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Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson,
Middleton and Heywood - Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse
By Grace Ioppolo
Routledge
£65
Dateline: 18th August, 2006
The early modern dramatist's lot was not, we have been led to believe,
a happy one. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, having been paid an
almost insultingly small sum of money for their labours, handed their
manuscripts over to theatre managers then watched in helpless dismay
as their works were mangled by censors, ad-libbing actors and barely
literate typesetters. The result was often a garbled mess that had to
be interpreted by generations of brilliant editors, who eventually restored
the text to something resembling its "original" state. But
in Dramatists and their Manuscripts Grace Ioppolo argues convincingly
that playwrights, despite being unprotected by copyright laws, would
have had the opportunity to exercise considerable control over their
work at every stage of theatrical production.
She points out that dramatists, far from being at the mercy of theatre
managers, could also be actors/sharers who would have been on hand for
the first read-through, rehearsals and adaptation of plays to suit the
talents of specific actors or different audiences. The author of a new
work would have been able to assist with revivals of his previous plays,
and there is evidence that dramatists revised their works as much for
their own satisfaction as to placate the censors.
Many readers will be surprised to learn just how many manuscript plays
of this era still exist. There are no less than six autograph copies
of Middleton's A Game at Chess, and intriguingly they show signs
of authorial revision at every stage. The most famous manuscript of
all must surely be the three pages of Sir Thomas More attributed
to "Hand D", widely believed to have been written by Shakespeare
himself. This fragment has often been described as the only extant example
of Shakespeare's "foul papers", but Ioppolo points out that
the elaborate letter forms and distinctive "eyeskip" errors
suggest that the writer was fair-copying an existing manuscript.
The difficulty of deciphering secretary hand, a form of handwriting
that died out at the end of the seventeenth century, has caused problems
ever since. Not every author took the advice of handwriting teacher
Edward Cocker: "Let not your Breast lie on the Desk you write on,
nor your Nose on the Paper, but sit in as majestical a posture as you
can". Playhouse scribes must often have struggled to make sense
of poorly written manuscripts - Ralph Crane corrected grammatical errors
in the First Folio Measure For Measure, christened the nameless
Duke Vincentio (had he heard it used by the actors?) but drew the line
at correcting some glaring inconsistencies.
Ioppolo demonstrates that by the end of the sixteenth century dramatists
were well aware of the power of their work to move and perhaps influence
audiences of up to three thousand people at each performance (compare
this to an average play-text print run of a mere 500 volumes). Londoners
who were once attracted to the theatre by a play's subject matter were
now coming to see the works of a specific author. In 1601 Ben Jonson
appeared on stage at the end of his Poetaster to defend the authority
of the author and criticize both the actors and spectators; unfortunately
the play was being staged at the Middle Temple and he was pelted with
fruit by an audience of lawyers and law students, who were obviously
still of the opinion that playwriting was more of a trade than an art
form.
Dramatists and their Manuscripts is an admirably thorough investigation
of a previously neglected subject. The book is enlivened by many touches
of human interest: the correspondence between impresario Philip Henslowe
and the permanently skint dramatist Robert Daborne, a writer's fear
that his work might end up as "waste paper to wrap candles in",
and Ben Jonson's narrow escape from having his ears cut off and nose
slit for co-writing Eastward Ho! (his mother thoughtfully offered
to send him a fatal dose of poison if the sentence was not commuted).
Dramatists and their Manuscripts would be a valuable addition
to any university or public library.
J D Atkinson
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