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Notes
See the article by John Russell Brown, "The Rationale of Old-Spelling Editions of the Plays of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries," Studies in Bibliography, XIII (1960), 49-67, and the rejoinder by Arthur Brown, ibid., pp. 69-76; see also Fredson Bowers, "Today's Shakespeare Texts and Tomorrow's," On Editing Shakespeare (1966), pp. 137-179.
Cf. Alice Walker, "Compositor Determination and Other Problems in Shakespearean Texts," Studies in Bibliography, VII (1955), 9, and Arthur Brown, "Editorial Problems in Shakespeare: Semi-Popular Editions," Studies in Bibliography, VIII (1956), 19.
See, for example, the interesting essay "What's in a Name?" in G. Wilson Knight's The Sovereign Flower (1958), pp. 161-201.
See the survey of editions at the end of this article. Line references are to the Third Cambridge Edition, 1891-1893.
Nobody has yet modernized the form Sala which occurs in the same context (H5 1.2.44, 51) to Saale, the affluent of the Elbe, though it is unmistakably identified as such by the reference to the March of Meissen, the territory between the Saale and the Elbe in medieval times. The basis for the original Holinshed passage linking the river Saale with the area subject to Salic Law is a popular etymology deriving the adjective "Salic" from this river. However obscure the origin of "Salic" has remained to the present day, there is no question that it was first used with reference to the area of the lower Rhine and has nothing to do with the Elbe affluent. It is perhaps best to leave the name in its First Folio form since this is not an Elizabethan variant but the medieval Latin name of the river Saale.
In Thomas Kyd's The Housholders Philosophie (1588), for example, the additional forms Myllain and Mylain occur. In this connection one might also question the tendency of some editors to take into account the orthography of toponyms in Shakespeare's sources such as North and Holinshed since these forms are no less accidental than those of other Elizabethan texts.
This does not hold true for the hyphenation of significant names which has to be counted among the accidentals; see the Folio readings of the names in MM 4.3.1-19. George Lyman Kittredge seems to have been the first to discard hyphenation of these names altogether except for those cases which aim at a special effect, for example, Mock-water in WIV 2.3.51. Some editors have followed his example.
One of the earliest examples of this device is perhaps to be found in the anglicized version of Every Man in His Humour. The hyphenated names Downeright, Well-bred and Brayne-worme are not differentiated from their common adjectives or noun; Kno'well, however, is already slightly disguised, and the form looks surprisingly similar to the surname Knowell listed by C. W. Beardsley, A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames (1901), with a seventeenth-century occurrence. The important difference, of course, is that Jonson prepared this play very carefully for his folio edition of 1616 and, unlike Shakespeare, had a reading public in mind.
See Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963), I, 180f., and T. H. Hill, "Spelling and the Bibliographer," The Library, 5th Series, XVIII (1963), 1-28.
If Hand D of Sir Thomas More is identified with Shakespeare, the case of Scilens in 2H4 furnishes a good example how an authorial spelling of a significant name disappears in the transmission of the text. Even in Qa the name does not always appear as Scilens; several times it has been changed by the compositor, assuming homogenous authorial spelling, to Silens and Silence. On the pages of Qb all traces of the Sc- spelling have been removed, and F1, whatever the nature of Jaggard's copy, reads Silence throughout. The assumption that the spelling of significant names occurring only once or twice was even more subject to compositorial interference is strongly supported by the evidence of the later folios.
The F2 reading Dizy has to be attributed to the general change in word endings on this page (Sig. G3); see below, footnote 20.
Steevens' note in the Variorum Edition of 1803 reads "The old copy has Dizey." As mentioned above, F1 reads Dizie, Ff2-4 Dizy. Which "old copy" may have been intended does not become clear.
The New Arden editor considers part of the typographical evidence but makes no use of compositor analysis.
Compositor A: tye (TMP 5.1.253; AWW 1.3.171; R2 4.1.77; TRO 5.8.21<Q1 tie; COR 2.2.63); tie (TRO 2.3.98). Compositor B: tye (COR 3.1.314; MAC 3.1.17; 4.1.52; LR 4.2.14 <Q1 tie; ANT 2.1.23; 2.6.6, 117; CYM 3.7.15; 5.4.147; 1H4 1.2.171: B?); tie (MM 4.2.167; SHR 2.1.21).
William S. Kable, "The Influence of Justification on Spelling in Jaggard's Compositor B," Studies in Bibliography, XX (1967), 236.
Since many editors have retained F2 Shooty, it may be of interest to examine this text. The F2 compositor has rather consistently changed the -ie endings of Sig. G3 to -y, except for monosyllabic words (tie>tye a23, die>dye b56, 59, 66.) We do not know why Shootie was not altered to Shootye, analogous to tye and dye. Perhaps the F2 compositor simply followed a mechanical analogy to other polysyllables in -ie or, less likely, may have made the change consciously since ty is a seventeenth-century variant of tie. Whatever his understanding of his predecessor's form may have been, Shooty is a derived reading without authority.
The same reluctance can be observed with the name of Falstaff's filching retainer in WIV and H5; since the eighteenth century the form Nym has been used. The corresponding verb in its original meaning "take" was already archaic in Elizabethan times and had deteriorated to "steal, pilfer." The modern spelling of this word is nim, and a strong defense of the form Nym cannot be based on the copy-text since both forms occur, Nim being more frequent.
The -au- spelling of Launce is also invariable in the authoritative text closest to Shakespeare's foul papers (F1). An explanation for these consistent spellings might perhaps be found in Shakespeare's autograph: Hand D in Sir Thomas More writes all phonetically similar words with the exception of flanders in the same way (graunt, comaund, ffraunc, advauntage); the single form comand (170), Dyce's reading, is no longer legible in the manuscript.
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