William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition by William Shakespeare Page A

words are easily handled: ‘doe’ becomes ‘do’, ‘I’ meaning ‘yes’ becomes ‘ay’, ‘beutie’ becomes ‘beauty’, and so on. But it is not always easy to distinguish between variant spellings and variant forms. It is not our aim to modernize Shakespeare’s language: we do not change ‘ay’ to ‘yes’, ‘ye’ to ‘you’, ‘eyne’ to ‘eyes’, or ‘hath’ to ‘has’; we retain obsolete inflections and prefixes. We aim not to make changes that would affect the metre of verse: when the early editions mark an elision—know‘st’, ‘ha’not’, ‘i’th’temple‘—we do so, too; when scansion requires that an -ed ending be sounded, contrary to modern usage, we mark it with a grave accent—formed’, ‘moved’. Older forms of words are often preserved when they are required for metre, rhyme, word-play, or characterization. But we do not retain old spellings simply because they may provide a clue to the way words were pronounced by some people in Shakespeare’s time, because such clues may be misleading (we know, for instance, that ‘boil’ was often pronounced as ‘bile’, ‘Rome’ as ‘room’, and ‘person’ as ‘person’), and, more importantly, because many words which we spell in the same way as the Elizabethans have changed pronunciation in the mean time; it seems pointless to offer in a generally modern context a mere selection of spellings that may convey some of the varied pronunciations available in Shakespeare’s time. Many words existed in indifferently variant spellings; we have sometimes preferred the more modern spelling, especially when the older one might mislead: thus, we spell ‘beholden’, not ‘beholding’, ‘distraught’ (when appropriate), not ‘distract’.
    Similar principles are applied to proper names: it is, for instance, meaningless to preserve the Folio’s ‘Petruchio’ when this is clearly intended to represent the old (as well as the modern) pronunciation of the Italian name ‘Petruccio’; failure to modernize adequately here results even in the theatre in the mistaken pedantry of ‘Pet-rook-io’. For some words, the arguments for and against modernization are finely balanced. The generally French setting of As You Like It has led us to prefer ‘Ardenne’ to the more familiar ‘Arden’, though we would not argue that geographical consistency is Shakespeare’s strongest point. Problematic too is the military rank of ensign; this appears in early texts of Shakespeare as ‘ancient’ (or ‘aunciant’, ‘auncient’, ‘auntient’, etc.). ‘Ancient’ in this sense, in its various forms, was originally a corruption of ‘ensign’, and from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries the forms were interchangeable. Shakespeare himself may well have used both. There is no question that the sense conveyed by modern ‘ensign’ is overwhelmingly dominant in Shakespeare’s designation of Iago (in Othello) and Pistol (in 2 Henry IV, Henry V , and The Merry Wives of Windsor ), and it is equally clear that ‘ancient’ could be seriously misleading, so we prefer ‘ensign’. This is contrary to the editorial tradition, but a parallel is afforded by the noun ‘dolphin’, which is the regular spelling in Shakespearian texts for the French ‘dauphin’. Here tradition favours ‘dauphin’, although it did not become common in English until the later seventeenth century. It would be as misleading to imply that Iago and Pistol were ancient as that the Dauphin of France was an aquatic mammal.
    Punctuation, too, poses problems. Judging by most of the early, ‘good’ quartos as well as the section of Sir Thomas More believed to be by Shakespeare, he himself punctuated lightly. The syntax of his time was in any case more fluid than ours; the imposition upon it of a precisely grammatical system of punctuation reduces ambiguity and imposes definition upon indefinition. But Elizabethan scribes and printers seem to have regarded