Gabriel Egan
Globe Education
Shakespeare's Globe
London SE1 9DT
6 January 2002
Year's Work in English Studies 2001: Shakespeare: Editions
and Textual Studies
The current crises in theories of editing Shakespeare pivot on a single
question: can we determine with tolerable certainty the kind of manuscript used
as printer's copy for each of the early printings? Editors who think that we can
tend to use this 'knowledge' to discriminate between multiple early printings to
find the one they want to base their modern text upon and they conjecturally emend it by
reference to their theories of how its errors came about, while editors who
think that we cannot so discriminate tend to be more cautious, stressing the
arbitrariness of their choices about base text and emendation. This year appeared
two major critical editions of the same play, 3 Henry 6, one for The
Oxford Shakespeare edited by Randall Martin, and one for the Arden
Shakespeare edited by John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen. The differences
between them usefully illustrate the consequences of differing answers to the
central question.
Randall Martin's introduction to the Oxford Shakespeare 3
Henry 6 runs to 132 pages and is organized under 8 heads that move from
'Rediscovery and reception' through analyses of particular characters (Richard
of Gloucester, Edward 4, Queen Margaret, but not Henry 6 himself), to Martin's
view of the origins of, and relationships between, the early printings. The first
edition was an octavo of 1595 (O) called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of
York, which Martin abbreviates to True Tragedy (the 1986 Oxford
Complete Works chose Richard Duke of York), followed by quartos in
1600 (Q2) and 1619 (Q3), and the Folio text of 1623 bearing the familiar name
of The Third Part of King Henry VI. Martin takes the now common view that
True Tragedy was the second part of a two-part play the beginning of
which is
represented in the 1594 quarto called The First Part of the Contention of the
Two Houses of York and Lancaster and that the play we know as 1 Henry 6
was a prequel written later to tell the pre-history to the two-parter. It is
worth distinguishing True Tragedy as represented by O and the quartos
from 3 Henry 6 as represented by the Folio because Martin thinks that
substantial authorial revision separates them; they are not merely different names
for the same thing. Changing titles are revealing, and True Tragedy's
gives attention to York even though he dies in act 1 while Henry lasts to almost
the end. Martin thinks that True Tragedy was Shakespeare's first version
of the play, written in 1591, and that the 1595 octavo is an imperfect report of
it, and that Shakespeare's longer version of the play was written
1594-6 and this is essentially what got into the Folio as 3 Henry 6.
Martin's edition is based on the Folio.
The Folio title is probably not authorial and it gives
priority to Henry 6 without, however, mentioning his life or death, and moreover
it "avoids the contemptus mundi associations hinted at by York's
'true tragedy'" (p. 20). 3 Henry 6 does indeed deepen the character
of Henry. The play would have reminded people of the danger of two monarchs
claiming one kingdom when Mary Queen of Scots arrived in England in 1568, which
only ended with her execution in 1587. Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc,
written early in Elizabeth's reign, was printed in 1590, the year before
Shakespeare began on True Tragedy, and its representation of civil strife
in a divided kingdom is alluded to in Shakespeare's play. An early performance
of Gorboduc appears to have used a real company of soldiers in a
formalized battle scene, showing the stage/reality crossover of "drill as
theatrical rehearsal and combat as performance" (p. 23). Neoclassicism demanded that violence be reported, not shown, and Gorboduc breaks this
rule and had to be excused for it in Sidney's Defence of Poetry. Sidney
and Jonson tried to distinguish 'low' from 'high' dramatic art, a distinction
that rather misrepresents Elizabethan drama's mingling of 'official' and 'popular' culture. Popular civic
dramas such as those performed at Coventry would have large, well choreographed
battles including female warrior-characters (but not female actors), and Martin
notes that victory over the Armada in 1588 did not bring an end to military
preparations, just the opposite: there was increasingly conscription by the
government as well as the older kind of feudal conscription by lords raising
troops from amongst their tenants. Hence the play's son (conscripted in London)
who kills his father (conscripted in Warwickshire), and the wider theme of the
"broken connection with local history" and the "uncertain embrace
of metropolitan culture" (p. 32). The first London playhouse, the Theatre in
Shoreditch, was near the muster ground of Finsbury Fields and the audiences may
be expected to have appreciated (indeed, have experience of) drills being done
well. On the stage weapons were "not simulated period props but actual
contemporary equipment" (p. 33). Martin offers no evidence for this last
alarming claim, and one assumes that weapons were blunted to prevent accidental
slaughters in performance. As usual with the Oxford Shakespeare, footnotes are
used to reference supporting materials, which makes for convenience of use at
the cost of limiting space. Martin elects to give what is known as a 'deep' link
to an article in the online journal Early Modern Literary Studies (p.
33n1)--meaning that the Internet address is specified right down to the
particular document to be accessed--which is a practice to be deprecated because
it wastes space and because the smallest error makes the link unusable. In this
case there are several small errors and the link as printed does not work;
writers should cite only the homepage of the journal (here, http://purl.oclc.org/emls)
and provide sufficient additional information (title, volume, year) to allow the reader
to navigate her own way down to the specific article.
Continuing his exploration of contemporary contexts, Martin argues that
history plays could be defended as tools for teaching military strategy and
that where True Tragedy is overt and showy in its militarism, 3 Henry
6 is somewhat restrained, even pacifist. The opening stage direction of True
Tragedy calls for the men to be wearing white roses, while 3 Henry 6
does not, and the latter increases the sense of confusion (who is who?) and makes
the story more easily applicable to other conflicts (p. 26). Of course, Martin
accepts that some differences between the True Tragedy and 3 Henry 6
might be due to the latter deriving from an authorial manuscript (so,
Shakespeare had not yet thought to add the detail about the roses) or indeed to
editing in the printing house. But Martin detects in other differences, such as
Margaret and Prince Edward being captured separately in 3 Henry 6, the
signs of subsequent authorial revision "toning down the sound and
fury" and making the play's attitude towards war "more rueful".
In short, 3 Henry 6 has been distanced from "official Elizabethan
wartime and political contexts" (p. 37). Likewise True Tragedy lacks
3 Henry 6's imagery of
war being like a sea (the water caught between the forces of the moon and the
wind) that makes conflict seem like a natural condition rather than human sin.
Martin ties his introductory sections on particular characters to the
stage history, and under the Brechtian heading "The (resistible?) rise of
Richard of Gloucester" he observes that one reason for the relative neglect
of 3 Henry 6 was the success of Colley Cibber's adaptation of Richard 3
that
held the stage between 1700 and 1821 and contained large sections of 3 Henry
6 (p. 46).
Also, it is common to tack the beginning of Richard 3 onto the end of 3
Henry 6
by having Richard give his "Now is the winter of our discontent"
speech, which gratifies audiences by linking the obscure play to the well-known
one and gives a teleological reading: it was all leading up to the
evil reign of Richard and then the good reign of Henry 7. But Martin thinks that
3 Henry 6 actually has a weak sense of historical causality and there is little justification
of present actions by past ones; indeed, Shakespeare is less teleological than
his sources (p. 49-50). Political motives for action quickly give way to
blood-feud and competitive savagery, and then even familial ties cease to be a
motive to action and all becomes "expedient violence" for
"seizure of power" (p. 54). Under "'Edward IV'" Martin notes
that Henry 6's entailing of the crown removed the "transgenerational
continuity" that makes it "an abiding authoritative symbol",
instead it is just a property; hence Edward 4 is not even given a coronation:
"3 Henry VI's relatively subdued use of ritual denies Edward the
myth-making spectacles of kingship" (p. 71). Here Martin gives the
substance of his illuminating note reviewed last year (2000) on the regional
and topical allusions of 5.1, which features places near to Shakespeare's home
town and a 'John Somerville' whose namesake was probably his disgraced relative.
Indicating just how far Shakespeare's play has influenced modern attitudes,
Martin notes that Shakespeare downplays to the point of extinction the
historical Warwick's reputation as one of the old class of martial aristocrats,
loved for his courtesy and hospitality, and makes him more a self-serving setter-up and plucker-down of others; we think of him as the 'kingmaker' largely
because of this play (p. 79). In telling "Margaret's story: a 'new'
play" (pp. 82-96), Martin records that for most of the stage history of the
play--until the mid-twentieth century, in fact--Margaret lost out in cutting and
adaptation, yet now the part is frequently compared to that of Lear. There was a
distinct trend to liken Margaret to Britain's Prime Minister Thatcher in productions by the English Shakespeare Company and the Royal Shakespeare
company in the 1980s, combined with a noticeable anti-feminist backsliding from the
progressive mid-century work; this tended to "rehabilitate patriarchal
biases against an outspoken non-domestic woman" (p. 94).
Martin's section on "The Original Texts: their
history and relationship" is of greatest concern to this review. Martin
claims that the copy for F is "generally agreed to be Shakespeare's
manuscript", although there is debate about "its state" and
whether other hands annotated it "in anticipation of use in the playhouse
as a prompt book or script" (p. 96). It is hard to see what Martin means by
"or" in that last phrase: 'script' is certainly a less contentious
term than the wildly anachronistic 'promptbook' favoured by New Bibliography,
but naming both does not make the claim any more tentative. Martin gives the
standard New Bibliographical reason for thinking that F is based on authorial
papers: some of its stage directions are "indefinite or vague", which suggests
"'pre-performance'" status, and others are authorially
descriptive rather than practically prescriptive (p. 97). As if to soften his
line, Martin footnotes the work of Paul Werstine and William B. Long that showed
that vague and indefinite stage directions were not necessarily absent from
"playhouse copy", conjoining it to his own assertions with "however
. . .". But if one accepts the validity of Werstine and Long's
scholarship, one simply cannot use the evidence of 'permissive' stage directions
to determine printer's copy; it will not do to simply name-check them and move
on without stating where one stands on the matter. The problem recurs with other evidence for
authorial copy, "Changes in speech prefixes [that] seem also to reveal
subtle shifts in a character's function or status . . ." (the
indicator first seized on by R. B. McKerrow (1935), and again Werstine's
demonstration that these can be found in theatrical (as opposed to authorial)
manuscripts is acknowledged but not refuted. On the matter of actors' names
("Gabriel", "Sinklo", and "Humfrey") occurring in the
Folio text, Martin tangles with W. W. Greg much as Cox and Rasmussen do in the
Arden version, as we shall see. Martin thinks that these names show that Shakespeare
had specific people in mind for certain parts as he wrote, and in a footnote
writes that "The names are unlikely to derive from a prompter annotating
the play, since this kind of annotation typically takes the form of extra
information or duplicate directions in extant playhouse manuscripts of the
period. See Greg, Folio, pp. 114-15" (p. 98n5). It is worth
remembering that Greg's view was that where an actor's name glosses a
character's name, we are seeing signs of a prompter reminding himself who was
playing a minor part. Where, as here, we find the actor's name instead of the
character, Greg thought that this was typically authorial but should only occur
where it would matter to the dramatist who played the part, since minor parts
that anybody could take would not concern the dramatist during composition
(Greg 1955, 117, 142). The problem here is that the actors' names are instead of
character names (so, consistent with authorial copy) but the roles are minor
ones that anyone could play (something about which the author should not care),
and Martin cites Greg's firm view that in the present case the names could not
have come from Shakespeare's pen (p. 99). In this Martin stands against Greg,
whom he sees contradicted by the fact that actors names in "extant dramatic
manuscripts" and early printings of Shakespeare "are overwhelmingly
hired men rather than sharers", in support of which assertion he cites a page
of John Dover Wilson's 1952 Cambridge edition of the play. Wilson does
indeed discuss the matter of actors' names, and disagrees with Greg about
what they tell us, but he makes no such claim about "extant dramatic
manuscripts" generally, confining himself to Shakespeare alone.
The New Bibliographical 'mast' is broad enough to
accommodate disagreements between Wilson and Greg, yet having pinned his colours
to it Martin remains tentative: "If these traces and anomalies point to F
being Shakespeare's working papers" then we should consider whether they
were annotated in the theatre. Departing from Greg and previous editors of this
play in thinking that they were not, Martin follows William B. Long's lead
(1985) in deciding that unannotated papers could have been used in the
playhouse "as an acceptable, 'finished' script" (p. 100). One is
entitled to ask if Martin means by "script" what he earlier meant by
"prompt book"--he uses the word "prompter" on the previous
page--and one detects here a trend. As reviewed here last year, Gordon McMullan's
Arden Shakespeare edition of Henry 8 used the expression "a score
for a stage play" to avoid the problematic word 'promptbook'. Martin notes that F has
none of the features that McKerrow claimed book-keepers added to their
manuscripts--anticipatory calls for actors and properties, stage directions
naming properties needed later in a scene, names assigned to character roles,
and anticipatory entry stage direction (McKerrow 1931, 270-72) but in the same
footnote (p. 100n2) Martin admits that Werstine (1990) has
"questioned" the application of these criteria and advised taking each
document individually. This is hardly an adequate description of Werstine's
critique of New Bibliography: if Werstine is even just mostly right, we have
precisely nothing to tell us what copy underlay a given printing assessed solely
on internal evidence. For Martin the most economical explanation is that F
represents "Shakespeare's draft papers" and that a fair copy of these
were sent off to get the Master of the Revels's licence and become the
"official promptbook" . Little tweaks that seem unShakespearian (such
as "Speaking to Bona", "Speaks to Warwick" in 3.3) might
have been added by the Folio editors for readerly clarity (p. 101).
In his narrative of True Tragedy's text, Martin records that O was
reissued in 1600 to make Q2 and then in 1602 Thomas Millington (publisher of The
Contention of York and Lancaster and True Tragedy) transferred his rights to Thomas
Pavier, who in 1619 had William Jaggard (later publisher of F) print both plays
together as The Whole Contention betweene the two famous houses, Lancaster
and Yorke (Q3). The copy for our play in this composite Q3 was "an
edited copy of O" (about this Cox and Rasmussen disagree, as we shall see)
with just one passage possibly altered with authority and the others changes
occurring in the printing
house (p. 104). O is about 1000 lines shorter than F, needs the same number of
actors, has some dramatic alternatives that are arguably preferable to F, and
some verbal "anomalies" that are hard to explain by revision or
printing error. Edmond Malone thought O an earlier, non-Shakespearian, version
of the play but in the twentieth century it was mostly held a report of the play
better represented by F. The latter view has recently come in for criticism, and
Martin thinks there is compelling evidence to support revision and
reporting: ". . . True Tragedy is a memorially reported
early version of the play that Shakespeare substantially revised as 3 Henry
VI" (p. 105). What has traditionally been thought to clinch the
argument for memorial reconstruction being the source for O is Peter Alexander's
argument that it has a corrupted version of the row between King Edward and his
brothers Gloucester and Clarence about the daughter-heiresses of lords
Hungerford, Scales, and Bonville being married (with King Edward's consent) to
Hastings, the Queen's brother, and the Queen's son respectively, rather than to
Gloucester or Clarence, who, as the king's brothers, should come first. 3
Henry 6 gets
it right, and followed the sources, while True Tragedy omits the important fact that it is
the queen's relatives being preferred that irks Gloucester and Clarence, and True
Tragedy
names Scales (rather than his daughter) and has him married to the daughter of
"Lord Bonfield". This looks like the kind of error someone might make
in dim recollection, although Steven Urkowitz claimed that True Tragedy makes good enough
sense on its own; that the details are not historically correct does not
make it a bad text. For Martin the important point is this name "Lord
Bonfield", which appears in no sources but does appear in Robert Greene's George a Greene which was published in 1599 with
a title-page claiming that it was performed by Sussex's men. We know from its
1594 title-page that Titus Andronicus was owned by Derby's (also
known as Strange's), Pembroke's, and Sussex's men, so this is a link to True
Tragedy since the 1595
title-page claims it was performed by Pembroke's. Thus "Bonfield"
appears in two plays with no historical
connections but both performed "by companies [Sussex's and Pembroke's] who
shared scripts and personnel", something we know from the evidence of the Titus
Andronicus title-page and other company history. Hence the name Bonfield
"is a non-authorial interpolation by players", which supports
Alexander's theory of memorial reconstruction, although there is nothing
necessarily surreptitious about this (pp. 108-9). Also, True Tragedy has "Edward,
rhou [sic] shalt to Edmund Brooke Lord Cobham" (A7r) where F has
"You Edward shall vnto my Lord Cobham" (TLN 353,
1.2.40). The
sources do not give this man a personal name, only a title, and it is hard to
imagine that F represents something removed from the play, for if the motive was
to not offend the Cobhams the name could have been taken out altogether.
Moreover, True Tragedy is incorrect: the man's name was Edmund not Edward Brooke, so the
likeliest explanation (as Hattaway suggested in the New Cambridge Shakespeare
edition) is that the personal name was added by an actor, perhaps to allude to
the Lord Cobham of Shakespeare's time, William Brooke (p. 110).
Further, albeit weaker, evidence for memorial
reconstruction is the phenomenon of characters betraying knowledge they could
not yet have at a given point in the play. An example happens near the end of
2.5 in True Tragedy (C3v) when Exeter enters in the middle of a battle and says "Awaie
my Lord for vengance comes along with him" (my emphasis), which word
"him" has no antecedent. In F, however, this line appears slightly
differently ("Away: for vengeance comes along with them" my
emphasis, TLN 1275) and continues an ongoing onstage conversation. Martin's
explanation of what happened is unfortunately foggy: "O's entry was
apparently changed so that Prince Edward preceded Exeter on stage" (p.
111). This is a badly-worded ambiguity and might mean that the printed text O
was changed in some way or that something was changed to make the printed text
O; John Jowett's notational shorthand (MSO meaning 'the manuscript underlying
O', MSF meaning 'the manuscript underlying F') is ideal for dispelling such
confusion. Martin's suggestion seems to be that the reporters making O failed to
have the Queen, Prince Edward, and Exeter enter as a group and instead had them
enter successively, and then in response to this change the reporter(s) adjusted
"them" to "him" because Exeter's line now responds only to
what the Prince has just said, which would be about just one man, Warwick ("him"),
whereas previously Exeter was responding to what the Prince had just said about
Warwick and what the Queen said about Edward and Richard (thus "them").
The reporters then omitted Prince Edward's comment on Warwick so that
Exeter's comment has no antecedent. I find this inherently implausible: the
reporters change a line of dialogue ("them" to "him") to
suit a change in stage direction, which is fairly fussy of them, and then they
fail to notice that they have produced nonsense because another line of dialogue has
been omitted. Alternatively, suggests Martin, F simply revises O, and then we
have still the problem of Exeter's gibberish in O. Of the same kind of weak evidence
for memorial reconstruction is the moment in O's 5.1 when Richard of Gloucester
advises against entering the gates of Coventry in pursuit of Oxford's troops
("Weele staie till all be entered", E1v) in language that suggests
that he knows that more (making up "all") are coming, which is in fact
foreknowledge of the ensuing actions of Montague and Somerset. In F, by
contrast, Edward simply cautions against going in because "other foes"
(TLN 2741) may turn up, which phrasing Martin calls "strategically
hypothetical" (p. 112). Finally, Martin observes that True Tragedy lacks the
classical allusions that Shakespeare put in his other early plays, although of
course one might argue that they were simply added to F as part of a process of
authorial revision.
The relationship between O and F is so complex, Martin
argues, that it cannot be explained solely by memorial reconstruction or
revision, rather both must be operating. Twentieth-century scholars who went
beyond the theory of simple piracy as the reason for memorial reconstruction
argued that O represents an abridgement for touring with fewer players, but they
never quite agreed on how to do the calculations of doubling. Martin's
calculation of the doubling shows that O and F need the same personnel: 13 men
and 4 boys, plus a couple of non-speaking walk-ons. Thus a rationale for
abridgement (to save parts) falls although one might still argue that O
represents abridgement for shortened playing time. But O does not do its cutting
simply, rather it is full of "complex rearrangement of scenes and
lines" that seems oddly roundabout if the desire was just to save time. In
some respects O actually expands on F (including having stage directions derived
from the sources), so we cannot just say that O represents a badly-remembered F,
nor that O represents a heavily censored text since it retains surely the most
censorable event, the disinheriting of Henry's son. Martin supports Malone's
conjecture that Shakespeare went back to the play that we know from True
Tragedy and
amplified it to make the play we know as 3 Henry 6 (p. 115). In this he follows other
twentieth-century critics, but where they merely applied subjective criteria--True
Tragedy
being good enough to stand on its own and not merely a bad report--or were simply
expressing poststructuralist dissatisfaction with New Bibliography, Martin
thinks he has something more tangible to base his argument upon. By comparing O
and F's dependence on Holinshed and Hall he attempts to show a
pattern of authorial revision (p. 117). For this he uses three examples and
promises more in an essay called "Reconsidering the texts of The True
Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and 3 Henry VI" forthcoming in Review
of English Studies. Since publication of Martin's edition the essay has
appeared, although under the more definite title of "The True Tragedy of
Richard Duke of York and 3 Henry VI: Report and revision" and it
will be reviewed here next year. Martin's first example is in 2.1 where, between
the towns of Wakefield and Towton, Warwick sizes the opposing Yorkist and Lancastrian forces:
in O it is 50,000 Lancastrians versus 48,000 Yorkists, while in F it is 30,000
Lancastrians versus 25,000 Yorkists. Martin compares these numbers to those
given in the sources. For the battle of Towton, Holinshed and Hall agree on
60,000 Lancastrians versus 48,660 Yorkists while for the second battle of St
Albans Holinshed says 20,000 Lancastrians versus 23,000 Yorkists, while Hall
mentions only the 23,000 Yorkists. Thus for scene 2.1, O seems to be getting its
numbers from the battle of Towton while F gets its from the second battle of St
Albans. So much seems clear, but Martin goes on "Thus it seems that O, with
its figures linked to Towton, followed Hall, whereas F followed Holinshed . . ."
(p. 118), which is a claim I cannot fathom since both sources report on both
battles. In any case, the numerical correspondences do not see close enough to
posit definite use of the sources and since an educated person would know
something of the scale of the Wars of the Roses anyone might pick appropriate
numbers unaided. Unfortunately, Martin's explanation of all this is tortuous.
More clearly, Martin's second illustration from source use
is that for the battle of Tewkesbury, O follows Hall in having Margaret and
Prince Edward captured together, while F follows Holinshed in having Prince
Edward captured separately. There are also in F a couple of pious lines from
Margaret that might reflect Holinshed's unique report that she fled to a
religious house. During the revision of the O version to make the F version,
Shakespeare apparently turned from Hall to Holinshed, as he generally did with
his history plays. Martin's final example is Clarence's return to the Yorkist
side after supporting the Lancastrians for a while. Hall and Holinshed report
that this was motivated by a "damsel, belonging to the Duchess of
Clarence" persuading him of the unnaturalness of his actions, while Hall
alone also reports Richard's agency in bringing his brother back over to the
Yorkists' side, with whispered words, but reminds the reader of the damsel's
prior work. O dramatizes Richard's agency (E1v-E2r) and gives him alone the
credit for bringing Clarence back whereas Holinshed stresses instead Clarence's
internal turmoil and his pretence to Warwick that he is still on the
Lancastrian side, which is what F dramatizes. In F Clarence apologizes to his
singular "brother" (that is, Edward ) for his betrayal whereas in O he
refers to his "brothers" (Edward and Richard), thereby again stressing
Richard's role as Hall does. In all, O seems influenced by reading Hall and F by
reading Holinshed (p. 119-21).
At this point Martin summarizes where we are ("Having
established that O is a memorial report of an earlier version of the play which
Shakespeare revised as F") and turns to F's use of O (or
its derivatives) as printer's copy. McKerrow thought that the opening stage
direction and first 18 lines of 4.2 in F were set directly from O or Q3, and
Martin rightly comments that "none of the variants McKerrow cites is
indubitably an error" (p. 122), although of course they are not
"variants" but invariants, places where F follows what McKerrow
thought was an error in O, for that is how you prove the dependence of one text
upon another. For the Arden 2 edition, Andrew Cairncross went further and
claimed that much of F was set from O. The 1986 Oxford Complete Works editors
were sceptical of the McKerrow/Cairncross view but accepted that the F
compositor might intermittently have glanced at Q3 and perhaps took a whole
passage from it if his copy was not good. Martin, on the other hand, finds no evidence of Q3 being used in
the printing of F and argues that one can explain the agreement of Q3/F against
O/Q2 by "acceptable metrical variation, different chronicle details, and
rewriting". Martin gives the example of George of Clarence saying in
the Folio that Henry has passed a law "To blot out me, and put his owne
Sonne in" to which Clifford replies "And reason too, / Who should
succeede the Father, but the Sonne" (TLN 967-9). George's speech should, of
course, be given to Edward (the son who has been blotted out) and Cairncross
thought that it was the compositor following O (at least for the speech prefix)
that caused the problem, for O has a different speech that does suit George of
Clarence ("blot our brother out", B7v). In support of this view one
can observe that at this point Q3 and F agree on some incidentals against O: the
spelling "Parliament" (Q2/Q3/F) against "Parlement" (O) and
the dividing of Clifford's next line ("And reason . . . the son") into
two verse lines (Q3/F) rather than being a single long overlapped line (O/Q2).
But Martin observes that F has a pleasing literary opposition of sons/fathers
that O/Q3 spoils with its "blot our brother out" and that O/Q2/Q3 have
Clifford say "And reason George" where F has "And reason
too". If the F compositor was following Q3 at this point (rather than his
manuscript copy), why did he changed "George" to "too" if his
Q3 copy showed that George had indeed just spoken and hence "And reason
George" (the Q3 reading) would be correct? No, Martin concludes, more
likely F is a revised version of O and O's problems are those of "faulty
reporting" (pp. 122-3).
In seeking the dates of original composition and staging,
of the reporting to make True Tragedy, and of Shakespeare's revision to make what got into
F, Martin notes some fixed points (pp. 123-5). The play's composition
cannot precede publication of Holinshed's Chronicles in 1587 nor be later
than Robert Greene's death on 2 September 1592, since Greene famously alluded to
a line from True Tragedy ("Tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide"). The
significances of three other dates are debatable: Henslowe's record of "harey
the vj" being "ne[w]" on 3 March 1592, the plague closure
starting 23 June 1592 (and lasting until 1594) and Thomas Nashe's allusion in Pierce
Penniless to a performance of 1 Henry 6 by August 1592 ("brave
Talbot . . . fresh bleeding"). We cannot be sure that Henslowe's
"harey the vj" is 1 Henry 6 (as opposed to parts 2 or 3), but
Roslyn Knutson showed that for multi-part plays, Henslowe consistently recorded
if something were 'part two', so probably "harey the vj" is part one;
Henslowe often neglected to state the first part number for a multi-part play.
If True Tragedy was written after 1 Henry 6, then Contention of York and
Lancaster and True Tragedy must have been written and performed between March 1592
("harey the vj" being "ne[w]) and June 1592 (the theatre
closure), which does not seem enough time. Just possibly, Greene got the
"tiger's heart" line from a manuscript of the play, not from
performance, so the plague closure is not relevant. Most likely is E. K.
Chambers's explanation that Contention of York and Lancaster and True
Tragedy formed a two-parter written before 1 Henry 6 (the prequel), but
then the ownership of the different parts gets tricky. 1 Henry 6 we know
was performed by Strange's men led by Edward Alleyn at the Rose (as Henslowe's
Diary indicates) and True Tragedy's title-page says it was performed by Pembroke's men.
Martin claims that Contention of York and Lancaster was definitely a
Pembroke's men's play too even though its title-page is silent on the matter,
and does not indicate why he thinks so (p. 126). Andrew Gurr showed that
Pembroke's men was created to fill the Theatre when Edward Alleyn rowed with
James Burbage in May 1591 and took his company of Strange's men away from the
Theatre. Initially Pembroke's were successful, playing at Court during Christmas
1592 and 1593, but they failed in their provincial tour of summer 1593 and
pawned their apparel and playbooks. Shakespeare seems to have retained control
of his plays, since they ended up with the Chamberlain's men, as did he. So, who
reconstructed True Tragedy from memory? It could have been Pembroke's men, if Shakespeare
had the play in his possession and did not go on their provincial tour of
1592-3. The Titus Andronicus title-page suggests a traffic in playbooks
and personnel from Strange's to Pembroke's to Sussex's, so alternatively those
of Pembroke's company who did not move on to another one after its collapse in
August 1593 might have tried touring, perhaps joining up with "a downsized
Strange's" and/or Sussex's. Martin claims that the fact of the True
Tragedy
title-page mentioning only Pembroke's (not Strange's or Sussex's) suggests that
a hard-up regrouping of Pembroke's "made the report sometime after August
1593, which they subsequently published in early 1595" (p. 127). Again,
Martin's logic defeats me: why does mentioning only Pembroke's on the True
Tragedy
title-page suggest this? If they were poor in August 1593 and recollected True
Tragedy to
make some money from a printer, why wait until 1595 to get it printed? The
argument here is too compressed even for a specialist to follow.
In all events, True Tragedy was written before 1 Henry 6
opened in March 1592 and if written before May 1591 (the creation date of
Pembroke's men) then it was most likely written for Strange's, with Edward Alleyn as
"bigboond" Warwick (O, E3r), or if after then for Pembroke's. That True
Tragedy
was in performance by 1591 is suggested by its being echoed in The
Troublesome Reign (published 1591) and by its echoing of Spenser's The
Faerie Queene (published 1590). But what of the objection that 1 Henry 6
just feels like its early, less accomplished, work, too 'rough' to be a
later-written prequel to Contention of York and Lancaster and True
Tragedy? We can get around that by saying that 1 Henry 6 is not all by Shakespeare,
and multiple authorship would also explain its link with Strange's (the "harey
the vj" is definitely for Strange's at the Rose) but not Pembroke's; Martin
gives the analogue of the multi-authored Sir Thomas More which belonged to
Strange's (pp. 128-9). The final remaining question is 'when did Shakespeare
revise the play to make the F text?' (pp. 130-2). The names of actors in the Folio
texts of 2 Henry 6 and 3 Henry 6 help: John Holland and George
Bevis appear in the former--although as reviewed last year, Roger Warren
believes that Holland is a name from the sources, not an actor, and Bevis is the
mythical figure (2000)--and "more certainly" (presumably a nervous
glance at Warren's view, although his article is not cited) there are Gabriel
Spencer, John Sincklo, and Humphrey Jeffes in 3 Henry 6 (p. 130).
Spencer's death on 22 September 1598 gives us a terminus ad quem for the
manuscript underlying Folio 3 Henry 6. From the minor parts played by
Spencer and especially Jeffes (who we know of as an Admiral's men sharer later)
we may guess that the manuscript is relatively early, else they would have
bigger parts. Holland and Sincklo are in the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins
"which was performed by Strange's Men at the Curtain around 1590, and
certainly before 1592", for which claim Martin cites work by Greg, Gurr,
and Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean. Actually, this is not certain and
McMillin seriously entertained the possibility that 2 Seven Deadly Sins might be as late
as 1594 (McMillin 1988) and in a forthcoming paper David Kathman dates it to 1597-8 on
the basis of biographical knowledge about the actors named in the plot. Spencer,
Sinclo, and Jeffes came together in the Chamberlain's men in 1594, so that is
the earliest date of the revision that made the version of the play we know from
the Folio, and the terminus ad quem is provided by the uncensored
reference to Lord Cobham (discussed above), which must precede the controversy
over 1 Henry 4 in 1596. There is also some evidence in the
expansion of Margaret's oration in 5.4 that Shakespeare was reading Arthur
Brooke's The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet as he revised the
play, which would make it roughly contemporary with Romeo and Juliet
written in 1595 and a hint of Richard 2 confirms 1595 as the likeliest
year.
Having described precisely what he thinks of the materials
he is working from, Martin is able is give a pleasingly crisp description of his
editorial procedures: his edition is based on F, the expansion and revision of
the play reported in O. F's variant passages are followed except in a few cases
of "error, omission, or indispensable clarification", and where's O's
stage directions are simply significantly different but not essential, they are
merely recorded in the collation (p. 133). (Being post-theatrical, O's stage
directions perhaps offer insights about how particular matters were settled in
the theatre, but the revision to make F diminishes this value.) Martin's edition
uses the Oxford Shakespeare's broken brackets for "plausible but debatable or
ambiguous" stage directions and follows Stanley Wells's well-known rules on modernizing spelling. Because Martin thinks
the Folio text
substantially different from the O text, he "reluctantly" uses the
Folio's title. I defer an examination of Martin's choices regarding
particular textual cruxes until the introduction to Arden Shakespeare edition
has been described so that the differing choices of the two editions can be
compared directly. To conclude on Martin's Oxford edition it remains only to note
his appendices. Appendix A is a "Commentary on Historical Sources"
(pp. 327-56), a study of how the play relates to what is described in Hall and
in Holinshed keyed to the line-numbers in Martin's text, so it is a set of commentary
notes, more full than could be got onto the pages of the main text. Martin's
comments are about the differences in the narratives as well as the literary
qualities of what Shakespeare does with his source material. Appendix B
"Montague" (pp. 357-60) is about how this character relates to two
historical figures, Warwick's father and Warwick's brother, and to the character
of Salisbury in 2 Henry 6. In Appendix C "Casting Analysis of 'True
Tragedy' and '3 Henry VI'" (pp. 361-78) Martin builds on David Bradley's From
Text to Performance (1992) and T. J. King Casting Shakespeare's Plays
(1992), but he disagrees with their view that older boys could not double in
non-speaking roles such as drummers, flag-carriers, and soldiers. Martin's view that they
did perform such "hack work" (as Greg called it) comes
from the plots of The Battle of Alcazar and Orlando Furioso.
Martin reckons that O needs 15 men and 4 boys, while F needs 13 men and 4 boys,
but in fact this is effectively the same thing because the two extras in O could be
just walk-ons. In Appendix D "Queen Margaret's Tewkesbury Oration" (p.
379) Martin reprints the bit of Brooke's Romeus and Juliet from which
Shakespeare took this speech, and Appendix E "Alterations to
Lineation" (pp. 380-2) needs no explanation.
The division of labour in John D. Cox's and Eric
Rasmussen's Arden Shakespeare edition of 3 Henry 6 is made explicit: Cox
thanks Rasmussen for editing the text and writing the textual introduction and
textual notes (p. xv) and Rasmussen thanks Cox for "overturning centuries
of editorial tradition by pointing to overlooked analogues that render
emendation unnecessary and the Folio eminently defensible" (p. xvii). The
style of Cox and Rasmussen's long introduction (176 pages) is quite unlike
Martin's for the Oxford Shakespeare and unlike other Arden Shakespeare editions,
for they
set out to tell the story of "written engagement with the play (at least in
English) from the earliest comment to the latest" (p. 4), surveying the
reception rather than giving a reading of the play. Theirs is a huge
undertaking, and some aspects of the reception (such as feminist criticism) are
only sketched in. On the matters of Henslowe's receiving £3 16s 8d for "harey
the vi" which was "ne[w]" on 3 March 1592 and Nashe's Piers
Penniless being entered in the Stationers' Register on 8 August 1592, with
its reference to "brave Talbot" bleeding again the English stage, and
on Greene's Groatsworth being entered on 22 September 1592 with its allusion to
True Tragedy,
Cox and Rasmussen are on familiar ground surveyed above (pp.
5-6). O's stage directions are fuller than F's, although it is a third shorter
overall, and call for use of the stage balcony ("on the walles"
E1r). Cox and Rasmussen are unaccountably confident that the play was first
performed at Henslowe's Rose and for details of its design they rely on
Christine Eccles's flawed book 1990. Cox and
Rasmussen reproduce a picture (p. 8) of Jon Greenfield's model of the first Rose
(1587), which shows the theatre having no stage cover, but as discussed in last
year's review, an erosion line one foot in front of the foundations of the
Rose's stage (uncovered in 1989) clearly indicates water running off a
roof over the stage. Like Randall Martin for the Oxford Shakespeare, Cox and
Rasmussen think that Jonson's mockery of "York and Lancaster's long
jars" being staged with "three rusty swords" is, like Sidney's
criticism, a misapplication of Italian Neoclassicism to the English stage (pp.
9-10), but oddly they cite Jonson in original spelling ("iarres")
although they modernized Henslowe's "harey the vj" to "harey the
vi" on page 5.
Cox and Rasmussen chart the stage history of the play from
its first performances to the present, in particular via John Crowne's
Restoration adaptation The Miseries of Civil War (pp. 12-14) and then
nineteenth- and twentieth-century revivals that returned more to less to
Shakespeare. Like Martin for the Oxford Shakespeare, Cox and Rasmussen reproduce photographs from notable twentieth-century productions, but they also
devote nearly half a page to the picture of a horribly injured skull recovered
from the site of the battle of Towton (p. 24), rather tenuously linked to the
Clifford's death from an arrow in his neck. Cox and Rasmussen report on the 1999-2001 Royal Shakespeare Company production
of 3 Henry 6 in its This England cycle but neglect to use that label, so adding
to the difficulties of future theatre historians. This production ended with the Yorkists in the final scene walking over a stage covered with
Henry 6's blood and Cox and Rasmussen comment that "Shakespeare's occasional pun on 'guilt' and
'gilt' has never been rendered more graphically" (p. 32). Without further
explanation this remark is cryptic: what is the link between blood and
gold-plating? Over-egging their critical pudding, Cox and Rasmussen claim that
an amateur production of 3 Henry 6 by slave descendents on the Honduran
island of Roatan in 1950, reported by Louise Wright George, "undoubtedly
staged the most radical version" of the play, and in blissful ignorance of
Bertolt Brecht and Jann Kott (p. 40).
Cox and Rasmussen are careful to separate the question of
whether Shakespeare alone wrote 3 Henry 6 from the question of O
representing a
memorially reconstructed version. Edmond Malone took the view that Greene's charge against Shakespeare
("beautified with our feathers") was one of plagiarism, and hence that Shakespeare had
rewritten an
existing play by George Peele, and that this is why the first printings of Contention of
York and Lancaster (1594) and True Tragedy (1595) name Pembroke's men
rather than the Shakespearian company of Chamberlain's/King's men. The
memorial reconstruction hypothesis of Peter Alexander and Madeleine Doran
provided a different way to explain True Tragedy's inferiority to 3
Henry 6, but it does not
directly bear on the matter of authorship. Cox and Rasmussen think that the authorship question
might be insoluble since even style detection by computer analysis is thrown off by "variations in
orthography and typography and poor proofreading of early printed texts"
(p. 47); they might have added also the problem of one writer imitating
another's style. On the matter of computerized stylometry, Cox and Rasmussen report as though factual Don Foster's objections to the
work of the Shakespeare Authorship Clinic at Claremont McKenna College,
specifically the failure to "commonize" (regularize in matters of incidentals)
the electronics texts used, and they give an over-generalized explanation of this
procedure: "As a basis for accurate computer
analysis, texts need to be 'commonized', i.e. rendered identical in textual
accidentals such as spelling, punctuation and word breaks . . ." (p. 47n2).
This may
be true for some of the linguistic tests one may want to apply, but
clearly not for tests that rely on idiosyncrasies of spelling, punctuation and
word breaks.
As part of their survey of the play's reception, Cox and
Rasmussen offer potted histories of a number of 'criticisms': "Moral"
(pp. 49-64), "Character" (pp. 64-81), "Historical" (pp.
81-113), "Psychoanalytic" (pp. 113-7), "New" (pp. 117-35), "Performance" (pp.
135-40), and "Feminist" (pp. 140-8). Several of these sections are too brief to be of use, but in the first
the editors offer something of their own reading: sidestepping Tillyardism, they
claim that 3 Henry 6 exhibits "'magical' thinking", a belief in the power of "spells,
incantations, curses and blessings", in "prophecies, omens,
'prodigies', oaths and swearing". About this the play is deeply ambivalent,
and although such
"'oppositional thinking'" (God/Devil, Good/Evil) was not done away
with until the Enlightenment it could in Shakespeare's time be challenged by
scepticism. This challenge was always ultimately futile since there was nothing
to replace 'magical' thinking (pp. 57-9). Binary oppositions fused
magical and moral thinking and were in the service of monarchial
dynasties, but more than anything else Protestantism undermined 'magical'
thinking from within by its "miracles are ceased" principle manifested in rejection
of transubstantiation and exorcism (p.
60) This is a kind of deconstructivist reading, although the editors do not openly
identify the self-destructing binary opposition in structural terms even after
using the expression "complementary oppositions" (p. 59). The history
plays articulate the
crisis in 'magical' thinking, Cox and Rasmussen
claim, and although there is some providentialism in the Henry 6 plays, much is not providential but man-made. The section on "Historical
Criticism" opens with the surprising claim that "A 'turn to history' marked
criticism and critical theory since the 1980s, as a reaction against the
'linguistic turn' of deconstruction" (p. 81). Deconstruction is as much a
philosophical as a linguistic practice and one more properly seen in alliance
with New Historicist and Cultural Materialist thinking than against it. Cox and
Rasmussen use the notion of intertextuality to argue that
establishing Biblical allusions and sources for Shakespeare is a fraught
business since his culture was "saturated with the
Bible" and we might easily mistake him getting something directly from
there that actually came from another area of contemporary culture such as other plays
or prose writings (pp. 88-90). Thus they do not emend the Folio's "Let me embrace the sower Aduersaries, / For
Wise men say, it is the wisest course" (TLN 1422-3) because there is a Biblical analogue for it as it stands: "Agre with
thine aduersarie quickely" (Matthew 5.25) which appears in the Geneva Bible
and the Book of Common Prayer; Henry we know is carrying a prayerbook (p.
91). It is for this sort of supporting evidence enabling retention of
Folio readings that Rasmussen thanks Cox for (p. xvii), although one must observe
that the claimed analogy is not close.
Establishing the play within the context of Shakespeare's
early career, Cox and Rasmussen point out that it is "second only to Titus Andronicus
in the number of words with the root 'venge'", which is "probably"
a sign of Seneca's influence (p. 96). Such claims should always be accompanied
by a statement of which texts were used to do the word-counting (or which
concordance, if that is the source), and moreover rank order is not always as
revealing as the raw data it conceals. Using the electronic edition of the
Oxford Complete Works, I count Titus Andronicus having, at 43, nearly
twice as many words based on 'venge' as 3 Henry 6, which has 23. The
third place goes to Richard 3 at 20, as one might expect, but in fourth
place is Cymbeline at 19, ahead of fifth-placed Hamlet at 18. The
link between frequency of 'venge' words and Senecan influence does not seem
quite as clear in the light of this evidence. Stylistically the joining of the
separate labours of Cox and Rasmussen is largely seamless, but because their
introduction is written to be readable as discrete sections there is necessarily
repetition between them, and a point about critical prejudice against Tudor
morality plays is made several times. Indeed, an entire inset quotation from
Philip Brockbank's seminal essay "The Frame of Disorder" is produced
on pages 64 and 124. This militates against a 'through-line' of argument and it
is disconcerting to be told that Richard of Gloucester "is based on the morality
play figure called the Vice" on page 106 of an introduction that has been
referring to the Vice figure since page 78. Congruent with the editors' slightly
shaky comments on recent literary and philosophical theory is their misuse of
the word 'over-determined' to mean 'trying too hard' or 'forced' (". . . [Richard] Simpson's reading [that
3 Henry 6 is about 1580s politics] seems arbitrary and over-determined", p. 110)
rather than in its proper sense of 'having more
determining factors than the minimum necessary'. Especially weak is the section
on "Psychoanalytic Criticism", which claims that Freudianism "has strong affinities with the inclination
to see the human psyche as transcendent and homogeneous across cultures"
(p. 113). This does Freud an injustice, since he was much concerned with how
specific cultural forms make us unwell and his theory of the conscious/unconscious split is precisely the
opposite of a homogeneous human psyche. Much better is the section on "New
Criticism" that Cox and Rasmussen convincingly claim incorporates the 'metatheatrical'
criticism of Anne Righter, James Calderwood, and John Blanpied in which the
'governing theme' (what New Critics always look for) is always the same:
artistic creation itself. They approvingly cite, with a few reservations,
Richard Levin's critique of this approach which pointed out that if every play
is about artistic creation, we might as well all pack up and go home for the
critics' work is done (pp. 130-4).
Cox and Rasmussen begin their section on "The Texts of
The True Tragedy and 3 Henry VI" (pp. 148-77) with a couple
of useful summaries: a list of all the places where in editing F they have made
"judicious use" of O, and that, although it is not conclusive, they
intend to present evidence against the view that O is based on a memorial reconstruction and that F
was printed from authorial papers (pp. 148-9). As is usual with this third
Arden series, the text not used as the basis for the edition is quite superbly reproduced in facsimile at the back of edition. Cox and
Rasmussen's departures from the editorial tradition begin with their assertion
that Q2 (1600) is not an exact reprint of O: dozens of irregularly divided verse lines in O
are relined, properly put back into verse in Q2 (p. 151).
Likewise, Q3 (1619, the "Whole Contention" edition of Contention of
York and Lancaster and True Tragedy) was identified as
a reprint of O by Greg but Cox and Rasmussen have found 32 places where
Q3 follows Q2's lineation rather than O's. This could happen by independent relineation--after all, the verse
was
there to be recovered--but "the simpler explanation" is that Q3 was
reprinted from Q2 (p. 153). As the Q3 title-page claims, it is indeed "newly corrected" (there
are nearly 300 substantive variants from O/Q2) and "enlarged" (Contention
of York and Lancaster gains 11 new lines, True Tragedy gains one), although the authority for these changes and
additions is disputable. Cox and Rasmussen dispute a claim about space-wasting in Q3
made by the editors of the Oxford Complete Works of 1986 (Wells et al. 1987, 205):
signature
Q3v does have a couple of extra lines of dialogue, but Cox and Rasmussen wonder
why, if these were compositorial padding (as the Oxford editors have it), the
man did not just wait until finishing the next page (Q4r), which completed the
inner forme, and then see what needed to be done (p. 155). One answer might be
that he feared cumulative error making the situation even worse by then. More
clear is the case of putative expansion on Q4r that Cox and Rasmussen rightly
observe makes no new lines so "can have nothing to do with
problems of casting off" (p. 156). The agency and authority of Q3's variants
are important in connection with the link between Q3 and F, and Cox and
Rasmussen give
the Hinman/Blayney compositor attributions for F, divided between compositor A
and B for whom they conveniently list the respective Folio signatures, Folio
page numbers, and corresponding act, scene, and line numbers in their edition. F and Q3 were printed in the shop of William Jaggard and
Folio compositor B worked on both. As Cairncross pointed out, there are frequent F/Q3 agreements
against O/Q2, one of which (O: "Henry and
his sonne are gone, thou Clarence next" sig. E7r; Q3: "King Henry,
and the Prince his sonne are gone" sig. Q3v; F1: "King Henry,
and the Prince his Son are gone" TLN 3165) shows such strong F1/Q3 linkage
that we should think that "Q3 may have been used in some way by the Folio
compositors" (p. 157). To be convincing, a claim of dependence should
ideally rest on agreement in error and since all three versions of the line are
acceptable it is possible that each printing represents the reading of its
underlying manuscript, which manuscripts differed for some reason.
Cox and Rasmussen agree with the editors of the Oxford
Complete Works that there is evidence for no more than the
occasional consultation of Q3 in the setting of F, yet they offer a most
surprising summary of the bibliographical stemma of textual descent:
". . . the first edition of 1595 (O) was reprinted with some minor
changes in 1600; the second edition (Q2) was then reprinted with further
revisions in 1619; this third edition (Q3) was then reprinted in a substantially
revised form in 1623 (F1)" (p. 158). This stemma ignores the manuscript(s)
entirely and describes only how the printed texts are related, and having just
announced that ". . . Q3 was probably consulted only occasionally
by the F compositors" it is bizarre to then use the phrase "was
reprinted . . . in" to describe the Q3/F relationship. The
hypothesis that O was printed from a memorial reconstruction of the play is
based "rather precariously" on a
single variant passage (4.1.47-57) about the matching of the heiresses of
Hungerford, Scales, and Bonville to Hastings, the Queen's brother and the
Queen's son. This is mangled in O but accurately follows Hall's Chronicle
in F, which fact is the "linch-pin" of Alexander's argument that Cox
and Rasmussen attempt to remove (pp. 161-3). There are, in fact, "significant orthographic correspondences"
between True Tragedy and Hall's Chronicle in the spellings of Penbrooke,
Norffolke, Fawconbridge, and Excester, whereas F has Pembrooke, Norfolke,
Falconbridge, and Exeter, and other O/Hall agreements against F include Warwick
saying his men number "48. thousand" (O), "48,600" (Hall), but
"fiue and twenty thousand" (F TLN 839, 2.1.180), Henry's having reigned for 38
years (O and Hall) rather than 36 years (F TLN 1831, 3.3.96), York retreating to
Sandall Castle in Wakefield (O and Hall) which is not unspecified in F (TLN 235,
1.1.206), and his recollection of battles in Normandy (O and Hall) but in France
(F TLN 395, 1.2.72).
Less convincingly, there is a link between the phrasing of Hall's
account of Warwick's landing in 1470 ("crying 'King Henry! King Henry! A
Warwick! A Warwick!") and O ("All. A Warwicke, a Warwicke")
against F ("They all cry, Henry" TLN 2216, 4.2.27) and O's order of scenes 4.4 and 4.5 is historically correct while
F
has the chronology reversed. In short, there is much in O that "could
not have been derived from the version of the play preserved in the Folio
text" (p. 163), and hence the hypothesis of memorial reconstruction
receives another blow; Cox and Rasmussen do not entertain the possibility that
simple revision might also separate O and F to account for these differences.
The idea that memorial reconstruction might be done
because the authorized book was left behind when a company toured was
"effectively undermined" (p. 163) by Werstine's pointing out the entry in the Hall Book of Leicester dated 3 March 1583/4 which reads "No
Play is to bee played, but such as is allowed by the sayd Edmund [Tilney], &
his hand at the latter end of the said booke they doe play". One might
respond that this evidence is open to the usual law of ambiguity in historiography: does a
prohibition show that a thing never happened, because it was not allowed, or
that it did happen, else why would anyone ban it? Formerly 'bad' quartos are
indeed being critically rehabilitated as authorial first drafts, although the
1608 quarto of King Lear is a surprising example for Cox and Rasmussen to
mention (p. 164) since no-one has ever claimed it is 'bad'. The editors acknowledge
Steven Urkowitz's argument that O is
an original authorial version that was later revised to make the play
represented by Q, but "are cautious about advancing this conclusion since
other explanations are certainly possible" and they include amongst the
other explanations the use of Hall by those making the memorial reconstruction.
Laurie Maguire has "puckishly" pointed
out that the repetition of essentially the same lines in O ("For strokes
receiude . . . I rest my selfe" C1r, "For manie wounds
receiu'd . . . I yeeld to death" E2v) is traditionally attributed to
memorial reconstruction (the reporter unintentionally anticipating himself) while the same
phenomenon in Q2 Romeo and Juliet ("O true Appothecary . . . with a kisse I
die" L3r) is attributed to authorial false start, and Cox and Rasmussen
agree that neither 'proves' anything (p. 165). Actually, these are not the same
thing at all since the repetition in O occurs across a gap of about 1800 lines
while in Q2 Romeo and Juliet the repetition is on the same page. The
former could have got into print without anyone failing to delete anything,
since
the 'error' is not easily noticed, while the latter must involve someone's
failure to delete the repetition since no-one produces such a thing
intentionally. To put it another way, it is exceedingly difficult to make a
single hypothesis that covers both cases: a false start followed by failed
deletion works for instance in Romeo and Juliet but not True Tragedy, anticipation
by a reporter is good for True Tragedy but not Romeo and Juliet. Contrary to
Maguire and Cox and Rasmussen, Greg did not claim that these things
"'prove'" (Maguire's scare quotes) what kind of copy was used in the
printings, only that they were
"characteristic" of different kinds of copy. Cox and Rasmussen admit the evidence of
memory in O's apparent aural garbling of words that F seems to have got right:
"Wrath makes him death" (O B1r), "Wrath makes him deafe"
(F TLN 513, 1.4.53);
"his adopted aire" (O B2r), "his adopted Heire" (F TLN 561, 1.4.98); "Tygers
of Arcadia" (O B3r), "Tygers of Hyrcania" (F TLN 622, 1.4.155); "Sore
spent with toile as runners" (O C1r), "Fore-spent with Toile, as
Runners" (F TLN 1057, 2.3.1); "the litnes of this railer" (O E5r), "the likeness of this
Rayler" (F TLN 3013, 5.5.38); "Cyssels" (O E7v), "Sicils"
(F TLN 3210, 5.7.39) (p. 165). Hence Cox and Rasmussen, although "dubious about the theory of
memorial reconstruction by touring actors" do not think anyone can explain
these homonymic errors saying that O was printed from authorial copy. Instead,
they find "more plausible" the view put forward by Blayney with
support from Humphrey Moseley's preface to the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of
1647 that memorial reconstruction was done by actors to give private transcripts
to their friends (p. 166).
Like Martin editing the Oxford Shakespeare edition of 3
Henry 6, Cox and Rasmussen think they have caught Greg in a contradiction in
The
Shakespeare First Folio: "[occasionally] the substitution of the name
of an actor, when the part is written with a particular performer in view" shows that the copy was foul papers, and yet
of the names of Gabriel
Spencer, John Sincler, and Humphrey Jeffes appearing in F 3 Henry 6 Greg
writes: "[In no case is it of the least consequence who took
these minor parts and their assignment] cannot possibly be attributed to the
author" (p. 167). This does indeed look like an "internal
contradiction" in Greg's writing if one omits, as Cox and Rasmussen do, the
words I have placed in square brackets. By selective quotation (dropping the
qualification) Cox and Rasmussen make Greg definite where he was tentative
("occasionally") and they ignore his earlier
explicit claim that there "are two ways in which actors' names may
find their way into dramatic manuscripts" (1955, 120 my emphasis), from the
author's pen and from the prompter's. What matters, Greg claims, is how
important it is that a particular man plays the part and how big the part
is, for an author will care (and write about it) if it does matter dramatically,
while a prompter will want to know who is doing it either way, especially if
it is
a minor part he might otherwise forget the casting of. Here it does not seem to
matter if the particular named men are used (Sincler's famous thinness, for
example, is not exploited in the scene) so it would seem to be a matter for the
prompter not the author. After tracking the genesis of explanations about actors' names in printed plays for several pages (pp.
167-71) Cox and Rasmussen declare that the whole question has "little relevance to the editing process"
(p. 172) and speculate whether there are not actors' names after all. Gabriel would be a good name for the
divine messenger of 1.2 and Humphrey too might be fictional name, although they
concede that "Sinklo" is a harder case to argue. (An obvious retort to this
speculation is that even if these are fictional names, no-one utters them in
performance so any aptness would be lost on an audience.) Cox and Rasmussen support the recent
rejection of McKerrow's 'suggestion' that variant names in speech prefixes and
stage directions show authorial copy, citing the usual work by Werstine and Long and also Richard
Kennedy (Kennedy 1998). Generally, modernized editions regularize speech prefixes but
there are
special cases--aristocratic and monarchial titles get lost and won in
the plays--and Cox and Rasmussen think that Lady Grey's speech prefix "Wid[ow]"
in 3.2 is such a case: she is known to the audience only as a widow at this
point and her widowhood is what makes Edward interested in her. Thus they
break "with three centuries of editorial tradition by retaining the WIDOW SPs in
3.2" (p. 175). This smacks of caprice and taken further the same logic
could change dozens of speech prefixes in modern editions bringing no great
advantage and much confusion; a Hamlet without Claudius (just
"KING") would be the next step, one supposes. Cox and Rasmussen
conclude with their view that the
compositional priority of True Tragedy and 3 Henry 6 is unknown, as are the natures of the
underlying manuscripts (pp. 175-6), but one is then left wanting to know how they
came to the decide on the latter as their base text, even if it was only the
tossing of a coin. After their text, Cox and Rasmussen provide four appendices.
The first is a facsimile of the 1595 octavo keyed to the
line-numbers of their modernized text and to the Through Line Numbering of
Charlton Hinman's facsimile of the Folio. Appendix Two is a doubling chart in
which Cox and Rasmussen reckon that the play's 67 roles require 21
men and 4 boys, which is 8 more than Martin calculated in the Oxford
Shakespeare. One reason for the
difference is that Martin allows boys to double as soldiers and watchmen while
Cox and Rasmussen have 8 men do nothing but silent soldiering with drums, trumpet, or
colours. The third appendix lists the names of the battles depicted in the play,
together with their dates, their outcomes, and where they appear in the play,
and the fourth gives genealogical tables for the houses of
Lancaster, York, and Mortimer.
Regarding particular editorial choices, Randall Martin's
Oxford Shakespeare 3 Henry 6 and John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen's Arden
Shakespeare 3 Henry 6 are here considered together. The play begins with
a stage direction that brings on the Yorkist party, and for the Arden Cox and
Rasmussen import to F the additional information provided by O that they have
"white roses in their hats", and there is a similar detail for the
entrance of the Lancastrians at 1.1.49.2. Despite a long description of their
views about the early texts, Cox and Rasmussen provide no rationale for
borrowing stage directions from O and since F makes sense on its own, it is
hard to see this other than as old-fashioned textual conflation; this borrowing
recurs throughout the text and only interesting cases will be noted. Martin, on
the other hand, declares his intention to ignore O and use only F except where
his hand is forced by "error, omission, or indispensable clarification"
(p. 133), so quite understandably he leaves O's detail about roses out of the
opening stage direction and the subsequent one for the Lancastrians. At 1.1.19
Norfolk, observing the lopped-off head of Somerset, says "Such hope have
all the line of John of Gaunt" and both editions take this from F without
worrying as their predecessors have done that Shakespeare might have meant
"Such hap" but "hope" got picked up from Richard of
Gloucester's next line, "Thus do I hope to shake King Henry's head".
Richard of Gloucester's encouragement to his brother Edward to live up to the
family tradition of slaughtering for power is given in F as "For Chaire and
Dukedome, Throne and Kingdome say" (TLN 749, 2.1.93) which makes reasonable
sense (with "say" meaning 'declare yourself ambitious') and thus
Martin uses it, whereas Cox and Rasmussen have the benefit of Richard
Proudfoot's new and ingenious emendation to "'ssay" meaning 'make a
successful attempt to gain'. Both editions use O's "idle thresher"
where F has Warwick say "Or like a lazie Thresher with a Flaile" (TLN
789, 2.1.130), although only Cox and Rasmussen explain that "lazie"
appears in the previous line too and must have been repeated by compositorial
accident. Arden notes discussing "editorial amendations or variant
readings" are supposed to be "preceded by *" (General Editors'
Preface, p. xiii) but this one and many more in Cox and Rasmussen's editions
lack the asterisk; I can detect no pattern in the few that do receive the mark.
F's repetition of "lazy" makes sense and is defensible as the kind of
imperfect language that suits the moment and the speaker (as Frank Kermode
explored in Shakespeare's Language), so it is surprising that this should
be thought a clear error needing emendation.
Alone in the midst of battle, King Henry reflects on the
quiet life: "So Minutes, Houres, Dayes, Monthes, and Yeares / Past ouer to
the end they were created" (TLN 1172-3, 2.5.37-8). Cox and Rasmussen follow
Rowe in inserting "weeks" between "days" and
"months" because the preceding speech considers in turn the passing of
minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years and because it fills out the metre,
whereas Martin passes over the matter in silence. At 2.5.119 both editions use Dyce's "E'en for the loss of thee" instead of F's obviously faulty
"Men for the losse of thee" (TLN 1257) and observe that the box
holding types of the letter M lay directly below the one for letter E in the
upper case used by compositors, so either the printer's hand went to M box by
mistake or someone accidentally put an M in the E box. (Were the M box above the
E box we could free the printers of all suspicion and blame gravity.) For
Clifford's entrance, wounded, at the start of 2.6, Cox and Rasmussen borrow O's
colourful stage direction "with an arrow in his neck" that
follows Hall, while Martin eschews it as "perhaps faintly ludicrous",
not quite what Hall has ("striken in the throte"), and unsuited to the
action of the scene. It is worth observing that Cox and Rasmussen's long
expression of the uncertainty regarding the nature and origin of the printers'
copy for O and F gives them greater freedom to emend and conflate than Martin's
more definitive account of the textual situation permits him. Before Clifford's
line "And whither fly the gnats but to the sun?" (2.6.9) Cox and
Rasmussen insert from O the line "The common people swarm like summer
flies" that F omits, presumably thinking that the sense requires it. Martin
lets F stand, points out that "summer flies" and "gnats" do
not seem to be the same thing to Shakespeare (the former conjure up heat, the
latter light), and persuasively argues that because "summer flies" are
mentioned by Clifford 8 lines later in F, conflating O and F (as Cox and
Rasmussen do) produces "lame repetition" not present in either early
printing. The moment when the Yorkists find dying Clifford is almost the same on
both editions. Martin follows F exactly in having "Clifford groans / RICHARD Whose soul is that which
takes her heavy leave? / A deadly groan, like life and death's departing. / See
who it is. / EDWARD And now the battle's ended, / If friend or foe, let him be
gently used. / RICHARD Revoke that doom of mercy, for 'tis Clifford"
(2.6.41-45), while Cox and Rasmussen move Edward's speech prefix back three
words to give him the command "See who it is". Both editors resist
arguments by C. J. Sisson, amongst others, that O's distribution of these lines
gives markedly superior staging and both think that O's "Clifford
grones and then dies" would rob the scene of the horrible abuse of a dying
man by the Yorkists. Martin observes that although there is some difficulty in
Richard answering his own interrogatory command ("See who it is
. . . 'tis Clifford"), his giving orders in the presence of his
brother (F's version) hints at his future ambition.
Just before he is captured by the gamekeepers, F has King
Henry say "Let me embrace the sower Aduersaries" (TLN 1422, 3.1.24).
Martin points out that the stress falling on 'ver' sounds wrong (it should fall
on the first syllable) and although 'sweet adversity' is proverbial he follows
Sisson (1956, 84) in rejecting as unlikely a misreading of "aduersitie"
as "aduersaries" and instead favours Pope's emendation to
"adversities". Once the plural "adversities" is accepted,
there is no reason to suppose that F's "the" is a form of the personal
pronoun 'thee' and so no need to put a comma before it. Cox and Rasmussen make
no emendation to F and rightly point out that "polysyllabic words often
vary in emphasis in Shakespeare"; moreover they have what they believe to
be a Biblical analogue for the line as it stands (Matthew, 5.25 as discussed
above). Another of Richard Proudfoot's happy suggestions appears in Cox and
Rasmussen's alteration of F's "Whom thou obeyd'st thirtie and six yeeres"
(TLN 1831, 3.3.96) to "six and thirty years" on the grounds that it
scans properly and the underlying manuscript might well have had a numerical "36"
that was badly expanded by the compositor. Martin follows F here, as he does for
Rivers's question to Queen Elizabeth "Madam, what makes you in this sudden
change" (4.4.1) for which Cox and Rasmussen follow Collier's alteration of
"you in" to "in you". Yet again we see the New
Bibliographical Oxford Shakespeare editor being reluctant to emend if there is
any hope of making sense of the base text, while the Arden Shakespeare editors,
who offered lengthy reasons to be editorially cautious (since we do not really
know much about the origins of O and F) and were scathing of New Bibliography,
are in practice more cavalier in their interventions. Both editions reluctantly
let stand F's version of the proclamation at 4.769-75, which rather awkwardly
uses a common soldier to do the public reading, rather than following O which
has Montgomery do it, and both reject out of hand the complicated theory offered
by the editors of the Oxford Complete Works in which the soldier was invented by
a compositor trying to make sense of Hastings's phrase "fellow
soldier". There remains the problem that the proclamation ends awkwardly
("Edward the Fourth, by the grace of God, King of England and France, and
Lord of Ireland, etc"), which neither edition can explain and which both
think might indicate that the actor playing the soldier could be relied upon to
fill in the rest, whether from a property document or common knowledge.
Neither edition starts a new scene with the Folio's "Exeunt"
of Henry's supporters at 4.8.32, Martin adding "all but Henry"
and then bringing on Exeter to talk to him, while Cox and Rasmussen add "all
but King Henry and Exeter", the latter already on since the beginning
of the scene because they followed Capell in replacing Somerset (who has nothing
to do or say in this scene) with Exeter in the opening stage direction. Before
the Yorkists burst in on Henry there is in F a "Shout within, A
Lancaster, A Lancaster" (TLN 2653, 4.8.50) that both editions retain,
explaining that perhaps it is a Yorkist plot to confuse the Lancastrian guards
or else the cry of the guards when then realize what is afoot. For the scene in
which George of Clarence switches allegiance back to his Yorkist family, both
editions have him accompany his line "Father of Warwick, know you what this
means?" (5.1.81) with some business with a red rose: showing it to Warwick
in Martin's edition, taking it out of his hat and throwing it at Warwick in Cox
and Rasmussen's edition which takes its stage directions from O, which has a
quite different version on the scene. In O (as in Hall), a parley with his
brother Richard of Gloucester's convinces Clarence to change sides, while in F
Clarence enters having already made this decision. Martin makes a case for F's
version being superior because it focusses on the Clarence/Warwick relationship
without the distraction of 'whispering Vice' Richard, while Cox and Rasmussen
think O's version "more dramatic" in its portrayal of "Richard's
rhetoric affecting a reconciliation". Finally, F has Somerset speak of
Montague's dying voice "Which founded like a Cannon in a Vault" (TLN
2846, 5.2.44) and both editions keep "cannon" in preference to O's
"clamor", Cox and Rasmussen silently ignoring the common emendation
while alone Martin goes to the trouble of refuting McKerrow's somewhat wild
suggestion (actioned by the Oxford Complete Works) that the word should be the
musical term "canon".
Only one monograph of relevance appeared this year, David Scott Kastan's
2001. Kastan
begins with a conviction that stage and page are incommensurable, that performance
makes a new thing rather than enacting an existing one: "Hamlet is
not a pre-existent entity that the text and performance each contain, but
the name that each calls what it brings into being" (p. 9). Thus we should
not always think in a stage-centred way, for the stage tends to dehistoricize,
making him our Shakespeare, everybody's Shakespeare, while print conserves him.
Because Shakespeare clearly intended performances and seems to have no concern
for his books in print, a recurrent theme in Kastan's book is the ontological
and epistemological status of extant early texts of Shakespeare, and although he
never quite settles these matters Kastan is sure of the falsity of G. Thomas
Tanselle's distinction that the 'work' is the set of unrealized intentions that
the 'text' only approximate. Rather, it is the materialization that
makes the 'work' possible in the first place (p. 4). Kastan sets out to chart
the entire history of Shakespeare in print, beginning with the seldom-noted
facts that Shakespeare was a best-selling published author in his own lifetime
and that as early as 1638 a Folio of Shakespeare was represented in an
oil painting (Van Dyck's painting of Sir John Suckling); already his prestige
was
a matter of print, not performance (pp. 10-1). Necessarily in a short book (136
pages), Kastan's narrative moves at a breathless pace and tends towards
generalization, but for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular
there is a wealth of information newly synthesized into a compelling
argument. Citing the famous Q1 Hamlet line "To be, or not to be, I
there's the point" (D4v), Kastan points out that this seems like
textual corruption only if one is expecting to find "that is the question"
and that "I there's the point" is perfectly good language, indeed it
provides a "moment of unmistakably Shakespearean power along the tragic
trajectory of the play" when it occurs in the Folio text of Othello
(TLN 1855, 3.3.232) (pp. 26-7). From the evidence of early dramatic playtexts
Kastan constructs a convincing case for thinking that the market for printed
plays was the playgoing audience and that only gradually during the period did the name
of Shakespeare as author come to be as (and eventually more) important than the
name of the performing company. The defining event, of course, was the
publication of the 1623 Folio to which Kastan devotes a central chapter
displaying great breadth of historical knowledge and a virtuosity of compression.
(Just one slip: Kastan gives the wrong date, March 1597 (p. 54), for Lord
Hunsdon's promotion to Lord Chamberlain that changed the name of Shakespeare's
company back to Chamberlain's men; it was in fact 17 April 1597, as Chiaki
Hanabusa recently pointed out (Hanabusa 1999).)
Repeating an argument he made in Shakespeare After
Theory (1999), Kastan argues against one of the one founding principles of New
Bibliography, A. W. Pollard's distinction of the "stolne and surreptitious
copies" mentioned in the Folio preliminaries from the "all the
rest" in order to form two categories of pre-Folio publication of
Shakespeare: the 'bad' quartos and the good. In a footnote to page 73 Kastan
assigns this distinction to Pollard's Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates
(1920) but in fact it appeared 11 years earlier in Pollard's Shakespeare
Folios and Quartos (p. 4). Kastan thinks that, as actors used to textual
instability, Heminges and Condell would not have made such as strong distinction
between the existing quartos, but since Kastan earlier argues that good editions
were produced to replace ones perceived to be 'bad' this appeal to casual theatrical
sensibilities seems weak (p. 74). In an article to be reviewed next year
(2002) Lukas Erne argues that Shakespeare's fellow actors actively
supported the publication of his plays, in which case there is little reason to
suppose with Kastan that the Folio preliminaries dismiss all previously
published Shakespeare as "maimed and deformed". After a tour of
Shakespeare publishing from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries (pp.
79-110), Kastan returns to matters philosophical in his final chapter on the
impact of electronic text (pp. 111-36), which Kastan values most of all because
it defamiliarizes the textual medium, the codex having become so familiar to us
that we easily overlook its conventions. Although he thinks recovery of
authorial intentions is laudable, Kastan aligns himself with Jerome McGann's
view that texts do not exist independently of the media that carry them rather
than Tanselle's platonic view that textualizations are imperfect representations
of unembodiable work, and Kastan's position is implicitly nominalist: "Hamlet
is perhaps best considered not something in itself at all but, rather, the name
for what allows us comfortably to consider as some metaphysical unity the
various instantiations of the play . . ." (p. 133). Kastan's
excitement over the possibilities of electronic text is leavened with a caution
about the shift of power that the Worldwide Web brings as readers become
"dependent upon technologies . . . [over which they have]
distressingly little control" (p. 130-1). They cannot take away our
books, he observes, but they can shut down the websites we use; true, but they
cannot take our CD-ROMs either. Kastan gets a little carried away on the euphoria of
textual copiousness of polymorphously self-connected hypertext, and takes up
George Landow's argument that it realizes the textual jouissance promised
by post-structuralism (pp. 125-7), but in fact in the case of Shakespeare all
you need is a collection of about 80 electronic texts to encompass the entire
pre-Commonwealth cache of printings. Kastan imagines a huge hyperlinked archive
including the early printings, theatre reviews, film versions, etcetera, but one
might argue that we already have such a thing, it is called a library.
Marvelling at the possibilities raised by such projects as Peter Donaldson's
Shakespeare Electronic Archive at Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Kastan
wonders if they take away the need to edit at all, for unedited early
editions "are the most compelling witnesses to the complex conditions of
their production" (p. 123). The economics of the print medium have denied
readers cheap versions of the early printings in facsimile and Kastan, modestly
omitting to mention that he is a general editor of the Arden Shakespeare,
complains that today's editions of Shakespeare are too much alike and engender
"wasteful duplication of scholarly energy" (p. 124). Kastan's optimism
that electronic text might offer new potentialities unavailable in the print
medium is properly
guarded, and amidst ever-changing technology he ruefully asks how many of us
cannot open electronic documents of our own that we made more than 10 years ago
(p. 131). (To be fair, this is a matter of individual failing since the computer
support departments of universities around the world have always provided the
right advice about keeping one's personal archive in a machine-readable form;
they report that academics in the humanities tend to ignore the advice while
those in the sciences follow.) A tiny flaw that indicates the electronic origins
of Kastan's book itself is the persistent use of the wrong kind of apostrophe (a
right-facing instead of a left-facing one) at the start of words that begin with
elision, as in "'em" (p. 85) and "'s" (meaning
"us", p. 109); Microsoft Word bossily enforces this change to prevent
'error'.
Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Survey
contained no articles of interest to this review. Review of English
Studies contained three, and they will be taken in order of appearance. In a
companion piece to a previous article (1999), MacDonald P. Jackson
reaches the same conclusion by different means, namely that sonnets 104 to 126
are Jacobean while the rest date from the 1590s (2001c). Jackson's evidence
for this is Shakespeare's use of particular words at particular times in his
career, for example the almost total absence of "goodness" and
"particular" from the early works can help date sonnets that contain
these words. Eliot Slater showed that Shakespearian rare-words (ones used more
than once but fewer than 11 times overall in the canon) cluster in time and that
the sonnets are lexically linked to the play's Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo
and Juliet, Richard 2, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado
About Nothing, and Henry 5 (that is, to the period 1595-9), and
Gregor Sarrazin's much earlier work found the sonnets to be linked to the period
1593-98 (p. 60). Slater and Sarrazin took the sonnets as a whole, and Jackson
thinks it much better to follow A. Kent Hieatt, Charles W. Hieatt, and Anne Lake
Prescott whose work on the occurrence of early (pre-1599) and late (post-1599)
Shakespearian rare-words in the sonnets showed them that he was working on the
sonnets after 1598 and so caused them to divide the sonnets into 4 zones: Zone 1
(sonnets 1-60), Zone 2 (sonnets 61-103), Zone 3 (sonnets 104-126), and Zone 4
(sonnets 127-154). Hieatt, Hieatt, and Prescott decided that zones 1, 2, 4 were
written 1590-5, 3 was about 1600, and 1 was revised in the seventeenth century,
but their analyses were not finely grained: rare-words were for them just
'early', 'late', or 'both periods', and they did not provide enough information
about the distribution of different kinds of rare-words in their control texts
for comparison with the distributions in the sonnets (p. 62). For Jackson, an
important category of rare-words is 'middle'--say, from King John
(1595-6) to Macbeth (1606) and although Hieatt, Hieatt, and Prescott do
not use this category, Jackson manages to extract data about it from their
tables. Jackson's Table One shows the occurrences of 'early', 'middle', and
'late' rare-words for the sonnets zones 1-4, although it has a line-wrapping
problem that makes it unnecessarily hard to read and its own footnote ends mid-sentence:
"'Early' means found in" (p. 63).
This refinement broadly supports Hieatt, Hieatt, and
Prescott's earlier conclusions about the zones, but Jackson observes that very
rare words tend to cluster more than averagely rare words, so that Sarrazin's
category of words that occur only twice or thrice in the canon ought to be a
highly sensitive
indicator of chronology. Indeed it is: if one divides the
canon into four chronological periods, the 'Sarrazin links' mostly confirm that
the plays in each group belong together, as Jackson showed in his book Studies
in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare (1979). Jackson's groups are:
(1) Titus Andronicus, 1 Henry 6, The Comedy of Errors,
2 Henry 6, 3 Henry 6, The Taming of the Shrew, Richard
3, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, A
Midsummer Night's Dream
(2) Romeo and Juliet, Richard 2, King John, The
Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry 4, 2 Henry 4, The Merry
Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry 5, Julius
Caesar
(3) As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Troilus
and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Othello, All's Well
that Ends Well, Timon of Athens
(4) King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles
(acts 3-5 only), Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale,
The Tempest, Henry 8 (excluding the Fletcher parts)
Jackson combines categories (3) and (4) to get a general index of 'lateness':
calculate how many 'Sarrazin links' a given play has with this 'late' category
(as a percentage of how many links it has to all the categories) and one should
get a simple indication of how 'late' it is. If one puts all the plays in
order of this ratio they come out pretty much in the chronology we know from
Karl Wentersdorf's work. Jackson's explanation of his interpretation of the plays' ordering is somewhat compressed
(he calls it "reading their position on the vocabulary order as a position
on Wentersdorf's chronological order"), and I presume his procedure is as
follows: one notes that play A occupies position B on the vocabulary list (the
plays in order of their 'lateness' index), one looks to Wentersdorf's list for the
play occupying position B, which we may call play C, and look to the date, D,
assigned to it by Wentersdorf. The question Jackson appears to ask is 'how close to D is the true
date of play A?', and he reports that for 31 of the 37 plays the answer is not
more than 3 years out and for half it is correct to within a year (p. 65). This
provides a benchmark for an undated work, since one can calculate its 'lateness'
index (from its 'Sarrazin links') and then read off the date from the known
chronology of the plays. By this method Venus and Adonis comes out at
1592-3 and The Rape of Lucrece as 1593-4, as we would expect, and A
Lover's Complaint comes out with such a high 'lateness' index that it has to
be seventeenth-century. Thus Jackson's new method confirms results found by
other methods, and should be reliable.
What of the sonnets? Jackson shows the 'Sarrazin links'
tests for the 4-zoned sonnets against the 4-zoned plays as his Table Two, and
the most important thing is that Zone 3 shows lots of links with Groups 3 and 4,
while for the other sonnets zones links with the first two play groups
predominate. The pattern of 'Sarrazin links' for the 'Marriage' sonnets (numbers
1-17) is 3, 5, 2, 2, showing a bulge of links with the second group of plays and
hence suggesting that these were written after rather than before 1595. Jackson
does some other tentative reading of the detail, but has little confidence in
it; the important thing is that Zone 3 sonnets are most likely Jacobean not
Elizabethan, and the others probably were written within 1595-9 (p. 66). Having
done this analysis for Sarrazin's twice-or-thrice-used words, Jackson does it
again with the Hieatt-Hieatt-Prescott rare words, which are not nearly so
rare and hence not such a good indicator of date. Jackson counts how many
sonnets in each zone have their highest number of links with play groups 1, 2, 3, and
4, in other words for each sonnet he records which of the four play groups it
has most links with, and then assigns the sonnet to that group. The results are
as follows, with the four numbers for each zone showing how many sonnets in that
zone are most strongly connected with play groups 1 (Titus Andronicus to A
Midsummer Night's Dream), 2 (Romeo and Juliet to Julius Caesar),
3 (As You Like It to Timon of Athens, and 4 (King Lear to Henry
8) respectively:
Zone 1 is 9, 12, 10, 7
Zone 2 is 14, 9, 7, 1
Zone 3 is 4, 4, 4, 3
Zone 4 is 8, 4, 3, 3
This confirms that the sonnets in zones 1 and probably also zone 3 are later
than those in zones 2 and 4, for the latter profiles are front-loaded with links
to the play groups 1 and 2 (the early plays). Jackson repeats the analysis using
the Hieatt-Hieatt-Prescott word links between the sonnets and the poems Venus
and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and A Lover's Complaint, and
gets the following profiles for links to the poems in that order:
Zone 1 is 12, 33, 7
Zone 2 is 16, 28, 3
Zone 3 is 7, 17, 7
Zone 4 is 10, 12, 1
Of course, the three poems are different lengths whereas the plays are
roughly-equally sized, and the specific ratios of length are 33½ : 56½ : 9.9
for Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and A Lover's
Complaint respectively. (Something must be slightly adrift here, as the
ratios sum to 99.9 instead of 100.) Thus 22.6% (7 out of 31) of the sonnets in
Zone 3 have most links with A Lover's Complaint, a poem that
occupies only 10% of the total size of the three poems taken together, which
difference (22.6% being more than double 10%) is caused by the chronological factor that
Jackson is attempting to isolate. Since we now think that A Lover's Complaint
is seventeenth-century, this suggests that Zone 3 (sonnets 104-26) and perhaps
also Zone 1 (sonnets 1-60) "are later, or contain more late writing"
that the other sonnets (p. 68).
In pursuit of a still more finely grained approach,
Jackson counts the Hieatt-Hieatt-Prescott links between the sonnet zones and
each individual play in the Shakespeare canon (rather than using four
chronological groups as before), checking the observed frequency of the rare
words against the background of each play's vocabulary, so that if a play
contains 5% of the total number of different words in the canon, it should have
5% of the rare words found in a sonnet; any more than 5% suggests a
chronological link. Taken
together sonnet Zones 1 and 2 have unexpected links with A Midsummer Night's
Dream, Henry 5, and King John, and although the first of these
might be explained by the shared genre of love, the last two cannot. This suggests
composition of the 'Young Man' sonnets (numbers 1 to 103) in 1596-9,
and that these sonnets have fewer than expected links with the last 11 plays (All's
Well that Ends Well to Henry 8) confirms this view. The 'Dark Lady'
sonnets (numbers 127 to 152) have links with 2 Henry 6, The Comedy of
Errors, and Richard 2, thus the Zone 4 sonnets are early. Jackson
breaks the sonnets down into still smaller collections (p. 69), although he is
cautious with his conclusions because cognizant of the problem that small
datasets are subject to distortion by random fluctuation. The case of The Phoenix and Turtle Jackson offers as a warning:
by the linguistic link analyses described above it would seem to have been
written or revised after the few first years of the seventeenth century, but in fact
we know it was printed in 1601. Thus we should not rely on the evidence here to say
that Shakespeare definitely was involved with the sonnets up to (and including
participation in) the publication of the 1609 quarto (p. 73). But if Jackson is
right that the 'Marriage' sonnets (numbers 1-17) were written after 1595, they
cannot have been written to encourage Henry Wriothesley to marry since from 1589
(his 16th birthday) to 1594 Wriothesley was being pressured by William Cecil,
Lord Burghley, to marry Burghley's eldest granddaughter Elizabeth Vere, with the
threat of a large fine when he was 21. Had Shakespeare written the 'Marriage' sonnets then, Wriothesley would have thought him
Burghley's stooge.
In 1594, when Wriothesley became 21, this fine was exacted, so addressing the
'Marriage' sonnets to Wriothesley then, when Wriothesley was impoverished and could not
afford to marry, would be insulting. No, Jackson concludes, the 'Marriage'
sonnets cannot have been addressed to Wriothesley at all; they were to Henry Herbert.
Likewise, the 'Rival Poet' sonnets, if written 1596-1604, cannot be about
Marlowe since he died in 1593 (p. 74). Conveniently, Jackson ends by restating his
main conclusion: ". . . the majority, if not all, of the last
twenty-odd of the sonnets to the Friend [numbers 104 to 26, in Zone 3] were
written in the seventeenth century. A few other sonnets, in both the Friend and
the Dark Lady series, may have been written equally late, but the bulk of them
belong to the 1590s" (p. 75).
Next from Review of English Studies is Charles
Cathcart's attempt to demonstrate that Hamlet must have been written in
1599 because it is echoed in Marston's Antonio and Mellida and the
anonymous Lust's Dominion, both written in the winter of 1599/1600
(2001). Antonio and Mellida features a portrait inscribed "Anno
Domini 1599" and "Aetatis suae twenty-four", suggesting
composition in 1599 since Marston's 24th birthday fell in early October 1599 (p.
342) A reference to "the new Poet Mellidus" in Jack Drum's
Entertainment (late spring/early summer 1600) is the terminus ad quem
of Antonio and Mellida and Lust's Dominion is "widely
accepted" to be "the spaneshe mores tragedie" that
Henslowe paid Dekker, Haughton, and Day for on 13 February 1600, and the view
that Marston too wrote Lust Dominion, for which he was loaned £2 for on
28 September 1589, is strengthened in this article. Cathcart admits that the dating
of Antonio and Mellida from the portrait is not entirely secure since
it might be supposed to represent Marston's father and the date the year of his death,
but Reavley Gair has argued that Marston's poor relationship with his father at
the end makes this unlikely (p. 343). Michael Neill and MacDonald P. Jackson date
Antonio and Mellida on a collocation of "morphews" and
"Cousin german" (4.1.25-6) which also collocate in Philemon Holland's
translation of Pliny, published 1601 but Cathcart points out that Jonson's Poetaster
clearly satirizes both Antonio plays and was in performance by autumn
1601 (according to Tom Cain, earlier according to others), which does not leave
enough time for the first Antonio play to be in performance by mid-1601, especially
as the failure of Antonio's Revenge to fulfil the promise of Antonio
and Mellida's induction has suggested to several commentators that the
second part did not follow hard upon the first. Thus Cathcart rejects the "morphew
. . . Cousin german" evidence as a piece of later revision not affecting
the date of composition of Antonio and Mellida (p. 345). In Antonio
and Mellida there is a ghost that Antonio can, and Mellida cannot, see, just
like the closet scene in Hamlet except that in Antonio and Mellida
it "has no significance beyond the merely local" and hence the
influence runs from Shakespeare to Marston and not the other way (p. 346). This
logic is faulty, since one might by the same thinking argue that Martin Amis's Time's
Arrow must be the source for Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
because Vonnegut does not make much of 'time-in-reverse' idea, using it in just
one paragraph. But in fact we know that Amis took this paragraph in Vonnegut's
book and expanded it to make his novel. Having established the direction of
influence, Cathcart sets out to marshal indisputable evidence of a Hamlet/Antonio
and Mellida connection by numerous verbal parallels (pp. 346-8) such as
"this distracted globe" (Hamlet 1.5.97) with "your
distracted eyes" (Antonio and Mellida 2.1.267), "soul . . .
hoops . . . steel" (Hamlet 1.3.63) with "hooped . . .
steel . . . soul " (Antonio and Mellida 5.2.210-12),
"sliver" (Hamlet 4.7.145) with "sliftered" (Antonio
and Mellida 1.1.219), "plausive" (Hamlet 1.4.29) with
"applausive" (Antonio and Mellida 2.1.111), and
"chop-fallen" (Hamlet 5.1.188) with "chap-fall'n" (Antonio
and Mellida 4.2.1); this last example being a late 1590s coinage, so
unlikely to be due to shared descent from the ur-Hamlet.
The most thorough parallel is in Hamlet Senior's
battlements speech to Hamlet (1.5) and Andrugio's speech to Antonio (4.2):
"thy fathers spirit" (Hamlet 1.5.9) with "Thy fathers
spirit" (Antonio and Mellida 4.2.21), "hold my heart" (Hamlet
1.5.93) with "my panting heart" (Antonio and Mellida 4.2.12),
"freeze thy young blood" (Hamlet 1.5.16) with "heat thy
blood; be not froze" (Antonio and Mellida 4.2.18). There are reports
of drownings in both plays, with the sinking thing buoyed up and making noise
(singing in Hamlet, sighing in Antonio and Mellida), and the
prologue of Antonio and Mellida refers to pouring "pur'st elixed
juice" of art into the audience's ears, just as distilled juice is poured
in Hamlet Senior's ear. Indeed, both plays use imagery of damaged ears:
"assail your ears" (Hamlet 1.1.29), "do mine ear that
violence" (Hamlet 1.2.170), "the whole ear of Denmark . . .
abused" (Hamlet 1.5.36-8), "cleave the general ear" (Hamlet
2.2.565), "daggers enter in mine ears" (Hamlet 3.4.85),
"infect his ear" (Hamlet 4.5.88), "ravished the ear"
(Antonio and Mellida 2.1.116), and "taint not they sweet ear" (Antonio
and Mellida 2.1.193). Cathcart argues that Shakespeare's use is the more
thoroughgoing--and there are previous examples in "Piercing the night's
dull ear" (Henry 5 4.0.11) and "bite thee by the ear" (Romeo
and Juliet 2.3.72)--and hence the earlier. Cathcart offers a number of
verbal similarities in common words between Antonio and Mellida 5.2 and
the ghost-on-battlements scene (1.5) in Hamlet as well as the thematic
links of feverish sons deprived of their kingdoms, fathers in full armour
exhorting sons to resist, and imagery of a poisonous snake. In Shakespeare the snake
imagery follows from what precedes it (the story given out of Hamlet Senior's
death by snakebite) whereas in Marston it does not fit well, which tells
Cathcart that Marston is the borrower, likewise Balurdo and Ophelia sing
different lines from the same song and the same line from another song, but
whereas Ophelia's song has thematic links with the rest of the play, Balurdo's
does not. There are verbal parallels between the description of the ship headed
for England in Hamlet and Antonio and Mellida, but in the latter
it is not integrated with the plot but rather "unanticipated and
undeveloped" (p. 350). Cathcart uses the same logic for the many echoes of Hamlet
that occur in Lust's Dominion (pp. 351-3) and observes that if the
borrowings are accepted we would have to dislodge at least two other datings (Antonio
and Mellida by internal evidence, Lust Dominion by external evidence)
to avoid the conclusion that Hamlet was ready by the end of 1599. That
particular year might seem already crowded with Shakespeare plays, but then the
Chamberlain's men had the Globe to launch and as Leeds Barroll has shown
Shakespeare wrote not at a steady rate but in bursts of high activity separated
by lulls.
If Hamlet is as early as Cathcart suspects, we
might find other early echoes of it, and Cathcart offers "retrograde to our
desire", with the word "retrograde" being mocked in Jonson's Cynthia's
Revels which he thinks was performed in 1600, as the Jonson Folio claims. In
fact, the Jonson Folio dates must be March-March not January-December since Volpone
alludes to the sighting of a whale in the Thames that Stow's Annals dates
to 19 January 1606 yet the Folio insists it was acted in 1605. Greg made an
uncharacteristic slip in this regard (1925-6, 345), thinking the verbal
parallel inconclusive because he overlooked a marginal note in Stow that used
precisely the words ("as high as Woolwich") found in the play and
presumably circulated in word-of-mouth transmission. Thus Hamlet could be
opened in the first three months of 1601 and yet be echoed by Cynthia's
Revels that by Jonson's March-March reckoning was performed in 1600, and
Cathcart is wrong to claim that "A debt to Hamlet in Cynthia's
Revels would exclude 1601 as a possible date for Hamlet . . ."
(p. 355). Cathcart concludes with a consideration of the interpretative
implications for a 1599 rather than 1600-1 date for Hamlet, such as
bringing Hamlet's use of, and comments upon, satire closer to the Bishops' Ban of 1599, that
"arbitrary and petty ruling" (p. 359)
Finally from Review of English Studies is Katherine
Duncan-Jones's argument that the 1616 printing of The Rape of Lucrece was
a clumsy attempt to make it look more accessible than it is (2001). Many
readers have agreed with Gabriel Harvey that The Rape of Lucrece is like Hamlet
in being too long and too difficult, and despite the word "rape" in
the title, there is no titillation, no comedy, no farce, and none of Venus's
sweaty physicality in "bloodless and bodiless" Lucrece; instead,
Shakespeare takes us (and his original, predominantly male, readers) into her
mind. There is no real narrative in The Rape of Lucrece (except the
Argument's summary), all is introspection and dialogue. Venus and Adonis
was printed at least 10 times by 1617, The Rape of Lucrece just 6 and the
format of the 1616 edition suggests that it was thought to be in need of editorial
intervention to increase its attractiveness to readers. The final line is often
mispunctuated as "Tarquin's everlasting banishment" but Duncan-Jones
points out that the Argument makes clear that the entire dynasty is meant (so it
should be "Tarquins'") and thus it should have been a warning to the earl of
Southampton about his desires causing revolution, but the poem fails to make the
point clear. A mark of the poem's reception in its own time is that Thomas
Heywood, Shakespeare's admirer, copied Venus and Adonis in his Oenone
and Paris in 1594 but took at least a decade to copy The Rape of Lucrece
in his The Rape of Lucrece: A Roman Tragedy, which did try to inject the
necessary storyline and humour. In 1614 John Harrison sold his rights in The
Rape of Lucrece to Roger Jackson, who presumably knew that the reprinting of
Heywood's bawdy play on the subject (also in 1614) would probably boost interest
(p. 519). (Actually, Duncan-Jones writes that it was Nicholas Okes, not John
Harrison, but this is merely a slip, as is a slight mixing of January-January
and March-March dating schemes.) Jackson was an old hand at reprinting others'
works from the past, but in this case he waited a couple of years, perhaps
until Shakespeare died so that his changes (advertised on the title-pages as
"Newly revised") might pass as authorial, or perhaps this ruse simply
occurred to him once Shakespeare had died. Either way, later seventeenth-century
editors did act as though the changes were authorial, and respected them (p.
520). What are the changes? One was to change the title from Lucrece
to The Rape of Lucrece, and another was to break the indigestible work
into 12 number sections, each prefaced with a summary. But these are misleading,
and the crucial moment when Lucrece is comforted by a painting about the sack of
Troy and Hecuba's woes (a strong parallel with Hamlet) is not indicated.
Overall, the section divisions look like an effort to make the work appear less
hard-going to prospective buyers (p. 521). Duncan-Jones surveys the variants
between Q6 (1616) and the earlier printings and concludes that they are mostly
silly slips with no overall intention. The most obvious 'revision' is a
extensive use of italics: it does not make the thing easier to read, but it might
well make the casual peruser think that it does, that these are signposts
in a renownedly difficult work. By then Shakespeare was already 'dead' in the
modern sense regarding an author's loss of control over his writing, as well as
in the standard sense (pp. 522-3).
The journal Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography
folded at the end of 2001 with a bumper double issue on
"Shakespeare's Stationers". Paul Menzer makes a rather slight argument
that Q1 Hamlet needs fewer properties than Q2 or F, so it might reflect a
touring text (2001). Menzer's style is irritating in its jokiness
and he is poorly served by the quality of typesetting, which renders parts of
his own body text as inset quotations. In matters of substance that are slips
and ambiguities, such as calling Q1 "a version of F1" (p. 31) which
is, of course, impossible since Q1 was printed two decades earlier; he means that the underlying
manuscripts might be so related and as ever Jowett's
terminology (MSQ1, MSF) is what is needed. At the end of Q1 Horatio calls for a
stage to be erected in the market place for him to tell the tragic story of what
has happened, whereas in F he says the bodies should be set up on a stage and he
will speak the events over them, which sounds to me much the same thing, but for
Menzer Q1 is metatheatrical, reflecting its own "transient" conditions
of performance. Menzer characterizes Q1 as "built for speed" (p. 32)
without saying why he thinks touring performances were faster; if he means they
were shorter he should at least address recent scholarship showing that
shortened plays typically need more actors because doubling opportunities
are lost. Colloquialism gives the wrong impression when Menzer calls Philip Henslowe
a "clotheshorse" (p. 33) as though he thinks that the theatrical
impresario's costume purchases were all for himself, and Menzer's analysis of the
properties called for in different versions of the play is contestable. In what
way is the "Arbor" in which the victim lies in the Q1 dumbshow to The
Mousetrap "less specific than F1's 'Banke of Flowers'" (p. 35)? I
would have thought it equally specific and possibly calling for a more bulky
property. Using the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volume for the
town of Cambridge, Menzer attempts to work out the features of the stage at
Queen's College Cambridge, one of the universities that Q1's title-page claims
hosted a performance, and to relate these to the phrasing of stage directions in
Q1. Unfortunately, Menzer does not cite REED page-numbers or even which volume
he is using (there are two for Cambridge), and my check of the index entries
failed to turn up any evidence of the 17 feet width of the stage claimed by
Menzer. Menzer uses the occurrence of "gallery" in Jonson's Epicoene
("do you observe this gallery . . .with a study at each
end?" 4.5) to argue that the two projecting tiring houses at Cambridge
(known from REED) effectively made a 'gallery' between them and hence Q1's stage
direction reference to a "gallery". But this overlooks the fact that Epicoene
was written for the indoor Blackfriars playhouse where there was a flat frons
scenae, not projecting booths, and in any case his 17-foot stage hardly has
the room for what Menzer imagines to be staging. Assuming the two tiring houses
were a minimum of 4 feet wide, there would be just 9 feet remaining for
'gallery', so Hamlet's characteristic claustrophobia is more than adequately
justified if, as Corambis says, "The Princes walke is here in the galery"
(p.36-8). Menzer's errors come thick and fast in the final pages, including his
claim that in the play's opening moment, ". . . the wrong guard
issue[s] the challenge" (p. 43)--a contemporary military manuals shows the
pre-emptive challenge to be quite normal (Edelman 2002)--and Menzer thinks that
Hamlet's "shall I couple hell?" puns on 'shall I have sex with hell'
and he cites the OED entry for "couple" meaning 'come together
sexually' without noticing that this entry is specifically intransitive
(for reflexive) and Hamlet's usage is definitely transitive (p. 45). A choice
ambiguity comes near the end: "As the first quarto is nearly 1,600 lines
briefer than F1 Hamlet, there is scant material unique to that text"
(p. 46); who can tell which text he means? In the citations of authority, Robert
E. Burkhart's book loses part of its title ("designed for") and R. A.
Foakes is wrongly credited with sole editorship of the standard edition of
Henslowe's Diary (R. T. Rickert was of course he co-editor).
Jean R. Brink adds to our knowledge of the stationers
William Ponsonby and Robert Waldegrave (not actually "Shakespeare's
Stationers", of course) and their rivalry in printing the works of
Philip Sidney (2001). Terri Bourus argues that Q1 Hamlet is not a
piracy because the men involved in printing it would not do that, and we can
account for the printing of Q1 and Q2 with simple bibliographical knowledge of
Nicholas Ling, Valentine Simmes, and James Roberts (2001). Bourus's
knowledge of the printing industry is not always perfect: she claims that the Stationers'
Company charter "confined printing, though not bookselling, to the City of
London with the exception of the university cities of Oxford and Cambridge"
(p. 206). In fact it was not the cities of Oxford and Cambridge that were
allowed have printing presses, it was just the university presses that were
allowed, and more importantly this was not in the company charter of 1557 but
the Star Chamber act of 1586, which also tightened up licensing. Bourus has
considerable biographical knowledge about particular stationers, but is not
always able to marshal it into an argument and has not avoided some egregious
errors, such as claiming that puritans did not go to the theatre (p. 210).
Bourus thinks that plague closure of the theatres in 1603 probably hurt sales of
Q1 Hamlet (p. 216) but one might just as easily argue that serious
addicts of drama would buy plays to get their fix, and she speculates that
during plague closure from March 1603 until April 1604 Shakespeare revised Hamlet
into something that was unperformable (p. 217), as I suppose he might were he
thinking of a readerly market. Shakespeare might have offered this long version
to Roberts, who would again have approached Ling and the readerly potential of
this version would have been apparent to them, but they would have worried about
hurting sales of Q1 which still had not sold out (p. 218) At this point Bourus
argues that the theatres being closed would have stimulated the demand for
printed plays, but earlier she argued the opposite: "It seems reasonable to
speculate that sales of this book [Q1 Hamlet] would have been below average, since
Q1's release date coincided with the outbreak of the great plague of 1603"
(p. 216). Bourus thinks that Roberts and Ling would have destroyed unsold Q1's
(to help sales of Q2), which is why there is only one extant. Roberts gave
Ling's compositor the new Shakespeare manuscript, plus a copy of Q1 to help
where the manuscript was hard to read, which is why, as we know, Q2 follows Q1
in some accidentals in the first act. The compositorial errors in Q2 (by a man
who did not make many errors in other work) probably show that the work was
hurried, as we might suspect because with Q1 suppressed, Ling needed the money
(p. 220). This is an inherently implausible conjecture: Ling suppresses his own text
to increase the market for a new version, which is then mangled because he is in
a hurry because he has lost the income from the first one. Bourus concludes that
Ling and Roberts were respectable men with professional relations to the playing
companies, and they would not have got involved in piracy, and Simmes, although
he got in trouble, did high standard work so it is unlikely he would have done
Q1 if it were mangled text; Q1 and Q2 are just different versions of
Shakespeare's play. This is reasonable enough as a conclusion, but since the
claim that 'bad' quartos are piracies is no longer commonly made, it is
somewhat unnecessary.
The final piece in Analytical and Enumerative
Bibliography is a sequence of explanatory and emendatory notes on the Folio Henry
5 by Thomas L. Berger and George Walton Williams (2001). The prologue
says "O pardon: since a crooked Figure may / Attest in little place a
Million, / And let vs, Cyphers to this great Accompt, / On your imaginarie
Forces worke" (TLN 16-19, 1.Pro.15-8). A "crooked Figure" is
usually taken to mean zero (the cipher), but as Gary Taylor notes in his Oxford
Shakespeare edition of the play, the word "crooked" nowhere else means
a full circle. Some critics have argued that the "crooked Figure" is a
one, which did have some finishing dashes that made it not a simple down stroke
but a zig-zag. In The Winter's Tale Polixenes says "And therefore,
like a cipher, / Yet standing in rich place, I multiply / With one 'We thank
you' many thousands more" (1.2.6-8) and since a zero cannot go on the left
end of a number, Shakespeare must think of the "rich place" as the
right-side of a number and hence the "little place" of Henry 5
must be the left-side. In King Lear, the Fool's "Now thou art an 0
without a figure. I am better than thou art, now. I am a fool; thou art
nothing" (1.4.174-6) distinguishes the "figure" from the zero,
and Henry 5 does so too ("And let us" not "So
let us") and there was indeed a "learned tradition", that zero
is not a number and elsewhere in Shakespeare "figure" and
"cipher" are contrasted. In all this, Berger and Williams are reading
"O pardon" as an exclamation, not as a form of 'Pardon the O' as
Humphrey Tonkin did (2000) and they not consider the force of Ernst
Gombrich's suggestion that "wooden O" means 'wooden zero' (2000).
In the prologue's "For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our Kings, /
Carry them here and there: Iumping o're Times" (TLN 29-30, 1.Pro.28-9) the
audience might be said to carry its thoughts (imperative) or perhaps the thoughts
are said to carry the kings (indicative). Berger and Williams decide that it is
perhaps better for line 29 to be, like line 28, indicative and thus for both to
contrast with lines 1-27 where the principal verbs are imperative. In "'Gainst
him whose wrongs gives edge unto the Swords. / That makes such waste in briefe
mortalitie" (TLN, 174-5, 1.2.27-8), it is the swords that make waste, not
the wrongs. The problem is "whose wrongs gives" and the most likely
explanation is that the repeated "-s" in "whose wrongs" made
the compositor add one to "give" too, and perhaps also to
"Sword". In "for God before. / Wee'le chide this Dolphin
at his fathers doore" (TLN 458-9, 1.2.307-8), "God before" could
be a prayer ('God going before') or an oath ('I swear before God'), and Berger
and Williams advise that a prayer better suits the tone of the passage. The act
2 chorus ends with two rhyming couplets (TLN 501-4), violating the pattern of
the other choruses, although the first chorus might have a rhyme on its
penultimate pairing of "supply . . .history" and might be
allowed to be anomalous. But the other three choruses end on a personal note
with the chorus referring directly to the audience rather than the story. The
penultimate couplet of act 2 chorus does this, and its final couplet does not,
so Berger and Williams reckon this final couplet is a non-Shakespearian
addition. For "No, to the spittle goe" (TLN 575, 2.1.71) the usual
emendation to "spital", short for "hospital", makes it a
place free of disease (as in Love's Labour's Lost 5.2.857), whereas the
meaning each of the three times it is used in this spelling in Folio Henry 5
is the opposite, a place of disease, so Berger and Williams think we should
retain F's "spittle" as Shakespeare seems to mean something different
from hospital by it. It is odd that Berger and Williams should think of the
hospital referred to in Love' Labour's Lost as a place free of disease,
since it contains "the speechless sick" and "groaning
wretches" (5.2.837-8), just as modern ones do.
For "feare attends her not" (TLN 917, 2.4.29)
Berger and Williams supply the somewhat obvious gloss that England is unfearful
because she (in the form of her king) is giddy and vain. Emending "Dolph.
For the Dolphin . . . what to him from England? / Exe. Scorne
and defiance, sleight regard, contempt, / And any thing that may not mis-become
/ The mightie Sender, doth he prize you at" (TLN 1010-4, 2.4.117-9) Capell
put a semi-colon after "defiance" since only up to there is Exeter
answering the Dauphin's question; the rest is a sentence with "prize"
its main verb. Taylor, on the other hand, put the semi-colon after
"contempt" because "Scorne . . . contempt" is the
answer. Berger and Williams distinguish the "externally directed"
challenge of "Scorne and defiance" that cannot be the objects of
"prize you at" from the "internally conceived" words that
follow ("slight regard" and "contempt") that can be the
objects of "prize you at". I would have thought that if
you can prize someone at "slight regard" you can prize them at
"scorn", and the waters are muddied here by a spurious negative in
Berger and Williams's prose: "'he does not prize you at scorn and
defiance' is not idiomatic". To Berger and Williams the obvious break is
after "defiance" and Capell's
Gabriel
Egan . com