SOURCE: Kahan, Jeffrey. “Henry Chettle and the Unreliable Romeo: A Reassessment.” Upstart Crow 16 (1996): 92-100.

In the following essay, Kahan disputes the claim made by other scholars that Chettle was the editor of the 1597 edition of Romeo and Juliet.

According to Gary Taylor, the ultimate aim of a Shakespeare editor is the identification of “the nature or function of a lost manuscript which served as the printer's copy for an extant edition.”¹ These extant editions range from reliable to very unreliable quartos, generally graded as either good or bad. In terms of those “stolne, and surrepititious copies,” the scholar's task is complicated by the task of identifying those infamous “iniurious impostors.” The 1597 Romeo and Juliet is one of the few texts where a substantial claim of identification has been made and verified a number of times, most recently by John Jowett who declared in the Oxford Textual Companion that...