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notes
W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, I, 276. The identification is based on the ornaments used. As far as I have been able to determine, nothing is known of Bradock which would be of significant value to us in our examination of MND Q1. He was admitted to the Livery on 1 July 1598 and for a time was actively engaged in the trade. Around the turn of the century, he probably printed several play quartos: in 1598 Edward II Q2; in 1600 Every Man out of his Humor; in 1601 The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington; and in 1602 Antonio and Mellida, Antonio's Revenge, and Poetaster (see Greg, Bibliography, I, s.v.). The Stationers' Registers occasionally record his misadventures as well as his normal business transactions, but none of these seem to have any immediate bearing on the matter at hand (see Edward Arber [ed.], A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers. . . ., passim, and R. B. McKerrow [ed.], A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers . . . 1557-1640 [1910], pp. 46-47).
See Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1928 [1951 reprint]), pp. 158-159.
As the skeletons were transferred, there was some shifting of the positions of the running-titles within their own formes: the running-title of C1, for example, goes to D2v and not, as we might expect, to D1 or, if the skeleton were turned, to D3. I see no significance in this.
RT IX, distinguished from the others by the spelling "nights", replaced VI at H3v probably because VI had pied. All of the other RTs were in use from sheet B on.
As I have noted elsewhere ("Notes on the Text of Thierry and Theodoret Q1," SB, XIV [1961], 221), reapppearing types are sometimes hard to identify and mistakes are easy to make. I think that as a general rule one should have a cluster, perhaps four or five, identifications which he regards as positive before he concludes that a distribution has been made. In what follows, the identifications which seem to me less than positive I have indicated with a query. I worked with photostats of the Huntington Library copy of MND Q1.
If, as the running-titles indicate, A(i) was composed before A(o) and we find G(i) type in A(i), we ought to find G(i) type in A(o) also unless it was set from another case. I am pretty confident of the identification of the 'k' at A3.26 but rather dubious about the other identifications in A(o). Since a good many A(o) types were used earlier in the book, the possibility of A(o)'s composition from a different case, and thus by a different workman, is ruled out, but I am not altogether happy about the evidence as it now stands.
See, for example, George Walton Williams, "Setting by Formes in Quarto Printing," SB, XI (1958), 39-53.
I exclude from consideration what seem to be accidental wrong-fonts (e.g., ital for rom S, D4; ital for rom I, D4v; rom for ital S, F4v; sc for ital C, G3; sc for rom P, H3v); VV for W, an occasional substitution which sometimes confirms the testimony of others but which often does not, I suppose because the compositor did not make a very strong differentiation between the two characters; and a small roman capital I which is sometimes used for the I's of the regular supply. As far as the last is concerned, it is possible that valid evidence could be drawn from the appearance of the smaller type, but there were at least two sizes of I's in the case when composition started (as there were of A's, H's, and P's), and I am unable always to distinguish between these and the third, smaller, size which I think was introduced later.
That F3 and F4v were set after F1 and F2v is further indicated by the appearance on these pages of a small "k" employed evidently to eke out k's of the regular size. Since these types do not appear in F(i), they were probably not added to the box but set from their own case.
Type from E2 and E3v reappears on G1:
- m E2,13-G1,16
- p E3v,13-G1,9
- m E3v,24-G1,14
- w E3v,34-G1,12
- b E3v,35-G1,15
Throughout this section of the text, the speech prefix for Puck is Robin, yet at III.i.83 a speech that doubtless belongs to Puck is assigned to Quince. Wilson (p. 122) suggests that in the MS the speech was tagged "pu", and that this was misread as "qu" by the compositor. If so, revision would be indicated since the designation "Puck" belongs to a different level of composition but, Wilson thinks, the revision was very minor.
Op. cit., p. 131. Wilson later notes (p. 132), "Q prints both these speeches as prose. The first might be accidental; the second we must attribute to prose arrangement in the 'copy.'"
In a paper entitled "On the Editing of Elizabethan Drama: Or a Note on the Bowers of Light and Darkness" read before the Renaissance Drama Conference of the MLA in December, 1959, Professor Leo Kirschbaum said: "You remember that the manuscript behind the quarto of MND is considered to be Shakespeare's own papers largely because of hypothetical marginal additions which led the compositor to set up incorrectly lined verse. It now appears that whoever marked off the manuscript [for setting by formes] put down too much for certain pages, with the result that the compositor was forced to relinquish correct lining in order to get all the designated material on the page. So much then for the main evidence that the quarto of MND goes directly back to Shakespeare's pen." If my analysis is correct, Professor Kirschbaum is right about the book having been set by formes, but wrong in the inference drawn from that fact.
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