ABSTRACT
The act of writing explanatory notes for a text is one of the great joys of scholarly editing. If presenting the text requires care to allow the text to speak for itself, annotation allows the editor to interpret, to comment, to highlight, and to contextualise: that is, to bring his/her scholarship to bear on the text, to act as a guide for the reader, and to demonstrate the text's significance and worth. Although the focus of most scholarly editions will be on the text, editors should not ignore the many non-textual elements that may be present in printed or manuscript works. This chapter offers advice to editors who are faced with the often complicated problems of recording variant readings among multiple copies of Renaissance texts. One area of modernisation that has received surprisingly little attention in guidelines and handbooks is the punctuation of speech.
