Rough working draft.
A rough working draft, or foul paper, of a scene in blank verse and prose between the Prince
[Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Florence] and Lorenzo [Lorenzino de' Medici] which was later heavily adapted as Act I, scene ii of The Traitor; a fragment comprising some 144 lines of text drafted out, with numerous currente calamo revisions, in the mixed secretary and italic hand of its (probably professional) author on two conjugate folio leaves, each c.390 x 305 mm; from the papers of Sir John Coke (1563-1644), Secretary of State, or his family, and the muniments of the Marquess of Lothian at Melbourne Hall, Derbyshire; the MS at some time folded and used as wrapping paper to enclose a bundle of letters (possibly in 1634 or 1640) when books and papers were sent by his sons respectively from Gray's Inn and from London to Melbourne); marked in pencil in the 1880s by William Dashwood Fane Packet 3
(which originally contained documents of 1601-30, including Sir Fulke Greville's household accounts of 1602-3).
c.1606-31.
This MS was discovered by Edward Saunders and identified by Felix Pryor at Melbourne Hall in 1985. Bloomsbury Book Auctions, 20 June 1986, lot 222 (unsold).
This MS appeared in a separate sale catalogue by Felix Pryor for Bloomsbury Book Auctions, 20 June 1986, lot 222, and is discussed by him, with a facsimile page and transcript, in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, ed. J.M. Brook (Detroit, 1986), pp. 133-8. It was publicized elsewhere, with occasional reduced facsimile examples, notably in The Times (6 May 1986), pp. 1, 12, and (19 October 1989); Time (19 May 1986), p. 11; New York Times (24 May 1986); TLS (13 June 1986), p. 651; The Spectator (14 June 1986), pp. 34-5; and Maine Antique Digest (July 1986), pp. 36-37C.
Discussed, with reduced facsimiles, and the attribution to Webster supported, in Antony Hammond and Doreen DelVecchio, The Melbourne Manuscript and John Webster: A Reproduction and Transcript, SB, 41 (1988), 1-32, and in Alfred Marnau, John Webster. Teufel Wörter (Nordlingen, 1986) [where it is also translated into German as Il Moro, Herzog von Florenz. Ein Webster-Fragment]. Facsimiles also in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987), p. 8., and in DLB, vol. 58, Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists, ed. Fredson Bowers (Detroit, 1987), pp. 290-1.
Discussed, and the attribution to Webster rejected in favour of Shirley, by I.A. Shapiro in letters to the TLS (4 July 1986), pp. 735-6, and (8 August 1986), p. 865 (also in unpublished further articles), and in The Works of John Webster, Vol. III, ed. David Gunby, David Carnegie, and MacDonald P. Jackson (Cambridge, 2003), pp. xxx-xxxi. See also letters and articles by Richard Proudfoot and Felix Pryor in TLS (13 June 1986), p. 651; (18 July 1986), p. 787; (22 August 1986), pp. 913-14; and (29 August 1986), p. 939, and N.W. Bawcutt, The Assassination of Alessandro de' Medici in early Seventeenth-Century English Drama, RES, NS 56 (June 2005), 412-23.