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Some Lears
- Edited by Peter Holland, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 24 October 2002, pp 139-152
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Summary
'In Goethe's view, every old man knows what it is to be King Lear. “Ein alter Mann”, he dolefully remarked, “ist stets ein König Lear!”' I quote Peter Conrad's extended and subtle discussion of King Lear offshoots - novels, plays and films - in 'Expatriating Lear', the third chapter of To be Continued. That King Lear may offer a paradigm of old age is a comment congruous with the view of Shakespeare as universal genius, speaking from the height of poetic imagination to the heart of every man (we notice already the absence of women from the formulation).
When we turn to literature the proposition that every old man is a King Lear is both enticing and challenging.
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, ‘It is just as I feared! –
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!’
The collocation of an old man with a beard and the name of Lear does not, alas, allow me to add Edward Lear's old man to the inexhaustible search for the cultural traces of King Lear in the nineteenth century - though with a little ingenuity and a little straining it would no doubt be possible to relate the bird-loud beard to the trauma of Shakespeare's King Lear in the storm of Act 3 and the madness of Act 4. Certainly searchers for King Lear in nineteenth-century fiction should carry an identikit portrait of an old man in which a beard (white, long and either wind-swept or restored to order by a daughter's loving care) would constitute an important identifying mark.
The 1998 Globe Season
- Edited by Stanley Wells, Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 28 November 1999, pp 215-228
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The 1998 repertoire at Shakespeare’s Globe included two comedies, As You Like It, probably written for the original Globe in 1599, and The Merchant of Venice, revived there before Court performances in 1605. As in 1997, two further plays were added in August: Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters, written for the Children of St Paul’s, at their small indoor theatre in the cathedral precinct; and The Honest Whore (part 1 by Thomas Dekker and Middleton; part 2 by Dekker alone), written for Prince Henry’s Men at the Fortune (whose stage used the Globe’s as its model). One play, then, was both Shakespeare’s and a Globe play. Other performances at the Globe included a single performance of King John by the ‘Original Shakespeare Company’, and several concert performances of John Blow’s opera Venus and Adonis (whose libretto bears no relation to Shakespeare’s poem).
As the novelty of the Globe eases into familiarity, its attractions and its discomforts and discontents become clearer. Simply to enter the yard and stand in the building remains among its most reliable satisfactions. The enclosed space of the yard and timber galleries excludes the modern city around it. Even the nuisance of aircraft noise, especially hovering traffic helicopters, is taken in their stride by actors and audience alike, if anything creating a bond of sympathy.
3 - Textual Studies
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 17 November 1977, pp 203-210
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Although this review is not the appropriate place for extended obituary comment, the deaths, within one year, of A. C. Cairncross, J. W. Lever and J. C. Maxwell, must mark 1975–6 as a season of dreadful and irreplaceable loss to Shakespearian editing and textual studies and cannot pass unnoted. All three made important contributions to the revised Arden Shakespeare and Maxwell had the unique distinction of belonging as well to Dover Wilson’s team for the new Cambridge Shakespeare.
Coriolanus and Pericles, which may have been written in the same year but have little in common either as plays or in the tasks they offer to editors, are the latest volumes to appear, respectively, in the New Arden and New Penguin Shakespeares, the former edited by Philip Brockbank, the latter by Philip Edwards.
Brockbank's long introduction to Coriolanus, for all its divisions into sections on ‘The Text’ and ‘The Play’, is a seamless garment. His deepest engagement with the play is revealed in his commentary on Shakespeare's handling of his sources and in his pages on ‘The Tragedy of Coriolanus’, but the same questioning alertness which distinguishes his critical discussion is equally apparent in his treatment of the historical and technical issues of dating, stage history and text.
3 - Textual Studies
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 07 October 1976, pp 177-186
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This year has been marked by the publication of two of the major comedies in the New Arden Shakespeare, As You Like It edited by Agnes Latham and Twelfth Night completed by T. W. Craik on the basis of work nearly finished by J. M. Lothian at the time of his death in 1970. The circumstances of their completion may be reflected in the different characters of these two excellent editions. As You Like It is flavoured throughout by its editor’s dry wit and pondered wisdom, reflected in an economy of statement which is more often informed with ironic implication than a casual reading may reveal: the edition is clearly the product of a long and deep affection for the play. It is perhaps in part the accident of juxtaposition which gives Twelfth Night the air of a less fully integrated piece of work, but for all its solid virtues, its style lacks the poise and pointedness of As You Like It and its different sections give less sense of being pervaded by a clear and subtle awareness of the play’s integrity and individuality.
3 - Textual Studies
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 20 November 1975, pp 173-182
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Publication of the American Riverside Shakespeare, whose text has been edited throughout from the early editions by G. Blakemore Evans, has been long awaited with keen interest, nor are expectations disappointed by the handsome and substantial book which has now appeared. Never before can a single-volume edition of Shakespeare have managed to combine so reliably edited a text presented in such a readable form with so rich a digest of ancillary and explanatory materials. John Heminge and Henry Condell addressed themselves and the First Folio of 1623 to ‘the great Variety of Readers’, a phrase which the publishers of this new Shakespeare translate as covering ‘in the plainer language of today . . . the general reader, the student, and the scholar’. The general reader may find more grounds for speculation about the plan of the volume than others with a professional interest in the subject. He will find obvious sense in the chronological grouping of the plays and distinct convenience in the placing of the brief but helpful commentary unobtrusively at the foot of each page of text. In the text itself, he may wonder why words sometimes appear in a spelling which departs from modern usage and why square brackets enclose not only many stage directions but words, phrases or more extended passages in the speeches themselves. He may reflect that the textual notes, although decently postponed to the end of each text, occupy enough space to suggest comprehensiveness, and it may occur to him to question the relative prominence given to the general textual introduction (which precedes the works) and the stage history (which follows them).
3 - Textual Studies
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 05 December 1974, pp 179-192
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The survey of this year’s work in Shakespearian textual studies may well take as its point of departure the papers delivered by Charlton Hinman and Fredson Bowers to the World Shakespeare Congress at Vancouver in September 1971, both of which take stock of the situation then current and concern themselves with the immediate prospect as well as with the vital needs of future editors of Shakespeare. Hinman recapitulates the major developments from 1964 to 1971, coming to rest on D. F. McKenzie’s ‘Printers of the Mind’ and assessing the damage sustained by the structure of bibliographical analysis of the early texts as the dust and smoke clear after that most severe assault on many of the assumptions underlying such analysis. He finds those parts of the structure most haunted by Shakespearians among the least shaken, namely, the identification of compositors on internal evidence and the establishment of their characteristics, the demonstration of setting by formes in the printing of the First Folio and the currency in the Elizabethan period of methods of proof-correction less rigorous than those described by Moxon in the 1680s. Points that he is willing to concede include the normality of concurrent printing in the Elizabethan period as well as later and the consequent invalidity of analyses, on internal evidence alone, of the interrelation of rates of composition and rates of presswork.
3 - Textual Studies
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 15 November 1973, pp 177-184
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Charlton Hinman follows his facsimile of the First Folio with the 1600 Quarto of Much Ado About Nothing, published as No. 15 of the Clarendon Press Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles. The copy reproduced is the fine one in the Capell collection at Trinity College, Cambridge, which contains all recorded variant formes in their corrected state, with the trivial exception of a single turned letter in outer D. This is the first volume in the series to be numbered with the Through Line Numbering of the Hinman Folio facsimile, adapted to cover the few places where the quarto text includes lines omitted from the folio. The introduction explains the conventions used in this adaptation and also presents evidence for the setting of the text from Shakespeare’s foul papers by Valentine Simmes’s Compositor A, ‘a compositor who, though reasonably competent, is likely to have been responsible for a considerable number of minor departures from his copy’. Twelve perfect copies of the quarto were collated in the preparation of the facsimile, a thirteenth, in the Bodmer Library, having been, at the time, unavailable (a problem unlikely to face future scholars since the establishment in 1971 of the Bodmer Foundation, in accordance with the wishes of the late Dr Martin Bodmer).
3 - Textual Studies
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 19 October 1972, pp 193-200
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On the upper slopes of Shakespearian textual studies, where the air is thin and advances are measured in proudly gained inches, Professor Kristian Smidt and Professor J. K. Walton are already familiar figures. Both have returned this year to the scene of previous struggles, the question of the copy for the Folio Richard III. As before, they propose different solutions, although Smidt’s support for the sixth Quarto, 1622, as providing the printed basis for the F text is attended with more qualifications than he once admitted, while Walton’s championship of the third Quarto, 1602, has become, if anything, more absolute, so that he now speaks of its use as copy for F not as hypothetical but as an established fact.
Their two books are of very different scope and character. Smidt's short monograph restates and reassesses the evidence bearing on the nature of the Q text of Richard III and on the identification of the particular Quarto used as copy for F. Walton's aim is more ambitious: by examining the whole body of Folio plays printed from Quarto copy, whether or not the Quartos were annotated, he sets out to create a new context for the discussion of those few plays in F about which no consensus of opinion yet exists as to whether they were printed from Q copy or from independent manuscripts, or as to the identity of the particular Quarto edition used for copy.
3 - Textual Studies
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 30 November 1971, pp 170-179
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The publication of the Norton facsimile of the First Folio, edited by Charlton Hinman, is the culminating achievement of many years of devoted labour by the editor and by earlier investigators of the printing of the Folio. In a real sense this is the first edition of the First Folio, of a book representing as nearly as is possible the ideal copy of the Folio as Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount intended to publish it. Where extant copies of the Folio may vary in formes corrected at press, this facsimile presents every variant forme in its latest or most fully corrected state and in addition it reproduces each page from the most legible exemplar to be found among thirty of the best copies of the Folio in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Editorial matter is limited to the marginal printing of through line numbers (as advocated by McKerrow) which will provide a new standard system of numbering for the Folio plays and to the supplying of cross-references to the conventional act, scene and line numbering at the foot of each page. The facsimile is followed by an appendix of fourteen plates illustrating the cancelland and cancel settings of the last page of Romeo and Juliet and the first of Troilus and Cressida, two of the extant proof-sheets, together with the corrected state of the pages involved and three selected pages in uncorrected and corrected states.
3 - Textual Studies
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 02 November 1970, pp 176-186
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The need for a new Shakespeare concordance, more complete and more accurate than John Bartlett’s New and Complete Concordance of 1894, may not have been acute but it existed and it was inevitable that the aid of computers would be enlisted in compiling such a concordance. Not one but two computer-generated concordances are now in course of publication. The first volumes of Marvin Spevack’s modern-spelling concordance, based on the forthcoming Riverside Shakespeare under the textual editorship of G. Blakemore Evans, were reviewed last year. The year 1969 has seen the publication of five sections of T. H. Howard-Hill’s old-spelling concordance, based on the text of the First Folio and of selected Quartos. His Oxford Shakespeare Concordances are intimately related to Dr Alice Walker’s Oxford Shakespeare and use the early text of each play which she has chosen as her copy-text. Fears that the two concordances may render each other redundant are to some extent mitigated by the two editors’ widely differing aims and methods: Spevack’s promises to be a useful work of general reference, Howard-Hill’s is essentially a tool for minute study of Shakespeare’s language and text which preserves the linguistic and typographical details of the early texts.
3 - Textual Studies
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 02 January 1970, pp 176-184
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Marvin Spevack has used the resources of the German Computing Centre, Darmstadt, to compile a new and unprecedentedly complete concordance to the works of Shakespeare. The first two volumes contain separate concordances to the comedies and histories and to each of their characters, and the second ends with separate and consolidated concordances to the non-dramatic works. Volume three is to cover the tragedies, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the Shakespearian portion of Sir Thomas More, while a further three volumes will be occupied by a consolidated concordance to the complete works. The present volumes supply exhaustive statistical information about the vocabulary of the texts they include, beginning with act, scene and line reference for every occurrence of every word, and extending to data about the incidence of verse and prose and about the vocabulary of every speaking part. The concordance is based on a modernized, American-spelling text which is to be published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. Wherever this text departs from the readings of the early text on which it is based, the concordance indicates the fact, but does not record the rejected reading. Homographs differently etymologized by the O.E.D. are separately listed and indicated with an asterisk. This concordance will clearly be an indispensable tool for future analysts of Shakespeare’s language.