Whereas previous generations of editors blamed the early printers as the agents responsible for the errors in Shakespeare’s texts, today’s editors tend to blame previous editors. The fault, it turns out, is not in the compositors but in ourselves. In the textual studies under review here we are told that the New Bibliographers created ‘a clairvoyant world, where the metaphysics of presence endorsed editorial decisions’, that the Oxford Shakespeare ‘dematerializes the text’, that ‘much of what editors have done is an obstacle to staging the work’, that ‘the texts of Shakespeare have been occluded by the labours of privilege’, and that ‘the most difficult problem’ for editors working today is ‘how to shake off the eighteenth-century hand of Nicholas Rowe and those who have followed him’.

early editors are more likely to be reviled than revered, the appearance of the Pickering & Chatto seven-volume facsimile of Rowe's 1709 edition presents something of a problem. Should we clasp the hand of the past, shake it off, or engage in some intermediate, compromise gesture? Peter Holland's introduction asserts Rowe's claim to importance as 'the single greatest determinant' of the way Shakespeare's plays appeared in edited versions for nearly three centuries: 'From the names by which we know some of Shakespeare's characters, the definition of where scenes take place, the list of characters or the act and scene divisions to the spelling, along with hundreds of emendations to the text and the way in which Shakespeare's language is punctuated, Rowe's work defined the methods and the details by which we think we know Shakespeare in print' (p. viii). By