would be particularly implausible. Stern reads Jonson's account of removing the "second pen" from Sejanus as a case of his losing control of the play when his plot was given to someone else to do some of the writing (26). I cannot see any of this in Jonson's account: he just says that he wants the thing to be all his own work, and not that a second person's contribution was forced on him. Stern speculates that the phrasing of some stage directions might come from plots, and maybe a plot used twice by different writers would explain why the anonymous Troublesome Reign of King John and Shakespeare's King John are so alike in action but unalike in words. Yes, that may be.

Stern's second chapter on "Playbills andthe few professional theatre plays published with 'arguments' appeared in the Interregnum and the only earlier examples are from masques. Rather like a modern programme, an 'argument'--made after the play was completed--was given to certain members of the audience at certain performances, but not on the professional London stage. Stern gives details of what the 'arguments' show for the masque-within-the-play in John Ford's The Lover's Melancholy, James Shirley's The Constant Maid and Middleton's No Wit/Help Like a Woman and Women Beware Women, and then 'arguments' for some actual masques and a puppet-show-within-a-play (67-8). When Stern finally comes to an 'argument' in a play, it is the play-within-the-play in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, which is a court performance. There is an elaborate manuscript at the Houghton Library that