Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the EditorShakespeare and the Rise of the Editor by Sonia MassaiReview by: Helen SmithModern Philology, Vol. 108, No. 4 (May 2011), pp. E253-E256Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659134 .Accessed: 10/04/2012 15:31

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B O O K R E V I E W

Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor. Sonia Massai. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xiiþ254.

Editorial and new bibliographical scholarship has often painted an unflat-tering picture of the early modern book trade, depicting printers, publish-ers, and booksellers as unscrupulous denizens of a piratical communitywhose members botched and blundered their way through some of thegreatest texts of our literary heritage. The inky fingers of misguided printersand compositors, the story goes, misset type, skipped lines, and rewrote po-etic truths as garbled nonsense, all in an atmosphere of healthy contempt forintellectual and authorial property and for the aesthetic beauties of the text.This pervasive mythology has served a dual purpose, providing a flexible se-ries of explanations for the errors, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies of earlymodern printed books and forming a compelling justification for the casti-gatory ventures of the modern editor, whose task becomes the Herculeaneffort of clearing away the mass of printerly and compositorial corruptionthat obscures the authorial text.

Sonia Massai’s Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor is an important newcontribution to the project of reconceptualizing editorial and bibliographictheory. Massai mounts a direct and convincing challenge to the bibliograph-ical assumption that ‘‘once dramatic manuscripts embarked on their journeyto the printers, the quality of the text they preserved could only deteriorate’’(92–93). She argues instead that a number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stationers made deliberate and concerted efforts to improve andperfect the copy they reproduced. Massai demonstrates persuasively thatthe editing of Shakespeare did not begin abruptly with Nicholas Rowe’scelebrated 1709 edition. With admirable precision, Massai constructs a dualargument: on the one hand she demonstrates that many early modern dra-

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matic texts were subject to the kind of interventions we now describe as edi-torial, while on the other she reveals the extent to which assumptions about‘‘proper’’ editorial practice have blinded scholars to the rather different tex-tual operations of the agents she describes as ‘‘annotating readers’’ (30).

In crafting this first book-length study of the ways in which early moderndramatic texts were prepared for the press, Massai builds on the work of anumber of previous scholars, including Paul Werstine, Laurie Maguire,Lukas Erne, and Grace Ioppolo, and she is scrupulous in acknowledgingher intellectual and methodological debts.1 The care with which Massaiembraces the strengths of past scholarship while tactfully demolishing fre-quently reproduced assumptions is emblematic of the quality of her schol-arship: she is rigorous in assessing and weighing the available evidence, butshe is careful never to claim more than her data can bear.

In her generously illustrated introduction, Massai reads the paratextualevidence of prefatory materials, marginal annotations, and other commen-taries to establish the category of the annotating reader. This type of reader,Massai argues, whether a print-house professional or an educated amateur,read the texts he or she encountered as perfectible, adding comments, cor-rections, and sometimes insightful emendations. Throughout the book,the changes she identifies demonstrate that annotating readers were thor-oughly at home in the fictive world of the play and displayed a clear graspof dramatic logic and playhouse conventions, providing speech prefixes,altering stage directions, and emending misreadings or difficult cruces inthe dialogue. Massai draws on contemporary annotations from a variety ofsources to demonstrate the type and nature of changes made by readersbefore turning to the question of whether these practices could be asso-ciated with the printing house. Rather than dismissing as a clumsy market-ing gesture the frequent title-page claim that the text has been newly cor-rected, perused, amended, or perfected, Massai scrupulously tests theextent to which editions that make these claim correct or emend theirsource text. In doing so, she shows herself to be a sensitive reader of thecomplexities of prefatory materials. The accompanying photographs ofearly modern annotated playbooks allow the reader to witness for them-selves the style and frequency of emendation that Massai has so carefullytraced.

Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor goes on to demonstrate that the ear-liest stationers to procure English dramatic texts for the press, John and

1. See Paul Werstine, ‘‘Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: ‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Bad’Quartos,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 65–86; Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts:The ‘‘Bad’’ Quartos and Their Contexts (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Lukas Erne, Shake-speare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Grace Ioppolo, Dramatistsand Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authorityand the Playhouse (London: Routledge, 2006).

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William Rastell and Richard Jones, were concerned with the quality of thetext they reproduced and went to impressive lengths to emend and correcttheir copy. This section is illuminating as a demonstration of an unex-pected level of printerly care as well as an account of the influence ofhumanist and Italian publishing traditions on early English drama. Itneatly sets the scene for the second, and more substantial, part of Massai’sbook, in which she approaches a series of early Shakespeare editions with afresh and careful eye. Massai examines a range of editions from the popu-lar quartos of Richard II, Richard III, I Henry IV, and Much Ado about Nothingpublished by Andrew Wise in the late sixteenth century to the 1685 fourthfolio. In so doing she offers us alternative views not only of the publishersof the first folio but also of several notorious figures, including NahumTate, seen here not as the ham-handed Restoration adapter of Shake-speare’s plays but as a likely candidate for the careful corrector of thefourth folio Coriolanus. Perhaps most compelling is Massai’s reinterpreta-tion of the infamous Pavier Quartos. She argues that Thomas Pavier, farfrom being an unscrupulous pirate determined to defraud the King’s Menand his fellow stationers of their rights to several Shakespeare texts, was a‘‘significant investor in Shakespeare in print’’ who ‘‘took great care toimprove the quality of the texts of the plays he published in 1619’’ (37).

Massai’s final chapter closes with a brief account of some eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Shakespeare editors whose approaches to the text,she argues, bear a striking similarity to those of her pre-1709 annotatingreaders. This continuity in editorial practice further challenges ‘‘the evolu-tionary understanding of the transmission of ‘Shakespeare’ in print’’ (1),showing not only that publishers before Tonson were concerned with thequality of their texts but also that editors after Rowe continued to operatewithin many of the same paradigms as their early modern forebears.

In her conclusion, Massai turns to the import of this study for editorialpractice. The argument that copy-text editors are anachronistically weddedto a sense of the author as the sole originator and controller of textualmeaning has been made persuasively elsewhere, but Massai balances thisobservation by noting that ‘‘the un-editors idealize the material integrity ofthe early playbooks’’ (204) in a way that ignores the early modern under-standing of the text as inherently perfectible and in process and deniesthe care of some of Massai’s quasi-editorial annotating readers. More-over, Massai suggests, efforts to separate out the particular agents involvedin textual emendation and reproduction, somewhat paradoxically, con-tinue to privilege the author as the maker of meaning. Instead, she sug-gests, we should understand the interventions of annotating readers asfunctions that may have been undertaken by a range of agents but thatshould not be dismissed as corrupt or irrelevant if they can be proved to benonauthorial.

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Nonetheless, what Massai does not offer her reader is a concrete conclu-sion about the meaning of her research for editorial practice or how themodern editor can responsibly convey the collaborative indeterminacy ofthe early modern play text. Her book thus stands as further testimony tothe current tensions between the financial, pedagogical, and formal needfor editors to make hard choices between different possibilities and theexpanding array of scholarship that argues the need to investigate andvalue every version of a given text. Massai’s book is a tremendously impor-tant contribution to the latter field, and in some ways her determination toclose with a consideration of the significance of her findings for editorialpractice downplays the broader interest and relevance of this book, whichnot only provides a crucial prehistory of editing but makes a fascinatingcontribution to histories of the book, of reading, and of collaboration andappropriation.

Helen SmithUniversity of York

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