Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor by Sonia

Massai Review by: Helen Smith Modern Philology, Vol. 108, No. 4 (May 2011), pp. E253-E256 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659134 . Accessed: 10/04/2012 15:31
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BOOK REVIEW

Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor. Sonia Massai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii254. Editorial and new bibliographical scholarship has often painted an unattering picture of the early modern book trade, depicting printers, publishers, and booksellers as unscrupulous denizens of a piratical community whose members botched and blundered their way through some of the greatest texts of our literary heritage. The inky ngers of misguided printers and compositors, the story goes, misset type, skipped lines, and rewrote poetic truths as garbled nonsense, all in an atmosphere of healthy contempt for intellectual and authorial property and for the aesthetic beauties of the text. This pervasive mythology has served a dual purpose, providing a exible series of explanations for the errors, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies of early modern printed books and forming a compelling justication for the castigatory ventures of the modern editor, whose task becomes the Herculean effort of clearing away the mass of printerly and compositorial corruption that obscures the authorial text. Sonia Massais Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor is an important new contribution to the project of reconceptualizing editorial and bibliographic theory. Massai mounts a direct and convincing challenge to the bibliographical assumption that once dramatic manuscripts embarked on their journey to the printers, the quality of the text they preserved could only deteriorate (9293). She argues instead that a number of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury stationers made deliberate and concerted efforts to improve and perfect the copy they reproduced. Massai demonstrates persuasively that the editing of Shakespeare did not begin abruptly with Nicholas Rowes celebrated 1709 edition. With admirable precision, Massai constructs a dual argument: on the one hand she demonstrates that many early modern dra 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu.

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matic texts were subject to the kind of interventions we now describe as editorial, while on the other she reveals the extent to which assumptions about proper editorial practice have blinded scholars to the rather different textual operations of the agents she describes as annotating readers (30). In crafting this rst book-length study of the ways in which early modern dramatic texts were prepared for the press, Massai builds on the work of a number of previous scholars, including Paul Werstine, Laurie Maguire, Lukas Erne, and Grace Ioppolo, and she is scrupulous in acknowledging her intellectual and methodological debts.1 The care with which Massai embraces the strengths of past scholarship while tactfully demolishing frequently reproduced assumptions is emblematic of the quality of her scholarship: she is rigorous in assessing and weighing the available evidence, but she is careful never to claim more than her data can bear. In her generously illustrated introduction, Massai reads the paratextual evidence of prefatory materials, marginal annotations, and other commentaries to establish the category of the annotating reader. This type of reader, Massai argues, whether a print-house professional or an educated amateur, read the texts he or she encountered as perfectible, adding comments, corrections, and sometimes insightful emendations. Throughout the book, the changes she identies demonstrate that annotating readers were thoroughly at home in the ctive world of the play and displayed a clear grasp of dramatic logic and playhouse conventions, providing speech prexes, altering stage directions, and emending misreadings or difcult cruces in the dialogue. Massai draws on contemporary annotations from a variety of sources to demonstrate the type and nature of changes made by readers before turning to the question of whether these practices could be associated with the printing house. Rather than dismissing as a clumsy marketing gesture the frequent title-page claim that the text has been newly corrected, perused, amended, or perfected, Massai scrupulously tests the extent to which editions that make these claim correct or emend their source text. In doing so, she shows herself to be a sensitive reader of the complexities of prefatory materials. The accompanying photographs of early modern annotated playbooks allow the reader to witness for themselves the style and frequency of emendation that Massai has so carefully traced. Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor goes on to demonstrate that the earliest stationers to procure English dramatic texts for the press, John and
1. See Paul Werstine, Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: Foul Papers and Bad Quartos, Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 6586; Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The Bad Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Grace Ioppolo, Dramatists and Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse (London: Routledge, 2006).

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William Rastell and Richard Jones, were concerned with the quality of the text they reproduced and went to impressive lengths to emend and correct their copy. This section is illuminating as a demonstration of an unexpected level of printerly care as well as an account of the inuence of humanist and Italian publishing traditions on early English drama. It neatly sets the scene for the second, and more substantial, part of Massais book, in which she approaches a series of early Shakespeare editions with a fresh and careful eye. Massai examines a range of editions from the popular quartos of Richard II, Richard III, I Henry IV, and Much Ado about Nothing published by Andrew Wise in the late sixteenth century to the 1685 fourth folio. In so doing she offers us alternative views not only of the publishers of the rst folio but also of several notorious gures, including Nahum Tate, seen here not as the ham-handed Restoration adapter of Shakespeares plays but as a likely candidate for the careful corrector of the fourth folio Coriolanus. Perhaps most compelling is Massais reinterpretation of the infamous Pavier Quartos. She argues that Thomas Pavier, far from being an unscrupulous pirate determined to defraud the Kings Men and his fellow stationers of their rights to several Shakespeare texts, was a signicant investor in Shakespeare in print who took great care to improve the quality of the texts of the plays he published in 1619 (37). Massais nal chapter closes with a brief account of some eighteenthand nineteenth-century Shakespeare editors whose approaches to the text, she argues, bear a striking similarity to those of her pre-1709 annotating readers. This continuity in editorial practice further challenges the evolutionary understanding of the transmission of Shakespeare in print (1), showing not only that publishers before Tonson were concerned with the quality of their texts but also that editors after Rowe continued to operate within many of the same paradigms as their early modern forebears. In her conclusion, Massai turns to the import of this study for editorial practice. The argument that copy-text editors are anachronistically wedded to a sense of the author as the sole originator and controller of textual meaning has been made persuasively elsewhere, but Massai balances this observation by noting that the un-editors idealize the material integrity of the early playbooks (204) in a way that ignores the early modern understanding of the text as inherently perfectible and in process and denies the care of some of Massais quasi-editorial annotating readers. Moreover, Massai suggests, efforts to separate out the particular agents involved in textual emendation and reproduction, somewhat paradoxically, continue to privilege the author as the maker of meaning. Instead, she suggests, we should understand the interventions of annotating readers as functions that may have been undertaken by a range of agents but that should not be dismissed as corrupt or irrelevant if they can be proved to be nonauthorial.

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Nonetheless, what Massai does not offer her reader is a concrete conclusion about the meaning of her research for editorial practice or how the modern editor can responsibly convey the collaborative indeterminacy of the early modern play text. Her book thus stands as further testimony to the current tensions between the nancial, pedagogical, and formal need for editors to make hard choices between different possibilities and the expanding array of scholarship that argues the need to investigate and value every version of a given text. Massais book is a tremendously important contribution to the latter eld, and in some ways her determination to close with a consideration of the signicance of her ndings for editorial practice downplays the broader interest and relevance of this book, which not only provides a crucial prehistory of editing but makes a fascinating contribution to histories of the book, of reading, and of collaboration and appropriation. Helen Smith University of York