From Packet 3 to `The Duke of Florence'
Felix Pryor
Next week, the fragment of Webster's play discovered at Melbourne Hall last year is put up for sale at Bloomsbury Book Auctions. Here is the story of its identifica- tion, and the light it throws.
No real example of an Elizabeth play- wright's 'foul papers', his own working manuscripts, was known to have come down to us; nothing which showed the playwright actually engaged in the act of composition — scoring out, redrafting, adding words or phrases. The nearest equivalent was the playhouse book of Sir Thomas More, a fair copy with later revisions made to it by a number of playwrights. But this derives from the playhouse and not, in American business parlance, the author's desk; it does not show him working from scratch. Otherwise there were only contemporary descrip- tions; that for example in the First Folio of Shakespeare: 'His mind and his hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers.'
It seems therefore the oddest freak of chance that part of a professional dramat- ist's foul papers should come to light after 380 years, and that the professional dra- matist in question should be not, say, William Haughton or Robert Yarrington or the prolific Anon, but John Webster. It is even more extraordinary that these foul papers should be for part of a tragedy, a companion piece to The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi,.plays which in the words of William Hazlitt `upon the whole, perhaps, come the nearest to Shakespear of anything we have upon record'.
The manuscript was found on Good Friday last year. I had been asked, with the help of Mr Edward Saunders, to sort through the papers of Sir John Coke and his descendants at Melbourne Hall. Sir John Coke was Principal Secretary of State to Charles I and is the subject of a biography published this year under the title Servility and Service. Melbourne Hall gave its name to the viscountcy inherited by Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister and, through him, to the Australian city. The manuscript had at some time been used to wrap a bundle of Coke's corres- pondence. When the archive was listed for the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts at the end of the last century it was carefully docketed 'Packet 3', and for some reason passed over in silence. It ended up in a box containing plans for the garden, from where it was fished out by Edward Saunders.
One thing was immediately obvious: it had nothing to do with gardens. The writing dated it to the early years of the 17th century and, from the numerous revisions, it was clearly autograph; a work- ing draft in the hand of its author. None of these features are particularly extraordin- ary of themselves; not, at least, for some- one who has just sifted through several dozen boxes of a 17th-century civil ser- vant's papers. But they are all utterly remarkable when taken with one other fact — the manuscript was for part of a play. It was written on one large folio sheet folded in half, so as to form four pages. It had character-headings, stage-directions (the word 'exeunt' standing near the head of the first page), and it mixed blank verse and prose; blank verse, as we are taught at school for the more serious bits, and prose for the funny bits. It was clearly written for the professional theatre. What country vicar writing for the amusement of his wife or servants would have a courtier. address a prince in these terms — 'What are you learnd Epictetus; or have you read Boetius de Consolatione; or els Catos sentences; well: it is a commendable thing in a Prince. I hope you will in tyme write bookes, that the whole world may laugh at you . . .'?
The first place to look for anyone con- fronted by such a manuscript is Sir Walter Greg's massive English Literary Auto- graphs 1550-1650, where practically every known hand of the period is illustrated. And there I drew a blank. For a while it was placed to one side and other more pressing business intervened. Only when a typescript had been prepared was I able to put the unidentified handwriting out of my mind. A glance at The Duchess of Malfi and the identity of the author seemed obvious. (A few days before, I had lent the typescript to a friend in the British Library. I discovered later that it had taken him as many minutes as it had taken me months to realise that the piece was, at least Websterian'). As Graham Greene has written: 'Only a scholar could differentiate between untitled scraps of the other poets, but Webster's tone is unmistakable.' Two passages in particular had this tone. Part of one I have already quoted. The other contains an almost surreal image to de- scribe the activity of the spy. The courtier here explains to the prince why he has been consorting with enemies of the state - are not all yr. statesmen great intelligencers, and without this intelligence can theare bee anie thing done in this Common wealth: why
it is the spectacles wise men put on to reade others lines and how they should direct their owne arts. Some wth. infinite summes cor- rupt those who are able to inform them . • • Others with an easier way, and sweeter know their enemies secrets namely by lying with their wives or mistresses . . .
Possibly because I had taken so long to see the obvious, fate took pity on me and pushed in my way a bewildering succession of clues and chance discoveries. Given the absence of external evidence and an inde- pendent example of handwriting for com- parison, one might assume (as I had till then) that the authorship of the piece could never be established with any degree of certainty. This would have been the case with any author but Webster. But Webster had a peculiar method of composition, one which might almost be described as col- lage, borrowing phrases and images from other writers and incorporating them into his work (much as Eliot does in The Waste Land). He would often re-use the same phrase or image, so that The Duchess of Malfi is constantly echoing the earlier White Devil. The manuscript contains two strange images which are not only Websterian', but recur in the two other plays. The manuscript is littered with classical allusions. One is to Sejanus. Just about the only stage play that Webster quarried for his quotations is Ben Jonson's tragedy of that name; and in Sejanus I found waiting for me an image which crops up in the manuscript.
A little later, leafing through my meagre stock of about half-a-dozen Elizabethan plays acquired in the course of an undis- tinguished academic career, I glanced at The Traitor by James Shirley, written some 20 years after Webster was writing his tragedies. Shirley's straightforward, regu- lar style is as far removed from Webster's as is possible. But it was immediately apparent that his play was a reworking of Webster's lost original. Both are based on the murder of Alessandro dei Medici, Duke of Florence, by his kinsman and companion Lorenzino dei Medici. Again, I had already been handed the crucial clue on a plate (surrounded by watercress, as Wodehouse would say) in the form of a line in the fragment — 'Lorenzo Medices hath oft tymes avowed yr. death'. The manuscript corresponded to Act I scene 2 of Shirley's play, which even used some of the same details. Above all else, here We had a skeleton outline, if no more, of Webster's complete play; and this outline was what one would have expected of Webster. Like the other plays, it draws on recent Italian Renaissance history; Loren- zo, the favourite, promises the Duke his sister, whom he then kills and places in bed as if alive. He then presents the Duke to her corpse before murdering him. Com- parison with Shirley's version throws the into sharp of the Melbourne fragment sharp relief. It was as if a piece for full orchestra had been rescored for a small wind band (which in turn had been re' scored for banjo — Shirley's play forming the basis of the early 19th-century melo- drama Evadne. In this form, the ghost of Webster's tragedy had last played in New York on 13 December 1881). I then turned to another of my half- dozen paperback plays, The Malcontent by John Marston. It has long been recognised that Webster's satiric bent owed much to Marston's work. He had contributed an `Induction' to The Malcontent when it was reviewed at the Globe in 1604. And in The Malcontent, as well as its companion piece, The Fawn, certain aspects of the plotting of the Melbourne manuscript were prefigured (a discovery which, in a sense, had been anticipated by Webster scholars). The manuscript also has an interesting link with the plays of Dekker, Webster's sometime collaborator, as with Hamlet, being in a sense an extremely complex, richly ironical variant of the Hamlet play-scene. With an undergraduate's distaste, I left the sources till last, knowing that thorough work had been done on Shirley's play. It is generally agreed that it was based on two works; the 12th novel of the Heptameron by Margaret of Navarre and Segni's Istorie Fiorentine. Perhaps it had been considered too obvious to point out, but I found no reference to the fact that the 12th novel of the Heptameron had been translated as part of Painter's Palace of Pleasure. This is relevant as it also provides the source for The Duchess of Malfi. In Segni's history, I found the exact source for our scene; one which made Shirley's version seem, in dramatic terms, almost pointless. But even more unexpectedly, the historical sources for The Duke of Florence (as I had by then called the play) threw light on a previously inexplicable feature of The White Devil. None of the known sources could account for the fact that, in the play, Vittoria Corombona's serving maid is a Moor and infatuated with Francesco dei Medici, Duke of Florence; nor for the fact that, in defiance of historical probability, the latter takes it upon himself to disguise himself as a Moor. The historical Alessandro dei Medici, Duke of Florence and subject of the lost play, was the son of a Moorish serving woman by Pope Clement VII. There is a wonderfully subtle portrait of him by Bronzino, from which it is readily apparent why the Florentines nicknamed him `il Moro.'
And what if the fragment which had found its way to Melbourne Hall in the 17th century as wrapping paper had been for part of The Duchess of Malfi? It would have been more immediately provable; perhaps more sensational. But it wouldn't have added so much to the record. It is as if there had now come most unexpectedly to light a perfectly preserved window and a ground plan from a great building, long since destroyed — 'but all things have their end:/ Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men/ Must have like death that we have'. And plays too.
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