Item 117 - Parts of a letter (to W. W. Greg)

2 slips, neatly torn from different sheets and pasted together

Transcript

[…] evidence how Butter came by the text, but (as with other piracies) the play was topical & popular, & therefore worth stealing. But put case that Butter managed to ‘borrow’ a […]

Also, after re-reading your essay in the new collection of Modern Sh. Criticism {1}, I would like to query Theobald’s famous ‘babbled’. My impression of misprints from copy is that on the whole a printer is more likely to make errors in the body of a word than in the first letter or two: that is, he is more likely to have misread table for talke than for babbled (even if the form is bable). Moreo-ver not only does Q1 of Henry V give ‘talk of floures’, but talk is aesthetically a better word in the context than babbled, because Mistress Quickly’s sentence reaches its rhythmical climax in ‘green fields’—it is not

‘and a babled——of green fields’

but (with growing incredulous sympathy)

and a talke of GREEN FIELDS!
[…]

COPY—
‘Well’, sighed Essex, ‘it may be so’

PRINTER
‘Gos’, sighed Essex, ‘it may be so’.
—there being no possible resemblance between even my ‘Well’ & ‘Gos’.

PROOF READER (brightly) ‘Query—Gosh!’

The most illuminating experience I ever had was when a printer made 22 mistakes—mostly wrong words—in a 2000 word introduction. Of these not more than 10 could be allowed as mis-reading of the copy. The man was simply thinking of something else. In the reading of any M.S.—from a private letter to a learned paper—[…]

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{1} The reference is probably to Greg’s ‘Principles of Emendation’, as reprinted in Aspects of Shakespeare in 1933.

Formerly inserted in Greg’s copy of ‘Principles of Emendation in Shakespeare’ (1928) (not in the Library).

This description was created by A. C. Green in 2020.