Queenʼs
Men Editions

Para1Like most other printed playtexts of the time, Thomas Creede’s 1594 edition of Selimus is spartan in its layout; no dedicatory epistle, author’s preface, errata page, or set of commendatory verses adorn its first gathering.¹ As the play text’s publisher, Creede did fashion, however, a rather busy title page for his quarto, one that includes, along with his printer’s emblem and imprint, a long title and three blurbs. These additions give us a good sense of Creede’s assessment of Selimus as one its earliest readers. Creede’s title not only promises the First part of what is advertised in the conclusion as a two-part story but also indicates the play’s genre (i.e. Tragicall) and seemingly alludes to the current ruler of the Ottoman Empire Murad III (if by grandfather, Creede meant great grandfather). This allusion was likely not an afterthought. Events having to do with Turkey had drawn Creede’s interest the previous autumn when he entered a news pamphlet in the Stationers’ Register that recounted a recent battle in Croatia involving the Ottomans. His description of Selimus as grandfather to him now raigneth then was part of larger publication strategy to appeal to readers interested in happenings to the east. The title page’s following two blurbs both provide recaps of the play’s action, Selimus’s war against and poisoning of his father as well as his murthering of his two brethren. Its highlighting of Selimus’s actions as unnatural echoes similar characterizations in the text; it also presents the play as entirely a Selimus vehicle even while the actions and affective registers of both Bajazeth and Acomat are equally brought to the fore. In this, Creede aligned his offering with Tamburlaine the Great which had the year before reached a second edition. The title page’s third blurb promises a version of the play as it was playd by the Queenes Maiesties Players. Advertising the theatrical provenance of a play was a common print strategy of the time, encouraging buyers to read plays as vestiges of past performances. Though it often has been argued that the Queen’s Men were essentially defunct at that point, this gesture suggests that at least Creede thought there was something to be gained from conjuring thoughts of the company in prospective readers.

Para2Creede’s 1594 first edition of Selimus was not a bestseller. It was reprinted neither in the second half of the 1590s nor in the decades that followed, and Creede eventually transferred his unsold copies to John Crooke and Richard Sergier. In what was probably an attempt to move a stack of unbound quartos, the two booksellers reissued the play in1638 with a new title page. This reissue is a much more restrained affair than its predecessor. Gone is the prologue, and, cutting the 1594 edition’s lurid blurbs, its spartan title page recasts the play as a stand-alone tragedy with no second part. Promised is not a a most lamentable history (Prologue Sp1) of war, patrocide, fratricide, and an unplacable king (Prologue Sp1) but simply The Tragedy of Selimus Emperour of the Turkes. Unlike the first edition, though, it ascribes the play to what remains an elusive T.G. In the late nineteenth century, Alexander Grosart suggested that this was a botched reference to Robert Greene, but one can only wonder why Crooke and Sergier would prefer R.G. to Robert Greene; some of Greene’s titles like Pandosto and A Quip for an Upstart Courtier were still selling four decades after their author’s death, and these reprints all trafficked in Greene’s full name, not his initials.

Para3Though neither Creede’s first edition nor Crooke and Sergier’s reissue garnered enough interest for a second edition, we are fortunate that in some of the copies that did sell we have manuscript evidence of reception by the play’s buyers. Each set of additions suggests a particular response to the play. Some of this evidence is limited and difficult to parse. One of the three Dyce copies of the 1594 edition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, for example, contains the seventeenth or eighteenth-century ownership signature G. Pinson above the prologue, a correction to Anthropomphagi on F3r, and an x next to Your eyes do see, but mine can nere behold on F3v. This latter mark is as inscrutable as the single x in the otherwise clean 1638 copy of Selimus owned by the Huntington Library. There, it was inscribed to the left of Bajazeth’s early description of Corcut—i.e. Corcut in faire Magnesia leades his life, / In learning Arts, and Mahounds dreaded lawes A4r (Sc1 Sp2). Owners of the National Library of Scotland’s 1594 Selimus were interested in ascription and organization. The copy has Anonymous written over Creede’s printer’s emblem on the title page and, in a different hand, divisions for Acts two through five boldly inked in. Apparently looking to regularize the pentameter, a reader of the British Library’s reissued Selimus wrote word between But and that in Hali Bassa’s nine-syllable line But that thy Page betraied thee to vs (Sc22 Sp7). This copy also contains an early bookseller’s receipt for six pence on one of its many end pages, the standard price for an unbound play in 1638.

Para4More revealing are the marks left in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copy of the 1594 edition. This copy contains the ownership signature Hen: Wright in the upper-right-hand corner of the title page as well as over twenty passages all inscribed by the same quill either with underlining, with a manicule and underlining, or with what G.K. Hunter has described as gnomic markers (i.e. inverted commas). Though it is impossible to know whether these were made by Wright, gnomic markers were very much an early modern phenomenon, part of the craze for commonplacing and commonplace books that was an offshoot of the humanist pedagogical practices that so shaped the period. They were used too by authors, compilers, publishers, and readers to indicate sententiae (i.e. quotable passages) in both printed titles and manuscripts. As Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass have traced, it was not until the late 1590s that professional drama was considered commonplaceable, that is, of enough literary merit to be seen as a source of quotable wisdom. This was mainly accomplished through the publications of the Bodenham circle, of which England’s Parnassus was one. The early reader of the Folger Selimus was clearly an heir of this development. Indeed, the first passages that he or she highlighted—Bajazeth’s He knows not what it is to be a King, / That thinks a scepter is a pleasant thing (Sc1 Sp2)—was also excerpted in Allott’s sententiae volume. Not surprisingly, the lion’s share of passages marked in the Folger copy come from speeches spoken by either Bajazeth or Selimus. Four alone come from Selimus’s first speech, sentiments like Auant such glasses: let them view in me, / The perfect picture of right tyrannie (Sc2 Sp1) as well as And these religions obseruations, / Onely bug-beares to keepe the world in feare / And make men quietly a yoake to beare (Sc2 Sp1). A few of the copy’s marked passages like Bajazeth’s Well I must seeme to winke at his desire (Sc3 Sp3) are not sententiae at all but lines that simply provoked the reader for one reason or another. Perhaps the most striking of these is Mustaffa’s vow So helpe me God and holy Mahomet (Sc25 Sp4). Whether the reader found the holy vow ironic because Muslim or moving because it prefaced Mustaffa’s doom is impossible to know.

Para5The 1594 copy of Selimus held at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library bears witness to a different mode of reception by an early reader. It apparently at one time was the first in a sammelband collection of fifteen plays. A sammelband is a composite volume of two or more titles, manuscript and/or print, that is bound together by its owner. On the first page of the A gathering in what otherwise is a clean copy is the following table of contents (with author and date of the first print edition added in brackets) in what looks like a seventeenth-century hand: Plays vol. 20 | Selimus Emp. of the Turks unknown, 1594 | Mulleasses the Turk John Mason, 1610 | Mustaffa Fulke Greville, 1609 | Rape of Lucrece Thomas Heywood, 1608 | Claudius Tiberius Nero unknown, 1607 | Croesus William Alexander, 1604 | Darius William Alexander, 1603 | The Alexandrian Tragedy William Alexander, 1607 | Julius Caesar William Alexander, 1607 | Caesar and Pompey George Chapman?, 1606? | Cornelia Thomas Kyd, 1594 | Marius and Scilla Thomas Lodge, 1594 | Mariam Elizabeth Carey, 1613 | David and Fair Bathsheba George Peele, 1599 | Miseries of Enforst Marriage George Wilkins, 1607 | Vol. 20. If the collection only contained first editions (which is unlikely), the earliest possible date of its compilation is 1613. In terms of size and content, this bound collection of plays would have been similar to those put together by Sir John Harington in the early seventeenth century which contained between eleven and thirteen quartos. Harington’s 7 tome included a copy of the 1594 Selimus, the eleventh title in a collection of thirteen. While the principle behind this sammelbande’s content and ordering is elusive, the Beinecke sammelbande’s is seemingly straightforward. All of its plays are tragedies or have significant tragic content, and, with the exception of Wilkins’s Miseries of Enforced Marriage, all them belong to one or more subgroupings organized by topic (i.e. the Turks), or period (i.e. the classical period), and/or author (i.e. William Alexander). That three Turk plays are grouped with eleven classical-period plays suggests that whoever compiled the sammelbande was equating spacial, temporal, and religious difference, England being assumed to be as different from Muslim Turkey as it was from pagan Greece and Rome. Selimus, in other words, was exoticized by the compiler of this seventeenth-century sammelbande. At the same time, in associating Selimus, Mulleasses the Turk, and Mustaffa with plays about the empires of Greece and Rome, this reader was also extolling the expansive ambitions of the Ottomans.

Para6Later readers of Selimus’s first edition and reissue also left provocative tracks. At Oxford’s Bodleian Library are Edmond Malone’s copies of the 1594 Selimus and the 1638 reissue. The famed British scholar and literary biographer had begun assembling an extensive collection of early modern poetry and drama towards the end of the eighteenth century, and much of it was donated to Oxford in 1821, nine years after his death. Like he did in a number of his early modern playbooks, Malone marked each copy with a note opposite the title page. In the 1594 quarto, he pointed out that This play was reprinted in 1638, and falsely ascribed to Thomas Goffe; in consequence partally of his having written the Raging Turk, Couragious Turk, &c EM. Malone’s note in the 1638 reissue doubles down on this indictment of Crooke and Sergier: This is merely a repuplication of the old and very scarce play of Selimus, printed in 1594…. The words added in this title page “Written T.G.” were inserted for the purpose of deception, to induce the purchaser to suppose that this play was written by Thomas Gough, who had sometime before written two plays entitled The Raging Turk, and the Courageous Turk. He appears to have been a popular dramatist, and was at this time (1638) dead EM. I have preserved this copy to show what havock is generally made in second editions at the press: not that this is more faulty in that respect than many others. Supporting Shakespeare-editor Edward Capell’s valorization of first editions as crucial textual witnesses, Malone describes the 1638 title-page ascription of Selimus to T.G. as an example of the muddying interventions that publishers and printers often introduced when reprinting a play. For Malone, such title-page havock constitutues the play book’s enduring importance, not any literary value.

Para7Other traces can be found in the Houghton Library’s 1594 copy. On the quarto’s opening page in the upper right-hand corner is the signature John Mitford 1826…. Jan: 1823. Mitford was a sailor turned journalist who wrote for many of London’s grub-street periodicals of the day. At some point in the following decades this copy was then acquired by the actor, playwright, and theatrical publisher Thomas Hailes Lacy, who below Mitford’s inscription wrote Tho H. Lacy 1860. £1.7.0. At that time, Lacy was collecting new material for a revised edition of David Erskine Baker’s two-volume Biographia Dramatica (rev. 1812), and his reading of Selimus appears to have been partly to that end. From Baker’s encyclopedic tome, Lacy drew an account of the play’s authorship—‘It is … ascribed to Th. Goffe, who from his then age, could not possibly be the author.’—which he inserted under his 1860 signature. He also added page numbers in the quarto’s upper corners, marked Selimus’s description of Tonombey as that great Aegyptian bug (Sc28 Sp3), and bracketed three passages spoken by Bullithrumble (H1v, H2v 2). He then added the following to its last end-paper page: P.55. 56. | P.67. “that great Aegyptian bug..” Hamlet. Act V. Sc.ii. p.347. ed. Read. | P.68. Unctions. i.e. Hedge.hogs. | P.54. Cramuk. This short index points to Lacy’s interest both in the play’s clown and in its obscure vocabulary. Its first entry references the marked Bullithrumble passages. Its second cross- references Selimus’s Tonombey description with Hamlet’s such bugs and goblins in my life. The third entry glosses Selimus’s disparaging description of Acomat and company as vrchins (K1r, Sc29 Sp1), and with his fourth entry Lacy was possibly intending to provide a gloss for Bullithrumble’s complaint that his wife was cramuk with him (H1v).

Para8For the only identifiable early female reader, the playtext’s sloppiness and anachronistic perspective were at issue. The National Library of Scotland’s 1638 copy was owned in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries by one Priscila Sparow who in a large hand signed the verso side of the copy’s second end leaf. At some point, the copy made its way to the library of Thomas Maitland who in turn gave it to the Edinburgh’s Advocate Library in 1912. Two of Sparow’s four interventions are corrections. On D3r, she marks one of the edition’s many cases of creative spelling, underlining Daniocles and writing Damocles across from it in the right-hand margin. Pages on, she corrects a faulty stage direction, crossing out Mustaffa on H3r and writing ^Bajazet immediately below. Sparow’s correction of it bespeaks a close engagement with the playtext’s theatrical apparatus. This may simply have been the product of a diligent reading or possibly of some kind of amateur home production of the play. The last of her interventions take the play to task for its Elizabethan setting. In the lower left-hand margin of H2r, Sparow adds two manicules. The upper points at Bullithrumple’s underlined vow about the truth of his name that he wil bring my godfathers and godmothers, and they shal swear it vpon the font stone, and vpon the church booke too, where it is written (Sc20 Sp7). Below this, introduced by a second manicule, Sparrow zeroes in on the clown’s Anglican reasoning, sarcastically observing that The Author seems to haue forgot his scene lies in Turky.