A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: "The Winter's Tale" (review)

"Heavy matters, heavy matters" (The Winter's Tale, TLN 1552).¹ So says the Shepherd to his son upon hearing the latter's dire news of shipwreck and ursine appetite. The New Variorum Winter's Tale, 107 years after Horace Howard Furness's first such treatment of the play, and a century after an explosion of scholarship devoted to it, is heavy matter, but only in the material sense (almost 1,000 pages). Its weighty scholarly apparatus defies the pedantic tedium often found in such massive projects to yield instead the gold of scholarship practiced in the best manner—scrupulously careful, judiciously comprehensive, generously balanced, robustly challenging, and, perhaps no less important, delightfully good humored.

The first half of this major reference tool offers "a text of the play reprinted with little change from that of . . . the Folio of 1623 (F1)" (ix).² The text is taken from photocopies of a Folger Shakespeare Library copy, with the transcript of these prints compared to texts in several other Folger copies; to Sidney Lee's Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies; Being a Reproduction in Facsimile of the First Folio Edition (1902); and to Charlton Hinman's Norton Facsimile, "the object being to make the Variorum text as accurate as possible" (ix). Accompanying each page of text are textual notes pointing to "significant departures" (ix) from F1 in eighty-six editions of the play from 1632 to 1988 and commentary on grammar, syntax, prosody, meaning, and artistry compiled from editions, dictionaries, and critical works. Robert Kean Turner is responsible for this part of the book. The second half brings together the efforts of coeditor Virginia Westling Haas (on critical opinion and the text as adapted to the stage) and several contributors: Robert A. Jones (criticism in German), Patricia E. Tatspaugh (performance history), and Andrew J. Sabol (the play's music). An extensive bibliography and welcome index round out the volume.

Anyone with a query regarding a certain word, line, or passage in The Winter's Tale will be grateful for Turner's mastery of centuries of editorial decisions and critical perspectives. Rather then setting his reader adrift on a sea of opinion, he sometimes introduces an annotation with a brief contextualizing statement and concludes with an equally brief observation that astutely sums up the critical trajectory traveled from the first to the last critic cited. He points out errors and provides examples to support either the citation or his correction. Good examples of Turner's annotative style include the notes to markers of the onset of Leontes' jealousy: "yet . . . Lord" (TLN 99–101n), "The offences we have made you do . . . and that you slipped not / With any, but with us" (TLN 149–52n), "At my request, he would not" (TLN 155n), and "Too hot, too hot . . . that is entertainment / My bosom likes not, nor my brows" (TLN 181–92n). Similarly impressive are the notes to what the editors term Antigonus's "remarkable experience" involving the ghostlike appearance of Hermione (TLN 1458–83n), Paulina's seeming shift from castigation to sympathy in the trial scene (TLN 1409n), Autolycus's feigned shoulder injury (TLN 1740–41n), sheepshearing (TLN 1800n), the garment exchange between Florizel and Autolycus (TLN 2557–58n, 2631–32n), and Julio Romano's name (TLN 3104–5n). So much information in one place, especially when buttressed by frequent cross-references to sections on criticism, performance, and sources, is nothing short of a gold mine.

In the first of several appendices, the editors provide lists of "irregular, doubtful, and emended accidentals in F1" (567) and "unadopted conjectures" (569), along with textual information concerning authenticity, compositor attributions, the copy for the F1 text, Ralph Crane's copy and his reliability, the printer's dependability, and the production of subsequent early editions. A comparison of several chronologies, but focusing on those of E...