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Notes
"The Final Revision of Bonduca" and the letters of Lady Elizabeth Greg and A. W. Pollard are reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
W. W. Greg, Introduction, Bonduca, (Malone Society Reprints, Oxford University Press, 1951), p. v. Hereafter cited as MSR.
In the Introduction to his MSR edition of the play, Greg identified the scribe as either Edward or Anthony Knight (p. vi); later editors, including Cyrus Hoy, identify him as Edward Knight (see Textual Introduction to Bonduca, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, Vol. 4 [Cambridge University Press, 1979], p. 151).
MSR, p. 90. The manuscript of another play of the period, the anonymous The Faithful Friends, also contains missing scenes for which the scribes have substituted summaries and "plotts" (see The Faithful Friends, eds. G. M. Pinciss and G. R. Proudfoot [Malone Society Reprints, Oxford University Press, 1975]).
Greg, "Prompt Copies, Private Transcripts, and the 'Playhouse Scrivener,'" The Library, 4th ser., 6 (1925), 156.
Greg, Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses: Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), pp. 321-324.
Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare, 3rd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 29-30. Greg first made this statement in the 1942 first edition of this book.
Lady Elizabeth Greg's letter, dated 11 July 1959, to the Huntington Librarian reads: "Dear Sir: Professor F. P. Wilson of Merton College, Oxford is Literary Executor for my late husband Sir Walter Greg, and he has been helping me to pick out works which he thinks may be acceptable to various people & Libraries as tokens of remembrance of my late husband & his work. I am sending you these facsimiles & manuscript in the hope that you will care to accept them as such. I am sincerely, Elizabeth Greg" (HEH Inst. Arch. 33.1.7.4. FL. 28). I wish to thank Thomas V. Lange, the Associate Curator of Early Printed Books at the Huntington Library, for providing me with information about the acquisition of Greg's essay.
A. W. Pollard's letter reads in part, "I am conscious that I haven't been able to do justice to your paper, but it certainly throws light on what scribes & authors & compositors may respectively have done in a given case. The point I have not sufficiently disentangled is as to how much you have introduced for the elucidation of Bonduca as contrasted with what has a wider applicability. From the point of view of the reader as well as of the Editor of a magazine, the length is rather daunting. I've never read Bonduca; if it is a decently good play & worth printing, I am inclined to think a lot of your matter would come better as notes to an edition. Between this & the end of October when I shall be making up the December Library, you might consider whether you could get Oxford to print the play, & write an article in The Library, which would call attention to the Edition only presenting your general conclusions without so much detail. This is all I can suggest at present, but The Library is so heavily indebted to you for your help that you may be sure it will do its best to print anything you want printed" (HEH RB 112111 PF).
Greg did not include "The Final Revision of Bonduca" in either of the two lists of his writings which he prepared (printed in The Library, 4th ser., 26 [1945] and 5th ser., 15 [1960]), but these were of his published writings only.
See R. C. Bald, Bibliographical Studies in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 (Oxford University Press, 1938), and Hoy, pp. 151-259.
Many of Greg's theories have lately been re-examined. For a discussion of the modern categorization of manuscripts and printer's copy, see Gary Taylor's General Introduction to William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 10 ff.
For a discussion of some current trends in editing Shakespearian plays which may have been authorially revised, see David Bevington, "Determining the Indeterminate: The Oxford Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 501-519.
All act-scene-line references are to Cyrus Hoy's edition of Bonduca (his collation of the texts appears on pages 249-259); the corresponding lines in Greg's MSR edition of the manuscript are given in parentheses.
In support of this point, Greg refers readers in this essay to his article, "The Printing of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647," The Library, 4th ser., 2 (1921), 109-115.
Honigmann argues that an author's first draft may show indifferent and substantive variants when compared with a draft with "second thoughts" made soon afterwards and before delivery to the actors. These two "unstable" drafts represent "not so much a fastidious author's determined attempts to improve passages that fail to satisfy as an author so unconceited with himself and so fluent that little verbal changes, not necessarily always for the better, ran quite freely from his pen when the process of copying refired his mind" (The Stability of Shakespeare's Text [London: Edward Arnold, Ltd, 1965], pp. 2-3).
Robert K. Turner, Textual Introduction, The Maid's Tragedy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Vol. 2, p. 22 (Dramatic Works hereafter cited as DWBF).
As Greg's reproduction of the following passages in his unpublished essay is sometimes
Greg noted in the margin of this passage that he had erred in originally assigning to MS. the completion of the line "why I dare fight with these" with "thates my good chicken."
Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), pp. 107-110. Greg had also made these points in The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (1942), pp. 27-30.
Greg has footnoted in pencil, "Where was it?" in the manuscript, with the inked response, "Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates, 2nd ed. (1920), p. 60."
Bald, pp. 84-89. Bald also cited the variants at 2.4.91-94, 5.3.124-127 and 5.3.129-131 which Greg had cited earlier in his essay (Greg had at first also included the passage at 2.4.91-94 in his discussion of major variants but deleted it, perhaps after he realized that he had already discussed this passage in his section on "The Foul Papers and the Errors of the Scribe").
Hans Walter Gabler concludes of the 1639 Quarto of Monsieur Thomas that "the absence of directions and notations of an exclusively theatrical nature and the presence in high proportion of Fletcherian linguistic forms according to Cyrus Hoy's classification suggests authorial papers as printer's copy, further defined as a fair copy in Fletcher's hand by the virtually error-free verse lining" (Textual Introduction, Monsieur Thomas, in DWBF, Vol. 4, p. 418). Gabler draws the same conclusions about the Folio printer's copy for Women Pleased: "The proximity in transmission of the copy-text to a fair copy in the author's hand is suggested by the general cleanness of the text and its arrangement—there is little corruption to be emended in the words, the verse-lining, or the verse/prose division—as well as by the marked incidence of Fletcherian forms such as the 'em and ye colloquialisms" (Textual Introduction, Women Pleased, in DWBF, Vol. 5, p. 443).
Robert K. Turner argues of The Maid's Tragedy that "although there is little direct evidence to show that either Beaumont or Fletcher made a fair copy which lay behind Q2 and even less to indicate which of the two performed the task, an authorial transcript seems the best choice among the possible alternatives; and the failure of Fletcher's linguistic practices to force their way into the passages found only in Q2 allows the inference that Beaumont was the transcriber" (Textual Introduction, The Maid's Tragedy, in DWBF, Vol. 2, p. 20). Similarly, of The Scornful Lady, Cyrus Hoy states that "whether the manuscript behind Q1 was prepared by one of the dramatists (if either, it is more likely to have been Beaumont, in view of the scarcity of Fletcher's famous ye's), or, as seems somewhat more likely, by a scribe, the quarto print exhibits a number of features, specifically with reference to stage-directions, that are more likely to be traceable to an authorial manuscript or a transcript thereof, than to a manuscript that had been prepared for use in the theatre" (Textual Introduction, The Scornful Lady, in DWBF, Vol. 2, p. 456).
Fredson Bowers conjectures that certain textual variants between Q and F of The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn result either from a reworked manuscript behind Q, or from the fact that "Beaumont himself wrote out the printer's copy manuscript for Q and in the process made a few improvements in the theatrical form of the text" (Textual Introduction, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn, in DWBF, Vol. 1, pp. 120-121).
Fredson Bowers concludes of the copy for the Folio text of Cupid's Revenge: "That Beaumont may have copied out the play, revising it in the process from the combined foul papers in order to produce a copy suitable for submission to the theatre company, is a hypothesis that the general uniformity of the accidentals save for the noted compositorial characters appears to support, especially since Fletcher's individual linguistic preferences are obscured" (Textual Introduction, Cupid's Revenge, in DWBF, Vol. 2, p. 324).
Robert K. Turner finds that certain features of
Quarto 1 of The Tragedy of Thierry
For a discussion of revision by Beaumont and Fletcher in these plays, see the Textual Introduction and Notes to DWBF, Vols. 1-6; also see A King and No King, ed. Robert K. Turner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963); Robert K. Turner, "Revisions and Repetition-Brackets in Fletcher's A Wife for a Month," Studies in Bibliography, 36 (1983); Philaster, ed. Andrew Gurr (London: Methuen, 1969); The Maid's Tragedy, ed. Andrew Gurr (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969).
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