Abstract

This paper explores the significance of naming and the role of editing practices of Shakespeare's plays: Is it Imogen or Innogen, Falstaff or Oldcastle? By looking into how editors of Shakespeare have approached these and other naming problems we will investigate what has influenced their approaches and choices, what the implications of their choices might be and what we may learn from their ways of thinking about textual editing, be it defective or successful. This paper therefore deals with editing practices in general and, more specifically, with the actual significance of naming: is Henry IV featuring Sir John Oldcastle a wholly different play from Henry IV featuring Sir John Falstaff?

Highlights

  • Among the issues that lack fixity in the world of Shakespeare is that of naming

  • There are countless cases of uncertainty to do with Shakespearean names, from the appearance of “ghost” names and variances of spelling to the existence of completely different proper names seemingly belonging to one and the same character

  • Naming can be counted among those issues that have given editors the power, and sometimes the obligation, to define and shape texts according to a number of ideological, theoretical, methodological, literary and linguistic considerations

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Summary

Introduction

Among the issues that lack fixity in the world of Shakespeare is that of naming. There are countless cases of uncertainty to do with Shakespearean names, from the appearance of “ghost” names and variances of spelling to the existence of completely different proper names seemingly belonging to one and the same character. In the introduction to their 1986 Complete Oxford 1 Henry IV, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor inform us that their edition “restores Sir John’s original surname for the first time in printed texts”.2 That original surname is “Oldcastle” instead of the more familiar “Falstaff.” The Norton edition, which is based on the Oxford, does not adopt Wells and Taylor’s new naming.

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