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).
Myth 25
Boy actors played women's roles
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.
That Shakespeare's female characters were played by males is not in doubt, but what has been more controversial is, first, the question of the age of these actors, and second, the dramatic effect of this theatrical cross-dressing. Our popular phrase “boy players” suggests youthful performers whose voices have not yet broken. Many references in Shakespeare's plays suggest that treble voices played women: Orsino tells Cesario his “small pipe / Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound” (Twelfth Night 1.4.32–3); Hamlet greets the players at Elsinore with special affection for “my young lady and mistress … Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring” (Hamlet 2.2.426–31). But it has sometimes been difficult for modern readers to imagine such pre-pubescent actors having the maturity and gravitas to play, for example, Cleopatra. Janet Suzman, herself a Cleopatra directed by Trevor Nunn in a version filmed for television in 1974, voices this skepticism: “I find it hard to think he wrote [Cleopatra] for a boy … there must have been some kind of prima donna in his company playing women's parts. It could never have been acted by a boy.”3
On the other hand, evidence from the period just after Shakespeare was writing gives us some suggestion that male actors in women's roles were typically teenagers under the age of 21.4 It is one of the delicious ironies of the debates about theater in the early modern period that much of our evidence about theater practice comes from its fiercest moral detractors. Much of the disapproval of the theater in the period is focalized on male actors performing female roles. “All men are abominations that put on women's raiment,” wrote the Oxford theologian John Rainolds in 1599, and anti-theatricalist polemic stresses the youth of the cross-dressed actors. Defending the theater against these attacks, Thomas Heywood, himself a dramatist, also suggests that female roles are indeed taken by younger male actors, but tries to differentiate between cross-dressing in and out of the theater: “nor do I hold it lawful to beguile the eyes of the world in confounding the shapes of either sex, as to keep any youth in the habit of a virgin, or any virgin in the shape of a lad, to shroud them from the eyes of their fathers, tutors, or protectors, or to any other sinister intent whatsoever. But to see our youths attired in the habit of women, who knows not what their intents be.”5 Because there is no “sinister intent” to deceive, Heywood argues, male actors in women's clothing is an understood theatrical convention outside the moral codes of the rest of society.
So the evidence identifies “young men,” “boys,” and “youths” as the actors likely to play women's parts—designations suggesting a range of ages through childhood towards maturity. Puberty, including the breaking of the voice, may well have been later in early modern England than today. One popular medical textbook suggests that boys are “apt to change their voice about 14 years of age” but there is evidence of even later maturation among choral school students, with the treble voice remaining to age 17 or 18.6 David Kathman shows that the actors who performed female roles in Shackerley Marmion's Holland's Leaguer (1631) and Massinger's The Roman Actor (performed 1626) were all teenagers between 13 and 17 years old at the time of performance.7 Richard Sharpe, the first Duchess of Malfi in Webster's play, was probably between 17 and 21 years old, and he later graduated to playing male roles with the company. Kathman's exhaustive examination of the named actors in the period up to the closing of the theaters shows that the adult male sharers (part-owners) in the theater companies never, so far as we can tell, acted female roles, and that instead young men aged between 13 and 21 took these parts. Kathman points out that “boy” also means “apprentice,” so perhaps the term “boy” needs to be seen in institutional terms—these were theatrical apprentices—rather than in terms solely related to age.
There is further evidence that young male actors were highly capable and popular. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, the biggest commercial and artistic threat to the Lord Chamberlain's Men was the newly formed boys' companies: Rosencrantz's report that “there is … an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for't. These are now the fashion” (2.2.340–2) was a topical one. Companies of teenage male actors were hugely successful, carrying complex, often saucy or satirical, plays without adult sharers, and the major dramatists wrote for them: Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Marston, and George Chapman among others.
As the resident playwright for a well-established and stable theater company, Shakespeare wrote with a keen eye for the personnel resources available for his plays. Almost all his plays require between two and four actors in female roles: Much Ado About Nothing, in which a cabal of four women meet as Beatrice is tricked in 3.1, is unusual. Stanley Wells suggests that the worry that he would run out of appropriate actors made Shakespeare scrap his original plan for a further female character in the play, Innogen, mother of Hero (her name appears in a couple of stage directions although she has no lines and is usually expunged by editors as an error in drafting: Josie Rourke's 2011 production reintroduced her and gave her the lines Shakespeare gives to Antonio). Wells suggests that the much-remarked absence of mothers in Shakespeare's plays (where is Queen Lear, or Duchess Prospero or Frederick or Senior, or Mrs Egeus? and look what happens to Thaisa and Hermione after they have given birth in Pericles and The Winter's Tale) may have practical theatrical, rather than sociological, reasons.8 If he is right about Innogen, then more boys must have been available for Love's Labour's Lost (four women and two boy pages on stage in the final scene).
Heywood's common-sense defense of the practice of cross-dressing in the theater suggests it should be understood as convention: part of the make-believe of theater. But Shakespeare's plots seem often to be teasing us with the knowledge of the male actor underneath the female costume, particularly through the common plot-device of female characters dressing as men. When Rosalind in As You Like It takes on the male persona of Ganymede in the Forest of Ardenne (the name had strong associations of male homosexuality), there are numerous jokes about his/her ambiguous gender position. At the end of the scene in which Rosalind, dressed as Ganymede and pretending to be Rosalind, is mock-married to Orlando, Celia scolds her: “we must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest” (4.1.192–4). Within the fiction of the play wha
t is beneath the doublet and hose is a female body, but within the theater? The joke, taken direct from the prose romance by Thomas Lodge that Shakespeare uses as his source for the play, has a double resonance on a transvestite stage. And, like other of Shakespeare's heroines dressed in male clothing (Viola in Twelfth Night, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), it is not entirely clear that Rosalind appears back in her female clothing at the end of the play, although most modern productions have her do so. Her epilogue, however, teases the audience with the ambiguous sexual allure of the man-woman (it would send poor John Rainolds rushing for his smelling salts): “If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me …” (5.4.212–14). Stephen Orgel's ludic essay “Nobody's Perfect; or, Why Did the English Renaissance Stage take Boys for Women?” plays on the final elusive line of Billy Wilder's cross-dressing film comedy Some Like It Hot (1959): Rosalind's epilogue, like the film (which ends with one heterosexual couple, Joe and Sugar, and the phlegmatic Osgood apparently accepting the pragmatic “Daphne”) does not close down the “queer” sexuality indicated by cross-dressing.9
The dramatic effect of male actors in women's roles was not, then, neutral. Neither the plays themselves nor their moralistic detractors deny the erotic suggestiveness of the cross-dressed male actor, and Shakespeare frequently adds to this in his comedies by including transvestite disguise within the plot. The poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge formulated the notion of “willing suspension of disbelief” as a way to identify the implicit contract between the reader or viewer and non-realistic elements in literature, but although it is sometimes used of the Shakespearean theater, Coleridge's idea is not entirely appropriate. It is hard to suspend our disbelief about Viola's femininity in Twelfth Night when the plot keeps drawing attention to gender as performance, just as Francis Flute's unwillingness to play the female character of Thisbe in the play-within-the-play of A Midsummer Night's Dream draws attention to the male actors performing the “outer” play's Helena, Hermia, Hippolyta, and Titania. Rather than the “suspension of disbelief” it seems the plays require a kind of collusion from audiences willing to switch between an immersion in the fiction the play is presenting and a more self-conscious awareness of its material basis in the theater. On the other hand, describing the moving death of Desdemona in an Oxford production, one spectator uses the female pronoun without any awkwardness: the gender of the character and the gender of the actor could be held to be distinct.
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 21