University of Virginia Library

COMPOSITOR B'S SPEECH-PREFIXES IN THE FIRST
FOLIO OF SHAKESPEARE AND THE QUESTION OF
COPY FOR 2 HENRY IV

by
S. W. Reid

Textual critics of Shakespeare have traditionally focused on the names or
titles represented in the speech-prefixes of his plays in the course of clas-
sifying them as either typeset from foul-papers or as derived from fair copy or
prompt-books. This has been so since R. B. McKerrow's truly seminal article in
the 1930s, which proposed that the substantive content and consistency of the
'character-names' in an early printed edition could indicate the kind of manu-
script that served as its copy. He contrasted the First Folio's 'permanent labels'
and 'uniform' names in Two Gentlemen of Verona with the irregularity in The Comedy
of Errors of the names for 'the brothers Antipholus and the two Dromios', and
then went on to discuss the now well-known alternation in the second quarto
of Romeo and Juliet between the names and functions of Juliet's parents, as well
as similar inconsistency in the first editions of Love's Labour's Lost, All's Well that
Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus.[1] McKerrow's 'Suggestion'
has constituted one of the principal reference points for several generations of
editions, including the most recent ones, though as of the end of the last cen-
tury his typically coherent, temperate, and modest observations have incurred
searching criticism, whether because of their lack of documentary confirmation,
the pressure they have had to endure from editorial speculation, or fin de siècle
doubt.[2]

Nonetheless, the speech-prefixes of the principal compositor of the First Folio
have received less attention from bibliographers than might have been expected.
For in some plays, it is the precise forms of Compositor B's speech-prefixes,
the various combinations of letters he used to represent the names or titles of
the characters who speak, that provide some of the most promising evidence for
examining whether or not a given quarto served as the basic setting copy for
William Jaggard's first collected edition—a question that continues to plague
the textual analysis of plays like 2 Henry IV, Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear.

A few scholars have had recourse to such evidence in attempts to distinguish
pages set by B from those set by other compositors, chiefly E. More important,
however, and more neglected, has been Fredson Bowers' suggestion that these
'appurtenances' provide 'evidence about the nature of the underlying Folio copy'
which 'can be evaluated with some confidence'. The proposition he develops
is that B, like other compositors, was 'conservative in the treatment of names
and titles' not only in stage-directions but in speech-prefixes, especially on their
earlier appearances. Furthermore, Bowers argues, in the latter 'variation in the
forms of names and titles… including even some variant spelling of the names'
will usually reflect the variability of B's manuscript copy, despite his tendency
to repeat the form of an immediately preceding stage-direction and to prefer
shorter forms to longer ones.[3] The conclusion that the variable speech-prefixes
in the Folio texts of All's Well that Ends Well and Julius Caesar do not represent
the compositors' own 'predilections', but rather reflect the manuscripts behind
them, has important implications for assessing the character of other Folio manu-
scripts. Yet the hypothesis itself, which has potential application to printed copy
as well, remains untested because the manuscripts themselves have perished. The
survival of examples of the quartos used by B and his partners to set up seven
Folio plays offers the opportunity to examine the proposition that, under most

circumstances and with certain qualifications, he faithfully followed his copy's
speech-prefixes.

Compositor B's pages in these Folio plays[4] indicate that the proposition is es-
sentially sound and, in particular, that when speech-prefixes containing complete
names appear in his work, they almost certainly derive from B's copy. However,
the reliability of the evidence must be defined not only in the context of B's gen-
eral practices and tendencies in setting speech-prefixes, but also by reference to
some specific techniques he employed in handling the forms of his quarto copy,
especially under the influence of justification and of nearby stage-directions.

I

A quick survey of his speech-prefixes in these seven plays shows that, despite
the length of the forms in his copy, B favored three-letter prefixes, was also open
to setting four-letter forms, and was even not averse to producing some speech-
prefixes with only two letters. The speech-prefixes in short lines (those not fill-
ing the measure or even extending to within three ens of it) provide the most
unequivocal evidence.[5] More than 80 percent of B's prefixes in short lines run
to three or four letters, and if those containing only two letters are also included
in the count, the percentage jumps to well over 90. Short speech-prefixes are
clearly what B generally preferred throughout the Folio (F). In this respect his
general practice appears to have changed little over the two and one-half years
he worked on this book.

His preference for three-letter speech-prefixes is most evident in F's Com-
edies. In Ado, LLL, MND, and MV, there are almost four times as many three-
letter forms as four-letter. Moreover, if we exclude from consideration the two
and one-half pages of Ado—in which B faced a number of relatively long speech-
prefixes typical of Simmes's Compositor A[6] and set one and one-half times as
many four-letter forms ('Mess.', 'Leon.', 'Clau.', 'Iohn.') as three-letter ('Leo.', 'Bea.',
'Ben.')—the proportion of three-letter to four-letter forms in the Comedies is a
flat five to one. Thus MND is about typical of B's performance in the Comedies.
It is dominated by 'Her.', 'The.', 'Dem.', 'Lys.', 'Hel.', and 'Dut.'; many of these
reproduce the forms of quarto copy, but 'Lys.' and 'Dut.' also replace longer copy
forms ('Lysan.' or 'Lysand.' and 'Dutch.').

On the other hand, even in the Comedies B is not so committed to speech-
prefixes of three letters that he completely eschews those of four or of two. Besides
setting a majority of four-letter forms in Ado, B once expands his copy's 'Fai.' to
'Fair.' in MND and reproduces Q2's 'Quin.', 'This.', 'Wall.', 'Lyon.', and 'Moon.'.
In LLL, though favoring 'Ber.', 'Dum.', 'Mar.', 'Lon.', 'Ros.', 'Kin.', and 'Ped.', he
retains 2 of Q's 3 'Mari.', 4 of its 9 'Long.', 5 of its 12 'Rosa.', 8 of its 21 'King.',
and all 11 of its 'Brag.'. In MV he changes to 'Bas.' half of the dozen 'Bass.' found
in Q1, but he reproduces the other half dozen four-letter forms even after having
regularized others to the shorter form. Likewise, he reproduces a single 'Anth.'
from Q1 despite his already established preference for 'Ant.'. The Comedies thus
exhibit B's tolerance for four-letter speech-prefixes as well as his stronger prefer-
ence for forms of three letters. Furthermore, LLL and MND especially display his
use, though limited, of certain two-letter speech-prefixes, which generally belong
to one of two groups of analogous forms (see below in section I).

In F's Histories and Tragedies, speech-prefixes of three and four letters, along
with a smattering of two-letter forms, continue to dominate the pages studied
here. Although the raw statistics do not suggest as strong a preference for three-
letter forms as in the Comedies, the particular features of the texts and other
circumstances indicate that there was no appreciable shift in B's practices in these
later Folio plays. It is true that in 1 Henry IV, where B set 117 (+15NL+75L)[7] three-
letter speech-prefixes and 91 (+14NL+83L) four-letter, the three-letter forms out-
number the four-letter by the small factor of 1.3 to 1, as compared to 3.7 to 1
in the Comedies. And it is also true that in his three and one-half pages of Tit.
and Rom., B set 10 (+3NL+10L) three-letter speech-prefixes and 17 (+4NL+15L)
four-letter, thus apparently abandoning his former practice and using the longer
form almost twice as often. However, even though these raw statistics suggest an
increasingly decided shift to four-letter forms, the nature of the speech-prefixes
indicates that no decisive shift occurred.

Four characters—'King.', 'Prin.', 'Poin.', and 'Fran.'—occur so frequently
in B's pages of 1H4 that together they account for B's apparent gravitation to
speech-prefixes of four letters in the course of setting F. With the exception of
one 'Kin.' in a long line of Q5 (3019L), B found only 'King.' in his copy and repro-
duced all but one of its 13 (+6NL+4L) long forms, shortening to 'Kin.' only once.
Since in LLL he had already displayed a tendency to reproduce his copy's 'King.'
despite his preference for 'Kin.', his prefixes in 1H4 suggest that this preference
had not been reversed but merely weakened, probably as a result of his continual
exposure to 'King.' in the copy for the Histories.[8]

The increase in the proportion of 'King.' forms accepted by B can be traced
to two long-standing habits which made him peculiarly susceptible to the influ-
ence of his copy's virtually uniform 'King.'. First, even in the Comedies his work
exhibits a general though secondary inclination to set speech-prefixes of four
letters, of which there are a total of 135 (67+6NL+62L) in the seventeen pages
of four plays. More particularly, he displays throughout F a tendency to retain
full forms of names like 'Duke.', 'Iohn.', 'Hero.', 'Wall.', 'Lyon.', 'Page.', and even
'Claudio.', 'Borachio.', 'Boyet.', 'Egeus.', and 'Nerissa.'. (More on this practice in
section III below.) Together with the preponderance of 'King.' forms in his copy
for R2 and possibly in the various copy for the other Histories set before 1 Henry
IV, these two tendencies of B's probably combined to make him more disposed
than in the Comedies to retain his copy's 'King.'

Still more numerically dominant than 'King.' in B's share of 1H4 are the
analogous speech-prefixes 'Prin.', 'Poin.', and 'Fran.'. B's pages have a total of
46 instances of 'Prin.' in short lines and another 47 in long or nearly long lines;
of these 93, more than one-third replace longer forms (e.g., 'Prince.'), while the
remainder duplicate Q5's 'Prin.'. The number of 'Poin.', or 'Poyn.', forms (11+7L)
is comparable to the number of 'King.', as is the number of 'Fran.' (10+4L). Why
B preferred these forms, not only to the longer ones which he periodically found
in his copy but also to their shorter alternatives, is not altogether clear. However,
it is a fact that he often eschewed three-letter speech-prefixes that end in a vowel
even in the Comedies. For instance, his 'Leon.' accounts in part for the higher
proportion of four-letter speech-prefixes in Ado than in the other three Comedies;
when setting the first page of this play B shortened Q's 'Leona.' to 'Leon.' in the
first two instances, then followed its 'Leo.' in the next three, and finally settled
on 'Leon.' for subsequent speech-prefixes, where Q had either 'Leonato.' or 'Leo.'.
Likewise, he followed Q's 'Brag.' 11 times in LLL, though setting 'Du.' 5 times,
'Boy.' or 'Boi.' 12, and 'Clo.' 9.[9] It may be that 'Brag.' merely reflects the influ-
ence of Q copy on B rather than his disposition to eschew three-letter prefixes
ending in a vowel, but 'Leon.' at least seems to betray an actual compositorial
preference.

Whether the influence of copy or an instinctive attraction to ending abbrevi-
ated speech-prefixes with -n rather than a vowel led B to prefer 'Prin.', 'Poin.', and
'Fran.', these speech-prefixes, along with the dozen instances of 'King.', largely
account for the higher proportion of four-letter forms in 1H4 than in the Com-
edies. Nonetheless, it is a fact that in this play B also set 19 'Fal.' (13 instead
of Q5's 'Fals.'), 20 'Wor.', 5 'Nor.', and 45 'Hot.'. Hence, his general habit of
setting speech-prefixes either with three or four letters apparently continued in
1 Henry IV, even though the raw statistics seem to suggest an increasing tolerance
of the latter.

In the few pages of the Tragedies which B set from known prints, the raw
totals may again be misleading in their indication of a stronger leaning towards
speech-prefixes of four letters. The evidence for such an inclination is all in
Rom. but is not convincing. B's one and one-half pages have a sufficient number

of four-letter speech-prefixes to suggest a shift in his practice: a quick glance
finds 'Greg.', 'Samp.', and 'Abra.' recurring in the first page (ee3), 'Prin.' repeated
in the second (Gg1), and 'Moun.' in both. Yet in view of his performance in 1
Henry IV, B's 2 (+2L) 'Prin.' prefixes are hardly surprising, especially since they
reproduce Q3 forms. Furthermore, analysis shows (1) that the 1 (+1L) 'Moun.' is
another speech-prefix ending in -n which preserves the copy form; (2) that all 5
(+1NL+6L) 'Samp.' reproduce Q3 forms and that in 2 (+4L) instances B reduces
Q3's 'Samp.' to 'Sam.'; (3) that all 5 'Abra.' duplicate Q3's speech-prefixes; and
(4) that B's 'Greg.' is analogous to the 'Brag.' forms of LLL, that it reproduces
Q3's 'Greg.' 1 (+1NL+3L) times, that it replaces Q3's 'Grego.' 2 (+1NL) times, and
that Q3's 'Gre.' is retained in 2 (+1NL) instances. The only hard evidence, then,
of B's actually preferring speech-prefixes of four letters to those of three in the
Tragedies is the 1 (+1L) example of his changing Q3's 'Gre.' to 'Greg.'.[10] Folio Tit.
more clearly represents B's continuing practice. Dominated by very long speech-
prefixes that mimic those of Q3, its only four-letter form ('Aron.') occurs in a long
line and reproduces that of B's copy, whereas B's one and one-half pages contain
2 (+2NL+1L) three-letter speech-prefixes which shorten longer copy forms ('Lu-
cius.', 'Marc.', 'Puer.').[11]

The pages of the four Comedies, one History, and two Tragedies in which
B set varying amounts of type from known printed copy are fairly consistent in
their implications. Although the raw evidence can sometimes be deceptive, it
indicates that B favored shorter speech-prefixes to longer ones throughout F. It
also suggests that his primary preference was for speech-prefixes of three letters
and that he had throughout a secondary bias for those of four letters, though
various circumstances led him to tolerate the latter increasingly as the printing
of the Folio progressed.

The evidence of these seven plays thus generally confirms earlier inferences
that shorter speech-prefixes are typical of B and that longer ones indicate the
influence of copy or of other factors on his work. However, it would be imprecise
to characterize B's preference as one for 'maximally abbreviated forms'.[12] Only
a small portion of B's speech-prefixes in these seven plays could be construed as
fitting that description:

• Ado: Bea., Ben., Leo.
• LLL: Qu., Du., Ka., La.
• MND: Qu., Du., Ob., Dut., Her., Hel.
• MV: An., Du.
• 1H4: La.
• Rom.: Gr.

Yet not all of these are the forms that B either settled upon as his standards or
at least was inclined to favor. A few of them he either adopted briefly and then
quickly abandoned for longer ones (e.g., 'Du.' and 'Ka.' in LLL), or retained
from his copy despite his established preference for a longer form (e.g., 'Leo.'
in Ado, 'An.' in MV). The remainder, which do seem to represent B's genuine
preferences, fall roughly into two categories. The first is probably the more sig-
nificant and comprises two groups: (a) speech-prefixes ending with -u, like 'Qu.'
(for Queen) and 'Du.' (for Duke), and (b) those ending with -a, like 'La.' (for Lady)
and 'Bea.' (for Beatrice). The second category is associated with a few three-letter
speech-prefixes, such as 'Ben.' in Ado and 'Dut.', 'Her.', 'Hel.' in MND, which may
be classified as 'maximally abbreviated' only because these characters' opposite
numbers ('Bea.', 'Du.', 'Hel.', 'Her.') would have been confused with them had B
adopted shorter forms. Along with 'Ob.', the forms belonging to these two cat-
egories constitute a limited and by no means typical class of speech-prefixes in
Compositor B's pages.

In contrast to this relatively small number of maximally abbreviated forms
stands a larger number of prefixes for which B settled on forms containing an
additional letter or two when still shorter ones would have been sufficient to
distinguish the characters. Sometimes he deliberately rejected the shorter forms
of his copy by setting longer ones: 'Leon.' (Ado), 'Ber.' (LLL), 'Fair.' (MND), 'Ant.'
(MV), 'Poin.', 'Bard.' (1H4), 'Greg.' (Rom.) More frequently, he early opted for a
speech-prefix of three or four letters despite the fact that a shorter alternative was
an obvious expedient. He set the following where a shorter speech-prefix was a
realistic possibility:

• Ado: Mess., Hero., Pedro., Iohn., Clau., Fri.
• LLL: Dum., Lon(g)., Brag.
• MND: Quin., Dem., This., Wall., Moon.
• MV: Gra., Ner., Por.
• 1H4: West., King., Prin., Vint., Peto., Theeues., Iohn., Host.
• Tit.: Bassia.
• Rom.: Abra., Tyb., Wife., Prin.

What would have been the 'maximally abbreviated form' in a given case is no
doubt a matter of definition, or supposition. But in any event, the use of the
minimum number of letters necessary to identify a speaker was not a firm rule
for B. Instead, with the exceptions already noted (e.g., 'Qu.', 'Du.', 'La.', 'Bea.'),
he seems to have preferred speech-prefixes of three or four letters closed by a
consonant following a vowel. It is this practice that in some part helped create
the impression of typographical neatness and professional competence which
characterizes his work.

II

With B's general practice of setting speech-prefixes established, we can now
examine a few of his more specific methods of handling the forms of his quarto
copy. Both an immediately preceding stage-direction and line justification might

lead B to depart from the form that he preferred for a given speaker. But of
more importance than these specific influences is the manner in which B de-
veloped such preferred forms, especially since he usually began setting a play
in the middle of a scene, rather than at its beginning. Although the influence of
justification and of stage-directions cannot be ignored in any close analysis of B's
particular habits, it is best to consider first his manner of settling on preferred
forms. Evaluation of particular speech-prefixes needs to take place against the
background of this practice.

The evidence suggests that B sometimes required repeated exposure to a
character before he found a standard form for a speech-prefix. Less frequently
he established a standard form on his first encounter with a character, even
though the speech-prefixes, stage-directions, and dialogue in the immediate con-
text failed to reveal the character's name.

In Love's Labour's Lost, for instance, B's speech-prefixes for Longaville show
how he gradually developed a preferred form in the face of conflicting copy forms
and despite the exigencies of line justification. His Q1 copy was dominated by
'Long.', and on sig. M4, his first page of the play, B reproduced this form the first
four times he set speeches for this character. The fifth instance of the speech-
prefix on this page almost surely exhibits the influence of justification, for there
B lengthened his copy's 'Lon.' to 'Long.' in a verse line which he was forced to
turn over and word-space more liberally than usually (2166–67). Finally, in the
last occurrence of the name on M4 (2170), B shortened Q1's 'Long.' to 'Lon.'
Thereafter, 'Lon.' was his preferred form. Three pages later, while setting M5v,
B again encountered Longaville and shortened 4 of Q1's 5 'Long.' speech-prefixes
to 'Lon.', reproducing only one. On M6 he again substituted 'Lon.' for 'Long.'
the single time the latter appeared in his copy, and on M6v he regularized both
'Longauill.' and 'Long.' to 'Lon.'.

His manner of establishing a standard speech-prefix of three or four letters
followed essentially the same pattern in the other Comedies. In Ado, for example,
several conditions combined to postpone but not to prevent his development of
a preferred speech-prefix for Beatrice. B set two and a half pages of this play, the
opening page in prose (I3), the second column of I5 (also prose), and all of K4
(verse). It was not until he neared the bottom of I3b that he felt sufficiently sure
of Beatrice's identity to settle on 'Bea.' as his standard speech-prefix. Nonetheless,
in his later pages the influence of copy forms and interruption of his work on the
play twice induced him to abandon this form.[13] The speech-prefixes for this char-
acter show that alternation between plays and his copy's longer forms, as well
as the exigencies of justification, could sometimes work together to inhibit B's
general tendency to establish a standard speech-prefix of three or four letters.

This general inclination of B's, affected as it was by various circumstances,
may be observed in several speech-prefixes in the Histories and the Tragedies
which he set from identified quartos. His speech-prefixes for Northumberland
are perhaps typical. When setting d6v he found one 'Nor.' and then one 'Nort.' in
his copy (335, 344); B retained the first, and he expanded the second to 'North.',
perhaps with reference to an earlier stage-direction (320). The next five speech-

prefixes for this character all appeared as the simple 'Nor.' in Q5, which B repro-
duced without fail in e2 and in e1v. In setting the penultimate line of the latter
page, B came upon Q5's 'North.', but by this time his exposure to the dialogue
between the lord, his brother, and his son in I.iii had made the compositor fa-
miliar enough with the character that he regularized this speech-prefix to 'Nor.'.
That form he used in the three remaining instances of the name, all in e1 (two
of them in long lines).

Although B quickly fixed on standard speech-prefixes for this character partly
as a result of his own inclinations and partly with the support of the forms he
early found in his copy, he had more difficulty settling on one for Poins, because
the shifting forms of Q5 frustrated his attempt to develop 'Poin.' as his stan-
dard tag. Q5 exhibited bedazzling variability on B's early acquaintance with this
character. His first encounter with the speech-prefix for Poins, at the bottom of
d6, involved confusing circumstances and probably editorial annotation.[14] Then,
while setting d6v, B came to identify Hal's sidekick and developed a tendency to
use for him a four-letter prefix ending in -n, but Q5's alternation of forms, espe-
cially its almost exclusive use of 'Poy.' and 'Po.' after the first two examples on
the page, diverted B from his inclination to use 'Poin.'. However, his next page
(e3v), occupied wholly by the early part of the great tavern scene) contained a
number of speeches for the same character; here B found Q5 virtually uniform
in printing 'Poines.', and he quickly fixed on 'Poin.' as his own preferred form,
which he used in his remaining pages of the play with only an occasional reten-
tion of Q5's 'Poines.' or 'Poynes.' (often soon after a stage-direction naming the
character). B's experience with Poins and Northumberland illustrates not only
his inclination to settle on a prefix of three or four letters once he had identi-
fied a character, but also the influence which the forms of his copy exerted on
him, sometimes reinforcing this inclination, sometimes thwarting his attempt to
develop a preferred form.

The speech-prefixes in the Tragedies which display this same inclination
most clearly are those for Sampson in the opening page of Romeo and Juliet.
Except for a 'Sa.' in a justified line of Q3 (TLN 53), B's copy had only 'Samp.'
prefixes. In the first two-thirds of column a of ee3, B followed Q3's lead, retain-
ing 'Samp.' in the first six instances, substituting 'Sam.' once to justify a line (28L),
and then reproducing 'Samp.' in the next speech in a shorter line (31). After a
stage-direction introducing 'two other Seruingmen' (Abraham and a mute), and after
another justified 'Sam.' (37L), B began to adopt the shorter 'Sam.' as his standard
speech-prefix: he changed 5 of Q3's next 8 'Samp.' forms to 'Sam.' and altered
1 'Sa.' to 'Sam.' (53L), though he also retained 3 of Q3's 'Samp.' prefixes, one of
them (59L) probably under the influence of justification. In short, not only in the
Comedies and the Histories but also apparently in the Tragedies, B's normal
practice was to settle on a standard speech-prefix of three or four letters as soon
as he was familiar with a character.

Although this practice was often affected by the forms of his copy, sometimes
by the forms of preceding stage-directions or by his need to justify his lines, and
occasionally by alternation between plays or disjunctions in his copy for a single

play, the strength of this predisposition of B's should not be underestimated. It
sometimes led him to abbreviate to a short form on his very first exposure to a
character. In LLL B first encountered Maria in the last line of Q1's sig. G4v and
promptly shortened it to 'Mar.' (TLN 2148, sig. M4 in F). This immediate change
was then reinforced on the following pages by Q1's frequent 'Mar.', but here B
also continued to regularize his copy's periodic 'Mari.' and 'Maria.' to 'Mar.'.
That is, he continued to do so until he had come upon 'Marcad.' when setting
M6: there he reduced to 'Mar.' the first two of Q1's 'Marcad.' forms in short lines
and set the third as 'Marc.' in a long line. Consequently, when in the next page
he again came upon Maria twice, he followed Q1's 'Maria.' both times. This
evidence suggests that Bowers ('Foul Papers', p. 80) is right in his conclusion that
B was careful not to sacrifice details necessary to distinguish one character from
another when abbreviating speech-prefixes. But his handling of Maria's prefixes
also shows the strength of his inclination to shorten them.

The same inclination is exhibited elsewhere in B's pages of LLL. It is seen
in (1) his immediate substitution of 'Qu.' for Q1's 'Quee.' in the very first prefix
on M4, despite the lack of guidance as to the identity of the character from
any source (the dialogue or a stage-direction) other than the speech-prefix itself;
(2) B's immediate adoption of his uniform 'Ber.' for Q1's favored 'Bero.' begin-
ning in the second line of M4 and for its less frequent 'Berow.' (as well as 'Ber.')
from there on; (3) his reduction of Q1's 'Kath.' first to 'Ka.' and then to 'Kat.'; and
(4) his shortening to 'Ped.' of Q1's 'Peda.' (or, later, 'Pedan.') upon his first encoun-
ter with that character and subsequently without exception.

Two other Comedies exhibit B's precipitation in shortening speech-prefixes.
In MND, aside from frequently retaining Q2 prefixes like 'Bot.', 'Her.', 'The.',
and 'Hel.', he immediately reduced 'Dutch.' to 'Dut.' on sig. O3, carefully distin-
guishing her from 'Du.' (Theseus). He followed a similar procedure in MV when
he shortened 'Bass.' to 'Bas.' without any guidance to the name of the character
in the preceding dialogue that he set on O4v, though later he retained some of
Q1's 'Bass.' forms.

B was even quicker to find a standard form for Prince Hal. He altered to
'Prin.' the second of Q5's 'Prince.' speech-prefixes which he came upon when set-
ting d6 (TLN 133), and thereafter he used this four-letter form almost exclusively,
regardless of whether his copy had it or the longer 'Prince.'. In his fifteen pages of
this play, only occasionally did B set 'Prince.' or 'Pri.'—as at 841L, where after a
stage-direction containing 'Prince' he substituted the prefix 'Prince.' for his copy's
'Prin.', or at 2934L, where in a full verse line 'Pri.' replaces Q5's 'Prin.'. In but
one page did B temporarily abandon his preference to set another form succes-
sively, and then apparently under special circumstances (see section III below).

In B's speech-prefixes for other characters the same proclivity to immedi-
ate abbreviation is evident, though it is possible in these cases that either the
dialogue, preceding stage-directions, or his copy's prefixes themselves made B
aware of the name of the character. For instance, when beginning his second
page of Ado (I5b), B immediately shortened Q's 'Bene.' to 'Ben.' (558), even before
encountering Don John's question to Claudio, 'Are you not signior Benedicke?'
(567) and Q's stage-direction 'Enter Benedicke' (590). It is perhaps possible that
B remembered the name of this character from the long stage-direction which

he had set at the end of I3, though Benedick does not have a speech there (91).
However, since discontinuity in his setting of Ado apparently occasioned a lapse
in his memory of Beatrice (who has many speeches on I3), that possibility is re-
mote, and the likelihood is greater that B's first 'Ben.' is another example of his
blind shortening of speech-prefixes if not his preference for those ending in -n
rather than a vowel.[15]

In other instances B's information about the identity of a speaker was more
immediately at hand. When, having previously set only its first page (CC4), he
resumed work on Tit. with the last one (ee2v), B reduced 'Lucius.' to 'Luc.' and
'Marc.' to 'Mar.' in the first two speech-prefixes on this part-page; the tag itself
supplied B with the complete name in the first instance, though Marcus identified
himself only in the second line of his speech. Elsewhere, either the speech-prefixes
themselves or accompanying stage-directions or dialogue provided the names of
characters when B first came upon them: in MV he abbreviated Q1's 'Loren.' to
'Lor.' and 'Portia.' to 'Por.' without further ado (informed by dialogue and the pre-
fix); in MND he shortened Q2's 'Queene.' to 'Qu.' and 'Robin.' to 'Rob.' when first
setting prefixes for these characters (stage-directions giving their names in full);
in 1H4, he substituted 'Fal.' for Q5's 'Fals.' and 'Dow.' for 'Dowg.' immediately
(stage-directions); on his first page of Rom., he shortened Q3's first 'Benu.' to 'Ben.'
and abbreviated its 'Tibalt.' to 'Tyb.' (stage-direction and speech-prefix).

Often, then, B found the full name of a character in a preceding stage-
direction, the immediate dialogue, or his copy's speech-prefix itself when he
undertook to abbreviate the first tag for a given character. Nevertheless, in his
work on four Comedies, one History, and two Tragedies, there is evidence of
varying value that B's inclination to abbreviate speech-prefixes was sometimes
so strong that he would fix on a short form, despite the form of his copy, when
setting his very first for a character.

If it is true that the speech-prefixes of his copy did not always effectively in-
fluence B to reproduce the form he found there while he was becoming familiar
with a given character, it is also true that many of his speech-prefixes in long, or
full-measure, lines were not affected by justification. A glance at the numbers in
the appended table (Note D) suggests that remarkably few of B's prefixes in long
lines find no precedents in short lines and that most of his forms in long lines
exhibit the general practices already described.

B's clearly preferred forms appear not only in short lines, but also in long and
nearly long lines which otherwise display the effects of justification on his normal
practice.[16] For example, on sig. f5 of 1H4, he set the complete 'King.' in a very full
line (2988L) that otherwise exhibits crowding in the shortened 'hart' at the end
of the line and in the lack of B's characteristic spacing after punctuation. Indeed,
there is no spacing after the point which concludes the speech-prefix itself; this

omission is contrary to one of B's most regular practices, that of setting at least
a one-en space between a prefix and the first word of dialogue. Earlier in the
same column B set 'Prin.' in a nearly long line of verse (2968NL) which otherwise
shows crowding to prevent flow-over, especially in the omission of spacing after
punctuation (including, again, the point that ends the speech-prefix itself). Like-
wise, in Tit. both 'Aron.' (2688L) and 'Lucius.' (2695L) are speech-prefixes that
display B's general practices in the face of pressures to justify. Both are in long
verse lines which B could have allowed to flow over but which he wished to keep
to one line in this part-page for purposes of formatting. 'Aron.' reproduces the
full form of Q3 despite B's substitution of '&' for its 'and' as well as the absence
of his usual comma spacing later in the line. 'Lucius.' also reproduces Q3's full
form even though in the speech itself B used the unsightly 'Emp.' to abbreviate
'Emperour', the penultimate word of the line. Thus neither speech-prefix was
affected by the anticipatory justification frequently found in the long lines that
often open verse speeches set by B; rather, each is typical of his normal practices.
These are perhaps the most unambiguous instances of B's adherence to his usual
practices for setting speech-prefixes in the face of the influence of justification,
but they are by no means uncommon.

Nevertheless, a relatively small number of B's speech-prefixes do exhibit the
effects of line justification. Some of these justified prefixes occur in prose. 'Bea.',
in the first page of Ado (32L), is one possibility (see Appendix, Note A). In the
first page of Rom., two instances of 'Gr.' substituted for Q3's 'Gre.' in long lines
betray justification. B's preferred form almost from the beginning was 'Greg.',
but in TLN 42L he set 'Gr.', besides (1) omitting all spacing after internal points
(including that for the prefix), (2) omitting the full-stop at the end of the line, and
(3) abbreviating with the generally eschewed forms 'thẽ', '&', and 'wil'. Another
'Gr.' (56L) appears in a line which also lacks spacing after punctuation (including
the speech-prefix point) and contains the non-preferred 'here'. Additionally, as
already mentioned (above in section II), two 'Sam.' speech-prefixes in this page
occur in lines that display similar evidence of compression.

More frequent than such prose lines are verse lines which contain short-
ened speech-prefixes resulting, presumably, from anticipatory justification. For
instance, in LLL B abandoned his well-established, standard 'Qu.' and 'Dum.'
to set 'Q.' and 'Du.' (2275L, 2743L) in long lines. On f5 of 1H4, he set 'Pri.'
instead of Q5's 'Prince.' in a full-measure line of verse that lacks spacing after
punctuation (including the speech-prefix point) and that contains 'here' (2934L),
while earlier he set 'Blu.' for Q5's 'Blunt.' (which B normally retained) in a line
that is similarly spaced and that contains the ligature [OMITTED], one of the most reli-
able signs of B's compression (2892L). His 'K.' for Q5's 'Kin.' on the next page
of 1H4 (3019L) and his 'Fai.' and 'De.' in MND (376L, 2941NL) also exhibit the
influence of justification, and several other speech-prefixes may possibly do so.
Justification, then, sometimes led B to shorten speech-prefixes, especially in long
or nearly long verse lines.[17]

Even smaller is the number of B's speech-prefixes lengthened for such ty-
pographical reasons. In fact, there are only three in the seven plays studied

here. Although in different formes, all three occur in B's last few pages of 1H4
(f4v–5v), and all three concern Falstaff, who is identified as 'Falst.' instead of Q5's
'Fal.' or 'Fals.'. Two of these expanded speech-prefixes are in long prose lines
that contain long spellings (e.g., 'bee', 'mee') and liberal word-spacing, especially
after commas (2766L, 3077L). The third is in a nearly long line displaying the
same sort of spacing but exactly reproducing Q5's faulty verse lineation (2944NL).
However, there is some uncertainty about the extent to which these three 'Falst.'
forms were the effect of justification alone. In f2, set at about the same time,
B used three other 'Falst.' speech-prefixes in long lines that exhibit crowding
rather than expansion; these three longer forms cannot, therefore, be attributed
to justification and apparently represent a temporary lapse from his preferred
'Fal.'.[18] Consequently, it may have been this short-lived and weak flirtation with
'Falst.' as well as the pressures of justification which thrice led B to lengthen his
usual 'Fal.' in f4v–5v.

Other possible evidence that B set long speech-prefixes to justify his lines is
even less persuasive,[19] and it is not comparable in quality to the relatively sparse
evidence, already cited, that B did sometimes shorten his speech-prefixes to fit
a type line to the Folio measure. But throughout F the proportion of prefixes
so influenced is relatively small. In sum, although exceptions are likely to occur
and must be allowed for, even speech-prefixes in full-measure lines, especially
the longer forms, will by and large exhibit B's general practices of handling these
'appurtenances'.

One other influence on B's speech-prefixes might have come from the forms
of names found in immediately preceding stage-directions. There is some slight
evidence that such influence did sometimes occur. The clearest instance is again
in 1 Henry IV, where on e2v B substituted the prefix 'Prince.' for Q5's 'Prin.' (841),
thus rejecting the form he had already adopted as his own standard. This speech-
prefix immediately follows the stage-direction 'As they are sharing, the Prince and
Poynes set upon them'. Two other examples in the same play are more complex
because the stage-direction does not immediately precede the speech-prefix in
question. These are the two cases of 'Pointz.' at the end of d6 which replace Q5's
'Poines.', once in a normal prefix, once in a catch-word. As explained elsewhere
(Appendix, Note B), the first Folio speech-prefix (214) comes after a Q5 stage-
direction ('Enter Poines') that was apparently deleted editorially, the addition of
'and Pointz' to the opening stage-direction (114) compensating for the later cut.
Since these two are the only 'Pointz.' prefixes that B set in the play, it is difficult
not to believe that the forms ultimately derived from the annotation for the earlier
stage-direction, which for some reason must have impressed itself on B's mind.

Altogether, then, in the seven plays studied here there are only three speech-
prefixes which show B rejecting the forms of his copy in favor of those found in
preceding stage-directions. They suggest that B sometimes made a deliberate

connection between a character's speeches and his entrance as represented in a
stage-direction. In a few other instances such a connection may in part lie behind
B's retention of long speech-prefixes (e.g., 'Prince.', 'Poines.', 'Bassianus.') from his
copy soon after the full name of the character appeared in an entry (1H4, 116L,
736L, 831, 968, 3097; Tit., 15). Yet in these instances other factors were probably
more responsible for B's reproduction of his copy's forms, including not only the
influence of justification, but his general liability to reproduce such long copy
forms under ordinary circumstances.

III

Indeed, what is perhaps most interesting about B's handling of speech-prefixes
is his disposition to reproduce certain forms of his copy despite his preferences
for alternative forms. That B's speech-prefixes were liable to be influenced by
those of his copy is the premise behind Bowers' arguments that the variable
designations for the same characters in different scenes of All's Well that Ends
Well (e.g., forms of Rossillon and of Bertram) reflect the variable usage of the
Shakespearian foul-papers which served as printer's copy for this Folio play, and
further that B's use of 'Cassi.' and of 'Cass.'/'Cas.' in different episodes of Julius
Caesar reveals the presence of two different hands in the manuscript behind that
play. The evidence of the seven plays which B set from identified quartos gener-
ally confirms the validity of this general premise, though not necessarily of its
suggested implications for these plays.[20]

Variable designations appear in two Comedies set from known quartos. In
The Merchant of Venice, B's standard form for Shylock was, from the outset, 'Iew.'.
While setting IV.i (the court scene), he continued this practice. Not only did he
use 'Iew.' exclusively where Q1 varied between 'Iewe.' and 'Iew.', but he also set it
five times where Q1 reads 'Shy.'. However, twice B followed Qq's 'Shy.', contrary
to his established preference.[21] In MND Q2's name for Theseus varies between
'The.' and 'Duke.'. B followed his copy's 'The.' all 4 (+4L) times in the first scene.
But in setting the last scene of the play he followed Q2's 'Duke.', though varying
the length of the speech-prefix slightly by setting 'Duke.' (1) and 'Duk.' (1L), as well
as his usual 'Du.'. He also precisely reproduced Q2's 'Pir.' and 'Pyr.'.

As for B's use of longer but not full forms of a given name, one of the more
interesting cases is his 'Beatr.' at the top of K4 (Ado).[22] This derives from Q's
'Beatrice.' and was B's only such departure from his preference for 'Bea.' in Ado,
though elsewhere he displayed his tolerance for Q's 'Beat.'. In MV he likewise re-
tained one 'Anth.' from Q1 despite his well-established preference for the shorter

'Ant.'; he also reproduced half (6+1NL+3L) of Q1's 'Bass.' forms, after having
settled on 'Bas.' as his standard in the face of Q1's uniform 'Bass.'.[23] Furthermore,
he followed copy forms like 'P.Ioh.' and 'Mess.' in 1H4 and 'Samp.' and 'Offi.' in
Rom.; as in the Comedies these copy forms appear in B's work in pages containing
his expressed preference for a shorter prefix.

Had the quartos which served as B's copy for Ado, MV, MND, 1H4, and
Rom. vanished, the inferences would have been accurate that speech-prefixes like
'Shy.', 'The.', 'Beatr.', and 'Anth.' reflected those of his lost copy. Yet in 1H4 there
are 7 (1NL+6L) 'Falst.' prefixes which would seem to contradict the implications
of the evidence concerning longer forms, for they replace Q5's 'Fal.' or its 'Fals.'.
This conflicting evidence is, however, less forceful than it at first appears. As
already argued, 3 (1NL+2L) of these 'Falst.' forms can be put down largely to the
influence of justification (section II above). The other 4 all appear close together
in long lines in sig. f2. These aberrant instances of B's five-letter speech-prefixes
where his copy has shorter ones would normally weaken the value of longer (but
not full) speech-prefixes as indexes to the forms of his copy. But it may well be
that, as Eleanor Prosser has argued, B was deliberately expanding his text in this
page in every way possible and that consequently these four examples of 'Falst.'
are atypical and by no means indicative of his usual practices.[24] Certainly the four
full 'Prince.' prefixes on the same page—in fact, in the same passage—suggest
that here B had temporarily abandoned his normal practice, for whatever reason
(see below).

In assessing the implications of B's longer but not full speech-prefixes in other
Folio plays, it will be necessary to allow for the kind of aberration exhibited in
the four 'Falst.' speech-prefixes clustered together at the beginning of f2. It will
also be necessary to recognize that prefixes which are longer than B's normally
preferred forms, but which are not complete names, might reproduce the forms
of his copy imprecisely. Both 'Beatr.' (Ado) and 'North.' (1H4) were stimulated by
the longer forms of B's copy, but neither duplicates his copy's prefix exactly.

As with B's early retention of Q's 'Beat.' and his unique 'North.', longer pre-
fixes derived from copy are more likely to occur in the pages B set while he was
developing a standard form, whereas those, like 'Beatr.', that were set after he had
established a preference are likely to be less frequent though more unequivocal
evidence of a shift in the forms of his copy. His prefixes for Sampson in Romeo
and Juliet illustrate both parts of this generalization. Had Q3 not survived, the
first six of B's 'Samp.' prefixes in ee3, instead of being recognized as longish forms
derived from copy, might have been explained away as B's flirtation with a four-
letter standard form (as with 'Leon.' in Ado or 'Greg.' in Rom.).[25]

These provisos admitted, by and large the evidence of B's pages studied
here indicates that not only variable designations for a single character, but also
speech-prefixes that are longer than one of his standard abbreviations reflect the
variability of his copy. We are perhaps on somewhat surer grounds in making
such an inference when different names ('Iew.', 'Shy.') occur, than when a name
remains the same but a longer (though not complete) form of it appears in B's
work. Yet variable designations are likely to occur less frequently simply because
a Folio editor might have noted and tinkered with such differences, rather than
fussing with the extra letters of a prefix. In any event, either kind of variable
speech-prefix in B's pages should provide relatively good evidence of the char-
acteristics of his copy.

Finally, the most useful of B's speech-prefixes are not his longer but his full
forms, both because they are more frequent than the two kinds just discussed
and because they are highly reliable witnesses to the speech-prefixes of his copy.
In the four Comedies which B typeset from identified quartos, he set 63 speech-
prefixes containing complete names. All but 3 derive from his copy, the excep-
tions being 'Bottom.' for 'Bot.' in MND and 'Boyet.' for 'Boye.' and 'Boiet.' for 'Boy.'
in LLL. Almost half of B's full forms consist of five or more letters (e.g., 'Pedro.',
'Borachio.', 'Claudio.', 'Leonato.', 'Nerissa.'). The remainder are four-letter speech-
prefixes (e.g., 'Duke.', 'Iohn.', 'Lyon.', 'King.'), which might appear to represent B's
normal inclinations; yet he set such forms only when they occurred in his copy,
and his actual preferences were often clearly for shorter forms of the names (e.g.,
'Du.', 'Kin.').

In 1 Henry IV, the only play in the Histories universally acknowledged to have
been set from an identified quarto, B generally used a full name in a speech-prefix
only where his Q5 copy had such a form. This he did 37 times, reproducing
speech-prefixes like 'Prince.', 'Poi(y)nes.', 'Iohn.', 'Blunt.', and 'King.'. The first two
contrast strikingly with the favored abbreviated forms that dominate his pages,
whereas the other three are in the majority in B's pages, though there is evidence
to suggest he was open to setting other alternatives.[26] Of chief interest are the
full names for Hal and Poins, both because of their frequency and because B
established clear preferences for the shorter 'Prin.' and 'Poin.', though in different
manners (see section II above). The former was almost instinctive, the latter labo-
riously developed, and consequently B's use of either of these full forms instead
of its already established alternative provides strong evidence of his copy's forms
that is analogous in kind to 'Beatr.' and the two later instances of 'Samp.'.

In B's fifteen pages of this play, there are only five examples of his use of a
full form where his copy had an abbreviated speech-prefix, and all involve F's
'Prince.' for Q5's 'Prin.' or 'Pri.'. Of these five, four occur in sequence in f2,
the only page in that quire, or indeed in the play, for which B was required to
switch from his half of a quire in order to substitute for his partner and set up
the forme-mate to his own assigned page (f5v). It will be recalled that the same
page also contains the four aberrant 'Falst.' speech-prefixes mentioned earlier.
Two of the five anomalous 'Prince.' forms (2138L, 2150L) are in long lines and
in one-sentence speeches that flow-over to a second line of two or three words,
and a plausible cause for them may be found in Prosser's conclusion that B was
generally expanding his text on this page owing to underestimates of the matter
during casting-off. Whether these two prefixes somehow induced B to set the
other two full forms that follow them closely (2142, 2155) it is impossible to as-
certain. As for the remaining aberrant 'Prince.' (841L), it was probably occasioned
by the complete name that B set up in the immediately preceding stage-direction
(839), if not by justification as well. Thus there are no more than five instances
of B's speech-prefix 'Prince.' in 1H4 which belie the nature of his copy's speech-
prefixes, and all but two are to some extent special cases. This number of anoma-
lies compares rather favorably with the 37 instances in which B's full form derives
from his copy, though a few of them might conceivably exhibit the influence of
preceding stage-directions (116L, 736L, 968, 3097).

That this particular practice of B's continued through his work on the Trag-
edies is not easy to show because the evidence of the four part-pages of Tit. and
Rom. is limited. Yet even these few pages contain six complete speech-prefixes
that reproduce the forms of quarto copy and none that replaces a shorter form.
For instance, one 'Prince.' at the bottom of the opening page of Rom. (ee3) re-
produces Q3's 'Prince.', while four examples of B's 'Prin.' on the last page (Gg1)
succeed his copy's abbreviated form. Furthermore, B's work in Troilus and Cres-
sida offers some supporting evidence of this practice in the Tragedies. In arguing
that the Folio text was set from an annotated example of the 1609 quarto, Philip
Williams used complete names in six speech-prefixes to show the influence of Q's
forms on F, and two of these six are in B's pages.[27] Moreover, of the ten 'Aiax.'
speech-prefixes in F which he cites (its normal form being 'Aia.'), eight are B's,
and all eight occur in the first of the pages in which he encountered this charac-
ter (¶3). This evidence from Tro. combines with the limited evidence of Tit. and
Rom. and with the more numerous speech-prefixes in 1H4 and the Comedies to
suggest that throughout the Folio B's full forms generally and predictably derive
from his copy. Such evidence may be of use when the identity of B's setting copy
is more problematic than in these seven plays.

IV

If ever a genealogical problem needed sorting out, it is that of the relationship
between the Quarto (1600) and Folio texts of Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV. In his

Lyell Lectures of 1959, Fredson Bowers remarked that 'at present, Hamlet and 2
Henry IV appear to be very seriously snarled in controversy',[28] thus summing up
two decades of work on the latter by four prominent scholars. Although M. A.
Shaaber, Alice Walker, J. Dover Wilson, and W. W. Greg had been able to agree
that the Folio restored eight passages (presumably cuts) omitted from Q cor-
rected and otherwise altered many of Q's stage-directions and speech-prefixes,
removed its profanity and colloquial or vulgar language, added its own mis-
lineations to two in Q, contained numerous differences of other kinds, and must
have derived from a manuscript of a 'literary' character, they had not been able
to agree whether F was typeset directly from that manuscript or from an example
of Q annotated by reference to it and containing both its variant readings and
possibly some initiated by the annotator.

In a long appendix to his Variorum edition, Shaaber had supported, not
infrequently with negative evidence, the position taken by the Cambridge edi-
tors (1864) that F's source was a 'thoroughly overhauled' transcript of Shake-
speare's manuscript: he had argued, among other things, that the 32 supposed
errors shared by Q and F (and rejected by at least a majority of editors) could
be reduced to three either because they were defensible, lacked an agreed-on
editorial emendation, had a precedent elsewhere in F, or could have derived
independently from a common source. Walker, however, had put forward the
contrary view first in an article and a note, and then more fully in her book on
quarto copy for the Folio; in her usual positive and persuasive manner, she had
cited eight shared errors in wording and other 'common errors' in punctuation
and word forms, including 'maner', as evidence that F was set directly from an
annotated copy of Q. The responses to Walker's essays had been swift but differ-
ent. Wilson, who in his 1946 New Shakespeare edition had followed Shaaber, in
1952 had added at the end of his discussion of the textual problems two sentences
that suggested he had accepted Walker's conclusions (as set out in her article)
and would thoroughly revise for 'a second edition'; he cited three passages for
which notes had already been revised. Shaaber had reacted almost immediately,
employing the strategies seen in his Variorum edition to neutralize Walker's case
but adding some new observations.[29] Almost simultaneously, however, Greg had

recorded a mixed response: he had credited Shaaber's Variorum analysis of F's
so-called 'massed entries' and other features with showing that they could not
have been drawn directly from the prompt-book, and had found his case for F's
direct dependence on manuscript persuasive, but had been impressed by the
common verbal errors (which he thought likely to number more than Walker's
eight), the shared nonsense, Walker's odd 'maner' spelling, and the instances of
mislining, all of which inclined him to believe that F was typeset from annotated
Q. 'And so the dispute continues without any certain conclusion in sight', Greg
wrote somewhat prophetically, not having seen Shaaber's article, published the
same year. [30]

By the end of the 1950s, then, discussion of 2H4 in the traditional terms of
textual criticism had ended in a virtual stand-off, with the main lines of differ-
ence regarding Folio copy defined, the proponents clearly identified, and with
Greg and Shaaber agreeing independently that more study was needed, either of
the kind seen in Philip Williams' analysis of Q and F Troilus and Cressida (Greg,
p. 272) or of'the working methods of compositors' (Shaaber, 'The Folio Text',
p. 144). In the editions that have followed and in other scholarship, whether in
support of these editions or independent of them, there has been much careful
analysis of the problem as defined by Shaaber, Walker, and Greg, but (with one
exception) no significant new evidence brought forward.

Shaaber's view of Folio copy has prevailed, though in various permutations.
A. R. Humphreys' 1966 New Arden Edition set the pattern in its thorough review
of the 'exasperatingly ambiguous' evidence and its general conclusion. Running
a variation on Bowers' 1953 suggestion that F's copy was a transcript of an
annotated Q,[31] Humphreys hypothesized a scribal manuscript combining 'con-
currently' Q and an independent transcript 'showing some cognizance of stage
practice'—this despite his recognition that such a theory required 'mediation'
(transmission) of typographical details through both transcription and composi-
tors and despite his decision to prefer 'about eighty' of F's variants to Q's.[32]
David Bevington, revising Hardin Craig's Complete Works, tentatively approved
the New Arden's manuscript and Bowers' transcript as likely scenarios, without

mentioning annotated quarto, and G. Blakemore Evans, textual editor of the
Riverside Shakespeare, summarized the dispute and seemed to defer to the New
Arden's position.[33] In an overview of the play's textual condition, George Walton
Williams found no credible bibliographical links between Q and F, suggested F's
setting copy was the 'fair copy of the foul-papers made ca. 1598' which Walker
believed had been used to annotate Q, and proposed that it was 'a companion
piece to the manuscript from which the 1 Henry IV quarto was printed', both
of them made 'to prove to Oldcastle's angry posterity' that his name had been
removed from the play.[34] Peter Davison, uncomfortable with the New Arden's
adoption of 80 Folio readings, with another 100 being of equal merit to Q's, and
with F's 'excision, wholly or in part, of some twenty-five Quarto stage directions
that are superior to those remaining in the Folio', produced his Penguin edition
on the theory that F's copy was 'a transcript … made with the aid of actors'
parts, despite the trouble and expense' but 'with the Quarto at hand, an excellent
guide to the order of speeches'.[35]

More recently, manuscript as Folio setting copy has remained the preferred
scenario, but its precise character and the role of the quarto (if any) in creating it
has continued to generate multiple hypotheses. Eleanor Prosser, in a book-length
study now most valued for its observations on the compression F's text underwent
in its first quire (g) and the expansion in its second (χgg), thought that the manu-
script conflated with Q was not a transcript but Shakespeare's own foul-papers.[36]
The long-anticipated Oxford Edition, though most notable for its view that six of
the eight passages that F supplies and Q wants represent Shakespeare's revisions,
ruled out annotated Q, partly on the basis of new statistical evidence, speci-
fied a scribal copy of the prompt-book, but stipulated consultation of Q by the
scribe.[37] The New Cambridge Edition rejected many of the Oxford's arguments,

propounded its own theories regarding an ur-Henry IV play, the pre-publication
manuscripts, and the various agents involved in the transmission of their texts,
but ended up agreeing that for Folio copy the idea of an 'intermediate transcript
by an interfering scribe' was 'more plausible' than annotated Q, prompt-book, or
a 'transcript put together from actors' parts'.[38] Finally, the Oxford Shakespeare's
one-volume edition has also rejected the Oxford Edition's analysis of F's eight
unique passages, reverted to the traditional position that they were 'integral'
to the play 'from the beginning', revived Shaaber's argument (via Prosser) that
marking Q would have been 'a near impossible task', and concluded that Q and
'a post-1606 expurgated prompt-book' were 'collated in' a private literary tran-
script that later became printer's copy for F.[39]

Compositor B's speech-prefixes may shed some light on the central question
of Folio copy for this play. In his pages there are well over 50 forms that should
be useful for identifying his setting copy. On the whole, his long speech-prefixes
in these pages, which generally conflict with his tendency to set abbreviated
forms, indicate that certain Quarto forms—and a significant number of them—
somehow found their way into F. But the value and precise implications of the
evidence can only be properly assessed against the background of B's handling of
speech-prefixes throughout the Folio, especially in 1 Henry IV, and more narrowly
through analysis of the context in which the particular forms occur.

As to the larger background, B's pages of 1H4 on the whole confirm that in
the Histories (as in the Comedies and Tragedies) his long speech-prefixes, and
especially his full forms, should generally reflect the variable forms of his copy.
There is every reason to expect that such practices should have continued in B's
next play, 2 Henry IV, which was begun on sig. f6v—the forme-mate to f1, the
last page of 1H4 to be put into type—and which occupies the next two quires.
At those points in 2H4 where speech-prefixes attributable to his copy appear in
B's pages, almost all find precedents in the Quarto.

This evidence is naturally of various weights, as the earlier review of B's
work throughout F would suggest. But here its value is especially affected by the
compression and expansion which characterize the pages of this play in particu-
lar and which Hinman referred to generally as 'page justification'. Hinman has
shown that 2 Henry IV was unusually subject to such page justification because
the Histories were printed out of order, beginning with all of King John and most
of Richard II before the Comedies had been completed, then jumping ahead to
Henry V and most of the Henry VI plays, and then returning to 1H4 and 2H4 be-
fore the remainder of the Histories (the end of 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and Henry
VIII) were set. Since H5 had begun on sig. h1, the end of R2 and all of 1H4 and
of 2H4 were to be packed into four quires (d–g), and this obviously was found
to be impossible as the printing proceeded. The adjustment of type matter to
alloted pages became critical during the composition of 2H4, and consequently
the compositors were under special pressure, as copy was cast off quire by quire,
to fit text to the assigned pages, first by crowding as much of it into quire g as
possible, and then (after the decision was made to create an eight-leaf quire to
accommodate the rest of 2H4) to see to it that enough text was left to make xgg7v
a proper part-page. As the more experienced of the two typesetters, apparently,
much of the responsibility for this adjustment fell to Compositor B, who set up
not only the entire second half of the last quire (xgg5–8v)—where the play was to
be made to end part way through xgg7v, and then eked out with an epilogue (xgg8)
and a list of actors (xgg8v)—but also xgg1, which he composed as forme-mate to
his xgg8v before copy for the rest of the quire was cast off.

Following on Hinman's general suggestions regarding 'page justification' and
his more specific analysis of the production of quires g and xgg, Eleanor Prosser
has attempted to reconstruct precisely the circumstances and sequence of events
that led Jaggard first to compress and then to expand text in the two quires

that almost wholly comprise 2H4. In the process, she has indicted B for liber-
ally altering the wording of the play in order to perform his master's bidding.
Although these attempts are not entirely successful and the arguments regard-
ing B's treatment of wording particularly shaky, there can be little doubt about
the general validity of her observation that the compositors, especially B, were
under extraordinary pressures to adjust the length of lines and thus of pages for
this play.[40]

In the first quire, most of B's pages (sigs. g1–3) exhibit some compression,
though the first two he set up (forme-mates 3v and 4) appear relatively normal.[41]
In the second quire, however, sigs. χgg1 and χgg5–7 betray signs of expansion,
which ceases in sig. χgg7v, the part-page that, once reached, signalled success
in filling the eight-leaf quire. How strong was the pressure to adjust lineation
and vertical spacing to fit the text of the play into the allotted pages remains
debatable. But mechanical matters, such as the length of speech-prefixes and the
placement and spacing of stage-directions, would have been especially subject
to these pressures, when they affected the number of lines of actual text that
would occupy a column or page. These factors must certainly be considered in
an assessment of the quality of B's speech-prefixes as evidence of the nature of
his setting copy for 2 Henry IV.

In about 40 cases B's full speech-prefixes indicate that his copy for 2 Henry IV
must have had forms identical to those in Q. Some of the best evidence is in
quire g (see table 1). In sigs. g3v and g4, B's initial pages of the quire, it would
appear that B's work was generally less affected by considerations of linear spac-
ing than elsewhere in the play, and there are proportionately more full forms
here than in the other pages of this quire.[42] His general preference for 'Prin.' B
abandons six times for the full form, which Q has uniformly throughout II.ii. A
few of these forms may be affected by justification of the lines in which they occur
(TLN 873NL most likely, and perhaps 852L and 888L). The others, however, seem
clearly to have been set independently of such concerns (800L, 879, 898L). The

Table 1. B's full speech-prefixes (Folio quire g)

                   

Quire	TLN	Folio	Quarto	Riverside Act.Sc.Line
g3	616	Hostesse.	Hostesse	II.i.1
g3	622	Snare.	Snare	II.1.7
g3v	800L	Prince.	Prince	II.ii.9
g3v	847L	Pointz.	Poynes	II.ii.65
g3v	852L	Prince.	Prince	II.ii.70
g4	873NL	Prince.	Prince	II.ii.92
g4	879	Prince.	Prince	II.ii.98
g4	888L	Prince.	Prince	II.ii.106
g4	898L	Prince.	Prince	II.ii.117

single 'Pointz.' in sig. g3v (847L) recalls B's practice in 1H4.[43] But what is most
intriguing about this speech-prefix is that this single instance of B abandoning
his standard 'Poi(y)n.' occurs where Q fails to have the 'Poy(i)nes' speech-prefix
otherwise found throughout this scene. The parallels with 1H4 are striking and
tend to confirm the view that B's 'Pointz.' in 2H4 reflects the peculiar state of his
Quarto copy at this point, in much the same way that it did earlier.

As might be predicted, there are fewer long speech-prefixes in the remaining
pages of quire g, which were subjected to the crowding already discussed. Yet if
B in fact was trying to compress the text while setting sigs. g1–3, then the two
full speech-prefixes that do occur in these pages (those at 616 and 622) are very
good evidence of his copy's influence on the forms he set. Both are contrary not
only to B's general preference for shorter forms, but to his specific aims in these
pages. In particular B's 'Snare.' is an unmistakable instance of a copy-derived
form. The earlier 'Hostesse.' may exhibit not only the additional influence of Q's
catchword on the previous page, but also of the full name in the immediately
preceding stage-direction, though (as already shown) stage-directions rarely ex-
erted so strong a force on B as to make him depart from his usual inclination for
shorter forms in the absence of some other inducement. Although predictably
not numerous, the full speech-prefixes in these compressed pages are valuable
evidence of the presence of Q's forms behind F.

Compared to this quire, the next one, where B was generally under pressure
to lengthen his type pages, should contain more long speech-prefixes, and they
should be more suspect as reliable evidence of the influence of his copy. Such
forms are indeed more frequent in quire χgg (see table 2). Five of these full forms
(TLN 1693L, 2799L, 2809L, 2832L, 3254L) may be put down to B's expansionist
policy in this quire, and four others are perhaps suspect on similar grounds (2712,

Table 2. B's full speech-prefixes (Folio quire χgg)

                                                                 

Quire	TLN	Folio	Quarto	Riverside Act.Sc.Line
χgg1	1673	Wart.	Wart	III.ii.138
χgg1	1675	Wart.	Wart	III.ii.140
χgg1	1685	Feeble.	Feeble	III.ii.148
χgg1	1687	Feeble.	Feeble	III.ii.150
χgg1	1693L	Feeble.	Feeble	III.ii.156
χgg1	1700	Feeble.	Feeble	III.ii.163
χgg1	1705	Feeble.	Feeble	III.ii.169
χgg5	2671	Prince.	Prince	IV.v.138
χgg5	2712	King.	King	IV.v.177
χgg5	2757	Prince.	Prince	IV.v.220
χgg5	2764	King.	King	IV.v.224
χgg5	2768	King.	King	IV.v.227
χgg5v	2775	King.	King	IV.v.232
χgg5v	2778	King.	King	IV.v.235
χgg5v	2795	Dauie.	Dauy	V.i.8
χgg5v	2799L	Dauy.	Dauy	V.i.13
χgg5v	2804	Dauy.	Dauy	V.i.18
χgg5v	2809L	Dauy.	Dauy	V.i.22
χgg5v	2817	Dauy.	Dauy	V.i.29
χgg5v	2822L	Dauy.	Dauy	V.i.34
χgg5v	2826	Dauy.	Dauy	V.i.38
χgg5v	2832L	Dauy.	Dauy	V.i.43
χgg6	2905L	Iohn.	Iohn	V.ii.19
χgg6	2907NL	Iohn.	Iohn	V.ii.22
χgg6	2915L	Iohn.	Iohn	V.ii.30
χgg6	2930NL	Prince.	Prince	V.ii.44
χgg6v	3070	Dauy.	Dauy	V.iii.41
χgg7	3254L	King.	King	V.v.44
χgg7	3259L	King.	King	V.v.47
χgg7v	3309	Iohn.	Iohn	V.v.97
χgg7v	3315	Iohn.	Iohn	V.v.103
χgg7v	3318	Iohn.	Iohn	V.v.105

2757, 2804, 2826).[44] But the other full forms in these pages would appear to be
reliable evidence of the influence of his copy, rather than of page justification,
on B's work.

The speech-prefixes 'Feeble.' and 'Prince.' (1685, 1687, 1700; 2671, 2930NL,
and perhaps 2757) are especially valuable, because they contain more than four
letters, and such forms are among the surest signs of his copy's influence on B.
The latter particularly recalls B's retention of this form from Q5 copy in 1H4,
although a four-letter name, 'Iohn.' also constitutes reliable evidence the six times
it occurs. As already shown, B rarely uses such forms unless copy has them. More

specifically, in V.iv of 1H4 B usually follows Q5's variable speech-prefixes for
Prince John, reproducing exactly its single 'P.Ioh.' on f5 and its two 'Iohn.' forms
on f5v, though characteristically shortening one 'Iohn.' to 'Ioh.', probably as a
result of the need to justify a line (2973L).

In repeatedly setting the full name of 'Dauy.' in V.i of 2H4, B uses the form
found in Q throughout this scene. These eight complete names in χgg5v cannot
be easily explained away as the result of either line or page justification.[45] B also
reproduces this form in V.iii, despite the fact that he there reverts to his usual
tendency to shorten speech-prefixes, setting both 'Da.' and 'Dau.'.[46] In view of
his performance in the plays set from known quartos, most of these must be at-
tributed to the influence of copy. The speech-prefixes for this character, as well
as those for Feeble and the princes, in quire χgg look very much like copy-derived
forms.

Of all the speech-prefixes in Folio 2H4 perhaps the least reliable as evidence
for quarto copy are the seven for the King, which invariably occur in B's pages
in the form 'King.', as they do throughout Q. It is possible, as Howard-Hill at
one point suggests, that B had 'settled' on the full form of this title after quire b
of Richard II. But it is equally possible, as Howard-Hill also seems to recognize,
that B's inclination was to the 'Kin.' form and that the complete form exhibits
the influence of his copy's persistent 'King.' on his work.[47] Clearly this is the case
in LLL, where he followed Q's uniform 'King.' on his first page, began to shorten
to 'Kin.' on his next, and thereafter alternated between this preference and Q's
form. It may be inferred that his adoption of the full form midway through R2
is similarly traceable to his copy: both Q3 (printed by Simmes and probably set
by his compositor A) and Q5 (the other print believed by some to have provided
Folio copy) have 'King.' throughout. In 1H4 Q5's virtually uniform 'King.' would
have reinforced such influence, but the presence of one 'Kin.' (2709) more than
half way through B's work on this play suggests that he retained his preference
(however weakened by repeated exposure to 'King.') for the shorter form. There
is no clear evidence in the Histories of an actual preference for the full form, but
only of its domination of his pages, which presumably reflects its persistence in
his copy. Acquiescence (in this case) is not the same thing as preference.

Table 3. B's long speech-prefixes (Folio quires g and χgg)

                           

Quire	TLN	Folio	Quarto	Riverside Act.Sc.Line
g1v	332	Ch.Iust.	Iustice	I.ii.58
g3	654L	Falst.	Falst.	II.i.46
g3	661NL	Falst.	Falst.	II.i.54
g3	681L	Falst.	Falst.	II.i.78
g3	687	Falst.	Falst.	II.i.84
g3	729	Falst.	Falst.	II.i.132
g3	733	Falst.	Falst.	II.i.138
g3	739CW	Falst. (Fal.)	Falst.	II.i.143
χgg7	3217L	Falst.	Falst.	V.v.10
χgg7	3223	Falst.	Falst.	V.v.16
χgg7	3250NL	Falst.	Falst.	V.v.41
χgg7	3258L	Falst.	Falst.	V.v.46
χgg7v	3298NL	Shall.	Shall.	V.v.187

The 'King.' speech-prefixes in his pages of 2H4 may, then, be taken as some
evidence, though perhaps the least unequivocal, of the influence of the full forms
of Simmes' quarto on B. One could argue, of course, that such forms could have
been present in the left margin of a manuscript serving as Folio copy (or provid-
ing the basis for such copy), where its scribe, unlike a Folio compositor, would
have been under no pressure to fit them within a narrow column along with the
opening line of each speech. But a possibility, or at best a probability of some
indeterminate degree, is not a certainty. Q's invariable full form is an observable
fact and offers a credible explanation of the forms in B's pages that is consistent
with other evidence.

Other traces of the forms of Q's speech-prefixes may be found in Folio 2
Henry IV. Although longer forms occur throughout, the significant ones would be
in the pages where B was not pressed to expand the matter (sigs. g3v, g4, χgg7v)
and especially in g1–3, where he was actually trying to compress (see table 3).
Perhaps the single most interesting speech-prefix in the whole play is the 'Shall.'
on B's last page (sig. χgg7v) in a one-line speech that nearly fills the measure
(3298NL). This is the only such form in B's work. Otherwise, he set 'Shal.' (the
norm) or 'Shallow.' (under special circumstances).[48] The length of this crowded
line would have encouraged B to use his customary shorter form. His unique
'Shall.' duplicates that in Q, which is, moreover, the only instance of this form
that B would have found there.[49] The coincidence is too much to sequester be-
hind the skirts of Fortune: F's unique 'Shall.' reproduces Q's equally odd usage.

Some other long, but not full, speech-prefixes in these pages may also indi-
cate F's dependence on Q. The frequency of 'Falst.' in B's g3 would suggest that
J/A—who on the evidence of 1H4 favored this and other longer forms—rather

than B, typeset the page. But this suggestion carries no weight once it is seen
that Q also has 'Falst.' here and could well have influenced B to vary from his
pronounced preference for 'Fal.', as exhibited in 1H4 and in B's first page of 2H4
(g3v).[50] Cumulatively, these 11 are the longer forms of greatest weight, but those
in χgg7 must largely be discounted because of the general expansion happening
there, even though they might not have occurred with such frequency without
inducement from copy.[51] On the other hand, the single most interesting 'Falst.'
is that in the catchword on g3, because earlier B had set the actual speech-prefix
'Fal.' at the top of g3v (739) in accord with his settled preference.[52]

Likewise, the many instances of 'Ch.Iust.' in these pages, which occur despite
B's inclination to set the shorter and simpler 'Iust.', are misleading at first blush
(and therefore not listed here). Some of them would have occurred in response
to annotations in Q. But the most significant longer form for this character—the
first 'Ch.Iust.' in the play (332), which is the last B set—was apparently induced
by Q's rare complete name ('Iustice') in combination with the preceding stage-
direction (see Appendix, Note C).[53]

Although more complex than others in 2H4, these longer speech-prefixes
reflect the state of the forms that B would have found in an annotated copy of
Q. These longer forms, therefore, provide some support for the view that Q was
B's basic copy for 2H4, but apart from 'Shall.', and perhaps his odd 'Ch.Iust.', the
best evidence remains the full forms in his pages.

This is so despite the presence of some anomalous ones, which prove to be
not altogether surprising given his practices in the Comedies and in 1H4. In 2H4
B set a total of 13 full-name speech-prefixes where Q has a shorter form, four
together on sig. g3, the remainder in quire χgg (see table 4). The four anomalous
speech-prefixes on g3, all 'Hostesse.' instead of 'Host.', occur in one sequence. On

Table 4. B's anomalous full speech-prefixes (Folio quires g and χgg)

                           

Quire	TLN	Folio	Quarto	Riverside Act.Sc.Line
g3	618L	Hostesse.	Host.	II.i.3
g3	621	Hostesse.	Host.	II.i.6
g3	626L	Hostesse.	Host.	II.i.13
g3	632	Hostesse.	Host.	II.i.20
χgg1	1654L	Shallow.	Shal.	III.ii.119
χgg1	1731L	Falstaffe.	Fal.	III.ii.196
χgg5v	2824L	Shallow.	Shal.	V.i.36
χgg5v	2850L	Falstaffe.	Falst.	V.i.60
χgg5v	2881L	Warwicke.	War.	V.ii.1
χgg7	3171L	Hostesse.	Host.	V.iv.1
χgg7	3212L	Falstaffe.	Falst.	V.v.5
χgg7	3216	Pistol.	Pist.	V.v.9
χgg7	3245	Pistol.	Pist.	V.v.39

χgg1, where B again stood in for J/A, 'Shallow.' and 'Falstaffe.' replace Q's 'Shal.'
and 'Fal.'. In the latter half of quire χgg, these three full forms reappear, along
with a 'Warwicke.' (Q: 'War.') and two instances of 'Pistol.' (Q: 'Pist.').

Of the nine in quire χgg, all but two seem to be traceable directly to the
policy of expansion which B was following in these pages and which Prosser has
explored at some length.[54] She notes particularly the 'Falstaffe.' forms as products
of this strategy. But on these same pages, each of the 'Shallow.' forms allowed B
to overrun the matter into an extra line, as did the second 'Pistol.' and the 'War-
wicke.' on χgg5v.[55] Hence, only the earlier 'Pistol.' (3216) and a 'Hostesse.' (3171L) in
this quire appear to be genuinely anomalous, and both may well reflect B's gen-
eral expansionist tendencies in this part of the play. The latter, however, is like
the earlier examples of this full form in that it might be related to the preceding
stage-direction. Indeed, this and the three other aberrant speech-prefixes on page
χgg7 are all immediately adjacent to changes found in the Folio's text. The first
'Pistol.' (3216) precedes the deletion of a single word presumably struck to censor
oaths, but beside the other three are stage-directions that had undergone major
alteration and would have been heavily marked up and potentially distracting
had B's copy been an annotated Q.[56]

In contrast, the four 'Hostesse.' speech-prefixes on g3, early in II.i, cannot be
attributed to such general pressures on B, since if anything he was compressing
in this page. Yet the brief sequence, which ends with her long speech beginning

at 635, is comparable to the cluster of 'Prince.' forms on sig. f2 of 1H4, where B
was called upon to stand in for J/A. On g3 B seems to have been temporarily
influenced, not by considerations of space, but by the three full forms that he
found in the opening stage-direction (615) at the bottom of Q's sig. C1, in the
catchword there, and in the first speech-prefix of the scene (616) at the top of its
C1v, which he reproduced.[57] In short, if we except the seven complete forms in
quire xgg that are almost certainly traceable directly to B's efforts to expand his
copy, the remaining aberrant instances parallel almost exactly those in B's pages
of 1H4, even if we ignore the markings that would have been present in an an-
notated copy of Q.

There can be little doubt that by and large the longer and full speech-prefixes
in B's pages of 2H4 exhibit the influence of Q's forms. Or, to put it differently, a
significant number of B's speech-prefixes in this Folio play are remnants of those
set in Valentine Simmes's shop, presumably by his compositor A, some twenty
years earlier. As such they may be regarded as the kind of direct bibliographical
links between F and Q that Williams sought, unless a scribal manuscript that
preserved Q's forms intervened between the two books.

The purpose of this theory of intervening manuscript, which posits a docu-
ment incorporating not only the major Folio 'additions' that could not be written
upon the leaves of a copy of Q, but also all the other variants drawn from the
prompt-book (or other theatrical manuscript) as well as the Quarto's words and
forms, would be to account for those readings unique to F that a critic or an edi-
tor wished to reject as not deriving directly from the theatrical manuscript (or
from the Folio compositors). To the extent that Q's speech-prefixes have been
transmitted to F in a manner similar to that observed in the seven control texts
typeset from identified quartos, this theory faces a serious impediment. For their
survival through an intervening manuscript would have to be credited to the
slavish accuracy of its scribe, who cannot then readily be blamed for changes in
the actual wording (as opposed to forms) that it was his business to reproduce,
and whose reputation as an 'interfering', 'cavalier', and 'overhauling' workman
would therefore require considerable rehabilitation.

As genetic evidence of the dependence of F upon Q, the speech-prefixes of
Compositor B in 2 Henry IV may, then, be taken to bear considerable weight
in attempts to sort out the question of the precise printer's copy for the Folio
typesetting, as well as the more important one of its text's derivation from that
of Q. One Shallow, however, does not make a summer, and Taylor's statistics
for round brackets, hyphens, and exclamations remain to be reckoned with, not
least because they lack contextual analysis. On the other hand, should evidence
similar to B's speech-prefixes (say, his spellings and typographical styling) con-
firm the implications of these 'appurtenances', the case for annotated Quarto as
Folio copy would rest on a less ambiguous and more substantial basis than can
be provided by the substantive readings and anomalous features so long cited
and debated.

APPENDIX

Note A. Up to the last third of column b, I3 is dominated by 'Beat.', which is also
the prevailing form of Q. B's initial 'Bea.' (32L) possibly reflects the pressures of
justification, and the next two (62L, 75L) probably do so. However, toward the
bottom of the second column, B substituted two 'Bea.' forms for Q's 'Beat.', both
in short lines (87, 89). From there on this was his preferred form, which he set
three more times, once in I5b and twice in K4.

In these two pages, however, he departed from his preference twice, once to
set 'Beat.' (in I5b) and once 'Beatr.' (in K4); each of these forms (553L, 1779) rep-
resents the first type B set on the page, and each betrays the influence of Q's form
('Beat.', 'Beatrice.'). In the first instance, not only copy but a break in B's work on
the play may have induced his temporary reversion to Q's 'Beat.'. Between the
time he composed I3 and resumed Ado with I5b, he had set four pages of The
Comedy of Errors (I1v, I2, I1, I2v), and at least one and one-half days had passed
while three formes of I—set by B, C, and D—went through the press. This in-
terruption apparently combined with the influence of Q's 'Beat.' to prompt B to
reproduce that form upon resuming work on Ado. But when he next set the name
a few lines later (559L), the preference he had finally developed while composing
I3 reasserted itself. When he proceeded directly to set up K4, it was Q's full form
'Beatrice.' that presumably occasioned B's only 'Beatr.', which was followed by two
substitutions of 'Bea.' for copy's 'Beat.'.

Note B. At the end of sig. d6, B set 'Pointz.' where Q5 (wrongly) had 'Poines.'
(214L) and then repeated that substitution in the catch-word five lines later. What
caused B to adopt this unusual form at first blush is not altogether clear, but the
change probably had something to do with the presumably editorial excision of
Q5's 'Enter Poines' a line before his misassigned speech and the correlated ad-
dition of 'and Pointz' to the opening stage-direction of the scene (I.ii) earlier on
the page (114). Of course the Folio, misled by Q5, mistakes the action here. The
speech assigned to Poins actually continues from Falstaff's previous statement af-
ter he and Hal have seen Poins enter; F compounds the problem by having Poins
on stage from the beginning of I.ii. The speech-prefix, the deleted stage-direc-
tion, and the expanded stage-direction are thus all of a piece of misapprehension
and annotation, presumably editorial.

On his next page, d6v, B tried to fix on a standard form, but the variability
of Q5's prefixes thwarted his attempt. He began by reproducing Q5's 'Poines.'
(the same speech-prefix that he had altered to 'Pointz.' for the catch-word of d6).
Q5's next speech-prefix for the character took the same form, which B reduced
to 'Poin.'. This proved to be the form he eventually settled on, but when Q5
shifted to 'Poy.' in the next two instances B followed suit (230L, 241), and when
Q5 then printed 'Poin.' (252L) B set 'Poyn.', apparently in the recognition that he
was dealing with a single character and in an attempt to reconcile Q5's various
forms. B's copy then returned to 'Poy.', which B retained, and then Q5 printed
the innovative 'Po.' three times in succession, which B first set as 'Poy.', then as
'Poyn.', and finally as 'Poin.' in a reversion to his originally preferred form. Yet
Q5's return to 'Poy.' for the character's next speech led B to set 'Poyn.' in the last
instance of the speech-prefix on this page.

Note C. The speech-prefixes for the Chief Justice are unusually complex because
they can be properly understood only as the result of two independent series of
actions by editor and compositor, often tending in opposite directions. Whoever
prepared B's copy, whether scribe or annotator, had the advantage of being able
to follow the dramatic sequence and would have been aware that the character
identified as 'Lord.' (or occasionally 'Lo.') in II.i of Q was the same as that called
'Lord chiefe Iustice' on his initial entrance in I.ii (328SD) and tagged throughout
that scene as 'Iust.' or 'Iustice'.

In contrast, B first encountered this character in setting column a of g3v,
which contains the end of II.i and the beginning of II.ii. The speeches there were
the last of a long series in this part of the play, many of which B was eventually to
prefix with 'Iust.', but only as he worked back through the scenes. About ten lines
into sig. g3v, B thus would have come upon annotated speech-prefixes which he
set first as 'Ch.Iust.', then as 'Ch.Iu.', and then again as 'Ch.Iust.' for the rest of the
scene. Working back through his copy, he turned to setting g3, which begins with
the last few lines of I.iii and then the opening of II.i. Here, towards the bottom
of the first column, B came upon this character again. Although Q has the stage-
direction 'Enter Lord chiefe iustice and his men.' properly centered in a separate line,
B crammed the laconic 'Enter Ch.Iustice.' into a single line alongside half a line
of dialogue, in the manner usually reserved for exits, and then set 'Iust.' before
his first speech in the next line, which nearly fills the measure (665, 666NL). Yet
in spite of his efforts to compress matter elsewhere in the lines containing these
speech-prefixes, he then reverted to the earlier 'Ch.Iust.', setting it twice (669L,
683L), presumably in response to the annotator's marks for replacing Q's 'Lord'.
He made one more effort to shorten this speech-prefix, setting 'Iust.' three times
in sequence, first where Q briefly varied to the shorter 'Lo.' (710L, 717L) and then
once where it resumed its full 'Lord' (726L), before he reverted to a final 'Ch.Iust.'
near the bottom of g3 (730).

Turning further back in his copy to set sig. g2, containing the middle of I.ii,
B at last used speech-prefixes for this character that he favored both by general
habit and in this particular situation requiring compression. The form 'Iust.',
which up to this point he had tried unsuccessfully to impose, dominates these
pages of Q, and B set it repeatedly and almost uniformly, justifying one line with
'Iu.' (418L). Finally, when finishing sig. g1v, containing the beginning of this scene,
B used the same form, which was again found in Q, with one important excep-
tion: he set the long 'Ch.Iust.' where Q has the unusually complete 'Iustice' (332).
This is the first speech-prefix for the character in the play, but B—in contrast
apparently to Q's compositor, who was setting seriatim (Williams, p. 174)—would
have had no uncertainty about the speaker's identity in this first instance on the
page. The full name in the preceding, slightly annotated stage-direction may
have exerted some influence here, but (as already shown) stage-directions were
rarely sufficient, in the absence of some other inducement, to make B depart from
his preference for shorter forms.

This character of course reappears frequently at the end of the play, in B's ex-
panded pages, which contain 'Ch.Iust.' throughout, beginning on χgg5v, through
all of χgg6, and less frequently in χgg7 and χgg7v (equivalent to a final page).

But the speech-prefixes in these later pages are not informative. Able to follow
the dramatic sequence, either an annotator or a scribe would have had the op-
portunity to bring these later tags into conformity with the earlier. Whether or
not these forms mirror those in B's copy, they certainly were compatible with his
policy of expansion in these pages, and by the time he reached χgg7 and χgg7v,
the form was so well established as to override all other alternatives.

In sum, the annotated forms of Q would have led B to use longer forms than
he would ordinarily have done, even when he was otherwise compressing mat-
ter. But when setting from that portion of Q containing speech-prefixes for this
character that would not have required annotation, he followed his usual prac-
tices, right down to setting a longer form where Q had one of its rare complete
forms. In a scribal manuscript these variations in B's copy would, presumably,
not have been at play.

Note D. Tabulated below are Compositor B's speech-prefixes in the seven Folio
plays set from known quarto copy. The forms set by B appear in the first column,
those of the respective quartos in the second. All speech-prefixes for a given
character are listed together. The list follows the order in which B encountered
the characters when setting the plays and then, within the listing for a character,
the order in which the various combinations of quarto-Folio forms first occurred
as he worked. Not included in the table are B's speech-headings (that is, the full
name centered above the first column of an opening page of a play or a scene).
The symbols NL, L, and CW identify, respectively, forms in nearly long lines, long
(full-measure) lines, and in catchwords.

Much Ado about Nothing

                                                             

Folio	Quarto	Total
Mess.	Mess.	6 8L
Mess.	Messen.	1L
Leon.	Leona.	2L
Leo.	Leo.	1 2L
Leon.	Leonato.	2 1L
Leon.	Leo.	2L
Leo.	Leon.	1
Leon.	Leon.	3L
Leo.	Leonato.	1 1NL
Bea.	Beatr.	1L
Beat.	Bea.	1L
Beat.	Beat.	1 6L
Bea.	Beat.	4 3L
Beatr.	Beatrice	1
Hero.	Hero	2L
Pedro.	Pedro	2L
Ben.	Bene.	4 1L
Ben.	Benedicke	1 2L
Ben.	Bened.	1L
Ben.	Ben.	1L
Bene.	Bene.	1
John.	John	2 1NL 2L
Borachio.	Borachio	1L
Bor.	Borac.	1L
Clau.	Clau.	1
Claudio.	Claudio	1
Clau.	Claud.	1
Clau.	Claudio	5
Fri.	Frier	3 1NL 2L
Frier.	Frier	1

Love's Labour's Lost

                                                                                                               

Folio	Quarto 1	Total
Qu.	Quee.	28 3NL 4L
Quee.	Quee.	1L
Qu.	Qu.	1
Q.	Que.	1L
Que.	Quee.	2L
Qu.	Queen.	2
Ber.	Bero.	25 4NL 11L
Ber.	Berow.	6 1NL 2L
Ber.	Ber.	6 1L
Ber.	Be.	1L
Du.	Duman.	1 1L
Dum.	Duma.	13 1NL 1L
Du.	Duma.	4 1L
Dum.	Dum.	8
Dum.	Duman.	1
Du.	Dum.	1L
Mar.	Maria.	1 1L
Mar.	Mar.	5 3L
Mar.	Mari.	1
Mari.	Mari.	2
Long.	Long.	4 1L
Long.	Lon.	1L
Lon.	Long.	5 1NL 1L
Lon.	Longavill.	1
Boyet.	Boyet.	1 1NL 1L
Boyet.	Boye.	1L
Boy.	Boy.	2 2L
Boy.	Boyet.	4 2L
Boiet.	Boyet.	1
Boiet.	Boy.	1NL
Boi.	Boyet.	5
Boi.	Boye.	1
Rosa.	Rosa.	5 2L
Ros.	Ros.	1NL 1L
Ros.	Rosa.	7 1L
Ros.	Rosal.	3NL
King.	King.	8 3NL 7L
Kin.	King.	13 2NL
Kin.	Kin.	1L
Ka.	Kath.	1
Kat.	Kath.	3 1NL
Kath.	Kath.	1NL
Clo.	Clow.	8 10L
Clow.	Clow.	1L
Clo.	Clowne.	1
Brag.	Brag.	11 6L
Brag.	Braggart.	1L
La.	Lady	1
Curat.	Curat.	1L
Cur.	Cura.	1L
Ped.	Peda.	6
Ped.	Pedan.	4 1NL
Page.	Page.	1L
Mar.	Marcad.	2
Marc.	Marcad.	1L

A Midsummer Night's Dream

                                             

Folio	Quarto 2	Total
Bot.	Bot.	1 2L
Bottom.	Bot.	1L
Quin.	Quin.	2 1L
Rob.	Robin.	1
Rob.	Rob.	1 1L
Fai.	Fai.	1NL 1L
Fair.	Fai.	1
Ob.	Ob.	3
Qu.	Queene.	1
Qu.	Qu.	1
Que.	Queen.	1
Her.	Her.	15 1NL
The.	The.	4 4L
Dem.	Dem.	4 1NL
Dem.	Deme.	3L
Dem.	De.	1L
De.	Deme.	1NL
Lys.	Lys.	6 1NL 3L
Lys.	Lysan.	1
Lis.	Lys.	1 1L
Lys.	Lysand.	1
Egeus.	Egeus.	1NL

                                     

Folio	Quarto 2	Total
Ege.	Ege.	2 1L
Hel.	Hel.	3 2L
Hip.	Hip.	1L
Pir.	Pir.	1 1NL 1L
Pyr.	Pyr.	1L
This.	This.	3
This.	Th.	1L
Wall.	Wall.	1
Du.	Du.	1
Du.	Duke.	4 1NL 5L
Duk.	Duke.	1L
Du.	Duk.	1L
Duke.	Duke.	1
Dut.	Dutch.	3 1NL 2L
Dut.	Dut.	1L
Lyon.	Lyon.	1 1L
Moon.	Moon.	1L
Moon.	Moone.	2L

The Merchant of Venice

                                                     

Folio	Quarto 1	Total
Lor.	Loren.	3 2NL
Gra.	Gra.	3 1NL 2L
Gra.	Gratia.	1 1NL
Gra.	Grati.	1
Ant.	An	3 1NL
An.	An.	3
Ant.	Anth.	1L
Ant.	Antho.	1
Ant.	Ant.	1
Anth.	Anth.	1
Bas.	Bass.	6 1L
Bass.	Bass.	6 1NL 3L
Sal.	Salarino.	1
Sal.	Salerio.	1
Salar.	Salanio.	1
Jew.	Jewe.	1 3NL 5L
Jew.	Jew.	6 1NL 1L
Jew.	Shy.	5
Shy.	Shy.	2
Du.	Duk.	1L
Du.	Duke.	6 1L
Duke.	Duke.	1L
Ner.	Ner.	4
Nerissa.	Nerissa.	1
Por.	Portia	1
Por.	Por.	22 3NL 5L

1 Henry IV

                                                         

Folio	Quarto 5	Total
West.	West.	3 1NL 2L
King.	King.	12 6NL 4L
Kin.	King.	1
K.	Kin.	1L
Fal.	Fals.	13 1NL 26L
Fal.	Fal.	6 1NL 19L
Falst.	Fals.	1L
Falst.	Fal.	1 5L
Prince.	Prince.	1 1L
Prin.	Prince.	17 2NL 18L
Prin.	Prin.	29 4NL 20L
Prin.	Princ.	2L
Prince.	Prin.	2 2L
Pri.	Prin.	1L
Prince.	Pri.	1L
Prin.	Hrin.	1L
Pointz.	Poines.	1L (+1CW)
Poines.	Poines.	2 2L
Poin.	Poines.	8 1L
Poy.	Poy.	1 2L
Poyn.	Poin.	1L
Poyn.	Po.	1L
Poy.	Po.	1L
Poin.	Po.	1L
Poyn.	Poy.	1L
Poin.	Poin.	2 1L
Poin.	Poynes.	1 1L
Poynes.	Poynes.	1

                                                                             

Folio	Quarto 5	Total
Wor.	Wor.	20 2NL 3L
Nor.	Nor.	4 1NL 4L
North.	Nort.	1
Nor.	North.	1
Fran.	Fra.	1L
Fran.	Francis.	10 3L
Vint.	Vint.	1L
La.	Lady.	2
La.	La.	4 2L
Hot.	Hot.	44 4NL 4L
Hot.	Hots.	1
Ser.	Ser.	3
Gad.	Gad.	6 7L
Gad.	Gads-hill	1
Bar.	Bar.	2 1L
Bard.	Bar.	1
Peto.	Peto.	1
Tra.	Tra.	1 1NL 1L
Theeves.	Theeves.	1
1. Car.	1. Car.	7L
Car.	Car.	1
2. Car.	2. Car.	6L
Ost.	Ost.	1 1L
Cham.	Cham.	1 1NL 4L
Blunt.	Blunt.	1 1NL
Blu.	Blunt.	1NL 1L
Arch.	Arch.	1 1L
Sir M.	Sir M.	1L
Ver.	Ver.	3
Dow.	Dowg.	4 3NL 3L
Dow.	Dow.	2
P. Joh.	P. Joh.	1
Joh.	John.	1L
John.	John.	2
Mes.	Mess.	2 1NL
Mess.	Mess.	1
Host.	Host.	2 3L
Host.	Hos.	1L

Titus Andronicus

                     

Folio	Quarto 3	Total
Bassianus.	Bassianus.	1
Bassia.	Bassianus.	1
Bassia.	Bascianus.	1
Saturnine.	Saturninus.	2
Luc.	Lucius.	1 2NL
Lucius.	Lucius.	1L
Mar.	Marc.	1
Boy.	Puer.	1L
Romans.	Romaine.	1NL
Aron.	Aron.	1L

Romeo and Juliet

                                           

Folio	Quarto 3	Total
Greg.	Greg.	1 1NL 3L
Greg.	Gre.	1 1L
Greg.	Grego.	2 1NL
Gre.	Gre.	2 1NL
Gr.	Gre.	2L
Samp.	Samp.	5 1NL 6L
Sam.	Samp.	2 4L
Sam.	Sa.	1L
Abra.	Abra.	5
Ben.	Benv.	1L
Ben.	Ben.	1
Tyb.	Tibalt.	1L
Tyb.	Tib.	1L
Offi.	Offi.	1L
Cap.	Capu.	1L
Cap.	Cap.	3
Wife.	Wife.	1NL
Moun.	Moun.	1 1L
2. Wife.	M. Wife. 2.	1NL
Prince.	Prince.	1
Prin.	Prin.	2 2L