University of Virginia Library

Compositor C

Hinman attributed to Compositors A and D the pages in quire G not set by Compositor B, but he acknowledged that the "spelling peculiarities in this quire are often far from conclusive" (II, 386). Howard-Hill and O'Connor have since agreed to assign G2b, 4a, 4vb, 5, 6b, and 6v to Compositor C. Evident in these pages and columns are C's characteristic spellings doe and goe, the speech prefixes Isab. and Duke., unitalicized forms of Prouost, Duke and Frier, and spaced medial and terminal commas. Based on this evidence (charted below), these attributions to Compositor C cannot be challenged except in the case of G6v, a part-page which contains the last twenty-two lines of the text of MM and "The names of all the Actors." There is, of course, some evidence of Compositor C's work on this part-page: two Duke. speech prefixes in the first column and, especially, the contraction wee'll in the second last line of the text in the second column. Although it is unlikely that any compositor but Compositor C would have set wee'll, it is equally unlikely that Compositor C set all of G6v, for the text in the first column contains the spelling here (in herein) and the second line of the second column includes an italicized form of Prouost, a word Compositor C never set in italics in quire G. It would appear then that Compositor C merely finished composition of G6v, setting the last few lines of the second column of text and, perhaps, "The names of all the Actors" as well. Part-page G6v belongs to the same forme as page G1, the second column of which, as already noticed, has been assigned to Compositor C by O'Connor. Although, as I have shown, the lower part of the column was Compositor B's, there is still much evidence to support attribution of upper column G1b to Compositor C: the spellings doe, in a long line, and goe, twice in short lines, the speech prefix Duke. in short lines, as well as two unitalicized forms of Duke/s and one of Frier. Here is enough to outweigh the three italicized forms of Frier in upper G1b, forms uncharacteristic of Compositor C who italicized Frier but one other time in quire G. It is difficult to say, however, precisely where Compositor C left off composition of G1b to allow Compositor B to finish the column. The last spelling in the column peculiar to Compositor C is Frier in l. 22, but the first distinctive type indicative of Compositor B's case is not found until l. 40. Thus Compositor C may have set as few as twenty-two lines or as many as thirty-nine lines of column G1b.

Type-recurrence evidence confirms that all the pages and columns now attributed to Compositor C were set from the same case, except for G6b, upper G1b and lower G6vb. With one anomalous exception, the distinctive types in G6b all come from column G4vb, which furnishes distinctive types to no other Folio page or column. The single distinctive type in upper G1b was last seen by Hinman in upper column G3a, which also provides no distinctive

types to other Folio pages. Lower G6vb contains no distinctive types. Attribution of G6b, upper G1b, and lower G6vb to Compositor C must rest on spelling evidence alone. Type-recurrence evidence demonstrates the integrity of the case from which Compositor C set the remainder of his output in quire G:

Compositor C also distributed the middle of column F5vb (see Table II, ll. 4.1 and 14), column F6vb (l. 14) and column G4a (l. 4.1), since distinctive types from these columns also recur on page G5 and columns G4vb and G2b. Like Compositor B, Compositor C set his stint on quire G from the same case he used for his pages of quire H: G4a, which supplies distinctive types to Compositor C's column G2b, also supplies a distinctive type to his page H2v and another to his column H3a (see Table I, ll. 11.1 and 18). Additional type-recurrence evidence from quire H has already indicated that Compositor C distributed the upper parts of columns G2vb and G3vb. Distinctive types from these partial columns re-appear in Compositor C's column H3a and his page H1 (see Table I, ll. 10 and 26), although no distinctive type from upper G2vb or upper G3vb recurs in pages of quire G.