EMLS 14.3 (January, 2009) 5.1-36 Old Plays and the General Reader: an Essay in Praise of the Regents Renaissance Drama Series

Old Plays and the General Reader: an Essay in Praise of the Regents Renaissance Drama Series

Charles Cathcart
The Open University
charlescathcart@hotmail.com

Charles Cathcart. "Old Plays and the General Reader: an Essay in Praise of the Regents Renaissance Drama Series". Early Modern Literary Studies 14.3 (January, 2009) 5.1-36 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/14-3/Cathrege.html>.

Late in the 1970s, acting on a teacher’s recommendation, I bought a copy of John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, and there on a spacious page I read the opening line,

Still to be haunted, still to be pursued,
and my love affair with old plays began. The edition I possessed was that of the Regents Renaissance Drama Series. It was published in Britain by Edward Arnold; Cyrus Hoy was the general editor of the series; and the volume’s editor was D.K. Anderson. The book cost 70 pence, which was then a significant outlay for someone on a low weekly wage, though not so great an expense as to prevent further purchases. The price was, I believe, a discounted one, and many companion volumes were then available for the same sum in the great London bookshops of Foyles and Dillon’s. I now regret that I did not buy more of them.1
My emphasis upon the retail price of my Perkin Warbeck is quite deliberate. In this essay I shall commend the Regents Renaissance Drama Series and advocate its merits as a format for presenting the texts of Renaissance plays. It is therefore fair that I also record that the profusion of discounted copies available in the London of thirty years ago hardly suggests a commercial viability to match the scholarly and aesthetic qualities I shall claim for the publishing venture.
Series volumes were released in both Britain and the United States, where the publisher was the University of Nebraska Press. The American series – the senior partner in the enterprise – appeared under the imprint of Bison Books. The text and layout were the same as that of the Edward Arnold volumes, though the series in America did not possess the striking cover design of the British paperbacks. These covers displayed a detail from an embroidered bodice – a tiny detail, blown large, in which the depiction of a bird and of a trefoil leaf and flower with a long and curling stem was prominent. The same illustration adorned all the paperback volumes of the British series, variously appearing in shades of blue, pink, green, purple, and yellow. The surname of the playwright or playwrights appeared in lower case Roman type above the play’s title, which was in a larger point size and in capitals. These were framed by the title of the series, placed above and in italics, and by the editor’s name, which appeared with the same typography below. The appearance was spare and attractive.
The preliminaries featured a series statement by the general editor, a contents page and a list of abbreviations, and there was also an introduction, usually of about ten pages. The text of the play was exceptionally followed by an appendix unique to the volume, and each edition concluded with a chronological appendix in a standard form, again of some ten pages long. Given that the play text itself might typically take up a hundred pages, most editions were slim ones. A long play, such as Bartholomew Fair, or one of the series’ six double volumes (amongst which I include the parallel text edition of Every Man in his Humour), would result in a plumper book, but on no occasion was a lengthy introduction or voluminous notes responsible for an outsize publication.
The slightness of the Regents volumes derives in part from a certain modesty of scholarly ambition. Regents editions record textual variants, including all departures from the chosen copy text, on each page of the play, so that readers may see for themselves the choices that editors have made in preparing their text; and in this way the Regents series matches the practice of the most authoritative editions of early modern plays. But there is no requirement for Regents editors to record press corrections; the analysis of an editor’s textual decisions is succinct; and questions of provenance – that is, of authorial attribution, date, revision, and company ownership – are reviewed briskly rather than exhaustively. In this regard a certain principle is usually at play for established series of Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean drama. This applies to series of individual plays rather than to collections of plays, and it suggests that the more thorough the editing procedure has been, the more extensive will be the non-textual apparatus – principally, the introduction to the volume and the explanatory notes. In other words, a series with high scholarly aspirations is likely to yield bulky editions. Of course, there are exceptions to this general rule, and individual volumes from such prestigious series as the Revels Plays or the Arden Shakespeare have had their editorial rigour challenged; and some volumes from series with less ambitious general standards – in the area of textual collation for example – considerably exceed the requirements for their series. However, viewed against the field, Regents volumes are compact in relation to their standard of scholarship.
A further principle appears to operate, one that again relates to editions of single Renaissance plays, and this also is a kind of donnèe. It dictates a sharp division between series of plays written by Shakespeare and series of drama composed by other Renaissance authors. This rule, if it is fair to call it such, is observed with remarkably few exceptions. Of course, the growing acknowledgement that there is a substantial body of drama in which Shakespeare’s writing sits alongside that of other dramatists means that the principle of division is necessarily stretched.2 The inclusion of Edward III in the Cambridge Shakespeare and of Sir Thomas More within the Revels plays (where its principal ascription is to ‘Munday and others’) demonstrates this tension.3 It was anticipated by G.R. Proudfoot’s edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen in the Regents series, with a title page ascription to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare.4 Recent editions by Gordon McMullan of Henry VIII for the Arden Shakespeare and by John Jowett of Timon of Athens for the Oxford series form perhaps the richest and most searching editorial discussions of the critical implications of collaborative authorship to date; and both McMullan and Jowett place a special stress upon the contributions of Shakespeare’s collaborators, John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton.5 The context of both editions, however, is that of a dedicated series of Shakespeare’s writing.
This publishing distinction between the drama of Shakespeare and of his contemporaries is no doubt fired by the financial and marketing pressures and opportunities to which publishing houses must necessarily respond. However, it increasingly lacks either a rationale of critical and theoretical substance or even a straightforwardly practical and common sense division into a single coherent authorial corpus and a remainder. In certain ways the Regents series appears outmoded, but in this regard it has not as yet been supplanted by innovative successors.
Despite the presence of The Two Noble Kinsmen within the Regents canon, the series was effectively a collection of non-Shakespearean drama. Yet it was not avowedly such an enterprise, for its series statement simply describes its range as ‘the more significant plays of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline theatre’. Perhaps this reflects a tendency for university English departments in the 1960s, when the Regents series got under way, to adopt ‘Jacobean Drama’ or ‘Elizabethan Drama’ courses that stood alongside, but did not overlap with, a ‘Shakespeare’ course. The Regents series statement does not profess any design to meet the needs of student readers, but the back covers of earlier Arnold paperbacks announce that the series is ‘intended for use in universities and the upper forms of schools’.6 Given this early purpose, the range of plays to appear within the Regents series has its oddities. (A bibliography may be viewed by title, by title page author and by year of publication.) The forty-three volumes of the series unearth many neglected plays of excellence and produce new and sometimes notable editions of more celebrated plays, yet there is no place for The Alchemist, Doctor Faustus, The Duchess of Malfi, Edward II, Volpone or Women Beware Women. Given the high canonical place these plays have occupied during the past fifty years, the omission is striking. However, an early account by Cyrus Hoy of the plans for the series makes clear that the Regents canon was designed to have a yet wider scope than it actually attained.7 The published series, in its finished state, clearly diverges from the lists of the principal competitors to the Regents series: the New Mermaids and the Revels Plays. Although Edward II was a relatively late addition to the Revels series, appearing in 1994, each of the six plays has enjoyed a paperback release for both the New Mermaids and the Revels series; and Malfi, Volpone and Women Beware Women all appear within the Revels Student Editions. Faustus, indeed, holds a unique place within the Revels series, for it is the only play to have received a second edition; or, rather, a new edition which (unlike John Jump’s volume of 1962) presents two alternative texts, each based on a different early modern publication.8 The later volume responds not only to a changing view about the inception of the different Renaissance texts but also to a shift in thinking about the intellectual basis upon which modern editions are built.
This single Revels instance of a new volume – and essentially a replacement volume, for the publisher, Manchester University Press, has not continued to release Jump’s edition – is the sole example of an approach which the New Mermaids have adopted as a matter of policy. The New Mermaids, which commenced their operation at around the time that the Regents series began to appear, have continued for over forty years to develop their list. Some plays have fallen by the wayside with the result that such editions as those of James IV and Sejanus His Fall have not persisted in print.9 On the other hand, plays with a rich critical and performance history in the intervening years have received new editions, and this includes each of the six plays named as significant omissions from the Regents series.10
In this way, therefore, the New Mermaids have been able to renew themselves. Through selective additions to their list and by selectively replacing or updating individual editions they have been able not only to accommodate new scholarship and shifting critical perspectives upon plays that have long held a high canonical place but to respond to changing notions of what that canon should be. It is presumably for this reason that The Roaring Girl has been for a second time edited for the New Mermaids.11 The same play also appeared within the Revels Plays, for which it was first published in 1987.12 Manchester University Press have responded to the way that concerns of gender, sexuality and race have permeated English studies in recent decades more clearly through the Revels Plays Companion Library, which has released volumes such as Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays and Three Renaissance Travel Plays, and the Revels Student Editions, one of which is titled Plays on Women.13
Whatever changes of emphasis the Revels series may have experienced over the fifty years of its life, it has maintained a degree of detachment from the shifts of intellectual fashion that have taken place over this period. Nevertheless, the very length of time through which the series has been sustained means that its volumes have a span of generations. One achievement of the series has been to release many of Ben Jonson’s plays. Indeed, the Revels series has partly anticipated the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson as a concerted effort to provide a modern alternative to Herford and Simpson. The Revels volumes, with the dates of their first publication, are these: Bartholomew Fair (1960), The Alchemist (1967), Eastward Ho (1979), Volpone (1983), The New Inn (1984), The Staple of News (1988), Sejanus His Fall (1990), The Devil is an Ass (1994), Poetaster (1995), The Magnetic Lady (2000), Every Man In His Humour (2000), Every Man Out of His Humour (2001), Epicene; or, The Silent Woman (2003).14 The rate of new additions to this corpus has speeded up, and only a single edition, that of the collaborative Eastward Ho, appeared between 1967 and 1983; but in general this effort has been consistent and gradual, extending to date for over forty-three years.
This forms a striking contrast with the development of the Regents series. The first Regents volume released by Edward Arnold appeared in 1964. By the end of the decade the great majority of the Regents editions were in print. A few volumes appeared in the early 1970s, but it was a venture with fruits that largely appeared in the 1960s. The ‘Revels Jonson’ on the other hand commenced four years prior to the first British Regents play and it continues to expand. In this way the Revels Plays, like the New Mermaids, have adapted to changing academic priorities. The Revels Bartholomew Fair is by no means a redundant edition, and the recent Epicene is not modish in its concerns; yet it is instructive to see how different in tone and in content are the introductions to the two volumes, for Jonson’s twin comic achievements might otherwise sit neatly together as companion plays.
The Regents series, on the other hand, is firmly located within a narrow range of time and it is animated by a set of scholarly and critical values that reflects this period. Of course, the different volumes of the series also mirror the styles and concerns of their various editors; but the individual editing projects were undertaken within a shared academic context. There are certain ways in which this endeavour now appears dated. But it is worth saying first that there is a modernity to the series. Before the 1960s, Renaissance plays were largely available to readers in books that were either heavy and academic, or spare, highbrow and largely without annotation.
An example of the former might be Thomas Marc Parrott’s great edition of George Chapman’s plays. There is a lively and unfussy air to Parrot’s introductions and notes, and the achievement of this edition is perhaps worthy of comparison with that of the Herford–Simpson Jonson in its thoroughness and its legacy to later scholars, yet the reading experience it yields is altogether shaped by the material forms in which the edition exists. Chapman’s comedies, for example, comprising one part of the edition, have been published in a heavy double volume, and also in a lighter single volume in which ten plays and a masque, together with their various introductions and notes, all appear.15 Neither offers a pleasant way of enjoying these plays.
In contrast to this, the original Mermaids series of Renaissance plays was a popular venture. Largely arranged by author, this was essentially a series of selected plays. There was little suggestion that these selections were arbitrary, for the editions appeared as ‘The Best Plays of’ the author in question. The selections are introduced with a biographical memoir, one which typically includes pithy summaries of the genre and the narrative content of the plays presented and makes an estimate of the likely interest they will hold for their readers. These assessments are forthrightly evaluative. The editors were often well known literary figures, and Arthur Symons, Havelock Ellis and Algernon Charles Swinburne are amongst them. The volumes are compact, printed on thin paper, and the text is readably set with a generous typeface. The editions do not have a scholarly format. They offer minimal annotation and there is little effort to offer a provenance for the text or to explain the editorial procedures. They most resemble Everyman’s occasional editions of Renaissance plays and they certainly seem to be marketed at a lay readership.
These then were the principal options for reading Renaissance drama when the first Regents volumes were released in the mid-1960s. The first volumes of the Revels Plays were newly in print and the early New Mermaids appeared as the first Regents volumes were emerging. The short-lived Fountainwell series, which offered single Renaissance plays in old-spelling editions, became available at the same time. The profusion of new editions to emerge in the 1960s was a charged cultural phenomenon. The expansion of higher education, an enhanced regard for accessibility, of which the growth in paperback use was a part, an increase in personal spending power and developments in technology, both of which also contributed to the rise of the paperback: all of these are familiar as aspects of the ‘long sixties’ (to use Arthur Marwick’s term). The greater availability of Elizabethan plays was one offshoot of these social changes.16 In certain ways, too, classics of the Renaissance drama had an appeal to the tastes of the time. Perhaps a heightened attention to John Webster’s plays, or to The Revenger’s Tragedy, had its counter-cultural aspect; and perhaps also the plays of Jonson and Chapman were less likely to gain new admirers during the sixties.
The Regents series was largely confined to this decade. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the single play to appear in 1963 in America, was one of five volumes published in the British debut year of 1964. By the end of the decade the flow of new editions was slackening, and the final volume released by Edward Arnold, Middleton and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel, came out in England in 1977, a year after its release by the University of Nebraska Press. Uniquely, as I believe, No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s was released only in America; and this publication also took place in 1976.
As Table 1 indicates, the Regents series was one which emerged in little over a decade; indeed, in both Britain and America over two-thirds of Regents volumes were published from 1964 to 1968. The series was therefore a venture that fell within a narrow range of time: it neither established its style over an extended period, as did the Revels Plays, nor updated and revivified itself in the manner of the New Mermaids. This certainly left the Regents canon with an outdated air, for its choice of plays is hardly one to address an interest in sexual politics, or queer theory, or race and cultural difference, or eco-criticism, and is only partly one to enlighten questions of power and resistance. I have mentioned those omissions from its corpus that seem surprising, given its stated intention to present ‘the more significant’ plays of the period. Academic readers today might note the absence of The Island Princess, Mariam, A Woman Killed with Kindness or The Witch of Edmonton. Indeed, the absence of domestic drama leaves a notable gap within the series, especially given the appearance of the Penguin Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies in 1969.17 Instead, the inclusions within the Regents series are often classical in temper, and All Fools, Catiline, and The Wounds of Civil War are amongst them. Attempting to place the series within the cultural values of the 1960s may partly illuminate its genesis; but doing so would also fail to acknowledge what is traditional about the venture. Perhaps the 1960s rediscovery of Early Music may form a fair analogy, for in that movement a cherishing of what had once been a narrowly antiquarian taste had a focus in the quest for authenticity; and in the attempt to slough off the obfuscation of the intervening years a new attitude to the artistic creations of the Renaissance emerged, one that sought to understand and in some measure to recreate the conditions in which the works were first composed.18
The Early Music revival, however, aspired to become a popular as well as a scholarly fashion. To what extent was the new availability of scholarly editions of Renaissance plays in modern paperback form also a popularizing venture? Clearly, the growing student population was a principal target, whether or not the Regents list was well placed to reach that target. So too was the professional scholarly community; and the various play texts furnished by the Regents, the Revels, and the New Mermaids quickly became the editions of choice for most scholars. But the slim and elegant volumes of the Regents series, as well as the release of every New Mermaids edition and many of the Revels plays in paperback, testify to a marketing strategy that at least entertains the possibility of a non-specialist readership.
There was a counterpart to this modernizing tendency in the publication of Renaissance drama. This was the massive growth in productions of old plays that gathered pace in the 1960s as the fringe theatres of London grew and that reached its height in the 1970s and 1980s; that had its reflection in provincial repertories; that continues, if less insistently, to this day; and of which the ‘Read not Dead’ series run by Globe Education may be deemed an outgrowth.19 This meant that many plays for which there was no recorded performance since Restoration times, or even earlier, or in some cases ever, were realized on stage. The early Revels editions had a dedicated note upon each play’s stage history. This note frequently recorded a blank in modern times – and yet in many cases this has since been rectified.20 It is not easy to say what was cause, what was effect, and what was a common response to the social and academic changes associated with the sixties. It seems clear, however, that the sudden growth in modern academic editions of Renaissance plays and the parallel staging of the same repertoire were connected happenings. Of course, many productions may have reached a public less effectively than even an obscure edition; and I have strong memories of being in a tiny audience easily outnumbered by the players of Tamburlaine the Great, part two. Yet the growth and range of performed early modern drama in modern times has meant that readers and non-readers of Renaissance plays have had opportunities to see plays performed that no generation since Stuart times has experienced.
And readers of the Regents Renaissance Drama Series have had their access to many early modern texts made sweet to them. The concise and selective annotation is available to the reader on the same page as the text. It is rare for these notes to be so extensive as to challenge the play’s text for primacy on a given page. The modest point size of the dialogue – itself greater than that of the annotations below – together with the wide margins of each page enables the dialogue to have an appearance at once elegant and clear. The use of capitals for speech headings and the generous indentation of the lines to be spoken allow the layout of a play’s text to achieve a clear indication of speech divisions. No doubt there is a subjective element to my sense that the Regents series attains a more pleasing arrangement of its texts than do its principal competitors; and I freely acknowledge that this is a largely inauthentic gracefulness, for most early modern quartos present a cluttered appearance. Yet the achievements of the Regents series in presenting its texts pleasantly are considerable. The wide margins allow prose dialogue to appear with a degree of spaciousness; and for plays written predominantly in verse there is a special elegance. In Donald K. Anderson’s edition of The Broken Heart, a companion volume to Perkin Warbeck, the match between text and publication form is sublime. The cool precision of Ford’s verse acquires a visual form of corresponding beauty. Ford’s language, his syntax, and his range of allusion are likely to be, for us, relatively accessible, and so the sparing extent of Anderson’s explanatory notes is helpful to the general effect; and the Regents Catiline, for example, suffers a little by comparison, whereas such editions as the series’ Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay or Antonio’s Revenge do not.
Antonio’s Revenge and its companion volume, Antonio and Mellida, possess introductions by their editor, G.K. Hunter, that use the narrow canvas of the Regents format with exceptional verve. Marston’s critics have sometimes found the task of introducing a single play, as opposed to reviewing the dramatist’s oeuvre, an aid to their endeavour. Hunter approaches the two plays winningly, seeking to identify what is exceptional about each one, rather than to address all of the many points of interest the plays hold for both scholars and critics. And the very brevity of his assessment means that items of particular insight – that the analogy of opera may help the reader to approach Antonio and Mellida and that Antonio’s Revenge may better reward its students if they attend to ritual rather than to psychology or morality – are unlikely to be lost.
Typically, a Regents introduction would succinctly review the provenance of the play in question, commenting upon any matters of uncertainty about its inception or revision, and at their best these discussions possess the limpidity of a helpful scholarly note. This, together with a comment upon the play’s text, with which it might be combined, and an observation upon stage history, is almost invariably subordinated to an overview of the play itself. This might comment upon the formal properties of the play, as when Cyrus Hoy commences his discussion of The City Madam by saying, ‘Comedy, by definition, is concerned with representing the ridiculous’ (p. xii). Other volumes might give prominence to the milieu of the action; and Edward Partridge attends first to records of the Bartholomew Fair that gave a title and a setting for Jonson’s play (p. x), whereas the ‘news industry’ is the initial focus for attention when The Staple of News is introduced by Devra Rowland Kiefer (p. xi). Eliot, or Swinburne, or Dryden, might be cited as a critical point of reference, but Regents editors tend not be exercised by the critical heritage of the plays they introduce. Indeed, on reading the introductions today one may be struck with the absence of self-consciousness about the editorial role, and this is one of the features to make the Regents plays so clearly the products of their time.
Given that the Regents series was conceived, prepared and released during the years just before the growth of new historicism, the standard appendix – a kind of timeline – shows a prescient concern for the social and political context of the plays. In this appendix, titled ‘Chronology’, a left hand column sets out ‘Political and Literary Events’ while on the right a second column offers details of the ‘Life and Works’ of the play’s writer or writers. The ‘Events’ are a standard feature, running from 1558 (‘Accession of Queen Elizabeth. Thomas Kyd born. Robert Greene born.’) and usually extending to 1666 (‘Fire of London. Death of Shirley.’). It reads oddly nowadays. The yoking together of miscellaneous events seems to hint at possible connections and occasionally (as with 1666) delivers them. Generally, however, the effect is that of the Diary and Proverb Book used by Arrietty in Mary Norton’s The Borrowers.21
If some aspects of the Regents format seem passé, its choice of plays, whilst never striving for fashionability, triumphantly achieves a pioneering brilliance.22 Richard Brome is yet to achieve recognition with the Revels and New Mermaids series, and for this reason the Regents editions of The Antipodes and The Jovial Crew are the more valuable. Until David Crane’s New Mermaids edition of The Dutch Courtesan appeared in 1997, Martin Wine’s Regents edition was the only modern-spelling and single-volume edition of the play. Marston, however, was generally well served by modern editions in the 1960s and 1970s, but there was little competition for the Regents release of four plays by George Chapman, three of which were amongst his often unregarded comedies. Ethel M. Smeak’s edition of The Widow’s Tears anticipated Akiro Yamada’s Revels edition by almost a decade, thus releasing in a modern edition a gem amongst the brilliant compositions of the first Jacobean years. But even this achievement is surpassed by Frank Manley’s edition of All Fools and Smith’s of The Gentleman Usher. As with the Regents trilogy of plays by John Ford, these verse comedies appear to great advantage in their Regents homes, and the editorial attention to the artifice of All Fools and to contemporary accounts of the gentleman usher’s role is felicitous indeed.
The twin publication in the mid-sixties of the early Middleton comedies, A Mad World, My Masters and Michaelmas Term, especially when buttressed by the New Mermaids A Trick to Catch the Old One (1968), gave these early plays a modern form, thereby offering a vivid context for the growing sense of the first post-war decades that The Revenger’s Tragedy might correctly be viewed as a Middleton play.23 This invited a new openness to the realism, as opposed to the grotesqueries, of the tragedy; and this was a point well made by Lawrence J. Ross in introducing The Revenger’s Tragedy, although the Regents edition of 1966–67 placed Tourneur’s name upon its title page.
And one further local achievement of the series is Hoy’s own Regents edition of Massinger’s The City Madam. This is one of those editions to exploit most fully the spareness and elegance of the Regents format; and the accessibility of the text gains an unobtrusive backing through Hoy’s light and helpful annotation and through his introduction, in which a rich understanding of the play’s dramatic heritage sits alongside an approachable and perceptive account of the play’s developing impact as it proceeds. As so often with the Regents series, the value of the edition lies partly in its very existence. 1964, the year of The City Madam’s Regents publication, also saw the appearance of the New Mermaids A New Way to Pay Old Debts. And for over forty years since then, no major series of individual plays released a drama by Philip Massinger.24
Those who, like myself, hold the Regents series in high regard will have a particular admiration for the work of Cyrus Hoy’s general editorship. Readers with an interest in questions of authorial agency will be aware of the way that Hoy’s contributions to attribution study helped to lend the pursuit an objectivity and transparency it had frequently lacked; and those who have consulted his magnificent Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in ‘The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker’ are likely to have found their reading greatly enriched.25 These scholarly endeavours are towering ones, yet for me they are surpassed by the shaping and oversight of the Regents venture.
In celebrating the many individual achievements of the Regents series, I do not mean to downplay those of its competitors, as my mentions of the New Mermaids editions of A Trick and A New Way seek to indicate. In particular, the substance of individual Revels editions, together with the Revels’ position as the pre-eminent academic host of individual editions of non-Shakespearean plays, give the release of each individual volume a kind of momentousness. Their sponsorship of Jonson’s plays, reviewed above, constitutes a powerful and continuing reaffirmation of Jonson’s corpus. Readers will hold varying views as to which releases of Revels plays were the most significant, and my own list would certainly include the twin appearance in 1986 of James Shirley’s The Cardinal and The Lady of Pleasure, marking a new assertion of interest in Shirley and in Caroline drama and following two years after Martin Butler’s Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642; John Margeson’s edition of Chapman’s Byron plays, a volume that aligns not only with the period’s new historicist bias but with the burgeoning interest in the censorship of plays; and Tom Cain’s Poetaster, which heralded a renewed interest in the ‘Poets’ War’.26
A sense of the monumentality of the Revels Plays, against which I choose to contrast the slightness of Regents series, acknowledges the way that the Revels series explicitly states its derivation from the Arden Shakespeare. Successive prefaces by the Revels general editors credit the initiator of the series, Clifford Leech, with an attempt to replicate the success of ‘the New Arden Shakespeare’.27 By the ‘New Arden’ the second Arden series is meant. Now a third Arden series is being released; and Arden have announced a new venture, the ‘Arden Early Modern Drama’. ‘Modelled entirely on the Third Series in appearance, style and pricing’, this new series of non-Shakespearean plays will take its cue from the third, rather than, as with the Revels, the second Arden manifestation.28 By mirroring the format of the third Arden Shakespeare, the series promises at least partly to bridge the chasm between the publication of Shakespeare’s plays and those of his peers. This will not be the first new series of non-Shakespearean plays to emerge since the Regents, the Revels and the New Mermaids established themselves. The Revels have introduced a parallel series, the Revels Student Editions, in which the texts are substantially those of the senior Revels series, but which have truncated, critically updated, and less overtly scholarly introductions. Moreover, Nick Hern books have brought out the ‘Globe Quartos’. These, like the large format Nottingham Drama texts of the 1970s and 1980s, usually present Renaissance plays obscure enough to have found no place in the more established series. The Globe Quartos advertise a connection with the repertory of the restored Globe theatre in London or with the staged readings of the ‘Read not Dead’ series. Of all these ventures, the Globe Quartos approach most closely to the aesthetic qualities of the Regents series.
Nevertheless, the Arden Early Modern Drama will be a highly significant new entrant into the field of rival series. Clearly, its principal competitor will be the Revels Plays. Indeed, given the shared origin within the Arden tradition, there will be a common heritage to the two series. The Revels Plays have previously been distinct from the parallel ventures into non-Shakespearean drama. This derives from what I have called their ‘monumentality’: they have aspired to a breadth of annotation and a richness of introductory material. In the competition I envisage, the Arden and the Revels series appear set to become the principal, the most prestigious, and the most authoritative outlets for single volumes of non-Shakespearean Renaissance plays. Given this shared derivation from the Arden Shakespeare tradition, the rivalry may involve two ventures that prize what is abundant above what is concise.
The balance between text and exposition remains a crucial consideration for those who sponsor scholarly editions. The outcome of the editorial choices that are made will shape the reading experiences at stake. The work of a general editor has recently drawn the reflective consideration of Stanley Wells, who places his work upon the Penguin Shakespeare and the Oxford Shakespeare within the context of recent and competitive single-volume editions of Shakespeare. Essentially, Wells has reviewed the first section of the binary divide between the work of Shakespeare and that of his peers. He assesses the challenges of shaping a series of individual plays from the perspective of his own role, as his title – ‘On Being a General Editor’ – makes clear, and Wells sets out the various considerations that led to the New Penguin and the Oxford Shakespeares adopting the formats they did.29
The account is an absorbing and a human one. This partly derives from a light but pervasive sense of a rich editorial tradition, and Wells honours the scholarly heritage of Shakespeare editing at the same time as he sketches the concerns that would shape his own oversight of the two series of Shakespearean plays. In particular, the many-sided collaborations that lie behind such a series become apparent. ‘The first and perhaps most important task of a General Editor is to lay down the principles to which he and his publisher wish his edition to conform’, Wells writes, and this joint task of publisher and general editor (where both roles may themselves be shared ones) forms one of many areas for decision concerning the style and appearance of the series and the content of individual editions. Wells is clear about the considerations that may affect, first, the publishing partners of the general editorial team, and second, the editors of single plays within a series. He writes:
The publisher’s wishes are vital. Editions have to be financed, and it is the publisher who provides the financial backing. This does not mean that an edition needs to be driven by commercial considerations alone. Shakespeare can be a status symbol. Publishing houses may feel that their lists are incomplete if they do not include an edition of his works. They – by which one has to mean a number of individuals within the publishing house who are responsible for its policy – may even acknowledge a duty to provide the scholarly community with editions which fulfil their needs but are unlikely to make a profit. This is especially likely to be true of scholarly publishing houses, though I have yet to encounter a publisher who was oblivious to financial considerations. (p. 39)
With regard to colleagues responsible for individual volumes, Wells says:

There are times when I have observed with a sigh that an editor, having failed, for example, to observe the proposed word limits, has written a monograph rather than an Introduction, but not had the heart to wield the blue pencil too drastically. (p. 48)
Considerations of status, of service and of profit are only three of the concerns a publisher may feel; and a possible tendency to profusion is only one of the challenges that a volume editor must face. But the vivid way in which Wells displays the twin challenges of rigour and delicacy that may affect a general editor’s team working throws a sharp light on the pressures that may shape the development of a major series. Such a series may, for the publisher, be a kind of exercise in grandeur: that is, one motive for the fashioning of an authoritative edition may be that the prestige of the publishing house may grow. (Indeed, a few years after acquiring my Perkin Warbeck, when calling at Edward Arnold’s London offices to enquire where any unsold volumes might be found, I noticed that a set of paperback volumes of the Regents series was prominently displayed within a glass cabinet in the entrance lobby.) And for an academic editor of a single volume, sheer enthusiasm might well prompt a detailed introduction; and the commission also offers an opportunity to place in the public domain a notable and authoritative edition, one which may enhance the scholar’s reputation. In other words, collaborators on both the publishing and the editorial side might alike be motivated by considerations that militate against the slightness and simplicity I claim for the Regents series.
Publishers and editors might well consider this point to have been too strongly made, and both may rightly assert that they conduct their work with the ease and pleasure of their readers in mind. Nevertheless, the kinds of negotiation Wells points to indeed suggest that an editorial care for an entire series may have to contend with pressures that tend towards the weighty and away from the concise. Of course, it may be argued that market pressures are the most efficient mechanism for securing a fit between product and consumer; but whatever force such an argument may have, it can apply only fitfully to companies, such as a subsidized university press, with aims that are not narrowly directed to the making of money. The quest for ‘monumentality’ is a case in point, for the aspiration is not necessarily located in either the profit motive, nor the public good, nor even the fostering of pure scholarship.

Readers may perhaps detect a mismatch in the advocacy for what is friendly to the reader in a modern version of an old play and the qualities of the Regents series that are here celebrated. The Regents series, while elegant, is determinedly unshowy; though concise, its editions are certainly scholarly rather than popular in temper; and as I mentioned at the start of this essay, their paperback release was clearly not so widely in demand as to preclude their availability in Britain at least on the basis of a discounted price. No doubt the Regents series had its oddities, and as this discussion has sought to show, it was for good or ill finely shaped by the period of its inception. Yet it remains, I suggest, a uniquely pleasing form of presenting Renaissance plays to its readership: a form at once elegant, lucid, and chaste.

Bibliography

A. Regents Renaissance Drama Series: Listed by play title, by title page author, and by publication year.

Where two years are given, the first relates to the publication date in the U.S.A. and the second to the publication date in the U.K. Otherwise (except as stated with regard to No Wit, No Help, Like a Woman’s) the single date applies to publication in both countries. In the U.S.A. the publisher in all cases is the University of Nebraska Press and the place of publication, Lincoln, Nebraska. In the U.K. the publisher in all cases is Edward Arnold and the place of publication London.

Regents plays by play title:

All Fools, by George Chapman, ed. Frank Manley (1968)

The Antipodes, by Richard Brome, ed. Ann Haaker (1966; 1967)

Antonio and Mellida, by John Marston, ed. G.K. Hunter (1966)

Antonio’s Revenge, by John Marston, ed. G.K. Hunter (1965; 1966)

Bartholomew Fair, by Ben Jonson, ed. Edward B. Partridge (1964)

The Broken Heart, by John Ford, ed. Donald K. Anderson, Jr. (1968)

Bussy d’Ambois, by George Chapman, ed. Robert J. Lordi (1964)

Catiline, by Ben Jonson, ed. W.F. Bolton and Jane F. Gardner (1972; 1973)

The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton, ed. G.W. Williams (1966; 1967)

The City Madam, by Philip Massinger, ed. Cyrus Hoy (1964)

The Devil’s Law-Case, by John Webster, ed. Frances A. Shirley (1971; 1972)

The Dutch Courtesan, by John Marston, ed. Martin Wine (1965)

Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman, by Ben Jonson, ed. L.A. Beaurline (1966)

Every Man in his Humour, by Ben Jonson, ed. J.W. Lever (1971; 1972)

The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II, by Thomas Heywood, ed. Robert K. Turner, Jr. (1967)

A Fair Quarrel, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, ed. George R. Price (1976; 1977)

The Fawn, by John Marston, ed. Gerald A. Smith (1964; 1965)

The First Part of Hieronymo and The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross (1967)

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, by Robert Greene, ed. Daniel Seltzer (1963; 1964)

Gallathea and Midas, by John Lyly, ed. Anne Begor Lancashire (1969; 1970)

The Gentleman Usher, by George Chapman, ed. John Hazel Smith (1970)

Gorbuduc; or, Ferrex and Porrex, by Sackville and Norton, ed. Irby B. Cauthen (1970)

The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe, ed. Richard Van Fossen (1965)

A Jovial Crew, by Richard Brome, ed. Ann Haaker (1968)

A King and No King, by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. Robert K. Turner, Jr. (1964)

The Knight of the Burning Pestle, by Francis Beaumont, ed. John Doebler (1967)

The Longer Thou Livest and Enough is as Good as a Feast, by Wager, ed. R. Mark Benbow (1967; 1968)

A Mad World, My Masters, by Thomas Middleton, ed. Standish Henning (1965)

The Maid’s Tragedy, by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. Howard B. Norland (1968)

The Malcontent, by John Marston, ed. Martin Wine (1964; 1965)

Michaelmas Term, by Thomas Middleton, ed. Richard Levin (1966; 1967)

No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, by Thomas Middleton, ed. Lowell E. Johnson (1976, University of Nebraska Press only)

Perkin Warbeck, by John Ford, ed. Donald K. Anderson, Jr. (1965; 1966)

Philaster, by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. Dora Jean Ashe (1974; 1975)

The Revenger’s Tragedy, by Cyril Tourneur, ed. Lawrence J. Ross (1966; 1967)

The Staple of News, by Ben Jonson, ed. Devra Rowland Kifer (1975; 1976)

Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II, by Christopher Marlowe, ed. John D. Jump (1967)

The Traitor, by James Shirley, ed. John Stewart Carter (1965)

The Two Noble Kinsmen, by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, ed. G.R. Proudfoot (1970)

The White Devil, by John Webster, ed. J.R. Mulryne (1969; 1970)

The Widow’s Tears, by George Chapman, ed. Ethel M. Smeak (1966; 1967)

The Wounds of Civil War, by Thomas Lodge, ed. Joseph W. Houppert (1969; 1970)

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, by John Ford, ed. N.W. Bawcutt (1966)

Regents plays by title page author:

Beaumont, Francis, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. John Doebler (1967)

Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, A King and No King, ed. Robert K. Turner, Jr. (1964)

Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy, ed. Howard B. Norland (1968)

Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, Philaster, ed. Dora Jean Ashe (1974; 1975)

Brome, Richard, The Antipodes, ed. Ann Haaker (1966; 1967)

Brome, Richard, A Jovial Crew, ed. Ann Haaker (1968)

Chapman, George, All Fools, ed. Frank Manley (1968)

Chapman, George, Bussy d’Ambois, ed. Robert J. Lordi (1964)

Chapman, George, The Gentleman Usher, ed., John Hazel Smith (1970)

Chapman, George, The Widow’s Tears, ed. Ethel M. Smeak (1966; 1967)

Fletcher, John, and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. G.R. Proudfoot (1970)

Ford, John, The Broken Heart, ed. Donald K. Anderson, Jr. (1968)

Ford, John, Perkin Warbeck, ed. Donald K. Anderson, Jr. (1965; 1966)

Ford, John, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (1966)

Greene, Robert, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. Daniel Seltzer (1963; 1964)

Heywood, Thomas, The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II, ed. Robert K. Turner, Jr. (1967)

Jonson, Ben, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Edward B. Partridge (1964)

Jonson, Ben, Catiline, ed. W.F. Bolton and Jane F. Gardner (1972; 1973)

Jonson, Ben, Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman, ed. L.A. Beaurline (1966)

Jonson, Ben, Every Man in his Humour, ed. J.W. Lever (1971; 1972)

Jonson, Ben, The Staple of News, ed. Devra Rowland Kifer (1975; 1976)

Kyd, Thomas, The First Part of Hieronymo and The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross (1967)

Lodge, Thomas, The Wounds of Civil War, ed. Joseph W. Houppert (1969; 1970)

Lyly, John, Gallathea and Midas, ed. Anne Begor Lancashire (1969; 1970)

Marlowe, Christopher, The Jew of Malta, ed. Richard Van Fossen (1965)

Marlowe, Christopher, Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II, ed. John D. Jump (1967)

Marston, John, Antonio and Mellida, ed. G.K. Hunter (1966)

Marston, John, Antonio’s Revenge, ed. G.K. Hunter (1965; 1966)

Marston, John, The Dutch Courtesan, ed. Martin Wine (1965)

Marston, John, The Fawn, ed. Gerald A. Smith (1964; 1965)

Marston, John, The Malcontent, ed. Martin Wine (1964; 1965)

Massinger, Philip, The City Madam, ed. Cyrus Hoy (1964)

Middleton, Thomas, The Changeling, ed. G.W. Williams (1966; 1967)

Middleton, Thomas, A Mad World, My Masters, ed. Standish Henning (1965)

Middleton, Thomas, Michaelmas Term, ed. Richard Levin (1966; 1967)

Middleton, Thomas, No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, ed. Lowell E. Johnson (1976, University of Nebraska Press only)

Middleton, Thomas, and William Rowley, A Fair Quarrel, ed. George R. Price (1976; 1977)

Sackville and Norton, Gorbuduc; or, Ferrex and Porrex, ed. Irby B. Cauthen (1970)

Shirley, James, The Traitor, ed. John Stewart Carter (1965)

Tourneur, Cyril, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. Lawrence J. Ross (1966; 1967)

Wager, The Longer Thou Livest and Enough is as Good as a Feast, ed. R. Mark Benbow (1967; 1968)

Webster, John, The Devil’s Law-Case, ed. Frances A. Shirley (1971; 1972)

Webster, John, The White Devil, ed. J.R. Mulryne (1969; 1970)

Regents plays by year of publication: