4 - Modern editions of medieval English plays

Summary

Editions of medieval plays take many forms – ‘definitive’ editions for scholars, anthologies and teaching texts for students and general readers, facsimiles, modernised versions, performance-texts, abridgements and so on. Each has its own functional value and scholarly worth. But all in some measure manifest the great power that an editor wields to determine the text that is read, to direct the response of the reader or performer, to set the focus and course of criticism and even to influence our idea of what ‘medieval drama’ means. Student readers in particular may not always recognise the ways in which the editor's selective principles of ‘typicality’, or ‘literary excellence’, or ‘evolutionary progression’, or ‘structural coherence’, stated or undeclared, can shape an anthology or edition. Assumptions about the nature of drama, the mode of production, the kind of theatre for which the text was ‘intended’ and the supposed expectations of a medieval or modern audience often direct practices of emendation or other forms of editorial intrusion. A publisher, too, may unobtrusively control the shape of an edition by imposing upon it commercial considerations of cost, length, format and readership.

Additionally, living within a book culture, the modern reader may forget that dramatic activities uncontained by text were the medieval norm, and that such activities provided a complex frame of reference for the appreciation of minority, text-centred drama.