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2. Terminal punctuation of speeches.
There are 43 speeches in the Quarto of The White Devil which end with no punctuation at all, (or where the terminal punctuation is in the associated stage-direction only). Although it is possible to argue that absence of punctuation within a speech is merely a sign of rhetorical rather than grammatical punctuation, it is hard to think that there should be nothing at all at the end of a speech. There are also 75 speeches in Q1 of The White Devil which end with a comma, a colon, or a semi-colon. Some of these may, perhaps, employ the mark in order to indicate that the speaker is interrupted, but by no means all. A few times a speech lacking punctuation is followed by a stage-direction which ends in a stop, but this is only occasionally the case, in B4v, C1v, and I1r for instance.
25 of the unpunctuated sentences and 50 of those terminating with a irregular punctuation occur up to E4v; the figures for the remainder of the play are 17 unpunctuated, and 25 with another mark: clearly, a much lower proportion than in the earlier part of the play. Of these 42 irregular sentences in F1r-M2v, we find, in the pages assigned to A, 6 which end with nothing and 15 with a comma or other irregular punctuation; in those assigned to B, 10 with nothing and 7 irregular, leaving 4 in unassigned pages. This would rather suggest that B was more prone to omit the punctuation mark altogether than A, who in turn was more likely to use a comma to end a speech than B. B-E4v has an average of 0.81 unpunctuated and 1.56 irregularly punctuated speeches per page; Compositor A's figures from F1r on are 0.24 and 0.6. The proportion of unpunctuated to irregularly punctuated sentences in Compositor A's pages is 1:2.5; that in B-E4v is 1:1.92.
Collectively, these studies of punctuation go far to establishing that the compositor of B-E4v was a different workman from the two compositors Williams identified as A and B. I think it fair to conclude that Webster's MS. must have had very defective or irregular punctuation, with which each compositor did his best, with variable success.
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