III
It would help towards solving a variety of problems about Elizabethan
printing practice if we knew whether E3-4 and Eiij-iiii had been set by the
same compositor, or by two different members of John Wolfe's printing
house. On the whole it seems more than probable that the two texts are by
different compositors. The cancel was set up by a compositor with a strong
preference for spellings with y rather than i; he
set
bewrayes, slye, exclayme, wype, smylinge, wyll, tryall, hys,
villanyes, tyme, hym, wyth, (to take the first examples that occur)
whereas his copy spells all these with i. It might be supposed
that this spelling variation was adopted only to fill space in the cancel, since
the letter y occupies more space than i. But this
inference must be rejected because the same compositor equally consistently
sets a final -y instead of the longer (and numerous)
-ie spellings of his original, although, if his preference for
y spellings were merely an expedient to fill space, one would
have expected him to set -ye always instead of
-ie
or y. This he does only twice (Eiij, line 27:
anye;
Eiiii, line 28: commoditye);
in the latter case at least he was clearly under more than ordinary pressure
to fill his line with another letter. Significantly he drops a final
-
e after
y (E3, line 5; E4v, line 17) three times.
This abundant evidence that the compositor of the cancel would not
suppress his personal preference for -
y instead of
-
ie
endings, even when it was expedient to do so, makes it certain that he
cannot have set up the original leaves E3-4. It also warns us not to assume
that his other substitutions of
y for
i were made
solely, or even partly, to fill space.
