Revels Plays

"The Revels Plays have a earned a well-deserved reputation for producing exemplary critical editions of non-Shakespearean plays, prepared according to high scholarly standards and aimed at an audience of advanced students and literary professionals."

Professor Bruce Boehrer, SEL (Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900)

Clifford Leech conceived of the Revels Plays as a series in the mid-1950s, modelling the project on the New Arden Shakespeare. The aim, as he wrote in 1958, was ‘to apply to Shakespeare’s predecessors, contemporaries and successors the methods that are now used in Shakespeare’s editing’. The plays chosen were to include well-known works from the early Tudor period to about 1700, as well as others less familiar but of literary and theatrical merit: ‘the plays included’, Leech wrote, ‘should be such as to deserve and indeed demand performance’. We owe it to Clifford Leech that the idea became reality. He set the high standards of the series, ensuring that editors of individual volumes produced work of lasting merit, equally useful for teachers and students, theatre directors and actors.

The text of each Revels play, in accordance with established practice in the series, is edited afresh from the original text of best authority (in a few instances, texts), but spelling and punctuation are modernised and speech headings are silently made consistent. Elisions in the original are also silently regularised, except where metre would be affected by the change; since 1968 the ‘-ed’ form is used for non-syllabic terminations in past tenses and past participles (‘-’d’ earlier), and ‘-èd’ for syllabic (‘-ed’ earlier). The editor emends, as distinct from modernises, the original only in instances where error is patent, or at least very probable, and correction persuasive. Act divisions are given only if they appear in the original or if the structure of the play clearly points to them. Those act and scene divisions not in the original are provided in small type. Square brackets are also used for any other additions to or changes in the stage directions of the original.

Revels Plays do not provide a variorum collation, but only those variants which require the critical attention of serious textual students. All departures of substance from ‘copy-text’ are listed, including any relineation and those changes in punctuation which involve to any degree a decision between alternative interpretations; but not such accidentals as turned letters, nor necessary additions to stage directions whose editorial nature is already made clear by the use of brackets. Press corrections in the ‘copy-text’ are likewise collated. Of later emendations of the text, only those are given which as alternative readings still deserve attention.

One of the hallmarks of the Revels Plays is the thoroughness of their annotations. Besides explaining the meaning of difficult words and passages, the editor provides comments on customs or usage, text or stage-business—indeed, on anything judged pertinent and helpful. Each volume contains an Index to the Commentary, in which particular attention is drawn to meanings for words not listed in OED, and (starting in 1996) an indexing of proper names and topics in the Introduction and Commentary.

The introduction to a Revels play assesses the authority of the ‘copy-text’ on which it is based, and discusses the editorial methods employed in dealing with it; the editor also considers the play’s date and (where relevant) sources, together with its place in the work of the author and in the theatre of its time. Stage history is offered, and in the case of a play by an author not previously represented in the series a brief biography is given. It is our hope that plays edited in this fashion will promote further scholarly and theatrical investigation of one of the richest periods in theatrical history.

Former general editors: Clifford Leech, F. David Hoeniger, E. A. J. Honigmann and Eugene M. Waith
General editors: David Bevington, Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, J. R. Mulryne and Helen Ostovich

This series is within the Literature subject area.