MLR, ., to Stewart’s view that superficiality is its own positive end (p. )—or, worse yet, simply bad. roughout, Stewart asks how ‘the confluence of poetry, commerce and gender’ might be ‘read securely’ (p. ) not only in this period but more widely. He speculates (another key repeated word) both about how reading took place at the time and more recently in critical accounts of the reading process offered by key figures such as McGann and Ross. at such reading is possible through close attention to detail and a sophisticated sense of competing critical and ideological frames is admirably demonstrated here. at the work examined suggests ‘poetic creativity of a new kind’ (p. ) in an absolute sense is less clear. U W T S D P W Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, –. By P S. (Early Modern Literature in History) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . ix+ pp.£.. ISBN ––––. is short book explores what Paul Salzman suggests is a neglected period in the history of scholarly editing. e century or so before the advent of the New Bibliography has oen been dismissed as an (un)scholarly graveyard of eccentric enterprise. In Salzman’s reading, by contrast, many practices developed in this era were lastingly influential, and paved the way for the current florescence in the editing of early modern texts. is is by no means a comprehensive history of Victorian editing, but rather an attempt to rescue and reassess an editorial tradition that has, the book argues, been undervalued. Although it is organized chronologically, presenting a series of editorial case studies from Alexander Dyce (–) through to W. W. Greg (–) and in particular R. B. McKerrow (– ), the book is explicitly not teleological. It is central to Salzman’s argument that, rather than being a series of successively more ‘scientific’ and ‘professional’ approaches (p. ), the history of scholarly editing is marked by return and repetition , in which later editions are sometimes less competent, less ambitious, or more conservative than their forebears. e book begins with Dyce, who is in many ways the emblematic figure. His editorial work had, rightly in Salzman’s view, remarkable staying power: his edition of John Webster was standard until , his Poetical Works of John Skelton until . Dyce’s editing projects were multiple, compendious, and strikingly various. His early Specimens of British Poetesses () was highly unusual in presenting women writers in historical perspective, and illustrates the extent to which nineteenth-century editors sought to broaden the canon well beyond Shakespeare. Dyce also serves as a virtuous foil to the two editors discussed in the next chapter, J. P. Collier and James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. Salzman situates these men’s three almost contemporary editions of Shakespeare (Dyce, ; Collier, ; Halliwell-Phillipps, –) in what he calls a ‘crisis’ of Shakespearian editing (p. ). While Collier’s reputation is probably unredeemable, Reviews Salzman praises Halliwell-Phillips (whose reputation in his lifetime was besmirched by accusations of the from Trinity College Cambridge as a young man) for his exhaustive researches and encyclopedic accretions of explanatory and annotatory data. Much of this material is preserved in scrapbooks, now at the Folger, and the book convincingly relates Halliwell’s habit of dismembering early modern books to seventeenth-century practices of cutting as thinking. e next chapter, on ‘the extraordinary range of editorial activities’ (p. ) carried out in the second half of the nineteenth century, is the least interesting, although it bears out Salzman’s assertion that more recent is not always better. e final chapter extends this anti-teleological emphasis by contrasting McKerrow’s magisterial Works of omas Nashe (–)—not yet superseded, although a new Works is in the works for Oxford University Press—with Montague Summers’s less familiair edition of the works of Aphra Behn (). While Summers’s editorial approach is kindly described as ‘rather eclectic’ (p. ), the edition is nonetheless a ‘highly significant’ moment in giving a woman writer the full Works treatment. is is a recurrent concern throughout the book for Salzman, who has worked extensively on early modern women’s writing, and one of the book’s strengths is the space it gives to women. is means not just Behn and Laetitia Landon (anthologized by Dyce), but also...