AbstractsBiology & Animal Science

It is my contention that those critics are right who hold that the Q text of the Merry Wives of Windsor is a reported text  – that is, that some stage of its transmission was memorial. I certainly cannot believe that Q represents a Shakespearian first draft and F a Shaskepearian revision, or that Q is a farce interlude adapted from F. Limitations of space prohibit discussion of the possibility that Q is a stenographic report. But the problem of Elisabethan shorthand has been thoroughly investigated by competent scholars, and their findings convince me that there was no contemporary system capable of reproducing the best reported parts of Q from performance in the theatre. Surely, on the basis of the shorthand theory, we should have to assume an extraordinarily low standard of accuracy in the actors of Shakespeare’s company to account for the wholesale memorial corruption also observable in Q. The only reasonable hypothesis seems to me to be that the ‘gross corruption, constant mutilation, meaningless inversion and clumsy transposition’ in Q are solely the result of inept memorial reconstruction. It is my further belief that Q is a report of an original in substantial agreement with the F text. I propose now to adduce fresh evidence pointing to the conclusion that the Q text is indeed memorial; at the same time attempting to show that the theories which represent Q as a first sketch of the F text or a farce interlude adapted from F are untenable. [...]