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Notes
See my "Cast-off Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly, VI (1955), 259-273.
E, rather than C or D, because not all of the material before the Tragedies was set by A and B, and C and D may later be required to designate compositors in the Comedies.
See Alice Walker, "Some Editorial Principles," Studies in Bibliography, VIII (1956), 95-111. How important it is that as much as possible be learned about the compositors of the First Folio is here set forth, and illustrated, with Dr. Walker's usual incisiveness.
The bibliographical pecularities of the First Folio have lately produced a wealth of unexpected new information, not only about how the book was produced but also about the men who printed it and the materials from which they worked. (There is even evidence indicating that the copy for Folio Timon of Athens was in two different hands—only one of which, of course, can have been Shakespeare's.) But new investigative techniques have had to be developed, and the evidence has had to be dug for and recorded and analyzed before it could be understood. Hence my study of the printing of the First Folio has taken much more time than was originally planned for it. I hope to have it completed, however, by the end of 1957.
Strictly speaking, individual types are but the primary tools, not the only ones, used in this determination. Other kinds of evidence are sometimes essential. Rules, in particular, are invaluable in the Tragedies —as Dr. John Schroeder's forthcoming book (of which I have seen the dissertation version) will show. I should like to suggest, however, on the basis of an entirely independent study of the rules used in the Folio, that evidence from "box" rules alone has very real limitations. It can generally tell us only the order in which successive groups of formes were printed; and even this testimony, when unconfirmed by other evidence, can be—and sometimes is—seriously misleading. The order of individual formes can be absolutely determined only by a study of individual types—or of these in combination with evidence from rules (both "box" and "center"), from pagenumber errors, running titles, and the like.
Recto pages, here and hereafter, are indicated by leaf-numbers: only versos are given superscripts.
Difficulties about Henry VIII can alone be supposed responsible for this. The last three and a half pages of Richard III were evidently delayed only because these pages fall at the beginning of quire t, and so share four formes of this quire with pages of Henry VIII, which begins on t3. Thus the lateness of the final pages of Richard III has no special significance—though conceivably it may have some bearing on the fact that most of the last scene of the Folio text is based upon Q3 instead of the annotated Q6 that served as copy for most of the rest of the play.
Dr. Willoughby observed, more than twenty years ago, that A and B appear to have had nothing to do with Romeo; and it has since been recognized that Titus and Romeo were set by the same hand. Thus we find, in an article by the late Philip Williams in the preceding volume of these Studies, "I have [not] yet been able satisfactorily to identify the compositor who set the folio texts of Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet and whose work [I] suspect in other plays." See Studies in Bibliography, VIII (1956), 12. But it should be noted that Dr. Walker dissents. She believes that Romeo and most of Titus were set by Compositor B (whom she also considers solely responsible for the setting of Othello). I find that one page of Titus, the very first (cc4), was set by Compositor B; that B also set, or rather reset, the last half page of the present Folio text of Romeo; but that Titus and Romeo are otherwise entirely E's work, as are also the second and third pages of the Troilus text now found in the Folio.
This is not the place to discuss the possible reasons for these absences. Suffice it to say here that they were frequent but usually short, and that the overall evidence strongly suggests that most of them were caused by the demands of occasional lots of job printing—though illness, drunkenness, or mere truancy (to mention only a few of many possible causes) may sometimes have resulted in brief absences. The observed facts do not warrant the supposition that either A or B worked on any large project—another of the Jaggard folios, for example—during the absences that so often retarded the work on Shakespeare's tragedies. Not, that is, until A's very long absence, to be noticed again later, beginning just after he finished setting pp4v.
The evidence by which it can be determined from which case a given page was set cannot be described here. But the determination can usually be made with great certainty. (For the sake of simplicity I here use "case" to indicate a "set of cases". Strictly speaking, of course, one or more sets of cases are used to print a book.)Neither A nor B always used the same type-case. When both compositors were absent, for example, the first of them to return did not always return to the same case he had used just before going elsewhere. Thus A, after setting mm4v from one case, set mm2v from the other—and from the same one that E used in setting ee1v:6. So mm2v cannot have been started until ee1v:6 had been finished. A, therefore, cannot have set mm2v immediately after mm4v: there was an interval in which A was absent.
It has long been known that only one skeleton was used throughout the Tragedies, and this has seemed very strange. It is no whit stranger in the Tragedies than elsewhere, however, once the independent-sequence hypothesis is abandoned, as it now evidently must be.
Although the initial direction calls for "A Bnaket", the scene does not show, I think, an extraordinary large number of obvious compositor's errors—the errors with which the proof reader was chiefly concerned—and no really important changes were effected. More press-corrections were in fact made in the 85 lines set from manuscript than in the approximately 170 other lines in the forme, the lines set from the quarto; yet the main fault found with E's setting of Titus III.ii may well have been simply that it was slow. Speed seems to have been at least as important as accuracy in Jaggard's shop. (Else B's work would certainly have been proof read more than it was.)
In an article published in these Studies three years ago, when I was only well started on my investigation of the bibliographical peculiarities of the First Folio and still knew very little either of the order of formes in the Tragedies or of Compositor E, I observed that the Folio text of Romeo, unlike other play-texts in this part of the book, contains a large number of press-variant formes; that Romeo is "peculiar in the abundance of obvious errors that both its corrected and uncorrected states show"; and that in these respects "Titus is much more like Romeo than are the others". The proof reading for Romeo and Titus was sometimes neither prompt nor careful; yet an unusually large number of the formes for these plays were proofed. See "The Proof-Reading of the First Folio Text of Romeo and Juliet," Studies in Bibliography, VI (1953-54), 61-70. A number of additional press-variant formes have been found since this article was written, most of them in Titus.
Precisely how much and what material was distributed, and when, can almost always be determined by means of the individual types used in printing the Folio. As a rule there can also be little doubt as to who did the distributing, though this can never be really proved.
There seems no other reasonable explanation for the demonstrable fact that A changed cases just before setting mm3, then changed back again just before setting mm4v.
Not quite completely finished, however, since the closing lines that now appear in Gg1 (mispaged 79) were set somewhat later and by Compositor B—evidently only when all hope of having Troilus follow Romeo in the completed book had been finally abandoned (see below).
The word stint has so often been used to denote the material set by one compositor before he was relieved by another that it is likely to suggest alternate setting by two compositors working on successive pages. It should not of course, be supposed to imply such setting in the First Folio.A new and therefore unfamiliar line of argument is pursued in the following analysis, and the reader may find it neither easy nor, as to its conclusion, so compelling as I believe it to be. The peculiarities to be discussed are nevertheless so unusual that I am reluctant to leave them unmentioned.
Pages qq3v and 2 are somewhat more suspect than qq5, since the abnormality of qq2v:5 may show only that, after his temporary absence (while E alone set qq3:4v), B accidentally failed to take back the same block of copy that he had used to set qq3v. E may already have started work on qq2v when B reappeared. The switches after pp1:6v and qq2v:5, on the other hand, can hardly have been accidental.
Hamlet and Othello were also set, I take it, from annotated quartos; and these must sometimes have made more difficult copy than some manuscripts—clean scribal transcripts, for example. But there is no evidence that either the last five and a half pages of Hamlet or the first six of Othello were considered beyond the combined powers of Compositor E and the proof reader who reviewed his work.
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