Introduction to Collations

If you are new to editing (e.g., if you are an RA working with an editor), you may have seen (and possibly ignored!) the collations at the bottom of the page in an Arden edition. Other editions put them at the back of the book, and many editions pitched at students do not include collations at all. They are usually cryptic and require an understanding of the abbreviations and typographical conventions used.
What to collate—and how much to collate—is an anthology-level decision. For example, the DRE policy is to eschew the variorum approach: A complete record of textual changes throughout a work’s editorial history is known as a variorum, and while variorum editions are useful tools, their thoroughness and comprehensivity are outside the goals of the DRE project. Consult with your anthology lead(s) before you read the rest of this chapter.

Rationale

The point of a collation is to track variations in a text both as it differs between copies of an early edition and as it changes in later editions because of editorial interventions. A collation may attempt to capture some or all of the following variations and interventions:
Variants in the extant copies of a single printed edition, usually with the aim of identifying press variants between the uncorrected and corrected states of the sheets that make up the book. For example, one might collate all the surviving copies of the first quarto of Richard II in order to address questions about the way the book was put together.
Differences between multiple early editions. Early editions can be significantly different from each other, having different copytexts (a manuscript, promptbook, a previous printed playbook). Sometimes they bear signs of revisions, by the author(s) and/or later revisers. For example, an editor might collate Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, F1, and F2 of Richard II.
Sometimes the differences are so significant that scholars think of the early editions as constituting different texts (e.g., the three texts of Hamlet, the two texts of King Lear, or the multiple texts of Mucedorus). Depending on the anthology’s approach to such texts, you may need to make multiple collations to capture all the information you wish to include in your edition. Consult with your anthology lead to decide on an approach to multi-text plays. Documentation for extended collations is forthcoming.
Variants among manuscript witnesses (e.g. the six known manuscripts of Middleton’s A Game at Chess).
Editorial interventions made over a play’s 300+ years of editorial history (in the case of Shakespeare, Rowe’s edition of 1709 up through the latest Arden 3 edition, say).

Prosopography

James D. Mardock

James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonson’s representation of urban space as an element in his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in early modern English drama.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.

Mahayla Galliford

Project manager, 2025-present; research assistant, 2021-present. Mahayla Galliford (she/her) graduated with a BA (Hons with distinction) from the University of Victoria in 2024. Mahayla’s undergraduate research explored early modern stage directions and civic water pageantry. Mahayla continues her studies through UVic’s English MA program and her SSHRC-funded thesis project focuses on editing and encoding girls’ manuscripts, specifically Lady Rachel Fane’s dramatic entertainments, in collaboration with LEMDO.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Sarah Neville

Sarah Neville is an associate professor of English and Theatre, Film and Media Arts at the Ohio State University. She specializes in early modern English literature, bibliography, theories of textuality and Shakespeare in performance, chiefly examining the ways that authority is negotiated in print, digital and live media. She is an assistant editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016-17), for which she edited five plays in both old and modern-spelling editions, as well as an associate coordinating editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions. She regularly publishes on textual theory, digital humanities, pedagogy, and scholarly editing. Neville’s book, Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade: English Stationers and the Commodification of Botany (Cambridge, 2022), demonstrates the ways that printers and booksellers of herbals enabled the construction of scientific and medical authority in early modern England. A theatre director and film artist who is a great believer in experiential learning, Neville is the founder and creative director of Ohio State’s Lord Denney’s Players, an academic theatre company that enables students to see how technologies of textual transmission have shaped the reception of Shakespeare’s plays.

Tracey El Hajj

Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life. Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

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