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All Content © Edmund King, 2000.


Since about the mid 1980s, it has become fashionable to interpret the fact that some Shakespearean works exist in variant forms as evidence that Shakespeare frequently revised his texts. Hence F Hamlet represents Shakespeare's 'second thoughts' on the original (most closely preserved by Q2); Q1 and F King Lear represent different acting versions written months or years apart; F Othello stems from a authorially-revised version independent of Q1. These conclusions appear in the Textual Companion to the 1987 Oxford Complete Works, edited by Wells, Jowett and Taylor - an edition that Hugh Grady calls 'the first post-modern Shakespeare'. Applying these convictions, the editors make some radical departures from previous editions. Q2 and F Hamlet aren't conflated into one long version, but lines in Q2 not in F are relegated to footnotes; Q1 and F Lear are printed separately, and the editors planned initially to do the same with Othello.

While these moves add to the First Folio's authority, other aspects of the 1987 Shakespeare undermine it. Plays not included in F1 - Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, the hand D fragment of Sir Thomas More - gain entry (while the first two are uncontroversial, the third inclusion is unprecedented), and the Textual Companion considers Shakespearean participation in Edward III likely, and doesn't rule out his involvment in Arden of Faversham, the additions to Mucedorus - even Edmund Ironside. Moreover, the existence of non-Shakespearean material in the Canon is openly admitted. According to Wells and Taylor, 90% of 1 Henry VI is the work of other dramatists, probably including Nashe; Act I of Titus Andronicus is written by 'Peele or an imitator of Peele'; the first eight scenes of Pericles are mostly the work of George Wilkins; roughly a third of Timon of Athens is Thomas Middleton's, and Fletcher collaborated with Shakespeare on Cardenio, All Is True, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. These (with the exception of Fletcher and Kinsmen) are radical departures from the Modernist (and monolithic) Shakespeare that prevailed from about 1930.

Other postmodernisms have taken this 'disintegration' of Shakespearean authorities further. The New Bibliography's practice of dividing texts into 'good and 'bad' quartos, authoritative and corrupt versions, has been increasingly problematised. There have been attempts to find acting versions behind many of the 'bad' quartos, and a general reappraisal of terms such as 'author' and 'authority'. These moves in scholarship apparently stem from post-structuralist scepticism about authorial presence, originality and the possibility of uncovering authorial intentions. Behind them lies a Foucaultian analysis of discipline and conformity. The non-conformist text assumes the position of hysteric or pervert to the Shakespeare critic's psychiatrist. The text is stigmatised, pushed to the margins, labelled 'bad', 'irregular', 'corrupt', 'dubious' or 'apocryphal'. Its status is further diminished by the imagined circumstances of its creation. 'Bad Quartos' are stolen goods, sold to printers without authorial consent by stenographers or 'hired men' involved in production, but with no loyalties to a theatre company. For these theorists, the pejorative language levelled by the New Bibliography at these non-conformist texts is suspect. It reveals intolerance of that which falls outside a system, a need to control and dominate the text.

Post structuralism leads to a religitimising of the agencies that generate variant texts. The area of concern is no longer the author and his (sic) intentions, but the social mechanisms that bring about a text. From this perspective, authority is dispersed across a field of contributing agencies. Actors' interpolations and cuts, the audience which rejects or embraces a play, the reviser who remakes an old play for revival, the maker of scribal transcripts, the compositor, the printer, the bookseller, all 'collaborate' in the re/production of a text, and its transmission through space and time. Following Barthes and Foucault, contemporary theory denies that modern conceptions of the unitary author can be applied to Renaissance dramatic texts. Rather, the single, transcendent author is an Eighteenth century construct, informed by developments in copyright law and increasingly sophisticated concepts of individual property rights.

This theoretical environment is likely to be more congenial to heterogeneity - variants, manuscript copies that deviate from the norm of the singular, accepted, canonical Word¹. Each represents a different text, inscribed by its own, subtly unique, productive forces. Rather than viewing such material as corrupted and deformed; raw material from which (singular) authorially intended forms can be removed, separated and quarantined², contemporary theory gives each its own value. Each text represents a different generative act. Its formation reflects one of many concurrent socio-historic processes resulting in texts.

Editors who seek to recreate a definitive text that represents an author's final intentions are suspect. According to post-structuralist argument, intentionality can never be divined. Meaning in texts is contingent. It is shaped by discourses which change over time, stemming from ideologies and intellectual paradigms that shift from one historical period to another. In this way, the meaning of any particular text is predicated on shared assumptions and ideas which don't transfer in any straightforward way across time. To attempt to edit an early modern text - to determine the exact words and meanings its author intended to set down - is, from this perspective, a misguided enterprise. The editor is necessarily outside the matrix of shared knowledges and discourses that informed the text. The preconceptions, assumptions and ideologies with which the editor approaches the text are those of the socio-historical milieu of which he or she is a part. Editors therefore run the risk of merely projecting their own discourses onto the text, so that any meanings they 'extract' from the text are extrinsic rather than innate. Such editing is thus an arrogation of authority from the text to the editor.

The text legitimises the editor's presence by its 'problems', cruxes or 'difficulty'. The editor claims authority to annotate or explicate it in order to make its meaning accessible to readers. In doing so, the editor asserts power over the text. It comes to justify - authorise - the critical assumptions and methodologies applied by the editor. Its anatomising according to these culturally and historically specific conventions is a demonstration of power - a claim to ownership over the past.

What, then, can we expect from editors who bring to a Shakespearean text such radically sceptical attitudes to traditional editorial theory? The New Cambridge Pericles, edited by Doreen DelVeccio and Anthony Hammond and published in 1998, might give some insight. Rejecting two hundred years of consensus that the quarto text is seriously corrupt, and dismissing some recent cogent arguments for the authorial presence of George Wilkins in the first eight scenes, the editors are happy to present a 'cleaned up' version of Q1. Previous editors, they assert in their somewhat precious Introduction, have been prejudiced against the play, assuming corruption and conjecturally emending it in direct proportion to their moral distaste for the play's style and content. If only they had 'listened' to the text, say DelVecchio and Hammond, they would have realised that Q1 Pericles descends from Shakespeare's own foul papers! Is Pericles then 'the key with which Shakspeare hath unlock'd his heart'?

Probably not. The editors have no real arguments to back their assertion (they cite some very general, and mostly unspecified, 'resemblances' to Q1 Lear) and the extreme burden of proof they use to judge other editors' textual theories is lowered (or suspended completely) for their own. As more and more New Cambridge series editions appear on the market by-lined by the thirtysomething firebrands of the Class of '88, and each positively dripping with hostile attitudes to the idea that Shakespeare collaborated ³, and the methods and arguments used by those who investigate such things, it appears that being a competent historico-textual editor, and having been in Grad School during the '80s, may be mutually exclusive events.


Notes

¹ It seeks the marginal, that which indicates unconformities - fractures that run through a system - texts that reveal social textures and tensions running underneath.

² By the segregation of variants into appendices, textual notes, lists of 'incidentals'.

³ The freshly minted Cambridge Timon of Athens, (2001), is neglectful to the point of being positively Orwellian of the rather conclusive arguments for Thomas Middleton's presence in that play.

For Further Reading

Grady, Hugh The Modernist Shakespeare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991

Masten, Jeffrey Textual Intercourse - Collaboration, Authorship and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997

Rabinow, Paul (ed) The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin, 1984

Taylor, Gary and Wells, Stanley, with Jowett, John and Montgomerie, John William Shakespeare - A Textual Companion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987