#editorial practice

[noshitshakespeare]

About "fat and scant of breath"... Sir John Gielgud wrote in a 1930s essay on "Hamlet" that the correct word in that passage is probably "faint," not "fat." He mentioned scholarly support for this, but didn't cite the sources. Do you know of any historical evidence that the word should be "faint"?

I wrote something about this line once before, though on a slightly different note.

I don’t know the essay you’re referring to, but Gielgud has some reason to follow the decisions of some of the editors before his time. He’s perfectly right to say there was scholarly support for the idea, because in the nineteenth century there was a trend where critics regarded ‘fat’ as a printer’s error. The suggested emendations were ‘faint’ (Mattias Mull), ‘hot’, or ‘fey’ (John Bulloch).

Whether or not this scholarly support was justified is another thing entirely. The real counter-evidence is that all early prints of Shakespeare from the second quarto onwards contain this line, meaning that it was printed the same way by different printers and therefore different setters. There’s basically no scholarly reason to think it’s a printer’s error; it’s all conjecture. Where many emendations are suggested when a line doesn’t seem to make full sense, as far as I can tell, the only reasons given for the emendation of ‘fat’ here are based on the idea that it’s simply unacceptable to have a fat Hamlet. It’s rather telling that the suggestions don’t start until the nineteenth century (because implications of fatness were changing), considering that other textual emendations happen much earlier (a lot of them by Johnson in the eighteenth century).

So by 1930 the idea that the word ‘fat’ should be emended had gone a little out of fashion in academic circles, because, frankly, there’s no real scholarly evidence for it. But Gielgud is an actor, not a scholar, and many of the older editions with the suggested emendations would have been in circulation and widely accepted.

This doesn’t mean that the general prejudice against a fat Hamlet goes away. It just changes form. In the twentieth century, editors start preferring to suggest that ‘fat’ might mean something else, like ‘sweaty’ or ‘fatigued’ instead of claiming that the word itself is wrong. There’s a very good publically-accessible article on this topic by Elena Levy-Navarro if you’re interested in the details.

[gothhabiba]

For much of the twentieth century debates about textual authority operated according to the unexamined claim that authorial practice and textual corruption shared a common identity when the author was female. Put bluntly, it was assumed that the texts of works by female authors were likely to display more errors, more fundamentally, and in more places. Such assumptions had much to do with the ideological gendering of the act of writing and of textual critical practices as they served to form and defend a literary canon, first of Classical and in more recent centuries of vernacular works. Underlying textual criticism in its Classical, Johnsonian, and, in the twentieth century, its New Bibliographical guises was the belief that all material manifestations of a literary work (all the documents or vessels which transmit the work) in some significant way falsify its essence—that what conveys betrays—and that the work’s authentic state lies beyond expression. This is the spirit / matter dichotomy according to which the text is encountered as a physical body, usually diseased or deformed, and requiring the editor’s healing or cleansing intervention to restore its original health. In the terms of this explanation, the editor is both surgeon and priest, attending to the body in order to give relief to the soul of the text and restore it to a state of grace.

The traditional rhetoric of textual criticism since humanist times organized itself around this familiar binary, where the soul or spirit of the text was guaranteed or recovered by the periodic inspection and cleansing (or chastisement) of the textual body. Predictably in the body/ spirit dynamic, the body (or matter of the text) tended to be gendered female and the spirit male, with the corruption or unchastity of the female text, and the correction it required, providing useful legitimation of the activity of the (usually male) editor whose task it was to represent the interests of the betrayed authorial intention.2 When, rarely, the author was herself female (and text inevitably under the sign of a double contamination, as matter twice over) a further refinement was usually deemed necessary to discriminate authority from intention as, for instance, in the widespread invocation of a male family member (Percy Shelley or Henry Austen) to underwrite her productions.

—Kathryn Sutherland, "Speaking Commas." In Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (OUP, 2005), pp. 266-7.

2. Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), proposes a wide feminist argument about the transmission of texts and the gendered ideological grounding of Classical textual critical practices. See, too, Valerie Wayne, ‘The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission’, in Textual Formations and Reformations, ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 179–210; and Andrew Murphy, ‘‘‘To Ferret Out Any Hidden Corruption’’: Shakespearean Editorial Metaphors’, TEXT, 10 (1997), 202–19. The locus classicus for the trope of the text as gendered and/or diseased body is Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ (1765).