The 'Faust' Draft Notebook: A Facsimile of Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 18, Including Drafts of 'Scenes from the "Faust" of Goethe', 'Ginevra', 'Scenes from the "Magico Prodigioso" of Calderón, 'Fragments of an Unfinished Drama', 'Lines: "When the Lamp is Shattered"', 'From the Arabic', 'A Lament' ('O World! O Life! O Time'), 'With a Guitar, To Jane', and Miscellaneous Fragments of Verse and Prose, ed. Nora Crook and Timothy Webb, volume XIX of the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts. New York and London: Garland, 1997. ISBN: 0815311540. Price: £198.

Donald Reiman, the general editor of the Bodleian Shelley manuscripts series, begins his celebratory Foreword to this edition by quoting 'the adage that the best shall be saved till last' (p. vii). While it would be invidious to compare previous volumes unfavourably with this - it is hard, after all, to imagine more meticulous editions than those produced by, among others, Neil Fraistat, P. M. S. Dawson, Carlene Adamson, and Reiman himself - it is certainly true that the present edition is remarkably fine. Both editors are no strangers to the rigours imposed by the series, with its requirement that editors produce bibliographical descriptions, transcriptions of manuscript material that is often extremely difficult to decipher, and commentary on the state of the manuscript, the manuscript's relation to other manuscripts and subsequent printed editions. Nora Crook is already the editor of another notebook in the series (volume XII; adds. e. 17), while Timothy Webb has co-edited (with P. M. S. Dawson) volume XIV (adds. e. 9). Both these editions are edited with great scholarly acumen. All the volumes in the series tax and enthral their editors in different ways. This edition of a late notebook - used by Shelley in the spring of 1821 and then in the first quarter of 1822 - requires, above all, an ability to decipher some very rough drafts, including Shelley's versions of passages from Goethe's Faust and Calderón's Magico Prodigioso. As the editors point out in their lively and immensely informative Introduction to the edition, Shelley produced a literal version of the first twelve hundred or so lines of Goethe's work (the present adds. c. 4, ff. 142r-172r). The versions in adds. e. 18 - mainly the draft of the Walpurgisnacht or 'May-Day Night' and the 'Prologue in Heaven' - are, in the editors' judgement, 'incomparably finer and more ambitious' (p. lviii) than this literal crib. Composed between 12 January 1822 and 10 April 1822, these translations from Goethe caused Shelley problems: the opening chorus, whose rendering shows Shelley's powers at their height, required a lot of drafting and redrafting, a process traced tenaciously by the editors (see pp. lxi-lxii); and the explicit or implicit sexual suggestiveness of 'May-Day Night' prompted in Shelley an 'unease' (p. lxii) which is accounted for sympathetically. Passages from the 'May-Day Night' must have impressed Shelley deeply, especially the hauntingly Gretchen-like, life-like yet lifeless apparition who 'looks to every one like his first love' (see pp. 214-15); and it's possible to see the translation as contributing, albeit obliquely, to the nexus of thought and feeling out of which The Triumph of Life would emerge later in the year. As the editors observe, Goethe's work set going in Shelley 'an excited, self-consciously dangerous internalization' (p. xxxvii). The editors supply a valuable table of collations between adds. e. 18 and the fair copy in adds. c. 4. When Trelawny first met Shelley in Pisa on 14 January 1822 the latter was holding a book which was, he told Trelawny, 'Calderón's Magico Prodigioso, I am translating some passages in it'. Crook and Webb lay out crisply the history of the text and its attendant problems: the translations were drafted in adds. e. 18 and in Huntington Manuscript 2111 (edited by Mary A. Quinn in volume 7 of the Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Shelley), while Mary Shelley made a fair copy of the first scene (now in Iowa). There are problems with the precise accuracy of Trelawny's account, but it's clear that Shelley was deeply engaged with Calderón in the first quarter of 1822, and that Shelley's drafts were emended by …