Shakespeare's Speech Headings

This volume contains the papers presented at the Textual Seminar of the Shakespeare Association of America, held in Montreal in 1986. The topic of the seminar was "Speech-Headings: The Bibliographer, the Editor, and the Critic." The papers concentrate on the speech prefixes in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, with particular attention to All's Well That Ends Well, Coriolanus, the second and third parts of Henry VI, and Romeo and Juliet. They also investigate plays from the Shakespeare Apocrypha and plays by later dramatists. They examine the evidence provided by these little designators as it applies to the nature of the text, the performance, the acting companies, and the audience. The eight scholars whose contributions to the seminar are printed here come from England, Canada, and the United States. Experienced in bibliographical criticism and in editorial procedures and having published over the years important material on the assigned topic or on related topics, they brought to the seminar a unique depth of awareness and insight.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.