The Book of Lost Books

by Stuart Kelly

  The Romantic poets lauded Spenser as a dreamy, somnambulant poet: could the converse be the case? Is The Faerie Queene a mathematical puzzle, an undeciphered code? Researching this, I tried to borrow Dr. Fowler’s study from Edinburgh City Library, but, I was informed, their copy had vanished in the 1980s. Walking home, slightly miffed at having to use the National Library’s copy instead, I pondered the possible motives of the volume’s purloiner.

  Was there someone, somewhere in this city, elaborately uncovering the algebraic structure of The Faerie Queene? And if so, to what end? Just suppose the unknown monomaniac succeeded, and cracked the fundamental form of the poem . . . if book II was governed by Libra, book I, with Una the Virgin, would be under the auspices of Virgo . . . and book XII would then have had to be Leo, a symbol for Majesty and Magnificence. The rest might click like the wheels of a Leibniz calculating machine. Was someone writing the rest of The Faerie Queene? Or rather, could the poem now be actually writing itself?

  More than likely, not. Moreover, the layered dimensions of The Faerie Queene are not restricted to astrological and philosophical concepts. Political and historical matters are shadowed by the otherworldly figures. Elizabeth herself is variously Gloriana, Una, Belphoebe, and Britomart; Duessa, conversely, is Mary Queen of Scots. Sir Philip Sidney is hinted at in Sir Calidore and Lord Grey’s career in Ireland is paralleled in Artegall. Our monomaniac would need a time machine as well as a genius for abstruse trigonometries to recapture fully the subtleties of the poem.

  Did the other six books of The Faerie Queene ever exist? Some contemporary critics believe that the poem is, in its way, complete; that Spenser changed his plans to curtail the twelve-book structure. His initial letter to Raleigh was more akin to a proposal than a prospectus; and, indeed, Spenser does suggest he might contribute a further twelve books on the political, rather than personal, virtues, should the first twelve find favor. Satisfying though the idea is that the poem is complete, Spenser seemed intent on finishing it. In his sequence of sonnets, the Amoretti, written at the same time, he asks for “leaue to rest me being halfe for-donne” after having compiled six books.

  John Dryden, at the end of the seventeenth century, claimed Spenser had intended to flatter Sidney and Elizabeth by ending the poem with their marriage, but Sidney, “dying before him, depriv’d the Poet, both of the Means and Spirit, to accomplish his Design.” Sir James Ware, in 1633, claimed that in Ireland, Spenser “finished the later part of that excellent poem of his Faery Queene, which was soon afterwards unfortunately lost by the disorder and abuse of his servant.”

  Spenser, who was Lord Grey’s secretary in Ireland, had had to flee back to England in 1598 after his property at Kincolman was attacked and burned by rebels. The earliest biographical notice, by William Camden, only claims that he was forced out and his goods were despoiled: no mention of the missing manuscript and cack-handed servant. The inveterate compiler of oddments and anecdotes John Aubrey maintained that playing cards, with stanzas of The Faerie Queene, were found in the wainscot of a chamber in Sir Erasmus Dryden’s house, where Spenser had stayed. Aubrey does not mention if these cards contained stanzas not present in the extant books.

  John Worthington, in his letter on the lost works, suggested that manuscripts “may perhaps lie hid in some libraries or closets.” “He lived heretofore in the north of England, and in the south, viz., Kent,” he adds, narrowing down the search. And indeed, they may lie there still. Countless undergraduates fervently hope they lie there for a long, long time.

  William Shakespeare

  {1564–1616}

  IMAGINE YOURSELF SITTING on a bench in a garden at dusk, with a house behind you and the view in front. The hill slopes gently toward a river, the night-scented stock is beginning to bloom, and the pale summer light fades. Wisps of mist seem caught like sheep’s fleece on the branches of the trees lining the river; gradually, it thickens and coalesces, inching up the fields, billowing, solidifying, obliterating the trees it seemed to hang on, creeping, silently, toward where you are sitting. You think—I will wait, and see if it reaches me. It swirls and chills as the sun sets: a fence, running down the hill, lets you measure its progress up the field as the posts are one by one enveloped, erased. It stops. You wait. Wait. The wall of cloud does not move; exactly the same number of fence-posts remain, the last one barely visible. It gets slightly colder, and slightly darker, but the obstinate haze has halted. You stand up, stretch, and turn around, only to see the lighted windows of the house shimmering and blurred by the mist you are in. You pause, and realize: it was never the edge of the mist you were watching, but the limits of your own vision. You saw only the distance that your eye could pierce, rather than the periphery of inexorable mist. That moment of realization is like thinking about Shakespeare, as he disappears behind Shackespere, Shakeshafte, Shakspere, Shagspere, Shxpr.

  There is a large number of documents relating to Shakespeare’s life—baptismal registers, marriage licenses, loan agreements, satirical swipes, enthusiastic praises: but no letters, no memoirs, no autobiography. In the absence of incontrovertible evidence, countless scholars have chased will-o’-the-wisps through the plays, looking for allusions, disappointments, and the settling of scores. Did Shakespeare get back at Sir Thomas Lucy by depicting him as Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor? Is fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe the dead shepherd in As You Like It, and does the “great reckoning in a little room” refer to his death? What connects the performance of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarkin 1601 and the death by drowning of Hamnet Shakespeare, William’s son, in 1596? What triggered the great, late plays, which undo and mend the tragedies of the previous decade? Who is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets? What happened in the “Lost Years” between 1585 and 1592, or in the final years between the performance of The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1613 and his death three years later?

  That way madness lies: and the history of Shakespeare criticism is littered with fantastical theories, dogmatic speculation, and lunatic conspiracy. Let us leave biography along with its awful ghost: those reams of obsession that, discomfited by Shakespeare’s lack of self-presentation, presume instead that John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, the earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Sir Philip Sidney’s sister, and Shakespeare’s own wife must have written his work. Let us begin with what isn’t: Love’s Labour’s Won, Pericles, and Cardenio.

  In 1598, Francis Meres wrote in his Palladis Tamia, Wit’s Treasury, the first panegyric on Shakespeare:

  As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love’s Labour’s Lost, his Love’s Labour’s Won, his Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the 2., Richard the 3., Henry the 4., King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.

  The only plays written before 1597 that Meres omits are the trilogy on Henry VI and The Taming of the Shrew. This led to the supposition that the mysterious Love’s Labour’s Won was an alternative title for The Taming of the Shrew; and, one could argue, Petruchio wins his love, albeit aggressively, in that play. The chance discovery, in 1953, of a scrap from a bookseller’s list bound into a later volume demolishes that theory.

  The fragment seems to be a list of volumes sold in August 1603: it includes “marchant of vennis,” “taming of a shrew,” “loves labor lost” and “loves labor won.” Since it mentions both works, it precludes their being one and the same text. It does, however, raise further problems, since it would seem to imply that Love’s Labour’s Won was actually printed.

  Nineteen of Shakespeare’s plays—called quarto editions—were printed individually. In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, his friends John Heminges and Henry Condell edited his manuscripts or “foul papers” and published the Folio edition of thirty-six plays (which does not include Love’s Labour’s Won). The chimera never
theless persisted that Love’s Labour’s Won was an alternative title for another play by Shakespeare. The title might be thought to fit the plot of Much Ado About Nothing, which was performed in 1598, but published in 1600 under its own name. As You Like It or All’s Well That Ends Well could have been the subtitle for Love’s Labour’s Won, in the same fashion as Twelfth Night is subtitled What You Will: neither exists as a quarto. By interpreting “labour’s won” as “suffering deserved,” it has even been proposed that the Troilus and Cressida was the mysterious lost play. The idea of actually having lost a play by Shakespeare seems too much to bear, and these alternative ascriptions belie a desperation not to have lost anything.

  But the other possibility is that Love’s Labour’s Won is, in fact, Love’s Labour’s Won. Since it appears to have been printed, over one thousand copies might have existed in Elizabethan London. That Heminges and Condell did not include it in the Folio does not mean that it had disappeared by 1623. They do not include Pericles or The Two Noble Kinsmen, and analysis of the composition and printing of the Folio has established that Timon of Athens was only added at a later stage, and that Troilus and Cressida was nearly left out altogether. The Folio is a Collected Works of Shakespeare, not a Complete Works.

  The quarto of Titus Andronicus was only discovered in the first decade of the twentieth century; so the chance that Love’s Labour’s Won is bound, somewhere, in an anonymous bundle of old plays is not outside the realms of possibility. But the likelihood diminishes with every passing year. Love’s Labour’s Lost ends on a bittersweet note: “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You, that way: we, this way.” While Love’s Labour’s Lost is left secure in the canon, its putative sequel exits into a darker, more obscure offstage future.

  Pericles, Prince of Tyre, as mentioned above, is not in the Folio. The play was printed in quarto in 1609, though to justify its presence in this book requires a further distinction: the good and bad quartos. If the Folio is the album, and the quartos are singles, then the bad quartos are bootleg copies. Many of them were constructed by jobbing actors who memorized as much as possible, and then cashed in on the play’s success. What makes Pericles a lost work is that all we have is the version seen through a glass darkly: an unofficial, clandestinely created simulacrum of the real play.

  How do you spot a bad quarto? Thankfully, we have two quartos of Hamlet to compare, Q1 and Q2, printed only a year apart. It looks suspiciously as if the second was a retort to the plagiarized first version. There are some obvious corkers in Q1, particularly in soliloquies when “Hamlet” could not be overheard by his eavesdropping fellow actor. “To be, or not be, I there’s the point,” reads one famous line; and “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” is oddly rendered as “Why what a dunghill idiot slave am I!”, let alone the wonderfully problematic fact that Polonius, in Q1, is called Corambis. The evidence for how the bad quartos came about is equally persuasive: in Q1 Horatio does not “season,” but “ceasen” his admiration; Fortinbras’s bedridden uncle is “impudent” rather than “impotent,” and the play that “pleased not the million, ’twas caviare to the general” instead “pleased not the vulgar, ’twas caviary to the million.” Slips and mishearings, presumptions and anticipations typify the hastily assembled bad quarto.

  So with Pericles, all we can read is an image thus disfigured. Despite its mangled and mutilated state Pericles retains features that seem classically Shakespearean. Like the other late plays, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, it involves a parent reconciled with a child thought to have been lost. Just as the apothecary in Cymbeline reversed the tragic accident in Romeo and Juliet, or the insane jealousy of Othello is redeemed in Leontes’ penitence in The Winter’s Tale, or the irascible Lear is forgiven in Prospero’s own contrition, Pericles enacts a startling transformation of the potentially monstrous into an unexpected atonement.

  It opens in horror, with Pericles, looking for a wife, and realizing the incestuous relationship between his prospective father-in-law and his intended. He leaves in disgust and, endangered, is shipwrecked, married, and shipwrecked again. He thinks he has lost both his own wife and his own daughter, since he put one overboard, dead to the world, and left the other behind on his travels, and is reduced over the years to madness and misery. Then he glimpses his wife in his miraculously returned daughter (who has escaped, unharmed, from a brothel) and allows her to lead him to an epiphanic reunion with his similarly restored wife. Paternal devotion and daughterly love emancipate him, and counter the perversion of those attributes at the play’s beginning.

  There are flashes of Shakespeare’s language: when Pericles’ wife, Thaisa, regains consciousness in her coffin, the onlooker says, “Her eyelids . . . begin to part their fringes of bright gold.” Prospero similarly addresses Miranda, saying, “The fringèd curtain of thine eye advance.” The dialogue of the fishermen and the brothel frequenters has some recognizable brio. In his elegiac laments, Pericles occasionally reaches an almost familiar grandeur:

  A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;

  No light, no fire: the unfriendly elements

  Forgot thee utterly; nor have I time

  To give thee hallow’d to thy grave, but straight

  Must cast thee, scarcely coffin’d, in the ooze;

  Where, for a monument upon thy bones,

  The aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale

  And humming water, must o’erwhelm thy corse,

  Lying with simple shells.

  But in other places, the verse is clunking and bloated.

  Few love to hear the sins they love to act

  ’Twould ’braid yourself too near for me to tell it.

  In Ben Jonson’s Ode to Myself, he derided Pericles as a “mouldy tale,” “stale / as the shrieve’s crust, and nasty as his fish.” He could not have known just how corrupted and corroded our version of it would be. It is tempting to imagine a perfect Pericles that would rank alongside The Tempest; although, since Shakespeare reworked these notions of redemption and absolution in his subsequent plays, it might suggest that he too was somewhat dissatisfied with Pericles.

  Prospero, adjuring his magic and consigning his staff to the bottom of the sea at the end of The Tempest, has become romanticized into Shakespeare’s own farewell to the stage. It’s a lovely image, even if it is utterly wrong. Far from renouncing the theater in 1611, Shakespeare continued, in collaboration with the up-and-coming John Fletcher, on Henry VIII, or All Is True, The Two Noble Kinsmen (based on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale), and the enigmatic Cardenio. John Heminges, leader of the King’s Men, was paid by the Privy Council for presenting “Cardenno” or “Cardenna” in May and June of 1613; and the Stationer’s Register for 1653 attributes The History of Cardenio to “Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare.” Even if it was not entirely written by Shakespeare, it nonetheless raises some intriguing possibilities.

  The name “Cardenio” comes from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Part I, which appeared in English in 1612, and in which we learn his story intermittently from chapter 23 onward. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet Cardenio, a man driven mad by the duplicity of his erstwhile friend, Don Ferdinand, who has connived Cardenio’s beloved Lucinda into marriage and abandoned the farmer’s daughter, Dorothea, whom he had seduced. By a series of lucky coincidences, chance meetings, and the timely intervention of Don Quixote, the lovers are reunited, the wicked Ferdinand repents, and Cardenio is cured. Even this brief outline indicates that many of the elements are consistent with Shakespeare’s concerns in his last plays.

  Did Shakespeare read Cervantes in the original, or in the translation? Or did Fletcher summarize the plot and allow the elder dramatist to freely adapt the material? More important, did Cardenio keep Don Quixote, or dispense with the romance-obsessed knight entirely? Francis Beaumont, another collaborator of Fletcher’s, had staged a play called The Knight of the Burning Pestle in 1607, which featured an apprentice called Ralph, who harbored chivalric delusions, and w
as clearly modeled on Don Quixote. It is not impossible, though it is unlikely, that Cardenio contained the first appearance of Don Quixote on a British stage; and, in a manner as romantic and mythic as the identification of Prospero with Shakespeare, it is a pleasant conceit that the old playwright found in the gentle knight with the jangled mind another redemptive self-image.

  Cardenio had a curious afterlife. In 1727, Lewis Theobald, the Shakespeare editor whom Pope bitterly attacked in the first version of The Dunciad, presented a tragicomedy at Drury Lane entitled Double Falsehood, or The Distrest Lovers, which he claimed was adapted from Cardenio, “written originally by W. Shakespeare.” Theobald maintained he was working from the manuscript prompt-copy, not a quarto version, of the play.

  The plot has broad similarities: Cardenio is renamed Julio, and again he spies on the wedding of his fiancée and his onetime confidant. He goes mad, and with the help of Dorothea (now called Violante), brings Henriquez/Ferdinand to justice. There is no Knight of the Doleful Countenance, or his waggish squire. Perhaps the only strikingly Shakespearean device is that Violante disguises herself as a shepherd. How much of the “real” Cardenio was present in the later version is problematic: this was the age that gave us Tate’s King Lear, complete with happy ending, and Dryden’s The Enchanted Isle, which added a female monster and a man who has never seen a woman to The Tempest. Theobald would not have thought it disrespectful to radically rewrite Shakespeare. It is more difficult to explain why Theobald did not ever print the original. After his death in 1744, the precious copy lingered on, according to a newspaper advertisement, in the Museum of Covent Garden Play-house. The building, including its library, burned down in 1808.

  Shakespeare’s collaboration with other writers provides our final, tantalizing proximity to expanding his oeuvre. The only manuscript of Shakespeare’s creative work is a censor’s copy of The Booke of Sir Thomas More: the so-called Hand D is presumed to be Shakespeare’s by comparison to other examples of his handwriting. Hand D provides a longish speech for the protagonist. As a professional man of the theater, Shakespeare might well have had a hand in countless works. Later copies of the Folio included other plays—Arden of Feversham, Edward III, The Yorkshire Tragedy, Sir John Oldcastle, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The London Prodigal, The Birth of Merlin, The Tragedy of Locrine, The Puritan, and the like—and, though little of the “Shakespeare Apocrypha” has found favor with critics, the ghost of a chance exists that Shakespeare’s words are scattered throughout a far wider corpus. Shakespeare is like language itself, diffuse, ever-present, in constant flux, and we might read far more by him, if only our eyes were sharp enough to see words for what they are.