The OXFORD SHAKESPEARE: Othello: The Moor of Venice by William Shakespeare & Michael Neill

Author:William Shakespeare & Michael Neill [Shakespeare, William & Neill, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education & Reference, Literature & Fiction, Drama, British & Irish, World Literature, British, Shakespeare
ISBN: 0198129203
Amazon: B006MAXI5G
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-04-16T23:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

The one conclusion we can safely draw from this protracted history of debate is that the textual mystery of Othello is unlikely ever to be resolved to general satisfaction. Its problems have attracted the attention of the most distinguished minds in the pantheon of bibliographers, textual scholars, and editors; yet none has succeeded in arriving at a watertight and self-consistent theory of the copy for the two texts, and of their relationship to one another. It may well be true that, as Paul Werstine has argued, the quest is chimerical: ‘it is only our desire for New-Critical unity’, he argues, ‘that may have caused us to … fix the origins of the early printed versions upon single agents’, when the evidence suggests that agency may well have been ‘multiple and dispersed’. After all

these texts were open to penetration and alteration not only by Shakespeare himself and by his fellow actors but also by multiple theatrical and extra-theatrical scriveners, by theatrical annotators, adapters and revisers (who might cut or add), by censors, and by compositors and proofreaders.1

If early modern play-texts were indeed the fluid, infinitely variable artefacts suggested by much of what we know about contemporary stage practice, then the guiding star by which even the radical Oxford editors set their compass—the author’s ‘final intentions’—may be a fiction of the modern imagination. Yet even those editors who are most sceptical about the possibility of establishing an authoritative text of Othello, are forced, sooner or later, to make judgements not just about the merits of individual variants but about the relative reliability of F and Q; and, in default of conclusive empirical evidence, such judgements (whatever the scholarly arguments adduced in their support) must often be, in the last analysis, critical—that is to say idealist.2

This edition is no different. It proceeds from the assumption that F is in most respects the more reliable of the two texts. Whilst there can be no certainty about the nature of the manuscript copy for either Q or F, the evidence in the former of cutting, memorial corruption, probable actors’ substitutions, omissions, and interpolations, together with possible aural mistakes, is sufficient to point to the likelihood of a theatrical origin—perhaps in a scribal transcription of a text assembled, with occasional memorial assistance, from actors’ parts. The transcription may well have been made for a private patron, and obtained from him by Walkley. Act divisions were probably inserted as part of the process of preparing the script for a reading public. Of course the fact that some of the peculiarities of Q may be theatrical in origin does not necessarily discredit its variants, since it is quite conceivable that changes introduced in the course of production could have included minor authorial revisions, as well as other alterations made, as Moseley put it, ‘with the author’s consent’. Nevertheless, as nearly all editors have agreed, F seems to offer the better reading in the case of the great majority of substantive variants; and there are good reasons for supposing

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.