Free English Literature Essays - From The Point Of View Of 'Text' And 'Canon', What Is 'Shakespeare'?
In the light of recent scholarly debates, the creation of a definitive boundary for the body of work known as 'Shakespeare' is a complex issue. In the limited confine of an essay, it is necessary to attempt to reduce some of this complexity and so a choice has been made to limit the area of discussion to the best-known and most studied aspects of what we refer to as 'Shakespeare', not Shakespeare the person, nor his other poetry, but his dramatic works. The sonnets and narrative poems are not only less well known, but were also subject to different circumstances of production and have not provoked the same controversies and sustained debates concerning their provenance and authority. The editorial practices and critical debates that have been so crucial a part of producing Shakespearean dramatic texts over the last four centuries have not impinged so radically on other parts of Shakespeare's work and therefore it seems pertinent to focus attention on the plays.
It is necessary to take a historical view of both text and canon in any discussion of Shakespeare, as there are clearly discernable differences in what has constituted the text and canon of Shakespeare over time. By considering first the development of the canon and then the ways in which textual issues have been approached over time, it is possible to come to a view which simultaneously illustrates the background to current issues and debates and highlights the fact that, even with the most up-to-date scholarship, it is dangerous to be complacent about the notion of arriving at any conclusion at all. What the past often demonstrates is that present dogmas are a product of their historical moment, contingent and malleable in the light of future knowledge.
In the First Folio in 1623, John Heminge and Henrie Condell asserted:
'as where (before) you were abus'd with diuerse stolne, and surreptitous copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors, that expos'd them: euen those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceiued the.'
This is the first claim to a canonical version of Shakespeare, both refuting the legitimacy of the previously published quartos and attempting to set a terminal number on the works by stating that 'all the rest' are herein contained. Here were thirty-six plays: all of those now commonly looked upon as 'Shakespeare', with the exception of Pericles. Whilst it can be argued that Heminge and Condell's statement may have been publishers' hype, a clever marketing ploy to advertise the best and most complete version of the plays, it would, nonetheless be dangerous to dismiss the testimony of two of Shakespeare's close and long-standing professional associates. This is the best testimony from contemporary sources that remains to us. However, when the Third Folio was published in 1664, a further seven plays were added to the original thirty six, on the grounds that they had been published in quarto form with Shakespeare or by 'W.S.' on their title pages. These title page attributions are classified as 'external' evidence of authorship and although subsequent editions of Shakespeare's works expunged all but Pericles, the foundation of the continuing debate about the Shakespeare canon had been laid. This so-called 'Shakespeare Apocrypha' comprised The London Prodigal, A Yorkshire Tragedy, Sir John Oldcastle, Locrine, Thomas, Lord Cromwell, and The Puritan.
Later discussions of what might legitimately belong to the Shakespearean canon were based on 'internal', or stylistic evidence and on these grounds The Two Noble Kinsmen, Edward III, Edmond Ironside, Arden of Faversham, The Birth of Merlin and The Book of Sir Thomas More have now joined the debate. However, with increasing attention being given to stylistic evidence, some of those plays that had been safely uncontested since their inclusion in the First Folio became subject to scrutiny. In the late nineteenth century a quasi-scientific method of examining the play texts by quantifying stylistic features led to portions of the First Folio (and sometimes whole plays, as for example with Titus Andronicus) being attributed to other authors. In the first half of the twentieth century there was a backlash against this form of scholarship and those who had proposed it came to be know as 'disintegrators'. Yet their work had a lasting influence upon the ways in which scholars approached the plays attributed to Shakespeare. It is now a commonplace in academic circles for the authorship of such plays as Timon of Athens, Pericles, I Henry VI and even Macbeth to be discussed in terms of stylistic inconsistencies and collaborative authorship. In championing the notion of collaborative authorship, the 'disintegrators' therefore pointed towards two important aspects of modern scholarship: stylometrics and theatre history.
Now, often aided by computer technology, the practice of 'stylometrics' is undergoing a revival, as exemplified by Hope's study The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays (1994), which takes a 'socio-linguistic approach' to quantifying stylistic markers (such as the auxiliary 'do') within the plays. By this means, Hope has contributed to the authorship debates around the apocryphal texts as well as arriving at what he regards as a definitive conclusion that Shakespeare collaborated with Fletcher on Henry VIII (All Is True). Taylor's study of I Henry VI also provides convincing evidence that Shakespeare and (possibly) three others were involved in the creation of this play. As for Pericles, it has been proposed that 'a variety of evidence points to George Wilkins as [Shakespeare's] probable collaborator.'
The Book of Sir Thomas More is a play that has survived in manuscript form, never having been published (or, in all possibility, even produced on stage) because of having met with the ill favour of the Master of Revels, the Renaissance censor. The chief reason why this manuscript has become so celebrated is that one of the five different sets of handwriting that it contains is widely supposed to be Shakespeare's (Hand D). Although some scholars still dispute the attribution of handwriting, the play is usually taken to be concrete of Shakespeare's work as a collaborative artist. This chimes with the current acceptance that early modern play production was a collaborative enterprise and that playwrights were often engaged in groups to work on a new play or to adapt and update an old one.
Since Greg's work in collecting and publishing the theatrical documents of Philip Henslowe and E.K. Chambers's work on Elizabethan stage history in the first quarter of the twentieth century, much scholarship has been devoted to the study of the conditions of early modern theatrical production. In 1971, Bentley produced a seminal book on the the dramatist in Shakespeare's time in which he stated, 'collaboration between two or more dramatists, especially professional dramatists, was a common method of composition in the greatest days of English drama.' His conclusion is taken up in Documents of the Rose Playhouse, where Rutter comments:
The working habits of these playwrights are displayed in the pages of Henslowe's loan accounts with the Admiral's Men and Worcester's Men where one discovers that the typical Rose play was a collaboration involving sometimes as many as five playwrights who frequently submitted their work piecemeal and who rarely occupied themselves on one play fro more than a month.
More recently, Masten has also asserted that 'collaboration was the Renaissance English theatre's dominant mode of textual production.' This view, originally advanced by theatre historians, is now serving to illuminate the textual studies that surround the debates about the Shakespeare canon.
The collaborative and theatrical nature of Shakespeare's working life and the evidence of it in his dramatic texts had been, to a great extent, expunged during the four hundred years since the publication of the First Folio text. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, subsequent editions were altered according to editorial and public taste. As time went on, the central purpose of this process was, firstly, the sanitizing and improving of the text in line with the aesthetic principles of the Enlightenment era and, secondly, the adoption of the figure of Shakespeare in the Romantic mould as a solitary genius. Editions of Shakespeare that appeared during the eighteenth century brought his work from the public sphere of the theatre to the private, domestic space of the study. In 1725, an edition was edited by Alexander Pope, a prominent poet in his own right, who 'repressed the theatricality of the plays in favor of their readerliness.' In 1773-4, Garrick's complete acting edition was published by Bell, a work whose aim was 'retrospectively to project [its] own civilized standards onto Shakespeare's work', thus accomplishing 'the final salvation of Shakespeare from his own vulgar dramaturgy.' The theatrical origins and conditions of play production were thus veiled from view for subsequent generations. Furthermore, the playwright became the subject of a post-Enlightenment imagination which has constructed the image of 'the author standing above and beyond'. This image owes much to the Romantic construct of the solitary, heroic artist and for two centuries it has served to suppress the contrary fact that a shareholder in the Globe theatre, as Shakespeare was, was part of a collective and collaborative commercial enterprise.
During the nineteenth century, Shakespeare editing entered the realm of academic scholarship and this tradition was taken up in the early part of the twentieth century by a group of scholars who had a profound effect upon the development of Shakespeare scholarship, particularly in the field of textual and bibliographic studies. The endeavour embarked upon by J. Dover Wilson, A.W. Pollard, R. B. McKerrow and W.W. Greg instigated the creation of a set of theoretical criteria which could be used to judge the authenticity of the many alternative versions of Shakespeare's work. They took not only the First Folio but also the quarto versions of a significant number of Shakespeare's plays that had been published during and just after his lifetime. Their objective was to identify the version with greatest authority, based on the supposition that the 'original' version of the play, before it had been exposed to theatrical or printed production, would be that closest to the author's intention. Their editorial purpose was therefore to discover a version of the play that was closest to the author's manuscript and to use this as the basis for their work. This editorial practice, which came to be known as New Bibliography, led to an explosion of interest in the significance of textual details such as stage directions, speech prefixes and spelling and also the practices of printing house personnel during the early modern period. They were interested in how misprints and errors came to be printed and why different copies of the same book contained print variations. The New Bibliography went on to dominate the editing of Shakespeare's text right up to the nineteen eighties.
In 1935, McKerrow had written 'A Suggestion Regarding Shakespeare's Manuscripts' in which he argued that many of the puzzling irregularities of the early modern printed texts, where stage directions and speech prefixes appear ambiguous, show evidence of the author's manuscript:
Is it not natural that, in his first draft at any rate, he should at times follow the practice of the novelist ... distinguishing his characters just as and when they needed to be distinguished ... calling them by their functions ... or their peculiarities ... and not troubling himself about any formal inconsistency?
McKerrow also proposed that theatre personnel, whose chief interest was in the smooth production of the play, would attempt to eliminate such anomalies and ambiguities and would make their own additions to the text which reflected the necessities of performance and the actor's needs.. Greg went on the expand this idea by positing two alternative sources of the printer's copy text: the author's 'foul papers' and the theatrical 'prompt-book'.
The editorial work of McKerrow and Greg and those, prominent among whom was Fredson Bowers, who followed them depended upon a meticulous study of the minutiae of the printed texts. A huge body of information was subsequently collected by scholars such a Charlton Hinman, whose study of The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, published in 1963, 'propelled him to the forefront of Shakespearean bibliography and left him without a rival as the foremost living authority on the First Folio'. Such was the domination of the New Bibliography that, from the textual point of view, most of what twentieth century readers knew of Shakespeare was based upon its principles of selection and conflation. Each editor produced a single, privileged text that, to a greater or lesser extent, concealed the inconsistencies of the original printed texts.
Crucial to the New Bibliography was the idea that authorial intention lay behind the 'foul papers', before they were altered by the process of theatrical production. Yet authorial intention is an ideal whose value has been disputed by both literary critics and editors for over half a century, particularly since the publication of Wimsatt and Beardsley's essay 'The Intentional Fallacy'.
While many literary critics came to believe that the possibility of recovering an author's intentions is both impossible and irrelevant, bibliographers and textual scholars continued in their pursuit of authorial intention. Tanselle argued that the editor 'has undertaken a task of historical research, and his goal must necessarily be the recovery of the words which the author actually wrote.' He went on to point out that editorial practices are fundamental to literary criticism because those critics who claim to dismiss considerations of authorial intention often base their work on editions that have been produced with authorial intention in mind. Jerome M. McGann observes the 'passivity' of literary critics when they accept without question the texts as presented to them by editors about whose practices and motives they are ignorant. This paradox is expressed by Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass:
While editors examined and defended their choices, critics tended simply to assume the established status of the texts they used. In recent years the two dominant modes of reading Shakespeare - formalism and historicism - have received the text at hand on faith ... Both forms of criticism have taken for granted the identity of their object without realizing how that assumption subverts their very approach.
Whilst de Grazia and Stallybrass seem to agree with Tanselle on this point, the conclusion of their argument differs. Tanselle acknowledges the difficulties involved in discovering authorial intention, when no recorded expression of it exists, but he nonetheless argues that the editor's role is to recover the abstract 'work' of literature that lies behind the 'text' as it has been handed down in printed form:
If, as readers, we are interested in the verbal works that their producers intended, we must constantly entertain the possibility of altering the texts we have inherited. Those texts, being reports of works, must always be suspect.
As this quotation illustrates, the argument of authorial intention as posited by Tanselle and as practiced by the New Bibliographers, led to a distrust of the printed text and it was this perceived distrust of the texts and the willingness of editors to 'entertain the possibility of altering' them that, during the nineteen eighties, drove a new move to reject the practices of editors who were thought to be 'setting art above its material manifestation'.
In 1982, Randall McLeod attacked the 'extensive rationales of text and mind-numbing collations' that were characteristic of scholarly editing. He sought to refute the way in which New Bibliography created a singular, correct reading, deemed to be the author's final intention, arguing instead that 'multiple authority is richness'. McLeod's suggestion, since taken up by many others, has changed the practice of editing - now unediting - Shakespearean texts. Scott McMillin argues that New Bibliography's futile attempt to return to the perceived purity of authorial intention erases all traces of the complexities of transmission of a play text and denies the reality and purpose of the text as a theatrical document. Paul Werstine has also condemned the work of New Bibliography as 'overly simplistic' and 'reductive', while de Grazia and Stallybrass illustrate this trend in their rejection of the idea that there exists 'some ideal "original" behind the text'. Instead, they argue that the early texts are a collection of opaque material objects, whose very materiality yields meaning through their 'historical situatedness'. Kastan also argues that when the texts are no longer subjugated by notions of authorial intention they become 'the most compelling witnesses to the complex conditions of their production'.
These arguments have had a practical effect on publications of Shaekspearean texts. Since the publication of two texts of King Lear (The History of King Lear, based on the 1608 quarto, and The Tragedy of King Lear, based on the 1623 folio)in the Complete Oxford Shakespeare of 1986, a new disintegration has set in. The forthcoming Arden Hamlet (due out in March 2006) will be published in two volumes: 'an edited text of the second quarto', with folio variants and 'a second volume, of modernized, edited texts of the first quarto and Folio.'
As indicated in the opening paragraph, any discussion of the text and canon known as 'Shakespeare' must concern itself with boundaries: what is included and what is excluded? Although it might be considered that the New Bibliography was engaged in excluding textual variants in a bid to create a single, privileged text, nonetheless its meticulous attention to the details contained in all the texts and its move to reveal the 'editorial apparatus' (as seen in, for example, the Arden publications) accounting for where and how selections are made, have greatly added to knowledge and awareness of early modern printing and publication. This collection of textual and contextual knowledge has undoubtedly been a contributory factor in enabling a move towards the greater inclusiveness which marks the latest innovation of publishing multiple versions of the plays. The current availability of internet access to, for example, the quartos held in the British Museum and the First Folio held at the Folger Institute can only serve to expand the view of what, in textual terms, is meant by 'Shakespeare'. The two-pronged attack adumbrated by W.W. Greg's editorial and textual work together with his collection of historical documentary evidence concerning the day-to-day workings of the Renaissance theatre came to fruition at the close of the twentieth century. The study of the historical evidence of theatrical working conditions and practices in early modern London which has, at least in part, been stimulated by the Globe reconstruction has contributed to a deeper understanding of the material conditions of play production as well as the writing and printing of play texts. In this environment, 'Shakespeare' is seen as the product of a particular historical moment and particular social conditions. This knowledge puts Shakespeare in the context of his fellow writers and actors and the 'canon' of the plays is now accepted to contain not just the hand of Shakespeare, but also the contributions of some of his co-writers as well as annotations contributed by theatrical personnel and other actors. Current knowledge reveals that 'Shakespeare' as it is now known is not the pure product of a single man. Instead, it has come to mean the collection of traces left by writers, book-keepers, actors, scribes, printers and editors that reveal the truly cooperative nature of theatrical production and this inclusive view has also expanded the modern understanding of what 'Shakespeare' is.
As is evident from the consideration of past understandings of what 'Shakespeare' is, the emphasis reflects the time. In the Enlightenment period, taste and aesthetic predominated in views of Shakespeare, while the Romantics emphasised the sublime artistry of the poet. In this respect, it is perhaps true that the late twentieth century has produced a 'Shakespeare' for its own time: a more democratic, less dogmatic construct which allows the voice from the periphery to be heard. Current thinking gives a place to those who were previously over-looked and marginalized and their contributions to 'Shakespeare' have been included too. It is impossible to know what the future holds, but it seems certain that 'Shakespeare' will continue to be moulded by the preoccupations of future generations, making him truly 'not of an age, but for all time!'
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
Shakespeare, William, The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile (New York: Norton, 1996).
Secondary Sources
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Blayney, Peter, 'Introduction to the Second Edition' in The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile (New York: Norton, 1996).
de Grazia, Margreta and Peter Stallybrass, 'The Materiality of the Shakespeare Text', Shakespeare Quarterly, 44:3 (1993), 255-283.
Dobson, Michael, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
Hope, Jonathan, The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Kastan, David Scott, Shakespeare and the Book, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Masten, Jeffrey, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
McGann, Jerome J., Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
McKerrow, Ronald B., 'A Suggestion Regarding Shakespeare's Manuscripts', Review of English Studies, 11 (1935), 459-465.
McLeod, Randall (under the pseudonym Random Cloud), 'The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos', Shakespeare Quarterly, 33:4 (1982), 421-431.
McMillin, Scott, 'The Othello Quarto and the "Foul-Paper" Hypothesis', Shakespeare Quarterly, 51:1 (2000), 67-85.
Proudfoot, Richard, Shakespeare: Text, Stage and Canon (London: Thomson Learning, 2001).
Rutter, Carol Chillington, Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, second edition 1999).
Sanders, Norman, 'Shakespeare's Text' in Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. by Stanley Wells (Oxford, 1990).
Tanselle, G. Thomas, Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983).
Tanselle, G. Thomas, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).
Taylor, Gary, Reinventing Shakespeare (London: Hogarth Press, 1990).
Wells, Stanley, et al. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
Werstine, Paul,'Hypertext and Editorial Myth', Early Modern Literary Studies, 3.3 / SI 2 (1998), 2.1-19, Shakespeare, William, The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile (New York: Norton, 1996), p.7.
