by David LeBlanc
This edition offers three versions of the playtext: (1) digital images of the 1647 base text; (2) a transcription of the 1647 base text; and (3) a fully modernized, student-generated edition. The XML-TEI files for The Sea Voyage are also accessible for viewing or download via the play’s GitHub repository.
Our transcription of The Sea Voyage is based on the copy of Comedies & Tragedies (1647) held in PSU Libraries' Eberly Family Special Collections Library. The text of the play in PSU's copy includes three scribal emendations in an early hand and a number of typographical oddities, including turned letters and warped letter forms.
The edited version of the play is a product of Claire M. L. Bourne’s Fall 2019 undergraduate class, ENGL 445: Shakespeare’s Contemporaries. As part of their work for this course, students were tasked with editing portions of The Sea Voyage using the text of the play in PSU’s first folio as a base text. Their editorial work included modernizing spelling and punctuation; writing annotations and glosses; and identifying words and phrases that fit into a series of analytical categories to tag throughout the digital edition (this tagging is described below). Students submitted their editorial work as word-processing files. As general editor, I collected, integrated, and encoded (using XML and abiding by TEI guidelines) students' editorial work. In doing so, my guiding principle was to honor student work while intervening where I saw fit to render a cohesive and coherent fully-edited text. Whenever possible, student work was balanced with the editorial principles outlined below.
This digital edition of The Sea Voyage is designed with undergraduate classroom use in mind. In the transcribed version, textual accuracy is the primary aim — we want to provide students convenient access to a clean transcript of the folio iteration of the play. In the edited version, clarity is emphasized throughout to facilitate ease of reading.
The Penn State copy of the Beaumont and Fletcher first folio has been fully digitized by the Preservation, Conservation, and Digitization Department at PSU Libraries. This edition provides easy page-by-page access to images of the pages on which The Sea Voyage is printed.
The playtext, as it appears in the 1647 first folio, was transcribed and encoded with as light an editorial hand as possible; it is close to a 1:1 rendering of the original printed text. Textual difficulties, such as misplaced stage directions, have been rendered faithfully. All punctuation has been captured as it appears. In cases where punctuation or words were obscured due to markings or stains on the page, other editions of the 1647 folio were consulted to resolve these ambiguities. All misprintings (including obvious misspellings) have been preserved. This includes when an upper-case "i" was used in place of a lower-case "l [el]," and vice versa, and the use of the long-s (ſ). However, some typographical characters were not captured, such as ligatures (e.g., Æ or æ in place of AE and ae) and turned letters (e.g., ǝ in place of e). Other textual aberrations, such as long dashes, have either been captured as accurately as possible using available means or noted via an XML comment in the code. This site has been designed so that readers can click back and forth between the transcription and the modernized edition.
Due to the diachronic, collaborative set-up of this digital editing project, tracking and attributing editorial labor has played a key role in preparing our edition of The Sea Voyage . Editing decisions made by students are tagged with the xml:id “#student”. (Individual students could not be named due to FERPA regulations.) Decisions made by either the General Editor or Consulting Editor are tagged “#dl” and “#cmlb”, respectively. When a student intervention is kept but heavily modified by the General Editor, these are tagged with both the “#student” and “#dl” xml:ids. Though these attributions of labor are not displayed in the text of the digital edition, they can be accessed by downloading the associated .xml file.
Though Dr. Bourne’s students were charged with modernizing spelling (including capitalization) and punctuation as part of their editorial assignment, all final decisions of modernization fell to the General Editor in order to maintain a consistent style throughout the edition. Therefore, decisions concerning the modernization of spelling and punctuation were not attributed individually. All typography is modernized (e.g., every long-s was replaced with a short-s), and spelling is modernized using British forms. The only exceptions to modernized spellings concern contractions (see “Meter” below).
Two considerations guided changes to the folio punctuation. The first and most important was grammatical. Where possible, standard grammatical forms of punctuation are used to clarify meaning. (In some cases, however, the rules of grammatical punctuation are bent to accommodate and emphasize certain verbal effects. Such decisions are especially prevalent in moments of excited action, where non-verbal business creates non-grammatical patterns of speech.) The second consideration was stylistic. Grammatically correct marks of punctuation are at times swapped out for marks that play similar grammatical roles but better emphasize tone or clarify a dramatic situation. The most common substitutions are exclamation points in place of periods to convey the emotional tenor of certain statements and line-end dashes in place of periods to illustrate interrupted speech.
The verse meter in the 1647 text is highly irregular in places, but some attempts have been made to regularize it.
Most often, this means certain contracted forms of words are maintained (e.g., “to’th’” of the folio text is used instead of the modernized form “to the,” which contains an additional syllable) in cases where not modernizing maintains iambic pentameter.
In some cases, the lineation of the folio is altered in an attempt to capture the iambic pentameter of the dialogue. On occasion, this means splitting extra-metrical lines, but more often, it means displaying shared lines. When two lines of dialogue shared the same metrical line, the second line is right-justified. When three lines of dialogue shared meter, the second line is centered, and the third right-justified.
The act divisions of the folio are maintained, even though the act headings themselves were modernized and regularized throughout. The folio text is not further divided into scenes. We have inserted scene divisions any time the stage clears.
Student-generated stage directions are included in the edition if the dialogue directly supports the action(s) described in the direction. Student-supplied stage directions that are not supported by the dialogue are not included in the edition. In a few cases, student-generated stage directions have been slightly modified to make them less directorial/interpretive and more descriptive. Student-generated stage directions appear in square brackets.
Stage directions that appear in the folio text are included and modernized except in the few cases where the folio direction directly conflicts with dialogic or other cues. (For example, at the end of Act 4, the entrances and exits for Clarinda, Crocale, Hippolita, and Juletta have been moved and modified to reflect more accurately who is on stage and speaking.) Problematic stage directions have either been repositioned or eliminated to avoid confusion. Readers can consult the transcribed base text or page image to get a sense of the changes. Stage directions that appear in the folio text, even if they have been moved or modified, are not presented in square brackets to differentiate them from student-supplied directions.
Missing entrances and exits are provided using the following rules:
Most entrances and exits are displayed on their own line between speech acts. The only exceptions are when the dialogue indicates that an entrance or exit interrupts a speech act; in these cases, the entrance or exit is ranged to the right of the line of dialogue it interrupts. Other stage directions are ranged to the right of the dialogue to which they corresponded. However, if the stage direction suggests an activity that would require a good deal of stage time or seems of particular dramatic importance, it is afforded its own line between speech acts (e.g., when Aminta cuts her hair to bind Albert’s wounds in Act 2).
Glosses are supplied to clarify the meanings of difficult words and phrases. Glossed words and definitions reflect their grammatical usage in the text. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED ) was consulted to define words and phrases throughout. In a few cases, when the OED did not contain a particular word or phrase usage, glosses draw from the edition of The Sea Voyage in the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama and note this source.
For the most part, the glosses in the edition were supplied by students. Many of these glosses were altered or expanded by the General Editor for grammar or accuracy. Many words and phrases not glossed by students were later added by the General Editor or Consulting Editor to ease the burden of reading the play for future student users. In just a few cases, a student gloss was excluded from the edition due to inaccuracy.
Annotations were generated by Dr. Bourne’s undergraduate students to help contextualize or provide interpretative readings of key textual moments. When possible, these annotations were included in the final version of the play. If multiple students annotated the same moment, or if two annotations dealt with similar material, these annotations were combined and revised by the General Editor. The General Editor also line-edited student annotations. In a few cases, student annotations that included factual errors, that were lacking proper citations, or that explained a textual moment that future readers could reasonably be expected to work out on their own were not included in the final edition.
This editorial feature will be available in the updated edition. Check back in Summer 2022.
Dr. Bourne’s undergraduate students provided an additional analytical apparatus by tracking and tagging words and phrases that fall into certain categories and appear regularly throughout The Sea Voyage
. These categories were defined as follows:
PLACE
: References to physical places the characters are, have been, or could go. The students also tracked moments of slippage between theatrical and physical space.
FOOD/HUNGER
: References to anything alimentary: food and drink, the physical processes associated with consuming tangible food and drink, and the use of food and drink metaphors (e.g., when Sailor 2 says the ship may “cast up” her goods in the storm of Act 1, “cast up” is tagged as it means “vomit”).
RELIGION
: References to Classical and organized religions (including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam).
NAMES/TERMS OF ADDRESS
: Occurrences of character or proper names found in dialogue. Also, any time a character is named generically via direct address (e.g., “my lady,” “sir,” etc.).
OBJECTS
: References to any object that would be tangibly present during the staging of the scene, suggesting a prop may have been required for early modern performance. This includes clear references to tangible features of costuming or dress.
Student choices were included except where obviously erroneous. The General Editor also tagged additional words and phrases not tagged by students but that fell within these analytic categories. Articles and possessives were not included in the tracked phrases except in the case of vocative address (e.g., “my Aminta”). However, adjectives modifying tracked keywords were included as part of tracked phrases (e.g., “near rising hill”).
These analytic categories are meant to provide a springboard for classroom discussion. Our hope is that future users will also be encouraged to devise and track their own analytic categories, and/or challenge the categorical assignments included in our edition. Additionally, these tracked categories provide a model for student-generated textual analysis (that is, the pattern-finding associated with close reading) that models a productive first step towards literary scholarship.