Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

As Andrew Murphy has noted in chapter 5 of this volume, with the Cambridge edition of 1863–6, the editing of Shakespeare passes into the hands of professional academics (Clark et al.). Gifted amateurs of the sort who made up the earlier editorial tradition do not immediately exit but continue to publish well into the twentieth century. However, early in that century they are displaced by their professional successors. When these early twentieth-century scholars are celebrated in 1945 by F. P. Wilson, he fashions their work into a unified movement, the “New Bibliography.” Unfortunately for subsequent scholarship, under Wilson’s label disappear significant differences and open disagreements among the scholars of whom he writes – A. W. Pollard, J. Dover Wilson, R. B. McKerrow, and W. W. Greg. Gone through this mislabeling too is the awareness that twenty-first-century divisions in the Shakespeare editorial community reproduce to a significant extent those that fissure the New Bibliography. The label fails as well to distinguish between the research method developed by the New Bibliographers and the particular conclusions at which they as individuals arrived using their method. These conclusions remain open to further examination, revision, and outright rejection through the use of the very method established by the early New Bibliographers. This chapter will later provide a description ... log in or subscribe to read full text