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The ghosts of Troilus and Cressida

image of Catalogue with handwritten Troilus title
Later owners wrote Troilus into the catalogue to account for the discrepancy.
Courtesy of Palace Green Library, Durham University
Bishop Cosin's Library: Cosin W.2.11

Troilus and Cressida almost didn’t make it into the First Folio. The publishers intended to include it and started printing the play after Romeo and Juliet in the section of Tragedies. But the publishers’ attempts to secure permission to print from their colleague in the Stationers Company who owned the “copy” rights had failed, and printing on Troilus stopped after the first three pages. How did printers respond when they were coming to the end of one play but couldn’t print the next play? Timon of Athens was switched in for Troilus. At some point, they printed the Catalogue, or list of plays, without Troilus.

Troilus abandoned: ghost #1

In the regular course of things, gathering “gg” was supposed to contain pages 73 through 84, or to put it a different way, the last five pages of Romeo and the first seven pages of Troilus. In actuality, only one sheet of this planned gathering was printed before the printing was interrupted. As you’ve done before, start with the innermost nested sheet. Then, in this case, stop, and move on to the next step.

1r | p. 73
1v | p. 74
2r | p. 75
2v | p. 76
3r | p. 77
3v | p. 78
4r | p. 79
4v | p. 80
5r | p. 81
5v | p. 82
6r | p. 83
6v | p. 84
Reset ↺

3v

4r

3|4 (inner)

4v

3r

3|4 (outer)
Reset ↺

2v

5r

2|5 (inner)

5v

2r

2|5 (outer)
Reset ↺

1v

6r

1|6 (inner)

6v

1r

1|6 (outer)

Drag the single sheet into position in the gathering diagram to see how much of the original quire was left unprinted when the press was halted. When you’ve tried this, feel free to return and construct the whole quire to see what “gg” would have looked like if the interruption hadn’t happened. Once all the sheets are full, drag them into the proper order in the gathering and click "Read" to view your work in book mode. If you have trouble, you can click "Auto-gather" to have the sheet placed in the gathering diagram automatically.

Gathering gg6

1

2

3

4

5

6

Take particular note of the page numbers and other wayfinders in these special page images, which have been altered to simulate the way the pages would have looked if they were printed without interruption. If you have arranged the sheets correctly, the page numbers will appear in order. In the First Folios that have survived, disruptions to this order provide evidence of the interruption to the press, and how the printers worked around it.

Because the printers had to stop the presses after printing the first sheet, it looks like that single printed sheet might have to go to waste. More urgently, as you can see, the final four pages of Romeo still had to be printed. Continue on to see how this was done.