Over the last few decades advice books on how to handle Shakespearean verse have proliferated. But much of the advice they offer is misleading. This article explores some of their most striking errors, but also highlights the radical challenge they represent to the default priorities of Shakespearean scholarship.

In 1982 the actor Derek Jacobi was in Stratford-upon-Avon to play three roles – Prospero, Benedick and Peer Gynt – for the Royal Shakespeare Company. During that summer he had several abrasive encounters with academics, who criticized some of the line-readings he used as Benedick. One disliked his almost trademark habit of elongating selected vowel sounds and told him that this trait was more appropriate to a stand-up comic than a leading Shakespearian actor. Another regretted a moment in Benedick’s Act 2 soliloquy, as he absorbs the news that a love-lorn Beatrice is allegedly pining away for him. In modernized texts the words in question (Much Ado About Nothing 2.3, 212–13) characteristically read as follows: ‘Love me? Why, it must be requited’. Which Jacobi had the temerity to convert into: ‘Love me! Why? It must be requited’. So the disagreement hinged on whether a single three-letter word, ‘why’, should here be regarded as an interjection-cum-exclamation or an interrogative – an issue less trivial than might at first appear, since contrary judgements about it can generate radically different performances of the soliloquy.

In recent years, Shakespearian editing - long conducted in a quiet intellectual backwater, undisturbed by larger culture wars - has itself become a key battleground for current theoretical controversy. Debate has, however, tended to focus on the handling of the texts themselves, especially the practices of emendation and modernization, while other key aspects of editorial responsibility have received scant attention. The work of annotation, in particular, remains effectively unscrutinized.

This selectivity of vision has left undisturbed the traditional assumption that the rationale and aims of Shakespearian annotation are self-evident and therefore easily defined - so easily, in fact, that no one need devote energy to defining, or debating, them in print. R. A. Foakes has noted, with regret, the complete absence of 'guides to making a commentary on a Shakespeare play', a situation rendered more disturbing, since 'in editions like those in the Arden series the commentary, which is on the same page as the text, may well be the editorial contribution that is most useful and most studied'. Editors themselves generally remain silent about the principles or preferences that shape their style of annotation. Similarly, reviewers of new editions, though they may on an ad hoc basis query this or that piece of annotation, rarely mount a broader challenge to the rationale (or lack of it) discernible in the overall pattern of annotation in a particular edition; and too often they confine their comments to generalities, pausing only to remark that a particular editor's notes are 'judicious' or that another's 'are copious, perhaps sometimes even excessive', but also 'thoughtful and unintimidating'. In neither of the reviews from which those comments are taken is a single illustration offered in support of these judgements.

A controversy which erupted in the final years of the seventeenth century threatened the survival of theatre in England. At its peak, the poet laureate, Nahum Tate, drew up “A Proposal for Regulating the Stage & Stage-Players,” describing it as “valuable only in case it is decided not to suppress the theatres entirely.” A character in George Farquhar's novel, Adventures of Covent-Garden (1698), similarly predicted that “in the Battel between the Church and the Stage” “the Theatre must down.” Such grim prophecies recalled the playhouses' mid-century fate, when a parliamentary edict in 1642 had heralded an eighteen-year ban on theatrical performances.

The attack which gave impetus to this new campaign – Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) – was the first book-length assault on the theatre by an English author to be published since William Prynne's infamous Histriomastix (1633). Pro-stage writers quickly dubbed Collier a “Younger Histrio- Mastix” and asserted that the drama's old enemies were once again venturing into the daylight.

Rebuilding the Globe Playhouse on London’s Bankside cost Sam Wanamaker, the scheme’s only begetter, more than forty years of zealous and tenacious labour. That extended history of delay and disappointment had one fortunate consequence. The resplendent building which now adorns the Southwark waterfront is a decisively different phenomenon from the one which would have been erected, say, in 1960 or in 1975 if, by some miracle, the necessary money had then become available. Only in 1989, for instance, did new scientific discoveries make available a way of using chemicals to impede the spread of fire in thatch. Before that date, safety regulations would have imposed an inauthentic tiled roof on the reconstruction. Similarly, numerous details of the final design were strongly influenced by the researches of John Orrell, whose key book on the subject, The Quest for Shakespeare’s Globe, was only published in 1983. Orrell’s conclusions have in turn been modified by archaeological discoveries made during the recent excavations on the Rose and Globe Playhouse sites, and the results of that rethinking have also been incorporated in the new building. And, finally, the construction of the new Globe has been intimately shaped by the ‘vast knowledge of historic timber framing’ painstakingly acquired by Peter McCurdy, who only became associated with the project in 1991.