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Shakespeare's Text and the Bibliographical
Method
by
Fredson Bowers
[*]
Though definition of terms is dull work, any paper which attempts to discuss bibliographical method had better state what it means by that phrase, for of all modern terms for scholarly disciplines, 'bibliography' is perhaps the loosest used and the least understood. From among the various subdivisions of bibliography, two have the greatest bearing on the problems of Shakespeare's text. The first is analytical, or, as it is often called, critical bibliography. This I take to be the technical investigation of the printing of specific books, or of general printing practise, based exclusively on the physical evidence of the books themselves. Such a line of investigation may detect and explain cancels and reprinted substituted sheets of all kinds. It is especially concerned with the presswork of a book, and it may explain by the use of mechanical evidence the number of presses engaged on a book, the order of the formes through the press, the printing together as one sheet of widely separated leaves, or the assignment of parts in a book broken up and printed simultaneously in sections. In Sir Walter Greg's phrase, it treats a book not as a literary document but simply as a tangible object produced by a physical process. The evidence the method employs is correspondingly physical, and the ideal is to build up a case which could be taken to a court of law for a favorable verdict. This is analytical bibliography in its purest sense.
Two illustrations may be given of its operations on Shakespeare problems. The first is the famous case of the 1619 Shakespeare editions which were falsely dated reprints, the so-called Pavier quartos. By a magnificent piece of bibliographical detective work in analysis, Greg and Neidig first showed, on the mechanical evidence of the similarity in watermarked
My second illustration has no such far-reaching consequences, but it is an especially neat example of how strict analytical bibliography can clarify muddied waters. The quarto of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida exists in two forms. In one, the title-page is conjugate in its gathering, and on it the play is stated to have been acted at the Globe. In the other this title-page is cancelled and is replaced by two leaves in a fold. On the first leaf, a new title-page omits reference to this public acting. An anonymous preface appears on the second leaf, which somewhat offensively, perhaps, denies that the play was ever publicly acted and hints that it is now being printed against the wishes of the 'grand possessors.' In the first investigations, the order of these two title-pages was confused and the true first was thought to be a correction of the second. However, the physical facts of cancellation and substitution were soon discovered to set that right—a piece of analytical bibliography in itself. Thereafter, it was automatically assumed that a considerable time-lag intervened between the printing of the first form and of its cancel substitute; and on the basis of this assumption a number of rather fantastic theories were evolved to explain the reasons for the printing of the new title and the preface.
What exact circumstances lie behind the situation we still do not know as clearly as we should like, perhaps, but of one thing we may now be certain: the substitute title and preface were not added to the play some time after publication as a result of any set of hypothetical circumstances. Dr. Philip Williams has been able to show by purely mechanical evidence,
It is of importance to notice that analytical bibliography in treating a book as a tangible object deliberately operates without regard for the meaning of the text contained in the book. This is not purblindness but instead a logical and necessary restriction of the discipline to its proper mechanical evidence. I may illustrate with an example of a reading from Richard II. If one is investigating the history of its text the first problem that arises when one comes to the third edition is whether this Q3 was printed from Q1 or from Q2. There happens to be sufficient textual evidence, but in fact A. W. Pollard pointed out one piece of bibliographical proof which needs no further corroboration. In a particular line the word for appears clearly printed in Q1; in Q2 the word is again for, but the f is very faintly inked. The compositor of Q3 overlooked this faint f and printed the word as or. Trivial as the example is, it has important implications for method. The point is this. If we were to rely on meaning only, no evidence could be adduced. The word or instead of for is clearly wrong, but it could have occurred as a simple misprint if Q1 had been the copy. But without regard for rightness or wrongness, we can demonstrate, on this one piece of evidence alone, that Q2 was the copy because the faint inking of the letter f provides a mechanical reason for its omission in Q3. A more pertinent use of this sort of evidence comes in Dryden's Wild Gallant where it alone is sufficient to decide the difficult question of priority for the first and second editions printed in the same year. Here, in one edition, only the tip of a letter l inked, producing a mark that could easily be mistaken for an apostrophe. And as an apostrophe it appears in the other edition. A court of law would accept this evidence, for to reverse it one would be forced to argue that in a first edition the compositor set an apostrophe and in the second another compositor in the same place set an imperfect letter l which inked so as to resemble an apostrophe. I should not myself care to be briefed for such a defense.
I have spent time on these examples because they may assist somewhat when we come to the second branch of bibliography of which I spoke—this is textual bibliography. Since it may often occur that there is a difficulty in drawing a sharp line between textual and analytical bibliography in specific cases, I offer a rather over-simplified definition at the start. I take it that textual bibliography is the application of the evidence of analytical bibliography, or at least of its pertinent methods, to textual problems where meaning of some sort may be involved even though very slightly. Or if, in the strictest possible sense, meaning is not involved, textual bibliography deals with printing evidence which—in ordinary contrast to analytical bibliography—relies on cumulation for building up its case, and on some degree of interpretation. Because it is a form of bibliography, the textual method must still firmly base itself on the evidence of the printing process but it may associate palaeographical evidence with this, as well as evidence of any sort that seems pertinent. The nearer it approaches to analytical bibliography the more certain and mechanically demonstrable are its results; the farther it dissociates itself, the more its evidence becomes speculative, cumulative in its effect, and in need of interpretation. Very much in general, analytical bibliography has a tendency to find its normal material in larger questions of fact, whereas textual bibliography ultimately attempts to apply its findings to specific and even minute points. The field is so very broad that generalisations are difficult and I had better proceed to examples.
Before any logical approach could be made to the problem of the King Lear text, not only did the Pavier quarto need to be cleared out of the way as having any authority, but also the precise relationship of the first quarto and folio texts had to be established. By relationship I mean specifically their tangible relationship: was the Folio text printed from a manuscript or was it printed from an annotated copy of the first quarto. On the answer to this question hinges the entire logical approach one must take to the variants between the two texts in general, as well as in any specific reading. It happens that there is evidence which is at least on the fringes of the bibliographical method, that is, evidence of the Folio making a wrong rationalization in an attempt to ungarble a quarto corruption. In King Lear an example comes at II.iv.100 where in its unproofread state the first quarto read, "the dear father | Would with his daughter speak; come and tends service". The Folio, struggling with this unsatisfactory passage, changed "come and tends service" to the scarcely more satisfactory "commands, tends, service". "Commands her service" is of course the right reading as found in the proofread state of the quarto; the point here is simply that the Folio error can be explained only on the basis that the quarto error served as printer's copy. Another
It is true that these Folio variants are readily explained by our ability to trace the printing of the text through its various forms. To this extent the method is bibliographical, but it is somewhat remotely so perhaps in contrast to the truly bibliographical form which the clinching evidence took. The first quarto of King Lear was very considerably proof-corrected during the course of its printing so that all but a few sheets exist in two states of the readings. That the Folio was definitely printed not from any original manuscript but at least basically from a copy of the quarto became clear when P. A. Daniel, and later Sir Walter Greg, pointed out that in some instances the Folio text follows the uncorrected readings of certain quarto sheets, as with "commands, tends" for "come and tends," an impossible occurrence for a text set from an author's manuscript since these readings must have been copies of the blunders and misreadings of the Q1 compositor. This is very close indeed to mechanical proof, and the example places textual bibliography as near to analytical as it can come.[*] Somewhat similar investigations in Shakespeare are those of Philip Williams with Troilus and Cressida, and Charlton Hinman with Othello. In the one case such printing evidence as the common variable use of italic or roman type for names, as well as the forms taken by the speech headings, settled the long-vexed question of the relation of the Folio Troilus to the quarto by showing beyond doubt that the Folio was indeed set from a copy of the quarto and not from a manuscript. In the
But I am not interested today in listing the various horrid examples in Shakespeare in which bibliography has exposed the errors of what Sir Walter Greg calls 'metacritical' writers. I do want, however, to pursue a little more narrowly some differences between true bibliography and psuedo-bibliography, because this pseudo-bibliography has sometimes masqueraded as the real thing in Shakespearian textual criticism.[1]
Earlier I emphasized that to be called textual bibliography the method of investigation must be firmly rooted in the printing process; and I distinguished between analytical bibliography in which the evidence is not textual—at least in the purest state of analytical bibliography—and textual bibliography in which the chief concern is with the printing of the text as such, and the evidence is therefore drawn from the text and its characteristics although still in a largely mechanical manner. I can illustrate now, I believe, with a concrete example which may be of assistance. If a book were set by more than one compositor, it is of the highest importance to distinguish the exact pages composed by each workman, for each in all probability will have adopted somewhat different attitudes towards the text and, at the least, each will have imposed upon the author's manuscript somewhat different spelling and punctuational characteristics. Analytical bibliography has one certain method for making
Now what I wish to point out specifically is that while the results may in some degree be inferential and cumulative, for textual bibliography, since the evidence is based on the variable and sometimes unpredictable characteristics of human beings as they perform their tasks, as against the result from the printer's stick which bases its evidence on a piece of equipment in the printer's shop; nevertheless, actual and physical evidence is employed, and inferences are drawn from a very large body of cumulative evidence, not—as with pseudo-bibliography—from mere speculations as to what might have happened in the course of printing. In other words, true bibliography even in its inferences building up to an hypothesis—I dare say even in its occasional speculations—must govern itself by laws of evidence of a nature very similar to those which govern a Queen's Counsel in court. These laws of evidence, I take it, concern the logical process by which a chain of ascertained facts is linked together to show a certain relation between presumed cause and indubitable effect. Circumstantial evidence welds these links together. In some cases time may show that because of certain missing evidence or of some logical fault in the series of interpretations, the ultimate case was wrong; but it is perhaps not unknown in courts for a judgment to miscarry because all evidence was not procurable, or because counsel made a particularly dazzling leap over what for a less ingenious man would have been a yawning chasm in the evidence. If miscarriages of justice occur, whether in law or in bibliography, the fault is not in the method but in the application. Parenthetically,
Professor Dover Wilson's researches are frequently concerned with the bibliographical matters of the printing process and of compositorial and proofreaders' habits; but in his monograph on the manuscript of Hamlet and its printed transmissions he is prone to use personal generalizations and speculations about printing and to apply these assumptions to the text in question as if they were facts which had been previously ascertained as true by the corelation of large quantities of physical evidence derived from the actual texts under examination. This is a very dangerous method for unwary students to read, since they are often dazzled by the seemingly bibliographical display of information without recognizing that in truth the process of building up to an hypothesis through a chain of circumstantial evidence governed by strict laws has not been observed. The language of bibliography may have been used, but not the method.
It is incumbent upon me to illustrate, and I choose an example each from his consideration of the Quarto and the Folio texts of Hamlet. Professor Wilson makes two assumptions about the compositor of the good second quarto of Hamlet, our basic text, which are very important for his theory. (1) Only one compositor set the whole text. (2) This compositor was an untutored dolt who was setting difficult copy at a rate far beyond his normal speed. As proof for the first, that only one compositor set the text, he asserts only that the imperfections are so uniformly distributed throughout that it is inconceivable they belong to two different workmen. This is not bibliographical evidence, or proof, and it would be thrown out in any court of law, for if the imperfections of the copy were in some part responsible for the printed results there might well be a relatively even distribution of error. But convinced that the errors are compositorial, Wilson automatically accepts as authoritative various extra words supplied by the Folio, and then uses—with some circularity of argument—the appearance of these words in the Folio as demonstration that they were missing in the quarto. This may be textual criticism of a sort, but it is not bibliography. Bibliography would use demonstrable evidence at the very start of the argument to ascertain whether in fact one or two compositors set the text. The only scientific method of demonstration, the evidence of the printer's stick failing as it does, would be to determine by a spelling test whether variable or uniform compositorial habits are found in the spelling, leading by classification into the assignment by pages of composition by different workmen or to the hypothesis
But for the sake of argument let us hypothecate (what is actually untrue) that only one compositor set the second quarto of Hamlet. If he were the illiterate numbskull that Wilson makes him out to be, it is difficult to see how he was hired except as an apprentice in a competitive and rigorously controlled trade. Wilson's confident statements that this compositor could memorize no more than one or two words at a time before turning to his cases to set the required type are, of course, absurd since a disability of this nature would certainly have prevented any printer from hiring such a workman. Moreover, the very examples of anticipation errors which Wilson provides and assigns to this compositor disprove automatically his theory. But normal or abnormal, it is of some importance to learn whether this compositor was in fact immoderately rushed in his typesetting, for such a theory has some bearing on the fidelity of his text. Wilson assumes that he was, on the basis of his errors. But this is not bibliographical evidence, since the errors may have been caused by other factors. Indeed, the evidence of analytical bibliography suggests quite the contrary, and that the compositor was under no especial pressure. The details are too technical to offer here. Suffice it to say that certain assumptions can be made about the speed of presswork in relation to compositorial speed of typesetting, at this time, on the evidence of the specific manner in which the type-formes are imposed for the press, specifically on the evidence for the number of skeleton-formes constructed to hold the type-pages. That is, for this date it seems established that the apparent inefficiency of the one-skeleton method is not actually time-wasting if the press for various reasons is ahead of the compositor. On the other hand, for the two-skeleton method to be worth attempting the compositor must be comfortably ahead of the press. Hence it is more than ordinarily significant that Q2 Hamlet is printed by the two-skeleton method, an unlikely situation if the compositor were as hurried as Wilson asserts.
But the evidence may be even more specific. Sheets B, C, and D are imposed with a pair of skeleton-formes; but with sheet E two more skeletons are constructed and thereafter the two sets of pairs roughly alternate, the B-C-D pair imposing sheets F and I whereas the new pair imposes sheets G, H, K, and L, until with sheets M, N, and O the two pairs mix together according to a pattern which at the moment I have not worked at enough to comment on. This general alternation involving the use of four skeleton-formes is inexplicable for printing with one press; yet if we hypothecate two presses it follows that there must have been more than one compositor. And recently Dr. Alice Walker has communicated
The case is no better for his consideration of the printing of the Folio text. In examining what he believes to be the remarkably higher percentage of error in the Folio Hamlet in comparison to Antony and Cleopatra, the purpose being to assign the error to the playhouse scribe and not to the Folio compositors, he writes, "So wide indeed is the disparity that assuming as we legitimately may that the texts were set up by compositors who were, if not the same workmen at least of similar efficiency, it can only be assigned to a fundamental difference in the copies supplied them."
Now without regard for whether the conclusions reached are correct or incorrect, the method used to reach them was only pseudo-bibliographical since it played about with speculations concerning printing but without a single piece of strictly bibliographical evidence to back up these speculations. "Assuming as we legitimately may that the texts were set up by compositors who were, if not the same workmen, at least of similar efficiency." This is not bibliographical evidence, at least not for a court of law. Why may we assume that if there was more than one workman the two were of equal efficiency? Presumably because they were both employed in Jaggard's shop. But on this logic we should be able to argue that the much maligned second-quarto compositors for Roberts' Hamlet were the equal of the workman who set up King Lear for Nicholas Okes since all were employed by reputable London printers. Moreover, it is noticeable that the evidence is begged whether there were one or two compositors for these plays under scrutiny and whether they were the same workmen. The spelling-evidence which enables us to distinguish the two Folio compositors was known at the time Wilson contrived this passage, but he did not avail himself of it to apply such tests to the plays about which he was writing. If he had, he would have found that whereas Hamlet was set up by the two alternating compositors customarily distinguished as A and B, Antony and Cleopatra was composed by B alone. Thus, at least at the start, no inferences can be made from a comparison
When we consider the millions of words and the books piled on books that have been written about Shakespeare, it is astonishing to contemplate how little of a basic nature has been done to establish his text, and how much remains to do. One reason is that the bibliographical method for textual enquiry, which was developed first in this country by such great men as A. W. Pollard, R. B. McKerrow, and Sir Walter Greg, is still comparatively new. Another is that techniques are still being invented, or refined, to bring to bear this method, at its most powerful, to an analysis of the relation of the printing to Shakespeare's text. I turn now to a brief account of what I take to be some of the central problems and the methods that I anticipate will be applied to come to grips with them.
It is a commonplace of textual criticism that no editor is equipped
This general view of a text consists, perhaps, of two major parts. When there is more than one text available, it is important to estimate the exact relationship between them; and this leads inevitably into an enquiry about the exact process by which they descended—whether by direct derivation or collaterally—from Shakespeare's own manuscript. In this investigation it is important to attempt some analysis of what were the effects of this transmission, including the work of scribes, compositors, and possible editors. When there is only one text available, as in the plays first printed in the Folio, this investigation is of course somewhat circumscribed, but nevertheless such evidence as there is must be evaluated as to what can be determined about the process of transmission and the nature of the manuscript underlying the printed version.
Some parts of this investigation concern pure textual criticism, for McKerrow was correct, I believe, in disavowing as in any sense bibliographical the speculative enquiry which is necessary to achieve an hypothesis about the nature of a lost manuscript underlying a printed text and the history of its transmission up to the point that we can first read the text in print. But such speculations often need the checkrein of bibliographical logic if they are to escape manifest falseness.
The case is indeed worth a narrower scrutiny, for a principle is present which reaches its fullest flower in the Hamlet problem. If the Folio text were indeed set from a manuscript, independent concurrence of Folio and quarto in any reading would powerfully argue for its correctness. In order to demonstrate the need for emending any such reading we should be forced to argue either that the error was present in some manuscript which lay behind both the manuscript for the quarto and that for the Folio prints, or else that the X-manuscript reading was correct but that both quarto compositor and Folio compositor, or else a scribe copying the manuscript which either used, in addition to the other compositor, independently produced the same misreading. Such cases are not unknown, but an editor must be very sure of his ground and have palaeographical evidence to boot, before he engages himself to alter such a reading. On the other hand, if the Folio directly derived from the quarto,
Of course an editorial problem still resides in the variants, whatever the relationship of the texts, since the source for those in the Folio must still be hypothecated and the authority established. It does not do to take it as axiomatic that Folio variants, coming from an authoritative source, are thereby superior to the quarto in expressing Shakespeare's final intentions. The chain of transmission which may lie behind the manuscript used to correct the quarto could have been such as to afford opportunity for errors to creep in, these errors being faithfully copied by the scribe annotating the quarto. And by no means all such errors will be apparent errors. The majority are quite plausible readings. But the case may be even stronger. Dr. Williams has argued in an unpublished paper that by and large in Troilus and Cressida, where the same situation obtains, the manuscript behind the quarto was a Shakespeare fair copy somewhat revised in the process of copying from the original, and that the manuscript used to revise this quarto for the Folio printer's copy was Shakespeare's foul papers, or original draft. Thus if one accepts a Folio reading when it differs from that of the quarto, the odds are—it is argued—that one is rejecting a Shakespeare revision in favor of a Shakespeare first thought which he had modified. The case is a very interesting one and fortunately is in process of close examination.[*]
When we turn to 2 Henry IV, some of the problems I have cited, such as hypotheses about the nature of the manuscripts which in one way or another must lie behind the quarto text, and the Folio at least in part, are not proper subjects for truly bibliographical enquiry. But in two particular respects bibliography can, I think, be of assistance. To date, the arguments on each side—one for the independent typesetting of the Folio from a manuscript, and the other for the use as copy of an annotated quarto—have rested very largely on textual evidence of a non-bibliographical cast. There is certainly some reason to hope that a minute bibliographical examination of the formal characteristics of both texts would establish the case for direct derivation, or—with more difficulty—by demonstrating the lack of sufficient evidence for a direct relationship, the probability that
Richard III is an example of a play in which the necessary analysis has reached an intermediate stage. The main points in its textual history are these. In the late nineteenth century the estimate was correctly made that the basic source for the Folio text was a copy of the sixth quarto of 1622. Much later two further important discoveries were made. It was effectively demonstrated that the source for the text of the first quarto (all later quartos being mere reprints) was not an authoritative manuscript with some direct transmissional link to Shakespeare's own, but instead a memorially contaminated text very likely derived from the actors reciting their parts as they remembered them in order to make up a new prompt book. It was furthermore discovered that the source for the numerous Folio alterations lay in a collation of Q6 against a new and authoritative manuscript of some sort in order to revise the faulty printed text. Finally it was found that not all the play had been so collated and revised, but that several hundred lines divided between a large patch in the opening of Act 3, scene 1, and another at the conclusion of the play, were printed unannotated in the Folio from leaves detached from a copy of the third edition.
By ordinary standards these facts illuminating a most complex case would be taken as sufficient to guide an editor in the recovery of as much of the true text as we are ever likely to know—parts, of course, never
At the conclusion of her case for the nature of the manuscript and the history of the text, Dr. Walker makes a very significant bibliographical analysis to guide a future editor. The specific problems are: (1) how many of the Folio variants are authoritative and how many scribal or compositorial errors; (2) how many errors in the quarto text did the collating scribe fail to correct.
Her use of evidence is very interesting. On the basis of the respective shares of compositors A and B in the unannotated section set from the third quarto, she evolves some statistics to assist an editor in estimating the proportion of Folio variants which may reasonably represent compositorial errors and not scribal corrections. She then attacks the problem of the failure of the scribe to correct. With absolute logic she offers the proposition that when Q6 by the history of its transmission from the first edition varied from this first edition, and when the scribe by reference to his manuscript restored the Q1 reading, this is unassailable proof that he had correctly transcribed an authoritative reading from his manuscript.
Certainly this added freedom which bibliography can sometimes afford an editor to be logically bold is exemplified with King Lear, and it is not too much to say that recent bibliographical work has quite upended the conventional editorial treatment of this text, and in some respects outmoded every available edition. Professor Duthie's admirable edition published a few years ago gave the text a much needed thorough analysis. He performed a signal service in disposing of the shorthand theory to explain the peculiarities of the first quarto, and in analyzing the work of the scribe who annotated this quarto by reference to a playhouse manuscript in order to furnish the Folio copy. When he came to attack the problem of the Folio variants in constructing his own text, Duthie felt confident that critical ability alone could distinguish in the main between the authority of quarto and Folio in cases of significant readings. But when he arrived at the problem of the relatively indifferent reading, he confessed that criticism was helpless and that he had no recourse but to prefer the Folio variant since it was present in a text of generally greater authority. Some hundreds of readings in which the choice seemed indifferent, therefore, were arbitrarily accepted from a single source.
Now it is clear that in all cases of variation between quarto and Folio, either the preparer scribe or the compositor must be responsible, and it seems reasonable to assume that if the Folio readings are accepted in all such cases, in a certain percentage an editor is incorporating unauthoritative compositorial departures from copy. Whatever little authority any specific reading may have in the first quarto, with its contaminated text,
I am emphasizing the need for the minute study of the compositors who set Shakespeare texts because it is through these workmen that what Shakespeare wrote was set into type and printed in the texts now preserved to us. What these compositors did with the words they found in manuscript concerns us closely, for—cumulatively—it is not impossible that in thousands of small but eventually important ways these workmen have altered the exact reading of their copy. Therefore, the textual bibliographer is deeply interested in finding—for the First Folio—to give an example—precisely which pages and columns were typeset by which compositor, and how many workmen were in fact concerned in the composition of the First Folio text. Possibly there were also compositors C and D. The case is still uncertain. By an analytical examination of the evidence bearing on the presswork, we seek to learn what parts of the Folio were printed on one press and what parts on two presses. We want to recover any evidence as to whether a compositor was hurried or at leisure in composing certain pages; and the method by which the sheets went through the press can tell us much about this. Then we want to know every last thing there is to know about the habits of spelling, punctuation, and of faithfulness or carelessness in following copy for each compositor who worked on the book. This evidence can all be applied in one place or another to help remove the veil which the printing process places between us and the manuscript, and to help recover the at least relative purity of the manuscript reading. Let me illustrate with an example which is not concerned with an especially common problem but which I think is interesting. Some years ago I heard Professor G. B. Harrison deliver a paper on Coriolanus, in which he argued—very convincingly at the time, it seemed,—that the irregular lineation found in this Folio play represented a faithful following of Shakespeare's manuscript. And by showing the results which the rough lines had on vocal delivery as against the conventional
There is another gap in our knowledge of the way in which the printing process may have corrupted the text we have commonly accepted. We have very curiously never made the collation of copies that is necessary to discover which pages of an early Shakespeare text were proofread and what were the changes that took place as a result of the proofreading. I do not know of any source where a student can go to find out the facts about proof-correctors' variants in most of the Shakespeare first quartos, which are often the highest authorities for our text: so far as I know the majority have never been fully collated. This I think is a shocking state of affairs. It means that editors have been content to take their text from any random copy that was most convenient for them, without curiosity as to whether they were reprinting compositors' errors or proof-readers' sophistications. When the text has been based on the Folio the case is no better. In sorrow I quote from the preface to the latest edition of King Lear: "It has recently been suggested that a study of all the extant copies of the First Folio would reveal variants comparable in importance with those in the extant copies of the First Quarto. As no evidence has yet been produced that the Folio is made up of corrected and uncorrected sheets, I am skeptical of this theory; but I have consulted
Because no one, except for the New Variorum editors, has been willing to engage himself to the undoubted drudgery of collation, it is a paradox that we know more about the variable factors in the text of certain relatively minor Elizabethan playwrights like Field and Massinger than we know about Shakespeare's text. But collation of the authoritative texts is not all that is needed. It is true that usually there is no textual service to the discovery of variants in late and unauthoritative reprints of the basic texts. But I should like to point out one overlooked situation in which it is important for us to know if the text was indeed altered in any respect during the course of printing a late and unauthoritative edition. Let us take Richard III as our illustration, a play—it will be recalled—in which an example of the sixth quarto was conflated with a manuscript to serve as printer's copy for the Folio. When the Folio deviates from Q6, therefore, we may take it that in ordinary circumstances the different reading came from the manuscript. But I have already commented on the fact that not all such variants will have this authority, for it is positive that some will have been made by the Folio compositors. These, of course, should be thrown out in so far as we can develop the bibliographical means to enable a textual critic to isolate them. But even if we then disregard variants made by scribal blunder (which will not always be easy to detect), one further class may remain, even though only a handful of variants could be concerned. If the formes of Q6 were proofread while the sheets were being printed, we should have some variant readings
It is time for me to summarize what the bibliographical method can still contribute to assist with establishing Shakespeare's text.
First, it can re-survey every doubtful case, such as Hamlet, Othello, and 2 Henry IV in which there is still controversy whether the Folio text, which differs considerably from that of earlier quartos, was set directly from a manuscript, or else from a copy of some quarto edition which had been annotated by comparison with a manuscript or, as I believe for 2 Henry IV, had been used as the basis for a manuscript which served as Folio copy. This is not an academic question, for the principle of one's whole treatment of the text rests on the answer to the central problem: what exactly was the nature of the Folio printer's copy.
Secondly, by means of the necessary collation and the interpretation of the variants made in printed texts while they were going through the press, the bibliographical method can discover and classify these proofreaders' alterations with a view to recovering the true Shakespearian readings, or at least to distinguishing the certainly non-Shakespearian.
Thirdly, since the bibliographical method is concerned with the effect of the printing process on Shakespeare's text, it can make searching analytical studies of the relationship between the compositors (those intermediaries by which the text was transmitted to us) and the actual printing. Analytical bibliography can still find material to work on in Shakespeare by investigating the speed of presswork which, if suddenly accelerated, might affect the accuracy of the compositor hurrying to keep up with the press. A combination of analytical and textual bibliography, moreover, is necessary to distinguish in every Shakespeare text the number of compositors engaged on it and the exact sections for which each set the type. Then, by a series of extremely rigorous studies, the characteristics of these compositors must be analyzed in other printed texts where proper comparisons may be made; and finally everything that we know about the care or the negligence with which they treated what they were typesetting,
Notes
A public lecture delivered at Bedford College, University of London, on 4 March 1953, Professor Una Ellis-Fermor in the chair.
As this goes to press I have seen the typescript of an article by Dr. Philip Williams for the October 1953 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly in which he argues that the copy for the Folio text of King Lear was not an annotated quarto, as we have supposed for years, but instead a manuscript which utilized the quarto. From his review of Alice Walker's Textual Problems of the First Folio, in the same issue, it is evident that he now has altered his original views, as stated below, that the Folio Troilus and Cressida was printed directly from its annotated quarto and inclines to the belief that it also was printed from an intermediate transcript which preserved certain characteristics of the quarto.
As I understand that Professor Dover Wilson has now become philosophical about disagreements with his work, I hope he will forgive me the discourtesy if I choose my examples from his study of the text of Hamlet. If I disagree in details, or in the method by which certain results were arrived at, I do not wish to imply any lack of respect for the monograph as a whole. It was a splendid pioneering effort and though it will need to be redone in the future, we shall have to know a great deal more than we know now before the task can even be attempted.
Dr. Williams may perhaps revise this view in the light of his most recent researches. The general principle here remains the same, however.
I do not pretend to have made a rigorous examination, since the 'good long time' has as yet been denied me. But I may say that in the process of a preliminary collation of Q and F to familiarize myself with the problem, I have come upon the mechanical evidence of which I speak, and which in my opinion demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt, especially when joined to Dr. Walker's copious evidence of a somewhat different sort, that in some manner printed Q lies in a direct line behind the F text. Whether F was set direct from annotated Q, as Dr. Walker holds, or whether there was some intermediate step as I believe at the moment, still awaits further investigation.
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