University of Virginia Library

III. Sig. Li, pp. 123-4, Section I

Though many persons who have used the Fourth Folio must have observed that pp. 123-124 in Love's Labour's Lost are set in 8-point type instead of the 12-point used elsewhere throughout the volume, no one has been sufficiently curious about it to work out the explanation, or at any rate, thought it worthwhile to print it.[14] No variant is involved here, for all copies, including the Methuen facsimile, are in this respect alike.

Throughout F4 normal columns contain 74 lines of type. The four columns of pp. 123-124 contain 91, 90, 91 and 90 lines. All other pages of the L gathering, including those of L6, the leaf conjugate with L1, are printed in the usual type and with the usual number of lines.

The explanation is not difficult. Printing began with the inner sheet, L3:4, probably with its inner forme. L2:5 was printed and perfected next. Then the working off of either the inner or the outer forme of L1:6 was begun. At this point the proofreader discovered that a block of text had been omitted and that some resetting would be required. If possible the resetting must be confined to L1, since L2r:5v was already printed off or so far along that any resetting here would involve the discarding of much valuable paper as well as presswork. And, as we can see, it proved to be possible. Had the printing of L2r:5v not been finished or well along, the resetting could have been, and would have been, spread out so as to avoid such unsightly pages as 123-124 are.

For their unsightliness is not caused only by the smaller type. Additional compression has been accomplished by the elimination

of all of the usual white spaces at stage directions, by the printing of two very short speeches in one line (in seventeen places), and (in one place) by forcing three lines of verse into two type lines. A further small gain resulted from the fact that much of the first column of p. 123 is prose, which allows more words to the line in the smaller type. Thus no true measure of the total compression obtained is to be arrived at by the mere counting of lines and the discovery that the four reset columns contain 362 lines instead of the usual 296.

But in another way we can calculate the amount of compression almost precisely. The text which now fills pp. 123-124 (L.L.L. V.i.13 to ii.254, in the Globe edition) occupies 425 lines in F3, counting all white spaces at stage directions. If we assume that this was originally set up in the same way in F4—that is with the same spacing—296 lines would have been accommodated, leaving a balance of 129 lines. Since F3 is set 66 lines to the column, 129 lines is almost exactly one page. We can safely assume then that what the proofreader found missing from the F4 had been one page of the F3 text. This means that the omission was due to the compositor, for only he could have been concerned with F3 pages. Nothing about the F3 text of the passage involved suggests any reason for the omission or any clue as to which page was omitted. We have no way of knowing certainly that the whole first forme, presumably the inner, of L1:6 was not actually wrought off before the detection of the omission. But it appears probable that had this been the case L1 would have been cancelled so that L6 could be salvaged, reducing the loss of paper by fifty per cent. That no such cancellation was made suggests that the omission was discovered in the first forme in the press.