In 1969, Fredson Bowers claimed that most student editions of literary texts, which he called “practical editions,” were “a disgrace,” the result of a process in which “having committed himself to a hack job, some scholar contents himself with writing a general introduction and sends this off to the publisher with a note about the text of some edition that can be reprinted without charge.”[i] And yet, I propose here to review a student edition—specifically, Evelyn Smith’s 1927 edition of Henry V. How can such a thing be worthy of review alongside luminaries of twentieth-century bibliography such as Alfred Pollard and Percy Simpson? Although Bowers acknowledged the “certain small contribution to scholarship” made by a few useful practical editions, he cautioned us that we should not, under any circumstances, “confuse them with the real thing […] An editor who thinks that he is really establishing a text when...