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measures approximately 15.5 by 12 inches, and was folded once to create pages of about seven and three-quarter by twelve inches (i.e. a normal foolscap dimension). The paper itself, subsequent to its being written upon, was folded twice more for use as a wrapping for the correspondence, and the outermost page (fol. 2v) has suffered as a consequence. An area of about a third of the page is discoloured and faded, and several words have been rendered illegible at the creases. There is also a small hole in the second folio, coinciding with one of these creases, and an ink stain near the top of fol. 1v which obscures one word. Despite these damages, the writing is for the most part well-preserved, and the good general condition of the MS, considering the use to which it was put, is remarkable. However, the paper is clearly not strong, and the creases

are in danger of tearing; we have recommended that preservative work be done on it to protect it from further deterioration.

The text written on this paper is a part of a scene from a play (a modified typographical facsimile is provided at the end of this article). The scene is in progress at the beginning of the first page (which is numbered "2.", implying that the events it contains occur early in the dramatic action); it consists of a dialogue between Prince Alexander and his favorite, his cousin Lorenzo. The Prince begins by dismissing his attendants, and the only other speaking character (Alphonso); they leave in l. 7. The rest of the scene consists of Lorenzo's clever evasion of a charge of conspiracy, which the Prince has received against him in the form of a letter. Lorenzo establishes a humorous, witty tone with his cousin, affecting to think the whole matter a nonsense. He then turns round and admits the charge, but declares he was acting the role of a double agent, only seeming to join the conspirators in order to gain entry into their ranks and so to prevent their purposes. It is a lively scene, Lorenzo's prose in particular being racy and vivid, a highly theatrical mixture of colloquial, "low" style and learned allusion. The Prince's speeches, which are in verse, are more formal, but in no way incompetently written or uninteresting. In other words, the author of the MS was beyond any reasonable question a competent dramatist with a good deal of verbal and theatrical skill; there are none of the signs of the amateur or the closet-author in these pages.

It is immediately evident that this scene has much in common with Act I scene ii of James Shirley's play The Traitor, in which the Duke of Florence (Alexander de Medici) confronts his cousin Lorenzo with an accusation of treason; Lorenzo defends himself, though in a different way (he straightforwardly appeals to the record of his loyalty) and uses very different language. At the very least this would suggest that the writer of the MS and Shirley were using a common source, but if so it is a source that has not been satisfactorily established.[9] At any rate, it is clear that the author of the MS followed customary Jacobean practice in basing his plot on an historical source; he was also following fashion in using an Italianate setting and writing a plot of political and personal intrigue. These points are worth notice since they bear an obvious relationship to the question of what kind of document the MS is.

Until the discovery of this manuscript, everything that has been said about "foul papers" has been conjectural. Though there are several examples of fair copies, prompt copies, and scribal copies of Jacobean plays, hitherto there has been no known example of foul papers, whose characteristics have had to be inferred from casual contemporary comment, and from the characteristics of printed texts held to derive from them.

The MS gives flesh to these inferences, and happily confirms them as far as its limits enable it to do. One immediately striking feature is that unlike prompt manuscripts, it does not divide one speech from the next by a horizontal stroke. The speech-prefixes are abbreviated, not consistently, but quite clearly (the Prince is either "Prince" or "Pr:", and Lorenzo is "Lorenz." or "Loren:" or "Lor:"), and placed slightly to the left of the dialogue, except in lines where revision has caused the writer to encroach upon the left-hand margin. The hand is current and fluent, but there is good cause to think that the author was careful and painstaking. Altogether there are at least 85 corrections in these four pages, more than one every second line. This is a high rate of alteration, and suggests at once a fastidious author, concerned with striking exactly the right note in dialogue, and with minor details of spelling and presentation as well.

This impression is entirely confirmed by closer examination. Consider, for instance, l. 10, which was changed from "The roome nor the grizlie monsters Companie" to "The chamber for the grizlie monsters Companie",[10] with evident improvement to the rhythm; both alterations were effected by writing over the original words "roome" and "nor" to convert them into "chamber" and "for", a practice the writer evidently was habituated to. Lines 15-16 originally read "though that danger had | death for his Page", which was clearly intended to conclude Alexander's speech. However, the author improved Alexander's line to "though that danger had | for his attendant death", following which Lorenzo's ensuing line "By heav'n my Lord" makes up the pentameter (which would not have been the case with Alexander's original line). This suggests not only that the change was made currente calamo but that Lorenzo's line was not written until the change had been made. An even more interesting feature of this alteration is that the author in cancelling "death" also unwittingly or carelessly cancelled "for", a situation editors often hypothesize to account for strange readings in printed texts. In l. 24 "But Can the" was changed to "And Can the", then cancelled, and written again, "And Can theare", an interesting instance of authorial dither. Line 43 was struck out altogether, and replaced by a line squeezed in between it and the next line of the original. This strongly suggests authorial reconsideration subsequent to the original drafting of the lines, though not necessarily at a subsequent date. Usually there is no way of knowing whether alterations were made in the course of composition or later, but here the interlined l. 44 must surely have been, to some extent, an after-thought.

In Lorenzo's satiric diatribe (ll. 49-70) the author can be seen carefully adjusting the colloquial language for maximum effect. In l. 50 the profane "slight" is changed to the milder "why"[11]; in l. 53 "such small"

is cancelled, and replaced by the sharper word "pettie"; in l. 55 the striking phrase "Ile Conjure his Coat" is replaced by the commoner, though still forceful expression "Ile clapperclaw the villaine"; in l. 58 a reference to the "time of plague" is changed to "a Visitation"; most strikingly, in l. 61 the expression "ffavorite", used elsewhere in the scene, is deleted in favour of the word "privado", a much rarer noun.[12] A little later, at l. 74, the entire clause "Knowe you foster in your bosome a serpent" was carefully eliminated. There is an interesting false start in l. 106, which begins with a speech-prefix for Lorenzo, even though the Prince is in the middle of a sentence.

Finally, and most helpfully, there are four stage-directions in the pages. Unfortunately, they do not give any clue to which theatre or company the author was writing for, but still they yield valuable information. Though the mundane Exeunt at l. 7 is no great help, teares the subscription at ll. 47-48 is much more useful, since it indicates an action which cannot be inferred from the dialogue. Even more important is the direction at ll. 71-72, Hee reades the Prince attentively marking him, a perfect example of the kind of "literary" or "descriptive" stage-directions which Greg and others propose as characteristic of foul papers. Finally, at l. 82 we get a laconic read againe, in the imperative form allegedly characteristic of prompters. As the MS cannot be a prompt-book it is possible to deduce from this direction that the author was familiar enough with the theatre to know the form prompt directions took. A further inference from these directions is that the criteria for attempting to distinguish printed texts set up from foul-papers copy from those derived from prompt copy may have been too optimistic, since this author could obviously write directions that resemble both; presumably, so could other dramatists who were familiar with theatrical practice. These observations by no means exhaust the material available in the MS which confirms and extends our inferential knowledge of foul papers, but will serve to suggest the importance of the MS for study of this kind of dramatic manuscript, and cannot fail to cause thankfulness that, a piece of foul papers having been recovered, it should be so wonderfully informative.

One other feature requires brief mention. There are several revisions of a more mundane nature: the author seems to have been troubled by what he may have thought was his old-fashioned spelling: at l. 47 "theare" is changed to "theire" (though "theare" in the sense "there" is left to stand at ll. 24, 33, 126, and 129); at ll. 42 and 100 "heare" was altered to the more conventional "heere". The fact that the author was addicted to correcting words, changing one word to another by making a palimpsest of it (rather than always scoring out and writing afresh) again suggests

that the MS was revised, not only in the course of composition, but also subsequent to its initial drafting. However, it is possible that the practice may rather reflect the author's habits of composition. Either way, it would pose a series of near-insoluble problems to a compositor. What can usually be determined under bright light and magnification in 1986, namely which letters were written first, and which written over them, would not have been a practicable matter in the busy and probably ill-lit conditions of a Jacobean printing-shop. One cannot generalize of course, but if a compositor were trying to set from copy such as this (rather than a fair-copy transcript), the practice of correction by palimpsest would surely be reflected in strange readings in the typeset text. It therefore is of more than a little importance that the author be identified, not just for the sake of this MS, but for the light it might shed upon his other writings, in their printed form.