The Court Beggar
Textual Introduction1The only extant text of The Court Beggar probably dates from 1640, although the following year is possible. The play was printed in the 1653 octavo collection of Richard Brome’s Five New Playes, the first publication of any of his dramatic work after the playwright’s death in September 1652. The volume was edited by Alexander Brome, whose relationship (if any) to the playwright is unknown, and it was published by a trio of booksellers. Five New Playes, to quote its overall title page, was ‘printed for Humphrey Moseley, Richard Marriot and Thomas Dring…to be sold at their shops, 1653’ [sig. A1]. Although the Transcript of the Stationers’ Registers provides no clues to refine this date of publication, a manuscript note on George Thomason’s copy adds ‘May.20.’ Given Thomason’s habits in inscribing title pages, this could be the precise date when the book was published, or it could be the date when Thomason ([1602]-1660) bought his copy.n11384 Either way, his annotation gives a terminus ad quem for publication. 2In 1653 Humphrey Moseley was developing a niche market in the publication of pre-1642 dramatic texts, packaged by author. For some authors (George Chapman, William Davenant, John Webster) he only ever published single texts in quarto. For others (Thomas Middleton, Philip Massinger, James Shirley) he also published collections of two, three or more plays, generally in octavo, although his 1647 Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher was in folio. The octavo collections were both divisible into their constituent texts and also expandable by the addition of subsequently-published single texts.n11385 Moseley’s role in the publication of the 1653 collection of Richard Brome’s Five New Playes is a little puzzling: it has been claimed that the volume was his project, instigated by him, and its format is consistent with other collections which certainly were.n11386 As Greg demonstrates in some detail, two separate printers were involved in the 1653 Five New Playes, one printing the first three plays in the collection, and the other the last two as well as the preliminaries to the entire volume.n11387 The only place where Moseley’s name appears in that volume is on the overall title page in the preliminaries, which would have been printed after everything else. Since there is thus bibliographic evidence that Moseley was a late recruit to it, there is some possibility that the project of publishing Brome’s 1653 Five New Playes may have been initiated not by Moseley but in imitation of him and in competition, collaboration, or perhaps some combination of the two. However and whenever he came to be involved in the 1653 Five New Playes, Moseley maintained his interest, advertising it for six years after its 1654 reissue (on which his name does not appear) and in 1659 apparently buying out Marriot’s one-third interest.n113883With two separate printers involved in the 1653 Five New Playes, the first three plays in the collection (A Mad Couple Well Matched, The Novella and The Court Beggar) are bibliographically distinct from the last two (The City Wit and The Demoiselle) and the preliminaries to the entire volume. The last two plays, moreover, were paginated independently of each other. Greg notes: ‘There is no indication that the two biographically independent pieces were ever issued separately, though like others in the volume they are sometimes found so.’n11389 All five of the plays in the volume can be found separately in the British Library. One of the now-separate copies of The Court Beggar, British Library shelfmark 162.c.14, bears remarkable traces of its previous history. On the final page [signature S8v] there are two manuscript imitations of the last printed word -- ‘Finis’ - in The Court Beggar; and then, after the second of the two horizontal lines which bracket that word, a start has been made at copying the text which would have been on the facing page when this copy of The Court Beggar was still part of a copy of the 1653 Five New Playes. The next page in that volume is the title page of The City Wit, the subtitle of which has been partially imitated: the imitation, more careful than calligraphically skillful, now disappears into the binding, but the words ‘V V oman. Wears th[e]’ remain visible. A manuscript note inscribed along the right margin of signature P1, at 90 degrees to the printed text, may be relevant. Neat italic writing, by what could be the same hand as that which has copied out printed text on the final page, records: ‘Memorandum that I John Ffirth is a notty Boy.’ 4Greg identifies the printer of the last two plays in the 1653 Five New Playes and of the preliminaries to the volume as Thomas Roycroft, who did other work for Moseley and for Dring.n11390 The printer of the first three plays, who has not been identified, appears to have been capable of taking shortcuts. A Mad Couple Well Matched is printed on signatures A5v through H2, with H2V left blank; The Novella on H3 through N2, with N2V left blank; and The Court Beggar on N3 through S8V. To the confusion of theatre historians and literary scholars, the title page of The Court Beggar was printed from type which had been set for the title page of The Novella: the only differences between the title pages are the names of the plays and the performance venues respectively ascribed to them. So where the title-page for The Novella presents that play as ‘A / COMEDIE / Acted at the Black-Friers, by his / MAJESTIES Servants, / Anno 1632’ [sig. H3], The Court Beggar is correspondingly, and inaccurately, presented as ‘A / COMEDIE / Acted at the Cock-pit, by his / MAJESTIES Servants, / Anno 1632.’ [sig. N3]. The dramatis personae list for The Court Beggar [sig. N4] imitates that of The Novella [sig. H4] in layout and decorative border, but it has an uncorrected typographical error of its own in the tagword which links to the prologue on the verso: what ought to be ‘PRO-’ was printed as ‘POR-’. After the preliminaries, however, the printer’s observable economies seem to have been of space rather than of time: this is particularly noticeable in the setting of easily scanned verse as if it were prose. While all but a very few entrances have been given separate lines of print, exits have been placed more or less to the right of lines of dialogue. Other stage directions (more often than not distinguished by open-parenthesis signs as well as by italics) have also been partially justified right; and those which are longer than a word or two have been fragmented and fitted alongside as many as five lines of dialogue.5The present editor can detect no indication of The Court Beggar in the 1653 Five New Playes having been set from prompt copy. The printer’s practice with stage directions, as described above, can preclude certainty about their exact points of reference in the dialogue. The location of entrances there, however, is always clear; and when they are misplaced, entrances are not anticipatory, nor does any stage direction appear to have been a backstage cue. The longer stage directions, particularly in the final act, suggest the theatrical imagination of an experienced playwright who well knows the available resources. The best guess of the present editor is that the printer of The Court Beggar in the 1653 Five New Playes worked from a fair copy of an authorial manuscript. Both stage directions and speech headings do contain a few errors in characters’ names. Almost all of these, however, are unsurprising confusions of Fer and Fre, and only one - La instead of Str for Lady Strangelove on signature S6 - could possibly be construed as a sign of indecision about the name or identity of a character. Indeed, all dramaturgical decisions appear to have been taken: there are some omissions of exits, but these are easily rectified.6After the Restoration, parts of The Court Beggar were recycled by George Powell in A Very Good Wife. This very bad play was printed in 1693, ‘As it is Acted by Their / MAJESTIES SERVANTS. / At the Theatre-Royal’ - in other words, by the United (King’s with Duke of York’s) Company at Drury Lane Theatre.n11391 Powell’s name does not appear on the titlepage, but neither do the names of the playwrights. The quarto is an amalgamation of pre-1642 dramatic texts, their respective authors going unacknowledged: Richard Brome contributes chunks of The City Wit and The Court Beggar.n11392 Most of the plagiarism from The Court Beggar involves Brome’s three Wits, with Swain-wit rechristened as ‘Bonavent. A Blunt Cornish Gentleman’ and Cit-wit as ‘Squeezewit. A Foolish Citizen, very desirous of being thought a Wit’.n11393 Court-wit (played by Powell) does not change his name; but his new identity, as ‘a Gentleman, who by his Generous Temper, has wasted his Fortunes, and put to his shifts’, puts him closer to Brome’s Crasy in The City Wit than to Brome’s Court-wit in The Court Beggar. Dainty resurfaces as ‘Venture. One that keeps good Company, bearing the Port of a Gentleman, but is indeed a Pickpocket, and a Coward’. Lady Strangelove is diminished to ‘Widow Lacy, A humorous Lady, never long in one Mind’, but Philomel is elevated, both socially and morally, as ‘Caroll. Her Cozen’. The end of Act I of A Very Good Wife is taken from Act 2, scene 1 of The Court Beggar (corresponding to Speeches Nos. 173-245 in this edition); Act 2 of A Very Good Wife includes material from The Court Beggar Act 3, scene 1 (Speeches Nos. 482-505), Act 2, scene 1 (Speeches Nos. 302-306) and Act 3, scene 2 (Speeches Nos. 540-599); and Act 4 of A Very Good Wife recycles the whole of The Court Beggar Act 5, scene 1 (Speeches Nos.846-948).7The control copy for this edition of The Court Beggar has been EEBO’s set of online images made from the separate copy of the play in the Library of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It has been collated, and some fifty cruces checked, against the text of The Court Beggar in: the separate copy of the play in the British Library (shelfmark 162.c.14, discussed above); the two copies of the 1653 Five New Playes in the British Library (shelfmarks G 18535 and E1423.1 - the former being Thomas Rawlinson’s copy, of which remark will be made below, and the latter, as noted above, being Thomason’s copy, which was examined in photocopy and also in EEBO images); the copy of the 1653 Five New Playes in Templeman Library of the University of Kent, Canterbury (classmark C653.BRO); and the copy of the 1654 reissue of Five New Playes in the British Library (shelfmark 1607/490). No press corrections were certainly remarked, the few differences observed from the control copy being obviously mechanical in origin. 8What was observed in the copy of the 1653 Five New Playes which is now British Library shelfmark G15835, however, was the hand of the book-collector Thomas Rawlinson (1681-1725). Rawlinson wrote a biographical note about Brome on the flyleaf, signed his own name on signature A1, and inscribed annotations on all five plays. In The Court Beggar these include: addition of exits (for Raphael on P8v, after the speech which is No. 480 in this edition, and for Philomel on Q2, alongside Speech No. 517); indication of the direction for delivery of a line (on P1, line 5 in Speech No. 302, to Swain-wit); insertion of a word (bottom line on R4v, Speech No. 816, expanding ‘by means’ to ‘by my means’ and thereby altering the sense of the phrase); reassignment of speeches by changing speech headings (on R3v, Speech No. 778, from Ferdinand to Frederick) or by adding them (on O4v, Speech 180, for Cit-wit and then for Philomel; and on Q6v, second sentence in Speech No. 646, for Raphael; on S3, Speech 1021.5, for Raphael, twice), correction of orthographical or typographical error (on Q8, Speech 456, ‘Babilion’ to ‘Babylon’; and on R6, Speech No. 847, ‘convery’ to ‘convey’), and by emendation (on N8, Speech No. 62, ‘sonnes’ to ‘sums’; on P1, Speech No. 302, ‘madam’ to ‘madman’; and on R6v, Speech No. 866, ‘lady’ to ‘lad’). Rawlinson’s annotations are not systematic, nor do they always accord with decisions taken in the present edition, but they do command editorial respect.9The Court Beggar, like the other plays which had constituted the 1653 Five New Playes, appears in the first volume of John Pearson’s 1873 three-volume Dramatic Works of Richard Brome containing Fifteen Comedies. Pearson’s edition being quasi-diplomatic, that first volume reproduces the titlepage of the 1653 Five New Playes immediately after its own 1873 titlepage. The present editor is not aware of any other edition. This edition has been conservative in retaining linguistic forms used by the Wits, particularly Swain-wit, whose characteristic tagword - ‘Tho’ - has been tracked in textual notes. Re-sitings of stage directions, including entrances and exits, have also been tracked, as have changes of prose to verse. Re-lineation of verse, however, has not been recorded.
n11384 Thomason ([1602]-1660) bought his copy.
n11385 The octavo collections were both divisible into their constituent texts and also expandable by the addition of subsequently-published single texts.
n11386 and its format is consistent with other collections which certainly were.
n11387 the preliminaries to the entire volume.
n11388 Marriot’s one-third interest.
n11389 Greg notes: ‘There is no indication that the two biographically independent pieces were ever issued separately, though like others in the volume they are sometimes found so.’
n11390 for Dring.
n11391 in other words, by the United (King’s with Duke of York’s) Company at Drury Lane Theatre.
n11392 Richard Brome contributes chunks of The City Wit and The Court Beggar.
n11393 very desirous of being thought a Wit’.