that is, no step was taken except according to acknowledged rules.
It often happens when a book comes to its last sheet that the text runs short, and two or three blank or vacant pages remain at the end. In the middle of one of these it is usual to place the typographer’s imprint. What compositor is there who has rejoiced in such fat pages[2] but will not at once recognise the following allusion:
The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear,
And of this book this learning mayst thou taste.
Sonnet lxxvii.
People with a grievance write now-a-days to the Newspapers, in hope of redress. In Shakspere’s time the only method to make wrongs public and to show up abuses was by the Broadside, in prose or rhyme, passing from hand to hand. Many of these have survived to the present day, and are treasured up as curious relics of a by-gone age. They were frequently libellous and grievously personal, and hence the point of Pistol’s remark:
Fear we broadsides?
2 Henry IV, ii, 4.
We must not think here that the naval ‘broadside’—a volley of guns from the broadside of a ship—is meant. Shakspere does not use the word once in that sense, nor was it a conversational word in his time. That Pistol was indeed thinking of a printed broad sheet is evident from the whole sentence, which, although composed of disjointed exclamations continues with the following expressions, both strongly suggestive of the Composing room or Reader’s closet:
Come we to full points here? and are etceteras nothing?
2 Henry IV, ii, 4.
‘Come we to full points here?’ This question is often a puzzler for both Compositor and Reader. Indeed, few things cause more disagreements between Author and Printer than the very loose ideas held by the former concerning punctuation. Some writers, like Dickens in his early days, insist upon ornamenting their sentences with little dashes and big dashes, with colons where commas should be, and with
Points that seem impossible.
Pericles, v, 1.
In vain does the Printer declare that in altering the Author’s unregulated punctuation,