A Mystery Of Errors

He put down his quill, removed his light, close-fitting, deerskin writing glove, which had no mate for he had made it himself to keep the ink off his fingers, and rubbed his eyes, wearily. For a moment, his tired gaze focused on the quill, which he had laid flat on the table, and the well-worn, ink-stained writing glove beside it. The parchment, quill, ink pot, and glove looked rather like a still-life composition, the sort of thing that art students would practice at before they moved on to the more advanced techniques of portraiture. And, coincidentally, it also made, in a sense, for a portrait of his life… what it had been, and what it could yet be. The product of the glovemaker, next to the product of the poet. He could go in either one direction or the other. And this present task might well establish which direction that would be.

Perhaps it would not all come down to this, he thought. Even if he failed at this task of doctoring the play, there could yet be other opportunities to prove himself, though he did not know when or even if those opportunities would arise. The iron was, perhaps, not yet glowing hot, but it was warm, and it was up to him to strike just right, and in the proper time. He could not afford to dwell upon the play’s deficiencies and bemoan Greene’s clumsy unoriginality. To keep thinking about such things would make the task weigh even more heavily upon him, and he would start to work more and more slowly, taking more and more frequent breaks, and before he knew it, all momentum would be lost entirely. He needed to think of the play merely as a framework, a scaffolding upon which he would build a more solid and finished edifice. It was not the sort of beginning he had hoped for, but it was the beginning he would get… if he could properly begin it.

By the time midday was approaching, he had mapped out all the changes he would make to the whole play and finished the first and second stages. In all, there would be five stages of gradual changes to the play, each one adding new lines and new scenes for every part, and dropping others, until by the time the third stage was completed, it would be a play that was significantly different from the original version-or to be more precise, Greene’s rewrite of whatever the original version may have been-and by the time the fifth version had been staged, it was a completely different play entirely. This way, Shakespeare thought, the actors would not be overwhelmed by having to learn too many different lines and scenes and cues, and the audience would have an unusual opportunity to see a work in progress, a play being performed even as it was being rewritten. It struck him as a novel experience, and anything new could only help the Queen’s Men at this point. They certainly needed help of some sort after that last performance.

Now all that remained was to get the play to Burbage and, unless it was deemed completely unacceptable, a frenzy of activity would begin down at the Theatre. It would be necessary to make a clean and legible “fair copy” of the play for submission to the Master of the Revels, for which purpose a scribe was usually employed. Poets… or playwrights, as some thought poets who wrote plays should be called, though this made it seem more like a craft rather than an art… were not generally known for their calligraphic skills. Their first drafts were usually covered with ink blottings and crossed-out lines and changes written in the margins and between the lines and, not infrequently, food and ale or wine stains. Hence, the term “foul papers” for the manuscript initially submitted.

The company scribe who made the fair copy was often the bookkeeper, and he needed to be especially trustworthy, for no acting company wanted to see any of its plays fall out of their hands or, worse yet, be published. That would mean that rival acting companies could get their hands on them and thereby stage rival productions. Of course, there was really nothing to prevent a rival company from sending people in to mingle with the audience at a popular play staged by the competition and thus try to copy down the lines, but this was a rather more difficult and time consuming enterprise, not to mention potentially risky if the offending copyist was caught in the act.