Abstract
Chapter 5 focuses on two significant publication events at the beginning of the twentieth century: R.B. McKerrow’s edition of Thomas Nashe, and Montague Summers’s edition of Aphra Behn. The chapter places the shift towards the so-called New Bibliography in the context of the editorial history analysed in the preceding chapters. As the same time, this chapter draws together some connections between the history of editing and the recognition of the significance of early modern women’s writing.
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Notes
- 1.
For a detailed and at times provocative account of the New Bibliography, see Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- 2.
For a good summary see A.C. Green, ‘The Difference Between McKerrow and Greg’, Textual Cultures, 4 (2009), 31–53.
- 3.
For an account of McKerrow’s negotiations with Horace Hart at Oxford University Press over the delicate matter of the inclusion of Nashe’s erotic poem ‘The Choice of Valentines’, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘R.B. McKerrow, Horace Hart, and Nashe’s “The Choice of Valentines”’, N&Q, 64 (March 2017), 154–5.
- 4.
References to The Works of Thomas Nashe edited from the Original texts by Ronald B. McKerrow (London: A.H. Bullen , 1904–10; vol. 5 is published by Sidgwick & Jackson).
- 5.
W.W. Greg , ‘The Rationale of Copytext’, SB, 3 (1950/51), 19–36.
- 6.
The annotations to The Unfortunate Traveller are in vol. 4, pp. 252–94.
- 7.
Paul Salzman, ed. An Anthology of Elizabethan Fiction (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1987); J. Steane , ed., The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), Stanley Wells , ed., Thomas Nashe Selected Works (London: Edward Arnold, 1964).
- 8.
For an important, detailed account of the way that this edition was put together, see Martin Butler, ‘The Making of the Oxford Ben Jonson’, RES, 62 (2011), 739–57.
- 9.
References to C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson , eds., Ben Jonson, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927).
- 10.
The Knutowski study is Das Dido-Drama von Marlowe and Nashe (Breslau, 1905).
- 11.
The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow, reprinted from the original edition with corrections and supplementary notes edited by F.P. Wilson , 5 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958).
- 12.
F.P. Wilson , Shakespeare and the New Bibliography, revised and edited by Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
- 13.
References to Walter W. Greg, ed. Henslowe’s Diary, 2 vols (London: A.H. Bullen, 1904 and 1908).
- 14.
- 15.
Here I am not really concerned with the minute details of how extensive the forgeries might have been, and how far Greg was correct in his analysis of them, see my earlier discussion in Chap. 3, but also the lengthy account in Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier , Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) i.316–77.
- 16.
R.A Foakes and R.T. Rickert , eds, Henslowe’s Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1961); R.A. Foakes , ed., Henslowe’s Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
- 17.
Neil Carson, A Companion to Henslowe’s ‘Diary’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and see Henslowe-Alleyn.org.uk, accessed 14 July 2017.
- 18.
Egan , Chap. 1.
- 19.
See Wilson, p. 97.
- 20.
For a detailed and fascinating account of the Phoenix Society productions and T.S.Eliot’s response, see Anthony Cuda, ‘Evenings at the Phoenix Society: Eliot and the Independent London Theatre’, in Frances Dickey and John D Morgenstern, eds., The Edinburgh Companion to T.S. Eliot and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 202–24.
- 21.
Montague Summers, The Galanty Show: An Autobiography (London: Cecil Woolf , 1980), pp. 171–2.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 174.
- 23.
See Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 24.
Julia Kavanagh, English Women of Letters (1863), vol. 1, p. 48; but Kavanagh also has a whole chapter (2) on Oroonoko , which she praises as ‘one of the first great works of English fiction’.
- 25.
Ernest A. Baker, ed., The Novels of Mrs. Aphra Behn (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1905).
- 26.
Summers, The Galanty Show, pp. 175–6; The Bookman, September, 1915, p. 152.
- 27.
The Summers archive contains no other material relating to the Behn edition. I am extremely grateful for the assistance and access to the archive while it was still being fully catalogued by Ted Jackson, Manuscripts Archivist at Georgetown.
- 28.
Summers, The Galanty Show, p. 176.
- 29.
Anonymous as published, but by Harold Child, TLS 22 July 1915.
- 30.
Paul E. More , ‘A Bluestocking of the Restoration’, The Nation, 28 September 1916, part two, 5 October 1916.
- 31.
Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677), p. 3; Plays Written by the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn (1724), vol. 1, p. 6; Montague Summers, ed., The Works of Aphra Behn, 6 vols (Stratford/London: Shakespeare head Press /Heinemann, 1915), i.12/429.
- 32.
Robert D. Hume , ‘The Uses of Montague Summers: A Pioneer Reconsidered’, Restoration, 3 (1979), 59.
- 33.
Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 215–18; and for an earlier, incisive recognition of the influence Sackville -West had on Woolf accompanied by a stringent reading of Oroonoko as participating in ‘a special brand of racial pornography’ which binds not only Woolf’s fiction and Sackville -West’s study of Behn , but also implicates a whole tradition of women’s fiction, see Jane Marcus, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), pp. 32–6.
- 34.
Summers i.lxi, the quotation is from George Saintsbury , A Short History of English Literature (1898), p. 481.
- 35.
Nigel Nicolson, ed., Vita and Harold: The letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson 1910–1962 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992), p. 182.
- 36.
The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 241.
- 37.
References to Vita Sackville -West, Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea (London: Gerald Howe, 1927).
- 38.
Nigel Nicolson, ed., A Change of Perspective: Letters of Virginia Woolf iii, 1923–1929 (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 411.
- 39.
Virginia Woolf, Women & Fiction: The manuscript versions of A Room of One’s Own, transcribed and edited by S.P. Rosenbaum (Oxford: Blackwell for Shakespeare Head Press , 1992), p. 97; Rosenbaum notes the origin in Sackville -West, p. 211; for the published version, Woolf left out ‘it is said’, A Room of One’s Own (1929, rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 66.
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Salzman, P. (2018). Scientific Professionals and Learned Amateurs. 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_5
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