3 - Textual Studies

Summary

The publication of the Norton facsimile of the First Folio, edited by Charlton Hinman, is the culminating achievement of many years of devoted labour by the editor and by earlier investigators of the printing of the Folio. In a real sense this is the first edition of the First Folio, of a book representing as nearly as is possible the ideal copy of the Folio as Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount intended to publish it. Where extant copies of the Folio may vary in formes corrected at press, this facsimile presents every variant forme in its latest or most fully corrected state and in addition it reproduces each page from the most legible exemplar to be found among thirty of the best copies of the Folio in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Editorial matter is limited to the marginal printing of through line numbers (as advocated by McKerrow) which will provide a new standard system of numbering for the Folio plays and to the supplying of cross-references to the conventional act, scene and line numbering at the foot of each page. The facsimile is followed by an appendix of fourteen plates illustrating the cancelland and cancel settings of the last page of Romeo and Juliet and the first of Troilus and Cressida, two of the extant proof-sheets, together with the corrected state of the pages involved and three selected pages in uncorrected and corrected states.