Foul Papers, Promptbooks, and Thomas Heywood's the Captives

THE British Library catalogue describes folios 52 to 73 of MS Egerton 1994 as a [p]lay in five acts, without title, in which the characters are Raphael, Treadway, Ashburne, Lord and Lady Averne, an abbat, etc. Apparently autograph; with corrections and passages marked for omission. Since its identification by A. H. Bullen in 1885, the manuscript has been recognized widely as a text of Thomas Heywood's The Captives, a play written for The Lady Elizabeth's Men for performance at the Cockpit Theatre and granted license by Sir Henry Herbert on September 3, 1624. (1) But exactly what kind of text of Heywood's play the manuscript represents is less clear. The document has proven resistant to scholars' suppositions of what a theatrical manuscript should look like and remains the object of critical contention. (2) As a consequence, much of what the manuscript might tell us about the revision of early modern theatrical texts has been overlooked. This essay seeks to better understand this troubling and important manuscript by offering a detailed analysis of the document's composition and annotation informed by a consideration of the practical demands of early modern theatrical performance. The following study thus makes available for readers the valuable picture of textual revision in the theater that the manuscript affords and casts light upon aspects of seventeenth-century theater practice. But this essay also seeks to make a general intervention within current editorial and textual studies as the field moves onto a critical terrain after the New Bibliography. The reception of dramatic manuscripts has been dominated by W. W. Greg's categorization of documents into foul papers and prompt books, the former category representing rough authorial drafts that are assumed to contain contradictions and uncertainties of action and unresolved textual tangles, and the latter, theatrical manuscripts subject to the ordered levelling of a bookkeeper, expected to show a degree of textual regularization and as well as specification of performance details. (3) While many of Greg's methods and assumptions have been placed in doubt, scholars in different areas of early modern theater study continue to depend on New Bibliographical assumptions. (4) A recent description of the makingof Shakespeare, for example, while explicitly aligning itself with post-New Bibliographical work and seeking to situate the Shakespearean text firmly in the Renaissance theater, includes a decidedly Gregian image of the prompter, adding to the text missing entrances and exits, being where the author is vague and likely to specify the number of spare people he can muster. (5) The continued operation of New Bibliographical assumptions is nowhere more apparent than in the reception of The Captives. Extant playhouse documents, however, do not uniformly show the thorough and systematic revision posited by accounts that follow Greg. (6) William B. Long's study of the manuscript of Anthony Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber, for instance, shows that in addition to six small cuts, Munday's autograph manuscript has been marked by only six annotations, each a simple repetition of an authorial cue. (7) Contrary to expectations, there is no extensive tidying of textual tangles in the document, and the author's indefinite and permissive stage directions are not supplemented with specific details of production. Long's important work has revealed the occasional nature of playhouse textual revision, in the sense that annotations tend to be made only in response to particular problems for theatrical production. However, despite the undoubted importance of his studies of, in particular, Munday's text and the manuscript of Thomas of Woodstock, there is a danger that any study of an individual playbook (the term that Long prefers to avoid anachronistic associations expected of the prompt-book) is taken to be representative of all playhouse revision. …