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III
To evaluate Greg's categorical statement we need to summarize the "confusion" in Errors that cannot be discounted as a probable consequence of printing and compare it to what can be observed in the manuscripts that Greg himself designated "prompt-books." The most serious confusion in the copy for Errors seems to have been the variant identification of Antipholus of Siracusa, first, only with Latinate epithets (corrupted to 'Errotis' or 'Erotes' in the Folio) and, then, only with the place-name 'Siracusa'—different designations for the same character. A far less serious example of the same thing arises with the variants 'Angelo the Goldsmith', 'Angelo', and 'Goldsmith' in entrance directions. Yet neither of these compares to what we find in the manuscript of Thomas Heywood's The Captives, one of Greg's "prompt-books" (Malone Society Reprint [1953]). There a figure enters three times under the clear designation 'Lord de Averne' but comes on a fourth time as simply 'the knight' in an entrance direction (ll. 869-870, 1306, 1721, 2464). But the theatrical annotator of Heywood's manuscript would apparently have been satisfied with even less uniformity and specificity than Heywood offered: when the annotator recopied the direction for de Averne's first entrance, placing it in the left margin for greater visibility, he reduced the name to a simple 'Lo:' (l. 868). The same play has what may be a single character named 'gripus the ffishermann', as he is called when he enters at line 2850 (compare 'Angelo the Goldsmith'). Yet the various names of this figure are so problematic that Arthur Brown, who edited the manuscript for the Malone Society, had to reserve judgment about Gripus's identity (p. xiv). Gripus may or may not be one of the '2 ffishermen' who enter at line 904; he does seem to be 'the ffishermann' whose appearance is called for at line 1907. In this context, the variable designations of Antipholus of Siracusa and Angelo the Goldsmith in Errors would scarcely forbid us from thinking that
In Errors and in Greg's "prompt-books" characters also enter under designations that could apply just as well to other characters in the same plays. Dromio of Siracusa is simply 'Dromio', also his brother's name, when he first enters. The two different merchants in Errors each enter as 'a Merchant' or 'Marchant'; nevertheless, it would require a concerted effort to mix them up since one is found only in the play's first scene and then only in the company of Antipholus of Siracusa and the other, on both his appearances in the last two acts, in the company of Angelo the Goldsmith. In the playbook Edmond Ironside there are two Archbishops, Canterbury and York (Malone Society Reprint [1928]). The latter does not make an appearance until the beginning of Act Three; there was little effort expended then to distinguish Canterbury from York until that time. Although Canterbury is called 'Archbishope of Canterburye' in the first direction for his entrance, the next time he is just 'Arch: Bish:' and the next 'ArchB' (see the entrance directions in ll. 1, 385, and 564); on these occasions, he appears only in the company of Canutus. When the two Archbishops appear together in Act Three, and thereafter, they are always distinguished from each other by name. There is no more need to distinguish Canterbury from York when he appears alone in the first two acts of Edmond Ironside than there is to specify which of the nameless merchants enters in Errors, since in both cases the characters' identities are established by the groups in which they appear; Antipholus of Siracusa has his merchant, Angelo his; in Edmond Ironside, Canutus has his archbishop (Canterbury). To grant the possibility that printer's copy for Folio Errors could be a "prompt-book," Greg requires that it display a level of gratuitous precision in the identification of characters that exceeds that found in an extant "prompt-book" which is thoroughly representative of that class of manuscript.
The same is true of Greg's implicit demand for uniform and distinctive speech prefixes for each character throughout a printed text before he will allow printer's copy to be a "prompt-book." The frequent use of Ant. for both the Antipholi until they appear together in the last scene, the occasional use of Dro. for one or the other of the Dromios on their separate entrances, the use of Mer. for Egeon in the first scene, for Antipholus of Siracusa's merchant in the second, and for Angelo's merchant in the last two acts all sink Folio Errors below Greg's expectations. So do the variant speech prefixes for Egeon—Mer., Mar. Fat., and Fath. But some speech prefixes in Greg's "prompt-books" are themselves neither uniform nor distinctive. In Henry Glapthorne's The Lady Mother, the steward Alexander Lovell speaks as 'Lo:' (or simply 'L:') until line 1919, after which, in violation of any principle of uniformity, 'Alex:' is used for the rest of the play (Malone Society Reprint [1959]). In John a Kent and John a Cumber, the speech prefix Iohn is always used for John a Kent, even when he shares the stage with John a Cumber (Malone Society Reprint [1923]). This is hardly an example of the use of
In a "prompt-book" we might expect at a minimum to find clear distinctions among speech prefixes when the characters to which they refer are onstage at the same time, but such is often not the case. For example, an entrance direction in The Launching of the Mary calls for the presence of '1.2.' committeemen—presumably it means "committeeman 1 and committeeman 2" (l. 142). In the scene that follows this entrance direction, some speeches are prefixed 'Com: I.', but others, including two very long ones, are headed 'Com:' or 'Committ:'—a heading that could designate either one of the committeemen (ll. 216, 255, 278, 280, 284, 349). Similar ambiguity in speech prefixes arises in The Captives in a passage beginning with an entrance direction calling for the appearance of three women, 'Ashburne . . . his wyffe. Palestra Scribonia. . . .' The first speech prefix employed in this scene is the thoroughly ambiguous 'woman', which can be seen to refer, only upon examination of the speech and the reply to it, to Ashburne's wife. No such problems obtrude in Folio Errors, which can therefore be said to exhibit, in some respects, a clarity in the designation of characters that surpasses what is to be found in extant "prompt-books." By 1955, when Greg published The Shakespeare First Folio, he seems to have forgotten how much inconsistency was tolerated in playbooks. His judgment of the possibility of theatrical provenance for the manuscript behind Errors in The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (1942) seems closer to the mark: "the text is generally clean, and at this early date it is particularly dangerous to dogmatize. Perhaps a tolerably careful author's copy may have been made to serve on the stage with a minimum of editing" (p. 140).
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