30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (28 page)

Shakespeare presumably wrote this speech for Romeo, then decided to give it to the Friar. When he reassigned it to Friar Laurence he extended it: the four lines continue with the Friar saying that he must collect medicinal herbs from his garden before the sun gets too high. Thus, the speech seems to “belong” more to the Friar in that he has a reason for talking about the time. (The fact that it is moveable should perhaps be factored into our discussion of character in Myth 29: does Shakespeare think of the speech first and the character second?)

In fact, in
Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare did more than simply swap the speaker. He tinkered with the speech in aesthetic ways: “chequering” and “checking” are variant forms of a verb meaning to “variegate with rays or bands of different colours” (
OED
2). He changed the word order from “darkness fleckled” to “fleckled darkness.” The biggest change affects the last line, where in Friar Laurence's version the sun god's chariot has acquired an adjective, “fiery”; this then forces the rearrangement of the meter and the separation of one image into two (path and wheels rather than a wheel-created path). Whether Shakespeare failed adequately to signpost his deletion of Romeo's speech or the compositor misread the signs is unknowable. But the printshop compositor's error in setting both versions enables us to look over Shakespeare's shoulder and watch him at work—revising.

We see the same thing again in a comedy written about the same time:
Love's Labour's Lost
(1595), whose first printed edition of 1599 has two sequential versions of the dialogue in which Rosalind imposes tasks on Berowne. The second dialogue was clearly intended to replace the first; instead they are printed sequentially, and the result is duplication but with variant phrasing. However, in
Love's Labour's Lost
Shakespeare's second thoughts are not confined to expression but extend to plot. Shakespeare first intended that Berowne should woo Katherine, not Rosaline: Berowne's first sparring dialogue in 2.1 takes place with the character called “Katherine” (seven speeches); later in the same scene he questions Boyet about “Katherine.” In the rest of the play the plot links him with Rosaline and by the time the text was reprinted in 1623, the red herrings of 2.1 had been cleared up: the speech prefixes and dialogue references to “Katherine” have been replaced by “Rosaline.”

These are obviously revisions that took place while Shakespeare was actually composing; they concern small units of text, and both versions coexist in a single text. When we find differences of large episodes across texts (as when a scene is present in one printed text but not in another), questions arise as to whether Shakespeare made this excision, when he made it (immediately or later), or whether it was made (subsequently) by someone else. In the 1604–5 text of
Hamlet
, for example, Horatio has a long speech in Act 1, scene 1, just before the Ghost's appearance, in which he describes portents in ancient Rome before Caesar's death; later in the play, Fortinbras's brisk and brief crossing of the stage to invade Poland prompts a soliloquy from Hamlet in which he reproaches himself for delay. Neither of these moments appears in the Folio. The reasons for the cuts are conceivably theatrical. It is essential that the Ghost seem scarily supernatural; if spectators watch him walk on (as they might do if their attention wandered during a long speech) the ghostly impact of his surprise appearance is lessened. Preventing audience attention flagging may also lie behind the removal of Hamlet's soliloquy in Act 4. (Interestingly, when Shakespeare texts exist in plural versions, there is a high concentration of cuts in the fourth act when spectator stamina—or is it actor stamina?—can wane.)

We need to remember that Shakespeare is a dramatist as well as a poet; sometimes poetry has to be sacrificed to drama. The need for such cuts may not have been apparent until the play was staged. Who made the cuts? Maybe they were obvious to Shakespeare after a run through, or after the first performance. But if they were suggested by the actors, they presumably had Shakespeare's approval (he was a shareholder in his own company). Theater is a collaborative art (see Myth 17).

We see revision for theatrical reasons time and again in Shakespeare. Act 3, scene 6 of
King Lear
is a lengthy scene in which the mad Lear conducts a mock-trial of his two ungrateful daughters. In the Folio of 1623 this scene is reduced by 160 lines. But the traffic is not one-way. Although the first printed version of
Lear
in 1608 contains many lines that are not in the Folio, the Folio has many lines not in the quarto. So while Shakespeare the dramatist was making or sanctioning large cuts for theatrical purposes, the poet in him could not stop tinkering with small moments and single words

Plays are also revised to accommodate changes in theater circumstances. For instance, the scene in which Gloucester is blinded is concluded in the 1608 quarto of
Lear
by a compassionate dialogue between two unnamed servants who plan to help the wounded earl. This dialogue does not exist in the Folio. As such it is part of a pattern of excisions in the Folio whose version presents a bleaker, more hostile world. However, the dialogue's original raison d'être may have been practical rather than thematic. Having been blinded and thrown out to “smell / His way to Dover” (
The History of King Lear
, 14.91–2; the dialogue is cut in the
Tragedy
), Gloucester exits, only to enter nine lines into the next scene, by which time he needs to have his gory eyes cleaned up and a bandage wrapped round his head. Without the servants' eight-line dialogue, this change is rather tight. By 1608 the King's Men had acquired the indoor Blackfriars theater and plays had consequently acquired intervals between the acts (act breaks were needed to change the candles which lit the indoor theater). The act break in Folio
Lear
enables the change that previously required dialogue.

This poses a critical conundrum: when we look at those playtexts which exist in variant versions, how can we tell the difference between cause and effect? The
effect
of a revision (the reduction of compassion in the world of
King Lear
, for example, by cutting the two servants) and the
reason
for the revision (the servants' eight lines rendered superfluous by new theater conditions) may not be one and the same. Theater is a flexible form, continually adjusting itself to new topical/practical/political circumstances.

So far we have discussed revision in a way that implies two relatively stable texts: one version rejected and replaced by another version. But Shakespeare's plays may have accommodated regular ad hoc alteration: that is, they may have been flexibly variant at many stages. In Act 5 of
Hamlet
Osric tells Hamlet about Laertes' arrival at court. Lois Potter notes that Hamlet does not need this information “since Laertes had been trying to throttle him in the previous scene.”
³
She concludes that the graveyard scene was not included in every performance. She lists a host of other moments, across the canon, which bear signs of adjustment, large and small, for a variety of purposes (political, regional, topical, practical). It is too easy for us to think of Shakespeare texts as sacrosanct because for us Shakespeare is “Shakespeare.” But to his company he was not yet England's National Poet; he was a working playwright (see Myth 4).

Let us return to the quotation from W.W. Greg with which we began. Greg was part of a generation of critics who were implacably, ideologically opposed to revision. This was in part because their textual training conditioned them to think in binary terms of right and wrong, good and bad texts. They were able to tolerate the idea of local revision where one reading is immediately rejected for another (as in the example from
Romeo and Juliet
, above). But when presented with the idea of play-length revision or two readings of potentially equal validity, they ran into trouble: “faced with two sheep, it is all too easy to insist that one
must
be a goat.”
⁴

Faced with the taxing problem of variants between two texts of
Troilus and Cressida
Greg contemplated the possibility of revision in the Folio text but hesitated: “besides the more general objections there is the difficulty of deciding in which text revision is to be supposed. It is an assumption that I think the critic should avoid if possible.”
⁵
From this, it seems, we are to understand that because the critic cannot make a value judgment, cannot decide which text is “better,” she or he must put aside all thoughts of revision. Greg here faces the dilemma articulated by the poet, classical scholar, and acerbic textual critic A.E. Housman, in 1922:

If Providence permitted two manuscripts to be equal, the editor would have to choose between their readings by considerations of intrinsic merit, and in order to do that he would need to acquire intelligence and impartiality and willingness to take pains, and all sorts of things which he neither has nor wishes for; and he feels sure that God, who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, can never have meant to lay upon his shoulders such a burden as this.
⁶

Housman's dig at his colleagues satirically anticipates the wind of textual and theoretical change that blew in at the end of the century. This change of attitude showed that we do not need to choose between texts. Instead we can treat each on its own merits and investigate the circumstances that produced it. Whereas earlier editions of
King Lear
, for example, produced a single text from a combination of elements of the two distinct versions (the editorial practice known as “conflation”), there are now a number of Complete Works (the Oxford, for instance) which include the quarto and Folio texts as separate plays; the Arden
Hamlet
, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor in 2006, has two volumes with three versions of the play (the quartos of 1603 and 1604–5, and the Folio of 1623).

The myth that Shakespeare did not revise comes partly from Heminge and Condell's praise of his manuscripts in their epistle “To the Great Variety of Readers” at the front of the First Folio in 1623: “His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”
⁷
Shakespeare's contribution to
Sir Thomas More
bears this out: his lines are fluent and unblotted. But unblotted papers do not mean unrevised papers (as the
More
example shows where Shakespeare corrected himself in the process of writing).

Grace Ioppolo has shown how frequent revision was among Elizabethan playwrights. Ernst Honigmann has analyzed revisions in manuscript poems by a large number of post-Renaissance writers. Vladimir Nabokov said that his pencils outlasted their erasers. Ernest Hemingway rewrote the end of
Farewell to Arms
thirty-nine times. (“What was it that had stopped you?” an interviewer asked him. “Getting the words right,” replied Hemingway.
⁸
) It is rare to find authors who do not revise. Good writers are re-writers.

Notes

¹
 W.W. Greg,
The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), p. xix.

²
 The quarto reads “flectkted,” a non-existent word that is clearly a misprint for “fleckled.”

³
 Lois Potter,
The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 283.

⁴
 Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery,
William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 18.

⁵
 Greg,
The Editorial Problem
, pp. 111–12.

⁶
 A.E. Housman, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” in
The Classical Papers of A. E. Housman
, vol. 3, ed. J. Diggle and F.R.D. Goodyear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 1058–69 (p. 1064).

⁷
 
Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare
, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), “Preliminary Pages of the First Folio,” ll. 83–5.

⁸
 Grace Ioppolo,
Revising Shakespeare
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); E.A.J. Honigmann,
The Stability of Shakespeare's Text
(London: Edward Arnold, 1965); interview with Vladimir Nabokov (1962) at:
http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter01.txt
(accessed 28 September 2011); Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction,” interview in
The Paris Review
, 21 (1956):
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway
(accessed 12 July 2012).

In 1602, Richard Vennar advertised an entertainment extravaganza at the Swan Theatre.
England's Joy
was to include a depiction of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, an allegorical representation of “Belgia” as a beautiful Lady left in “piteous dispoilment” by Spain, her tyrannical attacker, and “strange fireworks” from under the stage. In addition to these attractions, it was widely rumored that the play would be acted “by certain gentlemen and gentlewomen”:
¹
the prospect of high-class women acting seems, like patriotic tableaux and pyrotechnics, to have been a real draw for late Elizabethan audiences. Unfortunately for the spectators gathered at the Swan, it was all a con. Vennar had taken their money and there were no fireworks, no joy, and definitely no performing women.

For historical reasons which are hard to uncover, the English stage was an entirely male space. No women acted in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and thus all female roles were taken by male actors. This was not the case in continental Europe. When Thomas Coryate traveled to Venice he described the new phenomenon of seeing female performers: “I saw women act, a thing that I never saw before, though I have heard that it hath been sometimes used in London, and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture, and whatsoever convenient for a player, as ever I saw any masculine actor.”
²
Coryate's hint that women have acted in London is tantalizing—but we don't know any more: it's just possible that he is referring to the legendary
England's Joy
. What's most interesting here is that for Coryate the experience of seeing women acting female roles is not revelatory—his tone of faint surprise is that they are as good as men, rather than, as we might expect, that they are so much more convincing as women than men are. Coryate's commentary on the Venetian theater gives us a way of thinking about the success of the transvestite theater for which Shakespeare wrote, in which a “masculine actor” presents the compelling “grace, action [and] gesture” of a woman.