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Actors' Names In Basic Shakespearean Texts, With Special Reference To Romeo And Juliet And Much Ado

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Allison Gaw
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Extract

One of the minor critical problems with regard to the early quartos and folios of Shakespeare relates to those textual irregularities in which the name of an actor appears in place of that of a character, suddenly transporting the reader from the land of make-believe to the Elizabethan tiring-room, and establishing a direct line of connection between the plays and the companies for which they were written.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , September 1925 , pp. 530 - 550
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1925

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References

1 E.g., Much Ado, Furness var. ed., 230, n. 1; ib., Cambr. ed., 92; 'Adams, Shakespeare, 517, 519.

2 John Sincklo as one of Shakespeare's Actors, in Anglia, 1925.

3 For the sake of completeness it should be mentioned that from the above discussion the following entries in texts have been omitted for the reasons indicated: (1) In Hamlet, F1, III, ii, 171, 187, 192, 226, 237, Bap. appears for the speech heading Player Queen, being merely an abbreviated Baptista, the name of the Queen (cf. III, ii, 249). (2) In 2 Henry IV, Q, I, i, 161, Umfr. appears for the speech heading Travers, probably merely as the result of a confusion of the name Travers with that of one of his sources of information, Sir John Umfreville (cf. I, i, 34). (3) In the Shrew, F1, IV, iv, 68, appears the stage direction, Enter Peter. No such name appears elsewhere among the characters of the play nor among the known members of the Chamberlain's Men; and the entrance is unmotivated, the character being given nothing to say or apparently to do, and a general Exeunt taking place four lines later. There is apparently not even any stage furniture to be shifted. (4) A parallel case to this is the Enter Will in 2 Henry IV, Q, II, iv, 20, where the entrance of an otherwise unknown character is again unmotivated, the character being given nothing to say or do. (5) The only case of any real interest is that in I Henry IV, Qq-F1, I, i, 181, where Poins says in the course of a speech to the Prince: “Falstaffe, Haruey, Rossill, and Gadshill, shall robbe those men that wee haue already way-layde,…. and when they haue the booty, if you and I do not rob them, cut this head from my shoulders.” In the scene of the robbery (II, ii) the characters here called Harvey and Rossill are discovered to be Bardolph and Peto, but in Q1 at II, iv, 193, 195, 199, three speeches given in F1 to Gadshill are headed Ross[ill]. On the strength of this passage Harvey and Rossill are often, after Theobald's suggestion, considered to be the names of otherwise unknown Elizabethan actors (e. g., Chambers, Eliz. Stage, II, 320, 337). This is improbable, however. The Q1 is a “good quarto,” published by authority of the company, seemingly to advertise the change of the name of Oldcastle to Falstaff (cf. Adams, Shakespeare, 228-9), and probably was printed directly from the playhouse MS. There is no chance for a slip through the faulty memory of an actor or the filling-in of a surreptitious stenographer; and the prompter would have no reason for inserting actors' names here in the middle of a speech. Nor, except through a momentary slip of the memory, is there any reason why, in the middle of a speech and for only the middle two out of a list of four closely consecutive names, Shakespeare should have inserted actors' names for those of characters; and that this is no momentary slip is clear from the three-fold appearance of Ross[ill] later in Q1. The only satisfactory explanation would appear to be that Shakespeare, writing the first speech in which the two characters were mentioned, intended to name them Harvey and Rossill, and after having passed II, iv, 199, changed his mind and gave them the more distinctive names Bardolph and Peto, but did not catch all of the back passages to be corrected (cf. the parallel case of Old. for Falstaff in 2 Henry IV, Q, I, ii, 137). That revision took place in II, iv, is clear from the fact that in F1 one of Gadshill's speeches (line 192) has been transferred to the Prince and Rossill's three speeches (lines 193, 195, 199) have been transferred, not to Peto or Bardolph, but to Gadshill. Regarded as Elizabethan actors, Harvey and Rossill are pretty certainly merely “ghost names,” and have no right to inclusion above.

4 The part of Balthazar seems too small to have been written for an actor capable of playing Feste in Twelfth Night, which is the singing part in the play; and Shakespeare's creation of Feste would suggest the recent acquisition by the company of a new singing actor. Yet if Wilson was baptized on April 24, 1585, as is considered probable (Chambers, Eliz. Stage, II, 349), his voice would scarcely be in condition for Feste by 1601. Of course, the stage direction may have been altered at any time prior to 1623. See Much Ado, Praetorius facsimile of Q, p. vi, n. 1.

5 Among the twenty plays first published in the First Folio all were apparently from full theatrical MSS except T. G. V., M. for M., W. T., and John, which seem, from the paucity of their stage directions, to have been made from texts of the actors' parts assembled with the aid of a plat of the play. Rich. III, 2 Hen. IV, Ham., Lear, Tr. and Cr., and Oth. were also printed from playhouse MSS although “good quartos” of them had already appeared; and the same was of course true concerning the plays that had appeared only in “bad quartos,” viz., Hen. V and M. W. Five plays were printed in F1 from authentic quartos that had been used as or corrected from prompt-books, namely, Much Ado (Q, 1600), Tit. And. (Q3, 1611), 1 Hen. IV (Q5, 1613), Rich. II (Q4, 1615) and M. N. D. (Q2, 1619). See Pollard's Shakespeare Folios and Quartos and his Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates, Adams' Shakespeare, and the available volumes of the new Cambridge ed. For the evidence that the F1 text of 1 Hen. VI was printed from the original MS of 1592, and that the F1 text of the Errors was based upon an MS parts of which go back to 1577, see studies of those plays by the present writer, soon to appear.

6 Outside of the case in R. and J., the sole exceptions to this are a Const[able] for Cowley and a Const[able] for Kemp in Much Ado, IV, ii, 53 and 69 respectively.

7 Rick. III, Rich. II, L.L.L., and M.N.D. had already been forced into the market by actual or attempted piracies, and 1 Hen. IV by the necessity for emphasizing the fact that Falstaff was not Sir John Oldcastle; but these appeared at intervals and the company would regard them as exceptional cases. In 1600 the representative of the company also registered for publication, but “to be stayed,” A.Y.L.I., Hen. V, and Every Man in his Humour.

8 For this paragraph see Murray, Eng. Dram. Companies, I, 74ff; also, at some points, the outcoming studies of the early history of the Errors and of 1 Henry VI by the present writer.

9 E.g., J. Q. Adams, Shakespeare, 137.

10 Plat of Four Plays in One, Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, 131.

11 There seems no relation between this abbreviation and the Fel. in R. and J. cited above, as the latter evidently results from the fellow in the preceding line.

12 Compare the interestingly isolated passages in Othello, III, i, 3-32, and III, iv, 1-23, in which the Clown is introduced where he can do the least harm. Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear of course contain triumphant solutions of the problem.

13 In Q1 the sense, though not the phrasing, is as in this from Q2. For the heading Balth. the Folio has Boy caught from a Boy (Paris' page) at V, iii, 167, 171.

14 F1 misprints the Constables of Q2 as a singular.

15 Much Ado, new Cambridge ed., 95-96.

16 Ibid., 93-99.

17 There is a bare possibility that an equivalent device may have been used to bring about the same plot result; but after a dramatist has written the scenes for a given device and produced them with fair success, there is not one chance in a thousand that he will discard them for different plot mechanics. This is especially true of Shakespeare, always economical of energy in rewriting.

18 A second advantage of this is that the low comedy in the second half of the play takes the place of the high comedy of Benedick and Beatrice in the first half, which latter tends to disappear with the growing seriousness of the main plot.

19 The planning of the balcony scene by Don John and Borachio in II, ii, is not sufficient preparation for the church scene, IV, i. The audience must know that the plan was carried out. The Cambridge editors apparently believe that in an earlier form of the play the balcony scene was presented.

20 Striking illustrations are in L.L.L., I, ii, 132, Clowne, Constable, Wench; III, i, 1, Braggart and his Boy; V, i, 1, the Pedant, Curate, and Dull; etc., etc.

21 Of course the actor of old Verges can blend them into his part, as is always done today.

22 This is also the opinion of Mr. J. D. Wilson, new Cambridge ed., 135.

23 See Tempest, new Cambridge ed., pp. xxxiv-xxxv.

24 It is possible that this speech was originally a part of Dogberry's, being the only one in the older section of the play where Verges uses Dogberry's trick of mistaking the word. In the new scene at III, iii, 3, he uses salvation for damnation, but elsewhere his speech has merely the rambling and weakness of age.

25 Owing to the fact that the introductory word to it is Const[able], it is more than possible that this was originally a part of Dogberry's preceding speech, standing: Const. Flat Burglarie as euer was committed, yea by masse that it is.

With Kemp written above Const. in revision, the Const. in MS might be read by the compositor as belonging to the next line. Or even with Couley (or Cou.) written below, the slip to Const. would be easy.

26 See the Cambridge editors' note on the effectiveness of this scene ending, p. 144, ll. 67-68.

27 This does not account for Andrew, line 3. The fact that Keeper (1. 1) is evidently the printer's misunderstanding of Kemp, and that Kemp follows in 11.10, 13, etc., makes it very unlikely that Shakespeare here thrust in Andrew as a nickname for Kempe borrowed from merry andrew, as suggested by W. A. Wright (noted in Much Ado, Furness var. ed., 230) and the new Cambridge editors (ed., p. 143, n. to IV, ii, S.D.). More probably it is the best the compositor could make of the tangle of lines caused by superimposing Kemp, on Const. However, this is a question for an expert on Elizabethan chirography.

28 Also they seem strong evidence that in Much Ado the compositor set up Q from Shakespeare's own script.