V
What then is the nature of the manuscript underlying the Folio text
of Errors? This question, it seems to me, must go without an
answer. Certainly Greg's attempt to resolve the problem in terms of a
"rigid dichotomy" between "foul papers" and a "prompt-book" fails in part
because he characterized "prompt-books" as exhibiting a regularity in the
identification of characters in stage directions and speech prefixes that was
not achieved until the edited texts published in the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Once the effects on the Folio Errors of
its
passage through the printing house have been discounted, comparison of the
variety, inconsistency, and ambiguity in
the naming of its characters with the standards achieved in playbooks
actually used to guide Renaissance performances has indicated that the
alleged confusions in Folio
Errors do not, in spite of Greg's
later belief, eliminate the possibility that Folio
Errors could
have been set from such a playbook. Yet there is no positive evidence in
the printed text of theatrical annotations such as would be found in a
playbook. As a consequence, Folio
Errors resists secure
classification in either of Greg's categories for printer's copy—"foul
papers" or "prompt-books."
[16] Such
is the case, I suspect, for a good many printed plays of the English
Renaissance. Textual theory and editorial practice that rest on putative
identification of printer's copy in Greg's terms are probably then grounded
only in sand.
