Committee on the Study of Books & Media - "Against Unediting" - Rhodri Lewis

Date
Wednesday, March 9, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
Location
211 Dickinson Hall
Audience
Public

Details

Event Description

"Against Unediting"

Rhodri Lewis, Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford


 

Rhodri Lewis is Professor of English Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Oxford; he is also a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. In addition to numerous essays on aspects of literary and intellectual history from about 1500 to 1750, he is the author of Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (2007), William Petty on the Order of Nature (2012), and the forthcoming Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness. For the duration of the academic year 2015-16, he is a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he is completing his editorial work on volume 5 of the new Oxford University Press edition of Francis Bacon’s complete works.

"Against Unediting”.

In what was framed as a response to the traditional ways in which the works of Shakespeare and other early modern authors had been edited and presented to their readers, the 1980s saw a group of scholars paying close attention to the material forms in which the different versions of early modern poems and plays had been transmitted to posterity. Rather than attempting to resolve or to reason away textual contingency or variance, these scholars sought to confront the reader with the textual and material realities of what early modern authors wrote and published — taking them in behind editorial decisions that assumed the language of mathematical certainty (W.W. Greg’s “calculus of variants”), but that more often than not reflected a particular editor’s unacknowledged attachment to the criteria of taste, ideology, or critical preoccupation. In Leah Marcus’s resonant phrase, these scholars were engaged in “unediting the renaissance”. Within a decade or so, unediting began to enjoy its current position of orthodoxy. Traditionally edited texts were now “conflated”; the task of the editor was to identify and record textual variance, rather than to interrogate it; in some cases, most famously those of /King Lear/ and /Hamlet/, the differences between particular versions of the text were taken to be so great that they were to be understood as fundamentally different works (the Arden 3 /Hamlet/, for instance, prints the first quarto, second quarto, and first folio texts separately). One paradox of unediting is that although its appeal has a good deal to do with the diminished status of the author-function in many comprehensions of literary study (each surviving printing of a work is a unique collaboration between author, scribe, typesetter, copy-reader, etc.), its proponents have very often had to assert a theory of authorial revision in order for their textual interpretations to cohere. (E.g., it is posited that Shakespeare revised the Folio versions of /King Lear/ and /Hamlet/ in the light of playhouse experience and changed political circumstances.) In this talk, I want to look again at the principles underlying unediting, and to suggest that they misconceive the nature of the editorial endeavour. Further, to suggest that the practice of unediting reifies — and therefore misrepresents — the contingencies of printed book production in the early modern world.

 


The primary purpose of this committee is to promote research and teaching in the history of books; but as its name indicates, it includes other media as well. The committee organizes a series of workshops, colloquia, and special lectures.

Organizers: Professor Anthony Grafton, Richard Calis, and Stephanie Pope.

Area of Interest
Book History
Intellectual History
Period
15th & 16th Centuries
Region
Europe
Scholarly Series
Committee for the Study of Books and Media