University of Virginia Library

A Note On King Lear, III.ii.1-3
by
George W. Williams

The publication of G. I. Duthie's new edition of King Lear, an attempt to produce a critical old-spelling text as near as possible to that which Shakespeare wrote,[1] has raised a problem in the punctuation of the opening lines of the second scene of Act 111. Although in various places he has admitted emendations from modern editors, in these particular lines Mr. Duthie has preferred the First Folio punctuation, and hence the particular meaning derived, to the punctuation as emended by editors from Pope to the present. Since the question of Shakespeare's intention in these lines has thus been reopened, it may be advisable to examine the evidence for the original

and the emended punctuation, and the two resultant interpretations of the meaning of these lines, to discover which should be nearer to Shakespeare's probable original.[2]

The text of the opening lines appears in the first or 'Pied Bull' Quarto thus:

In the First Folio there are certain alterations and the mislineation is corrected, but the first line remains run-on: The meaning seems to be, accordingly: 'blow you cataracts' and at the same time 'spout you hurricanes.' (The reading drown for the Quarto drown'd is customarily taken as a compositor's misprint.)

Rowe (1709) was content to preserve this reading, but Pope's emendation (1723) of the punctuation for the first time end-stopped the line:

Thus Pope would have the lines mean: 'blow, crack, rage, blow you winds' and 'spout you cataracts and hurricanes.' Theobald (1733) deleted the rhetorical comma after 'cataracts' and substituted one after 'hurricanoes'; and with a few minor differences in capitalization and in interchange of exclamation points with the semicolon and comma after 'cheeks' and 'rage,' all subsequent editors have followed this emendation by maintaining a full stop at the close of the first line.[3] Such a problem is, of course, an uncomfortable one for an old-spelling editor, who must generally follow the reading of his copytext if it seems to make sufficiently good sense; yet in this case it is probable that Mr. Duthie has been over-conservative and has reprinted a corruption from the First Folio, which he chose as his copytext.

The question to be resolved is whether Pope's emendation is preferable to the 'authority' of the Quarto and First Folio, or whether Shakespeare wanted the sense of the concluding words of the first line to be carried over into the beginning of the second.

Whatever the punctuation, it would seem that Shakespeare in this passage had in mind the distinction from Genesis 7:11 between the floodgates of heaven (or cataracts) and the fountains of the deep (or hurricanoes), both of which were set in motion at the time of the Deluge.[4] The crux is, whether he would then have taken the verb 'blow' and 'rage' with 'cataracts,' and 'spout' with 'hurricanoes': according to the Quarto and Folio, the cataracts of heaven would rage and blow while the waterspouts from the deeps inundated the land. The emended punctuation, on the contrary, causes the verb 'spout' to have the two subjects 'cataracts' and 'hurricanoes.' Editors with this latter situation in mind have regarded the two subjects as synonyms, both meaning waterspouts,[5] although this duplicate meaning is by no means necessary or even probable.[6]

The disadvantages of the Folio reading, followed by Duthie, are three. (1) 'Blow' is not the verb which could be assigned with the greatest of propriety to a cascade of water. 'Rage,' of course, is quite applicable, but the immediate verb must be that one standing nearer its subject. 'Blow,' however,

is readily applicable to the winds of the first line and is used once for these winds. (2) By reading 'blow' with the second line, the combination of the three imperatives in the first line secured by the important suspension of the two last verbs 'rage, blow' is wholly lost. (3) If the line is allowed to run on, the epanalepsis, that is the repetition of the same word at the beginning and end of a line of verse,[7] is so very considerably weakened that it is scarcely felt as a figure.

The traditional emendation providing the sequence 'spout you cataracts and hurricanoes' may now be examined. If cataracts and hurricanoes are both synonyms for waterspouts, the line may appear redundant. Yet the fact that the words may appear redundant to later critics is no indication that Shakespeare need have been averse to using both words. Both would appeal to the poet experimenting with the new language; stuffing or bombast perhaps they would be, but not without a splendidly effective sound and magnitude.

Nevertheless, it is most unlikely that he used them as redundancies: the passage in Genesis need not be a gloss restricted to the Folio's syntactical equation. Indeed, as Milton was later to demonstrate (see footnote 6 above), the imperative 'spout' can in Lear be most meaningfully directed to the floodgates of heaven, the cataracts, and to the fountains of the deep, the hurricanoes, so that Lear in a mighty image is calling for a second Deluge to wipe out the race of men by a joining of the waters of heaven and earth, both of which will share in the drowning of the land.

With this poetically more logical and significant meaning depending on emendation, we may return to the Folio text for an enquiry into the source of its probable corruption for these lines. In his extensive introduction Mr. Duthie argues most tellingly that the 'Pied Bull' Quarto was set from a manuscript which had been written by a scribe taking down the dictation of the actors of the King's Men reciting their parts to reconstruct a missing prompt book during a provincial tour. With a wealth of evidence he demonstrates that this hastily written manuscript was almost certainly taken down chiefly in prose and with only casual punctuation, and that at a later time, perhaps in preparation for making a fair copy, a reviser gave it a rough sort of final punctuation and lineation. Mr. Duthie is under no illusions about the quality of this punctuation, and he fitly describes it as sparse, erratic, and never dependable.[8] Since there can now be no question that the Folio text was set from a printed copy of the Quarto annotated by 'Scribe E' comparing

it with the true playhouse promptbook, the error in the Folio text originated in the Quarto, and therefore must be attacked in the Quarto.

If one follows Mr. Duthie's very plausible account of the origin of the manuscript behind the Quarto, there are two possible explanations for this error. If the scribe were roughly punctuating as he wrote, and if in this case he reproduced what he heard (very likely the actors would dictate by phrase groups or by clauses, pausing at a natural stop), we must assign the error to the actor and believe that in the process of carrying the lines in his memory over the course of months he forgot the unusual rhetorical suspension and slipped into the easier and more natural period offered by the run-on line with its neat pairing of subjects and verbs. As Mr. Duthie has shown in a number of examples, the actors were by no means perfect in their parts and on occasion forgot or confused their lines. If on the other hand we follow the hypothesis that the Quarto text was taken down in prose and almost completely without punctuation, followed by a later revision which rather ignorantly punctuated and lined the text, then regardless of the actor's delivery of the lines we probably have a clear case, as would be expected, of this reviser's failing to understand the delicate suspension and epanalepsis, and consequently reading the lines as seemed most natural to him.

These may seem sufficiently plausible alternatives to account for the mispunctuation of the Quarto, yet there is evidence not previously advanced which may lay the blame on the compositor.

The Quarto, to repeat, prints:

What is at once observable is the faulty comma in the second line after 'drencht', and it is a reasonable hypothesis that we have here a situation by no means unknown in Elizabethan play quartos whereby through a memorial or visual error the compositor misplaced the punctuation concluding one line by dropping it to the end of the line immediately below.[9] If this comma after the second line, which impossibly intervenes between a verb and its direct object, were moved to the line above, we should have the Quarto's conventional light punctuation to end-stop the first line after 'blow'. This is so clear an example of a reasonably common compositor's error that the case could be taken as demonstrated were it not for the lack of a necessary comma in the third line after 'ſteeples', which raises the question whether the comma after 'drencht' is not instead a faulty 'inversion' of this comma from the third line. However, the lack of such necessary punctuation is not at all unusual in the Quarto, as instance the omission of the necessary punctuation after III.i.21 in the same inner forme F with III.ii.3. Yet if there is any slight doubt that the comma after 'drencht' was moved up by compositor's error from 'ſteeples' instead of having been exchanged from 'blow' in the line above, another explanation may be advanced which is perhaps more strictly bibliographical.

It is well known that in setting verse a compositor was likely to use a shorter measure, or printer's stick, rather than the longer measure required for the full width of his type-page, and that he would shift to a stick with the full measure when he arrived at a series of long lines or approached a passage of prose.[10] This was an economical custom, for he could fill up the right-hand margin of his type-page more quickly by inserting quads in the page-galley than by setting them individually in his stick to fill out a succession of short lines. When we examine the 'Pied Bull' Quarto, we see that the compositor indeed used two measures according to the nature of his material, a short measure 80 mm. wide and a long measure 93 mm. wide. The lines in question occur on sig. F4 recto of the Quarto, where it can be observed that III.ii.1-3, 10, 21-22, as well as the concluding line of the previous scene III.i.55, are justified to the 80 mm. measure without the use of quads or spaces at the end, that line 18 has probably been concluded by direct setting in page-galley, and that the compositor did not switch to his 93 mm. measure until the prose beginning with line 25. If we then look more narrowly at III.ii.1 where we are questioning the lack of punctuation after 'blow', we see that the line is crowded in the 80 mm. measure. Thin spaces only are used between the words except for the thick space between speech-heading and first word which is invariably maintained by this compositor throughout the play. Moreover, in the first line no thin space is set after the comma following 'cheekes' or the comma following 'rage' although such spaces appear after commas in lines 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Therefore, the line could not be justified in the stick if a comma were to appear after 'blow' unless the compositor were to go to the trouble of picking out the final 'e' in 'cracke' or in 'cheekes' which he had already set, and it is plausible that he did not

take this trouble but instead automatically justified his line by omitting the final comma.[11] It would seem that the probabilities are as great (and indeed the two facts may perhaps be connected) that the comma after 'drencht' is the one properly belonging a line above after 'blow', but in either case there is good reason to suspect compositor's error.

To sum up, against the 'authority' of the Quarto punctuation we have a much superior Shakespearian reading to be derived by emendation. In turn, this emendation may be assisted by arguments concerning the circumstances of memorial composition of the manuscript behind the Quarto; but if these seem too speculative it is possible to bring forward the fact that within the crucial passage the punctuation is manifestly corrupt in two other places, and that certain lines of bibliographical speculation lead to the conclusion either that the original comma was displaced in error to the verse below or that because of difficulties in justifying the line the compositor did not set it although it was present in his manuscript.

There remains the problem of the retention of this corruption in the Folio text set from a marked printed copy of the Quarto corrected by comparison with the promptbook. One must admit that this corrector, Scribe E, devoted some attention to these lines since he relined correctly 2-3, altered 'wind' to 'windes' and 'the' to 'our' before 'steeples', and (unless we may credit the Folio compositor) removed the faulty comma after 'drencht' and possibly placed the semicolon with a following capitalization of 'rage' in the first line. Whoever was responsible,[12] this semicolon and its accompanying alteration of 'rage' to 'Rage' indicates as clearly as may be that in the Folio 'Rage' is intended to begin a new rhetorical period which must necessarily be completed by a run-on line. It was doubtless this consideration which led Mr. Duthie to retain the Folio reading, but in the light of all the evidence

adducing corruption in the origin of the reading in the Folio's copytext, it would seem that in this case, as in others which Mr. Duthie has illustrated, Scribe E was careless or chose to believe the superficially more natural rhetoric of the Quarto over the punctuation of the promptbook, if indeed that was perfect. Since no direct Shakespearian authority is present in the copytext for the Quarto, and since positive authority in the Folio is shown only by specific alteration and not by failure to alter, we may if we choose believe that this crux should properly be resolved on the purely literary ground of meaning and style, bibliographical evidence concurring, and that the most fitting conclusion we may reach is that Shakespeare did indeed write: