New Bibliography

Present-day editing exists in the shadow of a mid-twentieth century movement that presupposed that a definitive version of the original manuscript could be recovered: New Bibliography. Fredson Bowers advocated that in ‘stripping the veil of print from the texts, one may recover a number of the characteristics of the manuscript that

8 _{In the entry for ‘arch’ the OED claims that the earliest use of ‘arch’ comes in 1297 to ‘The Court of}

Arches’ which was the ecclesiastical court of appeal for the province of Canterbury, formerly held at the church of St. Mary-le-Bow, so named from the arches that supported its steeple. See

<www.oed.com> [date accessed 28 April 2012].

9 _{See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy,trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University}

Press, 2000).

10 _{This relates back to The Comedy of Errors: in the doubling of the twins, ‘one is genius to the other’}

(V.1.333). At first it seems that Shakespeare is acknowledging the idea of origins, but in failing to state to which twin he is referring (a theme running throughout the play) he maintains the uncertainty of the origin and, in practice, refutes the possibility of an origin. Here an origin is the beginning of a linear progression, where something follows something else, where simultaneity does not exist, even if the difference between the two is only marginal. Origins are ambiguous in the play more broadly, for although we are told one twin was older, suggesting a precedence, it is again left ambiguous which twin was the first. The closing lines of the play reinforce simultaneity rather than origin: ‘let’s go hand in hand, not one before the other’ (V.1.426).

was given to the printer. From such evidence one may eventually determine, not impressionistically as at present but scientifically, which were Shakespeare’s own papers’.11

He assumes that there was an authoritative, finished manuscript of a play which originated from a single author, a manuscript which is no longer available because of the interferences of the printing process, of various scribes and

compositors. Through a scientific approach that accumulates, compares, measures and gathers evidence, it is possible to ascertain, according to a set of fundamental principles, what Shakespeare originally wrote and therefore identify the ‘errors’ in the text.

This is not to present New Bibliography as having an overly simple approach to editing. W. W. Greg is open about the deficiencies of this scientific approach and that textual crticism is ‘tentative’.12

He sets down rules for dealing with a

Shakespearean text: seven straightforward, logical steps for coming to a satisfactory result. He displays a level of confidence that is absent from present Shakespearean editing, claiming that ‘the text of the plays contained in the early editions, though no doubt corrupted in one way and another, is nevertheless in most cases of very

respectable and even high authority.’13

Despite Greg’s title—The Editorial Problem

in Shakespeare—he sees editing Shakespeare to be less problematic than perhaps

editors at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a sense, the problems of a Shakespearean text have become magnified and more salient after decades of living with them rather than feeling enthusiastic and confident of their removal.

11 _{Fredson Bowers, ‘Today’s Shakespeare Texts, and Tomorrow’s’, Studies in Bibliography}

Vol. 19, (1966), 39-65, p. 59.

12 _{W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. ix.} 13

New textualism, working in the legacy of New Bibliography, has critiqued its predecessor’s assumptions.14

New Textualism is the product of poststructuralist thought on textual criticism. Plurality and indeterminacy are now an accepted part of Shakespearean editing, ushered in by the division of King Lear into two texts, the Quarto and Folio, claimed to be two different versions of the play.15 Focus has shifted to the materiality of the text and, according to John Jowett, editing now sees texts as material objects that are subject to error. If two texts differ, those differences can be framed in terms of questions about textual production rather than

deformation.16 Errors, once considered bad, are now as likely to be thought of as revealing. Jowett argues that since the division of King Lear, ‘in the case of a textual variant editors now had to consider not simply which reading was correct, but whether the variant represents either two alternative valid readings or one valid reading alongside one error.’17 The plurality of textual variation, and by extension uncertainty, has been rescued from being cast off as error. An editor now makes room for censorship, scribal confusion, authorial revision, theatrical adaptation or compositorial space-saving as possible alternatives to error. This, in turn, opens out the scope of understanding to include valuable historical information these

alternative explanations may bring.

It is important to emphasise that since New Bibliography, the editing of Shakespeare has moved on, its principles altered in the intervening decades. Yet

14 _{On New Textualism, see Randall McLeod, ‘Un-editing Shak-speare’, Sub-Stance, Vol. 10/11, Vol.}

10, no. 4 - Vol. 11, no. 1, Issue 33-34, (1981/1982), pp. 26-55; Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly,44, 1993; Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996); Laurie Maguire and Thomas L. Berger eds., Textual Formations and Reformations (London:

Associated University Presses, 1998. For a critique of New Bibliography, see Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

15

Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms. Shakespeare’s Two Versions

of King Lear, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

16 _{John Jowett, ‘Editing Shakespeare’s Plays in the Twentieth Century’, Shakespeare Survey Vol. 59,}

(2006), 1-19, p. 14.

17

there is still an ideal view of the text, on which basis some aspects are privileged above others according to an agreed set of principles that have their roots in New Bibliography and even earlier. As Leah Marcus points out, ‘[t]o an extent that few of us recognise, our standard editions are shaped by nineteenth-century or even earlier assumptions and ideologies.’18

Barbara Mowat notes that ‘[t]he belief of Bowers and other New Bibliographers remains current orthodoxy among Shakespeare editors, as one can see from the textual introductions to standard Shakespeare editions, where the editorial rationale is inextricably linked to the editor’s view of “the manuscript” seen as lying behind the chosen early printed text.’19 For Mowat, the structures in which we think about the texts are in themselves limiting: ‘editors continue to debate which version prints the authorial manuscript and which the theatrical “prompt- book,” or which prints the early holograph and which the holograph revision, and where a garbled early printed version can be accounted for only as the result of an actor’s memorial reconstruction’.20

As Mowat points out, modern editions of

Shakespeare still assume that the author’s hand is the ideal document and the further a text moves away from this the more it is ‘corrupted’.

A New Textualist approach might understand the semantics of error as unstable and consequently holds that removing errors may obscure important details in a text. Most obviously, textual cruces highlight this problem. Alteration of

difficulties in the text, often errors or variants, has been claimed to alter the text significantly and in unexpected ways given the size of the word or even letter to be amended. For example, notable editorial cruces that have a long critical and editorial

18 _{Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, p. 5.} 19

Mowat, ‘The Problem of Shakespeare’s Text(s)’, p. 132. Maguire makes the same observation: ‘The long-term influence of the New Bibliography can be seen in the apodeictic rhetoric of textual

introductions to most twentieth-century scholarly editions.’ See Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The Bad Quartos and Their Contexts, p. 22.

20

history are the wise/wife dilemma in The Tempest and Falstaff’s ‘babbled o’ green fields’/ ‘A Table of green fields’ from Henry V.21 The history of their treatment is more indicative of the ideology of the historical moment than any objective improvements to the text itself. In the twentieth and twenty-first century, attention has turned away from some conception of the ‘best’ way to amend a text to what those choices say about the editor and the imagined reader. Textual cruces reflect editorial attitudes and ideologies rather than pursuing ever closer approximations of the ‘correct’ text.

When the demand for authorial certainty and precision are dominant, the errors become a sub-text, a relegated second narrative that exists alongside a modern edition, suppressed to maintain the authority and holistic structure of the authorised version.22 Like any kind of social perversion, it must be concealed. Plurality, then, by extension, becomes a kind of perversity because of the need to present a single version. Even the editorial gloss that attends to ambiguous or uncertain meaning provides only one explanation of the many that may be appropriate. So the ambiguity that some poetic language works hard to achieve is restrained and even blacklisted by the editorial process.23 The official text, seeking a close relation to the author and its origin through a misapplication of the scientific process, obscures the erratical text that is wandering, uncontrollable and inexplicable, structurally and authorially uncertain and at the mercy of editors to expunge.

21 _{Discussed in detail by Jeanne Addison Roberts, ‘“Wife” or “Wise”—“The Tempest” 1.1786’,} Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 31 (1978), 203-208 and George Walton Williams, ‘Still Babbling of Green Fields: Mr. Greenfields and the Twenty-third Psalm’, Shakespeare, Text and Theater: Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio,eds. Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney, (Associated University Presses: London, 1999), 45-61.

22 _{For example, The Riverside Shakespeare has a ‘Textual Notes’ section at the end of the play where}

textual details that do not appear in the main body of the play are noted, such as the variants between texts. At the beginning of the Cambridge edition of Cymbeline, there is a ‘Textual Note’ which

explains the otherwise silent modernization of spelling, the treatment of stage directions and the division of the play into acts and scenes. See Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. Butler, pp. 73-4.

23 _{If ambiguity within language, especially poetic language, is not axiomatic, see William Empson,} Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: The Hogarth Press, 1991, first published 1930).