Shakespeare and Textual Theory

The Arden Shakespeare, a prominent and well-established series of Shakespeare editions, is now accompanied by a series called Shakespeare and Theory, of which a dozen titles have appeared, with at least nine more on the way. Whether or not one thinks that whole books need to be devoted to “Shakespeare and ecofeminist theory,” “Shakespeare and posthumanist theory,” and so on, there is no question that a book on “Shakespeare and textual theory” serves a useful purpose, for the textual choices that editors make affect all readers’ (and viewers’) experiences; and understanding the range of approaches editors can take is therefore a basic part of the preparation for serious appreciation of Shakespeare's works. One could of course say the same about any author, but the preeminence of Shakespeare and the complexity of the surviving materials have made the editorial history of Shakespeare a showcase for textual theories in English. A survey of those theories thus has a much wider audience than readers and scholars of Shakespeare alone.Gossett is qualified to undertake such a survey, for she has prepared two Arden editions and “General Edited” (as she puts it) the third edition of the Norton Shakespeare. In writing a book that is accessible to all readers (as this one aims to be), she wisely recognized that an account of how a book went through the press in Shakespeare's time and a condensed history of the editing and publication of his works would provide helpful background, and the first third of the book is devoted to those subjects. The result is a convenient and balanced summary that displays Gossett's command of the material. But she does slip up from time to time. It is an overstatement, for example, to say that the Folio Lear is “now generally thought to be Shakespeare's own reworking.” Her account of hand-press printing is repeatedly marred by careless language—such as speaking of “Folio sheets” and equating them with “large sheets” (there is no such thing as a “Folio sheet,” since any sheet, of any size, could be used to produce any format). And no bibliographer would agree with her vague definition of issue as “a republication with a few changes rather than a full re-editing.” (Readers wishing to use the book for reference should also be aware that the index is very incomplete and that the list of “References” contains errors in addition to being incomplete.)The heart of the book, however, is the final two-thirds, entitled “Current Debates,” where Gossett devotes chapters to collaboration (and attribution of authorship), textual instability, editing, book history, and performance (and then goes over them all again in connection with the “difficult cases” of Hamlet and Pericles). These are certainly topics of “current debate” (even if they are not always matters of “theory”), and Gossett's summaries of them, often full of quotations and paraphrases, are generally fair and accurate—though unfortunately her descriptions of some scholars’ positions are taken (and even quoted) from other scholars, not directly from the scholars in question. And sometimes she makes statements incautiously, as when she says “Gosson had never published a play before” instead of “Gosson is not known to have published a play before.” Her own opinions rarely intrude, except in the occasional appearance of a word like convincingly or, less obviously, in some of the emphases within summaries (though I assume that references to “Norton 3” reflect her views, as they obviously do when she uses the first person). Presumably she regards this reticence as a strength, but in my opinion a little more explicit evaluation would be desirable. One oddity is that, despite referring many times to “poststructuralism,” she defines it only by implication.Other questions came to mind as I read. For instance, one wonders what is accomplished by such a tautological statement as “Collaboration poses the greatest challenge to the concept of the single author.” I suspect that the underlying thought has to do with authorial intention, but the question of intention does not come up in this passage—though there are other places where a discussion of authorial intention slips into a comment on “solitary and unitary authorship.” The important point to be made is that authorship and intention are distinct concepts: identifying authors is a different activity from judging the origins of particular readings (though one might occasionally affect the other). An interest in determining authors’ intended wordings is therefore just as applicable to collaborative works as it is to works by single authors. (I should perhaps add that whether or not an editor chooses to include collaborative plays in an edition of Shakespeare—that is, to reject the “purity stance”—is a question of practice, not theory.)The matter of intention, indeed, proves difficult to handle, as it so often does. Gossett uncritically accepts Idealist and Platonic to describe the concept of authorial intention—words sometimes tinged with a hint of disapproval. But because language is an intangible medium, every point in a verbal text (and revisions of it) inevitably had an immaterial existence in a mind before being given material form (sometimes erroneously) in one or more documents. A great deal of historical study involves the search for people's actions and thoughts at particular past moments, and a concern with authors’ intentions is one such historical undertaking. That certainty cannot be attained in these efforts is no reason (as often claimed in the case of textual study) for giving up the attempt to gain historical understanding in this way; much of our thinking about the past, after all, has emerged from such attempts. (Authorial intention happens to be what most readers are interested in, but that point is irrelevant theoretically.)When I myself have “defended” (the word often used, as Gossett does) the goal of authorial intention, I have simply been trying to show its validity and not to claim that it is the only valid approach. The socially constructed texts that get published are also historical occurrences that, as such, obviously deserve to be studied. But some of the theorists whom Gossett cites have felt it necessary to denigrate other points of view when setting forth their own. Her usual evenhandedness and her cautious and enlightened analysis (in an excellent final chapter) of the multiple texts made possible by the “digital turn” suggest an openness to alternatives. Even so, she has missed an opportunity, in a book of this kind, to teach a valuable lesson by saying more often and more explicitly that recognizing the value of one approach need not entail the rejection of others.Despite such reservations, one can still regard the book—with its impressive weaving together of details and helpful examples from many sources—as a handy and well-informed survey of the questions that editors and readers must deal with and the positions that have been taken regarding them

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