University of Virginia Library

Part Three: Type-Study

I should have liked to report that I had established the order of printing of the formes of The White Devil, but in some embarrassment I must confess that despite diligent attempts, the Povey lamp failed to yield me much illumination on this question.[16] Nor, unfortunately, was an examination of the watermarks very much more revealing. In fact I have not been able to examine the watermarks of every copy of Q1 of The White Devil; apart from the fact that some libraries take an understandably dim view of the kind of treatment the binding gets in such investigations, and that few institutions

are equipped with mechanical devices to make such examinations less damaging to the book, I have not been able to visit every library holding a copy of the Quarto. Of the large number that I have seen, I examined the paper of the three copies in the British Library, and that in the Bute Collection of the National Library of Scotland. These were sufficient to make it immediately evident that Okes did not buy a special heap of paper to print Webster's play. In these four copies, a great variety of pot paper appears, with at least 20 and probably more different watermarks. In addition, numerous gatherings are printed on paper which seems entirely devoid of watermark: half-gatherings A and M in all three BL copies, for instance (Bute has a watermark in M), but elsewhere in the book: BL copy 840 c.37, for instance, has no watermarks in A, C, I, K, M; Bute lacks them in A—D, but has them elsewhere. In view of the evidently random nature of the papers being used, I have not pursued this line of enquiry.

Another route to the determination of printing order lies in examination of the skeleton-formes. Although John Russell Brown complained, "The running titles in this quarto are so similar to each other that it is very difficult to trace the press-work in detail," ("Printing II," 117) and although it is true, as was noted above, that for some reason the headline impressed very heavily, thus obscuring the kinds of typographical damage on which identification is based, with care all the settings of the headline can be identified. Altogether, there are ten settings of the running-title, "Vittoria Corombona". Seven settings are used in gathering B (B1r of course has no running title); that is, two skeleton formes were made up. However, the skeleton employed for inner B was used to print both inner and outer formes of gathering C; the headlines were re-arranged for inner C and the skeleton rotated for the outer forme. Rotated again, this skeleton was used for the inner forme of D, and then for the outer forme of gatherings E—L, in the course of which it was rotated and re-arranged twice more. The headlines used in outer B, with one new one for the fourth page, are used in outer D, and then become the regular skeleton for the inner formes from E to K. When inner K was stripped two of the headlines apparently were distributed, since two new ones were set for inner L. One of these does not recur, but that on L3v is used again in half-gathering M, together with one headline from the inner skeleton and two from the outer. What this means, in summary, is that most of the book was regularly printed with two skeletons, though an apparent error was made in the early distribution of part of the inner forme skeletons after gathering K was machined. Rather more interestingly, since all of gatherings B and C was in type at the same time (as evidence described below will confirm), Compositor N must have imposed his pages for inner and outer C in separate chases, and transferred the skeleton from the inner forme, once machining was complete, to the chase containing the pages of the outer forme. Yet the skeleton of outer B was not broken up, since its headlines survive to reappear in outer D, and inner E—L. There is thus little in the skeleton-evidence to aid in determining order of printing.

These lines of enquiry not having proved particularly fruitful, let us turn

to the crucial matter of the analysis of damaged types. The three principal purposes of such an investigation are as follows: first, that such types can be used to determine beyond question whether the book was set by formes. That is, if the same identical type turns up in both inner and outer forme of the same gathering, the inescapable inference is that it must have been distributed back into the case after the forme was worked, and re-set into the next forme. A quarto set seriatim would need to have seven of the eight pages of a gathering in type before the inner forme could be machined. The likelihood, in such a case, that the inner forme could be distributed and its types used in setting the eighth page of the gathering is vanishingly small, unless by some chance there was some kind of a hiatus in printing. Q1 of The White Devil reveals no reliable instance of a type occurring in both inner and outer formes of the same gathering. In view of the number of damaged types recorded, the chance that none of them would have so recurred is distinctly slight, if setting by formes had indeed been used. I did in fact record two highly questionable possible cases: i number 1 on L3v and L4v, and half-cap T 3 on L1r and L3v.[17] In each instance the identification is classed only as "possible", and doubtless the letters are different, and look similar by mere coincidence. Certainly neither identification is reliable enough for any suggestion that setting by formes was employed to be based upon them. In any event, the pattern of composition already established by other evidence rules out the idea that the book was set by formes. Indeed, it would have been surprising, in view of the battered state of the fount, if no such instances of doubtful identification had turned up.

Secondly, some indications of the order of printing can be derived from the re-appearance of damaged types in new setting. The thing to be established is the pages at which previously-used types re-appear, which will indicate when the forme in which the type first occurred was ready for distribution. The assumption has sometimes been made that an entire forme was distributed at a time. The evidence suggests that this was not done in The White Devil; consequently, the unit adopted here is the page, and even that can be of doubtful validity. In practice, the page to be distributed must be taken from the stone or chase a few lines at a time, and there is no physical reason why the distribution could not be shared by different compositors. The irreducible minimum unit of distribution, in practical fact (as any printer will acknowledge), is the single line, nothing more. However, it is likely enough that, with certain exceptions to be mentioned later, each compositor in the main distributed an entire page.

Thirdly, the career of the types through the book can be traced, and from this study it is possible to determine with some accuracy the order of distribution and setting of the pages. It is also possible to indentify the actual cases used. The assumption that each compositor worked from his "own" case is not one that it is safe to make for a shop like Okes's, but where type-evidence supports spelling and punctuation-evidence, it can be valuable additional evidence in the matter of compositor-identification.

However, before any of these purposes can be achieved, the types must be identified. The first major work to attempt type-analysis was Charlton Hinman's The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (2 vols., 1963), and Hinman's methods have been followed by most subsequent investigators. However, as Peter Blayney (op. cit., p. 91) very rightly observed, the quantity of types that proved sufficient for Hinman's purposes, working on a Folio forme, is quite inadequate for the much smaller dimensions of a quarto. For instance, in King Lear, Hinman's methods enabled him to identify an average of 23 types per forme, but in a quarto set seriatim, a comparable density to Hinman's would result in only about 5 types per page. Blayney's attempt to gather a quantity of evidence of a different order of magnitude can fairly be described as heroic. "Bodleian Library copy 1 of Lear was examined type by type under magnification. Every type which differed at all noticeably from the normal appearance of that character was noted by ringing the corresponding type on a photocopy of a facsimile. Over 7000 types were thus marked." He then repeated the procedure with the Capell copy, compared the results, eliminated inking flaws etc. and ended up with 6000. In the next phase, "many of the types originally marked were rejected . . . either because they were insufficiently distinctive or because there were far too many examples of nearly-identical appearance"; his final haul was "a list of over 2000 appearances made by 571 types", which gave him an average density of about 25 per page (op. cit., pp. 93-94). If his procedure had been as reliable as it sounds this would be excellent, but in practice the results he achieved do not bear out his claims.[18]

I suspect the density of evidence Blayney sought is simply not available. My working method was different: I kept the three British Library copies of Q1 before me as I worked, in order to avoid (so far as was possible) the process of assembling and then rejecting evidence that Blayney went through. I drew a detailed illustration of each letter that appeared irregular in all three copies, assigned it a number, and referred all subsequent and similarly damaged letters to the illustration, making direct comparison back and forth between the three copies as I went along. This procedure was not alone sufficient to secure an adequate standard of accuracy; in addition to the three British Library copies, I was obliged to seek confirmation also from the three copies in the Dyce collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and from libraries as far apart as the Bodleian, the Folger, and the Huntington. My list of queries includes types that were confirmed only after the consultation of the tenth copy, and some that resolutely refused to yield certainty. It takes an enormous amount of time, but yields more accurate results than Blayney's (which was partly imposed on him by the fact that no library owns more than two copies of the Pide Bull Lear). What it also does is demonstrate that the kind of density of evidence Blayney hoped to achieve is probably not possible. One must of course make all due allowance for the difference between the type used in Lear and that employed for The White Devil: the fount for the Webster play was larger, and the impression made by the type is less crisp

(and therefore subject to far more ambiguity) than that of Lear. Even with these allowances made, the result was at first sight disappointingly inferior to Blayney's: I ended up altogether with 734 appearances of 265 types, or 8.7 per page—but a number of these are of doubtful reliability. This has an important bearing on Blayney's observation (p. 91), "Unless the evidence-density is great enough to reveal at least two prior distributions in every quarto page, the order in which those pages were set cannot be proved beyond doubt". I believe he is right, but I do not believe that all it takes to provide such density of evidence is, like Boxer, to work harder. On the contrary, the more exacting the investigation, the more careful one becomes with unreliable evidence.

There are three different classes of damaged letter, which need to be carefully discriminated. First, there are those letters so individually and characteristically damaged that they are evident and unmistakable to the naked eye, and can even be made out on a xerox. Unfortunately, such types are likely to be noticed by the compositor or proof-reader, and discarded rather than distributed. In the present survey, for instance, of the 81 letters of this class which I found to recur, 41 recur once only. Secondly, there are types which have characteristic smaller flaws which can however be positively identified under magnification, if careful comparison of a number of original impressions is made. This is eye-breaking work, if it is to be done reliably; however, it ultimately yields firm results if persisted with.

The third class is where frustration sets in on a major scale. Types appear which are at first glance characteristically damaged, but which turn out to share the damage in a way that makes them useless: three lower case h on three successive pages, for instance, all so identically damaged that one cannot be distinguished from another. Letters which have a vertical joining a curve are most prone to damage at the join: b, d, h, n, m, p, q, r, u. Letters with a closed section will accumulate a plug of ink in the eye: a, b, d, e, g, o, p, q; this plug is sometimes permanent, and sometimes removed by washing: one can find a letter which looks identical in half a dozen copies, only to find in the seventh that the ink-plug has been cleaned. Letters with ascenders and descenders will sooner or later get bent: b, d, h, l, k, p, q, y. Anything with a kern will eventually be bent or broken: f, long s, and their associated ligatures, and j. Lower-case o is unusually prone to damage, with cracks at any point in its circumference; and unidentifiable damaged lower-case e are so frustratingly common that sometimes one feels one would do better counting the undamaged ones. Faults in impression must be firmly distinguished from damage to the type, which is sometimes difficult: if one copy shows a damaged letter where the others do not, is it a bad impression, or was the type damaged, and the copy with the flawed letter the last to be printed? Only if the type recurs can one be sure. Another common problem is the letter which, while undoubtedly damaged, prints differently in each copy.

It is time to cry "hold, enough": every investigator who works on damaged type will come to the realization that a lot of the "evidence" is worthless if really closely examined: I routinely eliminated from the investigation such

false fire as the ligatures long s-t, long s-h and ct in which the ligature is cracked at the top; lower case g in which the lower bowl is not closed; e and s with the ends of the letters worn; tilted or plugged e; plugged a; and a goodly number of other unusable letters. Even after all this elimination, I am left with a substantial number of identifications that must be classed as only "possible", which are listed with a question-mark in the Appendix of Damaged Types at the end of this article. These are letters that I think are the same, but which I will not rely on if other evidence seems to contradict them. Upper-case letters and numbers, italic sorts, punctuation and other typographical signs often offer clearer and more reliable kinds of damage than lower-case letters. But they recur so infrequently that they are seldom useful for the kind of analysis that must be undertaken. And they too can be susceptible to misidentification: for instance, capital I often develops a crushed serif when in conjunction with an apostrophe: compare the two 'I'le's on D1v, lines 1 and 2, which are virtually impossible to distinguish. With these caveats and reservations in mind, let us proceed to analyse what the evidence of damaged types can tell us, firstly about the order in which the pages of the book were distributed.

The results of this enquiry are found in Table 3 below, but some general observations are in order before seeing what the table reveals. First, it is apparent that the fount used to print the play was large enough to enable two entire gatherings (four formes) to be in type at the same time. This is proved by the fact that no distribution of gathering B was necessary in order to set gathering C.[19] I have not gone to the heroic extent of counting each type in these two gatherings, but at a rough estimate a full page of 37 lines in prose would contain almost 2300 characters (including spaces); the first two gatherings are about 75% verse overall, which would work out to around 27,500 pieces of type, or a good deal more than a "quarter bill".[20]

There are no special signs of type-shortage in the setting of gatherings B and C, or indeed, throughout the book. The use of italic or roman punctuation (or black-letter and roman periods) seems essentially motiveless (that is, the compositor(s) could not be bothered sorting them out, rather than that they are signs of type-shortages as such). There are, indeed, not a few wrong-fount punctuation marks apart from the black-letter periods (note for instance the comma in line 20, and the second comma in line 29, of B4r: the first clearly belongs to a fount of smaller size than pica, the second to a larger). The use of italic capital Y instead of roman is occasional throughout the play, but this seems to be the only sort in the fount in generally short supply; occasionally VV is set for W, in E2r, H1r (thrice), K3v (5 times) and K4r (twice); half-cap vv is set for half-cap w quite often in gathering E: E1r, E2r (thrice), E2v and E3r: the problem here is the speech-prefix 'Lavv.' for 'Lawyer'. Some of the long s-h ligatures may come from another fount: note

the instances in lines 1 and 12 of B4v, for example, which do not range with the other letters. Either a half-capital o or a zero (in the absence of numerals in the play it is impossible to be certain) is intermittently used instead of lower-case o; the first one is on B2v line 17, the second o in "consumption"; there are 32 altogether in the play, occurring in pages set from both cases. Elsewhere, a lower-case o may substitute for the half-capital: see the speech-prefix 'Lodo.', B1v line 10, for instance.

However, these isolated instances of petty carelessness hardly amount to evidence of general type-shortage; on the contrary, the absence of any more evidence than this implies that the fount must have been pretty large. One's initial reaction is, that since a single pair of cases could never have held enough type to set four formes, two cases must have been used, and two compositors therefore at work. (As an experiment, I counted the number of lower-case o in my case of 12-point Bembo. The box was about half full, and held 280 letters. Okes's sort-box—assuming it was about the same size—would probably have held between 500 and 600 letters before they started to slide over the rim into the box below. But there are 1508 lower-case o in gatherings B and C of The White Devil.) Of course the assumption is false: if most of the type was locked up in formes, the quantity in the case never need be more than the compositor immediately required. That is, the compositor would distribute into his case, as required, from the chase that held the type in its previous employment, and set B and C from that source. Obviously, by the time all four formes were in type, he must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel, an inference which is supported by the great cascade of types from B3v (which as the table shows was the first page to be distributed) which show up in D1r. But the method of working was entirely viable.

A second thing which the table makes evident is that as work proceeded, the types from many pages tend to reappear in clusters. Of the 84 pages in gatherings B-M, 23 pages yield types that reappear in some numbers on certain pages (those listed in column 4 in the table). Another 12 pages resurface in minor clusters; 31 pages do not cluster, and 18 pages seem not to have been distributed. The clustering effect is most obvious in the middle of the book, especially in gatherings E, F, G, H and I. Gatherings D and L have a number of pages with minor clusters. The inference is that a cluster occurs when a distribution has just taken place into a depleted case. One note of caution needs to be sounded. It is often assumed[21] that the types last distributed will normally be the first to be re-set. But this is contrary to the experience of those who set type themselves, and are trying to recover a misdistributed sort from a box. Because the cases are at an angle, and because type-metal is heavy, gravity ensures that mixing takes place. The likelihood of a cluster occurring, then, is increased if the case is getting low. Type appears to have been at its shortest in the first pages of E (in which types cluster on E1r, E1v, E3r and E3v) when C was distributed. The shortages at

the beginning of G, the middle of H, and the beginning of I are accounted for by simultaneous working of two compositors: the activity of the workmen ran the cases nearly dry in I. Subsequently, in K and L some mixing of the cases may have taken place (as is described below), possibly to ease shortages of sorts in one case.

Let us now turn to the table, and analyse the information to be obtained from it. It should be stressed that inferences concerning which case a page was distributed into can only be drawn from observing in which pages damaged types from the distributed page recur. Thus E1r was undoubtedly distributed into case x, since a large number of its types recur in G1v, set by Compositor A. Only one case was in use during the setting of gatherings B-D; this might be also called case x. But to do so would be misleading, since while much of case y was created by distribution, as described below, this practice would not ensure an adequate supply of all sorts. Types must have been imported from the original case to supply deficiencies during case y's establishment. I therefore believe it to be a more accurate reflection of the facts of the situation to regard the case in use for gatherings B-D as the ancestor of both cases x and y, whose identities do not become distinct until gathering C was distributed. And even then it is too early to say whether the distributor was Compositor N, or one or both of Compositors A, or B, or some other journeyman entirely. Not until compositors A and B begin regular work is it possible to assign the distribution of any page reliably.