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Page 199 Hawkes here legitimately criticizes the editorial practice of Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson, but their New Shakespeare series was riding the crest of a pioneering and pivotal intellectual development, the New Bibliography. By contrast, at the end of the twentieth century, our dominant editorial theorists are D.C.Greetham, co-founder and executive director of the Society of Textual Scholarship (Greetham 1992, 1995, 1997, 1999), and Jerome McGann, editor of Byron and Rossetti, author of A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism and The Textual Condition (McGann 1980–93, 1983, 1985, 1991). Greetham specializes in medieval literature, McGann in the nineteenth century. The internecine battles of Shakespeare editing may be as vicious as ever, but their victors do not command as much cultural authority as they once did. This decline in cultural authority is also relevant to the other counter-examples. Why does Kerrigan believe that he needs to justify his bardolatry? Kerrigan’s case for Shakespeare—subtitled “Rescuing Shakespeare from the Critics” —entails an attack on every major Shakespeare scholar of the last two decades. At the end of the twentieth century Shakespeare enthusiasts assume, for perhaps the first time since the end of the eighteenth century, that Shakespeare needs defending, that his genius is not universally appreciated, that his supremacy is contested. In particular, his defenders assume that Shakespeare is now appreciated primarily by an older generation of critics who are losing power in the academy. Ivo Kamps is right that, whether or not this assessment is correct, it positions Shakespeare not as a shared possession, but as the icon of one academic faction in its struggle with another. To the extent that Shakespeare is associated—by both his defenders and his critics— with political and cultural conservatism, even the most impassioned praise of his work will be seen not as an objective assessment, but as mere partisan rhetoric. Thus, when Kerrigan proclaims that the only appropriate response to Shakespeare is ‘‘adulation” and Bloom asserts that Shakespeare’s intelligence is “limitless,” they indulge in a kind of hyperbole that most professional scholars disdain. But maybe that is the problem; maybe academic Shakespeareans are an isolated and inbred minority, at odds with the rest of Western society. The fact that some of us are giving less time to Shakespeare, and more to Toni Morrison and Thomas Middleton, might not accurately represent Shakespeare’s status in the larger world. But the postmodern appropriations of Shakespeare separately examined in this book tell the same story. Novelists such as Gloria Naylor |
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