A Brief History of the Edited Shakespearean Text

A Brief History of the Edited ShakespeareanText

Gavin PaulUniversity of British Columbia

Abstract

This essay won the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize,Shakespeare Section.This essay will involve a historical survey of the underlying theories and principlesthat have been instrumental in determining the formative scholarly editions ofShakespeare since the early eighteenth century. By examining representations ofeditorial practice – specifically representations as expressed in prefatory material aswell as other editorial apparatuses such as notes and commentary in influentialeditions from Nicholas Rowe’s (1709) through to those of the late twentieth century– this paper is aimed at providing a clear sense of the fundamental principles shapingthe edited Shakespearean text.

Let him that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desiresto feel the greatest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play, from thefirst scene to the last, with utter negligence of his commentators. (Johnson 58)

So writes Samuel Johnson in the Preface to his 1765 edition of Shakespeare’sworks. Although the statement is partly a rhetorical flourish of self-effacementand self-deprecation (“commentators” refers specifically to Shakespeare’seditors), from a twenty-first century perspective, we cannot help butrecognize the impossibility of Johnson’s paradoxical fancy for reading anedited text while remaining utterly unaffected by editorial influence. Weknow only too well that “those who participate in the production andtransmission of a text inevitably affect its final form” (Farmer 164), editorsmore so than most; likewise, we recognize that given the role played byscribes, compositors, and printers in transmitting Shakespeare’s works intoprint,“his corpus is reconstructed by sets of motivations and practices thatleave their marks upon the text, distorting it even as they preserve and setit forth” (Kastan, Book 16). Despite the currency of many of Johnson’selucidations of Shakespeare’s textual cruces, his view of the editorial processseems remarkably antiquated. This archaic feel is not inexplicable: the weightand pressure of well over two hundred years of subsequent sophisticationin editorial and textual theory – a perpetually growing mass of criticalcommentary combined with new editions of plays forever accruing additional

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notes and collations – bear down on Johnson, and his contributions tocurrent debates are fossilized by this heavy load. In what follows, I willattempt to sift through the layers of editorial strata that, cumulatively,constitute the Shakespearean canon and now separate us from Johnson, hispredecessors, and many of his descendents; my goal is to summarize theheterogeneous principles that have energized editorial practice and thusshaped the Shakespearean text.

It seems easiest to begin such a task at the beginning. In essence, the quotefrom Johnson that opened this paper was an echo of the first address toShakespeare’s readers, the prefatory note “To the great Variety of Readers”written by John Heminge and Henry Condell and attached to the First Folio(F) in 1623 – the text that marks the beginning of the effort to collect andorganize Shakespeare’s works. Reproduced countless times since it firstappeared, Heminge and Condell’s invitation to prospective customers isquite simple:

it is not our prouince, who onely gather his works, and giue them you, to praisehim. It is yours that reade him. And there we hope, to your diuers capacities,you will finde enough, both to draw, and hold you: for his wit can no more liehid, then it could be lost. Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe . . .1

In praising Shakespeare’s creative powers, they claim,

as he was a happie imitator of Nature, [he] was a most gentle expresser of it. Hismind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with thateasinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers.

Here, what Shakespeare “thought” is equivalent to the text he producesand the documentary form that text assumes – authorial work is transformed(wholly, flawlessly, and with “easinesse”) into unblotted manuscript papers.Moreover, the transmission of the work from Shakespeare’s “papers” to itsprinted Folio form is also seemingly perfect: the Folio is implicitly figuredas being the vessel for not just Shakespeare’s “writings,” “perfect of theirlimbes, and . . . absolute in their numbers”, but also for Shakespeare’s workitself – it represents his writings “as he conceiued the[m].”

Heminge and Condell’s understanding of the transmission of Shakespeare’swork has ramifications on their discussion of the forms in which that workappears. In a passage more heavily scrutinized than any Shakespearean textualcrux in the Folio, Heminge and Condell juxtapose two different typesof “copies” of Shakespeare’s plays: those “maimed, and deformed” by“impostors,” and the Folio they have produced, “cur’d, and perfect.”Heminge and Condell insinuate that their access to an earlier, purifieddocumentary form – Shakespeare’s “papers” – allows them to reproduce amore faithful text of Shakespeare’s works.2 Moreover, the epistle suggeststhat the Folio not only accurately reproduces Shakespeare’s intended textthat was recorded in his manuscript papers, in so doing, it ostensibly makesShakespeare’s conceptual work physically present (something that manymodern textual theorists would deem impossible). Heminge and Condell’s

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History of the Edited Shakespearean Text . 183

epistle serves as a useful baseline for what follows. Conceptions ofShakespeare’s work perpetually morph as we move forward – not only interms of what constitutes Shakespeare’s work, but also the extent to whichShakespeare’s work is believed to be recoverable, the understanding andscrutiny of the textual and documentary forms that that work takes, and theeditorial strategies that are implemented to recover it.

Heminge and Condell’s two-pronged invitation to buy and read the FirstFolio was evidently answered with some zeal, as three more editions of theFolio soon appeared: F2 in 1632, F3 in 1663, and F4 in 1685. In additionto its retention of six apocryphal plays,3 F4 is noteworthy in that it marksthe end of editorial labour being shrouded in anonymity. The firstShakespearean editor to emerge from the shadows of the printshop todistinguish himself is Nicholas Rowe. Rowe’s six-volume edition waspublished in 1709, and its influence on subsequent editorial practice wouldbe difficult to overstate. Significantly, Rowe chooses to base his edition onthe text of F4, which was for him the most recently published folio; thisdecision to use a received text rather than extensively collating earlier editionsand seeking out the best copy-text would set an editorial precedent that hisdescendents would find no reason to deviate from until Edward Capell in1767. Many of Rowe’s other strategies were similarly momentous: he bringsthe language of the plays into the eighteenth century, modifying spellingand punctuation to conform to contemporary standards. He also labors toregularize certain features throughout his edition, dividing plays into fiveacts and (less systematically) into individual scenes, and providing each playwith its own dramatis personae. Each play begins with a brief reference to thelocation of its action, with some subsequent scenes placed in specific locationsas well.4

Rowe has next to nothing to say to his readers in terms of his editorialstrategies, although something of his approach to Shakespeare and his textscan be gleaned from a portion of the edition’s dedication to the Duke ofSomerset:

I have taken some Care to redeem him from the Injuries of former Impressions.I must not pretend to have restor’d this Work to the Exactness of the Author’sOriginal Manuscripts: These are lost, or, at least, are gone beyond any InquiryI could make; so that there was nothing left, but to compare the several Editions,and give the true Reading as well as I could from thence. (quoted in Murphy60)

Rowe is certainly aware of the challenges facing a Shakespearean editor: theauthor’s lost manuscripts, poorly transmitted printed editions in need ofcorrection, and the existence of differing extant texts of unknown authority,but he does not, however, implement a systematic approach to any of theseproblems, nor does he seem particularly interested in doing so. Rowe doesconsult printed editions other than F4, but predominantly, these arederivative acting quartos from the Restoration; moreover, any collation thathe undertakes with these quartos is haphazard at best.

184 . History of the Edited Shakespearean Text


Alexander Pope bases his edition (1723–25) on Rowe’s, but unlike Rowehe makes certain modifications to his text based on quarto readings thatpredate the folios. Pope’s distrust of the First Folio is fuelled by an intenseanti-theatrical bias; the theatre is seen as a corrupting influence on theinherent beauty of Shakespeare’s verse and the literary qualities of his drama,with the theatrical pedigrees of Heminge and Condell singled out asrepresentative of this process of degradation:

how many faults may have been unjustly laid to [Shakespeare’s] account fromarbitrary Additions, Expunctions, Transpositions of scenes and lines, confusionof Characters and Persons, wrong application of Speeches, corruptions ofinnumerable Passages by the Ignorance, and wrong Correction of ’em again bythe Impertinence, of his first Editors? (Preface, 1:xxi)

One of Pope’s primary goals, then, is to excise the taint of the theatre. Popeconsults the early quartos available to him,but he has no method for judgingtheir relative authority; in his mind, matters are simple: all early texts sharethe same potential for corruption, which allows him the freedom to“unsystematically . . . pick and choose among variant texts as some particularreadings appealed to him more than others” (Murphy 65). This unsystematicapproach to variant readings has major ramifications on the materialappearance of Pope’s edition. Pope means to save Shakespeare from thetheatre, but to do so is not a matter of simply scraping away the vile andloathsome crust of theatrical interpolation – textual flesh and bone must becarved away as well.

Essentially, Pope embraces the authority of earlier editions when theyprovide him with readings that he finds aesthetically pleasing.5 If he can findno attractive alternative to the reading as it stands in his received text, Popeliterally marginalizes the offensive portion from the text proper:

Some suspected passages which are excessively bad (and which seem Interpolationsby being so inserted that one can intirely omit them without any chasm, ordeficience in the context) are degraded to the bottom of the page. (1:xxii)

Pope’s physical manipulations of the text do not stop there: he identifiesShakespeare’s “most shining passages” (1:xxiii) by marking them withquotation marks along the margin; if “the beauty lay . . . in the whole scene”(1:xxiii), the exemplary scene is marked with a star. Pope also makesinnumerable alterations to the metre of Shakespeare’s verse, regularizing it,and correcting verse-as-prose and prose-as-verse misprints in the Folio; thesechanges, which are subtler than his heavy-handed treatment of “bad”passages, remain influential to this day.

Pope’s contemporaries would prove less than diplomatic in their assessmentof his edition. Where in 1709 Rowe had denied the possibility ofShakespeare’s “work” being “restor’d,” in 1726 Shakespeare Restored becomesthe battle cry which announces the arrival of Lewis Theobald on theeditorial front. Shakespeare Restored ostensibly provides a preliminary sketchof Theobald’s editorial principles, and those principles are mediated through



a book-length critique of Pope’s edition.6 Unlike his predecessor,Theobaldis willing to accept “that Shakespeare’s style, as he senses it, is in somepassages at variance with his own and Pope’s good taste” (Seary 151); whatshould guide editorial emendation, in Theobald’s opinion, are not an editor’saesthetic preferences, but an extensive familiarity with an author’s work andhistorical circumstances. Theobald is certainly not averse to emendation –what sets him apart from his predecessors is his desire for emendation to beinformed by an objective and defensible rationale.

Theobald lays out this rationale when he comes to edit the plays in 1733,going so far as to refer to it as “the Science of Criticism” (Preface, 1:xl).7

Theobald states the matter plainly: “An Editor . . . should be well vers’d inthe History and Manners of his Author’s Age, if he aims at doing him aService” (1:xlv–xlvi). His more nuanced familiarity with Shakespeare’scontext(s), contemporaries, and sources allows Theobald to detect and emendor gloss corrupted and obscure readings that had puzzled Rowe and Pope.In addition, Theobald displays a greater concern for the authority of theearly quartos. His position is that Shakespeare’s works were initially corruptedby “Mutilations or Additions made to them” (1:xxxviii) in the theatre, andthese corruptions have become entrenched as the plays have beenretransmitted in print. What is significant about this position is that Theobalddoes not recklessly heap all of the blame for corrupted texts on the players,but expresses an awareness that “the material circumstances in which thetexts were produced and transmitted . . . are responsible for theirinadequacies” (Jarvis 93).

The appearance of Theobald’s text is noticeably different from that ofRowe or Pope: where their pages were relatively clean (save for Pope’spredilection for demoting passages to the bottom of the page),Theobald’spages contain more prevalent and conspicuous annotation. Theobald defendshis liberal use of notes in his Preface, suggesting that they provide his editionwith a measure of textual stability:

a Note on every [obscure or emended passage] hinders all possible Return toDepravity; and for ever secures them in a State of Purity and Integrity not belost or forfeited. (xlv)

In this regard, some of the pages of Theobald’s edition look remarkably likethose of more modern editions, complete with extensive textual commentarythat frequently dwarfs the text itself, often threatening to consumeShakespeare from the margins.

This proliferation of marginal commentary, which continues in editionsby Thomas Hanmer (1743–44) and William Warburton (1747), elicits thecaveat from Samuel Johnson that opened this paper: “Let him that is yetunacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare . . . read every play, from thefirst scene to the last, with utter negligence of his commentators” (58).Ironically, Johnson’s edition (completed in 1765) has as much (if not more)marginalia as any preceding edition,making his commentary rather difficultto neglect. “Notes are often necessary,” concedes Johnson, “but they are



necessary evils” (58). And it is for his marginal commentary rather than forhis editorial acumen that Johnson remains influential; in Stanley Wells’swords, “Textually Johnson’s edition is of no great importance; its strengthslie in its Preface, which has become a classic of Shakespeare criticism, andin its explanatory and critical notes” (All Time 231). Johnson’s penchant forwaxing critical and conjectural in the margins of his edition is significant inthat it reveals a discernable shift (away from the aesthetic interests of earliereditors) towards a more explicit authorial orientation. For Johnson,Shakespeare’s drama is “a faithful mirrour of manners and of life” (10), andthis mirror – a metaphor that suggests fragility as much as revelation – mustbe handled with care and reverence: “where any passage appearedinextricably perplexed, [I] have endeavoured to discover how it may berecalled to sense, with least violence” (53).

Paradoxically, Johnson fears doing injury or violence to a text that heknows to exist in an injured and violated state, for it is clear that he is wellaware of the myriad ways in which Shakespeare’s text has become corrupted.Most significantly, Johnson is aware that these corruptions have accruedthrough time: “Whoever has any of the folios has all, excepting thosediversities which mere reiteration of editions will produce” (43). Johnsonmakes this point only in passing, and hence he himself does not seize on itspotential ramifications. This notion of derivative texts reappears later inJohnson’s preface when he remarks that despite many “strange mistakes” inthe early editions, “the reading of the ancient books [i.e. quartos and folios]is probably true . . . [for] they who had the copy before their eyes weremore likely to read it right, than we who read it only by imagination” (53).Hints of a methodological sea-change ripple through this statement, but itwould be one of Johnson’s contemporaries – Edward Capell – who wouldbring such a change about.

Capell’s concern for Shakespeare’s intentions is synthesized with a rigorousapproach to bibliographic matters not undertaken by his predecessors. Hisrefined bibliographic understanding has led to Capell being nominated bysome as “the eighteenth-century’s greatest editor of Shakespeare”(Braunmuller 10 –11); such accolades largely stem from one innovation:Capell breaks free from the shackles of the received text tradition. He doesso by first fleshing out Johnson’s comment that there are “diversities whichmere reiteration of editions will produce”:

The quarto’s [sic] went through many impressions . . . and, in each play, the lastis generally taken from the impression next before it, and so onward to thefirst . . . And this further is to be observ’d of them: that, generally speaking, themore distant they are from the original, the more they abound infaults . . . (1:13–4)

Significantly, Capell’s attentiveness to corruptions accumulating as editionsare copied and reprinted is applied to editorial practice:



the superstructure cannot be a sound one,which is built upon so bad a foundationas that work of Mr. ROWE’S; which all of them [i.e. subsequent editions] . . . insuccession, have yet made their corner-stone. (1:19)

Accordingly, Capell resolves “to stick invariably to the old editions, (thatis, the best of them) which hold now the place of manuscripts, no scrap ofthe Author’s writing having the luck to come down to us” (1:20). He thusstarts from scratch, basing his texts of individual plays on their quarto orfolio versions – “Where previous editors submitted to the printer amarked-up copy of a predecessor’s work, Capell provided a complete faircopy, every word and every letter written in his own hand” (Walsh 179).

After examining numerous eighteenth-century editions in some detail,it seems irresponsible to pass over large portions of the nineteenth century;truth be told, however, the Shakespearean editorial tradition in the first halfof the century is largely derivative. George Steevens edited the secondedition of Samuel Johnson’s text in 1773, and (with Isaac Reed) quicklyfollowed this up with editions in 1778, 1785, and 1793. This finalJohnson-Steevens-Reed text proved popular in reprint well into the1800s. The other frequently reprinted text was Edmond Malone’s 1790edition, an edition that reflected Malone’s skill for documentary and archivalresearch in its various apparatuses and appendices. With derivations ofJohnson(-Steevens-Reed) and Malone holding sway, the most influentialversion of the nineteenth century does not appear until much later, whenthe Cambridge edition is published between 1863 and 1866. The institutionalresources (financial and intellectual) powering the production of “the firstacademic edition of Shakespeare” (Taylor, Introduction 56) are monumental,8

as are the concomitant achievements of the Cambridge editors. They boldlystate their primary aim on the opening page of their preface:“To base thetext on a thorough collation of the four Folios and of all the Quarto editionsof the separate plays, and of subsequent editions and commentaries” (1:ix).In accomplishing this, the Cambridge editors collect and arrange a staggeringamount of information in a systematic two-column collation at the bottomof the page, a format that remains the standard to this day. Moreover, thecumulative collation of individual plays allows the editors to distinguishsubstantive texts from derivative ones, and thus establish a genealogy forsixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions. The Cambridge editors arealso the first “To number the lines in each scene separately, so as to facilitatereference” (1:ix); while editors since Rowe had been numbering acts andscenes, this particular system of reference “has become so familiar to literaryscholars that we can hardly appreciate its revolutionary significance infacilitating data retrieval” (Taylor, Reinventing 191).

The Cambridge edition proliferated in the form of the Globe Shakespeare(1864), an influential single-volume text that thrived well into the twentiethcentury. Devoid of annotation, commentary, or collation, the Globe text isnot weighed down by scholarly apparatuses (save for a glossary at the back),its relatively simple appearance perhaps helping to explain its popularity.9



Margreta De Grazia writes of the Globe edition that it “gave the impressionof being no edition at all. It seemed as if nothing intervened between thereader and Shakespeare – except sheer text”. She continues, describing theedition as “almost transparent, as if the reader could see through the text tothe mind in which it originated. One Shakespeare for one world” (247).

Seeing “through the text to the mind in which it originated”: to varyingdegrees this desire had fuelled editions of Shakespeare since Heminge andCondell, albeit in an often untheorized, unsystematic way. The Cambridgeeditor’s achievements in classifying and arranging substantive and derivativeprinted editions held the promise of transforming the editor’s task from animpressionistic endeavor into an objective science. After all, if one couldarrange the numerous and disparate quarto and folio versions of Hamlet intosome sort of logical sequence of derivation, one could then conceivablyidentify the most authoritative text and strictly adhere to it as acopy-text. While this was a tantalizing proposition for some editors, inpractice, the printing history of certain plays – like Hamlet, or Troilus andCressida – resisted neat stemmatic representation; more significant, however,was the fact that some scholars found the prospect of objectivity nottantalizing, but disturbing, and thus it did not take long for the mechanizationof editorial labor to be challenged and refined. Those who led the challengecame to be known as the New Bibliographers, the most influential of whichwere W. W. Greg, A. W. Pollard, and R. B. McKerrow. Greg and theNew Bibliographers work from the premise that “It is impossible to excludeindividual judgment from editorial procedure” (“Rationale” 48); accordingly,they seek to validate and rationalize the admittedly subjective judgmentsthat all editors must make. Rather than claiming to objectively decide on acopy-text and then slavishly adhere to its readings, the New Bibliographersseek to confer on editors the freedom to integrate substantive readings fromother texts into their critical editions.

(In)famously guided by their desire to establish “what the author wrote”(“Rationale” 51), Greg and company advocate a rigorous examination ofbibliographical data in order to determine the underlying manuscript copiesthat served as the source for early printed editions. This involves scouringprinted texts for markers indicative of an author’s original draft or “foulpapers,” or perhaps a theatrically-influenced “fair copy” or playbook. Theyalso attempt to codify a distinction between different forms of variantreadings: some differences between texts are “substantive” while others are“accidental”. Armed with the knowledge of what sort of manuscript isbehind a printed text, editors can then make an informed decision as towhich printed text might best reflect an author’s intended meaning. Despitetheir fidelity to authorial intention, New Bibliographers were not necessarilydriven by the belief that an author’s intended meaning was completelyknowable (although their critics often assume that they were); Greg, forexample, states that “the author may never have produced a definitive textfor us to recover” (Editorial ix).



The strategies of the New Bibliographers were influential enough todictate editorial practice for much of the twentieth century. Crucially,second-generation theorists inspired by Greg and company subtly alter theirprecepts: the rhetoric becomes more inflated, the promised ends moreextravagant and exact, and New Bibliographic tenets ironically begin toassume the form of scientific rules that can guarantee the very objectivitythat New Bibliographers originally set out to deny. Thus Fredson Bowerslater writes of stripping away “the veil of print,” (271), and of seeking “ascientific basis of factual evidence to assess the influence of the manuscript”(271–2). The emphasis shifts from selecting copy-texts and being well-versedin matters of textual transmission to recreating Shakespeare’s lost manuscripts.In another ironic twist, the means by which certain New Bibliographersattempt to recreate lost manuscripts through back-formation from printededitions ultimately undermine their claims regarding Shakespeare’s authorityover his texts. In order to fill the lacunae left by Shakespeare’s missingmanuscripts, New Bibliographers hypothesize extensively on the ways thatvarious intermediary influences – scribal tendencies, the idiosyncrasies oftheatrical promptbooks, printing house practice – have distorted Shakespeare’sfoul papers; as a result, these other factors involved in bringing Shakespeare’sworks into printed form become more prominent in textual scholarship.10

Jerome McGann is representative of this shift in thinking:

[T]he concept of authorial intention only comes into force for criticism when(paradoxically) the artist’s work begins to engage with social structures andfunctions. The fully authoritative text is therefore always one which has beensocially produced; as a result, the critical standard for what constitutesauthoritativeness cannot rest with the author and his intentions alone. (75)

The monumental edition of the twentieth century claims to answer thecall for a more socialized version of Shakespeare’s text. The Oxford edition(1986)11 represents a fundamental rethinking of many editorial problems; itseditors admit that the edition was conceived of as an engagement withtheoretical sophistication, of “put[ting] into practice the consequences ofcurrent textual study” ( Wells and Taylor, “Re-Viewed” 8). Interestingly,the Oxford editors produce a text devoid of collation or annotation, choosingto publish their editorial apparatuses in a separate Textual Companion(1987). The introduction to the Companion works to displaceShakespeare-as-author from his central position in the editorial process:“Shakespeare . . . devoted his life to the theatre, and dramatic texts arenecessarily the most socialized of all literary forms” (15).12 With an eyetowards socialized texts, the Oxford editors diverge from the tradition ofselecting a copy-text based on its close proximity to authorial manuscriptand/or intentions; instead, they “prefer – where there is a choice – the textcloser to the prompt-book of Shakespeare’s company” (15). The Oxfordeditors thus seem to imply that recovering the text as it was performed issomehow a less elusive, less ephemeral editorial goal than the quest forShakespeare’s intentions: “Performance is the end to which they were



created, and in this edition we have devoted our efforts to recovering andpresenting texts of Shakespeare’s plays as they were acted in the Londonplayhouses which stood at the centre of his professional life” (Preface xxxix,emphasis added).

This process of authorial displacement, however, is not without itsincongruities: Shakespeare, it seems, will not go easily; or perhaps moreaccurately, the Oxford editors do not find it so easy to let him go. Some oftheir prefatory remarks hint at an inherent contradiction at the heart of theirendeavor:

it is the texts as they were originally performed that are the sources of his power,and that we attempt here to present with as much fidelity to his intentions as thecircumstances in which they have been preserved will allow. (xv)

This reveals two seemingly incompatible goals: producing the socializedtext “as originally performed” seems to set the Oxford editors off on oneexpedition, while their desire to stay true to Shakespeare’s intentionswhenever possible suggests an editorial journey of a much different sort. Intrying to do two things at once, the Oxford editors are often operating ina kind of interpretive limbo where any emendation is theoretically justifiableso long as it can be argued that it is tending toward theatrical performanceor authorial intention (which isn’t difficult to do, since most emendationsmove in one direction or the other).

How can these “contradictory impulses” (Murphy 257) be explained?For all of their theoretical sophistication, why can’t the Oxford editorsrelinquish their grasp on Shakespeare’s authorial presence? The answer liesin that portion of their editorial orientation that is sociological: within suchan orientation, Peter Shillingsburg reminds us, “Social institutions, andperhaps the historical fact of collaborative production of literary works, takeprecedence over the author” (21). This is not to say, however, that socialand collaborative influences on a text are more stable objects of pursuit thanauthorial intentions or lost manuscripts. It is possible that an edition seekingto fully retain the influence of social institutions and assorted collaborators– like an edition that seeks to fully recover authorial intention – can onlyexist in theory. David Scott Kastan helps to explain why this might be:

Once one takes as one’s goal . . . the location of the text within the network ofsocial and institutional practices that have allowed it to be produced and read[,]it becomes . . . difficult to imagine the form such an edition would assume andthe procedures by which one would edit. Indeed arguably it becomes moredifficult to justify editing at all, since the unedited texts, even in their manifest error,are the most compelling witnesses to the complex conditions of their production.(Book 122–3, emphasis added)

This, I think, helps to explain why there has yet to be a complete editionof Shakespeare that applies post-New Bibliographical textual and editorialtheories in a systematic and consistent way: arguably, the most socializedtext is the unedited one.



Perhaps, then, recalling Johnson’s pronouncement that began this essay,editors themselves are the problem, and their mediation inherently distortswhatever kinds of meanings one might be inclined to search for: private andauthorial; social and collaborative; even if one takes umbrage at the verynotion of literary works having coherent meanings, then the stability andregularization that an editor usually confers on a text can be seen as a formof distortion. “Unediting,” in fact, is a term with a fair bit of cache. ForLeah Marcus, the term involves a readerly hyper-awareness of editorialinfluence that enables one to avoid becoming

caught up in a constricting hermeneutic knot by which the shaping hand of theeditor is mistaken for the intent of the author, or for some lost,“perfect” versionof the author’s creation. (3)

Taking the concept of “unediting” to its literal extreme, editors such asStephen Orgel and Randall McLeod have toyed with the proposal “that weuse only facsimiles, and thereby force ourselves and our students to confrontthe material reality of Renaissance literature” (Orgel 18). Such assertionsare probably meant to be more provocative than practical, but if we wereto seriously consider such a strategy, it is imperative to remember that afacsimile performs “its own act of idealization” (Kastan, After Theory 68),and remains a mediated way of engaging with a text. Facsimiles, like anyedited text, will retain and lose information, and whatever is lost and savedwill be valued according to the interests and concerns of different readers;certain elements of Shakespeare’s too too solid (?) sallied (?) sullied (?) textualflesh will always melt away and vanish from whatever documentary formattempts to contain them. In conclusion, it seems easiest to end my task atthe beginning. “Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe”: Hemingeand Condell’s three hundred and eighty-two year old invitation is no longeran invitation at all; it has become a challenge, one that cannot be answeredwithout the continued refinement of editorial practice.

Notes1 Facsimile reprints of the prefatory material from the First Folio are included in Evans 90–105.I quote from Heminge and Condell’s epistle as it is reproduced on page 95.2 Of course, the irony is that probably less than one quarter of the plays printed in the Folio arebelieved to have been directly set from Shakespeare’s holograph papers. According to Gary Taylorin the general introduction to William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, only eight of F’s thirty-sixplays have Shakespeare’s foul papers as their underlying copy; existing printed editions are usedeleven times; and some variety of scribal or theatrical transcript seventeen times (39). These numbersare speculative, but the margin of error is likely quite low.3 A second issue of F3 in 1664 had included seven plays not found in earlier folios – Pericles,TheLondon Prodigal, Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan, A Yorkshire Tragedy, andLocrine – and F4 followed suit. Only Pericles has subsequently been established as canonical, andfew assign its authorship solely to Shakespeare (the first nine scenes are usually attributed to GeorgeWilkins, author of the 1608 novella, The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre).4 Rowe is not comprehensive in his designation of scene locations. That said, some of his choicesin this regard have had immense influence in both editorial and critical circles; his decision toplace much of Act III of King Lear on “a Heath” despite the text’s lack of specificity on this matter



is one such example. Another example is provided by Barbara Mowat, who points out that Rowe’scall for Hamlet to encounter the Ghost on “the Platform before the Castle” (emended in mostmodern editions to “the battlements”) similarly lacks textual support (318).5 This is “hardly a surprising tendency, we might feel, in the foremost poet of his generation”(Murphy 64).6 Indeed, the full title of Theobald’s book is less than subtle: Shakespeare Restored: Or,A Specimenof the Many Errors, as well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr Pope in his Late Edition of this Poet.7 This “Science” is broken down into three major “Classes”:“the Emendation of corrupt Passages;the Explanation of obscure and difficult ones; and an Inquiry into the Beauties and Defects ofComposition” (xl). Theobald goes on the clarify that the first two classes:“[are] the proper Objectsof the Editor’s Labour” (xli); using Theobald’s terminology, it is clear that Pope focuses his effortson the third class of inquiry.8 The editors themselves acknowledge this: “Cambridge afforded facilities for the execution ofthe task such as few other places could boast of” (1:x).9 The Cambridge edition has reappeared in yet another altered state to cast a mass-market shadowinto the twenty-first century, with the “Harold Bloom Shakespeare Editions” (Riverhead, 2004).Reprinting the relevant chapter from Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human to serve asan introduction, these single-volume editions include a note stating that the text is based on the1863 Cambridge version, which Bloom silently (!) emends as he sees fit – no collations, no glosses,no editorial apparatuses of any kind. Everything old is new again.10 A more detailed account of this period would have to consider the ascendancy of Poststructuraland New Historical paradigms – which tend to destabilize texts and multiply authority – and theirinfluence on editorial theory and practice.11 The Oxford editors published both a modernized edition and an old-spelling edition; mycomments in this section refer to the more widely disseminated modernized edition.12 There is a distinct echo of McGann here, but this is not surprising considering that his influenceis acknowledged in the preface to the Textual Companion.

Works cited

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Braunmuller, A. R. “Shakespeares Various.” In Arden: Editing Shakespeare. Essays in Honour ofRichard Proudfoot. Ed. Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan. London: The ArdenShakespeare-Thompson Learning, 2003. 3–16.

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——. “The Rationale of Copy-Text.” 1950. Bibliography and Textual Criticism: English and AmericanLiterature, 1700 to the Present. Ed. O. M. Brack, Jr., and Warner Barnes. Chicago and London:U of Chicago P, 1969. 41–58.

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——. Shakespeare and the Book. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.McGann, Jerome J. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.Marcus, Leah. Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton. London: Routledge, 1996.Mowat, Barbara. “Nicholas Rowe and the Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Text.” Shakespeare

and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association WorldCongress, Tokyo, 1991. Ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells. Newark: U ofDelaware P; London and Toronto:Associated UP, 1994. 314–22.

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Pope,Alexander, ed. The Works of Shakespear. 6 vols. London, 1723–25.Seary, Peter. Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.Shillingsburg, Peter L.Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Ann Arbour:

U of Michigan P, 1996.Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, From the Restoration to the Present. New

York:Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989.——. “General Introduction.” William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Stanley Wells, Gary

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Theobald, Lewis. Shakespeare Restored: Or, A Specimen of the Many Errors, as well Committed, asUnamended, by Mr Pope in his Late Edition of this Poet. 1726. London: Frank Cass & Co., 1971.

——. The Works of Shakespeare. 1733. 7 vols. New York:AMS, 1968.Walsh, Marcus.Shakespeare, Milton & Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretive

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Documents

A Brief History of the Edited Shakespearean Text