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)