How were the anonymous Castle Ashby play manuscripts created, and why?

342 Pages·2012·3.17 MB·English

by  Luke Beattie

1

How were the anonymous Castle Ashby play manuscripts
created, and why?

Submitted by Luke Timothy Beattie, to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Drama, August 2011.

This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material
and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper
acknowledgement.

I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and
that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree
by this or any other University.

(signature)...............................................................................
2
Abstract

In 1977, a long-lost collection of manuscripts of plays, poems, and non-fiction texts
from the 17th century was re-discovered in the library of Castle Ashby,
Northamptonshire. Most of the items are not signed by an author, and have no known
record of publication or performance.
These technically anonymous items have received minimal scholarly attention in the
three-plus decades since their recovery, and what comment there has been has not
entirely agreed upon the collection's authorship, purpose, or even era of composition.
This thesis takes a confident position on those debates by investigating the unsigned
manuscripts and their contents through a variety of techniques.
This study reviews the collection's known history, past commentators' findings and
conclusions, and the physical and textual properties, and comes to an authorial
conclusion based on a fresh palaeographic investigation; it then offers a biography of
the proposed writer. It statistically analyses the collection's material, palaeographic, and
metrical traits, in search of trends that might show a development over time. It applies
modern electronic resources to investigate the collection's textual interrelationships and
plausible literary sources, and uses contemporary history and the proposed author's
biography to suggest conjectural allusions in the writing. Together, those avenues of
analysis allow for a best-guess ordering and dating to be proposed for the collection's
contents. Turning specifically to the dramatic texts, the thesis then considers the
proposed author's potential theatrical resources, searches the manuscripts for evidence
of possible professional theatrical use, and gathers dramaturgical information from the
texts themselves to form an opinion about how plausible contemporary performances
would have been; this is supplemented with the findings from the first modern stagings
of all of the dramatic texts, which establish what minimum physical needs the plays
would demand in performance, and identify where there are dramaturgical issues that
could limit the plays' theatrical practicality. The study's findings up to that point then
allow for the collection to be positioned within their period's larger context of authorial
and theatrical activity, conclude whether the writer achieved anything unique, and,
identifying the collection's major recurring thematic elements, propose a rationale for
the writer's authorial activity.
In summary, this thesis sets out to determine the conditions that brought the unsigned
Castle Ashby texts into existence, and to suggest why they were written at all.
3
Acknowledgements

I am grateful to many individuals and organisations for their assistance in making this
study possible.
The University of Exeter and its Drama Department helped to fund my research first
through the Exeter Research Scholarship and then through a PhD Studentship, and I
owe thanks to Dr. Jane Milling and Dr. Sarah Goldingay for advice on matters financial
and otherwise. My supervisor Professor Mick Mangan was a supportive and
knowledgeable guide through this process, and Professors Peter Thomson, Christopher
McCullough, and Graham Ley were sources of further encouragement and advice.
The Drama Department also provided space for several of my practical staging
experiments; other stagings would not have been possible without the help of Dr. Terri
Power and Bath Spa University, Simon Bartlett and the Richmond Shakespeare Society,
Gregory Berry and Seattle's Outsider's Inn Collective, Professor Stephen Heatley and
the University of British Columbia, and The Old Vic Theatre. Those who participated in
the projects (and those who offered a weary traveller accommodation) are too numerous
to name, but their good work, enthusiasm, and insights were of enormous help and are
not forgotten.
My sincere thanks go to the Marquess of Northampton for kindly allowing me to
explore the Castle Ashby document archives, to his son Lord Compton for patiently
showing me around the property, and to their archivist Peter McKay for assisting me in
locating and examining various items there.
Likewise, the staff of the British Library, particularly in the Manuscripts Reading
Room, has my gratitude for their constant assistance in my research.
Many scholars have been generous with their time and insight, with special
acknowledgement going to Jaspreet Singh Boparai of Cambridge, Dr. Robin Eagles and
others at the History of Parliament Trust, and especially Professor William Proctor
Williams of the University of Akron.
Finally, the moral support offered by friends and family was indispensible. In
particular, boundless gratitude goes to my parents for emotional and financial support,
my fiancée and favourite collaborator Sophie Hickman for her patience and help in
good times and bad, and our beautiful pets for never judging me for my cursing or
anguished howls when things got frustrating. The cuddles helped immensely.
4
Table of Contents

Abstract .......................................................................................................... 2
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................ 3
Table of Contents ........................................................................................... 4
Introduction .................................................................................................... 6
Chapter 1: Review of Previous Commentary ................................................ 15
Early References ................................................................................ 15
Rediscovery ........................................................................................ 16
Recent Debate .................................................................................... 19
Chapter 2: Item Descriptions ......................................................................... 22
Physical Descriptions ......................................................................... 22
Essential Synopses ............................................................................. 23
Chapter 3: Authorship .................................................................................... 37
Previous Authorial Theories .............................................................. 37
Handwriting Comparison ................................................................... 39
Chapter 4: The Writer's Biography ................................................................ 47
Family Background ............................................................................ 47
The Early Years ................................................................................. 48
The Prelude to Civil War ................................................................... 49
The War Years ................................................................................... 51
The Aftermath of War ........................................................................ 61
Life in the Commonwealth ................................................................ 65
The Protectorate Era .......................................................................... 68
Life in the Restoration ........................................................................ 73
Chapter 5: Grouping by Statistical Analysis .................................................. 78
Analysis of Physical Evidence ........................................................... 78
Analysis of Layout Evidence ............................................................. 82
Analysis of Writing Elements ............................................................ 84
Analysis of Metrical Evidence ........................................................... 86
Chapter 6: Textual Analysis - Sources and Resonances ................................ 88
Language Interrelationship ................................................................ 88
Literary Sources ................................................................................. 93
Plausible Historical and Biographical Allusions ............................... 107
Chapter 7: A Proposed Order for the Unsigned Castle Ashby Texts ............ 128
5
Chapter 8: Dramaturgical Findings from Textual Examination and
Theatrical Experimentation ............................................................................ 139
Potential Theatrical Resources ........................................................... 140
Theatrical Notation ............................................................................. 144
Methodology for Textual Dramaturgical Analysis ............................ 146
Working Scripts ................................................................................. 148
Material Needs for Staging ................................................................ 177
Performance Findings ........................................................................ 154
Chapter 9: Conjectural Rationale for the Writing Activity ............................ 175
Was the Activity Precedented? .......................................................... 175
Proposing a Rationale......................................................................... 183
Recurring Themes .............................................................................. 188
Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 196
Appendix 1: Detailed Plot Synopses .............................................................. 200
Appendix 2: Handwriting Comparison Chart ................................................ 228
Appendix 3: Statistical Tables ....................................................................... 236
Appendix 4: Source Analysis ......................................................................... 260
Table 1: Textual Parallels ................................................................... 260
Seafaring References .......................................................................... 260
Agamemnon Comparison ................................................................... 262
Hercules Furens Comparison ............................................................ 265
The Mandrake Comparison ................................................................ 268
Don Sancho Comparison ................................................................... 272
Plausible Sources for Mariamne Material ......................................... 274
Plausible Sources for Bassianus Material ......................................... 281
The Captives Comparison .................................................................. 298
Additional Potential Cultural Resonances ......................................... 300
Appendix 5: Dramaturgical Issues ................................................................. 319
Table 1: Dramaturgical Suggestions per Line ................................... 319
Table 2: Dramaturgical Necessities per Line ..................................... 319
Bibliography .................................................................................................. 320
6
Introduction

The Castle Ashby manuscripts are a collection of plays and a few related texts, most
of whose authorship is only conjecturally attributed. This unclaimed majority of the
collection has not been given more than journal article-length investigation previously;
the present study aims to illuminate them (with a focus on the plays) in much greater
detail, pursuing the major who/what/when/where/why/how questions in order to
establish more clearly the texts' place in the history of English drama. Essentially, the
goal is to investigate how the texts came into being, and then propose why.
I begin by reviewing the collection's brief known history and the modest sum of
scholarly literature that has previously been written about it; this establishes (for my
research as well as for the reader) where the study of the Castle Ashby manuscripts
presently stands, where experts and other reliable scholars' opinions converge, and what
has not been investigated or is still in some doubt. As there has been relatively little
written about the texts, it is unavoidable that certain scholars' names will come up over
and over again throughout this study, and there is a risk that I could simply trust the
findings of too small a group of past researchers. I attempt to offset this danger of a
limited reading in several ways: by applying the work of scholars in related fields to
ground my own work in a wider scholarly landscape; by consulting relevant texts
contemporary to the manuscripts in order to contextualise the collection in their era's
textual trends; and of course by carrying out my own analyses of the manuscripts and
their contents in various ways to check past scholars' findings and assumptions and to
explore new territory.
In Chapter 2, I briefly describe the manuscripts' physical condition to give the reader
a sense of what is being handled, before moving on to basic synopses of the texts' plots
to help the reader grasp the textual content of what is being treated in this study
(extensive plot synopses are provided in Appendix 1).
Chapter 3 joins the authorial debate in order to resolve it. It will be noted that this
study uses authorial biography in several avenues of investigation and interpretation, so
a few words about the benefits and pitfalls of biographical study would be fitting at this
point. In W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley's essay The Intentional Fallacy (1946),
they acknowledge value in literary biography as its own school of study, but condemn
the pursuit of knowledge about an author's biography and authorial intention as
irrelevant to literary criticism, in part because an author's intention can never be entirely
determined, and in part because they reject any authorial ownership of a text after the
7
act of writing is complete. As such, for literary criticism they reject facts and
assumptions found outside the text, and favour internal evidence consisting of the form
and content of the text. In particular, they see danger in the pursuit of identifying
allusions and debts to specific sources within a text (1946: 468-487). The rejection of
the author from literary analysis is taken further by Roland Barthes in The Death of the
Author, where Barthes seeks to shift the focus from the author—arguing that such a
focus imposes an unnecessary limit on a text's meaning—to the reader (1977: 143-148);
other critics continue to make such arguments. However, Leon Edel takes something of
an opposing view in Literary Biography (1973): while acknowledging that refocusing
on the texts themselves has been useful (xiii), Edel asks, 'When we have listened to the
writer as he verbalizes feeling in poem after poem or have read him as he brings
together his world in novel after novel, is it not possible to risk certain observations
about that writer' (xv), and states that a biographer relates a text
to the consciousness that gave it birth and to the world in which that
consciousness functioned. He discovers recurrent images and recurrent modes of
thought; patterns have a way of repeating themselves, for each writer has his
own images and his own language and his own chain of fantasy...every comma,
every period, every inflection, every word has been placed on the page by the
living, glowing, creating consciousness (53)

while taking note of Yeats' claim that 'There is always a living face behind the mask' of
a text, which argues that a layer of meaning is lost when a full separation is made
between author and text (62). In this study, I am comfortable to side cautiously with
Edel. This is neither primarily a work of the literary criticism that interests Wimsatt and
Beardsley—concerned with the effectiveness of poetic devices in the texts, for
instance—nor a reader-response commentary that might excite Barthes, but rather is an
investigation of the conditions of the collection's physical genesis, including a plausible
dating for contextual purposes, and an interrogation of whether they appear to have
served a practical purpose in their own time (theatrical, political, etc.). A biographical
understanding of the author is valuable in this sort of work, and it will be shown in
Chapters 1 to 3 how an authorial misattribution made by a previous researcher severely
distorted all of his further understanding of the texts. Furthermore, it will be shown that
the collection's author was a highly politically involved individual writing in a
tumultuous period where the practice of writing thinly veiled contemporary social
allusion was undeniable and widespread; the texts under investigation give all
appearances of also being work of this kind, in line with the known politics and
experiences of the author, probably written for a purpose other than commercial
entertainment and possibly actually for propagandistic purposes, so knowledge of the
8
period and the author's background is useful in understanding the textual content and
context. A consideration of the dramatic texts as potential theatrical pieces benefits from
a knowledge of the author's potential access to particular theatrical venues, resources,
and personnel. Finally, it is much easier to distance an author from a printed text, which
has passed through multiple hands to reach a reader, than from a manuscript that still
bears the marks directly from the author's hand, and often reveals much about the
process of writing and revision. The manuscripts at the core of this study constantly
return the investigator to an interaction with the creating consciousness of Edel's
imagined author. Therefore, a knowledge of the author is unapologetically pursued and
applied through this study, though always tempered with the understanding that claims
of authorial intention are ultimately conjectural, which is why I pursue several other
types of analysis as well, including the internal sorts that reassure Wimsatt and
Beardsley. Returning to Chapter 3, in that chapter I provide short biographical sketches
of those individuals previously proposed as potential authors, then draw authorial
conclusions from a handwriting comparison supported by the findings of palaeographic
experts, and finally explain what the handwriting suggests about each manuscript's
composition.
In Chapter 4, I offer an extensive biography of the writer identified in Chapter 3. As I
have explained, the biography will ground the manuscripts in a human reality that will
be used in the later chapters concerned with contemporary allusions, textual dating,
dramaturgy and theatricality, and overall artistic context.
Chapter 5 gathers data about the manuscripts' material condition, presentational
trends in the handwriting, and metrical forms, in an attempt to detect meaningful
patterns; this begins to address more precisely the questions of when the texts were
written and how they relate to one another, so that their context can be better
understood. The strength of statistical analysis is that it is more dispassionate than the
biographical work, and therefore is less vulnerable to accusations of subjectivity;
furthermore, the large number of texts under investigation here allows for quite a good
statistical sampling. A weakness, of course, is that there is no guarantee that a writer
will progress steadily along any sort of statistical trend over a writing career, so
perceived patterns could be misleading, and therefore need to be compared to the
findings of other analyses in the hopes of some sort of convergence. So once again
caution is demanded, and the data collected must be seen as simply one more element in
the greater investigation.
9
Chapter 6 begins by offering a study of the texts' language interrelationships, using
computer software and careful reading; this again has the strength of being a fairly
objective process of comparison and tabulation, though it must be treated with caution
since it is vulnerable to the influence of common or famous phrases that do not
necessarily indicate a close relationship between texts, as such phrases could be
mentally or culturally accessed by the writer at any time. The chapter then looks beyond
the collection for potential literary sources for the various texts, relying in particular in
the developing electronic resource, Early English Books Online, for detection of
plausible textual debts in the Castle Ashby items. When a particularly persuasive match
is identified, such literary source identification can be excellent for revealing how the
author developed his own texts, and for establishing an earliest potential date of
composition (i.e., the borrowing text must be written after the source became available).
There are weaknesses as well, however: the EEBO database is still growing, and is
nowhere near an exhaustive library of searchable early texts yet, so it is possible and
indeed probable that potential source texts are missed at times; as with the analysis of
the collection's textual interrelationships there is a risk of minor, coincidental parallels
causing a false positive match and distorting the findings; and identifying a source does
nothing to limit the upper dating range of the indebted text (a writer can still reference
Hamlet now, for instance). Finally, Chapter 6 investigates the texts for potential
historical and biographical allusions through an understanding of the author's life and
the contemporary social context. The risks of this work have already been noted in the
reference to Wimsatt and Beardsley, but the risks appear to be worth taking, as the
author will be shown to be far more knowable biographically than one like Shakespeare
(a typical example of an author whose intentions are seemingly impossible to recover
confidently) and whose affiliations and actions are largely known and highly political in
nature (indeed as a participant in the political events that appear to be referenced); also,
the overwhelmingly and overtly political nature of the era's writing, the other known
examples of the author's politically relevant writing, and the sheer bulk of often
recurring plausible allusions in the collection (which are sometimes blatantly clear,
undisguised references to contemporary politics) show that allusions are fairly
persuasive in this instance. Taken together, the chapter's findings shed light on the texts'
genesis, and continue the attempt to order and date them. While the findings are indeed
often conjectural, they are considered alongside all of the other forms of evidence, so
once again are only one avenue of approach to the collection, though quite a compelling
one.
10
The previous chapters' findings are then interpreted in Chapter 7 to generate a
proposed ordering and dating for the unsigned Castle Ashby texts, so that their potential
purpose may be considered in the most accurate context possible. As I have discussed,
much of the data collected particularly in Chapters 4 to 6—upon which Chapter 7's
ordering depends—has associated risks of subjective interpretation, but the danger is
lessened by comparing the results of such a variety of analyses in order to develop a
consistent impression. Still, Chapter 7's conjectural proposal is never implied to be more
than a best-guess theory based upon the most information presently available.
Concentrating on the plays in Chapter 8, I search for evidence of their being intended
for theatrical performance. I note the general theatrical resources most plausibly
available to the writer, before investigating the texts for signs of professional theatrical
use. I then describe my methodology for searching the texts for dramaturgical clues, and
for conducting experimental stagings (including the process of preparing actor-friendly
scripts, illustrated by an example from one of the items); finally I discuss the frequency
and variety of probable dramaturgical cues in each dramatic text, as well as the most
theatrically significant findings exposed by my experimental stagings of the ten
involved plays. Those investigations interrogate the dramatic texts' theatrical viability,
and identify the minimum theatrical resources that would have been needed if original
stagings had indeed occurred. Much work has been done in the field of practice-as-
research in the study of early modern drama, particularly in venues built in the image of
early modern ones, such as Shakespeare's Globe in London, the Blackfriars in Virginia,
and the indoor playhouse in the University of Bristol's Wickham Theatre, where texts
particularly of plays known or believed to have been originally performed in the venues'
early modern counterparts are staged in an attempt to learn things about original
theatrical practices, the original venues, and the plays themselves. While Bristol's
Martin White's work with The Spanish Tragedy and the Rose shows that a
dramaturgically sensitive reading can illuminate some theatre practices and material
needs, identifying props, set pieces, and probable architectural features in the intended
original theatre (2004: 307-310), in publications on his many experimental stagings he
repeatedly shows how the slow work of live rehearsal picks up issues that can easily be
skimmed over, missed entirely, or simply misinterpreted by a reader (1998: 1); in an
interview on White's DVD The Chamber of Demonstrations, Andrew Gurr adds that
audience response cannot be examined by reading alone (White 2009: np). In the
chapter 'Staging the Past' on the same DVD, White also suggests that the combination of
reconstructions and practical experimentation is particularly good at illuminating the