When thinking of what scene to choose for my edition, I knew that I wanted to focus on a moment that had some sort of action so that there would be multiple characters to look at, as well as stage directions to analyze. I ended up choosing the scene where Juliet dies because I thought it would be interesting to see if this crucial and essential moment in the play had variations across different editions. Since we were consulting the first published version as one of our editions, I decided I also wanted to look at the second edition, which was published in 1599. I was curious to find out if there were any large differences between the two, since they were only published two years apart. I suspected there might be some differences in terms of the language, spelling, and punctuation, but I was surprised to see how many differences there were between the first edition and second editions. I ended up using the 1599 edition as my copy text because it had the most in common with the other two editions I looked at, but there were moments where I felt the 1597 edition had very interesting language that belonged in my own edition. I was most surprised to see the difference in the last few lines of the scene I chose where Juliet stabs herself. The third edition I chose to look at was published in 1637, and I decided to look at that one in particular because it was published after Shakespeare lived. I was curious to see if there would be any major differences in editions published after he was alive, but the 1637 version was pretty similar to the 1599 version; there were mostly just punctuation and spelling variations.
The way I went about beginning this project was by printing out pages from each of the texts I was comparing. I then laid these out next to each other and went through them all line by line, highlighting differences in the text. Something that was difficult about this part of the project was that through this process I realized that the line numbers in the scene I chose were not universal. The 40 line moment that I chose ended up being only 31 lines in one version, and 43 lines in another, which made comparison between lines more difficult than I was expecting. After I was done with this, I knew I wanted to represent this process and what I saw in front of me digitally, which is why I chose to represent my findings for part one in a table with each version next to one another. I am a visual person, and I wanted to be able to clearly see differences next to each other in specific colors. I chose to use only two colors for the table to differentiate between the types of differences I was noticing: variations and omissions. I also changed the long s’s to modern ones and u’s to v’s when appropriate to help me compare and read the lines more clearly.
The version of the play that we read for class used the 1599 version as the copy text like I did for my edition. My editorial choices in part two of this project differed from the edition we read for class because I sometimes chose to use lines and stage directions from the original 1597 version of the play. There were some lines and stage directions that felt more dramatic and intense in the 1597 version, and since this scene was dramatic and intense for me to read, I wanted them in my own edition. Something that was a bit of a challenge was limiting myself to only 10 annotations. In order to begin my annotations, I first figured out what lines I wanted to use from each text, and then once I had my own edition, I went through and highlighted moments that I was curious about as a reader. I must have highlighted something in almost every line of the edition I made, so I knew that I needed to make decisions about what information I felt would be most valuable and interesting. Then, after doing research on the moments I was curious about, I decided which words or moments would be most important or beneficial for someone else to know about while reading. It is now clear to me how these choices shape the way readers interpret and understand texts. For example, if I hadn’t made a note of the word “sepulcher” and the idea of Juliet as a Jesus figure, then this idea may never have crossed the reader’s mind. Annotations guide the reader to think about certain ideas and concepts, and these thoughts contribute to their overall understanding of the text.