Abstract
In the eighteenth century, Lewis Theobald declared ‘we have scarce any book in the English tongue more fertile of errors than the plays of Shakespeare’ (Shakespeare Restored, p. i.). This Chapter explores the role of textual error when reading a play, specifically the unique case of The Comedy of Errors. In the earliest edition, the First Folio, the ambiguous speech-prefixes replicate the same confusion of twins as the play itself dramatizes. Thus, in the context of Erasmus’s Humanist ideals of standardisation embodied in the process of ‘proofing’ a work, this chapter seeks to defend the value of these printed slips. Textual criticism has until recently been engaged with removing the error and uncovering the ‘truth’ of Shakespeare’s text, whereas the printed copies identified here demonstrate the ineradicability of textual error. The chapter draws attention to a set of readers who encounter this error and fail to correct it in the annotations they leave behind. It proposes a new aspect of the material text for inclusion in the interpretation of the play and potentially for future editions.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
George Steevens, ed., The Plays of William Shakespeare (London, 1773), 10 Vols., Vol. 2, p. 221.
- 2.
Brian Gibbons, ‘Erring and Straying Like Lost Sheep: “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Comedy of Errors”’, Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 50 (1997), 111–124, p. 116.
- 3.
Although Sonia Massai has recently challenged this idea of Nicholas Rowe’s edition as a ‘crucial watershed’ by examining the editorial practices of ‘annotating readers’ pre-1709, the distinction is meaningful in terms of the turn towards error in Shakespeare’s text by Rowe and subsequent editors, of which the like had not before been seen. See Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 2.
- 4.
Anthony James West, ‘The Life of the First Folio in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy, (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 71–90, p. 82.
- 5.
Nicholas Rowe, ‘Dedication’, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, Vol. 1 (London, 1709).
- 6.
Rowe, ‘Dedication’, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear.
- 7.
Rowe, ‘Dedication’, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear.
- 8.
Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 18.
- 9.
John Jowett, ‘Shakespeare and the Kingdom of Error’, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Critical Reference Edition, eds. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. xlix–lxiii, xlix.
- 10.
Alexander Pope, ‘Preface’, The Works of Shakespear (London, 1725), p. i.
- 11.
Pope, ‘Preface’, p. ii.
- 12.
Pope, ‘Preface’, p. ix.
- 13.
Pope, ‘Preface’, p. xiv.
- 14.
Pope, ‘Preface’, p. xx.
- 15.
Pope, ‘Preface’, p. xxi.
- 16.
Pope, ‘Preface’, p. xxi.
- 17.
Lewis Theobald, ‘Titlepage’, Shakespeare Restored (London, 1726).
- 18.
Theobald, Shakespeare Restored, p. i.
- 19.
Theobald, Shakespeare Restored, p. i.
- 20.
Theobald, Shakespeare Restored, p. ii.
- 21.
Theobald, Shakespeare Restored, p. ii.
- 22.
Theobald, Shakespeare Restored, p. v.
- 23.
See de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, pp. 54–55. De Grazia’s study is widely concerned with the preliminaries of the various eighteenth-century editions, but does not focus on their discussions of error.
- 24.
Edward Capell, Mr. William Shakespeare His Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (London, 1768), 10 Vols., Vol. 1, pp. 49–74.
- 25.
Capell, ‘Do, of Plays ascrib’d to him’ in ‘Introduction’, Mr. William Shakespeare, Vol. 1.
- 26.
Capell, ‘Introduction’, Mr. William Shakespeare, Vol. 1, p. 1.
- 27.
Capell, ‘Introduction’, Mr. William Shakespeare, Vol. 1, p. 2.
- 28.
Thomas Hamner, ‘The Preface to the Oxford Edition’, in The Works of Shakespear in Six Volumes (London, 1745), p. v.
- 29.
Hamner, The Works of Shakespear, p. vi.
- 30.
Lewis Theobald, ‘The Preface’, Works of Shakespeare (London, 1733), 7 Vols., Vol. 1, p. xl. Andrew Murphy has usefully catalogued all the editions of Shakespeare, available in Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 279–410.
- 31.
Fredson Bowers, ‘Today’s Shakespeare Texts, and Tomorrow’s’, Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 19 (1966), 39–65, p. 59.
- 32.
On New Textualism, see Randall McLeod, ‘Un-editing Shak-speare’, Sub-Stance, Vol. 10/11, No. 33–34 (1981/1982), 26–55; Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 44 (1993); Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996); Laurie Maguire and Thomas L. Berger, eds., Textual Formations and Reformations (London: Associated University Presses, 1998). For a critique of New Bibliography, see Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
- 33.
De Grazia and Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, pp. 256–257.
- 34.
De Grazia and Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, p. 256.
- 35.
Randall McLeod, ‘Unemending Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Winter, 1981), 75–96, p. 96.
- 36.
John Jowett, ‘Editing Shakespeare’s Plays in the Twentieth Century’, Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 59 (2006), 1–19, p. 14.
- 37.
Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
- 38.
Jowett, ‘Editing Shakespeare’s Plays’, p. 15.
- 39.
Mowat, ‘The Problem of Shakespeare’s Text(s)’, p. 132. Maguire makes the same observation: ‘The long-term influence of the New Bibliography can be seen in the apodeictic rhetoric of textual introductions to most twentieth-century scholarly editions’. See Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The Bad Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 22. Leah Marcus points out, ‘[t]o an extent that few of us recognise, our standard editions are shaped by nineteenth-century or even earlier assumptions and ideologies’. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, p. 5.
- 40.
For example, The Riverside Shakespeare has a ‘Textual Notes’ section at the end of the play where textual details that do not appear in the main body of the play are noted, such as the variants between texts. See Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). At the beginning of the Cambridge edition of Cymbeline, there is a ‘Textual Note’ which explains the otherwise silent modernization of spelling, the treatment of stage directions and the division of the play into acts and scenes. See Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. Martin Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 73–74.
- 41.
Marcus, ‘Editing Shakespeare in a Postmodern Age’, in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 128–144, pp. 135–136.
- 42.
See also Paul Werstine, ‘“Foul Papers” and “Prompt-Books”: Printer’s Copy for Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors”’, Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 41 (1988), 232–246.
- 43.
Maguire, ‘The Girls from Ephesus’, in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Miola (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 355–383, 356.
- 44.
See Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), TLN 163, 394, according to Charlton Hinman’s Through Line Numbering (TLN) found in the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE), ed. Matthew Steggle, http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/ [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 45.
R. A. Foakes, ‘Introduction’ to Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1991), p. xii.
- 46.
See Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, pp. 88, 90, TLN 409, EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 47.
Foakes, ‘Introduction’, p. xii.
- 48.
TLN 30, 35, 101, 127, 160, 1671.
- 49.
TLN 982, 1038, 1045, 1056, 1467, 1472, 1488, 1490, 1496, 1587, 1593, 1736.
- 50.
As Foakes points out, Menaechmus of Epidamnum (who corresponds to Antipholus of Ephesus) is more central dramatically than his twin brother, whereas Shakespeare gives his Antipholus of Syracuse more prominence, including nearly a hundred lines more dialogue than his brother. R. A. Foakes, ‘Introduction’, p. xxv. Plautus focuses the action of the Menaechmi on the twin in his home town while the other twin orbits around him, whereas Shakespeare reverses this feature, focusing on the wandering, lost twin, emphasising his being in error.
- 51.
R. B. McKerrow, ‘A Suggestion Regarding Shakespeare’s Manuscripts’, Review of English Studies, Vol. 44 (1935), 459–465, p. 460.
- 52.
McKerrow, ‘A Suggestion Regarding Shakespeare’s Manuscripts’, p. 460.
- 53.
TLN 1762, 1766, 1771, 1778, 1783, 1785, 1788, 1801, 1838.
- 54.
McKerrow, ‘A Suggestion Regarding Shakespeare’s Manuscripts’, p. 461.
- 55.
McKerrow, ‘A Suggestion Regarding Shakespeare’s Manuscripts’, pp. 464–465.
- 56.
McKerrow, ‘A Suggestion Regarding Shakespeare’s Manuscripts’, p. 464.
- 57.
W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 114.
- 58.
See also James Knapp who claims that the confusion in the speech-prefixes is evidence of the author’s own manuscript. James Knapp, ‘Textual Introduction’ to The Comedy of Errors in The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn., ed. Stephen Greenblatt (London: W. W. Norton, 2016), p. 752.
- 59.
See G. Blakemore Evans, ed., Shakespearean Prompt-books of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 3 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), online edition available http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/ShaComP.html [accessed 12 March 2018]. For the most recent study of Shakespeare’s readers see Jean-Christophe Mayer, Shakespeare’s Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Claire M. L. Bourne, 'Marking Shakespeare', Shakespeare, Vol. 13 Issue 4, 367–386.
- 60.
Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 241. Smith argues that ‘Mr Biggs (who played Antipholus of Ephesus) and Mr Disney (his Syracusan twin), Mrs Cooke, who played Luciana, and Mr and Mrs Coysh (Dromio of Ephesus and Adriana) were all members of Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Company performing at Drury Lane in London in the 1660s and 1670s.’ p. 241.
- 61.
Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, p. 241.
- 62.
Although these texts are well-known and discussed because they represent only a small body of extant evidence from the seventeenth century, their individual treatments of error-correction or interaction has not been addressed.
- 63.
For a digitisation of this see: Evans, Shakespearean Promptbooks of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 3, http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/images/ce12open.jpg [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 64.
See Evans, Shakespearean Promptbooks of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 3, http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/images/ce-p88a.jpg [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 65.
At lines 1, 14, 17, 22, 41, 43, 46, 51, 54, 58, 60, 62, 65, 149, 157, 162, 165, 168, 183, 198, 200, 214. See http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/images/ce-p88b.jpg [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 66.
See Evans, Shakespearean Promptbooks of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 3, http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/images/ce-p90.jpg [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 67.
This occurs another twelve times. See lines: 27, 40, 42, 54, 57, 59, 63, 69, 73, 80, 84, 123.
- 68.
See Evans, Shakespearean Promptbooks of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 3, http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/images/ce-p92.jpg [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 69.
See also: 3.2.54, where Hand 1 prefixes the F speech-head ‘Ant.’ with ‘S:’; also at lines 56, 58, 60, 60, 66, 71, 75, 79, 84, 90, 95, 103, 107, 110, 114, 118, 122, 125, 128, 133, 136, 142, 152, 161, 170, 174, 176, 181, 184. [http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/images/ce-p92.jpg [accessed 12 March 2018]; 4.1.15 where Hand 1 prefixes the F speech-head ‘Ant.’ with ‘E:’; also at lines 34 41, 43, 48, 54, 57, 62, 64, 66, 74, 80, 93, 96’ 100; 4.3.15 where Hand 1 prefixes the F speech-head ‘Ant.’ with ‘S:’; also at lines 21, 29, 34, 42, 48, 50, 63, 66, 80, http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/images/ce-p94.jpg [accessed 12 March 2018]; 4.4.1 where Hand 1 prefixes the F speech-head ‘An.’ with ‘E:’; also at lines 11, 13, 15, 17, 24, 27, 43, 47, 56, 61, 63, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 85, 90, 98, 104, 112, 127, 129, http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/images/ce-p95.jpg [accessed 12 March 2018]; and 5.1.23 where Hand 1 prefixes F speech-head ‘Ant.’ with ‘S:’, also at lines 25, 29, http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/images/ce-p96.jpg [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 70.
Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 117.
- 71.
See Evans, ‘The Douai Manuscript—Six Shakespearean Transcripts (1694–1695)’, Philological Quarterly, Vol. 41 (1962), 158–172 and Ann-Mari Hedbäck, ‘The Douai Manuscript Reexamined’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 73, No. 1 (1979), 1–18.
- 72.
The Catalogue general des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques, Vol. 6: Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de Douai, ed. C. Dehaisnes (1978) of the Douai Public Library states: ‘Provient sans doute de l’un des couvents anglais de Douai’, pp. 477–478.
- 73.
Evans, ‘The Douai Manuscript’, p. 164.
- 74.
Evans, ‘The Douai Manuscript’, p. 165.
- 75.
Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts, p. 118.
- 76.
Arthur Marotti and Laura Estill, ‘Manuscript Circulation’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 53–70, p. 64.
- 77.
Jean-Christophe Mayer, ‘Annotating and Transcribing for the Theatre: Shakespeare’s Early Modern Reader–Revisers at Work’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, eds. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 163–176, 171.
- 78.
The overwhelming sense that promptbooks are useful to understanding the stage is in part due to the lack of evidence of early performance. As Charles Shattuck’s The Shakespeare Promptbooks: A Descriptive Catalogue shows us, there are only three performances of Errors from which we have related texts, we have no texts from the eighteenth century and the next recorded text is John Philip Kemble’s from 1811. Charles Shattuck, The Shakespeare Promptbooks: A Descriptive Catalogue (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1965), p. 67.
- 79.
Shattuck, The Shakespeare Promptbooks, p. 3.
- 80.
Evans describes the Smock Alley prompt-book to be ‘of uncertain date but almost certainly before 1700’. Evans, ‘Introduction “The Comedy of Errors” First Folio’, Shakespearean Promptbooks of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 3, http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/ShaComP.html [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 81.
Evans, ‘Smock Alley “The Comedy of Errors” Third Folio Introduction’, Shakespearean Promptbooks of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 8, http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/Sha8CEP.html#n1 [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 82.
Evans, ‘Smock Alley “The Comedy of Errors” Third Folio Introduction’ at http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/Sha8CEP.html#n1.
- 83.
Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, p. 241.
- 84.
See Charles Whitworth, who upholds this distinction in Errors: ‘Rectifying Shakespeare’s Errors: Romance and Farce in Bardeditry’, in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Miola (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 227–260, 242.
- 85.
This distinction has been challenged by: Paul Werstine, ‘“Foul Papers” and “Prompt-Books”: Printer’s Copy for Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors’, Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 41 (1988), 232–246; William B. Long, ‘“John a Kent and John a Cumber”: An Elizabethan Playbook and its Implications’, in Shakespeare and Dramatic Tradition, eds. W. R. Elton and William B. Long (Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1989), pp. 125–143; Werstine, ‘Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: “Foul Papers” and “Bad” Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 41 (1990), 65–86; and David Bradley, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
- 86.
For discussion of this copy, see Noriko Sumimoto, ‘Updating Folios: Readers’ Reconfigurations and Customisations of Shakespeare’, Early Modern Literary Studies, Vol. 21 (2013), at https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-21/07-Sumimoto_Updating%20Folios.htm [accessed 14 February 2018].
- 87.
Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespear’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies Published According to the True Original Copies (London, 1685), Wing / S2917, from the Bodleian Library, available via EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 88.
Pope, ‘Preface’, p. xxi.
- 89.
Pope, The Works of Shakespear, Vol. 1, p. 449.
- 90.
Thomas Dekker, ‘Ad Lectorum’, Satiro-mastix, or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet (London, 1602).
- 91.
For one of the most detailed discussions of errata in early modern literature, see Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 75–136.
- 92.
Whitworth, ‘Rectifying Shakespeare’s Errors’, p. 242.
- 93.
Jowett, ‘Shakespeare and the Kingdom of Error’, p. l.
- 94.
Jowett, ‘Shakespeare and the Kingdom of Error’, p. lxii.
- 95.
Patricia Parker, ‘Elder and Younger: The Opening Scene of The Comedy of Errors’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), 325–327, p. 325.
- 96.
Parker, ‘Elder and Younger’, p. 325.
- 97.
Parker, ‘Elder and Younger’, p. 326.
- 98.
Barbara Freedman notes the role of these two types of error, as the experience of observing the mistaken identity begins with one and ends with another: ‘they at first seem to bolster our sense of superiority; we know who everyone really is and why these misunderstandings occur. But as the mood darkens, as it oscillates ever more rapidly between comic terror and romance, nightmare and wish fulfilment, we come to identify with the experiences of these erring creatures’. Barbara Freedman, ‘Reading Errantly’, in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Miola (London: Garland Publishing, 1997), pp. 261–297, 261.
- 99.
‘The significant misrecognitions are not, finally, those that take place between the characters in the play, but those that occur because of the play of character itself’. Freedman, ‘Reading Errantly’, p. 266.
- 100.
A number of significant contributions have shaped the field: Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Sasha Roberts, ed., Reading in Early Modern England, special issue of Critical Survey, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2000); Sabrina A. Baron, Elizabeth Walsh, and Susan Scola, eds., The Reader Revealed (Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001); Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Stephen Orgel, The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Studies of reading and annotation practices include: H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) and William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
- 101.
Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Current Trends in the History of Reading’, in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, eds. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 1–20, p. 2.
- 102.
John Kerrigan, On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 115–137, 119, 137.
- 103.
Jerome McGann, Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and by Donald McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
- 104.
For a critique of this position, see T. H. Howard-Hill, ‘Theory and Praxis in the Social Approach to Editing’, TEXT, Vol. 5 (1991), 31–46.
- 105.
McGann, ‘From Text to Work: Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text’, Romanticism on the Net, 41–42 (2006), http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/013153ar [accessed 12 March 2018].
- 106.
McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, p. 15.
- 107.
McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 10.
- 108.
Stephen Orgel, The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 2.
- 109.
Tiffany Stern, ‘Future Directions in Renaissance Drama’, Renaissance Drama, Vol. 40 (2012), 151–160, pp. 151–152.
- 110.
Marcus, ‘Editing Shakespeare in a Postmodern Age’, p. 142.
- 111.
See Harold Bloom, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999); Richard Dutton, ‘“The Comedy of Errors” and “The Calumny of Apelles”: An Exercise in Source Study’, Religion and the Arts, Vol. 7, No. 1–2 (2003), 11–30.
- 112.
Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 9.
- 113.
Michael Warren, ‘The Perception of Error: The Editing and the Performance of the Opening of Coriolanus’, in Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama, eds. Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 127–142, 130.
Works Cited
Primary Works
Dekker, Thomas, Satiro-mastix, or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet (London, 1602).
Shakespeare, William, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 12 March 2018].
———, Mr. William Shakespear’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies Published According to the True Original Copies (London, 1685), EEBO at http://eebo.chadwyck.com [accessed 12 March 2018].
———, The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1991).
———, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008).
———, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
———, Cymbeline, ed. Martin Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Steggle, Matthew, ed., Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE). http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/ [accessed 12 March 2018].
Secondary Works
Andersen, Jennifer, and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
Baron, Sabrina A., Elizabeth Walsh, and Susan Scola, eds., The Reader Revealed (Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001).
Bloom, Harold, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999).
Bourne, Claire M. L., Marking Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Vol. 13 (4), 367–386.
Bowers, Fredson, ‘Today’s Shakespeare Texts, and Tomorrow’s’, Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 19 (1966), 39–65.
Bradley, David, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Brayman Hackel, Heidi, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Capell, Edward, Mr. William Shakespeare His Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (London, 1768), 10 Vols.
de Grazia, Margreta, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
———, and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 44 (1993).
Dehaisnes, C., Catalogue general des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques, in Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de Douai (1978), Vol. 6.
Dutton, Richard, ‘“The Comedy of Errors” and “The Calumny of Apelles”: An Exercise in Source Study’, Religion and the Arts, Vol. 7, No. 1–2 (2003), 11–30.
Evans, G. Blakemore, ed., ‘The Douai Manuscript—Six Shakespearean Transcripts (1694–95)’, Philological Quarterly, Vol. 41 (1962), 158–172.
———, Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), online edition available http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/ShaComP.html [accessed 12 March 2018].
Freedman, Barbara, ‘Reading Errantly’ in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Miola (London: Garland Publishing, 1997), 261–297.
Gibbons, Brian, ‘Erring and Straying Like Lost Sheep: “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Comedy of Errors”’, Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 50 (1997), 111–124.
Hamner, Thomas, The Works of Shakespear in Six Volumes (London, 1745).
Hedbäck, Ann-Mari, ‘The Douai Manuscript Reexamined’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 73, No. 1 (1979), 1–18.
Howard-Hill, T. H., ‘Theory and Praxis in the Social Approach to Editing’, TEXT, Vol. 5 (1991), 31–46.
Jackson, H. J., Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
Jowett, John, ‘Editing Shakespeare’s Plays in the Twentieth Century’, Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 59 (2006), 1–19.
———, ‘Shakespeare and the Kingdom of Error’, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Critical Reference Edition, eds. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), xlix–lxii.
Kerrigan, John, On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Knapp, James, ‘Textual Introduction’ to The Comedy of Errors in The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn., ed. Stephen Greenblatt (London: W. W. Norton, 2016).
Lerer, Seth, Error and the Academic Self (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2002).
Long, William B., ‘“John a Kent and John a Cumber”: An Elizabethan Playbook and its Implications’, in Shakespeare and Dramatic Tradition, eds. W. R. Elton and William B. Long (Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1989), 125–143.
Maguire, Laurie, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The Bad Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
———, and Thomas L. Berger, eds., Textual Formations and Reformations (London: Associated University Presses, 1998).
———, ‘The Girls from Ephesus’, in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Miola (London: Routledge, 1997), 355–383.
Marcus, Leah, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996).
———, ‘Editing Shakespeare in a Postmodern Age’, in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 128–144.
Marotti, Arthur, and Laura Estill, ‘Manuscript Circulation’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 53–70.
Massai, Sonia, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Mayer, Jean-Christophe, ‘Annotating and Transcribing for the Theatre: Shakespeare’s Early Modern Reader–Revisers at Work’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, eds. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 163–176.
———, Shakespeare’s Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
McGann, Jerome J., Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
———, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
———, ‘From Text to Work: Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text’, Romanticism on the Net, 41–42, (2006). http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/013153ar [accessed 12 March 2018].
McKenzie, Donald, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
McKerrow, R. B., ‘A Suggestion Regarding Shakespeare’s Manuscripts’, Review of English Studies, Vol. 44 (1935), 459–465.
McLeod, Randall, ‘Un-editing Shak-speare’, Sub-Stance, Vol. 10/11, No. 33–34, (1981/1982), 26–55.
———, ‘Unemending Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Winter, 1981), 75–96.
Murphy, Andrew, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Orgel, Stephen, The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Parker, Patricia, ‘Elder and Younger: The Opening Scene of The Comedy of Errors’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), 325–327.
Pope, Alexander, The Works of Shakespear (London, 1725), 6 Vols.
Raven, James, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Roberts, Sasha, ed., Reading in Early Modern England, special issue of Critical Survey, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2000).
Rowe, Nicholas, ‘Dedication’, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear (London, 1709), 6 Vols.
Sharpe, Kevin, and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Shattuck, Charles, The Shakespeare Promptbooks: A Descriptive Catalogue (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1965).
Sherman, William, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
Smith, Emma, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Smyth, Adam, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Steevens, George, ed., The Plays of William Shakespeare (London, 1773) 10 Vols., Vol. 2.
Stern, Tiffany, ‘Future Directions in Renaissance Drama’, Renaissance Drama, Vol. 40 (2012), 151–160.
Sumimoto, Noriko, ‘Updating Folios: Readers’ Reconfigurations and Customisations of Shakespeare’, Early Modern Literary Studies, Vol. 21, (2013) at https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-21/07-Sumimoto_Updating%20Folios.htm [accessed 14 February 2018].
Taylor, Gary, and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
Theobald, Lewis, Shakespeare Restored (London, 1726).
———, Works of Shakespeare (London, 1733), 7 Vols.
Warren, Michael, ‘The Perception of Error: The Editing and the Performance of the Opening of Coriolanus’, in Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama, eds. Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 127–142.
Werstine, Paul, ‘“Foul Papers” and “Prompt-Books”: Printer’s Copy for Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors”’, Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 41 (1988), 232–246.
———, ‘Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: “Foul Papers” and “Bad” Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 41 (1990), 65–86.
———, ‘Editing After the End of Editing’, Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 24 (1996), 47–54.
———, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
West, Anthony James, ‘The Life of the First Folio in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy, (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 71–90, 82.
Whitworth, Charles, ‘Rectifying Shakespeare’s Errors: Romance and Farce in Bardeditry’, in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Miola (London: Routledge, 1997), 227–260.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Leonard, A. (2020). Error and the Text. In: Error in Shakespeare. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35180-9_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35180-9_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35179-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35180-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)