[42a] Cf. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, 1865; Meissner, Die englischen Comödianten zur Zeit Shakespeare’s in Oesterreich, Vienna, 1884; Jon Stefansson on ‘Shakespeare at Elsinore’ in Contemporary Review, January 1896; Notes and Queries, 5th ser. ix. 43, and xi. 520; and M. Jusserand’s article in the Nineteenth Century, April 1898, on English actors in France.
[42b] Cf. As you like it, IV. i. 22-40.
[43a] Cf. Elze, Essays, 1874, pp. 254 seq.
[43b] ‘Quality’ in Elizabethan English was the technical term for the ‘actor’s profession.’
[43c] Aubrey’s Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, ii. 226.
[44a] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 121; Mrs. Stopes in Jahrbuck der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 1896, xxxii. 182 seq.
[44b] Scourge of Folly, 1610, epigr. 159.
[47] One of the many crimes laid to the charge of the dramatist Robert Greene was that of fraudulently disposing of the same play to two companies. ‘Ask the Queen’s players,’ his accuser bade him in Cuthbert Cony-Catcher’s Defence of Cony-Catching, 1592, ‘if you sold them not Orlando Furioso for twenty nobles [i.e. about £7], and when they were in the country sold the same play to the Lord Admiral’s men for as many more.’
[48] The playhouse authorities deprecated the publishing of plays in the belief that their dissemination in print was injurious to the receipts of the theatre. A very small proportion of plays acted in Elizabeth’s and James I’s reign consequently reached the printing press, and most of them are now lost. But in the absence of any law of copyright publishers often defied the wishes of the owner of manuscripts. Many copies of a popular play were made for the actors, and if one of these copies chanced to fall into a publisher’s hands, it was habitually issued without any endeavour to obtain either author’s or manager’s sanction. In March 1599 the theatrical manager Philip Henslowe endeavoured to induce a publisher who had secured a playhouse copy of the comedy of Patient Grissell by Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton to abandon the publication of it by offering him a bribe of £2. The publication was suspended till 1603 (cf. Henslowe’s Diary, p. 167). As late as 1633 Thomas Heywood wrote of ‘some actors who think it against their peculiar profit to have them [i.e. plays] come into print.’ (English Traveller, pref.)
[49] W. S. Walker in his Shakespeare’s Versification, 1854, and Charles Bathurst in his Difference in Shakespeare’s Versification at different Periods of his Life, 1857, were the first to point out the general facts. Dr. Ingram’s paper on ‘The Weak Endings’ in New Shakspere Society’s Transactions (1874), vol. i., is of great value. Mr. Fleay’s metrical tables, which first appeared in the same society’s Transactions (1874), and have been reissued by Dr. Furnivall in a somewhat revised form in his introduction to Gervinus’s Commentaries and in his Leopold Shakspere, give all the information possible.