"A Certain Text": Close Readings and Textual Studies on Shakespeare and Others in Honor of Thomas Clayton.

Linda Anderson and Janis Lull, eds. "A Certain Text": Close Readings and Textual Studies on Shakespeare and Others in Honor of Thomas Clayton.

Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press/AUP, 2002. 205 pp. index. append. bibl. $41.50. ISBN: 0-87413-789-6.

Among his many scholarly achievements, Thomas Clayton edited The Hamlet First Published (Delaware, 1992), bringing welcome attention to Q1 Hamlet on its own terms, through essays dealing with both its bibliographic and literary issues. "A Certain Text" seeks similarly to unite textual and formal analysis. It presents a number of fine essays but lacks the coherence that Clayton's own volume achieved by challenging dominant bibliographic and critical narratives.

Richard Proudfoot's contribution takes pride of place among the textual studies. Proudfoot has discovered an unrecorded edition of Mucedorus "hiding" as five leaves of a made-up copy of the fifteenth edition (now at the Folger). Beyond detailing this remarkable find, Proudfoot makes a compelling argument about editorial modernization, based on his analysis of the "modernization" performed by Jacobean compositors of Mucedorus. Modernization has always been with us, he argues; editors, therefore, should not be unduly attached to old spelling and the "authenticity" (27) it seems to carry.

The two other essays positioned by the editors as "textual studies" are more close readings than bibliographic analyses. Janis Lull's essay on Buckingham's execution in Richard III addresses the fact that it occurs on All Souls' Day; she offers a number of convincing readings of this passage, centering on the cultural meanings of the holiday, but she is not really undertaking a "textual study." David Haley's argument about the "dram of eale" crux in Hamlet similarly provides an excellent close reading of the guiding metaphor of the passage as well as its intertextual relation to Nashe's Pierce Penilesse. But the bibliographic aspect is less compelling, because Haley's emendations ("The dram of esill [vinegar] / Doth all the noble substance often sour") lack paleographic support. How "sour" in the manuscript could have become "doubt" in print, or "esill" become "eale," is never adequately explained. Indeed, Haley acknowledges that the former case is "paleographically unlikely," nevertheless insisting that "the literary probability is strong that sowre is what Shakespeare actually wrote" (46-47, n. 16). This simply replaces analytic bibliography with literary judgment.

Linda Anderson's contribution on "ghost" characters in the stage directions of Q1 Merry Wives of Windsor bridges the two categories of the volume's subtitle, nicely balancing close reading with analysis of the material book. Taking a theatrical perspective on why characters might be on stage without speaking or being addressed, Anderson challenges the very idea of such "ghosts," and, incidentally, undermines their bibliographic use as an index to the type of copy underlying printed texts. Her theories deserve to be tested against a larger sample of playbooks.

Many of the remaining essays are written, self-consciously, in a older critical mode. Jay Halio thematically relates one scene (the induction to The Taming of the Shrew) to the entire play, focusing on "appearance" and "reality," while generally eschewing the contextualization within early modern gender constructs favored by most recent critics. Anatoly Liberman's essay on dwarves is a piece of good, old-fashioned Germanic philology, which this reviewer is not equipped to evaluate on its merits, but which he found interesting, if anomalous to the rest of the volume. Stephen Booth's wonderful reading of Hamlet's "rogue and peasant slave" speech details the verbal "complexity" (75) of the passage, a feature that for Booth confers literary value; I only wish he had clarified the precise status of these complexities: are they deliberate inventions of the author, effects of language itself, or the results of critical ingenuity? Achsah Guibbory's important essay on Hesperides stands out here, because, while it certainly employs close formal analysis, its critical methodology is not explication de texte but historicism: she changes our view of Herrick by expertly locating the politics of his use of the Hebrew Bible within the religious controversies of the 1640s.

One does wonder what unites these essays other than their authors' biographical connections to Clayton. I wish the editors had devoted more space to thinking through the links between bibliography, editing, and close reading, since editors and bibliographers so often depend on close reading to argue their cases, and since literary critics almost always depend on the decisions of editors and bibliographers when analyzing closely the text of a work. The odd introductory denunciations of "[t]otalitarian theorists" (12), "indiscriminate novelty" (11), and "the dismissal of tradition [that] threatens to become an academic orthodoxy" (11) are not subtle enough to define the state of work in the field and, as a result, are not helpful in clarifying what work the book is meant to do within Renaissance studies. Still, as individual pieces, many are excellent and a credit to their dedicatee.

ZACHARY LESSER

University of Illinois, Urbana