This thesis intervenes in a debate over the value of the editorial tradition in the study of early modern English literature. In recent decades, one radical form of the New Textualism has rejected the editorial tradition altogether, arguing that it stifles interpretation and distorts texts. This thesis takes a different tack, considering the value and nature of the editorial tradition itself. It argues that the editorial tradition provides privileged access to the reception of authors and their works, informing our understanding of certain reconfigurations, and sometimes helping to produce them, between their time and our own. Moreover, although as a concept the editorial tradition often tends toward conservation and stability, this thesis argues that in practice it may also sustain emergent conceptions, internal debates, and multiple interpretations. These arguments are developed across four case studies that treat the place of the poems and /Sonnets/ in Shakespeare's authorship; the evolution of the biographical approach to Shakespeare's /Sonnets/; the authorial relationship of Herbert and Donne in seventeenth-century publications, as well as in the context of more recent ‘metaphysical poetry'; and the pairing of Milton's /Paradise Regained/ and /Samson Agonistes/. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that the editorial tradition concerns reconfigurations in the present, as well as the past.