Some Recent Dramatic Manuscript Studies

THE STUDY OF EXTANT English poetry, prose, and dramatic manuscripts is once again flourishing. Spurred on by the frequent reluctance of history of the book scholars grapple with the role of manuscripts in the transmission, and history, of a text, manuscript scholars are again insisting on the primacy of manuscripts in textual and authorial production. This resurgence, especially in dramatic manuscript studies, can be seen in recent publications as well as in the inauguration of annual conferences on Manuscript and their Makers in the English at the University of Reading in the last two years. Publications The mysteries of the collaborative manuscript Book of Sir Thomas More continue attract scholarly attention. In The Review of English Studies 51 (2000), Thomas Merriam argues that Anthony Munday has been misunderstood as the original author of the play. Merriam extends an earlier argument of E. A. J. Honigmann's that Munday was predominantly a copyist rather than the composer of the play. In a series of not always persuasive conjectures about stylistics, Merriam argues that Munday's portions of the manuscript suggest he was fair-copying another author's text pass it off as his own, rather than composing or fair-copying his own text. Merriam claims Munday did so to create a provocation in order injure a theatre company under suspicion because of its patron, its playwrights, and its daring and popular presentations on the public stage. Merriam's failure compare Munday's paleographic characteristics with those of authors and scribes, as foul and fair copyists, in the numerous other extant manuscripts of the period (relying instead evidently on Malone Society reprints of the play-texts) provides a weak foundation on which build his case. Only by surveying all extant authorial fair copies could Merriam command as much information as necessary promote Munday's work as copyist rather than composer in the More manuscript. Thomas Middleton, for example, fair-copied all of one manuscript of his notorious, banned, and highly provocative play A Game at Chess and part of another (in total, six manuscripts of the play survive); his copying habits vary between manuscripts. This case alone suggests that conjectures about the conditions under which a copyist or composer wrote at any given time (even under stress, as Middleton apparently was) and about the way such conditions are reflected in the handwriting are too difficult sustain. Nonetheless, Merriam offers enough energetic arguments convince others re-examine possible evidence hidden or readily available in the unique manuscript of Sir Thomas More. N. W. Bawcutt similarly admonishes scholars return manuscripts, rather than invent theory, in order make persuasive arguments about the practices of authors in his essay Renaissance Dramatists and the Texts of Their Plays in Research Opportunities in Drama 40 (2001). Bawcutt especially attacks Stephen Orgel, David Scott Kastan, W. Speed Hill, and Paul Werstine for ignoring documentary and archival evidence, particularly manuscripts, in formulating editorial theories designed attack the work of traditional editors (and manuscript scholars) such as W. W. Greg. In his essay, Bawcutt, an impressive editor and manuscript scholar himself, offers a much-needed corrective the stream of garbled theory that has recently popularized the notion that dramatic manuscripts are figments of the imagination and we negligible in the process of textual transmission. As usual, the annual journal English Manuscript Studies (published by the British Library) continues be a rich resource for manuscript scholars, especially in offering a number of recent essays on dramatic authors and on newly discovered manuscripts or manuscript fragments of plays and masques. In English Manuscript Studies 6 (1997), Arthur Freeman discusses a manuscript leaf from an unidentified play found in 1988 as binder's waste in a 1586 edition of Homer's Odyssey printed in Geneva and bound in England between 1586 and 1620. …