Learn about the impact of textual scholarship on the understanding of literary works, such as Shakespeare's plays Hamlet and King Lear
J.E. Luebering, director of Encyclopædia Britannica's Core Reference Group, discussing...
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Transcript
Textual scholarship is basically the study of texts and how they are created. A text has to move through editors' hands, publishers' hands, many other hands before they get to the reader. And what textual scholarship helps us to understand is how a text changes on its way.
So during Shakespeare's lifetime, a number of his texts were published in different forms. "Hamlet" and "King Lear" are the most prominent examples in which there are a variety of different texts that exist that are called "Hamlet" or called "King Lear." After his death they were all collected into a more comprehensive form, for some of these texts, and what we have today, is often a combination of these texts.
And so, textual scholarship helps us to understand how these texts came down to us and what that means in terms of understanding the plays themselves, any text, as well as the authors who wrote them.
So during Shakespeare's lifetime, a number of his texts were published in different forms. "Hamlet" and "King Lear" are the most prominent examples in which there are a variety of different texts that exist that are called "Hamlet" or called "King Lear." After his death they were all collected into a more comprehensive form, for some of these texts, and what we have today, is often a combination of these texts.
And so, textual scholarship helps us to understand how these texts came down to us and what that means in terms of understanding the plays themselves, any text, as well as the authors who wrote them.