University of Virginia Library

I

A quick survey of his speech-prefixes in these seven plays shows that, despite
the length of the forms in his copy, B favored three-letter prefixes, was also open
to setting four-letter forms, and was even not averse to producing some speech-
prefixes with only two letters. The speech-prefixes in short lines (those not fill-
ing the measure or even extending to within three ens of it) provide the most
unequivocal evidence.[5] More than 80 percent of B's prefixes in short lines run
to three or four letters, and if those containing only two letters are also included
in the count, the percentage jumps to well over 90. Short speech-prefixes are
clearly what B generally preferred throughout the Folio (F). In this respect his
general practice appears to have changed little over the two and one-half years
he worked on this book.

His preference for three-letter speech-prefixes is most evident in F's Com-
edies. In Ado, LLL, MND, and MV, there are almost four times as many three-
letter forms as four-letter. Moreover, if we exclude from consideration the two
and one-half pages of Ado—in which B faced a number of relatively long speech-
prefixes typical of Simmes's Compositor A[6] and set one and one-half times as
many four-letter forms ('Mess.', 'Leon.', 'Clau.', 'Iohn.') as three-letter ('Leo.', 'Bea.',
'Ben.')—the proportion of three-letter to four-letter forms in the Comedies is a
flat five to one. Thus MND is about typical of B's performance in the Comedies.
It is dominated by 'Her.', 'The.', 'Dem.', 'Lys.', 'Hel.', and 'Dut.'; many of these
reproduce the forms of quarto copy, but 'Lys.' and 'Dut.' also replace longer copy
forms ('Lysan.' or 'Lysand.' and 'Dutch.').

On the other hand, even in the Comedies B is not so committed to speech-
prefixes of three letters that he completely eschews those of four or of two. Besides
setting a majority of four-letter forms in Ado, B once expands his copy's 'Fai.' to
'Fair.' in MND and reproduces Q2's 'Quin.', 'This.', 'Wall.', 'Lyon.', and 'Moon.'.
In LLL, though favoring 'Ber.', 'Dum.', 'Mar.', 'Lon.', 'Ros.', 'Kin.', and 'Ped.', he
retains 2 of Q's 3 'Mari.', 4 of its 9 'Long.', 5 of its 12 'Rosa.', 8 of its 21 'King.',
and all 11 of its 'Brag.'. In MV he changes to 'Bas.' half of the dozen 'Bass.' found
in Q1, but he reproduces the other half dozen four-letter forms even after having
regularized others to the shorter form. Likewise, he reproduces a single 'Anth.'
from Q1 despite his already established preference for 'Ant.'. The Comedies thus
exhibit B's tolerance for four-letter speech-prefixes as well as his stronger prefer-
ence for forms of three letters. Furthermore, LLL and MND especially display his
use, though limited, of certain two-letter speech-prefixes, which generally belong
to one of two groups of analogous forms (see below in section I).

In F's Histories and Tragedies, speech-prefixes of three and four letters, along
with a smattering of two-letter forms, continue to dominate the pages studied
here. Although the raw statistics do not suggest as strong a preference for three-
letter forms as in the Comedies, the particular features of the texts and other
circumstances indicate that there was no appreciable shift in B's practices in these
later Folio plays. It is true that in 1 Henry IV, where B set 117 (+15NL+75L)[7] three-
letter speech-prefixes and 91 (+14NL+83L) four-letter, the three-letter forms out-
number the four-letter by the small factor of 1.3 to 1, as compared to 3.7 to 1
in the Comedies. And it is also true that in his three and one-half pages of Tit.
and Rom., B set 10 (+3NL+10L) three-letter speech-prefixes and 17 (+4NL+15L)
four-letter, thus apparently abandoning his former practice and using the longer
form almost twice as often. However, even though these raw statistics suggest an
increasingly decided shift to four-letter forms, the nature of the speech-prefixes
indicates that no decisive shift occurred.

Four characters—'King.', 'Prin.', 'Poin.', and 'Fran.'—occur so frequently
in B's pages of 1H4 that together they account for B's apparent gravitation to
speech-prefixes of four letters in the course of setting F. With the exception of
one 'Kin.' in a long line of Q5 (3019L), B found only 'King.' in his copy and repro-
duced all but one of its 13 (+6NL+4L) long forms, shortening to 'Kin.' only once.
Since in LLL he had already displayed a tendency to reproduce his copy's 'King.'
despite his preference for 'Kin.', his prefixes in 1H4 suggest that this preference
had not been reversed but merely weakened, probably as a result of his continual
exposure to 'King.' in the copy for the Histories.[8]

The increase in the proportion of 'King.' forms accepted by B can be traced
to two long-standing habits which made him peculiarly susceptible to the influ-
ence of his copy's virtually uniform 'King.'. First, even in the Comedies his work
exhibits a general though secondary inclination to set speech-prefixes of four
letters, of which there are a total of 135 (67+6NL+62L) in the seventeen pages
of four plays. More particularly, he displays throughout F a tendency to retain
full forms of names like 'Duke.', 'Iohn.', 'Hero.', 'Wall.', 'Lyon.', 'Page.', and even
'Claudio.', 'Borachio.', 'Boyet.', 'Egeus.', and 'Nerissa.'. (More on this practice in
section III below.) Together with the preponderance of 'King.' forms in his copy
for R2 and possibly in the various copy for the other Histories set before 1 Henry
IV, these two tendencies of B's probably combined to make him more disposed
than in the Comedies to retain his copy's 'King.'

Still more numerically dominant than 'King.' in B's share of 1H4 are the
analogous speech-prefixes 'Prin.', 'Poin.', and 'Fran.'. B's pages have a total of
46 instances of 'Prin.' in short lines and another 47 in long or nearly long lines;
of these 93, more than one-third replace longer forms (e.g., 'Prince.'), while the
remainder duplicate Q5's 'Prin.'. The number of 'Poin.', or 'Poyn.', forms (11+7L)
is comparable to the number of 'King.', as is the number of 'Fran.' (10+4L). Why
B preferred these forms, not only to the longer ones which he periodically found
in his copy but also to their shorter alternatives, is not altogether clear. However,
it is a fact that he often eschewed three-letter speech-prefixes that end in a vowel
even in the Comedies. For instance, his 'Leon.' accounts in part for the higher
proportion of four-letter speech-prefixes in Ado than in the other three Comedies;
when setting the first page of this play B shortened Q's 'Leona.' to 'Leon.' in the
first two instances, then followed its 'Leo.' in the next three, and finally settled
on 'Leon.' for subsequent speech-prefixes, where Q had either 'Leonato.' or 'Leo.'.
Likewise, he followed Q's 'Brag.' 11 times in LLL, though setting 'Du.' 5 times,
'Boy.' or 'Boi.' 12, and 'Clo.' 9.[9] It may be that 'Brag.' merely reflects the influ-
ence of Q copy on B rather than his disposition to eschew three-letter prefixes
ending in a vowel, but 'Leon.' at least seems to betray an actual compositorial
preference.

Whether the influence of copy or an instinctive attraction to ending abbrevi-
ated speech-prefixes with -n rather than a vowel led B to prefer 'Prin.', 'Poin.', and
'Fran.', these speech-prefixes, along with the dozen instances of 'King.', largely
account for the higher proportion of four-letter forms in 1H4 than in the Com-
edies. Nonetheless, it is a fact that in this play B also set 19 'Fal.' (13 instead
of Q5's 'Fals.'), 20 'Wor.', 5 'Nor.', and 45 'Hot.'. Hence, his general habit of
setting speech-prefixes either with three or four letters apparently continued in
1 Henry IV, even though the raw statistics seem to suggest an increasing tolerance
of the latter.

In the few pages of the Tragedies which B set from known prints, the raw
totals may again be misleading in their indication of a stronger leaning towards
speech-prefixes of four letters. The evidence for such an inclination is all in
Rom. but is not convincing. B's one and one-half pages have a sufficient number

of four-letter speech-prefixes to suggest a shift in his practice: a quick glance
finds 'Greg.', 'Samp.', and 'Abra.' recurring in the first page (ee3), 'Prin.' repeated
in the second (Gg1), and 'Moun.' in both. Yet in view of his performance in 1
Henry IV, B's 2 (+2L) 'Prin.' prefixes are hardly surprising, especially since they
reproduce Q3 forms. Furthermore, analysis shows (1) that the 1 (+1L) 'Moun.' is
another speech-prefix ending in -n which preserves the copy form; (2) that all 5
(+1NL+6L) 'Samp.' reproduce Q3 forms and that in 2 (+4L) instances B reduces
Q3's 'Samp.' to 'Sam.'; (3) that all 5 'Abra.' duplicate Q3's speech-prefixes; and
(4) that B's 'Greg.' is analogous to the 'Brag.' forms of LLL, that it reproduces
Q3's 'Greg.' 1 (+1NL+3L) times, that it replaces Q3's 'Grego.' 2 (+1NL) times, and
that Q3's 'Gre.' is retained in 2 (+1NL) instances. The only hard evidence, then,
of B's actually preferring speech-prefixes of four letters to those of three in the
Tragedies is the 1 (+1L) example of his changing Q3's 'Gre.' to 'Greg.'.[10] Folio Tit.
more clearly represents B's continuing practice. Dominated by very long speech-
prefixes that mimic those of Q3, its only four-letter form ('Aron.') occurs in a long
line and reproduces that of B's copy, whereas B's one and one-half pages contain
2 (+2NL+1L) three-letter speech-prefixes which shorten longer copy forms ('Lu-
cius.', 'Marc.', 'Puer.').[11]

The pages of the four Comedies, one History, and two Tragedies in which
B set varying amounts of type from known printed copy are fairly consistent in
their implications. Although the raw evidence can sometimes be deceptive, it
indicates that B favored shorter speech-prefixes to longer ones throughout F. It
also suggests that his primary preference was for speech-prefixes of three letters
and that he had throughout a secondary bias for those of four letters, though
various circumstances led him to tolerate the latter increasingly as the printing
of the Folio progressed.

The evidence of these seven plays thus generally confirms earlier inferences
that shorter speech-prefixes are typical of B and that longer ones indicate the
influence of copy or of other factors on his work. However, it would be imprecise
to characterize B's preference as one for 'maximally abbreviated forms'.[12] Only
a small portion of B's speech-prefixes in these seven plays could be construed as
fitting that description:

• Ado: Bea., Ben., Leo.
• LLL: Qu., Du., Ka., La.
• MND: Qu., Du., Ob., Dut., Her., Hel.
• MV: An., Du.
• 1H4: La.
• Rom.: Gr.

Yet not all of these are the forms that B either settled upon as his standards or
at least was inclined to favor. A few of them he either adopted briefly and then
quickly abandoned for longer ones (e.g., 'Du.' and 'Ka.' in LLL), or retained
from his copy despite his established preference for a longer form (e.g., 'Leo.'
in Ado, 'An.' in MV). The remainder, which do seem to represent B's genuine
preferences, fall roughly into two categories. The first is probably the more sig-
nificant and comprises two groups: (a) speech-prefixes ending with -u, like 'Qu.'
(for Queen) and 'Du.' (for Duke), and (b) those ending with -a, like 'La.' (for Lady)
and 'Bea.' (for Beatrice). The second category is associated with a few three-letter
speech-prefixes, such as 'Ben.' in Ado and 'Dut.', 'Her.', 'Hel.' in MND, which may
be classified as 'maximally abbreviated' only because these characters' opposite
numbers ('Bea.', 'Du.', 'Hel.', 'Her.') would have been confused with them had B
adopted shorter forms. Along with 'Ob.', the forms belonging to these two cat-
egories constitute a limited and by no means typical class of speech-prefixes in
Compositor B's pages.

In contrast to this relatively small number of maximally abbreviated forms
stands a larger number of prefixes for which B settled on forms containing an
additional letter or two when still shorter ones would have been sufficient to
distinguish the characters. Sometimes he deliberately rejected the shorter forms
of his copy by setting longer ones: 'Leon.' (Ado), 'Ber.' (LLL), 'Fair.' (MND), 'Ant.'
(MV), 'Poin.', 'Bard.' (1H4), 'Greg.' (Rom.) More frequently, he early opted for a
speech-prefix of three or four letters despite the fact that a shorter alternative was
an obvious expedient. He set the following where a shorter speech-prefix was a
realistic possibility:

• Ado: Mess., Hero., Pedro., Iohn., Clau., Fri.
• LLL: Dum., Lon(g)., Brag.
• MND: Quin., Dem., This., Wall., Moon.
• MV: Gra., Ner., Por.
• 1H4: West., King., Prin., Vint., Peto., Theeues., Iohn., Host.
• Tit.: Bassia.
• Rom.: Abra., Tyb., Wife., Prin.

What would have been the 'maximally abbreviated form' in a given case is no
doubt a matter of definition, or supposition. But in any event, the use of the
minimum number of letters necessary to identify a speaker was not a firm rule
for B. Instead, with the exceptions already noted (e.g., 'Qu.', 'Du.', 'La.', 'Bea.'),
he seems to have preferred speech-prefixes of three or four letters closed by a
consonant following a vowel. It is this practice that in some part helped create
the impression of typographical neatness and professional competence which
characterizes his work.