Eighteenth-Century Editing, ‘Appropriation’, and Interpretation

Summary

Eighteenth-century literary editing, of Shakespeare as well as Milton and other authors, has sometimes been characterized as tending to alter and construe the text in the light of distinctively eighteenth-century, and often distinctively personal, tastes and knowledges. That view has been subject to especially serious and repeated challenge in the last few years, but survives at some points in the writings of distinguished Shakespearian commentators, including Margreta de Grazia and Gary Taylor. In my own study of the subject, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing (Cambridge University Press), to some of the materials and arguments of which this essay will recur, I have attempted to demonstrate that a number of the significant works of eighteenth-century scholarship and scholarly editing are based on coherent and often well-formulated theoretical understandings of interpretation, which profess to establish authorial readings, and to understand an original, authorially intended, meaning.