De Grazia & Stallybrass 1993

Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass. "The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text." Shakespeare Quarterly 44.3 (1993): 255-283. Print.

• theoretical idea of the material text builds on McGann 1991 (supercedes "bibliographic codes"), Darnton 1982, McKenzie 1999, Eisenstein 1979, Stallybrass 2002 (reading practices encouraged by materiality), PMLA 121_1#Hutchison Breaking the Book Known as Q
• 255 In recent years the two dominant modes of reading Sh - formalism and historicism - have received the text at hand on faith, whether it be, for example, the Alexander editio in England or the Riverside edition in America.
• 256 intervention: Formalists call for exacting attention to the minutiae of literary language without giving thought to the printing-house practices that have in modern editions produced them. Historicists, tracing in Sh's works the discursive structures specific to the late 16th and early 17th centuries, have ignored the extent to which these structures are C18 constructs.
• The features that modernization and emendation smooth away remain stubbornly in place to block the illusion of transparency - the impression that there is some ideal "original" behind the text.
  • compare to McGann 1991#What is Critical Editing?, which problematizes "authorial intention" similarly
• ...old typefaces and spellings, irregular line and scene divisions, title pages and other paratextual matter, and textual cruxes. They constitute what we term "the materiality of the text." [257] These older forms return as active agents calling our own forms into question. When the materiality of the early texts confronts modern practices and theories, it casts those modern practices into doubt, revealing that they, too, possess a specific - and equally contingent - history. It makes us face our own historical situatedness.
• 260 [material contingency of the work] Mechanical copying in Shakespeare's day, not unlike scribal copying varied its object in duplicating it, affording a particularly concrete instance of the poststructuralist insight that every repetition introduces difference.
  • for ex) multiple variant titles referring to multiple variant texts of the "same" work (as with Lear, Hamlet, etc.) -- in McKenzie's phrase, "the normality of non-uniformity" in textual and theatrical production
• 263 [material contingency of the word] An incorrect Folio or quarto word is generally assumed to be the result of an accident: the author nodded; a compositor slipped ("sleeepe," "womandood," "inongh"); a letter broke in the printing process. Yet identifying an accident can be difficult when dealing with materials produced prior to the establishment of standards of correctness. Before a field of regularity has been determined - before lexical and grammatical standardization - by what norms can an irregularly or "crux" be identified?
  • can be more semantically substantive than compositor "error": we think of the "weird" or "weyard Sisters" in Macbeth, but in F1 it's "weyward"
    • 266: In modernized editions the mutable Renaissance signifier disappears: weird ceases to be linguistically (and epistemologically) vagrant; heir ceases to be philologically (and genealogically) unsettling.
• 269 [material contingency of characters, since early texts lack dramatis personae lists and uniform nomenclature] When dramatic nomenclature is made uniform, the variability of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical books and manuscripts is phased out. Furthermore, without venturing into the text-performance debate, it may at least be suggested here that this character instability is not limited to the written or printed text. Onstage the doubling of actors might also have destabilized character.
  • using same woodcuts to identify different persons also contributes to this (and would have been even more common in broadside ballads into the C19)
  • also gender, as in the sonnets that were later normalized to heterosexual modes of address by Benson in 1640 (270-1)
  • 273 Our modern habit of probing the text for an imagined complexity of character may have drawn us away from the more sensible yet no less intricate markings of discursive personal (non)identity. If Jonathan Goldberg is right in arguing that in the Renaissance "there is no notion of human character save as a locus of inscription," we need to make sure that it is Renaissance "charactering" we are analyzing and not modern.
• 275 [material contingency of the author] Like the names of characters, the name of the playwright is itself a variable material sign inscribed in books, not a fixed essence that lies imperceptibly behind the text. [variability of Shakespeare's name spelling due to spelling instability and good compositor habit, but also how frequently before 1600 "his" texts were published anonymously]
  • in the C19 the material contingency of authorship gets transposed into variability between periodical, newspaper, and book: Brake 2001, Beetham 1990, The Warden (Trollope, 1855)
  • 276 The authorial name ties the work not to a sole agent or "onlie begetter" but to a productive and reproductive network. (A concrete paratextual example of Foucault's author-function)
• 280 [the counterargument that depth is where meaning resides, anticipating Marcus, Felski 2011, other proponents of surface reading] If we reject depth as the object of analysis, we will at the same time have to transform our notion of surface. No less than depth, surface is locked into the dichotomy of outer/inner, form/content, appearance/reality. Perhaps a more helpful way of conceptualizing the text is to be found outside metaphysics, in the materials of the physical book itself: in paper. [rag paper]
  • The Shakespearean text is thus, like any Renaissance book [or until the 1850s really], a provisional state in the circulation of matter, a circulation that involves an extraordinary diversity of labors.
  • because rags were imported, the Shakespearean text was a "foreign body"; traces of urine of printers on texts because it was used to soak the balls that inked the press (281-2): "It is these material practices that, even when noted, are ignored in favor of a transcendent "text" imagined as the product of the author's mind."
• 282 In presenting the "true" Shakespeare, editors have effaced editing itself as a form of (collaborative) production. New formats, inclusions and exclusions, orderings, scholarly apparatuses, glosses, and orthographies construct new Shakespeares.
• 283 [Focusing on the materiality of texts] might take our minds off the solitary genius immanent in the text and removed from the means of mechanical and theatrical reproduction. This genius is, after all, an impoverished, ghostly thing compared to the complex social practices that shaped, and still shape, the absorbent surface of the Shakespearean text.