Текст книги "William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition"

Автор книги: William Shakespeare

9. A reconstruction of the Blackfriars playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, opened in 2001, and regularly used for performances

Dramatic conventions changed and developed considerably during Shakespeare’s career. Throughout it, they favoured self-evident artifice over naturalism. This is apparent in Shakespeare’s dramatic language, with its soliloquies (sometimes addressed directly to the audience), its long, carefully structured speeches, its elaborate use of simile, metaphor, and rhetorical figures of speech (in prose as well as verse), its rhyme, and its patterned dialogue. It is evident in some aspects of behaviour and characterization: Oberon and Prospero have only to declare themselves invisible to become so; disguises can be instantly donned with an appearance of impenetrability, and as rapidly abandoned; some characters—Rumour at the opening of 2 Henry IV, Time in The Winter’s Tale, even the Gardeners in Richard II—clearly serve a symbolic rather than a realistic function: and supernatural manifestations are common. The calculated positioning of characters on the stage may help to make a dramatic point, as in the scene in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (4.2) in which the disguised Julia overhears her faithless lover’s serenade to her rival, Silvia; or, more complexly, that in Troilus and Cressida (5.2) in which Troilus and Ulysses observe Diomede’s courtship of Cressida while they are themselves observed by the cynical Thersites. Not uncommonly, Shakespeare provokes his spectators into consciousness that they are watching a play, as when Cassius, in Julius Caesar, looks forward to the time when the conspirators’ ‘lofty scene’ will be ‘acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown’ (3.1.112 -14); or, in Troilus and Cressida, when Troilus, Cressida, and Pandarus reach out from the past tense of history to the present tense of theatrical performance in a ritualistic anticipation of what their names will come to signify (3.2.169-202).

Techniques such as these are closely related to the non-illusionistic nature of the Elizabethan stage, in which the mechanics of production were frequently visible. Many scenes take place nowhere in particular. Awareness of place was conveyed through dialogue and action rather than through scenery; location could change even within a scene (as, for example, in 2 Henry IV, where movement of the dying King’s bed across the stage establishes the scene as ‘some other chamber’: 4.3.132). Sometimes Shakespeare uses conflicting reactions to an imagined place as a kind of shorthand guide to character: to the idealistic Gonzalo, Prospero’s island is lush, lusty, and green; to the cynical Antonio, ‘tawny’ (The Tempest, 2.1.57-9): such an effect would have been dulled by scenery which proved one or the other right.

In some ways, the changes in Shakespeare’s practice as his art develops favour naturalism. Thus verse becomes freer, metaphor predominates over simile, rhyme and other formalistic elements are reduced, the proportion of prose over verse increases to the middle of his career (but then decreases again), some of his most psychologically complex character portrayals—Coriolanus, Cleopatra—come late. But his drama remains rooted in the conventions of a rhetorical, non-scenic (though not unspectacular) theatre: the supernatural looms largest in his later plays—Macbeth, Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. The Tempest draws no less self-consciously on the neo-classical conventions of five-act structure than The Comedy of Errors, and Prospero’s narration to Miranda (1.2) is as blatant a piece of dramatic exposition as Egeon’s tale in the opening scene of the earlier play. Heroines of the late romances—Marina (in Pericles), Perdita (in The Winter’s Tale), and Miranda (in The Tempest)—are portrayed with less concern for psychological realism than those of the romantic comedies—Viola (in Twelfth Night) and Rosalind (in As You Like It)—and the revelation to Leontes at the end of The Winter’s Tale is both more improbable and more moving than the similar revelation made to Egeon at the end of The Comedy of Errors.

The theatre of Shakespeare’s time was his most valuable collaborator. Its simplicity was one of its strengths. The actors of his company were the best in their kind. His audiences may not have been learned, or sophisticated, by modern standards; according to some accounts, they could be unruly; but they conferred popularity upon plays which for emotional power, range, and variety, for grandeur of conception and subtlety of execution, are among the most demanding, as well as the most entertaining, ever written. If we value Shakespeare’s plays, we must also think well of the theatrical circumstances that permitted, and encouraged, his genius to flourish.

10. A performance of Julius Caesar in progress at the reconstructed Globe Theatre on Bankside, London

The Early Printing of Shakespeare’s Plays

For all its literary distinction, drama in Shakespeare’s time was an art of performance; many plays of the period never got into print: they were published by being acted. It is lucky for us that, so far as we know, all Shakespeare’s finished plays except the collaborative Cardenio reached print. None of his plays that were printed in his time survives in even a fragment of his own handwriting; the only literary manuscript plausibly ascribed to him is a section of Sir Thomas More, a play not printed until the nineteenth century. In this edition of the Complete Works we replace the fragment previously offered with a newly edited text of the whole play. The only works of Shakespeare that he himself seems to have cared about putting into print are the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. A major reason for this is Shakespeare’s exceptionally close involvement with the acting company for which he wrote. There was no effective dramatic copyright; acting companies commonly bought plays from their authors—as a resident playwright, Shakespeare was probably expected to write about two each year—and for whatever reason, companies generally preferred that their plays should not get into print except when they needed to raise money by selling them to publishers. Nevertheless, by one means and another, and in one form and another, about half of Shakespeare’s plays were printed singly in his lifetime, almost all of them in the flimsy, paperback format of a quarto—a book made from sheets of paper that had been folded twice, and normally costing sixpence. Some of the plays were pirated: printed, that is, in unauthorized editions, from texts that seem to have been put together from memory by actors or even, perhaps, by spectators, perhaps primarily to create scripts for other companies, perhaps purely for publication. Some of the plays were printed in shorter editions in some of which the text is variously adapted, paraphrased, and garbled. It has been argued that they have been subject to ‘memorial reconstruction’—put together by actors—though the extent to which the reporters’ defective memories gave rise to the peculiar features of these texts has been much disputed. They make up an unstable grouping often referred to as the ‘bad’ quartos: bad not because they were, necessarily, badly printed or surreptitiously published, but because the quality of the text is different from, and by and large inferior to, that of the alternative versions. The term has become contentious, as it places texts of different character and possible provenance under a single pejorative label. The earliest texts of The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York (usually known by the titles under which they were printed in the First Folio—2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI) appeared in 1594 and 1595 respectively; they may well be reported texts, but the reports seem to have been based on an earlier version of the plays as Shakespeare wrote them. Also in 1594 appeared The Taming of A Shrew, perhaps better described as an imitation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (the titles may have been regarded as interchangeable) than as a detailed reconstruction of it. The 1597 edition of Richard III is perhaps the best of these heavily variant texts; it seems to be closely based on a performance version. The text of Romeo and Juliet, as printed in the same year, may have been put together by a few actors exploiting a popular success, though some critics regard this too as an acceptable theatre version of the play. The 1600 quarto of Henry V may present a text made for a smaller company of actors than that for which it had been written; here again theatrical adaptation seems to have played a major part in its evolution. The Merry Wives of Windsor of 1602 seems to derive largely from the memory of the actor who played the Host of the Garter Inn—perhaps a hired man no longer employed by Shakespeare’s company. Worst reported of all is the 1603 Hamlet, which also appears to derive from the memory of one or more actors in minor roles. Last printed of the ‘bad’ quartos is Pericles, of 1609, where there are strong indications of memorial reporting even in the absence of a fuller text with which to compare it.

The worst of these reported texts have many faults. Frequently they garble the verse and prose of the original—To be or not to be; ay, there’s the point‘, says the 1603 Hamlet; usually they abbreviate—the 1603 Hamlet has about 2,200 lines, compared to the 3,800 of the good quarto; occasionally they include lines from plays by other authors (especially Marlowe); sometimes they include passages clearly cobbled together and in distinctly un-Shakespearian language to supply gaps in the reporter’s memory. For all this, they are not without value in helping us to judge how Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed. As the fuller texts may have been too long for performance, the shorter versions potentially offer an indication as to how the plays were reshaped for the Shakespearian stage. Their directions may give us more information about early performances than is available in other texts: for instance, the reported text of Hamlet has the direction ‘Enter Ofelia playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing‘—far more vivid than the good Quarto’s ‘Enter Ophelia’, or even the Folio’s ‘Enter Ophelia distracted’. Because these are post-performance texts, they may preserve, in the midst of corruption, authentically Shakespearian changes made to the play after it was first written and not recorded elsewhere. A particularly interesting case is The Taming of the Shrew: the play as printed in the Folio, in what is clearly, in general, the more authentic text, abandons early in its action the framework device which makes the story of Katherine and Petruccio a play within the play; the quarto continues this framework through the play, and provides an amusing little episode rounding it off. These passages may derive from ones written by Shakespeare but not printed in the Folio: we print them as Additional Passages at the end of the play. In general, we draw more liberally than most previous editors on the reported texts, in the belief that they can help us to come closer than before to the plays as they were acted by Shakespeare’s company as well as by others. However, we are mindful that, no matter what their various origins, these texts constitute distinct versions of the plays.

11. ‘To be or not to be’ as it appeared in the ‘bad’ quarto of 1603

Although in general, companies which owned play scripts preferred not to allow them to be printed, some of Shakespeare’s plays were printed from authentic manuscripts during his lifetime, and even while they were still being performed by his company; these have often been designated as ‘good’ quartos. First came Titus Andronicus, printed in 1594 from Shakespeare’s own papers, probably because the company for which he wrote it had been disbanded. In 1597 Richard II was printed perhaps directly from Shakespeare’s manuscript, minus the politically sensitive episode (in 4.1) in which Richard gives up his crown to Bolingbroke: a clear instance of censorship, whether self-imposed or not. The first play to be published from the outset in Shakespeare’s name is Love’s Labour’s Lost, in 1598. Several other quartos printed from good manuscripts appeared around the same time: I Henry IV (probably from a scribal transcript) in 1598, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, 2 Henry IV, and Much Ado About Nothing (all evidently from Shakespeare’s papers) in 1600. In 1604 appeared a new text of Hamlet printed from Shakespeare’s own papers and declaring itself to be ‘Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy’: surely an attempt to replace a bad text by a good one. King Lear followed, in 1608, in a badly printed quarto whose status has been much disputed, but which we believe to derive from Shakespeare’s own manuscript. In 1609 came Troilus and Cressida, probably from Shakespeare’s own papers, in an edition which in the first-printed copies claims to present the play ‘as it was acted by the King’s majesty’s servants at the Globe‘, but in copies printed later in the print-run declares that it has never been ‘staled with the stage’. The only new play to appear between Shakespeare’s death and the publication of the Folio in 1623 was Othello, printed in 1622 apparently from a transcript of Shakespeare’s own papers.

Not much money was to be made from printing a single edition of a play, but some of these quartos were several times reprinted. In the right circumstances Shakespeare could be a valuable property to a publisher. He and his company, however, would have benefited only from the one-off return of selling a manuscript for publication. It is not clear why they released reliable texts of some plays but not others. As a shareholder in the company to which the plays belonged, Shakespeare himself must have been a partner in its decisions, and it is difficult to believe that he was so lacking in personal vanity that he was happy to be represented in print by garbled texts; but he seems to have taken no interest in the progress of his plays through the press, and only two plays, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, were printed in debased quartos that were replaced with fuller quarto texts. Even some of those printed from authentic manuscripts—such as the 1604 Hamlet—are badly printed, and certainly not proof-read by the author; none of them bears an author’s dedication or shows any sign of having been prepared for the press in the way that, for instance, Ben Jonson clearly prepared some of his plays. John Marston, introducing the printed text of his play The Malcontent in 1604, wrote: ‘Only one thing afflicts me, to think that scenes invented merely to be spoken, should be enforcively published to be read.’ Perhaps Shakespeare was similarly afflicted.

In 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, Ben Jonson published his own collected plays in a handsome Folio. It was the first time that an English writer for the popular stage had been so honoured (or had so honoured himself), and it established a precedent by which Shakespeare’s fellows could commemorate their colleague and friend. Principal responsibility for this ambitious enterprise was undertaken by John Heminges and Henry Condell, both long-established actors with Shakespeare’s company; latterly, Heminges had been its business manager. They, along with Richard Burbage, had been the colleagues whom Shakespeare remembered in his will: he left each of them 26s. 8d. to buy a mourning ring. Although the Folio did not appear until 1623, they may have started planning it soon after—or even before—Shakespeare died: big books take a long time to prepare. And they undertook their task with serious care. Most importantly, they printed eighteen plays that had not so far appeared in print, and which might otherwise have vanished. Their decision not to include Edward III suggests at least that they did not believe Shakespeare to have written all of it. They omitted (so far as we can tell) only Pericles, Cardenio (now vanished), The Two Noble Kinsmen—perhaps because these three were collaborative—and the mysterious Love’s Labour’s Won (see p. 337). And they went to considerable pains to provide good texts. They had no previous experience as editors; they may have had help from others (including Ben Jonson, who wrote commendatory verses for the Folio): anyhow, although printers find it easier to set from print than from manuscript, they were not content simply to reprint quartos whenever they were available. In fact they seem to have made a conscious effort to identify and to avoid making use of the quartos now recognized as unauthoritative. In their introductory epistle addressed ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ they declare that the public has been ‘abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors’. But now these plays are ‘offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them’.

None of the quartos believed by modern scholars to be unauthoritative was used unaltered as copy for the Folio. As men of the theatre, Heminges and Condell had access to theatre copies, and they made considerable use of them. For some plays, such as Titus Andronicus (which includes a whole scene not present in the quarto), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the printers had a copy of a quarto (not necessarily the first) marked up with alterations made as the result of comparison with a theatre manuscript. For other plays (the first four to be printed in the Folio—The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Measure for Measure—along with The Winter’s Tale and probably Othello) they employed a professional scribe, Ralph Crane, to transcribe papers in the theatre’s possession. For others, such as Henry V and All’s Well That Ends Well, they seem to have had authorial papers; and for yet others, such as Macbeth, a theatre manuscript. We cannot always be sure of the copy used by the printers, and sometimes it may have been mixed: for Richard III they seem to have used pages of the third quarto mixed with pages of the sixth quarto combined with passages in manuscript; a copy of the third quarto of Richard II, a copy of the fifth quarto, and a theatre manuscript all contributed to the Folio text of that play; the annotated third quarto of Titus Andronicus was supplemented by the ‘fly’ scene (3.2) which Shakespeare appears to have added after the play was first composed. Dedicating the Folio to the brother Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, Heminges and Condell claimed that, in collecting Shakespeare’s plays together, they had ‘done an office to the dead to procure his orphans guardians’ (that is, to provide noble patrons for the works he had left behind), ‘without ambition either of self profit or fame, only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare’. Certainly they deserve our gratitude.

The Modern Editor’s Task

It will be clear from all this that the documents from which even the authoritative early editions of Shakespeare’s plays were printed were of a very variable nature. Some were his own papers in a rough state, including loose ends, duplications, inconsistencies, and vaguenesses. At the other extreme were theatre copies representing the play as close to the state in which it appeared in Shakespeare’s theatre as we can get; and there were various intermediate states. For those plays of which we have only one text—those first printed in the Folio, along with Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Edward III-the editor is at least not faced with the problem of alternative choices. The surviving text of Macbeth gives every sign of being an adaptation: if so, there is no means of recovering what Shakespeare originally wrote. The scribe seems to have entirely expunged Shakespeare’s stage directions from The Two Gentlemen of Verona: we must make do with what we have. Other plays, however, confront the editor with a problem of choice. Pared down to its essentials, it is this: should readers be offered a text which is as close as possible to what Shakespeare originally wrote, or should the editor aim to formulate a text presenting the play as it appeared when performed by the company of which Shakespeare was a principal shareholder in the theatres that he helped to control and on whose success his livelihood depended? The problem exists in two different forms. For some plays, the changes made in the more theatrical text (always the Folio, if we discount the bad quartos) are relatively minor, consisting perhaps in a few reallocations of dialogue, the addition of music cues to the stage directions, and perhaps some cuts. So it is with, for example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard II. More acute—and more critically exciting—are the problems raised when the more theatrical version appears to represent, not merely the text as originally written after it had been prepared for theatrical use, but a more radical revision of that text made (in some cases) after the first version had been presented in its own terms. At least five of Shakespeare’s plays exist in these states: they are 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and King Lear.

The editorial problem is compounded by the existence of conflicting theories to explain the divergences between the surviving texts of these plays. Until recently, it was generally believed that the differences resulted from imperfect transmission: that Shakespeare wrote only one version of each play, and that each variant text represents that original text in a more or less corrupt form. As a consequence of this belief, editors conflated the texts, adding to one passages present only in the other, and selecting among variants in wording in an effort to present what the editor regarded as the most ‘Shakespearian’ version possible. Hamlet provides an example. The 1604 quarto was set from Shakespeare’s own papers (with some contamination from the reported text of 1603). The Folio includes about 80 lines that are not in the quarto, but omits about 23 that are there. The Folio was clearly influenced by, if not printed directly from, a theatre manuscript. There are hundreds of local variants. Editors have conflated the two texts, assuming that the absence of passages from each was the result either of accidental omission or of cuts made in the theatre against Shakespeare’s wishes; they have also rejected a selection of the variant readings. It is at least arguable that this produces a version that never existed in Shakespeare’s time. We believe that the 1604 quarto represents the play as Shakespeare first wrote it, before it was performed, and that the Folio represents a theatrical text of the play after he had revised it. Given this belief, it would be equally logical to base an edition on either text: one the more literary, the other the more theatrical. Both types of edition would be of interest; each would present within its proper context readings which editors who conflate the texts have to abandon.

It would be extravagant in a one-volume edition to present double texts of all the plays that exist in significantly variant form. The theatrical version is, inevitably, that which comes closest to the ‘final’ version of the play. We have ample testimony from the theatre at all periods, including our own, that play scripts undergo a process of, often, considerable modification on their way from the writing table to the stage. Occasionally, dramatists resent this process; we know that some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries resented cuts made in some of their plays. But we know too that plays may be much improved by intelligent cutting, and that dramatists of great literary talent may benefit from the discipline of the theatre. It is, of course, possible that Shakespeare’s colleagues occasionally overruled him, forcing him to omit cherished lines, or that practical circumstances—such as the incapacity of a particular actor to do justice to every aspect of his role—necessitated adjustments that Shakespeare would have preferred not to make. But he was himself, supremely, a man of the theatre. We have seen that he displayed no interest in how his plays were printed: in this he is at the opposite extreme from Ben Jonson, who was still in mid-career when he prepared the collected edition of his works. We know that Shakespeare was an actor and shareholder in the leading theatre company of its time, a major financial asset to that company, a man immersed in the life of that theatre and committed to its values. The concept of the director of a play did not exist in his time; but someone must have exercised some, at least, of the functions of the modern director, and there is good reason to believe that that person must have been Shakespeare himself, for his own plays. The very fact that those texts of his plays that contain cuts also give evidence of more ‘literary’ revision suggests that he was deeply involved in the process by which his plays came to be modified in performance. For these reasons, this edition chooses, when possible, to print the more theatrical version of each play. In some cases, this requires the omission from the body of the text of lines that Shakespeare certainly wrote; there is, of course, no suggestion that these lines are unworthy of their author; merely that, in some if not all performances, he and his company found that the play’s overall structure and pace were better without them. All such lines are printed as Additional Passages at the end of the play.

In all but one of Shakespeare’s plays the revisions are local—changes in the wording of individual phrases and lines—or else they are effected by additions and cuts. Essentially, then, the story line is not affected. But in King Lear the differences between the two texts are more radical. It is not simply that the 1608 quarto lacks over 100 lines that are in the Folio, or that the Folio lacks close on 300 lines that are in the Quarto, or that there are over 850 verbal variants, or that several speeches are assigned to different speakers. It is rather that the sum total of these differences amounts, in this play, to a substantial shift in the presentation and interpretation of the underlying action. The differences are particularly apparent in the military action of the last two acts. We believe, in short, that there are two distinct plays of King Lear, not merely two different texts of the same play; so we print edited versions of both the Quarto (‘The History of ...’) and the Folio (‘The Tragedy of...’).

Though the editor’s selection, when choice is available, of the edition that should form the basis of the edited text is fundamentally important, many other tasks remain. Elizabethan printers could do meticulously scholarly work, but they rarely expended their best efforts on plays, which—at least in quarto format—they treated as ephemeral publications. Moreover, dramatic manuscripts and heavily annotated quartos must have set them difficult problems. Scribal transcripts would have been easier for the printer, but scribes were themselves liable to introduce error in copying difficult manuscripts, and also had a habit of sophisticating what they copied—for example, by expanding colloquial contractions—in ways that would distort the dramatist’s intentions. On the whole, the Folio is a rather well-printed volume; there are not a great many obvious misprints; but for all that, corruption is often discernible. A few quartos—notably A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600)—are exceptionally well printed, but others, such as the 1604 Hamlet, abound in obvious error, which is a sure sign that they also commit hidden corruptions. Generations of editors have tried to correct the texts; but possible corruptions are still being identified, and new attempts at correction are often made. The preparation of this edition has required a minutely detailed examination of the early texts. At many points we have adopted emendations suggested by previous editors; at other points we offer original readings; and occasionally we revert to the original text at points where it has often been emended.

12. The last lines of King Lear in the 1608 quarto

13. The last lines of King Lear in the 1623 First Folio

Stage directions are a special problem, especially in a one-volume edition where some degree of uniformity may be thought desirable. The early editions are often deficient in directions for essential action, even in such basic matters as when characters enter and when they depart. Again, generations of editors have tried to supply such deficiencies, not always systematically. We try to remedy the deficiencies, always bearing in mind the conditions of Shakespeare’s stage. At many points the requisite action is apparent from the dialogue; at other points precisely what should happen, or the precise point at which it should happen, is in doubt—and, perhaps, was never clearly determined even by the author. In our edition we use broken brackets—e.g. [He kneels]—to identify dubious action or placing. Inevitably, this is to some extent a matter of individual interpretation; and, of course, modern directors may, and do, often depart freely from the original directions, both explicit and implicit. Our original-spelling edition, while including the added directions, stays somewhat closer to the wording of the original editions than our modern-spelling edition. Readers interested in the precise directions of the original texts on which ours are based will find them reprinted in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion.

Ever since Shakespeare’s plays began to be reprinted, their spelling and punctuation have been modernized. Often, however, this task has been left to the printer; many editors who have undertaken it themselves have merely marked up earlier edited texts, producing a palimpsest; there has been little discussion of the principles involved; and editors have been even less systematic in this area than in that of stage directions. Modernizing the spelling of earlier periods is not the simple business it may appear. Some words are easily handled: ‘doe’ becomes ‘do’, ‘I’ meaning ‘yes’ becomes ‘ay’, ‘beutie’ becomes ‘beauty’, and so on. But it is not always easy to distinguish between variant spellings and variant forms. It is not our aim to modernize Shakespeare’s language: we do not change ‘ay’ to ‘yes’, ‘ye’ to ‘you’, ‘eyne’ to ‘eyes’, or ‘hath’ to ‘has’; we retain obsolete inflections and prefixes. We aim not to make changes that would affect the metre of verse: when the early editions mark an elision—know‘st’, ‘ha’not’, ‘i’th’temple‘—we do so, too; when scansion requires that an -ed ending be sounded, contrary to modern usage, we mark it with a grave accent—formed’, ‘moved’. Older forms of words are often preserved when they are required for metre, rhyme, word-play, or characterization. But we do not retain old spellings simply because they may provide a clue to the way words were pronounced by some people in Shakespeare’s time, because such clues may be misleading (we know, for instance, that ‘boil’ was often pronounced as ‘bile’, ‘Rome’ as ‘room’, and ‘person’ as ‘person’), and, more importantly, because many words which we spell in the same way as the Elizabethans have changed pronunciation in the mean time; it seems pointless to offer in a generally modern context a mere selection of spellings that may convey some of the varied pronunciations available in Shakespeare’s time. Many words existed in indifferently variant spellings; we have sometimes preferred the more modern spelling, especially when the older one might mislead: thus, we spell ‘beholden’, not ‘beholding’, ‘distraught’ (when appropriate), not ‘distract’.