University of Virginia Library

Conclusion

I do not by any means claim this study to be exhaustive. I have certainly not been able to duplicate the scale of the unprecedented researches Peter Blayney undertook into the Pide Bull quarto of King Lear. Within my more modest limits, however, I believe I have gone much further into the physical evidence than has any previous work on Webster, and I have attempted to examine all the bibliographical questions which could shed useful light on the composition and printing of The White Devil. If, after turning over all the stones (some of them mightily massive and slow to be turned, at that) little has been found under some of them, that is in the nature of bibliographical investigation. To say this is not to say that I am disappointed with the results, nor that the time spent in the investigation was not well-spent. On the contrary, I am satisfied that the actual editing of Webster can now proceed with a better appreciation of just how much information concerning Okes and his workmen's share in the production of the text exists, and can be textually exploited.

What has been established, I hope beyond reasonable query, is first that compositor-determination in this quarto is unusually difficult because there are so many "concealed prose" lines—lines whose method of justification requires them to be treated as prose. Secondly, Philip Williams's division of the book's composition between two compositors in gatherings F-L holds up well (with only one page needing to be re-assigned, and another to be seen as divided between the workmen). However, his attribution of pages B-E and M is unreliable, and his belief that Compositor B set some of gathering B is surely mistaken. On balance, reviewing all the evidence contained

in this article, it seems to me highly probable that a single workman, whom I have nominated Compositor N, set B-E (though the possibility that another compositor, different from A, B, and N, set some of the later pages of gathering E, when case y was being established, cannot be absolutely ruled out). The evidence of punctuation, spacing, and (to a much lesser extent) spelling, suggests that Compositor N and Compositor A shared many practices and preferences, but it does seem possible to discriminate between them on statistical grounds. Some further confirmation comes from the treatment of speech-prefixes. Thanks to Blayney's researches, we know that Okes tended to employ a variety of journeyman compositors, and, in the circumstances, the probability that more than two men could have worked on The White Devil is quite high; and the prospects of reaching absolute certainty in discriminating between them are not as good as one would like. This obviously has a bearing on assumptions made about compositors and their fidelity to copy when actually editing the text.

Finally, thanks to an examination of damaged types perhaps more exacting than has hitherto been attempted, it has proved possible to trace the pattern of distribution and composition through gatherings F-L, thereby confirming the evidence of spelling and spacing. While this survey turned up some minor irregularities in the setting of later gatherings, by and large the quarto seems to have been printed very regularly. Perhaps one of the most valuable conclusions to be drawn from the exercise is that whereas the study of damaged types and their distribution and reappearance is a bibliographical tool of value, it will not in itself suffice to determine the compositors, or without some ambiguity, the precise order of setting. It is, in other words, a valuable tool, but not a panacea. It is also perhaps the most time-consuming and potentially frustrating bibliographical labor yet conceived, and should not be undertaken lightly in hope of easy and certain results.