Hi, Sue

You're probably right about agreement at one level. I was a bit surprised at the "People" remark, though, as I think much peering into biographies and the history of texts quite legitimate. Without some primary textual criticism, how do you know you even have the proper text to deal with; this is the province of critical or variorum editions, and I'm more than happy to have them. The interpolations in Macbeth are well known; they come primarily in the so-called Hecate scene and are probably from Middleton's The Witch. On the whole, I think the play is genuine S, but there are certainly passages that are suspect. This is true in several Shakespeare plays, by the way, and only reinforces the necessity for a good text to begin with before any interpretive reading or criticism. I can't recall at the moment who it was who went on and on about a phrase in Moby Dick that read "soiled fish of the sea." This was to show the corruptibility of nature, etc. The problem was that a careful reading of the manuscript showed that Melville had written “coiled fish” not “soiled fish.”

As for Faustus, yes I’ve read it in German. It’s a terrific book. I lived in Germany and Austria when I was younger and the language is almost as natural to me as English – more natural in some ways. Lowe-Porter is pretty much poison as far as I’m concerned. When the going gets tough, she sometimes doesn’t even translate entire sentences. Her Joseph and His Brothers is a disgrace in that regard. I can see how some of what she did could seem good to someone who doesn’t read the language (and that ‘s what translations are for, after all), but I think readers of her work get a skewed view of what Mann was about. Joseph is a comedy after all, as are parts of The Magic Mountain, and she gets the tone entirely wrong. If you read Faustus in her translation, take a look at the Wood. I haven’t, but the reviews I’ve looked at have been fairly uniformly adulatory.

Best

Lee