ABSTRACT
1 Sir John Oldcastle was indeed published in 1600. Captain Thomas reached print in 1605, and 2 Sir John Oldcastle either never was printed or has simply disappeared. The eighteenth century saw more editions of Oldcastle. Henry Tyrrell edits Oldcastle in his The Doubtful Plays of Shakespeare. A. F. Hopkinson, the last of the nineteenth-century editors of Oldcastle, is also the last to modernize the spelling of the original, a practice adopted by every previous editor or printer and by none afterwards. A brief introduction to the play provides the bibliographical background to the Oldcastle text, and refers to the important Greg articles in The Library which established the correct printing date of the “Shakespeare” quarto and thus Q1’s textual superiority over Q2. Lineation of the text has caused a few problems, primarily because of the indifferent nature of much of the verse in Oldcastle.
