Shakespeare's Editors
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Shakespeare's Editors were essential in the development of the modern practice of producing printed books and the evolution of textual criticism.
The seventeenth-century folio collections of the plays of William Shakespeare did not have editors in the modern sense of the term. In the best understandiing of contemporary consensus scholarship, the plays to be included in the First Folio (1623) were gathered together or "compiled" by John Heminges and Henry Condell, two long-time colleagues of Shakespeare in the King's Men. The play manuscripts may have been proofread and prepared for printing by Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or prompter of the company. The task of proofreading and correcting the actual printed pages of the Folio was left to the compositors and printers in the print-shop, yielding the uneven and often defective text that is the First Folio.
Even less is known about the creation of the Second (1632), Third (1663–4), and Fourth Folios (1685) than about the First; see: Folios and Quartos (Shakespeare).
In the eighteenth century, however, interested individuals made the first concerted efforts to bring order to the tangle of textual difficulties that the Folios of the previous century presented. The list below gives the date of each edition of Shakespeare's plays, the editor, the format of the collection, and pertinent specific information.
- 1709, Nicholas Rowe; octavo, 6 volumes. Rowe was the first person to attempt a clean and fully comprehensible text of the plays; but he depended upon a copy of the Fourth Folio and made generally conjectural emendations. He also added full stage directions (he was a playwright himself) and full lists of Dramatis personae, and wrote the first biographical sketch of the poet.
- 1725, Alexander Pope; quarto, 6 volumes. Pope was the first to attempt a collation of the quarto texts of the plays—yet he produced what was basically a reprint of Rowe that added little of value.
- 1733, Lewis Theobald; octavo, 7 volumes. Theobald has been called "the first Shakespeare scholar;" he carried forward the task of collating the quartos, and began the study of Shakespeare's sources and the order of the plays' composition. [See: Chronology of Shakespeare plays.]
- 1744, Thomas Hanmer; quarto, 6 volumes. Hanmer relied on Theobald's text, and made guesswork corrections.
- 1747, William Warburton; octavo, 8 volumes. The "supercilious" Warburton also relied on Theobald while criticizing him, and made his own sometimes fanciful emendations. In 1748 Thomas Edwards published his Supplement to Warburton's Edition of Shakespeare, in later editions called The Canons of Criticism—a satirical exposure of Warburton's failings.
- 1765, Samuel Johnson; octavo, 8 volumes. Johnson in turn relied upon Warburton; his edition is noteworthy mainly for its famous Preface.
- 1768, Edward Capell; octavo, 10 volumes. Appalled by the undisciplined emendations of Hanmer and Warburton, Capell spent three decades collecting and collating the quartos. He was also the first to exploit the Stationers' Register and Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia, and to explore Shakespeare's use of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles and Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives.
- 1773, George Steevens; octavo, 10 volumes. Steevens employed Johnson's text, but continued Capell's trend of adding new material. In 1780 Edmond Malone added another 2 volumes to Steevens' edition, containing Shakespeare's non-dramatic poems and other material.
- 1790, Edmond Malone; octavo, 10 volumes. Malone, often considered the best of the century's editors of Shakespeare, wrote the first general consideration of English Renaissance theatre, utilizing resources like the records of the Master of the Revels and Edward Alleyn's papers at Dulwich College. He is also noted for his work of the problem of chronology.
The early nineteenth century saw the first Variorum editions of Shakespeare's works, editions that collated and synthesized the efforts of the editors of the previous century:
- 1803, the First Variorum edition, edited by Isaac Reed; 21 volumes.
- 1813, the Second Variorum, a reprint of the First; 21 volumes.
- 1821, the Third Variorum, edited by James Boswell;[1] 21 volumes.
These massive editions laid the foundation for modern textual scholarship on Shakespeare's works, and by extension on works of literature in general.
(As for the personalities involved...some of these men were friends, like Steevens, Reed, and Malone; acquaintances called them the Shakespeare Gang. Others nourished spirits of competitiveness and resentment. Pope made Theobald the first hero of The Dunciad. Warburton belittled Rowe's "Account of the Life" of Shakespeare—but he reprinted it in his own edition, without change or improvement.)
The next major edition, the Cambridge Shakespeare (1863–6), moved away from the practice of a single editor following his own sometimes-capricious instincts and judgments. The first volume of the Cambridge Shakespeare was edited by William George Clark and John Glover, and the subsequent eight volumes by Clark and William Aldis Wright. Clark and Wright also produced the single-volume Globe Shakespeare (1864) using their Cambridge texts; together, these became the standard for the remainder of the century.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
- Schoenbaum, Samuel. Shakespeare's Lives. New York, Oxford University Press, 1970.
