November
17th, 2009
THE SHAKESPEARE WARS:
SHAKESPEARE MYOPIA
I've been reading The Shakespeare Wars
by Ron Rosenbaum and writing short essays in response to some of the
more dunder-headed bits of scholastic self-indulgence that Rosenbaum
has been discussing. (Rosenbaum also discusses a lot of good stuff, and
despite some reservations over the quality of Rosenbaum's writing, I
recommend checking his book out for a good review of current
controversies in Shakespearean scholarship.)
Today I want to take a peek at one facet of
the debate between the theories of the Lost Archetypes and the
Revisions.
To
offer a simplistic summary: All modern editions of Shakespeare are
based on versions of the plays published during the late-16th and
early-17th centuries. All of these texts feature various typo-like
errors that must be corrected.
In the case of nineteen plays,
however, things get a little more complicated because we have multiple
versions of each play published during or near Shakespeare's life. (For
example, we have three extant versions of Hamlet.) In
producing a modern edition, the differences between these versions must
be resolved in order to produce a single text.
This is where the difference between the
Lost Archetype theory and the Revision theory comes into play.
The
Lost Archetype theory says that Shakespeare wrote one, authoritative
version of each play. In other words, the original manuscript, written
in Shakespeare's own hand, is the Lost Archetype for each play. The
differences between the primary sources for a play are the result of
different editions making different errors in transcribing
Shakespeare's text, and our goal in rendering a modern edition is to
remove these errors.
The Revision theory, on the other hand, says
that Shakespeare continued revising his plays throughout his lifetime
and that the differences between the various versions of each play are
the result of Shakespeare's rewrites.
For example, the 1604 Second Quarto
of Hamlet
contains an entire soliloquy which is missing from the 1623 First
Folio. Under the Lost Archetype theory, this soliloquy was somehow
lost: Perhaps the page was misplaced. Or the typesetter accidentally
skipped
it. Or the typesetter was working from a theater promptbook that had
been cut for length. Basically, there are many different theories to
explain how this
soliloquy went missing, but the underlying theory is that Shakespeare
intended the soliloquy to be part of the play and,
therefore, it should be included in the modern text.
Under the Revision theory, on the other
hand, the idea is that Shakespeare
rewrote the play. At some point between 1604 and 1623,
Shakespeare came back to Hamlet
and decided to cut that soliloquy. Maybe he cut it for length or pace;
or because it was repetitive; or because it cast an inaccurate light on
Hamlet's character. Again, there are many theories for why
Shakespeare might have cut it, but the underlying theory is that
Shakespeare changed the play and we should ask the question, "Why did
he change it?"
TAYLOR'S
FOLLY
With
these two theories in mind, let's take a closer look at a particular
argument proffered by Gary Taylor (one of the primary advocates for
the Revision theory), as shown by Rosenbaum in The Shakespeare Wars:
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"There's
always someone standing between you and him. It's like being at a
cocktail party and there may be one person in the room that really
interests you most, but there's other people around, and so it's like
seeing Shakespeare across the room at a party. There's always going to
be parts of him you can't see, and which parts you do see is partly
accidently..."
And yet, he tells me, it was his
communion with
the inky traces of the compositors and typographers that led him to
see, through an ink-smudged glass, darkly, a vision of Shakespeare as a
reviser.
It was a reaction to what he calls the
"demonization" of
the compositors by the partisans of the Lost Archetype who try to blame
the variations between the two Hamlets
on the inattention, the "eye skip", the carelessness, the willfulness
and wandering eyes of an array of compositors. On the contrary, Taylor
believes, "You need only one agent to account for all those variations
and that's the agent who's present in all these cases: Shakespeare."
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And right there is the point where Taylor's
logic runs aground.
I can say this with a fair degree of
confidence for three reasons:
(1)
We know that compositors made errors because the publisher would
frequently correct them during a print run. In other words,
there
are differences between the various copies of the 1604 Second Quarto of
Hamlet
that survive today. I
suppose one might still imagine that Shakespeare was actually at the
printers, looking over their shoulders and doing rewrites while the
book was being published, but...
(2) Compositor errors are not
limited to the work of Shakespeare. They can be found in every single
book published in this era. The King James Bible is particularly noted
by many scholars because it contains so few
errors compared to other texts of the era, but it still contains
hundreds of known errors. And maybe, like our hypothetical Shakespeare,
every author of the era -- including the translators of the King James
Bible -- made a habit of going down to the print shop to make rewrites
on the fly, but...
(3)
The errors continue long after Shakespeare is dead. For example, the
First Folio was published in 1623 (seven years after Shakespeare was
dead). Over the course of the 17th century it was followed by the
Second Folio (1632), Third Folio (1663-1664), and the Fourth Folio
(1685). These later editions are essentially never used in the creation
of modern editions because
(a) We know that they were based on
the text of the First Folio. (In other words, the typesetters of these
later editions were looking at copies of the First Folio or
other
editions derived from the First Folio.)
(b) They introduce even
more errors of the exact same type seen in the earlier texts. (They
also attempt to fix some of the existing errors, but since they're
doing so without any reference to a primary text, we have no particular
reason to invest trust or value in their decisions.)
This is what
I refer to as Shakespeare Myopia. Shakespeare is such a towering figure
in English literature that lots of people will study him exclusively.
And this, in my experience, results in all kinds of half-assed theories
that wouldn't have any kind of traction if people would look outside of
the Shakespeare Box once in awhile.
(Another example of
Shakspeare Myopia can be found all over the so-called "Authorship
Question". For example, people looking to discredit Shakespeare's
authorship of his
own plays will often declaim the lack of historical evidence we have
for Shakespeare's life. The only problem? We have more documented
evidence of Shakespeare's life than for any other Elizabethan
playwright with the possible exception of the always self-promoting Ben
Jonson. For those interested in a thorough debunking of the "Authorship
Question", I recommend Irvin Leigh Matus' exceptional Shakespeare, In Fact.)
SHADES
OF GREY
In any case, unless one is willing to
believe that Shakespeare was still rewriting his plays as late as 1685,
we know for an absolute
certainty that at least some of the variances between the
texts are the result of typesetting errors and not Shakespeare's
revisions.
And if we have concluded that some of them
must be, then doesn't it make sense to apply Ockham's Razor and say
that all
of them are the result of typesetting errors?
Well... maybe.
But
misplacing a whole soliloquy seems like quite the slip of the eye,
doesn't it? Maybe we could hypothesize that the soliloquy was on a page
all by itself in the manuscript and either that page got misplaced or
two pages got flipped over at the same time or... Well, any number of
things. But it seems just as likely that the soliloquy was deliberately
removed from whatever text the compositor of the 1623 First Folio was
working from.
But here we run into two more problems with
the Revision theory:
(1)
We have no way of knowing who did the revising. It might have been
Shakespeare who cut that soliloquy. But it could just as easily have
been a theater manager who thought the play was too long. In other
instances, of course, words have been added. But it was a
well-documented practice for other playwrights to touch-up older works
and it remains a common (if often frowned upon) practice in the theater
for promptbooks to reflect improvisations from the actors of the
current production.
(2) We have no way of knowing which text is
the original and which text is the revision. It's easy, for example, to
assume that the 1623 First Folio text of Hamlet
would be the revision of the 1604 Second Quarto text. But the 1623 text
could just as easily be the copy that Shakespeare originally gave to
the Globe Theater to perform in 1600, while the 1604 text is the result
of Shakespeare revising the text before submitting it for publication.
Personally,
I feel like attempts to apply a one-size-fits-all solution to the
relationships between the various primary sources of Shakespeare's
plays is somewhat foolish. Among these theories:
(a) Bad Quartos.
The result of pre-copyright publishers trying to surrepititously obtain
a copy of a play to publish without paying for it, either by having
someone in the theater trying to write down the lines as fast as they
can or by hiring a former actor to reconstruct the text from memory.
(b) Revision. Shakespeare rewrote the plays
to lesser or greater extents.
(c)
Derived texts. Some texts in the First Folio appear to have been set
from previously published quartos; some from manuscript (although
whether it would be Shakespeare's original or a scribed copy is often
open for debate); some from theater promptbooks.
In my
opinion, all of these have some merit. In fact, it makes sense that
different texts would have different relationships (both to each other
and to Shakespeare). It seems silly to argue that if King Lear was
rewritten by Shakespeare, then it must also be true that Shakespeare
rewrote Hamlet.
(Or, vice versa, that if Shakespeare didn't rewrite Hamlet, it must be
true that he didn't rewrite King
Lear.)
But this is so often what happens: Somebody
comes up with a nifty theory and then they try to apply it everywhere. They
overreach.
For example, A Midsummer Night's Dream
exists in three primary sources: The 1600 First Quarto, 1619 Second
Quarto, and 1623 First Folio. We are almost completely certain that the
1619 Second Quarto was set from a copy of the 1600 First Quarto (based
on textual similarities in which the 1619 text duplicates the unusual
spellings, incorrect speech attributions, typographic features, and
various other errors of the 1600 text in a way that only makes sense if
the compositor of the 1619 text were looking at the 1600 text).
In
most cases, therefore, moden editor would largely ignore the 1619 text
as a mere reprint. But here it gets weird because the 1623 First Folio
was almost certainly set from a version of Q2 (once again we have
similarities between the texts, but where the 1619 Second Quarto
differs from the 1600 First Quarto, the 1623 First Folio always follows
the 1619 Second Quarto). And, once again, we would normally ignore this
text... except that information from the theater's prompt-book has
apparently been added to it.
(How do we know it was a
prompt-book? Several bits suggest it, but the clincher is a stage
direction in V.1: "Tawyer with a trumpet before them." Tawyer was the
name of a company member, not a character.)
Dover Wilson
postulated that a copy of the 1619 Second Quarto must have been used as
a prompt-book at the Globe and then that prompt-book was used to set
the type for the 1623 First Folio. Some doubt has been cast on this
theory due to errors in various entrances and exits (which would never
be tolerated in a theater manager's copy of the script), but it seems
more likely that those errors were introduced by the compositor.
The
result is that we have a very clear textual lineage for these scripts:
The 1600 First Quarto was published from some unknown source. The 1619
Second Quarto was set from the 1600 edition and was accurate enough
that the theater started using it as their promptbook, which was then
used (in turn) for the 1623 First Folio.
But
I think it would be foolish to draw any broad conclusions from this.
(For example, by assuming that all First Folio texts were printed from
theater promptbooks.) When it comes to the history of Shakespeare's
texts, there are no easy answers. No one-size-fits-all solutions that
will remove all doubts. (In this, they are much like the plays
themselves.)
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