Revising Shakespeare

Description

In "Revising Shakespeare" Grace Ioppolo addresses the question of Shakespeare's "integrity". Through analysis of variant texts spanning the history of the plays, she arrives at an interpretation of Shakespeare as author and reviser. Ioppolo stars with the physical text. As textual studies of "King Lear" have shown, the text of Shakespeare is not as given. The "text" is nearly always a revision of another text. Critics can no longer evaluate plots, structure, and themes, nor can scholars debate what constitutes (or how to establish) a copy-text that stands as the "most authoritative" version of a Shakespeare play, without reconsidering the implications of revision for traditional and modern interpretations. Ioppolo examines the evidence provided by dramatic manuscripts and early printed texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Gradually we see how a recognition of the diverse facts regarding authorial revision leads to basic changes in how we study, edit, and teach Shakespeare. Ioppolo places the textural revolution in a broad historical, theatrical, textual and literacy context. She presents textual studies which show Shakespeare and other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists at work revising themselves, their plays, and their audiences. She concludes that both textual and literacy critics must now re-evaluate and redefine the idea of the "text" as well as that of the "author"; the "text" is no longer editiorially or theoretically composite or finite, but multiple and ever-revising. In addition, Ioppolo produces a new conception of Shakespeare as a creator and recreator, viewer and reviewer, writer and rewriter of his dramatic world.