Douglas A. Brooks, Texas A&M University

Let vs returne vnto the Bench againe,
 And there examine further of this fray.

—Sir John Oldcastle, I.i. 124-5

A decade ago the editors of the Oxford William Shakespeare: The Complete Works replaced the name of the character called Falstaff in Henry IV Part I with a hypothetically earlier version of the character's name, Sir John Oldcastle. The restoration of Oldcastle to the Oxford edition makes it the first authoritative text to undo an alteration which, as scholars have long suspected, Shakespeare himself must have made sometime between a non-extant 1596 performance text and the 1598 quarto of the play. The resulting scholarly debate over this editorial decision has touched on a number of significant issues linked to the authority and authenticity of "Shakespearean" texts, and it has raised important questions about how these texts were shaped by the material, religious, and...