| ||
Bibliographical Evidence
When stop-press corrections are made, they come early in the run, or there is, of course, little point in making them. That is, if the aim of the printer is to have as many corrected sheets as possible, he will begin proofing and correcting as soon as he can. And if one is talking about authorial corrections, or at least an attempt to follow authorial intention, one or the other of which seems most likely in the present instance, corrections would be made early or not at all. Therefore, the mere proportions of copies with the Astraea/Pallas conclusion or the Pallas/Astraea conclusion provide evidence as to which is the corrected version. In the argument I wish to pursue here, this evidence corroborates conclusions that are drawn from a close examination of physical differences in the printing of the two versions. The sequence is this: all of the large-paper sheets of 4Q2-3v and 1v-4 were machined with the Pallas/Astraea conclusion[11] and then some of the small-paper sheets (in the neighborhood of ten percent) were.[12] Then someone intervened to reverse the order of the Pallas/Astraea speeches. The sequence is decisively established by a piece of type that was broken during the machining of 1v-4 after the speeches had been rearranged to Astraea/Pallas.[13] In all large-paper copies and in the small-paper copies with the original arrangement (i.e., Pallas/Astraea), after the word "unsold" in line thirty of 4Q4 (the penultimate line of Astraea's speech) the comma is intact (see Fig. 1). After the type was rearranged, and the line became line eight of 4Q4, for a while the comma remained intact (as in four of sixteen copies with the final leaf present that I have recently examined). Subsequently, however, during the press run of the rearranged forme (Astraea/Pallas), the comma, its face somewhat broken, went adrift. As the broken comma moved, it was pushed into the letter "d," more and more, by stages. A glance at Figs. 2 and 3 (reproduced at twice actual size) reveal that such movement did take place, even to the point of the broken comma subsequently damaging "d." The letter "d" and the disintegrating comma seem to have survived the press run; at least I am not aware of any evidence that they did not. Although one might argue that
There are, conveniently, several other details which, though less conclusive, are nevertheless useful in helping to confirm the order of printing that I have just described. Sometime after the Pallas/Astraea speeches were rearranged, another variation was introduced. In line three of 4Q2 a space between the words "fraud" and "and" was pulled to the level of the type face
Another detail is that the Pallas/Astraea version has "The End" in caps and small caps, in rather small type. The Astraea/Pallas version has "The end" in much larger type and in upper and lower case. The font used for the reset "The end" is the same as that used for the words "The Catalogue," on the first page of set type of the preliminary matter, ¶3.[15] It is reasonable to suppose that the compositor, following the customary practice of setting the preliminaries last, was drawing upon that font when the speeches were reversed and that he employed it as a matter of convenience. As it happens, the font is one that was employed but sparingly in the Folio. Aside from "The Catalogue" on ¶3 and "The end" on 4Q4, it appears at most at sixteen places,[16] each time as part of the title of a play or entertainment or masque, but in no instance running for more than two or three words.
There is also another connection between the final pages of the volume and the preliminaries. The watermarks in the preliminaries are all grape bunches. I have charted all watermarks in twenty-two small-paper copies and have found only one instance of these grapes in the body of the volume (in 4I2.5 of one copy). This single example, present perhaps by accident, does at least show that the grape-bunch stock of the preliminaries was in Stansby's shop when some of the last quires were being printed.
To return to the issue raised at the first part of this section, how many copies, then, were printed with the original Pallas/Astraea ending and how many with the reverse? I have consulted sixty-nine copies of the Folio, and add to that number six of those cited by Greg which I have not yet examined, for a total of seventy-five. Four of those (all small-paper copies) are missing both of the last leaves, and thus provide no evidence. Of the seventy-one remaining, six are large-paper copies, all of which retain the Pallas/Astraea ending. One small-paper copy, the Lowell volume in the Houghton Library,[17] has bound in with the normal small-paper sheets several of large-paper cut down to small-paper size, including all of 4Q. This can be readily determined by examining the watermarks. There are some three dozen different watermarks in the various sheets used for the small-paper printing, but large-paper
| ||