Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

No text of Shakespeare’s has ever appeared without, in some sense, being “edited.” Indeed, the playwright may have been his own first editor, if (as seems likely) he himself brought the narrative poem Venus and Adonis to the Stratford-born printer Richard Field for publication in 1593. Every text that came to print in quarto needed some element of preparation before it reached publication, and so too did the First Folio and the three further collected editions which followed it in 1632, 1663/4, and 1685. We know what the folio editors did, thanks to an extensive study carried out by N. W. Black and Matthias Shaaber (1937). In their Shakespeare’s Seventeenth-Century Editors, 1632–1685, they track the changes made by the anonymous printshop workers who helped to shape the text of the plays by, for example, retrieving Greek and Roman names that had been scrambled in F1, correcting obvious typographical errors, and even adding entrances and exits.While we know what work these early editors carried out, we do not know their identities, nor do we really know what explicit “program” they were following as editors. Black and Shaaber have proposed (specifically of those involved in editing F4) that “their object was to produce a creditable specimen of the printer’s art and a book that buyers could read with ease” (1937: 59) and, intuitively, it seems right to think that the earliest of Shakespeare’s ... log in or subscribe to read full text