Quote:
Originally Posted by FrustratedReader
Maybe your texts are not widely visible.
The issue of changing the Author's intent would have removed the need to ask about Boots' as it's what the author decided (and is likely correct).
So it's not an entirely different topic. It's related. If you found one or two Boots's and most are Boots' you'd know anyway to silently correct to Boots', also it's correct.
Unless you are doing a Shakespeare in Modern English and also expert at Jacobean play English (which wasn't the same as regular Jacobean, nor was the AV/KJV bible) you'd want to only edit Shakespeare for yourself, especially as you said you are not a native English speaker and don't know the rules for apostrophes. Sorry to be negative.
I've been reading English for over 50 years and editing / proofing for more than 30 and I'd not attempt to edit Shakespeare, not even for myself. I've more fun ways to waste time.
Most literature from the 18th C onwards the correct reading can be established. With Shakespeare there are actual valid different versions.
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I would be exceedingly unhappy to learn that someone revised PD books as an editor. That's not why I'm reading it. I want the original text. I don't want someone's opinion, several hundred years later, of what it should have been. I don't want modern usage replacing what was in use at the time, what was in the writer's mind. Fixing SCAN errors is one thing. Fixing the author's? Ixnay, I say.
I mean...can you imagine
Ulysses, "fixed?" I know, all too well, that there are "modern english" versions out there of older books. Fine, whatever; there are experts that do that sort of thing. (We're in the process of producing Donal Grant that way, with side-by-side modern English text for dialogue, as it happens. We're making the paperback--we didn't do the modernization, to be clear.) If that makes it more accessible for modern readers, fine--but it's CLEAR what it is and the original is right there for the readers' enjoyment.
Whatever, but...I think that "fixing" an original author's work, of PD books--that's something else again, and it's not a something that I would be happy about encountering.
Hitch