Gabriel Egan: The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text. Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice

• Dieter Mehl

When in 1970 Helen Gardner revised and re-edited F. P. Wilson’s important essay “Shakespeare and the New Bibliography” (1942), she stated that this “swan-song of the ‘school of Pollard’” saluted the work of Alice Walker, and she went on to add that “leadership passed to some extent in the 1950s across the Atlantic”, mentioning Fredson Bowers and Charlton Hinman with their influential contributions (pp. ix–x). Gabriel Egan (who does not mention Gardner) attempts to offer what can be described as a continuation of Wilson’s and Gardners’ narrative, rehearsing the progress of editorial theory and practice from the advent of the influential Cambridge Shakespeare (later ‘Globe’) to the latest theories on the relationship between printed and performed texts and the literary versus stage-oriented aspirations of Elizabethan playwrights and Shakespeare in particular.