Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton

Textual bibliography is no longer considered an objective discipline divorced from interpretation, and it is being embraced by politically engaged critics.Showing that New Bibliographers were never the cool-headed scientists they might have believed themselves to be, Leah Marcus charts the critical assumptions underlying their editing in five essays that examine the early editions of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of A/The Shrew, and Hamlet, and Milton's Poems.For the plays, Marcus lends support to the increasingly accepted view that the differences between the early editions might reflect not varying degrees of fidelity to a lost authorial original but different versions that were in production at different times.The 'A' and 'B' texts of Doctor Faustus must be kept apart because the former is set in Wu ¨rttemberg, a centre of militant Protestantism, and the latter is set in the more theologically conservative Wittenberg.The change in the religious norms violated by Faustus reflects changing English theological politics between the 1590s and the 1610s.Marcus is thinking along the same lines as the editors of the new Revels edition of the play in maintaining that far from getting the best of both worlds, conflation of the two versions loses the theological specificity and produces a collection of contradictory ideas.Likewise, the location of the 1602 quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor is more urban than that of the 1623 Folio version because a consistent set of revisions was made; the quarto is not inferior but merely different.T. W. Craik described the 1602 quarto's dependence upon the Folio version as the kind of 'loose paraphrase which is a characteristic of reported texts'.Marcus finds that this 'at least fleetingly suggests sexual transgression' (p.78), and that the language of New Bibliography figures bad quartos as femininely errant.