The various strands of Shakespeare scholarly publishing are explored in this chapter. The emergence of techniques for producing increasingly accurate facsimiles of early modern editions led to the appearance of multiple facsimile editions of the First Folio and of the early quartos. But the period was also marked by significant controversy, most particularly in the instance of John Payne Collier's claim to have uncovered an edition of the 1632 second folio with annotations in the hand of a seventeenth-century theatre functionary. The eventual debunking of Collier's claims destroyed his reputation. Of key importance in the period was the production of the Cambridge Shakespeare, under the primary editorship of William Aldis Wright. This was the first edition produced by university scholars and it offered the definitive scholarly text of its era (in addition to being spun off, commercially, into the Globe Shakespeare). The chapter closes by considering the launch of the Arden Shakespeare, initially under the general editorship of Edward Dowden. The Arden set the model for academic editions produced by a range of editors under the stewardship of a general editor; it has survived through a number of iterations over the course of more than a century.

Bibliography, as defined by W. W. Greg in 1932, excluded meaning; it was to deal only with documentary inscriptions as physical things. This excluded the reader from the editorial equation. A recent series of essays by Hans Walter Gabler repeats the mistake but in a new language.

He proposes that text is based on the fundamental fact of textual variance, and that text is a function of documents. He thus rules out appeal to the biographical author’s intentions. Editorial discourse (emendation, commentary) arises instead, he contends, from the need to explain textual variation.

In contrast, the work model offered in the present book incorporates the reader into text considered as a dimension of experienced meaning. This step requires the meaning of ‘document’ to expand. The two are cast as being in a negative dialectic relationship, dependent on one another to secure their own identities. The embodied work emerges as a regulative concept that embraces the successive iterations of the dialectic over time, around which a new literary studies could be organised. It is argued that Gabler’s binary synchronic needs replacing with a diachronic semiotics such as C. S. Peirce’s.