The various strands of Shakespeare scholarly publishing are explored in this chapter. The emergence of techniques for producing increasingly accurate facsimiles of early modern editions led to the appearance of multiple facsimile editions of the First Folio and of the early quartos. But the period was also marked by significant controversy, most particularly in the instance of John Payne Collier's claim to have uncovered an edition of the 1632 second folio with annotations in the hand of a seventeenth-century theatre functionary. The eventual debunking of Collier's claims destroyed his reputation. Of key importance in the period was the production of the Cambridge Shakespeare, under the primary editorship of William Aldis Wright. This was the first edition produced by university scholars and it offered the definitive scholarly text of its era (in addition to being spun off, commercially, into the Globe Shakespeare). The chapter closes by considering the launch of the Arden Shakespeare, initially under the general editorship of Edward Dowden. The Arden set the model for academic editions produced by a range of editors under the stewardship of a general editor; it has survived through a number of iterations over the course of more than a century.

The New Bibliography represents one of the most important developments in the history of Shakespeare editing. Those associated with the movement – most especially W. W. Greg, R. B. McKerrow and A. W. Pollard – aimed to bring a scientific mindset to the business of examining, theorising about and editing early modern texts. Much of their early work provided significant breakthroughs in bibliographic knowledge. Their more speculative ideas – including the division of early single play texts into 'good' and 'bad' quartos; 'memorial reconstruction'; proposed differences between foul paper manuscripts and prompt books – have proved controversial in the long run, but have nevertheless, for the past century, served as the bedrock for techniques for editing early modern texts. The history of these ideas is mapped out here. The chapter concludes with an extended consideration of two projects spawned by the New Bibliography: the Oxford Shakespeare, which ultimately ran into the sand, despite repeated efforts to revive it, and the New Cambridge Shakespeare, which was brought successfully to completion by John Dover Wilson.

Randall Martin and others have argued that Shakespeare revised 3 Henry VI after his composition of Richard III to consolidate the early history plays as a sequence. Meanwhile, recent attribution studies argue that Shakespeare originally wrote 3 Henry VI in collaboration with one or more other dramatists, making little or no contribution to Acts 1 and 4. If these arguments are correct, the older hypothesis that the first edition issued in 1595 as The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York is a memorial reconstruction begins to look vulnerable. If it is shorter and less Shakespearean, some possible reasons for these characteristics other than derivative reconstruction are now evident. This chapter will agree with the arguments for collaboration in both versions, and for revision in one. But it will reassert the necessity of regarding Richard Duke of York as a derivative text with a tenuous line of transmission from an authorial script.