Authenticating Shakespeare's Text, Life, and Likeness

Abstract

Every Shakespearean project Edmond Malone undertook throughout his thirty-five-year career involved the concept of authenticity. In 1780, Malone established without the authenticity of the 1609 quarto of the Sonnets that up until then had circulated, both independently and in editions of William Shakespeare's works, in an eclectic 1640 edition. As one shall see, Malone's new and pervasive emphasis on authenticity was not the overdue emergence of an obvious criterion. Its validity was hardly self-evident, for it depended on a schema of interrelated textual imperatives that became clearly visible for the first time in the apparatus to Malone's 1790 Shakespeare. This chapter itself is evidence of their interconnectedness, for while it focuses on authenticity in regard to three of Malone's projects — the establishing of Shakespeare's text, biography, and likeness — it periodically anticipates the concerns of succeeding chapters with issues of history, factuality, self-identity, and literary property.