University of Virginia Library

It is received opinion among late twentieth-century editors that printer's copy for Comedy of Errors, first printed in the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623, was Shakespeare's "foul papers" as annotated (sparsely) by a bookkeeper. According to G. Blakemore Evans, for example: "the manuscript behind the F1 [First Folio] text seems to have been some form of Shakespeare's autograph, probably his 'foul papers.' There is also perhaps some slight evidence of a book-keeper's hand in a few stage directions. . . . That the manuscript could ever have served as a prompt-book, however, seems highly unlikely, because there is a good deal of confusing variety, ambiguity, and inconsistency in the form of the speech-prefixes, and Luce [the 'Kitchen wench'] is once referred to as Nel, Luciana as Juliana."[1]

This view had been developed by E. K. Chambers and W. W. Greg in opposition to J. Dover Wilson's complex theory of a text assembled from actors' parts (with reference to a plat or plot) and then revised.[2] The Chambers-Greg position has been challenged only once, and then only in part. R. A. Foakes, editor of the new Arden edition (1962), attempted to trace to Shakespeare's manuscript and to the printing house the few errors and duplications that Chambers and Greg assigned to the theatrical annotator (pp. xiii-xv). I find Foakes's argument convincing and believe that it can be further developed. I shall argue that the Chambers-Greg identification of copy as annotated "foul papers" has never been effectively demonstrated, that the evidence for it has been eroded by study of the printing of the Folio, and that its final articulation by Greg in the Shakespeare First Folio, which

most subsequent editors have almost slavishly imitated, misrepresents what he himself has taught us about theatrical manuscripts in Dramatic Documents of the Elizabethan Playhouses (2 vols., 1931). I believe that Comedy of Errors exemplifies the following generalization recently offered by Professor Bowers concerning "what Greg called 'the general character' of the manuscript from which a Shakespeare print was made": "So important is the subject for one's total information about the text that almost every editor these days feels it incumbent to discuss the question at some length in his introduction. I must say, however, that except in a few clearcut cases the evidence is subject to such varying interpretation and in its history has had such reversals of opinion . . . that insufficiently rigorous standards have governed the usual discussion and little conviction may result."[3]