Some of the most quoted words in Romeo and Juliet were written by editors. When Juliet, alone on her wedding night, asks for her husband to be cut out in little stars after death, the pronoun on which the whole fantasy turns is not stable across the play’s texts: the Second Quarto of 1599, the documentary foundation of every scholarly edition, reads “when I shall die,” and the “he” that generations of readers have memorized arrived later, as an emendation carried into the text by other hands. When Romeo speaks his first lines to Juliet in the shared sonnet at the Capulet feast, two of the eighteenth century’s greatest editorial intelligences agreed that a word in the quarto was wrong and proposed a replacement that Samuel Johnson admired, and the modern editions have voted the replacement down. The text of this play, the most familiar love tragedy in English, is a fabric in which authorial words and editorial conjectures are woven so closely that only the small print at the foot of a scholarly page can tell them apart.

The verdict argued through this casebook is a strict one. Emendation, the correction of a transmitted text by conjecture, is a legitimate instrument exactly when it behaves like a science: when the early reading demonstrably fails, when a credible mechanism explains how the failure entered the text, when the proposed repair is the smallest change that restores sense, and when the whole transaction is published in the apparatus for any reader to reverse. Judged by that standard, the famous emendations of this play divide cleanly. A few are rescues, acts of restoration for which the editors deserve the gratitude readers unknowingly give them. Others are trespasses, improvements imposed on passages that were never broken, and the most instructive cases in the play’s editorial history are the ones in which a brilliant conjecture, praised by the best judges of its age, has been weighed by a later discipline and refused. The history also carries a warning in the opposite direction: the refusal to emend can become its own dogma, and a reading does not become Shakespeare’s merely because a printing house set it in type. What follows examines the celebrated cases one by one, the reading each early text carries, the editor who intervened, the argument offered, the resistance met, and the standing each intervention holds in the editions a modern reader can buy.

What Is an Emendation, and How Much of Romeo and Juliet Is One?

An emendation is a reading that no early witness contains, introduced into the text by an editor who judges the transmitted reading corrupt. The definition matters because it separates three operations that casual talk about editing confuses. The first is choice: where the early texts disagree, as the First Quarto of 1597 and the Second Quarto of 1599 disagree in thousands of places, an editor who prints one witness’s word over another’s is selecting, not emending. The second is normalization: every modern edition modernizes spelling, regularizes speech headings, and repunctuates, and while those silent operations alter the look and sometimes the meaning of a line, they follow stated conventions rather than guesses at lost words. The third operation, emendation proper, begins only where all the witnesses fail together, where the words on every surviving early page refuse to construe, scan, or cohere, and the editor concludes that the corruption lies deeper than any one printing, in the copy behind the print or in the transmission before it. The Latin tags of the discipline preserve the distinction: correction ope codicum is repair from the manuscripts and early prints, correction ope ingenii is repair from the editor’s own wit, and only the second is emendation in the famous and dangerous sense.

Is an emendation just a grand word for a correction?

No, and the difference is the whole subject. A correction restores what a document can be shown, or plausibly argued, to have lost in transmission: a turned letter, a word misread from a difficult hand, a line skipped by a compositor’s wandering eye.

An emendation in the strict sense goes further and supplies what no document preserves, on the strength of the editor’s reasoning about sense, metre, idiom, and the habits of scribes and compositors. The correction answers to evidence; the conjecture answers to judgment, which is why the famous cases are famous: each one is a wager that a named editor’s judgment, at a named moment, saw further than the surviving paper. Every case in this article is a wager of that kind, and each is graded by whether the wager was forced, whether it was economical, and whether it has held.

The scale of the phenomenon in this play surprises readers who meet it for the first time. In the substantive sense, words that matter, the play is lightly emended: a modern scholarly text of Romeo and Juliet follows the Second Quarto for the overwhelming majority of its words, departs from it for the First Quarto or the Folio at a modest number of points, and prints pure conjecture at only a handful. But the handful is not randomly distributed. Conjecture clusters exactly where readers look hardest, at the celebrated speeches, the anthology lines, the moments quoted in wedding readings and examination halls. The reason is structural. A corrupt or puzzling reading in an obscure line attracts little attention and may stand for centuries unchallenged; a puzzling reading in a famous line attracts the concentrated intelligence of every generation, and the famous line is correspondingly more likely to have been retouched. Fame is a cause of emendation, not merely its consequence.

The play’s textual situation makes the wagers intelligible. No manuscript of Romeo and Juliet survives. The earliest witnesses are the First Quarto of 1597, a short text generally read as a reported or adapted version of the play as performed, and the Second Quarto of 1599, a long text printed by Thomas Creede from copy that the title page advertised as “newly corrected, augmented, and amended” and that editors since the nineteenth century have treated as standing close to the author’s own papers. Later quartos descend from these, the Third of 1609 and the undated Fourth of about 1622 reprinting the Second Quarto’s line with corrections and corruptions of their own, and the First Folio of 1623 sets the play from the later quarto tradition rather than from any manuscript. An editor of this play therefore works from a tall, narrow pyramid: one authoritative early text with known blemishes, one shorter rival with independent value, and a descending tradition whose agreements add no independent weight. Where the Second Quarto errs alone, its error is the text’s error, and only three remedies exist: adopt the rival reading, conjecture a better one, or print the error and explain it in a note. The famous emendations are the history of editors choosing among those remedies under pressure.

One class of substantive intervention deserves naming here, because it is the commonest in practice and the least discussed in principle: the correction of speech assignments. The early texts attach speeches by abbreviated prefixes in the margin of the copy, and the prefixes are among the most corruptible elements in transmission, since a compositor who misreads or misremembers a contraction can hand a speech to the wrong character without disturbing a word of it. Editors of this play reassign speeches where the Second Quarto’s prefix contradicts the sense of the scene, and each reassignment is a small emendation, argued from who is on stage, who is addressed, and who has knowledge the speech requires. The class matters to the casebook because it shows the discipline working at its most defensible: the transmitted text fails demonstrably when a speech is given to a character who cannot speak it, the mechanism is a known frailty of the copy, and the repair is the minimum reassignment that restores the scene. Most readers have absorbed dozens of such repairs without knowing an editor was present, which is exactly why the famous verbal conjectures must be judged strictly: the invisible repairs have spent the reader’s trust, and only the visible ones can replenish it.

That pressure produced a literature of its own. A passage where the early text seems impossible is called a crux, and a crux in a famous play is an open invitation to the profession: the New Variorum edition of the play prepared by Horace Howard Furness in 1871 filled twenty-eight pages of small print with proposals for a single word of Juliet’s night speech, and school editions repeated the count for a century as the standard measure of editorial industry. The cases gathered here are the peaks of that industry. Each has a name attached, because emendation was for two centuries a personal art practised by identifiable intelligences: Nicholas Rowe, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, William Warburton, Samuel Johnson, Edward Capell, Edmond Malone, and their successors in the Cambridge, Arden, Oxford, and Folger editions. The casebook method, original reading first, then the intervention, the argument, the resistance, and the modern verdict, is the only honest way to present them, because an emendation detached from the reading it displaced is merely an assertion of editorial power.

The Anatomy of a Corruption: How Errors Enter the Text of Romeo and Juliet

Before the cases can be judged, the court needs to know what kinds of failure it is judging among, because an emendation’s plausibility is a claim about a physical process: somebody, at some desk or press, turned one word into another. The transmission of this play offered that process four theatres. The first is the author’s own draft. The Second Quarto was set, on the account its features support, from papers close to the author’s working manuscript, and a working manuscript carries its own false starts within it: the dawn doublet examined later in this article, in which a quatrain stands twice in variant forms, is the fossil of a revision the author made and the printing house failed to resolve. Error of this class is not corruption but incompletion, and it calls for judgment about intention rather than repair of damage. The second theatre is the scribe and the reporter. Between the playhouse and the printing house stood copyists, and behind the First Quarto stands, on the prevailing account, a process of reporting or adaptation in which speeches were shortened, transposed, and paraphrased; a reported text corrupts wholesale, by the scene and the speech, and its individual words carry correspondingly little weight against the long text’s. The third theatre is the printing house itself, and its failures are the best documented because they are mechanical. Compositors in Thomas Creede’s shop set the Second Quarto from the manuscript in stints, misread the secretary hand in which such copy was written, set u for n and n for u from a foul case, let their eyes skip from one occurrence of a word to the next and drop the matter between, and repeated or omitted syllables at line turns. The Second Quarto even preserves the scar of a mid-course correction: a stretch of the text in the second act was set twice, the second setting drawing on the First Quarto to repair the first, a patch that bibliographers can still detect because the repaired pages differ in their readings and their spelling habits from the pages around them.

The fourth theatre is the one this casebook chiefly patrols, the study of the editor, where the failure is not mechanical but volitional: a reader with authority decides that the text is wrong and changes it. The taxonomy matters because the remedy must match the theatre. A compositor’s misreading can be reversed by proposing what the hand in the copy actually wrote, and the proposal can be tested against the letterforms of the period and the compositor’s habits elsewhere in the book. A reporter’s paraphrase cannot be reversed at all, only outvoted by the better witness. An author’s unfinished revision cannot be repaired, only adjudicated. And an editor’s improvement can be reversed only by argument, which is why editorial improvements are the most dangerous corruptions of all: they arrive with reasons attached, and the reasons are often good enough to outlive the evidence. The famous cases that follow are arranged to keep the theatres distinct. Where the failure was mechanical, the casebook asks whether the repair found the letterforms. Where the failure was editorial, it asks whether the repairer had earned the authority the repair assumes. The distinction sounds elementary. The history of this play’s text is the record of how often it was ignored, and the modern discipline, at its best, is nothing more than the distinction enforced.

The Editor’s Instruments: How a Conjecture Is Argued

A conjecture is not a guess with a university press behind it; at its best it is an argument built from instruments, and the instruments were assembled early. Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored of 1726, for all its polemical occasion, is the first systematic display of the kit. Its master instrument is the parallel passage: the author’s usage elsewhere, in this play and across the canon, treated as the dictionary of his intentions, so that a doubtful word is tried against the places where the same hand used the same figure in undisputed lines. A conjecture that can point to the author’s own parallels carries evidence; a conjecture that merely satisfies the editor’s ear carries biography. The second instrument is metre, the verse treated as a measuring device: a transmitted reading that wrecks the line’s rhythm where the author is elsewhere regular stands accused by the verse itself, and a proposed repair that restores the count without disturbing the sense earns credit no argument from taste can match. The third instrument is the period’s idiom at large, the usage of the 1590s recovered from other pens, which acquits many a reading that a later century found impossible: the defense of the stars pronoun from the erotic sense of “die” is an idiom argument, and the acquittal of the quarto’s “glooming” against the Folio’s smoothing is another. The fourth instrument is peculiar to plays with sources, and this play has the richest source trail in the canon: Arthur Brooke’s poem Romeus and Juliet and William Painter’s prose tale stand behind the text as controls, and where a quarto reading is doubtful, the source can sometimes show what the dramatist had before him, converting a conjecture into something closer to a restoration. Editors of this play have used the source control since the variorum period, and its existence is one reason the play’s textual scholarship is unusually well evidenced: the adapter’s departures are themselves data, and a reading that matches the source where the rival does not has a witness of a second kind.

A fifth instrument completes the kit, and it is an institution rather than a technique: the variorum edition, which gathers the commentary and conjecture of centuries at the foot of the text and preserves the defeated with the victorious. Furness’s New Variorum Romeo and Juliet of 1871, whose twenty-eight pages on the runaway word have served this article as a measure of the industry, is the type of the form, and its value to the discipline is archival in the strictest sense. A conjecture that loses does not disappear; it goes into the variorum’s custody, with its author’s name, its reasoning, and the reasoning that beat it, so that the profession’s memory is longer than any editor’s tenure. The gentle fine can be refused with confidence partly because its whole dossier survives to be re-examined, and the stars pronoun can be re-argued by each generation because the variorum tradition kept the argument’s papers. An editor working without that archive repeats the eighteenth century’s condition, judging by the light of a single lifetime; an editor working with it judges as the profession’s executor, and the difference in humility is the difference between the two ages of the art.

The instruments cut both ways, and the casebook’s skepticism is built into them. Parallel passages can be found for almost anything in a canon of this size, and the history of conjecture is full of parallels marshalled like regiments behind a word the documents never contained. Metre accuses irregular lines that the author may have written irregularly on purpose, in a play whose lovers speak in sonnets and whose clowns speak in prose. Idiom acquits so generously that a determined defender can save nearly any reading by finding the sense it needs in some corner of the period’s usage, which is why the defense of a reading must show not merely that its sense existed but that the sense fits the speaker, the scene, and the figure in progress. The instruments are therefore tests of a proposal’s coherence, not proofs of its truth, and the mature discipline treats them as Housman treated all his apparatus: as means of thinking clearly about a local problem, in full view of the documents. With the instruments named and their limits marked, the cases can be heard. Each of the famous interventions that follows was argued with some subset of this kit, and each stands or falls by how honestly the kit was used.

The Pronoun in the Stars Speech: The Case of “When I Shall Die”

The most consequential single word in the play’s editorial history is a pronoun in Juliet’s soliloquy on her wedding night. Alone in the Capulet orchard, waiting for the darkness that will bring her husband, Juliet summons night in the speech that begins “Gallop apace” (3.2) and rises to its climax in a fantasy of Romeo’s death transfigured: “Give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night” (3.2.21-25). The Second Quarto, the copy-text of the modern editions, reads “I” in the second line. The fantasy as the quarto gives it runs: when I am dead, take him, cut him into stars. The reading that most readers memorized in school reads “he”: when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, a smooth sequence in which Romeo dies, is stellified, and shines. Between the quarto’s pronoun and the schoolroom’s pronoun lies the whole ethics of emendation in miniature.

The case for “he” is the case of narrative sense. Juliet is imagining Romeo’s posthumous glory, not arranging her own funeral; the imperative “take him” needs a dead Romeo to work on, and the following lines, “And he will make the face of heaven so fine,” continue the subject without strain if “he” has already been named as the one who dies. On this view the quarto’s “I” is a simple transmission error, and small pronouns are among the most corruptible words in any text: a compositor setting type at speed, or a scribe copying a draft, can drop or substitute a monosyllable with no visual drama, and first and third person pronouns are confused elsewhere in early modern printing often enough that the error class is well attested. The reading “he” surfaces in the seventeenth century quarto tradition after the Second Quarto, Ron Rosenbaum traces it to the Fourth Quarto in his account of the crux in The Shakespeare Wars, and editors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, meeting a text that already contained it or reasoning their way to it independently, printed “he” as the obviously intended word. For most of the play’s life in print, “he” is what the line said.

The resistance began when the documentary discipline started asking what right an editor had to the improvement. The defense of the quarto’s “I” runs on two rails. The first is grammatical generosity: Juliet’s fantasy is not a narrative sequence but an incantation, and its grammar is the grammar of wishes, in which the death imagined may be her own and the command to night may still take Romeo as its object, since night is being asked to perform the whole transformation at the end of time, when both are dead and he can be cut into stars for her to see. Defenders note that the speech has already imagined Romeo dead and shining within a grammar of pure apostrophe, and that Shakespearean soliloquy tolerates, and often prefers, the visionary shortcut over the clerk’s sequence. The second rail is lexical, and it is the argument Rosenbaum reports hearing and passes on with mingled delight and doubt: in the erotic vocabulary of the period, “die” carries the sense of sexual consummation, and Juliet on her wedding night, in a speech saturated with the expectation of the marriage bed, may mean by “when I shall die” the little death of that night itself, after which, in the fantasy’s logic, Romeo is to be taken and cut into stars. On that reading the quarto’s pronoun is not an error but a precision, and the emendation smooths away exactly the daring that marks the speech as Shakespeare’s.

Two further considerations discipline the choice, and neither points the way the emenders assumed. The first is metre, which is neutral: “I” and “he” are both unstressed monosyllables in a line that scans identically with either, so the verse offers no vote, and a crux that metre cannot settle must be settled by sense and document alone. The second is the speaker’s demonstrated habit of mind. Juliet imagining a death in advance is not an anomaly invented to save a pronoun; it is her signature figure. In the parting scene she looks down at Romeo descending from her window and sees him, in her own words at 3.5, “as one dead in the bottom of a tomb,” her ill-divining soul converting the living man into his corpse a full two acts before the vault. A speaker who habitually rehearses deaths, her lover’s and her own, in the grammar of vision rather than narrative, is a speaker whose stars speech may run its deaths in visionary order without apology: her death named first, as the gate through which the fantasy passes, and his stellification beyond it, in the eternity where sequence dissolves. The emenders read the speech as a story and corrected its chronology. The defense reads it as a spell and declines to. Between those readings the documents cannot arbitrate, because both parties are construing the same words; what the documents can do, and what the copy-text exists to do, is hold the quarto’s pronoun in place until the case against it is stronger than a preference for tidiness. Three centuries of argument have not made it stronger.

The modern standing of the case is a genuine split, and the split is the verdict’s raw material. Editions divide: many print “he” and record the quarto’s reading in the apparatus, others print “I” and defend it in the commentary, and the divergence is visible enough that a reader comparing two reputable editions meets two different Juliets in the play’s most famous anticipation of the tomb. The Shakespeare Navigators text, which prints the quarto’s reading, glosses the matter with unusual candor: some editors print “when he shall die,” but “I” makes perfectly good sense. That sentence is the whole modern argument in nine words. The emendation was proposed, or adopted, to repair a failure of sense; the defense replies that the failure was in the repairers, who read a visionary speech with a bookkeeper’s eye and missed the word’s second sense under their noses. Judged by the standard this article applies, “he” fails the first test of a legitimate emendation: the early reading does not demonstrably fail. It construes, it scans, and under period usage it means more, not less, than the substitute. The stars speech therefore belongs in the casebook not as a rescue but as the play’s standing warning that the demand for smoothness is itself a corrupting force, and that an editor’s first duty at a famous line is to ask whether the difficulty is the author’s design. The pronoun remains contested, and the honest editions are the ones that let the contest show.

The contest reaches readers through channels that never mention it, and the channels deserve a sentence of the casebook’s attention. The most widely seen screen version of the play, Baz Luhrmann’s film, speaks the quarto’s “I” at this moment, an unwitting restoration performed before an audience of millions who could not have named the Second Quarto; and the words of the play as the internet circulates them descend, on the largest quotation sites, from texts of the nineteenth century, the Cambridge edition of Clark and Wright among them, so that the line as the culture quotes it is a layered object, part quarto, part editorial tradition, part accident of digitization. A crux is therefore never only a scholarly event. It is a fork in the culture’s memory of the play, and the editor who chooses a pronoun is choosing, in a small way, what the next century will misremember as Shakespeare’s.

The Gentle Fine: A Brilliant Conjecture and Its Long Defeat

If the stars pronoun is the play’s great contested case, the feast sonnet holds its great defeated one. Romeo, taking Juliet’s hand at the Capulet feast, speaks the opening quatrain of the shared sonnet: “If I profane with my unworthiest hand / This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: / My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand / To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss” (1.5). Every early text reads “sin.” Lewis Theobald, the most gifted textual intelligence of the eighteenth century, judged the word wrong, and William Warburton after him printed the conjecture that both names are attached to in the apparatus of later editions: “the gentle fine is this.” The reasoning is elegant, and it deserves to be stated at full strength before it is refused. To profane is to commit an offense against something sacred; the law’s answer to an offense is a fine; Romeo’s sonnet is built as a conceit of transgression and reparation, in which the hand offends, the lips offer to make amends, and the kiss is tendered as payment. On that logic “fine” is the word the conceit demands, the penalty that the pilgrim lips are ready to pay, and “sin” is the scribal or compositorial banalization, the common word substituted for the pointed one, the kind of error that transmission commits a thousand times.

The sonnet’s economy deserves a closer audit, because the verdict against the conjecture rests on it and the audit shows how an editor reads when the discipline is working. Romeo’s quatrain opens the account with a debt word, “profane,” the hand’s offense against the shrine. The second line names the offense’s nature, and on the name everything downstream depends. If the word is “sin,” the sonnet denominates its currency in the theology of guilt and cleansing, and the exchange that follows spends exactly that currency: Juliet grants that saints have hands and lips, Romeo begs that lips do what hands do, the kiss transfers the sin from his lips to hers, he asks for it back as a favour, and her closing compliment prices his technique against a book of devotion. Sin, purged, trespass: the figure is a liturgy of contamination and absolution conducted in fourteen lines and a coda, and its first coin must be the metal the rest are struck in. If the word is “fine,” the quatrain denominates in law, and the liturgy that follows must change money at the counter, from penalty to guilt, without a line acknowledging the exchange. Shakespeare’s sonnet sequences within scenes are built with a jeweller’s consistency of figure; the feast sonnet’s figure is sin from its second line to its last word, and the conjecture asks readers to believe that the author opened his figure in one metal and continued in another, and that a compositor, by luck, corrected the opening into consistency with everything that follows. Transmission does commit errors of that convenient kind approximately never. The case against “fine” is not that the word is impossible English but that the poem around the word is impossible with it, and an editor’s first loyalty is to the poem that exists rather than to the figure that might have been neater.

Why did Samuel Johnson praise the “gentle fine” conjecture?

Because Johnson judged conjectures the way the eighteenth century judged them, by the flash of the solution rather than by the state of the documents, and this one flashes: it completes the sonnet’s legal figure at a stroke, giving the profaning hand its penalty and the pilgrim lips their errand of payment.

The Cambridge History of English Literature, surveying Warburton’s edition, lists “gentle fine” for “gentle sin” among the favourable specimens of his emending, in the company of the Warburtonian corrections Johnson admired, at a moment when Johnson himself was calling another of Warburton’s conjectures noble. Johnson’s praise matters to the case because Johnson was no indiscriminate friend of emendation: his own edition of 1765 is famous for its reluctance to disturb the text, and his preface warns against the licentiousness of conjecture in terms editors still quote. When the age’s great skeptic salutes a conjecture, the conjecture has passed the strongest examination its century could give, and “gentle fine” entered the tradition carrying the highest references an emendation can carry.

The resistance, when it came, came from the sonnet itself. Juliet’s answering quatrain and the exchange that follows run on the word the conjecture would delete: “Then have my lips the sin that they have took,” and Romeo’s reply, “Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged! / Give me my sin again.” The sonnet and its coda form a closed economy of sin, purgation, and trespass, in which Romeo’s opening word is the seed the rest of the exchange harvests. Print “fine” and the economy breaks at its origin: the lips pay a penalty in line two and spend the remainder of the scene trading in a currency, sin, that was never introduced. Defenders of the quarto word add the transmission argument, and it is the argument that finished the conjecture as a serious candidate. A legitimate emendation must explain how the error happened, and no editor in three centuries has produced a credible account of this one: the supposed corruption requires a workman to replace a pointed legal term with a general religious one wholesale, in a printing whose known errors run to smaller game, turned letters, skipped words, and eyeskip, and to do so at the one word in the quatrain on which the sonnet’s whole economy was about to be built. The conjecture, in short, explains the passage better than it explains the document, and the modern discipline counts that order of explanation backwards.

The verdict of the modern editions is accordingly settled, and it is a defeat. The Cambridge editors of the 1860s, William George Clark and William Aldis Wright, printed “sin” in their text and preserved the conjecture where defeated conjectures live, in a note recording that Theobald and Warburton conjectured “gentle fine.” The Arden, Oxford, Cambridge, and Folger editions of the modern period print “sin” without exception known to this casebook, and “fine” survives in older printings and in the memory of the controversy. The case is the casebook’s purest example of its central distinction. Theobald’s instinct was the instinct of a great editor: he saw that “profane” raises a legal shadow and he reached for the word that completes the figure. What he did not have, and what his century had not yet built, was the discipline that asks the second question, how the supposed error arose, and the third, what the surrounding text does with the word already there. A conjecture can be brilliant, praised by Johnson, printed for a century, and still be a trespass, because the passage it improves was never broken. The gentle fine is the emendation every editor of this play should be required to admire and forbidden to print.

Rowe’s Silent Hand: Emendation Without a Record

Before the famous conjectures could be proposed, the practice that made them necessary and the habit that made them dangerous were both established by the play’s first editor. Nicholas Rowe, whose edition of Shakespeare appeared in 1709, was the first man to prepare the plays for the press as an editor rather than a printer, and his Romeo and Juliet set the pattern the century followed. Rowe modernized the spelling, regularized the entrances and exits, supplied the scene locations that editions still print, and corrected the text where it puzzled him. The corrections were competent, often necessary, and entirely silent. The Cambridge History of English Literature’s summary of his work has become the standard indictment and the standard defense in one sentence: his emendations were silently introduced into his text, and as silently appropriated by his successors. Rowe asked for no gratitude and left no record. A reader of his edition could not tell, at any given line, whether the words were the Fourth Folio’s, inherited from the quarto line behind it, or Rowe’s own repair, and neither could the editors who copied him.

The case for the prosecution is obvious, and the modern discipline is built on it. Silent emendation destroys the evidence it claims to serve: once a conjecture enters the text unmarked, the next editor inherits it as if it were a document, and a guess acquires the authority of a witness by mere survival. The textual history of this play is full of readings that persisted for generations on no stronger ground than an early editor’s silent preference, and the apparatus of a modern edition exists precisely to reverse Rowe’s procedure, to make every departure from the copy-text visible, attributed, and reversible. The whole of the history of editing the play from Rowe to Malone can be read as the slow invention of that visibility, from Rowe’s silence through the noisy attributions of the Theobald and Pope quarrel to Malone’s documentary footnotes.

The defense deserves its paragraph, because Rowe’s position was not stupid and his successors’ gratitude was not mere laziness. Rowe edited for readers, not for a profession that did not yet exist, and the text he inherited was in places unintelligible as printed: the late folios had accumulated a century of compositorial error, punctuation had decayed into noise, and speeches stood assigned to the wrong speakers. An editor who stopped to argue every repair in print would have produced a commentary with a play attached, for an audience that wanted the play. Rowe’s silent smoothing made Shakespeare readable at the moment when readership was the battleground, and several of his corrections of this play’s inherited errors were simply right, absorbed so completely that their origin is forgotten. The apparatus of a modern edition of this play is, in one of its aspects, a museum of Rowe’s decisions, because his regularizations defined the page his successors inherited. The scene locations that editions still print at the head of each scene, a public place in Verona, a street, the Capulet garden, descend from Rowe’s editorial housekeeping, supplied where the quartos give nothing but entrances. His tidying of speech headings, his supplying of exits the copy omits, his repunctuation of speeches whose pointing had decayed into randomness: all of it passed into the tradition as the text’s own furniture, so thoroughly that a reader must consult a facsimile to discover how bare the early pages are. The point for the casebook is that the silent hand did not only change words. It changed what a Shakespeare page was understood to be, and every subsequent editor, including the ones who repudiated Rowe’s methods, worked on a stage Rowe had built. His conjectures in the narrow sense are the least of his legacy; his normalization is the largest, and it is the part no apparatus can fully reverse, because a modern edition that stripped away every regularization would be unreadable in exact proportion to its purity.

The verdict the casebook records is therefore double. Rowe’s ends were legitimate and his means were ruinous, and the ruin is the reason the modern editor works under a rule Rowe never heard: emend if the case compels it, but emend in the open, with the early reading preserved beneath the text where any reader can restore it and reverse the judgment. The sin of the silent hand is not conjecture. It is conjecture with the evidence suppressed.

Pope’s Margins: The Editor as Executioner

Alexander Pope’s edition of 1723 to 1725 brought to this play a method more violent than conjecture and a temperament that made the violence famous. Pope edited by taste. Where a passage offended his sense of what Shakespeare could have written, he degraded it, printing the suspect lines at the foot of the page in smaller type as the margin’s rejects, and where a passage offended him past bearing he struck it out. Romeo and Juliet, the Cambridge History records, fared worst of all the plays under this treatment. Many passages were omitted on the pretext that they do not occur in the defective First Quarto, while others were inserted because they appeared in the Second, and others again were struck out simply because they were, in his reported judgment, nonsense or trash or ridiculous. His text was further marked by hundreds of verbal alterations for which no justification was attempted. The haver of the knife did not lack intelligence: the same history notes that although he made havoc of the text of Romeo and Juliet by his excisions, he instinctively introduced a number of undoubtedly genuine readings, and his preface contains a careful and accurate characterization of the quarto and folio texts, the first of its kind, including the first statement of the theory that the Folio’s copy had lain in the playhouse, cut and added to at the company’s pleasure. Pope understood the documents better than any predecessor and trusted his taste more than his understanding.

Why did Pope trust the First Quarto’s shortness as a warrant to cut?

Because the First Quarto’s brevity looked, to an editor of his formation, like evidence of what the play contained before theatrical and scribal accretion fattened it. A shorter text could be read as the author’s lean design and the longer Second Quarto as that design swollen by interpolation, actors’ gags, and the printing house’s expansions.

The inference was available in 1725 and it was wrong in a specific and instructive way: it treated the direction of derivation as readable from length alone, when the documents, patiently compared, show the short text’s dependence on the long one, its speeches thinned from fuller versions, its gaps falling where memory or adaptation would drop them. Pope’s error was not stupidity but method: he decided from a theory of what the text should be, and consulted the documents for confirmation, which is the exact reverse of the procedure the next generation built.

The reversal of Pope’s judgment is total in its principle, whatever local debts editors owe his eye. The First Quarto is read as the derivative witness, precious for the stage history it preserves and for occasional readings, but no warrant for deleting a line the Second Quarto contains. Every passage Pope struck from this play on the quarto’s silence has had to be argued back into the text on its merits, and the argument has succeeded in case after case, because a reported text’s omissions testify to the reporter, not to the author. The deeper lesson of Pope’s margins is about the kind of authority an emendation claims. A conjecture proposes a word; an excision abolishes a passage, and abolition on a theory of taste is the one editorial act the modern discipline forbids outright, because it destroys the evidence by which the theory could be corrected. Pope’s own fate in the tradition makes the point with a neatness no theorist could improve: his edition provoked Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored of 1726, the founding document of scientific editing, which demonstrated page by page that the poet had neglected the documents and that the despised drudge with his collations could recover readings the genius had mangled. The quarrel that followed, and Pope’s revenge in the Dunciad, fixed the two styles in the profession’s memory forever: the editor as man of taste, cutting by instinct, and the editor as scholar, emending by evidence. This play, which suffered most from the first style, is the right place to record that the second style won, and why it deserved to.

One Word, Twenty-Eight Pages: The Runaway Industry

Juliet’s night speech contains a second crux, and its scale rebukes any reader who thinks emendation a quiet trade. In the Second Quarto the passage runs, in modern spelling, “That runawayes eyes may wink,” the word standing unpointed, its grammar unresolved: the eyes belong to some runaway, or to runaways, or to a personified figure the line never names. Theobald’s pointing made it “th’ runaway’s,” a single fugitive whose identity commentators then had to invent, and the invention industry ran for two centuries: Charles Knight and John Payne Collier printed rival solutions, Samuel Singer proposed another, and the conjectures catalogued by the school editions include runagates, Luna’s, noonday’s, and a small crowd of desperate ingenuities. The measure of the frenzy is the count preserved from Furness’s New Variorum edition of 1871, whose treatment of the emendations and explanations of this one phrase filled twenty-eight pages of small print. Twenty-eight pages, on the pointing of one word, in a speech whose every other word stood still.

The case belongs in this casebook at brief length, because its full anatomy, the pointing, the candidates for the runaway’s identity, and the modern settlement of the pointing, fills a study of its own elsewhere in this series, and the present concern is narrower, the use of the episode as a diagnostic. What the runaway industry diagnoses is the economics of conjecture at a famous crux. The passage resisted solution because the quarto’s word is a genuine puzzle, and a genuine puzzle at a celebrated place is a standing offer of fame to any scholar who cracks it. The result was emendation as tournament, in which the probability of a proposal mattered less than its novelty, and in which the accumulated pages measure not the difficulty of the word but the reward structure of the profession. The modern settlement, which prints a pointing and declines to identify the runaway beyond what the grammar bears, looks like surrender and is in fact the discipline’s maturity: the recognition that a crux may be a crux, that the honest apparatus records the tournament and the honest text refuses to crown its winner. Against the twenty-eight pages stands the stars pronoun’s quieter lesson from the same speech. In one place editors invented too much; in the other, they improved too quickly. The speech has been a school for editors in both directions.

A further point about the runaway industry belongs to the casebook, because it extends the taxonomy. Much of what was fought over at the crux was not wording at all but pointing, and pointing is emendation’s silent form: the early texts’ punctuation is rhetorical and sparse, the modern editor’s pointing is grammatical and dense, and every comma an editor sets decides a small question of construction that the quarto left open. Theobald’s apostrophe in “th’ runaway’s” is a pointing decision wearing a word’s clothing, since the quarto’s letters are untouched by it; what he supplied was a grammar, and the industry that followed was an industry of grammars, each identifying its runaway by first deciding what the sentence was doing. The lesson generalizes uncomfortably. An edition’s most consequential interventions may be its least visible, the stops and apostrophes no apparatus fully records, and the reader who audits only the famous words has audited the smaller half of the editor’s work. The runaway word attracted its twenty-eight pages partly because it made the invisible visible: a crux where the pointing itself was the scandal, and therefore the one place where the profession was forced to watch its own hand.

The Doublet and the Rose: Decisions That Are Not Conjectures

Two of the play’s most famous editorial problems are not emendation problems at all, and their presence in the casebook is a control on its method, since an article about conjecture should be exact about what conjecture is not. The dawn doublet of the Second Quarto, in which the quatrain beginning “The grey-ey’d morn smiles on the frowning night” stands twice, once at the close of the balcony scene as Romeo’s farewell and once at the opening of the Friar’s cell scene in a variant form, presents an editor with documents in surplus, not documents in failure. Both versions exist; the question is whether the author drafted twice and cancelled once, and the editorial act, whether Brian Gibbons’s restoration of the quatrain to Romeo or the more common retention of the Friar’s version alone, is a judgment about revision, not a conjecture about lost words. Its full trial, the evidence of the small verbal differences between the two versions and what they imply about the manuscript behind the 1599 printing, belongs to the study of the Friar’s duplicated lines, and the casebook notes it here only to mark the boundary: an editor deciding between two authorial drafts is in a different court from an editor inventing a reading, and the standards of proof differ accordingly.

The rose line marks the same boundary from the other side. When Juliet asks what is in a name and concludes that a rose by any other word would smell as sweet, the choice between “word,” which the Second Quarto prints, and “name,” which the First Quarto prints and the proverb prefers, is a choice between witnesses, ope codicum, however heated the argument over the witnesses’ characters becomes. Most scholarly editions print the Second Quarto’s “word”; at least one well known modern edition prints “name”; the proverb, indifferent to both, keeps the form the culture memorized. No conjecture is involved, because no editor needed to invent the alternative: the documents supply it. The full hearing of that choice, including the dislocated catalogue of body parts that surrounds it in the Second Quarto and the question of which text the proverb descends from, is given in the study of the rose line’s word and name. For the casebook the rose matters as the limiting case that proves the definition. Emendation begins where the documents end. Where a rival reading stands in an early witness, the editor’s duty is judgment between evidences; where no witness offers a remedy, the editor who intervenes crosses into conjecture and accepts the heavier burden this article has been enforcing, the burden of the mechanism, the economy, and the published record.

A Glooming Peace: The Smoothing That Was Sent Back

The smallest case in the casebook may be its most satisfying, because it is the one in which the machinery of restoration can be watched working perfectly on a single word. The Prince closes the play: “A glooming peace this morning with it brings; / The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head” (5.3). The early texts read “glooming,” the participle, peace arriving as an activity, a thing the morning does. The Fourth Folio of 1685 printed “gloomy,” the flat adjective, and the smoother word travelled through the tradition on the Folio’s authority, the kind of trivial modernization that no reader notices and no editor confesses. The school editions of the nineteenth century, in the person of K. Deighton’s widely used text, record the variant and render the verdict in a single note: gloomy is what the Fourth Folio gives, and the participle seems more forcible from its notion of activity. Modern editions print “glooming.”

The Fourth Folio deserves its paragraph of context, because its smoothing was not carelessness but a programme. The late seventeenth century editions of Shakespeare modernized as they went, regularizing grammar, tidying metre, and replacing the period’s stranger forms with the usage of a later London, and the Fourth Folio of 1685 carried that programme further than its predecessors. Its text of this play descends from the quarto line through the intervening folios, and at each stage of the descent the text gathered small easings of exactly the gloomy class: nothing that a reader would protest, everything that a philologist regrets. The participle “glooming” offended the programme twice over, as an unusual formation and as a verb doing an adjective’s work, and its replacement by “gloomy” is the programme in miniature, the substitution of the regular for the expressive under the banner of correctness. That the replacement then travelled for two centuries on the folio tradition’s authority illustrates the casebook’s recurring mechanism of error: a late witness, itself derivative, lends its reading the prestige of print, and the prestige compounds until a school editor with the quartos open beside him asks the elementary question, which text is older and which word is better, and finds both answers point the same way.

The interest of the case is not the word but the principle it exercises, the principle editors name with the Latin tag lectio difficilior probabilior, the harder reading is the likelier. Transmission smooths. Compositors, scribes, and editors all drift toward the familiar: the unusual participle becomes the common adjective, the pointed term becomes the general one, the strange construction becomes the expected one, and the drift is so constant that it can be used as a compass. Where two readings stand and one is the easier, the easier is suspect, because the history of texts is a history of easings, and the harder reading is the one no transmitter had a motive to invent. The principle decided the gentle fine against its proposers, since “sin” the common word was supposed to be the smoothing and yet the sonnet’s economy defended it, which is why the principle is a compass and not a law: it points, and the editor must still walk the ground. In the glooming case the compass and the ground agree. “Glooming” is harder, better, and early; “gloomy” is a late smoothing with nothing to recommend it but its century’s taste for tidiness; and the restoration of the participle in modern texts is emendation’s mirror image, the discipline correcting not the author but itself. A casebook of famous emendations should end its survey of cases with a restoration, because the restorations are the proof that the system can learn: the same profession that produced the gentle fine and the twenty-eight pages also produced the habit of sending smoothings back.

Forged Authority: Collier’s Old Corrector and the Price of Trust

Every discipline has the scandal that teaches it what its evidence is worth, and for Shakespeare editing the scandal arrived in 1852, when John Payne Collier published his Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare’s Plays. Collier announced that he owned a copy of the Second Folio, the Perkins Folio, annotated throughout in a seventeenth century hand by an old corrector who had evidently worked from authority, and that the annotations supplied thousands of corrections to the received text. The readings were offered, and for several years received, exactly as emendations dream of being received: not as one man’s conjectures but as documentary evidence, the voice of the seventeenth century itself settling the cruxes. Collier had printed his own pointing among the candidates at this play’s runaway crux, and readings from the old corrector entered discussions of the text across the canon. Then the documents were examined. The handwriting proved to be a modern imitation executed in pencil and ink over erasures, the annotations Collier’s own work, and the exposure, driven through by the investigations of Nicholas Hamilton and Clement Ingleby in 1859 and the years following, destroyed both the folio’s authority and, for a while, the credit of its owner, who had been among the most respected Shakespeare scholars in England.

The relevance to this casebook is not the melodrama but the moral the profession drew, because the moral rewired the standards of emendation for good. Collier’s fraud worked because the culture of conjecture had created a hunger it could feed: editors wanted documentary warrants for the corrections they already believed, and a corrector from the seventeenth century was the warrant in its purest form. The lesson absorbed after 1860 was that a warrant must itself be warranted, that paper, ink, provenance, and hand are evidence before any reading they carry can be evidence, and that the desire for a reading to be right is the precise condition under which its credentials must be checked hardest. Bibliography, the physical study of books as manufactured objects, rose in authority from that date, and it rose as emendation’s police force. When Charlton Hinman, a century later, reconstructed the printing of the First Folio compositor by compositor, the point of the enterprise was Collier’s lesson generalized: an editor who cannot say how a book was made cannot say how its errors arose, and an editor who cannot say how an error arose has not earned the right to correct it. The forged corrector thus improved the discipline he disgraced, and the improvement is visible in every modern apparatus, where a conjecture must arrive with its mechanism attached or not arrive at all.

The play’s own stake in the scandal is worth isolating. Collier’s editions and his crux interventions, at the runaway word among other places, had been part of the respectable furniture of the text before the Perkins Folio appeared, and the folio’s supposed authority was promptly available to bless them: a corrector of the seventeenth century could be imagined to have settled what the nineteenth century was debating, and Collier’s own positions stood to gain a manufactured ancestry. No evidence suggests the folio’s Romeo and Juliet annotations changed the play’s text as durably as the fraud changed the profession, but the mechanism is the casebook’s purest negative example. Every other intervention surveyed here argued from documents that exist and can be re-examined; Collier’s argued from a document that had been manufactured to be argued from, and the difference is the difference between error and crime. The profession’s response, to make provenance a branch of editing, is the reason a modern conjecture must show its mechanism: the mechanism is what a forgery cannot retrospectively supply.

One circumstance explains both the fraud’s success and its long half-life, and the casebook records it because it generalizes. Collier was not a charlatan at the gate but a scholar at the centre: his History of English Dramatic Poetry and his editions had made him a pillar of the Shakespeare establishment, a founder of societies, a man whose word on a document was itself a form of evidence. The establishment believed the old corrector because Collier’s accumulated credit stood behind the annotations, and the credit was real, which is what made its expenditure on a forgery so destructive. Sir Frederic Madden, the British Museum’s keeper of manuscripts and the greatest palaeographer of the age, examined the folio and recorded his suspicions of the annotations in his diary years before the public exposure, and the long delay between private suspicion and public proof is its own lesson in how establishments protect their ornaments. After the exposure, the profession changed its rules of evidence in ways still visible: provenance research became a branch of editing, the physical description of annotated books became a discipline, and no reading has since been admitted on a scholar’s say-so, however eminent, without the document open beside it. The casebook’s fourth test, publication of the whole transaction, is Collier’s unintended gift.

The Discipline Arrives: Collation, Documents, and the Rules of Proof

The standards invoked throughout this casebook were not eternal verities; they were built, piece by piece, by the editors who found the older freedom intolerable. The first piece was collation. Edward Capell, whose edition appeared in 1768, did what no predecessor had done systematically: he acquired and compared the early quarto editions themselves, treating the old prints as the evidence and the modern editorial tradition as the thing to be checked against it. The effect on emendation was immediate and permanent. A conjecture proposed after Capell had to survive a question that could not have been asked before him in any rigorous form: what do the documents actually read, all of them, and how are they related? The second piece was documentary method in argument. Edmond Malone, whose edition of 1790 became the foundation on which the nineteenth century built, brought the habits of the historian and the lawyer to the text: chronology established from records, theatrical documents, Stationers’ Register entries, the paper trail of the early book trade. Malone’s Shakespeare was a historical person whose texts had a history, and an emendation after Malone had to be a historical hypothesis, consistent with that history, rather than a flash of taste. Conjectures did not stop; they acquired footnotes, and the footnotes acquired standards.

What must a conjecture prove before an editor may print it?

Four things, in the order the discipline learned them. It must prove that the transmitted reading fails, not merely that a better phrase can be imagined, since the history of this play is littered with improvements to passages that were sound.

It must prove a mechanism, a credible account of how the author’s word became the document’s word, through misreading, mishearing, memorial substitution, or compositorial habit. It must prove economy, that no smaller change, and no rival witness’s reading, does the same work. And it must publish its proof, printing the conjecture as a conjecture in apparatus or note, so that the verdict can be appealed by any later reader holding the same documents. A proposal that meets all four tests has earned the text; a proposal that meets fewer belongs in the commentary, honoured as an idea and refused as a reading.

Between Malone and the theorists stand two figures who converted the documentary turn into editorial practice and deserve the casebook’s record. R. B. McKerrow, in his Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare of 1939, argued the conservative brief with a bibliographer’s precision: an editor’s duty is to the copy-text, departures from it require positive justification, and a reading that can be construed as it stands is not corrupt merely because an editor can imagine a better one. McKerrow’s influence runs through the century’s best editing of this play, and his rule, construe first and emend last, is the direct ancestor of the presumption the modern editions give the Second Quarto. Fredson Bowers, Greg’s American heir, built the rationale into an editorial programme for the great collected editions of the postwar period, insisting that the choice of copy-text and the exercise of critical judgment in emending it were a single act of scholarship, documented in an apparatus complete enough for the reader to reconstruct the documents entire. Bowers’s programme had its own excesses, and the skeptics of the next generation aimed at its confidence as much as at the eighteenth century’s; but the standard it set for the record, that nothing be hidden and everything be reversible, is the standard the modern editions of this play still meet, and it is the fourth of the casebook’s four tests given institutional form.

The twentieth century gave the discipline its theoretical charter and its patron saint of rigor. W. W. Greg, bibliographer and theorist, argued in his essay on the rationale of copy-text that an editor must distinguish the authority of a witness in accidentals, its spelling and punctuation, from its authority in substantives, its words, and that where the copy-text’s substantives fail, the editor not only may but must emend, exercising a judgment that the documents inform but cannot replace. Greg’s framework licensed emendation and disciplined it in the same motion: the copy-text governs until it errs, the error must be argued, and the correction must be the editor’s declared act. A. E. J. Housman, editing classical texts with a ferocity Shakespeareans borrowed as a model, stated the ethic in its purest form in his 1921 lecture on the application of thought to textual criticism: textual criticism is the science of discovering error in texts and the art of removing it, and its instrument is neither inspiration nor machinery but thought, applied without laziness and without fear. Housman’s famous comparison, that the textual critic at work is not Newton investigating the motions of the planets but a dog hunting for fleas, is quoted wherever editors gather, because it captures the discipline’s mature self-image: the work is humble, local, empirical, and unglamorous, and the brilliant generalization is precisely what it distrusts. Between Greg’s rationale and Housman’s ethic, the casebook’s standard stands fully assembled, and it remains only to record that the standard has enemies, and that the enemies have a case.

The Case Against Emendation: The Documentary Turn

The strongest challenge to the whole enterprise arrived in the later twentieth century, and it came, fittingly, from inside bibliography itself. Randall McLeod, writing as Random Cloud among other signatures, argued that the edited text is a modern fabrication wearing period dress: that editors, in their drive to present a single clean reading text, suppress the documentary reality of early modern books, modernize away their strangeness, and print as Shakespeare’s a composite that no early reader ever saw. Leah Marcus gave the challenge its manifesto in Unediting the Renaissance, proposing that the texts be approached in their documentary plurality, versions rather than a version, with the editorial urge to conflate and correct treated as a historical force to be studied rather than a service to be performed. Paul Werstine’s parallel skepticism cut the theoretical ground from under the copy-text narratives themselves, questioning whether the categories of foul papers and fair copy, on which editors had built their accounts of how a text like the Second Quarto arose, described anything that ever existed. The cumulative force of the critique is visible everywhere in this play’s modern presentation: editions that print the First Quarto entire as a document in its own right, as Lukas Erne’s edition of the short text does; parallel texts that refuse to choose; a professional rhetoric in which the word editor is spoken with an apology the eighteenth century would not have understood.

If the early reading can be defended, must it be printed?

Not always, and the concession defines the surviving discipline. The documentary critique wins its central point: a defensible early reading carries a presumption in its favour that no amount of editorial cleverness should overturn lightly, because the editor’s sense of the defensible is itself historically conditioned, as the stars pronoun shows, where one century’s nonsense is another’s precision.

But a presumption is not a verdict. Where the early reading cannot be construed at all, where the mechanism of corruption is demonstrable and the repair economical, printing the error and praising its difficulty is not humility but abdication, and it leaves the reader with a text the editor privately believes false. The defensible must be printed; the indefensible must be repaired in the open; and the entire art lies in the honesty of the border between them, patrolled by the apparatus.

Lukas Erne’s work gives the turn its constructive form, and his double presence in this play’s editing shows what the documentary conscience builds when it builds. His argument in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist reframed the long texts as works composed with readers in view as well as players, which repriced the Second Quarto’s authority upward, while his edition of the First Quarto printed the short text entire, old spelling’s modern dress and all, as a theatrical document with its own integrity rather than a corruption to be mined and discarded. An editor formed by that double vision does not ask which single text deserves to be the play; the question becomes what each document is evidence of, and emendation shrinks to its proper size, a local repair within a documentary landscape, never a substitute for the landscape. That shrinkage is the turn’s real achievement, and it is why the famous conjectures read so strangely against it: the gentle fine and the rest belong to a world in which one text had to be produced and the editor was its author of last resort, a world the documents, patiently edited, have dissolved.

The adjudication this casebook reaches, between Greg and Housman on one bench and McLeod and Marcus on the other, is therefore a split verdict with a clear rule of application. The skeptics are right about the past: the history of emending this play is a history of confident men improving what they had not understood, from Pope’s margins to the gentle fine, and the presumption must lie with the documents because the conjecturers’ record is bad. The discipline’s defenders are right about the task: a text exists to be read, a demonstrable error helps no reader, and the refusal to emend merely transfers the corruption from the printing house to the reader’s eye unmarked. The synthesis is the practice the best modern editions already follow, stated here as the casebook’s rule. Emend rarely. Emend only where the early reading fails on its own terms, not on the editor’s. Show the mechanism or stay silent. Prefer the rival witness to the invention, and the invention to the nonsense, and print the whole transaction where it can be audited. Under that rule the famous cases sort themselves, as the survey has shown: the stars “he” fails at the first gate and stays a warning; the gentle fine fails at the second and stays a monument; Rowe’s silence fails at the fourth and stays a reproach; and the handful of repairs that pass all four gates are not embarrassments to the documentary conscience but its instruments, the points at which judgment, having done the documents full honour, does the reader full justice too.

The Modern Editions at the Famous Cases

A reader who lines up the modern scholarly editions of this play and turns to the famous places will learn more about emendation in an hour than a treatise can teach, because the editions embody the discipline’s settlement in physical form. All of them start from the Second Quarto. All of them print its errors corrected where correction is demonstrable and record the departures in an apparatus or textual commentary. And at the celebrated cases they divide exactly where this casebook’s analysis predicts, which is the strongest evidence that the divisions are principled rather than accidental. At the feast sonnet they are unanimous for the quarto’s “sin,” the gentle fine retired to the notes after its century of glory. At the Prince’s closing speech they are unanimous for “glooming,” the Fourth Folio’s smoothing refused. At the stars pronoun they divide, and the division is the honest one: the reading text must print something, the documents support an argument either way, and each edition’s pronoun is a small published verdict on the largest question in editing, how much weight a construable difficulty can bear. The full comparison of the editions’ layouts, annotations, and tempers belongs to the comparison of the modern editions, Arden, Oxford, and Folger, where their handling of the First Quarto and their rival introductions receive the extended hearing they deserve.

Do the modern editions print the same pronoun in the stars speech?

No, and the disagreement is printed on the page for any reader to find. Editions of the play available in any large bookshop divide between “he” and “I” at the climax of Juliet’s night speech, each recording the other reading in its notes, so that the most famous anticipation of death in English drama exists in two authorized forms.

The division is not carelessness. It is the visible edge of the discipline’s deepest unsettled question, whether a reading that yields sense under period usage may be displaced by a reading that yields easier sense, and the editions that print the quarto’s pronoun with a defense and the editions that print its rival with a note are answering that question in opposite directions with equal professionalism.

The Folio-based complete works pose the play a special problem that displays the modern settlement from an unexpected angle. A modern complete Shakespeare built on the First Folio as its copy-text, as the RSC Shakespeare of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen is, meets in this play a Folio text that is itself a reprint, set from the later quartos and carrying no independent authority; fidelity to the Folio would mean fidelity to a derivative, and the editors must work back through the quarto tradition for the substance while honouring the volume’s Folio frame. The contortions are instructive. They show a discipline that has learned to rank witnesses by descent rather than by format or fame, and they put the quarto texts, the little books the eighteenth century treated as raw material, at the top of the evidentiary order where Capell’s collations first placed them. A play that exists in two early quartos and a derivative folio is the perfect school for that lesson, and the modern complete works are its latest pupils.

Three features of modern practice deserve emphasis, because together they constitute the difference between the discipline as Pope practised it and the discipline as it stands. The first is the presumption of innocence for the copy-text: G. Blakemore Evans’s New Cambridge edition and Brian Gibbons’s Arden edition, for all their differences of temper, treat the Second Quarto as a witness to be cross-examined rather than a draft to be improved, and René Weis’s Arden third series volume continues the presumption with the First Quarto admitted as a second witness of independent standing. The second feature is the completeness of the record. Jill Levenson’s Oxford edition prints a text accompanied by a commentary in which the famous conjectures are rehearsed with their pedigrees, so that a reader can watch the gentle fine proposed, praised, and refused without leaving the volume; the Folger edition of Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine carries the same ethic into the classroom, its textual notes flagging the places where the printed word is an editorial act. The third feature is the migration of conjecture from the text to the note. The modern editor’s invention, where invention survives at all, lives below the line, labelled with its author’s name and date, competing in the open. A scholar collating the famous cases across centuries keeps the whole dossier in order with a private research library, and tools built for exactly that discipline of keeping documents straight, such as VaultBook, matter to editors for the same reason the apparatus matters to readers: a conjecture whose pedigree cannot be retrieved cannot be judged, and the history of this play’s text is a graveyard of pedigrees lost and found. What the eighteenth century did by instinct and hid by silence, the modern edition does by rule and displays by design, and the display is not pedantry. It is the difference between a text that asks for trust and a text that earns it.

The Stage’s Wholesale Alternative: Adaptation Is Not Emendation

One neighbouring practice must be separated from the casebook’s subject before the verdict, because the two are constantly confused in popular talk about the text. The stage rewrote this play wholesale for two centuries, and it did so in the open. When the theatres reopened and the play returned in 1662, James Howard’s version supplied a happy ending, and the two endings, his and the tragedy’s, were played on alternate nights as an advertised choice. Thomas Otway’s Caius Marius of 1680 absorbed great stretches of the play into a Roman frame. Theophilus Cibber’s version of 1744 kept the lovers’ waking in the tomb and cut the Rosaline references, and David Garrick’s production of 1750, the century’s defining staging, worked from substantially Cibber’s text; Charlotte Cushman’s restoration of the tragic conception in 1845 was news precisely because the adapted ending had held the stage so long. None of this is emendation, and the distinction is not pedantry. The adapter claims the stage for an evening and prints his name on the bill; the audience knows the text has been handled, and the documents survive untouched in the study for the next generation to restore. The emender claims the document itself, and if the claim is hidden, the next generation inherits the handling as the evidence. That is why the casebook judges Pope’s margins more harshly than Garrick’s rewritings, though Garrick changed a hundred lines for Pope’s one: Garrick’s changes were performances, confessed and perishable, while Pope’s were presented as the text, permanent and silent. Adaptation is theatre’s ancient right, exercised in daylight. Emendation is scholarship’s narrow licence, valid only in daylight too. The famous cases divide, in the end, by whether the hand that changed the words was willing to be seen.

The InsightCrunch Emendation Ledger

The cases surveyed in this article, with the decisions that are not conjectures included for the boundary they mark, are gathered in the InsightCrunch emendation ledger. The ledger’s pattern is the article’s argument in miniature: the interventions that survive are the ones that respected the documents, and the interventions that failed are the ones that trusted the editor.

Passage	Early reading	Intervention	Standing in modern editions
Juliet’s stars speech, 3.2	“when I shall die” (Second Quarto)	“when he shall die,” entering through the later quarto tradition and carried by editors	Contested; editions divide, each recording the rival
Feast sonnet, 1.5	“the gentle sin is this” (all early texts)	“the gentle fine,” conjectured by Theobald and Warburton, praised by Johnson	Refused; “sin” printed, the conjecture kept in the notes
Inherited text, throughout	Readings of the late folio tradition	Rowe’s silent corrections, 1709	Absorbed where right, unidentifiable where wrong; the practice condemned
Passages absent from the First Quarto	Present in the Second Quarto	Pope’s excisions and marginal degradations, 1723 to 1725	Reversed; the passages restored, the method repudiated
Gallop apace speech, 3.2	“runawayes” unpointed (Second Quarto)	Theobald’s pointing “th’ runaway’s,” then two centuries of rival conjectures	A pointing printed, the identification industry declined
Prince’s closing speech, 5.3	“A glooming peace” (early texts)	“gloomy,” the Fourth Folio’s smoothing, 1685	Refused; the participle restored and defended
The dawn quatrain, 2.2 and 2.3	Printed twice in variant forms (Second Quarto)	Editorial retention or deletion; Gibbons restored the quatrain to Romeo	A judgment on revision, not a conjecture; editions divide
The rose line, 2.2	“word” (Second Quarto), “name” (First Quarto)	None; a choice between witnesses	“word” in most scholarly editions, “name” in at least one, the proverb independent
Readings across the canon, this play included	The received text	Collier’s Perkins Folio annotations, 1852, offered as documentary corrections	Exposed as forgeries; the scandal that re-priced evidence

Verdict: When Conjecture Is Rescue and When It Is Trespass

The casebook closes where it opened, with the claim that the text of the world’s most familiar love tragedy is partly an editorial fabric, and with the verdict that the fabric’s quality depends entirely on the discipline of the weaving. The survey warrants three conclusions. The first is that fame corrupts editing: the celebrated lines attracted the interventions, the interventions attracted the controversies, and the controversies consumed the pages, while obscure lines kept their quarto words in peace, so that a reader’s confidence should vary inversely with a line’s celebrity until the apparatus has been consulted. The second is that the great age of conjecture, the century of Rowe’s silence, Pope’s knife, and Warburton’s brilliance, bequeathed the play a double inheritance, a handful of genuine rescues buried in a sediment of improvements, and that the work of Capell, Malone, the Cambridge editors, and their modern successors has been the long assay of that sediment, returning the early readings to the text one documented argument at a time. The third is that the assay is not finished and cannot be: the stars pronoun still divides the editions on the bookshop shelf, and the next generation’s account of the First Quarto may reprice the evidence again.

The four tests can be run over the casebook’s docket in a paragraph, and the exercise is the article’s method made portable. The stars “he” fails the first test, failure of the early reading, since the quarto’s pronoun construes under period usage; it is an improvement, not a repair, and improvements belong in the notes. The gentle fine fails the second test, mechanism, since no credible process turns the author’s word into the document’s, and it compounds the failure by breaking the sonnet’s verbal economy; it is the casebook’s monument to ingenuity ungoverned. Rowe’s corrections divide: the repairs pass the first three tests wherever the folio tradition was demonstrably corrupt, and fail the fourth, publication, in their entirety, which is why their legacy is a warning rather than a model. Pope’s excisions fail every test at once, being voluntary, extravagant, and framed as the text itself. The glooming restoration passes all four in reverse, the discipline’s own error found, mechanized, and corrected in the open. And the runaway pointing passes the fourth test so exuberantly, twenty-eight pages of published transaction, that it redeems its failures of the second and third: nothing there was hidden, and a later age could reverse any of it, which in the end is the difference between a profession’s tournament and a fraud’s forgery. Collier fails all four from underneath, his evidence itself being the fabrication, and his case is the boundary stone: beyond him lies not editing but crime.

What should a reader do with a line that exists only by emendation?

Read it twice, once as the poem and once as the evidence. As the poem, the emended line asks for the same surrender as any other line, and a reader who flinches at every editorial word will never reach the tomb.

As the evidence, the line asks for a moment’s audit: which edition prints it, what the early text reads, whether the change is confessed in the notes, and whether the confession satisfies the tests of failure, mechanism, and economy. A line that survives the audit can be quoted with a clean conscience; a line that fails it should be quoted, if at all, with its quarto rival standing beside it in the sentence. The reader who learns that double reading has learned the only lesson the casebook exists to teach: that reverence for the play and suspicion of its editors are not opposites but the same virtue, practised at different depths.

The casebook’s lessons export beyond this play, and the export is worth a paragraph because Romeo and Juliet is not an eccentric text but a typical one with an unusually complete record. Every early modern play that survives in multiple early prints presents the same pyramid: an authoritative witness with blemishes, a derivative tradition with prestige, and a modern readership that mistakes the composite for the document. What this play adds is density of attention, three centuries of the best editors in the language working the same two thousand lines, so that the failure modes stand out in higher relief than anywhere else in the canon. The editor of a less studied play inherits the same temptations with less warning: the smooth reading that flatters a theory, the conjecture that solves a problem of the editor’s manufacture, the silent repair that borrows the document’s authority for the study’s opinion. Against each, this play’s record supplies the inoculation, because here the profession tried everything, in public, and the record of what survived the trying is the closest thing textual criticism has to experimental results. The famous emendations are famous partly because the play is famous; they are instructive because the fame forced the arguments into the open and kept them there, generation after generation, until the standards emerged from the quarrels. That is the sense in which the casebook’s subject is not a set of curiosities but the discipline’s own history, written in the margins of its most read play.

Emendation, then, is rescue when it is rare, forced, economical, and confessed, and it is trespass when it is frequent, voluntary, extravagant, or silent. By that standard the famous interventions in this play earn their mixed posterity honestly. Theobald, who gave the discipline its method, also gave it the gentle fine, proof that method without the documentary conscience is only cleverness with footnotes. Pope, who understood the quartos best, cut the play worst, proof that knowledge without humility is a sharper knife. The modern editions, which emend least and record most, are not the play’s cautious custodians but its most honest ones, and the words they print, quarto words in the main, an editor’s word here and there under a flag, are as close as print can bring a reader to the Verona that Shakespeare’s company played and his century read. The lines readers love are safe. They are safe because the profession learned, over three centuries and at the cost of its proudest reputations, to keep its hands visible.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the InsightCrunch emendation ledger, and what pattern does it expose?

The InsightCrunch emendation ledger is the table at the centre of this article, gathering the play’s famous interventions in one reference: the passage, the early reading, the editor and the proposed change, and the standing of that change in modern editions. The pattern it exposes is a sorting. Interventions that respected the documents, or that repaired a demonstrable failure by the smallest credible change, survived; interventions that trusted an editor’s taste over the documents, however brilliant their proposers, were refused or reversed. The ledger is also a warning about fame: the famous lines attracted the most intervention, so a celebrated passage is exactly where the text should be checked hardest.

Q: What is an emendation in an edition of the play?

An emendation is a reading that appears in no early witness, introduced by an editor who judges the transmitted reading corrupt and supplies a replacement by conjecture. It differs from choosing between the First Quarto and the Second Quarto where they disagree, and from modernizing spelling and punctuation, both of which work with what the documents contain. Emendation begins where the documents fail together. In the case of this play, where no manuscript survives and the Second Quarto is the documentary foundation, a substantive conjecture is the editor’s last resort: the admission that the surviving paper, on its own terms, does not yield sense, and that judgment must supply what transmission lost.

Q: What does the second quarto print in Juliet’s cut-him-out-in-little-stars speech?

The Second Quarto prints “when I shall die” in the speech at 3.2. The passage, in the quarto’s words, reads: “Give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night.” Modern readers often meet the line with “he” instead of “I,” and the substitution is easy to miss, because the two pronouns are both plausible to the eye and the difference changes the fantasy’s logic without changing its music. The article’s case study shows why the quarto’s pronoun, far from being an obvious misprint, has a serious modern defense.

Q: Where did the reading “when he shall die” come from?

The reading “when he shall die” entered the text through the seventeenth century quarto tradition after the Second Quarto. Ron Rosenbaum traces it to the Fourth Quarto of about 1622 in The Shakespeare Wars, and it was carried forward by the editors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who printed it as the obviously intended word. The mechanism matters: “he” may be a correction made in the printing house, an editor’s conjecture that hardened into tradition, or a manuscript reading preserved by a later transmission, and the documents do not settle which of those stories is true. Its authority is therefore the authority of usage, not of attested origin, and that is why modern editions that print it record the quarto’s “I” alongside.

Q: Why do defenders of the quarto’s “I” say the word “die” rescues the sense?

Defenders argue that “die” in the period carries the erotic sense of sexual consummation, so Juliet’s line, spoken on her wedding night while waiting for Romeo, imagines the little death of the marriage bed itself: when I die in that sense, take him and cut him out in little stars. On that reading the fantasy is not a narrative sequence but an incantation, in which the speaker’s own death and her husband’s transfiguration belong to one visionary moment rather than to consecutive events. The defense also draws on the speech’s own tolerance for visionary grammar: apostrophe and wish do not observe the clerk’s sequence, and Shakespearean soliloquy prefers the compressed image to the orderly timetable. The sense, defenders insist, was never absent; it was hiding in a word the emenders read flatly.

Q: What did Theobald and Warburton want to put in place of “the gentle sin”?

Theobald and Warburton conjectured “the gentle fine” in place of “the gentle sin” in Romeo’s opening quatrain of the feast sonnet at 1.5. The reasoning ran on the sonnet’s legal conceit: to profane a holy shrine is an offense, and the penalty an offense incurs is a fine, so the lips’ readiness to make amends fits the word “fine” better than the word “sin.” The conjecture was printed by Warburton and praised by Samuel Johnson as one of the favourable specimens of editorial wit, and it circulated widely enough that the Cambridge editors of the 1860s preserved it in their notes even as they refused it in their text. The joint attribution matters: two of the eighteenth century’s most formidable textual intelligences agreed, and the agreement still did not save the conjecture.

Q: Why do modern editions keep “sin” in the feast sonnet despite the famous conjecture?

Modern editions keep “sin” because the sonnet’s own language defends it and the conjecture cannot explain how the supposed error arose. Juliet’s answer and the exchange that follows run on sin throughout: “Then have my lips the sin that they have took,” and Romeo’s “Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged! / Give me my sin again.” Removing “sin” from the opening quatrain breaks the chain the rest of the sonnet depends on. Transmission analysis adds the second objection: no editor has shown a credible misreading by which an author’s “fine” became a compositor’s “sin,” the substitution being of a whole concept rather than of confusable letterforms. A conjecture that improves a passage it cannot explain has solved the wrong problem, and the modern discipline refuses it on that ground.

Q: Which passages of this play did Pope strike out for missing from the first quarto?

Pope struck passages from Romeo and Juliet on the pretext that they do not occur in the defective First Quarto, treating the shorter text as the measure of what the play originally contained and deleting Second Quarto material that the shorter text lacks. The history of his edition records the policy in general terms rather than preserving a complete hit list: passages were omitted on the quarto’s silence, others were inserted because they appeared in the Second Quarto, and still others were struck because they struck his taste as nonsense, trash, or ridiculous. The excisions fell on the play more heavily than on any other, and the policy was later reversed in its principle once the First Quarto was understood as a derivative, reported text whose omissions testify to its reporter, not to the author.

Q: What is the difference between an emendation and a choice between early readings?

The difference is whether the documents supply the alternative. When the First Quarto reads “name” and the Second Quarto reads “word” in the rose line, an editor who prints one or the other is choosing between witnesses, and the choice can be argued from the witnesses’ characters, their transmission, and the passage’s sense. When no witness supplies a workable reading and the editor supplies a new word from judgment, that is emendation, and it carries a heavier burden: the editor must show that the transmitted text fails, explain how the failure arose, and publish the invention as an invention. The distinction governs the whole casebook, because several of the play’s famous problems, the rose and the dawn doublet among them, are choices dressed in the rhetoric of conjecture.

Q: What is the harder-reading principle, and how does it restrain an editor?

The harder-reading principle, lectio difficilior probabilior, holds that where two readings stand, the more difficult one is likelier to be original, because transmission smooths: compositors, scribes, and editors drift toward the familiar word, the expected construction, and the common adjective. It restrains an editor by reversing the burden of proof: the easy reading must justify itself against the suspicion that it is a smoothing, and the difficult reading earns a presumption that it is the author’s because no transmitter had a motive to invent it. The principle is a compass, not a law, as the feast sonnet proves: “sin,” the commoner word, is defended by its passage’s economy against the pointed “fine,” and the editor who applied the principle mechanically would emend the wrong line. Used with the passage in view, it is the discipline’s best defense against taste.

Q: What was Collier’s Perkins Folio, and how was the fraud detected?

The Perkins Folio was a copy of the Second Folio that John Payne Collier claimed had been annotated in the seventeenth century by an old corrector with access to authority, and from which he published thousands of corrections in his Notes and Emendations of 1852. The annotations were received for several years as documentary evidence, the seventeenth century itself settling cruxes. The fraud was detected by physical examination: the handwriting proved to be modern imitation executed over erasures, and the investigations of Nicholas Hamilton and Clement Ingleby in 1859 and the following years demonstrated that the corrections were Collier’s own. The exposure destroyed the folio’s authority and re-priced evidence for the whole discipline: after Collier, a warrant for a reading must itself be warranted, by paper, ink, provenance, and hand.

Q: How can a reader tell whether a word in a modern edition is an editor’s conjecture?

A reader can tell by the apparatus, the small print at the foot of the page or the textual notes at the back of the volume, where a scholarly edition records its departures from the copy-text. A conjecture appears there with its author’s name and date, beside the reading it displaced, so that the transaction is auditable. Where an edition carries no apparatus, as many classroom and paperback texts do not, the reader has only the editor’s reputation and the consensus of other editions to consult, and the comparison of two editions at the famous places, the stars pronoun and the feast sonnet among them, is the fastest way to find the contested words. The practical rule is simple: if two reputable editions differ at a line, at least one of them is exercising judgment, and the notes will say which.

Q: How many substantive conjectures does a modern text of the play actually print?

Very few. A modern scholarly text of Romeo and Juliet follows the Second Quarto for the overwhelming majority of its words, departs from it for the First Quarto or the Folio at a modest number of points, and prints pure conjecture, a word found in no early witness, at only a handful. The handful is what makes the count deceptive: conjecture clusters at the celebrated speeches, so a reader who knows the famous lines knows a text in which the editor’s hand is disproportionately present. The bulk of editorial change in a modern edition is not conjecture at all but modernization of spelling and punctuation and the regularization of speech headings, changes that alter the page’s appearance far more than its words. Substantive conjecture is the rare event, and its rarity is the measure of the modern discipline’s restraint.

Q: What did A. E. Housman demand of anyone who would emend a text?

Housman demanded thought, applied without laziness and without fear. In his 1921 lecture on the application of thought to textual criticism, he defined textual criticism as the science of discovering error in texts and the art of removing it, and he insisted that its instrument is neither inspiration nor machinery but disciplined reasoning about sense, metre, idiom, and the habits of transmission. His famous comparison, that the textual critic at work resembles a dog hunting for fleas rather than Newton investigating the motions of the planets, states the ethic: the work is humble, local, and empirical, and the grand generalization is what it distrusts. Housman edited Latin poets, not Shakespeare, but the Shakespeareans borrowed his ethic wholesale, because it named the virtue their own century’s editors had most often lacked.

Q: Why did the twentieth century turn against confident emendation?

The twentieth century turned against confident emendation because bibliography exposed how often confidence had been misplaced. The documentary work of the century showed that many confident corrections were solutions to problems the documents did not present, that the categories of foul papers and fair copy on which editors had built their accounts of transmission were inferences rather than facts, and that the composite reading text suppressed the plurality of early versions. Randall McLeod, writing as Random Cloud, argued that the edited text is a modern fabrication in period dress, and Leah Marcus, in Unediting the Renaissance, urged that the versions be read as versions rather than conflated into one. The turn did not abolish emendation; it moved the presumption to the documents and made conjecture answer to mechanism, economy, and publication.

Q: Can an emendation ever be proved correct?

Strictly, no conjecture can be proved correct in the sense a document can, because the evidence that would prove it, the author’s manuscript or an early witness carrying the word, is by definition absent. What a conjecture can earn is a status close to proof: a transmitted reading that fails on its own terms, a mechanism of corruption so plausible that the error explains itself, and a proposed word that restores sense, metre, and idiom at the smallest possible cost. The emendation of a nonsense reading by a single letter that a compositor demonstrably misread elsewhere in the same book comes as close to certainty as the art allows. The honest editor distinguishes that case from the plausible guess and labels both, because the distinction is the whole of the discipline’s claim to trust.

Q: What happens to a famous emendation when scholars find the early reading makes sense after all?

The emendation is demoted from the text to the notes, and the passage is restored. The feast sonnet is the model case: “the gentle fine,” conjectured by Theobald and Warburton and praised by Johnson, was returned to the apparatus by the Cambridge editors of the 1860s once the sonnet’s sin economy was read properly, and modern editions print the quarto’s “sin.” The Prince’s “glooming peace” shows the same motion at the level of a single word, where a Fourth Folio smoothing, “gloomy,” was sent back in favour of the early participle. Demotion is not disgrace: the notes preserve the conjecture, its author, and its reasoning, so that a later generation can revive it if new evidence arrives. The text’s health is measured by how freely it demotes.

Q: Why do reading editions and classroom texts hide most emendations from sight?

Reading editions and classroom texts hide most emendations from sight because they are designed for readers who want the play, not the debate about the play, and because an apparatus would double their bulk and distract from the verse. The cost is real: a reader of such an edition cannot tell at a glance which words are the quartos’ and which are an editor’s, and a famous line may be memorized in an emended form without any warning. The scholarly editions exist to pay that cost on the reader’s behalf, by recording every substantive departure where it can be checked. The practical compromise for a classroom reader is to own one scholarly edition with a full apparatus and to consult it at the famous places, where the hidden hands are most likely to be working.

Q: How should a student quote a line whose key word is an emendation?

A student should quote the line as the edition prints it, name the edition, and, where the word is contested, note the early reading beside the quotation. At the stars speech, for example, a quotation of “when he shall die” should carry the information that the Second Quarto reads “when I shall die,” because the pronoun is the point and the reader has a right to know that the edition exercised judgment. At the feast sonnet the modern text needs no such flag, since the editions print the quarto’s “sin” and the conjecture lives in the notes. The rule behind both cases is the same: the quotation belongs to the edition, the early reading belongs to the record, and honest quotation keeps the two visible at once.

Q: Why has one pronoun in the stars speech divided editors for three centuries?

One pronoun has divided editors for three centuries because it sits at the intersection of every question emendation raises. The quarto’s “I” and the later tradition’s “he” cannot both be right, yet each can be defended: “he” by the narrative sense of a dead lover cut into stars, “I” by the visionary grammar of the speech and by the erotic sense of “die” that the wedding night scene activates. The division persists because the evidence underdetermines the choice: no mechanism proves how “I” or “he” entered the text, and no edition can print both. Each generation therefore re-argues the pronoun with its own theory of what a speech may do, and the argument is the history of editing in miniature, sense against document, smoothness against difficulty, the editor’s judgment against the printer’s page.