Case study
Make your own: Editing a Renaissance play
Background / Context
Only a tiny fraction of the extant corpus of Renaissance plays is widely available in reliable and
user-friendly editions. However, almost all can now be read through Literature Online or Early
English Books Online or, in most cases, both. Many of the plays which are not widely known may
indeed be of poor artistic quality or suffer from textual dificulties or continuity glitches
(sometimes arising from multiple authorship): in Peele’s Edward I, for instance, a character who
has previously been beheaded is referred to as plotting a further rebellion, while in Field, Fletcher
and Massinger’s Knight of Malta, one character is referred to, without explanation, by two entirely
different names. In Richard Brome’s The Queen’s Exchange, which a student has edited for this
module, two characters who are separately named, Alberto and the hermit, appear to be the same
character - the hermit and his servant carry the banished and wounded Segebert off in Act II
Scene iii (in Northumbria) only for Segebert to reappear in the West Saxon court in Act V Scene
ii, accompanied by the original banished lord, Alberto. There is no intervening scene that explains
the connection between the hermit and Alberto, but the implication is clear, which provided
something of a headache for the student who edited it.
Nevertheless, the nitty-gritty, hands-on engagement with these texts which producing an edition
of them demands is something which students, in my experience, find both enormously
informative and, in most cases, enormously enjoyable.
Even though we do not collate manuscript variants or press-variants for this exercise and confine
ourselves to plays which exist in only one text, the preparation of an edition demands an
extraordinary number of skills. At the most basic level, the module requirement that editions
should be modern-spelling makes it imperative to be able to spell, punctuate, and parse an English
sentence correctly. The typically frequent references to classical deities and other mythological
motifs all require to be glossed, which generally constitutes a useful refresher course in itself.
Students need to remind themselves of (or grasp for the first time) the fundamental principles of
iambic pentameter, so that they can spot if (as so often) any lines of verse have been mislineated
during the printing process. They soon learn that errors can, and usually will, creep in anywhere,
and that they matter. Many of the students have chosen Roman plays – that is, seventeenth- or
late sixteenth-century plays dealing with subjects from Roman history – and have been on a very
steep learning curve about the Caesars, Latin phrases, Roman customs, and the cultural meanings
of classical texts in the Renaissance. It has been hard work, but they have been glad to do it, and
have all benefited enormously. Finally, having wrestled with all this, they are required to supply a
4000 word introduction setting the text in its historical and critical context.
Activities / Practice
The initial allocation of texts takes place well in advance, at the point when students choose the
module. I ask students whether they would prefer comedy, tragedy, or history, whether would
like a play with a local setting or one based on a true story, and so on, and together we arrive at
something which stands a reasonable chance of being interesting to them. The module runs for
one semester, and is supported by weekly seminars of two hours each. After an initial
introductory meeting, the first week is devoted to a session called ‘Lineation: establishing a text –
verse or prose?’. The second looks at the structure of a critical edition, with case studies of the
contents pages of the Arden and Oxford editions of The Tempest, on which I invite students to do
a compare-and-contrast exercise. A later week covers the ‘band of terror’, the textual notes often
to be found at the foot of the page in a scholarly edition. We usually focus specifically on a passage
from the Arden 2 Hamlet, where, underneath the page on which the Player King breaks off his
speech in tears, there appears the following set of notes:
515. whe’er Capell (whe’r); where Q2, F. 516. Prithee] Q2; Pray you F.
517. of this] Q2; not in F. 519. you] Q2; ye F. 520. abstract] Q2;
Abstracts F, QI. 522. live] Q2, QI; liued F. 524. bodkin] Q2; bodykins
F. much] Q2; not in F; farre QI. 525. shall] Q2; should F, QI.
531. To First Player] As they follow Polonius, Hamlet detains and steps aside with I Player. White.
Slowly, and I hope humanely, students are encouraged to make sense of this and to see why it is
interesting. A later week looks at reviews of editions from The Year’s Work in English Studies and
other sources. I also invite past MA students to come along for one week and talk about what
they learned from the module, whether they have anything to recommend, and whether they
would have done anything differently; this also serves a number of ancillary purposes, since it helps
build links between MA and PhD students, and I hope too that it is encouraging for current
students to learn that two of their recent predecessors have had notes published in Notes and
Queries which arose from their work on their plays, and that a third has built up his introduction
into a paper which he has successfully delivered at a conference and is now consolidating into an
article. The remaining sessions include one in a computer-enabled room which involves
introducing the students to useful resources such as previous products of the module (and of the
undergraduate version) at http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/resources.html; other online editions
of Renaissance plays at http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm and at
http://web.uvic.ca/shakespeare/; and information about individual plays and playwrights at
http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm, http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/reed/, Dave Kathman’s
biographical index of English drama before 1660 at http://shakespeareauthorship.com/bd/,
http://www.litencyc.com and Gabriel Egan’s non-Shakespearean drama database at
http://www.gabrielegan.com/nsdd/index.htm
We also look at the three invaluable online resources to which SHU fortunately subscribes, the
Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of National Biography, and Early English Books Online, and we
talk about ways of presenting material and which format the students find most helpful: where
should notes be? Where should note markers go? What sort of things should be glossed?
All the other sessions are run on a clinic basis, with all of us collectively looking at difficulties and
cruxes which students have encountered in their texts. Each student in the group is asked to bring
a page of the ‘original’ text and the equivalent page of how it now looks in their treatment of it.
We all really pore over these, paying attention to every tiniest detail. This year I too have brought
passages from Ford’s The Broken Heart and The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, which I am currently
editing for the Oxford Complete Ford; next year my colleague Matthew Steggle will be doing the
same with Richard Brome’s The English Moor, which he is editing for the Complete Works of Richard
Brome.
The module has not been without challenges. It does demand a considerable range of skills,
including an ear for verse, which is extremely helpful for this purpose but also extremely hard to
teach. There have been some bad moments, when students have been totally stumped by an
unfamiliar word or name. By the same token, though, it has also been an extremely useful tool for
teaching students that the most dangerous word of all is the one you think you don’t need to look
up. The module has generated several publications: as well as the two notes in Notes and Queries
and the conference paper, there has been a piece about editing theory in Literature Compass. Most
importantly, this has proved to be a module which enthuses and engages students; indeed some of
them become quite passionate about ‘their’ play. They can choose a text which plays to their
strengths: for instance, a student with a strong interest in mediaeval Scottish history chose to edit
J. W.’s The Valiant Scot, which centres on William Wallace. They can choose which aspects of the
edition to develop: one student, noticing that a high number of the characters in her play died by
poison, made a special study of this and ended up writing her MA dissertation on death by
poisoning in Renaissance drama; another concentrated his efforts on the uncertain date of his play,
unearthing previously neglected evidence for the dating which he is currently developing into a
note for Notes and Queries.
Conclusions
Over the four years it has been running, no student has failed this module, and some have been
awarded higher marks for it than for any of their previous work, in a just reflection of how much
energy and care they have brought to the task. What they learn from it stands them in good stead
for all their other work too, for it involves not only the editing of a specific text but exposure –
often for the first time – to the idea of why we need editions and what questions we should ask
before we buy, cite or trust an edition of any text from this period.
Bibliographical references
Duxfield, Andrew. ‘Modern Problems of Editing: The Two Texts of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus’.
Literature Compass. Online: http://www.literature-compass.com/viewpoint.asp?section=2&ref=476
‘”Fferrarae’s Heire”: A Note on the Date of The Fatal Marriage; or a Second Lucretia’, Notes and
Queries 51.3 (September 2004): 296-7.
Early Modern Literary Studies Hosted Resources. Online:
http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/resources.html
Wilkinson, Katherine. ‘A Source for The City Wit’, Notes and Queries 52.2 (June 2005): 230-232.