University of Virginia Library

V

The punctuation of both Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice has been praised as particularly sensitive.[15] It is certainly very light, and the possibility that it represents Shakespeare's own punctuation must be considered. The first question to ask is whether it was typical of Roberts' printing house.

My general impression of the punctuation in the Roberts books I have examined is that the two compositors in whom we are interested, varied their punctuation considerably; this is especially clear in England's Helicon where their copy was possibly in different hands, with as many different kinds of punctuation. However, the lyrics of England's Helicon are perhaps special cases. I will quote some passages from the prose works already examined. First, two passages from Estie's Exposition, the first set by Y, and the second by X:

These two passages are, I believe, representative of the kind of punctuation throughout this book. Occasionally there is a proliferation of commas: Both compositors in Smith's Four Sermons reproduce a peculiar use of the colon to mark direct speech: The examples I have given could be greatly multiplied, but I hope they are sufficient to show that the light punctuation of Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice is by no means the invariable practice of the two compositors who set the plays.

This is borne out by Roberts' Q2 Titus Andronicus; in this book, the compositors made the punctuation heavier than their copy. Not counting question marks, there were some 240 changes which made the punctuation heavier, and some 120 which made it lighter. A good proportion of these must be considered as corrections to the copy; there was a measure of editing in the reprint and the 'editor' may have considered punctuation to be within his scope. Of all the changes, about 80 or so involved semicolons, colons, or full-stops. Titus Andronicus therefore suggests that the compositors of Hamlet and The Merchant tended to add to the punctuation, not reduce it. And despite their changes and some obvious errors, they seem to have been careful and conservative over it; for example, on G2 a comma is kept at the end of a line, where it may imply that the following line breaks out abruptly, stopping the first speaker in the middle of a sentence (IV.ii.80). I have been unable to find any way of treating the copy's punctuation which could be ascribed to one compositor only.

I think this is as far as my investigations will allow me to go in considering the printing of Q2 Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. Obviously there is a lot left to do. We should like to know more about the spelling of each compositor, and, perhaps more important, we should like to know to what kind of errors each compositor was prone. This paper can only be a beginning, and will have achieved its purpose if it has shown the evidence for two compositors in each play, and suggested ways of tackling the many problems connected with editing their work.