Facsimiles and the History of Shakespeare Editing

Is a facsimile an edition? In answering this question in relation to Shakespeare, and to early modern writing in general, the author explores the interrelationship between the beginning of the conventional process of collecting and editing Shakespeare's plays and the increasing sophistication of facsimiles. While recent scholarship has offered a detailed account of how Shakespeare was edited in the eighteenth century, the parallel process of the 'exact' reproduction of his texts has been la...