ABSTRACT
The play exists in a single hand-written copy in the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays in the British Library (Add. MS 53182 N). The title page bears the words ‘To be performed at the Theatre Royal Coventry. Madlle Leander’ (Figure 13). The Licence No. attached to the manuscript is 45, dated ‘Feb-March 1877’. The Lord Chamberlain’s Day Book dates the licence ‘March 2; Entered March 6. Theatre Royal Coventry’. The title page also has an annotation in a later hand, stating:
The statement is signed ‘EP’, presumably for Edward Pigott, the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays,1 and the same hand has struck out ‘two’ and inserted ‘Four’ on the title page. The play is clearly a version of Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer’s play, and the confusion about the division into acts probably arises from the title-page of BirchPfeiffer’s printed play, which defi nes it as ‘a Drama in Two Parts and Four Acts’, Part 1 being the Prologue, and Part 2 consisting of Acts I-III.2 The original manuscript of the Hering play has headings for Act I (corresponding to Birch-Pfeiffer’s Prologue) and Act II, but its division into scenes (with some minor differences) follows BirchPfeiffer’s, producing the anomaly that the scenes in Act II are numbered 1-6, 2-12, 3 (very odd!) and 2-9. EP has attempted to introduce some order by striking out all the scene numbers (and since ‘scenes’ indicate entrances and exits rather than changes of scenery, this is not a damaging change) and inserting ‘Act III’ before the 2-12 group and ‘Act IV’ before the fi nal group. He has in turn been confused by the fact that Birch-Pfeiffer’s fourth act is labelled ‘Act III’ (since her fi rst ‘act’ is a ‘Prologue’) and has thus written ‘This appears really to be a Third Act’ before the fi nal group of Hering scenes which he then labels ‘Act IV’. In representing this chaos, I have adopted EP’s numbering in four acts, indicating the original Act and Scene numbers in square brackets.
