Why three versions.

There are three versions of my text of Merry Devil, each of which represents a specific phase of the process, and each of these is more suitable to a different audience. The first version of the text is my blueprint edition: this edition conservatively follows the principles of bibliographic scholarship to create a text that suitable for rescripting into a performance text.

The second edition of Merry Devil is the performance text, rescripted to suite the needs of our specific company, and our specific production. This involved re-assigning certain lines to accommodate having fewer actors than the blueprint version calls for, and removing some of the less sensible portions of the play that rely on scenes or passages that are missing from the extant text. This version still includes a significant amount of variation so that the cast could chose from the variations of words and phrases between Q1, Q2, and Q3 that made the most sense to them as performers.

The third edition of Merry Devil incorporates the choices of the acting company, and at the same time undoes several of the edits made for the purposes of our production. The governing logic of this edition is both bibliographical and performance-based, which is both a weakness and a strength.