This book is the fourth and final project in a series undertaken in collaboration with students enrolled in my course in Literary Editing (English 441/641), in this case during spring semester 2015, at Clemson University. The book follows editions of poetry by Edward Dowden, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and Elizabeth Dickinson West. Like any critical edition, it engages with and acknowledges all of the relevant texts, including unpublished materials consisting of variously corrected copies of the play The Hour-Glass from W. B. Yeats's personal library, housed for the most part in the National Library of Ireland. Such materials are technically “pre-textual,” but, as the four base-texts and all of the collated texts are printings of the play (10 for the prose states and 7 for the verse), the provisional states of annotated copies are genetically intermediary, often unique. When my collaborators began the course, most of them were strangers to the principles of literary editing and to Adobe InDesign desktop programing software in its latest Creative Cloud iteration. Most were enrolled in the Writing and Publication Studies program and not conventional undergraduate English majors. I dare say some only vaguely recognized the name W. B. Yeats. For studio-based instruction, they were a large class, and, as editorial assistants, they are recognized here in alphabetical order. Too numerous for the title page, they are Larissa A. Barkley (who, as an intern, also assisted with the appendices), Andrew A. Bertsch, Steffen L. Campbell, Nicole F. Consoli, Elaine C. Day, Morgan M. Derrick, Joseph D. Glass, Emily B. Gyemant, Ryan M. Hall, Sarah K. Hollenbeck, Lisa M. Imber, Marissa J. Kozma, Meghan E. Noone, Kathryn S. O'Dell, Brace K. Plumblee, Emily E. Puitt, Tyler M. Riggs, and Kaitlin G. Thomas. Special duties were given to Stephanie M. Heath, a graduate student in the Master of Arts in Professional Communication (MAPC) program, and, occasionally, to Karen Stewart (MAPC) and Tenesha Head (MA English), who worked for me at the university press.

It was from the beginning an objective of the team to unpack and unwind the convolutions of the notoriously dual presentations of prose and verse versions of The Hour-Glassin The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, edited by Russell K.