The Texts of 'Othello' and Shakespearian Revision (review)

Reviews 227 English, and Glyndwr was the last Welshman to bear the title.' Moreover, whilst Llywelyn fought to retain the freedom of the Welsh principality; Owain fought to regain that lost freedom. Both m e n are powerful symbols for contemporary Welsh nationalists, but Henken betieves Owain Glyndwr is more often to be seen as the champion of poor folk because 'working folk live close enough to sorrow. W h e n they find a prince w h o fights for them, toils for them, plans for them, and dreams for them, then they are not likely soon to forget.' Perhaps 'Owain Glyndwr is y mab darogan, son of the prophecy' The book is well structured; the Chapter Notes, Bibliography and Index are comprehensive and Henken's joint use of Welsh language sources with contiguous English translations works effectively. A n d finaUy, although Henken deals expressly with the quest for Welsh poUtical and national autonomy, a sense of the underlying nexus between nationalism and ethnocentricity begins to emerge. Graeme Cronin c/o Department of English University of Western Australia Honigmann, E. A. J., The Texts of 'Othello' and Shakespearian Revisi London and N e w York, Routledge, 1996; cloth; pp. xix, 187; R.R.P. US$69.50. Textual editors are all too often the unseen and unsung heroes of literary scholarship. Milestones in editing pass unremarked, even when they should be heralded as most remarkable. One milestone that did not escape notice, however, was Honigmann's The Instability of Shakespeare's Text, which some thirty years ago revolutionised the way in which w e thought about play texts of the Renaissance in general and Shakespeare's in particular. Honigmann was a postmodern, introducing the principle of radical uncertainty, long before most of us had ever thought of what postmodernity might be. tii view of past experience one comes to Honigmann's latest work, The Texts of 'Othello' with a frisson of expectation. To the extent that Honigmann's new book is a model of scholarly thoroughness, clarity and precision, it must serve as compulsory reading for anyone 228 Reviews entering the field of editorial work in relation to Shakespeare's texts or, indeed, any other play texts of the period. The middle chapters provide a masterly exposition of the process of editorial scholarship at work. Overall, however, this book leaves one not a little disappointed. Let us see why. The book arose out of Honigmann's projected Othello for the third series of the 'Arden' edition. There were so many editorial problems that Honigmann found himself writing another book alongside the edition itseti. This is it. Like others before him, Honigmann found both the late Ql (1621) and FI equally marred with imperfections. There were not the huge discrepancies between Q and F that have fuelled the unresolved textual arguments over Hamlet and King Lear. Nevertheless, in the words of another editor of Othello, Alvin Kernan, the differences 'present an editor with a series of most difficult questions about what to print at any given point where the two texts are in disagreement' (Introduction to the Complete Signet Classic edition). At this stage w e should note that Kernan and other editors of recent times have followed W . W . Greg in preferring F as the better of two manifestly imperfect texts. Honigmann proposes a family tree of texts that looks like this: Aa —Q / A \ B — B b — F In this genealogy, A (author's foul papers) leads in one direction through A a (scribal copy) to Q; and in the other through B (authorial fair copy of foul papers) through Bb (another scribal copy) to F. In the end, Honigmann finds himseU making a marginal, though reluctant, choice in favour of Q, against the current of received critical opinion. It does not take the genius of a Wittgenstein to see that the paradigm represented above both reflects and directs a closed circuit within Honigmann's editorial judgement in several ways. First, A suggests an Ur-text (from which notion, thanks in part to Honigmann's earlier work, w e have withdrawn). Then, by placing the lineage of A above B, Reviews 229 Honigmann implicitly privileges that line...