"Every time an editor emends a text he is, to an extent, reconstructing its author in his own image" (124).
The foundation of modern editorial practice is in creating emendations that are "transparent" and "anonymous" in that they manage to correct the sense or the meter of a line without adding anything to the dramatic context (127).
"The principle of anonymity is a false principle. In the first place, anonymity must always yield to plausibility; in the second, when probabilities are equal, anonymity must yield to individuality" (128).
Much as eighteenth century editors emended Shakespeare's plays to conform to their own eighteenth century aesthetics, modern editors tend to emend Shakespeare in a way that anyone could have written the words. What an editor should attempt to do is create an emendation in keeping with the words Shakespeare wrote (128). Of course, creating an emendation that seems "Shakespearean" requires creating that emendation given the author's sense of their audience's interpretation of what is Shakespearean; i.e. exactly what the eighteenth century editors did.
W.W. Greg, Alice Walker, and Charlton Hinman all advanced studies of printshop, specifically compositorial practice that advocate for a greater degree of emendation to texts than most modern editors, who tend to follow the tradition of McKerrow and Bowers, would be comfortable making (131).
"When the fact which confronts you is an absence, you can offer no mechanical explanation for that absence until you have conjecturally filled it, and that conjecture is a work of pure imagination" (132).
"In general the more words that have been omitted the less confidence we can have in replacing them" (134).
Analytical bibliography is most useful when providing the tools to decide between two reasonable alternatives in a text, but it is less useful at the point where readers and actors most need assistance: where there are literal gaps in the text (142).
Summary
Taylor agrees with Greg in finding that the practice of textual emendation is an "art" rather than a science (141). He argues that gaps in the text should be filled with our best approximation of what Shakespeare would have filled those gaps with, and as his title implies, this is based purely on our conception of who Shakespeare is. By filling in the gaps left in the printed texts, editors invent Shakespeare for their readers.
Citation
Taylor, Gary. "Inventing Shakespeare" Shakespeare: The Critical Context. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen Ed. New York: Garland Publishing. 1999. p. 124 - 142. Print. Dual pagination is given for all works in this volume, but since the table of contents follows the pagination running at the bottom center of each page, this is the pagination that I have followed in my
Showing posts with label Ronald McKerrow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ronald McKerrow. Show all posts
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Notes on "Shakespeare and the New Bibliography" - Chapter 1
The working relationship between Pollard, Greg, and McKerrow was a cordial one, which stands in contrast to the work of Shakespeare's 18th and 19th century editors (1). Their cooperative approach to bibliographic scholarship may have been one of the reasons this group did make so many advances in their field; it is perhaps also the reason why the narrative of good and bad quartos and piracy persisted in their ranks.
K. Deighton's The Old Dramatists: Conjectural Readings (1896) is "one of the better examples of that kind of textual criticism which proposes emendation without relation to the origin of the text or inquiry into the cause of corruption" (4). I feel as if I should look this up; one of the arguments that I seem to be evolving is that a performance is, in some ways at least, an island, and to use Dessen's phrase, directors will often find themselves "re-scripting Shakespeare" for modern performance anyway. Perhaps editing for modern production has more in common with the old bibliography than with the New.
When Sidney Lee accused early modern printers of piracy in his 1898 Life of Shakespeare, Greg replied that 'it should be frankly confessed that we know very little about the old copyright regulations' (5).
The strength of McKerrow and Greg's work rested in their recognition of "what they did not know and what they needed to know" to develop bibliographic analysis into more than just a guessing game (6). Maybe I've been too hard on them; when the previous generation is guessing, and you've gone to the trouble of discovering some facts, perhaps that gives you the right to create whatever narrative you want. No, that's not true; not when that narrative means ignoring some very important facts.
The origin of the good quarto/bad quarto theory, and Pollard's melodrama of piracy, originated with Halliwell-Phillipps' defense of Heminge and Condell. Throughout the 19th century, scholar's had regarded their claims of other texts being maimed and deformed as being merely an advertisement for the new works in the Folio (11 - 12).
Summary
Whereas earlier editors of Shakespeare confined themselves to readings of the text of the plays, Pollard, Greg, McKerrow, and the rest of the New Bibliographers undertook to understand the materials and conditions under which Shakespeare's plays were printed. In doing so they were able to determine that the Pavier quartos were, despite their title impressions, all printed at roughly the same time, and to determine the lineage of several other printed texts of the period. While their work did involve a good deal of guess work, their guess work was at least grounded in historical and technical fact to the greatest extent that they were able.
Citation
Wilson, F.P. Shakespeare and the New Bibliography. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1970. Print.
K. Deighton's The Old Dramatists: Conjectural Readings (1896) is "one of the better examples of that kind of textual criticism which proposes emendation without relation to the origin of the text or inquiry into the cause of corruption" (4). I feel as if I should look this up; one of the arguments that I seem to be evolving is that a performance is, in some ways at least, an island, and to use Dessen's phrase, directors will often find themselves "re-scripting Shakespeare" for modern performance anyway. Perhaps editing for modern production has more in common with the old bibliography than with the New.
When Sidney Lee accused early modern printers of piracy in his 1898 Life of Shakespeare, Greg replied that 'it should be frankly confessed that we know very little about the old copyright regulations' (5).
The strength of McKerrow and Greg's work rested in their recognition of "what they did not know and what they needed to know" to develop bibliographic analysis into more than just a guessing game (6). Maybe I've been too hard on them; when the previous generation is guessing, and you've gone to the trouble of discovering some facts, perhaps that gives you the right to create whatever narrative you want. No, that's not true; not when that narrative means ignoring some very important facts.
The origin of the good quarto/bad quarto theory, and Pollard's melodrama of piracy, originated with Halliwell-Phillipps' defense of Heminge and Condell. Throughout the 19th century, scholar's had regarded their claims of other texts being maimed and deformed as being merely an advertisement for the new works in the Folio (11 - 12).
Summary
Whereas earlier editors of Shakespeare confined themselves to readings of the text of the plays, Pollard, Greg, McKerrow, and the rest of the New Bibliographers undertook to understand the materials and conditions under which Shakespeare's plays were printed. In doing so they were able to determine that the Pavier quartos were, despite their title impressions, all printed at roughly the same time, and to determine the lineage of several other printed texts of the period. While their work did involve a good deal of guess work, their guess work was at least grounded in historical and technical fact to the greatest extent that they were able.
Citation
Wilson, F.P. Shakespeare and the New Bibliography. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1970. Print.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Notes on "The Treatment of Shakespeare's Text by His Earlier Editors"
While the editions of McKerrow's contemporaries may be more textually accurate than those produced by Shakespeare's 18th century editors, many of those who read Shakespeare purely for pleasure do not need an edition filled with extensive scholarly scaffolding; this might actually hinder their enjoyment of his work. Shakespearean scholars therefore owe a debt to the "less careful, I might almost say less respectful, treatment accorded to him by [Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Johnson, and the other eighteenth century editors]" (1-2, quotation on 2).
The alterations in the 1632, 1663, and 1685 folios tend to be of the sort one would expect to see in reprints of the works of a contemporary or recent author: they correct errors and modernize spelling and typographical practice. Where Rowe significantly diverges is that he regularly substitutes modern forms of words: i.e. 'whilst' for 'whiles,' 'been' for 'bin,' 'an' for 'and' in the sense of 'if,' 'he' for 'a,' &c (3).
Rowe's edition is largely a reprint of F4, but it is a careful and intelligent one for its date and purpose. Rowe was conservative, and seldom made changes to the text where the text made sense, excepting the case of Hamlet, where he collated with a later (probably post-1676) quarto copy (7 - 8).
More important than Rowe's textual work was his insertion and regularization of lists of dramatis personae, the correction of stage directions (especially entrances and exits), the addition of act and scene divisions, and the addition of scene locations. These emendations to the text of Shakeseare's works make them more convenient for a reader of the plays (9).
Rowe likewise normalized character names, such as Aegeon in Comedy of Errors. It is noteworthy that McKerrow perceives the author as thinking in terms of dramatic function when he writes speech prefixes for the character; while that may be telling information about the playwright or for an actor, it is likely to confuse the casual reader (9).
Rowe seems to have carefully made sure that entrances and exits for characters were correctly indicated, but otherwise did not make extensive additions to them, although he sometimes used different wording (10).
In F1, six of the plays are printed without any kind of act or scene division, Hamlet is divided up to the second act, but no further divisions are given, eleven plays are divided solely into acts, and the remaining eighteen into both acts and scenes (11).
While it may be true that Shakespeare provides the scene locations in dialog when it is necessary for an audience to know, or that seeing the characters on stage will otherwise be sufficient for an audience to understand the action on stage, readers of the plays do not have the latter frame of reference, and thus are incapable of seeing the action in their minds eye. Rowe's addition of scene locations thus makes Shakespeare's plays "more generally readable" (12).
On 2 August 1721 Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, sent a letter to Pope claiming that "the hardest part of Chaucer is more intelligible to me than some of those scenes [of Shakespeare]...there are allusions in him to an hundred things, of which I knew nothing and can guess nothing. And yet without some competent knowledge of those matters there is no understanding him. I protest Aeschylus does not want a comment to me more than he does." It is noteworthy that Atterbury was a learned and well read man (13).
When creating his edition, Pope relied on F1, F2, and quartos published before 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death; he seemingly regarded later quartos to be without authority. He kept Rowe's dramatis personae lists, and expanded act and scene editions to follow French-scene customs that create a new scene every time a major character enters or leaves the stage (14 - 15).
Despite Rowe's claim to have compared his copy text with several editions, he appears to have done very little of this, and Pope seems to be the first Shakespearean editor to attempt to gather all authoritative texts to create the best text possible for his own edition (17).
"New readings of authority can never be obtained by comparing texts in the same line of descent, where the earliest must obviously be the most authoritative, but only by comparing texts in different lines of descent." This is because later editions of a print text tend to be compared to earlier printed versions and not to authorial draft copy (18).
"It seems to be customary among editors of English classics to use as the basis of their own edition that particular earlier one which in their preface they most vehemently condemn; and Theobald follows the custom by using Pope's" (22).
Edward Capell, by leaving his extensive collection of original quarto copies to Trinity College, facilitated the creation of the Cambridge editors in 1863-1866 (27).
Conclusion
Each of the eighteenth century editors of Shakespeare made contributions to the readability of Shakespeare's text for their audiences, even if they did not arrive at readings that New Bibliographers would call more authorial. McKerrow praises Capel, especially, for collecting a great compendium of facts, but notes that he didn't seem to know what to do with it (27). In a way, McKerrow is guilty of the same offense: he has compiled an index of noteworthy contributions to the development of Shakespearean readership and scholarship of Shakespeare's early editors, but cannot help but see them in light of the New Bibliography. By viewing the eighteenth century editors in terms of their failure to live up to the standards of the New Bibliography, McKerrow cannot see how each of these editors addressed specific needs within their market place, and thus unwittingly links himself with the failings he has accused these editors of.
Citation
McKerrow, Ronald B. "The Treatment of Shakespeare's Text By His Earlier Editors." Proceedings of the British Academy Annual Shakespeare Lecture. Red 26 April 1933.
The alterations in the 1632, 1663, and 1685 folios tend to be of the sort one would expect to see in reprints of the works of a contemporary or recent author: they correct errors and modernize spelling and typographical practice. Where Rowe significantly diverges is that he regularly substitutes modern forms of words: i.e. 'whilst' for 'whiles,' 'been' for 'bin,' 'an' for 'and' in the sense of 'if,' 'he' for 'a,' &c (3).
Rowe's edition is largely a reprint of F4, but it is a careful and intelligent one for its date and purpose. Rowe was conservative, and seldom made changes to the text where the text made sense, excepting the case of Hamlet, where he collated with a later (probably post-1676) quarto copy (7 - 8).
More important than Rowe's textual work was his insertion and regularization of lists of dramatis personae, the correction of stage directions (especially entrances and exits), the addition of act and scene divisions, and the addition of scene locations. These emendations to the text of Shakeseare's works make them more convenient for a reader of the plays (9).
Rowe likewise normalized character names, such as Aegeon in Comedy of Errors. It is noteworthy that McKerrow perceives the author as thinking in terms of dramatic function when he writes speech prefixes for the character; while that may be telling information about the playwright or for an actor, it is likely to confuse the casual reader (9).
Rowe seems to have carefully made sure that entrances and exits for characters were correctly indicated, but otherwise did not make extensive additions to them, although he sometimes used different wording (10).
In F1, six of the plays are printed without any kind of act or scene division, Hamlet is divided up to the second act, but no further divisions are given, eleven plays are divided solely into acts, and the remaining eighteen into both acts and scenes (11).
While it may be true that Shakespeare provides the scene locations in dialog when it is necessary for an audience to know, or that seeing the characters on stage will otherwise be sufficient for an audience to understand the action on stage, readers of the plays do not have the latter frame of reference, and thus are incapable of seeing the action in their minds eye. Rowe's addition of scene locations thus makes Shakespeare's plays "more generally readable" (12).
On 2 August 1721 Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, sent a letter to Pope claiming that "the hardest part of Chaucer is more intelligible to me than some of those scenes [of Shakespeare]...there are allusions in him to an hundred things, of which I knew nothing and can guess nothing. And yet without some competent knowledge of those matters there is no understanding him. I protest Aeschylus does not want a comment to me more than he does." It is noteworthy that Atterbury was a learned and well read man (13).
When creating his edition, Pope relied on F1, F2, and quartos published before 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death; he seemingly regarded later quartos to be without authority. He kept Rowe's dramatis personae lists, and expanded act and scene editions to follow French-scene customs that create a new scene every time a major character enters or leaves the stage (14 - 15).
Despite Rowe's claim to have compared his copy text with several editions, he appears to have done very little of this, and Pope seems to be the first Shakespearean editor to attempt to gather all authoritative texts to create the best text possible for his own edition (17).
"New readings of authority can never be obtained by comparing texts in the same line of descent, where the earliest must obviously be the most authoritative, but only by comparing texts in different lines of descent." This is because later editions of a print text tend to be compared to earlier printed versions and not to authorial draft copy (18).
"It seems to be customary among editors of English classics to use as the basis of their own edition that particular earlier one which in their preface they most vehemently condemn; and Theobald follows the custom by using Pope's" (22).
Edward Capell, by leaving his extensive collection of original quarto copies to Trinity College, facilitated the creation of the Cambridge editors in 1863-1866 (27).
Conclusion
Each of the eighteenth century editors of Shakespeare made contributions to the readability of Shakespeare's text for their audiences, even if they did not arrive at readings that New Bibliographers would call more authorial. McKerrow praises Capel, especially, for collecting a great compendium of facts, but notes that he didn't seem to know what to do with it (27). In a way, McKerrow is guilty of the same offense: he has compiled an index of noteworthy contributions to the development of Shakespearean readership and scholarship of Shakespeare's early editors, but cannot help but see them in light of the New Bibliography. By viewing the eighteenth century editors in terms of their failure to live up to the standards of the New Bibliography, McKerrow cannot see how each of these editors addressed specific needs within their market place, and thus unwittingly links himself with the failings he has accused these editors of.
Citation
McKerrow, Ronald B. "The Treatment of Shakespeare's Text By His Earlier Editors." Proceedings of the British Academy Annual Shakespeare Lecture. Red 26 April 1933.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Notes on the Modern History of Editing
As I continue to work on the editing aspects of this Merry Devil project, and the new critical edition that I hope to create from this work, I continue my research into the history and practice of modern critical editing. The Bibliographic Society of the University of Virginia is a terrific resource for this research, as they have published most issues of Studies in Bibliography online. Here, I examine "W. Bang Kaup, W.W. Greg, R.B. McKerrow and the Edition of Dramatic Works (1902 - 1914)." My notes use the pagination reflecting the print edition given in the web site.
Willy Bang Kaup was an early 1900s editor of early modern texts. He believed in the creation of facsimile editions that preserved mistakes, typographic errors, and the like, but stopped short of full on photo-facsimiles. While he realized that photo-facsimiles would more accurately reveal broken characters and the like, his goal was to get as close as possible to a photo-facsimile using type, in effect creating a diplomatic edition of the texts he edited (213 - 214).
Greg disagreed with Bang's practices, which he deemed "ultra-conservative," and dubbed his work as being more akin to preparing the materials for an edition rather than creating a complete edition in and of itself. Greg was himself more interested in discovering the middle ground between mindlessly reproducing a work including all of its obvious errors and the willful disregard of authorial intent that led to what he described as uncritically mangled texts (215). I find myself walking this very wire with Merry Devil. The practical necessity of creating a textual conclusion to the play that will bring about a resolution to the story is directly at odds with the extant text, which concludes with a punch line to a joke that has been lost from the text of the play that comes down to us. When preparing my edition of Merry Devil, do I use this "performance edition" based on my critical text, re-integrate some of the discoveries made during the performance into the critical text, or present a critical text and pretend that I never created a separate performance edition? How badly does my performance edition mangle the text? Can one mangle a text that displays evidence of heavy cutting and multiple authors at work (i.e. is already mangled)?
Greg's article on Bang's Materialen series works outlines the possibility of a series of texts being edited according to a general plan developed by a single scholar, with other scholars providing the individual details of the work. This passage comes two years before the Malone Society began printing its own editions (215).
McKerrow, in recognizing that stop press correction was commonly employed in hand-press print shops, does not reprint a single copy of an extant text. No two sheets of existing editions may be the same, and because of the way these sheets were later bound into books, he sees the printing form rather than the printed sheet as the basic unit of expressing authorial intent. After choosing a copy text to base his work in The Devils Charter on, McKerrow gives notes justifying his selection of which sheet to use as a copy text, and to provide a list of variants between the copies (216). A letter from McKerrow to Bang dated 4-August-2010, he speaks of the beginnings of a scheme for printing subsequent editions of works (217).
Part of Greg's inspiration for the Malone Society was the nationalistic idea that Englishmen ought to be the ones who recovered their own literary past. While he was not opposed to "foreigners" (in this case, Bang) conducting the work, the responsibility for doing it lay with the English. While he was initially opposed to facsimile reprints, by 1905 he had been converted by Bang's process (219).
To me, of course, the most interesting question is how much editing is too much. We know Greg's thoughts on Merry Devil, and the rather jumbled text we have left would not be elucidated in any meaningful way by a diplomatic edition of any of the extant quartos. Even a critical edition of the play that does not take certain liberties with the text will result in a play that is still unperformable, and maybe that's why Bad Quarto's will be the first production of Merry Devil in this century (and possibly much longer than that).
On the one hand, I feel the urge to be conservative in my editing, and leave the creation of the final production script to the hands of the director. That's part of what a good director does, after all, and my friends with the Bakerloo Theatre Project have done some excellent work adapting and creatively editing much more complete works in ways that the original playwrights probably never imagined. On the other hand, it is equally possible that a good director might look at the script as is, and promptly dismiss it as lacking a resolution, and move on to a play that requires less effort on their part.
I don't think I'm going to resolve any questions about what the final form of the work will look like here, but the historical context of the founding of the Malone Society; both it's nationalistic aims and the international aspirations of its founding members, helps extend the conversation I need to have with this text by several centuries.
Willy Bang Kaup was an early 1900s editor of early modern texts. He believed in the creation of facsimile editions that preserved mistakes, typographic errors, and the like, but stopped short of full on photo-facsimiles. While he realized that photo-facsimiles would more accurately reveal broken characters and the like, his goal was to get as close as possible to a photo-facsimile using type, in effect creating a diplomatic edition of the texts he edited (213 - 214).
Greg disagreed with Bang's practices, which he deemed "ultra-conservative," and dubbed his work as being more akin to preparing the materials for an edition rather than creating a complete edition in and of itself. Greg was himself more interested in discovering the middle ground between mindlessly reproducing a work including all of its obvious errors and the willful disregard of authorial intent that led to what he described as uncritically mangled texts (215). I find myself walking this very wire with Merry Devil. The practical necessity of creating a textual conclusion to the play that will bring about a resolution to the story is directly at odds with the extant text, which concludes with a punch line to a joke that has been lost from the text of the play that comes down to us. When preparing my edition of Merry Devil, do I use this "performance edition" based on my critical text, re-integrate some of the discoveries made during the performance into the critical text, or present a critical text and pretend that I never created a separate performance edition? How badly does my performance edition mangle the text? Can one mangle a text that displays evidence of heavy cutting and multiple authors at work (i.e. is already mangled)?
Greg's article on Bang's Materialen series works outlines the possibility of a series of texts being edited according to a general plan developed by a single scholar, with other scholars providing the individual details of the work. This passage comes two years before the Malone Society began printing its own editions (215).
McKerrow, in recognizing that stop press correction was commonly employed in hand-press print shops, does not reprint a single copy of an extant text. No two sheets of existing editions may be the same, and because of the way these sheets were later bound into books, he sees the printing form rather than the printed sheet as the basic unit of expressing authorial intent. After choosing a copy text to base his work in The Devils Charter on, McKerrow gives notes justifying his selection of which sheet to use as a copy text, and to provide a list of variants between the copies (216). A letter from McKerrow to Bang dated 4-August-2010, he speaks of the beginnings of a scheme for printing subsequent editions of works (217).
Part of Greg's inspiration for the Malone Society was the nationalistic idea that Englishmen ought to be the ones who recovered their own literary past. While he was not opposed to "foreigners" (in this case, Bang) conducting the work, the responsibility for doing it lay with the English. While he was initially opposed to facsimile reprints, by 1905 he had been converted by Bang's process (219).
To me, of course, the most interesting question is how much editing is too much. We know Greg's thoughts on Merry Devil, and the rather jumbled text we have left would not be elucidated in any meaningful way by a diplomatic edition of any of the extant quartos. Even a critical edition of the play that does not take certain liberties with the text will result in a play that is still unperformable, and maybe that's why Bad Quarto's will be the first production of Merry Devil in this century (and possibly much longer than that).
On the one hand, I feel the urge to be conservative in my editing, and leave the creation of the final production script to the hands of the director. That's part of what a good director does, after all, and my friends with the Bakerloo Theatre Project have done some excellent work adapting and creatively editing much more complete works in ways that the original playwrights probably never imagined. On the other hand, it is equally possible that a good director might look at the script as is, and promptly dismiss it as lacking a resolution, and move on to a play that requires less effort on their part.
I don't think I'm going to resolve any questions about what the final form of the work will look like here, but the historical context of the founding of the Malone Society; both it's nationalistic aims and the international aspirations of its founding members, helps extend the conversation I need to have with this text by several centuries.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
An Interesting Device
Take a look at the Merry Devil title page again...
Note well the pictures. These are called printers devices, and were (surprise, surprise!) commonly used by London printers to help identify who had printed the material. Then, as now, a picture said a thousand words, but unlike now, the title page would commonly serve as a poster advertisement for the book (or so Dr. Menzer tells me). These days we put eye catching images on our posters to get people to read the text of whatever it is we're advertising, and I'm taking an imaginative leap that these devices might have served a similar purpose.
The great 20th century bibliographer Ronald McKerrow collected these device into his Printers and Publishers Devices in England & Scotland: 1485 - 1640, in which he describes and produces facsimiles of over 400 hundred devices. Neither of the devices on the Merry Devil title page is found within Printers and Publishers devices, but the lower of these two is close. That is indexed as device number 379 and has the following description: "(33 x 30 mm.) A mask with rings: the letters A. H. below. This is perhaps a cast ornament with the letters inserted." (144). In both cases it appears on material printed by A. Hart in Edinburgh. This is the device as McKerrow reproduces it:
A very striking similarity, eh? If it's not the same device, or at least produced from the same casting, that's one hell of a coincidence. If A. Hart was ever the printer for The Merry Devil, I would feel like this was less of a mystery.
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