The Case of the Rouged Corpse: Shakespeare, Malone, and the Modern Subject

This report, or meditation, reflects on some highly selective features of the ongoing debate about the materiality of Shakespeare's texts (and by extension of any text), and the new challenges thrown down, often in a spirit of revolutionary fervor, to contest what had been thought of as received notions of scholarship, editorial practice, and even the pursuit of literary study itself.Over the last few years a series of articles (many of them in the journal 'Textual Practice) have debated the protocols, value, and implications of idealistic versus materialistic approaches to the play texts (and indeed the sonnets) that stemmed from Margreta de Grazia's 'Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus' (1991) and from de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass's later article "The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text," which appeared in 'Shakespeare Quarterly' in 1993.The whole question of editorial practice has become a topic of intense theoretical discussion - not only regarding editorial practice in relation to the texts of Shakespeare but also regarding early modern literature at large and, by a logical extension, editorial intervention in all texts.