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Text and Stage: Shakespeare, Bibliography, and Performance Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Graham Holderness  and
Bryan Loughrey
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Abstract

This article continues the debate initiated by Brian Parker, who in NTQ24 (1990) offered a critique of the new Oxford Shakespeare, and one of its editors, Stanley Wells, who responded in NTQ 26 (1991) with a defence of his departure from traditional practices of textual conflation. Here, Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey suggest that, on a closer examination, there is evidence that editorial intervention and conflation have been regularly employed in the Oxford edition: and in arguing against all such attempts to reconstruct ‘authoritative’ texts, they propose that, in their inevitable absence, the originals present the closest we are likely to approach to recreating the collaborative theatrical practice of Shakespeare's time. In illustrating the effects of editorial intervention from a close comparative examination of particular passages, they suggest, for example, that the stage directions make a shovel a likelier object of Hamlet's graveside contemplation than Yorick's skull. Graham Holderness, newly-appointed Professor and Dean of Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire, and Bryan Loughrey, Research Director at Roehampton Institute, have recently begun, through the Centre for Textual Studies, a programme of publishing accessible reprints of the important early editions, of which the first three have now appeared from Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 9 , Issue 34 , May 1993 , pp. 179 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

Notes and References

1. Parker, Brian, ‘Bowers of Bliss: Deconflation in the Shakespeare Canon’, New Theatre Quarterly, VII, No. 24 (1990), p. 357–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wells, Stanley, ‘Theatricalizing Shakespeare's Texts’, New Theatre Quarterly, VII, No. 26 (1991), p. 184–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. See for example de Grazia, Margareta, ‘The Essential Shakespeare and the Material Book’, Textual Practice, II, No. 1 (1988)Google Scholar, and Shakespeare Verbatim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Patterson, Annabel, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar; and Marcus, Leah, ‘Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local Texts’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XLII, No. 2 (1991), p. 168–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. See, for example, The Division of the Kingdoms, eds. Taylor, Gary and Warren, Michael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

4. William Shakespeare: the Complete Works, and William Shakespeare: the Complete Works, Original-Spelling Edition, eds. Wells, Stanley and Taylor, Gary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

5. Wells, Stanley and Taylor, Gary, William Shakespeare: a Textual Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Platter, Thomas, cited in The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare, eds. Campbell, O. J. and Quinn, E. G. (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 634Google Scholar.

7. See Bate, Jonathan, ‘Shakespeare's Tragedies as Working Scripts’, Critical Survey, III, No. 2 (1991), p. 118–27Google Scholar.

8. See Cloud, Random [Randall McLeod], ‘The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XXXIII, No. 4 (1982), p. 421–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. See, for example, Loughrey, Bryan, ‘Ql in Modern Performance’, in Clayton, Tom, ed., Ql Now (Minnesota: University of Nebraska Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Shrimpton, Nicholas, ‘Shakespeare Performances in London and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1984–5’, Shakespeare Survey, XXXIX (1987), p. 193–7Google Scholar.

10. The ‘Oxford Shakespeare’ as a global totality contains the editions of Wells and Taylor, and a series of individual texts by other editors, under the general editorship of Stanley Wells.

11. Stanley Wells, ‘Theatricalizing Shakespeare's Text’, p. 185.

12. The type of edition that is clearly theoretically cognate with the Oxford project is exemplified by Warren's, MichaelThe Parallel ‘King Lear’, 1603–23 (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

13. ‘General Introduction’ to Wells and Taylor, William Shakespeare: the Complete Works, p. xxxv.

14. The Norton Facsimile: the First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Hinman, Charlton (London; New York: Paul Hamlyn, 1968), p. 78Google Scholar.

15. Complete Works, Original-Spelling Edition, p. 774.

16. Complete Works, eds. Wells and Taylor, p. 774.

17. Shakespeare, William, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke (London: N[icholas[ L[ing] and lohn Trundell, 1603), H4Google Scholar.

18. A parallel occlusion can be found in modern editions of The Taming of the Shrew. Although Christopher Sly is referred to in the Folio text, both on initial entry and in all speech-headings, as ‘Beggar’, virtually all modern editors take him at his own word and promote him in their ‘Dramatis Personae’ to ‘Tinker’ (e.g., Arden, New Penguin, New Cambridge). Wells and Taylor (1986) admit him ‘drunkard and beggar’, but still with all other editors alter his speech-headings from ‘Beg’ to ‘Sly’ (and to ‘Slie’ in their original-spelling edition). The substitution of an original emphasis on public identity and social function for a modern emphasis on personality and the individual subject (whether the focus is on a character or the character's putative creator) is a clear instance of modern editors imposing anachronistic values on an early modern text (though the systematic effacement from social obtrusion of beggars was an aspiration of the state in Elizabethan times as much as it is today).

19. The phrase was used by Bowers, Fredson, ‘Textual Criticism’, in The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare, eds. Campbell, O. J. and Quinn, E. G. (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 369Google Scholar.

20. Charlton Hinman's facsimile of the First Folio (cited at Note 14 above) offers a striking illustration of why this should be so. Hinman set out to reproduce the text of the original First Folio, but his collation of the Folger Library's numerous copies demonstrated that ‘every copy of the finished book shows a mixture of early and late states of the text that is peculiar to it alone’. He therefore selected from the various editions those pages he believed represented the printer's final intentions and bound these together to produce something which ‘has hitherto been only a theoretical entity, an abstraction: the First Folio’. Thus the technology which would have allowed him to produce a literal facsimile in fact is deployed to create an ahistorical composite which differs in substance from every single original upon which it is based. See Hinman (1968), p. xxiii–xxiv.

21. Once the process begins, it becomes impossible to adjudicate between rival conjectural emendations. In this case, for example, Hunter's suggestion that Lady Macbeth should be given the second of these lines seems no less (and no more) convincing than Rowe's.

22. See McCullough, Christopher J., ‘The Cambridge Connection: towards a Materialist Theatre Practice’, in The Shakespeare Myth, ed. Holderness, Graham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

23. The Centre for Textual Studies, established in 1991 at the Universities of Sussex and Hertfordshire, and at Roehampton Institute, is in the process of preparing such a comprehensive edition of ‘Shakespearean’ dramatic texts. The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke (1603), The Cronicle History of Henry the fift (1600), and The Taming of A Shrew (1594), eds. Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey, have been published by Harvester-Wheatsheaf in 1992–93 under the series title Shakespearean Originals.