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
on aa3
v, by compositorial attempts to solve the
problem of lack of space created by cast-off copy. While a few SH errors seem to derive from
misunderstanding ambiguous abbreviations for `Coriolanus' and `Cominius', by and large SHs are fairly
regular and not misleading; compositorial shortening of what may have been longer manuscript forms
has not changed this fact. Although modern editors alter a number of them, believing certain speeches to
have been misassigned, in many cases there is dispute about which need altering, and the retention of F
by one or another editor supports the actability of F as it stands. Where it is not, the fault can be seen as
at least plausibly having been introduced later, by scribe or compositor or both, or, as on
bb2
v for instance, as the result of physical damage to the manuscript suffered sometime in
the interim between production and publication. And we must also at least entertain the possibility that
some ambiguities were straightened out in the actors' parts and the `plot' but not recorded in the playbook
itself.
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
appear to disqualify
Coriolanus as theatrical
playbook seem to be scribal in origin, and since the text as we have it (especially when we conjecture
what it looked like before obvious compositorial intervention) seems to have been by seventeenth-
century standards adequately annotated for performance, a late transcription would appear most likely.
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.
