Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan, (eds.), The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition 47
London: HMSO, 1911. 409-412. British History Online. Web. 20 March 2019.
Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan, (eds.), The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. ix + 3382 pp.
Reviewed by OYA Reiko, Keio University
In the 1980s, Gary Taylor was deemed the enfant terrible of the Shakespeare world for his revisionist textual scholarship and fearless reevaluation of the playwright’s iconic status. He edited (with Michael Warren) a collection of essays, entitled The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of ‘King Lear’ (1983), postulating that the texts in the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 First Folio reproduce discrete versions of the tragedy and that the differences between them are signs of authorial revision. In 1986, Taylor and his senior coeditor Stanley Wells went on to publish the Oxford Shakespeare (hereafter Oxford) to reflect this view. They embraced single-text editing and treated each early edition in its own right, discarding the age-old practice of putting multiple versions together and creating a ‘conflated’ text. Two versions of King Lear were included in Oxford as a result. While earlier
英文学研究96.indd 47 19/11/20 15:16 48 書 評
editors were preoccupied with reconstructing Shakespeare’s original manuscript drafts (‘foul papers’), the Oxford team attended to authorial revision and theatrical collaboration, prioritizing texts in the ‘more theatrical’ First Folio over those in earlier Quartos. They reviewed the Shakespeare canon by examining linguistic features such as function words, which have little lexical meaning. An unremarkable lyric poem in a 17th-century miscellany (‘Shall I die?’) was ascribed to Shakespeare as a result. Oxford was not a user-friendly edition as the plays were given unfamiliar titles and ordered in a new way, and the conventional act- scene division was replaced by consecutive scene numbering̶people struggled to even locate the passage they needed in it. Its assumptions about the manuscripts underlying early- modern playbooks were not unanimously accepted, either. Still, it transformed modern textual reproduction of Shakespeare’s plays and poems and single-text editing would soon become the order of the day. Thirty years on, Taylor and his new editorial team, which includes John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan, published the New Oxford Shakespeare (New Oxford), reviewing Shakespeare’s canon yet again with recourse to computer-assisted textual analysis. New Oxford at present comprises the modern-spelling Modern Critical Edition (Modern), the old- spelling Critical Reference Edition (Reference) in two volumes, and the Authorship Companion (Companion). Modern and Reference include the same versions of the same works. The online edition, presented on the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online platform, offers the content of the three print publications. New Oxford also promises an ‘Alternative Versions’ volume for the Quarto and Folio versions not included in Modern and Reference. In Companion, Taylor’s manifesto piece ‘Artiginality’ (a blend of ‘artisanship’ and ‘originality’) reinforces his long-standing revisionism about Shakespeare’s superstardom (‘Shakespeare was a star̶but never the only one in our galaxy’, Reinventing Shakespeare, 1989) by underlining the artisanal poetics and practice common to the famous playwright and his contemporaries. Based on ‘the fundamental ethical principle’ (Companion, p. 20) of giving the early-modern ‘artisans’ credit for their work, the New Oxford team reassessed the authorship, constitution and chronology of the Shakespeare canon with recourse to statistical analyses of digital databases of early-modern plays and other types of writing, such as Literature Online and Early English Books Online. As Taylor claimed in a press release (25 November 2016), ‘Shakespeare has entered the world of Big Data’. The outcomes of their analyses unsettle the standard narrative of Shakespeare collaborating with fellow dramatists on his early plays (such as the three parts of Henry VI and Titus Andronicus) and the final ones (Pericles, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen) but single-handedly completing the masterpieces that came in-between. New Oxford lists 45 plays (rather than the standard 37) in its Table of Contents and identifies collaborators in 17 of them. His presumed coauthors
英文学研究96.indd 48 19/11/20 15:16 Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan, (eds.), The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition 49
include Thomas Middleton (in Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well, Timon of Athens and Macbeth), Christopher Marlowe (Henry VI), Thomas Kyd (The Spanish Tragedy) and Ben Jonson (Sejanus). All in all, New Oxford is a landmark project both in scale and methodology and is far too large to do justice in a short review: its statistical methods and its ‘disintegration’ of the canon, which so far have not generated universal confidence, will be scrutinized by Shakespeare scholars and authorship-attribution experts for many years to come. The following survey will, therefore, focus on the way in which the cutting-edge scholarship underpinning the Reference and Companion is fitted for general use in the Modern edition. Modern arranges the plays authored or part-authored by Shakespeare in the chronological order of composition as established in Companion (Chapters 21, 22, and 25), to offer ‘a kind of biography’ of his creativity (p. 48). Poems, meanwhile, are placed in the years in which their first editions appeared. As a result, The Sonnets, first published in 1609 but probably composed much earlier, is placed between Coriolanus (1608) and The Winter’s Tale (between 1609 and 11). In the Table of Contents, the plays are listed under their full original titles (for instance The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus) but an alphabetical list of contents is also supplied using the familiar short titles (Titus Andronicus). While Oxford attempted to reproduce the plays as they were originally performed, New Oxford simply chooses the longest version of each play as their copy text, to give readers ‘the most Shakespeare’. As a matter of fact, the editors are now less sure than their 1986 predecessors about the nature of the manuscripts underlying early-modern playbooks:
Recent decades have witnessed a collapse of confidence in the earlier categorization of Shakespeare texts. Difficulties relating to the terms ‘foul papers’ and ‘promptbook’ have been mentioned already [in pp. xxv-xxvi]. Editors are also now reluctant to identify the wide separation observed by the New Bibliography between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quartos. This is not to say that the nature of the manuscript underlying a print edition is completely beyond scrutiny, but rather that our understanding of such matters is provisional, and the proposed dichotomies raise as many questions as they answer. (Jowett, ‘Shakespeare, Early Modern Textual Cultures, and This Edition’, in Reference, p. xli)
They therefore use the Second Quarto version of Hamlet (1604-05) rather than the much shorter First Quarto (1603), or the First Folio. Some of their copy texts have act intervals, while others do not. When they do, it is difficult to establish whether the intervals were written by Shakespeare or inserted later by his fellow actors or by printers. For easy reference,
英文学研究96.indd 49 19/11/20 15:16 50 書 評
Modern gives both continuous scene numbering and conventional act-scene division in most plays. The scene division follows the editorial tradition except for a small number of cases (Titus Andronicus, 1.1 and 2.1; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.1 and 4.1; King John, 2.2 and 3.1; Measure for Measure, 1.2, 3.1 and 4.1; Macbeth, 3.4 and 3.5). The edition also includes original musical scores for the songs within the texts. While modernizing the spelling, the edition modifies some of the speech prefixes and adds many stage directions implied by the dialogue. For instance, when Romeo and Juliet first meet and speak in a shared sonnet toward the end of the ball scene (1.5), the editors insert the direction, ‘He kisses her’, at lines 102 and 106, even though the early texts do not clarify the exact moment when the lovers kiss. Interpretive interventions such as this one are indicated by square brackets. The page layout of Modern is legible. The plays and poems are printed in a single column and there are helpful glosses at the bottom of each page. The side margin is used to provide Performance Notes, which supplement stage directions and explore various staging possibilities. Meanwhile, textual notes are postponed to the Reference volume and full collation will only be available in the forthcoming Alternative Versions. Instead of regular introductions, individual plays and poems are supplied with a selection (‘Bricolage’) of quotations representing different critical perspectives from 1592 to 2016. The background information normally found in an introduction is pared down to a timeline of some dozen key events related to the play, and a small box of ‘useful information about the work or its critical history’ (p. 47). Modern is primarily intended for students and first-time readers, as seen in the titles of the two introductory essays by Taylor and Bourus (‘Why Read Shakespeare’s Complete Works?’ and ‘Why Read This Complete Works?’) and the subset of questions addressed in them (such as ‘Why read dead white men?’, ‘Why read plays, when I can watch films?’ and ‘Why read anyone who is so hard to understand?’). The three publications of New Oxford are closely connected but Modern is the only affordable volume (at £50) and, realistically speaking, all that undergraduates are likely to see. Reference and Companion, together containing over 4,500 pages, come with a big price tag ( £195 and £125 respectively) and are clearly for dedicated postgraduate students and researchers. Purchasers of Modern are given free access to the complete online edition for one year, but when the free trial period expires, an individual subscription costs a whopping £340 annually, which is beyond the means of an average undergraduate. As a stand-alone piece, Modern is problematic in the way in which texts are edited and presented to its intended reader. The two introductory essays much subdue the ‘artiginal’ collaborative authorship explored in Reference and Companion and instead resort to out-
英文学研究96.indd 50 19/11/20 15:16 Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan, (eds.), The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition 51
and-out Bardolatry, styling Shakespeare as the ‘most best’ author. While omitting vital textual information, the essays bombard readers with such value-laden superlatives as ‘most’ (178 times), ‘best’ (45 times) and ‘greatest’ (14 times). The phrase ‘most best’ itself is quoted from Hamlet (2.2.120) and the playwright certainly used superlatives to great effect in his plays and poems. However, to misquote James Gingell’s blogpost at the time of the US presidential campaign titled ‘Why superlatives are the absolute worst (unless you’re Donald Tr ump) ’ (The Guardian, 15 April 2016), superlatives are ‘the absolute worst’ unless you are actually Shakespeare. The editors promote Shakespeare, alongside his newest Complete Works, even at the expense of his talented contemporaries. For instance, they have this to say about Fletcher:
Measured against the number of worlds he created, Shakespeare was exceptionally economical. Others have written more words than Shakespeare, but he wrote more texts considered the best of their kind. For instance, his young contemporary, John Fletcher, wrote or co-wrote more plays than Shakespeare; but fewer of Fletcher’s are masterpieces, and most people who have read all of them feel that the plays and their characters blur together, indistinguishably. Fletcher was enormously popular and admired in the seventeenth century, but he achieved that success by repeatedly giving audiences and readers more of what they liked about him. By contrast, Shakespeare keeps surprising us: we turn the page and step through a door into another world. Most readers and writers and actors agree that Shakespeare wrote more of the best work in more genres than any other writer: tragedies, comedies, history plays, tragicomedies, and poems. (‘Why Read Shakespeare’s Complete Works ’, p. 7)
This type of argument by consensus is fallacious, to begin with. As an argument in literary criticism, to let the testimony of ‘most people’ and ‘Most readers and writers and actors’ about ‘the best’ playwright crush a (comparative) minor writer is unacceptable. Even more crucially, to praise Shakespeare to the detriment of Fletcher is incongruous with the concept of ‘artiginality’ which Taylor and his team develop in Reference and Companion. New Oxford is saying one thing to Shakespeare specialists and something quite different, or even contradictory, to the readers of Modern. Editing the text, the New Oxford team transcribed the original copy texts for Reference, and the transcriptions were then modernized for Modern. The transcriptions were checked not only manually but also ‘automatically, with twenty-first-century tools’ such as the free software Juxta, which compared them against other digital transcriptions available online.
英文学研究96.indd 51 19/11/20 15:16 52 書 評
This sounds perfect but random spot checking shows that the transcriptions in Reference are not exactly flawless. For instance, in The Merchant of Venice, Act 1 scene 2, Portia’s lines are rendered, ‘If I should marr [recte marry] I should marry twenty husbands: if hee would despise me, I [recte I] would forgiue him…’ (1.2.46-8). In the following dialogue (1.2.50- 100), roman types are used instead of the italics in the copy text (1600 Quarto) in 17 places. In the online edition, the ‘marr’ has been amended silently but other errors are uncorrected as of March 2019. (I will base my analysis on the print edition hereafter.) The play’s alternative title ‘The Iewe of Venyce’ is misspelt as ‘THE IEWE OF VENICE’ in the running title. Similarly, the running title of Romeo and Juliet gives the First Folio spelling of the heroine’s name (‘IVLIET’) even though the edition is based on the 1599 Quarto. Titles are also incorrect in other places. In Richard II, line numbering is shifted by one throughout Act 5 scene 5. I would not dwell on these local errors if it were not for the editors’ sweeping assertion that ‘This edition [i.e., Modern] began with the most accurate, the most thoroughly checked, transcriptions of all Shakespeare’s texts ever prepared’ (‘Why Read This Complete Works ’, p. 53). The barrage of emphatic words (‘most…most…all…ever’) might be effective in an advertising blurb but it is unseemly in a critical introduction, especially when the claim is not entirely borne out by what follows. In Bricolage, or ‘tapas’ (‘General Editors’ Preface’, p. iv), critical opinions spanning over 400 years are juxtaposed in a deliberately unchronological order. According to the editors, the Bricolage represents not ‘critical monologues’ but rather ‘exceptionally ample, brilliant, varied, and vehement dialogues’ inspired by Shakespeare’s works. In fact, it is difficult to imagine how these soundbites would help the first-time readers intended by the edition to think, ask questions, and reason in a critical manner. The Bricolage for Hamlet, for instance, contains quotations from 40 authors, each of which runs from two to twenty lines. The first quote is from Stanley Wells’s introduction to Hamlet in the 1986 Oxford: ‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet has himself entered the world of myth’. Even in the original single-page introduction, the statement is not supported by any concrete evidence and the ‘myth’ Hamlet has entered is undefined. Detached from the discursive context, the pronouncement hardly makes clear sense in the Bricolage. The final quote is even more problematic:
The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr. Swinburne. James Joyce, 1922
The quotation is from the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode in Joyce’s Ulysses, and the statement is made by Stephen Dedalus. Stephen might be Joyce’s literary alter ego but the novelist and his character inhabit different worlds of (non)reality. The latter half of the
英文学研究96.indd 52 19/11/20 15:16 Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan, (eds.), The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition 53
quotation stands sorely in need of historical contextualization. Stephen’s reference is to A. C. Swinburne’s chauvinistic Boer War sonnet, ‘On the Death of Colonel Benson’ (1901), and the ‘concentration camp’ does not refer to one of Nazi Germany, which would only come into being in the 1930s. Indeed, removed from the original contexts and deprived of the discursive frame normally supplied by the editor, the quotations in the Bricolage look like the reckless posts published on social networking platforms such as Twitter. The kind of information usually found in the ‘Sources’ or ‘Background’ section of the introduction is pared down to a timeline of about a dozen events. The one for Love’s Labour’s Lost for instance reads:
1560 Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (2nd edition) 1572 Marguerite de Valois marries Henri of Navarre 1578 John Florio, Florio His First Fruits c.1580 Sidney, The Old Arcadia 1586 Thomas Bowes’s translation of de la Primaugaye’s The French Academy 1589 Henri of Navarre becomes Henri IV of France c.1592 Robert Wilson, The Cobbler’s Prophecy c.1595 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream c.1597 Ben Jonson, The Case is Altered 1598 Robert Tofte, Alba 1599 The Passionate Pilgrim 1600 England’s Helicon (pp. 774-75)
It would take an exceptionally culturally literate undergraduate to establish the relevance of these events and books to Shakespeare’s early comedy. I for one could not figure out why the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was so vital for Love’s Labour’s Lost, until I spotted the following sentence in Reference: ‘The pageant of the Worthies may imitate the staging of Pyramus and Thisbe in Midsummer Night’s Dream [recte A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the initial ‘A’ is missing from the title three more times in pp. 862 and 864 in Reference] (or, depending on the dating of the plays, Midsummer may imitate Love’s Labour’s Lost)’ (pp. 449-50). Omission of this and such other explanations makes Modern more difficult, not easier, to use. Despite the radical reconsideration of the Shakespeare canon, Modern omits textual notes and only supplies brief explanations (of two to ten lines) under the heading ‘Te x t ’ in the information boxes. For instance, the Text section of Pericles, which most researchers, including the New Oxford editors, attribute to Shakespeare and George Wilkins, reads:
英文学研究96.indd 53 19/11/20 15:16 54 書 評
First published in 1609 and reprinted frequently thereafter, probably because of the play’s popularity in the theatre. The first edition is exceptionally corrupt. See Reference edition. A novella by Wilkins, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608), sometimes appears to plagiarize the King’s Men’s staging; some of these details are included in our Performance Notes. (p. 2662)
The reader has no way of knowing from this that the ‘exceptionally corrupt’ 1609 Quarto is the copy text of the edition. Moreover, it fails to mention the play’s absence from the First Folio, which is a conspicuous feature of the play’s publication history with important implications for the authorship question. The editors explain the omission of textual information from Modern as follows:
Most readers want something more accessible [than Reference]. In particular, most readers are most interested in Shakespeare’s relevance to the present and want to read the works without considering how they come down to us. Every reader of this introduction is living more than 400 years after Shakespeare died. Most of us are interested in the stories Shakespeare told, the characters (and roles) he created, the beauty of his poetry and prose, the range and wisdom of his observations of human behaviour, the worlds he created. For most readers, archaic spellings, arcane conventions of punctuation, seemingly random capitalization and italicization, are a distraction from the main business, the main pleasure, of reading Shakespeare. Most people do not care to keep track of every typo in a cheap sixteenth-century paperback. Most readers are not scholars̶and even the scholars who read Shakespeare are often scholars who specialize in something else. (‘Why Read This Complete Works?’, pp. 54, 56)
Reviewing the volume, Brian Vickers observed that the omission of textual notes is ‘one of several features suggesting that this “Modern Critical Edition” regards serious scholarly issues as of no interest to its intended audience, who are demoted to second-class citizens’ (‘Too too solid’, TLS, 19 April 2017). In fact, the passage cited above has even more unsettling implications. In it, the editors contradict their earlier statement (‘With Shakespeare, we are all students’, ‘General Editors’ Preface’, p. iv) and contrast ‘most people’ and ‘most readers’ with ‘scholars’ engaged in ‘arcane’ issues, and it is the former’s supposedly sounder, saner point of view that gets endorsed. The New Oxford editors are in fact incorrigible hardcore Shakespeare specialists, but the phrase ‘most of us’ implies that they
英文学研究96.indd 54 19/11/20 15:16 川端康雄著『ウィリアム・モリスの遺したもの──デザイン・社会主義・手しごと・文学』55
side or even belong with ‘most’ readers. This is a textbook example of the rhetoric of populism, which appeals to ‘the people’ set against ‘the elite’. In a recent interview, author Roxane Gay underlined the importance of understanding and accepting complication and fighting against dichotomies and essentialism in this increasingly divisive world, noting: ‘Public discourse rarely allows for nuance. And see where that’s gotten us’ (The Guardian, 27 December 2018). Most undergraduates are not going to be Shakespeare specialists, but they can develop their analytical and interpretive skills and learn to think, talk and write ‘with nuance’ by engaging with Shakespeare’s texts. Despite the monumental research and scholarship that went into it, Modern fails to embody this basic tenet of Shakespeare studies and addresses its intended reader in an inappropriate manner, endorsing crude public discourse by replicating it.
川端康雄著『ウィリアム・モリスの遺したもの ──デザイン・社会主義・手しごと・文学』
岩波書店 2016 年 320 pp.
モリスのデザインによるファブリック、「クレイ」（1884 年）を配した美しいカバー に惑わされてはいけない。この本の英語タイトル、William Morris and His Legacy が 語るように、legacy という言葉には、「ある任務をつかさどる使節団（もとはローマ教 皇の特使）」という古い意味もある。つまり『ウィリアム・モリスの遺したもの』は、そ のレガシーをどう私たちが次世代へと伝えていくのか、という使命を問う挑戦状でも ある。その意味で、この題名はフィオナ・マッカーシーのモリス伝（1994 年）の副題 が A Life for Our Time であったことに通ずるものがある。 本著は、ヴィクトリア朝研究のみならず、ジョージ・オーウェルやレイモンド・ウィ リアムズ研究でも第一人者である著者が、これまで発表してきた数々の論考の中から えりすぐったものをさらに推敲し、新たに詳しい注を加えて世に出した一冊である。 本著は、副題に挙げられた 4 つの分野のいずれにおいても今なお影響を与え続ける ウィリアム・モリスの軌跡をたどるものではあるが、デザイン、社会・政治思想、資 本主義における手しごとの意味、そして再評価が進む韻文・散文によるロマンスを、 分断させることなく縦横無尽に絡み合わせながら論じていく。その複眼的な構成は、 数々の活動を同時に遂行したウィリアム・モリスの人生を検証する際に有効であるこ とはいうまでもない。 その手法がはっきりと表れるのは、第 I 部「タペストリーの詩人」である。この部は、 詩、ロマンス、芸術家、社会主義者としてのモリスの活動を、さながらタペストリー
英文学研究96.indd 55 19/11/20 15:16