What's wrong with literature?

Textual Practice

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 505-526

  Pechter, Edward ^a,b  

^a Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering

^b UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

Aesthetic interest; Literary effects; Shakespeare criticism; Theatrical values

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949447326     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0950236032000140104     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor, Five Days in July (Toronto: Thunderhawk Music & Home Cooked Music, 1993).
2. Kathleen O. Irace, Reforming the Bad Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespeareian First Editions (Newark:University ofDelaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), p. 11 and p. 12; emphasis added. Subsequent references are interpolated parenthetically.
3. Stephen Miller, 'The Taming of a Shrew and the Theories; or, ''Though this be badness, yet there is method in't'' ', in Textual Formations and Reformations, ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1998), pp. 251-63, p. 262. Subsequent references are interpolated parenthetically.
4. Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), Sect. 35, p. 34.
5. SeeBiographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches ofMy Literary Life andOpinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), Vol. 7, Part 2, p. 27
6. 'Shakespeare; or, the Poet' in Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Richard Poirier (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 329-42, p. 335.
7. Scott McMillan, Othello (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 7-8. Subsequent references are interpolated parenthetically.
8. William Carroll, 'New plays vs. old readings: The Division of the Kingdoms and folio deletions in King Lear', Studies in Philology, 85 (1988), pp. 225-44. I am quoting from pp. 230-1.
9. For a comprehensive summary, see Richard Knowles, 'Two Lears? By Shakespeare?' in 'Lear' from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, ed. James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten (Madison, Teaneck and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 1997), pp. 57-78.
10. In A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 441-60.
11. Andrew Gurr, Henry V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 10-11. Subsequent references are interpolated parenthetically.
12. Gary Taylor, Henry V (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 12. Subsequent references are interpolated parenthetically.
13. Kathleen O. Irace, The First Quarto of Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 20. Subsequent quotations are interpolated parenthetically.
14. G.B. Shand, In Shakespearean Illuminations: Essays in Honor of Marvin Rosenberg, ed. Jay L. Halio and Hugh Richmond (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1998), pp. 33-49, p. 34. Subsequent quotations are interpolated parenthetically.
15. Kenneth Burke, 'Othello: an essay to illustrated a method', Hudson Review, 4 (1951), pp. 165-203, p. 174.
16. Alexander Leggatt, 'Standing back from tragedy: detachable scenes in Shakespeare', in Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R.A. Foakes, ed. Grace Ioppolo (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 108-21, p. 113. Subsequent quotations are interpolated parenthetically.
17. Francis Berry, The Shakespeare Inset: Word and Picture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 9. Subsequent quotations are interpolated parenthetically.
18. The Aristotle is from Poetics (1460) in JohnWarrington's translation (London: Dent, 1963). The Guillory is from Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 284 (Guillory's emphasis).
19. For a development of this argument, see Edward Pechter, 'Literary and cultural texts: why Shakespeare studies should not be peaceful', in The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Volume III, ed. Graham Bradshaw, Angus Fletcher and John Mucciolo (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 103-14.
20. Peter W. M. Blayney, 'The publication of playbooks', in Cox and Kastan, A New History, n. 10, pp. 383-422, p. 415, p. 384 and p. 416.
21. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 79 and p. 128. Subsequent references are interpolated parenthetically.
22. W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 2.
23. Knowles, 'Two Lears?', n. 9, pp. 59-60.
24. For a more sceptical version of this sort of claim, see William Empson, 'The length of performance of an Elizabethan play', in The Strengths of Shakespeare's Shrew: Essays, Memoirs and Reviews, ed. John Haffenden (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), pp. 80-3. Empson is more inclined to identify Shakespeare the Writer in terms of formalist achievement than of exploratory play.
25. The quotations may be found in the sceptical review I wrote in these pages a few years ago. 'Making love to our employment; or, the immateriality of arguments about the materiality of the Shakespearean text', Textual Practice, 11 (1997), pp. 51-68, p. 59.
26. Paul Werstine, 'Close contrivers: nameless collaborators in early modern London plays', in The Elizabethan Theatre XV, ed. C.E. McGee and A.L. Magnusson (Toronto: Meany, 2002), pp. 3-20, pp. 18-19.
27. Werstine has argued this position with relentless brilliance for years. The quotation here is taken from his probably most influential piece, 'Narratives about printed Shakespeare texts: ''Foul Papers'' and ''Bad''Quartos', Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990), pp. 65-86, p. 86.
28. See Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 10 and p. 75.
29. See Robert Witbeck Babcock The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry, 1766-1799: A Study in English Criticism of the Late Eighteenth Century, 1931 (reprinted New York: Russell & Russell, 1964).
30. De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, p. 76. 'In the script factory: it is time to stop worrying about Shakespeare's collaborators, and to start appreciating them', Bate in Times Literary Supplement (18 April 2003), pp. 3-4, p. 3.
31. As Michael D. Bristol argues, 'The wish to redeem and vindicate the dignity of those anonymous [print house] laborers is certainly admirable, but that dignity doesn't depend on the abolition of the notion of authorship as singular creative agency, which [has] its own kind of dignity.' 'How good does evidence have to be?', in Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence, ed. Edward Pechter (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), pp. 22-43, p. 40. 'Mob thought may kill us all before our time.' Empson wrote these words in the midst of making the strongest case I know for locating the values of Shakespearean drama in the diverse audience of the Renaissance public theatres; but he understood that community and individualism do not designate moral absolutes, and that any choice between them is bound to be tentative and specific to the context in which it is made. See Some Versions of Pastoral, 1935 (reprinted London: Chatto & Windus, 1986), p. 67.
32. I develop this claim in 'Shakespeare and Romantic anti-theatricalism', in Re- Placing King Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (New York: Palgrave, forthcoming, 2004).
33. For references and a development of these claims, see Edward Pechter, 'Romanticism lost: Bloom and the twilight of literary Shakespeare', in Harold Bloom's Shakespeare, ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 145-66.
34. Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 117, p. 3 and rear cover.
35. Stephen Greenblatt, 'Racial memory and literary history', PMLA, 116 (2001), pp. 48-63, p. 57.
36. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 286.