The First Quarto of Othello

This is the first modernized and edited version of the 1622 Othello. By taking this earliest published version of Othello as a book in its own right, Scott McMillin accounts for the mystery of its thousands of differences from the Folio version by arguing that the Quarto was printed from a theatre script reflecting cuts and actors’ interpolations made in the playhouse. McMillin explains that the playhouse script was apparently taken from dictation by a scribe listening to the actors themselves, and thus reveals how Othello was spoken in seventeenth-century performance. This edition, which consists of a detailed introduction, quarto text, select collation and textual notes, is an important book for scholars in Shakespeare and Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, with wide ramifications for other Shakespeare textual studies and for students of early theatre history.

• The first modernized and edited version of the 1622 Othello • Accounts for the mystery of why the Othello Quarto differs from the better-known Folio version on thousands of points • An important book for scholars in Shakespeare and Elizabethan-Jacobean drama

Acknowledgements; Abbreviations and conventions; Introduction: The textual problem; Q1 and foul papers; Greg sets the standard; Economy in the New Bibliography; Revision or abridgement; New evidence of foul papers?; Grounds for doubt; Walkley, Okes and the ‘Cameron Group’; Punctuation; Compositorial prudence; Scribal punctuation and the Barnavelt Manuscript; Other King’s-Men plays, 1619–22; Actors’ interpolations; Listening; Dictation in the theatres; Mislineation; Playhouse scripts; Summary; Date of the Q1 playscript; Editorial procedure; The Play.