Notes on "Inventing Shakespeare"

"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 

Notes on Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators -- Ch. 1

"The modern editor's most basic task is the accurate reproduction of the copy text on which subsequent, more complex editorial operations are based" (13).

There is a distinction between modernizing spelling and modernizing Shakespeare's language: the latter of these "is a travesty," but the former is common practice among all major editions of Shakespeare's works, and represents "a serious scholarly task" (13).

While early modern spellings, and perhaps pronunciations, could enable a single word to carry more than one meaning, both written and spoken English have become more distinct, and in most cases the duality of meaning is lost. While some critics suggest preserving original spellings to preserve this duality of meaning, modern readers are generally incapable of noticing dual meanings. The best practice for an editor of a modern spelling edition is therefore to choose the spelling and sense that seems more dominant, and gloss alternate meanings in a footnote (15 - 16).

"It seems clear that, contrary to modern punctuation, which is chiefly grammatical and logical, early modern punctuation was strongly rhetorical" (18).

While early modern punctuation clearly has meaning to its audiences, that meaning can be difficult to decipher. An editor's task in punctuating the text, therefore, is to try to communicate, as clearly as possible, the apparent intention of the original (18).

Following Gary Taylor's logic (c.f. "Inventing Shakespeare") that every editor reconstructs a text's author in his or her own image, every editor participates in the process of "authorial reconstruction" (20).

"When textual corruption of some kind seems beyond dispute, the exact form of emendation should take can be far from clear" (21).

Erne cites Mercutio's "We waste our lights in vaine, lights lights by day" as being a circumstance where emendation is necessary (21). I note this primarily because I disagree with it. Emendation may be possible, but the line, as printed carries with it performative possibilities for the actor, and the line as printed may therefore be exceptionally informative, although if left un-emended, it is worth a gloss.

"Clearly, it is hard to draw the line between what is and what is not desirable emendation, between legitimately fixing the text when it is broken and meddling with it in ways which seem unnecessary or downright harmful" (22).

Taylor opts for a more expansive and creative approach to emendation than most modern editors would take when he uses George Wilkins' The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre to help rewrite the text of Pericles in a number of places (23).

Peter Blayney examined copies of the Folio in the Folger and determined that, what Jeanne Addison Roberts argued was an 'f' in 1978 ("so rare a wondered father and a (wise|wife)") was actually a blot of ink on a long s, and so returned to the reading as "wise" (24 - 25). I kind of want to see his evidence; I wonder if he took any pictures while examining it under 200x magnification. See his Arden 3 Tempest for more info.

Setting short lines together into a metrically regular line is a practice that has precedent in Ben Jonson's treatment of his own collected works, and while this sometimes couples lines that metrically and syntactically go together, and editor must be careful to not force lines together by meter when they are divided by sense (28).

c.f. Patricia Parker's "Altering the Letter of Twelfth Night: 'Some Are Born Great' and the Missing Signature," Shakespeare Survey, 59 (2006), 49 - 62.

Act and scene divisions in modern editions are largely a matter of editorial fancy; none of the playbooks printed in Shakespeare's life time contain act and scene divisions (34 - 35). We have elsewhere seen that the act and scene divisions in the Folio text are not uniform.

Scenes seem to have been the basic measure of dramatic unity, but Henslowe's Diary records writing plays by acts as early as the 1590s (35). Although as I have said before, if to my cast if not here, I don't think it fair to even attempt a guess at where the original act divisions in Merry Devil may be since the text is cut.

The "dominant consideration" for modern editors in determining a speech prefix is clarity of meaning, and while normalizing speech prefixes can subvert layers of meaning that a variation reflects, normalizing and expanding them will tend to produce a more readable text (39 - 40).

Summary


I'll leave off with Erne's words: Editing is "a task which requires considerable discrimination and can have important critical repercussions. Editors modernize and punctuate, name characters, determine who is present on stage, print speeches in prose or verse, choose specific words at the expense of others, even decide when a character is no longer a king - and in the process determine what constitutes Shakespeare's works" (42).

Citation


Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare's Modern Collaborator's. London: Continuum. 2008. Print.

Notes on "(Dis)Embodied Letters"

c.f. Jerome McGann The Textual Condition.

Leah Marcus, in her article "Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of Dr. Faustus" (Renaissance Drama n.s. 20 (1989): 1-29), argues that both the A and B texts of Dr. Faustus can claim aesthetic integrity in their own right, and that neither comes any closer to "the absent authorial presence we call Marlowe" (284).

"post-structuralist theory has taught us [that] the idea of the original is not only misleading, but wholly illusory" (285).

Traditional textual critics typically attempt to link texts to an authorial agent as a way of authorizing their own interpretations of text, but while texts may be understood as the instruments of an authorial agent, they also bear traces of "nonagential" composition. Shakespearean texts are the product of collaborative intervention from agents of printshops, scriveners, and playhouses, and thus so-called "accidentals" form an essential part of a text (286).

"Texts -- like history -- exist in spite of us" (287).

The text of Antonio's letter to Bassanio is, in the folio text, clearly set off in italic text, and is otherwise unassigned: while Portia is given a speech prefix before and after the reading of the letter, no speech prefix is assigned to the letter itself (290). "[The letter] has no voice (that Portia or Bassanio voices the letter on stage is either purely conjectural or merely convenient)" (emphasis mine) (291). What a load of crap. It is conjectural in so far as a servant, or some other present person on stage may read the letter, but it is not "merely convenient," it is theatrically necessary. Stern has shown how letters were often separated from their surrounding texts, but if the letter was not meant to be read out loud, nothing at all would have been printed on it. There is an insignificant chance that anyone would have seen the text of the letter on the comparatively intimate Blackfriars stage, let alone at the Globe.

In his 1987 New Cambridge edition of Merchant, M. M. Mahood proposes that the distinction between Solanio, Salarino, and Salerio is one that can be resolved by a director in performance, which very likely was what would have happened in Shakespeare's company, but the three characters ought to be preserved in print because they were all present in the manuscript (295 - 296). This presumes that the manuscript can be reconstructed through print, and we should know better by now, but also "constitutes a performative version of the logocentrism described by Derrida: spoken language is imagined as prior to and more immediate than the written" (297). Ah.... I wasn't going to pull Derrida into this, but if someone else wants to, who am I to argue?

"It seems to me not much to matter how there came to be three characters with such names in the Hayes quarto, but simply that there came to be these three "letteral" configurations we have decided to call characters. The matter of the three Sallies is important here not because it stands as yet another site for our intervention in the attempt to solve a textual crux, but rather precisely because it marks the eruption -- inexplicable and yet undeniable -- of the accidental" (303).

"To clean up accidents in a text is to construct a narrativized world of total causality and accountability, a purely rational world in which everything is under control" (305 - 306). Such practice is untenable; it can only create texts within the historiographical framework of the editorial narrative. As Mahood demonstrates, there are no fewer than 16 "characters" (where each speech prefix and potential variant spelling represents its own unique character) in Merchant, and each are just as authorial as the other (306).

Citation

Marchitello, Howard. "(Dis)Embodied Letters and The Merchant of Venice: Writing, Editing, History." Shakespeare: The Critical Context. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen Ed. New York: Garland Publishing. 1999. p. 283 - 311. 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 citations.

Notes on "What is an Editor?"

"Textual practice for the past twenty years has been increasingly faced with the necessity of abandoning the notion that was basic to the bibliography practiced by Greg and Bowers, that by comparing texts we can arrive at a single, authentic, original, a reconstruction of the author's final manuscript" (117).

Playtexts are built with a fluidity that enabled them to change as the conditions of performance change, and thus the printed text represents only a single stage of an ongoing process. Writers complaining that players have altered their scripts in performance helps demonstrate this point (117).

Uuncorrected sheets were bound into books with corrected ones, and there was nothing in print technology that required this: it is merely reflective of a Renaissance mindset that saw printed books as a fluid medium (117). I disagree with this, partially based on some of the other notes in this journal: hiring a proofreader was an added expense, and wouldn't always be done, and since time was money, when a proof reader was employed, even if only checking for typographical errors, it would mean idle press time to stop the press for the ten minutes Orgel says would have been necessary.

The fundamental assumption of most editors is that there is a "perfect" text that the editor should be true to in creating new editions of that text (118).

Producing a modernized text is not the best way to preserve the print archeology of the originals, but it is necessary to make Shakespeare accessible to the majority of modern readers, and thus the two key tasks of an editor are irreconcilable (119).

"Every facsimile is identical to every other one, and in this respect facsimiles falsify the essential nature of the Renaissance book" (121).

Summary


Orgel observes the material instability of the printed book, and the material instability of text itself ("proud" vs "provd" in Sonnet 129). He never says what an editor is, or proscribes a practice for editing, but instead illustrates that editors will often seek two contradictory goals in creating their editions. Editorial logic will, of necessity, be left to the individual judgment of the editor and the needs of the editor's audience.

Citation


Orgel, Stephen. "What is an Editor?" Shakespeare: The Critical Context. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen Ed. New York: Garland Publishing. 1999. p. 117 - 123. 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 citations.

Notes on "Back by Popular Demand"

The absence of the choruses from the quarto makes that text fundamentally different from the folio, and where critics like to point to the ambiguity of national politics and militarism that Henry V implies, the textual justification for those implications are found only in the folio text. The only reference to a contemporary event in the canon, the comparison to Essex's expedition, and the reminder that all of Henry's gains will be lost by his successor are both absent from the quarto text (315).

Despite the assumption that the folio text of Henry V is set from the "acting edition" of the play, there is no evidence to support this, and while we will never know what was actually acted on the London stages, it is quite probable that the quarto text actually represents a closer approximation to performance than the folio (316).

Greg's theory of memorially reconstructed texts does not adequately account for the gaps between the quarto and folio text: whole scenes and sense-changing speeches are completely left out, and the theory of an actor with a bad memory creating a transcription cannot account for the absence of such crucial material (317).

Wells and Taylor argue that the quarto of Henry V represents a memorial construction of a previously performed text cut for touring, and argue that the reduction in the quarto removes thirteen speaking parts (321 - 322). King, of course, disagrees.

Taylor himself admits problems with his theory: cast reduction cannot have been the motivation for the removal of the first scene, which casts a cynical eye on the military affair as the English Court tries to invent reasons to invade France, or of the Jamy/MacMorris scene, or of the substitution of Clarence for Bedford, or of some of the cuts in the Harfleur scene (322).

"No single hypothesis is likely to be able to explain all the instances of textual divergence; and... it is better to admit this in advance than be forced to introduce exceptions that shake the primary hypothesis at its roots" (322 - 323).

English monarchs were always interested in controlling the narrative of history, and Elizabeth was no exception. The printing of Q Henry V, coming as it did on the heels of the Essex rebellion, The LC's Men's involvement in the presentation of Henry IV the night before, and in the face of a 1 June 1599 Bishop's Order prohibiting the printing of histories, was likely to be censored if the LC's men did not censor the text themselves; removing the choruses and other controversial scenes turns the play into an unproblematic celebration of a popular monarch, whom audiences would  have likely instinctively linked with Elizabeth (325 - 330).

Summary

Theatrical considerations may not be the only ones that lead to the abridgment of a text, whether for print, performance, or both. Patterson succinctly demonstrates how the quarto version of Henry V could represent an edition of the text made for political expediency, and creates an implicit warning about trying to understand the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries outside of the political and professional context of the late 16th/early 17th century professional London playhouses.

Citation

Patterson, Annabel. "Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of Henry V." Shakespeare: The Critical Context. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen Ed. New York: Garland Publishing. 1999. p. 313 - 346. 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 citations.

Notes from "The Kindest Cut" Forum

Mary Baldwin College's Shakespeare and Performance Program hosted the second of their discussion forums on the theory and practice of cutting the texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries this past Sunday (Nov 14), and you better believe I was there with my keyboard clacking away. Between Merry Devil, the upcoming Second Shepherds' Play, and my Dramaturgy class, I've had to do more textual emendation than someone who isn't getting paid good money for it should have to in a semester, and lets face it, I'm not done yet. So here are some notes from the event. Please be advised that this was one of those situations where there was so much good stuff flying around the room that I couldn't keep up, so while representative of the discussion, these notes are far from complete, and I offer my advance apologies if I have mis-noted anywhere below as I very likely have done so.

Serving as our panelists were Lue Douthit, Director of Literary Production and Dramaturgy at the
Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Alan Armstrong, dramaturg at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Emeritus Professor of Humanities and Director of the Center for Shakespeare Studies, Southern Oregon University (and visiting professor here at Mary Baldwin), and John Harrell, one of the most long serving members of the resident acting company at the American Shakespeare Center.

Before beginning the question and answer session, Paul Menzer, who moderated, invited the panelists to share some opening remarks.

Lue Douthit
The answer to any question you ask anyone in the theatre is "it depends." Thus is her answer to the question of if you cut the text. The process of cutting the text as specific to the performance with the company of actors she is working on at the moment. Douthit recounts that she once cut the "double double toil and trouble lines" from Macbeth, and that she would not do so again.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival operates, with the exception of certain plays such as King Lear and Hamlet, under a three-hour rule as its primary principle of cutting the text. Likewise, different spaces will limit the availability of actors: the indoorspace, for example, has only twelve dressing room spaces, and so the cast size is limited.

Dramaturgy is the study of dramatic structure. Every play has structure or bones, and if you can determine the structure of the play you can best determine what is to be cut. You thus should not simply cut 20% of everyone's lines as a rule, as that will create a cut that will not necessarily conform to the structure of the play.

Different actors bring different skill sets, and changes in the cast should influence the cutting of the text. Cross gendered casting also plays into OSF performance, and there they must likewise make the decision as to whether it is a woman playing a man, or whether the role is amended to female.

"If you don't cut enough by the first day of rehearsal, it is a horrible bargaining process that happens." Actors will not necessarily deliver the lines at the pace the dramaturg/director anticipates, and once actors start working with the text it becomes difficult to get them to release lines. In a recent Love's Labour's Lost at OSF they have cut into the structure of the play, with the theory that they could be more generous to actors who wanted to put things back into the play.

Alan Armstrong
Echoes the idea that "it depends." For his recent production of Hamlet at the Bohmer, the director and the actor playing Hamlet had prepared a cut of the text before Armstrong got to it. At that point, the
approximate running time was close to four hours, and even following dramaturgical meetings, only an additional four minute s was cut.

Armstrong pursues the policy of dramaturg as "devil's advocate." Even if you agree with the cuts, the job of the dramaturg is to think through the logic of the cuts and the implication of those cuts on the play.

Armstrong offers the example of 4.4 of 1 Henry IV as an example of a big cut. The characters in the scene do not re-appear in the play, and they provide no new information. It is therefore a wonderful candidate for a cut. However, King Henry mentions the Archbishop of York at the end of the play, and also figured prominently in the rebellion of 2 Henry IV. The character "seems to be a trailer for part 2" in some ways, and while Shakespeare gives York some personal motivations for rebellion in the scene, he drops those for the second part. Thus the structure of the play itself, and its impact on the sequel (since
they're running it in rep with 2 Henry IV) is also negligible. Armstrong argues that this small, private scene, sandwiched between two war council scenes as it is, may have been written for variety in the play (like similar scenes in the canon), or may have been designed to allow for a costume change. Cutting the
scene did not create any problems.

"Tracking the consequences is one of the most important thing that dramaturgs do."

John Harrell
discusses the difference between his cut for The Alchemist for the last Ren Season, and Look About You for the next. The Alchemist was cut from a prepared edition, but Look About You was in need of basic emendation (such as entrances and exits for characters), and thus they both have a different starting point.

Harrell has developed some basic guidelines to help him cutting the plays that have been colloquially referred to as "John's Don't List" over the past few days. It's been much requested, and lets face it, is probably the reason why you're reading this if you went to the talk. Without further adue:

• Beware low hanging fruit: i.e. anything that seems too easy to cut. If you instinctively think it should go, that might be a good reason for keeping it. Songs are really easy to cut half of, and certain scenes may only be present because Shakespeare's audiences are familiar with the source material. Also people who talk too much (i.e. Epicure Mamon or Palonius) are sometimes  supposed to talk to much.
• Things that are highly repetitive. There is something to be gained from repetitive things in the plays.
• Don't have a pencil in your hand the first time you read the play. 
• Things you don't understand: you may cut things that will work out on stage, or even things that actors will enjoy playing. 

Douthit
There's a difference between the five most known Shakespeare plays and everything else. "No one really cares if you cut Love's Labour's Lost."

Menzer
Something we've discussed so far is to be careful about cutting "information," but what constitutes "information?"

Armstrong

The history plays feature several long speeches where a lot of information is repeated, and it is tempting to cut some of those speeches in favor of a punchier dialog, but as Harrell says, repetition is sometimes part of the point. The scene in 1 Henry IV where King Henry and Hal come together in the middle of the play is also odd for modern audiences, as most modern audiences will want the play to feel like a tennis match, but the scene is a series of long speeches to Hal. The task of the dramaturg is to ask what is to be gained from the King's rant.

Ralph Alan Cohen (ASC Co-founder and Director of Mission)
Beware of cutting things you're afraid the audience won't understand, even when you understand it.


Matt Davies (MBC MLitt/MFA Program Professor)
Asks if, when you're cutting blank verse, if you feel the need to stitch the meter back into your cut.

Harrell and Cohen both respond that they try to. Douthit argues that, the more you know the structure of what is happening, the better you'll be able to decide whether this is necessary or desirable. She has sutured the verse together at times, but at others she is content to leave a few empty feet. Armstrong argues that it's the meter not that penta that's important, and will work much harder to keep the iamb than the line.

MFA Candidate Casey Caldwell asks if, over repeated cuttings, there is enough of the structure present in the play to indicate that certain things will be kept across cuttings, even if cutting is always circumstantial. Armstrong thinks this is true. "It's like filet on your fish, you kind of know where to put the knife in and where to follow."

Douthit argues that certain repetitions are exciseable, but not the themes that land on the audience emotionally. She goes on to suggest  front-loading information on the audience, and then cutting away from it. For contemporary audiences, it's the accumulation of data that starts to bog down the play. She argues starting cuts in the 5th act so the dramaturg (and ultimately the audience) is able to track where everything goes. 

ASC Actor Bob Jones asks if we might be cutting the wrong way: it's possible that some things would play quite nicely on the stage that are cut by the dramaturg. No one likes having a line cut, but Jones argues it might make more sense to start with the entire play in rehearsal and then cut back from there.

Douthit agrees that the process of rehearsal can create some interesting possibilities, and one of the things they've started doing at OSF is doing a read through with as much of the cast as possible before the season for which it rehearses.

Menzer asks if there has ever been a point when the dramaturgs realized they screwed up and cut too much or ineffectively.

Harrell recounts the story of someone cutting Cymbeline to the bare essentials and then adding lines back to get the line count up to about 2400, and that was not so effective a way of cutting. 

Douthit points out that is more often the opposite case: the dramaturg realizes they have not cut enough. Information accumulates in such a way that it feels repetitive to the modern audience.  

Harrell notes that actors will sometimes cling to peculiar lines that make the scenes make sense for them. Actors will frequently want easy jokes and offensive material, and things where they refer to relationships with other characters. Even if you don't need the latter of these, it tends to help them understand their characters.  

"The more you get actors involved," Douthit says, presenting your cuts as a first draft and then asking for help, "the better the esprit du corp you get in the room." Actors will begin arguing against cuts they see as essential, even when they're not their own lines. 

Armstrong agues against combining multiple "marginal" characters into a single, all purpose character.  

Douthit argues that, to keep alive the theatricality of transformational acting, doubling is essential. It may have been a simple matter of finding another actor who was backstage and available to put on a crown and come back on as a king. Such doubling can create meaning for audiences even accidentally. 

MFA Candidate Paul Rycik asks about cutting prose, and how it compares to verse.

Armstrong answers that by cutting large sections of prose, you begin to lose the character of the language. It won't kill the audience to hear unfamiliar words, in fact it will often help them. Having the "slimy" contemporary language of the period helps color the performance. 

Menzer asks about leaving the offensive lines in, and how the ugliness of the language can be left intact, or when it shouldn't be left intact.

Douthit answers that it depends (and gets a laugh). She argues that, in every production, there are moments that take you out of the play, and sometimes consciously. The audiences who watched these plays were much more homogenous than our own, and every dramaturg/director must decide how much slander an audience will be able to absorb.

Menzer proposes that may more of a directorial function, and Douthit agrees. Cohen notes that there was much discussion about cutting the line "be not a niggard of your speech" from the ASC's current production of 2 Henry IV (which Cohen directed) because it has the potential to be offend.

Douthit argues that Ben Jonson made his published Folio more literary than his plays performed, and that Hemings and Condell likely did the same for Shakespeare. She compares this to textual ambiguity in modern texts as contracts will specify that a company must produce the published text of a play by Tennessee Williams, but there are sometimes multiple versions of that text (an acting edition, a reading edition, etc), and that the contract will not specify which of these is the more correct.

Caldwell asks if the panelists think the plays were written to be cut.

Douthit thinks so. She argues that the plays are probably performed more times in 1 year at OSF than in Shakespeare's lifetime, and thus it is quite possible that we know the plays better than the Chamberlain's/King's men ever could. She notes that he wrote roughly two plays a year, which is a lot, and that not everything he wrote is gold. "There is always something in every one of them that takes your breath away," she says, arguing that maybe 70% of what Shakespeare wrote is very good, but there's lots of it that doesn't work in terms of dramatic action. She concludes by quoting Bertolt Brecht "the proof of the pudding is in the eating."  

Those were all the notes I could manage to get from a very fascinating, at least from the point of view of this lit & phil nerd, of reasons and methods for cutting Shakespeare's text. Since it's my blog, I get to editorialize a bit that textual emendation and cutting is a very general thing that maybe applies more to the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries than other playwrights, but Douthit's citation of the problem of Tennessee Williams' plays very nicely drives home the point that these problems aren't going away. Cast sizes and running times keep shrinking, and the attention span of YouTube is becoming the new normal. It's a criterion that we're all going to need to work with. 

Notes on Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism

As I continue my readings in bibliography, I've moved on to "Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism" by G. Thomas Tanselle, which sounds like it should be right up my alley given the conundrums I'm dealing with in the preparation of a final text. Merry Devil has textual instability aplenty, and right now if there's one thing I'm clearly lacking, it's enough experience as an editor to have a guiding ideology of how to best proceed with this project. Lets see what I can learn here....

Tanselle begins with the observations that the study of texts as social objects that are newly edited each time they are read has become popular in the last half century, but that this does not necessarily invalidate the Greg-Bowers tradition of establishing authorial intent. The vogue for "anti-foundationalist" literary theory leads to an anti-foundationalist textual theory, but neither can be more correct than the other (1-3).

Bowers preferred dealing with the problems presented by specific situations to discussions of theory (3).

The question of "multiple authorship" can only be answered based on how one define multiple authors. In Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, Jack Stillinger defines multiple authorship so broadly that a single author must be someone who never incorporates anything outside of themselves into their work, and never revises it at a later time. Otherwise, any contribution made to a text is made by another "author." Tanselle finds this proposition ridiculous (3 - 5).

Stillinger's proposition is further undercut when he makes the distinction between changes that an editor makes to a text that are then authorized by the original writer, and changes that an editor makes to a text that are not; in this case calling them corruptions. These corruptions to the original authors text are, however, still authorized by the editor who makes them, and thus are "legitimate" for that particular new work (6). So, in a nutshell, if I make a change to a text by Shakespeare, I've corrupted Shakespeare's text at the same time that I've authorized by own, but my text has at least two authors (myself and Shakespeare). If an actor asks to change a word in the text and I let them, I am authorizing that change, and thus they become another author of text B, but if I don't and they do it anyway, they create a text C with three authors anyway. You can see how quickly this lies to madness, for if we follow this logic, by choosing to not make the change my actor suggests, they author a new edition because I have had to consider an alternative and choose not to use it, so they force me to re-evaluate my original choice, so in reality we create text C (actor changes word without me authorizing the change) and C prime (me not making the change after the actor has suggested it.  This sounds like a Caucus Race.

Questioning the importance of authorial intention in textual studies is a worthwhile endeavor, but only if it can account for how the socialized, anti-foundationalist understanding of a text can fit together with the foundationalist approach. "Textual idealism" is not a synonym for "textual perfection," and constructing a text as it was conceived of by the author at a certain point in time does not undermine the notion of further editions of that text as products of social and historical change, nor does it invalidate those other texts (12).

It is further important to distinguish that bibliographers who attempt to discern authorial intention are not attempting to discover an original idea behind the work, but are attempting to reconstruct a material work that is not extant in physical form (12).

An author may have simply made a mistake in writing down their ideas, or they may have been limited by available materials or technology, but these limitations or accidents do not invalidate the text they intended to write. An intentionalist editor is therefore not trying to recover the idea of the text, they are simply intending to recover the text that was conceived of, but not necessarily written down properly by the author (12). Honestly, I'm a little shaky on this one. When it comes to typos &c, seeing through to authorial intention, that is the idea behind the text, is almost necessary. When an author calls a character by the wrong name (for example, omitting "Sir" in a speech prefix) and names another character that is clearly not present in the scene, I don't think it wrong to say that we can see the idea behind the text. Reconstructing the material textual object would mean reconstructing the error, but in this case it is more useful to reconstruct the idea behind the text and simply note the error. There's no need to muck this up with poetic notions of trying to see through to the genius or the muse behind the idea, for in this case we are seeing an idea clearly manifested in symbolic form that, for whatever reason, simply did not translate well into a material object. Maybe this is just splitting hair between the meaning of "idea" and "text as conceived."

It is important to remember that an intended text is in itself the product of a historical (and a social) process. Since no author writes in a vacuum, the texts they produce, whether intended or unintended, are distillations of a particular historical/cultural moment, and the texts intended by authors at the moment of conception should have their place in the history of the text (13-14). Thus, understanding of an author's intention means having to understand the author's particular historical/social/cultural context.

Editors attempting to create a text that reflects an author's intention by making emendations do so by attempting to fix the text as intended at a specific time by the author. This can mean incorporating later emendations into an earlier text on the premise that those emendations more accurately reflect the intended earlier text, or vice versa. Still, the editor is also fixing the edited text in a certain moment in time, and as with any historical research, will be required to fill in the gaps with their own critical judgment (17).

In the anthology Editing in Australia, Peter Shillingsburg's "The Autonomous Author, the Sociology of Texts and Polemics of Textual Criticism" advocates an approach to reading, and thus editing, based on context. A text needs to be read in light of all possible contextual factors. This position is not a new one, but Shillingsburg sets it forth very well, and this essay is therefore worth following up with (23).

James McLaverty suggests the two important questions when considering a text are what versions are, and which text editors should present to readers. He goes on to argue that any distinctive "utterance" of a text somehow connected to other utterances constitutes a new version. The text editors should present to readers encapsulates one or more of the author's intended utterances, and also includes the structural apparatus for connecting these utterances, and for connecting this particular utterance with other utterances (25 - 26).

Joseph Grigley builds on McLaverty's work with the observation that individual utterances cannot be repeated because each utterance is its own event. Even if the precise words of an utterance can be repeated, its context cannot. Grigley's conception of the timely nature of utterances may not offer anything new to editors, who have known for generations that they can never recapture the complete context of a work, but it may help clarify what editors have done and will continue to do going forward: capture the interpretation of a textual moment (26).

The binary between "modernist editors" who seek to create a stable and definitive text and "post-modernist editors" who highlight the instability of texts and the value of interpretation is, as most binaries tend to be, too neat to be practical (30).

Morris Eave's entry in Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body offers a view of editing that delights in the instability of texts. He argues that all editorial decisions are legitimate, and links the decisions of the editor to the same decisions the artist makes as part of "the process of history." Intentionalist editing is one more form of interpretation and creation, and should not be dismissed (32 - 33). A-men I say to that. The fact is that it's very difficult to present Renaissance or earlier, or even early 20th century or earlier plays in their entirety to a modern audience. The theatrical conventions of the time will dictate an audiences expectation and basic level of tolerance for how long they're willing to sit still. Like it or not, in the early 21st century, that means the 10 or 15 minute span of a YouTube video.

Tanselle's got my back on this last point. I'll quote him here: "Thus when Eaves says that 'whatever is may be . . . on its way to becoming right,' he recognizes that change may be necessary to produce rightness for a given audience" (33).

Ann R. Meyers, in "Shakespeare's Art and the Texts of King Lear" notes that even attempts at documentary editing still require a degree of selection and interpretation. In presenting the two versions of King Lear in their Oxford Edition, Wells and Taylor have made emendations to the quarto Lear where Qa has "crulentious," Qb "tempestuous," and F "contentious," Wells and Taylor have used the Folio reading in their quarto version of the text based on paleographic evidence that demonstrates the Folio provides the correct reading to the compositor error of the Quartos. Despite similar paleographic evidence for reading for the correctness of Folio's "Come unbutton" (as opposed to Qa's "Come on be true" or Qb's "Come on") Wells and Taylor have left the reading of "come on be true" because it makes to them "local and contextual sense" (34 - 35). Wells and Taylor are the ones that determine the sense of their inclusion or rejection of certain readings, and thus they still are creating a text that is a conflation; an edition of their own interpretation.

In "Text as Matter, Concept, and Action," Peter L. Shillingsburg offers an ambitious argument for the existence of non-material texts, in which he demonstrates how non-material texts are linked to their material counterparts. He conceives of works as entities that are manifested in material and linguistic form, but that the conceptual version of a text should not be confused with the Platonic ideal of "text" (37). This is definitely one I'll have to read. Where does one draw the line between ideas, texts as conceived but not written, and the text that appears on the page. I can only imagine some future textual scholar trying to make sense of the stew of tracked changes that Google Docs keeps of "Battleground State." Precisely how much weight should we give to the text as conceived when the author might decide that the text as conceived sucks, and needs extensive re-conception before it's fit to be put in front of people?

Texts can only be understood through observation, but every observer has the right to choose how they wish to observe a text (or anything else for that matter). Any theory of textuality must encompass every process by which a text may be observed, which includes a range of methods and tastes as diverse as the number of observers (39-40). Observing a text through an historical scope requires a different apparatus than observing that text with a final performance in mind, and observing a text as a work of art fit to be hung on a wall requires a still different apparatus. Before presenting an edition of Merry Devil, I must determine who that edition is for.

Paul Eggert, in "Document and Text: The 'Life' of the Literary Work and the Capacities of Editing," also argues that all editions of a work should be considered and studied as authentic iterations of the work and should be studied as authentic (41).

Tanselle says this of Grigely's "Textual Criticism and the Arts: The Problem of Textual Space," but I think it bears quoting, as it has general application, and should, I think serve as a framework for understanding any essay arguing for any theory of a text: "Practically everyone understands that the experience of a text, like all other experiences, is colored by one's entire previous life and that it will continue to reverberate in one's mind, affecting all experiences afterward. An essay that says something like this does not mark any advance in thinking" (45).

If modern approaches to editing emphasize the plurality of texts rather than the intentions of a single author, than it is curious that modern textual scholars have a low regard for the work of the intentionalist editors of previous generations. The texts they produced are, after all, a further contribution to the plural text that modern textual scholars celebrate (49 - 50).

New theoretical insights into the nature of editing have the danger of creating a sense of the futility of the editing process. If all versions of a text ought to be considered in their own right, it is impossible to present a modern reader with an accurate distillation. It is likewise impossible to create an edition that encompasses the needs of all possible readers of a text. Through this, it is important to remember that editing a text is a creative activity, akin to writing an essay or giving a performance (50 - 51). So it is more than helpful, it is essential to determine the ultimate goal of a text before it is produced. Is the goal for the text to be read in a classroom or to be performed on a stage. What kind of classroom? What kind of stage? Determining the ideal audience for a work will provide the context in which the work is to be created. The way you advertise your show for a Philly Fringe audience will of necessity be different from the way you advertise your show for a largely academic audience in rural Virginia.

While some more modern philosophies of editing have heaped criticism on previous generations of editors for preferring a "single text" edition of a work, the form of the codex lends itself to this style of presentation. Critical editors of the past might very well have wanted to present multiple text editions of their work, but this option was unavailable given the physical and economic limitations they faced (52-53).

Here's something worth quoting: "The acts of constructing texts and works are social events, as many textual theorists have been telling us; but we are not going as far as we can toward understanding those events if we limit ourselves to surviving objects and exclude from our deliberations the mental events that are a fundamental part of the textual process" (58).

Quoting Virginia Wolfe: "I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. . . . But a novel, as I say, to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable but only visible; so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when
one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all my novels were first rate before they were written" (58-59).

Summary: Texts that are conceived are inherently different from texts that are written, and if we are truly to explore textual objects as cultural artifacts, this requires seeing beyond the words printed or written on them. The form of the printed book has as much as any guiding philosophy led to the development of single text editions, but single text editions will always be a requirement of publishing. Someone with the proper knowledge and training will always be necessary to distill information that a less well informed reader does not have, or does not have access to. In the complete social history of a text, a single text edition of that text is another version of the text.


Wow. This was a thick survey of the development of theories of editorial instability and editorial theory. It's left me with a lot to think about, and some other things to explore.