I

There is something innately paradoxical in the fact that generations of editors of Shakespeare’s plays have sought to provide, in print, a representation of the plays as they were acted. The very process of authenticating a performative entity in a finite material form is a logical contradiction: if the live drama is to be verified, it must surely only achieve this through live presentation. Yet the fact remains that, for the great majority of us, as much at the beginning of the twenty-first century as at the start of the eighteenth, the first experience of Shakespeare has come through the printed page. Arguments about the relative importance of these two identities defy immediate resolution. A clearer way is to see performance and print as separate embodiments of a shared fable, the play in performance existing alongside its presence as printed paper, in paths that, while parallel, engage each other through a reflection that may create conflict or mutual clarification, but in which neither depends upon the other. All of these relationships, and the questions they raise, are extended, complicated and enriched by the presence of illustrations within the printed volume.