Grace Ioppolo

This edition of The Honest Man’s Fortune, a play co-written by JohnFletcher, Nathan Field, and Philip Massinger for the Lady Elizabeth’sMen in 1613 and revived for the King’s Men in 1625, is the first diplomatic edition of one of the most remarkable dramatic manuscripts of the early modern period. Almost uniquely, the fair-copy manuscript records the entire process of the circular transmission of the textfrom authors to censor to book-keeper to actors to playhouse, as well as the types of revision each required. In the hand of Edward Knight, the King’s Men’s book-keeper, this manuscript’s title-page notes thatit was "Plaide In the yeare 1613" and contains one of the few surviving complete licences by Master of the Revels Sir Henry Herbert who states,"This Play. Being an olde One and the Originall Lost was reallowd by mee. This: 8 febru. 1624 [i.e., 1625]."In fact, Herbert accepted as payment for the newlicense a printed edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. More excitingly, the many cuts, deletions, and marginal and interlinear additions and revisions, as well as the names of three actors in its stage directions show us two transmissions of this text: the first in 1613, when it was composed and licensed and then adjusted by the authors, and the second in 1625, when it went through almost the same process for revival. With a full discussion of the manuscript’s material properties, provenance, transcription history, and theplay’s composition and performance history, this new edition of The Honest Man’s Fortune puts the play where it belongs: at the center of the canon of Jacobean drama.

The Honest Man's Fortune

William Shakespeare

The Shakespearean Originals Series takes as its point of departure the question: "What is it that we read Shakespeare?" The answer may seem self-evident: we read the words that Shakespeare wrote. But do we? In the case of all the major editions of Shakespeare available in the market, the fact of the matter is that many of the words that we read in an edition of, say, Hamlet, never appeared in the text as it was printed during or shortly after Shakespeare's own lifetime. They are the interpetations and interpolations of a series of editors who have been systematically changing Shakespeare's text from the eighteenth century onwards. This volume offers the text of Measure for Measure, as printed in the 1623 First Folio.

The Folio of 1623

Measure For Measure

In Revising Shakespeare Grace Ioppolo addresses the question of Shakespeare's integrity. Through analysis of variant texts spanning the history of the plays, she arrives at an interpretation of Shakespeare as author and reviser. Ioppolo stars with the physical text. As textual studies of King Lear have shown, the text of Shakespeare is not as given. The text is nearly always a revision of another text. Critics can no longer evaluate plots, structure, and themes, nor can scholars debate what constitutes (or how to establish) a copy-text that stands as the most authoritative version of a Shakespeare play, without reconsidering the implications of revision for traditional and modern interpretations.

Revising Shakespeare

With a remarkable breadth of coverage and a focused, user-friendly approach, this sourcebook is the essential guide for any student of King Lear.

A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare's King Lear

This book presents new evidence about the ways in which English Renaissance dramatists such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton composed their plays and the degree to which they participated in the dissemination of their texts to theatrical audiences. Grace Ioppolo argues that the path of the transmission of the text was not linear, from author to censor to playhouse to audience - as has been universally argued by scholars - but circular. Extant dramatic manuscripts, theatre records and accounts, as well as authorial contracts, memoirs, receipts and other archival evidence, are used to prove that the text returned to the author at various stages, including during rehearsal and after performance. This monograph provides much new information and case studies, and is a fascinating contribution to the fields of Shakespeare studies, English Renaissance drama studies, manuscript studies, textual study and bibliography and theatre history.

Grace Ioppolo

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