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Notes
See, e.g., Hamlet, ed. T. M. Parrott and H. Craig (1938), pp. 41ff; Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare ( 1942, 2nd edn, 1951), p. 64; A. Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953), p. 137 ("We have in Q2 the authoritative text, printed in the main from foul papers.")
'The Textual Problem of Hamlet: A Reconsideration', Review of English Studies,n.s., II (1951), 328 ff; Textual Problems of the First Folio (1953).
The Folio prefers 'sinewes', but one instance of 'sinow' (3 Henry Vl, II.vi.91) and three of o in the adjective (Love's Labour's Lost, IV.iii.308, sinnowy; As You Like It, II.ii.14, synowie; Troilus, II.ii.259, sinnowie) suggest that the o may have been Shakespearian practice.
The hypothesis of a diplomatic text, like that of the printer's preference for printed copy, seems to me an anachronism.
Cf. Dr. Walker's own view of the divergences between Q1 and Q2 in the last four acts: "If Q2 continued to be printed from a corrected copy of Q1, it is difficult to see how it came to make some of its blunders" (RES, op. cit., p. 331).
On the other hand in Troilus and Cressida, although F revises and amplifies the stage-directions of Q as well as inserting new ones, it tends to keep Q's original framework and never transposes the order of the characters. But this permits no inference about Hamlet, where the circumstances may have been very different.
I follow Willoughby's division of the F text between its two compositors. See The Printing of the First Shakespeare Folio, p. 58.
Cf. Philip Williams's analysis of the spelling of this name in Lear ('Two Problems in the Folio Text of King Lear', Shakespeare Quarterly, IV (1953), 455-456).
This paragraph needs qualifying with a note that Dr. Walker queries the attribution to compositor A of one block of three and a half pages. If Willoughby is wrong about this, then the names Fortinbras and 'Osricke' occur in B's work only.
What another compositor working from Q2 did in fact do with this name appears from Q3. Starting off with y, he nevertheless ends up with i seven times out of ten. In Q4, printed from Q3, y increases to five times. But the original i still appears in half the instances.
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