Thesis: Foster opens his essay by announcing that "The past decade has seen a remarkable upheaval in the small world of Shakespearean textual scholarship." Previously, textual scholars had tried to decide what one text best reflected Shakespeare's intention, but the new view is that Shakespeare did not have just one intention. Instead, The Shakespearean page was a text perpetually under construction, and therefore subject to unfortunate renovation, entailing cuts and revisions that a minute could reverse until fossilized in print. The quarto or Folio text of this or that play is at best a passing manifestation, a blurred snapshot of the theatrical script as it stood at one historical moment in the ongoing life of Shakespeare's theatrical company.Foster embraces this new point of view, but he also embraces the traditional aim of Shakespearean textual scholarship: to establish what Shakespeare really meant to write. Instead of determining Shakespeare's one intention, Foster aims to determine Shakespeare's many intentions. In Foster's words: "My ambitious object . . . is to distinguish linguistic events of the text (such as authorial word-selection and spellings), traceable to the act of writing, from those events that happened to the text (by way of subsequent revision, recopying, printing, or theatrical improvisation)." In addition, Foster has another aim, which is to show the usefulness of electronic texts in deciding textual questions Textual scholars have always used comparisons in order to answer questions about Shakespeare's use of words; they compare Shakespeare's use of a word to the use of the same (or a similar) word by his contemporaries. However, in the past, scholars had to rely almost exclusively on the OED(Oxford English Dictionary). It's a huge dictionary, but it often provides only one or two possible comparisons for any given word during a given time period. With the advent of electronic texts and searches, the process of making many such comparisons can take less than a minute. In order to demonstrate the power of modern technology, Foster tackles some of the most difficult passages in Hamlet, including Hamlet's use of the phrase, "dram of eale." Scholars, thinking that "eale" must be a misprint for something else, have offered dozens of interpretations of the phrase, but Foster says, "It takes only a few minutes, working intensively [i.e., searching Literature Online], to dispense with two centuries of leisurely and ultimately fruitless speculation. Shakespeare's editors, depending on the OED and other printed reference works in which 'eale' does not appear, have neglected to observe that eale was once a familiar north-country word for heather ale." And heather ale is very strong, which is highly appropriate, since Hamlet is talking about Claudius' drinking. Problem solved. Or maybe not. Foster devotes 17 paragraphs to "the dram of eale / Doth all the noble substance of a doubt / To his owne scandle." Our understanding is enriched, but Foster does not challenge the generally accepted idea that Hamlet is saying that just one fault can ruin a person's reputation. Bottom Line: Very well written, but for specialists only. |