"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 W. W. Greg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label W. W. Greg. Show all posts
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
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.
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 and the New Bibliography" - Chapter 4
While printed books inherently provide evidence of printshop practices, since there is no extant dramatic manuscript used for printed copy, bibliographers that wish to reconstruct the kind of manuscript a play was printed from have to rely on circumstantial evidence. This includes the information contained in stage directions, textual corruption, and mislineation (50).
Scientific advances in the 20th century have enabled bibliographic work that was impossible in earlier eras. New and improved photographic techniques have enabled photo-facsimiles of printed books and manuscripts, and new and improved scientific instruments have enabled researchers with access to the original documents to discover more about them than would otherwise be knowable (50).
cf Maunde Thompson Shakespeare's Handwriting. 1916.
cf W. W. Greg Henslowe Papers. 1916.
cf W. W. Greg Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses (1931).
"The confusion of the More manuscript would have made it useless for prompting" (57). Gurr and Stern have elsewhere noted that prompting is an anachronistic term, and Wilson's sense of the duties of a "prompter" in the period may be a bit skewed.
"Prompt-books differ very much among themselves" (58). Amen. Wilson goes on to discuss the divers ways in which a prompt-book acquired annotation for use in the playhouse on page 59.
"In one respect, and in only one, prompt-books are alike: they are all in folio" (60).
The only extant part from an early modern play that has survived is is for Orlando in Greene's Orlando Furioso. This part contains evidence of errors and omissions that appear to have been corrected by the owner of he part, probably Alleyn (60).
"The part of the actor who played the title-role in 'Duk Moraud' survives in a fourteenth-century hand on a margin of an Assize Roll for Norfolk and Suffolk of the second half of the thirteenth century in the Bodleian Library; we have also the part of God from a late text of a miracle play (c. 1570-80) which gives one or two stage-directions" (60).
c.f. J.Q. Adams Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas.
"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as portion of forty-two lines was called a 'length'" (60, footnote). Wilson cites the OED.
It is unlikely that most, if any, of the King's Men's playbooks were burned in the Globe fire of 1621, as Sir Henry Wotton wrote three days after the fire that 'nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks.' While the Fortune plays did lose their books and wardrobe when that playhouse burned, the Fortune burned at midnight, and the Globe during the middle of a performance, and it is probable that, if anything of value was stored at the Globe, the actors would have rescued it (61 - 62). Of course, if you believe Gurr, the Globe was perfunctory to the operation of the Kings Men by this time, and so it is plausible that they stored their more valuable materials at the Blackfriars.
"The most serious defect in a text supplied by a man like Crane would not lie in its 'general imperfections' but in its general perfection. In tidying up his copy and clearing away obscurities he might sometimes misinterpret the intention of his author and obliterate all chances of recovering his original" (64).
Summary
Extant dramatic documents from early modern London are rare, but they give us valuable glimpses into playhouse practice, which can help us understand how some of the plays came to print. Of particular interest is Wilson's acknowledgement that Crane, as a professional scribe, would have perfected the copy he was working from. As scientific advances in the early 20th century enabled new kinds of bibliographic work, we might also consider the types of advances 21st century has made in determining the future of bibliographic studies.
Notes on "Shakespeare and the New Bibliography" - Chapter 2
c.f. Pollard's Shakespeare's Folios and Quartos.
When a dramatist sold their play to a playing company, they sold their rights along with their manuscript, and if they were, like Shakespeare, sharers in that company, they continued to own the play as sharers, but not as authors in the modern sense (18).
When a theatre wished to print a playbook, they would sell it, and the rights, to a stationer, who typically assumed all of the financial risks and publishing responsibilities, just as they would when any other author sold them a work to be printed (19).
"The notion that books not entered [in the Stationer's Register] must necessarily be surreptitious has long been abandoned" (22).
A bookseller might enter a work with the Stationer's Company to secure the job of printing it, but this theory does not account for the entry and transfer of the rights of Merry Wives by and from Busby to Johnson on 8 May 1605 as Busby was not a printer, and Johnson had the quarto printed by Thomas Creede. Pollard (Shakespeare's Folios and Quartos, 45) and Greg (The Library, 4th ser. xx (1940), 379) both hypothesized that the purchaser of the copy feared trouble and insisted on the procurer of the manuscript make the registry entry on the first instance (21). All of this only makes sense if you believe in the piracy and surreptitious printing practices, which I don't see a good argument for in light of the complete absence of legal action taken against such printing. This is, of course, significant, as this bad quarto Merry Wives is a cousin to Merry Devil.
Chambers speculates that the Lord Chamberlain's order of 1619 that none of the King's Men's plays should be printed without their permission in Shakespearean Stage i.136-137 (32). The idea is, apparently, older the Lukas Erne, but I still think Massai makes a strong argument for the logic behind the Pavier quartos.
Summary
Copyright, in the modern sense, did not exist in early modern London, and our evidence for the way printing rights were handled is thin. We have Stationer's records from which we can draw inferences, but the data that we do have does not give us sufficient information to determine how the relationships between stationers, printers, and playing companies functioned in any exact detail. We therefore must be cautious about interpreting that data with our own prejudices.
When a dramatist sold their play to a playing company, they sold their rights along with their manuscript, and if they were, like Shakespeare, sharers in that company, they continued to own the play as sharers, but not as authors in the modern sense (18).
When a theatre wished to print a playbook, they would sell it, and the rights, to a stationer, who typically assumed all of the financial risks and publishing responsibilities, just as they would when any other author sold them a work to be printed (19).
"The notion that books not entered [in the Stationer's Register] must necessarily be surreptitious has long been abandoned" (22).
A bookseller might enter a work with the Stationer's Company to secure the job of printing it, but this theory does not account for the entry and transfer of the rights of Merry Wives by and from Busby to Johnson on 8 May 1605 as Busby was not a printer, and Johnson had the quarto printed by Thomas Creede. Pollard (Shakespeare's Folios and Quartos, 45) and Greg (The Library, 4th ser. xx (1940), 379) both hypothesized that the purchaser of the copy feared trouble and insisted on the procurer of the manuscript make the registry entry on the first instance (21). All of this only makes sense if you believe in the piracy and surreptitious printing practices, which I don't see a good argument for in light of the complete absence of legal action taken against such printing. This is, of course, significant, as this bad quarto Merry Wives is a cousin to Merry Devil.
Chambers speculates that the Lord Chamberlain's order of 1619 that none of the King's Men's plays should be printed without their permission in Shakespearean Stage i.136-137 (32). The idea is, apparently, older the Lukas Erne, but I still think Massai makes a strong argument for the logic behind the Pavier quartos.
Summary
Copyright, in the modern sense, did not exist in early modern London, and our evidence for the way printing rights were handled is thin. We have Stationer's records from which we can draw inferences, but the data that we do have does not give us sufficient information to determine how the relationships between stationers, printers, and playing companies functioned in any exact detail. We therefore must be cautious about interpreting that data with our own prejudices.
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.
Notes on "Principles of Emendation in Shakespeare"
"The fact is that there is only one general principle of emendation, which is that emendation is in its essence devoid of principle" (1).
"Emendation is an art," and while there are no general principles of emendation that can guide great editors, there are some basic rules that will help lesser editors (1). Honestly, all of this double talk just doesn't make any sense to me.
Any editor would do well to remember two facts: even careful authors do not always write the most sensible phrases, and sometimes it will be impossible to trace the agency of corruption in a particular text (4).
"When we have satisfied ourselves that an emendation is acceptable, the next question we ought to ask is what it implies with respect to the history and origin of the text" (5).
"The central point at which I am aiming is this: that no emendation can, or ought to be, considered in vacuo, but that criticism must always proceed in relation to what we know, or what we surmise, respecting the history of the text" (6). I had initially paraphrased this in the manner that follows, but F.P. Wilson saw fit to quote this passage on p. 97 of Shakespeare and the New Bibliography, so I have included it in my notes after reading it there.
No single emendation can be made without considering the historical context of the work at hand, and when more than one emendation is made, they should not involve mutually contradictory origin theories (6).
When editing plays that exist in only one version, such as the plays that were first printed in F1, beyond the general suitability to the text, there are only two general guides that an editor has at their disposal: a knowledge of the kinds of errors a compositor is likely to make in reading a text, and of the kinds of errors he is likely to make in setting the text (8). Greg loves his binaries.
In cases where there are two texts from the period, one may be taken as a correction of the other, and where the texts have common errors, it is probable that the error stems from a misreading of authorial manuscript. In this cases, it is helpful to consider what interpretation was placed on this corruption, especially by the actors who probably used it (9).
By the same logic, when a reading is specifically preserved in two extant texts, it may be a sign that it is correct, and should be retained (10). Admittedly, this is one of the reasons that I preserved "the nun will soon at night turn lippit" instead of "tippet." Lippit is a nonsense word and a clear misreading, but it is preserved in all six quartos, and tippet is perfectly sensible, if a little obscure to a modern audience, that has performative implications (i.e. Miliscent wearing a monk's robe as part of her escape). Looking back on it, I made the wrong choice, and so will generally disagree with Greg's logic here.
When considering instances in the Folio where the Folio version was apparently set from an earlier quarto, Greg says "where the texts differ, one possesses vastly greater authority than the other: where they agree, we not only have direct transcriptional witness to what the author wrote, but we know, subject to certain exceptions, that this was what was actually spoken on stage" (14). Again, I find this claim to be dubious.
For those texts in which a "good" quarto corrected a "bad" quarto, and then was used to print the Folio, the bad Romeo and Juliet is better than the good text. Greg sees this as an opportunity for "critical exploration" (21).
Summary
It's kind of hard for me to honestly evaluate W.W. Greg. He certainly makes a great deal of sense at times, but his subscription to the New Bibliography's narrative colors his view of the evidence, but I am encouraged by his ability to see that the bad quarto of Romeo and Juliet, at least, isn't all that bad. I can't help but think there is more science to emendation than Greg lets on, even if it is a science that is particular to a text, or to a set of texts. As each text needs to be regarded on its own terms, the specifics of emendation are specific to the text(s) being edited, however similar governing principles to that process seem to apply.
Citation
Greg, W.W. "Principles of Emendation in Shakespeare." Proceedings of the British Academy. Annual Shakespeare Lecture. Read 23 May 1928. Print.
"Emendation is an art," and while there are no general principles of emendation that can guide great editors, there are some basic rules that will help lesser editors (1). Honestly, all of this double talk just doesn't make any sense to me.
Any editor would do well to remember two facts: even careful authors do not always write the most sensible phrases, and sometimes it will be impossible to trace the agency of corruption in a particular text (4).
"When we have satisfied ourselves that an emendation is acceptable, the next question we ought to ask is what it implies with respect to the history and origin of the text" (5).
"The central point at which I am aiming is this: that no emendation can, or ought to be, considered in vacuo, but that criticism must always proceed in relation to what we know, or what we surmise, respecting the history of the text" (6). I had initially paraphrased this in the manner that follows, but F.P. Wilson saw fit to quote this passage on p. 97 of Shakespeare and the New Bibliography, so I have included it in my notes after reading it there.
No single emendation can be made without considering the historical context of the work at hand, and when more than one emendation is made, they should not involve mutually contradictory origin theories (6).
When editing plays that exist in only one version, such as the plays that were first printed in F1, beyond the general suitability to the text, there are only two general guides that an editor has at their disposal: a knowledge of the kinds of errors a compositor is likely to make in reading a text, and of the kinds of errors he is likely to make in setting the text (8). Greg loves his binaries.
In cases where there are two texts from the period, one may be taken as a correction of the other, and where the texts have common errors, it is probable that the error stems from a misreading of authorial manuscript. In this cases, it is helpful to consider what interpretation was placed on this corruption, especially by the actors who probably used it (9).
By the same logic, when a reading is specifically preserved in two extant texts, it may be a sign that it is correct, and should be retained (10). Admittedly, this is one of the reasons that I preserved "the nun will soon at night turn lippit" instead of "tippet." Lippit is a nonsense word and a clear misreading, but it is preserved in all six quartos, and tippet is perfectly sensible, if a little obscure to a modern audience, that has performative implications (i.e. Miliscent wearing a monk's robe as part of her escape). Looking back on it, I made the wrong choice, and so will generally disagree with Greg's logic here.
When considering instances in the Folio where the Folio version was apparently set from an earlier quarto, Greg says "where the texts differ, one possesses vastly greater authority than the other: where they agree, we not only have direct transcriptional witness to what the author wrote, but we know, subject to certain exceptions, that this was what was actually spoken on stage" (14). Again, I find this claim to be dubious.
For those texts in which a "good" quarto corrected a "bad" quarto, and then was used to print the Folio, the bad Romeo and Juliet is better than the good text. Greg sees this as an opportunity for "critical exploration" (21).
Summary
It's kind of hard for me to honestly evaluate W.W. Greg. He certainly makes a great deal of sense at times, but his subscription to the New Bibliography's narrative colors his view of the evidence, but I am encouraged by his ability to see that the bad quarto of Romeo and Juliet, at least, isn't all that bad. I can't help but think there is more science to emendation than Greg lets on, even if it is a science that is particular to a text, or to a set of texts. As each text needs to be regarded on its own terms, the specifics of emendation are specific to the text(s) being edited, however similar governing principles to that process seem to apply.
Citation
Greg, W.W. "Principles of Emendation in Shakespeare." Proceedings of the British Academy. Annual Shakespeare Lecture. Read 23 May 1928. Print.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Notes on Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor - Chapter 3
The quartos of Richard II, Richard III, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Much Ado printed by Andrew Wise represent ideal case studies to test the theory of McKerrow, Pollard, and Greg that Shakespeare had a direct hand in the preparation of his works for print. These texts are considered authoritative, and no publisher ever invested so heavily in printing Shakespeare's works while he was still alive. If Shakespeare worked with anyone for initial or subsequent printing of his plays, it would have been Wise (91).
Paul Werstine has demonstrated that both McKerrow's description of an 'author's original draft' and Greg's of 'foul papers' are 'a purely ideal form of printer's copy of which there are no examples among extant dramatic manuscripts' (91).
Greg and Pollard have conceived of an extremely linear path of transmission that led from the author's hand to the prompter's book to the printed form, but Gurr's argument that the written text existed in different states at different times, and served different purposes challenges this notion. Scott McMillan argues that transcriptions of performances were sometimes offered to patrons or given to printers; he supports this by noting Mosely's address to the reader in Beaumont and Fletcher's Comedies and Tragedies, which notes that "the Actours omitted some Scenes and Passages (with the Authour's consent) as occasion led them; and when private friends desir'd a Copy, they then (and justly too)transcribed what they Acted. But now you have both All that was Acted, and all that was not" (92).
New Bibliography, generally speaking, attempts to streamline the process of print, which may cause New Bibliographers to overlook realities of print house practice: type setters were expected to faithfully reproduce the copy they were given, and paid more attention to the details of their craft than the dramatic action of the plays they were setting (94).
It is possible that an annotating reader, maybe Shakespeare or Wise himself, contributed annotations to the early printings of the Wise Quartos, such as the correction of a wrong speech prefix in Richard II (95).
Wise published Shakespeare's three best-selling quartos as his first three plays (Richard II, Richard III, 1 Henry IV); whether this was exceptional foresight or good luck, it has lead both Lukas Erne and Andrew Gurr to speculate that the Chamberlain's Men had a regular relationship with Wise, but his relationship may be stronger than either speculate; effectively making him the Chamberlain's first official publisher (95-98).
Wise had no strong ties to the Stationer's Company, and in this way he was not unique among printers of plays during the period. Other printers, such as Thomas Millington and Richard Oliff, seem to have printed dramatic works only after coming into contact with a specific company or an agent of that company. Massai describes numerous other printers and stationers doing likewise (98-99).
Most of the books Wise printed come from three authors: Thomas Nashe, Thomas Playfere, and William Shakespeare; all of whom were under the direct patronage of Sir George Carey, Earl of Hunsdon. It is likely that Wise had a connection with one of these three authors, and to have met the other two as a result of this connection, as patrons seldom had a personal hand in the printing of their company's works (100).
Revenues from selling a playbook for printing were small; Peter Blayney argues that companies may have sold their playbooks as a way of generating publicity for their performances. Printing playscripts was a means of advertisement (101). It sounds like I definitely need to look up this article in Shakespeare Quarterly.
"Substantive variants in speech prefixes, stage directions and dialogue in the second and third quartos of Richard II, Richard III, and 1 Henry IV suggest that they were corrected as they were repeatedly reprinted between 1598 and 1602" (102).
Emendations that require knowledge of the plot of a play are more realistically going to come from an annotating reader than a print-house typesetter (103).
The publisher was as likely as the author to have a hand in emending manuscripts for print, and while it is possible that Shakespeare did take an interest in revising the Wise Quartos for subsequent printings, especially as his popularity was then peaking, he did so more like an annotating reader of the 16th century than as a revising author as E.A.J. Honigmann or Lukas Erne describe (105).
Summary
The Wise Quartos were both some of the earliest examples of Shakespeare's works in print, and some of the most successful. As these quartos were regularly reprinted, and as their reprints require knowledge of dramatic action, it is likely that an annotating reader had a hand in these revisions. Since the texts are considered authorial, these annotations were perhaps done either by Shakespeare himself, or with his approval, but that cannot be demonstrated, and even if it could, the annotations do not conform to New Bibliographical conceptions of an author revising their work.
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, July 25, 2010
Interesting Textual Variants
Stern has a lot of good ideas about how "Shakespearean" texts were made, how they got on the stage, and how they were printed, and I have this funny feeling like her work will be extremely handy in bringing The Merry Devil of Edmonton to life, but as part of this project involves the creation of my own new critical-edition of Merry Devil, I am struck by two things: first of all is the overwhelming regularity of the three quartos that I have so far collated; few variations exist between them.
Where these quartos differ most, however, falls in a seemingly trivial moment early in the play, when Fabell and Raymond accuse Frank Jerningham of taking part in the plot for him to steal Milliscent away from Raymond. Frank describes his affections for another lady:
The delightfully apoplectic W. W. Greg summarizes his analysis of the variant texts thusly:
Lets play the game "everybody is right." If I'm right that there are emendations to the text that represent changes made out on the road between Q1 and Q2, that means that Arthur Johnson needs to have got his hand on those changes. If he wanted to do a simple reprint, he could have either printed from an existing Q1, or from the papers that he had from that printing. The advantage of the latter could derive from dissatisfaction with the first printing; he did change printers from Henry Ballard (Q1) to Thomas Creed for Q2, after all, and his further change to G. Eld for Q3 seems to indicate that he may have had a more habitual dissatisfaction with printers.
Yet it is also worth considering that the book that the King's Men supplied Johnson for printing was the touring prompter's book. No copy of the text would be more dispensable than an edited for touring text when the London theatres were open, after all. If Johnson printed Q2 from this book, which would likely have been edited over years of use, that may account for some of the variation in this passage. It would, of course, be just as likely that the line had been edited back for subsequent printings (if Johnson continued to use the touring book), or perhaps, unable to obtain it, he printed from one of the variants of Q1.
Maybe I even get a little bit of support for the ever-changing touring prompt book theory from the evolution of another line within this same passage:
Anything I've said here needs to be read in light of the disclaimer that this is all mere conjecture. Yet given the evidence that Stern has put forth in Making Shakespeare, it is worth examining the book printing industry and the playing companies as having more of a symbiotic relationship than some would suggest. If Johnson regularly obtained copy for subsequent printings of The Merry Devil from the King's Men, the printed history of The Merry Devil may reflect an increasing simplification of dramatic writing.
Works Cited
Greg, W. W. "The Merry Devil of Edmonton." The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. 1944. London. Oxford UP. vol. s4-XXV 3-4 p. 122-139.
Stern, Tiffany. Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page. Routledge. London. 2004.
Where these quartos differ most, however, falls in a seemingly trivial moment early in the play, when Fabell and Raymond accuse Frank Jerningham of taking part in the plot for him to steal Milliscent away from Raymond. Frank describes his affections for another lady:
...but thou know'stThat's the text from Q1. Q2 reads thusly:
That Essex hath the saint that I adore,
Where ere did we meet thee and wanton springs,
That like a wag thou hast not laughed at me,
And with regardless Jesting mocked my love?
...but thou know'stNote the changes in bold. Also note that Q2's line is less poetic. One must be cautious about such proclamations in a play like this, where characters of all classes regularly change between verse and prose throughout, but Q2's line change creates a metrically irregular line in an otherwise regular passage. One might also make the argument that "wanton springs" is more idyllic than "we two were jovial."
That Essex hath the saint that I adore,
Where ere did'st meet me, but we two were jovial,
But like a wag thou hast not laughed at me,
And with regardless Jesting mocked my love?
The delightfully apoplectic W. W. Greg summarizes his analysis of the variant texts thusly:
I think that if a rough author's draft (after having served for the production of a prompt-book) had been severely cut with a view to preparing an abridged version of the play, and had then come into the printer's hands, the resulting edition might have been something like what we find in the extant text (130).So why the variation? Stern points out that country audiences were generally less sophisticated than their London counterparts, and thus the plays were cut (145-146). Her further suggestion that prompters themselves would be a common source of emendation to might lead one to think that the Q2 printing followed from a prompt copy further edited from the original (144). Of the four extant copies of Q1, none are identical, which is not necessarily odd given the practice of stop-press correction that was common in London printing houses (Greg, 125). Greg, however, traces the lineage of Q2 to a cousin of what he calls Q1B with one exception, and this based on a line that occurs just a little bit later in the passage I have examined above (127). It may serve us to examine that variation. Q1 is as follows:
Before I would give o'er the chase, and wrong the love,Q2:
Before I would wrong the chase and leave the love,Q3:
Before I'd wrong the chase and o'ergive love,I'm apparently working from Q1B, because Greg gives the reading of Q1A as
Before I would unage the chase and overgive love (127)The plot thickens, eh? It's difficult to say why such variation would arise. Pretending that "unage" is a misreading for "wrong," there seems to be an almost casual swapping of verbs in the line. If Greg is correct and the Q1B reading represents the text in an intermediary state of printing, that would simply confirm the statistically likely possibility that Q2 was not printed from one of the four extant Q1s (127). Nothing Earth shattering there, but why the other edits?
Lets play the game "everybody is right." If I'm right that there are emendations to the text that represent changes made out on the road between Q1 and Q2, that means that Arthur Johnson needs to have got his hand on those changes. If he wanted to do a simple reprint, he could have either printed from an existing Q1, or from the papers that he had from that printing. The advantage of the latter could derive from dissatisfaction with the first printing; he did change printers from Henry Ballard (Q1) to Thomas Creed for Q2, after all, and his further change to G. Eld for Q3 seems to indicate that he may have had a more habitual dissatisfaction with printers.
Yet it is also worth considering that the book that the King's Men supplied Johnson for printing was the touring prompter's book. No copy of the text would be more dispensable than an edited for touring text when the London theatres were open, after all. If Johnson printed Q2 from this book, which would likely have been edited over years of use, that may account for some of the variation in this passage. It would, of course, be just as likely that the line had been edited back for subsequent printings (if Johnson continued to use the touring book), or perhaps, unable to obtain it, he printed from one of the variants of Q1.
Maybe I even get a little bit of support for the ever-changing touring prompt book theory from the evolution of another line within this same passage:
Q1: I have taught the watchful Nightengale to wake,Q3 bears markers of both Q1 and Q2 in this case. Again, Q1 seems the more poetic, and depending on the pronunciation of "have" may read as a regular verse line. Q2 omits the description of the nightingale, but is metrically regular without elision. Q3 is what a music director friend of mine would describe as a hot mess. It just doesn't work as verse. Through these three printing, we see the evolution of a line of verse into a line of prose.
Q2: And I have taught the Nightengale to wake,
Q3: I have taught the Nightengale to wake,
Anything I've said here needs to be read in light of the disclaimer that this is all mere conjecture. Yet given the evidence that Stern has put forth in Making Shakespeare, it is worth examining the book printing industry and the playing companies as having more of a symbiotic relationship than some would suggest. If Johnson regularly obtained copy for subsequent printings of The Merry Devil from the King's Men, the printed history of The Merry Devil may reflect an increasing simplification of dramatic writing.
Works Cited
Greg, W. W. "The Merry Devil of Edmonton." The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. 1944. London. Oxford UP. vol. s4-XXV 3-4 p. 122-139.
Stern, Tiffany. Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page. Routledge. London. 2004.
Friday, March 19, 2010
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?
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.
Friday, February 12, 2010
What Greg said
I've mentioned W.W. Greg's name before, but perhaps not as central to my inquiry into the text of Merry Devil as I should have. When it comes to bibliographical studies in the first half of the twentieth century, Greg was, as the kids say, "the man." I'm sure someone out there would disagree with me, but he was one of those most responsible for the newness of the "New Bibliography" movement, and so it just makes sense to consult him whilst developing my own edition of the work. So let's see what he has to say.... hmmm......
"It would be difficult to find a play that presents a greater variety of difficulties to an editor."
That's hard. In "The Merry Devil of Edmonton," from The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society (1944, pages 122-139) Greg does a decent job of eviscerating William Amos Abrams' 1942 "definitive edition" of The Merry Devil. Certainly, this has given me much to think about. Maybe too much.
Authority, for Greg, means something strictly from the author's hand; that's impossible (and he knows as much). In so far as the old New Bibliographers were interested in bibliography as a tool to see through "the veil of print" (borrowing that term from Dr. Menzer), no one is really sure whose hand to look for in Merry Devil.
Greg dismisses the work as being a collaboration, but he admits that the comparatively short line count indicates this is an abridgment. Greg cites Abrams' opinion that the extant version is possibly cut for touring purposes (129), but he goes on to say that
Greg approves of Abrams' selection of the first quarto as the copy-text, which is also the one I picked, so w00t, and goes on to praise Abrams for his investigative work into the connection between the play The Merry Devil of Edmonton and the chapbook The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton, with the Pleasant Pranks of Smug the Smith, Sir John, and mine Host of the George, about the Stealing of Venison. Those early-moderners did love their long titles.
Anyway, Greg points out that while the chapbook is clearly inspired by the play, there are references in the play that are informed by the chapbook. The theory being that the chapbook is based on an unaltered version of the play text, and the references still in The Merry Devil that don't necessarily make sense at a glance, but are informed by the chapbook, are the result of uneven cuts. Think of the chapbook as an original novelization of a film, which is then cut before being released by the studio. The novel is based on the uncut script, and still has things in it that the studio release leaves off. Even so, Greg remarks that "the chapbook contains no hint of the main plot of the play" (134-135), so how much can really be lost?
Sarcastic yet true answer: for a 1500 line play, maybe about 1000 lines or so.
Of course, while The Life and Death of the Merry Devil may inform the action in The Merry Devil, there really isn't any way of constructing the original text based on that. If Greg and Abrams are right, the original, uncut play must be considered lost. Of course, that doesn't mean that the extant text isn't funny, and quite honestly, maybe being shorter makes it funnier. It was cut for a reason, after all. Maybe it's better that someone cut them back in the early 1600s: I won't have to worry about cutting them for my production in Philly.
Greg goes on to say that all an editor can "legitimately aim at is to repair corruption that has arisen in the course of printing and remove minor contradictions." As much as the editorial job is difficult, it is difficult beyond the ability of anyone to achieve definitively, and that actually makes my job as an editor easier. Of course, that makes my job as a director that much harder, but I'm a better director anyway.
Works Cited
Greg, W. W. "The Merry Devil of Edmonton." The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. 1944. London. Oxford UP. vol. s4-XXV 3-4 p. 122-139.
"It would be difficult to find a play that presents a greater variety of difficulties to an editor."
That's hard. In "The Merry Devil of Edmonton," from The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society (1944, pages 122-139) Greg does a decent job of eviscerating William Amos Abrams' 1942 "definitive edition" of The Merry Devil. Certainly, this has given me much to think about. Maybe too much.
Authority, for Greg, means something strictly from the author's hand; that's impossible (and he knows as much). In so far as the old New Bibliographers were interested in bibliography as a tool to see through "the veil of print" (borrowing that term from Dr. Menzer), no one is really sure whose hand to look for in Merry Devil.
Greg dismisses the work as being a collaboration, but he admits that the comparatively short line count indicates this is an abridgment. Greg cites Abrams' opinion that the extant version is possibly cut for touring purposes (129), but he goes on to say that
if a rough author's draft (after having served for the production of a regular prompt book) had been severely cut with a view to preparing an abridged version of the play, and had then come into the printers hands, the resulting edition might have been something like what we find in the extant text (130).Of course, what Greg refers to as "corruption" I might be inclined to call "collaboration." Have you ever seen the directors cut of a film when the director wasn't very good? It makes you wish you had watched the studio cut. In a modern theatrical environment, directors, actors, designers, and even stage managers and hands all bring something to the table that influence the performance, and sometimes that means cutting an over indulgent text. Who really wants to sit through a four hour Hamlet anyway?
Greg approves of Abrams' selection of the first quarto as the copy-text, which is also the one I picked, so w00t, and goes on to praise Abrams for his investigative work into the connection between the play The Merry Devil of Edmonton and the chapbook The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton, with the Pleasant Pranks of Smug the Smith, Sir John, and mine Host of the George, about the Stealing of Venison. Those early-moderners did love their long titles.
Anyway, Greg points out that while the chapbook is clearly inspired by the play, there are references in the play that are informed by the chapbook. The theory being that the chapbook is based on an unaltered version of the play text, and the references still in The Merry Devil that don't necessarily make sense at a glance, but are informed by the chapbook, are the result of uneven cuts. Think of the chapbook as an original novelization of a film, which is then cut before being released by the studio. The novel is based on the uncut script, and still has things in it that the studio release leaves off. Even so, Greg remarks that "the chapbook contains no hint of the main plot of the play" (134-135), so how much can really be lost?
Sarcastic yet true answer: for a 1500 line play, maybe about 1000 lines or so.
Of course, while The Life and Death of the Merry Devil may inform the action in The Merry Devil, there really isn't any way of constructing the original text based on that. If Greg and Abrams are right, the original, uncut play must be considered lost. Of course, that doesn't mean that the extant text isn't funny, and quite honestly, maybe being shorter makes it funnier. It was cut for a reason, after all. Maybe it's better that someone cut them back in the early 1600s: I won't have to worry about cutting them for my production in Philly.
Greg goes on to say that all an editor can "legitimately aim at is to repair corruption that has arisen in the course of printing and remove minor contradictions." As much as the editorial job is difficult, it is difficult beyond the ability of anyone to achieve definitively, and that actually makes my job as an editor easier. Of course, that makes my job as a director that much harder, but I'm a better director anyway.
Works Cited
Greg, W. W. "The Merry Devil of Edmonton." The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. 1944. London. Oxford UP. vol. s4-XXV 3-4 p. 122-139.
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