A well-known member of Shakespeare’s profession, who is also a regular reader of Shakespeare Survey, said to me the other day, “I wish one of you fellows would give us a Textual Introduction to Shakespeare without Tears. We can see that there is a great deal of important work going on and that the scholars are enjoying themselves no end over it. But what it all means is very hard for the layman to understand. What for instance is the exact difference between a folio and a quarto? You are always talking about them, but you never explain what they are.”

In the following article I shall try to provide my friend and others like him with what he asks, and I thought I might make it more interesting if I threw it into a quasi-autobiographical form. For the new way of dealing with Shakespeare's text is the result of a number of related discoveries and theories which have been made or formulated during the last forty-five years, i.e. during my adult life, while the authors of most of them were men whom I knew personally.