University of Virginia Library

The First Edition of Greene's Quip for an Upstart Courtier
by
I. A. Shapiro [*]

I

Only two copies of the first edition of Greene's Quip for an Upstart Courtier (STC 12300) are known to survive: one is in the Bodleian and the other in the Huntington Library. They appear to be identical save in signatures E and F, where important differences are found. A mistaken ordering of these variant readings has obscured the history of the Quip's text. A collation of the two copies has already been printed in Studies in Bibliography [1] and is therefore omitted here, but it is necessary to review fully the variant readings in signatures E and F. It will be convenient to discuss the latter first.

In the outer margin of F1, opposite the passage in which Greene asserts that knavish curriers are evading the statute forbidding them to buy leather hides or backs from tanners, the Bodleian copy has the following side-note:-

In the Huntington copy this side-note does not appear, but otherwise the setting of the page seems identical with that in the Bodleian copy.

Another variant in sig. F occurs on F4v. In the Bodleian copy the last six lines of the page (the last of sheet F) read as follows:-

The corresponding six lines in the Huntington copy read:- The type and setting of the rest of this page are the same in both copies. It should be obvious, though it has not been so, that the Huntington text of F4v is a revision of that found in the Bodleian copy, and that the text was changed to remove the blasphemous comparison of the baker's behaviour in the pillory to that of Christ on the cross. It is astonishing that the version in the Bodleian copy should ever have been set up, let alone printed off and used.

There is nothing in this alteration to indicate that the author necessarily had any hand in it; indeed the wording of the revised version suggests rather that the printer or publisher (in this case the same, John Wolfe) was responsible for it. Clearly the first step was to remove the offending words, 'And for you goodman Baker, you that are cosine to Christ in brooking the pillorie as he did the crosse,' and find a substitute of about the same number of letters. It looks as if the printer began by substituting 'And as for you goodman Baker, that delight to be seen where most people resort, euen on the pillory', and, finding himself still left with blank space, added the otiose 'in the cheefe market place'. Having thus overcompensated heavily, he was driven to omit from the last line the much more meaningful phrase 'by many ounces', for he had to end the page with the same words as formerly, 'you put in', so that the opening words of signature G should follow on naturally. His concern on this last point is evidence that at least some substantial portion of signature G was already set up before F4v was altered.

There can be no reasonable doubt that Greene's original text is to be found in the Bodleian copy of F4v and that the Huntington's variant must be a revision. There seems every reason to suppose that the side-note found on F1 in the Bodleian copy, but not in the Huntington, was removed at the same time as F4v was revised, since both pages are in the same (outer) forme. The alteration on F4v was evidently made to avoid possible, or rather inevitable, offence. No doubt the same motive accounts for the removal of the side-note on F1. The Lords of the Privy Council might well have been annoyed by Greene's jaunty admonition that they 'should do well to look to' one of their responsibilities. There is little likelihood that the side-note was omitted through some accident in the printing-house. It is much more probable that the prudent publisher, looking over a proof of the outer forme of F, decided to play for safety and remove the side-note from F1 at the same time as he ordered a revision of the blasphemous passage on F4v.

For the original text of signature E we have to turn to the Huntington copy, a facsimile of which is now available.[3] This contains, on E3v-E4, the attack on the Harvey brothers which provoked Gabriel Harvey's famous reply in his Foure letters . . . Especially touching Robert Greene . . . 1592. Greene's references to the Harveys fill the last 13½ lines of E3v and the first 8⅓ lines of E4, which also has, in the outer margin, a long side-note designed to make it quite explicit that Richard Harvey and his brothers are here referred to.

In the Bodleian copy the original leaves E3-4 have been replaced by a cancel consisting of two conjugate leaves, the contents of which differ substantively from those of the corresponding leaves in the Huntington copy chiefly by omission of the passage about the Harveys and its accompanying side-note. The original leaves are signed 'E3' and 'E4' whereas the cancel is signed 'Eiij' and 'Eiiii', the variation in the numerals conveniently distinguishing them for reference purposes. The omission of the allusion to the Harveys was compensated for largely by resetting the rest of the text into thirty-three lines on 'Eiij' and its verso, into thirty-four on 'Eiiii' and into thirty-five on its verso, as against thirty-seven lines on all the original leaves, and by reducing slightly the length of the lines of type in the new setting. As well as spacing the diminished text more generously, the compositor of the cancel has stretched it further by frequent use of longer spellings such as bee, twoo, dooth, woorthy, manne, writtes, Infourmer, aunsweare. He also inserted many final and some medial e's, even indulging in the unusual pieece and learge, though otherwise his spellings keep within Elizabethan norms. He has also taken advantage of opportunities to expand abbreviations, changing M. to Maister, 3 to three, & to and (twice) and qd. to quoth (thrice; he unaccountably ignored a fourth opportunity in E4r, l. 26). His substitution of upon for of in 'bestow some odde Angell of Maister infourmer' (E3r, l. 33) may have been prompted by idiomatic considerations as well as by desire to fill more space. More important than the changes so far reported are the textual expansions he permitted himself. These begin in the middle of Eiijv and end at the top of Eiiiiv where, presumably, he realized he now had sufficient material to fill the final page of the cancel. His expansions are of interest in several connections, and are therefore given below with their immediate context, the additional matter being italicized; page and line references are to the context in the original version:

• E3v, ll. 14-15: you may apparently see I am made a curtall, for the Pillory, (in the sight of a great many good and sufficiente witnesses,) hath eaten off both my eares,
• l. 21: with a good crab-tree cudgell

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• E4r, l. 25: but questioned with them of their seuerall occupations.
• l. 26: the seconde a Shoomaker, and the third a Curriar:
• E4v, l. 2: by the aunciente lawes and Statutes

When the compositor of the cancel text came to the beginning of a new paragraph in the middle of Eiiiiv he found it expedient to follow the rest of E4v line for line. But since the length of a line of type in the cancel is shorter than in the original, and the same fount was being used, the compositor was now compelled to set his type more closely, and to reverse the procedure he had followed hitherto. In the second half of Eiiiiv final and medial e's are dropped almost as frequently as earlier they had been introduced, and we find the occasional spellings Lether, shomaker, coms, although in adjacent lines the same compositor used the spellings normal in Elizabethan texts.

Since the compositor of the cancel had obviously taken care that the last line of his last page should end with the same words as his copy, it follows that the cancel was set up at earliest after the outer forme of signature F had been printed off, for had that not yet been done it would have been quicker and cheaper to re-arrange any type already set, no matter how far composition had proceeded. In fact there is nothing to suggest that the cancel was printed before the whole book was completed. Thus there is no reason to question the statements of Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe that the offensive allusion was cancelled only after the Quip was in circulation. Now that we know how scurrilous were the lines removed, there seems more probability than McKerrow allowed to Gabriel Harvey's assertion that Greene paid the printer to omit the offending passage for 'feare to be called Coram for those forged imputations'.[4]

Although we possess only two copies of the first edition of the Quip, the range of variants they chance to include proves that at least three different states of the Quip must once have existed. The first copies put on sale must have contained E3-4 in its uncancelled form (as found in the Huntington copy). This is confirmed by what we know from other sources about the effect of the pamphlet's first publication. Since the Huntington copy contains a revised state of sheet F, it will be safer to assume that no impressions of F's unrevised state (found in the Bodleian copy) got into this first batch. After the Quip was already in circulation the two leaves E3-4 were removed from unsold copies and replaced by the cancel Eiij-iiii (found in the Bodleian copy). Thus the new state of the Quip must have contained a number of copies which combined the cancel Eiij-iiii with a revised version of F; it may indeed consisted entirely of copies so constituted. Of this state no copy has survived though, as we shall see, its former existence is proved by the readings of the second edition. The Bodleian copy represents yet a third state of the first edition. If it was not always unique (which is possible) it must be one of a relatively small number with

that make-up, for there is no reason to suppose that many unrevised versions of sheet F were printed. If, however, any others were used, obviously one or two copies of the first edition may once have existed in yet another state, in which the original E3-4 was combined with the unrevised version of F.

It should now be clear that an editor who wishes to produce a text of the Quip as close as possible to what Greene wrote must reprint signature E from the Huntington copy of the first edition and signature F from the Bodleian copy. Undoubtedly these present the text as Greene sent it to be printed. We cannot determine certainly whether the changes in signature F were made by Greene or by the printer (with or without Greene's knowledge or approval); but since the rewording of F4v in its second state drops, without absolute necessity, a phrase Greene would have wished to retain,[5] it will be safer to attribute these changes to the printer.

II

Each of our only two copies of the first edition of the Quip shows two different and important variants. It is by this chance that we know the original contents of sheet E, and also that sheet F was revised during printing. Quite possibly changes were introduced into the text of other sheets during printing but if so, the chance that gave us variants of E and F has left us with duplicates of the same state of any other sheets that may have been altered. The Huntington and Bodleian copies do not represent all the different combinations that existed even of the varying states of sheets E and F, for it is clear that the copy of the first edition followed in the first reprint of 1592 must have contained the cancelled version of E (as in the Bodleian copy) and a revised version of F. It could not have been the Bodleian copy or another exactly similar to it, for the original comparison of the baker in the pillory to Christ on the Cross does not reappear in the reprint.[6] Moreover the 1592 reprint which Mr Miller believes to be the earliest of that series seems to be following here an improved version of the Huntington text of signature F. The Huntington reading has already been cited above; the Westminster Abbey copy of the Quip reads instead (E3, lines 16-21):-

This follows the original (Bodleian) wording exactly from 'the world cries out . . ." onwards, and is clearly better than the revision in the Huntington copy, for it gets rid of the Huntington's redundant 'where most people resort' and restores the significant phrase 'by many ounces'. We must conclude either that there was a second revision of sheet F (and consequently a third state, now lost), or that the printer of the first 1592 reprint, finding the reading of the revised version of F4v (as in the Huntington copy) unsatisfactory, sought out a copy of the original version (as in the Bodleian) and conflated the two texts to produce a better version. I find the latter explanation difficult to credit, and therefore conclude that sheet F was revised twice during the first printing of the Quip. There are other grounds for holding this view.

Mr Miller has found that some at least of the type of Wolfe's 1592 reprints of the Quip was kept standing.[7] Is it possible that Wolfe, a shrewd printer and publisher of somewhat unorthodox business methods, realizing that Greene's Quip might be a 'best-seller', kept the type of the first edition standing, ready to meet any unexpectedly heavy demand for copies? If so, we have a very simple explanation of how several states of sheet F came to exist, for standing type lends itself in many ways to the generation of variants. If this surmise is correct, the first edition of the Quip may have been much larger than was usual, perhaps even larger than was officially permitted. Whatever its size, the disappearance of all but two copies shows how widely Greene's pamphlet was read, and thumbed out of existence, on first publication. It is also a warning that the total number of variant states may have been greater even than those postulated above, and that most of the textual alterations (possibly all except the cancellation of the passage about the Harveys) may have been introduced by the printer and publisher.

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.

Notes