The Review of English Studies Advance Access published online on August 16, 2007
The Review of English Studies, doi:10.1093/res/hgm041
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press 2007; all rights reserved
Three Disputed Shakespeare Readings: Associations and Contexts
University of Auckland
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Preparing a critical edition of a Shakespeare play necessarily entails selecting from among variants preserved in the earliest printed texts or later proposed as conjectural emendations. This article examines one problematic passage in Romeo and Juliet (II.ii.26–32 in The Riverside Shakespeare) and two in Hamlet (I.iv.36–8 and II.ii.174–86) and argues that in each case nearly all recent editors have made the wrong choice. The arguments for the readings supported here rest on their relevance to the immediate context and on their complex associations with similar passages in other Shakespeare plays. Special attention is paid to the nature of the imagery.