Shakespeare and Textual Theory by Suzanne Gossett;

Author:Suzanne Gossett; [Gossett, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350121256
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2021-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

Editing Shakespeare

Whatever his or her theoretical persuasion, a fundamental decision for any editor of a Shakespeare play is the choice of what is called the base- or copy-text, that is, the early printed text which serves as the basis for the edition. This becomes the default from which any variation must be justified. As described in Chapter 2, in 1950 W.W. Greg proposed – in what seems at first a counterintuitive approach – a critical difference in the treatment of the ‘substantives’, that is, the actual words, and the ‘accidentals’, that is, the spelling and punctuation, of any early text. Recall that Greg argued that an editor should accept the accidentals of the earliest text, as most likely to reflect those of the author. But for the substantives the editor could choose, based on an analysis of how she/he believed the variants came to be (e.g., compositorial or scribal error, marginal insertion, etc.). This theory left the editor free to correct ‘errors’ in the chosen base text by adopting whichever words (substantives) seemed to be Shakespeare’s (or, once again, best pleased the editor). This theory ruled editing for many decades, remarkably so since it was well known that spelling and punctuation were the responsibility of the compositors and hence that playwrights would expect their accidentals to be regularized in the printshop by someone over whose decisions they might have no say (unless, unusually, they were directly involved in the printing process). Whether or not Hand D in Sir Thomas More is Shakespeare’s, its three pages give a good instance of what dramatic writing might have looked like before the compositors intervened. It has very little punctuation, irregular or uncertain speech prefixes, stage directions placed inexactly and continuous writing that does not respect the lineation of verse.

The most important effect of Greg’s essay was that it ‘invoked an idealist distinction between the work and a particular material embodiment of it’, giving editors authority to alter the texts they were dealing with (Egan 2010: 45). The rationale justified emendations from alternative early texts or from the long history of proposed variants listed in the variorum editions. It supported the assumption that ‘the work’ was originally one text, although there was argument about whether its form might reflect the author’s original intentions or, just possibly, be the product of later revision and hence embody final intentions.

As already mentioned, the major break came with work on King Lear in the collection The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (ed. Warren and Taylor 1983). Essays in that volume proposed that the tragedy’s two texts were not, as had always been assumed, each a different and inadequate reconstruction of a lost single original. Instead, the Folio text was a revision by Shakespeare himself of the earlier quarto version. Consequently any attempt to conflate the two versions would violate Shakespeare’s intentions, no longer viewed as singular or stable. In the 1986 Oxford Shakespeare Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor carried through the implications of this new theory by editing the two texts separately.

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.