The Queen's Exchange
Textual Introduction1Probably written in 1634, The Queen’s Exchange was not published until 1657, five years after Richard Brome’s death. The publisher was Henry Brome, younger brother of the poet Alexander Brome (1620-1666): their relationship to the playwright, if any there was, is unknown. In 1657 Henry Brome was near the beginning of a productive career, which continued until his death in 1681, as a bookseller.n11362 Entered for the Stationers’ Register late in November of 1656,n11363 The Queen’s Exchange may have been Henry Brome’s second publication: only John Deacon’s The Grand Impostor Examined: or, The life, tryal and examination of James Nayler, of which Henry Brome brought out two imprints in 1656, is certain to have preceded it. Henry Brome’s three other publications in 1657 were: Two Essays of Love & Marriage, an exchange of opinions by J.H. and A.B.., for which the Stationers’ Register entry immediately precedes the entry for The Queen’s Exchange; Psychomachia, eight sermons by Rev. Henry Beesley; and Heavens cry against murder, an anonymous pamphlet concerning an event which occurred in August of 1657.2Henry Brome’s publication of The Queen’s Exchange at this early and inchoate stage in his career may have had some connection with the activities of his elder brother Alexander. Both Alexander Brome and Richard Brome had contributed to the commendatory verses in the preliminaries to Moseley’s folio publication of Beaumont and Fletcher’s in 1647. After the playwright’s death in 1652, Alexander Brome had edited the collection of Richard Brome’s Five New Playes, which Humphrey Moseley, Richard Marriot and Thomas Dring brought out in 1653. (This 1653 collection contained A Mad Couple Well Matched, The Novella, The Court Beggar, The City Wit and The Demoiselle: see below.) Writing as ‘The Stationer to the Readers’ of The Queen’s Exchange in 1657, Henry Brome gives hints of hoarding Richard Brome’s work: ‘This short account I thought fit to give you of this Poem, that it came to my hands among other things of this nature written, and left by Mr. Rich.Broome a person whose excellency in Comical wit has been sufficiently proved, and needs not my partial and weak commendation.‘ He then averts to five of Richard Brome’s plays as having been ‘published already’ — The Northern Lass, The Antipodes, The Sparagus Garden, The Jovial Crew and The Late Lancashire Witches — ‘besides the 5. Plays lately published in a Volume’ — that is, the contents of the 1653 Five New Playes. The existence of these ten plays in print, writes Henry Brome, is his warrant for publishing The Queen’s Exchange: ‘The good acceptance of all which encourages me to publish this, being no way inferior to the rest...Your kinde entertainment of this will enable me to make known to the World divers more of the same Authors works of this kind, which have not yet seen light.’ So Henry Brome evidently had, or at least claimed to have, access to other unpublished plays by Richard Brome. Although, as will be seen, The Queen’s Exchange did not meet good acceptance, Henry Brome did make ‘divers more of the same Authors works’ known to the world. In 1658 he published The English Moor, and then, a year later, he was co-publisher of a second collection of Richard Brome’s Five New Playes. (The 1659 collection contains The English Moor, The Love-sick Court, Covent Garden Weeded, The New Academy, and The Queen and Concubine). The year 1661 saw Henry Brome’s last efforts to make Richard Brome’s work known to the world and profitable to himself: that year he brought out A Jovial Crew, and he re-issued his own publication of The Queen’s Exchange under a new name, The Royal Exchange. (Although the scholar who first noticed this recycling pronounced it ‘a not uncommon fraud’,n11364 it is particularly striking in this instance of a play full of doubles and confusions of identities!) The reissue has acquired a new title-page to match the new title, but its running titles remain unchanged from 1657, as does the preliminary paragraph from ‘The Stationer to the Readers’. The fact that in 1664 this reissue was still being advertised for sale by Henry Bromen11365 suggests that repackaging did not improve sales and that The Royal Exchange of 1661 proved no more of a commercial success than its alter (and anterior) ego The Queen’s Exchange had done in 1657.3By the time of the publication of the 1653 collection of Richard Brome’s Five New Playes, Humphrey Moseley had established a niche market as a publisher of pre-1642 dramatic texts, packaged by author. For some authors (George Chapman, William Davenant, John Webster) he published only 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.n11366 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.n11367 However, since there is 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, with him. 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 (The City Wit and The Demoiselle) as well as the preliminaries to the entire volume.n11368 Although a Stationers’ Register entry dated 9 September 1653 shows Moseley to have staked his claim on the last two plays,n11369 he is not named on their individual title pages in the 1653 Five New Playes: the only place where his name appears in that volume is on the title page for the entire collection.4Whatever the nature and extent of Humphrey Moseley’s involvement in the publication of the 1653 Five New Playes may have been, it seems clear that the 1657 The Queen’s Exchange was modelled on Moseley’s work. The most striking resemblance is the first thing which would come to the eye of browsing book-buyer: the title page. Among some 25 individual plays published by Moseley between 1648 and 1659, the great majority have a title page which first states the play’s title and genre (the latter usually subtitled) and then advertises its up-market theatrical success. In a few instances, the theatrical venue is identified as Salisbury Court or the Cockpit/Phoenix, but in most it is the Blackfriars Theatre; and if these title pages are to be believed, then the King’s Men’s performances there must always have been received ‘with great applause’. As published by Henry Brome in 1657, The Queen’s Exchange bears a title page which appears to be mimicking Moseley’s: ‘THE/ QUEENES/ EXCHANGE,/ A/ COMEDY/ Acted with general applause at the/ BLACK-FRIERS/ BY/ His Majesties Servants.’ If the would-be buyer of The Queen’s Exchange proceeded to turn over the page, however, the effect of that advertisement on the title page would have been erased. On the very next leaf, in ‘The Stationer to the Readers’, Henry Brome denied all knowledge of the play’s original provenance and performance history: ‘this Poem...came to my hands among other things of this nature written, and left by Mr. Rich. Broome.....but when ‘twas written, or where acted, I know not.’5The Stationers’ Register entry for The Queen’s Exchange is dated 20 November 1656. The printer is recorded as Randolph Taylor, who on that date also appears in the Stationers’ Register entry for another text, which Henry Brome would publish the following year: Two Essays of Love & Marriage. Greg suggests that there had been ‘some private arrangement between Henry Brome and Randolph Taylor’,n11370 and he elsewhere credits ‘Randal or Randolph’ Taylor with the printing of The Queen’s Exchange.n11371 If Taylor was the printer, it would have been a very early effort on his part: an EEBO search on Randolph Taylor turns up no titles before 1667, and on Randall Taylor, none before 1663. The two names are at the same shop, so they do designate a single printer: his output was very small in the 1660s, non-existent in the 1670s, but prolific across the 1680s and into the 1690s. 6A more unusual, and unfortunate, point of resemblance between The Queen’s Exchange and some of Moseley’s early play-publishing is the page layout. Like Moseley’s editions of Beaumont and Fletcher plays in the late 1640s, Henry Brome’s 1657 edition of The Queen’s Exchange is printed in double columns, divided by a vertical rule. After the initial indication of ‘ACT. I. SCEN. I’, and until the final ‘FINIS. ‘, the line of columnar division is never crossed, save by the running title at the top of each page. This discipline ill suits Brome’s irregular versification: many lines of The Queen’s Exchange cannot be squeezed into the space available for them in the 1657 edition. Sometimes the end of a verse line which surpasses the linearly defined limit gets carried down to a new line of type and there indented — a familiar arrangement. Sometimes, however, the excess is carried up to the end of the preceding line, or down to the end of the succeeding one, and there marked off by an open-parenthesis sign. As a rule the latter arrangement is the one adopted for very short spill-overs, but there are at least two occurrences of it which involve fully twenty characters, while the former arrangement can be deployed for as few as three characters. Distribution is irregular, but only a single forme (C1, 2v, 3v, 4) appears to have been set without any use of the latter, and no single page is entirely without the former. Sometimes both arrangements are found in the same line of type.7The visual results of these space-saving practices are unattractive: the 1657 text of The Queen’s Exchange looks fussy, and it is fiddly to follow. They, the second arrangement especially, also have unfortunate implications for dramatic bibliography: they weaken confidence in such inferences about the status of the manuscript copy text for the printed text as are based on the placement of stage directions, and on the absence/presence of exits/entrances. That a stage direction is placed where it is could be because there is where the printer found room for it; and that a mid-scene entrance or exit is missing could be because the printer found no room for it. Although certainty on this point is thus impossible, nevertheless The Queen’s Exchange as printed by Henry Brome in 1657 does appear to bear traces of a manuscript which had seen (or at the very least, had anticipated) use in playhouse. Slightly misplaced stage directions, including entrances, are more often than not anticipatory. (And the very slightly anticipatory placement of one direction — for knocking at the end of speech No. 486 rather than in the middle of speech No. 487 — can be explained by the hypothesis that a cue at the correct point would have been inaudible offstage: the character who would have given it speaks from a bed which is likely to have been curtained.) Interestingly, however, the density of theatrical traces seems to be greatest in Act 3, the only act which is wholly without scene divisions, even at its opening. Is it conceivable, or even remotely possible, that the manuscript for The Queen’s Exchange was an authorial/theatrical hybrid? To broaden that question: might the Brome brothers have had access to a cache of authorial manuscripts which had been more or less marked up in the playhouse?8One extremely anticipatory stage direction in The Queen’s Exchange occasions a suggestion about composition. The place where the direction makes sense is at the top of the righthand column on signature E2. The place where it has been printed is two-thirds of the way down the righthand column on signature D1. These signatures would fall in the same position on a forme. I suggest that the play was set by a single compositor on two formes, that the setting of D1, 2v, 3 and 4v was simultaneous with the setting of E1v, 2, 3v and 4, and that the compositor lost track of the forme on which he was working. 9The control copy for this edition of The Queen’s Exchange has been EEBO’s set of online images made from the copy of Henry Brome’s 1657 edition in the Library of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. It has been collated, and some thirty cruces checked, against the two copies of The Queen’s Exchange in the British Library: shelfmark 644.d.35 (Thomason’s copy, on the titlepage of which there is a manuscript correction of the year, from 1657 to 1656, and an addition of ‘Nou. 3rd’ — earlier than the Stationers’ Register entry) and shelfmark 161.g.61. The same collation and checking were also undertaken between the control copy and EEBO’s set of online images of the British Library copy of The Royal Exchange: shelfmark E.1045.(18) (also Thomason’s copy, and again with an inscription, on the title page, of the date of the Stationers Register entry, ‘September: 29’). No press corrections were certainly remarked, the few differences observed from the control copy being obviously mechanical in origin.10The Queen’s Exchange is the last play in the final volume of John Pearson’s 1873 three-volume Dramatic Works of Richard Brome containing Fifteen Comedies. Although his text is quasi-diplomatic, Pearson did not preserve the lay-out of Henry Brome’s edition, from which he corrected a very few obvious typographical errors. The only other edition of The Queen’s Exchange of which the present editor is aware is Richard Wood’s 2005 Sheffield Hallam University MA dissertation, available online.n11560 Lightly annotated and rather briefly introduced, Wood’s edition presents a modernised text which shows an admirable sense of verse lineation. In keeping with the general principles of this Collected Works, the present edition of The Queen’s Exchange has in its Original Text preserved the anomalous lineation of the 1657 quarto as exactly as online technology permitted, short of photographic images. In the Modernised Text, re-lineation has been recorded in notes when it has involved a change of prose to verse (or vice versa) and when it has been at variance with Wood’s edition. Variant spellings of ‘holiday’ (a keyword in Act 2) and contracted forms of ‘ever’ (including compound words) have also been tracked.
n11362 In 1657 Henry Brome was near the beginning of a productive career, which continued until his death in 1681, as a bookseller.
n11363 Entered for the Stationers’ Register late in November of 1656,
n11364 ‘a not uncommon fraud’,
n11365 The fact that in 1664 this reissue was still being advertised for sale by Henry Brome
n11366 subsequently-published single texts.
n11367 and its format is consistent with other collections which certainly were.
n11368 as well as the preliminaries to the entire volume.
n11369 shows Moseley to have staked his claim on the last two plays,
n11370 ‘some private arrangement between Henry Brome and Randolph Taylor’,
n11371 ‘Randal or Randolph’ Taylor with the printing of The Queen’s Exchange.
n11560 online.