ABSTRACT
The business of editing Shakespeare can be divided into two main tasks. Firstly, the editor must establish, in all its details, the actual text of the play that is to be printed. Secondly, she or he must explain or communicate that text to the readers – by adding an introduction, notes, glossary and so forth. Editors in the late twentieth century are continuing to build on and refine the work of their predecessors, but at the same time they find themselves in the midst of a fundamental revolution in attitudes to some of the basic assumptions of editing and textual scholarship taken for granted in the past. The material is complicated, but it ought to be possible for an editor to describe what procedures have been followed and why, in language that an interested but non-specialist reader can understand.
