"Shakespeare: Editions and Textual Studies in 2016" Not the Year's Work in English Studies

The Third Edition of The Norton Shakespeare appeared this year, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan. As a General Editor of the rival New Oxford Shakespeare, I cannot be trusted to give an objective review of the Norton, so I will confine myself to a couple of relevant factual observations. The printed version of the edition contains no textual notes--these are confined to the online version--and within those notes there is no attempt to record the history of particular readings that have appeared in earlier editions. That is, the Norton offers no historical collation. In the notes on textual variants, the abbreviation "Edd" means that a particular reading occurred in some previous editions without specifying which. The Norton evidently does not expect its readers to be concerned with the scholarly debate over contested readings.

    The Arden Shakespeare Third Series nears completion with James C. Bulman's edition of King Henry IV Part 2. In his Introduction (pp. 1-148), Bulman explains that he calls the prince Harry in 2 Henry 4 because that is the predominant form of his name there, and Hal in 1 Henry 4 for the same reason (p. 1n1). 2 Henry 4 is somewhat in the shadow of 1 Henry 4, but Bulman sees his play as "Shakespeare's most radical experiment in dramatizing English history", on account of its largely ignoring political history and instead giving us "a panorama of an England unrecorded by chroniclers" (p. 2). But whether it was part of the plan all along or just a sequel written to follow up the success of 1 Henry 4 is not agreed upon. Falstaff has a lot more to say in 2 Henry 4 than he does in 1 Henry 4 and the king and the prince rather less. The trickery of the low characters gets echoed in the trickery of the high characters regarding the false amnesty near the end of 2 Henry 4. Certainly 2 Henry 4 echoes 1 Henry 4 in its succession of episodes, but it does so in order to subvert the expectations that this echoing raises.

    There is in 2 Henry 4 a marked lack of continuity from the previous play: the prince seems once more in need of reformation (although he reformed at the end of 1 Henry 4), the Hostess has gone from honest tavern keeper to brothel keeper, Bardolph is more clearly Falstaff's man-servant, and Falstaff seems older and sicker and less closely associated with the prince. For Bulman, all this shows that Part Two was not conceived at the same time as Part One but rather is an "unpremeditated" sequel (p. 7) and indeed can stand alone; the linkage of them as Part One and Part Two did not begin until the 1623 Folio. On the other hand, the prince's rejection of Falstaff is significantly less poignant if you have not seen their previous closeness, and the rebellion in Part Two is prepared for at the end of Part One, which suggests that a sequel was in Shakespeare's mind. Harold Jenkins argued that Shakespeare intended just one play, got as far as Act 3 of Part One, and then realized that he had too much material and decided on making two parts. This could also help explain why Falstaff is recruiting men in Gloucestershire in Part Two, which is well out of his way in heading from London to the rebellion in the north. If that recruiting scene were originally intended for Part One, Gloucestershire makes perfect sense as the place to recruit men for the Battle of Shrewsbury. Then again, Shakespeare might have planned a two-parter in which Part One covered the events up to the Battle of Shrewsbury and Part Two from the death of Henry 4 right up to the victories of Henry 5, as indeed The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth did.

    Bulman takes the view that Shakespeare's first Henry 4 play was always meant to end with the Battle of Shrewsbury and that the sequel was meant to cover the accession of Henry 5 and his exploits in France, but that in writing the first play Shakespeare found he had too much comic material so he cut it and saved it. Then when Henry 4 was a hit in the theatre he wrote a whole, unanticipated, sequel using this excised comic material and digging another rebellion out of Holinshed, and he postponed Henry 5's exploits to a third play. To link Parts One and Two of Henry 4, Shakespeare went back to Part One and added in the anticipatory reference to the Prelate's Rebellion. "This theory explains what is otherwise nearly inexplicable: why, if Henry IV was originally conceived as a two-part play, Shakespeare saved so little chronicle history for the second part, deprived it of the narrative coherence of the first part, opted for a more discursive structure and echoed so many of the comic scenes and situations from Part One in a much darker and more cynical vein" (p. 16).

    Regarding "The Play in Performance" (pp. 17-54), Bulman observes that there is no evidence that Parts One and Two were performed consecutively as a pair in Shakespeare's life although they were performed in close proximity to one another at court at the end of 1612. Bulman reckons that 2 Henry 4 "probably held the stage as an autonomous play" (p. 18) in its first performances, and that remained the case until the eighteenth century. Bulman explores Thomas Betterton's alterations that further severed the connections between Parts One and Two. A recurrent trend was to rearrange scenes to reduce the intermingling of the tragic/political material with the comic material. Making the play into a standalone Falstaff vehicle allowed Part Two to be independent across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus although ". . . the success of Part Two on the stage had never been dependent on Part One" (p. 25), Bulman reckons that "Both parts of Henry IV are enriched when they are performed together" (p. 26), especially in giving more motivation for the banishment of Falstaff.

    Putting the two plays on together became a distinct practice in the early twentieth century, and with Falstaff not the prince as the key role. But there has also been a distinct theatrical tradition since the mid-twentieth century to perform the tetralogy as a cycle in which 2 Henry 4 is the least important element, especially under the influence of E. M. W. Tillyard's Tudor Myth reading of both tetralogies, which itself was heavily dependent on the German critical tradition of the nineteenth century. In the survey of recent productions, Bulman misspells the name of the actor Geoffrey Streatfeild who played the prince for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2007 (not "2008"). Bulman detects in the recent tendency for Falstaff to be "simply impressively large" a change in wider attititudes about body size: "Fat, after all, is no longer a laughing matter" (pp. 43-44).

    Of a recent production of both parts at the replica Globe in south London, Bulman remarks that ". . . the entire theatre served as a playing space, [which] allowed a fluidity of performance and a level of audience involvement such as might have been common when the Henry IV plays were performed at the Curtain more than four hundred years ago" (p. 50). It is not clear why he associates both plays with the Curtain, since the Chamberlain's Men were at the Theatre until at least mid-1598, which is late enough for at least Part One (and quite possibly Part Two as well) to be premiered there. Moreover, in neither the Theatre nor the Curtain would the entire theatre be used as the playing space: this is an aspect of performance at the modern replica Globe that is entirely inauthentic.

    Bulman's section "Falstaff and his Friends" (pp. 55-99) is largely a reading of the character of Falstaff and his relationships with others, and it bears on this review's concern with the text because contemporary responses to this character caused Shakespeare to revise the play. Part Two is nostalgic for the merry England of Part One in the way that people of Shakespeare's time really were nostalgic for their lost festive, Catholic past. In naming the man who embodies that lost festivity for a proto-Protestant martyr, Shakespeare "outrageously constructs a figure of forgetfulness and historical revisionism as the object of a powerful, irresistible nostalgia" (p. 64), as Jonathan Baldo puts it. In mocking a Lollard, Shakespeare was not taking such an unorthodox stance as we might think: the extremist nonconformist sects were by the late-sixteenth century widely considered to be unpatriotic and religiously dangerous, and quite possibly hypocritical too. Using extensive Biblical quotation, Falstaff is himself a "strategic mocker of nonconformists" (p. 68). Bulman moves to character criticism of the Hostess and then Pistol. He finds 2 Henry 4 particularly important for its expansion of the range of characters who normally inhabit a history play, giving a more representative cross-section of Elizabethan society than we are used to, and providing a kind of alternative chronicles, especially in the reminiscences of Shallow.

    In "The Play as Chronicle History" (pp. 99-133), Bulman explores why Shakespeare chose, from among all the things that happened towards the end of Henry 4's reign, to emphasize the Prelate's Rebellion, bearing in mind his theory that Shakespeare had originally planned the continue to story after the end of the first Henry 4 play with the story of Henry 5. The main reason was that the way this rebellion is suppressed "offers a view of history as radically contingent and amoral" (p. 102). Critics since Samuel Johnson have found Prince John's perfidy in the Gaultree episode to be distasteful. Bulman explores the role of recollection and oral testimony as a contrast to chronicle history, for example in Henry 4's imperfect quotation of Richard 2's prophecy about fresh rebellion plaguing the usurper's reign. Bulman considers how Shakespeare's combined material from two incompatible sources for the Gaultree episode, both found in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, and then moves to the sources for Henry 4's death in Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars and the prince's life in Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth.

    For "Dating the Play" (pp. 133-146), the terminus ad quem is its entrance in the Stationers' Register on 23 August 1600. The key event helping to date 2 Henry 4 is the censorship of its predecessor 1 Henry 4, which offended the powerful Cobham family because the historical Oldcastle, the name that Shakespeare originally gave Falstaff, was their honoured ancestor and a proto-Protestant martyr. (Actually, there is also internal evidence about chronology from the datable drifts in Shakespeare's metrical habits and rare-word vocabulary, but Bulman considers none of it.) The precise cause of the change of the name of Oldcastle is, according to Bulman, uncertain: it could have been some action by the Cobhams because Oldcastle was their ancestor, or it could have been a reaction to "an outpouring of sentiment by reformers against parodying . . . a martyr" (p. 134), or it could have been preemptive self-censorship by Shakespeare.

    William Brooke (a Cobham) became Lord Chamberlain (and so in a position to do something about the play) on 8 August 1596 after the previous incumbent Henry Carey died on 23 July 1596. Presumably 1 Henry 4 was written before Henry Carey died, since Shakespeare would not deliberately antagonize the new Lord Chamberlain. On the other hand, the Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney might have licensed 1 Henry 4 after Brooke took over as Lord Chamberlain because he thought it no more offensive than the Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (in which Oldcastle is a drinking companion of the prince), a play he had licensed in 1594. Bulman quotes Thomas Hoccleve's letter of 1633-34 that makes it clear that the Cobhams forced Shakespeare to change the name Oldcastle, but the exact nature of the pressure remains unclear. Bulman attributes to Gary Taylor the argument that Brooke acted because he could not withstand the pressure of public opinion against 1 Henry 4 (p. 136n3), but Taylor in fact argued that public opinion merely strengthened Brooke's hand in an essentially personal reaction. If Brooke himself took exception to the play and moved against it, that must have happened between 8 August 1596 when he got the Lord Chamberlainship and 24 January 1597 when he retired from court to mourn his daughter's death.

    Bulman refers to Shakespeare's company having "returned to London in October [1596] for a short season at the Swan" (p. 137) but in fact there is no evidence that Shakespeare's company ever played at the Swan: why would they when they had the Burbage family's Theatre in Shoreditch to play in? The myth of a move to the Swan arises from Leslie Hotson's discovery of two writs of attachment, both issued in November 1596 to the sheriff of Surrey. In one of these, William Wayte sought protection from William Shakespeare and Francis Langley (owner of the Swan) and other persons, and in the other, Francis Langley sought protection from William Wayte. From these writs Hotson inferred that Shakespeare had moved to Bankside and hence that an unnamed company that played at the Swan in 1596 was his company, but this is just wishful thinking: Hotson wanted to believe that the De Witt drawing of the Swan depicted Shakespeare's company.

    Bulman explores just when Brooke could have seen 1 Henry 4 play and concludes (from only circumstantial evidence) that a documented court performance on 26 December 1596 was of this play and that Brooke took its comic representation of his ancestor Oldcastle as a public humiliation (pp. 137-39). The rechristening of the characters in 1 Henry 4 must have taken place after composition of 2 Henry 4 began, since the old names are present in parts of the first edition of 2 Henry 4. Bulman acknowledges suggestions that the 1598 quarto of 1 Henry 4 was based on a transcript made to show to Tilney that the rechristening had taken place, and that at the same time a transcript was made of 2 Henry 4, presumably also designed to show that the required changes had been made, and that this transcript was later the authoritative document by which an exemplar of the 1600 quarto of 2 Henry 4 was corrected before it was used as printer's copy for the Folio edition (pp. 140-41).

    Bulman concludes that the play was written perhaps as early as January 1597 and perhaps was shown at court at Shrovetide 1597; he names no end-point for the composition of the play, but implicitly its entry into the Stationers' Register on 23 August 1600 gives that datum. If Bulman is right that the play was in performance by early 1597, it would not have premiered at the Curtain (a claim he repeats on p. 145) since the lease on the Theatre did not expire until March 1597 and the company remained there after its expiration for more than a year. The play's epilogue is (unusually) in prose and is long and somewhat incoherent; quite possibly what we have is the conflation of multiple epilogues. Bulman thinks the first part (his lines 1-17) are "spoken not by an actor in the play but by Shakespeare in his own person" (p. 143), which seems to me a misreading of the tone of epilogues, which are faux impromptu. Bulman thinks that the first epilogue ends with the speaker kneeling and praying for the queen (pointedly not begging for applause) and that what follows is a separate epilogue for public performance "spoken by Falstaff" (p. 144), by which he means the actor who played Falstaff now in a part-character/part-actor hybrid. Bulman traces the subtle ways in which this second epilogue asserts that Falstaff is not Oldcastle while suggesting that of course he is.

    In a brief section on "Editorial Choices" (pp. 146-8), Bulman remarks that none of the three versions of 2 Henry 4 is the "fully authoritative basis for an edition" (p. 146). Appendix One has the detail, but the essence is that Bulman uses as his copy text the first issue of the 1600 quarto (Qa) except where Qb or F have authoritative passages missing from Qa, for which passages Qb or F becomes the copy text. Bulman reports that he sticks to Q except where it is indefensible "even though another reading may seem preferable" (p. 147). That seems a rather high bar to emendation, and an odd sense of the word "preferable": if something is to be preferred why not prefer it? Adoptions of readings from F are marked by "^F . . . ^F" in the text, which was R. A. Foakes's preference for representation of F-only readings in his Q-based Arden3 King Lear. Bulman writes that he has "retained archaic spellings if they indicate idiomatic pronunciations or regionalisms that are important in defining a character's social class or geographic origin" (p. 147), but as we shall see he appears to have retained archaic spellings with less justification than that. Regarding stage directions, Bulman reports that he has resisted the editorial urge to explain too much or limit the "imaginative interplay between text and reader" (p. 148) that happens when we struggle to make sense of the stage action.

    Turning to the text of the play, we note that Bulman is considerably more assiduous than previous Arden3 editors in marking with an asterisk the notes that discuss textual variants, using this convention nearly 100 times. The following is a discussion of the more interesting of his editorial choices. At Induction.35, Rumour describes the place before which he stands as "this worm-eaten hole of ragged stone", which is what Q and F have, rather than adopting Lewis Theobald's emendation hole > hold. Bulman uses circular logic, arguing that "the agreement of Q and F on hole, if one assumes that Q was not F's source (see pp. 468-70), would seem to have more authority here" than the emendation, while at the place in his appendix on the textual issues that he refers the reader to he reports that ". . . I argue in the commentary, a good case can be made for 'hole' . . ." (p. 468). But he does not make a case for hole beyond remarking that there is an "imaginative association of hole with worm-eaten". That association is precisely the point, since after worm-eaten the word hole is the weaker reading because it is pleonastic: of course a worm's eating makes a hole. Moreover calling a dwelling a hole is a modern idiom not Shakespeare's; for him holes are hollow places.

    Bulman stages the opening of the first scene without the use of the 'above' space, an idea first suggested by Edward Capell, in response to an awkwardness in the staging. If Lord Bardolph and the Porter are on the main stage together, social deference should make the latter do the knocking or indeed (as is his job) just let the visitor in; that the Porter needs to ask a lord to do his own knocking strongly suggests that the Porter is 'above', where editors since the mid-nineteenth century have put him. In Q the line at 1.1.161, "This strained passion doth you wrong my lord", absent from F, is given a speech prefix "Vmfr.", for whom there is no entrance; the next line "Sweet earle, diuorce not wisdom from your honor" is given to Lord Bardolph, after which Morton has a speech. The speech prefix "Vmfr." presumably refers back to the man mentioned earlier by Travers: "My lord, sir Iohn Vmfreuile turnd me backe" (1.1.34). On the commonly accepted assumption that Shakespeare at some point decided to conflate Sir John Umfreville and Lord Bardolph, Bulman gives "This strained passion doth you wrong my lord" to Bardolph and adds the next line ("Sweet earle . . . your honor), which is Bardolph's in Q, to the beginning of Morton's speech. There clearly is some speech prefix confusion here relating to an incomplete revision and as Bulman observes the margin of the manuscript underlying Q may have been crowded with corrections.

    Bulman's solution here is reasonable, but he still leaves a mysterious reference to "sir Iohn Vmfreuile" back at line 1.1.34. The trouble with changing that mention of Lord Bardolph is metrical and verbal--the line would lose a foot and acquire an awkward repetition in "lord, Lord"--but the trouble with not changing it is more severe. Lord Bardolph says that he encountered Travers on the road, gave him the good news from Shrewsbury, and then brought this news to Northumberland's castle more quickly than Travers could because he had the better horse (1.1.28-36). Travers agrees with this account if we emend his line "My lord, sir Iohn Vmfreuile turnd me backe" to "My lord, Lord Bardolph turnd me backe". But if we do not, Travers seems to say that he did not turn back until someone else, Lord Umfreville, told him the same good news. This is particularly confusing for the audience since the real import of Travers's account is that yet another informant ("A gentleman almost forespent with speede", 1.1.37) then gave him a different account, the bad news from Shrewsbury. It is hard to believe the Shakespeare wanted the account of good and bad news chasing one another across the country to be quite so confusing. If an editor is prepared to complete Shakespeare's revision intentions by reassigning Umfreville's last remaining speech prefix to Lord Bardolph, it seems remiss to then leave the last remaining mention of Umfreville's name unemended. 

    At 1.1.166-79, Bulman imports from F the 14 extra lines that Q lacks of Morton's speech, exhorting Northumberland to a stoic acceptance of his son Hotspur's death. As evidence that this was cut to make the version represented by Q rather than added later to make the version represented by F, Bulman adduces the fact that Lord Bardolph goes on to extend Morton's "gambling metaphor" (1.1.180-86); it is not clear why Bulman thinks that makes a cut more likely than an addition. As part of this adoption of 14 lines from F, there is "What hath then befalne? | Or what hath this bold enterprize bring forth", which Bulman emends, following F2, to ". . . brought forth". Bulman finds a parallel "hath . . . hath" construction more likely than the 1986 Oxford Complete Works' editors' argument that the second hath is a contamination from the first and that it should in fact be doth. However, a misreading of manuscript brought as F's bring is harder to believe than the easy misreading of manuscript doth as F's hath.

    Bulman again imports from F a chunk of Morton's speech (1.1.189-209)--announcing that the Archbishop of York is rising against Henry 4--that Q lacks and that without which the surrounding speeches make no sense. At 1.2.7-8, Bulman retains the unusual Q and F compound clay-man in Falstaff's "this foolish compounded clay-man is not able", on the strength of the Q/F agreement. More likely, though, F simply got the error from Q since clay-man is an exceedingly rare form, with just one other example in all of the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership's (EEBO-TCP's) more than 60,000 books, and that one is from 1680 by which time the error's repetition through three Shakespeare Folios may have given it some currency. C. J. Sisson (New Readings in Shakespeare, 2.42) pointed out that clay-man suggests an individual while Falstaff is clearly talking about man in general and counselled emendation to "clay, man,". The 1986 Oxford editors wondered whether the scribe making F's manuscript copy "glanced at Q and found some apparent logic in its hyphen". Since early printed texts do occasionally have commas where today we would favour a hyphen--as in Q1 A Midsummer Night's Dream's "bully,Bottom"--it is not hard to suppose that this equivalence is the source of Q's error here and its retention in F.

    Bulman follows Q (1.21-2) in having Falstaff say "I will sooner have a beard grow in the palm of my hand than he [the prince] shall get one off his cheek" rather than ". . . on his cheek" (F's reading) or ". . . of his cheek" (John Payne Collier's suggestion). Bulman reports that of and on would mean the same here, but not why he prefers off; presumably it also means roughly the same: from, at. In scene 1.3 Bulman excises the ghost character of Fauconbridge who is included in the opening stage direction but has nothing to say in the scene. Bulman thinks that Q might have omitted Morton's account of the Prelate's Rebellion at 1.1.189-209 (which he includes from F) because that account duplicates what is given here. It appears then that his procedure is to give the reader as much Shakespeare writing as possible, even in a case such as this where he suspects that two pieces of writing were not supposed to co-exist in one script. Of the reason for Q omitting 1.3.21-4 and 1.3.36-55, Bulman is just not sure. The F-only passage at (1.3.36-41) is imported into Bulman's Q-based edition, but it gets considerably altered in its punctuation, as the original is hard to follow. 

    At 1.3.79-80, Bulman's adopts the F version of Hastings's explanation for the king's refusal to draw his forces together, "He leaves his back unarmed, the French and Welsh | Baying him at the heels", rather than Q's "French and Welch he leaues his back vnarmde, they baying him at the heeles". As Bulman sees it, Q's "French and Welch" was interlined or marginal in the manuscript underlying Q and got inserted by the compositor at the wrong place. The F-only passage at 1.3.85-108, as discussed elsewhere, is one of those that Bulman restores to his Q-based edition, speculating that the cut might have been motivated either by politics (the Archbishop's speech refers to the fickle multitude who supported Richard 2's usurpation and would not support the usurpation of his successor) or by theatric effect (streamlining performances in which connections to the earlier plays in the cycle were not needed).

    Although Bulman's editorial practice generally agrees with the New Textualist rejection of the New Bibliography (see his dismissal of what is "anachronistically called a promptbook" in his appendix on "The Text," quoted below), a notable exception occurs in his treatment of Q's stage direction at the beginning of 2.1, "Enter Hostesse of the Tauerne, and an Officer or two." Bulman takes the vagueness about the number of authors to suggest that Q's copy may have been authorial rather than theatrical, based on the assumption that theatrical scripts would have to be more precise. This assumption has been vigorously contested by Paul Werstine in Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (reviewed in YWES for 2013, but Werstine's claim is not fully convincing. He is able to find only one example, in John Fletcher's The Honest Man's Fortune (Victoria and Albert Museum Manuscript Dyce 9), of an "X or Y" permissive stage direction regarding the number of characters entering (Werstine pp. 176-8); all Werstine's other examples are merely imprecise nouns such as "Attendants" and "Fellows". The same consideration applies at the beginning of 2.4, for which Q provides the permissive "Enter a Drawer or two" although the action certainly calls for at least two of them.

     Bulman adopts F's reading of continuantly (2.1.25) as the Hostess's malapropism (meaning incontinently) instead of Q's continually. As Bulman notes, a compositor might easily have mistakenly 'corrected' this characteristic speech. At 2.1.168, Bulman uses F to make Basingstoke (rather than Q's absurd "Billingsgate") the place where the king is said to be resting on his way back to London. For the reading of Falstaff's letter (2.2.105-31), which Poins starts and then the prince takes over, Bulman follows Q until the strange moment when Poins gives one of his witty glosses on what the prince has just read aloud (punning on brevity as short-windedness) and then seems to continue reading aloud the letter himself, since Q and F have no speech prefix for the prince to continue his reading with "I commend mee to thee . . .". As Bulman observes, this seems wrong from a practical point of view--did Poins snatch the letter back from the prince?--and tellingly the next speech prefix in Q is also for Poins. Since all this suggests that a speech prefix for the prince has dropped out, Bulman duly supplies it.

    At 2.2.113, Q and F agree that Poins says that the answer to a riddle is "as ready as a borowed cap", which is a particularly obscure simile, and Bulman opts for William Warburton's widely accepted emendation to ". . . borrower's cap", since borrowers come cap-in-hand. Bulman restores from F the long eulogy (2.3.23-45) of Lady Percy for her dead husband Hotspur, missing in Q, which dramatic logic alone would require since Northumberland is clearly moved by it. As to why Q lacks this speech, Bulman can only speculate. At 2.4.49, Q has Doll reply to Falstaff's "we [men] catch of you [women]" the obscure line "Yea ioy, our chaines and our iewels", presumably meaning that men catch (steal) women's valuables. But "Yea joy" is a strange exclamation with no parallels in EEBO-TCP and F has "I marry", which suggests expurgation of an oath. Bulman follows M. R. Ridley's suggestion that Shakespeare wrote "Yea Iesu", which was misread by the compositor and then expurgated by the scribe preparing copy for F.

    In Q, the Hostess responds to Falstaff's objection to the exclusion of his ensign Pistol with "Tilly fally, sir Iohn, nere tel me: & your ancient swaggrer comes not in my doores" (2.4.83-84). Bulman finds that this "does not make sense" without indicating why. He takes the ampersand to stand for An (meaning if), which means there is a missing consequence to this conditional. And certainly can be a conditional (equivalent to An), and an ampersand can stand for And, but And need not be conditional and with a modern full stop in place of the colon the line forms two grammatically correct and intelligible sentences. Bulman instead adopts J. C. Maxwell's suggestion that "swaggrer" was the compositor's misunderstanding of "swagger a" and so renders the line as the conditional "An your ancient swagger, 'a comes not in my doors!". Bulman does not report Maxwell's objections to his own hypothesis, which were that: i) Q and F agree on swaggrer/Swaggerer at this point, ii) the Hostess uses swaggerers at the end of her epeech, and iii) Falstaff says in reply that Pistol is "no swaggrer". 

    At 2.4.157-200 Bulman chooses to render in prose (as it is in Q) all of Pistol's rant that is full of scraps of other plays--"To Pluto's damned lake", "Have we not Hiren here", "hollow pampered jades of Asia" and so on--rather than relining to verse. Bulman cites George Wright's argument that we are supposed to understand that Pistol is echoing what he has heard in the theatre without fully understanding its verse structure. This is an appealing but somewhat strained argument, since Pistol later seems capable of speaking his own (not quoted) verse in 5.3 perfectly well. Where the quarto has a stage direction "enter musicke" (2.4.226) Bulman thinks it unclear whether the musicians are on the main stage or "in the music gallery". In fact, as Richard Hosley long ago showed from a comprehensive survey of the relevant stage directions, the Globe's music room was inside the tiring house until 1609, when it was moved to the stage balcony to match the one at the Blackfriars. The Theatre and the Curtain (where 1 Henry 4 might instead have premiered) were most likely the same as the Globe in this regard. Since Falstaff addresses the musicians--"play sirs"--they must be on stage.

    At 2.4.338, Bulman prints "For boy, there is a good angel about him, but the devil blinds him too", which is Q's reading while F has outbids for blinds. Bulman explains that "too = like everyone else" so the boy is like the rest of us in being blinded by the devil to the presence of his good angel. The difficulty with this explanation is that Falstaff has said nothing about the devil blinding the rest of us, so too seems to have no antecedent; Bulman must think it is implied but does not indicate where. Bulman prints "Canst thou, O partial sleep, give then repose | To the wet sea-son" (3.1.26-27), using then where Q has them (and F has thy) and sea-son where Q has season (and F has Sea-Boy). Bulman supposes a minim error by Q's compositor turning his copy's then into them, and thinks this more likely than F's thy, which is nonetheless possible. This shows an admirable refusal to overvalue a reading simply because it appears in one of the early editions. 

    Bulman assigns to Silence line 3.2.55, "Good morrow, honest gentleman", as the press-corrected Qa and Qb have it, rather than to Bardolph as uncorrected Qa has it, or Shallow as F has it. Bulman's reasoning is that Silence greeted Shallow with "Good morrow" at the beginning of the scene (but acknowledging that Shallow later uses "Honest gentleman") and that uncorrected Qa prints a speech prefix for Bardolph on the next line too, so that the one on this line is clearly an error. Bulman follows Q and F in assigning line 3.2.150, "What trade art thou, Feeble?", to Shallow even though Falstaff has been doing the questioning of the recruits up to now. There is nothing to prevent Shallow trying to take part in the questioning. Falstaff says in Q and F that as a young man Shallow's physique was so slight that he was "inuincible" (3.2.312) to anyone with poor vision, where the context clearly requires the modern sense of invisible. Bulman retains the Q/F reading, arguing that it is meant to "imply the defeat a shortsighted person would suffer in struggling to see Shallow". This is rather strained. Unseen persons can only be said to have defeated the viewer if they want to escape detection, and the sense here is almost the opposite of that: Shallow's inconspicuousness contrasts with rather fulfilling his aggrandizing self-representation, as Bulman's reading implies.

    In its uncorrected state, Q reads "I may snap at him: let Time shape, and there an end" (as F does, albeit repunctuated), which in stop-press correction was altered to "I may snap at him, till Time shape, and there an end" (3.2.330). Bulman favours the uncorrected state of Q without speculating why this good reading was turned bad by mistaken stop-press correction. At 4.1.34, Westmorland says in Q and F that the true nature of the uprising against the king is "rebellion . . . guarded with rage" and that the Archbishop is dressing it up as something more respectable. Most editors emend rage > rags, not least because the entire speech is concerned with the contrasting imagery of "base and abject routs", "beggary", and "ugly form" on one hand, and the "white vestments" (of a priest) on the other, and because the error is graphically plausible. Bulman retains rage and does not so much defend as paraphrase it: "rebellion as a figure progressing through a mob, led by youth, protected (OED guard v. 7) by rage". There is considerable evidence of F's dependence on Q here--for example in having brackets around "in these great affairs" at 4.2.6--so their agreement on rage is not strong evidence of its correctness.

    The uncorrected state of Q reads "[WESTMORLAND] What peere hath beene subornde to grate on you? | That you should seale this lawlesse bloody booke | Offorgde rebellion with a seale diuine, | And consecrate commotions bitter edge.| Bishop My brother Generall, the common wealth | To brother borne an houshold cruelty, | I make my quarrell in particular" (4.1.90-96). The corrected state (and F) omit the lines "And . . . edge" and "To . . . cruelty", so Bulman follows the uncorrected state to include both of them since their omission gives no better sense than their inclusion. The line "And . . . edge" is needed, according to Bulman, "as a culmination of Westmorland's reproof to the Archbishop", although without it Westmorland's speech ends satisfactorily with "seale diuine". Bulman finds the Archbishop's speech problematic with or without "To . . . cruelty" but it makes better sense without this middle line: the grievous conditions that are common to all, says the priest, I make particular to myself.

    Within the section 4.1.103-39, imported from F and probably absent Q because of censorship, Bulman follows Lewis Theobald in emending Mowbray's claim that Richard 2 "Was forc'd, perforce compell'd to banish him" to "Was force perforce . . ." (4.1.116), meaning he was willy-nilly compelled, thereby avoiding the tautology of "forced . . . compelled". In Q, Prince John tells the Archbishop that he was better giving divine counsel to his congregation "That now to see you here, an yron man talking, | Cheering a rowt of rebells" (4.1.236-7). Bulman follows F in emending to "Than now . . ." and omitting talking as a deleted first-stab for Cheering. Bulman follows Q in having Prince John speak a metrically incomplete half line at a key point in his justification for tricking his enemies with a fake truce: "But for you rebels, look to taste the due | Meet for rebellion" (4.1.434-5), rather than borrowing from F to complete the line as "Meet for Rebellion, and such acts as yours". Bulman thinks that "and such acts as yours" might be "a scribal afterthought" and that the metrical incompleteness gives a stronger dramatic effect. Just as importantly, it is hard to see how Q could have unintentionally omitted these words since their absence is highly visible on the page.

    At 4.2.41, Bulman follows Q's Falstaff who says "I may justly say with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome, 'There, cousin: I came, saw and overcame'". The trouble with this is "There, cousin" (which words are omitted in F): who is calling whom cousin and why? In addressing this question, Bulman seems to contradict himself. He argues that "Falstaff, impersonating Caesar and, as ever, delighting in effrontery, uses these words ["There, cousin"] to address Prince John as a familiar". In the same note, however, he argues against George Walton Williams's inclusion of "There, cousin," remarking that "It is presumptuous for a commoner, even one as irreverent as Falstaff, to address royalty as cousin". C. J. Sisson argued that Q's "there cosin" is a misreading of "their Cesar" (thus identifiying the nook-nosed fellow), pointing out that in the catchword "there" is spelt "their". 

    Throughout Falstaff's paean to alcohol (4.2.88-123), Bulman retains the spelling sherris that is now almost always modernized to sherry. In doing so, he is following Stanley Wells's advice in "The Modernizing of Shakespeare's Spelling", which advice, though, was not followed in the 1986-87 Oxford Complete Works nor the 2016-17 New Oxford Shakespeare texts of this speech. When Henry 4 gets the good news of further suppression of the rebellion and finds that although it cheers him it does not take away his underlying sickness, Bulman follows Q's "Will Fortune never come with both hands full, | But wet her fair words still in foulest terms?" (4.3.103-4) rather than adopting F's version of the second line: "But write her faire words still in foulest Letters?" Bulman explains Q's reading by claiming that wet means "daubed or soiled as with ink" and that the good news is tainted "by unfavourable conditions (foulest terms)". This explanation relies on rather strained senses of wet and terms. According to Sisson the image, conveyed by F and plausibly garbled to give Q's reading, is of good news (fair words) written in bad handwriting (foulest Letters), which is attractive but does not quite explain the difference between Fortune giving with one hand rather than both.

    At 4.3.163-4 Bulman remarks that the idiosyncratic spellings of the modern noun down and the modern adjective downy as "dowlne" (in Q and F), "dowlny" (Q), and "dowlney" (F) may be Shakespeare's own. Certainly these -wln- spellings are unusual in the period, appearing just 16 times in 11 books in all EEBO-TCP, according to a search for dowln* in which the asterisk stands for any letters (or none) after those specified. By contrast, the downy/downey spellings alone appear 972 times in 568 books. The figures for the noun down spelling in EEBO-TCP would be time-consuming to produce since one would have to read in context each of the hundreds of thousands of hits in order to distinguish those for the adverb down from those for the noun down, but just on the evidence of dowln* being so rare and downy/downey so common it is reasonable to treat the -wln- forms as idiosyncratic. That F has the same -wln- form as Q is strong evidence for F's dependence upon Q here, since Q and F derive from different manuscripts and their lineages cannot be supposed to have independently preserved an authorial idiosyncracy.

    At 4.3.307 and 4.3.349, F has additional half-lines ("O my sonne!" and "My gracious Liege:") that Bulman, following P. H. Davison, thinks are more likely "actors' interpolations" than authorial writing. The notion that actors made up their own lines has long been invoked to explain oddities in early printed editions, but it would be helpful to hear of a plausible way that these inventions might have become part of an authoritative manuscript, and none has been offered. In Q, Henry IV says to Prince Hal "And all thy friends which thou must make thy friends, | Haue . . ." (4.3.333-4), and F substantively agrees; Bulman, however, adopts Thomas Tyrrwhit's emendation of the first thy to my. Sisson argued (and Bulman cites René Weis's agreement) that the QF reading is satisfactory so long as make is emphasized: they are your potential friends if you confirm the friendship by your actions. Bulman thinks that the king's subsequent claim that these friends advanced him to the throne proves that he is referring to his own friends not Prince Hal's, but since the point of the king's speech is that these are the same people who must be Prince Hal's friends once he ascends the throne, this seems like a nice argument.

    At 5.3.3, Bulman chooses not to modernize the present participle graffing to grafting, just as at 2.2.60 he retained engraffed instead of modernizing to engrafted, which would not have affected the meter since that line is prose. It is not clear why he retains these archaic forms that have no semantic distinction from the modern forms. When Falstaff rationalizes turning up at the procession in ordinary clothes as sign of zeal, Bulman follows Q and F in having Pistol agree: "PISTOL It doth so. | FALSTAFF It shows my earnestness of affection -- | PISTOL It doth so. | FALSTAFF My devotion -- | PISTOL It doth, it doth, it doth" (5.5.15-19)". The first of these speeches could be given to Shallow since Falstaff's speech (to which it is a response) was addressed to Shallow and attempted to justify not having spent the thousand pounds Shallow had lent him to buy formal clothes. If so, Pistol's two subsequent speeches could, as a consequences, also be reassigned. But Bulman prefers the idea that Pistol is trying to butt into the conversation of Falstaff and Shallow to impart the news of Doll's arrest.

    Appendix One (pp. 430-77) concerns "The Text". Bulman sketches the differences between Qa, Qb, and F, including the fact that Qb introduced a scene (now 3.1) that is not in Qa and that F provides eight passages not in Q and includes the Qb-only scene. F also "adds or clarifies stage directions, makes speech prefixes consistent and tidies the text in a manner once thought to be indicative of stage practice, suggesting to some editors its possible provenance in a playbook (anachronistically called a promptbook) used by the Lord Chamberlain's company for theatrical performance, but which is actually more indicative of scribal preparation of a text for publication" (p. 430). Most importantly, F censors the swearing found in Q. According to Bulman, the inconsistencies and omissions of Q are no longer taken (as by many New Bibliographers) to be signs of foul-papers copy: theatrical documents, the New Textualists argue, have the same kind of inconsistencies and omissions. Likewise, the ghost characters of Q: Fauconbridge, Kent, and Sir John Russell, and the one-line Sir John Umfrevile who seems to have gotten conflated with Lord Bardolph. But some other mutes are not really ghosts: they do not speak but are needed in a scene. We now know that the presence of ghosts in a printed play edition does not mean that the underlying manuscript copy was authorial rather than theatrical: they were not systematically purged.

    What about the supposedly characteristically Shakespearian spellings in Q: Scilens for Silence, mas for mass, and yeere for ear? Bulman reckons the evidence of these spellings in Hand D of Sir Thomas More is not enough to establish that they were distinctly his preferences. Bulman argues that scilens was not unprecedented since "Most spellings of 'silence' recorded in the OED begin with sci or end with lens . . .". This is poor logic: the number of variants listed by OED is no guide to how common the occurrences of those variants were. A search (in August 2017) of all of EEBO-TCP books from the period (60,237 of them) finds the specific spelling scilens occurs just three times--in this quarto, a book of prayers from 1546 and an edition of the bible from 1568--whereas silence produced over 62,000 hits in over 16,000 books. So, the form scilens is indeed vanishingly rare. Bulman concludes that everything we used to consider as uniquely signs of authorial papers are now known to be findable in theatrical documents, so we just do not know what kind of manuscript underlies the 1600 quarto of 2 Henry 4.

    The second version of the quarto, Qb, was presumably made to accommodate the insertion of scene 3.1 that was omitted from Qa. Of the 21 surviving complete exemplars of Q, ten are Qa and eleven are Qb, and Bulman cites A. R. Humphreys in his Arden2 edition of the play in support of his claim that this "may suggest that the addition was made about half-way through the printing of the Quarto" (p. 440). This is an ambiguous statement since printing does not produce one exemplar followed by another but rather produces all the first sheets for all the exemplars and then all the second sheets for all the exemplars, and so on. Just what counts as "half-way" through that process?

    Humphreys takes the fact that the surviving exemplars are divided about equally between the two states to suggest that the same ratio probably existed in the original print run (most of which is now lost). His suggestion assumes that the surviving texts accurately reflect the original print run, but this is not necessarily the case. It turns out that even if a 750-exemplar print run was as asymmetrically divided as 275-to-475 between the two states, there is almost a one-in-four probability (24.5%) of getting the 11-to-10 split in the surviving exemplars. In other words, it is not highly unlikely that the original print run was asymmetrically divided: the almost-even split of the surviving set is not strong evidence of an almost-even split in the print run. (I am grateful to Mary Egan and Alan Cox for showing me the means of calculating this probability.)

    The difference between Qa and Qb extends only as far as sheet E: in Qb the original leaves E3 and E4 from Qa have been cut out and replaced by a new gathering of four leaves impressed from freshly set type that collates E3-E6. Bulman mentions in passing an article in Studies in Bibliography in 1987 in which Gary Taylor and John Jowett argue that Qa and Qb differ because a single manuscript leaf holding just scene 3.1 was out of sequence in the printer's copy for the quarto--because it was itself a Shakespearian afterthought--and it was initially overlooked in the printing and then sheet E was altered to accommodate it. Because this alteration was a correction made by a printer to remedy a fault he had found in his work, rather than a separate publishing intention, this theory makes Qa and Qb different states not different issues of the quarto. Rather than credit Taylor and Jowett with this hypothesis, Bulman credits the key element of it--the late discovery of a misplaced leaf in the printshop--to personal correspondence from George Walton Williams.

    The crucial piece of evidence, noticed by James G. McManaway in 1946 and not mentioned by Bulman, is that two sets of running titles (one for the inner forme and one for the outer) are used consistently across Qa. That is, the running title that heads B1r also heads C1r and D1r and so on to the end of the book, and the one that heads B1v heads C1v (and so on to the end of the book), and so on up to the headline for B4v and its recurrence to the end of the book. The same pattern is found in Qb except for its gathering E, which has its own non-recurring running titles for E3-E6. If we suppose that gathering E was altered before the rest of the book was completed, it would be theoretically possible to continue reusing the running titles in the way that they appear in Qa and Qb, but to do so would be awkward, pointless, and inefficient. It seems much more likely that the entire print run was completed before the problem was spotted--creating the consistent pattern before, within, and after sheet E--and once it was spotted just some of the sheets E were altered to fix it.

    This alteration likely occurred during the printing, at the same shop around the same time, of the 1600 quarto of Much Ado About Nothing which, as John Hazel Smith showed, was interrupted. Further evidence adduced by Taylor and Jowett showed that the added E3-E6 sheet in 2 Henry 4 shares watermarks with sheet F in 2 Henry 4 and with six sheets in the 1600 quarto of Much Ado About Nothing but with no other books made by the same printer between 1600 and 1604. As an alternative to the late-insertion narrative, Bulman takes seriously the possibility that 3.1 was censored because of its content, the recollection of Richard 2's usurpation. The chief problem of course is that Qb containing this material followed hard on Qa, and Bulman concludes that ". . . accidental omission appears, though far from a certainty, a more credible explanation" (p. 447). Obviously, scene 3.1 from Qb's E3-E6 should be included in a modern text, but what about the bits either side of it that were reset: should we prefer Qa or Qb? Bulman reckons that the many variants between them show that the compositor was careless and that for the resetting he used Qa as his authority rather than the manuscript; he does not explain how he came to this conclusion.

    The eight passages in F absent from Q might have been either in the play before Q was made and omitted from it or written after Q was created. Notably, in some cases the meter and sense of Q are improved if we add one of the Folio-only passages, suggesting cutting-to-make-Q rather than adding-to-make-F as the explanation. Bulman notices that all eight passages involve the rebels and surveys the theories for why these bits of the play in particular might have been cut, for example because the Archbishop's involvement in the rebellion was particularly objectionable to those (including ecclesiastical authorities) who licensed plays for printing. Cyndia Susan Clegg, Bulman notes, is unconvinced by this argument and thinks that more would be required to trigger the press censors. Also, the Prelate's Rebellion would have been at least as objectionable to the Master of the Revels when the play was performed in 1597 so why was it not cut then? Bulman explores the possibility that by 1600 the situation with the Earl of Essex had changed the climate regarding representations of popular rebellions, but does not find it a likely cause of censorship of Q.

    Next Bulman argues against Taylor and Jowett's claim that six of the eight Folio-only passages are authorial revisions, noting that in these cases too the meter or sense is improved by F's additions: "omission from Q makes mincemeat of the surrounding text metrically, or logically, or both" (p. 455). Rather, the eight F-only passages and scene 3.1 too were probably cut "to shorten the play for performance by removing historical material deemed unnecessary for audiences already familiar with the earlier plays or for their understanding the present action" (p. 455). This conclusion seems to contradict what Bulman noted earlier about the mislaid 3.1, which must (in this newest hypothesis) have, rather implausibly, occupied exactly one sheet of paper despite being written as part of the integral whole that was the initial composition of the play. In support of the cut-for-performance hypothesis, Bulman invokes Lukas Erne's and Andrew Gurr's work on plays being written longer than they needed to be.

    The copy for F seems to have been a literary transcript: it tidies up a lot of the stage directions (although removing some of the fuller descriptions), eliminates some ghosts, regularizes speech prefixes, and haps non-obvious improvements to some of Q's stranger readings. Since we no longer think that these improvements were necessary in a prompt book, Bulman wonders if they are improvements for readers. Certainly, the massed entrances found in F and not in Q are typical of what scribes might produce, and the absence from F of some necessary stage directions (particularly exits) found in Q also points towards a literary transcript. Most importantly, F shows the play after the "wholesale elimination of profanity" (p. 462) but in a haphazard way (missing some swearing, making some worse) that seems less driven by the strictures of the 1606 Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players than by a scribe's sense of propriety. The corrections of grammar and expansions of contractions also point to scribal copy behind F, as do some updatings of archaic language and normalizings of characters' habitual colloquialisms, and the widespread use of round brackets. Bulman even thinks that the scribe, perhaps Ralph Crane, invented half lines to complete hemistiches in his copy. (This seems rather more intervention than even Crane would undertake.)

    Despite the presence of things that are clearly new, F also repeats it also some of Q's clear errors and idiosyncrasies which, to some scholars, suggest that F is in some way dependent on Q. Bulman does not entirely agree: some of the supposed errors are in fact acceptable readings. However, he acknowledges that three other Q/F agreements do show F's dependence on Q, so "the scribe may have consulted Q in preparing the text for F" (p. 469). (But surely this tips the balance of probability in the other cases too? Once you know that Q influenced F, it is better to explain difficult Q/F agreements by the same means rather than strain to accept those difficult readings.) Noting what appear to be scribal misreadings of a manuscript, Bulman considers the idea that Q itself might have been the source for the manuscript on which F was based. He rejects the idea, plausibly enough, but why even start to consider the unlikely possibility that a scribal transcript might itself be derived from a printed edition? Bulman concludes that "the scribe who prepared the manuscript for F did so by collating Q with a literary transcription of the play . . . which included those passages not found in Q and many of the significant variants" (p. 470).

    Next Bulman considers the special problems encountered in printing 1 Henry 4 and 2 Henry 4 in the Folio. For some reason, Henry 5 was set first and there were allowed only three quires plus three pages (39 pages in all) for 1 Henry 4 and 2 Henry 4, which was a substantial underestimate. To fix this, an extra quire (gg) was added to make 51 pages, which still left the compositors short in the end because 1 Henry 4 was set with generous spacing. Bulman details the extensive compression required for Folio 2 Henry 4 to fit the space allowed for it, including cutting whole words and lines. When this was not enough, one more sheet (four pages) was added to gg, which created the reverse problem that there was now insufficient material to fill the space. Giving the prologue its own page and adding a list of characters helped, but the compositor also invented words and phrases to bulk his copy. In all, ". . . the level of scribal intervention and later compositorial intervention makes the F text ultimately more sophisticated and compromised than Q" and hence this edition is based on Q, which quite probably was based on the playbook used by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1597" (p. 477). This last claim is a bit of a stretch: we can seldom, post-Werstine, make firm distinctions between foul-papers copy and promptbook copy, and there is no positive evidence for the supposition that Q was "quite probably" based on a theatrical manuscript.

    The second appendix (pp. 478-504) is about "Performing Conflated Texts of 2 Henry IV". This is not so much a complete history of TV, film, and stage conflation as a sketch of a few such attempts, from the Dering manuscript--which Bulman suspects might accidentally reflect the play as Shakespeare originally planned it--to the present day. A recurrent device is a reinterpretation of the end of the Battle of Shrewsbury in which Falstaff's claim to have killed Hotspur has serious consequences, either the displeasure of Henry 4 (because he believes it and hence thinks Prince Hal a liar, as in Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight), or the displeasure of Prince Hal at the lie (in Dakin Matthews's adaptation called Henry IV).

    The third appendix (pp. 505-9) is on "Casting the Play". Bulman asserts that Shakespeare's plays have "far larger casts than plays written in later centuries" (p. 505) but he means "speaking roles". This is not what cast means, which is the set of actors who play the roles; otherwise it would make no sense to say "other roles were played by members of the cast". Bulman also thinks that cutting scripts for touring would have reduced the number of actors needed, and while that might be true the opposite can also be true: longer scripts give more opportunities for doubling. Given its abundance of major roles, Bulman thinks that 2 Henry 4 would require "even principal actors" to "on occasion have doubled in minor roles" (p. 506). Bulman reports T. J. King's figures for casting Q and F 2 Henry 4 (20 men and 4 boys, and 18 men and 4 boys, respectively), and then David Bradley's figures (16 men and 6 boys) and John Jowett's (11 men and 3 boys). Bulman's own figure is a remarkable 9 men and 3 boys, which he achieves by having everyone double except the actor playing Falstaff. Bulman gives an actual doubling chart for this, where other Arden3 editors just provide lists of which character is in which scene. Noticeably, his scheme involves one actor playing two roles in one scene, as when one man plays Henry 4 and the non-speaking Sir John Blunt in 3.1 and then plays the Lord Chief Justice and Sir John Blunt in 5.2.

    There were three monographs on our topic this year. The longest is Brian Vickers's The One King Lear. Other reviewers have noted simple mistakes of expression in this book--from misspelling formes as forms to sentences of pure gibberish--and these will be ignored here on the assumption that Vickers could not have intended them and would have fixed them before publication had he noticed. These aside, there remain substantial errors of fact that render untenable Vickers's central claim that the differences between the 1608 quarto of King Lear and the 1623 Folio version result from printing house actions rather than Shakespearian revision. A recurrent problem of dependence on uncertain premises emerges at the beginning of Vickers's book when he writes: ". . . I take it that all of us will be concerned to know which text best represents Shakespeare's conception of the play" (p. ix). We do not know that Shakespeare had such a singular conception, so Vickers is begging the question.

    Of the differences between the 1608 quarto and the 1623 Folio versions of King Lear, Vickers reckons that "If you were to complete either version by adding the passages preserved by the other, you would have, in terms of characters and events, two identical plays" (p. ix). This assertion sounds meaningful until one examines it closely. On reflection, it is also true that "If you were to complete" The Comedy of Errors "by adding the passages preserved" in The Taming of the Shrew and "complete" The Taming of the Shrew "by adding the passages preserved" in The Comedy of Errors "you would have, in terms of characters and events, two identical plays". This does not prove that The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew are two witnesses to a single authorial conception of one play. (In case the reader is thinking that the situation of King Lear is different because the quarto and the Folio editions share the same title, try the above with Q1 and Folio Hamlet.) Moreover, deciding where one edition's "passages [are] preserved" in another is subjective: we have no objective means for deciding that two passages are the same writing with unimportant verbal differences rather that two distinct passages. Thus, Vickers's thought experiment is meaningless.

    Vickers thinks that the 1986-87 Oxford Shakespeare's claim to present two distinct versions of King Lear was "nullified" by the edition's "emending each text in the light of the other, producing just such a 'conflated' text as they had scorned" (p. x) but this is untrue. Only where the Oxford editors thought that Shakespeare had not revised the play--so that, in their subjective judgement the quarto and Folio are two witnesses to an unrevised passage--did they use one to make sense of the other. Then comes Vickers's key claim: the passages present in F and absent in Q are not subsequent writing by Shakespeare (as the revision hypothesis supposes) but were present in the manuscript underlying Q and "were, in fact, omitted by the printer, Nicholas Okes, because he had underestimated the amount of paper that he would need" (pp. x-xi).

    Vickers reckons that F was "set in part from his [Shakespeare's] original manuscript as it had been copied for the company's 'Booke'" (p. xii) because it has distinctive Shakespearian spellings that appear also in Q. We would, of course, expect the same repetition of some spellings if F was set from an exemplar of Q, or a reprint of Q. But F, Vickers reckons, was much edited in the Jaggards' printshop. Vickers seems intentionally to muddy the waters when he conflates the undeniable fact that the act of printing generally destroyed a manuscript with the undeniable fact that some surviving play manuscripts seem to have been used in the theatre: "Despite the printers' discarding of play manuscripts, about twenty of them have survived until this day, still containing the markings used for theatrical performance" (p. xiii). This is misleading because no one supposes that those 20 manuscripts were ever given to printers, so the term "Despite" has no meaning here. Vickers reckons that passages present in Q and absent in F are due to "the cuts made by the King's Men and preserved in the Folio" (p. xiii), which he thinks "destroy important narrative and ethical sequences, showing none of the care for continuity evinced in the Quarto omissions" (p. xiii); that is, they cannot be cuts authorized by Shakespeare.

    Having claimed that Okes misjudged the amount of paper he needed to print Q--without cutting the script ". . . Okes would have needed twelve full sheets, not the ten and-a-half that he had estimated" (p. xii)--Vickers now asserts that Okes set Q seriatim because it "made life easier in the short term, since he could get by with a rough estimate of the amount of text needed for each page" (pp. xvi-xvii). But the point of setting seriatim is that it avoids casting off, and if Okes did not do the casting off where did he get his estimate of 10½ sheets from? It seems that Vickers wants Okes to have done a rough-and-ready casting off to approximate the number of sheets for the book, which calculation he then decided not to stick to by setting seriatim instead of setting by formes. It is not immediately obvious that this is compatible with his conception of a printer determined to stick to a predetermined number of pages. In "A Note on References" (p. xxi) intended to explain his referencing system, Vickers obscures matters by confusing the idea of a leaf with that of a page, writing that "'G3v27' refers to the third page, verso, of sheet G, line 27". In fact within Vickers's system that would be the reverse of the third leaf of the G gathering, not "the third page".

    Vickers begins his main chapters with "King Lear at the Printer" that gives a largely accurate account of the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of scholarship accounting for the state of the quarto and Folio texts of King Lear, leading to the widely accepted view that Q was printed from Shakespeare's own papers. In the midst of explaining the printing process, Vickers quotes Peter Blayney on the printing of the quarto starting "at half-press" (p. 9) but neglects to mention what this means. It is that one man inked the type, attached the paper to the tympan, lowered the frisket onto the tympan, lowered the tympan onto the forme of type, rolled the carriage under the platen, pulled the bar, rolled the carriage back out, raised the tympan and the frisket, and removed the printed sheet; at full-press these tasks would be divided between two men with the efficiencies of overlapping actions. Vickers rightly asserts that some errors in the quarto that seem auditory, such as "a dogge, so bade" where "a dog's obeyed" is wanted, are easily understood as errors of "phonetic memory" (p. 10).

    Vickers repeats the common misconception that "Once printed, the damp sheets would be hung along the center crease for drying, until the reverse side could be printed . . ." (p. 13) when in fact the sheets were merely kept horizontally in a pile until perfected. (That R. B. McKerrow realized his error about this is clear from manuscript correspondence recently uncovered by A. C. Green and reviewed in YWES for 2009.) Vickers has a peculiar sense of how printing is done today: ". . . the whole text is set up in type, and a few sets of the complete work are printed off for independent proof checking . . ." (p. 14). In fact, modern books are almost never set in type--the printing processes are now essentially digital and chemical--and those that are set in movable type are never wholly in type at one time, for the same reason that they never were in Shakespeare's time: no printer has enough type to do this and there would be no point to it.

    Vickers is equally confused by the details of proofing in Shakespeare's time, thinking that ". . . the compositor would place the forme on the correcting stone for the pressman to print a single sheet or 'pull' from the freshly set type" (p. 14). It is not possible to take an impression from a forme that is on the correcting stone and Vickers seems to have misunderstood Adrian Weiss's account of the process, which refers, on the pages that Vickers cites, to the stone that comprises part of the press and the other stone used for imposition and correction. Also confusing for the novice reader whom Vickers is trying to serve is his claim that "While the corrector was marking up a forme, printing continued . . ." (p. 15) where of course he means not "a forme" but a sheet holding the printed impression of that forme. Vickers garbles the cause of surviving exemplars of the same edition showing certain formes in the uncorrected state and other exemplars showing the same formes in the corrected state. The reason is not, as Vickers thinks, that "printers did not always discard the sheets or 'revises' carrying corrections, but retained them alongside the corrected ones" (p. 16) but rather that they retained the sheets printed before the corrections were made. Many editions show uncorrected and corrected states of the same forme, but vanishingly few contain "the sheets or 'revises' carrying corrections" as Vickers claims.

    Vickers seems to think that the amount of stop-press correction that we find in an edition is an index of how carefully it was printed, so that he wishes that the Shakespeare Folio had as many stop-press corrections as the Ben Jonson folio of 1616. In fact, of course, correction before the print run started leaves no trace so the overall quality of a printing cannot be judged by stop-press corrections but only by a subjective sense of how likely it is that its readings are what the author intended. When quoting stop-press corrections in the King Lear quarto, Vickers does not make clear which word was substituted for which, so that he writes that the corrected Q has "'proper deformity shewes not in the fiend, so horrid as in woman' (H4r17-18), where the Folio follows 'seemes,' the reading found in the uncorrected sheets" (p. 18). There are two problems with this example. The first and worst is that Vickers neglects to tell the reader which of the corrected quarto words is replaced by seemes (the uncorrected quarto reading) in the Folio (the answer is shewes), and the second is that his quotation of the Folio reading seemes includes a comma within the quotation marks, which comma is not present in the quarto or the Folio. This last fault arises from his book's use of an American punctuation rule that illogically requires the quoter to include her own sentence punctuation (in this case, Vickers's comma after seemes) within the quotation marks; a careful scholar would have insisted that in this case the American rule cannot be followed without misrepresenting the source. (This problem continues throughout the book and one has to check the source in each case to see if the commas that Vickers puts at the ends of quotations really are present in his sources.)

    On D4v, the exemplars of the quarto that are not stop-press corrected (hereafter Qu) read "To haue these--and wast of this his reuenues", Qc (the corrected quartos) read "To haue the wast and spoyle of his reuenues", and F reads "To haue th'expence and wast of his Reuenues". Vickers quotes W. W. Greg on this variant and concludes that an independent manuscript provided the Folio's reading of expence (p. 19), but he ought to have acknowledged that Greg recognized that the quarto copy might have contained the reading the spence that the quarto corrector did not recognize so he guessed spoyle, and that the Folio's th'expence is just a sophistication of the spence. That is, Greg does not (as Vickers implies) assert that at this point the Folio reading must derive from an independent manuscript. Vickers's section heading "Imposing: By Formes or Seriatim" reveals that he really does not grasp the detail of what he is trying to describe, since imposition is the bringing together of pages to make a forme and there is no such thing as imposing seriatim. The contrast Vickers is trying to describe is between setting type in the order that the pages are read (setting seriatim) and setting type in the order that the pages will appear on one side of a sheet (setting by formes).

    Vickers thinks that Charlton Hinman "showed that most of the Folio pages had been set in pairs by two compositors working simultaneously" (p. 26), when in fact Hinman showed that most formes (not "pages") were set that way; the list of compositor attributions by page given in Blayney's second edition of Hinman's Folio facsimile shows that almost all pages were set by one man not two. Quoting Weiss, Vickers again misunderstands the point being made. Weiss notes that setting seriatim has the advantage that lines can be moved back and forth between pages until the pages have the desired number of lines, and Vickers responds "But this presupposes that the compositor has enough space to absorb the unexpected material" (p. 29). No, it does not presuppose that: it is an account of how the compositors can overcome such problems of space. Okes three times set entrance stage directions outside the main rectangle of page type and Vickers considers these to be evidence of his inexperience in printing plays (pp. 30-31). That may be, but Vickers seems not to notice that the trouble that Okes took to retain these few words--"Enter Edgar" (C2v), "Enter Edgar" (D3v), and "Enter Glo" (F3r)--contradicts Vickers's general thesis that Okes was a shoddy workman who butchered the text at his convenience, especially since in each case the entrance direction is cued by the dialogue and the reader can easily follow the action without it.

    Vickers thinks that ". . . the compositor had to 'justify' each line of type, so that it fit the 'measure' or width of the agreed page dimension (narrow for poetry, wide for prose)" (p. 37). This is wrong: the measure was the same for poetry and prose, since the type had to end up as a rectangular block no matter what its contents; the apparently narrower measure for  poetry in the quarto of King Lear was just the consequence of a particular expedient that the compositor used--the placing of multi-line spacing material at the right edge of the stick--because he wanted to save regular spaces but had to reach the same measure for verse as for prose. It is clear that Vickers is firm in his mistaken belief, for he repeats it later: "Because prose filled a wider measure . . ." and "In setting verse each line had to be justified in a narrower column width . . ." (p. 49).

    In his illustration of the absence of spaces between words as a text-compression technique (p. 51), Vickers asserts that the compositor must have got it into his head to compress wherever possible since in the prose example quoted there was no need to do so, the last line of each paragraph not being full. Vickers's explanation may be right, but he ought also to consider the possibility that the compositor was short of certain sizes of space and that this made justification of prose so difficult that the loss of inter-word spaces was the exigent resorted to. Regarding the misplacing or awkward placing of stage directions in relation to the saving of space, Vickers cites some examples from Q1 1 Henry 4 as illustrations of tricks that will be later seen in Q1 King Lear (pp. 52-53), but they are no worse than examples that could be cited from well-printed play editions: it was just hard for compositors to accommodate stage directions perfectly given the variety of places they could appear--interlineally, marginally, and so on--in a play manuscript.

    Where Folio 2 Henry 4 lacks a line that is present in Q1--"Vmfr. This strained passion doth you wrong my lord" (1.1.161)--Vickers simply assumes that the Folio compositor accidentally or deliberately omitted it (p. 57), but in fact the absence of this line has occasioned much debate, not least because of its hard-to-explain speech prefix that Vickers does not mention (discussed above in connection with James C. Bulman's new Arden3 edition), and Vickers's assumption is not sound: the line could have been intended for deletion by the author. Again, Vickers begs the question, assuming the proposition that he is supposed to be demonstrating. Vickers's rhetorical manoeuvre here seems to be to try to give the impression that lots of cuts were made by compositors even when they were not strictly necessary, which impression he can fall back on later when he is positing cuts made by the compositors of Q1 King Lear that seem under-motivated. That is, he wants the reader to see every textual omission as a cut made in the printshop for practical reasons concerned with compressing the text to save paper, even when this explanation is implausible. Vickers is forced to characterize the compositors this way, as men who irrationally cut the play even when they did not need to, because if they were acting sensibly the evidence would not be as evenly distributed as it is. The F-only passages of King Lear--those bits absent from the quarto that Vickers thinks were present in the quarto copy but omitted in its printing--occur right across the play and yet compression to meet a predetermined sheet count would naturally happen most obviously towards the end of a quarto set seriatim, as Q1 King Lear was.

    Because he starts from the assumption that revision could not account for it, Vickers has to insist that a 37-word passage ("and God knows . . . are mightily strengthened") present in Q1 2 Henry 4 and absent from the Folio was a massive cut made by the Folio compositor (p. 58). But this Folio page (g3v) is not cramped: on the same page there are blank lines above, below and within the box announcing "Scena Secunda", the entrance direction following this box takes up two lines where one would easily do, and after the supposed cut the compositor puts "Enter Bardolphe" on a line of its own with a blank line above it, when those two lines could easily be saved by placing the entrance direction on the same line as the end of the previous speech, which has lots of room. That is, more lines are wasted in the immediate vicinity of this supposed cut than are saved by making the cut, so the explanation of compositorial cutting to save space on the page is most implausible. Enough examples have now been given here to show that the evidence that Vickers adduces does not support the conclusions he draws. The long rehearsal of Eleanor Prosser's arguments about Folio 2 Henry 4, running to 13 pages (pp. 54-67), ends with Vickers deciding that there must have been an "editor" (p. 64)  in the Folio printshop authorizing the more substantial alterations made to fit the copy to the space available. Vickers concludes the chapter with an account of space-saving in plays by Ben Jonson.

    Vickers reckons that casting off copy and setting a book by formes "made a great demand on the printer's stock of type, including spacing quads" (p. 74) when compared to setting seriatim. The opposite is true: setting by formes requires less type to be kept standing unused before each sheet can be printed because the printing can proceed after four pages are set instead of seven pages as when setting seriatim. According to Vickers, the Folio text of King Lear was "set from a copy of substantially the same manuscript as the Quarto" (p. 75) and so provides an independent record by which we can see what the quarto compositors did. But in reality, of course, this is the very thing Vickers is setting out to prove by this book--that the script of the play used to set Q was essentially the same as the one used to set F--so it is logically incoherent to assume this as a given and use it to make judgements about Q as part of the proof.

    Vickers goes through the various features that he thinks are space-saving exigents in the quarto of King Lear, such as use of tildes to indicate the omission of an n or an m, the abbreviating of words, use of & for and, and using numerals rather than words for numbers. The trouble is that most often the examples quoted do not prevent the making of new lines--and hence do not save any paper--and might as easily arise from type shortage or, in some cases, a shortage of the larger spaces. As often as not the evidence flatly contradicts the conclusion Vickers derives from it, as when he claims that the turn-unders of the ends of long lines at the top of H1r are a space-saving measure (p. 83). In fact, the first turn-under gets a whole type-line to itself (because the line below was also full) so no line is saved by its use, and in any case the entire speech is prose and has plenty of space at its end to accommodate the words that were turned-under. Vickers seizes on what he thinks is the "single reference to a 'space shortage'" in Peter Blayney's study of Q1 King Lear, noting that "Otherwise, Blayney did not comment on the compositors' many devices to save paper . . ." (p. 84). Unfortunately, Vickers has simply misread his source: by "space shortage" Blayney clearly means a shortage of pieces of type to make spaces in the printing, not a shortage of space on the page arising from a shortage of paper to print on. Vickers further mistakes his source's meaning when he takes (p. 86) Blayney's phrase "space-metal" to mean the small spaces that go between words in a line when in fact Blayney means the large spaces that are used, one after another, to fill the end of a line that does not otherwise reach to the right edge of the composing stick.

    Vickers assumes that every instance of setting verse as prose was done to compress the text of King Lear, but when confronted with its opposite, the setting of prose as verse, he assumes mere carelessness: ". . . the compositors either forgot to change the setting of their stick or could not be bothered to do so" (p. 94). Presumably Vickers is here alluding to the use of multi-line spacing material to indent the stick, but his suggestion of carelessness or laziness makes no sense. Even if the multi-line spacing material were left in place--as it might be if removing it were difficult because its height did not match the height of a whole number of lines--then this would simply have narrowed the gap within which the prose would have to be set. It would not give the compositor any reason to treat the copy as verse, for which (unlike prose) all the adjustments of spacing needed to achieve justification are first attempted at the end of the line and in which the first letter of each line is capitalized. Vickers compounds his mistakes with his suggestion that combining two short speeches into one type line might have been done by "the pressman imposing the pages on the stone" (p. 95). The pressman would not be involved in such typographical matters and in any case no one would attempt such delicate surgery on the imposing stone during imposition, since the risk of toppling the unsecured type would be great.

    Vickers supposes that to make the large gap in the middle of "To be my child Cordelia.        Cord. And so I am" (K2v) the compositor "placed one or more spacing quads in the middle to hold the type together more firmly, inadvertently creating a blank space" (p. 96). The blank space is, of course, intentional not inadvertant (it makes "Cord." more obviously a speech prefix starting a new speech), and the compositor put in the spacing quads not "to hold the type together more firmly" (as if he might hope to get by without it but wanted to be sure) but rather because they were essential to creating a solid and full line of type. Vickers thinks that "Only an urgent need to save space would bring a compositor to" set a stage direction to the right of the dialogue and over multiple lines (p. 98), but such a layout is perfectly normal.

    Discussing the indenting of the composing stick in Q1, Vickers misunderstands the mechanices of the printing process. He quotes Greg's remark that when a compositor used different measures within the same page he "'. . . made up the difference in the galley with furniture,' that is, blanks" (p. 99). What Greg calls "furniture" Vickers glosses wrongly as "blanks"; no wonder he cannot follow the scholarly debate on this topic. Amidst all this confusion, Vickers claims of Greg and D. F. McKenzie that "neither considered what I have called 'the dynamics of type setting'" (p. 102). Because he does not understand the mechanics of 'indenting the stick', Vickers hypothesizes a more-or-less random sequence of panic attacks afflicting the printers of Q1 and making them switch measures and apply other expedients such as turn-overs/-unders and, ultimately, just omitting lines of dialogue present in their copy. The pointless speculation of this kind runs on to the end of the chapter (p. 128), and its conclusion is that almost every infelicity in Q1 has a single cause: "Okes simply had too little paper" (p. 127).

    Vickers tabulates the words-per-page of Q1 King Lear (333 words), Q2 Hamlet (302 words), Q Troilus and Cressida (307 words), and Q2 King Lear (311 words) to conclude that the higher words-per-page count for Q1 King Lear is further evidence of paper shortage (p. 116). This is a useful comparison but would only really contribute to the argument if the sample were wider (that is, if it included more of the early quartos) and if the tabulation also showed the number of lines per page (a design choice that strongly determines the word-per-page and is itself shaped by the sizes of type available to the printer), along with each play's prose/verse ratio (since prose gets more words onto each type line and hence more words onto each page). In all cases where Q2 King Lear omits something from Q1 in the act of reprinting it, Vickers assumes that the cause was "to avoid a typographical solecism" (p. 126) when in fact each case should be examined on its own merits; some have equally plausible explanations such as a desire to fix what was misperceived as an error in Q1.

    At times, Vickers seems to think that Folio King Lear is longer than the quarto: "My analysis takes a different direction [from Eleanor Prosser's], comparing the 1608 Quarto of Lear with the fuller text as preserved in the Folio" (p. 129). In fact, Q is the longer by around 150 lines. Vickers thanks William Proctor Williams for telling him that parts of lines of type could be joined together on the imposing stone, where "long columns of type" were made "into pages" to "fit in the skeleton forme" (pp. 130-1). No thanks are due since Williams is wrong: part lines were not rearranged on the stone and no "long columns of type" needed to be broken up since a compositor would tie up a page as soon as the line completing it was set. The remainder of this chapter is a series of fantasies in which Vickers imagines himself "Looking over the abridger's shoulder" (p. 131) and trying to make logical sense of the absence in  Q of lines present in F as though they were omissions made in Okes's printshop. It is a futile exercise since no logical pattern can be found, on account of the false premise that these are omissions made to save paper.

    Even on its own terms, the argument here is full of contradictions. Regarding Edmund's first soliloquy, Vickers argues that in Q1's omissions of "Base, Base?" and "fine word: Legitimate" we see that "the abridger deleted a small but significant aspect of the bastard's mentality--the way he holds up for scornful inspection the words and concepts that deny him social acceptance, as if he could so deprive them of meaning and power" (p. 137). So, in Vickers's view the abridger took away some valuable Shakespearian nuances. Vickers quickly sees the danger here: if he makes this "small but significant" aspect of character too important then the reader might suppose that perhaps Shakespeare added it in subsequent revision, so he back-pedals: "Indeed, it is hard to imagine Shakespeare, or anyone else, subsequently inserting two additional instances of 'Base' and one of 'Legitimate' into what is already a long speech (p. 137). Of course, there is every reason to suppose these words were added in revision if they are as dramatically effective as Vickers claims.

    Because there is ample evidence that the expedients that Vickers thinks were meant to be space-saving devices did not in fact save space in Q1, Vickers is forced to argue that the compositors became so fixated on various kinds of contraction that they applied them even where they served no space-saving purpose, and that "This point reinforces my argument" (p. 141) rather than, as we might suppose, undermining it. Vickers's limited knowledge of early printed dramatic texts is again evidenced when he asserts that the marking of "asides to the audience" using the word "aside" is "a relatively recent editorial convention, unknown at that time" (p. 145). It was known and is used in the early Shakespeare editions and elsewhere, including the Folio text of Titus Andronicus (on dd6r) and the 1609 quarto of Pericles (on D4v). Once Vickers turns to the larger cuts he thinks were made in Okes's printshop (pp. 148-62) the argument becomes increasingly absurd as he tries to account for over 100 lines appearing only in F; this would be a unique case of a printer not printing the copy he was given. Claiming than an entire 111-word exchange between Goneril and Albany in 1.4 was cut to save space, Vickers is forced to argue that "the on-stage action is perfectly comprehensible" (p. 157) without them. But the dramatic advantage of these lines is clear: they make it apparent earlier in F than in Q that Goneril is scheming independently of her husband, who is unconvinced of the dangers she perceives: "you may feare too farre".

    Next Vickers turns to the printing of King Lear in the 1623 Folio. He rejects the idea that F was set from an annotated exemplar of Q1 or Q2 and instead supports Madeleine Doran's idea that F was set from a theatrical manuscript. Vickers surveys the considerable evidence from idiosyncratic spellings that Q1 was set from papers in Shakespeare's own handwriting (pp. 173-80). He makes a lot of Paul Werstine's work in Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (reviewed in YWES for 2013) showing that the New Bibliographical categories of 'foul papers' and 'promptbook' were much too narrowly defined, which argument helps Vickers's claim that maybe a manuscript containing Shakespeare's idiosyncratic spellings was the copy for F. New Bibliographers thought that the licensed company playbook--which the movement's founding father A. W. Pollard believed might well be an annotated copy of the author's own papers--would be much too valuable to be sent to the printers, since the act of printing would destroy it. Nonetheless, if Pollard were right about the author's papers becoming the licensed playbook then in theory a book might be printed from such a document.

    Vickers highlights the significance of Werstine's reference to "a play that appeared in print with its license actually reproduced in the printed text" (p. 183), but this was an uncharacteristic slip on Werstine's part. Certainly Werstine's example, The Walks of Islington and Hoxton, was printed with its performance licence at the end, signed by the Master of the Revels Henry Herbert, but this edition appeared in 1657 not 1641 as Werstine thought. The date of publication matters because by the middle of the Interregnum a theatrical licence held no value as there was no commercial theatre industry, so the New Bibliographers' point that a licensed manuscript was too valuable to send to the printers in Shakespeare's time is not thereby refuted. On this mistaken grounds Vickers erects his central claim that "It follows that the Booke of King Lear, as delivered to Jaggard in 1623, may also contain traces of Shakespeare's original manuscript, as delivered in 1605" (p. 184). Of course this is certainly true if by "traces" we mean the words that Shakespeare wrote, but what Vickers wants the reader to accept is that this document might have been in Shakespeare's own idiosyncratic handwriting. This, however, is highly unlikely, not least because, as we now know, there was much more routine copying of play manuscripts than the New Bibliographers thought and since the plays in the Folio were still routinely being performed by the King's Men the obvious thing to send the printer would have been a transcript of the play, not the highly valuable licensed playbook.

    In the specific case of King Lear, there is a mountain of evidence in the form of inherited errors that F was set from quarto copy, not from a manuscript; this was obvious to Greg and to Werstine who here (understandably) drops out of Vickers's narrative. Taking an example of Q1's lineation errors in one speech, Vickers lists what he thinks are the necessary corrections that would have to have been written into the small margin in a quarto exemplar in order for F to be set directly from that quarto (pp. 184-5), but he wildly overstates the explicit instructions the compositor would need. Once told where the line endings fall, no compositor would need to be explicitly instructed about each contraction to expand or each letter to capitalize as Vickers supposes. Vickers expresses incredulity that the 15 necessary correction marks could be squeezed into a quarto's narrow margin, and concludes that the idea that F was set from a quarto is thus impossible, but most of the marks he proposes would not be needed at all, and strokes to show correct lineation might just as easily be written into the body text as the margin.

    Vickers thinks that "The Folio's restoration of the play's careful division between verse and prose is the single most important proof that it relied on the Booke as its main authority" (p. 187). Werstine showed that lineation evidence gives strong reasons to believe the exact opposite, that F was printed from an annotated exemplar of Q2: ". . . Folio Lear prints two-line verse speeches as prose only when they are so printed in the second quarto" (Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 8 (1984): 121). Vickers rightly points to moments when the Folio corrects some errors in Q1 and Q2 using what must have been an authoritative manuscript, since the corrections cannot be inferred from context, but he wrongly asserts that this can only have been done by the printers of F using that manuscript. In fact the abundant evidence that F reprints quarto errors means that the corrections must have been written on an exemplar of one of the quartos. That is, only the annotation of a quarto to produce copy for F makes sense of the Folio's mix of new correct readings and the reprinting of quarto errors.

    Vickers reckons that because F sometimes turns a good quarto reading bad in a way that suggests a misreading of handwriting the authoritative manuscript used in the printing of F must have been the printer's copy. The prior annotation of an exemplar of the quarto by the authoritative manuscript would also account for these manuscript misreadings making their way into F. Vickers is unclear whether Q and F were set from the same manuscript, writing that F was "set from a later version of the same manuscript that had been used for the Quarto" but also that "the Quarto and Folio texts derive from the same manuscript" (p. 193). It never becomes clear what Vickers intends the reader to understand by "a later version of" and "derive from".

    In support of his claim the F was printed from a manuscript rather than a preceding quarto, Vickers cites Richard Knowles's essay "The Evolution of the Texts of Lear" reviewed elsewhere in this round-up. Vickers also cites René Weis's argument for the one-text theory, arguing that Q's "Warbling" is a misreading of a written form of F's "Mumbling" and remarking that in type "W / M . . . are turned versions of each other" (p. 198). This last claim is certainly not true of the type used in quarto or Folio King Lear: in lower-case and upper-case forms the outermost strokes of an M are parallel while in a W they are at an acute angle; accidentally inverted examples of one are not easily mistaken for the other. Vickers quotes Weis's claim that certain Q and F readings are "guesses at the same manuscript word or phrases" (p. 196), but in every case one or the other reading is actually correct so only the incorrect reading is a guess. (Indeed, even then the word "guess" is usually an unhelpful term to describe a misreading as it assumes an uncertainty from which we have no evidence of the compositor suffering.)

    Vickers uses the word "editor" for the person who prepared copy for the Folio, attributing to this person a collection of Q/F variants that could just as easily be mistakes made in the printshop: "am I cast downe" (Q1), for example, versus " I am cast downe" (F), and some fairly indifferent singular/plural verb substitutions (p. 204). Vickers likewise attributes to an editorial hand some Folio contractions (where Q has the uncontracted form) and vice versa, and some modernizations. Vickers simply asserts indifference in cases that can be argued to carry real poetic weight, thereby going round in circles to reach his preferred conclusion that we cannot be dealing with Shakespearean revision. Vickers makes a lot of Knowles's as yet unpublished work on the texts of King Lear, which itself (in the parts quoted) relies heavily on arguments based on compositor identifications; in the light of Pervez Rizvi's demonstration of these identifications' unreliability (reviewed elsewhere in this round-up) they should be treated with caution. Regarding the Folio's stage directions, Vickers notes that they are more consistent than the quarto's, and yet in places they lack details the quarto has, such as the coronet property in the first scene (pp. 221-4); as ever he feels able to infer a distinct editorial hand at work.

    According to Vickers, the anonymous King Leir performed by the Queen's Men in the 1590s was published in 1605 to capitalize on the success of Shakespeare's play in performance, but this is unlikely. Shakespeare's play is clearly dependent on this earlier one, it is hard to see how he could have read it in manuscript, and it was not being performed (the Queen's Men had disbanded), so the more plausible sequence is that Shakespeare wrote his play after reading the edition of King Leir that came out in 1605, as Knowles argued in an essay reviewed in YWES for 2002. Because he does not accept the idea that Shakespeare revised King Lear, Vickers has to explain the lines present in the quarto but absent in the Folio as the "damaging effects" (p. 227) of the King's Men's abridgement after the first performances. Q and F clearly have alternative endings, so Vickers is forced to come up with a complex hypothesis of not only cuts made in the printshop to produce Q and other cuts made in the printshop to produce F, but also additions made in the printshop to produce Q. Thus, Lear's dying groans rendered as "O, o, o, o" in Q were "probably substituted by Okes or his compositors" (p. 234). Vickers does not say what these groans were substituted in place of and he seems to really mean they were added by Okes or his men; he makes no mention of Hamlet's dying groans of "O, o, o, o" in the Folio or how they got there, nor Roderigo's dying "O, o, o" in the 1622 edition of Othello.

    Because the Folio lacks the quarto's news delivered by Kent to a Gentleman that "from France there comes a power" in 3.1, Vickers thinks that the Folio becomes unintelligible when Kent goes on to hand the Gentleman a ring to give Cordelia. What would she be doing in England? However, F has an alternative version of this scene in which Kent rather more allusively says that the French have spies in the courts of Albany and Cornwall, thereby merely suggesting rather than asserting an imminent attack from France. In Q and F, Kent says only "if you shall see Cordelia, | As fear not but you shall, give her this ring", which itself is also non-specific. Far from being strong evidence that Q and F are different witnesses to the same version of the play, this scene (3.1) is one of the best pieces of evidence to suggest different conceptions of the action: in Q the war becomes a certainty (because the French have landed) earlier than it does in F. Indeed, in Q and not F the French are rather preemptive since the abuse of Lear has barely started, so their motivations are more self-interested than in F.

    Vickers accepts Nikolaus Delius's assertion that "The actors see in the play merely a certain number of leading and secondary characters to be divided amongst them . . . The poet views his play as an edifice, out of the architectural structure of which no part can be taken without damaging the whole building" (qtd pp. 244-5). This is not a characterization of early modern theatre that most of today's historians would recognise; we tend now to see the writers as rather sanguine about necessary adjustments. Vickers finds it implausible that Shakespeare himself would cut Albany's statement of his principled position in going to war--"where I could not be honest . . . heauy causes make oppose"--because this cut leaves Regan's "Why is this reasond?" with no obvious referent (pp. 262-3). But F retains enough of Albany's speech for Regan's reply to make sense: Albany says in F "Sir, this I heard, the King is come to his Daughter | With others, whom the rigour of our State | Forc'd to cry out". For Regan this ability to see the other side of the argument is a kind of unwelcome reasoning. Likewise with other omissions of parts of speeches in F: contrary to Vickers's claims, there generally is enough left to make sense of how someone else responds to the speech.

    Vickers's last chapter charts the history of the debate about the two-text hypothesis, and claims some dubious adherents to his cause. He claims that E. A. J. Honigmann in an article called "Shakespeare's Revised Plays" in The Library in 1982 rejected the authorial-revision hypothesis, but in fact in that article Honigmann accepted it. Vickers also claims to find support in Werstine's contribution to the collection The Division of the Kingdoms (1983) and Werstine's 1985 review of Steven Urkowitz's book Shakespeare's Revision of 'King Lear' (1980), both of which reject Vickers's one-text hypothesis, as in the last words of Werstine's review: "To demonstrate, as Urkowitz has done, that Shakespeare probably rewrote parts of the greatest of his plays is an important contribution to scholarship". Although Vickers acknowledges the obvious fact that F has about 100 lines not in Q, he sometimes ignores his own acknowledgment: "If Shakespeare really had revised this play it is hardly conceivable that he would have been content to do so merely by making cuts" (p. 271).

    Most of this chapter is taken up with Vickers remarking at length on what poor literary critics the two-texts scholars are and how percipient the one-text scholars are. In one particularly unconvincing instance, he endorses Kenneth Muir's claim that there is in the Folio version too little time for the newly blinded Gloucester to leave at the end of Act 3 and return near the start of Act 4 because the Q-only exchange between sympathetic servants is missing (p. 278). The obvious retort is that by the time the Folio version came into existence, the open-air as well as the indoor theatres were observing act intervals, thus making up for the time lost by the removal of the sympathetic servants. Regarding the assignment of the final lines of the play, Vickers reckons that Q errs in giving them to Albany and that they were Edgar's all along as the Folio shows. In this view, Albany is still in charge: his "you twaine, | Rule in this Realme" is not an abdication but a power-sharing proposal.

    Vickers presents a stemma for the textual transmission in which F is printed from two sources: the 1619 quarto (Q2) and a theatrical manuscript. But the text accompanying the stemma flatly contradicts it: "Okes's 1608 Quarto would have been the obvious choice" as the edition to supplement the manuscript copy for the Folio, "for although scholars have argued that Jaggard also referred to the 1619 Quarto, that suggestion has been disproved" (p. 303). At this point, Vickers clarifies just what he thinks the manuscript used as Folio copy was: "a scribal copy of the theater manuscript" (pp. 303-4). Earlier Vickers had been ambiguous about whether this manuscript was in Shakespeare's own handwriting, and we can now see that he accepts that it was not: it was in a scribe's handwriting. This nullifies all his earlier claims about its preserving Shakespeare's idiosyncratic spellings, since no one thinks that professional scribes' work did that.

    Describing the two-text hypothesis for King Lear, Vickers claims that it requires "that the King's Men had (conveniently for the revisionist thesis) lost their 1606 Booke" (p. 305), but of course it does not: it requires only that the book of the revised play supplanted the book of the original version. Since plays had to be relicensed if they were revised for revival, this would be normal practice. Vickers claims that the two-text theory requires us to "treat any variant between the Quarto and Folio as a deliberate alteration" (p. 306), but this too is mistaken: there are also simple textual errors in both editions, and correcting one by reference to the other is required in such places. The difficulty is in distinguishing between revision and corruption. 

    Vickers asks the rhetorical question, "why would he [Shakespeare] choose to do so [revise King Lear] on an actual copy of the poorly printed 1608 Quarto[?]" (p. 307), but there is in fact a clear answer: it would be risk-free to do so whereas trying to alter the licensed playbook would probably raise objections amongst his fellow sharers in the King's Men. As MacDonald P. Jackson noticed, the Q1 exemplar that Shakespeare used to begin his revisions (if that is what he did) contained stop-press corrections in the uncorrected state and a different exemplar would have had them in the corrected state. Vickers affects to understand Jackson as suggeting that Shakespeare knew about the stop-press corrections when his point was simply that Shakespeare might well have noticed such errors in his exemplar.

    Vickers's conclusion is about how the two-text hypothesis took hold, and he claims abuse of academic and institutional protocols. As part of this, Vickers claims that Stanley Wells was director of the Shakespeare Institute in 1982 and used this position to promote the two-text hypothesis; in fact Philip Brockbank was the director in 1982 and Wells was not appointed to this post until 1988. Vickers spends a long time picking through the presumably self-interested motivations by which the two-text hypothesis was advanced in the 1980s. It is not clear that such arguments keep the conversation going in a useful way.

    There is a single and utterly disabling flaw to the whole of Vickers's book on King Lear. He assumes before he starts that the version of the play used to print Q was essentially the same as the version used to print F (pp. 75-6), and he uses this 'fact' to judge what happened to Q in the printshop, which was that it got cut, which cuts he can spot because he can see in F the lines that got cut to make Q. This is logically incoherent, since Vickers assumes as a premise the very thing that his book sets out to prove. Also, as noted above and remarked upon by other reviewers, the crowding of the text into Q1 might just as easily be argued as a sign that the printer Nicholas Okes did not want to omit anything in his copy as it can be used (as Vickers uses it) as evidence that Okes was forced to omit some of the play. And as Eric Rasmussen's review has pointed out (Modern Philology 2017), and as Vickers acknowledges (p. 359n6), the publisher, not the printer, paid for the paper so all Okes had to do was ask for more paper if he had misjudged.

    A much better book published this year is Richard Dutton's Shakespeare, Court Dramatist. It contains two key claims. The first is that for a number of Shakespeare plays the substantial quarto/Folio differences are the result of authorial revision reflected in the Folio version, and the second is that these revisions were made for court performance. The evidence for the first claim is largely literary-critical--Dutton gives readings of the differences in terms of dramatic effect and authorial intention--while the evidence for the latter is largely theatre-historical: there is abundant circumstantial evidence from other plays that it was customary to revise for the court plays that had already been performed in the professional theatre. Court performances were allowed to run much longer than professional theatre plays--and the Shakespeare Folio versions in most cases are substantially longer--and of course the court audiences were more educated and hence accepting of wordiness than the general public.

    Dutton reports that Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen's Royal Shakespeare Company edition of Shakespeare's Collaborative Plays (reviewed in YWES for 2013) "expanded the number of plays in which Shakespeare's hand is now suspected to include Locrine; The London Prodigal; A Yorkshire Tragedy; Thomas Lord Cromwell; Arden of Feversham; The Spanish Tragedy (1602 version); Mucedorus (1610 version); and Double Falsehood" (pp. 2-3n2 ). In fact Bate and Rasmussen make no such extraordinary claim, and Will Sharpe's essay on authorship in that edition explicitly rejects as highly unlikely or almost impossible most of these ascriptions. All that Bate and Rasmussen claim is that these plays were either co-written by Shakespeare or were ascribed to him in his lifetime.

    Dutton reckons that in the lives of theatre company members the court was more important, and the paying public less important, than theatre historians have hitherto thought. The actors got £10 for playing at court, so even if they played at court a dozen times a year this was never going to be a substantial part of their income. But court performance made public performance possible, because court playing was the official excuse for public playing and the court repeatedly defended the players against city authorities for that reason. Before the 1590s, the actors' relationships with a patron were based on reciprocated gift-giving, not proto-capitalistic exchange: he gave them a name and protection, they promoted his importance across the realm by touring. The Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Admiral were cousins of the queen so their companies' court performances "were in spirit a family present-giving" (p. 16).

    In December 1578 the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor of London instructing him to permit a group of companies to play in the city on account of their needing to get ready to play at court. Dutton reckons that as the travelling servants of aristocrats, players would naturally gravitate towards their patrons, and since the most senior aristocrats were with the queen at Christmas, it was natural for the players to come to court (pp. 20-1). As Master of the Revels from 1579, Edmund Tilney switched the predominance of court performances from masques to plays, which saved his office a lot of money since the playing companies paid for all their own costumes and properties. When in 1581, the Master of the Revels acquired authority to license all plays for public performance, the intention was not to create a professional theatre industry but to better enable his office to have plays ready for court performance.

    In Dutton's account, the creation of the Queen's Men in 1583 eviscerated the leading playing companies by taking their best men and this shows that the court's needs trumped those of the commercial theatre. But the Master of the Revels got the bulk of his income not from the court but from fees paid by playing companies for the licensing of plays and from theatre owners for licensing of their venues. The alternative to Andrew Gurr's duopoly theory--the idea that the court formed two new companies and gave them exclusive access to the London market and settled them at two venues--is Roslyn Knutson's idea that after plague decimated the companies in 1592-4 those who were left naturally coalesced around the Burbage family based at the Theatre to form one new company and around Edward Alleyn and this father-in-law Henslowe at the Rose to form another. Certainly by 1598 this duopoly was court policy--the document of 19 February 1598 showing this is quoted on page 31--but the important question is whether it was policy from 1594.

    Dutton thinks that from 1598 the two leading companies were more closely bound than ever to Tilney: the formal policy that they were the only licensed London companies marks their closeness to the court. Around this time, both companies' printed plays started to advertise that they were performed at (or revised for) the court. The next step was taken in 1603 when all the leading companies got royal patronage. Shakespeare's works dominated the playing of plays at court in the period 1603-13, with one of each of his plays being shown for each one by anybody else, and Dutton thinks that all Shakespeare's plays got a court performance and were revised for this purpose (pp. 35-7).

    Before Tilney took over as Master of the Revels in 1579, the Christmas revels were generally performed either by courtiers themselves or else used children of particular schools such as Westminster, St Paul's, the Merchant Taylors, and the Chapels Royal at Windsor and Whitehall. Tilney built up the side of his work that involved the perusing of, and improving of, possible plays for court performance, and simultaneously his work on actually presenting them decreased. That is, he redefined himself as a censor. According to Dutton, this initially involved supervising rehearsals at Tilney's office in Clerkenwell and calling for changes (p. 54). Dutton describes the literary lives of the Masters of the Revels in order to establish that they were not "faceless bureaucrats" but "every bit as much theatrical professionals as the dramatists whose works they licensed" (p. 59).

    Dutton reviews briefly the evidence that Shakespeare revised A Midsummer Night's Dream between the version represented in Q of 1600 and the version represented in the Folio, including the fact that in having Egeus take over the role of Philostrate as Master of the Revels, who is present at the beginning in Q and F but replaced at the end by Egeus in F, gives Egeus a presence in Act 5 that he otherwise lacks, thereby helping to increase the sense that he is finally reconciled to his daughter's marriage choice. Also, by having Egeus take over Philostrate's work in Act 5 we avoid the Master of the Revels's professional embarrassment at the rubbish he has to offer: when Egeus does it, his personal investment in the romantic aspects of the ending deflects from any such professional concerns. Dutton reckons that the Master of the Revels in A Midsummer Night's Dream would necessarily be seen as a Tilney-like figure, but thinks there is no reason to suppose that Tilney would object to this character's embarrassment if they played the Q version.

    Dutton thinks that the choices of King Lear and Barnabe Barnes's The Devil's Charter for court performance in the 1606-7 season was probably Tilney's doing, since he would know--and might even have asked for--these plays' topical allusions to matters and persons close to King James I's heart. The claims get more self-avowedly speculative still as Dutton pursues this line of thinking for later seasons. Dutton notes that the claim by Thomas Tilney on behalf of Edmund Tilney, as his executor, for Master of the Revels expenses in the 1609-10 season is proof that Edmund Tilney remained active as Master right up until his death in 1610. It is a myth that George Buc took over the actual role from 1603 or some later date, which probably has spread because in 1603 Buc acquired the reversion of the job and in 1606 acquired the right to license plays for printing but not for performance.

    Three of the early Shakespeare quartos, Romeo and Juliet, Henry 5, and Hamlet, have Folio counterparts that are significantly longer and well beyond the playing times of the public theatres. No one has previously considered the possibility that the long texts were the court versions. We do not know if the oft-repeated "two hours" performance time, as given in the Romeo and Juliet prologue and several other contemporary sources, was meant to be taken literally. Lord Hunsdon's letter of 8 October 1594 asking the Lord Mayor to let his men perform at the Cross Keys Inn promises that they will start at 2pm (instead of 4pm as before) and finish between 4 and 5pm. Thomas Platter's accounts of playgoing also specify a 2pm start, but Robert Dawes's contract at the Hope says 3pm. Surveying all the evidence, Dutton reckons 2-3 hours was normal for a play. He then gives accounts of Alfred Hart's, Gurr's and Lukas Erne's work on plays' lengths (in lines) and running times (in minutes) in the light of plausible speeds of delivery (in lines per minute) that led these three to conclude that the long versions of most Shakespeare plays were not performed in their entirety.

    Dutton notices that the especially overlong plays of Shakespeare cluster in the second half of his career: up to 1596 all his plays are under 2,800 lines except Richard 3. But in 1597-1600, just as Henslowe shows the Admiral's Men's plays being revised for court performance, the long Shakespeare plays start to appear. The court demanded long plays as there were more hours to while away, typically 9pm to 1am. Jonson's Bartholomew Fair is absurdly long at 4344 lines, and Dutton thinks that the text we know represents performance at court and that there was a (lost) shorter version that matched the Induction's reference to "two hours and a half, and somewhat more". The 1601 quarto of Jonson's Cynthia's Revels is 2,640 lines and its title page says it was performed at the Blackfriars, while the 1616 Folio version (dedicated to the court) is about 1,000 lines longer; in Dutton's view these extra lines were written for court performance, although we have no evidence that such a court performance took place. In short, the extreme length of Jonson's plays and his widely known ambitions at court are connected: he wrote such long plays because the court liked them.

    The currently popular idea that plays were routinely expanded for revival is mistaken, according to Dutton. The cases of Doctor Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy witnessed in Henslowe's Diary are exceptional. Dutton lists all the Henslowe records for "additions", "mending", and "altering" plays and writing new prologues and epilogues (pp. 100-1). There are not many examples and the commonest reason given for expansion is "for the court". In working through the surviving texts of some of these examples, Dutton determines that in some cases (such as Old Fortunatus) there are passages that were clearly added for the benefit of (because addressed to) the court audience, but that in others, since we do not have 'before' and 'after' versions, identifying the reason for presumed expansion is necessarily speculative. The first edition of Love's Labour's Lost (1598) says that the play was performed at court and that it was "augmented": for Dutton these are related facts. Dutton sketches the Shakespeare play title pages that refer to their contents being performed "publicly" versus those that say the play was performed at court and was augmented or corrected, but it is not clear that he thinks quantitative evidence supports his case and in a footnote he remarks that "The evidence from other plays is more equivocal" (p. 110n23).

    The title page of the third edition of Mucedorus, published 1610, reports that it contains "new additions" and represents the play as acted at court, and Dutton details the changes (when compared to previous editions) that seem particularly directed at the court audience. A Fair Quarrel was published in 1617 with a title page referring to court performance and public performance and then reissued the same year with an updated title page referring to added scenes and to court performance and removing the mention of public performance. From this, Dutton (somewhat tendentiously) links the adding of scenes to court performance. Dutton rehearses the cases of The Spanish Tragedy, Doctor Faustus, and The Malcontent without doing more than reporting the orthodoxies. Regarding Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's Philaster (first performed 1609), the 1620 first edition, which is a poor text, says it was performed at the Globe and the "corrected, and amended" second edition of 1622 says it was performed at the Globe and the Blackfriars. There are substantive plot differences between Q1 and Q2 and Dutton reckons that they happened long after the first performances and probably around 1619 when English relations with the Spanish court made the original play's representation of the Spanish prince Pharamond unacceptable. Thus the changes were probably made for court performance.

    The case for The Maid's Tragedy being revised for the court is especially tenuous: amongst the newly added matter is a mention of night-time revelling, and Dutton thinks this a meta-theatrical reference to the late-at-night court performance. Dutton tabulates all first instances in which the title page declares that the play was "augmented", "enlarged", "amended" or "with additions" (pp. 126-8). The first surviving edition of Love's Labour's Lost says that it is "Newly corrected and augmented" and that it was played at court. The danger here is that we really want to see the correlation between references to an enlarged text and references to court performance. Citing quite a few examples where both appear does not tell us if there is a significant correlation between one kind of phrasing on title pages and the other: one would have to count the occurrences to establish that. In the case of Richard 3, the third edition claimed to be "Newly augmented" but it is essentially the same as the previous two, so Dutton argues that its very length (3,570 lines) means it was unplayable on the professional stage--so there must have been a now-lost shorter version in existence--and hence Q3's boast might refer to its contents being longer than that lost version.

    Dutton proceeds through the cases for which title pages use the words and phrases "enlarged", "amended", "with additions", and "corrected" (pp. 131-5). The 1619 Pavier edition of The Contention of York and Lancaster and Richard Duke of York as The Whole Contention is interesting in that the garbling by York of his own family tree, present in the 1594 Contention of York and Lancaster, is in the combined two-play edition corrected. These title-pages clearly misrepresent their contents, but Dutton nonetheless finds enough consistency to conclude that "augmented" and "enlarged" are meaningful and he notices that these terms are particularly heavily used between 1598 and 1604, which is also when Henslowe's Diary tells us that plays were being altered for court performance. Dutton sees a link here: the publishers were exploiting the fact that everyone knew that plays were expanded for court performance, even though the claim that a particular book's contents were so expanded might not actually be true. Dutton reckons that ". . . no one--not Henslowe, nor any publisher (saving only John Webster's publisher on the title page of The Duchess of Malfi)--ever speaks of a play being cut from its original length, for touring purposes or any other" (p. 137), but in fact Humphrey Moseley writes in the preliminaries to the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio that when its contents were performed "the Actours omitted some Scenes and Passages (with the Author's consent) as occasion led them".

    Dutton thinks that the discovery that the Shakespeare Folio was, for many plays, based on a preceding quarto was made in the twentieth century (pp. 138-9) but in fact the eighteenth-century editor Edward Capell first discovered this and the Cambridge-Macmillan 1863-6 edition's systematic collation put it beyond doubt. Dutton reckons that in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More the censor ". . . Tilney had neither affixed his licence to the text, nor marked any of the revisions" (p. 152). In fact he did mark revisions, for example the line and large cross deleting lines 316-23, the marginal comment "MEND Y^IS" alongside line 320-3, and the alteration of the identity of the foreigners from a "straunger" and a "ffrencheman" to Lombards in lines 364 and 368, as recorded in Greg's Malone Society Reprint of the play. Dutton is adamant that the Master of the Revels did not allow plays to be routinely revised without relicensing (pp. 152-67). Sometimes in Henslowe's Diary we see costumes and properties being bought for plays before Tilney is paid for licensing them, but as Dutton argues that is only because Tilney was paid monthly in arrears for licensing whole batches of plays. Quite possibly, plays were licensed in sections, just as they were written in sections, rather than all-at-once when finished. Knutson noted that there are 280 plays mentioned in Henslowe's Diary and just 16 of them are described being revised, so revision was not routine (p. 165).

    For this review's purposes, Dutton's key claim is that The Contention of York and Lancaster (1594), Richard Duke of York (1595), Romeo and Juliet (1597), Henry 5 (1600), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), and Hamlet (1603) are all early versions of their plays, not simply debased corruptions of the later-printed versions that we are more familiar with. All these plays were expanded by Shakespeare to make the more-familiar versions. Complicating the textual situation, however, is the fact that these first editions are based on "poorly reported . . . oral/aural" texts (p. 169) made by the original actors or a theatregoer. Dutton traces the "developments in plotting, characterization, and language" (p. 170) that suggest that these texts represent early versions of their plays, not later reductions/corruptions. Dutton examines a moment where, according to Erne, Q1 Romeo and Juliet makes sense only if you look at Q2 Romeo and Juliet and see that a bit of the script has dropped out in Q1, from which he concludes that Q1 is a debased representation of the Q2 version. (Specifically, in Q1 Juliet reflects that "All this is comfort" (F3r) right after some lines that are not comforting to her, where in Q2 she says this just after saying that Tybalt would have killed her husband so that Tybalt's death is indeed comforting.) Since Dutton thinks that Q1 not only reflects the earlier state of the play but also is memorially corrupted, he can just dismiss this evidence by supposing that Juliet's lines about Tybalt killing her husband were already in existence when Q1 was made but that the Q1 compositor accidentally omitted them. The danger here of course is that a revision-plus-corruption explanation for the differences between the early editions of Shakespeare can account for almost any particular piece of evidence by flip-flopping from one side of the explanation to the other as necessary.

    In the case of Q1 Henry 5 representing the play as first written and F representing a subsequent revision of it, Dutton repeats the argument he made in articles reviewed in YWES for 2005 and YWES for 2009. Where Folio Henry 5 depends on the 1598 Famous Victories of Henry V it does so only in places where Q1 Henry 5 does so too. This is hard to explain if Q1 is supposed to be derived from the version underlying F since it means that what got left out of Q1 was only those parts that are not in Famous Victories; why would anyone omit only those? But if F Henry 5 builds on the Q1 base this makes sense: for the augmentation Shakespeare did not rely on Famous Victories. Dutton finds that Q1 contains likely mishearings and likely misreadings of an authoritative text. If the version underlying F was cut to make the version underlying the highly patriotic Q1, why cut F's choruses and "Once more unto the breach . . ." since they are utterly patriotic? The Q/F differences regarding just which historical figures take part in the play's action amount to F bringing in many more senior aristocrats whom we know from the Henry 4 and Henry 6 plays: Warwick, Talbot, Salisbury, Westmoreland, Clarence, Gloucester, and Bedford; thus F ties Henry 5 into the wider historical arc of the series of plays before and after it.

    According to Dutton, the addition of Henry 5's choruses to make F would be consistent with F representing an expansion of Q1 for the purposes of indoor, seated court performance, but he then has to strain to make sense of the Prologue's "cockpit" and "wooden 'O'": indoor theatres, he notes, could be "quasi-circular", such as "the wooden banqueting house built at Whitehall in 1581 and in use until it was replaced in 1607" (p. 188). The misplacement of the choruses in the Folio may result from their being written only for the court performance: by 1623 no one could remember where they went. In some places where Erne attributes F's wordiness to a readerly audience, Dutton remarks that the uses of amplificatio involved could be equally theatrical. And of course, the theatrical audience most likely to appreciate wordy bits in plays would be the elite and highly educated court audience (pp. 189-92). In Folio Henry 5 the motivation for wordiness can be attributed to theatrical characters as well as to the authorial targeting of readers, as when the Archbishop uses it at court as a rhetorical and political device.

    Dutton's view of the 1590s editions of The Contention of York and Lancaster/2 Henry 6 and Richard Duke of York/3 Henry 6 is essentially Edmond Malone's: Shakespeare wrote two versions of each: the early short sketch and the subsequent, fuller revision. As Randall Martin showed in his edition of 3 Henry 6 (reviewed in YWES for 2001), the differential use of Edward Hall's chronicles in O and Raphael Holinshed's chronicles in F is hard to explain by textual corruption but readily explained by authorial revision of the O version to make the F version. Dutton considers the Q and F versions of Clifford's discovery of the body of his dead father at the Battle of St Albans in 2 Henry 6, arguing that although some kind of memorial corruption may vitiate Q the F version is so much more intellectually developed that Q cannot simply reflect a corruption of the F version (pp. 204-7). That the revision was for the court is harder to show, as is the dating of the revision, and Dutton scarcely tries for want of hard evidence. Perhaps, he says, the revision occurred in the late 1590s to coincide with revival of the whole historical sequence.

    Although almost no one now claims that Q1 Romeo and Juliet is a memorial reconstruction, the orthodoxy is still that Q2 represents the play as first written by Shakespeare and that Q1 was derived from that version and represents what got performed. Dutton argues that in fact Q2 shows "deliberate revisions to the characterizations of Juliet and Friar Laurence [and] . . . the clown's role played by Will Kemp" and hence that the Q2 title page is accurate in calling it "Newly corrected, augmented, and amended" (p. 213). Juliet becomes a stronger and more complex character, and Dutton reckons that the revision probably happened in the late 1590s when Shakespeare, as a result of acquiring an especially good boy actor in the company, was writing a group of roles for strong young-women characters. Dutton focusses on a series of moments--such as Juliet's impatient questioning of the Nurse about the news from Romeo--when, subjectively, Q2 seems to build on Q1, and it is hard to see how its greater complexity and subtlety could have been mangled to make Q1.

    Dutton provides other examples of what he takes to be revision rather than corruption, including the scene in Friar Laurence's cell as he and Romeo await the arrival of Juliet for the marriage and Juliet's soliloquy waiting for Romeo to come to her for their wedding night. Friar Laurence also has some rewriting that Dutton cannot easily see going the other way (from Q2's version to Q1's). In the final act at the tomb, Q1's Romeo is accompanied by Balthasar, but in Q2 he is accompanied by Peter (played by Will Kemp) and Dutton reads this as a conscious revision made to keep the comic potential alive until nearly the end: we continue to hope that it will all end happilly. Anticipating the objection that Peter is a Capulet not a Montague servant, Dutton points out that servants move between houses in Shakespeare--Feste seems to do so in Twelfth Night-- and that Kemp probably wears his own livery not the Capulets, which is why Romeo does not recognize him as a Capulet man when he is asked to read the list of guests to the Capulet feast.

    The differences between Q1 and Q2 Hamlet, and between Q2 and F, are also the consequence of revision for court performance. The impossibility of Q1 deriving from the version underlying Q2/F is shown most clearly in the key plot differences: in Q1, for example, the Queen is consciously in league with Hamlet against the King. The major addition to the Hamlet story that Shakespeare provided is the figure of Fortinbras, present in all his three versions and nowhere else; this is crucial, according to Dutton, because, having the successor come from another country, it maps the Danish story onto the Elizabethan succession. Dutton reckons that the Q1 version was written in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, and the massive expansion of it to make the Q2 version (almost twice as long) was undertaken for a court performance before the real-life model for Fortinbras, King James 1. In the Q2/F-only line "I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation", inhibition refers to the closure of the theatres around the time of Elizabeth's death and innovation refers to the succession of James 1; it was added for a court performance in the 1603-4 season. Dutton's reading of how Q2 advanced upon Q1 is suggestive but ultimately subjective: he just infers that James 1 would have liked the beefing up of the play's exploration of how kingship and succession work. Shakespeare revised the play again in 1606-8, to judge by the inclusion of the "little eyases" passage, to make the version underlying the Folio.

    In the case of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the myth that Shakespeare was commanded to write it in a hurry bolstered Alexander Pope's view that Q1 was the first hurried sketch and F the later revision. Dutton surveys the whole complex debate about the dating of the play and its possible connection to an Order of the Garter celebration in 1597 (which Dutton rightly rejects as entirely fanciful), and the debate over the renaming of Oldcastle as Falstaff. The use of the name "Brooke" in Q1 (which becomes "Broome" in F) would make sense in 1599, when Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, was indeed elected to the Order of the Garter. Since The Merry Wives of Windsor dramatizes the humiliation of a knight, Falstaff, it cannot have been written for the 1597 Garter celebrations, but it could, Dutton argues, have been written in 1599 to mock Henry, Lord Cobham's elevation to the Order in that year. The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed at court on 4 November 1604 and Dutton reckons that it was for this performance that the version underlying Q (which itself had earlier been performed at court, according to its title page) was revised to make the version underlying F. In 1604 Henry Brooke had just been sent to prison for a plot against King James and James had made six new knights of the Order, so Shakespeare ramped up the celebration of the Order and disconnected the play from the Brooke family by changing the name to Broome, but in the process he consciously ruined Falstaff's pun about brooks that overflow so that the change was but "a fig leaf" that "draws attention to itself in a particularly pointed way" (p. 255). The revision of the play left the manuscript used to print F in a fairly confused state, as the many inconsistencies and mysteries in F attest.

    In his last chapter, Dutton considers plays that seem at some point to have acquired an additional scene: Titus Andronicus, Richard 2, and 2 Henry 4. Regarding the difficulty of staging Titus Andronicus with the Fly-Killing scene in it--it seems to violate the Law of Re-entry across 3.2 and 4.1--Dutton asserts that act intervals in the professional theatre do not seem to offer the solution since "There is no evidence that the practice of continuous staging ever changed at public amphitheatres like the Globe" (p. 260). In fact, Gary Taylor in Shakespeare Reshaped (1993) amassed the considerable evidence that after the King's men acquired the Blackfriars in 1608 they brought the indoor theatre practice of observing act intervals to the Globe too. It is surprising that Dutton does not mention this claim to refute it, since it matters greatly to his argument. Instead, Dutton merely observes that we have no reason to suppose that Titus Andronicus was revived at the Blackfriars (where the use of act intervals would solve the Law of Re-entry problem), but performance at court (where act intervals were observed) would solve the problem.

    Regarding the possible censoring of the abdication episode in Richard 2, Dutton finds convincing Cyndia Susan Clegg's argument that what was dangerous about this scene was the idea that parliament can hold a king to account, and that this was unacceptable (and hence censored) in the late 1590s because of the succession crisis but was tolerable (and allowed) by 1608 with James 1 securely on his throne with heirs at the ready. But Dutton thinks that maybe the abdication episode was simply newly written for revival of the play in the Jacobean era. Regarding the scene (3.1) in 2 Henry 4 where the Henry "laments the miseries of kingship" (p. 263), present in one state of the 1600 quarto and not the other, Dutton thinks that its fundamental disconnection with the rest of the play makes it probably a later addition for court performance. Likewise, Dutton sees the eight passages present in F and not the quarto as later additions rather than passages in existence in 1600 but censored from the quarto of that year.

    Did Shakespeare's writing change after the accession of James 1? Dutton notes that the first-named actor in the patent given to the King's Men is Laurence Fletcher, who had entertained James in Edinburgh since the early 1590s. According to Dutton, the presence of someone who knew the king's tastes would be valuable to the new royal company. Almost none of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays were printed before the Folio: just King Lear for sure and perhaps, depending on how we date its composition, Othello. (Dutton dismisses the case of Pericles by referring to the 1609 quarto's problematic text and co-authorship.) Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays continued to be reprinted, so it was not for want of demand that the new plays did not appear in print. Dutton reckons that the King's men stopped publishing Shakespeare's plays out of deference to their patron and the popularity of Shakespeare at court. But Shakespeare also slowed his writing from about two plays a year to about one, and Dutton wonders if this was because he took on the revising of others' plays, for example the anonymous Mucedorus, for court performance.

    Dutton questions the orthodoxy that plays were performed at court only after being performed before the public. He cites the Henslowe's Diary entries of 9 August 1598 and 5 November 1602 for plays "for the court" that seem to be payments for original compositions not revisions, and the occasional payment from the crown to the King's Men for rehearsing for court performance when the theatres were closed by plague. The increased demand for plays from the Jacobean court would have kept Shakespeare busy, and noticeably most of his Jacobean play are longer than his Elizabethan ones, as they would be if written specifically for the court. The reference to Troilus and Cressida never being staled with the stage in the preliminaries to one state of the 1609 Troilus and Cressida quarto is taken by Dutton to indicate that the play was written for court, not professional public, performance.

    In conclusion, Dutton finds that the court mattered to Shakespeare much more than we have thought. The short quartos of 2 Henry 6, 3 Henry 6, Romeo and Juliet, Henry 5, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor are poorly transmitted texts of the plays as originally written and the longer, better-transmitted editions reflect the plays as revised and expanded by Shakespeare for court performance. That is why we have more variation between early editions of his plays than other dramatists' plays: his special role as leading dramatist for the company most popular at court generated more acts of revision for court than happened with other men's plays. If Dutton is right, we have to stop conflating the early versions of a Shakespeare play.

    Two more monographs must be briefly noticed. The first half of James Purkis's Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration and Text is about non-Shakespearian plays--Anthony Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber, Thomas Heywood's The Captives, and Thomas Middleton's The Second Maiden's Tragedy--and hence is beyond the purview of this review. The second half sceptically reviews received opinion about Shakespeare's hand in Sir Thomas More. His "Chapter 4. Curious Coincidences The Collaborations of Sir Thomas More" (pp. 143-90) starts with a long survey of the manuscript's physical state and the uncertainties that surround the pages in the handwriting of Edmund Tilney, Munday, Henry Chettle, Hand B, Hand D, and Thomas Dekker. This is expert summary of what is known but adds nothing of its own. "Chapter 5. Singularly Shakespearean: Attributing the Hand-D addition of More" covers the same ground as Michael L. Hays's article described elsewhere in this review in showing that the paleographical case for Hand D being Shakespeare is unproven: we do not have enough evidence to be sure.

    Purkis acknowledges that: "There is undoubtedly something suggestive about the way in which the coincidences of common spellings cluster between D and Shakespeare . . ." (p. 217), but it is not proof. Purkis thinks that the variety of spellings of single words in Hand D--"He spells country three different ways within the space of a line and a half . . ." (p. 216)--means that we cannot sensibly talk about the writer's preferences. This is not logically valid. I may choose to sometimes spell colour as color and connection as connexion without those habits being a good guide to my authorship of an unattributed passage, but if I ever spell logically as logickly and valid as vallid then these are such unusual choices that their occurrence in an unattributed passage should count for much. This principle applies to the spelling scilens that, as Purkis admits, is found in Hand D and in Shakespeare's 2 Henry 2 and almost nowhere else.

    Purkis seems to grudgingly accept MacDonald P. Jackson's proof, in an article reviewed in YWES for 2006, that the words in Hand D were composed by Shakespeare so that he is the author even if Hand D is not his handwriting. But like Hays he explicitly denies that this fact bears on the identification of Hand D: it could be someone copying out Shakespeare's words. And having called Jackson's argument "a reasonably plausible case" (p. 231), Purkis back-pedals and objects that hunting for verbal parallels across a wide swathe of early modern drama necessarily privileges writers like Shakespeare who have a lot of plays in that swathe and penalizes those who have only a few. This is a valid objection: no one has yet come up with a satisfactory way to 'weight' such hits according to the size of the respective canons.

    Purkis also claims that he applied Jackson's method of searching within Literature Online (LION) to the passage in Chettle's hand on folio 6 and found that this throws up rare links with plays by Anonymous, John Fletcher, Heywood, and Shakespeare (in that order of density) but not any to plays by Chettle himself. Purkis does not give any detail on exactly how he accomplished this test and sounds unsure of himself in executing it--". . . I have perhaps thought some links significant that Jackson might not consider so, and no doubt missed some links that he would have recorded . . ." (p. 233)--so this rather interesting result is less valuable than it would have been if performed decisively. Purkis's "Chapter 6. Canon, Apocrypha, and Sir Thomas More" is essentially a conflation of his essay "Shakespeare's singularity and Sir Thomas More" in Shakespeare Survey (reviewed in YWES for 2014) and Purkis's contribution to the collection called Shakespeare and Textual Studies (reviewed in NYWES for 2015), and need not detain us here. There is no concluding chapter to his book.

    The last monograph this year is a trivial affair. Throughout The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and the Authorship of Early Shakespeare and Anonymous Plays, Donna N. Murphy finds parallel phrasings between works of known authorship and works she would like to attribute. Her method is to search EEBO-TCP looking for words and phrases in common, but she is willing to accept remarkably wide gaps between the words that form her collocations. For example, she calls a "Rare Word Scattered Cluster" the discovery of "two to four words or phrases that occur within 100 words of each other in the two works identified plus no more than one other time in EEBO, with at least one of the instances spread out over three or more lines" (p. 8). Moreover, she is far from the scholarly consensus in her use of the known oeuvres of particular writers as ground truths by which to measure the works she wishes to attribute, most notably in how she deals with the problem that Thomas Nashe left us only one sole-authored, well-attributed play: Summer's Last Will and Testament. Murphy's attempt to find a way around this problem is to claim that ". . . Nashe and [Thomas] Dekker were one and the same person" (p. 11) so that taken together the Nashe-and-Dekker oeuvre is large enough to test. As one might expect from such a way of working, the results are bizarre, as Murphy tries to show that Shakespeare had nothing to do with the writing of Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and 1 Henry 4, because Marlowe (who faked his death in 1593) co-wrote them in various partnerships involving mainly Nashe (who was really also Dekker). Title-page evidence is of course to be treated cautiously, but Murphy seems particularly perverse in giving so many works to Marlowe and Nashe while denying them the authorship of Dido, Queen of Carthage, which was published in 1594 with their names together on the title page.

    One book-length special issue of a journal was published this year, as the Journal of Early Modern Studies invited William Leahy and Paolo Pugliatti to put together a volume on "The Many Lives of William Shakespeare: Biography, Authorship and Collaboration". In their "Editorial" (pp. 11-3) Leahy and Pugliatti offer an out-of-date account of the antipathy between author attribution studies and the disintegrationist position of the likes of Tiffany Stern and Jeffrey Masten that theatre writing is, like theatrical production, a thoroughly socialized phenomenon involving scribes and printers. They claim that the latter position emerged "in mute opposition" to the former and is "gaining ground" (p. 11); in fact the latter position preceded the former and has been orthodoxy for a couple of decades, demonstrated by Masten's foundational Textual Intercourse, published in 1997.

    In "Everything and Nothing: The Many Lives of William Shakespeare" (pp. 17-26), Roger Chartier claims that nothing but "fair copies, clean copies" (p. 18) have survived of the manuscript plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries, which assertion rather depends on what we mean by clean: some of them, such as Sir Thomas More, are pretty untidy looking. Bizarrely, Chartier reckons that when dramatists copied their own plays (for example to make copies for patrons) these documents "cannot be distinguished [meaning, we must not distinguish them] from the productions of scribes who, too, composed elegant copies for presentation"; these authorial transcripts "must be considered not as the traces of the writing process" (p. 18). This is patently untrue: we know that dramatists made changes when copying out their work, and that, unless we start from the absurd premise that there is no such thing as authorship in the first place and that all writing is equally unauthorized, those changes clearly have greater authority than changes made by non-authorial agents when copying out the work.

    Chartier really does take this as his premise, for he gives the standard Foucauldian line that authorship as we know it started in the eighteenth century in tandem with "the idea of intellectual ownership" (p. 18). Not the least problem with this claim is that we have historical records of people arguing about their intellectual property much earlier than the eighteenth century, for example Thomas Heywood objecting in 1612 to the printer William Jaggard for playing fast and loose with authorship ascription and thereby doing "a manifest injury" to Heywood by allowing readers to think he "might steal" (that is, might have stolen) some poems from Shakespeare. Chartier asserts that plays were published anonymously unless the writer were "famous, celebrated, respected" and thereby a "commodity" (p. 19) to be used in marketing, as happened with Shakespeare in 1598; but it was not only Shakespeare to whom this happened: within a few years most plays were published with their writers' names on the title pages and Chartier's selective mentioning of the relatively few that were not is a misrepresentation of the vast body of evidence about this.

    Because printed plays were mediated by scribes and compositors, Chartier is sceptical that we can use the evidence of "spellings, or of the contractions found in printed editions as if they were assured 'authorial markers'" (p. 21). Indeed, this is a challenge to authorship attribution, but it is demonstrable that in many cases the ascriptions based on substantive word-choices (which the mediators were less likely to interfere with than they were incidentals) form into authorial stints that also coincide with distinct changes in practice regarding incidentals, so that the only reasonable conclusion is that the author's incidentals are also showing through in print. Chartier attempts to explain the practice of setting type by formes rather than seriatim (which is setting pages in reading order), but garbles the account by remarking that it was done to enable printers to "print the pages for one side of a sheet before the pages for the other side were set" (p. 21n1). In fact, that is just as possible with seriatim setting as it is with setting by formes and is beside the point. The true difference is that setting by formes enables printers to print particular pages before setting the ones that appear earlier in the reading order, and that this out-of-order setting makes more efficient use of the stock of type and the compositors' time.

    Chartier thinks that "between 1604 and 1612 . . . none of his [Shakespeare's] plays seems to have been written in collaboration", which means Chartier must be implicitly rejecting the evidence that Shakespeare made his contribution to the multi-authored Sir Thomas More in 1604, that he co-wrote Timon of Athens with Thomas Middleton in 1606, that he co-wrote Pericles with George Wilkins in 1608, and that he co-wrote Cardenio with John Fletcher in 1612. Even if we allow Chartier to quibble about some of the dates, that Shakespeare co-wrote Timon of Athens and Pericles right in the middle of Chartier's period is attested by a mountain of independent evidence. Chartier thinks that once eighteenth-century scholars had figured out the order in which the plays were written, the concomitant principle was that "the plays must be published in the order in which Shakespeare composed them rather than according to the division between 'Comedies, Histories and Tragedies', lastingly inherited from the 1623 Folio" (p. 23). But that did not happen: before the 1986-7 Oxford Complete Works the major editions, including the 1951 Peter Alexander edition and the 1974 Riverside, either bundled the plays by genre as the Folio did or actually followed the Folio order.

    The next essay is William Leahy's "The Dreamscape of Nostalgia': Shakespearean Biography: Too Much Information (but not about Shakespeare)" (pp. 31-52). Leahy quotes Stanley Wells writing that although we lack some facts, we can be sure that the young Shakespeare "ate and drank, belched and farted, urinated and defecated", and comments that "None of what Wells says is recorded and none of it can be verified" (p. 33). Well, no, that was Wells's point: we do not need verification to be sure of these things because they are implicit in the fact of human existence. Equally misconceived is Leahy's assertion that in the absence of documentary evidence "even trying to get some idea of the correct chronology of the plays is doomed to failure" (p. 34). In fact, MacDonald P. Jackson came up with a new method for constructing a chronology (his essay "Pause Patterns" reviewed in YWES for 2002) and found that it closely agreed with the Oxford Complete Works's chronology that was entirely independent of Jackson's method: the likelihood of two approaches coming to the same answers by chance (rather than because they are basically correct) is small.

    Leahy surveys some of the records of Shakespeare's financial transactions and reports that "We do not find him, in the records at least, writing plays" (p. 35). This is only true if you do not consider as part of "the records" the many references to him writing plays, such as his name appearing as author on the title pages of printed plays, the Revels Account recording his name as the author of plays performed at court, Francis Meres recording his name as the author of many popular plays, Gabriel Harvey recording his name as the author of Hamlet, John Webster identifying him as an author in the epistle to The White Devil, and so on. Having overstated the absence of evidence, Leahy then takes a pointless tour through what he imagines are writers' attempts to deal with that absence. For the rest of the essay, Leahy belabours the mundane claim that in the absence of hard evidence biographers tend to construct their subjects as versions of themselves. Having decided that he is exposing a hitherto unnoticed narcissism--despite the fact that he quotes many people noticing it before he did--Leahy congratulates himself for not falling for it: "one must be brave to resist this dominant form of Shakespearean biography" (p. 49).

    In "William Shakespeare, My New Best Friend?" (pp. 53-68), Andrew Hadfield worries about biography, and especially historical fiction, making historical figures familiar and likeable to us: "The past is not a warm, comfortable place full of our friends, but another country entirely in which people did things differently" (p. 55). This seems something of a limiting premise: why assume this extreme difference between them and us or then and now? Hadfield thinks that it was not until the eighteenth century that "Shakespeare's already rising star grew to obscure all others" (p. 55), but in fact as Lukas Erne has shown he outshone all others as a publishing star in his own lifetime and immediately after it. Hadfield reckons that collaborative writing was at least in part driven by the unavailability of private spaces in which to write: houses were more open-plan than they are today, on account of the limited technologies for heating and lighting them.

    Hadfield claims that as theatre became more commercially stable towards the end of Shakespeare's career, and more dependent on audiences than patrons, "A vital and vibrant period of collaborative authorship was coming to an end . . ." (p. 59), but he does not quite explain the connection, nor offer any statistics to support his claim of a decline in collaborative authorship. I would counter that the prolific collaborations between various permutations of Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, Thomas Heywood, John Ford, and Thomas Middleton produced dozens of play editions after the end of Shakespeare's  career and, what is more, that these are openly acknowledged as co-authored works on their title pages. The rest of Hadfield's essay is a reading of various bits of Shakespeare writing to show that he reacted to others' writing and wanted to outdo them.

    In "Shakespearian Biography and the Geography of Collaboration" (pp. 69-90), Katherine Scheil wonders how Shakespeare could be so active a collaborator if he spent much of his time at New Place in Stratford, as some critics assert. Scheil makes an even greater claim than Chartier does in asserting that there was "an eleven year period in the middle of his career with no collaboration" (p. 73). It would have been useful of Scheil to identify when she thinks these eleven years fall. If we date 1 Henry 6 to 1595 and Timon of Athens to 1606 (both of which would be uncontroversial) we would have such a gap, were it not for Shakespeare writing additions to Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy in 1599 and parts of Sir Thomas More in 1603-4. Perhaps it is these last two activities that Scheil is implicitly rejecting or else she is distinguishing between minor contributions to others' works and active collaboration.

    Scheil supports the argument of Stanley Wells that Shakespeare did not retire to Stratford but rather did a lot of his writing there across his career, and she offers some insubstantial pieces of evidence from the archaeology of New Place that support this. John Ward, the vicar of Stratford in the Restoration, collected anecdotal evidence that Shakespeare wrote plays while in Stratford and was himself an active commuter between London and Stratford. Ward is the writer who claimed that Shakespeare died after a drinking session with Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. Scheil returns to the idea that the middle period when Shakespeare did not collaborate was "1604-12", giving no reason for the reduction from eleven years (claimed on p. 73) to nine.

    As Scheil notes, there was nothing to stop writers who had figured out who was going to write which parts of a play from writing their parts in isolation rather than in the same town, let alone the same room. I would add that the plot and character inconsistencies we find in some collaborative plays--such as the unexpected and then forgotten death of Mutius in Shakespeare and George Peele's Titus Andronicus and the inconsistency about which clothes are the "first habits" worn by Lawrence and Parnell in Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood's The Witches of Lancashire--are strong evidence for co-authors not working in the same room. Having twice denied that Shakespeare collaborated in the middle of his career, Scheil next explores the possibility that his contribution to Sir Thomas More was written while away from London and that this is why it is not perfectly integrated into the rest of the play.

    Rosalind Barber, in "Shakespeare and Warwickshire Dialect" (pp.70-118), takes Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson to task for failing in their collection Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (2013) to "engage with contemporary research on the issue" of the Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theory, such as that done by Diana Price, William Leahy, Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky. (The present author should acknowledge here that he gave the publisher a positive evaluation of Wells and Edmondson's plans for their book before it was contracted.) In fact, Wells and Edmondson's collection does engage with Price and Leahy, the latter's name appearing 34 times in their book. Barber raises the matter in order to refute the fallacy that words specific to Warwickshire are used in Shakespeare's plays, which is often advanced as evidence for Shakespeare's authorship.

    Barber starts by making the unsupported assertion that there are "31,500 different words" in Shakespeare's "lexicon", by which she presumably means that there are that many different words in the plays and poems. There are not. Although specialists disagree on how to count words--is well-beseeming one word or two?--their counts roughly agree and are much lower than Barber's. Marvin Spevack found just over 19,000 words in the plays and more recently Hugh Craig found around 20,000. Barber's count presumably treats as multiple words the strings that are in fact single words inflected for different grammatical purposes (such as who and whom) or to conjugate verbs (such as am, are, and is) or to form tenses (such as run and ran). There are indeed about 35,000 such strings in all of Shakespeare and Barber's conception of them as "different words" does not inspire confidence in her understanding of her topic.

    For her first example, Barber takes the claim that "Golden lads" and "chimney-sweepers" (in Cymbeline) are Warwickshire terms for dandelions in different parts of their life-cycle, which as she points out--and has been known for several years--is a myth of fairly well-understood origin, as is also shown by Charles E. Nelson in an article noticed elsewhere in this review. Barber shows that Michael Wood was wrong to assert that redcoat is Shakespeare's Warwickshire dialect for a variety of apple, since in fact the word does not appear in his works. But she mangles Wood's claim about caraways, thinking that "Justice Shallow does mention" this "apple" when he offers guests his own variety of pippin "with a dish of caraways" in 2 Henry 4. In fact, Shallow is probably offering not more apples (how many can one person eat?) but a dish of caraway seeds, which were recommended by dietary author Thomas Cogan as an accompaniment to apples. She is right to show that leather-coat was not a Warwickshire dialect word for a kind of apple, as Robert de Capel Wise claimed in 1861. Barber catches Wood in further slips, but since Wood is not a scholar but a popular writer and presenter upon whom authorship experts do not rely it feels rather pointless to refute at such length the content of Wood's 2003 television show In Search of Shakespeare and its spinoff book.

    When it suits her argument, Barber implies that the Folio is less reliably Shakespearian than preceding quartos--a word "only appeared in this form in the posthumously edited First Folio" (p. 99)--even in the case of The Merry Wives of Windsor, for which of course the preceding quarto is extremely unreliable. Barber has more success showing that some claims by David Kathman for Warwickshire dialect words appearing in Shakespeare are wrong: although her authorities (and everyone else's) are centuries later than Shakespeare's time, they appear to give a wider currency to the words pash (meaning to smash) and potch (meaning to poke) than has been thought. Barber's account of the word honey-stalks (from Titus Andronicus) repeats the substance of her note on this reviewed in NYWES for 2015. Barber seems to get confused by the appearance of Shakespeare and John Fletcher's play The Two Noble Kinsmen in the Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher folio of 1679, writing of Beaumont and Fletcher that the play "was originally published as theirs" (p. 109). In fact it first appeared in a 1634 quarto with Shakespeare and Fletcher's names on the title-page.

    Parts of Barber's argument are hard to follow, as when she argues that in the phrase "wappered out" the word wappered "cannot mean 'fatigued' (an adjective which cannot accommodate 'out'), but rather 'tired'" (p. 110). I cannot see the difference between fatigued and tired. In her argument about the word moble, Barber claims to quote the non-existent "Q2 (1603) edition of Hamlet": Q1 was published in 1603 and Q2 in 1604-5. Her quotation includes the name Corambis, which shows that she must be thinking of Q1--the only edition to use that name for the character that later editions call Polonius--but she consistently calls this edition Q2. Worse, her quotation matches no early edition, as she gives: "1st PLAYER: 'But who O who had seen the mobled queen-' | CORAMBIS: Mobled Queene is good, faith very good" (p. 112). Q1 actually reads: "Play.  'But who, O who had seene the mobled Queene?' | Cor. Mobled Queene is good, faith very good". Here Barber has silently altered both speech prefixes, added quotation marks around the first line, omitted the comma before "O", changed "seene" to "seen", changed "Queene" to queen" and added a dash at the end of the first line. Barber's quotation of the Folio version of these lines is even more inaccurate: I count eleven silent alterations of spelling and punctuation.

    These details matter because Barber offers a "speculative" account that "would explain the changes seen in this passage between Q2 and the Folio text" (p. 113). She means of course the differences between Q1 and the Folio text (since she has not yet mentioned what is really in Q2), and because she is thoroughly confused about which text is which she fails to consider Q2's reading altogether, which is another variant again and one that makes her speculative explanation impossible. Even if those obstacles could be overcome by revising her text to include Q2's real reading, Barber's speculation depends on the bizarre idea that a "printer's error in Q2 [read Q1] then inspired a revision of the original text" (p. 113), meaning that in performance Polonius actually speaks the misprint and Hamlet queries it. Compounding all this, Barber refers to the "Q2 text" as "far cleaner" than the Folio (p. 113) when of course the Q1 text she is quoting (as she has been, albeit inaccurately, all along) is notoriously corrupt. It reflects badly on the diligence of the editors of this collection that they did not save Barber from these errors which, in any case, digress from her main point: the mistaken word provenances in Wood's In Search of Shakespeare.

    In "'Fabricated Lives': Shakespearean Collaboration in Fictional Forms" (pp. 119-32), Robert Sawyer surveys the way that co-authorship of early modern plays is represented in modern fictions fictions: "the more collaborative that the fictionalized work is in origin", he finds, "the more positively it portrays such relationships in Shakespeare's time" (p. 119). This is fascinating but not relevent to the present review. Likewise, in "Text, Style, and Author in Hamlet Q1" (pp. 135-156), Christy Desmet gives a history of the scholarly reception of Q1 Hamlet before offering a reading of its rhetorical style and then a survey of recent work on its authorship, including theories about shorthand notetaking, before returning to the idea that we were best to understand the play in relation to early modern ideas and practices of rhetoric.

    "Authors of the Mind" (pp. 157-73) by Marcus Dahl discusses some of the problems that beset authorship attribution by computational means, starting with the fact that "Sometimes a lack of authorial markers is taken as evidence for the presence of an author" (p. 158). This is indeed apposite, since Dahl is the constructor of the private database of play texts that Brian Vickers uses for his authorship attribution work, which the present reviewer has shown--most recently in The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion (2017)--to lack a great many plays that should be in it, including much of Thomas Middleton's work. Because the Dahl-Vickers database is largely incomplete, conclusions drawn from the investigators' failure to find something in the database are worthless: we cannot say that an author did not use a word or phrase since it is just as likely that he used it but in a work that Dahl failed to put into his database. That Dahl appears to understand this and Vickers does not is something of a mystery.

    Dahl frets over the problem of detecting authorial markers of style that involve spelling and contractions in the light of our knowledge that scribes and compositors changed these features of the writing they transmitted. Things go wrong with Dahl's citation of authorities when he gives "11983" as the year of publication of Gary Taylor and Michael Warren's book The Division of the Kingdoms and when he attributes it to Taylor and "John Warren" in his list of Works Cited, and when he gives the year of Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith's article on Middleton's hand in All's Well that Ends Well as 1012. In criticizing the last of these, Dahl muddies the waters further by referring to "Jonathan Hope's account of the declining use of the marked 'do' auxiliary . . . during the late Elizabethan period" (p. 161) when in fact Hope showed that auxiliary do use rose in that period; it is not clear what Dahl means to convey by his imprecise qualifier "marked". On page 162 Dahl starts referring to "our own statistical evaluation of Hope's data" and since he has no co-author on this essay it is only a guess that by "our" he means himself and Brian Vickers, although the latter is not identified as Dahl's collaborator anywhere in this essay and those who do not know their previous work will presumably be mystified on this point. This is another detail the collection's editors should have caught.

    In a footnote that seems to respond to the present reviewer's demonstration that Dahl's database lacks many Middleton works, Dahl writes "Our analysis of the perceived collaborative authorship Macbeth has been impeded by lack of access to the same electronic texts as the Oxford editors" (p. 162n6). In fact the opposite is true: Dahl and Vickers's work is impeded by their insistence on compiling their own private database of electronic texts--and then failing to fill it properly--instead of doing what every other investigator does and use the widely available Literature Online (LION) and Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) databases that all UK universities subscribe to, including the University of London where Dahl and Vickers work.

    Thus, Dahl and Vickers's critics have no databases that they lack: rather, Dahl and Vickers have a private database that they have never allowed anyone else to examine. To complain, then, that "sharing of resources is rare" (p. 162) is rather rich. Worse, Dahl later refers to the "restricted access allowed to the Oxford Middleton Works electronic text database" (p. 164n 9) preventing other scholars checking the claims made using it. There is no such thing as "the Oxford Middleton Works electronic text database", only the Oxford University Press edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (2007) edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino that the present reviewer used to find the holes in Dahl's collection of Middleton texts. Anyone can buy this recent edition of Middleton and confirm that these holes exist. (Dahl clearly has access to a copy since he quotes it later in this essay.) The purchaser might even buy the book as an electronic text available within the publisher's Oxford Scholarly Editions Online product, but this is subject to no "restricted access" other than that it is expensive.

    Dahl reports that he and Vickers get different results from other investigators on such things as "function word and vocabulary tests" (p. 162), but since they alone are using secret resources and undisclosed methods it is impossible to say whether this too is simply because their private database is inadequate or whether they are also making methodological errors in searching it. Dahl reports that Maguire and Smith's counts of the words All and Omnes in Folio plays are wrong, but since Maguire and Smith conceded that point five years ago this is not news. Remarkably, Dahl revisits the presence of the Middletonian stage direction "Enter the three Witches, meeting Hecat" in Macbeth--which Roger Holdsworth and Gary Taylor maintain is a sign that Middleton adapted the play--and insists that it is not Middletonian because the 1608 quarto of King Lear has "Enter Bast. and Curan meeting" and "we can see that the construction is essentially the same" (p. 163). The construction is not essentially the same, and Holdsworth's scholarship is scrupulous about maintaining such differences in wording while Dahl thinks it relevant that "a similar construction" occurs in Henry 8 and elsewhere. Only if we follow Dahl in lumping together other phrasings with the ones that actually are specific to Middleton do we find that such forms of words are not distinctive of authorship.

    Dahl continues throwing up smoke rather than constructing arguments in the pages that follow, expressing incredulity that authorship attribution proceeds using small verbal details even though we know that compositors and scribes altered small verbal details as they mediated plays. What Dahl conceals in his account is that the small verbal details that investigators use for authorship attribution are not the ones they think that scribes and compositors interfered with. Dahl quotes Stanley Wells's views on the likely problems in Shakespeare and Middleton's collaboration on Timon of Athens--to judge from the problems that remain in the play--but misreports them as an account of "Measure for Measure . . . following Taylor and Jowett's case for the play's collaborative origins" (p. 166), which latter play is in fact a posthumous adaptation by Middleton and not an active collaboration like Timon of Athens. Dahl thinks that Wells "speculates rather wildly" about the collaboration without noticing that his own narrative has entirely lost touch with reality because he has confused Measure for Measure with Timon of Athens.

    In addition to his inaccuracies, Dahl's indulgence in table-thumping italics tends to ignore the tonal norms of scholarly discourse: "Yet here because for once we actually have the document in the author's own hand . . . the mis-lineation presents no puzzle though the explanation is either . . . concerning what would be economical for the supposed printers . . . which was apparently redacted" (p. 170). Dahl's closing shot at Gary Taylor's claims about Macbeth is hard to follow because it refers to "the scribe who set the 1622 edition of Othello" (p. 171) where presumably Dahl means the compositor. Dahl seems to think that because Taylor reckons that there is no authority in the spelling of the Folio text of this play he is not entitled to argue anything from the spellings found in the text, asking "if there is no authority in these matters, then what of all these textual arguments?" (p. 171). This question betrays ignorance about the nature and scope of the editorial notion of authority.

    In "Shakespeare in Arden of Faversham and the Additions to The Spanish Tragedy: Versification Analysis" (pp. 175-200), Marina Tarlinskaja, after a survey of the authorship studies on Arden of Faversham, begins her account of the metrical features of early modern drama. Unfortunately, Tarlinskaja uses typographic conventions to represent rhythm without ever explaining them, as in "Seems to reject him, tho' she grants his Pray'r" (p. 177); just what the italics, boldface, and underlining are meant to convey about prosody is not clear. Moreover, Tarlinskaja asserts that this particular line "contains an extrametrical stress on syllabic position 1 and two missing stresses on S, on positions 2 and 6" without declaring what assumptions underpin that claim. Why cannot the line be stressed as a perfectly normal iambic pentameter as "seems TO reJECT him, THO' she GRANTS his PRAY'R" (if we allow lowercase type to represent unstressed syllables and uppercase type to represent stressed ones)?

    Tarlinskaja's rules requiring words such as seems to be stressed and to and tho' not to be stressed should be stated from the outset; instead she simply presents her first example as if it explains itself. The confusion deepens when Tarlinskaja reports that "The line Seems to reject him, | tho' she grants | his Pray'r contains nine dictionary words but only three metrical words, separated in the example by vertical bars" (p. 177). The bars here separate four not three words: him from tho' and grants from his, and the reader is left wondering what Tarlinskaja means by "metrical words". Her explanation is of no help: "Metrical words contain a dictionary word or their groups whose stress falls on a metrically strong syllabic position" (p. 177). This appears to say that metrical words contain "a . . . word or their groups", which is meaningless. And since all nine words in the line are in any dictionary, what can Tarlinskaja mean by a "dictionary word", and why did the collection's editors not ask her this question? Later in the paragraph Tarlinskaja describes the phrase "deep trenches" as a "metrical word", which suggests that she is using the word word in a different sense from everyone else, which explains part but not all of the confusion.

    Some clarity emerges when Tarlinskaja retrospectively provides some of her rules for choosing when to stress monosyllabic words, but for the full system she refers readers to her book of 1976. Tarlinskaja offers (p. 179) some examples of her typographical conventions in which a "minimum of midline stressing" is depicted by the adding of boldface underlining ("The caterpillars of the commonwealth", "To dim his glory, and to stain the track"), but the method remains unclear. One would intuitively expect to find boldface and underlining accompanying an increase not a decrease in stress, since these are conventionally marks for emphasis. This feature of minimized midline stressing turns out to be one of Tarlinskaja's main text-dating tools, since "in Elizabethan plays [it tended to fall] on the sixth syllabic position, but after 1600 it shifted to position eight" (p. 179). She offers a graph (Figure 1) to convey this idea but does not talk the reader through it, and the key point that might mislead a reader unused to these ideas is that the ups and downs of the picture do not convey the stress of any one line but rather average the totals for stresses found at each evenly numbered syllabic position across entire plays. Thus about 88% of the lines of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy have the expected stress on the fourth syllable, 70% of them have the expected stress on the sixth syllable, and 77% of them have the expected stress on the eighth syllable, making a "dip" at the sixth syllable. By comparison, 80% of the lines of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi have the expected stress on the fourth syllable, 81% of them have the expected stress on the sixth syllable, and 68% of them have the expected stress on the eighth syllable. Thus the "dip" moves to later in the line over time.

    Next Tarlinskaja moves to the idea of clitics: unstressed monosyllabic words that "cling to the following or the preceding stressed lexical word" (p. 180). The obvious difficulty is that the notion of clinging is nowhere clearly defined, but at least the reader can do a web-search for the terms proclitic and enclitic to fill in the detail that Tarlinskaja omits. The third major category in Tarlinskaja's method is the syntactic link and its opposite the syntactic break. The strongest link is between a noun and its modifier or a verb and its direct object, the link-that-is-also-a-break is between a subject and its predicate or "any two adjacent words that have no immediate syntactic link" (p. 181), and the strongest break is "between two sentences" or between speeches. (Actually, Tarlinskaja reports the last as being "between the author's and reported speech" (p. 181) but that description makes no sense in relation to drama and elsewhere she gives the definition I have used.) These classifications allow Tarlinskaja to tabulate percentages of these features found across all the lines of a play and to give a graph of where in the line the links/breaks tend to fall: after each of position 2, 3, 4, and so on.

    After considering the categories of verse-line-endings--feminine, masculine, enjambed, and so on--Tarlinskaja is ready to start classifying plays to build profiles of authors' differing verse styles. For analysis she divides Arden of Faversham into three blocks--scenes 1-3, 4-8, and 9-end--and sets out to summarize each. This study is vitiated by Tarlinskaja taking seriously M. L. Wine's opinion of more than 40 years ago that the 1592 edition is based on a memorial reconstruction; this is not what Laurie Maguire concluded in her landmark study Shakespearean Suspect Texts (1996) and it is no longer widely believed. Digging into the stress profiles (the first of her classifications) in each of her three blocks of Arden of Faversham, Tarlinskaja spots the problem that the profile for the whole play is quite different from the three profiles when studied blockwise: the trouble is that in the play-wise profile "the data indicated average numbers" (p. 189). (Actually, in all the profiles they contain averages: her point is that averages for the whole of a play may conceal variations in component averages between its parts.)

    The differences in stress profiles between Tarliskaja's three divisions of the play certainly suggests multiple authorship, but in the absence of profiles for candidate authors the reader cannot see whose profile most closely matches what she has found. Rather, she simply asserts that Shakespeare, Marlowe and Kyd (and no one else) are candidates. On purely anecdotal sampling of the evidence, Tarlinskaja concludes this section with "Let us tentatively assume that the older collaborator [with Shakespeare] of Arden was Kyd" (p. 193). With all the underlying tabulation that Tarlinskaja claims to have undertaken, it would surely have been possible to present some statistical analysis of the data, at the very least to calculate each candidate's consistency (say, the standard deviations around the mean averages) for each of the habits being tested.

    Next she turns to the Additions to Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, and begins with some peculiar assertions about the play's stage history. Tarlinskaja asserts that it "must have been first performed in one of the Inns of the city of London" (p. 193) before being performed at a purpose-built theatre, without saying why; furthermore, she believes that the latter kind of venues were "constructed in 1579-1580" (p. 193) when in fact no known theatres were built in London in those years. Regarding the additions to The Spanish Tragedy for which payment is recorded in Henslowe's Diary, Tarlinskaja assumes that these are the ones that ended up in the fourth edition in 1602 and that her job is simply to determine who wrote them. In fact, Henslowe is clear that he is paying Ben Jonson to write those additions and we know that they cannot be the ones that ended up in the 1602 edition since other evidence--omitted by Tarlinskaja--shows that at least some of the 1602 edition's Additions were completed by 1599. This other evidence is the allusion to the Painter's Part addition in John Marston's Antonio and Mellida in 1599.

    Bizarrely, Tarlinskaja sets out to test the likelihood that either Jonson or Shakespeare wrote the Additions found in the 1602 edition of The Spanish Tragedy, ignoring all other candidates. She determines Jonson's style using only his play Sejanus and for Shakespeare she uses just Henry 5, Hamlet, and Othello, and unsurprisingly this highly limited study comes down in favour of Shakespeare writing the Additions. Summing up her essay in a sentence, Tarlinskaja writes that "Numerous features of versification, combined, suggest Shakespeare in collaboration with Kyd at different phases of Shakespeare's career: in Arden of Faversham (early Shakespeare) and in the Additions to The Spanish Tragedy (Shakespeare of the early seventeenth century)" (p. 197). The latter is uncontroversial--several independent studies have come to this conclusion--but the former is a distortion of the essay it summarizes, since in her own words that claim was not proven: "Let us tentatively assume that the older collaborator [with Shakespeare] of Arden was Kyd" (p. 193).

    Darren Freebury-Jones's method in "Exploring Co-Authorship in 2 Henry VI" (pp. 200-16) is to look for "'rare' tetragrams" (p. 202), meaning strings of four or more words in a row that occur no more than four times in plays first performed between 1580 and 1600. To help him find strings common to different digital texts, Freebury-Jones uses the open-source plagiarism detection software called WCopyfind and for his source plays he uses "old spelling versions of the texts drawn from 'ProQuest'" (p. 203). This source is obscure since ProQuest is the name of a corporation providing databases, but not the name of any one database, and Freebury-Jones cannot mean that he uses Literature Online (LION) provided by ProQuest since he separately mentions "check[ing] the rarity of these matches using the databases 'Literature OnLine' . . . and Early English Books Online" (p. 203).

    Another of Freebury-Jones's sources is Martin Mueller's "Shakespeare His Contemporaries", but unfortunately at the time of review (1 October 2017) the project did not exist at the URL Freebury-Jones provides. A web-search for "Shakespeare His Contemporaries" leads to a page that says "This site is now obsolete. Please visit the current site . . ." for a project called "Early Print", which does not have the essay about shared tetragrams that Freebury-Jones quotes. Likewise, another of the three online-only items by Mueller in Freebury-Jones's Works Cited list also led this reviewer to a "Not found" page. Only Mueller's essay "Authors are Trumps" is still findable, a year after the article's publication. As a result, it serves as the sole foundation for Freebury-Jones's claim for shared tetragrams, which claim's weakness has already been demonstrated. Other studies undertaken independently by David L. Hoover and the team of Hugh Craig, Alexis Antonia, and Jack Elliott (reviewed in YWES for 2012 and YWES for 2014) found that tetragrams are not as good authorial markers as single words.

    The problem with looking for strings as long as four words in the subset of drama that is the plays performed in London between 1580 and 1600 is that the total body of evidence is small: the Law of Large Numbers, in which local variations due to differences in genre and subject matter cancel one another out, does not apply. As a result, Freebury-Jones's conclusions are not based on adequate evidence. He finds just three tetragrams in common between the Peele and Shakespeare portions of Titus Andronicus and because one of them, let it be your, appears in Peele's section and elsewhere in the Peele canon he concludes that "The evidence seems to consolidate Vickers, Craig and Kinney's divisions of authorship in Titus Andronicus . . ." (p. 205). A reader who did not know of the mountain of solid evidence for the co-authorship of Titus Andronicus might be misled into thinking that the claim rests on unstable ground. In the same way, Freebury-Jones bases his conclusion "that playwriting was a relatively hasty process" (p. 205) on a single piece of evidence, a letter written by Robert Daborne to Philip Henslowe.

    To see if rare tetragrams are repeated more often across a sole-authored work than a collaborative one--as intuition would have us expect--Freebury-Jones cconsiders whether the tetragrams in Act Three of Shakespeare's Richard 3 appear elsewhere in the play and in other plays from 1580 to 1600. It emerges that his technique is anecdotal not quantative: he quotes the parts of Shakespeare where his tetragrams appear but offers no tables for comparison between writers. Extremely rare phrases are relatively easy for the investigator to work with because they throw up so little evidence, but this is why they are not especially useful for authorship attribution and in using them one is hardly maximizing the potential that the new large digital corpora offer us. Freebury-Jones considers just a couple of dozen tetragrams in all, across Richard 3 and Romeo and Juliet. What he mainly finds is that the characters (not dramatists) have favourite phrases that they repeat within their speeches.

    Turning to 2 Henry 6, Freebury-Jones finds that the rare tetragram he is the next appears in 1.1 which is supposed to be non-Shakespearian and in 3.1 that is supposed to be Shakespearian. Other rare tetragrams are confined to their respective authors' stints. When the data do not conform to his expectations, Freebury-Jones uses special pleading, remarking of one tetragram that "This sequence of words is memorable, and could very well have been deliberately repeated by Shakespeare or a co-author" (p. 210). This excuse could be made for any tetragram recurring where the investigator does not want to find it, and indeed the likelihood that long n-grams are consciously rather than unconsciously repeated is the very reason that Hoover and Craig and others think them poor discriminators of style. After all, the writers of the Beyond the Fringe stage show were able to create a plausible-sounding Shakespeare parody by combining memorable phrases from the plays, and it is not clear how Freebury-Jones's method would avoid the mistake of declaring Shakespeare to be that parody's author.

    At no point does Freebury-Jones attempt any systematic validation of his method by taking a large number of plays, some sole-authored and some co-authored, and running his test--which is to see whether tetragrams from Act 3 recur elsewhere in the play--in order to quantify how often such repetitions occur in each of the two classes of writing. Instead, testing just four plays (two sole-authored, two co-authored) and finding low numbers of repetitions (the nine in Richard 3 being the highest) he extrapolates his results to form general expectations. In further violation of the principles of sound methodology in this field, Freebury-Jones then reuses one of the plays that generated his expectation--2 Henry 6--by treating it as a play to be tested against this expectation. He apparently cannot see the circularity of his reasoning.

    In all, Freebury-Jones finds five tetragrams shared between Act 4 of 2 Henry 6 and the rest of the play, which he takes as evidence against the play's co-authorship. But in fact two of the five are the names "Mortimer, Earl of March" and "William de la Pole", which would have to be repeated no matter who is writing. (Many investigators just exclude all proper nouns to avoid this kind of distraction.) That leaves just three real pieces of evidence: the heart of France, the reason of these arms, and to do me good. The last of these also occurs in Marlowe's Edward 2 so it really cannot count against the idea that 2 Henry 6 is co-authored, but Freebury-Jones tries to get around this by supposing that either Shakespeare imitated Marlowe in 2 Henry 6 or Marlowe imitated Shakespeare in Edward 2. Having presented just two tetragrams relevant to his claim, Freebury-Jones concludes that "It would seem that the overall data I have presented here renders 2 Henry 6 closer to the sole-authored Shakespeare plays than the collaborative works" (p. 214).

    "Shakespeare and Middleton's Co-Authorship of Timon of Athens" (pp. 217-35 ) by Eilidh Kane is primarily a literary-critical essay on Timon of Athens, informed by knowledge of the co-authorship, which it finds especially compatible with the patterns of imagery in the play. Kane surveys the history of authorship attribution work on the play, leading to a table of John Jowett's division of the stints, in which Scenes 5-9 (most of Act 3) are especially clearly Middletonian. Kane classifies the imagery in the play using groups as animals, subdivided by kind, noticing that the canine and lupine imagery predominantly occurs in parts that previous studies gave to Shakespeare. Middleton's parts repeatedly refer to disease but Shakespeare's use the terms plague, leprosy, and infection. Other images, for example of cannibalism, cut across the stints.

    Kane sensibly acknowledges Jeffrey Masten's point that two writers working together do not necessarily produce what they would have produced if working alone, but she is careful not to overstate the case: "Not only is it possible to trace an individual author's presence in a collaborative text, it is also worthwhile" (p. 225), not least because it may illuminate just how writers collaborated. Jowett thought that in the scenes of mixed authorship, Shakespeare wrote first and Middleton next, based on the predominance of Shakespeare markers in the scenes' core (essential) speeches and of Middleton markers in their peripheral (inessential) speeches. Kane finds this sometimes incompatible with the different spellings each seems to prefer for certain names--Shakespeare uses Apemantus and Ventidius, Middleton uses Apermantus and Ventigius--and the different values they attribute to a talent. Nonetheless, Kane finds Jowett's basic pattern (Shakespeare first, Middleton second) convincing for the scenes of mixed authorship but not as a general rule for the whole play.

    Maybe there were different methods for different parts of the play, with the sole-authored scenes done first by each writer (using an agreed-upon plot outline of the kind suggested by Tiffany Stern) and then the Jowett method was adopted for the mixed scenes. In the absence of hard evidence, this plausible suggestion can be no more than a possibility. Kane turns to Middleton's pamphlet writing and finds that it contains concerns about debt and profligacy similar to those in the play and hence that Middleton had the material to get started on his own scenes of Timon of Athens "without reading Shakespeare's scenes first" (p. 232).

    Paolo Pugliatti's "'Ready Apparrelled to Begyn the Play: Collaboration, Text and Authorship in Shakespeare's Theatre and on the Stage of the Commedia dell'Arte" (pp. 236-260) is a fascinating account of the organization of Italian theatre in Shakespeare's time, stressing points of similarity but offering no new insights about the latter. In "'Mere Prattle Without Practice': Authorship in Performance" (pp. 261-74 ), Thomas Betteridge and Gregory Thompson, while acknowledging that they "are not experts in the field of Shakespeare authorship" (p. 263), are nonetheless confident that the problem with "much of the current work on Shakespearean authorship is that it is based on a quaintly donnish understanding of how plays are and probably were produced" (p. 263). Attribution scholars "can draw up data-banks of a writer's lexicon, idiosyncratic uses of words and linguistic structures, but there is no way of knowing if what appears to be the presence of a particular authorial hand in a text simply reflects the influence of an actor who happens to have shared our chosen writer's linguistic habits" (pp. 263-4). This is strictly true, but observe the unlikelihoods upon which it rests. There would have to be an actor we do not know about whose habits test exactly like the habits of authors we do know about, and somehow this actor's "influence" got itself--by an undisclosed means--into the published work. In granting this possibility we may notice that it becomes even more possible if we drop the assumption that this person was an actor as well as a writer, and if we do that we are back with the hypothesis that Betteridge and Thompson set out to dispel: that the work is co-authored.

    Betteridge and Thompson do not like modern authorship attribution work, not because it is hard but because it mistakes its object: "There is something rather dispiriting and even alienating in reading articles on Shakespeare full of statistics and graphs since they seem a world apart from the nature of his drama and its art" (p. 266). Presumably Betteridge and Thompson think that art historians who use the radiocarbon dating of canvas or manuscript scholars who take beta-radiographs of watermarks to determine provenance are missing the point too, since this objection can hardly apply to Shakespeare studies alone. They describe their own investigations of Shakespeare authorship using theatre practice as a research tool. It is unfortunate that in trying to get their bearings on "the unmistakable sound of the Bard" (p. 267) they started with King John since of all the plays still confidently classified as sole-authored this is the one that gives experts the most cause to suspect co-authorship. In their workshops in which anonymized tests were read aloud from unpunctuated scripts the participants "More often than not . . . judged passages from Look About You to be Shakespeare while rejecting those from King John as Not Shakespeare" (p. 272). It never becomes clear exactly what Betteridge and Thompson think this exercise achieved, although they are sure that they "demonstrated that there is scope for applying practice as research techniques to the study of early modern drama" (p. 273).

    In "Between Authorship and Oral Transmission: Negotiating the Attribution of Authorial, Oral and Collective Style Markers in Early Modern Playtexts" (pp. 277-306), Lene Buhl Petersen starts by asserting that strings of words, or n-grams (or, loosely, phrases), rather than individual words, are the building blocks of writerly creativity and she cites David Hoover, John Burrows, and Hugh Craig as if they agreed with Brian Vickers about this. In fact, Hoover, Burrows, and Craig disagree with Vickers's view that it is necessarily better to study strings of words rather than individual words, and Petersen neglects to cite MacDonald P. Jackson whose research is (like Vickers's) primarily based on strings of words rather than individual words.

    In a footnote on infrequent collocations of words, Petersen offers a couple of sample searches of EEBO-TCP for which I get different results on 30 September 2017 than the ones she reports. She says that the search "tasks near.20 ladies" gets "only 3/34874 returns before 1690". I do not understand that fraction: where does the 34874 come from? When I run that search today, I get "Your search produced 5 hits in 5 records".  For the search "golden meane near.5 reason(s)" Petersen reports: "only 3/17348 returns before 1652" and again the fraction makes no sense to me, and the brackets around the s are not meaningful within an EEBO-TCP search. If I change the search to "golden meane near.5 reason*" (so that any letter, or none, may follow "reason") I get "Your search produced 3 hits in 3 records". Apart from anything else, since EEBO-TCP is an ever-growing collection, any reported results are meaningless unless the investigator indicates the date on which the search was performed.

    Petersen reports that there is lots of software "for extracting collocations/multi-word units" (p. 281) and includes amongst them one called Pl@giarism that is "downloadable online" (p. 282). When I tried to do that on 30 September 2017 the only website offering it was clearly a scam: "please enter your email so we can send you the link when it becomes available". Petersen lists the website-and-HTML editing software called Dreamweaver (from Adobe Systems) as a suitable text-editor for this kind of work, whereas in fact if one is going to apply any encoding to one's corpus the right choice is eXtensible Markup Language (XML) not HTML. Petersen sets out to "review" the collocations by which Brian Vickers (as published in the journal Shakespeare and reviewed in YWES for 2012) confirmed the claim of previous scholars that Shakespeare wrote the Additions found in the 1602 edition of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Petersen gets some of the details wrong, for example thinking that Vickers looked only within plays "between 1586-1642" (p. 283) when in fact he looked within plays and masques between 1587 and 1642. Her "review" is not an independent test to see if Vickers was right, since as Petersen notes, she was one of the compilers of the database that Vickers searched and that database was the basis for the one she uses here.

    Petersen uses the part-of-speech (POS) searching feature of her database to exclude any collocation that is not a "syntactically sound expression" (p. 283) because it runs across the boundary between two sentences. It is not clear why she needs a POS search to apply this constraint, nor indeed how POS helps her to apply it: surely what needs to be encoded in the corpus are the boundaries between sentences, not the parts of speech. According to Petersen, writers can intend collocations only within sentences or clause, not between them, which claim is more than we know about how creative language is constructed in the brain. We cannot be sure that writers' minds collocate words only within sentences and clauses. In fact, they might not only collocate language units in the form of whole words: who is to say that phonemes or even individual letters are not also collocate in authorially distinctive ways? Until we check, we do not know.

    In her "review", Petersen notes the many cases where Vickers's 2012 study simply overlooked the existence in other plays of the collocations it reported, as the present reviewer reported in YWES for 2012. She also rejects particular collocations for reasons not mentioned in the description of her approach, for example because they are classified by her as "an idiom or commonplace" or "a dramaturgical formula" (p. 285) or "a phrase or a clause, not a collocation" (p. 286). What is more, Petersen decides that she may thereby determine that a particular collocation is "probably not a strong indicator of individual, authorial style" (p. 284) or "probably should be disqualified as a reliable authorial style marker" (p. 286), as though this were a matter of subjective interpretation rather than objective quantification. Any given feature of writing is an authorial style marker if its positive or negative correlation with a certain writer's authorship exceeds its positive or negative correlation with other writers' authorship. An authorship marker is an objective fact, not a gut feeling.

    The history of authorship attribution is full of the discovery of features that were previously unrecognized to be authorship markers until objective correlations were discovered, for example the function word frequencies in the Federalist Papers studied by Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace. This fundamental error of classification makes Petersen's entire study of authorship markers pointless: she has thrown out some perfectly good candidates for no good reason. What Petersen goes on to claim about trigrams and tetragrams being particularly pertinent to the concerns of performance and actors' memories may well be true, but her confidence that she can spot formulaic phrases or those that reveal that a text has been altered through performance is not based on any objective measure. She is not actually measuring anything at all and what she presents are not "data" (p. 297) in the sense of raw material: they are the results, not the sources, of her conclusions.

    Joseph Rudman contributes "Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution Studies of William Shakespeare's Canon: Some Caveats" (pp. 307-28). By "non-traditional authorship attribution studies" Rudman means those done using "stylistics, statistics, and the computer" (p. 307n1). Rudman rightly complains that most published studies of authorship attribution do not give enough detail to enable replication by an independent investigator, but notes that "Hugh Craig does this better than most" (p. 311). He is also right to claim that there is a problem with the texts that provide the baseline for what actually constitutes Shakespearian authorship, since even if we take the 1623 Folio as our basis there is the problem of press variants and non-Shakespearian elements in Folio plays. Rudman describes the proper scientific method for finding out if particular authorial markers really do distinguish Shakespeare from other writers by randomized testing of samples from known-Shakespeare and known-non-Shakespeare sets, which he thinks impossible because "there were so many plays lost to time that we cannot get a random sample of all the plays written" (p. 318). But Rudman offers no evidence that the extant plays are untypical of what got written. Most scientific studies work on samples from populations and that one is working on a sample rather than the whole population is by no means a necessarily disabling compromise. Imagine--because the cases are entirely parallel--if paleontologists felt they could infer nothing from fossils because we cannot get a random sample of all the extinct lifeforms.

    Rudman reckons that genre is a confounding variable in authorship attribution studies, meaning that we may mistake as authorial likenesses features that are really generic likenesses. In fact this has been studied and found not to be the case: the essay "An Information Theoretic Clustering Approach for Unveiling Authorship Affinities in Shakespearean Era Plays and Poems" by Ahmed Shamsul Arefin and others (reviewed in YWES for 2014) showed that except to a minor degree with history plays, authorship comprehensively trumps genre when the plays are classified by standard information theory metrics. Rudman makes the therefore surprising claim that "It has been shown in many studies that genre trumps authorship . . ." (p. 318) but unfortunately he identifies none that does this. Oddly, in the context of his discussion of chronology as another possibly confounding variable, Rudman acknowledges Arefin et al.'s article, only to misquote it.

    Rudman is largely indifferent to the question of which particular style markers to choose, though he sets the bar high regarding the general criteria by insisting that we need "many different and statistically independent markers that can be shown to be consistent and constant across the selected sample of Shakespeare work" (p. 320). Actually, the author's use of a given marker need not be "consistent and constant" (an impossible ideal), only distinguishable from other authors' use. In places it becomes obvious that Rudman does not fully understand the technologies he is describing. He thinks that one of the reasons for using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) application of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is that with it ". . . style markers such as the ratio of nouns to adjectives can be brought into the mixture" (p. 321). He is confusing TEI with part-of-speech (POS) markup, which in fact has long been used without TEI.

    On mathematics Rudman is even more out of his depth, writing that: "The most common assumptions [in statistics] are randomness and independence, yet Shakespeare's words are neither random nor independent" (p. 321). Of course no one thinks that writers choose their words at random, and the pertinent question Rudman should be asking is whether language generation is a stochastic process and hence tractable to probabilistic analysis, and the consensus amongst information theorists is that it is. Running out of steam, the sections in Rudman's essay get shorter towards the end and they impart little more than their headings: yes, "Sample Selection and Size" is important, yes we must "Analyze and Interpret Results". In each part of his essay Rudman manages to convey something of the difficulties of doing computational stylistics, but independent studies using different methods are repeatedly converging on the same results, for example that some of the Additions to Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy are by Shakespeare and that Christopher Marlowe had a hand in all three Henry 6 plays. These convergences make it clear that the difficulties of the enterprise have not precluded some remarkable successes.

    Like James Purkis reviewed above and Michael L. Hays reviewed below, Diana Price in "Hand D and Shakespeare's Unorthodox Literary Paper Trail" (pp. 329-52) reckons that the paleographic case for Shakespeare's hand being Hand D of Sir Thomas More, based as it is only a few signatures and a couple of other words, does not meet the ideals that a forensic document examiner would like to apply in a criminal court. Price cites several handwriting experts counselling caution when the evidence is as limited as it is in the case of Hand D. Fair enough, but she fails to take into account MacDonald P. Jackson's evidence (in an article reviewed in YWES for 2006) that the words in Hand D are undoubtedly Shakespearian composition. The question then becomes: how likely is it that someone other than Shakespeare who had similar orthography copied out Shakespeare's words? This is not impossible, but it is more likely that Hand D is Shakespeare's.

    Price acknowledges the "cumulative evidence" for Hand D as Shakespeare (p. 343), but wishes to assert the autonomous authority of the paleographic evidence, adducing Eric Rasmussen's point that the handwriting of the manuscript of The Second Maiden's Tragedy is not evidence of its authorship. But that is not a parallel case: with Hand D the authorship case is settled, and the question is what follows from that. For Price, the passage of time between the writing of Hand D and the writing of the Shakespeare signatures is a key reason that the identification is shaky. Price offers a long account of W. W. Greg's definitions of the manuscript category called foul papers and the fact that many textual scholars no longer believe that it is a useful concept, which is all true but irrelevant to her point about Hand D.

    In a section on orthography, Price argues that the rare spellings shared by Hand D and Shakespeare plays believed (for other reasons) to have been printed directly from his papers are inconclusive evidence because the printed plays are inconsistent: the 18 Scilens spellings in the 1600 quarto of 2 Henry 4 are accompanied by 3 Silence spellings and 19 Silens spellings. Actually, I count these as 16, 3, and 17 occurrences respectively, but the important point--as we saw above in respect of Bulman's new Arden3 edition of the play--is that scilens is a vanishingly rare spelling in the period and to find its occurences in Hand D and 2 Henry 4 is powerful evidence. Price counters this evidence by suggesting that there cannot be such a thing as a preferred spelling that indicates Shakespeare's handwriting if we can also find inconsistent spelling of one name, and damningly "D usually spells the title character's name as 'moor', but he also spells it 'moore', 'more', and 'moo'" (p. 347). It is hard to believe that "moo" is Shakespeare's spelling of the name, rather than an abbreviation.

    In "Fake Shakespeare" (pp. 353-79) Gary Taylor demonstrates that in places we have convincing evidence that the script of Double Falsehood has speeches by Lewis Theobald, others by John Fletcher, and others by Shakespeare. If we try to eliminate Theobald's contributions to get back to the original play, we are left only "a collection of Jacobean fragments" (p. 357). Taylor is particularly disparaging of what Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee did in their Cardenio, which was to dispense with most of the play and add in bits of non-Shakespearian writing of the early modern period. He judges Gregory Doran's Royal Shakespeare Company Cardenio to be better, not so much because of its better textual sense but because of Doran's imaginative staging.

    Taylor details the means by which we can spot some of Theobald's additions, such as changing the name Cardenio to Julio to avoid being associated with Thomas D'Urfey's Comical History of Don Quixote of 1694. Where the name Julio fits the poetic meter and Cardenio would not the line cannot originally have been by Shakespeare and Fletcher. Similar considerations govern the name Leonora in Theobald's script where Cervantes (and presumably Shakespeare and Fletcher) had Lucinda. Taylor finds some dramatic tangles in Double Falsehood that he decides are best explained by supposing that Theobald was forced by the powerful actors performing his play to add material that harmed the drama but enhanced their parts in it. To close, Taylor explains how he invented some lines he felt dramatically necessary that must have been cut by Theobald.

    Throughout her contribution "'By Curious Art Compild': The Passionate Pilgrime and the Authorial Brand" (pp. 383-407), Donatella Pallotti refers to "Adam Hook", which I take to mean Adam Hooks. Pallotti starts by drawing a distinction between a writer and an author, the latter being a "persona . . . constructed" (p. 384) by the collaborative arts of book-making and selling. To see how Shakespeare's persona as an author was constructed in his lifetime, Pallotti looks at the creation, reprinting, and reception of The Passionate Pilgrim collection starting some time around 1599. In an overstated post-structuralist fashion, Pallotti reckons that William Jaggard's role in the book makes him its co-author, and she goes on to show how the title pages of the editions, and their organization of the materials, contributed to the book's meanings.

    Pallotti asserts that the 1598 edition of Love's Labour's Lost was "the first work issued with Shakespeare's name on the title page" (p. 393), but several of his plays were published in 1598 with his name on the title pages and it is not clear which appeared first. There is a second title-page in the middle of the 1599 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim and Pallotti quotes Colin Burrow claiming that the two halves could not have been sold separately since the first ends and the second begins with the same gathering. Actually, this would not prevent them being cut apart and sold separately since no indivisible leaf is shared by the two halves. In the last essay in the collection, "Transmission as Appropriation: The Early Reception of John Benson's Edition of Shakespeare's Poems (1640)" (pp. 409-22), Jean-Christophe Mayer examines the early annotations on two exemplars of Benson's edition, which do such things as retitle, censor, rewrite, and gloss the poems. He also considers their extractions into a miscellaneous manuscript.

    We turn now to chapters on our topic within book collections, the first of which is by Richard Knowles ('The Evolution of the Texts of King Lear', in Kahan, Jeffrey, ed. King Lear: New Critical Essays, pp. 124-54) and was overlooked when published in 2008. Its key findings are that the quarto and Folio King Lear are separated not by Shakespeare revision but rather by multiple non-Shakespearian authorial agencies and that we should offer readers conflated texts of the play. Knowles starts by recapping Alfred Hart's counting of the length of plays, showing that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson wrote plays about 50% longer than anyone else's and suggesting that they were too long to be performed without cuts. Just why Shakespeare wrote overlong plays is unclear, though readers will no doubt be aware of Dutton's claims about court performance, discussed earlier, and probably of Lukas Erne's suggestions argument about Shakespeare's writing for readers.

    Knowles accepts that Q1 King Lear was printed from hard-to-read copy, presumably too messy to have been the manuscript given to the King's Men as their base script. F was printed, according to Knowles, from "the company's playbook" (p. 130). He supports Madeleine Doran's claim that mistakes in Q1 and F "were obviously derived from the same manuscript" (p. 130) and hence that the transcript used to print F could not have been in Shakespeare's hand, since he would know what he wrote and not be misled by it. Thus, according to Doran, the manuscript that was used to print Q was also used to make the transcript underlying F. It is unfortunate that Knowles does not lay out Doran's evidence regarding these shared mistakes, showing why we should agree that they prove that F was set from a transcript rather than being set from an earlier printed edition (as most people now believe). For the moment, Knowles ignores the key problem in Doran's idea, which is that F is clearly in places dependent on Q2.

    Because not many Shakespeare plays were published after Hamlet--just Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, and Othello before the Folio--Knowles infers "his company's new reluctance to publish" (p. 134) his plays, but that is not the only possibility and Knowles is unwise to build on it. Build he does, supposing that copy for Nicholas Okes's 1608 quarto of King Lear cannot have been provided by the King's Men (because they were reluctant to publish Shakespeare's plays) and cannot have been provided by Shakespeare himself (because he would not overrule the King's Men's reluctance). In speculating how Nathaniel Butter and John Busby, who entered King Lear in the Stationers' Register on 26 November 1607, got hold of a script, Knowles supposes that for some unknown reason the scribe making the transcript of Shakespeare's authorial papers in order to create a fair copy for theatrical purposes did not return Shakespeare's authorial papers to the company and the company did not mind this omission (perhaps they were away on tour) and after a year or so the scribe sold the papers to Busby. This speculation is hard to reconcile with Knowles's belief that the company were keen to avoid Shakespeare's plays getting published: what excuse could the scribe give for not including the authorial papers when handing over the transcript he had been hired to produce?

    Thinking of the copy for F, Knowles reckons that the scribe who made the transcript of the messy authorial papers would have relined the verse correctly and "instinctively, even unconsciously, made small improvements in punctuation, spelling, and grammar" as well as "small verbal changes--occasional errors, substitutions of synonyms or homonyms, transpositions, additions or omissions of particles" (p. 136), whence a lot of the small Q/F variants. Knowles is agnostic whether some of the 300 lines present in Q and absent in F were cut from the play by a censor, but he believes that most of them were theatrical cuts, being "static or reflective material that does little to move the action forward" adding that "most of the cuts occur in the last two acts of the play, a fact suggesting that they were intended to move the action as quickly as possible to its conclusion" (p. 137). The 110 lines that are present in F and absent in Q Knowles reckons are "later additions to the Quarto text, and since the Folio evidently derives from the company's playbook, these additions almost certainly represent changes made to the play during one or more playing seasons" (p. 137).

    Aside from the Fool's "Merlin's prophecy" and "Kent's ruminations in 3.1 about French spies and domestic disturbances" (p. 138), both of which Knowles suspects are not Shakespeare's writing, the additions to the play are small and hence, as Knowles sees them, are not part of Shakespeare's concerted revision of the play but instead "local improvements, added piecemeal by several hands on several occasions for a variety of reasons" (p. 138). No evidence is given for this model of revision, nor does Knowles mention any similar cases that might be considered as parallels. As evidence for the non-Shakespearian origin of "Merlin's prophecy" passage and other F-only passages, Knowles offers the evidence that they "contain a much higher than usual number of words found nowhere else in Shakespeare" (p. 140).

    Rather than identify these words, Knowles sends readers to two of his earlier publications, where they turn out to be: buzz (as noun), enguard, unfitness, speculation, furnishing (as a noun), able (as a verb), hurtless, snuff, and packing (as a noun). In fact, all but one of these are common in Shakespeare's time--with dozens or hundreds of hits in EEBO-TCP--but not all are found elsewhere in Shakespeare's writing. The word buzz occurs often in Shakespeare but not as a noun, fitness is common in Shakespeare but unfitness is not, speculation is common in Shakespeare, able is common in Shakespeare but not as a verb, snuff is common in Shakespeare, and so is packing but not as a noun; the other three are absent from Shakespeare's writing outside of Folio King Lear. The real outlier is enguard, which is absent not only from the rest of Shakespeare but from EEBO-TCP altogether, despite its being a substantial subset (around 40%) of all the books published in Britain up to the year 1700.

    Since enguard is a hapax legomenon no matter who wrote the line in which it appears in King Lear, it is neither evidence for nor against Shakespeare's authorship. Knowles makes no attempt to survey the details of these words' appearance outside of the lines in Folio King Lear, beyond remarking that he could not find them to be "the favorites of any particular dramatist" from searching in LION. At Knowles's request, Brian Vickers asked Marcus Dahl to search for them in "his data base of 450 texts, some non-dramatic" and that Dahl found that "3 fell in the decade 1600-1610, 5 in 1611-1620, 13 in 1621-1630, and 3 in 1631-1640", which according to Vickers "further weakens the theory of an authorial revision [of King Lear] in 1610" (p. 151n11). The paucity of hits found by Dahl inspires no confidence in the comprehensiveness of his set of texts, whose precise contents have never been declared by Vickers or Dahl and whose incompleteness has repeatedly been demonstrated by this reviewer.

    Knowles rejects the claim that F King Lear was set from a marked-up exemplar of Q2, as argued by Gary Taylor, preferring Doran's argument that F was set from manuscript copy. Knowles gives the misleading impression that Trevor Howard-Hill also took this view, but in fact Howard-Hill changed his mind between his 1982 article in The Library and his 1986 article in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (both of which are cited by Knowles), the latter accepting Taylor's argument for F's dependence on Q2. Knowles claims to have new evidence that F could not have been set from Q2: "F rejects some 1,300 substantive readings found in Q2, and seems to accept a mere 90. Moreover, the 90 agreements between the texts need not show any substantive influence from Q2, since the F readings could all have been arrived at independently by such natural means as the substitution of obviously correct readings for Q1 misreadings" (p. 144). None of this evidence is presented by Knowles, although he reports that it includes his own "computer-aided comparison of the three texts" (p. 152n15); presumably this evidence will be presented in Knowles's forthcoming New Variorum Shakespeare edition of the play.

    The extensive appearance of Q2's incidentals in F is credited by Knowles to the Folio compositors repeatedly consulting Q2 as they set type, turning to it wherever their (allegedly clear and readable) manuscript copy was hard to make sense of; this sounds like a desperate attempt to deny that Q2 itself was their copy. The remainder of the body of Knowles's essay is concerned with what happened to the text of King Lear in print and performance between the appearance of F and the present day, and need not detain us. Knowles concludes that neither Q1 nor F is likely to represent the play as performed in Shakespeare's time as both are too long, and that conflating them at once shows how essentially alike these two early editions are and creates "an archive of possibilities" (p. 150) from which theatre people can draw.

    In an important book chapter, Alan Farmer shows that (contrary to popular belief) early modern printed plays were not an ephemeral genre in their own time ('Playbooks and the Question of Ephemerality', in Brayman, Heidi, Jesse M. Lander and Zachary Lesser, eds. The Book in History, the Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text, pp. 87-125). The fact that few copies of early printed editions of plays survive is not evidence that they were ephemeral: the same seems to be true of early printed books of all genres. The more popular a book the more likely it is to get reprinted and the more likely that the first edition copies will in fact be rarer than copies of books that were not reprinted. (Why they should be rarer is never explained and it is not obvious to me.) To get a sense of how many editions were printed for which there are no extant copies, Farmer counts the books that specify the edition number on their title pages, taking into account the rate of how often the edition numbers are just wrong based on the evidence before him. In fact most title pages turn out to be correct about their edition numbers, so we should trust them at least for editions after 1580 when this numbering of reprints began to be common. The outcome is that around 17% of all editions are entirely lost (no copies survive), which is in fact close to the rate found by previous studies that looked only at particular subsections of the market.

    Looking at the loss rates by edition-sheet size (that is, how many sheets it takes to make a copy), the losses go down as the size goes up. Looking at loss rates by genre--and controlling for edition-sheet size since that also affects loss rates--the high-loss genres are "schoolbooks, handwriting manuals, works of moral philosophy containing advice for children, catechisms, prayer books, prose fiction, and books of needlepoint patterns . . . [and] corantos" (p. 100). Controlling for edition-sheet size is important because, for example, poetry looks like a high-loss genre until you take into account the fact that books of poetry were typically quite brief (low edition-sheet size) and hence were likely to be lost for that reason alone; after controlling for edition-sheet size, poetry turns out to be a low-loss genre. Some genres, like handwriting manuals, were meant to be used not simply read and hence tended to get destroyed in use more often than other genres. 

    The overall loss-rate average for all books across 1580-1640 was 23.6%, so "For just over every four extant speculative publications in the S[hort] T[itle] C[atalogue] during this period, there is therefore probably about one lost edition". Actually, that would be one lost edition for every three, not every four, extant editions. The Stationers' Company had a rule that books above a certain length (varying by format) had to have a sewn binding instead of being just stabbed stitched, but bindings do not seem to have a significant effect on survival rate: books just below the Stationers' Company rule's cut-off length have the same loss rates as books just above it. It used to be said that stab stitching indicated that a book was essentially disposable, but in fact most books were sold with this kind of binding, and most books were much shorter (median length seven sheets) than has previously been thought. Playbooks were among the less ephemeral of the genres, with a low loss rate of around 5%.

    In another relevant contribution to this book-form collection ('Early Modern Punctuation and Modern Editions: Shakespeare's Serial Colon', in Brayman, Heidi, Jesse M. Lander and Zachary Lesser, eds. The Book in History, the Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text, pp. 303-23), William Sherman describes the relationship between two commemorative reprints of Sonnets, one in 1909 and one in 2009, arguing that the early modern writer had access to the "serial colon" now considered grammatically incorrect. The piece is so similar to Sherman's earlier piece on "Punctuation as Configuration; or, How Many Sentences Are There in Sonnet 1?" reviewed in YWES for 2013 that it need not be considered again here. Robert Watson ('New Directions: Why No-one Hears Lord Capulet's Line', in Lupton, Julia Reinhard, ed. Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader, pp. 101-32) argues that even though editors amend Q2's speech prefix to assign to Montague the defence of Romeo in the lines "[Punish] Not Romeo, Prince, he was Mercutio's friend. | His fault concludes but what the law should end, | The life of Tybalt", we should nonetheless respect Q2's speech prefix assigning it to Capulet. Like Sherman, Watson is revisiting an earlier argument, developed in a Renaissance Drama piece on "Lord Capulet's Lost Compromise" reviewed in NYWES for 2015; and once again the details are so close that there is no need for another consideration here.

    Valerie Wayne begins an essay with a brief history of editing Shakespeare as a gendered act ('The Gendered Text and its Labour', in Traub, Valerie, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, pp. 549-68). Wayne finds a source for Posthumus's speech that comprises all of Cymbeline 2.5 in Juvenal's 6th Satire, which also provides the name Postumus. The key word in Posthumus's speech is pudency (2.5.11) which Wayne reckons male editors have failed to explore and explain. In the Folio Posthumus's first letter, introducing Iachimo, ends "Reflect upon him accordingly, as you value your trust. Leonatus". Editors since Thomas have emended trust.>truest to make this a sign-off. As Wayne points out, it is hard to see that this really is a sign-off since Innogen goes on to say "So far I read aloud, | But even the very middle of my heart | Is warmed by th' rest". The emendation removes the sense that Posthumus is implicitly questioning Innogen's capacity to evaluate her own trust. Posthumus's second letter ends "So he wishes you all happinesse, that remaines loyall to his Vow, and your encreasing in Loue", which again is ambiguous: he may be making his wish of happiness dependent on her loyalty and increased love. Again, some emendations reduce the sense that Posthumus's good wishes are contingent not absolute. 

    Lastly for book chapters, Jeffrey Masten notes that Iago says that Othello is "tupping" Desdemona in Othello 1.1, but later asks if Othello would like to see her "topt" (Q1) or "top'd" (F), for which Michael Neill editing the Oxford Shakespeare edition (reviewed in YWES for 2006) followed Alexander Pope in emending to "tupped" (Jeffrey Masten 'Glossing and T*pping: Editing Sexuality, Race, and Gender in Othello', in Traub, Valerie, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, pp. 569-85). Masten objects to this emendation for reasons that are not entirely clear but seem connected to not wanting Iago to thereby be allowed to make an internal echo and not wanting to lose the idea that sex is hierarchical so it matters who is on top. Also, in the last scene Othello says that "Cassio did top her" in Q1 and F, which Pope (and Neill) again emend to ". . . tup her". Masten uses the OED to explore the possibility that Desdemona is said to be topt in the sense of being made drunk, which takes him to the idea that Desdemona is "intoxicated with her own desires", and tapt in the sense of being a vessel from which liquor is drawn (p. 581). Masten calls for editions to consider more fully the recent queer scholarship, to produce a queer philology. As an example, Masten proposes that editors could print "t*pped" and offer a note explaining the possible range of meaning at work here. Or they could print "təpped" using the inverted e called schwa.

    And so to journal articles. By far the most important is Pervez Rizvi's proof that Folio compositor identifications are almost all unreliable because the spelling evidence on which they are based does not stand up under careful scrutiny ('The Use of Spellings for Compositor Attribution in the First Folio', PBSA 110[2016] 1-53). D. F. McKenzie showed in his celebrated essay "Stretching a Point" (1984) that the habit of spacing around commas, a so-called psycho-mechanical habit, is not a reliable guide to compositor identification, so what is left is spelling evidence. To check Folio compositor identifications by spelling, we need words that are fairly frequent in their different spellings in the Folio, and Rizvi reckons there are more than 100 suitable words. He starts with Compositor B, who is supposed to have set more than half the Folio and is identifiable by his preference for do-go-heere spellings. Dividing Compositor B's work into two stints (before the end of q1r and after the end of q1r), and looking only at lines where justification cannot have been a consideration, Rizvi finds that there are many words in his list that undergo a reversal in the second stint. For example, a clear preference for beautie becomes a clear preference for beauty, likewise companie > company, and so on. The pattern holds even if we include justified lines too.

    What if, in the light of this discovery, we split this man into Compositor B1 (who set type before the end of q1r) and Compositor B2 (who set type after the end of q1r)? The same trouble emerges when we divide this new Compositor B1's stint in half: there are reversals in the second half. And if we divide again to make a Compositor B1a and a Compositor B1b? There is still a reversal at the mid-point in the stints, requiring us to invent Compositor B1a-i and Compositor B1a-ii. Rizvi does this for other Folio compositors and finds that the same situation obtains for compositors A, C, D, E, F, H, and I. To drive the point home, Rizvi divides the plays into two groups depending on whether they have an even or odd number of lines and sees what the compositors do with certain spellings. Again, they shift their preferences between the groups, which of course shows that in fact they were just variable in their spelling, since the division by evenness or oddness of line count is effectively random.

    What about the influence of copy spellings where the Folio was set from a preceding quarto? Charlton Hinman and others thought that a Folio reading that matched its copy-quarto reading was not evidence of a preference--the compositor just set what was in front of him in his copy--and instead focussed on readings where the Folio departs from its copy: only these did they treat as strong preferences. The problem with this attention to just a subset of the data, the departures from copy, was that it blinded Hinman and others to the overall preferences for the spellings of the words in question, which often contradicted the evidence from these copy-spelling departures. Moreover, if one thinks that copy spellings strongly affected Folio spellings then one cannot use the habits one thinks one has discerned in Folio plays set from quarto copy to make compositor attributions in Folio plays not set from quarto copy, since they might have been influenced by the spellings in the unknown copy. (To be fair, that unknown copy would have to be manuscript, unless there are lost quarto editions we do not know about, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that printed copy readings more strongly affected Folio compositors than manuscript copy readings did.)

    Rizvi turns to Folio plays based on Ralph Crane transcripts for which the copy spellings are highly predictable because Crane's preferences are fairly well known. The trouble is, in Folio plays set from Crane manuscripts, such as Measure for Measure, there are copies spellings that are neither Crane's preferred spelling nor the supposed compositor's preferred spelling. Rizvi points out a logical problem in determining compositor preferences in spelling by ignoring cases where the Folio spelling matches the putative copy spelling: a compositor who is indifferent to the spelling of a particular word will have half his settings thrown away as merely reflecting his copy and the other half will be taken, wrongly, as strong preferences. Despite all this, there still seems to be sense in Thomas Satchell's original observation that Folio Macbeth is divided into pages set by a compositor who consistently spells do-go-heere and other pages set by a different compositor who consistently spells doe-goe-here, which Hinman found also correlated with two typecases, x and y. Rizvi shows that any attempt to beyond this example collapses under the weight of self-confirming assumptions: investigators would throw away the same-as-copy evidence and/or fudge results by inventing a compositor who is tolerant of a spelling he did not favour.

    It can be demonstrated that the Folio compositors were, in some cases such as Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream, closely following their quarto copy's spellings of certain words such as O/Oh, but it can also be demonstrated that when setting from Crane transcript copy they departed from the copy's spellings. Indeed, there are scores of cases where a compositor spells the same word two ways in the same line or successive lines. Were they just capricious? Rizvi thinks that part of the answer may lie in justification, which had to be done for all lines not just those that are full. Press correction evidence shows that sometimes spellings were changed to help tighten even a short line after correction, and we have no way of excluding the possibility elsewhere that short lines are short precisely because the compositor, anticipating a problem, changed a spelling. In other words, we have no reliable evidence to determine a compositor's preference: the needs of justification are always active. Rizvi's essay uses the convention of calling a line 'justified' only when it is full--when the line does not end with spaces--but his consideration of the need to fill every line with pieces of type right to the end (using spaces to complete verse lines) shows that this is an unhelpful piece of terminology: in reality all lines are justified.

    Across the whole Folio the word preferences of compositors form a series of spectra from absolute preference to total indifference, but on any particular page even the common words that a compositor tends to spell in more than one way and with about equal frequency tend to be spelt just one way; this is why compositor identification by page is possible in the first place. The existence of apprentice Compositor E is particularly weakly attested--he was deduced by Hinman from the absence of spelling preferences--and his work might just be the work of a couple of journeyman compositors brought in to cover a busy period. After all, a set of pages containing two men's different spelling preferences would look exactly like the work of one man with no spelling preferences, and their work might easily get more stop-press correction than that of permanent employees.

    Compositors A, B, C, D, and E were identified by Hinman and F, H, and I were later identified by other investigators. Trevor Howard-Hill split F off from A when he noticed some inconsistencies in the habits of the putative A. But this is the same process by which Rizvi showed that we can divide Compositor B into as many men as we like, so it is entirely unreliable. Paul Werstine, in an article reviewed in YWES for 2001, showed that F is not distinguishable from D once we take copy spellings into account, but as Rizvi points out the problem is worse than that: that D was distinguishable from A in the first place (that is, that D even exists) is uncertain in the light of a thorough re-examination of the evidence. The same can be said of Gary Taylor's splitting off of Compositor H from Compositor A, and his splitting off of Compositor I from Compositor C, and his invention of Compositor J. Moreover, Rizvi rightly notes that the studies by Hinman, Howard-Hill, John O'Connor, and Taylor depend on one another so that fixing an error in one affects the reliability of the deductions made in the others, producing "a potential domino effect we cannot ignore" (p. 40).

    Rizvi repeats the statistical experiment that Jackson performed in his 1975 paper on the compositor stints in the 1609 edition of Sonnets, which found that, if we accept the division he proposes, the proposed Compositor A put a colon at the end of a quatrain 24 times and a comma 3 times, while Compositor B put a colon at the end of a quatrain 11 times and a comma 18 times. Putting these figures into a two-by-two contingency table Jackson found that this skewing of the data would happen by chance if Compositor A and Compositor B were in fact one man only one time in 10,000 and hence they were indeed two men. But Rizvi applies the same method to his own discovery of word-spelling variation in stints supposed to be by Compositor B, who before the end of q1r set prethee 32 times and prythee 1 time, and who after the end of q1r set prethee 2 times and prythee 47 times. If we put these into the same two-by-two contingency table, the asymmetry in the data suggest, to an extremely high level of statistical significance, that chance alone would make one person set pages so differently only one time in many billions. As Rizvi points out, it is not just the prethee/prythee spellings that do this: he has many words for which this same asymmetry is evident before and after the end of q1r. Yet these pages were all set by Compositor B, so the conclusion must be that this particular statistical approach is being misapplied and that the high levels of statistical significance being claimed are illusory. 

    The same analysis can show that Compositor E is probably not one man. Rizvi concludes that such statistical tests are valid only when you have first shown by many trials that they reliably declare likely the things that we know are true and that they reliably declare unlikely the things that we know are false. His conclusion is that compositor identification by spelling is entirely unreliable. The typographical evidence uncovered by Hinman shows that three typecases were used in setting the Folio and hence three compositors; beyond that we cannot at present say anything. Advance view of Rizvi's essay in 2015 influenced the editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare to make no substantive use of compositor identifications in its work on establishing the texts of Shakespeare.

    In another important essay this year, Gerald Baker demonstrates that The Moor of Venice was the original stage name of the play we call Othello, used for performances right into the Restoration, at which point the printed play's name Othello began to supplant it ('The Name of Othello is Not the Name of Othello', RES 67[2016] 62-78). Where do the variant titles of early modern plays come from? Where we have manuscripts in the author's hand, the title is often on a separate piece of paper and in another hand, so maybe authors wrote plays without having a definite title in mind. Baker works through the earliest references to Othello, pointing out when the hero's name is mentioned or not. The Revels Account of the 1604-5 performance at court calls it "The Moor of Venice". The Prince of Wüttemburg, who saw it at the Globe in April 1610, recorded it as "du More de Venise". The account of the 1610 performance in Oxford does not name it, and nor does Edward Pudsey's collection of extracts from plays. The Chamber Account payment for a court performance for the wedding of Elizabeth Stuart and the Elector Palatine in 1613 calls it "The Moore of Venice". The elegy to Richard Burbage in 1619 calls the role "the Greued Moore".

    The familiar modern title emerges in print. The Stationers' Register entry on 6 October 1621 calls it "The Tragedie of Othello, the moore of Venice", as do Q1 in 1622, F in 1623, Q2 in 1630, and F2 in 1632. A later Register entry for a transfer calls it "Orthello the more of Venice". By contrast, Henry Herbert's Office Book for 22 November 1629 calls it "The Moor of Venice". Sir Humphrey Mildmay's diary entry for a theatre visit on 6 May 1635 calls it "the More of Venice". The Treasurer of the Chamber's account for a court performance on 8 December 1636 calls it "the Moore of Venice". Abraham Wright's manuscript notes on plays from around 1637 or earlier (which might reflect seeing it in performance or reading the book) calls it "Othello". A Stationers' Register transfer of the play in 1638 calls it "Othello the More of Venice" and another in 1639 calls it "Orthello the more of Venice". The last mention of the play before the closure of 1642 is in Leonard Digges's commendatory verses in the preliminaries to John Benson's 1640 edition of Poems and calls the play "Honest Iago, or the jealous Moor".

    From all this evidence, it seems clear that the stage name of the play was The Moor of Venice and that the less authoritative print title--in the sense of being less directly connected to Shakespeare's demonstrable intentions--used the main character's personal name. In the Interregnum, all the evidence necessarily refers to the play in print (since the theatres were closed), and the play is mostly called Othello. The Restoration print history likewise uses Othello as the title, and the theatre record (with one exception) uses The Moor of Venice. Play lists from the end of the Interregnum and into the Restoration sometimes combine Othello and The Moor of Venice in their titles and sometimes use one or other. From 1685, the title Othello starts to dominate the theatre record too. Samuel Pepys referred to the printed text as Othello but repeatedly referred to the performances he saw as The Moor of Venice.

    In yet another important piece this year, John V. Nance demonstrates that Shakespeare is the likeliest candidate for authorship of a piece of verse he calls "To ye Q.", also sometimes referred to by its first line, "As the dial hand tells o'er" ('From Shakespeare 'To ye Q.'', SQ 67[2016] 204-31). Nance surveys past scholarship on this poem by William A. Ringler and Steven W. May (who found it), Juliet Dusinberre (reviewed in YWES for 2003), Michael Hattaway (reviewed in YWES for 2009), and Helen Hackett (reviewed in YWES for 2012). None of them used established authorship attribution techniques. Nance sets about attributing the authorship by searching for each bigram, trigram, and quadgram, and collocation (he does not yet say of what length, see below) in this 106-word poem among the drama in LION and EEBO-TCP first performed in 1576-1642 and then separately among all texts in all genres in EEBO-TCP printed in 1576-1642, looking in each case for unique matches, meaning hits where the term searched for is found only in "To ye Q." and one other work. Focussing on unique matches mitigates the problem that Shakespeare's canon is so much larger than anyone else's, which would be a confounding factor if we were counting how many matches there are. I would say that this approach does not eliminate the problem, since we are still counting how many matches there are, retaining only those where the answer is one, and the fact that Shakespeare's canon is the largest of the period presumably makes it more likely to contain such a singular match than would be anyone else's smaller canon.

    Nance reports that he used "discontinuous bigrams and trigrams" (p. 210) where continuous ones found no matches, and it is not immediately apparent what "discontinuous" means in this context. In a footnote he seems to say that they are collocations--"Discontinuous n-grams (also called 'collocations' or 'recurrent sequences') are . . ." (p. 210n27)--but then why not just call them collocations, since he used that term on the previous page? Nance goes on to explain his method and in fact by collocation he means, for example, a trigram combined with one other word allowed to appear within so many words before or after the unit. So, this is not the collocation of four words but the collocation of a trigram and a unigram. Nance helpfully explains just what can go wrong in such searching, as when a database search engine (in this case, EEBO-TCP's) fails to find matches within which a line break occurs or when there are transcription errors in the underlying digital texts being searched, and he shows how increasingly complex proximity searches (of the form "x NEAR y NEAR z") can ameliorate the effects of these problems. Unless there is reason to suppose that particular authors are more affected than others, I would expect the Law of Large Numbers would cancel out such technical faillings across a large study, but I suppose that with only 106 words in "To ye Q." Nance is right to worry that this Law will not apply as much as one would like.

    In an exploratory phase, Nance sets out to see if his method can correctly attribute an epilogue of comparable length in trochaic meter by each of Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare. Unfortunately, only Shakespeare has a trochaic epilogue (the one to A Midsummer Night's Dream) so for the other two he has to settle for trochaic songs in their dramatic canons. The result is 17 examples of a match that is unique to the epilogue to A Midsummer Night's Dream and a single other play, and of these 17 five are to Shakespeare works, followed by two to George Chapman works and two to Philip Massinger works, and the rest to just single matches in the whole of someone else's canon. (I am not sure that the extraordinary largeness of Shakespeare's canon has been properly adjusted for here, not because Nance does not try but because the problem may be insoluble.) Expanding the test to find matches in books in any genre produces 20 matches, 18 of which are 18 matches to each of 18 authors' canons, and the last two of which are matches to two Shakespeare works. So again, Shakespeare comes out on top. Next Nance repeats the test for 94 words (the length of the A Midsummer Night's Dream epilogue) from a trochaic song from Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and now Dekker comes out as the author. Then he tries 94 words from a song in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels and now Jonson comes out as the author. So, in six tests (three looking only at drama, three looking at all books) the right author is selected each time; for Nance this is validation of his test.

    Nance attempts to quantify the effects of the differences in dramatic canon size, arguing that because Dekker's dramatic canon is two-fifths the size of Shakespeare's and Jonson's is three-quarters the size of Shakespeare's, "Shakespeare is 60 percent more likely than Dekker and 20 percent more likely than Jonson" (p. 220) to be the match for any word or phrase chosen at random. This does not seem right to me. Taking Shakespeare as our reference point (as 1.0), Dekker's canon is 0.4 times the size of Shakespeare's and since 1.0 is 2½ times the size of 0.4, Shakespeare's canon is 2½ times as likely to be hit: that is 150% not 60% more. Jonson's canon is 0.75 times the size of Shakespeare's, and since 1.0 is 1⅓ times the size of 0.75, Shakespeare's canon is 1⅓ times as likely to be hit; that is 33% more likely, not 20%.

    Looking at each writer's entire canon (not just their dramatic canon), "Dekker's total canon is a little over four-fifths the size of Shakespeare's total canon, and Jonson's full count is a little over three-fourths the size of Shakespeare's" (p. 221). According to Nance that means that ". . . Shakespeare is still 20 percent more likely than Dekker and (slightly less than) 25 percent more likely than Jonson to appear in the results . . ." (p. 221). Again, my calculations differ. If Dekker's canon is 0.8 to Shakespeare's 1.0 then  Shakespeare's is 1¼ times as likely to be hit (25% more likely, not 20%) and if Jonson's is 0.75 to Shakespeare's 1.0 then, as with the dramatic canons, Shakespeare's is 1⅓ times as likely to be hit (33% more likely, not 25%).  Nance does not factor these numbers into his weighing of the results of his hits, but does observe that his tests found the right authors for all three validation passages despite these unfavourable odds, so the test seems relatively immune to the effects of the differing canon sizes.

    Now Nance applies his tests to "To ye Q." itself, starting with just its first 94 words because that is how many he used for the validation run (arising from the 94 words in the epilogue to A Midsummer Night's Dream). On the test that looks only in drama, Shakespeare has five unique links, after which come Thomas Heyword, Jonson, and James Shirley with two each. Including the final 12 words of "To ye Q." does not change the results. In the test that looks at all genres, the results are the same: Shakespeare's canon has the most links (two, where everyone else has one). Thus Shakespeare is the likeliest author of this epilogue or terminal prayer.

    An essay on authorship attribution in the same journal by the present reviewer and others must be noticed briefly by recording only what it claims, since no one should trust an investigator's critique of his own work (Santiago Segarra, Mark Eisen, Gabriel Egan and Alejandro Ribeiro 'Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays By Word Adjacency', SQ 67[2016] 232-56). The essay illustrates a new method for authorship attribution based on capturing a writer's distinct habits for placing particular function words near to other function words. Across the whole of an author's canon these habits were captured for all the occurrences and all the proximities of over 100 function words, the data being stored in a Markov Chain called a Word Adjacency Network (WAN) for each candidate. The same kind of WAN was then generated for each text to be attributed and it was compared to each author's WAN to find the closest match. The method is shown to have a 93.4% accuracy in attributing authorship of whole plays or acts, falling to 91.5% when attributing individual scenes. The method purports to confirm Christopher Marlowe's hand in all three of the Henry 6 plays, that George Peele and Shakespeare co-wrote Titus Andronicus, that Thomas Middleton and Shakespeare co-wrote Timon of Athens, and that John Fletcher and Shakespeare co-wrote Henry 8 and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

    Also concerned with authorship attribution is Darren Freebury-Jones's investigation of the Quarrel Scene (that is, Scene 8) of Arden of Faversham (''A Raven for a Dove': Kyd, Shakespeare, and the Authorship of Arden of Faversham's Quarrel Scene', Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 253[2016] 39-64). Freebury-Jones reflects that Brian Vickers's essay in the Times Literary Supplement called "Thomas Kyd, Secret Sharer" (reviewed in YWES for 2008), which argued that Arden of Faversham is by Kyd, "has been heavily criticised for not having passed through peer review" (p. 41). Indeed, but the more important fact is that the claims it makes have been thoroughly confuted and Vickers's methodology has been shown not to work. In an article reviewed in YWES for 2009, MacDonald P. Jackson showed that Vickers's method is a "one-horse race" that is bound to find evidence in favour of almost any candidate it is looking for. As Jackson showed, one can use Vickers's  method to find rare phrases common only to Arden of Faversham and the plays of Christopher Marlowe, and indeed to show that Arden of Faversham and The Taming of the Shrew share more rare phrases than Arden of Faversham and Kyd's plays do. Any two substantial bodies of writing will share some rare phrases and this discovery tells us nothing unless we try (as Vickers does not) to apply the same method to each of several candidate authors.

    Freebury-Jones quotes from Jackson's devastating critique but tries to brush off the problem in two ways: i) by suggesting that perhaps the evidence Jackson found merely shows one dramatist imitating another, and ii) by asserting that Vickers has found new evidence in support of his claims (p. 42). The obvious objection to point (i) is that if imitation is now to be suggested as a confounding variable then it affects attributions to Kyd as much as it does attributions to anyone else (and in fact good attribution methods rely on verbal links that cannot plausibly be explained by imitation). For point (ii) Freebury-Jones offers no evidence whatsoever: he merely asserts that it is so.

    Freebury-Jones's own method includes the fatal flaw identified by Jackson: he uses anti-plagiarism software to find parallels between Arden of Faversham and the works of his candidates and then goes looking "for uniqueness", that is making sure that the parallels are not common-place words and phrases, in EEBO-TCP and LION. But he announces a peculiar hypothesis behind this approach: "My primary objective is to explore whether Arden of Faversham is a unified work produced by a single authorial mind, or a collaborative work . . ." (p. 43). As we shall see, for Freebury-Jones it counts as evidence for a "single authorial mind" if we fail to find discontinuities across a text, but that is not a reliable test since there are other reasons we might fail to find evidence of collaboration, not least that the investigator erred in hunting for it.

    Once Freebury-Jones gets to the verbal evidence, he starts to quote parallels between various plays without giving any detailed account of how he found them--that is, what exactly did he have his software do?--or providing any numerical summaries that enable comparison of how one author fares against another. Instead, we get quotations that are offered as if they were self-explanatory, much as nineteenth-century investigators were apt to do. For example "to a cannon's burst | Discharged" in Arden of Faversham Scene 8 is offered by Freebury-Jones as a parallel to "cannon in the doore, ready to discharge it" in Soliman and Perseda. The collocation of cannon with discharge, which is all these two quotations have in common, is (unsurprisingly) frequent in books printed in the 1580s and 1590s. EEBO-TCP offers "to discharge a Cannon gainst a lowse" from Thomas Nash's Pierce Penniless and his Strange News, both of 1592, "to discharg one or to cannon" in Don Bernadino de Mendoza's Theory and Practice of War of 1597, and eight other examples from the period. Freebury-Jones seems to include in this parallel the word to although its grammatical function in his Arden of Faversham quotation ("to a cannon's burst") is different from its function in his Solimon and Perseda ("ready to discharge") so I have included to as well.

    Freebury-Jones offers the parallels of "Chief actors" in Arden of Faversham Scene 8 with "cheefest actor" and "cheefe actor" in Solimon and Perseda. But this is merely a stock phrase of the period: EEBO-TCP finds 33 examples up to 1600 in the works of Robert Greene, Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Harsnett, Raphael Holinshed, Philip Sidney, and dozens of others. I do not understand why Freebury-Jones thinks this a rare phrase of special signficance. Nowhere does he offer counts of the phrases he finds to show that they really are rare. Likewise with "murder love" from Arden of Faversham Scene 8 and "murther honest love" from Soliman and Perseda. In EEBO-TCP books up to 1600 there are seven examples of murder followed by love with up to one word in between; to determine if that counts as a rare phrase, Freebury-Jones would have to establish a numerical value to establish the principle of rareness, something he never does.

    Since Freebury-Jones's method is comparable to that undertaken by John V. Nance in his article on "To ye Q." discussed above, it is useful to contrast their execution. Nance tells us exactly what he counted and what his cut-offs are and is scrupulous documenting his arithmetic; Freebury-Jones does not so it is impossible to tell if he is on to something or not. Freebury-Jones offers a great many useless examples of parallels he has found. In Solimon and Perseda he finds my followed five words later by braine followed 17 words later by windes, and in Arden of Faversham Scene 8 he finds my followed two words later by brain followed 15 words later by wind (p. 46). We can put these words and their general proximities into EEBO-TCP, asking for books from 1580 to 1600 as Freebury-Jones does, using "my FBY.5 brain FBY.20 wind" (where FBY means 'followed by') and allow EEBO-TCP to accept variant spellings and forms (so, winds for wind) as Freebury-Jones does.

    Unfortunately, in response to this search request EEBO-TCP complains that the task is too complex and we should simplify it. (It is no use expecting Freebury-Jones to tell us how he checked for this collocation's rareness in EEBO-TCP, as he claims to have done.) We can make the task easier for EEBO-TCP by switching off the 'variant forms' feature and looking only for variant spellings and asking for a 'near to' rather than a 'followed by' promixity arrangement, so "my NEAR.5 brain NEAR.20 wind". This gives a hit in Thomas Middleton's The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased ("Breathing that erring wind into my braine") and another in Richard Harvey's Plain Percival the Peacemaker of England ("wind shakes none of my Corne, quoth Perceuall, whereupon Gossip Reason the chiefe actor in the pageant of my braine"). Then we can apply the variant forms variation ourselves by allowing brains to be plural by manually making it so in a fresh search: the result is to add King James's The Essays of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poetry ("my braines did brew, | And since that only wind"). Then we have search again using the plural winds instead of wind. Now the result is to add Nicholas Breton's Melancholic Humours  ("my braine, doth finde my spirit spoiled. | The winds"). What Freebury-Jones claims as a rare collocation of words appears in four other books from the two decades he says he is searching. It might nonetheless still count as a rare occurrence but only if he would tell us how few times something has to occur for him to consider it rare.

    Freebury-Jones continues in this vein for many more collocations and it is not worth checking their rareness since he has not declared how many occurrences he uses as his cutoff. This is not an empirical study at all because Freebury-Jones is more interested in discussing the literary merits of the language he finds rather than counting occurrences of things. As literary criticism, this is inherently interesting--Freebury-Jones is a sensitive reader--but it is not empirically grounded authorship attribution. At times Freebury-Jones extends his analysis to what might be called the clustering of function words. One of Freebury-Jones's collocation matches is "Then is there Michael and the painter too" in Arden of Faversham Scene 8 and "This is he gone? and is my sonne gone too?" in The Spanish Tragedy (p. 47). This then-is-and-too sequence can be considered a skip n-gram--that is a series of words in a certain order but allowing other words to intervene that have to be skipped over--but we might instead consider this a collocation and measure the distances between the words, as the present reviewer does in the article mentioned above. From that perspective, the most salient fact is that is appears immediately after then in both cases and that too appears three words after and in Arden of Faversham and five words after and in The Spanish Tragedy. That Freebury-Jones includes such examples shows that he does not agree with Vickers's claim that the highly common function words are useless as evidence for authors--Vickers is sure that only rare words and phrases matter--and that independence of approach should be credited.

    After many more examples of parallels treated impressionistically rather than mathematically, Freebury-Jones concludes tentatively that what he has found are "possible signifiers of Kyd's irrepressible self-repetition" and that "The matches that suggest Kyd's hand in the quarrel scene are seldom 'attractive' phrasal structures or conventionally appealing adjective and noun bigram combinations . . ." (p. 49). To get further, Freebury-Jones turns to evidence from Martin Mueller's project "Shakespeare His Contemporaries", which raises the same problems noted above in the context of Freebury-Jones's essay on the authorship of 2 Henry 6. At the time of reviewing this article, 23 March 2018--which is more than six months after the date of the above review of Freebury-Jones's other essay--the URL he provides still produces a "Not found" error. A web-search for "Shakespeare His Contemporaries" leads to a page that reports that "This site is now obsolete" and points to yet another site at <https://shc.earlyprint.org> that now produces another "Not found" error. It is impossible therefore to check any of Freebury-Jones's claims about the contents of this project.

    Next Freebury-Jones looks for matches between Arden of Faversham Scene 8 and plays by Shakespeare, but this work is vitiated in places by his use of links to the Henry 6 plays (which are widely thought to be co-authored) and King John (for which there are increasing suspicions of co-authorship). Where Freebury-Jones compares Scene 8 to plays that everyone agrees are by Shakespeare, such as Romeo and Juliet and The Two Gentleman of Verona, the parallels he finds are genuinely of interest, but as before his failure to count them makes the analysis purely impressionistic. Freebury-Jones turns to evidence that he thinks shows Shakespeare borrowing from other writers. He starts with the phrases common to Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Richard 3. One that on the face of it seems significant is "remembrance of so foul a deed" (The Spanish Tragedy) and "remembrance of so fair a dream" (Richard III). But a search of EEBO-TCP for books from 1580-1600 turns up "remembrance of so great a wonder" (William Averell A Wonderful and Strange News), "remembraunce of so worthy a personage" (Richard Becon Solon's Folly), "remembrance of so great a losse" (Thomas Bentley The Fifth Lamp of Virginity), "remembrance of so very good & most mighty a Prince" (Heinrich Bullinger Of the End of the World), "remembraunce of so great a victory" (Fernando Lopes de Castanheda The First Book of the History of the Discouery and Conquest of the East India), "remembraunce of so terrible a place" (William Chub The True Travail of all Faithful Christians), "remembrance of so late an ill" (Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas The History of Judith), and "remembrance of so meane a knight" (Jerónimo Fernández The Honour of Chivalry). And that is just on the first page of four pages of hits. In all, EEBO-TCP has dozens of books using the construction "remembrance of so x a y" so it clearly is just a stock phrase of the period, not a sign of authorship.

    Freebury-Jones must be aware of the need to perform the so-called negative check to make sure that the feature one is looking for is not simply a commonplace of the language of the time, used by many writers, but he fails to perform it. He offers each parallel he finds as if it were significant and then moves on to the next. The example just given is at least unusual even to readers familiar with the language of the period, but it is hard to credit that Freebury-Jones really thinks that the phrase "will come to nought", which is common to The Spanish Tragedy and Richard III, is rare, but he offers it as if it were. (EEBO-TCP of course offers 17 examples from books from 1580-1600). And so on with commonplaces such as "tell my tale", "you" near to "enforce me to", and more, all found many times in EEBO-TCP. Freebury-Jones is entirely right to raise a problem that bedevils the entire project of hunting across the corpus of early modern drama for rare phrases shared by different writers' works, which is that Shakespeare dominates the corpus in a numeric sense by having more securely attributed plays to his name than anyone else. A search for any phrase across this corpus is more likely to throw up a match in Shakespeare's canon than in anyone else's, merely because he presents a larger target to hit. No one has yet come up with a demonstrably reliable way to compensate for this inherent bias.

    To explore Shakespeare's imitation of Kyd's writing--as part of a larger manoeuvre to dismiss parallels between Arden of Faversham's Scene 8 and Shakespeare as examples of mere imitation--Freebury-Jones goes looking for parallels between The Taming of the Shrew and Kyd's plays, offering a list of seven. He introduces them with a specific and significant claim: "The following selected matches are unique to The Taming of the Shrew and Kyd's accepted plays" (p. 56). In fact, some are and some are not. In the period 1580-1600, EEBO-TCP gives 28 examples of "she will not be", an occurrence of "did I not bid thee" in Mucedorus, and "of him" near "I know him not" in Job Throckmorton's A Dialogue, all of which Freebury-Jones overlooks. Importantly, I have checked only the "selected examples" that Freebury-Jones offers and not checked whether The Taming of the Shrew has lots of rare phrases in common with other plays not by Kyd, or indeed with other plays by Shakespeare. Freebury-Jones's approach is, like Vickers's, offering a one-horse race that was bound to find some rare parallels: all substantial texts have some rare phrases in common, that is just how language works. What matters is how many are found in common with each of a set of candidates.

    Freebury-Jones's last list is of phrases that are common to Scene 8 of Arden of Faversham and the rest of the play. As before, his approach is impressionistic and makes no attempt at a negative check to ensure the phrases are not simply commonplace in the period, nor does he tabulate how often the phrases occur in different dramatists' plays. Freebury-Jones ought not to think significant his finding in common to Scene 8 and the rest of the play the bigram "you stand", or the word cur near bone, or and followed within seven words by the earth.  For the first of these three the hits in EEBO-TCP for 1580-1600 run into the hundreds, and for the last they run into the thousands. It is not significant that sit followed within a couple words by in and within a few more by seat is a sequence found in Scene 8 and elsewhere in the play: then as now, seats were for sitting in and we can find hundreds of parallels in EEBO-TCP for 1580-1600. Likewise the bigram "to wound", and the unigram epithets ungentle for Alice and sweet for Mosby within and without Scene 8. The phrase "a word or two" is common today and was common in 1580-1600, as EEBO-TCP shows with 275 hits. Freebury-Jones parries an objection that nobody sensible would make: "If we are to dismiss these matches as imitation . . ." (p. 63). The proper objection is that almost every phrase that Freebury-Jones offers as a significant link between one piece of writing and another is a common phrase in the language.

    In fact, an argument could be constructed from such evidence. The true significance of the many parallels that Freebury-Jones has found might emerge within a statistical study that looks at how many such parallels one would expect to find by chance and how many one actually finds across the works of a range of candidate authors. The commonplaces of language are indeed distinctive of authorship if we count their total occurrences and weigh the results for one writer with those from another. It is demonstrable that authors have differing preferences about the commonplaces, which is why the act of simply counting the frequencies of function words is a good discriminator of authorship. Without undertaking such a statistical study, however, Freebury-Jones's essay makes no contribution to the field. 

    Brian Vickers ('Shakespeare and the 1602 Additions to The Spanish Tragedy: A Method Vindicated', Shakespeare 13[2016] 101-6) responds to my review (in YWES for 2012) of Vickers's essay "Identifying Shakespeare's Additions to The Spanish Tragedy (1602): A New(er) Approach" that appeared in the journal Shakespeare, which this reviewer co-edits. Vickers finds it dishonest that this reviewer accepted an article for publication in a journal that he co-edits and then criticized that article in another publication. The explanation, of course, is that editors of serious journals do not publish contributions because they like them, but only when the expert reviewers upon whom they rely advise them to do so. Vickers's original essay passed strict peer review and so Shakespeare published it. Or, at least, the journal Shakespeare takes this approach with contributions of more 4,000 words, so that shorter pieces--typically theatre and book reviews and the briefer introductions to special issues--do not require external peer review. Although Vickers's original essay was longer than 4,000 words and went through peer review, the piece under consideration here, Vickers's objection to this reviewer's critique of that original essay, is itself under 4,000 words and so it was not peer-reviewed before it was accepted and published in Shakespeare. I recused myself from any evaluation of it. I can hardly be trusted to offer here an objective account of Vickers's complaints about my reviewing, but I am happy to recommend Vickers's own account of them to readers since, by what has become known as the Streisand Effect, it draws further attention to the abundant errors in Vickers's methodology.

    Another essay by Vickers is relevant to our survey (''Upstart Crow'?: The Myth of Shakespeare's Plagiarism', RES 68[2016] 244-67). Vickers thinks that Greene's Groatsworth of Wit was written by Robert Greene and that it does not accuse Shakespeare of plagiarism, and hence that Edmond Malone's account of the Henry 6 plays, that they are other men's work that Shakespeare took over and rewrote, loses one of its supports. Perhaps only by unconscious bias towards his own hypothesis, Vickers's citation of Warren B. Austin's seminal paper on this topic misrepresents Austin's title: "Authorship of Greene's Groatsworth of Wit" becomes "Authorship of Greene's [without italics] Groatsworth of Wit", thereby suggesting that Green's authorship is assumed in Austin's piece.

    Vickers approves of the critique of Austin called "Computing Error: Reassessing Austin's study of Groatsworth of Wit" published in 2006 by Richard Westley, whose name is repeatedly misspelled as "Wesley" by Vickers. Westley shared Vickers's belief that rare words are the best detector of authorship, and Vickers announces that in an article forthcoming in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Vickers will use anti-plagiarism software to show that Greene wrote Groatsworth. Convinced that Groatsworth is by Greene, Vickers examines Greene's corpus to find uses of Aesop's Crow story, and reports that they do not imply plagiarism, only persons getting above themselves.

    Recurrently in Greene, actors in particular get above themselves in forgetting that what they say was given to them by the writers and they are likened by Greene to parrots for doing so. Greene's animus in Groatsworth is about overweening actors, not about plagiarism. Malone read Groatsworth as an accusation of plagiarism on Shakespeare's part, and that helped his argument that the three Henry 6 plays were written by other people and taken over by Shakespeare. Vickers finds decisive Peter Alexander's 1929 study that claimed that the 1594 quarto of 2 Henry 6 and 1595 octavo of 3 Henry 6 are memorial reconstructions of the versions underlying the 1623 Folio. For Vickers the problems of the Henry 6 plays are thereby fully explained without recourse to the notion that all three contain multiple hands.

    Peter Womack argues that in Shakespearian drama the notion of 'place'--the scene's location--is a contested, dialogic attribute, and editors who refuse to identify where a scene takes place are just as much taking sides with one character over another as are editors who pedantically state the location in the eigthteenth and nineteenth-century fashion ('Another Part of the Forest': Editors and Locations in Shakespeare', ShSurv 69[2016] 243-52). Edmond Malone was the first to systematically provide place-setting editorial stage directions of the kind "Another part of the forest" that are much mocked these days. But Malone knew that Shakespeare's theatre had no scenery and he was not mistaking the conventions of his day for those of Shakespeare. Rather, his use of this formula in, for example, As You Like It 3.5 is perfectly logical and arises from the needs of the reader, who must be made aware that the locations of scenes 3.4 and 3.5 are different even though the action might at first suggest that they are the same.

    For Malone, every scene has to take place somewhere even if that somewhere is not communicated to the theatre audience. Nicholas Rowe preceded Malone in some of these place-setting stage directions, and his "the Platform before the Palace" for Hamlet 1.4 is not the "gratuitous supplement to the Shakespearian text" (p. 246) that it might seem, since that is exactly where the characters in this scene repeatedly said in 1.2 they would next meet. As with the 3.4-to-3.5 transition in As You Like It, the 1.4-to-1.5 transition in Hamlet involves moving to another place in the same general vicinity but not exactly the same spot, and editors are warranted in signalling this minor relocation to the reader, as Lewis Theobald did with "SCENE changes to a more remote Part of the Platform". Thereafter, editors largerly agreed on this sort of thing--inheriting one another's place-setting stage directions--because in fact the logic of the drama makes clear where such scenes are set.

    It may be that we are inclined these days to overstate the placelessness of many scenes. Consider the weird hiccup enacted by the chorus just before Act 2 of Henry 5: the uncertainty about where we are to be taken suggests that the early modern stage did not just glide effortlessly from place to place. Shakespeare was conscious that there is effort and artifice in this place-shifting. The chorus's locution, that we "shift our scene", sounds like an eighteenth-century interpolation, but it suggests that even without scenery the early modern stage had the sense that a scene was set somewhere. Womack finds a couple of Restoration plays--Rowe's Tragedy of Jane Shore and Theobald's adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard 2--that are less interested in place than Shakespeare was, using fewer and more generalized locations than he did despite being on the supposedly more localized, flats-and-shutters, post-1660 stage. What is wrong with the old-fashioned editorial markers such as "a more remote Part of the Platform" is not that the early stage was unconcerned with where things were happening--it was not--but that the phrases that editors invent are not up to the task of conveying the dialogic complexity of location in Shakespeare. This last point Womack illustrates with the example of the room where Macbeth 1.7 is set, and the place in 2.2 where Macbeth hears the knocking at the gate and does not know where it comes from, and yet Lady Macbeth can identify it precisely as "knocking at the south entry": "The scene is 'located' for her as it is not for him" (p. 252).

    Michael L. Hays reckons that the paleographic case for Hand D of Sir Thomas More being Shakespeare's is not strong: we just do not have enough of a Shakespeare sample to be able to tell ('Shakespeare's Hand Unknown in Sir Thomas More: Thompson, Dawson, and the Futility of the Paleographic Argument', SQ 67[2016] 180-203). Hays twice asserts that the paleographic argument (that Hand D is Shakespeare's handwriting) and the attribution argument (that Shakespeare chose the words in Hand D) are independent: it is an "untenable belief . . . [that] aggregating their separate probabilities increases the consensus probability of that conclusion" (p. 182) and "The concurrence of their separate conclusions [that Shakespeare chose the words in Hand D and that its letter forms look like those in the wills]--their probabilities are not additive or multiplicative--does not strengthen the consensus conclusion . . ." (p. 184). Hays gives no explanation for this unusual assertion. I would argue, contrary to Hays, that these matters are indeed connected. If we are able to establish definitively that Shakespeare wrote the words--as MacDonald P. Jackson has in an article that was reviewed in YWES for 2006--then that discovery increases the likelihood that the reason Hand D looks like Shakespeare is because it is Shakespeare, since the only alternative is the much less likely hypothesis that someone with handwriting that looks like Shakespeare's copied out his writing.

    Hays details the weakness of the purely paleographical argument, arising most importantly from the lack of a large enough sample of handwriting that is definitely Shakespeare's, in the six known signatures on various documents and the words "By me" on his will. Hays tries to undermine Giles E. Dawson's argument that letterforms like those found in Hand D make easy the misrecognition of babld as Table that underpins Lewis Theobald celebrated emendation of Table to babled in Henry 5. According to Hays, the capital T in the Folio is a problem in the evidence: he rejects without saying why the simple supposition that the compositor capitalized what he thought was a t in the copy. Hays also objects to Dawson's reduction of Theobald's babled to babld, which he suspects was made "to ensure a like number of letters and to eliminate the problem of the double 'e,' which would otherwise result from his argument that the final letter was a 'd' read as an 'e'" (p. 198). Dawson also claimed that the variety of shapes for k found in Hand D was like the variety of shapes for k in Shakespeare's handwriting and unlike the uniformity of k in other samples of writing, but Hays objects that in his guide to Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500-1650 Dawson reproduced a wide variety of shapes for k in six samples from around the same time as Hand D. Dawson argued that use of a to mean he is frequent in Shakespeare and Hand D and infrequent in other writers' plays, but Hays points out some arithmetical errors that undermine this result too.

    Also on the subject of manuscripts, Amy Bowles reconsiders the habits of the King's Men scribe Ralph Crane ('Dressing the Text: Ralph Crane's Scribal Publication of Drama', RES 67[2016] 405-27). She looks at three aspects of Crane's playscript work--his expurgation of oaths, his use of massed entries, and his use of parentheses--and shows that they are part of a plan to make the plays more literary, more suited for reading. There was a market for privately circulated play manuscripts and Crane supplied it. Crane, across his varied output, seems to have expurgated oaths most often when the transcript was being made for an important person, not bothering to do so when the text was designed for a theatre company; thus this habit does not reflect Crane's personal objection to bad language but rather his practical consideration of the market and/or the tastes of the buyer.

    Massed stage directions at the beginnings of scenes make the ensuing lines look more like poetry (that is, Literature) by eliminating untidy marginal directions, and Bowles reckons this is why Crane employed them. Across the Crane manuscripts there is a plethora of punctuation and especially brackets, and where we have Crane's transcript for A Game at Chess and Middleton's copy we can see that Crane added many brackets. Bowles reckons that Crane's intention with his punctuation, especially the brackets, was to aid reading by "communicating semantic subtleties" (p. 419). There were two main uses of brackets: to enclose (box in) matter to be emphasized, and to show matter that could be omitted without grammatical harm, as with the pair used earlier in this sentence. Bowles provides examples of both these uses from Crane's work, suggesting once again that Crane was accommodating an audience of readers.

    To show that the Crane features she has been discussing are specific to the work he did for elite readers, Bowles offers the contrast with Crane's transcript of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, made for a theatre company and largely lacking these features. But then why are Crane transcripts of Shakespeare that formed copy for the Folio so variable in these features? Bowles suggests that rather than being commissioned as one piece of work just before the printing of the Folio, they were a disparate set of private transcripts made for different people some time earlier. This would also explain why only six Folio plays are based on Crane transcripts: it is not that he started the job and gave up for some reason, but that these six were the only ones that could be acquired for the purpose of providing Folio copy.

    Larry Weiss believes that he has solved a crux ('A Solution to the Stubborn Crux in The Comedy of Errors', Shakespeare 12[2016] 148-60). In the Folio text of The Comedy of Errors Adriana says "I see the Iewell best enamaled | Will loose his beautie: yet the gold bides still | That others touch, and often touching will, | Where gold and no man that hath a name, | By falshood and corruption doth it shame:", which seems garbled. Weiss's solution is to add a long dash in the second line so that "yet the gold" starts a parenthetical clause and emend the last two lines to read "Wear gold--and any man that hath a name | By falsehood and corruption doth it shame". The where>wear alteration was first proposed by Lewis Theobald, as Weiss notes, but in fact it is not an emendation but a modernization since the Folio's where was an acceptable early modern spelling of modern wear. Weiss also makes punctuation alterations, the most significant of which is hyphenating often-touching to indicate that it is a compound present participle. His emendation of no man to any man fixes the deficient meter of that line. Weiss provides a gloss for these lines and the couplet that follows, and insists that the gloss stands even if the emendation is not made, which would be no bad thing since ". . . there is much to be said for fiddling with the text as little as possible" (p.  151). The remainder of the essay critiques the other solutions that have been proposed, including Gary Taylor's 1989 article on this crux.

    Roger Stritmatter argues that censorship affected the text of Hamlet ('Two More Censored Passages from Q2 Hamlet', Cahiers Elisabethains 91[2016] 88-95). There are two passages in Hamlet 2.2, "Let me question more . . . am most dreadfully attended" and "How comes it? Do they grow rusty . . . Hercules and his load too", that are present in F and absent in Q2. It has been argued that these were censored when Q2 was printed, since they might offend the new Queen Anne of Denmark: the first because it speaks ill of her country and the second because it suggests that the Blackfriars boys, who had just come under Queen Anne's patronage, were scandalous troublemakers. Those who, like Stritmatter, who think these are cuts to make Q2 not additions to make F note that the absence of the first produces a disjointed effect in Q2 as two consecutive sentences begin with "But".

    Stritmatter reckons that two more passages present in F and absent from Q2 are also cuts made by censorship: "Other. Why he had none . . . dig without arms?" in 5.1 and "To quit him with this arm? . . . Peace, who comes here?" in 5.2. Stritmatter thinks that Q2 5.2 loses a direct reference to regicide by omitting what is in F, citing Janet Clare's book on censorship from nearly 30 years ago as "new comparative evidence" (p. 89). According to Stritmatter this cut leads to a non sequitur in Q2: the Clown says "Ile put another question to thee" without having asked a previous question because the cut removes the questions "What, ar't a Heathen? how dost thou vnderstand the Scripture?" In fact, "Ile put another question to thee" does not require the Clown to ask previous questions because the Other just asked the Clown a question, "Was he a Gentleman?", to which the Clown may be referring, stressing "to thee" as a retort. Stritmatter thinks that the Folio lines omitted in Q2--"Other. Why he had none. | Clo. What, ar't a Heathen? how dost thou vnderstand the Scripture? the Scripture sayes Adam dig'd; could hee digge without Armes?"--allude to the sermon of the Lollard priest John Ball during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 that begins "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?". This sort of thing was likely to be censored around 1604 when King James was making it clear that he would not tolerate Puritan and other dissenting ideas.

    In the song "Fear no more the heat o' th' sun" in Cymbeline, the phrase "golden lads" is often glossed as Warwickshire vernacular for the flower heads of dandelions and "chimney-sweepers" as dandelion clocks, but Charles E. Nelson shows that these identifications, never suggested prior to a letter Francis Birrell wrote to The Nation and Athenaeum in 1928, are probably groundless (''Shakespeare Has Missed the Dandelion . . .'', Shakespeare 12[2016] 175-84). No preceding botanical work supports this claim and no book on the plants in Shakespeare ever mentions the dandelion. Hugh Kenner popularized the claim in his 1971 book The Pound Era and in subsequent retellings. Chimney-sweepers is a familiar name for a quite different plant, ribwort plantain (plantago lanceolata), evidenced from the mid-nineteenth century.

    Michael Shurgot wonders if perhaps Folio Henry 5's "his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields" includes a reference to the table in Psalm 23, since "greene fields" (or green pastures) alludes to Psalm 23 ('Falstaff's Table', ShN 66[2016] 41-3). Perhaps the Hostess is malappropriately misreporting what the dying Falstaff said, which itself (in his delirium) was a jumbling of the 23rd Psalm's references to green pastures and a table, since being at table was Falstaff's favourite occupation. (The problem with this reading is that unless you emend table > babbled, there is no indication that the Hostess is reporting what Falstaff said.) John A. Dussinger reports that Samuel Johnson's notes for his 1765 edition of Shakespeare were substantially plagiarized from Thomas Edwards's The Canons of Criticism, first printed in 1748 ('Johnson's Unacknowledged Debt to Thomas Edwards in the 1765 Edition of Shakespeare', PQ 95[2016] 45-100).

    And so to the round-up from Notes and Queries. Tom Clayton tackles a couple of much-debated cruxes ('Two Textual Cruxes in The Tempest', N&Q 261[2016] 436-41). In the Folio text of The Tempest, the speech prefix for the speech "Abhorred Slaue, | Which any print of goodnesse wilt not take" is "Mira." but for a long time editors gave it to Prospero. The Arden3 edition (reviewed in YWES for 1999) claimed that Caliban seems to include Miranda as well as Prospero by using you instead of thou when he says "You taught me language", but Clayton notes that Caliban also says "You both" so he is not making the sharp you=plural/thou=singular distinction or he would not need the word both. (This seems to me a weak argument, since both could be simply reinforcing the plurality of you.) Elsewhere, as Clayton shows, Caliban certainly uses you to be singular: "I am all the subjects you have". Clayton thinks it dramatically implausible that Prospero just stands silently by as Miranda gives the "Abhorred Slaue" speech, and in any case the whole vituperative exchange of which this forms a part is between Prospero and Caliban.

    Clayton's second crux occurs in Ferdinand's "So rare a wondred Father, and a [wife|wise]", in connection with which, agreeing with an Arden 3 comment, Clayton remarks "Amen, or Apersons" (p. 439). Clayton is referring back snidely to the 1970s, when feminists called for the use of gender neutral terms such as chair (or chairperson) instead of chairman and firefighter instead of fireman, and the editors of Notes and Queries would have done well to delete the remark. Clayton claims that the Folio unequivocally reads wise but he goes on to acknowledge that this has been disputed (that is, what looks like an s might be an f), concluding that the matter is now settled because ". . . Peter Blayney proved that [the appearance of an f is] likely to be an optical illusion . . ." (p. 439). In fact in the second edition of his Norton facsimile--presumably Clayton's source (he neglects to give a reference)--Blayney pointedly declined to prove anything, remarking that ". . . proper resolution of the matter must await a much more thorough discussion" (p. xxxi). Clayton ends with a literary-critical reading of the wider passage that supports the wise reading.

    Three contributions by Thomas Merriam may be taken together. In the first he finds verbal links between Additions II and III of Sir Thomas More and 2 Henry 6: 27 words occuring no more than 12 times in the Folio (so, fairly rare words) that are common to these parts of Sir Thomas More and 2 Henry 6 ('A Nexus of Associations with Hand D and Addition III of Sir Thomas More', N&Q 261[2016] 415-8). Seven of these rare words--argo, half-penny as an adjective, handicraft, herring, loaf, magistrate (x2), and spin--are found in the Additions and in just one scene of 2 Henry 6: scene 4.2 (the Jack Cade rebellion). Moreover, another five--beef, eating as a noun, palsy, plod, and riotous--are common to the Additions and Act 4 of 2 Henry 6. This clustering of rare-word links is unique. There are also quite a few such parallels between the Original Text of Sir Thomas More and Act 4 of 2 Henry 6, which Merriam tabulates here; they are in fact the same parallels that he used to make the claim that Shakespeare wrote the Original Text of Sir Thomas More in his article "Conjunction of Collocations in More and 2H6" reviewed in YWES for 2012. Merriam again concludes from all this that Shakespeare wrote the Original Text of Sir Thomas More.

   In the same vein, Merriam takes Eliot Slater's method of dating plays by looking for their shared rare words, meaning those used by Shakespeare 1-12 times in 35 plays (all but Henry 8) from the Folio, and applies it to Sir Thomas More Additions II(D) and III ('An Echo of the Original Text of Sir Thomas More in Additions II (D) and III', N&Q 261[2016] 406-13). To see if these rare-word links tell us something about the date of Additions II(D) and III, Merriam draws a cumulative sum graph; the outcome is that these Additions seem to share rare words with Folio plays written around 1603-4, although there is also some likeness to plays of the early 1590s that Merriam explains by the Additions being in places rewrites of the Original Text from the early 1590s with only limited changes. Merriam argues that these rewrites might well include the Hand D portions, which perhaps were not entirely freshly written for the Additions but were revisions of (now lost) parts of the Original Text. Pursuing this idea, Merriam finds some rare words common to Hand D and The Comedy of Errors, and then notices some thematic parallels too: the incorporation of strangers and the religious injunction to obey authority.

    In his third note, Merriam brings together some figures for features of King John--feminine ending rates, average word lengths, and frequency of use of a, I, is, me, my, not, and you--that he tabulates for each of 26 sections of the play that he previously determined in his "Feminine Endings in King John" reviewed in YWES for 2009 ('Feminine Endings and Function Words in King John', N&Q 261[2016] 402-5). Merriam shows that these features are correlated and that if he draws on an x/y scatterplot the first and second principal components of these three variables the 26 sections of the play form two distinct clusters. Then he adds three more variables to the mix: i) the frequencies of and, in, of, that, the, and to; ii) the determinations of one neural network; and iii) the determinations of another neural network. Merriam tells the reader nothing of these neural networks, not even what the term means, but presumably they are the same ones he described in a couple of essays in the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing in 1993 and 1994. With these six variables, the principal component analysis divides the proposed 26 sections of King John even more clearly into two distinct clusters on his scatterplot.

    John M. Rollett reckons that perhaps William Stanley, the Sixth Earl of Derby, is Hand D of Sir Thomas More ('Another Candidate for 'Hand D' of Sir Thomas More', N&Q 261[2016] 413-5). Hand D has some idiosyncracies of spelling: 28 capital C letters where we would expect lower-case c, half of them verbs, doubled consonants as in hiddious and sinn, y where we would expect i as in desyres and fayth, au where we would expect a as in advauntage and graunt, final c where we would expect ce as in fraunc and obedyenc, among others. The letters of William Stanley have these peculiarities and the handwriting is similar too. Stanley was said in 1599 to be writing plays and has been proposed by Shakespeare-authorship conspiracy theorists as the writer of all Shakespeare's works. Rollett acknowledges that many of the idiosyncracies in Hand D are not especially uncommon and that there are distinct spelling differences consider too (for example where Stanley uses -con for -cion, Hand D does not).

    Expanding on his edition of Measure for Measure in the new Norton Shakespeare, Matthew Steggle proposes some new emendations ('Two Emendations to Measure for Measure', N&Q 261[2016] 425-7). In response to Angelo's accusation that she is either ignorant or feigning ignorance, Isabella says "Let be ignorant, and in nothing good" and all modern editions adopt F2's "Let me be ignorant . . .". Steggle notes that let't often got contracted to let' (especially before be) and thence let, so he proposes the emendation to let't. Later, when the Duke asks Mariana if she thinks that he respects her, she answers "Good Frier, I know you do, and haue found it". Editors usually put I or oft or so before have to make this metrical, but Steggles proposes so after the have. The use of I or oft leaves the sense incomplete--it stands for it to be so--leaving so have found it the best choice amongst those alternatives. But in EEBO-TCP so have found it has only two occurrences and in neither is it an independent phrase (the so completes a previous clause), whereas have so found it has six occurrences, all as an independent phrase. Moreover, a long-s in so found would explain the omission of so by eyeskip to the f of found.

    The anonymous Latin textbook on rhetoric Rhetorica ad Herennium is a known source for several passages in Shakespeare, and Vanessa Lim wants to add another: York's outburst about Richard's wrongs to Bolingbroke in Richard 2 2.2.164-186 ('The Rhetorica Ad Herennium: A Source for Richard II', N&Q 261[2016] 405-6). The textbook advises that one way to start such a remonstrance is to identify the ill treatment you have received, then to specify the subject's birth and circumstances, physical attributes, and qualities of character. York follows these suggestions in order. Peter D. Usher tries to make sense of Lancelot's absurd remark that his "nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last at six o'clock i' th' morning, falling out that year on Ash Wednesday was four year in th' afternoon" by supposing an allusion to the Gregorian/Julian calendar discrepancy ('Lancelot's Nosebleed', N&Q 261[2016] 419-20). The nosebleed happened on Easter Monday 1596--Black Monday being a disaster on Easter Monday in 1360--and the "four year" refers to that last four times that Easter Monday (in the old calendar) coincided with Passover (in the new calendar), which latter feast Lancelot confuses with Ash Wednesday since Ash Wednesday is the start of Lent and Shylock has just lent money.

    Ceri Sullivan thinks that Duke Senior's unusual "sermons in stones" in As You Like It comes from St Augustine's De ordine (Of Order) 1.3.6, which considers the degree of divine control over the world--does it extend to every ripple of water over pebbles in a stream?--and which Shakespeare could have read in Erasmus's Latin edition of 1529 (''Sermons in Stones': Augustine, Joseph Hall, and As You Like It', N&Q 261[2016] 420-1). In a second note, Sullivan argues that the drunken Porter in Macbeth may have been inspired by Shakespeare's reading of a sermon called "A Glass for Drunkards" by Henry Smith of St Clement Danes without Temple Bar that appears in a collection of his sermons published in 1593 (''Drunken Porters Keepe Open Gates': Macbeth and Henry Smith', N&Q 261[2016] 432). The sermon says that "drunken porters keepe open gates" and that suits the moment in the play in that he is the means by which the outside world is let into Macbeth's castle and reveals its terrible secret. I would have said that the drunken Porter is taxed not for keeping an inappropriately open gate but for keeping an inappropriately closed one, since he takes so long to answer the knocking. Eric Weiskott remarks that when in Twelfth Night Duke Orsino says to Feste "You can fool no more money out of me at this throw" he is not only using throw in the sense of throw of the die (harking back to Feste's previous payments to Feste) but also in the obsolescent sense of time, which editors seem these days to overlook ('A Postdating of throw 'Time' in Twelfth Night', N&Q 261[2016] 421-2). 

    Elisabetta Tarantino records that an Italian entertainment written for a celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany (the day after Twelfth Night) called Il Sacrificio was its authors' predecessor to their play Gli Ingannati which Shakespeare certainly knew ('John Florio's A World of Words (1598) as Link between Plot and Subplot in Twelfth Night', N&Q 261[2016] 422-4). In this entertainment, Shakespeare would have come across the word Beffana, Italian for the Feast of the Epiphany, and if he looked this word up in John Florio's English-Italian dictionary A World of Words (1598) he would have found definitions that link this word to the idea of playing a practical joke. This ties the subplot gulling of Malvolio with the main plot epiphany in the revelation of the final scene. Emanuel Stelzer contributes to the debate about the dating of All's Well that Ends Well (''Some Sport with the Fox': The Later Dating of All's Well That Ends Well in Relation to Jonson's Volpone', N&Q 261[2016] 427-31). He observes that it has "affinities in tone and subject matter" (p. 428) with Ben Jonson's Volpone, especially between All's Well that Ends Well's 2.1 (Helen's arrival in the court of France) and Volpone's 3.7 (Corvino offering Volpone his wife Celia). Both scenes are about a young woman reviving an old sick man, and Stelzer finds some words/phrases in common. Assuming there was some influence, the problem of priority is still unresolved: Stelzer has a hunch that Volpone influenced All's Well that Ends Well but offers not supporting evidence.

    MacDonald P. Jackson reckons that part of the Fool's prophecy in King Lear--"A fox, when one has caught her, | And such a daughter, | Should sure to the slaughter, | If my cap would buy a halter; | So the Fool follows after"--may be prophetic (''When One Has Caught Her': The Fool's Rhymes in King Lear, I.iv.327-331', N&Q 261[2016] 431-2). Lear's daughter Cordelia does indeed die by hanging and the Fool does indeed follow after in hanging ("And my poor fool is hang'd"). The only other use of caught in the play again collocates with foxes: Lear's "Have I caught thee? | He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven, | And fire us hence like foxes".

    Manabu Tsuruta thinks that Volumnia's "action is eloquence" in Coriolanus does not simply mean that doing is more persuasive than saying: it is also a pun, since pronuntiatio in Latin rhetoric manuals was sometimes also called actio and translated into English as utterance ('Is Action Eloquence? -- A Note on the Use of Rhetorical Terms in Coriolanus and Julius Caesar', N&Q 261[2016] 434-5). In other words, Volumnia is providing a kind of gloss telling the audience what action means in rhetoric studies. Walter Evans and Blaire Zeiders find that the "hoope" into which Sycorax is said to have grown in The Tempest is in fact a hoopoe, a bird associated with witchcraft ('The Fowle Witch Sycorax as 'Hoope' in Shakespeare's The Tempest', N&Q 261[2016] 441-6). Thus there is a pun in calling Sycorax a "foul" (=fowl) witch. Evans and Zeider trace the hoopoe's links to witchcraft: multiple sources say the bird is filthy (hence "foul"), one that it feeds on graves, another that quack doctors used it for divination, another that witches used it. The hoopoe was often invoked as the embodiment of filial love, and certainly Caliban holds his mother in high respect.

Books Reviewed

Brayman, Heidi, Jesse M. Lander and Zachary Lesser, eds. The Book in History, the Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library [2016]. 432 pp., £16.99, ISBN 978-0300223163

Dutton, Richard Shakespeare, Court Dramatist. Oxford University Press [2016]. 336 pp., £35, ISBN 978-0198777748

Kahan, Jeffrey, ed. King Lear: New Critical Essays, Shakespeare Criticism, 33. Routledge [2008]. 374 pp., £37.99, ISBN 978-0415775267

Leahy, William and Paola Pugliatti Journal of Early Modern Studies. Firenze University Press [2016] Volume Five: The Many Lives of William Shakespeare -- Biography, vol. Authorship and Collaboration. 341 pp., £0 (Free on Open Access), ISBN 978-8866559474

Lupton, Julia Reinhard, ed. Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader, Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. Bloomsbury [2016]. 296 pp., £15.65, ISBN 978-1474216371

Murphy, Donna N. The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and the Authorship of Early Shakespeare and Anonymous Plays. Cambridge Scholars Publishing [2015]. 330 pp., £49.99, ISBN 978-1443849883

Purkis, James Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration and Text. Cambridge University Press [2016]. 340 pp., £64.99, ISBN 978-1107119680

Shakespeare, William King Henry IV Part 2, ed. James C. Bulman, The Arden Shakespeare. Bloombury [2016]. 576 pp., £11.99, ISBN 978-1904271376

Shakespeare, William The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan. Third edition. W. W. Norton [2016]. 3536 pp., £66, ISBN 978-0393934991

Traub, Valerie, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race. Oxford University Press [2016]. 816 pp., £35, ISBN 978-0198820406

Vickers, Brian The One King Lear. Harvard University Press [2016]. 416 pp., £24, ISBN 978-067450484