ABSTRACT
The textual notes to the edition record only the corrected and uncorrected forms of the substantive variants. Of some sixty-nine stop-press variants in the Conspiracy, twenty-nine are substantive changes. The explanatory notes, placed for the reader’s convenience at the bottom of the page and keyed to the text, are designed to permit the lay reader, as well as the scholar, to understand the play without recourse to outside assistance. Though they chiefly gloss difficult words and passages, the explanatory notes also provide information on little-known historical, mythological, classical, social, military, astrological, and cosmological references. Except for the dash used to indicate interrupted speeches, a change of addressee, or the end of an aside the punctuation is conventional and conservative. Leaving aside the correction of one turned letter and one shift to lower-case type, the correction of accidentals consists entirely of spelling and punctuation changes, nearly all of the latter in the direction of heavier pointing.
