University of Virginia Library

The present writer has recently embarked on the task of collating the entire Folger collection of 79 First Folios. Twenty copies have now (April 1953) been collated throughout the "Tragedies" (including Troylus and Cymbeline) and 79 copies through sigs. ss-vv (Othello and parts of Lear and of Antony and Cleopatra). About two years will be required for the collation of the Folger First Folios throughout all thirty-six plays. As a precaution against possible disaster, only about half of the irreplaceable Folger copies are being kept in the Library in Washington; but the other copies will be brought back for collation as soon as work has been completed on the copies now available.

E.E. Willoughby's The Printing of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1932) has as its frontispiece a full-sized reproduction of the Antony proof-sheet and, on pp. 62-63, a discussion of it. Illustrations of the Othello and Lear proof-sheets accompany my articles about them: "A Proof-Sheet in the First Folio of Shakespeare," The Library, 4th ser., XXIII (1942), 101-107; and "Mark III: New Light on the Proof-Reading for the First Folio of Shakespeare," Studies in Bibliography, III (1950), 145-153.

See pp. 103-104 in the Library article and pp. 150-151 in the SB article cited in note 2 above.

Drs. Willoughby, McManaway, and Dawson, of the Folger staff, all share my conviction that the page in question is nevertheless a perfectly genuine proof-sheet.

I consider this unlikely, especially in view of the four variant pages showing only one correction each: probably some pages, though proof-read, were deemed to require no correction. Yet the possibility remains lively that at least a few more variant pages are yet to be found.

Such peculiarities certainly tend to support the conjecture that the Romeo and the Antony proof-sheets were marked by different readers. It will be recalled that the Antony reader marked nineteen errors in the page, but that only two out of the 38 copies examined show the uncorrected state.

It is possible, though I believe it unlikely, that these two pages of Titus will eventually be found to be variant. If so, the uncorrected states will be found paired with other, and earlier-printed, uncorrected states of the Romeo pages than have yet turned up; and we should thus have clear evidence that the same forme was twice unlocked: first to correct errors in Titus, and then later to correct Romeo.

Titus contains by much the greatest number of variant formes (four, as against a total of three in the four other plays); and the uncorrected states of three of these formes appear in over 20% of 38 copies—an abundance not found in the variant formes of Caesar and Macbeth. Thus Titus is much more like Romeo than are the others. Is it mere coincidence that Titus is the only one of these five plays that was, like Romeo and Juliet, set up from printed copy? And that the two plays in which no variants whatever have yet been found were probably set from MSS in Shakespeare's own hand?

This could of course be checked in the case of the Folio text of Romeo, since the Quarto of 1609 from which it was set can be studied. But unfortunately the plays for which the First Folio gives us a really authoritative text are precisely those that were not set from copy now extant.

Or, of course, of different proof-readers. See note 6.