The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.107 Thursday, 5 March 2015
[1] From: Lawrence Weiss <
Date: March 4, 2015 at 3:04:50 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: OP
[2] From: Gabriel Egan <
Date: March 5, 2015 at 7:23:22 AM EST
Subject: Re; OP
[3] From: Jim Carroll <
Date: March 5, 2015 at 12:55:04 PM EST
Subject: Re: OP
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Lawrence Weiss <
Date: March 4, 2015 at 3:04:50 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: OP
William Blanton concludes his observation that Shylock is in fact the Devil by saying,
>I would really like to enter into a dialog with some
>scholar/theologian who can help me make better
>sense of what I perceive Shakespeare was doing.
Amen!
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Gabriel Egan <
Date: March 5, 2015 at 7:23:22 AM EST
Subject: Re; OP
Gerald E. Downs tries to pick sense out of what John Drakakis wrote:
GED> "Printing by formes" does have meaning, even
GED> if the phrase should be "setting by formes."
GED> . . . I understood Drakakis to mean that quartos
GED> were set by formes . . .
Drakakis’s phrasing prohibits us from making sense of him that way when he writes:
JD> . . . printing was by formes (setting might
JD> be by a combination of seriatim and formes
JD> . . . and we should distinguish printing
JD> from setting.
Yes, quartos might be set by formes. But to say that the printing of quartos was by formes (and to distinguish this from setting by formes) is meaningless, since by definition everything was printed by formes.
I have trouble following Downs’s argument about the press variant at 4.1.73 in Q1 The Merchant of Venice because he seems to contradict himself:
GED> We can't deny some kind of correction. . . .
GED> Thus the two complete lines do not result from
GED> correction but represent the state of the text
GED> before the accident.
What we have is a variant, not necessarily a correction. This I indicated by writing the qualification “if one accepts that the difference between the two states is due to intentional stop-press correction”. Downs infers from this that Egan “allows for ‘unintentional stop-press correction’”. I don’t. My contrast is between intentional correction and unintentional alteration, for example by accident.
There is also the possibility of miscorrection by various vectors. A proof-reader might order a change because he misunderstands what he reads, a compositor might misunderstand the marks that the proof-reader makes on the proof, and a compositor’s hands might perform an alteration to his type that his brain did not intend.
In the speech under discussion from The Merchant of Venice there are four lines that each begin “you may as well” and a proof-reader might have thought that one or more of them was dittography caused by a compositor’s eye-skip and might mistakenly asked for one or more to be removed. In the case in question, taking out the repetition of “you may as well” would not disrupt the sense. If so, this is not quite what the compositor achieved (since the word “well” was not removed) but it might, I suppose, have been the intention. As far as I’m aware there aren’t any other known variants on this forme that might help us to decide this case.
Gabriel Egan
PS: I’m honoured that Hardy thinks my Open Access publications list is worth drawing to SHAKSPERians’ attention. Corrections to anything I’ve written are always gratefully received.
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jim Carroll <
Date: March 5, 2015 at 12:55:04 PM EST
Subject: Re: OP
I believe that the participants in this discussion have confused themselves so thoroughly that not only do they not understand what the other is saying, they don’t even understand what they themselves are saying.
Here’s my solution to Iobbe/Gobbo: Just a hunch, but I doubt that there was any shortage of alcoholics in Elizabethan print shops. Maybe they just screwed it up.
Jim Carroll