Shakespeare and the Book.

David Scott Kastan. Shakespeare and the Book.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xiii + 167 pp. index. illus. $54.95 (cl), $19.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-521-78139-6 (cl), 0-521-78651-7 (pbk).

Above all David Kasran demonstrates in Shakespeare and the Book that Shakespeare's authentic presence has been as elusive in print or in electronic text as it has been in performance. In this wide-ranging but brief history of printed and digital versions of his plays, Shakespeare remains, like King Hamlet, a "questionable shape" or "a ghostly presence" (136).

The first two chapters cover well-traveled ground but offer fresh perspectives. In the first chapter, on printed editions of the plays before the folio edition of 1623, Kastan suggests how our anachronistic assumptions about Shakespeare's importance have led us to misevaluate his earliest publishers. For example, Kastan argues that John Danter's Romeo and Juliet of 1597 was not a "pirated edition" since printing it "did not violate any law or regulation" (46). Placing the 1597 quarto edition of Romeo and Juliet in the context of the book trade and recognizing that a play was "essentially a pamphlet," Kastan argues, "We might think better of Danter if we see his decision to save himself ten pence by denying the play both license and entrance [in the Stationers' Register] less as an effort to put forth a degraded version of one of Shakespeare's tragedies than as one to put food on the table of his family" (46). While not everyone will sympathize with Kastan's empathetic treatment of Danter, Kastan's elucidation of the market value of Romeo and Juliet in the context of the competitive but loosely regulated early printing industry does make our rather pejorative descriptions of the "bad" quartos seem somewhat inappropriate.

With similar realism in his second chapter, on the first folio publication of Shakespeare's collected plays, Kastan makes an appraisal of the risk involved in publishing an unprecedented book, an edition attempting to offer the complete plays of a single contemporary "author." Kastan writes, "Few stationers would have been eager or even able to undertake a project the size of the Shakespeare folio" (57, 60). The pressures generated by the level of risk, according to Kastan, probably account for "Heminge and Condell's distinction between the 'diuerse stolen, and surreptitious copies' that were 'maimed and deformed' and 'all the rest"' (73). Against the new bibliographers' tendency to see this distinction as parallel to their distinction between "good" and "bad" quartos, Kastan argues that Heminge and Condell were merely distinguishing between all previous printed versions of the plays and their versions in the folio edition. Again, a later desire to locate the true text of Shakespeare seems to dissolve when i t is read back into the publishing conditions of the early seventeenth century.

Chapter 3 examines Restoration and eighteenth-century efforts to publish an authentic Shakespeare, paradoxically in an age that took great liberties with his plays in performance. Kastan points to Lewis Theobald to show "the era's schizophrenic relation to Shakespeare" (93). Kastan describes Theobald's rewriting of Shakespeare for the stage (and for as-it-was-acted publication) even as Theobald produced, in his own words, "as far as possible, the original Purity of [Shakespeare's] Text" in Shakespeare Restored (93). Taking note of another paradox that developed in the era, Kastan points our that the editorial debates accumulated around the imagined "original Purity" of Shakespeare's text until a reprinting of the first folio in 1807 was greeted (sarcastically by some and sincerely by others) as "the true thing" (109).

In his final chapter, Kastan examines the implications of computer texts -- especially hypertext versions -- of Shakespeare. Here, too, what emerges is not authentic Shakespeare but how "Shakespeare's texts remain unnervingly (exhilaratingly?) fluid in spite of 375 years of editorial efforts to stabilize them" (124). With hypertext it is now possible to have nearly all the options available all at once, or at least all accessible merely by clicking on hypertext options that can offer any early quarto or later edition as well as film clips and whatever scholarly material the hypertext creator has decided to provide. The result is that the "variant texts, images, audio, and film ... are nor, then, supplemental materials but primary evidence of the play's fundamental existence as something multiple and variable" (133). Shakespeare's presence remains, but as indeterminate and elusively beckoning as ever.

It would be too much to expect this book to be comprehensive. It has an editor's focus on the history of the text with only peripheral examination of the sociology of Shakespeare's texts. For example, in leaping from early nineteenth-century publication to hypertext issues, Kastan ignores the textbook Shakespeare of secondary and university education, certainly a major version or set of versions of Shakespeare, the author. Also, in looking closely at Shakespeare's embodiment in texts, Kastan has little to say about the necessary complement of the embodied readers of those texts in all their variety. Perhaps, though, Shakespeare and the Book should not be evaluated by what it omits since the rich array of issues it opens up will no doubt lead to future work. One should anticipate that this hook is only a beginning.