Some of the earliest witnesses to the Book of Isaiah are translations into Greek and Syriac. Sometimes the translators offered not simply basic equivalents to Hebrew words but shaped their translation of passages to accord with understandings of them that were current in their Jewish communities. Although this can make the window to their Hebrew text opaque, sometimes their differences from today’s standard Hebrew text preserve alternative wordings found elsewhere in early Hebrew texts, while in other cases they include wordings that have not survived in any other Hebrew witnesses. The chief question such differences raise is whether the translator tailored his version to the readers’ pre-understanding or if they reflect different Hebrew words in the manuscript he used. In “Early Versions of Isaiah as Translations and Interpretations,” Ronald L. Troxel cites examples of these conundrums, and illustrates how scholars attempt to reason about their origins.

Randall Martin and others have argued that Shakespeare revised 3 Henry VI after his composition of Richard III to consolidate the early history plays as a sequence. Meanwhile, recent attribution studies argue that Shakespeare originally wrote 3 Henry VI in collaboration with one or more other dramatists, making little or no contribution to Acts 1 and 4. If these arguments are correct, the older hypothesis that the first edition issued in 1595 as The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York is a memorial reconstruction begins to look vulnerable. If it is shorter and less Shakespearean, some possible reasons for these characteristics other than derivative reconstruction are now evident. This chapter will agree with the arguments for collaboration in both versions, and for revision in one. But it will reassert the necessity of regarding Richard Duke of York as a derivative text with a tenuous line of transmission from an authorial script.

The Introduction first outlines the grounds for the collection’s dating parameters for ‘early Shakespeare’. It then discusses what a category such as ‘early’ or ‘late’ might mean for someone with Shakespeare’s long career, and how such temporally bound categories can condition critical responses. Next, it considers the many variables in play in Shakespeare’s early canon, discussing these with relation to the value ascribed to these works. The chapter then reflects upon how most readers of Shakespeare begin somewhere in the middle of the collected works, with super-canonical works like Twelfth Night and Hamlet, before, if ever, working to the margins of the canon where the early works reside. It concludes with brief summaries of each of the chapters in the collection, noting how contributors shed significant new light upon the formative part of Shakespeare’s career.

This is an essay about early Shakespeare and loss. It attempts to put some kind of order on a span of several years when Shakespeare is first writing plays, or parts of plays, in a commercial environment with fellow professionals. It discusses a period of time, the mid-to-late 1580s and early 1590s, for which much information about Shakespeare and other working dramatists is lost. It asks, how do you write about that kind of loss? And, what sort of data-sets do you hold up to the blank spaces of those years, knowing only the likelihood of Shakespeare’s activity, to enable plausible deductions about his early working life? It considers how the early canon has been categorized and written about, situates the documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s first forays in writing in the context of surviving evidence about theatrical activity in the 1580s, contextualizes Shakespeare’s overall career in the light of those of his peers, and, finally, considers some of the defining features of Shakespeare’s earliest writings.

The works of Joseph Conrad (b. 1857) and D. H. Lawrence (b. 1885) came from deeper sources than Boldrewood’s (see Chapter 7) and are far more ambitious in scope and thematic concern. In such cases the biographical sources and initiating phases of the work’s existence generally repay intent study.

The tortured genesis and revision of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) is clarified by reference to MSS materials. The work–version relationship is put under productive stress, the implications for editing are pursued, and a book-historically informed avenue for literary study is demonstrated.

The marvellous new world of widespread literacy and the ready availability of print, complemented by the effects of the US Chace Act of 1891, the rise of literary agents and upmarket literary publishers such as Seltzer and Secker mediated the forms of Lawrence’s idiosyncratic writings. Since every act of writing presupposes a reading, even in Lawrence’s case, literary study needs to be informed by this conditioning context. The versionality of his writings uncovered by the Cambridge Works editors argues the need for a digital critical archive of his writings organised on a temporal principle.