account of work in hand; he was often obliged to send his manuscripts piecemeal to the manager, and on one occasion supplied a rough draft of the last scene of a play in order to obtain a few shillings in advance.  The amounts paid for new plays at this time were very low.  Before 1600 Henslowe never gave more than L8 for a play, but after that date there was a considerable rise in prices.  In 1613 Daborne received L20 for his tragedy of “Machiavell and the Devil.”  In the same year, however, for another play, “The Bellman of London,” he was content to take L12 and “the overplus of the second day.”  He had demanded L20 in the first instance, but being in great stress for money, had reduced his terms, beseeching Henslowe “to forsake him not in his extremity.”  Daborne’s letters of entreaty indeed expose his poverty in a most pathetic manner, while occasionally they betray amusingly his vanity as an author.  In one of his appeals to the manager, he writes:  “I did think I deserved as much money as Mr. Massinger;” but this estimation of himself and his writings has not been confirmed by later ages.

The “overplus of the second day” was probably, as a rule, not very considerable, seeing that a payment of L20 down was regarded as a higher rate of remuneration than L12 and “the overplus,” whatever it might produce, in addition.  Daborne’s needs, however, may have induced him to prize unduly “the bird in the hand.”  Still his brother-authors held similar views on the subject.  They, too, disliked the overplus system, while the managers as resolutely favoured it.  So that, apart from the consideration that poverty clings to certainty because it cannot afford speculation, and that, to the literary character especially, a present payment of a specified sum is always more precious than possible undefined profits in the future, we may conclude that the overplus system generally told to the advantage of the managers.  In the end the labourers had to yield to the capitalists; indeed, they could make little stand against them.  Authors have never manifested much faculty for harmonious combination, and a literary strike was no more conceivable then than now.  In time a chance of the overplus became hardly separable from the method of paying dramatists.  It was thought, perhaps, that better works would be produced by the writers who were made in some sort dependent for profit upon the success of their plays and partners in the ventures of the managers.  In such wise the loss sustained from the condemnation of a play at its first representation would not fall solely upon the manager; the author would at least be a fellow-sufferer.  Gradually the chance of the overplus was deferred from the second to the third performance.  The system no doubt varied according to the position of the dramatist, who, if he were a successful writer, could make his own terms, so far as the selection of the overplus night was concerned.  Sir John Denham, in the prologue to his tragedy, “The Sophy,” acted at Blackfriars about 1642, speaks of the second or third day’s overplus as belonging to the poet: