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Reviews 233 Marcus, Leah S., Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, London and N e w York, Routledge, 1996; board; pp. xi, 268; RR.P. US$69.95. A contribution to the history of editorial practice, this book claims to usher in 'a major paradigm shift' and a new methodology under 'the new phtiology'. Undoubtedly the change is radicaUy reshaping our view of Elizabethan texts, but since the foundations have been underway at least since Ernst Honigmann's The Stability of Shakespeare's Texts (1965), it cannot be claimed as Marcus's discovery, or perhaps even caUed 'new'. Marcus does, however, neatly summarise the evidence and the main lines of development. More consistently than others, Leah Marcus argues for the iUuminating discreteness of different Renaissance editions of texts which 'New Bibliographers' like Greg, Bowers and McKerrow had argued were simply variants of a single monolithic play that could be reconstituted by scientific methods. Drawing equally upon Roland Barthes and Romantics scholar Jerome McGann, this book sees each 'text' not as sacred 'work' but as an inherently unstable network incorporating 'a wider historical and cultural matrix'. Under this paradigm, 'earlier and later versions of a given work are accorded fairly equal status', seen as revisions or recontextuatisations, rather than as items arranged in a hierarchy running from had' to 'good'. Versions formerly regarded as 'corrupt' are located in material contexts which give them specific functions that are efficiently realised, turning their frustrating qualities into a re-defined autonomy and even authority. The enterprise could have been refitted 'hi praise of bad quartos'. It should be of some interest to readers of Parergon that two of the pioneers of the n e w phtiology, acknowledged as such by Marcus, are antipodeans: Harold Love and D. F. McKenzie. Textual instability and relativity m a y exhilarate rather than dismay those w h o are accustomed to working at the margins of empire. If so, then in true postcolonial fashion, the margins have found their way to the centre, and m a y even in time constitute a new scholarly empire. One example has a timely relevance. The new, four-hour Branagh 234 Reviews movie has been hailed as the 'complete' Hamlet. In fact, it is a kind of anthology or conflation of three editions which the n e w philologist would claim are separate and quite different: two quartos and the folio. If the viewing public could have tolerated it (and there is some evidence that it could) it would have been m u c h more interesting to have three films each based on a single text. Marcus's book came before the film, but it neatly sketches the argument for the three, occasional versions, hypothesises about their possible theatrical contexts, and speculates on the origins of each as products of a movement from oral culture to the primacy of printed texts. Marcus also argues that the differences between the A and B texts of Doctor Faustus might be explained by positing that the latter is a rewriting of the former with n e w national priorities in mind—an adaptation written after Marlowe's death to meet n e w political circumstances whtie cashing in on the 'Marlowe effect' and on the earlier play's popularity. The Quarto version of The Merry Wives of Windsor has been seen as a debased travesty of the longer folio text which depicts rural life alongside the royal court, but Marcus suggests that it was a purposeful rewriting for a more urban audience in London, or alternatively it m a y have been a travelling text for the provinces, where a smaller cast and shorter plays were required. The final chapter moves forward to the different versions of Milton's various poems. Given Milton's blindness, Marcus argues that at the heart of the poem's composition lay a feat of long-distance oratory or memorial construction, rather than an impetus towards textuality as such. The multi-dimensional interactive capacities of a C D - R O M are invoked to remind us that texts need not be stable and fixed but m a y be, in the author's mind, a quarry that can be...

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