Page 203 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

128 T H E COPY FOR
Williams takes four character-names—Albany, Glou-
cester, Kent, and Tom—and compares their typography
in F and Q I throughout the play. From 3. 4. 129 to
4.6.247 F, in the dialogue, prints Gloucester, Kent, and
Tom invariably in roman, whereas these names are in-
variably in italic in Q 1. It is true that on occasion,
earlier and later than this stretch of text, F prints in
roman one or another of these names which appears in
italic in Q 1. But the stretch from 3.4.129 to 4. 6. 247
is remarkable in that the setting of the relevant names in
the dialogue is always in roman—within these limits it is
not a sporadic phenomenon. Williams suggests, plau-
sibly, that here F depends directly on manuscript copy in
which the scribe had not written the names in question
in Italian script. That it was not a matter of the printing-
house having temporarily run out of italic type is indi-
cated obviously by the fact that in the lengthy passage
with which we are concerned italics appear in the normal
way in stage-directions, speech-headings, and other
proper names within the speeches.
The hypothesis that Williams suggests is that 'in
1623, the prompt-book of King Lear-was a conflation
of "good" pages from Q 1 supplemented by inserted
manuscript leaves to replace corrupt passages of Q 1.
Reluctant to let the official prompt-book leave their
possession, the company permitted a scribe to make a
transcript of this conflated text to serve as copy for the
First Folio.' (The 'good' pages of Q 1 would them-
selves, presumably, require some editing before serving
in the alleged prompt-book.)
Critics sympathetic to Williams's hypothesis must, I
think, modify it in two ways. First: on the basis of the
findings of Cairncross, the prompt-book postulated by
Williams must be supposed to have contained some
pages of a Q 2 as well as some pages of a Q 1. Secondly:
if F depends directly on manuscript copy, there would