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  • Shakespeare's Errant Texts: Textual Form and Linguistic Style in Shakespearean 'Bad' Quartos and Co-authored Plays
  • Natalie Aldred (bio)
Shakespeare's Errant Texts: Textual Form and Linguistic Style in Shakespearean 'Bad' Quartos and Co-authored Plays. By Lene B. Petersen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. xx + 310 pp. £55. ISBN 978 0 521 76522 0.

As a book which, through text corpora and computer-assisted quantitative methods of enquiry, attempts to answer some of the more substantial questions relating to Shakespeare's extant canon — to what extent are his texts the product of various forms of collaboration, and, in terms of the methodologies we might use, how best (or, perhaps, better) might we go about identifying and measuring this extent — Lene B. Petersen's study, Shakespeare's Errant Texts, competently offers an important model by which we might undertake future investigations into Shakespearean authorship and the editing of his plays.

The three case studies that form the focus of Petersen's book, all drawn from the middle of Shakespeare's working career — Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Titus Andronicus — are extant in multiple versions, sometimes of competing textual authority, at other times deriving from a parent quarto or folio version. By extension, each play offers an unusually large pool of variant textual readings, variants which, when collated in full, might help us to better organize and understand the overlaying forms of authorial and memorial or oral composition. Each version of the three plays, then, is rigorously tested by Petersen for stylistic points in common and variations, all in a series of linked chapters. This is buttressed by a Prologue setting out Petersen's methodologies and her predecessor's work and an Epilogue that provides some useful conclusions about the findings and limitations of her work, together with how they might best be used in conjunction with other studies into Shakespearean authorship.

The various chapters of the book divide into two overarching parts. The first, 'Oral-Memorial Transmission and the Formation of Shakespeare's Texts', identifies the key importance of actors and oral/memorial culture in Shakespeare's time, and how this links to the wider issue of oral/memorial reproduction in extant versions of Shakespeare's play-texts. This is usefully tied to a play's 'quarto mechanics', or 'the oral-mechanical functions activated in the popular play when actors and audiences join forces and […] perform the play into shape' (p. 64). The second part of the book, 'Recomposing the Author: Some Tools for Positioning the Role of the Playwright in Dramatic Transmission', offers new quantitative textual analyses for [End Page 64] approaching form and style in Shakespearean texts. Here, Petersen underlines, through valuable demonstrations, the uses of discriminant data sets, contextual stylistics, function words, syntactical items, stage directions, set phrases, repetition and repetitious patterning, and additions and subtractions of scenes as a means to quantify and expose the various forms of underlying collaboration present in her chosen texts. A number of the outcomes of this study have arresting consequences: according to Petersen's data sets, the first quarto (Q1) of Romeo and Juliet is stylistically closer to Q2–3 then previously argued, suggesting that a link between Q1 and later editions should not be dismissed (as it so often is). Petersen concedes that this might seem to hark back to Pope's conclusions following his similar stylistic analysis over 250 years ago, but her study importantly proposes a new slant: that Q2 and F1 represent orally transmitted texts, and that the multiplicity between the various versions of the play might in turn be subscribed to the influence of oral tradition. By comparison, the three extant quartos of Hamlet are 'independent entities systematically developed in tradition, differentiated on independent stylistic merits', not, as has previously occurred, 'simply deemed so on the basis of aesthetic value judgements' (p. 235).

Four appendices complete the work. The first details the scenic units in the first extant quartos of Hamlet/Der Bestrafe Brudermond and Romeo and Juliet/Romio und Julieta, while the second provides verbal evidence of quarto mechanics in the short versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. The third appendix offers a table of results for discriminant analysis on...

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