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Scribes, Compositors, and Annotators: The Nature of the Copy
for the First Folio Text of Coriolanus
by
LEE BLISS
[*]
The First Folio of 1623 (hereafter F) is our sole authority for the text of what is probably Shakespeare's final tragedy, Coriolanus. With the possible exception of four bb formes (discussed below), Coriolanus was, in all accounts, set from manuscript copy. About the provenance of that manuscript, or whether it was in Shakespeare's own hand, there is less certainty and, hence, less agreement. Many editors have suggested Shakespeare's autograph papers as copy, and G. Blakemore Evans in 1974 concluded that `[t]here is general agreement that the F1 text was printed from a carefully prepared authorial manuscript, a "producer's copy" as it has been called'; he went on to assert that, `though perhaps showing one or two book-keeper's notations', it `had never served as a prompt-book'.[1] In contrast, Albert Gilman, though inclined to accept authorial copy, entertained the possibility of scribal transcript and was certain that the manuscript had `been used as a prompt-book'.[2] In his New Arden edition, Philip Brockbank was more cautious on both counts, finding it `consistent with the evidence to suppose F was set up from autograph copy, at least partly prepared by the playwright for the theatre. It is not possible to be sure that the book-keeper had or did not have a casual, occasional hand in it.'[3] More recently, in their 1987 Textual Companion to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, the Oxford editors designate
Before turning to the argument itself, however, two unusual features surrounding the printing of Coriolanus need to be mentioned, for in major and minor ways they affected the resulting F text. Because Coriolanus was being set into type by Compositors A and B while Compositor E was simultaneously setting the next play in this section, Titus Andronicus, the manuscript pages of Coriolanus had to be entirely `cast off' at the printing house before work on it could begin.[6] Obviously, over- or under-estimation by the man who did the casting off, especially in conjunction with the constant challenge posed by F's narrow double-column format (so inhospitable to long verse lines), could put the compositors' ingenuity to a severe test. This peculiarity in the circumstances under which Coriolanus was printed helps explain, as we shall see, some at least of the play's high incidence of mislineation, as well as some of the apparent compositorial tampering with SDs.
Another peculiarity originating in the printing house is more problematic (and, for our purposes, less significant), but worth mentioning since it may have influenced Compositor A's work on bb1v in a minor way. Charlton Hinman notes that, given the orderly sequence generally followed in setting F, the only exception stands out: quire bb of Coriolanus. Without precedent in the prior work on the Comedies and Histories, `a beginning was made on quire kk before quire bb was finished', and the `four bb formes which we might certainly have expected just after bb3v:4 and bb3:4v eventually turn up between quires ll and mm'. Hinman believes the four formes may have been set in their normal order but, after suffering some physical degradation (possibly a `warehouse disaster'), they had to be replaced. If Hinman's explanation is correct, and if the damaged sheets were still legible, these four formes in F might have been reset from printed copy, returned to after `about fifteen working days after the completion of group 3'.[7]
I
The F text of Coriolanus certainly seems to reflect in some of its features an authorial basis, for instance in its retention of at least one possible 'Shakespearean' spelling and, more generally, in its often full and `literary' SDs that perhaps reflect either Shakespeare's own `bridging' thoughts during composition, as he stitched together episodes from North's Plutarch into dramatic form, or a later fleshing out of brief SDs with narrative details intended to help his acting company understand the evolving, quite fast-moving and complicated, story.[8] Sweeping claims for Shakespearean spellings surviving into the printed texts have been rightly challenged, but there is more critical agreement about one spelling predeliction that does appear in Coriolanus.[9] In the fragment of the manuscript Booke of Sir Thomas More by Hand D, thought by many to be Shakespearean autograph, the noun silence is spelled with an sc, scilens; the sc preference reappears in scattered earlier texts of Shakespeare plays thought to have been set from `foul papers' — Scilens for Justice Silence in the SHs of quarto 2 Henry IV, Sceneca for Seneca in the
Stage directions that exceed the needs of a book-holder include 1.3's informative introduction of the women, specifying their relationship to the protagonist as well as their immediate physical actions: Enter Volumnia and Virgilia, mother and wife to Martius: | They set them downe on two low stooles and sowe. Titus Lartius' movements are twice tracked with some care: at 1.9.11/759, Enter Titus with his Power, from the Pursuit,[16] and the elaborate opening SD of 1.7 that locates the action in time and space, in its F form nearly half as long as the scene itself: Titus Lartius, having set a guard upon Carioles, going with | Drum and Trumpet toward Cominius and Caius Mar- | tius, Enters with a Lieutenant, other Souldiours, and a | Scout. Other SDs display a literary turn of phrase, as when two officers enter at the beginning of 2.2 to lay cushions, as it were, in the Capitoll, or 1.6 where Cominius enters as it were in retire, with soldiers, or when Coriolanus makes his final entrance in 5.6, the Commoners being with him. Some are `literary' in the most literal sense, having been lifted almost verbatim from the section of North's Plutarch that Shakespeare was at that moment casting in dramatic form: at 1.4.29/523 the Romans are beat back to their Trenches, and at 4.4.0 Coriolanus enters in meane Aparrell, Dis- | guisd, and muffled.[17]
Some elements of Shakespeare's original papers thus survive in the 1623 printed text, although this does not necessarily mean the compositors had Shakespeare's own hand before them rather than a scribal transcript faithful to at least some features of the original. Although it is impossible to distinguish with complete certainty between scribal and authorial copy, several aspects of the F text suggest the manuscript was not Shakespearean holograph. The Oxford Textual Companion has gathered a number of these features as evidence for its argument that printer's copy for Coriolanus was a scribal transcript. The preponderance of ha's over has and, less decisively, do's or doe's over does is uncharacteristic.[18] The contracted form a'th' occurs
Two other contracted forms in Coriolanus might be added to this list, and, although it is only a remote possibility, the first may even derive from an idiosyncratic Shakespearean spelling. In Sir Thomas More's three pages by Hand D, we find one example of tooth (= to th').[21] All ten of Compositor A's forms of this contraction in Coriolanus are spelled toth', and he also uses this spelling (in five out of six instances) in Macbeth; yet since it does not appear in the other eight F plays on which he worked, this is unlikely to be his preference imposing itself. (Compositor B resists this form: all 11 of his spellings in Coriolanus are to'th'.) The probable explanation is that the scribes for Coriolanus and Macbeth (who do not, on other evidence, appear to have been the same man) were either tolerant enough of tooth to only semi-modernise it or, less likely, themselves preferred toth'. Another rarity in F plays, in this case almost certainly scribal, lies in the four occurrences of it's (three set by Compositor B, one by A). Tis is by far the more usual form of this contraction, and the only other F play with this number of it's is Henry VIII, set from scribal transcript.[22] It may also be worth noting that two misprints
If Hand D in the More manuscript is Shakespeare's, his punctuation was light almost to the point of non-existence: in these three pages there are no colons, round brackets, exclamation or interrogation marks, and `an average of one comma to every five lines, a lower ratio than in any of the Good Quartos, and about one-sixth of the rate of use in a normally punctuated First Folio text'.[24] Absent punctuation could easily lead astray a copyist trying to make sense of, and mark, the syntactical units in such a manuscript.[25] Some of the relatively heavy and sophisticated pointing in Coriolanus was probably added in the printing house: apostrophes indicating elision of a letter, which on the evidence of Hand D in More Shakespeare indicated by spelling alone;[26] some at least of the colons, semicolons, brackets, additional commas, marks of interrogation and exclamation, as well as emphasis capitals.[27] It is unclear who is responsible for the probable purging of the contracted spelling in words for which the meter requires syncopation or slurring; of the many, many instances of full-spelling words that need to be reduced by a syllable in
Compositorial sophistication does not sufficiently explain a number of uncharacteristic features of Coriolanus's punctuation, however. The high incidence of certain unusual contractions, clipped forms, and pseudo-grammatical apostrophes (ha's, doe's), noted above, all point away from Shakespearean holograph for the F manuscript copy. [29] In some of its other punctuation too — notably in exclamation marks and round brackets — Coriolanus is untypical. Since Compositor B `heavily interfered with the punctuation of his copy', in this matter he makes an unrelaible indicator;[30] it is to the more conservative Compositor A that we should look for signs that the copy manuscript was already generously pointed. In Compositor A's work in F, excluding The Winter's Tale (a Ralph Crane transcript that would be rich in brackets), he worked on nine plays and set 112 brackets in 104 pages.[31] At this rate, in Coriolanus Compositor A was setting nearly double his usual number per page, and in fact his rate is nearly that of Compositor B, whose slightly higher average of 2.1 per page probably reflects his tendency to add his own brackets to those he found in his copy. Compositor A's heavier than normal use of round brackets (13 in all) suggests scribal rather than authorial copy, since he does not seem to add them on his own initiative. On the other hand, Compositor A seems to have resisted exclamation marks: there are only nine in 120 pages of his work in F, and he omitted all six in setting from printed copy for F Richard II.[32] That there is only one such mark in his seven and one-quarter pages of Coriolanus is not surprising, though his resistance makes it highly likely that the mark stood in his copy and fairly likely that there were more that he suppressed. In Compositor B's pages there are 13, and even though some of them may be his own additions, it is also probable that he was encouraged by the presence of exclamation marks in his copy. On the basis of his work from printed copy, at least slightly over half the exclamation
The nature of the mislineation in Coriolanus suggests that here, too, both compositors and scribe contributed errors to what was probably in this respect an already confusing original manuscript. If Hand D in More is a reliable guide, Shakespeare was himself misleading: he did not capitalise the initial letter of a verse line, and he tended to crowd the concluding part-line of a speech onto the preceding line to save space at the bottom of a page. In the three pages of More, there are three examples of mislineation.[34] Inaccurately cast-off copy could push both compositors to purposefully alter their copy: in some cases cramming one and one-half lines onto one line of type, in others needlessly splitting lines to take up space, as well as relining verse as prose and prose as verse. As Paul Werstine points out, Compositor B is in general more faithful to his copy's verse lineation than A, though A is more reliable in lining prose. Compositor A's unreliability with verse frequently stems from his apparent dislike of enjambment and preference for emphasising syntactical structure; as a consequence, he was more than willing to relineate on his own to create end-stopped verse.[35] In such circumstances, Compositor B's pages are more likely to indicate the extent to which the manuscript behind Coriolanus was itself ambiguous or erroneous. The same ambiguities in lineation in the Hand D pages of More were apparently frequent in the F copy for Coriolanus: there, Compositor B `mislined more verse passages containing short lines than he did in all the rest of the plays he shared with A'.[36] Most probably not all instances stood in his copy, since he was also using mislined verse as a way to save and waste space, yet the examples of F Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, where combined verses are spread across the stints of both compositors and which were not set from cast-off copy, `makes it evident that the source of the combined verses in all three plays probably lies beyond the commpositors'.[37] Werstine concludes that the high incidence of mislineation in Hamlet is at least in part scribal, since it is generally agreed that a transcript underlies the F version of that play, and speculates that the same may be true for Coriolanus and Antony.[38]
Some inconsistencies in the naming of characters in SDs and SHs may take us, from another direction, a bit closer to distinguishing between an authorial or scribal origin for the printing- house copy of Coriolanus. Certainly, those for Titus Lartius have not been standardised. Not only does reference to him vary between Tit. or abbreviations of Lartius in SHs (Lart., Lar.), but he is also once addressed as Titus Lucius within a speech (1.1.239/262), becomes Titus Latius in the SD at 2.1.161/1060 and, later, Titus Latius in the entry direction and Latius as SH throughout 3.1. The first misnaming, at 1.1.239/262, is by Compositor B, the others by A. In the first case, hasty and therefore slightly illegible script, with an open a and a dropped or extremely abbreviated r, might have produced Lucius, since t is easily mistaken for c in secretary hand. Given the other occurrences of Latius, however, it is perhaps more likely that this is what the compositor misread as Lucius. In Compositor A's stints, the SD in 2.1 might be a simple misreading, again due to ambiguous copy; he had correctly set Titus Lartius 35 lines earlier on the same page. Yet it is also possible that Latius stood in the manuscript here, too, either in Shakespeare's hand or carefully copied by a scribe. The edition of North's Plutarch almost certainly used by Shakespeare, that of 1595, mentions this figure, described as `one of the valliantest men the ROMANES had at that time', only once in the text, as Titus Latius; in North's marginal comment the designation is Titus Lartius, a valliant Romaine.[39] Both spellings may have stuck in Shakespeare's mind, even though he had provisionally settled on one and used it as the dominant form in Act 1.[40] As Shakespeare moved on from the conquest of Corioles, the only part of Plutarch in which Titus is specifically involved, and also into scenes of his own creating — Coriolanus' triumphant return to Rome in 2.1 and a new setting (3.1) for the Plutarchan speech in which Coriolanus argues against giving corn to the people — the distinction between `Latius' and `Lartius' may have become blurred and one form substituted for the other when his mind was concentrated elsewhere. In 2.1 Titus has no speaking part; indeed, in Shakespeare's own chronology of the story, Titus should not be in Rome at all. His presence is needed for the visual effect of the tableau of military heroes Menenius defines as the `three, that Rome should dote on' (2.1.187/1096). If Latius did stand in the copy SD, it would in this scenario represent an authorial
The beginning of 3.1 is a slightly different case, but one that may point to Compositor A setting from scribal copy. Titus Latius not only appears in the entry direction, but he is for twenty lines the focus of Coriolanus' attention and has five speeches, all with the SH Latius. Yet although the mistake seems of greater magnitude here, its repeated occurrence requires only a single appearance of Latius in the entry direction. That is, this could be another momentary lapse, as at 2.1.161/1060, since Titus' role in this long scene is not in fact prominent at all: he gives his information about Aufidius and on the page, and perhaps in the author's mind, disappears. While a significant character earlier in the play, he now no longer has anything specific to say or do; he is given no exit direction. Modern editors, and producers, usually leave him on stage to contribute shouts to the patrician cause and general chaos; they take him off [ with others] at 3.1.252/1980, since some of the `Gentry' and senators apparently leave then, but F provides specific exits for only Coriolanus and Cominius.[42] If Titus and his bit of information were not upppermost in Shakespeare's mind as he built to the first climax, the breakdown of the Roman political process, then Latius might have found its way into the entry direction. If the variable SHs in other plays thought to be set from foul papers are indicative of Shakespearean practice, or the decremental SHs in Sir Thomas More (other, oth, o; or Lincolne, Linco, Linc, Lin), the original manuscript SHs may have been severely abbreviated.[43] The five Latius SHs on bb1v might then be a scribal attempt to fill out that form or forms (possibly as brief as La or L) by copying the one full spelling in the
Backtracking slightly to establish Compositor A's work habits may help clarify the grounds of the argument here and lend support to the case for scribal copy. On his first page of Coriolanus, aa4, Compositor A's use of the full form SHs of both Lartius and Martius (and of Brutus on aa5v and aa6),[45] longer forms than B for Auffi. or Auffid. and Sould. (B sets Auf. and Sol. or Soul.), as well as his departure from his usual spelling preference for blood to set instead two bloud and one bloudie,[46] all suggest a cautious new-comer's attempt to follow unfamiliar copy; he also here prints one of the play's two Omnes SHs.[47] If I am correct, the scribe expanded and regularised his author's various SH abbreviations. Compositor A, at least initially, fairly conscientiously follows suit; on aa4 he experiments with abbreviations only for the longer SHs which obviously could not be accommodated to F's two-column format. By 3.1 (bb1v), however, he had set five and one-quarter of his seven and one-quarter pages, and his earlier full SHs now tended toward shorter forms: Brut., Cor. and Corio. (but no longer Coriol.). Yet Compositor A had not attended to Coriolanus for some period of time, since after bb4v a good deal of other F work intervened.[48] While he remembered and abbreviated Brutus to Brut., his only prior acquaintance with Titus as a speaking character on stage had been on his very first page, aa4. By the time he set bb1v, Compositor A had either forgotten or was now unsure about Lartius/Latius, and he followed the scribal expansion to Latius for each instance, as he had on aa4 when faced with new characters. That Compositor B, who moves immediately to shortened forms on his first page, aa3v ( Lar. and Lart.), should among ten Mar. and one Mart. on that page include a Martius might suggest that his copy, too, presented him with fuller SH forms.
Thus while Compositor A was quite capable of himself lifting the SD Latius from the entry direction for 3.1, rather than the scribe I have posited, the other full-form
In the series of SHs for Coriolanus on aa5, Thomas Clayton has seen the decremental prefixes characteristic of Hand D in More, and he takes the similarity as evidence that the manuscript copy for F Coriolanus was Shakespearean holograph.[49] This is one of the very few pages on which such a claim could be based, but since it also offers spellings and sophistications not connected with Compositor A's practice elsewhere,[50] it seems advisible at least to consider alternative explanations. Certainly this page, especially in the second column, is replete with errors, many of which appear to derive from misreading, but some at least might as easily be scribal as compositorial: Latius for Lartius in the SD at TLN 1060, Com. for Cor. at TLN 1087, and possibly the mislineation of Coriolanus' first two speeches as prose and the duplicate Martius Caius in TLN 1066-67. (Mislineation from TLN 1088 to the bottom of the page is clearly compositorial, stretching copy to waste space.) While this is Compositor A's third page, it is the first on which he needs SHs for `Coriolanus', and what look like `Shakespearean' decremental prefixes may be connected with Compositor A irregularly working toward his own preferred form. He sets Herauld in full, then two Coriol., each of which heads verse set as prose. Whether he or the scribe was responsible for the mislineation here, perhaps the look of these long lines, coupled with the fact that the intervening SH is Com., convinced Compositor A he was going to need a shorter form to accommodate long verse lines. (He had adopted the short form Com. immediately on aa4, his first page, probably because Cominius' first two speeches there begin with long lines.) The next Coriolanus SH is Corio., followed by three Cor., although none of these lines presented problems with justification. On Compositor A's next page with this SH, aa6, the first two instances are Coriol. again, but at TLN 1288 a long first verse line pushes him to Corio., and this becomes his preferred form, from which he departs only twice (one Cori. required for justification on bb1, one random Cor. on bb1v).
Compositor B's practice on his first page with Coriolanus SHs (aa6v) is puzzling, but, while he is much less trustworthy in reflecting copy spellings than A, one feature suggests that Coriol. was at least the usual copy form. He sets one Corio., one Coriol., then seven Corio. However, when the first group of citizens in 2.3 exits and the second enters, at TLN 1475, his treatment of both citizens and Coriolanus changes anomalously. The citizens are reduced to numbers, where previously on this page they had been `I. Cit.', `2. Cit.', etc.; although B is under no apparent pressure to stretch his copy here, Coriolanus
Even more unShakespearean than the copy's full- or long-form SHs that I am positing, but cannot prove, are the two instances of the SH Omnes demonstrably there (1, noted above, set by Compositor A at 1.9.67/823 on his first page, 1 by B at 4.6.138/3065). As a SH, Omnes is extremely rare in F: its only other occurrences are in Antony and Cleopatra (6: 2 set by Compositor E, 4 by B).[51] Whether Omnes appeared consistently in the manuscript and was almost completely purged in the printing house, as is possible, we cannot tell; the usual SH in substantive Shakespearean texts (and Hand D's practice in More), however, is All. Coriolanus has an extraordinarily high number of `crowd' speeches: 30 All SHs, not counting the lightly differentiated All Lords, All Consp., All Ple., All People. It would not be surprising that with so many to set, each compositor should have let one slip through on a page with no other All SHs to alert him.[52] An alternative explanation would be that a printing house editor went over the copy first, marking it to bring it into conformity with the general style decided on for F (which seems to have allowed Omnes to stand in exit directions but not as a SH), and missed these two instances, which both compositors then dutifully reproduced. In either case, Omnes is likely to have been the copy's form, and this suggests scribal sophistication rather than Shakespearean autograph.
The latter explanation might seem better to fit the oddity produced by Compositor B in the exit direction at 3.3.135/2424: Exeunt Coriolanus, Cominius, with Cumalijs. This (misread) Latin sophistication, too, seems to have been against Jaggard's house style: the only other F instance is the Cumalijs in Hamlet in the entry direction for 2.2, also set by Compositor B. (What was a Cum Alijs in Q2 Hamlet at 1.2.0.3, in F has become Lords Attendant.) It looks as though the Coriolanus manuscript copy had been marked,
The last feature of Coriolanus to be considered is not certain evidence of scribal origin, but it seems appropriate to discuss it in this section: the fact that Coriolanus is divided into acts (although not, after Actus Primus. Scoena Prima., into scenes). For public theatre plays written before about 1607 this feature, along with the Finis that follows the printed text, is usually taken to indicate the sophistication of a scribe or, possibly, later annotation for stage or publication.[55] Private theatre plays were regularly marked with act division, since noting the intervals in which music or dancing took place was a significant feature of their playbooks; later public theatre plays also show this mark of sophistication. If composed in 1608, Coriolanus falls into a transitional stage in the practice of dividing public theatre plays into acts: before 1607, in plays for the adult companies only Jonson's are so divided; by about 1616 the practice is universal.[56] Gary Taylor dismisses as unlikely the explanation that a sudden change in fashion led London publishers to impose their own act division when presented with undivided theatrical copy; rather, he argues for a change in theatrical practice — from continuous playing to
Although the King's Men did not start playing at Blackfriars until late 1609 or early 1610, Coriolanus may be the first of Shakespeare's plays composed with it in mind as a potential venue, an indoor theatre where act intervals were a common practice. Unlike the scenic construction usual in earlier Shakespeare plays, even as recently as Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus seems structured in a five-act movement: exposition and Coriolanus' military success, ending with Shakespeare's addition to Plutarch, a scene in the Volscian camp in which Aufidius announces his envy and intention to defeat Coriolanus by `wrath or craft'; Coriolanus' triumphal return to Rome, nomination to the consulship, and the plebeians' initial confirmation, ending with the tribunes convincing the citizens to rescind their vote; Act 3's descent into near civil war and, on the tribunes' urging, Coriolanus' banishment; in Act 4, Coriolanus' defection to the Volscians, Rome's reception of the news that both Aufidius and Coriolanus are joined against it, concluding with Aufidius' analysis of Coriolanus' character and vow to destroy his present co-general; finally, the series of pleas for mercy by friends and family that culminates in Coriolanus' confrontation with his mother and decision to spare Rome, followed by Aufidius' long-predicted revenge, the murder of Coriolanus.[58] Indeed, two of what I suspect to be scenes added or at least expanded in the process of revision (the final scene of Act 1 and, especially, the final scene of Act 4) accentuate the formal breaks by returning to Aufidius; they strengthen the contrast between him and Coriolanus and focus our attention on questions of character rather than physical prowess. These unPlutarchan scenes also counterpoise the protagonist's apparent progression throughout each of these acts toward acknowledged superiority and public acclaim, first in Rome and then among the Volscians. Acts 2 and 3 are virtually continuous in action but so structured that Act 3 replays in a more desperate key Act 2's movement: apparent civic success cut short not only by Coriolanus' own behaviour but by the tribunes' stratagems. Whether the actual notations were first entered in the hand of the author, scribe, or playhouse annotator, Shakespeare composed Coriolanus so as to be playable with intervals that reinforced its structure.
Paul Werstine has argued against the hope fostered by R. B. McKerrow
II
Since indefinite SHs or variable SHs for the same character, combined with the misassignment or misplacement of other SHs, have been taken as one sign that a play text has not yet been made fully ready for performance, we should examine Coriolanus to see how many difficulties they would actually have presented and at what point in the transmission these irregularities are likely to have entered the F text. Although SHs vary, they would not in general have baffled the book-keeper. Those that reflect one or the other of Titus Lartius' names, or variant abbreviations for Coriolanus, Menenius, and Aufidius, present no problem. Most indefinite SHs, such as Both (four in 2.1; one in 2.3; two in 4.5), are clear from context (the two tribunes in 2.1; the two citizens on stage at 2.3.111/1502; First and Second Servingman in 4.5); the Exeunt both at 4.6.148/3076 obviously refers to Menenius and Cominius and may have even specified them in the manuscript, since Compositor B was clearly pressed for space here and could not afford a two-line SD. A couple would need to be decided in rehearsal or, more probably, in making up the `plot' and the individual actor's parts: which two of the three women on stage should speak the words assigned to `2 Ladies', at 2.1.107/1004, and does Tri. at 4.6.120/3042 mean Both Tri. (which appears at 4.6.26/2924) or just one, where either one will do? A both that has proved troublesome to some editors appears in the SD Draw both the Conspirators, and kils Martius, who | falles, Auffidius stands on him (5.6.130/3804), since the entry direction had been for 3 or 4 Conspirators of Auffidius Faction. Brockbank suggests two
Such vagueness about minor characters seems characteristic of Shakespeare's habits during composition. In Hand D's three pages of Sir Thomas More, four speeches are assigned to other (which shrinks to oth and o); the revising playhouse scribe known as Hand C deleted all four instances and substituted characters' names. In Coriolanus such authorial indifference may lie behind the mixture of numbered and unnumbered senatorial speakers in 1.1 (where the first two are `I. Sen.' but two more are unnumbered), 2.2 (the first is `I. Sen.', the other four unspecified), and the jumbling of numbered and unnumbered senators in 3.1, or the wholly unnumbered soldiers in 1.10. Some of the undesignated senators might be the result of scribal or compositorial oversight, but they span both compositors' stints and most probably reflect Shakespeare's thinking in terms of effective crowd scenes (like other in More), where anonymous voices issue from different parts of the group.[63] The four undesignated soldier-speakers in 1.10 may have been intended for a similar effect, although in this case Shakespeare might have left them to be dealt with when the play was cast and the number of available soldiers known, since the SD has Aufidius entering with two or three Souldiors.[64] There are F plays whose underlying copy is thought to have been annotated in consultation with a promptbook that contain speeches for unspecified (except by function) minor characters, like the gardener's two servants and Queen's two ladies in Richard II.[65] Paul Werstine has noted similar
No one has deemed it necessary to normalise the various designations for the opposed classes in different scenes. Classical Rome and seventeenth-century England co-exist comfortably in SDs where the entering Citizens of 1.1 are both Citizens and Plebeians in 2.3, a rabble of Plebeians as well as the People in 3.1, and back to Citizens in 4.6, while their Volscian counterparts in 5.6 are the Commoners. The Patricians are also all the Gentry in 3.1, Nobles in 3.2, and some of them the yong Nobility of Rome in 4.1. The terms may slide between civilizations, but the class status and relationship remain the same and clear, hence there was no need to tamper with them. Immediate function within the scene being composed seems to have governed the terms that came to mind. So in 4.3 the entry direction and SHs are for a Roman and a Volce, despite the fact that each soldier is named in the dialogue. The important point is that one is a traitor to Rome, reporting Rome's troubles to the enemy he now joins, in a scene immediately preceding Coriolanus' arrival in Antium seeking Aufidius.
The frequent SH All, too, has been left largely untouched, although in only a few cases can it be taken literally as requiring everyone on stage to speak at once. Some disambiguation has been (rather intermittently) undertaken, by author or theatrical annotator, for we do find one All Ple. in 3.1 (where on this principle many more differentiated Alls are needed), and All Lords, All People, and All Consp. in 5.6. All is a common SH in promptbook texts, and it seems to have been conventional to leave what it might mean in individual cases to be worked out in the playhouse.[67] All might signify nearly everyone on stage speaking in unison, as when Coriolanus is celebrated by Omnes shouting his new full name in 2.1, or more restrictively, when only the plebeians chant `It shall be so' when the tribunes declare Coriolanus' banishment at 3.3.106/2407. At times the words it labels should be distributed as widely a possible, as in the breakdown of order in Corioles
Some SHs are either demonstrably wrong or missing, or have been thought to be so by some editors, but this fact is less of a bar than it might seem to the manuscript behind Coriolanus having been adequately marked to serve as playbook. Where SHs seem misassigned, some at least of the SHs cruxes facing a modern editor may have been imposed by the compositors and so not have stood in the manuscript copy at all.[69] One ambiguity that requires resolution occurs in the first breakdown of civil order, 3.1.185-87/1894-96, where after the SD They all bustle about Coriolanus the first two lines of what must be `crowd' noises appear with no SH (`Tribunes, Patricians, Citizens: what ho: | Sicinius, Brutus, Coriolanus, Citizens.'); the previous speaker was `2 Sen.', but the words are unlikely to be meant as his. The subsequent line, TLN 1896, reads `All. Peace, peace, peace, stay, hold, peace'. Thomas Clayton offers various explanations, including the possibility that it is not in fact an error because All is implicit in the SD. Or, the cause might be an authorial SH `entered, after composition, in the wrong place'; if the error was introduced later by compositor or scribe, it `could be due to simple omission of one of two intended uses of All'.[70] It is also possible that two similar-looking SHs were in the copy and that only one reached print, perhaps because scribe or compositor read them as identical and consciously or subconsciously rejected the repetition. In this hypothesis, TLN 1894-95 were prefixed All and 1896 assigned to the Aediles, of which there seem to be at least three on stage. If that were the case, the All at 1894 was omitted and Aed. misread as All.[71]
In another category of SH problems, some, though perhaps not all, of what modern editors take to be inaccurately labeled speeches may also have been introduced by scribe or compositor. Confusion between Cominius and Coriolanus in SHs may have been caused by misreading abbreviations (Cor and Com); this would be even more likely if the Shakespearean original contained (or moved quickly to) such severely shortened forms as Co and Co.[72] The greeting of Valeria after the triumphal return to Rome in 2.1 (TLN 1087) is by F assigned Com.; almost all modern editions adopt Theobald's reassignment to Coriolanus on the grounds that the line is clearly his. It is at this point in the text that the SHs for the title character switch, and as Brockbank notes, `it is likely that the transition from Mar. to Cor. made the slip or misreading Com. easier'.[73] If I am right about the F manuscript being scribal, and by a scribe who preferred full- or amply-abbreviated SHs (probably to make them line up evenly on the page), then this misreading was the scribe's; his own SH was likely to have been Coriol., which does appear in F ten times. If he was not consistent with his SH choices, however, and if his r and m were more easily confused than those in Hand D of More (and in most secretary hands they are confusables), then the misreading could be compositorial. The same misreading of a Cor. SH as Com. is probably responsible for what is in F a rebuke of the tribune Brutus by Cominius: `You are like to doe such businesse' (3.1.48/1734).[74]
A cluster of SH errors on bb2v suggests a damaged or for some other reason illegible margin in the lower first column, or `problems associated with the printing of part of quire bb, or both'.[75] Here F assigns Cominius as the speaker of `Stand fast, we have as many friends as enemies' (3.1.230-31/1954) and to Corio. `Come Sir, along with us' (3.1.236/1961). Most editors
Other SHs that have seemed problematic to later editors are less likely to have resulted from scribal or compositorial error. They might have been straightened out in the playhouse, with or without the author's help, and changed for the actors' parts. They might also have been played as they appear in F. Not all editors have emended these SHs; to some, F Coriolanus seems correct — or as likely to be correct as not — as it stands. Emendation in these cases will affect our response, as any such reassignment must, but not in significant ways for the principal characters. One common, though not universal, reassignment in 1.1 certainly alters our sense of the `Company of Mutinous Citizens'. In F the two individualised speakers for the first 55 lines are `I. Cit.' and `2. Cit.'; thereafter the character who argues so articulately with Menenius is `2. Cit.'. Clearly, this distribution suggests not only that this `Company' includes a hot-head who thinks killing Coriolanus will solve their problems, but also the more reasonable Second Citizen who becomes their natural spokesman, a man who can see the complexity of both their situation and Coriolanus's (as can other commoners later, like the three groups of citizens in 2.3, or the soldiers laying cushions in 2.2). Since Capell most editors have reassigned all of F's `2. Cit.' speeches in response to Menenius' persuasions to `I. Cit.', on the grounds that they better fit the personality of `I. Cit.' established in the scene's first 55 lines.[79] If F is in error here, the error
Other arguable editorial SH reassignments are less significant in effect, but more defensible. In the Act 3 exchange in which Menenius tries to convince the tribunes to allow Coriolanus a second chance, Hanmer (on Warburton's suggestion) reassigned one speech from F's Menen. to the tribune Sicinius: `The service of the foote | Being once gangren'd, is not then respected | For what before it was' (3.1.304-06/2045-47). In 1950 H. Eardley-Wilmot defended Hanmer's reassignment on the grounds that the metaphor is out of character for Menenius and was in a moment of inattention assigned to him by Shakespeare or compositor, and recent editions of Coriolanus reflect the persuasiveness of the arguments for Sicinius as speaker.[82] It is only fair to note, however, that most editions from Rowe (1709) to Brooke (1924) retain F, although they usually alter the final punctuation to `?' or `—' in order to make it more plausible for Menenius.[83] This is a case in which the critical arguments for reassignment are strong, but in which the F text could be played as it stands without substantively changing the relationship between Menenius and the tribunes. Another such instance is the exclamation `O the Gods!', SH Corio. in F, in the scene of Coriolanus' farewell to his family and friends (4.1.37/2477). Keightley first reassigned these words to Virgilia, but here there has been less recent agreement than for the reassignment in 3.1; of the eight post- 1950 editions sampled by Clayton, three `read
III
Theatrical annotation was needed to convert the original manuscript for use by the King's Men, and some of it was probably added by Shakespeare himself. As an experienced man of the theatre he certainly knew the kind of specific directions needed for stage production, and on his second run through the manuscript, he might well have contributed at least some of the play's many sound cues: the numerous instances of Flourish; Musicke playes (4.5.0) and Sound still with the Shouts (5.4.57/3631); drum or alarum a farre off (1.4.15,19/503,509) and Alarum continues (1.4.47/546 and a similar SD at 1.5.3/572). Most of his `literary' SDs could have served adequately in a playbook and remain untouched. Both They fight, and all enter the City (1.4.62/568) and Beats him away (at 4.5.49/2703, to indicate that the Third Servingman is beaten off the stage by Coriolanus) could have been considered sufficent as exit cues.[86] Shakespeare's many indefinite entry directions, too, remain open; they range from the slightly permissive seven or eight Citizens in 2.3 or the 3 or 4 Conspirators of Auffidius Faction of 5.6, to the wholly unspecified numbers signaled by a Company of Mutinous Citizens in 1.1 through Captains and Soldiers (2.1), all the Gentry...and other Senators (3.1), to the Commoners (5.6). Study of the surviving manuscript playbooks indicates that this kind of indefiniteness was not something the book-keeper paid much attention to.[87] There was almost certainly an understood number
Apparently contradictory or insufficient SDs may be in part due to scribal error or compositorial oversight (in the latter case, even intentional omission, such as the situation in 1.4 and 1.8 discussed below), but some of what looks inadequate to modern eyes might not have seemed so to an early seventeenth-century book-keeper. For instance, in the elaborate entry direction for the senatorial confirmation of Coriolanus as consul in 2.2, the final words are Corio- | lanus stands (2.2.36.5/1242-43). Although he has not in the interval been directed to sit, 34 lines later we find Coriolanus rises, and offers to go away (2.2.66/1275). It is possible that a SD has been dropped by the compositor: since some of the intervening lines are verse set as prose, he may have been preoccupied with saving space and refused to give up a line (though he could have tucked it into the margin at 2.2.48/1255, where modern editors usually add it). But the direction to sit may never have been added to the playbook: simple stage action evident from dialogue — an embrace, a handclasp, the delivery of a letter or report — usually happens, in printed and
Single action-directions and exits were as a rule added in the right margin (and reproduced there by the compositors); other marginal additions (often on the left for the annotator's) were meant to be incorporated into entry or exit directions, and these could present the compositors with more of a problem. A theatrically specific Exeunt appears on the dialogue-line at 3.1.228/1948, just above the two-line SD In this Mutinie, the Tribunes, the Ædiles, and the | People are beat in; the intended position in the text for Exeunt was apparently not clear, and it was inaccurately set before instead of after the narrative version. In the descriptive entry direction at 1.9.0 a marginal Flourish seems to have lacked a clear indication for placement, and it was mistakenly set as the first word rather than after Alarum. A Retreat is sounded, where it should signal the victorious Romans' return to their camp after their enemies' retreat. Indeed, Alarum. A Retreat is sounded may have been meant as part of the missing exit direction for 1.8 (at the bottom of the second column on aa3v), omitted because Compositor B had run out of space on his page; or, if the sound cues were all marginal additions, their order might not have been clear, and Compositor B, or the printing- house editor who cast-off the copy, picked out Flourish to set as the catch- word.[90] The SD at 1.9.0 is at the top of Compositor A's first page, aa4, and he repeated the error. He seems to have soon found a kindred confusion in his portion of the manuscript: the first words of the entry direction for 1.10, A flourish. Cornets, should probably appear above, in the exit direction for 1.9, where the flourish would more appropriately accompany the departure of the victorious Romans than the subsequent entry of the wounded Aufidius and two or three Souldiors somewhere on the battlefield.[91] At 2.2.154/1377-78 it looks as though the
While it is quite likely that Shakespeare himself would be concerned with the sound cues that would help create an effective atmosphere for this most martial of plays, some SDs point to the likelihood that a practical stage-manager has also gone over the manuscript, clarifying and specifying.[92] Although some Flourish directions stand alone, the SD A flourish. Cornets at 1.10.0 mentioned above suggests two marginal annotations, perhaps in different hands, where the initial cue for A flourish has been made more specific by indicating the appropriate instruments to produce it, perhaps with the Blackfriars Theatre in mind as a venue.[93] The same may be true of the earlier
The single word Cornets at the head of the opening SD of Act 3 may well be another instance of a doubly specified marginal annotation (e.g. `Flourish' `Cornets' in the manuscript), here truncated by Compositor A's pressing need for space. There is no white space around the SDs on bb1v, and the rules setting off Actus Tertius are only 8 mm. apart instead of the usual 16 mm. The entry direction is lengthy, and in order to preserve the favoured inverted-pyramid form for multi-line SDs, Compositor A may have omitted what he judged the less significant word in the sound cue. Other indications of a practically-minded annotator appear in directions which give redundant information in order to insure that significant speakers are named on entry. Both in the dialogue and in SHs such as Both, Both Tri., and Tri., Shakespeare sometimes appears to think of the tribunes collectively, important as tribunes of the people and as Coriolanus' civic antagonists but not otherwise distinguishable. It is quite likely that in entry directions Shakespeare went no further than listing the two Tribunes and that the `doubling' produced by adding both individual names at 2.1.0, 4.2.0, 4.6.0, and 5.1.0 is the playhouse annotator's contribution.[94]
Annotation for performance was not as thorough as in a modern promptbook, but no entries are omitted. Twice Enter means `Come forward' (2.1.204/1122; 4.5.147/2808), but in the first instance Brutus and Sicinius have been directed to stand Aside earlier (2.1.96/992), and the second can be worked out from the dialogue.[95] Except for Titus Lartius in 1.4 and 3.1, omitted exits are clear from the context; they would have presented no problems to a professional
A few more serious problems remain, ambiguities that might have required consultation by the players with the author. As mentioned above in the discussion of SHs, in 3.1 it is unclear when Titus Lartius, a fairly major character in the first act of the play, exits. Perhaps the theatrical annotator either did not catch the oversight or considered that Titus' accompanying the exiting Coriolanus and Cominius would be assumed; perhaps Titus' exit here (and in 1.4) were evident in this actor's own part but did not get recorded in the playbook of the whole text. Alternatively, Titus' name might have been accidentally omitted by the scribe. The page, bb2v, is crowded and contains both mislineation to save space and the cramming of short speeches by two separate characters onto one line, but Compositor A has had to allow two lines for the marginal exit direction for Coriolanus and Cominius (both spelled out in full), and he could have squeezed in Titus had he noticed it in his copy.
Another muddle over exits appears on page cc3, between two scenes set in the streets of Rome which since Dyce have been differentiated as 5.4 and 5.5; before his subdivision, they were considered one continuous scene. There is only one Exeunt here, at 5.4.62/3638; the subsequent entry direction is for two Senators, with Ladies, passing over | the Stage, with other Lords (5.5.0.1-2). Since it is clear that seven lines later a new scene must begin, when Aufidius and his attendants enter and the action shifts to Antium/Corioles (5.6), an exit direction is needed for the Roman procession. Although Dyce's division into two separate scenes (5.4 and 5.5) has been generally accepted, it
Two more significant confusions about exits, entrances, and general stage movement occur in 1.4 (on aa3) and 1.8 (aa3v).[97] Page aa3 is replete with indications that Compositor B, on only his second page of work on the play, was having trouble with his copy. Some of the problems may have been created by Shakespeare, the scribe, or the annotator; others were mechanical, imposed by having too much copy allotted for this page. White space around SDs in the first column begins to disappear and Titus' entry direction is crammed into the right margin; in the second column the one bit of white space (after 1.4.61/563) is misplaced in that it comes within a scene (perhaps mistaken for a new scene, since it is above an entry direction for Martius), while there is none before 1.5 or 1.6, each clearly a new scene. Turnovers and mislineation to gain space indicate that in the second column Compositor B was desperate to crowd in his allotted amount of copy. The ambiguities we are concerned with first, however, appear in the first column and may not be Compositor B's fault. Descriptive, `literary' SDs in Coriolanus, while apparently sometimes annotated, have not here been sufficiently clarified for a twentieth-century reading audience, although they are unlikely to have proved insuperably challenging to Shakespeare's own company. At 1.4.29/523-24, a two-line SD demands
Space-saving imperatives may have influenced SDs in other ways that can affect our view of the degree to which the manuscript copy for Coriolanus was in its final form. The most obvious instances occur in two short scenes,
In his handling of 1.8, it would seem that Compositor B took up the challenge of bending his copy to his own immediate practical needs. Hard-pressed for space at the very end of the second column of his page, he combines two short verse lines (1.8.6-7/731) and then amalgamates the medial action direction and the concluding exit direction, not bothering to excise the now old-fashioned here (though to have done so would have saved space): Heere they fight, and certaine Volces come in ayde | of Auffi.Martius fights til they be driven in breathles. The pressure under which B operated is suggested by the uncharacteristic name abbreviation, lack of spacing between names, and the uncharacteristic spelling breathles (instead of breathlesse). If there was an Exeunt in his copy, Compositor B had room for it on the same line as the last words of dialogue, but there may well not have been such an imperative, if we assume that driven in breathles was deemed sufficient by both Shakespeare
In smaller matters, too, the effects of incorrectly cast-off copy have forced abandonment of typographical convention, and compositorial compensation here supports the case for more important omissions or misplacements. Exeunt with a lower-case e at 1.5.3/572 (on aa3) and 4.7.57/3148 (on cc1) both manage to cram in the necessary directorial information at the cost of relinquishing the conventional capital, which takes up more space. Folio plays set from printed quarto copy suggest that Jaggard's house style preferred the full form of proper names in SDs, yet on crowded pages SDs with abbreviated names appear, not just at 1.8.13/741 but at 2.3.150/1547 (bb1) and 3.1.222/1939 (bb2v). At 4.6.148/3076 (bb6v), Exeunt both may be a Shakespearean direction left unexpanded by the annotator, or it may be Compositor B's solution to the impossibility, on a page with no room for a separate-line exit direction, of setting Exeunt Cominius and Menenius. Elsewhere exit and entry directions on the same line at TLN 1475 (aa6v), or entry directions tucked into the same line as dialogue (such as Enter Titus Latius, on aa3, mentioned above; Enter Cominius at TLN 2195 on bb3v; Enter second Servant at TLN 2665 on bb5), as well as short speeches by different speakers set on the same line, all bear witness to economising on pages with little or no white space and showing other signs of crowding.[103]
While these space-saving stratagems do not affect more than F's attempts at standardised presentation of the copy text, there are other instances where the need for economy enforced by inaccurate casting-off may have affected the transmission more substantively. At 2.3.60/1451 (aa6v) Menenius exits, but a number of editors have felt that Coriolanus' next one and one- half lines are still addressed to Menenius and have moved the exit down accordingly. While I do not think the F SD is certainly misplaced, the case can be made that the page is crowded, space-saving measures have been taken elsewhere in the second column, and there was no room to set Exit Menenius at 2.3.61/1454, where these editors think it belongs; it was possible, however, to add a simple Exit at the end of Menenius' final speech at 2.3.60/1451. At 1.5.3/572 (on aa3) the space-saving exeunt for the looting Roman soldiers, which even with its lower-case e fills the space remaining in the third soldier's last line, may be a compositorial compression of a longer SD (such as Souldiers steele away, similar to the SD at 1.1.251/279 for the citizens). The subsequent
More problematic than the moved direction for a battle-exit in 1.8, though of significant production impact, is the possibility that inaccurately cast-off copy for cc2v may have forced Compositor B to push up one of Shakespeare's most theatrically powerful advisory directions. At the point of greatest tension in Act 5, the conclusion of Volumnia's peroration on behalf of Rome at 5.3.183/3539, F calls for a brief tableau: Holds her by the hand silent. E. A. J. Honigmann has argued for the SD's correct placement one line below its F occurrence (that is, after `O Mother, Mother!'). He urges that in pragmatic theatrical terms it would make easier the actor's `difficult task of conveying an overwhelming emotion without the help of words' if he could begin to express his feelings and then break off. He further points
Yet this line of reasoning is not wholly persuasive, for it assumes a Compositor B concerned with very immediate problems but unable to look even one line ahead to the true solution: having managed to provide a spare line for the SD, Coriolanus' completion of Volumnia's half-line could have been set immediately after TLN 3538 and the direction set beneath it. Elsewhere in Coriolanus Compositor B was willing to interrupt a speech for a necessary cue that would not fit into the margin, if he could spare the extra line: in 1.4 (in the first column on aa3) the First Senator's speech to the Romans is disrupted by the Alarum farre off to which he refers.[110] Alternatively, if B
Some errors of mistaken content rather than placement may also be compositorial. We have already noted Compositor B's misunderstanding on bb4 of the scribe's or book-keeper's perhaps poorly-spaced Latin tag as a proper name and his appending it to Exeunt Coriolanus, Cominius, with Cumalijs. Another such misreading, appearing in the dialogue at 1.3.43/405, might be compositorial: what most modern editors print as `At Grecian sword contemning. Tell Valeria' is in F `At Grecian sword. Contenning, tell Valeria'. More likely, the misunderstanding of a partially illegible word and consequent re-punctuation — or, if Hand D is any indication, the lack of a full stop after `contemning', probable lack of all the minims for the word itself, and likelihood of a capital C — was the scribe's, merely reproduced by Compositor B. Trying to make sense of it, either could have misplaced the italic from Grecian to Contenning. Even had the error stood in the manuscript playbook, however, the result is an odd name for the Waiting Gentlewoman, but not unintelligible dialogue.
IV
There are no major bars to the manuscript copy for F Coriolanus having served as playbook for the King's Men. While there are a few inaccurate SDs, in content or slight misplacement, a number of absent exit directions, and many fewer SDs describing stage business than the dialogue suggests should take place, these features are all common in the surviving manuscript promptbooks and also occur in printed quartos thought to have been set from prompt copy or to have been annotated from it. Indeed, some were probably created by later misreading of the intended placement for marginal additions; others, including the missing sound cue on aa3 and the repositioned exit direction
The original manuscript was annotated with performance in mind, almost certainly twice and possibly three times: first by the author as he went over his work adding SHs, sharpening SDs, and perhaps adding minor revisions; again by the book-keeper; and, if the first performance was at the Globe, again for a later Blackfriars performance. (It may also have received further attention in the printing house to bring it into conformity with the F format.) The scribe had his own problems with, and consequent misreadings of, that manuscript, though on the whole he seems faithfully to have reproduced what he thought he saw before him, including at least one possibly Shakespearean spelling in the unfamiliar name Scicinius and perhaps others. He did sophisticate in lesser matters of spelling, punctuation, the Latinisation to Omnes in at least some SHs for All and, possibly, in Cum alijs (though this may be the book-keeper's contribution). Further alterations in spelling and punctuation, as well as further misreadings, would have been contributed by Compositors A and B. Much of the serious mispunctuation in F Coriolanus, which can sometimes render a passage nearly unintelligible, was probably introduced by the scribe, trying to make sense of a very lightly pointed Shakespearean original while imposing his own more modern and sophisticated system of punctuation. That the compositors added their own is likely; they certainly increased the degree of mislineation. This scenario seems to me the most likely one, although the point at which the scribe entered the chain of transmission of F Coriolanus is beyond any certain determination. If early, he prepared the fair copy subsequently annotated by the book-keeper. SH errors, much of the mispunctuation, and many misreadings would have entered the text at this stage, while misplacement of ambiguously cued marginal annotation would be the later contribution of Compositors A and B. If later, then most of the SD errors were the scribe's (though he may have introduced some new ambiguities himself); the compositors would inevitably have added erroneous readings of their own, but probably tampered with his SD placement only when they could not accommodate it to their page. Since some of the irregularities that would
Late transcription would mean that the playbook used for performance was substantially freer of error than the F text. That the author's papers were transcribed twice, first in 1608 to be given to the book-keeper to annotate and then later in preparation for F, is possible but not, to me, probable. To the reasons given above, we might add the unlikelihood of Shakespearean idiosyncracies, like spellings, surviving yet another copyist. It would make sense, then, that although the King's Men had performed Coriolanus from an annotated Shakespearean fair copy, they would not want to give up their one, perhaps by now quite untidy, exemplar to the printers. A professional, sophisticated- looking transcript would also have been desirable for Coriolanus' intended prominence as first play in the Tragedies section of the First Folio.
Much of the research for this essay was completed while on a Folger-NEH fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., while the author was working on an edition of Coriolanus for the New Cambridge Shakespeare.
The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 1437a. In 1985, in The Craft of Printing and the Publication of Shakespeare's Works (Washington D.C.: Folger, 1985), George Walton Williams still found the scholarly consensus to be Shakespeare's own `fair copy' of his `foul' or working papers (p. 84), and in `Today We Have Parting of Names: A Preliminary Inquiry into Some Speech-(Be)Headings in Coriolanus', Thomas Clayton agrees about Shakespearean holograph, but thinks the manuscript might have been used as a promptbook (MS copy, courtesy of the author, p. 24; forthcoming in Shakespeare's Speech-Headings and the Bibliographer, the Editor, and the Critic, ed. George Walton Williams, AMS Studies in the Renaissance 25 [New York: AMS Press]).
Albert Gilman, `Textual and Critical Problems in Shakespeare's Coriolanus', 1954 Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, p. 147.
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 7.
In William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), gen. eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Coriolanus appears in the summary chart of copy texts on p. 147. John Jowett's later discussion of the nature of the copy is more certain of a promptbook original, although the F compositors' copy may have come to them at one remove: `The inaccuracies in speech-prefixes might alternatively indicate that the copy for F was not the prompt-book itself but a transcript of it — in which case the prompt-book may or may not have been based on authorial fair copy' (p. 594).
R. B. Parker, ed., Oxford Shakespeare Coriolanus (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), p. 143. Parker thinks that the author's fair copy probably became the company's playbook and that the F copytext manuscript was probably the `penultimate draft in which he was still to some extent "thinking through" the play' (p. 147).
Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 2: 506. In `Line Division in Shakespeare's Dramatic Verse: An Editorial Problem', Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 8 (1984), Paul Werstine emends Hinman by noting that since four formes of Coriolanus were set before the first of Titus was composed, `it was not strictly necessary that copy for the whole of Cor. be cast off until after the last of these formes (2v:5) was in type. Perhaps then three pages of Cor. were not set from cast-off copy (aa4, 4v, 5v)' (p. 117 n. 30).
Hinman, Printing and Proofreading of the First Folio, 2: 163-64. Hinman's temporal calculation is based on the fact that `between cc3:4v and the postulated cancels in groups 7 and 8 come two full quires of the regular series and five intercalary formes'.
The suggestion, first made by Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947), 2: 294, was developed by John Dover Wilson in his New Shakespeare edition of Coriolanus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960): the elaborate SDs for this play, as for The Tempest, were `perhaps necessitated ... by the author's absence in Stratford at the time the play was being rehearsed' (p. 131); see also Martin R. Holmes, Shakespeare and Burbage (Chichester, Sussex: Phillmore & Co., 1978), p. 196.
In the New Variorum Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra (MLA, 1990), Marvin Spevack questions a number of Wilson's list of characteristic Shakespearean spellings (New Shakespeare Coriolanus, pp. 133-34), but he offers support for the unusual use of sc for initial s, unmentioned by Wilson, in Scicinius for Sicinius (p. 374). Brockbank, in his Arden edition of Coriolanus (pp. 3-4), does discuss this example, and he adds several others `which may indicate Shakespearean idiosyncrasies'—such as shoot for shout, strooke for struck, god for good, too for to, especially in the form too't; see also Parker's Oxford Shakespeare edition, pp. 138-39.
On the pages of Addition II of More, see Shakespeare's Hand in `The Play of Sir Thomas More', ed. A. W. Pollard and J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1923); for the other instances of sc for s, see the Oxford Textual Companion, p. 593, and Spevack, New Variorum Antony and Cleopatra, p. 374.
Alice Walker's conclusion in `The Folio Text of 1 Henry IV', SB 6 (1954) that Compositor B exhibited `habitual carelessness' and `was unusually prone to take liberties with his copy' (p. 55) has, on a more extensive survey of B's Folio work, been corrected by Paul Werstine in `Compositor B of the Shakespeare First Folio', Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 2 (1978), 241-63, and `Line Division', cited in n. 6.
In his editior's preface to the most recent book of essays on the More manuscript, Shakespeare and 'Sir Thomas More': Essays on the play and its Shakespearean interest (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), T. H. Howard-Hill notes that his contributors at the very least agree that the case for Shakespeare as author of Addition II is as strong as any so far made to deny it or identify another playwright as Hand D (p. 2). Howard-Hill himself concludes that together the essays tip 'the balance further in favour of Shakespeare as the author and hand' of Addition II (p. 8).
In 'Spelling and the Bibliographer', The Library, fifth ser. 18 (1963), T. H. Hill concludes that it 'has not yet been settled whether a preference for one form of spelling predisposes an author or copyist towards another morphologically similar spelling' (p. 11). His own study of Ralph Crane shows that Crane, at least, was not so predisposed.
The probabiliity that an idiosyncratic spelling would be perpetuated through the labours of two regularising copyists is lower than for one, of course (Q Justice Scilens does not survive in F 2 Henry IV); but the fact that Scicinius is an uncommon Roman name, rather than a common English noun for which a copyist often had his own preferred spelling, might increase its chances of being carefully reproduced by both scribe and Compositor A. It should be noted, however, that A. C. Partridge cautions against depending on the initial sc as being spectacularly rare; in Orthography in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1964), he cites other contemporary examples (p. 62), and I have found additional ones, including settings in John Marston's Sophonisba (Q 1606) of Scyphax for Syphax, scilent for silent, and scilence for silence (twice).
Shoot appears on both Wilson's and Brockbank's lists (see n. 9); arrant is suggested by David Bevington in his New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), p. 261.
Act, scene, and line numbers are cited from The Riverside Shakespeare (see n. 1) and, following the slash, TLN (Through-Line-Numbers) keyed to Charlton Hinman's Norton Facsimile of The First Folio of Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968). These will sometimes appear not to match, where the modern edition has relineated the F line(s). Because they are often pertinent to my argument, the F spelling (with only u/ v and long s normalised) and line breaks have been retained. F's terminal periods for SDs and unabbreviated SHs have been omitted as too distracting to appear repeatedly in mid-sentence. When medial or terminal punctuation, or its absence, is significant, it will be noted in the discussion.
In The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, transl. Thomas North (London, 1595): `So the Coriolans ... made a salye out upon them, in the which at the first the Coriolans had the better, and drave the Romaines backe againe into the trenches of their campe' (p. 238); later, Coriolanus `disguised himselfe in such array and attire, as he thought no man could ever have knowen him for the person he was, seeing him in that apparell he had upon his backe ... his face all muffled over' (p. 247).
See the Oxford Textual Companion introduction to All is True, p. 618, for a more detailed discussion of evidence for Shakespeare's apparent preference for has, and for the fact that the only other plays in which Compositor B, at least haphazardly following his copy, set a high proportion of ha's are Macbeth and F Hamlet, both generally agreed to have been set from scribal copy; for do's and does, see the Textual Companion introduction to F Lear, pp. 530-31. Less certain as indication of a scribal intermediary is Coriolanus' pattern of 40 Oh against 12 O, although O `predominates over Oh in nearly all the good quartos of Shakespeare's plays', according to MacD. P. Jackson, Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare (Salzburg, 1979), p. 215; see also Gary Taylor and John Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606-1623 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Appendix II.
This and the preceding examples and figures are taken from the Oxford Textual Companion, p. 593, although I have corrected the number of a'th from the Textual Companion's inaccurate 29; the figures given include variant spellings that lack the final mark of elision, a'th and o'th. (The fact that in both All's Well and Coriolanus most a'th' were set by Compositor B suggests that he was more tolerant of this form, less prone to regularise to o'th', than Compositor A, who in Coriolanus set only 1 a'th' to 6 o'th'). On a'th' and o'th', John Jowett, the Oxford editor of Coriolanus, finds that `to some extent' these two forms are found in `clusters', and that `in particular the copy for 4.5.21-4.6.131/2285-2631 might have been in a second hand' (p. 593). Inspection of the passage in question, however, does not seem to substantiate this last point.
For instance, o'th' is common in both Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra; Coriolanus' 27 instances of a'th', however, distinguish it from Ant., which has only 1. In `The Use of Linguistic Criteria in Determining the Copy and Date for Shakespeare's Plays', Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma Greenfield (Eugene: Univ. of Oregon Books, 1966), Frederick O. Waller finds that from about Twelfth Night on, there is a clear pattern of Shakespeare's `moving toward more informal, colloquial usages', with an increasing use of has and does, alongside the early forms hath and doth, and of the contracted forms of the (p. 7). However, the figures for Coriolanus, and the number with added apostrophes, are still anomalously high.
Brockbank suggests as a Shakespearean preference too for to, though he connects it with the form too't (see n. 9).
In his note to Hamlet 1.5.35 (Textual Companion, p. 404), Gary Taylor observes that the `Shakespeare canon contains 1,526 occurrences of tis to only 35 it's'. Only 3 it's appear in good quartos; most occur in plays generally agreed to have been set from scribal copy, and `another 7 occur in Folio texts of doubtful copy', Coriolanus (4) and Antony and Cleopatra (3). I think Coriolanus was set from a scribal transcript, and this is probably the case for Ant. as well.
It is of course possible that both instances result from the wrong type being in the compositor's `I' box, or from Compositor B's mistake as he repeated the word to himself to hold it in mind while he set his composing stick. In his Oxford Shakespeare edition of Coriolanus, Parker disagrees: he finds that Hand D's capital I `resembled an A or arabic 4' and was responsible for these errors (p. 139). Inspection of the plates in Sir Edward Maunde Thomspon's Shakespeare's Handwriting and Pollard and Wilson's Shakespeare's Hand in `The Play of Sir Thomas More' indicates that Hand D's I could be mistaken for 4 but not for A.
Partridge, Orthography, p. 58. Regardless of the identity of Hand D, Shakespeare's own punctuation was likely to have been light. In 'The Noisy Comma', Antony Hammond notes that most dramatic manuscripts 'before about 1620 are very sparsely punctuated, and what punctuation there is ... is based upon conventions different from those which the printers were in the process of establishing' (Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, ed. Randall McLeod [New York: AMS Press, 1994], p. 214).
Absence of final punctuation and Shakespeare's tendency to write initial c as a capital apparently created the new sentence at 4.1.5/2441 (bb4v), although the break violates the original sentence's sense: `You were us'd | To say, Extreamities was the trier of spirits, | That common chances. Common men could bear,...'. It perhaps accounts for the random capitalisation in mid-sentence elsewhere of verbal forms beginning with c. Another whole passage of mispointed verse comes at 3.3.67-71/2348-52 (bb4).
Jaggard's house style for F was to use an apostrophe to indicate an unvoiced ending to the past participle in verse, e.g. `answer'd'; instances of elision indicated by spelling alone in Hand D are `lyvd' (= lived) and `sylenct'. Initial elision in the More pages can be seen in `thippe' (= th'hip) and `thoffendor'.
Partridge, Orthography, pp. 102-03. For evidence from Jaggard's 1599 printing of Shakespeare's sonnet 144 in the quarto of The Passionate Pilgrim, see pp. 133-34.
In `Author, Compositor, and Meter: Copy-Spellings in Titus Andronicus', Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 53 (1959), Hereward T. Price thinks it clear that Shakespeare `closely adapted spelling to meter, showing elision, where that was necessary, or printing the full form, just as the meter demanded' (p. 160). In his study of Spenser, Massinger, and Harrington, he finds that in most cases, when setting verse, the compositor would follow his copy (p. 185). If this is true, then the scribe would be the one to have expanded most of the elisions. Yet we cannot be certain that Shakespeare was consistent, at least for medial elision, or that there were as many instances as I have supposed. It is also possible that compositors had certain preferences of their own or for some words set colloquial pronunciation, since marv'llous (2682) occurs in a short line of prose.
In `Folio Compositors and Folio Copy: King Lear and Its Context', Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 79 (1985), Gary Taylor finds that Compositor B would add anomalous apostrophes where the sense does not require them, so some beyond those imposed by the scribe might have crept in in the printing house (pp. 35, 49). An instance in Coriolanus appears at 4.1.37/2476: start's.
For tables showing the proportion of exclamation marks taken from printed copy to those added by Compositor B, see Taylor, `Folio Compositors and Folio Copy', p. 66.
Werstine, `Line Division in Shakespeare's Dramatic Verse', p. 76. As will be apparent, my discussion of the lineation problems in Coriolanus is deeply indebted to this essay. On the mislineation in Hand D, see also the Oxford Textual Companion, p. 637.
Werstine, `Line Division', p. 97. Werstine's general assertions about Compositors A and B are based on his study of those F plays set from earlier printed copy and of the F plays set by these two compositors. See also Brockbank's discussion in his Arden ed., pp. 12-16.
Ibid., p. 96. Werstine notes that only 12 of A's 15 combined verses and 19 of B's 29 occur on pages where they were `demonstrably short of space' (p. 95), and also that if the compositors' copy contained combined verses,`we should expect to find repeatedly in the printed text not only two lines of verse set on a single line of type, but also two lines of verse set as two lines of prose, as we do in both Antony and Coriolanus' (p. 121 n.40).
Ibid., p. 97. Of Compositor B, Werstine notes that the example of Antony `indicates that he reproduced irregularities [in line division] in his copy when he found them' (p. 101).
The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, p. 238. The 1595 edition corresponds in spelling with Shakespeare's text in conduites (compare Coriolanus, 2.3.242/1645), as well as in providing both the family names for Titus. For futher arguments on this edition as Shakespeare's source, see Brockbank's Arden edition, pp. 27-29.
The play's variant spellings of Corioles — Carioles (5 instances), Coriolus (1), Corialus (2) — may derive from misreadings by scribe or compositor ( Carioles appears in Compositor A's work as well as B's, although the latter two variants are set only by B); but all, or some, may originate in a Shakespearean casualness in reproducing North's Plutarch's Corioles. If the scribe and/or Compositor A were as careful here as with reproducing Scicinius, then at least Carioles as well as Corioles stood in the original manuscript text, or were misread as standing there.
In The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), E. A. J. Honigmann offers a theory of `irregular composition' that would explain the Lartius/Latius variations differently. In his view, Shakespeare did not begin composition with 1.1 but rather wrote 2.1.161ff., 3.1, and perhaps parts of 1.1 `before spotting the misprint in his Plutarch'; the argument is clinched for Honigmann by Shakespeare's highly unusual repetition of an identifying `label' — repetition but `not in its original form' — for Cominius in the SD at 2.1.161/1060 (Cominius the Generall) and at 2.2.36/1241 (Cominius the Consul), the latter a scene not, in Honigmann's view, written consecutively after 2.1 (p. 147). I do not find this argument convincing, in part because, as I have indicated, there are other possible explanations for the Lartius/ Latius variations, and in part because the Cominius labels can be seen as consistent with continuous composition, since they designate distinct functions for this character in the two scenes: returning triumphant military general who then, in 2.2, reverts to his peacetime office of consul. The labels may also be meant to indicate costume changes.
Capell first added with others to the exit direction for Coriolanus and Cominius at 3.1.252/1980. The only Coriolanus supporters who have speaking parts after this exit are Menenius, one or two patricians (two Patri. SHs), and one or two senators (I Sen., Sena.). In his Oxford Shakespeare edition, however, Parker has Titus exit earlier, at 3.1.20/1698.
Evidence from Hand D's scene in Sir Thomas More is perhaps most easily studied in Thomas Clayton's transcription in The `Shakespearean' Addition in `The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore': Some Aids to Scholarly and Critical Shakespearean Studies, Center for Shakespeare Studies Monograph No. 1 (Dubuque: Wm. C. Brown, 1969); see also the Oxford Textual Companion, pp. 461-67. In `Today We Have Parting of Names', Clayton suggests that the kind of `decremental abbreviations' found in the More manuscript may lie behind some SH mistakes in Coriolanus (p. 13).
What we cannot tell is whether the Latius spelling represents Shakespeare's original or a later misreading of a hastily written Lartius whose minim strokes fell short of the full complement for r and were glossed over for an immediate t.
Indeed, the first instance on aa4 is Titus Lartius, even though only this character's first name had been given in the immediately preceding SD, Enter Titus with his Power, from the Pursuit. Either Compositor A reproduced an unusually full copy form, or he dropped Lartius from the SD to make it centre more attractively on the page and then added it to the SH, since he was only setting a part line there and had plenty of room for it. It should be noted that he set one Mar. SH on this page, but he was forced into this expedient because the verse line at 1.9.41/797 is a long one.
Compositor A's preferred spellings, established by comparing his relevant F work with its printed quarto copy, are part of the evidence detailed by Gary Taylor in `The Shrinking Compositor A of the Shakespeare First Folio', SB 34 (1981), 96-117.
Other marks of non-authorial copy suggested by Compositor A's first page are 1 ha's, 1 do's, 2 Oh, and perhaps the round brackets. Compositor A generally resists the do's spelling, and this is his only instance in Coriolanus; elsewhere he sets 2 does and 3 doth.
Clayton, `Today We Have Parting of Names', pp. 12-14, 24. The sequence in question reads: Coriol., Coriol., Corio., Com. (mis-set for Cor.?), Cor., Cor., Cor.
If we consider the whole page, 4 brackets, 6 Oh, 3 ha's; if we consider only the second column, where the Coriol.-Cor. series appears, 2 pair of brackets, 4 Oh.
There are also two occurrences in Q1 Pericles (1609), but this is a corrupt text and not thought to have been set from Shakespearean autograph.
Facing a similar anomaly with the 6 Omnes (though only 8 All, all set by B) in Ant., Marvin Spevack sees the probable implication to be that `the first instance of Omnes,...set by Compositor E, was the copy's form. The other instances, set by B, are typical of his vacillation between what may be copy and the more economical All' (New Variorum Antony and Cleopatra, p. 368).
Possibly with (or wth) o, where the o had been smudged out of existence. In `A Prompt Copy of A Looking Glass for London and England', MP 30 (1932-33), Charles Reed Baskervill notes inconsistencies in the book- keeper's correction of SHs in this black-letter quarto that has been marked up for a prompt: in some cases the printed copy's mistake is heavily scored through, in others only lightly, and in 5 instances the `incorrect printed SH has been allowed to stand along with the MS entry', written to its left (p. 38). The same casualness might affect annotated SDs.
In his Arden edition of Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1982), Harold Jenkins includes among what he takes to be the book-keeper's annotations to Q2's foul-paper copy the duplicate sound cues and Cum Alijs (p. 42); in a footnote he suggests that this book- keeper was the same man who prepared the fair copy behind F Hamlet.
W. W. Greg, in The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), thought that because Coriolanus was intended to head the `Tragedies', act division was introduced at the time of printing as a mark of sophistication (p. 407). T. W. Baldwin thinks that, had this been the case, `one would have expected full dress of acts and scenes, not acts merely'; he suggests the `probability, not certainty, is that Coriolanus, Titus, and Caesar had recently been in production, so that availability may have been a weighty reason for using stage copies for them' (On Act and Scene Division in the Shakespeare First Folio [Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965], p. 105).
Wilfred T. Jewkes, Act Division in Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays, 1583- 1616 (Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1958), pp. 96-101. Jewkes thinks act division in Coriolanus was probably not entered at the time of composition; to him it seems more likely that it was introduced at the same time as the additional SDs, and both `in connection with performance' (pp. 188-89).
Taylor, `The Structure of Performance', Shakespeare Reshaped, pp. 18, 30-31. J. Dover Wilson had suggested this adoption of act intervals in `Act and Scene Division in the Plays of Shakespeare', RES, 3 (1927), p. 394; see also Jewkes, Act Division in Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays, pp. 91-92, and Richard Hosley, `The playhouses and the stage', in Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum, eds., A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), p. 33.
Taylor has proposed a similar reading in `The Structure of Performance', p. 40. In his Oxford Shakespeare edition, however, Parker argues that the F division between Acts 3 and 4 `seems a mistake' and is perhaps therefore unShakespearean; yet since in his designation of three main movements in the play's action the first also overlaps an act division (between 1 and 2), he concludes that `the asymmetry may be intentional' and leaves unaltered F's notation of Acts 3 and 4 in his own text (p. 28).
Paul Werstine, `Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: "Foul Papers" and "Bad Quartos"', SQ 41 (1990), p. 69. He urges that we abandon the desire to `fix the origins of the early printed versions upon single agents, when these texts were open to penetration and alteration not only by Shakespeare himself and by his fellow actors but also by multiple theatrical and extra-theatrical scriveners, by theatrical annotators, adapters and revisers (who might cut or add), by censors, and by compositors and proofreaders' (p. 86). See also Gary Taylor, `Post-script', Shakespeare Reshaped, p. 243.
Philip Williams, `New Approaches to Textual Problems in Shakespeare', SB 8 (1956), p. 6. Williams, however, believed this copyist to be the same one who transcribed Timon of Athens.
OED Both a B 1b (`Extended to more than two objects.'). One of the OED examples is from 1 Henry VI: ` Margaret shall now be Queene, and rule the King: | But I will rule both her, the King, and Realme' (5.5.107-08).
Editors have generally assigned all these unnumbered speeches to `First Senator' or `First Soldier', but this procedure gives perhaps unintended prominence to single individuals (though those actors might be grateful). The desired degree of verbal involvement in the action by those on stage might, for a specific production, have been left to the rehearsal stage. In `Editorial Treatment of Foul-Paper Texts: Much Ado About Nothing as Test Case', RES n.s. 31 (1980), Stanley Wells argues against an editorial judgement to assign the 5 unnumbered Watch speeches in 3.3 of that play to `2 Watch', as is usually done: `To give him all the lines is to build up his part beyond justification, and to make mutes of all the other watchmen; it goes beyond the textual evidence' (p. 11); the point is just as well taken if the copy is a faithful transcript of an author's undesignated original. Editorial assignment of such speeches may do a disservice to a script intentionally left open.
It should be noted, however, that in some scenes with entry directions of indefinite number, speeches are all assigned: for instance, of the seven or eight Citizens who enter at the beginning of 2.3, only `1', `2', and `3' speak, and in 5.6 there are speeches for `1', `2', and `3' of the 3 or 4 Conspirators of Auffidius Faction.
There are also unnumbered speeches for the Queen's ladies and for the tribunes in Cymbeline, 1.5 and 3.7; 5 speeches for Watch in 3.3 Much Ado About Nothing, although 7 others are specified `I.' or `2'(see n. 63); and in Timon of Athens successive SHs Some speake and Some other at 3.5.86-87, but as these F texts are not thought to have been set from prompt, we cannot know whether a playhouse annotator would have particularised the SHs. Julius Caesar, which is thought to have been set from prompt copy or a transcript of it, has two unnumbered speeches for Sold. in 5.4, but since the next (and only other) two soldier speeches are numbered, the missing specificity for the first two may result from compositorial oversight.
In `"Foul Papers" and "Prompt Books": Printer's Copy for Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors', SB 49 (1988), Werstine observes that SHs for the 2 committeemen who enter at l. 142 in The Launching of the Mary are sometimes `Com: I' but also sometimes `Com:' or `Committ:'; in The Captives appears a SH `woman' when three possible female speakers are on stage (p. 242). On variable SHs in manuscript playbooks, see also Werstine's `McKerrow's "Suggestion" and Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism', RenD, n.s. 19 (1988), pp. 152-53.
The revising Hand C in Sir Thomas More, who seems to have been preparing the manuscript for theatrical production, altered only 1 of 10 All SHs in Hand D's 3 pages. F Julius Caesar, set from prompt or a transcript of it, uses All in 3.2 to designate speech for the crowd of plebeians, though in some instances the words clearly should be further distributed among several distinct voices.
E. A. J. Honigmann, `Re-Enter the Stage Direction: Shakespeare and Some Contemporaries', ShS 29 (1976), p. 122. Thomas Clayton notes that some All speeches, such as `Speake, speake', call for `not necessarily only two but for n repetitions' (`Today We Have Parting of Names', p. 7).
If the scribe that I am hypothesizing made his transcript late, perhaps with the F publication in mind, then he too could have contributed mistakes and misreadings.
Clayton, `Today We Have Parting of Names', p. 8. Clayton notes that in this last case, the two uses of All would still require disambiguation; for the possibility of duplicate Alls as successive SHs, he points to Giorgio Melchiori's persuasive argument that the two instances of all in l. 38 of More mean some and others (`Hand D in "Sir Thomas More": An essay in Misinterpretation', SB 38 [1985], p. 101). Editors have chosen among these possibilities in their handling of this passage: The Riverside Shakespeare, Brockbank's Arden ed., and Parker's Oxford ed. assume one misplaced SH and so move the existing All up from TLN 1896 to 1894, thus giving all 3 lines to All; others move All up to 1894 and give this SH 2 lines, but then variously reassign 1896 (Malone to Cit.; Kittredge to Patricians; Hibbard to Menenius, thus merging 1896 with Menenius' subsequent lines).
Such is the reasoning, I assume, on which the Oxford Textual Companion conjectures AEDILES. I find this hypothesis attractive in terms of context and, more guardedly, on bibliographical grounds. Unfortunately, Coriolanus offers no control for this misreading: the only other relevant SH abbreviation is a single instance in 3.3, a scene which uses the spelling `Edile' (Edi.). We do not know what 'Aed[.]' (or 'Æd[.]'?) in Shakespeare's hand would look like. In Hand D's pages of the More manuscript, SHs are entered in secretary hand (with the exception of one Italian S), and in this script `All' and `Aed' could be easily mistaken. Indeed, `Aedile' is quite possibily itself a scribal sophistication; if so, and if the miniscule initial letters in the `all' SHs in the More manuscript are any pointers, Shakespeare may have left `edi' without a distinct dot for the final letter, with the result that the abbreviation was mistaken for the commoner `all'.
Clayton points out that, on the pattern of Hand D in More, r would more likely be mistaken for m than vice versa, and both the examples here discussed misread in that direction. He also cites a personal letter from George Walton Williams relevant to even shorter abbreviations for these two characters: in Romeo and Juliet `there are many instances in which it is pretty clear that Shakespeare forgot to add the tilde in various contractions' (`Today We Have Parting of Names', p. 25).
In his New Shakespeare ed. of Coriolanus, Wilson notes, besides the easy graphical confusion, that `Brut.'s [sic] reply is clearly addressed to Cor.; and Cor. replies in turn' (p. 196).
Clayton, `Today We Have Parting of Names', p. 13. Clayton reminds us that Hinman established a considerable break in the printing of quire bb (see p. 000 and n. 7 above), and the bb2v:5 forme was among those that had to be reset; he also notes that the cruxes on bb2va occur in a `span of F lines (TLN 1915-65) that may all have been on the same page' of the manuscript copy (p. 13).
Warburton reassigned the first quoted line to Coriolanus; as early as F2 (1632) the second was given a SH for Cominius.
Clayton offers a version of this argument in `Today We Have Parting of Names', p. 18. In New Readings in Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1956), C. J. Sisson suggested that TLN 1962-64 were a marginal addition, `prefixed by the compositor in error to the existing speech of Menenius' (2: 127), but Clayton, rightly I think, finds this argument unlikely on grounds of both meter and sense (p. 17).
The actor who plays `I. Cit.' would, of course, appreciate the emendation, and his part can be — and has been — strengthened even further through non-verbal stage business in Acts 2 and 3. The role of `I. Cit.' can thus become an attractively substantial minor part for an up-and-coming actor; in some modern productions it has been played by the understudy for Coriolanus, as it was in Peter Hall's 1959 production in which Albert Finney played First Citizen and understudy for Laurence Olivier.
Wilbur Sanders mounts a persuasive defense of retaining F in Wilbur Sanders and Howard Jacobson, Shakespeare's Magnanimity: Four Tragic Heroes, Their Friends and Families (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), p. 140. See also Michael Warren, `Textual Problems, Editorial Assertions in Editions of Shakespeare', in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome McGann (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 31-32, and Richard Proudfoot, `Textual Studies', ShS 30 (1977), p. 204.
H. Eardley-Wilmot, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1950, p. 645. In his New Shakespeare ed. of Coriolanus, Wilson further elaborates on the appropriateness to Sicinius' argument of specifying the disease as gangrene, whereas this would be a tactical error for Menenius (p. 204 n). Brockbank suggests a simple misremembering on the part of Compositor B (Arden ed. Coriolanus, p. 214 n); see also Clayton, `Today We have Parting of Names', pp. 19-20.
Theobald conjectured `?', which Steevens adopted in the 1778 Variorum; Malone followed Rowe (1714) in providing a dash to indicate interrupted speech and speculated that had he been allowed to continue, Menenius would have added, `Is this just?'. Replying to Eardley-Wilmot in the TLS and assuming the F punctuation to be correct, A. P. Rossiter defends F's assignment to Menenius as being in character with his `personal style' of `dry irony' ( Times Literary Supplement, 20 October 1950, p. 661. Rossiter's argument does not, however, answer the objections to F made by either Wilson or Clayton (see preceding note).
Brockbank, who gives the line to Virgilia, finds it only `just conceivable that Coriolanus cries out in apprehension or distress, or even intends a dismissive blasphemy, but either would be inconsistent with the assumed role of "lonely dragon"' (Arden ed. Coriolanus, p. 240 n).
In Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), W. W. Greg answered the question of what treatment the book-keeper would acccord the author's SDs: `as a rule he left them alone. So long as they were intelligible it mattered little to him the form in which they were couched' (1: 213)
Although he later altered his opinion on this matter, in The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), W. W. Greg thought a book-keeper might `not trouble to make specific such a direction as "with two or three Lords attendant"' (p. 38). In several articles detailing his study of the surviving manuscript playbooks, William B. Long has presented strong evidence that Greg's early statements, here and in Dramatic Documents (quoted in n. 86) were correct. In `"A bed | for woodstock": A Warning for the Unwary', MARDE 2, ed. J. Leeds Barroll and Paul Werstine (New York: AMS Press, 1985), Long observes that modern bibliographers wrongly demand that the `ideal' late 16th- and 17th-century `"promptbook" should be neat and orderly, containing complete and regular speech-heads, entrances and exits — with all manner of vagueness and ambiguities resolved. Unfortunately, the surviving ... playbooks exhibit no such features, even on an occasional basis' (p. 93). In `Beggars Bush: A Reconstructed Prompt-Book and Its Copy', SB 27 (1974), Fredson Bowers concurs: `In the surviving playbooks, bookkeepers have not changed playwrights' entrance directions that leave the number of extras indefinite' (p. 94; see also p. 131). In Coriolanus there are 4 lightly permissive entry directions, 10 SDs for a collective body (e.g. the Army of the Volces at 1.4.22/514, or a rabble of Plebeians at 3.1.179/1886), and 9 unspecified with others or with Attendants.
In Casting Shakespeare's Plays: London Actors and Their Roles, 1590-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), T. J. King suggests that the number provided for with Lords/Soldiers/Attendants was usually 3, although it might vary according to the number of mutes required for the play as a whole (p. 34). For Coriolanus, King estimates that 11 men could handle the 16 principal male roles (25 lines or more); along with 3 boys, they would be responsible for 93% of the play's lines. An additional 14 men would be needed for 34 small speaking parts, as well as 4 boys and 30 mutes. According to King's tables, of the F plays only Antony and Cleopatra and Henry VIII require larger casts (see Chap. 4).
Long, `"A bed | for woodstock"', pp. 106, 110. In `Modern Textual Theories and the Editing of Plays', The Library, sixth ser. 11 (1989), T. H. Howard-Hill notes that, unlike modern promptbooks, Renaissance playbooks `do not usually record information contained in other necessary playhouse documents', such as actors' parts, casting tables, or the `plot' (p. 111).
In the printed, black-letter quarto of A Looking Glass for London and England that has been marked as prompt, `flourish' appears either in the left margin opposite the space for its occurrence or above the printed entry SD (Baskervill, `A Prompt Copy of A Looking Glass for London and England', p. 37). A hasty annotator might cause ambiguity with either placement.
Peter M. Wright argues that these are two distinct SDs, meant to cover movement during a scene change: the Flourish accompanies the departure of the victorious Romans at the end of 1.9, but the Cornets are for Aufidius' entry, or what editors usually mark as 1.10 (`Stage Directions in Two Seventeenth-Century Folios: Ben Jonson's Folio of 1616 and the Shakespeare Folio of 1623', Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1991, pp. 144-45,n. 14). A flourish, presumably of trumpets, followed by a separate flourish of cornets, while possible, seems unlikely; as John H. Long observes in Shakespeare's Use of Music: The Histories and Tragedies (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1971), `the fourish concludes the council just ended by the Romans. There is no reason for Aufidius, who enters defeated..., to be greeted with a fanfare' (pp. 221- 22).
In Bibliographical Studies in the Beaumont & Fletcher Folio of 1647 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938 [for 1937]), R. C. Bald notes this as a typical change made in turning the transcript of a play into the playbook for performance: `careful attention to musical effects and noises off stage in a text is an indication that it has received the producer's attention, and is probably derived from a prompt-copy' (p. 79). The Oxford Textual Companion also notes that the music cues, as well as the detailing of the names of characters in entry directions and the misplaced Exeunt at TLN 1948, suggest a playhouse annotator (p. 593). Brockbank, on the other hand, while seeing `some evidence for the intervention of the book-keeper', finds `it is not decisive' (Arden ed. Coriolanus, p. 5).
W. J. Lawrence in Shakespeare's Workshop (rpt.; New York: Haskell House, 1966) notes that at the beginning of the 17th c. cornets are associated with the indoor private theatres, where their softer tone could be used more effectively than in the public amphitheatres (pp. 52-53). The King's Men acquired Blackfriars in August 1608, although all playing was prohibited due to plague until at least November 1609; Lawrence takes the call for cornets as a pointer to dating Coriolanus, `which cannot have been produced before the end of November 1609, and seems more likely to have seen the light a month or two later. In either case it would have been a Blackfriars production' (p. 63); see also Long, Shakespeare's Use of Music, pp. 222, 228-29, and Oxford Textual Companion, p. 594. Though less likely, Coriolanus could have been composed early in 1608 and opened at the Globe in the spring, before plague closed the theatres, then been reannotated for a subsequent Blackfriars performance. Such appears to have been the case with All's Well and Merchant of Venice, which also mix trumpets and cornets in flourishes; All's Well exists only in its F form; Q1 Merchant (1600) lacks any reference to cornets. See n. 55 for T. W. Baldwin's suggestion that Coriolanus had received a production not long before work on F began.
The first doubling at 2.1.0.2 may have been authorial (Enter Menenius with the two Tribunes of the | people, Sicinius & Brutus), since `commonly Shakespeare identified a character at his first entrance with a label stating his rank, profession, or relationship to another character' (Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare's Text, p. 147); these labels are only rarely repeated, however, so the latter instances are likely to be those of an annotator making sure that entry directions included the names of all the scene's important characters. Even at 2.1.0.2, the order suggests that the tribunes' proper names may have been tacked onto an existing direction (in contrast, 1.3.0 begins Enter Volumnia and Virgilia, mother and wife to Martius). See also the Oxford Textual Companion, p. 593, on this point.
A SD Retire or Aside for First and Second Servingman at 4.5.52/2707 would be helpful, but only Capell, followed by Keightley, has been seriously confused by its absence. For another possible example in 1.4, Enter Martius Cursing, see p. 000 above and n. 98; Troilus and Cressida, 4.5.158, offers another instance where Enter applies to characters who have previously only gone `aside'.
Bowers notes that the `common failure to mark ordinary and expectable exits wanting in Massinger's papers shows that scrupulous attention to exit directions is no absolute criterion for prompt-copy' (` Beggars Bush: A Reconstructed Prompt-Book and Its Copy', p. 132); see also Gary Taylor, `"Praestat difficilior lectio": All's Well that Ends Well', Renaissance Studies 2 (1988), p. 40. Some or all may also have existed in the manuscript but been omitted by oversight or because of space constraints (the probable cause of the missing exit SD for 1.8 and the shorter Exit for Exeunt at the end of 1.7); they may also have been clear in the actors' parts, though unnoted in the playbook.
1.4 presents Coriolanus's major staging challenge, though the SDs may have been less confusing in the manuscript copy, before Compositor B got through with it. Still, on the basis of a non-Shakespearean playbook, Fredson Bowers concludes that `If Knight's transcript of this prompt- book from Massinger's papers is at all typical, it is evident that unresolved tangles in the action and even in the casting could be transferred to print from a prompt-book or transcript' (` Beggars Bush: A Reconstructed Prompt-Book and Its Copy', p. 135); see also Baskervill, `A Prompt Copy of A Looking Glass for London and England', pp. 50-51, and Oxford, Textual Companion, p. 387.
J. W. Saunders, `Vaulting the Rails', ShS 7 (1954), p. 77. In his view, no exit is required because neither Marius nor the Roman soldiers really leave (or leave our sight). The SD Enter Martius Cursing is `similar to those illogically entered in other plays, when a player has not left the stage but has moved between two different visible areas'. Modern productions often employ a similar solution, with the Romans retreating to the verge of the stage or even the centre steps and centre aisle; Titus exits fighting and re-enters from the same direction to comment on Martius' bravery (so staged in the 1984 Peter Hall production at the National Theatre). Martius may exit fighting and almost immediately re-enter cursing, or he may be visible driving off the Volscians.
The centred SD Enter the Gati also suggests Compositor B might have been led by an ambiguous terminal symbol to see Gati instead of Gates and to assume another army is indicated. Just above, at TLN 514, he had centred Enter the Army of the Volces; here, at TLN 543, he centres what was presumably a marginal action-direction for what is in effect an exit.
The fact that aa3v is B's first page of Coriolanus may mean that, as yet unfamiliar with the play and especially its proper names, he was trying to follow his copy closely. Had he been willing at 1.7.0 to alter his spelling, use an & and jettison Caius, as he may have done in the first column and again at 1.8.0, he could either have saved a line for white space (1.7.0.4 is only one word long, Scout), or achieved his preferred direction format. With the exception of this instance and the short entry direction on aa1v, he elsewhere sets simply Martius in his Act 1 Sds.
The Oxford Textual Companion finds Enters an additional argument for scribal copy, since the indicative rather than imperative form `does not elsewhere appear in texts thought to be set from Shakespeare's papers' (p. 593). Yet this SD seems one of the most `authorial' in the play, containing information that neither paid scribe nor compositor would be likely to know, and in fact the indicative form does appear elsewhere in a text believed to have been set from holograph: Q1 Richard II, on B2 and I1 (at 1.3.6 and 5.2.84 in the Riverside edition). Alternatively, Enters could be a scribal addition, but it might also derive from a playhouse annotator or from a compositor's correction for having failed to head the SD with Enter. Its capitalisation suggests it may have been written in the margin of Compositor B's copy, perhaps even as Enter, meant to head the SD but miscued (or its cue misread) as to placement.
In his New Shakespeare ed. of Coriolanus, Wilson finds it `obvious that Auf.'s [sic] address to the Volscians precedes their being "driven in breathless"' (p. 167). Many editors still retain F, however, and simply add Exit for Aufidius after his final two lines.
On bb5, for instance, Compositor B has managed to get the second servingman's speech at 4.5.3-4/2657 onto one line by abbreviating `master' as `M.', sacrificing two of the three spaces after punctuation marks, and leaving off the period after Exit. Mislineation at TLN 2659-60 is probably intentional, so that the first half-line would leave a bit of white space under Enter Coriolanus, and running lines 2664 and 2665 together as prose allows room in the right margin for the off-center Enter second Servant.
Discussing the combining of two verse lines into one as a compositorial space-saving technique, Werstine notes that on aa3 `the combined verses occur near the bottom of the second column where there is no white space around two entrance directions' (`Line Division', p. 120 n. 38).
In setting the two penultimate pages of F 1 Henry 4 from printed copy, Compositor B compressed his copy by shortening SDs to hold them to one line and by omitting one altogether on f5v, at TLN 3066 (cutting from K3 of the quarto He spieth Falstaffe on the ground); see Eleanor Prosser, Shakespeare's Anonymous Editors (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1981), p. 202 n. 21. In The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, 2: 508, Hinman notes B's probable omission of a SD in Antony and Cleopatra, due to poorly cast-off manuscript copy. On B's willingness to tamper with his copy's SDs, see also Werstine, `Compositor B of the Shakespeare First Folio', pp. 252, 257-59, and Williams, `New Approaches to Textual Problems in Shakespeare', p. 8.
There are other mis-settings on this page (bb1v), such as mislineation and Latius in the entry SD and SHs in 3.1. The mislineation is quite likely at least in part Compositor A's but, as argued above, the Latius misnaming probably stood in the copy. The unnumbered senatorial SH at 3.1.31/1712 may be related to an economising impulse, since the line is justified only by eliminating the usual space after the SH period, but senators are either unnumbered (two more on this page alone) or erratically numbered in the rest of this scene, in both compositors' stints and where justification is not an issue.
In `New Approaches to Textual Problems in Shakespeare', Philip Williams observes that Compositor A tended to reproduce the copy position of SDs; Compositor B was more likely to normalise, and he `was reluctant to interrupt a speech to insert even a needed stage-direction' (p. 7). Williams does not, however, offer his evidence for this assertion; see below, n. 110.
In `Justification and Spelling in Jaggard's Compositor B', SB 27 (1974), S. W. Reid provides evidence that `when justifying a line B generally altered types toward the end of it before changing those toward the beginning' (p. 110). TLN 3538 is a case in point, for a shorter spelling of `vntill' would have allowed Compositor B to set the sentence's terminal period.
Five lines earlier in the same speech B does split a verse line in order to set Drum a farre off in the right margin, rather than set the SD on its own separate line, but farther down the same column a sound and action SD breaks up Coriolanus' tirade to the Roman soldiers. If Compositor B had a preference for uninterrupted speeches, it was not a particularly strong one. As noted earlier, in the second column of aa3 one sound cue has probably been left out because there was no room in the margin next to `Hark', and by this time B could not spare a separate line.
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