IV
We are now in a position to consider the probable nature of the
printer's copy for the A1 quarto. In order for Compositor X
to
be able to set the end of Act IV scene i at his pair of type-cases while
Y simultaneously set the beginning of the next scene at his
(as
they did for E3r), each would need to have had the copy for his scene at his
own case, probably held by a visorum.[26] Apparently, the manuscript leaf
that
contained the end of IV.i was physically separable from the leaf on which
the beginning of IV.ii was written. That this division of copy between the
two compositors was possible throughout the setting of A1 suggests that
every fresh scene in the manuscript began on a new page. Bowers
(discussing Faustus in another text and context) asserts that
he
knows of "no preserved dramatic manuscript which does this" but adds that
"it might well be a convenience for the foul papers of a collaboration"
("The Text of Marlowe's
Faustus," p. 199). In fact, in the only preserved
example of the foul papers of a collaboration,
The Book of Sir
Thomas More (B.L. MS Harl. 7368), three of the scenes written by
the collaborating playwrights do begin on new pages (see fol. 7v, 8r,
12r).
Another manuscript that may have some application here as well is
the fragment of The Massacre at Paris. This manuscript leaf,
now in the Folger Shakespeare Library (MS J.b.8), may be in Marlowe's
own hand, and, if so, it is one of the few preserved examples of a
playwright's foul papers.[27] The
approximately 7" X 8" manuscript leaf contains exactly one scene of the
play, beginning with Enter at the top of the recto, and ending
with Exeunt halfway down the verso; the rest of the page is
left
blank. If the leaf is genuine then we may have evidence that Marlowe's
method of composition was to begin and end individual scenes on separate
pieces of paper. There are, however, enough doubts about the authenticity
of the leaf that any such conclusions can only be tentative.
Whatever Marlowe's practice when he was writing alone, it is
generally agreed that Doctor Faustus was something of a
collaborative effort, and a collaboration might necessarily entail special
methods of composition. Before speculating further about the nature of the
manuscript (or manuscripts) that the collaborating playwrights produced, we
need to consider how that collaboration may have progressed. Specifically,
was the writing of Faustus an interactive collaboration, or did
the collaborator merely inherit a play that Marlowe had left
unfinished?[28] Greg contends that
Marlowe "planned the whole" and farmed out certain scenes to another
dramatist, but Roma Gill speculates that Marlowe's "encounter at Depford
brought his writing of Dr. Faustus to an untimely end" so
that
the actors were left with "the
beginning and end of a great tragedy, and the problem of how to bridge the
twenty-four years."
[29] Although Gill's
conjecture has a certain attraction, it does not account for inconsistencies
in the text that seem to point instead to a collaboration in which the two
dramatists were writing their scenes separately and simultaneously. For it
appears that the collaborator was, to a certain extent, unfamiliar with
Marlowe's section of the play.
Indeed, to speak of Renaissance dramatic "collaboration" may be
something of a misnomer, because playwrights who worked together on a
play generally worked apart. Rather than a line-by-line collaboration (such
as that employed by the twentieth-century team of George S. Kaufman and
Moss Hart), the usual division of labor was the separate composition of
individual acts and scenes.[30] Writing
in relative isolation, one collaborator would often not know exactly what the
other was doing: Shakespeare was using a different source for his share of
The Two Noble Kinsmen than Fletcher was using for his.[31] Nashe, who wrote only the
induction and
first act of The Isle of Dogs, complains that Ben Jonson, who
wrote the other four acts, did not have "the least guess of my drift or
scope."[32] In Shakespeare's additional
scene for More, he seems unaware of both the original
version
of
the play and the revisions made by his fellow collaborators.[33]
Tucker Brooke was the first to point out that the author of
Mephistopheles's complaint in the Faustus scene with the
clowns—"How am I vexèd with these villains' charms! /
From
Constantinople am I hither come / Only for pleasure of these
damnèd
slaves" (III.ii.33-35)—contradicts Marlowe's conception of the
effects of
conjuring at I.iii.43-57, where Mephistopheles explains that he was not
"raised" by Faustus's conjuring speeches but came of his "own
accord."[34] Greg, while noting that
we need not expect the philosophical outlook of the serious scenes to be
maintained in the farcical scenes, agrees that this contradiction "may
legitimately be cited as confirmation of the manifest difference of
authorship" (Parallel Texts, p. 360).
Moreover, it has not been previously noticed that two of the
collaborator's
scenes refer to specific incidents from the prose
History of the
Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus (1592)
that do not appear in the play. At the end of the Show of Sins scene,
Lucifer promises to send for Faustus at midnight for a visit to hell
(II.ii.171). The promised trip to hell takes place in the
Damnable
Life (chap. 20), but not in the play.
[35] In the collaborator's Robin and
Rafe
scene, Mephistopheles says that he has come "from Constantinople"
(III.ii.34). Although an important episode takes place in Constantinople in
the
Damnable Life (chap. 22), there is no corresponding
scene
in the play. Apparently, the collaborator assumed that the play, like its
source, would include both a scene of Faustus's visit to hell and a scene at
Constantinople. If the collaborator was given a copy of the
Damnable
Life from which to dramatize certain scenes (i.e. the scene at Rome
[chap. 22], the scene at the
Emperor's court [chap. 29-30], the Horsecorser episode [chap. 34], the
scene at Vanholt [chap. 39]), but was unaware of exactly what other
material from the source Marlowe was incorporating into his share of the
play, the inconsistencies in the collaborative text might easily have
resulted.
[36]
It would make sense, or, as Bowers says, it would be a
"convenience" for a collaborating playwright to begin each of his scenes on
a new page so that they could later be collated with those of his collaborator
(as appears to have been the case in the collaborative revision of The
Book of Sir Thomas More). Such a supposition, which may seem
sufficiently obvious, is corroborated by Thomas Dekker's testimony that
playwrights conceived of collaboration in terms of writing separate acts on
separate pieces of paper. In a libel suit brought by Benjamin Garfield over
the portrayal of his mother-in-law in the subplot of Keep the Widow
Waking, Dekker asserts that he only "wrote two sheets of paper
containing the first act" (Bentley, p. 233). It is reasonable to suppose that
Marlowe and his collaborator proceeded in this fashion. Presumably, their
separate foul papers would then be combined and, perhaps after some
stitching and reworking, a fair copy would be transcribed
(either
to be used as or preparatory to the promptbook). In such a transcript the
scenes would follow one after the other, with no necessary relation to the
beginning or end of the pages on which they were written. Bowers is
essentially correct in that there is no extant
fair copy dramatic
manuscript in which every fresh scene begins on a new page, but we might
expect new scenes to begin on new pages in the foul papers of a
collaboration.
I would suggest, then, that the printers of A1 Faustus
had
as their copy the original foul papers of Marlowe and his
collaborator.[37] A certain amount of
shuffling and reshuffling of the combined papers might have occurred when
they were first transcribed or during the more than a decade that they spent
in storage; such a manuscript would have been anything but orderly, and
we would not be surprised to find certain scenes out of place in a text that
was printed from it. And, indeed, it has long been suspected that the two
Robin/Rafe scenes, which follow one immediately after the other, are not
in their proper positions; the Act IV Chorus, which is obviously intended
to introduce the Carolus scene but comes two scenes too early in A1, is
certainly misplaced.
This type of manuscript, in which Marlowe's scenes could be easily
separated from those of his collaborator, would have facilitated the unusual
method of composition found in the A1 quarto: it would allow one
compositor to set a scene (Marlowe's) while another simultaneously set the
following scene (collaborator's). This hypothesis gains considerable strength
when we compare the compositors' stints with the shares of the play that
have been traditionally assigned to Marlowe and to his collaborator.
Compositor changes often coincide with authorship changes: on D1r,
Y set Wagner's chorus (Marlowe's), while X
set the
beginning of the scene at Rome (collaborator's); on D3r, X
set
the chorus (Marlowe's), while Y set the beginning of the
Robin
and Rafe scene (collaborator's). The compositors are here able to divide up
their copy at the exact points at which authorship changes. This textual
feature can perhaps best be explained if the copy that they had to
work with was the foul papers of the two playwrights.[38]
