Naslov
Ungrateful Custom: Johnson, Steevens, and the Variorum Tradition

Autori
Lupić, Ivan

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, ostalo, znanstveni

Skup
Johnson and Shakespeare, Pembroke College, University of Oxford

Mjesto i datum
Oxford, Ujedinjeno Kraljevstvo, 07.08.2015. - 09.08.2015

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
Shakespeare editing ; Samuel Johnson ; George Steevens ; Edmond Malone ; variorum

Sažetak
One of the many things for which Samuel Johnson deserves to be praised is his ability to recognize in George Steevens a gifted Shakespearean and a worthy editorial successor. Steevens’s first comments on Shakespeare are found in the Appendix to Johnson’s 1765 edition, but by the end of that same year Steevens prepared his own reprint of the Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare (published in 1766) and by 1773, when the second edition of Johnson’s Shakespeare was published, Steevens managed to establish himself as one of the leading authorities on Shakespeare’s texts. Writing to David Garrick in 1772, while revising and expanding Johnson’s edition, Steevens complains about the excess of commentary and describes Shakespeare as being “wrapped up in too many swaddling clothes.” For this he blames Johnson, “the elder of his nurses, ” who “was rather obstinate, and determined to adhere closely to certain old customs, (variorum I think they call them) introduced by the two Burmans, and other Dutch midwives of oppressive memory.” Ironically, by the end of the century Steevens himself became one of the most eloquent defenders of the variorum practice in Shakespeare editing. The focus of this paper is Steevens’s 1793 edition of Shakespeare’s plays and the role it had both in consolidating the eighteenth-century editorial tradition and in shaping the work of Steevens’s great editorial contemporary, Edmond Malone. The rivalry between these two towering editorial figures cannot, I argue, be properly understood without reference to the contested legacy of Johnson’s work on Shakespeare.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija, Interdisciplinarne humanističke znanosti, Kazališna umjetnost (scenske i medijske umjetnosti), Književnost

POVEZANOST RADA