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"Alcides beaten by his [p]age": The Discipline of Comment in the Shakespeare Edition

One of the most incisive statements regarding the purpose of Shakespearean commentary in eighteenth-century England -- the era in which Shakespeare's texts were for the first time furnished with an annotative apparatus -- was made in the "Advertisement" to the 1793 "revised and augmented" fourth republication of the so-called Johnson-Steevens Shakespeare, unsigned but generally considered to have been written by George Steevens. As the editor points out, even some "manifestly erroneous" notes are retained in this new edition in order "to show how much the tone of Shakspearian criticism is changed" (viii). In other words, the apparatus serves not simply to assist the text (or the reader in approaching the text) but to be a record of its own formation and development. On the one hand, the edition is designed to perpetuate Shakespeare ; on the other hand, it perpetuates the scholarly tradition that links itself to Shakespeare. However, the selection of old and provision of new comment must always be performed judiciously, not least because it is the task of the editor to make sure that there is some space left on the page for the literary text. "Marginal criticism" (x), in Steevens’ s view, is a special sort of critical activity, spatially controlled by the object of annotation and, like a shadow, closely following the text that always soars above: Alcides served rather than beaten by his page. The relation between the text and its annotation thus becomes marked by an ongoing battle over authority, enacted on the page and defined by its limits. The paradox of annotation that we are still confronting and that is clearly visible in our contradictory responses to the annotated page of the modern Shakespeare edition ("cluttered with commentary" or "richly annotated"?) needs therefore to be studied with this problem in view. Rather than simply reasoning the need for annotation, our study of it needs to acknowledge the importance of both the nature of the margin and the nature of the critical activity appropriate for it. This paper is a preliminary, partly historical and partly theoretical, attempt in that direction.

Shakespeare; editing; commentary; longer note; material page

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