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Notes
In The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963) C. J. K. Hinman identified five workmen. A sixth came to light when in "The Compositors of Shakespeare's Folio Comedies," T. H. Howard-Hill, Studies in Bibliography, 26 (1973), 61-106, distinguished between Compositor A of the Histories and Hinman's Compositor A of the Comedies, whom Howard-Hill renamed F. In "The Shrinking Compositor A of the Shakespeare First Folio," SB, 34 (1981), 96-117, Gary Taylor nominates Compositors H, I, and J for part of the other work commonly assigned to A.
"The Compositors of the Shakespeare Quartos Printed by Peter Short," PBSA, 65 (1971), 393-397; "Simmes's Compositor A and Five Shakespeare Quartos," SB, 26 (1973), 37-60. Though Craven is wrong about 1 Henry IV and Short's section of Richard III, his articles contain much of value.
Hinman, introduction to the Clarendon Press facsimile of Henry IV, Part 1, 1598 (1966), p. ix. In studying both Quartos I have worked from the Clarendon facsimiles; my line references are to the Globe edition (1891) numbering which the facsimiles employ.
Iniurious Impostors and "Richard III" (1964); Memorial Transmission and Quarto Copy in "Richard III" (1970). In his first book Smidt was disinclined to see any evidence of memorial corruption in Q; in his second book he modifies his earlier attack on Patrick's theory.
The former consensus was summarized by W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (1955), pp. 192-93. J. K. Walton disturbed this in The Copy for the Folio Text of "Richard III" (1955). Greg accepted Walton's conclusions in his review in The Library, 5th series, 11 (1956), 125-129; so at first did Fredson Bowers in his review in SQ, 10 (1959), 91-96, but he later withdrew his support in "The Copy for Folio Richard III," SQ, 10 (1959), 541-544, and in Bibliography and Textual Criticism (1964). See also A. S. Cairncross, "Coincidental Variants in Richard III," The Library, 5th series, 12 (1957), 187-190, and, especially, "The Quartos and the Folio Text of Richard III," RES, n.s. 8 (1957), 225-233; J. K. Walton, "The Quarto Copy for the Folio Richard III," RES, n.s. 10 (1959), 127-140 (pp. 139-140 consist of a reply by Cairncross); Silvano Gerevini, Il Testo del "Riccardo III" di Shakespeare (Pavia, 1957); Hardin Craig, A New Look at Shakespeare's Quartos (1961). Gerevini offered a summary (in Italian) of the whole debate in "Ancora sul Testo del Riccardo III," English Miscellany, 21 (1970), 11-33. Walton's various restatements of his position, in response to Bowers, Smidt, and others, are best consulted in The Quarto Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare (1971). In a study (not yet published) which uses computer concordances for a thorough analysis of spelling and punctuation, Gary Taylor concludes that both Q3 and Q6 served as F copy, in a pattern related to page-breaks in the Quartos and the Folio, and to major textual insertions.
Craven, SB, 26 (1973), 46. Ferguson, "The Compositors of Henry IV, Part 2, Much Ado About Nothing, The Shoemakers' Holiday, and The First Part of the Contention," SB, 13 (1960), 19-29.
It is sometimes difficult to tell whether a comma has been spaced or not, and because of poor inking even the existence of a comma may occasionally be in doubt. The precision of my figures is thus illusory, but the counts were made without preconceptions and the essential pattern is unmistakable.
The figures include such locutions as "my gracious Lord" and "my Lord of Buckingham" when these are appellations directed at the lord rather than references to him. They exclude "my L. Maior" on H1.
The variability of the King speech prefixes was drawn to my attention by Professor Antony Hammond, who is editing the New Arden Richard III.
Both the chi-square test and the runs test mentioned below are described by M. Hammerton, Statistics for the Human Sciences (1975). They provide standard formulae for estimating the probability that observed results are due to chance.
The change was pointed out by George Walton Williams in a review of Smidt's Iniurious Impostors in MP, 36 (1966), 265-267. He attributed the setting of entrances towards the right margin over the bulk of the text to "both compositors' desire to save space"—he assumed that just one compositor set Simmes's section and one Short's section.
See S. W. Reid, "Some Spellings of Compositor B in the Shakespeare First Folio," SB, 29 (1976), 102-138 (129-130). Interested scholars may obtain from me copies of a paper which, using the techniques described by William S. Kable, "Compositor B, the Pavier Quartos, and Copy Spellings," SB, 21 (1968), 131-162, lists all Folio Richard III's theoretically copy-reflecting spellings in B's stints and matches them against Q1, Q3, and Q6.
A1 is the title page (verso blank) and A2 has a head title, but otherwise there is continuity between sheet A and sheet C headlines. For a study of this pattern of skeletons in Simmes's Richard II and his share of Richard III, see Peter Davison, "The Selection and Presentation of Bibliographical Evidence," Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, 1 (1977), 123 ff.
By a curious coincidence I count 394 commas within short lines in each compositor's stints: Y spaced 63, X 30.
A more complex, and, strictly speaking, more appropriate way to assess the significance of the disparity between the two men is to work out for each page the proportion of double 'o' spellings which are ligatured, and use a t-test to compare the two sets of proportions (for X's 40 pages and Y's 38), in order to determine the probability that they have been drawn randomly from a single population. The result is t = 2.0, 76 df, p<0.05: the odds are less than one in twenty that the two sets of proportions belong to the same population, so the test supports the view that different compositorial habits are involved.
For a full list of Qo/Q1 variants, including accidentals, see S. B. Hemingway's New Variorum 1 Henry IV (1936), pp. 345-349. But at II.i.70 Hemingway has misread Qo's Saine as Sainc.
Evidence from the spacing of colons has been suppressed from the Qo part of the graph, because it tends to obscure the pattern formed by the other markers. Spaced/ unspaced colons for each page are as follows: C1 0/4, C1v 2/0, C2 0/3, C2v 0/1, C3 1/1, C3v 0/2, C4 0/0, C4v 0/0.
If Compositor Y set B4v of Q1, as the evidence graphed in Figure 1 seems to indicate, he reproduced the two apostrophes which he found in his Qo copy at this point, so it seems likely that he set apostrophes whenever he found them in his copy. As he set none in any of his other Q1 pages before G3, it follows that there were no others in his copy until he reached G3. Therefore, if X and Y worked together on Qo, X not Y introducing apostrophes, Y in Q1 must have been setting mainly from his own Qo pages—except on B4v and from G3 onwards.
Hinman, Clarendon facsimile, p. ix; G. Blakemore Evans in the Riverside Shakespeare (1974), p. 881, inclines towards the same view. But Davison in his New Penguin edition (1968) suspects that "the printer's copy . . . was in Shakespeare's handwriting" (p. 245), as does the New Arden (1960) editor, A. R. Humphreys. For evidence suggesting that the copy was a transcript, see F. Bowers, "Establishing Shakespeare's Text: Poins and Peto in 1 Henry IV," SB, 34 (1981), 189-198.
I refer to the two lists, (a)-(e) on p. lxix, and (a)-(h) on p. lxx; (d) of the first list contains two instances; I ignore knowest in (b) of the second list.
J. Dover Wilson's phrase in his New Cambridge edition of 1 Henry IV (1946), p. 104. In "Linguistic Evidence for the Date of Shakespeare's Addition to Sir Thomas More," Notes and Queries, 223 (1978), 154-156, I showed that ten colloquial and contracted forms which Shakespeare used more often in his later plays could be added together and divided into the number of lines in a play to yield an index to the degree of colloquialism of each play's orthography. 2 Henry IV, with one selected colloquial form to every 20 lines, is twice as colloquial as 1 Henry IV, with one to every 40 lines. For each play a Quarto serves as copy text. 2 Henry IV has 43 instances of a as the weakened form of he; this is completely absent from the Quarto of 1 Henry IV.
I derive these figures from Marvin Spevack's Concordance (1968-75). They are for the full forms of the words only, because Shakespeare prefers aphetic twixt to tween.
Q once omits betweene where it appears in a Folio stage direction; but Q contains betwixt in a passage absent from F, and it once reads betweene where F has tweene, which does not contribute to F's total for between. Simmes's compositor set betwixt 5 times, between twice; Short's Compositor N set betwixt twice; Short's Compositor O set betweene once. The fact that both Simmes's compositor and Short's Compositor N set betwixt in places where F has betweene strongly suggests that they found betwixt in their manuscript copy.
In a review of Bowers's Textual and Literary Criticism in The Library, 5th series, 14 (1959), 211. I should like to thank both the editor and Dr Gary Taylor for suggesting improvements to this article, and Dr John Andrews, Dr Nati Krivatsy, and Ms Sarah Novak of the Folger Shakespeare Library for checking a point of detail in 1 Henry IV, Qo.
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