v-vi, however, a change of plan when he reached a new scene could have caused Fletcher to modify a passage he had just completed. One may imagine that Fletcher originally ended III.ii with lines 119 and * and, intending to open III.iii upon Frederick alone, wrote Enter Frederick and perhaps a few lines of a soliloquy which did not please him. He then decided to begin III.iii with Sorano's report, but to bring Sorano on at the start of the scene created a near-violation of the law of reentry, Sorano having exited from III.ii only at line 118. The solution was to lengthen Valerio's speech, which Fletcher did by writing the lines between * and 127, like II.vi.4.1-25 primarily filler. Line * and Enter Frederick should have been cancelled, and the situation is further complicated by the transposition, perhaps compositorial, of lines 120 and 121 and, if Fletcher provided it, the omission of Enter Frederick and Sorano at the head of III.iii.[12] Sorano's "and so I leave ye" is a perfectly good exit line, yet because the line ends with a comma and the exit is unmarked it may be that the speech continued for a line or two more. As speculative as this reconstruction may be, it probably accounts for the facts more readily than postulating either a later cut or a later addition. The former would have created the reentry problem and left it unattended to; the latter would suppose that in his first draft Fletcher created the same problem and passed it by.

One more repetition-bracket remains to be considered. Near the end of the play Valerio, although his life actually has been preserved, is thought by Frederick and Evanthe to have been executed, and in accordance with Frederick's earlier conditions Evanthe has twenty-four hours in which to find a new husband. In V.iii four unsuitable suitors are introduced, but their courtship is swiftly concluded when they learn the consequences of marrying the lady. Evanthe, speaking to Frederick, attempts to bring matters to an end (6I1v):

Lines * and 173 constitute the bracket, and, as before, there is no positive indication of the nature of the intervening lines, which could equally well be an omission to shorten the scene or an addition to lengthen it. Yet these lines too could result from a new idea's striking Fletcher as the scene took shape. Originally this segment of the action was to end with Evanthe's request for death, Frederick's angry order for her execution, and immediately upon that the entrance of the disguised Valerio. Perhaps Fletcher had written a few lines more when it occurred to him that the situation could be given one last twist. With Evanthe reduced to desperation, Frederick might try once again; he will offer to marry her, as he had previously done, but this time the marriage will save her life. And Evanthe will accept him, but only if he will agree to the terms imposed on Valerio—his own death at the month's end. This idea Fletcher developed, but in what F1 prints Frederick's proposal has been lost. Line * should have been cancelled and Valerio's entrance should have been inserted before line 174, but as was the case at the end of III.ii, the tidying-up was not done.

Five examples of revision have now been examined. Two—II.v.42 ff. and IV.ii.1 ff.—seem reasonably certain to have been changes made during composition; three—II.v.47 ff., III.ii.114 ff., and V.iii.157 ff.—are less certainly, but probably, the same. All are marked by prominent irregularities in the text. It stands to reason, then, that the play contains other revisions not so marked or at least less obviously so, although in these cases the evidence may be revealing only authorial carelessness or the misinterpretation of the manuscript by some agent of transmission. In I.ii, for example, Camillo, Cleanthes, and Menallo are having the usual expository conversation about vice and corruption in the kingdom of Naples when they are interrupted by the entrance of Frederick and his henchmen. Convinced by her rejection of Frederick that Evanthe has another lover, Sorano has sent Podramo, his servant, to fetch Evanthe's cabinet, which the three will rifle for clues to Evanthe's secret. The text runs (6G1):

"So do I too" is a part of the courtiers' conversation; it and the words following probably belong to Camillo, for whose speech-prefix Podramo's has been substituted, Podramo having been dropped from the entrance direction. Later, at I.ii.103, Sorano and Podramo depart, their direction, incorrect because Podramo is a servant, being Exit Lords. The oddity is that this direction duplicates the one at I.ii.50. At V.iii.37 ff. (6I1) Frederick orders Castruchio to bring Evanthe forth "and give way To any Suitor that shall come to marry her . . . ." Castruchio exits and reenters immediately with Evanthe, the three courtiers, and Tony, the entrance being marked after line 40. After V.iii.275 (6I2), however, Castruchio again enters, although no exit has ever been provided for him. Disguised as Prince Urbino of Abydos, Valerio, as a part of a noble preliminary to claiming Evanthe's hand, mentions with respect to Valerio's supposed execution, "I have heard his fate: My Fathers had not been to me more cruell" (V.iii.219-220; 6I2); what Urbino's father had done to him, however, is nowhere revealed. The clerics who care for the melancholic Alphonso are sometimes monks and sometimes friars. The scene of the action, Naples, unaccountably becomes an island at V.iii.3 (6I1). Throughout the text entrance directions are commonly placed immediately or one line before the first speech or notice of the character. In three or four instances the directions are as many as three lines high, but in two (after III.iii.88 [6G4v] and after V.iii.64 [6I1v]) the entrances are advanced by eight lines, possibly misplaced because of insertions of material following them.

All the signs examined so far point to a heavily worked-over authorial manuscript as the F1 copy, yet, as Cyrus Hoy noticed, A Wife for a Month, together with Rule a Wife and The Woman's Prize, exhibits the lowest number of Fletcher's favorite ye's of all his unaided work, an indication that the F1 copy was not the working draft directly but a transcript of it. The scribe, Hoy thinks, was Edward Knight, who was actively employed as bookkeeper of the King's Men by 1624 and whose transcript of the Bonduca foul papers shows a considerable reduction of the ye's present in the F1 text of that play, a derivative of the prompt-book.[13] As no comprehensive study of Knight's characteristics has as yet been made, one cannot be very definite about the identity of the scribe, but the chances are that Hoy is right. Knight would have been readily available to work for Fletcher, of course; as for more specific evidence, in A Wife for a Month "gent." stands not only for "gentleman" but also, quite uncommonly, for "gentlewoman" (II.vi.16; 6G3v), as it does in Knight's transcript of The Honest Man's Fortune;[14] the spelling of off is "of" as it is in one of Knight's additions to The Soddered Citizen (MSR, line 2210), in The Honest Man's Fortune (I.i.234), and in his transcript of Bonduca (MSR, lines 487, 1336, 1560, etc.); and the spelling of too is occasionally "to" as it is occasionally in Bonduca (lines 121, 897). There is a fairly good possibility, then, that Knight copied Fletcher's draft, preserving in his rendition many of the discrepancies it contained, including duplicate versions of some sections of the text and other details indicating that while writing the play Fletcher changed his mind several times about how the action was to develop. While some of Fletcher's alterations may have baffled Knight, it looks very much as though he never set out to create a finished

product; instead, he copied more or less everything he saw perhaps because nearly every word—right or wrong, redundant or not—might be useful subsequently.[15] It is apparent that the version he created could not have served as the prompt-book; it must, therefore, have been intended to furnish a reasonably clean, although unfinished, text for further revision, after which the prompt copy would be inscribed from it. And there are a few signs that alterations were made on the transcript itself. F1 renders III.ii.115 (quoted above) as "And much may it do ye with it my deare Brother," a garbling of "much good may it do ye" and "much may ye do with it." It is not likely that a scribe would have written such nonsense; the line looks more like the scramble a compositor might make of an unclear cancellation and substitution. By the time he wrote the stage-direction at II.vi.4.1-2 (also quoted above), the scribe, having met Tony in II.i and II.iv, should have known him for the play's fool. He might have taken over and Foole following from Fletcher's draft, but it would have been extraordinarily dense of him to write what F1 prints—Tony following, and Foole following. Here someone was trying to substitute Tony's personal name for his generic name, but he did it in such a way as to confuse the compositor, an indication that the alteration was made on the transcript. But one imagines that most of the changes made to the transcript would have been deletions of redundant material or the repositioning of misplaced parts, both done so as to be clear to Knight but not necessarily to the printer.[16] And it is possible, of course, that Knight, knowing what to do when he came to the prompt-book, at some points made no notation on the transcript at all. One would think Fletcher might have reviewed the transcript, but if I am right in interpreting the revisions examined here as being essentially connected with the composition of the play, Knight himself or some other member of the company could have handled them, implying that the author gave the actors an imperfect text expecting them to alter it as they chose. Such considerations must remain speculative, but the F1 text of A Wife for a Month provides a rare glimpse of a play in the making, further evidence for the existence of intermediate transcripts, and a few more details about the way the King's Men handled theatrical documents soon after the time copy was gathered for the Shakespeare First Folio.

Notes