#amateur academic is not a criticism btw

[g0g0mi]

I actually think this post is really important. If people don't learn to look critically at the content and credibility of stuff that sounds semi-academic and if they just blindly trust it because it lists a few fancy looking sources then misinformation like this will spread.

And there doesn't necessarily need to be desire or intent to spread misinformation - I really doubt that the majority of these amateur academics on tumblr who dig into queer history are consciously trying to spread an insidious narrative, but none of us are immune to misinterpreting sources to support common preconceptions that perpetuate real harm.

We have enough issues with the rewriting and erasure of queer history - especially queer media history that isn't anglocentric.  

We have to be so, so careful. If you aren't 100% sure about what you're writing, if you haven't checked it against multiple sources or gone through it with people who you know are just as educated or more educated than you about this history, you have to be VERY very careful about what you say.

Because even if your intention isn't to hurt or harm anyone with misinformation, there are people out there who will take your words and use them that way.  

folks see me get aggro in replies and are like "dude chill, what's your problem"

my problem?

my problem is some people want "queer porn artist saw the Errors of his ways and now only creates Morally Correct Family Friendly content™" to be true so badly they'll ignore everything that doesn't fit their vision

and cloak that in academic language and throw in an academic or popular academia source (that does NOT support their claim but sounds good) or two for credibility

and it gets reblogged 300 times

I'm not saying we need a peer review procedure for tumblr, but.

[noshitshakespeare]

What are your thoughts on the New Oxford Shakespeare? I've long been a fan of the Norton Shakespeare (I have mixed feelings on the Norton 3rd Edition.) To be honest, I was expecting a bit more from the New Oxford, but I would be interested in another scholar's perspective. (I may be stretching things a bit by calling myself a scholar, but I have been studying Shakespeare and scholarly works on Shakespeare for a couple decades now, so I guess I'm an "amateur scholar.) Great site, BTW.

Thank you, glad you like the blog. I’m sure you can call yourself a scholar. It takes a lot of dedication to be an amateur. 

Generally speaking, I’m not fond of complete works. They have a place, and for reasons like expense and versatility, they’re excellent for poor students, but I personally prefer stand-alone copies hands down. 

I own the Norton because my university gave me a couple of advertisement copies sent to them by Norton, and I do rather like it for what it is. It’s about as complete as a huge (and frankly unwieldy) book can be, with the minimum amount of scholarly notes and introductions to make it an acceptable academic edition, and the digital version is quite usable. I don’t own the New Oxford Edition, but I have looked through it and have been peripherally following the developments.

Altogether, I’m not too sure about the approach the Oxford edition is taking. I like innovative thinking and all, but many of the decisions made appear to subvert tradition for the sake of it. For instance, I agree that multivocality is important, but I don’t like what they’ve done by culling the scholarly introduction, because it means you can’t get a coherent and structured argument about the text. Also, the quotations chosen for their tidbit introductions are out of context, which means it doesn’t do justice the pieces they’re quoted from. What’s more, even the choice of these quotations are according to the decision of a few people, which means it doesn’t solve that ‘single perspective’ problem they appear to set out to solve.

The general introduction also seems really dumbed-down and populist in a way that suggests a student (and not even an undergraduate student level) edition rather than an updated version of their previous scholarly edition. And that’s fine to some extent, because it is marketed as an undergrad edition, but it’s still an odd choice. Why dumb-down things for undergraduates? They’re at a level where they should be challenged to use the proper critical editions. They don’t need another edition to keep them separated from professional critics.

I like the idea of the performance notes in the margins, and that was something I liked about the Norton digital edition, but in the Oxford it’s rather sparse for the amount of space given to them, and the comments often seemed… too obvious to be worth that space. It could easily have included a performance introduction of a couple of pages to cover the same information instead. They can’t seem to make up their minds what their target market is.

The one big thing I’ve always had an issue with is the Oxford editions’ obsession with authorship. I understand that they want to challenge the canon, and I grant that many of the plays would have been collaborations with the acting company, or that some lines might have been added by others. But there’s no need to be sensationalist about it (I refer to the Christopher Marlowe collaboration ascription that was deemed worthy of multiple major newspaper articles). It also starts to look like finding patterns because you’re looking for them, not because they’re necessarily there (in the same way we see faces in inanimate objects). And to attribute entire plays to a joint authorship on the basis of relatively speculative scholarship, or even on the basis of a few tiny lines, is excessive. If I had written an entire novel and somebody added a few lines or even a chapter, that novel would still be mine. In the case of plays like Pericles or The Two Noble Kinsmen the joint attribution is entirely understandable, but the others? Keep the possible ascription to the footnotes unless you’re absolutely certain, I say. It’s also rather at odds with the otherwise dumbed-down approach they’ve taken with the main text because authorship is a relatively complicated matter that few undergraduates are going to get into. And then to have to have an entirely separate authorship companion edition just to explain these choices… I applaud the transparency of the approach, but when one of the only things that makes a complete works edition worthwhile is its affordability, the choice verges on ridiculous. 

I’ll stick to the Norton in my recommendation of complete works.