(ii) Accounts of John Bridges.
It appears from extracts given by Kempe, 69, that some accounts of John Bridges between 1539, when he became Yeoman of the Revels, and 1544, when Cawarden became Master, are at Loseley.
(iii) Accounts of Sir Thomas Cawarden.
Many of these are at Loseley, often in more than one copy. Kempe, 69, gives a few extracts for the last years of Henry VIII, and the most important documents for the next three reigns, ranging from 1547 to 1559; are printed by A. Feuillerat in Materialien, xxi and xliv, with accompanying warrants and other subsidiary documents. From 1547 to 1550 the accounts are mainly office copies of ‘particular’ books, setting out the details and cost of each individual revel, airing, or the like; but for 1550–55, and again for 1555–9, the ‘particular paye bookes’ are brought together with summaries in two great ‘Certificates’ (Loseley MSS. 62 and 63), which relate to the Tents as well as the Revels. The second of these includes, as well as money accounts, inventories of the office stuff and notes of its employment in masking and other garments during 1555–60, and a similar record for 1550–5 is in Loseley MS. 112. These Certificates, although signed by the Clerk, Clerk Controller, and Yeoman, are not audited. Probably they are office copies of Original Accounts prepared for audit.
(b) Elizabethan Period.
Eleven Original Accounts of the Masters or Acting Masters of the Revels, with annotations by the Auditors, are in R. O. Audit Office, Accounts Various, 3, 907 (formerly 1213). They relate to the periods: (i) Feb. 1571–May 1572; (ii) June 1572–Oct. 1573; (iii) Nov. 1573–Feb. 1574; (iv) March 1574–Feb. 1575; (v) March 1576–Feb. 1577; (vi) Feb. 1578–Oct. 1579; (vii) Nov. 1579–Oct. 1580; (viii) Nov. 1580–Oct. 1581; (ix) Nov. 1582–Oct. 1583; (x) Nov. 1584–Oct. 1585; (xi) Nov. 1587–Oct. 1588. It will be seen that a regular annual system, starting with the opening of the season for revels at All Saints in each year, was ultimately adopted. All these accounts were printed in P. Cunningham, Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court (1842, Sh. Soc.), but (ii) imperfectly and (xi) from an unaudited duplicate in the same bundle. These vagaries are corrected in the text of Feuillerat (1908, Materialien, xxi), who also gives an account for Nov. 1587–Oct. 1589 from Lansd. MS. 59, f. 38, which in part duplicates (xi), and much illustrative matter, including an estimate in some detail of the expenditure from Christmas 1563 to Shrovetide 1565 from S. P. Dom. Eliz. xxxvi. 22. The Audit Office series of Declared Accounts for the Revels is imperfect, but contains two, printed by Feuillerat, for the years 1581–2 and 1583–4, for which there are no Original Accounts. The Pipe Office series appears to be complete.
(c) Jacobean Period.
There are only two Original Accounts, for 1604–5 and 1611–12, which are printed by Cunningham. The Pipe Office Declared Accounts are complete. I have not examined those of the Audit Office. The Original Accounts for 1604–5 and 1611–12, and especially the former, have been the subject of a good deal of controversy. The facts are as follows. They were printed in 1842 by Peter Cunningham, then a clerk in the Audit Office, who described them as a separate discovery from the Elizabethan bundle, which he also printed. Twenty-six years afterwards, in 1868, he attempted to sell them to the British Museum, stating that he had found them some thirty years before ‘under the vaults of Somerset House—far under the Quadrangle in a dry and lofty cellar, known by the name of the “Charcoal Repository”’. Their official character was realized, and they were sent to the Record Office, and placed amongst the papers known as Audit Office, Accounts Various, 3, 908 (formerly 1214), with a note that Mr. E. A. Bond, Keeper of the Manuscripts in the British Museum, ‘saw reasons for doubting the genuineness of one, at least, of these papers, from the peculiar character of the writing and the spelling’. It is probable that Bond had in mind, wholly or mainly, the play-list of the 1604–5 book, which does use some spellings, such as ‘Shaxberd’ and ‘aleven’, which are unusual although by no means unparalleled, and is, moreover, in a style of handwriting sufficiently different from the rest of the document to have at first sight a suspicious air. But it is an integral part of the book, occupying ff. 2, 2v of its three small folio sheets, with other matter both on ff. 1, 1v, and on ff. 5, 5v, which form the second half of its sheet, and therefore, if a forged insertion, it occupies a long blank conveniently left by the original scribe just where, according to Revels practice, such a list ought to come. Bond’s scepticism was shared by Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, and although the grounds of it did not extend beyond the play-list in the 1604–5 account, the acceptance of this as a forgery naturally reflected some suspicion upon the corresponding list for 1611–12. The position, however, called for some reconsideration when, in A Note on Measure for Measure (1880) and subsequently in the fifth edition (1885) of his Outlines (ed. 9, ii. 163, 309), Halliwell-Phillipps called attention to evidence that Malone, at some date before his death in 1812, and therefore before Cunningham was born, was acquainted at least with the substance of the 1604–5 list. The Bodleian contains a number of Malone’s note-books, which are believed to have been purchased from Mr. Rodd, a London bookseller, in 1838, and contain material collected after the issue of Malone’s Shakespeare of 1790 with a view to a second edition ultimately produced by Boswell in 1821. With them were a bundle of loose scraps, which have since been mounted and bound as a supplementary volume. One of these scraps (Malone MS. 29, f. 69v) consists of a list of plays headed ‘1604 & 1605 Edd. Tylney’, which substantially agrees with the list in the Revels book, even to the unusual spelling ‘Shaxberd’, although it is clearly not a transcript of the Revels list, but merely an abstract of this, or a similar document, in an unknown hand other than Malone’s. One of the plays named in the Revels book, The Spanish Maze of Shrove Monday, is omitted. No use of the scrap had been made by Boswell, although he prints (Variorum, iii. 360) extracts made by Malone from the Elizabethan Revels books, together with a letter of 7 Nov. 1591 from Sir William Musgrave, of the Audit Office, inviting Malone to inspect them, and an official memorandum on the ‘State of the Books of Accounts and Records of the Master of the Revels, still remaining in the Office for Auditing the Public Accounts in 1791’. It is, I think, inconceivable that, if the Jacobean as well as the Elizabethan books had then been discovered, no reference should have been made to them either by Musgrave or Malone, and the most probable explanation of the Bodleian scrap is that the Jacobean books turned up later, and that an abstract of the 1604–5 list was then prepared for the use of Malone. It is true that in that case the Jacobean books would naturally have been added to the ‘proper presses’ which Musgrave says that he had provided for the Elizabethan ones, whereas Cunningham found the two sets apart. But as Cunningham also says that he had redeemed the Elizabethan bundle from ‘a destructive oblivion’, it is possible that Musgrave’s successors had been neglectful. Moreover, although the 1604–5 list does not appear in the 1821 Variorum, it is difficult to see on what other grounds Malone can have stated of Othello (Variorum, ii. 404), ‘We know that it was acted in 1604’. Probably, indeed, he had seen the list, before he abandoned in a note of 1800 to Dryden’s Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy his earlier opinion that Othello was one of Shakespeare’s latest plays. Further, there is similar indirect evidence that he had also come across the 1611–12 list. In 1808 he privately printed and in 1809 published an Account of the ... Tempest, written ‘some years ago’. The chief object of this was to fix an inferior date by Shakespeare’s use of a pamphlet of 1610. The superior date he took for granted, saying (p. 31) ‘That it was performed before the middle of 1611, we have already seen’, and adding the foot-note ‘Under a former article’. There was no former article, but in the preface Malone describes the essay as making ‘a part of the Disquisition concerning the order of the plays in an enlarged form’, and no doubt the former article would have been included in the disquisition, had Malone ever completed his own work. Boswell, reprinting the essay in Variorum, xv. 414, altered the foot-note to refer to the essay on the Chronological Order of Shakespeare’s Plays in ‘vol. i’. This is in fact in vol. ii, but though Boswell here states (ii. 465) that there is evidence that the Tempest ‘was produced in 1611’, he does not give any evidence beyond the pamphlet of 1610. Probably he did not know everything that Malone knew. But how did Malone arrive at ‘the middle of 1611’, since the 1604–5 list does not take us beyond 1 Nov. 1611? I suppose he assumed that public production preceded performance at court. Later in the essay (Variorum, xv. 423) he says that the play ‘had a being and a name in the autumn of 1611’.
Since Halliwell-Phillipps’s discovery the prevalent view, suggested by him, has been that if the lists, or at any rate that of 1604–5, are forged, the forger had before him a genuine original. More recently, however, the matter has been fully investigated by Mr. Ernest Law, who stimulated the Record Office to a minute examination of the 1604–5 document, including chemical and microscopical tests of the ink conducted by Professor J. J. Dobbie at the Government Laboratories. As a result, Mr. Law’s own view that the list is genuine is confirmed by such high palaeographical authorities as Sir George Warner of the British Museum and Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte, Mr. Scargill-Bird, and other officers of the Record Office, as well as by Professor Feuillerat, than whom no one knows the Revels documents better, and Professor Wallace. Mr. Law set out the evidence and the whole history of the case in Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries (1911). His view was controverted in a review and a number of subsequent communications in the Athenaeum for 1911 (i. 638; ii. 101, 131, 421) and 1912 (i. 469, 654; ii. 142) by a writer using the signature ‘Audi Alteram Partem’, whose rather amazing contentions Mr. Law disposed of in the same periodical (1911, ii. 297, 324, 388; 1912, i. 390, 470) and in More about Shakespeare Forgeries (1913). A recent controversy between Mrs. C. C. Stopes, Mr. Law, and Sir E. M. Thompson (T. L. S. 2, 23, 30 Dec. 1920; 27 Jan., 10, 24 Feb. 1921) has led to no different result.
I do not think that, in view of the palaeographical investigation, it is any longer possible to reject the genuineness of the 1604–5 list, and although that of 1611–12 has not been so minutely tested, it is pretty obviously of a piece with the ‘Book’ of which it forms a part, and had it stood alone, probably no suspicion would have fallen upon it. In fact, it would really be more plausible—although this also is not in the least plausible—to take the whole documents as forgeries, than to take the lists as forged insertions in genuine accounts.