Textual Transmission and the Enterprising Plagiarist: George Powell, The Treacherous Brothers, and The Dumb Knight

t his essay tells a story. It features a tragedy of 1690 — George Powell ’ s The Treacherous Brothers — in which the author commandeers long passages of dialogue from plays fi rst printed between 1602 and 1680 and uses those passages to fl esh out the speeches of his own characters. At least eight such plays contribute to the text of The Treacherous Brothers . In examining Powell ’ s practice, I draw special attention to one of these sources: Lewis Machin and Gervase Markham ’ s The Dumb Knight . This comedy of 1607 or 1608 supplied the plot — and frequently the words — with which Powell presents his play ’ s cru-cial deception: a trick that induces the King of Cyprus to believe that his Queen has been unfaithful. I examine a speech in which Powell melds his fi rst appropriation from The Dumb Knight with another, from John Marston ’ s Antonio ’ s Revenge . The fi rst line of that speech — “ Night Clad in black, mourns for the loss of day ” — careered across the seventeenth century. Its appearances in The Dumb Knight and The Treacherous Brothers constitute two moments in what was a sustained progress featuring not only dramatic dialogue but also erotic narrative verse, acrostic tribute, and a sequence of miscellanies. That single web of in fl uence and appropriation offers a vivid illustration of Powell ’ s preference for material that itself possessed a complex intertextual history. It points to the sources and the afterlife of The Dumb Knight as subjects of interest in their own right. And it sketches a transmission history that may be val-ued and appreciated on its own terms, prioritizing neither the origin, the end-point, nor the various intervening stations. These claims re fl ect the threefold subject of this essay. First, it is a tale of Powell ’ s acquisitive practice, and in that