Bonduca - Text

Text

Bonduca has a two-way relationship of influence or borrowing with other plays before and after it. Arthur Sherbo discovered a range of parallels and commonalities between the play and Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I (c. 1587). In the opposite chronological direction, S. W. Brossman identified borrowings from Bonduca in John Dryden's Cleomenes (1692).

A list of the cast members survives from the original production of Bonduca by the King's Men. The list includes: Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, John Lowin, William Ostler, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley, William Ecclestone, and Richard Robinson.

In addition to the 1647 printed text, the play exists in manuscript form. The manuscript was written by Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or prompter of the King's Men, probably c. 1630. In a note appended to his transcript, Knight explains that the original prompt-book that supported the stage performances had been lost, and that he had re-copied the author's "foul papers" into the existing manuscript. Knight, however, was unable to transcribe the entire play (he had to summarize the first two and a half scenes in Act V), because the set of foul papers from which he worked was itself incomplete — a useful demonstration of the difficulties in textual transmission that plagued English Renaissance theatre. (The missing scenes are present in the 1647 printed text, though their order, as Knight describes it, is reversed: his V,i comes second and his V,ii comes first.)