The rehearsal that changed the text

A play printed in 1623 contains a line that makes no sense, and three centuries of editors have proposed emendations. The most likely explanation is that the line was never written by the author at all.

Early printed plays were set from whatever manuscript a printer could obtain, and the manuscripts in circulation were working documents: a prompt book marked up by a stage manager, an actor's part containing only their own lines and cues, or a text reconstructed from memory by performers. Each kind of source corrupts in a characteristic way. A prompt book carries stage directions that have migrated into dialogue. An actor's part produces scenes where that actor's lines are perfect and everyone else's are approximate. A memorial reconstruction preserves the plot and the striking phrases and paraphrases the connective tissue.

Textual critics use these signatures to identify what they are looking at, which turns an unsolvable question into a tractable one. The question is not what the author wrote, which is usually unrecoverable, but what kind of document this print was made from, because that determines which errors are likely and therefore which emendations are plausible.

The nonsensical line, in this case, appears in a passage where the surrounding verse is metrically irregular in exactly the way memorial reconstruction produces, and where a stage direction from a known prompt book would fit the space. The modern edition prints the line with a note rather than a correction.

That decision is the interesting one. An editor who emends produces a readable text and conceals the evidence. An editor who notes produces a slightly awkward text and leaves the next reader able to disagree, which in a discipline built on three centuries of revised guesses is the more useful kind of honesty.