![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay attempts to insulate the Folio from periodic swings of opinion about it by illustrating that some aspects of this text have gained greater respect over the last four centuries. The essay locates the importance of the Folio specifically in the increased esteem for its apparent reflection of early performance, as instanced in the editorial handling of a pair of cruxes near the close of A Midsummer Night's Dream. This essay charts a course from the eighteenth-century rhetorical denigration of Folio readings as supposedly corrupt theatrical documents to valuable witnesses of stage practice by some editors in the nineteenth century and later. Part of this essay's original contribution is also an emphasis on the ease with which editors moved from text to text, and line by line, to construct thoroughly hybrid editorial texts. At our four hundred-year remove, the Folio remains a powerful force not principally because it was endorsed by a series of editors who agreed on its prominence but because it has persisted through an extensive series of editorial arguments about its performability and its overall validity.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Collins; Higgins; Mays; Rasmussen; Smith, ed.; West, Census; West, Sales; West and Rasmussen, eds.; Weingust; Williams and Lazzuri, eds.
2 I am grateful to an anonymous reader for the formulation of this sentence and the previous one, and for help in orienting this essay to these concerns.
3 See Shakespeare 2016 (ed. Erne), 1125n7.44: “This change [regarding Lysander / Theseus] may be related to the Folio’s addition to the scene of Lysander’s stepfather [father-in-law?], Egeus.”
4 See also, inter alia, Taylor and Jowett, Wells and Taylor, and Shakespeare 1986, Works.
5 Act divisions are first given in the Folio.
6 For another emphasis on struggle in textual matters, see Egan.
7 Cf. Shakespeare 1905 (ed. Cuningham): “The text of this play has reached us in a state more perfect than perhaps that of any other play of Shakespeare” (xiii).
8 For more on the mis-lining, see Turner 47–54.
9 Citations from Q, and TLNs from F, are cross-referenced by citations from act, scene, and line number from the most recent Arden edition: Shakespeare 2017, ed. Chaudhuri.
10 The Folio is cited by TLN from Shakespeare 1623 [1968].
11 See Wells and Taylor 285: “Almost certainly F has simply failed to alter one of its copy prefixes.” See also Shakespeare 1994 (ed. Holland), 235n (5.1.76n): “QF gives the speech to Philostrate but in F this becomes Philostrate’s only speech in the scene. His sudden intervention seems odd and discordant, reminding the audience of his role in 1.1 and that Egeus has taken over his job. F is likely to have failed to have changed one of the SPs in Q2 in making the change for the restaged scene.”
12 Shakespeare 1632, 1:159–60; Shakespeare 1663, 159; Shakespeare 1685, 1:143.
13 For a similar eighteenth-century preference for the quarto at a crux in Troilus and Cressida, see Held.
14 The list focuses on collected editions of Shakespeare. Conflation of Q and F was also happening in single-text editions of Shakespeare as well; see Reilly. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for this reference. For a more comprehensive listing of early editions, see Murphy.
15 Shakespeare 1745, ed. 1:127–30; Shakespeare 1747, 1:157–61; Shakespeare 1765, 1:160–64; Shakespeare 1773, 3:88–90; and Shakespeare 1778, 3:104–9.
16 Shakespeare 1768, 3:60 (pagination for A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
17 Shakespeare 1821, 5:310n2, 5:311–12n6. I identify the 1803 edition primarily with the surviving member of its editorial partnership, Reed, though it included some new notes also from Steevens (died 1800).
18 Shakespeare 1803, 4:465n3. Johnson’s note is cited at 4:466–67n7.
19 Shakespeare 1839, 373–74; Shakespeare 1855?, 341–42; and Shakespeare 1858–60, 1:375.
20 Shakespeare 1839, 374 note c, col. 1. See also Shakespeare 1858–60, 375 note b.
21 Shakespeare 1857, 2:225–28; Shakespeare 1863–66, 2:258–62; and Shakespeare 1883, 464–66.
22 Stanley Wells also argues against doubling: “it would be difficult for a single actor to double Philostrate and Egeus in the play’s opening scene, since only four to six lines separate Philostrate’s exit from Egeus’s entry (19–22).