The Revision of Manuscript Drama

Abstract

Generations of scholars of early modern drama have followed W. W. Greg’s suppositions about the drafting and transcription of plays. Greg’s model of textual production stipulates that an author first produced a draft that ‘must have contained the text substantially in the form the author intended it to assume though in a shape too untidy to be used by the prompter’.¹ He terms such drafts ‘foul papers’ on the basis of a couple of historical references, which I explore later on, and describes the draft’s untidiness in a priori terms as consisting of ‘quite a lot of deletion, alteration, interlining, false starts, and the like’.² The text of the ‘fair copy’ derived from such ‘foul papers’ is, according to Greg’s model, thus almost identical to that of the original draft. Indeed, if the final copy were to be prepared by a scribe rather than the author, Greg not unreasonably insists that the ‘foul papers’ ‘would need to contain his final touches and the text appear exactly as he meant it to stand.’³ While Greg’s textual ‘narrative’ has been the subject of compelling critique it remains influential and his assumptions about the characteristics of manuscripts continue to shape editors’ work.⁴ That Greg’s theory should occupy such a contradictory position is in part attributable to the lack of documentary evidence to confirm or contest his narrative. No complete antecedent and derivative copy of a professionally produced play has survived.