Manuscript
The Faithful Friends was entered into the Stationers' Register on 29 June 1660 by bookseller Humphrey Moseley. Moseley did not publish the play, though, prior to his death in the next year, 1661. The play remained in manuscript — now known as Dyce MS. 10 — until it was first published in Henry William Weber's 1812 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher. "The MS. is in various hands, one of which has made corrections. Some of these seem on internal evidence to have been due to suggestions of the censor, others to playhouse exigencies." The main hand in the MS. is thought to be that of Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or prompter of the King's Men. Knight may have purged oaths from the text, though he also left gaps in his manuscript, rather than guess at the intended meaning, where he couldn't read the "foul papers" or authorial draft from which he worked.
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