Paul Werstine "A rationale for a new edition of Bonduca designed to capture authorial final intention"

This paper attempts to build on an analysis of the two texts of John Fletcher's Bonduca recently published as "The Continuing Importance of New Bibliographical Method." That piece proposed that the extant manuscript (MS) of the play transcribed by the book-keeper of the King's Men, Edward Knight, provides the complete version of the play that Fletcher originally wrote. The version of the play published in the Beaumont and Fletcher First Folio of 1647 (F), according to that analysis, is a theatrical adaptation of the play by one or more non-authorial and not very competent hands. This view of the two texts is radically different from Cyrus Hoy's in his edition of Bonduca in Fredson Bowers's The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. However, Hoy is at pains in his edition to present a final authorial text of the play, and to that extent, he and I, as far as this paper are concerned, have the same goal. The paper concludes that if one is to capture final authorial intention, one would necessarily choose the MS as copy-text for its accidentals, but one would also have to turn to F repeatedly for substantive readings. The editorial text thereby produced would be more artificial and less historical than Hoy's, but it would also be a lot more authorial.