Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 179. Wednesday, 3 Jul 1991.
 
(1)	From: 	Ken Steele <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
	Subj: 	Possible Delays on SHAKSPER
	Date: 	Wed, 3 Jul 91 21:40:06 EDT
 
(2)	From: 	Ken Steele <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
	Subj: 	New on the SHAKSPER Fileserver
	Date: 	Wed, 3 Jul 91 21:40:06 EDT
 
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
 
From: 		Ken Steele <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Subject: 	Possible Delays on SHAKSPER
Date: 		Wed, 3 Jul 91 21:40:06 EDT
 
Dear Fellow SHAKSPEReans;
 
You may have noticed an increase in the delays between SHAKSPER
digests lately; this note is simply advance warning that things will
probably become somewhat worse before they become better.  My wife's
transfer to Dundas, Ontario, has us moving to Hamilton at very short
notice -- probably early next week, in fact.  (And I thought the move
to UNIX was chaotic!)
 
This will not affect my electronic mail address, or SHAKSPER's for
that matter, although I will have to start paying for toll calls to
access my electronic mail from home.  (The University of Toronto's
School of Graduate Studies rather magnanimously considers any location
within 80 kilometers of Toronto to be technically "on-campus.")
I would, however, advise anyone to confirm surface mail addresses or
telephone numbers before using either.  (I do not yet have the latter
in hand).
 
Thanks for your patience, and I hope I can keep things running
reasonably smoothly through this period.
 
					Yours,
 
					Ken
 
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------------
 
From: 		Ken Steele <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Subject: 	New on the SHAKSPER Fileserver
Date: 		Wed, 3 Jul 91 21:40:06 EDT
 
	[Following are brief excerpts from the opening and closing
	paragraphs of Steve Urkowitz's paper, presented at the
	Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting in Vancouver
	this spring.  The entire amusing and enlightening romp through
	the quartos is available as URKOWITZ RJ-MWW SHAKSPER from the
	SHAKSPER Fileserver.  To retrieve the full copy, send the command
	"GET URKOWITZ RJ-MWW SHAKSPER" to <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
	(see your SHAKSPER GUIDE for further instructions, or contact me).
 
	Many thanks to Steve and all the others who have expended so
	much time and energy to transmit electronic texts for the
	Fileserver.  As always, all SHAKSPEReans are invited to contribute
	abstracts, reviews, papers, chapters, or drafts for this
	purpose.  -- k.s.]
 
Steven Urkowitz
English
City College and CUNY Graduate Center
New York, NY 10031
212 650-6363
 
             "Do me the kindnes to looke vpon this"
                               and
                      "Heere, read, read":
 
 An Invitation to the Pleasures of Textual/Sexual Di(Per)versity
 
                             *******
 
     Many enticements beckon us to read Shakespeare's texts in
their earliest available forms, and if we would only choose, the
technology of fast and cheap xeroxing throws into our hands the
variant quarto and Folio versions.  Nevertheless, for many no
doubt practical reasons very, very few of us read these plays in
facsimile, nor do many of us ever suggest such facsimiles to our
students at any level.  But I do, and as quickly as possible I'd
like to show you why.  And then I'd like to encourage you to
explore these texts further.
 
		.		.		.
 
     This talk is about alternative versions of texts: in the
First Quarto of Merry Wives, Mistress Page hands Mistress Ford
the letter she received from Falstaff, and she says, "I prethie
looke on that Letter."  Mistress Ford invites her to collate it
with a second exemplar of the same text:
 
     Ile match your letter just with the like,
     Line for line, word for word.  Only the name
     Of misteris Page, and misteris Foord disagrees:
     Do me the kindnes to looke upon this.
 
In the Folio version Mistress Ford rather than Mistress Page
makes the first presentation, and she offers the text far more
urgently:  "Wee burne daylight: heere, read, read."
 
     In the modern tradition of editing, our friends the editors,
for one reason or another, have been witholding from us the real
pleasures of reading and comparing two texts of Romeo and Juliet
and of Merry Wives of Windsor.  Do we know "What Shakespeare
Meant" by erasing Ann Page from the conclusion of Merry Wives in
the Folio?  Nope.  But we do see the erasure with painful clarity
when, and I claim only when, that text is juxtaposed with the
Quarto version.  And do we know What Shakespeare Meant by the
dark imagery and ambiguous greetings of Q2 Romeo and Juliet?
Nope, again.  But we should see them clearly when contrasted with
the the sunlight and embraces scripted in Q1.
 
     The textual instances I've chosen reflect radically distinct
literary and theatrically self-consistent formulations of
gendered subjects.  Hence the "Textual/Sexual" part of the
paper's title."  And finally for the "Diaperversity."  It seems
that editors in the orthodox and authoritarian tradition of Greg
and Bowers insist on swaddling and pampering both texts and read-
ers because otherwise, don't you know, we'll make those horrible
messes.  But perhaps it's time, perhaps we ourselves have the
self-control and readerly sophistication, to confront the naked
texts in their old spelling, in their compositorial blunderings,
and in our basic confidence in our common wealth of diverse
interpretive skills.
 
     With the two merry wives, indignant over having been targets
for a bloated, self-important good-ol'-boy who assumed his
victims would be restricted to a single text, I prithee, look
upon these texts as sources of delight and critical empowerment.
We burn daylight.  Here, read, read!
 
     Thank you.

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