‘The Operation of Individual Judgement’: in Praise of Critical Editing

The topic of the inaugural ‘Alessandro Serpieri Lecture’ from which this essay developed – what ‘critical editing’ means and how it affects current editorial practice – reflects areas of research interest that defined this scholar’s lifework and that intersect with my own, both as a Shakespeare textual editor and as a literary critic. I was therefore delighted to be asked to open this lecture series and to have the opportunity to pay homage to the legacy of Serpieri’s scholarship. Although I was not taught by Serpieri, his influence on my appreciation of what pertains to the study of early modern (dramatic) literature has been important and pervasive: Part 3 of this essay gives a representative example of how my work towards a new Arden edition of Richard III, briefly discussed in Parts 1 and 2, aligns in significant and serendipitous ways with how Serpieri understood the evocative quality and semantic instability of Shakespeare’s language.

Sonia Massai, PhD, FEA, OMRI, is Professore Ordinario in Shakespeare Studies at Sapienza, University of Rome, and affiliate Professor at King’s College London, where she taught from 2003 to 2023. She is General Editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare (CSE) series. Other current projects include a new Arden edition of Richard III and the co-curatorship of the Shakespeare and War exhibition at the National Army Museum, along with the co-editorship of the companion exhibition book Shakespeare at War (Cambridge UP, 2023). Massai has published widely in the fields of Shakespeare, Editing and Textual Studies, Shakespeare in Performance, Book History and Global Shakespeare.