Review Article: The Works of William Congreve

Abstract

Review Article: The Works of William Congreve D. F. McKenzie (ed.) and C.Y. Ferdinand (prepared for publication), The Works of William Congreve edited in three volumes: prepared for publication by C. Y. Ferdinand, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, vol. 1, pp. xlvi + 752, vol. 2, pp. vi + 869, vol. 3, pp. vi + 579, hb. £350, ISBN: 978 0 19 811884 1 (vol. 1), 978 0 19 92947 4 (vol. 2), 978 0 19 929746 7 (vol. 3), 978 0 19 920254 6 (set)In 1977 D. F.McKenzie, prompted by the problems set by Congreve's texts, responded to recent thinking in France about l'histoire du livre. He noted that 'generalisations' about the 'sociology of the text' had as yet found 'no place for the fine detail of textual criticism'. Such 'generalisations', he wrote, 'will remain banal, at least for textual and literary criticism' unless they are made 'to bear finally on the most important [relationship] of all-what, exactly, an author in his own age did say to his readers and how he and his printers directed them to respond'.The larger issues about book history were to be developed at length in McKenzie's ground-breaking Panizzi Lectures, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986). Now, more than thirty years later, the challenge McKenzie set to the 'sociology of the text' is triumphantly met by his own editorial practice in Oxford's posthumous publication of Congreve's Works.McKenzie's editorial principles have been clear since the early 1970s. His text is based on Congreve's three volume Works (1710), a key example for McKenzie of the book as 'an expressive intellectual structure'. This edition, the collaborative product of the author, his publisher Jacob Tonson, and their printer, John Watts, unites text, format, and typography into a meaningful whole at a specific historical moment. It is Congreve's attempt to present his reader with his canon in the form he wished to preserve.Previous editors, with the single exception of Bonamy Dobree (1925, 1928), have based their texts of Congreve's five plays on the first quarto editions (1693-1700) in the belief that they are closest to the author's manuscript and to the original stage performance. Works (1710) represented instead a 'reading edition', a case most fully argued by Peter Holland (1979). This was partly because a substantial number of Congreve's alterations, cutting out obscenity and 'blasphemy', looked like self-censorship. More importantly, where the quarto editions mark scenes as a change of set in the conventional English manner, Congreve in Works (1710) defines scenes by the entrance and exits of characters in the French style. The characters' names are placed in capitals at the head of each numbered scene, and acts and scenes are further marked offby ornamental rules and decorative capital letters.It is well known that Congreve's decision to set out his plays in the French manner makes explicit his adherence to neoclassical dramaturgy, the unities of time, place and action, and, in particular, the liaisons between scenes which ensure that the stage is never empty. It is equally clear that for Anglo- American readers this style of representing stage action is unfamiliar if not actively off-putting. But, as McKenzie was the first to realise, Congreve's reply to Jeremy Collier (1698) shows that from his very first play, The Old Batchelor (1693), he conceived of 'scenes' in the neoclassical sense. In McKenzie's view, Congreve's introduction of neoclassical scenic divisions in Works (1710), far from moving his play-texts towards the library, allowed him to present a more accurate representation of stage action than did the quartos, and also, on occasions, gave him the opportunity to improve on the original.Two convictions underlie McKenzie's editorial rationale, both based on his detailed analysis of variants, the contextual evidence, and a sustained attention to the actualities of staging. First, Congreve the dramatist had matured by 1710, and second, despite the care he took, Works (1710) is an imperfect realisation of his intentions. …