Hypothesis
The Folio's printed copy (Q3) for Richard II received
at least
three kinds of annotation: the systematic provision of act and scene
divisions
(the latter apparently editorial), the systematic collation of stage directions
and speech prefixes, and the sporadic collation of dialogue variants. The
fluctuations of accuracy in this third stage are documented in Table 2.
Explanations for that pattern of fluctuation are necessarily conjectural. To
some extent, no doubt, they reflect the universal rhythm of alternating
alertness and inattentiveness.[33] We
have
already suggested that the annotator may have been more alert to dialogue
variants in scenes where the protagonist is present. From the beginning the
annotator left some short passages uncorrected, with no obvious motive for
his alterations in procedure. But just as the annotator of Love's
Labour's
Lost stopped his thorough collation shortly after TLN 977, so the
annotator of Richard
II after 1003-4 must have decided that it was necessary
to lighten further the amount of attention he was giving the promptbook.
The sudden slackening in his thoroughness is indeed quite dramatic (though
not so total as in
Love's Labour's Lost). The annotator
apparently
saved time partly by avoiding work on those parts of the play which had
already received at least some annotation; that is, around the added and
changed directions themselves. A few exceptions crept in between 2364 and
2704, but his basic approach remained the same until the end of the play.
Such a procedure is not entirely illogical, and is psychologically plausible.
It
also fits neatly into the larger pattern of Folio annotation.
We have already pointed out that the layout of manuscript pages
would
have provided a physical encouragement and basis for separating the
annotation of speech prefixes and stage directions from the annotation of
dialogue. Such a separation also has an obvious basis in the nature of the
two authorities the collator was comparing. His printed copy was a reprint
of
a good quarto, set from autograph or fair copy, presumably reliable in its
verbal detail but deficient in the very theatrical features (stage directions
and
regularity of speech prefixes) supplied by a promptbook. Hemmings and
Condell would have known very well the differences between these two
kinds of documents, and even if they were not themselves responsible for
collating quarto and manuscript, one would expect them to have discussed
with the publishers, at least in general terms, the differences between the
material in their possession and the printed texts already available. Finally,
such a method of working would
have been immediately attractive and intelligible to a printer or publisher:
Moxon explains the normal two-step compositorial procedure for setting
pages with 'Marginal Notes . . . down the Side or Sides of
the
Pages'.[34]
Before Richard II, four Folio texts had been set from
annotated
quarto copy: Much Ado about Nothing, Love's
Labour's
Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The
Merchant of
Venice. In each case, the annotation was sparse, chiefly affecting act
divisions, stage directions and speech prefixes. But in the case of
Richard
II it seems to have been
decided, for whatever reason, at whatever point in time, to attempt a more
extensive collation of Q3 against the manuscript. This collation of dialogue
variants was, by modern standards, unevenly, even 'superficially' carried
out,
but it nevertheless represents a clear departure from previous Folio practice.
And
I Henry IV, the next Folio play to be set from quarto
copy,
shows similar signs of two different kinds of annotation: again, directions
and prefixes have been altered throughout the text (often in trivial ways),
and act and scene divisions provided, but alteration of the dialogue is
sporadic.
[35]
I Henry IV
and
Richard II both, in different ways, offer evidence of a
transition in
methods of Folio annotation, from the consistent practice in the Comedies
to
the more extensive annotation first undertaken in earnest in
Richard
III (up to the end of quire s).
[36] After
this experiment in
extensive annotation, laziness returned: the end of
Richard III
(t1-2
v),
Romeo, and
Titus are
given the absolute
minimum of annotation (again concentrating on stage directions, prefixes,
and act divisions), and the same was clearly intended at first for
Troilus. This reversion to the earlier procedure may have
been
connected with the introduction of Compositor E, who by all accounts was
an inexperienced compositor who may not have been able to cope with
heavily-annotated copy; or Compositor E may have been called in because
a
decision had already been taken to make do with sparsely-annotated copy.
In
any case, after this lapse the Folio finally reverts to extensively prepared
quarto copy for both
King Lear and
Troilus,
the last two
plays to have been set from printed copy.
[37]
In short, the Folio itself, like the individual plays within it, shows a pattern
of
varying thoroughness in the annotation of
quarto copy; within this pattern,
Richard II and
I
Henry IV
are pivotal, and both reveal a discrepancy between their treatment of, on
the
one hand, directions, prefixes,
and act and scene divisions, and, on the other, their annotation of
dialogue.
This apparent pattern in the nature of the copy from which Jaggard's
compositors set inevitably raises a question about who prepared that copy.
In the case of the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio, a single publisher
(Moseley) provided copy for six different printers; all of the texts seem to
have been set from manuscript copy, and the collection and preparation of
the copy was clearly the publisher's rather than the printer's
responsibility.[38] The 1616 Jonson
Folio
was both published and printed by William Stansby; Jonson himself was
clearly instrumental in supervising the preparation of this volume, and
hence
was probably personally responsible for the annotation of those plays set
from annotated quartos.[39] The
Shakespeare First Folio falls somewhere between these two eminent stools.
Rather like Stansby, Jaggard—the sole printer—was also
co-publisher;
but the 1623 Folio, like that of 1647, was a posthumous
publication, and the collection of texts to print was at least partly and
perhaps wholly the work of Heminges and Condell. Unlike Jonson,
Shakespeare was not available to annotate quartos himself; yet like the
Jonson Folio, Shakespeare's contains plays undoubtedly set from annotated
quarto copy. Who annotated those quartos? Heminges and Condell may
have done so; or the publishers may have. In this case, however, the printer
was himself one of those publishers—indeed the senior partner in the
syndicate: as Greg concludes, 'There can then be little doubt that . . . the
moving spirit of the scheme on the publishing side was Isaac Jaggard'
(First Folio, p. 6).
Jaggard's shop was clearly in a position to provide the skills of
collating
and proofreading, and to ensure that the quartos were annotated in the
manner most convenient for the compositors. Three more specific
arguments
suggest that even if the annotator was not 'Jaggard's man', he nevertheless
worked in association with the printers. First, it does not seem likely that
theatrical professionals would have introduced act divisions as inept as those
in The Taming of the Shrew, Henry V, and
I Henry
VI; the divisions in those plays, at least, seem to originate outside
the
theatre, and if so a similar origin for other editorial annotations of copy
must
be suspected. Secondly, it is certainly suspicious that the evidence for
consultation of a manuscript in Folio Love's Labour's Lost
ceases so
abruptly only nine lines from the bottom of a Folio page—nine lines
which
would have required no other annotation. This might
be a coincidence, but it suggests that annotation and casting-off of copy
sometimes went hand in hand. Finally, a dramatic change in the character
of
the annotation at the end of
Richard III coincides with an
irregularity
in the sequence of setting. After most of
Richard III had been
set up
from heavily-annotated quarto copy, at the end of quire s work on the play
was broken off, and setting of the Tragedies commenced. When eventually
the compositors returned to
Richard III, extreme variation
from
quarto copy continued for only half of the first column of t1; the remainder
of the play was set from copy that had been only nominally edited, almost
wholly in respect to speech prefixes and stage directions. This coincidence
seems most plausibly explained in one of two ways, either of which
presumes
a close connection between the annotator of the quarto and Jaggard's
compositors. The temporary abandonment of work on
Richard
III
may have been due, as Hinman
conjectured (II, 127), to difficulties in securing the copy for
Henry
VIII (which completes the Histories section of the volume). If this
explanation is correct, then the drastic change in the level of annotation on
column a of t1 may have occurred because the annotator had, in the
interim,
prepared copy for
Titus and
Romeo (already set
or being set,
when work on
Richard III resumed), and as a result quickly
decided
to revert to the more economical degree of annotation employed for those
two texts. This seems to us unlikely: why should the annotator stop work
on
Richard III just because copy for
Henry VIII
was not ready,
why should there have been any problem about the copy for
Henry
VIII, and why when resuming
Richard III should he
extensively
annotate half a column of Folio text before abruptly changing his methods?
It
seems likelier that the abrupt switch to the Tragedies occurred
because the annotator had
encountered some difficulty or deficiency in the manuscript he was
consulting, halfway down the first page of a new quire, and that completion
of
Richard III was delayed while an attempt was made to
rectify this
difficulty. A full justification of this hypothesis would require an extensive
investigation of the vexing problem of printer's copy for Folio
Richard
III; here we must limit ourselves to the statement that such an
investigation has convinced us of the validity of this hypothesis.
[40] Certainly, it would be most
economical to
assume that the change in the nature of Jaggard's copy at the end of
Richard III bears some relation to the change in the order of
Jaggard's setting. This does not prove that the annotator was employed by
Jaggard, or worked in his shop, but it does suggest—like the other
evidence—that he worked in close association with Jaggard's
compositors,
and that he may sometimes have cast off pages
as he annotated them.
Two further facts, specific to Richard II, support the
same
conclusion. First, it seems most likely (as we have suggested) that the
apparent influence of Q5 in a 53-line stretch near the end of the play results
from the fact that someone in the theatre transcribed that passage from Q5,
in order to rectify a gap in the promptbook. If someone in the theatre also
presented Jaggard with annotated printed copy, why was Q3 (rather than
Q5) used? The most obvious agent to have performed both functions would
have been the book-keeper, who would have done both jobs between 1615
and 1622; we would expect the same quarto to be used for
both,
even if (as is possible) there had been a change of book-keeper.
Secondly, we have already remarked on the fact that Folio
Richard
II betrays evidence of annotation more extensive than that in the
Comedies; I Henry IV has been similarly annotated;
Richard
III, the next play set from quarto copy, was even more extensively
annotated. Matthew Law, who was not a part of the syndicate which
published the Folio, held the copyright to all three plays (and to no others
printed in the Folio). One does not like to attribute such coincidences to
coincidence. In the case of Troilus and Cressida, it has been
widely
accepted that the difference between Jaggard's abandoned first setting of the
play (after Romeo, from quarto copy as minimally annotated
as that
for Titus and Romeo) and the second (between
the Histories
and Tragedies, from heavily annotated quarto copy) probably resulted from
difficulties of copyright: the heavy annotation was, in other words, a ruse
to
evade someone else's copyright. (See
Greg, First Folio, pp. 447-449.) We find it difficult not to
see the
same motive at work in the change in the level of annotation which takes
place between the Comedies and Richard II.[41] And if the annotators were
working closely in
conjunction with Jaggard's compositors, then the irregularity in setting
which
interrupted work on Richard II may be related to that which
interrupted work on Richard III. Henry V, 1 and 2
Henry VI,
and part of 3 Henry VI (all from manuscript copy) were set
before
Richard II was completed and 1 Henry IV
begun. Could this
interruption be due to the fact that the annotator was not far ahead of the
compositors whose copy he prepared, and that in order for him to have time
to finish the (more extensive than usual) annotation of Richard
II and
1 Henry IV, the compositors had to leapfrog him and begin
work on
Henry V? We cannot confidently answer
this question, but it is surely legitimate to ask it.
All of this evidence suggests that the man (or men) who annotated
quarto copy for use by Jaggard's compositors worked closely with Jaggard's
compositors. Jaggard's dual position as sole printer and co-publisher would
have made this possible. But would the King's Men have turned any of
their
promptbooks over to Jaggard? Perhaps not. If Heminges and Condell would
not let their promptbooks out of the theatre, then (obviously) the annotator
must have performed the actual task of marking up a quarto in the theatre
itself, rather than the printing house.[42] If
the King's Men had no other manuscript of the play on hand, and if Jaggard
for copyright reasons needed a source of variant readings, and if the King's
Men wouldn't let go of their promptbook, then someone would have
had to collate Jaggard's quarto against their promptbook.[43] Whoever that someone was, he
must have
worked, for a while, in close association with
both the King's Men and Jaggard.
