Lumpers and Splitters

Abstract

Darwin, writing in this instance to the botanist Hooker about the classification of genera and species in plants, is normally credited with the division, since taken up in other contexts, between those who prefer precise and minute distinctions and those seeking larger organizing categories. The world needs both, Darwin suggests, and perhaps further suggests that each of us needs to entertain both modes of thought: without his fine observation of the varieties of Galapagos finches larger theories may never have arisen in the form for which he is now famous. So, in early modern studies, editorial theory in the first half of the twentieth century was dominated by lumpers, given to dismissing variant dramatic texts as “bad,” and producing as the best products of their work, for example, Kenneth Muir’s King Lear (1952), or, at the late extreme, Harold Jenkins’s Hamlet (1982), both for the Arden Shakespeare series. Splitters moved decisively into the field in the 1980s, giving us two texts of King Lear in the Oxford Shakespeare (1982), while the latest Arden Hamlet appeared as three texts in two distinct volumes (2006). The splitting of Hamlet could further continue by including plays for which we no longer have the texts, and one other text deriving from touring players in Germany. E. K. Chambers thought that earlier allusions to Hamlet or Hamlet, 1588–96, as well as later allusions to non-Shakespearean “Hamlet” lines, 1608–1620, were all to one unitary play, eventually owned by Shakespeare’s company, and thus the source text for Shakespeare’s version(s).2