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It has helped to publicize the apparently fully dastardly termination by the Arden Shakespeare of Patricia Parker as editor of the third series Midsummer Night’s Dream, an edition I am not alone in anticipating with the greatest eagerness.
The list of names on the petition to reverse this termination, perpetrated by the private firm Cengage, which now manages the publication of the Ardens, reads as a who’s-who in early modern studies. (Most amusingly, Gary Taylor writes succinctly that he has “written to the editors” at Cengage — how genuinely, and yet humorously, menacing!) As well it should read: Parker is a scholar of the highest order, and I can only imagine that her work on this edition meets, if not excels, the high standards of intelligence, creativity, precision, and integrity she has set throughout her career. I sincerely hope she will be reinstated, and that the Cengage brass will hang their faces in shame as they offer her their most profound apologies.
If Parker’s account of her relationship with the editors at Cengage is accurate, and I can’t believe we have any reason to doubt it, her termination not only smacks of poor ethics but casts doubt on the integrity of the entire enterprise of the Arden Shakespeare — which, as anyone who has ever taught from one of their editions or used one for research knows, constitutes a serious blow to the field of Shakespeare studies.
The scandal further raises a number of questions about the state of academic publishing, most of which I am not remotely prepared to address – I do hope it will raise those questions to a visible level of broad discussion. Meanwhile, assess the thing for yourself using the links above, and then sign the petition.
[I am amazed to find that I already have a "misadventures in editorship" tag -- how convenient.]
The other day, my blogfriend the Sexy Plantagenet performed the useful exercise of posting a series of changes made to the text of Richard II by Thomas and Harriet Bowdler in their 1821 Family Shakespeare. The edition, as the SP duly notes, is frequently cited scoffingly as an example of bardolatry gone awry, or alluded to in the term bowdlerize, but is seldom studied systematically. Her findings demonstrate the difficulty of discerning any obvious logic of emendation in the Bowdler edition — what does and does not make the cut seems often arbitrary.
In my recent dealings with the (twenty-one-fucking-volume) 1821 edition of Shakespeare established from Edmond Malone’s notes by James Boswell (the younger), I came across the following hilarious review of the Family Shakespeare, in the October, 1821 Edinburgh Review (which, incidentally, declined to notice the Boswell-Malone edition). I am particularly amused by the lengths to which the anonymous reviewer goes to establish, first, that some things in Shakespeare are fundamentally un-Shakespearean, and second, that this fact should not disturb us because we are well able to tell the one from the other. We may remake Shakespeare in our own image, and this proposition is not only not remotely problematic, but rather a grand idea, and we ought to do more of it.
But we shouldn’t wear spectacles.
After the jump.
