Abstract
In an epoch like our own, where the limits of knowledge are mapped onto models of language, the special character of historical criticism (as opposed to literary hermeneutics) may be clarified by asking the following question: must we regard the physical channels of communication as part of the message of the texts we study? Or are the channels to be treated as purely vehicular forms whose ideal condition is to be transparent to the texts they deliver? How important, for the reader … are the work’s various materials, means, and modes of production? Does a work’s bibliographical existence, for example, seriously impinge upon its symbolic form and meaning?1
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Notes
Jerome J. McGann, ‘Literature, Meaning, and the Discontinuity of Fact’, Modern Language Quarterly, 54 (1993), p. 167.
Roger Chartier, ‘Laborers and Voyages: From the Text to the Reader’, diacritics, 22.2 (1992), p. 50.
J. O. Bartley, Teague, Shenkin and Sawney: Being an Historical Study of the Earliest Irish, Welsh and Scottish Characters in English Plays (Cork: Cork University Press, 1954), pp. 16–17.
Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 74, 75.
David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 12.
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 56.
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ‘History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 215.
David Baker, ‘“Wildehirissheman”: Colonialist Representation in Shakespeare’s Henry V’, English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1992), pp. 42–3.
Michael Neill, ‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), p. 23.
On Bartley and Edwards, see endnote 36 below. Michael Neill and Stephen Greenblatt base their analyses on G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1974); David Baker and Dollimore and Sinfield rely on Gary Taylor’s 1982 single volume Oxford University Press edition; and Cairns and Richards make use of an unspecified modern edition. It is striking that Cairns and Richards’ bibliography — despite the fact that it runs to some 350 items — contains no entry for Shakespeare.
As I hope will become clear, by ‘the text itself’, I do not mean a single static object, but rather a set of changing manifestations. See Hershel Parker, ‘“The Text Itself” — Whatever That Is’, TEXT, 3 (1987), pp.47–54.
Fredson Bowers, Textual and Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 5.
Gary Taylor, for one, would seem broadly to share something of Bowers’ pessimism, as he observes that ‘Scholars who feel obliged to familiarize themselves with the most abstruse developments in anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and literary theory are unembarrassed about their ignorance of editorial issues. Even the most momentous editorial controversies … are mentioned in footnotes, only to be dismissed as immaterial to what the critic is doing.’ See his ‘The Renaissance and the End of Editing’, in George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (eds), Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 123–4. On Bowers’ resistance to the convergence of bibliography and literary theory, see his critique of Jerome McGann in ‘Unfinished Business’, TEXT, 4 (1988), pp. 1–12.
Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992; first published University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. xxii. For a lucid and engaging account of the interpenetration of bibliographic and theoretical issues, see Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44 (1993), pp. 255–83. See also Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey and Andrew Murphy, ‘“What’s the Matter?” Shakespeare and Textual Theory’, Textual Practice, 9 (1995), pp. 93–119 and the debate between all of these writers and Edward Pechter in Textual Practice, 11 (1997), pp. 81–7.
For critiques of the categorization ‘bad quarto’, see Random Cloud (Randall McLeod), ‘The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982), pp. 421–31;
Steven Urkowitz, ‘Good News about “Bad” Quartos’, in Maurice Charney (ed.), ‘Bad’ Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988); and
Paul Werstine, ‘Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: “Foul Papers” and “Bad” Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990), pp. 65–86. The most thorough-going treatment of the question is Laurie E. Maguire’s Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For the origins of the division of the quarto texts into the good and the bad, see Alfred W. Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos: A Study in the Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Plays, 1594–1685 (London: Methuen, 1909), especially p. 80. T. W. Craik’s ‘Arden 3’ edition of King Henry V (London: Routledge, 1995) includes as an appendix a reduced photofacsimile of the 1600 text. See also Michael Allen and Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 72–3, 77.
This view of the relationship between the two textualizations is predicated on a broadly accepted chronology which sees the 1623 text as reflecting a version of the play composed in 1599 and predating the version represented in the 1600 quarto. For alternative assessments of the likely date of composition of the Fl version of the text, see Warren D. Smith, ‘The Henry V Choruses in the First Folio’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 53 (1954), pp. 38–57 and
Keith Brown, ‘Historical Context and Henry V’, Cahiers Elisabéthains, 29, April (1986), pp. 77–81.
Random Cloud (Randall McLeod), ‘What’s the Bastard’s Name?’, in George Walton Williams (ed.), Shakespeare’s Speech-Headings (New York: AMS, 1996), p. 134.
See James Perrot’s early seventeenth-century Chronicle of Ireland, 1584–1608, ed. H. Wood (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1933), p. 94: ‘The rebells beinge many more in number came on thicke, marching in redde coates (a manner not usually seene before that time emongst the meere Irishrie)’. Elsewhere, Perrot notes that the ‘aleven hundred foote and above 400 horse’ that O’Neill ‘had ordinarily about hym … were armed after the English maner’ (p. 89).
Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary … (London, 1617), p. 138.
De Grazia and Stallybrass list the six variant ‘supposed autograph’ signatures of the name in ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’: ‘“Willm Shaksp,” “william Shakspe,” “Wm Shakspe,” “william Shakspere,” “Wilim Shakspere,” “William Shakspeare”’ (p. 273). They note that none of these variations indicates a separation of the two syllables of the surname with an ‘e’, and they point to Randall McLeod’s suggestion that this spelling may have arisen from compositors’ concern to avoid type damage when setting a forward kerning ‘k’ and a backward kerning long ‘s’ side by side. See Randall McLeod, ‘Spellbound’, in G. B. Shand and Raymond C. Shady (eds), Playtexts in Old Spelling: Papers from the Glendon Conference (New York: AMS, 1984), pp. 81–96.
D. C. Greetham, ‘Textual Forensics’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 111 (1996), p. 33.
Michael Warren, ‘Textual Problems, Editorial Assertions in Editions of Shakespeare’, in Jerome J. McGann (ed.), Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 23–37. Warren describes this as a process whereby ‘pieces of commentary or interpretation … have attached themselves to the text and have become encrusted in the rock of the original’ (p. 30).
Roland Barthes, ‘The Theory of the Text’, in Robert Young (ed.), A Poststructuralist Reader (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 37.
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Murphy, A. (1997). ‘Tish ill done’: Henry the Fift and the Politics of Editing. In: Burnett, M.T., Wray, R. (eds) Shakespeare and Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25924-3_12
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