I. Introduction
From the textual scholar's point of view, the Beaumont and Fletcher
Folio of 1647 is in some ways as interesting a book as its more famous
predecessor, the Shakespeare Folio. In it Humphrey Moseley, the publisher,
gathered, in addition to Beaumont's Masque of the Inner
Temple, his verse letter to Ben Jonson, and a suitably copious
amount
of preliminary material, thirty-three "Beaumont and Fletcher" plays
previously unprinted. The book thus preserves the copy-texts of most of the
works in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon. Of a different order of interest
is the fact that Moseley, evidently to speed production, had the volume
manufactured in sections, bibliographically independent for the most part,
by perhaps as many as seven different printers, the shares of five of which
have been identified.[1] Because
within its covers the bibliographer sees eight moreor-less separate books,
the Folio is an ideal ground for a comparison of the methods
adopted in several contemporary houses for the printing of similar material
in the same format. This article reports the results of a study of the printing
of Section 2, which, it is hoped, will lead to
a more extensive investigation of the work of the other printers who
contributed to the volume.
[2]
