Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The "Bad" Quartos and Their Contexts.

Laurie E. Maguire. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xvii + 427 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-47364-0.

In 1982, Harold Jenkins praised the identification of memorial construction (dramatic texts compiled from the recollections of actors or auditors) as "one of the achievements of twentieth century textural scholarship" (5). Professor Maguire, in an "exercise in textual spring-cleaning" (18), reconsiders the concept of memorial reconstruction, questioning the methodology of the New Bibliographers for whom this phenomenon explained the textual problems of "bad quartos." She develops criteria for a systematic and unbiased reassessment of those Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays identified by New Bibliographers as reported texts. Her redesignating of "bad quartos" as "suspect texts" challenges the pejorative and polarized thinking which has shaped the classification of English Renaissance dramatic texts.

Maguire evenhandedly examines the theory and practice of the New Bibliographers. Michael Warren and Stephen Urkowitz's recent reclamation of Q King Lear as evidence for Shakespearean revision leads Maguire to observe that the very same evidence which the New Bibliographers used to dismiss Q King Lear as a bad quarto or reported text can be appropriated to demonstrate the process of revision. She argues that W.W. Greg's championing of a new scientific approach to the investigation of dramatic texts empowered even his tentative conclusions, which were received as fact by his successors. Thus his concept of memorial construction was uncritically embraced as a blanket explanation for any textual problem although, as Maguire shows, the theory was based on unmethodological criteria, hypothetical assumptions about the operation of memory, a sample restricted to Shakespearean texts, and inaccurate terminology, "bad" describing not the process of memorial construction but the effect. Only recently have scholars recognized, for example, that Greg's rationale for the practice of memorial construction - the reported text was reproduced specifically for provincial performance by touring actors - was based on false assumptions.

Maguire undertakes a fresh search for Elizabethan references to memorial reconstruction. In another original chapter she investigates the textual marks which are indicative of memorial reporting (marks which Greg identified by a circular process of reasoning, not research) by comparing folk-ballads with their variants, Renaissance commonplace books with the plays they transcribe, and recordings of the 1979 BBC performances of Shakespearean plays with the BBC playtexts. The features which recur in these memorial reproductions - recollection, omission, expansion, transposition, to name a few - are those which the New Bibliographers assumed would distinguish memorial construction from an authorial text.

In a rigorously constructed experiment, Maguire proceeds to examine the twenty-eight features, which for the New Bibliographers characterized the bad quartos, to ascertain what they might indicate. Her strategy is to compare suspect texts with a large control group of non-suspect plays composed between 1585 and 1625; when features designated as evidence of memorial reconstruction appear in non-suspect plays, she concludes that these features cannot be exclusive signs of a reported text. Finally, in tabular form, Maguire systematically analyzes each of forty-one suspect texts in terms of the features studied earlier, provides a summary of scholarly opinion on the derivation of the text, and assesses the likelihood of memorial construction. A valuable reference for scholars, Maguire's detailed study suggests that the provenance of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English dramatic texts is more various and more complex than the New Bibliographers were willing to admit. Her banishment of the "bad" quarto and her tentative "acquitting" of some suspect texts (16) invite a reexamination of the orthodox and unchallenged assumptions which students of English Renaissance drama have inherited.

MARSHA S.ROBINSON Kean University