Editions and Textual Studies reviewed by

Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers’ efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers’ strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers’ interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.

Whenever people talk to one another, there are at least two things going on at once. First, and most obviously, there is an exchange of speech. Second, and slightly less obviously, there is a negotiation about how that exchange is organized—about whose turn it is to talk at any given moment. Linguists call this second, organizational, level of communicative activity ‘turn-taking’, and since the late 1970s it has been central to the way in which spoken interaction is understood. In spite of its relevance to the study of drama, however, turn-taking has received little attention from critics and editors of Shakespeare. This book aims to put that right. It offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic text by reversing the priorities of traditional literary analysis. Rather than focusing on what characters say, it focuses on when they speak. Rather than focusing on how they talk, it focuses on how they gain access to the floor. Its central argument is that the turn-taking patterns of Shakespeare’s plays are a part of what Emrys Jones has called their ‘basic structural shaping’—as fundamental to dialogue as rhythm is to verse. It investigates what it means for a character to speak in or out of turn, to interrupt or overlap with a previous speaker, to pause before speaking, or to fail to speak at all. It explores how these moments are—and are not—signalled by the Shakespearean text, how best to describe and understand them, and the implications of such questions for contemporary debates about editing, rhetoric, prosody, and early modern performance practices.