University of Virginia Library

The spelling on the title page is "Divel", but this spelling occurs nowhere else in the play and rarely in the Webster canon. The likelihood is, therefore, that the title-page spelling is an accidental form that chanced to be used by whoever set the title.

Philip Williams, "The Compositor of the 'Pied Bull' Lear," Studies in Bibliography, 1 (1948-49), 61-68.

The White Devil (1960), pp. lxiii-lxiv.

"The Printing of John Webster's Plays", Part I, SB, 6 (1954), 117-128; Part II, SB, 8 (1956), 113-117; Part III, SB, 15 (1962), 57-69. (Part III deals only with The Dutchesse of Malfy.)

Chiefly by Peter Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and their Origins: Volume I: Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto (1982), pp. 154-155.

For instance the anomalous -ie endings he reports on E1r and F2v are both in prose.

Ed. David Carnegie, David Gunby and Antony Hammond. I acknowledge with gratitude the assistance provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, in funding this research, and the energy and enthusiasm of my assistant, Miss Doreen DelVecchio.

First 32 lines

Last 5 lines

D. F. McKenzie, "'Indenting the Stick' in the First Quarto of King Lear (1608)", PBSA, 67 (1973), 125-130.

A violent protest must be made against the growing practice, even among professional bibliographers, of referring to prose lines as "justified" and verse lines as "unjustified". All type lines have to be justified.

J. R. Brown, The Plays of Webster Considered in the Light of Contemporary Stage Conditions, B. Litt thesis, Oxford, 1952, section 5.

"Stretching a Point: Or, The Case of the Spaced-out Comps," SB, 37 (1984), 106-121.

The three spaced before and after (and one spaced after only) in the last five lines of F2v have been removed from A's count, since these lines were (as Williams noticed: p. 63n) set by B.

This form also occurs in B—E.

'dog' is used by both for the singular; 'dogge' does not occur.

This preference is interesting, in view of B's routine omission of the apostrophe in 'Ile' and 'nere'.

Although these spellings merely reflect A's preference for -y endings and B's for -ie, it is worth recording that the form found in B—E is 'fye'.

Curiously on both K3r and L1r, B uses the singular for the plural of this word.

One or two probable spellings from the manuscript are worth noting: 'cocould', 'falckner', 'peece' ('piece' does not occur), 'powre' rather than 'pour', the forms 'poticarie', 'appoticarie' and 'potticarie', each of which occurs once, 'scritch-owle', 'venomne', and others.

Williams's belief that B set B2r-B4v is mere moonshine, as a glance at Table 2 reveals.

The prefix is 'Flo.' five times on K3r and K3v, a variant which I am sure arises in the manuscript.

See Kenneth Povey, "The Optical Identification of First Formes," SB, 13 (1960), 189-190. The British Library has what they assured me was a Povey lamp, which failed to reveal any ink bobbles whatever, so far as I could see, in any of their three quartos of The White Devil.

For a complete listing of all damaged types, see the Appendix to this article.

See my review of Blayney in The Library, 6th ser., 6 (1984), 91-92.

The one certain and two possible types from B which occur in C unquestionably got there in the process of proof-correction. It is inconceivable that only three types would have been found had either forme of B been distributed during the setting of C.

See Blayney, pp. 145-7; he does not, however, count spaces.

E.g. by Blayney, p. 91.