Category:Partial payment

The venerable E. K. Chambers observed that the sums paid to playwrights in Philip Henslowe's Diary by the Admiral's men and Worcester's men for new plays, 1597-1603, "ranged from £4 to £10 10s" (The Elizabethan Stage, I.373). He thus concluded that "a fee of £6 may be taken as about normal" (I.373). The category, "Partial payment," refers to the situation of several dozen plays in the diary for which the payments were below the norm. Roslyn L. Knutson discusses various reasons why the payments for a given play might have been partial, even though in numerous cases such plays appear to have been staged: for example, the plays might have been secondhand; Henslowe's records are broken or incomplete; payments might have been applied to a playwright's loan; and payments might have been combined or titles changed ("The Commercial Significance of the Payments for Playtexts in Henslowe's Diary, 1597-1603," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England [1991]: 117-63).