by Andrea Mays
The acting companies, as owners of the plays, did not publish them to sell printed copies for profit. On the contrary, they kept the plays secret so much as it was possible. In the competitive world of Elizabethan theater, rival groups pirated one another’s plays with virtual impunity. Competing companies sent spies to listen to the plays being performed, memorize them, and write down the words as best they could recall. A troupe of actors could thus plagiarize a script, take it for its own, and perform the play in the countryside far from London, paying neither the theater nor the playwright royalties. An acting company’s best protection against piracy was to keep its plays out of print and, thus, out of the hands of the competition.
The fugitive nature of the First Folio source material has bedeviled scholars for more than a century. Today there exist no first-generation sources for the plays. Nothing survives from Shakespeare’s original, handwritten manuscripts—not one play, not an act, not a scene, not a single page of dialogue, not even a sentence. Heminges and Condell must have had more sources available to them four centuries ago. But they left no account of what sources they used, making it impossible to retrace their steps and reconstruct exactly how they derived the final text of each play. They left us no bibliography, no files, no memoirs, no notes. All that survives is the incandescent climax of their work, the First Folio itself.
Still, we can imagine the universe of possible sources from which they worked. There are only six possibilities: Shakespeare’s original, handwritten manuscripts; complete handwritten copies of those original scripts written out by scribe Ralph Crane for use by the acting troupe; manuscript “sides” used by the actors, which were stand-alone fragments containing only the lines in the play to be spoken by the actor for whom each individual, unique side was prepared; printed quartos that published unauthorized and sometimes multiple, confusing versions of some of the plays; after-the-fact memorial reconstructions of dialogue furnished orally by the few dozen actors who had performed in the plays; and, finally, the personal memories of Heminges and Condell themselves.
Without doubt, the single best source for the First Folio text would have been Shakespeare’s original manuscripts. Those pages, recording in his own handwriting the dialogue, strikeouts, emendations, substitutions, rearrangements, and other edits as they flowed from his mind to his pen, from first to final draft, could have offered nonpareil documentation of his artistic process. Not only did Shakespeare fail to make an effort to publish his complete works, but he apparently also made no attempt to preserve the originals. He failed to keep copies. In his will, he left behind no manuscripts, prompt books, or hand-corrected printed quarto editions. Once he turned his manuscripts over to a scribe like Ralph Crane for copying, he abandoned the originals. He was, it turned out, one of his own legacy’s worst enemies.
Shakespeare wrote in an age before scholars and collectors fetishized an author’s original manuscripts. It is hard for a modern reader to fathom that in Shakespeare’s time these manuscripts possessed no intrinsic value. In our own age, they are prized. A single page written in Shakespeare’s hand might now fetch several million dollars. His complete manuscript for one of the great plays—Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III—might bring twenty million, or possibly more, at auction. In Shakespeare’s time, an original manuscript was worth little more than the paper it was written on.
Indeed, the high cost of paper in early modern England might explain the disappearance of at least some of Shakespeare’s manuscripts. Paper was too valuable to use only once. In an otherwise excellent depiction of an Elizabethan playwright’s working life, the film Shakespeare in Love fails on this point, depicting Will crumpling up sheets of paper as he writes drafts of poems, and tossing wads of paper on the floor. Paper was purchased in small amounts, handwriting was small to squeeze as many words as possible onto a sheet, and paper was reused whenever possible. Centuries ago, the pages of a disbound copy of the First Folio were once used in Spain to wrap fish. A fragment of the oldest-known surviving manuscript written in England, an obscure religious tract from the seventh century,8 survived for nine hundred years until 1578, when it was dismissed as printers’ waste, and recycled as a stiffener inside the binding of an old medical text. The manuscript fragment remained hidden inside that book for another four hundred years, until it was unearthed during the dissection and conservation of the volume. It is possible that someday, during rebinding of an old book from Shakespeare’s time, one of his manuscript pages might accidentally be discovered under the spine, or glued as reinforcement under one of the binder’s boards.9
Although the Elizabethan (1558–1603) and Jacobean (1603–1625) periods of English history were prolific times for poets and playwrights, very few manuscripts from that era survive, and more than half the manuscripts that we know once existed can no longer be found. As with another art form three centuries later, when a large percentage of all the silent films ever produced would be lost forever, the manuscripts of Renaissance England suffered a high attrition rate. The Dead Sea Scrolls enjoyed better preservation than the manuscripts of Shakespeare and many of his peers. Thus, the disappearance of all Shakespeare’s manuscripts was not a unique—or even rare—occurrence. Even before Shakespeare’s death, it is likely that some of his papers had perished. Today, no authenticated writing of Shakespeare’s exists save three examples of his signature on documents, plus the words “by me” on his will.
This dearth of documentary evidence has been seized upon by a cult of naysayers who suggest that William Shakespeare never wrote the plays that we credit to him. His manuscripts failed to survive not, they claim, because they were lost, but because they never existed in the first place. These Anti-Stratfordians, as they have come to be known, advance two principal arguments against Shakespeare’s authorship: first, no physical evidence survives to prove he wrote the plays, and second, he did not possess the intellectual or social qualifications necessary to write them. Although this is decidedly the minority view, a cottage industry has grown around the thesis that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare.
The idea that Shakespeare was a man of mystery about whom we know nothing has been exaggerated by those who say that our incomplete knowledge of his life is inherently suspicious, giving credence to the accusation that he did not write the plays. We may know little about him, but we know more about him than any of his contemporaries, save playwright Ben Jonson. The Elizabethan English were efficient record keepers, resulting in a trail of thirty-six government and church references to Shakespeare in contemporary documents—his baptism, marriage, lawsuits he was party to, real estate transactions, mortgages, a deed to Blackfriars real estate, and also citations to him not only as a person who actually existed but also specifically as a playwright and shareholder of the Globe Theatre. Yes, the surviving documents are inadequate to flesh out the life story of such an important writer. This absence of evidence of his everyday life plus his humble origins and un-illustrious social status have caused some contrarians to insist that the man named “William Shakespeare” is not the same man who wrote the plays.
Those who question Shakespeare’s authorship rely heavily upon the lack of manuscript evidence. It is also frustrating that, although he enjoyed the patronage of earls and monarchs, not a single letter of his has been unearthed. But although Shakespeare was a professional author, writing letters was more a pastime of the leisure class of his age. Moreover, in this regard, Shakespeare is not an outlier. The inference drawn—that as an artist he did not exist—would be more persuasive if the manuscripts of Shakespeare’s contemporaries showed up in significant quantity, which they do not. Not a single manuscript of a Marlowe play survives, not one by Robert Greene, and only one by John Fletcher. Does this mean they, too, are not the authors of their plays?
Lurking below the surface is the elitist prejudice that such an ordinary man could not possibly have created such magnificent literature. Surely, these incredulous critics argue, only a man of breeding and education could have wri
tten such timeless works. Shakespeare was from the wrong class. It was impossible. This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover’s home in a small town in Elizabethan England.
During Shakespeare’s lifetime the plays were attributed to him and to no one else. In fact, several of his peers praised him as a poet and playwright. Dramatist John Webster praised Shakespeare’s “copious industry” in his preface to The White Devil. None questioned his authorship. Another of his contemporaries, Robert Greene, mocked Shakespeare’s talent. If the dyspeptic Greene had suspected that Shakespeare was fronting for a secret author operating behind the scenes, Greene would not have hesitated to expose Shakespeare as a fraud—a mere actor truly masquerading as a playwright. Furthermore, allusions to Shakespeare as an author occurred in the plays, poems, and literary criticism of several of his peers. The records of the Master of the Revels name him as a playwright. Other records, including personal diaries, scrapbooks, and letters, reveal the existence or performance of Shakespeare’s works.
After Shakespeare’s death his fellow actors, shareholders, and colleagues all continued to acknowledge him as the author of the plays that they had attributed to him in life. It would have required a conspiracy of dozens of men, including fellow actors Burbage, Heminges, and Condell, to keep the secret that Shakespeare was not the author of the plays the public had come to know as his. And for the next one hundred fifty years, no one challenged his authorship until after Shakespeare had become an icon. Weighing all the evidence, two things are certain: William Shakespeare did exist, and he is the man who wrote the plays. One might say it does not matter. We have the plays, whoever wrote them. But vexatious conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, the plays’ author is William Shakespeare.
In the absence of Shakespeare’s original manuscripts, the next best source for Heminges and Condell to establish the First Folio text would have been the theatrical “prompt” books based upon those manuscripts. An author’s draft—with its cramped handwriting disfigured by marginalia, corrections, amendments, and stage directions—could be a messy thing to behold. This draft, the so-called foul papers of the play, was too disorganized for the director and actors to work from. Plays sold by a playwright to the theater troupe were hand-copied from the author’s draft by a scribe into a neater, more legible manuscript called the fair copy. Thus, Shakespeare hired Ralph Crane to transform his manuscripts from “foul” to “fair.” Macbeth contains an allusion to this literary process in the scene where the three witches mix a brew and cast a spell so that “fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
The director annotated this fair copy with stage directions, scene divisions, actors’ names, and any changes he wished to incorporate. During a performance a theater factotum, an employee standing at the foot of the stage, used it to “feed” a line to an actor who had forgotten his text. It was from such a prompt book that Titus Andronicus was set up when the plays for the First Folio were gathered.
The prompt book was, in turn, the source for the actors’ sides—small sheets of paper with an individual character’s lines written on them that were copied by the guardian of the prompt book, the “book-keeper,” and then distributed to the players. The actors were not given a complete script, so they could not sell it to publishers or rival companies, as they possessed or had memorized only fragments of it. By gathering together all the sides, one could, hypothetically, reassemble the dialogue of an entire play. As with the original manuscripts, the prompt books and the sides have all since been lost.
But what is lost to us today was not lost to Heminges and Condell almost four centuries ago. They may well have had all these sources available to them. As members of the King’s Men, they would have had access to any unpublished and annotated prompt books, and possibly, tantalizingly, some of Shakespeare’s own manuscripts, both his foul papers and fair copies, and collated them into the most reliable texts, as close as possible to Shakespeare’s original language.
Heminges and Condell hired Crane to transcribe some of the plays from the foul papers and other sources. Now, after Shakespeare’s death, he put quill to paper again, this time not for performance but for publication.
Heminges and Condell were fortunate to locate any manuscript sources. Although we know that the fire that burned the Globe Theatre to the ground on June 29, 1613, destroyed the principal physical asset of the King’s Men—their theater—we do not know to what extent the fire damaged their other precious asset, their intellectual property. The loss of the prompt books would have been devastating to the company and its shareholders. Second in value only to the costumes as assets of the theater, they were stored under lock and key by the book-keeper to prevent theft by rival companies. Perhaps some manuscripts burned. Or perhaps the trunk that secured them was spirited out of the Globe in time. Whatever happened, the fire, however catastrophic, could not have destroyed all the documents and sources for Shakespeare’s plays. For without them—if the flames had consumed them all—then the First Folio would not exist.
Beyond the potential manuscript sources, the compilers could also have turned to printed sources: the quartos. The subject of the Shakespeare quartos is a field unto itself, vast and controversial. Prior to the publication of the First Folio, eighteen of the plays were published as quartos, and some, such as King Lear and Hamlet, in multiple and conflicting editions. By tradition, scholars have divided Shakespeare’s quartos into three categories intended to describe the integrity of the text: “good,” “bad,” or “doubtful.” A good quarto, such as the second quarto edition of Hamlet published in 1604, was used as a source by Heminges and Condell because it derived from a trusted manuscript. Rival troupes or publishers paid scribes or “reporters” to sit in the audience and write down the words of the play. The results were abridged, sometimes “bad,” incoherent, low-quality reconstructions of the play containing text that corrupted the original. A bad quarto, like the 1597 printing of Romeo and Juliet, might be based on no more than the recollections of one player with a minor part, who had performed in the production and who could be bribed to sell his recollections to a pirate publisher. Actors with major parts, who memorized large parts of the play, were sometimes also sharers—that is, they kept a portion of the take at the door—and did not want to undercut their own livelihoods by enabling other companies to perform the plays in which they appeared. They had a financial interest in keeping the plays out of the hands of rival acting companies, and would have been unlikely to have cooperated with pirates.
Heminges and Condell could have consulted a variety of published quartos, some of which contain widely—and occasionally, absurdly—different texts of the same play. They warned readers in the prefatory material of the First Folio against “stol’n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors.” It would fall to them to be “the office of their care, and paine, to have collected & publish’d them.”
The 1603 “bad” quarto of Hamlet is replete with errors and distortions—a butchery of what would later become the version of the play in the First Folio:
To be, or not to be, Ay, there’s the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? Ay, all:
No, to sleep to dreame, I mary there it goes.
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger euer retur’nd
The undiscovered country, at whole sight
The happy smile and the accursed damn’d.10
The more familiar version of the speech is from the First Folio:
To be, or not to be—that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
&nbs
p; And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—
Hamlet, Act III, scene i, lines 56–61, First Folio
Here is another example from the “bad” quarto of Hamlet:
Why what a dunghill idiote slave am I?
Why these Players here draw water from eyes:
For Hecuba, why what is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?
What would he do and if he had my losse?
In the First Folio edition these lines become the more familiar:
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wan’d;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba?
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
that he should weep for her?
While recent scholarship has reexamined and conferred new status upon some of the quartos, textual analysis of all their known editions, copies, and variants proves that Heminges and Condell derived the First Folio text for the eighteen previously published plays from much more than the quartos alone. For the eighteen hitherto unpublished plays, quartos played no role in their recovery.
Once they had exhausted all the physical sources, they and their fellow King’s Men had a monopoly on a unique source that could never be stolen, pirated, or taken away from them: their memories of what they had seen and heard. But memory and life itself were ephemeral. Their recollections would die with them. One by one, the old King’s Men were dying off: Heminges, Condell, and Burbage were the last three of the original troupe. Soon, no one would be left alive who had performed onstage with William Shakespeare. For eighteen years following a September 1642 act of the Puritan-controlled Parliament, theaters were banned from performing plays. By the time of the Restoration of 1660, when theaters began to stage performances again, almost every actor who had known Shakespeare would be dead. Eventually, all collective public memory of Shakespeare would expire when, in time, every last soul who had seen William Shakespeare walk the stage, or had watched one of his plays performed during his lifetime, would, like him, be dead. Soon all the living witnesses would be gone. But that time had not yet come.