3 - Textual Studies

Summary

The New Cambridge Edition moves one volume nearer completion with the publication of Macbeth, a play that challenges and receives John Dover Wilson’s best efforts. Textually the edition has the same virtues—and faults—that W. M. T. Dodds describes so acutely in the first four pages of a memorable review of two earlier plays in the series, pages that should be read by every Shakespeare specialist, particularly those who contemplate editing one of the plays. Miss Dodds points out what has long been realized, that the fourfold aims and methods of the edition are mutually incompatible. These are, in Miss Dodds' words:

(1) To advance textual study.

(2) To advance the literary appreciation of the general reader.

(3) To present to the general reader a text embodying the results of specialist methods at present beyond that reader's ken.

(4) To give due weight to literary considerations, as well as to strict textual analysis, in arriving at an established text.

The matter of prime importance [Dodds continues] is the incompatibility of the first and third aims when handled in the way here chosen. A little reflection on the immediately practicable as distinct from the ultimately desirable makes plain their incompatibility within one and the same edition, were both to be consistently pursued: one cannot simultaneously advance an unfinished study and present its final or even its agreed results to a public to whom textual study must be rather mediated than laid out for scrutiny As long as critical method kept within the comprehension of the general reader, and editors were in fact required to be no more than especially gifted general readers, they could in one and the same edition appeal to scholar and general reader alike. But the new critical methods of the scholar are beyond the ken of the ordinary reader; therefore, what must be offered him is decision. One cannot at the same time offer the scholar what he needs: the material for decision (the presentation of alternatives, specialized debate, the tentative solution submitted for consideration).

But to assert that a New Cambridge text “is highly controversial and carries no guarantee by textual scholars” (Dodds, p. 373) is not to deny the brilliance of many of the editor's observations and conjectures or the eloquence of his aesthetic appreciation. The New Cambridge continues to be the most stimulating as well as the most controversial of editions.