Preface

Summary

I am grateful to a number of friends who have helped my work on this book at various stages, particularly Bernard Beatty, Nick Davis, Howard Erskine-Hill, Nicholas Grene, Geoffrey Holloway, Ernst Honigmann, Molly Mahood and Michael Screech. I am also grateful to Seiko Aoyama, Manfred Draudt, Tetsuo Kishi and Holger Klein for allowing me to discuss my ideas on Othello with their colleagues and students in Japan and Austria.

I have not modernized the spelling in my quotations (except for the forms of the letters u, v, j). If some readers find the original spelling awkward, even difficult, I am sorry. But modern spelling may give a false sense of familiarity to authors of the distant past. Much of the argument in Sea-Mark depends on a detailed teasing out of the meaning of passages, and modern spelling, making the authors seem much nearer to us than they actually are, sometimes suggests a misleading modern meaning. Old spelling operates a bit like Brecht's Verfremdung. It creates a space between us and the text, and in the end brings it nearer to us by keeping it at a distance in the first place. In maintaining the original spelling of my texts, there is not often much hope of preserving the author's actual spelling, but at least the text appears in a form with which the author would have felt at home.

There is obviously a problem about Shakespeare: two problems in fact. The first is that we are so accustomed to reading Shakespeare in modern spelling; the second is what ‘original spelling’ means when the accepted text comes as so often from more than one source.