3 - Textual Studies

Summary

Two volumes have now been added to the New Cambridge Shakespeare: Pericles, edited by J. C. Maxwell, and Othello, jointly edited by Alice Walker and John Dover Wilson. Editing Pericles is a thankless job. The only text is a wretched repot, and no one but himself is likely to be satisfied with any editor’s solution of the problem of single or dual authorship. Maxwell is conservative in rejecting the suggestion that there was an Ur-Pericles and in believing in dual authorship. He is sound in dismissing George Wilkins, author of a prose romance about Pericles that is essentially a narrative report of the King’s Men’s play, as a collaborator; and he is courageous in checking doubtful readings in the play against the text of the novel. He disagrees with Mr Philip Edwards, a believer in Shakespeare’s sole authorship, who has argued that the extant text is the product of two reporters, the first of whom did incalculably greater damage to Shakespeare’s Acts I and II than his fellow did to Acts III–IV; and although he corrects Edwards in some details he does not, in my opinion, upset his hypothesis. Maxwell cannot decide whether Shakespeare had a collaborator or took a poor play and after touching up the first part wrote the last three acts afresh. If there was a collaborator, Maxwell inclines towards Thomas Heywood, though he admits that he cannot explain how a dramatist for the Queen’s Men offered a manuscript to the King’s or acquiesced in Shakespeare’s rewriting it.