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Shakespeare's Pentameter and the End of Editing

The earliest texts of Shakespeare's plays contain many unmetrical passages, most of which are probably the result of scribal or compositorial interference and are easily rectified by minor emendation of accidentals (usually, by re-lineation or re-punctuation). The judgement of editors about what is unmetrical has for centuries been informed by a combination of intuition and explicit rules about numbers of syllables. Over the last few decades, however, editors have for a number of reasons rejected much of the hard-earned historical consensus of editing by intuition, yet at the same time have retained some of the least appropriate results of editing by syllabic count. In terms of their treatment of Shakespeare's verse, therefore, some recent editions of Shakespeare are among the least satisfactory since the rise of scholarly editing in the late eighteenth century. This essay considers the implications and benefits of adopting one of the more sophisticated linguistically based systems of scansion that have been developed since the 1960s as a tool to be used in the redaction of Shakespearean texts, arguing that the need for texts edited with proper sensitivity to the metre is all the more pressing at a time when students and other readers seem to be less and less familiar with organized rhythmical form in theory or in practice, and when actors and directors are being fobbed off with unedited Folio versions masquerading, by semantic legerdemain, as the “original text”.