New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, II: Papers of the Renaissance English Texts Society, 1992-1996 (review)

230 Reviews Hill, W Speed, ed., New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, II: Papers of th Renaissance English Texts Society, 1992-1996 (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 188), Tempe, Arizona, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1998; cloth; pp. xvi, 173; R.R.P. US$25.00, £22.00. Professor Speed Hill's preface to this collection of essays supplie very great extent, the place of a review. H e places the papers in their context of having been given over a five-year period at the M o d e m Languages Association of America convention, and the collection of papers as being the successor to New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, I: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991. Pages xi to xv offer a clear summary of each paper, its editing subject, and the abstract issues that are addressed in terms of that subject. The rationale for the book, that 'read chronologically [the essays] supply a useful proxy for developments in the field' (p. xi) is valid as far as it goes but does not, as it could with justice have done, state that the collection demonstrates the breadth of that field and the range of editorial projects and subjects in existence. For a reader new to the subject, this collection of articles is valuable for that reason if for no other. While the editing projects themselves are, as might be expected of the Renaissance English Text Society, limited to seventeenth-century English literature and earlier, the types of texts produced and the abstract issues of textual criticism raised are applicable to editing work from any period. Whether the subject of the paper is a new type of edition, such as Jill Levenson's n e w Oxford edition of Romeo and Juliet using a combination of World Wide W e b technology and an ink-andpaper text, enabling wider public access to little-known works such as that of Queen Katherine Parr, or addressing the issue of which authorrevised text to produce, as in the case of George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and (or) The Posies, the c o m m o n factor among all the papers is a steady concern that the end product of the project should be a readable, accessible text. Even Steven Urkowitz, w h o m Speed Hill describes as being of the school of 'unediting' (p. xiv), does not stop at the point of demonstrating the restrictions that editorial judgement can impose on the reader. His call for 'looser formats, with larger pages, Reviews 231 perhaps something with magazine-style sidebars that would allow an editor to spin out a discussion of a twenty-line textual variant or a particularly apposite antecedent source text' might present its o w n problems when put into practice as such, but at the same time it opens up new and intriguing possibilities for textual models. Along with the practical concerns that abound in any editing project, this collection addresses some more abstract textual questions. Gary Taylor's paper 'Judgement' is a provocative meditation on the issues of choice which are intrinsic to the task of editing. Choosing which books to edit, and h o w to edit them, Western society's focus on the works of Shakespeare as opposed, in this case, to those of Middleton offers> according to Taylor, insights into the w a y w e view ourselves and our world. In doing so, Taylor highlights a moral dimension to editing that has disturbing implications for any reader, whether that reader has a specific interest in editing or not. Speed Hill's exemplar of the Folger Library edition of the works of Hooker covers numerous issues involved in editing a non-dramatic, heavily revised and lengthy work; one, moreover, where a second modem edition is unlikely to appear in the near or even long-term future. Through a discussion of the different criteria for text selection and editorial models possible for such a project, Speed Hill demonstrates the practical difficulties, in print at any rate, of constructing a non-author- centred text, difficulties that m a y be summed up in the...