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  • Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare by Paul Werstine
  • William Proctor Williams (bio)
Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare. By Paul Werstine. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Illus. Pp. xvi + 430. $99.00 cloth.

It has been estimated that between 1570 and 1642, some 3,000 plays were written for the professional theater in England.1 Let us assume that for those 3,000 plays the playwright(s) eventually produced a draft that underwent further revision, requiring the production of another draft, clean enough for the Master of the Revels and others to read and understand. From that came the approved book, which may have been the same as the previous draft but could have been yet a further draft; from that came yet another document that we have come to call the promptbook, and from that or those almost certainly came further partial or whole manuscripts of the play. All this adds up to four or five documents of various kinds just to get to performance, with no notion of what will be required to get to print, yielding something in the neighborhood of 13,000 dramatic manuscripts existing at various times during these seventy-two years. According to Greg, about 800 plays have survived in print, and estimates of surviving manuscripts range from 18 (Long), to 21 (Werstine, in this volume), to 125 (Grace Ioppolo), with the difference in the numbers having to do with how dramatic manuscript is defined.2 Less than a half-dozen of these manuscripts are in any way connected to a printed edition. Finally, no example of printer’s copy survives for any of these plays.3 This is the physical situation.

Since early printed editions will, perforce, serve as the basis for the modern editing of these plays, a question for editors is what texts were used to produce the early printed editions. Attempting to deal with this dilemma, at least in part, caused the rise of what came to be called the New Bibliography, founded by A. W. Pollard, R. B. McKerrow, and W. W. Greg. The New Bibliography was grounded on the study [End Page 473] of the book as a physical object and involved study of the technical procedures of setting, printing, proofing, binding, and selling of books. This methodology so revolutionized scholarly editing, as well as the description of printed books, that generations of scholars were taught it and it came to completely dominate the field. Alas, for W. W. Greg and for some others of his time, the physical evidence—“empirical” evidence, to use one of Werstine’s favorite words in this book—was not able to fully explain, or explain at all, the connection between what the author(s) had committed to the manuscripts that no longer exist and the texts that survive in printed form. Put more simply, how close are the surviving printed texts to what the author(s) intended the texts to say?

In a remark by Edward Knight, the bookkeeper for the King’s Men in the 1620s and 1630s, in his transcription of Fletcher’s Bonduca, Greg thought he had found the answer. Knight said, “‘The booke where by it was first Acted from is lost: and this hath beene transcrib’d from the fowle papers of the Authors wch were found’” (13). Even though it seems likely that Knight meant no more than the modern expression “fouled up” or something similar, Greg seized on this to create the hitherto-unknown category of dramatic manuscript, foul papers, and consequently the other categories of promptbook and/or approved book. This jibed well with the New Bibliographers’ correct understanding that every transmission of a text committed without authorial intervention produces a new series of erroneous textual variants, and foul papers must be the closest thing to the author’s intention. The authority of Greg meant that this idea, based on almost no documentary evidence, immediately became part of the techniques of the followers of the New Bibliography.

Now Greg was a great scholar who worked with these manuscripts for decades. Werstine does an excellent job in the first half of...

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