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Notes
A public lecture delivered at Bedford College, University of London, on 4 March 1953, Professor Una Ellis-Fermor in the chair.
As this goes to press I have seen the typescript of an article by Dr. Philip Williams for the October 1953 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly in which he argues that the copy for the Folio text of King Lear was not an annotated quarto, as we have supposed for years, but instead a manuscript which utilized the quarto. From his review of Alice Walker's Textual Problems of the First Folio, in the same issue, it is evident that he now has altered his original views, as stated below, that the Folio Troilus and Cressida was printed directly from its annotated quarto and inclines to the belief that it also was printed from an intermediate transcript which preserved certain characteristics of the quarto.
As I understand that Professor Dover Wilson has now become philosophical about disagreements with his work, I hope he will forgive me the discourtesy if I choose my examples from his study of the text of Hamlet. If I disagree in details, or in the method by which certain results were arrived at, I do not wish to imply any lack of respect for the monograph as a whole. It was a splendid pioneering effort and though it will need to be redone in the future, we shall have to know a great deal more than we know now before the task can even be attempted.
Dr. Williams may perhaps revise this view in the light of his most recent researches. The general principle here remains the same, however.
I do not pretend to have made a rigorous examination, since the 'good long time' has as yet been denied me. But I may say that in the process of a preliminary collation of Q and F to familiarize myself with the problem, I have come upon the mechanical evidence of which I speak, and which in my opinion demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt, especially when joined to Dr. Walker's copious evidence of a somewhat different sort, that in some manner printed Q lies in a direct line behind the F text. Whether F was set direct from annotated Q, as Dr. Walker holds, or whether there was some intermediate step as I believe at the moment, still awaits further investigation.
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