In his presidential address to the Bibliographical Society in 1930, W. W. Greg reviewed the achievements of the textual colleagues with whom he was associated ‘in what will perhaps one day be recognised as a significant critical movement’. That critical movement came to be known as ‘New Bibliography’ and, as represented in editorial practice and textual journals in Britain and North America, assumed a significance and supremacy which Greg's modest prolepsis could scarcely have envisaged. With its emphasis on the material book rather than its literary content, and its formidable array of technical tools (to say nothing of vocabulary) for analysing textual evidence, the New Bibliography heralded a brave new world in editorial epistemology and procedure. By analysing all aspects of textual transmission, and formulating principles for editing, Greg and his colleagues aimed to systematise the editing of Elizabethan drama, thus delivering Shakespeare and his readers from the inaccuracies, eclecticism, and taste of previous editors.