Notes on "Shakespeare and the New Bibliography" - Chapter 6

An editor "must give reasons which shall cohere with all the bibliographical evidence both for the choice of the text upon which he founds his edition, where a choice is offered him, and for any textual changes which he admits into his text" (96). This is true, but if the editor stops at considering bibliographical evidence, they are going to do shallow work.

Greg believed that bibliographical scholars are editors should be two separate persons, the former investigating the facts of textual transmission, and the latter concerning themselves with creating critical editions based on those facts (97). So.... why didn't they stick to this plan? Or did the critical editors of the New Bibliography swallow the bibliographic narrative wholesale? Or did the bibliographers over-reach?

Once a given text is established as having more authority (i.e. being closer to the writer's manuscript) than another, that text should be chosen as the copy-text, and only emended or otherwise altered after careful consideration of Bibliographic evidence (102).

c.f. Percy Simpson's Shakespearean Punctuation (1911).

Elizabethan punctuation was more attentive to the pauses in spoken English than, as modern punctuation is, grammatical constructions in written English (107).

Hand D of Sir Thomas More, which is presumed to be Shakespeare, is only lightly punctuated, and given Moxon's direction that a corrector be 'very sagacious in Pointing' it is impossible to know how much the punctuation of a printed play book is the authors and how much the compositor's (108-109). Of course, an annotating reader might have also marked a text for punctuation before it was passed to a compositor (c.f. Massai).

While printshops tended to normalize spellings in-house, it is likely that a less-experienced compositor would have set his print direct from copy and without attempting to normalize, which creates a greater variation of spelling within a text (as in Q2 Hamlet) (109 - 111).

'While literary judgments are notoriously as shifting as the sand, bibliography provides a foundation of fact -- the rock of fact.' -- John Dover Wilson (qtd on 112).

Variations in the spelling of a characters name may be a sign of multiple compositors rather than authorial revision half-completed or multiple authors (113). You see that a lot in Merry Devil, I wonder what Wilson would say to the phenomenon of characters having the wrong names in the text (as opposed to speech prefix). I feel as if that is less likely to be a compositor error than an authorial one.

The best test for an emendation is that it is consistent with what is known or surmised of the textual history, agrees with the style of the author at the time of the writing, is the only probable reading that is appropriate to the context, and can explain the reason for the corruption (115).

Where it is supposed that a corruption in a printed text has arisen from a misreading of copy, it must be demonstrated that the manuscript words proposed could be mistaken for those printed, and the spelling falls within the range of variation witnessed in good quartos" (119-120). While some quartos may be better than others, I don't think any of them are necessarily bad.

Summary


New Bibliography has "profoundly changed editorial principle and practice. But no bibliographer would think for a moment of claiming that bibliography by itself is enough. To no aspect of Elizabethan literature, language, or life can an editor afford to be indifferent, and the ideal editor is at once bibliographer and critic, historian and antiquary, paleographer, philologist, philosopher, and theologian" (121). Where the New Bibliographers have failed is that, nowhere in that list appears anything approaching being a theatrical practitioner. Shakespeare was a man of the theatre, and while most writers for the stage were not, their customers were, and every producer must cater to the wants of their consumers.

New Bibliographers revolutionized the practice of editing, but for all their achievements, they neglected to look deeply enough into the one practice that was the sine qua non of Elizabethan playwrighting: the professional playhouses of early modern London. The narratives the New Bibliographers created neglect to account for the business of printing and playing, and the one fact that everyone who works in the entertainment industry knows: not all profits are necessarily immediate or monetary in nature.

Citation
Wilson, F.P. Shakespeare and the New Bibliography. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1970. Print.

Notes on Shakespeare's Punctuation

It's time for another British Academy Shakespeare lecture! This time I'll be compiling notes from Peter Alexander's 25 April 1945 Annual Shakespeare Lecture entitled "Shakespeare's Punctuation." Punctuation in Merry Devil seemed a bit willy-nilly, although every now and again a pattern seemed to emerge, it was almost as quickly contradicted by some other evidence. The result of multiple authors or compositors, perhaps? I can't say, but my actors were able to clarify a reading of the text with the insertion of a simple comma, so this is definitely worth a read for my continuing adventures with this project.

18th century editors revised both Shakespeare and Milton, and routinely found veils of imperfection to which they could ascribe faults in the genius which they alone could see through. Bentley blamed Milton's scribe, and Pope similarly blamed the actors of Shakespeare's stage, and when men were so concerned with choosing to add or remove words wholesale, they could be little concerned with something so trivial as punctuation, thus the field has remained relatively unexplored (3 - 4). Although, to this last point, it is necessary to recall that Alexander is delivering this lecture in 1945. Still, the sentiment gives me pause. Is my treatment of the ending page of Merry Devil any better than Pope's treatment of Shakespeare's text? Hmm...

Since modern scholars will tend to agree that any edition of a text must proceed from a reading of the text itself, and not from the editors attempt to see through the veil of the text to the genius of the author, the same must be true of punctuation (5 - 7).

"Knowledge of Documents should precede final Judgment upon Readings" (7 - 8), Alexander here quotes Hort and Westcott's introduction to The New Testament in the Original Greek, citing page 20, but providing no other information about the book.

"Knowledge of any document as a whole has to be built up from judgments on individual passages" (8).

Alexander cites Hort and Westcott a second time in stating that "all trustworthy restoration of corrupted texts is founded on the study of their history," and that this applies to all texts of all fields of inquiry (8).

Q2 Hamlet and Coriolanus (found only in F) are both thought to derive from authorial manuscripts, and both texts are replete with commas and colons, featuring full stops only rarely. The punctuation of these texts must be thought of in the context of the authorial manuscript upon which they were based (16 - 17). A very fair point; if the print shop wasn't in the habit of changing the words of plays, why would they change the punctuation? I find myself questioning my previous assertion that Merry Devil is punctuated without much reason, although it still seems like it is fairly irregular.

c.f the punctuation scheme outlines by Alfred E. Thiselton.

Dover Wilson, in setting Hamlet from the Q2 rather than the Folio, has done so inconsistently, and while Q2's punctuation, especially in the "what a piece of work is man" speech can provide insight into the text, than it ought to be able to provide insight into the whole text and not just some of the parts that Dover Wilson has chosen to apply this punctuation schema to in his own edition (22).

Further reason to take punctuation from the Q2 Hamlet as being authorial can be found in its similarity to the manuscript of Sir Thomas Moore, which of course, is thought to be the only manuscript in Shakespeare's hand (23).

Analysis

Tom Berger's exhortation to not apply post-Enlightenment thinking to this problem is ringing in my ears again, and while Shakespeare may have used commas internally to punctuate lines for emphasis (23), it would be a mistake to read Shakespeare's use of punctuation as necessarily consistent with our own.