SOURCE: Kahan, Jeffrey. “Henry Chettle and the Unreliable Romeo: A Reassessment.” Upstart Crow 16 (1996): 92-100.

[In the following essay, Kahan disputes the claim made by other scholars that Chettle was the editor of the 1597 edition of Romeo and Juliet.]

According to Gary Taylor, the ultimate aim of a Shakespeare editor is the identification of “the nature or function of a lost manuscript which served as the printer's copy for an extant edition.”¹ These extant editions range from reliable to very unreliable quartos, generally graded as either good or bad. In terms of those “stolne, and surrepititious copies,” the scholar's task is complicated by the task of identifying those infamous “iniurious impostors.” The 1597 Romeo and Juliet is one of the few texts where a substantial claim of identification has been made and verified a number of times, most recently by John Jowett who declared in the Oxford Textual Companion that Henry Chettle was Q1's “dramatist-editor” and subsequently stated it was “apparent” that Chettle was the culprit behind Q1.²

I do not share Jowett's certainty. Authorial attributions, questionable or not, can seem to have great force, presented, as they often are, with neat and highly-detailed statistical tables, graphs, or similar passages that seem to indicate common authorship. Subsequent citations of original investigations can create an impression of evidence that is uncontested and uncontestable. In the case of Romeo Q1, the textual evidence is illusionary, built upon inferences as to what Chettle wrote and how much authenticity and reliance those texts have or had. A study of those inferences raise a variety of questions that are unavoidable and perhaps unanswerable.

Henry Chettle was first identified as the culprit behind Romeo Q1 by Harry R. Hoppe, who speculated that Chettle may have supplied verse where the copy for Q1 was incomplete or defective. Hoppe's suggestion was little more than a guess made in passing and was of such a tenuous nature that within the same book he rejected his own suggestion.³ Nonetheless, his idea that Chettle was behind Romeo Q1 took hold. His speculation was, and remains, attractive. Chettle was an employee for John Danter, the stationer behind Romeo Q1, and a sometime pamphleteer and playwright. Chettle was Danter's business partner from 1598 to 1591 and worked for Danter until at least 1596. By 1598, Chettle was writing plays, either solo or in collaboration, for the Admiral's Men.

The speculation that Chettle was behind Romeo Q1 would be furthered indirectly by W. L. Renwick, who suggested that since Chettle added eleven lines to the anonymous play John of Bordeaux (circa 1590-9), he probably worked on other parts of the play as well.⁴ However, in a later article, Sidney Thomas, citing Renwick as his authority, stated that Chettle was behind the rewriting of John of Bordeaux and then argued that much of Romeo Q1's spelling, vocabulary, and imagery are consistent with Chettle's revision of that play and Chettle's own play Hoffman (1602).⁵ Thomas further asserted that Chettle was a capable artist and a first-rate dramatist:

He was no ordinary hack-writer, as students of his work have lately come to realize, but a poet capable of creating verse of lyric beauty and exquisite sensibility.⁶

However, subsequent research has undermined Thomas' claims. Let us first begin with Thomas' assertion that Chettle's spelling is apparent in Romeo Q1. Certainly evidence of Chettle's spelling should at least give the bibliographer a solid foundation to judge whether Chettle was at least involved in the editing or writing of Romeo Q1. However, Thomas overlooked Hoppe's earlier and far more detailed study of Romeo Q1's spellings, in which he identified the spellings of four compositors.⁷ Chettle, working as one of Danter's compositors and press correctors, may well have set some of Romeo Q1, but that would not make him the man who wrote all or parts of the manuscript, just one of the compositors who set some of the type. Even if Chettle's claim as a compositor and/or corrector were validated, his contribution to the quarto is further limited by the fact that Danter's shop set only a portion of the text. Although Danter's name appears as the sole printer, his shop printed only sheets A-D.⁸

Thomas' declaration that Chettle was a capable dramatist rests on his supposition that Chettle rewrote significant portions of the anonymous play John of Bordeaux and that Hoffman adequately reflects the author's style. But Thomas' own efforts to prove that Chettle rewrote other sections of John of Bordeaux have been quashed by John Jowett who noted that Chettle merely “supplied a passage to mend a gap” in the play.⁹ Even if Chettle did add eleven lines to John of Bordeaux, Thomas overlooked the fact that this addition probably took place in 1598, not circa 1590-9.¹⁰ It is, therefore, difficult to follow his logic, since an eleven-line addition to a play in 1598 cannot be used as proof that Chettle was an active editor/reviser of plays in 1597.

Even if we could prove that Chettle had a hand in a pre-1597 play, it might not tell us much. Defining Chettle's style is a complicated and possibly futile undertaking. In a chapter on “Avoiding Disaster” in authorial attributions, a cautionary Samuel Schoenbaum notes that identifying Chettle's style is always a tricky business as Chettle often imitated those writers he revised.¹¹

The rest of Thomas' evidence is derived from parallels in language and imagery drawn from Chettle's play Hoffman. Here, problems of imitation are not an issue. Nonetheless, we have reason to pause. Drawing parallels between Romeo Q1 and Hoffman is an equally risky business. Firstly, Hoffman was written in 1602, well after Romeo Q1. Again, the evidence that Chettle was capable of patching, writing, and editing Romeo Q1 in 1597 must surely be culled from texts that appeared before 1597, not after. Further, even if a reliable version of Hoffman might help identify the writer of the unreliable Romeo, the textual difficulties of Hoffman discourage such a process. The play was printed posthumously in 1631 from a very poor copy-text.¹² The edition is so poor even Chettle's biographer openly questions whether it adequately reflects Chettle's style.¹³ Since it is difficult to identify passages that are clearly Chettle's, it is equally difficult to identify reasonable parallels between Chettle's work and Romeo Q1.

No discussion of Chettle's possible contribution to Romeo Q1 would be complete without reference to John Jowett's work, which has reinvigorated interest in this minor Elizabethan “Johannes Factotum.” In Jowett's notes to Romeo, Jowett cited one passage from Hoffman presumably as proof that Chettle's usage and spellings are discernable:

If Shakespeare never used agile, Chettle … did so (Hoffman, MSR, 2001: ‘noe woodnimphes here / Seeke with their agill steps to outstrip the Roe’; note spelling).¹⁴

Jowett's case for Chettle's discernable usage and spellings rests on the selection and spelling of this one word (agill), found in a badly printed quarto, published more than 30 years after Romeo Q1. On this point, his case is hardly overwhelming. Jowett also argued that “the more informative and picturesque of Q1's stage directions … are not dissimilar to those of his [Chettle's] own Hoffman.”¹⁵ However, in his otherwise praiseworthy textual study of Romeo, Jowett failed to cite a single example of such a non-dissimilarity. Six years later, in the “Notes” section of RES, Jowett cited a sole Romeo stage direction that he believes bears out his assertion: “Enter Juliet somewhat fast, and embraceth Romeo.”¹⁶ This time, Jowett failed to cite any non-dissimilar stage direction from Hoffman. To date, his case remains incompletely stated.

It is not just John of Bordeaux, Hoffman, and Romeo Q1's spellings that give one pause to reconsider Chettle's supposed role and the seemingly “apparent” evidence. The chronology of Chettle's work calls into question his writing ability and therefore suitability for the complex task of editing and possibly mending gaps in Romeo Q1. His name has been associated with a variety of texts from as early as 1579: The Pope's Pitiful Lamentation for the Death of his Dear Darling Don John of Austria (1578?), the broadside A Doleful Ditty or Sorrowful Sonnet of the Lord Darling (1579?), and a miscellany of verse fiction and short narratives, The Forest of Fancy (1579). These ascriptions rely on the initials, H. C., which appear on the aforementioned texts. Since Henry Chettle has the same initials, some argue, he must be the author. Chettle's one and only biographer, the erudite Harold Jenkins, is skeptical of this evidence.¹⁷ In any case, none of these texts has ever been used in any comparison with Romeo Q1.

According to Warren Austin's 1969 computer tests, Chettle may have written most of Greene's Groatsworth (1592).¹⁸ However, aspects of Austin's methodology have come under scrutiny. The most recent computer-aided study, conducted in 1978, rejected both Chettle and Greene as author.¹⁹ In 1993, John Jowett accepted Austin's findings while providing a detailed list of scholars who did not.²⁰ A 1994 edition attributes the work to both Greene and Chettle.²¹ Clearly, this controversy is far from settled, and any attempts to use Groatsworth as a test for Chettle's hand in Romeo Q1 would be premature.

Moreover, there is a great deal of uncertainty concerning the nature of many of Chettle's playwrighting activities during this period. There is no denying that prior to 1597 Chettle was sometimes called upon to recopy plays or patch them. But in many cases we are not yet in a position to even agree on what passages Chettle wrote, much less use them in any comparison with Romeo Q1. For instance, Jowett ascribes a third of Sir Thomas More (circa 1590-93, revisions circa 1594-95)²² to Chettle.²³ But more recent studies have been less generous: The Revels editors of Sir Thomas More point out that, in many instances, Chettle's job may have been to allocate revisions to other writers rather than undertake them himself.²⁴ In another recent study, Scott McMillin remains unsure whether Chettle's contributions consisted of crafting speeches or copying the speeches of others.²⁵

I do not mean to imply that Chettle added nothing of his own to the play. Chettle did contribute one section, consisting of a dialogue of five speeches, which was partially deleted, and he may well have written more. For instance, Thomas Merriam argues that many of Chettle's own contributions may have been recopied by Munday, though even he admits that the question will only be resolved when Munday's own contributions are fully verified.²⁶ As with Groatsworth, the question of Chettle's contribution to Sir Thomas may never be satisfactorily resolved. To date, no test has ever been undertaken attempting to link any supposed Chettle passages in Sir Thomas to passages in Romeo Q1.

In 1598, a year after Romeo, Henslowe recorded Chettle's involvement in both The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon. Henslowe paid Chettle 10s. to revise the first of these plays and lent the same again to Chettle for his collaborative contribution to the second.²⁷ At first glance, Henslowe's information seems very clear. Yet, many textual scholars continue to question the exact nature of Chettle's role in both of these plays. E. K. Chambers notes that the paltry sum probably indicates that Chettle made “small alterations” to both plays.²⁸ More recently, John Carney Meagher, who edited both plays, concluded that Chettle had nothing to do with Downfall and little to do with the text for Death.²⁹

Similarly, Gabrieli and Melchiori ascribe a portion of The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1600) to Chettle.³⁰ But this ascription contradicts both Henslowe's Diary and a new scholarly study by Corbin and Sedge, which do not list Chettle as writer or revisor of the play.³¹ To date, no test linking any detailed stylometrical qualities of Oldcastle or The Huntingdon Plays to Romeo Q1 has ever been undertaken.³²

The first work that is unquestioningly and fully Chettle's is the prose pamphlet, Kind-Hartes Dreame (1592). Yet the author himself asserts how unusual it is for him to compose rather than composite:

… let it not seeme strange (I beseech ye) that he that all daies of his life hath beene famous for drawing teeth [correcting press], should now in drooping age hazard contemptible infamie by drawing himselfe into print.³³

We do know that in 1595 Chettle published his Piers Plainness: Seven Years' Prenticeship. But this too is a prose work, not a play. Thus far, no tests attempting to match these works with Romeo Q1 have been undertaken.

I do not dispute the fact that Chettle may have written plays in part or in whole circa 1597. But the evidence brought forward that Chettle was involved in Romeo Q1 is highly selective in that it either (1) ignores chronology, and thus the nature and scope of Chettle's dramatic activity circa 1597, or (2) derives from texts that suffer from dubious textual authority. Nor do I dispute the fact that Chettle was later called upon to write, revise, and collaborate on plays. Neil Carson has pointed out that Chettle was among “the most active” of the collaborative dramatists.³⁴ But these collaborations began in February 1598.³⁵ Even Carson's study of Chettle's collaborative activities dates for the most part from August 1602 to March 1603 well after Romeo Q1.

Romeo and Juliet, writes New Cambridge editor G. Blakemore Evans, “is fraught with problems, some of them essentially insoluble.”³⁶ The same may well be said of Henry Chettle's work, particularly his plays. While it is true that Chettle did collaborate on a number of plays, his actual role in many of these works remains ill-defined. Selecting any of his circa 1597 work for the purpose of linking Romeo Q1 to Chettle remains a dangerous undertaking.

While Chettle certainly wrote one play and co-wrote scores of others, in many instances we are unsure as to the full nature of his contributions. Extant documents circa 1597 give us no uncontested reason to assume that Chettle was the dramatist-editor behind Romeo Q1. Even if we accept Thomas' claim that Chettle's spelling is apparent in Q1, it does not follow that he was the play's dramatist-editor. He may well have been a copyist for the manuscript given to Danter or one of the compositors who set Q1's type. Jowett's case concerning Hoffman's stage directions has never been fully published and cannot, in the light of problems concerning Hoffman's textual reliability, be accepted without detailed study. Stylometric tests comparing Romeo Q1 to other texts Chettle may have had a hand in might solve this problem, but such tests are unlikely to be run until we are in a firmer position to define Chettle's style.

The nature of the case is such that we cannot say with certainty that it was Chettle who was behind the 1597 Romeo, but there is plenty of reason to say that the uncertainty is of such a continuous nature that we should approach Hoppe's, Thomas' and Jowett's claims with serious reservations. Comparisons of Romeo Q1 and Chettle's circa 1597 plays on stylistic grounds are based on the assumption that the latter are reliable and authorially uncontested. Scholars who undertake such an exercise may not have fully digested the many conflicting bibliographic analyses of Chettle's roles in a number of texts and/or the dubious textual reliability of the single play (Hoffman) attributed to him with any degree of certainty. In the light of these facts, any argument concerning Chettle's candidacy as Q1's dramatist-editor based on his writings circa 1597 cannot be accepted unconditionally.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, gen. eds. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor; associate eds. John Jowett, William Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 14.

2. A Textual Companion, pp. 296-97, note to III. i. 92-108/1478-94; John Jowett, “Johannes Factotum: Henry Chettle and Greene's Groatsworth of Wit,” PBSA, 87 (1993), 453-86; p. 486.

3. Harry R. Hoppe, The Bad Quarto of “Romeo and Juliet”: A Bibliographical and Textual Study (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1948), p. 220.

4. See W. L. Renwick's textual study in John of Bordeaux; or The Second Part of Friar Bacon, checked by W. W. Greg (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1936), i-xiv; vi; xiii. Hoppe later expanded Chettle's contribution to a total of fourteen lines (220).

5. Sidney Thomas, “Henry Chettle and the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet,” Review of English Studies, new series, 1 (1950), 8-16. On reference to Renwick, see 12, n. 5; on parallels to Hoffman, see pp. 13-16.

6. Thomas, p. 16.

7. Hoppe, p. 46.

8. The other pages were set by Edward Allde. See Standish Henning, “The Printer of Romeo and Juliet, Q1,” PBSA, 60 (1966), pp. 363-64. Hoppe's findings were confirmed by Frank E. Haggard, “Type-Recurrence Evidence and the Printing of Romeo and Juliet Q1 (1597),” PBSA, 71 (1977), 66-73.

9. Jowett, “Johannes Factotum,” p. 484.

10. Renwick, p. xiii.

11. Schoenbaum did allow that Chettle “may have occasional strange quirks of individuality.” Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship: An Essay in Literary History and Method (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1966), p. 169.

12. Jowett, “Notes on Henry Chettle (Concluded),” Review of English Studies, 45 (1994), 517-22; pp. 520-21.

13. Harold Jenkins, Introduction, The Tragedy of Hoffman, text checked by Charles Sisson (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1951), as well as Harold Jenkins, The Life of Henry Chettle (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1934), 71n. The unreliability of Hoffman has been used to call into question his hand in other plays. See Gabrieli and Melchiori, Sir Thomas More, gen. eds. E. A. J. Honigmann, J. R. Mulryne, David Bevington, Eugene M. Waith, The Revels Plays (Manchester and New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1990), p. 21.

14. A Textual Companion, p. 297, III. i. 165/1551.

15. A Textual Companion, p. 288.

16. Jowett, “Notes on Chettle (Concluded),” p. 519.

17. The case is surveyed by John Jowett in “Notes on Henry Chettle (Part One),” Review of English Studies, 45 (1994), 384-88; pp. 384-85.

18. Warren B. Austin, A Computer-Aided Technique for Stylistic Discrimination—The Authorship of “Greene's Groatsworth of Wit,” Project No. 7-0-036: Grant No. OEG 1-7-070036-4593 (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, Bureau of Research (1969) described by L. Marder in “Chettle's Forgery of the Groatsworth of Wit and the ‘Shake-scene’ Passage,’” Shakespeare Newsletter, 20 (1970), p. 42; reviewed by T. R. Waldo, The Computer and the Humanities, 7 (1977), p. 109. See also Warren B. Austin, “Technique of the Chettle-Greene Forgery: Supplementary Material on the Authorship of the Groatsworth of Wit,” Shakespeare Newsletter, 20 (1970), p. 43.

19. Norbert Bolz, Eine statistische, computerunterstuzte Echtheitsprufung von “The Repentance of Robert Greene” (Frankfurt, am Main: Peter Lang, 1978), summarized in N. Bolz, “Are Robert Greene's ‘Autobiographies’ Fakes? The Forgery of The Repentance of Robert Greene,” Shakespeare Newsletter, 29 (1979), p. 434.

20. Jowett, “Notes on Henry Chettle (Part One),” pp. 386-87, notes 8 and 9.

21. Greene's Groatsworth Bought With a Million of Repentance (1592), ed. D. Allen Carol: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Binghamton, NY: SUNY Univ. Press, 1994).

22. The play's dates are derived from G. Blakemore Evans' entry for the play in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1974), pp. 1683-85. Some date the play as late as 1605, again far later than Romeo. While this later date would aid my argument, most scholars prefer the earlier date.

23. John Jowett, “Henry Chettle and the Original Text of ‘Sir Thomas More’,” in T. H. Howard-Hill (ed.), Shakespeare and ‘Sir Thomas More’: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearian Interest (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 131-49; p. 148.

24. Gabrieli and Melchiori, p. 21.

25. Chettle may have been one of the copyists for both the original play and for the revision. See Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and The Book of Sir Thomas More (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 83, 91, 93, 145-50, 159.

26. Thomas Merriam, “Did Munday Compose Sir Thomas More?” Notes and Queries, 37(1990), pp. 175-78.

27. Henslowe's Diary, eds. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1961), 44v, 52 (p. 87, p. 102).

28. Chambers' conclusion is based on the amounts Henslowe paid to various playwrights for revisions. In comparison with his contemporaries, Chettle received meagre payment. See his, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), vol. 1, p. 212. For a clear list of Chettle's work, individual, collaborational and revisional, see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), vol. 3, pp. 264-67. Henslowe paid Chettle for a number of plays which he never finished, a possible sign of Chettle's weak creativity. Chettle's inability to finish many of his plays is also mentioned in Neil Carson's A Companion to Henslowe's Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), p. 48.

29. See his textual study in Anthony Munday, The Huntingdon Plays: A Critical Edition of the Dawnfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (New York: Garland, 1980), 96-107; esp. pp. 99-100, n. 4.

30. Gabrieli and Melchiori, p. 16.

31. See The Oldcastle Controversy: Sir John Oldcastle Part I and The Famous Victories of Henry V, eds. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge. The Revels Plays Companion Library (Manchester and New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1991), p. 9. An earlier study by Jonathan Rittenhouse reached the same conclusion. See his A Critical Edition of I Sir John Oldcastle, The Renaissance Imagination, vol. 9 (New York and London: Garland, 1984), 46-67. Percy Simpson's critical introduction to Sir John Oldcastle raises the possibility that Henslowe's attribution is incomplete. The Life of Sir John Oldcastle, text checked by W. W. Greg (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1908), i-xvi; p. vii.

32. It should be noted that an earlier article of mine, based upon a blind acceptance of Hoppe's, Thomas' and Jowett's findings, did find some tentative evidence of minor stylistic affinities between one stage direction in Romeo Q1 and two stage directions in The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon. The comparisons are, admittedly, primitive. See my “Chettle's Romeo Q1 and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon,” Notes and Queries 43 (1996), pp. 155-57. With reference to that same article, please note the following rectification: 14^v and D3^r should read D3^v and H3^r respectively.

33. Henry Chettle, Kind-Hartes Dreame (1592) and William Kempe, Nine Daies Wonder (1600), ed. G. B. Harrison in Elizabethan and Jacobean Quartos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1966, reprint of London: Bodley Head Quartos, 1923), p. 9.

34. Neil Carson, “Collaborative Playwrighting: The Chettle, Dekker, Heywood Syndicate,” Theatre Research International, 14 (1989), 13-23; p. 15.

35. Charles J. Sisson states that Chettle had a hand in forty-eight plays written between 1598-1603. The Elizabethan Dramatists (Folcroft, Penn.: Folcroft, 1928; reprinted 1969), p. 43.

36. G. Blakemore Evans, “Textual Analysis,” in Romeo and Juliet, gen. ed. Philip Brockbank; assoc. eds. Brian Gibbons, Robin Hood, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 206-12; p. 206.