 | |  |
The aim of this article is to present a list of the press-variants revealed by collation of the nineteen copies of Q1 Othello (1622) included in the Bartlett and Pollard Census,[1] so that a scholar using one copy of the book may know how its text differs from the texts of the other eighteen copies. Since, however, the press-variants seem to provide evidence about the degree to which proofreading in Nicholas Okes's printing-house did or did not safeguard the transmission of the manuscript copy underlying the quarto, this article offers an interpretation of that evidence secondarily. Indeed, the strong probability—discovered by Dr. Alice Walker and further demonstrated by Professor Fredson Bowers[2] —that an annotated quarto served as copy for the Folio has made the degree of Okes's accuracy more crucial than ever to those who try to account for the correspondences and variants between the Q1 and Folio texts. Moreover, the evidence about proofreading indicates that the printshop's effect on the transmission of the text needs to be accounted for in more detail before it is safe to say, as Professors Nevill Coghill and E. A. J. Honigmann[3] have suggested in recent years, that some variants between the two substantive texts of Othello represent different stages of Shakespeare's thoughts, rather than the inaccuracies of scribes and compositors coupled with playhouse cuts in the quarto copy and some editorial interference in the Folio.
Bibliographical descriptions of Q1 are to be found, of course, in Bartlett and Pollard's Census and in W. W. Greg's A Bibliography of English Printed Drama to the Restoration. To conserve space, here I merely list the nineteen copies, giving the Census number, the abbreviation used to refer to the copy in the table of variants, and the copy's location:
- (796) Bodl, Bodleian Library
- (797) MB, Boston Public Library
- (798) BM1, British Museum
- (799) BM2, British Museum
- (800) CLU-C, Clark Library, U.C.L.A.
- (801) Cohen, Estate of the late W. W. Cohen, N.Y.C.
- (802) Dyce, Victoria and Albert Museum
- (803) Edin, Edinburgh University
- (804) CtY-EC, Elizabethan Club, Yale University
- (805) DFo1, Folger Library
- (806) DFo2, Folger Library
- (807) MH, Harvard University
- (808) CSmH, Huntington Library
- (809) NNPM, Pierpont Morgan Library
- (810) NN, New York Public Library
- (811) Petw, Petworth House, Sussex
- (812) Pforz, Pforzheimer Library
- (813) PPRF, Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia
- (814) Trin, Trinity College, Cambridge
The quarto includes forty-eight leaves collating A2 B-M[4] N2. Since several of the nineteen copies collated are imperfect, they yield only the following numbers of sheets printed by Okes: Sheet A (15 ⅔), B (18), C (17 ¾), D (17), E-H (19), I (18 ½), K-M (18), N (15). Of the book's twenty-four formes—that is, the four-page groups that printed one side of a quarto sheet—nine contain press-variants.
| | |