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V
It is necessary at this point to broaden the scope of this discussion to an examination of the combinations of bibliographical and textual evidence which demonstrate that Gascoigne neither was involved in the printing of the book nor saw any printed sheets. Thus Gascoigne's absence during the entire printing operation is the key to perceiving the relationships between the sharing situation and the bibliographical facts produced by the piecemeal evolution of the texts and the modifications in Gascoigne's overall plan for the book during the eight-month period. There can be no doubt that the texts evolved given the most remarkable insight provided by the printing reconstruction: that Gascoigne failed to complete one sub-text despite the minimum printing time of eight months. In the final editorial link, G. T. notes that he had "not recovered a full ende of this discourse" in reference to "The reporter's conclusion vnfinished.". This is clearly not a fiction. The completed version in The Posies added fifty-four stanzas to the original ten. Gascoigne, in short, had planned a considerably longer concluding link for "The Reporter" but abandoned it after just beginning its composition or the revision of an existing draft. Other internal textual evidence of the aborted plan for "Dan" is present. Beyond that, the failure to complete "Dan" probably is the reason for the modification of the original plan to include it as an independent sub-text. This late modification produced four major anomalies: (1) the cancellation of B1-2; (2) the anomalous imprint in page 164; (3) the pagination gap between pages 164-201; and (4) the separation of "The Printer to the Reader." from the text of "F.J." The evidence of Gascoigne's absence follows.
(1) The pre-textual materials of A Hundreth contain statements that are equivalent to components of a bibliographical description. Two fundamental discrepancies occur which categorically exclude the possibility that Gascoigne examined either the printed sheets or the completed book. Circumstantial evidence is provided by the only known fact regarding Gascoigne's whereabouts during the period: a record of his attachment to an English regiment in Holland by 25 May 1573.
First, the belated delivery of copy of "The Printer to the Reader," probably along with the "F.J." manuscript in mid-May or thereafter, doubtlessly produced the displacement of the letter from its intended position directly preceding the letters of H. W. and G. T. The "printer" begins in A2:7 (unpaginated): "Master H.W. in the beginning of this worke, hath in his letter (written to the readers) cunningly discharged himselfe of any such misliking . . ." (47:6-7). H. W.'s letter actually appears in 2A1-1v (page 201). The
The letter therefore reveals two components of authorial intention. Gascoigne intended that "The adventures of master F.J." appear first in the book. Moreover, his references in the letter to Supposes and Iocasta leave absolutely no doubt that the two plays were to be printed along with "F.J." but after it. In short, Gascoigne wrote the letter in the mistaken belief that his directions for the sequence of texts had been implemented by Smith and Bynneman. Although title pages are notoriously untrustworthy in regard to descriptive materials which appear beneath the main title, this title page confirms the statements of the letter. The main title is A Hundreth sun-|drie Flowres bounde | up in one small Poesie, corresponding to the title contrived in "H. VV. to the Reader." to refer to the collection of four sub-texts commencing with "F.J." "F.J." therefore must appear first in the book (I know of no exception to this rule). Moreover, specific reference is made to translations of Euripides and Ariosto: Euripides' only contribution is Iocasta; the reference to Ariosto is very probably to Supposes although the short translation of the allegory also appears at 2M3v. The title page references to translations by Ovid and Petrarch present an unresolvable crux but may indicate that at some point Gascoigne planned to add these texts to the book.
Second, the correction notice heading the misplaced narrative link in Ii1 was written by Gascoigne, but someone with access to the printed sheets provided the page reference "in Folio. 430." The notice is quite specific as to the proper textual location for the insertion of the link ("in the dolorous discourse" and "before the Supplication to Care." [my emphasis]) but would be ambiguous to either Smith or Bynneman. The misplaced link appears in The Posies at a location corresponding to page 420 in A Hundreth where it makes textual sense. Memorial confusion on Gascoigne's part probably led to the ambiguity of his confusing reference to the intended textual location.[32]
(2) In general, a repeated alphabet and/or pagination at a sharing boundary is an expedient solution to the problem of joining two shared sections without restrictions imposed by printing sequence and textual length. The two sections can be printed in any sequence and the first section can be extended indefinitely without causing confusion as to the order of texts, which is then established by the binding sequence. The flexibility is due to the absence of a sequential alphabet and/or pagination that locks the two sections into a defined order. Although the alphabet repeats in Middleton's section of A Hundreth, the pagination does not. Rather, Bynneman's first section B-X concludes at page 164 and Middleton's section begins at 2A1 with page number 201. Bynneman obviously intended to produce a book with sequential pagination for the reader's benefit as was his standard practice. Compositorial error can be ruled out: neither Middleton nor his compositors would supply a page number if none was marked in the received copy. Moreover, casting-off was a precise art essential to efficient printing, but the process categorically required copy to cast off.[33] The pagination gap, in short, is evidence that
The length of the "missing text" varies according to whether casting-off occurred before or after the gap at pages 36-46: if cast-off before, the length is 44 pages or 5½ sheets vs. 36 pages and 4½ sheets if after (note also that the correct page number for X4v is 156, not 164 as printed). The excess half-sheet normally would be used for the preliminaries if needed. The eventual omission of the "missing text" is clear evidence of a modification in the original plan for the book as presented to Bynneman. Gascoigne's withdrawal of a completed text seems quite improbable. Conversely, it is likely that the "missing text" was given to Bynneman in partially completed form with revisions and/or additions to be supplied later. The necessary assumption is that the text was completed in one of two senses: (1) the text required only minor revisions with little or no effect upon total length; or (2) a specific amount of text was to be added as defined either by a draft or an outline. An accurate casting-off would be greatly facilitated by a plan to add a precise number of stanzas of a fixed length to a partially completed verse text. A survey of Gascoigne's published work reveals only one candidate text that corresponds in length to the 5½ sheets yielded by an early casting-off. The fifty-four stanzas of uniform length that were added to "The reporter's conclusion unfinished" for the completed version of "Dan Bartholmew" as seen in The Posies brings the total length to forty-four pages or 5½ sheets. This assumes that the misplaced narrative link (Ii1-1v) was completed prior to casting-off; the assumption is clearly reasonable since it is the third sub-text in "Dan" and the second to be composed for the project (the enclosed poems are all earlier compositions).
The fact that "Dan" was omitted from the planned location in pages 165-200 can be attributed to two related factors. Without the additional fifty-four stanzas, the text fit neither length of gap (36 or 44 pages), but this would be of no concern to Gascoigne—it was the printer's problem. More importantly, when Gascoigne abandoned the composition of "Dan", it could no longer stand alone as an independent text. So he attached it to "F.J.," "The devises," and "devises of Master Gascoigne" through the simple expedient of G. T.'s quite short transitional editorial link (Ee2v:8-12). As delivered to Smith, "Dan Bartholmew" is a sub-text with its title embedded in G. T.'s editorial frame. The textual oddity produced by this solution points to Gascoigne's original conception of "Dan Bartholmew" as an independent sub-text (as it later appeared in The Posies). The editorial function of "The Reporter" exactly duplicates G. T.'s with the result that the global editor (G. T.), who is anthologizing poems by various authors, happens to incorporate a local editor's ("The Reporter") collection of poems by a single author. "Dan Bartholmew" simply does not belong in G. T.'s editorial realm. Furthermore, it can be argued on literary grounds that "Dan Bartholmew" was Gascoigne's initial experimentation with the narrative structure consisting of the incorporation of poems into an editorial framework. Perhaps
(3) The cancellation of B1-2 and the insertion of the anomalous imprint in page 164 clearly seem related to the modifications of Gascoigne's plan which produced the pagination gap at 164-201. The imprint in page 164 is significant evidence of Bynneman's preparation of copy for setting at the beginning of the project and reveals that, at that time, he viewed B-X as a self-contained production unit containing the texts of Supposes and Iocasta and preliminaries. As yet, Bynneman was unaware of any additional texts for the book. The terminal imprint at page 164 was marked in the manuscript by Bynneman at this time and indicates that the "original book" was limited to these two texts. The distinction between title-page and terminal imprints provides the key clue. The publisher provided and controlled the text for a title-page imprint and could clearly suppress the identification of the printer. Th title imprints of Bynneman's books as often follow the format "AT LONDON, | Imprinted for Richarde Smith." as the full format "H. Bynneman for H. Toy." and in some instances "Imprinted by F. Coldocke." the publisher.[35] (The omission of the date could reflect Smith's inexperience since A Hundreth was his first book.) On the other hand, the terminal imprint seems to have been a printer's tactic used usually to claim his work. Such imprints appear in two locations: (1) most frequently at the end of a book (as in Ii3r of A Hundreth), and (2) occasionally at the end of an initial or intermediate section in a shared book. Were it not for the pagination gap 164-201, the imprint "Printed by Henrie Bynneman | for Richard Smith." on X4v would be a normal intermediate imprint followed by the sharing printer's section. As such it would indicate that Bynneman knew that more text was to follow and that he would pass it to a sharing printer. However, the reconstruction shows that the text of "F.J." was not delivered until mid-May and was passed to Middleton because of production circumstances and not as part of a preplanned sharing strategy. The imprint further reveals that Bynneman was unaware of the fact that the "missing text" was to be included in the book; otherwise, he would not have thus marked the end of the Iocasta manuscript. In short, this terminal imprint remained in copy as an oversight which the
The cancellation of B1-2 most probably is the end product of Gascoigne's evolving text and his failure to deliver the "missing text." Three facts are clear: (1) the use of Bynneman-Y1a shows that sheet B was definitely printed as part of B-X and probably first; (2) sheet A containing the independent-text title "Supposes," "The names of the Actors," and "Prologue" was printed last since it uses only the Guyot 76mm roman introduced in the final section (Dd-Ii) and contains "The contents." with page references; and (3), the whole sheet B was printed, followed later by the cancellation of B1-2.[36] Presumably the cancellation caused the resetting and movement of the preliminaries of Supposes to A4-4v. It seems reasonable to assume that these materials appeared in the cancelled B2-2v since no revisions or additions occur in The Posies; the formats in the preliminaries of both plays remains stable as well. Since the sheet is signed B, Bynneman clearly intended to prefix a signature A, probably as a half-sheet of preliminaries including the standard errata list and contents. The contents of the cancelled B1-1v must remain conjectural, but given Gascoigne's penchant for (usually lengthy) prefatory letters to various segments of his audience, common sense suggests that such a letter appeared in B1-1v. Gascoigne's prefatory letters always contain specific, detailed references to the subsequent text(s). Hence a prefatory letter (or letters) delivered along with the manuscripts of the two plays and printed at the outset of the project simply would not introduce the book as a whole. However, the simple expedient of shifting B-X to the end of the book would have solved the problem since the letter then would introduce the rest of the book and reproduce Gascoigne's intended sequence of texts as well.[37] This solution was unavailable in only one circumstance: part of the letter (or one of the letters) carried over to B1 from sheet A. (This was no problem since casting-off permitted printing a divided text in reverse order.) Such an incomplete text would categorically require the radical solution of cancellation and the financial loss sustained thereby. In the final analysis, this view must remain conjectural, but the logic is difficult to reject: something in B1-2 required cancellation because of the change in Gascoigne's plan.[38]
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