Bad Memories of Margaret? Memorial Reconstruction versus Revision in The First Part of the Contention and 2 Henry VI

Abstract

TWO DEVELOPMENTS IN THE 1980s challenged editors and critics to reconsider the validity of entrenched beliefs about the historical formation and transmission of Shakespeare's plays. The King Lear controversy focused attention on the contending printed states of Lear, and one consequence of that discussion has been a more general application of its central concerns: the questions raised there have convinced some critics of the need to reappraise the relationship between other Folio plays and quarto counterparts that either had been printed anonymously or else had appeared with doubtful attributions to Shakespeare on their title pages. A separate but clearly related development harks back to E.AJ. Honigmann's earlier objections to the imprecise or misleading use of such terms as foul papers and intermediate fair copies.' Honigmann's call for greater precision in the use of bibliographic terms has since metamorphosed into an increasingly insistent proposal to reexamine not only the use of terminology but also the validity of the assumptions behind some bibliographic concepts that took root early in the twentieth century: foul papers, corrected prompt copy, good and bad quartos, and memorial reconstruction. Over the past two decades Paul Werstine, Randall McLeod, Steven Urkowitz, Laurie Maguire, and others have reminded us that although these bibliographic terms have acquired currency, they are hypothetical constructs that still have only theoretical status, however much they appear now to have passed into the realm of fact.2