In Arden: Editing Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Richard Proudfoot (review)

It is gratifying to have Richard Proudfoot's indispensable contributions to the study of English Renaissance drama recognized in this collection of varied and engrossing essays by his colleagues. The contributions are all from editors of the Arden Shakespeare, as are the affectionate encomia that open the volume, expressing the gratitude that all of us in the profession feel for his tireless labors as the "editors' editor" (xii) of the Arden and Malone Society series.

Reflecting the current attitudes and protocols guiding the scholars involved in one of the most important current editions of Shakespeare, these essays are a barometer of scholarly editing's present climate. Far from revealing any anxiety about the alleged postmodern "crisis" in editing, any paralysis in the face of the much bruited plurality and indeterminacy of texts, they reveal a group of scholars energetically engaged in the practical work of presenting Shakespeare's plays to modern readers and performers, and doing so with great intelligence, engagement, resourcefulness, brio, and—if I read them correctly—enjoyment.

Two essays do attempt to meet head-on some recent critiques of traditional editing. Giorgio Melchiori defends on theatrical rather than bibliographical grounds the methods and achievements of the New Bibliographers, who "show[ed] how from a printed text it is possible to reconstruct the state of the original [theatrical] manuscript with all its accretions and corrections," necessarily by "suggestions, guesses, hypotheses," not definitive proofs (21, 23). One of his own guesses is that bad quartos are reconstructions by theatrical hacks from performances of authorially shortened acting versions. Anthony Dawson, responding to the pluralist argument that no stable text is possible because its material manifestations keep changing—in multiple printed versions, theatrical collaborations, productions and performances, cultural affiliations—reasserts the New Bibliographers' emphasis on authorial intention. Like Thomas G. Tanselle, he insists on the reality and primacy of the (at least partially) recoverable nonmaterial "work" that was conceived in the mind of its author; the creation of that nonmaterial work was a historical event, and without its existence there could be no coherent history of its later material versions. H. R. Woudhuysen discusses one feature of the physical form of printed plays: the frequency of blank leaves in them—title-page versos, end blanks, initial blanks—apparently intended to protect the printed pages or to bulk out the volumes. The considerable expense of including these suggests to him that printed plays were not "the unconsidered trifles they are generally taken to have been" (55).

Not surprisingly, several essays are about notes and noting. G. K. Hunter discusses "the social function of annotation" as a kind of bridge or "translation," by means of which "the multiform indeterminacy of the original can be accommodated within the cultural expectations of one age after another" (177–78). It is pleasing to find here an appreciative consideration of that supremely good, now unjustly forgotten pair of Victorian annotators, Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke. More whimsically, Helen Wilcox does a Theophrastian "character of a footnote" and a Burtonian anatomy of kinds of notes—"textual, etymological, intertextual, contextual, dramatic, and critical"—with examples (194, 199). A. R. Braunmuller traces the development of the dominant modern format for annotation—text at the top of the page, two ranks of notes below—from humanist editions of Greek and Roman classics, through old and New Shakespeare Variorums, down to the present Oxford, Cambridge, and Arden volumes. Eric Rasmussen, undismayed by the middle rank of notes, the "'band of terror'" recording textual variants, urges "collation inflation": "Instead of cutting back on collations, perhaps we should actually be encouraging editors and students of Shakespeare to assemble and analyse them more thoroughly" (211).

The Arden editorial guidelines require the editors to "present their plays as texts for performance, making appropriate reference to stage, film, and television versions" (xiv). It is easy to exaggerate the novelty of our recent attention to performance. Shakespeare editors (e.g., Theobald, Capell...