Item 68 - Letter from J. M. Nosworthy to Sir Walter Greg

1 single sheet

Senior Common Room, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth.—Comments on statements in The Shakespeare First Folio relating to Macbeth and Troilus and Cressida.

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Transcript

Senior Common Room, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth
16. XI. 55.

Dear Sir Walter.

I have been looking at your latest pronouncements on Macbeth & Troilus as I am working on the texts of these two plays. I hope that the ensuing comments will seem interesting rather than impertinent.

Troilus

p 339. “your (read that) braine”. Do you imply a misprint? I take “your” to be the common colloquial usage

p 340. The ‘Epistle’ doesn’t ring true to me. I have just completed a paper putting forward the novel, if hazardous, view that it was probably vamped up from a special Prologue used at the Inn of Court performance (as a substitute for the regular Prologue). The legal jokes seem well-fitted to such an occasion, but they seem (to me) incredible in an ‘epistle’ of 1609.

p 348. The notion that “the grand possessors” = the King’s Men may be a red-herring. It’s another legal joke, & “possessors” in law signifies persons other than the owners. ‘scape’ in the preceding sentence is also a legal joke. See “possessor” & “escape” in O.E.D. It rather looks as if “the grand possessors” are to be identified with the earlier “grand censors”.

p 350. My examination (as yet incomplete) fully endorses Alice Walker’s view that the transcript was not Shakespeare’s. It was evidently made by someone (whom I’d tentatively identify with the author of the Epistle—or “Prologue”) who was an amateur of rhetoric. And I’m afraid that where variants occur, it is the Folio which is normally correct. When he found Shakespeare’s rhetorical figures objectionable or unintelligible, he simply omitted them. The test case is probably “the abiect neere’ which the Folio despite emendators) gives correctly.

Macbeth

p 389. Metrical irregularities are frequent & distressing—but it was a habit of Compositor B to produce unmetrical lines. I’m not so sure about these as evidence of cutting.

p 391 (esp. note 10.) Several musical copies of the songs were made & must have been preserved in the theatre. There was no need for the words of the songs to be added to the prompt-book, & the Folio S.D. show the book-keeper doing all that was really necessary from his point of view. One MS of Robert Johnson’s setting of ‘Come away, come away’ was used by Stafford Smith & Rimbault & another survives, I believe, in the Folger. His setting of ‘In a maiden time profest’ (from The Witch) survives in the hand of John Wilson in the Bodleian. The two Witch Dances, assuming that these were the ones also used in The Masque of Queens, are in B.M. Add MS. 10,444 (an important & sadly neglected collection of masque tunes). I have not been able to trace a setting of “Black spirits & white”. Incidentally this musci served as the tap-root for the Macbeth music attributed to Matthew Locke.

p 391. I agree that Hecate is not Middleton. She is, in fact, Shakespeare. The echoes from Titus Andronicus & The Merry Wives are unmistakable. No imitator is likely to have sought these out—especially from such sources. The passages are, of course, interpolations necessitated by the introduction of the songs.

p 391 (note 13.) The Sergeant = Pyrrhus analogy is mine rather than Wilson’s, though many of the points in my R.E.S. note were anticipated by Coleridge.

p 395. I think the ‘copy’ was probably a transcript of the prompt-book, though I’m not sure that Wilson’s reasons for this belief will stand the test. It certainly seems that we are concerned with a MS., the work of someone who was addicted to ‘ey’ spellings—hence weyward/weyard, Seyton, Seyward (which are not compositors’ spellings). He also used tildes fairly often, I think—hence “Can post with post” for “Came etc”, & elsewhere ‘then’ for ‘them’.{1} I wonder whether it is possible to identify him on the grounds of these two habits?

p 396 (note A). Doesn’t Weird Sisters imply that they were ministers of Fate? ‘Weird’ is a noun, isn’t it? I thought it was Scott who first used the word adjectivally. The three ladies are an unmitigated nuisance anyway. They “three virgins wondrous faire” in Heywood’s Hierarchie. I sometimes wonder whether Shakespeare really knew what to make of them.

Please forgive this hideous smear which has just happened.{2}

Yours sincerely
J. M. Nosworthy

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{1} Full stop supplied. The preceding word is at the end of a line.

{2} There are a few ink-blots below.

Formerly inserted in Greg's copy of The Shakespeare First Folio (1955) (Adv. c. 26. 1).

This description was created by A. C. Green in 2020.