University of Virginia Library

§13. Phase III

This is the phase where the quire D sheets printed by Nicholas Okes first
make their appearance, in 41% of the surviving copies from that phase. Most,
though not all, copies come with the title page omitting the words "of Grayes
Inne". During the course of Phase III we see the skeleton changes to the outer
forme of quire B that define Phase IIIb of that sheet, as discussed in §6.

The following table shows the composition of Phase-III copies. The patterns
of association, based on a very small sample size, are at particular hazard of be-
ing broken by new copies of ToP that may happen to emerge, and the following
discussion need to be read with that caveat in mind.

TABLE 42. Schematic contents of copies with quires B—D from Phase III

Three copies with quires C and D from Phase III (shaded above) contain
quire "a" from the previous phase, and one of these also has quire A from the
previous phase. Because of their residual Phase-II content, they are likely to have
been among the first exemplars from Phase III to be gathered into complete cop-
ies. Two of these three copies contain Norton's quire D and one has Okes'. This
statistically equal representation is consistent with my earlier conclusion that the
two men's sheets were effectively printed "simultaneously", so were about equally
available to use in any copy of Phase III.

In §6B, I discussed an imposition of B(o) that I called Phase IIIb. The five
copies containing it show some puzzling patterns in their makeup. In most re-
spects they behave like normal copies from Phase III. However, none of them has
quire "a" from the earlier phase, and all five have quire D in Norton's printing.
The first point is not especially surprising, given the rarity of Phase III copies
with quire "a" from Phase II. On the other hand, if Norton's and Okes' printings
of quire D were equally available to make up those five copies, the probability
of their ending up only with Norton's is 1/32, or about 3%; so perhaps this does
call for some explanation. In §6B, I argued that Phases IIIa and IIIb of B(o) were
perfected in one run with the same inner forme. In the resulting stack(s) of sheets,
the two sub-phases would probably have remained separate strata. Hanging the
sheets up to dry could have led to some intermixing of the two states, but by the
time Phase III copies were assembled, the two sub-phases of sheet B might still
have had enough spatial segregation to create dissimilar patterns of association.
If, for example, the IIIb's ended up in a remote stack and were retrieved late in
the collation process, and if the supply of Okes' quire D had arrived somewhat
before Norton's and was exhausted first, there could be a tendency for Phase IIIb

of sheet B to end up with the remainders of Norton's quire D. But we cannot draw
any conclusions about what happened, and with the discovery of more copies the
pattern shown in table 42 could easily fall apart and we would have something
different to explain.

Phase IIIb of forme B(o) also associates with unique states of forme C(i) and
page D1r:

• C1v has the page number and parentheses displaced about 2 mm to the right
  with respect to other copies of Phase III.
• On C4r, in the same forme, the page-number types have moved 4 mm to
  the right.
• In both these cases the page-number materials are unchanged except in position,
  and there is nothing to indicate whether the states are earlier or later than their
  Phase III cohorts.
• On D1r, the italic signature mark "D" shows three possible positions in the
  Phase IIIb copies:

• 2a1: Under the "hi" of "white," in the last line. This is the normal position
  in Norton's Phase IIIa copies, but it is also found in the Phase IIIb copy at the
  Bristol Central Library. Line 10 has the misprint "Masqncrs".
• 2a2: Under the comma. "Masquers" is now correctly printed, so this state is
  later than the preceding, and the handling required to make the correction may
  be sufficient to explain the signature-mark shift. The state is uniquely associated
  with Phase IIIb of B(o), occurring in three of the five copies.
• 2a3: Under the "w". Line 10 also has "Masquers". This state is found in
  the Newberry copy of Phase IIIb, but also in all of Norton's Phase IV sheets, so
  it is evidently the latest of the three. Its presence in the Newberry copy prob-
  ably results from a slightly short run of quire D which had to be made up from
  Phase IV.

The materials and alignments of the headlines are invariant in all of these
states.

The five copies containing Phase IIIb of quire B are already unusual in their
B(o) skeleton, but the association of that skeleton with unique states in two other
quires is unsettling. I cannot imagine an event happening during the printing of
one sheet that would manifest itself at about the same point during the printing
of another. The arbitrary realignments in quires C and D are reminiscent of St.
Catharine's College Z59, with its unique page-number placement on B4v (§6B);
but here they coincide with the unique skeleton settings of B(o). Three of the
seven states that appear during this sub-phase improve the readings found in
their Phase III cohorts, 38 though another (B2v:2c2) actually introduces a textual
corruption that persists through Phase IV. One is tempted to suggest that the
copies containing Phase IIIb of quire B are witnesses to a separate production
phase of the entire book, with no changes except the reset skeleton of forme B(o),
corrections to D1r, and incidental shifts on C(i). (There were later deliberate
changes and attendant shifts on B2v, B4r, and D1r.) How the five IIIb copies

came to combine all these unusual features is, to my mind, ToP's greatest remain-
ing mystery.