Received Text versus Authentic Text

Late Eighteenth-century Choices in Editing Shakespeare

Abstract

This paper focuses primarily on the editorial activities of George Steevens and tries to answer the radical change in his editorial theory and practice in his Shakespeare edition of 1793. The two editors who dominated Shakespeare editing from the last third of the eighteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth were George Steevens and Edmond Malone, both of them working in the Johnsonian tradition. They also collaborated on a number of Shakespeare editions until the early 1790s, when their new editions became a site of contest. I argue that while Malone stands for the recently established criteria of modern textual scholarship, i.e. the quest to determine the authentic text, the editorial principles of Steevens's 1793 edition embody a recognition of the merits of the received text and the genre best fitting it - the tradition of variorum editing. I suggest that the sudden break may be read as Steevens's attempt to show an alternative to the scholarly editing principles he had helped establish, as well as reinforce the idea that editions are discursive constructs.