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In the Nota at the end of the third volume of Debenedetti's 1928 edition of the Furioso the editor lists and discusses thirty-seven variants which have emerged from a collation of the eleven copies examined.[12] This list only contains variants relevant to the constitution of the text. In Debenedetti's working material, there is an unpublished list of thirty other variants, many of which are not relevant to the constitution of the text, e.g. they concern the correction (or the inadvertent creation) of printing errors. At the time of writing, I have collated ten of the eleven copies utilized by Debenedetti (the present whereabouts of copy no. 4 in the list in Appendix A is unknown) and the copies numbered 12 to 23 in the same list. The number of press variants of which I currently have note is 282. Of the new variants some fifty per cent are of Debenedetti's second type, those not relevant to the constitution of the text; the rest are stylistic or contenutistical variants which, like the thirty-seven variants in Debenedetti's Nota, cannot reasonably be attributed to anyone other than the author. The extent of the phenomenon can perhaps best be shown by relating it to the structure of the volume. As has been mentioned, the 1532 Furioso is a quarto in eights, with thirty-one gatherings, and so sixty-two sheets. My 282 variants are regularly distributed from beginning to end of the volume, and occur in ninety-one of the 124 formes needed to print it. This figure is the more impressive if one bears in mind that the sample on which I have been working is small—less than one per cent of the print-run, if the figure of 3000 is correct—and if I confess frankly that my collations have been selective rather than comprehensive.[13]

It is reasonable to conclude that in the printing of this edition press-correction was normal, and that the collation of a bigger sample would lead to the discovery of press-variants in many, perhaps all, of the thirty-three formes at present without variants. For this, however, we must probably await the discovery of the whereabouts of further paper copies of the edition.

Only seven of the sixty-two sheets which comprise the volume have no press-variants. Of the fifty-five sheets in which variants have so far been found thirty-six have variant states of both formes. Thus, it was certainly not the norm in the printing of this volume for the second forme of a sheet to receive its final corrections while the first forme was on the press. Presumably, a final proof of the second forme was not normally taken until perfecting had actually begun. But there is another aspect of the press-correcting which deserves comment. In seventeen of the thirty-six sheets with variant states in both formes, the uncorrected states of both formes (and consequently also the corrected states) only occur together, that is, in the same copy or copies. The number of copies involved is, in one case, one copy; in five cases, two copies; in four cases, three copies; in one case, four copies; in two cases, five copies; in three cases, six copies; and in one case, seven copies. Twelve of the sheets involved belong to the second half of the volume. The phenomenon assumes even greater proportions if we include "near-miss" cases, in which there is a difference of only one or two copies in the group of those with uncorrected (or corrected) states of both formes. This gives a further twelve sheets, again concentrated in the second half of the volume. Indeed, after gathering N there is only one sheet where there is not some close connection between the list of copies with uncorrected (or corrected) states for the two formes of a sheet. A much less extensive instance of this phenomenon was discussed many years ago in connection with seventeenth-century editions of Massinger's plays, and was taken to demonstrate an "orderly regularity in perfecting".[14] This assumes, of course, that all the edition of a sheet is printed on one side before perfecting begins. In the printing of the 1532 Furioso, the cases listed above involving a certain number of copies provide a substantial obstacle to the acceptance of this explanation. The presence of the uncorrected state of both formes of some sheets in a sizeable minority of the surviving copies suggests that there was a delay in proofing these formes, and it is stretching credence a bit far to require that the same length of delay which occurred in performing this operation on the first forme should also occur later, in the printing of the second forme. More consistent with the evidence in these cases is the hypothesis that both formes were corrected at the same time, after some of the edition had been printed and perfected. As for the

"near-miss" cases, the obstacle which they present to the acceptance of this explanation can be overcome on the hypothesis that on some occasions the correction of the forme on the press was delayed until after printing had re-commenced. If the 1532 Furioso really did have a print-run of 3000, then the printing of a sheet would have been an operation barely possible to perform on one press in two full days of continuous work, let alone in one; in cases where the printing of a sheet did not start at the beginning of the working day, the operation would have spilt over into a third day. As a working hypothesis, I assume that the instances of copies bearing uncorrected states of both formes of a sheet indicate the gradual establishment, during the course of the printing of this edition, of the practice of not making the final corrections to the formes until after the end of the first day's printing, during which a portion of the edition of the sheet being worked had been printed and perfected.[15]