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Presence or absence of spacing in conjunction with punctuation has become a new tool in compositor-identification in the last few years. It has been recognized that, especially in a Quarto, the number of words revealing idiosyncratic

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spellings on any given page may be far too few to permit a reliable identification, especially of compositors whose habits are quite close. It seemed that the investigation of a wholly mechanical parameter, such as whether the compositor used a space after a comma, or before a colon, would be a much more reliable way of amassing the kind of objective evidence in quantities that would be statistically significant. However, the malleus bibliographici of our time, Professor D. F. McKenzie, has recently contrived to cast grave doubt on the validity of such an assumption.[11] With evil and puckish delight, McKenzie sets up a case where it looks utterly clear that analysis of spaced commas will determine the compositors, only to demonstrate from irrefutable external evidence in the Cambridge University Press's archives that the spacing evidence tells us nothing whatever about who set what, and that a compositor would space commas on one page, and not space them on another, with a fine abandon. He insists that the burden of proof is upon those who would wish to claim that practices in a commercial London printing house a hundred years earlier were different from those of the Cambridge compositors. Where, then, does this leave the bibliographer with no such external evidence?

In a word, in a situation of healthy scepticism and caution. What I have assumed in this article is that if discriminators agree (for instance if we find on one page that a compositor spells -ie and also usually spaces before a colon in verse, where on another page the usual spelling is -y, and the colon does not have a space before it) then the likelihood increases that these are the practices of two distinct workmen. The more discriminators that coincide, the stronger the supposition, but one must be clear that such suppositions are never more than that, and that virtually any pattern of apparently habitual composition practice can be susceptible to some alternative explanation. Nor am I in a postion to argue that Okes's men were different in their habits from those at the Cambridge University Press a century later. It seems to me that it is not unlikely that they were, but the evidence to prove it does not exist. I must reiterate that I speak only of spacing in association with punctuation. It is not yet within the scope of bibliographical knowledge to ascertain the number and kind of spaces a compositor used routinely between words to space them and to justify his lines. Nor do I believe that such information will ever become available. With these reasonable cautions in mind, let us see what an examination of spacing with punctuation in The White Devil can yield.

The results are found in Table 2 below, but may be summarized here. The first column lists the number of cases in which the compositor put, or failed to put, a space following a comma. Obviously, commas at ends of lines and those used as terminal punctuation are omitted from the count. Sometimes there is a space before as well as after, or a space before, not after. Taken as a whole, the text of The White Devil contains 899 commas which

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are spaced (327 of them up to E4v, 572 thereafter) and 265 which are not spaced (165 up to E4v, 100 thereafter). The general statistic, then, is that the compositors were 3.4 times more likely to put a space after a comma than not (1.98 times up to E4v; 5.72 times afterwards). In B's 22 pages there are only 8 unspaced commas, compared to 257 spaced: he was 32.1 times more likely to space a comma than not, and he averaged 12 commas a page. In the 25 pages more or less firmly assigned to A, there are 256 spaced, and 85 unspaced commas; he was 3.0 times more likely to space a comma than not. This is a significantly lower proportion of unspaced commas than in the B-E4v section of the play.

The possibility that Compositor B could have worked in gatherings B-E is eliminated by the second class of spacing evidence, tabulated in column two of Table 2. In this I list the number of punctuation marks (the ! ? : and ;) which have a space before and after them, compared with those that only have a space after. Up to E4v, a mere 24 marks have spaces before and after; 107 have the space after, a proportion of 1:4.46. In Compositor B's pages from F3r on, the numbers are 267 spaced before and after, against 39 spaced after, a proportion of 6.8:1; in the pages assigned to Compositor A the numbers are 31 before and after, against 275 spaced after,[12] a proportion of 1:8.87, or rather more than the opposite of Compositor B. The discrepancy between the proportion for B-E4v and A's stint after F1r is statistically significant, though obviously not of the same order of difference as that between A and B.

In conclusion, and with due regard for Professor McKenzie's caveat, it seems clear to me that Compositor B almost invariably set a space before as well as after the four marks under discussion, and that by a substantial proportion he preferred to put a space after a comma; Compositor A very seldom put a space before any of the four marks, and was much more variable not only in his treatment of commas, but in the number of them he used on a page. Curiously, it seemed not to make a great deal of difference to these practices whether the compositor was setting "verse" or "prose", though in certain individual lines of course it is possible to detect use or absence of spaces as aids to justification. But it hardly affects the overall pattern, so in Table 2 I have been content to indicate if there is prose on the page in question rather than go into elaborate detail about it.