ABSTRACT:
Starting from the vantage point of editing a new Arden Shakespeare edition of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and a new Norton edition of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night", this paper will examine what might be called the "apostolic succession" of editors and editions that from the early eighteenth century forward have created the "text" of Shakespeare that is by now familiar to us for these (and other) plays -- a text that is often strikingly different from the earliest Quarto and / or Folio texts of Shakespeare's plays produced during his lifetime or in the later seventeenth century. Focusing on Rowe, Theobald, Capell and other influential eighteenth-century and later editors -- whose emendations continue to be reproduced in modern texts of the plays (and translations of the plays into other languages)-- the paper will go on to examine crucial examples of such emendation and the editorial transformation of the early texts, which literally created new texts that in turn became the basis of an entire history of criticism and close reading of those plays.
