News
2024.07.20
On Saturday, June 15, 2024, the Research Center for Textual Schlorship held an event titled “The Practice of Editing Shakespeare Plays – The Taishukan Shakespeare II/Phase 2 Publication Commemorative Event” in Room 008 of Building 8 at Seijo University.
The Taishukan Shakespeare Series is a collection edited under the concept of reading Shakespeare in English through detailed commentary and annotations by Japanese scholars. This event offered a valuable opportunity to hear directly from the editors themselves. Participants included not only our university’s students and faculty but also graduate students and researchers from various academic institutions and disciplines. Through presentations and a panel discussion, lively exchanges took place both among the speakers and with the audience, making the event fruitful and highly successful.
The event opened with welcoming remarks from Professor Kiyoko Myojo (Seijo University; Director of the Research Center for Textual Scholarship), followed by Professor Arata Ide (Keio University; Special Visiting Scholar of the Center), who provided an overview of the program. As Professor Ide noted, a distinctive feature of this series is that each editor has reconstructed the text entirely by hand and provided original annotations.
Five scholars took the stage to discuss the challenges they faced in editing, the principles guiding their editorial decisions, and their perspectives on future directions for translation and reception studies.
Professor Hiroko Maezawa (Dokkyo University) discussed her editorial work on The Taming of the Shrew, focusing on the issue of variant character designations (“Pedant” vs. “Merchant”), which have shifted in interpretation over time. She shared the editorial dilemmas she encountered and the process leading to her final decision to present the text while preserving the imperfections of the First Folio.
Professor Minoru Shinozaki (Chiba University; President of the Shakespeare Society of Japan) then addressed the editorial challenges of King Richard the Second, where unlike The Taming of the Shrew, the text must be established from multiple early editions (Quartos 1-4 and the First Folio). He examined textual variants among these editions and pointed out the possible origins of differences—whether resulting from censorship-related deletions or authorial revisions.
Professor Kazuki Sasaki (Professor Emeritus, Akita University) focused on the lyric “Take, O take those lips away…” in Measure for Measure, providing a detailed overview of annotation studies on its authority from the eighteenth century to the present. He also reflected on the significance of editing and publishing Shakespeare’s texts in Japan, in relation to the annotations included in the series.
Next, Professor Tatsuro Sato (Japan Women’s University) examined the inconsistent distinction between verse and prose in the First Folio of Antony and Cleopatra. He explored the potential causes of these inconsistencies—such as compositorial practices and features of Shakespeare’s late style—and discussed how these issues were handled editorially in the series.
Finally, Professor Ide returned to present on The Winter’s Tale. Drawing on the First Folio, he illustrated how he emended passages that were unintelligible in their original form and explained the types of annotations he added, taking into account constraints of page length and the intended readership. Summarizing the series as a whole, he emphasized that such editorial choices—made within given constraints—reflect each editor’s individuality, and that the diversity of editorial approaches across volumes is one of the series’ greatest strengths.
In the subsequent roundtable discussion and Q&A session, participants engaged in vigorous debate on a wide range of topics. Central to the discussion was the notion of the “eclectic” edition—a key concept in Anglo-American editorial theory. Participants discussed editors’ awareness of their own interventions, textual problems arising from multiple versions or editions, and broader issues such as the dual nature of plays as both performance scripts and reading texts, the role of annotation and page design, the definition of target readership, Shakespeare’s intention and authorship, and the very notion of “completion” in literary texts.
Between sessions, participants enjoyed coffee breaks, which further encouraged lively interaction and exchange.
The Research Center for Textual Scholarship will continue to hold regular events related to editorial and textual scholarship. Announcements will be made on Seijo University website. We warmly welcome anyone interested to join us at future events.
