‘Taking just care of the impression’: Editorial Intervention in Shakespeare's Fourth Folio, 1685

Summary

Nicholas Rowe is still widely regarded as the first professional editor of Shakespeare. Because significant seventeenth-century contributions to the editorial tradition were systematically overlooked, disregarded or silently absorbed by Rowe and his successors, he remains the 'father' of Shakespearian editing. The predominant view, according to which Shakespeare's seventeenth-century editors were simple-minded printers' correctors is similarly short-sighted. Though anonymous, they were theatrically minded specialists, whose work is much closer to current editorial practices than is Rowe's interventionist editing in his 1709 edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works.

Evidence of editorial intervention can be found in a range of seventeenth-century texts, including Quarto and Folio editions, promptbooks, acting editions and adaptations, manuscript annotations and transcriptions. Restoration adaptations, for example, anticipate 'all the activities that editors of Shakespeare still undertake . . . - the modernization of spelling, the introduction of stage directions . . . , the drawing up of a list of dramatis personae, and, that highest of all editorial activities, the collation of quarto and folio variants'. The practical advantages of regarding seventeenth-century adapters as the precursors of eighteenth-century editors are manifold. The editors of Macbeth in the Complete Oxford Shakespeare (1986), for example, include two songs, which the Folio fails to preserve in full.