The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama by Schneider Brian W.;

Author:Schneider, Brian W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

More Framing Texts than We Suspect?

What a new Play without an Epilogue?81

81 John Banks, Cyrus the Great, London, 1696, A4. The title page of Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pythias (1565, published 1571) states that ‘the Prologue … is somewhat altered for the proper use of them that hereafter shall haue occasion to plaie it’.82 Apparently, therefore, the edition does not print the original prologue, and we do not know the extent of what is described as ‘somewhat altered’. Thus, there may be two quite different prologues, or at least two versions of the same prologue. In any event, there is, on the evidence of the title page, one extra (lost) prologue to add to the tally of prologues in the period.

82 Richard Edwards, The Works of Richard Edwards, Ros King, ed., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, 108. In a different context, there is the strange nature of the single reference to the Prologue figure in Thomas Middleton’s Your Five Gallants (1605). In the first extant edition of the play, an initial stage direction prior to a Dumb Show begins: ‘Presenter or prologue passing over the stage, the Bawde-gallant, with three wenches’.83 No more is heard of, or from, the Presenter/Prologue figure, which raises the possibility that there was some action or introductory speech performed prior to the stage direction, a speech that never reached the printer. If there were such a speech, it would make sense of the Presenter/Prologist’s move across the stage and his disappearance from the play thereafter. It would also lend some credence to the argument put forward here, that there were more framing texts composed, or spoken extempore, in the period than have survived. The editors of the recent collected works of Middleton, cited earlier, with some ingenuity, turn the whole Dumb Show into the prologue.84 To do this, however, is to assume that the prologue begins with the words ‘Passing over the stage’, which seems unlikely.

83 Thomas Middleton, Your Five Gallants, London, 1608, A2. 84 Their argument is set out in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, eds, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007, 577, 598. The statistical evidence suggests that a little over half of the extant plays prior to 1660 enjoyed prologues and/or epilogues. Berger’s Index lists some 671 extant plays.85 Of these, 369 have prologues and 307 have epilogues (some, as has been noted earlier in this work, have more than one of these framing texts, although they do not always appear at the beginning or end of the plays they embellish, and are not always allowed uninterrupted performance). Weimann and Bruster note, for example, that ‘a high of 64 per cent of surviving plays originally performed from 1580 to 1589 have prologues, in contrast to a low of 31 per cent … from 1590 to 1599’.86 Remarks made in some plays during these decades seem to bear out the (temporary) decline in usage and popularity of the prologue.87 The decline is reversed

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