Dido Queen of Carthage

Textual History

The only contemporary publication of the play text was a Quarto edition [Dido-Q] printed in 1594, within a year of Marlowe's death in Deptford:

The
Tragedie of Dido
Queene of Carthage:
Played by the Children of her
Maiesties Chappell.
Written by Christopher Marlowe, and
Thomas Nash. Gent.
...
At London,
Printed, by the Widdowe Orwin, for Thomas Woodcocke, and
are to be solde at his shop, in Paules Church-yeard, at
the signe of the blacke Beare. 1594.

The extent of Nashe's involvement is considered under Authorship.

The edition was printed by the widow Joan Orwin for Thomas Woodcock. Woodcock died on 22 April of that year, which may imply publication in the earlier part of 1594. There is no record of the play in the Stationer's Register for this edition. The printing rights for all Woodcock's titles would appear to have been transferred by his widow to Paul Linley (who had worked for her husband) two years later in 1596.1 Unsold copies of Dido may have been packaged with another publication from 1594, a prose romance Arisbas, Euphues amidst his Slumbers, or Cupids Journey to Hell, &c written by John Dickenson (c.1570–1636), for they appear as a single item in a list of titles transferred by Linley to his bookbinder business partner John Flasket in 1600.2 There is however no extant evidence of any further editions of the play printed at this time.

Three copies of the original 1594 Quarto are extant:

• one in the Bodleian Library, originally owned by Edmond Malone;
• another copy in the Folger Library, which traces its ancestry back to George Steevens and the Duke of Devonshire's collection;
• a third copy in the Huntingdon Library descends from the Earl of Bridgewater's collection, and is the basis for the EEBO-TCP text.

The latter two in particular are in excellent condition, but all three provide consistent versions and there are no textual variants. Analysis indicates that the text was set by a single compositor, and on balance the source for the printed text is perhaps more likely to have been a theatrical manuscript rather than an authorial copy, despite a number of descriptive stage directions that may suggest the author's hand.3

The next printed edition of Dido, Queen of Carthage probably did not appear for over two hundred years. Marlowe was beginning to earn some overdue attention from the Romantics at the start of the nineteenth century (for example, Charles Lamb in 1808,4 and William Hazlitt in 1820 5) and his plays also began to be revived on the stage.6 Dido was selected for inclusion in Hurst's 1825 collection of plays by various authors, The Old English Drama, and also appeared in Robinson's Works of Christopher Marlowe published the following year.

Actor William Oxberry (1784-1824) printed some of Marlowe's other plays individually in 1818-20, and Dido was added when these were collected together in a single publication, The Dramatic Works of Christopher Marlowe [Oxberry] in 1827. Oxberry's editorial efforts are deemed somewhat hasty by critics, and the general impression of the modern reader is not enhanced by the title page crediting the editor as "W.Oxberry, Comedian".

Thereafter Dido, Queen of Carthage was included in most collected editions of Marlowe's plays, including [Dyce] (1850), [Cunningham] (1870), and [Bullen] (1885) as well all more modern Marlowe collections. It also appeared in editions of Nashe's works, most notably those edited by [Nashe-Grosart] (1885) and [Nashe-McKerrow] (1904-10).