Reading Materiality: The Literary Critical Treatment of Physical Texts

"23 Hence, both the play's structure and its projected marriage offstage almost certainly point to the achievement of a conventional comedic resolution, but the physical manuscript now frustrates the expectations that the action has consistently aroused. Because so much of the final leaf has been tom from the manuscript, the play ends mid-breath, or in a series of mid-breaths, with the speakers' lines increasingly diminished as the reader's eye progresses down each side of the leaf. [...]we witness what appear to be the initial signs of acquiescence by the fathers Chester and Llwellen to the will of the younger generation: Because of the expectations that the prior action has set up for its audience, these various half-lines lead the reader to assume that, had we access to them, the rest of the lines would confirm the play as a specimen of New Comedy. "30 Were it not for John S. Farmer's 1910 edition of "The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore" published in the Tudor Facsimile Texts series, the images of the slips in situ would probably net have been preserved, since there seems to be no other photographic record of the manuscript prior to the work on folios 11b and 14a that same year.31 The following readings concentrate on the slips before they were detached and are therefore entirely dependent upon Farmer's facsimile. Because the two slips have been removed, one might justifiably say that my readings are now obsolete, since the manuscript no longer exists in that particular state, but this is partly the point that I want to make. D1^sup v^)47 If we return to the opening of the 1598 quarto, this central problem of Edward giving political "fauour" to "one so basely borne" exhibits itself not only dramatically in the play's first lines, but subtly in their typographical features too. Because of the large space consumed by the decorative capital that adorns the first line of the play, the typesetter ran out of room in his composing stick for the last word in the second metrical line, forcing him to press it into the available space of the first line using a turnover.