THE

SHAKESPEARE

APOCRYPHA

BEING A COLLECTION OF FOURTEEN PLAYS

WHICH HAVE BEEN ASCRIBED TO

SHAKESPEARE

EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

BY

C. F. TUCKER BROOKE

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

FIRST PUBLISHED 1908

REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY IN GREAT BRITAIN

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD

BY VIVIAN RIDLER, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

1967

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

This volume is designed to satisfy a need which during the past two generations has been variously and often expressed. The ambition of the editor has been to provide an accurate and complete text, with adequate critical and supplementary matter, of all those plays which can, without entire absurdity, be included in the 'doubtfully Shakespearian' class. A similar work--to comprise the first thirteen dramas in this book, in addition to The Arraignment of Paris, The Death of Stucley, and The Siege of Antwerp--appears, indeed, on the list of suggested publications of the New Shakspere Society (Transactions,1874, p. 4), but it did not get beyond the stage of projection.

Since the days of Malone, only three of the works before us--Arden of Feversham, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Sir Thomas More--have appeared in English-speaking countries in what can at all justly be termed independently edited texts. Tolerable versions of four others have been published by Germans in editions now practically unprocurable. As regards the other seven plays, no real attempt at purification of the text or collation of the early editions has been made, if made at all, for more than two centuries, and in the case of Sir John Oldcastle, it has remained for this book to give the very first reprint of what is most unmistakably the only reliable and uncorrupted version. Thus considerable and important passages appear here for the first time since 1600.

In the preparation of the body of the text, the main object has been to give a faithful reproduction of the most authoritative edition of each play ; that is, of the earliest, except in the rare instances where a later edition is demonstrably truer to the author's manuscript. Supplementary passages are printed, within brackets, from the earliest edition which contains them. Where a variant or an emendation has appeared inevitable, it has been adopted, but the reading of the editio princeps has invariably been given in the footnotes. Great pains have been taken--it is hoped with a fair measure of success--to register in the footnotes all variants in accessible sixteenth and seventeenth-century editions which are not purely orthographic, and all such later emendations and conjectures as possess any degree of usefulness or probability.

Silent alteration of the original has been tolerated only in such purely mechanical matters as the abandonment of the long 's'; the correction of obviously unintentional mis-spacing ; the rectifying of the most transparent typographical errors, such as Flaundsrs for Flaunders (Edward III, I. i. 151) and thinekst for thinkest (Ibid. II. i. 98) and the introduction of modern punctuation where the sense would otherwise be uninteligible to the ordinary reader. The old punctuation is, however, retained where possible, and all misprints which can conceivably have interest or significance are recorded in the footnotes. The numeration of lines is, of course, new, and it should be noted that the parts of divided metrical lines are often separately numbered for convenience of reference and in order to preserve the appearance of the original page.

It is believed that the text will be found as free from inaccuracy as a reprint can well be made. Except for the few additional passages from the third quarto of Mucedorus, personally copied by the editor, transcription has in no case been trusted. The texts of the six plays contained in the third Shakespeare folio and that of the first edition of Mucedorus have been based on photographic facsimiles of the original quartos; the other plays are printed from the best modern old-spelling editions very carefully corrected by the originals. The collation of the early editions has been done twice to ensure accuracy, and the proof sheets revised by the original quartos. Particular care has been taken to verify readings which are in opposition to those recorded by other modern editors.

The general notes are to be considered in connexion with the footnotes. They have been kept within modest compass, and their raison d'être--the explanation or defence of the readings of the text--has perhaps not often been lost sight of. If more general comments have here and there intruded themselves, it is trusted that they will be found always to serve some more legitimate purpose than the mere display of 'all such reading as was never read'.

Like so many students of Elizabethan literature, I have to acknowledge a large debt of gratitude to Mr. P. A. Daniel. My obligations to him for textual comments and conjectures, particularly relating to The Merry Devil of Edmonton and The Two Noble Kinsmen, will, I hope, be sufficiently evident from the notes to those plays; but for a great deal of other trouble willingly undertaken on my behalf I have only this opportunity of rendering my sincere thanks. I am equally indebted to Dr. Furnivall for unfailing interest and sympathy as well as for a number of valuable suggestions for my Introduction; and I gladly take this occasion of expressing also my recognition of Dr. W. Aldis Wright's courtesy to me while reading in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and since.

Finally, it is with especial pleasure that I acknowledge my many obligations to Professor Raleigh, to whom are due both the original inspiration for this book and continued helpful encouragement during its preparation. It is my sincere hope that the volume may be regarded as a testimony and a small tribute to the force of his influence and example.

C. F. T. B.

January, 1908.

INTRODUCTION

The Shakespeare Apocrypha are indisputably the work of many hands, varying to the extreme of possibility in strength, in skill, and in manner. Not even the amateur Tieck, insatiable in his quest of literary curios, has had the hardihood to ascribe the entire number to the greatest of the Elizabethans. Yet unequal as they are in literary merit, these plays diverge still more, if possible, in subject-matter, style, and general tone. Between certain individuals of the group, indeed, a few similarities may be noted and a few comparisons drawn; but to attempt to treat the collection comprehensively and as a generic whole would be like undertaking a family history of Falstaff's motley company. The pseudo-Shakespearian plays are waifs and strays of the Elizabethan drama, brought together adventitiously from here, there, and everywhere, and with no common bond but that mighty name, beneath whose broad influence they all seek shelter.

Disconcerting though it is to the commentator, this infinite variety yet lends a special zest to the consideration of the pseudo-Shakespearian cycle. The plays are almost without exception interesting, but for very different reasons. Two of them, Arden of Feversham and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and probably they alone, can rest their case boldly on their character as artistic wholes and claim a position, when judged thus in their entirety, in the very first rank of the extra-Shakespearian drama. Three others--Edward III, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and Sir Thomas More--failing either in dignity or in unity of outline, rise in parts to an equal height of poetry, a height where the question becomes less whether they are good enough for Shakespeare thanwhether they are like him.

The remaining members of the group belong distinctly to a lower order, that is, except on the theory of apprentice work or the hastiest of retouching, modern criticism can hardly admit their claim of Shakespearian origin to be even plausible. Yet there is scarcely any other dramatist of the period, save Marlowe and Ben Jenson, whose reputation would suffer by the fathering of plays like The London Prodigal, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, or The Puritan.

As there is no difficulty in selecting the five best pseudo-Shakespearian dramas, so there need be little hesitation in pointing out the worst. Literary and dramaturgical considerations would pretty certainly assign the position of discredit to Fair Em and Mucedorus, productions that bear the mark of vagabondage on every feature. Yet, for the reader of to-day, these plays, distinctly the weaklings of the flock, possess an attractiveness of their own by very virtue of their dull impersonality, because they display so little of the individual author and so much of the vulgar dramatic taste. Such literary phenomena evolve themselves, they are not created; the writer does no more than drift down current of theatrical convention, and is doubtless as undiscoverable--certainly as little worth discovering--as the author of a political election song or a low melodrama of a generation ago.

There is a curious dramatic irony in the fact that Mucedorus and Fair Em have been attributed by serious and respectable critics to the pen of Shakespeare. Composed in utter disregard of probability and reason, with little poetry and less psychology--with no particular merit, indeed, but the freshness that comes of complete unintelligent conventionality--these performances made their appeal frankly to the groundlings. In the case of Mucedorus, at least, we know that the appeal was enormously successful. This absurd play, with the merits and defects of a nursery tale, was acted by strolling companies everywhere till long after the Commonwealth, and passed through seventeen editions between 1598 and 1700, a record unequalled in the history of the pre-Restoration drama. The only play of the pseudo-Shakespearian class, which can at all compare with Mucedorus in popularity with the early book-publishers, is a considerably better comedy of similar kind, The Merry Devil ol Edmonton. Six quarto editions of the latter are recorded between 1608 and 1655. It may be added, as a commentary on Shakespeare knowledge after the Restoration, that Mucedorus, Fair Em, and The Merry Devil of Edmonton, were bound together into a volume for the library of King Charles II with the label, 'Shakespeare. Vol. I.'

The Shakespeare Apocrypha have been accumulating during three centuries. Each generation has attributed to the poet, in good faith or in fraud, tentatively or with conviction, the authorship of plays with which his name had not previously been connected. At the same time, certain plays once ascribed to Shakespeare have gradually disappeared from the list, as the actual authors have been discovered or the absurdity of the ascription has made itself generally felt. In the present state of the case, the preparation of an adequate and practical catalogue of pseudo-Shakespearian plays is a matter of some difficulty. The epithet 'pseudo-Shakespearian' no longer carries with it any presumption as to Shakespeare's authorship Certain plays, a baker's dozen in all, have acquired a prescriptive right to the title, and must be mentioned in every list ; twenty or thirty others have at various times been proposed, with greater or less diffidence, but are still far from having established their position in the category. In regard to these last, each writer on the subject must decide for himself which may be admitted into the 'doubtfully Shakespearian' class without offence to the rules of critical seemliness. The catalogue of a seventeenth-century bookseller, for instance, gives to Shakespeare three histories: Edward II, Edward III and Edward IV. The second of these is universally regarded as one of the doubtful plays, but to admit into the group either of the others, known to be by Marlowe and Heywood respectively, would show an absurdly uncritical deference to the blunder or deceit of the bookseller, the only mortal who has ever hinted at the connexion.

The long critical history of the Shakespeare Apocrypha divides itself into three pretty well defined epochs. The first, which lasted from the close of the sixteenth century till well into the eighteenth, was the age of purely unliterary attribution. Plays were stated on title-pages, on the Stationers' Registers, or in book-lists to be by William Shakespeare, and there, for a time, the matter ended. No evidence, internal or external, was adduced in support of the attribution, and in few cases or none could the attributors by any stretch of the imagination be called literary critics. Such ascriptions are either the most authoritative of all, or they are utterly valueless ; they may rest on personal knowledge or general contemporary report ; they may, on the other hand, be no more than the fabrication of an ignorant or fraudulent bookseller. It requires a considerable amount of boldness to deny the possility of Shakespeare's concern in The Two Noble Kinsmen, in the face of the title-page of the first edition, ¹ which declares it to be 'written by the memorable Worthies of their time; Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. William Shakespeare, Gentlemen' ; and the evidence of the Stationers' Registers ² and first edition ² of A Yorkshire Tragedy in favour of Shakespeare's authorship of that play is perhaps even stronger, because dating from the poet's lifetime. Yet an edition of Sir John Oldcastle in 1600 likewise bears the words, 'Written by William Shakespeare,' and this boast, absurd on the face of it, is proved mendacious beyond the shadow of a doubt, by the record in Henslowe's Diary of the actual authors: Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathway. To sum up, we have in the seventeenth century practically no evidence to indicate that Shakespeare's dramatic activities extended beyond the list of canonical plays, save that of printers, publishers, and stationers. This evidence is worthy of serious consideration in case, and only in case, there is no prima facie cause to believe the witnesses grossly ignorant of the matter, or dishonestly intent on palming off their spurious wares as the works of Shakespeare.

The generation of Capell, Steevens, and Malone, ushered in the second epoch in the criticism of the doubtful plays. They and their followers took a purely literary point of view, judging the dramas on catholic lines and, in general, with accuracy and fairness, though they suffered from inadequate comprehension of the peculiarly distinguishing features of Shakespeare's art and placed a mischievous amount of confidence in such vanities as parallel passages and identical archaisms. This tendency of criticism--to which the apocryphal plays owe as much perhaps, after all, as to any that has so far succeeded it--vanished in a burst of midsummer madness with the wild attributions of Tieck and his romantic satellites.

For these last, Germans all, and incapable of appreciating the delicacies of English style, Shakespeare appears to have meant rather a poetic principle than a poet. Dazed by the newly discovered and ill-understood brilliance of the Shakespearian drama, they tended to appropriate to the individual poet qualities of freshness and freedom which, in truth, were the common property of the age. To this misconception and to the desire, so characteristic of later German

¹ 1634.

² Both in 1608.

The Shakespeare Apocrypha
Being a Collection of Fourteen Plays
Which Have Been Ascribed to Shakespeare
Edited, with Introduction, Notes and Bibliography by
C. F. Tucker Brooke
Oxford
At the Clarendon Press
[1908]

First Internet Edition 1998

Rutgers University Libraries
PR2851.B7 1908A

Omnipædia Polyglotta
F López R
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