Title: <scp>James Purkis</scp>, <i>Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration and Text</i>
Abstract: James Purkis’s Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama extends the critique made by William Long and Paul Werstine of A. W. Pollard, R. B. McKerrow, and W.W. Greg’s New Bibliography. While rejecting the latters’ hopes of flawlessly restoring what Shakespeare wrote, Purkis shares their concentrated focus on the ‘materiality’ of the written evidence, provided here by the manuscripts of John a Kent and John a Cumber, The Captives, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, and, most importantly, the Additions to Sir Thomas More. The book is divided in two. The first part demonstrates the inability of the New Bibliography’s taxonomy of ‘foul papers’, ‘fair copy’, ‘prompt book’ to classify the mixed evidence in the three non-Shakespeare manuscript plays. Residing in the background of Purkis’s analysis lies the opposition between ‘authorial singularity’ (‘the centrality of the author’) favoured by the New Bibliography, and the material evidence of proprietary, commercial collaboration of many hands discernible in the record of the documents. Collaboration makes it difficult to tell what was added, corrected, or deleted and by whom. Although favouring the case for collaboration, Purkis accepts the necessity of the author as ‘an interpretative category’, while recognizing the ‘impossibility of marking the bounds of an agent’s work among the text’s collaborations’. Purkis accepts the ascriptions of traditional palaeography, although recognizing the impossibility of its establishing autograph composition.
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-12-26
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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