Our modern idea of a definitive text did not exist. Renowned editor and scholar Stephen Orgel has argued that plays in the early modern era were never absolutely fixed, but were considered collaborations between playwrights, theatre companies, and printers. The variances can be so great in some cases, like the two substantially different versions of King Lear, that recent editors have treated them as separate plays. Where more than one Renaissance edition of a play exists (and some exist in two, three and even four substantive versions) different words, different speeches and sometimes completely different scenes exist. We have no manuscript versions, and the oldest printed editions contain obvious mistakes, problems and omissions. The very good reason is that no one is sure exactly what that was. “Why don’t they just print what he wrote?” readers ask in despair. To many novices, the biggest shock about the plays of Shakespeare is discovering how different one edition can be from another.
Annotated List of Complete Shakespeare Editions Kurt Daw, November 2013
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