Naslov
Shakespeare Collated: The Editorial Tradition and the 1793 Apparatus

Autori
Lupić, Ivan

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Ocjenski radovi, magistarski rad

Fakultet
Columbia University, English and Comparative Literature

Mjesto
New York, USA

Datum
28.04

Godina
2008

Stranica
80

Mentor
Kastan, David Scott

Ključne riječi
Shakespeare, editorial theory, critical edition, commentary tradition, George Steevens, Edmond Malone

Sažetak
The history of Shakespeare scholarship has always been marked by vigorous debate regarding the editing of Shakespeare’s texts. The last several decades, however, have witnessed an intensification in theorizing and consequently understanding the business not just of textual transmission (the focus, in many ways, of the so-called New Bibliography, the first systematically theorized approach to the study of Shakespeare’s texts) but of the editorial decisions made in connection with particular texts and the repercussions this has for the reading, interpretation and reception of Shakespeare, in the study and the theater alike. It is therefore all the more surprising that this extended and often exciting conversation – sometimes described in rather revolutionary and paradigm- shifting terms – has failed to pay sufficient attention to the interpretive side of the critical apparatus, the place where the critical encounter between the editor and the text is most visibly dramatized. The commentary consisting of explanations of archaic or defunct words, elucidations of syntactical oddities and discussions of obscure references to the complex discursive networks of the early modern period remains to this day an essential part of any Shakespeare edition that aspires to satisfy the twin demands of accuracy and usefulness. The division between the textual and the interpretive side of the apparatus happened early on and could be dated as far back as the nineteenth century (or even to the eighteenth century, with the strange example of Charles Jennens or the protracted publication history of Capell’s edition), but the total dispensation with the explanatory and interpretive side is more of an exception than a rule. The influential and controversial Oxford Shakespeare (1986) provides a bulky Textual Companion to its new rendering of the Shakespearean texts, but it has never produced a corresponding volume of indispensable “non-textual” annotation. It thus, even if only temporarily, brought to fruition a process the symptomatic traces of which are visible at the very beginning of serious editorial engagement with Shakespeare’s texts: among the eighteenth-century editors. The aim of this thesis is not so much to redirect our attention from the problematic status of the Shakespearean texts qua texts to the entirety of the critical apparatus as to insist on the inevitability of annotation – however frugal and however stringently disciplined – and consequently the need to study both its history and its present uses. It is in many ways anomalous, especially in view of the renewed interest in the value of the successive critical dispositions of the Shakespearean text, that George Steevens, the crucial figure in the development of the interpretive apparatus – exemplified in the eighteenth century in the so- called “variorum edition” – should be so consistently pushed to the margins of the debate. It is the intention of this essay to address this obvious gap in our understanding of the fortunes of the Shakespearean critical apparatus in the eighteenth century in order to see whether the contribution of George Steevens has anything valuable to tell us about not simply the Shakespearean past (which should in itself be rewarding enough) but about the present too. The thesis focuses on Steevens’s continuous investment in the variorum tradition, from Johnson’s 1765 edition to Reed’s 1803 edition – in no less than twenty-one volumes – which Steevens did not live to see published. As a cacophonous conference of critical voices vying with the classical text and with each other, the variorum commentary is always a monument to the (critical) culture of the present. In the study of this tradition we see that despite its professed subservience to the text it is designed to elucidate and illustrate, the interpretive apparatus gradually acquires a value of its own. Such a sophisticated and complicated and extremely vigorous engagement with the Shakespearean text can help us understand our own investments better. For this, however, we need to abandon the progressive models of historical explanation, which – although almost entirely discredited in treatments of general history – seem still to reign supreme in our accounts of criticism and scholarship of the past. If it is essential to understand that there will always be “friends to exploded explanations, ” it is no less important to acknowledge that every explanation – that of today as much as that of two centuries ago – is at its heart always potentially explosive.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filozofija

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