Superior in his Profession: Essays in Memory of Harold Love (review)

Few bibliographers deserved a Festschrift more than Harold Love, and it is sad that this excellent volume has to be 'in memoriam'. I met Harold Love only once, but was enthralled by his energy and the immense range of his knowledge of books, manuscripts, and the bibliographical world in general, and like everyone I owe him the debt incurred by his wonderful Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (1993). This collection begins not with the expected personal memoir — that comes later — but with the bibliography of his writings that demonstrates his range: seventeenth-century poetry and drama in profusion, but also Australian colonial theatre and opera, editorial principles and technique, and at least one libretto. Almost every article begins with a reminiscence of Harold and an acknowledgment of the writer's debt to him, whether as student, colleague, or friend. Love by name and Love by nature, as was evident in my one glimpse of him.

The personal memoir is by his former student Lurline Stuart and is affectionate, closely informed, and sensibly brief. Detailed bibliographical study is everywhere, but most fully represented by B. J. McMullin's article on the editorial problem of Mercutio's 'Queene Mab' speech, a problem very interestingly resolved, Nicholas Fisher on Rochester's re-working of Fletcher's Valentinian, Peter Shillingsburg on the editing of Thackeray's The Four Georges, and Wallace Kirsop's study of an illuminated address to Adelaide Ristori of 1875. John Emmerson unveils the realities of the English pamphlet trade in 1642, John Burrows uses computational stylistics to investigate an authorship problem in Dryden, and Clive Probyn discusses Jonathan Swift's well-known dislike of music and what it signified for a Dean one of whose duties was to administer his cathedral's liturgical music. Archival study comes to the fore in Felicity Henderson's 'Robert Hooke's Archive', which for reasons of my own I found extremely valuable, and Judith Milhouse and one of Love's old collaborators, Robert Hume, study theatre account books in eighteenth-century London. Antipodean theatre history is the focus of Elizabeth Webby's 'Harlequin in Van Diemen's Land' (too brief, alas) and Robert Jordan's too long but convulsively funny 'Australia's Worst Actor? The Life Art and Business Practices of Mr. Henry Kemble of Drury Lane, Monopolylogist'. Mary Jane Edwards looks at an untouched subject, the transformation in French-Canadian translations of the English-Canadian novel The Golden Dog (1877), and Patrick Spedding offers an essay very much in the spirit of Love's historic Scribal Publication, studying Lady Mary Wortley Montague's letters to her daughter to illuminate her attitude to manuscript publication and circulation.

The volume concludes with a thoughtful essay by Paul Eggert on 'Advice for Scholarly Editors of Australian Literature: "Just Push On"' (Love's advice, given at a critical moment). Eggert considers both the argument for full-fledged critical editions of colonial literature (as important here in Canada as in Australia), but also the larger issues of editing during the period of literary theory, and the relationship between 'Text History' and 'Book History'. It is an essay that ought to be read by anyone attempting a critical edition, and by book historians who might never prepare one, but consult them all the time. As the book's title proclaims (from a 1728 poem by Roger North) 'he was certainly a very happy person, . . . of an easy temper, superior in his profession, well accepted by all'. Though Love did not live to attend the party, this volume, in the true spirit of the genre of the 'festschrift', is a festival celebration of a distinguished scholar's life and work.