3 - Editions and Textual Studies

Summary

This has not been a good year for the texts of Romeo and Juliet. Apparently, though, the worst is not so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’. I was ready to pronounce an edition prepared by two relatively inexperienced editors, in which I found forty-one substantive errors (see below), the worst edition under review. And yet, that distinction belongs, utterly surprisingly, to the work of a veteran editor: Jay Halio's new parallel-texts edition of Romeo and Juliet contains an astounding 108 errors in the text of the play.

The experience of reading Halio's edition is an emotionally variegated one for a critic concerned with textual accuracy. I laughed at the howlers (e.g. instead of calling for a mattock as he enters the tomb, Friar Laurence requests a ‘hammock’, Q1 5.2.21; his poison resides not in the infant rind of a weak flower but in its ‘instant rind’, Q1 2.2.23); I cried at the invented words (e.g. at Q1 1.1.222 ‘with beauty’ unaccountably becomes ‘with heaven's beauty’; ‘rest’ at Q2 4.5.6 becomes ‘sleep’); and I got angry at variants appearing in lines which are identical in Q1 and Q2 (e.g. whereas both Q1 and Q2 read ‘I lent him’ at 2.2.81, Halio's text of Q1 reads ‘I gave him’; both Q1 and Q2 read ‘poison’ at 4.3.20 but Halio's Q1 reads ‘potion’). All told, I found seventeen lines with invented words, twenty-one lines with omitted words, twenty transpositions, ten instances in which a different preposition is substituted for the one in the copy-text, an omitted line (at Q2 2.4.127 add ‘him than he was when you sought him; I’), and thirty-nine further assorted textual errors. A parallel-text edition of Q1 and Q2 has obvious potential utility, but the unfortunate textual editing throughout renders this one all but useless.