15. "lushious"
The one occurrence of lushious in both copy and Pavier
texts is included in this discussion because Alice Walker put great weight
upon the coincidence of the lushious spelling in Q1 and Folio
Othello. She used this coincidence as evidence that Folio
Othello was derived from a marked copy of Q1 (1622). "It
is
ridiculous to suppose that anomalies like 'timerous' (I.i.76), 'lushious'
(I.iii.346) and 'pudled' (III.iv.144) passed from a fair copy, via a prompt
book, to a manuscript prepared by a book-keeper with (at best) only half an
eye on the prompt-book, and so into Okes's quarto, thereby representing a
common legacy in the quarto and Folio from some common
ancestor."[18] If Miss Walker had
checked the Concordance, she would have found two recorded uses of
luscious, in the Othello passage in question
(I.iii.354
— — Globe numbering) and in A Midsummer Night's
Dream (II.i.251). Both Midsummer Q1
(1600) and the Pavier Q2 (1619) contain the lushious spelling
(C2v in both Qq). Far from being anomalous, the
lushious
form is common to the compositors of Q1 Midsummer, Q1
Othello, and Jaggard's B. It is interesting to note that the
Midsummer lushious is changed to luscious on
N3v in the Folio. Hinman assigns this page to Compositor
C.[19] The point of this example is that
any
common spelling, however "anomalous" it may appear, must be used with
extreme caution in attempting to demonstrate direct derivation of one text
from another.
