Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 1825—1915. By Paul Salzman

Abstract

Contrary to its title, Paul Salzman'sEditors Construct the Renaissance Canon is less about the construction of the canon than about the construction of individual nineteenth‐century editions, and some twentieth‐century ones. The canon in question is the English literary canon and the editors considered are for the most part English. Salzman sets out to remedy the neglect suffered by nineteenth‐century editors and to show that their work still has value, especially with regard to their capacious understanding of what constitutes a worthy object of literary editing and to the variety of their editorial approaches, all more or less displaced by the apparent singleness of the New Bibliographic method. The usefulness of the term Renaissance remains unexplained, as the book also features a discussion of the editing of Chaucer and of Restoration literature. While the task, because of its great ambition, may seem difficult to accomplish, the book is rather short. A brief introductory chapter (pp. 1‐6) states the aim of the book—to remedy the neglect—and lays out its structure, whereas the quick concluding chapter (pp. 133‐43) dwells on the implications the nineteenth‐century tradition might have for current editorial trends, particularly the editorial projects driven by the idea of an author's complete works. The rest of the book is divided into four parts (Chapters 2 to 5), each of which describes the work of an individual editor or a group of editors. The principle of organization is thus partly biographical and partly chronological. However, it is impossible to guess from the chapter titles, and sometimes from the chapters themselves, in what ways individual editors in fact helped construct the Renaissance canon of English literature. The second chapter is simply titled ‘Alexander Dyce’ (pp. 7‐41); the third does not name an editor, but it is mostly about James Orchard Halliwell and appears to be primarily interested in the construction of ‘a perfected Shakespeare text’ rather than the Renaissance canon (pp. 43‐81); the fourth is a densely populated one, with Alexander Grosart, Frederick J. Furnivall, Mary Cowden Clarke, Horace Howard Furness, and A. H. Bullen, who are broadly defined as ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’ working in the second half of the nineteenth century (pp. 83‐112). Those, like me, who might be guilty of thinking that all editors are either amateurs or professionals will learn from Chapter 5 that further distinctions are in order, for that chapter is concerned with ‘Scientific Professionals and Learned Amateurs’ (pp. 113‐32). The former are R. B. McKerrow and W. W. Greg, names almost too familiar to students of English editing, while the latter is Montague Summers, an editor of Restoration literature whose most memorable if hardly flattering description in this book comes from Vita Sackville‐West's letter to her husband written after she had lunch ‘with the priest’: ‘Dressed in black, hung with amethyst crosses and bits of jet, black suede shoes, fat white hands, a fat dimpled face, oiled black curls, very carefully disposed—he is just like a Lely’ (p. 130). The portrait is so striking—and so expressive of Summers's devotion to things Catholic, medieval, and occult—that his success as an editor of Aphra Behn and of various Restoration dramatists forms but a curious background, like a tiny but busy section of some Renaissance painting. As such, it is symptomatic of Salzman's own method, according to which Halliwell's scrapbooks deserve twenty pages, but Furness (who on p. 103 is also called Furnivall) and his great American variorum is given only four and a half. In fact, Furness himself adopted the scrapbook method, but unlike Halliwell he refrained from destroying Renaissance books and was content to treat so only his editorial predecessors. This was not simply an early experiment in Furness's editorial career (cf. p. 103); it was the way in which he went about editing Shakespeare, as the volumes preserved in the Furness collection at Penn abundantly show. In terms of editorial method, then, Halliwell and Furness would have made great chapter companions.