A Minor Elizabethan Dramatist
The Life and Work of Henry Chettle. By Harold Jenkins. (Sidgwick and Jackson. 12s. 6d.)
As much by an improvident bohemianism which landed him once in the Marshalsea as by his resourcefulness and his possession of a ready pen adaptive enough to deal satisfactorily with most of the types of play in Polonius's exuberant cata- logue, the fat and amiable Henry Chettle was a typical dramatist of his period. By what misfortune he was com- pelled to abandon the aid and comfort of an Elizabethan printer-publisher's life to engage himself in pulling the devil by the tail as one of Henslowe's hacks must remain a mystery. To rank him is exceedingly difficult seeing that, while alone or in collaboration, he had a material hand in over fifty plays, nothing of his of single authorship, irrespective of a few interesting pamphlets, has come down to us beyond that sublimated melodrama of Monte. Cristo-like retribution, The Tragedy of Hoffman, and that only in corrupt form. Yet, after all, we know more about his dramatic work than about Michael Drayton's or others of his associates. So well, how- ever, has Mr. Harold Jenkins acquitted himself of the severe task of outlining his life and appraising as much of his output as can be determined that he must be reckoned an able recruit to Elizabethan scholarship, and as such honoured with a warm welcoming. His has been the difficulty of providing acceptable solutions for divers intricate pioblems, not to speak of the necessity to refute the mischievous conjectures of previous investigators, and, if on a few points, he has failed to reach finality, no blame can be attached to him, for, in our present state of knowledge, there are Elizabethan puzzles which must ever remain baffling.
But it will in no wise derogate from the penetrative acumen which is apparent in every chapter of his book to say that its main value lies in its procreative potentialities, or, in
other words, in the more or less fruitful controversy it will evoke. Experience, sometimes bitter enough, has taught in that keen disputation on historical matters when conducted by experts now and again leads to the establishment of much sought for truths, and, under that belief, I take leave to open the campaign. In my opinion, the evidence which Mr. Jenkins so skilfully assembles in association with more titan one crux points to a different conclusion from that which he reaches. Occasionally the curbing influence of early theatrie4 routine is by him somewhat incautiously ignored. He seemq to think that collaborated work was to some extent a matter of chance, a question throughout of flint and steel, overlooking the fact that before any play was definitely commissioned by a theatrical company a full scenario of the plot and action had to be submitted to, and approved by the company. No matter how many minds worked on the play, the scenario, whether or not after consultation with his associates, was drafted by a single author. One recalls how Meres com- mended Anthony Mundy as " our best plotter." I find reason, therefore, to -demur when Mr. Jenkins, in discussing Patient Grissel, while admitting that Chettle was the originator of the comedy, surmises that he failed to make headway with the work, which consequently " only took satisfactory shape when Dekker and Haughton were called in " to help him out of his difficulty, and that to one or other of his assistants " was probably due the inspiration which worked into the Grissel story the two sub-plots." The objection is that we have no evidence to show that collaborated work was ever otherwise than collaborated work from the beginning, or that a scenario ever underwent-serious alteration after it was once! agreed to by the commissioning company.
Again, to my mind, Mr. Jenkins's excellently marshalled
account of the remarkable discrepancies in the text of the two. Robin Hood plays points inescapably to a discomforting conclusion regarding the possibility of which he has apparently; no suspicion. Since both plays were successfully. produced I by the Admiral's Men early in 1598 and published in December.' 1600, a period of less than two years, no material revision of either is likely to have taken place within so short a time, yet revision of a more .or less clumsy order is apparent. Not even the alterations Made for the court performances of Christmas, 1598—even if we could assume' that it was the court versions of both that were printed—would account for the weird confusion so noticeable in the texts. In the sequel there has been imperfect changing of the ;names ofl some of the characters, a most unlikely thing to occur save! in the case of belated revival; and seldom even then. Nor. is this all. Mr. Jenkins draws attention to the fact that in the same play it had become imperative for some reason to reduce the number of dramatis personae, and the result had i been a drastic disturbance of the textual flow., But it k, difficult to see what need there would have been for such a reduction within a fah, months of the play's production.
Surely Mundy and Chettle were well acquainted with the! strength of the company for which they were writing, and were expert enough not to indulge in a greater wealth of characterization than the company could cope with. Recall: how the author of The Two Merry Milkmaids once averredi that " Every Writer must governe his Penne according to i the Capacitie of the Stage he writes to, both in the actor and
in the auditors" Personally, I am compelled on the evidence to conclude that the. two Robin Hood plays were printed
from pirated and debased texts made for the use of a strolling: company. The various discrepancies in the texts are better' accounted for in this way than by assuming that such atrocious cutting and hacking was the work of the Admiral's Men.
By a parity of reasoning, the text of Hoffman must also' have been derived from a strolling company's piracy, seeing that it presents a like clumsy alteration of the names of the characters, together with a number of ugly cuts, maltreatment such as no competent reviser would have made or any reput- able company suffered. Some confirmation of this conclusion comes to hand from the fact that the play was issued by a publisher who was not the owner of the copyright. But, disputable points apart, Mr. Jenkins's book is a good book, and cannot safely be ignored by any thoroughgoing student of Elizabethan drama.
W. J. LAWRENCE.
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