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Notes
In this article I have used the Shakespeare Association facsimile of Q2 (1949) and photostats of the Heber-Vernon copy of Q1 in the Folger Shakespeare Library. References are to the line-numbering of the Q2 facsimile.
E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare (1930), I, 341-345; H. R. Hoppe, The Bad Quarto of Romeo and Juliet (1948); W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (1955), pp. 225-228.
Robert Gericke, "Romeo and Juliet nach Shakespeare's Manuscript," Shakespeare Jahrbuch, XIV (1879), 270-272; Chambers, op. cit., I, 344; Sidney Thomas, "The Bibliographical Links between the First Two Quartos of Romeo and Juliet," RES, XXV (1949), 110-114; Greg, op. cit., pp. 230-231.
Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (1942), p. 62; R. Hosley, "The Received Text of Romeo and Juliet," SQ, IV (1953), 15-16, and The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (1954), pp. 161-162. In The Shakespeare First Folio Greg writes (p. 231) that in addition to the reprinted passage "there are others in which Q1 was at least consulted by the printer of Q2, presumably owing to the occasional obscurity of the manuscript."
Greta Hjort, "The Good and Bad Quartos of Romeo and Juliet," MLR, XXI (1926), 141-142; G. I. Duthie, "The Text of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet," Studies in Bibliography, IV (1951-52), 3-29; J. Dover Wilson, "Recent Work on the Text of Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare Survey, 8 (1955), 81-99; Duthie and Dover Wilson, Romeo and Juliet (1955), pp. 113-115. In Principles of Emendation in Shakespeare (1928), p. 20, Greg suggested that the first two sheets of Q1 had been corrected and used as copy for Q2.
Possibly because they attempted for some months to work from the position that Q2 was mostly printed from the foul papers (p. 114). A few examples are discussed in section II below. In defense of their adoption of Q1 "name" in place of Q2 "word" at II.ii.44, the editors argue (p. 155) that the Q2 editor, in collating his exemplar of Q1 with the foul papers, must have misread the correct reading of the foul papers and then substituted his misreading for the correct reading of the quarto copy. However, the weakness of this proposition becomes evident when we recall that the Q2 editor would have had to mistake a given manuscript reading despite the concurring evidence of Q1. For such an editor would not be in the position of a compositor spelling out manuscript copy unaided; rather, he would be comparing his manuscript with a printed text. He would have (in effect) one finger on the printed quarto reading, another on the corresponding manuscript reading; and he would glance back and forth from one reading to the other. For example, to conform to the New Cambridge hypothesis he would come upon "coniuration" in the foul papers at V.iii.68. The ductus litterarum would make possible the misreading "commiration". The Q2 editor would then glance at his First Quarto, where the reading appeared correctly (although in plural form) as "coniurations". But this (the editor would feel) could not be right, and anyway the manuscript reading would still appear to him to be "commiration". Therefore (an insert slip being here unnecessary) he would substitute the nonsense word "commiration" for "coniurations" in the quarto copy. Such a train of events is unnecessarily complicated and presupposes perhaps excessive "stupidity" on the part of the Q2 editor.
In the reprinted passage: (1) Q1-2 "Anselme", a common error for "Anselmo" at I.ii.68; (2) "Vtruuio" for "Vitruuio" at I.ii.69; and (3) "fire" (Q2 "fier") for "fires" at I.ii.94. Beyond the limits of the reprinted passage: (4) "sinne" (Q2 "sin") for "pain" at I.v.96 (although Q1 signature C3v is not among those supposed by the New Cambridge editors to have served as annotated-quarto copy for Q2); (5) omitted speech-headings for the Friar and the Nurse at III.iii.85b and 86b, so that lines 85b-86a ("O wofull simpathy: / Pitious prediccament") are continued to the Nurse; the New Cambridge editors supply the missing speech-headings, so as to assign lines 85b-86a to the Friar; (6) "change" for "changd" or "changed" at III.v.31; (7) "Death" for "Dead" at V.iii.87.
For example, Professor Wilson's Shakespeare Survey article does not demonstrate the hypothesis of annotated-quarto copy; it merely demonstrates that Q1 occasionally influenced the text of Q2 during the printing of that edition.
The New Cambridge editors suppose that only 33 of Q1's 75 printed pages served as annotated-quarto copy for Q2 (D4-4v are listed only in the notes to the edition, F4v only in Professor Wilson's article); and the text of Q2 (3,007 lines in Chambers's count) is over a third again longer than that of Q1 (2,232 lines). Other difficulties connected with the hypothesis of annotated-quarto copy are commented on by the editors (p. 115; compare Shakespeare Survey, p. 96).
Compositor's consultation of a printed text seems also to have occurred during the typesetting from manuscript of the Second Quarto of Hamlet (1604-5); see Fredson Bowers, "The Textual Relation of Q2 to Q1 Hamlet," Studies in Bibliography, VIII (1956), 39-66.
In seeking to establish a bibliographical link between A and B, the critic is in possession of all the evidence (the readings of the two editions), whereas in seeking to establish a manuscript link he lacks the evidence of MS. That is to say, the case for a bibliographical link involves an inference (based on concurrent readings preserved in A and B) concerning the relationship of an extant reading in B to an extant reading in A, whereas the case for a manuscript link involves an inference (based on variant readings preserved in A and B) concerning the relationship of an extant reading in B to a lost reading in MS. Hence in the nature of things a manuscript link will usually be less readily demonstrable than a bibliographical link.
A. W. Pollard and J. Dover Wilson, "The 'Stolne and Surreptitious' Shakespearian Texts: Romeo and Juliet, 1597," TLS, August 14, 1919, p. 434. The authors advanced the hypothesis (since withdrawn) that this and other concurrences between Q1 and Q2 resulted from a common manuscript source for the two editions.
For this suggestion, as well as for much valuable criticism, I am indebted to Professor Fredson Bowers.
Paul L. Cantrell and George Walton Williams, "The Printing of the Second Quarto of Romeo and Juliet (1599)," Studies in Bibliography, IX (1957). Compositor A typeset all pages of Q2 except K3v, L3-3v, L4-4v, and M1, which were set by Compositor B. I am indebted to the authors for permitting me to make use of their article in typescript, and I am especially grateful to Mr. Williams for helpful criticism of my own article.
The possibility that Q2 Compositor A, in transmitting Q1 "bon iour", might have altered the reading to a single capitalized word in italic type ("Boniour", misprinted "Bonieur") because in ignorance of French he misinterpreted it as a name applied to Romeo is an extremely remote one, for the Q1 reading is evidently not a name; but in any case the possibility is ruled out by the fact that Compositor A introduced a comma between the name and the salutation, there being no punctuation in Q1 at this point.
The O.E.D. (under an entry for Middle English "iour") cites only the ou-spelling of "jour" and fails to record an eu-spelling of "journal" or "journey". Elsewhere in Shakespeare the word "jour" occurs in Titus Andronicus, I.i.494, First Quarto "bon iour"; in Henry V, IV.v.2, Folio "le iour"; and in As You Like It, I.ii.104, Folio "Boon-iour".
In my edition (pp. 161-162) I have attempted to visualize the compositor's procedure in consulting Q1. I now feel that in parts of Q2 the consultation must have been somewhat steadier (that is to say, less "occasional") than I there suggested, although in several cases the compositor nevertheless failed to consult Q1 within a line or two of a point where his misreading of manuscript copy clearly indicates that he should have consulted Q1. It may be further observed that from time to time Compositor A seems to have consulted Q1 as he began setting a new page of type, for the influence of Q1 is occasionally apparent at the head of a Q2 page but notably lacking at the foot of the preceding page. For example, Q1-2 "Abraham: Cupid" occurs in the first line of Q2 signature D1v, whereas Q2 "prouaunt" and "day" (Q1 "Pronounce" and "Doue") occur in the third line from the bottom of D1. Again, Q1-2 "Passado", "Punto", "Hay", and "Poxe" (Q2 "Pox") occur in the first four lines of Q2 signature E2v, whereas Q2 "Prince of Cats", "Complements", and "dualist a dualist" (Q1 "prince of cattes", "complements", and "Duellist a Duellist") occur in the last five lines of E2. And Q1-2 "Tut" (in what I take to be the common error of "Tut . . . lost" for "But . . . left") occurs in the first line of Q2 signature B2, whereas "But" (the Q2 catchword for this reading) occurs at the foot of B1v.
Between I.ii.53b and I.iii.35 inclusive the quartos vary in six additional substantive readings. Three of the Q2 variants belong to the class of error we normally expect to find in a reprint and therefore probably result from Compositor A's errors of transmission in reproducing the text of Q1: his omission of Q1 "and" at I.ii.72, his substitution of "you" for Q1 "thee" at line 81, and his misprint of Q1 "shall" as "stal" at I.iii.17. Two are apparently the compositor's corrections of obvious errors in Q1: his emendation of Q1 "a" to "an" before "houre" at I.iii.11 and his interpolation of "the" (omitted from Q1) before "Dugge" at line 32. The last variant, Q2 "yeares" for Q1 "yeare" at I.iii.35, occurs at the very end of the reprinted passage and may, accordingly, be explained as probably resulting from the compositor's return to manuscript copy at that point.
The terms "substantive" and "accidental" are here used in the senses suggested by Sir Walter Greg, "The Rationale of Copy-Text," Studies in Bibliography, III (1950-51), 21-22. In counting punctuation-variants I have considered only stops (commas, colons, periods, interrogation points). Line-counts refer to lines of type in Q2.
Shakespeare Survey, p. 83. It should be pointed out that Professor Wilson has inadvertently cited more evidence than actually exists: the speech-headings common to Q1 and Q2 at I.ii.46-58 do not run "Ben", "Romeo", "Ben", "Romeo", "Ben", "Romeo", "Ben", "Rom"; but "Ben", "Romeo", "Ben", "Romeo", "Ben", "Rom".
"Plantan" is the normal 16th- and 17th-century spelling. Since in the late 16th century the unstressed vowel had already been reduced to [ß] or [I] (see Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation, 1953, pp. 255 ff.), the contemporary spellings "planten" and "plantin" are fairly common, and the spelling "planton" is also possible although unrecorded by the O.E.D. Hence the o:a variation at I.ii.52 of Q2 "Plantan" from Q1 "Planton" may be regarded as Compositor A's normalization of an aberrant spelling in his quarto copy.
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