Musings/Träumereien/Devaneios

“An example of Taylor’s creative approach to emendation in his edition of ‘PericIes’ in the Oxford Complete Works, which contains a number of passages rewritten by the editor with the help of the novella ‘The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre”, by Shakespeare’s collaborator George Wilkins.”

In “Shakespeare’s Modern Collaborators” by Lukas Erne

Right! Gary Taylor is one hell of a creative editor of Shakespeare. As the Oxford Shakespeare editor, he is an iconoclastic who just loves to chip away at the national bard. The problem is that disintegration of the authorship of the Shakespearean texts is nothing new, and older theories have been exploded or superseded by newer theories.

For instance, Shakespeare's contribution to “Henry VI Part 1” was once seen by almost all editors to have no more than apprentice work, retouching the work of older playwrights such as Nashe, Greene, and Peele. Tillyard in 1942 may have been the first modern editor to attribute the play entirely to Shakespeare, but John Dover Wilson in 1952 was equally adamant in assigning the work mostly to Nashe. Modern editors, not incidentally having discovered that the work is actually a lot better than traditionally thought, have tended to reassign the play to Shakespeare. Naturally, Taylor is an exception.

If you're into Shakespeare, read on.