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The First Folio of 1623 (hereafter F) is our sole authority for the text of what is probably Shakespeare's final tragedy, Coriolanus. With the possible exception of four bb formes (discussed below), Coriolanus was, in all accounts, set from manuscript copy. About the provenance of that manuscript, or whether it was in Shakespeare's own hand, there is less certainty and, hence, less agreement. Many editors have suggested Shakespeare's autograph papers as copy, and G. Blakemore Evans in 1974 concluded that `[t]here is general agreement that the F1 text was printed from a carefully prepared authorial manuscript, a "producer's copy" as it has been called'; he went on to assert that, `though perhaps showing one or two book-keeper's notations', it `had never served as a prompt-book'.[1] In contrast, Albert Gilman, though inclined to accept authorial copy, entertained the possibility of scribal transcript and was certain that the manuscript had `been used as a prompt-book'.[2] In his New Arden edition, Philip Brockbank was more cautious on both counts, finding it `consistent with the evidence to suppose F was set up from autograph copy, at least partly prepared by the playwright for the theatre. It is not possible to be sure that the book-keeper had or did not have a casual, occasional hand in it.'[3] More recently, in their 1987 Textual Companion to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, the Oxford editors designate


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the copy as `scribal transcript (possibly of a prompt-book)';[4] in his 1994 Oxford Shakespeare edition of Coriolanus, however, R. B. Parker concludes the manuscript beneath F was Shakespearean holograph, though he believes it was `a draft that still required revision'.[5] The two issues -- autograph or scribal copy and relation to theatrical production -- are important. We would like to know, of course, whether textual problems in F result solely from compositorial misreading or mis-setting of an authorial original, or whether another layer of possible alteration intervenes in the transcriptional processes of a scribe. Equally, we would like to know how closely the text printed in F approximates the early seventeenth-century acting script of Coriolanus. Despite earlier assertions of scholarly consensus, it clearly does not exist on either count. I will argue in the following sections, first, that Coriolanus was set from a scribal transcript and, second, that most of the apparent problems created by the F text's speech headings (SHs) and stage directions (SDs) were introduced either by the scribe or in the printing house; they should not be taken as certain evidence that the copy manuscript was not yet in a form that could serve as theatrical playbook.

Before turning to the argument itself, however, two unusual features surrounding the printing of Coriolanus need to be mentioned, for in major and minor ways they affected the resulting F text. Because Coriolanus was being set into type by Compositors A and B while Compositor E was simultaneously setting the next play in this section, Titus Andronicus, the manuscript pages of Coriolanus had to be entirely `cast off' at the printing house before work on it could begin.[6] Obviously, over- or under-estimation by the man who did the casting off, especially in conjunction with the constant challenge posed by F's narrow double-column format (so inhospitable to long verse lines), could put the compositors' ingenuity to a severe test. This peculiarity in the circumstances under which Coriolanus was printed helps explain, as we shall see, some at least of the play's high incidence of mislineation, as well as some of the apparent compositorial tampering with SDs.


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Another peculiarity originating in the printing house is more problematic (and, for our purposes, less significant), but worth mentioning since it may have influenced Compositor A's work on bb1v in a minor way. Charlton Hinman notes that, given the orderly sequence generally followed in setting F, the only exception stands out: quire bb of Coriolanus. Without precedent in the prior work on the Comedies and Histories, `a beginning was made on quire kk before quire bb was finished', and the `four bb formes which we might certainly have expected just after bb3v:4 and bb3:4v eventually turn up between quires ll and mm'. Hinman believes the four formes may have been set in their normal order but, after suffering some physical degradation (possibly a `warehouse disaster'), they had to be replaced. If Hinman's explanation is correct, and if the damaged sheets were still legible, these four formes in F might have been reset from printed copy, returned to after `about fifteen working days after the completion of group 3'.[7]