ENG 331: Corrigenda

FULGENS AND LUCRES (Broadview edition)

List of Characters, footnote for "Ancilla": add an additional definition, “slave,” referring to non-racialized enslavement in Ancient Rome. Though the play is supposedly set in antiquity, Medwall obviously writes his characters as fifteenth-century English people, and as a result, Joan is depicted as a free servant. However, Many in Medwall’s educated audience would have known enough about Ancient Rome, where non-racialized slavery did exist, to register this shift as a deliberate choice on the playwright's part; they may have also drawn parallels between Joan and "clever slave" tropes in Roman comedies, which were being printed in England for the first time in this period. Alternately, it may have been Rastell, not Medwall, who chose the label of “ancilla” for Joan the maid, based on his knowledge of those printings (Valliere-Paul 2025).

Part 1, lines 26 and 21: emend the footnote to remove the assumption that B emerges from among the servants or assistants, rather than properly among the high-class guests at the dinner — if anything, the dialogue strongly implies that he was initially among the latter (Graves-Ward 2025).

Part 1, lines 31-32: repeat the lines “And it were but for the manner sake, / Thou mayst tarry by license”. In the 1512 Rastell edition, these lines are repeated; editors have generally (and quite reasonably) dismissed these as a scribal error, which they most likely are, but they might also, possibly, have been repeated with purpose — for instance, B repeating A’s lines back to him as the two negotiate his emergence from the audience — so should not be discounted (Leslie 2023).

Part 1, line 165: remove question mark, which implies a kind of naïvete about how society works, which B does not seem to have elsewhere, and dulls the social commentary a bit (McCarthy 2025).

Part 1, line 193: add a note, replacing the editorial gloss of “Mary,” making clearer that the oath has by the late fifteenth century been so frequently and casually used (like the modern “bless you” after sneezing) that it has no real religious connotation here (Stefanov 2023).

Part 1, line 310-11: modify the editorial gloss on “substance,” providing punning room for Fulgens’ assessment to be of Cornelius’s physical body with this word — and, indeed, Cornelius’s penis, especially if his infamous codpiece is already visible on his costume during the play. Establishing the prominence of Cornelius’s genital substance early on better justifies Gaius’s later accusations of him (Lahav 2025).

Part 1, lines 345-6: reassign these two lines to Fulgens, rather than Cornelius, as they are in the early printing. There are multiple reasons why Fulgens, not Cornelius, would say these lines, not least including the consistency of the rhyme scheme (Mondrow 2025).

Part 1, line 521: emend gloss on “guise,” here and elsewhere, to reflect that throughout this scene the term also consistently either connotes or denotes “fashion, clothing,” a crucial theme in this play, alongside the other meanings in the glosses (Fatima 2025).

Part 1, line 576+SD: remove insertion of Joan’s exit — neither the staging style nor the logic of the scene require Joan to leave here, and indeed, the possibility that she may remain in the space throughout subsequent scenes, unseen by A and B, adds new sense to her reasons for messing with A and B later (Johnston 2025). Cp. to Kumar 2023.

Part 1, line 729: remove gloss on, and capitalization of, “by Yes.” There is insufficient support for this gloss; it could just as easily be a reduction of the then-common “by yea or nay” (Burzymowski 2023).

Part 1, lines 1018-20: remove insertion of “[to A]”; assign “Nay, for God… but only I” to B. This is Rastell’s arrangement and preserves a sense that the clever Joan is consciously manipulating, and stirring up a rivalry between, her suitors (Kumar 2023).

Part 1, line 1253-5: remove the missing line insertion at footnote 3; change “gentlewoman” back to “gentleman.” The meter is not consistent enough here to require the added line; Rastell’s original printing of “gentleman” makes reasonable sense as is. A often misinterprets what has been told to him, wilfully or accidentally; Gaius may hint to him, earlier, that he wants A to approach Cornelius aggressively, hence bringing the matter to pass by speaking to a gentleman (Cui 2023).

Part 2, line 99: remove the editors’ gloss of “lewd “ as “ignorant.” In early usage, the word can mean or connote ignorance, but it can also simply mean what present-day speakers mean by “lewd”; that latter meaning is surely the primary denotation here (Hayes 2023).

DIGBY KILLING OF THE CHILDREN (Coldewey edition)

Line 80: emend footnote or rearrange the entirety of page 259. The Digby MS does indeed have the lines cancelled out, as Coldewey notes, but the cancelled lines also show signs of having been continually modified, suggesting multiple variations across performances. There is not sufficient evidence, meanwhile, to suggest that the cancelled lines are “incorporated” in subsequent speeches — to the contrary, the cancelled lines (which thus were only skipped in one case, but included in others) add more layers to Watkyn’s character and to his relationship with Herod (Nash 2025).

DIGBY MARY MAGDALENE (Broadview edition)

Line 461: add a footnote that complicates the gloss on “leech” and reveals a possible pun — yes, the primary denotation of the word is the medieval usage of “healer,” but the blood-sucking, draining animal (also known by the same term in early usage) could as easily have been heard by audiences in this case, and indeed, that is what Lechery is really doing here (Borbash 2025).

Line 490+SD: change editorial gloss on the word “gallant” — it means something far more specific than “lover,” here, as Scoville notes. A medieval “gallant” is a man who dresses ostentatiously according to trendy fashion, perhaps in an overperformative way, and who otherwise might be shallow or shady. What the best modern equivalent would be is debatable (“fop,” “dandy,” “metrosexual,” and “hypebeast” have been suggested), but “lover” does not adequately cover these (Zhi 2025).

Lines 491+SH - 540+SH (including all speech headings throughout): Scoville’s normalizing of the SHs to “Pride” in this scene, for the sake of clarity, flattens a striking choice by the medieval scribe to present Pride behind the various guises that fool Mary, then to reveal Pride’s true identity to the reader at about the same time that a similar reveal might happen in performance. In short, it ruins the surprise; this corrigendum can’t fix that spoiler (and in fact might worsen it by drawing more attention to it!), but the positioning of reader as play audience here is crucial (Cressatti, Kozlowski, and Pennycoke 2025).

Lines 722-47: add a note that aligns the speech headings in this scene more closely with that of the manuscript (compare to Coletti’s SHs, which differ from these). The way that these various demonic speakers line up with the cast is not clear; the current invisible editing here may suggest a more streamlined cast than is implied in the manuscript (Singhania 2023).

Line 1561: remove editorial note (on trapdoors) entirely. Trapdoors were typical of early modern London stages, but there is less consistency across medieval staging outside London — so offering a wider range of possibilities, here too hastily limited by Scoville’s hypothesis. There is a similar cue for “sinking” at line 747, but that one is not noted as such; the connection between the two lines suggests some technological spectacle being used here, which could have been achieved in multiple ways, whether on a raised stage or not, trapdoor or not (Lollo 2023).

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (Pelican edition)

Act II, Scene 2, lines 145 and following: McDonald’s punctuation makes considerable changes to the early text throughout (a necessity of editing, to be sure), but here, the insertion of multiple exclamation points makes Hermia seem far weaker and more hysterical than she is in the original QQ and F; in those, she comes off more as a strong woman who has stood up for her desires against authority (Lalla 2025).

Act V, Scene 1, lines 2-22: compare to all quarto and folio editions, in which the line breaks of Theseus’ speech reveal enjambed end-rhymes on “habitation” and “imagination” — meaning that, with fear/bear and joy/joy, this speech denigrating poets is itself constructed in a conspicuously, unusually poetic form (Aviv 2025).