Product Code Database
Foul papers are an author's working drafts. The term is most often used in the study of the plays of Shakespeare and other dramatists of English Renaissance drama. Once the composition of a play was finished, a transcript or "" of the foul papers was prepared, by the author or by a scribe.
The term "foul papers" is given different definitions by various scholars. For example, some define them as "the author's original drafts". W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers define them as "the author's last complete draft, in a shape satisfactory to him for transfer to a fair copy".Greg, W. W. The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare. Oxford University Press (1954)Fredson Bowers. On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists. University of Pennsylvania Library. (1955) E. A. J. Honigmann defines them as "any kind of draft preceding the first fair copy".Honigmann, E. A. J. The Stability of Shakespeare's Texts. University of Nebraska Press (1965) p 17. Paul Werstine states that foul papers "need not refer exclusively to authorial drafts", and that the term "simply describes papers that are to be, are being, or have already been transcribed", and that foul papers may once have been fair copies.Werstine, Paul. Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press (2013). p. 98
Few sets of foul papers actually exist from the era in question. Of the relatively small number of dramas that are extant in manuscript,E. K. Chambers provides an extensive (though not exhaustive) list of fifty plays and masques in manuscript or manuscript fragments . the majority are from the (1625–1660) rather than the Elizabethan and Jacobean era (1558–1625), and most are fair copies of plays by professional scribes like Ralph Crane.See: A Game at Chess; Sir John van Olden Barnavelt.
In a rare direct reference to foul papers and fair copies, Robert Daborne mentions both in a November 1613 letter to theatrical manager Philip Henslowe: "I send you the foul sheet and the fair I was writing",Spelling, punctuation modernized (; ). which appears to indicate that Daborne prepared a fair copy of his working drafts as he wrote.
|
|
