The Struggle for Shakespeare's Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice

by Gabriel Egan

• ISBN13: 9780521889179
• ISBN10: 0521889170
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-11-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

We know Shakespeare's writings only from imperfectly-made early editions, from which editors struggle to remove errors. The New Bibliography of the early twentieth century, refined with technological enhancements in the 1950s and 1960s, taught generations of editors how to make sense of the early editions of Shakespeare and use them to make modern editions. This book is the first complete history of the ideas that gave this movement its intellectual authority, and of the challenges to that authority that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Working chronologically, Egan traces the struggle to wring from the early editions evidence of precisely what Shakespeare wrote. The story of another struggle, between competing interpretations of the evidence from early editions, is told in detail and the consequences for editorial practice are comprehensively surveyed, allowing readers to discover just what is at stake when scholars argue about how to edit Shakespeare.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. viii
A note on references, quotations, names and pronouns	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
The fall of pessimism and the rise of New Bibliography, 1902-1942	p. 12
New techniques and the Virginian School: New Bibliography 1939-1968	p. 38
New Bibliography 1969-1979	p. 81
Intermezzo: the rise and fall of the theory of memorial reconstruction	p. 100
New Bibliography critiqued and revised, 1980-1990	p. 129
The 'new' New Bibliography: the Oxford Complete Works, 1978-1989	p. 167
Materialism, unediting and version-editing, 1990-1999	p. 190
Conclusion: the twenty-first century	p. 207
How early modern books were made: a brief guide	p. 231
Table of Shakespeare editions up to 1623	p. 237
Editorial principles of the major twentieth-century Shakespeare editions	p. 240
Works cited	p. 272
Index	p. 309
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