g 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:

Gentlemen, if you dislike the play,
Pray make no words on'