Editing Cruxes in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream: Folio, Quarto, Performance

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay attempts to insulate the Folio from periodic swings of opinion about it by illustrating that some aspects of this text have gained greater respect over the last four centuries. The essay locates the importance of the Folio specifically in the increased esteem for its apparent reflection of early performance, as instanced in the editorial handling of a pair of cruxes near the close of A Midsummer Night's Dream. This essay charts a course from the eighteenth-century rhetorical denigration of Folio readings as supposedly corrupt theatrical documents to valuable witnesses of stage practice by some editors in the nineteenth century and later. Part of this essay's original contribution is also an emphasis on the ease with which editors moved from text to text, and line by line, to construct thoroughly hybrid editorial texts. At our four hundred-year remove, the Folio remains a powerful force not principally because it was endorsed by a series of editors who agreed on its prominence but because it has persisted through an extensive series of editorial arguments about its performability and its overall validity.