Knight 2015

Knight, Jeffrey Todd. “Shakespeare and the Collection: Reading beyond Readers’ Marks.” Shakespeare and Textual Studies. Ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Print.

• 177: The entries describe more-or-less identical books: Shakespeare’s play is complete, bound in leather, decorated (copiously) with gold, lettered with the author, title, and date, flanked with protective endpapers, and given a class mark reflecting the order of acquisition in an institutional collection. The uniformity is unremarkable, indeed expected by a modern reader of Hamlet, trained to see copies in predetermined material configurations that are consistent with the literary value and distinction of the work.
• 178-9: …the essential involvement of collectors, curators, conservators, and consumers in the materiality of these texts. The permutations are also, in an important sense, readings of the play. *181: [limits of marginalia case study for the history of reading] Where markings do survive [rarely in Shakespearean texts], and reading becomes recognizable to scholars only or primarily in forms of marginal response, the history of reception can be unhelpfully restricted to a sequence of particularizing case studies. The more abstract forces of reading and interpretation – markets, norms of ownership, classification systems – that shape literary texts across multiple temporal planes are made to seem natural or objective in turn. A more dialectical approach is needed – one that gives renewed attention to the ‘theoretical constructs’ that define and obscure early modern reading without sacrificing the historical specificity of empirically minded material text analysis. Such an approach might begin with the idea that early Shakespearean texts have ‘implied collectors’ and ‘implied collections’, which inform a work’s meaning by virtue of its situation in a larger network (a binding or library, for example: often several of them over time).
• 182: Medievalist literary scholars have been quick to take up miscellanies, anthologies, and other collections not just as material artifacts but as culturally resonant ideas: among them, frameworks for reading and canon-formation, and templates for literary production, including Chaucer’s.
• 183: The fact that most of the surviving pamphlets are now bound individually means that research on Shakespeare’s readers must account for, and draw its insights from, both the imagined collection(s) of early modern book culture and that of the modern library.
• 184: To see acts of storage, selection, and arrangement as creative and productive of meaning – especially where such acts were not yet prescribed in universal catalogues and commercial book-binding, but also where they were, much later, in modern literary culture – is the challenge of a post-materialist history of reading.
• 185: …attentiveness to forms of textual organization as reading, as meaning-making.
• 194: The curatorial histories of texts are a vital, underexplored part of what James Simpson has recently called the préjugés upon which any hermeneutic act depends: ‘An artifact implies its history, and is illegible without habituated understanding of that history’.
• 195: As William St. Clair has recently observed, ‘Although there has always been much interest in the meaning of certain texts, how they came to be written, and in the lives of their authors, little attention has been paid to the processes by which the texts reached the hands, and therefore potentially the minds, of different constituencies of readers.’