Adopting a broad understanding of editing, this chapter views medieval and early modern text producers as precursors of present-day scholarly textual editors. The chapter surveys how editors from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century discuss their choices concerning the selection and reproduction of texts when making them available to contemporary audiences. Editors’ awareness of the historical nature of their project makes their work philological. The comments examined in the chapter are obtained from editors’ prefatory materials from three time periods: 1. the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, before the emergence of scholarly editing and the disciplinisation of English studies; 2. the mid nineteenth century – characterised by a more systematised activity in vernacular text editing and societies promoting it; 3. the twenty-first century, dominated by the rise of digital editing. The survey shows that editors of all three periods address textual selection and reproduction in their comments. Although editors in all periods sometimes arrive at similar editorial solutions, for example in favour of the faithful linguistic reproduction of the source, their decisions do not necessarily spring from similar motives. Throughout the three periods, editors convey their ideas of the target audience; readability is identified as a major editorial concern from early on.

This chapter investigates the affordances of the digital edition (the ability to advance nonsequentially or randomly, the possibility for representing multiple modalities, the incorporation of interaction between networked readers via group comments, etc.) alongside the affordances of the printed book (the possibilities of manual annotation, the ability to display one’s collection on a bookshelf, the archivability of a book versus that of a digital edition, etc.). Often positioned as the dangerous other to the printed book, auguring its obsolescence, Brown argues that digital editions are and will remain in dialogue with printed books. Brown offers a sketch of a future for the digital edition – one of new “conventions and infrastructure to pry editions away from the legacy of print towards the wide range of affordances offered by digital instantiations of texts.” The digital edition of the future, she argues, carries with it the promise of another “sea change.”

Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO) is an infrastructural project designed to host the New Internet Shakespeare Editions (NISE) and other anthologies of early modern plays. This chapter – the first scholarly piece about LEMDO as a project – begins with a brief overview of the origins of LEMDO and its three principal objectives: to preserve the work of the old ISE and its sibling projects; to build a platform that sets new standards for preparing and preserving digital editions; and to create a networked hub for the study of early modern drama. LEMDO provides tools to view Shakespeare ‘in combination’, serves multiple user groups and supports asynchronous collaboration. Although LEMDO disseminates both digital and print outputs through its partnership with UVic ePublishing, editors agree to leave their editions ‘open’ for future pedagogical annotations so that the edition can capture the performances and criticism that the edition inspires. Students are stakeholders in and co-creators of LEMDO as part of their education, not merely consumers of its outputs. The involvement of students makes long-term preservation an ethical matter.