Year's Work in English Studies 2003: Shakespeare: Editions and Textual Studies

    In a review of this kind it can be difficult to know where to stop; after all, 'editions and textual studies' could encompass almost anything written about Shakespeare. In the past I have, at the risk of stepping on other contributors' toes, noticed items that discuss such matters as how the wording of stage directions affects performance. This year, because there are a great many (over 70) items to review, I shall discuss only work showing what an editor has done, or exhorting what an editor should do, or announcing a discovery about evidence that might shape what an editor will do. The burgeoning subject of how the different early versions of what we used to think of as a single play might differ in their performance potentialities bears only indirectly on what an editor should do and it has grown too large to be contained within a section of this book that is properly reserved for matters textual. Of the fine essays in Hardin L. Aasand's collection Stage Directions in Hamlet all but two fall into this category and are ignored here. Even reviewers paid by the word (as we are) must limit the fields of their enquiries.

    It was a busy year for Shakespearian textual studies with three landmark monographs appearing, but only one new substantial edition: Michael Taylor's Henry VI, Part One for the Oxford Shakespeare. The only authoritative early printing of this play is the 1623 Folio, so Taylor's relatively short introduction (77 pages) naturally has much more to say about the meanings and reception of the play than about the textual situation. Taylor first attends to the year 1592, when Thomas Nashe famously alluded to the play in performance, contrasting the heroic English past it presented with his own Puritan-ridden, usurious present (p. 2). Treating that year's Greene's Groatsworth of Wit as though it were simply Greene's work, Taylor finds it betraying a "rancid . . . anxiety of influence" that in a footnote he glosses as "mutual stimulation" and by which he clearly means to imply mental masturbation (p. 5). This seems somewhat unfair to Harold Bloom, whose notion of 'anxiety of influence' can often refer to a positive and indeed productive relation between present and preceding writers. Also somewhat misrepresented is one of Andrew Gurr's admittedly difficult essays ('The Chimera of Amalgamation', Theatre Research International 18 [1993].85-93), in which Taylor thinks Gurr opposed the whole idea that "in the early 1590s companies amalgamated" (p. 6) whereas in fact Gurr was specifically referring to the oft-alleged Strange's/Admiral's men's amalgamation.

    In a section about ' The 'Henry VI' Plays in 1592' (pp. 10-14) that discusses the sequentiality of 1, 2, and 3 Henry 6, Taylor surprisingly neglects to mention the problem that the allusion to 3 Henry 6 in Greene's Groatsworth suggests that 3 Henry 6 was at least written--and presumably, in fact, in performance--before Groatsworth's Stationers' Register entry on 20 September 1592, and yet 1 Henry 6 was apparently 'new' (according to most people's reading of Henslowe's Diary) on 3 March 1592. There seems, on this evidence, insufficient time for parts 1, 2, and 3 being written in that order. Taylor's compressed account of the debate about the order is written from the point of view of someone who knows the data and does not need them repeated. Taylor fails to mention that B. J. Sokol has presented strong evidence that 1 Henry 6 cannot have been written before 25 April 1591 because its 'garden' scene alludes to the refurbishment of the Inner Temple Garden completed by that date ('Manuscript Evidence for an Earliest Date of Henry VI Part One', N&Q 245 [2000].58-63). A much more serious error, however, is Taylor's claim that because the first printings of 2 Henry 6 and 3 Henry 6 do not name Shakespeare as the dramatist, there is nothing to link these plays to Shakespeare until the 1623 Folio firmly located them in his oeuvre (p. 11). In fact, there appeared in 1619 a printing of both plays in one volume called The Whole Contention between the Two Famous Houses Lancaster and York, and its title-page named "William Shakespeare, Gent" as the dramatist.

    Taylor treats the multiple authorship of the play as a matter of "problems and anomalies", not just the way drama was usually made and observes that if, as Gary Taylor argued, Nashe wrote act 1 of 1 Henry 6 then it was surprisingly reticent of him to praise the Talbot scenes so lavishly in his Pierce Pennilesse without mentioning his own contribution. If 1 Henry 6 was written before 2 Henry 6 and 3 Henry 6, as some have recently claimed, it is odd, remarks Taylor, that 2 Henry 6 does not follow up many of its leads and that 1 Henry 6 is more like 3 Henry 6 than like 2 Henry 6. On the other hand, 1 Henry 6 coming first would explain its weaknesses: they are beginner's flaws (p. 12). If 1 Henry 6 is a prequel, why did Shakespeare collaborate on it and so produce something inferior (p. 13)? Here again, Taylor perhaps unconsciously deems collaboration as a sign of weakness, as an anomaly. In a footnote (p. 14n1), Taylor characterizes Marlowe's Tamburlaine as a "daring venture" in being a two-parter. In fact there were many two-parters and Marlowe's play might well have not been conceived as one: the second part simply continues the story (extending an unexpected dramatic success?) and negates the first part's radical innovation by having the anti-hero eventually get his come-uppance.

    Shakespeare inherited rather than invented the history play genre, which collection of plays (mostly not by Shakespeare) Taylor sees as constituting "a critical response to Marlowe's glorification of ruthless foreign individualism." (p. 19). 1 Henry 6  is a piece of patriotic propaganda in a time of national crisis--post-Babington plot, post-Armada--but despite its patriotic elements it is not quite the kind of story one would tell to stiffen the national sinews (p. 21-24). Taylor thinks the second tetralogy (the Henry 4 and 5 plays) "infinitely superior in every way" to the first--it is refreshing to have an editor not extol his play as an undervalued masterpiece--yet the first is also vastly (if not infinitely) superior to the other history plays around at the time (p. 25). At this point, Taylor starts to write using sentence fragments that make sense only in relation to the antecedent subject of the previous sentence, as in "A pleasure we now take for granted" (p. 29n1) referring to Elizabethan audiences' pleasure in being made familiar with great ones. In this case the antecedent subject is in the body text and the fragment in a footnote, which is quite a stretch. This habit gets severely irritating in Taylor's section on the plays in recent performance: "[It was] A clear shape, we may recall, [formed] principally at the expense of Henry VI, Part One" and "[It was] Epic for theatregoers too as the three Henries were performed on the same day on eight occasions, outlasting the Terry Hands 1977 marathon by over an hour" (p. 36). In parts the introduction is repetitive: on page 41 is repeated from page 21 note 21 the claim that the encounter of Talbot and the countess of Auvergne looks forward to the "sharp-edged dialogue" between men and women in Shakespeare's romantic comedies; true, but presumably it also looks back to the same in The Taming of the Shrew. Taylor cites two critics (David Riggs and E. Pearlman) who refer to Tamburlaine playing at the Fortune, without mentioning that that theatre was built at least ten years after the play opened at the Rose.

    Taylor's sections on 'The Text' (pp. 75-77) and his 'Editorial Procedures' are remarkably brief, acknowledging no scholarship since the Textual Companion to the Oxford Complete Works and offering no discussion of what effect it might have upon editing certain parts of the play to think that Nashe, not Shakespeare, wrote them. There is, indeed, no acknowledgement of the New Textualism: "Loose ends, inconsistencies, contradictions, misplaced stage directions, changeable speech prefixes combine, with other irregularities in the Folio text, to make it very unlikely that the manuscript came from the playhouse" (p. 76). Taylor finds some theatrically unnecessary details that would suggest foul paper copy lying behind the Folio text, but too many irregularities for the foul papers to be those of one author, so he goes along with the Textual Companion's view that F's copy was "collaborative foul papers". (The date of the Oxford Complete Works itself, to which the Textual Companion is companion, is wrongly given here as 1988 rather than 1986.) Taylor confesses himself "somewhat eclectic" in choosing names for his characters, preferring historically-correct names for minor figures but Folio names for major ones (p. 80).

    In the text of the play itself there are more signs of incomplete proofing: the note to Talbot's entry in the dramatis personae has a cross-reference to "Introduction, pp. oo-oo" (p. 92). Thankfully, Joan of Arc gets her right name, Joan la Pucelle, rather than the name Joan Puzel used by Edward Burns for the rival Arden 3 edition of the play published three years ago. Likewise Taylor has Bedford say "Our isle be made a marish of salt tears" (1.1.50), sensibly following Alexander Pope, C. J. Sisson and the Oxford Complete Works and rejecting Burns's retention of "nourish of salt tears" from the Folio. At 1.2.21.1 Taylor comments that "Oxford [Complete Works] begins a new scene here, but this adherence to the letter of the dramatic law--an unwritten one--that a new scene begins each time the stage is cleared seems pedantic in this case". Actually, we know that Shakespeare did not mark scene breaks and that theatrical scribes did not add them, so they are only editorial markers anyway; that being the case, it does make sense to consistently follow the rule. Throughout the third scene (1.3.19, 36, 42, 49, 56, 79, and 84) Taylor retains F's repeated insistence that Winchester is a cardinal even though subsequent scenes show him to be only a bishop and that he gets made up to a cardinal in 5.1. This generates an anomaly but Taylor thinks that ". . . there is simply too much dramatic fall-out here from the Cardinal appearing as a Cardinal--his scarlet hat and his robes for instance--to allow us to correct F's contradictory chronology at the expense of the scene's colour and flair". This decision risks being tyrannized by the copy text, which presumably had to be corrected before performance. And yet, having accepted that F's inconsistency should stand, Taylor nonetheless emends F's "Here Glosters men beat out the Cardinalls men" to "Here Gloucester's men beat out the Bishop's men" (1.3.56.1), which suggests that he thinks that Winchester really is only a bishop at this point. If the colourfulness of the error in F is worth preserving when it made real trouble (by being in contradiction with what is said about him elsewhere) it is surely then worth retaining when it does not create trouble within a scene in which the editor has decided that Winchester is a cardinal.

    At 1.5.11 Taylor has Talbot say "Rather than I would be so vile-esteemed", which is essentially Pope's emendation of F's "pil'd esteem'd" for his edition of 1723-25, although the Textual Companion and Taylor himself credit Lewis Theobald in 1733. In support of "vile-esteemed" is Sonnet 121's 'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed", although this does not mean quite the same thing. The Folio has Mortimer absurdly likening death or locks of hair to Nestor: "And these gray Locks, the Pursuiuants of death, | Nestor-like aged, in an Age of Care, | Argue the end of Edmund Mortimer", which Taylor (like the Oxford Complete Works) sensibly reorders to make it clear that Mortimer is comparing himself to Nestor: "And these grey locks, the pursuivants of death, | Argue the end of Edmund Mortimer, | Nestor-like agèd in an age of care"  (2.5.5-7). Likewise Taylor follows the Oxford Complete Works's assignment of one of Warwick's lines to Gloucester: "WINCHESTER Rome shall remedy this. [GLOUCESTER] Roam thither then. | [WARWICK] (to Winchester) My lord, it were your duty to forbear. | SOMERSET Ay, so the bishop be not overborne" (3.1.51-53), whereas F has Warwick say "Roame thither then. | My Lord it were your dutie to forbeare", which Sisson (New Readings in Shakespeare, pp. 69-70) defended as being said in two tones: first he taunts ('off you go then') and then he softens to remind the bishop of his duty. Following a suggestion made but not enacted by Michael Hattaway in his New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the play, Taylor reorders F's "Looke on thy Country, look on fertile France, | And see the Cities and the Townes defac't, | By wasting Ruine of the cruell Foe, | As lookes the Mother on her lowly Babe, | When Death doth close his tender-dying Eyes". F makes an (albeit awkward) sense as it is, but is better rearranged as Taylor has it: "JOAN Look on thy country, look on fertile France, | As looks the mother on her lowly babe | When death doth close his tender-dying eyes, | And see the cities and the towns defaced | By wasting ruin of the cruel foe" (3.3.44-48).

    A footnote gloss ought to be something one could substitute for the tricky word or phrase being glossed, but for "Alarum. Enter the Earl of Suffolk with Margaret in his hand" Taylor offers the footnote gloss "0.1 in led by the". To be grammatical this should of course read "in his led by the", else the substituted phrase would read 'led by the his hand', but more importantly still Taylor's gloss switches whose hand it is: in F it is Suffolk's hand, in Taylor's edition it is Margaret's hand. Like many editors since Edward Capell, Taylor finds disorder in Suffolk's Folio lines "For I will touch thee but with reuerend hands, | I kisse these fingers for eternall peace, | And lay them gently on thy tender side" (5.4.3-5). Like Sisson, I cannot see what the problem is. In the famous scene of Suffolk and Margaret making lengthy asides (5.4.17-63), Taylor repeatedly has one or other speak "(To himself)" or "(To herself)". It has been a while since anyone concerned with staging wanted to be quite so specific that an aside is self-communion rather than making the less restrictive assertion that it merely is not to be clearly heard, or directly addressed to, the other character. Finally, at 5.4.148 Taylor deletes "Mad" from Suffolk's "Mad naturall Graces that extinguish Art" on the grounds that it is superfluous and that Burns suggested it was merely a false start in the underlying manuscript that was imperfectly deleted and hence set by the printer. Yet Burns did not just delete the word as Taylor had done. As with Hattaway's suggestion about France as a dead baby (3.3.44-48), Taylor follows another editor's suggestion even though that editor was insufficiently convinced on the point to enact it for himself in his edition.

    Easily the most important contribution to the field this year--indeed the most important contribution for a long time--is Lukas Erne's Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, which aims to overturn the oft-repeated orthodoxy that Shakespeare took no interest in the publication of his plays. That Shakespeare might in fact have worked with a readership in mind was the subject of an essay by Richard Dutton seven years ago ('The Birth of the Author', in R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner (ed.) Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum (Newark: University of Delaware Press [1996])) and of an article by Erne in Shakespeare Quarterly reviewed last year. In the book-length study Erne sets out his case in full. In recognition of the importance of the arguments, the University of Lancaster convened a two-day conference on the subject in July 2004, nominally titled 'New Shakespeare: A writer and his readers: The return of the author in Shakespeare studies' but effectively 'the Erne debate'. Erne begins by getting right the fine detail of Thomas Heywood's letter appended to his Apology for Actors that explains that it was William Jaggard the printer's fault that a couple of Heywood's poems (from Heywood's Troia Britannica) were described as Shakespeare's in the 1612 edition of the miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim. Heywood thought that people might mistakenly assume that Shakespeare put his name to them because Heywood had tried to steal them, which he had not: they were not Shakespeare's in the first place. Since the title-page of The Passionate Pilgrim was reset, we may reasonably assume that Shakespeare got it changed and this presents us with a Shakespeare concerned about his literary property and about publication (p. 2). (Since Heywood clearly objected to the misattribution too, I cannot see why he could not be the agent of change.) Erne thinks that the Greene's Groatsworth attack on Shakespeare, alluding to 3 Henry 6, is about his temerity in outdoing Marlowe and Kyd (writers of two-parters) with a three-parter. Erne twice calls the Henry 6 series an "ambitious project" (pp. 2, 5) but of course the likeliest scenario is that it was a two-parter that grew into a three-parter, which shows not ambition but mere opportunism.

    Erne reminds us that 28 of the Sonnets are about "poetry as immortalization" (p. 5), although it is worth recalling (as Robert Wilcher does in a forthcoming book) that Sonnet 17 refers to "my papers" not pages, suggesting manuscript survival. The view about writing yourself into posterity that we get from the Sonnets is incompatible with the publication-indifferent Shakespeare we get elsewhere, and Erne asserts that in late-sixteenth century England it became a real possibility for a poet to enter posterity (p. 6). An increasing amount of literary work was printed and although it is true that printers, not authors, held legal copyright, it was nonetheless widely recognized that writers had a moral claim to their own works. Erne gives examples of authors complaining that the Stationers' Company monopoly of printing gave these men unjust power over authors' work, and indeed there were royal patents granted that allowed particular authors "to a derive a profit from the sale of their books" (p. 9). Of course, that is not quite the issue: a share in the profits is not the same as control over the material. Thomas Bodley, it is true, kept printed plays out of his library, but Erne insists that he was not typical in that, witness Sir John Harington, and Francis Bacon's grandson Sir Roger Townshend, and others, who took printed plays seriously. Certainly in the first years of the theatrical period (say, 1567 to 1589) plays were primarily for performance only, but thereafter they took on a dual life, just as Shakespeare got going in the early 1590s. The peak of play publication in the 20 years of 1594-1613 exceeded (indeed is double) the combined total for the 10 years before and the 10 years after this 'spike'. That is, it was not simply a matter of ongoing increase: those years were special (p. 15). What we would call literature was only about a quarter of all publishing in these years, but within that literary segment drama was fully a seventh. Drama's share today is much less. Erne notices that particular men--Thomas Creede, Edward Allde, and Valentine Simmes--were especially active in play printing (p. 16n50), which point might usefully be cross-referenced with Gary Taylor's plenary paper at the Lancaster conference (''Shakespeare's First Readers': Plenary Lecture Delivered at the Conference 'The New Shakespeare: A Writer and His Readers: The Return of the Author in Shakespeare Studies' at University of Lancaster, 3 July' [2004]), which made the point that publishers might over-compensate for their lowlife reputation by publishing uncommercial material. This provides a useful counterbalance to Peter W. M. Blayney's empirical demonstration that, in general, play printing was not lucrative ('The Publication of Playbooks', in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (ed.) A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press [1997])).

    Material form showed drama's place: printed plays adopted Roman typefaces before other genres did, and hence were "catering to an educated and progressive readership" (p. 17). The anthology England's Parnassus (1600) puts an extract illustrating 'care' from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen (a clear piece of high culture) next to Friar Laurence on 'care', so Shakespeare was not thought of as low-culture in his own time. As an avid reader, Shakespeare must have seen this. Whereas freelance dramatists got their income primarily  from selling the play to the company, Shakespeare's income was primarily from box office (p. 19). And whereas the freelancers (we infer from Henslowe's Diary) wrote just enough to fulfil their commissions, Shakespeare habitually wrote more than was needed, because he could afford to write for the page as well (p. 20). This argument could usefully be nuanced with consideration of Tiffany Stern's work on dramatists' 'benefit days' that were an additional source of income beyond the flat fee for delivery of a playbook. Erne surveys the rise of performance-centered thinking in Shakespeare studies, which he dates as starting in the late 1970s, and dismisses the idea that we only 'overhear' Shakespeare via his scripts, the detritus of performance, as nonsense (pp. 20-25). The publishers, he points out, thought them coherent and whole enough to publish. Erne is explicitly against returning us to the New Critical position that drama is poetry, but he wants to push the pendulum back a little from the current obsession with performance only. The Romantics were not entirely wrong to say that Shakespeare is more suitable to be read than performed, but our view has been skewed by the fact that Shakespeare has been performed from the overlong reading texts that he produced rather than the short theatrical ones. Erne's view of Shakespeare's literariness has amongst its many merits the fact that it solves the long-standing mystery that his dramatic poetry whizzes by one in performance, seeming to demand close attention that it cannot, in the moment, be given.

    Usually Jonson is named as the first man to insist that plays were literature, either in his 1616 Workes, or in more tentative ways in the printings of Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) and Sejanus (1605) that mark a gap between the book and the performance text. For Erne, the gap between performance and print opened up at least as early as the 1590 printing of Tamburlaine and plays became literary artifacts part-way through Shakespeare's career and did so at the behest of publishers not playwrights (pp. 31-33). Pushing back by 10 years (1590 instead of 1600) the date when printed playbooks began to legitimize themselves by stressing their non-theatrical features and their authorial (as opposed to theatrical) origins is important for the case of Shakespeare, because it puts him inside this trend. Erne rightly objects to Jeffrey Masten's erroneous assertion that play title-pages in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries generally did not mention authors, and insist rather there was a palpable tension between performance and reading marked in the title-pages. In the 1590s, naming the author became a way to detach printed plays from the taint of the playhouse, but of course collaborative dramatic composition was a hindrance to this detachment. Nearly 60% of the plays written for the Admiral's men from autumn 1597 to summer 1600 were collaborative, yet not a single one of the plays printed in that period mentions multiple authorship on its title-page: either a single author is named or no author is named. (Erne should be careful here of taking the Admiral's men as the norm of collaborative writing: perhaps unattached dramatists (from whom this company got its drama) were more likely to collaborate than the attached dramatists who supplied other companies.) Overall, from 1584 to 1623, fewer than 12% of title-pages that mentioned playwrights mentioned multiple playwrights. So, it seems that collaboratively-written drama is under-represented in publication, either by being not selected or by being printed without mention of the dramatists. Playbills, it seems from John Dryden's evidence, did not name the author until the end of the seventeenth century, while title-pages started to do so 100 years earlier, so the theatre and the printing industry were not treating authors the same way (pp. 43-44). In England's Parnassus, John Allot attributed collaboratively written material to one playwright only, as though writers were supposed, in their very natures, to be loners.

    Non-commercial plays (translations and Latin plays for example) were in the mid-sixteenth century published with their authors'/editors'/translators' names on the title-pages and even appeared in collections of 'Works', but the commercial theatre play printings remained mostly anonymous until the 1590s. However, by the 1610s it was the norm to name the dramatist, so during the span of Shakespeare's career drama went from almost always anonymous in print to almost always attributed (pp. 45-47). The Jonsonian distinction between great dramatic matter to be studied in print by the learned, and the dross that the actors threw in to please the multitude, is already apparent in the preface to the reader in the 1590s printing of Tamburlaine that "left out some fond and friuolous Iestures". It is not clear whether the material excluded was Marlowe's work or actors' interpolations, but the point is that already, by 1590, there was a sense of what suits the stage and what suits the page, and this sense is coming from a publisher not an author (pp. 48-49). Did publishers perhaps carve out the sense of 'dramatic author' that the authors then took up? As well as creating the 'author', publishing might well have helped stabilize genre indeterminacy: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida was variably called a comedy (Q-1609 address), a tragedy (F1), and a history (Q-1609 title-page). Likewise, the 1590 printing of Tamburlaine refers to the removal of comic bits and its Stationers' Register entry calls it "commical". Histories and tragedies seem to have been more respectable reading matter than comedies (certainly, Shakespeare's comedies were not reprinted half so often as his histories and tragedies), and thus our modern genre expectations (for example, that Tamburlaine is a tragedy) might themselves have been shaped by the publishers (p. 50-51). When Richard Jones published Tamburlaine there was not yet an established market for printings of plays from the commercial theatre, and he treaded carefully in how he addressed his readers. This care was emulated by others. When The Spanish Tragedy was printed, its multi-lingual inset play was turned into English for the benefit of readers (hence it is not a record of performance), apparently by Kyd who thus wrote the same thing twice, once for the stage and once for the page. Around the same time the same stationer (Edward White) published Kyd's full version of the inset play, Soliman and Perseda, and it is conceivable that the miniature version in The Spanish Tragedy was a taster for the full one (pp. 53-55).

    Turning to Shakespeare's printed output in particular, Erne counts that by 1600 he had written 20 plays of which 15 had been printed. (When the facts are stated baldly like that, it is easy to share Erne's impatience with the orthodoxy that Shakespeare was print-indifferent.) Erne's impatience is heightened by Douglas Brooks's repeated assertion (in From Playhouse to Printing House) that the 1600 quarto of 2 Henry 4 was the first printed play to name Shakespeare on its title-page, made as part of an argument that this fact is extraordinary since 1 Henry 4 caused such a fuss. For Brooks, Shakespeare's authorship was constructed (as Michel Foucault would say) in an act of transgression and as a response to the Oldcastle controversy. Of course, this is nonsense since earlier printings of Love's Labour's Lost, 1 Henry 4, Richard 3, and Richard 2 had all named Shakespeare. Brooks's mistake was to look only at first printings and ignore reprints. What is truly odd (almost unique, in fact) about the Shakespearian cases is that an anonymous edition gets replaced by one that names the author (p. 57-58). For Erne, 1598 is the year that Shakespeare gets invented as an author and around the turn of the century a lot of authors were invented in this way. That is, they cease to get anonymously published and start to get named on title-pages. Shakespeare leads the way. At this point in an extraordinarily detailed argument, Erne makes the first slip that I can find: "the Pavier quarto of 1 Contention was said to be 'Written by W. Shakespere, Gent" (p. 65). In fact it was called The Whole Contention and its title-page reads "William Shakespeare, Gent" (a different spelling and an unabbreviated first name).

    In 1598 Falstaff had just become a popular character and Shakespeare had become a gentleman, but Erne does not think these things account for his emergence as an author. Rather, what mattered was his being canonized by Francis Meres and put amongst the acknowledged great writers (pp. 66-67). This seems to be why reprints of Shakespeare suddenly, thereafter, name him where the first editions had not: now, post-Meres, Shakespeare's name sells. This might also be why The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), a collection with a few bits of Shakespeare in it, is attributed to Shakespeare on its title-page, and might also explain by 4 non-Shakespearian plays (Cromwell, London Prodigal, Puritan Widow, and Yorkshire Tragedy) were printed with his name on their title-pages. Thus ". . . the social cachet of printed playbooks increased well before the advent of Ben Jonson and the publication of his Workes in folio in 1616" (p. 71) Allot's selection for his collection England's Parnassus was strongly influenced by non-anonymous publication: most excerpts were from printed plays and of those most were from printings with named authors. Identifiable playwrights, then, already qualified for inclusion amongst "the choicest flowers of our modern poets" as the collection called them. Another compilation is A. M.'s [probably Anthony Munday's] Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses (1600), which gives much shorter snippets (a couple of lines) and does not attribute them, although Charles Crawford was able to identify more than half of them by hand in the early twentieth century. The situation with Belvedere is like that with England's Parnassus: plays are given place amongst the literary, and Shakespeare most of all. So, we must review our standard history and stop saying that plays were, before the big dramatic folios, sub-literary, and we must stop thinking of the publishers as the enemies of the dramatists. To a considerable extent, the publishers made the dramatic authors. By 1600, Shakespeare had a substantial body of published work and must have expected that what he wrote next would also appear in print. The remarkable fact is that mostly it did not and only 5 more of his plays--Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, and Pericles--were printed in his lifetime.

    This fact structures Erne's next two chapters, which examine in detail Shakespeare's publication career up to (pp. 78-100) and after (pp. 101-14) the fulcrum year 1600. The gist of these chapters appeared as Erne's Shakespeare Quarterly article reviewed last year and need not detain us too long. Erne examines the first 12 plays that Shakespeare wrote for the Chamberlain's men. Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry 5, and perhaps Love's Labour's Lost first appeared in 'bad' quartos. Perhaps because subsequent printings were 'good', we can say that players did care about the quality of their plays in print and intervened. For Q1 Romeo and Juliet John Danter got licence but not Stationers' Register entry before printing it, but by 1599 Cuthbert Burby seems to have acquire the rights to Romeo and Juliet and owned a 'good' manuscript that he went on to print. It is hard to be certain what happened, but if the company sold a good manuscript to Burby, they might well have done this before Q1 appeared. (True, but equally they might not have.) That the good manuscript underlying Q2 Hamlet changed hands before Q1 Hamlet appeared is evidenced by the fact that James Roberts who went on to print Q2 entered his copy in the Stationers' Register before Q1 was printed for Nicholas Ling and John Trundle. Presumably, Roberts, pointing out the unintentional breach of the publishers of Q1, resolved the potential dispute by selling Ling and Trundle his good manuscript and having them pay him to print it. Q1 Love's Labour's Lost calls itself "Newly corrected and augmented", implying the existence of an earlier, lost 'bad' quarto; but there are other cases where such claims about correcting and augmenting are demonstrably false and Paul Werstine showed that Q1 Love's Labour's Lost was probably set up from printed copy, in which case the lost Q0 was good too.

    So, it is likely that rather than responding to 'bad' publication, the company sale of manuscripts to publishers preceded the bad publication. The 'bad' Henry 5 and Merry Wives of Windsor were not superceded by good ones in Shakespeare's lifetime, but the latter did not sell well (no reprint until 1619) so the players would not have been able to get a good text printed if they wanted to, for the publisher would have wanted to shift his existing copies first. Here Erne repeats the jumping from list to list that marred his Shakespeare Quarterly article: "Of eight other plays Shakespeare is likely to have written for his company from 1594 until close to the turn of the century . . ." (p. 82) Love's Labour's Won might be the same as Much Ado About Nothing or might be another play since lost, and King John could not be printed because Troublesome Reign's publication blocked it. (It would be doing the reader a service if every time a list of plays were referred to, the items in the list were spelled out. A little wasted space would save a lot of readerly guesswork.) Of the remaining 6 plays--Richard 2, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry 4, 2 Henry 4, and Much Ado About Nothing--we are now more sceptical than ever about our ability to tell the nature of the underlying copy from the printed text. Still, it remains quite possible that these plays were printed from good manuscripts supplied by the company. As a rule, 2 years seems to elapse between composition and Stationers' Register entry, although Erne has to dodge around a little amongst the critics for his dates of composition in order to make this all fit; there is a faint sense of shoehorning the evidence to fit the theory. To his credit, Erne admits the danger of circularity: some of the datings of plays are based on the idea that they would not get printed soon after composition because that would hurt performance income.

    The people involved in publishing the good texts of Shakespeare were a tightly-knit group of primarily just three men: the publisher of playbills James Roberts, plus Andrew Wise (with whom Roberts worked) and Cuthbert Burby. Why wait 2 years before selling the manuscript to the publisher? Perhaps to keep up the income from scribal dissemination (which was certainly more costly per book than print) to discerning aristocrats, or perhaps to get publicity for a revival (pp. 87-91). A few performances (including revivals) that we can date--Titus Andronicus June 1594, The Taming of the Shrew June 1594, A Knack to Know an Honest Man October 1594 to November 1596, and Massacre at Paris June-September 1594) coincide with printed texts being published. Of Shakespeare's pre-Chamberlain's men's plays the evidence is generally hazy and it is no surprise that a clear pattern cannot be determined. Although Erne does not explicitly make the connection, it follows from his argument that once the two main companies have what Andrew Gurr called 'settled practices' resulting from their state-enforced duopoly of London playing (The Shakespearian Playing Companies, pp. 78-104), settled practices in publication also emerged.

    Then, suddenly, Shakespeare playbook publishing fell off after 1600, with just 5 plays appearing from 1601 to 1616. The decline was in new editions and in reprints, and only 2 new plays, Hamlet and Pericles, went into a second edition. This is harder to explain than the fairly straightforward pattern of the pre-1600 years, which was clearly one of intended company publication (p. 100). One possible explanation is that there was a glut of playbooks around 1600-1 and supply outstripped demand; this would make publishers reluctant to take on new books. Another explanation would be competition from the newly re-formed Paul's and Blackfriar's boys: their plays got into print and hurt the adult players' publications. The Stationers' Register 'staying' order of Much Ado About Nothing and 2 Henry 4 (not Henry 5 as usually thought), As You Like It, and Every Man In His Humour, was not an attempt to block publication but rather an acknowledgement that the licence lacked ecclesiastical authorization; otherwise, how come 3 of the 4 plays were regularly entered within 20 days and published the same or the next year? Looked at this way, As You Like It failed to get published, rather than was blocked (p. 103). Dutton suggested that the prefatory address to the Troilus and Cressida quarto about the play never being performed refers to the readerly, long text of that edition, just as Q2 Hamlet boasts of being longer and new in the sense of being newly available in this long version. James Roberts entered Troilus and Cressida in the Stationers' Register on 7 February 1603, the entry recording that he still needed "sufficient aucthority" (that is, ecclesiastical approval). This does not mean that there was anything wrong: Roberts entered several plays that had not been allowed, but as he seems to have been trading in manuscripts (entering them and then selling his rights to let someone else publish them) he did not need to pay the 10 pence to have the plays allowed, since he was not going to publish them. So, we do not have to imagine two different Troilus and Cressida manuscripts, an acting version that was not allowed and a reading version that was.

    Tracing Stationers' Register entry of Shakespeare plays, there is a big gap from Troilus and Cressida on 7 February 1603 to King Lear on 26 November 1607 (after a steady flow before then), and King Lear is the most badly printed of the 'good' quartos. This Erne admits presents a problem for his argument that Shakespeare cared about its publication (p. 107). The same is also true of the next-but-one Stationers' Register entry in respect of Shakespeare: Pericles on 20 May 1608 by Edward Blount, which was followed in 1609 by Henry Gosson's publication of the 'bad' quarto without a transfer of rights from Blount to Gosson. That Gosson was not contravening Blount's rights seems indicated by the fact that he printed a second edition in 1609. Erne rather cryptically here asserts that if Gosson got his manuscript and his rights from Blount, it is unlikely that the company were involved. (Why? Because Pericles is textually so bad? If so, that stands as an objection no matter what Gosson or Blount did.) If the King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and Pericles entries in the Stationers' Register did originate in the playing company passing their manuscripts to publishers, then there was at least a trickle of the old flood after 1600. But since we cannot assume that, we must see what else might account for the Stationers' Register entry gaps from 1603 to 1607. Plague closure of the theatre would have hurt everyone, and it is only Shakespeare's printed output that dwindles. Erne has no certain answer, but wonders if there were a collected works of Shakespeare being planned, or perhaps the company chose to limit their print output in order to favour patrons, especially William Herbert, who probably got them royal patronage, probably is the dedicatee of Sonnets, and certainly is, with his brother, joint dedicatee of the 1623 Folio and almost certainly stopped Pavier's collected works in 1619. (In an article to be reviewed here next year, Gary Taylor argues that Shakespeare's dramatic powers failed him and he simply did not have a hit until Pericles; that would explain the gap)

    The history of Shakespeare printing duly (and largely convincingly) rewritten, Erne moves to the consequences of his ideas. Regarding the players' alleged opposition to print (pp. 115-28) Erne can build on existing knowledge with which his narrative is compatible. That printing did not lead to other companies playing a company's play is indicated by companies paying for new plays on subjects about which printed plays already existed: the Master of the Revels's licence did not allow just anybody to perform a play, only the company that licensed it. There is no evidence--just the tradition started by A. W. Pollard--that printing a play reduced its box office. Contrary to the usual explanation that players sometimes sold their plays to publishers when they were hard up, the amount given by publishers (Blayney reckons 30 shillings) was trivial when compared with the cost of costumes; it were better to sell those to raise cash. Richard Brome's deal with Queen Henrietta's men, come to court in 1640, prevented him from getting his plays published. G. E. Bentley extrapolated from this that Shakespeare was bound by the same rule, but in fact Brome's contract prevented him only from printing his plays without company agreement, which suggests that in fact companies did support publication. Heywood's address to the reader in The English Traveller seems to imply that actors were against publication and that he has no such ambitions, but needs to be read in the context of his frustration that his Age plays did not come out as a collection, as he had been promised, so he was making a virtue of non-publication necessity. Likewise, the Articles of Agreement amongst the Whitefriars sharers seem to prohibit publication, but only by individuals: collectively the company may print its plays. Moreover, the articles most particularly protect the 'playbook' (the copy with the all-important performance licence) currently being used, rather than any copy of any of their plays. All the mistakes about publication of plays in Shakespeare's time stem, as Blayney pointed out, from the failure to look at it from the publisher's point of view. Once we get that straight, we can deal with such questions as why Shakespeare wrote overlong plays, how performance relates to published text, what is a 'socialized' text in this context, and what lies behind the 'bad' quartos. These matters occupy the rest of Erne's book.

    Erne detects a neat irony in performance-centered study of early modern drama: the very fact that we have the plays relies on someone not thinking that the scripts existed only to be performed (p. 131). Since we have only the printings, its delusional to think we can achieve performance-centered criticism in any meaningful sense. (Here Erne makes another of his rare errors, referring to "Elizabethan groundlings standing in the pit of the Globe" p. 136; he means of course standing in the yard.). We can, however, detect a wide gap between performance and printing in the excessive length of many Shakespeare printed plays; even a company specializing in speedily delivery such as the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express cannot get through Hamlet or Richard 3 in under 3 hours. (This reviewer's telephone call to Barrie Rutter of the Northern Broadsides company revealed that with the cutting of about one-sixth of the Arden 2 Richard 3, about 600 lines, the remaining text of 3,400 lines was routinely performed in under 2½ hours. There may well be truth in Rutter's claim that the southern regional accent draws out Shakespeare's lines and makes them tedious.) It is indeed hard to see why playwrights would have written hundreds of lines that could not be performed, and Alfred Hart's counts in the 1930s showed that Shakespeare and Jonson were unusual in writing such long plays as they did. Erne twice (pp. 139, 144) refers to the belief that abridgement was done for provincial touring while full texts were performed in London, without commenting on whether he accepts this idea about provincial touring and without noting Scott McMillin's demonstration that abridgement often increases rather than reduces the number of actors needed by reducing the opportunities for doubling. Shakespeare's comedies average around 2,500 lines, which would be performable in just a few minutes over 2 hours, while the histories and tragedies are markedly longer, averaging around 3,000 lines. The most heavyweight plays (in subject matter and sources) are also the longest: Hamlet, Richard 3, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus. Contemporary accounts also seem to suggest that comedies were thought lightweight and not much worth reading, while tragedies had readerly gravity.

    Erne notes that the printings of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1623) and of Brome's The Antipodes (1640) explicitly refer to the printing being longer than what was performed. (True, but the latter says that the printing included extra material from "the allowed original" meaning the licensed playbook, so that is still a theatrical rather than a readerly origin.) Of course, with the introduction of musical act intervals performance took longer for the same total number of lines, so line counts might go down if performance duration were to be kept the same. Erne makes much of the strongest piece of evidence of cutting-for-performance: Humphrey Moseley's publisher's address to the reader in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio. Moseley claims that whole scenes were cut from the plays for performance and that the private transcripts that circulated were of the cut texts, so the folio is the first opportunity to see the uncut versions. The plays in the folio are not particularly long, averaging about 15% fewer lines than those in the Shakespeare folio; so, if these shortish Beaumont and Fletcher plays had to be cut for performance, much more cutting would have been needed to perform Shakespeare plays. Moseley's claim about cutting was rejected by W. W. Greg but is borne out by the fact that the plays Moseley did not initially enter in the Stationers' Register (presumably because he did not have manuscript copies) are indeed much shorter than the others, perhaps because printed from those private, post-cutting transcripts (p. 153). In particular, the private transcript of The Woman's Prize seems to give the cut version of what the folio has in full, albeit minus what the censor removed in 1633. Likewise the manuscript from which the folio's Beggar's Bush is printed seems to have had restored to it some things that were originally cut for performance, to judge from repetitions and metrical lines split in two. Erne's own counts of lines in manuscript playbooks from 1576 to 1642 confirm the general picture that plays of under 2,500 lines are left virtually uncut and those with substantially more than that number are cut down to about that number (pp. 158-64). The only-indirectly applicable evidence of the post-Restoration stage points the same way: the long Shakespeare plays were not performed in their entirety.

    What are the implications of all this for editorial policy? At the height of New Bibliography, Erne's conclusion that plays were cut for performance would not have mattered much for editors because their aim was to recover the play as it would have stood in the author's manuscript as he handed it over to the players. However, for the stage-centered new New Bibliography (most obviously manifested in the 1986 Oxford Complete Works) that tries to recover the play as it was first performed, routine cutting for performance is devastating (p. 175). The underlying rationale for new New Bibliography that Shakespeare's intentions extended only so far as performance (and hence that the performed text is primary) has been buttressed by the idea that he was indifferent to print; this latter has fallen in the first half of this book, so the former is vulnerable. In other words, perhaps Shakespeare's ideals for his works were fully realized by him in the print versions. From this point of view, Greg's seeking after the authorial manuscript before the players got hold of it is a less distorting ideal than the Oxford Complete Works's seeking after the first performance. Gurr's New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Henry 5 argued that Q1 shows us that the choruses were omitted in performance, so an edition done along the principles of new New Bibliography would have to omit them.

    Folio Hamlet might well reflect some of the cuts made to make the play performable: it has absences in common with Q1. On a couple of occasions, F omits some things that are in Q2 and at that point where the extra material is in Q2 there is a lost half line: presumably there was a mark for a theatrical cut in the manuscript underlying Q2 that the compositor took for a half-line deletion. Because printers printed everything in their copy, ". . . no printed text allows us to recover how much would have been marked for omission in its copy-text and, consequently, would have been cut in performance" (pp. 180-81). How come Folio Hamlet contains some of the cuts (from Q2) that Q1 shows, but not all? Because it is based on a preliminary abridgement. The history of The Honest Man's Fortune by Fletcher, Massinger, and Field provides a parallel: the play was 'lost' in 1625 so the censor Henry Herbert relicensed a transcript of the author's foul papers for performance. The play was printed in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647 from the author's foul papers. Thus, the folio shows the play-as-written before cuts and whatever the folio has that the manuscript has not (primarily one scene, 5.3, and a different version of another, 5.4) are things that the players cut or changed before sending the play for relicensing. However, the manuscript also has marginal bars showing further cutting, so is itself another example of a "preliminary abridgement" because already reduced from its copy and marking more reduction to be made, just like Folio Hamlet. It follows from this that, since there was cutting before licensing, Gurr's Maximal/Minimal textual model--that they licensed the most text they could ('Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare V. the Globe', ShSurv 52 [1999].68-87)--is not corroborated (p. 182n31). One might well respond to this that the circumstances of Honest Man's Fortune, with the licensed playbook being lost, are scarcely typical.

    In this view, neither Q2 nor F Hamlet, nor editions based on them, show us the play as performed. Equally, Q1 Othello's being 160 lines shorter than F might be explained by its deriving from a preliminary abridgement, since 160 lines is not enough to bring it down to the performable length. The argument that the revision of King Lear caused the loss of the mock-trial scene simply because it was artistically ineffective is strained, and we would have to factor in the certainty that the play as represented in Q1 is unperformably long. The idea that Q1 Richard 3 was produced by collective, company memorial reconstruction while on tour (because they lost their licensed playbook) is inherently implausible: if you know your parts (which is what a memorial reconstruction presupposes) there is no point recreating the playbook when what you really need is the licence. Also, at 3,400 lines, Q1 Richard 3 is too long to represent performance. Here Erne might useful have acknowledged John Jowett's brilliant demonstration, by entirely independent means, that Q1 Richard 3 cannot be a memorial reconstruction (''Derby', 'Stanley', and Memorial Reconstruction in Quarto Richard III', N&Q 245 [2000].75-9). Macbeth is short (about 2,000 lines) and if it does indeed, as many suspect, derive from a posthumous theatrical adaptation, we should have to accept that in performance the other long tragedies might have lost more than about a third of their lines too. Concluding this section, Erne asserts that once we admit revision as an agent that separates versions that have competing authority, we have accepted an artistically self-conscious Shakespeare and we should go the extra mile to accept that not everything he did was driven by the exigencies of live performance (p. 189).

    There follows a chapter on the origins of the so-called 'bad' quartos for which there are also overlong 'good' companion texts (Romeo and Juliet, Henry 5, and Hamlet), which chapter adds little that is new to the debate and largely echoes the best of the work of the New Textualists (pp. 192-219). Erne's intention is not to show that the 'bad' quartos are really 'good' (p. 194) but that they do nonetheless yield important evidence about performance. McMillin's point about the absurdity of cutting for a smaller cast (because in fact cutting often removes opportunities for doubling) finally appears here (p. 207). Kathleen O. Irace pointed out that certain alleged memorial reconstruction texts retain characters' parts disproportionately--as in Q1 Henry 5 retaining 84% of Exeter's part as represented in F, although Q1 is only half the length of F overall, and Q1 Hamlet retaining 92% of Marcellus's part, although it is only 60% as long as F--and she thought this incompatible with the claim that the actors were remembering a text already abridged for provincial performance. After all, would not Exeter's and Marcellus's parts have been cut with something approaching the severity that the entire play was cut? Erne thinks not: Marcellus's lines are largely unscathed in Q1 Hamlet because they are necessary to the plot (p. 208). Taking F Henry 5's part for Exeter and cutting it by 16% (or rather, taking the combined reporter's parts for Exeter, Pistol, and Gower, which overall are cut by 20%) is a process we can imagine being done to the whole play, and if the choruses were entirely removed too (as Gurr thinks happened in performance) this would put the play that the reporters were trying to reconstruct at around 2,500 lines. The point that Erne is making (and it is not easy to keep sight of it in all this detail) is that the memorial reconstruction was indeed aiming to reproduce a text that had indeed been cut (relative to F in each case), but not drastically for regional performance but by the usual amount necessary to make a play performable. The short quartos are performance texts, and their long companions are essentially literary works not for performance.

    Pursuing this claim about literariness further, Erne attempts to show that the short quartos are speakerly and rely on performance showing things to the audience while the long texts are readerly and have things described. Thus Q2 Romeo and Juliet has Juliet say that she is kneeling to beseech her father while Q1 simply has a stage direction for it. Rather illogically Erne runs the same kind of evidence the other way too: Q2 Hamlet (but not Q1) gives a stage direction for the cock crowing that startles the ghost in the first scene (pp. 222-24). One might well respond to this by pointing out that stage directions can be readerly and theatrical at once: after all, someone in the theatre needs to know that a cock crowing noise is to be made. Erne surveys other passages in the long texts (absent in the short ones) that seem gauged to please a reader and, although performable, would probably be the first to go when cutting for length. For Erne, Friar Laurence's 'grey-eyed morn' speech in Q2 Romeo and Juliet is "purple"--surely that is too strong a word--and appears in two places because Shakespeare was planning where to drop this detachable, literary bit of anthologizable writing. Risking a charge of ethnocentricity, Erne quotes Walter Ong using E. M. Forster's notion of 'rounded' character to argue that oral culture cannot produce characters that challenge our expectations, only ones that fulfil them. (By this logic, we would have to accept the implausible notion that the complexity of Odysseus's character in The Odyssey was something absent in all the oral retellings and that emerged only once it got written down.) Erne is quite serious on this concluding point, and suggests that criticism based on a better understanding of "the cultural contingency of characterization" might take its proper place in Shakespeare studies (p. 243).

    Erne provides three appendices. The first ("The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in print, 1584-1623") provides useful tables of all the first editions of all the plays (abbreviated by using Greg's numbering in the Bibliography of English Printed Drama). These are marred by attempts at typographical distinctions--such as solid or dashed underlining to show how firmly Shakespeare's authorship is advertized on the title-page--that in the review copy were almost impossible to see. In the second appendix Erne ponders whether the "stolen and surreptitious" copies of Shakespeare plays that the 1623 Folio preliminaries refer to could have been Thomas Pavier's quartos of 1619; they might but Erne has no new evidence to offer. In the third appendix Erne gives reasons to believe in the circulation of dramatic manuscripts of successful plays well before the phenomenon is referred to in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. Greg observed that we have no surviving examples before 1624, but Erne notes that the publisher's epistle to the 1619 printing of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King refers to Sir Henry Nevill having one, and the printer's address to the 1620 printing of The Two Merry Milk-Maids refers to "false Copies" travelling abroad. Also, Gabriel Harvey's reference to Hamlet, written into his copy of Chaucer, sounds like a reference to a reading copy, yet is pre-Essex's execution and hence pre-Q1 Hamlet.

    2003 certainly was a year for landmark monographs, and Andrew Murphy's extraordinary Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing will remain the standard single-volume reference work for a long time. Murphy covers the entire timespan from first printings to the present, and geographically he covers English, Scottish, Irish, and American editions, but thankfully for our purposes he gives equal space to each period covered so that the material relevant to this review is only a small part of the whole. Murphy's introduction attends to the matter of balance and observes that some editions that are not distinguished as textual scholarship are nonetheless important for their place in the struggle over Shakespeare as intellectual property, or for sheer numbers sold (pp. 6-7). To complement his scrupulous scholarship Murphy has a fine feeling for a good anecdote, as shown in his account of the publishing house Macmillan's employment of an imperfect mechanical process to copy their outgoing correspondence. The images turned out to be impermanent, and Murphy has us picture him in the British Library receiving to his desk bound volume after bound volume of carefully stored and respectfully handled material, the pages of which were, upon opening, entirely blank (p. 11).

    Murphy's first chapter ("The early quartos") is a fine work of print history but adds nothing to our knowledge of matters textual. As with Erne's book reviewed above, Murphy seldom makes a slip, but I am sure that when he twice uses the formula "X published Y for Z" he really means "X printed Y for Z" (pp. 24-25). If not, I do not understand what 'publishing for' someone might mean. In his second chapter ("Early collected editions") Murphy gives a potted history of the Pavier quartos, with a useful summary table, and likewise for F1, F2, F3, F4, and the putative F5. Chapters 3 and 4 cover the Tonson era from Nicholas Rowe to Edmond Malone and are helpful to have to hand when examining one of the many multi-volume Shakespeare editions produced in the eighteenth century (often republished with alterations) and trying to work out what it is. Murphy credits Samuel Johnson as the first to articulate the principle that derivative texts must be given lower authority than the texts they derive from, from which they "only deviate . . . by the printer's negligence" (p. 82), and he, correctly in my view, demurs from Margreta De Grazia's Foucauldian view that Malone's edition was a whole new way of doing things. Following Simon Jarvis, Murphy prefers to see it within the developing tradition (p. 97). In chapters 5 and 6 Murphy breaks off the historical narrative to consider the matter of copyright disputes amongst English, Scottish, and Irish publishers that emerged because of the legal differences across the (only fictionally 'united') kingdom. Murphy describes the eighteenth-century price war between Tonson and the publisher Robert Walker, who between them flooded the market with cheap editions (4 pence per play, and under) and drove a boom in Shakespeare appreciation generally (pp. 107-10). There was some confusion about whether English law applied in Scotland after the union of 1707, and it certainly did not apply in Ireland, so the copyright situation in those places was unclear in a way that favoured printing and exporting to England books previously printed in England. These editions' original English publishers believed them to be subject to perpetual, rather than time-limited, copyright, and after a test case of 1774 rejected this interpretation, Shakespeare printing doubled in rate.

    Murphy's chapter 7 on American editions is especially interesting on the genesis and development of the Furness Variorum, and his surveys of nineteenth-century popular (chapter 8) and scholarly (chapter 9) editions are exemplary condensations of his extensive work in archives, but fall outside our scope here. In chapter 10 ("The New Bibliography") Murphy covers the faltering Oxford Shakespeare (under R. B. McKerrow and then Alice Walker) and the rival ('New') Cambridge Shakespeare (under Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson). Murphy has not much to say about the principles of New Bibliography itself, although he makes the important observation that Wilson's series was the first to be completed (albeit very late, in 1966) along New Bibliographical lines. Discussing the later twentieth century, Murphy too cautiously (as we shall shortly see) remarks that Pericles "may have been co-authored" (p. 250). In his conclusion ("Twenty-first century Shakespeares") Murphy repeats the familiar line about hypertext as a new configuration that decentres the author because of the capacity for movement from one place to another. Actually, a print library itself can be seen as a hypertext with the individual works' footnotes as the links; electronic media just make the jumps from text to text that we all do anyway a little less time consuming. To my mind, focussing on the links misses the truly important differences between paper and etext, which have to do with alterability (in postmodern terminology, 'textual stability') and copyability.

    Murphy ends with an anecdote about printed Shakespeare crossing class boundaries and with an implied prediction that print will survive a long time for certain kinds of readers. Murphy contrasts such a printed book with the electronic text that is "dispersed" and not so much for reading as "surfing" (p. 275). Such terminology taints the medium, etext, by association with allegedly mindless recreations (surfing television channels, surfing the Internet) and sounds rather like the pre-web pseudo-theoretical mistakings of the nature of etext, which could see no further than the 'magic' of hypertext. Quite possibly the relative advantages of the printed book will soon disappear with the mass production of e-paper: illuminated or reflective electronic displays capable of showing as much detail as paper and consuming power only when changing the image and flexible enough to be folded (or rolled into a tube) when not in use. About a third of Murphy's book is an appendix--a substantial work of scholarship in itself, that lists all the major Shakespeare editions to date and provides multiple indices sorted on such fields as 'publisher name' and 'editor name'. In a revealing footnote (p. 412n4) Murphy cites Erne's demurral from the general consensus that Shakespeare was indifferent to publication, which Murphy announces is forthcoming in a book called Lines to Time: Shakespeare and Literary Drama. This must have been an earlier title for Erne's book Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist reviewed above, and it is worth knowing that, like Wilcher, Erne alighted on Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") for its exploration of the potential for immortality through art.

    MacDonald P. Jackson's Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case is rather like Brian Vickers's Shakespeare, Co-author reviewed last year in its subject matter and its deprecation of certain aspects of modern theory's application to dramatic authorship. More focussed than Vickers's book, however, Jackson's aims for one target and hits its squarely: to show that George Wilkins wrote Pericles with Shakespeare. Indeed, Jackson hits his mark many times over from multiple new angles, taking the demonstration of his correctness far beyond the limits of anyone's reasonable scepticism. Unusually for our subject, we may truly say that the case is now closed. Jackson begins by quoting Jeffrey Masten's Textual Intercourse to disagree with the view that when collaborating, dramatists submerged their personal distinctiveness (p. 6), and instead cites Vickers's book on collaboration being done "by acts or scenes or other large units dominated by differing plot lines or sets of characters". As noted last year, that was one of the weakest points of Vickers's book since there is not as much evidence to support the claim as Vickers's rhetoric suggests. Happily, however, Jackson adds to the evidence that collaboration was not done at the level of the line but something larger by showing Middleton's preference for the shortening I've and Rowley's absolute avoidance of it, across many sole-authored plays "with their diverse textual histories". When they collaborate on a play, each section (be it Middleton's or Rowley's, determined on other grounds) betrays its author's particular preference for or against I've (p. 7). Jackson makes the important point that every act of 'disintegration' (say, splitting off a part of a play from Shakespeare) is simultaneously an act of 'integration' (say, giving that part to the rest of the Middleton canon). This is worth saying because there is a current mistaken orthodoxy (articulated by Masten amongst others) that an author-based approach to drama is anachronistically post-Enlightenment. In fact, Jackson (like Vickers) points out, the ancient Greek dramatic authorship contests, and the pre-Christian canonizing of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, show otherwise (p. 12).

    The ground cleared of theoretical objections, Jackson turns to the necessary preliminary matter of statistics, stylishly addressed via the opening scene of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead concerning the strangeness of a tossed coin coming up heads 92 times in a row (p. 23). Everyone uses statistics, asserts Jackson, even those who attribute something on the basis of verbal parallels with a work of known authorship, because there the implied reasoning is that chance could not produce those parallels with work by a different known author. In truth, chance often can produce the unexpected and Jackson promises that when verbal parallels are used in his argument there will be also "a search for similarities with other playwrights" and that statistics will be used to test what chance can do (p. 22). Jackson thinks the clincher for Wilkins's prose narrative Painful Adventures being based on the play is that it has Lychorida bring the newborn Marina up on deck to show Pericles: this utterly implausible event (Marina is just a few minutes old) happens in the play because Pericles cannot leave the deck without leaving the Globe stage bare. Had Wilkins not been copying the performance, he would have written the scene differently. (I would not have thought plausibility a reasonable criterion in relation to this story and would also object that Marina's association with the sea cannot be formed in a scene set below decks. Indeed, it is not dramatic practice that prevents Pericles going below deck: Shakespeare could have written a new scene or written the existing scene differently; he did not have to have Lychorida come on deck.)

    Jackson traces Ernest Schanzer's and then Gary Taylor's demolition of Philip Edwards's claim that the whole of the quarto is by Shakespeare, but that acts 1-2 had a different (and worse) reporter than acts 3-5. Were this so, Wilkins's Painful Adventures and the Pericles quarto would be independent witnesses to the play as performed, and hence where they agree they must be right since chance could hardly make them agree in error. And yes, they agree on 5 lines in 2.3 that are too bad to be Shakespeare and are typical of the first half of the play. The obvious inference is that the offending lines are by Wilkins, which is why his novel has them right (pp. 27-28). Also, if acts 3-5 of the Pericles quarto are simply a more-accurately reported account of the play as performed than acts 1-2 were, these last three acts should be more similar to the corresponding parts of Wilkins's novel than the first two acts were, since in Edwards's theory Wilkins's novel is just a uniformly good/bad account of the performance. In fact, acts 3-5 of the Pericles quarto diverge from rather than converge upon the novel (p. 29). More speculatively, Jackson insists that if Pericles had been Shakespeare's solo work, Heminges and Condell would not have left it out of F1; the only other play they left out was the undisputedly collaborative The Two Noble Kinsmen. Pericles was in the company repertory around 1623, so they had a playbook of it (hence availability of copy was not the problem), and Blount (one of the F1 publishers) had a Stationers' Register entry proving his copyright priority over Gosson; thus Blount could have printed the play if he had wanted. Indeed, claims Jackson, printing the play would have established a text "which would have differed sufficiently from Gosson's quarto to be exempt from any copyright claim Gosson's successors might have made" (p. 31). This is not right: stationers were protected from another stationer publishing the same story even if it were from a different text, as Blayney pointed out in relation to King Lear and King Leir ('The Publication of Playbooks', in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (ed.) A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press [1997])). From Blayney's view it seems to follow that Blount had effectively conceded the right to print Pericles, or even privately agreed to it, by not objecting to Gosson's 1609 quarto, for as Blayney showed it was printing that firmly established ownership of copy. Jackson claims that the 'problem' with Troilus and Cressida in F1 seems to have been overcome "in this way" (that is, by printing a good text) and cites the Oxford Textual Companion page 425 (p. 31), but in fact the Companion at that point makes no mention of how "difficulties over copyright" in respect of Folio Troilus and Cressida were overcome, only that we can presume they existed because F1's printing of the play was interrupted. Jackson is assuming that getting a manuscript to supplement the Troilus and Cressida quarto--to substantially alter its readings--was how the F1 publishers got around the copyright problem, but that is not what Taylor is arguing at the place cited.

    Finally, the idea that Pericles acts 1-2 are early Shakespeare material that he reused at the end of his career can be dismissed because whereas everything else he wrote can, by certain independent tests, be shown to belong to a particular phase in his career, these two acts have some kinds of stylistic links with early Shakespeare, some other kinds of links with mid-career Shakespeare, and other kinds of links still with late Shakespeare. (Actually, that is what I would expect to find if it were reworked juvenilia--a mix of old and new characteristics--but Jackson clearly means to imply that it belongs to no definite stage of Shakespeare's career because it does not belong to Shakespeare at all.) To refute the late Eric Sams's claim that Pericles is, in part at least, a Shakespeare play from the 1580s, Jackson shows that the alleged early allusions to it are weak or simply mistaken, and useful lists all the clear allusions to it that cluster after 1609, appearing in the plays Pimlico, or Run Red-Cap, Robert Tailor's The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl, and (via a plot echo) in Robert Armin's The Two Maids of Moreclacke (pp. 34-39). Perhaps seeing Gower's tomb in St Saviour's church during the burial of his brother Edmund on 31 December 1607 gave Shakespeare the idea for the play, Jackson wonders. Having established that the sole-authorship claim cannot stand, Jackson turns to the particular evidence for dual authorship, which is where the hard matter of this book begins. 

    The key to Eliot Slater's work in this field is rare-word usage, which is also what interested the most famous stylometrician Donald Foster and for which he was soundly excoriated in Vickers's other book reviewed last year, 'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare. The principle followed by Slater and Jackson is that ". . . works written by the same author at about the same time are apt to have more of their low-frequency words in common than works whose dates of composition are separated by many years" (p. 40). Low-frequency means that the writer concerned does not use them often, and hence they are for him or her (but not necessarily anyone else) 'rare' words. Slater's precise criterion was words used in at least 2 plays and a total of less than 10 times overall in the canon, and he counted how many such words should be common between play x and other plays in the canon on the basis of expectation derived simply from play x's total vocabulary. Jackson reckons that Slater should have derived his expectation from the proportion of rare words in x compared to the total number of rare words in the canon. This notion of 'expectation' is the ground upon which stylometricians start to leave the rest of literary scholarship behind, primarily because the stylometricians can put a number on it. The numbers generally refer to how unlikely a given event is, a matter about which non-specialists are apt to be wildly mistaken in their assumptions. Unless they are extremely careful with phrasing, stylometricians tend to make claims that non-specialists find either wholly persuasive or absurd. Here (p. 41) Jackson writes of the link between The Tempest and acts 3-5 of Pericles in the form of rare words that "the possibility of this discrepancy [between expected links and found links] being due to chance is infinitesimal". In fact he means that, were random chance all that connected rare word choice in The Tempest and Pericles acts 3-5--the whole of Shakespeare's career considered as a single word-pool with no chronological forces shaping his selection of words--then the likelihood of this high linkage (way above 'expectation') occurring by chance alone were infinitesimal. A little logic, however, shows that this does not necessarily link The Tempest and Pericles 3-5 directly by shared authorship. Imagine a world in which all dramatists were choosing their rare words according to the seasons (words beginning with the letters A-B in January, C-D in February, and so on) then the same results might occur if The Tempest and Pericles 3-5 were written at the same time of the year. The high-sounding mathematics ("infinitesimal") does not tell us that we are onto the right connection between The Tempest and Pericles acts 3-5, only that the chance of there being no causal connection is small.

    In a footnote (p. 41n2) Jackson explains his method for linking The Tempest and Pericles 3-5. The Tempest contains about 2.4% of the rare words in all Shakespeare and Pericles acts 3-5 contains 1228 Shakespearian rare words itself, so we would expect about 30 of these words (2.4% of 1228) to be in common, that is to be the same words, were a writer's changing habits over time not a factor. But a writer's changing habits over time are a factor--plays written about the same time tend to share rare-words because the writer is favouring those words at that moment--and indeed The Tempest and Pericles acts 3-5 have 62 rare words in common, more than twice what we would otherwise expect. Jackson uses a procedure called chi-square to give a sense of how big a difference from expectation this is (and explains it well) and cautions that it is not really an index of probability (a comparison with random chance) but of the alleged association (of rare words with phases in a writer's career) being tested. That is, a high chi-square indicates that two variables are unlikely to be randomly associated and likely to be causally linked somehow, but it does not (despite some popular misuse) tell you how likely something is. Rather, it tells you how unlikely the result you got would be if the variables were linked only by random chance, which is to say it tells you how infrequently chance alone will produce the result obtained. In Great Britain a one-in-14-million unlikelihood happens to someone about every other week in the National Lottery: the chance of a particular person winning is tiny, but the chance of someone winning is about 1 in 2. The likelihood that the phenomenon 'winning' will emerge from these events needs to be closely defined with qualifiers before we can put numbers on it. This objection to terminological slippage applies throughout Jackson's book: he repeatedly makes claims of the kind 'the odds of this being by chance are 1 in 100' (which sounds like 'it almost certainly is not chance') which strictly means the same as, but has different rhetorical force from, 'by chance this will happen 1 time in a 100 anyway' (so, eventually chance alone does it).

    Returning to Jackson's main argument, it emerges that if the same rare word tests are repeated with Pericles acts 1-2, the association with the last phase of Shakespeare's career disappears. One can also do the same tests for the absence of rare-word linkages between plays since chance operates equally on the non-selection of the same rare words in two plays. I would have thought this no more illuminating than the test for present links, since non-selection is selection's mathematical complement, but Jackson seems to think it highly significant. At this point, I suspect most non-mathematical readers will become lost. Jackson admits that Pericles 1-2 has above-expectation links with Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus but rejects the obvious conclusion that his makes Pericles 1-2 likely to be Shakespeare's too with the assertion that this can happen by verbal osmosis from one's collaborator. That is, when working on Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus the rare words of the other man's work in Pericles were in Shakespeare's mind. I cannot see how this can be accepted without it diminishing the significance of the claimed links of Pericles 3-5 with other plays: might not they too be explained this way? Jackson anticipates this objection by pointing out that Pericles acts 3-5's departures from random chance are way above those of Pericles acts 1-2, and indeed taking the Shakespeare canon together, the links of Pericles acts 1-2 are within what random chance would be expected to produce (p. 42). Better still, taking the canon in 4 sections, Pericles acts 3-5 has a strong association with the plays from King Lear to All is True and against the 3 earlier sections, while Pericles acts 1-2 has no significantly strong associations with any period. The pattern looks much the same if one considers the even-more-rare words, those occurring 2 to 6 times rather than 2 to 10 times (p. 43), although there emerges a hint of connection between Pericles acts 1-2 and Titus Andronicus and 1 Henry 6. Jackson does not think that this supports the idea of Pericles acts 1-2 being early Shakespeare because the evidential base becomes so small--in that case (I would say) he should draw no conclusions from it either way--and in any case Titus Andronicus and 1 Henry 6 were probably collaborative and in any case early Shakespeare is less idiosyncratic (uses more common words) so will have more links with what other men do than later Shakespeare will (p. 44). (Here Jackson sails closest to special pleading for his case.)

    Jackson 'proves' the insignificance of Pericles acts 1-2 having links with early Shakespeare by showing that a sole-authored Wilkins play, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, or at least a random sample of its rare words, has links with early Shakespeare too. Jackson here brings in the fact that Pericles acts 3-5 has fewer than 'expected' rare word links with 1 Henry 6 and Titus Andronicus, but by this point the exhausted reader has surely forgotten that 'expected' means 'were only chance operating' and that in fact Jackson believes that changing authorial preference is what he is tracking. That is, we would expect old Shakespeare to have given up rare words he favoured as a young man and hence falling below 'expectation' also confirms the 'changing-tastes' hypothesis. Yet if that is so--if dropping words over time is as important as acquiring new ones--we should expect Jackson to be presenting all the evidence of non-linking between chronologically separated plays too (p. 44). At this point Jackson introduces a fundamental principle that so many attributors have neglected: the importance of negative testing. It is one thing to show that writing X is like writing Y in certain respects, but for authorship attribution you have also to show that lots of other writings are not like writing Y in those respects (pp. 45-46). This will become important later in Jackson's argument.

    Karolina Steinhäuser's work on Shakespearian rare words in each scene of Pericles (including the choruses) can be used to show that the choruses in acts 1-2 are like the scenes in acts 1-2 (and like early Shakespeare) and those in acts 3-5 are like the scenes in acts 3-5 (and like late Shakespeare); so again the play is internally divided and hence probably not all by Shakespeare. Even if he were, in the choruses, imitating an archaic style, then Shakespeare would have to have dropped this imitation part-way through. Steinhäuser's more finely reticulated counting of rare words (by scene) allows Jackson to rank the scenes in terms of rare words per thousand words even though the scenes differ in length. When he does this, not all the 17 scenes of acts 3-5 come ahead (in terms of Shakespearian rare word richness) of all the 11 scenes of acts 1-2, but most of them do and that is not likely by chance distribution of rare words (pp. 47-49). Gregor Sarrazin's work on very rare words confirms the foregoing: there are far fewer of these (expressed in lines per rare word) in Pericles acts 1-2 and Middleton's part of Timon of Athens and Fletcher's part of All is True than is normal for all the other Shakespeare plays (pp. 51-53). While it is admittedly much more subjective, poetic parallels (such as calling eyelashes the "fringes" of the eye) between Pericles acts 1-2 and the rest of the Shakespeare canon and between Pericles acts 3-5 and the rest of the canon confirm what has already been found: the latter is much more Shakespearian (parallels occur twice as often) than the former. This also makes unlikely the possibility that Pericles acts 1-2 are early Shakespeare later reworked (pp. 56-59).

    Metrical features such as extra syllables over the usual 10, various degrees of enjambment, and absence of a caesura, can all be measured (pp. 59-68), and Karl Wentersdorf produced a table showing how a single indexical figure derived from these features rises steadily over Shakespeare's career. The figure for Pericles acts 3-5 takes its expected place amongst the late plays but the figure for Pericles acts 1-2 is more like the figures for Shakespeare's late-sixteenth century plays. Jackson describes Ants Oras's work on where the caesura falls, which shows that increasingly over his career Shakespeare put the pause in the second half of a verse line, and the figure for Pericles acts 3-5 matches the late plays and the figure for Pericles acts 1-2 again matches the late-sixteenth century plays. Charles A. Langworthy's work on rates at which sentences start at a verse-line beginning and/or end at a verse-line end--in early plays they usually do, in late plays usually not--confirms the preceding work. Marina Tarlinskaja's works on rates at which 'slots' for unstressed and stressed syllables in iambic pentameter verse (1, 3, 5, 7, and 9, and 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10, respectively) are actually filled by stressed or unstressed syllables shows that over his career Shakespeare decreasingly put stressed syllables in slots 1 and 4 and increasingly put stressed syllables in slots 3, 6, and 9. Into this trend of changing habits Pericles acts 3-5 fits well as late Shakespeare and Pericles acts 1-2 looks more like late-sixteenth century Shakespeare. Also, in the second half of his career, Shakespeare increasingly allowed polysyllabic words to be the cause of loss of stress in a slot where we would expect it, compared to how often he allowed monosyllabic words to do this work of taking away stress. 

    As well as summarizing these mutually-supportive (and under-recognized) works, Jackson has done his own fresh work on elision. In early Shakespeare we/you/they are and I/we/you/they/to have are rarely best spoken as monosyllables (such as we're and they've) and frequently are best spoken as disyllables if one wants to follow strict iambic pentameter. Jackson does not make it clear whether he means this claim regardless of how the words are spelt, but in fact he is confining himself only to cases where they are fully-spelt out, since he uses only Marvin Spevack's concordance entries for are and have and these do not include the elisions, which get listed under the first word (so under they for they're). Of course, one would want to check whether the edition Spevack used, the Riverside edited by Gwynne Blakemore Evans, had ever changed non-elided to elided spelling for the sake of metre. Evans's introduction (The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 40) refers to his regularization of -ed and -'d endings (all made -'d) in prose passages on the assumption that mere compositorial convenience might be the determinant; Evans might also, on that basis, have wondered whether convenience shaped practice in full-width verse lines where the compositor faced the same pressure in justifying the line of type. Evans's saying nothing of are and -'re and have and -'ve implies that he left them as he found them, but it would be reassuring to know and Jackson's argument is not complete without this information. Pericles acts 1-2, it turns out, has a much higher proportion of fully-spelt out we/you/they are and I/we/you/they/they have being pronounced monosyllabically (if we want to preserve iambic pentameter) than ought to be the case were it early Shakespeare (p. 71). Shakespeare's use of rhyme fell (albeit unevenly) over his career and was low by 1607; rhyme use is high in Pericles acts 1-2 (one in 4 lines) while low in Pericles 3-5 (one in 33 lines), and the particular kinds of rhyme in Pericles acts 1-2 (especially the pattern aabcc) are unlike what Shakespeare does elsewhere (pp. 72-73).

    To conclude this section on why Pericles simply cannot be the work of one writer, Jackson touches briefly on Barron Brainerd's tests, which relied mostly on usage of certain words across the career (unto, because, and with decreased over time while might, more, and most increased over time) and the tests of the Claremont McKenna College Shakespeare Clinic that pass Pericles acts 3-5 as Shakespearian but Pericles acts 1-2 as not  (pp. 75-79). Jackson does not give much detail about the Claremont McKenna tests, but criticizes their method of 'badges and flukes'. This method relies on Shakespeare's most-commonly-used and least-commonly-used words, relative to the dramatists Marlowe, Greene, Kyd, and Munday. The problem with this is that Shakespeare started writing in a style that was like everyone else and got distinctive over time, and the Shakespeare plays chosen to form a baseline of his style were about 10 or more years later than the plays from Marlowe, Greene, Kyd, and Munday. Thus by this test the early plays of Shakespeare tend to look non-Shakespearian because they sound too much like Marlowe, Greene, Kyd, and Munday.

    Having established that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Pericles acts 1-2, Jackson turns to identifying the writer, paying most attention to the likeliest candidate, George Wilkins. The only known sole-authored play by Wilkins is The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, so that is not much to go on for establishing if the Wilkins oeuvre shares features with Pericles acts 1-2. We can also see if things unique to Miseries and Pericles acts 1-2 crop up in Wilkins's share of Wilkins, Day, and Rowley's The Travels of the Three English Brothers. Of course, most of the stylometricians so far discussed never thought to look at Wilkins's work, but F. G. Fleay and H. Dugdale Sykes found that Miseries has metrical affinities with Pericles acts 1-2 (pp. 83-86). Jackson has not done Langworthy's or Tarlinskaja's kind of analysis on Wilkins' play, but he has repeated Oras's work on where the caesura falls (how often after the first syllable, how often after the second syllable, and so on) and finds that Miseries is much like Pericles acts 1-2 and unlike Pericles acts 3-5 and Coriolanus. This result Jackson submits to a series of comparisons between Pericles acts 1-3, Pericles acts 3-5, Miseries and all the Shakespeare plays, with statistical computation to show how likely it is that the result achieved could happen by random chance (pp. 88-94). Consistently Pericles acts 1-2 is like Miseries and Pericles acts 3-5 is like the rest of Shakespeare around 1607. Likewise, repeating the we/you/they are and I/we/you/they have as monosyllable or disyllable test for Miseries shows it to be like Pericles acts 1-2, and so on for the Wilkins share of Travels too. Jackson reports David J. Lake's work on rhymes, especially assonantal near-rhymes (such as ship/split, sung/come) and finds Pericles acts 1-2's high frequency of them to be like Wilkins's work and not like Shakespeare's or anyone else's (pp. 95-96). Jackson's fresh work on rhymes (of the direct, law/awe kind) shows that where Miseries and Pericles have a rhyme in common, it is almost always in Pericles acts 1-2 and not in Pericles acts 3-5, and that three of the rhymes that Miseries and Pericles acts 1-2 share (consist/resist, him/sin, impudence/offence) occur nowhere in the Shakespeare canon (pp. 97-99). Comparison of all the rhymes in Miseries with the rhymes in all the Shakespeare works shows that the Shakespeare works have far fewer rhymes in common with Miseries than Pericles acts 1-2 has rhymes in common with Miseries, and indeed that after Pericles acts 1-2 the text with the next greatest number of rhymes in common with Miseries is Wilkins's share of Travels. But what if the rhyming links between Pericles acts 1-2 and Miseries are due to them both being full of commonplace rhymes? To exclude this possibility Jackson ran a couple of unShakespearian rhymes that appear in Pericles acts 1-2 and in Miseries (consist/resist and impudence/offence) through Chadwyck-Healey's Literature Online (LION) database and found that they are extremely rare (pp. 100-104).

    To show that the counting of function words (articles, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and so on) can be a stylometric tool, Jackson quotes passages from Marlowe's Tamburlaine (full of of . . . the constructions), Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (full of ands), and Middleton's Women Beware Women (full of it . . . a constructions), which features, were they typical of the plays at large, would make for good general discriminators of authorship (pp. 105-106). Jackson touches on analysis of the so-called Federalist papers from the mid-eighteenth century and the Pauline New Testament using function-word frequency--in the latter case the analysis is now considered suspect--and Thomas Merriam's application of function-word analysis to Sir Thomas More. The Federalist work was especially good because the researchers produced their discriminators using just half the available material, reserving the other half (of known authorship) for the unbiased testing of the efficacy of their discriminators (p. 107). Jackson reports M. W. A. Smith's function-word analysis of Pericles acts 1-2 and Pericles acts 3-5 compared to the works of Shakespeare, Chapman, Middleton, Jonson, Webster, Tourneur, and Wilkins, in which Pericles acts 3-5 comes out as consistently (over different kinds of test) closest to Shakespeare and Pericles acts 1-2 gets inconsistent results, with some tests favouring Shakespeare and other tests favouring others dramatists (pp. 109-13). Jackson describes his own function-word analysis done by hand in the 1960s and 1970s in which he counted the frequencies (relative to one another) of the occurrences of a, and, but, by, for, from, in, if, of, that, the, to, and with in Shakespeare. Unsurprisingly, amongst a group of contemporary dramatists chosen, the work of Wilkins is closest in function-word frequencies to Pericles acts 1-2 and the work of Shakespeare closest to Pericles act 3-5 (pp. 113-18). Here again Jackson slips into unhappy phrasing about chance ". . . the probability [of Revenger's Tragedy sharing the discovered function-word frequencies with a set of Middleton plays] being considerably less than one in ten thousand that it was due to chance" (pp. 114-15), when in fact he means were chance responsible for the rates at which function-words are chosen in the test texts, we would get this result one time in ten thousand. Even chance can produce these results on rare occasions, and there are lots of other factors to consider in real writing, such as one writer imitating another.

    When one puts the 27 scenes of Pericles in descending order of the frequency with which they use 'to + verb-infinitive' (such as the opening line's "To sing a song"), 7 of the top 8 scenes are from Pericles acts 1-2, the interloper being scene 4.4, which for other reasons people have long suspected is not by Shakespeare (pp. 118-22). This distribution into two distinct populations is most unlikely if all the scenes were by one hand and the use of the 'to + verb infinitive' usage were randomly distributed amongst the scenes. There are about 20 such uses per 1000 words in Pericles acts 1-2 (close to the Wilkins norm and unlike almost all other writers) and about 10 such uses per 1000 words in Pericles acts 3-5, which is close to the Shakespeare norm. Simply counting how often the function word to is used corroborates Wilkins's writing of Pericles acts 1-2, and so do unusual uses of which, such as the which, favoured by Wilkins and no-one else and occurring in Pericles acts 1-2 (pp. 122-29). Jackson reports that Jonathan Hope's sociolinguistic approach says little about Pericles because for most of the things he measures acts 1-2 are like acts 3-5, although in the detail there are some things that indicate Wilkins for Pericles acts 1-2; examples are use of non-personal who and 'non-restrictive zero forms', which means the dropping of relative pronouns, as in 'all the examples [that] I can think of' (pp. 129-34). Early in his career Shakespeare overused the word unto, and late in his career he overused the word most. Pericles acts 3-5 has few untos and many mosts, while Pericles acts 1-2 and Wilkins's other work has more untos than mosts (pp. 136-38). Jackson also surveys certain kinds of analysis begun by Cyrus Hoy and used successfully to determine what Middleton wrote, but which is of limited value in relation to Pericles because acts 1-2 and acts 3-5 are not unalike in this regard (pp. 138-42). (This should, of course, have been counted amongst the evidence against dual authorship rather than listed as non-evidence.)

    A bridge to chapter 5 ("A Literary-Critical Approach to Style in Pericles") appears at the end of chapter 4 where Jackson reports some interesting verbal parallels and collocations between Wilkins's work and Pericles acts 1-2 (pp. 142-48). Chapter 5 itself is old-fashioned literary criticism and is the least successful part of this book simply because it is subjective. If one cannot hear the difference between acts 1-2 and acts 3-5--and this reviewer confesses that he cannot--then literary criticism is not likely to make good the deficiency. Chapter 6 is devoted to summarizing and defending the case for Wilkins as the co-author of Pericles, and refuting the claims for Shakespearian sole-authorship made by James O. Woods (based on imagery that is in fact commonplace), Karen Csengeri (likewise for diction), and A. Q. Morton (bad stylometry, especially for measuring the placing of words at sentence boundaries, which in fact is editorially not authorially made). Jackson points out that the consistent use of the two main sources in the play (Gower's Confessio Amantis and Laurence Twine The Pattern of Painful Adventures) is not of itself evidence for a single shaping hand across acts 1-2 and acts 3-5, because collaborating writer simply agree about these things. J. C. Maxwell (in the Cambridge New Shakespeare) pointed out that in Wilkins's Painful Adventures Marina does not know of her parentage (that Cleon and Dionyza are only foster-parents) until the dying Lychorida tells her, which is how Twine has it, and hence thought that Wilkins did not have anything to do with the play in which, of course, Marina knows her parentage all along. Jackson points out that this shows only that Wilkins did not know the second half of the play well: he had presumably seen it in performance but not having written these scenes it were easier to plagiarize Twine on this point than follow what happened in performance (pp. 180-81). Jackson mocks the New Cambridge Shakespeare editors Doreen DelVecchio and Anthony Hammond's absurd adherence to all the errors in the Pericles quarto and their strained attempts to defend the misreadings, and hence he justifies the use of Wilkins's prose novella to help patch the deficiencies in the quarto (pp. 183-89).

    Jackson's final chapter explains his "New Technique for Attribution Studies", which turns out to be fairly obvious in principle and novel only in exploiting new technology. The idea is to look in LION for words/phrases (using 'near to' proximity searching for phrases) in the passage under investigation amongst the known works of the rival contenders for authorship, and to count the hits. One has to make the corpora of the rival candidates roughly equal in size, otherwise getting a hit amongst, say, Shakespeare plays means little if the rival is Kyd whose entire corpus is just The Spanish Tragedy (pp. 193-203). In the case of Pericles, the corpus of Wilkins is already tiny (just Miseries of Enforced Marriage) and to match this the Shakespeare corpus is reduced to just The Tempest. Unsurprisingly, Pericles acts 1-2 has many more words/phrases in common with Miseries than with The Tempest, and for Pericles acts 3-5 the reverse is true. Turning to the detail, Jackson reports that Pericles scenes 4.2, 4.5, and 4.6, which he expected to be more like The Tempest than like Miseries, are in fact more like Miseries so perhaps Wilkins had a hand in them (p. 206). When, as a test of the methodology, the words/phrases that The Tempest and Miseries share with Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and Wilkins's supposed part of The Travels of the Three English Brothers are counted, Antony and Cleopatra gives "ambiguous results", The Winter's Tale shows up more Tempest connections than Miseries connections, and the Travels bit shows more Miseries connections than Tempest connections (p. 207). Jackson seems to think his test has come out rather well, but he is calling "ambiguous results" the fact that Antony and Cleopatra (which is definitely Shakespeare's) has fewer links with The Tempest (definitely Shakespeare's) than it has with Miseries (definitely Wilkins), in the ratio of 2:3. That is to say, 40% of Antony and Cleopatra's links are to The Tempest and 60% of them are to Wilkins's writing. I would have thought this to be devastating evidence of the insufficiency of this discriminator: it finds a known Shakespeare play to be, if anything, unShakespearian.

    At this point Jackson starts to (rightly) fret over the Antony and Cleopatra results and wonders whether the test is skewed by Miseries being almost half as long again as The Tempest. If we adjust the figures for this (by making more of the Shakespeare connections, proportionally) then Antony and Cleopatra comes out as Shakespearian again, but of course if Jackson really thinks that The Tempest's being short has skewed the test he should go back and recalculate all the figures on the previous page: presumably the things that looked Wilkinsian should now seem a bit less Wilkinsian in the light of the greater weight to be place on the (numerically fewer) links to Shakespeare (p. 208). Clearly still worried, Jackson turns to a subset of his Pericles/Miseries links to focus on just those that are unlike anything elsewhere in the entire Shakespeare canon. He produces a pretty extensive and impressive list of 59 links, of which 47 are in Pericles acts 1-2 and 12 are in Pericles acts 3-5, hence the former is by Wilkins. The ones in acts 3-5 cluster in tiny bits of that part of the play (such as part of a brothel scene) that might also be by Wilkins; this might explain why the brothel scene is contradictory about Lysimachus's intentions in going to the brother: Shakespeare toned down, but did not entirely eliminate, Lysimachus's vice (pp. 208-12).

    Using Sarrazin's rare-word links (from chapter 3) it emerges that the bits of the brothel scenes that seem, on the new evidence, to be Wilkins's have links with the 4 periods of Shakespeare (Two Gentlemen of Verona to A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet to Julius Caesar, As You Like It to Timon of Athens, and King Lear to All is True) that are distributed much like the links between Pericles acts 1-2 and those 4 periods are distributed. And conversely, the bits of the brothel scenes that do not, on the new evidence, seem to be Wilkins's have links with the 4 periods that are distributed much like the links between Pericles acts 3-5 and those 4 periods are distributed. Thus, although the sample of data is too small to prove much, the bits of Wilkins that we seem to have found in the brothel scenes are like the work of Wilkins in Pericles acts 1-2 (p. 213). If, as seems to be emerging, Wilkins had a hand in the brothel scenes, then the versions of those scenes in his prose novella have added usefulness in supplementing the Pericles quarto versions of those scenes. The important conclusion of the book, of course, is that Wilkins wrote Pericles acts 1-2. There is no reason to suppose he ever wrote more than that (say, a full play) from which Shakespeare just extracted two acts. Renaissance theatre was more economical with revision than that, and the likeliest collaborative scenario is that Shakespeare and Wilkins worked together as collaborators with an agreed division of labour (pp. 215-16).

    His main claim effectively (indeed, multiply) proven--my quibbles notwithstanding--Jackson offers a couple of appendices. In the first (pp. 218-32) Jackson defends the view that Pericles says "till she be married . . . all unscissored shall this hair of mine remain" instead of "vnsisterd . . . heyre" (as the play quarto has it) on the grounds of the unemended text making no sense of "till she be married"; it is not as if Marina would get a sister on her marriage day. (Actually, Pericles could plausibly be saying that he will not produce another heir, to whom Marina would be sister, until Marina is married. It is a wonder Jackson could not see that.) Jackson points out that Painful Adventures, which was unknown when the unscissored emendation was first proposed by George Steevens, independently confirmed the emendation, and Gower and Twine's versions of the story also confirm the hair-growing vow. Although it is never going to be explained with complete satisfaction, Jackson surveys the theories about the manuscript underlying the Pericles quarto and concludes that Gary Taylor's account (in the Oxford Textual Companion) is the best overall. Jackson reconsiders the brothel scenes (especially in their repetitiveness and contradictions) in the Pericles quarto, in Wilkins prose novella, and in the sources, in the light of the 'discovery' that Wilkins had a hand in them. In the second appendix (pp. 232-43) Jackson gives the LION data showing words/phrases that each scene of Pericles shares with The Tempest or Miseries but not both.

    Richard Proudfoot is a general editor of the Arden Shakespeare and at an age when others might be thinking of winding down he launched its third series (the current one) in 1995. In a large collection of fairly short essays called In Arden: Editing Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Richard Proudfoot edited by Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan, 21 Arden editors, past and present, pay tribute to the generosity with which Proudfoot gives away ideas that others turn into books of their own. "In all fairness", write Thompson and McMullan, "the name of Richard Proudfoot should be on the cover of every volume, not just as general editor but as, in effect, co-editor" (p. xii). Proudfoot's work has brought stage-centered thinking to prominence in Shakespeare scholarship, via Arden and as textual adviser to the Oxford Complete Works that so dramatically (in both senses) altered the scene in 1986. The second Arden was not stage-centered, but the third is and indeed George Walton Williams argues that editing is itself a kind of performance directing "for the page" (p. xv). For Thompson and McMullan, after years of division between editing and theory, suddenly they have come together (pp. xvi-xvii). The essays in the book are divided into 5 categories: "Part I: Bibliography/Theory of Editing" (pp. 1-61), "Part II: Editing and Feminism" (pp. 63-108), "Part III: Editing and Stage Practice" (pp. 109-74), "Part IV: Annotation and Collation" (pp. 175-218), and "Part V: The Playwright and Others" (pp. 219-68). Not all the essays are relevant to this review. A. L. Braunmuller ("Shakespeares various", pp. 3-16) starts with early-twentieth century comments on editorial notes and collations from E. M. W. Tillyard and Stephen Potter, but is primarily concerned with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century variorum editions.

    In the next chapter, Giorgio Melchiori asserts "The continuing importance of new bibliography" (pp. 17-30) but has nothing substantial with which to support that (entirely reasonable) claim. Melchiori rightly comments that Werstine "could hardly be more unfair" for claiming that New Bibliography did not take account of the multiple, non-authorial inputs that could get registered in early printed texts (p. 19). Something goes awry in Melchiori's quotation of Stanley Wells: "There is no doubt that Stanley Wells is right in stating that 'The primary surviving texts of Shakespeare's plays represent those plays in various states of composition' and that none of these texts 'necessary represent in anything but in a definitive state the words that Shakespeare wished to be spoken or a larger action that he wished to be bodied forth' (in Elam, 340)" (p. 24). This is such an odd thing to claim--surely Wells meant that a definitive state was not available to us--that I followed Melchiori's footnote. "Elam, 340" is supposed to refer to an article by Keir Elam but is in fact an article by Melchiori himself ('What Did Shakespeare Write?', Textus: English Studies in Italy 9 [1996].339-56) and in it Wells is indeed quoted thus, and the quotation cited as a letter to the Times Literary Supplement on 18 January 1986. There was no issue of the TLS on 18 January that year, and a glance at the previous and following years' issues shows that Wells's letter actually appeared on 18 January 1985. And, unsurprisingly, Wells wrote that we should not expect to find the plays in "anything like a definitive state" ('Editing Shakespeare', 18 January. ISSN 0307661, TLS 4268 [1985].63) rather than the opposite as Melchiori's quotation has it. Melchiori concludes his essay by giving his views on the provenance of all the plays that exist in quarto form, without bothering to explain how he came to these opinions (pp. 26-29).

    The next essay is much better, and in it Anthony B. Dawson argues that we do no have to give up entirely our notions of the authorial ideal, only to moderate them ("Correct impressions: Editing and evidence in the wake of post-modernism", pp. 31-47). In Troilus and Cressida at 4.4.47 (Folio TLN 2434) F, but not Q, has "Enter Aeneus" and then both texts have "Aeneas within. My lord, is the lady ready?". Is he within or not? This "Enter" could be the bookkeeper's reminder to himself to have the actor ready, and is not likely to be an authorial revision: it is unlikely to be Shakespeare saying, no, let us have him come in there, since the whole point of the scene is "the pressure exerted by Aeneas's invisible presence" (p. 34). For the Oxford Complete Works, Gary Taylor argued that the "Enter" had to be purposeful, while the "within" might be a failed deletion, so perhaps he just stands in the doorway, making a kind of half-entrance. (In fact, work by the scholar who has spent the longest considering Shakespearian entrances and exits, Mariko Ichikawa, shows that an actor being 'within' did not necessarily mean he could not be seen by the audience (''Acting Spaces' in English Renaissance Drama: An Unpublished Research Report' [2003]).) Later in the scene there is an "Exit" after Cressida's last line, which cannot be her exit as she needs to be silently onstage for what happens next. Taylor took this as an exit for Paris whom he also, like Aeneas, imagines 'at the door' rather than 'within' even though he speaks lines marked 'within' in Q and F. The trouble is that this staging makes awkward Troilus's line "come you hither" to Paris, which is more easily spoken to someone offstage ('come on, get on stage') than someone in the doorway. Dawson thinks that perhaps this "Exit" is an error made by a bookkeeper looking quickly over the text, seeing that Cressida has nothing more to say, and so erroneously giving her an exit (p. 35). The scene, Dawson argues, needs Aeneas and the others to be offstage not loitering in doorways; perhaps the actors were keen to show themselves and so spoilt Shakespeare's design. Or perhaps, and the mistaken entry stage direction "Enter the Greekes" supports this, the manuscript underlying F was imperfectly annotated by a bookkeeper--who did not care that there is actually only one Greek, Diomedes, in the group that enters, only that a group enters--and the "Enter Aeneus" was him warning himself to have the actor ready and the "Exit" after Cressida's last line was him noticing that she had finished her speeches in the scene (p. 36). Sensibly, Dawson advises that just because performance never quite conforms to a given manuscript (there are always the little flourishes not scripted) does not mean we cannot reasonably treat it as though it does (p. 37).

    Surveying how these matters have been theorized, Dawson relates that for Jerome McGann, there is the 'text' (the "literary product . . . as a lexical event"), the 'poem' (the place where this happens in "a specific process of production . . . and consumption"), and the 'work' (the superset containing "all the texts and poems which have merged in the literary production and reproduction processes"). For W. B. Worthen in Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance a performance is like McGann's 'poem', which can never be authentic because the 'poem' in this sense is utterly tied to Shakespeare's own time: there are only performance events in their own specific times, each of which is different because the time is different. McGann argues that the contingency of meaning--its being the result of collaborative forces (and, I should argue, conflictual ones such as censorship)--makes the author's final intention unsuitable as a guiding criterion for selecting one's copy-text (p. 39). In Unediting the Renaissance, Leah Marcus attacked the New Bibliography but as Michael Bristol argued (and Dawson agrees) there is a difference between veridical and circumstantial evidence. The New Bibliographers were not trying to establish a single coherent history of the texts (what veridical evidence helps with), only a set of plausible explanations for the texts (for which there is only circumstantial' evidence; this is what Marcus misunderstood) (p. 40). Dawson points out the problems with Marcus's view--most importantly that a commitment on principle to "discontinuity and rupture" is as ideological as a commitment to continuity and order--and insists that McGann's terminology does not give enough space for the idea, the non-material version, of the created artefact: there has to be a 'work' that is not simply Q or F Troilus and Cressida (p. 41). Where is it? Dawson answers: "The text is born in the brain of its comically talented author, but when it grows up it becomes a book" (p. 42). With ideas like this in circulation, 2003 really was a good year for literary approaches to Shakespeare. The 'work', Dawson goes on, is a dialectic of the immaterial idea and the physical embodiment, and without some element of the immaterial in one's conceptual framework for editing you could not even fix the grossest errors (p. 42). Quite right. Just because Shakespeare is not the single author of his plays (they are indeed collaborative in a number of ways) does not mean that he is not the 'primary' author; he is, and his "initiating authorial act", even though not wholly recoverable, is not wholly lost either: pluralizing authority does not undermine it completely (p. 43). And that, as Dawson observes, is one of the concerns of Troilus and Cressida too.

    H. R. Woudhuysen's essay explores the peculiar phenomenon that printed plays had unnecessary blank pages at the front and the back despite this being an expensive waste ("Early play texts: Forms and formes", pp. 48-61). Generally the versos of title-pages were left blank to prevent show-through, but that was expensive: Blayney reckons that when making 800 copies of a quarto about half the cost was the paper. We do not know who made book-design decisions. Compositors were paid by printers by the page, so the non-labour of setting a blank page was 'fat work' (as it was called), yet printers seem to have liked leaving a blank page, or even a whole leaf of two pages, at the end of a book to protect it when unbound. Such a blank end-leaf could be folded round to protect the title-page at the front, and there developed in the eighteenth century the half-title to protect the title-page proper. It is possible that blank pages and even whole leaves were there to make a short play seem bulkier in print than it really was, for the phenomenon is more common in plays under 2,000 lines long such as the first quartos of Shakespeare's Henry 5, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor than it is in longer plays. This would suggest that plays were not quite the ephemera we have thought (the point made also by Erne above). The practice that Greg called 'continuous printing'--not starting a new line for a new speech but printing it on the same line as the end of the preceding speaker's speech--looks like a compositorial trick to save paper (and so correct for casting-off errors) but it appears in Q1 King Lear, which was set seriatim. Here the effort seems to be to leave the final verso unprinted upon, since there is much 'continuous printing' on the last three pages (p. 57). That leaving the final verso unprinted was considered important is witnessed by books such as Q2 Romeo and Juliet, which increases its lines-per-page rate towards the end, but has an unprinted final verso. Ultimately, having described the phenomenon in detail, Woudhuysen admits that he has not solved the puzzle that even though paper was expensive and worth saving, pointless blank pages were considered worth including in books.

    Easily the richest and most intellectually stimulating section of the book is the second one, "Editing and feminism". It begins with a demonstration by Suzanne Gossett (whose Arden 3 edition of Pericles will be reviewed next year) that, in the absence of hard evidence, editing Pericles is a critical, not a scientific, matter. In the play, Cleon asks Dionyza what she will say to Pericles about Mariana's disappearance, and in Q1 Dionyza replies "That shee is dead. Nurses are not the fates to foster it, not euer to preserue, she dide at night, I'll say so" (sig. G2r). H. H. Vaughan suggested emending to "That she is dead. Nurses are not the fates. To foster is not ever to preserve. . . .", which posits minimal error (is to it) and some repointing, and mirrors the repartee in the previous scene about bastards being brought up and down in the brothel (p. 65). Gossett thinks that "to foster is not always to preserve" is a good editorial aphorism. The Oxford Complete Works emended and patched the play wholesale while the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition bent over backwards to trust Q1, finding "To foster it" acceptable because it can be the indefinite object of the verb to foster, as in Lear "I cannot daub it further", and ignoring the problem of "not ever to preserve". The New Cambridge Shakespeare editors thought the Pericles quarto to be printed from foul papers because it is like the King Lear quarto (which probably was). However, Werstine has deconstructed the category 'foul papers', showing it to be metaphysical, and what is worse the New Cambridge Shakespeare's unemended lines of Pericles are often just gibberish. On the other hand, Taylor's solution for the Oxford Complete Works was vastly over-confident in the face of indeterminability and according to Gossett what the text needs is "a post-modern, post-structuralist approach" that takes each decision locally  (p. 67).

    As an example of how feminism affects editing, Gossett notes that editors often have Lychorida exit after giving Pericles his baby as though she were too low-status to stay while Pericles welcomes his daughter to the world, but in fact midwives were well thought of. Equally, Pericles is often made to hand over his baby while wailing his wife's death, as though ". . . a man cannot emote with a baby in his arms" (p. 68). Another example is Marina's startled response to Leonine's commission from Dionyza: "Why would she haue mee kild now? as I can remember by my troth, I neuer did her hurt in all my life" (sig. F3r), which editors since Malone alter the punctuation of to make "Why would she have me killed? Now, as I can remember . . .". but the point is indeed 'why now?' after fostering her all these years. The answer (that Marina does not know) is the recent unfavourable comparisons that people have drawn between her biological and her adopted daughter, and the subtext of their being now pubescent (p. 69). A common substitution of a passage from Wilkins's novella for what seems a faulty bit of the quarto--Cerimon's speech about the cold and apparently dead being revived (sig. E4r)--is unnecessary and apparently motivated by a concern that the Egyptian should be male and hence should be the agent, not the recipient, of a reviving. In fact, there was much interest in cold, apparently (but not really) dead women in the period (p. 70). The peculiar repetition of Pericles's vow about cutting his hair (first said after Thaisa's apparent death, 13.29, and repeated after hearing about Marina's death, 18.28) is the consequence of an emendation of the first one, which reads: "till she [Marina] be maried, | Madame, by bright Diana, whom we honour, | All vnsisterd shall this heyre of mine remayne, | Though I shew will in't." (sig. E4r), which usually gets changed to "all, | Unscissored shall this hair of mine remain, | Though I show ill in 't". That is, unsistered becomes unscissored and will becomes ill, both of which are easy mishearings (p. 71). And yet, Gossett argues, a wilful Pericles refusing to remarry and produce another heir makes sense when one considers the play's concern with dynasty and sisterhood. Regarding sisterhood, the quarto says that Philoten "Would euer with Marina bee. Beet when they weaude the sleded silke, | With fingers long, small, white as milke, | Or when she would with sharpe needle would . . ." (sig. F1v). This speech goes on about Marina not Philoten, so editors often have changed "they" to "she" so only Marina weaves with attractive long white fingers. In fact, later needlework again comes up in connection with sisterhood ("her art sisters the natural roses" 20.7) and as in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen the point is about "the quasi-identity of young girls" being "destroyed by competition for men", as Gossett brilliantly puts it (pp. 72-73)

    The brothel scene of Lysimachus's conversion is often patched with lines from Wilkins because Marina just does not seem to say enough for the miracle to happen; to bring in Wilkins's version is to make Lysimachus actually a brothel-frequenter (he confesses it), while in Q he could be just a tester like the duke in Measure for Measure. Gary Taylor's use of Wilkins here on the grounds of corruption in Q is inconsistent: the actor playing Marina is supposed to be a reporter and she is in this scene, so the actor ought to have known the scene well. Taylor thought also that perhaps the censor cut the scene, but since George Buc began censoring printed plays from 1607 and Edmund Tilney continued censoring performances until 1610, who would have done it? (Actually, that uncertainty does not of itself make the censorship less likely.) More significantly, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, and Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, and The Maid's Tragedy also have randy men of authority and yet these plays escaped apparently unscathed. Our modern objection to Q's version of the scene is its sexual double standard--Lysimachus is a brothel-visitor, we suspect, yet Marina apparently does not mind--while Wilkins at least gives Marina a quasi-feminist resistance in her long speeches. Unfortunately, but unavoidably argues Gossett, that double standard does seem to be the period's norm (pp. 75-76). Alterations in the brothel scene can be made on the grounds of strengthening Marina's resolve and resistance, and of weakening Lysimachus's integrity, and we have really nothing hard in the way of evidence to go on. It has, finally, to be a critical decision not a purely bibliographical one (p. 77)

    In the next essay, Lois Potter argues that Desdemona is innocent yet sexual and that the Q/F differences can be seen as an attempt to get that tricky balance right ("Editing Desdemona", pp. 81-94). For his stories, the quarto has Desdemona give Othello "a world of sighs" (like Brabantio says, a "maiden never bold") but in the Folio she gives the much more sexually active "world of kisses". Editors generally prefer the demure Desdemona of Q even when using F as their control text. Alice Walker preferred F overall, but her views were couched in extraordinarily moralist language. To use Jowett's handy terminology, Walker thought MSQ a debased version of MSF; Potter reports this as Walker believing that ". . . the Quarto is a perversion of the Folio", which taken literally is absurd since of the two the quarto was printed first. (This demonstrates why everyone should use Jowett's terminology.) For Arden 3 Honigmann also thought MSF better, but because it was a revision of MSQ and not the uncorrupted source, and Honigmann held that in this revision Desdemona was 'protected', made less forward (p. 83). Certainly, a number of small Q/F differences (detailed by Potter) seem to show the Folio toning down the sensuality and loquaciousness of Desdemona, although Cassio's speech on Othello arriving in Cypress and making "loues quicke pants in Desdemonaes Armes" (F) is stronger than the same moment in Q: "swiftly come to Desdemona's armes" (pp. 84-85). Annoyingly, Walker (one of the few women to do a major edition in her age) was less feminist than M. R. Ridley (the Arden 2 editor), and indeed editors have consistently been irritated by Desdemona's partial failure to be the demure girl they want her to be: she understands Iago's bawdy banter, and (in their eyes), should not (p. 86). The line "O, fie upon thee, slanderer!" (2.1.113) is the moment Desdemona enters into dialogue with Iago, but although indented (to indicate a new speaker) in Q, it lacks a speech prefix so it might be Emilia or Desdemona saying it; F gives it to Desdemona. If Emilia says it, it is just one more example of her and Iago's marital bickering, but if Desdemona says it then she knows what Iago has been talking about (sex) and encourages him by responding. Honigmann ingeniously argued that Desdemona intervenes and "places herself in the firing line" (by asking how Iago would praise her, 2.1.117) in order to stop the marital bickering. The really tricky scene is 4.3 (the Willow Scene), especially as Q lacks Desdemona's song, and much of the dialogue including Emilia's long final speech, while F has Desdemona say, with no prompting, "This Lodovico is a proper man" (4.3.34), which might indicate that she is tempted to infidelity. For this reason, some editors have transferred it to Emilia. Desdemona's twice asking Emilia (in F) whether she would commit adultery for all the world might, Honigmann suggested, be due to a faintly-marked deletion by Shakespeare of his first stab (pp. 87-88).

    Potter wonders (without much supporting evidence) if the same thing happened with Cassio's hyperbolic speeches about Desdemona before she landed in 2.1, and Montano's question, apropos of nothing, "is your general wived?". Editorial emendations tend, for later readers, to smack of their own times, as when Charles Jennens solved Iago's puzzling comment that Cassio is "A fellow almost damned in a fair wife" (1.1.20) by changing it to the caddish "A fellow's almost damned in a fair wife!" (p. 89). Honigmann's emendations too may seem dated to future generations. Although F seems a building-up of Q, there are places where Q must represent a cutting-down of F since there are lines in Q that do not make sense without the context for them, context that only F provides. An example that Potter draws from Honigmann is Desdemona's prayer ("God [Heauen] me such vsage [vses] send" at the end of 4.3 in (Q and F) that relies upon Emilia's preceding "Then let them vse vs well" that is only in F (p. 89). If the song and Emilia's long speech were cut out to make Q, this might again be a sign of embarrassment: women should not talk so much about potential infidelity. Q2, like F, sometimes makes Desdemona more sensual and sometimes less, and Potter wonders if this might be "the result of a general male inability to come to terms with female sexuality" (p. 92). It is fair to consider Q and F as two differing 'takes' on how to balance the sexuality and innocence of Desdemona, and although the sum total of Q/F differences is small, so is Desdemona's part. A few changes can greatly alter the characterization.

    Barbara Hodgdon's essay argues that modern editions of The Taming of the Shrew have much in them from the masculinist theatrical tradition and that the Folio text itself has potential for feminist reinterpretation of the play ("Who is performing 'in' these text(s)?; Or, Shrew-ing around", pp. 95-108). Hodgdon begins with some fairly trivial objections to the editing principles of Gary Taylor (who, unlike Jeffrey Masten, seeks authorial origin) and Stanley Wells whose model of the 'general reader', for whom one makes up stage directions, does not really match anyone. Then she gets specific about Arden 3's guidelines, which "bracket off performance as performance", separating it "physically and spatially as part of the Introductory matter", and which presume an "'original' theatrical life" that "lies at the heart of textual editing". These observations are true, but it is rather annoyingly vague to write that 'X presumably implies Y' without explicitly stating what you think about X or Y themselves (pp. 96-97). Like a lot of modern books that begin as documents created with Microsoft's Word software, this one has possessive apostrophes that point the wrong way (pp. 98-99); Word notoriously insists that only a 6-shape apostrophe can begin a word. Overly-prescriptive stage directions, Hodgdon complains, make impossible certain mental stagings that a reader might otherwise have entertained. For example, adding "Servant spills some water" to gloss Petruccio's "Will you let it fall?" removes the possibility that Petruccio spilt it himself and is blaming the servant unreasonably; that is, it makes Petruccio less mad. Similarly, as H. J. Oliver pointed out, sending off a servant because Petruccio says "bid my Cousin Ferdinand come hither" suggest that there actually is a Cousin Ferdinand to be fetched when the point might well be that there is not and that Petruccio and the servant know it. Just because dialogue implies an action does not necessarily mean that there should be an action.

    Importantly, F has no stage directions for Petruccio hitting people: he is verbally, not physically, abusive. Many modern editions distort his character by inventing stage directions for him assaulting his servants, and even Ann Thompson's feminist Cambridge edition of the play has a cover illustration of Petruccio with a whip. This property comes from John Philip Kemble's much later performance of the role, and got into editions from the performance tradition. Indeed, the play's problematical reputation comes largely from the performance history, and as Stephen Orgel puts it "actors are the original poststructuralists, assuming . . . that the author does not control the play, the interpreter does" (pp. 100-102). Virtually all modern editions have Petruccio and Kate exit together at the end of the play, but in fact F has an exit only for him, leaving her behind. It is hard to see this as error since all preceding stage directions have them leaving together, even when it was hard to crowd this information on the line ("Exeunt P.Ka"). Since we have been importing material from the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century theatrical tradition to our editions, why not do it consciously asks Hodgdon, imagining use of the ending from David Garrick's adaptation Catherine and Petruchio (1754). Then she imagines a performance following F--rather than importing A Shrew's end-frame that too smoothly closes down the narrative as a "masculinist power fantasy"--and leaving Kate onstage as a object of wonder (as though in a 'domestic' masque) who might or might not be thought to have been tamed (pp. 103-105).

    Taking quite the opposite approach, George Walton Williams argues that editors should intervene to fix faulty stage directions, even to show simply what they believe is the most likely staging ("To edit, to direct?--Ay, there's the rub", pp. 111-24). Like Peter Holland (and unlike Harold Jenkins), George Walton Williams thinks that the editor is a director, the page his stage; after all, directors always presume to edit, not least by cuts (p. 112). An editor simply has to fix faulty stage directions such as "Enter Clarence, and Brakenbury, guarded" (Folio Richard 3) because it is clearly wrong: the latter guards the former, as the ensuing dialogue makes clear. Why privilege the dialogue? Because "All editors will agree that the dramatist's dialogue is primary". (Actually, they will not.) Williams surveys moments when an editor obviously needs to think up entrance and exit stage directions, and then startlingly asserts that "The term 'aside' appears in Folio directions only some seventeen times, of which about half are in one play, Pericles; the direction is clearly not something that Shakespeare thought necessary to include in his text" (p. 117). Pericles is not in the 1623 Folio; I wonder if he means F3 or F4. Williams declares that he is not going to get into the debate about whether editors have been over-prescribing 'aside' markers (the ones that make a character speak to the audience) and whether more of them should be removed to make speeches be given aloud, which makes the reader wonder why he raised the matter in the first place. Of the other kind of 'aside', where members of one faction on the stage talk amongst themselves, Williams notes that the term 'apart' could usefully be employed, as in 3.2 of All is True where three factions form and multiple 'aside' markers would be confusing (p. 118).

    Williams raises but does not settle the trickier problem of placing the kiss(es) in the sonnet spoken by Romeo and Juliet when they first meet (pp. 119-20). Most alarmingly, Williams quotes an article by M. J. Kidnie ('Text, Performance, and the Editors: Staging Shakespeare's Drama', SQ 51 [2000].456-73) in a way that shows that he entirely mistakes her to be taking his side when he claims that: "The very difficulty, however, of the decision-making process implicitly validates the editorial activity, and behind assertions of the editorial responsibility to the author and the reader lies the conviction that the intellectually--even morally--upstanding editor is the busy editor". Williams precedes this with the claim that when editors are convinced about the need for a particular emendation, they are "obliged to print that choice" and writes that Kidnie "phrased this necessity well" (p. 121). In fact, Kidnie's entire article is concerned to make the case that this obligation does not exist; her tone is ironic and she does not think that making these difficult choices is "intellectually--even morally--upstanding", quite the opposite. Whereas Kidnie demands that editors leave matters open, Williams insists that editors must print "the instruction that they think 'most likely'". I am with Williams and, according to him, Proudfoot agrees, but the cause is not helped by again glancing at Kidnie with the remark that "One critic wants editors . . . to be morally upstanding" (p. 122). Would that she did.

    Continuing the theme of stage directions, R. A. Foakes also thinks that we should not slavishly follow those in early printed texts, for the little evidence we have from playhouse 'plots' and the one surviving actor's 'part' shows that the different manuscripts involved in a performance could differ greatly in this regard ("Raw flesh/lion's flesh: A cautionary note on stage directions", pp. 125-37). As research by Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson has shown, there was a standard vocabulary for stage directions and there were special, unusual terms for particular effects. Foakes argues, contra Dessen, that editors should "expand and explain more than is customary in such scholarly editions as the Arden Shakespeare" (pp. 125-26). Manuscript playbooks are sparsely and inconsistently marked up with stage directions, but that is because the performers had the 'plot' to supplement it in the theatre. The plot for The Battle of Alcazar has staging detail for the dumbshows that is not in Q, except the first and (because missing from the damaged plot) the last. Whereas Greg thought Q represented a "drastically cut down" version of the play represented by the plot, Bernard Beckerman showed that in fact they agree structurally and in the number of actors needed. The plot is more precise in naming properties and actions than Q, specifying Q's "murderous iron" as a "Chopping knife" and "raw flesh" for Q's "lyons flesh" (pp. 128-29). Beckerman thought he could distinguish authorial (literary) from playhouse (practical) stage directions in Q, indeed he mapped this onto the two typefaces (Roman and Italic) used for Q's stage directions, but Foakes finds this unconvincing. Over his career, Marlowe's stage directions got sparser and less descriptive, as if in learning his trade he came to trust a kind of theatrical shorthand that he knew the players would understand. It may well be that authorial texts are more extensive and complete in their stage directions than theatrical ones, but we should not assume that these authorial stage directions show us what the players actually did: they might have chosen other means to the same effect. Edward Alleyn's part for Orlando Furioso omits and shortens Q's stage directions, but adds others.

    The relationship between playbook, plot, and part "seems to have been complex" and although William Long might well be right that "nothing was done to the author's directions unless the players felt it to be necessary", that does not mean they followed those directions, for the plot and/or part might have something different (p. 134). Amidst all this uncertainty, Foakes wants editors to be bold "in suggesting possible action" and to use Dessen and Thomson's new dictionary of stage directions to distinguish those directions that are the conventional, widely-used, vocabulary and "those that seem special to the author or play". After all, the only actor's part we have shows directions not in Q, so editors might "go further and look constantly for possible stage business". Foakes gives the example of how he wishes he had dealt with the opening stage direction of King Lear: "Sennet [or flourish of trumpets introducing a formal processional entry]. Enter one bearing a coronet, then Lear [in majesty, crowned], then the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, and attendants" (p. 136). I suspect that second word "or" might mislead someone into thinking that Foakes is presenting alternatives rather than a gloss, so perhaps an "=" sign would be better. The point of the additions is to indicate the formality of the scene (which "may not be obvious to laid-back readers of the twenty-first century") and to indicate that a "coronet" (a detail from Q1 only) is less than a crown (p. 137).

    Lynette Hunter and Peter Lichtenfels certainly agree that a feeling for the theatre is necessary for an editor, but like Hunter's work on Romeo and Juliet reviewed here two years ago, there are considerable problems with their essay giving detail about how the theatrical sense should operate ("Reading in the moment: Theatre practice as a guide to textual editing", pp. 138-56). Hunter describes herself as a bibliographer, but gives an extraordinary (and pointedly non-bibliographical) reason for deciding to base the Arden 3 edition of Romeo and Juliet on Q2: "Because we are interested in the social and political relations of the early modern period and how they have laid grounds for current liberal nation state democracies . . ." (pp. 138-39). Apparently there is more of that sort of thing in Q2 than Q1 or F1. With a conceitedness that must offend several senior editors sharing the same covers as themselves, Hunter and Lichtenfels bemoan the fact that ". . . there is so little previous scholarly work that has wholeheartedly used the theatre" (p. 139). Contrary to preceding contributions to this book, Hunter and Lichtenfels think that directing a play "is completely different to the process of editing" and give a very woolly account of directing that includes "making possible the rhythms of the interaction of the production elements"; that sounds more like stage managing, having little to do with ideas and much to do with organizing people (p. 140). Hunter and Lichtenfels decided to mount productions of Q1 and Q2 Romeo and Juliet as if they were new plays, and in describing what this achieved they leave comprehensible English far behind: "This made possible an experience rarely realized on the modern stage: productions that used a text with little editorial input, except as a physical object, after 1623". It gets worse: "We were struck by the inexorable power of working on collation, during which one follows the historical logic of particular decisions, and how this generates a physical musculature of acceptance" (p. 141). Such gibberish is itself in need of a firm editorial hand.

    One of the abiding limitations of Hunter's editorial work is her absolute disbelief in the existence of error, which leads to such problems as the assertion that collation "precisely locates the historical specificity of decision-making" (p. 142). Of course, collation should merely report difference regardless of cause, and such difference might be due to someone's decision (in which case a collation might help locate the decision historically), or it might just be random error. Hunter and Lichtenfels are quite right to describe how actors have managed to find meanings in things that editors have excised as error, but that should not be understood as a demonstration that the meanings really are there; actors habitually construe meanings from scraps (p. 143). The repetition of "The grey-eyed morn" speech Hunter and Lichtenfels defend as implying "an overlap of time that impels us from one scene to the other, constructing the illusion of haste". Thankfully they admit defeat with the repetition of "O true apothecary | Thy drugs are quick" in Q2's version of 5.3 (sig. L3r), since even the best actor cannot convincingly die twice (p. 141). Hunter and Lichtenfels think that keeping to Q2's punctuation can help in performance, as when Capulet tells Peter to "find those persons out | Whose names are written there, and to them say | My house and welcome on their pleasure stay" (the end of 1.2), which in Q2 is "and to them say, | My house and welcome, on their pleasure stay". Hunter and Lichtenfels think that the comma after "welcome" makes the line mean 'They are welcome to my house. Wait to find out whether they can come'. Of course, it does not since no-one can convincingly utter "My house and welcome" as an invitation on its own.

    Hunter and Lichtenfels admit that punctuation has changed its meaning, and they return to good sense with the observation that in response to the Nurse's ambiguous "He's dead", Juliet's "Brief sounds determine of my weal or woe" might be a piece of swearing: "sounds" could be 'zounds', which is spelt this way in Mercutio's dying speech: "a plague a both your houses, sounds a dog, a rat" (Q2 sig. F3v). This reading is strengthened by the fact that the Nurse uses "wounds" (the origin of swounds) in the next line (p. 146). A couple of 9-syllable lines in Q2, Hunter and Lichtenfels found to be capable of "a provoking instability" that "could generate all manner of signification" (p. 147), but they decline to disclose any of these possible significations. Q2 has Juliet exclaim against Romeo (hearing that he has killed Tybalt): "Rauenous douefeatherd raue<n>, woluishrauening lamb", which Hunter and Lichtenfels report the actors finding significantly irregular (p. 148). (It is pretty clearly just an undeleted first thought; the first word should just go.) Hunter and Lichtenfels claim that "Recent editions" claim to be based on Q2 but have "few qualms about using Q1 where they prefer it" (p. 149), which is entirely unfair to the most recent edition--the one that their Arden 3 will be directly competing with in the marketplace--Jill Levenson's Oxford Shakespeare (reviewed here three years ago). Levenson refused to do this and edited Q1 and Q2 as separate states of the play-in-production in Shakespeare's lifetime, and reproduced both in her edition. Fittingly, Hunter and Lichtenfels close with a sample of their choicest gibberish: "Reconstructive readings are specific to a cultural materiality; they depend on the ability to negotiate, to net together new grounds between oneself, one's context and the text, that will delineate the materiality of difference" (p. 154).

    John Russell Brown wants editors to think about the theatrical importance of silent action and to annotate for it where they can ("Annotating silence", pp. 157-74). Brown knows that this is a counsel of perfection--scarcely achievable in many instances--but he takes some recent editors to task for not commenting on (or for only commenting reductively on) the performance of the final battle between Richard and Richmond in Richard 3 (pp. 161-62). There is, he admits, simply too much to say about performance possibilities in the most interesting of Shakespeare's lines (such Lear's dying "Never, never, never, never, never") yet he maintains that simply sending the reader to a secondary text (as Stanley Wells does for the Oxford Shakespeare) is an abdication of editorial responsibility. Unreasonably, Brown thinks that an incomplete verse line implies silence before or after it (p. 165), which is a claim that crops up periodically without evidence to support it. The rest of the essay is not about editing at all but about directorial choices (especially concerning moments of silence) in performance and has some clear misprints: an impossible comma after "father's" (p. 167) and "chose" for 'choose' (p. 171). An experienced practitioner, Brown has definite views about acting: ". . . action and words [should] seem to spring from unspoken thoughts and feelings in such a way that the persons of the play seem to be alive in their innermost beings" (p. 172). That there are other ways to do it is clear from Bertolt Brecht's ideas, of course.

    By this point, around half-way through the book, it becomes clear that not everyone gave McMullan and Thompson their best work. G. K. Hunter offers a pedestrian tour of 400 years of printed Shakespeare, with some fairly garbled assertions about annotation within that tradition ("The social function of annotation", pp. 177-93). In a rather strained comparison, Hunter argues that actors were "the first annotators" of Shakespeare's text, for "they determined, by voice, by gesture, by pause and speed of utterance, the focus of significance for the words they spoke" (p. 178). A little misleadingly Hunter refers to the theatre company's "copyright" on the plays passing to the printers in 1623, when in fact there was no such concept: the Stationers' Company rules simply protected stationers. Hunter summarizes the seventeenth and eighteenth-century publishing history using the ideas of people such as Margreta De Grazia and Michael Dobson, which is all very well but unnecessary (pp. 181-88). As in previous essays, errors that should have been spotted remain ("honours" is spelt two ways in one sentence on page 189) and the contributor should have been saved from gibberish such as "The gap between what the Cowden Clarkes' annotations offer as a representation of what Shakespeare was trying to communicate is particularly obvious in a modern world in which the vocabulary they use can no longer be taken, any more than can the neoclassical strictures, as an objective expression of what is there for us in the play" (p. 191). A gap can only exist between an A and a B, and Hunter's sentence has no B. Still lower in aim and execution is Helen Wilcox's "The character of a footnote . . . Or, annotation revisited" (pp. 194-207), which contains failed witticisms such as the 'character' of a footnote being dwarfish and low (like Hermia) because confined to the bottom of the page. Wilcox explains how (and using which types of footnote) she would annotate the 'virginity' banter between Helena and Parolles in the first scene of All's Well that Ends Well (pp. 199-204) before returning to irritatingly unfunny characterizations of footnotes as butlers to a longstanding house, or guides to a newly-opened one. Ernst Honigmann keeps his contribution brief ("To be or not to be", pp. 209-10): Hamlet's phrase comes from Cicero's Tusculun Disputations ("aut esse aut non esse") and is really, as Honigmann has argued elsewhere, about Hamlet's own death.

    Eric Rasmussen argues that although it is often unwieldy, historical collation is a good thing that editors should do more of ("Richly noted: A case for collation inflation", pp. 211-8). Rasmussen is working on a full historical collation for the New Variorum Hamlet, so the matter is in his mind, and recently completed the Arden 3 Henry 6 with John D. Cox (reviewed here two years ago). In the Folio text of 3 Henry 6, the eyewitness to York's murder has the stage direction "Enter one blowing" (TLN 697, 2.1.42), which many editors have interpreted as a reference to blowing a horn, hence he is a post. But it just means 'out of breath', so that is what Cox and Rasmussen gloss it as in their text, yet because they did not do an historical collation--they recorded only departures from their control text--it was not obvious that they were overturning decades of editorial error. Another example is that Victorian editors favoured "the Queene embracing him" (F's version) in the dumbshow in Hamlet, rather than Q2's more mutual "embracing him, and he her"; such things are of interest to historians of patriarchy.

     John J. M. Tobin is still finding fresh examples of Shakespeare borrowing from Thomas Nashe, and thinks that we can use Nashe's writing to find solutions to cruxes in Shakespeare: if there is a Nashean analogue to the crux in the vicinity of the part that Shakespeare borrowed, Shakespeare probably borrowed that too ("Sources and cruxes", pp. 221-38). Taking just King Lear, there are within 3 pages of Nashe's Pierce Pennilesse: "Hell . . . stench . . . darknesse" (like King Lear 4.6.123-5), "Fortune turnes her wheele" (like King Lear 2.2.171), "Dover Clyffes", "We, that" (like King Lear 5.3.324-5), and "flyes plaie" (like King Lear 4.1.38-9) (pp. 227). Those are Tobin's strongest candidates, and he has some rather weaker parallels between King Lear and Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament, Have With You to Saffron Walden and Lenten Stuffe. This last has "a trundle-taile tike" so Q's "tyke or trundle-tail" is preferable to F's meaningless "tight or troudle-taile" (King Lear 3.6.67). Tobin goes on to detail Hamlet's borrowings from Nashe's Pierce Penilesse, Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, Have With You to Saffron Walden, and Lenten Stuffe and then Othello's memorable "O beware my Lord of Jealousy! | It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock | The meat it feeds on" (3.3.167-9), which comes from Pierce Penilesse: "Envie [is] a crocodile that weepes when he kils, and fights with none but he feedes on. This is the nature of this quick-sighted monster" (p. 233). In the same book Nashe writes about the ignorance of Indians (not Judeans) about the value of gems, so that solves a longstanding problem about Othello's last words. Tobin ends with some examples of Nashe in Macbeth.

    Things get sharply better with the penultimate essay in the book, in which Juliet Dusinberre argues that Will Kemp, not Robert Armin, played Touchstone  in the first performances of As You Like It and that Sir Oliver Mar-text is brought on simply so Kemp can have some of his usual fun at the expense of the Martinists ("Topical forest: Kemp and Mar-text in Arden", pp. 239-51). Unfortunately this essay is beyond the scope of this review. The same is true of John Pitcher's typically learned "Some call him Autolycus" (pp. 252-68) in which he argues that Shakespeare inserted a representation of himself into this character from The Winter's Tale. Overall, Thompson and McMullan's collection is an uneven affair. The best work--in the feminist section--is groundbreaking, but many of the more established editorial scholars are, to use a theatrical expression, merely 'phoning it in.

    A couple of other books of essays contained material relevant to this review. Adrian Kiernander reckons that oral dictation was used in the copying of manuscripts in the theatre, and that this could be the origin of Q/F differences in Richard 3 (''Betwixt' and 'Between': Variant Readings in the Folio and First Quarto Versions of Richard III and W. W. Greg's Concept of Memorial Reconstruction', in Lloyd Davis (ed.) Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance (Newark: University of Delaware Press [2003])). Kiernander tracks the arguments over what kind of manuscript underlay Q1, up to the point where Laurie Maguire declared that it is not a memorial reconstruction. As mentioned above in relation Lukas Erne's book, the latest work is Jowett's proof that Q1 Richard 3 cannot be based on a memorial reconstruction, reviewed here three years ago (''Derby', 'Stanley', and Memorial Reconstruction in Quarto Richard III', N&Q 245 [2000]). So what is it? Part of the puzzle is the variety of small differences between F and Q such as slew/kill'd, King/Sovereign, betwixt/between. Printing generally destroyed the manuscript copy, so it is unlikely that the players sent a theatrical manuscript that they were using unless they never wanted to perform the play again or they had a spare one for some reason. Most likely, a special transcript was made for the purpose of printing, and it might well contain the latest changes initiated by the actors, "even if it were being transcribed by the author" (p. 243). In an imagined world of proliferating manuscript copies of the play--the model the New Bibliographers tried to resist--innumerable small variants are not surprising, especially if a system of shorthand were used that recorded not sound but meaning. In the system described in Timothy Bright's Characterie (1588), a synonym might easily be substituted for a word not in the list of signs. (Painful as it is to admit, I suppose that early modern theatrical practitioners might indeed have been sufficiently barbarous as to put dramatic poetry through the mangle of such a shorthand system.) Of course, use of stenography was rejected by most New Bibliographers when it was a means of explaining what was thought to be piracy--memorial reconstruction being the preferred explanation--but as we no longer believe there was piracy we should reconsider stenography afresh.

    The idea (perpetuated, for example, by Peter Thomson) that a scribe chopped a single copy of the play into individual speeches and then glued all the speeches for one role together to make an actor's part is not borne out by the only surviving part, Alleyn's for Orlando Furioso. It does not have a glue join between each speech, but only between sheets, on each of which is a collection of speeches that must, therefore, have been copied out together (p. 246). Kiernander rightly points out that it is hard to imagine a single scribe managing to do what we see in Alleyn's part for a whole play: there would be just too many heaps of papers, one for each of 40 or 50 parts. It were much easier to do the copying by oral dictation from a master text with each of several scribes recording the lines for a few characters (say, one major and a handful of minor). During this dictation, slight revisions arising from the thoughts of the author-dictator, or indeed of actors acting as scribes for their own parts, might easily have emerged and been accepted (p. 247). Kiernander finds evidence of oral dictation in Alleyn's part: there are gaps where words (mostly unusual proper nouns) have been left out and filled in later by another hand. If the part were made by scribal copying of another document, then where the scribe left a gap because he could not read the word in his master text he would certainly have left a gap big enough for what he could see. But in the part many of the gaps left are too small for the necessary words to be fitted in, and this sort of thing is only likely to occur during oral dictation in which the scribe knows that he has not caught the word or words needed, but fails to leave enough room (p. 248).

    A new book on stage directions in Hamlet produced three essays of relevance here. In the first, Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor survey some of the problems in those directions and give hints how their Arden 3 edition will treat them ('Variable Texts: Stage Directions in Arden 3 Hamlet', in Hardin L. Aasand (ed.) Stage Directions in Hamlet: New Essays and New Directions (Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press [2003])). Because they will be doing separate Q1, Q2, and Folio versions of their play, Thompson and Taylor are free to have each play's stage directions apply only to that version. For their main text (based on Q2), Thompson and Taylor will retain an act interval at 3.4/4.1 that they do not really believe in but which it would too greatly inconvenience readers (and those following citations from criticism) to change (pp. 29-31). This is too timid: if Arden editors were to go with what they think is right, others would follow. For their Q1 text they will use sequential scene numbering only and in their F text they will move the act 3/4 interval to where they think it really belongs: beginning act 4 with Ophelia's mad scene, traditionally called 4.5. Actually, they write "4.4" but it is clear that they mean 4.5 when they go on to write that "[traditional] 4.5 becomes [our] 4.1" (p. 31).

    In the second chapter of relevance from this book, Bernice Kliman (like Carl D. Atkins, article reviewed below) finds the punctuation in the early printed texts to be meaningful and seems not to accept the principle that it is just printer's work and not authorial ('Explicit Stage Directions (Especially Graphics) in Hamlet', in Hardin L. Aasand (ed.) Stage Directions in Hamlet: New Essays and New Directions (Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press [2003])). Or rather, Kliman acknowledges the point but proceeds as though she had not. Kliman insists on reading line-end commas as a sign that the speaker is being interrupted, for which we might use a dash. She has certainly found some cases where interruption is plausible ("Bar. Long liue the King, | Fran. Barnardo" Hamlet Q2 1.1.3-4) but that does not make all such cases interruptions, and Kliman insists that some examples are clearly interruptions when they do not have to be. For example there is "Bar. Welcome Horatio, welcome good Marcellus, | Hora. What, ha's this thing appeard againe to night?" (Q2 1.1.29-30) about which Kliman writes " . . . Horatio eagerly interrupts Bernard's salutations" (p. 79). Well he might, but the text does not demand it. Abandoning all logic, Kliman goes on to claim that no punctuation at all at the line-end might also indicate interruption. The final chapter of relevance is by Pamela Mason and trumps this run of silliness by arguing that editions need not tidy up absurd stage directions (such as Q2 Hamlet requiring Osric to enter twice in the final scene without an intervening exit), nor variable speech-prefixes, because pondering these things can stimulate readers and performers to explore interesting corners of the play (''. . . and Laertes': The Case against Tidiness', in Hardin L. Aasand (ed.) Stage Directions in Hamlet: New Essays and New Directions (Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press [2003]))

    Turning to articles in journals, there were four items of relevance in Shakespeare Quarterly this year. In the first, Juliet Dusinberre gets a new date and venue for the first performance of As You Like It--20 February 1599 at court--by means of a flawed elimination of the alternative candidate plays that might have preceded a surviving epilogue from that date and venue, assisted by acres of speculation ('Pancakes and a Date for As You Like It', SQ 54 [2003].371-405). As You Like It is absent from Francis Meres's list of 1598, so it must be after that date--unless he forgot it, I suppose--and it cannot be later than 4 August 1600 when its printing was stayed (pp. 371-72). Dusinberre surveys internal evidence for the date, including Jaques's "All the world's a stage" speech and the alleged allusion to the Bishops Order for book-burning on 1 June 1599; she finds them unconvincing. There is an unsupported nineteenth-century claim that a letter once existed that named Shakespeare as being at court at Wilton in December 1603 and hence that As You Like It probably played there that season, but the only hard evidence for early performance is the document that grants Thomas Killigrew 108 old Blackfriars plays for his new Theatre Royal in 1669, including As You Like It amongst 21 Shakespeare plays. An epilogue to a play performed before the queen at Shrovetide 1599 turned up in the 1960s and Dusinberre agrees with its finders (and with Brian Vickers) that it is Shakespeare: it has the trochaic couplets that he favoured for epilogues (Robin Goodfellow's, Prospero's), and it was found copied into the commonplace book of Henry Stanford, tutor in the household of the 2nd Baron Hunsdon, the lord chamberlain (and Shakespeare's patron) from 1597 (pp. 375-77).

    Looking for which play the epilogue was for, Dusinberre decides at this point to exclude as candidates certain of "the non-Shakespearian plays for which the Stanford epilogue might have been written" on the basis that we know that a couple of them (Dekker's Old Fortunatus and The Shoemaker's Holiday) were performed at court around new year 1599/1600, in which case they were probably not also performed at Shrovetide 1599. (They might have been, though, might they not?). Jonson's Every Man in his Humour was described as performed at court and 'new' in a letter dated 20 September 1598, but Dusinberre wrongly reports this letter as indicating that the play was performed on 20 September, which is not what her cited source--the Oxford edition by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson--actually claims. As with the Dekker plays, Dusinberre too quickly excludes the possibility that it could have been performed again at Shrovetide 1599. Dusinberre's exclusion of A Warning for Fair Women and A Larum for London really is sloppy: she claims that they are "too late for the new epilogue", citing the epilogue's finders. In fact those finders, William M. Ringler and Steven May, do not exclude the plays, noting only that "there is no evidence that they were performed as early as February 1599" ('An Epilogue Possibly By Shakespeare', MP 70 [1972].138-9). It is not reasonable to date first performance solely from Stationers' Register entry dates, which is where Dusinberre gets the dates of 1599 and 1600 that she puts in brackets after these last two plays--although you need to read Ringler and May to discover that--because register entry gives only a terminus ad quem. Moreover, earlier in the article Dusinberre dated As You Like It itself by using Erne's suggestion that register entry usually followed 18 to 24 months after first performance, and by this same reckoning A Warning for Fair Women (entry 17 November 1599) and A Larum for London (entry 29 May 1600) were performed too early to be Stanford's play, not too late. Dusinberre also seems to think that Every Man Out of His Humour being performed in the autumn of 1599 at the Globe precludes its being performed earlier that year at court, without saying why and without mentioning (yet, it comes later) her position on the relationship between public performance and court performance, the possibilities for repeat court performance, and the notion of newness in relation to court performance. This whole paragraph of Dusinberre's is an evidential and logical mess and should not have been published (p. 378).

    Having cleared away the non-Shakespearian candidates, we get the real reason why Dusinberre thinks it is a court epilogue to As You Like It: Touchstone makes a joke about pancakes (1.2.61-3) and that is what the court would have been eating at Shrovetide (p. 379). It being 20 February 1599, in this performance Touchstone would have been Kemp not Armin. Ganymede had a special association with Shrovetide, and the new epilogue fits nicely on the end of As You Like It once you take Rosalind's epilogue off. The epilogue's references to a 'dial' (like the pocket sun-dial that Touchstone is supposed to have) suit the play, and also link with Shakespeare via Sir John Harington who possessed such a rare dial and whose translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso is a major source for As You Like It; Richmond Palace, where the performance took place, had a famous enormous dial that was spruced up for the occasion (pp. 383-84). Perhaps having not entirely convinced herself, Dusinberre returns to the other candidates for the play that preceded this epilogue and despite the epilogue's likeness to some things by Jonson, she excludes him again on the grounds of his being in prison from the end of January 1599 and hence not around on 20 February 1599. (Might he not have written it before going to prison?) Dusinberre closes with some loosely argued links between the court occasion and the play, including the idea that the Globe theatre could thereby open in autumn 1599 with a play that already had royal approval. (The whole official excuse for having theatres, of course, was to get plays ready for the court and we know that public performance did indeed precede court performance.)

    The next article from Shakespeare Quarterly is much better, and in it Lawrence Manley argues that The Contention of York and Lancaster and 2 Henry 6 differ regarding the presentation of Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, in ways consistent with the latter being essentially the earlier, Strange's men's, version of the play that was revised (perhaps when it came into the hands of Pembroke's men) to reduce the ambiguity about her guilt; the revised version is what lies under The Contention ('From Strange's Men to Pembroke's Men: 2 Henry VI and The First Part of the Contention', SQ 54 [2003].253-87). Strange's men are the first company we know of that tried to have a permanent (or at least long-term) residency in London, staying 4 months at the Rose in Spring 1592 during which they gave 105 performances; they were somewhat maverick and said to be defiant of authority. The editorial consensus (although Manley footnotes the dissenters and their range of views) is the MSQ is not merely a report of MSF but a report of a revised, perhaps abridged, version of the play as represented in F. The Contention of York and Lancaster gets associated with Pembroke's men because its sequel Richard Duke of York was printed in an octavo of 1595 mentioning Pembroke's men on the title-page. It is not clear which company first owned The Contention but there is "a substantial body of opinion" that Folio 2 Henry 6 was based on a script written for Strange's men and edited/censored over the next 30 years. There is also a "growing consensus", to which Manley will add, that The Contention quarto represents a Pembroke's men's adaptation of this Strange's men's play (the one visible in F 2 Henry 6) (p. 256). The nub of this is what happens to Eleanor Cobham in the two versions, which reflects some topical matters. Ferdinando Strange's mother was herself accused of using witchcraft to predict the monarch's future. Folio 2 Henry 6 has Eleanor Cobham sent into banishment on the Isle of Man, the witch Jordan burnt, and the priests and Bullingbrooke hanged, while The Contention omits what happens to her accomplices and just has Eleanor Cobham banished (pp. 257-58).

    Scott McMillin showed that a least part of the reason for the differences between the versions regarding Eleanor Cobham's sentencing (and indeed her earlier scene of conjuring) are consistent with alteration to suit a reduced cast. But also, Manley notes, in F she is condemned for witchcraft (which Exodus 22.18 says must be punished by death) while in Q she is condemned for the lesser crime of treason (p. 259). According the Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563 edition), Eleanor Cobham suffered from the same anti-Lollard prejudice that killed her kinsman John Oldcastle and she was falsely accused of heresy. A Catholic response claimed that Foxe was inventing martyrs and that Eleanor Cobham was in fact banished not for heresy but for treason, and in subsequent editions Foxe backpedalled, but insisted that false charges of heresy were the sort of thing that sixteenth-century papists habitually made up (pp. 260-61). Hall and Holinshed have Eleanor Cobham accused of making a kind of wax voodoo doll of Henry 6 and harming it, rather than of foretelling the future; of course, the latter (with a devil and with prophecies) makes better theatre. In at least one version of the Eleanor Cobham story, she admits trying to foretell the future but without harmful intent. Topically, the law against prophesying the life of the monarch (whether or not for harmful purpose) was reinstated as capital treason in 1581 after a period when the penalties had been lower (p. 262). In 1591, amid the Martin Marprelate controversy, a Presbyterian called William Hacket was executed for prophesying about the monarch, clearly as part of an attempt to crack down on Puritanism generally (p. 263). In propaganda it was alleged that Hacket had done voodoo-like harm to a picture of queen Elizabeth, which, the propaganda pointed out, was not what he had been charged with. This might be why the play turned Eleanor Cobham's voodoo into prophesy, but although that would reduce the topicality somewhat it also would have the dangerous effect of making her, like Hacket, someone who is tried for the merely heretical (not actually homicidal) act of prophesying, which nonetheless now was a capital offence (p. 264).

    It was the real, historical Eleanor's trial that set the precedent that witchcraft against the monarch was capital treason, although she was tried by an ecclesiastical court and hence got banishment instead of execution. F's version of the play has Eleanor committing essentially a spiritual crime and getting a (possibly unjust) political punishment, while Q's version has her committing treason. That is to say, Q accepts the new principle that her prophecy was itself a state crime and not just a spiritual one, and thus Q eliminates the possibility that mere papist superstition was what lay behind Eleanor's condemnation (p. 265). Persuasive as Manley's historical narrative is, this is rather a lot of weight to put on a few words of F/Q difference: "Sinne, | Such as by Gods Booke are adiudg'd to death" (F) and "Treasons . . . committed against vs, our States and Peeres" (Q). But this is not the only means by which "Q follows the government's line" (p. 266). As well as the difference in wording of the accusation Q has Eleanor be more active in the preparations for the conjuring and makes it less possible for an audience to see her as entrapped by others: she has already written the questions, and she is more eager to get on with it, and more devious in taking advantage of everyone's else's being away at St Albans. F has the bishop of Winchester (as well as Suffolk) be behind Hume's temptation of Eleanor, and has Hume say more about his trickery of her; this makes her downfall more a political conspiracy than Q has it. Comparing the two versions of the conjuring scene itself (pp. 268-72), Q has Eleanor be an active instigator while F has her aloft and something of a spectator, and Q has Jordan ("a surrogate for the duchess herself") be active and culpable, and likewise when Buckingham makes public the arrest of Eleanor, in Q she is guiltier and more treasonous than in F. The bit of paper on which are written the questions and answers is clearly tracked in Q's version of the story, and it is the paper that constitutes proof of Eleanor's guilt; F, by contrast, allows hearsay to condemn Eleanor. Manley thinks all these F/Q differences show what Pembroke's men did to the play once it entered their repertory. Manley recounts the story of Ferdinando Stanley's mother, the countess of Derby, falling for grace for seeking prophesies about the monarch's life and he wonders if that is why the F version (the Strange's men's version) is softer on Eleanor--so like the countess of Derby--than Q's version (the Pembroke's men's). Ferdinando Strange himself had a claim to the throne, and potentially was the object for a Catholic succession (or even a coup), but was inscrutable about his own ambitions and managed to alienate the crown and his own people and died on 16 April 1594. When did the play that became Folio 2 Henry 6 get revised into the play that became The Contention of York and Lancaster? A good time would have been after the anti-alien riots that closed the playhouses in June 1592, which seem connected, somehow, with the formation of Pembroke's men.

    Timothy Billing shows that the word Cataians being glossed as a derogatory term in Shakespeare is just a piece of eighteenth-century racism (especially by George Steevens) being projected back to the Elizabethans with whom it does not belong ('Caterwauling Cataians: The Genealogy of a Gloss', SQ 54 [2003].1-28). The two Shakespearian uses are "PAGE (aside) I will not believe such a Cathayan though the priest o' th' town commended him for a true man" (Merry Wives of Windsor 2.1.136-7) and "SIR TOBY My lady's a Cathayan, we are politicians" (Twelfth Night 2.3.72). Steevens's racist gloss--that Cataian means thief/cheat--has stuck, even though it hardly fits the context (would Toby call Olivia this?) and despite the fact that Cathayans were not so characterized by John Mandeville, Marco Polo, and Frère Hayton. It was an Elizabethan error (that we must not replicate) to call China by the name Cataia, which was in fact a Mongolian and outdated name for it: "we must treat Cataia as a distinct discursive construction" (p. 5). Indeed, there was much confusion about whether China and Cataia were the same place, and not until the mid-seventeenth century was it decided that they were; thus it is anachronistic to treat the word Cataia from before this time as if it meant China: it did not. What Cataian actually meant to the Elizabethans was a person whose threats or boasts were not to be believed, and it came from i) the exaggerations of European travellers about such places as the mythically wonderful Cataia, ii) Ludovico Ariosto's Cataian princess Angelica in Orlando Furioso who was not to be believed, and a lost Elizabethan play called Sir John Mandeville that Henslowe's Diary shows was popular in early 1593 and which presumably popularized that traveller's stories (p. 7-8). Billings traces Cataian in the glosses to various editions, and especially how  Lewis Theobald's, Thomas Hanmer's, and William Warburton's insight that it meant an unreliable European's report of the East got displaced by Steevens's racist explanation that it meant an unreliable person from the East (pp. 9-17), and thence through the words chosen by translators of Shakespeare into foreign language, including (ironically) those translating into Chinese (pp. 18-20). Finally, for Shakespeare Quarterly, John Considine solves a crux in The Tempest (''Thy Bankes with Pioned, and Twilled Brims': A Solution to a Double Crux', SQ 54 [2003].160-6): the correct reading is "bankes with pioned, and twigged brims" (4.1.64). Pioning is excavating (what a pioneer does) and it produces sloping banks of earth, hence it is suitable to the banks in the form of an adjective, pioned. Twilled should be twigged because it suits the needed sense and occurs in Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (one of the play's sources) and in the same context of plants growing by water. Forced to explain how -gg- got mistaken for -ll-, Considine strains a little but does not push his claim beyond the bounds of possibility.

    Unusually, an article in Poetics Today was relevant to this review. In it, Douglas A. Brooks links Shakespeare to Hans-Georg Gadamer via a basic misreading of the Folio preliminaries ('Gadamer and the Mechanics of Culture', Poetics Today 24 [2003].673-94). After 10 pages of asserting that Gadamer anticipated where we are now in matters textual, Brooks writes that the Folio title-page phrase "Published according to the true originall copies" is a claim "not employed on the title page of any other collection of plays published in early modern London" (p. 685). Actually, the title-page of the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio claims that its contents are "published by the authours originall copies". If Brooks sees a difference between those, he declines to mention it. Equally slippery is Brooks's claim that the printed page was "essentially unstable" because no two pages of a given printed edition "are identical" (p. 687). Well, strictly speaking no two things of any kind are exactly identical, but plenty of books appeared in editions containing pairs of copies in which page after page have the same letters and punctuations marks in the same order. I suspect that Brooks is referring to variants within print runs caused by stop-press correction, but he is wildly overestimating the frequency of variants if he thinks that every page of every copy routinely differed from its fellows. Brooks reads Heminges and Condell's exhortation to the Folio peruser to buy ("what ever you do, Buy") as being self-interested, worrying about "their purse" (p. 689). There is in fact no reason to suppose that Heminges and Condell stood to gain from sales: the publisher's money was at stake, not theirs (p. 689). As happens so often that she must have considered changing it, Katharine Eisaman Maus's name is repeatedly misspelled as "Katherine" (pp. 691, 693).

    In Textual Practice, Edward Pechter argues that due to misguided ideas about radicalism and theatrical anti-elitism, the New Textualism undervalues the literary in relation to theatre ('What's Wrong with Literature?', Textual Practice 17 [2003].505-26). In essence this, like Erne's, is an argument for a revaluation of Shakespeare's literariness, although like Brooks's it is marred by misspelling (Nevill Coghill becomes "Neville" p. 509). The argument that the short quartos are theatricalized (cut for a fast pace, losing the wordy stuff not needed in the theatre) is, Pechter claims, based on an impoverished sense of what the theatre can do. Fourth acts are often reflective (and female) acts, and cutting there (as many shortened versions do) does not just increase the pace, it changes the gender balance (p. 509-15). Thus we should not be afraid to laud the plays' literary qualities. Politics also gets in the way: we are supposed to reject the literary as conservative and elitist and the theatrical as radical and demotic, but in many cases to support Q because you think it more radical than F is to give up F's more interesting political material such as the complexities of Henry 5's heroism and Desdemona and Emilia's discussion of the gender double standard. Moreover, the claimed Romantics' idealization of solitary authorship just is not true: they did not so idealized it (p. 520-21).

    Carl D. Atkins argues that we should not treat punctuation as less important than the words when modernizing Shakespeare's Sonnets ('The Application of Bibliographical Principles to the Editing of Punctuation in Shakespeare's Sonnets', SP 100 [2003].493-513). The argument begins with a contradiction that mars the whole thing, for Atkins is not "denying . . . [the] assumption" that punctuation might be scribal/compositorial and yet he thinks that editors should be just as careful "about emending accidentals as they are about substantives" (p. 493). If one accepts that they are accidental, there is no sense in respecting them. Atkins points out that for the Sonnets the 1609 quarto is all we have to go on regarding the punctuation, and he rightly observes that if an author expected a printer to put his punctuation right for him, an authorial manuscript might, paradoxically, be further from the author's intention than a printed texts made from that manuscript (p. 494). The punctuation we find in Shakespearian early printed texts might be following a logic of its own that we do not necessarily need to disrupt, such as marking for breath rather than logic. This is clearly mistaken: we must disrupt that logic if we are to put Shakespeare into good modern English that uses punctuation for sense, not breathing. Atkins cannot believe that compositors would put punctuation in at random--actually, they might to justify a line--but of course he accepts that they made random errors, and he holds that we should apply the same standards to punctuation as to other parts of the text: firstly deciding if what we have is in error (in relation to contemporary usage, not ours), and if so we must decide how the error came about. Atkins insists that we should never emend where to do so would be to assume that the compositor added punctuation where none was in his copy (pp. 497-99). It would be interesting to hear what Atkins thinks compositors did with authorial copy like Hand D of Sir Thomas More that is almost entirely unpunctuated, although Atkins's knowledge of printing generally is weak. For example, in a footnote (p. 499n27) Atkins tells the reader to ". . . remember that the compositor set his work in his stick upside-down and backwards", which would be quite a trick if anyone could do it. The truth, of course, is that the letters are upside-down but nonetheless left-to-right. Atkins (or his printer) also consistently misspells 'forme' as 'form'.

    Atkins dismisses MacDonald P. Jackson's compositor attributions on the grounds that they require changes of shift within a forme, which he (citing Philip Gaskell's primer on bibliography) thinks unlikely; in fact if the compositors were doing other work at the time such a change would not be surprising at all. Atkins decides that it is impossible for a compositor to choose punctuation marks during setting, so they must have been written into the copy during "proofreading or casting off" (p. 502). Certainly they could be added during casting off, but not during proof-reading; I suspect that Atkins mistakenly thinks this means the reading of copy but in fact it means the reading of what has been printed. In another mistaken footnote (pp. 501-2n37) Atkins thinks he can tell that the outer forme of C was printed before the inner forme, as it has an 'error' (an unwanted comma in the running head on one page) that is not on the inner forme. His principle is that such an error could not be introduced during skeleton reuse, only corrected and thus C-outer with the error was printed before C-inner without the error. This is not so: error can be introduced during skeleton reuse because the type easily pies. Since a period was a perfectly acceptable mark to end the running head with (since it appears on others in the book) a comma could have been introduced to replace a space lost when the skeleton's type was partially pied. Atkins suggests some emendations of Sonnets that editors have overlooked but that are strengthened by an assumption that the punctuation is as reliable as the substantives; none are unreasonable nor especially better than what other editors have done with the problems (pp. 503-13). The two blank lines within parentheses after Sonnet 126, Atkins thinks, arose because the casting-off was made on the assumption that a sonnet has 14 lines and when the compositor came to set this one he found it had only 12 lines, so he added the two parenthesized blank lines rather than have "an ugly blank space" (p. 512). I should have thought this a splendid means to draw attention to the supposed printing error rather than a device to conceal it.

    Kenji Go argues that in Cymbeline 1.6.79-81 the word 'talent' means vagina ('The Bawdy 'Talent' to 'Occupy' in Cymbeline, The Complaint of Rosamond, and the Elizabethan Homily for Rogation Week', The Review of English Studies 54 [2003].27-51). In this case, Iachimo says (and Go interprets) "yet heaven's bounty towards him [that is, the big penis that Posthumus has] might | Be used more thankfully [rather than putting it in whores of Rome, as he does]. In himself 'tis much; |  In you [that is, your delightful vagina], which I count his, beyond all talents" (pp. 29-31). In Samuel Daniel's The Complaint of Rosamond (published 1592) 'talent' means vagina, and in the context of an argument about how sexual sinning with a king is not really sinning at all--because he is God-like--that alludes to Isaiah 1.18, which speaks of God making red sins white again. Also, the Daniel reference uses 'author' to mean king (or God), just as does, many times over, 'The Homily for the Days of Rogation Week', which also refers to the Biblical Parable of the Talents. Daniel's poem has the collocation "author . . . redeem . . . sanctifies", which would have reminded readers of the Anglican catechism for the confirmation ceremony ("who hath made . . . redeemed . . . sanctifies") (pp. 32-35). In the collocation of "lot . . . cast into . . . lap" Daniel's poem echoes Proverbs 16:33 and what follows is an allusion to Jove's showering gold into Danae's lap that strongly suggests that the good fortune that befalls Rosamond (the king fancying her) is the work not of untrustworthy Fortune but of sanctified Providence. The same point about distinguishing Fortune from Providence is the point of the second part of the homily for Rogation Week (pp. 36-38). Daniel's poem also alludes to the importance of seizing the moment, which is the subject of the third part of the homily for Rogation Week, quotes the Pauline exhortation in Ephesians 5.16 to "redeem the time"; this same phrase appears in Daniel's poem. Furthermore, "the world" gets used in the poem just like in the homily as something not to be thought of by godly Christians. The homily goes on to allude to the Parable of the Talents in connection with adultery, implying (again) that 'talent' means vagina (pp. 39-41). In the bibles of Daniel's and Shakespeare's time, the servant who traded the 5 talents to make 5 more "occupied with" them (the King James has "traded with"), and this word 'occupy' was of course also a bawdy term. Yet 'occupy' was also in the homily for Rogation Week: "we shall make account for that which God gives us to occupy" and so get the praise that befell the good servant in the Parable of the Talents. With the recent change in the meaning of the last word occupy (mentioned in the 1600 quarto of 2 Henry 4, sig. D4v), this threatens to become an extended pun since what God gives us are our talents, our sexual organs. The 1611 Authorized Version of the bible changed 'occupy' to something else wherever it might be misconstrued as having a human person as its object (pp. 45-51).

    Just one article from Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America is relevant to this review, and in it Vernon Guy Dickson finds a sliver of evidence about spelling from which he makes just a little capital ('What I Will: Mediating Subjects; Or, Ralph Crane and the Folio's Tempest', PBSA 97 [2003].43-56). Dickson begins with the uncertainties that currently dominate textual studies, and responding to Werstine's work on distinguishing Ralph Crane's habits from compositors' habits reviewed here two years ago, Dickson hopes to offer a little certainty regarding elisions of the phrase I will: more than 1600 times the Folio has Ile, 1200 times it is I will, I'll only 3 times and only in Measure for Measure, and I'le 27 times of which 21 are in The Tempest plus 2 in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2 in Measure for Measure, 1 in The Winter's Tale, and 1 in Henry 8 (pp. 44-45). This list almost matches the list of plays printed from Crane manuscript: The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, and The Winter's Tale. Henry 8 Dickson discounts as an aberration: the words there means isle not I will. (So, contrary to his terminology, it is not the same word at all, just the same string of letters.) Dickson does not know why The Merry Wives of Windsor has no uses of I'le.

    After the Folio was published, I'll, which was pretty rare before, became the standard shortening (according to the 'Helsinki Corpus' which admittedly misses much of the evidence) and thus I'le in Crane-Folio plays might be his own Ile on its way to becoming I'll (pp. 46-48). When one analyzes I'll and I'le usage by compositor, the man than Taylor calls "D?(F?)" has by far the highest usage of I'le over Ile (16 against 39 times) and compositor C is also pretty high (7 against 175), while the other men massively favour Ile over I'le. Confusingly, Dickson calls these "higher ratios of Ile to I'le use" (p. 49) but they are not, they are relatively low ratios of Ile to I'le, being ratios of about 2:1 and 25:1 against their fellow compositors' ratios of about 300:1 and some infinities (that is, never using I'le). Dickson decides to confine himself to The Tempest, which was set by compositors B, C, and "D?(F?)". They all use all three variants (Ile, I'le, and I will) although "D?(F?)" is responsible for the majority of the play's I'le occurrences. Compositors B and C seem, on other evidence, to deviate from copy, while "D?(F?)" seems likely to follow copy, which here would seem (this is all tentative) to be copy that contains Crane's (relative) preference for I'le (pp. 49-50). Werstine showed that the distinction of compositor D from compositor "D?(F?)" might just be an effect of different copy on one man, and indeed it is likely that (as Werstine showed) Crane's practice itself has produced "the recent scholarly splintering of Compositor D" (p. 52).

    Last year was noticed the first volume of a new annual book, the Shakespearean International Yearbook that had a cover date of 1999. Abstracting services show that two more volumes (volumes 2 and 3, dated 2002 and 2003 respectively) have appeared, but I have been able to get hold only of volume 2 (2002); the third volume will be noticed next year if it is received. Stop-go production of volumes is not sufficiently confusing to defeat well-trained librarians, cataloguers, and indexers, so the periodicals' editors invented a new confusion-inducing anomaly by giving volume two (2002) the same volume-title ("Where are we now in Shakespearean studies?) as volume one (1999); such ingenuity warrants a peculiar kind of admiration. An entire section ("Text, textuality and technology") yields only two articles of interest. In the first Ros King exhorts editors to pay more respect to the punctuation and lineation of early Shakespeare printings because they might not in fact be corrupt (''And Stand a Comma': Reinterpreting Renaissance Punctuation for Today's Users :-)', Shakespearean International Yearbook 2: Where Are we Now in Shakespearean Studies? [2002].111-26). After a longish disquisition on the Biblical origins of punctuation systems, King remarks (as she did in a book chapter reviewed here three years ago) that the colon joined as well as separated clauses and should not be modernized to a period (p. 115). Even line-endings are punctuation of a kind, since Shakespearian actors are trained to stress the last word of a line. (True, but should they be?) King inveighs against editorial relining to fit Shakespeare into strict iambic pentameter and cites David Bevington objecting to it, but ignoring Werstine's demonstration that interesting, non-metrical lineation is usually not Shakespeare's but his compositors' ('Line Division in Shakespeare's Dramatic Verse: An Editorial Problem', AEB 8 [1984].73-125). King takes an exchange between Antony and Caesar (3.1.28-36) and attempts to show that the unmetrical short lines in F are better than the editorially-relined versions because they are in fact not incomplete but "completed by silence" (p. 120). There follow more, fairly convincing, examples of how King would preserve F's lineation while altering the punctuation to convey what was originally meant by the lines (pp. 121-24) but the problem here is subjectivity. King is entitled to think certain editorial choices are not as good as the ones she makes--and she certainly has an good ear--but not to complain about those choices unless she has a method for making better choices, and she has not. Indeed, that here King records her work as dramaturg to an English Shakespeare Company production of Antony and Cleopatra indicates that the possibilities she is exploring are not closed down to practitioners. More power to her elbow.

    In the second of the new periodical's two relevant articles, Richard Proudfoot surveys the situation in Shakespeare editing from an Arden perspective, with particular reference to editors' engagement with theatricalization and what the New Textualism (which he calls "new textual fundamentalism", suggesting dogmatism) is bringing about ('New Conservativism and the Theatrical Text: Editing Shakespeare for the Third Millennium', Shakespearean International Yearbook 2: Where Are we Now in Shakespearean Studies? [2002].127-42). Proudfoot claims that for his landmark Folio facsimile Charlton Hinman chose pages to show "only the corrected states of variant formes" (p. 130), which is true but he chose not by forme but by page. Hinman, Proudfoot notices, missed one: d2dv shows a turned 'll' in 'hollow' in Titus Andronicus (TLN 1223) that got corrected. For some reason, having given the correct date of Hinman's book on the previous page, Proudfoot wrongly gives is as 1967. There is no equivalent to the Folio facsimile for the quartos, of course, because Kenneth Muir and Michael Allen's collection does not give a proper collation and they chose texts not by textual status but by convenient place of custody, and the Malone Society's series is as yet incomplete. Proudfoot is undoubtedly right to remind us that we have New Bibliography to thank for all the great facsimile books of the twentieth century (p. 131). These days, editors by and large do not establish 'the text' from the early textualizations, rather they accept one of those textualizations in toto (p. 133).

    Proudfoot surveys key moments regarding theatricalization that Arden 3 editors have had to address in a range of plays (pp. 135-39), including the questions 'Does Lavinia stoop to using "thee" when taunting Tamora' ("to try [thy] experiments" Titus Andronicus 2.3.69), does Juliet stoop to using 'zounds' when asking her Nurse to make it clear who has died ("Brief sounds" or "Brief, zounds" Romeo and Juliet 3.2.51 ), and does Miranda call Caliban "Abhorred slave" in reference to his rape attempt (The Tempest 1.2.353)? For the last, Proudfoot outlines the circularity of arguing from character (giving or not giving her this speech makes her character and to a lesser extent makes Prospero's too) and gives his reasons for thinking that the lines do actually belong to Prospero. However, as Proudfoot points out, our current gender politics make us want Miranda to say the lines just as previous generations' gender politics made them want Miranda not say the lines. Proudfoot ends with a suggestion for a new kind of edition (based on what Stephen Booth did with his Sonnets edition): each opening has a facsimile page on one side and modernization on the other, so that less explaining of the alterations would have to be done. Ironically, the New Textualism (with its insistence on making an edition of an existing textualization) makes this possible even for multi-text plays, because each early textualization would be done separately rather than picked from eclectically. Also, rather than giving editors' names in the historical collation, Proudfoot suggests using date of publication in order to show what changed from age to age (pp. 140-41).

    In respect of Studies in Bibliography, the slippage between cover date and date of actual delivery to libraries remains wide and the volume for 2001 has just been delivered. It has one article of interest, in which Jill Farringdon uses what is called cusum analysis to confirm that Funerall Elegye is not by Shakespeare but by John Ford and to announce that the dedication to it is by someone else again ('A Funerall Elegye . . . Not . . . by W. S. After All', Studies in Bibliograhy 54 [2001].157-72). Farringdon makes the absolutist claim that hers is an objective method of analysis that can show that Funerall Elegye is "certainly by one author" (p. 158). Anyone not blinded by the mists of stylometry can see the absurdity of this claim: any writer might ask a friend to supply the odd word and no test can hope to catch this. As is often the case in print, the URL for a web-based introduction to Farringdon's work is wrongly given as "http://members.aol.com.qsums" when it should be "http://members.aol.com/qsums" (p. 160n14). Anticipating incredulity, Farringdon rather embarrassingly brags that the cusum analysis that she is using was invented by A. Q. Morton "Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Retired Minister in the Church of Scotland" and that it has been used in courts (pp. 160-1). So indeed has the 'ear-print' evidence left behind at the scene of a burglary, and its 'forensic' champions talked a judge and jury into believing that it was as distinctive as a finger-print; the poor innocent they convicted, Mark Dallagher, has since been released without an apology. Farringdon's cusum method is based on the proportions of function words that constitute a large part of what we say and write and yet are a tiny fraction of our total vocabulary (she offers the, and, of, in, I, a, to, you, my, is, that, and he as examples) and she thinks that because writers as different as Dylan Thomas and Henry Fielding have more or less the same words as their most-frequently used "This surely confirms the usefulness of using these vocabulary items for recognizing authorship" (p. 161). No, it does not confirm that: there are punctuation marks that are even more widely shared, but that does not make them distinguishing items. That all humans have ears does not mean that 'ear-prints' are distinctive.

    Farringdon's tone gets increasingly tense as she goes on to describe media moments of triumph and disaster for the cusum method. Farringdon reveals that the tests rely on frequency of function words and on sentence-length, but is rather sparing of the details. Importantly, she does not address the problem that a peculiar class of writers called dramatists are highly developed in their ability to invent the characteristic speaking of persons whose existences they have imagined for the purposes of entertainment. A dramatist writing a scene between a wordy pedant and a simpleton will write a mix of long and short sentences and sentences with lots of hard words and sentences with lots of easy words; the 'habits' of this writer are not his own but those of this creations. Having decided that the dedications to Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are "authentic Shakespeare", and having asserted again that cusum has nothing to do with style, Farringdon admits that she had to leave "What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours" (from the dedication to Lucrece) out of the process because it is "an anomaly" in that it "departs so far from natural utterance" and so upsets the graphs (p. 164). I wonder if Farringdon thinks the dedication's first sentence is closer to what she calls 'natural utterance': "The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end, whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety" (p. 164).

    Farringdon talks the reader through her graphs but she does not actually describe the cusum technique at all. It works like this: find the average sentence length (in number of words) for the block of text. For each sentence, take the actual sentence length from the average, thus giving a positive number for short sentences and a negative number for long sentences. This produces a series of positive and negative numbers (S₁ to S_n), of which the cusum series is (S₁), (S₁+S₂), (S₁+S₂+S₃), up to (S₁ . . . + S_n). Say one takes a block of seven sentences whose sentence-lengths are, in turn, 8 words, 8 words, 9 words, 5 words, 6 words, 7 words, and 6 words. There are 49 words in total, so the average sentence-length is 7 words (49 words divided into 7 sentences). The differences from the average are, in turn, -1, -1, -2, 2, 1, 0, and 1. Adding these cumulatively gives -1 (= first number), -2 (= first two numbers added together), -4 (=the first three numbers added together), -2 (=the first four numbers added together), -1 (=the first five numbers added together), -1 (=the first six numbers added together), and 0 (=all seven numbers added together). A cusum series always ends with zero because the total of differences from the average must sum to zero, since that is how an average is defined.

    A cusum graph, then, is a trace showing how much variation there is in particular writing habit (here, sentence length) across the text, but presented so that at any one point the total variation so far from the block's eventual norm is visible. This is not, it should be noted, a new stylometric method--it depends on the old technique of counting sentence length, word length, and so on--only a new way of presenting the numbers that the counts produce. The same counting can be repeated for any habit, such as use of 2-, 3-, and 4-letter words. Farringdon's claim (based on Morton's) is that for a single writer the plot of total variation so far of one habit (say, sentence length) should be the same shape as the plot of total variation so far of another habit (say, use of 2, 3, and 4 letter words), allowing for rescaling of the Y axis between the two plots. In other words, one writer's pattern of deviation from her own norm in one feature should be the same as her pattern of deviation from her own norm in the other. If the pattern of total variation so far in respect of one feature does not have the same shape as the pattern for the other feature, Farringdon says that ". . . the sample may be safely assumed to the [sic] 'mixed' utterance, or non-homogeneous". I cannot tell if she means that the sample may be assumed to be 'mixed', nor whether 'or' is used here to mean 'also known as';  or is non-homogeneity an alternative explanation for the difference between the patterns? Stylometry stands generally accused of failing to explain itself in plain English, and this sort of thing shows why. Next Farringdon attaches the 4 sentences of the Venus and Adonis dedication onto the 4 sentences of the Rape of Lucrece dedication to make an 8-sentence block. (She wrote earlier that she was excluding one sentence as anomalous. That would leave 7 sentences, but the chart clearly shows that she used 8.) Farringdon shows the cusum charts for this combined block and indeed the sentence length and the '3 and 4 letter words and words starting with a vowel' habits do vary from their own norms in ways that have the same shape. That the two habits change together is, claims Farringdon, a sign that the author of the combined block is one person (p. 165).

    Next Farringdon puts bits of Funerall Elegye into the blocks of Shakespeare, and shows that this makes the charts (of cusum sentence length and another chosen habit) diverge. It must be remembered that even when the text is wholly by Shakespeare the charts' lines only sit on top of one another when you rescale the Y axis for one of the charts and not the other; a mismatch might only be a failure to rescale properly. Indeed, in Farringdon's Figure 4 the two lines do indeed look like they would match up if only one had its Y axis rescaled. Moreover, this figure shows the lines for a block of 4 sentences from Venus and Adonis followed by 4 sentences from Lucrece followed by 5 sentences from the Funerall Elegye dedication, and the noticeable mismatch occurs before the Funerall Elegye part (p. 166). That is, the mismatch happens within the purely Shakespearian section. Did Farringdon (or the journal's editors) think the reader would not notice? More convincing is Figure 5 where the obvious mismatch happens in the Funerall Elegye bit, but nonetheless the mismatch has certainly started by the end of the 24th sentence (that is, within the Shakespearian block) and thereafter the mismatch is not great (p. 167). Likewise Figure 6 (for 15 sentences of Funerall Elegye followed by 30 sentences of The Tempest) shows clear mismatch before the end of the Funerall Elegye part. Trying Funerall Elegye with Ford's known work, Farringdon finds a clear match and hence her primary conclusion that the Ford attribution is correct (p. 168). The problem of Farringdon's dodgy charts gets worse as she now starts inserting the foreign material not at the end of the block but in the middle. (No explanation for this change of method is given, nor how it relates to the overall stylometric rationale.) Farringdon's Figure 9 showing "Ten sentences of the Elegye with its dedication inserted at sentence 6" is labelled (at sentence 6) "insertion causes separation", which is why she claims that the dedication was not by Ford. Yet anyone looking at the chart can clearly see there was separation at sentence 4 and at sentence 5 and at the lines come together again thereafter so that at sentence 8 (the inserted dedication), 9 (the inserted dedication), and 12 (back to the poem) they are united (p. 17). The conclusions of this article should not, on this evidence, be trusted, and the whole thing brings no credit to Studies in Bibliography.

    David M. Bergeron argues that excising the character Violenta from All's Well that Ends Well is a decision that editors should at least defend with an argument ('All's Well That Ends Well: Where Is Violenta?', Explorations in Renaissance Culture 29 [2003].171-84). The opening stage direction of 3.5 in the Folio text is "A Tucket afarre off | Enter old Widdow of Florence, her daughter Violenta and Mariana, with other Citizens" (TLN 1602). There are no lines for Violenta in the scene, but there are for a character called Diana who is not mentioned as entering, so one might simply think that Violenta = Diana. Bergeron surveys the editorial treatment of Violenta (usually, simple removal) and argues that her being silently present can be in itself an important function. After all, if we are removing silent figures, why not remove "the whole army" who troop across the stage in this scene (pp. 171-77)? The obvious answer is that their stage direction gives them something to do--troop across the stage--while Violenta has nothing to do or say. Bergeron has one piece of real argument to offer (pp. 178-79). We know that the group of women that begins 3.5 is Old Widow, Mariana, Diana, and (entering to them after a few dozen lines) Helen, because they all talk, and perhaps there is a silent Violenta with them. Near the end of the scene the Old Widow invites Helen to eat with her and Helen asks that "this Matron, and this gentle Maide" should join them too and "Both." answer "Wee'l take your offer kindly" (TLN 1729). Who is meant by "Both"? As Bergeron points out, the Old Widow and her daughter Diana do not need permission to dine at their own house, so the 'both' has to be two other people: therefore, it is Mariana and another, and hence Violenta is present. Fatally, Bergeron has mistaken the nature of Helen's offer, which is not just to pay for everyone's dinner but also to bestow "some precepts" on "this Virgin" (that is, Diana), so Mariana ("this Matron") may be saying thanks for the dinner invitation and Diana ("this gentle Maide") for the offer of words of wisdom from a pilgrim. Bergeron thinks that Violenta highlights the limitations of New Bibliography, with its Platonic ideals of textual purity. I would respond that this is not Platonism: editors who remove Violenta hold that Shakespeare himself would have removed her had he realized what he had done. The ideal is not in an ethereal realm but in potential reality. Bergeron says that the authorial manuscript by reference to which Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor for the Oxford Complete Works edited the play is one "that the editors have imagined" (p. 181). They imagined its particularities, for sure (since it is lost), but not its existence: that there once was one is a certainty.

    The 2003 issues of the journal The Library contained nothing of interest to this review. It is difficult to track the output of the journal TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies, the subtitle of which is needed to distinguish it from a journal of the same name in a sister discipline. Volumes 12 and 13 of the journal TEXT are dated 1999 and 2000 on the title-pages and their copyright notices, but  volume 14 is dated 2002 on its title-page and its copyright notice and volume 15 is dated 2002 on its title-page and 2003 on its copyright notice. Presumably, volume 14 should have been dated 2001 ("2002" being simply an error) and volume 15 was meant to appear in 2002 but actually slipped out a little late; one can put what one likes on a title-page but a copyright notice has legal force and must needs admit what really happened. The two latest volumes--14 (2001) and 15 (2002)--contain no articles of interest noticed here; volume 16 (2003) will be noticed when it appears. In Shakespeare Newsletter, Bernice Kliman reports on the fairly wild emendations made by editor David Maclachan in his 1888 edition of Hamlet, presumably arising from her work on the New Variorum edition of that play (''Cum Notis Variorum': A Nineteenth-century 'Restorer' of Shakespeare's True Text: David Maclachlan's Hamlet', ShN 53 [2003].15-6).

    In the Times Literary Supplement, Brian Vickers argues (under a cryptic title) that A Lover's Complaint is not by Shakespeare but by John Davies of Hereford ('A Rum 'Do'', TLS Number 5253 (5 December) [2003].13-5). The poem just does not sound Shakespearian--there is some poetic ineptness unlike him--and its only connection with Shakespeare is that Thomas Thorpe printed it in the 1609 Sonnets quarto that may or may not have been authorized. The poem does have certain rather Spenserian things about it, including the setting, particular images, and the form, and especially pleonastic do (hence this article's title?). Vickers ran some words and phrases from A Lover's Complaint through LION: maund, forbod, affectedly, rocky heart, and fell rage. The only person who uses all 5 is John Davies of Hereford (1564-1618). A Spenser imitator, Davies was fond of pleonastic do and (like the Lover's Complaint poet) had a host of almost risible tricks to make a rhyme work. Davies was an avid coiner of words that no-one took up, and certain overdone images such as love-letters in blood are common to A Lover's Complaint and Davies and are not found elsewhere. A Stationers' Register entry for 3 January 1600 has a book called "Amours by J D." entered at the same as "certen oy^r [other] sonnetes by W S." entered to Eleazor Edgar, which initials might be for J[ohn] D[avies] and W[illam] S[hakespeare], although Vickers wisely does not press this point else he would have to explain Edgar's possession of copy for Shakespeare's Sonnets.

    Finally, to Notes and Queries. Paul Hammond finds where Shakespeare got certain poetical phrases and rhymes ('Sources for Shakespeare's Sonnets 87 and 129 in Tottel's Miscellany and Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie', N&Q 248 [2003].407-10). Sonnet 129 owes a debt to a sonnet by Lord Vaux in Tottel's Miscellany (1557), sharing language about infection, and about the dissatisfaction that ensues upon the consummation of hotly pursued lust, expressed by figures of asyndeton or brachylogia (both meaning the suppression of conjunctions, so list-making) such as "perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame, | Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust". There is a similar poem (a response? a copy?) in George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589) that seems to have given Shakespeare the adjectival phrase "not to trust", which occurs in sonnet 129--in both poems it is at a line ending--and nowhere else in contemporary literature. Shakespeare copied Puttenham's deserving/swerving rhyme for his sonnet 87 (it occurs nowhere else in poetry of the time), and also seems to be showing that he can do the verse form tricks that Puttenham is illustrating. In the first of four articles this year, Thomas Merriam claims that the stylometry in Vickers's book Shakespeare, Co-author (reviewed here last year) concerning the hands in Sir Thomas More was flawed by his failure to do the proper 'negative check' ('Correspondences in More and Hoffman', N&Q 248 [2003].410-4). Vickers was wrong to endorse the claim that one can distinguish Henry Chettle's part of Sir Thomas More from Munday's on the basis of its use of twixt, nere, yond, and for to that Chettle was supposed to prefer and others not. In fact, in the only certain Chettle play, The Tragedy of Hoffman, there is no twixt, four nere, no yond, and one for to. But there is a for to in Munday's John a Kent, so the evidence is just that use of nere (p. 410). Vickers picked up the 4 words he thought were markers of Chettle from Jowett's work on what Chettle (presumed by Jowett on other evidence to be the writer at this point) does in Sir Thomas More, so the argument is circular.

    Likewise, Jowett's hunch that Chettle's liking of the words hurt and remedy could be a possible way to distinguish him from Munday becomes, in Vickers hands, a much stronger distinguisher than Jowett meant it to be. Also, some of Sir Thomas More's uses of hurt and remedy come directly from Holinshed and should be discounted (p. 411). Merriam agrees with Jowett's view that many of these allegedly distinguishing traits (and others including certain rhyme pairs) are useless because others writers have them too; like poor Dallagher's 'ear-print' they are common to many. Merriam points out that 'negative checking' (making sure an alleged similarity between known-author-text-A and unknown-author-text-B is not simply a commonplace) using LION is frustratingly awkward because of original spelling, using as his illustration the 14 ways that to thee could appear (p. 414). In this, Merriam is mistaken, since the search "to? FBY.1 th??" would catch all of these because the wildcard character '?' stands for '0 or 1 occurrences of any character'. To be fair, the online documentation provided with LION is also wrong on this point, claiming that '?' stands for just 1 occurrence of any character. That is not what computer programmers (to whom such things are everyday affairs) would expect the character to mean and it is not indeed what the LION database software (written by programmers) actually does with this term. To illustrate this, one might try a LION search for "m??n", which according to the documentation should return only 4-letter words but in fact returns 3-letter words (such as man and men) as well as 4-letter words (such as mean, moan). The only flaw in my suggestion for Merriam's search would be that one would have to eliminate the false positive to them, but that is easily accomplished with a logical NOT. Merriam includes ye as a form of thee which in fact one might want to isolate, but if not it could easily be incorporated with a logical OR.

    Horst Breur thinks that Hamlet's "dram of eale" should be 'dram of gall' ('Hamlet's 'Dram of Eale' Reconsidered', N&Q 248 [2003].416-9). Whatever it is a dram of, it should be a concrete noun not an abstract thing like evil (because 'dram' suggests concreteness). The speech is about slander, and what is used to slander? The tongue. That is what makes humans serpent-like, and their equivalent of a serpent's poison is their gall, so the solution to the 'dram of eale' crux is 'dram of gall'. Breuer decides to "leave it to the handwriting specialists" (p. 419) whether that is a likely misreading, but one does not have to be a specialist to see that with most hands it is a pretty unlikely confusion. It requires g to be misread as e and l to be misread as e too. The latter is not too hard in many secretary or italic hands, but in both the former error (g to e) is most unlikely as the descending loop of g is pretty clear, and to read such differing letters as g and l as both being e is hard to do too. It were, I suppose, a little less hard if for some reason the g were a capital. Thomas Merriam's second note argues that Gary Taylor's function-word tests to discriminate Shakespeare from Fletcher can be refined, and the refinement used to more accurately apportion their shares in Henry 8 ('Taylor's Method Applied to Shakespeare and Fletcher', N&Q 248 [2003].419-23). Taylor's 10 function words used in the Textual Companion to the Oxford Complete Works do not distinguish Fletcher from Shakespeare particularly well. When you have two known authors, you can pick your function words to be ones that their habits diverge over and that each dramatist is personally consistent about. For Shakespeare and Fletcher the good words are all, dare, hath, in, must, sure, and too. Once you know the standard deviation--how often Shakespeare himself will use a function word unusually often (for him) or unusually infrequently (for him)--you can say how likely it is that the frequency observed in a particular play will be a normal occurrence within the work of the given writer, and hence, how likely that in fact it is not that writer's (anticipated) unusual behaviour, but the behaviour of another writer (p. 420). Doing the function word frequency testing for the 36 Shakespeare Folio plays, and a handful of Fletcher's, the Fletcher ones often show frequencies that would be highly anomalous for Shakespeare (p. 421). So much so, in fact, that by far the most plausible explanation is that they are not by Shakespeare (and indeed we know that they are Fletcher plays). Dividing Henry 8 up the way that James Spedding does and testing each separately by this function-word method, the Shakespeare parts come out like Shakespeare and the Fletcher parts come out mostly not like Shakespeare, so that is a confirmation of Spedding's division. Readjusting the boundaries between Shakespeare's and Fletcher's parts of Henry 8, however, we can get Shakespeare's parts to come out like Shakespeare and Fletcher's to come out totally unlike Shakespeare, so this division of the shares is even better than Spedding's (p. 422). Merriam gives his usual Principal Component Analysis (PCA) diagram showing how the populations (Shakespeare plays and Fletcher plays) occupy different regions of the grid, and as usual he does not explain PCA well (p. 423).

    Merriam's next note also makes slight adjustments to the boundaries of the Fletcher and Shakespeare shares in Henry 8, but by a different method ('Though This be Supplementarity, yet There is Method In't', N&Q 248 [2003].423-6). Merriam starts by citing Gordon McMullan's Arden 3 edition of the play in order to mock the editor's closing statement about the two dramatists' "supplementarity", and to claim that the use of the word conscience challenges McMullan's position. Conscience occurs 24 times in the play, the highest in the canon and twice as high as the count for the next highest use, Henry 5. Charting usage of all, are, conscience, did, 'em, feminine endings, find, from, hath, in, is, it, little, -ly, must, now, sure, they, 'tis, too, and elsewhere Merriam is able to produce a chart in which positive slopes roughly correspond to Shakespeare sections and negative slopes correspond to Fletcher sections. Merriam calls the chart a 'cumulative sum' graph, which sounds like the technique described above in relation to Farringdon's article, but it appears to be simpler than that: Merriam seems to have divided the current total count for all the features being watched for by the current line number, so that the slope is always either going up (when there is a hit) or down (for every line where there is not) (p. 423). Looking at each use of conscience and whether it is ironic, there is a good fit between the ironic/non-ironic distinction and the Shakespeare/Fletcher distinction as attributed by Spedding and Jonathan Hope. That is, it looks like Shakespeare is almost always ironic in his use of conscience in this play, and Fletcher is almost always non-ironic. Using the chart that Merriam thinks shows Shakespeare's preference for the 21 features listed above, Merriam proposes that Shakespeare was always ironic with conscience in this play (we know he used it to mean vagina, because of the con-/cunt pun) and Fletcher never was, and hence that the dividing lines between the two dramatists' shares of the play need to be altered slightly to accommodate this (p. 434). The alternative is for criticism of the play to interpret the evidence conceptually (as McMullan has)--to give Fletcher some ironic moments that really belong to Shakespeare--and thereby in fact, according to Merriam, blunt the sharp Shakespearian wit (p. 435)

    Charles Cathcart's amusing note claims that the play Histriomastix alludes to Hamlet's "quintessence of dust" speech with one about the "quintessence of ducks" ('Histriomastix, Hamlet, and the 'Quintessence of Duckes'', N&Q 248 [2003].427-30). In Every Man Out of His Humour, Jonson has Fastidius give a speech that uses "apprehension", "angellical", "quintessence", "the verie christall crowne of the skie", and "delights", and hence sounds like it is making fun of Hamlet's "I have of late . . . quintessence of dust" speech. We know that Every Man Out of His Humour is complexly linked to Histriomastix, and the simplest explanation for what seems to be two-way traffic between those plays is that Every Man Out was first performed, then Histriomastix mocked it, then extra material was written for Every Man Out to mock Histriomastix in turn. In Histriomastix Velure and Lyon-rash enter "with a water-spaniel and a duck" and Vourchier says "One of the goodliest Spaniels I have seene" to which Lyon-rash responds "And heer's the very quintessence of Duckes", which is an allusion to Hamlet's talk about man as the paragon of animals. Cathcart ends by trying to work out how this might fit into Marston's career, if he did indeed write Histriomastix (p. 430). Katherine Duncan-Jones has evidence that 1, 2, and 3 Henry 6 were in performance before the mid-1592 playhouse closure, and that Richard 3 was not (''Three Partes Are Past': The Earliest Performances of Shakespeare's First Tetralogy', N&Q 248 [2003].20-1) In 1593 Giles Fletcher's Licia, or Poems of Love was published, and it included a poem about Richard 3 that begins "The Stage is set, for stately matter fitte, | Three partes are past, which Prince-like acted were, | To play the fourth, requires a Kingly witte, Else shall my muse, their muses not come nere. | Sorrow sit downe, and helpe my muse to sing, | For weepe he may not, that was cal'd a King". Duncan-Jones thinks this must refer to the three Shakespearian Henry 6 plays and an anticipated play (set up for in 3 Henry 6) about Richard 3 (the fourth). "Their muses" indicates (as we already suspected) that the works were not all by one dramatist. The book is dated in its epistles to September 1593. The "clouds that loured over our house" in Richard 3 could allude to clouds of pestilence that had so long loured over (and kept closed) the playhouse.

    Adrian Streete thinks that queen Margaret's "The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul" (Richard 3 1.3.222) contains an idea (the 'worm of conscience' which is not proverbial) from the work of John Chrysostom, but in phrasing from John Calvin's Institutes of 1561 ('Chrysostom, Calvin, and Conscience: More on King Richard III, I.iii.222', N&Q 248 [2003].21-2). Specifically, it is Book 1 Chapter 2: "the worm of conscience gnaweth them". That chapter is about how one cannot entirely blot out one's feeling for the Godhead, not matter how sinful one is, which suits Richard 3 who wakes from his sleep crying "Jesu!" and speaking of the "coward conscience". J. J. M. Tobin has evidence that in The Comedy of Errors Shakespeare borrowed from Nashe ('Dr Pinch and Gabriel Harvey', N&Q 248 [2003].23-5). The Comedy of Errors 4.4 has "Heart and good will . . . not a rag of money", which is in Nashe's Strange News (1592) as a phrase used by Gabriel Harvey's dead brother. Tobin puts this together with some other collocations from the same two places (the nearby pages of Strange News and the scene from The Comedy of Errors) to argue that, although Dr Pinch in The Comedy of Errors is not necessarily supposed to evoke Gabriel Harvey, the play draws on Nashe's Strange News and Pinch might have been performed "with voice, grimace, posture, and even perhaps clothing to suggest Harvey" (p. 25). R. W. Maslen notes that Petruccio's particular means of subduing his wife in The Taming of the Shrew is not the usual one in stories of taming, and that Shakespeare may have got it from the wife-taming story The Image of Idleness (1556), which advises treating wives like falcons ('The Taming of the Shrew and The Image of Idleness', N&Q 248 [2003].25-7). The trick is to let them think they are doing their own bidding, and wives also can be tamed by the husband feigning madness made to seem consequent upon the failure to follow a special diet ordered by a physician (as Petruccio claims to be under when he throws his food away).

    Thomas Merriam's final note argues that the feminine-ending evidence in Sir Thomas More has not been sufficiently recognized in the debate about the play's authorship and date ('More and Woodstock', N&Q 248 [2003].27-31). The play has a strikingly high proportion of lines with feminine endings: between about 15% and 25% of all lines, depending on how strict you are in what counts as a feminine ending. An average of 21% is a reasonable figure, and only The Merry Wives of Windsor (dated 1597-8, at 22%) and Woodstock (date uncertain, at 21%) come close it to. If MacDonald P. Jackson is right in dating Woodstock to the early seventeenth century, then Sir Thomas More is "isolated and anomalous" regarding its high proportion of feminine endings in the early 1590s. The data from the Shakespeare Authorship Clinic at Claremont McKenna College might help here for it gives the rate of feminine endings (plus 56 other linguistic variables) in 112 plays. Of the linguistic variables, 17 seem to be significantly correlated to the date of play composition (that is, they fairly consistently get more common or less common as time goes on), so we can assume that these variables (or rather, the first principal components of them taken together) form a continuum and let the dates be derived from them (p. 29). This should give an independent check on the dating. This confirms that Sir Thomas More dates from about 1593 and Woodstock from about 1605. Supporting this conclusion is a graph that suffers from a familiar Merriam problem identified in previous years: the horizontal axis must be incorrectly labeled since it rises, left to right, in steps of 0.2 until it gets close to zero, then it skips one step. Also, moving in steps of 0.2 it cannot be right for the central label to be 0.5 (must be 0.4 or 0.6). Merriam's prose uses "can not" where it means 'cannot'. The former has the sense of 'it is possible not to', as might be said by cricketers sent to Zimbabwe and considering their options ('we can not play the game') whereas the latter has the sense 'it is impossible to', as black cricketers used to find in racist South Africa ('we cannot play the game'). Merriam ends with the observation that if the Additions to Sir Thomas More are 10 years or so later than the original composition, it is odd that Addition 1, in Hand A (Chettle's), has a low proportion of feminine endings (2%) that is generally characteristic of the early 1590s, not the early 1600s (p. 31).

    A. B. Taylor thinks that the serpent that Hermia dreams is at her breast (A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.2.151-6) comes from Arthur Golding's translation of Book 4 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the punishment of Ino by Juno and the Furies ('Golding and the Myth Underlying Hermia's Dream', N&Q 248 [2003].31-2). Hermia's dream is obviously phallic--Lysander tried to sleep with her (near her, I would say)--and the dream is of penetration and represents her entry into the adult world. Shakespeare's using the word "serpent" (where Golding has "snake") gives the moment also a Biblical connotation. The play also draws on Nashe's Have with You to Saffron-Walden, according to J. J. M. Tobin ('Have with You to Athens' Wood', N&Q 248 [2003].32-5). Tobin finds a collection of words and phrases the texts share, including "the short and long [of it]", jokes about bare French crowns, and some others that might just be commonplaces. Saffron-Walden was dedicated to the Master Barber of Trinity College, and is full of barber references that link it with A Midsummer Night's Dream, such as Bottom's hairy face, Flute's beard, and the barber's pole that Nashe calls a "painted may-pole", just as Hermia calls Helena. Nashe has a scene in which musk, sugar and honey are personified and addressed much like Bottom addresses the fairies Cobweb, Peaseblossom, and Mustardseed. Tobin discounts, without giving reason, the possibility that Nashe echoes Shakespeare, and observes that the dependence puts A Midsummer Night's Dream no earlier than 1596. The late I. A. Shapiro notes that the word "wedding-knives" in Edward 3 does not mean anything and must be a misprint for 'weeding-knives' ('Wedding- or Weeding-knives?', N&Q 248 [2003].35). In a second note on the same play, Shapiro observes that the countess inappropriately addresses the king using "thee", "thou", "thyself", and "thy" even before she decides to repulse him, so the dramatist apparently did not know court protocol ('The Text of The Raigne of Edward III', N&Q 248 [2003].35-6). Also, the king and countess speak in rhyming couplets, which is an early dramatic device that later writers dropped, so probably this part of the play was written by Shakespeare more or less as soon as he arrived in London, which would also explain some similarity in ideas and images in this play and others by Shakespeare. J. C. Ross hears in Shylock's "stop my house's ears" (The Merchant of Venice 2.5.34) an echo of Stephen Gosson's The School of Abuse in the context of not being seduced by sounds ("stoppe your ears") and finds a couple of other (fairly common, it must be said) phrases that Shakespeare and Gosson share ('Stephen Gosson and The Merchant of Venice Revisited', N&Q 248 [2003].36-7).

    Steve Sohmer points out that "Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man" (epilogue to 2 Henry 4) is not really an apology to anyone, and hence not to William Brooke, 7th lord Cobham, as is usually claimed ('Shakespeare's Posthumous Apology to Lord Cobham: Henry V (II.iii.8-14)', N&Q 248 [2003].39-42). But the death of Falstaff between midnight and 1am as the tide turned (Henry 5 2.3.9-16) fits William Brooke's death on 5-6 march 1597, and the book of common prayer reading for 5 march was Psalm 23 ("rest in grene pasture") hence "'a babbled of green fields". Falstaff's death is Protestant (no priest, no sacrament, yet he goes to heaven), which suits Brooke and hence Shakespeare's death of Falstaff is a eulogy to William Brooke. Sohmer points out a few other uses of material from psalms in Shakespeare, on just the right days as given by the calendar. Steve Roth thinks that the "late innovation" that Rosencrantz refers to (Hamlet 2.2.334) means Fortinbras's uprising that makes the whole of Denmark so edgy ('Hamlet, II.ii.332: 'Their Inhibition Comes By the Means of the Late Innovation'', N&Q 248 [2003].43-6). Edginess (specifically, fear of civil unrest) Roth illustrates from across the play. Claudius seems glad to see the players, so presumably it was Polonius (who is not) who banned them. Where Q2 and F have (more or less) "POLONIUS "Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men" (2.2.401-3), Q1 has "For the law hath writ those are the onely men". The latter sounds like a statement about 'allowed' players and hence the memorial reconstructor of Q1 associates Polonius with what players are allowed do, which suits him being the official who banned them.

    Tobin pops up again to argue that Measure for Measure is indebted to Nashe's Strange News, not least of all in its reference to "Barnadines", which R. B. McKerrow glossed as referring to Barnard's Law, a means of cheating at cards by working with a confederate who feigns drunkenness ('How Drunken Was Barnadine?', N&Q 248 [2003].46-7). Thus Barnardine in the play is probably faking intoxication to avoid execution. Tobin finds in Nashe's Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem the source of a number of words and phrases in Iago's part in Othello, especially "nonsuits" (1.1.5), "cashiered", (1.1.48), and "put money" (1.3.339, 341, 351) and there are some parallel themes ('Nashe and Iago', N&Q 248 [2003].47-50). Following Garry Wills's suggestion, Matthew Baynham thinks that Robert Southwell's poetry was the source for the naked babe image in Macbeth (1.7.21-5), but not the poem 'The burning babe' but rather 'New heaven, new war' (published in the same book of 1602), which has certain verbal parallels with Macbeth ('The Naked Babe and Robert Southwell', N&Q 248 [2003].55-6). In Coriolanus the tribunes say that Martius is happy to be commanded by Cominius in war because if it goes well he will get the credit and if badly Cominius will get the blame. For this David George finds a source in John Hayward's 1599 prose Life of Henry IV ('The Tribunes' Envy: Coriolanus, I.i.245-260', N&Q 248 [2003].56-7). It is well known that in the King James bible, the 46th psalm has "shake" as its 46th word from the beginning and "spear" as its 46th word from the end, and that Shakespeare was aged 46 when the book was completed. R. H. Robbins shows that this is just a coincidence: the agents and texts involved, surveyed by Robbins, admit no opportunity for deliberate rigging of the text ('Shakespeare and Psalm 46: An Accumulation of Coincidences', N&Q 248 [2003].58-60).

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