The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 23.192  Friday, 18 May 2012

From:        Gabriel Egan < This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it >

Date:         May 16, 2012 10:14:29 AM EDT

Subject:     Re: SHAKSPER: Peds

Gerald Downs attributes an opinion to me:

> I gather that Gabriel Egan agrees (finally!) with

> Michael Egan and Steven Urkowitz that /Contention/ is

> not a memorially contaminated text but that it descends

> by transcription from the hand of Shakespeare.

My essay (“Foucault’s Epistemic Shift and Verbatim Repetition in Shakespeare”) that I pointed to, which is available without cost, gives my view.

Memorial reconstruction and revision may both be active in the differences between two early editions, and a transcriptional link may be intermittent. My essay factors in an additional document not usually considered in this regard: the property document holding the Articles of Peace read aloud in the first scene of CYL/2H6. In F the words read aloud from this document by Gloucester are different from those read aloud from it by the Cardinal Beaufort, while in Q they are the same. That’s the “Verbatim” part of my title and I believe it may be relevant to our problem.  But I’d rather not rehearse the entire argument here since it’s easily accessed by any interested reader.

> Of course, since /R3/ is probably a memorial report

> the same questions may arise.

See John Jowett’s elegant proof that Q1 R3 can’t be based on a memorial report (“’Derby’, ‘Stanley’, and Memorial Reconstruction in Quarto Richard III” Notes and Queries 245 (2000): 75-79.)

Gabriel Egan