"This is an invaluable introductory guide for the English student who needs to decipher a page from a play, or a facsimile equivalent, from the Shakespearean period. The original quartos and folios of early play texts are increasingly subject to editorial and critical scrutiny, and electronic facsimiles are making the originals accessible to undergraduate and graduate students. Giddens provides a practical 'how to' guide to the original printed texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He explains how the features of the play text came about, what the different elements mean, and who created them. The book provides that important first step towards bibliography and critical editing, presenting a detailed account of how to read these early texts and how they have been turned into the modern editions we are accustomed to" -- "This book offers a detailed consideration of how Shakespearean play texts came about, including the material constraints and cultures of performance, publishing, printing, and reading that produced them. It then considers how these conditions impact upon reading early printed play texts. This is not a book for trained bibliographers. Instead, it outlines bibliographical insights and techniques to those who have engaged in the study of early printed play texts without having yet undertaken a course on bibliography. Jerome McGann pointed out in 1985 that 'textual/bibliographical studies, already conceived as "preliminary operations," are all but removed from the programme of literary studies' (McGann 1985, 181). McGann's claim is still true today, as bibliography is infrequently taught in undergraduate, masters, and PhD programmes in English. Although Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan argue that 'the recent explosion of work' in 'editing and textual criticism' has brought them 'from the periphery of English studies to the much-debated centre' (2003 Thompson and McMullan: xvi-xvii), this enhanced critical interest has not been matched by increases in training for those not already entrenched within the profession"--