Foul papers, promptbooks, and Thomas Heywood's The Captives.(Critical essay)

THE British Library catalogue describes folios 52 to 73 of MS Egerton 1994 as a "[p]lay in five acts, without title, in which the characters are Raphael, Treadway, Ashburne, Lord and Lady Averne, an abbat, etc. Apparently autograph; with corrections and passages marked for omission." Since its identification by A. H. Bullen in 1885, the manuscript has been recognized widely as a text of Thomas Heywood's The Captives, a play written for The Lady Elizabeth's Men for performance at the Cockpit Theatre and granted license by Sir Henry Herbert on September 3, 1624. (1) But exactly what kind of text of Heywood's play the manuscript represents is less clear. The document has proven resistant to scholars' suppositions of what a theatrical manuscript should look like and remains the object of critical contention. (2) As a consequence, much of what the manuscript might tell us about the revision of early modern theatrical texts has been overlooked.

This essay seeks to better understand this troubling and important manuscript by offering a detailed analysis of the document's composition and annotation informed by a consideration of the practical demands of early modern theatrical performance. The following study thus makes available for readers the valuable picture of textual revision in the theater that the manuscript affords and casts light upon aspects of seventeenth-century theater practice. But this essay also seeks to make a general intervention within current editorial and textual studies as the field moves onto a critical terrain after the New Bibliography. The reception of dramatic manuscripts has been dominated by W. W. Greg's categorization of documents into "foul papers" and "prompt books," the former category representing rough authorial drafts that are assumed to contain "contradictions and uncertainties of action and unresolved textual tangles," and the latter, theatrical manuscripts subject to the "ordered levelling" of a bookkeeper, expected to show a degree of textual regularization and tidying as well as specification of performance details. (3) While many of Greg's methods and assumptions have been placed in doubt, scholars in different areas of early modern theater study continue to depend on New Bibliographical assumptions. (4) A recent description of the "making"of Shakespeare, for example, while explicitly aligning itself with post-New Bibliographical work and seeking to situate the Shakespearean text firmly in the Renaissance theater, includes a decidedly Gregian image of the "prompter," adding to the text "any missing entrances and exits," being "specific where the author is vague" and "likely to specify the number of spare people he can muster. (5) The continued operation of New Bibliographical assumptions is nowhere more apparent than in the reception of The Captives.

Extant playhouse documents, however, do not uniformly show the thorough and systematic revision posited by accounts that follow Greg. (6) William B. Long's study of the manuscript of Anthony Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber, for instance, shows that in addition to six small cuts, Munday's autograph manuscript has been marked by only six annotations, each a simple repetition of an authorial cue. (7) Contrary to expectations, there is no extensive "tidying" of textual tangles in the document, and the author's indefinite and permissive stage directions are not supplemented with specific details of production. Long's important work has revealed the occasional nature of playhouse textual revision, in the sense that annotations tend to be made only in response to particular problems for theatrical production.

However, despite the undoubted importance of his studies of, in particular, Munday's text and the manuscript of Thomas of Woodstock, there is a danger that any study of an individual playbook (the term that Long prefers to avoid anachronistic associations expected of the "prompt-book") is taken to be representative of all playhouse revision. (8) Unlike Munday's text, The Captives shows extensive annotation, including the resolution of several textual problems, even if, as I shall argue, the principles behind its annotation are more consistent with the marking of John a Kent than they might at first appear. This essay is offered as a further micro-narrative of early modern theatrical revision to supplement existing work that advocates a rethinking of the reception of early modern dramatic manuscripts. In the closing section, I shall argue that this reading of The Captives as a further story of textual revision challenges a number of assumptions that the New Bibliographical "metanarrative" has occasioned concerning the revision and use of the period's theatrical documents. (9) In pointing toward a plurality of playhouse manuscripts of the same play, the following account also raises fundamental questions about the identity of the theatrical text.

The original text of the play, which includes numerous corrections apparently made currente calamo, is written by Heywood in a hand that has been described as "exceedingly rough," "vile," "execrable," "difficult," and as a "villainous scrawl." (10) Throughout this stage of writing, Heywood used an ink or inks that vary from almost black to a medium brown, but which consistently have a brownish tone. The manuscript has undergone subsequent revision in two different hands in two different inks. One reviser is evidently Heywood himself, who went through the manuscript after its initial writing making several alterations in a medium brown ink that for the most part is readily distinguishable from the ink(s) of the original, although making a distinction between later revision and changes made currente calamo becomes uncertain where the original text is of a medium tone. Of those alterations that may be identified confidently with this second stage of composition are a small number of verbal changes and corrections, "none of them of great significance" according to Arthur Brown, the editor of the Malone Society Reprints edition of the play. (11) Examples of such revisions are the replacement of "in heaven" by "elcewheare," the addition of the metrically disruptive, interlined "stands" in the phrase " and in my ffyxt thoughts stands Irreproovable," and the passage of the villain of the play, the bawd Mildew, from a "ffrenshe monsier" to an "Italian" and then a "Neopolitane Seignor" (11. 1351, 1360, 75). (12) We may also surmise that on one folio Heywood added parentheses to clarify the sense and dramatic context of a couple of speeches (11. 378, 388-89). The most extensive form of revisions that the author made are cuts. In his edition of the play, on the grounds of ink Paul Merchant identifies around 190 lines cut from dialogue by Heywood in revising his text, while a further forty are lost through the author's cutting of two of the original play's three songs. (13)

The second revising hand--which for convenience and convention's sake I shall call that of the bookkeeper--is described by Greg as being "almost as bad as the text." (14) This agent has been very busy, making a little over 110 annotations, in addition to several cuts, which I shall address in thefirst instance. In all the bookkeeper has canceled around fifty lines of Heywood's text through deletions that vary in length from one line to seventeen lines; so doing, he has also reassigned one line. The cuts are apparently shaped by a number of different, and at times coinciding, theatrical exigencies: the demands of censorship, the limitations of the company's resources, requirements for the play's length, and, perhaps, dramatic tightening.

The longest of the bookkeeper's cuts are to speeches by the young women of the play. Nineteen lines of the lament that Palestra delivers on having been shipwrecked and (she fears) having lost her companion, Scribonia, are canceled, perhaps, as Merchant suggests, because her complaint that "wee poore sowles wreches./are punishe ffor his [Mildew's] grosse Impietyes" may have run foul of the censor on religious grounds (11. 674-75). (15) However, later lines of the speech are also cut by Heywood, and the annotator may be taking his lead from Heywood's dramatic priorities to trim expendable lines. Nine lines of Scribonia's anxious words on seeing Mildew and his companion, Sarlebois, are also cut in what appears to be theatrical tightening as again the bookkeeper's deletion connects with a cut that Heywood has made, this time to the speech that follows (ll. 1072-80). Scribonia's speech at the sight of the villains of the piece functions to allow Godfrey time to exit and fill a pail of water before returning to find Scribonia gone; with Heywood's cutting of Godfrey's return, much of Scribonia's speech is no longer required and it has been trimmed. Beyond Palestra's lament, perhaps another instance of selfcensorship accounts for the loss of the final six lines of John's fantasizing about Lady D'Averne, as he implies that he is doing the devil's work (ll.897-902). The same folio sees the fisherman lose five lines of reflection upon the lot of the poor, which may also have interested Herbert (ll.921-25). One other minor cut, the reason for which is unclear, sees the cancellation of one line from Lady D'Averne voicing her difference in age from her spouse (l.1294). The bookkeeper has also tidied Heywood's cutting of a short aside from Richard by striking out the last two words that Heywood missed (ll.360-61). He has in addition tidied other authorial cuts by crossing out the speech headings for deleted passages (ll.2111-14, 2123-25). The annotator has further crossed out Heywood's call for music (l.880).