An Annotated Copy of Sir William Killigrew's The Seege of Urbin (1666)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1Johnston (1976), Johnston and Vander Motten (1979), Vander Motten and Johnston (1983) Horden (1984), and Horden and Vander Motten (1989). Both the Rosenbach and the Brotherton copy have The Imperial Tragedy bound in with the other plays. Killigrew added this title to the printed title page, thus claiming authorship of a play published anonymously in 1669. Given his bent for autograph revision, it is remarkable that no annotated copies of Three Playes have as yet been discovered. 2One of the commendatory poems preceding Three Playes, Edmund Waller's “Of Pandora's not being Approved upon the Stage as Tragedy,” tells us that Killigrew had “reformed” this play as a comedy after it had failed on the stage as a tragedy. 3Each of the Four New Playes has its own title page and pagination, so that they could be issued separately. 4See http://www.history.ac.uk/gh/newsletter2.htm For permission to reproduce these annotations, I am indebted to the Guildhall Library, City of London. There is no evidence that G was ever bound with the other four plays. 5H1 has been bound in so as to face A1r but it is not clear whether it was the author who moved this leaf to its new position or the modern binder at the time of the restoration of the (water?) damaged volume in 1952. Killigrew's memo “goe on in the other [i.e., “opposite”?] leafe” may point to the former. 6Condensation also extends to the stage-direction at the end of the G text, which is less explicit than in the other two copies: “Celestina looks the Dore and seetts againe” (B) and “She loocks the Dore, and then sitts” (R). 7The absence of the dramatist's signature, a proof of authorship appearing in R as well as B, may indicate that he did not intend the G copy of The Seege of Urbin to pass out of his hands. 8Publication was no doubt arranged during Killigrew's stay with the court at Oxford, after the outbreak of the plague in London. The title page to Selindra states that it was “printed for the Author.” It may be noted that Henry Hall and his colleagues “printed by private arrangement for all and sundry” but used their title of “Printer to the University ... if the size or importance of their production warranted it”; see Madan xii. 9The book-collecting earl acknowledged the gift on the title-page: “Anglesey given me by the worthy author Sept. 17 1670”; the copy was listed in the 1686 sale catalogue of his library, under “Miscellanies in Folio”; see Philipps 28. 10 Four New Playes does contain the prologues and epilogues for Pandora and The Seege of Urbin but not the cast list included in the manuscript of the latter: see Taylor 22. For part of my argument, I am indebted to Holland 117–25. 11I subscribe to G. Thomas Tanselle's view that “authors do have intentions, and their intentions [ ... ] are legitimate goals for historical investigation, even if they become mixed with the intentions of others in the publication process” (65). 12On the stage history of his plays, see Vander Motten, Sir William Killigrew, 153ff. 13It is a measure of Scott's fastidiousness that in the period of his partnership with William Wells, from 1663 to 1672, he issued “an approximate total of ten books” only

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  John Horden•The Library•1984

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  Jack Canfield, J Douglas Canfield et al.•Eighteenth-Century Studies•1991

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• The Ornament of Action

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