By Gabriel Egan
We all know Shakespeare's writings purely from imperfectly-made early variations, from which editors fight to take away error. the recent Bibliography of the early 20th century, sophisticated with technological improvements within the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties, taught generations of editors the right way to make feel of the early variants of Shakespeare and use them to make glossy variations. This ebook is the 1st entire heritage of the guidelines that gave this move its highbrow authority, and of the demanding situations to that authority that emerged within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties. operating chronologically, Egan lines the fight to wring from the early variations proof of accurately what Shakespeare wrote. the tale of one other fight, among competing interpretations of the proof from early variants, is advised intimately and the implications for editorial perform are comprehensively surveyed, permitting readers to find simply what's at stake while students argue approximately tips on how to edit Shakespeare.
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Extra info for The Struggle for Shakespeare's Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice
Sample text
In support of this Pollard noted that Folio Much Ado About Nothing, essentially a reprint of Q (1600), departs from surviving exemplars of the quarto in having the stage direction ‘Enter Prince, Leonato, Claudio, and Iacke Wilson’ where Q has ‘Enter prince, Leonato, Claudio, Musicke’ (Shakespeare 1623, i6r ; 1600c, d1r ). Jack Wilson would appear to be the actor who played Balthasar, the provider of the music, and Pollard read this alteration as evidence that the exemplar of the quarto used as copy for the Folio was one that had formerly served as the company prompt-book: once the prompter knew who was to provide the music, he accordingly altered the stage direction in his quarto prompt-book.
In an original-spelling edition, an emended word would naturally have to be put into the spelling of the period, or better still into the spelling of the copy-text’s underlying manuscript if the editor has a sense of it (McKerrow 1939, 39). For following this practice, the editors of the Oxford Complete Works of 1986 (which was the fulfilment of the commission that McKerrow had been given in 1929) were later mocked (pp. 187–8 The rise of New Bibliography 37 below). The remainder of McKerrow’s Prolegomena was concerned with the precise rules that he intended to follow in his Oxford Shakespeare regarding such matters as alteration of punctuation and the recording of readings in editions other than the copy-text.
McKerrow 1939, 18) McKerrow was quite clear about what an obvious misprint had to be: ‘any form which, in the light of our knowledge of the language at the time when the text in question was written, was “impossible”, that is, would not have been, in its context, an intelligible word or phrase’ (McKerrow 1939, 21). But what about ‘those words and locutions which we must class as doubtful’ in the derivative edition? McKerrow insisted that there is no ‘infallible objective test of what is correct in the texts’ and editors simply have to use their judgement (McKerrow 1939, 34, 35).