Henslowe's Diary Part II. Commentary

From the beginning of the PREFACE: OF the difficulties that lie in the way of an editor of Henslowe's Diary - at least if he regards his work as historical rather than romantic-not the least is to avoid writing a general history of the Elizabethan stage. There is no such thing as a clearly defined historical field; facts are linked to other facts in all directions, and investigation merely leads to further and yet further questions. Every custom and every institution at once raises the problem of its own origin; every corporation and every social fact is influenced by other corporations or reacts on other social facts. Thus to treat intelligibly any of the several dramatic companies at the end of the seventeenth century, or any series of events in the dramatic history of the time, necessarily demands a knowledge of the constitution of other companies and of the sequence of other events such as at present can hardly be said to exist. My only course under the circumstances seemed to be to discuss as fully as possible those companies and events actually mentioned in the Diary itself, and to touch on other matters only so far as appeared necessary for the immediate purposes of such discussion. A critic might urge that the fact that I have avoided writing a general history is more obvious than the desirability of so doing. To this I could only reply that since I had-perhaps rashly-undertaken to produce an edition of Henslowe's Diary, it was necessary to complete it within a reasonable period. Whether the time which has elapsed, since the appearance of the first volume of this edition in the autumn of 1904, can be considered to be within the limits of reason is not perhaps for me to judge; but if the sanguine forecasts in which I have from time to time indulged have been doomed to repeated disappointment, that seems after all to be but the common experience of writers with whom I am acquainted. Still I feel that some word of explanation at least, if not apology, is needed. I had not long been at work upon the elucidation of Henslowe's affairs when I began to feel the great inconvenience of the fact that the only reprints of the documents preserved at Dulwich, many of which are of the first importance for the history of the Elizabethan stage, were scattered through a number of different publications. Some had been published in Malone's Shakespeare as early as 1790, others first saw the light in Boswell's Variorum of 1821, others again were published by Collier either in his Memoir of Edward Alleyn or in his Alleyn Papers, while for a few it was even necessary to go to Mr. William Young's learned but ponderous History of Dulwich. Nor was this all. It was clear from Dr. Warner's admirable catalogue that, quite apart from the question of deliberate fabrication, the texts printed by Collier were quite untrustworthy. It therefore seemed necessary, as an indispensable preliminary to further research, that the material should be put into a more accessible, complete, and authoritative shape. The result was the volume of Henslowe Papers published last year. I should be glad if this came to be regarded as a companion and supplement to Dr. Warner's catalogue of the Dulwich Manuscripts-a work which mine is in no way intended to supersede, and which, indeed, must always remain one of the most important books of reference for the student of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Having thus got the material, in so far as it is contained in the Dulwich documents, into more convenient shape, I again turned to my work upon the Diary, and have now the satisfaction of penning this prefatory postscript to the second volume just three and a half years after that to the first, the whole having occupied something over five years of fairly continuous work....