The Review of English Studies/Volume 1/The Rights of Beeston and D'Avenant in Elizabethan Plays

THE RIGHTS OF BEESTON AND D’AVENANT IN ELIZABETHAN PLAYS

By Allardyce Nicoll

On the re-opening of the theatres in 1660, several dramatic companies sprang into existence, eager to recapture some of the glories of the Caroline stage cruelly shattered by Cromwell and his satellites. As is well known, these companies, within a few years, were reduced to two, the King’s men under Killigrew, playing at Vere Street and at Bridges Street, and the servants of the King’s brother, the Duke of York, under D’Avenant, playing at Salisbury Court and at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The theatrical history of the first few years of the Restoration period is exceedingly confused, but it is evident that Killigrew’s actors, some of whom were relics of the old King’s men of the pre-Commonwealth period, regarded themselves as the direct heirs of that company which, since the time of Shakespeare, had dominated the dramatic activities of London. D’Avenant, on the other hand, seems to have regarded his men as the descendants of that “young company of players” of which he had been created governor in the year 1640. This young company, however, had, immediately before 1640, been under the direction of William Beeston. It was William Beeston who in 1660 was the proprietor of the playhouse in Salisbury Court, and from him, accordingly, D’Avenant leased the theatre when he started acting there.

The relations between the two later and the two earlier companies become of vital importance when we pause to consider the repertoires of each. On August 10, 1639, Lord Pembroke issued an order to the masters of all theatres other than the Cockpit, in which Beeston’s young company was performing, commanding them on no account to act any of the plays belonging to that band of players, an order, it has been suggested, called forth by the fact that Beaumont and Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas (or Fathers owne Sonne) seems to have been seized upon by the King’s men.^[1] The list of plays “appropried” includes some forty-four dramas, mostly the legacies of then defunct companies. For comparison with this there is, happily, another list dated August 7, 1641, detailing sixty comedies and tragedies which were the sole property of the King’s men.^[2] Here the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson are not included, and their omission may be taken as indicating that the dramas detailed in the list are only those which so far had not found their way into print.

When acting was re-started in 1660 there seems to have been still some vague sense of proprietary ownership of the older plays; and this vague sense was crystallised by warrants issuing from the Lord Chamberlain’s office, defining with greater or less accuracy the dramas authorised to be performed by the several companies. On December 12, 1660, a short list of plays allotted to D’Avenant was issued; on August 20, 1668, there was provided a lengthier enumeration of his dramas; and about January 12, 1668–9, was drawn up “A Catalogue of part of His Ma^tes Servants Playes as they were formerly acted at the Blackfryers & now allowed of to his Ma^tes Servants at y^e New Theatre.”^[3] The last of these three documents enumerates no less than 108 plays in all, but among them are to be found many of the works of Jonson and Shakespeare. Of the former, there is included Every Man in his Humour, Every Man out of his Humour, Cynthia’s Revels, Sejanus, The Fox, The Silent Woman, The Alchemist, Catiline, Bartholomew Fair, The Staple of News, The Devil is an Ass, The Magnetic Lady, The Tale of a Tub, and The New Inn—fourteen in all; of the latter, The Winter’s Tale, King John, Richard II., The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well that Ends Well, Henry IV. (both parts), Richard III., Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Julius Cæsar, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline—twenty-one plays. The Jonson and Shakespeare entries together, therefore, account for thirty-five in the list, leaving seventy-three. Of these seventy-three, thirty-eight appear in the 1641 document mentioned above. The “Beaumont and Fletcher” dramas are represented by The Beggar’s Bush, Bonduca, The Custom of the Country, The Captain, The Chances, The Coxcomb, The Double Marriage, The Little French Lawyer, The Humorous Lieutenant, The Island Princess, The Knight of Malta, The Loyal Subject, The Lover’s Progress, Love’s Pilgrimage, The Noble Gentleman, The Prophetess, The Martial Maid, The Pilgrim, The Queen of Corinth, The Spanish Curate, Valentinian, The Woman’s Prize, A Wife for a Month, and The Wild Goose Chase—twenty-four pieces, as against the twenty-seven of the earlier list, the omissions being The Mad Lover, The Maid of the Mill, and The Honest Man’s Fortune. In the first two of these D’Avenant had been given a two months’ right in December, 1660, the plays thereafter evidently becoming common to both the companies, and in August, 1668, he was allowed full right in the third. Fourteen plays duplicated in the pre-Restoration and in the Restoration lists, as will be seen, remain to be accounted for. Of these, the three plays of Shirley, The Doubtful Heir, The Imposture, and The Brothers, appear in both unchanged. The Duke of Lerma of 1669 is no doubt, “The Duke of Lerma or y^e spanish Duke” of 1641, a non-extant play of Henry Shirley’s. Alphonsus is the only “Chapman” work in both, but only two of the three Massinger plays, The Guardian and The Bashful Lover, are given in the later list, The City Madam being omitted. Suckling’s Brennoralt and The Goblins, Newcastle’s The Country Captain, Brome’s The Novella and Middleton’s More Dissemblers besides Women, The Mayor of Quinborough, and The Widow, all remain.

The omissions in the 1669 list can be easily classed under two headings. There are, in the first place, plays which must have disappeared in the intervening twenty-eight years. Arthur Wilson’s The Swisser, The Inconstant Lady, and The Corporal may be included here, as well as Brome’s The Love-Sick Maid, Ford’s Beauty in a Trance, Tourneur’s The Nobleman, and Massinger’s Alexius, The Forc’d Lady, The Judge, and Minerva’s Sacrifice. It is noticeable that, with one exception, all the plays noted by Mr. E. K. Chambers as being non-extant or else preserved in some MS. form are absent in the document of 1669; the Commonwealth era had evidently told heavily on the fortunes of the dramatic works of the time.^[4] Besides these, however, a few plays are omitted because of their having been given over to D’Avenant, along with The Mad Lover, The Maid of the Mill and The Honest Man’s Fortune. Quite naturally, that dramatist’s own Unfortunate Lovers, The Fair Favourite, The Distresses, Love and Honour, and News from Plymouth passed into his own hands (in December, 1660), as did one or two other dramas undoubtedly belonging to the King’s men but not mentioned in their 1641 list. Carlell’s The Passionate Lovers, like Massinger’s The City Madam, seem simply to have disappeared, possibly because these dramas were not considered worth reviving on the stage.

The 1669 list, however, compensates for its omissions by adding a number of other dramas, practically all of which must have belonged to the pre-Commonwealth King’s company. Of the “Beaumont and Fletcher” plays, we find The False One and The Fair Maid of the Inn (both printed in 1647), The Laws of Candy and The Sea Voyage, which had been entered in the Stationer’s Register under the date September 4, 1646, as well as The Elder Brother, The Faithful Shepherdess, A King and No King, The Maid’s Tragedy, Philaster, Rollo, The Scornful Lady, Thierry and Theodoret, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, which were omitted from the 1641 list, no doubt, because they had been already printed. The other additions include plays of Cartwright (The Royal Slave), Shirley (The Sisters, The Cardinall), Massinger (The Unnatural Combat, The Duke of Milan, The Emperor of the East, The Fatal Dowry, The Roman Actor), Suckling (Aglaura), Carlell (Arviragus and Philicia, The Deserving Favourite, Osmond the Great Turk), Newcastle (The Variety), Berkeley (The Lost Lady), Chapman (Bussy d’Ambois, The Widow’s Tears), and Brome (The Northern Lass). All of these, with the exception of The Variety (printed 1649), and Osmond (printed 1657), had been published before 1641, and all, with the exception of Bussy d’Ambois (an original Paul’s play),^[5] The Faithful Shepherdess (originally Queen’s Revels),^[6] Osmond (Queen’s), and The Widow’s Tears (Black and Whitefriars), seem to have been brought out originally by the King’s men.

This somewhat lengthy consideration of the correspondences between the two lists of plays belonging to the King’s players may form a background for the more interesting analysis of the plays given over to D’Avenant in 1660 and in 1668. The warrant of the former year presents him with nine plays of Shakespeare, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Much Ado about Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Henry VIII., Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet, besides allowing him two months’ use of Pericles. Besides these, he obtained Denham’s The Sophy, a King’s men’s play not printed till 1642, but peculiarly left out of the 1641 list, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, another King’s men’s tragedy, but rightly omitted from the list since it had been published in 1623. It has been noted above that a two months’ right was given him in The Mad Lover and The Maid of the Mill; to these and Pericles may be added The Spanish Curate, The Loyal Subject, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. The 1668 warrant provides a different set of plays altogether. Those of 1660 had been, without exception, plays originally in the possession of the King’s men; these of 1668 mostly belonged to other sets of actors, and several came from the Cockpit company of 1639. Thus Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge and Chapman’s Chabot Admiral of France appear in the 1639 list, the first having belonged to the Queen’s Revels and later to the Lady Elizabeth’s men,^[7] and the second in all probability to the former company.^[8] Besides these, we know that Shirley’s The Bird in a Cage was an original Cockpit play. Markham’s Herod and Antipater was given first by the Red Bull company of the King’s Revels, while Day’s Humour out of Breath and Mason’s Mulleasses were owned by the Children of His Majesty’s Revels. Jonson’s Poetaster was published in 1602 as acted by the Children of the Chapel, Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Woman Hater in 1607 as acted by the Children of Pauls (although it was being given by the King’s men later^[9]); Chapman’s All Fools and The Conspiracy of Charles Duke of Byron are early Blackfriars plays, and his Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois was presented at the Whitefriars. Randolph’s The Jealous Lovers was a Cambridge drama; Chapman’s (or Glapthorne’s) The Revenge for Honour was licensed to the Prince’s men in 1624.^[10] There remain the three Shakespeare dramas (Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, and the three parts of Henry VI.) as well as four Beaumont and Fletcher plays (The Honest Man’s Fortune, Women Pleased, The Faithful Shepherdess, and Wit at Several Weapons), two of Ford’s (The Broken Heart and The Lover’s Melancholy), all of which were associated with the King’s men.^[11]

In collecting his plays at the time of the Restoration D’Avenant seems to have culled them from three separate sources. He evidently took over from Beeston, or held in his own right, many of the “Cockpitt playes appropried” in 1639. To the list given above might be added Massinger’s The Bondman, Heywood’s Love’s Mistress, and Shirley’s The Grateful Servant, The Witty Fair One, and The School of Compliment, all of which we know from other sources to have been acted in the first years of the Restoration period either at Salisbury Court or at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and all included in the Cockpit list. D’Avenant was enabled, moreover, to secure a number of dramas which had originally been produced by children’s companies or by companies other than that serving the King. Most important of all, he seized upon some of the most popular pieces of the King’s men themselves. It certainly seems strange that he should thus have been able to purloin what obviously were among the most taking plays of that time, and still more strange that the Lord Chamberlain and the King should have supported him by their warrants. What, we may well ask, was the justification for granting him these rights? Autocratically as Charles II. behaved in regard to the theatres, we can hardly believe that he wilfully alienated a number of the best of Shakespeare’s plays from those who were after all his own servants; and the problem arises of discovering some reason underlying the two warrants. There are no other documents here to assist us; but there seems to be a clue, never followed out, to be discovered in the texts of some of the plays in question. Of these plays a number were reprinted in the period of the Restoration, notably The Tempest (in D’Avenant’s and Dryden’s alteration), Measure for Measure and Much Ado about Nothing (in D’Avenant’s own composite adaptation), Macbeth (in 1673, and as an opera in 1674), Hamlet, and The Duchess of Malfi. The Law against Lovers, which unites parts of Measure for Measure and Much Ado about Nothing, may be dismissed, as the alterations made in the text make comparison with the original Folio versions impossible; but The Tempest, in the original 1670 version, the first (1673) edition of the “D’Avenant” Macbeth, before that play like The Tempest had been metamorphosed out of all likeness to the original, and Hamlet afford material for some possible conjecture. Elsewhere I have attempted a brief examination of the texts of the 1676 Hamlet and of the 1673 Macbeth,^[12] and have come to the conclusion that both point back, not to printed originals, but to prompt-copies of the pre-Commonwealth period. This conclusion is arrived at from an examination of several facts: (1) that in neither play does one single Quarto or Folio seem to have been the original, readings being taken from various sources;^[13] (2) that the Macbeth quarto gives the full text of those songs, the first lines only of which appear in the First Folio; (3) that the Hamlet quarto has excisions which seem more probably executed in the period before 1642 than in that after 1660. In The Tempest of 1670 only one act is left in something like its Shakespearian state, and, as a consequence, this play does not furnish such a sure basis for investigation. Yet even in this restricted field there are again indications that the original before Dryden and D’Avenant was a prompt-copy. A close examination of the speeches retained from the original play reveals the fact that there are readings occasionally from the First Folio, occasionally from the Second or from the Third. Sometimes, even, the text of the Dryden–D’Avenant adaptation points to an original which is more authentic than any of those three. It is manifest, for example, that the lines beginning:

“Abhorred Slaue,
Which any print of goodnesse wilt not take,”

cannot have been intended for Miranda, as they are given in the Folio, and the Dryden–D’Avenant “attribution” of them to Prospero has been followed by every later editor.

The Tempest, therefore, Macbeth and Hamlet, as printed in the time of the Restoration, all point back to some texts independent of the Folios and the previous Quartos. The conclusion to which this examination of the three Restoration play-lists along with those of 1639 and 1641 and along with an analysis of these Shakespeare plays would tend is that D’Avenant, who seems all through the Commonwealth period to have been eager to recommence dramatic performances, together with Beeston, who during the period of theatre suppression made himself proprietor of the Salisbury Court playhouse in anticipation of happier days to come, secured the possession of a number of prompt-books belonging originally to the King’s men, and by virtue of the possession of these the former contrived to get a royal warrant in 1660, declaring that he might have those dramas as the property of his company. The only definite item of proof against this theory of which I am aware is that the 1678 quarto of The Duchess of Malfi is but a modernised reprint of the quarto of 1640; but even this does not necessarily establish the non-existence of an original prompt-text in D’Avenant’s hands. It is, at all events, possible that the printer here used for convenience a printed text instead of utilising a theatre copy, no doubt presenting matter much more difficult to set up satisfactorily.^[14]

The warrants of 1660, 1668, and 1669 are thus seen to have a very definite interest as proving the continuity of Elizabethan ideas concerning the ownership of plays, and, if the conclusion set forth above be in any way accepted, they serve to put more of intrinsic importance on those late quarto texts which critics in the past have been inclined to regard rather as literary curiosities than as possible sources of information in a determination of the true text of Shakespeare.

1. This list is to be found in the Public Record Office, L.C. 5/134, p. 337. For the suggestion regarding Monsieur Thomas, see Mr. E. K. Chambers’ article on Plays of the King’s Men in 1641 (Malone Society Collections, i. 4 and 5, p. 364) and his Elizabethan Stage, iii. 228.
2. Public Record Office, L.C .5/96; printed in Malone Society Collections, i. 4 and 5, pp. 367–369.
3. These three lists are all in the Public Record Office; L.C. 5/137, p. 343; L.C. 5/139, p. 375, and L.C. 5/12, p. 202. They have been printed in the present writer’s History of Restoration Drama, pp. 314–316.
4. It may be noted here that possibly one other drama is common to the two. The Bridegroom and the Madman (1641) is no doubt to be identified with The Nice Valour, or The Passionate Madman (1669), another of the Beaumont and Fletcher group.
5. But given later by the King's men (Adams, Henry Herbert, 55 and 76; cf. Murry, J. T., English Dramatic Companies, i. 177).
6. Revived by King’s men in 1633 (Adams, op. cit. 20).
7. Chambers, Eliz. Stage, iii. 225.
8. It was licensed later as Shirley’s (Adams, op. cit. 36).
9. As in the edition of 1648.
10. Adams, op. cit. 28.
11. The Honest Man’s Fortune seems to have been produced by the Lady Elizabeth’s men, but was later licensed to the King’s company (Chambers, op. cit. iii. 227). The introduction of The Faithful Shepherdess in both the lists is an exception which presupposes some error.
12. See an essay on Shakespeare’s Editors from First Folio to Malone, the last of a series of First Folio Tercentenary Lectures, shortly to be published by the Oxford University Press.
13. This is particularly true of the 1673 Macbeth; a corrected quarto may have been used for the 1676 Hamlet.
14. It is noticeable that while The Tempest was published by Cademan, Hamlet by Martyn and Herringman, and Macbeth by Herringman, The Duchess of Malfi was described as printed by D. N. and T. C., and sold by Simon Neale. It is probably that the publication of the last was not authorised by the actors.