Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (review)

Reviews 273 Walsh, Marcus, Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought 35), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; cloth; pp. xii, 222; 12 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. AUS$95.00. The seventeenth century had seen the development of characteristicall Anglican types of biblical exposition. Set against the R o m a n Catholic support of an oral tradition for the interpretation of scripture, a tradition which necessarily involved the Church as the custodians of the authoritative sense, Anglican apologists promoted the primacy of the printed text. This was not a simple opposition of 'public voice' (the Church) versus 'private' (the believer), the latter as in the Puritan view of scriptural interpretation, for the Anglican tradition maintained that rational interpretation of the printed text was possible to the extent that it was supported by knowledge of the 'authorial intention' of the writer of scripture. This knowledge was not a Romantic and postRomantic psychological knowledge, but a verbal knowledge supported by contextual knowledge. In the Anglican tradition, such knowledge was typically supplied to the reader by two means/paraphrase and annotation. In his book Walsh briefly suggests this view of English hermeneutics, in a short chapter 'Making sense of Scripture,' in order to suggest the transference of this view from scripture to vernacular secular texts in the eighteenth century. H e argues the latter in two lengthy chapters, 'Making sense of Milton' (58 pages) and 'Making sense of Shakespeare' (88 pages)—out of 201 text pages in all—and the strength of the book undoubtably lies in the detailed account of specific editorial practice described in those two chapters. W h a t Walsh unambiguously establishes, as indeed he explicitly states, is not so much the transference of these Anglican practices from scripture to the vernacular, as the incorporation of the works of these two English writers into scriptural status, along with their incorporation into a history for English texts comparable to the established history of illustrious classical texts. Such incorporation means that the methods for interpreting scripture and for editing the classics become appropriately relevant. At the same time, this entry of Milton and Shakespeare into canonical and historical status gives English writers 274 Reviews generally, and indeed the English people, a more elevated significance, a greater cultural coherence and importance. In an opening chapter, 'Some theoretical perspectives for the study of eighteenth-century editing', Walsh gives a rapid overview of twentieth- century discussions of editing, and settles quickly on Peter Shillingsburg's 'taxonomy of textual editing', outlined in Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice (1986). A footnote indicates that Shillingsburg has later redrawn his 'map of relations,' taking into account, I infer, poststructuralist critiques, but Walsh continues to find Shillingsburg's earlier structuralist categories adequate to his descriptive purposes. These categories indicate four possible formal orientations of textual editing, 'depending on where the editor chooses to locate authority for the text': the historical/ documentary, the aesthetic, the authorial and the sociological. Walsh extends the application of these categories from 'pure textual criticism' to interpretation because, he suggests, eighteenth- century editors typically did not distinguish between exegesis and textual criticism. Thus Walsh will use Shillingsburg's categories in discussing the taking up of practices of scriptural interpretation in the editing of Milton and Shakespeare, in particular the categories of aesthetic and authorial orientations. Patrick Hume's Annotations on Milton's Paradise Lost (1695) are the first full-scale commentary on Paradise Lost. Walsh suggests that H u m e clearly uses the established 'key instruments' of biblical commentary, 'explicatory paraphrase and learned annotation'. In contrast, Richard Bentley (his 1732 edition of Paradise Lost referred to as 'notorious'), a distinguished editor of the classics, transferred his editorial practices from the classics to the English text. This represented a significant recognition of the status of English writing, but also led to a 'contest of authority between poet, text and editor'. Walsh suggests that 'Bentley undermines the possibility of documentary, sociological, and authorial approaches in order to justify what will appear to be an essentially aesthetic emphasis'. This approach was not representative of eighteenthcentury attitudes to editing...