Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Drakakis, John

Titel

Intention and Editing

Ist Teil von

• Style (University Park, PA), 2010-09, Vol.44 (3), p.365-377

Ort / Verlag

DeKalb: Pennsylvania State University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• “Intention” has always been a topic that has impinged directly on the study of Shakespeare, usually in relation to biographies that seek to establish a causal connection between the writer's experience, and its subsequent recall as a striking theatrical or poetical image. The issue has recently attracted the attention of editors, in particular in relation to the various discursive regimes that traverse the text as a product of the early modern printing house. The states of particular texts such asMuch Ado About NothingorThe Merchant of Veniceraise particular problems in relation to ‘intention’ and to the distinction that needs to be made between a conscious decision on the part of the writer to choose one strategy as opposed to another, and the writer as an “agent” through whose own creative processes there flows various kinds of “knowledge” that do not have their origin in the creating mind. This process is laid bare in a number of texts where the name of an actor appears instead of a character, and where the printer's copy may very well have been the writer's “foul papers.” Elsewhere in other texts, such asThe Merchant of Venice, the intervention of the compositor, charged with a series of decisions of a pragmatic nature, can produce a text that opens up a series of gaps between the copy, and the printed result that prove to be of some cultural significance. All of these examples raise questions about the extent to which the distinction between “intention” and “agency” have been elided in the dominant discourses of textual bibliography.