The Struggle for Shakespeare's Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice

Abstract

for Shakespeare's Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice, by Gabriel Egan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. x + 319. Cloth $90.00 Reviewer: STEVEN URKOWITZ In for Shakespeare's Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice, Gabriel Egan has carved out a valuable track through tangled forest of Shakespearean textual criticism. work is valuable, clear, sensible, and illuminating. Egan stays his announced purpose, to show the development of a series of arguments about how best to present plays of Shakespeare to modern (9). Given complex materials, processes, and practitioners of editorial arts and sciences over last dozen decades, this is no easy task. Nevertheless he manages to follow intertwined narratives of different specialties and interests, with special attention to new breakthroughs, consolidations of positions, corroborations, disruptions, and reversals (11). And he maintains steadfast attention to often forgotten simple question of how far editors should not only combine but also depart from surviving textual witnesses ... in seeking to recover for modern readers words coming from Shakespeare's mind that his contemporaries heard and saw. Chapter 1 introduces self-confident and imaginative New Bibliographers, W. W. Greg, A. W. Pollard, and R. B. McKerrow. Chapter 2 covers movement from Greg's Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (1942) to rise of American New Bibliographers led by Fredson Bowers and his student Charlton Hinman. Egan is particularly skillful in explaining different players' argumentative styles, goals, and gambits, and he shows how elaborate edifice of compositorial analysis built by Bowers, Hinman, and their followers was vulnerable to collapse when E. A. J. Honigmann showed likelihood of minor textual variations being introduced by authors rather than scribes or compositors. Chapter 3, The New Bibliography 1969-1979 brings in D. E McKenzie's Printers of Mind (1969) and his challenge to inductive arguments of New Bibliographers, supported by documents reporting work of actual compositors in real printing houses. These records called into question much of work done on compositor analysis in previous decades. And as a result, other scholars began to recognize that bibliography's obsessive and recondite empiricism gives it a spuriously scientific air (86). Struggle becomes fascinating and many-sided, different combatants striking, ducking away, feinting slightly misrepresented evidentiary claims, and blithely ignoring evidence sharply contradictory to their beliefs. By end of 1970s, new work drawn from theatrical and literary analysis rather than printing trades would emerge that seemed to change direction of entire editorial enterprise. murkiest part of narrative Egan has to tell appears as an unnumbered Intermezzo chapter titled the rise and fall of theory of memorial reconstruction. Though title and lead-in to this chapter both imply that memorial reconstruction is down and nearly out, this part of struggle for Shakespeare's text still leaves considerable confusion abounding. As much else, W. W. Greg generated most interest in theory of memorial reconstruction and had greatest influence in spreading its acceptance. While giving Greg his proper due, Egan passes over other critics important in extending theory's application to other plays in early decades of twentieth century. And he misses important counterarguments (usually by American scholars) that rejected and refuted instances of claimed memorial reconstructions. At this point I must report that I have been one of antagonists in this struggle. (Egan credits strength of several of my articles where I argue against memorial reconstruction as explanation of major differences between early printed texts of plays like Hamlet, Lear, and Richard III, but most commentators and editors reject my similar efforts about multiple texts of 2 and 3 Henry VI Ah, welladay. …

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