Materialising Marlowe

Stripped of authority, Edward, in Marlowe’s Edward II, can only fantasize about revenge on the one he holds responsible. Displacing the violence he wishes he could enact on Mortimer, Edward tears the warrant Mortimer has signed for Edward’s arrest.

Well may I rent his name, that rends my hart,

This poore revenge hath something easd my minde,

So may his limmes be torne, as is this paper... (Marlowe, I4v)

Like Edward’s fragmented page, the Dyce copy of Edward II, held by the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum (Dyce Catalogue Number 6209, Shelfmark Dyce 25.D.40), is also a “rent” text. While Edward’s fantasy enacts destruction upon the page, however, the Dyce Edward II is paradoxically made whole by being a “rent” text. Part of the copy is the 1598 edition of the play, printed in quarto by Richard Bradock for William Jones and normally coming to 38 leaves, but another part comprises a manuscript on added pages. Interleaving blank sheets into a printed book for annotation was common (Jackson 33). In this case, however, the pages were bound in not for annotation but to compensate for damage. At some point, the Dyce Edward II lost its first two leaves and so an early owner added two leaves comprising manuscript facsimiles of the title page (A1r) and first seventy lines (A2r–v), and they inserted text to work around tearing on the bottom of other pages (B1v, B2r, B3v, and K1v).

The manuscript portion is vaguely skeuomorphic, that is, it generally attempts to reproduce the layout of what the scribe saw in the printed exemplar, though the use of an italic hand, with its loops and flourishes, while formal, is not the kind of “quasi-typographical” writing commonly used in eighteenth-century manuscripts that “imitated printed fonts, such as Roman or italic” (Blair 9). Indeed, the hand appears to be from the “late sixteenth or early seventeenth century” (3:179; see also Greg vii). The scribe also corrected several errors in the printed copy—though they also introduced new errors of their own.

Who copied the pages and why is unknown. As Ann Blair notes, “even when there is clear evidence of copying from a printed source, rarely can the copying be associated with a particular person or context from which to assess motivation” (10). The paper used for the manuscript portion differs from that used in the printed portion, suggesting it was added by a later owner. Only two of those owners are known. It was given to the Victoria & Albert in 1869 by Alexander Dyce, who was also likely responsible for its current binding. It seems unlikely that Dyce supplied the missing text: his handwriting differs from that used to make the additions. In the 18th century, an earlier owner added an inscription on the back of the title page, dated 3 October 3 1751, reading “Mary Clarke her Book and Writing” (A1v). “Mary Clarke” was also likely not the scribe—her inscription and the play text are in different hands—though her ownership of the book and declaration of her ability to write (‘her Writing’), put Clarke in the company of the increasing number of literate women readers of the early eighteenth century (see Levy, 8–9). By the time Clarke put her name in her copy of Edward II, women readers were “a cultural ideal and market force” driving new publications, though the Dyce Edward II testifies to women reading much older books as well (Hackel and Kelly 2; see also Knight, White, and Sauer).

The Dyce Edward II presents further mystery beyond the identity of the scribe: the printed portion of the play is the 1598 edition, the manuscript title page resembles that of the 1594 edition, but the scribe wrote the date of 1593 in the imprint. In 1909, the first scholar to note the copy’s existence, C. F. Tucker Brooke, identified fifteen variants between the manuscript portion and the 1594 edition and concluded that “the divergences are sufficiently great to make copying [from the 1594 edition] unlikely” (72). As a result, and taking the date of 1593 at face value, he suggested “that there existed during the middle of the eighteenth century, and may still exist in some private English library, a copy of a yet earlier edition, published in 1593” (71). He further noted that Jones entered the play in the Stationers” Register on 6 July 1593 and “the ceremony of registration was normally followed by immediate publication,” especially given Marlowe’s death just five weeks earlier: “In such circumstances it would be surprising in the highest degree for a publisher to withhold the issue of the dead poet’s masterpiece until nine months or more after it had been officially licensed” (73).

Tucker Brooke’s theory of a lost 1593 edition of Edward II was, for a time, widely accepted, including by E. K. Chambers (3:425), W. W. Greg (vii), W. Moelwyn Merchant (xxvii), and David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (xxix–xxx). Most recent scholars, however, have not been convinced. In 1973, Fredson Bowers observed that the rate of variants Tucker Brooke found (and Greg added to) would result in an edition so filled with errors as to “be a fantastic proposition scarcely to be supported by the evidence” (2:4). Evaluating the bibliographical evidence of how the 1594 edition was printed and comparing it to what is known about how reprints of plays were prepared, Bowers concluded that “the 1594 quarto was a first edition, not a reprint” (2:6). Bowers’s challenge has been followed by Martin Wiggins and Robert Lindsey (xxxix), Wiggins (3:179), and the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts.

Charles Forker, for his 1994 Revels edition, likewise agreed with Bowers that the variants are “more readily explicable as a combination of careless errors and misguided “improvements” on the part of someone who was transcribing the 1594 text than as readings that already antedated his [sic] efforts” (4). He also contributed a further piece of bibliographic evidence: the copy of the 1594 edition in the Zentrabibliothek, Zürich, reveals that the edition existed in two states. In the Zürich copy, the first leaf was inserted to replace a cancelled title page, leading Forker to propose that the book was set into type in late 1593 and printed twice, in late 1593 and in 1594, at which point the title page, with its date, was changed (5). It was this 1593 state of the 1594 edition, Forker suggested, that served as exemplar for the Dyce scribe. Altering a numeral in the standing type of an imprint date occurred often in the period, including for Q2 of Hamlet. Forker added this could also account for the change in the appearance of the playwright’s name, being expanded from “Mar” to the more recognizable (and marketable) “Marlow’.

The Dyce Edward II demonstrates the extent to which early modern play texts existed, and survive, as hybrid objects: it is both a manuscript text and a printed text, both the 1598 text of the play and not, both a surrogate of the printed play and its own unique version of the play. Even the text’s auspices are hybridized. Some scholars consider the manuscript from which the play was printed to have been Marlowe’s working copy (Bevington and Rasmussen, xxx) and some consider it to have been a playhouse copy (Greg, xii, and Merchant, xxvii). But it could have been both: several extant playhouse manuscripts were also author’s working copies. There was no tidy distinction between categories of manuscripts in the period. That is, the copy for the printed edition may have been interstitial—both an “authorial” and a “theatrical” manuscript.

The Dyce Edward II demonstrates also the persistence of manuscript practices well into the age of print (Love 197–204). Perhaps the most obvious form in which manuscript practices appear in the context of printed works are readers” marks and marginalia, which can suggest a particular reader’s active, responsive engagement with a text (see Jackson and Sherman). The Dyce Edward II represents a different kind of engagement—one centered not on responding to the printed text but on collaborating with it. In the Dyce Edward II, manuscript and print are not merely bound together; they depend upon one another to produce a completed literary work. The book thus literalizes the idea that, when thinking of manuscript and print in the period, “it is more realistic to speak not of one superseding the other, but of the two working together” (McKitterick 21). Texts like the Dyce Edward II, with its hybridizing form, may seem peculiar to modern readers accustomed to uniformity as a defining attribute of printed books, but in the early modern period they were “sufficiently common [as] to be familiar” (McKitterick 108).

In addition, the Dyce Edward II reveals a reversal of the typical progression of a text from manuscript into print; instead of a compositor setting type from manuscript copy, the scribe worked from a printed exemplar to write out the text in manuscript. In an age when printed books were costly, making manuscript copies from printed exemplars was common (Lutz 261–67; Blair 7–33). Eva Nyström provides the useful term “composite volume” to describe such a text (113). Although her focus is primarily on anthologies, such as miscellanies and Sammelbände that bound together print and manuscript materials to complement each other, Nyström does note the practice of “intentional merging” by which “manuscript textual unit and printed units are bound together into the same volume,” including “to complete an otherwise unfinished printed text” and even add “a handwritten title page” (117–18).

Most scholarship on such “composite volumes” focuses on the medieval period. McKitterick, for example, notes several fifteenth century examples of “manuscript additions [made] by readers, making good incomplete editions,” which could often happen “because sheets ran short in the hands of the binder, or because books were incompletely gathered prior to sewing” (102 and 107). Printers at times did the same to insert text missed in the manufacturing process (McKitterick 127 and 143). While the Dyce Edward II additions were made due to physical damage, not text lost through printer’s error, the copy nonetheless thus literalizes yet another hybridization—a merging of the reader’s and the stationer’s roles, through which the reader became “responsible for a part of the book’s physical manufacture” by “amend[ing] with the pen what had been set and printed in type” (McKitterick 132–33).

Well into the age of print, manuscript copies of books were made and circulated for several reasons: to create a cheaper copy, obtain an additional copy of a rare book, add or omit text for a specific owner, or carry out a pedagogical or moral exercise (Blair 10–11). With the Dyce Edward II, however, as with other books in which only a portion of the book is in manuscript, we might consider also the bibliophile’s urge for completeness as a motivating factor. Like the desire to have the whole of a particular author’s works or all the books on a particular subject, the collector’s desire for the whole of the book emerged alongside printing itself, and by the nineteenth century even gave rise to commercial “pen facsimile” artisans who imitated the specific typefaces and mise en page of famed printers (McKitterick 145).

Even if we decide there was no 1593 edition of Edward II, the Dyce copy provides an important reminder about the numerous printed works from the period that no longer survive. The number of plays that failed to make the transition from stage to print is considerable: the Lost Plays Database counts at least 839 titles known from other sources but which do not survive and there were certainly many more whose existence itself is lost. Scholars such as Matthew Steggle, David McInnis, and Roslyn Knutson have demonstrated that extant texts give us only a partial understanding of the drama from the period.

The Dyce Edward II raises a related problem: lost editions, or what Andrew Pettegree describes as the “vast shadow army of lost books.” Using Stationers” Register entries for 1557 to 1640, Alexandra Hill calculates that at least 5,000 early modern books are no longer extant (3). Not all titles registered were ultimately printed, of course, but this does suggest that over 45% of books printed in early modern England no longer survive. As Pettegree notes, most lost books are those that had “a much lower sale value” and were “read for the information they contained, and then discarded,” rather than being kept in a collection (2). Playbooks in quarto or octavo form would usually have met that definition of a disposable book.

Manuscript copying of part of a play, like the Dyce Edward II, can have implications for editors who might be tempted to restrict their attention only to printed witnesses. In examining such a manuscript source, an editor must ask whether any of its readings—though not appearing in any extant print copies of the play—provide preferable alternatives, whether or not we think they come from a lost edition. For example, in the 1594 Edward II, Gaveston dismisses “the multitude” as “but sparkes, / Rakt up in embers of their povertie” (Marlowe, A2v); the Dyce scribe, however, describes the multitude as “bakt” in the embers of their poverty—a rather different, and more peculiar, image. “Rakt” is likely the correct reading, but elsewhere the Dyce manuscript provides readings preferable to those in printed editions. For example, in Gaveston’s opening speech, the 1594 quarto sets a line as “Sweete prince I come, these these thy amorous lines” (Marlowe, A2r); the Dyce scribe presents this line with just one “these,” which makes better sense. If an editor rejects the 1593 hypothesis but nonetheless accepts this variant from the manuscript portion of the Dyce Edward II, they would be privileging an emendation introduced by a reader, making the reader, for a moment, a collaborator in the making of the play. Through its status as a “rent” text, then, the Dyce Edward II speaks to the various forms of hybridity surrounding early modern dramatic texts: the folding together of stage and page, print and manuscript, and even, in a small way, play-maker and play-consumer.

Matteo Pangallo, Virginia Commonwealth University

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the staff at the National Art Gallery, and especially Catherine Yvard, for their assistance with research for this essay.