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Notes
Early use of spellings to identify compositors is discussed in some detail in my "Spelling and the Bibliographer," Library, 5th. ser., 18 (1968), 1-28.
Compositor A is discussed on pp. 84-88 where I conclude that the compositor of the comedies before WT is not A of the Histories. For ease of reference, however, I continue to use the accepted designation in this discussion.
C. Hinman, "The Prentice Hand in the Tragedies of the Shakespeare First Folio: Compositor E," SB 9 (1957), 3-20.
Hinman discusses the 'do/go/here' spellings of these compositors in The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, (1963), I, 18-200. Since the fifth compositor, E, does not appear in the comedies, I have not referred to his habits here.
These general observations may be checked in the summary tables of compositorial spellings on pp. 89-91.
Mr. Cairncross's use of the arrangement of SD to identify compositors is discussed briefly on pp. 72-74.
To MV I worked from the Malone Folio in the Bodleian Library, thereafter from the Norton facsimile. Hinman's through-line-numbering system is used throughout for reference.
Other inked quadrats and spaces may be seen at Wiv. 2420, 2421; MM 2690; MV 2396, 2397; AYL 1671; Shr. 300; WT 3355; Jn. 229 and 2H6 3302.
Whether any particular comma is counted as spaced or non-spaced depends partly on individual judgement; preceding or succeeding sorts and the extent to which they are correctly centered, may influence judgement. The italic ligature 'us', for instance, seems always to be followed by a space, but whether there is one in a particular instance is difficult to decide. My counts, therefore, may differ (even though they have been repeated and checked) from the counts of others.—Counts of spaced commas column by column for the pages of the comedies form appendix I of 'Ralph Crane and five Shakespearian First Folio comedies', D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1970.
See for example in the tables on pp. 90-103 the figures for pages with many long lines in Tmp., TGV, Wiv., and MV set by B and C who normally preferred to set spaces after commas in short lines.
In this table and hereafter, 'j' is used to denote occurrence in a long line. When spellings or spaced terminal commas occur in both short and long lines, the counts are given in the form '3:1'.
I shall cite the counts of spacing in this form hereafter: the figures are for spaced terminal commas, spaced medial commas, and non-spaced commas inside short lines respectively.
Ralph Crane and some Folio Comedies, a monograph based on an Oxford D.Phil. thesis (see note 14), has just been published by the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia (1972).
Cairncross, p. 42, does not show the indentation of C's SD; there is a misprint in B's example. Q2 in the antepenultimate line should be O2.
The distribution of the main variants of 'fareyouwell' may be of interest: fare-thee-well D5v, farethee well sslv, fareyouwel K5, fareyouwell G4, P2, R4, a6v, farthee well Gg2v (2), fartheewell Z2v, Bb2, faryewell O4, O4v, faryouwell P5, far-thee-well Z2v.
These figures come from a fairly hasty manual count and may be inaccurate, though not, it is believed, to an extent that affects the argument.
See Hinman II, 380 ff. for an account of the irregular distribution of this part of the comedies. There is nothing intrinsically unlikely about compositors sharing pages: it occurred elsewhere in the Folio even after work practices had become more regular. See also p. 80.
Unlike Mr. Cairncross I find some traces of C in the spacing of some of the pages of the Tragedies section which Hinman assigns to him, but I am unable to write confidently on this at the moment.
Henceforth, to Wt, I discuss only the pages where Hinman's identifications have been questioned or confirmed.
Pafford, "The Winter's Tale: typographical peculiarities in the Folio text", N&Q, 206 (1961), 172-178. The table is on p. 174.
In an earlier investigation for which Hinman's attributions were accepted, but drawing only on the pages about which he was certain, I noticed variation between A's preferred spelling of been/beene/bin and honor/honour in Tmp., TGV, Wiv., and MM, and WT. This and the other evidence is all the more significant if the copy for all these texts had been prepared by the same scribe. In A's pages of the early comedies there are many bin's (Crane's strongly-preferred spelling was byn), a scattering of beene spellings, and no been's at all, yet been is the dominant spelling of A's pages of WT, and there are no bin spellings. In R2, A changes bin to beene.
Crane's spellings of some of the words mentioned here are: doe, goe, here, deere, deuil/l, greif/ue, howre, indeed, mistris, sodaine, yeare/yeere, yong.
These folios are Mille's Treasurie, 1619 (STC 17936), Boccaccio's Decameron, 1620 (STC 3172), Burton's Description of Leicestershire, 1622 (STC 4179), Vincent's Discoverie of Errours, 1622 (STC 24756), and Favyn's Theater of Honour, 1622-3 (STC 10717).
Since my work on these folios relied on spellings derived from Hinman's compositor identifications, I am unwilling at the moment to write more specifically about the compositors in these books. The inescapable point is that these folios show mutually exclusive spelling-patterns, and more than are found in the Folio hitherto. The inference must be made that more than four compositors were employed in their composition.
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