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Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 1825-1915
Paul Salzman
Early Modern Literature in History Series Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 Hardcover. ix+167 p. ISBN 978-3319779010. £79.99
Reviewed by François Laroque Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris
Paul Salzman, professor Emeritus at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, is a well-known specialist of Elizabethan prose fiction and early modern women’s writing. In 2012, he published a digital edition of Mary Wroth’s poetry and in 2006, he edited Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford University Press). In this new book dealing with a history of Renaissance editing, he clearly recaps his goal in selecting this restricted but essential ninety-year period (1825-1915, as the title reminds us) of unrelenting editions of Renaissance literature and drama (from complete editions through to collections and individual editions of pamphlets, jest-books and other material until then deemed ephemeral or of lesser interest) at the end of his introduction: Editing, editorial theory, and book history have seen a resurgence of interest in recent years, and this study is intended to bring to light a largely hidden history that offers a more sophisticated context for recent development and a window into some neglected earlier achievements. Salzman argues that nineteenth-century editors created the modern idea of English Renaissance literature and analyses the theories and practices of editors who worked not only on Shakespeare, but also on complete editions of a remarkable range of early modern writers. He repeatedly insists on the fact that so-called more scientific theories of editing actually marginalised the work of earlier editors . In restoring a history which has thus progressively been obscured, he addresses the current interest in the theory and practice of editing. This small book of a little more than 160 pages consists of five main chapters that survey, more than they study, the history of Renaissance editing. These chapters analyse the construction of the canon, from the considerable work of the dramatic editor and literary historian Alexander Dyce (1798-1869), the idea, or illusion, of constructing a perfect Shakespeare text, the work of amateurs and professionals in the second half of the nineteenth century, up to the work of learned amateurs and scientific professionals. The conclusion, entitled “Forgetting the Past”, warns against the neglect, not to say the oblivion, into which such remarkable editors as Dyce, Halliwell-Phillipps, Collier, Grosart or Wright , now seem to have fallen into. Salzman indeed explains that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the editors aimed at a wide-ranging representation of the Renaissance , while later edit ors worked on the production of a more restricted field of studies. The period surveyed and analysed by the author is indeed characterise d by a massive increase of access to Renaissance writings from complete works editions to collections of so-called minor publications. A brief history of the transmission of Renaissance writings characterised by a copious and heterogenous editorial tradition , this book purports to show how editing was at the origin of understanding the Renaissance as a literary and cultural field of study. After the first three chapters respectively devoted to the impressive body of work due to such ‘giants’ as Alexander Dyce (1798-1869), James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-1889) and Alexander Grosart (1827-1899), Salzman comes to examine the shift from ‘amateur’ to professional and scientific editing as illustrated by McKerrow’s edition of the works of Thomas Nashe in five volumes. According to the author, the generous anthologies of the past have progressively given way to narrower collections aimed at the student market, a process marked by the unrelenting insistence on Shakespeare, as Margreta de Grazia has shown in her Shakespeare Verbatim (1991), in which she argues that Edmund Malone’s edition of Shakespeare (1790) contributed to stabilise the text of the canon (an idea now widely and frequently questioned as may be seen in the recent collective volume Shakespeare and Textual Studies, edited by Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai). In the sixth and last chapter, Salzman gives a brief account of the massive development of editing and textual studies from 1915 to the present day, to insist on the “fruitful connections between recent editions and the history of editing analysed in the course of the book”. Such a well-researched and interesting piece of work certainly deserves our praise and thanks for its clear and carefully documented presentation of the years of Renaissance and Shakespeare editions here under scrutiny. In his invaluable historical approach, Salzman provides us with a well-needed context making for a better understanding of the importance of the work of those nineteenth and early twentieth-century editors of Renaissance literature and culture to whom he is paying a justified tribute, for all their personal eccentricities at times.* His book paves the way for more studies on the question as it allows to complement what we might call the other side of the coin and to revive an interest in the editions of Renaissance texts other than dramatic ones and other than those of the Shakespearean canon. __________________________ * Here, the term essentially refers to the antiquarian James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips who had been accused of stealing manuscripts from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. This led to the elopement of James and Phillipps’ daughter, Henrietta, after her father had refused to consent to the marriage. Henrietta then became an important collaborator of her husband since she was a skilled copy-editor trained by her father, the bibliomaniac Sir Thomas Phillipps.
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