The Authentic Shakespeare

and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage

Stephen Orgel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317796213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

In this lavishly illustrated book, one of the most important and influential scholars of the Renaissance stage brings together essays that have changed the way we think about the age of Shakespeare. His subjects are varied and interconnected: the theater as social phenomenon, the development of the stage as an architectural presence and a cultural institution, the changing use of setting and costume, the changing status of the acting profession, the complex relation of theater to the political life of the age. Most of all, The Authentic Shakespeare is about how the modern constructs the past, how the texts that were performed on the Elizabethan stage became the books and editions that are, for our time, Renaissance drama. Many essays in The Authentic Shakespeare have become classics. Collected here for the first time, they essential reading for students of the Renaissance stage and the history of the book.

1

What Is a Text?

MODERN SCIENTIFIC BIBLIOGRAPHY began with the assumption that certain basic textual questions were capable of correct answers: that by developing rules of evidence and refining techniques of description and comparison the relation of editions of a work to each other and to the author’s manuscript could be understood, and that an accurate text could thereby be produced. Behind these assumptions lies an even more basic one: that the correct text is the author’s final manuscript, which is sometimes (though usually not in Renaissance bibliographical practice) interpreted to mean the last printed edition published during the author’s lifetime.

We assume, in short, that the authority of a text derives from the author. Self-evident as it may appear, I suggest that this proposition is not true: in the case of Renaissance dramatic texts it is almost never true, and in the case of non-dramatic texts it is true rather less often than we think.

What scientific bibliography has taught us more clearly than anything else is that at the heart of our texts lies a hard core of uncertainty. I want to consider the implications of this not so much for editorial practice as for our whole notion of the nature of the materials we are dealing with—the structuralist’s question “what is a text?” has a particular force when it is applied to the texts of Renaissance plays. The two works that bear most directly on my subject are E. A. J. Honigmann’s The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text (1965) and G. E. Bentley’s The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time (1971), books whose implications seem to me far more radical and far-reaching than has generally been recognized.

I shall start with the second of these books. Bentley makes it clear how much the creation of a play was a collaborative process, with the author by no means at the center of the collaboration. The company commissioned the play, usually stipulated the subject, often provided the plot, often parceled it out, scene by scene, to several playwrights. The text thus produced was a working model, which the company then revised as seemed appropriate. The author had little or no say in these revisions: the text belonged to the company, and the authority represented by the text—I am talking now about the performing text—is that of the company, the owners, not that of the playwright, the author. This means that if it is a performing text we are dealing with, it is a mistake to think that in our editorial work what we are doing is getting back to an author’s original manuscript: the very notion of “the author’s original manuscript” is in such cases a figment.

Shakespeare might seem to be an exception, since he was not simply the playwright but also an actor and shareholder in the company—he was literally his own boss. But I do not think he is an exception: I think he was simply in on more parts of the collaboration. I shall return to this and to its implications shortly, but first I want to clarify it with a contrasting example. Ben Jonson provides an excellent control for our notions of Renaissance dramatic texts. Jonson makes a large point out of insisting that the printed versions of his plays are substantially different from the versions that were staged. He complains of the actors’ cuts—other playwrights (including Shakespeare) report interpolations or revisions, with varying degrees of resentment. Sejanus constitutes what we might think of as a classic example for our purposes. The play was first written in collaboration with another playwright; that was the version the actors performed. But in preparing the play for publication, Jonson took control of the text: he replaced his collaborator’s scenes with ones of his own, and added a good deal of new material, consisting largely of historical documentation. He is lavish in praise of his collaborator, but he also (pointedly I would think) doesn’t mention his name, and since there are no other records, we can only speculate about who he was. Jonson here has succeeded in suppressing the theatrical production, and has replaced it with an independent, printed text, which he consistently refers to, moreover, not as a play but as a poem.

This example is, in Jonson’s canon, extreme but not uncharacteristic. Why does he rewrite his plays for publication? Precisely because he hasn’t sufficient authority in the theatrical versions. The only way for Jonson to assert his authority over the text was to alter it and publish it: his authority, that is, lies in the publication.

But even here, we would have to say that the author is a curiously shadowy figure. Let’s move away from drama for a moment, to a situation where the issues might seem to be more clear-cut: the work of professional poets. For the Elizabethan age Spenser is the prime example, and yet Spenser continually asserts that the authority of his text derives not from his genius but from the poem’s subject and patron, the queen. Our tendency is to dismiss this claim as flattery. Flattery it may be, but it cannot be dismissed on that account. As Jonathan Goldberg’s book on Spenser Endlesse Worke (1981) quite brilliantly demonstrates, the question of authority in Spenser’s text is both crucial and profoundly problematic. Similarly, when Ben Jonson says in The Masque of Blackness that he “apted” his invention to the commands of Queen Anne, he is distinguishing the invention of the text from its authority. Spenser and Jonson are the first writers in English to declare their status as professional poets—“laureate poets,” in Richard Helgerson’s excellent term—and it is therefore very important for them to locate the authority of their texts. They both locate it not in themselves, but in their patrons. (Jonson is a more ambiguous case than Spenser, but ambiguous here only means that he wants it both ways.)

It may seem that I am now working with a notion of authority that no longer involves what we ordinarily mean by it when we use it in relation to literature—that the text represents the poet’s mind, voice, intentions (though we tend to be wary about the last of these), and that when we write about, say, The Faerie Queene, we are writing about Spenser. It would be perverse to argue that this is not true, but that is precisely what I am arguing. Let us take another analogy: Michael Baxandall, in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, discusses the documents relating to one of Filippo Lippi’s commissions. Not only is the contract for the painting quite detailed about what is to be included, but a correspondence survives from which it is clear that Lippi sent sketches to the patron for instructions about the composition and colors. Here is another example, from my own work: I was always puzzled about why Inigo Jones regularly did his costume designs in a brown or grey wash, and indicated the colors with annotations—wouldn’t it have made more sense simply to do the paintings in color, so that both masquers and dressmakers could actually see what the costume was going to look like?—out of several hundred surviving drawings, there are only seven in which the color of the costume appears. The answer became clear when I got a look at the notes and letters accompanying the drawings: Jones would do his designs, and then submit them to the queen. The queen chose the colors, and made whatever alterations she wished in the design.

Now: when we write about a Lippi painting or an Inigo Jones drawing, are we really writing about Lippi or Jones? Aren’t we, at the very least, writing about a complex collaboration in which the question of authority bears precisely on our notions of the nature of the artist’s invention?

Let us return to literature and drama. I said that the only way for Jonson to assert his authority over his texts was to publish them, and for Jonson this was a genuinely effective strategy. For most writers, however, the situation was quite different. The authority of the published text was, for the most part, that of the publisher: he owned it; the author’s rights in the work ended with his sale of the manuscript. The publisher was fully entitled to alter the manuscript if he saw fit—the manuscript was his. In this respect the publisher was precisely analogous to the theatrical company or to the recipient of a verse epistle or a manuscript poem; or, to carry the analogy further, into an area where the situation has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance, precisely analogous to the owner of a painting. Once the painting has been sold, we do not believe that the artist has any further rights in it. The owner may cut it down to fit a particular place in his house or a frame he happens to like, may have it repainted to suit his taste, may even (as Lady Churchill did with Graham Sutherland’s very famous portrait of her husband) destroy it, and we do not acknowledge that the artist has any say in the matter. In this last case, I would think the question of authority in the work was especially critical: to believers in the autonomy of the artist, the painting was a Sutherland; but to Churchill, the painting was a version of himself, and he didn’t like it. The authority in this case belonged to the subject/patron just as Spenser says it does in The Faerie Queene.

Now let us consider a text. We have two versions of the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella. The 1590 quarto version reads as follows: “Loving in truth and fain in verse my love to show, / That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain. . . .” The Countess of Pembroke’s folio version reads: “. . . That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain.” How shall we interpret this variation? Is Q’s printer misreading the manuscript? lt seems unlikely— those parentheses would be difficult to miss. Is the Countess then revising? She claims to be printing authentic texts, from her brother’s own papers—does the concept of authenticity perhaps involve making improvements? Or was “she (dear she)” in the original manuscript, and did it seem too irregular or advanced for Q’s editor, and did he improve it? Or were there, perhaps, as in the case of so many Donne poems, two (or more) versions of this sonnet, both Sidney’s, both final, both authentic? The reason it is a mistake to believe we can answer this question is not merely that we cannot in fact do so; it is that it places an anachronistic emphasis on the author.

We return now to Shakespeare. E. A. J. Honigmann, in The Stability of Shakespeare’s Texts, shows quite persuasively that the notion of final or complete versions assumed by virtually all modern editors of Shakespeare is inconsistent with everything we know not only about Renaissance theatrical practice, but about the way writers in fact work. Poets are always rewriting, and there is no reason to think that many of the confusions in Shakespeare’s texts don’t involve second thoughts, or amalgams of quite separate versions of a play. I’d want to go a great deal further than this, but the idea of the basic instability of the text seems to me an absolutely essential one.

I have argued that most literature in the period, and virtually all theatrical literature, must be seen as basically collaborative in nature, and I have said that Shakespeare can be distinguished from most other playwrights only because he was in on more parts of the collaboration. Editors who get this far usually want to go on to argue that Shakespeare’s company wouldn’t have presumed to alter Shakespeare’s text—the play was, after all, written by the boss. I would argue, on the contrary, that all this means is that Shakespeare would have been in on the revisions. Or might have been: think about the text of Macbeth. We believe the opening scenes have been truncated, we know the witches’ songs are by Middleton, and the Hecate scene and a later passage seem also to be non-Shakespearean interpolations for a court performance: if all this is true, where is Shakespeare’s authority? If the changes were made after Shakespeare’s retirement or death, why did the company think that was the right text to include in the folio? I suggest that the case of Macbeth is only an extreme example of the normal procedure. The text we have was considered the best (or “correct”) text of the play at the time the folio was prepared. And if we think of the texts of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, we shall see an even more extreme example, in which the author has become a curiously imprecise, intermittent, and shifting figure, even on the title page. He is referred to in the 1604 first quarto as “Ch. Marl.”, and in the 1616 quarto as “Ch. Mar.”, which, in the one surviving copy, has been expanded by an early owner to read “Marklin.”

To summarize, then: when we make our editions, of Shakespeare or any other dramatist, we are not “getting back to the author’s original text.” We know nothing about Shakespeare’s original text. We might know something about it if, say, a set of Shakespeare’s working notes or rough drafts ever turned up, or if we ever found the text that Shakespeare presented to the company as their working copy. But if we did find such a manuscript, that would be something different from the play—just as different as the printed text of Sejanus is from Jonson’s play. It is a difference in the opposite direction, but I would argue that the degree of difference is probably about the same.

2

What Is a Character?

IN “WHAT IS A TEXT?” I argued for the radical instability of Renaissance dramatic texts, and ended by observing that the dramatic text in its own time was not the play: the text was a script, and it was only where the play started; the play, and its evolution into the texts that have come down to us, was a collaboration between author and actors, with the author by no means the controlling figure in the collaboration. The playwright in the Renaissance theater was an employee of the company, who wrote to order and was paid for piecework. Shakespeare may seem to be an exception, in the sense that he was, almost uniquely, his own boss, an actor and shareholder in the company as well as its leading playwright; but this probably only means that he was in on more parts of the collaboration than other playwrights were.

Renaissance plays are inevitably, for us, books, and they therefore have the air of finality that publication, in this case quite incorrectly, carries with it for our age. My claim, however, was not limited to drama, but was ultimately a claim about the Renaissance attitude toward texts as a whole, and part of the argument depended on observations about printing house practice, which practically guaranteed that no copy of any Renaissance book would be identical with any other copy: since proof corrections were made while printing was in progress, and both corrected and uncorrected sheets were indiscriminately bound up together in the book, there was never any single ‘final’ copy. The assumption that dramatic texts were unstable, therefore, is related not only to Renaissance theatrical practice, but also to assumptions about texts in general, and particularly about books, which, to summarize very briefly, did not require them to represent the true, or final, or accurate, or authentic text of the work they presented. This may seem like an exaggerated claim, but that is because we come to the matter with post-enlightenment assumptions of correctness—it would, after all, have been perfectly simple for Renaissance printers to stop the press for the ten minutes it took to proofread a single sheet; the fact that this was not considered necessary or even desirable is relevant to the basic question of what a book was conceived to be. This is not to say that there was no concept of textual authority, but only that the book was not assumed to be embodying that.

This argument has implications for the concept of character in drama as well. One way of thinking of character is simply as part of the text. This of course is the original meaning of the word: both a written account of a person, and the letters—characters—in which the account is written. When I was a student learning how to deal with literary texts, William Empson vanquished the sentimental hordes at one blow by pointing out that we cannot dispose of ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: / They kill us for their sport’ (4.1.36–7) by remarking that it represents the view of the crude and prosaic Gloucester, rather than that of the sensitive and perceptive Cordelia or Lear. Plays, Empson observed, have linguistic and poetic structures, and characters are not independent of those structures. The notion that the gods make fools of us is one that runs throughout King Lear, and is not dependent on the view of any particular character.¹ Characters, that is, are not people, they are elements of a linguistic structure, lines in a drama, and more basically, words on a page. This argument had, for some graduate students at Harvard in the 1950s, a wonderfully liberating effect.

It is, of course, very difficult to think of character in this way, to release character from the requirements of psychology, consistency and credibility, especially when those words on a page are being embodied in actors on a stage. But it is arguably a difficulty that drama itself accepts, indeed, embraces, and even explicitly at critical moments acknowledges. When Coriolanus angrily rejects Rome with the words ‘There is a world elsewhere’ (3.3.136), he imagines a space outside his play, a world he can control. He declares his intention, in effect, of writing his own script, invokes to himself the imagination of the playwright and the authority of the actors. The remainder of the play is in every sense designed to prove him wrong, designed to prove that no character can escape his play.

It may seem self-evident that in drama, the character is the script, though it is a truism that drama nevertheless also ta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• A Retrospective Preface
• 1. What Is a Text?
• 2. What Is a Character?
• 3. What Is an Editor?
• 4. Acting Scripts, Performing Texts
• 5. The Poetics of Spectacle
• 6. The Spectacles of State
• 7. The Renaissance Poet as Plagiarist
• 8. Gendering the Crown
• 9. The Play of Conscience
• 10. Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama
• 11. Macbeth and the Antic Round
• 12. Prospero’s Wife
• 13. Marginal Jonson
• 14. Tobacco and Boys
• 15. The Authentic Shakespeare
• Notes
• Index