Pericles-cutting

I’ve been editing the play Pericles – that sprawling romance of families scattered and the rejoined, written by William Shakespeare and (almost certainly) inn-keeper and persistent criminal George Wilkins. The play is a thing of patches: it has an electrifying reunion scene in Act 5 between Pericles and his lost daughter Marina (‘My dearest wife was like this maid, and such / A one my daughter might have been’), but there’s also quite a lot of bad writing in the opening 2 acts. Critics argue about who wrote which part, tugging at the seams of the play. The bad stuff generally gets assigned to Wilkins, and Shakespeare is understood to take over in Act 3, in the brilliant storm scene — wandering on stage, as it were, as the rain lashes down and the skies light up.

Editing the play means, among other things, inching through the text, revising errors (the printing of the first quarto in 1609 was fairly disastrous – wrong words, prose printed as verse), and adding a commentary to the tricky bits. Much of the work is in consulting all the other editions of the play since 1609, seeing what other editors have done, and working out my own way forward. And there have been a lot of editions: I regularly compare about 12.

And so to the practical problem. I like to work in different places; various libraries; cafes; I read and write a lot on trains. This means, if I wanted to both keep mobile and keep editing, that I’d have to lug around 12 editions of Pericles, which would be a pain and also an oppressive metaphor. I don’t want to lug around 12 editions of Pericles. I could photograph each, but that’s fiddly and I don’t like working across dozens of tabs on a computer screen.

The answer, as so often, is knives and scissors. I sliced out all the Act 1s from all the modern editions I consult (supplemented with photos of the more precious pre-c20 texts), and assembled them into a little Act 1 anthology: the key editions, broken up and re-gathered, and lighter than a paperback, with all the text I immediately needed. An Act 1 miscellany. The same for Act 2, and Act 3, and so on.

The original books, with Act 1 removed, become themselves interesting objects, registering both the presence of most of the play alongside the absent presence of the excised section.