The Queen and Concubine
Textual Introduction1The Queen and Concubine was first published as part of the Five New Playes collection printed for Andrew Crook and Henry Brome in early 1659, a volume which also features The English Moor, The Lovesick Court, The Weeding of Covent Garden and The New Academy. The Queen and Concubine is placed at the end of the volume, and is bibliographically independent, with its own title-page and pagination; its independence is emphasised, as W.W. Greg notes, by the appearance of advertisements before and after it, the first advertising plays by Crook, and the second plays by Brome.n10431 Greg argues that the printing of the main volume was in three sections (i.e. 1: The English Moor and The Lovesick Court; 2: The Weeding of Covent Garden and The New Academy; 3: The Queen and Concubine), and that each section, plus the preliminaries, was printed by a different press; he notes, further, that Henry Brome probably supplied the copy for The Queen and Concubine.n10432 The printer of The Queen and Concubine is unknown. 2The Queen and Concubine appears in at least 41 extant copies of the 1659 Five New Playes (copies marked with an asterisk have been consulted in the preparation of this edition):UK Libraries
British Library *[161.c.21] *[E.1782] *[G.18536]
Bodleian Library, Oxford [Douce B 334] [B 14 (1) Art. BS.]
Dyce Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum [25.E.44] [25.E.45]
Eton College
National Library of Scotland
University Library, Cambridge
Worcester College, OxfordUS Libraries
Boston Public Library, Boston, Mass.
Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. [2 copies]
Columbia University
Cornell University
Library of Congress, Washington D.C.*
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. *[B4872 Copy 1] *[B4872 Copy 2]
Houghton Library, Harvard University
Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California *[600202] *[113370]
Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City
Newberry Library, Chicago *[Case PR2439.B5A19 1659] *[Case Y 135.B779]
New York Public Library, New York City
Ohio State University
Princeton University
University of Arizona
UCLA, Clark Library
University of Chicago
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Yale UniversityOther Libraries Worldwide
University College Cork, Republic of Ireland
Trinity College, Dublin
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
McMaster University, Canada
National Library of Australia
University of Sydney, Australia
State Library of New South Wales, Australia3Its bibliographical independence from the rest of the Five New Playes volume means that The Queen and Concubine could have been sold as a separate single-volume play.n10433 Greg noted Henry Brome’s inclusion of ‘Five New Comedies which were never before publisht, By Richard Brome’ in his list of ‘Books now in the Press: which will shortly be extant’ at the end of the 1659 Five New Playes and wrote, ‘It would appear, therefore, that this single piece was meant to be issued separately in advance of the collection’.n10434 However, he had not come across any copies of the play as single-volumes, and so treated The Queen and Concubine as part of the collection only. In fact, two additional surviving copies, those held by Edinburgh University Library (JA 107) and Cornell University Library (Kroch PR2439.B5 Q3 1659), are now single volumes, and may originally have been sold in this way.n104354Further evidence has also come to light, in advertisements of plays available to be bought from Crook and Henry Brome in 1663-5.n10436 In the 1663 fifteenth edition of A Help to Discourse, Crook advertises ‘Bromes Five New Playes’ and lists the titles of each;n10437 in 1664, Crook advertisesn10438 ‘Mr Broomes five Playes’ in Thomas Herbert’s Some Years’ Travels into Divers Parts of Africa and Asia, but in the same year Henry Brome publishes two different notices. In Henry Bold’s Poems, licensed on 13 February, he lists all five titles separately,n10439 with no mention of the title Five New Playes; this notice also appears in Samuel Hardy,n10440 A Guide to Heaven from the Word. However, in the second edition of Alexander Brome’s Songs and Other Poems, published in 1664 but licensed as long ago as 28 April 1663, he advertisesn10441 ‘four New Playes in 8. by R. Brome’. Then, in three notices published in 1665, Henry Bromen10442 advertises The English Moor, The Lovesick Court, The Weeding of Covent Garden and The New Academy as separate titles, but does not mention The Queen and Concubine.5Greg was aware only of the advertisement in Alexander Brome’s Songs and Other Poems, and he suggested in his account of the 1659 collection that the presentation of The Queen and Concubine implied thatThe Queen and Concubine was not only the first printed, but that it was actually issued before the rest of the collection was ready. Of such separate issue no evidence, however, remains, unless it is to be found in Henry Brome’s advertisement of 1664. A possible interpretation of this would be that after the stock of The Queen and Concubine was exhausted, Brome reissued the first four plays with a fresh title-page. But of such a reissue no trace has been found.n104436The new Crook/Brome advertisements of 1663-5 may support this thesis; while Henry Brome does not mention the ‘four new plays’ again, he proceeds to advertise the four remaining plays as single volumes, suggesting that he may have abandoned a plan to print a new title-page. It is also possible that Henry Brome’s advertisements during 1664 mean that he again began to sell individual plays separately and ran out of copies of The Queen and Concubine some time before the advertisement in Alexander Brome’s Songs and Other Poems was composed. In the absence of more data (and, in particular, more information about Crook’s sales strategies) it is difficult to be certain.7The Queen and Concubine is generally well-printed, with comparatively few errors and very few press corrections. In the copies consulted, only three pages exist in more than one state: at [QC 1.5.line470], ‘forgets’ appears as ‘forges’ in Newberry Library Case Y 135.B779; in Act 4, Scene 3, the stage direction ‘Enter three country-men more’ (after [QC 4.3.line2780]) appears as ‘E nter’ in Huntington Library 113370 and Newberry Library Case Y 135.B779; and at [QC 5.6.line3783], ‘superabundance’ appears as ‘snperabundance’n10444 in Huntington Library 113370 and British Library 162.c.21. Instead of carrying out extensive press corrections, Crook and Brome provide at the end of the volume, after the Epilogue (sig. K1v) and a list of Brome’s recent and forthcoming publications (sig. K2r), a list of errata for The Queen and Concubine (sig. K2v) [QC 5.4speech1424]. This list corrects the majority of the printer’s errors - for instance, it corrects misprints such as ‘Nignion’ for ‘Minion’, amends erroneous speech prefixes and adds missing stage directions:Errata.PAg.9.l.13.f.is read in p.11.l.5.f. Nignion r. Mignion.p.28.
l.6.f.Hor.r.Lod. p.38 l.13.and 14. Ent. Sforza.p.61.l. 20.for
and r.in.p.68.l.antepenult. f.mine.r.my.p.69.l.5. f.shalt be
King.r.shalt.King.p.75.l.19 f.inspir’d r. has inspir’d. p.76.f.but
r.bate.l.32.p.80.l.26.f.said,r. have said.p.83.l. 4.r.Lol.p.84.
l.18.dele Countr.p.94.l.r. Exeunt.p.95.l.23.f.speaks r.speak and
l.29.f.in.r.is in. p.97.f.they.r.thy. p.97.f.speaks. r speak. p.115.
l.13.f.to their r.to be their & l.18 dele Eul. p.116.l.24.p.119.
l.3.f.on.r.one,and l.6.f.one,r.on p.112.l.5.dele to my.8Errata lists are rare in plays (examples appear in Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, printed by Edward Allde for Edward White in 1602, and in Thomas Nabbes’s Hannibal and Scipio, printed by Richard Oulton for Charles Greene in 1637), but they appear frequently in other texts printed for Brome and/or Crook.n104459These errata sheets are what Julie Stone Peters in Theatre of the Book terms ‘calls to the reader as press corrector’; she notes that ‘As in classic scholarly annotation, the reading of plays was a co-operative enterprise of editor and reader: discerning readers were to supply their own amendments’.n10446 She quotes John Marston in the re-issued second quarto of The Fawn: ‘Reader, know I have perused this copy to make some satisfaction for the first faulty impression; yet so urgent hath been my business that some errors have still passed, which thy discretion may amend.’n10447 A more laissez-faire attitude is taken by others presenting a printed playbook. Publisher Francis Burton in the 1607 quarto of Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer, for instance, merely writes, ‘If you find any errors by me committed, correct them or neglect them’.n1044810In the case of The Queen and Concubine at least some readers took up the call to act as their own press corrector - for instance, at [QC 2.3.line869], a former owner of Folger B4872 Copy 2 has corrected the erroneous speech heading ‘Hor.’ to ‘Lod.’ - and some make further emendations not included in the errata, such as the correction of the misprint ‘Cuurt’ at [QC 2.8.line1249] to ‘Court’ in some copies (e.g. Folger B4872 Copy 2; Library of Congress PR 2439.B5A17 1659). One of the most interesting copies consulted is Newberry Library Case Y 135.B779, which has two sets of annotations, one in ink, in an early hand, and another in pencil, apparently in a later hand. The earlier reader has worked through the errata list, making his or her own corrections. Against [QC 2.7.line1204], for instance, the errata list’s additional entrance direction, ‘Enter Sforza’, is added in the margin. This reader also makes some small insertions, in addition to correcting typos: for instance, at [QC 5.6.line3778.5], ‘Then the point’ becomes ‘Then to the point’, and at [QC 3.7.line1967], Andrea’s malformed Latin, ‘Abi hinc & malam rem’, is corrected to ‘Abi hinc in malam rem’.11More radical interventions are made by the later reader, who pencils in corrections to misprints, occasionally changes punctuation, and on two occasions inserts words so as to improve the metre. This reader also makes some amendments where s/he apparently thinks that a word that is not clearly a misprint is wrong. For instance, at [QC 1.5.line470] the word ‘forges’ — which in all other copies examined reads ‘forgets’ — is amended to ‘forgoes’, and in Alinda’s statement at [QC 3.11.line2381] that ‘a Father / Is not so early forgot’, ‘early’ is underlined and ‘easily’ written in the margin.n1044912As Sonia Massai notes in her recent book, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor, ‘the conscious editorial manipulation of Shakespeare’s text had started well before Nicholas Rowe’s edition, albeit informed by radically different views about what constituted an “authoritative” text’.n10450 Aspects of the 1659 text of The Queen and Concubine also suggest that a quasi-editorial intelligence is at play. The printer is extremely conscientious about marking ‘aside’ speeches, of which there are many, and he uses two different methods to do so. See, for instance, the opening of the octavo’s Act 5, Scene 3 [QC 5.3.line3550], where a number of asides are presented in square brackets (which are used elsewhere in the text for other kinds of stage directions), but others are also indicated through the use of round brackets around dialogue. Another feature of the text of The Queen and Concubine is the frequency with which lines by different characters are presented as shared and are set on the same line, even when there is enough space for the second speaker’s words to have been printed on the next line (see, for instance, the dialogue between Sforza and Petruccio in the octavo’s Act 2, Scene 8 [QC 2.8.line1214]).n1045113While the printing of The Queen and Concubine is relatively straightforward, the origin of the text printed appears to be more complex. A number of features suggest that the octavo version of the play is a pre-production text, and that it combines material deriving from different drafts. In the first place, the extant text of The Queen and Concubine is extremely long, much of the extra length coming in Acts 3 and 4, where there is evidence of some textual confusion surrounding the countrymen who are healed by Eulalia, the exiled queen, and welcome her into their community. In the octavo’sn10452 Act 3, Scene 5, a group of countrymen meet and discuss the appearance of Eulalia in their community, and one uses the phrase ‘without all adventure’ [QC 3.5.line1841]. This phrase and a variation, ‘without all peradventure’, are used repeatedly by Poggio elsewhere in the text. A similar situation occurs in the octavo’s Act 4, Scene 4, in which another unnamed countryman declares that Strozza and Fabio ‘shall die fortie times without peradventure’ [QC 4.4.line2909]. In both cases, the dialogue is followed by the entrance of Poggio less than twenty lines later, meaning that it is impossible for him to be one of the participants. It therefore seems possible that Brome originally intended Poggio to be part of these scenes, and that the dialogue went unrevised when he was removed.14Further signs of revision in the scenes featuring the countrymen can be found at the opening of Act 4, where the octavo has the stage direction ‘Enter Poggio, Lollio, two Countrey-men with Eulalia.’ [QC 4.1.line2429], and the speech prefixes assign the dialogue to Poggio and Lollio. However, it is impossible for Poggio and Lollio to be on stage chatting with Eulalia at this point, because - as is clear from the succeeding action - they are needed offstage, where they are attempting to hang Fabio and Strozzo. In addition, the dialogue here is rather more sober and considered than we find in their manic double act elsewhere in the play. The most plausible explanation is that Brome originally assigned the dialogue to Poggio and Lollio in an early draft of the play, but then rewrote the pastoral scenes and gave the pair a most substantial role in the parodic representation of justice, in the process developing them more fully as comic characters. The odd stage direction ‘Enter Poggio, Lollio, two Countrey-men with Eulalia’ suggests that in his revision Brome changed the stage direction to indicate that ‘two Countrey-men’ were talking to Eulalia instead of Poggio and Lollio, but the compositor(s) of the octavo text ignored the deletion and printed both the original direction and the correction. Either Brome did not revise the speech prefixes or the compositor ignored the corrections.15 A further, more serious problem comes in connection with the groups of assassins sent by Alinda to kill Eulalia. The first to arrive are two ‘cashiered lieutenants’, Strozzo and Fabio, who appear in the octavo’s Act 3, Scene 6 (following [QC 3.6.line1846]), approach Eulalia with drawn swords, and are disarmed and captured by the country folk, led by their pompous Curate. Among them are Lollio and Poggio. It comes as a surprise, therefore, when in Act 4, Scene 3 a ‘Countryman’ enters and discusses with Lollio and Poggio that very encounter with Strozzo and Fabio. He tells them that Eulalia is ‘a witch: flatly and plainly said to be a witch’ [QC 4.3.line2704], and this dialogue ensues:Pog.Did not I tell you she was an unknown woman,
and therefore a good one, quoth you? but say I, doubt-
lesly; and without all peradventure, all that she did
was but a kind of witchcraft.
Lol.It cannot, fie, it cannot be: how is she found
so?Countr.I do not say shee’s found a witch, but she’s
accus’d for one.
Pog.By whom is she accus’d?
Countr.By two brave men at Arms that came from
Court
VVith purpose to have kill’d her for the same.
To be short, They found her out, and naked swords
they drew:
But as they thought to have thrust her through and
through,
They both dead Palsie-struck fall to the ground.
And had no strength but of their Tongues to wound
The Fame she had.Pog.Vertue can want no Foes,
Count.VVith that they cryed she was a witch, and
She also was that Queen which for a whore (swore
The King had turn’d away.
Pog.This is indeed the best news thou couldst bring.
Now doubtlesly and without all peradventures, ’tis
the Queen indeed: and if she be not a witch, I am
sorry I thought so, with all my heart: where be those
men? wee’l hang ’m presently. [QC 4.3.lines2706-2732]16The description here contradicts the events of Act 3 scene 6, which were witnessed by Lollio and Poggio, even though they have now apparently forgotten that they were on stage at that point.n1045317Furthermore, this section of the text features a number of confusions with regard to exits and entrances, and scene divisions. Earlier dialogue has suggested that Lollio and Poggio actually exited with Fabio and Strozzo at [QC 4.3.lines2649-2661], and at the end of the dialogue between Lollio, Poggio and the countryman, Eulalia and two other characters are required to enter without having exited. At this point we also find a second scene division also numbered Act 4, Scene 3 [QC 4.3.line2764]. In addition, Poggio’s question, ‘Did not I tell you she was an unknown woman, and therefore a good one, quoth you?’ [QC 4.3.lines2706-2707] refers back to that problematic exchange between the unnamed ‘countrymen’, discussed above. Something is clearly anomalous about this section of the text, with its numerous duplications and contradictions.18Although it is impossible to know what shape the final performance text of The Queen and Concubine took, the discussion between Lollio, Poggio and the Countryman in Act 4, Scene 3 is clearly inconsistent with the rest of the narrative. It seems likely that it was marked for omission in the manuscript used in the preparation of the octavo, and that the compositors ignored the deletion marks,n10454 or, alternatively, that the sequence was written on a loose sheet that had been shuffled into the papers which came into the hands of Andrew Crook and Henry Brome, and that they inserted it at a point at which it made at least some kind of sense. In my modern-spelling edition, I have opted for the most straightforward option that will nonetheless create a coherent reading/performance text, and have deleted the sequence between the stage directions ‘Enter one of the Countreymen’ and ‘Enter three country-men more’. The modern-spelling text therefore has the three countrymen enter after Poggio’s statement ‘It is your heavenly mind that sweetens all things’ [QC 4.2.speech826], and the excised sequence is presented as an ‘additional passage’ [QC 4.speech834.1]. This is, of course, only one possible solution,n10455 but it involves the least amount of emendation elsewhere in the text.19The confusion with the country people is one indication that the text preserved in the octavo is problematic. Another is the vagueness of a key stage direction in the octavo’s Act 5, Scene 4, a feature which leads Matthew Steggle in his recent book on Brome to suggest that the play ‘seems not quite completed’.n10456 Alinda and the King have come to the country and are welcomed by Eulalia. At one point, Alinda goes to leave, only to be called back by Eulalia, who says, ‘Seem not to turn away, most gracious Madam, / Before I shew for which I hop’d you came, / The manner how I get a competence to live’ [QC 5.4.lines3576-3578]. These lines are followed by the stage direction, ‘Shews her works, and makes a brave description of Pieces: As Sale-work, Day-work, Night-work, wrought Night-caps, Coyfs, Stomachers.’ Vague stage directions are relatively common in early modern texts (in the playhouse manuscript of Thomas Heywood’s The Captives, for instance, we find the direction ‘Eather strykes him wth a staffe or Casts a stone.’),n10457 and some stage directions require the improvisation of dialogue, such as the direction ‘The lady speaks in Welsh’n10458 in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part 1 (3.1.197SD). Such directions are usually for dialogue in foreign languages, but it is possible that Brome intended the boy actor playing Eulalia to improvise her dialogue, despite the fact that it is rare for such improvisation to combine dialogue and stage business. Another possibility is that the direction holds a place for dialogue that was to be inserted at a later stage, or that ‘description’ refers to a purely visual display of the items: OED includes ‘Pictorial representation; a picture, painting’ among its definitions for ‘description’, with its earliest usage dated as early as 1620.n1045920Further complications relate to the play’s music. Songs are required at three points in the octavo text: in Act 4, Scene 3, Eulalia asks her pupils to ‘let me hear you sing the last I taught you’ [QC 4.3.line2853], and the stage direction ‘[Song]’ follows; in Act 5, Scene 4, she asks them to perform ‘The Song I taught you last’ [QC 5.4.line3593] for the King and Alinda, and the direction ‘Song.’ appears in the margin; in Act 5, Scene 9, after Alinda is brought on stage ‘in a Chayre, veyl’d’ (after [QC 5.9.line4132], and we find the direction ‘Here a new Song, Ealalia [sic] unvailes Alinda.’ (after [QC 5.9.line4140]). None of the lyrics are provided in the main text, but the octavo includes on signature A2v the lyrics for the first two, which are cross-referenced to the text with the headings ‘The first Song, for pag. 88’ and ‘The second Song, for pag. III.’ (before [QC 1.1.line1]) The placing of the lyrics at the head of the octavo may indicate that they were originally on separate sheets of paper, rather than copied into the main manuscript. Tiffany Stern suggests that this practice was standard in the early modern playhouse.n1046021Songs are among the most unstable elements in early modern play-texts, and the survival of lyrics, settings, and even musical cues is haphazard. A great number of play-texts have directions for a ‘song’ but include no lyric: examples abound in the Brome canon alone.n10461 Similarly, an equally great number of lyrics which survive in print and manuscript may have appeared in dramatic contexts or have been originally written to be sung in plays. A number of songs appear in more than one play: popular tunes appear in a variety of plays - Brome himself makes use of a number of ballads in his playsn10462 - and even songs apparently composed for specific plays might recur elsewhere. For instance, the song ‘Take, O Take Those Lips Away’ seems to have been incorporated into Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure during the 1620s, having first appeared in Fletcher’s Rollo, Duke of Normandy, performed by the King’s Men in 1619, while ‘Cupid Calls, Come Lovers Come’ appears in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Lady Elizabeth’s Men, 1613) and his More Dissemblers Besides Women (?King’s Men, c. 1614).n10464 Similarly, old songs were sometimes refreshed with new settings; for instance, surviving settings by Henry Lawes and John Wilson for plays including Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge, Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess and The Mad Lover, Jonson’s Epicoene, Middleton’s The Widow and Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece were almost certainly composed for Caroline revivals of these Jacobean works.n1046322 These issues are directly relevant to The Queen and Concubine, as neither of the lyrics printed in the 1659 octavo is unique to this play. The first, which begins ‘VVHat if a Day, or a moneth, or a year / Crown thy Delights / With a thousand wish’d contentings?’ is, as C.R. Baskervill appears to have been the first to point out, the first stanza of a song attributed to Thomas Campion.n10465 This song was hugely popular: the lyric first appears in manuscripts dated to the early 1590s, and the tune with which it is most often associated is first recorded around 1599-1600; versions appear in English and Dutch manuscripts and in texts printed throughout the seventeenth century.n10466 The lyric as it is printed in The Queen and Concubine varies somewhat from other manuscript and print versions, and I have therefore collated it against three other major sources: ‘The Commonplace Book of John Lilliat’, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS 148, fo. 109v (the first appearance of the lyric with a tune, c. 1599-1600; cited from Greer, 305); Richard Alison, An Hour’s Recreation (London, 1606), nos. 17-18 (printed with a five-voice setting); and A Friend’s Advice In an Excellent Ditty, Concerning the Variable Changes in this World (London, c. 1625) (a ballad version which may date originally from the 1590s). Variants are detailed in the commentary notes.23The second song, which begins ‘HOw bless’d are they that wast their wearied Hours / In solemn Groves, and solitarie Bowers’, is also found - as E.B. Reed points out - in another play, Francis Quarles’s The Virgin Widow, printed in 1649 and apparently written for private performance around 1640-2.n10467 Although The Queen and Concubine was written in the mid-1630s, before The Virgin Widow, the fact that it was not printed until 1659 means that it is difficult to tell which play the song originated with (or, indeed, whether it is original to either). The text is identical in both plays, bar some minor differences in spelling and punctuation, and in neither play is the lyric directly referred to in the dialogue, meaning that precedence is not easy to establish. It may seem unlikely that Quarles, writing a play for private performance, would have drawn on a lyric associated with the commercial theatre, although there was substantial interaction between commercial and amateur stages in the Caroline period. If the song was written by Quarles in the early 1640s, it cannot have featured in early performances of The Queen and Concubine, but it is possible that it was used in a revival of Brome’s play in the early 1640s, or for a surreptitious performance during the Civil War or Commonwealth periods. An alternative theory would be that it was inserted by Crook and Brome in 1659, or that a sheet with its lyrics had been accidentally shuffled into the play manuscript.24The third song - which is absent altogether - may be a rather different case, as it is specifically described as ‘a new song’ in the octavo’s stage direction. For Steggle, the direction is another characteristic that suggests that the octavo represents an unfinished draft of The Queen and Concubine, as Brome may have inserted it as a place holder for a song that had not yet been composed.n10469 This is difficult to prove, however, since directions for ‘new’ songs appear in a number of plays, most of which do not appear necessarily to be unfinished.n10470 Julia K. Wood’s suggestion that the lyric ‘may have been kept from publication deliberately by the author’ now seems unlikely, as we have confirmation that Brome died in 1652, five years before the publicationn10471 of the 1659 Five New Playes. The fact that the two surviving lyrics for songs in The Queen and Concubine appear at the head of the octavo text may suggest, rather, that all of the song lyrics were originally on loose sheets of paper, and that the third became detached from the manuscript before it could be printed. It is also possible that all of the lyrics sung in the original 1630s production have been lost, and that the lyrics to ‘What if a Day’ and ‘How Blessed are They’ were substituted at a later date.25This edition takes British Library E.1782 as its copy text, and it has been collated against nine further copies (see above). I have also collated the text against the only post seventeenth-century edition, The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome, published by John Pearson in 1873, and probably edited by Richard Shepherd, where it appears, with the rest of the 1659 Five New Playes, in volume 2.n10472 This odd text presents itself as a facsimile, though closer inspection shows a number of divergences from the octavo. These include variations in ornaments and alterations in lineation, which often lead to changes in the catchwords at the bottom of each page. The editor also alters a number of words, correcting some printer’s errors and introducing a number of his own; in addition, he changes punctuation, transposes words and occasionally introduces words to improve the metre.n10473 He does not, however, embark on any major emendations, bowdlerise, standardise speech prefixes consistently (although occasional speech prefixes are altered), or relocate the songs from the octavo’s preliminaries to their places in the text.26The main editorial interventions in this edition have been the relocation of the lyrics to the first and second songs, the alteration of speech-prefixes in Act 4, Scene 1, and the extraction of the problematic passage in the octavo’s Act 4, Scene 3, as described above; it can be found as an additional passage [QC 4.speech834.1]. The octavo follows - though not entirely consistently - the classical convention of beginning a new scene when new characters enter; I have here instead adopted the now more usual convention of beginning a new scene when the stage is cleared. The octavo also seems to print some prose speeches as verse, and some verse speeches as prose; these have been corrected, and I have also relined some verse speeches where they appear to have been incorrectly lined. Elsewhere, alterations to the copy text are in general restricted to minor emendations concerning words that appear to be incorrect, or words that have been omitted, and the regularisation of speech prefixes.n10474 One possible pressure for an editor of a rarely edited text is to be conservative in his or her choices - there will not be another edition along in a year, or five years, or even twenty years, as will be the case for plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Webster and certain works by Middleton. But in this edition of Brome’s plays the presence of the old-spelling parallel text perhaps counteracts this tendency: at any stage, a reader can consult the old-spelling transcript and reach his or her own conclusions about my decisions, and I have therefore felt freer to produce in my modern-spelling edition a text that could be easily read and performed.
n10431 as W.W. Greg notes, by the appearance of advertisements before and after it, the first advertising plays by Crook, and the second plays by Brome.
n10432 and that each section, plus the preliminaries, was printed by a different press; he notes, further, that Henry Brome probably supplied the copy for The Queen and Concubine.
n10433 Its bibliographical independence from the rest of the Five New Playes volume means that The Queen and Concubine could have been sold as a separate single-volume play.
n10434 ‘It would appear, therefore, that this single piece was meant to be issued separately in advance of the collection’.
n10435 now single volumes, and may originally have been sold in this way.
n10436 Further evidence has also come to light, in advertisements of plays available to be bought from Crook and Henry Brome in 1663-5.
n10437 lists the titles of each;
n10438 Crook advertises
n10439 he lists all five titles separately,
n10440 Samuel Hardy,
n10441 he advertises
n10442 Henry Brome
n10443 The Queen and Concubine was not only the first printed, but that it was actually issued before the rest of the collection was ready. Of such separate issue no evidence, however, remains, unless it is to be found in Henry Brome’s advertisement of 1664. A possible interpretation of this would be that after the stock of The Queen and Concubine was exhausted, Brome reissued the first four plays with a fresh title-page. But of such a reissue no trace has been found.
n10444 ‘snperabundance’
n10445 but they appear frequently in other texts printed for Brome and/or Crook.
n10446 she notes that ‘As in classic scholarly annotation, the reading of plays was a co-operative enterprise of editor and reader: discerning readers were to supply their own amendments’.
n10447 ‘Reader, know I have perused this copy to make some satisfaction for the first faulty impression; yet so urgent hath been my business that some errors have still passed, which thy discretion may amend.’
n10448 ‘If you find any errors by me committed, correct them or neglect them’.
n10449 For instance, at [QC 1.5.line470] the word ‘forges’ — which in all other copies examined reads ‘forgets’ — is amended to ‘forgoes’, and in Alinda’s statement at [QC 3.11.line2381] that ‘a Father / Is not so early forgot’, ‘early’ is underlined and ‘easily’ written in the margin.
n10450 ‘the conscious editorial manipulation of Shakespeare’s text had started well before Nicholas Rowe’s edition, albeit informed by radically different views about what constituted an “authoritative” text’.
n10451 (see, for instance, the dialogue between Sforza and Petruccio in the octavo’s Act 2, Scene 8 [QC 2.8.line1214]).
n10452 octavo’s
n10453 The description here contradicts the events of Act 3 scene 6, which were witnessed by Lollio and Poggio, even though they have now apparently forgotten that they were on stage at that point.
n10454 It seems likely that it was marked for omission in the manuscript used in the preparation of the octavo, and that the compositors ignored the deletion marks,
n10455 This is, of course, only one possible solution,
n10456 a feature which leads Matthew Steggle in his recent book on Brome to suggest that the play ‘seems not quite completed’.
n10457 ‘Eather strykes him wth a staffe or Casts a stone.’),
n10458 ‘The lady speaks in Welsh’
n10459 with its earliest usage dated as early as 1620.
n10460 Tiffany Stern suggests that this practice was standard in the early modern playhouse.
n10461 examples abound in the Brome canon alone.
n10462 Brome himself makes use of a number of ballads in his plays
n10464 For instance, the song ‘Take, O Take Those Lips Away’ seems to have been incorporated into Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure during the 1620s, having first appeared in Fletcher’s Rollo, Duke of Normandy, performed by the King’s Men in 1619, while ‘Cupid Calls, Come Lovers Come’ appears in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Lady Elizabeth’s Men, 1613) and his More Dissemblers Besides Women (?King’s Men, c. 1614).
n10463 were almost certainly composed for Caroline revivals of these Jacobean works.
n10465 the first stanza of a song attributed to Thomas Campion.
n10466 versions appear in English and Dutch manuscripts and in texts printed throughout the seventeenth century.
n10467 printed in 1649 and apparently written for private performance around 1640-2.
n10469 Brome may have inserted it as a place holder for a song that had not yet been composed.
n10470 do not appear necessarily to be unfinished.
n10471 five years before the publication
n10472 I have also collated the text against the only post seventeenth-century edition, The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome, published by John Pearson in 1873, and probably edited by Richard Shepherd, where it appears, with the rest of the 1659 Five New Playes, in volume 2.
n10473 The editor also alters a number of words, correcting some printer’s errors and introducing a number of his own; in addition, he changes punctuation, transposes words and occasionally introduces words to improve the metre.
n10474 the regularisation of speech prefixes.