Para1Previous editions of Civitatis Amor by Nichols (1828), Dyce (1840), and Bullen (1886) do not clearly outline their editorial practices. Nichols’ edition indulges in nineteenth-century editorial interventions that are very different from modern-day practices. Nichols embeds phrases, sentences, and blocks of text from the Camden manuscript that offers eyewitness accounts of Charles’ installation¹. While Nichols’ practice of merging texts runs counter to the modern editorial insistence on treating each witness separately, we can appreciate Nichols’ keen interest in the event as a whole, which anticipated what Jenstad and Kaethler call for: an edition of the complete event (228). Yet Nichols’ additions beg the question of when textual conflation results in a new work with no early modern authority. Dyce and Bullen adopt Nichols’ additions in their editions with footnotes and annotations.

Para2Bergeron’s 2010 edition—the only edition to adopt modern and transparent editorial procedures—takes the 1616 quarto pageant book as its copytext. Importantly, Bergeron’s edition is part of Taylor and Lavagnino’s Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, an edition that aims simultaneously to read the texts to which Middleton contributed through the authorial lens (Taylor 24) and to acknowledge the complex textual practices that included co-authored, revised, and composite texts in which Middleton had a hand. Given these aims, Bergeron rightly notes the significance of The Order and Solemnity as a source text and points to the importance of the boats from the Lord Mayor’s show that occurred five days earlier (1203). However, the Textual Companion includes far fewer collations than one might expect, given the editorial history of Nichols, Dyce, and Bullen, as well as the known close relationship between The Order and Solemnity and Civitatis Amor. The annotations on the edited text in the Works are mainly historical notes and explanatory glosses.

Para3My modern edition includes 24 collations and 43 annotations that provide commentary on editorial adherences and deviations, give credit where credit is due to the previous editors of Civitatis Amor, and provide contextual information for the modern reader.

Para4My edition takes Q1 as its copytext and will eventually provide a full collation against The Order and Solemnity. This edition approaches editorial decisions with guidance from the Digital Renaissance Editions (DRE) Editorial Guidelines. The DRE Editorial Guidelines for Emendation and Modernization ask, what are you editing towards? which is the question I kept central in my editorial practices. This open-access digital scholarly edition of Civitatis Amor, the first of its kind, is aimed at senior undergraduate students and scholars; my editorial choices keep this audience at the forefront. The DRE Editorial Guidelines provide a process for editorial challenges specific to early modern non-Shakespearean drama; because they do not address civic pageantry, I have extrapolated from their recommendations and overruled them when necessary. For example, early modern English capitalizes abstract nouns and many other substantives. The DRE Editorial Guidelines, following Wells and Taylor’s Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling (1979), call for downstyling. However, it is not always clear whether abstract nouns in civic pageantry are concepts (hope, peace) or allegorical figures (Hope, Peace). I have carefully considered the context before retaining or downstyling the capitalization in Q1. Honourary titles like knights of the bath are now lowercase. I follow Wells and Taylor in modernizing or retaining words that end with ’t (deckt becomes decked).