[In the following essay, Jowett discusses Chettle's contribution to the play Sir Thomas More, his involvement in Romeo and Juliet, the plays he wrote in collaboration with others, his work on The Tragedy of Hoffman, his debts, and his death.]

CHETTLE AND SIR THOMAS MORE

Chettle has confidently been identified as one of the revisers of the manuscript play Sir Thomas More. Tannenbaum's identification of the handwriting of so-called Hand A as that of Chettle has found general assent.¹ Here we find Chettle and, amongst others, Shakespeare collaborating on the same project. The date of the original text (which exists as a fair copy in Munday's hand), the date of the revisions, and the circumstances of the revisions have all been widely debated. Jenkins reviews discussion up to the point of writing in his 1961 supplement to the Malone Society's reissue of its edition of the play.² The debate is continued in an article by Peter Blayney, which argues that the original text, written by Munday, Chettle, and others, and the revisions, are echoed in Chettle's Kind-Heart's Dream (December 1952), and must therefore have been written before the pamphlet.³ The contributors to a subsequent collection of essays generally agree that the original text was written in or around 1593.⁴ The revisions belong to the same period,⁵ or, more likely, to about a decade later, around 1603.⁶ My own contribution to the collection makes the date of the original text pertinent to Chettle.⁷ The essay argues that Chettle was co-author of the original text, and advances a breakdown of authorship by scenes. In some parts of the play, it seems clear that Chettle had at least a main hand. These scenes are mature and effective dramatic writing. They suggest that Chettle was an experienced dramatist well before Henslowe began theatrical accounts in his Diary.

THE ‘BAD’ QUARTO OF ROMEO AND JULIET

The ‘bad’ quarto of Romeo and Juliet was printed by Danter with the assistance of a second stationer, evidently Allde. It was issued as ‘Printed by Iohn Danter’ without the name of a publisher, and Danter was presumably behind the whole project. Jenkins is always generous to his subject, and never more so than when he briefly sets aside the possibility that Chettle had a hand in putting together this book (p. 18).

There seem to be two strata to this text: a corrupt and discontinuous version of the Shakespearian play and a non-Shakespearian overlay designed to give the text continuity. The corrupt text is usually supposed to have been put together by an actor or actors. An alternative or additional possibility is that Chettle and Danter resorted here—and perhaps also for the other infamous Danter bad quarto, Orlando Furioso—to the reporter who, according to the title-page, took ‘by characterie’ a sermon preached by Henry Smith and published by Hoskins, Chettle, and Danter in 1591. As for the non-Shakespearian overlay, three passages in particular have no correspondence with the authoritative text and are written in a style that is distinctly un-Shakespearian; these correspond to the entire short scene 2.5, 3.2.57-60, and 5.3.12-21 in the full, Shakespearian text.⁸ In his detailed study of the quarto, Henry Hoppe pointed out that Chettle was an obvious candidate for the role of reporter-versifier.⁹ Hoppe eventually preferred to attribute the whole assemblage of the text to actor-pirates, finding his own half-hearted case for Chettle, which includes one or two suspect verbal parallels, less than convincing. Sidney Thomas concentrates specifically on Chettle's possible authorship of the un-Shakespearian passages.¹⁰ Thomas refers to Chettle's continued association with Danter after 1591, and cites Chettle's other known activities as dramatic reviser. He notes some more persuasive instances of parallel vocabulary and imagery than those located by Hoppe. There is also spelling evidence; Thomas finds that ‘all of the characteristic spelling habits of the author of the disputed passages of Q1 of Romeo and Juliet are those of Chettle himself’, basing this assertion on both Chettle's autograph manuscripts and the quarto of Hoffman. Here Thomas's case cannot be undermined by supposing that Chettle was still working as compositor for Danter, for Danter again printed only one section of the book (sheets A-D). Finally, the ‘descriptive’ stage direction ‘Enter Iuliet somewhat fast, and embraceth Romeo’ in 2.5 is interestingly compared with similarly ‘descriptive’ directions in Hoffman and in the parts of collaborative plays believed to have been written by Chettle. Chettle must surely have written the un-Shakespearian passages, and probably had wider responsibility for the continuity of the text and the provision of stage directions.¹¹ In such circumstances it becomes natural that the first quarto should have its own literary and dramatic coherence.

PLAYS WRITTEN IN COLLABORATION

Chettle's contributions to the extant collaborative plays Patient Grissel and The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green have been defined reasonably clearly,¹² and any subsequent work will probably amount to no more than fine-tuning. The extent of Chettle's writing in the quarto texts of The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon has not been adequately determined.¹³ Before Jenkins's discussion, Muriel St Clare Byrne dismantled the shaky methodology that had been adopted by Dugdale Sykes; despite her reservations on the strength of most ‘bibliographical clues’, she nevertheless found the evidence good for Chettle's authorship of scene 5.2 of the Death.¹⁴ More recently, the plays' Malone Society editor denied Chettle's presence in the Downfall and even cast doubt on his contribution to the extant text of the Death.¹⁵ Chettle's contribution, he suggests, was deferred to the lost work The Funeral of Richard Coeur de Lion. This substantially revises Jenkins's more inclusive estimate, but the matter cannot be regarded as settled.

THE TRAGEDY OF HOFFMAN

Jenkins developed his work on Hoffman in his Malone Society Reprints edition of the play and a related article on textual issues.¹⁶ Jenkins was working at the same time as Ernst J. Schlochauer, and noted one more variant state in the dedication of the quarto's publisher Hugh Perry to Richard Kilvert than did Schlochauer.¹⁷ Schlochauer's collation of American copies in his dissertation edition added substantially to Jenkins's list of press corrections in the quarto as a whole.¹⁸

Doubts have been persistently expressed, both before Jenkins's biography and subsequently, as to whether Chettle wrote The Tragedy of Hoffman unaided. The play would be anonymous were it not for an entry in Henslowe's Diary recording a payment to Chettle of five shillings for ‘A tragedie called Hawghman’ on 29 December 1602. The Diary at this stage does not give a full account of Henslowe's transactions on behalf of the actors, and the absence of further records of payment is therefore not in itself disturbing. This does leave open the possibility of collaboration, but there are no sound reasons for assuming a second hand. It is probably the chaotic state of the text that leads to such a supposition, but this can be accounted for in other terms.

The most striking textual anomaly is that for a portion of the play Clois Hoffman is named in stage directions, speech-prefixes, and dialogue as Sarlois.¹⁹ It is most likely that this error results from an inadequately cancelled ‘Sa’ for ‘Saxony’ closely followed by ‘clois’. An annotator probably perpetuated the error. The reason for this intervention may have been extreme instability in the naming of the character.

Another post-authorial intervention probably brought about the quarto's misleading and suspect act divisions, which distort the play's informal five-part structure. Formal act breaks would not have been the practice for the Admiral's Men performances, but were usual well before 1631 when the play was published.

Jenkins considered that the manuscript underlying the quarto was a non-theatrical scribal transcript that had been marked up for revision. His hypothesis of a transcript seems unnecessary. The manuscript was probably old, with its first leaf damaged and last leaf badly damaged or missing. Some of the errors Jenkins supposes to result from misreading of a hand unlike Chettle's are better explained as compositor's foul case, and Chettle's writing was probably not always as tidy as the passage for Sir Thomas More suggests. It may be concluded that the manuscript was a rough draft by Chettle, annotated in the printing-house and/or in anticipation of a transcript to provide a new promptbook for the play's revival at the Phoenix in the 1620s.

CHETTLE'S DEBTS

Henslowe's Diary provides repeated instances of Henslowe's advancing Chettle small loans. It is often thought that Henslowe was harsh in his dealings with Chettle, but this interpretation of the Diary entries is challenged by Neil Carson, who sees an informality in the records pertaining to Chettle that suggests a closer relationship than Henslowe had with other playwrights.²⁰ Mark Eccles confirms that Chettle's financial affairs were in a bad way; he finds that in 1600 Chettle was in debt for £40.²¹ (He also notes that in February 1601 Chettle was co-defendant in a Star Chamber hearing, accused of conspiring to libel Alderman Paul Bayning.)

CHETTLE'S DEATH

In 1607 Thomas Dekker commemorated Chettle's death in A Knight's Conjuring by describing his arrival in the Elysian Fields. Jenkins takes Dekker's tribute to imply that Chettle's death was then recent. Eccles contests this, claiming that there is no record of any activity on Chettle's part between April 1603, when he wrote England's Mourning Garment, and 1607. He discovered that an Elizabeth Chettle married William Webber at St Olav, Southwark, on 9 October 1603. This could, apparently, be Henry Chettle's widow, in which case, Eccles suggests, he must have died in mid-1603. However, England's Mourning Garment was not Chettle's last work. Chettle compiled ‘A true bill of the whole number that hath died … since the time that the last sicknes of the plague began … to October the sixt day, 1603’ (STC 16743.2). This item is not mentioned by Jenkins, nor is it recorded in the original edition of the STC; in the revised STC the only listed copy is in the Huntington Library. It is a small but illuminating addition to the Chettle canon. Clearly it puts paid to Eccles's conjecture about Chettle's death: if Chettle was alive on 6 October, funeral bakemeats would not even have reached the oven three days later. One can only revert to Jenkins's assumption that Chettle was alive until shortly before Dekker wrote A Knight's Conjuring.

OTHER WORK TO BE DONE

As the techniques for author discrimination develop, the Chettle canon will no doubt be defined with greater exactness. Some problems may need revisiting. One example of an issue that deserves further consideration is the relationship between the orphan plot in Two Lamentable Tragedies, attributed to Robert Yarrington, and The Orphan's Tragedy, for which Henslowe made payments to Chettle. There is scope too for entirely new work. In Chettle we have an identifiable compositor who worked, it seems, on literary texts; he is also a literary figure in his own right, and samples of his writing survive in autograph manuscripts. There are therefore unusual opportunities, for example, for adducing compositorial habits from literary practices. A detailed study of Chettle's work as a compositor for Danter would be of bibliographical interest in connection with the books concerned; it would make towards a detailed study of the activities and practices of a small London printer in the 1590s; it would afford more information as to how Chettle spent his time and earned what little money he had; and it would contribute further to our understanding of the interconnections between writing and printing in the unusual and yet symptomatic circumstances of Danter's shop.

Notes

1. S. A. Tannenbaum, ‘The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore’: A Bibliotic Study (New York, 1927), 53.

2. Originally edited W. W. Greg (Oxford, 1911).

3. P. W. M. Blayney, ‘The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore Re-Examined’, SP 69 (1972), 167-91. For a critique of Blayney, see G. Taylor, ‘The Date and Auspices of the Additions to Sir Thomas More’, in T. Howard-Hill (ed.), Shakespeare and ‘Sir Thomas More’: Essays on the Play and its Shakespearean Interest (Cambridge, 1989), 101-29, at pp. 114-18.

4. Howard-Hill (ed.), Shakespeare and ‘Sir Thomas More’. G. H. Metz's ‘“Voice and Credit”: The Scholars and Sir Thomas More’, ibid. 11-44, provides a thorough survey of scholarship on the play.

5. G. Melchiori, ‘The Book of Sir Thomas More: Dramatic Unity’, ibid. 77-100, at pp. 95-6.

6. S. McMillan, ‘The Book of Sir Thomas More: Dates and Acting Companies’, ibid. 57-76; Taylor, ‘The Date and Auspices of the Additions to Sir Thomas More’.

7. J. Jowett, ‘Henry Chettle and the Original Text of Sir Thomas More’, ibid. 131-50. Mention should be made of T. Merriam's ‘The Authorship of Sir Thomas More’, Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing Bulletin, 10 (1982), 1-8. Merriam's stylometric tests assign the entire original text to Shakespeare, a finding that has been generally rejected.

8. References are to the Oxford Shakespeare, general editors S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford, 1986). The scene 2.5 is more conventionally numbered 2.6.

9. Hoppe, The Bad Quarto, 220.

10. S. Thomas, ‘Henry Chettle and the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet’, RES ns 1 (1950), 8-16.

11. My view is based on an examination of the overall textual problem of Romeo and Juliet conducted whilst editing the play. See S. Wells and G. Taylor, with J. Jowett and W. Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987), 288, and notes to 3.1.92-108/1478-94 and 3.1.165/1557.

12. See, in addition to Jenkins, C. Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in ‘The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker’, edited by Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1980), i. 143-6.

13. I understand that the problem is currently being addressed by Thomas Merriam.

14. M. St Clare Byrne, ‘Bibliographical Clues in Collaborate Plays’, The Library, 4th ser., 13 (1932), 21-48.

15. Introds. to Anthony Munday, The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, ed. J. C. Meagher, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford, 1964 (1965)), and Munday, The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, ed. Meagher, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford, 1965 (1967)).

16. The Tragedy of Hoffman: or, A Revenge for a Father, ed. Harold Jenkins, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford, 1950 (1951)); Jenkins, ‘The 1631 Quarto of The Tragedy of Hoffman’, The Library, 5th ser., 6 (1951), 88-99.

17. E. J. Schlochauer, ‘A Note on the Variants in the Dedication of Chettle's Tragedy of Hoffman’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 42 (1948), 307-12.

18. Princeton University, 1948. The fullest collation of press variants appears in J. Jowett, ‘The Tragedy of Hoffman: An Edition’ (diss.: Univ. of Liverpool, 1983).

19. These paragraphs give a slightly modified summary of parts of my diss. edition of the play.

20. N. Carson, A Companion to Henslowe's Diary (Cambridge, 1988), 63.

21. M. Eccles, ‘Brief Lives: Tudor and Stuart Authors’, supplement to SP 79 (1982), 22-3.