Editing Arden: The Dramatis Personae List in As You Like It

Abstract

ABSTRACT The first printed dramatis personae list for As You Like It appeared in Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 Works of Mr. William Shakespear. That list included an incomplete entry that described Rosalind’s father as the ‘Duke of ’, leaving a tantalising blank space where a geographical qualifier might be expected to appear. In a second issue of the edition of 1709, the incomplete entry was revised to read ‘Duke of Burgundy’. Yet, in a second edition of the play, printed later in 1709, the incomplete ‘Duke of ’ appeared again, and it appeared for a third time in 1714, in the revised third edition of Rowe’s Works. The 1714 dramatis personae list included another bold editorial revision: it contained an entirely new entry for a second ‘Clown’, suggesting that this second clown was distinct from the character we have come to know as Touchstone. This article traces the changes made to the dramatis personae lists of 1709 and 1714. It argues that these lists offer insights into early eighteenth-century critical responses to the play. The paper also shows that these lists, though often overlooked by modern editorial historians, anticipated later eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century debates about the play’s geography and about Touchstone.