The Compositor's Spelling

Charlton Hinman and the Optical Collator of the First Folio

Inside a basement vault at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., two copies of William Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio lay side by side on iron cradles. Above them stood a six-foot steel frame rigged with surplus World War II reconnaissance lenses, mirrors, and rotating shutters. Sitting at the binocular eyepiece in 1949 was Johns Hopkins professor Charlton Hinman. During the war, as a U.S. Navy aerial intelligence analyst, Hinman had watched officers compare before-and-after photos of Pacific airfields. By superimposing both images through an optical blink-comparator that flashed the left and right pictures alternately, any newly dug trench or bunker flickered against the motionless background.

Returning to Renaissance scholarship, Hinman realized that the same optical physics could solve the hardest problem in English bibliography. He set out to reconstruct how William and Isaac Jaggard's London shop set and printed Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies between February 1622 and November 1623. Eighteen of Shakespeare's thirty-six plays—including Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, and Julius Caesar—survive exclusively because fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell gathered his manuscripts into the 1623 First Folio seven years after his death.

Before Hinman, editors assumed two premises about early modern printing. First, they assumed that every copy of the 1623 First Folio contained the exact same printed words. Second, they assumed that Jaggard's workmen had set the lead type for each play sequentially from Page 1 to the end. Checking whether all copies were identical had been impossible. The First Folio contains roughly nine hundred double-column pages holding over 3.5 million pieces of hand-set type. Even after Henry Clay Folger amassed eighty-two of the roughly 235 surviving copies inside one building, comparing fifty copies letter by letter by naked eye would have required inspecting 175 million characters.

With Folger grants, Hinman built his custom optical collator and spent sixteen years—from 1947 to 1963—blinking fifty-five Folger copies of the First Folio against a reference copy at forty pages an hour. Whenever a pressman in 1623 had stopped the press to change a comma or fix a word, the altered character danced inside Hinman's eyepiece. Moreover, Hinman's lenses picked up microscopic scars on pieces of lead-antimony-tin type nicked on the shop floor. By tracking three streams of telemetry across fifty thousand folio pages, Hinman reconstructed Jaggard's printing room:

• - Stop-Press Variant Collation: Whenever a proofreader spotted an error while a sheet was being printed, he pulled the faulty type from the iron chase and inserted a correction. Because imported rag paper constituted nearly half the cost of a book, the shop never discarded the faulty sheets already printed. Corrected and uncorrected sheets were stacked and bound at random, producing over five hundred stop-press variants across the fifty-five Folger copies.
• - Damaged Type Recurrence and Casting Off Copy: By cataloging over six hundred scarred metal letters (such as a capital B with a broken loop) and charting every page on which those pieces reappeared after distribution back into the type cases, Hinman proved that Jaggard's shop owned too little type to set a play sequentially. Because each six-leaf gathering (quire) consisted of three nested folio sheets folded inside one another, typesetters had to cast off copy. They estimated manuscript line counts ahead of time to set inner pages (Pages 6 and 7) first and outer pages (Pages 1 and 12) last. Whenever they miscalculated, they crowded two verses onto one line or padded scenes to hit the bottom of Page 6.
• - Compositor Spelling Fingerprints: Early modern typesetters read a clause from the manuscript, held the words in working memory, and plucked letters from the type case using their own spelling habits. Cross-referencing spelling profiles (doe/goe/heere versus do/go/here) against the type cases tracked by damaged letters, Hinman isolated five workmen (Compositors A through E). Among them was Compositor E, a teenage apprentice named John Leason bound on November 4, 1622, who introduced hundreds of errors into Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello.

In 1963, Hinman published The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, giving editors a reliability calibration for every column. Because Jaggard's pressmen corrected type on the fly and mixed sheets continuously during binding, across the fifty-five Folger copies Hinman collated, no two copies shared the exact same combination of corrected and uncorrected text across every play.