Year's Work in English Studies 2000: Shakespeare: Editions and Textual Studies
Six major critical editions appeared this year. For the Arden third series: King Henry the Eighth edited by Gordon McMullan, King Henry VI Part One edited by Edward Burns, and The Merry Wives of Windsor edited by Giorgio Melchiori; for the Oxford Shakespeare: Richard III edited by John Jowett, Romeo and Juliet edited by Jill Levenson, and King Lear edited by Stanley Wells. Of these, Melchiori's The Merry Wives of Windsor was not received in time to be included in this survey and will be reviewed next year. Several New Cambridge Shakespeare editions were published in 1999 and 2000 and these will be reviewed together in next year's survey.
McMullan's introduction to Henry VIII runs to nearly 200 pages, nearly half of which is a "Cultural History" constituting virtually a monograph on the play's meanings since its first performance. It should surprise no-one, observes McMullan, that the play (usually subtitled All is True) is only a partial slice of the truth: only 2 of the 6 wives are shown, and the play foregrounds engagements with the political truth of its own time and of Henry's time. Until recently, because "the watchword of criticism was 'unity'" (p. 4), those who liked the play tended to argue that it is all by Shakespeare, and those who disliked it blamed collaboration. Since the mid-1970s, however, it has been possible to read the play without the critical strait-jacket of 'unity', and to see its contrary impulses ("at once celebratory and cynical about display" p. 5) and its representation of history as inherently a contradictory narrative.
Of the performance that burned down the first Globe playhouse, McMullan writes that "It is described in one of the reports as a 'new' play" but then he goes on to quote two reports in which it is said to be new (pp. 9, 58-59). McMullan thinks it had previously been performed at the Blackfriars because of the irresistible resonances of using the very hall where Katherine's trial had taken place, and because Henry mentions Blackfriars explicitly (2.2.139). If so, perhaps the big spectacles in the Folio text were added when it moved to the Globe which, unlike the Blackfriars, had room for them (p. 10). The second recorded performance (in which it is called "K. Hen. 8") was at Globe in 1628, sponsored by the Duke of Buckingham to bolster his popularity; his doing this makes sense only if one sees that he got the play's political irony. McMullan's account of the stage history documents the increasing attention to spectacle in the eighteenth- and especially the nineteenth-century productions, which entirely subordinated the words. John Downes's claim that Thomas Betterton had his Henrician acting instructions from William Davenant, who had them from John Lowin, who had them from Shakespeare, suggests that Lowin (not Richard Burbage) performed Henry in 1613, setting a precedent for productions which show "Henry in the prime of his years" (18n3). Burbage was 45 to Lowin's 37, and perhaps that is indeed enough of a difference.
The modern stage history of the play McMullan begins at 1916, when Herbert Beerbohm Tree's pre-war production toured the United States and was deemed a relic of a bygone age. Even in the twentieth century the play was never done in modern dress and was still used as propaganda. The attention on 'truth' and 'authenticity' shifted from the period in which the play is set (which the nineteenth-century spectacles wanted to recover) to the period in which it was first performed. The BBC TV version is, ironically, low-budget and 'inward' rather than spectacularly expansive, thus breaking with the stage tradition. Terence Gray's 1931 production was irreverent towards the history and debunked it, albeit in the name of a different kind of 'authenticity': the original performance effect. Gray's method was not to recreate the original staging, but to find a modern way of doing what the original did. The characters were dressed like playing card figures and behaved like marionettes, although for the final moment Gray effectively rewrote Shakespeare: the baby turns out to be a cardboard doll of Elizabeth 1 aged 60 that is thrown into the audience. Rather than find subversiveness within the play, Gray worked against it to be radical. Gray's alienation effect has influenced three subsequent Stratford production, including Tyrone Guthrie's in 1949 where the duchess of Norfolk sneezed noisily during Cranmer's address in honour of the baby Elizabeth (p. 48). For the 1996 Royal Shakespeare Company production, Greg Doran's awareness of his predecessors made him want the play's ceremony to be taken 'straight' in order to show its emptiness, rather than have it undermined before it was even seen. Doran undermined the spectacle subtly by providing the rainstorm mentioned at 1.1.90, and by a persistent whispering of courtiers even when they should be attentive. McMullan believes that audiences did not understand these devices, expecting either unironic celebration or else entire debunking (p. 55n1).
Returning to the play's first contexts, McMullan gives a splendid reading of Henry Wotton's account of the burning of the Globe as an example of the familiar Reformation genre of comedia apocalyptica (pp. 60-1). The play is situated between "celebration of James's Reformation inheritance and the suggestion that that Reformation had never truly taken place". The important historical context of 1613 was that prince Henry, a great hope for a Reformed Europe, was gone and protestant hopes were transferred to his sister Elizabeth's marriage to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, the most prominent continental protestant ruler (p. 64). The baby Elizabeth would remind the audience of this Elizabeth. The 'truth' of the play (its title and Cranmer's final speech) relates to the "Truth is the daughter of Time" iconography with which Elizabethan associated herself (Truth being the true church liberated from her sister's Catholic influence). The theme of veritas filia temporis was revived by Dekker in The Whore of Babylon and by Middleton in his pageant The Triumphs of Truth. To many protestant Henry 8 was hardly a true protestant reformer because, prior to the break with Rome, he had persecuted protestant heretics. Because of his intemperance (in the senses of immoderation and keeping odd hours) Henry could not be 'Time', so Cranmer (who was to become a protestant martyr under Mary) is a surrogate Father Time to the baby Elizabeth in the final scene (pp. 67-87). Cranmer's reference to Saba (Sheba) in his speech might also reflect badly on Henry, whose extra-marital infidelity is like David's with Bathsheba. Henry was known to be sensitive about this parallel, especially because God's punishment of David is the death of his first child with Bathsheba. This would also have made James 1 uncomfortable, who might also have taken the loss of his son as a divine punishment for his "negligence of the godly cause". The final scene can thus be read as straight celebration of the royal dynasty, or as a criticism of kings Henry and James, and especially the latter for not having "fully understood the nature of his responsibilities towards the continuing Reformation" (pp. 88-93).
Were all this not apparent to the original audience, the play is still unlike a normal history in that it refuses teleology: events are related sequentially but not causally. In a rare lapse into jargon, McMullan writes that the spectators of the Field of the Cloth of Gold are "interpellated by official ceremony" without making clear if he means 'interpellate' in the Althusserian sense or the obsolete archaic sense of 'interrupt'. In place of soliloquies in which the protagonists might reveal their real feelings, this play has the endless reporting of one person's words by another; rumour is all and truth becomes indistinguishable from opinion. When two characters provide almost entirely conflicting accounts of someone's life (as Katherine and her gentleman usher Griffith do about Wolsey), we have no stable truth to fix upon. The same happens with events such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, making the play a powerful reflection on "the way in which truth is debated and established within a culture and particularly within that culture's conceptions of history" (pp. 94-106). Of the genre indeterminacy of the play, McMullan notes that it can be seen as masque-like in using an anti-masque in the penultimate scene with the Porter holding back the lower-class characters, before the masque-like christening. But although the play borrows the masque form, it refuses the monolithic kind of truth purveyed by it. The play has something of the Romance qualities of Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest: multiple-character focus, a supernatural moment (Katherine's vision), it ends with "a redemptive father-and-daughter tableau", and it juxtaposes linear with cyclical time (pp. 108-10). McMullan links these plays as 'late writing': "the idea that authors, towards the ends of their careers, tend to return to patterns associated with their early writings in order to rework them from the perspective of the experience of the intervening years". Of course the play is late Shakespeare, but also early Fletcher. Shakespeare and Fletcher were in the vanguard of new fashionable genre, romantic tragicomedy, which was to dominate the stage beyond the Revolution. Fletcher's early plays draw on or require an audience to be familiar with Shakespeare's plays, and Shakespeare returned the compliment with The Tempest which draws on Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess; Henry VIII draws on Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy. But since the chronologies of the Shakespeare and the Fletcher canons are uncertain, and since Roslyn Knutson has shown that company needs and competitive fashion, not individual creators' tastes, shaped genres, it is unwise to speak of Fletcher influencing Shakespeare or vice versa (pp. 112-16).
One of the sources of Katherine's dream vision was, ironically, Holinshed's report of Anne Bullen's death-dream vision. Indeed, in a number of ways Katherine and Anne are linked by the play in a way which undermines a simple religious reading of the play. Another source of Katherine's dream vision appears to be Elizabeth 1's dream vision in Heywood's If You Know Not Me, which is of course a most strange connection between Bloody Mary's mother Katherine and Anne Bullen's daughter Elizabeth. In her distance from the excesses of Wolsey, Katherine is thus something of a Catholic reformer, nearer to Anne and her Lutherism than to Rome. The movement from reign to reign in England (Henry 8, Edward, Mary, Elizabeth), each of which it is hoped will provide political and religious stability, is thus likened to Henry's restless sequence of wives in search for a son and heir. At the end of his career Shakespeare returned to Roman 'New Comedy', with its elements of clandestine marriage to a lower-class person that turns out to be non-transgressive (as in The Winter's Tale), and the rediscovery of a person at the end who was thought lost and has special knowledge to contribute, as with Perdita and also with Marina in Pericles. Henry VIII is in this pattern: Henry marries Anne secretly with Wolsey providing the necessary paternal disapproval of the marriage. McMullan points out the parallels between Henry VIII and Plautus's Amphitryo which tells the story of Jupiter (in the likeness of Amphitryo) sleeping with Alcmena (Amphitryo's husband) and their offspring being the prodigy Hercules. In Henry VIII Henry, initially in disguise, sleeps with Anne and produces the prodigy Elizabeth. There was in fact a tradition of protestant reworkings of Roman comedy, and Henry VIII would have been seen in this light and not as loosely episodic, and many have since claimed. Clandestine sex and marriage is made proper by the outcome (Elizabeth), but--and this is the subversion--it remains tainted by the impropriety. The 'siege' of the penultimate scene is crucial: the specificities of places and clothing speak of 1613 not 1533. This linking of the Henrician to the Jacobean world "creates a dramatic space within which the outcome of the English Reformation is still very much at stake" (pp. 134-46). This extended and highly persuasive reading of the play show McMullan's extraordinary range of historical knowledge couple to an exemplary literary and dramatic sense; the quality of this interpretative work is much higher than in Jay Halio's Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play published in 1999.
Concerning the textual history of the play, McMullan avoids the conventional (and currently controversial) terminology. Rather than calling the copy for the Folio text (our only authority) a promptbook, or even a playbook, he calls it "a score for a stage play" (p. 149). The F copy seems to have been scribal since it uses "ha's'" for "has" and round brackets, neither of which is a Shakespeare or Fletcher habit, and the long stage directions are not in theatre-speak but often drawn directly from Holinshed. McMullan demurs from the view of William Montgomery (for the 1986 Oxford Complete Works) that the direction "Trumpets, Sennet, and Cornets" (2.4.0.1) indicates duplication derived from theatrical annotation; rather, McMullan thinks F's copy might have been, but not necessarily was, used as "prompt copy" (p. 155). McMullan provides a useful table showing the order of composition (with folios and act.sc.line numbers keyed to his own edition) by compositors B and I (called B and A in Foakes's Arden2 edition, but with the same sections assigned to each) and records that Charlton Hinman's machine collation showed no significant press variants for this play (p. 157). Regarding modernization, McMullan decided reluctantly to retain capitalization aristocratic of titles because it reduces confusion for the modern reader, if a little old-fashioned and not like the historians' practice. Indeed, for the purpose of modernization, what counts as archaism can be culturally conditioned: "comptroller" is not considered archaic by Americans and McMullan leaves it alone in the text.
Discussing how the playwrights used (or, in McMullan's phrasing, "read") Holinshed, McMullan again uses the term "interpellate", but this time he glosses it to mean: "call[ing] into being in an apparently natural but in fact constrained way". McMullan says the play does this to the individual audience member, but the syntax obscures that McMullan is in fact making a substantial Althusserian claim that the play calls the audience into being rather than, say, the audience calling the play into being by creating a market for it or by giving it their attention (p. 166). McMullan reports that the Shakespeare scenes follow source (usually Holinshed) more closely than the Fletcher scenes, which interweave more texts (including the Bible); frequently there is subtle subversion as the material is used. When fallen Wolsey speaks of himself as like a little boy whose swam out of his depth buoyed up by "bladders" (3.2.360), some of the audience would be reminded of the prose chronicles which likened Wolsey himself to an inflated bladder fit to burst (p. 172). N. W. Bawcutt's publication of Henry Herbert's records showed that The Birth of Merlin was new in 1622 and hence not, as sometimes though, a source for this play. McMullan explains the unobvious suspicion that some of Henry VIII is not Shakespearian--it is after all in the 1623 Folio--by pointing out that around the same time (the mid-1960s) that E. A. J. Honigmann showed the inherent instability of the Shakespearian texts, G. E. Bentley showed that collaboration was the norm. Since the Stationers' Register indicates that Shakespeare and Fletcher collaborated on Cardenio, and the quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen names them both as its authors, Henry VIII fell under suspicion. McMullan describes the Stationers' Register as the place "in which all plays to be printed were registered" (p. 186), but Peter Blayney has shown that this is not the case (Peter W. M. Blayney 'The Publication of Playbooks', in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds. A New History of Early English Drama, pp. 383-422). McMullan follows Jonathan Hope's division of the work--Shakespeare wrote 1.1, 1.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.2a, and 5.1 and Fletcher the rest--and makes a case for Hope's "socio-historical linguistic" solution of the old stylometric problem that compositorial or scribal intervention in a printed text might be the origin of preferences (such as "ye" for "you" and "'em" for "them") that have traditionally been the means of attribution. Hope uses alternates that scribes and copyists are unlikely to have interfered with, such as relative markers "that" and "which", and auxiliary "do". Of course, as McMullan admits, this is still not perfect: people change their styles over their lifetimes, and in different contexts (such as when collaborating). and, as Jeffrey Masten notes, all drama is impersonation of others' styles of speaking anyway (pp. 187-95).
The Arden3 policy of marking with an asterisk footnotes which discuss deviations from copy is most useful for comparing editorial practice. With only one authoritative early text (F), McMullan's work with the text is naturally confined to creative emendation of what he thinks is erroneous. Mostly his choices are the same as in the Oxford Complete Works of 1986 and in Jay L. Halio's 1999 Oxford Shakespeare edition. At 1.1.219 and 2.1.20 McMullan names the accused plotter as "Gilbert Park" where F has "Gilbert Pecke" because McMullan thinks the underlying copy read "Perke", since this is what Holinshed and Hall have. (This was not really the man's name but a misreading of his occupation, 'clerk'). Halio thought so too and printed "Perke", but the Oxford Complete Works modernized this by dropping the final 'e' to make "Perk". McMullan thinks this is just a variant spelling of "Park", which he uses. Where McMullan is confident that Shakespeare is following his source, he uses it to emend. Thus at 1.1.218, 1.2.162, and 2.1.20 McMullan names "John de la Court" where F has (and both Oxfords kept) "Iohn de la Car"; the Surveyor's testimony comes from Holinshed and its spelling is thus preferred. Where it looks like the dramatists misread Holinshed, McMullan is happy to respect their intention (to follow Holinshed) rather than their act. Thus at 1.2.147-8 McMullan (like the two Oxfords) prints "Nicholas Hopkins. KING What was that Hopkins?" where F has "Nicholas Henton. | Kin. What was that Henton?" because the dramatists confused the place he came from (Henton) with his name. C. J. Sisson, however, argued that the man could also be called Nicholas Henton precisely because he came from Henton (New Readings in Shakespeare, p. 99). At 1.2.164 McMullan prints "Whom after, under the confession's seal" where F has "Whom after vnder the Commissions Seale". The sense demands the word 'confession' and McMullan thinks the four uses of the word 'commission(s)' previously in this scene caused the error, although he does not mention that compositor I set all four of them and is the presumptive cause; McMullan's table of the order of setting helps a reader discover this for himself. Where punctuation strongly effects meaning, McMullan is prepared to be bold. At 3.1.21 he has Katherine comment on the news that two cardinals are coming to see her: "I do not like their coming. Now I think on't, | They should be good men, their affairs as righteous" for F's "I doe not like their comming; now I think on't, | They should bee good men, their affaires as righteous". Halio followed Capell and cited Sisson's argument (New Readings in Shakespeare, pp. 100-1) that if one follows F's stop after "coming", Katherine first says she does not like their coming, then reconsiders since they are after all cardinals, whereas the sense should be 'I don't like this, now I think about it'. Halio and the Oxford Complete Works used a comma after "coming" to avoid a hard stop. McMullan argues that precisely this strange emotional shift ('I don't like this. Oh well, I suppose it is alright since they are cardinals') is right for Katherine at this moment and foreshadows her succumbing to their pressure.
McMullan's choices regarding stage directions are clearly informed by an understanding of the fluidity of the early modern stage and he is prepared to stretch logic to avoid straitjacketing the text. At 5.1.157 the Folio has "Enter Olde Lady. | Gent within. Come backe". For "dramatic economy" McMullan makes this interior gentleman be Lovell who has anyway to come on to be addressed by the king 12 lines later. So, McMullan prints "Enter Old Lady[; LOVELL follows.] | LOVELL (within) Come back!", which produces the mild absurdity of Lovell being onstage (he is included in the entrance direction) and yet speaking 'within'. Surely the solution was to have Lovell speak offstage and then enter. Likewise, for Henry and Butts to spy on the privy council McMullan prints "Enter the KING and BUTTS at a window above" (5.2.18sd) and for Henry's intrusion on the main stage "Enter KING, frowning on them" (5.2.147sd). Between these two entrance directions McMullan prints no exit direction, but rather footnotes that once the curtain is closed above--fully, not partly as other editors have it--the king can come down at any time ready for his surprise entrance to the council chamber. It surprises the privy councillors and the theatre audience too, since they thought he was above. One can see the point of this arrangement, but it is not theatrically consistent to have two entrances directions with no intervening exit, leaving the explanation to the footnote; those using McMullan's script need to know what he wants from his stage directions. Finally in this list of objections, McMullan prints "Do you take the court for Parish Garden?" (5.3.2) where F has "doe you take the Court for Parish Garden". Why not modernize to 'Paris Garden', unless one thinks that a speech impediment is being indicated by the unusual spelling? McMullan's footnote explains Paris Garden as the a bull- and bear-baiting arena near the Globe (otherwise known as the Beargarden), without mentioning that it could just mean the Liberty and Manor of Paris Garden where, in the early sixteenth century, public bearbaiting was held without an arena. Indeed, the Beargarden had the alternative name of Paris Garden precisely because of the association of this area of park with bear baiting, and not because it was situated in the Liberty and Manor of Paris Garden (which, in fact, the Beargarden was not). Bull baiting, on the other hand, was just a part of butchery, not a sport, and there is no reason to think it was done in front of spectators.
In contrast to McMullan's outstanding Arden3 edition of Henry VIII is Edward Burns's edition of Henry VI Part One for the same series, the introduction to which is about half the length. It is traditional when editing a marginal play to make a case for its being more important than the reader might otherwise think. McMullan did this brilliantly, but Burns does not even try. One can also compare Burns's handling of the problem of multi-authored writing of a play for which we have only the Folio text with McMullan's thoroughly theorized attempt at the same. Of the copy for the Folio, Burns thinks that Heminges and Condell probably had 30-year old papers to work from because he is convinced the play had not be revived since its first performance in the early 1590s. (That the epilogue to Henry 5 refers to the events of Henry 6's reign, "Which oft our stage hath shown", makes revival of the first tetralogy to run alongside the second somewhat likely, as does the reprinting of The Contention of York and Lancaster/2H6 and Richard Duke of York/3H6 in 1600.) Burns thinks the reference to a Talbot play in Nashe's Piers Penniless is to 1 Henry 6, and that it is also the "harey the vj" which Henslowe records as new at the Rose on 3 March 1592; hence the play is a prequel to what we now call 2 Henry 6 and 3 Henry 6. As such, it ironizes the known outcomes contained in Parts 2 and Parts 3 by showing the grand ideas by which these 'heroes' lived their lives, and yet the events of Parts 2 and 3 come to pass. As with McMullan's reading, Burns thinks his play "an ironic meditation on what history is, and as such it constantly exposes the gratuitousness of the signs and symbols which allows to think we know history" (p. 6)
Burns notes that refurbishment of the Rose theatre in 1592 was just before 1 Henry 6 premiered and the addition of a stage cover implies that the stage was permanent, whereas hitherto stages may have tended to be temporary to permit bear-baiting. In fact, there is no reason to suppose that animal baiting took place at any playhouse prior to the opening of the Hope in 1614 (Oscar Brownstein 'Why Didn't Burbage Lease the Beargarden? A Conjecture in Comparative Architecture', in Herbert Berry, ed. The First Public Playhouse: The Theatre in Shoreditch 1576-1598, pp. 81-96). As for the suiting of play to venue, Burns notes that Titus Andronicus (which also played at the Rose) and 1 Henry 6 both open with a funeral procession, which suits the Rose's wide shallow stage. Indeed, Burns makes rather contentious assertions about how the stage shape at the Rose influenced the way the audience was addressed and where actors stood, and he cites John Astington's work on the Roxana and Messalina pictures (John H. Astington 'The Origins of the Roxana and Messalina Illustrations', ShSurv 43[1990] 149-69) as supporting his view that the Rose-style tapered stage was "a more standard stage shape, with a longer history, than had been assumed" (p. 12n1). In fact, Astington's articles comes to virtually the opposite conclusion, that these pictures are virtually useless as evidence for contemporary theatres. Theatre history is not Burns's long suit, relying as he does on Christine Eccles book on the Rose which is widely considered to be of little value (The Rose Theatre). Burns makes the surprising claim that a company patron such as Lord Strange would "meet financial losses" incurred by the company (p. 18)--one would like to see the evidence for this--and asserts that "Southwark . . . was exempt from control by the city", which is not quite right. Liberties such as The Clink were exempt, because that is what being a 'liberty' meant, but these could be anywhere including inside the city walls. Burns is not quite in control of his adjectives: the 'end of an era' anxiety in the play, he argues, mirrored the same anxiety regarding "the loomingly predictable end of Elizabeth's reign" (p. 22). He means "looming and predictable", since one can hardly claim that it was predictable in a looming way as distinct from other ways of being predictable. Burns thinks Holinshed was used largely "as a quarry for juicy bits about Joan Puzel" (p. 22n1) which is rather too colloquial and moreover a bad metaphor: quarries are notoriously dry places.
Burns is better when lining up binary opposites. In his reading, the play alters its sources to make a binary of fighters Joan Puzel and Talbot, and this segues into the binarism of Gloucester and York's struggle to control the child king and the country, which links the end of this play to the beginning of The Contention of York and Lancaster/2 Henry 6. The historical Joan always called herself "Jeanne la Pucelle", and 'pucelle' means nubile but also 'whore', especially when spelt 'puzel'. As a gender transgressor, Joan is also a puzel with a pizzle (penis) and a puzzle; she is not a single character but an embodied self-contradiction of saint and a witch (pp. 23-27). From this Burns's makes an excellent 8-term homology: French is to English as Catholic is to Protestant as Magical is to Rational as Female is to Male. This neat pattern is somewhat disturbed by Burns's assertion that the male motif of history is primarily the broken or constrained body (p. 39) which I would rather have thought was a Catholic fixation. As Burns notes, Joan's claim to be pregnant links her to the pregnant virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth (of the Visitation), and Talbot's opposition to her is Protestant opposition to the Catholic cult of the virgin. Of course, the historical Talbot was as Catholic as Joan. When Burns decides to survey the critical debate regarding a particular point he tends to produce big footnotes (for example 48n1 and 72n1) occupying as much as two-thirds of a page; these would be better integrated into the main text or else thinned.
The red and white rose material in 1 Henry 6 is not present in 2 Henry 6 or 3 Henry 6 and this itself is evidence that 1 Henry 6 was written later; were it written first we should expect this material to be followed up in the later plays. However, the red/white rose distinction does appear in the opening-scene stage directions of the quartos of Richard Duke of York/3 Henry 6 ("with white [later red] roses in their hats") but not the Folio text of 3 Henry 6, which could be evidence that the quarto represents Richard Duke of York/3 Henry 6 as it came to be revised after 1 Henry 6 had been rewritten as a prequel, and that the Folio text was printed from authorial papers representing the play as it was originally conceived. Burns observes that no director has presented 1 Henry 6 on its own; rather it is always part of a cycle and usually chopped around to suit the larger pattern. Burns's dating of the play takes the usual form of an argument derived from Robert Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (published September 1592) allusion to a line in Richard Duke of York/3 Henry 6. If we accept that 1 Henry 6 was "new" at Henslowe's Rose on 3 March 1592 (because Henslowe's Diary labels it "ne") it cannot have been written before The Contention of York and Lancaster/2 Henry 6 and Richard Duke of York/3 Henry 6 if the last of these is to be available for Greene's allusion (which depends on knowledge gained by public performance) in September 1592. The six months between March and September are not enough time for all three plays to been written in the order 1, 2, 3 Henry 6, so 2 Henry 6 and 3 Henry 6 must already have been in existence (p. 70). Actually, the pressure of time is even greater than Burns imagines, since a plague closure from 23 June 1592 means that 3 Henry 6 would have to be in performance by then in order for Greene to be able to allude to it in September 1592. Supporting this conclusion, Burns notes the publication of The Contention of York and Lancaster/2 Henry 6 and Richard Duke of York/3 Henry 6 as a matched pair in 1594 and 1595, called "The First Part . . ." and "The True Tragedie . . ." on their titlepages.
What if the label "ne" in Henslowe's Diary doesn't mean 'new', or perhaps only new to his repertory because revived? Burns suggests that the higher cost of entrance for a "ne" play (reflected in higher income in the Diary) might be to cover the expenditure on a new license from the Master of the Revels, but I do not think we can suppose that audiences were concerned with the impresario's outgoings. If Henslowe's "ne" means only revival, we could imagine that 1, 2, and 3 Henry 6 were written as a trilogy, with 1 Henry 6 subsequently revised to make it performable on its own. However, as Burns observes, there was a strong a tradition of two-part plays, but few examples of trilogies. Also against the theory that the 1, 2, 3 Henry 6 was conceived as a trilogy is the fact that the preparations for the printing of the 1623 Folio including the first-time entry in the Stationers' Register on 8 November 1622 of "The thirde parte of Henry the sixte". This cannot be what we now call 3 Henry 6 because this had already been printed in 1595 as Richard Duke of York, so it is most likely 1 Henry 6 considered the third part of the series in order of composition, not in order of historical events. Millington entered "The firste parte of the Contention . . ." in the Register on 12 March 1594 and then printed The Contention of York and Lancaster/2 Henry 6 (1594) and Richard Duke of York/3 Henry 6 (1595), so presumably the single Register entry covered this pair of plays. On 19 April 1602 Millington transferred his rights in "The first and Second parte of HENRY the VJt[h]" to Pavier who later printed The Contention of York and Lancaster/2 Henry 6 and Richard Duke of York/3 Henry 6. All this suggests that what we now call 2 Henry 6 was originally the first part of a two-parter and 3 Henry 6 was its completion. Thus, as Burns writes, when "The thirde parte of Henry the sixte" was entered in the Register on 8 November 1622, it was really the prequel 1 Henry 6 (p. 72).
As McMullan observed regarding Henry 8, those who like 1 Henry 6 tend to see it as by Shakespeare and as part of a planned sequence, those who do not see it as by him and others. In the former group was the Arden2 editor Andrew Cairncross--presumably this is why he edited all three Henry 6 plays--while in the latter group was Arden1 editor H. C. Hart. Burns agrees with Gary Taylor's division of 1 Henry 6 into Shakespeare and Nashe sections, and Taylor's view that several others no longer identifiable also had hands in it. Burns reads Robert Greene's attack as being about Shakespeare as a cheater in collaboration, someone who passes off as his own work containing others' "feathers", and points that the wider context in the Groatsworth of Wit is a story of a player rescuing a down-at-heel writer, which player is "both his saviour and a kind of devil figure, drawing him into further artistic degradation" (p. 79). How collaborators might parcel out a play is not clear: by act, by scene, or smaller units? There is evidence that a writer might be responsible for individual speeches, but Burns prefers to think of the units of authorial division in 1 Henry 6 being "strands of rhetorical action" (p. 81). There are, Burns asserts, two discernible strands, perhaps by different authors: the English/French conflict, and the Shakespearian breakdown of English unity (p. 83).
Burns's characterizes his editing as "a broadly non-interventionist approach to the punctuation of F" (p. 90) and he avoids brackets because they are "inhibiting for actors"; one is tempted to respond that inhibited actors should learn punctuation. Sometimes Burns retains F's ambiguous punctuation because ambiguity is the point and likewise he does not always fix what others have seen as F's failure to supply necessary exit stage directions. For example, Burns has the gaolers stay on stage during Mortimer's death-chair interview with Richard in 2.5. For asides, Burns has invented his own editorial convention (some are "to the audience" and others "to him/herself" p. 98), which novelty could be accused of anachronism since self-communion appears to be a proscenium-arch technique impossible on the Elizabethan thrust stage where the audience can never be ignored. Burns thinks that Gary Taylor showed that "plays for the professional stage were not split into formal act divisions, nor performed with gaps between the acts, before about 1610" and that "Only academic and court performances bothered to follow classical precedent by splitting plays into five acts . . . " (p. 101) This is wrong: the professional indoor hall theatres always used act divisions and this practice spread to the open-air amphitheatre stages after about 1609, as Taylor argued.
Burns's decisions regarding the play's famous cruces are mostly conventional, but he appears to be unaware of the important principle of praestat difficilior lectio ('prefer the more difficult reading') when faced with exotic words in his copy. Burns's prints "A base villain, to win the Dolphin's grace, | Thrust Talbot with a spear into the back" (1.1.137) where F has "A base Wallon", which editors usually modernize to Walloon. Burns argues that the ethnicity of the assailant is not in the sources and the Walloons were on the English side, and that the error is a likely misreading of a sequence of minims. But the point is that one should trust one's copy in the case of an unusual word since compositors tend not to invent exotica. Likewise at 1.3.29 Burns prints "How now, ambitious Humphrey, what means this?". where F has "How now ambitious Vmpheir, what meanes this?". Burns calls "bizarre" the Oxford Complete Works's choice of "vizier" for F's "Vmpheir", but since Gloucester, as Protector, is Viceroy, "vizier" is a good abusive word to hurl at him. Much more serious than individual choices for emendation is the mess that Burns makes of scene divisions. At 4.3.53 Burns decides not to start a new scene, something about which his predecessor Cairncross agreed but did not act upon, mentioning it in a note but preserving the traditional break. At this point Burns starts two numbering sequences, continuing with 4.3.54 in the marginal numbering and the running-titles, but also adding a marginal marker "[4.4]" to show that other editors start a new scene here. To match this marginal "[4.4]" Burns starts a second marginal numbering (4.4.1 onwards) using steps of 10 rather than 5, which runs in the same column as his own numbering system (4.3.54 onwards) until the real end of the scene at his 4.3.99. Then 4.4 runs normally until its line 55 when again Burns decides that a scene conventional scene break (after Talbot's "And soul with soul from France to heaven fly") is wrong. So, again, he adds the conventional number "[4.6]" in the marginal column while continuing his own number (4.4.56 onwards) in the running-titles and two numbering systems in the marginal columns. The same thing happens again at Burns's 4.4.112 (Talbot's "And, commendable proved, let's die in pride"), where other editors generally start 4.7, so again there are marginal marks for the traditional break, the traditional numbering, and Burns's numbering, while the running-titles follow Burns's numbering. Distinguishing the two line-numbering systems is not especially difficult once one realizes what is going on--although I can find the practice explained nowhere in the book--because the traditional ones are in square brackets and mostly (but oddly not for the "[10]", "[20]", and "[30]" of the traditional 4.7) in a smaller typeface. But distinguishing the two act- and scene-numbering labels is tricky: both are in square brackets, with the traditional ones being (counterintuitively) in a bolder typeface. The only point of retaining a traditional numbering system at all is ease of reference, and the multiple numbering systems used here to not achieve that. Indeed, in the absence of an explanatory note, readers may well assume that the entire numbering system is simply erroneous. An editor who believes he has corrected his copy's faulty breaks should adopt his correction entirely, not try to run two numbering systems in parallel.
A problem of equal magnitude occurs with Burns's idiosyncratic naming of characters. In his Appendix One, Burns defends his naming of "Puzel" and "Dolphin" instead of 'Pucelle' and 'Dauphin' (the common modernizations), because, like Churchill's deliberate "Naazi" pronunciation, these mark the refusal of the English to speak a despised foreign language properly. Burns argues for the spelling "Dolphin" instead of the more usually modernized 'Dauphin' on the grounds that the latter is the French word for the aquatic mammal, and he wants to use a word that will invoke the playful resonances understood by the original audience as well as its connections with beast fable and heraldry: it was the symbol of the Comte de Vienne, a title sold to Philip 4 in 1349 and thereafter given to the heir to the French throne. For Joan's character, the big difference in spelling her name is between medial 'c' and medial 'z'. Taylor argued that the modernized form turns 'c' or 'z' into 'c' (so "Pucelle"), but Burns argues that since 'c' and 'ss' make the same sound, this would make Talbot's "Puzel or pussel" (1.4.106) into the nonsensical "Pucelle or pucelle", which is a repetition of one sound when of course it was spoken with a distinction (because it could mean virgin or whore) in Shakespeare's time. Burns thinks that keeping the 'z' also helps to make it sound like 'puzzle', and Joan is of course a puzzle to Talbot. A reviewer need not raise the obvious objections to Burns's reasoning, since the Arden3 general editors do it themselves in a remarkable note distancing themselves from Burns's choices (pp. 294-6). "Puzel", they note, is the minority form in F ("Pucel(l)" occurs twice as often) and using it "deprives the French characters of an intelligible French epithet for their saviour, Joan 'the Maid'"; instead they have to use a derogatory English term. The French word 'pucelle' (virgin) has the advantage to an editor that it could be used derogatorily or straight, so both sides could use it with their own meanings. Burns's rendering "Puzel or pussel" has no contrast: both are derogatory. Regarding Dolphin/Dauphin, Burns's use of the former in a modernized text makes the sounding of the 'l' compulsory, whereas of course the point is that it is optional, as in Walter/Water; Ralph/Rafe, and salvage/savage. If 'Dauphin' had been used by Burns, the editors remark, then Talbot's "Dauphin or dogfish" (1.4.107) would have been the only time it is pronounced "Dolphin", and hence an appropriately scathing comparison. The freedom to individual editors granted by the Arden2 general editors (and apparently Stanley Wells is equally liberal with the Oxford Shakespeare) obviously allows the rejection of extraordinarily wise counsel.
For the Oxford Shakespeare, John Jowett's edition of Richard 3 handles with wisdom and impeccable literary-dramatic style the most difficult editing task in the canon (Richard III). Jowett's edition is based on the 1597 quarto (Q1), "the text that seems closest to the play as it would have been staged" (p. 3). Before the formation of the Chamberlain's men in 1594, Shakespeare appears to have been with Strange's men, whose patron Ferdinando Lord Strange was descended from the play's Lord Stanley, and Shakespeare has altered Thomas More's Stanley to present him more favourably; was this done because Shakespeare was one of Strange's men? On the other hand, the ancestors of the Earl of Pembroke, who had his own players, also get adjusted favourably in Richard 3, so perhaps Shakespeare wanted to please two potential patrons. Or did he please two patrons at two different times and both alterations got into the Folio? Jowett addresses the same problem of distinguishing synchronic from diachronic evidence in a footnote which usefully summarizes what is known of Shakespeare's activities before joining Chamberlain's men: the performance of "harey the vj" at the Rose on 3 March 1592 suggests he was with Strange's (who were using the Rose at the time); the titlepage of the 1594 quarto of A Shrew names the players as Pembroke's men (but it might not be Shakespeare's play); and the titlepage of the 1594 quarto of Titus Andronicus names the players as "the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Seruants", which could be a joint performance or else a "summary stage history" (p. 7n1). Jowett thinks that Richard 3 was written "as if for Strange's" and then "given finishing touches towards its close that make it suitable for the new Pembroke company", which makes 1592 the likeliest year of composition, it being when Pembroke's company was formed. The play was not finished in time before the plague closure of 23 June 1592 (else Strange's men would have played it at the Rose, and Henslowe's Diary shows they did not), and it was as he was finishing it during the closure Shakespeare added the Pembroke material (pp. 7-8).
Concerning Shakespeare's use of his sources, Jowett observes that by making Richard 3 the epitome of evil, his being done away with allows a line to be drawn under the factious middle ages and the Tudor age of Richmond (Henry 7) can begin with past strife finally buried. More's account of Richard 3 ends before his death and Jowett wonders if he started to see Henry 8 as a bad king and so was reluctant to bring to the story to its end because this would amount to "developing a specifically pro-Tudor polemic" (p. 15). Jowett finds a tension between the teleological and analogical readings of the events of Richard 3: the former sees the overthrow of Richard as inevitable, but the analogical reading (which reads the events as metaphors for the present) comes up hard against the contemporary injunction not to rebel against even a tyrant, as the Homily against Disobedience insists. Indeed, Richmond's claim to the throne was weaker than Richard's, and some political thinkers argued that while tyrants had to be endured, usurpers (like Richmond) could be overthrown. More reversed the crookedness of Richard he found in his source (John Rous), making the left (sinister) shoulder higher than the right, and the tension between the play's two explanations of Richard's deformity (too much, or too little, gestation) match the tension between the teleological and analogical readings. Jowett reads Richard 3 as a revenge play in that Richard kills those responsible for the stabbing of Prince Edward at the Battle of Tewkesbury. Of course, he too was responsible for that stabbing; but in this genre then the revenger often does have his own crime for which he must be punished (32-38). Aspects of Jowett's close reading of the play are truly inspired. The young prince Edward's concerns with the documentary record regarding Caesar's building of the Tower of London in 3.1 mark him out as a proto-Humanist like More, and Richard's murder of the prince can be read as a delaying of Renaissance humanist culture in England. The dream of Clarence is like the dream of Lady More's wife in Sir Thomas More, a play in which Erasmus's visits to England are celebrated. This might suggest that the victory of Tudor Richmond marks the end of medieval period and the start of the humanist Renaissance in England, but on the other hand his son Henry 8 was eventually to lock More in the same tower and then execute him. The link between building construction and the passing on of knowledge about it is the word "edify", which has both meaning (as in "succeeding ages have re-edified" 3.1.71). Richard's "So wise so young, they say, do never live long" (3.1.79), said of the young prince Edward, sounds like determination to kill the truth that the prince embodies, but it simultaneous admits in its "they say" that oral transmission--what the prince has been talking about--makes it impossible to entirely silence shared knowledge (pp. 56-58).
Jowett sees no reason to think that Q's economy of roles derives from the needs of touring, "for the main elements in the doubling pattern are already apparent in F". Q does reorder the ghosts so that Lady Anne's ghost does not enter immediately after princes leave, necessary because one of the princes (presumably, the elder, Edward) must double with Lady Anne. Dorset and Grey only become two characters after Grey is arrested. F is confused on this point, and Q resolves it in a surprising way: instead of separating the characters, it more strongly indicates in the early scenes that these are two names for one man. Once they are separated (in 2.4), "doubling of a more routine kind was no doubt followed" (75-76). Jowett observes that William Hogarth's picture of David Garrick as Richard awaking in his tent looks like a bedroom scene, which acts as a reminder of the onstage bedroom scene murders in this, Colley Cibber's, adaptation of the play (86). In fact, it is likely that the original staging would also have made the bed/tent connection because of the nature of the stage property use for either (Gabriel Egan 'Thomas Platter's Account of an Unknown Play at the Curtain or the Boar's Head', ISSN 0029-3970, N&Q 245[2000] 53-6).
Jowett is a world-leading bibliographer with a gift for explaining clearly and concisely what others obfuscate, and he deals with the play "In Print" in just 22 pages (pp. 110-32). Jowett's philosophical position on the difference between stage and page is a rather subtle nominalism: texts are only "representations of the play rather than the thing itself, and there is a real sense in which the play can exist only in representations of it". The play in its ideal form, then, does not really exist, but his is not the now-conventional materialism since Jowett does not privilege the early printings: even possession of the early manuscripts "would offer not so much 'the play' as versions of it" (p. 110). Q1 was printed from a previously unprinted manuscript, and F by close attention to another unprinted manuscript; all other printings are derivative. Jowett takes the view expressed most articulately by Peter Blayney (Peter W. M. Blayney 'The Publication of Playbooks', in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds. A New History of Early English Drama, pp. 383-422) that companies had their plays printed as a form of advertising, and in this case the printing of Richard 2 and Richard 3 in 1597 (after The Contention of York and Lancaster/2 Henry 6 and Richard Duke of York/3 Henry 6 in 1594-5) displayed that the Chamberlain's men's principal dramatist specialized in history plays. The Stationers' Registry entry for Richard 3 on 20 October 1597 showed that it had ecclesiastical authorization: William Barlow, under whose 'hand' the play was entered, was chaplain to John Whitgift, the archbishop of Canterbury, and another under whose 'hand' it was entered was Thomas Man, Warden of the Stationers' Company. In 1596 only 40% of books printed had ecclesiastical authority, but all potentially controversial ones were. Of Richard 3 Q1, sheets A-G were printed by Valentine Simmes, and sheets H-M by Peter Short. Each subsequent quarto was printed its predecessor, except sheets C and E-M of Q5 which were printed from Q3. The number of quarto reprints (Q6 appeared in 1622) shows how popular the reading text was. Although there is evidence of manuscript consultation for some of the quarto reprint, it is hard to say if the small changes in later quartos are authoritative. Q3's titlepage advertises that the contents are "Newly augmented", and it has some new stage directions and is of value for emending stage directions, speech prefixes, and occasionally dialogue. Jowett observes that Andrew Wise and Matthew Law printed their Shakespeare history plays quartos in linked groups (such as Law's pairing of Richard 2 and its historical sequel 1 Henry 4 in 1608) but does not fully draw out the implication of this for recent historicist scholarship. It is not straightforwardly true that the Folio's organization of material forced the history plays onto a Procrustean bed for which their sprawling generic and thematic material is not suited; the organization was already in evidence from the quarto printings.
In his discussion of the copy for Q1 and F, Jowett introduces a useful innovation in nomenclature that greatly aids clarity. Instead of the usual longwinded formulae such as 'the manuscript underlying Q [or F]'--so clumsy that some omit the first part and wrongly imply that a printing is identical with its copy text--Jowett uses the shorthand MSQ and MSF. In fact, the copy for Folio was not simply a manuscript but rather alternated between Q3 and Q6, with manuscript passages not present in these interwoven into the text. These passages show that this manuscript was not the one used to make Q1 (which lack them), and it is also the source for hundreds of Folio readings which differ from whichever quarto (Q3 or Q6) being used at that point. Where later quartos had introduced error, the manuscript used to make F often restored the Q1 reading, which shows how much MSQ and MSF had in common. Rather that demonstrating these claims with detailed examples, Jowett collects in his Appendices A-D the supporting collation evidence. MSQ and MSF show no signs of conforming to the simple New Bibliographical categories of 'foul papers' and 'promptbook', but MSF is earlier than MSQ and probably represents the text before it came to the theatre. MSF is longer (for an already long play) than MSQ but lacks the "dramatically incisive" 'clock' passage in 4.2 and has lots of repetitive wordy stuff easily cut without harm. It is hard to see, Jowett points out, how this redundant material could have got into F by revision, but easy to see how it might have been cut to make Q. MSF is also more profligate with characters, such as an unnecessary daughter for Clarence. Like Q1's reordering of the ghosts (so one boy can be a prince and Lady Anne), cutting this daughter saves a boy actor. Q1 also lacks a Folio passage which links Richard 3 with Richard Duke of York/3 Henry 6, which is more likely to have been cut to make Q than added to make F since "The play is far more likely to have grown towards greater independence of the events in the Henry VI plays", especially as it proved (as the frequent reprinting shows) to be a much more popular play. Q also saves personnel by conflating characters such as the Keeper of the Tower and Brackenbury; these make little difference to the size of the cast but increase dramatic intelligibility at the cost of historical accuracy. Again, it is less likely that characters in MSQ were split to make a more historically accurate MSF; in general F is historically more accurate than Q, and it has signs of authorial confusion over names created by punctuation in the source material.
What was this MSF? Apparently is was not in Shakespeare's hand since it departs from his lexical preferences in using "ay" where Shakespeare and Q1 preferred "yea", "prithee" where he and Q1 preferred "pray thee" (as E. A. J. Honigmann noted) and "which" where he and Q1 preferred "that" (as Jonathan Hope noted). These preferences and the act/scene divisions suggest scribal transcript. MSQ does not seem like the New Bibliographers' idea of a 'promptbook', but Jowett agrees with the New Textualists that the old idea of a promptbook was too narrow and that such features as imperfect stage directions could be permitted in the theatre document. In any case, the cramped printing of Q1 (from which MSQ is conceptually extrapolated) might have necessitated throwing away exit directions which we notice it lacking. Jowett thinks that Q1 probably is not a memorial reconstruction (the usual theory being that the company found themselves on tour without their playbook), and quotes the moment in scene 3.2 (F4v of the quarto, TLN 1912-21 of the Folio) where Hastings whispers in a priest's ear. Here F and Q1 suddenly diverge right in the middle of scene otherwise well reported, and furthermore the relationship of the F/Q versions here is much more like revision that garbling: a clash of idiomatic language in F is avoided by alteration to the syntax in Q. Moreover, Q's differences save a speaking role, and put together these are "signs that the dialogue has been consciously modified" (p. 125). Admittedly, there are a few single-word slips of the kind best explained by Memorial Reconstruction, but Jowett points out that any act of transcriptions involves memory, and a scribe could have made these slips during copying. Most damagingly, there are is a a pattern of variation in the naming of Stanley/Derby which could not survive Memorial Reconstruction, as Jowett argues more fully in a note reviewed below.
While unhappy with the classificatory criteria of New Bibliography, Jowett does believe we can distinguish texts nearer or further from performance and on this rests his preference for Q1, newly freed from the stigma of Memorial Reconstruction. Jowett acknowledges that were one to follow slavishly the Oxford Complete Works's logic of preferring performance over authorial writing one might have to accept a crude adaptation over its original, and drawing a line somewhere before this is a matter of "choice rather than law" (p. 129). Unlike later plays, the 'theatricalizing' of the Richard 3 script might not have involved Shakespeare because he was not yet a sharer in a playing company, but still Q1 is to be preferred because it "largely retains authorial texture", it has not been so corrupted as to be inferior to F, and indeed it has some preferable verbal variant readings which might be authorial. Once an editor has settled on Q1 as the control text, the difficult decisions concern how bad something has to be before it should be corrected; the dividing line is not what the author wanted (as it would be if one worked from F) but what could have passed in the theatre without 'correction'. Most of the emendations of Q1 used by Jowett are readings from F (on the hypothesis that the faulty transmission lost the authorial reading and we can recover it from there), but some will be readings which first appeared in later quartos because their printers (using earlier printings as their copy) spotted the manifest mistakes and fixed them. Rather than stake out all the arguments for each genuine Q1/F variant choice in his edition, Jowett prefers to make limited comment in his notes and "recognize that many alternative readings can legitimately coexist". Editing with Q1 as the control text makes for a play less melodramatic and less connected with the other histories (because less connected with the real history) and more of a free-standing "psycho-political drama about Richard's rise and fall", which is what the play was becoming in the theatre in the 1590s (pp. 131-32).
The main innovation of this edition is a double collation between the body text and the commentary. The first records this edition's departures from Q1 and the second records records readings from F not adopted in this text; emendations by other editors are recorded only in the commentary. In Jowett's opinion many of the Folio readings can be considered valid alternative readings. In the Folio collation, wherever the rejected reading in F originated in a quarto reprint (Q2-Q6) this fact is recorded but only up the quarto that was the copy for F at that point (Q3 or Q6). In other words, where a quarto was the first occurrence of a reading which later appeared in F, that quarto is named unless it is later than the copy used for F, in which case the quarto in question could not be the cause of F's reading. In the Q1 collation, if F also has the rejected reading this fact is explicitly confirmed except in the two places (3.1.0-144 and 5.4.28-end) where F was printed from Q without consultation of the manuscript, for which one may assume that F has the same reading. Alterations to stage directions are marked by broken brackets only where they are significantly disputable, otherwise they are just recorded in the Q1 collation, but a marker about address printed after a speech prefix (such as "to Margaret" or "Aside") may be assumed to be editorial and if, unusually, Q1 has them also (as with the ghost scene) this is recorded (pp. 134-135). Given Jowett's procedures for a two-text play, there is little point in a reviewer going through the editor's choices regarding particular cruces because most of the decisions will have been made for Jowett his choice of copy, whereas for a single-text play one is thinking about the correction of manifest error and must be more inventive. An interesting mixture of editorial and critical impulses is registered in Jowett's preservation of Richard's claim that Richmond's army were "Long kept in Bretagne at our mother's cost" (5.5.53) rather than changing this to the historically correct "brother's cost", since the Duke of Burgundy, his brother-in-law, armed Richmond. The error originates in Holinshed and Jowett keeps it (as Shakespeare decided to) because it is a "Freudian slip" (p. 66n2) prompted by the desertion of the women Richard had previously been able to control with his rhetoric. One tiny flaw which could be corrected in reprinting is that the running-headers on pages 244 and 245 wrongly give the act and scene label 3.1 (it should be 3.2).
Jowett prints seven appendices. Appendix A provides the texts of passages which were first printed in 1623. Most of these are the same as the ones so designated in the Oxford Complete Works, which agreed that they were "probably deleted for stage performance", but two of the short ones (Oxford Complete Works's 'Additional Passage B' beginning after 1.3.166 "RICHARD GLOUCESTER Wert thou not banished on pain of death? | QUEEN MARGARET I was, but I do find more pain in banishment | Than death can yield me here by my abode" and 'Additional Passage F' after 3.1.170 "BUCKINGHAM And summon him tomorrow to the Tower | To sit about the coronation") Jowett simply includes in the F collation as variant material not used. This shows the advantage of Jowett's double collation in cutting the number of 'additional passages' he has to enumerate separately in his already full appendices. Conversely, there are four F-only passages (comprising 23 lines of speech) which in Oxford Complete Works were incorporated into the body of the main text which Jowett has freshly reassigned as 'missing from Q because cut for performance'--of course, were they missing from Q because its printers merely failed to follow MSQ, Jowett would have printed them--showing his continuation of the Oxford resistance to conflation and the increasing fragmentation into distinct versions begun by the Oxford Complete Works's decision to print two King Lear plays. Some such decisions are explained in the longer textual notes in Appendix D. Appendix B lists the variants between Q1 and Q2-6 where F (but no intervening quarto) restored the Q1 reading. This is useful because, except where the corrections are obvious, these confirm Q1 readings since they must be caused by MSQ and MSF agreeing on these words. Jowett divides the list into sections according to whether Q3 or Q6 was the copy for F, as determined by Gary Taylor using the evidence of incidentals (William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, pp. 229-30), and naturally does not show the variants that appeared after the quarto which is copy for F at that point (Q3 or Q6). Appendix C records Jowett's changes to Q1's lineation, and here he mentions an Oxford typographical convention (common to the Arden3 but not the New Cambridge) whereby the editor indicates his view on whether a passage is prose or verse by placement of the speech prefix on the same line as the speech or on its own line above the speech respectively. Like typographical conventions regarding voiced and unvoiced suffixal '-ed', this sort of thing should be stated more often by editors; even graduate student readers can be unaware of them. Another convention (begun by Edward Capell) is to push right half lines which complete another's metrical unit, and where there is more than one way to do this (as with the cut-and-thrust between Richard and Lady Anne at 1.2.178-88), Jowett does not impose the flush-right convention.
In Appendix D ('Longer Textual Notes') Jowett discusses such matters on act/scene breaks, for which he largely follows the Oxford Complete Works except that when Richmond goes into his tent in Act 5 (the beginning of the 'simultaneous staging' of both camps, which allows the ghosts to speak to Richard and Richmond), Jowett continues without a scene break. The division of source material makes Jowett think that five-act structure might have been in Shakespeare's mind even though the open-air theatres did not mark intervals until after 1609. For the Derby/Stanley shifts in stage direction and speech prefixes Jowett summarizes his Notes & Queries essay (reviewed below). Jowett explains the Dorset/Grey confusion in the early texts: initially these were two names for what Shakespeare planned as one character, but later he decided to have one son of the queen die by Richard and another survive. Thus in the latter half of F Shakespeare has them be different men, but the exigencies of performance made conflation of them desirable, at least as far as the actor is concerned (so, the two roles are doubled). Thus Jowett's surprising 'Persons of the Play' list describes Dorset and Grey as "treated as one figure in the early scenes". For his decision to have Richard in his opening soliloquy say "Plots have I laid inductious, dangerous," rather than Q3/F's "inductions", Jowett points out that "inductious" is a perfectly comprehensible Shakespearian coinage (along the same lines as 'conceptious' in Timon of Athens 4.3.188) which John Ford used in 1620. "Inductious" would not seem strange to us had not Q3 (1602) changed it to "inductions"; thus does editorial practice become self-validating as the 1602 alteration becomes traditional. Jowett discusses the oddness of Q1's labelling of the two orations by the Richmond and Richard to their respective armies, and records that John Dover Wilson noted that Richard's follows a strong exit-like couplet. Even though he remarks that they involve "a rather awkward transition from a small group of on-stage leaders to an 'army'" and "probably should be taken to address the theatre audience", Jowett does not cite Ralph Cohen's fine suggestion (Ralph Alan Cohen 'Watching Richard Lie: 'We're Actors: We're the Opposite of People'', ShakB 16.iii[1998] 24-8) that in the preceding few lines Richard addresses the theatre audience as his army and, since they do not, cannot, follow him "hand in hand to hell" as he rushes off, he has to come back and "say more" than he has "inferred" (5.5.43). Appendix E prints relevant passages from Thomas More's History of Richard III, Appendix F reprints the "quick if slanted guide to the characters" given by the English Shakespeare Company in their The Wars of the Roses (1988-9), and Appendix G prints an A to Z of practitioners who have done significant work on the play since its first performance. The index is essentially a guide to the Commentary.
Jill Levenson claims that her interest in Romeo and Juliet sprung from work with likeminded students who wanted "no part of its sentiment", and the splendid introduction to her Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play makes a powerful case for the play having political and social substrata inherited from its sources (Romeo and Juliet). Levenson gives an amusing example of how rhetorical the sources novella could be: in Matteo Bandello's 1554 Novelle Juliet, on discovering who Romeo is, says "Now let us assume that he really loves me . . . should I not be reasonable and consider the fact that my father will never agree to it?" (p. 11). These source novella also "strain towards verisimilitude", giving explanations for such things as the use of rope ladders in Italy and Romeo's living arrangements in Mantua, and Levenson's fine survey of how these pre-texts shaped the play should disabuse students who, having seen the film Shakespeare in Love, think the play is semi-autobiographical. (A further misconception which animates Jenny Tiramani of the London Globe Theatre's clothing department: doublets were kept on at all times, not swung on and off like a modern jacket, despite Joseph Fiennes's usage.) Despite the problem of sentiment, Levenson deals in one section with 'Love, Death, and Adolescence', where she focuses on the psychosexual matter in the play with special attention to adolescent sexuality, transition to adulthood, and guilt about sex (pp. 16-30). While this is more than perfunctory, Levenson gets properly into her stride with the section on 'Patriarchy' (pp. 31-43) where she argues that the feud does the work of ideology, making everyone identify their allegiances--thus giving each an identity--and meld into a group. The family unit and the city-state unit come under stress, but endure. An important part of patriarchy is the control of masculine aggression, and Levenson argues that Elizabethans interested in the decorum of duelling would notice that the fights in Romeo and Juliet start properly but descend into chaos and accident. Shakespeare thus showed that the formalized rules governing violence, promulgated in duelling manuals, do not work (p. 36). At a different level of subversion, what Juliet's autonomy enacts--and she's much more active in this than Romeo--is a disruption of capitalism, since her clandestine marriage prevents Capulet's transmission of his wealth to a count, which would be a consolidation of it. I am not entirely sure why Levenson thinks this consolidation capitalist rather than feudal, and this part of the introduction the reviewer would liked to have seen see expanded (p. 40). Of course, whatever disruptions the lovers create are finally inconsequential; they are doomed to fail.
In the section 'Style and Genre' (pp. 42-61) Levenson argues that the play consistently shows rhetoric failing to express the real conditions people experience; language, no matter how overblown, is inadequate. As a 'tragedy of romantic love' rather than of statesmanship the play was a significant innovation by Shakespeare, indeed virtually an oxymoron. But comic and tragic drama had never really been far apart, being made from the same sources and of the same length: "It was primarily the conclusion that made the difference". In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare satisfied the demand for tragedy and comedy from different theatre patrons "with the blended essences of [the] two favourite genres" (pp. 51-52). This claim can be most usefully compared with Martin Wiggins's argument (Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time, pp. 102-22) that tragicomedy--another kind of blending, although Romeo and Juliet is not a tragicomedy--came into being around 1600. Also on matters formal, Levenson points out that the play put into the plot the essential elements of the sonnet tradition: the anguished lover, the unattainable lady, and the equating of love and war. The sonnet form in the 1580s and 1590s became the way in which political and financial desire was mediated: the lover (poet) seeking gifts from his woman (the patron), and in his unrequited love for Rosaline, Romeo begins the play as the archetypal Petrarchan lover. Levenson's section on 'Performance History (pp. 61-96) confirms that, beyond the titlepages of printed editions, no pre-Restoration performance is recorded. Shakespeare probably started Romeo and Juliet before the Chamberlain's men formed, so he did not know who would play it, and yet he was fairly demanding in his staging since the plays needs a balcony, a bed, and a tomb. Of course, one might not always get what one wants, and the first two quartos (1597 and 1599) are permissive in their stage directions, a feature no longer thought to be incompatible with their origins being documents used in the theatre. There are three moments when the locale changes without a clearing of the stage: in 1.4 the masquers walk around the stage to represent going to the Capulet ball; 2.1 starts in the street but becomes the Capulet orchard; and 4.4. starts in a room where preparations are being made for the wedding, but becomes Juliet's bedchamber. Levenson has rightly decided not to mark scene breaks at these points of locale-change. Surveying the stage history from the Restoration to the present, Levenson describes Thomas Otway's adaptation The History and Fall of Caius Marius which is set the story in Rome. The immediate political context of this adaptation was the Exclusion Crisis as Charles 2 tried to get his Catholic brother James barred from succession, and accordingly Otway's version moralizes against civil war. Correcting the common error that Colley Cibber originating the alteration, apparent even in the latest film version of the play, Levenson notes that Otway allowed the lovers a moment of conscious togetherness in the tomb before both dying. Quite properly, Levenson alludes to "soft-core pornographic" versions of the play without wasting time on such masturbatory aids as Troma Films's Tromeo and Juliet to which even some academics seem disturbingly drawn.
Regarding the dating of the play, Levenson argues that this is not necessarily a singularity since the matter could have been reworked by Shakespeare until Q2 appeared in 1599 (pp. 96-103). The outer limits of composition are 1591 and 1596, but linguistic evidence suggests that it was first written probably in 1593 and came on the stage 1594-5. Q1's titlepage gives the performing company as "L. of Hunsdon his Seruants", which name they had only between 22 July 1596 and 17 April 1597, being the Lord Chamberlain's men before and after that. But this titlepage evidence does not preclude the possibility that the Lord Chamberlain's men acted it before 1596; by 1598 there were many allusions to the play. In a rare slip, Levenson writes that "The Shaxicon database on [sic] World Wide Web should help to refine the study of linguistic evidence for purposes of dating Shakespeare's plays: it charts the interrelation of rare words in Shakespeare's texts with contemporary works from around 1591 to 1616". If only Donald Foster had fulfilled his promise to publish his SHAXICON database on the Worldwide Web then others, including this reviewer, might be less sceptical of everything it is supposed to prove, including Shakespeare's authorship of the Funeral Elegy.
In titling her section on the early printings of the play 'The Mobile Text' (pp. 103-25), Levenson puts herself with the New Textualists rather than the New Bibliographers. Q1 (1597) is, she notes, less than 80% of the length of Q2 (1599) and separating them are numerous variants; all seventeenth-century editions derived from Q2. Levenson treats these two printings as two witnesses to "distinct phases" in the play's sixteenth-century career. What she calls "millennial postmodern theory", which is sceptical of everything, rightly makes the play "part of a multivalent and dynamic process", and although they acknowledged the uncertainty at the heart of their work, the Enlightenment-inspired New Bibliographers nevertheless "misconstrued the randomness" of the textual evidence. (One might more charitably say that they did not see as much chaos as we postmoderns do.) At the end of twentieth century, as Levenson worked on the play, the New Bibliographical binaries (author/stage, good-quarto/bad-quarto, Memorial Reconstruction/foul-papers, promptbook/foul-papers, and touring/London) were breaking down. Books necessarily stabilize performance, but Levenson reminds the reader that our books are more stable than were theirs, which were often non-identical within a print-run. Q1 or Q2 were not entered in the Stationers' Register, a fact that longer excites suspicion, and collation of the 5 copies of Q1 shows no press variants, which as Levenson points out, is not unusual in so small a sample. Q1 has fewer obvious errors than Q2, yet most bibliographers consider Q2 more authoritative.
Sheets A-D of Q1 were printed by Danter, sheets E-K by Edward Allde (we can tell by recurrence of types, by running-title differences, and by printing conventions), and the work was done by formes (not seriatim) simultaneously in the two printing shops after casting off, probably at Danter's. Levenson points out that the raid on Danter's shop during Lent 1597 did not stop him printing so it cannot be used to date Q1, nor can the titlepage reference to performance by Lord Hunsdon's men because that could still be said after their name changed back. Thomas Creede's Q2's titlepage say it is "New corrected, augmented, and amended" and indeed it is more than 20% longer than Q1, has variants from Q1 in more than 800 of its lines, and some passages are totally different. There are few significant press corrections evident by collating the 13 extant copies of Q2, but many errors remain, apparently because of difficult copy. Two compositors, A and B, set Q2, A doing most of it and B helping at the end. Paul L. Cantrell and George Walton Williams have reconstructed from running-titles in the two skeleton formes the order and timetable by which the sheets were printed, but no-one has yet looked at Creede's other work to determine when in 1599 Q2 was printed. Q3, Q4, and Q5 were each a reprint their predecessor, although Q4 appears to have been informed by sporadic consultation of Q1. The Folio text is almost entirely derivative, being set solely from a copy of Q3 which was probably annotated by someone who knew the play in performance. Levenson herself collated the 7 extant copies of Q3 and found no press variants. There is no evidence that Q1 was an illicit publication, but the New Bibliographers called it 'bad' because of its shortness, its lack of a Stationers' Registry entry, and its alleged poor quality printing; none of these alleged deficiencies stands up to scrutiny. The "short quartos"--Levenson's less-judgemental term for those formerly called 'bad'--were disliked by the New Bibliographers because of the non-authorial influences found in them. By the mid-twentieth century Q1 was widely dismissed as a memorially-reconstructed pirating and Q2 was thought to have been printed mostly from Shakespeare's holograph with just the occasional bit of Q1 used as copy. Fifteen years ago, John Jowett's entry on Romeo and Juliet in the Textual Companion to the Oxford Complete Works placed him squarely in this tradition.
Certainly one section of Q1 (1.2.53-1.3.36 in this edition) was used as copy for Q2, to judge from the fact that Q1's incidentals--such as the Nurse's speech being in italics--were closely followed, Moreover, Q1 appears to have been consulted elsewhere in the setting of Q2 and since this influence cannot be measured, cannot be distinguished from simple agreement between what Jowett would call MSQ1 and MSQ2, we reach what Levenson (somewhat exaggeratedly) calls "an impasse which blocks the search for copy and a stemma" (p. 117). As New Bibliography undergoes necessary correction by the New Textualists some well-washed conceptual babies will be discarded. Levenson asserts that there is "no contemporary evidence to verify that any actor(s) ever reconstructed a play memorially" (p. 118), which is strictly true for early modern England but not for Spain where, as Jesus Tronch showed, this was done and with precisely the textual corruption we should expect ('Play-text Reporters and 'Memoriones': Suspect Texts in Shakespeare and Golden Age Drama', Short paper delivered at the Seventh World Shakespeare Congress in Valencia on 19 April[2001]). Peter Blayney hypothesized a non-piratical form of memorial reconstruction as actors made texts for friends by recalling their lines; since plays were routinely abridged for acting, this would make for short versions. The theory that the differences between Q1 and Q2 might be caused by authorial revision--either Q1 being a first draft enlarged to make Q2, or Q1 being a cut-for-pace version of Q2--cannot, Levenson insists, be excluded. Q2 has three moments of repetition which look just like second thoughts being printed alongside undeleted first thoughts, and this suggests its copy was authorial (pre-theatrical) papers since, as William B. Long showed, when theatre people interfered with a play manuscript it was to solve problems, and the repetitions in question cry out to be solved. On the other hand, the repetitions might represent revision well after original composition, or "may record different versions in different performances" (p. 123). In short, Levenson concludes, we cannot be certain of the copy for Q1 or Q2 and therefore cannot privilege one over the other. This view conditions the entire edition since if Q1 and Q2 "represent two different and legitimate kinds of witnesses to two different stages of an ongoing theatrical event" (p. 126) then Romeo and Juliet follows King Lear in becoming a play we can no longer consider as a single entity. Necessarily, then, Levenson edits both texts of Romeo and Juliet for this edition and prints both. Because of the tradition which takes Q2 as basic, she puts it first and prints Q1 with minimal apparatus. With both versions of the play present, Q1 appears in the Q2 collation "only when its readings bear significantly on the later text". Levenson has tried to interfere as little as possible in either text but has cut such things as the "potentially confusing duplications" of Romeo and the Friar's shared 'dawn' speech.
Levenson delivers on her promise to trust Q2, so Mercutio describes Queen Mab drawn "Over men's noses as they lie asleep" (1.4.56), as Q2 has, not "Athwart men's noses" which is the more familiar Q1 reading. Likewise, at 2.1.86-7 Levenson prints "That which we call a rose | By any other word would smell as sweet" which reflects Q2 and eschews Q1's "By any other name", the familiar reading. The mortally-wounded Mercutio says "I am hurt. | A plague a both houses, I am sped" (3.1.90-1), which is Q2's reading, whereas Q1 has "A pox of your houses". Levenson resists the usual emendation "A plague a both your houses", which makes this phrase identical with what Mercutio says 10 lines later in his short speech about death, and it also regularizes the metre; she instead thinks that "irregularities suit the dialogue of a fight and its aftermath". Levenson keeps as much as possible to Q2's stage directions, so at the transition from the street to the Capulet party (1.4.112) she keeps "They march . . . forth with napkins", but she deletes Romeo's subsequent entrance since he never left the stage; explaining the staging possibilities here requires commentary that occupies more than 80% of the printed page. Sometimes traditional emendations provided the more interesting reading, such as at 2.1.39 where Levenson prints "An open-arse, or thou a popp'rin' pear" where Q2 has "An open, or thou a Poprin Peare" and Q1 has "An open Et caetera, thou a poprin Peare". Levenson might have trusted Q1 here, since "An open etcetera" makes sense: Mercutio will not name the open thing Juliet is to be. Having asserted a principle of minimal intervention, Levenson ought perhaps to have outlined at greater length the rationale of this emendation. The 'dawn' speech ("The grey-eyed morn . . . Titan's burning wheels" 2.2.1-4) Levenson gives to the Friar alone (as Q1 does) rather than to the Friar and Romeo (as Q2 has it). She argues that it is easy to see how Shakespeare might have written these lines for Romeo and than imperfectly deleted them and written a slightly different and improved version for the Friar, thus creating Q2's duplication. As C. J. Sisson pointed out, it is hard to imagine the opposite case of of Shakespeare writing these lines for the Friar and then retrospectively reassigned them to Romeo, since there would be no room (New Readings in Shakespeare, p. 154). Respecting Shakespeare's second thought of giving the lines to the Friar, Levenson uses the form of words given the Friar in Q2 for this speech.
Actual mistakes by Levenson are hard to find. At her 3.1.122 (but really 121, she miscounted) Levenson has Romeo say of Tybalt "He gan in triumph and Mercutio slain?", which is Q2's reading. Levenson defends "gan" as either past participle (gone) or infinitive (to go). Levenson's Juliet, awaiting her lover, says "Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, | That runaways' eyes may wink, and Romeo | Leap to these arms, untalked of and unseen" (3.2.5-7). Thus she uses Q2's reading ("runnawayes"), but having cited some alternatives and the argument about it her commentary does not tell the reader who are these runaways, their plurality being implied by the position of her possessive apostrophe. Sisson thought the correct reading "runaway's eyes" because the runaway is Romeo, whom Juliet (unaware that he is banished) fears might be too cautious and not come to her (New Readings in Shakespeare, p. 156). For the obvious problem regarding what flies may do at 3.3.40-43, Levenson follows the Oxford Complete Works's conjectures about the line "This may flyes do, when I from this must flie" being imperfectly deleted and rewritten as "Flies may do this, but I from this must flie" and this change, together with the associated reordering of lines and the composition of a new one ("They are freemen, but I am banished"), being misunderstood by the Q2 compositor. Levenson has Capulet described Paris as "youthful and nobly ligned, | Stuffed, as they say, with honourable parts" (3.5.180), turning Q2's "liand" into "ligned". Levenson's commentary says that "noble ligned" means coming from noble lineage, and that the silent 'g' makes also a possible pun on 'lined' which goes with 'stuffed' in the next line. Fair enough, but since "ligne" is an archaic spelling of straightforward modern word (OED line n.2), there seems no reason to retain the 'g' in a modernized text. When in Q2 Juliet says "Or bid me go into a new made graue, | And hide me with a dead man in his" (4.1.84-5), Levenson supplies the apparently missing final word with "tomb", as did the Oxford Complete Works, in preference to Q4's "shroud" and F's "graue"; Q1 has a different wording altogether but uses word "tombe". This would appear to be another case where Q2 might have been trusted, since there is no need for a final word: "in his" can refer back to the "grave" of the previous line. Likewise, Levenson has Paris say "Have I thought long to see this morning's face" (4.4.67) where Q2 has "thought loue", which Sisson defended as better than Q1's "long" when punctuated "Have I thought, love, to see" (New Readings in Shakespeare, pp. 161-2); Levenson points out that the source uses "long" at this point. Finally, although Levenson is aware of Katherine Duncan-Jones's persuasive argument linking Juliet's autonomy with possession of her own knives (Katherine Duncan-Jones ''O Happy Dagger': The Autonomy of Shakespeare's Juliet', N&Q 243[1998] 314-6), Levenson prints "She takes Romeo's dagger" (5.3.169) to kill herself. Perhaps Levenson was swayed by Capulet's assertion that "This dagger hath mista'en, for lo, his house | Is empty on the back of Montague, (5.3.202-3), but as Duncan-Jones argued this is just another example of the father's ignorance about his daughter.
The titlepage of Stanley Wells's Oxford Shakespeare edition of King Lear say that he edited it "on the basis of a text prepared by Gary Taylor", which in this case means he started with the electronic text of the quarto ('History') version published on floppy disks by Oxford University Press in 1989. Wells's introduction is short (88 pages), in keeping with Oxford Shakespeare guidelines, and provides a useful summary account of the special two-text status of this play, the first for which a majority of scholars has accepted the principle that it cannot be considered as one thing. The original version of the play was written probably in 1605 and led to Q1 of 1608, and then it was revised, probably by Shakespeare, for revival in 1610 which led to the F text of 1623 which was printed from an annotated copy of either Q1 or the Q2 of 1619. An omission from the argument here is a statement of why anyone should accept that the alterations to the text represented in Q1 took place some years after an initial run of the play rather than as part of the preparations for first performance. It is because of this delay that Q1 and F are witnesses to two different versions of the play, rather than being merely witnesses to two stages in the genesis of a single play. The reading list at the end of introduction does not mention Gary Taylor and Michael Warren's The Division of the Kingdoms which convinced scholars that substantial revision separates Q1 and F, and although it appears in the larger reading list at the end of the book, the title running-headers to that section ("Offshoots of King Lear") hardly encourage readers to look there for further reading on textual matters. It is perhaps too obvious to Wells, but worth stating explicitly for most readers, that having established that the revisions seen in F were marked onto a copy of Q1 or Q2, these revisions could not have been made before Q1 was printed, thus not before 1608.
The series policy has been to "base an edition on the text that lies closest to performance", which in this case would be F, but Wells decided to break with the policy because F is well-represented in other editions while Q1, a distinct version, has only recently been properly edited in its own right, and only two critical editions (by Ren� Weiss and Jay L. Halio) have been published. Although, as observed above, the argument that about 5 year passed between the original performances and performances of the revised text is not outlined, Wells admits that some of the differences between Q1 and F are absences from MSQ1 (to borrow Jowett's useful labelling) which would have been rectified before the play's first run. Thus it is a "nice philosophical problem" (p. 8) to distinguish these things from the later major revisions. The nicety would be more apparent were the reader given at least a sketch of the reasons against attributing all the differences to this cause, such as the evidence adduced by Gary Taylor that F shows influence of Shakespeare's post-1605 reading matter and that its vocabulary is typical of his later work (Gary Taylor 'King Lear: The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version', in Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds. The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear, pp. 351-468). Wells's approach is to accept Folio readings which are necessary to make Q performable (thus including the music cues), but not those readings which are unnecessary. Wells does not collate Folio variants nor print (even as appendices) the F-only passages, since the Oxford Complete Works provided these, but he does collate choices made by Weis and Halio with great assiduity that is usual since "the Quarto has only just entered the editorial tradition". Dating the initial composition, Wells's discusses the dependence on Samuel Harsnet's Declaration of Egregious Popish Imposture and on the chronicle history of King Leir which, to judge from its influence on his earlier plays, Shakespeare knew in the mid-1590s. Wells thinks that references to astronomical eclipses are of little use for dating the play since audience would always relate these to the last such events they remember.
In the section 'Where the Play Came From' (pp. 14-31), Wells indicates King Lear's themes and character-types appearing in earlier plays: Titus Andronicus has an elderly mad tyrant, the Henry 6 plays explore division in the kingdom, and Constance in King John is "an enfeebled by eloquent grieving parent"; apparently the artistic gestation of King Lear was a long one. For the tangible sources, Wells traces the King Lear story in legend, starting with Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae which was not in print in Shakespeare's time but was circulating in manuscript, through Holinshed, Mirror for Magistrates, William Warner's Albion's England, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and most importantly of all, the play King Leir. The Edmund/Edgar subplot comes from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, printed in 1590. Discussing how Shakespeare shaped the ideas, events, and persons from these sources, Wells's wide range of critical reading is apparent, from Leo Salingar to Marianne L. Novy and Jonathan Goldberg. It is arguable that King Lear is beginning to overtake Hamlet as the work for which Shakespeare is most known, but as Ann Thompson observes King Lear has no moments to match the synecdochical power of Yorick's skull or "To be . . .". Wells notes that the poetry of King Lear is subordinated to the dramatic effect, which is why so little of this play bears being quoted out of context, and I suppose this might explain the difference (p. 52). Wells handle so deftly the material of his stage history that it strains the reader not at all. Regarding the early performances, Wells thinks the ballad, which he reprints in full, "gives us what may well be unique eyewitness impressions of moments from the play as performed by Shakespeare's company" (p. 57). Wells charts the dominance of Nahum Tate's adaptation of King Lear, which diminished over the period when it held the stage (1681-1838) as more Shakespeare was put back. Wells defends Tate's play as doing to Shakespeare what Shakespeare did to King Leir. In the section 'Return to Shakespeare' Wells surveys nineteenth- and twentieth-century productions, with Harley Granville Barker's work as the watershed between an entirely readerly appreciation and the play's rehabilitation as theatrical work.
The section 'Textual Introduction and Editorial Procedures' Wells, who has nothing to prove in this area, keeps to 8 pages (pp. 81-88). There are, he observes, numerous press variants in the 12 extant copies of Q1, but Wells argues against automatic acceptance of a reading in a corrected sheet since "the compositor may guessed" when he spotted an error rather than consulting the manuscript copy. The errors and the press variants suggest that the copy was hard to read, possibly authorial manuscript rather than fair copy, and it had not been through the theatre. In Wells's text Q1 is used for every reading unless it does not make sense, in which case all possible explanations of the error and all concomitant readings are considered, including those in F but without giving it special preference. Because the play was written before act intervals were observed in the open-air amphitheatres, Wells has simply numbered the scenes sequentially (as with the Oxford Complete Works), and not marked a new scene when Edgar enters while Kent sleeps in the stocks, nor another when Edgar leaves, Kent wakes up, and Lear enters. The collation records all substantive departures from Q1 (that is, those affecting meaning), with a selection of plausible editorial emendations not adopted. Variants where F departs from Q1 are not recorded, but adopted Folio readings are, like any other adopted readings, recorded. Wells usefully lists the places where he accepts Q1 readings which the Oxford Complete Works rejected, and where he imports readings from F or from one of the two critical editions of Q1. Regarding the punctuation, Wells aims to "increase comprehensibility for the modern reader without being over-prescriptive for the actor", which modest goal is a useful corrective to the absolutism of Ros King's claims about editorial intervention (reviewed below). Although Wells has been saying in public for some time that he is not convinced of the desirability of the practice, in this edition stage directions "whose content and/or placing are uncertain" and speech prefixes which are "disputable" are printed in broken square brackets
For individual cruces there is little point comparing this edition
to earlier ones, nor comparing Wells's choices with Sisson's, since as Wells points out Q1
has only recently been edited independently. However, a few choices deserve special
attention. Wells has Kent say "Be Kent unmannerly | When Lear is mad" (1.136-7),
using Q2/F's "mad" rather than Q1's "man" which makes sense and, as
Peter Stallybrass argues (in an essay reviewed below), is perhaps better than
"mad". At 1.176.1 the entrance of the King of France and Duke of Burgundy is
accompanied by a musical flourish (as in F but not Q) because they are important men.
However, for the exit of Lear and Burgundy at 1.256.1 Wells puts the "Flourish"
in broken brackets, even though it too is marked in F. It is not clear how these things
are different, unless of course Wells thinks royal exit directions are less likely overall
to be marked with a music, or perhaps because the scene is somewhat disordered and leaving
out this mark of Lear's importance could signal that. At 1.257-8 Wells has Cordelia say
"The jewels of our father, with washed eyes | Cordelia leaves you", which is
what Q and F have. Wells rejects Nicholas
Rowe's emendation, used in the Oxford Complete Works, to "Ye jewels of our
father" made on the basis that the sense is "You jewels" and the manuscript
probably had either "ye jewels" or "ye jewels" which the
compositor misread as the abbreviation for "the". Wells accepts that this might
be true, but since Q1 also makes sense so he does not emend it. This is a tricky footnote
for readers who do not know that the 'y' in such advertising signs as "ye olde
tea-shoppe" stands for the letter thorn þ or Þ (so "the olde
. . .") which was already by Shakespeare's time disappearing from
manuscripts and almost universal represented by 'y' in print (OED Y (3)). At 2.125-6, when
Edgar enters Edmund says "and out he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy,
my cue is villainous melancholy", which is Q1's reading, instead of the more familiar
"Pat: he comes" which is F's. Wells has the First Gentleman says that Lear
"Strives in his little world of man to outscorn | The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and
rain" (8.9-10). George Steevens's conjecture that Q1's "outscorne" was
misreading of the manuscript's "outstorm" (followed in Kenneth Muir's Arden2
and the Oxford Complete Works) is possible, Wells says, but "outscorn" also
makes perfect sense. At 11.4 Kent says "Good my lord, enter" and, in the same
metrical line, Lear responds "Wilt break my heart?" which is Q1's reading. F has
"enter heere" which regularizes the metre, but as Wells observes on E. A.
Abbott's authority "a missing syllable at the caesura is acceptable".
The textual choice which will probably be noticed by most readers is Edgar's reciting "Child Roland to the dark town come" (11.65), from Q1's "darke towne" rather than F's "darke Tower". Wells admits himself tempted to follow the familiar F reading, but sticks to his principle that where Q1 makes sense he should follow it. John Jowett suggests a dark British town is here contrasted with the enlightened city of Athens ("Come, good Athenian" Lear says to Edgar immediately before this), but Wells was sufficiently unsure as to post a message on the SHAKSPER email discussion list to poll others' opinions. Nearly as noticeable, and based on precisely the same principle, is Wells's decision to have mad Lear say "It were a delicate stratagem to shoe | A troop of horse with fell" (20.173-4), using Q1's "fell" against F's "felt"; Wells points out that 'fell' is a perfectly good word meaning 'skin'. Finally, an example of punctuation being crucial to meaning is Lear's "This feather stirs. She lives. If it be so" (24.261), regarding the breathing of Cordelia. Q1 has "This feather stirs she liues, if it be so" and F has "This feather stirs, she liues: if it be so", either of which could be understood as two indicative statements (the feather does move, therefore she is alive), although Q1 lacks something between the clauses to indicate that they are separate. But also, Q1 or F could be read as one subjunctive statement: if this feather moves, then she must be alive. Wells admits both possibilities and says the choice is "open to the actor", but his period between "stirs" and "She" eliminates the subjunctive interpretation whereas a comma would have left the options more obviously open. On the other hand, it would create an error which North American students are most strenuously warned to avoid--the comma splice--if taken to be to one subjunctive statement. (Senior scholars are, of course, allowed such liberties: one seldom hears Terry Hawkes's famous dictum "Shakespeare doesn't mean, we mean by Shakespeare" being criticized for this grammatical fault.)
Moving from editions to books about, or in support of, editing, Trevor Howard-Hill has revised and enlarged his Shakespearian Bibliography and Textual Criticism: A Bibliography, a repetitious title which illustrates that awkward terminology is one of the things that makes work in this area difficult. Most students do not discover until graduate work that 'bibliography' can mean more than just a list of books they have read. Howard-Hill's second edition of this book first published in 1972 was, he reports, declined by Clarendon Press because they thought it "premature" (p. v), but I would suggest rather that it is too late. This sort of printed bibliography has limited value to a scholarly community used to the electronic indices provided by the Modern Language Association International Bibliography and the World Shakespeare Bibliography. A spot-check failed to reveal any items in Howard-Hill's book which could not easily be found by a 'keyword' search in one or other of these. Increasingly such indices are adding evaluative descriptions of the items indexed--an area where Howard-Hill's book has obvious value--and in some cases (especially for recent work which was created electronically in the first place) the full texts of the items are also included in the database.
The published proceedings of the conference "Ma(r)king the text" at Trinity College Cambridge in September 1998 has several excellent articles of general interest, but only one of direct relevance to this survey: Ros King's claim that modern editions spoil Shakespeare's metrics with by punctuation ('Seeing the Rhythm: An Interpretation of Sixteenth-century Punctuation and Metrical Practice', in Joe Bray, Miriam Handley and Anne C. Henry, eds. Marking the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page, pp. 235-52). The sixteenth-century colon, King observes, was used not only to divide clauses but also to show that they are linked (a usage derived from the Hebrew psalms) and so editors should not, when confronted with "strings of clauses separated by colons", simply chop them up using periods. King looks at the setting to music of poems in the period, and from this concludes that ". . . what is most important for mid-sixteenth century prosody is the natural rhythm of the words". The problem for editors, of course, is that editors think punctuation a matter of sense and actors think of it as a matter of pausing. King believes that compositors were "first and foremost copyists" and so she thinks that they mostly got their lineation right, which view should be contrasted with Paul Werstine's ('Line Division in Shakespeare's Dramatic Verse: An Editorial Problem', AEB 8[1984] 73-125). King promulgates that common actorly view that ". . . the last word in any line is usually one of special importance that needs to be picked our or emphasized in some way", and of course if an editor has relined to the script the wrong word will be chosen. (One would like to see some evidence for this claim about the terminal word.) King thinks we should expect the silence around short lines to be filled with business or sound-effects, and urges editors not to simply settle for the choices of "the eighteenth-century poets who were his first editors".
Another collection of essays this year is Andrew Murphy's The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, containing 7 essays of interest. Michael Steppat subjects Leah Marcus's book Unediting the Renaissance to 'discourse analysis' to show that it coerces the reader into alignment with unproven ideas ('Unediting and Textual Theory: Positioning the Reader', in Andrew Murphy, ed. The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, pp. 73-90). Marcus's book is hardly worth such an effort, since its claims can be more easily dismissed, as Paul Werstine showed regarding Marcus's claim that Q and F Merry Wives of Windsor are independent versions separated by authorial revision ('A Century of 'Bad' Shakespeare Quartos', SQ 50[1999] 310-33). Steppat then applies the same analysis to an essay by Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey, and Andrew Murphy to rather more effect, showing that their application of Marxist terms about the value of plays makes it unclear how use-value relates to exchange-value, an all-too-common misunderstanding. Moreover, since Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy's concern is for the labour that goes into performance (including that by non-authorial theatre people) and into printing (including that by scribes and compositors), Steppat spots that authorial intention has re-entered by the back door since even as part-sharer in that collective labour, the dramatist's efforts must be accounted for. Steppat points out that as general editors of Shakespearean Originals series of play reprints, Holderness and Loughrey claimed that these offered a "unique window on to the plays as they were originally performed" while at the same time insisting that these earliest texts are as far back as we can going without committing the error of trying to 'see through' the material object to something beyond it. As Steppat asks, why assume that the early texts are windows onto the theatre and nothing else?
Peter Stallybrass's excellent essay argues that costumes, properties, and speeches, but not characters, are at the centre of early modern drama's production processes ('Naming, Renaming and Unnaming in the Shakespearean Quartos and Folio', in Andrew Murphy, ed. The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, pp. 108-34). Shakespeare uses 'personal' names to indicate deprivation, that a person has lost their socially-ascribed name, and for him the important names are those given by function. Speech-prefix variation is not, as McKerrow claimed, a sign of authorial carelessness but often signals the point of the whole play, to reunite a personal name (such as Perdita) with a real social position (such as Princess). Names are better thought of as attached to properties (beard and dresses) rather than to actors; costumes not actors are at the centre of the early theatre's economics. Considering the permutations of one-to-many relationships in acting, Stallybrass repeats the error that more than one man played Demetrius in performances of Believe as You List, citing David Bradley as his authority. In fact Bradley, like C. J. Sisson, thought the practice highly unusual, and T. J. King has argued that the three names in the play manuscript come from three different men who played the part at different times (Casting Shakespeare's Plays: London Actors and Their Roles, 1590-1642, p. 47). Stallybrass reads speech-prefix variation in relation to the plays' concern with social status in a number of Shakespeare works including Twelfth Night, Richard 2, Hamlet, and King Lear. There is always the danger that such interpretations misread randomness as art, especially where no early printing is consistent. Stallybrass defends Q1 King Lear's "Be Kent unmannerly when Lear is man" over Q2/F's "is mad", on the grounds that since Kent has notably left off Lear's title, is appropriate for him to refer to Lear's transition from monarch to mere man, and the word also suits Kent (whose name is a whole county) going from man to unmannerly. The modern concern for individuality and personal names is inappropriate, Stallybrass argues, for an understanding of how early modern drama was written. The manuscript of the play Sir Thomas More suggests that speeches were written then divided up between the main speaker and 'others', the 'others' being sorted out later.
Laurie E. Maguire argues that editorial theory and practice follow 'grief theory', here grief at the loss of the writer's presence, upon which loss all literature is predicated ('Composition/decomposition: Singular Shakespeare and the Death of the Author', in Andrew Murphy, ed. The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, pp. 135-53). The first half of Maguire's essay rather tediously describes funeral practices and likens editing to the tidying-up of the corpse (or corpus), and includes such banalities as "Life and death were closely linked in the early modern period". Poststructuralism at its silliest identifies everything as its own opposite, as when Maguire approvingly quotes Richard Lippert writing that a coffin "protects something precious at the same time its protection confirms loss", leading to Maguire's comments that "To use Derrida's formulation, the funeral, like the text, is the ultimate in 'presence' as 'generalized absence'". Derrida's point was that things are not merely their own opposites, but rather are self-contradictory in a productive, possibly Marxian dialectical, and fascinatingly unstable way. Maguire claims that the Renaissance was all about recovering the dead, the lost classical cultures, and although she admits that there was editorial/authorial intervention, in these textual resurrections "the living and the dead, comfortably co-exist" (p. 148). At this point Maguire could have invoked Derrida's zombie simile, since the classics were reanimated for distinctly presentist humanist motives and were not so much like Lazarus as the undead. Near its end Maguire's essay takes a remarkable turn for the better, arguing that twentieth-century denial of death--unmentionable and postponed by medical intervention--led to "untidying, unediting the body of the text" and hence the current denial of the finalized text. We now have the same flexible ideas about the end of life as the early moderns did: they allowed a corpse to be arrested for debt en route to its burial, and our machines can keep a human vegetable going indefinitely. New Bibliographical desire for one originary text parallels Freud's death drive, the desire to return to the inorganic state. Loss, Maguire concludes, is at the heart of literary writing because the author is always absent and the words stand in for him. We grieve for loss first by denying and idealizing, then by simultaneously grieving and celebrating, and finally by looking forward whilst also remembering; the point is "not to reduce these oppositions to singularity".
Graham Holderness, Stanley E. Porter, and Carol Banks argue that the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare has much in common with the King James authorized version of the Bible ('Biblebable', in Andrew Murphy, ed. The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, pp. 154-76). The Shakespeare Folio and the King James Bible were alike in their print format (folio size, double columns, expensive paper), both represented that which was also available in oral performance as play and sermons, and both were supposed to provide definitive versions to oust inferior competition from the marketplace. (In fact, it is not clear that the Folio was intended to oust the quartos, which in any case continued to be reprinted.) The new Bible and the 1623 Folio collected together what was fragmentary and monumentalized it to preserve a tradition, which meant choosing between competing existing versions of texts. Holderness, Porter, and Banks write that plays were "officially printed only when the theatres were temporarily closed, or when the company needed extra money, or if a particular play had ceased to draw the crowds profitably in performance" (p. 167), yet at the end of the preceding sentence they cite Peter Blayney's essay which specifically argued against these explanations and offered the new one that plays were printed for publicity purposes ('The Publication of Playbooks', in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds. A New History of Early English Drama, pp. 383-422). On the basis of this error the authors distinguish in F1 the 'old Testament' Shakespeare plays (those worn out ones already printed) from the 'new Testament' Shakespeare (the newer ones or older ones that still drew crowds, some not previously printed). Since their premise is wrong, this distinction is wrong. Such errors the authors repeat, writing that "It is generally assumed that the First Folio editors worked from such manuscripts [that is, foul papers, parts, and promptbooks] for all the plays in their collected edition . . ." and they go on to mention that in fact this was not so, some quartos were used as Folio copy. Of course, this faulty assumption is not generally made and it was known before New Bibliography began that quartos were used as Folio copy. Indeed, one of the founding steps of New Bibliography was to show that this did not matter, since only the good quartos were used and that Heminges and Condell's phrase "diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies" referred to the other, bad, quartos. Since Holderness, Porter, and Banks footnote A. W. Pollard's Shakespeare Folios and Quartos a couple of sentences earlier (p. 175n34), one would expect them to know this: Pollard addresses it on pages 1 and 4.
Errors abound in this essay: Charles Jasper Sisson loses his first name and becomes "Jaspar Sisson". The writers think that the Histories section of the 1623 Folio rearranged "the random, non-historical order in which they were performed" into a historically chronological sequence, but of course The Contention of York and Lancaster and Richard Duke of York were not randomly ordered. This fact the writers could have discerned simply by looking back over their own writing: on page 169 they give the Contention its full title of "The First Part of the Contention . . .". which label ("The First") clearly indicates historical non-randomness rather than random non-historicalness. Likewise it is self-evident that 1 Henry 4, and 2 Henry 4 (and possibly Henry 5) were historically ordered, and as argued above in the review of Edward Burns's Arden3 edition of 1 Henry 6, the printing and performance of the history plays shows a pre-Folio concern for historical orderliness. While it is true that the Folio strengthened the connections between the plays, and arguably imposed a teleological principle to the grand narrative so constructed, Shakespeare's histories can hardly be called "ten discrete stories" when so obviously partaking of the well-known two-part construction format. Holderness, Porter, and Banks think that the King James Bible and the Shakespeare Folio make a false unity of disparate materials, and now we must disintegrate them to release "from their authoritarian structures the many and varied utterances" of which they were made.
Emma Smith traces scholarly desire to have something tangible as the ur-Hamlet, making it up if necessary ('Ghost Writing: Hamlet and the Ur-Hamlet', in Andrew Murphy, ed. The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, pp. 177-90). Just as the ghost of Hamlet Senior haunts Hamlet, so the ur-Hamlet haunts Shakespeare's play, and Smith neatly summarizes the evidence that there was an ur-Hamlet existing in 1589-1595, the slight evidence that Kyd wrote it, and that it is related to a German play Der Bestrafte Brudermord. In a familiar pattern, Smith shows that the presence of the ur-Hamlet in Shakespeare's Hamlet was used to exonerate Shakespeare for that play's weaknesses: the bits critics did not like were taken to be Kyd's. Smith quotes bizarre 'reconstructions' of ur-Hamlet using the source story (Belleforest's account of Amleth) and Spanish Tragedy as guides, and observes that bibliography seems to need this old play as a justifying principle just as Hamlet needs to the ghost to justify what he does. Andrew Murphy's "Texts and textualities: A Shakespearean history" is a fairly standard anti-New Bibliography survey of Shakespeare editing and editorial theory, starting as is often the case with E. K. Chambers's 1924 British Academy lecture, which argued against multiple authorship and against John Dover Wilson's notion of 'continuous copy' for sullying the authorial purity of a manuscript capturing a single moment of a single man's work. Murphy articulates the fashionable view that Shakespeare's plays, indeed all plays of the period, are inherently collaborative. This claim is easily overstated: dramatists, not whole companies of actors, went to gaol for their plays, titlepages named Shakespeare as an dramatist in his lifetime, and accolades such as Francis Meres's were addressed to Shakespeare not the company. The afterword to the book is by Leah S. Marcus and called "Confessions of a reformed uneditor", which title (but not the essay itself) suggests that doing some editing has significantly altered the views Marcus advanced in her Unediting the Renaissance. Marcus refers to her co-edited text of Elizabeth 1's writings, which prints multiple versions of her speeches rather than trying to editorial produce something definitive. Marcus thinks that the Worldwide Web will help the move away from singularity, but notes that editors will have to acquire the technical skills for themselves since the technical specialists tend to get lured into better-paid commercial work. (This seems to be an allusion to the technical work of John Lavagnino, the general editor of the forthcoming Oxford Complete Middleton, to whom Gary Taylor elsewhere in this book rather ungraciously apportions the lion's share of the blame for that edition's delayed publication. Taylor's excuse that he lost his computer in a divorce settlement suggests third-world levels of technological poverty in American academia.) Like W. Speed Hill, Marcus thinks that collations are more ostentatious than practical and remarks that the extreme variations in versions of Elizabeth's 1's speeches would render full collation impractical, but nonetheless Marcus has had to print variants. Marcus acknowledges the editorial tension between wanting to not intervene and having for financial reason to modernize spelling and punctuation, and furthermore as a feminist she wants to raise the international profile of women's writing by making it as widely-readable as possible.
Shakespeare Quarterly published eight articles on matters textual this year, and one review whose consequences make it worth reporting. Scott McMillin argues that New Bibliography has long, and E. A. J. Honigmann has recently, misrepresented the situation regarding Q1 Othello because in pursuit of authoriality and supposing a principle of textual economy, neither of which is reasonable ('The Othello Quarto and the 'Foul-paper' Hypothesis', SQ 51[2000] 67-85). Contrary to W. W. Greg and Honigmann, Q1 has theatrical features, most especially in its distribution of 'cuts', the 160 lines of the Folio text which it lacks. Greg thought that Q1 was printed from authorial foul papers because of its indeterminate and erroneous stage directions, whereas Alice Walker argued that it was printed from a theatrical manuscript made by a scribe who introduced things he remembered from performance. That Q1 was printed from foul papers, or a scribal copy of foul papers, was widely accepted in editions of the 1950s-90s, including the Oxford Complete Works and Honigmann's Arden3. Greg's argument was that Q1's vague and/or erroneous stage directions show its authorial origins, but he admitted that its omission of Folio lines is not random but rather seems theatrical; moreover, there are readerly features in Q1 (such as act divisions and literary stage directions) which suggest a copy made for a private patron. Greg needed to eliminate the theatrical-copy and private patron theories, so he supposed that the authorial papers had intended cuts marked on them, and these were obeyed by the printers, so that instead of being a theatre document, it is still an authorial document albeit by a man of the theatre. To eliminate the private-patron evidence Greg imagined that the copyist making this extra copy for a patron was the book-keeper himself, and thus the single author-to-theatre line of transmission is preserved. Of course, in reality the extra copy could have been made anywhere in the chain of transmission, but Greg was trying to limit the proliferation of texts in his New Bibliography.
As Paul Werstine has long argued, New Bibliography always has to suggest the most economical lines of textual transmission so that the choice of copy remains binary: authorial papers or promptbook. Extra scribal copies for private patrons or for revivals are, wherever possible, eliminated as a possible source of copy and even Honigmann, who spends many pages discussing the habits of scribes and compositors, admits only one extra scribe: the one who copied the foul papers to make Q1's copy. This scribal copy Honigmann would only accept being "at one remove" from the author, whereas of course this oft-revived play (at court 1604, at the Globe 1610, at court 1612-13) could have generated descending 'trees' of multi-generational copies. Like Greg, Honigmann wanted to preserve the purity of the author-to-prompter genealogy. Honigmann excluded the possibility that Q1 is a 'bad' quarto (because it is unlike other bad quartos), so all that was left was "foul papers or a scribal copy of foul papers". McMillin asks a pressing question: what about theatrical copy for a revival, or a copy of that made for a private patron? (p. 72) The problem is with New Bibliography itself, which ignores some real possibilities. Honigmann's recent book on the texts of Othello (Werstine's review of which is discussed below) states that Q's omission of those 160 line cannot be due to cuts for performance nor due to Folio additions, yet also attempts to distinguish those lines which Honigmann thinks were Q cuts from those he thought were Folio additions. One of the reasons Honigmann gives for dismissing the idea that the 160 lines are cuts from Q is that they save only 8 minutes, which McMillin thinks is an under-estimate given that they contain the willow-song. Even if only amounting to 8 minutes of stage time, such a cutting in the right way might, McMillin argues, be worthwhile. Honigmann introduced what he thought was new evidence that Q1 is based on foul papers: it has some false starts. This view should be contrasted with Pervez Rivzi's claim that the Folio text has false starts mended in Q ('Evidence of Revision in Othello', N&Q 243[1998] 338-43). One of Honigmann's example is the double questioning of Emilia by Desdemona ("Wouldst thou do such a deed") in which the first answer ("I might doe it as well in the darke") is too jokey for the serious situation, so Shakespeare cut it and wrote a more appropriate one; the cut was overlooked by the printer. (An obvious objection here is that this example of double questioning occurs in Q and F, so it can hardly be used to argue that they had different kinds of copy.)
McMillin points out that a hypothesis of multiple errors (a false start, an insufficiently marked cancellation, a printer who overlooked the cancellation) is awkward and that since Honigmann thinks Crane made from foul papers (or a copy of them) the transcript that lies behind F (which also has the putative false start) this hypothesis requires that Crane also missed the cancellation, which is unlikely. Honigmann has an answer to this: in parts F was set from Q. Another false start Honigmann finds is Cassio being said to be "almost dambed in a faire wife" (1.1.20, present in Q and F), which Shakespeare meant to cancel once he decided it were better Cassio were a bachelor. Honigmann lists some Q1 odd spellings, and a stage direction of the form "x driving in y", which he thinks are Shakespearian, but McMillin shows that that are either found elsewhere or merely odd and not indicative of copy. Because Q1 has "Enter Montanio, Gouernor of Cypres" (2.1.0), and this information is not available from the dialogue but only implied, Honigmann argued that this is a sign of the author to whom this occupation--never made explicit--matters. McMillin responds that anyone involved in costuming Montano would care, and this information could well be recorded on prompt copy. None of the things that Honigmann claimed indicate that the copy for Q was authorial papers (or an accurate scribal copy of them) are really persuasive, but tied to New Bibliography Honigmann had to choose between foul papers or promptbook, so he staked all on the former (p. 78). What of the copy for F? Honigmann decided that it was a scribal transcript of Shakespeare's revision of those same foul papers, and thus both printings are tied to foul papers. This, McMillin observes, realized New Bibliography's greatest hope of putting us back in touch with the authorial hand.
McMillin believes that a central tenet of New Bibliography--that promptbooks were 'tidier' than foul papers--has been gravely undermined and cites for this view work by William B. Long and Paul Werstine (''A Bed / for Woodstock': A Warning for the Unwary', Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 2[1985] 91-118; 'McKerrow's "Suggestion" and W. W. Greg', in George Walton Williams, ed. Shakespeare's Speech-headings: Speaking the Speech in Shakespeare's Plays: The Papers of the Seminar in Textual Studies, Shakespeare Association of America, March 29, 1986, Montreal, pp. 11-6). Damaging as they are, these two essays do not demolish the principle but only show cases where the assumption of theatrical tidying does not fit well the facts. A systematic survey of theatrical documents is urgently needed and one of its first steps would be establishing which extant playbooks are theatrical, hopefully without generating a logical circularity by determining this using New Bibliographical criteria. McMillin thinks that promptbooks did not have to be regular because the 'plot' controlled entrances and actors controlled their own exits, but really one would need to bring in here a recognition that the function of playhouse plots is not agreed upon. David Bradley, for example, thinks them primarily casting documents. Experiments currently underway at Shakespeare's Globe London are testing the usability of extant plots to control backstage affairs. McMillin thinks the alleged 'confusions' in Q are in fact quite playable (p. 79).
Having pointed to flaws in Honigmann's book, McMillin offers his own contribution to the subject, a study of where the 'cuts' from F to make Q fall. The biggest omission is in Act 4 and and half of the total 160 lines are lost from Desdemona's and Emilia's parts. Perhaps the boy actors were not good and their parts needed to the shortened, McMillin wonders. He might have mentioned that the eyewitness account of Othello at Oxford in1610 praised the boy actor playing Desdemona, but for silent action not speaking (Geoffrey Tillotson 'Othello and The Alchemist at Oxford in 1610', 20 July, TLS 1639[1933] 494). In a footnote McMillin reports that Eric Rasmussen has studied where other plays' Q/F cuts fall and found that mostly it is Acts 4 and 5, which McMillin takes as a sign that the cuts were made to shorten the play. One would have thought that a cut anywhere shortens the play. Indeed, McMillin's logic descends to tautology at this point: "Mainly and obviously the distribution indicates that the omissions [in Q Othello] occur toward the end of a long play, the most reasonable explanation being that they were cuts intended to shorten that play in its final scenes" (p. 82). McMillin's conclusion is essentially the same as Rivzi's, although from different evidence, that Q was printed from a manuscript containing the play as abridged for the theatre some time between composition and Stationers' Register entry in 1621, and possibly this manuscript was annotatively 'touched up' for reading by a private patron or the quarto's readership. In the current conflict between New Textualists and the New Bibliography, McMillin insists that the possibility of play transcripts made for private patrons becoming the copy for early printings is one we cannot ignore.
A spin-off from Honigmann's Arden3 edition of Othello, a book called The Texts of 'Othello' and Shakespearian Revision (London: Routledge, 1996), is the subject of a Shakespeare Quarterly review by Paul Werstine which claims that Honigmann is a wholly out-of-date defender of the New Bibliography ('Review of E. A. J. Honigmann The Texts of 'Othello' and Shakespearian Revision (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)', SQ 51[2000] 240-4). The review wholly misrepresents Honigmann's opinions and achievements. Werstine claims that in The Stability of Shakespeare's Texts Honigmann argued that variants between early printed texts of King Lear, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida "are authorial" (p. 240). In fact Honigmann did not, he pointed out that some of the variants might be and that these would be indistinguishable from corruptions, which is virtually the opposite to the position that Werstine ascribes to Honigmann. Werstine thinks that Stanley Wells took up this position as general editor of the Oxford Complete Works, but that Wells failed to find what Stephen Orgel found in Honigmann's book, the important principle that 'finality' and 'completion' do not really really exist for these plays. Werstine is mixing two things here: it was not Honigmann's Stability that persuaded Wells that substantial authorial revision separated some early printed text, it was the work of Michael Warren, Steven Urkowitz, and Gary Taylor did that. Wells took Stability for what is was, and what Orgel took it for, a demonstration of underlying textual instability.
Since then, Werstine claims, the supporters of revision have been reminded that there are many other non-authorial ways that a play's words can get changed, and ". . . the theory of authorial revisions seems to have receded to the . . . position . . . of an unverifiable hypothesis". This is obviously untrue: almost everyone accepts that King Lear was substantially revised by the author, and most accept that other plays were too. Werstine find that in The Texts of 'Othello', Honigmann took up the authorial revision claim again. F Othello has about 160 lines (in a number of clumps) that do not appear in Q and Q has about 12 lines or part-lines not in F. That not unusual, but this is: F and Q have large numbers of unsatisfactory readings, although rarely at the same place, so whichever one takes as the basis on one's edition, one has to import numerous individual readings from the other to make sense. Werstine rudely calls authorial revision Honigmann's "id�e fixe" and says that he used it to give himself as much room as possible to exercize choice when selecting between Q and F variants. Honigmann's project was "to arouse suspicion about the reliability of both texts" and then reconstruct the processes whereby extra-authorial agents caused the problems" (p. 241). The two biggest culprits are William Jaggard whom Honigmann says printed F (whereas of course, says Werstine, it was really his son Isaac) and Thomas Walkley who printed Q. Honigmann took the word of their enemies to cast aspersions on their professionalism. Honigmann also blamed F's Compositor B, but his scholarship on this was "woefully out of date" and missed the significance of recent work which exculpates Compositor B. Honigmann wanted a shoddy Compositor B "to widen the scope of his editorial interference". Honigmann claimed that Ralph Crane may have supplied the copy for F Othello and F 2 Henry 4, but he avoided undertaking the labour, such as performed by Trevor Howard-Hill, needed to show this (p. 242). Honigmann did usefully correct "Gary Taylor's gross error in denying the existence of literary censorship of dramatic texts", but just because oaths have been purged by the scribe does not make the scribe Crane. Honigmann aligned himself with New Bibliography and "indulges in the excesses" of that discredited movement, he accepted the entirely unproven claim that Hand D of the Sir Thomas More manuscript is Shakespeare and that Shakespeare's writing got harder to read as he got older. (Werstine knows that most palaeographers think Hand D is Shakespeare and that given the current evidence the matter cannot be settled.) Where F differs from Q, Honigmann speculatively 'corrected' the error by reconstructing how it might have come about from a scribe's "misreading of one of these imperfections in the later Hand-D-Shakespeare's penmanship". Werstine ends with a lame joke that, just as Honigmann imagined that he could see past the Folio to the manuscript and its correct reading, so he Werstine can see past the copyright page of Honigmann's book to spy a turned type: the ideas are so out of date it should be dated "1966" not "1996" (p. 244)
In the Shakespeare Newsletter Honigmann replied to Werstine, claiming that the review "grossly misrepresents" him ('Letter to the Editor: Paul Werstine's Review of E. A. J. Honigmann The Texts of 'Othello' and Shakespearian Revision in Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 240-244', ShN 50[2000] 66). Honigmann points out that far from uncritically championing New Bibliography, he challenged it because he realized that corruption and authorial revision were largely indistinguishable. As for using the "enemies" of Walkley to blackguard him, Honigmann points out that he quoted both sides of Walkley versus Everard. Like many others, Honigmann declares himself convinced that Hand D of Sir Thomas More is Shakespeare and that he is entitled to use this in his argument. Far from offering almost no evidence in support of the contention that a Crane transcript of Othello was the copy for F, Honigmann insists that he offered plenty, as the reviewer for Shakespeare Survey noticed. Shakespeare Newsletter also published W. Speed Hill's review of Honigmann's work which includes his observation that Honigmann is on the pre-structuralist, empiricist, side of the current divide in Shakespeare studies ('Editing Othello: The Indefatigable in Pursuit of the Intractable: a Review of E. A. J. Honigmann The Texts of 'Othello' and Shakespearian Revision (London: Routledge, 1996) and William Shakespeare Othello Ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, The Arden Shakespeare Third Edition (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997)', ShN 50[2000] 67-68, 70, 72, 84, 86). Hill thinks that Othello is the hardest Shakespeare text to edit and that there is no real agreement about the texts underlying Q-1622 and F-1623. Apart from Werstine's dismissive review of The Texts of 'Othello', only McMillin's article (reviewed above) has entered the debate at all--to disagree with Greg and Honigmann that Q derives from foul papers--probably because Arden and Honigmann are too intimidating, even though Honigmann's being right would have important consequences for the editing of Othello and for the 'revision' question generally. Hill produces Honigmann's stemma for Othello and observes that in Honigmann's hypothesis there is no extant text descending from prompt copy, there is no need for memorial reconstruction, and a total of 5 lost texts are conjectured in addition to extant Q1, F, and Q2. For the existence of a scribal copy between the authorial foul papers and Q1, Honigmann adduced the evidence of misreadings and sloppy omissions (that is, material we know from F which did not make it into Q because the scribes did not copy the authorial papers carefully). Thus Honigmann's view was that what Q lacks of F is material dropped to make Q, not material later added to make F. Between the authorial foul papers and F, Honigmann posited an authorial fair copy and a Ralph Crane transcript of that fair copy. The authorial fair copy is authorial, not scribal, in Honigmann's view because Crane apparently had trouble reading it, and when copying his own work, Shakespeare introduced numerous tiny revisions, as argued in Honigmann's book The Stability of Shakespeare's Texts. Thus Honigmann posited two authorial manuscripts (foul papers and fair copy), each of which is at two removes from its extant print witness (Q1 and F, respectively). Hill thinks that there is nothing wrong with assuming 5 lost manuscripts--we have to do this all the time for other texts available in multiple witnesses--and overall Honigmann's stemma unites those editors willing to produce a narrative about how Q and F came about. (Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine are, of course, outside this consensus, being sceptical of such narratives.) However, many editors now respond to such a complex textual situation by saying that we should edit each extant early printing independently of "its textual siblings". Although Honigmann challenged parts of New Bibliography in The Stability of Shakespeare's Text, Hill concludes that he still wants to get back to the author's words, not the collaborate troupe's performance.
Hill thinks it surprising that Honigmann, who did so much to convince people that Shakespeare revised as he copied, should reject the hypothesis that Q and F Othello are separated mostly by authorial revision--about which Honigmann admits a change of mind since he used to support the two-texts hypothesis for this play--and should therefore not be conflated; Honigmann's Arden3 Othello is a conflated text. (This point which renders superfluous much of Werstine's commentary reviewed above.) The Oxford Complete Works did a textbook Gregian mixed-authority conflation job (Q was their copy-text and thus their source for incidentals, but they introduced F readings where they thought these to be more Shakespearian or to be authorial revisions), but Honigmann was more cautious because his Stability demonstrated our inability to distinguish certain kinds of transmission errors from authorial revision. Honigmann raised the value of Q, because the scribe separating it from authorial papers was inexperienced and so could mangle but not subtly alter, and lowered the value of F because the scribe separating it from authorial papers, Ralph Crane, knew what he was doing and could subtly interfere. Hill asks but does not answer the question of whether we are entitled to 'correct' early printed texts by reference to some imagined origin beneath them to which we have no reference other than the printings. Where once there was a general consensus about editing, there are now two camps: those who see empirical work on the texts as leading ultimately to knowledge and who do critical editing (like Honigmann), and those who see this view as mere wish-fulfilment and who do "best-text documentalism" (like Werstine) where the editors picks the text she thinks best and reproduces it with its major errors corrected.
Returning to work in Shakespeare Quarterly, Barbara Kreps argues that the character of Margaret changes between the quarto version The Contention of York and Lancaster and the Folio version 2 Henry 6 where she is more assertive but yet is taken less seriously by others ('Bad Memories of Margaret?: Memorial Reconstruction Versus Revision in The First Part of the Contention and 2 Henry VI', SQ 51[2000] 154-80). Such an artistically coherent difference cannot be explained by memorial reconstruction but must be Shakespearian revision. Kreps begins by surveying the New Bibliographical explanations of the quarto and Folio versions of this play, and criticizes the binary thinking (especially notions of 'good' and 'bad' texts) which underlie it. Between Q (1594) and F (1623) there are 1000s of variants, and in the mid-twentieth century Peter Alexander and Madeleine Doran independently offered evidence that Q was based on a memorial reconstruction of a production and that a manuscript of that production was copy for F. Although Doran and Alexander are often lumped together for their shared view that the quarto is a memorial reconstruction, they had entirely different reasons for believing so, and Alexander had a much lower opinion of Q much than did Doran; they agreed, however, that F was not an expanded form of Q, but rather Q was a cut down version of F. Doran thought that company, Pembroke's men, was forced to tour in 1592-3 because of plague, found that they had left the book behind, so they attempted to reconstruct it from their memories and at the same time abridged it because the touring troupe was smaller than the London company. Thus for Doran Q was a good acting version. Alexander, on the other hand, imagined unscrupulous actors doing an unauthorized memorial reconstruction for money, and fingered the men playing Warwick and Suffolk/Clifford. No dramatist could have written Q, Alexander pointed out, because it makes York claim descent from the second son of Edward 3 which, if true, renders absurdly pointless his subsequent argument for his right to inherit via the daughter of the third son of Edward 3 (p. 158).
Kreps notes that those who think Q a memorial reconstruction tend to follow Alexander in thinking that a bad thing, ignoring Doran's equally viable theory of a virtuous origin. Of course, Kreps remarks, memorial reconstruction is good at explaining pointless variation variation--attributable to failures of memory--while a theory of revision is good at explaining purposeful alteration. Unfortunately both kinds of variation separate Q and F: there are long sections of perfect correspondence and sections where the texts do not converge at all. This fact would appear to necessitate a hybrid theory incorporating memorial work and direct copying, but Kreps thinks that supplementing memorial reconstruction with the idea that chunks of Q were directly copied to make F is "critical doublethink" (p. 161). Kreps believes that Q is not 'bad' and that indeed it bears the mark of Shakespeare determining to write its sequel. Kreps summarizes the characterological differences between Q and F thus: ". . . in F Margaret is more of a virago, Humphrey is more admirable, the king's relationship with Humphrey is cooler, Henry's personal and political inadequacies are more evident, York and his claim to the throne are more politically complex and the cardinal more Machiavellian than they appear in the quarto" (p. 162). The welcome Henry gives his bride-to-be Margaret is verbally similar in Q and F, but in the latter it has a proviso: "If Simpathy of Loue vnite our thoughts" (TLN 30) which would be ironically understood by those who knew the sources. In her reply, Q has Margaret be timid and anxious to please while F has her boldly emphasizing her own intellect. Likewise when petitioners mistake Suffolk for the lord protector in 1.3, Margaret in Q hands the papers to Suffolk who tears them while in F Margaret holds on to the petitions and she, more forceful and rougher in speech than in Q, tears them. The reordering of the petitioners from Q to F makes the crucial matter be monarchial inheritance, as indeed it will be in the second half of 2 Henry 6 and throughout the sequel 3 Henry 6 (p. 165). After the petitioners leave, Margaret tells Suffolk her woes. In Q these are Henry's political impotence, her two enemies Humphrey and his wife, her dissatisfaction with Henry as a husband and her attraction to Suffolk. In F the order is different, and the speech much longer: she goes on about how her own dignity suffers, about how much better than her husband Suffolk is, and gives a longer denunciation of Henry (especially his religious piety) and all his courtiers. Her enemies in F include Beaufort, whereas crucially in Q Margaret does not say anything against Beaufort and indeed when Beaufort dies she is sorry. Q and F are each consistent about her attitude to Beaufort: in the former he is not her enemy and she is sorry when he dies, in the latter he is her enemy and she is not sorry when he dies. This kind of consistency, "coherent maintenance of dramatic logic across the distance of half the play", in each text cannot be accounted for by memorial reconstruction, only by artistic revision (p. 168).
When the matter of who shall be regent in France comes up in 1.3, Margaret in Q gives her opinion in favour of Somerset whereas in F she interrupts and insists that the king favours Somerset (which, in fact, he has not said). In F but not Q Gloucester complains that "These are no Womens matters" (TLN 507). F has Henry be cooler to Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, and for example when his wife is tried Henry omits her title and Gloucester's when calling her to give evidence. Q generally has Henry use affectionate language towards Gloucester, but F only has this affection reappear once it is too late to do any good. When Humphrey resigns he uses much the same words in Q and F, but since Margaret has commanded him to do it in F his failure to answer her makes these words become a snub. Does Q lack her telling him to do because the memorially-reconstructing actor forgot it, or because it was cut in the text underlying Q? Or was it added to the text underlying Q to make the text underlying F? If the last of these, as Kreps believes, adding the lines in which Margaret commands Humphrey to resign makes her assertive and makes him indifferent to her political interference, since he does not answer her. Perhaps making this simple revision gave Shakespeare the idea to make Margaret politically more assertive in 3.1, and yet not taken seriously by others (p. 171). The cardinal is much powerful in F, and is Margaret's enemy. When planning the death of Humphrey, F has the queen, the cardinal, Suffolk, Buckingham, York, and Somerset present, but York says "we three haue spoke it". Which three of them: Suffolk, York, and the queen, or Suffolk, York, and the cardinal? (Suffolk must be one because he says "Here is my Hand", and York must be one because he says "we three".) Leaving out the queen would be another example in F of "deflation of the ambitious Margaret" and one which accords with the following moment: the post from Ireland enters and, in F, ignores Margaret. All these changes of Margaret's political power (diminished in F from Q) and the cardinal's power (increased in F from Q) are not likely to come from memorial reconstruction rather show artistic intention.
What of the sequel? Q and F end with the defeat for the crown at St Albans, the royal couple's flight to London to summon a parliament, and the Yorkists's attempt to beat them to London, which matches the beginnings of Richard Duke of York (Q version) and 3 Henry 6 (F version) at the palace where the parliament is to be held. The lasts acts of The Contention of York and Lancaster and 2 Henry 6 show signs that Shakespeare was thinking of a sequel, for example in the sudden attention to father-son relationships, which will become a motif in the next play. But 2 Henry 6 (the F version) has many more of these links than The Contention of York and Lancaster (Q text): sympathy for York, which 3 Henry 6 will extend, Clifford's vow to kill the infants of the York family, Henry and Salisbury talk about making/breaking oaths, and the character of Margaret. In Folio 2 Henry 6, Margaret and Henry are equal partners and plan together their next move, whereas in the quarto The Contention of York and Lancaster he is defeatist and she impatiently implores him to take manly action. This unwomanly queen of the Folio 2 Henry 6 (absent from the quarto Contention) is the same as at the start of Folio 3 Henry 6, suggesting that the writer of Folio 2 Henry 6 knows he has a sequel and knows its outline. But if the known sequel were as in the quarto Richard Duke of York then it does not wholly account for Margaret as she appears in Folio 2 Henry 6: yes, she is bolder, but the point of Folio 2 Henry 6 is that she does not get the political ends she seeks. It is as though Shakespeare wrote Folio 2 Henry 6 (that is, he built upon the existing play represented by the quarto The Contention of York and Lancaster) with the quarto Richard Duke of York in front of him and got from it Margaret's greater boldness, to which he added her achievements failing to live up to her desires (pp. 175-8). Kreps admits that she cannot prove all of this; her theory of the artistic changes in the character of Margaret explains some of the Q/F differences but not others, just as the theory of memorial reconstruction does. While Kreps dislikes hybrid theories ("doublethink"), others will presumable take her persuasive argument as good evidence that artistic revision and memorial reconstruction separate Q and F.
The point of M. J. Kidnie's long essay in Shakespeare Quarterly seems to be the essentially trivial one that editors are too apt to tidy up and augment stage directions where in fact readers should face the indeterminacy of the originals ('Text, Performance, and the Editors: Staging Shakespeare's Drama', SQ 51[2000] 456-73). Kidnie quotes Michael Warren's observation that Q1 King Lear does not specify the moment of Lear's death, and nor (usually) does any particular performance, but editors want to produce fixity. (I should say they are constrained by the necessity to put the words "He dies" somewhere, so the reader knows this really is a death, even if they do not want to be precise about when.) Kidnie thinks Warren has lost sight of the one-way relation between script and performance: the former is incorporated into the latter, never the other way around, and as Marco de Marinis argued one cannot go from action to scripted stage direction. This is either obviously an error or this reviewer misunderstands Kidnie's point entirely, since memorial reconstruction does precisely go from action to words, as indeed does the task of theatre reviewer, and as John Jowett argued Ralph Crane seems to have written his stage directions for The Tempest using recollections of performance ('New Created Creatures: Ralph Crane and the Stage Directions in The Tempest', ShSurv 36[1983] 107-20). Kidnie goes on to quote Marinis in absurdities such as "There is no necessary link between dramatic language and the stage" and argues that when the stage takes a script it destroys its status as a literary text and makes it something else; so really editors cannot hurt performance by seeking fixity in their stage directions. It may seem that Q1 King Lear preserves the unfixity which is characteristic of performance, but Kidnie thinks this is an illusion: it is just that the oral messages from Shakespeare about when Lear was to die have not survived, only the paper has. Kidnie adopts Roman Ingarden distinction between haupttext (dialogue) and nebentext (side text, including stage directions) because recent performance theory uses this distinction and it prioritizes the dialogue and makes the stage directions ancillary, thus giving the producers freedom to choose their own mise-en-sc�ne. R. B. McKerrow too made speech more important than stage directions and Kidnie thinks this is justified since in the printing-house and in the theatre these two kinds of writing were treated differently: the dialogue was committed to paper while the stage directions were transmitted verbally or were "sorted out in a collaborative rehearsal space" (p. 461). Kidnie here overlooks the possibility that professional convention (such as which stage entrance to use) or ingrained habits of movements (generated, for example, by rules of social deference ) governed matters for which we might want stage directions.
Kidnie's assertion that there is no way to "render an early modern script entire", no one way to close "gaps in the nebentext" is one that even school children now learn, and it is surprising that she feels the need to say so in Shakespeare Quarterly. Editors must, she argues, think about what they are doing in representing thing that "survive only as textual fragments", but this surely indicates a leap of logic since Kidnie has not established that they are fragments in the sense that something has been lost. Rather, the stage directions may never have been written down or may always have been indeterminate in order to enable multiple reworkings. We might follow Stanley Wells who, in Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader, implored editors to be bold in helping the unimaginative reader but Kidnie dislikes Wells's moral tone, referring as he does to the "responsibility to both author and reader". Kidnie again surprises with the assertion that no-one would suggest that a person reconstructing a broken ancient vase had a responsibility to do the reconstruction, to which this reviewer finds himself responding "I would!". Sensitive to generalizations about what people should do, Kidnie nonetheless confidently asserts that as "actors, directors, and theatergoers" we want to see "the plays performed in a modern context", and again I often feel the urge to cry "I don't!". As a piece of literature, the stage directions interact with the dialogue to make a virtual performance representing the author's ideal, Kidnie's argues, but it is hard to see how this is true in the case of something like Robert Greene's direction "Or if you can conveniently, let a chaire come downe from the top of the stage" in his Alphonsus of Aragon; surely here is deliberate looseness which makes the thing adaptable to a variety of places and occasions. Kidnie cautions that even if we only want to help readers get the right virtual performance in their minds, we run the risk of an essentialist error in assuming that "the ways we currently make sense of performance would have been shared by early modern practitioners and theatergoers" (p. 465). Correct use of terminology is not Kidnie's strength, for of course this would be the error of anachronism, not necessarily essentialism. (When tempted to use the word 'essentialism', one should always first ask oneself 'what is the essence?'). Worse, the assumption of a shared sense of performance is in fact reasonable up to a point: to use Wells's well-known example, we can be tolerably sure that characters who kneel rise again before they exit. When Kidnie asserts that the early modern might have closed the gaps in the nebentext in ways we cannot imagine, one is entitled to respond that they could not have used some of the ways which we can imagine, such as exiting by being teleported à la "Star Trek". Kidnie makes the extraordinarily elitist claim that editorial intervention cannot make up for the specialist skills needed to read a play--I have yet to meet a child who could not handle the genre comfortably, although of course unfamiliar language can be a problem--and she claims "most published scripts" of twentieth-century drama include detailed ancillary material on staging which, offering Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill as examples, she claims "is fairly standard practice". To test this I dipped into as many modern plays as I could in half an hour's browsing at my local branch of Waterstones, and none included detailed ancillary material on staging; Stoppard and Churchill seem to be exceptional.
Kidnie claims that when editors augment stage directions they necessary "embed critical interpretation" in the text (p. 467), but the same is true of modernizing of spelling, or emending errors, and everything else one does in mediating a text. Even facsimile reprints embed a subjective interpretation manifested in such things as the quality of the paper and the shape of the type. Kidnie thinks that the embedding of an editor's critical interpretation does more harm than the embedding in performance of a directors critical interpretation because the latter's work is ephemeral. This is not necessarily so: the directors of the BBC Television Shakespeare are likely to have more influence than editors on generations of students, especially in the vast areas of the world where live performance is hard to come by. Kidnie is sure (and quotes Alan Dessen agreeing) that we really know little about early modern staging, but one would be more confident that the ignorance was not solely hers if she had shown awareness of the work of Bernard Beckerman, Glynne Wickham, and Andrew Gurr, and of ongoing experimentation at the Globe reconstruction in London. Kidnie proves that she does not know what 'essentialist' means by throwing this epithet at the defence of editorial intervention as a commonsense necessity in aid of readers. Instead of there being one type of edition for the non-specialist reader there should be others that "reintroduce variability and historical contingency", so Kidnie calls for "the development of a plurality of editorial approaches". Actually, the editorial approaches of the Arden, Oxford, and Cambridge series are not identical and the Arden certainly aims to do some of what Kidnie wants. But Kidnie's entire exhortation is forestalled by McKerrow's remark in the first page of the Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare that "There can be no edition of the work of a writer of former times which is satisfactory to all readers, though there might, I suppose, be at least half a dozen editions of the works of Shakespeare executed on quite different lines, each of which, to one group of readers, would be the best edition possible".
Kidnie writes that she has "deliberately resisted the temptation" to present her plans for other better ways to edit, but one cannot help suspecting that she has none. Instead, Kidnie offers editors some pointers: they might use promptbooks and other records of actual performance (such as photographs and video recordings) to flesh out their stage directions. (Or just go to the theatre?) Alternatively they might leave the stage directions as they are and ask the reader's indulgence, which would be an empowering experience (p. 470). Kidnie likes the idea of "allow[ing] readers to evaluate the evidence for themselves", although it is not clear why she thinks this is more valuable than having a specialist doing it. Certainly textual democracy might reveal new insights since "One person's compositor's error . . . may well prove to be somebody else's new insight about early modern staging", but that is an argument for such perspicacious readers being educated, learning to to research and to publish to persuade their peers; one should not expect that level of engagement from people who are not reading professionally, or are only reading for undergraduate degrees. Kidnie wants editions that defamiliarize the drama, not make it comfortable, but with Chaucer rapidly disappearing from undergraduate English courses I should think this merely a way to hasten Shakespeare's joining him, and one which conservatives will find useful. Kidnie makes the classic historicizing demand that editions should create "an awareness of the dramatic text's otherness", but this is a demand which, as Kiernan Ryan has argued, may already have gone too far ('Measure for Measure: Marxism Before Marx', in Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, eds. Marxist Shakespeares, pp. 227-44).
The remaining items in Shakespeare Quarterly take the form of short pieces. Ann Thompson argues that George MacDonald's 1885 Folio-only edition of Hamlet was a century ahead of its time in using authorial revision as a reason for not conflating and in its elegant layout to represent the textual situation of a two-text play ('George MacDonald's 1885 Folio-based Edition of Hamlet', SQ 51[2000] 201-5). The design put an original-spelling Folio text on the left-hand page and MacDonald's notes on the right-hand page. Q2-only passages were placed at the foot of the left page in smaller type and separated from the main text by a line; an asterisk in the main text indicated each passage's position in Q2, and Q2 variants were in small type in the right-hand margin. Folio-only passages are identified by a vertical black bar on the left edge. Peter Holland argues that although Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition of Shakespeare was the first to use entirely logical/syntactical pointing in place of the breathing/rhetorical pointing found in the first four Folios, a trial printing of 1708 shows Rowe not quite having reached this endpoint since some 'breathing' pointing remains ('Modernizing Shakespeare: Nicholas Rowe and The Tempest', SQ 51[2000] 24-32). Rowe did far more changing of spelling and pointing than F1-F4 editors had, and his practices are essentially those used now. Holland says that the language of Shakespeare was "originally designed to be spoken", which is true but of course it was mediated, so far as we know, only by writing. Samuel Schoenbaum noted that the British Library has a few 'trial' sheets of Rowe's The Tempest, which Holland thinks were "an experiment in setting" to see how the style to be used for the edition would look. As Schoenbaum saw, this trial sheet was based on F2 and not F4 as the 1709 edition was to be. Holland lists the variants that show that it was indeed F2 and not F3 or F4 that was used to make the trial sheets. Comparing the 1708 trial printing and the 1709 edition, the latter shows a move towards the more syntactic as opposed to the rhetorical pointing, especially in using the semicolon (as it still is used in Shakespeare editing) to break up "the long Shakespearean period in ways approximating modern conventions of syntactical punctuation for print". For example, Rowe turned "Heigh my hearts, cheerely, cheerely my harts: yare, yare: Take in the toppe-sale: Tend to th' Masters whistle: Blow till thou burst thy winde, if roome enough" (F1) to "Hey my Hearts, cheerly my Hearts; yare, yare; take in the Top-sail; tend to th' Master's Whistle; Blow 'till thou burst thy Wind, if room enough" (Rowe 1709). I was no longer acceptable to link parallel clauses with colons, although in 1708 Rowe kept F2's colons. Rowe's eventual adoption of the contemporary prescriptive pointing is "almost a pity" since it took us away from "those possibilities for understanding the text still present in the later Folios".
George Walton Williams thinks that sometimes it is better for an editor to end a scene with characters exiting one by one, even if the copy text gives a massed exit ('Early Exits: An Open Letter to Editors', SQ 51[2000] 205-10). Bardolph, Nym, Pistol, and Boy taking their leave of Hostess at the end of Henry 5 2.3 have an exeunt in F (TLN 884) but might more effectively leave one-by-one, and there is a similar opportunity for sequential exit at the end of Macbeth 2.1. Theatrically this winding down of a scene can be more effective than the collective exit offered in the script since it allows for decreasing tension. Williams addresses the objection "you're an editor, not a director!" by suggesting that this kind of nudging to readers can be helpful "without serious damage to the text", but this could be countered by the assertion that one can also rewrite dialogue without serious damage, yet it is not the editor's job. Two short pieces received independently by Shakespeare Quarterly are, because of their similarity, printed together: Randall Martin and John D. Cox identify the historical man represented as John Somerville in Shakespeare's 3 Henry 6 ('Rehabilitating John Somerville in 3 Henry VI', SQ 51[2000] 332-40; 'Local References in 3 Henry VI', SQ 51[2000] 340-52). John Somerville was tried and condemned for sedition alongside Edward Arden, probably a relative of Shakespeare. The Somervilles were fervent Catholics and in 1583 John Somerville became unhinged, announcing his intention to kill queen Elizabeth, for which he was arrested; under torture he implicated Somervilles and Ardens. Only John Somerville and Edward Arden were condemned at the trial; their heads were displayed on London Bridge. The case caused an outcry since Somerville was obviously insane and no evidence pointed towards Edward Arden, and in defence of the government's action was published Lord Burghley's The Execution of Justice in England which was begun in response to the outcry at Campion's execution. Burghley's book complained of seditious Catholic publications, presumably (because Burghley was elsewhere much annoyed by it) including John Leslie, Bishop of Ross's A Treatise of Treasons against Queen Elizabeth (Louvain, 1573). Leslie's Treatise is alluded to in 3 Henry 6 when Richard of Gloucester say that he "set the murtherous Macheuill to Schoole" (F, TLN 1717) or "set the aspiring Catalin to schoole" (1595 Octavo, sig. C8v). Cataline and Machiavel are used interchangeably in Leslie's Treatise as abusive terms for the powerful ministers of the government, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, and Burghley, and he also, in likening the present situation to the fall of Troy, refers to Ulysses and Sinon, as does 3 Henry 6 (F, TLN 1713-14). Leslie also likens Bacon and Burghley to Richard 3. That Folio and Octavo 3 Henry 6 allude to Leslie's Treatise but in different ways makes both likely to be Shakespearian, and probably the unusual and specific "Catalin" became the less specific (because generally reviled) "Macheuill"; that is, the O reading being revised to F's is more likely than the opposite (pp. 337-40). Martin concludes that Shakespeare's vignette with a character named Somerville cannot but have recalled the case. Shakespeare has Somerville be not mad, and indeed corrective of another's error (Warwick), and so is a coded rebuke of the government's treatment of Shakespeare's Warwickshire relatives, all of which adds to the evidence that Shakespeare was Catholic.
Cox puts this historical material in the wider context of local references in Shakespeare, noting that in 3 Henry 6 Shakespeare's Warwick is more of a kingmaker than the sources have him. Shakespeare added places references to 3 Henry 6 5.1 which are not mentioned in the sources: Dunsmore and Daventry, both on the London-Stratford (or Coventry) road, and appropriate for the action. Shakespeare moved the scene from Warwick to the walls of Coventry to make the most of Rose theatre's upper playing area, argues Cox. Shakespeare gives the local pronunciation "Daintry'" for Daventry and gives the correct walking distance (2 hours) from Southam the Coventry. Cox says that in fact a walker could do the 10 miles in 2 hours, but a "puissant troop" would take longer. I suspect Cox has missed the point of what Somerville says: "At Southam I did leaue him [Clarence] with his forces, | And doe expect him here some two howres hence." (TLN 2683-4). Somerville's answer says how far behind him Clarence's forces are. If Somerville took 2 hours to arrive from Southam (as Cox suggests) and the army moves at half that speed (say 4 hours to do 10 miles) they will indeed be 2 hours behind him. The man who gives this local information about Southam would appropriately be a Warwickshire man, since Warwick has boasted of his local support; Somerville's correction of Warwick's idea about which direction Southam lies in also suggests a local man. Like Martin, Cox thinks that the case of John Somerville was the reason Shakespeare chose this name for 5.1 of 3 Henry 6. Cox quotes C. C. Stopes Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries on John Somerville's landholdings in "Edstone, Wootton Wawen, Knoll, and Clareden, . . . Halford . . . Lapworth . . . Wydney super Bentley Heath", which is indeed what Stopes writes, although one suspects a typical Stopes transcription error since the placename Clavedon (now a station on the Stratford-Warwick railway line) is more likely than "Clareden". Cox relates essentially the same story of Somerville's attempted assassination and his death given by Martin and observes that whether or not Mary Arden was related to these Park Hall Ardens, Shakespeare would undoubtedly have known of the family and their downfall. In having his character Somerville be one of Warwick's loyal retainers, Shakespeare was "disagreeing obliquely" with Burghley's claim that Somerville was a traitor. The scene at Coventry in 3 Henry 6 5.1 is militarily absurd and Cox lists the things that do not add up, including Warwick being effectively besieged in poorly-defensible Coventry but allowed by Edward to decide that the battle will take place 80 miles away at Barnet; this adds to the sense that Shakespeare ordered material for its local resonances for himself, and part of that was defending the honour of the family of Somervilles.
Just one article in Review of English Studies was relevant to this survey, and in it Roger Warren argues that, contrary to Steve Urkowitz's view, the quarto The Contention of York and Lancaster is a memorial reconstruction of the play otherwise known as 2 Henry 6 in the Folio ('The Quarto and Folio Texts of 2 Henry VI: A Reconsideration', RES 51[2000] 193-207). As discussed above in the review of Kreps's article, the crux is York's explanation of his genealogy which Q garbles. Urkowitz argued out that York does not draw attention to his being descended from Langley, so the garbling would not make an audience think there was problem, but Warren counters that the audience could be expected to make the (historically correct) assumption that one York was descended from the other. Urkowitz also claimed that the memorial reconstruction argument ignores "surrounding contexts" in 1.1 and 1.3, so Warren looks at these specifically and shows a number of scenes where Q clearly just garbles the Folio. McKerrow pointed out that where Q lacks historical details present in F we must assume that the reporter forgot them since it is hardly likely that these were sprinkled through the play as part of a process of revision, which tends to be wholesale. Warren argues that the reverse is also true: where Q contains spots of historical detail not in F, the reason is not (as the editors of the Oxford Complete Works had it) that Q represents performance later than the foul papers underlying F, and performance which may have been revised since those foul papers, but rather that what was in the play originally (and so got into the report underlying Q) was subsequently cut by the author (p. 201-3). This means that revision separates Q and F. Evidence for this is the moving of the reading out of the prophecies (from the paper containing the spirit's answers) from the end of 1.4 (by York) in F to the middle of 2.1 (by King Henry) in Q, but Warren admits that the direction of revision could be either way. In other words, F might be the original, left unrevised, and Q the revision for performance, or Q might represent first performance and F a later revision. F has Richard of Gloucester and Young Clifford 'flyting' as though about to fight, but they do not fight in F. In Q they do, and Warren thinks that F represents a decision to delay the fight of Richard of Gloucester and Young Clifford to the next play so that in this one can be shown the chivalric ideal which dies with the old men to be replaced by barbarity in the young men. Why might Shakespeare revise the text underlying F? William Montgomery thought that publication in 1600 of 2 Henry 6 and 3 Henry 6 at the same time as Henry 5 indicates renewed interest in these old plays, and that the reference to them in the epilogue to Henry 5's indicates revival of the Henry 6 plays in the late 1590s. Warren admits that against this claim that F 2 Henry 6 being a revised text is the presence of slips such as Queen Margaret twice being called Eleanor/Nel, and the use of an actor's name in 4.2, but he has explanations for these. In revising, Shakespeare left untouched the powerful third act (including the Margaret/Nel slips) and John Holland's name is not that of an actor but a name from Shakespeare's source reading (he was Earl of Huntingdon) which stuck with him when thinking up names for Cade's followers. Q being a reported text is not incompatible with revision in F; in fact Q is a report of an earlier state of the play which is revised in F. For this reason, Warren in his Oxford Shakespeare edition will not insert passages from Q, since he thinks F contains authorial revisions later than Q. Warren's claims has obvious common ground with those of Barbara Kreps reviewed above, and go some way towards countering Paul Werstine's rejection of the entire memorial reconstruction theory reviewed last year ('A Century of 'Bad' Shakespeare Quartos', SQ 50[1999]). Where two texts appear to be mostly related by memorial corruption, but have awkward stretches of entirely unalike material, a hybrid theory of memorial reconstruction and revision might be the best hypothesis from which an editor should proceed.
Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography prints one long and one short piece of relevant to this survey. Karen Bjelland uses Foucault's work to trace the history of Shakespeare's editors as 'theologians' (Folios 1 to 4), 'historians' (the Restoration to about 1980), and 'archaeologists' (in the last 20 years) ('The Editor as Theologian, Historian, and Archaeologist: Shifting Paradigms Within Editorial Theory and Their Sociocultural Ramifications', AEB 11[2000] 1-43). Although there is a postmodern aptness to the difference, the article's running-title of "The Editor as Theologican, Historian, and Archaeologist" is probably just a misspelling of 'theologian'. Shakespeare editors are like clerics, Bjelland claims, because they are concerned with preserving a textual canon, a process which started with F1's preliminaries. Jonson's "To the Reader" invokes class in calling him "gentle" Shakespeare--which links him to a protestant work ethic--as though the reader were being encouraged to view here the means by which he was able to retire wealthily to Stratford. Bjelland should, of course, acknowledge that "gentle" could also just mean 'mild' or 'kind', so it might not be about class. The Folio engraving looks like those made of early protestant martyrs, which Bjelland thinks is ironic "in the light of Shakespeare's own recusant origins". For this claim she cites an article in Shakespeare Quarterly 1989 on John Shakespeare's Testament, which is hardly where the matter rests at present. Bjelland calls the work of eighteenth-century editors the "Alexandrian" phase without say in which of the many senses she means this word, and she charts how they refashioned Shakespeare as a classical author while raising the questions which editors still cannot answer, such as whether Q/F variants show corruption or revision. From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries editing tried to recover an "ideal text" which is never one of the actually-available texts and the important thing is the critique made of this editorial tradition by "those of a Pergamanian persuasion" (p. 14). Bjelland's argument is postmodern but her jargon obscurely classical; presumably her analogy is between two classical approaches to grammar, the former (Alexandrian) predicated on inherent orderliness and the latter (Pergemenes) more interested in anomalies which can be explored empirically. Bjelland identifies Steven Urkowitz, Michael Warren, Randall McLeod and Gary Taylor as the four leading Pergamanians, although the last she thinks more an Alexandrian in practice.
Bjelland identifies a Foucauldian epistemological shift around 1980, with the Platonic base of editing being attacked, and she sees new technology offering a democratic alternative to the specialism of the editor. With hypermedia archives, no one document need be privileged over others and this Bjelland thinks a good thing. One would have thought that such textual egalitarianism elides the author's effort to revise; after all, how would Bjelland like it if someone insisted that an earlier draft of her essay were equal to the published one? Bjelland writes approvingly that the hypermedia archive will promote the reader to editor, or in her jargon, there will be "the transfer of the 'author function' from the editor to the reader" (p. 21). This surely is a misreading of Foucault, since his point in inventing the notion of an author-function was that textual fixity comes not from authors but from readers who assign their own fixity--such as their unwillingness to accept certain meanings--to the author and say it came from him. Bjelland's article is marred by bad writing, such as "Unlike those currently creating these archives, the users of tomorrow will not have the same critical background or repertoire of skills" (p. 27). It is impossible to tell whether Bjelland means that the users will be not the same as each other or not the same as the those creating the archives. In a footnote Bjelland writes of problems that ignorance about how an electronic archive was made might cause: "In the language of Roman Jacobsen, one might say that the inherent 'metonymic' tendency of hypermedia can be so overwhelming for some that it leads to an 'aphasic' response". This is either a terribly clever joke or it is gibberish, and the odd spelling of Jakobson's name might fit either explanation. Bjelland's argument hinges on Foucault's 'author-function', yet she repeatedly misrepresents it. For example, she claims that nowhere in his essay "What is an author?" did Foucault did consider the possibility "of the author himself exercising the 'author function' in terms of his own text and/or the mode of its production". In fact he did: "But the author-function is not a pure and simple reconstruction made second-hand from a text given as passive material. The text will always contain a certain number of signs referring to the author" ('What is an Author?', in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. 3rd Edition, trans. Josue V. Harari, pp. 341-53). Possibly Bjelland is using a different version of "What is an author?" from me, but given her reliance on this essay she really ought to have mentioned the differences between versions of it published in different languages over several years.
The other Shakespeare piece in this year's Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, by Robert F. Fleissner, is equally bad, but mercifully short ('The Round Knight of the Table: Did Not Theobald Emend 'A' Talkd Of' (Rather Than 'A Table Of') in Henry V?', AEB 11[2000] 179-80). After reading this note four times, I still cannot find what point Fleissner is making. It is known that Theobald got his "babbled of green fields" emendation in Henry 5 from an anonymous gentlemen's marginal note that "talked of" makes better sense that "table of"; beyond reminding us of this, I cannot see anything here. In stark contrast was the single piece of relevance in The Library, by Martin Butler, which I also read four times but for the pleasant reason that its two densely-packed pages repeatedly educated me ('Running-titles in Cymbeline', The Library 1[2000] 439-41). Butler shows that the formes of the 'zz' quire of the 1623 Folio were set in the usual order, as proved by a rogue Roman letter 'i' in the running-titles which Charlton Hinman feared showed something else. Hinman noticed that five pages of F1 (zz3v, aaa2r, aaa3r, aaa4r, and aaa5r) have running titles with a rogue roman 'i', making "Cymbeline". Hinman wondered if perhaps this tells us of an unusual order of setting the formes: that zz3v:4r "was the last forme in the quire [zz] to be set, the error then being carried over into the early formes of quire aaa", whereas, of course, we would expect the order to be from inner to outer formes, thus: zz3v:4r, zz3r:4v, zz2v:5r, zz2r:5v, zz1v:6r, zz1r:6v. Hinman did not think that zz was set unusually, but was stumped by the running-title error. Butler has solved it. There are other anomalies in the Cymbeline running titles to help us: a broken swash 'T' in "The" which appears on zz1v ("The Tragedie of [Anthony and Cleopatra]"), zz2v ("The Tragedie of Anthony and Cleopatra"), and zz3v ("The Tragedie of Cymbeline"), and then "on each recto page of quires aaa and bbb (with one exception, to be described in a moment)". Another running-titles anomaly is that some spell it "Tragedy of Cymbeline" and some "Tragedie of Cymbeline"; it is "Tragedie" on zz3v then throughout aaa and bbb recto pages (with one exception) while verso pages use "Tragedy". In the verso running-titles the 'T' of "Tragedy" is missing a end of its right-side crosspiece. "These facts indicate that a single skeleton was being used throughout the printing of aaa and bbb, the recto side of which carried the running-title 'The Tragedie of Cymbeline' (with broken 'The'), while the verso side was headed 'The Tragedy of Cymbeline' (with damaged 'Tragedy')". The pattern was only broken with the penultimate forme bbb1v:6r, where the pattern is reversed: "Tragedie" is on bbb1v and "Tragedy" on bbb6r. This happened because bbb1:6 was the last sheet of the book and bbb6r (the very last printed page) needed to be adapted to take the colophon. So, the skeleton was dismantled and the running-titles reset. We can from this reconstruct the setting of the running-titles in the zz quire, which holds the last 4 pages of Antony and Cleopatra and the first 8 of Cymbeline (hence running-titles had to be repeatedly rearranged), assuming they worked from inner to outer, and Butler provides a table showing this. After printing of zz3v, no forme needs 'Cymbeline' twice (left and right), so the running-title with the rogue 'i' was partially dismantled ("The Tragedie of" being reused for zz2v and zz1v) and the word "Cymbeline" set aside. When this word "Cymbeline" came to be needed again for the next quire, aaa, the error was spotted and the 'i' replaced with an italic 'i', which is why aaa6r has the broken 'T' in "Tragedie" but no rogue 'i' in Cymbeline". Thus Hinman's order of formes, the usual order, is confirmed by this rogue 'i' disappearing and reappearing.
This year's Notes & Queries contained the expected collection of factual enlightenment, unexpectedly spoiled by an extraordinary number of printing errors. So frequent are the misprints that the reviewer contacted several of the contributors to confirm the true readings; otherwise authors might be blamed for mistakes beyond their control. B. J. Sokol shows that 1 Henry 6 was written not earlier than 1591, which supports the 'late start' theory of Shakespeare's career ('Manuscript Evidence for an Earliest Date of Henry VI Part One', N&Q 245[2000] 58-63). Records of the Inner Temple show that the garden was improved in 1591, probably by 25 April when the Parliament of the Inner Temple made new arrangements for the gardener, and Shakespeare is much more likely to have chosen this location just after the well-known changes than before them. Richard Levin shows that the ballad of Titus Andronicus entered in the Stationers' Register is derived from the play, not a separate source ('Titus Andronicus and 'The Ballad Thereof'', N&Q 245[2000] 63-8). The "booke" of Titus Andronicus was entered on 6 February 1594, and "the ballad thereof" was the immediately next entry; Levin lists all 37 occasions when a book and a ballad were entered together in the Register from 1590 to 1616. Almost always the ballad is mentioned after and in a subordinate relationship to the book, and in the year following John Danter's entry for Titus Andronicus and its ballad he entered 5 more ballads based on plays associated with Henslowe: The Jew of Malta, Bellendon, A Knack to Know an Honest Man, Tamburlaine, and Long Meg of Westminster. This shows that Danter had an arrangement with Henslowe to print ballads of plays Henslowe was promoting and thus the Titus ballad was likewise a follow-up to the play Henslowe was promoting, rather than deriving from the prose history, which conclusion the internal evidence adduced by others also leads to. John Jowett, in a argument cited in his Oxford Shakespeare edition of Richard 3 (reviewed above), argues that memorial reconstruction cannot account for Q1 because it follows F's erratic stage-direction and speech-prefix alternation between 'Stanley' and 'Derby' as names for one man (''Derby', 'Stanley', and Memorial Reconstruction in Quarto Richard III', N&Q 245[2000] 75-9). F was printed from portions of Q3 and Q6 annotated by reference to MSF in all but two places (3.1.0.1 to 3.1.148.1 and 5.5.4 to end), and where speech prefixes vary in F they usually do so consistently, so Lady Anne is sometimes "La.", "Lady", "Lad.", "Anne." or "An.". These variations come from the manuscript, not the underlying quartos. In dialogue the name 'Derby' appears five times in 1.3 in both Q1 and F which is an odd anachronism to get in performance, especially if Q1 were a memorial reconstruction. In the rest of the play, from 3.1 onward, he is consistently called 'Stanley' which represents an authorial shift part-way through composition. So much for the dialogue: the speech prefixes and stage directions are more complex in their variation. Q1 and F agree in speech-prefix and stage-direction names for this character throughout (that is, they shift together, sometimes in conflict with the dialogue) except that Q1 calls him 'Derby' (in conflict with the name 'Stanley' used in dialogue) from 4.2 onwards whereas F calls him 'Derby' (in conflict with the dialogue) from 4.5 onwards. Jowett lists the character's names used in speech prefixes and stage directions throughout the play and whether this is in consort or in conflict with the dialogue.
The sections where Q1 and F disagree in speech prefixes and stage directions about the character are most revealing: 4.2 and 4.4, in both of which Q has 'Derby' and F has 'Stanley'. This shows that F is independent of its quarto copy in its speech prefixes and stage directions for this character. Elsewhere it is clear that MSF agreed with Q1 but it provided further material which was used to annotate Q to make F: the other quartos have "Darby" which F changes to "Earle of Derby", or "others" which F changes to "Derbie", and "L. Stanlie" which F changes to "Stanley". These readings, Jowett insists, point to consultation of MSF and show that 'Derby' or 'Stanley' stood in MSF "at thereabouts in Q1" (actually, a printing error renders this as the nonsensical "as thereabouts"). Although MSF influence on the quarto copy used to make F diminishes in Act 5, it is still discernible: Jowett shows a number of stage directions and speech prefixes in F which deviate in intelligent ways from Q1 and show that an authorial manuscript was consulted. Thus it is safe to infer that MSF slipped back to calling him 'Derby' (because F does) in speech prefixes and stage directions (in conflict with the dialogue), and hence there is a discernible pattern of alternation Derby/Stanley/Derby/Stanley/Derby in both MSQ and MSF. F's following of an erratic pattern in Q1 is not, then, due to its following Q1 directly--we have seen that it must be because F's underlying manuscript and Q1's underlying manuscript agree--but rather because there is transmission from MSF to MSQ. This transmission is not consistent with memorial reconstruction since the the alternating speech prefixes and stage directions are unlikely to have made it into the actors' parts, let alone into their memories since actors do not remember variability when what matters is who they interact with. Jowett imagines the objection (necessary to sustain memorial reconstruction as the origin of Q1) that perhaps MSQ, made by memorial reconstruction, was then annotated by reference to MSF or some other manuscript which maintained the distinctive alternation of speech prefixes and stage directions for Stanley/Derby, but in fact this cannot be so because there are speech prefixes in Q1 demonstrably not 'corrected' by reference to MSF. It is hard to find a way other than transcription by which MSF could have so oddly influenced MSQ, so memorial reconstruction cannot be the basis for Q1 Richard 3. Jowett's brilliant work is difficult reading because the subject is hard, but it is rendered even harder by a particularly bad printing error which makes Jowett refer to the view that that F represents an earlier state of the text than Q1 thus: "This has been the orthodox view of two-thirds of a century, but that orthodoxy adds the particular interpretation that MSF is derivative in the special sense that it is based on a memorial reconstruction" (p. 76). Jowett's typescript of course had "that MSQ is derivative in a special sense".
N. F. Blake argues that a perceived crux, Helen's phrase "still-peering aire" in All's Well that Ends Well, does not need emending, just explaining ('A Crux in All's Well That Ends Well', N&Q 245[2000] 451-3). Helen's exhortation to musket balls to "moue the still-peering aire | That sings with piercing, do not touch my Lord" (3.2.112) does not seem to make much sense. Most editors emend to "still-piecing" in the sense of putting itself together again after the ball has passed, although Sisson pointed out that Shakespeare nowhere else uses 'to piece' intransitively; one thing is pieced, eked out, with another, and does not piece itself. In support of 'still-piecing', "moue" is sometimes emended to "cleue" (cleave) to make it strong enough for the required sense. Blake points out that emending one word because another has been emended is "unsatisfactory". Editors have missed the musical imagery in the passage. To 'move' means to utter sound and 'touch' means strike the keys or strings of a musical instrument. Blake says OED has examples of this sense of 'touch' from "c. 1740" onwards, but this is another printing error since it is really "c. 1470" onwards. So, 'move' should stay, as the air is being made to sing by the bullet. This kind of continuous sounding is contrasted with the single strike' the bullet would make on Bertram (a touch, and him as the instrument touched) which would yield a single last gasp. Thus "still-peering" means constantly reappearing (based on 'peering' meaning 'appearing, being visible') in the sense of indestructible, in contrast to destructible Bertram.
I. A. Shapiro argues that "Beat down these rebbell powres that thee array" was the second line of Sonnet 146 ('Mending Shakespeare's Sonnet 146', N&Q 245[2000] 91-2). There is an obvious problem in its only authentic printing (Q 1609) which gives: "Poore soule the center of my sinfull earth, | My sinfull earth these rebbell powres that thee array, | Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth". The repetition of "my sinful earth" must be in place of something with two syllables (to regularize the metre), which something contained an active verb meaning to oppose or repel and made the first two lines a complete sentence (as are 3-4, 5-6, 7-8). Rejecting other emendations Shapiro proposes "Beat down", at which point his entire sentences switches to an italic fount, presumably because someone involved in the printing of it forgot to switch off the italics after Beat down. Shapiro notes that Shakespeare used this phrasal verb on 17 other occasions, which he lists, and it has pleasant alliteration (Beat . . . rebel . . . powers) and assonance (Beat . . . these . . . thee and down . . . powers).
Macd P. Jackson thinks that Bottom's line "If I were fair, Thisbe, I were only thine" should be emended to "If I were horse, fair Thisbe, I were only thine" ('Bottom's Entry-line: A Midsummer Night's Dream III.i.98', N&Q 245[2000] 69-70). Bottom-as-Pyramus enters with an ass's head on at 3.1.98 after Thisbe has said "As true as truest horse that yet would never tire", and his "If I were fair, Thisbe, I were only thine" makes no sense. Edmond Malone thought the punctuation was the problem, emending to "If I were, fair Thisbe, I were only thine", meaning "If I were as true as truest horse". However, Malone's emendation does not allow 'fair' to be disyllabic, as it needs to be, and it still makes Pyramus's loyalty conditional, which logically it should not be. Jackson thinks that Pyramus should pick up the subjunctive mood of Thisbe's metaphor of him as horse-like so that his "If" has a point, so he emends to: "If I were horse, fair Thisbe, I were only thine". This extra word "horse" allows "fair" to remain monosyllabically attached to Thisbe and the line to remain Alexandrine. This emendation had the added merits that he refers to himself as if a horse at the moment that he appears as if an ass, and there is a pun on 'hoarse', which he probably is because the ass-head makes him bray.
Adrian Streete argues that Titus's references to his bowels containing, before vomiting up, Lavinia's woes comes from Thomas Nashe's Christ's Teares Over Ierusalem and Bartholomaeus Anglicus's On the Properties of Things ('Nashe, Shakespeare, and the Bishops' Bible', N&Q 245[2000] 56-8). J. M. M. Tobin found that Nashe was probably a source for Titus Andronicus, but did not note a speech in act 3 (3.1.220-32) which is heavily indebted to material on signature Dr2 of Nashe's Christ's Teares in its collocation of 'heaven', 'earth', 'sea', 'deluge', 'drowned', and, most interestingly, 'bowels'. Christ's bowels comes from Paul's Epistle to the Philipians which in the Vulgate is "visceribus", and the first Renaissance Bible to translate visceribus as 'bowels' was the Bishops' Bible of 1568. Paul says he is in Christ's bowels, while Nashe has Christ say that he wishes he had Jerusalem in his bowels. Nashe feminizes the bowels by referring to the mother pelican who lets her young tear at hers. Titus imagines Lavinia's woes lodged in his bowels only to be vomited up again, and Streete thinks this is because Shakespeare saw Titus's bowels as feminized by the loss of his wife (so he is father and mother to Lavinia); the male bowels cannot be truly female and container-like. To support this Streete quotes Bartholomaeus Anglicus's On the Properties of Things (which Shakespeare knew well) on bowels being like a widow, which Streete rather tenuous links to Titus's widowhood.
Rodney Stenning Edgecombe notes that Romeo tries to comfort Juliet at their final parting with "all these woes shall serve | For sweet discourses in our times to come" (3.5.52-3), which editors usually say is proverbial with citations of Tilley. Edgecombe thinks it comes straight from Aeneas's address to his men in Aeneid: "Perchance even this distress it will some day be a joy to recall" because Aeneas, like Romeo, is putting on a brave face despite have had premonitions of doom ('Romeo and Aeneas: Proverb or Allusion in Romeo and Juliet III.v?', N&Q 245[2000] 68) If this is not an allusion to brave Aeneas, then Romeo just being "Pollyanna-like" (that is, self-deludingly optimistic). In the immediately succeeding note, Edgecombe argues for emending "runaways" to "rumourers" in Romeo and Juliet ('Shakespeare, Catullus, Rumourers, and Runaways', N&Q 245[2000] 68-9). As discussed above in the context of Jill Levenson's Oxford Shakespeare edition, Juliet says "Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, | That runaways' eyes may wink, and Romeo | Leap to these arms untalked of and unseen. | Lovers can see to do their amorous rites | By their own beauties; or, if love be blind, | It best agrees with night." (3.2.5-10). Benjamin Heath suggested "rumourers" instead of runaways, and Edgecombe agrees because of a link via Catullus. Juliet thinks of lovers lighting up the night, just as Catullus LXVIII does and here too the speaker is in Verona: "lux mea contulit in gremium", "sed furtiva dedit mira munuscula nocte". We know that Shakespeare knew Catullus III because he got from it Hamlet's "from whose bourn | No traveller returns", and there is a strong parallel between Juliet's situation and that in Catullus V where Catullus's reckless love for Lesbia is in opposition to "rumores . . . senum severiorum". Roger Stritmatter thinks that Shylock's references to the Christians owning slaves is about the Hebrew law which frees all slaves after 7 years service (''Old' and 'New' Law in The Merchant of Venice: A Note on the Source of Shylock's Morality in Deuteronomy 15', N&Q 245[2000] 70-2). The Merchant of Venice, Stritmatter notes, is full of Biblical allusions and the fight over the bond can plausibly be read as a dramatizing of the conflict of the old law (Judaism) and the new law (Christianity). Even Jessica's flight mirrors that of Rachel marrying Jacob or the exodus of Hebrews from Egypt, and Gobbo's tricking of his sand-blind father mirrors Jacob's deception of his father Isaac in Genesis 27-28. Shakespeare's understanding of the Hebrew tradition was ample and subtle, and he problematizes the ethnic issues, as when he makes the anti-semitic Gratiano insist on revenge even after Shylock has been humbled, thus showing a Christian's adherence to the old law while professing the new. Indeed, it is not even clear what the old law and the new are: Portia's 'mercy' speech draws on old law sources, Deuteronomy and Ecclesiasticus. Just as Jessica (imitating Rachel's robbing of her father Laban) stole Shylock's wealth, so the Christian's stole the Hebrew philosophy of mercy. This cross-ethnic borrowing ironizes characters' assertions of their identity. Shylock's "You have among you many a purchased slave" (misprinted as "purchase" here) alludes to the old law tradition of Jubilee debt remission in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Thus the old law limits the slavery that the new law permits, which is Shylock's point when he mockingly asks "Shall I say to you, | 'Let them be free! Marry them to your heirs!'" (4.1.92-3).
Todd Pettigrew traces the name "Caius" in The Merry Wives of Windsor and decides that he is a fake doctor exploiting the name of a famous one ('The Naming of Shakespeare's Caius', N&Q 245[2000] 72-5). John Caius, president of the Royal College of Physicians and founder of Gonville and Caius College, was not bumbling and not French, and the play's French doctors is passing himself off as John Caius to impress patients. Hugh Evans the Welsh parson denounces him as "Master Caius that calls himself Doctor of Physic" (3.1.3-4, Pettigrew's italics) and says "He has no more knowledge in Hibocrates and | Galen -- and he is a knave besides, a cowardly knave | as you would desires to be acquainted withal" (3.1.61-3). Evans breaks off after "Galen", Pettigrew thinks, because he was going to say "than I do", but stops short because parsons like him did indeed stand in for physicians in rural areas; so Evans and Caius are alike in being fake doctors. It is not that Caius is a bad doctor, but that he is an impostor. Pettigrew gives a number of dramatic examples of the 'fake doctor with an impressive name' character type, a recognisable motif. A known technique of these fakes was to speak bad English, as though they were so well-travelled as to have become rusty in their native language, or else they are exotically foreign. John K. Hale notices that in the source the hero fights a male lion, yet Orlando in As You Like It fights a female lion and a snake ('Snake and Lioness in As You Like It, IV.iii', N&Q 245[2000] 79). The reason is Psalms 91:13 "Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet", the play having quite a few Biblical allusions. Why make the lion female? In order to make the lion more ferocious (she is defending her young) and to make it a fight between one family (Orlando/Oliver) and another (the pride), and so represent Orlando's anger at Oliver's lack of family feeling. John Cathcart argues that Toby's desire to "draw three souls out of one weaver" (Twelfth Night 2.3.58) is an allusion to John Weaver's The Whipping of Satyre ('Twelfth Night and John Weever', N&Q 245[2000] 79-81). Part of the Shakespeare-Hoghton link is John Weever, who enjoyed Hoghton patronage and who repeatedly echoed Shakespeare and addressed him in his Epigrammes (1599), which replicates Shakespeare's idiosyncratic sonnet form so early that a personal knowledge of Shakespeare is hard to avoid. John Weever's poem The Whipping of the Satyre was entered into the Stationers' Register on 14 August 1601, and it attacked the "Satyrist" (meaning Marston), the "Epigrammatist" (meaning Guilpin), and the "Humourist" (meaning Jonson). This poem was alluded to and responded to in the Poetomachia plays and answering poems. Toby's "three souls out of one weaver" is, Cathcart thinks, another allusion to it. The Whipping rebukes the three men's work for its irreligiosity. Others punned on Weever's name, so why should not Shakespeare? Asinius Bubo in Satiromastix is owl-like ('bubo' is Latin for owl), which means foolish, and E. A. J. Honigmann showed strong reasons to think Asinius is Weever. If so, this makes sense of Toby's apparently calling Malvolio the "night-owl" they will rouse, so one would think Malvolio is Weever, but Cathcart actually thinks Aguecheek is. Aguecheek has just used the word "mellifluous", which Cathcart says was "previously given a careful emphasis by Weever", and he (like Asinius Bubo) is a troublemaker's sidekick, and he is "improbably lionized as a valiant duellist", just like Lieutenant Slight in Every Man out of His Humour (whom Honigmann also thought a portrait of Weever), by the false claim that "Souls and bodies hath he divorced three" (3.4.231). Cathcart avoids claiming that any of these identifications are strong, it is just that Shakespeare appears to be playing the game of Jonson, Marston, and Dekker in alluding to known persons. If Twelfth Night alludes to Weever's The Whipping of the Satyre then it could plausibly be dated after 14 Aug 1601 (when Whipping was entered in the Stationers' Register), which fits with the first known performance on 2 February 1602. This is only a plausible date, not a strict terminus a quo, because the Weever-Shakespeare links indicate that Shakespeare might have seen the work in manuscript earlier. Whipping was published pseudo-anonymously, but Shakespeare gets the name right ("weaver") where, Honigmann argued, the other stage-writers were not certain--they avoid unequivocal identifications--and this increases the likelihood that Shakespeare knew Weever personally.
Steven Doloff thinks that the Cyprus of Othello is, as in myth, the birthplace of Venus (''Well Desir'd in Cyprus': Othello on the Isle of Venus', N&Q 245[2000] 81-2). Cassio's fulsome welcoming of Desdemona to Cyprus ("The divine Desdemona" 2.1.74) might be, as Iago claims, just that he wants "to play the sir", but it might also be a glance at the island being Venus's home. Likewise Othello's greeting of Desdemona ("Honey, you shall be well desir'd in Cyprus; / I have found great love amongst them" 2.1.205-6) glances at the island's amorous customs. When Desdemona welcomes Lodovico to the island, however, the worship of love has turned to disgust at venery: Othello says "You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!" (4.1.265). Jonathan Bate made the opposite argument in his keynote address to the World Shakespeare Congress in Valencia on 19 April 2001, pointing out that the Cyprus of Othello is more like the Malta of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and like recent historical reality, than it is like the mythical birthplace of Venus ('Shakespeare's Islands', Plenary paper delivered at the Seventh World Shakespeare Congress in Valencia on 19 April[2001]). Mark Hutchings observes that the beginning of Shakespeare's King Lear takes over from the end of 2 Tamburlaine, with the same generational transfer of power ('The End of II Tamburlaine and the Beginning of King Lear', N&Q 245[2000] 82-6). In each play an old man in decline disinherits one child, asking for a map in the act of stating the limit of the power and indicating an urge to shed his burden and greet death. At this point Hutchings quotes Maurice Charney on how Shakespeare "was troubld by Marlowe", but I am willing to bet neither Charney nor Hutchings dropped the 'e' in 'troubled'. The influence of Marlowe on Shakespeare need not be direct: King Lear seems inspired by Selimus (possibly by Robert Greene) which is itself inspired by Marlowe, and a loyal attendant is blinded in Selimus as in King Lear. How Tamburlaine and Selimus were read in their own time is not clear: do they show that the Turks can be defeated (as they were by Timur) and have divisive internal weaknesses, or do the eastern distinctions merge and the plays stand as a warning to beware the empire building of easterners? If Tamburlaine ends optimistically in that the Turkish empire is in ruins and its conqueror dead, Selimus (set a century later) corrects this optimism by showing how the Turks quickly recovered and went on to capture Constantinople in 1453. More than Tamburlaine, Selimus is the model for King Lear in showing the ruptured--rather than Tamburlaine's smooth--transfer of power from generation to generation, accompanied by betrayal and murder. Or rather, Hutchings persuasively argues, King Lear takes over where Tamburlaine left off and rewrites it pessimistically. Howard Jacobson finds a new Biblical sources in Macbeth ('Macbeth, I.v.48-52', N&Q 245[2000] 86). Lady Macbeth imagines dark night preventing heaven seeing the stabbing of Duncan and so unable to "peep through the blanket of the dark | To cry 'Hold, hold!'". Jacobson thinks this is indebted to: "Then Abraham extended his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of God called to him from heaven and said, 'Abraham, Abraham!'" (Genesis 23:10-11 according to the note but 22:10-11 in my Bible). The doubled "hold" came from the doubled "Abraham".
Rosalind S. Meyer finds Macbeth indebted to Seneca's Medea (''The Serpent Under't': Additional Reflections on Macbeth', N&Q 245[2000] 86-90). Meyer gives examples of Seneca-like phrases and sentiments in Shakespeare and finds origins for "To beguile the time, | Look like the time" and "look like the innocent flower, | But be the serpent under 't" (1.5.62-3 and 64-5) in Medea. Less specifically, there are also the parallels in the conjuring of spirits, the appearance of Hecate, the Scottish witches who are also Fates and Furies, a prominent cauldron scene, the heroine being on the battlements when she calls for spirits to fill her "top-full | Of direst cruelty" (1.5.41-2), and the (imagined) killing of her child ("I would . . . Have . . . dashed the brains out" 1.7.56-8). This talk of an oath to kill her children make little sense for Lady Macbeth's situation, but it makes her Medea-like. Just before the parallel moment in Medea, Medea puts upon Jason a curse of being rejected in homes once familiar, which suits Duncan's case too. Meyer finds a few other verbal parallels between Shakespeare's play and Seneca's. Lady Macbeth wrests male power much as Medea does, and likewise does so to invert natural order. Of course is only true if you think the existing political system natural, as Meyer is sure the Jacobeans did. A further link with Medea is the idea of a palace in flames, which was the aim of the Gunpowder Plot (to which Macbeth repeatedly alludes to), and yet another is the killing of children: Macbeth, Meyers claims, is the only Shakespeare play to kill a child onstage. (She has overlooked Arthur's death in King John.) Meyer's classical knowledge is strong, but her historical sense is warped by teleology: "Shakespeare warns his countrymen against a potential Civil War--still thirty years ahead". Colin Burrow explains Sonnet 3's phrase "despite of wrinkles" as a likening of old people's wrinkled eye-skin to imperfect glass ('Shakespeare's Wrinkled Eye: Sonnet 3, Lines 11-12', N&Q 245[2000] 90-1). In context it is not clear what this clause governs: "So thou through windows of thine age shall see, | Despite of wrinckles this thy goulden time". If 'see', this would mean he cannot see clearly because of the window's wrinkles; Elizabethan glass was not clear. John Kerrigan's gloss is that in the glass's wrinkles the old man see his own wrinkles superimposed on the image of his son outside at whom he is looking, but Burrow finds this excessively complex optically. Wrinkled faces go with bleary eyes when Hamlet says that "old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber", and this association comes from Batman upon Bartholomew, a popular version of Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things) which records that "the sight of olde men is not sharpe, because their skins are riveled [wrinkled]". Ultimately the source is Aristotle's De Generatione Animalium, where he remarks that old people's sight is bad because the skin of their eyes, like their other skin, is wrinkled. Shakespeare knew this bit of Aristotelian wisdom (perhaps from Batman) and made an analogy between wrinkled Elizabethan glass and the wrinkled skin of an old man's eye. We can all get a sense of what vision is like for the old by looking through wrinkled glass, thus old people see "despite of wrinkles" in their eyes.
Eric C. Brown argues that Trinculo's "puppy-headed monster" epithet is an allusion not to fawning but to cannibals ('Caliban, Columbus, and Canines in The Tempest', N&Q 245[2000] 92-4). Christopher Columbus, the first to contact the Indians, was told by them that some of their enemies (the "Cariba") ate people, but because he was looking for the Great Khan he heard "Caniba" (so says Tzvetan Todorov). Columbus assumed that this name came from the Latin root canis, meaning dog, and that they also had dogs' heads. Of course, Caliban is almost vegetarian in the play, but in Trinculo's mind he is 'cannibal' in the sense of dog-headed. When hybridized with Caliban under the gaberdine, Trinculo and he made something like the dog-headed monster in Conrad Lycosthenes's Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicum of 1557, a two-bodied creature with one human head and one canine head. Continuing his fine work on the Shakespeare's Bible, Naseeb Shaheen points out that he would have known--so editors should use--the revised Bishops' Bible of 1572, not the first edition of 1568 ('Shakespeare and the Bishops' Bible', N&Q 245[2000] 94-7). The Bishops' Bible is the one that influenced Shakespeare, to judge by his allusions to phrasing that appears only in that version, and it was supposed to be placed in all churches. The 1568 edition was revised in 1572 and subsequent editions are substantially different in places. Strictly speaking, the King James was not the first but the third authorized version: the Great Bible (so named because of its size) of 1539 was ordered to be placed in every church by Cromwell and its second edition of 1540 (the standard edition) boasts to be the one "apoynted to the vse of the churches", so it is the first authorized bible. The Geneva Bible of 1560 was an improvement, not least in numbering the verses, which the Great Bible did not. In 1561-64 archbishop Parker planned a revision of the Great Bible which he divided into parts and sent each to a bishop or other reviser for improvements, and the resulting work was known at the Bishops' Bible. Just as the second edition of the Great Bible became the standard one, so the second edition (of 1572, with careful re-revision of the New Testament by Giles Lawrence) became the standard work of the Bishops' Bible. So, all versions--there were quarto and octavo versions, the latter New Testament only--of the Bishops' Bible published between 1568 and 1572 should be avoided. Shaheen lists some places in Shakespeare where using the 1568-1572 Bishops' Bible would mislead an editor. Moreover, there were many more copies (in the ratio 9:1) of the post-1572 Bishops' Bibles than the pre-1572, so Shakespeare is much more likely to have owned a post-1572 copy.
Another whose work is continuing in a well-established pattern is Thomas Merriam, who argues that stylometric texts suggest that Hand S of Sir Thomas More is not Munday's words although it is his handwriting ('An Unwarranted Assumption', N&Q 245[2000] 438-41). Merriam has in the past cast doubt on Munday's authorship of Sir Thomas More on the evidence that "Four logometric habits" were symmetrically distributed in the 36 Shakespeare 1623 Folio plays and Sir Thomas More but were not found in four known Munday texts (all of John a Kent and John a Cumber and Munday's bits of The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, and 1 Sir John Oldcastle). As frequently happens in work of this kind, Merriam does not immediately disclose what a "logometric habit" might be, but here it is the favouring of one word or phrase over another one which is similar. Using the Chadwyck-Healey English Verse Drama database Merriam has added other Munday work to the test. The four 'habits' are choices of "I have/have", "I have/I", "this/this & that", "with a-an/with" and Merriam attempts to explain how the raw data of preference is subjected to the statistical process of principal component analysis (PCA). He does not explain it well. PCA is used to produce a single number which is characteristic of most of, here 70% of, the variation between plays regarding their 'scores' for each of the four habits. Two plays with similar patterns of ratios of the habits should have similar First Principal Component (PC-1) numbers, and indeed in Merriam's Table 2 they do. The benchmark is the autograph play John a Kent whose PC-1 is -0.16, and the ones we know he collaborated on are near to this number, although a couple we thought were solely his (the entertainments Sidero-Thriambos and Chruso-Thriambos, which have "by A.M." on their titlepages) are so far from -0.16 that they appear to be collaborations. (Merriam does not consider the alternative explanation that the tests are no good.) The furthest from Munday's characteristic score away is Sir Thomas More, whether one considers the whole play including the additions or just Hand S. As is usual, readers have to trust Merriam's execution of the PCA mathematics, but my spot-check of his arithmetic showed no errors. Moreover readers have to trust that the "logometric habits" are indeed indicative of authorship. What we know of anti-Catholic Munday makes it hard to understand how he could have come to write Sir Thomas More, but, Merriam asserts, it makes perfect sense that he would copy it out for others, perhaps to entrap them. Unfortunately, there is a serious printing error in Merriam's Table 1: the figures for Chruso-Thriambos are all one column too far to the left, so the ratio given for "I have/have" is in fact the ratio for "I have/I", that for "I have/I" is the one for "this/this & that" and the final cell for "With a-an/with" is empty.
David Farley-Hills has a new way to date Titus Andronicus based on the use of the 'above' playing area which is compatible with the Rose theatre as it existed in 1587-1592, but not afterwards when the cover over the stage would have prevented spectators high in the galleries seeing this space ('The Date of Titus Andronicus', N&Q 245[2000] 441-4). Henslowe's Diary says "ne -- Rd at titus & ondronicus the 23 Jenewary iiili viiis" for 23 Jan 1594. The titlepage of the 1594 Q does not say it was "sundry times" played, but the titlepage of Q2 does, so presumably it was indeed "ne[w]" in 1594, and hence Henslowe got a lot of money for it (£3-8s-0d). Objections have been raised to Titus Andronicus being new in 1594: it is too crude to be by a 30-year old Shakespeare; the Induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614) suggests Titus Andronicus was by then 25 years old (hence performed by 1589); and the Q1 titlepage says that three companies (Derby's, Pembroke's, Sussex's) played it. The first two objections can be dismissed as subjective and over-literal respectively, and the third can be explained (as Jonathan Bate does) as meaning an amalgamation of three companies played it. More problematically, A Knack to Know a Knave ("ne" in June 1592, printed 1594) has echoes of Titus Andronicus, although Bate argued that the Knack printing was a memorial reconstruction corrupted by men learning their Titus Andronicus lines. Farley-Hills does not accept this: Knack's allusions to Titus Andronicus are not corruption but deliberate and entirely coherent. Moreover, the allusion in Knack has Titus offered the crown by the senators of Rome (as it looks in performance) whereas an actor who played in Titus Andronicus would remember that it is the people of Rome who offer Titus the crown. Bate concedes that there might have been a preceding version, by Shakespeare or others, existing before the Henslowe entry in January 1594. Farley-Hills rightly complains that Bate reproduced C. Walter Hodges's picture of Rose of 1587 (before it had a cover) and labelled it as the Rose of 1592 (when it got one). Q1-3 and F are from authorial copy, so the stage directions show what Shakespeare expected to be able to do at the Rose, and these makes extensive use of the 'above'. The stage direction, then, imply that Titus Andronicus was written to be performed at the Rose before the 1592 alterations made the 'above' less usable. Possibly Shakespeare wrote it for the pre-1592 Rose but it was not performed until "ne[w]" in 1594; the authorial papers, on which the printings are based, would not record the changes necessary to reduce use of the 'above'. Alternatively, it was actually performed before 1592, at the Rose or elsewhere.
There are a host of objections to Farley-Hills argument, not least its excessive dependence on Hodges's drawings which are merely interpretations of the scant evidence, and Farley-Hills ignores all the vital evidence. Farley-Hills does not mention the erosion line just in front of where the stage would have been in the 1587 Rose which Julian Bowsher and Simon Blatherwick claimed is from human feet ('The Structure of the Rose', in Franklin J. Hildy, ed. New Issues in the Reconstruction of Shakespeare's Theatre: Proceedings of the Conference Held at the University of Georgia, February 16-18, 1990, pp. 55-78), but which John Astington showed is a rainwater line and therefore the stage had a cover even though it had no posts ('The Rose Excavation and the Playhouse Heavens', Seminar paper for 1991 International Shakespeare Congress, Tokyo[1991]). One archaeological certainty is that stage posts' foundations are definitely from 1592 or after. Andrew Gurr also thought the erosion trench "a foot in front of the stage foundation" was made by rain running off a roof over the stage of the 1587 Rose (because the erosion is just like the circular erosion line just inside the yard wall which was definitely from water running off the roof), and points out that two Rose plays from before 1592 seem to require stageposts even though the archaeology seems to rule out posts at the 1587 Rose (The Shakespearean Stage 1574 - 1642, p. 130). Carol Rutter attributed the erosion line in front of the 1592 stage to the effect of dripping water, but wrote, without explaining the difference, that the one in front of the 1587 stage was probably caused by feet (Documents of the Rose Playhouse, xi, xiii).
Roger Prior has found further evidence that a neglected source for A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet is a masque by George Gascoigne written for a Montague marriage and preserved in Gascoigne's The Poesies of 1575 ('Gascoigne's Posies as a Shakespearian Source', N&Q 245[2000] 444-9). As Brian Gibbon's Arden2 edition of Romeo and Juliet acknowledged, it is likely that the prologue's "ancient grudge" comes from a masque celebrating the marriage in 1572 of two children of Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montague, via George Gascoigne's The Posies (1575) or other printings of the same masque. Prior has found more phrases in Romeo and Juliet that seem (by individual verbal parallels and by collocation of ideas and images, such as strangers daring to enter a feast) to be from the same Montague masque. The masque appears also to be a source for A Midsummer Night's Dream, using its phrases for anticipation of the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. Then Shakespeare noticed a poem 'The Refusal' on the facing page of The Posies which had material he could use for the rivalries of Demetrius and Lysander in 1.1 and of Hermia and Helena in 3.2. From preparations described for the Montague masque Shakespeare took preparations (including the mechanicals' rehearsals) for Theseus's wedding: the Montague masque has a prologue twice padded with "seem to" and with every other line in 14-syllables, which is paralleled in "let the prologue seem to say . . . it shall | be written in eight and six" (3.1.16-22). Prior goes on to list some lesser, but still significant, Midsummer Night's Dream borrowings from the Montague masque. That A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet are dependent on the Montague masque strengthens the case for them being a pair. Gascoigne was co-author of the Kenilworth entertainment which seems to be alluded to in A Midsummer Night's Dream ("once I sat upon a promontory | And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back | Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath | That the rude sea grew civil at her song"), so this new dependence on Gascoigne strengthens the case for the Kenilworth allusion. The Montague-masque link also supports the case (believed for other reasons) that the manuscript underlying Romeo and Juliet Q2 existing before Q1 was printed and was used in that Q1 printing. Q1 lacks material from the Montague-masque which Q2 has, but all that which is in Q1 is in Q2 too, so probably Q1 is not getting them directly from Gascoigne but rather from the Q2 manuscript. The Montague-masque link gives reason to accept a reading from Q2 which editors (but not Levenson for the new Oxford Shakespeare reviewed above) usually reject in favour of a reading from Q4. Q2-3 have what is modernized as "Good father! 'Tis day" (4.4.20) but editors prefer "Good faith, 'tis day", using Q4's "faith" instead of Q2's "father". The Montague-masque has the phrase "good father" and nearby collocates "fathers" and "straight" just as Romeo and Juliet does ("Good faith [or father], 'tis day. | The County will be here with music straight" 4.4.20-1).
Mark Hutchings's second note on matters Turkish elucidates a crux in The Merry Wives of Windsor (''Turkish' or 'Arabic' emir: The Merry Wives of Windsor, II.i.176', N&Q 245[2000] 449-51). In Notes & Queries 1999 Deanne Williams argued that the Host saying "Will you go, Anheers?" (2.1.205-6) referred to the French word 'asnier' or 'ânier' meaning a muledriver. She mentioned in passing that it might also be the Turkish title 'emir', but elided the difference between Turkish and Arabic (which Hutchings thinks is important) and claimed that there were no other Turkish words in the play whereas in fact there is another one. To the Elizabethans 'Turk' meant much the same as 'Muslim' (covering even converts from Christianity) and 'Moor', and indeed could be used of any inhabitant of the Ottoman empire; it was also a form of abuse hurled by Protestants at Catholics. Given this polysemy, Williams's eliding of the difference between Turkish and Arabic meanings was, Hutchings concedes, perhaps reasonable. But the word 'emir' was Arabic, not Turkish, and Shakespeare drew attention to that by alluding to its Turkish equivalent 'vizier'. Graphically similar to 'anheer' is 'ameer', a variant spelling of 'emir', and the Arabic/Turkish slippage also occurs when the Host declares "Cesar, Keiser, and Pheazar" (1.3.9). Actually, Hutchings quotes this as "Caesar, Kaiser, Pheazar" which I can find in none of the early printings, all of which have "and" before the last word. Moreover, Hutchings says that Q (he does not specify which one) has "Pheeser", which is a spelling no early printing has: the two pre-1623 quartos (1602 and 1619) both have "Phesser" and the 1630 quarto has "Pheazar" like the Folio. Perhaps these are further examples of the poor printing of this year's Notes & Queries. "Pheazar" is a form of "vizier", which was well known in the playhouse, and so 'emir' is likely what was meant by "anheers". At the least, an editor who chooses 'vizier' for 1.3 should choose as its opposite 'emir' for 2.1.
Denis Corish explains the closing couplet of Sonnet 1 (''The World's Due, By the Grave and Thee': Shakespeare, Sonnet 1.14', N&Q 245[2000] 453-5). The lines are initially confusing: "Pitty the world, or else this glutton be, | To eate the world's due, by the graue and thee." Does "by" govern "eat", meaning double destruction, by death and by dying childless? No, the solution is that "by" is a preposition governing "the grave" and "thee" and following "due" (not "eat"), so it means "To eat the world's due by the grave" (that is, to eat what the world is due by the grave) and "To eat the world's due by thee" (that is, to eat what the world is due by you). The latter is clear enough (the children you should leave to the world, not eat up by your celibacy) but what is the world's due by the grave? It is "the eternity of the species", says Corish. Even the grave is not so greedy as to rob the world of all the young beautiful people: the pretty may breed before the grave gets them, and the addressee should do so too. Shakespeare used the 'eternity of the species' idea in other sonnets too, and Corish suggests a source in Thomas Wilson The Arte of Rhetorique of 1560. Maurice Hunt argues that Cymbeline uses 'fourteeners' to make the ghosts' speeches archaic and to make Cloten a figure of discord ('Fourteeners in Shakespeare's Cymbeline', N&Q 245[2000] 458-61). George T. Wright claimed that only a handful of heptameters (7 feet lines) exist in Shakespeare, but that is true only if one accepts modern editors' changing of the heptameters into something else. In Cymbeline 5.5 the ghosts of Posthumus's family speak in what might "ballad metre" (that is, alternate tetrameter and trimeter lines) or else heptameter, depending on what lineation you think the underlying papers had (lines of 4 feet then 3 feet, or lines of 7 feet). In the Folio, 9 of the ghosts' lines are printed as heptameters (that is, all 7 feet on one line), but perhaps the others were broken into 4+3 just to fit the measure. Speaking the lines as heptameters (eliding the pause between the 4 feet and the 3 feet) makes the speeches sound old-fashioned, which would suit the dramatic context. F4 broke 8 of the 9 ghosts' fourteeners into ballad metre. The song which Cloten has the musicians play for Innogen in 2.3 is printed in F1 as 4+3, 4+3, 7, 7, which some editors have relined to be entirely 4+3s and even emended words to make this arrangement rhyme. Perhaps the whole thing was 7-feet lines (that is, 'fourteeners'), but Hunt thinks this unlikely, since there would be unnecessary internal rhyme, and he prefers to defend the F1 arrangement: it is ballad rhyme first then switches to 'fourteeners'. One reason (and perhaps Rowe's) to keep F1's arrangement of the song as a mixture of ballad verse and 'fourteeners' is that it then mirrors the ghosts' dialogue later in the play which also has this mixture. Thematically, Cloten who commissions the song is a figure of discordance: Belarius recognizes his voice after many years, and once he is silenced Belarius's ingenious instrument is sounded. Also, as Wright noted, Cloten has the lone 'fourteener' occurring in the midst of blank verse: "I cannot tremble at it. Were it toad or adder, spider" (4.2.92). Actually, as Hunt mentioned at the beginning of the piece, this is not Cloten's line but Guiderius's response to hearing Cloten speaking his name.
Thomas Merriam thinks that the phrase "queen of earthly queens" in Henry 8 is an implicit allusion to the virgin Mary ('Queen of Earthly Queens', N&Q 245[2000] 461-4). Henry calls Katherine "The queen of earthly queens" (2.4.138), which goes well beyond his source Holinshed where she is just appropriately wifely. Merriam asks what is the contrast here, what is opposed to "earthly"? In this play and elsewhere, the contrast of 'earthly' is 'heavenly': Henry's attack on Wolsey ("You are full of heavenly stuff . . . You have scarce time | To steal from spiritual leisure a brief span | To keep your earthly audit" 3.2.138-42) and Norfolk's description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1.1.12-23) which mentions "earthly" and via biblical allusion implicitly invokes its opposite, 'heavenly'. There is one use of 'earthly' in Henry 8 which does not invoke its opposite, 'heavenly', and that is Wolsey's speech in 3.2 about having been corrected by Henry. This, however, is Fletcher's not Shakespeare's part of the play. The 'earthly queen' is not proverbial and it occurs only one more time in the drama of the period, in an unrelated context in Heywood The Golden Age. Merriam thinks that in Henry 8 it is an allusion to Mary, and the parody of the Annunciation in 2.3 makes this all the more likely: the Lord Chamberlain is Gabriel, lowly Anne Bullen is Mary. Thus comes more sly Catholicism from Shakespeare, since 2.3 is his.
Finally from Notes & Queries this year, Roger Stritmatter argues that Shakespeare knew the Geneva Bible marginal notes to 1 Samuel 6:9 and 1 Samuel 14 ('By Providence Divine: Shakespeare's Awareness of Some Geneva Marginal Notes of 1 Samuel', N&Q 245[2000] 97-100). Several people have shown that Shakespeare was influenced by marginal notes in the Geneva Bible, which shows that his biblical knowledge was by reading not hearing since marginal notes are seldom spoken. This bolsters the view that, since he was familiar with Ecclesiastes (despite it being not widely used in Anglican or Catholic practices), Shakespeare did private devotional reading. Stritmatter thinks that when Shakespeare used the marginal notes in the Geneva Bible, it was to have a character elaborate an argument, one of "the traditional techniques of Renaissance topology". Unless this is a misprint, Stritmatter would appear to think 'topology' is the art of using topoi, but topology means only three things: the botanical study of where plants grow, the study of a particular locality, and the branch of maths that deals with that which does not change when shapes are deformed. Perhaps Stritmatter means 'typology', the study of symbolic representation. This illustrates the harm done by the misprints in this year's Notes & Queries: one cannot properly criticize errors--here is another, 'sortilege' misspelled "sortilage"--since they might not be the writer's fault'. (Here is another, 'synergistic' misspelled "syngergistic".) In All's Well that Ends Well, Helen argues for free-will over predestination ("Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, | Which we ascribe to heaven" 1.1.212-3) and then the other way around ("it is presumption in us when the help of heaven | We count the act of men" 2.1.151-2). Both these speeches are indebted to the Geneva Bible's marginal notes (i) and (r) from 1 Samuel 14. The connection is a concern with gambling. Just before the second quotation Helen refers to those of us "that square our guess by shows", which Stritmatter thinks is about gambling on appearance, and there are references to sortilege (casting lots) throughout the play).
Another connection is note (r)'s use of the word "presumption" in attributing events to human rather than divine intervention. Note (f) to 1 Samuel 6:9 is about the wicked attributing to fortune/chance things which are properly controlled by God. Shakespeare appears to have been aware of this note too, to judge from such moments as wicked Macbeth's "If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me | Without my stir." (1.3.142-3) which Stritmatter (or the failing printer) quotes as "If chance will crown me, chance will have me king". Appropriately, non-wicked Hamlet comes to the opposite conclusion that providence supervenes over chance/fortune: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, | Rough-hew them how we will" (5.2.10-1), and "There's a special | providence in the fall of a sparrow." (5.2.165-6), and "Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own." (3.2.204) which Stritmatter (or the failing printer) quotes as "Our thoughts are ours, our ends none of our own" (3.3.213). Even giving all these faults to the printer, Stritmatter's writing is imperfect. He chooses to provide a footnote gloss for his use of the verb "marked" (the explanation: "That is, remarked upon"), which is unnecessary since he could just have used the verb "remarked upon" or left it to the reader to look up. Yet earlier he neglected to gloss "topology" which is not in OED in the sense he means. In Richard 2 there is more of the lot-casting material so prominent in 1 Samuel 14 ("However God or fortune cast my lot" 1.3.85), and there is more fortune-versus-providence material in Romeo and Juliet ("A greater power than we can contradict | Hath thwarted our intents. Come, come away" 5.3.153-4) which Stritmatter or the printer mangles to "'A greater power than we contradict | Hath thwarted our intents' (5.3.152)". Since this is a two-line quotation, the single-line reference must be wrong. All these quotations show that Shakespeare knew the Geneva marginal notes to 1 Samuel 6:9 and 1 Samuel 14, Stritmatter claims, although one might think that they are merely commonplace.
Studies in English Literature provides one essay of relevance this year, in which Sonia Massai argued that Nahum Tate's use of King Lear for his adaptation strengthens the case that the Q and F versions are distinct works ('Nahum Tate's Revision of Shakespeare's King Lears', Studies in English Literature 40[2000] 435-50). Tate made the tragedy into a tragicomedy and his invention of a love affair for Cordelia and Edgar, and the generally increased role for women, "are clearly a tribute to the new practice" of women acting. Omitting the Fool was an ideological matter: a source of criticism of the king had to go. Tate rendered explicit Lear's flaw in the opening scene (characters discuss his rashness, "Chol'rick and suddain") but at the same time made it forgivable. Tate has Cordelia deliberately fail the love trial because she is secretly engaged to Edgar and this too diminishes Lear's fault since, in Tate, Edgar has already been declared a traitor and Lear guesses at her love for him. By making Lear known to be choleric, did Tate give Lear a tragic flaw he previously lacked? No, it is already there in Q: seven Folio lines explaining why he is dividing the kingdom (he is too old to rule properly) are omitted in Q which thereby makes Lear seem irrational. In Q, the division of the kingdoms is more about dowries than about the transfer of power from old to young. The "coronet" Lear tells his sons-in-law to "part betweene you" is not the royal crown (that is not what 'coronet' means) but an inferior crown for nobility. Q has a coronet brought on, and it is for Cordelia (says Jay L. Halio) but F omits the stage direction for the coronet and so reduces the obvious sense that this is just about settling dowries rather than settling succession. Several variants line up in agreement with this claim that in Q the king has not really abdicated, such as Gloucester's advice to Cornwall and Regan to let "the good King his Master" punish Kent-as-Caius. Tate has Lear borrow words similar to Kent's to express his hatred of Oswald. So, Tate's Lear is "still as strong and capable of indignation as he was at the beginning of the play", and other changes make Tate's Lear, like the quarto Lear, "mad with rage at seeing his power taken away from him and he struggles to resist"; he is not losing his grip on reality (p. 442). However, around the end of Act 2 Tate started to borrow more from F than Q because he wanted F's sentimental identification with, and sympathy for, Lear.
Tate turn to F because something like Q's vignette when the servants lament the blinding of Gloucester "protects the audience from the brunt of the violence" (by making the world less harsh), and in its place Tate put a monologue for Gloucester to express his own feelings. The point is to externalize grief and allow the audience to share it and share the feeling of pathos; characters do not despair but rather vow to get even. Gloucester never contemplates suicide. This externalizing of pain to elicit audience sympathy and anger "implies a shared belief in the political and aesthetic necessity of poetic justice". Tate ignored the quarto scene in which a gentleman describes how the letters to Cordelia affected her because, Massai claims, it is too much about grief being strange and admirable rather than something to identify with. Instead Tate chose to show Cordelia weeping and to have Edmund spying on her like Milton's Satan in Eden, so again grief externalized has an effect on a spectator. That Tate jumped wholesale from Q to F in his adapting (rather than picking-and-mixing) reinforces the view that Q and F are distinct and individually coherent. Tate's omission of Q's "moralizing passages" which are meaningful but do not provoke sympathy is further evidence that these passages (not in F) are of a kind, and hence that Q and F are separated by authorial revision.
In Cahiers Elisabethains Bernice Kliman shows that Charles Jennens's incomplete eighteenth-century Shakespeare edition was ahead of its time ('Charles Jennens' Shakespeare and His Eighteenth-century Competitors', Cahiers Élisabéthains 58[2000] 59-71). Jennens wanted to collate others' emendations and publish them in footnotes, and not simply to impose his own favourite readings as the habit was at the time. The Steevens/Johnson circle viciously denigrated Jennens, and Steevens wrote a calumniating anonymous entry for Jennens in Biographia Dramatica which persists in the electronic Concise Dictionary of National Biography. Jennens accused the editorial mainstream of not even bothering to do collations, and he was largely right in that. Jennens, like Capell, went back to the earliest printings for his authority. Unlike Capell, Jennens stuck to his principles and used quarto-Hamlet readings rigorously, and moreover did his collation absolutely completely, thus making a proper critical edition. Jennens was the first to put the act and scene number in the running-headers for ease of reference, which shows concern for the use of books as reference works into which one might dip; a reader going linearly from 1.1 to 5.5 does not need such assistance. Although Jennens conflated the texts, he indicated typographically which early texts lacked or had which passages. Concerning The Mousetrap, Jennens pointed out that Theobald had emended (and thundered about blunderers who do not emend) unnecessarily. Hamlet says the play is the image of a murder done in Vienna to a duke but the dumbshow stage direction calls him a king. This is not a discrepancy: the source story was about a duke and duchess, the play of it about a kind and queen.
Finally, Shakespeare Newsletter carries four items of relevance this year. In the longest, Richard Levin argues that the Indian to whom Othello compares himself is American, not Asian, since these were reputed to be ignorant of the value of gems ('Othello's American Indian and the Nu Principle', ShN 50[2000] 35-36, 52). Dennis Bartholomeusz argued that Shakespeare consistently associates pearls with India and the East (so it is an Asian Indian in Othello), but Bartholomeusz mistook "orient pearl" to mean "eastern pearl" when in fact it could just meant "brilliant pearl" (OED Orient B. adj. 2). Also, there are plenty of pearls in the Shakespeare canon which are not 'orient' or 'eastern', so there is not the consistent association as Bartholomeusz claimed. There was an identifiable belief that American Indians did not know the value of gems and gave them away for trash, and it begins with The First Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, and crops up in other places including Hakluyt's Principal Navigations and Robert Harcourt Voyage to Guiana. Robert Cawley The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama collects all the examples in his chapter "Gold for beads". There is no such tradition for Indians of the East, just a couple of examples which Levin thinks come from the word "India" being used to mean America (OED India n. 3). Of course, there was considerable vagueness about just what some ethnic/geographic distinctions meant, as with Moor and Turk. There seems to have been an association of East India (that is, modern India) with spices and West India (America) with mined gems, but Levin does not rely on this because there is too little evidence of it. Does it really matter whether the Indian is American or Asiatic? Levin points out that the Judean/Indian difference does matter, since if Othello is like Judas then the killing of Desdemona is a serious betrayal invoking eternal damnation, whereas if he is like as ignorant Indian then it is less serious and he deserves some pity. But whether the Indian is Asian or American does not matter, so Levin invokes an hermeneutic doctrine he has recently invented, "the Nu Principle", meaning "so what?".
On a related matter, Lisa Hopkins proposes a change to the punctuation in The Merchant of Venice (''An Indian Beauty'?: A Proposed Emendation to The Merchant of Venice', ShN 50[2000] 27). Bassanio calls deceptive covering "the beauteous scarf / Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word, | The seeming truth which cunning times put on | To entrap the wisest." (3.2.98-101). The repetition "beauteous . . . beauty" is weak, and given the Elizabethan aversion to dark skin Hopkins thinks we should emend the punctuation to make "Indian" a noun not an adjective. Thus it is "Veiling an Indian; beauty--in a word, | The seeming truth which cunning times put on | To entrap the wisest". Rodney Stenning Edgecombe considers Jaques's question in As You Like It: "Why, who cries out on pride | That can therein tax any private party? | Doth it not flow as hugely as the sea, | Till that the weary very means do ebb? (2.7.70-3) ('Two Suggested Emendations', ShN 50[2000] 113). The problem is "weary very means", and because trying to control the sea is an image of that for which no-one is strong enough, Edgecombe suggests "weary fleerer's main" meaning until the weary mocker's strength (=main, punning on sea=main) does ebb. Edgecombe also considers Proteus's line "But say this weed her love from Valentine, | It follows not that she will love Sir Thurio" (The Two Gentlemen of Verona 3.2.49-50). It is odd to think of weeding something from someone, especially in the case of love. The emendation 'wind' for 'weed' has been proposed, but this suggests it will take time and Proteus's point is that he will be quick in alienating Silvia from Valentine. Edgecombe proposes the emendation of 'wedge': "But say this wedge her love from Valentine". Edgecombe is right that there are Shakespearian uses of 'wedge' to mean split, including Troilus's speaking of a heart "As wedged with a sigh, would rive in twain" (Troilus and Cressida 1.1.35), but it just of often means the opposite, fastening together. In a second note, Edgecombe argues that the First Gentleman's praise of Posthumus in Cymbeline is a herbalist image ('Crushing and Extending in Cymbeline', ShN 50[2000] 51-2). The praise is fulsome but cryptic: "I do not think | So fair an outward and such stuff within | Endows a man but he. SECOND GENTLEMAN You speak him far. | FIRST GENTLEMAN "I do extend him, sir, within himself; | Crush him together rather than unfold | His measure duly. SECOND GENTLEMAN What's his name and birth? | FIRST GENTLEMAN I cannot delve him to the root" (Cymbeline 1.1.22-28). Edgecombe rejects as entirely inappropriate Nosworthy's suggestion that the crushing/extending image is one of torture. Rather, the image comes from something to do with family trees, with Posthumus as a kind of herb which the gentleman cannot dig up roots and all. In a herbalist context, crushing releases the essence of a root. But how crush and extend, as the First Gentleman has it? Edgecombe thinks 'extend' means "to seize upon, take possession of, by force" (OED extend v. 11b). Having referred to the "stuff" within Posthumus prompted Shakespeare's perhaps unconscious recollection of the Doctor's "Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, | Raze out the written troubles of the brain, | And with some sweet oblivious antidote | Cleanse the fraught bosom of that perilous stuff" (Macbeth 5.3.43-6), hence the collocation of root/stuff in a herbalist image here in Cymbeline. So, Edgecombe paraphrases the First Gentleman's comment on his own praise (that, "I do extend him . . . measure duly") as "I extend him [forcibly seize upon his essential virtue] and express from it a definition of human excellence that goes much further [as the virtue of a plant is extended by being reduced to a spreadable substance] than it would in a comparatively inert enumeration of his merits ['unfold | His measure duly'], such as you might find in a Theatrum sanitatis or Herbal".
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