What's your opinion on the issue of speech prefixes (e.g. Aaron/Moore) supposedly conveying subtleties of character development when they are 'silent' elements in performance? There is, as you point out, the issue of co-authorship in this play to potentially complicate the problem of consistency, but still the issue of naming for me would be more convincing were the changes to occur within text that is intended to be spoken i.e. provably part of the intellectual/semantic/political/etc. designs of the artwork, and I wondered what you think about this. The argument - which Randall McCleod proposed in 'Unediting' - about the preservation of speech prefix forms as a way of gauging Shakespeare's perceptions of the characters he was voicing surely implies that it is being argued that these texts were prepared with a readership, as opposed to a theatrical audience, in mind. Or, put another way, the printed text was prepared from a manuscript that was written, or modified, to accommodate these textual and hermeneutic considerations. Again, I'd be interested to know your take on this.

What's your opinion of Marcus' claim that editions which don't uphold these postmodern principles in their presentation are necessarily founded upon "unstated biases … hidden agendas". I have trouble accepting the claim that editions which seek to regularise consistently are somehow robbing readers of rich interpretive possibilities when a) if they have collation then they don't do that, b) if they employ features like square brackets around stage directions then they are openly admitting that this is a guess on the part of the editor, and c) arguments about why any early printed text is the way it is--taking in its relations to both printing house and theatrical circumstances of production--are far from being resolved, so calling for the preservation of forms on the basis that the text was authored with these aesthetic and informational qualities in mind seems as immovable in its prejudices about what the text is and how a reader should relate to it as the supposedly outmoded, unthinking editorial 'norms' it seeks to replace. Do you agree with any or all of this, and could you expand a little on why?