Notes on Teaching Textual Studies
(a session at the Shakespeare Studies Assoc. New Orleans, March 2016)
I think that one
reason for this session is to prove wrong the general notion that textual study
us deadly boring to students. Our own
counter myth is that the monolithic marble monument which is the one true text
of Shakespeare is itself boring and off-putting, not to say frequently wrong. Neither of these narratives strikes me as wholly
true, but our focus is on the question, can textual studies energize students' understanding
and enjoyment of Shakespeare's plays.
The papers presented in this seminar show that it does. It does so by several different paths.
1. Examining the
range of variant historical texts gives students permission to question the
text by showing the tenuousness of the supposedly finished text and the
vulnerability of the developing text in the hands of both genius and
incompetent text handlers. Permission to
question is an essential element of learning.
2. It gives students the individual
responsibility of determining the significance of the play by asking them to
choose among various texts. This aspect
is enhanced by the more familiar notion that performances fill in a great deal
that is not explicit in the text. The
things that went without saying must
have been well understood by Shakespeare's contemporaries and therefore went without saying. They no longer go without saying and yet must
now be acted out, performed in accordance with our best informed guesses about
how to make the text live. There may be
wrong answers but there may not be a single one right answer either. The explanations one reads in the footnotes
ain't necessarily so. And yet, some
erudite reasoning on recondite information found in the seminar papers prepared
for this session suggests that textual variation is not just a smorgasbord of
choices to be made willy nilly according to uninformed guesstimate. Research leads to better guesses.
3. Confronting original material texts, even if
only through images on a screen, gives students a clearer sense of the passage
of time and of their own precarious temporal position on the shifting sands of
the English language. Our today, like
Shakespeare's, soon becomes the murky past; modernized texts don't stay modern. Like
other doses of reality, this realization could be enervating or invigorating,
but it is clear from the seminar papers that the realities of textual and
verbal instability are not things we need to protect our students against. (It might be worth pointing out that
instability of text preceded any of our destabilizing moves. The illusion of textual stability is just a
mark of the textual ignorance with which many students and some of our
colleagues approach what they call literature and we call a text.)
4. Awareness of textual complexities gives
students a clearer sense of the relationship between the written text and the
spoken word. Particularly this struck me
in the examination of 15th and 16th century printers' symbols used to mean a
variety of things that, at the time, were perfectly ordinary but which now seem
strange to the untrained eye. Spelling
and punctuation carry similar lessons for us.
Learning to read is a never ending but liberating process. Dismissing material evidence that we do not
understand is a stupid way to study Shakespeare--literally. It is not the case that textual criticism is
the art of detecting that which we do not understand and replacing it with
something we do. That would reflect a
love of ignorance.
5. I asked myself why it is that the students
described in these papers as well as my experience of forty years dragging
alternative texts into classrooms--why do students always glom onto variants in
texts. I recall one of my classes cursed
by the bookstore having substituted a cheap inferior text for the one I
ordered. Upon comparing a passage in his text to the one in mine, a student in
the back threw his text on the floor, pointed at my copy and said, "I want
that one." Students are interested, not only for the four
reasons already given, I think, but for a more profound resonance that students
have with the functions of variant texts in processing and understanding words. It is what I tried to express at
excruciating length in chapter three of From
Gutenberg to Google and which I called rather grandiosely Script Act
Theory. It is that in understanding any
text, whether written or spoken, the words of a sentence are understood in a
particular way NOT because of what they are intrinsically but by how they
contrast with what they are not but could have been, given the surroundings in
which they are found. Touchdown and
Spinach are both nouns and can be grammatically correctly substituted in a
sample sentence, but spinach is not something that can be shouted at a football
game. Context is old hat in
interpretation. Either we use the
context we know to be the operative context of the text's origination or, in
literature, if we don't know that context, we sometimes make one up. That is how John Keats's "Oh, Attic shape" in "Ode to
the Grecian Urn" can remind us of the big vase in grandma's attic. If we get context wrong, all sorts of
wonderful adventitious things can happen.
But textual studies gives us the other important contrast--that between
what is said or written and that which, in the given context, could have been
said or written. If you live in a green
house I know it is not white or yellow or blue.
That is how I understand green house.
I am not confused about green houses for raising plants--that is not a
viable alternative for the house you live in.
If you have sullied flesh I know it is not clean or soiled or solid or
sallied. That is how I understand
sullied. Textual variants give us some
of the unspoken words at least as they were understood or misunderstood by
someone close to the text's origin. And
since in Shakespeare's case we frequently do not know if the original word or
the replacement was correct or if the alternative was newly intended or if it was
just a new mistake, the student gets to react to the variants in a very
sophisticated way, because they have, from the beginning of their language use
as babies, been testing every spoken and written word against its appropriate alternatives
in the contexts in which the words are encountered. That is how they are used to finding
appropriate meanings. We almost don't
have to teach this thing. The most
tricky thing to get them to acknowledge is that experiencing two or more texts
of a passage side by side, holding them in comparative and contrasting contemplation,
is often more satisfyingly rich than rejecting one and sticking with the single
monumentally marble one. That might not
be a perform-able richness, but it does play well in the mind.
6. The consideration of variants in
Shakespeare's text does not have to be restricted to those found in early
Quartos and the Folio. Once you get on a
roll with this thing, the editorial speculative conjectures through the years
becomes fair game, both for joy and disdain.
But it is worth pointing out again two important matters to be
considered. First, is it okay to
approach textual variation with ignorance about their origins and
contexts? If so, then perhaps it does
not matter what mashup students make of the text as long as they think it is
fun, like a game. My experience makes me
think students soon tire of that game because there are no consequences; there
is no standard against which to measure their success or failure. Textual awareness, I have found, involves
more than the realization that there are variants. It involves the full range of what we call
textual criticism. A little knowledge is
a dangerous things, so drink deep from the fonts of information available to
us, including that often neglected fact that in some cases we just cannot
know. The editors our predecessors in
the production of new texts for classroom use have been limited by two factors
over which they had no control. The
first is the limitation placed upon them by the print media and publishers
whose eye was on the bottom line. They
had to be brief. The second is the
editor's own ignorance and misunderstandings.
Misunderstanding feels exactly like understanding until it is properly
acknowledged. Often that acknowledgement
comes after publication. So treat your
classroom edition with care. But also
treat previous editor's emendations as a resource of variants that extend those
in the early record.
7. Some minor recommendations:
a. Assigning
students "tasks" might be less conducive to good work than asking
them to help you explore possibilities.
Doing tasks always bored me. The
assumption is that the only thing one will find is what the teacher already
knew. Why not save time and just tell
me. But exploring and helping--who knows
what we will come up with. However,
giving students free rein to make stuff up might be less interesting than
giving them free rein within the strict parameters of logic and the rules of evidence.
b. Extrapolating
from a few examples in one area of
editorial ignorance to a blanket condemnation of eclectic editing I did not
find to be very convincing. Lost and
unachieved texts, created out of the surviving textual record by critical
analysis does not produce correct texts, but they do create contrasts to the
surviving records. It is good to
remember that the variants among historical texts resulted from speculative
emendation on the part of their editors, also.
c. We probably
do not need reminding that textual studies of original texts cannot be
conducted on reprints or modern editions without recourse to original texts or
at least to facsimiles of them. Every
edition claiming to reproduce the text of an original edition is itself a new
completely re-contextualized material object reflecting our own time. Unfortunately, that is true of digital facsimiles
as well, though I have no idea how to avoid that. We just have a lot of explaining to do.
