Pollard argued that printed texts of Shakespeare's plays, especially the Folio, were closer to his manuscripts than most earlier editors had thought, and that several of these were probably set from his own holograph (65).
"The problem of deciding whether a play was printed from the prompt-book is often difficult and sometimes insoluble (66).
Evidence for Folio texts being set from authorial copy, whether foul or fair papers, derives from the inclusion of several named actors in the speech prefixes who flourished at the time the plays were written, but were no longer in the company by the time the Folio was printed. It is likely that, were these plays set from playhouse prompt-scripts, those names would have been replaced by either characters or other actors (67 - 68). And yet Wilson ignores the possibility that it could be both; as he himself notes that prompt-book annotations usually appear in a different hand and form than the surrounding play-text, and are easily excluded by a compositor so directed (67). Again, Wilson is relying on an early 20th century interpretation of a job that had begun to disappear from the professional stage at the time he originally wrote (his original essay, upon which this book was written, first appeared in 1945).
NB: research the role of the prompter in 20th century theatre. I need to figure out where the prompter would have been known as primarily the task of the previous generation. I'm pretty sure that the job would have been obsolete by the mid-20th century. As Stern and Gurr describe the task, early modern book-keepers didn't necessarily need to have uniform prompt copy, and from my own experience, it is often easier to track an actor by their proper name than it is by the diversity of characters they may play in a single production.
Wilson acknowledges, as Gurr notes, that the prompt-book would be too valuable a commodity to hand over to the printers, as it would contained the authorizing signature of the Master of Revels, which is what allowed the play to be performed anywhere in England. Wilson theorizes that authorial draft, from which the prompt-book would have been set, would make a more logical choice to turn over to the printers (71). A more logical choice, perhaps, but certainly not the only choice; and if it was not uncommon practice for audience members to make transcriptions of plays they heard, it is equally possible that the KM might have hired someone to transcribe the play as it was performed one afternoon. Or else they might have sent over a collection of parts from a company member who no longer needed them because they were memorized. Or maybe the one supplemented the other.
A licensed prompt-copy of the play may have been submitted for license for printing, while a different copy, such as foul papers, submitted to the printer (72).
Wilson talks about "O, o, o, o" after "the rest is silence" as being a notorious idiosyncrasy of Burbage (74).
"In choosing to reprint these plays [in the Folio that were reprinted from earlier quartos] from the handiest instead of from the earliest and best texts, the Folio not inexcusably falls far short of the textual standards of modern scholarship" (77 - 78). Which is a key, here; modern scholarship cares about things that the KM or their printers never would have bothered about.
It is also possible that some of the Folio texts were printed from copy that was based on prompt copy, in whole or in part (79 - 80).
Greg, in his 1910 edition of Merry Wives, concluded that the quarto text was memorially reconstructed from the player who played the Host; this study laid the foundations for further study of the bad quartos (81). Naturally, I want to get my hands on this, as quarto Merry Wives is a cousin text to Merry Devil.
Two other "bad quartos" exist: The Battle of Alcazar, and Orlando Furioso. In the case of the former we have the original plot, and in the latter the actor's part, as a point of comparison, and from this Greg determined that The Battle of Alcazar was a case of "simple abridgment," although Orlando Furioso was "impoverished" by the addition of more comic scenes (82). Quality and causation judgments aside, this is fascinating.
"In 1608 [Thomas] Heywood speaks of some of his plays being 'copied only by the ear', which is ambiguous. In a prologue written c. 1632 and printed in 1637 he mentions 'Stenography' as responsible for the corruption of his If You Know Not Me (1605)" (86).
Even into the eighteenth century, memory played a more significant role in the pirating of live performance than did note taking or actors parts (86 - 87).
If shorthand notes of a reporter were available for use in reconstructing a performed play text, they would have likely been augmented by the memories of one or more witnesses to the theatrical event, however G.I. Duthie conclusively demonstrated that Elizabethan short hand was not up to the task of reconstructing a play text from a performance in Elizabethan Shorthand and the First Quarto of 'King Lear' (88).
The memorial reconstruction of a play text from dictation might account for "bad-verse lineation, light stopping, mishearings, and actors' phrases" (90).
When a dramatist wrote that their play would take two hours to play, they probably meant two hours and not much longer than that. The same can be said when they said "three hours" (91). I don't think the playwrights should be taken so literally as Wilson seems to feel compelled to, especially in light of the article I recently read by Hirrel.
Summary
It seems to me the crucial flaw of the New Bibliography was when the New Bibliographers presumed they knew anything about the theatrical practices of Elizabethan London. Their interpretations of playbooks and other evidence of the playhouse seems based on their own limited experiences of the modern stage, and those are insufficient grounds to serve as the foundation for any argument about how the materials were used. It also seems likely that they committed similar mistakes regarding the literary value, as the players or the reading public of early modern London saw them, of printed plays. Their work with the materials is groundbreaking, and the evidence they have gathered is still extremely useful, but the conclusions that they draw are based on too many suppositions about fields which they knew little.
Showing posts with label Tiffany Stern. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tiffany Stern. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Notes on Re-patching the Play
I thought I would take a brake from Dessen for a little bit to examine Tiffany Stern's essay "Notes on Re-patching the Play," which sounds like it might be right up my alley for this project.
Stern notes that while primary documents of the period can be an important source of evidence, the push to find new primary sources has led to a push away from close examinations of secondary sources, such as joke books, travel journals, poems, pamphlets, and the like, which can be equally useful in determining Renaissance staging practices (151). Of course, Life and Death is one such secondary source, so Dr. Stern's got my attention.
Stern cites 50,350 being printed between the years of 1580 and 1660, and further notes that only about 700 of those are plays. Theatre historians have not yet comprehensively examined the other 49,450 books printed in the period for theatrical references that might illuminate theatrical practice of the period. This is especially true as many of these books were written be authors who were known playwrights, or who were regular play goers (153).
A pejorative term for a playwright, then more commonly and neutrally referred to as a "poet," was a "play-patcher." In this sense, someone who patches together disparate pieces of text from their commonplace book, as opposed to a poet who presumably would be more dedicated to the construction of a single work (154 - 155).
If plays were the product of a poet patching together pieces from their common place books, those text fragments would routinely find their way into the commonplace books of others. Lawyers and lovers alike were known to attend plays and write down pieces that appealed to them for later use (155).
"Beyond the commonplace-book aspect, a look at the printed layout of surviving texts raises the suggestion that some plays were transcribed, kept, learned, revised, and even written, not as wholes, but as a collection of separate units to be patched together in performance" (156). That sounds like a not wholly inaccurate description of Merry Devil.
Stern discusses songs being separate textual objects from the rest of the printed text in much the same way she argues in Making Shakespeare, but here she quotes William Percy telling the "Master of children of Powles" that he may cut the songs from the production if any of the plays "overreach in length" (158). That has implications. Clearly dramatists were aware that their plays would sometimes need to be shortened, and while we here have an explicit reference to cutting down on songs, I wonder if there is anything comparable to cutting scenes.
Stern notes that the 1600 "bad" quarto of Henry V, printed within a year if its performance, lacks the prologue, epilogue, and the choruses. It is an open question as to whether they were left out of the printing of hadn't been written yet (159).
Prologues and Epilogues were detachable from their play texts because they were sometimes written for specific occasions, and thus might not be attached to the playbook proper (160 - 161). I know Stern has said this before, but only now does it occur to me that perhaps the prologue to a probably cut play could be viewed in this light.
A play might be longer and rougher at its first performance than at subsequent ones, with the disapproval of the audience leading to certain cuts. Stern references Gurr's concept of the "maximal" and "minimal" text and offers that the first night performance was the "maximal" one (163). Is Merry Devil therefore a minimal text?
cf Gurr's "Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare v. the Globe." Shakespeare Survey. Vol 52. 1999. p 68 - 87.
Plays were given to actors in individual parts, and were revised, and perhaps written in this way too. Thus, between prologues, epilogues, songs, choruses, and even individual parts, the picture of a play as written in separable threads begins to emerge (168 - 169).
"Plays, then, should not always be regarded like epic poems in which each bit of text has the same worth" (170).
Citation
Stern, Tiffany. "Re-patching the Play." From Script to Stage in Early Modern England. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgell Ed. Houndmills. Macmillan. 2004. p 151 - 177
Stern notes that while primary documents of the period can be an important source of evidence, the push to find new primary sources has led to a push away from close examinations of secondary sources, such as joke books, travel journals, poems, pamphlets, and the like, which can be equally useful in determining Renaissance staging practices (151). Of course, Life and Death is one such secondary source, so Dr. Stern's got my attention.
Stern cites 50,350 being printed between the years of 1580 and 1660, and further notes that only about 700 of those are plays. Theatre historians have not yet comprehensively examined the other 49,450 books printed in the period for theatrical references that might illuminate theatrical practice of the period. This is especially true as many of these books were written be authors who were known playwrights, or who were regular play goers (153).
A pejorative term for a playwright, then more commonly and neutrally referred to as a "poet," was a "play-patcher." In this sense, someone who patches together disparate pieces of text from their commonplace book, as opposed to a poet who presumably would be more dedicated to the construction of a single work (154 - 155).
If plays were the product of a poet patching together pieces from their common place books, those text fragments would routinely find their way into the commonplace books of others. Lawyers and lovers alike were known to attend plays and write down pieces that appealed to them for later use (155).
"Beyond the commonplace-book aspect, a look at the printed layout of surviving texts raises the suggestion that some plays were transcribed, kept, learned, revised, and even written, not as wholes, but as a collection of separate units to be patched together in performance" (156). That sounds like a not wholly inaccurate description of Merry Devil.
Stern discusses songs being separate textual objects from the rest of the printed text in much the same way she argues in Making Shakespeare, but here she quotes William Percy telling the "Master of children of Powles" that he may cut the songs from the production if any of the plays "overreach in length" (158). That has implications. Clearly dramatists were aware that their plays would sometimes need to be shortened, and while we here have an explicit reference to cutting down on songs, I wonder if there is anything comparable to cutting scenes.
Stern notes that the 1600 "bad" quarto of Henry V, printed within a year if its performance, lacks the prologue, epilogue, and the choruses. It is an open question as to whether they were left out of the printing of hadn't been written yet (159).
Prologues and Epilogues were detachable from their play texts because they were sometimes written for specific occasions, and thus might not be attached to the playbook proper (160 - 161). I know Stern has said this before, but only now does it occur to me that perhaps the prologue to a probably cut play could be viewed in this light.
A play might be longer and rougher at its first performance than at subsequent ones, with the disapproval of the audience leading to certain cuts. Stern references Gurr's concept of the "maximal" and "minimal" text and offers that the first night performance was the "maximal" one (163). Is Merry Devil therefore a minimal text?
cf Gurr's "Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare v. the Globe." Shakespeare Survey. Vol 52. 1999. p 68 - 87.
Plays were given to actors in individual parts, and were revised, and perhaps written in this way too. Thus, between prologues, epilogues, songs, choruses, and even individual parts, the picture of a play as written in separable threads begins to emerge (168 - 169).
"Plays, then, should not always be regarded like epic poems in which each bit of text has the same worth" (170).
Citation
Stern, Tiffany. "Re-patching the Play." From Script to Stage in Early Modern England. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgell Ed. Houndmills. Macmillan. 2004. p 151 - 177
Friday, September 24, 2010
Notes on Prefatory Material and Notes to Nicola Bennett 2000 edition of The Merry Devil of Edmonton
The London Globe produced a workshop reading of The Merry Devil in 1998/1999, and Nicola Bennett's 2000 edition is one of the results of that work. Bennett's is one of the most important editions of Merry Devil for me to use as a point of comparison because it is so recent. The preparation of such an edition little more than a decade ago would hardly suggest a new edition as necessary unless it suffered from scholarly defect, was produced under a different editorial rationale, or some combination thereof. Given the resources available to Bennet (which are, according to her acknowledgments, vastly superior to mine), it would seem improbable that she has suffered from a lack of materials. To the contrary, the available resources of the Globe may have worked against her in preparing this edition.
In "A Note from the Coordinator," Sonia Ritter describes the Globe cast playing darkness without resorting to torches as props, but in such a way that is inconsistent with American Shakespeare Center techniques for playing darkness. Ritter explains "having established lack of light to see, playing out to the audience clarified thought: playing to nowhere i particular denoted confusion" (vii). The American Shakespeare Center, by contrast, explores the convention of actors trying to see other characters in a dark scene, but either failing (keeping their eyes unfocussed, or by fixing their eyes on some other point where they think their addressee is standing), or using their other senses, most especially their hearing, to help them identify the location of a speaker. The relative intimacy of the Blackfriars may account for this difference, but our performance space in Philadelphia was even more intimate than the Blackfriars, which is a condition the King's Men were likely to have found themselves in when touring their original production.
Ritter also describes some of the missing scenes being filled in by the actors in the workshop, and notes "Dumb shows were, after all, prevalent in this era." That may be true, and certainly there is evidence available to suggest that actors commonly improvised (i.e. Hamlet's injunction to the players), and that comic scenes were sometimes simply excised from printed text's (Jones' introduction to Tamburlaine), but the scene described in The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton is more intricate than simple pantomime would allow. There must have been some textual material to accompany the misadventure of Smug on the sign of the George, if for no other reason than Smug, like the rest of the clowns in Merry Devil, is rarely content to be silent for long.
Standing in testimony against the Globe's construction of this text is the cast list of the workshop itself. 17 individual cast members are listed for a play in which the concluding scene calls for 11. While 17 would certainly not be outside of the number of players available to the King's Men, according to Stern's formulation, it is unlikely that hired men would have accompanied the sharer's on tour. The number of actors available for the Globe's workshop allowed them to use more bodies on stage than is likely the King's Men would have had available.
Bennett is correct in her agreement with Greg that Abrams takes the scene describing the sign business in the Life and Death pamphlet too literally (85). Yet the importance of the pamphlet in determining the course of the scene is still plain: either the pamphlet predates the play, and thus the play was likely inspired by the pamphlet, or the precise opposite of this. For our production, the most theatrically convenient way of staging the presence of the sign was to leave it off stage, which seemed appropriate to our touring needs, and satisfies nearly all of the requirements of the cut text printed in 1608.
Analysis
Bennett has got a lot right with her 2000 edition of Merry Devil, but I still have some issues with this edition. The resources available to the Globe in creating this text are more expansive than the cut version of the text printed in 1608 seems to indicate. Ultimately, the Globe workshop never had to solve some of the textual problems present in the text. Apart from the fact that they did not mount a full production, they had more resources available than the King's Men would have had on tour, and their doubling ignores some of the comic possibilities suggested by the text.
Bennet, Nicola Ed. The Merry Devil of Edmonton. New York. Globe Education and Theatre Arts Books/Routledge. 2000.
Ritter, Sonia. "A Note from the Coordinator." The Merry Devil of Edmonton. Nicola Bennet, Ed. New York. Globe Education and Theatre Arts Books/Routledge. 2000.
In "A Note from the Coordinator," Sonia Ritter describes the Globe cast playing darkness without resorting to torches as props, but in such a way that is inconsistent with American Shakespeare Center techniques for playing darkness. Ritter explains "having established lack of light to see, playing out to the audience clarified thought: playing to nowhere i particular denoted confusion" (vii). The American Shakespeare Center, by contrast, explores the convention of actors trying to see other characters in a dark scene, but either failing (keeping their eyes unfocussed, or by fixing their eyes on some other point where they think their addressee is standing), or using their other senses, most especially their hearing, to help them identify the location of a speaker. The relative intimacy of the Blackfriars may account for this difference, but our performance space in Philadelphia was even more intimate than the Blackfriars, which is a condition the King's Men were likely to have found themselves in when touring their original production.
Ritter also describes some of the missing scenes being filled in by the actors in the workshop, and notes "Dumb shows were, after all, prevalent in this era." That may be true, and certainly there is evidence available to suggest that actors commonly improvised (i.e. Hamlet's injunction to the players), and that comic scenes were sometimes simply excised from printed text's (Jones' introduction to Tamburlaine), but the scene described in The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton is more intricate than simple pantomime would allow. There must have been some textual material to accompany the misadventure of Smug on the sign of the George, if for no other reason than Smug, like the rest of the clowns in Merry Devil, is rarely content to be silent for long.
Standing in testimony against the Globe's construction of this text is the cast list of the workshop itself. 17 individual cast members are listed for a play in which the concluding scene calls for 11. While 17 would certainly not be outside of the number of players available to the King's Men, according to Stern's formulation, it is unlikely that hired men would have accompanied the sharer's on tour. The number of actors available for the Globe's workshop allowed them to use more bodies on stage than is likely the King's Men would have had available.
Bennett is correct in her agreement with Greg that Abrams takes the scene describing the sign business in the Life and Death pamphlet too literally (85). Yet the importance of the pamphlet in determining the course of the scene is still plain: either the pamphlet predates the play, and thus the play was likely inspired by the pamphlet, or the precise opposite of this. For our production, the most theatrically convenient way of staging the presence of the sign was to leave it off stage, which seemed appropriate to our touring needs, and satisfies nearly all of the requirements of the cut text printed in 1608.
Analysis
Bennett has got a lot right with her 2000 edition of Merry Devil, but I still have some issues with this edition. The resources available to the Globe in creating this text are more expansive than the cut version of the text printed in 1608 seems to indicate. Ultimately, the Globe workshop never had to solve some of the textual problems present in the text. Apart from the fact that they did not mount a full production, they had more resources available than the King's Men would have had on tour, and their doubling ignores some of the comic possibilities suggested by the text.
Bennet, Nicola Ed. The Merry Devil of Edmonton. New York. Globe Education and Theatre Arts Books/Routledge. 2000.
Ritter, Sonia. "A Note from the Coordinator." The Merry Devil of Edmonton. Nicola Bennet, Ed. New York. Globe Education and Theatre Arts Books/Routledge. 2000.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Collaborative Play Editing
It strikes me as odd that, where any playwright worth their salt wouldn't think of trying to publish a play without first having actors read it and mounting a production of it, most editors don't think twice about doing exactly that. Having finished a collation of three quartos, I'm fairly confident in my familiarity with the text (here I mean textual object), but the process of collation is no necessarily the most conducive to producing a functioning edition of the text.
I have previously commented on the relatively clear evidence for multiple authors in Merry Devil. The names are often times just plane wrong: surnames are inconsistent, or in the case of this afternoon's discovery, a character refers to another who simply isn't in the scene. If it was a clown, you might be tempted to brush this off as a malapropism of names, but in what I have dubbed scene 9, Peter Fabell calls Harry Clare "Ralph." There are already two Ralphs in the play, of course: Sir Ralph Jerningham, Frank's father, and Brian's man, Ralph. This isn't the sort of thing one would expect someone of Fabell's status ad knowledge, which is the foundation of his status, to get wrong.
So we paused for a moment to make sure that I hadn't simply let this typo slip through, and sure enough, there was the reference to "Raph" right there in Q1. Obviously this needs to be amended to "Harry," with the appropriate footnote that Q1 has Raph here, and that it is probably an error in the script or a compositor error.
Again, remember what Stern was saying about plays being cut for touring and some characters being cut or combined. It is completely plausible that this "typo" is the result of the King's Men editing the script for touring and creating a mashup character out of several others. It is also possible that it is the result of the scrivener of the fair copy missing the in-text reference to a character not present in the scene. One can't rule out simple compositor error either. I don't know how the mistake got in Q1, but it took my cast members trying to make sense of something they saw as inherently senseless to figure it out.
I have previously commented on the relatively clear evidence for multiple authors in Merry Devil. The names are often times just plane wrong: surnames are inconsistent, or in the case of this afternoon's discovery, a character refers to another who simply isn't in the scene. If it was a clown, you might be tempted to brush this off as a malapropism of names, but in what I have dubbed scene 9, Peter Fabell calls Harry Clare "Ralph." There are already two Ralphs in the play, of course: Sir Ralph Jerningham, Frank's father, and Brian's man, Ralph. This isn't the sort of thing one would expect someone of Fabell's status ad knowledge, which is the foundation of his status, to get wrong.
So we paused for a moment to make sure that I hadn't simply let this typo slip through, and sure enough, there was the reference to "Raph" right there in Q1. Obviously this needs to be amended to "Harry," with the appropriate footnote that Q1 has Raph here, and that it is probably an error in the script or a compositor error.
Again, remember what Stern was saying about plays being cut for touring and some characters being cut or combined. It is completely plausible that this "typo" is the result of the King's Men editing the script for touring and creating a mashup character out of several others. It is also possible that it is the result of the scrivener of the fair copy missing the in-text reference to a character not present in the scene. One can't rule out simple compositor error either. I don't know how the mistake got in Q1, but it took my cast members trying to make sense of something they saw as inherently senseless to figure it out.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
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:
The delightfully apoplectic W. W. Greg summarizes his analysis of the variant texts thusly:
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:
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.
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'stThat's the text from Q1. Q2 reads thusly:
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?
...but thou know'stNote 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."
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?
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,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.
Q2: And I have taught the Nightengale to wake,
Q3: I have taught the Nightengale to wake,
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.
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