Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century

Front Cover
Joanna Gondris
Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1998 - 379 pages
Reading Readings begins with a long provocative essay by Random Cloud decrying eighteenth-century Shakespeare editions. The seventeen essays that follow assert the power of eighteenth-century editions to engage and inform the late twentieth-century reader. Together these essays show the many ways in which an examination of eighteenth-century Shakespeare editions can illuminate our understanding of Shakespeare, the eighteenth century, and the history and practice of editing.

From inside the book

Contents

Shakspear Babel
1
Grammatical Emendation in Some EighteenthCentury Editions of Shakespeare with Particular Reference to Cymbeline
71
The Scene Changes? Stage Directions in EighteenthCentury Acting Editions of Shakespeare
86
Examining the Parts Linebyline Analysis and the Redistribution of Meaning
101
Lewis Theobald Edmond Malone and Others
103
The EighteenthCentury Shakespeare Variorum Page as a Critical Structure
123
Chedworth and the Territoriality of the Reader
140
Hamlets Mousetrap and the PlaywithintheAnecdote of Plutarch
164
The Rowe Editions of 17091714 and 31 of The Taming of the Shrew
244
Hanmers Winters Tale
268
The Annotation of Shakespeares Bawdy Tongue after Samuel Johnson
281
Editing and the Marketplace
297
Warburton Anonymity and the Shakespeare Wars
299
Anonymity and the Erasure of Shakespeares First EighteenthCentury Editor
318
A Comparison of the Two Editions of A Midsummer Nights Dream
323
Visual Images of Hamlet 17091800
330

Lewis Theobald and Theories of Editing
188
Codifying Gender The Disturbing Presence of Women
207
Where lies your Text?
209
Contending with Ophelia in the Eighteenth Century
224
The Editing and Publication of Shakespeares Poems in the Eighteenth Century
345
Contributors
366
Index
369
Copyright

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Page 167 - I have heard That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaim'd their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ.
Page 129 - O curse of marriage, That we can call these delicate creatures ours, And not their appetites ! I had rather be a toad, And live upon the vapour of a dungeon, Than keep a corner in the thing I love For others
Page 81 - Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, And Phoebus 'gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes: With every thing that pretty is, My lady sweet, arise: Arise, arise.
Page 160 - His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men. He knew that Rome, like every other city, had men of all dispositions ; and wanting a buffoon, he went into the senate-house for that which the senate-house would certainly have afforded him.
Page 204 - ... when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
Page 293 - The Family Shakspeare ; in which nothing is added to the Original Text ; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud.
Page 229 - Ophelia is a character almost too exquisitely touching to be dwelt upon. Oh rose of May, oh flower too soon faded ! Her love, her madness, her death, are described with the truest touches of tenderness and pathos. It is a character which nobody but...
Page 173 - Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown, Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own: So think thou wilt no second husband wed; But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.
Page 158 - ... let us be — Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon : And let men say, we be men of good government; being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we — steal, P.
Page 311 - He had, what is the first requisite to emendatory criticism, that intuition by which the poet's intention is immediately discovered, and that dexterity of intellect which despatches its work by the easiest means. He had undoubtedly read much; his acquaintance with customs, opinions, and traditions, seems to have been large; and he is often learned without show.

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