Venus and Adonis

From the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library

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Until now, with the release of the Folger Digital Texts, readers in
search of a free online text of Shakespeare’s plays and poems had to
be content primarily with using the Moby™ Text, which reproduces a
late-nineteenth century version of the plays and poems. What is the
difference? Many ordinary readers assume that there is a single text of
all these works: what Shakespeare wrote. But Shakespeare’s plays
were not published the way modern novels or plays are published
today: as a single, authoritative text. In some cases, the plays have
come down to us in multiple published versions, represented by
various Quartos (Qq) and by the great collection put together by his
colleagues in 1623, called the First Folio (F). There are, for example,
three very different versions of 
Hamlet
, two of 
King Lear
, 
Henry V
,
Romeo and Juliet
, and others. Editors choose which version to use as
their base text, and then amend that text with words, lines or speech
prefixes from the other versions that, in their judgment, make for a
better or more accurate text.
Other editorial decisions involve choices about whether an unfamiliar
word could be understood in light of other writings of the period or
whether it should be changed; decisions about words that made it into
Shakespeare’s text by accident through four hundred years of
printings and misprinting; and even decisions based on cultural
preference and taste. When the Moby™ Text was created, for
example, it was deemed “improper” and “indecent” for Miranda to
chastise Caliban for having attempted to rape her. (See 
The Tempest
,
1.2: “Abhorred slave,/Which any print of goodness wilt not
take,/Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee…”). All Shakespeare
editors at the time took the speech away from her and gave it to her
father, Prospero.
The editors of the Moby™ Shakespeare produced their text long
before scholars fully understood the proper grounds on which to make
the thousands of decisions that Shakespeare editors face. The Folger
Library Shakespeare Editions, on which the Folger Digital Texts
depend, make this editorial process as nearly transparent as is
possible, in contrast to older texts, like the Moby™, which hide
editorial interventions. The reader of the Folger Shakespeare knows
where the text has been altered because editorial interventions are
signaled by square brackets (for example, from 
Othello
: “ If she in
chains of magic were not bound, ”), half-square brackets (for
example, from 
Henry V
: “With blood and sword and fire to win your