3 - Editions and Textual Studies

Summary

‘Editors engaged in modernisations of texts would be well advised to discuss their difficulties more fully in print for their mutual advantage and the formulation of some working conventions that will do the least damage.’ So wrote Fredson Bowers in 1959. In Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader, Stanley Wells draws on his experience as General Editor of the Oxford Shakespeare to further the open discussion advocated by Bowers a quarter of a century ago and promoted by Wells himself in Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling. At the same time, Wells challenges the view, implicit in Bowers’s phrase ‘the least damage’, that modernized editions are inevitably less scholarly than old-spelling ones, doing greater violence to the meanings of Shakespeare’s plays. Under the chapter heading ‘Old and Modern Spelling’, Wells argues that the disadvantages of modernization have been exaggerated, and shows how specific problems, including several over proper names, may be met by ‘reasoned decisions’.