‘Another Part of the Forest’: Editors and Locations in Shakespeare

Until recently, most editions of Shakespeare headed each scene with a note of its location: ‘A ship at sea’; ‘Troy. A room in Priam’s palace’; ‘Another part of the forest’. As is well known, these headings have no textual authority: in the Folio and the Quartos, a scene typically starts by specifying which characters are to enter, but with nothing to indicate where they are supposed to be. With very few exceptions, the locations are the work of eighteenth-century editors, reproduced or emended by their nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors.