'But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee': editing King Lear for an Australian Audience

'But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee': editing King Lear for an Australian Audience. Philippa Kelly 'And who asserts, "the play's the thing"? The bard!/He proves he's right/In Hamlet twice a night', wrote Eardley Turner in turn-of-thecentury Australia.1 These days such views are contested by the notion that inherited educational and cultural structures create the value of the very texts which are reified for their 'universal' appeal. Australian scholars are increasingly aware of 'the nation' not just as a postcolonial community seeking to define itself away from the inherited artefacts which once served to define a national identity, but as a people looking to sever its formal identification with 'Englishness' as signified by the Commonwealth. 'Shakespeare' is 1 Eardley Turner, 1912, as quoted in Entertaining Australia: An Ill History, ed. Katherine Brisbane, (Sydney: Currency Press, 1991), p. 32. 134 Philippa Kelly often seen as a bulwark of the imperial past which impedes our national self-evolvement.2 The ambivalent status of all three terms, 'Englishness', 'Shakespeare' and 'the canon,' w a s uppermost in my mind as I worked on the edition of King Lear which I had been contracted to prepare for the Bell Shakespeare series. I wanted to put together a text and apparatus that would address the legacy of King Lear's tragic meaning and value, mobilising the conceptual currents which have generated n e w and challenging ways of looking at the play, at its place in the canon, at canonicity as a constraining value, and at what it means to be Australian. With this general aim in mind, I focussed on four different aspects of the edition. The first aspect concerns the moral and medical hierarchies which have characterised editing until recent times. If obsessions about definitive versions and the resolution of thorny textual difficulties yoke an Australian edition of King Lear to an editorial history which is both global and academicallyoriented , at the same time I don't think it's useful for an editor to refuse to engage at all with this tradition. While divorcing text and /or apparatus from this tradition could be seen as an act of liberation from historically-imposed conceptual constraints, i t might also compromise the range of interpretive choices in favour of idiosyncratic editorial strategies. The second aspect of the edition refers to the version of King Lear (broadly speaking, quarto or folio3 ) which is considered by critics to be the more 'authentic'. The 2 See, for example, the essays in Shakespeare's Books, ed. Marian Campbell and Philip Mead, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press), 1993. 3 Graham Holdemess et al discuss the 'multiplicity' of texts which has emerged in recent decades, as with Michael Warren's unbinding of two quarto texts and one folio: ...the modern deconstructionist reader can freely manipulate the textual elements of the various texts entitled King Lear to form any number of differential versions.' (Graham Holdemess et al, 'Shakespeare and textual theory,' Textual Practice, 9:1 (1995), 109 Editing King Learfor an Australian Audience 135 third aspect concerns the material I chose for m y annotations and my Introduction. The fourth addresses the doubly fictionalised performance 'history' involved in an analysis of Australian performance reviews: in assessing reviews in the composition of a performance history, I brought m y o w n interpretive parameters to discussions already marked by reviewers' particular cultural perspectives. MORAL AND MEDICAL HIERARCHIES King Lear's history of uncertain textual authority presented a number of problems for m y Bell Shakespeare edition. Would I use an established text as a copy-text? If so, which one? Shakespeare scholarship is structured around categories—'good' and 'bad' quartos, 'foul papers', 'memorial contamination' and 'fair copies'— that establish the authority of editorial procedures. This observation draws on recent editorial theory which suggests that instead of bodies that need to be exhumed, cleaned and dissected for inspection, texts should be considered as refusing neat categories of intention.4 It also suggests that the conventional 'tree logic' which traces a text back to its 'roots' in order to designate authority m a y refuse to engage with the material life of a text in 4...