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Notes
For an examination of the evidence substantiating my belief that the Folio Othello was printed from an annotated copy of Q1 and not from a manuscript, see my article in Shakespeare Survey V (1952), pp. 16-24 and my Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953), pp. 153-156.
After this article went to the printer, Sir Walter Greg most kindly provided me with photostats of the Malone copy of Q5, supplemented by photostats of G1 (defective in Malone) from a B.M. copy, so that I have been able to make an independent collation of this quarto with the Oxford facsimile of the First Folio text and to verify the collation notes of the editions used (i.e., Hemingway's 1936 Variorum and the 1891-3 Cambridge). I have found nothing of importance to add to Hemingway's admirably full and accurate record of Q5 readings, though Q5's 'let them spake' for 'let them speake' at II.iv.164, 'you' for 'your' at V.ii.27, and F1's 'hee's' for 'he is' at III.i.233 should perhaps, in principle, have been recorded. The Malone copy, like the Jennens-Folger copy, has the uncorrected reading 'would' for 'I would' at III.iii.85 (see Hemingway's note to III.iii.82 in his edition). In view of Hemingway's reasonable conclusion that the Folio text was set up from a copy of Q5 with all know variant formes in the corrected state, I have disregarded the uncorrected readings of the Malone copy ('our' for 'your' at II.ii.64, 'would' for 'I would' at III.iii.85, and 'though' for 'thought' at IV.i. 2). In the present paper, all references are to the Cambridge edition.
By trivial errors I mean, of course, any combination of symbols which, through foul case or the omission, addition, or transposition of letters, failed to form a word or formed a word which, in the context, made no sense. I have also disregarded the Folio corrections (both compositor A's) of a duplicated word ('of of') at III.i.149 and an interpolated word ('tell', caught from the previous line) at IV.ii.56, since both of the Q5 errors would have been corrected by an attentive compositor.
Variants like 'whither' and 'whether', 'farther' and 'further', 'forward' and 'forwards', 'bore' and 'bare', and substitutions like 'ye' for 'you', 'you'l' for 'you will', and so on, are more relevant to the question of the Folio's fidelity to copy in accidentals than in substantive readings.
The first of A's corrections in list (a), for instance, might have been due to the unconscious transposition of the letters and the third to interpolation, but I infer that the majority of A's corrections were introduced in accordance with hand-corrections in the copy and that B's readings at I.ii.10, II.ii.104, V.i.5, V.i.40, V.i.90, V.iv.72, V.iv. 107 had probably similar warrant.
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