 | |  |
In The Manuscript of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1934), Professor J. Dover Wilson made one of the first attempts to analyse the habits of a compositor in an Elizabethan printing house, and his conclusion was that James Roberts employed a bungling and inexperienced workman for the 1604/5 Hamlet. The picture Professor Wilson drew of this compositor was detailed and paradoxical. He was a novice and, left to himself, would have worked letter by letter, reproducing the spellings of his copy, but he was rushed in his work, and sometimes omitted lines, half-lines, phrases, words, or letters. In moments of confidence, he abandoned his plodding method and let his eye 'race ahead of his fingers,' so that he might transpose a word in error from the end to the beginning of a line. This picture of Roberts' compositor has been generally accepted and has greatly influenced the repute of the second quarto of Hamlet; Sir Walter Greg thought it "was printed from Shakespeare's autograph copy, though there was little that was foul about it and the chief trouble is the incompetence of the printing."[1]
Since Professor Wilson's early study, other techniques have been developed in order to trace the work of compositors. The acquisition of these techniques has been recorded in the pages of The Library and Studies in Bibliography, and the first large scale application of them has appeared in Dr. Alice Walker's Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953). The trail has been clearly blazed: editors of Elizabethan texts should no longer speak vaguely of compositorial error or sophistication. Many old textual
| | |