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- PERICLES 23
All Marina’s verse in Act iv is so disguised. In some of the early scenes blank verse is suffered suddenly to masquerade as prose, and then resumes its correct garb. At other times two lines are run into one (cf. ii. 3. 60-1; ii. 5. 4-5, 42-3); or one line is set out in two (cf. ii. 4. 25). Elsewhere prose is printed as irregular verse. The second fisherman’s final speech (ii. 1. 174-6) is printed thus:—
Wee’le sure prouide, thou shalt haue
My best Gowne to make thee a paire;
And Ile bring thee to the Court my selfe.
How Gosson acquired the corrupt ‘copy’ is not easily determined. The practice of taking down a piece in shorthand from the actor’s lips was not uncommon.¹ There is
¹ Plays were often ‘copied by the ear’. Thomas Heywood included in his *Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas*, 1637 (pp. 248-9), a prologue for the revival of an old play of his concerning Queen Elizabeth, called ‘If you know not me, you know Nobody’, of which he revised the acting version. Nathaniel Butter had published the first and second editions of the piece in 1605 and 1608, and Thomas Pavier the third in 1610. In a prose note preceding the new prologue the author denounced the printed edition as ‘the most corrupted copy, which was published without his consent’. In the prologue itself, Heywood declared that the piece had on its original production on the stage pleased the audience:
So much that some by stenography drew
The plot, put it in print, scarce one word true.
And in that lameness it hath limpt so long
The Author now to vindicate that wrong
Hath took the pains, upright upon its feet,
To teach it walk, so please you sit and see’t.
Sermons and lectures were frequently described on their title-page as ‘taken by characterie’. (Cf. Stephen Egerton’s Lecture, 1589, and Sermons of Henry Smith, 1590 and 1591.) The popular system of Elizabethan shorthand was that devised by Timothy Bright in his ‘Characterie: An arte of shorte scripte, and secrete writing by character’, 1588. In 1590 Peter Bales devoted the opening section of his ‘Writing Schoolmaster’ to the ‘Arte of Brachygraphy’. In 1612 Sir George Buc, in his ‘Third Universitie of England’ (appended to Stow’s Chronicle), wrote of ‘the much-to-be-regarded Art of Brachygraphy’ (chap. xxxix), that it ‘is an Art newly discovered or newly recovered, and is of very good and necessary use, being well and honestly exercised, for, by the meanes and helpe thereof, they which know it can readily take a Sermon, Oration, Play, or any long speech, as they are spoke, dictated, acted, and uttered in the instant’.
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