Paul Werstine

Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus.

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The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (review)

When, at the 1980 MLA convention, Stephen Orgel said “We know nothing about Shakespeare’s original text” (5), he was addressing an editorial community that had focused for several decades on “recovering” the texts of Shakespeare’s “foul papers,” a term defined (with a precision that far exceeded any known early modern usage of it) by W. W. Greg as the manuscripts containing the plays in the form that Shakespeare finally intended—Shakespeare’s original text. Orgel’s words provided powerful inspiration to those willing to examine the evidential basis for the then-prevailing textual theory and editorial method, and he deserves a great deal of the credit for the recent shakeup in editing. This MLA talk, titled “What Is a Text?,” leads off the group of four pieces devoted to editorial matters that open this selection of fifteen previously published essays. Orgel offers this general characterization of the essays: they are “often frankly revisionist in intent” (xvii). Bearing out this generalization,“What Is a Character?,” which follows in more ways than one “What Is a Text?,” takes on the “requirements [for character] of psychology, consistency and credibility” from the Empsonian position that “characters . . . are not people, they are elements of a linguistic structure, lines in a drama, and more basically, words on a page” (8). In its turn, “What Is an Editor?” attacks the practical distinction between accidentals (for example, spelling and punctuation, which allegedly do not affect meaning) and substantives (the text’s words, regarded as alone meaningful).1 Finally, among the opening four textual essays, “Acting Scripts, Performing Texts” aggressively compares modern editors to the scribe who marked up pre-Restoration acting scripts now in the University of Padua library and to Simon Forman, who provided what seem to us partial and inaccurate accounts of Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale, based on seeing these dramas in the playhouse. Orgel suggests that editors, in their commitment to “modern assumptions about verse and prose [and] wholly anachronistic principles of taste and decorum,” emend both the line-division and the punctuation of early modern texts so as to damage them severely and thus invite comparison of their practice with that of the Padua scribe and Forman (47). Writing against editor-