 | Studies in bibliography |  |
FORM AND FUNCTION IN
THE ENGLISH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERARY EDITION:
THE CASE OF EDWARD CAPELL
by
Marcus Walsh[1]
The forms of eighteenth-century editions of English literary texts were at
least as diverse as the forms taken by literary editions in our own time,
varying as they did not only with the different markets at which particular
editions were aimed, but also with the naturally more fluid state of a scholarly
genre in a relatively early phase of its historical development. Small-format
editions for instance, aimed at general use, or theatre texts meant to be
pocketed by a playhouse audience, included minimal scholarly paratexts.
Early editions of Shakespeare, prepared by poets—Nicholas Rowe (1709)
and Alexander Pope (1723-25)—for a general and genteel readership similarly
provided sparse textual and explanatory matter. As vernacular literary editing
became more and more a domain of historical scholarship, or `philology',
the poetic text was increasingly accompanied by a far more elaborated apparatus,
as in Zachary Grey's edition of Hudibras (1744), Thomas Newton's
variorum Paradise Lost (1749), or Thomas Tyrwhitt's Chaucer (1775). The
disposition and relations of that apparatus, as now, were variable. In Tyrwhitt's
Chaucer, or in John Upton's 1758 Spenser, elaborated scholarly annotation
was printed separately from the `clean' text. In Grey's Hudibras or
Newton's Milton the text was accompanied by substantial bodies of footnotes.
In Richard Bentley's 1732 edition of Paradise Lost the text page becomes a
complex and interrelating pattern of various components, the text attended
by substantial and typographically insistent footnotes and a battery of marginal
alternative readings, and itself broken up by italics and square brackets—
`hooks'—drawing attention to what Bentley thought dubious readings.
In the editing of the plays of William Shakespeare, however, an essentially
`standard' format for the scholarly edition was adopted and evolved
over the course of the century. Lewis Theobald, arguably the first `critical'—
to use his own word, `intelligent'—editor of Shakespeare, also led the way
in providing a formal model, deliberately choosing (as he told his then
friend William Warburton) `to follow the form of Bentley's Amsterdam
of providing the text with a running accompaniment of explanatory
and textual footnotes was followed, with a generally rising ratio of notes to
text, and more or less steadily increasing scholarly paratexts, in the editions
of Pope and Warburton (1747), Samuel Johnson (1765), Johnson and Steevens
(1773 and 1778), Reed (1785), Malone (1790), and Steevens (1793).
In this paper I shall be discussing the highly individual editorial work
of Edward Capell, which formally is strikingly distinct from this recognizable
main stream. Capell is now best remembered for his edition of Shakespeare,
ten octavo volumes of the text of the plays, published in 1768, followed by a
First Part of Notes and Various Readings in 1774, and the complete threevolume
Notes and Various Readings of 1779 through 1783. I shall refer also
to Capell's only other piece of published editing, the Prolusions . . . of Antient
Poetry (1760); to Capell's holograph copy for the Shakespeare edition; and
to Capell's unpublished holograph Milton, which survives with the Shakespeare
holograph in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Both the text and the subsequent apparatus of Capell's Shakespeare
edition are innovative and distinctive. As we shall see, the Shakespearean text
was published, in 1768, in a strikingly, even provocatively, `clean' form.
Capell's textual practice, abandoning the textus receptus and returning to
the `original copies', displayed what is arguably a radical text-critical modernity.
Capell's explanatory notes, published many years after the text, and
very different in book form and mise en page, are based on a daunting range
and depth of contextualizing knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture
and literature rivalled, amongst previous editors of Shakespeare, only by
Theobald and Johnson.
Capell's hermeneutic procedures and text-editorial methodologies have
been both discussed and appreciated by such scholars as Alice Walker and
Brian Vickers.[3]
Here I shall examine rather the `bibliographical codes' of
Capell's works of English editorial scholarship: matters of volume format and
makeup, the relations among texts and paratexts, styling and mise en page.
In particular I shall argue that Capell's editorial publications are deliberately
designed and carefully produced, reflecting not only the expertise and craftsmanship
of their printer, but also the intentions of Capell himself. Both the
Shakespeare and the Prolusions display Capell's thorough and thoughtful
attention to form and to the effect of form on function. Both books show the
clearest evidence of Capell's highly distinctive view of the editor's role, of
typographic layout, of the reader's use of the text, and of the relation of the
editor both to his author and to his reader.
Illustrations
PLATE 1. Title page of Edward Capell's Prolusions (1760). From a copy in the possession
of the author.
PLATE 2. First page of Edward III in Capell's Prolusions. From a copy in the possession
of the author.
PLATE 3. Title page of Capell's edition of Shakespeare (1768). By kind permission of
the Birmingham Shakespeare Library.
PLATE 4. Title page of Samuel Johnson's edition of Shakespeare (1765). By kind permission
of the Birmingham Shakespeare Library.
PLATE 5. Capell's holograph title page for his edition of Shakespeare. By kind permission
of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.
PLATE 6. First page of Hamlet in Capell's 1768 edition of Shakespeare. By kind permission
of the Birmingham Shakespeare Library.
PLATE 7. Page 5 of Hamlet in Capell's 1768 edition of Shakespeare. By kind permission
of the Birmingham Shakespeare Library.
PLATE 8. Page 5 of Capell's holograph of the text of Hamlet. (Reduced 25%.) By kind
permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.
PLATE 9. Page 30 of Nosce Teipsum in Capell's Prolusions. From a copy in the possession
of the author.
PLATE 10. Page 18 of The notbrowne Mayde in Capell's Prolusions. From a copy in
the possession of the author.
PLATE 11. Page 39 of the Foulis Lucretius, De Natura Rerum (1759). By kind permission
of the University of Birmingham.
PLATE 12. Page 74 of the `Glossary' to Shakespeare, from Capell's Notes and Various
Readings to Shakespeare (3 vols., 1779-83). (Reduced 33%.) By kind permission of the
Birmingham Shakespeare Library.
PLATE 13. Page 127 of the `Notes', from Capell's Notes and Various Readings to
Shakespeare (3 vols., 1779-83). (Reduced 33%.) By kind permission of the Birmingham
Shakespeare Library.
PLATE 14. Page 163 of the `School of Shakespeare', from Capell's Notes and Various
Readings to Shakespeare (3 vols., 1779-83). (Reduced 33%.) By kind permission of the
Birmingham Shakespeare Library.
This paper has benefited from kind suggestions made in response to earlier and
partial versions presented at seminars at Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I would particularly like to thank Roger
Lonsdale, Paulina Kewes, Jim McLaverty, Simon Jarvis, William St Clair, Howard Erskine
Hill, and Michael Suarez, S. J.
Letter to William Warburton, November 18, 1731. Quoted by Peter Seary, Lewis
Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), p. 127.
Alice Walker, `Edward Capell and his Edition of Shakespeare', Proceedings of the
British Academy, 46 (1960), 131-145; Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare. The Critical Heritage,
6 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974-81), vols. 5 and 6 passim. See also my own
Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1997), pp. 175-198.
| Studies in bibliography | |