Q/F: the Texts of King Lear By

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Q/F: The Texts of King Lear by

DUNCAN SALKELD Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021

he two early texts of King Lear , the 1608 Quarto (hereafter Q) and the 1623 Folio (hereafter F) differ substantially from each other. TConsequently, there has been much critical dispute over how those differences arose. Some have regarded Q as derived from an authorial manu - script, others as a reconstruction from memory by one or more of its actors. F has been thought to be based on Q, or possibly the 1619 quarto (hereafter Q2), or on a playhouse manuscript. The current orthodoxy is that Q (printed by Nicholas Okes) represents Shakespeare’s first draft, and that F is a later revision made by Shakespeare sometime after 1608. Throughout most of the twentieth century, editors tended to choose the best readings as they saw them from both Q and F, and offered readers a conflated ‘ideal’ text, one that reflected the judgement of the scholar responsible for the edi - tion. In the 1980s, this policy of making the best of all possible readings was strongly challenged by a group that came to be known as the ‘revisionists’. 1 These influential critics included Michael Warren, Steven Urkowitz, and Gary Taylor. Collectively, they maintained that conflation could only produce a patched-up text that Shakespeare never in fact wrote. Their view is that Q was essentially Shakespeare’s first attempt, and that F constituted a much-revised version. 2 So persuasive has this argument been that significant scholarly editions of the plays have since absorbed its line of thinking. Readers now find themselves offered as many as three King Lear s, separate editions of Q and F, plus a conflated text that merges the two. If the detail involved in these debates appears sometimes complex and technical, the revision theory at least had the virtue of making the solution seem simple.

I am grateful to Brian Vickers for prompting me to write this article, and for his support. I also wish to thank the exacting anonymous readers of drafts of this article who have at various points saved me from misapprehension and error. My sincere thanks also go to Peter Holland, MacDonald P. Jackson, Pervez Rizvi, and Stanley Wells for their helpful responses to a draft of this article. 1 Richard Knowles, ‘Revision Awry in Folio Lear 3.1’, Shakespeare Quarterly , 46 (1995), 32–46 (p. 32). 2 See for example Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s Revision of King Lear (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 129.

4 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear This article adopts a different view, but one that is not entirely new. An implication arising from it is that no revision of King Lear took place after 1608, save for a few corrections made in Q2. Part of the Lear problem, it seems, has resided in the way the relation between Q and F has been understood. Almost all studies have assumed that F, printed in 1623, must to some extent derive from Q, printed in 1608. On this view, F contains improve- ments or corrections made after Q. But, for reasons that will become clear, the reverse appears to have been the case. The great majority of verbal alterations (aside from significant excisions in F) happened to Q, not to F. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 Furthermore, there is no sign that these alterations were made as part of a deliberate strategy of re-shaping the play. The argument here is that, while F was printed later than Q, the manuscript on which it was based (or one similar) was available to the printers of Q. In short, a manuscript very much like F, but without its cuts, lies behind Q. In line with several studies before it, this article argues further that Q is a reported text, but a report of a very specific kind. Before proceeding further, it may be helpful to expand on what is meant by this claim. The central argument here proposed runs as follows: Q was printed by dictation in the printing house from an uncut manuscript very similar to F. It is well-known that Q has material not in F, perhaps because the manuscript behind F was shortened for performance (mainly at 2.2.7–15, 3.6.17 –55 and 94–112, 3.7.98–106, 4.1.61–66, 4.2.32–51, all of 4.3 and 5.3.203–20). 3 Q’s numerous verbal slips derive on the whole, though not entirely, from a combination of misreadings and mishearings made between a lector , or reader, and Okes’s on-duty compositor. The idea that the first quarto might have been produced by dictation was considered, though not endorsed, by Madeleine Doran as early as 1931, but has since received little attention, perhaps for lack of evidence that this was a method much used by early printers. The proposition set out below is that the complete text of King Lear was broadly finished by 1608. An imperfect quarto was published in that year from a manuscript that had been read aloud, and a version of this text was later reprinted with a few corrections in 1619 (Q2). In 1623, the play was printed again as one of the tragedies of the First Folio, but by this time the manuscript had been cut for performance. In order to explain the rationale for these claims, some review of prior critical studies is required since a broad but important consensus held before the revision hypothesis emerged. That consensus produced a number of insights that ought still to be heeded, especially in so far as they touch on the question of mishearings. For clarity, this article is divided into four sec - tions. It begins with an account of some of the complexities of the Lear

3 Line references to Shakespeare’s plays are throughout keyed to the editions of the Third Series of the Arden Shakespeare, unless otherwise stated. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 5

Duncan Salkeld 5 debate. These details may at times seem technical, but they are central to the argument. It adds an account of the currently dominant view—the revision theory—and its critics. The second section risks testing the reader’s patience by providing a brief recapitulation of critical positions regarding the Q/F problem. But this summary is necessary since it demonstrates that key observa tions regarding misreadings and mishearings were generated by these prior studies. The third section sets out to establish the order of the Lear texts, and challenges a long-influential account by P. A. Daniel, published in 1885, which all subsequent studies of the question have followed. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 The fourth section sets out some of the evidence for dictation. It will be clear that several scholars have anticipated, in one way or another, the conclusions advanced in this article. Complexities and Revision The complexities of the Lear problem can seem daunting. Not only do the play’s two earliest imprints (Q and F) differ in significant respects, but Q itself survives in varying states. Of the twelve extant quartos, no two are iden tical. As is characteristic of early printed texts, each contains a pattern of variants not exactly reproduced in any of the others. It appears that as Q was going through the press, its sheets were checked for faults and occa - sional corrections were added. Some were only partly corrected but the improved sheets were subsequently distributed haphazardly (as it were) in the final work. Ever since W. W. Greg’s definitive study of these variants, Q’s original or uncorrected sheets have usually been referred to as ‘Qa’, and its sheets in the amended or corrected state designated ‘Qb’. Each of the extant quartos contains different sheets in either state. Greg provided a table showing the distributions of these anomalies in the twelve quartos, arranged by the sheet-signature and forme on which they appear. 4 From this table alone, it would appear that Q’s marked degree of instability resulted from agents other than Shakespeare. There are abundant signs in the surviving quartos that Q was printed with out much thought or care. Verse is very often set as prose, occasionally prose is given as verse, character speech prefixes are sometimes confused, and punctuation is often either omitted or quite out of kilter with the sense. Q contains some 300 or so lines that are not in F, while F has about 100 lines not in Q. One of the many striking differences between the texts is that, sporadi cally, sections ranging from a few lines to entire passages appear either only in Q or only in F. Among other omissions, F lacks thirty lines for the ‘mad trial’ of Goneril (3.6.17–55) and the whole scene of 4.3. Several other substantial Q-only passages confirm that the original manuscript was

4 W. W. Greg, The Variants in the First Quarto of ‘King Lear’ (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1940), p. 11. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 6

6 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear longer than that eventually printed as F. For revisionists, these incon sis - tencies are signs, broadly speaking, of Shakespeare at work. A consensus seems to have it that the additional lines in Q are better construed as F’s omissions, in all likelihood cuts made after 1608 to streamline performance. But perhaps more striking are the thousand or so minor verbal differences between the two versions. Curiously, many of these differences are extra- ordinarily trivial in nature. The question at the heart of the Lear problem is who made those trifling changes, and why? It is quite reasonable to think that Shakespeare might have sanctioned the excisions we find in F, even if Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 he himself did not make them. But it is very unlikely that he would have gone through his play to make a myriad of mostly pointless alterations. Revisionists argue that most, if not all, of these changes were strategic and deliberate. That Shakespeare might have revised his plays is not an entirely new idea. Samuel Johnson wrote in his 1765 ‘Notes’ on Richard II , ‘This play is one of those which Shakespeare has apparently revised’. Paul Wer- stine has argued that the idea that Shakespeare revised his plays—including Romeo and Juliet , Hamlet , Othello and King Lear —was widely accepted throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. 5 But the revision theory was given critical prominence in 1976 when Michael Warren argued in a con- ference paper that, ‘for all its problems Q is an authoritative version of the play of King Lear … and F may indeed be a revised version of the play’. Concluding that F’s supposed cuts and changes are ‘Shakespeare’s considered modification of the earlier text’, Warren stated, ‘we certainly cannot know if they are not’. 6 In 1980, Steven Urkowitz proposed that, ‘By every standard, the theory of Shakespearean revision as the basis for variants in King Lear offers a more powerful, more complete, and more coherent explana tion for the data than any other theory so far stated … all that is

5 For Johnson’s ‘Note’ see H. R. Woudhuysen, ed., Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (Harmonds- worth: Penguin, 1989), p. 197. Michael J. Warren cites Johnson on King Lear , ‘I believe the folio is printed from Shakespeare’s last revision’ in ‘Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar’, in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature: Shakespeare Criticism in Honor of America’s Bicentennial from International Shakespeare Association … 7;98 , ed. by David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), pp. 95–106 (p. 106). Paul Werstine argues that the rise of the New Bibliography and focus on agents other than authors in textual transmission led to a demise in regarding Shakespeare as a reviser: see his ‘Authorial Revision in the Tragedies’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy , ed. by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 301–15. Edmond Malone departed from his friend Johnson on this point: ‘Our author seems seldom to have revised his plays’, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare … by the late Edmond Malone , 21 vols (London: Baldwin, 1821), VIII , 142. Jonathan Bate, in ‘The Case for the Folio’, http://www.modernlibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/ 09/TheCaseForTheFolio.pdf, provides an account of how successive editors since the eighteenth century regarded textual variants and questions of emendation and revision: ‘The eighteenth century also witnessed his rise to the status of national genius, icon of pure inspiration. That image required the imagining of a single perfect original for each play. Shakespeare couldn’t be allowed second thoughts—that would imply some deﬁciency in his ﬁrst thoughts. So it was that over time, there emerged a preference for early texts over later ones …’ (p. 14). 6 Cited in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear , ed. by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 14. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 7

Duncan Salkeld 7 needed is Shakespeare’. 7 The claims for revision were authoritatively endorsed in a collection of essays edited by Warren and Gary Taylor titled The Division of the Kingdoms (hereafter Division ), published in 1983. 8 In 1986, the Oxford Complete Works controversially published Q and F sep a - rately as two distinct plays. This decision was repeated by the Norton Shake speare, with a ‘conflated’ text added for those who prefer to read Lear as one play. 9 The New Oxford Shakespeare has once again enshrined the revision theory in a significant scholarly edition. 10 Yet the argument for revision has not convinced everyone. Reviewing Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 Division , Richard Knowles found that several of the essays relied on ‘fre - quent exaggeration, in which the smallest details come repeatedly to assume the greatest significance’. 11 He expressed concern at the way wider patterns of meaning were constructed on the basis of ‘the change of even a word or two’. One essay, focusing on the speech-prefix ‘ Cor .’, was wholly grounded, he noted, ‘on the presence or absence of a single letter n’. Another made the ‘preposterous’ claim that Kent’s line in the Folio ‘Breake heart, I prythee breake’ (5.3.311) is equally correct when allocated to Lear in Q. Discussing Gary Taylor’s long, closing chapter, Knowles expressed serious doubt as to whether F was indeed entirely Shakespeare’s. 12 In a later essay on the variant passages about the war in 3.1, Knowles laid out a series of reasons for doubt ing the hypothesis of authorial revision, including the fact that F added no new scenes, characters, episodes, rearrangements, or replacement speeches. 13 Altogether, Knowles voiced substantial criticism of—or, as Brian Vickers writes, ‘fundamental objections’ to—the revision theory. 14 Accepting that the play must have been ‘re-worked’, Knowles regards this as likely to have been by agents other than Shakespeare—perhaps a scribe, prompter, or other theatrical editor. For him, the concept of ‘revision’ is neither authorial nor tied to any supposition about the play’s ‘revival’ in performance. His

7 Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s Revision of King Lear , pp. 148–49. 8 See, for example, Gary Taylor, ‘The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version’ in The Division of the Kingdoms . Taylor writes: ‘The conclusion that the Folio represents a new version of the play, and one begun from an exemplar of Q1, provides a simple explanation for the complex and apparently conﬂicting evidence as to the nature of the Folio copy’ (p. 366). 9 It is worth observing that the ‘Textual Note’ to King Lear in the ﬁrst iteration of The Norton Shakespeare (New York, 1997) outlines a possible explanation of the play’s variants that is entirely consonant with the one argued for here (see p. 2315). 10 The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works , ed. by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); The Norton Shakespeare , ed. by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); The New Oxford Shakespeare , ed. by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 11 Richard Knowles, ‘The Case for Two Lear s’, Shakespeare Quarterly , 36 (1985), pp. 115–20 (p. 116). 12 Taylor, ‘Date and Authorship’, pp. 116, 118. 13 Knowles, ‘Revision Awry’, p. 32. 14 Brian Vickers, The One King Lear (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 2016), p. 271. R. A. Foakes also felt that the position had been overstated (‘Reshaping King Lear ’, in King Lear: New Critical Essays , ed. by Jeffrey Kahan (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 104–23 (p. 110). Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 8

8 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear further claim—that the speeches and actions in Q ‘remain on the whole unchanged’ in F—echoes an important observation made by Madeleine Doran: ‘the first quarto of King Lear … despite its misprints, misreadings, omissions and faulty printing of verse, is substantially the same play, line for line as the Folio’. 15 Ever since Ernst Honigmann’s The Stability of Shake - speare’s Texts , trivial variants have been regarded as possible signs of an author’s second thoughts. 16 For Honigmann, Shakespeare was a writer who routinely tinkered with his work. Any plausible explanation of the Lear ques tion needs therefore to be able to account for this apparent paradox: Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 how can two texts with over a thousand verbal differences between them remain, in all essentials, the same? Others added further criticism of the case for revision. In 1984, Sidney Thomas argued that the Q/F differences in Lear’s first speech are omissions in Q, not additions to F: ‘It is clear that the Folio variant represents the primary text, and that the Quarto variant is an imperfect, even misleading abbrevi ation of the original speech as recorded in the Folio’. 17 As an example, Thomas pointed out that while the words ‘Conferring them on younger strengths’ (1.1.39) finish in Q abruptly on ‘strengths’, they are followed naturally in F by a connecting phrase, ‘while we / Unburdened crawl toward death’. William C. Carroll took revisionists to task for privileging readings in F as ‘theatrically superior’ regardless of those in Q. 18 More recently, Brian Vickers, in his full-length monograph The One King Lear (2016), has presented a substantial challenge to the revision hypothesis. His principal argument is that variants between Q and F arose principally from a shortage of paper in Okes’s printing-shop and a consequent need to save space. This thesis has provoked mixed reactions, both favourable and critical. Yet it is sustained by close engagement with the detail of the texts, and remains one of the most substantial contributions to the question to date. Unlike Division , it underlines the importance of attending to scholarship on Lear prior to the re-emergence of the revision theory. 19

15 Madeleine Doran, The Text of King Lear (Oxford and London: Stanford University Press, 1931), p. 123. Doran was in fact an early advocate for limited revision in King Lear (see esp. pp. 133–36). 16 Ernst Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare’s Texts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), esp. pp. 72–73. 17 Sidney Thomas, ‘Shakespeare’s Supposed Revision of King Lear ’, Shakespeare Quarterly , 35 (1984), 506–11 (p. 507). 18 William C. Carroll, ‘New Plays vs. Old Readings: The Division of the Kingdoms and Folio deletions in King Lear ’, Studies in Philology , 85 (1988), 225–44 (pp. 228–29). 19 Vickers, The One King Lear . Hostile reviews of Vickers’ book include Holger S. Syme, ‘Live- Tweeting The One King Lear ’, online blog at www.dispositio.net, and ‘The Text is Foolish: Brian Vickers’s “The One King Lear”’, The Los Angeles Review of Books , 6 September 2016 (see Vickers’s reply, ‘A Response to Holger Syme’, The Los Angeles Review of Books , 6 November 2016); Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Can we ever master King Lear ?’, The New York Review of Books , 23 February 2017; Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘Quadrat Demonstrandum’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America , 3 (2017), 61–101 (a review article of considerable detail and substance, hereafter designated ‘Quadrat’). More favourable reviews include Leeds Barroll, ‘The One King Lear’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England , 30 (2017), 183–87, and Paul Werstine, ‘The One King Lear’, Shakespeare Studies , 45 (2017), 312–16. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 9

Duncan Salkeld 9 Perhaps the central problem at the heart of the Lear debate concerns the number of variants between the two texts, and the kinds of alteration they represent. When discussing these variants, some distinction needs to be made between types of example. First, there are numerous verbal mistakes in Q that appear in their correct form in F. As the following handful of examples shows, throughout its text, Q is repeatedly incoherent because a single word has been mistaken (the correct alternative in F is added here in square brackets): 20 ‘Be Kent vnmannerly when Lear is man [F: mad]’ (B2 v, 1.1.148); ‘when my dementions [F: dimensions] are as well compact’ (C1 r, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 1.2.6); ‘bag [F: beg] To keep base life afoot’ (E2 r, 2.4.216) ; ‘O reason not the deed [F: need]’ (F2 v, 2.4.267); ‘ Enter Gloster and Edmund [F: Edgar]’ (I2 r, 4.5.41); ‘to shoot [F: shoo] a troupe of horses with fell [F: felt]’ (I4 r, 4.6.189). If we add to these instances the fact that ‘Leister’ leaves the stage instead of ‘Gloster’ (F3 r, 2.4.289 SD), it should be apparent that Shakespeare is most unlikely to have been responsible for what are essentially absurd - ities. In 1942, Greg made precisely this point, stating, ‘I ﬁnd myself unable to imagine any competent author, least of all Shakespeare—and moreover Shakespeare, not in his apprentice stage as in Richard III , but at the very height of his powers—writing the clumsy and tentative lines we ﬁnd in the quarto, apparently groping after his expression and even his meaning with the hesitancy of a novice’. Just about all commentators agree that F is the more accurate text. From each of the above examples, it is clear that Q has garbled the word that occurs in F. Greg’s characterisation of Q’s lines as fumbling after both expression and sense is fair. He concluded ‘the quarto is, I am convinced, derivative’. 21 Although he did not specify what it derived from, the above examples point to the answer—a manuscript akin to F (at least in these particular instances). A second category of variant concerns words that differ across Q and F only in the most trivial way. The following are just a few of the many Q/F so-called ‘indifferent’ readings, listed in order as they occur in the text (here once again keyed to Greg’s 1939 edition of the quarto): ‘thy’/‘thine’ (B3 r, 1.1.170 and four subsequent instances), ‘On’/‘in’ (B3 v, 1.1.209), ‘that’/ ‘which’ (B4 r, 1.1.239 and six subsequent instances), ‘the’/‘thee’ (C3 v, 1.4.6), ‘done’/‘did’ (C4 v, 1.4.115), ‘it’/‘it’s’ (D1 v, 1.4.235), ‘his’/‘ones’ (D3 r, 1.5.22), ‘more’/‘mo’ (D3 r,1.5.39), ‘sometime’/‘sometimes’ (E3 r, 2.3.19), ‘Mold’/ ‘moulds’ (F4 r, 3.2.8), ‘make’/‘makes’ (F4 r, 3.2.8), ‘wit begins’/‘wits begin’ (F4 v, 3.2.67), ‘Hast’/‘Did’st’ (G1 v, 3.4.49), ‘content’/‘contented’ (G2 v, 3.4.115), ‘Lest’/‘Least’ (I1 v, 4.4.18), ‘troope sets’/‘troopes set’ (I2 r, 4.5.16),

20 All subsequent Q signatures and F line references are taken from King Lear 786: (Pied Bull Quarto), ed. by W. W. Greg (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1939). 21 W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), p. 89. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 10

10 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear ‘would it’/‘’twould’ (I3 v, 4.6.78), ‘presageth’/‘presages’ (I3 v, 4.6.121), ‘do’/‘do’s’ (I3 v, 4.6.121, plus seven similar instances), ‘th’are’/‘they are’ (I3 v, 4.6.125), ‘should’/‘shall’ (I4 r, 4.6.137), ‘hands’/‘hand’ (I4 v, 4.6.193 and K2 v, 4.7.57), ‘with running’/‘by running’ (I4 v, 4.6.207), ‘farther’/‘further’ (K4 r, 5.2.8), ‘my right’/‘my rights’ (L1 r, 5.3.69), ‘you love’/‘your loves’ (L1 r, 5.3.89), and ‘hether’/‘hither’ (L1 v, 5.3.107). These changes are so minor that the meaning is barely altered. So why and how were they made? It is just pos sible that one or two of them reflect a compositor’s spelling preference (e.g. ‘presageth’/‘presages’ or ‘th’are’/‘they are’). But it is difficult to imagine Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 any author wanting to change ‘sometime’ to ‘sometimes’, ‘hands’ to ‘hand’, ‘farther’ to ‘further’, or ‘love’ to ‘loves’ as part of a strategic reshaping or revision. 22 To account for such trifling alterations, we need to look to alterna tive explanations, and to agents other than Shakespeare. Critical History When it emerged in the early 1980s, the revision theory seemed to turn con - ventional wisdom on its head. But it had the unfortunate effect of occluding a series of significant prior discussions of the problem. Some account of these previous studies illustrates that, when it emerged, the modern revision theory was strikingly eccentric to the twentieth-century debate thus far. When Urkowitz wrote that, ‘[o]ne theory after another has been offered to account for the differences between the two early texts’, he passed over the fact that these so-called ‘theories’ evolved in a critical dialogue that had established significant areas of agreement. That overlap did not stray far from E. K. Chambers’ early assessment that Q was a reported text. The particular manner or kind of report he had in mind was a method by which the play was recorded from performance by shorthand. This at least was a theory that might account for some of Q’s apparent aural mistakes. 23 The current article’s central claim—that Q was dictated from a text similar to F in the printing house—rules out the conjecture that shorthand played a part in the making of Q, but shares with Chambers, and indeed with Greg and subsequent critics, the notion that misreadings and mishearings played a significant part in the quarto’s printing. Apart from brief outlines by Urkowitz, and also Stanley Wells in the intro duction to Division , Madeleine Doran’s work on Lear has been

22 It might be objected that Ernst Honigmann, in Othello , ed. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), pp. 365–66, entertained the possibility that Shakespeare revised Othello on evidence of just these kinds of trivial differences (see also pp. 356–57). Since the 1622 Othello quarto was also printed by Okes, it may similarly have been dictated, although this claim has yet to be demonstrated in publication. The quarto of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster , printed by Okes in 1620, shows signs of dictation: see Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding , ed. by Andrew Gurr (London: Methuen, 1969), p. lxxvii. 23 E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems , 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), I, 463–70. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 11

Duncan Salkeld 11 largely over looked by revisionists. 24 Doran noted in her ‘Preface’ that E. K. Chambers regarded both Q and F as ‘substantially derived from the same original’. 25 For Chambers, she observed, F represented ‘a stage version since most of the omissions from it appear to be the result of cutting for theatrical presentation’. Similarly, Doran concluded that ‘a common manu - script origin will account for the errors common to the first quarto and the Folio’. 26 She concurred with Greg that F was ‘by far the more regular and satisfactory text of the two’, yet also saw that Q was ‘… substantially the same play, line for line as the Folio’. 27 As for whether Q might have been Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 produced by memorial reconstruction, she could point to only three phrases in support of that claim. Broadly, Doran agreed with Chambers’ view of F, but concluded that Q derived not from shorthand but from an authorial manuscript later revised for F. 28 The idea that Q might be a memorial reconstruction was gradually given additional weight by Greg. In 1942, he concurred with Chambers that Q is ‘a reported text’, taken by shorthand. Citing Alexander Schmidt and Chambers, Greg believed Q to be ‘a reported text, obtained from actual performance’. Greg followed Chambers in thinking it unlikely that Q’s mistakes resulted from ‘errors of composition or by marginal insertions in copy’, and, like Doran, he regarded F as based on a company manuscript and ‘a much altered copy of the first quarto’. 29 Greg similarly found F the superior text: ‘with few exceptions the folio preserves the original read - ing’. 30 He doubted that ‘the folio represents a conceivable revision’, or that Shakespeare would have taken the trouble to make so many trivial altera - tions to the text. He noted, ‘there is no suggestion of any structural necessity for revision in … Lear ’. 31 Over the next decade, however, his position subtly evolved away from the idea that Q derived from a performance-based report and towards the notion that it was a text con structed from memory. The idea that Q might be a reported text persisted. George Duthie gave it added momentum in his critical edition of the play (1949). Duthie accepted that Q was a reported text but ruled out the possibility Chambers (and initially Greg) had entertained, that it could have been made by shorthand. He rejected, too, the possibility of revision, regarding (for example) the word ‘years’ in Lear’s line in Q, ‘Confirming them on yonger yeares’ (B1 v, 1.1.39) more as ‘a corruption than as a Shakespearean first shot’. 32 Duthie

24 See Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s Revision of King Lear , pp. 4, 10–11, The Division of the Kingdoms , ed. by Taylor and Warren, pp. 12–13. 25 Doran, The Text of King Lear , p. 3. 26 ibid. p. 4. 27 ibid. pp. 39, 123. 28 ibid. p. 137. 29 Greg, Variants , pp. 138–39. 30 Greg, Editorial Problem , p. 92. 31 ibid. p. 89. 32 King Lear , ed. by George Duthie (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), p. 23. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 12

12 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear pointed to a number of what he took to be mishearings, including Q’s ‘a dogge, so bade’ for ‘a dog’s obeyed’ (I4 r, 4.6.162), ‘in sight’ for ‘incite (I1 v, 4.4.27)’, and ‘their’ for ‘there’ (G1 r, 3.4.14). 33 He accepted that Q’s ‘a dog, so bade’ might have resulted from ‘dictation of the copy to the compositor at this point’. Overall, he found it ‘much easier to hold a reporter respon - sible for the variety of errors on display in Q than to hold a scribe or compositor responsible’. 34 Weighing the evidence up, Duthie came to the tenta - tive conclusion that, ‘the Q text of Lear is a memorial reconstruction made by the entire company’, subsequently dictated to a scribe. 35 In choosing Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 between Q and F instances, Duthie accepted that we simply cannot ‘dispense with editorial judgement’. 36 In a case like Lear , an editor will always be compelled to make difficult choices. In his ‘New Shakespeare’ edition of the play (1960) Duthie amended this view, regarding it in hindsight as ‘cumber - some’. 37 Influenced by Alice Walker, he considered the possibility that the text of Q might have been printed from dictation. He wrote, ‘If X dictated to Y in some haste, he would no doubt read out the words in fairly short phrases, with short pauses between them: he would not indicate verse- lining, nor would he dictate punctuation … Under these conditions, Y would probably write out the whole text in prose form, and would probably punctuate by merely dashing in, after each group of words read out’. 38 This is an important, if little noticed, statement, for these are broadly the essen - tial characteristics of Q. Given that Duthie altered his view under Walker’s influence, it is to her arguments we briefly turn. Alice Walker also regarded Q as a reported text, one that showed signs of actors’ interpolations and corruptions. 39 For Walker, the manuscript behind Q had been surreptitiously ‘copied by the ear’ throughout. She judged F to represent ‘the play as acted’, derived from a promptbook, adding that while it remains ‘our best authority’, the two texts combined ‘may preserve a better text of Lear than is generally supposed’. 40 In a follow-up book-length study of the First Folio, Walker reiterated her argument that Q was based on foul papers surreptitiously dictated to a scribe by an actor who relied on his memory for dialogue with which he was most familiar. This reader was, Walker suggested, a small-part actor, ‘probably the boy who played Goneril’ since it seemed to her that ‘memorial contamination’ was especially marked ‘in scenes involving both Goneril and Regan’. She reiterated her view that ‘certain features of the quarto—its chaotic lineation, mistakes due

33 ibid. pp. 42, 79–82. Line references are keyed to King Lear 786: , ed. by Greg. 34 ibid. p. 42. 35 ibid. p. 76. 36 ibid. p. 119. 37 King Lear , ed. by George Duthie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 131. 38 ibid. p. 135. 39 Alice Walker, ‘“King Lear”: The 1608 Quarto’, The Modern Language Review , 47 (1952), 376–78. 40 ibid. pp. 377–78. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 13

Duncan Salkeld 13 to misapprehension, its phonetic spelling and poor word-division—suggest that it was copied by the ear’. 41 Overall, Walker accepted that Q and F are complementary. For her, it remains the job of an editor to recognise that ‘conﬂation of the quarto and Folio readings is … necessary’. 42 It was largely in response to these claims by Duthie and Walker in the mid to late 1950s that Greg abandoned his commitment to shorthand reporting. By 1955, he was at least willing to entertain the idea that Q might have been a memorial reconstruction, though he did so ‘rather reluctantly’ in the face of consider - able diﬃculties as he saw them. 43 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 Broadly speaking, it is against this background—of views established by Chambers, Doran, Greg, Duthie and Walker—that the contribution of P. W. K. Stone should be understood. 44 At a time when the revision theory was just taking hold, Stone published a searching study defending the view that Q is a reported text. Like Doran, he dismissed the idea that Q could have been assembled by memorial reconstruction. Considering the possi - bility of dictation, Stone observed that this explanation is ‘very nearly, if not perfectly, consistent with the evidence already examined’, but he puzzled over why the scribe or compositor did not ask for repetitions when he found himself setting nonsense. He ruminated that time might have been short. In a footnote, he took an even stronger line and ruled out the possibility of dictation altogether, citing the authority of Philip Gaskell. 45 Observing Q’s bizarre punctuation, Stone doubted ‘that an authorial rough draft would show such irregularities’. The switches between mislined and metrical speech seemed arbitrary. The evidence seemed to suggest that ‘many of the corruptions of the Q text originate in errors of the ear’. He added that some apparent mishearings may in fact be misreadings. The examples he set out included words that sounded alike, dropped the initial ‘h’, split into two, and misapprehended names. In his judgement, these examples were ‘obviously not misreadings’. On the question of whether these textual confusions might be down to a compositor, Stone took a mixed view. He granted that the compositor could have been prone to aural con - fusions when trying to remember a line, but thought it unlikely that ‘tricks of memory’ could lead him to set ‘gibberish’. Overall, he remained in no doubt, from his list of homophones, near-homophones, dropped aspirates,

41 Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 41–42. 42 ibid. pp. 63, 66. It is unfortunate that Walker’s work should have been dismissed as ‘stubbornly insensitive’ in The Division of the Kingdoms , ed. by Taylor and Warren, p. 236. 43 W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 380. 44 P. W. K. Stone, The Textual History of King Lear (London: Scolar Press, 1980). 45 ibid. p. 17. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 14

14 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear misapprehensions and garbled words, that the evidence pointed to ‘persuasive testimony that the text of Q1 was based on a report’. 46 At the same time, Stone also felt that some of the incoherence in Q, like ‘a nelthu’ [F: ‘he met the’] suggested a compositor setting in haste. He took Q’s frequent vocatives, ‘gag’ words and interpolations as possible actors’ interventions, but was disinclined to believe that an entire group of actors could have been responsible, as Duthie had conjectured. Nor would a prompt book produce such errors and omissions. Stone concluded that it is ‘only by supposing a reporter at work in the theatre that we can satisfac- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 torily account for the mistakes and the lacunae’. 47 Summarising his position regarding Q, he wrote, ‘this remarkably consistent evidence points clearly to the conclusion that the reporter’s efforts at lineation were guided pri - marily by the ear; it suggests indeed that he tried to divide the lines of verse as best he could even as he heard them and copied them down’. 48 The fact that Stone proposed this view just as the revision theory was taking hold has left him with the appearance of a ‘lone voice’ in Lear criticism. 49 But viewed in the context of Chambers, Greg, Duthie and Walker, he was clearly worry- ing away at long-recognised problems in an attempt to refine and con sol- idate an evolving consensus about the play. Three further relevant discussions should be noted. The first, by T. H. Howard-Hill, focused on the copy behind F which, he argued on the basis of shared spellings, had probably been Q2 rather than Q. In making this case, Howard-Hill provided a very probing critique of Greg’s defence of the view that Q lay behind F. In particular, he undermined a series of so -called ‘proofs’ for F’s derivation from Q which traced back to the Vic - torian editor P. A. Daniel, who had argued that F was based on Qa. Howard-Hill also noted evidence in Stone suggesting that F derived from Q2’s absorption of corrections in Qb. 50 Howard-Hill’s claim that Q2 lay behind F was subsequently challenged by Richard Knowles, who felt that the argument for Q2’s influence on F had been overstated. Knowles pointed out that, ‘F rejects some 1,300 substantive readings found in Q2, and seems to accept a mere 90. Moreover, the 90 agree ments between the texts need not show any substantive influence from Q2, since the F readings could all have been arrived at independently by such natural means as the substitution of obviously correct readings for Q1 mis - read ings’. 51 Knowles posited that what lay behind F was ‘a scribal copy of

46 ibid. p. 16. 47 ibid. p. 20. 48 ibid. p. 30. 49 René Weis, ed., King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition, ed. by René Weis, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2010), p. 43. 50 T. H. Howard-Hill, ‘The Problem of Manuscript Copy for Folio King Lear’, The Library , VI , 4 (1982), 1–24, (p. 21). See Stone, The Textual History of King Lear , p. 251. 51 Richard Knowles, ‘The evolution of the texts of Lear’, in King Lear: New Critical Essays , ed. by Jeffrey Kahan (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 124–54 (p. 144). Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 15

Duncan Salkeld 15 the playbook’. He doubted that Shakespeare had undertaken the job of ‘thoroughly editing or vetting the playhouse manuscript’. For Knowles, a ‘hired reviser or an editor’ was a good deal more likely to have made the host of alterations that we find between the early imprints. 52 In sum, Howard- Hill doubted Q’s influence on F, and Knowles doubted Q2’s (although he allowed that F’s compositors might occasionally have consulted Q2). The case for Q as a first shot and F as a later revision was weakening under scrutiny. The third account of the Q/F problem to be considered here is by René Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 Weis in the introduction to his parallel text edition of the play. Weis made it clear in the first edition (1993) that he doubted the case for authorial revision. In the second edition (2010), he added an important section devoted to ‘Q/F Variants and Palaeographic Clues to an Integral Lear Text’. 53 As with Knowles, he held that a promptbook was ‘the most likely text behind F’. He regarded Q as based on authorial ‘foul papers’, perhaps themselves revised. 54 He also noted the hypothesis Doran had considered but rejected, that many Lear variants arose ‘in all likelihood from spells of dictation in Okes’ printing office’. Weis added a simple but important point: ‘if Shakespeare did not revise Lear , then all the lines in F must have stood in the papers behind Q at some stage’. 55 Weis went on to argue that with most of the variants in Lear ‘there are sound palaeographic reasons for arguing that Q and F are guessing at the same reading’. He took the example of Q’s ‘pottage’ and F’s ‘porredge’ (Gv, 3.4.55), pointing out that only one of these readings can be correct since one is an attempt at the other. 56 Similarly, when Q has ‘craving’ and F has ‘cunning’, only one of them reproduces the word that Shakespeare penned. He regarded the confusion of numbers in Q, ‘four’, ‘fifth’ ‘and ‘tenth’, which read in F as ‘five’, ‘sixth,’ and ‘tenth’, as a sign, not of revision, but of a misreading of the manuscript behind F. Cruci- ally, he noted that ‘Q and F are more likely to be guesses at the same manuscript than an instance of revision’. 57 He later underlined this point, stating that the myriad of variants ‘demonstrate time and again that the two printed texts converge on a common pedigree’. 58 The key point Weis establishes is that the great majority of variants are near-misses at the same word. Weis does not say it explicitly, but the guesses only go one way: Q’s fumbles are attempts at F.

52 ibid. pp. 143–44. 53 Weis, King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition , pp. 46–72. 54 ibid. pp. 33, 35. 55 ibid. pp. 42–43. 56 ibid. p. 47. 57 ibid. pp. 50, 52. 58 ibid. p. 71. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 16

16 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear This summary of textual perspectives on Lear has sought to outline a gradual refinement of understanding, although there are important nuances to bear in mind. Chambers had always been cautious about the provenance of Q, allowing only that, ‘Possibly, it was produced … by shorthand and not memorization’. He added, ‘I take it that, both in Q and in F, more than one cause has operated’, and among these causes he included ‘some printer’s errors’. 59 Greg also held misgivings. Writing in 1942, he acknowledged ‘all the objections to the theory of shorthand reporting’ but felt compelled to entertain it ‘however little I like the conclusion’. By 1951, he had accepted Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 Duthie’s case that no contemporary system of shorthand could have pro - duced Q. 60 Signs of a critical consensus were beginning to emerge in spite of differences. Both he and Chambers noted significant evidence of mishearings in Q, as did Doran who otherwise regarded the majority of Q’s errors as misreadings of illegible autograph. 61 Chambers and Doran accepted that Q and F share a common manuscript ancestry. Greg and Duthie rejected the possibility that F was a revision of Q. Duthie, Stone and Weis noted the prom in ence of homophones or near-homophones across the two versions. Greg and Weis observed the great number of indifferent or trivial variants. Lastly, Walker and Duthie allowed the possibility that Q looked like a text produced from dictation. Evidently, any proposed explanation for the dif - fer ences between Q and F will need to address all of these forcefully made points. In sum, there are those like Doran, Knowles, and Weis who propose a direct connection between Shakespeare’s autograph and Q. Others, like Chambers, Greg, Walker, Duthie, and Stone, have posited an indirect link, holding that agents of one kind or another must have intervened between authorial papers and Q. The argument presented here—that Q resulted from a manuscript like F being read aloud in the printing house—is clearly aligned with this latter group. The order of the texts In order to understand how Q might derive from F, or a manuscript like it, we need to address the sequence of texts. An examination of this question is crucial since, as Weis has highlighted, the entire edifice of critical thinking about F’s provenance rests on clarifying its relationship with the quartos that chronologically preceded it. 62 Almost all studies of the problem have taken the evolution of the Lear texts to have been Qa →Qb →Q2 →F. As Peter Blayney stated at the outset of his great study of Okes’s printing of the play,

59 Chambers, William Shakespeare , I, 466–7. 60 Greg, Editorial Problem , p. 96 (Preface c). 61 Chambers, William Shakespeare , I, 465, Greg, Editorial Problem , pp. 94–95, Doran, The Text of King Lear , pp. 22, 124. 62 King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition , ed. by Weis, pp. 34–35. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 17

Duncan Salkeld 17 ‘the later edition is evidently derived in part from Q itself’. It might be noted, however, that Blayney took a somewhat nuanced position on this question. He observed that most commentators end up compelled to accept that ‘Q’s text must derive from F’s’. 63 This article argues that the quarto does not represent the first version of the play. It proposes instead that the sequence was in fact (F) →Qa →Qb →Q2 where (F) designates a manuscript like F but without its theatrical cuts. To explain why this latter order is correct, we need to return to the variants between states Qa and Qb, and between Q and F. As noted earlier, Howard-Hill offered a detailed critique of Greg’s Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 defence of Q as copy for F. 64 His article took issue with the notion that Q lay behind F. In turn, Knowles’ critique of Howard-Hill doubted that F drew from Q2. Together, they both question whether F has any ancestry in Q at all. The long-standing and widely held assumption that F derives from one or other of the quartos rests upon a series of examples first outlined by P. A. Daniel in 1885 which were subsequently accepted by Chambers, Greg and just about everyone who has followed them. P. W. K. Stone went so far as to claim, ‘F is obviously derived from Q’. 65 But very little about King Lear is obvious. Daniel had argued, in the introduction to the ‘Praetorius’ facsimile copy of an edition in the British Library (C. 34. k. 18), that since appar ent Qa errors occur in F, F must have been set from Qa. 66 I here set out Daniel’s argu ment in some detail for two main reasons. First, upon it (as mediated by Chambers and Greg) all subsequent textual studies of the play rest. Second, Daniel’s properly scholarly caution in making these claims needs to be credited. His initially tentative proposals were subsequently cemented into a critical edifice. Greg, for example, based his account of the texts’ order entirely on Daniel. 67 Yet Daniel himself held misgivings: he puzzled over why the makers of F should, as it seemed, have drawn on both Q and Q2 when only one would have served. It appeared needless and contra dictory. Daniel himself was far from believing that his line of thinking should be accepted without question. In seeking to establish Q as copy for F, Daniel identified three groups of Qa error that apply to F, the first of which concerns a group of Qa-only anomalies mirrored in F. First, where F has ‘the dear father, / Would with his daughter speake, commands, tends, seruice’, Qa reads, ‘the dear fate, / Would with the daughter speake, come and tends seruise’ (E4 v, 2.4.103).

63 Peter W. M. Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and their Origins, Volume 7: Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 1, 8. 64 See Howard-Hill, ‘The Problem of Manuscript Copy for Folio King Lear ’, pp. 20–22. 65 Stone, The Textual History of King Lear , p. 41. 66 M. William Shak-speare’s King Lear: The First Quarto, 786: , ed. by P. A. Daniel (London: C. Praetorius, 1885), pp. iii–xii, xviii–xxi. Act, scene, and line references are keyed to this Daniel’s edition in this section (III), unless otherwise stated. 67 Greg, Editorial Problem , pp. 96–98; idem, Variants , pp. 139–40; idem, First Folio , p. 384. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 18

18 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear Daniel understandably assumed that Qb’s version of the last three words, ‘commands her seruice’, is an amendment, not allowing that ‘tends’ marks a self-correction in Lear’s tone and demeanour, as in to ‘tender’ or ‘bid for’. He deemed it ‘obvious’ that Qb offers ‘an incomplete correction of the nonsense’ in Qa. 68 The lines in Qa do indeed begin with nonsense (‘the dear fate’) but the concluding Qa phrase ‘come and tends’ is evidently a botched understanding of F’s ‘commands, tends’, and Qb’s ‘commands her seruice’ has simply made Qa’s error worse. Second, Qa gives ‘My foote vsurps my body’ (H3v, 4.2.28) for F’s ‘My foole vsurps my body’. Again, Daniel Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 understandably assumed that Qb’s ‘A foole vsurps my bed’ was an amendment. But Qa has simply muddled F’s ‘foole’, by a process of misreading, mishearing, or a combination of the two (it is probably impossible to say which). Qb’s ‘bed’ for F’s ‘body’ has just added another mistake and confused matters further. A third example is critical not just to Daniel’s reasoning but also to sub - sequent assumptions about the sequence of the texts. Near the end of the play, Edmund tells Albany that he thought it fit ‘To saue the old and miser - able King to some retention’ (5.3.46–48, Arden 3). The layout of the text at this point is significant (see Figs 1a (Qa), 1b (Qb) and 1c (F)). Daniel’s case is that from the fact that the Qa and F versions almost match, we may surmise that F has carried over Qa’s original form and missed out Qb’s supposed correction—the added words ‘and appointed guard’. Although this is a key example in the argument for regarding Q as behind F, the reasoning does not stand scrutiny. Edmund’s speech in this example begins with a five-syllable half-line (‘Sir, I thought it fit’). In Qa (Fig. 1a), the succeeding words ‘To saue the old and miserable King to some retention’ fill a single, fifteen-syllable line. 69 Qb (Fig. 1b) appears to have attempted to improve the Qa line by adding an extra (‘turned-down’) five syllables—‘and appointed guard’. Daniel simply accepted Qb’s version as a correction from Shakespeare’s manuscript, despite the anomaly that it extends an already fifteen-syllable line to some twenty syllables. Leaving this problem unremarked, he concluded that since F sets the line as it is given in Qa, omitting ‘and appointed guard’, this must have been a mistake taken over by F from Qa: hence Qa stood behind F. Greg accepted this reasoning, adding that the extra words were necessary to the verse. Not questioning

68 Daniel, in M. William Shak-speare’s King Lear , p. xviii. 69 Shakespeare usually counts ‘miserable’ as four syllables (see Romeo and Juliet , 4.5.44; As You Like It , 4.3.131; Antony and Cleopatra , 4.15.53). He always writes ‘retention’ as pronounced with three syllables (see Sonnet 122, line 9). Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 19

Duncan Salkeld 19

FIg. 1a Qa, K4 v, from the uncorrected quarto (British Library, C.34.k.18). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021

FIg. 1b Qb K4 v: the same lines with added press ‘correction’ (British Library, C.34.k.17).

FIg. 1c Folio: the same lines as given on folio ff2 r, page 307 (Folger, no. 68, by permission).

Daniel’s assumption, he accepted that F was ‘printed from an elaborately, but not perfectly, corrected copy of the quarto, and is therefore liable at times to take over erroneous readings from it’. 70 With Greg’s formidable authority behind it, there the matter has rested. If we look more closely at this example, we see that the three added words in Qb (Fig. 1b, ‘and appointed guard’) are not at all necessary to the verse. In fact, they are a needless encumbrance. Given that Edmund’s speech begins with a five-syllable half-line and is followed by a line of fifteen syllables, it is reasonable to suppose that the initial five syllables of the second line (‘To saue the old and’) should have been transferred to become the last five syllables of the first line. Had this happened, both the first and second lines of Edmund’s speech would have formed two perfectly trochaic lines. Sir, I thought it fit to send the old and Miserable King to some retention … (5.3.47–9) Intriguingly, Shakespeare enjambs a line on ‘and’ only in his later works, and he does so again shortly afterwards in the same scene, in Edmund’s last speech:

70 Greg, Variants , pp. 141–42. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 20

20 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear Ed. He hath commission from thy wife and me To hang Cordelia in the prison and To lay the blame upon her own despair … (5.3.250–53) 71 F’s compositors set their copy of the play from a manuscript that did not have the additional phrase ‘and appointed guard’. What Daniel took to be F’s failure to correct an error in Q was in all likelihood Qa’s failure to notice the mislineation as it stood in the prior (F) manuscript. The words ‘and appointed guard’ were another unnecessary addition. They were probably supplied by Okes’s proof-corrector since they compound the problem by Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 making the line an absurd twenty syllables long. Here again, we see that a supposed amendment hazarded in Qb is no correction at all—quite the reverse. Okes’s corrector was struggling to make sense of, or improve, appar ent errors but blundering in doing so. All of Daniel’s examples are bet - ter explained if we accept that a manuscript like F lies behind Qa. Daniel’s second group concerns apparent errors in F that appear also in Qa and Qb sheets. He wrongly assumes that ‘weild’ (B1 v, 1.1.56) in the phrase ‘more than words can weild the matter’ is a spelling mistake. Jacobeans routinely wrote ‘ei’ as in ‘feild’ or ‘sheild’. Where Q has ‘sommons’ (I3 r, 4.6.57) in the line ‘the dread sommons of this chalkie borne’, and F reads ‘Somnet’ [summit], Daniel took F as a ‘blundered correction’ of Q2’s ‘summons’. Yet ‘Somnet’ is a Shakespearean spelling that occurs in Hamlet (3.3.18). Q’s ‘sommons’ appears a simple misreading. While Q and F both have a newly recovered Lear ask Cordelia ‘where did you dye?’ (4.7.49), Daniel took Q2’s ‘when did you dye?’ as a correction, and hence as yet further evidence of F carrying over mistakes from Q. But Q’s ‘Yar a spirit I know, where did you dye’ is more simply explained as a version of F’s ‘You are a spirit I know, where did you dye’. It is perhaps worth noting that Shakespeare never contracts ‘you are’ to ‘yar’. Daniel identiﬁed a third group of supposed errors in F that could have derived, he thought, from Q or Q2, since they agree in both. Daniel offered

71 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this article who raised the pertinent question of how often Shakespeare enjambs on the connective ‘and’. It appears that he does so only in his late plays, beginning with King Lear . I am sincerely grateful to respondents on the online forum SHAKSPER who have enabled me to compile the following additional instances (keyed to Arden 3 editions but also occurring in F): All’s Well That Ends Well , 2.1.115; Antony and Cleopatra , 2.2.151, 3.1.9–10, 3.6.44, 3.7.46; Coriolanus , 1.1.68, 1.4.62, 3.2.61, 4.1.28, 4.1.58, 4.6.98, 5.6.6, 5.6.38, 5.6.75; The Winter’s Tale , 1.2.370, 1.2.445, 2.1.66, 3.2.22; Cymbeline , 1.6.40, 1.6.145, 3.6.28, 4.3.10, 4.4.28, 5.5.224; The Tempest , 1.2.12, 1.2.54–6; and Henry VIII, 2.4.171, 3.2.58, 3.2.68, 3.2.173, 3.2.195. It seems that, on occasions, F’s compositors may have sought to avoid (or correct) enjambment on ‘and’, setting the conjunction at the start of the succeeding line, in the following instances: Macbeth 2.1.11 –12, Coriolanus , 2. 1.166, 2.1.185, 2.1.256, 2.2.35, 2.2.83, 2.2.141, 2.3.185, 3.1.69, 3.1.266. In each of these latter examples, modern editions tend to ‘undo’ F and allow ‘and’ to complete a metrical line. My thanks go to Peter Groves, Peter Holland, Bill Lloyd, Al Magary (who helped me conduct my own search), David Richman, Pervez Rizvi, Will Sutton, and especially Jonathan Hope who found, in addition to the great majority of these examples, a further three instances in Pericles and seven in The Two Noble Kinsmen (see SHAKSPER, athttps://www.shaksper.net/, 11 April 2019). Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 21

Duncan Salkeld 21 examples. Both Q and Q2 read ‘the mistress of Heccat’ (B2 v, 1.1.112). F has ‘miseries’, often thought to be a mistake for the word ‘mysteries’. Daniel supposed that the letters ‘tress’ in Q might have been struck out by a scribe’s pen and replaced with ‘eries’, so resulting in F’s blunder. Looking more closely at this example, F’s ‘miseries’ is almost certainly the correct reading. Lavater, a source-text for Hamlet , speaks of the ‘terrors’ of Hecate (A3 v, 6) and Shakespeare never uses the word ‘mystery’ in a pagan, occult sense. 72 Daniel’s example of F’s apparent error ‘ Historica passio ’ is simply a follow - ing by—not of—Q. Similarly, Edgar’s list of dogs while playing ‘poor Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 Tom’—Hound or Spaniell, Brach or Hym ’—follows the F text (G4 r, 3.6.72). Daniel supposed that the mistake of ‘ Hym ’ for ‘lym’ originated in Q or Q2, but it evidently does so in F. In setting out all these examples, Daniel believed he was presenting reasons for taking Q →F as the most plausible direction of influence. To his credit, he did so only as suppositions to be tested: he never once presumed that others should accept his inferences as conclusive. Dictation, misreading and mishearing It is important to recall that, although she considered it, Doran did not advocate a theory of dictation in the printing house. Nevertheless, in a con - cluding chapter devoted to Q, she detailed several possible instances of mis - reading and mis hearing (quarto reading first): ‘may know’ for ‘make knowne’ (B4 r, 1.1.229), ‘I apprehend’ for ‘Ile apprehend’ (C2 r, 1.2.83), ‘weaknes’ for ‘weakens’ and ‘lethergie’ for ‘lethergied’ (D1 v, 1.4.248–9), ‘argue-proofe’ for ‘Agu-proofe’ (I3 v, 4.6.107), and ‘a dogge, so bade in office’ for ‘a Dogg’s obey’d in office’ (I4 r, 4.6.163). 73 She noted other Q/F quibbles that almost match in sound: ‘Confirming’/‘Conferring’ (B1v, 1.1.41), ‘confirm’d’/‘conferr’d’ (B2 r, 1.1.84), ‘great’/‘grac’d’ (D2 r, 1.4.267), ‘attaskt’/ ‘at task’ (D2 v, 1.4.366), ‘aske’/‘act’ (D3 v, 2.1.20), ‘stopping’/‘stocking’ (E2 v, 2.2.139), ‘taske/‘taxe’ (F4 r, 3.2.16), ‘haue’/‘of’ (F4 r, 3.2.33), ‘That sorrowes’/ ‘That’s sorry’ (F4 v, 3.2.73), ‘stock-punisht’/‘stockt, punish’d’ (G2 v, 3.4.140 –1), ‘troope sets forth’/‘troopes set forth’ (I2 r, 4.5.16). She added that some spellings in Q seem to reflect mis hearing: ‘caterickes’ for ‘Cataracts’ (F4 r, 3.2.2), ‘vaunt-currers’ for ‘Vaunt-curriors’ (F4 r, 3.2.5), ‘cushings’ for ‘cushions’ (G4 r, 3.6.36), and ‘Fauchon’ for ‘Faulchion’ (L3 v, 5.3.276). Doran’s citation of over twenty examples of possible misreading or mis - hearing naturally led her to consider whether dicta tion might have been used in setting the play. 74 She noted R. B. McKerrow’s suggestion that if light was

72 Ludwig Lavater, Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Night (London: Richard Watkins, 1572). Talbot, in 7 Henry VI , refers to Joane La Pucelle as ‘that railing Hecate’ (3.2.63). 73 Act, scene and line references in this section (IV) are keyed to King Lear, 786: , ed. by Greg. 74 Doran, The Text of King Lear , pp. 124–25. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 22

22 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear poor, a compositor might have had the text read aloud. Yet she did not think this could have been routine practice or explain the variety of textual differences in Lear . For Doran, citing William Blades via McKerrow, a compositor may hold a word in his mind but inadvertently supplant it with a different word when setting the text. 75 We know from Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683) that copy was routinely read aloud in the printing house. Moxon explains that, once printed, a sheet will be carried to the ‘corrector’ by ‘one that is well skill’d in true and quick Reading, to Read the Copy to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 him, whom I shall call the Reader ’. 76 It is not implausible to think that copy might have sometimes been initially set from dictation. There is sporadic evi dence for this conjecture, a point noted by Doran: ‘there is proof that it was sometimes done’. 77 McKerrow gives examples of apparent dictation from Sir John Harington’s Epigrams , John Fletcher’s play (perhaps with Massinger) The Elder Brother , and an account of a Swiss printer, Henri Pantaleo, in Basel. 78 The 1618 imprint of Harington’s poems gives the title of verse 23 thus: ‘To Bassifie, his wiues mother, when shee was angry’. As McKerrow notes, the word ‘Bassifie’ had been taken to indicate a name. A 1633 edition that restores the sense shows that ‘Bassifie’ in the title should have read ‘pacify’. The first two lines of Fletcher’s play The Elder Brother (3.3.1–2) include an instruction to the printer: ‘What noise is in this house, my head is broken, / Within a parenthesis, in every corner’. McKerrow writes, ‘It is quite evident that the words ‘Within a parenthesis’ merely mean that ‘my head is broken’ should be printed within parentheses, or round brackets’. He further notes an insertion of the word ‘Ah’ in some copies of the first quarto of Richard II (1.1.139) which A. W. Pollard took to be a ‘probable’ sign of dictation (though Pollard otherwise ruled dictation out). 79 These are what McKerrow calls ‘internal’ or in-text examples. He cites further ‘external’ evidence from a volume published in 1716, John Conrad Zeltner’s C. D. Correctorum in Typographiis eruditorum centuria speci - menis loco collecta , printed in Nürnberg. This work gives a short account of a Swiss historian, Henri Pantaleo (1552–1595) and describes the process by which some manuscripts were printed by dictation. It also states that this was a practice dropped in the eighteenth century or earlier. McKerrow gives

75 ibid. p. 125; William Blades, Shakespeare and Typography (London: Trübner, 1872), p. 72; Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 254. 76 Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of handy-works applied to the Art of Printing (London, 1683), II , ch. 23, p. 261 (Nn1 r). 77 Doran, The Text of King Lear , p. 125. 78 See McKerrow, Introduction to Bibliography , pp. 242–46. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 23

Duncan Salkeld 23 the passage in Zeltner’s Latin, leaving the English translation for a later scholar. 80 In his updated successor to McKerrow’s work, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), Philip Gaskell downplayed the possibility of composition from dictation, arguing that it would have been neither common practice nor particularly effective. In the face of McKerrow’s evidence, Gaskell suggests that this account of a Swiss ‘lector’ (his term for the ‘reader’) must simply have been mistaken. In his view, apparent mishearings were ‘more likely to have been introduced into the text during dictation for Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 manuscript fair-copying, or during proof-correction by reading aloud’. Gaskell’s authority on these matters is of course to be respected, but he entirely ignores Zeltner’s reference to a change in practice, and it seems rash to suppose that printers never, under any circumstances, resorted to dicta - tion given that there is evidence for it. 81 Q’s bizarre punctuation, often noted, is most simply explained by the com positor setting and pointing each phrase as it was read aloud to him. Dictation also explains, as Duthie suggested, why verse is frequently set in Q as prose since a compositor working mainly by ear would compose accord ing to phrases and lines as he heard them. Punctuation and lineation would be relatively arbitrary, with lines ending as the margins allowed. All the same, it is worth considering the likelihood of other scenarios: as Peter Blayney has pointed out, Okes’s compositors were short of ‘quads’ or metal - lic spacers that would fill any gap left by a short line. 82 But a shortage of space-metal cannot account for the text’s often erroneous punctuation. It might be expected that, with any kind of reported text, mishearings would occur. Yet an argument for thinking that these mistakes happened outside the printing shop is itself an argument for supposing the text’s imperfec - tions, introduced elsewhere, were flawlessly reproduced within the printing house. The evidence for dictation is more extensive than Doran suggested. We can begin with the most trivial variants that point to auditory mistakes. In Q, the letter ‘s’ is randomly added or missed (Q reading first, followed by F): ‘kingdomes’/‘kingdom’ (B1 r,1.1.4), ‘labour’/‘labours’ (C3 v, 1.4.6),

80 McKerrow, Introduction to Bibliography , pp. 243–44. 81 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972), p. 49. Gaskell takes the word ‘lector’ from Zeltner’s Latin text, ‘in Isingrinii oﬃcinâ lectorem egit’ (‘he worked as a reader in the printshop of Isingrenius’). Zeltner also refers to ‘verba ex ore recitantis’ (‘words from the reciter’s mouth’): see McKerrow, Introduction to Bibliography , p. 244. It is worth noting that Gaskell does later leave open the possibility of setting from dictation (p. 352). 82 For a discussion of Okes’s use of quads, see Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and their Origins , pp. 66, 159, 207, 215; also Vickers, The One King Lear , pp. 83–92, esp. pp. 85–86. In his 2017 review article (‘Quadrat’, pp. 74–85), Blayney argues that a shortage of quads explains the setting of verse as prose. For Vickers’s reply to Blayney’s critique, see Brian Vickers, ‘Making sense of Q1 Lear. A reply to Peter Blayney’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America , forthcoming. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 24

24 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear ‘stande’/‘standes’ (D3 r, 1.5.20), ‘thunders’/‘thunder’ (D4 r, 2.1.49), ‘wind’/ ‘Windes’ (E3 r, 2.3.12), ‘mothers’/‘mother’ (E4 v, 2.4.133), ‘wanderer’/ ‘wanderers’ (F4 v, 3.2.43–4), ‘brothell’/‘Brothels’, ‘placket’/‘plackets’ and ‘booke’/‘bookes’ (G2 r, 3.4.99–100), ‘reuenge’/‘reuenges’ (H1 r, 3.7.8), and ‘fortune’/‘fortunes’ (I4 r, 4.6.180). We might add that any conscious re -shaping or revision would be likely to affect phrases, lines or whole speeches, and yet the vast majority of the thousand or so Q/F variants are single words. As Weis pointed out, many of these single words sound alike or manage to be partly or almost correct—similar in some respects, but not Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 all. Elsewhere in Q, single words are misheard as two: ‘so phisticated’ (G2 r, 3.4.110), ‘some thing’ (G3 r, 3.5.5), ‘King dome’ (H1 v, 3.7.45), and ‘in sight’ (I1 v, 4.4.27, F: ‘incite’). 83 Urkowitz somewhat weakly argued that ‘a dogge, so bade’ could not be a mishearing because it requires a ‘z’ sound when pronounced. He added that similarly split words are found in the manuscript by ‘Hand D’ in the ‘Book of Sir Thomas More’. But the examples he gives— ‘offendo r’ and ‘fo rbid’—are merely spaced letters, not single words taken as two. 84 Dictation is a process liable to errors of misreading and mishearing. Q mishears the definite article ‘the’ for the pronoun ‘thee’ (B3 r, 1.1.185, and four further instances). The adjective ‘manifold’ is misread or misheard in Q as ‘many fould’ (D4 r, 2.1.49). Absurdly, F’s ‘on speedy foot’ is similarly mistaken in Q as ‘on speed fort’ (I4 v, 4.6.216), an unlikely misreading. But perhaps the most nonsensical mistake of all occurs only in the Bodley edition of Q where the word ‘miracles’ has been set as ‘my rackles’ (Qa, E3 r, 2.2.172). It may be objected that we cannot know for certain that these mis - readings or mishearings arose from dictation. They might (just) be scribal rather than compositorial. It must be admitted there is room for doubt—but not considerable doubt. Yet on balance, the variety of problems we find in Q—near-miss variants, mislineation, mispunctuation and interpolations— is entirely consistent with the uncertain and hazardous practice of dictation. The alternative notion that these errors were made as part of a scribal or stenographic transcript requires, conversely, that we suppose an unusually high degree of accuracy from the printer, the scribe’s mistakes reproduced in the printing house with absolute fidelity. As Peter Blayney has explained, ‘Lear is the only play-quarto which can fairly claim a place among Okes’s half-dozen worst-printed books of 1607–9’. 85 What the Q/F variants show is the possibility that Q was dictated through out. In almost all of the following instances, the word in Q is best

83 Line references in this section are keyed to Greg’s 1939 edition of Q, unless otherwise stated. 84 Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s Revision of King Lear , pp. 132–33. 85 Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and Their Origins , pp. 184–85. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 25

Duncan Salkeld 25 understood as a misreading or mishearing of its equivalent in F. There have been several ingenious attempts to explain some of these differences in terms of an agent, perhaps Shakespeare, altering the play with a deliberate sense of purpose. Yet the extent, kind and number of examples demonstrates no evident pattern. A far more random process seems to be at work. In order to show how distributed these misreadings and mishearings are, many of them (but not all) are set out below according to the act in which they occur. The list is indicative only, by no means exhaustive, and may include a few errors that arose in undecidable circumstances. 86 They are given below with Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 the F reading first, followed by that in Qa, in accordance with the order of texts here proposed: Act : (F / Qa) qualities / equalities (B1 r, 1.1.5) other / further (C2 r, 1.2.95) to the world / into the world auricular / aurigular (C2 r, 1.2.99) (B1 r, 1.1.21) nor / or (C2 v, 1.2.172) father found / father friend person / parson (C2 v, 1.2.177) (B1 v, 1.1.60) upbraids / obrayds (C3 r, 1.3.6) professes / possesses (B2 r, 1.1.76) these / this (C4 r, 1.4.90) miseries / mistress (B2 v, 1.1.112) gall / gull (C4 v, 1.4.126) disasters / diseases (B3 r, 1.1.177) Nuncle /vncle (C4 v, 1.4.130) a Dowrie / and dowre (B4 r, 1.1.243) To / doe (D1 r, 1.4.183) my chance / thy chance (B4 v, 1.1.259) know / trow (D1 v, 1.4.234) let us sit / lets hit (C1 r, 1.1.307) to / you (D1 v, 1.4.258) prescribed / subscribd (C1 r, 1.2.24) grac’d / great (D2 r, 1.4.266) ore-looking / your liking (C1 v, 1.2.40) milky / mildie (D2 v, 1.4.362) his / this (C2 r, 1.2.87) afore / before (D2 v, 1.5.5) Act : reposall / reposure (D4 r, 2.1.70) should / could (E2 v, 2.2.144) hear / heard (D4 v, 2.1.106) elfe / else (E3 r, 2.3.10) thredding / threatning (D4 v, 2.121) meiney / men (E3 v, 2.4.35) best / lest (D4 v, 2.1.125) here / there (E4 r, 2.4.60) intrince / intrench (E1 v, 2.2.81) commands / come and (E4 v, 2.4.103) vnloose / inloose (E1 v, 2.2.81) knapt / rapt (E4 v, 2.4.124) being / bring (E1 v, 2.2.83) sickly / fickle (F1 v, 2.4.188) gall / gale (E1 v, 2.2.85) beg / bag (F2 r, 2.4.216) Camelot / Camulet (E1 v, 2.2.90) need / deed (F2 v, 2.267) flicking / flitkering (E2 r, 2.2.113) is / as (F2 v, 2.4.270) fleshment / flechuent (E2 r, 2.2.130) tamely / lamely (F2 v, 2.4.279)

86 Further examples are discussed in Lear , ed. by Duthie (1949 edition), pp. 79–82. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 26

26 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear Act 3: Battailes / battel (F4 r, 3.2.22) witch / with (G2 v, 3.4.126) of / haue (F4 r, 3.2.34) have / Hath (G2 v, 3.4.145) pudder / Powther (F4 v, 3.2.50) deerern / deerer (G3 r, 3.4.174) there / their (G1 r, 3.4.14) darke Tower came / darke towne come own / one (G1 v, 3.4.23) (G3 r, 3.4.186) Sword / foord (G1 v, 3.4.53) Fretereto / Fraterretto (G3 v, 3.6.6) Iustice / iustly (G2 r, 3.4.82) They / Theile (G4 r, 3.6.64) contented / content (G2 v, 3.4.115) festiuate / festuant (H1 r, 3.7.10) Flibbertigibbet / Sriberdegibit rain / rage (H1 v, 3.7.62) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 (G2 v, 3.4.120) subscribe / subscrib’d (H1 v, 3.7.65) alight / O light (G2 v, 3.4.125–6) Dunghill / dungell (H2 r, 3.7.97) Act : esperance / experience (H2 r, 4.1.4) may / my (I3 r, 4.6.42) poorly led / parti eyd (H2 r, 4.1.9) Beggar / bagger (I3 r, 4.6.68) vndoe / vnder (H3 r, 4.1.73) crying / coyning (I3 v, 4.6.84) whistle / whistling (H3 v, 4.2.39) Hewgh / hagh (I3 v, 4.6.91) eye-discerning / eye-deseruing euery / euer (I3 v, 4.6.109) (H4 r, 4.2.52) thine / thy (I4 r, 4.6.139) thrilled / thrald (H4 r, 4.2.73) Felt / fell (I4 v, 4.6.189) Fenitar / femiter (I1 r, 4.4.3) stolne / stole (I4 v, 4.6.189) Centery / centurie (I1 r, 4.4.6) speedy foot / speed fort (I4 v, 4.6.189) Least / Lest (I1 v, 4.4.18) descry / descryes (I4 v, 4.6.216) incite / in sight (I1 v, 4.4.27) ’casion / cagion (K1 r, 4.6.240) Edmond / and now (I v, 4.5.11) haue beene / ha’bin (K1 r, 4.6.244) further / farther (I2 v, 4.6.30) oppos’d / expos’d (K2 r, 4.7.33) snuff / snurff (I2 v, 4.6.39) Act : alteration / abdication (K3 r, 5.1.3) Conspirant / Conspicuate heard / heare (K3 r, 5.1.21) (L1 v, 5.3.135) guesse / quesse (K3 v, 5.1.52) hell-hated Lye / hell hatedly stung / sting (K3 v, 5.1.56) (L2 r, 5.3.148) countenance / countenadce you / your (L3 v, 5.3.257) (K3 v, 5.1.52) woman / women (L3 v, 5.3.273) further / farther (K3 v, 5.1.63) fore-done / foredoome (L4 r, 5.3.291) common / coren (K4 v, 5.3.49) says / sees (L4 r, 5.3.293) immediacie / immediate (L1 r, 5.3.65) haue / of (L4 r, 5.3.306) hither / hether (L1 v, 5.3.107) hath / haue (L4 r, 5.3.325) Despise / Despight (L v, 5.3.132)

These differences, close in sound and occasionally in sense, are most simply explained as Q’s patchy attempts to match acoustically the word in F. We know that Okes printed King Lear in late 1607 or early 1608. We know too that his staff were young men and probably inexperienced. 87 It

87 Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and Their Origins , pp. 70, 185. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 27

Duncan Salkeld 27 is not implaus ible to imagine a scenario where, in the dark and freezing winter months, Okes had the play printed in haste from dictation. Under these con di tions, all the kinds of error that we find in Q were likely to occur. A lector may misread, mispronounce, omit lines through eye-skip, misspell aloud, impro vise a word or two, add in ‘gag’ words, or make a rough and ready attempt when unsure of his text. The compositor, for his part, may set what he hears, misremember a word, or, if he checked the manuscript, similarly struggle to make out a difficult reading in poor light. This scenario is suffici ent to account for most of the problems we find in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 Q. Chambers, Greg, Duthie, Walker and Stone were convinced that Q was based upon some kind of reporting. Weis was able to show that the variants aim at the same word, evidently the word in F. It is not unreasonable to conclude that a manuscript very similar to F, but without its cuts, served as the copy dictated to Okes’s compositor. There remains the problem of a small minority of Q/F readings that are more difficult to explain as misreadings or mishearings. It seems that the reader improvised at certain moments: ‘my Leige’ for ‘my Lord’ (B1 v, 1.1.36), ‘betwixt’ for ‘betweene’ (B2 v, 1.1.141), and ‘that’ for ‘which’ (D1 v, 1.4.230). He added ‘gag’ words such as ‘Well’ (B2r, 1.1.110), ‘Doe’ (B3r, 1.1.165) or ‘Come sir’ (D1 v, 1.4.257). Sometimes the interpolations marred the sense, as when a Gentleman (whom Q, in a moment of confusion, forgets is a Doctor) says of the gently recovering Lear, ‘I doubt not of his temper - ance’ (K2 r, 4.7.24), reversing the good sense of F’s ‘I doubt of his Temper - ance’. Occasionally, a reading is correct in Q but wrong in F: Q ‘tike’ / F ‘tight’ (G4 r, 3.6.74) and Q ‘scald’/ F ‘scal’d’ (K2 r, 4.7.48). Elsewhere, the Qb proof-corrector successfully matched the word in F where Qa was incorrect: ‘milky’ (D2 v, 1.4.364), ‘auricular’ (C2 r, 1.2.99), and ‘bounty and benizon’ (K1 r, 4.6.229). 88 Q shows occasional signs that the letter ‘l’ was easily misread as a ‘t’ in the manuscript. F’s ‘They kill vs for their sport’ is rendered nonsensically in Q as ‘They bitt vs for their sport’ (H2 v, 4.1.38). F’s ‘this contentious storme’ was printed in Qa as ‘this crulentious storme’, an aim that is half-successful, but altered entirely in Qb to ‘tempestious’ (G1 r, 3.4.6). In Qa, F’s ‘Ballow’ becomes ‘battero’ (K1 r, 4.6.246), and ‘at task’ is made ‘alapt’ (D2 v, 1.4.365). It was quite plausibly the lector who mistook ‘Leister’ for ‘Gloster’ (F3 r, 2.4.289) and made errors elsewhere in speech prefixes (F1 v, 2.4.185, L4 r, 5.3.309 and 323, K2 r, 4.7.22). The puzzle of who should speak the play’s final lines (Q’s Albany or F’s Edgar, L4 r, 323) is solved by the play itself. Albany addresses both Kent and Edgar when he says, ‘you twaine / Rule in this kingdome’ (L4 r, 5.3.319–20). Kent responds

88 The word ‘auricular’ and Regan’s phrase ‘square of sense’ may derive from George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), 3.133–44 and 2.83, as does (arguably) the Fool’s prophecy at 3.2.81–95. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 28

28 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear first, speaking of the journey he has to undertake, and so it remains for Edgar to close the play by way of his reply. Objections to the argument here proposed may point to alternative explanations for some of the variants. Adele Davidson, for example, has argued that many of the variants arose because Q was a text recorded by stenography. She suggested that John Willis’s system of shorthand note - taking aptly fits the kind of fumbles, slips and errors found in Q. This theory has more recently been adapted and extended by Bryan Crockett to cover other early quartos. 89 The detail of Davidson’s case has been rigor ously Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 chal lenged in two review articles by Knowles, a point insuffici ently acknow - ledged by Crockett who argues, in an original and wide-ranging article, that the Lear quarto was constructed by stenography from a live performance. 90 Crockett compares the variant texts of a 1595 ‘Spital’ sermon by Thomas Playfere with examples of verbal difference found in Shakespeare’s ‘suspect’ quartos (a term drawn from Laurie Maguire). 91 He assumes that Playfere’s sermon was recorded piratically (twice) by stenography on the basis of dis - crepancies between its three printed versions. 92 He adds a table of mis hear - ings from Q Lear that he takes to have arisen similarly from steno graphic reconstruction (Table 3). 93 But there is no evidence to show that Playfere’s sermon was ever recorded by shorthand, and Crockett’s assump tion that one version of the sermon was made ‘from no text at all’ is unsafe. 94 Repeated abbreviation by the two early versions of the third hints at their potential origin as independent readings to a compositor of a prior draft. Crockett’s identification of mishearings in Lear and other quartos streng- thens the possibility argued for here—that these errors arose from dicta tion. All in all, stenography requires a cumbersome method—a live transcript made in shorthand followed by a new transcript put into long hand which was later read by (or to) the compositor in the printing shop. Not only is this explanation convoluted, but any argument that Q’s anomalies derive solely

89 Adele Davidson, ‘Shakespeare and Stenography Reconsidered’, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography , 6 (1992), 77–100; eadem, ‘“Some by Stenography”? Stationers, Shorthand, and the early Shakespearean Quartos’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America , 90 (1996), 417–49; eadem, Shakespeare in Shorthand: The Textual Mystery of King Lear (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009); Bryan Crockett, ‘Shakespeare, Playfere and the Pirates’, Shakespeare Quarterly , 66 (2015), 252 –85. 90 Richard Knowles, ‘Shakespeare and Shorthand Once Again’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America , 104 (2010), 141–80, and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America , 105 (2011), 247 –52. 91 Laurie Maguire, Shakespeare’s Suspect Texts: the ‘Bad’ Quartos and their Contexts (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Playfere’s was a sermon delivered at ‘St. Mary’s Spittle’, a ‘hospital’ just east of Shoreditch. 92 Playfere complains that his sermon has been ‘mangled’ and printed with ‘broken-ended sentences’. Thomas Playfere, The Meane in Mourning (London, 1596), sig. A1 v. 93 Crockett, ‘Shakespeare, Playfere and the Pirates’, p. 278. 94 ibid. p. 269. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 29

Duncan Salkeld 29 from stenography implies that the recorder’s transcript was perfectly reproduced when in press. We know, not least from Qb’s attempts at correc tion, that the work of Okes’s compositors was far from perfect. Davidson and Crockett do, however, independently confirm mishearings in Q that, cumula tively, point to its status as a reported text. A further objection might be that the kinds of variants we see in the Lear texts could derive from errors in scribal copying. In a densely argued study of plays in manuscript, Paul Werstine has argued that professional scribes like Ralph Crane and Edward Knight each left their own mark on playscript Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 copies, often altering words, duplicating directions or phrases, and missing speech prefixes, lines or sections of the text: ‘the omissions, misplaced lines, misassigned speeches, and other such errors in the Knight transcript of Bonduca are easily traceable to his [Edward Knight’s] known habits as a scribe’. 95 Given the complexities involved, Werstine disavows any single cause or origin for the wide range of textual inconsistencies found in early play texts: ‘The sheer variety of ways used by playhouse personnel to indicate deletion may well have confused printers and may account for duplicate passages in print’. 96 For him, ‘there are an array of possibilities for printer’s copy’, and any hope that an editor might securely track the origins of particular examples to a source ends up in a fog—what Greg termed a ‘misty mid region’ of elusive conclusions. 97 Yet the question remains: could scribal copying account for the textual variants between the texts of King Lear ? There is probably no way of ruling this possibility out altogether. But it could only be a part of the answer. There is in any case no evidence at all that Q was prepared by a scribe. 98 Transcription errors would not explain the play’s consistent pattern of misreadings or mishearings, its arbitrary errors in punctuation, or the setting of verse as prose. On the latter point, Vickers argued that Okes’s men set verse as prose to save significant space. In response, Blayney argued that since ‘there was constant pressure on the supply of quads [space-metal] and quotations, and creative indenting with quotations set either vertically or horizontally’, page-space could be filled with ‘ Shakespeare’s words instead ’ (Blayney’s italics). 99 It was a shortage of space-metal, for Blayney, that led to the page being filled with text, printing verse as prose across rather than down the type-page. But at best, this again can only offer a partial explanation, since patent aural errors and mistakes in punctuation are evident in these passages, as throughout the text.

95 Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 91. 96 ibid. p. 188. 97 ibid. p. 231; Werstine here cites Greg, First Folio , p. 105. 98 The number of absurdities Q contains makes this hypothesis highly unlikely, since a scribe would almost certainly smooth the text out, even if at the same time introducing a few errors of his own. 99 Vickers, The One King Lear , pp. 86–92; Blayney, ‘Quadrat Demonstrandum’, pp. 93, 91–92 respectively. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 30

30 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear It must be acknowledged that some Q/F variants are clearly not aural errors. A few, for example ‘richer’/‘ponderous’ (B2 r, 1.1.80), ‘seruice’/ ‘farmes’ (E3 r, 2.2.17) or ‘rash’/‘sticke’ (H1 v, 3.7.58), seem neither errors of sight nor sound. 100 But we have already seen evidence of printing house improvisation or invention. A handful of puzzling instances, or a lack of certainty, need not obscure the likelihood that the great majority are visual or auditory errors. The appearance of ‘Shakespearean’ spellings in Q is consistent with the text having been prepared from an authorial manuscript or transcript very much like F. It would be surprising if Jaggard’s printers in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 1623 did not consult either Q or Q2 occasionally for clarification, but with a good early manuscript they probably had little need to do so. The sheer number of evident errors in Q must mean that Shakespeare was not closely involved in its production. Parallel passages in 3.1 referring to the invading army from France are the strongest evidence that Shakespeare might have rewritten a section of his text, although Knowles has made a reasonable argument for a partial merging of the two passages. 101 That Q has much material not in F, including a whole scene, suggests merely that F was printed from a manuscript where those passages had been cut. Among the short passages unique to F are single lines that might easily have been missed through a lector ’s eye-skip. A reader may also make occasional slips with speech-prefixes such as the omission of Qb’s ‘Ba.’ for Bastard in Qa (1.2.37, C1 v). We find signs of dictation elsewhere in Shakespeare’s texts, for example in the 1600 quarto of Henry V .102 In that edition, F’s reference to the ‘defunc tion of King Pharamond’ is printed as ‘the function’ (A2 v, 1.1.37). Elsewhere, the quarto gives ‘Shure’ for F’s ‘sure’ (A2 r, 1.1.9), ‘Faramount’ for ‘Pharamond’ (A2 v, 1.1.42), ‘Elme’ for ‘Elbe’ (A2 v, 1.1.45), ‘Inger’ for ‘Lingare’ (A2 v, 1.1.74), ‘Pippins’ for ‘Pepin’s’ (A2 v, 1.1.87), ‘said eyde’ for ‘sad-ey’d’ (A4 r, 1.1.202), ‘approach’ for ‘reproach’ (D1 r, 3.6.50), ‘partition’ for ‘perdition’ (D1 v, 3.6.103), ‘cocks-come’ for ‘coxcomb’ (D4 r, 4.1.80–1), ‘crasing’ for ‘grazing’ (E2 v, 4.3.104), ‘twise’ for ‘thrice’ (E4 r, 4.6.5) and ‘turne’ for ‘turn’d’ (F r, 4.7.50). There is some reason to think that the 1603 quarto of Hamlet may have been produced in part by the same process. 103 Plausible misreadings and mishearings in the play include ‘cost’ for ‘cast’ (1.1.76), ‘inapproved’ for ‘unimproved’ (1.1.99), ‘invelmorable’ for

100 See Weis, ed., King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition , p. 46, for ‘seruice’/‘farmes’. 101 Knowles, ‘Revision Awry’, p. 43. 102 References to Q Henry V (1600) are quoted from the quarto facsimile Henry V, 7866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), ed. by edited by W. W. Greg. Andrew Gurr, ed., The First Quarto of King Henry V (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 15–18, discusses evident mishearings in the 1600 quarto. 103 References to Hamlet (1603) are from Hamlet (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), ed. by Harold Jenkins. Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 31

Duncan Salkeld 31 ‘invulner able’ (1.1.150), ‘frikes’ for ‘strike’ (1.1.167), ‘impudent’ for ‘impotent’ (1.2.29), ‘a loofe’ (C2 r, Q1 only), ‘ceremonies’ for ‘cerements’ (1.4.48), ‘beckles’ for ‘beetles’ (1.4.61), ‘traine’ for ‘trail’ (2.2.47), ‘Plato’ for ‘Plautus’ (2.2.396), ‘th’arganian’ for the ‘th’Hyrcanian’ (2.2.446), ‘calagulate’ for ‘coagulate’ (2.2.458), ‘Epiteeth’ for ‘epitaph’ (2.2.521), ‘trapically’ for ‘tropically’ (3.2.232), ‘poopies’ for ‘puppets’ (3.2.242), ‘To morrow’ for ‘Tomorrow’ (4.5.48), ‘dan’d’ for ‘donn’d’ (4.5.52), ‘too blame’ for ‘to blame’ (4.5.61), ‘adue’ (Q1 only), ‘uncapable’ for ‘incapable’ (4.7.177), ‘joles’ for ‘jowls’ (5.1.75), ‘Pellon’ for ‘Pelion’ (5.1.246), ‘Oosell’ Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 for ‘Ossa’ (5.1.278), and ‘ambassie’ (Q1 only). These seem to be largely acoustic errors, akin to the near-misses in Lear . Although we cannot know for sure that these are printing-house mistakes, a careful and precise compositor is unlikely to have set ‘Epiteeth’ or ‘poopies’. Conclusion It will be clear from all that has been said so far that there is nothing sur- reptitious, on this view, about the reporting behind Q. The position adopted here is not far from that of Walker, although we do not need to posit a boy- actor as responsible for Q’s mistakes. In some respects, it also accords with Duthie, whose New Cambridge edition (1960) traced Q’s flaws to possible dictation. It is close also to observations made by Weis in his second edition parallel text. Brian Vickers has argued in The One King Lear that a shortage of paper in Okes’s printing house was principally responsible for the differ - ences between Q and F. A perceived need to conserve space may have resulted in Q’s crowded pages, but it is hard to see how this problem alone would have resulted in the great number and variety of word-alterations. The variants from Acts 1 to 5 listed above show no sign of having been adopted to save space or text. Q’s deficiencies in lineation and punctuation, together with its multiple variants, are more explicable as having arisen from in-house dictation, a process that doubles the potential for individual error. Vickers intriguingly notes that stage directions in Q tend to be more vivid than in F, indicating their possible authenticity: ‘Enter Edmund with his rapier drawne’ (E r, 2.2.46) or ‘She takes a sword and runs at him from behind’ (H2 r, 3.7.81). Either the (F) manuscript retained some of the original directions, or the lector/reader had an eye and ear for the dramatic. As for whether Lear survives in two distinctly authorial versions, on this account Q must be regarded, with Greg, as derivative. F itself is imperfect and shorn of vital Shakespearean matter which any edition must fill from Q. Whether or not it existed in more than one manuscript by 1623, (F) and F, for our purposes barely matters. If two, then they seem to have been almost identical save for the abridgements. Even with redactions, Q and F remain— for reasons set out by critics from Doran to Weis—essentially the same text. Blayney conjectured that the staff in Okes’s printing house included appren - Library March 2021,1 Salkeld.qxp_Layout 1 01/02/2021 12:02 Page 32

32 Q/F: The Texts of King Lear tices Thomas Corneforth and John Reynolds, alongside other hired hands. It seems that Corneforth and Reynolds would have been ‘about 21 and 17 respectively’. 104 As Blayney pointed out, Q was a distinctively poor example of this printer’s output, and quite untypical of his standards. 105 He thought it likely that both apprentices worked on Lear , although a journeyman might also have been involved. 106 Blayney suggested that after the freezing Christmas of 1607, a second, less competent, compositor began to share the work of setting. Given that this was Okes’s ﬁrst play, and the inexperience of his staff, it should not be out of the question that the compositors resorted Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/library/article/22/1/3/6174155 by guest on 27 September 2021 to dictation to speed up the process. Manuscript illegibility will also have played some part. We may never know for certain, but the edition they produced bears substantial evidence that points in this direction. Much of the explanation offered here has been anticipated in one respect or another by a series of invaluable prior studies. It would seem that the play’s ﬁrst compositors wanted to save time rather than paper. In the dim light of December 1607, Okes needed a rushed job, and, although he got it done, dictation proved a clumsy strategy. The Unversity of Roehampton

104 Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and Their Origins , p. 187. 105 ibid. pp. 184–85. 106 ibid. p. 186.