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IV
Dr. Walker's expert scrutiny of the two texts has revealed, as we have seen, a number of resemblances between them. And when due allowance has been made for those which need not have the significance which she attaches to them, enough remain to make it probable that, in the preparation of F, some use was made of Q2. Such a conclusion is not in itself a new one; scholars have sometimes fallen back on the explanation that the printers of F occasionally "consulted" Q2. Dr. Walker ridicules such an explanation as lacking in logic and realism. It is also very inconvenient, since, if neither the nature nor the extent of consultation can be defined, it leaves the position of the modern editor hazy and insecure. But this he may have to put up with. What is illogical, of course, is the easy supposition that a handful of obvious common errors may be explained as due to consultation at the same time as F and Q2 are held to be otherwise independent. As Dr. Walker has so well insisted, in an important clarification of textual theory, to admit consultation in a few instances is to admit its possibility at any point in the text. For it is not to be supposed that every time Q2 was consulted what was taken from it would be a questionable reading; many readings thought to be above suspicion may have come
But Dr. Walker's theory that the actual copy for the Folio Hamlet was a corrected Second Quarto must clearly be rejected.[28] And although this may seem, so long as one accepts that Q2 was used at all, to leave the editorial position materially unchanged nevertheless where so much is uncertain, even the disproving of a hypothesis is something gained.
What remains uncertain is exactly how Q2 was used for F. Professor Duthie has brilliantly shown how Q2 of Romeo and Juliet was set up from a copy containing manuscript and printed leaves,[29] and Dr. Philip Williams has recently argued that a similar composite copy lay behind the F King Lear. [30] In his view the printers set up Lear from a transcript of a promptbook which consisted of a copy of a quarto with some of the leaves replaced by leaves of manuscript; and he suggests that the copy for the F Hamlet may have been of the same kind. I do not know what further investigation may reveal, but I have found no evidence of this. Although significant resemblances between F and Q2 are greater in some passages than in others, notably in I.i.1-94 and II.ii.420-612, these passages also contain significant divergences and it does not seem to me that limits of text can be defined within which F does or does not depend on Q2.
The probability, as I see it, is that when the printer's copy for the Folio was being got together, Heminge and Condell were not satisfied with the Hamlet quarto and, notwithstanding Jaggard's supposed preference for printed copy, supplied a manuscript version. In that case one may tentatively suggest that either the scribe who made a transcript for the printer (Dover Wilson's scribe C) or someone in the printing-house itself made reference to the quarto. The first seems to me the more likely. For everything goes to show that the printers were normally content to work from the copy that was supplied them and make the best they could of it. But I see no difficulty in supposing that a scribe who was charged with preparing a transcript of a manuscript might have a copy of the quarto at hand, or even open, in case of need. How much he may have used it will not be easy to determine.
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