She was Shakespeare’s ‘editor’
“What do you mean you edit Shakespeare? What do you do? Correct his grammar?”
She had been asked that question more times than she could remember, said Barbara Adams Mowat, former director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington and co-editor of more than 40 editions of the Bard’s plays and poems. No, she was not a grammarian. Her editing of Shakespeare came in the resolution of discrepancies between differing versions — hundreds of years old — of the same play.
Mowat died Nov. 24 of cancer at her home in Washington, only blocks away from the Folger Library, where she served 25 years on its literary staff. She was 83. She was a former president of the Shakespeare Association of America.
She was probably best known for her work over 20 years as editor with Paul Werstine of Shakespeare’s works for the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions. More than 17 million copies have been sold, according to the Folger, and they have become standard Shakespeare texts in American high schools.
In the 400 years since William Shakespeare’s death in 1616, Mowat wrote in an essay in Folger Magazine, “editors have recognized … that we have nothing from Shakespeare but printed versions that often disagree with each other and that are filled with typographical and other kinds of errors.”
Sometimes characters had different names. In an early version of Hamlet, the queen — Hamlet’s mother and new wife of the villainous King Claudius — is named Gertrard, not Gertrude as she would later become known.
“The more I work with Shakespeare texts, the more I become aware of the double pull on the editor of Shakespeare today,” Mowat wrote, citing “the pull toward accuracy and consistency in editing and the often conflicting pull exerted by what I call ‘readers’ rights.’ … Does one replace ‘Gertrude’ with ‘Gertrard?’