Notes on The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton

Talking a little bit about Bennett's (and Greg's) thoughts on Abrams' over-reliance onT for his edition has made me realized that I never explored that work ore thoroughly in my notes here. Honestly, I haven't looked at it since first conceiving this project almost a year ago in Dr. Knutson's class, which makes me think it's time to revisit this pamphlet.

I want to re-iterate what I said yesterday, the parallels between The Merry Devil of Edmonton (Merry Devil) and The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton (Life and Death) are too strong to be merely coincidental. I find it probable that either the pamphlet inspired the play, or that the play inspired the pamphlet, but before I can say anything meaningful about that, it might help to describe the pamphlet.

Originally registered on 5 April 1608 by Joseph Hunt and Thomas Archer, the earliest extant version dates from 1631. The initial registration follows Arthur Johnson's registration of Merry Devil on 22 October 1607 so closely that the registration dates are of no practical use in determining precedence. Where Merry Devil remains completely anonymous, the title page of Life and Death bears the initial T.B. Editorial tradition ascribes this to Anthony (Tony) Brewer.

Life and Death is, much like Tarleton's Jests, a pamphlet describing humorous situations, which in some cases rely on physical comedy, but usually involve one party being over-reached by another. The first couple of stories are about Master Peter Fabell, as the title would imply, but the majority of the work is devoted to the further misadventures of Smug (the title page also advertise "With the pleasant pranks of Smug te Smith, Sir John, and mine Host of the George, about the stealing of venison," but these other characters do not figure as prominently into the narratives as does Smug.

5 of the vignettes feature Peter Fabell, the last of which to mention his name is a story wherein he is deceived by Smug. Smug, by contrast, plays a staring role in 17 of the vignettes described, 3 of which feature Sir John, Banks, and the Host, and 1 of which features the nuns of Chesson. The keeper and the constables are common antagonists, but nowhere do any of the knights or lovers of Merry Devil make an appearance. Smug does indeed deceive the keeper and his man by climbing on top of the sign of the White Horse (not mentioned in Merry Devil) and taking on the appearance of St. George, this causes the keeper to think there are two Georges and that they are in the wrong town, which is not at all like the situation described in Merry Devil's penultimate scene.

There are some crucial, noteworthy differences. Neither the Host's catchphrase about "serving the Good Duke of Norfolk" nor Sir John's "grass and hay, let's live till we die and be merry, and there's an end" are at all featured in Life and Death. It might also be argued that the role of Smug among his fellow clowns is greatly reduced in Merry Devil, but one must also remember that we have an incomplete text, and possibly transmitted to Arthur Johnson in a manner as the Q1 Merry Wives (which was formerly described as bad): that is to say largely reliant on the parts of the actor playing the Host.

Given the wildly differing narratives between Merry Devil and Life and Death, two clear probabilities emerge. Either Merry Devil came first, and a fan of that play reworked the events he saw there into a book of jests to capitalize on the popularity of the show (which was likely written in 1603 and popular on the London stage by 1604), or an author or authors familiar with an already circulating pamphlet (perhaps even a manuscript publication) reworked the events there described into a romantic comedy for the stage.

There is no way of knowing which of these scenarios, or if some other, is correct, but I once again cannot help but think of the Marx Brothers, whose work provided so much inspiration for our productions. I have compared Merry Devil to A Night at the Opera; a central love drama is transformed into a comedy with a happy ending by an unrelated group of wild and crazy guys trying to get ahead in the world. That film, however, represents the middle period in the Marx Brother's films; their earlier work had a tendency to feature the wild and crazy guys trying to get ahead in the world, and proceeded from one bit to the next. Duck Soup is the classic example of these films, and Life and Death tends to follow this mold.

Again, as Tom Berger would say, let us be wary of applying post-Enlightenment thinking to pre-Enlightenment work, but the plot of the lovers and the plot of the clowns in Merry Devil is distinct enough that it is conceivable that each plot has its own source, and Merry Devil represents a conflation of these. Life and Death could conceivably be the source for the clown plot and the Famous History of Friar Bacon, which was likely the inspiration of Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, would serve as an equally viable source for the lover's plot if it were indeed available in manuscript before it's printing (which it would have to be to inspire Greene's play).

The history of the London stage is one of adaptation, conflation, and collaboration, and if Merry Devil is an example of this, it stands in very good company.

Notes on Prefatory Material and Notes to Nicola Bennett 2000 edition of The Merry Devil of Edmonton

The London Globe produced a workshop reading of The Merry Devil in 1998/1999, and Nicola Bennett's 2000 edition is one of the results of that work. Bennett's is one of the most important editions of Merry Devil for me to use as a point of comparison because it is so recent. The preparation of such an edition little more than a decade ago would hardly suggest a new edition as necessary unless it suffered from scholarly defect, was produced under a different editorial rationale, or some combination thereof. Given the resources available to Bennet (which are, according to her acknowledgments, vastly superior to mine), it would seem improbable that she has suffered from a lack of materials. To the contrary, the available resources of the Globe may have worked against her in preparing this edition.

In "A Note from the Coordinator," Sonia Ritter describes the Globe cast playing darkness without resorting to torches as props, but in such a way that is inconsistent with American Shakespeare Center techniques for playing darkness. Ritter explains "having established lack of light to see, playing out to the audience clarified thought: playing to nowhere i particular denoted confusion" (vii). The American Shakespeare Center, by contrast, explores the convention of actors trying to see other characters in a dark scene, but either failing (keeping their eyes unfocussed, or by fixing their eyes on some other point where they think their addressee is standing), or using their other senses, most especially their hearing, to help them identify the location of a speaker. The relative intimacy of the Blackfriars may account for this difference, but our performance space in Philadelphia was even more intimate than the Blackfriars, which is a condition the King's Men were likely to have found themselves in when touring their original production.

Ritter also describes some of the missing scenes being filled in by the actors in the workshop, and notes "Dumb shows were, after all, prevalent in this era." That may be true, and certainly there is evidence available to suggest that actors commonly improvised (i.e. Hamlet's injunction to the players), and that comic scenes were sometimes simply excised from printed text's (Jones' introduction to Tamburlaine), but the scene described in The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton is more intricate than simple pantomime would allow. There must have been some textual material to accompany the misadventure of Smug on the sign of the George, if for no other reason than Smug, like the rest of the clowns in Merry Devil, is rarely content to be silent for long.

Standing in testimony against the Globe's construction of this text is the cast list of the workshop itself. 17 individual cast members are listed for a play in which the concluding scene calls for 11. While 17 would certainly not be outside of the number of players available to the King's Men, according to Stern's formulation, it is unlikely that hired men would have accompanied the sharer's on tour. The number of actors available for the Globe's workshop allowed them to use more bodies on stage than is likely the King's Men would have had available.

Bennett is correct in her agreement with Greg that Abrams takes the scene describing the sign business in the Life and Death pamphlet too literally (85). Yet the importance of the pamphlet in determining the course of the scene is still plain: either the pamphlet predates the play, and thus the play was likely inspired by the pamphlet, or the precise opposite of this. For our production, the most theatrically convenient way of staging the presence of the sign was to leave it off stage, which seemed appropriate to our touring needs, and satisfies nearly all of the requirements of the cut text printed in 1608.

Analysis

Bennett has got a lot right with her 2000 edition of Merry Devil, but I still have some issues with this edition. The resources available to the Globe in creating this text are more expansive than the cut version of the text printed in 1608 seems to indicate. Ultimately, the Globe workshop never had to solve some of the textual problems present in the text. Apart from the fact that they did not mount a full production, they had more resources available than the King's Men would have had on tour, and their doubling ignores some of the comic possibilities suggested by the text.

Bennet, Nicola Ed. The Merry Devil of Edmonton. New York. Globe Education and Theatre Arts Books/Routledge. 2000.

Ritter, Sonia. "A Note from the Coordinator." The Merry Devil of Edmonton. Nicola Bennet, Ed. New York. Globe Education and Theatre Arts Books/Routledge. 2000.

What Greg said

I've mentioned W.W. Greg's name before, but perhaps not as central to my inquiry into the text of Merry Devil as I should have. When it comes to bibliographical studies in the first half of the twentieth century, Greg was, as the kids say, "the man." I'm sure someone out there would disagree with me, but he was one of those most responsible for the newness of the "New Bibliography" movement, and so it just makes sense to consult him whilst developing my own edition of the work. So let's see what he has to say.... hmmm......

"It would be difficult to find a play that presents a greater variety of difficulties to an editor."

That's hard. In "The Merry Devil of Edmonton," from The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society (1944, pages 122-139) Greg does a decent job of eviscerating William Amos Abrams' 1942 "definitive edition" of The Merry Devil. Certainly, this has given me much to think about. Maybe too much.


Authority, for Greg, means something strictly from the author's hand; that's impossible (and he knows as much). In so far as the old New Bibliographers were interested in bibliography as a tool to see through "the veil of print" (borrowing that term from Dr. Menzer), no one is really sure whose hand to look for in Merry Devil.


Greg dismisses the work as being a collaboration, but he admits that the comparatively short line count indicates this is an abridgment. Greg cites Abrams' opinion that the extant version is possibly cut for touring purposes (129), but he goes on to say that

if a rough author's draft (after having served for the production of a regular prompt book) had been severely cut with a view to preparing an abridged version of the play, and had then come into the printers hands, the resulting edition might have been something like what we find in the extant text (130).

Of course, what Greg refers to as "corruption" I might be inclined to call "collaboration." Have you ever seen the directors cut of a film when the director wasn't very good? It makes you wish you had watched the studio cut. In a modern theatrical environment, directors, actors, designers, and even stage managers and hands all bring something to the table that influence the performance, and sometimes that means cutting an over indulgent text. Who really wants to sit through a four hour Hamlet anyway?

Greg approves of Abrams' selection of the first quarto as the copy-text, which is also the one I picked, so w00t, and goes on to praise Abrams for his investigative work into the connection between the play The Merry Devil of Edmonton and the chapbook The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton, with the Pleasant Pranks of Smug the Smith, Sir John, and mine Host of the George, about the Stealing of Venison. Those early-moderners did love their long titles.

Anyway, Greg points out that while the chapbook is clearly inspired by the play, there are references in the play that are informed by the chapbook. The theory being that the chapbook is based on an unaltered version of the play text, and the references still in The Merry Devil that don't necessarily make sense at a glance, but are informed by the chapbook, are the result of uneven cuts. Think of the chapbook as an original novelization of a film, which is then cut before being released by the studio. The novel is based on the uncut script, and still has things in it that the studio release leaves off. Even so, Greg remarks that "the chapbook contains no hint of the main plot of the play" (134-135), so how much can really be lost?

Sarcastic yet true answer: for a 1500 line play, maybe about 1000 lines or so.

Of course, while The Life and Death of the Merry Devil may inform the action in The Merry Devil, there really isn't any way of constructing the original text based on that. If Greg and Abrams are right, the original, uncut play must be considered lost. Of course, that doesn't mean that the extant text isn't funny, and quite honestly, maybe being shorter makes it funnier. It was cut for a reason, after all. Maybe it's better that someone cut them back in the early 1600s: I won't have to worry about cutting them for my production in Philly.

Greg goes on to say that all an editor can "legitimately aim at is to repair corruption that has arisen in the course of printing and remove minor contradictions." As much as the editorial job is difficult, it is difficult beyond the ability of anyone to achieve definitively, and that actually makes my job as an editor easier. Of course, that makes my job as a director that much harder, but I'm a better director anyway.

Works Cited
Greg, W. W. "The Merry Devil of Edmonton." The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. 1944. London. Oxford UP. vol. s4-XXV 3-4 p. 122-139.