[644] Pollard, Sh. F. 74; cf. his introd. to A New Shakespeare Quarto (1916).
[645] Epistles to Heywood, Rape of Lucrece; Marston, Malcontent, Fawn; Middleton, Family of Love. In Father Hubburd’s Tales Middleton says, ‘I never wished this book a better fortune than to fall into the hands of a truespelling printer’. Heywood, in an Epistle to Apology for Actors (1612), praises the honest workmanship of his printer, Nicholas Okes, as against that of W. Jaggard, who would not let him issue errata of ‘the infinite faults escaped in my booke of Britaines Troy, by the negligence of the Printer, as the misquotations, mistaking of sillables, misplacing halfe lines, coining of strange and neuer heard of words’.
[646] ‘Proofs’ and ‘revises’ had come into use before 1619, for Jaggard, criticized by Ralph Brooke for his ill printing of Brooke’s Catalogue of Nobility (1619), issued a new edition as A Discoverie of Errors in the First Edition of the Catalogue of Nobility (1622), regretting that his workmen had not given Brooke leave to print his own faulty English, and saying, ‘In the time of this his vnhappy sicknesse, though hee came not in person to ouer-looke the Presse, yet the Proofe, and Reuiewes duly attended him, and he perused them (as is well to be iustifyed) in the maner he did before’; cf. p. 261.
[647] Cf. pp. 106, 107, 117, 127.
[648] e.g. Cynthia’s Revels (F1), ‘The Scene Gargaphie’; Philaster (F2), ‘The scene being in Cicilie’; Coxcomb (F2), ‘The Scene; England, France’ (but in fact there are no scenes in France!).
[649] The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom has no acts, but nine scenes. The latish Jacob and Esau, Respublica, Misogonus, Conflict of Conscience have acts and scenes.
[650] Ralph Roister Doister, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, Gorboduc, Gismund of Salerne, Misfortunes of Arthur, Jocasta, Supposes, Bugbears, Two Italian Gentlemen, Glass of Government, Promos and Cassandra, Arraignment of Paris; so, too, as a rule, University plays. Dido and Love and Fortune, like the later private theatre plays, show acts only.
[651] Devil’s Charter, Duchess of Malfi, Philotas, Sir Giles Goosecap, The Turk, Liberality and Prodigality, Percy’s plays, The Woman Hater, Monsieur Thomas, 2 Antonio and Mellida.
[652] Acts and scenes are marked in Tamburlaine and Locrine; acts, or one or more of them only, sometimes with the first scene, in Jack Straw, Battle of Alcazar, Wounds of Civil War, King Leire, Alphonsus, James IV, Soliman and Perseda, Spanish Tragedy, John a Kent and John a Cumber; a few scenes without acts in Death of Robin Hood. These exceptions may indicate neo-classic sympathies in the earlier group of scholar playwrights; some later plays, e.g. of Beaumont and Fletcher, have partial divisions. The acts in Spanish Tragedy and Jack Straw are four only; Histriomastix, a private theatre play, has six. Where there are no formal divisions, they are sometimes replaced by passages of induction or dumb-shows.
[653] Cf. ch. xxi.