Properties
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- 13989
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- 2026-01-30T06:24:48.293Z
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- 13943
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- 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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PERICLES
a likelihood that Gosson commissioned a shorthand writer to report the piece in the theatre, or that at any rate he purchased a shorthand writer’s notes. Many incoherences may be attributed to confused hearing, and the failure to respect the just metrical arrangements is hardly explicable in any other way.
Several of the least intelligible passages in the early editions can be with certainty restored to sense by reference to the corresponding passage in Wilkins’ novel. A comparison of the shape that many words take respectively in novel and play shows beyond doubt that the play’s incoherences are errors of the ear. In i. 4. 39 in the speech, in which Cleon, governor of Tarsus, describes the straits to which his subjects are put by the pending famine, a hopeless line runs:—
> Those pallats who not yet too sauers younger,
> Must haue inuentions to delight the tast.
The novel shows the correct words are:—
> Those palates who not yet two summers younger,¹ &c.
> In Act ii, Prologue, 22 it is said of Helicanus, Pericles’ deputy at Tyre, that he
> Sau’d one of all that haps in Tyre.
The novel reads in like context that ‘Helicanus let no occasion slip wherein hee might send word to Tharsus of what occurrents soeuer had happened’. Sau’d one is an ignorant mishearing of ‘sends word’.
In iii. 3. 29 Pericles vows:
> All unsisterd shall this heyre of mine remayne.
> The novel relates how Pericles vows that his ‘head should grow unscisserd’.
The quotations in foreign languages are hopelessly mis-
¹ In the novel it is said of the famine-stricken city that she ‘not yet two summers younger did excell in pompe’.
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Progressive degradation of the text.
The two editions of 1609.
printed from the same cause. In the Spanish motto (ii. 2. 27) the words ‘Piu’ and ‘que’ appear as ‘Pue’ and ‘kee’ respectively, and in the Latin motto (ii. 2. 30) the word ‘pompae’ is disguised as ‘Pompey’.
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