This chapter talks about the editing in Britain of patristic texts, classical texts and the writings of Shakespeare. The broader field of the editing of Greek and Latin classical texts similarly reflected cultural, academic and social issues, though in more complicated ways. Classical editing of course addressed itself to that audience which had access to knowledge of the learned languages, public- and grammar-school and university educated, primarily male. Major editorial work was carried on by gentleman scholars and by professional men. The editing of vernacular literary classics in the long eighteenth century shows a still more extensive and dramatic dissemination of reading, and development of professional institutions and practices and communities of scholarship. Shakespeare is the exemplary case: a native text, even by the beginning of the eighteenth century the great representative of a characteristically British literary genius, played with increasing frequency in the theatre, and the central ground of the exercises and battles of an emerging English literary scholarship.