Article
Reference
Review of Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare's Text:
Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice
ERNE, Lukas Christian
ERNE, Lukas Christian. Review of Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare's Text:
Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice. Around the Globe , 2011, vol. 48, p. 43
Available at:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:34575
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FAIR CDPY
Lukas Erne
The Strugglefor Shakespeare's Text:
Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice,
Gabriel Egan, Cambridge University Press,
332pp,f55
A
fellow Shakespearean I talked to at sorne point in the mid-1990s summed up his resistance to theory by saying: 'theories come and go;the texts remain the same'. Whatever one makes of the dismissal in the first part of this sentence, the second part is manifestly wrong. The texts do not remain the same.
Shakespeare's texts, in particular, greatly changed throughout the 20th century and, as anyone familiar with modern editions knows, continue to change. In a small book called Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators, I recently tried to illustrate the repercussion of the differences betwen editions on our understanding of the plays. Now, more ambitiously, Gabriel Egan has produced an incisively argued history of the set of ideas underlying Shakespeare's changing text.
Egan's study traces the rise and decline of the New Bibliography in the last hundred years. In the first half of the 20th century, Alfred Pollard, R. B. McKerrow, and, above ali, W. W. Greg, to whom we owe the influential classification of play manuscripts {'foui papers', 'fair copy', 'promptbook', etc.), break with 18th and 19th-century pessimism, believing that much of Shakespeare's !ost manuscripts can be recovered from the extant printed editions. The 'Virginian School' adds to the founding fathers' optimism in developing tools like compositor analysis to 'pierce' or 'strip the veil of print', in Fredson Bowers's famous words. The 1970s, while being the 'heyday of New Bibliography',
simultaneously witnessed the first serious challenges to it, led by D. F. McKenzie's demonstration that many of the New
Bibliographers' most cherished beliefs were not grounded in actual printing house practices. From the 1980s, the plot thickens, with revisions and refinements of the New Bibliography existing alongside the 'new' New Bibliography and the New Textualism. The 'new' New Bibliography is Egan's label for the pursuit of the editors of the Oxford Complete Works (1986) to recover not what Shakespeare wrote but what his company performed. The New Textualists' objections to the project of the New Bibliography is more fundamental, in that their post-structuralist mode!
of textuality deprives the author of the agency editors could hope to recover, leading to the advocacy of 'unediting' (thereby supposedly undoing the harm done by the New Bibliographers) or 'version-editing' {editing the extant documents rather than irrecoverable intentions that may have informed them).
Summed up this way, the account may seem circular (from pessimism to optimism to pessimism), and the outlook bleak. But Egan does not disguise his impatience with the New Textualists' a priori skepticism, and makes clear that he aims to 'help push the pendulum back from a currently fashionable dispersal of agency and insist upon authors as the main determinants of what we rea d'.
His concluding advocacy of a 'high New Bibliography' is hopeful and compelling:
the editorial attempt to represent 'the author's pre-theatrical script' is worthwhile, Egan argues, and what it shows is 'not a disdain for theatrical art but rather a celebration of writing's capacity to generate so much of it'.
The Struggle for Shakespeare 's Text is remarkable not only for its levelheaded advocacy of the importance of the author in thinking about Shakespeare's texts, but also because of its lucid explanations of textual and bibliographie concepts of which many have heard but of which far fewer have grasped the intricacies and repercussions. If you have long been wondering but have not known where to turn, then here is an eminently readable guide to ali the key concepts and tools in engaging with Shakespeare's text, substantives and accidentais, copy-text and control text, the Hinman collator, setting by formes, continuous copy - and muchmore.
Lukas Erne is Professor of English Literature at the University of Ge neva.
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Paul Edmondson
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare,
edited by Laura Tosi and Shaul
Bassi, Ashgate, 259pp, f60
S
hakespeare was writing about Venice when the great Republic herself was going throughsignificant and lasting change. Shaul Bassi and Laura Tosi take as their" point of departure the tension between Venice's centuries of mounting cultural and economical capital and the fact that, by the late 16th century, she was beginning to decline and becoming less competitive on the mercantile world stage. In or around the time that Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice (circa 1595), her mythological status was becoming weil established: 'Venetians started investing in symbolic capital and made of their name a currency that circulated through Europe and beyond, exerting its influence in such disparate arenas as political theory, painting, travelliterature and global tourism'. Venice began a new (and still on-going) !ife in the imaginations of others. The fact that I can easily refer to Venice as female is a direct result of Early Modern myth-making.
Visions of Venice in Shakespeare records sorne of the proceedings of a conference organised by the University of Venice and Shakespeare's Globe in 2007. The volume is international and multi-disciplinary in scope. History, Shakespeare, art, and travel enthusiasts will find much to enjoy here. There are four sections: 'Sources' (Venice occupied a crucial space in Shakespeare's imagination); 'Political Culture and Religious Policy in Venice and England' (English writers projected their own political fears and hopes on to
