Text and Stage: Shakespeare, Bibliography, and Performance Studies

This article continues the debate initiated by Brian Parker, who in NTQ24 (1990) offered a critique of the new Oxford Shakespeare, and one of its editors, Stanley Wells, who responded in NTQ 26 (1991) with a defence of his departure from traditional practices of textual conflation. Here, Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey suggest that, on a closer examination, there is evidence that editorial intervention and conflation have been regularly employed in the Oxford edition: and in arguing against all such attempts to reconstruct ‘authoritative’ texts, they propose that, in their inevitable absence, the originals present the closest we are likely to approach to recreating the collaborative theatrical practice of Shakespeare's time. In illustrating the effects of editorial intervention from a close comparative examination of particular passages, they suggest, for example, that the stage directions make a shovel a likelier object of Hamlet's graveside contemplation than Yorick's skull. Graham Holderness, newly-appointed Professor and Dean of Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire, and Bryan Loughrey, Research Director at Roehampton Institute, have recently begun, through the Centre for Textual Studies, a programme of publishing accessible reprints of the important early editions, of which the first three have now appeared from Harvester Wheatsheaf.