Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Fiona Ritchie & Peter Sabor, eds. Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xiii + 454 pp. $104.99 USD, £69.99 (hardback). ISBN 9780521898607.The compiling and re-editing of critical studies and of rewritings of Shakespearean work from the past have not only saved from possible oblivion a multiplicity of texts whose future was at best uncertain, but have shed considerable light on the processes by which the provincial actor, poet, and playwright was elevated to the rank of national and international icon. Addressing particularly this latter phenomenon, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century constructs a rich and variegated picture of how the numerous reinventions, rewritings, or reinterpretations to which he was subject in the period allowed him to achieve the "exemplary status" the volumes editors, Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, attribute to him in their introduction.Most of the rediscoveries were conducted through the medium of print, and part 1 of the volume, entitled "The Dissemination and Reception of Shakespeare in Print," comprises essays on the editing, criticism, reviewing, and (that peculiarly eighteenth-century phenomenon) falsification of Shakespeare. Marcus Walsh's chapter, "Editing and Publishing Shakespeare," unpicks the fiercely competitive world of Shakespeare editing, from the first (not quite) complete-work offerings from the house of Jacob Tonson, chief commercial beneficiary of the 1710 Copyright Act, to the single-volume editions that flooded the market following the commonlaw ruling which put an end to exclusive ownership of the plays in 1774. Walsh's thesis, that editing and publishing was "a stage upon which were played out some of the most significant issues in British cultural, political and commercial history" (21), is borne out by a consideration of the work of the most serious, and also successful, actors on it (from Nicholas Rowe to Edmund Malone, through Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and George Steevens). Such work, from Walsh's evolutionary perspective, is seen to gain in philological rigor, explicative clarity, and interpretative acumen as the century advances. For Walsh, the "end-point of an editorial journey" from Pope's appeal to the educated reader to the more interventionist approach of the professional commentator (35), is that of Malone (1790), whose ten-volume octavo offering, including primary documentary evidence, historical contextualization, and a "focused and selective in- terpretive method of real theoretical self-consciousness and cogency" (34), set the standards for future interventions.The importance of the editions might seem overstated here, were it not for the fact that their mere existence helped to shape, and contributed to, other distinctly eighteenth-century forms of cultural intervention, such as criticism and reviewing. What Jack Lynch, in his chapter, "Criticism of Shakespeare," describes as the "symbiotic relationship" between both entities, with critics contributing to the esteem for Shakespeare at the same time as Shakespeare contributed to the invention of the critic (41), was, he argues, largely a product of the emergence of increasingly learned editions of the works. With the editorial dispute between Pope and Lewis Theobald, prompting the latter's Shakespeare Restored (1726) and subsequent edition of the plays, the start-of-the-century obsession with the (mainly moral) imperfections of Shakespeare's work is described as developing into a more appreciative, if "hardly irenic" (44), mode of attention. Later critical efforts were thus directed at defending Shakespeare from incompetent editorial "meddlers," historicizing his use of language, social and cultural references, as well as sources, and, in a patriotic gesture, defending his disregard of French-imposed rules. But if the editions had such a profound and lasting effect on criticism, they also gave an impulse to that much neglected field of literary intervention, the book review. …