Inter-editional collation

This page displays a comparison of the first six editions of The Shepheardes Calender, printed in 1579, 1581, 1586, 1591, 1597, and 1611. The text that appears below is an uncorrected transcript of the 1579 edition. By checking or unchecking one or more of the toggles above, you can highlight particular types of textual variants. Clicking on a highlighted word will give you a list of variations in that word across all six editions, and clicking on a word in that list will give you an image of the page of the edition on which the word appears.

Some toggles refer to a particular kind of variant, such as the “trailing e” in the variant of Shepheardes/Shepheards. Other toggles, marked STR DIFF, refer to string difference. Using the Levenshtein string difference measure, these toggles indicate the number of character insertions or deletions for a particular variant.