to the reader, before publication. Some literary rehandling of this sort is traceable, for example, in the First Folio of Shakespeare, although the hearts of the editors seem to have failed them before they had got very far with the task.[1] Yet another type of descriptive stage-direction presents itself in certain 'surreptitious' prints, where we find the reporter eking out his inadequately recorded text by elaborate accounts of the details of the business which he had seen enacted before him.[2] So too William Percy, apparently revising plays some of which had already been acted and which he hoped to see acted again, mingles his suggestions to a hypothetical manager with narratives in the past tense of how certain actors had carried out their parts.[3]
It must not be assumed that, because a play was printed from a stage copy, the author had no chance of editing it. Probably the compositors treated the manuscript put before them very freely, modifying, if they did not obliterate, the individual notions of the author or scribe as to orthography and punctuation; and the master printer, or some press corrector in his employment, went over and 'improved' their work, perhaps not always with much reference to the original 'copy'.[4] This process of correction continued during the printing off of the successive sheets, with the result that different examples of the same imprint often show the same sheet in corrected and in uncorrected states.[5] The trend of modern criticism is in the direction of regarding Shakespeare's plays as printed, broadly speaking, without any editorial assistance from him; the early quartos from play-house manuscripts, the later quartos from the earlier quartos, the folio partly from play-house manuscripts, partly from earlier quartos used in the play-house instead of manuscripts, and bearing marks of adaptation to shifting stage requirements.[6] On this theory, the aberrations of the printing-house, even with the author's original text before them, have to account in the main for the unsatisfactory condition in which, in spite of such posthumous editing, not very
- ↑ Pollard, Sh. F. 79.
- ↑ e.g. R. J. (Q_{1}), III. i. 94, 'Tibalt vnder Romeos arme thrusts Mercutio in and flyes'; III. ii. 32, 'Enter Nurse wringing her hands, with the ladder of cordes in her lap'; IV. v. 95, 'They all but the Nurse goe foorth, casting Rosemary on her and shutting the Curtens'.
- ↑ Cf. ch. xxi, pp. 133, 136.
- ↑ Pollard, Sh. F. 71; Van Dam and Stoffel, William Shakespeare, Prosody and Text, 274; Chapters on English Printing, Prosody, and Pronunciation.
- ↑ R. B. McKerrow, introd. xiv, to Barnes, Devil's Charter.
- ↑ Pollard, Sh. F. 74; cf. his introd. to A New Shakespeare Quarto (1916).
