Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

 Answers 
1. A
2. C
3. A
4. C
5. B
6. A
7. A
8. D
9. D
10. A
11. D
12. A
13. A
14. B
15. D
16. C
17. B
18. D
19. B
20. C
21. D
22. A 

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23. C 
24. A 
25. D 
26. D 
27. B 
28. C 
29. C 
 
Case-study 
This case study describes how students go about preparing an edition of a Renaissance play 
entirely from scratch for a core module in English Studies (Renaissance Literature). In the 
process, they learn about principles of editing, associated theoretical and practical problems, and 
the protocols and pitfalls of preparing a text. 
Background / Context 
Only a tiny fraction of the extant corpus of Renaissance plays is widely available in reliable and 
user-friendly editions. However, almost all can now be read through Literature Online or Early 
English Books Online or, in most cases, both. Many of the plays which are not widely known 
may indeed be of poor artistic quality or suffer from textual dificulties or continuity glitches 
(sometimes arising from multiple authorship): in Peele’s 
Edward I
, for instance, a character who 
has previously been beheaded is referred to as plotting a further rebellion, while in Field, 
Fletcher and Massinger’s 
Knight of Malta
, one character is referred to, without explanation, by 
two entirely different names. In Richard Brome’s 
The Queen’s Exchange
, which a student has 
edited for this module, two characters who are separately named, Alberto and the hermit, appear 
to be the same character - the hermit and his servant carry the banished and wounded Segebert 
off in Act II Scene iii (in Northumbria) only for Segebert to reappear in the West Saxon court in 
Act V Scene ii, accompanied by the original banished lord, Alberto. There is no intervening 
scene that explains the connection between the hermit and Alberto, but the implication is clear, 
which provided something of a headache for the student who edited it. 
Nevertheless, the nitty-gritty, hands-on engagement with these texts which producing an edition 
of them demands is something which students, in my experience, find both enormously 
informative and, in most cases, enormously enjoyable. 
Even though we do not collate manuscript variants or press-variants for this exercise and confine 
ourselves to plays which exist in only one text, the preparation of an edition demands an 
extraordinary number of skills. At the most basic level, the module requirement that editions 
should be modern-spelling makes it imperative to be able to spell, punctuate, and parse an 
English sentence correctly. The typically frequent references to classical deities and other 
mythological motifs all require to be glossed, which generally constitutes a useful refresher 
course in itself. Students need to remind themselves of (or grasp for the first time) the 
fundamental principles of iambic pentameter, so that they can spot if (as so often) any lines of 
verse have been mislineated during the printing process. They soon learn that errors can, and 
usually will, creep in anywhere, and that they matter. Many of the students have chosen Roman 
plays – that is, seventeenth- or late sixteenth-century plays dealing with subjects from Roman 
history – and have been on a very steep learning curve about the Caesars, Latin phrases, Roman 
customs, and the cultural meanings of classical texts in the Renaissance. It has been hard work, 

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but they have been glad to do it, and have all benefited enormously. Finally, having wrestled 
with all this, they are required to supply a 4000 word introduction setting the text in its historical 
and critical context. 
Activities / Practice 
The initial allocation of texts takes place well in advance, at the point when students choose the 
module. I ask students whether they would prefer comedy, tragedy, or history, whether would 
like a play with a local setting or one based on a true story, and so on, and together we arrive at 
something which stands a reasonable chance of being interesting to them. The module runs for 
one semester, and is supported by weekly seminars of two hours each. After an initial 
introductory meeting, the first week is devoted to a session called ‘Lineation: establishing a text 
– verse or prose?’. The second looks at the structure of a critical edition, with case studies of the 
contents pages of the Arden and Oxford editions of 
The Tempest
, on which I invite students to do 
a compare-and-contrast exercise. A later week covers the ‘band of terror’, the textual notes often 
to be found at the foot of the page in a scholarly edition. We usually focus specifically on a 
passage from the Arden 2 
Hamlet
, where, underneath the page on which the Player King breaks 
off his speech in tears, there appears the following set of notes.