Textual Studies
Richard Proudfoot · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1973
Charlton Hinman follows his facsimile of the First Folio with the 1600 Quarto of Much Ado About Nothing , published as No. 15 of the Clarendon Press Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles. The copy reproduced is the fine one in the Capell collection at Trinity College, Cambridge, which contains all recorded variant formes in their corrected state, with the trivial exception of a single turned letter in outer D. This is the first volume in the series to be numbered with the Through Line Numbering of the Hinman Folio facsimile, adapted to cover the few places where the quarto text includes lines omitted from the folio. The introduction explains the conventions used in this adaptation and also presents evidence for the setting of the text from Shakespeare’s foul papers by Valentine Simmes’s Compositor A, ‘a compositor who, though reasonably competent, is likely to have been responsible for a considerable number of minor departures from his copy’. Twelve perfect copies of the quarto were collated in the preparation of the facsimile, a thirteenth, in the Bodmer Library, having been, at the time, unavailable (a problem unlikely to face future scholars since the establishment in 1971 of the Bodmer Foundation, in accordance with the wishes of the late Dr Martin Bodmer).