The plan of focusing individual issues of Shakespeare Survey on particular topics is an admirable one. Upcoming issues will concentrate on “theatres for Shakespeare” and “Shakespeare, sound, and screen”; this present number is on editing Shakespeare. As Edward Pechter points out in his essay “Crisis in Editing?” this is the first time in fifty-four years that an issue of Shakespeare Survey is devoted to the question of editing. Peter Holland and his editorial advisory board have assembled a distinguished group of textual scholars and have distributed topics in a way that provides both coverage and challenge. The result is a valuable insight into the state of Shakespeare editing today.

John Jowett sets the agenda by reviewing the history of Shakespeare editing in the twentieth century, concentrating on the New Bibliography of A. W. Pollard, W. W. Greg, R. B. McKerrow, and Fredson Bowers, among others, and on the way in which its proud boast of establishing “definitive” editions of the works has inevitably and properly dissipated into textual multiplicity, evolution, and indeterminacy. The result is that we are still negotiating what to make of the legacy of the New Bibliography. The ideal of old spelling has suffered a number of defeats. What were once called the “Bad” quartos are now regarded with a new appreciation. Theories of memorial reconstruction are less in favor than was once the case. Distinctions between so-called foul paper texts and promptbook-based texts are far less clear than was once supposed. Jowett's is an immensely learned and useful history, fair-minded, judicious, comprehensive, and clear.

Does the revision of editing practice in recent decades amount to a revolution? Is there a crisis in editing? Pechter cites some critics and editors who have proclaimed a radical change, including Randall McLeod, Leah Marcus, Gordon McMullan, Scott McMillin, and others, only to challenge that view and to side with Thomas Tanselle in asking if the Newer Bibliography's challenges to editorial tradition “have outlived their purpose” (21). The consequence of Pechter's adroit reassessment of revisionism is perhaps to suggest ways in which the field of Shakespeare editing is moving toward consensus. Stanley Wells's reflections on what it is like to be a general editor have a similarly reassuring impact: the task he outlines for any general editor is the timeless one of laying down general principles enabling individual editors to work together in harmony and commonality of purpose.

What follows from this mood of synthesis is a rich opportunity for individual editors to bring forward new and illuminating discoveries. Patricia Parker explores how the familiar phrases “some are born great” and the “Fortunate-Unhappy” are not to be found in the Folio text of Twelfth Night at 2.5.242ff.; they are the work essentially of Nicholas Rowe, Edward Capell, and Edmund Malone. Whatever choice a modern editor should make, Parker is right “to open a fresh consideration of the issues” (61). MacDonald Jackson revisits the question of the date and authorship of Hand D's contribution to Sir Thomas More by consulting evidence from the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Online, providing valuable new data in support of the majority view that the passage is indeed Shakespeare’s. Jackson's inventory uncovers surprising links to the scenes of drunken revelry in Twelfth Night, for example, as well as to scenes of crowd violence in 2 Henry VI, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus. Andrew Gurr points to the dangers inherent in editing of seeking closure and consistency, by interrogating editorial insistence on representing Caliban's speeches as always in verse, even when the Folio text refuses to support such a position. Does Caliban instead desert verse at times for the prose rhythms of Stefano and Trinculo? These are pragmatic, skeptical questions, reevaluating the truisms of editorial tradition in ways that can open our eyes to new possibilities.

Jeanne Addison Roberts's valuable contribution to this collection is to examine the work of women editors of Shakespeare, particularly Charlotte Endymion Porter and Helen Armstrong Clarke, who, between them, published three editions of the complete works between 1903 and 1913. Independent, unconventional, fascinated by theater, these two women “represent a crucial development in the history of Shakespeare criticism. For the first time smart, educated, and free-spirited women were devoting themselves to editing the complete Shakespeare canon” (140). Bernice W. Kliman surveys for us the print and electronic editions inspired by the new Variorum Hamlet Project, for which she has assembled an editorial team. Christie Carson asks a singularly hard question about online editing: “Where will it end?” We all assume, perhaps a little uneasily, that online editing is the wave of the future, but what are we to do with the open-endedness of such an endeavor and the anxiety of academic presses as to whether online editing can pay for itself? Suzanne Gossett uses her vantage as one of the senior editors of the recently inaugurated Arden project of editions of non-Shakespearean plays to look at the opportunities and challenges of editing collaborative drama; collaborative work is today a growth industry, as seen in the work of Jeffrey Masten, Gary Taylor, MacDonald Jackson, and many others, including, of course, Gossett herself.

This volume of essays does not fail to provide a generous amount of space for the interface of editing and theater. Alan C. Dessen talks about the theater director as Shakespeare editor, making choices that run the gamut from an essentially uncut text (Deborah Warner) to what Dessen calls “rewrighting”; Peter Brooks's Hamlet offers a memorable instance. How much should a director cut or rephrase for improved clarity, manageable running time, and coherent concept? Dessen's point is that directors are in effect editors when they make their choices. Balz Engler characterizes editing as a form of translation. Performance editions provide for Elizabeth Schafer a medium in which to study the art of directorial “editing.” Tom Rooney looks at Orson Welles's coediting of three plays, including The Merchant of Venice, in Everybody's Shakespeare (Woodstock, IL, 1934), as a way of studying Welles's sense of theater, which can manifest itself in Welles's imaginative stage directions even where we do not have a film or record of performance.

Not all the articles in this collection are about editing, as is appropriate for an annual journal that undertakes to represent some of the best work being done in Shakespeare studies. Ruth Morse sensitively explores the meaning of the “Middle Ages” and in what way the term can be employed in discussing an author for whom the concept was unknown. Shakespeare inhabited a predominantly agricultural world in which time was told by days and months and cycles of the moon: “How does Shakespeare divide times and ages, how does he periodize?” (256). These are wonderful questions. “Age” for Shakespeare tends to mean “a long period of time” (257). Ronald Gray asks whether Shakespeare knew Plato's Symposium. Lynn Forest-Hill looks at The Tempest in the context of British myths, legends, and stories about giants as found, for example, in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae and Nennius's Historia Brittonum. Michael Dobson informatively chronicles Shakespeare performances in England in 2005, including (but by no means exclusively) the productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company. A concluding study, “The Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies,” by Michael Taylor, Emma Smith, and Eric Rasmussen, ably surveys the whole field, informing us, among many other matters, that the Oxford Shakespeare, “once a youthful iconoclast,” has now become, in its second edition, “a middle-aged member of the establishment” (375). Surely this is another sign of the kind of synthesis and commonality of purpose in Shakespeare editing that this issue of Shakespeare Survey seems to represent.

My only regret about the assembly here of generally valuable textual essays is the inclusion of a piece by Ronald A. Tumelson II, “Ferdinand's Wife and Prospero's Wise.” I’m sorry, I thought that question had been put beautifully to rest by Peter Blayney in favor of regarding the tall s in “So rare a wondred Father, and a wise” as indeed a tall s and not an f. Blayney has magnified the type impressions to a high degree, thereby demonstrating that the supposed crossbar of an f touted by Jeanne Addison Roberts and Stephen Orgel is little more than “blotted ink” (83). This present essay, in offering a “metacritique” of recent arguments and attempting to elevate the dispute into one of textual indeterminacy with ideological implications, seems to me to muddy the water that had begun to settle.