Article
Reference
[Review of:] Othello, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2005) / Julie Hankey (ed.) [and of:] The First Quarto of Othello (Cambridge, 2005) / Scott
McMillin (ed.)
ERNE, Lukas Christian
ERNE, Lukas Christian. [Review of:] Othello, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2005) / Julie Hankey (ed.) [and of:] The First Quarto of Othello (Cambridge, 2005) / Scott McMillin (ed.). Around the Globe , 2006, vol. 32, p. 38-39
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38 FOLIO
How many modern editions of a Shakespeare play do we need? Take the example of Othello: there is the Arden Shakespeare Othello, edited by E. A. J. Honigmann (1996), the New Cambridge Shakespeare Othello, edited by Norman Sanders, of which a second, updated edition was published in 2003, the Norton Critical Edition of Othello, edited by Edward Pechter (2004), and The New Penguin Shakespeare Othello, edited by Kenneth Muir, re-issued with a new introduction by Tom McAlindon in 2005. By the time these lines are published, Michael Neill's Oxford Shakespeare Othello, scheduled to appear in February 2006, will (soon) be in print. Plus there are editions of Othello included in one-volume complete works such as the Oxford Complete Works (2nd ed., 2005), The Longman Complete Works (5th ed., 2004), the Norton Shakespeare (1997), or The Riverside Shakespeare (2nd ed., 1997), and school editions such as the New Longman Shakespeare Othello (2004), the Oxford School Shakespeare Othello (2002), or the Cambridge School Shakespeare Othello (2005). The number of Othello editions published within the last ten years easily exceeds a dozen.
Does that mean that too many Shakespeare editions get published?
I'm not sure it does. An exciting offshoot of the proliferation of recent Hamlets, King Lears, and Othellos are specialized editions, devoted to a specific part of the play's production or reproduction, editions which are now increasingly available in fairly inexpensive paperbacks. Cases in point are Julie Hankey's Othello
What is it we do?:
Godfrey Tearle as Othello. Courtesy of the Shakespeare Centre Library
Two further editions of Shakespeare's tragedy have recently appeared in paperback. Do we really need them?
thinks so.
FOLIO 39
in the Shakespeare in Production series and Scott McMillin's The First Quarto of Othello in The New Cambridge Shakespeare's 'Early Quartos' subseries, both published in paperback in 2005. Both are editions of Othello, and both were published by Cambridge University Press in the same year, but that's where similarities end. Hankey's edition is devoted to the play's reproduction on screen and stage, whereas McMillin's edition is interested in the play's origins on the printed page.
Hankey draws on almost 100 theatrical and filmic productions, from the 17th to the early 21st century, meticulously listed in her edition. The copious introduction, a small monograph in its own right, organizes the material into a coherent narrative that progresses along roughly chronological lines. Hankey's stage history does not confine itself to productions in Britain and America but also devotes attention to the play on the Continent, notably France and Italy, including the operatic
adaptation by Verdi. She is finely attuned to the play's complex racial politics and devotes several sections to this issue: 'Othello's colour and what it meant'; 'Race and sex; slavery and satire'; 'Othello in South Africa'.
The annotation is unusually thorough, and certain key moments of the play - Othello's second speech to the Senate, the conversation between Iago and Othello in Act 3 Scene 3, Othello's suicide - are discussed in what are almost short essays. The combination of introduction and annotation allows Hankey to draw both the large and many small
pictures, telling us just about everything we may want to know about the production history of Othello.
While Hankey takes the text of Othello as a given to explore how the play has been performed, McMillin's edition suggests that another important undertaking is to try to determine what exactly the text or texts of Othello are. Modern editions such as Hankey's usually conflate the two earliest versions, the first quarto of 1622 and the one in the Folio published the year after. The two texts dramatize the same events in the same order, but they differ in hundreds of readings, and each version includes lines not present in the other. The total number of lines in the Folio is superior to that in the quarto, but the quarto has fuller and more informative stage directions. Neither version is in any obvious way better than the other. Shakespeareans are increasingly realizing what rich sources of insights the variant versions of Othello and other plays offer, and it seems less and less satisfactory to leave it up to editors to decide what readings are or are not adopted into modern editions, thereby obscuring the peculiarity of each of the early printed versions. McMillin's fine edition - the first fully-edited and modernized version of the 1622 quarto - thus fills a yawning gap in the scholarship on the play, providing a solid basis for the sustained study of the earliest text of Othello.
Far from doing all over again what many other editors of Othello have done before them, Hankey and McMillin's editions - both ground-
breaking in the specific area they cover - suggest there is still ample room for important work in the editorial reproduction of Shakespeare.
The different, in some ways indeed opposed, concerns of their editions have the further merit of raising key questions which, obvious though they at first seem, deserve sustained thought: What exactly is Othello (or Hamlet, or King Lear)? Do we think of Othello first and foremost as a play invented by Shakespeare and printed in early modern England or as a play that keeps being reinvented on screen and stage around the world?
And how do we best arrive at its meaning? Does the play's meaning chiefly inhere in its original production in Shakespeare's own time or in its reproduction through the centuries? Whose Othello do we study when we engage with modern productions without worrying about what constitutes the play's text(s)?
At their best, modern editions like Hankey and McMillin's not only advance our knowledge of Shakespeare but also invite us to reflect on what it is we do when we next sit down to watch or read one of his plays.
Othello, edited by Julie Hankey in the 'Shakespeare in Production' series, price f16.99, and The First Quarto of Othello, edited by Scott McMillin in 'The Early Quartos' series, price f15.99, are both published by Cambridge University Press.
Lukas Erne is Professor of English at the University of Geneva, and the author of Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003).
