外国文学研究文库莎士比亚与生态批评理论/外国文学研究文库第3辑

　　《莎士比亚与生态批评理论/外国文学研究文库·第三辑》：　　Questions of textual corruption （which the 1609 quarto shows）， and sexual corruption （which the play of Pericles is much concerned with）， can be interrelated in critical works. Wendy Wall studies the diagrams of lineal descent， called stemmata， that are used by bibliographers to represent the relationships between early texts， and she finds them rather like the lines of familial descent used to represent family trees in the study of genealogy. In both， Wall detects a patriarchal fixation that obscures the complex relationships of text and sex that cut across these lines.26 In fact Wall is wrong to deride bibliographical stemmata on these grounds， since the relationships between early printed editions of plays really can be thought about in genetic terms. The reason for this is that most commonly a reprint of a play （say， Q2） was made by using an exemplar of the previous edition （say， Q1） as the printer's copy text. Wall is wrong to think that such lines of descent are patrilineal and suppress the matrilineal possibilities， for in fact there really is only one ancestor text （not two） for each descendant. That is， printed editions are made by something like mitosis （cloning） of the parent rather than by meiosis （sexual cell division）. Meiosis， sexual reproduction， is a rather better metaphor for the reproductive creativity that happens in authors' minds， as described by Richard II in prison.　　Meiosis is what happens when Gower's creativity， fertilized by his sources-'mine Authors'-including Godfrey of Viterbo （c. 1120 to c. 1196）， was， in the minds of Wilkins and Shakespeare， combined with material from Laurence Twine's Pattern of Painful Adventures （1594）， which itself took material from the widely circulating collection of stories Gesta Romanorum from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In the bibliographical stemmata of Shakespeare editions， a single text stands at the head of the monogenetic line of descent， and， by contrast， medieval works are more properly conceived as polygenetic， because the earliest versions are almost always multiple semi-independent manuscripts. In Shakespeare's time， however， Gower's reputation was that of standing alongside Chaucer at the creative head of the entire tradition of English Literature. As Philip Sidney puts it， '[first] wer Gower， and Chawcer， after whom， encouraged & delighted with their excellent foregoing， others haue folowed to bewtify our mother toong'. Of the two， Chaucer's reputation was arguably a little less secure than Gower's， as Ann Thompson shows， but importantly for our purposes Shakespeare only ever acknowledged as his artistic creditors this pair of literary predecessors. Shakespeare's debt to Gower is marked by his appearance in Pericles， and his debt to Chaucer by the prologue's notably sexualized reference to him as the work's 'noble breeder' in The Two Noble Kinsmen （Prologue， 10）.　　The recurrence of sexual imagery of artistic fertilization in Shakespeare's collaborative work gives credence to Masten's general claim that collaborative writing excited consciously and unconsciously sexualized descriptions， but it would be a mistake to think that the emergent concerns of singular authorship' were simply aligned with heterocentrism. In Shakespeare the contrast is clearly between solitary self-division of the faculties-making the brain female to the soul， in Richard IT's soliloquy-by which artistic conception remains monogenetic， and collaboration as a division of labour that in making the work polygenetic risks reducing the dramatist to a mere conduit for another's words and ideas. The abhorrence of incest at the start of Pericles， and the dramatization of its avoidance at the end， we can read as necessary self-justifications for a new way of working that Shakespeare adopted in his forties in order to appropriate 'the juice'， as Gary Taylor calls it， of younger， more successful men.　　……