The First Quarto of Othello (The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Early Quartos)

Cambridge University Press, 3/24/2005
EAN 9780521615945, ISBN10: 0521615941

Paperback, 162 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

This 2001 book presents the first modernized and edited version of the 1622 Othello. By taking this earliest published version of Othello as a book in its own right, Scott McMillin accounts for the mystery of its thousands of differences from the Folio version by arguing that the Quarto was printed from a theatre script reflecting cuts and actors' interpolations made in the playhouse. McMillin explains that the playhouse script was apparently taken from dictation by a scribe listening to the actors themselves, and thus reveals how Othello was spoken in seventeenth-century performance. This edition, which consists of a detailed introduction, quarto text, select collation and textual notes, is an important book for scholars in Shakespeare and Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, with wide ramifications for other Shakespeare textual studies and for students of early theatre history.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and conventions
Introduction
the textual problem
Q1 and foul papers
Greg sets the standard
Economy in the New Bibliography
Revision or abridgement
New evidence of foul papers?
Grounds for doubt
Walkley, Okes and the 'Cameron Group'
Punctuation
Compositorial prudence
Scribal punctuation and the Barnavelt Manuscript
Other King's-Men plays, 1619–22
Actors' interpolations
Listening
Dictation in the theatres
Mislineation
Playhouse scripts
Summary
Date of the Q1 playscript
Editorial procedure
The Play.