The Weeding of Covent Garden
Textual Introduction1The Weeding of Covent Garden exists in a single version printed before the nineteenth century, contained in the multi-play volume of Brome’s plays of 1659:Five nevv / PLAYES, / VIZ. / The ENGLISH MOOR, or The MOCK- / MARRIAGE. / The LOVE-SICK COURT, or The AM- / BITIOUS POLITIQUE. / COVENT GARDEN Weeded. / The NEVV ACADEMY, or The NEVV / EXCHANGE. / The QUEEN and CONCUBINE. / By RICHARD BROME. / LONDON, / Printed for A. Crook at the Green Dragon / in Saint Pauls Church-yard, and for H. Brome / at the Gunn in Ivy-Lane, 1659.2The Weeding of Covent Garden has its own titlepage:The / WEEDING / OF THE / COVENT-GARDEN. / Or the / Middlesex-JUSTICE / OF / Peace. / A Facetious COMEDY. / A POSTHUME of RICHARD BROME, / An Ingenious Servant, and Imitator of his / Master, that famously Renowned / Poet Ben. Johnson. / Aut prodesse solent, aut delectare Poetæ. / Dramatis Personæ. / LONDON, / Printed for Andrew Crook, and are to be sold at the / Green Dragon in St. Pauls Church-yard: And / Henry Broom at the Gun in Ivy-lane. 16583As well as being dated 1658 and having a separate titlepage, The Weeding of Covent Garden is independently paginated and has an independent series of signatures. The signatures continue into the following play, The New Academy, though the pagination does not.4W.W. Greg deduces thatthe volume, apart from the preliminaries, was printed in three sections, and each of the four probably came from a different press. … The two plays of the second section [The Weeding of Covent Garden and The New Academy] were evidently printed straight ahead on B-O8: preliminaries to The Weeding of Covent Garden being later supplied on an unsigned half-sheet, and epilogues to the same and preliminaries to The New Academy on a half-sheet signed h (a signature further distinguished by being within parentheses). The former half-sheet was padded with extraneous matter, the latter is more than half blank. That they were designed from the start appears from the catchword on G8v, and they would naturally be printed together as a single sheet.n99805The contents of the unsigned half-sheet are as follows:• ‘Upon Aglaura printed in Folio’, a 40-line poem in heroic couplets, signed ‘R.B.’‘Upon Aglaura printed in Folio’ is a satire mocking Sir John Suckling’s play Aglaura, first performed by the King’s Men in 1637 and printed in 1638. Whatever the merits of the play, Brome seizes on what he sees as Suckling’s pretensions in printing in the expensive folio format and using such large margins. Commentary on Brome’s poem is below.• ‘A Song’, which is here presumed to be the song in praise of sack performed by Cockbrain and missing from Act 3;n11658 [CG 3.1.speech537]• Two prologues, headed ‘A Prologue’ and ‘Another Prologue’; and• ‘To my Lord of Newcastle, on his Play called The Variety. He having commanded to give him my true opinion of it’, a poem again signed ‘R.B.’William Cavendish (baptized 1593; died 1676), in Brome’s lifetime earl of Newcastle but subsequently raised to the status of duke (1665), and later married to Margaret Cavendish, was a literary follower and patron of Ben Jonson, and also himself an author. The Variety is Newcastle’s second play (perhaps written with some assistance from James Shirley) and it was also performed by the King’s Men, in 1641, and was printed in 1649. Commentary on Brome’s poem is below.• These preliminaries are followed by a Dramatis Personae, titled ‘The Actors Names’. The play text itself begins at Signature B1r and continues to G8v.• Following the play text are two epilogues, headed ‘Epilogue.’ and ‘Another.’. These are printed on signature (h)1r; (h)1v is blank. As Greg notes, there is a catchword on G8v. Commentary on the epilogues follows below.6After 1659 the play is not printed until being issued in quasi-facsimile by John Pearson in 1873. In the twentieth century, D.S. McClure published A Critical Edition of Richard Brome’s ‘The Weeding of Covent Garden’ and ‘The Sparagus Garden’ (New York, 1980). Despite the remarkable faithfulness of Pearson’s text, his 1873 printing cannot be regarded as a significant textual witness, not least because its origin and methods of preparation remain unknown. D.S. McClure’s Critical Edition has many excellent features. However, it contains a few readings I have not found in any copies of Five New Plays (1659). Some pages of the 1659 volume are poorly printed; the Library of Congress copy, on which McClure based his edition, is particularly feint in places. I can only conclude McClure’s unique variants are mistaken readings of an often poorly printed text.7Although McClure judges that ‘the play is carefully edited and relatively free from printer’s errors’ (p. 35), the printed text contains a considerable number of textual confusions. Its problems are particularly striking when this play is compared with the other contained in the same part of the 1659 volume. By comparison with The New Academy, The Weeding of Covent Garden has far more textual problems. The number of emendations required, and their nature in clarifying problems and dilemmas that, however simple, must be resolved for the play to be staged, leads me to conclude that the manuscript standing behind the sole significant witness, the 1659 printed edition of this play, could not have been a clean copy created for use in the theatre. It is more likely to be the author’s ‘foul papers’, with occasional annotation by someone other than the author; a stage before the clean theatre copy, perhaps. The text as it stands in the 1659 volume could not have been satisfactory for someone required to achieve a coherent staging. Imprecisions and confusions seem to arise where compositors have either failed to notice that something has been struck out and so have left in a supernumerary phrasen11659 [NA 2.2.lines938-939] [NA 2.2.speech334]; or when there is clear confusion about speech prefixes or placement of lines in the text. On one occasion the compositor appears to have included an annotation made when someone noticed that a passage didn’t make sense:n11660 ‘the word’s out’ [CG 3.1.lines1587-1588].8In preparing this text I have collated the following copies:Bodleian Library, Oxford, Douce B 334
Bodleian Library, Oxford, 8o B 459(2) Linc.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, 8o B 14(1) Art.B.S.
British Library BL 162.c.21
British Library BL 18536
Folger Shakespeare Library B4872 Copy 1
Folger Shakespeare Library B4872 Copy 2
Henry E. Huntington Library 600202
Henry E. Huntington Library 113370
Library of Congress 24031999
National Art Library Dyce 25.E.45
National Art Library Dyce 25.E.44
Newberry Library Y135.B779
Newberry Library PR 2439.B5A199In addition I have used the microfilm/digitized copy from the Thomason Tracts in the British Library: G.18536. The titlepage to Thomason’s copy of The Weeding of Covent Garden is marked in what appears to be Thomason’s hand (conservation restrictions mean that modern users can only see this book on microfilm): ‘Jan:’ and ‘January’. The Weeding of Covent Garden is numbered ‘1590’ at the top of the titlepage; ‘1588’ is written on the titlepage to the whole 1659 volume, and - after the first play, The English Moor, which has no markings on its titlepage - each play’s titlepage is sequentially numbered. If these are Thomason’s numberings, he may have thought of the text of each play as a separate work, particularly since he probably acquired the volume unbound. (In Bodley 8o B 459(2) Linc., The Weeding of Covent Garden is bound as the first play in the collection.) Thomason dated the last play, Queen and Concubine, again ‘Jan:’, and crossed out the final digit of its printed date, 1659, writing in ‘8’; he appears to have been dating the texts with Old Style years. He had made the same ‘correction’ on the volume’s main titlepage.10Comparison of The Weeding of Covent Garden in copies of the 1659 volume reveals that some press corrections were made in the course of printing this play. Trying to group copies by variants results in no timeline that can be confidently asserted for corrections and copies.11There are four principal instances of press corrections:Act 2 ‘enred’ corrected to ‘entred’n11661 [CG 2.1.line669] [CG 2.1.speech237] ‘discontinee’ corrected to ‘discontinue’n11662 [CG 2.1.line675] [CG 2.1.speech238]Act 4 ‘Belt’ corrected to ‘Bett’n11663 [CG 4.1.line1836] [CG 4.1.speech708] ‘Cit’ corrected to ‘Ciot’ (itself a mistake: if anything, the Speech Prefix should read ‘Clot’; there is no-one in the cast who could be referred to as ‘Ciot’)n11664 [CG 4.1.line1932] [CG 4.1.speech754]12The British Library copy British Library BL 18536 has all the uncorrected errors; Henry E. Huntington Library 600202 and National Art Library Dyce 25.E.44 also have the majority.13The Henry E. Huntington Library 113370 copy has errors in page numbering between what should be p. 18 and p. 31; in this copy it is p. 14 to p. 27. Several copies also have garbled running heads in the D gathering, and an error continues into the E and F gatherings (‘Garedn’). The garbling differs, however, suggesting that the compositors tried to correct the error while the printing press continued to produce pages, and they needed several attempts before they got it right (letters are reversed or put in upside down, suggesting haste).14Several of the copies consulted have manuscript annotations. Three in particular, with hands tentatively dated to the later seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, show intense reading, the annotators being alert to textual confusions: National Art Library Dyce 25.E.45; Folger Shakespeare Library B4872 Copy 1; and Newberry Library Y135.B779. My spotting a textual problem not noticed by any of these eagle-eyed annotators became a source of pride. When useful in confirming emendations, or illustrating the textual problem and potential solutions, manuscript annotations have been described in the textual notes.The Preliminaries15As described above, the text of The Weeding of Covent Garden is preceded in the 1659 volume Five New Plays by two prologues, the text of a song in praise of sack, likely to be that sung by Cockbrain in Act 3, and two unrelated poems by Brome. W.W. Greg calls these padding (p. 1023). There are also two epilogues to The Weeding of Covent Garden. The prologues and epilogues, and the Song, are included in the modernized spelling text of The Weeding of Covent Garden; here, they are described only.Prologues and epilogues16The compiler of Five New Plays prints a prologue and an epilogue each from the time of the original staging and from a revival about a decade later; the prologue and epilogue from the revival make clear the passage of time. The presence of the second prologue and epilogue is essential to the suggestion that The Weeding of Covent Garden was revived in 1641.i. Prologue and epilogue from the original stagingThe prologue17Written in heroic couplets, this Prologue - spoken by a representative of the actors - presents Brome as a robustly straight-talking playwright, honestly presenting his work to the public without special pleading; he requests the like integrity and fairness from his audience, who are thus flattered into accepting the vision of themselves presented. Honesty and integrity are not only asserted but enacted in the word choice and syntax: plain, muscular, Latinate when necessary, but not affected or posturing (except in so far as this is a posture).18Half way through line 15, the Prologue turns from this very Jonsonian presentation of the author to a ‘defence’ of the actors and the play. Little is actually said of the actors; the focus of attention is pre-emptive screening of the play from criticism on the grounds of being overly or too-pointedly satirical and of engaging in ad hominem attacks on actual figures involved in the development of Covent Garden and the new society of its neighbourhood. This section of the Prologue does read defensively: Brome gives every sign of expecting criticism. On the other hand, the Prologue creates a complicity between actors and audience: having claimed that no reflections on actual persons are intended, the Prologue goes on to acknowledge that persons such as those represented in the play do exist and it archly offers something close to encouragement to anyone who might think there is an element of the roman à clé about The Weeding of Covent Garden.The epilogue19The Epilogue, eight lines of heroic couplet, again disclaims the right of either the author (‘the poet’) or the actors to assert the value or success of the play, instead ‘humbly’ acknowledging that this right belongs to the audience and asking for approbation.ii. Prologue and epilogue from the revival20Both the second Prologue and Epilogue are written in heroic couplets.21The reference to ‘Some ten years since’ (l. 5) in the second Prologue identifies these as dating from a revival in the years immediately before the outbreak of civil war and the subsequent closing of the public theatres. By this time the new Covent Garden neighbourhood was well established and the ambition for it to be a centre for polite society, with the riotous element exiled, appeared to have been attained. The Prologue is self-congratulatory, encouraging the audience to look at contemporary Covent Garden and contrast it with the district as it appeared in its early phases, a decade earlier. Then the neighbourhood’s character appeared up for grabs; now it is successfully ‘weeded’, occupied by a population ‘of worth and honour’ (l. 11), a source of pride. Brome asks through the Prologue that his accuracy in prophesying Covent Garden’s success will lead his audience to continue their approval of the play.22The second Epilogue continues the association of the success of the Covent Garden neighbourhood, both beautiful (‘fair’) and socially reputable (‘nobility’), with the hoped for reception of Brome’s play.The song: ‘Away with all grief and give us more sack’23This appears to be the drinking song in praise of sack extemporized by Cockbrain in the guise of a tavern entertainer in Act 3. It is placed and annotated there in this edition’s modern-spelling text.Poems unrelated to The Weeding of Covent Garden24As W.W. Greg points out, these two poems, both signed ‘R.B.’, have no obvious relationship to the Five New Plays volume. The compilers of that volume seemed to have seized the opportunity to print more of Brome’s works.25The printing of these two poems as part of the section of the 1659 volume containing The Weeding of Covent Garden (and The New Academy) is essential to arguments concerning the possibility that the 1659 text - the only one to survive - contains revisions for the 1641 revival (see below). It is therefore necessary to set the poems in context, particularly ‘Upon AGLAURA in Folio’.‘Upon AGLAURA in Folio’26As mentioned above, ‘Upon Aglaura, printed in Folio’ satirises the printing of Sir John Suckling’s play Aglaura, first performed by the King’s Men in 1637 and printed in 1638. Brome attacks Suckling’s presumption in printing his play in the expensive folio format, ridiculing what he takes to be implicit claims of exceptional worth. Brome’s lampoon is one of three printed by Thomas Clayton in his edition of Suckling’s non-dramatic works, Appendix A, section 5.n9990 Clayton’s edition of this poem collates the text as printed in 1659 with various other witnesses and bases his edition on the text in Musarum Deliciæ (1655). In this edition of Brome’s works, I have chosen to retain the text of the 1659 printing; readers should consult Clayton’s edition for variants.Upon AGLAURA printed in FolioBy this large margin did the poet mean
To have a comment writ upon his scene?
Or is it that the ladies, who ne’er look
On any but a poem or playbook,
May, in each page, have space to scribble down5
When such a lord, or fashion comes to Town,
As swains in almanacs account do keep,
When their cow calved, and when they bought their sheep?
Ink is the life of paper; ’tis meet, then,
That thisn9991 which ’scaped the press should feel the pen.10
A room with one side furnished or a face
Painted half-way is but a fair disgrace.
This great voluminous pamphlet may be said
To be like one that hath more hair than head,
More excrement than body.n9992 Trees which sprout15
With broadest leaves have still the smallest fruit;
When I saw so much white, I did begin
To think Aglaura either did lie in,n9993
Or else took penance.n9994 Never did I see
(Unless in bills dashed in the Chanceryn9995)20
So little in so much,n9996 as if the feet
Of poetry, like law, were sold by th’ sheet.
If this new fashion should but last one year,
Poets, as clerks, would make our paper dear.
Doth not the artist err and blast his fame25
That sets out pictures lesser than the frame?
Was ever chamberlain so mad, to dare
To lodge a child in the Great Bed at Ware ?n9997
Aglaura would please better, did she lie
I’ th’ narrow bounds of an epitome.n999830
Pieces that are weaved of the finest twist,n9999
(As silk and plush) have still more stuff than list.
She, that in Persian habitn10000 made great brags,
Degenerates in this excess of rags;
Who, by her giant-bulk this only gains,35
Perchance in libraries to hang in chains.n10001
’Tis not in book, as cloth: we never say
‘Make London-measure’,n10002 when we buy a play,
But rather have them paired: those leaves be fair,
To the judicious, which more spotted are.40
Give me the sociable pocket-books.
These empty folios only please the cooks.n10003
R. B.27Brome’s lampoon is surely provoked by disdain for the pomposity of Suckling’s use of the folio format and the wide margins. But this is not the whole explanation for Brome’s animosity. First, and perhaps contributing to an explanation of the presence of Brome’s poem in a printing of The Weeding of Covent Garden, Suckling appears to have patronized Thomas Nabbes, writer of the rival play, Covent Garden. In fact, Nabbes dedicates his play to Suckling and it was printed in 1638, the same year as both Aglaura and, in all probability, Brome’s lampoon. As summarized in the main Introduction to The Weeding of Covent Garden, Nabbes’s dedication appears to take swipes at Brome’s play, without mentioning him or it by name. But more widely, during the difficult mid-1630s, when plague disrupted the theatre industry, Brome seems to have developed a vehement antipathy to the attempt by some associated with the royal court to muscle in upon the theatre, both in the writing of plays and in control of companies and playhouses. The amateurs included figures such as William Davenant (who allowed to circulate the rumour that he was Shakespeare’s illegitimate son), Thomas Killigrew, and - most prominently - Sir John Suckling. Suckling probably antagonized Brome not least by his attacks on Ben Jonson: he contrasts ‘the sweat of learned Johnson’s brain’, with ‘gentle Shakespear’s easier strain’ - not likely to please the ear of a professional writer and disciple of Jonson.n10004 As L.A. Beaurline comments, ‘Suckling relentlessly lampooned Jonson’.n10005 By the time Aglaura was so lavishly published in 1638, Brome was already hostile to amateur court dramatists and to Suckling in particular. Their antipathy would only grow with the remaining years before the theatres closed. R.J. Kaufmann sets Brome’s play The Court Beggar in the context of this ‘second war of the theatres’.n10006 Marion O’Connor’s edition as part of the Brome Project considers anew the evidence for the dating of The Court Beggar and the context of Brome’s attacks on Suckling.28L.A. Beaurline draws attention to other contemporary vanity publications by courtiers, providing the context for Suckling’s folio printing of Aglaura:John Haviland printed the 1638 folio [of Aglaura] for Thomas Walkley, just after the second extravagant performance at Court. It was an extravagant piece of printing too: extra large paper, conspicuously wasted by wide margins, unused spaces at top and bottom of certain pages, and duplicate title-pages …. The format was pretentious for a single play, as if it were a poem or a literary ‘work’. Thus the book appears to be a specially printed piece for the amusement of an amateur, comparable to the folios containing Sir William Alexander’s Recreations with the Muses (1637), William Habington’s The Queen of Arragon (1640), Sir William Berkeley’s The Lost Lady (1638), and Sir John Denham’s The Sophy (1642). And tradition confirms this impression, for Elijah Fenton said, ‘A small number of Suckling’s plays were printed for himself, to present to the Quality when they were acted at Court.’n1000729These pretensions, and the damage to professional opportunities for commercial playwrights like Brome, easily explain the antagonism.To my Lord of Newcastle, on his play called The Variety. He having commanded to give him my true opinion of it.30The other poem is Brome’s apparent response to a request from his patron, William Cavendish, earl (later duke) of Newcastle, for an unvarnished judgement on The Variety, composed by Newcastle with, in all probability, James Shirley. The play was performed in 1641 and printed in 1649.31Brome plays on the idea of judgement and the law. As a poet he could have lied, drawing on the concept of poetic licence; but his patron’s wonderful play compels honest praise, revealing - paradoxically - that Brome is no poet. Instead, it is as though he has been subpoenaed in the Court of Chancery and cannot perjure himself with false testimony; or has been sworn a member of parliament and is again required to fulfil his responsibilities to give honest judgement. Finally, Brome invokes Ben Jonson, his own master and Newcastle’s mentor. Newcastle employed Jonson and perhaps supported him in his old age; he may have provided similar assistance to Brome.To my Lord of Newcastle, on his play called The Variety. He having commanded to give him my true opinion of it.My Lord,
I could not think, these seven years, but that I
In part a poet was, and so might lie
By the poetic licence; but I find
Now I am none, and strictly am confined
To truth. If therefore I subpoenaed were5
Before the Court of Chancery to swear,
Or if from thence I should be higher sent,
And on my life unto a parliament
Of wit and judgement, there to certify
What I could say of your Variety,10
I would depose each scene appeared to me
An act of wit, each act a comedy;
And all was such to all that understood
As knowing Jonson, swore ‘By God, ’twas good’.The 1659 text, the preliminaries, the revival, and the possibility of revision32With the text of the play and the preliminaries contained in the 1659 volume described, we should now turn to the possibility that the 1659 volume, published seven years after Brome’s death and nearly twenty years after the presumed revival just before the outbreak of the civil wars, and not far short of three decades since the first performances, contains a text that reflects revision, particularly for the revival. This possibility has been most thoroughly explored by Matthew Steggle in ‘Brome, Covent Garden, and 1641’.n10008 Steggle’s article is primarily concerned to establish that The Weeding of Covent Garden was revived for performance in 1641 and to draw attention to the probable topicality of the play’s themes and actions in that year. In this he is surely correct. My attention here, however, is on a relatively small, but in this context essential, part of his argument, that the text of The Weeding of Covent Garden printed in the 1659 volume may be a version revised for the revival:in May 1641, Brome and Beeston, unexpectedly back in control of the Cockpit theatre following the spectacular fall from grace of Suckling and Davenant, celebrate by staging a strangely appropriate item from Brome's back catalogue, and even, in one case at least, seemingly updating the text. (paragraph 27)33The support for this suggestion largely depends on the preliminaries printed in the 1659 volume. Steggle rightly draws together evidence for the revival of the play in 1641 from the second Prologue and Epilogue. He then draws attention to the two poems, ‘To my Lord of Newcastle, on his play called The Variety. He having commanded to give him my true opinion of it’ and ‘Upon AGLAURA printed in Folio’, pointing out that these must date from the late 1630s at least; and notes that the ‘Song: Away with all grief and give us more sack’, printed with these other elements, shares lines with ‘a song which occurs twice in Brome’s 1641-2 play A Jovial Crew (Paragraph 4). From beyond the text of the play and the preliminaries, Steggle draws attention to the aptness of some elements of The Weeding of Covent Garden for the year of the revival, the apparent echoing of some of his phrases in pamphlets of the early 1640s, and the entry in the Stationers’ Register on 4 August 1640 of the proposed publication of six plays by Brome: Christianetta, The Jewish Gentleman, The New Academy, The Love-Sick Court, The Weeding of Covent Garden, and The English Moor. Apart from the first two, which are lost, the others are contained in the 1659 volume.34While there can be no serious doubt that The Weeding of Covent Garden was revived in 1641, this edition does not support the idea that the text contained in the 1659 volume represents a revision. My scepticism is not least because a text derived from a revival would be unlikely to display the kinds of confusions found in the printed version. A revision would in all likelihood be based on the playhouse copy, and this would have had such problems as mistaken Speech Prefixes and vague Stage Directions corrected for the earlier performances in 1633. The 1659 printed text seems to me more likely to be based on the author’s copy submitted to the playing company, warts and all.35It is surely correct that The Weeding of Covent Garden was revived because it remained topical and therefore was thought likely to attract an audience. As Matthew Steggle says, ‘a topical “application” of The Weeding would be easy to make’ (Paragraph 17), though this editor would disagree about what made the play topical (see below). But this is not necessarily an argument for revision; it is an argument for continued topicality.36Much of Steggle’s argument is based on the Preliminaries; but as W.W. Greg noted,[the] preliminaries to The Weeding of Covent Garden [were] later supplied on an unsigned half-sheet, and epilogues to the same and preliminaries to The New Academy on a half-sheet signed h (a signature further distinguished by being within parentheses). The former half-sheet was padded with extraneous matter, the latter is more than half blank.37The separate printing of the preliminaries makes them dubious evidence for revision of the play text. Steggle also quotes from the paratexts to the whole 1659 volume; but as Greg points out the section containing The Weeding of Covent Garden and The New Academy is separately printed; we cannot without more evidence assume that statements at the beginning of the volume have a direct relation to a section separately printed and paginated.38Steggle argues that the Song (‘Away with all grief and give us more sack’) ‘makes very little sense in its context, since no explanation is offered of what it is doing among the preliminary matter of an entirely different play’ (Paragraph 4). However, this edition suggests that the Song does belong in The Weeding of Covent Garden, being that which Cockbrain sings in praise of sack in Act 3. Again, as a reason to suppose that the 1659 text must be revised, this offers little support.39The echoing of some of Brome’s more striking phrases in the pamphlet literature of the 1640s is, once more, problematic as a reason for thinking the printed playtext in the 1659 volume was revised. Steggle draws attention in particular to The Pimpe’s Prerogative, The Sisters of the Scabards Holiday, and The Brothers of the Blade, all published in 1641; the titles of the latter two connect with the names used respectively in Brome’s play as a jocular collective term for prostitutes and for the roistering gang of young men. But apart from the titles there is little else about these pamphlets that would connect them explicitly with Brome’s play: neither the conversation in the pamphlets between the prostitutes nor that between the low-life ex-soldiers (or fake ex-soldiers) contains more than the vaguest similarities with equivalent conversations in The Weeding of Covent Garden. It seems more likely that both Brome and the pamphlets’ authors are drawing on the kinds of jocular terms for these groups current in the 1630s and 40s, that satiric representation of prostitutes and young male braggarts was popular, and that the use of the terms in the pamphlets is possibly stimulated by the success of a revival of The Weeding of Covent Garden. In other words, the influence is more likely to be from Brome’s plays, onto the pamphlets, not the other way around.40Once more, much of the circumstantial evidence adduced for revision is based on the assumption that the play is concerned with high politics, especially antagonism to the Personal Rule of Charles I and resentment of his inept attempts to impose his ‘paternalistic’ authority. As Steggle writes,Influential accounts of The Weeding in the context of 1633 have seen it as a play about a failure of central authority, and by indirect implication, of the king: this interpretation would be even less avoidable in 1641. But whether, ultimately, this should be fitted into a narrative of Brome himself as a political radical (Butler 1984), or Brome as a conservative, nostalgic for the strong royal leadership Charles failed to provide (Kaufmann 1961), remains a difficult question (evidence reviewed by Clark 1992). (Paragraph 29)41This edition is far from persuaded by the modern insistence that the play is a kind of allegory of the ‘failure of central authority, and by indirect implication, of the king’. As Steggle himself notes, the fact that scholars holding this view can interpret the play in such radically different ways is more than a little problematic. Again, such readings offer little support for revision.42Steggle offers a final, and crucial, element in the argument for revision; it must be quoted extensively:One joke is so strikingly topical to 1641, and so inappropriate to 1633, the supposed year of composition, as to threaten our certainty about the status of the text. One of the oaths sworn by the Philoblathici is 'that you be ever at deadly defiance with all such people, as Protections are directed to in Parliament, and that you watch all occasions to prevent or rescue Gentlemen from the gripes of the Law brissons'. This looks like an innocuous joke which may have become topical again in the light of the plotters' objective of rescuing Strafford, but the reference to 'protections' repays attention. The word has a technical, Parliamentary meaning: it refers to the extension of parliamentary privilege to non-MP's, notably members' servants. To be under a 'protection' offered benefits including 'freedom from arrest during a session' of parliament, especially arrest for debt. Thus 'such people, as Protections are directed to in Parliament' is a comic periphrasis for 'bailiffs'.But the word 'are' presents difficulties. Protections were only in force for the duration of a parliament, so that in 1633, they hadn't been topical for four years. In 1633, with no prospect of a Parliament in the immediate future, and indeed, in a play seen as very centrally concerned with the problems of Charles' personal rule, even a vague reference to 'protections' administered by Parliament is redundant and jarring. In 1641, on the other hand, protections were being handed out freely - so freely, indeed, that it was something of a scandal. (Russell 1991, 418: D'Ewes 1923, 304-5). This reference makes much more sense in the context of the revival than it did in 1633.Since only one version of The Weeding survives, only one good example of a possible later interpolation is needed to throw into question the whole status of the text, and the line under discussion provides that example. Although it is clear that the text remains largely that of a 1633 play - as discussed above - there is certainly the possibility that material that postdates that year lurks within it. (Paragraphs 20-21)43As so often, the possibility that The Weeding of Covent Garden may glance at matters of high politics has here solidified into certainty: ‘a play seen as very centrally concerned with the problems of Charles' personal rule’. But, as suggested in the main Introduction to this edition of the play, there is little really to connect its characters and events with Charles I; and in 1633 no-one knew that Parliament would not be called for an unusual period of time. (Three, four, or more years between Parliaments was pretty standard, and Parliament had last met in 1629. That Parliament had been disastrously contentious, so a pause before the calling of another was welcomed by many.) I find Captain Driblow’s reference to Parliament unproblematic as a line in a 1633 playtext; as a result it does not strike me as necessarily an interpolation; and therefore it does not provide the ‘one good example’ that throws the text as printed in 1659 into question.
n9980 they would naturally be printed together as a single sheet.
n11658 ‘A Song’, which is here presumed to be the song in praise of sack performed by Cockbrain and missing from Act 3;
n11659 confusions seem to arise where compositors have either failed to notice that something has been struck out and so have left in a supernumerary phrase
n11660 On one occasion the compositor appears to have included an annotation made when someone noticed that a passage didn’t make sense:
n11661 ‘enred’ corrected to ‘entred’
n11662 ‘discontinee’ corrected to ‘discontinue’
n11663 ‘Belt’ corrected to ‘Bett’
n11664 ‘Cit’ corrected to ‘Ciot’ (itself a mistake: if anything, the Speech Prefix should read ‘Clot’; there is no-one in the cast who could be referred to as ‘Ciot’)
n9990 Appendix A, section 5.
n9991 That this
n9992 More excrement than body.
n9993 To think Aglaura either did lie in,
n9994 Or else took penance.
n9995 Unless in bills dashed in the Chancery
n9996 So little in so much,
n9997 To lodge a child in the Great Bed at Ware ?
n9998 I’ th’ narrow bounds of an epitome.
n9999 Pieces that are weaved of the finest twist,
n10000 She, that in Persian habit
n10001 Perchance in libraries to hang in chains.
n10002 ‘Make London-measure’,
But it fals out in penny worths of Wit,
As in all bargaines else. Men ever get
All they can in; will have London measure,
A handful over in their verie pleasure.
9[A2r]
n10003 These empty folios only please the cooks.
n10004 a professional writer and disciple of Jonson.
n10005 ‘Suckling relentlessly lampooned Jonson’.
n10006 ‘second war of the theatres’.
n10007 John Haviland printed the 1638 folio [of Aglaura] for Thomas Walkley, just after the second extravagant performance at Court. It was an extravagant piece of printing too: extra large paper, conspicuously wasted by wide margins, unused spaces at top and bottom of certain pages, and duplicate title-pages …. The format was pretentious for a single play, as if it were a poem or a literary ‘work’. Thus the book appears to be a specially printed piece for the amusement of an amateur, comparable to the folios containing Sir William Alexander’s Recreations with the Muses (1637), William Habington’s The Queen of Arragon (1640), Sir William Berkeley’s The Lost Lady (1638), and Sir John Denham’s The Sophy (1642). And tradition confirms this impression, for Elijah Fenton said, ‘A small number of Suckling’s plays were printed for himself, to present to the Quality when they were acted at Court.’
n10008 Matthew Steggle in ‘Brome, Covent Garden, and 1641’.