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셰익스피어 본문의 확립- 이론과 실제 : Establishing Shakespeare's Text in Theory and Practice

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Authors

이경식

Issue Date
1981
Publisher
서울대학교 인문대학
Citation
인문논총, Vol.6, pp. 3-19
Abstract
There are two main origins of textual errors in early quartos and the First Folio of
Shakespeare: scribes and printing houses. To discover these two kinds of errors and to
remove them is to establish Shakespeare's text. What I propose to do in this writing is to
discuss (1) origins of textual errors and corruptions, (2) some principles and means for
correcting these errors and corruptions, (3) analytical bibliography and its contributions
to the establishment of Shakespeare's text, and ( ~ f ) some important practices of 16th-and
17th-century English printing houses which have important'bearings on the transmission
of Shakespeare's text such as stop-press correction and casting-off copy.
Two things are suggested as means to correct textual errors and corruptions. One is
documentary evidence which is given by the equally authoritative corresponding text, and
the other emendation. Documentary evidence enables us to substitute authorial readings
whereas emendation aims at substituting readings as close to inferential authorial readings
as possible. It is extremely difficult to produce good emendations. Greg's warning can
serve to prevent bad emendations from being produced: 'no emendation can be, or ought
to be, considered in vacuo, but that criticism must always proceed in relation to what we
know, or what we surmise, respecting the history of the text.'
Analytical bibliography is an indispensable tool of textual criticism; i.e. the task of
establishing Shakespeare's text. By analysing books as material objects, it seeks to discover
all the demonstrable truths about the transmission of texts and about every process
of bookmaking from papermaking to human agents involved like compositors, presscorrectors,
press-men, and bookbinders. The finest triumph that analytical bibliography
has so far achieved is the demonstration that six compositors worked for the First Folio of
Shakespeare and which part each of them undertook, thus revealing spelling-preferences
or habits and reliability of each of them. Compositor B, for instance, introduced a new
error in every 15 or 16 lines he composed. This means we can emend him more freely
than Compositor A who made an error in every 80 lines. In conclusion, there is no
denying that analytical bibliography is indispensable for the task of establishing literary
texts in general and Shakespeare's text in particular.
ISSN
1598-3021
Language
Korean
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/10371/26139
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