Shakespeare in Print. A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing

in Print. A History and Chronology of Publishing, by Andrew Murphy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 503. Cloth $75.00. One of the editors brought in by John Dover Wilson help complete the New Cambridge Shakespeare, J. C. Maxwell, was well known for mailing cards or notes fellow-toilers pointing out their errors. I remember receiving such a card, with no greeting, merely a few words advise me that on some page or other of my edition of Henry VIII (or All is True, as the Oxford editors would have us call the play) I had incorrectly printed some date, let's say 1597, instead of 1598. Maxwell I think meant be helpful, though his concern for scholarly accuracy could be seen as pedantic. A notable failed editor, John Crow, who spent years on the Arden 2 series Romeo and Juliet without getting past the collations, liked claim that he possessed a copy of Maxwell's first printed paper, mocking his zeal for getting things right: Crow said it was entitled Chariot-races: Clock-wise or Anti-clockwise? How is it that during the twentieth century editing has become a major scholarly industry, encouraging editors be obsessive about textual accuracy, and provide explanatory notes that sometimes explore matters as arcane and trivial as Roman chariot races? Andrew Murphy's in Print does consider such matters head-on, but in its fine survey of the history of four centuries of editing in Britain and America such questions are implicit and surface explicitly from time time. The history of editing is also a history of the problematic nature of scholarship, and of the ways in which Shakespeare's works have been valued and interpreted. Murphy provides a straightforward catalog as a Chronological his history, listing all single-text editions up 1709 and all collected editions published up 1821, the year that saw the final printing of Edmond Malone's great edition as completed by James Boswell. After this date the listing aims at thoroughness but rather to foreground the editions which helped popularize as well as those which contributed the advancement of the editorial tradition (281). So it includes a Sixpenny Shakespeare issued by Ward and Lock in 1890 (without providing any more information than this title), and various school editions. The appendix also lists early editions of apocryphal plays, as well as editions of The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III. This appendix frees the author concentrate in his narrative on the context in which editions have been constructed, trace their purpose and their influence on later publications, and show how editorial theory has changed and developed through four centuries. In broad outline the history of editing will be familiar many readers. The first two chapters deal with the early quartos and folios, and are followed by two sections concerned with eighteenth-century editions, the Tonson cartel, and quarrels over the issue of copyright. The next two sections concern matters that are less well known, notably the impact of Irish and Scottish editors who could ignore English copyright laws. The next chapter focuses on American editions that began proliferate from 1795 onward. Two further sections are devoted the nineteenth century and the development first of popular editions, and secondly of scholarly ones. These in turn are succeeded by two chapters that neatly divide the twentieth century. The first describes the emergence of the New Bibliography and its influence on editing, while the second starts from Peter Alexander's one-volume edition of 1951 and ends with an account of the Oxford edition and its counterpart in America, the Norton (1997). A concluding section outlines ways in which the New Bibliography has been challenged in recent times, and ideas of editing have changed; it ends with the vision some have of electronic texts that would not interpose an editor between the sources and the reader (272, citing John Lavagnino). …