Handbook of English Renaissance Literature

Ingo Berensmeyer, Ingo Berensmeyer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110436082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

This handbook of English Renaissance literature serves as a reference for both students and scholars, introducing recent debates and developments in early modern studies. Using new theoretical perspectives and methodological tools, the volume offers exemplary close readings of canonical and less well-known texts from all significant genres between c. 1480 and 1660. Its systematic chapters address questions about editing Renaissance texts, the role of translation, theatre and drama, life-writing, science, travel and migration, and women as writers, readers and patrons. The book will be of particular interest to those wishing to expand their knowledge of the early modern period beyond Shakespeare.

Part I: Systematic Questions

1 Editing English Renaissance Texts

Sarah Neville

Abstract

The works of Renaissance authors survive in texts that were copied between documents, and changes were frequently introduced during the process of transmission. Scholarly textual editors use forensic investigation into the provenance and materials of documents to establish the agents responsible for textual changes and determine an author’s intentions for a particular work. This chapter defines the terms ‘text’, ‘work’, and ‘document’, and explores the tools and methodologies editors use as they construct modern scholarly editions.

Keywords: Author, document, edition, error, intention, scholarly edition, text, variant, work,

Take notice that I am in Cambria at Milford Haven. What your own love will out of this advise you, follow. So he wishes you all happiness that remains loyal to his vow, and your increasing in love. Leonatus Posthumus.

Cymbeline (3.2.43–47)

While the inhabitants of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England have left behind tombs, portraits, jewelry, crockery, and other kinds of material artifacts that testify to the values and concerns of their world, much of what historians now understand of the period comes from a specific form of material artifact: the written documents through which the past seems to be able to speak directly to the present. But understanding the meaning of written documents is difficult, and misinterpretation can have hazardous consequences, as the plot of William Shakespeare’s late tragicomedy Cymbeline attests. The passage quoted above is an excerpt from a letter sent by the banished Posthumus to his wife Innogen after he received misleading evidence of her infidelity. Posthumus hopes to exact revenge on Innogen, and the letter is designed to lure her to Cambria so that his servant Pisanio can murder her. Posthumus’s ambivalent feelings towards his wife are on display throughout the letter, which cumulates in an ambiguous final sentence that “can be read either as Posthumus wishing Innogen happiness and loyalty, claiming his own increase in love for her, or his extending his wish on the condition she remain loyal to his vow and increase her love for him” (Wayne 2017, 240). Posthumus’s equivocation is easily recognizable to audiences of the play who are aware that his belief in his wife’s betrayal is mistaken, but Innogen is completely unaware of Posthumus’s suspicion. She reads the letter simply as an invitation to join her husband, and, as Posthumus had hoped, she flees her father’s court to meet him in Milford Haven.

Innogen interprets only the positive meaning of Posthumus’s ambiguous message because she is responding not only to his words, but also to the material form in which they were brought to her. Before she had even opened the letter, Innogen appreciated it as an object that had been created by the person she loves, commenting on its handwriting as well as on the wax seal that kept its contents private from everyone but herself, the addressee:

[…][T]hat is my lord, Leonatus?

O, learn’d indeed were that astronomer

That knew the stars as I his characters [letters]:

He’d lay the future open.[…]

[…] Good wax, thy leave. Blest be

… … … … … … … … … … …

You bees that make these locks of counsel. […]

(3.2.26–29, 35–36)

As a material object, the letter is able to function as a metonymy for the absent Posthumus, and Innogen keeps it in her bodice next to her heart. As she reads Posthumus’s letter, then, Innogen is interpreting more than just his words: she is reading what she believes to be Posthumus’s intention through the document of the letter itself.

As she interprets both the words of Posthumus’s message and the physical document through which the message is expressed, Innogen engages in the same activity that an editor of a Renaissance text performs when she constructs a scholarly edition. Scholarly editions are newly edited texts of older works that have been produced specifically for researchers interested in a work’s documentary, linguistic, and cultural history. In order to produce a scholarly edition of a work like Cymbeline, an editor must examine the early documents containing the work and consider the relationship between the form of those documents and the words that they contain.

1 Works, Texts, and Documents

In my discussion of Cymbeline above, I quoted the text of the play found in my personal copy of a scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s work that was prepared by Valerie Wayne and published in 2017. My description of Wayne’s Cymbeline edition makes a careful separation between a material document (a single copy of Wayne’s 2017 book), the verbal text that it contains (the quoted writing inside the book, which we generally presume to be identical between one copy of an edition and another), and the literary work that Wayne’s scholarly edition represents (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline). Because literary criticism examines Renaissance works primarily via modern scholarly editions that were published hundreds of years after these works were originally written, it is crucial to keep these concepts of document, text, and work distinct.

Works are the compositions of artists, and different materials produce different forms of art. The constituent element of the literary works produced by authors is language, a medium that, though it can be represented in writing, is fundamentally intangible. (It is the intangibility of language that makes it possible for someone to use a word incorrectly but still be understand by a listener – the word’s meaning is conveyed despite the technical error in delivery.) A literary text is an arrangement or sequence of words that can be materialized in a document, the actual artifact containing a piece of writing that exists in the physical world and that is consequently subject to change over time (Tanselle 1990). In other words, the written text of Cymbeline that appears in its earliest surviving document, Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623, is not exactly Shakespeare’s work but an attempt to represent it, something that is always “open to question” in ways that might necessitate a reader’s intervention (Tanselle 1989, 14). When works, texts, and documents are understood in this way, a reader of Wayne’s edition of Cymbeline can better grasp that her job as a scholarly editor is to consider whether and what kind of remedial action might be taken to bring the 1623 text closer to the work that Shakespeare himself had in mind.

Sometimes literary critics use the terms ‘text’ and ‘work’ interchangeably, as if they had identical meanings, but the words are not synonyms, and a few examples of Renaissance works will serve to explain why it is important to understand this crucial technical difference (Tanselle 1990). The play that we know as Shakespeare’s King Lear actually exists in two early versions: the text of the quarto, or first edition of the play printed in 1608, and the text of the play that is contained within the 1623 folio. Numerous copies of the folio and the quarto editions survive. Though most of the language of the play is the same in copies of each book, the two versions feature hundreds of minor variants in word choice, spelling, punctuation, and arrangement of lines on their pages. More importantly, each book features a handful of unique lines: the quarto has 285 lines that do not appear in the folio, and the folio has 102 lines that are not in the quarto. No copy of the play survives either in Shakespeare’s handwriting or in a manuscript copy that was used in the theatre, leaving these two early printed witnesses as our only means of accessing the text of Shakespeare’s work.

Because the texts of documents are actually attempts to reproduce the texts of works, scholars encountering the textual variation between quarto King Lear and folio King Lear long assumed that both were insufficient reproductions of the same thing: a single play about a king with three daughters that William Shakespeare authored in or around 1604 for the London stage. In this theory, the similarities between the folio and quarto texts indicated that they had once descended from the same ‘ancestor’, a now-lost document that better represented Shakespeare’s intentions as the author of the work. The unique lines in the quarto and the folio indicated that as the text of this original document was copied into two or more new documents, some lines had gone missing in each, and these features eventually found their way into the copies of the two printed texts that survive. For the scholarly editors interested in recreating Shakespeare’s original, it was fortunate that the lines that were omitted from the 1604 quarto survived in the 1623 folio, and in their scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s intended work, editors could conflate the folio and quarto texts together to produce an ‘eclectic’ or composite text.

A composite King Lear that attempted to reproduce Shakespeare’s original was the standard for scholarly editions for two hundred years, but by systematically examining the hundreds of macro- and micro-variants between the two forms in a process known as ‘collation’, scholars began to consider that perhaps their assumptions about Shakespeare’s intention for the play were flawed. They eventually began to argue that the quarto and folio texts of King Lear are not both corrupted versions of a single, unified work, but actually the result of there being two distinct and finished drafts of Shakespeare’s play: an earlier, initial state and a revision (Taylor and Warren 1986). In other words, the first draft of the text that appears in the quarto and the revised text that appears in the folio are the result of Shakespeare or his company’s deliberate intentions at two separate moments, both equally interesting to a critical perspective. Most scholars now talk about King Lear as a “two-text play” to represent the fact that the earliest appearances of the work in print are so distinct from each other that they should not be conflated into a single hybrid, and complete works editions of Shakespeare now frequently offer both the early and later versions of King Lear in their volumes (Marcus 2004, 21).

2 Textual Variation

The case of King Lear is not unusual. Shakespeare’s plays are particularly disposed to exist in multiple versions, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth century they were often printed with...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Systematic Questions
• Part II: Close Readings
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• List of Contributors