18 May, 1595 - a hoax entry!

Here's what the Admiral's Men did not perform at the Rose playhouse on this day, 424 years ago...

"Henslowe" writes: y^e 18 of Maye 1595 ... R at galfrido & Bernardo ... xxxj^s 

In modern English: 18^th May, 1595 ... Received at Galfrido and Bernardo ... 31 shillings

Today's post is a strange one, for Henslowe's supposed diary entry for 18 May is in fact a forgery inserted by the nineteeth-century scholar John Payne Collier. We have encountered many 'lost plays' before, but this is something quite different: the play of Galfrido and Bernardo never existed at all. How can something so outrageous have happened? Read on...

John Payne Collier, 1789-1883

Henslowe's Diary has been studied by many scholars since it was rediscovered by Edmund Malone in the 18th century. One of them was Collier, who borrowed the manuscript from Dulwich College in 1840 and kept it for years. The following description of what happened next is based on Arthur and Janet Freeman's 2004 bio-bibliography of him.

Collier spent five years creating an annotated transcript of Henslowe's Diary, eventually publishing it in 1845. He was a brilliant scholar and his work was an extremely important contribution to our understanding of the document. But Collier had a demon inside him: throughout his career he inserted fake information into the documents that he worked on. His alterations were often small and subtle, and not until 1876 did scholars comparing the Diary with earlier transcripts first notice the hoaxes that Collier had introduced.

Collier used his expert knowledge of Elizabethan handwriting to insert words into the Diary. His additions can be recognized now due to their different ink colour. Take a look at the facsimile of this page of the Diary. At the very bottom, you'll see the entry for Galfrido and Bernardo. The ink is more faded and if you look closely you can see that although the imitation of Henslowe's handwriting is impressive, it is not perfect. In his published edition of the Diary, Collier disguises his insertion by noting that it was "omitted to be noticed by Malone".

What was Collier's motivation? With most of his Henslowe hoaxes, he was trying to make more important his other scholarly endeavours. In 1844, he had published a reprint of a 1570 poem by John Drout, The Pitiful History of Two Loving Italians, Gaulfrido and Barnardo le Vayne. The false entry in the Diary makes the poem seem more significant by making it appear to have inspired a lost theatrical adaptation.  In his edition of the Diary, he proposes that the entry "relates to a play founded, doubtless, upon the recently-discovered poem by John Drout" and makes sure to mention his own publication of it, "limited to twenty-five copies".

Normal service will resume tomorrow!

FURTHER READING

Information on Collier and "Galfrido and Bernardo"

• John Payne Collier, The Diary of Philip Henslowe from 1591 to 1609 (Shakespeare Society, 1845), 52.
• Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2004), 1:361-8. 

Henslowe links

• Transcript of this page of the Diary (from W.W. Greg's 1904 edition)
• Facsimile of this page of the Diary (from the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project)

Comments?

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