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The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text Author(S): Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol

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The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text Author(S): Margreta De Grazia and Peter Stallybrass Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text Author(s): Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 255-283 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2871419 Accessed: 29-06-2019 21:12 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2871419?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Shakespeare Quarterly This content downloaded from 128.227.131.182 on Sat, 29 Jun 2019 21:12:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text MARGRETA DE GRAZIA AND PETER STALLYBRASS FOR OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS, KING LEAR WAS one text; in 1986, with the Oxford Shakespeare, it became two; in 1989, with The Complete King Lear 1608-1623, it became four (at least). As a result of this multiplication, Shakespeare studies will never be the same. This is not simply because we may now have more Shakespeare than before-many Lears instead of one; a mere enlargement of the canon requires no rethinking of how the works are to be prepared and interpreted. Shakespeare studies will never be the same because something long taken for granted has been cast into doubt: the self-identity of the work. We are no longer agreed on the fundamental status of the textual object before us. Is it one or more? The significance of this uncertainty cannot be overestimated. Identity and difference are, after all, the basis of perception itself, the way we tell one thing from another. The possibility of multiple texts, then, constitutes a radical change indeed: not just an enlargement of Shakespeare's works but a need to reconceptu- alize the fundamental category of a work by Shakespeare. One of the most evident results of the multiple-text issue has been mounting resentment toward the editorial tradition. Eighteenth-century editors have been blamed for substituting a composite Lear for the seven- teenth-century Lears, and subsequent editors have been charged with re- producing their predecessors' conflation. A denigration of editing in gen- eral has ensued, as if editors had been passing off an artificial Shakespeare for the real. What has not been stressed, however, is the extent to which literary critics have assumed and perpetuated the terms through which Shakespeare was reproduced in the eighteenth century. While editors examined and defended their choices, critics tended simply to assume the established status of the texts they used. In recent years the two dominant modes of reading Shakespeare-formalism and historicism-have received the text at hand on faith, whether it be, for example, the Alexander edition in England or the Riverside edition in America. Both forms of criticism have This piece began as an introduction to a collection of essays by Randall McLeod/Random Cloud/Random Clod, to whose work we remain indebted. See, in particular, Randall McLeod, "Spellbound: Typography and the Concept of Old-Spelling Editions," Renaissance and Refor- mation, n.s., 3 (1979), 50-65; "Unemending Shakespeare's Sonnet 111," Studies in English Literature, 21 (1981), 75-96; "UNEditing Shak-speare," Sub-stance, 33/34 (1982), 26-55; Ran- dom Cloud, "The Psychopathology of Everyday Art," Elizabethan Theatre, 9 (1986), 100-168; "The Marriage of the Good and Bad Quartos," Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982), 421-31; "'The very names of the Persons': Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character" in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, eds. (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 88-96; and Random Clod, "Information on Information," TEXT, 5 (1991), 241-81. We also wish to thank David Bevington, Jeff Masten, Barbara Mowat, Gary Taylor, and Paul Werstine for comments that helped shape this essay. This content downloaded from 128.227.131.182 on Sat, 29 Jun 2019 21:12:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 256 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY taken for granted the identity of their object without realizing how that assumption subverts their very approach. Formalists call for exacting at- tention to the minutiae of literary language without giving thought to the printing-house practices that have in modern editions produced them. Historicists, tracing in Shakespeare's works the discursive structures specific to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, have ignored the extent to which these structures are eighteenth-century constructs.' This inattention to the textual object catches both approaches in methodological paradox: formalists closely read printed texts as if they were authorial compositions; historicists anachronistically read Enlightenment texts as if they were Renaissance discourses. With both editing and criticism holding fast to a modern text that derives from an eighteenth-century tradition, where can we turn? The First Folio and early quartos seem our only recourse, but not because they hold out promise of getting back to "the thing itself," uncontaminated by latter-day mediations and interventions. "The thing itself," the authentic Shake- speare, is itself a problematic category, based on a metaphysics of origin and presence that poststructuralism has taught us to suspect. (Indeed it was the search for such a chimera that vexed the editorial project in the first place.) Return to the early texts provides no access to a privileged "original";2 on the contrary, for the modern reader it bars access. The features that modernization and emendation smooth away remain stubbornly in place to block the illusion of transparency-the impression that there is some ideal "original" behind the text.3 These features are precisely the focus of this essay: old typefaces and spellings, irregular line and scene divisions, title pages and other paratex- tual matter, and textual cruxes. They constitute what we term the "mate- riality of the text."4 Discarded or transformed beyond recognition in stan- 1 See, however, Leah Marcus's insistence on the relation between the topicality of history and the specificity of its texts in Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1988), esp. pp. 43-50; and "Levelling Shake- speare: Local Customs and Local Texts," SQ, 42 (1992), 168-78. 2 This point is made by Gary Taylor in the "General Introduction" to William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 3-7. 3 G. Thomas Tanselle argues influentially for this bibliographic and hermeneutic model, maintaining that a work is an abstract linguistic entity that does not "exist on paper or in sounds": "Whatever concept of authorship one subscribes to, the act of reading or listening to receive a message from the past entails the effort to discover, through the text (or texts) one is presented with, the work that lies behind" (A Rationale of Textual Criticism [Phila.: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989], p. 18, emphases added). Tanselle's search for the underlying work is like what Stephen Orgel has discussed as the desire for the "authentic" Shakespeare: "The assumption is that texts are representations or embodiments of something else, and that it is that something else which the performer or editor undertakes to reveal" ("The Authentic Shakespeare," Representations, 21 [1988], 1-25, esp. p. 24). Unlike Tanselle's idealized "work," however, Orgel's "script" has always been subject to varying historical, theatrical, and editorial contingencies. See also Paul Werstine's discussion of how one specific version of this drive- what he defines as "the desire for a certain kind of narrative"-can lead textual criticism astray, in "Narratives About Printed Shakespeare Texts: 'Foul Papers' and 'Bad' Quartos," SQ, 41 (1990), 65-86, esp. p. 82. 4 The materiality of the early Shakespearean texts was scrupulously examined by the New Bibliographers in the first half of this century, but only as a means of discovering an idealized Shakespeare. See Margreta de Grazia, "The Essential Author and the Material Book," Textual Practice, 2 (1988), 69-86; Anne-Mette Hjort, "The Interests of Critical Editorial Practice," This content downloaded from 128.227.131.182 on Sat, 29 Jun 2019 21:12:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE MATERIALITY OF THE SHAKESPEAREAN TEXT 257 dard editions, they remain obstinately on the pages of the early texts, insisting upon being looked at, not seen through. Their refusal to yield to modern norms bears witness to the specific history of the texts they make up, a history so specific that it cannot comply with modern notions of correctness and intelligibility. Though modern editions leave them behind as inert and obsolete matter, the Folio and quartos enable us to confront the historical gap between the distinguishing marks of the modern "Shake- speare" and the distinguishing marks of a particular set of early modern theatrical texts. Attention to these earlier material traces is no exercise in antiquarianism. These older forms return as active agents calling our own forms into question. When the materiality of the early texts confronts modern prac- tices and theories, it casts those modern practices and theories into doubt, revealing that they, too, possess a specific-and equally contingent-history.
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