University of Virginia Library

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The Relevance of Cast-Off Copy in Determining the Nature of Omissions: Q2 Hamlet
by
Eric Rasmussen

Confronted with the problematic omissions in the First Folio text of Hamlet, Sir Walter Greg admitted that "it is not always easy to distinguish between accident and design."[1] It is, however, one of the primary tasks of a bibliographer, particularly when dealing with texts which exist in multiple early editions, to determine the nature of omissions. One must decide whether a passage present in one edition but absent from another was accidentally omitted by the compositor or was intentionally left out—cancelled by a censor or by a revising hand (authorial or otherwise). Critical analysis of such omissions has generally concentrated on the contextual rather than the bibliographical—concerned with the content of the omission rather than the physical traces which the presence of its absence has left in the text. This brief note will suggest a new methodological approach for bibliographically distinguishing between accidental and intentional omissions in texts which were set by formes.

In his seminal studies which demonstrated that the Shakespeare First Folio was set by formes and that the copy must have been "cast-off," Charlton Hinman also concluded that the First Folio printers were not very adept in their casting-off technique.[2] In the casting-off process the compositor had to calculate precisely how much of his copy would be needed to fill each page (by counting words and making computations according to the sizes of type and page.)[3] If the compositor made an error in his calculations, he might reach the end of his stint with too little copy and be forced to fill out his page using such expedients as setting prose as verse or breaking verse lines. Hinman notes a number of these expedients which he classifies as "devices by which compositors were able to compensate for inaccurate casting-off and to accomodate, as it were, the copy to its allotted space."[4] However, Hinman's contention that the Folio printers "frequently misjudged"[5] must be tempered

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Assuming that by accurately casting-off, the compositor had predetermined the exact number of lines which could comfortably fit into a given quire, if the compositor accidentally omitted five lines of his copy, he would then arrive at the end of his stint five lines short, and would have to fill his page as best he could. The presence or absence of page-filling expedients at the end of a compositor's stint may be of use in distinguishing accidental omissions from intended ones. Since passages marked for omission in the copy would not be counted in the initial casting-off calculation, their omission would have no effect on the amount of copy the compositor had allotted for each page. Passages accidentally omitted, however, would have been initially counted and their omission would affect the compositor's ability to fill his page with the copy he had allotted for it. Thus, the fact that the end of a compositor's stint appears to be filled out is not necessarily an indication of sloppy casting-off—rather, and perhaps more importantly, it may indicate that a passage was accidentally omitted from that stint.

This theory may now be applied to a short omission in Folio Hamlet. The Second Quarto contains 2½ lines which are absent from the Folio text:[6]

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The fact that there is a 2½ line omission in a page which comes up 3 lines short may be pure coincidence. But when this is combined with additional evidence,[7] it seems nearly certain that the omission was not intentional, that the lines stood in the folio copy, that they were counted when the quire was cast-off, and that their accidental omission caused Compositor B to come up three lines short at the end of his stint.

This method of distinguishing between accidental and intentional omissions cannot, of course, be applied to all texts. But, as the example of Folio Hamlet demonstrates, this method of analysis can be useful in determining the nature of omissions in texts set by formes.

Notes