A Textual Companion — Early Modern Mythological Texts: Editorial Policy
The aim of the Textual Companion to A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology is to offer carefully edited early modern English mythological texts that can provide a useful literary context to the study of Shakespeare’s classical mythology. It is hoped they can prove of interest to teachers and students alike, to non specialists as well as specialists.
The text is edited afresh from the original text of best authority collated with other existing editions, if any.
Spelling and punctuation are modernized and abbreviations silently expanded.
Elisions in the original are silently regularised. The “-ed” form is used for non-syllabic terminations in past tenses and past participles, and “-èd” for syllabic.
Proper names are given their modern form (as for example Saturn for Saturne, Titan for Tytan, or Apollo for Appollo), except where metre, and more generally pronunciation, would be affected by the change. An original abbreviation for the sake of metre is signalled by an apostrophe, e. g. Achill’. Whenever modernization would involve more than minor change in spelling, the original name is kept, as for example Vesca for Vesta in Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy. In such cases an explanatory note is given.
Early modern grammar and morphology are respected, e.g. agreement between subject in the plural form with verb in the singular, and such archaic forms as “her” for “their”, “maketh” tookest”, or “foughten” are retained and explained whenever clarification seems necessary.
In translations from the French, gallicisms like “palais” for “palace”, “royaume” for “realm” or “moyen” for “means” have been kept in the text and systematically explained in the glossary.
Original punctuation is modernized every time this is made necessary to clarify the syntax.
The Textual Companion does not provide a complete variorum collation, but only those substantial divergences which require critical attention. Such accidentals as turned letters or obvious misprints are silently emended.
In the case of plays, speech headings are silently made consistent. Any editorial addition to the text is presented within square brackets.
Thorough annotations clarify the meaning of difficult passages and provide comments on any aspect of the text that requires elucidation or critical comment.
A glossary gives the meaning of rare, archaic or foreign words.