The Struggle for Shakespeare's Text
Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice

Egan traces a century of arguments about editing Shakespeare's plays, revealing what's at stake in presenting them to modern readers.

Gabriel Egan (Author)

9780521889179, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 October 2010

332 pages, 2 tables
23.5 x 16.1 x 2.1 cm, 0.7 kg

'An eminently readable guide to all the key concepts and tools in engaging with Shakespeare's text.' Around the Globe

We know Shakespeare's writings only from imperfectly-made early editions, from which editors struggle to remove errors. The New Bibliography of the early twentieth century, refined with technological enhancements in the 1950s and 1960s, taught generations of editors how to make sense of the early editions of Shakespeare and use them to make modern editions. This book is the first complete history of the ideas that gave this movement its intellectual authority, and of the challenges to that authority that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Working chronologically, Egan traces the struggle to wring from the early editions evidence of precisely what Shakespeare wrote. The story of another struggle, between competing interpretations of the evidence from early editions, is told in detail and the consequences for editorial practice are comprehensively surveyed, allowing readers to discover just what is at stake when scholars argue about how to edit Shakespeare.

Introduction
1. The fall of pessimism and the rise of New Bibliography, 1902–42
2. New techniques and the Virginian School: New Bibliography, 1939–68
3. New Bibliography, 1969–79
Intermezzo: the rise and fall of the theory of memorial reconstruction
4. New Bibliography critiqued and revised, 1980–90
5. The 'new' New Bibliography: the Oxford Complete Works, 1978–89
6. Materialism, unediting and version-editing, 1990–99
Conclusion: the twenty-first century
Appendix I. How early-modern books were made: a brief guide
Appendix II. Table of Shakespeare editions up to 1623
Appendix III. Editorial principles of the major twentieth-century Shakespeare editions
Works cited.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare plays [DDS], Literature & literary studies [D]