Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays

By Laura Estill

Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays. As this under-examined archival evidence shows, play readers and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be altered, appropriated, and, most importantly, used. These records provide information that is not available in other forms about the popularity and importance of early modern plays, the reasons plays appealed to their audiences, and the ideas in plays that most interested audiences.

Tracing the course of dramatic extracting from the earliest stages in the 1590s, through the prolific manuscript circulation at the universities, to the closure and reopening of the theatres, Estill gathers these microhistories to create a comprehensive overview of seventeenth-century dramatic extracts and the culture of extracting from plays. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays explores new archival evidence (from John Milton’s signature to unpublished university plays) while also analyzing the popularity of perennial favorites such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The study of dramatic extracts is the study of particulars: particular readers, particular manuscripts, particular plays or masques, particular historic moments. As D. F. McKenzie puts it, “different readers [bring] the text to life in different ways.” By providing careful analyses of these rich source texts, this book shows how active play-viewing and play-reading (that is, extracting) ultimately led to changing the plays themselves, both through selecting and manipulating the extracts and positioning the plays in new contexts.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Jan 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781644530474

Book preview

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Introduction

A Christ Church reader turned to William Cartwright’s 1651 collected works to copy pages of poetry and selections from The Royal Slave and The Ordinary. In Scotland, William Drummond read some recently published plays from the London stage and gathered bons mots. William Lilly, the astrologer, wrote pseudoscientific notes in a volume that also contains extracts from James Shirley’s Changes, Thomas Nabbes’s Hannibal and Scipio, and Thomas Heywood’s The Royal King.¹ We have long imagined early modern bookworms—but this university man, Drummond, and Lilly are actual readers who left tangible evidence of their interaction with plays. Early modern readers were not passive audiences: they were often themselves compilers, transcribers, revisers, and writers.

Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play-readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts, that is, selections from plays and masques, into their notebooks. These records provide information that is not available in other forms about the popularity and importance of early modern plays, the reasons plays appealed to their audiences, and the ideas in plays that most interested audiences. As this under-examined archival evidence reveals, play-readers and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be altered, appropriated, and most importantly, used.

With early modern plays, scholars often focus on how the original performance brings the text to life. Book historians have examined early modern print and manuscript plays to show the material circumstances under which these plays were written and published. As D. F. McKenzie famously asserts, however, different readers [bring] the text to life in different ways.² When we analyze dramatic extracts as a record of early modern responses to plays, we can incorporate a consideration of both print and performance, while also reconsidering the plays’ reception. This book is the first sustained study of dramatic extracts in manuscript, and the cultural, political, and literary forces of the early modern period that affect how we should approach and interpret both plays and their extracts. Dramatic extracts reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays.

Dramatic excerpting (or extracting) is the practice of copying selections from a play, either at a performance or from a print or manuscript source. These extracts appear in many types of manuscripts, including miscellanies, composite volumes, commonplace books, and diaries. While dramatic excerpting is easily defined, it can be more of a challenge to articulate what constitutes a dramatic extract.³ In some cases, a dramatic extract is easy to identify: it is a group of lines copied from a play. For the purpose of this study, I differentiate between extracts and abridgments or adaptations, although at times, they can overlap. For instance, George Bannatyne’s manuscript copy of David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits and Edward Dering’s telescoped version of both parts of William Shakespeare’s Henry IV are abridgments or adaptations. While these adaptations involve making a selection from a larger source text, they still present the final version as a play by including speech prefixes and maintaining the integrity of the plot.⁴ Not all cases, however, are as clear-cut as Bannatyne’s or Dering’s textual interventions, especially in those manuscripts that contain extensive extracts.⁵ If a manuscript contains the majority of a play or masque, I consider it an abridgment and only discuss these abridgments in their relation to shorter dramatic extracts.

Dramatic extracts are not abridgments or adaptations, but neither are they play fragments. A fragment is part of a once-complete version of a play that has been damaged, whereas manuscript compilers conceptualized dramatic extracts as separate from the plays. A dramatic excerpt is part of a larger play that a compiler selects and copies, deliberately omitting the rest of the play. For instance, the single leaf of Christopher Marlowe’s from The Massacre at Paris (Folger MS J.b.8) was once part of a complete text of the play, and therefore beyond the scope of this study. Similarly, handwritten additions meant to supplement imperfect print copies are not extracts.⁶ Acting parts, those manuscripts created for a player to rehearse his role, are not dramatic extracts because they do not indicate selectivity on the part of the compiler.⁷ Dramatic extracts are valuable for the study of early modern play reception because they provide a glimpse into early readers’ and playgoers’ reactions through their choices.

Although book-lists, allusions, and literary appropriations provide valuable insight into theatre history and early modern reception, they are not dramatic extracts either. Dramatic extracts involve copying selections from a play, whereas book-lists and allusions mention a title, playwright, character, or even moment in a play without offering any lines from the play. For instance, one gentleman, Henry Oxinden, copied a list of early modern plays in his commonplace book, Folger MS V.b.110 (p. 93). Gabriel Harvey famously pointed to Hamlet in a list of works enjoyed by The younger sort in his manuscript additions to Thomas Speght’s Chaucer (BL MS Add. 42518, f. 422v). Authors themselves would often refer to existing plays by title or character; The Shakspere Allusion-Book is chock-full of examples.⁸ Charles Whitney’s Early Responses to Renaissance Drama shows the value of exploring early modern reception history through these allusions.⁹ A mention of a play, however, is not the same as copying lines from that play. And although authors and playwrights would often recycle lines from other texts, literary appropriations or allusions (what William N. West calls play scraps) are not in the same vein as dramatic extracts because they intentionally repurpose parts of plays into other complete works.¹⁰

After reading what a dramatic extract is not (an abridgment, an adaptation, a fragment, a mention, or a literary appropriation), you might be left wondering about how much there is to say about those rare occasions where we find actual dramatic extracts. Except that dramatic extracts are not rare. Peter Beal’s Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts (CELM) lists hundreds of manuscripts compiled before 1700 that contain dramatic extracts from early modern plays written before the closure of the theatres in 1642.¹¹ The hundreds of manuscripts that Beal cites, however, provides only a sample of those that contain seventeenth-century dramatic extracts. Although CELM catalogues an extensive set of manuscripts that contain literary works from 1450–1700 and expands the coverage of Beal’s printed Index, it nevertheless focus on particular authors, thereby excluding lesser-known playwrights (such as Peter Hausted and William Peaps) and anonymous dramatic works (such as The Tragedy of Nero and The Mountebank’s Masque) that were also excerpted in seventeenth-century manuscripts.¹² Dramatic extracts reveal that early modern readers and audiences did not make the same assumptions about canon and authorship as modern scholars, but instead enjoyed plays by anonymous authors and playwrights who are almost entirely forgotten today. Many manuscript compilers copied dramatic extracts without ascribing the selection to its author, or even, at times, its play—though, as the examples in this book will show, others avidly followed the works of a particular playwright or scrupulously noted play titles, authors, and even page numbers. As CELM shows, there are thousands of known dramatic extracts, and many more to be discovered—these will certainly contribute even more to our understanding of early modern tastes, responses, and attitudes.

Just as there are certainly numerous manuscripts to be catalogued and copious extracts to be uncovered—even in catalogued material—many dramatic extracts have been lost because of their potentially ephemeral nature. Published dramatic extracts, which were printed in multiple copies, survive at a higher rate than those that were copied by hand. Most of the manuscripts discussed here are bound volumes: some readers copied extracts into empty notebooks that were pre-bound; other notebooks were bound after they were composed; and still other volumes, called aggregate or composite volumes, gather a variety of loose papers, such as letters and poems. In a few rare cases, we have evidence of a reader jotting a selection from a play onto a single leaf of paper—but these fragile documents rarely survive.¹³ It is likely that many readers who copied dramatic extracts never intended them to survive for centuries, but rather saw them as personal texts of value to themselves and perhaps a few friends. The low survival rate suggests that the evidence in extant manuscripts, such as dramatic extracts, needs to be considered as part of larger practices of reading and writing, instead of anomalous or rare.

Because of their changeable, adaptable, and useful nature, dramatic extracts are valuable pieces of archival evidence that should influence our understanding of early modern reading habits, textuality, and theatre. The examples discussed in this book prove that readers viewed early modern plays, like other texts, as works to be broken into fragments for personal use. Reconsidering plays as works that are malleable and divisible changes our understanding of how to evaluate early modern plays: we can consider them not as complete artistic units but as compendia of smaller pieces to be taken apart. For many early modern readers, the wit and value of a playwright lay in his or her use of sententiae, those pithy and often moral phrases that retain their value even when removed from the context of the play. Current scholarship on early modern drama explores multiple versions of texts (consider King Lear) and recognizes that many plays were the result of collaborative authorship. Valuing drama for its extracts and extractable nature further distances us from the idea of a Renaissance play as a single unit created by one author.

This examination of dramatic extracts in seventeenth-century manuscripts functions, in part, as a corrective to author-centric and Shakespeare-centric scholarship by returning to lesser-known plays as well as anonymous or relatively unknown compilers, which better captures early modern thinking about plays. This method of examination furthers our understanding beyond both the stage and the page by looking at how audiences and readers divided, changed, and used the plays as part of their daily lives. Dramatic extracts are evidence of the interpretive relationship that play-readers and playgoers had to plays—and the extracts themselves are often yet to be interpreted by scholars. The study of dramatic extracts is the study of particulars: particular readers, particular manuscripts, particular plays or masques, particular historic moments. Although no beautifully coherent history of dramatic extracts can (or, perhaps, should) be written, it is nevertheless important to attend to the historic patterns of dramatic extracting.

The study of dramatic extracts has its roots in literary studies, textual scholarship, and book history. Another valuable context for researching dramatic extracts can be found in analyses of manuscript poetry, just as manuscript poetry itself is often a context for the extracts themselves.¹⁴ Scholarship on commonplacing, print commonplace books and miscellanies, manuscript commonplace books, and scribal publication provides a framework for understanding the culture of extracting and anthologizing.¹⁵ Even with the scholarly work on full-text plays, playhouse documents, and acting parts, dramatic extracts are often ignored—though recent editors of Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton have begun to gesture toward this archival evidence.¹⁶ Examining dramatic extracts combines elements of all of these areas of research, while also making a distinct contribution by analyzing overlooked texts that change how we understand the reception of early modern plays.

To date, any discussion of dramatic extracts has been focused on primarily Shakespearean extracts, while research on non-Shakespearean extracts generally takes a music history approach to songs from plays.¹⁷ This Shakespearean focus points more to our modern preoccupation with Shakespeare than to early modern reading practices; the archival evidence suggests that there are more manuscripts with extracts from plays by Jonson, Francis Beaumont & John Fletcher, James Shirley, or even Sir John Suckling than Shakespeare.¹⁸Shakespearean extracts, furthermore, are more frequently identified and catalogued than their non-Shakespearean counterparts. It used to be that when faced with an unidentified stanza in a commonplace book or verse miscellany, a scholar could only determine its origins through intuition and extensive searching—and even that might have yielded no results. With digitized and searchable online play-texts, however, we can now identify the sources of extracts more easily, which provides a fuller picture of early modern textual culture.

Considering dramatic extracts complements previous research done on parts of plays, such as songs, epilogues, and prologues. Tiffany Stern’s Documents of Performance in Early Modern England casts early modern playwrights as play-patchers who brought together many disparate texts into one play.¹⁹ Her landmark book is important to the study of dramatic extracts because it shows how parts of plays, particularly songs, prologues, and epilogues, were frequently written and circulated separately from plays. Where Stern focuses on how plays are created from various separate texts, this book reveals how readers and audiences took plays apart after they were performed and published as complete texts. Both before and after their inclusion in a complete play, smaller sections circulated separately.

The practice of dramatic extracting was undertaken for centuries. This book focuses on extracts from English plays and masques first performed or published before 1642; the wealth of extracts from Restoration plays deserves in-depth consideration on their own. To show how extracts from dramatic works circulated beyond the moments of their play’s initial publication or performance, this examination considers dramatic extracts that were copied in manuscripts until 1700. Creating a narrative of dramatic extracts requires maintaining multiple historical points of focus: the original circumstances when the play was written, performed, and published and the later moment(s) when a playgoer or reader encountered the text or performance and copied selections into manuscript. As a series of microhistories, the study of dramatic excerpting can more accurately gauge the fierce particularities of these manuscripts, their individual compilers, and the changing cultural and literary contexts in which plays were seen and read.²⁰ Extracting from both plays and other literary works continued into the eighteenth century and beyond, which would be an area for further research that could concentrate on the changing literary and theatrical landscapes.

Chapter 1 demonstrates that dramatic extracting evolved from the long tradition of copying pithy and wise sayings from classical and religious sources, a practice known as commonplacing. In this chapter, I address the related questions of when dramatic excerpting began in England, why manuscript compilers began selecting dramatic extracts in the 1590s, and how dramatic extracting evolved over the early seventeenth century. I describe individual manuscripts and instances of dramatic excerpting, while also offering patterns and connections. This chapter includes an analysis of William Briton’s extracts from Gorboduc, a new way of considering the selections from Titus Andronicus in the Longleat manuscript, as well as a discussion of the newly rediscovered writing guide, The Modell of Poesye (BL MS Add. 81083). I show how changing attitudes toward vernacular literature and popular theatre led to the appearance of dramatic extracts in print and manuscript. This chapter also investigates the material contexts of dramatic extracting by considering the increase in play publication, typographical conventions such as commonplace markers, and writing technologies such as the table-book. Chapter 1 outlines multiple ways dramatic extracts circulated: for instance, they could be copied from full-text plays or print miscellanies, transmitted orally, or jotted down during a performance. As this chapter shows, early modern audiences and readers did not consider plays as unified artistic wholes, but as sources to be dismantled, changed, and mined for wit, wisdom, and song. This exploration of early extracts sets up how and why readers copied extracts (from performance, full-text plays, print miscellanies, other manuscripts, and memory) in order to provide contexts for the analysis in later chapters.

The over-arching argument of Chapter 2 is that the act of excerpting from a masque or entertainment creates meanings distinct from both the moment of performance and from the complete print or manuscript version. In Chapter 2, I argue that we can no longer consider masques as purely performed or occasional texts, but instead need to recognize them as cultural and literary currency whose meaning and value changed over time. I show how masque extracts were decontextualized from their full-text sources and recontextualized, in, for instance, state papers, to highlight their status as political texts, or alongside classical authors to add literary gravitas. I do not dispute the historical readings of performed masques as cultural and political texts, but instead offer an examination of excerpts from masques as embedded in new manuscript and print contexts. To put it another way, this chapter looks at the occasions of excerpting and the circulation of those extracts rather than the occasions of performance. I investigate the popularity of Nicholas Breton’s In the Merry Month of May, examine John Milton’s not-yet-discussed self-quotation from Comus (—if Vertue feeble were / Heaven it selfe would stoope to her), and consider Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed in relation to a scandal that involved adultery, cross-dressing, and expatriation. The study of dramatic extracts reveals that the cultural value of masques and entertainments extends beyond the initial moments of performance and publication.

Chapter 3 establishes dramatic extracting as a key way that theatrical activity persisted after the closure of the theatres. This chapter introduces a major development in seventeenth-century dramatic extracting: the dramatic miscellany, a book or manuscript primarily comprising dramatic extracts. Some well-known examples of dramatic miscellanies are John Cotgrave’s print English Treasury of Wit and Language—which contains extracts from plays by Samuel Daniel, John Ford, and William Davenant—and Abraham Wright’s commonplace book, BL MS Add. 22608. Wright, for instance, noted that Hamlet was but an indifferent play (f. 85v) and preferred the works of James Shirley to Shakespeare; Wright also copied selections from less popular plays, including Henry Shirley’s The Martyred Soldier and Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts. Taking into account the complicated political valences of the mid-seventeenth century, I show that early modern responses to drama were personalized and contingent. This chapter demonstrates the importance of attending to each manuscript and extract carefully; for instance, my research uncovers hitherto overlooked extracts in Wright’s dramatic miscellany that require scholars to re-date and reconsider both his manuscript and his attitudes toward plays. Many studies of early modern theatre take 1642 as a seemingly natural end-date. Dramatic miscellanies, one of the apogees of dramatic extracting, force us to consider the afterlives of plays beyond the closure of the theatres.

Attending to individuals and their manuscripts encourages us to rethink traditional periodization of theatrical and literary history. Chapter 4 explores how revivals, adaptations, and republications contributed to the continued extracting from Renaissance plays during the Restoration. The reopening of the theatres was a momentous event that in many cases altered how readers and playgoers perceived earlier plays by juxtaposing them with new drama predicated on different aesthetic values. This chapter shows how songs from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (most prominently Where the bee sucks) circulated alongside songs from the John Dryden-William Davenant and Thomas Shadwell adaptations. Extracts from The Tempest elicited both response poems and additional verses with topical references—in one case, to King Charles II’s notorious womanizing. In other cases, however, dramatic extracts from Renaissance plays continued to circulate as they had in the earlier seventeenth century, in verse miscellanies and commonplace books without reference to new productions and publications. Along with other primary sources, this chapter analyzes John Muddyclift’s diary entries (BL MS Sloane 161) about play reading and dramatic extracting that were bound with his dramatic extracts from an Elizabethan masque (Sir Philip Sidney’s Lady of May), a recently revived tragedy (Jonson’s Catiline), and a contemporary adaptation (Shadwell’s The Miser). The manuscripts discussed in this chapter offer concrete evidence of Restoration attitudes toward earlier plays.

Though William Sancroft is best known as the Archbishop of Canterbury during the nonjuring schism, he was also a prolific manuscript compiler who, as Chapter 5 reveals, copied hundreds of extracts from Renaissance plays. Sancroft’s manuscripts include previously unnoted dramatic extracts that exemplify many of the trends in dramatic extracting: the circulation of extracts in separates (short, contained manuscripts that were passed from person to person), their inclusion as poems in verse miscellanies, the appreciation of them as rhetorical utterances, the construction of dramatic miscellanies replete with selections from plays, the recontextualizing and decontextualizing of dramatic material, and the Restoration expression of nostalgia for Renaissance theatre. Sancroft is a significant example of dramatic extracting not only because of his high-profile standing but also because of his wide-ranging scholarship and his prolific extracting. The varied purposes and range of Sancroft’s extracts offer evidence of one educated man’s tastes, his views of authorship, and his conceptions of the canon, while also showcasing the multiple ways snippets from drama were part of quotidian seventeenth-century textual culture.

While previous chapters establish the importance of attending to one manuscript or one compiler, Chapter 6 demonstrates the value of studying the transmission of a single extract by tracing the path of one particular dramatic extract that appeared in multiple print and manuscript sources over the seventeenth century: Shakespeare’s fat paunches have lean pates from Love’s Labour’s Lost. This chapter investigates the proverbial nature of commonplaces in relation both to playwriting and to dramatic extracting. The fat paunches extract is a prime example of how dramatic extracts were not always taken from the plays themselves and could be copied from intermediate sources. The diverse intermediate sources show how extracts were not just parts of plays; they were parts of early modern textual culture. The widely varied contexts for this couplet (from a print physiognomical tract to a collaboratively written University miscellany) reveal how dramatic extracts circulated beyond their source texts, accruing new meanings in new contexts.

The conclusion of Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays reinforces the importance of archival research on dramatic extracts as a means of understanding the circulation and textuality of early modern plays, reader and audience responses, and the historically changing meaning of dramatic texts. I suggest that the multiple ways of approaching dramatic extracts (by play, by playwright, by manuscript, by compiler, and, indeed, by extract) will deepen our understanding of particular plays and historic moments. This book offers a foundation for the study of dramatic extracts and highlights the importance of further work on these significant, although rarely analyzed, texts.

Dramatic extracts show how theatrical texts circulated in everyday life, not as full-text artistic works, but as phrases to be used in conversation, as songs and poems, and as snippets of wisdom and advice. The act of watching a performance or reading a play was not passive: audience members scribbled notes into table-books just as readers jotted down their impressions or copied lengthy passages. In our classrooms and on our stages, twenty-first-century teachers and directors have treated Renaissance plays as unified works of art, but recent scholarship calls this treatment into question by pointing out that plays were cobbled from various sources, written collaboratively, and revised extensively. The evidence provided by dramatic extracts confirms this challenge to the received perception of plays as whole artistic units by proving that early modern reading and viewing audiences did not see plays solely as cohesive wholes, but rather, as texts that could be fragmented and changed.

Centuries have passed since the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were first performed and read, leaving scholars to lament the lack of evidence, but dramatic extracts in print and manuscript provide one often-overlooked form of archival documentation that presents a glimpse into how early modern readers and audiences approached the plays. As more dramatic extracts are uncovered, and as the known dramatic extracts can be examined more fully, further research will undoubtedly reveal valuable information about early responses to plays, early modern reading, writing, playgoing, and ultimately, the plays themselves.

Dramatic extracts are tangible evidence of what the plays themselves have told us: early modern plays were written for you to make of what you will and to take as you like it.

NOTES

1. The William Cartwright extracts are from Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 951; William Drummond’s extracts can be found in NLS MS 2059 (discussed in Chapter 1); William Lilly’s notes, which are in a hand-writing not unlike the dramatic extracts, can be found in Bodleian MS Ashmole 420. The handwriting observation is taken from William Henry Black, Bodleian Library Quarto Catalogue (Ashmole collection).

2. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, The Panizzi Lectures, 1985 (London: The British Library, 1986), 17.

3. I use the terms extract and excerpt (both as nouns and verbs) interchangeably.

4. Bannatyne’s manuscript, NLS Adv. MS 1.1.6; Dering’s manuscript, Folger MS V.b.34.

5. For instance, Arbury Hall MS 414 could be considered an abridgment or a series of extensive extracts taken from the 1617/18 Gray’s Inn Revels (sometimes called Gesta Grayorum Part 2 or The Masque of Mountebanks).

6. One of example of this is the Globe’s first folio (sometimes called West 172, formerly owned by John Wolfson), which has a handwritten page to supplement an incomplete version of Cymbeline. See Peter Beal, comp., Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM), King’s College London, celm2.dighum.kcl.ac.uk, entry ShW41.8.

7. See Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

8. C. M. Ingleby et al., eds., The Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere From 1591 to 1700, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus and Duffield & Company, 1909).

9. Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For more on allusions to Shakespeare and documentary evidence, see Catherine Loomis, Shakespeare: A Documentary Volume, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 263 (Detroit: Gale, 2002).

10. William N. West, ‘Go By!’: Intertheatrical Passages Between Early Modern Playhouses (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Toronto, Ontario, March 28–30 2013). Douglas Bruster explores Shakespeare both quoting and quoted (3), but similarly does not look at the quotation of Shakespeare or other dramatists in manuscript. Bruster, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

11. CELM expands the information previously available in his print Index: Beal, comp., Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. 1, 1450–1625 (New York: Mansell, 1980); vol. 2, 1625–1700 (New York: Mansell, 1993).

12. Excerpts from Hausted’s The Rival Friends are found in Folger MS V.a.87 (ff. 24v–26) along with excerpts from the anonymous play The Tragedy of Nero (ff. 10–11). Excerpts from Peaps’s Love in it’s Extasie appear in BL MS Add. 22608, ff. 114–15. For more on these manuscripts, see Chapter 3. For a list the multiple manuscripts that contain excerpts from The Mountebank’s Masque, see Alan H. Nelson and John R. Elliott, Jr., eds, Records of Early English Drama: Inns of Court, 3 vols. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,