Interesting Textual Variants

Stern has a lot of good ideas about how "Shakespearean" texts were made, how they got on the stage, and how they were printed, and I have this funny feeling like her work will be extremely handy in bringing The Merry Devil of Edmonton to life, but as part of this project involves the creation of my own new critical-edition of Merry Devil, I am struck by two things: first of all is the overwhelming regularity of the three quartos that I have so far collated; few variations exist between them.

Where these quartos differ most, however, falls in a seemingly trivial moment early in the play, when Fabell and Raymond accuse Frank Jerningham of taking part in the plot for him to steal Milliscent away from Raymond. Frank describes his affections for another lady:

                              ...but thou know'st
That Essex hath the saint that I adore,
Where ere did we meet thee and wanton springs,
That like a wag thou hast not laughed at me,
And with regardless Jesting mocked my love?

That's the text from Q1. Q2 reads thusly:

                               ...but thou know'st
That Essex hath the saint that I adore,
Where ere did'st meet me, but we two were jovial,
But like a wag thou hast not laughed at me,
And with regardless Jesting mocked my love?

Note the changes in bold. Also note that Q2's line is less poetic. One must be cautious about such proclamations in a play like this, where characters of all classes regularly change between verse and prose throughout, but Q2's line change creates a metrically irregular line in an otherwise regular passage. One might also make the argument that "wanton springs" is more idyllic than "we two were jovial."

The delightfully apoplectic W. W. Greg summarizes his analysis of the variant texts thusly:

I think that if a rough author's draft (after having served for the production of a prompt-book) had been severely cut with a view to preparing an abridged version of the play, and had then come into the printer's hands, the resulting edition might have been something like what we find in the extant text (130).

So why the variation? Stern points out that country audiences were generally less sophisticated than their London counterparts, and thus the plays were cut (145-146). Her further suggestion that prompters themselves would be a common source of emendation to might lead one to think that the Q2 printing followed from a prompt copy further edited from the original (144). Of the four extant copies of Q1, none are identical, which is not necessarily odd given the practice of stop-press correction that was common in London printing houses (Greg, 125). Greg, however, traces the lineage of Q2 to a cousin of what he calls Q1B with one exception, and this based on a line that occurs just a little bit later in the passage I have examined above (127). It may serve us to examine that variation. Q1 is as follows:

Before I would give o'er the chase, and wrong the love,

Q2:

Before I would wrong the chase and leave the love,

Q3:

Before I'd wrong the chase and o'ergive love,

 I'm apparently working from Q1B, because Greg gives the reading of Q1A as

Before I would unage the chase and overgive love (127)

The plot thickens, eh? It's difficult to say why such variation would arise. Pretending that "unage" is a misreading for "wrong," there seems to be an almost casual swapping of verbs in the line. If Greg is correct and the Q1B reading represents the text in an intermediary state of printing, that would simply confirm the statistically likely possibility that Q2 was not printed from one of the four extant Q1s (127). Nothing Earth shattering there, but why the other edits?

Lets play the game "everybody is right." If I'm right that there are emendations to the text that represent changes made out on the road between Q1 and Q2, that means that Arthur Johnson needs to have got his hand on those changes. If he wanted to do a simple reprint, he could have either printed from an existing Q1, or from the papers that he had from that printing. The advantage of the latter could derive from dissatisfaction with the first printing; he did change printers from Henry Ballard (Q1) to Thomas Creed for Q2, after all, and his further change to G. Eld for Q3 seems to indicate that he may have had a more habitual dissatisfaction with printers.

Yet it is also worth considering that the book that the King's Men supplied Johnson for printing was the touring prompter's book. No copy of the text would be more dispensable than an edited for touring text when the London theatres were open, after all. If Johnson printed Q2 from this book, which would likely have been edited over years of use, that may account for some of the variation in this passage. It would, of course, be just as likely that the line had been edited back for subsequent printings (if Johnson continued to use the touring book), or perhaps, unable to obtain it, he printed from one of the variants of Q1.

Maybe I even get a little bit of support for the ever-changing touring prompt book theory from the evolution of another line within this same passage:

Q1: I have taught the watchful Nightengale to wake,
Q2: And I have taught the Nightengale to wake,
Q3: I have taught the Nightengale to wake,

Q3 bears markers of both Q1 and Q2 in this case.  Again, Q1 seems the more poetic, and depending on the pronunciation of "have" may read as a regular verse line. Q2 omits the description of the nightingale, but is metrically regular without elision. Q3 is what a music director friend of mine would describe as a hot mess. It just doesn't work as verse. Through these three printing, we see the evolution of a line of verse into a line of prose. 

Anything I've said here needs to be read in light of the disclaimer that this is all mere conjecture. Yet given the evidence that Stern has put forth in Making Shakespeare, it is worth examining the book printing industry and the playing companies as having more of a symbiotic relationship than some would suggest. If Johnson regularly obtained copy for subsequent printings of The Merry Devil from the King's Men, the printed history of The Merry Devil may reflect an increasing simplification of dramatic writing.

Works Cited
Greg, W. W. "The Merry Devil of Edmonton." The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. 1944. London. Oxford UP. vol. s4-XXV 3-4 p. 122-139.

Stern, Tiffany. Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page. Routledge. London. 2004.  

The Q3 Collation

Not being 100% satisfied with my results from my collation of Q2 with my transcript of Q1, I decided to up the ante and do some even more hard core collating. For purposes of Q3, that meant going backwards through the script one word at a time. It was pretty slow going at first, but ten or so pages into the process I got into the rhythm of collating, and I dare say that this was faster and more accurate than my previous method.

You may, of course, raise the objection that I had caught and corrected most errors on my Q2 collation. You might even be right, however, I caught a substantial amount of Q1 transcription errors on this pass, too. It almost makes me wonder if it's worth the effort of going through with Q2 once more to make sure I didn't make any collation errors in that pass. Then again, as I turn back to my records of that collation, I did note a substantial amount of variations, largely concentrated in the same places of textual ambiguity as the variations in Q3.

No collation is perfect. No edition is definitive. That's why the next generation must collate and edit again. That's why people are still making money selling copies of books that have been publicly available for 400 years. At this point in the process, it will no doubt be better to invest my energies in moving on to Q4, and perhaps more importantly, turning my attention to the needs of my cast.

First read through is tomorrow, and while it saddens me that I won't have my full cast present, it will be nice to get everything started and get the ship sailing.

How Collation Worked

I talked a little bit about my collation process last night, but I figured it might be fun and interesting to mention the details. To begin with, I started with a print out of my transcription of Q1, a print out of Q2, and a print out of Q1. I suppose I could have left one (or more, with a bigger monitor) of these in a digital format, but I very specifically wanted to make sure that my transcript was a print out. Why? I didn't want to be able to make any of my edits to it have any degree of permanence associated with them. I'll get back to that later.

Then I proceeded backwards through the text, one line at a time. Backwards because it prevented me from reading the text, and missing valuable data. I would read a line of Q2 out loud, read a line from my transcript (out loud), and then re-read the line in Q2 (again, out loud). Then I would move on to the next line. Now maybe you can understand why this takes  a while and you can't do it for very long successfully.

When I encountered a discrepancy between Q2 and my transcript, I would turn back to Q1. If my transcript matched Q1, I would make a note of the variation in blue pen on my transcript. If my transcript did not match Q1, I would note the variation between my transcript and Q1 in red pen, and then I would compare that with Q2, and if there was still a variation note that in blue pen. The double variant didn't happen especially often. 

After I had made my way through the entire script, I went back to my digital copy and made my edits: correcting transcription errors from Q1, and making notes whenever there was a variation in Q2. On some very rare occasions I have chosen to modernize a word or use the Q2 variant, but in those cases, I have left a note in the text (using the notes feature, thank God for word processing) describing what Q1 actually says. 

It is a long and tedious process. Now step back to 1608 where word processors don't exist, and type is set out manually from manuscript copy in a dirty, noisy environment where you're working on a deadline and get paid by the page. I made a lot of mistakes in my transcription of Q1, and thinking about all the tools I have available to use, as well as my comparatively voluptuously luxurious work environment, makes me a lot more forgiving of any mistakes that the original printers might have made along the way.

Lessons in Collation

I recently finished collating the second quarto with my transcription of the first quarto. I knew going into it that the differences would be relatively minor, and based on the principle that a change is transmission is a breeding ground for errors, I think that most of the differences don't really qualify as "improvements." Most of the time, if Q2 has something different from Q1, it's worthy of a foot note, some of the time it might be useful to know there is another option available, and maybe one of these differences will actually find its way into one of the final products.

Still, the exercise was extremely valuable for one simple reason: I made a lot of my own errors when transcribing Q1 into a digital file. The differences between Q1 and Q2 were so minute that the only way I would be able to catch them was to go line by line, and every time I encountered a discrepancy between Q2 and my transcription, I turned back to Q1. Most of the time these discrepancies were the result of sloppy work on my part, but being able to see that helped me realize something that I hadn't thought of before: transcribing and collating quartos requires a lot of focus.

When I was making my initial transcription of Q1, I pushed myself through bleary eyes and headaches to get the thing finished as quickly as possible. That was a mistake, and seeing the sheer number of mistakes I made as a result of taking that approach helped me realized that working that way is extremely unproductive. What good is a collation if you can't rely on the copy you're collating against? So I took the Q2 collation much more slowly than I did the Q1 transcription, which is one of the reasons why I only recently finished.

The reward for finishing this collation will be collating what I have now with Q3. Experience tells me that is going to take a while. I almost said it would take even longer, but making the decision to use Q1 as my copy text means I'm not obliged to check every single discrepancy against Q1 and Q2; in fact, that would be a waste of time; I've already noted the differences between Q2 and my copy text. Now I need to see how Q3 informs my copy text, which will of necessity include Q2, as that is now a part of the text I'm working from.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm even more interested in collating my text laterally against the other Q1s out there in the world (besides the copy I got off of EEBO). Hmm.... because I and obsessive compulsive and like pain, I think I might have to look into that.

Why am I going out of my way to make my life harder, anyway? Sheesh.