a perpetual 'get-penny' and could, of course, be furbished up from time to time.[1] In Downton v. Slater (1598) the Admiral's men valued a misappropriated book at £13 6s. 8d. and claimed £30 damages for withholding it. The court awarded £10 10s. New plays cost more, and entailed fees of 7s. each to the Master of the Revels for licensing.[2] A play by Greene would fetch £6 13s. 4d. about 1592. The prices paid by the Admiral's and Lord Worcester's men between 1597 and 1603 ranged from £4 to £10 10s.; a fee of £6 may be taken as about normal. 'An they'll give me twenty pounds a play, I'll not raise my vein', says Antonio Balladino, who is Anthony Munday, in The Case is Altered, a play of about 1598.[3] In 1613 Robert Daborne was bargaining for plays with Henslowe at rates of from £10 to £20, and boasting that he could get £25 elsewhere. It seems likely that Henslowe charged a commission on these prices to the company. There are some traces of the system, used at a later date, by which the author was entitled to a 'benefit' night shortly after the production of a new play.[4] He was also; 'John Daye . . . after the playinge of the 2 part of Strowde'; 'Thomas Deckers . . . over & above his price of his boocke called A Medysen for a Cvrste Wiffe'. These are exceptional disbursements. The Daborne-Henslowe correspondence of 1613-14 (Henslowe Papers, 71, 75, 76, 82) suggests a more regular practice: 'I pay you half my earnings in the play'; 'We will hav but twelv pownds and the overplus of the second day'; 'You shall hav the whole companies bonds to pay you the first day of my play being playd'; 'I desyr you should disburse but 12^l a play till they be playd'. Probably the actual day selected for the poet's benefit varied; thus the third day is suggested by Dekker's prologue to If It be not Good, the Devil is in It (1612), a Red Bull play:
not caring, so he gains
A cram'd third day, what filth drops from his brains.
Malone (Variorum, iii. 157) quotes later evidence for a variation of days, together with Davenant, The Play-house to be Let:
There is an old tradition,
That in the times of mighty Tamberlane,
Of conjuring Faustus and the Beauchamps bold,
You poets used to have the second day.
This shall be ours, sir, and tomorrow yours.
The actual term 'benefit' appears first in connexion with the interest of]*
- ↑ E. Hoe, IV. ii. 92, 'thy name shall be written upon conduits, and thy deeds plaid i' thy lifetime by the best companies of actors, and be call'd their get-peny'; Barth. Fair, V. i. 13 (of a 'motion'), 'the Gunpowder-*plot, there was a get-peny! I haue presented that to an eighteene, or twenty pence audience, nine times in an afternoone'. Dekker, News from Hell (1606, Works, ii. 146), speaks of 'a Cobler of Poetrie called a play-patcher'.
- ↑ Henslowe, ii. 115; cf. ch. x. By the end of Sir Henry Herbert's time the fee had been raised to £2; even for an old play he exacted £1 (Variorum, iii. 266).
- ↑ C. is A. I. i.
- ↑ Henslowe, i. 113, 136 (Admiral's, 1599, 1601), 181 (Worcester's, 1602), 'for M^r. Mundaye & the reste of the poets at the playnge of S^r John Oldcastell the ferste tyme' [in margin, 'as a gefte'
