Year's Work in English Studies 2007: Shakespeare: Editions and Textual Studies

One major critical edition of Shakespeare appeared in 2007: Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen edited Shakespeare's Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and the Shorter Poems for the Arden Shakespeare series. An edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare appeared from an alliance of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Macmillan, but is of little scholarly interest. The parts of the Oxford Complete Works of Thomas Middleton that overlap with the concerns of this review are of considerable scholarly interest and will be noticed. Uniquely for an Arden edition, Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen's book is comprised of two major works, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and they think that Shakespeare might well have conceived of them as a pair, albeit perhaps not until he began the second one. The title-page epigraph of Venus and Adonis is a quotation from Ovid about cheap shows pleasing the crowds and this Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen think might be an allusion to Shakespeare's theatre work in an effort to distance the present book from it (pp. 11-13). There is an allusion to the story of Venus and Adonis in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew and it catches a moment very like one caught in the Venus and Adonis sonnets in Passionate Pilgrim (1599), so perhaps these were early stabs at the theme done around 1590 when Shakespeare was writing The Taming of the Shrew (pp. 18-19). The titles of the narrative poems were attractive in indicating that they are about women, and in his early plays Shakespeare was daring in his representation of women, especially the active and devilishly attractive Katherine of The Taming of the Shrew and Margaret of Anjou in the Henry 6 plays. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen ingeniously suggest that having his women be active and masculine was Shakespeare's way of overcoming the limitations of the boy actors (pp. 31-32). They see Shakespeare pondering republicanism in the waning years of Elizabeth's reign: not only The Rape of Lucrece (which shows the events that led to Rome's change from having kings to having consuls) but also Julius Caesar. In Shakespeare's poem, unlike his sources, Adonis is really just a boy and not ready for love, and Venus is scarily blind to that fact.

    The publishing history and significance of The Passionate Pilgrim is discussed by Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen (pp. 82-91). This book of sonnets appeared in octavo in 1599 with Shakespeare's name on the title-page, although of its 20 poems, only five are by Shakespeare and of these three were from Love's Labour's Lost, which was already available in print. A third edition appeared in 1612 with some extra non-Shakespearian poems by Thomas Heywood that had been published by William Jaggard in 1609, and Heywood added an epistle to his Apology for Actors (1612) in which he wrote that Shakespeare was annoyed with Jaggard for pirating his (Shakespeare's) sonnets, which had appeared in a good edition in 1609. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen think it quite likely that Romeo appeared disguised as a pilgrim at the Capulet's feast, giving force to The Passionate Pilgrim's appearance as a kind of spin-off: one of its poems seems to give the reader Romeo's thoughts on the way back from the Capulet house after his first meeting with Juliet. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen discuss the biographical links that might connect people involved in The Passionate Pilgrim and Shakespeare, and how far Shakespeare might have been actively involved in the project, but on the possible manuscript copy for The Passionate Pilgrim Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen defer to Colin Burrow's Oxford edition of 2002 (reviewed in YWES 83[2004]). The discussion of  The Phoenix and the Turtle puts the poem into a detailed context of what the book it appeared in, Robert Chester's collection Love's Martyr (1601), was trying to do for its dedicatee John Salusbury (pp. 91-123). Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen reject the idea that The Phoenix and the Turtle was about the execution of Catholic Anne Lyne, since Salusbury would not have welcomed such sympathies expressed in his name; they offer extensive new material on Salusbury and his connections with Shakespeare (especially via the Middle Temple) and his attempts to enter parliament (pp. 95-111). Perhaps, they suggest, the Phoenix is Elizabeth 1 and the Turtle is Salusbury. The introduction to this edition ends with the reflection that apart from the works already discussed, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, the bits of The Passionate Pilgrim by him, and The Phoenix and the Turtle, plus of course Sonnets, Shakespeare left us no substantial poetry.

    So, to the texts themselves. There is little emendation to comment upon because Fields's editions of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were well printed and Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen do not claim any startling new emendations. In Venus and Adonis they print "And whe're he run or fly they know not whether;" (line 304) in place of Q's "And where he runne, or flie, they know not whether". This is Edmond Malone's emendation for the sake of metre and sense, with whether meaning 'which of the two'. Oddly, there's a textual note justifying this emendation, but it has no preceding asterisk so it is hard to know just how big a change in meaning is necessary to warrant one. (Like all the current Arden series, the prefatory material promises that "Notes preceded by * discuss editorial emendations . . ." (p. xiii).) There is an asterisked note drawing attention to their printing of "But blessed bankrupt that by loss so thriveth" (line 466) where Q has "But blessed bankrout that by loue so thriueth", saying that loue was picked up from its use two lines earlier. The first edition to emend thus was Henry N. Hudson's American edition of 1886, based on a conjecture by Sidney Walker. There is an asterisked note too for "With purple tears, that his wounds wept, was drenched" (line 1054) where Q has "With purple tears that his woûd wept, had drencht". This is an emendation (had to was) that first appeared in Q7. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen are not sure about it: Q's had "may be correct", they write, if, as Richard Proudfoot suggests, the line was originally ""W^ch purple tears that his woûd wept, had drencht" and W^ch was misread as though it were W^th, or if the first word was The, as in "The purple tears that his woûd wept, had drencht".

    The text of The Rape of Lucrece shows rather more intervention, and again the use of asterisks to highlight the relevant notes is either irregular or follows a system that this reviewer cannot infer. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen print "As is the morning silver melting dew" (line 24)  where the uncorrected state of Q (hereafter Qu) has "As is the morning siluer melting dew" and the corrected state (Qc) has "mornings". Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen see this as a miscorrection: the word is fine as an adjective, as in Qu. Another miscorrection explains their "What needeth then apology be made" (line 31) where Qu has "What needeth then Appologie be made" and Qc has instead "Apologies". At line 55 Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen defend their changing Q's ore to o'er, which was first actioned in Q5 but is really just a modernization of spelling. The real reason for their asterisked note at this point is that Malone wanted to emend here (to or, the heraldic name for gold) and they want to resist him. Further miscorrection explains why they print "And every one to rest himself betakes, | Save thieves and cares and troubled minds that wakes" (lines 125-6) where Qu has "And euerie one to rest himself betakes, | Saue theeues, and cares, and troubled minds that wakes" and Qc has "And euerie one to rest themselues betake, | Saue theeues, and cares, and troubled minds that wake". Punctiliously, at line 147 Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen give an asterisked note to explain that altogether (Q's reading) and all together (their preference, from Q8) have different meanings now even though they were not carefully distinguished when this poem was written. And yet they offer no note for their admittance of Q's "To dry the old oaks' sap and cherish springs" (line 950), where most editors have wanted to do something with the last two words so that the springs are harmed, emending to such things as "perish springs" or "blemish springs". Three readings from the corrected state of Q follow: "Which by him tainted shall for him be spent" (line 1182) where Qu has "Which for him . . .", "As lagging fowls before the northern blast" (line 1335) where Qu has "northern blasts", and "Even so this pattern of the worn-out age" (line 1350) where Qu has this and the the other way around. Unsurprisingly, Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen accept Walker's justly celebrated conjecture and print "With sad-set eyes and wreathed arms across" (line 1662), where Q has "wretched armes". They accept too Edward Capell's conjecture (adopted by Malone) and print "The face . . . | . . . carved in it with tears" (lines 1712-3) where Q has "caru'd it in with tears". In the last line of the poem, Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen punctuate to indicate the "TARQUINS' everlasting banishment" whereas most editors make it a singular punishment (Tarquin's). As they rightly point out, even leaving known history aside for a moment the poem's Argument indicates that the whole family has to go.

    There are no further emendations to discuss, although the remainder of this long edition (nearly 600 pages) has much more to say about the texts. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen's treatment of The Passionate Pilgrim (pp. 385-418) reproduces the two sonnets later to appear in Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609), plus two sonnets that had already appeared in Love's Labour's Lost (1598), plus one non-sonnet poem from Love's Labour's Lost. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen do not attempt major editorial work but rather their collations and notes aim to highlight the differences between the versions presented in The Passionate Pilgrim and the versions as they appeared elsewhere. This makes sense, as the differences are by no means certain to be printing errors that need correction: they might be authorial tweaks. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen have each edited one of the other books that these poems appear in (Sonnets and Love's Labour's Lost respectively) so there is little remaining editorial work to be done. Although they print all the other poems in The Passionate Pilgrim, Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen do not engage directly with the detail of the arguments for attributing some of them to Shakespeare, but simply refer the reader elsewhere. For the Shakespearian verses in Love's Martyr (that is, The Phoenix and the Turtle, pp. 419-28) Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen reproduce only the parts of the book thought to be by Shakespeare and there are no important textual matters to discuss. The last section of the edition that reproduces the poetry itself covers "Attributed Poems" (pp. 429-69), meaning those that Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen do not guarantee are by Shakespeare. The first 11 are early attributions, starting with "Shall I Die?" about which the editors declare themselves convinced by Brian Vickers that it is not Shakespeare. They are less explicit about "Upon a Pair of Gloves" but do not sound convinced that it is authentic. Going into some considerable detail, Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen are in favour of accepting "Verses on the Stanley tomb at Tong" because, when added to other circumstantial evidence, the fact that Milton's poem in the preliminaries to the Second Folio (1632) seems to allude to these verses "strongly suggests that they may be by Shakespeare" (p. 445). Strangely, they do not give an explicit opinion on the four-line poem "On Ben Jonson", but sound sceptical. The "Inscription for the coat of Shakespeare's arms" (that is, the three words Non sans droict) is of course genuine.

    Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen are avowedly undecided on "An epitaph on Elias James" while accepting that the two epitaphs on John Combes might be genuine. Regarding "Upon the King", Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen report that Vickers will in a forthcoming Notes and Queries article give this to John Davies of Hereford, but they hold the matter to be still open. (That article did not appear in 2007 nor 2008.) The motto that Shakespeare wrote for the Rutland impressa is of course lost and that Shakespeare wrote the curse upon his tomb in Stratford-upon-Avon strikes Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen as "plausible". Turning to the modern attributions, Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen start with "The Lucy Ballad" and point out that Mark Eccles observed that Sir Thomas Lucy did not have a deer park at Charlecote (it was elsewhere) and that the story does not actually say Shakespeare stole deer, only that he fell in with a group that did and that he robbed a park. Presumably, if it is true, Shakespeare robbed Lucy's rabbit warren at Charlecote. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen are unconvinced that there is anything in the various seventeenth and eighteenth-century ballads that are supposed to record the event in the oral tradition. The "Skipwith verses" are now known to be not Shakespeare's but William Skipwith's and are not printed here. What Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen call "The Stanford poem" is the epilogue that Juliet Dusinberre thinks is Shakespeare's and belongs to As You Like It, but  Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen "are not convinced" and it is not printed here. Everyone knows that "A Funeral Elegy" is definitely not Shakespeare and it is not printed here. Finally, of "Tom O'Bedlam's song to King James" they give no view but mention that Stanley Wells rejected the attribution and it is not printed here.

    The appendices to the edition are substantial and deal with the textual situation of each of the major works included (Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, and The Phoenix and the Turtle) and provide the sources (extracts from Ovid and Livy), and also a photofacsimile reproduction of the part of Love's Martyr where The Phoenix and the Turtle appears. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen accept the view of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare that Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were well printed by Richard Field in 1593 and 1594, quite possibly from authorial papers. Field's printer's copy for two of John Harington's works survives, so we can get a sense of what his compositor(s) did but should be careful applying that knowledge to Shakespeare: Harington's poetry differs from Shakespeare's and his books were in folio and octavo while Shakespeare's were in quarto (p. 472). The compositor(s) of Venus and Adonis seem(s) different from the composistor(s) of The Rape of Lucrece, and indeed different from the compositor(s) of Harington's Ariosto, to judge by spelling and typographical preferences listed here (pp. 473-6). Venus and Adonis was entered to Richard Field in the Stationers' Register on 18 April 1593 and the Bodleian Library copy of Q1 printed later that year is the only extant exemplar. One of the problems that the text gave the printer was that the indentation of the last two lines of each stanza sometimes made a line that would exceed the measure if remedial steps were not taken. From the substitutions from other-sized founts, it looks like the printer was short of certain sorts, especially upper-case V. There are two sets of running titles, distinguishable by an oversize V that first appears in the head title on B1r and recurs in the running title on each 2r in sheets B-F but then (presumably because the two skeletons were swapped) on G4r. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen conclude that it is at present impossible to tell whether the printer's copy was autograph or scribal copy.

    The Rape of Lucrece was entered to John Harrison in the Stationers' Register on 9 May 1594, and thus while Field printed and published Venus and Adonis, for The Rape of Lucrece he printed for another man, Harrison, who was its publisher. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen note that when, as here, Field was printing for another man he tended to use arabic rather than roman numerals for signatures. There are ten copies plus one fragment of the book extant. Running title evidence suggests two skeleton formes, one used for the inner and outer formes of sheets B, D, F, H, K and the other used for the inner and outer formes of sheets C, E, G, I, L (with M, the last full gathering, and the half-sheet N both being anomalous). Press variants were collated by Hardy M. Cook in an article reviewed in YWES 86[2007].  One forme, I(o), survives in two states of correction. The press corrections cannot, write Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, be "firmly attributed to Shakespeare" (p. 485). I think they mean we cannot be sure that they were made by reference to copy: the idea of the author being responsible for them does not, I think, extend to agency beyond the manuscript. As in Venus and Adonis, there was a problem getting the verse lines into the measure (especially in the indented final couplet of each stanza) and the same expedients of turn-over and turn-under and abbreviation were resorted to. Because B(i) is anomalous in its avoidance of capitals and small capitals for proper nouns, Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen think it was probably set first, when the compositor(s) had not established the practice then followed throughout the rest of the book (p. 486). As with Venus and Adonis, the printer was short of certain capital letters, which led to inconsistent capitalization and substitution of different sized sorts, and as before we cannot tell whether the printer's copy was autograph or scribal copy.

    The Passionate Pilgrim first appeared in an edition, O1, of which only a fragmentary exemplar survives, giving 11 leaves from what were probably 28. There was no Stationers' Register entry for it and the printer was perhaps William Jaggard working perhaps in the year 1599; the missing title-page makes it hard to know. O2 appeared in 1599, printed by Thomas Judson for Jaggard and sold by William Leake, and it survives in one fragment and two complete exemplars. Collation of O2 shows minor variants on D1r and D3r, and the recurrence of the 'flowers' ornaments in The Passionate Pilgrim can be treated like headline recurrence, giving a pattern that strongly suggests that O1 was set by formes (p. 493). Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen assert that O1's unknown printer was not the Thomas Judson who printed O2, but they omit to tell the reader how they know that; the English Short Title Catalogue speculates that Judson did set O1 (p. 494). Again, recurrence of the ornaments suggests O2 was also set by formes. It emerges by implication--Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen do not spell it out--that O2 was not a reprint of O1. In 1612 Jaggard printed O3 as a repriint of O2, but the two surviving exemplars show two states of the title-page, and it seems that the first state (naming Shakespeare) was cancelled and the second (omitting him) was its replacement. Notoriously, O3 also included some of Thomas Heywood's poems to which Jaggard had the rights, but to which Heywood objected the same year (1612) in his An Apology for Actors. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen try to untangle just what Heywood's objection should tell us, but do not get very far (pp. 497-8). Love's Martyr was not entered in the Stationers' Register but was first printed (Q1) in 1601 by Richard Field for Edward Blount, and a reissue of the unsold sheets with a new title-page and new preliminaries was published in 1611 by Matthew Lownes; it is not clear how he got the sheets. It survives as two complete and one fragmentary Q1, and just one Q2. With one exception, the Attributed Poems have not survived in manucripts or printed books before the 1630s and Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen do not think it worth hazarding guesses about their early transmission.

    A brief section of this first appendix explains Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen's editorial practices (pp. 504-14). The first printings of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and Love's Martyr were carefully done and present no problems; they are the bases of the poems presented here. The Passionate Pilgrim and the attributed poems are trickier. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen present a surrprisingly long disquisition on the typographic feature of capitalization and on the modernization of punctuation and spelling, and how the early printings and previous editions are inconsistent in these matters. This edition uses initial capitals "only when a personification seems to be clearly intended" (p. 505). Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen explain why they have retained in The Rape of Lucrece the quotation marks that begin lines of sententiae, even though they cannot be shown to be authorial: "it seems possible Shakespeare would have known that they played a part in the volume" (p. 509). It is noticeable that Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen do not make clear whether Shakespeare knew beforehand about this feature and went along with it, or found out after and did not mind; there is subtly distinct agency at work in each case. In the event, they are so lightly marked in this edition--by an opening and closing pair of quotation marks rather than one at the start of each line--that a reader might easily miss them. Likewise, they retain The Rape of Lucrece's use of small capitals for proper nouns since Shakespeare might have approved their use, and having decided to retain them they naturally have to apply the feature consistently even where the early printing did not. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen permit themselves a little self-depracating irony in calling this "a bold and probably controversial decision" (p510). The Passionate Pilgrim is printed here from O1 where possible and where not then O2.

    The Royal Shakespeare Company Complete Works is edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, with two dozen others acknowledged in various roles that contributed to the "fifteen person-years of editorial labour" that made the book (p. 6). The edition is based on the 1623 Folio, and as if to forestall the obvious criticism that this foundational decision was bound to attract, Bate published an article in the Times Literary Supplement explaining the edition's rationale ('The Folio Restored: Shakespeare 'Published According to the True Originall Copies'', TLS Number 5429 (20 April) [2007].11-3). The fundamental objection to be overcome is that one ought not to base an edition on a mere reprint of an extant book but rather prefer the original over its derivative. For several plays, the Folio essentially reprints a surviving quarto, albeit with sporadic additional independent authority because its copy was first improved by consultation of an authoritive manuscript. It is the absence of evidence for extensive and consistent additional authority that makes editors prefer the quarto over the Folio for certain plays, and not (as Bate claims) their slavish adherence to an absurd rule that "the earliest surviving text must be the one closest to the original authorial manuscript". Instead of arguing case-by-case, Bate attributes to the Folio a general and thoroughgoing theatrical authority deriving from the actors Heminges and Condell working on it. In truth we do not know that they worked on the book, only that they signed an address to the reader at the front. All else is speculation. Thus while the Folio is a fascinating 'socialized' text embodying multiple labours, it is not the best text for every play. We get closer to Shakespeare (as writer and as sharer in the leading acting company) by choosing the most authoritative surviving text on a play-by-play basis.

    A longer article on the same topic appeared on a website to accompany the edition (Jonathan Bate ''The Case for the Folio': An Essay in Defence of the RSC Shakespeare Delivered Online at Www.rscshakespeare.org Accessed 16 April 2007' [2007]). After a (not entirely up-to-date) survey of the editorial problem in Shakespeare, Bate gets to his defence of editing from the Folio. Here a basic fact of printing is wrongly stated: type is not placed in the stick "upside down and back to front" (p. 37) but upside down only; were it back to front, it would be impossible to work from left to right through each line of the copy. Considering the evidence that for certain plays the quarto used as printer's copy for the Folio was itself first annotated by reference to an authoritative manuscript, Bate assumes that this was done out of respect for the theatrical manuscripts (p. 38). Perhaps, but it might also have been to evade the accusation of copyright infringement that might follow from reprinting someone else's book. Having established that the Folio is theatrically enhanced by this process of manuscript consultation, Bate leaps to the conclusion that "It surely follows that a Folio-based" edition will be the more theatrical (p. 41). This does not follow: one needs to pick out the bits that are theatrical enhancements from the bits that are debasements, such as the untheatrical massed entry stage directions inserted by the scribe Ralph Crane making copy for the Folio. Bate is fully aware of the objection to the basis of his edition: "The accusation is that the Folio should not be used when its copy-text is a derivative quarto, since it suffers from an accumulation of errors evolving through several quartos. The riposte is that it also has the benefit of accumulated improvements evolving through several quartos" (p. 52). The reply to this riposte is that where one thinks that these 'improvements' take us closer to Shakespeare, one should import these into an edition based on the earliest substantive text, rather than accept them all as a batch and thereby risk treating as Shakespearian things that are just artefacts of the reprinting process. Bate is forearmed for this answer too: "We must cut the Gordian knot here. It is best not to over-fetishize the source of individual corrections" (p. 52). It is hard not to read this as a fancy way of saying that the editor cannot be bothered to make the distinctions on a case-by-case basis and would rather press on and get the work done. The result is an edition that does not warrant close attention to the thinking that went on in those 15 person years.

    The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, was also a collaborative work, with 61 senior scholars listed as contributors to the project (p. 5). Only three plays in this edition are of relevance to this review: Timon of Athens, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure. Timon of Athens, described as being by Shakespeare and Middleton (pp. 467-508), is edited and annotated by John Jowett and introduced by Sharon O'Dair. O'Dair's introduction is largely concerned with the relative lack of productions and the problems of the script, which co-authorship does not dissolve. She wants us to understand Timon of Athens in its own time and not as a simple lesson that the older ways of doing things (Timon's ways before his fall) are better ways: the play does not idealize Timon. In the text of the play, the notes are all explicatory, not textual. There is nothing in the text to mark the transition from the bits Shakespeare wrote to the bits that Middleton wrote. The text seems much as Jowett's 2004 Oxford Shakespeare Timon of Athens (reviewed in YWES 85[2006]), although stage directions that are simply given in the Oxford Shakespeare edition are here marked in square brackets as editorial additions, reflecting the editions' different rules on marking intervention. Also, the odd stage direction is phrased slightly differently and decisions on scene breaks have been revised. For example, the direction at 14.538 (equivalent to 14.536 in the Oxford Shakespeare) is rephrased and is also the end of scene 14 here while in the Oxford Shakespeare the scene carries on. It is a matter of staging, for F has a stage direction exit which implies that Timon goes back into his cave--he does not leave the stage--which Oxford Shakespeare respects by sending him into his cave, while the Middleton edition emends to "Exeunt" and is thereby obliged to start a new scene.

    The edition of Macbeth is described as a "Genetic" text and is edited by Gary Taylor and introduced by the late (and sorely missed) Inga-Stina Ewbank (pp. 1165-1201). Ewbank notes that 11% of the words of the Folio text are Middleton's, and he might also have cut about 25% or more of the Shakespearian words. Ewbank starts with the point that it is only our post-Romantic conceptions that make us see what Middleton did to the play as adulterations: back then it was normal. On the evidence of Simon Forman's eyewitness account and Raphael Holinshed's chronicles, Ewbank concludes that the weird sisters were quite possibly a lot less weird in Shakespeare's version of the play. Ewbank finds the addition of songs and dances to be an intelligent reworking, taking attention from Macbeth's self-destruction and celebrating the witches' relative autonomy and their subversive, liberatory anarchism. Moreover the songs and dances make The Witch an intertext of Macbeth: audiences would have seen the same actors in both and understand them as alternative 'takes' on the same phenomena. In the text of the play, passages added (or moved to their present location) by Middleton are in bold typeface and bits he cut (or moved from their present location) are in greyed-out type. Thus passages that have been moved appear twice: once in grey where they used to be and once in bold where they ended up. To see how these distinctions were arrived at one must go to the edition's Textual Companion, reviewed below.

    The edition of Measure for Measure is also described as a "Genetic" text and is edited and introduced by John Jowett (pp. 1542-85). His introduction repeats the well-known argument from Shakespeare Reshaped that the song 'Take, O take' was brought in from Rollo, Duke of Normandy, that the "O place and greatness" speech that covers the time in 4.1 during which Isabella talks Mariana into sleeping with Angelo used to be at the end of act 3 and the "He who the sword of heaven will bear" speech at the end of act 3 used to cover the time while Isabella talks Mariana into the plot, and that the first telling of Claudio's arrest (by Mistress Overdone to the gentlemen) was Middleton's interpolation intended to replace Shakespeare's dialogue (a little later in F) in which Pompey tells Mistress Overdone the same news. Since we know of these major changes, we have to suppose that there are others that are not so obvious, and Jowett lists what he thinks these are. Bringing Juliet on in two scenes were she has nothing to say might be one: she acts as "silent moral comment" (p. 1543). Jowett does not say here why he thinks that silent moral comment was not part of the original composition but of the revision. Some of the Provost's line in 2.2 were given to Lucio, who also had new ones written for him by Middleton to make him more cynical and detached. Mistress Overdone was probably just called Bawd in the original: Overdone is a name that Middleton liked, and wherever it occurs in dialogue there is a disruption symptomatic of intervention. As mentioned in the Textual Companion, Pompey's speech about the inhabitants of the prison (in which Mistress Overdone is also mentioned) is a Middleton interpolation. Escalus's surprisingly intolerant assertion that Claudio needs to die (at the end of 2.1) is another Middleton interpolation: it is entirely detachable, brings in a character (Justice) with no other purpose in the play, and it serves only a Calvinist point about the need to regulate behaviour. Jowett outlines the evidence that the play was originally set in Ferrara and that to cover his tracks Middleton cut dialogue references to the Italian names Vincentio and Francisca. In the text of the play, greyed-out type and boldface are again used as in Macbeth to represent the changes made by Middleton in revision.

    As with the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare, this Middleton edition wisely prints all the textual scholarship unpinning the work in a separate volume (Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works). For the three plays that concern this review, the parts of interest are the relevant portions of the section "Works Included in this Edition: Canon and Chronology" (pp. 335-443) and the textual introductions to each play. Starting with the first of these, the section on Timon of Athens written by John Jowett (pp. 356-58) is essentially the same as the argument in his 2004 Oxford Shakespeare edition. The section on the adaptation of Macbeth in autumn 1616, written by Taylor, seeks to explain point-by-point how the adaptation occurred and how Taylor's edition of the play represents the 'before' and 'after' versions (pp. 383-98). Taylor's disentangling of the Shakespeare and Middleton parts is based on pursuing the logic of the definitely added Hecate material and the song and dance routines--that is, the dialogue and staging consequences of these additions--filtered through knowledge of what kinds of phrasing, staging and source reading (especially Holinshed, of which Middleton seems ignorant) are typically Shakespearian and typically Middletonian. Taylor is uniquely well placed to make these calls, and does not pretend that there is any certainty in them. A distinctive Middleton habit is stage directions taking the form "Enter X, meeting Y" which Shakespeare never used.

    The adaptation of Macbeth must follow the writing of The Witch in spring 1616, but since that latter play was suppressed the reuse of its songs right away would make sense. (Obviously, the very latest they could have been added to Macbeth is shortly before the printing of the Folio in spring 1623.) Once it is admitted that Middleton worked on the play, the judgement of how much of it is his can proceed on the internal evidence. If the Folio text of Macbeth is all that Shakespeare wrote plus what Middleton added, then Shakespeare wrote what was for him an extraordinarily short tragedy; more likely Middleton cut lines that we will now never see. By comparison with the average lengths of his other plays, Taylor reckons that 700-1200 lines of the Shakespearian play were cut by Middleton. Where there is a Middletonian "Enter X, meeting Y" direction, (as in "Enter Duncan . . . meeting a bleeding captain", 1.2.0) an editor is entitled to suppose that what follows has been touched by Middleton too. Picking apart 1.2 (because of its opening direction), Taylor finds plenty that echoes Middleton elsewhere and not Shakespeare. The Middleton bits cluster in lines 8-9, 15, 22, 27-9, and since dramatists were by the 1610s thinking battle scenes a bit old fashioned, it is likely that the first 30 lines of 1.2 (which tell the outcome of a battle) are Middleton's rewriting of an opening in which the battle itself was depicted.

    Taylor reprints all of Forman's account of a performance of the play, and wonders if its reference to Macbeth and Banquo "riding through a wood" means that in the original play at the Globe they were on horseback in 1.3 and that Middleton cut this because the Blackfriars theatre had a smaller stage. One of Taylor's two pieces of evidence for horses, real or property, being used on the stage is the entrance of the apparently dead D'Alva "carried vpon a horse couvered with blacke" in A Larum for London (B1v). In fact, it is clear from the ensuing action that this is not a horse but a hearse (presumably spelt herse and misread by someone as horse). The second bit of evidence is that the skimmington in The Witches of Lancashire is "on a horse", which is not terribly convincing as the whole point of such a procession is mockery and hence we should not imagine it as anything grand enough to be suitable for Macbeth and Banquo. For this evidence Taylor relies on the entry for 'horse' in Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson's A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642, and indeed they have misread the A Larum for London stage direction.

    Taylor notes that the casting needs of the 1623 text are heavy on boys: scene 3.5 needs three witches, three spirits, Hecate and a boy-as-cat (that makes eight), as does 4.1. It seems that adding the Hecate material made impossible demands on the cast if the witches were played by boys, and since Forman's account suggests that the witches are female and attractive Taylor proposes that Middleton, in adapting the play, changed these nymphs into gender-indeterminate hags by adding Banquo's reference to their beards (in 1.3). That would save three boy actors by allowing adult men to play the witches. The bit after the witches leave in 4.1, in which Macbeth is surprised that Lennox did not see the witches pass him, is problematic as it ought not to surprise Macbeth that they vanish: he has seen them do that before. But this exchange with Lennox has an exact parallel in the Middleton canon and Taylor thinks it is his. By adding Hecate to this scene (4.1) with a song and dance after the show of eight kings, Middleton prevented the exit of two boy actors needed for Lady Macduff and her son at the start of the next scene, so he had to write extra dialogue at the end of the scene--about the witches passing Lennox unseen and about his own intention to act without hesitation in future and about surprising Macduff's castle--to give these two boys time to change into Macduff's wife and son. The inclusion of Banquo in the show of eight kings is oddly phrased in F--"A shew of eight Kings, and Banquo last, with a glasse in his hand", yet the dialogue makes clear that the eighth king, not Banquo, has the glass--and Taylor thinks that "and Banquo" was a Middletonian marginal addition. After all, nothing else in the play suggests that the witches have power over the dead. In that case, Macbeth's lines of horror at seeing Banquo ("Horrible sight! . . . is this so?") are also Middleton's interpolation.

    Taylor finds the three apparitions rising from the cauldron in 4.1 suspect too: Shakespeare originally had the witches speak the prophecies. Adding the apparitions required an extra boy or two to perform inside the cauldron. The show of kings was changed by Middleton: Shakespeare had them arise from the trap and go back that way. This effect Middleton transferred to the apparitions he invented, and that meant that in order avoid an anticlimax (since he could have it too come up the trap) the show of kings had to be made into a parading across the stage. Perhaps the plan to surprise Macduff's castle, now stated in the soliloquy at the end of 4.1, was originally Macbeth's response to the scene's first prophecy ("beware Macduff"). This would make sense of his "Then live Macduff" as a response to the second apparition (about no man of woman born hurting him): Macbeth changes his mind. In other words, the extra dialogue Middleton added to the end of the scene (to enable a couple of boys to double) was plundered from Shakespeare's original response of Macbeth to the first prophecy. Scene 3.6 is sometimes said to have been moved from elsewhere, not least because it reports that Macbeth knows that Macduff has fled to England, and yet at the end of 4.1 Macbeth receives news of that flight and reacts violently to it. But that bit at the end of 4.1 is a Middletonian interpolation, so in fact 3.6 is fine where it is and the problem has been created solely by Middleton's work on 4.1. Probably all or part of 3.6 was meant by Middleton to be cut, and the 1623 printers ought not to have included it. Cutting 3.6 would also remove a reference to Edward the Confessor, as Calvinist Middleton would no doubt have wanted to do. There probably was also a scene later for Edward the Confessor, turned by Middleton into an onstage report.

    The phrase "how wilt thou do for a father" is said twice, 23 lines apart, by Lady Macduff in 4.2, and this is a known sign of insertion or deletion. For insertion, the logic is that the inserted material ended with a repetition of the next line of the original that should follow after the insertion, but the printer included that line from the original before starting the insertion and included it again as the last line of the insertion. For deletion, the logic is that someone copied out at the start of the deletion the line that should follow next after the deleted material had been removed, but the deletion was not actioned and this line was printed before the stuff that was meant to be deleted (but was not) and printed it again after the stuff that was meant to be deleted. At least, this was W. W. Greg's view of how so-called 'repetition brackets' came about. In the present case, Lady Macduff's repetition in 4.2, the material in between is Middletonian, most clearly because in it the words i'faith and 'em collocate closely (13 words apart) and no-one does this collocation as often as Middleton. Other collocations confirm the attribution. (This part of Taylor's argument demonstrates admirably just what a transformation of the field of attribution studies has been enacted by the creation of the Literature Online database.) The inserted lines allude quite clearly to the Overbury plot (topical in 1616 but not 1606), and faults in the lineation just before and just after the alleged insertion are consistent with there being an insertion at this point. Finally, Taylor thinks that the witches calling to familiars (Greymalkin and Paddock) in 1.1 is Middleton. The names are Middletonian and without these calls the women retain their ambiguity--it is not entirely clear what they are--whereas Middleton makes them unambiguously witches. On this point, one small note of disagreement creeps in. Whereas Ewbank had argued that Middleton's addition of songs and dances allowed celebration of the witches' freedom, Taylor thinks that the witches' new references to their "masters" makes them less  autonomous than Shakespeare's women (p. 391). Perhaps Middleton gave with one had and took with the other.

    For the "Canon and Chronology" section on the adaptation of Measure for Measure in October 1621 (pp. 417-21), Jowett is able to draw on his body of published research showing that the 'war news' material in 1.2 makes no sense in 1603-4 when Shakespeare wrote the play but perfect sense in 1621 when Middleton adapted it. That aside, the case for Middleton doing the adaptation was already made in Taylor and Jowett's book Shakespeare Reshaped (1993) and Jowett does not have to argue that matter point-by-point as Taylor did for Macbeth. Jowett revises the view given in Shakespeare Reshaped that the lines after the song in 4.1 were by John Webster. Reconsideration of the evidence (and especially a realization that Crane himself turned has into hath without authority, and therefore one cannot rely on this word as a test of authorship) changed Jowett's mind, and and he now gives those lines back to Middleton. Likewise Pompey's speech (about the population of the prison) at the start of 4.3

    With so much of the textual evidence covered in the "Canon and Chronology" section, there is little left to be dealt with in the textual introduction to each of the Shakespeare plays. For Measure for Measure (pp. 681-89), Jowett argues that there would be no point just representing the adapted version, since that is what every Shakespeare edition already has. This insight warrants boldness, and Jowett summarizes the new advances (beyond those in the Oxford Complete Works of 1986 and Shakespeare Reshaped of 1993) that are embodied in this edition, and tells the reader that the evidence is in the Critical Introduction and the commentary. It is nonetheless odd that Taylor decided to put his argument in the "Canon and Chronology" section while Jowett puts his into the Critical Introduction and commentary; on the face of it this makes the edition seem inconsistent. Equally, if Macbeth and Measure for Measure are parallel cases (as their shared designation as "Genetic" texts and shared use of boldface and greyed-out type suggest) it is odd that they treat modernization in differing ways, as we shall see.

    In the textual introduction to Macbeth (pp. 690-703), Taylor argues that the case for Middletonian adaptation is widely accepted and need not be be presented afresh here. (It is in any case fully presented in the "Canon and Chronology" section, as we have seen.) Taylor has decided to remove capitals from the beginnings of lines and to remove punctuation, since that is how both dramatists wrote their plays. Because "speech directions" ("aside", "To X", and so on) are rare in manuscripts from this period they are omitted here. Spelling is trickier as an editor cannot just leave it out, so because there is no authority to recover--we do not know Shakespeare's spelling and Middleton was not the main author--the least intrusive thing to do is to use modern spelling. This is defensible because modern spelling is standardized, so it does not draw attention to itself and and its use "removes meaningless arbitrary variation" (p. 691). This seemingly counter-intuitive point is exceptionally well made by Taylor. And yet Taylor has chosen to add stage directions where necessary (marked by square brackets) and to emend F where he thinks it in error. This strange mix of editorial choices Taylor defends by pointing out that there is no shortage of editions of Shakespeare's Macbeth, so one has no obligations to fulfil in preparing a new one and can instead "deliberately" set out to make something "alien and alienating" (p. 692). Here the lack of an overall editorial policy is most clearly marked, for if the case of Measure for Measure is parallel to that of Macbeth, as the edition seems to insist, it is peculiar that Jowett's Measure for Measure capitalizes the first letters of verse lines and deploys modern punctuation. Finally, for this edition, John Jowett's textual introduction for Timon of Athens (pp. 704-11) indicates that he has not started from scratch but only revisited his Oxford Complete Works text and that the textual notes are "skeletal" as it has all been said in the Textual Companion to that edition.

    The most important monograph this year is Sonia Massai's Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor, and its thesis is striking. Massai sets out to challenge the idea that until Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition each new edition of Shakespeare was just a reprint-with-errors and hence inherently worse that its predecessor. Massai is not referring to the injection of new authority into a reprint by the printer's copy (a previous edition) being first annotated by reference to an authoritative manuscript, but rather the idea that early readers could do such annotation using just their own wits. Necessarily, Massai needs to qualify her terms: their idea of 'authority' is not ours, and their editorial practices were different too (p. 2). We need, she argues, to widen our perspectives on seventeenth-century textual practices. The 1679 edition of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio (a reprint of the first edition of 1647) contained a note saying that the publisher had got hold of a copy of the first edition that had been annotated by someone who knew the authors and had attended early performances, and Massai notes that they called "perfecting" the act of improving a manuscript or printed book so that it may serve as printer's copy for a reprint (pp. 4-5). In the preliminaries to the 1623 Folio, Heminges and Condell write that "it hath bin the height of our care . . . to make the present worthy . . . by the perfection", which suggests that they did not (as they stated earlier) just collect them.

    Massai implies that where a reprint has substantive variants, including in the case of Q2 Richard 3 (a reprint of Q1) a couple of lines not in the book being reprinted, we should suspect editorial improvement (in this case an injection of fresh authority from a manuscript). But what about the possibility that the Q1 used as printer's copy had press variants no longer witnessed in surviving exemplars? There are only four exemplars of Q1 Richard 3 in the world, after all. Massai finally admits this possibility when attributing the insight to Peter Davison in 1977 (p. 219n5), but she rejects the objection as "reductive" because Davison "focused solely on press variants" (p. 219n5). This is poor logic: the objection is not reductive, but rather Davison pointed out one vector by which reprints might differ from what we think is their copy. That Massai thinks she has found another possible vector does not invalidate his. A surviving exemplar of Q2 The Contention of York and Lancaster has proof marks on B(o) and they are concerned only with accidentals, so Massai takes this as evidence that proof-readers did not bother with the substantives (p. 12). Annotations of printed books for use in performance (of which there are a couple of examples) show that they did not bother normalizing speech prefixes or stage directions or altering dialogue unless they wanted to make a big change in the action, and we know from William Long's work that theatre people did not tidy their manuscripts for use in performance. Yet from readers' annotations of printed plays for reading purposes we find the errors in speech prefixes and stage directions corrected (p. 14). (It is awfully hard to say for sure that these printed books were annotated for reading rather than for performance, and Massai does not explain how she differentiates these classes of evidence.)

    Massai notes that recent work by scholars such as Zachary Lesser and Gary Taylor has turned attention away from the author and towards publisher-centered approaches that consider how the publisher shaped meanings by functioning as a guarantor of quality in his specialized field. Yet, she argues, we have not taken on board the role of the publisher as the person who maintained that quality by perfecting copy or by securing copy that had been perfected (p. 33-5). She begins her examination of this role by looking at John and William Rastell as early-sixteenth publishers committed to humanist pedagogy through their association with Thomas More and his circle, which was itself shaped by continental publishing practice and the work of Erasmus (pp. 41-68). This fascinating section of her book has little relevance to this review, but it is worth noting that evidence derived from the printing of Utopia and Erasmus's role in it as editor or even co-author ought to be treated with circumspection. After all, the textual authority of the entire project (with Raphael Hythloday as its point of origin) is entirely a fabrication. Moreover, some of the principles she draws from the evidence seem peculiar. For example, More came to prefer print over oral or hand-written communication because it was harder for others to misuse it: a speech might be misreported, a hand-written letter might be altered by others and then published, but a printed book cannot be interfered with without the reader spotting it, since hand-written alterations stand out (pp. 56-7). One might reasonably conclude from this that the marginalia in a book are of less value than the words printed in it, which is almost exactly the opposite of Massai's general view.

    Having established that John and William Rastell's editions of More's work are punctilious, Massai hopes to show the same principle (punctiliousness) in the Rastells' publications of interludes, which comprise "three quarters of the extant printed interludes from the period" (p. 58). Thus stated as a fraction, the Rastells' domination of the market seems significant, but when we realize that Greg's chronological Bibliography of the English Printed Drama (BEPD) has by this point (the mid-1540s) reached only play number 21, the total population of printed plays seems too small for us to make much out of the relative proportions by publisher. In the midst of this discussion of punctiliousness, Massai's book itself becomes surprisingly inaccurate (p. 60). Quoting the title-page of John Rastell's The Four Elements, where the reader is told how it may be cut for shorter performance time, Massai fails to distinguish ordinary p without a bar (also used in the same sentence in parte) from the p with a bar that the printer uses as an abbreviation for par, as in "the messengers p<ar>te": she just gives "pte", using one modern sort for what in the book are two distinct sorts. Yet earlier (p. 7) she was conservative enough to preserve an early printer's use of two letters v to make a w in vvho). Also, she transcribes playd or playde or playdt--it is not clear which it is but editors usually choose the first as the last letter is indistinct and might not be meant to be there at all--as plydt which is definitely wrong in dropping the a. There are other mistranscriptions in quoting from this book: matter where the book has mater and wyse where the book has wyle (both on signature E6v but wrongly given by Massai as C6v). Massai quotes Roger Coleman claiming that the printing of music with movable type in one impression shown in The Four Elements had not yet been invented when this book was printed, which is clearly impossible and cannot be what Coleman meant (p. 61). Greg in BEPD dates the play after 1525 precisely because of the music thus printed. Massai reads the movement of speech prefixes from a central to a left-marginal position as indicating the temporary misrule of the disruptive characters (beginning with the entrance of Sensual Appetite) and the return of centered prefixes as indicating the containment of these subversives. By comparison, the interludes printed by Wynkyn de Worde are less sophisticated in mise en page, and that early readers cared about such things is shown by marginal annotations that correct Rastell's few printing errors (pp. 62-4).

    In a chapter on "Italian Influences on the Publication of late Tudor Drama" (pp. 69-87), Massai reads the dearth of published plays in the middle of the sixteenth century as arising from a general decline in performed drama towards the end of Henry's reign, whereas in the second half of the century well-printed Italian plays by the likes of Ariosto and Cinthio began to come into England with the flood of Protestant exiles from the Counter-Reformation. In these books, the level of editorial intervention and care was deliberately foregrounded as a selling point. She outlines the career of the publisher John Wolfe, the man mainly responsible for bringing Italian Renaissance texts to London readers and employer of 'correctors' (especially Gabriel Harvey) to improve copy before printing, and his use of false continental imprints to give his books extra kudos. She also describes the career of Richard Jones, who printed Tamburlaine and addressed its reader with a note about the "fond and frivolous gestures" in the play as he received it and that he omitted. (This last point rather undercuts Massai's argument that he was a conscientious 'corrector': from our point of view he was a meddling busy-body who should have printed what he received.) Massai suggests that Jones also lightly annotated his printed copy for Tamburlaine before reprinting it (so that the variants between the first three editions are not authoritative), and in this it feels like she is fighting her primary materials: she wants to suggest that printers were doing something to add authority and her evidence keeps contradicting her.

    Massai's study of Andrew Wise is, as she indicates, central to her argument (pp. 91-105).  Although not the first to publish Shakespeare, Andrew Wise was the first to seriously invest in publishing him and had a series of hit Shakespeare books in the 1590s: two editions of Richard 3 and three each of 1 Henry 4 and Richard 2. Massai asks ". . . can we assume that Shakespeare himself corrected the texts of his popular history plays when Wise decided to, or was prompted to, reprint them? Or, are we to assume that he entrusted Wise with their transmission into print?" (p. 91). She senses a means to test the New Bibliography, and claims that "The Wise Quartos, in other words, represent an ideal study case [sic] to test Pollard, McKerrow and Greg's optimistic assumption that a direct line of transmission connected authorial manuscripts to the so-called 'good' quarto editions of Shakespeare's works, without any significant 'interference' from the non-authorial agents involved in their publication". In fact, this last sentence is not the previous point (about the authority of reprints) expressed "in other words" but rather concerns the New Bibliographical assumption that the copy for the first printing was a manuscript in Shakespeare's hand rather than a theatrical document or a scribal transcript, which assumption in turn arises from prior assumptions about the textual economy of the early-modern playhouse, and in particular the desirability of there existing no more than two manuscripts of each play, the author's foul papers and the promptbook.

    There is a way to link New Bibliography and the reprints that Massai is interested in, but it is not via the first-generational work of Pollard, McKerrow, and Greg as she claims but rather in the compositor studies that began in the 1950s and to which she turns. Alan E. Craven used the evidence of how a particular compositor changed a text as he reprinted it from known printed copy to work out the compositor's general habits. Massai is not convinced that compositors could make changes of the kind Craven attributed to them. For example, Craven claimed that for Valentine Simmes's Compositor A to fix a faulty speech prefix in scene 5.3 of Richard 2 Q1 (in which York rather than King Henry is made to say "Good aunt stand up") requires him to have "worked out the degree of kinship and power relations among the four speakers in this exchange" (p. 93). In fact it only requires him to follow the action and notice that York ought not call his own wife "Good aunt". Massai objects that Craven assumed that the variants between Q1 Richard 2 and its reprint Q2 are all down to the compositor, but since she cannot show another vector she ought to be obliged on principle not to multiply the agents by speculation.

    Massai summarizes Wise's career and speculates about how he came to publish three Chamberlain's men smash hit plays. She reckons the link was that Wise knew writers under George Carey's patronage, which included Shakespeare (pp. 92-5). She makes the common mistake of giving the date that George Carey was made Lord Chamberlain as 17 March 1597 but in fact it was, as Greg long ago pointed out, actually 17 April 1597 (p. 100). Massai offers as one possible reason for the Chamberlain's men selling Wise the copy for three plays in 1597-8 their needing money to pay rent at the Curtain as the expiry of the lease on the Theatre drew near (p. 101). Since the company was in any case paying the Burbage family rent on the Theatre, it presumably made no difference to the company--only to the Burbages--if they moved to the Curtain and paid rent there. Moreover, they did not move to the Curtain when the lease expired but rather hung on at the Theatre for more than a year, and in any case it is likely that the Burbages owned the Curtain too.

    In order to show that someone annotated the printed copy for Wise's Shakespeare quartos before he reprinted them, Massai starts with the line "As thought on thinking on no thought I thinke" from scene 2.2 in Q1 Richard 2 which was reprinted as "As though on thinking on no thought I thinke" in Q2. She comments that the fact that some editors adopt Q1's reading and some Q2's shows that "intervention in Q2 was not determined by an obvious misreading in Q1" and she gives as an example of a modern editor going for Q1's reading Charles Forker's Arden3 edition (p. 102). (Massai's bibliography entry for this edition wrongly gives the date as 1998 and the publisher as Athlone: it was 2002 and Thomson Learning.) Importantly, Forker himself was only repeating the reading from the Oxford Complete Works, which was the source of the innovation: no previous edition had gone for Q1's reading. Massai thinks this the kind of "textual variation which seems to stem from light annotation" but she has not eliminated other reasonable possibilities. Obvious examples are that Q2 was printed from an exemplar of Q1 that had though as a press correction, or that the compositor of Q2 just missed off the terminal t by accident, or that the compositor read the Q1 line and believed it to be in error and tried to fix it. The variants of Q1-Q2 1 Henry 4 are outlined by Massai and she admits that scholars generally agree they are the kinds of things that can happen in the printshop, yet instead of offering reasons why that explanation must be abandoned she simply says she is "more inclined" to the view that they require an understanding of "the fictive world of the play" that was beyond a compositor's ken and thus they are more likely to be the work of an annotator (pp. 102-3). At this point argument becomes sheer assertion, and by referring the reader back to her Introduction Massai gives the impression that the present example is the reinforcement of a case already made. But in fact the Introduction promised that the case would be made here, so the rhetoric is circular.

    Regarding the variants in Q1-Q2-Q3 Richard 3 Massai rather unfairly claims that John Jowett "attributes them to [the printer Thomas] Creede" (p. 103) when the passage she quotes only says "Q2 may . . . have been corrected" from the copy for Q1 retained by Creede. The bigger problem, not addressed by Massai, is that in the edition she is quoting, the Oxford Shakespeare text, Jowett wrongly claimed that Q1 and Q2 were published by Creede (p. 153n102), but in fact Creede only printed (did not publish) Q2 and Q3 and Peter Short and Valentine Simmes printed Q1 Richard 3. It is clear that a simple typo explains all this: Jowett meant to say that Wise published Q1 and Q2 (but he accidentally typed 'Creede') and that hence it is possible that Q2 benefits from a reading in the manuscript copy for Q1 that Wise retained. Massai points out that Wise the publisher and not Creede the printer would have held the manuscript copy for Q1, which is true and is exactly what Jowett wrote elsewhere in the same edition (p. 116n3). Out of Jowett's typo Massai constructs a straw man. Rather than offer a new theory, Massai picks holes in Jowett's narrative and constructs a paragraph-long explanation of Creede's generally not being a careful man and hence not likely to introduce the small and unobvious corrections in Richard 3, and concludes that without Creede in the frame we are left with the agency of either Wise or Shakespeare in making the improvements. A more generous approach would have been ask to Jowett to clarify the glaring contradiction in his edition, but this would have denied Massai her straw man.

    Massai's chapter on the Pavier quartos of 1619 (pp. 106-35) does, however, offer a new and plausible interpretation of the facts. The standard narrative is that the letter of the Lord Chamberlain (William Herbert) to the Stationers' Company of May 1619, in which it was ordered that no King's men's play was to be published without the players' consent, was directed at suppressing Thomas Pavier's plan for a collected Shakespeare, perhaps because the 1623 Folio was already in planning. Indeed Lukas Erne argued that Pavier's quartos (and not the bad quartos) were the ones complained of by the Folio preliminaries. Massai is not buying this: the company order of 1619 was not directed at Pavier at all. The printers of the Pavier quartos were William and Isaac Jaggard, and it was Isaac--thus inspired by Pavier's vision of a collected Shakespeare--who persuaded the King's men to get the order stopping other stationers (not Pavier) from securing copy for the as-yet unpublished Shakespeare plays. And it was Isaac who persuaded Pavier to falsify the title-page dates so that his partial collection (sold together or individually) would seem like a gathering of old and new material and thus "whet, rather than satisfy, readers' demand" for a collected Shakespeare (p. 107). Working with Jaggard and the players this way, Pavier got their protection and got to make money lending his rights to the Folio syndicate.

    Massai thinks that her narrative answers previously hard to answer questions, such as why Pavier made such a poor attempt to fake title-pages from 20 years earlier and it also explains why Pavier was not punished by the Stationers' Company for breaking its order (p. 108). (I would have thought that Pavier's falsified title-pages were fairly convincing, since it took Greg's celebrated detective work with watermarks to reveal them.) To bolster her narrative, Massai looks to later repetitions of the Lord Chamberlain's intervention. In June 1637 and again in August 1641, successive Lords Chamberlain (Philip Herbert, William's brother, and then Robert Devereux) wrote to the Stationers' Company, invoking William Herbert's letter of 1619 as a precedent, asking it to protect court-patronized players from publication of their plays. The letter of 1637 asks the Company to check with the players that for any of their plays already entered in the Stationers' Register they are content to have the play printed, and to do this for any more of their plays that come into Stationers' Hall for entry, but nowhere does it mention taking action against stationers who have already printed plays. The letter of 1641 lists plays that had never been printed. Thus, argues Massai, the two letters suggest that the players were not able to prevent the reprinting of plays, only to keep their as-yet unprinted plays out of print (p. 109).

    Thus, on the evidence of these letters, we cannot assume that the 1619 order was supposed to cover reprints (and of course all of Pavier's quartos were reprints) and hence the 1619 letter might not have been aimed at Pavier at all. A potential objection that Massai might have forestalled is that we cannot apply the 1637 and 1641 letters to the lost 1619 letter in this way because of what had happened in the meantime: the Folio had been published in 1623. This clarified and established the rights for virtually the whole Shakespeare canon and the letters of 1637 and 1641 are thus clearly concerned with the non-Shakespearian plays of the companies named. In 1619 the rights to the Shakespeare canon had not been clearly established--as indeed the printing schedule of the Folio seems to show, with disruptions apparently due to disputes over rights--and the Lord Chamberlain's letter might well for that reason have had quite a different intent from the later letters. Massai points out that we can tell that the letter of 1637 had an effect because in the five years before the letter 13 Queen's men's plays were published, of which seven were new (in the sense of being previously unpublished), while in the five years after the letter 20 were published, of which only two were new. For the King's men, the rates are seven plays published in the five years before the letter, of which three were new, while in the five years after the letter eight plays were published of which only one was new. So, the letter did have the affect of keeping unpublished plays out of print (p. 110).

    Massai reckons that it was the dramatists such as Thomas Heywood who seemed to want their stuff published and against whom the Lord Chamberlain's letter of 1637 was written. Massai admits a problem in applying the 1637 letter to the 1619 conditions, since in fact there had been a slump in the publication of previously-unpublished plays in the 1610s (so there was little for him to prevent) and indeed the same was true in the later 1630s, just ahead of the letter of 1641. That the 1641 letter lists old unpublished plays to be protected presumably indicates that the players were planning a collection of previously-unpublished plays and wanted to stop anyone preempting it, and indeed that may have been what the 1619 did, with even a similar list attached (pp. 111-2). Greg's claim that Pavier broke the Stationers' Company order of 1619 by his quartos, and that this is why he gave them false imprints, is undermined by the fact that of the ten plays (nine quartos, The Whole Contention being two plays in one) he owned the rights to five of them, that he worked closely with the owners of the rights to three of them, and that the rights to the other two were derelict. Moreover two of the ones with false dates are ones Pavier himself owned the rights to (pp. 113-4). It was not the other stationers nor the actors Pavier wanted to deceive, it was the readers: he wanted to look like he had gathered some old printings with some new ones for a 'nonce' collection. Other 'nonce' collections had mixed title-page dates in them, and Pavier was successfully imitating those. Why do it? As a promotional build-up to the 1623 Folio.

    We usually give Edward Blount the credit for coming up with the idea for the Folio, but the Jaggards had connections with the King's men and that Blount came into the project late is suggested by his name not appearing alongside Isaac Jaggard's in the mention of the Folio in the Frankfurt book fair catalogue of 1622. Blount had the rights and the money, but Isaac Jaggard had the idea and got it from his father William's involvement with Pavier in 1619 (pp. 117-8). Isaac persuaded Pavier to make his quartos collection look like a 'nonce' work "as a pre-publicity stunt" for the Folio and to diminish its directly competing with the Folio when that came out. What would Pavier get out of it? By offering his quartos as both individual plays and a 'nonce' collection, Pavier would hedge his bets, and he would be able to lend his rights to the Folio consortium for a fee, and he might even have been a potential member of that consortium (p. 119). That cashing in on the planned Folio was seen as an potential opportunity explains Matthew Law's reprints of Richard 3 and 1 Henry 4 in 1622. The undated reprint of Romeo and Juliet in 1622 by  John Smethwick, one of the Folio consortium, shows that he wanted to get a general Shakespeare boom going but not to compete with his other project, the Folio. (This reprint is now confidently dated to 1623--see below--but that does not harm Massai's argument.) Thomas Walkley's 1622 Othello was probably also permitted pre-publicity for the Folio: after 1619 it is hard to see Walkley getting away with printing a previously-unpublished Shakespeare play without the syndicate's agreement (p. 120).

    Thus, Massai makes a plausible and nuanced case that the Pavier quartos were not piratical but part of a careful plan and that is why their corrections of their printer's copies are so good. Massai shows that when taken as a group, the Pavier reprints show certain patterns of editorial improvement, with certain directions being amplified or clarified and others (especially those useful to actors rather than readers) cut. There is an overall tendency to make the things more literary and less theatrical. As before, Massai asserts but does not prove that the changes made to the copy happened before the copy was submitted to the printshop: she assumes that no-one in the printshop was smart or careful enough to do it. Massai claims that there are similarities in the ways that stage directions are rephrased across eight of the ten plays, and quotes a few examples but without stating what she thinks is common in them; I cannot see a similarity (p. 124). In further examples, one habit is clear: the removal of redundantly repetitive ands in stage directions, but of course this is pretty easily attributed to an observant compositor. In the Pavier reprint of Oldcastle some lines amounting to a page and a half are omitted, and Massai reads this as an adjustment made to allow more whitespace around stage directions in order to make a prettier page. She argues that the cuts are clever in that they do not disrupt the sense, but is it really plausible that someone who tweaked stage directions to make them read better would also countenance such massive cuts for the sake of a good-looking page? The major example of editing of the copy for a Pavier reprint is his Q3 The Contention of York and Lancaster which is based an edited form of Q1 in which York's mangled account of his own genealogy is unmangled (pp. 126-8). True, but this has long been recognized. Compared to other reprints of the period, Pavier's are in many ways improved over the books they reprint so we should not consider his project shady (p. 132). He seems to have put money into perfecting his copy, but who did the perfecting?

    On the evidence of his reprint (Q3, 1602) of A Looking Glass for London and England, it was Pavier himself. There too, as in the Pavier 1619 reprints of A Yorkshire Tragedy and The Merchant of Venice, the reprint adds pronouns to clarify and improve stage directions: "Embrace him" becomes "She imbraceth him", "spurns her" becomes "He spurns her", and "open the letter" becomes "He opens the letter". (Since these are simply changes from the imperative to the indicative mood I cannot see the improvement, and even if we accept that the parallels--Massai has 15 in all--are compelling evidence of the same man at work, why does it have to be Pavier rather than a man he hired in 1602 and again in 1619?) Henry 5 Q1 was reprinted in 1602 by Pavier (Q2) and again by Pavier from Q1 in 1619 (Q3), and the pattern of improvements each time was the same. What Pavier had done to improve the play for his Q2 he had done again independently to improve it for Q3 (rather than reprinting directly from Q2), thus the same man was involved both times (in 1602 and in 1619) and the obvious candidate is Pavier himself (p. 134). Again, this we may call 'editing' after a fashion, but if it does not involve access to additional authoritative documents it does not transform the textual situation in the way that Massai seems to think: a clever guess by someone from Shakespeare's own time is still just a guess. For Massai, Pavier has thus been shown to be "an integral part of the editorial tradition", and in the limited sense of 'editorial' she is right, since after all Nicholas Rowe's 1709 Shakespeare is typically called 'edited' although he too used only his own wits.

    Massai turns next to the plays for which the 1623 Folio reprints an existing quarto (pp. 136-79). Massai thinks that the editors of the Oxford Complete Works of 1986 indulged in wish-fulfilment in their belief that the theatrical origins of certain Folio-texts' departures from their printed Q copy were caused by annotation of that copy by reference to a promptbook. Why would a publisher collate his printed copy against the theatrical manuscript (one not known to be radically different from it) only to recover a handful of readings? We know that for the purpose of printing authors such as John Lyly cut out the songs and dumbshows, and that the first publisher of Tamburlaine removed what he thought were theatrical frivolities for the sake of his readership. So why would the Shakespeare Folio syndicate bother to make their copy 'better' by reference to a theatrical document? This rhetorical question of Massai's, and the analogues on which it is thus based, skate over some important differences that are worth pursuing for a moment. Where it is claimed that the Folio copy was a quarto that was first annotated by reference to a manuscript, the idea is to undo the harm done by the first printer. Richard Jones's printing of Tamburlaine, on the other hand, was made from manuscript copy. Where the Folio is printed from foul papers and is our only text of the play (as in All's Well that Ends Well), no-one supposes that these papers were made more theatrical by reference to a theatrical document, although if they were it is hard to see how we would be able to tell this kind of subsequent annotation apart from simple annotation of those papers for use in the theatre. Also, to annotate the printed copy by reference to the promptbook takes the Folio text away from being a simple reprint of a quarto, and this might be helpful if the publisher of that quarto were thought likely to claim that his rights were being infringed. For the Folio project the theatre texts were the authorities but since it is easier to set type from printed copy it were handier to use that authority by having it modify an easily purchased quarto. In any case, the licensed theatrical texts ought not to be allowed out of the theatre.

    Massai compares the Folio variants from its own printed copy with the kinds of annotation made by readers in a couple of quartos, and as they are unalike she concludes that annotation of the printer's copy quarto is not the cause of the Folio variants. However, she deals only with John Dover Wilson's claim that the quarto of Love's Labour's Lost used to print the Folio had itself once been the promptbook and had annotations for performance on it. She does not address the Oxford editors' claim that the quarto used as printer's copy was annotated by reference to a promptbook in order to bring it into alignment with that promptbook. Massai says she will show that the Folio departures from its printed copy in Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost are not because Q was marked up for performance, but again no-one since Dover Wilson has made that claim. Only after disposing of straw man Dover Wilson does she turn to the Oxford claim of quartos marked up by reference to a promptbook, although she is careful to choose as a test case a play about which the Oxford editors were uncertain and admitted alternative possibilities, such as the annotator of Romeo and Juliet having only his recollections of performance to guide him. Militating against the hypothesis that a theatrical manuscript or recollections of performance were use to improve Q3 Romeo and Juliet before it was used as copy for F is the fact that on a couple of occasions it worsens the stage directions, making them less accurate an account of what must have happened on stage. Likewise, the Folio flattens out the speech prefixes of the musicians from "Fidler" and "Minstrels" in Q3 to just "Mu[sician]", thus reducing detail not enhancing it, and on some occasions the Folio gets speeches wrong that Q3 gets right, or at least more right than the Folio does in any case. Massai lists some more things that this putative annotator must have got wrong, and agrees with S. W. Reid (albeit he does not say this on the page she cites) that the Folio departures from Q3 cannot be put down solely to a Folio compositor. But she cannot accept either--because of the textual harm that would have to be attributed to him--that the annotator's authority was either a promptbook or his memory of performance. This is straining at gnats, for the Oxford editors readily conceded that if the Q3 copy for Folio Romeo and Juliet was improved by consultation of an authoritative manuscript, the process was not thorough.

    Regarding Love's Labour's Lost, Massai points out that John Kerrigan and Stanley Wells disagree on why the annotation of Q1 to make copy for F did not produce a better text than we have: Kerrigan says the annotator was slovenly and Wells says the manuscript used for the annotation was not good. (This is something of a false opposition, for Wells too argues that the annotator was slovenly.) Massai deals with the tangled speech prefixes that conceal which lord will pair off with which lady in the story (pp. 147-8), but without mentioning Manfred Draudt's argument that these couples are supposed to switch partners early on in the play because these people are like that. Massai simply asserts that the Folio departures from its Q copy are largely a matter of that Q having been sporadically annotated by a reader using nothing but his wits, but she is forced to concede that the intrusion in F of the speech prefix "Prin." halfway through a speech already assigned to the Princess of France in 2.1 cannot be explained that way and must be as Wells describes it, the effect of looking at a different textual witness in which the first 20 lines of her speech were marked for omission (pp. 148-9). (Of course, having conceded that point there is no reason for her to persist in positting an additional vector of annotation since this one alone can account for all the problems.) Looking across the Folio texts printed from existing quartos, Massai notices that the variants are not of the same kind in each case, suggesting to her that they do not all come from the same process by the same people, the putative Folio editors. Some of them (such as the part-lines added to 1 Henry 4 and 2 Henry 4 when reprinted in F from quarto copy) look like the things she has previously observed as the habits of annotating readers (pp. 151-8). There is here much repetition of arguments made earlier, but now taking as a starting point certain moments from--not comprehensive surveys of--Folio texts printed from quarto copy and arguing that they are better explained as the effect of readers annotating their copy (to improve it) than as someone sporadically collating F's printed quarto copy with a manuscript.

    Massai revives Eleanor Prosser's claim that an anonymous editor added bits to Q1 2 Henry 4 before it was used to make F (p. 153) and describes the annotator working on copy for Folio Much Ado About Nothing as someone intent on removing unnecessary characters from stage directions, and going too far in some places and not far enough in others. Massai makes the mistake of claiming that "Leonato's wife . . . is only mentioned once in the opening stage direction of both editions [Q and F]" (p. 157), but in fact she is mentioned again, in both editions, in the opening stage direction for the second act. If the F variants from its printed Q copy are all due to the prior-to-printing annotation of Q by comparison with an authoritative manuscripts, why are the outcomes so different for different plays? Why is profanity based on the name of Jesus removed from 1 Henry 4 but allowed to stand in Romeo and Juliet? For Massai, this indicates different annotators with different tastes (p. 158), but of course it could just as easily reflect differences in the authoritative manuscripts, such as one being made for first performance or revival before the ban on stage oaths and one being made for a revival after the ban.

    To discover which member of the Folio consortium engaged the annotator(s), Massai surveys each man's other projects (pp. 159-79). Edward Blount's 1632 edition of six Lyly plays, all reprints, shows no sign of this activity. To see if Isaac Jaggard might have engaged an annotating reader Massai goes on a fairly lengthy detour through the works of, and attitude towards print held by, Thomas Heywood solely to evaluate if the Jaggards' editions of A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607, 1617) show such a person at work. Answer: no. William Aspley gets the same treatment and answer, leaving just John Smethwick. Massai relies on Lynette Hunter's essay "Why has Q4 Romeo and Juliet such an intelligent editor?" (reviewed in YWES 82[2003]) and agrees that an annotator was at work on the copy for Q3 Romeo and Juliet and for Q4 Romeo and Juliet but unlike Hunter she does not think the same person was that annotator in both cases. Thus rather than being the annotator, Smethwick probably just engaged an annotator when he printed Q3 and Q4, and presumably he did the same as part of the Folio consortium.

    The first half of Massai's last chapter, "Perfecting Shakespeare in the Fourth Folio (1685)" (pp. 180-95), is a condensed reprint of her article "'Taking just care of the impression': Editorial intervention in Shakespeare's Fourth Folio, 1685" reviewed in YWES 83[2004], and the second part is an argument for relative continuity between the seventeenth-century 'editors' of Shakespeare that she has identified--her annotating readers--and their eighteenth-century successors such as Alexander Pope and Thomas Hanmer. The conclusion (pp. 196-205) observes that correcting did not end with the printing of the book: readers were enjoined to carry on the process by correcting their books. Massai ties this to the idea of the text as infinitely perfectible, fluid, and unstable. What are the consequences for editing? Massai finds fault with the New Bibliography and the recent campaign for un-editing, since both treat the book as a static object, which she thinks is an anachronistic approach since early moderns saw the book as an ongoing process. The important thing, she asserts, is to be historical about all this. Her own question remains unanswered, however, since she does not say what this historical approach would mean for editing.

    John Jowett's book Shakespeare and Text displays its author's extraordinary capacity for explaining complex textual problems, and his solutions of them, in terms that anyone can understand and then drawing out the subtle philosophical correlatives that go with his approaches. He neatly sums up recent developments by observing that in general we used to think that Q1 and Folio King Lear were imperfect witnesses to a singular antecedent authorial version, and now we are in danger of deluding ourselves that they are perfect witnesses to two equally viable authorial versions, whereas in fact the truth lies between these positions: authorial revision and corruption separate these printings (p. 3). The work of Lukas Erne has clearly moved Jowett's position somewhat, for he writes that Shakespeare "might have anticipated" that his plays would be printed but there is "little evidence that he was actively concerned" with printing (p. 4). Jowett's first chapter, "Author and Collaborator" (pp. 6-26) is a survey of the primary evidence and the recent stylometric discoveries. Throughout, the book is studded with insights that only someone stepping back from a long and close engagement with the textual detail is able to offer, as when observing that the attack on Shakespeare in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit is necessarily a compliment too, since it does not name him directly and hence assumes that Shakespeare was well enough known that readers could identify him merely by allusion (p. 7). Not every point need receive assent. Jowett claims that the spelling of scilens (for silence) in Hand D of Sir Thomas More is not known in any unShakespearian text "of the period" (p. 13), but that rather depends how flexible you are about the period: it was an accepted late-medieval spelling and is found in John Lydgate's poetry. The chapter "Theatre" (pp. 27-45) is a survey of the textual economy of the theatre, including the creation and purposes of plots and parts and how revision and adaptation occurred. There is an odd slip here: quoting Arthur Brown on Heywood's The Captives, Jowett reports that the manuscript was annotated to guide the scribe "for whom" the official 'book' was to be made, but of course Brown wrote "by whom" (p. 28). Jowett reads the Master of the Revels Henry Herbert's demand (written into the licence for The Launching of the Mary) for "fair copy hereafter" as meaning 'of this play', but since it can also be read as meaning 'in future send me fair copy' it would have been useful to know why Jowett excludes this possibility (p. 29).

    Jowett urges textual scholars to retain the term 'promptbook' in favour of more recently-proposed terms such as 'playbook' that are less loaded with nineteenth-century theatrical assumptions because it suggests the active connection with what is happening, minute by minute, on the stage. This he thinks these documents really are concerned with, especially as witnessed in their 'readying' notes, examples of which he usefully lists (pp. 32-5). He points out that taking the reference in Romeo and Juliet to "two-hours traffic" as an indication of how long the performance will run is a bit over-literal, since after all no-one would think that Henry 5 lasts sixty minutes because the Prologue says the events have been compressed into an "hourglass" (p. 36). Jowett does not accept the recently-floated idea that bad quartos are performance texts and the good quartos and Folio texts are authorial. Not only Shakespeare but also Jonson, Webster, and Fletcher tended to write long plays whose early printings--Every Man Out of his Humour (1600), The Duchess of Malfi (1623) and Humphrey Moseley's preface to the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio--indicate that the author's text was cut for performance. Thus Folio Hamlet or Henry 5 may still represent the full author's script, as represented in the promptbook, from which the actors cut a few scenes to make their performances (p. 37). Regarding the purposes for which playhouse 'plots' were created, Jowett quotes David Bradley's interpretation (that they are casting documents) as an alternative to Greg's (that they were a backstage 'cheat sheet' for forgetful performers), but Bradley's quotation is assigned to his page 120 when it in fact appears on his page 126 (p. 40, p. 206n18).

    In his chapter "The Material Book" (pp. 46-68) Jowett explains the appearance of the long-s as like "'f" without a forward crossbar", which is a little confusing for the reader as while the book-opening he presents in facsimile (from Q1 Troilus and Cressida) has long-s as he describes it (with a crossbar to the left of the stem but not to the right of it) the modern typeface with which Oxford University Press has represented this sort has no crossbar at all (p. 48). Jowett offers a neat and succinct summary of the process of entry in the Stationers' Register although he once (p. 51) treats 'authority'--which the entry for Troilus and Cressida needs more of--as a matter of "trade regulation" rather than ecclesiastical permission; elsewhere he follows Peter Blayney's accepted distinction of allowance = authority (= external approval from the church) and licence (= internal approval from the Stationers' Company). Jowett reckons that Blayney's estimates for the profitability of printing a play are a bit low: it cannot be the case that first editions did little more than break even and all the profits were in reprints, since only 50% of books achieved reprints (p. 53). Under these conditions, who would bother doing a first edition if there were a less than even chance of eventually making a profit on it? (I am not sure I agree with this logic: with nearly half the gambles paying off and the rest not losing any money, most gamblers would be happy to keep taking a chance.) Jowett makes the excellent point about the practice of compositors setting by formes rather than seriatim--and one I have not heard before--that this brings about the completion of a quarto forme at regular time intervals (one after every four pages are set) whereas seriatim work completes them unevenly (one after seven pages, and then after one, and then seven, and so on). Jowett explains the workings of a printing press well, but the description is let down by a picture of a press that has no frisket in place so it is not clear just how this operates as a mask to keep unwanted ink off the sheet to be printed (p. 55).

    In his chapter "The First Folio" (pp. 69-92), Jowett gives an account of the Pavier quartos of 1619, including a reference to Massai's account of them but not crediting her with the new idea that Pavier was in league with the Folio syndicate: Jowett sticks to the old story that Pavier was working against their interests, but then at the end wonders if Pavier was, perhaps inadvertently, helping to get the Folio project started by showing what was possible in republishing Shakespeare. (For Massai, as we have seen, Pavier was doing just this intentionally.) Jowett makes the familiar assertion that without the Folio we would not know of sixteen of Shakespeare's plays, but actually this counter-factual is not necessarily so straightforward. If no-one had thought to make the Folio then it is possible that publishers might have issued the unpublished plays in individual quartos over the succeeding years; after all, The Two Noble Kinsmen did not get its first quarto until 1634. Jowett's claim about the book's influence is well made, however. As he points out, as recently as Peter Alexander's 1951 Complete Works The Tempest was printed as the first play for no other reason than that the Folio had it so. In "Mapping the Text" (pp. 93-114) Jowett makes the point that the character commonly called Lady Capulet is merely an editorial invention: the Capulets are not aristocrats; he is just Capulet and she is his wife (p. 99). Editors could, he argues, synthesize the view of Barbara Mowat that editions should be concerned primarily about the needs of the reader (not so much the author) with Greg's distinction between the accidentals and the substantives, and so produce texts in which "matters of incidence and presentation would be ceded to the interests of the reader, while the substantives of the text would be recognized as having integrity in terms of their origin" (pp. 113-4).

    Jowett's chapter on "Emendation and Modernization" (pp. 115-35) offers an excellent example of the obligation to undo assumed censorship even where we have no access to the uncensored version other than by inference. When Angelo says "heauen in my mouth, | As if I did but onely chew his name" in Folio Measure for Measure, he must originally have been given the line "God in my mouth". Jowett concedes that there is idealism in emending in "pursuit of a prior text", meaning the author's manuscript, but rightly insists that this is less pernicious than the idealism of being willing only "to correct the errors in a document to no other criterion than an ideal version of itself" (p. 116). This prior manuscript was not necessarily a perfect expression of the mind creating it: Jowett gives examples of Hand D of Sir Thomas More not writing what he meant, as when making slips and also when forcing two verse lines into one because he has reached the end of the page and has no more room (pp. 117-8). Regarding "Versification and Stage Directions (pp. 136-57), Jowett makes the important point that when originally written the stage directions were meant to determine what would happen on the stage, while in a modern edition they are attempting to account for what might or must have happened on the stage, and hence these two kinds of writing are "ontologically distinct" (p. 149). He might nonetheless be overstating the case. We could say that the modern stage directions are showing what the original ones would have looked like if the original writers and readers, the actors, had our modern sense of how much you need to tell someone about the action. Looked at in this way, old and modern stage directions belong in the same ontological category, and we can proceed by analogy with the modernization of spelling and punctuation.

    There has been a recent demand that editors cease making explicit what they think the stage action should be, should cease being  prescriptive in their invented stage directions, and should retain the multitude of possibilities latent in the incomplete or missing directions in the early printings. Jowett offers the splendid rejoinder that this view overlooks the distinct possibility that rather than experiencing such moments as a range of performance possibilities the unaided reader might well simply have no idea what is happening on the stage (p. 155). Jowett ends this chapter by quoting the opening moments of Timon of Athens from the Oxford Complete Middleton (reviewed above) but unfortunately not entirely accurately in terms of typography. The indenting of the second part of the split verse line is not properly aligned in the last line of the quotation. The fact that the Oxford Complete Middleton puts the speech prefix on a line of its own for a speech of verse (except where someone else completes a split verse line) is misrepresented. In the quotation here the speech prefix is on the same line as the first word of the speech, and indeed that is the cause of the misalignment of the final split verse line. A pair of square brackets around an editorial stage direction are italicized in the quotation and should not be for they are not italicized in the Oxford Complete Middleton. Another slip: "As noted in Chapter 5, John Dover Wilson's Cambridge series employed quotation marks to identify wordings taken from the base text" (p. 156) but in fact there is no such point made anywhere earlier in this book, so presumably this is a relic from an earlier state of the text. Jowett's last chapter, "Texts for Readers" (pp. 158-69), is largely a survey of the digital future, especially the Internet Shakespeare Editions project.

    Thomas Merriam's book Co-authorship in King John has the same thesis as his previous one on Henry 8 (reviewed in YWES 86[2007]): the play was co-authored and Shakespeare did not write the anti-Catholic bits. Merriam reports that most people accept that King John is based on the anonymous two-part play The Troublesome Reign of King John. John Bale's King Johan and Troublesome Reign make John seem a proto-Protestant and portray Catholicism as bad, but Shakespeare seems to have evened the balance somewhat. Yet there remain three pro-Protestant speeches in King John and they are all in 3.1, and also distinctly Catholic sentiments remain. Critics have seen this as another demonstration of myriad-minded Shakespeare seeing both sides of an argument, but for Merriam the contradiction comes from co-authorship. Merriam begins with a postulate: in a study of relative frequency of words by an author, the median frequency should be close to the mean frequency (p. 15) This principle is refreshingly well explained by Merriam, which is not always the case with such research. Merriam provides a table of the relative frequency of the word and in 27 plays of undisputed Shakespearian sole authorship, ranked from Henry 5 (the highest, in which 3.7% of all words are and) to The Two Gentlemen of Verona (where only 2.35% of all words are and), and as expected the mean frequency (about 2.8%) is close the median frequency (held by Romeo and Juliet, 14th out of 27 plays in the list, with an and frequency of about 2.8%) (p. 16). This principle of symmetry (median equalling mean) in relation of one word's relative frequency should exist too in the subdivisions of a play if it is all by one hand. Merriam divides King John into 27 sections and puts each section into his ranking order table for 27 plays. The outcome is that ten chunks of King John use and way more often than the Shakespeare play that uses and the most, which is Henry 5, and thereby upset the median/mean symmetry (p. 17-8). Likewise for the pronoun I, the adverb not, and the pronoun it, which are all used way too little in King John (p. 19-24). Moreover, for these four tests (and, I, not, it) it is the same subsections of King John that are the outliers: the prime cases at the tops of the tables being units 1, 11a, 17, and 19 and at the bottoms being 14, 18, and 20. This suggests dual authorship. To refine the technique, Merriam brings in a further 17 such test words and makes a combined table of all 21 test words' results, to which he applies Principal Component Analysis. This confirms that certain bits of King John are much unlike the rest of Shakespeare (pp. 25-6). Interestingly, the bits of King John that critics have praised as its core great scenes are well within the Shakespeare norm, and the really strong outlier is the crucial hinge speech of 20 lines by the Bastard in 4.3 where he seems to take on responsibility for the future well-being of England. Take out the 15 outliers (representing half the play) and the remaining chunks fit perfectly well into the Shakespeare profile (pp. 27-8).

    Then comes a new approach to the problem (pp. 29-34). Merriam takes 92 words that occur 781 times in Tamburlaine but only 83 times in As You Like It and takes 104 words that occur 693 times in As You Like It but only 30 times in Tamburlaine. (Here Merriam makes the types/tokens distinction but does not explain it. A simple illustration is that this review contains 31,458 words (tokens) in total, but many of them are repetitions such as and and the, so that the number of different words (types) is only 4,826). Thus the Tamburlaine set is words favoured by Marlowe (and a lot of them seem to be about power), and the As You Like It set is words favoured by Shakespeare. The words chosen for these two sets are not the usual filler words (like and), so we need to check if they are subject to authorial influence (one writer to another) or vary by a play's subject matter. Merriam does this by showing that for 27 Shakespeare plays, three Marlowes, and three Peeles, the Shakespeare words occur way more often in the Shakespeare plays (always more often than they occur in the Marlowe or Peele) and the Marlowe words occur way more often in the Marlowe plays (always more often than in the Shakespeare or the Peele). Thus the frequency with which these words appear is a good discriminator of these authors. Merriam also puts usage of and in the same table and it follows the same pattern: all the Shakespeares (except Henry 5) use and less often than the Marlowes and Peeles do. Apply the same test with the 27 subsections of King John described above and they more or less fall into two camps: the sections that the previous tests suggested were Shakespeare are at the top of the table (with lots of uses of the Shakespeare words) and the non-Shakespeare sections are down the bottom because using lots of the Marlowe words, albeit two sections of each type are in the wrong camps. E. A. J. Honigmann noticed that the word right occurs more often in King John than any other Shakespeare play (3 Henry 6 is next in rank), and using this instead of and in the comparison of the 26 sections of King John with the 27 Shakespeare canon plays the same general outcome appears: mostly the non-Shakespearian sections are at the top (heavy users of right), then come the 27 Shakespeare plays, then the Shakespearian parts of King John down at the bottom as infrequent users of right. In previous tests it was 27 sections of King John not 26, and the difference is that one of those 27 was itself a sub-subsection, 11a, that Marriam has now left out of the argument without saying why. On page 17 Merriam promised he would later explain this 11a sub-subsection but in fact the reason for its existence is never made explicit.

    Merriam then turns from numbers to language, and especially the varieties of irony (pp. 35-44). Some ironies are hard to make sense of: the Bastard speaks favourably of the French war to support Arthur's claim while himself following King John loyally, he rails on commodity and then says he will follow it too, and he mocks Hubert's bombast and then emulates it. These incoherent ironies might come from co-authorship, while other ironies Merriam finds coherent as perhaps allusions to Elizabeth's 1 own official bastardy and suggesting little Arthur as a kind of Mary Queen of Scots figure. John is like Shakespeare's Richard 3 in being a younger brother claiming the throne at the expense of his nephews, and Shakespeare emphasized the link by making Arthur, who is a young man in Holinshed and in Troublesome Reign, into a child, and by making him (like Prince Richard in Richard 3) be "rhetorically precocious" (p. 42). Also, the suborning of Hubert is like the suborning of Tyrrell. All this is very daring on Shakespeare's part since it makes John look especially bad, whereas Holinshed made John an innocent victim of Rome and Bale made him a hero. The anti-Catholicism of King John, which is greatly attenuated from the source play Troublesome Reign, is concentrated in 3.1.61-105, the arrival of the papal legate Cardinal Pandolf and his abuse by John (p. 45), and Merriam thinks it significant that some particularly anti-Catholic lines in 3.1 were struck out in a copy of the second Folio used at the English Jesuit college at Valladolid in Spain (pp. 46-7). Merriam explains the Catholic distinction between a pardon (a release from the guilt of a sin) and an indulgence (a release from the temporal punishment for an already forgiven sin), and observes that section 11a of King John (3.1.91-3) mixes up these ideas. So too does Doctor Faustus when referring to "some ghost, newly crept out of Purgatory, come to beg a pardon of your Holiness" since ghosts in Purgatory have already been forgiven.

    Merriam thinks both this section of King John and Doctor Faustus mix up the idea in order to blackguard Catholicism by suggesting that the Roman church sells forgiveness, which it does not. Round about the same part of King John there are words borrowed from John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which itself may have got its account of King John from Bale, author of King Johan. Why would Shakespeare be Protestant around a time when he was also mocking Oldcastle? He would not: this bit is the work of another dramatist (pp. 47-54). The same bit of the play, Pandolf's threat to John, contains an apparent promise in advance of forgiveness (indeed, even canonization) for the sin of regicide, which is just what the Protestant extremists (and Troublesome Reign) claimed that Catholics were promised, but which in fact the Pope (in declaring her subjects' duty to Elizabeth to be void in 1570) specifically avoided promising. The Pope did not call for regicide, only disobedience. That Pandolf in King John offers as reward for regicide the chance to be "worshipped as a saint" (3.1.103) itself echoes anti-Catholic wilful confusion of the matter, for of course saints are venerated not worshipped, a distinction that Shakespeare himself makes in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (2.4.142-51). Moreover, there is ample evidence in other plays that Shakespeare knew all these theological niceties backwards and forwards. (pp. 54-74). Merriam's last chapter (pp. 75-83) is a response to Roland Mushat Frye's Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (1963), which claimed that Shakespeare's art is essentially secular. Frye assumed that Elizabethans were by default Protestants and adherents of the ideas of Martin Luther and John Calvin, but Eamon Duffy has overturned this assumption. Frye relied upon the expurgation of a second Folio in Valladolid, which attended to theological matters clustered in Henry 8 and King John, but in both cases it was the non-Shakespearian bits (as established for the former by James Spedding and for the latter by this study) that attracted the Roman Catholic blue pencil. There's also the deletion of a bit of 1 Henry 6, but it is a bit that Gary Taylor attributes to Nashe. Also gone are the conjuring scene and the unmasking of Simpcox's supposed miracle in 2 Henry 6, which latter Merriam suspects is not by Shakespeare. Merriam's conclusion is that in general King John is less anti-Catholic than Troublesome Reign, but in specific bits it is much more anti-Catholic, which is just the kind of evasion recusants had to practice. That is to say, co-authorship was a way to state your view without equivocation, since the other writer could give the opposing view. This sensible and well-argued ending is, to my mind spoilt by a pointless application of Bayes Theorem to test the likelihood that King John is co-authored, based on plucking from the air certain variables such as 0.7 being the consensus likelihood of single authorship and <=0.5 being the likelihood that Heminges and Condell were telling the truth in describing the Folio as the works of one man.

    The last relevant monograph this year is Brian Vickers's Shakespeare, 'A Lover's Complaint', and John Davies of Hereford. This is a study of Davies himself as a poet, and of the scholarship that has (wrongly) confirmed the attribution of A Lover's Complaint to Shakespeare, especially that done by Kenneth Muir and MacDonald P. Jackson. Refuting those, and introducing a battery of tests that show A Lover's Complaint to be typical of Davies but wildly untypical of Shakespeare, Vickers expands upon an argument first made in an article called "A Rum 'Do'" in the Times Literary Supplment in 2003 and reviewed in YWES 84[2005]. The book-length version uses literary-critical skills where the stylometric case is not proven, and as such can only deal in probabilities and need not detain us here. Three book-format collections of essays contain matter relevant to this review. The most important is Andrew Murphy's Shakespeare and the Text. Helen Smith's essay "The Publishing Trade in Shakespeare's Time" (pp. 17-34) is a fine introduction to the background for our topic, but has nothing new of direct concern to this review. In "Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590-1619" (pp. 35-56) Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier track the popularity of Shakespeare as an author (especially of poetry) in his life and shortly thereafter, recording who bought what and what they said about him. They claim that the publishing of The Rape of Lucrece in octavo in 1598 was probably a way of signalling its high status, since a quarto was considered ephemeral whereas an octavo had class. (Actually, this is a tricky argument to make, since Stallybrass and Chartier stress Shakespeare's being known in print more as a poet than a dramatist; they ought not to remain silent on the fact that his Richard Duke of York/3 Henry 6 appeared in octavo in 1595.) Stallybrass and Chartier repeat approvingly De Grazia's claim (from Shakespeare Verbatim) that "Renaissance 'quotation marks'" were the opposite of modern ones: they marked public property whereas ours mark private property. They ought to acknowledge Paulina Kewes's and Edmund G. C. King's independent demonstrations that in fact the use of the symbols in the modern way was common long before 1800, which is when De Grazia--for whom they exemplify the emergence of the Foucauldian 'author-function' around 1800--dates the change.

    In "Shakespeare Writ Small: Early Single Editions of Shakespeare's Plays" (pp. 56-70), Thomas L. Berger reports that the word promptbook is not  recorded before 1809, which is indeed what the print and old CD-ROM versions of the OED indicate, but in fact the online version now has examples from 1768 and 1772 (p. 65). Likewise Berger says that prompter in the theatrical sense is first used in Othello, but online OED has a use from 1585. Strangely, Berger here repeats, as if he accepts them, a number of putative rules about early-modern performance that are not universally agreed upon: that the prompter sat on the stage, that entrances and exits were anticipatorily marked in the promptbook, and that only the first and last words of letters spoken on stage were recorded in the promptbook. Berger wrongly gives the date of the expiration of the lease on the site of the Theatre: it was 1597 not 1598 (p. 66). Anthony James West's "The Life of the First Folio in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" is a history of the owners of the book, and includes a lament about the loss through theft of the exemplar with the longest recorded provenance, the Durham University copy. Since the publication of this essay that exemplar has been recovered and returned. In his "The Birth of the Editor" (pp. 93-108) Andrew Murphy implicitly rejects Sonai Massai's argument (reviewed above) by insisting that the editing of Shakespeare changed radically in the early-eighteenth century, which development he reviews. Paul Werstine's ironically titled essay "The Science of Editing" (pp. 109-27) begins by pointing the reader to the few occasions when the Cambridge/Macmillan edition (1863-6) speculates about the printer's copy. In fact, Werstine's page number references do not work for the 1863-6 edition and he must be working from a reprint that repaginated the texts. His references fit the 1891 reprint so maybe Werstine used that without realizing that the pagination had changed from the first edition. Werstine thinks that in the first half of the twentieth century it was by no means agreed that there was a new and unified approach to Shakespearian bibliography: only retrospectively did it seem like a 'new' bibliography. (Werstine believes that the term New Bibliography came into being with F. P. Wilson's 1942 talk on the topic, but in fact Greg himself used it as early as 1919.) Werstine usefully surveys the disagreements within early New Bibliography, including Greg's later realization that his own 'memorial reconstruction' theory for Q1 Merry Wives of Windsor does not fit all the evidence perfectly. A. W. Pollard and John Dover Wilson's alternative and convoluted explanations of the origins of bad quartos (based on multiple revisions), outlined in 1919, were swept away by Peter Alexander's demonstration of memorial reconstruction lying behind The Contention of York and Lancaster and Richard Duke of York, for which Werstine here neglects to give a date: it was 1924.

    Werstine credits E. K. Chambers with being the first to spot that Pollard was wrong about the relationship between non-entry in the Stationers' Register and publication of a bad quarto, although he gives the wrong reference: it is pages 186-7 of the second volume of The Elizabethan Stage. Strangely, Werstine declares himself convinced by Blayney's argument that playbooks were not terribly popular (and so were not worth a stationer's getting himself into trouble over by piracy) despite Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser's demolition of it (reviewed in YWES 86[2007]). Werstine rehearses his familiar objection to the hypothesis that Hand D of Sir Thomas More is Shakespeare's, and renews his long-running attack on the means by which Greg derived the category 'foul papers'. Greg compared Edward Knight's transcript of John Fletcher's play Bonduca to the printed text and decided that certain differences (such as reordering of lines) were created by the difficulty Knight had in reading what must have been (Greg inferred) crabbed authorial papers. In rejecting Greg's article on Bonduca for publication in The Library (it did not reach print until 1990) Pollard rightly pointed out that we cannot extrapolate from Bonduca to anything else as it seems unique, especially since comparison of other two-text plays never produces the kinds of misplaced lines seen in Bonduca. Werstine rightly dates the entry of the word promptbook into the language to the late-eighteenth century, and it is a pity that Murphy, as editor of the volume, did not notice that this contradicts what Berger wrote earlier (p. 65) about its first being recorded in the early-nineteenth century.

    Leah Marcus's essay "Editing Shakespeare in the Postmodern Age" (pp. 128-44) is a loosely-linked collection of assertions about how postmodernism's approval of everything discontinuous, inconsistent, fragmented, impure, unruly, borrowed, and imbricated chimes well with how we now think about Shakespeare. From an editing point of view, this offers the fashionable nonsense that we should leave speech prefixes unregularized, not mark speeches as 'aside', and leave stage directions incomplete or productively imprecise. The speech prefix for Edmund in Q1 King Lear is uniformly some shortened version of Bastard so Marcus thinks that this "almost nameless" character is "chastely regularized" in modern editions that make him uniformly Edmund (p. 134). In pursuit of this postmodern anonymity, Marcus overlooks the fact that not only is he called Edmund in the stage directions but his name is uttered 30 times by characters on stage, including more than once by Edmund himself. In theatre someone's name is precisely what is spoken, not what is written in the script and least of all what is written in the speech prefixes. Another ironic slip is that Marcus quotes, she says, from the Folio Hamlet the lines "whose griefes | Beares such an Emphasis? Whose phrase of Sorrow" and that thus "unemended by modern editors" these lines display what we would think of as bad grammar (p. 138). If fact her quotation is emended, for in F it is "whose phrase" not "Whose phrase". Marcus or a copy-editor or printer, presumably under the pressure of modern norms (in which an exclamation point ends a sentence and hence must be followed by a capital letter), has unconsciously emended.

    In "Shakespeare and the Electronic Text" (p. 145-61) Michael Best gives a history of electronic Shakespeares and a survey of some current projects, plus an indication of the current technical limitations. A small slip is that he claims that the Oxford Complete Works came out on CD-ROM in 1988 (p. 147), but in fact it was on what are now almost unreadable 5.25 inch floppy disks. Regarding the technical means for preventing users copying material that one makes available to them over the Internet, Best notes that "video clips can be streamed rather than downloaded" (p. 150). As the YouTube generation is well aware, streaming stops only the naive beginner from copying the stuff. The Internet offers many pieces of software that will capture an incoming video stream and turn it back into a single file that can be saved and reused when offline. David Bevington's "Working with the Text: Editing in Practice" (pp. 165-84) surveys the textual problems of 1 Henry 6 (which he concludes are essentially intractable) and then Othello and Troilus and Cressida. Bevington thinks that in 1 Henry 6 Beaufort (the Bishop of Winchester) makes his "first appearance, as he enters with his men to forbid access to the Tower of London" in 1.4 (p. 169), but in fact he is already bickering with Gloucester in the play's opening scene. In a book aimed at textual non-specialists, it is confusing to write (of Troilus and Cressida) that editors have disagreed "whether the quarto or the Folio text was derived, with changes, from the other" (p. 177) since the non-specialist is going to ask herself how a quarto made in 1609 could possibly derive from a Folio made in 1623. Bevington is referring to the underlying manuscripts of these printings, and it is a shame to confuse the non-specialist by omitting to say so.

    Sonia Massai's "Working with the Texts: Differential Readings" (pp. 185-203) is a history of King Lear editions from the seventeenth century to the present, and thus is somewhat repetitious of the historical narrative offered in Murphy's chapter. Samuel Johnson, she notes, thought that Shakespeare revised the text underlying Q1 King Lear to make the text underlying the Folio version, and yet, like R. A. Foakes in his 1997 Arden3 edition, Johnson kept in his edition things that he thought Shakespeare was quite right to cut when turning whatever underlay Q into whatever underlay F. Massai says that we have Rowe to thank, via a scene location note, for the 'heath' that people imagine Lear being mad upon. Or rather, Rowe probably got it from Nahum Tate's adaptation (represented in his 1681 edition) that first set Lear on a 'heath', which Rowe presumably saw in performance. (Perhaps I am underestimating the Restoration theatre's realism, but I have trouble imagining so distinctive a landscape as to permit the word 'heath' to travel, as it were, by sight; why might not Rowe simply have read Tate's text?) The last essay is Neil Rhodes's "Mapping Shakepeare's Contexts: Doing Things with Databases" (pp. 204-20), which explains how to teach using large-text corpora and does not really fit with the rest of the book except near the end when Rhodes lists some of the outcomes of teaching projects, which are mini-surveys of the books that name Cuthbert Burby and Peter Short in their imprints. It also contains a couple of errors: the date of Q2 Romeo and Juliet is given as 1589 instead of 1599, and the printer of Q1 Romeo and Juliet is given as just John Danter despite the certainty that Edward Allde printed some of the sheets, as established by Chiaki Hanabusa in 1997.

    Afterwords to collections of essays are usually innocuous and easily ignored, but John Drakakis's (pp. 221-38) stands out for a number of reasons. It starts with irrelevant reflections on the recent interest in objects instead of subjects in early-modern literary studies (deriving from the work of Hugh Grady and Jean Howard, whom Drakakis does not mention) and then turns to book history. Drakakis's attempts to weave a sentence or two about each of the preceding chapters into his own tedious account of textual variation is so clumsy as to constitute an insult to the contributors. Particularly egregious is the way that Anthony James West's work is tacked onto a point being made by Drakakis (p. 230), and with one essay Drakakis simply gives up and admits he can find no connection at all: "But this is a different kind of epistemological discourse from that traversed by Michael Best, who in chapter 8 above is concerned to identify what is available electronically to readers of Shakespeare's texts". Even on its own terms (that is, aside from the duty to argue for the chapters' coherence), Drakakis's argument is weak, and he gets wrong simple things like the Marxist notion of a commodity (p. 225). He thinks that it is the fact of being produced in order to be exchanged for money that makes something a commodity (and thus early books qualify), whereas in truth it is the attribute of being indistinguishable from another of its kind, as with, say, the notional barrel of Brent crude oil that is traded around the world. This matters because it is the realization that early books are not identical even within a single edition (because of press variants) that has recently brought postmodernists and poststructuralists into the discipline.

    Drakakis gets wrong the title of Honigmann's The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (p. 228), and surprisingly, having just glanced at Werstine's essay in this book in which the history of Greg's invention of the category 'foul papers' is given and Greg is shown to have extrapolated much too far from one document (the transcript of Bonduca), Drakakis nonetheless shamelessly uses the term 'foul papers' to describe the likely printer's copy for Q1 The Merchant of Venice. Drakakis bemoans the fact that no-one has had the courage to print a modern edition of The Merchant of Venice with variable speech prefixes for Jew and Shylock as in the early printing, and claims that this is because we labour under "some stable conception of dramatic 'character'" (p. 229) Of course, he ought to know that dramatic characters are stable--not once is a character in an early-modern play supposed to be played by more than one actor--and that this stability is reified in the single actor's 'part' for each character. The postmodern approach cannot destabilize the author and his characters at once, as Tiffany Stern's anti-authorial, 'part'-centered, research shows. Drakakis implicitly insults his fellow contributor Marcus by silently modernizing her American spelling when quoting her book Unediting the Renaissance and dropping a couple of her words ("to its"), and he seems to think that the Arden3 edition of Hamlet contains 4 texts: the edited one plus Q1, Q2, and F (p. 231). In fact it contains edited versions of Q1, Q2, and F.

    Drakakis gives the date of 1594 for Famous Victories of Henry V but in fact it was published in 1598 and first performed 1583-8 according to Alfred Harbage's Annals (p. 233). He also seems to totally misunderstand the argument for putting Oldcastle into speech prefixes in 1 Henry 4 and he absurdly wonders aloud if Shakespeare's manuscript had "Falstaff" in speech prefixes but that in writing the dialogue Shakespeare tried to gesture towards "the model", that is the Lollard martyr. Drakakis gives a quotation about the Oldcastle controversy supposedly from the Textual Companion to the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare but it is not on the page he cites (p 509), which is about King Lear. More misquoting follows (p. 234), this time of Greg ("comes so glibly" rendered as "comes glibly"), and with the end of his contribution in sight he is not even grammatical: "all the inconsistencies . . . is because" (p. 235). (In the ellipsis was a singular noun and that seems to have distracted him.) In a single sentence Drakakis manages to get wrong the working practices of the early-modern printshop and of modern cinema in imagining compositors leaving sheets on the printshop floor just as directors leave rushes on the floor (p. 237). Of course, compositors did not handle sheets (that was the work of pressmen) and rushes are not discarded but used to make a workprint to be edited; only then are bits discarded, and by editors not by directors. In the bibliography to the book I noticed only one error: on page 254 there is a typo in URL for the Text Encoding Initiative's wiki entry on how to deal with non-hierarchical textual structures. It should be <http://www.tei-c.org/wiki/index.php/SIG:Overlap> not <http://www.teic.org/wiki/index.php/SIG:Overlap>.

    The annual Shakespeare Yearbook was this year themed The Shakespeare Apocrypha and contains essays relevant to this review. The title of John Jowett's essay "Shakespeare Supplemented" (pp. 38-73) comes from Jacques Derrida's work and he shows how high French literary theory can illuminate textual studies. Jowett begins with Erne's point that for Heminges and Condell to be castigating the bad quartos in their Folio preliminaries would be odd, since none had appeared for a long time, but that they might be referring to the recent Pavier quartos. Jowett gives the narrative and chronology of the Pavier quartos which, because the seriously fake imprints begin only part-way through the manufacture of the collection, looks like a reaction to the Stationers' Company receipt of a letter from the Lord Chamberlain preventing publication of King's men's plays without the players' consent. Here, as in Shakespeare and Text reviewed above, Jowett considers the possibility that the players knew of Pavier's project and even tacitly approved for their own reasons. Jowett investigates just why seven more plays were added to the second issue of the third Folio (1664) and gives a history of the Shakespeare apocrypha in the eighteenth century, and then the nineteenth-century (when a whole new slew of apocrypha were added by the work of Ludwig Tieck), and on into the twentieth century. His main point is that  the hard boundaries of the canon are made by book production, not theatrical production, and that we do not need to accept them. Since we are sceptical of binaries such as good/bad quarto and foul-papers/fair-copy, why not the binary of "canonical and" (p. 68). That is how Jowett's essay ends, with what I take to be a Derridean joke, although it would be equally amusing if Jowett's typescript put the last words 'under erasure' and someone misread this as simple deletion.

    Michael Egan's "Woodstock's Golden Metamorphosis" (pp. 75-115) is literary criticism, based on Egan's false attribution of the play to Shakespeare; it reads a bit oddly coming as it does after Jowett's masterful account of the categorization of the apocrypha. Richard Preiss's "A Play Finally Anonymous" (pp. 117-39) is a work about the theatre and publishing history of Anonymous's play Mucedorus. Likewise, "A Fear of 'Ould' Plays: How Mucedorus Brought Down the House and Fought for Charles II in 1652" (pp. 141-66) by Victor Holtcamp explores Rowe's account of an illicit performance of this play (in which the floor gave way) in 1652. Scott Maisano's "Shakespeare's Dead Sea Scroll: On the Apocryphal Appearance of Pericles" (pp. 167-93) is a literary-critical essay arguing that Q1 Pericles's being a bad quarto is actually part of what the play dramatises, its own status as a recollection, a retelling of sources. Paul Edmondson's "'Beyond the Fringe'?: Receiving, Adapting, and Performing The London Prodigal" (pp. 195-221) is literary criticism and theatre history of this play. In "The Actors in Sir Thomas More" (pp. 223-40) Tom Rutter argues that just as in other Munday plays (he considers John a Kent and John a Cumber and The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon), Sir Thomas More shows just how bad amateur actors are in order to show how good the professionals putting on the play are (as indeed The Taming of A Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream do).

    The significance of Gerald Downs's essay is clear from its title, "A Question Not to be Askt: Is Hand D a Copy?" (pp. 241-66). Downs revives some old claims that features of Hand D can be explained by eye-skip of a copyist and he works through each piece of evidence. Downs thinks it unlikely that the deletion in "nor that the elamentes | wer not all appropriat to ther yo^r Comfortes" is authorial (p. 246), but it seems to me that the author has forgotten that he is in the subjunctive mood (what if your case was as the strangers' case?) and thinks for a moment he is describing the strangers' case directly. Downs considers it quite impossible for an author to write "ymagin that yo^u see the wretched straingers | their babyes at their backes, and w^t their poor lugage | plodding tooth portes and costes for transportacion" since luggage cannot plod (p. 247), but surely the subject (strangers) can be separated from the verb (plodding) by this parenthetical clause without damage to the meaning. Downs works through Giorgio Melchiori's readings of the evidence for currente calamo correction and tries to undermine each one (p. 248). Of course, this becomes a matter of how convincing one finds Downs's hypotheses versus Melchiori's, for neither has an absolutely irrefutable piece of evidence. If Hand D is a transcription, it is surely not one by which a scribe would want to advertise his work.

    As for who actually composed the words, Downs thinks that styolmetry cannot go to work on a piece this short (p. 251). This is not so: MacDonald P. Jackson's "The date and authorship of Hand D's contribution to Sir Thomas More: Evidence from 'Literature Online'" (reviewed in YWES 87[2008]) established conclusively that, leaving aside who owns the handwriting, the words in Hand D's contribution to the play were composed by Shakespeare. Perhaps, since they are not very different, Hands C and D are the same hand? If so, asks Down, why did the same man come back to his own writing (at line 237) to delete two and a half lines and replace them with a simple bridge "tell me but this"? Because he realized he had botched the copying in the first place (p. 252-3). As before, Downs's hypothesis relies on this being the work of an especially slovenly scribe. Throughout Downs's essay are infelicities of layout, such as the mechanical starting of a new paragraph after each inset quotation, even where there is no new idea but rather the continuation of an old one. Also, the occasional quotation of the manuscript in modernized form is unhelpful, as is the failure to mention that when quoting from Greg's Malone Society Reprints edition of the play, the corrections identified by Harold Jenkins in the 1961 reissue of that edition have been applied. It is hard to know to whom one should attribute these infelicities, as Downs himself is publicly on record as being in dispute with the journal Shakespeare Yearbook, which he claims published the article without his authority after it was accepted elsewhere and which did not give him the opportunity to make corrections in proof.

    The remainder of the book contains essays of only tangential relevance to this review. In "Apocryphal Agency: A Yorkshire Tragedy and Early Modern Authorship" (pp. 267-91), Michael Saenger offers literary criticism of the play, and its relation to the construction of authorship via title-pages. Jeffrey Kahan's "Canonical Breaches and Apocryphal Patches" (pp. 293-316) is a tour through others' arguments about attribution, picking holes in them by selective quotation; becomes increasingly bizarre as it progresses and ends with the suggestion that Edward 3's entry into the canon was a reaction to the attacks of September 11 2001, which made it topical. Nicola Bennett and Richard Proudfoot write about the Royal Shakespeare Company production of the same play, and the ways in which it failed to help make the case for Shakespearian authorship ("'Tis a Rightful Quarrel Must Prevail': Edward III at Stratford", pp. 317-38). The final three essays in the book are not on its theme and are of no interest to this review. Equally, Comparative Excellence: New Essays on Shakespeare and Johnson edited by Eric Rasmussen and Aaron Santesso is a fine collection of essays, but really more about the history of Shakespeare's reception and mediation (in print and on the stage), and the history of editing in the eighteenth century, than it is about the state of the text itself, so it is outside the scope of this review.

    Two essays appeared in a collection that is otherwise irrelevant to this review. Colin Burrow, whose Oxford Shakespeare edition of The Sonnets was reviewed in YWES 83[2004], offers a defence of modern editing, as opposed to the fashionable un-editing ('Editing the Sonnets', in Michael Schoenfeldt (ed.) A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets (Oxford: Blackwell [2007])). Burrows provides an excellent guide to the textual situation of the 1609 quarto and Benson's 1640 edition, and makes a convincing argument that Malone's driving impulse was not so much "proud discovery of the biographical foundations of the sonnets" or anything else to do with the works themselves but rather the "correction of the work of others" (p. 152). The un-editors (he identifies Margreta De Grazia and Randall McLeod) are too unsympathetic to the ordinary reader who wants to hear the poetry without having her sense of what constitutes a sentence challenged by unfamiliar typography, orthography, and punctuation. In the process they make a fetish of the object instead of a fetish of authorial intention, which is what they accuse their opponents of doing. McLeod's argument for retaining the reading "They had still enough your worth to sing" (Sonnet 106) instead of the usual emendation to "skill enough" was made on the basis of the st ligature--a compositor cannot select a t instead of a k by accident since they are linked to the s--but it overlooks the obvious objection that a compositor could simply have misread his copy, and in any case skill is the reading in early-seventeenth century manuscript copies that may descend independently of Q. In the same collection, Arthur F. Marotti deals with the copying of sonnets from printed texts (especially the 1609 quarto and Benson's edition of 1640) into commonplace books, which happened rather less frequently for Shakespeare's poems than it did for others' ('Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England', in Michael Schoenfeldt (ed.) A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets (Oxford: Blackwell [2007])). Interestingly, the abstractions or decontextualizations frequently left off the poet's name, giving credence to the idea that literary authorship was less important to the early moderns than it is to us.

       So, to the journal articles. The journal Studies in Bibliography has been erratic since 2002, but appears to be catching up with itself. Volume 55 'for' 2002 appeared with a copyright date of 2004 and was delivered to libraries in 2005, volume 56 'for' 2003-4 appeared with a copyright date of 2006 and was delivered in 2007, and the most recent volume, 57 'for' 2005-6, appeared with a copyright date of 2008 and was delivered as this review was being completed in November 2008. Of these three volumes, only the last contains an essay relevant to this review--R. Carter Hailey's analysis of the paper in the Pavier quatos--and it will be noticed next year, as befits both its copyright date and its real date of publication. It is entirely understandable that journals' production schedules slip, but it would be a service to the contributors and readers if their editors would explain these slippages and what they intend to do about them rather than leaving puzzles that only cataloguers can solve. Where one may refer to a volume by a number of different dates (here 2005, 2006, and 2008 are all technically correct for volume 57), authors writing references are likely to make differing choices. When following up such references in the print medium, readers and stack-fetchers naturally glance at neighbouring volumes on the shelf if the reference seems not to fit the way the volume has been catalogued, but with electronic surrogates this 'hunting' expedient is not always available. Volumes of journals with erratic dating practices might easily become invisible in the electronic media if more care is not taken to explain just what the various dates really mean. The journal TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies transformed itself into Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretations with a transitional volume 17 in 2005 and with an avowed broadening of perspectives to include things not relevant to this review. Under its new title the journal's first two issues (1.1 and 1.2, dated Spring and Autumn 2006) were not delivered until 2007 and so missed being noticed last year and issues for 2007 are awaited. The journal has elected to restart page-numbering from 1 in each issue, which means that those citing it will have to remember to include the issue number.

    The most important article this year is R. Carter Hailey's demonstration that Q4 Romeo and Juliet can be confidently dated 1623 and Q4 Hamlet can be certainly dated 1625 ('The Dating Game: New Evidence for the Dates of Q4 Romeo and Juliet and Q4 Hamlet', SQ 58 [2007].367-87). Of all the early printings of Shakespeare, only these two lack a date on the title-page, and of course scholars want to know if they were printed early enough to be available to use in the setting of the Folio in 1623. Both were printed by William Stansby for John Smethwicke, which was a longstanding partnership; Stansby's initials are on Q4 Hamlet and his role as printer of Q4 Romeo and Juliet is inferred from the presence of one of Stansby's ornaments. Hailey gives the history of the attempts to date these books (pp. 369-72), including Lynette Hunter's demonstration that George Walton William's dating of Romeo and Juliet on the basis of a deteriorating tailpiece was faulty, and Rasmussen's recent similar work dating Hamlet by deterioration in the title-page device (both reviewed in YWES 82[2003]). The key to Hailey's discoveries is that paper moulds lasted about 12 months, that paper made from a particular mould is detectable in surviving books, and that paper was bought for each printing job and rapidly consumed rather than held on to. Thus if one can show that two books are printed on the same stock of paper (that is, from the same mould) then they were printed no more than a year apart (p. 372). Hailey has been measuring the spaces between successive chain lines in a series of books, so for each stock of paper he has a 'fingerprint' of spacings, as well as his 'mugshots' of the watermarks. Having established his 'fingerprint' and 'mugshot' for Q4 Romeo and Juliet, Hailey went looking for other books using the same paper stock, starting in the likeliest year (1622) and looking at other books by the same publishing pair. He soon hit on the 1623 edition of Thomas Lodge's Euphues Golden Legacie. Stansby is not named as the printer of this Smethwicke book, but shared ornaments and distinctive type between this book and known Stansby books prove it is his work. Since in multiple copies of this book the watermarks from Q4 Romeo and Juliet appear only in sheet A, the obvious inference is that there was a little of this stock of paper left over from the printing of Romeo and Juliet, thus we can date Romeo and Juliet to just before the printing of Euphues in 1623.

    Q4 Hamlet was a much harder case. It was printed from a mixed stock of two papers, both poor quality and so hard to see through. In nine Folger Library exemplars, sheets D, G, and L were all printed on one of the papers and A and N were (almost) all printed on the other paper, with the other sheets being mixed in the sense that in some exemplars a given sheet was from one paper and in other exemplars the same sheet was from the other paper. With only nine exemplars this could happen by chance: in the whole print run the pattern may not have held. That is to say, the sheets that Hailey has identified (from nine exemplars) as being printed on either one or other of the papers might in fact have been printed from mixed stock, with the surviving exemplars (a random subset of the print run) just happening to all show one stock of paper for one set of sheets and the other stock of paper for the other set of sheets. Hailey found the same two papers in Usury Arraigned and Condemned (1625), which also has the same setting of type as Q4 Hamlet used for the imprint. Thus this imprint was kept as standing type, and therefore Usury Arraigned and Condemned must have been printed consecutively or concurrently with Q4 Hamlet. So how did Rasmussen get it wrong? He did not examine enough copies to properly establish progressive deterioration of the printer's ornament: Hailey shows that even in exemplars from the same edition the 'break' in the ornament comes and goes according to inking and press-pull variation. We can now say for sure that Q4 Hamlet had no effect on the Folio, but could itself have been influenced by the Folio, which would explain their occasional agreements against other witnesses. With a date of 1623 now established for Q4 Romeo and Juliet, it was probably not available before the Folio text of that play was typeset. Hailey ends by answering the question 'what is the significance of these Q4s appearing without dates? Answer: probably nothing, as 15% of all books did.

    In the same journal, Brian Vickers argues that only three dramatists, not four as Gary Taylor thought, composed 1 Henry 6, and that the shares are not quite as Taylor divided them ('Incomplete Shakespeare: Or, Denying Co-authorship in 1 Henry VI', SQ 58 [2007].311-52). Vickers begins with a summary of the state of the art of co-authorship studies and makes a (rather long-winded) analogy between collaborative play writing and collaborative Renaissance art. Using C. J. Sisson's account of the lost play Keep the Widow Waking, and the evidence of Henslowe's Diary, Vickers gives an account of a typical coming-together for collaborative playwrighting, the dividing up of shares in the  work, and of how the 'author-plot' was used to pitch the project to the players and to control the collaboration. The unit of collaboration seems to be the act (measured in sheets, each being a folio folded in the middle to give two leaves and four pages) and the prime mover dramatist in a group seems to be the one who writes the first act. Vickers's history of Shakespearian stylometry includes the clearest account I have read of Marina Tarlinskaya's analysis of proclitic and enclitic microphrases.

    One way to explain the inconsistencies in 1 Henry 6 is to say that it was rushed out to capitalize on the success of 2 Henry 6 and 3 Henry 6, but Vickers thinks that co-authorship, with imperfect agreement between the shares, is another. These are not mutually exclusive possibilities, of course, and indeed Taylor, cited here by Vickers as a supporter of the 'prequel' theory, also argues for co-authorship to (p. 325n1). Taylor's essay itself is wrongly cited as appearing in 1993 but it was in fact 1995. As examples of the chaos in 1 Henry 6 Vickers cites the poor placing of act intervals in the Folio and the confusion over whether Winchester is a bishop or a cardinal, but could not the former simply indicate that it was not written for intervals and had them imposed when printed? The latter was explained as no crux at all by Karl Wentersdorf in an article reviewed in YWES 87[2008]. In his history of attempts to work out who wrote what in 1 Henry 6, Vickers charts the emergence of Thomas Nashe as prime candidate, and the clincher is that the sources of certain phrases are shown to be ones that Shakespeare nowhere else drew on, but that Nashe used in his published works. Turning again to Taylor's article (and giving it the right date this time), Vickers is full of praise for its rightly using previous work that showed Nashe's hand in 1 Henry 6 but castigates it for applying a set of inappropriate tests that led Taylor to posit two other hands too.Vickers agrees with Taylor that act 1 is Nashe and that 2.4, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5 are Shakespeare, but disagrees about 4.6 and 4.7.1-32 which he sets out to show are not Shakespeare. In 4.5, Talbot Senior uses thou to address Talbot Junior who replies with you as we would expect of a familiar father and a respectful son. But in 4.6 Talbot Junior starts to thou his father, which is wrong and unShakespearian, as is some particularly poor choice of words. Scene 4.6 is like 4.7 in its diction ("bookish", "portentous gestures and linguistic display") and in its clumsy verse, and each contains a mention of Icarus, who is unknown elsewhere in Shakespeare. (p. 342).

    Tarlinskaya's work--which rejects Taylor's divisions and just has act 1 Nashe, 2.4 and 4.2-4.5 Shakespeare, and the rest Y--shows that Nashe averages 93 enclitics per 1,000 lines while Shakespeare averages 55 per 1,000 lines, and Y just 15. Corroborating this are three clearly distinct rates of using feminine endings in these three shares in the play. All that remains to be done is find out who Y is (pp. 344-5). Vickers ends surveying the recent editions of Shakespeare and ranking them according to how open-minded they are about the facts of co-authorship. Andrew Cairncross's Arden2 1 Henry 6 was particularly cavalier in its complex hypotheses about interference from scribes and others, and the wild cutting that followed, to avoid admitting co-authorship. At the close Vickers acknowledges Wentersdorf's article on the Winchester-as-bishop-or-cardinal crux, but only to say that it has no bearing on matters of authorship. In fairness he ought to have acknowledged that Wentersdorf argues that there simply is no crux at all, since once we properly appreciate the history being depicted there is no contradiction in the play as it reads in F.

    In the same journal, Denise A. Walen argues that the Folio text of Othello 4.3 represents the original staging at the Globe playhouse while the shorter version in the 1622 quarto represents the scene as cut for the Blackfriars ('Unpinning Desdemona', SQ 58 [2007].487-508). The Willow Song is absent in Q, and Walen reckons it was used to cover the action of unpinning Desdemona, which refers not to her hair but to her clothes. This took a while, and if the two minutes or so of stage time allowed by the text of the Willow Song as we have it was not enough then the actor was to sing as many extra verses as were needed to get the job done. This version of the scene gives a reflective pause before the final violent action, but such a long pause was not needed at Blackfriars because there was an act interval (with its own music to replace the Willow Song) right after this scene, so 4.3 got cut down for the Blackfriars, whence Q. Nina Levine offers a literary-critical reading of Sir Thomas More that tries to make analogies between the collective enterprises in the play (the outraged Londoners coming together to do something) and the collective enterprise of the dramatists writing it ('Citizens' Games: Differentiating Collaboration and Sir Thomas More', SQ 58 [2007].31-64). The play gives the 'mob' a lot of individuation, including personal names, and it was presumably in objection to this that censor Edmund Tilney crossed out the speech prefixes at the start of the play. (Well, he crossed out De Barde's as well as Doll's, which does not fit this supposed anti-rebels explanation.) Hand C reassigns to Lincoln specifically the line "[we will] by ruld by yo^u master moor yf youle stand our | freind to procure our pardon" that Hand D gave to "all", and this makes Lincoln's execution (which is like More's at the end) all the more ironic, since he is the only rebel not to be pardoned. Equally, Hand C (whom McMillin says we should treat as a collaborator with D, maybe even the same man) individuates the speakers that Hand D leaves as 'others'. The last piece of relevance from this volume of Shakespeare Quarterly is by Stephen Orgel ('The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole', SQ 58 [2007].290-310) and it offers a short summary of the size and shape of the Shakespeare canon in print up to present day, literary critical points about the plays themselves being not 'complete', nor the performances, and a description of the Cranach Press edition of Hamlet of 1929.

    Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America published three essays relevant to this review. In the longest and least rewarding, Lynette Hunter tries to explain the differences between Q1 and Q2 Romeo and Juliet by positing a whole set of slightly different manuscript readings arising over time as theatrical needs demanded ('Adaptation And/or Revision in Early Quartos of Romeo and Juliet', PBSA 101 [2007].5-54). It is tempting to stop reading Hunter's article when she lays her cards on the table about her approach to textual scholarship and says she "does not seek truth or authorial intention" (p. 6). Hunter reports that all quotations will be from the edition of Romeo and Juliet that she and Peter Lichtenfels published with Ashgate in 2007, but neither the British Library, nor Amazon, nor indeed the Ashgate website have any record of this book, although there is a similar-sounding title from Hunter and Lichtenfels forthcoming from Ashgate in 2009. The agenda set for this essay is to bring together the theatrical and the bibliographical, but Hunter immediately begs the question of agency by calling the differences between Q1 and Q2 "changes" (p. 7). To see why this is a logical error, one has only to imagine someone calling the differences between two photographs of the Empire State Building 'changes'. Certainly, the building might have changed in the interval between the taking of the first picture and the second, but this is not the only possibility: the pictures could differ merely because of different lighting, time of day, and means of reproduction. Equally, in textual scholarship an argument about 'change' has to be made, not assumed.

    A foundational hypothesis of the essay is that Q1 and Q2 Romeo and Juliet "stem from an earlier manuscript" but via "scripts for theatre production" (p. 8), meaning that there were multiple manuscript versions between composition and printed book; this is not a new hypothesis but it is one very hard to prove. Having noted that although an exemplar of Q1 was somewhat used in the printing of Q2 it cannot have been the main copy as there are far to many differences between Q1 and Q2 for them all to have been written onto an exemplar of Q1, Hunter out of the blue, and with no prior justification for it, simply prints her own proposed stemma with seven distinct manuscript versions leading in two lines of descent to Q1 and Q2 (p. 13). She uses a bizarre system of notation in which, for example, Q2P, Q2Pb, and Q2C are three different manuscripts that lead eventually to the printing of Q2. Aside from any other objection, this requires that three intervening transcripts (intervening between the author's papers and the printed book) prior to Q2 failed to remove the very obvious false-start duplications whereby first Friar Laurence and then Romeo describe the dawn in precisely the same terms, and whereby Romeo gets to repeat himself at length in his soliloquy before dying.

    Hunter wants to reject the commonly-accepted idea that Q2 was set from foul papers, so she asserts that ". . . there is no evidence of the existence of Shakespeare's 'foul papers'" (p. 14). However, since she must accept that there was at some time a first complete script in Shakespeare's hand (unless like Barbara Cartland he composed by dictation) then the point stands: Q2 shows no sign that it is based on an intervening transcript, since the duplications that seem plausibly part of authorial papers (but not plausibly part of a transcript) are in Q2. One quarter of the way into this long article, Hunter has not brought one new idea to the debate, nor adduced one new piece of evidence; she just keeps asserting things like "Q2 itself may well have been affected by rehearsal" (p. 14) without a shred of evidence or argument to support it. Now Hunter starts to read Q1 and Q2 for theatrical differences, and observes that Q1 "is one of the earliest printed texts of Shakespeare's plays to present the part of a woman on stage alone" (p. 16). Indeed, but since the only printings of Shakespeare's plays before Q1 Romeo and Juliet were 2 Henry 6, 3 Henry 6 and Titus Andronicus, this is the first of his plays with a woman in the title to be printed. It ought to be no surprise that it gives a female character significant stage time. Juliet has a lot more to say and do in Q2 than in Q1, so Hunter ponders whether a change in the personnel (the loss or acquisition of a good actor) caused this difference, and she quotes Q1 and Q2 to make an argument about cutting but using a modernized text of each. This modernized text is particularly unhelpful in that Hunter is trying to find evidence in Q1 of a rupture marking a cut, and such evidence is much easier to see if one has not first modernize the thing.

    Hunter notices that many of the things that Q2 has that Q1 lacks "occur at the end or toward the end of scenes" and (without saying why) she asserts that "It is unlikely that an actor, dramaturge, or manager would have added this material to produce a script behind Q2" (p. 21). She seems ignorant of Scott McMillin's demonstration, given in his work on Sir Thomas More, that padding out the end of a scene is precisely what early-modern actors would want to facilitate a reduction in casting, for it gives other actors a chance to change for the next scene. Hunter finds some things absent in Q1 and present in Q2 that are hard to explain as additions in the latter but easy to explain as omissions in the former, which is of course what the memorial reconstruction hypothesis was based upon. Regarding the moment in Q2 where Romeo and Friar Laurence describe the dawn in precisely the same terms, Hunter toys with the idea that the lines were for the Friar but someone accidentally added them to the part for Romeo. (Surely that would have been noticed once they started speaking their parts in rehearsal, and thereafter fixed.) Then she offers Randall McLeod's implausible suggestion that the repetition is intentional (p. 24) Nothing Hunter has written so far justifies her stemma that posits seven manuscript versions of the play, and all she has done is evaluated the evidence in Q1 and Q2 for what it would tell us about her stemma if indeed that stemma were correct. This is not scholarship but self-indulgent speculation. Amongst a group of things present in Q2 and consistently absent in Q1 is the act of retelling a story, and a slew of small references to law and justice; it is hard to see why these would be cut (or forgotten) so Hunter assumes they were added to the play. (Such cases can almost always be argued either way, and what is wanted to settle the matter is a conclusive example that everyone will agree goes only one way.) As well as shortenings in Q1 of what is longer in Q2, Hunter finds a few things expanded or adapted in Q1 from what Q2 has, but not done well enough to warrant the hand of a dramatist, therefore she says that "managers, [or] actors" did them (pp. 29-32). Hunter looks at a long list of small variants where single words are altered, and reckons she can tell those that probably are important enough to be the work of a dramatist and those that are not and hence are probably the work of "an actor or a scribe or a compositor" (p. 36).

    Hunter explores the possibilities for a memorial reconstruction explanation, on the basis of the main recollectors being the actors of Romeo, Mercutio, and Paris (as Kathleen Irace conjectured) and including the possibility that there were other recollectors (maybe the whole company) recalling a different version of the play, and she repeats the old and inaccurate saws about Q1 being more suited to touring than Q2 because it is shorter and simpler. By this point, three-quarters of the way into the article, the hypotheses are so complex and so laboured that is almost impossible to discern what Hunter is arguing. For example, she writes that there is "evidence for manuscript copy for Q1" (p. 41), but unless someone were to be arguing for the existence of a lost Q0 that served as copy for Q1, what else could be the printer's copy but a manuscript? She genuinely seems to consider the possibility that the actors entered the printshop as a troupe and recited the play to the compositor, only to reject it: ". . . the text was not directly memorially transmitted at the printing house". Apart from anything else, we know that Q1 was set by formes, so there had to be a written version for the printer to cast off. Against the argument for memorial reconstruction being the basis of Q1, she writes, is the fact that Q1 has extensive stage directions derived from dialogue in Q2. (Actually, that shows the weakness of her attack on memorial reconstruction on this score, since while actors trying to recall their performances are not likely to remember the precise wording of stage directions they certainly should remember instructions embedded in the dialogue.)

    Not satisfied with her seven-manuscript stemma, Hunter hypothesizes some more manuscripts: a whole line of them from Q1P¹ to Q1Pⁿ. Actually, it has never been clear by these notations whether Hunter is referring to distinct manuscripts or distinct states of the same manuscript (as in Wilson and Pollard's notion of 'continuous copy'), but now the possibility emerges that a single manuscript might, without being changed at all, appear with different notations in Hunter's system (and occupy different places in her stemma) just because it is used for two productions: ". . . a text from one performance (say Q1Pb¹) may be in fact the same text used by the next production of the play (Q1P²) . . ." (p. 42). More utterly implausible ideas are then considered, such as the printer being willing to accept (and the company being willing to hand over) the bundle of actors' parts as the basis for printing Q1, or his sending off to the company to find someone who could remember a scene that is present in Q2 but absent in Q1 (p. 43). Hunter harbours bizarre misunderstandings of the basic hypotheses at work in these problems, displayed when she writes that  ". . . there are several bibliographical indications that Q2 was set from manuscript rather than from actors speaking the scripts" (p. 44). Of course no-one supposes that the actors spoke their lines directly to the compositors; the memorial reconstruction hypothesis expains how the printer's copy manuscript was made and is not an alternative to there being such a manuscript. Hunter also knows little about printing, for she says that Q2's having "Nerona" where "Verona" is clearly the right word might be because the printer had printed, or would print, that same year a story with a character "Neronis" in it. More plausibly, of course, a letter 'N' had fallen into the 'V' compartment (directly below it) in the capitals typecase. Surely someone at the journal could have told her this and saved her from making a silly suggestion. To establish that Q2 was not based on memorial reconstruction, Hunter locates in it things that memorial reconstruction would not produce. This is the wrong method: one needs to find things that only transcription could produce, for the things she has found might exist even in the printed version of a script recovered by memorial reconstruction.

    When Hunter gets to the (ample) evidence for the copy for Q2 being authorial, she gives Randall McLeod rather than R. B. McKerrow the credit for noticing that the speech prefix variation for Capulet's Wife reflects her differing social function in different scenes (p. 44-7). In a section of the article called 'Theatre Practice' Hunter argues that Q2 has post-theatrical elements, but she is relying almost entirely on hunches about such things as certain lines being improvisations and the guess that deliberate mislineation of verse as prose marks it off as lines that actor has been given licence to adapt. Hunter assumes that the actor playing Nurse was a specialist in "straight comedy" and hence that the additional lines in Q2 (over what the Nurse has to say in Q1) were added by this comic. She seems unaware that this part must have been played by an apprentice, not a clown. The self-confusion that was bound to emerge from clumsy nomenclature is apparent in Hunter's claim that ". . . Q2 is not working [typeset] directly from Q1 but from Q2C . . ." (p. 48). Since in her notation Q2C is defined as the printer's copy for Q2--that is what she means by this siglum--this claim is tautologous. She concludes that the acts 5 of Q1 and Q2 show equally viable variants (as opposed to say Q1 just lacking something in Q2), so it looks like revision as well as garbling separate Q1 and Q2. This is not news: most cases of what used to be explained solely as memorial reconstruction are now treated as more likely to be cases of revision as well as memorial reconstruction. This entire article is weak in its logic and lacking in basic theatrical and bibliographical knowledge, and does harm to the reputation of the scholarly journal that elected to publish it.

    In the same journal, Arthur Sherbo continues his work on Malone's textual scholarship with two pieces ('Restoring Malone', PBSA 101 [2007].125-48; 'Edmond Malone and the Johnson-Steevens 1778 Shakespeare', PBSA 101 [2007].313-28). In the first he records that Malone's debut publication as a Shakespeare editor was a 1780 two-volume supplement to the 1778 edition by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, and that in 1783 Malone supplemented this supplement with what he called the Second Appendix. This was unknown to the New Variorum editors, as was part of the supplement, and only where bits of these made it into George Steevens's 1793 Shakespeare are they widely known to modern scholarship. The rest of the article is devoted to explaining exactly what Malone was up to in these books, reprinting the otherwise hard-to-find notes, and pointing out which notes the various Variorum editors missed. (An odd slip that someone ought to have caught in proofs is the reference to Shakespeare's play "4H4" (p. 128).) The second article is similar to the first, pointing out that there are lots of notes by Malone in the Steevens 10-volume edition of 1778 itself, and these too are largely unknown to modern editors because they turn to later books in the false assumption that all of Malone's notes were copied forward. Sherbo reprints in an appendix all the ones connected to the plays; the ones for the poems are to come elsewhere.

     Review of English Studies published two pieces of interest to this review. In the first Christine Cornell and Patrick Malcomson argue that the Q2 ending of Titus Andronicus (four extra lines usually dismissed as non-Shakespearian patching to cover a lacuna in its copy text, Q1) is worth restoring as it might have had a place in early performances ('The 'Stupid' Final Lines of Titus Andronicus', RES 58 [2007].154-61). The standard view is that Q1 Titus Andronicus was reprinted as Q2 but, because the exemplar of Q1 was imperfect, with a number of guessed readings and with four spurious lines at the end where the last leaf was mutilated. Q2 was reprinted as Q3 and F was set from an exemplar of Q3 that had been annotated by reference to a playhouse manuscript, hence the 'fly' scene, 3.2, was added for F. Modern editors use Q1 as their authority for the play except for 3.2 for which F is the authority. Cornell and Malcolmson see an illogicality in accepting F's authority for 3.2 but not for the extra four lines added in Q2. (Putting it like this muddies the waters somewhat, since even if the lines are admitted as authentic, F itself cannot be the authority for them as it is only a reprint of a reprint; if we think the lines are genuine, Q2 would be our authority.) According to Cornell and Malcolmson, the four lines tacked on the end are, in Q2, Q3, and F: "See Justice done on Aaron that damn'd Moore, | From whom, our heavy happes had their beginning: | Then afterwards, to Order well the State, | That like Events, may ne're it Ruinate" (pp. 155-6). They are mistaken and this is not the ending in any of the texts: they have quoted from the execrable Applause modern-type edition of F, which illogically retains capitalization and punctuation, but modernizes u/v and i/j spellings and removes emphatic italics. Moreover, F is substantively different from Q2 and Q3, which have "By whom[e]" not "From whom". It is sloppy of Cornell and Malcomson to get this wrong.

    Cornell and Malcomson ask why, if Greg was right that a copy of Q2 was used as a promptbook, were not the offending four lines deleted from it? That is to say, how come they got into Q3 and F? The right answer, of course, is that no-one is claiming that the particular exemplar of Q2 used as a promptbook--supposing for a moment that this indeed happened--was the one used to print Q3: the book-keeper could have struck them out in his exemplar of Q2 and they would still appear in a reprint of this edition. Cornell and Malcolmson try to defend these four added lines by pointing out that ruinate is used in 3 Henry 6 in a scene, 5.1, that also mentions the chopping off of hands (p. 157). Also, supposedly corroborating the 'mutilation' hypothesis is the fact that where Q2 reprints what would have been the other side of the supposedly damaged bottom of the last leaf of Q1, it has substantial rewording too. But this rewording Cornell and Malcolmson also think intelligent and appropriate and it has a phrase, "tender spring", used by Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece around the same time as Titus Andronicus. Their suggestion is that "someone who knew the play well wrote the lines, which were then generally accepted" (p. 158). This last clause they put in, I think, to explain why the lines are in Q3 and F, but of course that does not indicate acceptance by the company. Here they also mix up their terminology, calling Q1 "the manuscript [that] was damaged". Their main point, though, is that even if we accept that Q1 was damaged that does not mean the lines invented have no place in the canon: the company might have accepted them into the play as performed. Cornell and Malcomson address Eugene Waith's rejection of Greg's claim that an exemplar of Q2 was used as the promptbook. How come, they ask, if the exemplar of Q3 used to make printer's copy for F was first collated with the promptbook, the spurious last four lines of Q3 were not deleted as being not found in the promptbook, and yet a missing line in 1.1 was recovered from the promptbook? It is possible to defend the added lines: they shift attention away from Tamora (on whom Q1 ends) and towards Aaron and towards the wider political scene, promising stability, and in particular seeming to hint at constitutional change so that the likes of Aaron will never succeed again

    The second article from Review of English Studies is Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositksy's attempt to show that the Strachey Letter was, contrary to the date given upon its first publication, written later than The Tempest and therefore not a source for it ('Shakespeare and the Voyagers Revisited', RES 58 [2007].447-72). Malone thought that The Tempest was based on Sylvester Jourdain's Discovery of the Bermudas (1610) but this has been discredited: it was Henry Howard Furness who popularized the idea that The Tempest was based on a manuscript version of William Strachey's True Reportory (1625), the Letter, and hence must post-date the shipwreck that Strachey describes. As Stritmatter and Kositsky point out, we have no evidence that Strachey's text circulated in manuscript before publication, nor that if it did Shakespeare would have had access to it. Strachey's account seems to draw on other books that it is hard to imagine him having access to in Bermuda or Virginia, and it is hard to see how the account would have got back to London from the New World in time for The Tempest. Indeed, Stritmatter and Kositsky think that Strachey's Letter is most plausibly read as his response to a letter to him of 14 December 1610 from the Virginia Company asking for news, for Strachey seems to answer their questions in the Letter. Moreover, Strachey seems to describe the voyage back to London of Thomas Gates beginning on 15 July 1610, which is the one by which Strachey's account is itself supposed to have reached London, and this is logically impossible. In 1612 Strachey wrote of an as-yet incomplete work about Bermuda that he was producing, and the logical referent of that is the True Reportory. Also, True Reportory seems to plagiarize books not published until November 1610 or later, and if it does it is too late to be a source for The Tempest.

    At this point (p. 455), Stritmatter and Kositsky start to quote the parallels that they think prove Strachey a plagiarist, and indeed the same stories are told (of certain fruit and plants) but the wording is not close at all: these could be stories that were routinely circulating amongst the travellers. But for Stritmatter and Kositsky this 'borrowing', which required access to a library, must have been done after Strachey returned to London from Jamestown, and hence the Letter was not available to influence The Tempest. Indeed, since several works (including The Tempest) that were published before True Reportory have strong parallels with it, it were better not to assume that Strachey (in manuscript) was their source but that Strachey borrowed from these works. Stritmatter and Kositsky quote the strong parallel between True Reportory and True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony of Virginia (entered in the Stationers' Register on 10 November 1610), but they acknowledge that the standard explanation is that this was added to Strachey's Letter before it was published in 1625 even though it was not part of the original writing (p. 457). Other examples of Strachey's alleged plagiarism depicted here are weak: they would not get a modern undergraduate into much hot water. At the close, Stritmatter and Kositsky mention the fatal flaw in their position: when first published (in Samuel Purchas's Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1625), the Strachey Letter is given the date "July 15, 1610". They simply assert that Purchas is not to be relied upon for this date. For an unexplained reason, their article is signed by Stritmatter but not Kositsky.

    Carl D. Atkins makes a study of Benson's 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets as a reprint of the quarto of 1609 ('The Importance of Compositorial Error and Variation to the Emendation of Shakespeare's Texts: A Bibliographic Analysis of Benson's 1640 Text of Shakespeare's Sonnets', SP 104 [2007].306-39). Benson's edition was the basis for subsequent editions in the eighteenth century. As we have the quarto that it reprints (albeit with editorial changes) we can learn about printing habits from Benson's edition. Atkins offers an appendix listing all the variants between the two, categorized by kind. Benson's compositor corrected almost all the obvious misprints of Q, missing only emnity, which Atkins says should be enmity. (In fact Literature Online contains 13 occurrences of emnity in printings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so we might almost say that this counts as a minor alternate spelling although OED does not list it.) Using what he has learnt from Benson's compositor's mistakes, Atkins turns to the problem of emending Sonnets where Q seems in error. This is not a sound methodology: better to learn from other reprints, where we can compare source and output to infer habits and characteristic slips, produced around the time of Q and preferably coming from the same printshop and so likely to have been worked upon by the same people. Strangely, Atkins rejects Duncan-Jones's claim that the misprint in Q of having lack (where editors agree the word needed is latch) comes via the spelling variant lach because, he says, the OED gives no examples of that spelling (p. 137). It does: Wyclif's Bible has one. The date of Duncan-Jones's Arden3 Sonnets is here given as 1977 but should be 1997. Naseeb Shaheen makes a surprisingly belated claim for the Q1 Henry 5 deriving from a memorial reconstruction ('Henry V and its Quartos', ShN 57 [2007].43-44, 48). He summarizes the textual situation of Henry 5 and says that there are two main views of Q1: that it is a memorial reconstruction, or James Shapiro's new idea that it is a sanitized, depoliticized version put out by the players when they realized that the original was too politically provocative. Shaheen does not specify whether he means 'out on the stage' or 'out into print', and he does not address Andrew Gurr's argument that Q1 represents the simplified stage version, the 'minimal' text, nor Richard Dutton's recent argument (reviewed in YWES 86[2007]) that F represents revisions of the Q1 version in the light of events of 1601. Shaheen decides that Shapiro is wrong and Q1 Henry 5 is based on a memorial reconstruction because there are things missing in it that no-one would deliberately leave out in a process of sanitizing the play. This article is intellectually under-powered and widely ignorant of the state of the textual debate about this play.

    Finally, to the round-up from Notes and Queries. Guillaum Coatalen points out that as a source for "Now is the winter of our discontent | Made glorious summer" (Richard 3), Philip Sidney's Sonnet 69 from Astrophil and Stella is usually cited ("Gone is the winter of my misery | My spring appears") but that in fact both might come from the French poet Joachim du Bellay (c.1522-1560), who in different works refers to "l'hiver de mes douleurs" and "l'hyver de mes ennuis" ('Shakespeare, Sidney and Du Bellay's Winters', N&Q 252 [2007].265). John Peachman thinks that The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written in 1597 or 1598, draws on Nashe, and alludes to the Isle of Dogs scandal ('Why a Dog? A Late Date for The Two Gentlemen of Verona', N&Q 252 [2007].265-72). The only sure thing about the date of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is that is was completed before Francis Meres referred to it in Palladis Tamia (entered in the Stationers' Register on 19 October 1598), and the view that it is early is based on subjective interpretation of its weaknesses. J. J. M. Tobin pointed out The Two Gentlemen of Verona's borrowing from Nashe's Have With You to Saffron-Walden (1596), including the names of seven characters, and Tobin produced a list of significant collocations that the works share and that Peachman reproduces. This list has lots of common-place words that really count for nothing except where they closely collocate, such as cur, tongues, and forest. Peachman picks on a particular collocation that he thinks significant: "'puling' is in close proximity to 'wench'"  in only one play of the period, according to Literature Online, and that is The Two Gentlemen of Verona (p. 267). Peacham is mistaken about this: there is also Samuel Daniel's The Queen's Arcadia (1605) "there shall be found Fantasticke puling wenchnes in the world".

    It seems that Peachman does not know how to search Literature Online properly, and this exposes one of the dangers of this kind of work. The evidence on which his assertion rests is negative, that there are no other examples of X, but one is always afraid that what is really meant is 'I failed to find other examples of X' and that the scholar simply overlooked them. That Peachman thinks that the thing to search for is a play indicates another weakness in his methodology, since he should be searching all kinds of writing to see if these are common phrases in the literary-dramatic culture. A second collocation that Peachman thinks decisive is "water cast in an urinal" in Nashe and "water in an urinal" in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (p. 267). In fact, collocations of water, cast, and urinal are not hard to find: there is "an urinall . . . you cast | The water" in Dekker and "Casting their Water in his Vrinalls" in John Davies of Hereford. and if we drop the word cast (since it is not in The Two Gentlemen of Verona) then there are over a dozen collocations including the perfect match "water in an Vrinall" in John Day's play Law Tricks (1604). The warnings about the evidential weakness of simple verbal parallels given by Muriel St Clare Byrne 75 years ago are still not being heeded. Peachman has several more one-word parallels but they prove nothing. He explains the presence in The Two Gentlemen of Verona of a scandalous dog who is dry-eyed when he should be weeping and peeing when he should not be as an allusion to the play The Isle of Dogs by Nashe and others in 1597, named after the wet peninsula in the Thames. Convinced he has got a 'hit', Peachman then reads The Two Gentlemen of Verona for its set of allusions to The Isle of Dogs, and finds a bit of Jonson's stubbornness in Crab too. He ends on even more tenuous links between The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the publication of Marlowe's Hero and Leander in 1598 and Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour with its dog-related imagery.

    Thomas Merriam, in a point also made in his book reviewed above, notes that King John is like Richard 3 in being about uncles ordering the deaths of their dispossessed nephews ('Parallel Nephews, Parallel Uncles', N&Q 252 [2007].272-4). Wolgang Riehle thinks that Lysander's name in A Midsummer Night's Dream is an allusion to the story of Hero and Leander and also a pun on 'lie-sunder', meaning sleep apart, as Hermia insists they do in the woods ('What's in Lysander's Name?', N&Q 252 [2007].274-5). Alan J. Altimont has an Hebraic source for the same play, since Nedar means 'absentee' in Hebrew, which suits this character--he is not there to prevent Demetrius breaking faith with Helena--and also means 'pledge, vow' ('The Meaning of Nedar in A Midsummer Night's Dream', N&Q 252 [2007].275-7). That A Midsummer Night's Dream has a source in the Talmud does not, Altimont reassures us, require that we imagine Shakespeare reading Hebrew: he might just have heard about it. According to Beatrice Groves, the idea of the wall between families coming down (as it does metaphorically in Romeo and Juliet and literally in A Midsummer Night's Dream) derives from the Bible, Ephesians 2, where it refers to the union of gentiles and Jews (''The Wittiest Partition': Bottom, Paul, and Comedic Resurrection', N&Q 252 [2007].277-82). A. B. Taylor notes that Bottom's allusion to the Bible 1 Corinthians 2:9--"The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was" (A Midsummer Night's Dream 4.1.208-11, wrongly given as Act 5 in this article)--was not the first time that Pyramus and 1 Corinthians 2:9 were linked: John Gower did it in Confessio Amantis ('John Gower and Pyramus and Thisbe', N&Q 252 [2007].282-3). Also, Shakespeare borrowed from Gower the reference to a lion "in wild rage" and there being a hole in the wall; in Ovid it is only a crack. Matt Baynham explains that Portia's calling mercy "twice blest" (The Merchant of Venice 4.1.183) alludes to the Biblical Sermon on the Mount, for there only the merciful receive what the give; the peacemakers do not get peace, for example ('Why is Mercy 'Twice Blest'?', N&Q 252 [2007].285).

    Anthony Miller finds sources for the pointless war over a tiny patch of ground in Hamlet 4.4, and for the reflections on a "buyer of land"  in Hamlet 5.1, and for Lear's "we came crying hither" (King Lear 4.5) in Pliny's Naturalis Historia ('Fortinbras' Conquests and Pliny', N&Q 252 [2007].287-9). Thomas Festa thinks that Hamlet's comment that his father was a man "take him for all in all" (1.2.186) echoes the "all in all" from the Biblical Corinthians that was prescribed reading in the Book of Common Prayer for the burial of the dead (''All in All': The Book of Common Prayer and Hamlet, I. Ii. 186', N&Q 252 [2007].289-90). David Lisle Crane notes that when Angelo asks incredulously if Isabella is talking about the Duke's deputy, and says "The prenzie, Angelo?" (Measure for Measure 3.1.92), prenzie is obviously wrong. Crane reckons that a u before the p might have been mistaken by the compositor for a flourish and that the word really was upright here, and three lines later when Isabella repeats it ('Measure for Measure III.1.93, 96: Prenzie', N&Q 252 [2007].292). Andrew Hadfield claims that Isabella in Measure for Measure is a novice because she is meant to be like the Saint Ursula who had the same dilemma about choosing between life and virginity in the book The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine. ('Isabella, Marina, and Saint Ursula', N&Q 252 [2007].292-3). He thinks the conversion of brothel-goers in Pericles might also be indebted to this account of Saint Ursula. Hadfield is right that The Golden Legend went through many editions, but the latest of those was in 1527 so was not quite so "hard to avoid" (p. 293) in 1603 as Hadfield suggests. Rodney Stenning Edgecombe thinks that Othello's reference to being roasted in sulphur (Othello 5.2) has its source in Ovid's account in Metamorphoses of Phaeton's end being the reason that Ethiopians are black, and that this also was in Shakespeare's mind when Othello refers to "medicinable gum" in the "pearl away" speech, for Phaeton's sisters in Ovid weep tears that turn to amber that is later made into jewelry ('Ovid and the 'Medicinal Gum' in Othello V.ii', N&Q 252 [2007].293-4). David Womersley claims that certain passages from Heywood's 2 If You Know Not Me (Stationers' Register entry 14 September 1606) echo Macbeth, which must therefore have been completed and performed by this date in order for Heywood to use it ('Heywood's 2 If You Know Not Me and the Date of Macbeth', N&Q 252 [2007].296-8). Extraordinarily, Womersley quotes nothing from Macbeth to support this, apparently thinking the parallels so obvious that the relevant textual details need not be given. He also assumes, without giving reasons, that Shakespeare was the lender not the borrower.

    According to Juan Christian Pellicer, the servant's word saltiers in The Winter's Tale 4.4 is not a rustic mangling of satyrs but a learned Latin coinage (to convey leaping satyrs) perhaps prompted by the phrase "saltantis satyros" in Virgil's Eclogues ('Shakespeare's 'Saltiers'/satyrs in The Winter's Tale and Virgil's Saltantis Satyros', N&Q 252 [2007].303-4). MacDonald P. Jackson has a new way to date Sir Thomas More ('A New Chronological Indicator for Shakespeare's Plays and for Hand D of Sir Thomas More', N&Q 252 [2007].304-7). Using software that "analyses various structural features", Hartmut Ilsemann has counted the lengths of speeches in Shakespeare and noticed that they get shorter over his career. Jackson does not say so, but presumably the point about analyzing structural features means that the software does not just rely on punctuation to determine where speeches end, otherwise the method would be counting data from the printing/editorial processes, not from Shakespeare himself. Unfortunately, in a footnote citing Ilsemann's work, the URL--given twice albeit with the same real address, for the tilde is once given its ASCII code instead--points to a page no longer available on the worldwide web. Ilsemann's method more or less corroborates the Oxford Complete Works chronology, although The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew seem on this evidence to be later than usually thought. (If accepted, this would corroborate John Peachman's article reviewed above.) On this evidence, Hand D of Sir Thomas More was composed around 1603-4, and the two halves of Pericles are once again shown to be highly distinct. Kevin Curran finds that Cleopatra's aversion to the messenger's "but yet" (leading up to the news of Antony's marriage) is an idea borrowed from Samuel Daniel's The Tragedy of Philotas ('Shakespeare and Daniel Revisited: Antony and Cleopatra II.v.50-4 and The Tragedy of Philotas V.ii.2013-15', N&Q 252 [2007].318-20). Finally for this review, Arthur Sherbo reprints some notes by George Steevens and Edmond Malone (from Steevens's 1793 edition) that ought to have appeared in the New Variorum editions of Poems (1938) and Sonnets (1944) by Hyder Edward Rollins, and many of them are about bits of the plays that are illuminated by usages in the sonnets and the narrative poems ('Corrections and Additions to Professor Rollins's Editions of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Poems', N&Q 252 [2007].483-90). I assume that this fulfils the promise made by Sherbo in his longer article reviewed above, but the textual situation is so tangled and the notes are coming out in such short bursts and in different places that it is hard to be entirely sure.

Books Reviewed

Andrew Murphy (ed.) Shakespeare and the Text, Concise Companions to Literature and Culture. Blackwell [2007].

Brian Vickers Shakespeare, 'A Lover's Complaint', and John Davies of Hereford. Cambridge University Press [2007].

Douglas A. Brooks (ed.) The Shakespeare Apocrypha, The Shakespeare Yearbook, 16. Edwin Mellen [2007].

Eric Rasmussen and Aaron Santesso (eds.) Comparative Excellence: New Essays on Shakespeare and Johnson, AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century, 52. AMS Press [2007].

Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds.) Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works. Clarendon Press [2007].

John Jowett Shakespeare and Text, Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford University Press [2007].

Sonia Massai Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor. Cambridge University Press [2007].

Thomas Merriam Co-authorship in King John, Renaissance Monographs, 34. The Renaissance Institute of Sophia University [2007].

Thomas Middleton The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Clarendon Press [2007].

William Shakespeare Shakespeare's Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and the Shorter Poems, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen, The Arden Shakespeare. Thomson Learning [2007].

William Shakespeare The Complete Works (=The Royal Shakespeare Company Complete Works), ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. Macmillan [2007].