Playbook Titles as Evidence of Copy Text Type

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. http://deep.sas.upenn.edu [accessed 4 April 2019].

2. The list of plays and titles I considered is available at www.shakespearestext.com/titles [accessed 4 April 2019].

3. I have not sought to reproduce the erratic mixture of roman and italic types, and the mixture of upper- and lowercase that we typically find on title pages. I have modernized the spellings.

4. I have eschewed inferences about the identities of publishers and printers not named on title pages. For example, Q1 of Romeo and Juliet (1597) does not identify the publisher. On the strength of a Stationer’s Register entry of 1607, transferring title to the play from Cuthbert Burby to Nicholas Ling, some scholars have inferred that Burby was the publisher of Q1. However, that is not certain, since Q2 (1599), which names Burby as the publisher, intervened between those events, and we are not entitled to assume that both quartos had the same publisher, since publishers did not always register their titles.

5. This narrative is in large measure the same as that given by Lukas Erne, building on Blayney, although Erne does not make the connection with long titles and his argument is directed towards the main thesis of his book, that Shakespeare wrote long plays for readers, not playgoers (Erne 228).

6. Tiffany Stern has speculated that The Merchant of Venice quarto title page was copied from a playbill (Stern 61). That is certainly possible but can remain only a speculation since no playbills have survived.