In a Nutshell

Next time you open your copy of Romeo and Juliet, think about this: nobody knows exactly what Shakespeare wrote.

Say what?

Well, the thing is that sure, Shakespeare had to sit at his desk and write out the whole play, but nobody's actually seen the text that Shakespeare physically wrote. Shakespeare didn't leave behind big, neatly organized binder entitled "MY PLAYS" with all of his great works in it. There are usually two, and sometimes three, versions of each of Shakespeare's plays, published in different places and coming from different sources.

Most of the time, when we pick up a classic text of English literature, like a Shakespeare play or The Canterbury Tales or Paradise Lost, we just open it up and start reading. It doesn't necessarily occur to us to ask: how did this version of this work end up in our hands? In fact, we're often not even aware that these classic texts have been handed down to us in multiple versions.

So how do these classics end up in our hands in these nice clean versions? It's all thanks to a group of scholars called Textual Critics, or Bibliographers. These are the people who sit down with multiple versions of a text and try to come up with one version that is free of errors and that most closely reflects what they believe is the author's original thinking and writing.

Textual Critics like to ask questions like: Who wrote this? Which version of this work is the "best," or the most authoritative version? Which nosy person interfered with this important literary work, and how best can we reconstruct the author's original intentions and correct texts that have been tampered with?

Textual Critics may not always agree with each other—in fact, you may find more than one "best" version of a Shakespeare play in the library. But it's all part of the long process of Textual Criticism: new research is done, new discoveries turn up, and after all of that, those messy old texts get a little less messy.

Why Should I Care?

Why Should Readers Care?

The literary works that we read, and especially the classics that form the foundation of literary studies, aren't just magically handed down to us in perfect shape. The older the literary work, the more likely it is that it's been tampered with it along the way. It's also very likely that it exists in multiple versions.

The point is: if you're into reading, you have to care at least a little bit about Textual Criticism. We wouldn't even have access to these great literary works if it weren't for all the meticulous digging, correcting, and reconstructing that Textual Critics do.

Textual Critics save us a whole lot of work as readers. Do we really want to spend months and months combing through each and every version of a Shakespeare play to figure out where each version goes wrong and how each version needs to be corrected? Hey, we love our Shakespeare, but our love has its limits. Thankfully, the Textual Critics have done the hard work for us.

Why Should Theorists Care?

Okay, so some theorists may like to sit around and stare at a wall for hours to come up with all kinds of fancy theories about literary works. But without actual, concrete texts in their hands, they wouldn't be able to even begin doing their work.

What's the point of coming up with theories about Chaucer if you're reading the wrong version of Chaucer's tales? How can you come to any conclusions about Shakespeare's language if you're not actually reading Shakespeare's language?

Need we say more?