University of Virginia Library

Preamble

Although The White Devil [1] is one of Webster's most frequently-edited plays, very little original bibliographical work has been done on it since the late Philip Williams's article in the first issue of this publication.[2] In this, Williams, whose primary interest was in the composition of King Lear, attempted to compare the work done on the Shakespeare play with that on two other plays also set in Nicholas Okes's shop, one of which was The White Devil. He identified two compositors who were working for Okes at that time; his study of their habits in The White Devil indicated that Compositor A, with certain exceptions, used terminal -y rather than -ie, generally used the apostrophe in the form 'I'le' and was "predisposed" to the form 'do'. B, on the other hand, frequently used -ie rather than -y, never used the apostrophe in 'Ile', and had a "marked preference" for 'doe'. On the basis of this evidence, Williams assigned B1r-v, C1r-F2v, G1r-2v, H24-v, H4r-v, I3r-v, I4v, K1r, K3v-4v, L3r-M2v to Compositor A, and B2r-4v, F3r-4v, G3r-4v,

H1r-v, H3r-v, I1r-2v, I4r, K1v-3r, L1r-2v to Compositor B. John Russell Brown, in his Revels Plays edition, comments that the spellings 'here/heere', terminal -e or -ee and initial -en or -in, confirm Williams's division. But he does not tabulate the evidence,[3] and makes no mention of it in his articles for SB.[4]

Some of Williams's assumptions have been queried,[5] and some of his determinations will be challenged in the present article. However, it should be acknowledged that when Williams did his work, the art of compositor-determination was in its infancy, and any defects of his survey may be attributed to this fact. However, it is high time that the work was done afresh. Williams surveyed only the three spellings indicated, and failed to distinguish between prose and verse.[6] Nor, naturally, could he make any use of the more sophisticated discriminators which subsequent investigators have employed.

The results of such a new survey are embodied in this article, the research for which was undertaken as part of the textual editing of the forthcoming Cambridge edition of the Works of John Webster.[7] I propose to deal with three questions crucial to the composition of The White Devil. First, what is the effect upon compositor-determination of the physical setting of the type? Secondly, do spelling-preferences and other discriminators allow us to identify the compositors with any greater certainty than Williams and Brown achieved? Thirdly, what information can be derived from a detailed examination of the way type was set from case to forme and distributed thence again? The other possible aspects of such study, namely what light the investigation of printing may shed upon the nature of the manuscript used by the compositors, and the proof-reading and press-correction of the play, were examined by Brown in detail; his investigations in this area (in his edition and in the articles mentioned) hold up satisfactorily, and although they will be addressed in the Textual Introduction to the forthcoming edition, will not be resumed here.

Basically, Williams's identification of A and B is shown to be sound in gatherings F-L inclusive (with the relatively minor changes that I2v must be assigned to A, and that L2v turns out to be shared between the two compositors). However, the evidence described below weakens Williams's assignment of the greater part of gatherings B-E inclusive to A, and disproves his assignation of B2r-4v to B. It has therefore become necessary to postulate another workman as the compositor of gatherings B-E. In order to retain

the initials of "A" and "B" for the majority of the book (and thereby, I hope, cause as little confusion as possible to readers of Brown's edition), I have designated this workman "Compositor N". Neither A nor B seem to have been the workmen for much of gathering M; and evidence to assign gathering A simply does not exist. The compositor-distribution then which I have arrived at, and which this article gives the evidence for, is as follows: