- May 2015
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www.folgerdigitaltexts.org www.folgerdigitaltexts.org
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The course of true love never did run smooth.
The following lines (up to line 151) provide a great catalog of all the obstacles writers have used over the centuries to serve the same function as Wall in the play-within-a-play of Act V. Notice, though, that the obstacle between Hermia and Lysander is not listed in the catalog. That obstacle, of course, is simply Egeus's quite arbitrary objection to Lysander, and in the end it amounts to nothing.
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At any point in the text, you can hover your cursor over a bracket for more information.
How so? When I hover my cursor over the very first brackets I come to (around the word "wanes" in the opening lines), the 'explanation' merely says, "editorial emendation"--which tells us absolutely nothing, since the brackets themselves so indicate, and have for the past one hundred or more years. Am I doing something wrong?
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I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
So begins one of the great poems in the play.
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A certain aim he took FTLN 0528 At a fair vestal thronèd by the west,
A reference to Elizabeth I?
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The editors of the Moby™ Shakespeare produced their text long before scholars fully understood the proper grounds on which to make the thousands of decisions that Shakespeare editors face.
Isn't this a tad arrogant? Isn't the implication that we know best and those that came before us were ignorant?
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When the Moby™ Text was created, for example, it was deemed “improper” and “indecent” for Miranda to chastise Caliban for having attempted to rape her. (See The Tempest, 1.2: “Abhorred slave,/Which any print of goodness wilt not take,/Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee…”). All Shakespeare editors at the time took the speech away from her and gave it to her father, Prospero.
It would be interesting to know what changes contemporary editors make on the grounds the original might be offensive to a contemporary audience.
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