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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
Shakespeare in Print. A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing, by Andrew Murphy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 503. Cloth $75.00.
One of the editors brought in by John Dover Wilson to help complete the New Cambridge Shakespeare, J. C. Maxwell, was well known for mailing cards or notes to fellow-toilers pointing out their errors. I remember receiving such a card, with no greeting, merely a few words to advise me that on some page or other of my edition of Henry VIII (or All is True, as the Oxford editors would have us call the play) I had incorrectly printed some date, let's say 1597, instead of 1598. Maxwell I think meant to be helpful, though his concern for scholarly accuracy could be seen as pedantic. A notable failed editor, John Crow, who spent years on the Arden 2 series Romeo and Juliet without getting past the collations, liked to claim that he possessed a copy of Maxwell's first printed paper, mocking his zeal for getting things right: Crow said it was entitled "Roman Chariot-races: Clock-wise or Anti-clockwise?" How is it that during the twentieth century editing Shakespeare has become a major scholarly industry, encouraging editors to be obsessive about textual accuracy, and to provide explanatory notes that sometimes explore matters as arcane and trivial as Roman chariot races?
Andrew Murphy's Shakespeare in Print does not consider such matters head-on, but in its fine survey of the history of four centuries of Shakespeare editing in Britain and America such questions are implicit and surface explicitly from time to time. The history of Shakespeare editing is also a history of the problematic nature of scholarship, and of the ways in which Shakespeare's works have been valued and interpreted. Murphy provides a straight-forward catalog as a "Chronological appendix" to his history, listing all single-text editions up to 1709 and all collected editions published up to 1821, the year that saw the final printing of Edmond Malone's great edition as completed by James Boswell. After this date the listing aims not at thoroughness but rather "to foreground the editions which helped to popularize Shakespeare as well as those which contributed to the advancement of the editorial tradition" (281). So it includes a "Sixpenny Shakespeare" issued by Ward and Lock in 1890 (without providing any more information than this title), and various school editions. The appendix also lists early editions of apocryphal plays, as well as editions of The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III.
This appendix frees the author to concentrate in his narrative...
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