Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 4).pdf/151

 Repository"'. Their official character was realized, and they were sent to the Record Office, and placed amongst the papers known as Audit Office, Accounts Various, 3, 908 (formerly 1214), with a note that Mr. E. A. Bond, Keeper of the Manuscripts in the British Museum, 'saw reasons for doubting the genuineness of one, at least, of these papers, from the peculiar character of the writing and the spelling'. It is probable that Bond had in mind, wholly or mainly, the play-list of the 1604-5 book, which does use some spellings, such as 'Shaxberd' and 'aleven', which are unusual although by no means unparalleled, and is, moreover, in a style of handwriting sufficiently different from the rest of the document to have at first sight a suspicious air. But it is an integral part of the book, occupying ff. 2, 2^v of its three small folio sheets, with other matter both on ff. 1, 1^v, and on ff. 5, 5^v, which form the second half of its sheet, and therefore, if a forged insertion, it occupies a long blank conveniently left by the original scribe just where, according to Revels practice, such a list ought to come. Bond's scepticism was shared by Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, and although the grounds of it did not extend beyond the play-list in the 1604-5 account, the acceptance of this as a forgery naturally reflected some suspicion upon the corresponding list for 1611-12. The position, however, called for some reconsideration when, in ''A Note on Measure for Measure'' (1880) and subsequently in the fifth edition (1885) of his Outlines (ed. 9, ii. 163, 309), Halliwell-Phillipps called attention to evidence that Malone, at some date before his death in 1812, and therefore before Cunningham was born, was acquainted at least with the substance of the 1604-5 list. The Bodleian contains a number of Malone's note-books, which are believed to have been purchased from Mr. Rodd, a London bookseller, in 1838, and contain material collected after the issue of Malone's Shakespeare of 1790 with a view to a second edition ultimately produced by Boswell in 1821. With them were a bundle of loose scraps, which have since been mounted and bound as a supplementary volume. One of these scraps (Malone MS. 29, f. 69^v) consists of a list of plays headed '1604 & 1605 Ed^d. Tylney', which substantially agrees with the list in the Revels book, even to the unusual spelling 'Shaxberd', although it is clearly not a transcript of the Revels list, but merely an abstract of this, or a similar document, in an unknown hand other than Malone's. One of the plays named in the Revels book, The Spanish Maze of Shrove Monday, is omitted. No use of the scrap had been made by Boswell, although he prints (Variorum, iii. 360) extracts made by Malone from the Elizabethan Revels books, together with a letter of 7 Nov. 1591 from Sir William Musgrave, of the Audit Office, inviting Malone to inspect them, and an official memorandum on the 'State of the Books of Accounts and Records of the Master of the Revels, still remaining in the Office for Auditing the Public Accounts in 1791'. It is, I think, inconceivable that, if the Jacobean as well as the Elizabethan books had then been discovered, no reference should have been made to them either by Musgrave or Malone, and the most probable explanation of the Bodleian scrap is that the Jacobean books turned up later, and that an abstract of the 1604-5 list was then prepared for the use