Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama

H.D. Sykes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136264672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

First Published in 1966. This volume is a series of studies dealing with the authorship of sixteenth and seventeenth century plays. Many of the articles were initially published as part of 'Notes and Queries' and others by the Shakespeare Association and The Modern Language Review. The articles cover works by playwrights such as Shakespeare, Marlow, Peele, Webster, John Ford and Nathaniel Field. It includes an index of notes on the authorship of various Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays.

I

THE PROBLEM OF ‘TIMON OF ATHENS’

IT is generally agreed that Timon of Athens was not wholly written by Shakespeare, and that considerable portions of the text as printed in the First Folio are from some inferior hand. But as to the circumstances of its composition there is much difference of opinion, one school of critics holding that Shakespeare worked over an older drama the remains of which are visible in the inferior portions of the play, the other that Shakespeare was the original author, the inferior portions, on this hypothesis, being passages that have been interpolated in Shakespeare’s text.

The latter theory was in 1874 so vigorously and plausibly presented by Fleay that of late years scarcely a voice has been raised against it. Among recent critics Deighton has adopted it in his admirable introduction to the ‘Arden’ edition of Timon, and still more recently it has been elaborately restated and developed in a careful and exhaustive monograph by an American scholar, Dr. Ernest Hunter Wright.¹ Both these critics assign to Shakespeare a considerably larger portion of the play than is attributed to him by Fleay, but on the main point, that the nucleus of the play is Shakespeare’s and that the text as it stands is distinctly divisible into Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean portions, all three writers concur.

In spite of the apparently convincing arguments that have been adduced in support of this view, a careful study of the text has satisfied me that it is wrong, and that the earlier critics—Delius, Knight, and the Cambridge editors among them—were right in holding that Shakespeare worked over an existing play, or draft of a play. Accordingly my first task will be to demonstrate that there are plain marks of the hand which both Fleay and Wright pronounce to be non-Shakespearean in the parts that they attribute to Shakespeare, and that there is in fact no such cleavage between the Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean portions as they have assumed.

Those who hold that the extant text presents Shakespeare’s revision of an earlier play, and those who believe it to be an alteration and expansion of a Shakespearean Timon, have alike assumed that Shakespeare’s work is associated with that of another dramatist, and of one dramatist alone. I find plain evidence that two authors were concerned in the original play, which Shakespeare revised. It is possible, indeed, that there may have been more than two, but of the presence of two distinct hands other than Shakespeare’s I have no doubt whatever. With the evidence of the composite authorship of the original play, and the identification of its authors, I shall shortly deal. But it is necessary that I should emphasize the importance of the hypothesis that the original draft was itself the work of more hands than one, because this affords an explanation of certain peculiarities of the play that have given rise to much discussion and conjecture—the imperfect co-ordination of certain scenes, the confusion in the names of some of the characters, and other puzzling divergences and contradictions presented by the text. All these can readily be explained on the hypothesis that in Timon of Athens we have an imperfect recast by Shakespeare of a collaborated play.

That Fleay and those who have followed him in the attempt to separate the Shakespearean from the un-Shakespearean parts of Timon are in the main correct there is no reason to doubt. Apart from the fact that much of the verse is of very inferior quality and full of metrical irregularities, there are many passages, both in verse and in prose, feeble in expression and trite in sentiment. Moreover, at the time this play was written Shakespeare had almost discarded rime, and Timon contains a great deal of it, the proportion of riming lines in the verse rising as high as 20 per cent. in certain scenes. If we give to Shakespeare all the great poetry the play contains and all the good blank verse, and to the ‘unknown author’ all the irregular, halting verse, jingling rime, and uninspired prose, it is clear that the division thus made cannot be very far wrong.

But if we are to proceed on Fleay’s assumption that Shakespeare’s is the prior hand, there is something beside the relative aesthetic merit of the different parts of the play to be taken into account in separating Shakespeare’s work from the work that is not his. The portions of the text assigned to Shakespeare must constitute a play complete in itself, or at least the nucleus of a complete play. And it is precisely in reconciling these two considerations, in arriving at a division that will satisfy aesthetic requirements, yet at the same time be compatible with Shakespeare’s authorship of the substance of the play, that the difficulty lies—a difficulty so great that it seems strange that this of itself has not convinced those who have attempted the task of the fundamental error of the assumption that the prior hand was Shakespeare’s.

One or two illustrations of this difficulty may be noted here. On aesthetic grounds Fleay (rightly, as I shall try to show) rejects the prose dialogue between Timon and Apemantus in the first scene as non-Shakespearean, as well as other prose talk between the same characters that occurs later in the play. But Dr. Wright, noting in the ‘Shakespearean’ part of this scene, some hundred lines or so before the cynic appears, a reference to ‘Apemantus, that few things loves better than to abhor himself’ as pointing to the conclusion that Shakespeare was preparing us for his appearance, and further noting that immediately before his entrance (but still in the ‘Shakespearean’ portion) Timon warns his friends that they will ‘be chid’ by Apemantus, finds ‘every reason to believe’ that Shakespeare must have written the ensuing dialogue in which they are ‘chid’. Accordingly Dr. Wright—logically enough if the substance of the play is Shakespeare’s—endeavours to persuade himself and us that this is ‘cleverer’ and ‘more pointed’ than the later Timon-Apemantus dialogues, which (notwithstanding the similarity of their style) he is content to dismiss as spurious. Fleay further rejects the dunning scenes (III. i–iv), finding in them ‘no vestige of Shakespeare’s style’. Here, again, I believe him to be right. But Deighton objects (and, I think, properly objects) that they are essential to the development of the plot—that it is inconceivable that Shakespeare should have shown us Timon turned misanthrope without also showing in detail the process which caused the sudden revulsion. Once more, there is the scene (III. v) in which Alcibiades appears before the Senate, which Fleay also pronounces to be ‘wholly by the vamper’.¹ Dr. Wright agrees, and indeed (whether by a ‘vamper’ or not) it is so poorly written that if any scene is to be discarded as unworthy of Shakespeare it must surely be this. Yet is it possible—on the assumption of Shakespeare’s responsibility for the original play—to deny the force of Deighton’s emphatic protest against its rejection? Is it not, as he says, ‘absolutely necessary, as leading up to the concluding events, as contrasting the two chief characters, and as showing the Senators to be equally ungrateful to both, hard-hearted, unpatriotic, and richly deserving the lofty contempt with which Timon receives their refusal to help him’?

Clearly, if no one has ‘vamped’ or ‘interpolated’ Shakespeare’s play, if on the contrary Shakespeare has revised, and only partly revised, a piece by other hands, these difficulties too will disappear; there...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• I. THE PROBLEM OF ‘TIMON OF ATHENS’
• II. THE AUTHORSHIP OF ‘THE TAMING OF A SHREW ‘THE FAMOUS VICTORIES OF HENRY V’, AND THE ADDITIONS TO MARLOWE’S ‘FAUSTUS’
• III. PEELE’S ‘ALPHOXSUS, EMPEROR OF GERMANY’
• IV. ‘THE SPANISH MOOR’S TRAGEDY’; OR ‘LUST’S DOMINION’
• V. WEBSTER’S ‘APPIUS AND VIRGINIA’: A VINDICATION
• VI. A WEBSTER-MASSINGER PLAY : ‘THE FAIR MAID OF THE INN’
• VII. A WEBSTER-MIDDLETON PLAY : ‘ANYTHING FOR A QUIET LIFE’
• VIII. JOHN FORD’S POSTHUMOUS PLAY : ‘THE QUEEN’
• IX. JOHN FORD THE AUTHOR OF ‘THE SPANISH GIPSY’
• X. NATHANIEL FIELD’S WORK IN THE ‘BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER’ PLAYS
• APPENDIX : NOTES ON THE AUTHORSHIP OF VARIOUS ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PLAYS
• INDEX