Page 206 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

KING LEAR, 1 6 0 8 AND 1 6 2 3 131
by means of Bright's Gharacterie? but this idea was
3
effectively disposed of by Miss Doran, and it was John
Willis's much more efficient shorthand system that
Greg postulated. But even this is too cumbersome a
system to yield a text of the degree of fullness and
accuracy with which Q 1 confronts us.3
In my 1949 edition I adopted for Q 1 a theory which,
had already been advanced by Dr JD. L. Patrick to
4
explain Q Richard III, namely that the text is a
memorial reconstruction made by the whole company.
I thought of the company as being m the provinces,
temporarily deprived of its prompt-book, and desirous
of producing a new one; and I imagined its personnel
gathered round a scribe, each actor dictating his own
speeches in a kind of performance without action. The
Q 1 text as it stands could hardly have served in manu-
script as a prompt-book: some stages-directions are too
vague, various necessary entrances and exits are omitted,
and the quarto is not always consistent in the ways in
which it refers to this or that character in stage-directions
and speech-headings; in addition, the manuscript from
which Q 1 was printed seems to have been extremely
untidy and difficult to read, at least in places—and
legibility is a sine qua non in a prompt-book. I was
forced to suggest, therefore, that the scribe wrote down
(as best he could) all that he heard (or thought he had
heard) in a very hasty manner, and then later produced
the required prompt-book by transcribing his work
with the necessary modifications. This theory is not
impossible, but it is cumbersome. And if the company's
1
See Modern Philology, xxxi (1933-4), 135 ff.
a
See Modern Philology, xxxni (1935-6), 139 ff.
3 See my Elizabethan Shorthand and the First Qtfarto of
'King Lear', 1949 (1950).
•» See his book The Textual History of 'Richard JJT