Dr. Computer
The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare. By Charlton Hinman. (0.U.P., two volumes, £7 7s.)
LIKE a disillusioned whore aching to settle down in a provincial bistro and marry a policeman, literary criticism in our universities has sought ever more desperately to acquire the respectability of stringent scientific method. From Pollard and Greg, with their pioneer theories of manu- script transmission, has grown a vast hierarchy— Professor Fredson Bowers at its head, hurling anathema—dedicated to the pursuit of that philosopher's stone, the true, authentic text. Enfin Professor Hinman vint. A refugee from the Pentagon, he has developed a machine to collate exactly the eighty or so copies of the First Folio hoarded by the remarkable Mr. Folger for his library in Washington. (There is a model of it in the British Museum, though it wasn't working when I last looked.) Here then is the culmination A total analysis of the printing process from which, amongst much detailed study of formes, types and working procedure, emerge, with unexpected vividness, the dramatis persona! of Jaggard's printing works: the greatest care devoted by A, the particular aberrations of B; and most winning of all, E, the prentice setter of part of the Tragedies who could be allowed to work from previous editions but was still rather at sea with manuscript. After 900 pages, one feels one really knows E.
Unquestionably this is monumental scholar- ship. The sly hope of stumbling on some textual error had me poring relentlessly - on these Volumes: others more versed in the arcana may unearth cacoethes etnendandi to provide months of delectation in the learned journals; I stagger baffled from the Himalayan rigours of such impregnable erudition.
But mincing little doubts remain.. The vast apparatus developed in the half-century since Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates has left us little wiser about even the weariest cruces, the solidity of Hamlet's flesh or what exactly the dying Falstaff was up to with green fields; much less the `Corambis' Hamlet or the witch scenes In Macbeth. Analytical bibliography is immensely Impressive: but doesn't it belong in a College of Advanced Technology?
Still, we have unquestionably achieved Scien- tific Criticism : et tout le reste est litterature!
PETER FISON
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