3 - Editions and Textual Studies

Summary

When considering some of the editions and textual studies published in the last year or so, it is hard not to be reminded of the Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ On the one hand, the theories and certainties of the New Bibliography seem to be coming under more and more pressure with the beginnings of a movement proclaiming the death of the editor and the arrival of the New Textualism. On the other hand, the well-disciplined advance of the Oxford and Cambridge series continues, producing high-quality scholarly editions which stand firm against some of the most pressing current doubts and questionings. Editors and anti-editors lob brickbats over the parapet at their enemies (or simply ignore one another), and what Shakespeare did or did not write continues to receive detailed attention. All categories are questioned – but not at the same time, for that way, and this is what makes the times so worrying, madness lies.

It was Christmas Eve in The Times Literary Supplement and under the heading 'Hamlet by Dogberry' Brian Vickers effectively laid into Graham Holderness's and Bryan Loughrey's edition of Hamlet q1 in the Harvester 'Shakespearean Originals: First Editions' series. Vickers attacked their grasp of textual history and scholarship, dismissing their 'fiction that the pirated Quarto makes sense on its own' and concluded that the 'Harvester editors have presented the texts in an ideologically predetermined frame, denying editorial responsibilities while performing some of them sloppily.' Vickers's powerful polemic was perhaps aimed not just at Holderness's and Loughrey's slim volume, but at the growing trend which in addition to questioning what 'bad quartos' are, also believes (to put it crudely) that the editor's task is to make the textual materials available in an unmediated form so that the reader is allowed to construct whatever sort of edition he or she wants or needs.