‘Materialism’, Dialectics, and Editing Shakespeare

Abstract

Over the past few years we have encouraged the simmering in these pages of a continuing debate about the relationship between the bibliographical and scholarly problems of editing Elizabethan texts, changing perceptions of ‘authority’, and the theatrical and political conceptions, old and new, which may affect all these. Brian Parker, in NTQ24 (1990), and Stanley Wells, in NTQ26 (1991), were early contributors, and in NTQ34 (1992) Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey took up the argument, specifically questioning the editorial principles of the recent Oxford Shakespeare. Here, Alan Posener takes up the debate, criticizing the methodology and terminology adopted by Holderness and Loughrey, and some of the conclusions to which these led. Alan Posener is a British expatriate living in Berlin who – after stints in radical left-wing politics and teaching – became a writer, specializing in popular biography. He is currently rewriting one of the standard German biographies of William Shakespeare.