In The Manuscript of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1934),
Professor J. Dover Wilson made one of the first attempts to
analyse the habits of a compositor in an Elizabethan printing
house, and his conclusion was that James Roberts employed a
bungling and inexperienced workman for the 1604/5 Hamlet.
The picture Professor Wilson drew of this compositor was detailed
and paradoxical. He was a novice and, left to himself, would have
worked letter by letter, reproducing the spellings of his copy,
but he was rushed in his work, and sometimes omitted lines,
half-lines, phrases, words, or letters. In moments of confidence, he
abandoned his plodding method and let his eye 'race ahead of his
fingers,' so that he might transpose a word in error from the end
to the beginning of a line. This picture of Roberts' compositor
has been generally accepted and has greatly influenced the repute
of the second quarto of Hamlet; Sir Walter Greg thought it
"was printed from Shakespeare's autograph copy, though there was
little that was foul about it and the chief trouble is the
incompetence of the printing."[1]
Since Professor Wilson's early study, other techniques have
been developed in order to trace the work of compositors. The
acquisition of these techniques has been recorded in the pages of
The Library and Studies in Bibliography, and
the
first large scale application of them has appeared in Dr. Alice
Walker's Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953). The
trail has been clearly blazed: editors of Elizabethan texts
should no longer speak vaguely of compositorial error or
sophistication. Many old textual
problems now need to be re-examined, and among them is the nature
of the copy for Q2
Hamlet (1604/5). This paper is a
beginning of this reexamination; it presents evidence for
believing that two compositors were responsible for
Hamlet, the same two who shared the work for
The
Merchant of Venice which was printed by Roberts for Thomas
Hayes in 1600.
