Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

During the 1970s and 1980s the idea of getting students on undergraduate Shakespeare courses to undertake exercises in bibliography and textual criticism would have seemed perverse, antiquated, and unimaginative. In the 1970s, when the principle of literary value was still paramount, the aesthetic, moral, and emotional aspects of the text were what really counted; for many people, an interest in its material conditions was little more than trainspotting. In the 1980s, the coming of theory shifted teaching in large areas of English away from its traditional concerns toward a more political, historical, and culturally contextualized approach to literary study. Again, this seemed more exciting than the differences between quartos and folios. The 1980s, however, was also the period when much pioneering work on Shakespeare’s text was produced: the view of the Shakespearean canon as something stable and unitary – a view deriving ultimately from Romantic ideas of authorship – came under challenge; studies of King Lear in particular presented a Shakespeare who seemed actually to have revised his work for publication, and in 1986 the landmark new Oxford edition of the Complete Works appeared. And even if these developments appeared to be operating at some remove from the prevailing excitements of literary theory, the political agenda of theory inevitably made English more receptive to material ... log in or subscribe to read full text