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Notes
I wish to thank David Bevington, Douglas Bruster, Robert J. Fehrenbach, Michael Murrin, Bruce Redford, and Francis-Noël Thomas for reading and commenting upon this essay in its various stages. I am especially grateful to Professor Fehrenbach who introduced me to textual and bibliographical studies and to the texts of King Lear.
The First Quarto was entered in the Stationer's Register on 26 November 1607 and was published in 1608 for Nathaniel Butter. It is a poorly printed text with sporadic punctuation, incorrect lineation, limited stage directions and several unintelligible readings. Still, Q is not considered a "bad quarto" as are the earliest editions of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V. A second quarto (Q2) was published in 1619 by William Jaggard for Thomas Pavier. Studies have shown that the copy for Q2 was an exemplar of Q1. But with the exception of the occurrence of a new speech in Q2 sheet I, Q2 is a reprint of Q1 (see, for example, Michael J. Warren's discussion of Q2 in The Parallel King Lear p. XII, published separately as Part 1 of The Complete King Lear 1608-1623). Folio Lear contains numerous corrected spellings, clearer punctuation, and improved lineation. F also provides ample stage directions and divides the play into acts and scenes. Although F frequently reproduces obvious errors from Q, editors have typically based their editions on F, turning to Q for assistance in correcting erroneous readings in F and including passages, thought to be authorial, that appear only in Q. There are approximately 300 lines or half-lines that occur only in Q and approximately 180 lines that appear exclusively in F. In addition, there are roughly 850 variations between the texts in wording, punctuation, lineation and spelling. Several speeches are differently assigned between Q and F, the most famous of which affects the final speech: Albany closes the play in Q, while Edgar speaks the last lines in F.
See especially, William Shakespeare; The Complete Works, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds. (1986); Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (1987); The Division of the Kingdoms; Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear, Gary Taylor and Michael J. Warren, eds. (1983). These frequently quoted works will hereafter be cited in this essay using the abbreviations CW, TC, and Division respectively. See also Michael J. Warren, The Complete King Lear 1608-1623 (1989); Michael J. Warren, "Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar," Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, David Bevington and Jay L. Halio, eds. (1978) 95-107; Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear (1980); Grace Iappolo, Revising Shakespeare (1991).
Other plays that are thought to have undergone considerable authorial revision include 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello and Richard II (CW 17).
G. Thomas Tanselle argues that "the attempt to reconstruct authorially intended texts is one of the many activities that readers can engage in as they evaluate the socially produced evidence that survives for their examination" ("Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology" 99). Nor does "a concern with authorial intention . . . contradict the idea of textual instability, for authors' intentions shift with time, and our reconstructions of their intended texts can never be definitive" (95). Finally, the attempt to recover authorial intention does not depend upon how recoverable the author's intention is; rather, it is a question of deciding whether the attempt to recover the past is of "interest or relevance." Tanselle writes, "We never know whether anything is recoverable, nor do we know when we have in fact recovered something; all we can do is attempt to move in the direction of recovering whatever we have decided is worth recovering. Deciding that the past can be of interest or relevance is the crucial matter, not how recoverable it is" (94). For other recent discussions of the concept of authorial intention and related matters in textual and bibliographical studies, see Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983; repr. 1992); Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, Jerome J. McGann, ed. (1985); James McLaverty, "The Concept of Authorial Intention in Textual Criticism," Library 6th ser. 6 (1984): 121-138; T. H. Howard-Hill, "Playwrights' Intentions and the Editing of Plays," Text 4, D. C. Greetham and W. Speed Hill, eds. (1988): 269-278; Howard-Hill, "Modern Textual Theories and the Editing of Plays," Library 6th ser. 11 (1989): 89-115; G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (1989); Tanselle, Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (1990); Tanselle, "Textual Criticism and Deconstruction," Studies in Bibliography 43 (1990): 1-33; Peter L. Shillingsburg, "Text as Matter, Concept, and Action," SB 44 (1991): 31-82.
I have adopted the phrase "consolidated presentation" or "consolidated treatment" from G. Thomas Tanselle, whose essay "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology" has influenced the reasoning behind my argument. See especially pages 134-137 of that essay. I use "consolidated presentation" rather than "conflation" since the latter has come to imply an imprudent mixing of distinct authorial versions. To say that editors have "conflated distinct versions" is to suggest that they have "distorted" and "falsified the historical situation" (136). As Tanselle points out further, however, "One is not mixing versions simply by drawing readings from different documents, since the texts of documents cannot be equated with the texts of versions—a fact recognized in the original decision to present a critical text. After all, traditional critical editors interested in authors' final intentions are not trying to mix versions but to recreate one-one that is not present in satisfactory form in any surviving document" (120).
Many scholars have proposed arguments to account for variant readings in the early texts of King Lear. In addition to those mentioned in notes 2 and 4, some other well-known studies include: E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 1 (1930) 463-470; Madeleine Doran, The Text of King Lear (1931); Leo Kirschbaum, "The Origin of the Bad Quartos," PMLA 60 (1945): 697-715; George Ian Duthie, Elizabethan Shorthand and the First Quarto of King Lear (1949); W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare; A Survey of the Foundations of the Text, 3rd ed. (1954); Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio; Richard III, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, Othello (1953); Kristian Smidt, "The Quarto and the Folio Lear: Another Look at the Theories of Textual Deviation," English Studies 45 (1964): 149-162; P. W. K. Stone, The Textual History of King Lear (1980); William C. Carroll, "New Plays vs. Old Readings: The Division of the Kingdoms and Folio Deletions in King Lear," Studies in Philology 85 (1988): 225-244; Paul Werstine, "Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: 'Foul Papers' and 'Bad' Quartos," Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 65-86.
We know F derives in part from Q, since F reproduces some original errors in Q that had been set right in Q's corrected state.
Citations from Q are taken from The Historie of King Lear, Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto; A Facsimile Edition of Copies Primarily From the Henry E. Huntington Library, Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth Muir, eds. (1981) 664-703. Citations from F are taken from The Tragedie of King Lear, The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, Charleton Hinman, ed. (1968) 801-817. For the reader's convenience I also cite act, scene, and line designations from The Tragedy of King Lear, The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans, ed. (1974) 1249-1305.
In asking "But why 'tempestious', to which 'contentious' can have borne little resemblance?", Peter Blayney answers his own question with a depiction of proof-reader tactics and the mechanical difficulties associated with correcting type while consulting copy. According to Blayney, memory lapse and faulty hand-eye coordination explain the proof-reader's erroneous emendation (249). One might also have noted that given the context of Lear's speech, "tempestious" offers a sensible correction made by a proof-reader who did not trouble himself to consult the manuscript or who, when he did, could not decipher it. Six lines after "this contentious storme," Lear speaks of the "tempest" in his mind (Q: G1r; Riverside III.iv.12), and ten lines after that, in a passage addressed to his fool, the King continues to develop the storm metaphor: "Prethe goe in thy selfe, seeke thy one ease / This tempest will not giue me leaue to ponder / On things would hurt me more, but ile goe in" (Q: G1v; Riverside III.iv.23-25). In his discussion of press variants, Peter Blayney maintains that the proof-reader consulted his manuscript at all times when correcting outer G. He even argues that F's "contentious" was a later restoration of the original word that stood in Q's copy but claims that the proof-reader for Q did check his copy, and because of the illegible quality of the manuscript at G1r30 he had no choice but to guess at the proper word. Blayney says that the copy was checked carefully throughout outer G, since shortly after his false emendation of "crulentious" the proof-reader successfully corrected "raging sea" to "roring sea" and "the" to "this." Subsequently in his argument, however, Blayney argues that even if we find evidence that a manuscript was consulted during correction, we have no guarantee it was checked line by line or page by page: "The existence of a fussy or trivial correction in any one line of a forme which was elsewhere corrected by reference to the manuscript may or may not show that the correction itself was made after consultation, but it fails to guarantee that no major substantive errors remain in the same line." According to Blayney, we must not assume that, "when consulted at all, the manuscript was consulted with uniform care. Readings which had been deliberately altered by the compositor (or by the proof-reader himself when correcting foul proofs) were allowed to stand, and readings which would have been recognized as errors had they been noticed were overlooked. When consultation of the manuscript showed that a supposed error was in fact the original reading, it was likely to be altered anyway (291)." Blayney's observation here leads one to question his earlier assertion that reference was made to copy during the false emendation of "crulentious" to "tempestious." But this inconsistency in Blayney's discussion is a minor issue in relation to the sound logic of his two main points. First, there are several probable sources of revision and alteration in Q: the proof-reader may not have consulted the manuscript when correcting type and, therefore, introduced his own revision; compositors sometimes failed to carry out or follow properly the proof-reader's instructions, correcting the wrong word, inserting the wrong type, or simply misreading a word. Second, the Folio reading is a restoration of the original reading, and, therefore, what we find in F belongs in Q.
The textual notes for III.vi. of King Lear in The Riverside Shakespeare show another example of compositor B's inability to distinguish correctly between "r," "o," and "u" and between the minims "m" and "n." Q reads "Come o'er the broom" (25), but editors agree that the correct reading for "broom" is "bourn," meaning either "burn" or "brook."
Setting by formes allowed for greater flexibility of work schedules and a more advantageous supply of type, since the order of typesetting and printing did not depend on the final order of the text. Printing could begin as soon as either forme had been set. In this way more than one compositor, or in some cases more than one printing house, could work on different parts of the same text simultaneously. If, when setting by formes, the printer had overestimated his copy, he would compensate for error by introducing "white space" in the text. If on the other hand he had underestimated his copy, he would make adjustments by crowding verse into prose, neglecting proper punctuation, or by leaving little or no space between words and sentences. The quickest and easiest solution, of course, was simply to cut portions of his copy when he had underestimated the number of sheets necessary to print the text accurately and was therefore running out of room. Deletions under these circumstances were not uncommon.
Substantive cuts do not of course always derive from careless proofreading, compositorial error, or improper casting-off. Changes throughout F may have been made through reference to an independent manuscript, which may or may not have contained the author's revisions—although Thomas L. Berger, in his review of The Oxford Shakespeare, points out that for the Oxford editors "may" becomes "does" (145). Or F may have been set up from a copy of an earlier edition that had been altered by others. If the copy had been used as a promptbook, for example, some of these alterations might have been introduced by an actor or spectator from his recollection of performance. And no bibliographical investigation can dismiss the possibility of scribal interference with the manuscript used to annotate the printer's copy for F. In his essay, "Folio Editors, Folio Compositors, and the Folio Text of King Lear," Paul Werstine measures the influence of editors and compositors on F by examining changes in stage directions and "incidental" verbal forms that affect meaning, tone, and meter such as contractions, elisions, and substitutions (Division 247-312). Werstine concludes that editors and compositors may be held accountable for only a fraction of the 300 lines or half lines from Q that were cut in F (284). Hinman drew opposite conclusions in his two-volume study of the Folio, summarized in his Introduction to The Norton Facsimile. He did not think the proof-readers and compositors were skilled enough or conscientious enough to produce a text relatively free of accidental or deliberate cuts (xvi). According to Hinman, Jaggard worked with an indifferent attitude toward accuracy—not unlike Okes. His primary concern was to eliminate obvious typographical mistakes, and he often did so without consulting copy, introducing new errors rather than preserving authorial readings or rendering more reliable readings than those originally set. Hinman's evaluation of the Folio compositors was even less optimistic than his view of Jaggard. According to him, two compositors, E and B, set Folio Lear. E set more than half the play; judging from his many obvious errors, Hinman concluded that E was essentially incapable of setting even printed copy accurately. Compositor B's errors are much less conspicuous; he would neglect the authority of his copy and then conceal his inaccuracies by modifying the text (xix).
For similar reasons other substantive cuts in III.vi of F, namely the omission of Kent's Oppressed nature sleeps" speech and Edgar's soliloquy, "When we our betters see bearing our woes . . . ," have been considered deliberate cuts, although not necessarily authorial cuts (Riverside III.vi.97-115).
When I cite only from Riverside in this discussion and those that follow, the corresponding quotations are found in both Q and F.
G. Thomas Tanselle raises this issue in "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology": "the collaborative character of theatrical production raises in extreme form the question of how authorial intention in a work of language is to be conceived" (122). Following from this observation, he assesses T. H. Howard-Hill's arguments in "Modern Textual Theories and the Editing of Plays" (Library, 6th ser., 11 [1989], 89-115). Tanselle writes, ". . . the versions that reached the public in performance are obviously of historical interest. What is objectionable in Howard-Hill's presentation is his insistence that the only legitimate critical texts for representing playwrights' final intentions are those based on performance texts (or such textual evidence as there is of what actually occurred in performance). His account is notably unbalanced in not sufficiently recognizing that alterations made for performance (even if agreed to by the playwright) do not always please the playwright" (124).
Blayney observes that Okes' customary method was not seriatim, but setting by formes, and that Okes did not own a very large stock of type: "In seriatim work it is necessary to set at least seven pages before the first imposition of each sheet, and if the pages are to have headlines before the second forme of the previous sheet comes off the press, at least eleven are needed. . . . Okes's norm is likely to have been setting by formes. . . . It seems evident that the fount was not really adequate to the task [of setting seriatim]. . . . The shortage of type is another factor which affected the work—and consequently the text—from time to time" (150).
The editors write, ". . . type-shortage probably accounts, in part, for some of the text's deficiencies, particularly the peculiarity of the punctuation and lineation . . . Even after every allowance has been made for the possibility that Quarto variants may be authorial alternatives rather than errors, Q remains exceptionally unreliable in its distinction between prose and verse, and in its arrangement of verse" (TC 510).
Blayney suggests that Okes may have deliberately wanted L4v to be left blank. He states, "Okes seems generally to have attempted to end the text either on the final recto of a gathering or on the verso before the final leaf—thus allowing a blank to protect the print when folded or stitched copies were stored without wrappers. For the same reason he preferred to leave a blank leaf before the titlepage where possible" (96).
When we consider that there are nine instances of alternate speech assignments in sheet L, many of which have been judged by scholars as compositorial blunders, it is less surprising to find Albany, rather than Edgar, delivering the final speech in Q. The following citations indicate different speech assignments or speech prefix alterations in L. Numbers specify lines in the Riverside edition: 70, Q Gonorill, F Albany; 81, Q Bastard, F Regan; 161, Q Gonorill, F Bastard; 237, Q Duke, F Albany; 252, Q Duke, F Edgar; 276, Q Captain, F Gentleman; 296, Q Captain, F Messenger; 319, Q Duke, F Albany; 324, Q Duke, F Edgar.
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