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
the copy as `scribal transcript (possibly of a prompt-book)';
[4] in his
1994 Oxford Shakespeare edition of
Coriolanus, however, R. B. Parker
concludes the manuscript beneath F was Shakespearean holograph, though he believes it was `a draft that
still required revision'.
[5]
The two issues -- autograph or scribal copy and relation to theatrical production -- are important.
We would like to know, of course, whether textual problems in F result solely from compositorial
misreading or mis-setting of an authorial original, or whether another layer of possible alteration
intervenes in the transcriptional processes of a scribe. Equally, we would like to know how closely the
text printed in F approximates the early seventeenth-century acting script of
Coriolanus. Despite earlier assertions of scholarly consensus, it clearly does not
exist on either count. I will argue in the following sections, first, that
Coriolanus was set from a scribal transcript and, second, that most of the apparent
problems created by the F text's speech headings (SHs) and stage directions (SDs) were introduced either
by the scribe or in the printing house; they should not be taken as certain evidence that the copy
manuscript was not yet in a form that could serve as theatrical playbook.
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]
