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  • Compositor B’s Speech-Prefixes in the First Folio of Shakespeare and the Question of Copy for 2 Henry IV
  • S. W. Reid (bio)

Textual critics of Shakespeare have traditionally focused on the names or titles represented in the speech-prefixes of his plays in the course of classifying them as either typeset from foul-papers or as derived from fair copy or prompt-books. This has been so since R. B. McKerrow’s truly seminal article in the 1930s, which proposed that the substantive content and consistency of the ‘character-names’ in an early printed edition could indicate the kind of manuscript that served as its copy. He contrasted the First Folio’s ‘permanent labels’ and ‘uniform’ names in Two Gentlemen of Verona with the irregularity in The Comedy of Errors of the names for ‘the brothers Antipholus and the two Dromios’, and then went on to discuss the now well-known alternation in the second quarto of Romeo and Juliet between the names and functions of Juliet’s parents, as well as similar inconsistency in the first editions of Love’s Labour’s Lost, All’s Well that Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus.1 McKerrow’s ‘Suggestion’ has constituted one of the principal reference points for several generations of editions, including the most recent ones, though as of the end of the last century his typically coherent, temperate, and modest observations have incurred searching criticism, whether because of their lack of documentary confirmation, the pressure they have had to endure from editorial speculation, or fin de siècle doubt.2 [End Page 73]

Nonetheless, the speech-prefixes of the principal compositor of the First Folio have received less attention from bibliographers than might have been expected. For in some plays, it is the precise forms of Compositor B’s speech-prefixes, the various combinations of letters he used to represent the names or titles of the characters who speak, that provide some of the most promising evidence for examining whether or not a given quarto served as the basic setting copy for William Jaggard’s first collected edition—a question that continues to plague the textual analysis of plays like 2 Henry IV, Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear.

A few scholars have had recourse to such evidence in attempts to distinguish pages set by B from those set by other compositors, chiefly E. More important, however, and more neglected, has been Fredson Bowers’ suggestion that these ‘appurtenances’ provide ‘evidence about the nature of the underlying Folio copy’ which ‘can be evaluated with some confidence’. The proposition he develops is that B, like other compositors, was ‘conservative in the treatment of names and titles’ not only in stage-directions but in speech-prefixes, especially on their earlier appearances. Furthermore, Bowers argues, in the latter ‘variation in the forms of names and titles . . . including even some variant spelling of the names’ will usually reflect the variability of B’s manuscript copy, despite his tendency to repeat the form of an immediately preceding stage-direction and to prefer shorter forms to longer ones.3 The conclusion that the variable speech-prefixes in the Folio texts of All’s Well that Ends Well and Julius Caesar do not represent the compositors’ own ‘predilections’, but rather reflect the manuscripts behind them, has important implications for assessing the character of other Folio manuscripts. Yet the hypothesis itself, which has potential application to printed copy as well, remains untested because the manuscripts themselves have perished. The survival of examples of the quartos used by B and his partners to set up seven Folio plays offers the opportunity to examine the proposition that, under most [End Page 74] circumstances and with certain qualifications, he faithfully followed his copy’s speech-prefixes.

Compositor B’s pages in these Folio plays4 indicate that the proposition is essentially sound and, in particular, that when speech-prefixes containing complete names appear in his work, they almost certainly derive from B’s copy. However, the reliability of the evidence must be defined not only in the context of B’s general practices and tendencies in setting speech-prefixes, but also by reference to some specific techniques...

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