cartayne tyme as in your dyscressyon yow shall thinke good; which done ye may crose it oute of your boouke & keepe the byll; or else wele stande so much indetted to you & kepe the byll our selues'. Henslowe appears to have thought it safer to adopt the second alternative, as incomplete payments to the amount of £1 19s. 0d. for The Conquest of Spain by John of Gaunt still stand in his 'boouke'.[1] Other letters of the same kind concern Six Yeomen of the West, and Too Good to be True.[2] The normal price for a new play during 1597-1601 seems to have been £6, but sometimes it fell to £5 or possibly even £4, and sometimes the playwrights succeeded in squeezing out a few shillings more. One or two of them, notably Chapman, were able to secure a higher rate from the beginning; and about 1599 a general tendency towards a higher scale of prices becomes discernible. The 'book' of an old play could generally be purchased for about £2.
In attempting to estimate the actual 'output' of the company, one is faced by the difficulty that some of the plays commissioned are not shown by the diary to have reached the stage of payment in full, and that it must, therefore, remain doubtful whether they were ever completed. It is possible that, as Dr. Greg thinks,[3] some of the payments were made direct by the company, instead of through Henslowe. But the correspondence just quoted rather suggests that any such arrangement would be exceptional; and it would not be inconsistent with human nature, if the extremely out-at-elbows men of letters who hung about the Rose occasionally found it profitable to take their 'earnest' for a play, and then to find plausible reasons for indefinitely delaying its completion. Probably in the long run they had to account for the advance, but the example of The Conquest of Spain shows that such a repayment would not necessarily find its way into Henslowe's account. This view is borne out by an examination of the affairs of one of the most impecunious of them all, Henry Chettle, during 1598-9. During the first six months of the year, he had a hand in half a dozen plays, all of which were completed and paid for in full. But on one of these, 1 Black Bateman of the North, Henslowe appears, perhaps by an oversight, to have paid him £1 too much. At the beginning of May £1 was lent to Chettle upon this play, and the loan does not appear to have been considered when, on 22 May, a further sum of £6 was laid out upon 'a boocke called Blacke Battmane of the North . . . which coste sixe powndes'. On 24 June Chettle borrowed 10s., not apparently on any
