Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
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

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM EDINBURGH SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.edinburgh.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Edinburgh University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in ESO for personal use.date: 07 March 2021

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

Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.