Act-End Notations in Some Elizabethan Plays

Abstract

The First Folio (Fl) text of Twelfth Night, the earliest extant version, is apparently very accurate. As J. Dover Wilson observed, it contains very few verbal cruxes, ... is furnished with stage-directions and punctuation which are on the whole both adequate and competent, and gives no serious trouble either with the arrangement of its verse or . . . in the distribution of its speeches.' Because of the good quality of the text and because some stage directions seemed to him of playhouse origin, Wilson believed the printer's copy for F1 Twelfth Night was theatrical prompt-book or a transcript therefrom, an opinion which Greg shared and which has been the consensus of modern editors.2 I think this conclusion is dubious for several reasons, one of which is the presence of a finis after each of the acts of F1 Twelfth Night but the third, where its omission appears to have been inadvertent. The practice of indicating the ends of acts is very unusual in the folio, except, of course, for the finis following the fifth act and applying to the entire play. F1 Love's Labour's Lost has Finis Actus Primus (Through Line Number 488), but in that instance the notation looks as though it had been added [by Compositor C] merely to fill up space at the foot of a column.3 It does not appear in Q 1598, the F1 printer's copy, which, according to Greg, derives from authorial papers. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, Compositor C again set a single internal finis, this time not as a filler, for the notation shares a line (394) with the stage direction concluding the first act, but evidently in response to copy, a transcript by Ralph Crane.4 As far as Twelfth Night is concerned, we can thus be sure that the finis's did not originate in the printing house; Compositor B, who was entirely responsible for Twelfth Night, never set them elsewhere in the folio, and the exceptional nature of the two occurrences in Love's Labour's Lost and Two Gentlemen of Verona precludes the possibility of their introduction by an editor.5 They must, therefore, have been carried over from the copy provided for Fl.