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A 1660s Promptbook of Shirley's Loves Crueltie
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
The number of late seventeenth-century promptbooks known to scholars has increased astonishingly in the last thirty years, but further discoveries are always welcome. We are pleased to be able to report a new find: a very full prompt copy for what is clearly a 1660s production of James Shirley's Loves Crueltie by the King's Company at Bridges Street. The prompt notes are written in a copy of the 1640 edition held in the Brotherton Collection (University of Leeds). Cropping has cut away significant portions of the markings, but fortunately enough remains that we can reconstruct the original annotation in almost all instances.
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- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1986
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Notes
1. We are grateful to Mr Dennis Cox, Keeper of the Brotherton Collection, for permission to publish these prompt annotations. We also want to express our special gratitude to Mr C. D. W. Sheppard, Sub-Librarian of the Brotherton Collection, for his gracious and expert assistance at every step in the preparation of this article.
2. C. D. W. Sheppard informs us that this copy of Loves Crueltie was bought from the dealers William H. Robinson in April 1956 and rebound by the Cockerell Bindery the same year. At the top left of the title page in MS is the number ‘13’. Mr Sheppard notes that five other Shirley plays bought from Robinson at the same time have similar numbers in the corresponding place, suggesting that at one time they had been bound in a nonce-collection. The cropping may well have been done at the time the composite volume was put together, though since the dimensions of the other plays held by the Brotherton Collection vary slightly the cropping was evidently done because of poor condition rather than to impose uniform size.
3. The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, ed. Adams, Joseph Quincy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1917), p. 82.Google Scholar
4. Herbert, , p. 116.Google ScholarThe London Stage, 1660–1800, Part 1: 1660–1700, ed. Van Lennep, William, Avery, Emmett L., and Scouten, Arthur H. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965), p. 47.Google Scholar
5. Rpt. in An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Gibber, ed. Lowe, Robert W., 2 vols (1889; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966), I, xxv.Google Scholar
6. Highfill, Philip H. Jr., Burnim, Kalman A., and Langhans, Edward A., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 18 vols, in progress (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1973–), I, 378.Google Scholar
7. The Christian name is omitted in another copy, LC 5/62, f. i.
8. Holland, Peter, The Ornament of Action (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), p. 245.Google Scholar
9. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1981, Introduction. On King's Company promptbooks, see particularly pp. 13–39 and facsimiles of The Change of Crownes, The Sisters, Aglaura, The Maides Revenge, and Brennoralt.
10. For the same terminology (‘A wood stands’), see I. i. of Shirley's The Sisters (Langhans, , Promptbooks, p. 133).Google Scholar
11. The whistle indication appears to have been miswritten and XXXed out; it is rewritten below. Cf. a similar duplication on Fiv.
12. The song may well have been Robert Jones's ‘My mistress sings no other song, / But still complains I did her wrong. / Believe her not; it was not so, / I did but kiss her and let her go’, The First Book of Songs & Ayres, no. XIX, rpt. in Fellowes, E. H., English Madrigal Verse, 1588–1632, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 557–8.Google Scholar Clariana quotes ‘For he did but kiss her’ in IV. i. (F3v). Clariana's allusion is identified by John Frederick Nims (following Ebsworth and Bullen) in his edition of Loves Crueltie (diss. Univ. of Chicago 1945; pub. New York: Garland, 1980), p. 128.