motive for the change; the episcopal correctors must have got into a good deal of hot water over the affair of Eastward Ho![1] Even the Master of the Revels did not prevent the surreptitious issue of Pericles in 1609. In Caroline times we find successive Lord Chamberlains, to whom the Master of the Revels continued to be subordinate, directing the Stationers' Company not to allow the repertories of the King's men or of Beeston's boys to be printed, and it is implied that there were older precedents for these protections.[2]
A point might come at which it was really more to the advantage of the actors to have a play published than not. The prints were useful in the preparation of acting versions, and they saved the book-keepers from the trouble of having to prepare manuscript copies at the demand of stage-struck amateurs.[3] The influence of the poets again was on the side of publication, and it is perhaps due to the greater share which they took in the management of the boys' companies that so disproportionate a number of the plays preserved are of their acting. Heywood hints that thereby the poets sold their work twice. It is more charitable to assume that literary vanity was also a factor; and it is with playwrights of the more scholarly type, Ben Jonson and Marston, that a practice first emerges of printing plays at an early date after publication, and in the full literary trappings of dedicatory epistles and commendatory verses. Actor-playwrights, such as Heywood himself and Dekker, followed suit; but not Shakespeare, who had long ago dedicated his literary all to Southampton and penned no prefaces. The characteristic Elizabethan apologies, on such grounds as the pushfulness of publishers or the eagerness of friends to see the immortal work in type, need not be taken at their full face value.[4] Opportunity was afforded on publication to restore passages which had been 'cut' to meet the necessities of stage-presentation, and of this, in the Second Quarto of Hamlet, even Shakespeare may have availed himself.[5]*
- ↑ They had risks to run. The Star Chamber fined and imprisoned William Buckner, late chaplain to the archbishop, for licensing Prynne's Histriomastix in 1633 (Rushworth, Historical Collections, ii. 234).
- ↑ M. S. C. i. 364; Variorum, iii. 159.
- ↑ Moseley's Epistle to F_{1} (1647) of Beaumont and Fletcher says, 'When these Comedies and Tragedies were presented on the Stage, the Actours omitted some Scenes and Passages (with the Authour's consent) as occasion led them; and when private friends desir'd a Copy, they then (and justly too) transcribed what they Acted'.
- ↑ See Epistles to Armin, Two Maids of Moreclack; Chapman, Widow's Tears; Heywood, Rape of Lucrece, Golden Age; Marston, Malcontent; Middleton, Family of Love.
- ↑ Jonson, E. M. O. (1600), 'As it was first composed by the Author
