British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2005

26 April 2005

Abstracts

ABOUT THIS EVENT | PROGRAMME

Dr Tom Lockwood

Manuscript, Print, and the Authentic Shakespeare

Where do we locate the authentic Shakespeare? Our definitions of such authenticity, as has long been recognised, change across time. An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (1796), Edmond Malone’s modestly titled but viciously effective demolition of Samuel Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries, plays a vital part in the early constitution of Shakespearean authenticity; its influence on how we formulate and answer that question is felt today. But the Inquiry’s definitions of textual authenticity have often been treated by scholars in ways that divorce them from the textuality of the Inquiry itself, and the forgeries it exposes; texts which are vitally interested in the relations between early modern cultures of manuscript and print are read as if their own textuality were uncomplicated. Scholars, for instance, have been curiously incurious about one of the Inquiry’s central tools, its facsimiles of the hands of Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth and others. If, indeed, as Malone argues, it is the case that Ireland’s forgeries were prompted by, and therefore identifiable by their reliance upon, earlier facsimiles of Shakespeare’s hand, authenticity in the Inquiry is both produced from, and complicated by, its reproductions: the authentic is always under pressure. This paper will argue for a fresh understanding of the textuality of Ireland’s forgeries and Malone's Inquiry, and their (paradoxical) importance for our still-developing interest in early modern textual culture. It will ask how the relations of manuscript and print, and the social networks that they facilitate and record, can be understood between early modern and later cultures; it will ask, too, how the history of a given book can open up an understanding of a wider scholarly, authenticating culture.

Dr Tom Lockwood British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2002-05) in the School of English, University of Leeds, read for his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Girton College, Cambridge. His ongoing research explores the place of the early modern text in the 'long nineteenth century', starting with the publication of Edmond Malone’s edition of Shakespeare (1790) and ending with H.J.C. Grierson's Oxford edition of Donne (1912). His article, 'The Sheridans at Work' was awarded The Review of English Studies Essay Prize 2003; Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age will be published by Oxford University Press in 2005. From September 2005 he will be Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham.