Apropos the string about copyright claims in a "new" edition of
Shakespeare, Michael Scarpitti <mscarpit[_at_]asnt.org> wrote, in part:
>
> In my analogy, I did not say that no-one had ever attempted to
> reconstruct the ruins, only that they were ruins.
This ignores Amy Stoller's absolutely correct point that later publications of Shakespeare's plays were emphatically NOT based on fragments, or "ruins", but on the work of Heminges and Condel, actors who had performed the plays themselves, knew the lines, and had both their memories and their scripts to work from. We are not talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls here. Editions of Shakespeare's plays are no more a "reconstruction" than editions of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Chaucer, or Ben Jonson. Yes, there are some spurious passages and variant readings. That's also true of Joyce's Ulysses and lots of other works of literature. It doesn't mean that any "new" edition that differs in some respects is a "reconstruction" of "ruins".
Bob Cumbow
<cumbr[_at_]perkinscoie.com>
Received on Thu Jul 23 1998 - 17:19:59 GMT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Mar 26 2007 - 00:35:31 GMT