This collection brings together essays written over the last thirty years that question the editorial compulsion to elucidate, emend, or explain (what editors themselves perceive to be) the problems, opacities, and inconsistencies of Shakespeare's works. Reading the essays together, however, it becomes clear that Orgel's issue is not simply with the impulse toward elucidation, but with the shifting cultural forces driving that impulse: what were the circumstances that caused not only editors but also readers, performers, and audiences to identify certain things and not others as problems, and as the type of problems that called for solutions?
In the collection's titular essay, Orgel reads eighteenth-century forgeries and legends (that Shakespeare played the Ghost in Hamlet; that Hamlet and Richard II were performed on a merchant ship anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1608) alongside “another kind of forgery relating to Shakespeare, which is entirely accepted and passes unnoticed as simply part of the editorial process: the practice of emendation and elucidation” (20). As he elaborates in “The Poetics of Incomprehensibility” through an examination of textual opacities in The Winter's Tale, editorial yielding to the temptations of sense over (apparent) nonsense has tended to obscure the extent to which obscurity itself might be part of a text's meaning: “Shakespeare's age,” he reminds us, “found incomprehensibility a positive virtue” (62).
Similarly, in “The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole,” Orgel contrasts the editorial drive toward completeness (both on the level of individual works and that of the Shakespearean canon) with the marked and often self-conscious incompleteness exhibited by the plays and poems themselves. Orgel pursues Shakespearean incompleteness further in “No Sense of an Ending” and “Lascivious Grace: Seductive Evil in Jonson and Shakespeare,” reading the famous “missing” couplet at the end of Sonnet 126 and Iago's notorious silence at the end of Othello as related emblematic instances of “dramatic vindictiveness, . . . where the poet, the witty deviser of conceits, schemes, and devices, really is in control” (44). These are moments where to elucidate would be precisely to miss the point.
Although much of the collection focuses on “Shakespearean inconsistencies” that were “noticeable only to editors (and thus first noticeable in the nineteenth century)” (86), the essays also consider aspects of the plays that would have seemed much more problematic or surprising to early audiences than to modern readers and spectators, whose generic expectations are probably not disappointed in quite the same way by the forestalled marriages at the ends of Twelfth Night and Love's Labor's Lost, for example, and who are unlikely to emerge from a performance of King Lear with the feeling that their sense of British history had been violated by the death of that play's protagonist.
Indeed, as Orgel elaborates in “Revising King Lear,” for all the scholarly attention that has been lavished on the textual cruxes and problems that emerge from the discrepancies between the Quarto and Folio versions of Lear, modern readers are apt to miss some of the (from an early modern perspective) more interestingly problematic elements of the play—elements that are directly engaged in another revision that today receives far less attention: Nahum Tate's 1681 rewriting, which ends notoriously (but in a way that Shakespeare's own audiences would have expected) with Lear's and Cordelia's survival. If Tate's Lear is “interesting as a critical reading of Shakespeare, confronting genuine problems in the play” that have escaped the grasp of editorial elucidation, the last two essays in the collection look to more recent performance history as an alternative site for encountering Shakespearean indeterminacies ignored, suppressed, or explained away by the editorial tradition (125).
Much as a retrospective collection like this might reflect the canonical status of Orgel himself as one of the preeminent Shakespeare scholars of our time, Orgel's own commitment to the idea that “the book is not the play” (a mantra repeated several times throughout the essays)—and that “there is never a ‘final’ version”—holds true for this book as well (2). Like the manifold “false starts, second thoughts, and changes of mind” that he deftly excavates from the Shakespearean text and that he reminds us are “characteristics of any work in progress” (2), the “occasional inconsistencies, repetitions, and things” he admits to having “changed [his] mind about” over the course of the thirty years of scholarship represented here trace the development of a line of thinking that has come to seem so familiar that it is easy to forget that it is no more inevitable (or perhaps even internally consistent) than the Shakespearean text itself (5).
However, if it is true that “the one thing we really do know about Shakespeare's original text is that it was hard to read” (2), the same cannot be said of these essays, which are decidedly readable (and rereadable), in spite—or because—of the sly caveat concluding his introduction: that he has “not undertaken any major revisions” (5).
