Shakespeare Reshaped: 1606-1623.

By Gary Taylor and John Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 333. $60.

In many ways, this is Gary Taylor's best book. Essentially a postlegomenon to the Oxford Shakespeare, it is a summing up of what he (and John Jowett) have learned about the transmission and contamination of playtexts from the playwright's conception and intention (although he does not use these words), which lasts, these authors feel, until the first performance, and what happens after that in a highly collaborative process. There are essentially three kinds of change (or "reshaping") that are examined: the addition of acts in texts from about 1609 onwards and how this affects structure; the 1606 "Acte to restraine Abuses of Players," which made the use of God's name and associated language prohibitive on stage (in Taylor's words, "making it illegal for an actor to speak upon a stage words he could legally speak when off it," p. 51), and interpolations by later hand(s) perhaps due to later performances and revivals. Since all three procedures "reshape" plays, the focus here is twofold: how they reshape the original texts and how we can--if we can--recover the originals behind the later, extant scripts.

Taylor's survey of evidence on act division is astonishingly thorough. "Every one of the 245 extant plays written for [the London] companies between 1616 and 164a (inclusive) is divided into five …