Texts
A Game at Chess survives in nine different texts, each of which has its own unique characteristics. Gary Taylor thus calls the play "the most complicated editorial problem in the entire corpus of early modern drama, and one of the most complicated in English literature". The play is unique in that it exists in more 17th-century manuscripts than it does printed editions (six extant manuscripts compared to three printed editions). Of the manuscripts, one is an authorial holograph, and three are the work of Ralph Crane, a professional scribe who worked for the King's Men in this era and who is thought to have prepared some of the play texts for the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays.
There are two major studies of the relationship between the texts: that of T.H. Howard Hill (1995), and Gary Taylor (2007); the studies give different names to the texts.
| Name (Howard-Hill) | Name (Taylor) | Current location | Provenance | Created by | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Archdall (Ar.) | Crane1 | Folger Shakespeare Library | Once owned by Irish antiquary Mervyn Archdall | Ralph Crane (scribe) | Believed to be the earliest form of the play |
| Bridgewater-Huntington (B-H) | Bridgewater | Huntington Library | Bought from the Earl of Ellesmere's collection at Bridgewater House | Unidentified scribe | |
| Lansdowne (Ln.) | Crane2 | British Library | Lansdowne Collection | Ralph Crane (scribe) | |
| Malone (Ma.) | Crane3 | Bodleian Library | Formerly owned by William Hammond (d.1635) and John Pepys (d.1652) | Ralph Crane (scribe) | |
| First Quarto (Q1) | Okes | n/a | n/a | Nicholas Okes (printer) | |
| Second Quarto (Q2) | Okes2 | n/a | n/a | Nicholas Okes (printer) | A reprint of Q1 |
| Third Quarto (Q3) | Mathews/Allde | n/a | n/a | Augustine Mathews and Edward Allde (printers) | |
| Rosenbach (Rs.) | Rosenbach | Folger Shakespeare Library | Once owned by A.S.W. Rosenbach | Two unidentified scribes | |
| Trinity (Tr.) | MiddletonT | Trinity College, Cambridge | Perh. Patrick Young, librarian to King James I | Thomas Middleton (author) |
Read more about this topic: A Game At Chess
Famous quotes containing the word texts:
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)
“The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)