Brian Vickers: Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford
Brian Vickers’s book raises many questions. To start with a broad external query: when Cambridge University Press agreed to publish it, for what market was it intended? Amid the vast welter of studies of Shakespeare, book-length studies of the non-dramatic poems, other than Sonnets, continue to be uncommon. Detailed studies of A Lover’s Complaint are rarer still. Christa Jansohn’s edition of the twelve translations of the poem into German made between 1787 and 1894 was published in Berlin in 1997, and the first ever collection of Critical Essays on the poem (edited by Shirley Sharon-Zisser) appeared in 2006. But though it may be rarely discussed, texts of A Lover’s Complaint are not hard to find. Until 2007, all single-volume complete Shakespeare editions have included the poem, located as it was in Thorpe’s 1609 quarto immediately after the Sonnets, and headed with an attribution to ‘WILLIAM SHAKE-SPEARE’. Interested scholars for whom Vickers’s book is presumably intended will possess such a volume, as will most students. Many will also possess a single-volume edition of Sonnets plus A Lover’s Complaint, such as John Kerrigan’s 1986 Penguin, the present reviewer’s 1997 Arden or Colin Burrow’s 2002 Sonnets & Poems, and will also have access to digitized images of the 1609 original in Early English Books Online. For whom, then, is this book’s Appendix 1 intended, an un-annotated old-spelling text based on H. E. Rollins’s 1938 edition? On a quick trawl I have found more than a dozen undiscussed deviations from the 1609/‘Rollins’ text and two ‘Capell’ emendations (in lines 113 and 260) which Vickers says are incorporated, but aren’t. A further emendation, ‘aye’ for ‘I’ in line 261, which makes a considerable difference to sense, is classified as a mere change of spelling.
Seiten 409 - 412
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