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Notes
TLN quotations are taken from the Norton Facsimile of the First Folio prepared by Charlton Hinman (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968). All modern-spelling quotations are taken from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); references are cited parenthetically in my text.
While it is true that the singular noun "scissor" is recorded as an obsolete usage in the OED, it is noteworthy that the noun appears in the plural in all barbers' references I have come across. See, for instance, Randle Holme, The Academy of Armoury (Chester, 1688), III,iii,127: "a pair of Cisers" and "A Set of Cisers"; Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, ed. F. J. Furnivall (London, 1877-82), II,i,50: "what snipping & snapping of the cysers is there"; Ben Jonson, Epicoene, ed. R. V. Holdsworth (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1979) 3.5.79: "his scissors rust"; J. A. Comenius, Orbis Pictus (facsimile of first English edition of 1659, intro. John E. Sadler; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 263: "a pair of Sizzars"; John Ford, The Fancies in Works, ed. W. Gifford, rev. Alexander Dyce, vol. II (London, 1869), 5.2., p. 310): "scissors." The only Shakespearean usage occurs in the plural at The Comedy of Errors 5.1.176: "His man with scissors nicks him like a fool."
John M. Ward, Sprightly & Cheerful Musick. Notes on the Cittern, Gittern and Guitar in 16th-& 17th- Century England, Lute Society Journal 21 (1979-81):40.
Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1988) 1.5.127-130.
John Lyly, Gallathea and Midas, ed. Anne B. Lancashire (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1969) 3.2.35.
The Mayor of Queenborough in The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen, vol.II (New York: AMS Press, 1964), 3.3.166-167.
2 Honest Whore in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964), 5.2.151. The association of barbers' shops with music continued for many years. See The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. John Warrington (London: Dent, 1906, repr. 1966), vol. I, 5 June 1660, p. 70; The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers, vol. I (1927; reissued New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), 4.1, p. 71; Middleton, More Dissemblers Besides Women in The Works, vol. VI, 5.1.70-84; Ben Jonson, Vision of Delight line 93, in Ben Jonson vol. VII, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941).
In a nice economy, the teeth extracted by the barber-surgeons were hung up for display on discarded cittern strings. See anon., Wit's Triumvirate, ed. Cathryn Anne Nelson (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1975), 5.1.288-290; The Knight of the Burning Pestle 3.338; The Woman Hater in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966) 3.3.109-110; and Epicoene 3.5.87-88. This last reference is to a lute string. This may be a careless reference to a cittern; but lutes were apparently available for music making as well. See Margaret Pelling, "Occupational Diversity: Barbersurgeons and the Trades of Norwich, 1550-1640," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 56 (1982): 484-511 (esp. p. 504), and cf. Roger Sharpe, More Fooles Yet (1610): "Here comes old Spunge the Barbor with his Lute" (sig. D2r). An engraving of the interior of a sixteenth-century Dutch barber's shop shows a recorder as well as a stringed instrument hanging on the wall (see Ward, Plate X, between pp. 40 and 41).
Robert Hadaway, "The Cittern," Early Music 1 (1973): 77-81. See also Francis W. Galpin, Old English Instruments of Music (London: Methuen, 1910, rev. and repr. 1965), pp. 15-27.
For a discussion of the development of the cittern, see "The Survival of the Kithara and the Evolution of the English Cittern: a Study in Morphology," in Emanuel Winternitz, Musical Instruments and their Symbolism in Western Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), pp. 57-65, and Ward, passim. The cittern's history is complicated by the existence of the semantically and musically similar gittern (which may or may not be the forerunner of the modern guitar; for differing views on this subject see David Munrow, Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976] p. 26 and Ward, passim).
Henry H. Carter, A Dictionary of Middle English Musical Terms (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961), p. 77.
Love's Cure, ed. George Walton Williams, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 2.2.108.
The Fancies, in The Works of John Ford, ed. W. Gifford, rev. A. Dyce, vol. II (London, 1869), 1.2, p. 234.
John Ford, The Lover's Melancholy, ed. R. F. Hill (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1985), 2.1.36- 39.
The Works of Massinger, ed. W. Gifford, vol. IV (London, 1813; reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1966), 4.1., pp.533-534. In 1 Henry 4 Hal relies on the association between tavern drawers and citterns when he boasts that, by fraternising with "loggerheads" and "hogsheads," he has "sounded the very bass-string of humility" (2.4.4-6).
Fredson Bowers, On Editing Shakespeare (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966), p. 56.
Paul Werstine, "Compositor B of the Shakespeare First Folio," AEB 2 (1978): 241-63, and "Folio Editors, Folio Compositors, and the Folio Text of King Lear," in The Division of the Kingdoms, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 247-312.
In calculating this total I exclude corrections to the Italian and Latin in the text, and modernisations (e.g. the Oxford Complete Works "pip" for F "peepe" at 1.2.33/TLN 600). Where an emendation is universally rejected by editors, I identify the proposer and/or the sole edition in which the emendation appears; I omit this information when an emendation is generally accepted. Where an emendation seems gratuitous I indicate as much.
An obvious caveat is necessary: the alleged misreadings may be those of a scribe making a transcript, with B faithfully reproducing the errors in his MS copy. The nature of the underlying copy for F The Shrew is not clear, but "scribal copy, or some combination of scribal and autograph copy, cannot be ruled out"(Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells with William Montgomery and John Jowett, William Shakespeare. A Textual Companion [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987], p. 169).
The Taming of the Shrew, ed. H. J. Oliver (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982); The Taming of the Shrew in The Complete Works, ed. Wells et al.
The Taming of the Shrew, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1928; rev. 1953).
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