"A small-beer health to his second day": Playwrights, Prologues, and First Performances in the Early Modern Theater

Abstract

"A small-beer health to his second day":Playwrights, Prologues, and First Performances in the Early Modern Theater Tiffany Stern "Let fancy," shrugs the prologue to George Powell's Alphonso (1691), "save my Play, / And then I'll laugh at Wits on my Third Day."1 What he is saying is that he hopes the audience will accept his play by applauding it. Provided they do so, Alphonso will be put on at least another two times; if the reverse happens and it is "damned," it will never be staged again. Powell is particularly anxious that the play survive to its third performance, as he will be given a portion of the revenue brought in that night for his "benefit." This will be the major (and perhaps only) payment he gets for his writing. The prologue, as is clear, is for the play only in its early stage-life, angled toward that audience who will determine the production's survival to the benefit. This prologue and the wishes it expresses are entirely standard, and it is usual to point out the three-day nature of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prologues.2 But despite the fact that many Caroline and some Jacobean prologues and epilogues deal with the same issues—the role the audience will have in applauding or damning the play, the playwright's fears and desires for his "benefit" performance—no critics have drawn attention to this, or dealt with its corollary: that many surviving prologues and epilogues [End Page 172] in the early modern period were also temporary and the province of the opening day only (benefit performances, when held, generally took place on the second day up until the interregnum). Plays, I will argue, were differently packaged on their first performance from the way they were subsequently packaged; printed plays with and without prologues are making different statements. This article will show how prologues and epilogues affected the way a play was seen and marketed; it will show stage-orations referring to their first day status, referring to the "judgmental" audience in a position to damn the play, and referring to second-day authorial benefits to come. The suggestion also will be made that new plays (with prologues and epilogues) might be cut in the light of criticism received from the audience at the first, or "trial," performance. The chronology of playing is more pertinent to the argument than the chronology of publication; dates given for plays in square brackets are dates of performance.3 Prologues, Epilogues, and the First Performance It has always been clear that some prologues and epilogues were written for special single performances: those, for instance, addressed to "Ezekiel Fen at his first Acting a Mans Part" or addressed to "their two excellent Majesties, at the first Play play'd by the Queenes Servants, in the new Theater at White Hall."4 All prologues to the court are, of course, for specific one-off performances. But although many other prologues and epilogues show distinct signs of being highly topical—the prologue to Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, for example, makes articles of agreement between the spectators at the Hope theater and the author on "the one and thirtieth day of Octob. 1614"—critics have not considered that most surviving prologues and epilogues may have been for special first-day performances.5 Particularly when writing about Shakespeare, critics have assumed prologues and epilogues were permanently [End Page 173] part of the text, though history shows that even prologues sharing close thematic links with their plays seem to have been disposable.6 The scene-setting prologue to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida ("In Troy there lies the Scene") is a case in point: it had not featured in either of the variant first Quartos (1609) of the text, and it was almost accidentally acquired for the Folio late in the publication process to fill what had, for other reasons, become a spare recto before the start of the play.7 Similarly, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet appears in the Folio without its "star-crossed lovers" prologue; Henry V in its 1600 Quarto (thought to be, albeit in corrupt form, a performance text) is without prologue...