Jennifer Young "'A Form Worthy of its Contents': Editing Collective Agency in Edward III"

It is now generally acknowledged that collaboration was a common practice for playwrights writing for early modern commercial theaters. This understanding has led to critical acceptance that Shakespeare collaborated on several plays printed in the 1623 Folio and has also resulted in the introduction of The Two Noble Kinsman, originally considered an apocryphal play, into the Shakespeare canon. With Giorgio Melchiori's 1998 New Cambridge edition and additional scholarly editions in currently in production, Edward III is the newest collaborative play to make the transformation from anonymous apocrypha to Shakespearean drama. This paper will examine the editorial history of Edward III and its transition from apocrypha to Shakespeare in order to better understand how the editorial process and its approach to collective agency are impacted when a previously unattributed play suddenly becomes the work of Shakespeare. By collating the 1596 and 1599 quartos with influential apocrypha editions and the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Edward III, this paper will consider questions including: do editors treat texts differently when Shakespeare is involved? how is the change from apocrypha to Shakespearean reflected in the text? and what role does collective agency play in authorizing collaborative plays as part of the Shakespeare canon? The goal of this paper will be to better understand how editorial process constructs a textual space shared by Shakespeare (the playwright and the 'Author') and the numerous other agents of playhouse and printing house production.