3 - Editions and Textual Studies

Summary

'Editing might... be provisionally defined as a total waste of time which periodically reconstructs our image of the past.' Gary Taylor ends the first paragraph of his introduction to the Oxford Shakespeare's Textual Companion with this quip about the double-bind in which editors are caught: those who evade ridicule as pedantic drudges fussing over trivia expose themselves to charges of recklessness, presumption, and cultural vandalism.

Nobody is likely to dismiss the Oxford editors' prodigious labours as inconsequential drudgery. They have produced two separate volumes of Complete Works, one in old spelling and one modernized, that are spectacularly unlike any other. Reviewers wishing to convict them of 'hurlyburly innovation' that threatens a national monument as the Percies threatened King Henry the Fourth's state must somehow demolish Taylor's general defence of the editors' procedures, rebut the evidence supporting hypotheses about the textual histories of individual plays, and challenge the arguments with which the four editors have justified their choices of variants and their emendations. 'No edition of Shakespeare can or should be definitive', writes Taylor. 'Of the variety of possible and desirable undefinitive editions one asks only that they define their own aims and limitations: that they be selfconscious, coherent, and explicit about the ways in which they mediate between writer and reader' (TC, pp. 3-4).