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Notes
I am grateful to Computer Services of Illinois State University for the use of facilities; to Professor Richard C. Reiter for advice and for writing the program; and to my graduate assistant Joann Laetsch for coding the data. Professor Evans very kindly supplied me with corrected galleys of his text of The Merchant, and my collations were made from them. Most of my collating was done during the academic year 1967-68, when I had the good fortune to hold a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The Merchant was entered in the Stationers Register in July, 1598, by James Roberts with the stipulation that it not be published without the permission of the Lord Chamberlain. It was reentered in October, 1600, by Thomas Heyes with Roberts' consent, and Q1 (1600) was published by Heyes with Roberts as printer. Q1 offers a good text and is generally thought to be printed from clean copy "very close to Shakespeare's own manuscript" (John R. Brown, ed., The Merchant of Venice, 1955, p. xiv). Q2, dated 1600 on the title page, was published in 1619 and is a reprint of Q1. In Shakespeare Folios and Quartos (1909), A. W. Pollard showed that the date 1600 was probably false, and proof of this theory was supplied in the following year by W. J. Neidig, "The Shakespeare Quartos of 1619," MP, 8 (1910), 145-163. Previously most editors had assumed that Q2 was the earlier of the two quartos. It is generally agreed that the F1 text of the play was printed from Q1, although the evidence for this conclusion has been questioned by Hardin Craig, A New Look at Shakespeare's Quartos (1961), pp. 107-108. There was some influence of the playhouse on the Folio text, for it is slightly censored and contains new musical notes. Perhaps the copy of Q1 used for F1 had served as a prompt book, or, more likely, a prompt book was consulted in addition to Q1.
"Rough Notes on Editions Collated for I Henry VI," Shakespearean Research Opportunities, ed. W. R. Elton, No. 2 (1966), 41-48; "Rough Notes on Editions Collated for As You Like It," SRO, No. 4 (1968/69), 66-72. I conducted partial or spot collations of forty editions to test their value, and seven of them are included among the sixty-three.
The names of the "Sallies" are omitted, since they are a problem peculiar to this play and the large number of variants for certain editions would distort some of the statistics.
A computer card was made for each of the 2583 variants. One column was used for each edition. The reading of Q1 was recorded as zero, and every edition that agreed with it was recorded as zero. The earliest edition to disagree with Q1 received a one-punch as did all subsequent editions that agreed with it. The next edition to provide a new reading (if there was another reading) received a two-punch, and so on. It was thus possible to record up to ten different readings for each variant passage. One column was used for recording the value, one for recording the category, and four for recording the line number (according to Through Line Numbering, as used by Charlton Hinman in the Norton facsimile of the First Folio, 1968). The language used was 360 Fortran IV Level G, and the computer was an IBM 360 Mod. 40.
These two editions were chosen as recent, moderately conservative texts by single editors, one British and one American.
There are 37 transpositions; both Evans and Alexander agree with Q1 in 36 of these and with Q2 once. Often transpositions that appear in later editions were not intentional, but they were recorded in my collations if there seemed any chance that they were intentional or if they were repeated by a later editor.
The date of each edition is that of the volume which contains The Merchant. II and III indicate the second or third edition included in this study (not always the second or third edition). Corrected readings were used for Q1 and also for Q3 (see note 23 below). Since the quarto of 1652 (Q4) consists of pages of Q3 with a new title page, it is ignored. Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963), I, 261, found no proof correction in the text of The Merchant. My collations of F1 were based on the Vincent-Sibthorp copy at the Folger Library with consultation of the Yale and Norton facsimiles. My collation of F2 was made from the University of Illinois copy, with consultation of Folger copy 6; no press variants were observed. The Illinois copy was used for F3, with consultation of Folger copy 1; four proof corrections appear in the Illinois copy on sig. O5v, where the page number is corrected from "163" to "166", "Ttribe" is changed to "Tribe," "Shyloc" is altered to "Shylock," and "it is" becomes "is it" (I.iii.52, 62, 122). The Illinois copy primarily and Folger copy 1 were used for F4; no proof correction was observed. I have ignored the special punctuation marks in Capell's edition, except that where Capell indicates in aside, I have treated his reading as if he had given the stage direction. I have done the same for the New Cambridge edition, but have not included all the rewritten stage directions.
There are an excessively large number of metrical variants in Dyce and Old and New Cambridge because these editions used the -ed form where other editions used -'d.
R. B. McKerrow in his British Academy Lecture for 1933, The Treatment of Shakespeare's Text by His Earlier Editors, 1709-1768, pointed out that The Merchant is the only one of the comedies for which Rowe supplied scene divisions not in the folios and that the divisions correspond in part with those of Granville's adaptation The Jew of Venice (1701).
G. B. Evans, "The Text of Johnson's Shakespeare (1765)," PQ, 28 (1949), 425-428, showed that Theobald's edition of 1757 served as the basis of Johnson's text for I Henry VI, and he suggested that it served for a number of other plays as well. Arthur M. Eastman, "The Texts from Which Johnson Printed His Shakespeare," JEGP, 49 (1950), 182-191, concluded that Johnson used Theobald (1757) for twenty-three plays, Warburton for two plays, and both for eleven plays, including The Merchant.
Originally, I recorded about one hundred variants between Rowe I and II and about 280 between New Cambridge I and II. However, an unusually large proportion of these were trivial and were omitted when the 5000 variants were reduced to 2583.
See the New Variorum edition, ed. H. H. Furness (1888), pp. 275-276. Furness himself thought that Q1 and Q2 were printed from separate transcripts of a stage-copy, with an inferior transcript behind Q1 (Heyes). Although he knew it to be based on Q1, he printed the First Folio text in his own edition (see his Preface and pp. 274-275). In the Forewords to the Griggs-Praetorius facsimiles of Q1 and Q2, F. J. Furnivall maintained that the Heyes quarto was the better text, but he believed that the Roberts quarto was the earlier.
The Old Cambridge editors (Vol. II, p. x) thought that though the quartos were printed from the same manuscript, Q2 was more accurate.
"Compositor B's Role in The Merchant of Venice," SB, 12 (1958), 75-90. McKenzie gives a full analysis of the 3200 variants between Q1 and Q2 and rejects the possibility of a reviser other than Compositor B in the speeches. He finds 134 substantive alterations in the speeches in Q2 and thinks that the group of 116 "effective changes . . . does for the most part show the same combination of misdirected ingenuity, deliberate tampering and plain carelessness which Miss Walker has elsewhere found in the work of [Compositor] B." McKenzie discusses punctuation changes in Q2 in "Shakespearian Punctuation—A New Beginning," RES, n.s., 10 (1959), 361-370.
This fact is from the computer's table showing the relationship of F1 to each of its (two) predecessors.
In each of his editions Theobald listed a quarto of The Merchant dated 1637 with a title page and publisher different from those in Q3. He did not list Q3. W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, I (1939), 280, thinks that "presumably the description was based on a faked copy."
A collation of Folger copies 1-5 of Q3 shows that proof corrections were made, several of them substantive. For example, in the corrected state of sig. H1v there is a comma after the second "I" in "I wou'd lose all, I sacrifize them all" (IV.i.286): Qq 1-2 and the folios have "I" without the comma, Rowe emended to "I'd," and Pope, who is given credit for the emendation, emended to "Ay," which, with or without the comma, has been used by all subsequent editors. Credit should go to the Q3 corrector. Also, on sig. E4, where Furness (p. 273) calls Q3's emendation of "raine" to "reine" in "In measure reine thy joy" (III.ii.113) a spelling change by the compositor and the "only one real emendation" in Q3, the alteration is really a proof correction, the uncorrected reading (Folger copy 4) being "raine." (Copy 4 is probably uncorrected because in the next line it has "I feel to much" corrected to "too" in copies 1, 2, 3, and 5. There are four other press variants in the inner forme of sig. E, but the others are less conclusive.) Here Johnson conjectured "rein" and was followed by several nineteenth-century editions, including Old Cambridge, and by Neilson and London among modern editions. See Furness, p. 150, for commentary.
Black and Shaaber, pp. 42-46, 68-69. For The Merchant Black and Shaaber recorded eleven metrical variants for F2, two for F3, and none for F4. Among those which I counted as verbal rather than metrical are F2's omission of "then" in F1's "To intrap the wisest. Therefore then thou gaudie gold" (III.ii.101) and F2's "happier then in this" for F1's "happier then this" (III.ii.163). The first improves but does not by itself succeed in regularizing the meter, and the second actually changes the sense in one of the cruxes of the play.
McKerrow, Treatment of Shakespeare's Text, and Alice Walker in her British Academy Lecture of 1960, Edward Capell and His Edition of Shakespeare, have emphasized Capell's contributions. See also Hymen H. Hart, "Edward Capell: The First Modern Editor of Shakespeare" (diss., University of Illinois, 1967) and the author's abstract of it in Shakespeare Newsletter, 17 (1967), 50.
In F3 Black and Shaaber found almost twice as many editorial changes per play in the tragedies as in the comedies, and in F4 almost three times as many; they suggested (p. 51) that the lack of interest in the comedies during the Restoration may have been partly responsible. It seems too that during three centuries, if not before 1700, the greater precision of wording and importance of thought expected of the serious plays may have stimulated textual variety, especially in conjunction with texts that are more difficult for other reasons. The number of editorial changes studied by Black and Shaaber in The Merchant was below average for the comedies in F2, slightly above average in F3, and average in F4.
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