De Grazia 1991

de Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

1790 edition of Shakespeare -- "New interests emerged in this edition that became and remained fundamental to Shakespeare Studies. It was the first to emphasize the principle of authenticity in treating Shakespeare's works and the materials relating to them; the first to contain a dissertation on the linguistic and poetic particulars of Shakespeare's period; the first to depend on facts in constructing Shakespeare's biography; the first to include a full chronology for the plays; and the first to publish, annotate, and canonize the 1609 Sonnets." (2)

"Malone's overwhelming preoccupations with objectivity marks a significant shift in the focus of Shakespeare studies from what might be termed the discursively acceptable to the factually verifiable, from accounts whose validity was assured by continued circulation to information whose accuracy was tested by documents and records." (5)

"The practices applied to Shakespeare in Malone's edition defined him in terms of the very autonomy that newly enfranchised the bourgeois subject." (7)

"As this study will demonstrate, the apparatus encasing Shakespeare in the late 18c provided sanction, not for the ordinary subject -- at least not at the start -- nor even for the extraordinary subject of the author, but for the unique subject of Shakespeare. The apparatus protected Shakespeare from what Malone termed 'modern sophistications and foreign admixtures,' providing a bastion against the forces of 'astonishing' change at home and abroad that threatened to undermine political and cultural stability. The materials it collected and the use to which it put them uniformly insulated Shakespeare, enclosing him in his own experience, consciousness, and creativity." (10)

"The apparatus makes it possible for a text to come back -- to make a comeback -- on conditions it both prescribes and instantiates. In reproducing a text, in making it again available and accessible, the apparatus dictatesthe erms of its reception. WHereas it seems to be merely a useful tool for an informed and responsible reading, it in fact specifies a text's ontology and epistemology: what it is (and is not), how it may be known (and not known). In teremining the text's identity, the apparatus predisposes the reader to specific modes of reading and understanding." (11)

The 1623 Folio and the Modern Standard Edition

"While the succession of editions appears to stretch unbroken from the First Folio to the present, only something as decisive as a break can account for the sharp dissimilarities between the venerable patriarchal source and its filial issue." (15)

1968 Norton facsimile "based on no existing copy of the Folio, nor on any one copy that ever existed. It is an idealized composite made up of the most legible and most fully orrected pages the editor could locate in his collation of the 27 copies and one fragment in the Folger library." (18)

preliminaries -- "not documents that record with accuracy or inaccuracy the prior events that led to the Folio's publication. They are texts that encode those events in a form that will give viability to the book they are in the process of constituting." (29)

"turning the transitory playtexts ... into enduring art" through Latin inscriptions (35)

"The title-page and the layout of the volume itself thereby reify the tomb/tome homonym: the engraving depicts and [36] accomplishes the artful interment of the bibliographic tome within the architectural tomb." (36)

"The 1623 preliminaries work to assign the plays a common lineage: a common origin in a single parent and a shared history of production that includes patrons, readers, printers, theatrical company, audiences, and praising poets. The plays are bound to one another by these natural and legal ties that establish their literal affiliation or consanguinity. The language of the preliminaries thereby confers a generic and genetic identity on the heterogeneous texts, a 'natural' pretsext for their publication as a hegemonic text. 'Shakespeare' was the name that guaranteed the consanguinity and therefore the coherence of what might otherwise have been no more than a miscellany." (39)

"The preliminaries function, then, not to document an existing reality but to constitute one retrospectively. The language of the preliminaries works performatively rather than referentially, simultaneously speaking and effecting." (41)

Authenticating Shakespeare's Text, Life, and Likeness

"As Shx studies became rounded in authenticity, earlier practices were increasingly categorized as merely subjective and arbitrary. By returning to the original and unmediated documents, bypassing the transmission from generation to generation, Malone lost sight of the successive traditional treatments which formerly endowed the study of Shkx with purpose and meaning." (51)

until 18c, text selected for editing "was the one closes to the editor rather than that closes to the author (52)

"In recent histories of textual criticism, the understanding of this distinction between classical manuscripts and printed texts, between manuscripts that are not descended from the same source and printed texts that are, marks the beginning of modern bibliography" (58)

"While purporting to restore Shx's texts and sense, the editor claimed ownership over his own restoration, asi f his ascertaining and elucidating of the text made him co-proprietor with Shx of the works. It is not simply the clash of irascible and petulant personalities that generated these conflicts, as is generally maintained, but rather a radical uncertainty about both the source of the editor's authority and the relation [68] of his contributions both to those of other editors and to Shx's text itself." (67-8)

Johnson's variorum -- "by providing an array of contributions, it effectively put the reader in the position of arbitrator formerly reserved for the editor." (68)

"Once the text with its variants could be selected on the basis of documents, it became lodged in the remote history recorded in those documents, removed from both the site of reception and the process of transmission and fashioned instead to its distant authorial and historical origin." (70)

"We can begin to see here how the emphasis on authenticity exempted Shk's text from the warring judgements of earlier editors and positioned it within a new realm in which information pre-empted evaluations, factual scholarship phased out literary judgement. Authenticity provided an external principle for settline Shx's erratic text; from the vantage of that principle, earlier editorial activity looked arbitrary and personal." (70)

"Oblivious to former criteria and purposes, Malone abstracted Shx from the process by which hea had been made correct and comprehensible by Taste and Judgement and by which in turn Taste and Judgement had been enriched and fortified by Shx. The new criterion of authenticity converted the Shx texts into a new kind of object: one lodged in the past rather than integral to current cultural concerns." (71)

"The process of biographical transmission was thus as suspect as that of textual transmission: both processes were seen to contaminate rather than to endorse the materials they conveyed, each successive step multiplying the possibility of error rather than testifying to its enduring acceptability and relevance." (78)

replacement of Droeshout plate with Chandos portrait as "major bibliographic event" (80)

earlier 18 editors ignored earliest folio and quartors, "Not because they were inaccessible, but bc no need was felt to recover a remote text, life, and likeness when current ones remained incirculation. The earlier 18c editors were as little interested in ascertaining what Shx in fact had looked like than what he in fact had done or what he in fact had put on paper." (81)

"It appears, then, that at the same time as the authentic texts, documents, and paintings were established, inauthentic items and counterfeits began to emerge. The real proliferation of forgeries did not begin until the early 19c, after the standard of authenticity was firmly in place." (86)

1807, First Folio set in type facsimile for the first time

"Delivering an exact copy of the original, the facsimile appears as the mechanical culmination of the late 18c interest in authenticity that sought to eliminate the distortions and corruptions of mediations by preserving the exact physical features of the original mnauscript, printed page, painting, and engraving. WHat must be stressed, however, is the curious incompatibility of that mode of reproduction with the 16 and 17c materials to which it was applied. ... FAcsimile reproduction presupposes the uniformity of a stable original for both script and print, for both Shx's signature and his plays' texts." (87)

not a single popular professionally performed play survived in manuscript bw 1580 and 1642 (88)

copy --> copious; "increased or augmented in order to contain, not all that the author or authors had written, but all that had been produced or might be produced by the variable negotiations between enacted script and inscribed performance." (92)

"The problems posed by the Shakespearean text might be formulated in terms of the incongruity between copia/abundance and copia/copy. How can an object that is amenable to continual expansion and modification be copied? How can a fundamentally pliable play ext be reified by print?" (92)

Situating Shakespeare in an Historical Period

"period" and "revolution" both originally denoted cyclical recurrences, but came to refer to a specific moment at the end of the 18c

"The changes in both terms signalled the disruption of an homogeneous past, by unique cataclysmic upheaval in the first case and into discrete temporal divisions in the second." (97)

"In this chapte,r we shall see how the formation of an historical period similiarly exempted Shx from current standards of correctness and taste by attributing the ostensibly incorrect and distasteful to what was customary in Shx's age." (98)

"It was only once Shx was seen to occupy a specific time as distinct form a composite past that his irregularities could be defended as conventions rather than dismissed as errors or barbarisms." (115)

Johnson, disdained Shx's own time as barbarous; "He could confidently venerate Shx as an 'ancient' precisely bc his plays had through the years cast off the accidents of their historical origin. Having 'long outlived his century', having outlasted the base standards governing past writing and taste, Shx's works had proven themselves worthy to endure. In this context, Malone's project of retrieving lost allusions, customs, and opinions thru the examination of documents only dragged back the particulars that were in Johnson's view best consigned to oblivion." (116)

"The true value of a work would not become apparent until it was stripped clean of the contingencies once responsible for its popularity. Extraneous materials from the past or about the past tended to muddle rather than heighten the integrity of the work; by ensnaring the latter-day reader in its obscuring circumstances, it detracted from the experience of 'its ful design and its true porportions', 'the beauty of the whole.' Footnotes that dredged up the past reversed the purifying forward movement of 'the stream of time' which had gradually washed away local and temporal impurities to reveal 'the adamant Shakespeare'." (117)

"Like their predecessors, Johnson and the later Steevens had little use for the very sources and uses on which Malone depended in reconstructing Shx's past. Their admiration for Shx exacted ther emoval of his works from the contaiminating conditions of the past. Malone's researches, however, fixed the works within an historical milieu defined by his enquiries. Once that milieu had been defined by practices and customs of its own, emendation and correction of the text by modern standards were no longer justifiable." (119)

"Malone's awareness of the historical character of Shx's writing decisively changed the function and responsibility of the editor. From Theobald through to Johnson, editors had defined their task as threefold: to establish the text, illuminate obscurities, and evaluate the author's style. With Malone, and Capell before him, the latter function dropped out: 'The two great duties of an editor are, to exhibit the genuine text of his author, and to explain his obscurities.' Once modern standards were shown to be anachronistic, the editor could claim no right to judge the quality of his author's writing." (120)

"It might be said that criticism, under the pressure of Malone's differentiating historicism, ceased to be critical. Editorial comments became predominantly informative and, as we shall see, interpretative rather than evaluative." (121)

"While the trappings of a given time and place had formerly been held to trivialize and vulgarize a work, in Malone's practices they became essential to ascertaining its meaning." (122)

"Malone's invocation of a discrete Shakespearean age appears an overdue advance over his predecessors' homogenization of the past. His historicism made SHakespeare's past an object of study separate from the subject studying it, an object that resided not in continuing discourse practices, and institutions but rather in inert archives, records, and documents." (122)

"The function of the apparatus was now, therefore, to change the moder reader rather than the ancient text" (122-3)

"The historically contingent served as a repository for anything that fell outside the pale of the self-evidently true and right. Thus, while salvaging the past differences that his own universal standards could not comprehend, Malone's historicism still permitted those standards to appear universally valid." (123)

"In this way the category of the customary or the historically contingent served to protect Malone's present as well as Shx's past. It provided a solution to the problem of intractable historical difference, difference that could not be translated into Enlightenment equivalents, as could, for example, the 200 pounds at which Malone estimated Shx's annual income" (125)

"History must take the form of unique phenomena falling into unique periods (wit their own singuar principle of cohesion) before a disregard for its characterizing difference can be considered ahistorical. The language in which Shx's chronicle-based histories were written contained no word for 'anachronism'." (131)

Individuating Shakespeare's Experience: Biography, Chronology, and the Sonnets

'individual' as a word "provides a semantic focus for the general change implicit in Malone's practices, in this case a decisive shift from individuation predicated on corporate political solidarity to individuation predicated on personal artistic complexity and growth" (133)

Shx's "gradual attainment of prosperity" as becoming biographical fact (137)

"The identification of topical references in dating the plays disclosed the particulars presumed to exist in Shx's mind at the time of their writing. The plays thus functioned as repositories of Shx's thoughts and feelings as stimulated by contemporary events." (143)

"The significant dates in Shx's period, then, were those specifying not when a play was written, but when it was madde public, either in print or in performance. As we have seen, even as late ast 1778 Malone felt he had to justify attempting the 'new and curious inquiry' that would ascertain the order in which Shx wrote his plays. Yet once that order was determined, the works became fastened to Shx's sequence of writing, following an arrangement that reflected his and only his contribution to the making of the plays." (150)

"Once saturated with Shx, the text receded from the reader into an interiorized realm that had at best a tangential relation to the surface of the poem. The poem then had to be sounded, penetrated, and decoded in order to yield what had become its unique mystery, secret, or meaning. The more private it was -- the more exclusively Shx's -- the more it eluded comprehension." (160)

"authenticity and first-person writing were not of paramount importance before Malone. There was no commitment in 1640 to precisely what Shx had penned and to exactly what Shx in his own words had done and felt, no preoccupation with either textual authenticity or personal sincerity." (165)

"Benson's edition reflected a fidelity to a bibliographical rather than a personal entity during a time when the Stationers' Company regulations protected the bookseller's interests rather than the author's. His collection was not designed to preserve the author's poetic output; rather, it established a classification of printed materials according to their status among stationers and readers. The contingencies and pressures of publication affected ascription to a greater degree than the identity of an author who, once dead, existed in the printing house primarily as a bibliographic function." (171-2)

"When his plays and poems were printed in the 17c, Shx in the printing house was a name in the Stationer's Register and on title-pages rather than a man with a personal identity." (172)

"Situated within an historical period, differentiated by a factual biography, personalized by outer and inner experiences, Shx had within Malone's apparatus become an 'individual' divisible from the productive network he represented. That autonomy gave new definition and urgency to the categories of both 'authentic' and 'spurious'." (173)

Shakespeare's Entitlement: Literary Property and Discursive Enclosure

Tonson publishing dynasty, owning Shx

"The various Tonson apparatuses secured the Tonson ownership; Malone's secures Shx's self-owndership, not legally as copy but hermeneutically as original meaning." (208)

"What must be stressed is that respect for the impermeable boundaries of Shx's text was attended by a formation of independent auxiliary texts. It is not only Shx who occupies the page, but the commentators as well, and that occupancy entails a repartitioning of the space of the page, a remapping of typography to represent a coalition of minor texts." (211)

"By the end of the century, the variorum apparatus came to look like a format for attribution, registering critical as opposed to literary property, accurately drawing the lines between the various shares." (213)

"The variorum thus instates a complex system of attributions that draws typographical boundaries around the notis variorum, staking out critical property at the same time as establishing what properly and authentically belongs to Shx. The proprietary relation assigned to Shx is thereby reproduced in the territorializing of the critical field." (214)

17c, "quotations were distinguished from the rest of the discourse, whether set off by their position in the margins or by quotations marks or by both, not because they originally belonged somewhere else, but rather because they belonged everywhere: they were commonplaces rather than private discursive units." (215); italics and quotation marks used interchangeably in the period

gnomic pointing; ceased by end of 18c, for "the function of quotations marks had completely reversed itself by the end of the 18c. What formerly marked the universal and true (and therefore public) had come to designate the unique and exclusive (and therefore private). The sign once distinguishing the commonplace sets the bounds for private enclosure." (217)

"After the 18c, the omission of quotation marks is an ethical offence as well as a grammatical solecism; it violates the rights of another as well as the rules of grammar. To quote without acknowledgement, as to print without copyright, is a form of theft, an encroachment on private property." (217)

"The obligation to repeat accurately presupposes the recognition of the original utterance as a separate and inviolable entity, a linguistic lot roped off by quotations marks and tethered to its source." (217-8)

"Not until language has been demarcated as property and removed from the free flow of discourse, could a quotation be committed to a verbatim rendition. The original utterance -- whether issuing from Shx, an editor, or any other user of the language -- had to be objectified as something unto itself and apart from the medium of its transmission before its reproduction could be held to accuracy." (218)