Page 204 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

KING LEAR, 1608 AND 1623 129

appear to have been more than one scribe involved in the
transcription; as we have seen, the passage from 3.4.129
to 4. 6. 247 exhibits consistently a characteristic found
only sporadically in the remainder of the text.
Williams!s theory, thus modified, may seem to the
reader to be over-complicated and distinctly improbable.
The theory has indeed been adversely criticized. Thus
Cairncross notes that compositor B (involved, on
Williams's admission, in the crucial stretch of text—
3. 4. 129 to 4. 6. 247), had already in Q 2 shown a
disposition on occasion to set in roman proper names
that had appeared in italic in Q 1. Thus Cairncross
thinks of B as merely carrying further in F a tendency he
had already displayed in £) 2. But that does not explain
why the tendency in F should be so remarkably exempli-
fied in a limited number of names in one continuous
passage, and nowhere else so consistently. Mr J. K.
Walton allows that two compositors were concerned in
F Lear, but argues against the notion of manuscript
copy. 1 Neither Williams nor Walton envisages Q 2 copy
as a contributory factor.
As regards the nature of the copy, agreement has not
been reached among critics. All we can be sure of, I
think, is that at certain points F depends, directly or
indirectly, on edited pages of a Q 1, at other points on
edited pages of a Q 2, with the editing reflecting the
text of an official prompt-book, and with a certain
element of inefficiency and error in the editing to be
taken account of. It is uncertain whether what was sent
to the F printing-house was these edited pages them-
selves, or a transcript of them. And it is uncertain
whether there are any passages in F which can be held
not to depend on edited quarto at all, but to depend on
manuscript pages of prompt-copy or on a transcript of
1
See his book The Copy for the Folio Text of Richard UV
6 ff
) PP. *5 -