And speaking of the Folio, Massai's 5th chapter treats on "The making of the First Folio (1623)," which Dr. Menzer convincingly argues in Textual Culture was the first modern English book. I like the way Massai's arguments are grounded in data, and her narrative of Pavier's quartos is quite convincing.
Heminge and Condell's preface that the Folio is set from the "true and original copies" of Shakespeare's plays has been a source of contention, as several of the plays are demonstrably set from the quarto copies they would seem to denigrate. This distinction was one of the principles behind Pollard's labeling of quartos as variously good and bad; this preserved the idea that Heminge and Condell were faithful executors of Shakespeare's artistic legacy. Yet it is worth considering that "original," in the early modern sense, did not necessarily mean "rough draft penned by the writer." (136 - 137).
Previous generations of editors have sought to see through "the veil of print" to Shakespeare's hand, and modern editors may be pursuing a similarly elusive phantom in their attempts to link the Folio text to the allowed book of the King's Men's repertory. Writers who saw their works go into print usually tried to separate them from the playhouse performance scripts, and the size and format of the Folio indicates it is designed for a more upscale market than quarto play books. In terms of simple economics, it is unlikely that either the playhouse or the print house would have been able to provide an individual to collate two texts that were already similar in search of minute variations (137 - 139). Despite Wells' assertion that Heminge and Condell attempted to represent the plays as performed, there is little evidence to support that.
Changes to texts for the Folio where the majority of changes affect stage directions also include changes to dialogue that are outside the prevue of the typical early modern annotator. It is more likely that variants in the Folio derive from emendations added by annotating readers than from theatrical annotations or sporadic consultation with performance texts (140).
Treating on the Folio text of Romeo and Juliet, Massai argues that the emendations made for the Folio would not require any specific familiarity with either a performance of the play or the text of the play governing performance; they supply no information that is not given in the immediate context, and are not beyond the ability of an "alert reader" to note (141).
While Folio Romeo and Juliet does remove some confusing or inaccurate stage directions, it sometimes does so in such a way that creates other points of confusion in the text, making consultation with a performance script to be unlikely (142).
Certain changes in speech prefixes from F Romeo and Juliet and Q3 that are not necessary for sense, and which are sometimes incorrect, indicate that neither a playhouse agent nor a print house agent was responsible for the emendation (142 - 143).
"Like recent scholars, including Reid, I believe that the annotator cannot have been a printing house agent intent on reproducing his copy as closely as possible. However, unlike the majority of scholars since Reid, I find no evidence in the Folio text of Romeo and Juliet to support the theory according to which the annotator sporadically consulted a theatrical manuscript or relied on personal memories of the play as staged (144).
Certain annotations in the Folio text of Love's Labour's Lost clarify confusing words and passages, but are unlikely to be authorial in nature, nor are they likely to have arisen from print house practice or consultation with theatrical text. Both Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's only partially succeed at correcting speech prefixes, and at providing "viable, if not satisfactory" alternative readings to obscure words and phrases. As both plays belonged to the same stationer, John Smethwick, these changes possible originated with him (149).
Bibliographic scholars tend to assume that the collection of individuals who prepared Shakespeare's texts for print in the Folio (known as the "Folio Editors") were of a single mind and objective. While the presentational uniformity of the Folio may speak volumes to the control that William and Isaac Jaggard exerted over the syndicate, the range of variants in Folio texts set from printed copy speaks more to the differences than the similarities in preparations for print (150 - 151).
"The Folio variants in plays set from printed copy show that their preparation for the press was not informed by a uniform set of principles or general rationale" (151).
"Generally speaking, variants in the speech prefixes used in the Folio text of Much Ado About Nothing suggest inaccurate recollection of the play as staged and a fussy literary sensitivity on the annotator's part" (157).
"Overall, the Folio variants in Much Ado About Nothing are more likely to have originated from the annotator's patchy recollection of the play in performance then from the annotator's sporadic consultation of a theatrical manuscript" (157).
One oath "O Iesu" is systematically removed from the Folio text of 1 Henry IV, but is allowed to stand in Romeo and Juliet. Again, this clearly demonstrates that a different emending rationale was at play in the different texts (158).
The New Bibliographic concept of "good" and "bad" quartos derives in significant part from Thomas Heywood's address to the reader in The Rape of Lucrece, and the prologue to the 1639 quarto of If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 1. Despite Heywood's claim that he never wanted to see his works in print, he had a long standing and successful relationship with the press. Early printed quartos of Heywood's plays show that unusual efforts were taken to guide their transmission into print (165 - 166). Heywood's claim about surreptitious copies of his plays making their way into print may have been a baseless marketing ploy.
Prefaces to printed works often included an apology that blamed the author's friends for insisting a work should be printed and shared, or that an unauthorized copy had mad its way to print already, and that the author only published as a corrective to a maimed edition. Some writers, however, notably committed their work to print because they believed print to be a more accurate and reliable method of conveying their texts than oral or manuscript means: notable among these instances are Gray's Inn preacher Roger Fenton and Thomas More more than a century earlier. The reliability of print transmission was dependent upon an author being able to rely on their printer's work, and for this task Fenton chose William Aspley, who also printed Much Ado About Nothing and 2 Henry IV (171 - 172).
William Burton's translation of Erasmus' Seven Dialogues contains a preface from "The Printer to the Reader," where the printer begs pardon for errors arising from an un-perfected copy text, and the unavailability of the author [translator]. This edition was, however, set from printed copy, and as the 'printer' cites the circumstances of publication and the whereabouts of the author, including his lack of involvement, it is likely that 'printer' should be taken to mean the stationer: John Smethwick (173 - 174).
Printers did not retain annotated copies for subsequent printings: these would be held by the stationers, who ultimately had the right to decide if and when to reprint the material, and which printer to hire (178 - 179).
"While consultation of theatrical manuscripts for plays which had not been altered in the theatre and were already available in print must have been costly and impractical, annotation of copy was a common and welcome practice (179).
Rather than attempting to print texts that were as close as possible to either the author's original draft or the theatrical text, publishers in early modern London valued progressive improvements to the works they printed, and relied on collaboration with annotating readers to improve the quality of their texts (179).
Summary
Just as the editors of the New Bibliography attempted to see through the "veil of print" to the hand of the author, modern editors have a tendency to over-value the theatrical text as a standard for early modern publication. Stationers in the period viewed their printed works as texts to be read, and to this end sought as often as possible the assistance of readers who could correct and improve the copy they would send to the printer. Authors who brought their works into print needed to be able to rely on stationers and printers to faithfully transmit their works into that medium, and as such printers would have valued the accuracy of their work because their professional reputations depended on it. While errors were inevitable, publishers and printers of the period took pains to avoid them, which could mean normalizing a theatrical text and making it into a more literary object than its earlier incarnations.
Showing posts with label Stanley Wells. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stanley Wells. Show all posts
Monday, December 20, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Notes on Rescripting Shakespeare - Chapter 9
Dessen has a chapter devoted to "Compressing Henry VI" and to the Taming of the Shrew, but those sound a little bit too specific in their focus to be of much interest to me at the moment, so I'm skipping over them to Chapter 9: The Editor as Rescripter.
"In the process of rescripting directors often take on the role of editors... conversely, an editor wrestling with a problematic passage or stage direction may consciously or inadvertently take on the role of a director and make choices according to a sense of how X could be, should be, or would have been staged" (209). That's particularly useful, as a central part of the argument of my developing thesis is that the role of the editor and director should be combined.
Editors need to make decisions to help clarify plays for a first time reader, but in so doing they run the risk of limiting the options available when using the text for performance (209).
cf Honigmann, E A J. Myriad-minded Shakespeare. 2nd Ed. London. 1998. esp p 187.
cf Cambridge UP's Shakespeare in Production series, esp Christine Dymkowski's 2000 edition of The Tempest and Trevor Griffiths 1996 edition of Midsummer.
As Folio Facsimiles and other "original texts" become increasingly available to theatre professionals, the role of the editor can more closely resemble "unscripting," the process of adapting a play text to more closely resemble a text designed for readers of books than for producers of plays (209 - 210).
An individual theatrical choice will not undo three centuries of theatrical tradition (211).
Signs of emendations of stage directions should not provoke the question of which choice is correct, but what is the function of the signal of the stage direction, and whom is it intended for (217).
cf Wells, Stanley. "The Editor and the Theatre: Editorial Treatment of Stage Directions." Re-editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader. Oxford. Oxford UP. 1984. p76, 68. This for Wells' justification to edit texts without resorting to editorial precedent.
cf Kidnie, Margaret Jane. "Text, Performance, and the Editors: Staging Shakespeare's Drama." Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol. 51. 2000. p 464. -- "the responsible editor of modernized editions will necessarily adopt an interventionalist approach to staging."
cf Thomson, Leslie. "Broken Brackets and 'Mended Texts: Stage Directions in the Oxford Shakespeare." Renaissance Drama. Vol. 19. 1988. 175-193.
"Once the editors assumptions about performance are encoded into the script, it becomes difficult to historicize this intervention for the reader as a matter of debate and contested interpretation" (468). (qtd. in Dessen 218).
Wells and Taylor, in their Oxford Complete Works, adopted a policy of not indicating where stage directions were editorial in nature where the action was indisputable, but the question has remained: indisputable to whom? Dessen cites the example of "they kiss" in Taming of the Shrew; by not indicating the editorial nature of the stage direction, they present an event that is not fixed in sequence by the author as being authorial (219). Yes. Agreed. This context helps clarify some questions for my presentation of the edition.
Where there is a disagreement between a clearly articulated stage direction in the Folio text and editorial tradition, as is the case with the entrance of Malvolio cross gartered, which occurs in the Folio two lines before most editors place his entrance, it is better to field test the options in a theatrical environment than it is to cut off possible directorial interpretation (221). Yes. Agreed. I want to produce an edition of Merry Devil that both enabled interpretation and provides potential solutions to problems. My edits have been conservative enough that I think I can pull it off.
Massed entrances at the tops of scenes in some of the plays have been attributed to the scribe Ralph Crane, and editors have commonly shifted these into individual entrances just before they first speak their lines. It is perhaps significant that Merry Wives is among the plays where this happens (Two Gentleman and Winters Tale being the others) (224). There are a couple of these in Merry Devil, and we had to pare back on one to allow Victoria and Rachel to change from Smug and Banks into Dorcas and Harry. Hmm....
Speaking about Titus Andronicus: "Given the range of options in the Quarto, the user of these modern editions should ask: is making such a choice - on the page, without the benefit of the trial-and-error of rehearsal - the function of the editor? Where does "editing" end and interpretation or rescripting begin? (233)
Again on Titus: "do students, critics, actors, an directors want from their editions (that are to serve as playscripts) a plausible but iffy decision that may in turn close down equally valid or theatrically interesting options of which the reader is no longer aware? For me, the most fruitful answers will arise not from editors working on the page but rather from "field-testing" the script that survives in the 1594 Quarto" (234).
Dessen continues to question the editorial practices of Wells, Honingmann, and Pafford: why is it the place of an editor, who might be a brilliant bibliographic scholar but ignorant about theatrical practice, modern or early modern, to determine what is theatrically obvious or effective? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" (234).
Analysis
Dessen really drives the point home here: editors will often make interpretive gestures in preparing their texts just as directors will in preparing their productions, but this is a role that is not necessarily best suited to the editor. Directors should be cautious about subverting literary possibilities with their own interpretations, but editors should be more so. A director risks failing to communicate something in a single production, but an editor who goes too far will limit the dramatic possibilities for many productions.
"In the process of rescripting directors often take on the role of editors... conversely, an editor wrestling with a problematic passage or stage direction may consciously or inadvertently take on the role of a director and make choices according to a sense of how X could be, should be, or would have been staged" (209). That's particularly useful, as a central part of the argument of my developing thesis is that the role of the editor and director should be combined.
Editors need to make decisions to help clarify plays for a first time reader, but in so doing they run the risk of limiting the options available when using the text for performance (209).
cf Honigmann, E A J. Myriad-minded Shakespeare. 2nd Ed. London. 1998. esp p 187.
cf Cambridge UP's Shakespeare in Production series, esp Christine Dymkowski's 2000 edition of The Tempest and Trevor Griffiths 1996 edition of Midsummer.
As Folio Facsimiles and other "original texts" become increasingly available to theatre professionals, the role of the editor can more closely resemble "unscripting," the process of adapting a play text to more closely resemble a text designed for readers of books than for producers of plays (209 - 210).
An individual theatrical choice will not undo three centuries of theatrical tradition (211).
Signs of emendations of stage directions should not provoke the question of which choice is correct, but what is the function of the signal of the stage direction, and whom is it intended for (217).
cf Wells, Stanley. "The Editor and the Theatre: Editorial Treatment of Stage Directions." Re-editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader. Oxford. Oxford UP. 1984. p76, 68. This for Wells' justification to edit texts without resorting to editorial precedent.
cf Kidnie, Margaret Jane. "Text, Performance, and the Editors: Staging Shakespeare's Drama." Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol. 51. 2000. p 464. -- "the responsible editor of modernized editions will necessarily adopt an interventionalist approach to staging."
cf Thomson, Leslie. "Broken Brackets and 'Mended Texts: Stage Directions in the Oxford Shakespeare." Renaissance Drama. Vol. 19. 1988. 175-193.
"Once the editors assumptions about performance are encoded into the script, it becomes difficult to historicize this intervention for the reader as a matter of debate and contested interpretation" (468). (qtd. in Dessen 218).
Wells and Taylor, in their Oxford Complete Works, adopted a policy of not indicating where stage directions were editorial in nature where the action was indisputable, but the question has remained: indisputable to whom? Dessen cites the example of "they kiss" in Taming of the Shrew; by not indicating the editorial nature of the stage direction, they present an event that is not fixed in sequence by the author as being authorial (219). Yes. Agreed. This context helps clarify some questions for my presentation of the edition.
Where there is a disagreement between a clearly articulated stage direction in the Folio text and editorial tradition, as is the case with the entrance of Malvolio cross gartered, which occurs in the Folio two lines before most editors place his entrance, it is better to field test the options in a theatrical environment than it is to cut off possible directorial interpretation (221). Yes. Agreed. I want to produce an edition of Merry Devil that both enabled interpretation and provides potential solutions to problems. My edits have been conservative enough that I think I can pull it off.
Massed entrances at the tops of scenes in some of the plays have been attributed to the scribe Ralph Crane, and editors have commonly shifted these into individual entrances just before they first speak their lines. It is perhaps significant that Merry Wives is among the plays where this happens (Two Gentleman and Winters Tale being the others) (224). There are a couple of these in Merry Devil, and we had to pare back on one to allow Victoria and Rachel to change from Smug and Banks into Dorcas and Harry. Hmm....
Speaking about Titus Andronicus: "Given the range of options in the Quarto, the user of these modern editions should ask: is making such a choice - on the page, without the benefit of the trial-and-error of rehearsal - the function of the editor? Where does "editing" end and interpretation or rescripting begin? (233)
Again on Titus: "do students, critics, actors, an directors want from their editions (that are to serve as playscripts) a plausible but iffy decision that may in turn close down equally valid or theatrically interesting options of which the reader is no longer aware? For me, the most fruitful answers will arise not from editors working on the page but rather from "field-testing" the script that survives in the 1594 Quarto" (234).
Dessen continues to question the editorial practices of Wells, Honingmann, and Pafford: why is it the place of an editor, who might be a brilliant bibliographic scholar but ignorant about theatrical practice, modern or early modern, to determine what is theatrically obvious or effective? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" (234).
Analysis
Dessen really drives the point home here: editors will often make interpretive gestures in preparing their texts just as directors will in preparing their productions, but this is a role that is not necessarily best suited to the editor. Directors should be cautious about subverting literary possibilities with their own interpretations, but editors should be more so. A director risks failing to communicate something in a single production, but an editor who goes too far will limit the dramatic possibilities for many productions.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Notes on Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader: Chapter 1
"Old and Modern Spelling."
Most font families lack the long-s character that is common place in printed books of the late 16th and early 17th century, and thus there is an immediate impediment to producing old spelling editions. The technology is there, but requires some extra research, although in all fairness this is easily overcome, many readers are apt to look at a long-s and pronounce it as an "f," or simply not know what it is. The typographic conventions of the early 20th century have relegated this character to an historical curiosity. This begs the question, to long-s or not to long-s?
Is the long-s a stylistic curiosity, or a more telling bibliographic marker? The answer lies mostly in the mind of the reader, and as I prepare this new edition of Merry Devil that target reader is ever in my mind. Wells, in this chapter entitled "Old and Modern Spelling" notes that while some students who are more directly focused on the language would prefer an old spelling edition of Shakespeare's works, those who are more interested in critique or production are generally satisfied with a modernized spelling edition (7).
Wells counters Gaskell's argument that modernizing spelling may imply a modern meaning to a word on two points. The first is that many words are spelled now as they were then, the second is that meanings may have shifted either subtly or substantially, but the spelling of the word will provide no clarification as to its meaning in the mind of the reader. Furthermore, the old spelling of the word may obstruct a modern reader from discerning any meaning from it (8).
Gaskell's second objection to modern spelling is that it will conceal 'puns and rhymes,' and his third that it 'causes the editor to choose when the author was ambiguous.' Wells notes that a pun is not necessarily suppressed by the editor's destruction of ambiguity, and that much ambiguity is restored anyway when the text is received from the mouth of an actor (as it was intended) (9). I have mixed feelings on this last point; on the one hand, he's completely correct. On the other, the meaning created by the editor is interpreted by the actor. Then again, given that the period allowed for rehearsals shrinks every few years, I see nothing wrong with giving the actor the tools necessary to make some choices easier.
Bowers makes the argument that old spelling can preserve a double meaning to a word: for example "travel" and "travail" could mean either the same thing, or slightly different things. Modernizing all "travail" spellings to "travel" when the editor determines that travel is the primary sense intended robs the reader of the experience of both meanings. Wells argues, however, that the distinctive spellings of the words in modern English would inhibit such understanding anyway; he suggests that an editor would do well to choose the primary meaning of the word, and make a notation of the secondary (9-10).
If the point of an old spelling edition is to preserve the vagaries of present in the original text, it must also take the same care with the incidentals of the text (i.e. punctuation). In 1939 McKerrow argued that we might never knows how educated Elizabethans would differentiate definitively correct or incorrect punctuation, and that argument still holds to this day. If an editor wishes to preserve the obscurities of language, they must also be faithful to the incidentals of that written language (11).
While a modern spelling edition of a text may obscure some rhymes, it is noteworthy that even original spelling editions of certain texts will do this some of the time (11-12).
While Gaskell's fourth argument, that modernizing 'deprives the work of the quality of belonging to its own period' similarly disintegrates when one considers factors beyond the printed text. Modern text, whether or not they retain original spelling, are printed on modern paper, with modern ink, in modern bindings, and are likewise sold in modern bookstores (12). The time the work belongs to is the one in which it is produced.
John Russel Brown has argued at the "Elizabethan flavour" of a work produced in this period is a modern construction. The Elizabethans would have considered these works modern (12). I'm typing this in a medium that will almost certainly never be printed on paper, but which will be instantly readable by anyone in the world at the click of a button. Hand-press books may seem quaint by comparison, but let us remember that to the Elizabethans hand-press books were high-tech.
Modern editors may make decisions limiting the range of possible meaning, and which may create difficulty with rhymes. Such an editor is also likely to punctuate the text more precisely, and may make questionable decisions in the process of so doing. Depending on the reader of the work, these changes may make the edition useless for their study, or they may never notice that emendation has taken place. "There is no moral superiority in belonging to the class of readers best served by an old-spelling edition" (13-14).
In On Editing Shakespeare (155-6), Bowers states that "an old spelling edition is likely to be a work of scholarship," but the the editor of an old spelling edition may mangle the text just as easily as the editor of the modern spelling edition (14).
Provided the editor of the modern spelling edition does not simply re-create the mistakes of past editors, and that he thoroughly considers the implications and repercussions of the modernizing process, the development of new modern spelling editions may be more likely to lead to new explorations of the text than creating yet another old spelling edition (16-17).
While some will argue that original spelling preserves original pronunciation, Fausto Cercignani establishes that spelling is only a partial guide to pronunciation at best in Elizabethan Pronunciation and Shakespeare's Works (19-20).
Wells finds it more than slightly ridiculous to print original spellings when the modern word is pronounced the same, even if it would be pronounced differently if the pronunciation were phonetic. He offers, as an example, the Riverside's propensity for printing "We'nsday," "as if anyone in his senses... would ever be in danger of saying 'Wed-nes-day'" (20).
A modernizing editor needs to take care to modernize foreign words to their modern usage, unless it is clear that the word is being mispronounced (26). English has easily adopted certain words or phrases from French, but the editor needs to consider carefully whether a mis-spelled French word is the result of the authors unfamiliarity with the correct form, or if the author is trying to make a point with the character's mis-pronunciation. Huck Finn's "pooley voo franzie" comes to mind. Certainly, the word adieu appears in Merry Devil, although it is spelled as "adew." Should I modernize to "adieu," which could imply a correct pronunciation, or should I leave it as "adew," implying the pronunciation as "a-doo?" Context is key.
Summary:
I think Wells wraps up this chapter nicely, and so I'm going to quote him here:
Most font families lack the long-s character that is common place in printed books of the late 16th and early 17th century, and thus there is an immediate impediment to producing old spelling editions. The technology is there, but requires some extra research, although in all fairness this is easily overcome, many readers are apt to look at a long-s and pronounce it as an "f," or simply not know what it is. The typographic conventions of the early 20th century have relegated this character to an historical curiosity. This begs the question, to long-s or not to long-s?
Is the long-s a stylistic curiosity, or a more telling bibliographic marker? The answer lies mostly in the mind of the reader, and as I prepare this new edition of Merry Devil that target reader is ever in my mind. Wells, in this chapter entitled "Old and Modern Spelling" notes that while some students who are more directly focused on the language would prefer an old spelling edition of Shakespeare's works, those who are more interested in critique or production are generally satisfied with a modernized spelling edition (7).
Wells counters Gaskell's argument that modernizing spelling may imply a modern meaning to a word on two points. The first is that many words are spelled now as they were then, the second is that meanings may have shifted either subtly or substantially, but the spelling of the word will provide no clarification as to its meaning in the mind of the reader. Furthermore, the old spelling of the word may obstruct a modern reader from discerning any meaning from it (8).
Gaskell's second objection to modern spelling is that it will conceal 'puns and rhymes,' and his third that it 'causes the editor to choose when the author was ambiguous.' Wells notes that a pun is not necessarily suppressed by the editor's destruction of ambiguity, and that much ambiguity is restored anyway when the text is received from the mouth of an actor (as it was intended) (9). I have mixed feelings on this last point; on the one hand, he's completely correct. On the other, the meaning created by the editor is interpreted by the actor. Then again, given that the period allowed for rehearsals shrinks every few years, I see nothing wrong with giving the actor the tools necessary to make some choices easier.
Bowers makes the argument that old spelling can preserve a double meaning to a word: for example "travel" and "travail" could mean either the same thing, or slightly different things. Modernizing all "travail" spellings to "travel" when the editor determines that travel is the primary sense intended robs the reader of the experience of both meanings. Wells argues, however, that the distinctive spellings of the words in modern English would inhibit such understanding anyway; he suggests that an editor would do well to choose the primary meaning of the word, and make a notation of the secondary (9-10).
If the point of an old spelling edition is to preserve the vagaries of present in the original text, it must also take the same care with the incidentals of the text (i.e. punctuation). In 1939 McKerrow argued that we might never knows how educated Elizabethans would differentiate definitively correct or incorrect punctuation, and that argument still holds to this day. If an editor wishes to preserve the obscurities of language, they must also be faithful to the incidentals of that written language (11).
While a modern spelling edition of a text may obscure some rhymes, it is noteworthy that even original spelling editions of certain texts will do this some of the time (11-12).
While Gaskell's fourth argument, that modernizing 'deprives the work of the quality of belonging to its own period' similarly disintegrates when one considers factors beyond the printed text. Modern text, whether or not they retain original spelling, are printed on modern paper, with modern ink, in modern bindings, and are likewise sold in modern bookstores (12). The time the work belongs to is the one in which it is produced.
John Russel Brown has argued at the "Elizabethan flavour" of a work produced in this period is a modern construction. The Elizabethans would have considered these works modern (12). I'm typing this in a medium that will almost certainly never be printed on paper, but which will be instantly readable by anyone in the world at the click of a button. Hand-press books may seem quaint by comparison, but let us remember that to the Elizabethans hand-press books were high-tech.
Modern editors may make decisions limiting the range of possible meaning, and which may create difficulty with rhymes. Such an editor is also likely to punctuate the text more precisely, and may make questionable decisions in the process of so doing. Depending on the reader of the work, these changes may make the edition useless for their study, or they may never notice that emendation has taken place. "There is no moral superiority in belonging to the class of readers best served by an old-spelling edition" (13-14).
In On Editing Shakespeare (155-6), Bowers states that "an old spelling edition is likely to be a work of scholarship," but the the editor of an old spelling edition may mangle the text just as easily as the editor of the modern spelling edition (14).
Provided the editor of the modern spelling edition does not simply re-create the mistakes of past editors, and that he thoroughly considers the implications and repercussions of the modernizing process, the development of new modern spelling editions may be more likely to lead to new explorations of the text than creating yet another old spelling edition (16-17).
While some will argue that original spelling preserves original pronunciation, Fausto Cercignani establishes that spelling is only a partial guide to pronunciation at best in Elizabethan Pronunciation and Shakespeare's Works (19-20).
Wells finds it more than slightly ridiculous to print original spellings when the modern word is pronounced the same, even if it would be pronounced differently if the pronunciation were phonetic. He offers, as an example, the Riverside's propensity for printing "We'nsday," "as if anyone in his senses... would ever be in danger of saying 'Wed-nes-day'" (20).
A modernizing editor needs to take care to modernize foreign words to their modern usage, unless it is clear that the word is being mispronounced (26). English has easily adopted certain words or phrases from French, but the editor needs to consider carefully whether a mis-spelled French word is the result of the authors unfamiliarity with the correct form, or if the author is trying to make a point with the character's mis-pronunciation. Huck Finn's "pooley voo franzie" comes to mind. Certainly, the word adieu appears in Merry Devil, although it is spelled as "adew." Should I modernize to "adieu," which could imply a correct pronunciation, or should I leave it as "adew," implying the pronunciation as "a-doo?" Context is key.
Summary:
I think Wells wraps up this chapter nicely, and so I'm going to quote him here:
Sometimes I think I ought to be more radical than I am prepared to be at present: in these moments I ask myself whether, for example, any point is served by printing 'owe' where we should say 'own'... Certainly I should have no objection to a theatrical production in which such changes were made, and I could well believe that such a production would bring me closer to Shakespeare than one in which the actors laboriously pronounced-as some of them do-'pioner' for 'pioneer'.... What I hope I have shown is that modernizing itself is not, as I was once told, merely a 'secretarial task'; that current practice leaves much room for improvement; and that when thoughtfully carried out it can yield worthwhile results (31).
Friday, August 27, 2010
Notes on Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader: Prologue
Following William Proctor Williams' advice to treat anonymous play quartos like Hamlet, I continue my quest to formulate a cogent editorial theory that will serve the product of this process: a new edition of The Merry Devil of Edmonton. At the forefront of my reading list is Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader by none other than Stanley Wells, one of the men most responsible for the ground-shaking Oxford Complete Works.
From the first page of the introduction, I'm feeling good about this book. Wells distinguishes himself as an editor, and says that he has prepared the lectures contained within from an editorial rather than a bibliographic perspective. Where W.W. Greg's approach was primarily as a textual critic, and McKerrow and Bowers concerned themselves primarily with producing diplomatic editions (i.e. facsimile reproductions of a certain text), Wells has devoted himself to not only understanding textual problems, but also providing workable solutions to these problems in application (1).
"None of us can avoid error; all judgment is both subjective and fallible" (1).
New editions of already available plays do not immediately deprecate older editions, nor should every new interpretation of a passage or proposed emendation dictate the publication of a new edition. A new edition is the result of a cumulative process of scholarship, and thus not every new edition need be radically different from those that came before. While texts will be re-examined periodically in light of new scholarship, it should also be expected that some new editions will simply re-package older texts in order to reach a new or larger market (2 - 3).
Editors must think conservatively in their process. When an editor is tempted to set aside primary evidence, he should consider whether he is motivated by reason, or by "a lazy-minded reluctance to disturb the status quo" (4). Of course, the opposite must also be true, and an editor must be conscious of whether nor not they are motivated by an emotional impulse to disturb the status quo as well.
Analysis
Wells' agenda is pretty clear. The Oxford Complete Works deliberately challenged long held notions of textual accuracy. The facing-text presentation of King Lear introduced a new paradigm in the presentation of texts, which is grounded in a distinctly different flavor of editorial conservativism than John Dover Wilson had practiced in his earlier Cambridge Complete Works.
Returning for a moment to some previous discussion about versions as utterances and utterances of texts as participating in the larger story of a text, Wells seems more clearly interested in presenting a reconstruction of something more closely approximating an utterance of the text that Shakespeare himself may have heard. Still, this is only his reconstruction of that utterance, and it is both a product of Shakespeare's time and our own.
Lingering question: is the approximation of a 400 year old utterance the best one for the modern stage?
From the first page of the introduction, I'm feeling good about this book. Wells distinguishes himself as an editor, and says that he has prepared the lectures contained within from an editorial rather than a bibliographic perspective. Where W.W. Greg's approach was primarily as a textual critic, and McKerrow and Bowers concerned themselves primarily with producing diplomatic editions (i.e. facsimile reproductions of a certain text), Wells has devoted himself to not only understanding textual problems, but also providing workable solutions to these problems in application (1).
"None of us can avoid error; all judgment is both subjective and fallible" (1).
New editions of already available plays do not immediately deprecate older editions, nor should every new interpretation of a passage or proposed emendation dictate the publication of a new edition. A new edition is the result of a cumulative process of scholarship, and thus not every new edition need be radically different from those that came before. While texts will be re-examined periodically in light of new scholarship, it should also be expected that some new editions will simply re-package older texts in order to reach a new or larger market (2 - 3).
Editors must think conservatively in their process. When an editor is tempted to set aside primary evidence, he should consider whether he is motivated by reason, or by "a lazy-minded reluctance to disturb the status quo" (4). Of course, the opposite must also be true, and an editor must be conscious of whether nor not they are motivated by an emotional impulse to disturb the status quo as well.
Analysis
Wells' agenda is pretty clear. The Oxford Complete Works deliberately challenged long held notions of textual accuracy. The facing-text presentation of King Lear introduced a new paradigm in the presentation of texts, which is grounded in a distinctly different flavor of editorial conservativism than John Dover Wilson had practiced in his earlier Cambridge Complete Works.
Returning for a moment to some previous discussion about versions as utterances and utterances of texts as participating in the larger story of a text, Wells seems more clearly interested in presenting a reconstruction of something more closely approximating an utterance of the text that Shakespeare himself may have heard. Still, this is only his reconstruction of that utterance, and it is both a product of Shakespeare's time and our own.
Lingering question: is the approximation of a 400 year old utterance the best one for the modern stage?
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