The Love-Sick Court
Textual Introduction1There is no better, more succinct summary of Brome’s playwriting skill than in the prefatory material to the 1659 collection of Richard Brome plays entitled Five New Playes, a name which is neither original (since the 1653/54 Brome collection bears the same name) nor entirely accurate in its description of the plays contained within as ‘new’. The collection is entirely up front about this, however, justifying the title thus: ‘We call them new, because ’till now they were never printed’ [A3v]. The opening address ‘To the readers’ is qualified by the words ‘or rather to the Spectators’ [A3], with the writer insisting that Brome’s comedies, ‘exactly being dressed for the Stage’ were penned by a playwright who ‘understood the Proportions and Beauties of a Scene’. What this preface makes clear to the reader is that the printed plays they have purchased were penned by a master craftsman, one who understood the practicality and precision of staging drama, plays which have been tested already ‘before a thousand witnesses’ when they ‘trod the Stage (their proper place)’ [A3v].2The Love-Sick Court appears as the second play in this octavo collection, following The English Moor and preceding Covent Garden Weeded, The New Academy, or The New Exchange and The Queen and Concubine. Its title page bears a date of 1658, as do four of the plays in the collection, The Queen and Concubine alone advertising a date of 1659 which is also replicated on the title page to the collection. Although Greg conjectures that that play may have been set up for separate publication, Burnham MacLeod rightly points to the continuous signatures (F6-L8) and pagination (pp. 87-171) as obstacles to the acceptance of Greg’s suggestion.n11245 Perhaps more likely is the possibility that the first four plays were printed in the expectation that the collection would be ready in 1658, but that it was delayed for some reason or took longer than expected, resulting in the 1659 date for the final play’s title page and for that of the collection.n11246 All the collection’s plays apart from The Queen and Concubine were owned by Andrew Crooke, while Greg states that Henry Brome supplied the copy for this last play in the edition.3The Love-Sick Court was entered in the Stationer’s Register on 4 August 1640 by A. Crooke, amongst other plays. It is described in bibliographic detail in Greg’s collections volume of his Bibliography of the English Printed Drama as entry 807, where the title page is recorded thus:1659THE / Love-sick Court. / OR THE / Ambitious Politique. / A / COMEDY // Written by Richard Brome: // Nil mea, ceu mos est, commendes carmina curo / Se nisi comendent carmina dispereant. // [group of ornaments] // LONDON, // Printed by J.T.for A.C.and are to be sold by / Henry Broom, at the Gun in Ivie-lane, 1658.4Greg suggests that A.C. is the well-known stationer Andrew Crooke, while J.T. could either represent the ‘obscure John Taylor’ or the ‘unfortunate John Twyn’; like other aspects of The Love-Sick Court there are rival candidates for one role. According to Plomer, both were active printers in London around 1660; John Taylor also printed ‘Rumps Last Will and Testament’ while John Twyn was unfortunately executed at Tyburn for attempting to print a pamphlet in 1664. Interestingly, Thomas Roycroft, potential printer of The City Wit and The Demoiselle in Brome’s 1653 collection of plays (see [ESSAY_MC_TEXT]) sat on the jury at Twyn’s trial.5The Latin motto is from John Dunbar’s Epigrams and translates as: ‘I take no care (even if it be the custom) that thou shouldst (re)commend my verses;
if they commend not themselves, let them perish.’n112476This is the only printed version of the play, which was republished in the Pearson 1873 edition and was also edited for a doctoral dissertation by Burnam MacLeod at the University of Missouri, Columbia in 1977. MacLeod’s critical edition contains a photocopy of the Newberry library copy of the text, with limited textual notes and glosses beneath, plus a full critical introduction which discusses many of the issues also included in this new introduction.7MacLeod records eighteen copies of the 1658/59 octavo volume of The Love-Sick Court, however since he made his count (which is partially based on Greg’s list) several more copies of Five New Playes have been recorded in libraries in England, Scotland and the United States.n11248 There are currently thirty-two extant copies of the play from the 1659 collection (which is not always in its complete state, i.e. containing all five plays):UK libraries
British Library [3 copies]*n11249
Bodleian Library, Oxford [3 copies]*
Dyce Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum [2 copies]
Eton College Library [1 copy]
National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh [1 copy]
University Library, Cambridge [1 copy]
Worcester College, Oxford [1 copy]USA libraries
Boston Public Library, Boston, Mass. [1 copy]
Chapin Library, Williamstown, Mass. [2 copies]
University of Chicago Library, Chicago [1 copy]
Library of Congress, Washington D.C. [1 copy]*
Cornell University Library [1 copy]
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. [2 copies]*
Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Mass. [1 copy]
Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California [2 copies]
Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City [1 copy]
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC [1 copy]
Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois [2 copies]
New York Public Library, New York City [1 copy]
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. [2 copies]
Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. [1 copy]
Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn. [1 copy]Press Variants8The following press variants, of which there are very few, cluster around H1v and H2r. The uncorrected texts are located in the Folger and Huntington copies:H1vlose a master] loose a master
containing] containindH2rstrain] stream
thee, ] thee^
approaches] approache
yeeld] yeald9Additionally, in the Newberry, Bodleian, Chicago, and Chapin copies, ‘on so’ is corrected to ‘so on’ on H1v. These corrections perhaps suggest a spot-check by the printer; the proof state sheet of these corrections has not been found so far. MacLeod also notes a variant in what he describes as the running title of F8r (but which more accurately could be described as the title, since it is positioned on the page of the first act of the play), which appears as ‘LOV--ESICK’ in the Huntington and Newberry copies, but as ‘LOVE--SICK’ in others. MacLeod records that of the texts he collated, only the Newberry and Chicago (Joseph Regenstein) copies contained an Epilogue.n11250 This edition agrees with MacLeod that the manuscript provided to the printer seems to have been a fair copy, however there are some exceptions to this rule which deserve comment.10Errors in the Dramatis Personae suggest that it was not composed by the play’s author, and a previous reader of the Folger holding B4872 Copy 1 has helpfully underlined and annotated them. The main error concerns the mix up between Philargus and Philocles (which the reader alters by hand), since it is Philocles (and not Philargus) who is the Prince. In case it is not clear enough, the reader, also inserts ‘supposed’ before ‘twin with Philargus’, the latter being altered to ‘Philocles’. The spelling of ‘Themile’ is altered to ‘Thymile’ (also in Doris’s entry), and ‘Philocles Mother’ is annotated to read ‘Mother to Philargus’. The reader also helpfully adds ‘mother to Geron’ after ‘Garula, An old Midwife’. 11In addition, the Dramatis Personae lists a character named Euphalus, who never actually appears in the play; this edition corrects this to ‘Eupathus’, as named in stage directions. MacLeod instead views the Dramatis Personae as the authority, noting on G2 that the entry for Eupathus (which is described in MacLeod’s edition as a printer’s error) should be altered to ‘Euphalus’. However, it would appear conclusive that the Dramatis Personae has been added by someone who does not know the play as it appears in the octavo edition. If there was an indication that the copy for the printed text was the author’s foul papers, then the discrepancies between Dramatis Personae and play text might be explained as evidence of Brome changing his mind as he wrote. But as has already been noted, the octavo collection seems to make clear that this is a careful edition of Brome’s plays, printed long after they were first written and performed, with a detailed precision which will enable readers to experience the play as spectators.12The Folger copy’s careful reader also demonstrates his attention to the text’s detail by various suggestions of emendations in the same hand, for example, in the alteration of the Prologue’s ninth line from ‘Our judgements to but too’ to ‘Our judgements to boot’. On G5, the reader reassigns the line given to Philargus which reads ‘Welcom again my princely Nephews, welcom.’ [LS 1.2.line105] to Disanius as a continuation of his speech, marking ‘Thanks, courteous Uncle.’ with brackets as spoken by both Philargus and Philocles. On the same page, Garula’s speech beginning ‘You have repli’d’ is rightly allocated to Geron (perhaps a simple misreading of the manuscript copy or compositor error in picking the correct piece of type, ‘Gar.’ for ‘Ger.’). Similarly the reader questions the speech prefixes of ‘Gar.’ for ‘Ger.’ on G5v. Where the character speaking uses the catchword ‘whilom’ it is clear that these lines should be attributed to the educated pedant Geron (since this is his tag) rather than his mother (whose signature involves sipping from a bottle). The reader also spots a missing speech prefix for Doris on I8 before ‘But Gentlemen,’.13Throughout the text, the running title on each page appears in full as: The Love-ſick Court. On two occasions the compositor abbreviates the catchword: ‘Ra-’ for ‘Rather’ (G6v) and ‘Ma-’ for ‘Madam’ (H8). On I6 the catchword is incorrectly given as ‘Ter.’ when it should read ‘There’; this appears to be a straightforward error, rather than an example of a catchword remaining from a previous forme, since at no other point in the text is the catchword ‘Ter.’ (for Tersulus) used.14On the whole, the play has been laid out clearly, but the text is densely packed onto each page. Despite this, the compositor always leaves white space both above and below a new act and scene division, and around its opening stage direction, except on K4 (Act 4, scene 3) where there is no white line between act/scene division and the stage direction. This seems to be a conscious decision to differentiate between acts and scenes for the reader. Other than the opening stage direction of each new scene, all directions (including entrances, exits and all business) occur in the right-hand margin and occasionally span several lines (for example, see L3). Exceptions to this rule include two extremely long stage directions which are printed within the body of the text: Eudina’s dream vision (I2v) and Disanius explanation of Philargus’ death (L3v). Despite the dense appearance of the text on the page, the prologue and epilogue are printed on their own leaves (see F7 and L8).15Apart from the Dramatis Personae and occasional error with speech prefixes there is little requirement for editorial intervention, and the stage directions provided are notably theatrical. In the hands of a sensitive director, The Love-Sick Court could be revived as a comedy, an exercise which will be facilitated by this first appearance in a modern spelling, annotated edition.
n11245 Greg’s suggestion.
n11246 the collection.
n11247 ‘I take no care (even if it be the custom) that thou shouldst (re)commend my verses; if they commend not themselves, let them perish.’
n11248 England, Scotland and the United States.
n11249 British Library [3 copies]*
n11250 copies contained an Epilogue.