Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books by William W.E. Slights (review)

humanities 381 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 sprinckled with grey,= without any cross-reference between >hair= and >wedding.= The mention of >wedding knives= in the dialogue of King Edward III (2.2.171) constitutes another item in my proliferating marginalia around >wedding.= The rationale for excluding almost all dialogue amplification of words found in stage directions is thoroughly explained in the introduction, but is sometimes regrettable. Under >melancholy,= for instance, we are told that >the fourteen examples provide no indication of how the actor is to achieve the effect.= However, dialogue offers hints at how an actor might achieve the effect: for instance, with dishevelled clothing >indicating a careless desolation= (As You Like It, 3.2.381), and >Musing and sighing, with [his] arms across= (Julius Caesar, 2.1.240); such clues might judiciously be included more often. A cross-reference here to >book= would also have helped: >a book frequently conveys a state of contemplation, prayer or melancholy in the figure who enters with it, most famously in AEnter Hamlet reading on a Book.@= Nevertheless, the cross-referencing and comparisons encouraged by the format are this work=s great strengths. For instance, Romeo and Juliet has a Q1 entry direction for Paris >with flowers and sweet water= (5.3.0.1); >sweet= means perfumed, but how was this evident to a spectator at the play? Dessen and Thomson, under >water,= list this example alongside one from Antonio and Mellida, 3.2.24: >a casting-bottle of sweet water in his hand, sprinkling himself.= Reference to the text of Romeo and Juliet makes clear that Paris is not narcissistically perfuming himself, but rather the tomb where Juliet lies; what the dictionary adds is the information that Paris might have conveyed a visual signal by carrying the >sweet water= in a >casting-bottle.= This is illuminating for general reader, scholar, and theatrical practitioner alike. I look forward to an expanded second edition with such entries as >bench,= >eagle,= >lists= and >shop-board= (what does >Enter three Taylers on a Shop-board= mean visually?). Such a comment, however, and the increasing marginalia in my copy, indicate what an indispensable resource this book already is. (DAVID CARNEGIE) William W.E. Slights. Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books University of Michigan Press. xiv, 298. US $59.50 The latest title in Michigan=s distinguished series on Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism, Managing Readers fully and fascinatingly describes those directions in the margins by means of which the producers of books in the first two centuries of English printing vainly attempted to control the way xxxxxxxx 382 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 readers absorbed what they read. At another time or in other hands this subject might result in a piece of arcane antiquarianism, but that is not the case here; nor is book history, the growth area to which Slights makes a substantial contribution, just a trendy name for bibliophily. As D.F. McKenzie , J.J. McGann, and others insisted years ago, and as Renaissance specialists like Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, and Adrian Johns have demonstrated in recent work, technical scholarship and speculative criticism should never have been allowed to part ways; they need one another. Deconstruction, New Historicism, and the study of material culture B all of which inform Slights=s thinking B have revitalized the traditional Renaissance subfield of history of printing. One earlier full-scale account of printed glosses in the Renaissance, Evelyn Tribble=s Margins and Marginality (1992), has already politicized page layout by describing the power struggle between the centred text and the marginal annotation; with a much broader empirical base and a different approach, Slights complicates that dramatic generalization. Did printed marginalia >fix or free interpretation=? The simple answer emerging from this book is that they probably usually intended the first and achieved the second. >It would appear,= Slights says, >that none of the strategies employed marginally to simplify and stabilize the text actually had this effect.= But Managing Readers does not settle for simple answers. The core of it is made up of painstaking studies of important marginated books...