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I want to come back to Locrine,
because we have a very special copy of this play
owned by someone who knew who the author really was,
and who recorded their reaction to its being published as "Newly set forth,
overseen, and corrected, By W.S.""
That man is George Buck who, in 1603,
would be knighted, and become James I's
Master of the Revels.
The note he wrote is probably from a time not long after Locrine's publication.
On its title page, he wrote
"Charles Tilney wrote a tragedy of this matter he named
Estrild: which I think is this.
It was lost by his death.
And now some fellow hath published it.
I made dumb shows for it which I yet have. G.B."
Charles Tilney was George Buck's cousin,
and had been executed in 1586 for his part in the Babington Plot,
so the play was at least a decade old by the time it was published.
The text shows signs of revision;
there are clear borrowings from
Edmund Spenser which could not have been added in Tilney's lifetime.
Buck says he had written "dumb shows" for his cousin's play,
that is, sections of the drama to be acted without speaking.
Observing that "some fellow" has published it,
he is keenly aware that the following question,
one "W.S.", is not the author.
But George Buck's interest in the attribution of plays doesn't end there,
and it leads him to have a conversation with the man at the center of our inquiries.
Buck is one of the very few people who record a conversation with William Shakspere.
At the time Buck scribbled on his copy of Locrine,
he did not apparently know the identity of the person who had overseen and corrected it;
that person was just "some fellow".
Given his personal connection with the play, however,
it seems reasonable that he might have made inquiries to discover who that fellow was.
When Buck acquired an anonymous 1599 copy of George A Green,
The Pinner of Wakefield,
he recorded the opinions of two people he had
asked to help him determine who wrote this play.
If the order of these comments reflects the order of those conversations,
he sought out William Shakspere first.
On the title page, he noted,
"Written by....... A minister who acted the pinners part in it himself.
Teste, W. Shakespeare." Teste is a Latin word, and means 'source'.
The source of his information was William Shakspere - who may or may not,
of course, have been the author, William Shakespeare.
The information from Shakspere,
however, didn't satisfy him.
Perhaps because he wasn't given the writer's name, and perhaps
because he knew it was exceedingly unlikely that a minister of the church would do
anything so scandalous as to act in a play on the public stage.
(We know this was a public play because Henslowe's diary records its performance on
five separate occasions by Sussex's Men from the 29th of December 1593,
to the 22nd of January 1594.)
So George Buck sought out another opinion.
Beneath the attribution given by Shakspere, he wrote, "Ed.
Juby saith that this play was made by Robert Greene."
James Shapiro describes the title page note as
"Buck's flesh and blood encounter with a man he knew as both actor and playwright"
but in fact we have no idea whether Buck knew Shakspere as an actor or a playwright.
What seems much more likely is that he approached Shakspere for
this information because he knew that he bought and sold plays.
Had he, as seems likely, been curious as to
the identity of the "fellow" who published his cousin's play,
it is Shakspere in a playbroking role that he would have uncovered.
The person from whom he seeks a second opinion,
Edward Juby, was an actor and occasional playwright.
But what seems more pertinent here is that Juby
bought plays for the Admiral's men, the rival company.
Of all the people Buck might approach for information,
he must have been aware that the people most likely to
know would be the company playbrokers.
That Juby was the documented playbroker of the Admiral's men
surely increases the likelihood that
Shakspere was the playbroker for the Lord Chamberlain's,
given that Buck has asked them the same question.
But what if the answer?
Shakspere's unsatisfactory answer is
reminiscent of his equivocation in the Bellott-Mountjoy testimony.
A selective or defective memory fails to supply
the author's name for which Buck leaves a blank to be filled.
It is also, as I've mentioned,
implausible, and Buck would know this.
None the wiser after seeking Shakspere's opinion,
Buck sought out Juby,
and gained a direct and clear answer:
The author was Robert Greene, who had died in 1592.
Scholars studying the text of the play have determined that Juby's answer was correct.
Shakspere's answer, in the light of this, smacks of obfuscation.
He didn't know, or didn't want to reveal what he did know,
so he made something up.
George Buck was clearly very interested in correct authorial attribution.
His two title page inscriptions involving Shakspere
can be read as supporting the theory that Shakspere was a play broker,
and associate him with two separate cases of misattribution,
as well as bolstering a sense of him that we have seen in the Bellott-Mountjoy deposition,
as a man with a talent for misdirection and obfuscation.
We know that William Shakspere was a natural middleman or broker,
a man able to buy and sell,
and negotiate deals in a profitable manner.
We have evidence that he bought and sold grain,
that he negotiated the dowry of a marriage
- most likely for a cut or a fee -
and a letter from a neighbor suggests he was also a loan broker.
Once he became a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men,
it would be logical for him to bring these skills to bear,
for the benefit of the theater company,
in order to maximize the profits they would share.
A play could be sold for around 30 shillings,
about the same as a very good night's box office takings,
and a similar sum to the sum Shakspere sued Philip Rogers for.
If he had negotiated the sale himself,
it would explain why he and his company didn't sue
these so-called 'rogue' publishers who put his name or initials on plays he didn't write,
plays which belonged to his company.
It would explain why they sold canonical
Shakespeare plays to some of those same publishers.
It would explain, also, why Shakespeare was the only author who had works that weren't his
put out under his name:
writers were not normally shareholders in theater companies.
Once they sold their play to a company, the company owned it
and the writer had no rights over its performance, revision, or publication.
The company would decide what would be published, and how.
Professor Lucas Erne has shown that Shakspere's company developed
a strong pattern of performance followed by publication, once he was involved with them.
If he was the company playbroker,
Shakspere would have been responsible for this.
The anonymous and often multiple authors would not get any say.
Thus, the early attribution of the old play, Locrine,
that claimed only to have been "overseen and corrected by W.S.",
becomes, within 10 years,
the more confident assertion of the London Prodigal as "written by William Shakespeare."
Bear this pattern in mind,
when you approach the textual analysis at the end of this module,
on a poem by Ben Jonson.
Ros BarberDr
