(PDF) Annotated Bibliography

© Jean-Christophe Mayer CAUTION: THIS FILE IS AN UNCORRECTED PRE-PRINT MADE AVAILABLE UNDER THE FOLLOWING LICENSE : CC BY-NC-ND: This license allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements: BY – Credit must be given to the creator NC – Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted ND – No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted NB: ANY INFRINGEMENT OF THE LICENCE IS SUBJECT TO PROSECUTION 2 Annotated Bibliography © Jean-Christophe Mayer Note: sections and subsections in the bibliography have been assigned numbers. At the end of the various sections and subsections, readers will find cross-references allowing them to access relevant items listed in other sections. I. General textual criticism For comprehensive and accessible studies related directly to Shakespeare’s works, the following four books provide much of the necessary information for readers unfamiliar with the field: Richard Proudfoot, Shakespeare: Text, Stage, and Canon (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001); Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan, eds., In Arden: Editing Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Richard Proudfoot (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003); Lukas Erne, Shakespeare’s Modern Collaborators (London and New York: Continuum, 2008); John Jowett, Shakespeare and Text: Revised Edition, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Gabriel Egan’s The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) covers many of the same editorial subjects, but helps readers familiarize themselves with the growth and history of Shakespearean textual studies, as well as the main scholarly debates around them. As well as five introductory essays, Stanley Wells’s and Gary Taylor’s William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) offers detailed line-by- line textual notes on every work included in the 1987 corpus of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. The more recent The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), edited by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan is aimed also at the advanced 3 reader with technical essays on textual methodology, authorship attribution tests and the chronology of Shakespeare’s canon. Readers interested in accessible criticism providing an even wider perspective on the subject can turn to Andrew Murphy’s (ed.) A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007). For general background information on the production of printed books and the cultural impact of the printing press, the following books remain classics: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change : Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early- Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). A very useful and much-cited work of textual theory, Jerome McGann’s The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), provides answers to a number of editorial cruces by examining the instability of the physical text. Equally well-known, D. F. McKenzie, significantly expands the field of textual studies by including sociology and cultural studies. See, in particular, his Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). In the same spirit of expansion of the field, D. C. Greetham shows how texts invade each other and thus offers another thoughtful theoretical perspective on The Pleasures of Contamination: Evidence, Text, and Voice in Textual Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). II. The principles of bibliographical description Fredson Bowers’s Principles of bibliographical description (Winchester, UK: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1994) is a new edition of the 1949 classic giving readers all the basic and 4 essential tools to examine texts. For a more up-to-date guide by another expert bibliographer, see G. Thomas Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Joseph A. Dane’s What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012) tackles some of the same issues. However, he also gives useful advice on how we should deal with modern online digital facsimiles of early books. For accessible manuals on the basics of manuscript production, book making and bibliographical description see Mark Bland, A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts, Paperback edition (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books, 1450–1800: A Practical Guide (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019). See also: IV; V-A; XIII; XVII-A; XVII III. Shakespeare and book history A. The publication of plays in early modern England The production of early modern plays in print (which had often been regarded as a very small part of the print market compared to works of religion or history) began to stir interest again at the beginning of the new millennium. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser argued that there was a market for early modern plays in print in their ‘Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512–1660’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 39 (2000): 77–165. Zachary Lesser went further in Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) by investigating various publishers and looking at the way they chose and marketed their plays for specific readerships. Mark Bland takes a slightly different angle by exploring the links 5 between acting companies and publishers: ‘The London Book Trade’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s World, 1500–1660, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 335–40. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume complement previous work by focusing on a later period, studying the economic factors affecting play publication and throwing light on the intricacies of authorship attribution (in the case of Shakespeare in particular): The Publication of Plays in London 1660–1800: Playwrights, Publishers, and the Market (London: The British Library, 2015). Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser allow us to perform simple and complex searches on a vast corpus of bibliographical data (from the beginning of printing to 1660) with their online search engine ‘DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks’, http://deep.sas.upenn.edu/ (free). See also: VI-A to J; XIXB B. Selling Shakespeare in parts Prior to the publication of the First Folio in 1623 and especially after Shakespeare’s death (1616) a number of attempts were made by publishers to sell Shakespeare’s works individually and in small collections. The following essays and chapters examine this trend in detail: Gerald D. Johnson, ‘Thomas Pavier, Publisher, 1600–25’, Library sixth series 14 (1992): 12–50; Sonia Massai, ‘The Pavier Quartos (1619)’, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 106–35; Tara L. Lyons, ‘Serials, Spinoffs, and Histories: Selling “Shakespeare” in Collection before the Folio’, Philological Quarterly 91, no. 2 (2013): 185–220 and her ‘Shakespeare in Print Before 1623’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ed. Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1–17. 6 See also: VI-B, D, I1; XIXB C. Shakespeare as a print author Since the rise of performance studies in the second half of the twentieth century, Shakespeare has mainly been seen as an author who had no interest in the publication of his plays. This view was challenged in recent years by Lukas Erne, who in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), argued that Shakespeare had a readership in mind when writing many of his plays. The idea is taken up again in a second book (Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)), in which he focuses on the role of Shakespeare’s pre-1623 quartos in the formation of the playwright’s and poet’s textual presence. Erne’s work has influenced other important studies, such as Adam G. Hooks’s Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), where Shakespeare’s biography and literary career as a print author are closely associated. Erne’s argument is not completely endorsed by all scholars. A couple of years before Erne’s first book, David Scott Kastan had observed that the printed editions of his works constructed Shakespeare as an author he never really wanted to be: Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Kastan’s ‘“To Think These Trifles Some-Thing”: Shakespearean Playbooks and the Claims of Authorship’, Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 37–48. Nevertheless, Erne’s theory remains influential. Recently, Alan B. Farmer argued that Shakespeare was a popular print author and that he most certainly had an interest in the publication of his plays: ‘Shakespeare as Leading Playwright in Print, 1598–1608/9’, in 7 Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 87–104. See also: VI-D; XX; IX; XXI D. The popularity of Shakespeare’s works in print Shakespeare’s popularity as a print author is not a given in textual studies. Among the sceptics is Peter W. M. Blayney who does not see Shakespeare as topping the list of the most published early modern authors and points out that printed plays did not attract much interest from publishers: ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox, David Scott Kastan, and Stephen J. Greenblatt (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383–422. Alan B. Farmer’s and Zachary Lesser’s careful statistical study, which considers the frequency of reprinted plays (including Shakespeare’s), qualifies if not contradicts Blayney’s estimates: ‘The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited’, Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2005): 1–32. Blayney contests these findings in ‘The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks’, Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2005): 33–50. For a study of the decline of published first editions of Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, see also ‘The Mixed Fortunes of Shakespeare in Print’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 57–68. See also: XXI IV. The materiality of the text 8 The gradual decline of New Historicism in literary studies in the course of the 1990s led scholars away from the analysis of the politics of discourse and more towards how the materiality of texts and their physical form shape their meaning. Thus, material studies borrow much of their methodology from descriptive bibliography, book history and the sociology of reading. Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass were among the first Shakespeare scholars to demonstrate that material studies could considerably enrich our critical understanding of Shakespeare through the study of the material features of his early texts in their pioneering essay, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 255–83. The following works are good examples of how material studies serve not only Shakespearean criticism, but also the literary field at large, reminding us that book history can bring much to textual analysis: Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); John N. King (ed. and intro.) and Lotte Hellinga (prologue), Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jonathan Walker, ‘Reading Materiality: The Literary Critical Treatment of Physical Texts’, Renaissance Drama, vol. 41, no. 1/2 (2013): 199–232. See also: V-A; VII; XIII-A1 to 2 V. The early composition and printing of the text A. The material composition and printing of Shakespeare’s text The most accessible and concise account of how the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays was produced in 1623 in folio format is B. D. R. Higgins’s ‘Printing the First Folio’, in 9 The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ed. Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 30–47. Readers can also turn to another short account that gives details on William Jaggard’s printing house: Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘The Publication of Shakespeare’, in ‘So Long Lives This’: A Celebration of Shakespeare’s Life and Works 1616– 2016, ed. Peter W. M. Blayney, Alan Galey, and Marjorie Rubright (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2016), 17–26. A more substantial study of the First Folio, which describes not only its printing process but also the reception of the volume, is Emma Smith’s The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2016). Charlton Hinman’s The Printing and Proofreading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1963) has long been the standard bibliographical text on the First Folio’s composition, printing and press variants. Nonetheless, its findings have been challenged by more recent scholars. For instance, the number of compositors needed to print the volume as outlined by Hinman has been challenged by Pervez Rizvi’s ‘The Use of Spellings for Compositor Attribution in the First Folio’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 110, no. 1 (2016): 1–53. The following studies will be of use to readers who wish to have a more general perspective on how plays were affected by the bibliographical and editorial processes they went through: Grace Ioppolo, ‘The Transmission of an English Renaissance Play-Text’, in A New Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Thomas Warren Hopper (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 545–59; Gary Taylor and John Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped 1606–1623 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). See also: V-B; VI-A 10 B. Shakespeare’s early editors and printers Eric Rasmussen has produced a concise and reader-friendly account of the role of the agents involved in the editing and printing of the First Folio, that is, William and Isaac Jaggard, Edward Blount, William Aspley, and John Smethwick: ‘Publishing the First Folio’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ed. Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 18–29. There are also individual accounts of some of these agents for readers who wish more detailed information. David Kathman provides background on the two actors who compiled the First Folio in ‘John Heminges and Henry Condell’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s World, 1500–1660, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 923–27. Readers specifically curious about the first publication of Shakespeare’s two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) can turn to Carol Chillington Rutter’s ‘Schoolfriend, Publisher, and Printer Richard Field’, in The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Bibliography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 161–73. Rutter’s essay explores the friendship between William Shakespeare and Richard Field and describes Field’s career as a printer, during which he published two of Shakespeare’s poems. For a work that examines the multiple and intersecting forms of agency exercised by Shakespeare’s stationers in the design, production, marketing, and distribution of his printed works, see Marta Straznicky, ed., Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Finally, there are two comprehensive historical studies of Shakespeare’s editors for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Matthew W. Black and Matthias A. Shaaber, Shakespeare’s Seventeenth-Century Editors, 1632–1685, MLA General Series (NY: Modern 11 Language Association, 1937) and Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Black’s and Shaaber’s wide-ranging analysis of the textual changes in the three later Shakespeare folios shows that the process of editing the text as a whole began, not with Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 Works of William Shakespear, but with the First Folio and was continued in folios 2 to 4. Jarvis, for his part, analyses the textual and critical practices of Alexander Pope, William Warburton, Thomas Hanmer, Lewis Theobald, and Samuel Johnson. See also: III-A to D; V-A VI. Early editions of Shakespeare (quartos, octavos, folios, multi-volume editions) A. Surveys of Shakespeare in print The best analytical survey of print Shakespeare is Andrew Murphy’s Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). It is a unique starting point for anyone needing to carry out accurate and detailed research on the topic. Murphy also covers Irish and American editions, as well as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Additionally, Sonia Massai provides both descriptive and analytical information on a number of early texts, including the Wise Quartos (1597–1602), the Pavier Quartos (1619), the First Folio (1623), and the Fourth Folio (1685) in her Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Readers seeking more succinct surveys may turn to Eugene Giddens’s ‘Shakespeare’s Texts and Editions’, in The Shakespearean World, ed. Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby (London 12 and New York: Routledge, 2017), 465–80. Another concise study is Roger Chartier’s ‘Binding and Unbinding: The Seven Publishing Lives of William Shakespeare’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 93, no. 1 (2019): 90–106, in which he focuses on seven types of early Shakespeare publications: pamphlets, bound books, commonplace books, quartos, folios, complete works, and anthologies of best passages. Readers with more time on their hands will enjoy Eugene Giddens’s comprehensive and didactic How to Read a Shakespearean Play Text (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Giddens is interested in both early texts and modern editions and shows how their make-up can affect reading and performance. See also: XII B. Hamlet in quarto There are notable discrepancies between the texts of the first quarto of Hamlet printed in 1603 (Q1; the alleged ‘bad’ quarto of Hamlet), Q2 published in 1604–5; (the so-called ‘good’ quarto) and the version published in the First Folio in 1603. There is still no complete consensus regarding the relations between the three texts. Zachary Lesser’s Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) shows how the critical problem posed by Q1 Hamlet has had considerable influence on the way Hamlet and its author are perceived by both specialist scholars and the general public. Some scholars point out that all three texts are part of the history of the play and go so far as to argue that Shakespeare wanted to leave three versions of Hamlet rather than one authoritative text: Y. S. Bains, ‘Biography, Bibliography, and the Making of Shakespeare’s Hamlet’, Hamlet Studies 22 (2000): 10–25. 13 Paul Menzer’s The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008) is a technical study that collates the cues that would have appeared in the actors’ parts of the First and Second Quarto and First Folio texts of Hamlet. His conclusions are that Q1 is a separate play intended for print and that it was set from an authorial draft. The First Folio Hamlet, Menzer goes on to argue, is a related but modified version of Q1. See also: XIII-B1 and 6 C. The First Folio For a succinct but well-informed overview of the printing and ensuing iconicity of the First Folio as a book, see Adam Hooks, ‘The First Folio’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s World, 1500–1660, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 366–73. Likewise, Peter W. M. Blayney provides the essentials in a small and accessible book: The First Folio of Shakespeare (Washington: Folger Library Publications, 1991). Readers looking for a more exhaustive study that still remains accessible can consult Emma Smith’s Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Smith examines the making of the book both from a production and reception point of view explaining how it has become one the most famous books in the world. Despite its title, Emma Smith’s ‘The Canonization of Shakespeare in Print, 1623’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 134–46, points to the inconsistencies in the First Folio character lists and concludes that it is not exactly a text adapted to readers despite some of the promises made in its paratexts. On the same subject, see also her ‘Reading the First Folio’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ed. Emma Smith (Cambridge: 14 Cambridge University Press, 2016), 155–69. In Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Francis X. Connor compares the First Folios to other folio collections and reaches the conclusion that Shakespeare’s First Folio appears to be more deliberately theatrical. See also: V-A; XVII A and B1a D. Single editions Thomas L. Berger’s ‘Shakespeare Writ Small: Early Single Editions of Shakespeare’s Plays’, in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text (Blackwell, 2007), 57–70 is a concise account of the early publication of quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays printed before the First Folio. For a more in-depth analysis of how Shakespeare’s pre-1623 quartos played a part in in the formation of the playwright’s and poet’s textual presence, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Readers who are looking for a census of Shakespeare’s single editions should access Adam G. Hooks’s and Zachary Lesser’s free online database at https://shakespearecensus.org/. See also: III-B; VI-I1 to 2; XIV-B1c E. The Second Shakespeare Folio The Second Folio was printed in 1632 and appears to have attracted hardly any critical attention from scholars. However, it has three ‘claims to fame’. John Milton’s (1608–74) ‘On Shakespeare’ was included without attribution among the commendatory verses in the Second Folio. Milton must have been 22 years old at the time. John Pitcher discusses the Milton sonnet at some length in his ‘Memory, Oblivion, and the Book of Shakespeare’, in Variations Sur La 15 Lettre, Le Mètre et La Mesure: Shakespeare, ed. Dominique Goy-Blanquet (Amiens: Université de Picardie, 1996), 187–94. King Charles I also owned a personal copy in which he took notes. It is now in the Royal Library at Windsor, but a handy facsimile can be easily consulted: The Second Folio: A Reproduction of the Copy in the Windsor Castle Library Owned by Charles I (Alburgh: Archival Facsimiles, 1987). Its third ‘claim to fame’ is that a copy was once owned and partly censored (Measure for Measure was in fact completely excised from the volume) around 1650 by an English Jesuit father employed by the Spanish Inquisition at the English college in Valladolid, Spain. The volume if now held by the Folger Shakespeare Library. On this specific copy, see Brian Cummings, ‘Shakespeare and Inquisition’, Shakespeare Survey 65 (2012): 306–22. See also: XIV-B1b F. The Third Shakespeare Folio The Third Folio (1663–64) has attracted little critical attention also despite the fact that it contains seven more plays than the previous folios: Pericles, London Prodigal, Thomas, Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan, or the Widow of Watling Street, Yorkshire Tragedy, and Locrine. Apart from Pericles the rest of the plays have been considered as ‘apocryphal’ (not the work of Shakespeare) by modern scholars. Richard Finkelstein studies the reasons for these additions in ‘The Politics of Gender, Puritanism, and Shakespeare’s Third Folio’, Philological Quarterly 79 (2000): 315–41. He surmises that these plays were aimed at a nostalgic Puritan audience, but that their contents did not embrace Puritan ethics paradoxically. See also: XIV-B1b; XXI 16 G. The Fourth Shakespeare Folio Francis X. Connor’s ‘Henry Herringman, Richard Bentley, and Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio (1685)’, in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640–1740, ed. Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 38–54, investigates the roles played by the volume’s publishers, booksellers Henry Herringman and Richard Bentley, in establishing Shakespeare’s literary canonicity, as well in positioning his works, next to the ‘Triumvirate of Wit’, then represented by Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher. See also: VB; XIV-B1b; XXI. H. The Fifth Shakespeare Folio The existence of a Fifth Folio has long gone unnoticed. Yet, Lara Hansen and Eric Rasmussen provide evidence for a further volume probably printed in 1700 and explain why there was a need for an additional folio: ‘Shakespeare Without Rules: The Fifth Shakespeare Folio and Market Demand in the Early 1700s’, in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640–1740, ed. Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 55–62. See also: XIV-B1b I. Lyrical works 1. Sonnets 17 Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. The text is on the whole a good one, though its punctuation is clearly not authorial. Other pieces of evidence suggest that the edition was printed from a manuscript not in Shakespeare’s own handwriting. Its contents reappeared only in 1640, in John Benson’s volume Poems: Written by W. Shakespeare, Gent., which includes most of the sonnets along with A Lover’s Complaint, The Phoenix and Turtle (not by Shakespeare), The Passionate Pilgrim (a made-up collection of short poems not entirely by Shakespeare), as well as various non-Shakespearean poems, such as Ben Jonson and John Milton. Benson reordered the sonnets and gave them titles, running some of them together. The most recurring question posed by the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare’s Sonnets has always been whether it too, like Benson’s reprint, was unauthorized, a question hardly simplified by its particularly baffling dedication to ‘Mr W .H.’. For a complete and thorough overview of the textual, publishing and cultural history of the Sonnets, see Paul Edmondson’s and Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Sasha Roberts devotes a substantial section (141–190) of her book, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), to the Sonnets and contends that they were ‘turned both in print and manuscript from an unorthodox romance with an anti-feminist twist into routine poetic utterances on the passions of heterosexual love’ (12). In ‘Some Manuscripts of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Bulletin of the John Ryland’s Library 68 (1985): 210–46, Gary Taylor offers an article for advanced readers in which he discovers that 11 of the 13 scribal manuscripts of Sonnet 2 share significant differences from the 1609 quarto and show Shakespeare’s process of revision. He concludes that some manuscripts contain unique variants that are unlikely to be authoritative, and that traceable progressive deterioration reveals two families of texts descended from two different manuscript sources. The distribution 18 of the manuscripts further suggest that Sonnets originally circulated as individual poems rather than as a sequence. See also: XVII-B; XIX-C 2. Narrative poems Shakespeare’s first published narrative poem was Venus and Adonis (1593), followed by the tragic history of The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Shakespeare shortest narrative poem, A Lover’s Complaint, had already been published as a tailpiece to the Sonnets in 1609 and was later to reappear in John Benson’s 1640 edition of poems deceptively claiming to be a collection of Shakespearean lyrics: Poems: Written by W. Shakespeare. Lukas Erne and Tasmin Badcoe re-examine the alleged uneven success and popularity of Venus and Adonis, Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets in the early modern book trade (‘Shakespeare and the Popularity of Poetry Books in Print, 1583–1622’, Review of English Studies 65 (2014): 33–57). Their findings show that Venus and Adonis was the best-selling poetry book of its time. While recognizing that Shakespeare’s Sonnets were not reprinted within 25 years of their initial publication, they point out that very few sonnet collections were reprinted during the period. Following in the same footsteps, Emma Depledge discusses in detail the production, selling, and marketing of Shakespearean plays and poems from 1640 to 1740 in the second half of the seventeenth century (‘Shakespeare for Sale, 1640–1740’, in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640–1740, ed. Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 17–25). Sasha Roberts studies how the Rape of Lucrece was profoundly transformed by its publishing history in ‘Editing Sexuality, Narrative, and Authorship: The Altered Texts of 19 Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, ed. Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 124–52. In Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Roberts also devotes some in-depth and important chapters to other narrative poems: Venus and Adonis (20–101); A Lover’s Complaint and The Passionate Pilgrim (143–90). See also: III-C and D J. Late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century editions Emma Depledge, in ‘Shakespeare for Sale, 1640–1740’, in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640–1740, ed. Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 17–25, provides an overview and analysis of the production, selling, and marketing of Shakespearean plays and poems from 1640 to1740. For a monograph that seeks to survey the whole of the period, see Don-John Dugas’s Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660–1740 (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006). Dugas’s book covers many crucial topics in this fast-changing period: how Shakespeare’s plays were packaged for commercial consumption; how the revival of Shakespeare’s plays on the stage between 1660 and 1705 sparked an interest in publishing the plays; how Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition affected Shakespeare’s popularity; how the appearance of inexpensive editions in the early eighteenth century fostered the revival of some of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays; and how, after 1735, single-play publication influenced performance of Shakespeare. Students eager to delve deeper in the cultural significance of eighteenth-century editions should consult Margreta De Grazia’s dense but thoughtful Shakespeare Verbatim: The 20 Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). De Grazia insists that the idea of Shakespeare’s historical and personal autonomy was produced especially by Malone’s (1741–1812) editorial apparatus. Specialized readers interested in the legacy of eighteenth-century editing may refer themselves to Joanna Gondris’s edited collection: Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998). Together these essays can help twenty-first century readers consider the practice of editing differently, as well as appreciate the differences between us and eighteenth-century readers. See also: VI-C, E, F, G VII. Shakespearean paratexts Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai, eds., Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) is the standard book for anyone interested in print paratexts, that is to say, the materials to be found primarily in the plays’ preliminary pages and end matter. The materials include of course Shakespeare’s plays: title pages, prologues, epistles, dedications, and epilogues. For a study on the subject of paratexts, but focused only on the First Folio, see Chris Laoutaris, ‘The Prefatorial Material’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ed. Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 48–67. Laoutaris not only examines the history of the First Folio’s prefatorial material, but also provides information on booksellers, patronage, and commerce. Joseph Candido examines the preliminaries of the first two major Shakespearean editions of the beginning of the eighteenth century in ‘Prefatory 21 Matter(s) in the Shakespeare Editions of Nicholas Rowe and Alexander Pope’, Studies in Philology 97 (2000): 210–28. Finally, no section on paratexts would be complete with mentioning Gérard Genette’s lengthy and dense work of theory in which he defines precisely such terms as ‘paratexts’, ‘peritext’ and ‘epitext’: Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Jane E. Lewin (translator), and Richard Macksey (foreword) (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Genette’s study is still very influential and should be the starting point for students or scholars seeking theoretical definitions (despite the fact that Genette is mostly interested in novels). See also: V-B; VI-C and J VIII. Shakespeare and/in manuscript Alan Stewart’s ‘Manuscript Culture’ will serve the needs of readers looking for references to writing in Shakespeare. In same essay, Stewart also investigates how Shakespeare uses handwritten texts as narrative devices (The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s World, 1500–1660, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 360–66). While studying texts allegedly containing Shakespeare’s own handwriting, Grace Ioppolo argues cogently that the value of hand-written texts over print probably contributed to the disappearance of Shakespeare’s manuscripts (‘Manuscripts Containing Texts by Shakespeare’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s World, 1500–1660, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 986–95). William B. Long offers a fascinating survey and description of the eighteen surviving early manuscript playbooks (including Sir Thomas More), which contain passages arguably penned 22 by Shakespeare and explains how they were produced: ‘“Precious Few”: English Manuscript Playbooks’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 414–33. To understand the role played by scribes in the publication of Shakespeare’s texts, see two articles devoted to an important personality in the field of early modern manuscripts, Ralph Crane (fl. 1555–1632), a professional scrivener who seems to have had a close association with the King’s Men: F. P. Wilson, ‘Ralph crane, scrivener to the king’s players’, The Library series 4-VII, no. 2 (1 October 1926): 194–215 and Paul Werstine, ‘Ralph Crane and Edward Knight: Professional Scribe and King’s Men’s Bookkeeper’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 27– 38. Werstine emphasizes the part played by Ralph Crane’s and Edward Knight’s (fl. 1613–37) transcriptions in the preservation of Shakespeare’s plays. For more on the role of scribes in particular, see Peter Beal’s unsurpassed In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England, Lyell Lectures in Bibliography (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Finally, George Walton Williams and G. Blakemore Evans have edited one of the earliest known adaptations of Shakespeare, which conflated in manuscript 1 Henry IV (Q5, 1613) and 2 Henry IV (Q1, 1600): The Dering Manuscript: William Shakespeare’s History of King Henry the Fourth, as Revised by Sir Edward Dering, Bart (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978). Sir Edward Dering (1598–1644) was a keen theatregoer and book collector, who evidently liked to stage plays at his home at Surrenden in Kent. For readers interested either in Shakespeare’s writing or in Shakespearean extracts found in manuscripts, there are now an increasing number of online finding aids: 23 The Folger Shakespeare Library’s ‘Shakespeare Documented’, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/ curated by Heather Wolfe, Claire Dapkiewicz, and Eric M. Johnson, Director of Digital Access (free) The Union First Line Index of English Verse: 13th–19th Century (bulk 1500–1800): https://firstlines.folger.edu/ (free) Peter Beal’s Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM): http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html (free) Laura Estill’s Database of Dramatic Extracts (free): https://dex.itercommunity.org/ and for Shakespeare especially: https://daikatana.itercommunity.org/authors/?query=William%20Shakespeare See also: X; XI IX. The censorship of the text Censorship is a subject that is directly related to textual studies as it can affect the writing, performance and printing of texts. As far as press censorship is concerned the best and most concise account is Cyndia Susan Clegg’s ‘Liberty, License, and Authority: Press Censorship and Shakespeare’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 464–85. For the censorship of plays, Richard Dutton’s monograph, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), is well worth the read for its comprehensive and subtle analysis of the complex and changing relations between the various agents involved in censorship. Dutton studies the censorship of plays (including Sir Thomas More, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Richard II) between 1581 and 1626 and concludes that Elizabethan England was not an authoritarian regime in this domain. Janet Clare’s book on the 24 same subject, ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), is useful for a slightly different perspective. For print censorship specifically, there are two unsurpassed studies on the question, both by Cyndia Susan Clegg: Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Clegg examines some of Shakespeare’s editions, such as Richard II, King Lear, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. In ‘Shakespeare and Inquisition’ (Shakespeare Survey 65 (2012): 306–22) Brian Cummings offers an astute case study of the Valladolid copy of the Second Folio (now held by the Folger Shakespeare Library), which bears the certificate of a Jesuit censor and which has Measure for Measure cut out, as well as multiple lines blackened in ink. Finally, readers interested in scholarly and popular editions of Shakespeare that have been censored and printed specifically for families and classrooms should consult Alan Young’s ‘Popular versus Scholarly Texts’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: The World’s Shakespeare, 1660–Present, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1627–35. See also: XIII-B7; XV-D X. The performance text; playhouse texts and documents Tiffany Stern’s Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) is ideal for readers who are keen to understand how playhouse texts were created. Stern argues that, whether in manuscript or print, they were 25 originally made from separate documents, such as actors’ parts, plots-scenarios, songs, stage scrolls, to name but a few. This had already been made clear in Simon Palfrey’s and Tiffany Stern’s Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). The authors contend that actors were only given the parts they were going to speak preceded by a short cue to know when to speak. This system, they continue to claim, ensured intense collaboration between actor and playwright, which could produce remarkable innovation. The book contains substantial discussions of The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and The Tempest. Paul Werstine’s Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) is useful to understand that ‘promptbooks’, which were used by bookkeepers, were not necessarily neat and tidy documents and were part of variety of other related playhouse texts. In the eighteenth century, there were printed books sold as alleged ‘performance texts’ obtained directly from the prompter, such as John Bell’s (1745–1831) and Francis Gentleman’s (1728–1784) editions. Peter Holland’s ‘Theatre Editions’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 233–48, presents these editions and looks at how and why they differed from our modern editions. Charles Shattuck provided the first census of Shakespeare’s promptbooks: Shakespeare’s Promptbooks: A Descriptive Catalogue (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1965). His noteworthy book described (almost) all marked copies of Shakespeare related to English-language professional theatre productions from 1620 to 1961. With the development of the internet, some digital facsimiles of promptbooks are now available online: 26 Jill Levenson’s Romeo and Juliet: Searchable Database for Prompt Books, https://romeo- juliet.itergateway.org/index.php/. (free). The site includes two fully-searchable databases containing information from approximately 170 promptbooks for productions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Productions range from the seventeenth century to the 1980s. G. Blakemore Evans’s lengthy but extremely valuable eight edited set of books, Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century, 8 vols. (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1960–1996) is now freely available online at http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/. The volumes cover the so-called ‘Padua Macbeth’; the Padua Measure for Measure; The Winter’s Tale; the ‘Nursery’ The Comedy of Errors and Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Smock Alley theatre Hamlet; the Smock Alley Macbeth; The Smock Alley Othello, as well as promptbooks of King Lear, Henry VIII, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors, and The Winter’s Tale. ‘Shakespeare in Performance: Prompt Books from the Folger Shakespeare Library’ is likewise an important and up-to-date online resource (paywall, Adam Matthew Digital): http://www.shakespeareinperformance.amdigital.co.uk/ See also: XIV-B1d XI. The profession and activity of playwriting A number of scholars studying playwriting argue that Shakespeare had hardly any relationship with the world of print. Andrew Gurr presents evidence of theatre companies’ control of playtexts and suggests that Shakespeare did not care much about the printing of his plays: ‘Shakespeare’s Lack of Care for His Plays’, Memoria Di Shakespeare: A Journal of Shakespearean Studies 2 (2015): 161–76. 27 Grace Ioppolo largely avoids the issue of publication to focus on the specifics of the business of playwriting. In Dramatists and Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Heywood: Authorship, Authority, and the Playhouse (London and New York: Routledge-Taylor & Francis, 2006), she suggests that playwriting should not be seen as a linear but as a circular process with authors returning to texts during production and performance and collaborating with other agents in the process. See also: III-C and D XII. The dating of the text Andrew Murphy’s ‘Chronological appendix’ of printed editions of Shakespeare from the sixteenth to the end of the twentieth century, in his Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 287–386, offers a very comprehensive annotated chronology that will serve the needs of most readers. In recent years, scholars have increasingly turned to digital technology for the dating of Shakespeare’s texts. Needless to say, digital technology does not always produce the same results and the interpretation of even the same figures can be a source of endless controversy. For a sound analysis of current scholarship on the chronology and attribution of Shakespeare’s works, including poetry and some apocryphal or lost works, see Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane, ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works’, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 417–602. See also: XXI 28 XIII. The theory and practice of editing Shakespeare; editorial problems A. The theory of editing texts 1. Concise and accessible introductions There are at least three straightforward essays on the theory of editing Shakespearean texts. Gabriel Egan reminds us why the task of editing is crucial in the first place, as elements such as spelling, punctuation, chronology, and other editorial aspects change our interpretation of Shakespeare’s work: ‘Shakespeare and the Impact of Editing’, in Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital: His Economic Impact from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Dominic Shellard and Siobhan Keenan (Leicester: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 32–56. David Scott Kastan’s ‘The Texts of Shakespeare and Textual Theory’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: The World’s Shakespeare, 1660–Present, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1635–41, offers a very valuable historical survey of approaches to editing Shakespeare from the early modern period until now (with thoughts also about the future). He shows how each generation has developed its own conception of editorial responsibilities. The most recent study is Richard Proudfoot’s ‘New Conservatism and the Theatrical Text: Editing Shakespeare for the Third Millennium’, Shakespearean International Yearbook 2 (2017): 127–42. Proudfoot evaluates the current state of theory and practice in the field of Shakespearean editing. See also: XVIII-B1 to 7; XVII 29 2. More advanced studies in textual theory E. A. J. Honigmann’s The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text (London: Arnold, 1965) began to challenge the canonical status quo by arguing that for some of Shakespeare plays (Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear) there was no ‘finalized’ text but rather two copies both considered ‘finished’ by Shakespeare, although not beyond revision. Thus, as Stephen Orgel noted, there is no reason to believe in the existence of a correct text that would be the author’s manuscript. Orgel points out that this should have an impact on how we edit texts. See his ‘What Is a Text?’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 24 (1981): 3–6. Nonetheless, the question of authorial intent remains unsettled. While accepting the instability of the text, Gabriel Egan still believes that there is a way of taking into account problematic material conditions when dealing with the question of authorial intent: Gabriel Egan, ‘Intention in the Editing of Shakespeare’, Style 44, no. 3 (2010): 378–90. Randall McLeod criticizes the tendency on the part of editors to conflate different versions of Shakespeare’s text to produce a single edition. According to McLeod, this practice decontextualizes each different version: ‘Un-Editing Shak-Speare’, Sub-Stance 33–34 (1982): 26–55. For Stephen Orgel we also need to resist our desire for a ‘complete Shakespeare’, which remains for him an impossibility because of the constant instability of the Shakespearean canon: ‘The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole’, Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 290–310. For another article on the same lines, see Paul Werstine, ‘Copy-Text Editing: The Author-Izing of Shakespeare’, English Studies in Canada 27 (2001): 29–45. In Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), Leah S. Marcus points at the damage done to such works as The Tempest, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet by editorial choices clearly influenced by questionable cultural assumptions and ideologies. 30 Therefore, the question of the principles behind any type of emendation to the text should be examined. Lukas Erne remarks that emendation depends on how far editors believe they should intervene with the text: ‘Emendation and the Editorial Reconfiguration of Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 300–313). David Bevington concurs with these views in his survey of annotation practices used for editing Shakespeare, adding that annotation remains an interpretive process (David Bevington, ‘Confessions of an Annotation-Note Writer’, Shakespeare Quarterly 68, no. 1 (2017): 7–20). It should be added that since the 1990s the theory of editing Shakespeare according to the principles of the New Bibliography (a Shakespeare-centred school of textual and bibliographical study that analyzed texts not in isolation but in relation to their genesis and evolution) has come under fire. Its most famous antagonist is Paul Werstine who in a series of important articles set out to contest some of the key notions used by the New Bibliographers. See for instance, ‘Editing Shakespeare and Editing without Shakespeare: Wilson, McKerrow, Greg, Bowers, Tanselle, and Copy-Text Editing’, Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 13 (2000): 27–53; ‘The Science of Editing’, in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 109–27. Werstine and his followers are surely right when they suggest that there are no stable points of reference to ground New Bibliography’s key concepts. New Bibliographers merely present narratives rather than absolute knowledge, but then so does all work of scholarly reconstruction, including Werstine’s. Perhaps Werstine is at his most convincing when, in Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), he bases his conclusions on close examination of nineteen marked manuscripts and quartos and disputes W. W. Greg’s new bibliographical distinction between ‘foul papers’ (a dramatist’s complete draft of a play prior to transcription for use in the theatre 31 and that retained inconsistencies) and ‘promptbooks’ (a playbook or fair copy to be used in the theatre). Werstine explains that these distinctions do not hold up, as many promptbooks remain riddled with irregularities. See also: XIII-B 1 to 7; XIX-Bd B. The Practice of editing texts: editorial problems and cruces 1. The ‘Bad’ Quartos Paul Werstine has devoted much energy in questioning the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quartos, the related tendency to give credit to Shakespeare for what is in a ‘good’ quarto and the habit of blaming actors for what is a ‘bad’ one. Werstine believes that the distinction is limiting: ‘Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: “Foul Papers” and “Bad” Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 65–86. In ‘A Century of “Bad” Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (1999): 310–33, Werstine doubts that the ‘bad’ quartos of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, Henry V, and Romeo and Juliet, originate in memorial reconstruction. Laurie E. Maguire does not disagree with Werstine in her 1996 book, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). After careful examination of some 41 so-called ‘bad’ quartos she rejects the New Bibliography’s methods used to classify quartos as ‘bad’. Yet she does point out that memorial reconstruction by actors or other agents remains one of many possibilities (including rewrites by Shakespeare himself), which might account for these quartos’ textual instability. Lene B. Petersen further explores these possibilities and draws our attention to the exchanges and reciprocities between the oral and the memorial in authorial composition: Shakespeare’s Errant 32 Texts: Textual Form and Linguistic Style in Shakespearean ‘Bad’ Quartos and Co-Authored Plays (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also: VI-D; XIV-B1c 2. Modernizing Punctuation Scholars remain somewhat divided on this question, even though the (silent) modernization of punctuation has been practiced at least since the early re-editions of Shakespeare in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, William H. Sherman argues that the modernized punctuation found in most, if not all, modern editions of Shakespeare, replaces cultural contexts of Shakespeare’s works with our own (William H. Sherman, ‘Early Modern Punctuation and Modern Editions: Shakespeare’s Serial Colon’, in The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text, ed. Heidi Brayman, Jesse M. Lander, and Zachary Lesser (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 2016), 304–23). See also: V-A; V-J; XVII-B 3. Modernizing Spelling David Bevington recognises that old spelling can be a source of confusion for modern readers. Yet he also gives a number of examples when modernization can conceal important linguistic information. In practice, Bevington advocates a pragmatic and realistic approach when it comes to editing early texts for modern readers. The benefits of modernization to modern readers clearly outweigh the drawbacks. The task of the editor is then simply to provide well-informed commentary to explain what has been lost (David Bevington, ‘Modern Spelling: The Hard Choices’, in Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 143–57). 33 See also: XVIII-A 1 and 2 4. King Lear King Lear was first printed, badly, in 1608, under the title True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters. This quarto text was then republished in 1619 with minor improvements. Some scholars believe that this text derives from Shakespeare’s original manuscript, but the issue is still disputed. In 1623 King Lear was included in the First Folio, under the title The Tragedie of King Lear. The Folio version is substantially revised, 300 lines have been cut, 100 lines added and it also contains many other variations. Assuming that both the History and the Tragedy derived from a single archetype, many editors since the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards conflated them. However, the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare (1986) disentangled the two texts and decided to print them separately. Yet the relation between the two texts is still far from resolved and continues to expend much ink among specialists. The easiest way into those controversies are no doubt two short essays that will appeal to the general reader: Barbara A. Mowat, ‘Facts, Theories, and Beliefs’, in Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection, ed. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 57–64 and René Weis, ‘Case Study 1: King Lear’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: The World’s Shakespeare, 1660–Present, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1649–54. The staunchest critic of the two-text theory is no doubt Brian Vickers in The One King Lear (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). For Vickers, the differences between the 1608 quarto text and the First Folio version (1623) were not caused by any Shakespearean late revision. According to Vickers, the 103 lines not found in the Quarto were left out because of 34 the printer’s miscalculation of the amount of paper needed, while the 285 lines not in the Folio were theatre cuts for which Shakespeare was not responsible. See also: VI-D; XIV-B1c 5. King Henry V The play was first published in quarto in 1600 and is in many ways corrupt. Some scholars believe it may have been a memorial reconstruction (or reported text) by actors who had appeared in a shorter version of the play. The problem is that the 1600 quarto appears, to some extent, to derive from a later authorial text than does the First Folio text of the play (1623). To add another level of textual difficulty, the folio version of the play is different from the quarto and is presumed by some scholars to be derived from Shakespeare’s ‘foul papers’, or rough draft manuscript. Gary Taylor is among those critics who believe that the First Quarto of Henry V, is based on an abridgment designed for a cast of just 11 actors and that it could not have served as copytext for the First Folio. See his ‘Three Studies in the Text of Henry V’ in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling; Three Studies in the Text of Henry V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). In a more recent article, Duncan Salkeld argues that memorial reconstruction alone cannot explain the imperfect state of the First Quarto (‘The Texts of Henry V’, Shakespeare (British Shakespeare Association) 2 (2007): 161–82). He argues that the latter was assembled through a ‘tangled process’ (179) of textual construction, which no doubt included some memorial reconstruction, but also dictation. Furthermore, Salkeld believes that the Folio text was written for audiences rather than readers. See also: VI-C and D; XIV-B1c 35 6. Hamlet Hamlet was first published in quarto in 1603. The First Quarto contains a large number of errors and irregularities and has been considered by many scholars as the ‘bad quarto’ of Hamlet, despite the fact that it remains actable. In 1604–5 appeared what is now known as the ‘good quarto’. Some specialists consider that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600 and produced the version printed as the ‘good’ quarto of 1603–4. However, he revised his early draft in probably 1602 to create the version printed in the First Folio (1623). As it happens, this version also lies behind the ‘bad’ quarto of 1603 (a text reported by an actor who had played several parts in the play). There is still no critical consensus regarding the relations between the three texts. Modern editors have tended to focused on the Second Quarto (the ‘good quarto’) and the Folio. Some have produced convenient and instructive parallel editions: Jesús Tronch Pérez, A Synoptic Hamlet: A Critical-Synoptic Edition of the Second Quarto and First Folio Texts of Hamlet (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2002); Bernice W. Kliman, The Enfolded Hamlets: Parallel Texts of F1 and Q2 Each with Unique Elements Bracketed (New York: AMS Press, 2004). Interestingly though, Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor provide readers with a critical edition based on the Second Quarto, as well as a companion volume including editions of the First Quarto (the ‘bad quarto’) and First Folio texts (Hamlet (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006)). See also: VI-D; XIV-B1c 7. Sir Thomas More Sir Thomas More is an undated dramatic manuscript, in several hands, held by the British Library (BL, MS Harleian 7368). The manuscript, about the rise and fall of Thomas More, was 36 composed in the mid-1590s. Edmund Tilney, the then Master of Revels, refused to approve the manuscript and demanded revisions. Soon after the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 a number of additions in different hands were made to the text. Among these hands, ‘Hand D’ is of particular interest to Shakespeareans, as it is no doubt the only extant example of the playwright at work on a section of a dramatic manuscript: a passage now referred to as Addition II.D. There is a further possible Shakespearean addition (Addition III), though this one was copied by a scribe. Much has been written about what we can infer from these short additions concerning Shakespeare’s writing and stylistic habits. The additions continue to pose many questions, which John Jowett’s lucid edition endeavours to answer: Sir Thomas More (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011). See also: VIII; XV-D; XVIII XIV. The modern reproduction of the Shakespearean text A. Paper facsimiles Charlton Hinman’s The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare: Based on Folios in the Folger Shakespeare Library Collection (New York: Norton, 1996) has been used by generation of students and scholars and is not quite superseded yet by digital facsimiles. Its through line-numbering system (TLN), which takes Shakespeare’s First Folio as its base, makes passages easy to cite, although it privileges the First Folio over other textual alternatives. Meisei University Press published in 2014 a beautifully realistic colour facsimile of probably the world’s most annotated First Folio by an early reader (Meisei Library’s MR774). It is also available here in digital format: http://shakes.meisei-u.ac.jp/search.html 37 See also: VI-C; XX B. Digital facsimiles and editions of Shakespeare Note: all following links were checked at the time of publication. However, internet links are notoriously subject to change. Readers are therefore advised to search for the names of the resources via their own search engine should they encounter difficulties. 1. Online digital facsimiles a) First Folios Sarah Werner keeps a free and updated annotated list of all accessible First Folios online at https://sarahwerner.net/blog/digitized-first-folios/ See also Sarah Werner’s ‘Digital First Folios’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ed. Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 170–84, in which Werner discusses the interface and usability of various digital facsimiles. She also considers the impact of digital folio facsimiles on education, annotation, and accessibility. See also: VI-C b) Other Folios Folger Shakespeare Library’s ‘Shakespeare’s Works’, enables readers to choose all plays in the corpus and by following the link and pressing ‘Early Printed Texts’ the site gives access to all available digitized editions of Shakespeare owned by the Folger (free): https://www.folger.edu/shakespeares-works 38 The Howard Furness Shakespeare Library (Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image) allows readers to search for and access digital facsimiles of Shakespeare editions including, but not limited to, folios (free). http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/sceti/furness/ Noriko Sumimoto and Michiro Yabuki, eds., Meisei University Shakespeare Collection Database, provides free access to Shakespeare’s Folios 1 to 4 http://shakes.meisei-u.ac.jp/e- index.html (free). See also: VI-E to H c) Single play editions The British Library’s Treasures in Full (free) ‘Shakespeare in Quarto’, allows users to browse through 107 copies of the 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the 1642 theatre closures: https://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html Rare Book Room (free) Gives access to most of the Shakespeare Quartos from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, and the National Library of Scotland. It also contains a first edition of the Sonnets, and a first edition of Shakespeare’s Poems. A search engine is available on the main page to facilitate access: http://www.rarebookroom.org/ The Shakespeare Quartos Archive (free) 39 The website offers a digital collection of pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays. A cross-Atlantic collaboration has also produced an interactive interface for the detailed study of these geographically distant quartos, with full functionality for all thirty-two quarto copies of Hamlet held by participating institutions. http://www.quartos.org/index.html Internet Shakespeare editions (free) Its digital facsimile viewer gives access to an impressive number of digitized editions, including many quartos: https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/index.html Shakespeare Collected (free) The National Library of Scotland’s ‘Shakespeare Collected’ has digitized a good number of early quartos and promptbooks: https://shakespeare.nls.uk/ M. L. Stapleton, ed., Shakedsetc.Org (free): A website devoted to historic editions of Shakespeare: displays facsimiles of many editions from the sixteenth to the twentieth century now in the public domain: https://shakedsetc.org/ Early Modern Books (formerly Early English Books Online): Provides bibliographical data and black and white downloadable images of almost all Shakespeare editions for the period 1450–1700. https://search.proquest.com/eebo (paywall, ProQuest) 40 See also: VI-B; VI-D; VI-I 1 and 2 d) Promptbooks Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century (free) G. Blakemore Evans’s lengthy but extremely valuable 8 edited set of books, Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century, 8 vols. (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1960–1996) is now online at http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/. Shakespeare in Performance: Prompt Books from the Folger Shakespeare Library (paywall, Adam Matthew Digital) Is likewise an important and up-to-date online resource: http://www.shakespeareinperformance.amdigital.co.uk/ Jill Levenson’s Romeo and Juliet: Searchable Database for Prompt Books, https://romeo- juliet.itergateway.org/index.php/. (free). The site includes two fully-searchable databases containing information from approximately 170 promptbooks for productions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. See also: X, XI 2. Online digital editions Janelle Jenstad, ed., Internet Shakespeare Editions Offers Shakespeareʼs fully-edited plays and poems, critical and reference materials, and a full exploration of the context of Shakespeareʼs writing. All material is peer-edited and free: 41 http://ise.uvic.ca. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Digital Texts: Offers free, high-quality digital texts of Shakespeare’s plays edited on the basis of current scholarship: https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/ The Complete Works of Shakespeare (MIT) (free): http://shakespeare.mit.edu/ Pervez Rizvi, ed., Shakespeare’s Text: A collection of resources for students of the original texts of Shakespeare’s plays. This free website is technical and is addressed to advanced students or specialized scholars: http://www.shakespearestext.com. See also: XIII-A C. Shakespearean digital editing studies Michael Best’s article, ‘Standing in Rich Place: Electrifying the Multiple-Text Edition or, Every Text Is Multiple’, College Literature 36, no. 1 (2009): 26–39, is a good starting point to understand the challenges of creating a digital multiple-text edition. Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams in Deforming Shakespeare: Investigations in Textuality and Digital Media (Torun: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Grado, 2009) covers all the problems linked to digital editing, analyzes the various aspects of the visuality of Shakespeare texts and, more importantly, looks at how electronic technology socializes Shakespeare as an aesthetic artefact 42 or an object to play with, and considers the competing interests and ideological forces that govern publication of Shakespeare online. Michael Witmore, Jonathan Hope, and Michael Gleicher performed a digital analysis of 554 early modern plays to attempt to answer whether there is a characteristic language of tragedy and whether there is a distinctive language of Shakespearean tragedy. Their answer is ‘yes’ in both cases: distinctions exist in terms of diction, syntax, and other components of expression (‘Digital Approaches to the Language of Shakespearean Tragedy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 316–35). See also: XIII-A; XVII-A to D XV. Attribution studies and stylometry Attribution studies (determining whether a work or part of a work can be attributed to Shakespeare) and stylometry (the study of style through scientific and mostly computer-assisted techniques) are currently extremely active fields of study and have direct bearing on what we choose to call the canon of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as on authorship itself. A. Definitions Paolo Canettieri’s ‘Unified Theory of the Text (UTT) and the Question of Authorship Attribution’, Memoria Di Shakespeare new series 8 (2012): 65–77, is a good way into the subject. The author describes stylometry, the method of detecting stylistic traits representative 43 of a single author, and its usefulness in determining the authorship of texts whose attribution is uncertain. See also: XXI B. Brian Vickers’s method of analysis In ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall Elegye (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Vickers strongly rejects the attribution of the Elegy by W. S. and ‘Shall I die’? to Shakespeare. He points out that the verbal parallels are not convincing and can be found in common expressions. For Vickers, it is necessary not to work on small samples and one should at least consider negative evidence. Through linguistic and statistical analyses of vocabulary, syntax, and prosody, he concludes that John Ford is the author of Elegy by W. S. Gabriel Egan has regularly criticized Vickers’s methods. In ‘The Limitations of Vickers’s Trigram Tests’, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 60–66, he contends that Vickers findings are based on flawed methodologies and incomplete data, which invalidates Vickers’s recent attributions. Egan pleads for more reproducible research techniques using widely available data sets and software. See also: XVII-A to C; XXI C. Other extensive scholarship on attribution and stylometry There are two books, indispensable for all advanced students, which complement each other well: Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney’s Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of 44 Authorship (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Gary Taylor’s and Gabriel Egan’s (eds.) The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Craig’s and Kinney’s collection encompasses both Shakespeare’s and other writers’ styles. While some studies, confirm the current consensus, others challenge it by presenting more surprising conclusions. What distinguishes this book from others, is its almost complete commitment to statistics and computer studies. This is what brings it so close to the methods of Gary Taylor’s and Gabriel Egan’s contributors in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, which often enter into dialogue with Craig’s and Kinney’s collaborators. See also: XV-A; XVII-A to D; XXI D. Sir Thomas More The unpublished manuscript of Sir Thomas More is crucial for Shakespeareans as it allegedly contains the only manuscript sample of Shakespeare’s dramatic writing (Hand D in the manuscript). In ‘Shakespeare’s Singularity and Sir Thomas More’, Shakespeare Survey 67 (2014): 150–64, James Purkis remarks that the whole play is included in the second edition of the Oxford Complete Works and now the third series of the Arden Shakespeare. Yet the Shakespeare additions made visible in all these editions (additions which, after all, remain a small part of the play), do pose the problem of what type of criteria make us, as readers, decide that a certain portion of the play is Shakespearean. Michael L. Hays is one of the few academic who wholeheartedly rejects the attribution of the handwriting to Shakespeare. See his arguments in ‘Shakespeare’s Hand Unknown in Sir Thomas More: Thompson, Dawson, and the Futility of the Paleographic Argument’, Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2016): 180–203. 45 John Jowett produced a remarkably lucid and rigorously edited version of the play in 2011, in which he discusses the authors and revisers, sources, stage history, textual issues, dating, and publication history: Sir Thomas More (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011). See also: XIII-B7; XV-A; XVI; XXI E. Cardenio and Double Falsehood It seems almost certain that Shakespeare co-wrote Cardenio with John Fletcher in 1612–13, and that a manuscript of the play was still extant in the 1650s. Glimpses of this otherwise lost play were provided in 1728 by the publication of Double Falsehood, claiming to be originally written by Shakespeare and adapted for the stage by Lewis Theobald. Yet, if we assume that this was originally Shakespeare’s play, it no doubt represents Cardenio only remotely, as the play was heavily rewritten by Theobald to meet the tastes of a post-Restoration stage. These are the odds against which attribution scholars have to work against. After a series of stylistic tests on Theobald’s play, MacDonald P. Jackson finds little or no evidence at all of Shakespeare presence in the eighteenth-century play (‘Looking for Shakespeare in Double Falsehood: Stylistic Evidence’, in The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play, ed. David Carnegie and Gary Taylor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 133–61). Marina Tarlinskaja uses, for her part, versification analysis on Double Falsehood and concludes that Theobald worked from a post-Restoration text, potentially adapted from the original Cardenio by Davenant (‘The Versification of Double Falsehood Compared to Restoration and Early Classical Adaptations’, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 385– 406). In the same Authorship Companion, Giuliano Pascucci compares similarities in authors’ 46 patterns of repetition (what he calls ‘compression analysis’) and argues that Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Massinger all contributed to a text that Theobald adapted (‘Using Compressibility as a Proxy for Shannon Entropy in the Analysis of Double Falsehood’, 407–16). The text of Lewis Theobald’s play was edited in 2010 by Brean Hammond as part of the Arden Shakespeare Third Series: Double Falsehood; or, The Distressed Lovers (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010). In the introduction, Hammond discusses the relation of the play to Cardenio, its authorship; state history, and printing history. See also: XV-A; XVI; XVIII-A to D F. Arden of Faversham The play was first published in 1592, 1599 and 1633 as an anonymous playbook and was first attributed to Shakespeare in mid-seventeenth printers’ catalogue. It was subsequently published in 1770 by Edward Jacob and attributed to Shakespeare. Although the play is not officially included in the canon, Jack Elliott and Brett Greatley-Hirsch contend (after submitting the text to the most advanced statistical and computational analyses) that Shakespeare is the primary, if not sole author of the play. (‘Arden of Faversham, Shakespearean Authorship, and “The Print of Many”’, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 139–81). See also: VI-D: XIV-B1c; XV-A, XXI G. The Henry VI plays Santiago Segarra et al. investigated the Henry VI trilogy, particularly the writing style and word choice of the plays and propose that Shakespeare collaborated with co-authors, such as 47 Christopher Marlowe. (See ‘Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays by Word Adjacency’, Shakespeare Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2014): 232–56). See also: XVI; XIV-B1 a to c; XXI XVI. Shakespeare and the text of his contemporaries; Shakespeare and collaboration As we shall see, collaboration is a subject much related to the previous sections of this bibliography on attribution studies and stylometry. Non-specialist readers may consult MacDonald P. Jackson’s ‘Collaboration’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 31–52. Jackson gives an overview of the topic of attribution particularly though his examination of plays frequently discussed in scholarship about Shakespeare as a collaborator: Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII, Cardenio, Pericles, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, Arden of Faversham, and Edward III. Gary Taylor and John V. Nance statistically analyze sections of Titus Andronicus and 1 Henry VI, distinguishing between Marlowe’s contributions as a collaborator and Shakespeare’s imitation of Marlowe’s style. Through careful inquiry they are able to tell when Shakespeare is imitating Marlowe as well as distinguish his writing from Marlowe’s. In passing, they confirm that Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Nashe collaborated on 1 Henry VI and that even early Shakespeare was distinct from his contemporaries (Gary Taylor and John V. Nance, ‘Imitation or Collaboration? Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare Canon’, Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015): 32–47). Also, through analysis, John Burrows and Hugh Craig conclude that Marlowe is the most likely co-author of Henry VI, part 3 and rules out Greene and Peele (‘The Joker in the Pack?: Marlowe, Kyd, and the Co-Authorship of Henry VI, Part 3’, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: 48 Authorship Companion, ed. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 194–217). In the same volume, and again through computer analysis, Hugh Craig (‘Shakespeare and Three Sets of Additions’, 241–45) argues that Spanish Tragedy additions were written by Shakespeare, Mucedorus additions were not, and concludes that ‘the result with the Sir Thomas More scene is less clear cut and must be less reliable in any case because of its length’ (245). Still in the same collection, Rory Loughnane disputes Laurie Maguire’s and Emma Smith’s argument for Middleton as co-author of All’s Well that Ends Well. Loughnane suggests that, rather, Middleton revised the play for later performance (‘Thomas Middleton in All’s Well That Ends Well? Part One’, 278–302). See also: XVIII-B7; XV-D, E, F, G; XVII-A to D; XXI XVII. Shakespearean style A. Accessible introductions and reference David Crystal’s Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (London and New York: Penguin, 2002) is the ultimate reference work in the domain. His book provides a glossary of difficult words in Shakespeare’s works, along with appendixes on diagrams of the social circles within each play; a list of characters’ names; persons (classical, mythological, historical, and the like); times; places; languages and dialects. What is more the contents of his book can be searched freely at: http://www.shakespeareswords.com/Default.aspx. See also: XV-A to C 49 B. Punctuation We have already cited a number of works touching on the subject (no book on Shakespeare’s language is devoid of a chapter on the topic). Yet J. Gavin Paul’s article, ‘Performance as “Punctuation”: Editing Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century’, Review of English Studies 61 (2010): 390–413, deserves attention in that he reverses the perspective on eighteenth century editors such as Nicholas Rowe, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, and Edward Capell, who generally dismissed performance practice but were nonetheless concerned with the dynamic relationship between page and stage. See also: XIII-B2; XV-A to C C. Shakespeare’s metre The metre of a line is its inner rhythmical system and it is easy to understand how an editor who needs to emend Shakespeare’s text should pay careful attention to it. George T. Wright’s Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988) has remained the long-time classic on the question. Wright studies the iambic pentameter line (the dominant metre of English verse with its five-stress or pentameter form), its relation to other patterns and, most of all, how it is used by Shakespeare and his actors to express meaning powerfully. Furthermore, in ‘Shakespeare’s Pentameter and the End of Editing’, Shakespeare (British Shakespeare Association) 3 (2007): 126–42, Peter Groves argues that today’s editors should recognize the flexible and subtle nature of Shakespeare’s metre as a tool to help create or reinforce the meaning of a passage. 50 See also: XIII-A 1 to 2; XV-A to C D. Scene and act divisions Alan C. Dessen presents an enlightening history of scene and act divisions in Shakespeare’s plays. He focuses on the convention of placing scene divisions at points where the stage has been cleared. Dessen also shows examples in which the same passage has been divided at various times into two, three, or five scenes (‘Divided Shakespeare: Configuring Acts and Scenes’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 332–41). See also: XIII-A1 and 2 XVIII. Dialects and foreign languages in Shakespeare A. Concise introductions for the general reader Paula Blank looks at different plays (King Lear, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Henry V) to show how characters discriminate among alternative versions of speech, how Shakespeare can sometimes seem concerned to regulate neologisms, and how he uses Welsh and French (‘Dialects in the Plays of Shakespeare’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s World, 1500–1660, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 219–23). Katie Wales explains Shakespeare’s use of ‘standard’ English, dialects, sociolects, and idiolects in ‘Varieties and Variation’, in Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language: A Guide, ed. Sylvia Adamson et al. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 192–209. 51 Finally, in ‘Foreign Language and Foreign-Language Learning’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s World, 1500–1660, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 198–204, Ton Hoenselaars contends that Shakespeare’s implementation of foreign languages (including Greek, Latin, and French) contributes significantly to his reputation as a master wordsmith. See also: XIII-B4 and 5; XVII-A to D; XXI B. More advanced studies 1. Linguistic-oriented studies Through a linguistic study of verb usage (specifically ‘do + verb’), as well as archaisms, Michael Ingham, claims that choices in syntax can represent distance and/or alterity, either with respect with the past or to a foreign context (‘Syntax and Subtext: Diachronic Variables, Displacement, and Proximity in the Verse Dramas of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries’, Shakespeare (British Shakespeare Association) 11, no. 2 (2015): 214–32). Considering to what extent Shakespeare was familiar with the Italian language, Jason Lawrence examines Shakespeare’s use of John Florio’s instruction manuals to discover the ways in which Shakespeare sought to acquire his knowledge of the language (‘Who the Devil Taught Thee so Much Italian?’: Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005)). See also: XV-A to C; XVII-A to D 2. Culturally-oriented studies 52 Adam McKeown analyses the presence of Latin and allusions to classical literature that display, in his view, both familiarity with and distance from the foreign language, as well as anxiety concerning the threat of domination posed by other cultures. (See ‘“Entreat Her Hear Me but a Word”: Translation and Foreignness in Titus Andronicus’, in The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Luise Von Flotow, and Daniel Russell (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2001), 203–18). Jean-Christophe Mayer believes that Henry V is rife with linguistic fragmentation, as well as linguistic distance and chaos in ‘The Ironies of Babel in Shakespeare’s Henry V’, in Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jean-Christophe Mayer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 127–41. His conclusion is that early modern England’s ambition to transform itself into a modern nation depended on its ability (or failure) to embrace other cultures fully. In her study of 1 Henry IV, Henry V, and Merry Wives of Windsor, Marianne Montgomery explores the use of foreign languages (including Welsh, French, Dutch, Spanish, Latin, and Irish) by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in scenes of national, civic, and social identity and in moments of cross-cultural contact (Europe’s Languages on England’s Stages, 1590– 1620 (Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). Contrary many scholars she contends that the language used on stage is not always xenophobic or prejudiced. According to Montgomery, the scenes she discusses ‘begin to imagine transnational communities based on shared values and interests and suggest that the commercial theater is especially well-equipped to model such communities’ (5). See also: XIII-B5; XVII-A to D XIX. Adapting, circulating and appropriating the text 53 A. Introduction Graham Holderness’s Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2003) had stressed that modern Shakespeare editions are always rewritings of what we call ‘Shakespeare’, that is, a collection of documents which cannot be linked with certainty with what their author wanted to say. Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier expand on this point in their exploration of the circulation of Shakespeare’s works from 1590 to 1619. Stallybrass and Chartier show that the ‘Shakespeare’ we tend to treat now as singular, has been composed by multiple historical agents (theatre companies, actors, publishers, compositors, editors), who have produced the plural Shakespeares that never cease to multiply (‘Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590–1619’, in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 35–56). See also: V-A to B; X; XXI B. Compilations and collections of Shakespeare’s early books Jeffrey Todd Knight explores a variety of early copies of Shakespeare’s works (such as the Bodleian volume that binds together Venus and Adonis, Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets) to point out judiciously that the meaning of Shakespeare’s works may sometimes stem from the specific way they have been gathered and bound together by their owners and readers, their collectors, their conservators and curators (‘Making Shakespeare’s Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in the Archives’, Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2009): 304–40). In Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey Todd Knight expands on this idea: 54 Shakespearean archival copies discussed include copies of 1 and 2 Henry IV, Rape of Lucrece, Sonnets, Pericles, and Venus and Adonis. See also: XIX-E C. Commonplacing The commonplacing of some Shakespearean early editions (that is, the marking of lines with marginal printed commas or inverted commas as a sign for readers to memorize them or copy them into their commonplace books) was clearly outlined a while ago by G. K. Hunter’s ‘The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances’, The Library s5- VI, no. 3–4 (1 December 1951): 171–88. Inspired by Hunter’s previous study, Margreta De Grazia showed how these marks could serve as invitations for readers to appropriate the book. They were ‘communal signs’, as opposed to the modern quotation mark that serves to fence off the property of another writer (Margreta De Grazia, ‘Shakespeare in Quotation Marks’, in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 57–71). Zachary Lesser’s and Peter Stallybrass’s ‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2008): 371–420 build on similar ideas to study the First Quarto of Hamlet. The two scholars focus on printed commonplace markers and argue that their presence could signify that the First Quarto was conceived as a literary text for reading and note-taking. See also: XIX-E; VI-B; XIII-B6 55 D. Adaptations The second part of the seventeenth century is sometimes considered as a period when Shakespeare popularity was on the wane and yet this is not Emma Depledge’s opinion. In ‘Playbills, Prologues, and Playbooks: Selling Shakespeare Adaptations, 1678–82’, Philological Quarterly 91, no. 2 (2012): 305–30, she notes the significance of the Exclusion Crisis (1678– 1681) as a critical moment for Shakespeare’s posthumous popularity. She explores his position in the print market for the twenty-two years after Charles II’s Restoration. Interestingly, she reveals the extent to which Shakespeare’s name was used in playbills, prologues, and printed editions to market adaptions of his plays. See also: III-D; XXI E. Print anthologies and miscellanies of Shakespeare Kate Rumbold’s ‘Shakespeare Anthologies’ (in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare: The World’s Shakespeare, 1660–Present, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1688–94) is an accessible point of entry into the subject. Rumbold is interested in how these anthologies affected reading practices and remarks that they represented attempts at selecting ‘bits’ of Shakespeare aimed at a particular audience, rather than efforts to present his works as a whole. Christopher Salamone examines the eighteenth-century printed miscellany and finds it to be a mix of editorial, didactic, and performative uses of Shakespeare. Overall, the miscellany furnishes proof that Shakespeare can sometimes be learned through scraps or fragments of text (‘“The Fragments, Scraps, the Bits and Greasy Relics”: Shakespeare and the Eighteenth- Century Poetic Miscellany’, Eighteenth-Century Life 41, no. 1 (2017): 7–31). 56 See also: XX-C; XXI XX. The history of Shakespearean book owners and readers Readers are part of why Shakespeare’s text continues to be printed and edited today. Because of the changes (in the form of marginalia, notes, etc.), which they introduce to these material objects, one could say that, to some extent, readers make books. See also: IV A. Accessible and concise introductions Three accessible essays will give readers a concise and informed overview of the subject: Sonia Massai, ‘Early Readers’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 143–61, for reading strategies in particular; Sasha Roberts gives special attention to Frances Wolfreston’s (bap. 1607–1677) copy of Venus and Adonis and Mary Lewis’s (fl. 1685) copy of the First Folio in ‘Reading the Shakespearean Text in Early Modern England’, Critical Survey 7 (1995): 299–306; Claire M. L. Bourne’s ‘Marking Shakespeare’, Shakespeare (British Shakespeare Association) 13, no. 4 (2017): 367–86 is concerned mostly with annotated First Folios and methodological caveats. See also: XX-C B. Historical surveys The two comprehensive surveys on Shakespeare’s readers are: Jean-Christophe Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge 57 University Press, 2018), in which he studies annotated books and significant manuscripts with Shakespearean extracts over two centuries and Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), who traces the textual transmission and the history of readership of Shakespeare’s poems in England before 1700. Akihiro Yamada’s Experiencing Drama in the English Renaissance: Readers and Audiences (New York: Routledge, 2017) argues that the flowering of the English Renaissance was in part fostered by the emergence of a new class of readers. Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote for readers as well as audiences. Yamada’s book focuses mainly on Shakespeare’s First Folio readers. William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) looks at prices, print runs, intellectual property from over fifty publishing and printing archives. His study reveals that Shakespeare’s works had not been made available to ordinary readers (due to the monopoly system) until 1774, when perpetual intellectual property was ended. In Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers, 1800–1900 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Andrew Murphy charts the growth and decline of Shakespeare’s working-class readership in nineteenth-century Britain. He studies the impact of the expansion of elementary education and the publishing of inexpensive editions on the increase in readership up until the end of the nineteenth century, and concludes by addressing the implications of the fact that Shakespeare no longer commands a general popular audience in the ensuing period. Alan R. Young produces a survey of printing, editing, illustration, publication, and marketing of Victorian Shakespeare editions from Charles Knight, Robert Tyas, George 58 Routledge, John Cassell, and John Dicks in Steam-Driven Shakespeare or Making Good Books Cheap: Five Victorian Illustrated Editions (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2017). See also: III-A, C and D C. Methodology: reading readers Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy, xii, 322 pp. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005) is an excellent introduction to the methodology and practice of material studies in the field of the history of reading. Brayman defends a history of reading centred on the traces left by merchants and maidens, gentlewomen and servants, adolescents and matrons – precisely those readers whose entry into the print marketplace provoked debate and changed the definition of literacy. William Sherman’s Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) is especially commendable for devoting the first part of his book to a complete methodology of reading readers’ marks (3–67), which represents an absolute must-read for anyone seeking to carrying out research in the field. In The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), Stephen Orgel also provides historical details about how early modern readers interacted with their books in his focus on annotation and marginalia. His Shakespeare examples are centred mostly on the First Folio and how some of these copies were used. See also: IV; VI-C D. Early female readers 59 Shakespeare’s early female readership, remains a subject still under-represented, despite the labours of a number of scholars, amongst whom, Sasha Roberts. Roberts explores the relationship between seventeenth-century domestic, private reading spaces and female subjectivity, focusing on Venus and Adonis, a poem branded as risquée literature by society (‘Shakespeare “Creepes into the Women’s Closets about Bedtime”: Women Reading in a Room of Their Own’, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 30–63). See also her ‘Reading Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra in Early Modern England’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works (Blackwell, 2003), 1: 108–33. In ‘Engendering the Female Reader: Women’s Recreational Reading of Shakespeare in Early Modern England’, in Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 36–54, Roberts further observes that the male trivialization of women’s reading of Shakespeare in the early seventeenth century as merely recreational, directed at salacious pleasure, not intellectually or spiritually profitable, was altogether out of step by the 1630s. By the end of the century female readers clearly constituted a part of an urban, metropolitan elite, with increasingly critical interest in issues of spiritual, historical, and social concerns in the plays. Sae Kitamura confirms this and also enlarges the period under study to the eighteenth century. In ‘A Shakespeare of One’s Own: Female Users of Playbooks from the Seventeenth to the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Palgrave Communications 3 (2017): 1–9, Kitamura focuses on female annotating, editing, signing, and attaching ex libris to books. See also: VI-D and VI-I2 60 E. Specific book collections Readers seeking to access specific collections and obtain more information on how a particular set of books was assembled may begin with the two following essays, which are accessible and informative. Steven K. Galbraith in ‘Collectors’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ed. Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 137–54, gives examples of how buying, collecting, and owning Shakespeare’s First Folio changed over time and studies the move from private to institutional collections. Alan H. Nelson supplies an annotated and detailed list of individuals who, by 1616, owned at least one book by Shakespeare in ‘Shakespeare and the Bibliophiles: From the Earliest Years to 1616’, in Owners, Annotators, and the Signs of Reading, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll; London: British Library, 2005), 49–73. Nicholas D. Smith examines the formation and dispersal of the library of one of the foremost figures in English eighteenth-century theatre, the actor and playwright David Garrick (1717– 1779) in his An Actor’s Library: David Garrick, Book Collecting, and Literary Friendships (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2017). Smith reveals in particular that Garrick was a central force in building interest in quarto plays of Shakespeare. More generally, information on early modern private libraries can be obtained both from paper volumes and through R. J. Fehrenbach’s, Michael Poston’s, and Heather Wolfe’s free database, ‘PLRE.Folger: Private Libraries in Renaissance England’ accessible at https://plre.folger.edu/. Readers should note that the online information complements (and does not replace) the printed volumes of Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE). See also: VI-C and D; III-A, C and D 61 XXI. The establishment of the Shakespearean canon By tracing the history of anthologies of non-Shakespearean dramas, Jeremy Lopez is able to show the role they played in canon formation (Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Conversely, Lopez reveals how the Shakespearean aesthetic shaped approaches to these non-Shakespearean works. Peter Kirwan takes a different angle on a shorter period of time: he surveys the printing history of Shakespeare from 1640 to 1740 to demonstrate how publication shaped the Shakespearean canon during that age (‘Consolidating the Shakespeare Canon, 1640–1740’, in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640–1740, ed. Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 81–88). By focusing on John Benson’s (d. 1667) career as a stationer and publisher, Faith Acker argues that John Benson’s 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems helped construct Shakespeare as a canonical poet (Faith Acker, ‘John Benson’s 1640 Poems and Its Literary Precedents’, in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640–1740, ed. Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 89–106). Edmund G. C. King explores the use of ‘connoisseurial rhetoric’ (130) by Shakespearean editors and critics over the course of the eighteenth century. King contends that the rhetoric managed to shape the canonicity of Shakespeare’s works because editors felt they could identify his ‘personal style’ (131). See ‘Discovering Shakespeare’s Personal Style: Editing and Connoisseurship in the Eighteenth Century’, in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640–1740, ed. Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 130–42. Finally, Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane provide an extremely useful and detailed analytical summary of current scholarship on the chronology and current state of the 62 Shakespearean canon: ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works’, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 417–602. See also: III-A, C and D; VI-I 1 and 2; XII; XVII-A to D; XIX-E