Year's Work in English Studies 1999: Shakespeare: Editions and Textual Studies

    Three major critical editions appeared this year: King Henry VI Part 2 edited by by Ronald Knowles and The Tempest edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, both for the third Arden series, and King Henry VIII or All is True edited by Jay L. Halio for the Oxford Shakespeare. 2 Henry 6 exists in two substantive editions, the 1623 Folio and a quarto of 1594 (STC 26099), and so the inclusive practices of the third Arden series editors (Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan) dictate that the one not taken as the control text is printed in reduced photofacsimile as an appendix. Here the 1594 quarto is thus reproduced in admirable clarity, which is particularly convenient since it is one of the few items in the Pollard and Redgrave Short Title Catalogue which, although available in the University Microfilms International (now Bell & Howell) Early English Books collections of microfilms, has yet to be digitized for Bell & Howell's Early English Books Online project.

    Knowles's critical introduction to 2 Henry 6 pays considerable attention to E. M. W. Tillyard's work and balances it with Philip Brockbank's introduction of Machiavellianism to the debate, which aspect Tillyard entirely ignored. Knowles argues that we, like Shakespeare's audience, need to understand both views to see how the history plays, and their sources the prose chronicles, put providentialism and Machiavellianism into conflict. Whenever providence appears to be at work in 2 Henry 6, argues Knowles, something comic undermines it. The historical Richard 2 promoted trial by combat which was supposed to be reserved for cases in which witnesses and evidence were not available--cases of one man's word against another--and the practice reached its height under Henry 6. Trial by combat was brought into disrepute by fifteenth-century cases in which the fighters were not nobles, including one of a friar versus a woman. The fight of Horner and Peter in 2 Henry 6 is thus a burlesque: the weapons are not knightly, and one competitor is drunk, the other terrified. The providential outcome of this 'trial' is merely the consequence of drunken over-confidence.

    Shakespeare, like the contemporary propagandists, conflated Cade's 1450 rebellion with that of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw in 1381, whence Shakespeare's anti-literate and anti-lawyer Jack Cade; the historical Cade was intelligent and literate. Shakespeare's Henry 6 has much in common with Cade, which latter part Knowles thinks Will Kemp played because Weaver says "his breath stinks with eating toasted cheese" (4.7.10) and Kemp was said to be a cheese-eater in Pilgrimage to Parnassus (1598). Kemp kept an ironic distance between player and role: the clown can mock the part he is playing, and when Cade is defeated this is not simply containment but is rather the triumph of the anarchic clown over his role which, in Bakhtinian terms, is dialogized. Knowles's critical introduction is extensive and rather than merely reporting the critical debate he engages with it and produces a coherent and historically sensitive argument.

    Knowles takes as his control text for 2 Henry 6 the Folio of 1623, which appears to have been printed from authorial papers, rather than Q1 which appears to derive from a memorial reconstruction of the script by those who acted in it. The strongest piece of evidence for memorial reconstruction in Q1 is that York speaks a bungled version of his genealogical claim to the crown. Never mind that what he says is historically wrong, it is absurdly confused in a way which no dramatist would conceivably write but which might easily arise in an actor's recollection. Q2 and Q3 are reprints of Q1, but the situation is complicated by the fact that in isolated parts F appears to abandon its manuscript copy and draw upon one of the quartos (possible Q3). The previous Arden edition by Andrew S. Cairncross (1957) made a complex hypothesis about F's printers using Q2 and Q3 as copy, in the form of a scrapbook of detached printed pages with extensive manuscript addition and correction. Knowles rejects all this as absurdly unwieldy (pp. 129-31) and hence unlikely to be the time-saving device which Cairncross, convinced that compositors would have preferred printed to manuscript copy, had imagined. Steven Urkowitz argued that the quarto and Folio are distinct versions of the play, not 'pristine' (F) and 'garbled' (Q) texts as has been assumed, and pointed out that the memorial reconstruction explanation of Q1 has a problem: several of its stage directions are extremely close in wording to F's (the supposed authorial version) and while actors might recall their lines with great accuracy they are hardly likely to hit upon the same form of words to describe stage action (''If I Mistake in Those Foundations Which I Build Upon': Peter Alexander's Textual Analysis of Henry VI Parts 2 and 3', ELR 18[1988] 230-56).

    What about revision between Q1 and Q3? Editing the play for his PhD thesis, William Montgomery found 176 substantive variants, of which all but six can be explained as printing house error or correction or sophistication. One of these is York's bungled genealogy in Q1 which survives in Q2 but is fixed in Q3 ('The Contention of York and Lancaster: A Critical Edition', Unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford[1985]). The five others, printed by Knowles in his Appendix Two, Montgomery showed could be the result of casting-off error in Q1--the printer threw a line or two away to save space--or else could be press variants in Q1 which no extant copy happens to witness. If these five are thus explained away, the revised York genealogy is the single remaining substantive variant, in which case it might have been fixed in Q3 simply by reference to a chronicle or by asking someone who knew the F text of the play. Montgomery considered Thomas Pavier's copy for printing Q3 and decided that it was an example of Q1 into which someone, knowing the play in performance, had written the six 'corrections' needed; he rejected as less likely the possibility that Q1 was simply annotated by reference to the promptbook or that Pavier had the promptbook (p. 133).

    Knowles dismisses Montgomery's theory of auditory correction by quoting the Q1/Q3 variant at 2.1.10-14:

My Lord Protectors Hawke done towre so well,
He knows his maister loues to be aloft.
    Humphrey. Faith my Lord, it is but a base minde
That can sore no higher than a Falkons pitch.
(Q1, TLN 561-4)

My Lord Protectors hawkes do towre so well.
They know their master sores a Faulcons pitch.
    Hum. Faith my Lord, it's but a base minde,
That sores no higher than a bird can sore.
(Q3, 18)

Surely, argues Knowles, no-one could spot "the very slight transposition and variation of half-lines to different speakers in Q3"; one would need "documentary evidence" to make such a change. Knowles thinks that at the same time the annotator of Q1 saw the York genealogy error and fixed it, and also corrected other errors using "the original foul papers of the report, or the prompt-copy [of the memorial reconstruction]" (p. 134). Knowles's explanation of close verbal correspondence of Q and F stage directions (such as the beadle striking Simon, his leaping over the stool, and running away in 2.1), which Urkowitz found conclusive evidence against memorial reconstruction, is that at these points Q was used as copy for F. A corollary of this view is that at these points one must put away F and use Q as the basis of a modern edition. Knowles is not certain what kind of manuscript was used to make the great majority of F which was not based on Q. Knowles reports, but does not explicitly agree with, W. W. Greg's view that the indeterminate stage direction ("Enter Cade . . . with infinite numbers" 4.2.28.1-2 and "Enter multitudes with halters about their necks" 4.9.9) show that F's copy was authorial foul papers, nor does he agree that variable speech prefixes, neglected necessary entrances, tentative stage directions, and vague staging instruction show this.

    There appear to be prompter's annotations for sound effects in F and Greg thought that the entrance of "Beuis, and Iohn Holland" in 4.2, the latter being the name of one of Strange's men, could not be authorial. Roger Warren, engaged on the Oxford Shakespeare edition of this play, has an alternative explanation that Holland's name comes from the play's source, not from an actor, and Bevis's name comes from a mythological figure (again, not an actor); this explanation appears in an article published in 2000 which will be discussed at length in next year's survey. Knowles sees censorship at 2.1.38 where Q's reference to Winchester's bastardy is excluded from F and at 3.1.281-3 where Q has a reference to "wilde Onele" rebelling in Ireland. Knowles in both cases follows F, omitting the accusation of bastardy and the reference to Irish rebel O'Neill. The bastardy remark Knowles thinks could be an unauthorized actor's gag, but of the reference to Irish rebel O'Neill he writes "Obviously, as Cairncross surmised, this passage in Q had to be censored." (p. 140). It is not clear how or where Knowles thinks this censorship happened. If Q was based on a memorial reconstruction then "Onele" was what was performed (hence was not censored for the stage) and since Q1 was the copy for Q3 (which retains the "Onele reference") it was not censored there either. F's not having this cannot be due to censorship if F was printed from papers reflecting a state of the play earlier than that underlying Q1. Knowles includes this "Onele" variant in Appendix Two as an example of Q1/F difference and mentions that it is an echo of Marlowe's Edward 2, and also in Appendix Three as an example of memorial recollection of another play, namely Edward 2. Here Knowles is unreasonably sitting on the fence: if its presence in Q and absence in F is because of censorship then it cannot also be a reporter's accidental recollection of Edward 2, as his appendices have it and as Warren believes. For the Oxford Complete Works, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor restored the Winchester bastardy remark because it might be a case of censorship, which distortions they sought to reverse, or it might be authorial addition later than the foul papers which made F, the kind of pre-first performance addition they wanted to include. But Wells and Taylor did not restore the "wilde Onele" reference, which they did not think was a case of censorship.

    Knowles admits his dependence on New Bibliographical terminology and gives the final word to Paul Werstine's argument that New Bibliography's categories and assumptions are not supported by the surviving textual evidence: ". . .  there can be no certainty", writes Knowles, "in discriminating among the possible various agents whose interventions may stand between authorial manuscripts and the printed texts of Q and F." (p. 141). In light of such uncertainty one can appreciate the desire to reproduce all of Q1 in photo-facsimile, but the danger is surely that taken to an extreme this becomes dereliction of editorial duty since most readers are not well equipped to choose between variants and editors ought not give the impression that anyone's guess is as good as another's. The compendious appendices of variants provided here are admirable in allowing readers to see what textual options the editor rejected, but they might have been better presented. Appendix Two is particularly difficult to use: horizontal rules would have helped to associate labels (such as "2.1 This edition") with their accompanying quotations. The legal numbering system (1.1 to 14.2) of what are in fact fourteen variant cases looks too much like act and scene numbering and, unexplained in the text, the numbering is most confusing. Appendix Two contains a list of fourteen Q1/F variants followed by a list of five Q1/Q3 variants, and the latter should have been made a separate appendix because as it stands one cannot easily tell if one is looking at the first or second list.

    Textually, Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan were bound to have an easier time editing The Tempest since there is only the Folio text to rely upon. Before considering the textual work, it is worth noting some oddities in the critical introduction. It is surely strange to assert that at the end of the play Prospero "sets Ariel free ahead of schedule" (p. 26) with no mention of the equally plausible view that he burdens Ariel with yet another onerous and all unlooked-for task: "calm seas, auspicious gales, / And sail so expeditious that shall catch / Your royal fleet far off. (Aside to Ariel) My Ariel, chick, That is thy charge" (5.1.315-8). Likewise it is odd to assert that Miranda "remains the chaste ideal of early modern womanhood" (p. 27) and yet then to explore her inconsistent counting of how many men she knows, shifting from the inclusion of Caliban at 1.2.446 (within an aside, hence truthful?) to his exclusion when speaking directly to Ferdinand at 3.1.50-52. In their exploration of what kind of stereotype Caliban might be, the Vaughans call negative representations of Africans "derogatory" but those of the Irish "defamatory" (pp. 50-1), which sounds slightly less indignant, as though the anti-Irish stereotype had an element of truth which should not, however, be mentioned. Imperfect familiarity with early modern Irish scholarship is suggested by the misspelling of Andrew Hadfield's name (p. 54n1). However, the Vaughans tell a fine story (pp. 98-108) of how in the early twentieth century, especially outside Europe and North America, The Tempest came to be seen as a story of colonialism; it is easy now to assume that this interpretation arose from New Historicism and Cultural Materialism.

    Concerning the underlying copy for the Folio, the Vaughans assert that Ralph Crane, the King's men's scribe, probably used "authorial rough draft" since "Prompt copy, with its barely legible insertions, deletions and impromptu stage directions would have posed serious problems for the typesetters" (p. 126). These days one expects supporting authority or evidence for such bald assertions of the differences between authorial papers and prompt copy, especially as use of the latter term (instead of the more neutral 'playbook') implies adherence to New Bibliographical principles which are everywhere under attack. The editors report that Crane "habitually listed the play's dramatis personae at the end of the text" (p. 127) as in The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, Othello, and The Winter's Tale and that these lists provide potted character descriptions which might be Shakespeare's own or else Crane's dramatic observations. It is worth noting that the personal name Vincentio given for the Duke in Measure for Measure cannot be a dramatic observation since no-one calls him this in the script. Describing features of the Folio text the Vaughans suggest that the difference between Prospero and Prosper is one of spelling, as is the difference between u/v and i/j (p. 130). This is to use 'spelling' in an unhelpfully broad sense since the u/v and i/j differences arise because the old convention employed letter shapes differently from the new convention--place in the word, rather than sound, then determining the shape used--but they meant by these the same sound as in modern usage. The difference between Prospero and Prosper is a much more significant shift since it changes vocalization and hence meter. In the same category as Prospero/Prospero is the Isabel/Isabella shift in Measure for Measure but not Helen/Helena in All's Well the Ends Wells since Helena appears only once and in a stage direction which probably reflects first draft intentions.

    Two textual cruces receive special treatment in the introduction. Miranda's "Abhorred slave . . ." speech (1.2.352-363) has in the past been given by editors to Prospero, despite F's clear speech prefix for Miranda, because it seemed indecorous for her to speak about the attempted rape (pp. 135-6). The Vaughans of course give it to Miranda. More tricky is Ferdinand's exclamation upon seeing the masque: "Let me live here ever! /  So rare a wondered father and a wise / Makes this place paradise" (4.1.122-4). Jeanne Addison Roberts argued that the 's' in F's "wise" is a broken type and the word is really "wife", but Peter W. M. Blayney has shown that, like many of Charlton Hinman's claimed broken pieces of type, this is in fact a case of imperfect inking of unbroken type. The Vaughans speculate, perhaps needlessly, that Shakespeare might still have written "wife" but either Ralph Crane misread his manuscript and so produced "wife" in his transcript used to make F, or the Folio compositor had a misplaced letter 's' lurking in his 'f' typecase compartment and so meant to set 'wife' but set 'wise' instead (pp. 136-8).

    In the explanatory notes to the text, the Vaughans unwisely rely on Keith Sturgess's Jacobean Private Theatre for a suggestion about how the play's opening stage direction might have been realized: "A sea machine (pebbles in a drum) could echo the ocean's sounds and a wind machine (a loose length of canvas turned on a wheel) could create gusts". Indeed such machines could make the required sounds, but there is no evidence that the Shakespearian theatres used them; we know only of rolled balls, drums, and squibs. The editors think that when Prospero says "Go make thyself like a nymph of 'th' sea . . . Go take this shape" (1.2.302-4) he hands over a costume which Ariel exits to put on and returns. Ariel has only twelve lines, or about thirty seconds, to get back on in the costume so there seems to be too little time for this business. Moreover at 1.2.318 Prospero expresses pleasure at the costume ("Fine apparition") which is an odd thing to say if he has just handed it over and knows what it looks like. Ariel is a shape-changer and does not need Prospero to give him costumes. The Vaughans do not mention that around Prospero's original instruction ("Go make thyself . . .") the meter is faulty and something has probably dropped out of the text, hence the strange instruction that Ariel remain visible to himself ("Be subject / To no sight but thine and mine"). Stephen Orgel, editing the play for the Oxford Shakespeare, suggested that here are accidentally omitted the instructions about the spirits who sing "Come unto these yellow sands" and it is they who were to remain invisible to all but Ariel and Prospero. If Prospero does hand Ariel the sea-nymph costume, as the Vaughans believe, it presumably comes from the stock which later supplies the trumpery with which he snares Trinculo and Stephano. A final first act oddity is the Vaughans's gloss of Prospero's claim that "Sycorax / Could not again undo" (1.2.290-91) the imprisonment of Ariel, which they take to mean she had not the power to revoke her own spells (they repeat the claim on page 66). More likely this "could not" refers to her death since the context is Prospero's finding of Ariel. No doubt Prospero's reference to the "help of her more potent ministers" (1.2.275) led the Vaughans to this conclusion, but it needs greater argument than given here.

    For the problematic stage direction "Enter Prospero on the top, invisible" (3.3.17) the Vaughans follow Orgel's Oxford edition and quote his explanation that "the top" was a "technical term for the level above the upper stage gallery within which the musicians sat". This is misleading: no such level exists in modern models of the open-air or indoor hall playhouses. John Cranford Adams posited a third-level music-room above the upper playing place at the Globe and his student Irwin Smith did the same for the Blackfriars. Such a third-level room would suit this moment in The Tempest and also the direction in 1 Henry 6: "Enter Joan la Pucelle on the top, thrusting out a torch burning" (3.3.8). Adams's and Smith's third-level music rooms have been disproved with much sound argument by Richard Hosley ('The Gallery Over the Stage in the Public Playhouse of Shakespeare's Time', SQ 8[1957] 15-31; 'Was There a Music-room in Shakespeare's Globe?', ShSurv 13[1960] 113-23; 'The Playhouses', in Clifford Leech and T. W. Craik, eds. The Revels History of Drama in English 3: 1576-1613, pp. 119-235) and C. Walter Hodges (The Globe Restored: A Study of the Elizabethan Theatre, pp. 87-90). Written in 1592, 1 Henry 6 was intended for open-air amphitheatre performance. The place from which the torch is seen is described as "yonder turret" (3.3.13) by the Bastard, and Joan has to appear "within . . . on the walls" (3.5.0) at the beginning of the next scene. Taken together these descriptions make it difficult to imagine that the "top" is part of the first-floor gallery which also represents "on the walls". The solution of an adjacent balcony would certainly suffice for 1 Henry 6 at an open-air amphitheatre, but is less satisfactory at the Blackfriars where communication between the tiring-house gallery and the public galleries is problematic. However, Richard Hosley's suggestion that the Blackfriars' side galleries connected with the sides of the tiring-house ('The Playhouses', in Clifford Leech and T. W. Craik, eds. The Revels History of Drama in English 3: 1576-1613, pp. 119-235) makes it a possibility. In the case of 1 Henry 6 the use of an adjacent public gallery is plausible at an open-air amphitheatre, and if Hosley is correct about the conjunction of the public galleries and the tiring-house at the Blackfriars then this explanation will do for The Tempest also.

    The full Folio direction for Prospero's invisible entrance is this:

Solemne and strange Musicke: and Prosper on the top (inuisible:) Enter seuerall strange shapes bringing in a Banket; and dance about it with gentle actions of salutations, and inuiting the King, &c. to eate, they depart.

The stage direction clearly conflates events occurring while the succeeding lines of dialogue are spoken, these lines have implicit points of reaction:

Seb. I say to night: no more.
Al. What harmony is this? my good friends, harke.
Gon Maruellous sweet Musicke.
Alo. Giue vs kind keepers, heauens: what were these?
Seb. A liuing Drolerie: now I will beleeue
(TLN 1539-43)

Because Alonso says "what were these", using the past tense, the Vaughans "see no merit" in breaking the stage direction into its parts and distributing them through the dialogue in order to synchronize stage business and speech, as other editors have done. They must mean that Alonzo's use of past tense indicates that the spirits complete the actions of the stage direction almost before anyone reacts to it. This is absurd since Alonso's "What harmony is this?" is clearly a response to the "Solemne and strange Musicke". There is time for a response from Gonzalo concerning the music before the "strange shapes" are noticed by Alonso. Orgel and, for the Complete Works John Jowett, moved the second sentence ("Enter seuerall strange shapes . . . the depart") to after Gonzalo's comment upon the music (3.3.19). This still leaves in one place the direction for action that continues over the next twenty lines, since Gonzalo describes them as though they were still present on the stage ("Their manners are more gentle") at 3.3.32 (TLN 1556), and it is not until 3.3.39 that Prospero's says they are "departing" and then Francisco comments that "They vanished strangely!" (3.3.40, TLN 1567).

    The same compression of several actions into a single stage direction, apparently one of Crane's habits, occurs when Prospero breaks up the masque in 4.1:

Enter certaine Reapers (properly habited:) they ioyne with
    the Nimphes, in a gracefull dance, towards the end where-
    of, Prospero starts sodainly and speakes, after which to a
    strange hollow and confused noyse, they heauily vanish.
    Pro. I had forgot the that foule conspiracy
Of the beast Calliban, and his confederates
Against my life: the minute of their plot
Is almost come: Well done, auoid: no more.
(TLN 1805-12)

Clearly Prospero's 'start' and what he "speakes" occur as he begins "I had forgot . . . almost come" and the stage direction's "after which" means that the confused noise and the spirits departure accompany Prospero's "Well done, auoid: no more". The Vaughans do not break up the compressed stage direction, but realizing that the spirits leave when Prospero says "avoid" they add an editorial exit direction there. This is absurd duplication since having left the original stage direction intact the Vaughans have already made them vanish. To be fair Orgel did the same in the Oxford Shakespeare and furthermore he forgot to mention the nymphs in his exit direction, but this is avoidance of the editor's task. The Vaughans make no attempt to explain the "strange hollow and confused noise" which presumably has a connection with the "confused noise" of the ship seeming to split in the first scene, where the sound might simply be the combined effect of the sailors' cries. The word 'hollow' is used on two other occasions in the play, both connected with voices: Sebastian's "Even now we heard a hollow burst of bellowing, / Like bulls, or rather lions" (2.1.316-7), and Ferdinand's "If [I speak] hollowly, invert / What best is boded me to mischief!" (3.1.70-1). This hollow/voice connection lends weight to a suggestion made privately by Stanley Wells that "hollow" might be a noun (OED n. hollow) so that "a strange hollow and confused noyse" might indicate a shout and a sound effect.

    For the problem of what Ariel is to hang the "glistering apparel" upon, the Vaughans retain the Folio's "line" (a spelling of 'lind') rather than the common emendation to "lime", but a director who checks the footnote will avoid the error of running a washing line from the back of Prospero's cell. This scene ends with the exit of Ariel and Prospero who re-entry at the start of the next scene (5.1), which would violate the so-called Law of Re-entry were it not for the intervening act interval. Here the Vaughans see a problem where none exists, reassuring the reader that if Prospero "merely donned a clock, the quick change would not have disrupted continuous staging at the Globe. At the Blackfriars a musical interval could have allowed the actor time to exit and change his costume". Since they earlier cited Gary Taylor and John Jowett's Shakespeare Reshaped: 1606-1623 they ought to know that by the time The Tempest was written the Globe was using act intervals not "continuous staging", by which they mean 'continuous performance'. At the end of the scene they consider the freeing of Ariel and the infamous 'spit' by which Simon Russell Beale (Ariel) signalled the release of pent-up anger at his master's treatment in Sam Mendes's 1993-4 Royal Shakespeare Company production, wrongly dated here 1994-5 although correctly given in the introduction.

    Jay L. Halio's introduction to the Oxford Shakespeare Henry 8 is considerably shorter than is usual these days, and thus in line with guidelines of the general editor Stanley Wells. Halio gives a useful historical summary of the split from Rome, including Henry's desire for a divorce from Katherine of Aragon, and which parts of this history Shakespeare and Fletcher dramatized (pp. 1-8). Regarding the absence of discussion of clerical reform in the play, Halio thinks that maybe "Shakespeare's moderate anti-Catholicism" brushing up against Fletcher's strong Protestantism caused them not to tackle theological issues, but one might expect at least an acknowledgement of the growing view that Shakespeare's concealed Catholicism was the real reason (p. 9). Halio implicitly distances himself from "some scholars" who think the play was called All is True when first performed, Henry 8 being the name imposed by the generic categorization of the 1623 Folio, and he understates the case by dividing between two footnotes (p. 17) the evidence about the play's title and new evidence about the Globe fire: a letter found by Maija Jannson Cole ('A New Account of the Burning of the Globe', SQ 32[1981] 352) and a manuscript annotation found by H. R. Woudhuysen ('King Henry VIII and 'All is True'', N&Q 229[1984] 217-8). In fact the new evidence about the fire make it certain that All is True was the stage title, and Halio's term "subtitle" is quite wrong (p. 5). Halio considers the view that the play would have been particularly appropriate as one of the court performances of February 1613 to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine, although it is not in the surviving list. Perhaps, Halio wonders, it was cancelled at the last minute "and staged later" at the Globe, where after all it was "a new play" on 29 June 1613 (p. 16). Halio's reasoning is faulty here: performance before the public always preceded performance at court.

    Halio devotes just one paragraph to the nature of the copy underlying F, the only substantive text of the play, and he follows standard New Bibliography without demur (p. 21). Halio decides that the underlying manuscript was probably not a prompt book and cites J. D. Wilson's view that the variant speech prefixes "are not of an elaborately 'functional' kind". Presumably too late to be included in this discussion were Robert F. Kennedy's convincing demonstration that type shortage produced variant speech prefixes in Shakespeare quartos ('Speech Prefixes in Some Shakespearean Quartos', PBSA 92[1998] 177-209) or the collection of essays edited by George Walton Williams on Shakespeare's Speech-Headings. Halio moves quickly to a lengthy plot summary with critical commentary (pp. 24-38) and a study of the language of the play (pp. 38-45). The section on the play in performance from 1613 to the present (pp. 45-61) has rather trite comments about the relevance of its political message, asking "is consistency merely a literary invention" which rulers can do without? One might expect a more sophisticated examination of the play's engagement with debates about governance.

    There are few surprises in Halio's decisions about particular cruces. Where the Oxford Complete Works has Cardinal Wolsey say "My endeavours / Have ever come too short of my desires, / Yet filed with my abilities. (3.2.170-2), using Hanmer's emendation of F's "fill'd" to "filed", Halio reverts to F's reading on the grounds that it makes perfect sense: one's underachieving endeavours can nonetheless be filled with one's abilities. Likewise Halio follows F in having Suffolk tell Wolsey of the writ "To forfeit all your goods, lands, tenements, Castles, and whatsoever" (3.2.343-4) rather than follow Theobald's emendation of "Castles" to "Chattels" which C. J. Sisson approved in New Readings in Shakespeare, p. 101 and which the Oxford Complete Works confirmed. Instead Halio implements R. A. Foakes's argument, editing the play for Arden second series, that "castles" are a suitable climax to the list "goods, lands, tenements" and that Wolsey did indeed build palaces at Hampton Court and York, although having made this convincing case Foakes did not restore F's reading. Halio again follows Foakes's approval of F's reading in having Patience say of Katherine "How pale she looks, / And of an earthy cold?" (4.2.98-9). The Oxford Complete Works used W. S. Walker's proposed emendation to "earthly colour" because the remark is about appearance not temperature. Foakes argued that the remark is about looking like death, at which moment the four elements in the body were thought to separate with air and fire ascending and the earth, cold and dry, descending. For this Foakes cited 1 Henry 4 "the earthy and cold hand of death" (5.4.83). The disyllable 'colour' restores the metre but Foakes argued that a beat can be skipped here for dramatic effect.

    Only one monograph is noted this year, Shakespeare After Theory by David Scott Kastan, one of the Arden Shakespeare general editors, which contains three relevant chapters, each of which forms a separate essay. The first is "The Mechanics of Culture: Editing Shakespeare Today" (pp. 59-70). New Bibliography, often now accused of idealizing authorial intention, is partly exculpated by Kastan's observation of Greg's admission that having the Shakespeare manuscripts would not solve the editorial problems since if they were foul papers they would contain unresolved tangles and if promptbooks they would contain things not attributable to Shakespeare. This sounds like open-eyed pragmatism to me, but Kastan thinks the problem lies in the authorial origin which Greg laments being unable to reach. To seek to recreate the promptbook of the first performance, as the Oxford Complete Works editors did, does not in Kastan's view mitigate the idealization since 'promptbooks' is not a straightforward category and surviving ones are not univocal, often showing as much concern for what happens backstage as what is said on the stage. This constitutes a good argument that promptbooks should not be our object of desire. Arguably the Oxford Complete Works sought to recover an idealized form of the first performance (specifically, what the dramatist wanted for the first performance, mishaps notwithstanding) and for this the reconstructed promptbook in the author's handwriting--which the Original Spelling version aims at--is the best, albeit an imperfect, witness to that intention.

    Kastan's problematizing of authorial intention continues in the next essay. "Shakespeare in Print" (pp. 71-92) in which he asserts that "drama is, of all literary forms, the least respectful of its author's artistic intentions" (p. 78), which is a verbatim repetition of a sentence in the previous essay (p. 63). Kastan provides an impressively concise summary of the printing of the 1623 Folio with its three distinct states caused by the problems with Troilus and Cressida. Heminges and Condell wrote in the Folio's prefatory pages that prior readers of Shakespeare "were abus'd with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious imposters that expos'd them: euen those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceiu'd the[m]". Since A. W. Pollard's reinterpretation in the early twentieth century this sentence has been taken to delineate three kinds of texts: the bad quartos (maimed and deformed), "the rest" which includes the good quartos, and the manuscripts brought to the project by Heminges and Condell. But Kastan sees only two categories: the "stolen and surreptitious copies" already in print (the bad and good quartos) and the manuscript held by Heminges and Condell. Kastan acknowledges the main problem with his reading: bibliographers have shown that many quartos were not stolen and surreptitious works but were perfectly legally acquired and were printed accurately. Indeed only two first quartos, Henry 5 and The Merry Wives of Windsor, seem surreptitious and maimed, the former printed despite a stay and the latter printed from a report. Is it plausible, asks Kastan, that Heminges and Condell meant just these two plays? The existing printings of Shakespeare were not (as Edmond Malone thought) extremely bad, but it behove Heminges and Condell to claim that they were. This was "the classic 'before and after' advertiser's tactic", and like their "his mind and hand went together" and "scarce received from him a blot", their claim connects the plays directly with the writer's mind and removes all mediations, it makes Shakespeare an author (p. 91).

    In "'Killed with Hard Opinions': Oldcastle and Falstaff and the Reformed Text of 1 Henry IV" (pp. 93-106) Kastan finds it odd that David Bevington's Oxford Shakespeare edition of 1 Henry 4 called the fat knight 'Falstaff' even though the series' general editor, Stanley Wells, together with Gary Taylor, restored the name 'Oldcastle' in the Oxford Complete Works. (However odd, it is surely commendable that Wells allows his editors to reach such decisions for themselves.) Bevington's reasoning is that the fat knight was conceived as a single fictional entity to appear in more than one play and hence he must have a single name throughout the play sequence. Kastan prefers 'Falstaff' over 'Oldcastle' but for different reasons. Shakespeare did not intend to annoy Lord Cobham--Kastan thinks that would be uncharacteristically reckless--but his contemporaries understood that he meant to mock the historical Lollard martyr since the 1599 play Sir John Oldcastle tries to set the record straight by depicting him as "no pampered glutton, / Nor aged Councellor to youthfull sinne", as the prologue has it. The real Oldcastle, whose life Kastan conveniently summarizes, was not a buffoon but he was a problematic figure, having treasonously rebelled against the Catholic Henry 5, a fact that John Foxe could not entirely efface in his Acts and Monuments.

    Kastan argues that Gary Taylor is wrong to think that mocking Oldcastle would be seen in Shakespeare's time as a Catholic thing to do--on the contrary the Lollards had come to be seen as proto-Puritans, a group now undermining the unity of the Protestant state. Taylor saw the substitution of 'Falstaff' for 'Oldcastle' as a depoliticizing, secularizing, trivializing move forced on Shakespeare, but Kastan thinks putting him back "dematerializes the text in which he appears" (p. 101) since 'Oldcastle' never made it into printed texts and so, by Taylor's admission, to privilege authorial intention. But the Oxford Complete works, Kastan objects, was supposed to acknowledge that "dramatic production . . . was never an autonomous authorial achievement" (p. 102), which goal Kastan finds incompatible with restoring "what Shakespeare originally intended". Unconvinced by Taylor's story of the pressure put on Shakespeare by one of the Lords Cobham, Kastan asserts that the evidence "does not allow us to say precisely why 'Oldcastle' disappeared from the text of 1 Henry IV" (p. 104) and since censorship is one of the forces operating upon theatre at the time--and perhaps an enabling one--he feels 'Falstaff', the name the character became on stage and in print, should stand in modern editions. In fact the point is not one of authorial intention, as Kastan believes, but of what was first staged, since that is what the Oxford Complete Works aimed to represent. It is most implausible that the name 'Oldcastle' gave offence before the first performance--preparation for court performance after 'readying' at a public playhouse being the likeliest moment of objection--so to meet their 'first performance' goal the Oxford editors simply had to use 'Oldcastle'.

    In the first of the articles to be considered this year, R. A. Foakes aims to make a survey "addressed to the common reader, if such there be" of the topics and terms used in writings on Shakespearian textual theory ('Shakespeare Editing and Textual Theory: A Rough Guide', HLQ 60[1999] 425-42). Actually, the article is more pointed than that: Foakes rejects almost all modern critical and philosophical theory as irrelevant to readers and hence to editors. Most of those giving advice to editors in the recent explosion of interest in the subject have never actually edited a play, Foakes notes--although to be fair one should add that W. W. Greg was likewise more a man of theory than practice--and they are concerned with ideas such as the death of the author, the materiality of the text, and unediting which have no direct interest for readers. However, Foakes is not quite au fait with the theory he rejects, observing that Foucault and Barthes's declaration of the death of the author "fostered the deconstructionist argument that there is nothing outside the text, so that the reader becomes the constructor of meaning" (p. 426) which is of course nearer the reader-response view than the deconstructionist. Foakes has not grasped that 'nothing outside the text' means that things which seem outside the text are so influential that we can say the text/not-text border is illusory. Foakes invokes G. Thomas Tanselle's distinction between the work (the mental abstraction) and the text (the necessarily imperfect materialization) as a bulwark against the insistence of Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass (he might have included David Scott Kastan, discussed above) that there is only the physical manifestation. Randall McLeod, amongst others, has argued that photography and computers have killed editing since one can display the inherent indeterminacy and multiplicity of texts, but Foakes rightly asserts that most readers want editors to work on their behalf and, for example, to replace meaningless nonsense which happened to get printed in an early quarto with the corrected material which got printed in the Folio. In making this case Foakes asserts that many of the theorists are not good at stage-centered thinking (p. 439) but this is unfair: Paul Werstine, Peter Stallybrass, and Randall McLeod (to name three of Foakes's targets) are acutely sensitive to textuality in performance. Foakes ends with the observation, with which I agree, that those who want editions to offer readers a plurality of texts are merely promoting the reader to the position of editor, which job most readers lack the expertise to fulfil (p. 441)

    Paul Werstine ('A Century of 'Bad' Shakespeare Quartos', SQ 50[1999] 310-33) shows that there are important holes in the theory of memorial reconstruction as it is invoked to explain the origins of the so-called 'bad' quartos of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), Hamlet (1603), Henry 5 (1600), and Romeo and Juliet (1597). Werstine admits that generally the correlation of Q and F The Merry Wives of Windsor leaps when the Host is on stage and falls off markedly when he exits (and especially after his last appearance at the end of Act 4), which strongly suggests that Q depends on the recollection of the actor playing the Host. The detail, however, is rather more complicated: at the Host's first entrance (scene 3) Q and F snap into extraordinarily close agreement, but the agreement is never so close again. In four of his eight scenes (1.3, 2.1, 2.3, 4.5) there is convincing Q/F convergence when Host enters and divergence when he exits, but in the other four (3.1, 3.2, 4.3, 4.6) the convergence happens for Host's lines but not the lines of those on stage with him, which is odd. Nonetheless, Werstine acknowledges, there is here enough evidence of memorial reconstruction to demolish Leah Marcus's claim (Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, p. 70) that Q and F represent distinct versions separated by conscious revision (pp. 312-3).

    Werstine shows just how much Q/F disagreement there is in The Merry Wives of Windsor 3.2 when the Host is not speaking by quoting Q and italicizing those words it shares with F; they amount to fewer than half. There is a "higher than usual" correspondence between Q and F when the Host is on stage, but in promulgating the memorial reconstruction theory Greg declared that there should be tight correspondence, and in any case one is entitled to be suspicious that the Host seems to remember his own lines but not the lines of those around him. More difficulties await the memorial reconstruction theory in 4.6 where the Host's presence makes for nothing more than fragmentary verbal parallels. Here Werstine quotes part of 4.6 from Q, italicizing where it corresponds to F, but he misses two parallels ("your losse" and "at [the] least") which count against his argument. The defenders of memorial reconstruction need awkward hypotheses for the speeches in Q's version of 4.6 which bear no resemblance to anything in F, and for those occasions (such as Falstaff's entrance in 1.1) when the Host in not onstage yet Q/F converge (pp. 316-7). The most we can say, argues Werstine, is that the Host seems to have been involved in reconstructing parts of the play.

    The Merry Wives of Windsor offers the best evidence of memorial reconstruction and for other plays, according to Werstine, the theory is hopeless. The actors playing Marcellus, Horatio, Voltemand, and Cornelius (probably two men doubling) seem to be the reconstructors behind Q1 Hamlet until one notices that the quality of Q1/Q2 does not drop when Marcellus exits in 1.2 and in 1.4 (p. 318-9). Likewise Q1 and Q2/F converge for Polonius/Corambis's advice to Laertes in 1.3, yet none of the alleged reporters is on stage. Worse still for memorial reconstruction is the fact that Marcellus disappears after Act 1 and Voltemand after 2.2, so where did the rest of the play come from? No-one has managed to find parts that Marcellus and Voltemand could have doubled which meet the basic test of convergence rising when they enter and falling when they exit (pp. 320-2). Throughout his essay Werstine ridicules, but does not refute, the argument that where memorial reconstruction fails as an explanation revision occurring later than the moment of reconstruction might account for non-convergence where it is expected.

    The case of Q1 Henry 5  is harder for the memorial reconstruction argument because there is little agreement about where the correspondences with F lie and some of the lines of the best candidate for recollector, the man playing Exeter, are poorly reported. In the midst of an argument about the problems of assigning lines in Q, Werstine repeats in a footnote a complete sentence from the body text ("Q's entrance directions are some of the least accurate, least complete, and most indefinite of those in any of the early printed Shakespeare texts", p. 325n32) which inadvertently shows how easily textual matter can be wrongly, doubly assigned. At the tail end of the theory, Werstine considers Harry R. Hoppe's lone claim that the Q1 Romeo and Juliet was made by memorial reconstruction (p. 326-7). Hoppe proposed the actors of Romeo and Paris as the reporters in a case upon which Greg and E. K. Chambers had given up, but this needs copious special pleading to get around the many cases of poor reporting while these men are on and good reporting while they are off stage. One of the problems is the absence of an agreed quantitative way to measure quality of reporting and Werstine pours justifiable scorn on quantitative studies (such as those of Harry R. Hoppe, Kathleen Irace, and Gary Taylor) which look for the man with fewest corrupted lines and identify him as the reconstructor. Werstine rightly observes that in any method of textual transmission someone's lines are bound to be better represented that those of the others, the point is how much better (p. 328).

    Werstine keeps up his attack on New Bibliographical thinking in an essay which promises a theorized approach to editing, but apart from one gratuitous reference to "ideology at the level of the signifier" (p. 111) the title is irrelevant to the matter ('Post-theory Problems in Shakespeare Editing', YES 29[1999] 103-17). Werstine wants to show that Greg's grand narrative of foul papers being kept after copying (to make the promptbook) and subsequently sent to the printers is a blatant case of a priori selection of evidence and of inventing categories to suit one's story. Importantly, speech prefixes and stage directions do not become more regular as the play "progress[es] in manuscript towards production" and where we have multiple manuscripts of a single play they differ in ways which defy the New Bibliographical categories of foul papers and promptbook (p. 105).

    Unlike 'promptbook', the term 'foul papers' does at least occur in the period, when Edward Knight explained where he got material for his transcription of Fletcher's Bonduca: "the occasion. why these are wanting here. the booke where by it was first Acted from is lost: and this hath beene transcrib'd from the fowle papers of the Authors wch were found". Werstine points out the irony of Greg seizing on this evidence since it is an account of why two-and-a-bit scenes are missing from the transcript, material we know of from the early printed text (p. 106). Greg had to imagine that these foul papers were supplemented with further pages to make the printed version, so "fowle papers" can hardly mean 'the complete play as it left the author', the sense in which Greg used the term. Greg used the evidence of double-selling by Robert Greene and Thomas Heywood to argue that companies generally prevented such sharp practice by demanding the author's papers along with the fair copy. Werstine points out that if this were general practice the King's men would have had no need of the Lord Chamberlain's assistance to prevent stationers publishing their plays, which assistance they sought in 1619, and furthermore the purpose of Knight's transcript--to provide a copy of the play for a patron--should have told Greg that companies did not so jealousy guard their plays.

    Greg also used Robert Daborne's letter to Henslowe (Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe's Diary, p. 78) in which he says "J send you the foule sheet & ye fayr I was wrighting as your man can testify" as evidence that authors sent the company their foul papers. Werstine objects that Daborne's letter is an apology for only sending the foul (the fair not being ready), so we cannot assume from it a norm of sending the foul. This is not how I read the letter: Daborne must be sending both foul and fair of that sheet, since giving over the foul makes his writing of the fair impossible; the word "send" in the sentence quoted governs both "the foule" and "ye fayr" and the apology is for not having done so sooner. Werstine assumes that "& ye fayr" means 'and not the fair'. Alternatively, Werstine could be right that Daborne sent as a sign of goodwill the foul sheet he had just finished with but was still working on completing the entire fair book. Continuing his larger career-long thesis that New Bibliography over-categorizes manuscripts which should in fact be seen as lying along a continuum, Werstine points out that in other letters Daborne used "fair" as a relative, not an absolute, term and hence Greg's choice of this single "foule" sheet to hang his whole theory on is "a violation of a history whose mark is its variety, its resistance to any norm" (p. 111). Greg insisted on individual creativity being complete before the play was handed over to the players, but the evidence from Henslowe is that partly-finished plays were read to him and to the company, presumably to get guidance, theatre being inherently a collaborative affair. This might mean that "no distinction was then necessarily made between playwrights and players", says Werstine. This is clearly an overstatement since individual playwrights, Shakespeare amongst them, were praised for their plays and it was playwrights who went to jail when their plays caused offence.

    Unlike Werstine, Andrew Murphy is genuinely theoretical in arguing that New Bibliography relies on authorial presence which we know from Jacques Derrida is not available (''Came Errour Here By Mysse of Man': Editing and the Metaphysics of Presence', YES 29[1999] 118-37). In the preface to his translation of Seneca's Thyestes, Jasper Heywood recounted a dream of being given by Seneca a perfect text to work on, one that Seneca speaks aloud as Heywood reads it. Derrida showed that writing severs the link between presence and speech, and Heywood moves the complaint from writing to print: his dream-Seneca carries a perfect book in which never "came errour here by misse of man" (miss meaning mistake but also absence). The preliminaries to the 1623 Shakespeare Folio repeatedly assert that the book makes up for the man's absence, which of course they cannot do because--as Werstine argues--dramatic texts do not originate with an author, but with a company. Heminges and Condell intended to create the author Shakespeare but actually made a Derridean 'supplement', which stands between total absence and total presence, filling the place of the never-existing authorial text. Such supplements, predicated on an absence they cannot fill, have forever to be remade, hence the never-ending job of editing Shakespeare. New Bibliography sought to put a stop to this, or at least to make certain kinds of editing much more certain than others, but it idealized what lay before the printed text, the authorial manuscript. Murphy claims that even recent defenders of New Bibliography, such as G. Thomas Tanselle, are stuck in the same futile, psychologically naive, search for direct communion with the author. Murphy admits that Tanselle "obliquely acknowledges" that we are not in full possession of our minds, so there is something of the straw man about Murphy's criticism of Tanselle. Murphy thinks that "Intention can never be fully elevated above the complex dynamic" of textuality (p. 134) which is of course true but is surely not the last word since we can distinguish better from worse representations of intention. My grocery list does not perfectly express what I want to buy, but comes much closer to that ideal than does my laundry list. The best we can do, Murphy concludes, is give up on locating the "text as the author finally intended it" and merely give some account of how particular textualizations "functioned within particular historical moments" and show "how such versions and moments differ over time". This I find a miserably small intellectual goal. Murphy makes no comment on the new New Bibliography's relocation of the point of idealized origin from authorial intention to first performance, a goal considerably more realizable and one congruent with his conviction that theatrical meaning is collaborative.

    Anthony James West's work on the 1623 Folio led to two landmark studies this year. The first is the completion of an article begun in the same journal in 1998 ('Sales and Prices of Shakespeare First Folios: A History, 1623 to the Present', Part 2, PBSA 93[1999] 74-142). The first part covered the period 1623 to 1899 and this second brings the story to the present. West produces chronological tables showing the number of Folio sales and relates the spiralling prices to other purchases. West's account of the Folio's centrality to the New Bibliography is an impressive summary of what was wrong with nineteenth-century textual scholarship and how Pollard, Greg, and McKerrow responded to its "impressionistic speculation". This response was helped by the accumulation of Folios in one place: between 1893 and 1928, Henry Clay Folger bought eighty-two, or roughly a third of those extant. The 1890s to 1920s saw a flurry of trading which has since settled down, and at that time the average price (excluding really defective copies) was �1000 to �3000. The four major factors determining the price of Folios in the twentieth century were Lee's census, the Folio's centrality to New Bibliography, Folger's purchases, and the reduced number of copies available for purchase after the 1920s. West's summary of price trends is surprising. Have started out at 15 shillings to �1 (depending on binding) the Folio's price fell during the seventeenth century (when the second, third, and fourth edition were worth more) and it wavered around its original price until the second half of the eighteenth century. To give a sense of comparative cost, West calculates that a copy of F1 was worth 44 loaves of bread in 1623, 900 by the 1790s, 5000 in the 1850s, and in the early twentieth century 96000 loaves. Surprisingly, a loaf of bread cost exactly 5.4 pence in 1623, and in 1751, and 1907, having peaked at around 6.75 pence in 1850, and thus the F price rise is not inflation, it is increase in relative desirability.

    West is engaged in a full bibliographical description of extant copies of the Folio. He has completed a census of where they are and this year published a paper about his model for describing them ('A Model for Describing Shakespeare First Folios, with Descriptions of Selected Copies', Library 21[1999] 1-49). West aims to do most copies, not all, and observes that having a standard for describing copies would mean that when new ones turn up we could tell if they were ones we knew before but which had disappeared. West was forced to invent his own descriptive model because the one used in Greg's A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration was suited to describing ideal copies of many titles, not non-ideal copies of a single title. West's model should serve a wide range of users, but he is particularly concerned to record all matters bearing on the text and the provenance. West's descriptive system improves on those of Greg and Charlton Hinman in the area of collation (description of the order and signing of pages), drawing on his own researches and those of Peter W. M. Blayney. West agrees with Blayney that Hinman 'found' many press variants which were in fact no such thing, being only variations in inking of the type. Blayney recommends that we ignore all variants except those which "contain potentially useful information not found elsewhere (in the corrected state, or in an earlier edition)" of which he counts just five. To demonstrate his model, West here gives its descriptions of nine copies of the 1623 Folio, those at Dulwich College, the Reform Club, Sir John Soane's Museum, Senate House Stirling, Senate House Durning-Lawrence, Dr Williams's Library, the Shakespeare Centre (Ashburnham), the Shakespeare Centre (Wheler), and the Shakespeare Centre (Theatre).

    Two articles in Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography consider a single crux in the early texts of Shakespeare's Othello: the protagonist's request to be reported as one who "Like the base Indian/Judean threw a pearl away / Richer than all this tribe" ('Judean and Indian yet Once again', AEB 10[1999] 21-8; 'Indian/Iudean again', AEB 10[1999] 29-35). John Velz offers no definitive reading, but has found other Iudean/Indian misprints including one showing that handwriting can cause this trouble. A transcription of a late eighteenth-century manuscript mentioning the death in "Judia" of Doubting Thomas--whom tradition tells us died in India--shows that this is an easy misreading of some hands. However that manuscript's spelling "Judia" is anomalous (Judea or Judaea are right) and F1's correctly spelt "Iudean" is hard to get from Q1's "Indian". A variant in Heywood's The Art of Love between the 1613-25 and 1640 printings, in which "1udyes" is 'corrected' to "Indyes", also supports F2's 'correction' of F1's "Iudean" to "Indian" (thus agreeing with Q1). However, as if mocking all attempts to solve this crux, Richard Levin has found an example from the period of Jerusalem being said to be in India. Velz agrees with MacDonald P. Jackson and Norman Sanders that possibly Q1 and F1 were set from manuscripts which did not agree--Shakespeare might even have changed his mind--and notes the observation of Paul Werstine (ever the indeterminist) that even if we possessed the manuscript copy of Q1 and/or F1 we might not be able to determine the correct reading: minim ambiguities can defy the palaeography's interpretation.

    Nicholas Ranson thinks that Shakespeare himself revised "Indian" to "Judean". Against the 'misreading' theory Ranson offers the evidence that the renegade printer Roger Ward printed Robert Greene's The Spanish Masquerado (1589) and Greenes Vision (1592) and, although he had trouble reading Greene's handwriting sometimes, he never had trouble reading the word "Indian" in Greene's hand. In Greenes Vision is the line "the trees that growe in Indea haue rough barks" and since Greene's use of the word "India" was clear (and he never wrote "Indea") and since the compositor has consciously switched case (Black Letter to Roman, represented as Roman to italic here), the likeliest explanation is that "In" is wrong font and "n" is foul case. Thus Greene wrote "Iudea". Heywood was probably remembering a section in Pliny's Natural History which says the same thing about these trees, and there the location is definitely "the lands of Iurie". A few lines later in Philemon Holland's 1601 translation of Pliny's Natural History (which Shakespeare knew) is the unusual word "medicinable" which Shakespeare uses in the same passage in F1 Othello. Ranson cites MacDonald P. Jackson's argument that Q1's "Indian" is an easy misreading of the unfamiliar word "Iudean", whereas F1's "Iudean" is hard to explain as an error since foul case would turn "Indian" into "Iudian" but not "Iudean"; therefore Jackson thinks "Iudean" must be right. Perhaps, Ranson ponders, the F compositor corrected Q's "Indian" because he knew his Pliny and knew that Shakespeare really had "Iudea" in mind. If so, this interfering compositor mis-spelt the word because the correct adjective is "Judaean" not "Judean". Or did Shakespeare correct it when making the many authorial revisions of Othello? "Indian" is certainly an appropriate word in its own right, in the context of base people who throw pearls away; there are plenty of precedents. Greene and Shakespeare were using the same source (Pliny's Natural History) for the idea of trees weeping precious gum, and Ranson wonders if, during revision of Othello, Shakespeare re-read Greenes Vision and spotted that Greene's "Iudea" has been misprinted as "Indea" and realized that his own original, slightly trite, line "the base Indian" would be better as "the base Judean". If so, at the same time he borrowed "medicinable" (in place of his original choice "medicinal" found in Q) from Holland's translation of Pliny.

    Edmond Malone showed that the Macklin pamphlet passed to him by George Steevens was a forgery, but Jeffrey Kahan finds even greater mischief in it ('Reforging Macklin's Forgery: Yet Another Example of Steevens 'Laughing in His Sleeve' at Malone?', BJJ 6[1999] 295-303). Steevens's transcript of the pamphlet contains the Thomas May poem about Ford and Jonson stealing from Shakespeare and Kahan thinks that this poem Steevens invented and added himself (that is, it was not in the pamphlet) to make Malone appear foolish by attributing this classically indebted poem to the illiterate Macklin. Kahan observes that we know Steevens forged the letter from Peele to Marlowe that came to light in 1763, in which Alleyn accuses Shakespeare of stealing Hamlet's advice to the actors from him, and Kahan rejects as an unlikely coincidence that two such documents on the subject of plagiarism should happen to pass through Steevens's hands. Steevens was one of the few people with the classical learning to write the May poem (which borrows a phrase from Homer) and he liked to plant forgeries for others to find, then mock them for believing such nonsense to be genuine.

    The fourth issue of Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 10 (1999) is an index of the journal from 1.1 (1977) 9.4 of the new series (1995). David George's contribution is a slight piece surveying editing and theatrical productions of Coriolanus in the eighteenth century, with particular concern for the play's six major cruces and the harmful effect of the period's poor editions upon the stage life of the play ('Eighteenth-century Editors, Critics, and Performers of Coriolanus', AEB 10[1999] 63-71). More surprising is Akihiro Yamada's ill-advised piece about the limitations of modern editing which concludes that glossing is arbitrary and we should study early printed texts to see what Shakespeare really wrote ('Editions of Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century', AEB 10[1999] 72-80). Yamada objects to the relineation of irregular short lines into blank verse, for which the editors of the Oxford Complete Works had "almost an obsession" (p. 76), but without responding to Paul Werstine's demonstration ('Line Division in Shakespeare's Dramatic Verse: An Editorial Problem', AEB 8[1984] 73-125) that irregular lining is usually compositorial and hence should be corrected. At key points Yamada's logic is unclear. There are 349 plays in Greg's Bibliography of English Printed Drama printed between 1516 and 1616 (for these odd limits no reason is given) and Yamada notes that 23 of these have titlepages with phrasing similar to Q2 Hamlet's "Newly imprinted and enlarged . . . according to the true and perfect Coppie", which to Yamada "suggest revisions" (p. 78). Just how these other plays' titlepages are similar in wording is not stated by Yamada, nor does he consider whether such phrases might simply mean that earlier editions and/or performances were shorter than what is presently on sale. Six of these twenty-three plays are by Shakespeare, which disproportion suggests to Yamada that he was a keen reviser of his work. Yamada thinks that the comments about the poet at the start of Act 5 of A Midsummer Night's Dream show "Undeniable evidence of Shakespeare revising his own play" but this is just a highly subjective argument about Shakespeare "surely" trying "to create the literary integrity of a self-contained imaginary world in the play he was writing" (p. 78). Pursuing this artistic self-sufficiency in the teeth of modern Shakespeare scholarship which maintains the collaborative nature of early modern drama, Yamada thinks that the first performance was just an adaptation by the dramatist to the limitations of his stage, and the authority of this "cannot be higher than the author's original version" (p. 79).

    Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 10 takes a turn for the better with Bernice Kliman's attempt, presumably arising out of her work on the New Variorum Hamlet, to redefine the terminology used in connection with editing Shakespeare ('Considering the Terminology of the New Bibliography and After', AEB 10[1999] 148-65). 'Promptbook' should stay as the name for working theatrical manuscripts, and 'playbook' should be used for "a printed copy of a performance text", says Kliman (p. 148), the anachronism of the former being no more problematic than our use of 'upstage' and 'downstage' in connection with early stages which were not raked. A playbook, printed to recapture the performance for a reader, will necessarily be tidier than a promptbook, which serves the messy purposes of a number of theatre people. In cases where we do not have a promptbook underlying a playbook (as with all of Shakespeare) there is little we can infer about it since manuscript disorder is inherently unpredictable. The expression 'bad quarto' we should detach from the theory of memorial reconstruction and probably drop altogether since the moral overtones are unhelpful. 'Foul papers' we can retain so long as we realize that trying to recover such a lost ideal is hopeless: there were probably many ways to get from foul papers to fair copy including authorial copying-up fair, use of a scribe, or perhaps even several scribes working at once from oral dictation. Kliman thinks that 'parent', 'cohort', and 'reference text' are more useful terms than 'copy-text' and 'printer's text', but in this she appears to be more concerned with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions than with early printed texts since she defines 'printer's copy' as "The text that an editor presents to the printer for printing" (p. 154) rather than the more usual sense of 'what an early printer had in front of him', free of regard for possible intermediary editors. Kliman finds the distinctions between 'accidentals', 'substantives', and 'semi-substantives' particularly unhelpful, noting that Moxon used "accidentals" for those errors made by an author which he would want the printers to correct, but Greg used it for matters of punctuation which do not affect meaning and which if found to be similar in two texts suggest a relationship of dependence between the texts. Kliman proposes just two terms to replace these three: 'materials' for letters and pointing that affect meaning and 'immaterials' for words and pointing that do not affect meaning. Not everyone will agree with Kliman's new words and distinctions, but her argument that the old ones are contributing to the problems in modern editing is undoubtedly right.

    Only one article in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America was relevant to this survey: Ralph Maud's claim that the "W.H." of the dedication to the Shakespeare's Sonnets quarto of 1609 was William Hartopp of Leicestershire ('William Hartopp, the 'W. H.' of the 1606 and 1609?', PBSA 93[1999] 407-17). Whether or not Maud has the right man, and he admits that the evidence is circumstantial, his study of the form of dedications is impressive. Donald Foster, Maud notes, thinks that "Mr. W. H." is in apposition to the "onlie begetter" (that is, Shakespeare) and hence is a misprint for "Mr. W. S.", but none of Thorpe's other epigraphs have such syntax. Maud calls Type A those dedications of the form "To someone" followed by a separate sentence which is an epistolary statement addressed to that person; the other four dedications written by Thomas Thorpe are of this type. Most dedications of the period are Maud's Type B, starting with "To someone" who is then not directly addressed. (The argument becomes confused here because of a misprint, "type A" is printed where Maud means "type B"; librarians may want to pencil in a correction eight lines from the bottom of page 409.) Type B dedications take the form of a sentence with the dative or indirect object (the dedicatee) put first and then the sentence is completed with a subject and object (the good wishes). Thorpe's 1609 Sonnets dedication is Type A, and "W. H." is not in apposition to "onlie begetter" but is the subject of the ensuing sentence, thus it could be paraphrased "Mr. W. H. wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet" (p. 410). Thus Thorpe is telling Shakespeare that "W. H." wishes him all happiness, the "ever-living poet" is God, and the "adventurer setting forth" is Shakespeare on his way to retirement in Stratford. The "well-wishing" adjective means that Shakespeare approved the sonnets publication, after years of samizdat circulation in manuscript. Dedications to the author were not uncommon, and Maud thinks it "only a small step to having the publication itself be a commendatory gift" (p. 412) as with a dedication written by a "W.H." in 1606, for Philip Howard's A Four-fould meditation. This dedication was to Matthew Saunders, who was knighted on 2 September 1617 at Ashby de la Zouch along with one William Hartopp and four others, and hence this William Hartopp is probably the "W. H." who wrote the dedication. The Saunders and Hartopp families were from the same area in Leicestershire and Matthew Saunders and William Hartopp were almost exact contemporaries and almost certainly knew one another. But did William Hartopp know Shakespeare? Maud admits he has nothing more and ends lamely with a sentimental assertion that his narrative is suited "to our best sensibilities" because it brings "the amiable poet to the centre of the stage for a final curtain call" (p. 417).

    Notes & Queries published more than a dozen small pieces of relevance in 1999, and since 1998's volume was omitted last year there are twenty-nine notes in all. Thomas Merriam argues that parts of Titus Andronicus are so like the work of Marlowe that they probably are the work of Marlowe ('Influence Alone? More on the Authorship of Titus Andronicus', N&Q 243[1998] 304-8). Andrew Q. Morton's tables showing Shakespeare's stylistic differences from Peele are full of errors and should not have been relied upon by Jonathan Bate to support the argument that Titus Andronicus is solely by Shakespeare. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of Marlowe and Shakespeare shows that eight Shakespeare plays (1 Henry 6, 2 Henry 6, 3 Henry 6, Titus Andronicus, Richard 2, Richard 3, King John, and Henry 5) "group themselves in a cluster detached from the remaining body of twenty-eight First Folio plays" (p. 305). All of these but Titus Andronicus are history plays and can be explained as Marlowe influencing Shakespeare, but the 'function' words 'a', 'is', 'it', 'tis', 'not', and 'you' are fewer in these plays than elsewhere in Shakespeare; could influence lower the supposedly subliminal pattern of function word usage? Merriam divides Titus Andronicus into two sections (1.1, 2.1, 4.4, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 = Section A; 2.3, 3.1, 3.2, 4.2, 4.3 = Section B) and shows that by PCA analysis, Section A is much more like Marlowe than is section B. Section A is about straightforward revenge while section B has the emotionally complicating material of Lavinia's appeal for mercy, the restoring of Lavinia's dignity by fatherly love, the fly scene, the emergence of good in Aaron, and Titus's madness caused by suffering. The theory of influence cannot, Merriam maintains, explain how the two sections of the play could be distinct in both conscious and unconscious artistic attributes.

    MacDonald P. Jackson is also working on the authorship of Titus Andronicus, but with Peele as the other potential hand, revealed by his avoidance of the indefinite article 'an' ('Indefinite Articles in Titus Andronicus, Peele, and Shakespeare', N&Q 243[1998] 308-10). There are five extant Peele plays and these all avoid 'an' to the extent that only 5% of all occurrences of 'a' or 'an' are 'an' whereas in Shakespeare the corresponding figure is 10%. Jackson explains that such a low figure can be because a writer simply avoids the indefinite article altogether before a vowel by using a different construction and/or syntax. Jackson provides a table showing the ratio of 'a' to 'an' in a number of Shakespeare plays and Peele plays as witnessed in the electronic texts provided by Chadwyck-Healey's Literature Online (LION) database. Using the figures for individual scenes in Spevack's Concordances, Jackson observes that in Titus Andronicus 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, and 4.1 (the scenes Jackson has elsewhere argued might be Peele's) 'an' is used for about 3% of the indefinite articles, close to Peele's norm, whereas for the rest of the play the figure is 10%, which result buttresses the arguments made elsewhere that these scenes are Peele's. A flaw in Jackson's methodology is the use of electronic texts without consideration of the features (specifically abbreviated speech prefixes) which might give false positives, as Jackson came to realize (see below).

    Katherine Duncan-Jones observes that although editors allow Cleopatra and Lucrece to kill themselves autonomously, Juliet is made to take Romeo's dagger despite the fact that none of Q1, Q2, or F suggest this, and despite the fact that having broken from the Nurse she says she has power to kill herself (''O Happy Dagger': The Autonomy of Shakespeare's Juliet', N&Q 243[1998] 314-6). Indeed, that break from the Nurse would be a good time to show the audience her dagger, perhaps one of the small knives upper-class girls carried on their girdles. Desperate in Friar Lawrence's cell, Juliet says she has a knife in 4.1 and repeats this in her bedchamber in 4.2. Capulet, seeing his daughter dead, says that the knife "hath mistaken" since it belongs in Romeo's sheath, but the point is that, like Caesar at the death of Cleopatra, Capulet cannot guess the truth. Editors should not follow Steevens's stage direction "snatching Romeo's dagger" for Juliet's end, but should provide one for Juliet using her own knife.

    Another of Thomas Merriam's notes argues that Henry 5 contains some Marlowe in Henry's speech before the walls of Harfleur, possibly the remnant of an older Marlowe play on the same subject which Shakespeare revised ('The Tenor of Marlowe in Henry V', N&Q 243[1998] 318-24). Q1 omits Henry's speech about his soldiers sacking Harfleur and raping the women, which sounds like Tamburlaine's sack of Damascus, particularly in its shifting the blame onto the victims. Moving to a statistical approach, Merriam claims that 'bless', 'benedic', 'forgive', and 'pardon' were words (or word-stems) favoured by Shakespeare and 'curse', 'maledic', and 'venge' ones favoured by Marlowe. The ratio of occurrences of Shakespeare-preferred-words to occurrences of all seven words is 58.1% in Shakespeare and 29.2% in Marlowe. Merriam lists the Shakespeare and Marlowe plays in ascending order of this ratio and the Marlowes cluster at the top (with a low ratio of 'yielding' words) and the Shakespeares lie further down (with many 'yielding' words), except for Titus Andronicus, Richard 3, 1 Henry 6 which appear amongst the Marlowes and for which sole authorship by Shakespeare has in the past been questioned. But, asks Merriam, does Henry's speech omitted from Q1 Henry 5 describe the horrors of spoil to give the audience vicarious sadistic pleasure or merely to get the Harfleurians to surrender peacefully? Is it, in other words, an act of Christian mercy? That Henry worries that he cannot do what he threatens makes it a bluff, and a bluff "can not encompass humane design" (p. 320). The play is not neutral about trivial loss of life and Merriam cites the occasions when we are supposed to feel critical of those who treat it lightly. As well as echoes of the sieges of Damascus from 1 Tamburlaine and of Babylon from 2 Tamburlaine, the siege of Harfleur in Henry 5 echoes that of Troy in Marlowe and Nashe's Dido Queen of Carthage, in particular with the collocation of "confused", "infants", "virgins", "pikes", and "dash'd" which occur with nine lines of Dido and six times in all within twenty-six lines of Henry 5. These words seldom occur in Shakespeare and they never again cluster, and there are parallels in the images too: girls being pulled by their fair hair and old men's brains being dashed out. Together with other minor verbal links with other Marlowe works, Merriam takes this evidence to show that in the Harfleur siege "The tenor of Marlowe is pervasive" (p. 323) and offers as an explanation for the oft-observed phenomenon that the play presents two views of militarism (one celebratory, the other ironic) the possibility that it is the work of two men, Marlowe and Shakespeare. This might be because Shakespeare took material from an existing Marlowe play on the same subject, which play might have been the source for the memorial reconstruction which is The Famous Victories of Henry V (p. 324).

    In the midst of one her mad songs, Ophelia says or sings "O the wheel becomes it" (4.5.172), which obscurity David Farley-Hills thinks is not a reference to the song's refrain (OED wheel n. 17) but to the sexually arousing effect of a jogging coach journey ('Another Hamlet Crux', N&Q 243[1998] 334-6). Farley-Hills repeats Jacon Feis's claims that John Florio's translation of Montaigne's essays is echoed throughout Hamlet and that Ophelia's "wheel" is explained by Montaigne's observation of female arousal in coaches. Such an allusion suits the moment better than an abstruse point of prosody and is of a piece with Ophelia's songs about young women's vulnerability when aroused. In Eastward Ho!, which contains multiple parodies of Hamlet, Gertrude's excitement at the thought of her coach is sexual and Farley-Hills takes this to be Marston's expansion of the "wheel" glance in Hamlet. For Farley-Hills's purpose it would have been better were Shakespeare copying from Marston since the "wheel" allusion is extraordinarily slight and obscure, and moreover this gloss does not allow the line to make sense: what is the "it" and how does the wheel "become" it?

    Contrary to the editors of the Oxford Complete Works, Perez Rivzi ('Evidence of Revision in Othello', N&Q 243[1998] 338-43) thinks that the 1623 Folio text of Othello represents the original version of the play and that the quarto of 1622 quarto represents a revised, shorter, version of this. Rivzi's case is made primarily from claimed false starts, typical of the heat of composition, which are present in F but absent from Q. The first is Iago's "This may do something / The Moor already changes with my poison / Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons" (3.3.328-30) which is here quoted with the claimed false start struck out for the sake of demonstration. Q, Rivzi observes, omits the false start while F, representing an earlier stage in the text's life, prints it. It is not obvious to many readers and listeners, of course, that the line Rivzi thinks a false start is redundant and replaced by what follows it; alternatively the subsequent line simply follows the train of thought begun by the one Rivzi dislikes. Equally, not everyone will agree that the word "quite" produces unintended comedy when in F Iago says "He's [Cassio] almost slain, and Roderigo quite dead" (5.1.116). Rivzi thinks that "quite" (in the sense of requited) was Shakespeare's first thought which he immediately struck out and replaced with "dead" to give Q's "and Roderigo dead". One might respond that in the act of murdering Desdemona, Othello asks himself "Not yet quite dead?" (5.2.95) which surely is not comic, and since the above two examples are Rivzi's strongest evidence the matter is questionable.

    In the drunken brawl Montano says "'Swounds, I bleed still. I am hurt to th' death. He dies" (2.3.157) where the struck out words (omitted from Q) are perhaps a stage direction which F's compositor mistook for dialogue and did not notice was deleted. Rivzi argues that Shakespeare meant for Montano to die at this point, but then realized this would entail Cassio's imprisonment and hence Iago's plot could not proceed, so he struck out the stage direction "He dies". Equally plausibly, of course, an editor can have Montano attack Cassio with the cry "He dies!" Rivzi finds Emilia's "for all the whole world?" (4.3.73-4) in F to be pleonasm typical of the heat of composition which Q corrects, but since Emilia is repeating Desdemona's phrase in order to indicate the vastness of the prize, a rhetorical (if pleonastic) doubling is dramatically appropriate. More convincing is Rivzi's observation that in F 4.2 Emilia enters too late to hear Othello call Desdemona a whore yet later in the scene she discusses this accusation, and in Q this apparent problem is fixed by moving the stage direction up 5 lines. However, since Emilia's entrance is only two lines too late the problem may not exist, this being within the bounds of variation which an audience might not notice or which a manuscript might be inaccurate about, even assuming that the printed text represents the manuscript faithfully.

    When, in 1.3, Othello assures the Senate that Desdemona's accompanying him to Cyprus will not affect the execution of his duty he says that if it does, let adversities "Make head against my estimation" (in F) but "against my reputation" (in Q). This may look like an authorial change which could have happened in either direction but since 'reputation' becomes a keyword in the play, Rivzi thinks that F's "estimation" is more likely to have been authorially revised to Q's "reputation" than vice versa. In the same scene, Othello's account of his wooing has Desdemona rewarding him for his story with "a world of kisses" (in F) or "a world of "sighs" (in Q) before inviting him to "woo her". F's order of events (from kisses to a hint about wooing) is for Rivzi "implausible" (p. 340) which is why Shakespeare changed his first thought "kisses" (F) to "sighs' (Q). In F and Q Desdemona mentions the maid Barbary (her mother's maid, not her own as Rivzi thinks, p. 340) and her willow song in 4.3, but only in F does she sing the song and only in F does Emilia recall it in the closing scene of the play. This Rivzi admits is awkward for his theory of F->Q progression since Q does not entirely remove reference to the song, but he maintains that Q->F progression is even more awkward since what is in Q is pointless. It is more likely that Q's inconsequentiality is the result of incomplete cutting of the longer willow song material in F than F's willow song material grew from Q's sliver. With the willow song and surrounding material about infidelity gone, Q moves from the mention of Barbary to "Would'st thou doe such a deed, for all the world?" which is absurd since the audience has not heard what the deed is, and Rivzi's claim that this is a sign of inexpert incomplete cutting is convincing (p. 341).

    At the close Rivzi defends a number of Q and F readings from unnecessary emendation, all of which depend on one's willingness to accept an unusual expression with a difficult sense rather than a more straightforward word; in such matters there can be no certainty. Rivzi agrees with the scholarly consensus that Q's copy cannot have been a "promptbook" because "it contains an incorrect entrance for Desdemona at I.iii.46" but in a footnote observes that its permissive stage directions should not be counted as supporting evidence since Nahum Tate's King Lear was printed in 1681 from a carefully prepared manuscript yet with a stage direction "Enter Two or Three Gentlemen". Those wanting to receive the electronic facsimile of Tate's Lear should emend Rivzi's URL from "htt://www. . ." to "http://www. . ."

    Naseeb Shaheen reminds editors that biblical parallels in Shakespeare must be sought using bibles he had access to, especially the Geneva and the Bishops', not the King James which, being printed in 1611, was too late for most of the plays ('Shakespeare and the Authorized Version', N&Q 243[1998] 343-5). Sometimes scholars find biblical references in Shakespeare which are not there because they are using the wrong bible and Shaheen catches Nicolas Brooke's Oxford edition of Macbeth in a spurious biblical connection to Leviticus 25:21 ("Then I will command my blessing on you") for Banquo's "Let your Highness / Command upon me" (3.1.15-6). Leviticus did not get that wording until the King James bible and Shaheen lists half a dozen genuine biblical references in the play overlooked by Brooke. Similarly, Kenneth Palmer's Arden Troilus and Cressida links Ulysses's "Nay, her foot speaks" (4.5.56) with Proverbs 6:12-13 "he speaketh with his feet" but again only the King James has this wording, and Shaheen catches the Riverside Shakespeare glossing "Master Ford, you must pray, and not follow the imaginations of your own heart" (The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.2.155-6) as an allusion to Jeremiah 13:10 "the wicked imaginations of their own heart", which phrasing only appeared with the King James.

    Martin Dzelzainis finds a source for Antony's parting from Cleopatra at the end of 1.3 ("Our separation so abides and flies / That thou residing here, goes yet with me; / And I hence fleeting, here remain with thee. / Away!") in the third sonnet of Spenser's Ruines of Rome which ends "Rome now of Rome is th'onely funerall, / And onely Rome of Rome hath victorie; / Ne ought save Tyber hastning to his fall / Remaines of all: O worlds inconstancie. / That which is firme doth flit and fall away, / And that is flitting, doth abide and stay" (emphasis changed to show shared words). More than simple word echo, the "That . . . And" construction "is extremely unusual for both poets" ('Antony and Cleopatra, I.iii.102-5 and Spenser's Ruines of Rome', N&Q 243[1998] 345-6). Charles Edelman solves a staging problem so intractable that Greg thought Shakespeare's practical imagination failed him when he created it ('Coriolanus, I.iv: Beating Martius's Soldiers Back to Their Trenches', N&Q 243[1998] 350-1). The Folio text of Coriolanus has the direction "the Romans are beat back to their Trenches" in 1.4, which is difficult because we think of trenches as excavations and J. W. Saunders's suggestion that the yard might be used by the actors ('Vaulting the Rails', ShSurv 7[1954] 69-81) no longer convinces scholars of original staging. Edelman observes that George Gascoigne's prose account The Spoyle of Antwerpe (1576) and the anonymous A Larum for London (1602) refer to trenches as fortifications built above ground using woolsacks, and a few such sacks could have signified trenches on the Globe stage in Coriolanus.

    Sandra Billington thinks that Timon of Athens was first performed around 1600 to coincide with Essex's fall ('Was Timon of Athens Performed Before 1604?', N&Q 243[1998] 351-3). The prologue to Marston's Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600) says the audience will not be tormented with "mouldy fopperies of stale Poetry, / Vnpossible drie musty Fictions", which for Billington means that Marston's allusions to Timon of Athens (especially Planet's "Come, come, now I'le be as sociable as Timon of Athens", B4r) cannot be to Lucian's dialogue but to a recent production of Shakespeare's play. This logic is faulty: Marston might be promising that his play contains no "mouldy fopperies" and yet allude to them. The anonymous play Timon is too late to be the target of Marston's satire if J. C. Bulman's dating is accepted, and in any case Planet's reference associates Timon with Athens, which the anonymous play does not. Marston's play also has dialogue which echoes that of Shakespeare's Apemantus. More speculatively, Billington suggests that when Essex, under house arrest in May 1600, wrote to Elizabeth that "shortly they will play me upon the stage" he was referring to Middleton and Shakespeare's forthcoming Timon of Athens, whose hero, like Essex, was generous and melancholic. Marston's allusion to Timon of Athens suggest that this first production was unsuccessful, which makes more sense in 1600 (when Middleton was a novice straight from university) than 1605 when he was having notable hits.

    The Folio text of Timon of Athens has a textual crux in the first scene when the Poet says "Our Poesie is as a Gowne, which uses / From whence 'tis nourisht", which is usually emended to "Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes / From whence 'tis nourish'd" (1.1.21-25). Tom Adair ('Shakespeare's Horation Poet', N&Q 243[1998] 353-5) thinks this is an unnoticed allusion to Horace's "only you exude the honey of poetry" (Epistle I.xix). Not only are the words similar, but so is the usage as a metaphor for the poet's autonomy in the context of false protestations of modesty giving way to self-admiration, and also the wider context of artists "enmeshed within systems of patronage" asserting at that moment that they are free and answering the criticism that they keep their stuff for their patrons instead of releasing it to the public. Both Horace and Shakespeare's Poet, Adair convincingly argues, have to tread the fine line between self-promotion, to keep a patron, and affecting a posture of self-deprecation: "A thing slipped idly from me" (Timon of Athens 1.1.20). N. F. Blake notes that despite several attempts to repunctuate the 1609 quarto text of Sonnet 69, its "Then churls their thoughts (although their eies were kind) / To thy faire flower ad the rancke smell of weeds" remains difficult. The easiest, and hitherto overlooked, solution is that this is a genitive form: "churls their thoughts" means "churls' thoughts" ('Shakespeare's Sonnet 69', N&Q 243[1998] 355-7).

    Michael Baird Saenger argues that that an allusion to Robert Greene's Menaphon dates Love's Labour's Lost to around 1589, and the text we have is a revision made prior to the printing in 1598 ('Nashe, Moth, and the Date of Love's Labour's Lost', N&Q 243[1998] 357-8). Moth's speech at 3.1.10-23 sounds like Nashe, and the identification is strengthened by his "They have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps" which echoes Nashe's preface to Greene's Menaphon (1589): "to the mercy of their mother tongues, that feed on nought but the crumbs that fall from the translator's trencher". This allusion would only have made sense shortly after the publication of Menaphon so the date of Love's Labour's Lost is 1589-90. Alfred Harbage showed that Love's Labour's Lost would have been topical around 1589-93 while Henry of Navarre was struggling with the Catholic League. Around 1596-7 Shakespeare revised the play, Harbage claimed, renaming Navarre as Ferdinand (in the speech prefixes, not the dialogue) because his name was no longer topical. Saenger thinks the speech prefixes being different from the dialogue suggests that the renaming "was adopted after the initial concept of the play" (p. 358) without saying why and without addressing the usual explanation of variant speech prefixes as evidence that the composing dramatist was thinking about the different aspects of a single character (as, for example, 'Duchess' and 'Mother'). Indeed if Ferdinand were the new name for Navarre then changing just the speech prefixes and not the dialogue (as Saenger appears to suggest happened) was botching, not revision.

    E. Eugene Giddens finds in Antony and Cleopatra an undetected echo of Thomas Lodge's plays The Wounds of Civil War ('The Wounds of Civil War: An Unnoticed Parallel', N&Q 243[1998] 346-7). Cleopatra says "Your honour calls you hence" (1.3.98) and Lodge's Scilla says "farewell Anthony, honor calls me hence". This is not the same historical Antony, but it is another failed attempt to prevent a Roman leader called Antony from fighting in civil war. No other poem or play before 1610 has "honour calls . . . hence", asserts Giddens on the evidence of Chadwyck-Healey's full-text CD-ROMs, and having checked in Literature Online I agree. Helene Solheim lays to rest a ghost created by Vittoria Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori in the Revels edition of Sir Thomas More: the "Mr. Murray" Thomas Hearne says he got the play manuscript from is in all probability John Murray of Sacombe Hertfordshire, collector and antiquarian, not the imagined Alexander Murray ('On the Provenance of The Book of Sir Thomas More', N&Q 243[1998] 358).

    Thomas Merriam, having argued that parts of Titus Andronicus are by Marlowe (see above) argues that most of Edward 3 is also his, not Shakespeare's ('Influence Alone? Reflections on the Newly Canonized Edward III', N&Q 244[1999] 200-6). Merriam has found thirty-four rare words and collocations which appear in Edward 3 and in Marlowe's works but not Shakespeare's, and eighteen of these are not in Tamburlaine either, so it is not simply a case of Tamburlaine influencing the writer of Edward 3. In a table of descending vocabulary size (which is always higher when two men collaborate), Edward 3 is particularly high--it is rich in words--and comes between 1 Henry 6 (which is thought by Gary Taylor and others to be collaborative) and Henry 5 (which is thought by Merriam to be collaborative). The next less rich is Macbeth which is certainly two men's work, so all around Edward 3 in this group of vocabulary rich plays are collaborative works. Edward 3 shows few occurrences of 'good', 'I', 'not', 'so', and 'you', far fewer than was Shakespeare's habit and close to the norm for Marlowe and this does not happen by conscious imitation alone. Similarly in the occurrences of 'ye' instead of 'you' Edward 3 is like Marlowe and not like Shakespeare. Greene's Alphonsus, which everyone agrees is influenced by Tamburlaine, does not have Marlowe's ye/you ratio, so artistic influence seems not to be a conduit of this trait. Breaking Edward 3 into acts, the second one, which on other grounds has been thought to be Shakespeare's, has no occurrences of 'ye' and in this it is Shakespearian while the other acts have above Shakespearian levels of 'ye'.

    Richard 3's "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse" echoes, as everyone knows, Peele's The Battle of Alcazar (1594) "A horse, a horse, villain a horse! That I may take the river straight and fly!" but Paolo Cherchi points out that the two works have nothing else in common and Peele's lacks the extraordinary offer to swap a kingdom for a horse (''My Kingdom for a Horse'', N&Q 244[1999] 206-7). (In performance, I suppose, Richard might speak his line as an observation, meaning 'my kingdom is lost for want of horse!', rather than an offer.) In Xenaphon's Cyropedia Cyrus observes a horse so swift that he asks whether the owner would take a kingdom for it, and an English translation by William Bercker appeared in 1560 and was reprinted in 1567, and this is probably Shakespeare's source. Roger Stritmatter ('A New Biblical Source for Shakespeare's Concept of 'All Seeing Heaven'', N&Q 244[1999] 207-9) shows that Job 24:13-17 is the source of Richard 2's speech about the "searching eye of heaven" which makes those who work in the night such as thieves "stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves" (Richard 2 3.2.37-47, not Richard 3 as stated in the note.) Stritmatter traces the same imagery, especially to do with sexual crimes, in Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, and The Rape of Lucrece and a parallel source in Ecclesiasticus 23:18-19. Naseeb Shaheen's criterion (see above) is met: both sources are quoted from the Geneva bible of 1570.

    MacDonald P. Jackson retracts part of what he stated about Titus Andronicus in 1998 (see above). Jackson admits that his figures for use of 'an' were inflated by his ignorance that Chadwyck-Healey's Literature Online (LION) etexts have 'An' as a speech prefix for Lady Anne in Richard 3 and for Antipholus in The Comedy of Errors ('Titus Andronicus and Electronic Databases: A Correction and a Warning', N&Q 244[1999] 209-10). Jackson's corrected figures weaken his argument, and among them is a new figure is 6.683% for the occurrences of 'an' as a percentage of 'a' or 'an' in Richard 3. Thus Richard 3 now "has a lower percentage than the highest figure for a Peele play, David and Bethsabe, with 7.078%" (p. 210). Disturbingly, this second number was given as 7.087% in the original article; the difference is tiny but unmentioned discrepancies within a correcting note do not inspire confidence. Jackson warns others to beware the trap he fell into and suggests they "visit the individual contexts so as to ensure that the counts include only those items with which you are specifically concerned". One would expect that manual checking is impractical for large-scale text crunching and the proper moral of the story is to devise tests which would find flaws in one's methodology; computer programmers are suited to this work because they ask themselves 'how might this variable go out of bounds?' Jackson does not describe how he used LION, but amongst its 'Additional Terms' feature there is no option to exclude speech prefixes from a search. Nor indeed is there such a feature amongst the dialogue boxes in Chadwyck-Healey's English Verse Drama and English Prose Drama CD-ROM databases which are the basis of the LION database, but in those one could at least enter command-line searches naming particular parts of the text to include or exclude. Thus by a command line search of "an in <speaker>" in English Verse Drama's etext of Richard 3 one may find the thirty-nine 'An' speech prefixes (he claims there were just "several") which Jackson should have deducted from his total. 

    In the Folio text of The Taming of the Shrew Petruccio likens the cuts in Katherine's dress to a "Censor in a barbers shoppe" (4.3.91), which makes no sense. A 'censer' could be a perforated fumigator, but there is no evidence of these being used in barber shops and in any case they are metal, not something soft "slished and slashed" like a gown. Jackson has previously suggested that 'censor' is a misreading of 'tonsure' meaning haircut, which has the right sense and is graphically similar, but was dismayed that Shakespeare nowhere else used 'tonsure', even though words used only once in the canon amount for 6% of Shakespeare's vocabulary. Now Jackson has more evidence for 'tonsure': Shakespeare read Gower's Confessio Amantis in preparation for The Comedy of Errors around the time he wrote The Taming of the Shrew, and in Gower's Book 8 he would have found that while Apollonius of Tyre was absent from his kingdom, "There was no man whiche toke tonsure" (''Censor' in The Taming of the Shrew, IV.iii.91', N&Q 244[1999] 211-2). This Apollonius Shakespeare later used for Pericles and if he had in the early 1590s followed up his reading of Gower with Laurence Twine's prose narrative The Pattern of Painful Adventures he would have read about the closing of barber shops during Apollonius's absence, so strengthening the tonsure/barber association in his mind.

    Chiaki Hanabusa continues his work on Q1 Romeo and Juliet with a note about when it was printed ('A Neglected Misdate and Romeo and Juliet Q1 (1597)', N&Q 244[1999] 229-30). The 1597 titlepage says it was performed by Lord Hunsdon's men, which is worth knowing because Shakespeare's company had that name only between the death of their patron Henry Carey, the Lord Chamberlain, on 22 July 1596, and the appointment of his son, George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, to the Chamberlainship early in 1597. Many editors date Hunsdon's promotion to 17 March 1597 but in fact it happened, as W. W. Greg showed, on 17 April, which widens the period during which Q1 Romeo and Juliet might have been printed. The titlepage date of the 1597 quarto means the play could not have been printed earlier than the last few weeks of 1596, when such postdating would have been acceptable. John Danter and Edward Allde printed Q1 simultaneously between them, and the former had his presses confiscated by the Stationers' Company during Lent (9 February 1597 to 26 March 1597) and the latter had his presses confiscated some time between 14 March and 26 March. Thus Q1 was printed "sometime between the final few weeks of 1596 and 14-26 March 1597".

    MacDonald P. Jackson has two pieces concerning rhymes in Shakespeare's Sonnets. Jackson used the Micro-OCP concordance software to produce an alphabetized list of all the rhymes in the Sonnets quarto of 1609 and compared this with the rhymes in the plays ('Rhymes and Shakespeare's Sonnets: Evidence of Date of Composition', N&Q 244[1999] 213-9). Using the zoning of the sonnets by A. Kent Hieatt, Charles W. Hieatt, and Anne Lake Prescott (Sonnets 1-60 = Zone 1, Sonnets 61-103 = Zone 2, Sonnets 104-126 = Zone 3, and Sonnets 127-154 = Zone 4) Jackson agrees that the order of composition was Zones 4, 2, 1, then 3, because of shared rhymes with the plays periodized as 1588/9 to 1594/5, 1594/5 to 1598/9, 1599/1600 to 1604/5, and 1605/6 to 1613. This rhyming evidence agrees with the evidence from rare vocabulary. Using rare word rhymes shows the same pattern, although the pool of data is smaller and random fluctuations become more distorting. When rhymes in the plays are compared with rhymes in the other Shakespeare poems, those other poems' dates are confirmed, which suggests that Jackson's method works. Jackson concludes that ". . . the last twenty-odd of the sonnets to the Friend were composed significantly later than the rest . . ." and that ". . . most of numbers 104-126 belong to the seventeenth century, while numbers 1-103 and 127-154 were mainly written in the 1590s". In a related study, Jackson concludes that the order of the Sonnets is not random, as has sometimes been thought ('Shakespeare's Sonnets: Rhyme and Reason in the Dark Lady Series', N&Q 244[1999] 219-22). In the whole sequence, seventy-one of the sonnets (51%) are linked to the next by a rhyme-word, which is more than one would expect by chance: in a random re-ordering of the sonnets only 33% of the sonnets are so linked. Thus the sequence order is artistic, although not necessarily consciously. In the randomized sequence the longest run of rhyme-linked sonnets is five sonnets, but in the quarto numbers 131-145 (a run of sixteen sonnets) are rhyme linked: 131 heart face, 132 heart face me be, 133 me be me, 134 me me thine will still, etcetera. Such a pattern must be conscious. Andrew Gurr pointed out that Sonnet 145, anomalous in its tetrameters, seems like juvenilia with its pun on "hate away" and "Hattaway" (a variant of Hathaway). Jackson's result shows that it was not just thrown in but deliberately placed "like a smiling Janus" or a piece of "comic relief" where it is.

    By a series of verbal parallels, too numerous to list, J. J. M. Tobin shows that Sonnets 29, 55, 116 and 144 have echoes of Thomas Nashe's Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem ('Nashe and Some Shakespearian Sonnets', N&Q 244[1999] 222-6) and Roger Stritmatter shows that Sonnets 48 and 52 echo the New Testament Matthew 6:19-21 (Geneva bible, 1568) with its exhortation to store up treasure in heaven ('The Heavenly Treasure of Sonnets 48 and 52', N&Q 244[1999] 226-8).

    In the Folio text, but not the quarto, of The Merry Wives of Windsor the Host asks Shallow "Will you go, Anheers?" (2.1.209). There have been several proposed emendations of "Anheers" and Deanne Williams thinks it is an Anglicized form of "asnier" or "�nier" (French for mule-driver) which was often used to mean 'fool' (''Will You Go, Anheers':? The Merry Wives of Windsor, II.1.209', N&Q 244[1999] 233-4). This has the merit of sounding like "Anne" (whom Shallow is trying to get for Slender) and, being a French word, it glances at Caius the French doctor who also wants her. The same word, Williams claims, is meant by "Oneyers" in Gadshill's list of men with whom he is not ashamed to keep company (1 Henry 4 2.1.75), the joke in both cases being the pricking of middle-class pretensions in the low-born. Finally, Catherine Loomis claims that Othello's reference to "entire and perfect chrysolite" (5.2.152) comes from Francis Mere's Palladis Tamia in which the stone chrysolite it is said to so abhor adultery that it cracks in its presence, and hence by implication is a suitable stone for a wife's ring ('Othello's 'Entire and Perfect Chrysolute': A Reply', N&Q 244[1999] 238-9).

    Books Reviewed

C. J. Sisson New Readings in Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press [1956] 2: The Histories, vol. The Tragedies. ENTER PAGES, PRICE, AND ISBNs HERE

C. Walter Hodges The Globe Restored: A Study of the Elizabethan Theatre. Oxford University Press [1968]. ENTER PAGES, PRICE, AND ISBNs HERE

David Scott Kastan Shakespeare After Theory. Routledge [1999]. ENTER PAGES, PRICE, AND ISBNs HERE

Leah S. Marcus Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton. Routledge [1996]. ENTER PAGES, PRICE, AND ISBNs HERE

W. W. Greg (ed.) Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe's Diary. Bullen [1907]. ENTER PAGES, PRICE, AND ISBNs HERE

William Shakespeare King Henry VI Part 2, ed. Ronald Knowles, The Arden Shakespeare. Thomson Learning [1999]. ENTER PAGES, PRICE, AND ISBNs HERE

William Shakespeare King Henry VIII or All is True, ed. Jay L. Halio, The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford University Press [1999]. ENTER PAGES, PRICE, AND ISBNs HERE

William Shakespeare The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, The Arden Shakespeare. Thomson Learning [1999]. ENTER PAGES, PRICE, AND ISBNs HERE