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The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts$
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The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

Print publication date: 2011

Print ISBN-13: 9780748635238

Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: March 2012

DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748635238.001.0001

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PRINTED FROM EDINBURGH SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.edinburgh.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Edinburgh University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in ESO for personal use.date: 03 April 2020

Textual Shakespeare

Textual Shakespeare

Chapter:
(p.11) 1 Textual Shakespeare
Source:
The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts
Author(s):

Sonia Massai

Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748635238.003.0002

This chapter describes the range and type of variant readings introduced by subsequent generations of editors in a short sample scene in King Lear. It shows that even the earliest publishers of Shakespeare's works were acutely aware of the impact of the textual and paratextual features of their editions on their readers. It reviews the impact of the rise of scholarly editorial tradition on the transmission of Shakespeare in print from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. The tendency to monumentalize rather than to edit Shakespeare systematically continued despite the increasing stress placed on justifying and supporting editorial intervention by means of a thorough collation of the early editions. A renewed interest in the medium of print as fashioning rather than corrupting ‘textual Shakespeare’ has led increasing numbers of scholars and research students to work with facsimiles or digital images of the early editions, now available online.

Keywords:   textual Shakespeare, King Lear, online, editors, readings, editorial intervention, print

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