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Notes
The spelling on the title page is "Divel", but this spelling occurs nowhere else in the play and rarely in the Webster canon. The likelihood is, therefore, that the title-page spelling is an accidental form that chanced to be used by whoever set the title.
Philip Williams, "The Compositor of the 'Pied Bull' Lear," Studies in Bibliography, 1 (1948-49), 61-68.
"The Printing of John Webster's Plays", Part I, SB, 6 (1954), 117-128; Part II, SB, 8 (1956), 113-117; Part III, SB, 15 (1962), 57-69. (Part III deals only with The Dutchesse of Malfy.)
Chiefly by Peter Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and their Origins: Volume I: Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto (1982), pp. 154-155.
Ed. David Carnegie, David Gunby and Antony Hammond. I acknowledge with gratitude the assistance provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, in funding this research, and the energy and enthusiasm of my assistant, Miss Doreen DelVecchio.
D. F. McKenzie, "'Indenting the Stick' in the First Quarto of King Lear (1608)", PBSA, 67 (1973), 125-130.
A violent protest must be made against the growing practice, even among professional bibliographers, of referring to prose lines as "justified" and verse lines as "unjustified". All type lines have to be justified.
J. R. Brown, The Plays of Webster Considered in the Light of Contemporary Stage Conditions, B. Litt thesis, Oxford, 1952, section 5.
The three spaced before and after (and one spaced after only) in the last five lines of F2v have been removed from A's count, since these lines were (as Williams noticed: p. 63n) set by B.
This preference is interesting, in view of B's routine omission of the apostrophe in 'Ile' and 'nere'.
Although these spellings merely reflect A's preference for -y endings and B's for -ie, it is worth recording that the form found in B—E is 'fye'.
One or two probable spellings from the manuscript are worth noting: 'cocould', 'falckner', 'peece' ('piece' does not occur), 'powre' rather than 'pour', the forms 'poticarie', 'appoticarie' and 'potticarie', each of which occurs once, 'scritch-owle', 'venomne', and others.
The prefix is 'Flo.' five times on K3r and K3v, a variant which I am sure arises in the manuscript.
See Kenneth Povey, "The Optical Identification of First Formes," SB, 13 (1960), 189-190. The British Library has what they assured me was a Povey lamp, which failed to reveal any ink bobbles whatever, so far as I could see, in any of their three quartos of The White Devil.
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