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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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