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Notes
After I had come to my general conclusions, I heard that Dr. Alice Walker had information that led her to think along the same lines. We corresponded and she most generously gave me a free field. I should have felt more uneasy at accepting this arrangement if she had not assured me that an investigation into James Roberts' compositors would have led her away from the main direction of her studies. I have greatly benefited from her advice; in particular she has helped me to increase the number of significant spellings, and to decide about the allocation of doubtful pages.
A Definitive Text of Shakespeare: Problems and Methods," Studies in Shakespeare, ed. A. D. Matthews (University of Miami, 1952), p. 19. A detailed analysis, with identification of the skeleton-formes, is made in his "The Printing of Hamlet Q2" in the present volume of Studies in Bibliography.
Dr. J. Gerritsen has noticed that two fonts of italic capitals were used for this book; one was used for sheets B,C,D,F,I,N, and O[+A], another (with some swash types) for sheets E,G,H,K,L, and M. This information became available as this paper was going to press. It would seem that X used Y's cases for setting L4v, and also for L1 if it was his work.
In the following tables, I have not noted Ile where it follows a full-stop or begins a verse line in a passage where lines are normally capitalized.
Cf. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare (1930), I, 413; J. D. Wilson, op. cit., 1, 66; and W. W. Greg, op. cit., p. 65.
John Marston's The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image (1598) is the only other book in Roman '82' which I have looked at, but, unfortunately, there is not enough evidence to allocate the pages between the two compositors already known.
Especially interesting are spellings of eleven: Hamlet has 'a leauen' (C3) and The Merchant 'a leuen' (C3), both being set by Compositor X who elsewhere set 'eleuen' (Harsnet, Declaration, Ee4). It would seem that for both plays the copy had a form similar to 'a le(a)uen', which is also found in Addition 'D' of Sir Thomas More. This has a bearing on the theory that Act I of Hamlet was set from a hand-corrected copy of Q1: Q1 and Q2 are very close here and the former reads 'eleuen'.
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