Receiving and Rendering: Notes on the Edited Shakespeare Page

Abstract

This essay argues for a greater variety of approaches to editing Shakespeare, including editors who may creatively and productively refashion or distort the text, not just clarify it. Following an aggressive, seemingly spurious emendation to a speech in As You Like It by eighteenth-century editor William Warburton (here called a “dead crux”), the author explores how the dynamics of a Shakespeare scene inflect and infect the voice of the editor, in a way all but unimaginable within the predominant, professional tone of present-day Shakespeare editing. Working from the speculative writing of Lawrence Lipking, and the editorial provocations of James Joyce, as well as Shakespeare himself, other possibilities for the relationship of text, editor, edition, and reader are considered; this in the context of a reading, based on Warburton’s emendation, of the Shakespeare scene in question.