Philaster and Shorthand

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Gerald Downs describes the sole manuscript copy of Robert Greene‘s playtext and shorthand-related matters in “Memorial Transmission, Shorthand, and John of Bordeaux.”

2. Historians of the era overlook the later artisans who account for an almost super-human ability to report speech as spoken, whose predecessors would have solved problems in similar ways. It is less a matter of improved systems than of dedication to simplified alphabetic writing in need of every trick in a book not yet written. See the books of Reed; Brown; Sumner.

3. Turner edits Q1 Philaster in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon.

4. In “Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts”; Werstine argues that the “foul papers” category fails to account for early modern texts (81).

5. Maguire believes the terms memorial reconstruction, report, and bad quarto are synonymous (15, 18), and judges “as if no parallel text existed” (155).

6. Hughes’s exhaustive comparison of Q1 and Q2 shows the error of Maguire’s method.

7. Line numbering follows editor Suzanne Gossett, Arden Early Modern Drama Philaster. Lineation reflects the designated quarto.

8. Bordeaux often places “prefixes” mid-dialog between right-hand brackets or following a lone bracket (Downs 125–27). The indicator in shorthand notes could be a long space, which sometimes also represented punctuation.

9. The Fair Maid of Bristow (Maguire 249). The play is probably a bad quarto; With no “good” edition, some ascription errors will be missed.

10. Whole-cast (longhand?) dictation would logically require each player to identify his character before speaking – while others awaited their own time-consuming turns.

11. Reported names vary (Cleramont, Clerimon, Clerimont, Gleremon). Turner notes that neither “Arethusa nor Bellario is named … until Act iii and Cleremont and Thrasiline in the text not at all and in the stage directions not until Act iv” (1:395). But quarto beginnings and endings differ; only their “bodies” are comparable. Q1 prints names early: “Noble friend … see who encounters vs … Clerimon”; “My good Lord Lyon … worthy Trasiline” (B1). Q2 text fails to introduce the nobles, yet properly assigns speeches. Q2 copy may have been literary.

12. Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio (77).

13. Ashley H. Thorndike, in The Maid’s Tragedy and Philaster (149).

14. By 1602, Willis’s Stenographie was the only published phonetic system but it cannot account for Bordeaux’s b / p confusions. Later systems relied on wide or narrow ink-lines (e.g., \ or \) to disambiguate letter-pairs in context.

15. Q1 and Q2 refer to editions of the playtext under discussion, unless noted.

16. The Maid’s Tragedy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (2:15–17).

17. The beginning and end of Philaster Q1 is likely a poor memorial reconstruction necessitated by manuscript damage, (Turner 1:380–81) and reported a second time by shorthand.

18. See the definitions and discussion of terms in “Bordeaux” (Downs 109–10).

19. W. W. Greg asks of Orlando Furioso (1594): “Are we to assume that this … degeneration was normal … at any rate in the inferior companies” (335)? Time and transmission should caution against norms. Bordeaux was reworked for playing and Orlando was owned by two companies at once, according to The Defense of Conny catching (Cunny-catcher, C3-C3^v).