Precision, Consistency and Completeness in Early-Modern Playbook Manuscripts: The Evidence from Thomas of Woodstock and John a Kent and John a Cumber

According to William B. Long, New Bibliographers, such as W. W. Greg and his followers, were wrong to assume that early modern play manuscripts fall into essentially two categories: untidy authorial (or ‘foul’) papers with inconsistent speech prefixes and imperfect stage directions, and tidied-up promptbooks from which such irregularities have been eliminated. Long argued that in fact untidy authorial manuscripts could be used to run performances, and hence that we cannot determine the nature of the manuscript underlying an early print edition from the precision, completeness or accuracy of its speech prefixes and stage directions. Long's attack on this aspect of New Bibliographical thinking was influential in the widespread abandonment of New Bibliography since the 1990s. The present essay revaluates, in the light of subsequent discoveries, the logic of Long's argument and the manuscript evidence upon which it was based. Long's key inferences from theatre-historical data are rejected and the manuscripts are found to contain conflicting evidence that is no better explained by Long's new orthodoxy than by the old one it replaced.