What William Proctor Williams said...

Noted bibliographic and textual studies scholar William Proctor Williams was at the ASC today for a question and answer period about... well... bibliographic studies. So how could I resist asking him for advice on how to proceed with Merry Devil? Greg, in a piece I previously discussed, apoplectically declared that the only acceptable way of editing a text is to get as close as possible to the authors original work, but even Greg admits that this isn't possible in the case of Merry Devil.

So what does the great Dr. Williams have to say?

I don't think it matters who wrote it because the process from getting from whoever wrote it (maybe plural) is going to be the same, so treat it like Hamlet. No play was ever printed from foul papers, and feel free to quote me on this, no printer would accept it. They weren't in business to get PhDs or MFAs in Renaissance studies, and they wouldn't have their journeyman compositors try to set type from foul papers. The steps are just the same as Hamlet or King Lear, or anything else. Whoever prints it is going to have to take it into the Stationer's Company, and there the process is the same for everyone else. 

So there you go. From the man who literally wrote the book on bibliographic and textual studies (An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies). It's already the course that I'm following, but now I get to do it with Williams' blessing. 

Who's this for?

I always step out of Textual Culture with a wealth of challenges to my ideas, and today's theme was who I'm doing all of this for. Is it possible that there might be some folks out there that don't know the conventions of reading plays? Yes, but I'm ultimately not interested in writing for them. Is it possible there are some folks who would like to read the play with some guidance to help them picture it? Probably, but my cast would take exception to highly detailed stage directions that negate performance possibilities.

So the answer is that I'm doing this for my cast, and then I'm doing it for that mythical beast, the general reader. I hesitate to call it the first step in the process, as that would imply a degree of temporal  linearity that doesn't align with real world practice, but producing a play text for my acting company is the first goal on the road to a new edition of The Merry Devil. They will then perform that text, and that will be a new edition. I will perhaps then use the information gathered from that performance and prepare it as a reader's edition, a text which will be a cross breed of 17th century collaborative writing, performance, editing, printing, and then 21st century transcription, editing, printing, performance, editing, and printing.

So if you followed along with all of that, lets pretend that you're sitting there with the new reader's edition in your hot little hand: who is responsible for putting it there? Who authorizes it? The King's Men? Myself? My actors? The American Shakespeare Center? Mary Baldwin College's M.Litt/MFA program? All of the above? None of the above?

I think I had an insight into all of this in class today, and with luck I've brought you to the same crisis of contradiction that I find myself in: you can't win, so don't try. Alternatively, what is likely to sell the most tickets? And thus I turn back to The Merry Devil of Edmonton as a member of Shakespeare's Apocrypha, because lets face it, the name of William Shakespeare sells tickets.