The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text

Abstract

FOR OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS, KING LEAR WAS one text; in 1986, with the Oxford Shakespeare, it became two; in 1989, with The Complete King Lear 1608-1623, it became four (at least). As a result of this multiplication, Shakespeare studies will never be the same. This is not simply because we may now have more Shakespeare than before-many Lears instead of one; a mere enlargement of the canon requires no rethinking of how the works are to be prepared and interpreted. Shakespeare studies will never be the same because something long taken for granted has been cast into doubt: the self-identity of the work. We are no longer agreed on the fundamental status of the textual object before us. Is it one or more? The significance of this uncertainty cannot be overestimated. Identity and difference are, after all, the basis of perception itself, the way we tell one thing from another. The possibility of multiple texts, then, constitutes a radical change indeed: not just an enlargement of Shakespeare's works but a need to reconceptualize the fundamental category of a work by Shakespeare. One of the most evident results of the multiple-text issue has been mounting resentment toward the editorial tradition. Eighteenth-century editors have been blamed for substituting a composite Lear for the seventeenth-century Lears, and subsequent editors have been charged with reproducing their predecessors' conflation. A denigration of editing in general has ensued, as if editors had been passing off an artificial Shakespeare for the real. What has not been stressed, however, is the extent to which literary critics have assumed and perpetuated the terms through which Shakespeare was reproduced in the eighteenth century. While editors examined and defended their choices, critics tended simply to assume the established status of the texts they used. In recent years the two dominant modes of reading Shakespeare-formalism and historicism-have received the text at hand on faith, whether it be, for example, the Alexander edition in England or the Riverside edition in America. Both forms of criticism have