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An Hypothesis Concerning the Origin of the Bad Quartos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Leo Kirschbaum
Leo Kirschbaum*
Affiliation:
Saint Louis University
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Extract

In “To the great Variety of Readers” in the First Folio of Shakespeare, Heminge and Condell wrote:

where (before) you were abus'd with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of inuirious impostors, that expos'd them: euen those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes …

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , September 1945 , pp. 697 - 715
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1945

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References

1 RES, xiv (1938), 20-43. The present article was written while the author was Elizabeth Clay Howald Fellow for 1944-45 at The Ohio State University.

2 Since this paper was written I have discovered another maimed play text: “The Faire Maide of Bristow (1605), Another Bad Quarto,” MLN, lxv (1945), 302-308. For Doctor Faustus, see a forthcoming article in The Library. In all, then, there are twenty-two known bad quartos.

3 Cairncross attempts to demonstrate that Q1 of Hamlet contains echoes from no less than twelve plays (The Problem of Hamlet—A Solution [London, 1936], pp. 54-68), but some of his examples are stronger than others.

4 RES, xiv (1938), 20-21.

5 The following represents a bibliography that confines itself to studies that uphold shorthand as the method of piracy for an individual bad quarto: Otto Pape, Ueber die Entstehung der ersten Quarto von Shakespeares Richard III (Berlin, 1906)—Bright; Paul Friedrich, “Studien zur englischen Stenographie im Zeitalter Shakespeares: Timothe Brights Characterie, entwicklungsgeschichtlich und kritisch betrachtet,” Archiv für Schriftkunde, i (1918), 88-140, 147-188 (“Neue Gesichtpunkte für stenographische Untersuchungen von Shakespeare-Quartos; dargelegt an der ersten Quarto der ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ 1602,” pp. 163-186); Adolf Schöttner, “Ueber die mutmassliche stenographische Entstehung der ersten Quarto von Shakespeares ‘Romeo und Julia’,” Archiv für Schriftkunde, i (1918), 229-340—Bright; H. T. Price, The Text of Henry V (Newcastle-Under-Lyme, 1920)—Bright; W. Kraner, Die Entstehung der ersten Quarto von Shakespeares “Heinrich V” (Leipzig, 1924)—Bright; B. A. P. Van Dam, The Text of Shakespeare's Hamlet (London, 1924)—Willis, see p. 9, footnote 1; B. A. P. Van Dam, “Alleyn's player's part of Greene's Orlando Furioso, and the text of Q of 1594,” English Studies, xi (1929), 182-203, 209-220—Willis apparently; J. Q. Adams, “The Quarto of King Lear and Shorthand,” Modern Philology, xxxi (1933), 135-163—Bright; W. W. Greg, “The Function of Bibliography in Literary Criticism Illustrated in a Study of the Text of King Lear,” Neophilologus, xviii (1933), 241-262—some system of shorthand, apparently Willis, see pp. 256-257; Oskar Stoessel, Stenographische Studien su Shakespeares “King Lear” (Würzburg, n.d.)—Bright. See also Alfred Seeberger, “Zur Entstehung der Quartoausgabe des First Part of Jeronimo,” Archiv für Stenographie, lix (1908), 236-248, 257-261—Bright.

Contra Bright's shorthand as the method of taking down the bad quartos: W. Matthews, “Shorthand and the Bad Shakespeare Quartos,” MLR, xxvii (1932), 243-262; W. Matthews, “Shakespeare and the Reporters,” Library, 4th Series, xv (1935), 481-498—vide Dr. Price's reply and Matthew's counter-reply Library, xvii (1937), 225-230; Madeleine Doran, “The Quarto of King Lear and Bright's Shorthand,” Modern Philology, xxxiii (1935), 139-157. See also some very interesting remarks concerning shorthand and the texts of I If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, King Lear, and Richard III in W. W. Greg, “King Lear—Mislineation and Stenography,” Library, 4th Series, xvii (1936), 173-175.

Concerning Bales' relatively unexplored systems, see W. Matthews, “Peter Bales, Timothy Bright, and William Shakespeare,” JEGP, xxxiv (1935), 483-510; H. R. Hoppe, “The Third (1600) Edition of Bales's Brachygraphy,” JEGP, xxxvii (1938), 537-541.

6 Library, xvii (1936-37), 227.

7 “Shakespeare and the Reporters,” Library, xv (1935), 489-490.

8 Ibid., pp. 488-489. The statement of Professor Förster is from Sh. Jb., lxviii (1932), 90.

9 Prof. Förster came to the defense of the Bright shorthand advocates in “Shakespeare and Shorthand,” PQ, xvi (1937), 1-29. He adduces evidence and offers arguments which are already familiar to those who have read Friedrich, Schöttner, and Kraner who did their work under his tutelage. As a matter of fact, I do not believe his article goes beyond Curt Dewischeit's “Shakespeare und die Stenographie,” Sh. Jb., xxxiv (1898), 170-219 which started the Bright school. Förster does not answer any of the major charges of the opposition. Like all Bright advocates, he points only to single word variations and says nothing of the major variations of which word variations are but a part. And of course he calls in the careless printer and the careless actor.

But it seems to me that Förster gives his own case away on two occasions, (1) Bright expressed synonyms by the character (representing a root word) plus the first letter (in shorthand) of the synonym. On page 19, Förster writes: “Another difficulty for the transcriber would arise if there were several synonyms or almost synonymous words beginning with the same letter, each fitting well into the context. Here it was possible that the re-transcriber would hit upon the wrong synonym. And it is just these ‘incorrect synonyms beginning with the same initial letters as the correct word’ which even Matthews would allow to be a proof for the use of Bright's system. If the number of such ‘incorrect synonyms’ pointed out so far is not very great, we must not forget that an analysis from this point of view has not as yet been applied systematically to any Elizabethan play.” But surely the Bright defenders have had their opportunity. If they have not brought forth the strongest proof, we have a right to assume that such proof does not exist. Förster is really begging the question. And let us remember that if such “proof” did exist, it could only account for variations of the single word. (2) On pp. 14-15, he writes: “But how was it possible to write with only 538+32 = 570 symbols the whole English vocabulary, or even only Shakespeare's vocabulary, which I estimated to contain about 24,000 words? This was only possible through the convention that all words somehow connected with a character word in meaning (as synonyms, antonyms, or varieties of a species) were expressed by the same symbol, that of the character word, but with the addition of the first letter of the special word to the general symbol… .” In a note on page 26, he writes, “… a Bright expert had certainly associated the symbols not only with the ‘characterical’ words, but also with all the synonyms or semi-synonymous words which could be expressed by it. Unless we assume this, it is impossible that any practical use could be made of the system.”

Exactly! What right have we to assume that there ever existed a group of prodigies, employers of Bright's shorthand, each of whom attached 24,000 words to 570 symbols? And on the other side of the ledger is the fact that there is not even any evidence that Bright's method was at all well known in his day. His book apparently never passed beyond a first edition.

10 Greg, now evidently recognizing that Richard III is a bad quarto, writes: “There are, at the same time, two considerations that trouble me in connexion with a stenographic origin for the quarto text of Lear (apart from the question of its length). One is that I rather doubt the capacity of any seventeenth century system of shorthand to produce a text so generally accurate as this appears to be; the other is that the close similarity between the cases of Lear and Richard III seems to point to an agency capable of operation as early as 1597” (“King Lear—Mislineation and Stenography,” Library, 4th Series, xvii [1936], 175).

Matthews has pointed out that the shorthand system of Edmond Willis, An A bbreviation of Writing (1618), “might conceivably have been applied to verbatim reporting” in the early years of the seventeenth century: “A Postscript to ‘Shorthand and the Bad Shakespeare Quartos,‘]” MLR, xxviii (1933), 83; “The Piracies of Macklin's Love-à-la-Mode,” RES, x (1934), 318. As I have tried to point out above, however, the better the shorthand system, the less it explains the phenomena of the bad quartos.

Believers in the shorthand thesis always quote Heywood's statement concerning the bad quarto of I If You Know Not Me in A Prologue to the Play of Quene Elizabeth as it was last revived at the Cock-pit, in which the Author taxeth the most corrupted copy now imprinted, which was published without his consent: “some by Stenography drew The plot: put it in print: (scarce one word trew:).” But Giordano-Orsini has indicated that the text is probably a memorial reconstruction (see footnote 16 below). And A. W. Pollard in A Companion to Shakespeare Studies (New York and Cambridge, 1934), p. 267, n. 1 wrote: “There is some reason to believe … he [Heywood] was mistaken, the play appearing to be rather a memorial reconstruction by actors in it than produced by stenography.”

11 Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: The Battle of Alcazar & Orlando Furioso—An Essay in Critical Bibliography (Oxford, 1923), pp. 349-357.

12 Shakespeare's Henry VI and Richard III, “Shakespeare Problems iii” (Cambridge University Press, 1929) pp. 73-82, 89-93, passim.

13 Vide E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, i, 283: “I doubt whether the characters named by Alexander are so much better rendered than the rest throughout, as to point to actors.”

14 Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor—1602 (Oxford, 1910), pp. xxxvi-xli.

15 In iii. i of F we read.

Host. Disarme them, and let them question: let them keepe their limbs whole, and hack our English.

For this, in Q we have,

Host. Disarme, let them question.

Shal. Let them keep their limbs hole, and hack our English.

Greg himself now seems less than lukewarm in defense of his own hypothesis. In RES, iv (1928), 202, he has written “… my theory of The Merry Wives—which is, indeed, very likely mistaken.” However, E. K. Chambers in his William Shakespeare (1930) can write “Greg has shown that in Merry Wives the reporter was almost certainly an actor who played the Host, and reconstructed the play from memory” (i, 430).

16 I have referred above only to views on the bad quartos of Orlando Furioso, 2 and 3 Henry VI, and The Merry Wives of Windsor as memorial reconstructions. The hypothesis of memorial transmission has been employed for almost all the other bad quartos, sometimes with overwhelming evidence, sometimes with no evidence at all. (a) Giovanni Ramello has shown that Q1 of Hamlet is a memorial reconstruction of the good text as it appears in Q2: The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke 1603, “Studi Sugli Apocrifi Shakespearian!” (Torino, 1930); so too, independently, has G. I. Duthie in The ‘Bad’ Quarto of ‘Hamlet,’ “Shakespeare Problems vi,” Cambridge University Press, 1941. (b) David L. Patrick has offered ample evidence for his claim that the bad Richard III was memorially transmitted: The Textual History of ‘Richard III,’ “Stanford University Publications, Language and Literature,” vi, 1 (Stanford University Press, 1936). (c) G. N. Giordano-Orsini has claimed that I If You Know Not Me is at least a partial memorial reconstruction by two or more actors: “Thomas Heywood's Play on ‘The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth,’” Library, Fourth Series, xiv (1933-34), 313-338; see also Miss Madeleine Doran's introduction to the Malone Society Reprint (1934), p. xvii. (d) Miss Mary F. Martin writes, “From internal evidence in Wyat, too long to be adduced here, it would seem that the man who took the part of Wyat himself pirated the play… .”: “‘If You Know Not Me You Know Nobodie’ and ‘The Famous Historie of Sir Thomas Wyat,‘” Library, Fourth Series, xiii (1932-33), 277-278. (e) In an as yet unpublished doctoral dissertation Dr. W. S. Wells states that in the extant Famous Victories he has found “extensive repetition of half-lines, lines, and even of whole passages, clear evidence that the 1598 edition is the product of memorial transmission”: “Abstracts of Dissertations, Stanford University,” x (1934-35), Stanford University Bulletin, Sixth Series, No. 18, p. 47. (f) It will be recalled that Pollard and Wilson postulated the memorizing pirate actor for Romeo and Juliet and Henry V: Times Literary Supplement, Aug. 14, 1919, p. 434; March 13, 1919, p. 134. Harry R. Hoppe has succinctly but fully explored Q1 Romeo and Juliet as a memorial reconstruction in “The First Quarto Version of Romeo and Juliet ii. vi and iv. v. 43 ff.,” RES, xiv (1938), 271-284 and “The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet: A Bibliographical and Textual Study,” Cornell University Abstracts of Theses (1942), pp. 23-26. (g) A single scene of the original text of The Massacre at Paris has come down to us; its authenticity has recently been completely established (see J. Q. Adams, “The Massacre at Paris Leaf,” Library, Fourth Series, xiv [1933-34], 447-469.) Greg had written in the introduction to the Malone Society Reprint (1928) of the bad quarto, “If the fragment is authentic then the nature of the printed text becomes clear enough. The form in which the verse appears might of course be due to cutting, but the prose can hardly have assumed such a shape except through reconstruction from memory.”

For evidence of mnemonic phenomena in Edward I, Fair Em, George a Greene, The Fair Maid of Bristow, and Doctor Faustus, see the articles listed in footnote 2 below. For KL, see my The True Text of “King Lear,” The Johns Hopkins Press, 1945. I have yet to publish a study showing the multiplicity of such phenomena in Q of H V. For an illustration of the premise that almost anything can happen in a memorial reconstruction, even to the shifting of scenes, see my “The Sequence of Scenes in Hamlet,” MLN, lx (1940), 382-387.

A refinement of the memorial reconstruction theory is that a pirate-actor or pirateactors created the corrupt version by remembrance of performance. A further refinement is that the pirate or pirates utilized their “parts.” Other refinements are that the piracy took place (a) because of the desire for a text to be used in the provinces, (b) because the good text had been sold, (c) because the pirate could earn a few pennies by selling his concoction to a stationer.

Hart holds to the hypothesis of pirate actors for all the bad quartos he deals with: 2,3 H VI, H V, Hamlet, MW of W, and R & J. Belief in the actor-pirate has been most strongly held in the case of Hamlet Q1. It will be recalled that J. D. Wilson employed the hypothesis in The Copy for “Hamlet” 1603 and the “Hamlet” Transcript (London, 1918). Ramello and Duthie maintain it. The most persistent upholder has been H. D. Gray: “The First Quarto Hamlet,” MLR, x (1915), 171-180; “Thomas Kyd and the First Quarto of Hamlet,” PMLA, xlii (1927), 721-735; “The Hamlet First Quarto Pirate,” PQ, xvi (1937), 397-398.

17 Scholars have been altogether too easy in considering a bad quarto as a shortened or cut text or as representing such a text. Recent examples are W. L. Halstead, “Note on the Text of The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” MLN, liv (1939), 585-589; V. H. Ogburn, “The Merry Wives Quarto, a Farce Interlude,” PMLA, lvii (1942), 654-660; Alfred Hart, Stolne and Surreptitious Copies, A Comparative Study of Shakespeare's Bad Quartos, Melbourne University Press, 1942. How untenable the hypothesis is I have endeavored to indicate in my review of Hart's book: MLN, lix (1944), 196-198.

Some bad quartos are long. Some are short. All are memorial reconstructions. The widespread presence of mnemonic perversion makes it almost impossible to postulate hypothetical cuts. And then again the reporter himself may sometimes have had his own private reasons for omission. This is a ticklish problem, but see my “The Good and Bad Quartos of Doctor Faustus.” The most scrupulous investigation of a bad quarto as representing a cut version has been made by Hoppe, op. cit. Since Hoppe proves that the reporter of R & J knew the full version (as represented by Q2), I still cannot escape the Impression that the omissions are to be accounted for by lapses on the part of the pirate's memory.

I am not alone in holding that bad memory and not purposive cutting lies behind the omissions in the bad quartos. Some twenty years ago, R. Crompton Rhodes, referring to Pollard's view of the Shakespeare bad quartos (R & J, HV, MW of W and Hamlet) as garbled versions of texts abridged for the provinces, wrote: “My own opinion is that the shortening was, in all cases, largely accidental, and the result of defective recollection” (Shakespeare's First Folio [Oxford, 1923], p. 79). While reading Greg's analysis of Orlando Furioso, I repeatedly postulated unconscious telescoping where Greg named cutting.

18 William Shakespeare, i, 282-284. Chambers thinks that the bookkeeper-reporter “may have retained a ‘plot‘” which would help him “for the stage-directions” and “for the ordering of the scenes.”

19 Chambers does not distinguish between the book-holder and book-keeper. See J. Isaacs, Production and Stage-Management at the Blackfriars Theatre, The Shakespeare Association (London, 1933), p. 9.

20 That is, all the phenomena except lines from other plays.

21 My theory must not be confused with that of W. J. Lawrence. “The Secret of the Bad Quartos,” in Those Nut-Cracking Elizabethans (London, 1935), pp. 153-174. Lawrence holds that the text of a bad quarto represents a prompt-copy which was an adaptation for country performance; that the adapter had a “copy of the full acting text before him”; that the adaptation was surreptitiously made for a company other than the company which owned the play.

Unless one can show any sense behind the derangements created by the imaginary adapter, we must describe this theory as completely untenable. Even Lawrence writes concerning the transference of the Ghost's i, v, 49-50 to Hamlet in the closet scene (ll. 1475-60): “But puzzle over the matter as one may, it seems impossible to determine why, in most piracies, snippets of this trivial order should have been systematically juggled with” (p. 174). Lawrence, of course, begs the question with his “systematically.” On the one hand he refuses to believe that the quartos were shortened versions by the companies that owned the plays, “that reputable London players ruthlessly maltreated their plays for country performance” (p. 156); on the other hand he claims to see some “system” at work when he postulates changes by the pirate-adapter.

Lawrence did not thoroughly investigate the complexity of phenomena which make up a bad quarto. By no stretch of the imagination can we term the constant differences between good and bad text the work of an informing intelligence. By no stretch of the imagination can they be the result of conscious planning. It is quite as impossible to believe that Shakespeare consciously turned The Contention into 2 Henry VI as it is to believe that some one consciously turned 2 Henry VI into The Contention. A defender of Lawrence's theory must tell us why the pirate-adapter consciously introduced five errors in York's genealogy as given in 2 Henry VI, ii. ii. And when he has established the system which the pirate-adapter used in making hash out of the good texts, he must show this system at work in authentic cut texts of the period—the shortened Blind Beggar of Alexandria, for instance, or The Battle of Alcazar. He must tell us too how it comes about that the bad quarto of King Lear is longer than the Folio version.

Miss Gerda Okerlund has applied Lawrence's theory to Henry V, “The Quarto Version of Henry V as a Stage Adaptation,” PMLA, xlix (1934), 810-834. I hope to publish a study which will indicate that the quarto Henry V is a memorial report, and that not adaptation but mnemonic failure (leading to incredible corruption) is the source of the differences between F and Q.

22 For this view of the Folio text of King Lear, see W. W. Greg, Principles of Emendation in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1928), pp. 14-15, 38-41. On Richard III, see Chambers, William Shakespeare, i, 296-297. That Q2 of Philaster was printed from a corrected Q1 is my own opinion. That the printer of the B text of Doctor Faustus utilized to some extent the A text was pointed out by Hermann Breymann in the introduction to his parallel texts edition, Heilbronn, 1889, p. xxvi.

23 (a) 2 Henry VI, iv. v, passim: see Alexander, Shakespeare's Henry VI and Richard III, pp. 82-86; R. B. McKerrow, “A Note on the Bad Quartos of 2 and 3 Henry VI and the Folio Text,” RES, xiii (1937), 64-65. (b) 3 Henry VI, iv. ii. 1-18: see McKerrow, “A Note etc., 66-67. (c) Hamlet, i. i. 58-79: see J. D. Wilson, ”The Copy for Hamlet 1603 and The Hamlet Transcript 1593“ (London, 1918), pp. 12-13. (d) The Merry Wives of Windsor, ii, ii, 5-12; iii, v, 4-17: see J. D. Wilson (ed.), The Merry Wives of Windsor (Cambridge U. P., 1921), pp. 95-96, 121. (e) Romeo and Juliet—I quote McKerrow with whom I agree on the number of the similar passages as against Greg: ”According to Dr. Greg, sheet B of Q1 only. See his Principles of Emendation, British Academy Lecture, 1928, pp. 19, 50. I think, however, that scattered through the rest of the play, e.g., at ii. ii. 16-22; iii. iii. 15-36, 47-71, 82-98; iv. i. 1-16, 34-41, etc., there are passages too similar in Q1 and Q2 for us to assume that one is merely a report, unless some reason can be shown for their being much more accurately reported than the bulk of the text“ (”A Note on the Bad Quartos of 2 and 3 Henry VI and the Folio Text,“ p. 69, note 4). The hypothesis of memorization from MS supplies McKerrow's demand for ”some reason.“ (f) Henry V, iii. iii. 44-50: see Duthie, op. cit., pp. 30-31, n. 3. Greg disagrees (The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare [Oxford, 1942], p. 70, n. 1; but the similarity in the punctuation cannot be coincidental. Furthermore, see the agreement of capitals in i. ii. 111-114, of punctuation in ii. iv. 81-100, iv. vi. 16-17, of italics, spelling, and punctuation in v. i. 19-21. Duthie postulates the use of the Governor's seven line ”part“ to account for this similarity in punctuation between Q and F. But he also sees memorial confusion even in these seven lines—and attributes it to the transcriber of the ”part“! It is precisely this piling up of hypothesis upon hypothesis that the memorization from MS theory avoids.

24 I intend in the future to publish in brief form a description of this experiment and the results obtained. One can easily verify my results by performing the experiment himself, alone or with aid of others.

In “A Note on the Bad Quartos of 2 and 3 Henry VI and the Folio Text,” RES, xiii (1937), 64-72, Dr. McKerrow advanced a new theory concerning these similar passages—he does not cite those in Merry Wives and Henry V. He suggests that “in these pairs of similar passages the ‘good’ MS happened to be defective or illegible and the printer (or editor) of the ‘good’ edition was therefore compelled to follow the ‘bad’ one.” (p. 68). Some MSS for the Folio were “in various degrees of decay”: 2 and 3 Henry VI were “in somewhat bad condition” (p. 69). The same use of the bad text when the good MS was defective had occurred in the case of Q2 of Romeo and Juliet, though McKerrow writes: “Why this should have been necessary at so early a date as 1599 is far from clear, as one would have supposed that a good MS of a play written not more than at the most nine or more probably five years before, and apparently popular, would still have been available …” (p. 69).

The assumption of decayed MSS is rather peculiar. Decay in books and MSS tends to be progressive, and one would not expect it to be confined only to isolated short passages. And must one postulate decay too in the MS behind Q2 of Hamlet, the play being printed about four years after it was written? Then again, McKerrow tends to dismiss the minor differences in these similar passages: “We need not, of course, assume that the use of a bad text to fill up the gaps in a good one would necessarily mean that the bad text would be exactly reproduced. There can be little doubt that the Elizabethans did not share the modern reverence for every jot and tittle of an author's manuscript. If a man had to see a friend's work through the press, especially if that friend was dead, he would, I am sure, have felt that he was doing him or his memory a good turn if he made in his text such alterations as he considered his friend would have made had he been present. He might, indeed, use even more than normal liberty in such corrections if the text available to him was notoriously bad. We should, therefore, not be at all surprised if we find these scraps of bad quarto text inserted into the Folio somewhat tidied up, punctuation and metre improved and occasionally a better word substituted, while it is even possible that occasionally an editor might have drawn on his memory of performances of the play and have included from this source actors' additions for which there was no authority in the original MS” (pp. 70-71).

But were Qq2 of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet “edited”? Why should the printer go to the trouble of making unnecessary changes in the bad text he was utilizing? No, the differences in these similar passages being largely immaterial, their presence can be much better explained on the same basis as the rest of the phenomena in bad Qq: unconscious substitution due to faulty memory. Luckily in one of the similar passages in Merry Wives, there occurs a clear case of anticipation. At the beginning of iii. v in F, Falstaff asks for sack; at iii. v. 29-33 he calls for sack again. Q's reporter confused the two passages, put the second one at the beginning of the scene, and omitted the first entirely (see E2 i-v). Besides this clear case of substitution because of anticipation, there is further evidence of memorial error in iii. v. 4-17 amidst the likenesses of punctuation. Similarly, Merry Wives, ii. ii. 5-12, another one of the similar passages, shows clear evidence of mnemonic error in Q. When we discover such like-unlike passages, when we realize that some speeches are so well reported in some bad quartos that the pirate's use of parts has been postulated (e.g., Voltemand's at ii. ii. 58-80: Wilson, The Copy for ‘Hamlet,‘ 1603, pp. 4-8; Gower's: Price, The Text of Henry V, p. 19), we begin to realize how good a memorized report can be. As a matter of fact, a perfect memorization of an MS would in no way differ from a transcript of that MS. The beginning of Fair Em appears to be a case in point.

However the strongest argument against McKerrow's hypothesis is simply this. It is stretching credulity too far to assume that the bad quarto should be at its best just in those places where the good MS was defective.

25 Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, p. 346.

26 The playhouse nature of the stage-directions in Henry V has not escaped notice; see B. D. Simison, “Stage-Directions: A Test for the Playhouse Origin of the First Quarto Henry V,” Philological Quarterly, xi (1932), 39-56. See also Cairncross on Q1 of Hamlet as a prompt-copy, The Problem of Hamlet—A Solution, pp. 30-31. Of the Famous Victories J. Q. Adams wrote: “The imperative form of the stage-directions indicate that the printer was setting up from a prompt-copy of the play” (Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas [Boston and New York, 1924], p. 685, footnote 3).

27 My examples are all taken from the manuscripts which Greg puts in Class A: “Class A consists of prompt books proper. They are copies which either bear evidence of having been used in actual performance or at least prepared for such use, or else of being transcripts of such copies preserving their distinctive features or made for official purposes” (E.D.D., p. 191).

My examples are taken from the following MSS which are described in E.D.D.: John a Kent (pp. 239-243); The Captives (pp. 284-288); The Honest Man's Fortune (pp. 288-293); Sir Thomas More (pp. 243-251); Charlemagne (pp. 261-264); and The Welsh Ambassador (pp. 279-281).

28 E.D.D., p. 209, note 4.

29 Cf. ibid., p. 73, note 2.

30 On this use of “enter” see W. J. Lawrence, Speeding up Shakespeare (London, 1937), pp. 150-151.

31 Because of the variation of numbering in the various reprints of the Shakespeare bad quartos, I have merely given act and scene according to the Globe edition. The line numbering of Edward I, Orlando Furioso, The Massacre at Paris, I If You Know Not Me, A Knack to Know an Honest Man, George a Greene, True Tragedy of Richard III, and Fair Em is that of the Malone Society reprints. The scene numbering of Famous Victories is from the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimile, ed. P. A. Daniel. The scene numbering of Philaster is that of P. A. Daniel's text in the Variorum Edition. I have utilized the Tudor Facsimile Texts for Sir Thomas Wyatt and Doctor Faustus.

32 Sometimes it is difficult to decide whether the imperative request for noise refers to on-stage or off-stage. This direction in Hamlet is for off-stage noise; as Hamlet explains to Marcellus, the King “takes his rowse.”

33 This may be a request for off-stage percussion. The Black Book, describing a performance of Dr. Faustus at the Fortune, states that “Deuills runne roaring ouer the Stage with Squibs in their mouthes, while Drummers make Thunder in the Tyring-house …” (quoted John Bakeless, Christopher Marlowe [New York, 1937], p. 146).

34 It seems to me futile to attempt to ascertain who among the actors of the Chamberlain's men the “pirates” were. See J. D. Wilson, The Copy for ‘Hamlet’ and the ‘Hamlet’ Transcript 1593, pp. 62-63; H. D. Gray, “The Roles of William Kemp,” MLR, xxv (1930), 261-273; and the same author's “The Hamlet First Quarto Pirate,” PQ, xvi (1937), 400-401. Gray's method of picking out the best reported part or parts, deciding that the speakers of such parts were the actor-pirates, and then casting about for evidence why such-and-such an actor (e.g., Kemp) could have been the pirate is ingenious but unwarranted not only because no one character's part is uncorrupted but also because actors like Kemp were too important members of their company to stoop to such pilfering. As for Wilson's earlier theories in regard to the pirate-actor of Q1 of Hamlet, a later retrenchment allows us to pass over them in silence: vide The Manuscript of Shakespeare's ‘Hamlet‘ (Cambridge University Press, 1934), I, xii-xiii.

I shall have to consider elsewhere the evidence produced by Sisson (RES, xviii [1942], 138) that the bad quartos of Lear and Pericles were actually used by a provincial company as their “books.”

One phenomenon of the bad quartos that I have not discussed is the occasional wide difference between good and bad text—when the latter appears not to be reconstructing the former but drawing from some other source. I do not believe this source was an earlier draft of the play or a change introduced after the play was written in the form in which we have it in the good text. The source was the reporter himself. Like Duthie, I believe the reporter could be and was improviser and creator when his memory failed. I also believe that sometimes he was enterprising enough to seek aid outside his memorization from “books.” Almost certainly in the case of Doctor Faustus, and possibly in the case of Hamlet, he went to the source—the English Faust Book and Belleforest, respectively. That he may have utilized observation and hearing of performance is also possible. We must remember that there were different reporters: the reporter of Lear was stupid but mechanically accurate; the reporter of Richard III was an excellent patcher who knew how to write blank verse—and so on.

An immediate rejoinder to my hypothesis that the reporter memorized from manuscript may be that in the Elizabethan theatre play manuscripts were inaccessible. This is a widespread theory—but I have seen no evidence for it. In the absence of definite information, the late Miss Albright's opinion sounds sensible: “It is not necessary to suppose that all playhouse manuscripts were kept locked up and each actor could know only his role or roles (an idea which would not appeal to one who ever acted much, I fancy); nor, on the other hand, do we need to imagine that manuscripts of plays were strewn thick about the theatre” (Dramatic Publication in England, 1580-1640 [New York and London, 1927], p. 293).