The Provenance of <i>The Birth of Hercules</i>

The Birth of Hercules, an early modern English adaptation of Plautus’ Amphitryon, survives in a single manuscript witness (British Library, Add. MS 28722). When R. Warwick Bond edited the play for the Malone Society in 1911, he traced the manuscript’s provenance back to the sale of Joseph Lilly’s library by Sotheby’s in March 1871, where it was acquired for £1 9 s. by W. C. Hazlitt, who sold it to the British Museum on May 13 of the same year.1 Before then, both the provenance of the manuscript and the original context of the play have been mysterious. Despite the Sotheby’s catalogue’s identification of the play with the ‘firste parte of herculous’ performed by the Admiral’s Men in 1595, Bond argued that the play was ‘manifestly of academic origin’, having ‘no connection with the public stage’.2 Indeed, the play manuscript departs conspicuously from the conventions of professional manuscript playbooks not only in its unusual mise-en-page but also in its Latin stage directions.3 G. C. Moore Smith, in his survey of university drama at Cambridge, speculated that its author may have been Richard Bernard, the translator of Terence, and its first performance at Christ’s College, Cambridge, around 1598.4 In British Drama, Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson detect a further possible Cambridge connection in ‘the first prologue’s assertion that it is currently the fashion for plays not to have prologues, but only epilogues’, a phenomenon that occurred in two Cambridge performances around 1605.5 Of course, these associations with Cambridge remain tenuous not least because the provenance of the manuscript itself has been untraced before 1871. However, an earlier record of the manuscript has gone unnoticed: the sale catalogue of rare books and manuscripts from Surrenden House in Pluckley, Kent, which were auctioned by Puttick and Simpson for five days beginning 8 June 1858. The catalogue’s description of lot 1600 reads: Birth of Hercules (The) a translation of the Amphitryon of Plautus, very neatly written folio, pp. 60, circa 1600 From the stage directions on the margins, the introduction of “soft musick,” etc. this play would appear to have been represented, probably at court. There are two prologues, the first is entitled “Prologus Laureatus.”6 This is undoubtedly the same as Add. MS 28722, which matches the catalogue’s description closely. The extant manuscript is a professional scribal copy with the text of the play itself occupying 31 leaves (fols. 2r–32v) or 62 pages, beginning with a 56-line ‘Prologus Laureatus’ (fol. 2r–v), followed by the 60-line ‘Mercurius Prologus’ (fol. 3r–v). A stage direction for ‘soft musick’ (fol. 32r) is not part of the original text of the play but rather represents an annotation on the manuscript in another hand as the play was being prepared for performance, and thus perhaps unlikely to appear in any other manuscript copies of the play that may have been created. Indeed, the British Library copy of the Surrenden sale catalogue records that this lot was purchased by Lilly for £2 2 s. What is most valuable about the appearance of the Birth of Hercules manuscript in the Surrenden sale, however, is less the evidence about its location in 1858 than that it reveals an early and significant seventeenth-century owner: Sir Edward Dering (1598–1644), the antiquarian and bibliophile whose library constituted the bulk of the 1858 sale. Dering is well known today as a collector of drama.7 An extant ‘Booke of expences’ (Kent History and Library Centre, U350/E4) reveals not only that Dering was a frequent attendee of theatrical performances but that he purchased at least 221 playbooks between 1619 and 1624, including two copies of the Shakespeare First Folio.8 Evidently Dering was not only a solitary reader of drama, but also organized domestic performances, as suggested by his purchase of six copies of Band, Ruff, and Cuff on 4 December 1623 and three copies of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Woman Hater on 16 March 1624. Famously, Dering prepared for domestic performance an abridgement of the two parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, the manuscript of which, prepared by a scribe for Dering in 1623, survives at the Folger Shakespeare Library (MS V.b.34).9 Dering also acquired manuscript copies of plays, including The Marriage between Wit and Wisdom (British Library, Add. MS 26782), dated 1579, possibly transcribed from a now-lost printed edition; an autograph manuscript of Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory (Huntington Library, MS HM 600); a now-untraced ‘transcript in the writing of William Herbert of Thomas Ingelend’s A pretie and mery new Enterlude called the Disobedient Child’; and a now-lost copy of Fletcher and Massinger’s The Spanish Curate, which Dering apparently acquired around 1623–24.10 Evidence that The Birth of Hercules was among the dramatic manuscripts owned by Dering is not limited to the 1858 sale catalogue. Annotations on the extant manuscript, preserved in its original limp vellum binding, include an ink inscription ‘L, 6, 25’ on the verso side of the front cover, apparently representing a shelfmark and closely resembling a similar annotation on the Huntington manuscript of Love’s Victory that reads ‘L, 6, 27’ (fol. 1r), perhaps indicating that these two dramatic manuscripts were stored near each other in Dering’s collections. Also suggestive, if less direct, are the red ink annotations that appear on the top-right corners of the first pages of both The Birth of Hercules (‘I. 4’ on fol. 1r) and The Marriage between Wit and Wisdom (‘V. 27’ on fol. 1r), similarly reported on a since-removed flyleaf of the Henry IV manuscript.11 Identifying Sir Edward Dering as an early owner of The Birth of Hercules not only expands our understanding of Dering’s dramatic library, but may also provide some slight support to the theories of the play’s Cambridge origins. Dering was himself a student at Magdalene College, Cambridge from January 1615 to September 1617, and he was likely already interested in drama at this time, since the first record of Dering’s playbook acquisitions—9 s. spent on ‘27 playbookes’—occurs in the third quarter of 1619, shortly after the surviving account book begins.12 It may be then that Dering acquired the Birth of Hercules manuscript either while he was a student at Cambridge or, if later, from one of his Cambridge contacts. However, even if Dering’s ownership of the manuscript does not prove a Cambridge origin for the play, it does provide an early example of an academic dramatic manuscript moving from its original context into the private collection that allowed it to survive to the present.

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