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Rehabilitating the A-Text of
Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus
by
Eric Rasmussen
[*]
I
Few bibliographical theories are so apparently unassailable and, paradoxically, so constantly assailed as the prevailing belief that the 1604 quarto of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (the "A-text") is a corrupt, memorially reconstructed, "bad" quarto. Ever since the argument was first advanced by Leo Kirschbaum in 1946 and supplemented by W. W. Greg in 1950, the memorial reconstruction theory has enjoyed the status of fact.[1] In 1952, Fredson Bowers was wholly convinced ("we may take it as fully proved that the A-text is a reconstruction from memory of the play as originally performed"), and he remained so in 1973: "facts are facts."[2] Thus dismissed as a "bad" quarto, the A-text has been relegated to the appendixes in nearly every edition of the play completed in the last half-century. And even those who choose to edit the A-text acknowledge that "signs that it has been memorially reconstructed are incontestable."[3]
Though seemingly incontestable, the fact of the A-text's memorial origins has encountered nearly a half-century of contestation. Bowers himself, pointing out that the B-text contains entire scenes that are not in the A-text, observed that "the reporter of the A-text would need to have suffered a complete blackout."[4] Alternatively, Bowers argued that the substantial differences between the two textual versions of Faustus might best be attributed
The theory of the A-text as a memorial reconstruction is further cast into doubt by its enthusiastic critical reception, both early and late. No other "bad" quarto went through three editions in the seventeenth century, and no other supposedly corrupt Renaissance text has found such favor in the twentieth. Although literary interpreters have little use for the "bad" quartos of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, influential critics such as C. L. Barber and Stephen Greenblatt employ the A-text of Faustus despite its apparently unauthoritative status. As Barber explains, "my experience as a reader runs counter to the conclusions . . . which W. W. Greg arrives at from textual study."[6] So too, if a Shakespearean "bad" quarto text is ever performed it is only as a dramatic curiosity; and yet, both the Royal Shakespeare Company and Chicago's Court Theater chose the A-text of Faustus for their 1989 productions of the play. There appears to be a zeitgeist at work as scholars and theater companies embrace the A-text and so reject (or simply ignore) the rulings of bibliographers. It would seem that the time has come to reappraise the bibliographical facts and re-evaluate the theories surrounding the A-text of Doctor Faustus.
II
In January of 1601, the publisher Thomas Bushell entered in the Stationers' Register for his copy of "A booke called the plaie of Dcor ffaustus."[7] The first known edition of Faustus is a black-letter quarto, known as A1, printed by Valentine Simmes for Bushell in 1604. The A1 quarto collates
The A1 quarto was set in type by two compositors, first distinguished by Welsh who labeled them X and Y. Welsh's Compositor X abbreviates speech headings and punctuates them with a period, uses an upper-case "E" in Exit directions, prefers -ea- spellings in words like year, dear, and chear, prefers bloud over blood, and uses -ll spellings in words like will, shall, and hell. Welsh's Compositor Y frequently uses unabbreviated and unstopped speech headings or abbreviated speech headings punctuated with a colon. In contrast to X, Y uses a lower-case "e" in exit directions, prefers -ee- spellings in words like yeer, deer, and cheer, prefers blood over bloud, and uses single -l spellings in words like wil, shal, and hel. Although Y's habits may reflect simple spelling preferences, they should also be seen to represent
Welsh surveyed all of the dramatic quartos Simmes printed from 1603 to 1605 and concluded that "we have no relevant knowledge of either Compositor X or Compositor Y outside of the Faustus quarto itself" ("Printing," p. 126). However, the habits of Welsh's Compositor Y resemble those that W. Craig Ferguson had previously noticed in Q1 of 2 Henry IV, printed by Simmes in 1600: unabbreviated speech headings and exits with lower-case "e". Moreover, the compositor of 2 Henry IV, designated Compositor A by Ferguson, resembles Compositor Y of Faustus in that he does not distinguish names by setting them in a contrasting type font.[11] Ferguson's essay has been supplemented by a series of articles by Alan Craven which, taken together, claim that Compositor A set the type for quite a bit of Renaissance drama as we know it: all or part of Q1 Richard II (1597), Richard III (1597), Q2 Richard II (1598), A Warning for Fair Women (1599), An Humorous Day's Mirth (1599), Much Ado about Nothing (1600), The Shoemakers' Holiday (1600), Q2 The First Part of the Contention (1600), Q1 2 Henry IV (1600), Q1 Hamlet (1603), Q3 I Henry IV (1604), and Q1 and Q3 The Malcontent (both 1604).[12]
Ferguson and Craven attach a great deal of importance to the unusual (although by no means unique) compositorial habit of setting unabbreviated and unstopped speech headings; any dramatic quarto printed by Simmes between 1597 and 1604 in which such speech headings appear is automatically assigned to Compositor A. The assumption that only one of Simmes's compositors would ever have set an unabbreviated speech heading without adding a mark of punctuation is so strong that little significance is attached to some of the manifest differences between the texts attributed to Compositor A. Q1 Hamlet, for instance, is assigned to A despite the fact that "proper names (characters and places) in the dialogue are often set in contrasting italic type, a practice never used in 2 Henry IV and Much Ado" (Craven, 1973; p. 40). And even though one of A's hallmarks, setting lower-case exits, is nowhere to be found in Q3 of I Henry IV, Craven asserts that this evidence should not "raise doubts" about the identity of the compositor (1979; p. 188).
As the dramatic texts for which Compositor A was assigned responsibility began to multiply like Falstaff's men in buckram, A1 Faustus was added to the list by Craven, who asserts (in a brief footnote) that Welsh's Compositor Y
Although the characteristics of Compositor Y in Faustus do resemble, to a certain extent, those of Compositor A in Q1 2 Henry IV (1600), we ought to bear in mind Peter Blayney's caveat that "similar habits found a year or so apart in the same printing house do not prove identity."[13] Of the dramatic quartos that Simmes printed in 1604, the same year as A1 Faustus, Craven has assigned three to Compositor A. These three texts do contain the unabbreviated and unstopped speech headings necessary for attribution to A, but the other distinguishing characteristics of Compositor Y appear not at all (see table 1).
| Text | unabbrv. | Names | Single -l | |
| Unstopped | Lower- | not set in | Spellings | |
| Speech | case | contrasting | ||
| Headings | exits | font | ||
| A1 Faustus | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Q1 Malcontent | Yes | No | No | No |
| Q3 Malcontent | Yes | No | No | No |
| Q3 I Henry IV | Yes | No | No | No |
I suspect (although I cannot prove) that, over a period of eight years, Simmes may have employed more than one compositor who did not abbreviate and did not punctuate his speech headings when he set a play quarto, and that "Compositor A" as he is currently constructed was probably a number of different workmen. In any case, I can find little evidence to support Craven's identification as it pertains to Faustus, for it seems clear that Welsh's Compositor Y is not Compositor A. Moreover, the habits of X and Y in
Although Compositors X and Y have not
been
found at work on any other Simmes book, they can be readily distinguished
within the text of A1 Faustus where their individual habits
form
clear and regular patterns. The alternating groups of speech heading
punctuation on sheet C may serve as an example (see table 2).
As Bowers observes, "this practice is so consistent and so odd as to call for explanation" (Complete Works, II.147). Welsh found evidence of type-shortages indicating that the compositors were setting seriatim, rather than by formes, and Bowers notes that this conclusion is supported by the nature of the stints which are not confined to formes. Welsh assumes that the two compositors worked chiefly in turn rather than simultaneously, each setting a scene of the text ("Printing," pp. 114-115). D. F. McKenzie claims that such a procedure for shared setting would have been normal in a seventeenth-century print shop: "normally, even when two or more compositors worked on a book, they did not work together setting sheet and sheet about. What usually happened was that one took over where the other left off."[16] So strong is McKenzie's insistence upon "a fairly accurate definition of 'normality'" that there can be little doubt that this was the way that compositors usually worked. However, the irregularity of the stints in Faustus is so unusual that we may be justified in inquiring as to the possibly abnormal circumstances in which they were produced.[17]
Welsh concludes that only one type-case was in use because both compositors suffered shortages of black-letter W, and he imagines that two type-cases could not both contain an inadequate supply of this letter ("Printing," pp. 115-119). But Bowers points out that such W shortages were a congenital
Bowers's attractive and sensible conjecture has important ramifications for our understanding of the nature of the underlying copy that have not been previously realized. Compositors' stints are necessarily limited, and sometimes defined, by separable sections of the printer's copy.[19] If the compositors were setting simultaneously from separate cases, the copy itself would have to have been physically separated and divided between them. In order for each compositor to be given a successive scene from the manuscript copy, we would have to suppose that every fresh scene began on a new manuscript page. And Bowers himself elsewhere surmises that the only type of manuscript in which this might be true would be "the foul papers of a collaboration" ("The Text of Marlowe's Faustus," p. 199). The issue of whether or not the compositors were working simultaneously on the A1 quarto can now be seen to have considerable implications. Simultaneous setting might point to the use of foul paper copy.
III
Three decades ago, Charlton Hinman "noticed by chance" that what seemed to be the same damaged letter "m" appeared frequently in the Shakespeare
My investigation of the A1 quarto of Faustus followed Hinman's methods as modified by Blayney for application to quarto texts (see Texts, pp. 93-94). I examined the unique Bodleian copy of A1, type by type, under 7x magnification with a calibrated lens. Each type that differed in any significant respect from the usual appearance of that character was noted on a photocopy facsimile. 2250 types were so marked. I then examined each sort individually and rejected as evidence most of the types originally marked, usually because, as Hinman discovered, certain sorts are often similarly damaged because they are especially vulnerable to a particular kind of injury; identical injuries in several types are useless for identifying individual types. The blackletter font used to print Faustus, which was hardly fresh in appearance when Simmes first used it in 1594, had, in the intervening decade, been used for at least twenty-seven books.[21] By the time Faustus was printed, the font was old and battered: letters in which a vertical joins a curve (b, d, h, m, n, p, q, r, u) are almost all damaged at the join; ascenders and descenders (b, d, h, l, k, p, q,) are frequently bent or broken. Nearly every letter has a nick, chip, bend, break or bite (though not necessarily a distinctive one).[22] Nevertheless
Although 37 recurring types out of a possible 599 is a surprisingly low number, it should be stressed that because A1 survives in only one copy a type-recurrence study is inherently limited in its ability to gather large amounts of reliable evidence.[23] Hinman noticed that some identifiable type defects are liable to be inked over occasionally, so that a distinctive type might be unrecognizable in some copies, and he concluded that a "thorough investigation will certainly require the use of more than one copy" (Printing and Proof-Reading, I.55). When Blayney compared the damaged types he had identified in the Bodleian copy of Q1 Lear with those in the Trinity College copy, he found that more than a thousand supposedly damaged types were, in fact, simply inking flaws (Texts, p. 95). And Blayney has been criticized because he did not examine more of the extant copies. In similar studies, Anthony Hammond found it necessary to consult ten copies of Q1 The White Devil and Paul Werstine examined all of the extant copies of Q1 Love's Labour's Lost.[24]
Unfortunately, such comparison and cross-checking is impossible with A1 Faustus because the Bodleian copy is unique. The difficulty is felt even more keenly because of the uneven inking of the extant copy. On several pages the inking is quite heavy (A4r, B1r, B3r), and consequently some identifiable type damage may have been inked over. Conversely, on other pages the inking is so faint that there are sections of text (B3v:21-35, C3r:33-37, D3r:1-10, and E3v:29-34 are prime examples) in which what may be actual type damage cannot possibly be distinguished from mere inking flaws. I have no doubt that many distinctive types have chosen these pages on which to make their only reappearance, but, short of discovering a better inked copy of A1, there is no way to trace them.
Blayney, who rightly argues for greater rigor in type-recurrence studies
The black-letter font was apparently large enough to enable two entire gatherings (four formes) to be in type at the same time. Types from sheet A do not reappear until sheet C; types from B not until D; from C not until E; and from D not until F. It is reasonable to deduce that A did not need to be distributed until C was set; B not until D was set; C not until E; and D not until F (see Distribution Tables in Appendix II). But because the only identifiable type from outer D appearing in sheet F is a capital "W" (W3), which may simply have been cannibalized from the margin of an undistributed page, we have no evidence that outer D was necessarily distributed. Thus, the relatively large type supply meant that only seven formes needed to be distributed during the printing of this relatively short quarto.[25]
This type-recurrence study was undertaken primarily to determine whether or not the two compositors were setting simultaneously. The type evidence, minimal though it is, seems to point to the use of two separate pairs of type-cases. Twenty-two identifiable types from sheet C reappear for the first time in sheet E. Types last seen on C1r and C4v appear only on the pages of E set by Compositor X. Types from C2v, C3r, C3v, C4r appear only on the pages of E set by Compositor Y (see table 4).
Apparently, C1r and C4v were distributed into one pair of type-cases from which X set E2v, E3v(lower), and E4r; while C2v, C3r, C3v, and C4r were distributed into another pair of cases from which Y set E1r, E1v, E3r(lower), E3v(upper), and E4v(lower). Hinman observed that, in the Shakespeare
The evidence that two pairs of type-cases were in use does not, in itself, prove simultaneous setting by two compositors. Theoretically, the same compositor could set one page of a forme from one case and then another page from another case. However, the combined evidence of distinctive compositorial patterns of spelling-punctuation and the recurrence of identifiable types may be taken as proof of simultaneous setting. For while there would have been little point in employing two compositors, each working at his own type case, alternately to set pages and part-pages for the same forme, simultaneous setting, as Hinman points out, "would have secured the very important advantage of speeding up composition in relation to presswork" (Printing and Proof-Reading, I.109). It would appear, then, that Compositor X and Compositor Y, working from two pairs of type-cases, set the text of Faustus simultaneously.
IV
We are now in a position to consider the probable nature of the printer's copy for the A1 quarto. In order for Compositor X to be able to set the end of Act IV scene i at his pair of type-cases while Y simultaneously set the beginning of the next scene at his (as they did for E3r), each would need to have had the copy for his scene at his own case, probably held by a visorum.[26] Apparently, the manuscript leaf that contained the end of IV.i was physically separable from the leaf on which the beginning of IV.ii was written. That this division of copy between the two compositors was possible throughout the setting of A1 suggests that every fresh scene in the manuscript began on a new page. Bowers (discussing Faustus in another text and context) asserts that he knows of "no preserved dramatic manuscript which does this" but adds that "it might well be a convenience for the foul papers of a collaboration" ("The Text of Marlowe's Faustus," p. 199). In fact, in the only preserved
Another manuscript that may have some application here as well is the fragment of The Massacre at Paris. This manuscript leaf, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library (MS J.b.8), may be in Marlowe's own hand, and, if so, it is one of the few preserved examples of a playwright's foul papers.[27] The approximately 7" X 8" manuscript leaf contains exactly one scene of the play, beginning with Enter at the top of the recto, and ending with Exeunt halfway down the verso; the rest of the page is left blank. If the leaf is genuine then we may have evidence that Marlowe's method of composition was to begin and end individual scenes on separate pieces of paper. There are, however, enough doubts about the authenticity of the leaf that any such conclusions can only be tentative.
Whatever Marlowe's practice when he was writing alone, it is generally agreed that Doctor Faustus was something of a collaborative effort, and a collaboration might necessarily entail special methods of composition. Before speculating further about the nature of the manuscript (or manuscripts) that the collaborating playwrights produced, we need to consider how that collaboration may have progressed. Specifically, was the writing of Faustus an interactive collaboration, or did the collaborator merely inherit a play that Marlowe had left unfinished?[28] Greg contends that Marlowe "planned the whole" and farmed out certain scenes to another dramatist, but Roma Gill speculates that Marlowe's "encounter at Depford brought his writing of Dr. Faustus to an untimely end" so that the actors were left with "the
Indeed, to speak of Renaissance dramatic "collaboration" may be something of a misnomer, because playwrights who worked together on a play generally worked apart. Rather than a line-by-line collaboration (such as that employed by the twentieth-century team of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart), the usual division of labor was the separate composition of individual acts and scenes.[30] Writing in relative isolation, one collaborator would often not know exactly what the other was doing: Shakespeare was using a different source for his share of The Two Noble Kinsmen than Fletcher was using for his.[31] Nashe, who wrote only the induction and first act of The Isle of Dogs, complains that Ben Jonson, who wrote the other four acts, did not have "the least guess of my drift or scope."[32] In Shakespeare's additional scene for More, he seems unaware of both the original version of the play and the revisions made by his fellow collaborators.[33]
Tucker Brooke was the first to point out that the author of Mephistopheles's complaint in the Faustus scene with the clowns—"How am I vexèd with these villains' charms! / From Constantinople am I hither come / Only for pleasure of these damnèd slaves" (III.ii.33-35)—contradicts Marlowe's conception of the effects of conjuring at I.iii.43-57, where Mephistopheles explains that he was not "raised" by Faustus's conjuring speeches but came of his "own accord."[34] Greg, while noting that we need not expect the philosophical outlook of the serious scenes to be maintained in the farcical scenes, agrees that this contradiction "may legitimately be cited as confirmation of the manifest difference of authorship" (Parallel Texts, p. 360).
Moreover, it has not been previously noticed that two of the collaborator's
It would make sense, or, as Bowers says, it would be a "convenience" for a collaborating playwright to begin each of his scenes on a new page so that they could later be collated with those of his collaborator (as appears to have been the case in the collaborative revision of The Book of Sir Thomas More). Such a supposition, which may seem sufficiently obvious, is corroborated by Thomas Dekker's testimony that playwrights conceived of collaboration in terms of writing separate acts on separate pieces of paper. In a libel suit brought by Benjamin Garfield over the portrayal of his mother-in-law in the subplot of Keep the Widow Waking, Dekker asserts that he only "wrote two sheets of paper containing the first act" (Bentley, p. 233). It is reasonable to suppose that Marlowe and his collaborator proceeded in this fashion. Presumably, their separate foul papers would then be combined and, perhaps after some stitching and reworking, a fair copy would be transcribed (either
I would suggest, then, that the printers of A1 Faustus had as their copy the original foul papers of Marlowe and his collaborator.[37] A certain amount of shuffling and reshuffling of the combined papers might have occurred when they were first transcribed or during the more than a decade that they spent in storage; such a manuscript would have been anything but orderly, and we would not be surprised to find certain scenes out of place in a text that was printed from it. And, indeed, it has long been suspected that the two Robin/Rafe scenes, which follow one immediately after the other, are not in their proper positions; the Act IV Chorus, which is obviously intended to introduce the Carolus scene but comes two scenes too early in A1, is certainly misplaced.
This type of manuscript, in which Marlowe's scenes could be easily separated from those of his collaborator, would have facilitated the unusual method of composition found in the A1 quarto: it would allow one compositor to set a scene (Marlowe's) while another simultaneously set the following scene (collaborator's). This hypothesis gains considerable strength when we compare the compositors' stints with the shares of the play that have been traditionally assigned to Marlowe and to his collaborator. Compositor changes often coincide with authorship changes: on D1r, Y set Wagner's chorus (Marlowe's), while X set the beginning of the scene at Rome (collaborator's); on D3r, X set the chorus (Marlowe's), while Y set the beginning of the Robin and Rafe scene (collaborator's). The compositors are here able to divide up their copy at the exact points at which authorship changes. This textual feature can perhaps best be explained if the copy that they had to work with was the foul papers of the two playwrights.[38]
V
In the winter of 1600-01, four plays from the repertoire of Philip Henslowe's company, the Admiral's Men, found their way to London publishers: The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, Look About You, and The Shoemakers' Holiday. In each case, Henslowe appears to have sold the dramatists' foul papers.[39] This suggests a course of events in which the playwrights delivered their foul paper manuscripts to the company, that they were then transcribed for the purpose of the promptbook, and that the originals thus superseded were in due course released for publication. In January of 1601, the publisher Thomas Bushell came into possession of another Admiral's play: Doctor Faustus. The body of evidence presented in this essay is incompatible with the commonly held view that Bushell was given a memorially reconstructed version of the play. Instead, we now have reason to believe that the manuscript that Bushell had acquired, and that Valentine Simmes would subsequently print, was the original foul papers of Marlowe and his collaborator.
Notes
This study was undertaken in conjunction with an edition of both the A-text and B-text versions of Doctor Faustus for the Revels Plays series (forthcoming from Manchester University Press in early 1993). My collaboration with David Bevington on this edition has been an invaluable source of challenge and stimulation to my work on the texts, for which I should like to record my sincere and lasting gratitude to my co-editor. I must also thank Paul Werstine for sharing his specialized knowledge and Arthur Evenchik for his general perspicacity. The research for this article was supported in part by a Javits Fellowship from the United States Department of Education.
Kirschbaum, "The Good and Bad Quartos of Doctor Faustus," The Library, n.s. 26 (1946), 272-294; Greg, Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus' 1604-1616: Parallel Texts (1950), passim.
"The Text of Marlowe's Faustus," Modern Philology, 49 (1952), 195-204, esp. 197; The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols. (1973), II.143 (hereafter Complete Works).
David Ormerod and Christopher Wortham, eds., Dr. Faustus: the A-Text (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1985), p. xxvii.
"Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: The 1602 Additions," Studies in Bibliography, 26 (1973), 1-18, esp. 7.
Kuriyama, "Dr. Greg and Doctor Faustus: The Supposed Originality of the 1616 Text," English Literary Renaissance, 5 (1975), 171-197, esp. 177; Warren, "Doctor Faustus: The Old Man and the Text," English Literary Renaissance, 11 (1981), 111-147, esp. 146; Empson, Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust-book and Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus' (1987), p. 192.
"The form of Faustus' fortunes good or bad," Tulane Drama Review, 8 (1964), 92-119, esp. 93n; see also Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), p. 290.
Cited in Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (1939-59), I.17.
"The Printing of the Early Editions of Marlowe's Plays," (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke Univ., 1964), pp. 85-126 (hereafter "Printing").
In the same year that he printed Faustus, Simmes apparently shared the printing of Wright's The Passions of the Mind (STC 26040), in sheets G through O of which, not printed by Simmes, the number of lines per page drops from 32 to 31. See W. Craig Ferguson's chapter on "Shared Printing" in Valentine Simmes, Printer to Drayton, Shakespeare et al. (Charlottesville, Virginia: Bibliographical Society, 1968), pp. 86-89.
Adrian Weiss has recently emphasized the importance of font analysis for investigating and resolving the issue of shared printing. See "Bibliographical Methods for Identifying Unknown Printers in Elizabethan/Jacobean Books," Studies in Bibliography, 44 (1991), 183-229.
"The Compositors of Henry IV Part 2, Much Ado About Nothing, The Shoemakers' Holiday, and The First Part of the Contention," Studies in Bibliography, 13 (1960), 19-29, esp. 20. The name Faustus is not distinguished in fifty-eight of its sixty-seven occurrences in Y's pages of A1.
See Craven, "Simmes' Compositor A and Five Shakespeare Quartos," Studies in Bibliography, 26 (1973), 37-60; Craven, "The Reliability of Simmes's Compositor A," Studies in Bibliography, 32 (1979), 186-197.
"S" was first identified and so designated by Charlton Hinman in his introduction to the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimile of Richard II (1966), p. xiv. Compositor "B" was first identified by Ferguson as A's partner in Q2 of The Contention ("The Compositors of Henry IV, etc.," p. 25). Craven, after deciding that "there can be no doubt that Compositor A set all of The Contention," took the freed-up letter "B" and applied it to the second compositor of The Shoemakers' Holiday, noting that "Ferguson does not call the alternate compositor Compositor B" ("Two Valentine Simmes Compositors," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 67 (1973), 161-171, esp. 163, 166). However, Craven is mistaken: Ferguson does suggest, in the last word of his article, that the second Shoemaker compositor is "B".
I have conducted an independent compositor analysis, and my assignment of compositorial shares differs in minor respects from both Welsh's and Bowers's (cf. Complete Works, II.145).
"Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-house Practices," Studies in Bibliography, 22 (1969), 1-75, esp. 18.
I have been able to find only one other instance in Renaissance dramatic texts in which a compositor's stint begins and ends in mid-page, corresponding to the beginning and ending of a scene. In Q1 Lear, Blayney's compositor C's stint begins at the opening stage direction of IV.iii (sig. H4v18) and probably ends with the last line of IV.iv (sig. I1v25). But, as Blayney notes, "there is absolutely no reason why stints and scenes should coincide" (Texts, p. 158). See also note 38 below.
This does not, of course, mean that it must therefore have been the playwrights' foul papers. Presumably, the holograph manuscript of a reporter's memorial reconstruction (which is what Bowers has in mind) could be equally foul. In context, Bowers is here refuting Greg's suggestion that the 1604 quarto may be a mere reprint of a lost 1601 edition. He offers this bibliographical evidence as a proof that A1 "was composed from manuscript and hence that it is the true first edition" (Complete Works, II.147).
In Q1 Lear, Blayney's Compositor C set H4v18-I1v25 and Compositor B set H3r26-4v17, apparently simultaneously. Blayney argues that the section of the copy that C was given "was probably the first physically separable sheet or leaf of the copy following that on which the first compositor was already working" (Texts, p. 127).
Ferguson lists the dates and Short Title Catalogue numbers for each appearance of the font (Valentine Simmes, p. 43): 1594: STC 709, 22860; 1595: 4042, 4101, 4102, 15638, 23361; 1596: 720, 1053, 1829, 13252, 14802, 15281, 17126.1, 20297, 23362; 1597: 15379; 1598: 12099; 1599: 25089; 1600: 6523, 6798, 21466; 1601: 18893, 18894, 19343; 1602: 26026; 1603: 14377; 1604: 17429 [Faustus]. Although Ferguson asserts that Simmes had a "Black Letter 1a" font that was also used in 1594-96 and not after, he apparently does not distinguish between this font and Simmes's other 82 mm black-letter font "B.L.1b" in the above list. For a critique of some aspects of Ferguson's typographic scholarship see Adrian Weiss's review of Ferguson's Pica Roman Type in Elizabethan England (1989) in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 83 (1989), 539-546.
In his seminal study of font analysis and type recognition, Adrian Weiss observes that "routine battering and the beating of the type into place in the chase during locking-up of the forme wreaked havoc with lower-case letters" and he provides a useful survey of the typical damage sustained by pica roman sorts. See "Font Analysis as a Bibliographical Method: The Elizabethan Play-Quarto Printers and Compositors," Studies in Bibliography, 43 (1990), 95-164, esp. 116.
Some type-recurrence investigators do not weed out from their final results identifications about which they are uncertain. Hammond's final count for Q1 of The White Devil, for example, includes types from four levels of (un)certainty ("The White Devil in Nicholas Okes's Shop," Studies in Bibliography, 39 (1986), 135-172, esp. 170n). Although I considered amplifying my results by including such doubtful identifications, it ultimately seemed preferable to have a small amount of reliable data rather than a slightly larger amount that was untrustworthy.
See Hammond, review of Blayney's Texts in The Library, 6th ser., 6 (1984), 91-92; Hammond, "The White Devil in Nicholas Okes's Shop," p. 159; Werstine, review of Blayney's Texts in Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985), 121-125; Werstine, "The Editorial Usefulness of Printing House and Compositor Studies," in Play-Texts in Old Spelling: Papers from the Glendon Conference, eds. G. B. Shand and Raymond Shady (1984), pp. 35-64.
With only six gatherings, A1 Faustus is easily one of the shortest play quartos printed in the Renaissance; even the severely truncated first quarto of Hamlet (1603), also printed by Simmes, with nine gatherings, is twenty-six pages longer.
See Joseph Moxon's description of the compositor's use of visorums in Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683-4), eds. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter (1958), p. 204.
The authenticity of the manuscript has been argued for, on paleographic and literary grounds, by J. Q. Adams, "The Massacre at Paris Leaf," The Library, 4th ser., 14 (1934), 447-469, and J. M. Nosworthy, "The Marlowe Manuscript," The Library, 4th ser., 26 (1946), 158-171. In his Revels edition of Dido and The Massacre at Paris, H. J. Oliver makes use of the manuscript leaf in order to determine "Marlowe's mannerisms" and attempts (unsuccessfully) to find these in the printed text of Dido (1968, pp. xxiv, lviii). In 1973, Bowers claimed that "early doubts about the authenticity of the manuscript of this brief scene are no longer raised" (Complete Works, I.358). In the following year, however, after comparing the leaf with Marlowe's signature on the will of Katherin Benchkin, R. E. Alton denied the Massacre manuscript holograph status (TLS, 26 April 1974). Anthony G. Petti also expresses doubts on paleographic grounds (English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden [1977], p. 85).
A similar difficulty is presented by the co-authorship of Hero and Leander. The title-page of Paul Linley's 1598 edition asserts that the poem was "Begun by Christopher Marloe; and finished by George Chapman." In a passage in the third sestiad (lines 183-198), Chapman apparently alludes to his reasons for concluding the poem, and makes a veiled reference to Marlowe's "late desires" (III.195), from which Tucker Brooke concludes that "Chapman's conclusion was undertaken by the authority of Marlowe himself" (The Works of Christopher Marlowe [1910], p. 486). Conversely, Millar Maclure asserts that "we are not to suppose that Marlowe asked Chapman to finish the poem; rather that he would naturally wish to finish it himself" (Christopher Marlowe, The Poems [Revels, 1968], p. 52n).
Greg, "The Damnation of Faustus," Modern Language Review, 41 (1946), 97-107, esp. 99; Gill, "'Such Conceits as Clownage Keeps in Pay'—Comedy and Dr. Faustus," in The Fool and the Trickster, ed. Paul V. A. Williams (1979), pp. 55-63, esp. p. 56.
The two authors apparently learned the name of the character Pirithous from different sources. In Shakespeare's share of the play, the name is trisyllabic and spelled Pirithous (the spelling in North's Plutarch); in Fletcher's share, it has four syllables and is spelled Perithous (the spelling in Chaucer's Knight's Tale). See G. R. Proudfoot's introduction to his Regents Renaissance Drama edition (1970), p. xix.
See Giorgio Melchiori, "Hand D in Sir Thomas More: An Essay in Misinterpretation," Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), 112; see also Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (1987), p. 461.
A similar inconsistency, possibly caused by dual authorship, appears in Timon of Athens where the interview between Flavius and Ventidius that is arranged at the end of II.ii never materializes. See Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, p. 501.
It appears that the collaborator did, however, have access to Marlowe's two internal choruses; he appropriates a line from the first—"And take some part of holy Peter's feast" (III.Chorus.10)—verbatim for his scene at Rome (III.i.51). Before drafting the choruses, Marlowe seems to have skimmed through the Damnable Life, choosing incidents from the Faust legend that could be used for the middle of his play. Marlowe's review of the source appears to have been no more than cursory, and at times he merely versifies the chapter headings from the Damnable Life: "A question put foorth to Doctor Faustus, concerning the Starres. Chapt. 25." becomes "They put forth questions of astrology" (IV.Chorus.9). If it was Marlowe who planned the basic outline of the play, we might speculate that he provided his collaborator with these two choruses early on, one introducing the scene at Rome and one the scene with the emperor Carolus, as both a guide to and preliminary material for those scenes from the Damnable Life that he wanted dramatized.
In the printer's dedication "To the Gentlemen Readers" of Tamburlaine, Richard Jones claims that he has intentionally omitted what seem to have been comic or farcical scenes that were not germane to Marlowe's tragic scenes. These omitted scenes may have been written by a collaborator. Bowers suggests that the printer's copy that Jones had acquired did not contain these scenes and "hence his virtuous defense of the omission of unsuitable scenes may very possibly be an attempt to anticipate criticism that they were not present, though acted" (Complete Works, I.75).
Similarly, in the Folio text of I Henry VI, which Gary Taylor has recently argued was set from collaborative foul papers, one mid-page compositor change coincides exactly with an apparent change in authorship: while Compositor A set the conclusion of the first act (which, Taylor argues, was written by Nashe) for sig. K5r from type case x, Compositor B was simultaneously setting the beginning of Act Two (which, Taylor argues, was written by another, as-yet unidentified playwright) for the same page from case y ("Shakespeare and Others: the Authorship of I Henry VI," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, forthcoming).
See John C. Meagher, ed., The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (Malone Society, 1965) and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (Malone Society, 1967); Greg, ed., Look About You (Malone Society, 1913); Bowers, ed., The Shoemakers' Holiday in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 4 vols. (1953), I.9.
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