‘Stolne and Surreptitious’: Heywood as a Test Case

Authors

  • William Proctor Williams University of Akron

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12745/et.17.2.1203

Keywords:

Thomas Heywood, If You Know Not Me, stenography, textual theft

Abstract

 

In the eighth and final quarto edition of If You Know Not Me in 1639 Thomas Heywood claims that ‘some by stenography drew / The plot: put it in print, scarce one word true’ so that the text of the first quarto, and therefore all previous quartos, was defective. This article investigates the means by which this 'piracy' could have been done and provides an initial testing of such theft using a small portion of the text in performance.

Author Biography

William Proctor Williams, University of Akron

WILLIAM PROCTOR WILLIAMS (wps@uakron.edu) is professor of English emeritus at Northern Illinois University and adjunct professor of English at the University of Akron, and he has recently published editions of Macbeth (2006), Romeo and Juliet (2007), and Richard III (2007) in the Sourcebooks/Methuen series, and the fourth edition of his and Craig S. Abbott’s An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies was published by MLA in 2009. He has recently completed editions of four plays by Thomas Heywood for the Oxford Heywood edition. With Dr Matteo Pangallo he continues to work on the New Variorum Edition of Titus Andronicus (MLA).

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Published

2014-09-24

Issue

Vol. 17 No. 2 (2014)

Section

Issues in Review Essays

License

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