Item 20 - Letter from Alice Walker to R. B. McKerrow

2 single sheets

The White House, Tite Hill, Englefield Green.—Returns 1 Henry VI, Act V. Will go through the collation notes to the whole play again shortly. Discusses the explanatory notes, and commends the freshness of McKerrow’s approach.

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Transcript

at The White House, Tite Hill,
Englefield Green. Surrey.

20 May 1936.

Dear Dr. McKerrow,

I am returning I Henry VI Act V. I havn’t made a list of the points I have checked as I have done exactly what I did in the earlier Acts. Sometime soon I will read through the collation notes to the whole play again as I know there are a lot of things in the earlier Acts in particular that will need revising or eliminating in the light of what has emerged since I started. I havn’t done much to the notes but have merely jotted down things that occurred to me as I read them through. The real difficulty here is selection as it is quite impossible to form any kind of estimate of what either the average reader or the specialist will know. What one person requires to be told another doesn’t and what one reader likes to know another doesn’t care about. I think I shall be a little more use to you on the notes when I have the notes to a few more plays in my mind. My approach at present is very personal & lacks perspective and I expect that many of the objections I raise, for that reason, arn’t worth making. In general, however, the notes seem to me really useful and exactly the kind of thing your text requires. What I like about them in particular is their freshness. On account of such features of your text as preservation of old spelling & punctuation, restoration of F1 stage directions &c they get much nearer to the central problems than the traditional kind of allusive annotation that is always flying off at a tangent. Although I have always been very grateful for the accumulation of illustrative matter in the Arden notes I have only just realised, from your notes, how they really fail to grip at all on the crucial problems of the text. I hope the O.U.P. won’t try to spoil the freshness of your approach by wanting to bury it under the parasitic illustration associated with modernised texts.

This will be another gaudy parcel. If you find yourself growing weary of the colour scheme or losing prestige with the postman, you had better complain as there are several furlongs of this green tape left! I am going to Oxford on Tuesday {1} and enclose my address {2}.

Yours sincerely,
Alice Walker.

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Sent with MCKW A4/21.

{1} 26th.

{2} 151 Woodstock Road, Cf. MCKW A4/24.

Sent with MCKW A4/21.