The Impossible William Shakespeare
thoughts on shakespeare:
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: A TEXTUAL COMPANION
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Shakespeare's first editors were actors. Chances are, they were not very good actors. Certainly they fell on hard times and were obliged to support themselves by putting together texts of Shakespeare's plays - the so- called "Bad Quartos" - based on their memories of appearing in them. This meant that their own characters' speeches were reproduced with intermittent fidelity, while everybody else's came out as wild paraphrase.
It sounds a hell of a way to make a living, but as the editors of the Oxford Textual Companion remark, "Mere impossibility has seldom deterred human need, greed and ingenuity." They themselves, at the opposite extreme of scholarship and assiduity from the Elizabethan textual pirates, are still their heirs. They too, attempting to assemble a definitive edition of a writer 400 years dead and unconcerned with the publication of his work even when alive, are attempting the impossible.
In Shakespeare's own day the “Bad Quartos” were followed by authorized "Good Quartos," issued in self-defence by the theatres that owned the plays. The availability of plays in print was generally believed to harm the box office (today, play texts are marketed in the lobbies alongside the T-shirts and the original cast album), but the managers obviously figured that if anybody was going to make a profit on this kind of deal, they might as well do it themselves. Finally - well, no, not finally, far from it, but eventually - in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, two of his fellow actors redeemed the honor of their profession by seeing through the press a one-volume collected edition of 36 plays, the First Folio. And that should have been that.
Unfortunately the Good Quartos and the First Folio, each with a claim to authenticity, repeatedly contradict one another. Besides, seventeenth- century printing was messy, primitive and prone to error. Spelling and punctuation have changed. The twin tasks of deciding what Shakespeare actually wrote and presenting it in readable form have entertained centuries of subsequent editors.
The actors left the game early. Shakespearean editing became the hobby of gentleman amateurs or, more frequently, a sideline for professional literary men of the stature of Alexander Pope or Dr. Johnson. They in turn have been supplanted by the new academic industry. Over the past 100 years, top-level Shakespearean editing has been an Oxford-and-Cambridge sport, like the boat race.
Cambridge University Press pulled strongly ahead in 1863 with an edition in nine volumes, subsequently reprinted in one. This is still in some sense the "official" edition; most scholarly works refer to it, if only to keep the line-numbers straight.
Nevertheless, by the 1920s it was felt to be outmoded, and Cambridge embarked on a new one-play-at-a-time series called The New Shakespeare. It was essentially the work of a single editor, the redoubtable John Dover Wilson, and not surprisingly it took him 40 years - half his lifetime, during which his status changed from iconoclastic firebrand to lovable doyen. The New Shakespeare didn't remain very long and Cambridge is now replacing it, again play by play, though with an individual editor for each the obvious plan is to get the job done more quickly this time.
But Cambridge is being overshadowed by Oxford, making up for a false start early in the century when the designated editor, R. B. McKerow, proved so conscientious (he was the founder of modern textual scholarship) that he died while still at work on his preliminary researches. Such quixotry belongs to another age, for Oxford now comes forth, simultaneously and confusingly, with three editions. There are individually issued plays to rival or eclipse the Cambridge versions, each the work of a different scholar under the over-all editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.
Meanwhile, Wells and Taylor, with a couple of helpers, have edited two separate omnibus volumes: one in old spelling for the purists and one modernized for the rest of us. And since these new folios, stout though they are, have no space for anything besides the plays and poems themselves, we have this equally bulky Textual Companion to accommodate notes and commentary on each work and battery of introductions to the canon in general.
Stanley Wells, as critic, teacher, journalist and broadcaster, is probably the most visible of current Shakespeare scholars in England. I think of him as providing the project with its solid bottom, and Gary Taylor, a young academic from the United States, as supplying the gunpowder. Most of the introductory writing is Taylor's, and it races. He can even generate interest in the working habits of individual scribes and compositors in the Elizabethan play text business. (It's wonderful what they can reconstruct these days.) Anxious to return as closely as possible to the Shakespearean manuscripts, not one of which survives, the editors enjoy being ruthless toward our inherited textual illusions. They demonstrate (and a current production at the National Theatre in London accepts their findings) that Imogen, the beloved heroine of Cymbeline, is a chimera.
Somebody misread "m" for "nn" and the lady's name is really Innogen. The Imogens named down the years in honor of Shakespeare's princess owe their christenings to a Jacobean printer's howler. The revelation saddens me, but I will bear it like a man.
On the other hand, I rebel against Taylor's decision to re-allot most of the Dauphin's role in Henry V to a faceless French nobleman. I don't care what the scholarly evidence is; a French prince who goes right through the play, from tennis-balls to Agincourt, as a cocksure poltroon provides a dramatic counterweight to the English king, whose saving grace is his insecurity. If that wasn't Shakespeare's intention, it should have been, and some playhouse or printing-house reviser did him a favor.
This Oxford Shakespeare may come to be known as the Oldcastle edition. It is well known that the fat knight of Henry IV Part One was originally named Sir John Oldcastle. Only when contemporary members of the Oldcastle family objected was he renamed Falstaff. The Oxford editors put him back as Oldcastle. ("Sweet Jack Oldcastle, kind Jack Oldcastle, valiant Jack Oldcastle, and therefore more valiant being as he is, old Jack Oldcastle.") This is very odd, and not just for sentimental reasons. The editors are very hot on authorial revision; they approve of it, and of incorporating it where it can be detected. Changing Oldcastle to Falstaff was a Shakespearean decision, even if made under duress; when he got to Henry IV Part Two, he wrote the character as Falstaff without it seeming to cramp his style at all. His second thoughts should be respected. (A minor point: in Part One Prince Hal calls Jack "My old lad of the castle." If the character's name is Oldcastle, that's a weak pun. If it used to be Oldcastle but had to be changed, then it's a nice in-joke. You don't have to believe me.) The editors' decision here seems to me a piece of bravado: nobody else has dared to do it, but by God, we'll show 'em.
Or it may be known as the twin-Lear edition. So concerned are the editors by the differences between the Good Quarto and First Folio Lears that they print both: The History Of King Lear and The Tragedy Of King Lear, amounting, they inform us, to two totally different plays. Where the differences occur - whether they make any major difference to the aesthetic experience of the play - they do not tell us; the companion eschews critical interpretation.
Wells and Taylor accuse the First Folio editors Heminge and Condell of inventing the Shakesepare history play by lumping together in chronological order plays that had been written at various times and in various modes. Shakespeare probably thought of Richard II and Richard III as tragedies, and he never wrote a play called Henry VIII. That was a title slapped, for reasons of uniformity, on a piece that had hitherto been known as All Is True. I am sure the Oxford boys are right, but Heminge and Condell knew what was commercial; I cannot see any future producer ditching the title Henry VIII, which means something to an audience, for All Is True, which doesn't.
All Is True is forthrightly credited here to Shakespeare and John Fletcher. In the most fascinating of the introductory chapters, The Canon And Chronology Of Shakespeare's Plays, Wells and Taylor are often inclined to admit collaborators. That takes us back. Editors in the nineteenth century used to fall over themselves to assign to other writers the parts of Shakespeare's plays of which they personally disapproved. In reaction, twentieth-century scholars have made a fetish of "integrity" - if we can't believe that gentle William perpetrated the horrors of Titus Andronicus, that's our problem. Now the tide is turning again, and it seems like common sense. We know that all Shakespeare's contemporaries collaborated with one another. Why should he have been exempt?
The companion's editors, printing the plays in what they take to have been the order of composition, finish with another Shakespeare-Fletcher tandem, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the first play to be reputably admitted into the canon since 1664, when the Third Folio squeezed in Pericles. But it is not just late and early plays in which they detect other hands. They attribute much of the middle-period Timon Of Athens to Thomas Middleton. I had never thought of this, but now that I have, I believe it. In fact, it's a great weight off my mind.
"We do not know what Shakespeare wrote," says Gary Taylor (answering the presumptive question, "Why bother?"); "someone has to decide . . . on the basis of the evidence available at a particular time." And this evidence changes - multiplies, rather - as time progresses. But whether it makes any essential difference to the way we read, stage or interpret a play, I doubt it. The main lines of story, character and language remain the same. Look at a facsimile of an early quarto or folio and it seems, for a moment, passing strange. But when you start reading the words, you automatically begin translating them into the patterns of your own mind: modern patterns, of course, of which a modern edition is a symptom, not a cause.
With all its dash and finery, the new Oxford Shakespeare, including its Textual Companion, is a luxury object, like all its contemporaries and most of its predecessors. It is also inevitable, since it is a contribution to knowledge; and knowledge, especially on so fascinating a subject, must always tempt us. And it is a beautiful job.