facsimile editions
facsimile editions.Pioneered in 1807, reproductions of the First Folio and the quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays proliterated after the advent of photography in the 19th century. Such facsimile editions are widely used by bibliographers and textual critics, as well as readers who wish to encounter Shakespeare's texts in their original form. Although it is generally assumed that photographic reprints present a technically exact facsimile of the original, the notoriously unreliable facsimile of the First Folio prepared by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps in 1876 was heavily retouched in pen and ink on nearly every page. Charlton Hinman's Norton facsimile (1968) is made up of various leaves containing corrected formes from a number of actual copies, thus creating an ‘ideal’ copy that exists only in the facsimile.
Eric Rasmussen
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