This chapter discusses Chaucer’s language, the difficulties it posed for early modern readers, and the competing claims of superior accuracy and comprehensibility made by contemporary prints. Representing various texts in the Chaucer canon, the manuscripts discussed in this chapter have in common a unique aspect of their provenance – their words have all been corrected, glossed, or emended by different early modern annotators. Through analysis of hundreds of annotations in their manuscript context, the chapter argues that early modern readers sought to perfect the outmoded, error-prone, and sometimes illegible Chaucerian manuscript text, often on the basis of printed editions. These readerly interventions reveal contemporary anxieties about linguistic archaism and textual corruption, and strive to resolve them by recourse to glosses and readings contained in new books.

Notes that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the bulk of the rights to Shakespeare had been consolidated into the hands of the Tonson publishing firm. The Tonsons – oftentimes in concert with a cartel of other London publishers – served as the primary publishers of Shakespeare for the greater part of the eighteenth century. The chapter registers a number of innovations introduced by the Tonson group: the recruitment of well-known writers to serve as editors and the prominent advertising of this fact on edition title pages; the publication of the first illustrated edition of Shakespeare; experimentation with different multivolume formats, breaking with the tradition of single-volume folio publication. The textual strategies of the different editors employed by the Tonsons are explored, with the 'aesthetic' approach of an editor such as Alexander Pope being contrasted with the more scholarly approach of Lewis Theobald. The appearance of the first extended sketch of Shakespeare's life in Nicholas Rowe's edition is also noted.