Governor, The

Formido, Cornelius (1637)

Historical Records

King's Company Bill

A bill presented by the King's Company for 22 plays presented at court between Eastern Monday 1636 to 21 February 1637 lists the play as the 21st, presented on 16 February 1637:

Playes acted before the Kinge and Queene

this present yeare of the lord. 1636.

[…]

21 The 16^th of ffebruary at S^t James. the Governour.

(National Archives, AO 3/908/22; qtd. Adams 75–76; facsimile in Law, facing p. 39)

Records of Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels

Herbert's records, as printed by Malone, list the play's performance on 17 February 1637:

The Governor, by the K. players, at St. James, the 17 Febru. 1636.

(Malone 3.290; Bawcutt, #364)

Stationers' Register

Humphrey Moseley entered the play on 9 September 1653, along with a substantial number of other King's Men plays:

The Gouernour. by S^r Cornelius Formido.

(Liber E, p. 285; Eyre, 1.428)

Warburton's List

The play appears in Warburton's List listed as a tragedy ("T"):

The Governer T. S^r. Corñ. Fermido

Theatrical Provenance

Performed by the King's Men at St James's Palace on either 16 or 17 February 1637.

Probable Genre(s)

Tragedy (Wiggins)

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

Unknown.

References to the Play

(Information welcome.)

Critical Commentary

Extant Manuscript?

A manuscript in the British Library (MS Add. 10419) bears the title The Governor. However, it is unclear whether this is the same play that was performed by the King's Men. The main complication is that the first page of the manuscript reads:

The Governor

A Tragi Comedy 1656

Scene Barcellona

Samuel

While some critics have taken "1656" as a date of composition and the word "Samuel" as the name of the author (Harbage, "Notes," conjectures the interregnum writer Samuel Holland), thereby disqualifying its identity with the play performed by the King's Men, others have considered the possibility that this may be the date at which the manuscript was transcribed and that its copy may have been a Caroline play. However, much depends on what manuscript was owned by Warburton.

Greg (BEPD, 4.981) noted that the MS also bears an inscription "This Play formerly belonged to John Warburton, Somerset Herald" (fol. 1v) but added that "there is no reason to suppose that this possesses independent authority"—that is, the inscription may have been added to the manuscript later by someone who knew that a play of the same name was in Warburton's destroyed collection but had no specific knowledge about the provenance of the extant manuscript. Contra Harbage, Greg described the name "Samuel" as added below the title in a "childish hand" after the main text had been transcribed and that this should not be taken as evidence about the name of the manuscript's author.

Bentley (3.465–68) acknowledges "some uncertainty" from the evidence of "whether one, two, or possibly three plays" with the same name existed. Given the number of other dramatic manuscripts that entered into Moseley's possession from the King's Men, Bentley found it "natural" to assume that the manuscript he entered represented the same play that the company performed at court in 1637. Less clear is how the extant British Library manuscript relates to these earlier records. As Bentley noted, the attribution of "The Governor" to Formido in the Warburton list at least suggests that the play in his possession derived from Moseley's stock, as did The Second Maiden's Tragedy (pace Greg's reservations about the Warburton list's parallels with the Stationers' Register). When the extant manuscript in the British Library was sold in the 1836 Heber sale (Vol. 9, Part XI, 135), however, it was described thus:

The Governor, A Tragi Comedy, 1656. This play is one of the very few which Warburton's Servant spared. It is to be regretted that instead of being by Sir Corn. Formido, it was one of those written by our older dramatists.

Again, this note may simply reflect someone's assumption about the provenance of the manuscript based on separate information about the Warburton list. The catalogue's disqualification of Formido's authorship may have been based on the presence of the name "Samuel" on the manuscript, which (as Greg noted) does not seem to be in the same hand that transcribed the rest of the manuscript. In Bentley's jusgement, the manuscript play's allusions to wars in the Low Countries (including the Siege of Ostend) and Puritans, as well as its specific references to staging practices of the commercial theatre, all "contradicted" 1656 as a date of composition although were not quite enough to prove that the play was the one performed by the King's Men.

Wiggins (#2541), however, finds throughout the manuscript a revising hand that not only corrects mistakes made by the main transcriber but also inserts three new lines in the first act, suggesting that this was the play's author. Wiggins's reasoning—"If these amendments were indeed authorial, then the extant text cannot be the play performed in 1637, whose author died in 1638"—leads him to categorize Formido's "The Governor" as lost.

For What It's Worth

There seems to be sufficient evidence to doubt that the extant British Library manuscript derived from Warburton's collection, since the provenance annotations on the manuscript itself might well reflect conjectures by later owners (including, perhaps, Heber); as such, it seems entirely possible to believe that the manuscript entered by Moseley in 1653 ended up in Warburton's possession and that the extant manuscript (dated 1656 and owned by Heber) had never been owned by Warburton.

It may, however, be possible to reconcile Bentley's rejection of 1656 as a date of composition with the textual corrections and additions noted in the manuscript by Wiggins. To propose one possible scenario, might the extant manuscript have been transcribed in 1656 from an earlier manuscript of Formido's play, and then, after 1660, annotated not by the original playwright but by someone exploring the possibility of mounting the play on the Restoration stage (as was the fate of a number of unpublished plays discussed in Harbage, "Palimpsest," such as the King's Men's "The Duke of Lerma) or even potentially someone revising the manuscript with an eye for publication?

Works Cited

Adams, Joseph Quincy, ed. The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623–1673. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917.

Harbage, Alfred. "Notes on Manuscript Plays." TLS (20 June 1936): 523.

Harbage, Alfred. "Elizabethan-Restoration Palimpsest." Modern Language Review 35 (1940): 287–319.

Law, Ernest. More about Shakespeare "Forgeries". London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1913.

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