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Gary Taylor’s Letter

Dear Margaret Bartley,

I am writing to you because Arden’s abrupt termination of Pat Parker’s contract for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” raises fundamental questions about the legal, moral, and intellectual relationship between scholars and publishers.

I am joint General Editor (for Oxford University Press) of Shakespeare’s Complete Works and of Middleton’s Collected Works; I am also General Editor (for Palgrave) of two book series, “Signs of Race” and “History of Text Technologies”. I was an employee of Oxford University Press for eight years. In addition I have edited collections of essays for both Oxford and Palgrave, and published books with Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Basic Books, Routledge, Manchester UP, etc. So I have considerable experience with publishers, as an employee, an author, an editor, and a general editor.

Anyone who has ever general edited knows that there are sometimes clashes between an editor and their general editor, and anyone who has ever worked for a publisher knows there are sometimes clashes between authors and their publishers. I have heard–or rather, read online–only Prof. Parker’s version of the conflict between her and Arden/Cengage. There is, undoubtedly, another version of those events. However, the bland public silence of the Arden general editors and the publisher, in response to the protests of Parker and other scholars, is one of the most disturbing aspects of this business. Are the general editors hiding behind the legal authority of the publisher? Is the publisher enforcing silence on the general editors? Either explanation would be disturbing.

Everyone in the field of Shakespeare or English Renaissance studies knows Pat Parker’s work. Anyone who has been paying attention to “A Midsummer NIght’s Dream” over the last decade is aware, in particular, of Parker’s ongoing innovative research on that play. One suspects that her work has caused headaches for the general editors, and/or for the publisher, not because she has failed to deliver, but because the kind of work she has delivered and the kinds of question she has been asking are discomforting for business-as-usual.

If I were general-editing Parker’s work on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, I would certainly disagree with some, and might well disagree with many, of her decisions. But presumably Parker was commissioned in the first place because of the originality of her previous work. When publishers commission editions of canonical authors, do they really WANT scholars to do ground-breaking work? Or do they simply want them to deliver a familiar commodity, which can be slotted efficiently into a pre-existing production schedule and a pre-existing mindset? Do you want the NAME of Pat Parker, in order to market their product as authoritative? or do you want the REALITY of Pat Parker (in which case you must be prepared to accept something out of the ordinary)? Is Arden, or Cengage, willing to dare to publish really original, really controversial, work? Do we need to incorporate in our future contracts with publishers a proviso that we are allowed to go wherever our investigations lead us?

I might think Parker is wrong about how to edit MND. But unless people have the right to do things that others consider “wrong”, they do not have the right to be original. True originality will always be controversial. Sometimes an original hypothesis or practice will later be decisively refuted, but innovation and refutation are the engines of intellectual progress, in the humanities as much as the sciences.

As general editor of the Oxford Middleton, I was in the uncomfortable position of telling more than one very distinguished scholar that their work was unacceptable or that I could not wait for them any longer. I took the heat for those decisions (which is one reason some people will tell you I’m an asshole). If the Arden General Editors feel that Parker’s work is unacceptable, they should have the courage to say so to their colleagues, and to defend their decision on principled intellectual grounds.

As general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, I was in the uncomfortable position of having much of my eight years of intellectual work on that edition sabotaged by a change of management at the Press, which delayed publication of two of our three volumes, never published our commentaries, sold our text to W. W. Norton, and then let Norton make radical changes to our work while still exploiting our names and our authority. I learned from this experience never to trust anything that wasn’t explicitly promised in a contract–and that textbook publishers want the “look” of innovation without the risk of disturbing their customer base. If Cengage (rather than the Arden General Editors) decided to terminate Parker, then you should make clear to everyone–including other scholars who are laboring in good faith to produce books for you—why you have done so. As authors, we will then know whether to invest years of our lives in producing books for you; as customers, we will then know whether we should invest in buying any of your products.

If you do not reverse or explain this decision, the intellectual community that provides you with your work-force and your customer-base will have no choice but to think the worst of the publisher and the general editors. You are not just hurting Pat Parker here; you are hurting everyone who has edited or is editing a text for you, because you are undermining the intellectual credentials of the entire enterprise.

If you do not, then the Arden Shakespeare is, and should be, dead.

Peter Holland’s Letter

Dear Richard,

When I had finished writing the e-mail which follows, I hovered for a long time before sending it. It is not phrased quite as I might wish but I still think it worth sending. Here goes.

Since my inbox is full of messages on the subject of Pat and Dream and Arden and since I have not yet made any e-comment about what has happening, I thought I would use yours to make one. I count Pat as a dear friend and, of course, I deeply admire her work. She and I have talked on the phone about the Arden events, as we also busily e-mail about my work on the Shakespeare Encyclopedia she is editing. I have heard her account of what has happened.

What I have not heard - what none of us have heard — is Arden’s side of the story. Now it is likely to be the case that Margaret, Cengage and the General Editors might have something to say. I don’t know what it is and I am not going to guess whether it would impress or persuade me for a fraction of a second. I am sorry that there has been a rush to judgement [sic] by so many people, a decision that so unequivocally assumes that there cannot be any rational reason for Arden’s actions. Many appear to assume that everyone associated with Arden is 100% in the wrong, though that transgresses every aspect of complex human social interaction that I encounter. I repeat, as emphatically as I can, that I do not know whether there is any sensible reason from their POV; I only know that they have chosen to treat the matter as confidential and hence not to make a public statement about what led to the decision.

In addition, I do not believe that any further public statements of support for Pat and further reviling of the stupidity of the Arden team serves any purpose. It is already apparent that many people, having heard Pat’s account, have voiced their anger. Threats of boycotting Arden that you report below are silly as a scholarly and pedagogic response. The worth of all the other Arden 3 editions does not hang on whether or not Pat’s Dream edition, which would, I am sure, be outstanding, is published in the series. The exhilarating prospect of, for instance, working with my students Timon, using Tony and Gretchen’s magnificent edition (to take the most recent one I have been enjoying) does not depend for me on whether a completely different edition in the series is or is not published, even if I were absolutely sure (as I cannot be) that Margaret, Cengage and the Arden General Editors have behaved in the most damnable fashion. Much as I desperately want to see Pat’s Arden Dream (and I write as a previous Dream editor!), I, for one, will not deprive my students of the work of my colleagues, many of whom are as brilliant and wonderful as Pat is.

Since letters like this one which go against the flow are so often misread, let me repeat yet again that I do not write this with any assumption that Arden is right and Pat is wrong. Nor do I believe that the shares of responsibility or blame must be 50/50 or any other proportion. I write only in the full knowledge that I do not have full knowledge of what happened or why, from Arden’s perspective, termination of the contract seemed the right decision. Only with that knowledge could the (currently intemperate) comments that are widely circulating possibly be validated.

Please note that I have copied Pat into this e-mail exchange since I want her too to understand that I am not trying for a moment to exonerate Arden’s actions. But the current flurry of a campaign with associated threats to which you refer is not, for me, a good way (read: ‘a good scholarly, critical and pedagogic as well as a good political way’) to proceed.

With best wishes,

Peter