Abstract
Chapter 4 analyses changing approaches to the editing of Shakespeare from attempts to produce an authoritative edition through to more experimental approaches. While an editor like Alexander Grosart exemplifies a late version of nineteenth-century ‘amateur’ editing, A.H. Bullen is considered as exemplifying a shift towards a more commercial view of the editing process. This chapter also contrasts the editing of Renaissance literature with approaches to the editing of pre-Renaissance literature.
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Notes
- 1.
There is virtually no critical account of Grosart’s editing , apart from the useful summary in John Delafons, ‘A.B. Grosart, “A Prince of Editors”: Tribute to a Victorian Scholar’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 60 (1956), 444–54.
- 2.
Ibid., pp. 448–9.
- 3.
Dayton Haskin, John Donne in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 103–118.
- 4.
References to Alexander B Grosart, ed., The Complete Poems of John Donne, 2 vols (1872–3).
- 5.
Grosart was given access to the Stephens manuscript by the then owner, F.W. Cosens; this is now Harvard MS Eng 966.6, discussed in the online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts by Peter Beal, cross referenced as DnJ∆23.
- 6.
Grosart follows his copytext by numbering this Elegy 19; in the Variorum Donne , it is No. 8, see The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, ed. Gary A Stringer et al., vol. 2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 163–77.
- 7.
Ibid., p. lxi; 165–77.
- 8.
Ilona Bell, ed., John Donne Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007).
- 9.
The Saturday Review, 30 June 1877.
- 10.
Here I differ slightly from Charles Larson, who, in his excellent essay on Grosart’s editions of Donne and Marvell , argues that Grosart’s real achievement was in paving the way for the revival of metaphysical poetry as a touchstone for a canonical approach to Renaissance literature, see Charles Larson, ‘Alexander Grosart’s Donne and Marvell: “Glorious Old fellows” in the Nineteenth Century’, William F. Gentrup, ed., Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Brepols, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 187–99.
- 11.
The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and Thomas Gornall, vol. 25 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 255.
- 12.
Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of George Herbert vol. 1 (1874).
- 13.
Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Dr. Farmer Chetham MS. (1873).
- 14.
See Online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, Mun A.4.15.
- 15.
See, for example, Joel Swann, ‘Copying Epigrams in Manuscript Miscellanies’, in Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, eds., Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (2014 rpt. London: Routledge , 2016); more generally see the essays in Manuscript Miscellanies c. 1450–1700, ed. Richard Beadle and Colin Burrow, special issue of English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 vol. 16 (British Library, 2011).
- 16.
Ibid., esp. pp. 11–14.
- 17.
See for example Fred Schurink, ‘Manuscript Commonplace Books, Literature, and reading in Early Modern England’, HLQ, 73 (2010), 453–69, special issue on ‘The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England’, ed. Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink.
- 18.
Alexander Grosart, ed., The Works in Prose and Verse of Nicholas Breton (Edinburgh, 1879), fly leaf of Oxford University English Faculty Library copy, XH 17.1.
- 19.
For the Davies edition, See Tom Lockwood, ‘Another New Manuscript of Sir John Davies’s Epigrams’, RES 67 (2016), p. 876.
- 20.
Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Life and Complete Work in Prose and verse of Robert Greene (1881–3).
- 21.
Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Complete Works of Thomas Nashe (1883–4).
- 22.
See the fascinating account by Diana Kichuk, ‘Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO)’, Literary and Linguistic Computing, 22 (2007), 291–303, including her analysis of the implications of remediating, i.e., transferring material from one medium to another.
- 23.
To take just one example, Professor Lorna Hutson, private communication.
- 24.
See David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer , 2015).
- 25.
See in particular the pioneering study by David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
- 26.
See the innovative study by Stephanie Trigg , Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
- 27.
Paul G. Ruggiers, ed., Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1984).
- 28.
See ibid., especially the brief summary by Ruggiers , pp. 8–11.
- 29.
B.A. Windeatt (in ibid., pp. 117–43) ascribes the beginning of modern editing of Chaucer to Tyrwhitt , with some justification, given Tyrwhitt’s insistence on respecting the authority of the manuscripts he consulted, and on indicating clearly any editorial deviation from them, but Tyrwhitt lacks the overall consistency and depth of Skeat .
- 30.
See the account by Thomas W. Ross in ibid., p. 154.
- 31.
For general biographical information, I draw on ODNB, and the account by Donald C. Baker in Ruggiers , pp. 156–69.
- 32.
See the excellent account by Robert Sawyer, ‘The New Shakspere Society, 1873–1894’, Borrowers and Lenders, 2 (2006), 1–11.
- 33.
See the excellent account by Ann Thompson , ‘Teena Rochfort -Smith, Frederick Furnivall , and the New Shakspere Society’s Four-Text edition of Hamlet’, SQ, 49 (1998), 125–39; like Thompson , I see this as underlining Furnivall’s interest in the role women could play in scholarly approaches to Chaucer, but for a counter view, see Antonia Ward, ‘“My love for Chaucer”: F.J. Furnivall and Homosociality in the Chaucer Society’, Studies in Medievalism, 9 (1997), 44–57, though Ward’s case is at its strongest in its skewering of the incipient masculinist assumptions in The New Chaucer Society, rather than in Furnivall .
- 34.
Ibid., pp. 138–9.
- 35.
F.J. Furnivall , A Temporary Preface to the Six-Text Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1868).
- 36.
See Trigg , pp. 160–86; and see the important chapter on Furnivall in Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910, pp. 138–61.
- 37.
Trigg, esp. pp. 175–6; on this point see also the lively essay by Richard Utz, ‘Enthusiast or Philologist? Professional Discourse and the Medievalism of Frederick James Furnivall’, Studies in Medievalism, 11 (2001), 189–212.
- 38.
Matthews , p. 139.
- 39.
See ibid., pp. 196–8.
- 40.
Frederick J. Furnivall , ed., A Six-Text Print of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1869–77); the most comprehensive treatment of the edition is H.L. Spencer, ‘F.J. Furnivall’s Six of the Best: The Six-Text Canterbury Tales and the Chaucer Society’, RES, 66 (2015), 601–23.
- 41.
See the further discussion of these issues below in Chap. 6; McLeod is the most provocative of a group of theorists who have challenged the notion of an ideal early modern text constructed by the editor, and in favour of a process that takes into account the individual and irreconcilable features of individual sources whether manuscript or print, see classic essays like Random Clod, ‘Information on Information’, Text, 5 (1991), 241–81; Random Cloud, ‘The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos’, SQ, 33 (1982), 421–31.
- 42.
See ODNB, Skeat , Walter William, and the detailed account by Charlotte Brewer in Editing Piers Plowman : The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 43.
Ibid., p. 109.
- 44.
Ibid., pp. 109–10.
- 45.
See the account by A.S.G. Edwards in Ruggiers , pp. 171–89.
- 46.
The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), i. vii.
- 47.
Matthews , p. 181.
- 48.
Christopher Decker, ‘Shakespeare Editions’, in Gail Marshal, ed., Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 27.
- 49.
The Works of William Shakespeare, vol. 1, ed. William George Clark and John Glover (Cambridge and London: Macmillan, 1863), pp. ix–x; pp. xxiv–vi.
- 50.
W.G. Clark and William Aldis Wright , eds., The Tragedy of King Richard II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1868).
- 51.
On ‘segregation’ of editions into popular and scholarly, see Grace Ioppolo, ‘“Much They Ought Not To have Attempted”: Editors of Collected Editions of Shakespeare from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, Andrew Nash, ed., The Culture of Collected Editions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 162.
- 52.
Margreta de Grazia , ‘The Question of the One and the Many: the Globe Shakespeare, the Complete King Lear, and the New Folger Library Shakespeare’, SQ, 46 (1995), pp. 246–7.
- 53.
David McKitterick , A History of Cambridge University Press, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 395.
- 54.
De Grazia , p. 247.
- 55.
Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 177.
- 56.
Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts , ‘Mary Cowden Clarke: Marriage, Gender and the Victorian Woman Critic of Shakespeare’, in Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole, eds., Victorian Shakespeare, vol. 2 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 170.
- 57.
See the discussion of Guiney below in Chap. 7.
- 58.
References are to Mary Cowden Clarke, ed., Shakespeare’s Works (New York: Appleton, 1860), vol. 1.
- 59.
Michael D. Bristol , Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (New York: Routledge , 2013), p. 70.
- 60.
Furness , quoted in the authoritative biography, James M. Gibson, The Philadelphia Shakespeare Story: Horace Howard Furness and the New Variorum Shakespeare (New York: AMS Press, 1990), p. 60.
- 61.
Zachary Lesser , Hamlet After Q1 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p. 179.
- 62.
Ibid., pp. 211–25; for the most thorough and sympathetic account of the new bibliography, see Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- 63.
It is worth noting at this point that Furness gave a start to Charlotte Endymion Porter by asking her to edit the journal Shakespeariana. Porter left the journal and, in partnership with Helen Armstrong Clarke, edited a remarkable Shakespeare edition with the principle of strict adherence to the Folio text, though with variants and historical emendations listed in an appendix, and quite extensive annotations. The edition appeared in forty individual volumes between 1903 and 1913. For a fascinating, recuperative account of Porter and Clarke see Jeanne Addison Roberts, ‘Women Edit Shakespeare’, in Peter Holland, ed., Editing Shakespeare, Shakespeare Survey, 59 (2006), 136–46.
- 64.
Gibson, pp. 184–95.
- 65.
For a detailed account of Furness’s editing, see Gibson, Chaps. 5, 8, and 10.
- 66.
Gary Taylor , Guardian 18 November 2007.
- 67.
Jeremy Lopez , Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 37.
- 68.
Frank Sidgwick’s Diary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for Shakespeare Head Press , 1975), p. 13.
- 69.
A vellum set was listed for auction by Sothebys in June 2017 with an estimated price of £25,000 to £35,000.
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Salzman, P. (2018). Amateurs, Professionals, and the Second Half of the Century. In: Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 1825-1915. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77902-7_4
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