The New Academy; or, The New Exchange
Textual Introduction1The New Academy; or, The New Exchange 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 New Academy; or, The New Exchange has its own titlepage:THE / NEW ACADEMY; / Or, the / NEW / Exchange. / By RICHARD BROME. / LONDON, / Printed for Andrew Crook, at the Green Dragon in / Saint Pauls Church-yard : And Henry Brome / at the Gun in Ivy-Lane. 1658.3The New Academy is independently paginated but continues the series of signatures it shares with the previous play in the volume, The Weeding of Covent Garden. These two plays are, as W.W. Greg states below, printed together and separately from the rest of the volume. For this reason, much of the textual commentary here is shared with that for The Weeding of Covent Garden.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.n98935There are no preliminaries to The New Academy; it is without prologue or epilogue, and there are no dedicatory poems. The Dramatis Personae, headed ‘The Actors Names.’, follows the titlepage, printed on (h)1v. There are exceptions to this arrangement, however: in several copies (Folger Shakespeare Library B4872; Library of Congress 24031999; Henry E. Huntington Library 113370) the Dramatis Personae is bound before the play’s titlepage.6In some copies (Bodleian Library, Oxford, Douce B 334; Folger Shakespeare Library B4872) the play begins with signature G, rather than H.7The play text concludes on O7v. The final pages, O8r and O8v contain a sales list, headedThese BOOKs following are sold by Andrew Crook, at the Green Dragon in St. Pauls Church-yard.8The books, listed by size (folio and quarto) reveal a varied stock. The folios include Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Cervantes Don Quixote, Harrington’s translation of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, Chapman’s Homer, two Bibles in English, one in Welsh, and a biblical concordance, Ben Jonson’s two-volume Works and Beaumont’s Psyche, or Love’s Mystery. The quarto volumes include dictionaries, religious and devotional texts, accounts of travels, natural history, translations of the classics, and political information.9After 1659 The New Academy is not printed again until issued in quasi-facsimile by John Pearson in 1873. The play does not appear to have been printed since that date. 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.10In 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
Folger Shakespeare Library B4872
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.B5A1911In 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 New Academy is numbered ‘1591’ 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 materials that comprise 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.12Comparison of The New Academy in copies of the 1659 volume reveals a very small number of press corrections made in the course of printing this play:Act 1, Scene 1: And, ere I’ll be discovered [NA 1.1.line289]13This is usually printed:And, e’te14It is corrected in National Art Library Dyce 25.E.44Act 2, Scene 1: The best part of whose trade runs through the hands [NA 2.1.line703]15In two copies - Bodleian Library, Oxford, 8o B 14(1) Art.B.S. and British Library BL 162.c.21 - ‘through’ is misprinted ‘throngh’. The reversed letter is corrected in all other copies consulted.16Several 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; 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.17By comparison with The Weeding of Covent Garden, the other play in this section of the 1659 volume, The New Academy seems to have presented far fewer problems for the compositors. As I comment in the main Introduction to The New Academy, though it is perhaps ultimately less intellectually rewarding than The Weeding of Covent Garden, the play impresses simply as a piece of highly professional craftsmanship. There are fewer mistakes about who is speaking; there are no outright confusions as there are in The Weeding of Covent Garden, where the compositors seemed unable to work out what was supposed to be happening in a scene.18What does this suggest about the manuscript from which the compositors were working? It may be that this was a fair copy, either of the author’s manuscript or one deriving from use in the playhouse. In The Weeding of Covent Garden some erasures and marginal annotations appear to have confused the compositors; I have encountered nothing similar in this play’s text. Any conclusion is speculative: I am inclined to think that, first, The New Academy represents Brome as a pragmatic and professional writer, producing a clear text with which the company could work without confusions; and that the manuscript used in the printing house was a clean copy of either the author’s original or a copy used by the acting company.19There are some errors and variations in the setting of Speech Prefixes that cannot be reproduced in the original spelling text, principally to do with italicization or the lack thereof. Any variation that is substantive is noted at the appropriate point in the modernized text.
n9893 the 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.