The twentieth century has seen important advances in the editing of Elizabethan dramatic texts. Sir Walter Greg, the acknowledged leader of the ‘new bibliography’, took a very special interest in the plays’ stage directions which, as he demonstrated, can tell us much about their textual origins. Yet while the diversity and significance of Elizabethan stage directions is now recognised, modern editors of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have devised no new ways of dealing with them: they reprint them in their original form or adopt eighteenth-century interpolations, or, more often than not, they conflate the two, with unhappy consequences. Here I offer some preliminary remarks on modern critical editions and their stage directions (which for the purposes of this paper I take to include speech prefixes); a more systematic study would reveal other inconsistencies and errors, and could greatly help future producers of the plays.

Misplaced stage directions, (a) Every editor of Shakespeare knows that scores of stage directions have been moved in the textus receptus from their position in q and f texts, where they were inserted a line or more too early or too late. Such rearrangement elicits little comment, the usual assumption being that juggling with the text is established practice and needs no defence.