Memorial Reconstruction - Criticism

Criticism

Critics have argued that memorial reconstruction is not as prevalent as has been presumed (some use the term "memorial reconstruction" loosely to refer to both the supposed methods of illicit reconstruction: from actors and auditors). In 1975 Michael Warren argued that the quarto version of Lear is not a "bad" text, but that the later Folio version differed because it was a revised version. Later scholars such as James S. Shapiro have developed this argument. Likewise, it has been argued that the quarto of Romeo and Juliet was printed from a reduced and simplifed version designed for provincial productions. This argument has also been made for the published version of Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, and the first quarto of Hamlet.

In 1996, Laurie Maguire of the Department of English at the University of Ottawa published a study of the concept of memorial reconstruction, based on the analysis of errors made by actors taking part in the BBC TV Shakespeare series, broadcast in the early 1980s. She found that actors typically add, drop or invert single words. However, the larger-scale errors expected if actors were attempting to piece together the plays some time after their performance failed to appear in all but a few of the bad quartos. The study did, however, uncover some circumstantial evidence for memorial reconstruction in the bad quartos of Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Pericles. According to Maguire, virtually all the bad quartos appear to be accurate renditions of original texts that "merit our attention as valid texts in their own right".

The concept of memorial reconstruction has since been questioned by other scholars. In Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945-2000, Paul Werstine asserts that the theory has "yet to be empirically validated with reference to any extant Shakespeare quarto" and "there is no documentary evidence that any actor ever memorially reconstructed a play."

Alberty Freillerat, in The Composition of Shakespeare’s Plays, suggests that "it is odd that all actor-reporters should make similar mistakes and report inconsistently" and he concludes that the theory of memorial reconstruction is "as disappointing as that of stenographic reconstruction."