The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  He’s been telling me how his engagement in the war over the texts of King Lear began with a study of the war in King Lear: “When I arrived at Cambridge for graduate study, the topic announced for the prize essay that year was ‘War and Shakespeare,’ and I did mine on the battle scenes in Shakespeare’s plays, and what that meant was I had to look at the different stage directions, and the differences in those stage directions led to my essay on ‘The War in Lear.’ ”

  In that essay he argued that Shakespeare—or someone—had systematically altered the 1608 Quarto of King Lear to make it seem, in the 1623 Folio version, that the war in the final two acts waged by Lear’s daughter Cordelia was less an invasion by a foreign power than a civil war. He postulated the changes were designed to make Cordelia’s revolt more politically acceptable. Cordelia, you’ll recall, had gone off to marry the King of France after Lear had cut her out of the division of his kingdom for refusing to take part in his who-loves-Daddy-best contest with her two sisters. Later, when those two sisters, Goneril and Regan, cast Lear out into the cold, Cordelia returns from France at the head of an army to attempt to rescue her father. The changes from the earlier 1608 Quarto to the 1623 Folio, Taylor argued, made it seem that “Cordelia seems to lead not an invasion but a rebellion, like Bolingbroke or Richmond’s” (Henry IV and Henry VII). In the Folio, Taylor argues, Cordelia is made to seem less a French queen than a loyal British daughter. Others would contest this interpretation, but it won adherents.

  He went on from his analysis of the alterations in the depiction of the war to make a frontal assault on the long-held Lost Archetype theory about the differences between the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 Folio versions of Lear—differences that ranged from the omission from the Folio Lear of the mad-scene mock-trial of Lear’s daughters, to the addition of a fourth and fifth “never” in Lear’s heartbreaking response to Cordelia’s dying. It’s “Never, never, never, never, never” in the Folio instead of “Never, never, never” in the Quarto. And there’s a difference in Lear’s last words far greater than the difference in Hamlet’s, a difference I’ll address in detail in chapter 4.

  The Lost Archetype theory argues that the differences in the two versions of Lear came not from Shakespeare’s revision of a first draft, but from the fact that they both are imperfectly transcribed or recorded versions of the same lost Shakespearean original. That Shakespeare didn’t revise Lear, but scribes, theatrical prompt-book keepers, printers and compositors managed to produce two different imperfect versions of a lost Shakespeare manuscript, the Lost Archetype.

  Gary Taylor was not the first to make the counterargument that Shakespeare revised Lear. (It was Berkeley’s Michael Warren who argued the case in an influential 1976 paper at a Shakespeare Association of America convention, which rekindled the Lear text debate. And it was legendary textual scholar Peter Blayney whose book on the printing of the 1608 Lear restored the Quarto to the status of a text—however badly printed—based on a Shakespearean manuscript, not on a “memorial reconstruction by actors.” Blayney’s 1982 work laid the basis for the claim that Shakespeare both wrote and revised the 1608 version.) But Taylor was the one who forged an informal alliance of Lear text dissidents into a formidable scholarly phalanx that overwhelmed the opposition, an alliance it’s hard to resist calling the Raiders of the Lost Archetype.

  IIt was more than Gary Taylor’s prize-winning essay and his position on the cutting edge of the Lear revision rebellion that brought him to the attention of Stanley Wells, the scholar mandarin, then undertaking the Herculean task of producing the new edition of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare in the early eighties. It was also his dazzling facility at the insanely arcane and complex art of “compositor studies,” the hideously labor-intensive attempt to find the truth about the variants in Shakespeare texts based on the analysis of the characteristics of the work of the typesetting compositors in the print shops that inked the plays on quarto- and folio-size pages.

  Few have the combination of mental acuity and stamina to excel in this immersion in typographical minutiae. One of the avatars of the art, Charlton Hinman, even invented a kind of special Shakespeare collating machine, a contraption that employed flashing lights and mirrors to scan the seventeenth-century texts to track tiny variants not just among the three substantive Hamlet texts, say, but the changes often made, the errors often but not always corrected, during the print run of each of the texts—“on-press variants.” Variations that made almost every one of the surviving copies of the early Hamlet texts its own idiosyncratic variant of the play.

  But Taylor was one of the first, early in the eighties, to bring computer power to bear on Shakespearean bibliography. He combined it with a facility for teasing subtextual dramas and characters out of the typographical minutiae. An ability to find, in the cast of characters of the compositors in the print shop, clues to the cast of characters of Shakespeare in the playhouse. Consider Taylor’s influential 1985 study “The Folio Copy for Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello” in which he advances a heretical new hypothesis about the relationship between the two Hamlet texts. To get a flavor of the kind of microscopic attention Shakespearean textual editing devotes to elucidating clarity from the ink-smudged Rorschach of the typographical evidence, let me quote a little from Gary Taylor’s argument in that paper.

  First he tips his hat in a politic way to his predecessors: he wants to signal he’s building on their methods, not dismantling their legacy:

  Not the least of Charlton Hinman’s many contributions to bibliographical scholarship was his discovery of an apprentice compositor, “E,” at work in the Tragedies section of the First Folio, a discovery subsequently secured and sophisticated by the patient labors of T. H. Howard-Hill, who has developed and applied a whole range of tests to solidify the distinction between E and the compositor he most often worked alongside, B. Both Hinman and Howard-Hill have approached these compositor identifications in a spirit of disinterested research—not as a brief flanking attack on a larger target with more obvious editorial implications …

  Note the use of military metaphors—the “flanking attack on a larger target”—which, of course, is exactly what Gary Taylor engaged in:

  In the case of Compositor E, happily, the stamina of such bibliographers has now brought us to a position where we can finally resolve one of the major editorial problems in the study of Shakespeare …

  Taylor then introduces us to “Compositor E,” one of those ink-stained wretches who, he says, can help us resolve a mystery of Hamlet studies:

  Hinman himself observed that Compositor E was demonstrably very much more influenced by previously typeset copy than either A or B was … The extent of E’s conservatism can be quickly demonstrated by an analysis of the Folio punctuation of the plays he has known to have set from printed copy … The very first page that Compositor E is agreed to have set in the Folio, pp 4 of Titus, he retained Q3 punctuation 77 times and altered only 12 times, on the next page he retained punctuation 126 times and altered it 36 times …

  Taylor then argues that this habitual caution, this aversion to alteration of printed texts, of Compositor E offers a clue to the revision of Hamlet. For years bibliographers have argued that the 1623 Folio text of Hamlet was typeset from a cut, printed version of the earlier 1604 Good Quarto. All wrong, Gary Taylor claims to have proved, on the basis of a radical change in Compositor E’s punctuation-alteration ratios in the two pages of the Folio edition of Hamlet which our man E is said to have set:

  “The two pages that E is agreed to have set in Hamlet … dramatically depart from this pattern.” In these pages “the proportion of retained to altered punctuation [from the Quarto to the Folio version] is 53/82 and 65/99. In other words, for these two pages, the ratio of retention to variation is 2–3, whereas the pages from the three plays where Compositor E is known to have set from printed copy, it ranges from 3–1 to 6–1.”

  Follow that? E’s uncharacteristic departure here from his habitual conformity
to the punctuation in the printed texts he set proves the Folio must have been typeset from a more irregularly punctuated handwritten manuscript which in turn suggests a more far-reaching authorial revision:

  The evidence … in these two pages demonstrates that E cannot have been setting Hamlet from printed copy. And if E was not using printed copy, we have no reason to suspect that any of the other Folio compositors are either: indeed if any compositor were to have been supplied printed copy, it surely would have been the apprentice E.

  That latter statement seems more supposition than proof, but more important is the unstated purpose of this flanking attack: to advance the case that the Folio was extensively and personally revised, perhaps rewritten, by hand, by Shakespeare.

  SEEING SHAKESPEARE ACROSS THE ROOM

  The problem with theories of Hamlet texts is the tentative, hypothetical, almost destabilizingly complex nature of their arguments, their dependence on dotted-line rather than solid connections between entities such as “second transcripts” that have never been seen.

  The evidence of things unseen: Gary Taylor’s ability to grapple with the typesetting minutiae, and the statistical comparisons—and the power of the arguments he derived from them—made his rise within the Oxford Shakespeare hierarchy remarkably rapid. After appointing Taylor an assistant editor in 1978, Stanley Wells made him a full coeditor of The Oxford Shakespeare in 1984.

  But his facility led him to a deeper level of disillusion—about the ability to ever retrieve, from the texts we have, some true encounter with Shakespeare.

  “Paying attention to compositors,” Taylor told me, “you become aware of the fact that there’s always someone standing between you and Shakespeare. And that’s the basis of a lot of my subsequent meditative theorizing about editing, how the mediator is always there. And that came out of paying a lot of attention to identifying these particular mediators, the compositors actually who set the First Folio in type. You become aware in a very concrete way of somebody who is affecting what you see and what you read. And even then—there are some cases where you can quite literally say, well, compositor ‘A’ always spells that this way, or compositor ‘I’ that I identified in Henry VIII always does certain things with suffixes. But that doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about what Shakespeare’s spelling was. You may not be able to see through the compositor and figure out how Shakespeare did spell something, you become aware that there’s a limit to what you can know.

  “There’s always somebody standing between you and him. It’s like being at a cocktail party and there may be one person in the room that really interests you the most, but there’s other people around, and so it’s like seeing Shakespeare across the room at a party. There’s always going to be parts of him you can’t see, and which parts you do see is partly accidental.…”

  And yet, he tells me, it was his communion with the inky traces of the compositors and typographers that led him to see, through an ink-smudged glass, darkly, a vision of Shakespeare as a reviser.

  It was a reaction to what he calls the “demonization” of the compositors by the partisans of the Lost Archetype who try to blame the variations between the two Hamlets on the inattention, the “eye skip,” the carelessness, the willfulness and wandering eyes of an array of compositors. On the contrary, Taylor believes, “You need only one agent to account for all those variations and that’s the agent who’s present in all of these cases: Shakespeare.”

  Note that he says you only need “one agent” to account for the changes—that’s not the same as saying only one agent is responsible. But Taylor puts his case in historical context: “The existence of these intermediaries has been used since the eighteenth century as the justification for creating an idealized image of Shakespeare because anything you do not like in Shakespeare could be blamed on other people, these other people corrupted him. But when you actually begin seriously investigating these agents of transmission not as demonic figures being used to create a sainted divine figure, if you begin investigating them as actual human beings who had certain identities and practices which you could trace in their other work aside from Shakespeare, it becomes impossible to demonize them, make them responsible for everything bad, everything you don’t like.

  “And,” he adds, “to the extent that these other people become real, then Shakespeare can certainly become more real too. Because he’s not a divine figure, he’s not a figure you construct in the sort of religious terms that Harold Bloom does.”

  There are those who believe that in making Shakespeare “more real” as he puts it, Taylor has made him too real or too fallible. Some claimed Taylor himself was even a secret enemy of Shakespeare. That’s the spin some opponents put on Taylor’s controversial decision in 1985 to announce to the world (and to put the imprimatur of Oxford University Press upon) an important new “discovery”—attribution really—to Shakespeare of a previously little-known doggerel verse moldering away in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the one that began “Shall I die?/Shall I fly.” Only an enemy of Shakespeare would accuse the Bard of having written such awful stuff, some were heard to mutter.

  Mutter loudly enough that, without prompting, Gary Taylor tells me at the Krispy Kreme, “Despite what some people say, it’s just not true that I hate Shakespeare.” Although it’s clear he does hate the myth of unique Shakespearean genius and transcendence.

  But even among his erstwhile scholar allies in the war over Lear, there has been, it seems, hatred and strife. Taylor was telling me about the way he teamed up with other Doubters of the Lost Archetype such as Michael Warren, Steven Urkowitz and Peter Blayney, to challenge the tradition of conflating the texts of Lear. “I was very much influenced by Peter [Blayney] who was at Cambridge with me,” Taylor told me at the Krispy Kreme, “and we were good friends at the time, although he hates me now. We spent huge amounts of time talking together.”

  “He hates me now.…” Casually injected into his conversation, it’s a token of the kinds of passions the struggle over Shakespearean texts has engendered. (When I tried to reach Blayney to talk to him about Lear texts, he left a phone message telling me I must be mistaken: he had no interest in Shakespeare anymore—only in printing shops of the time.)

  Taylor is a bit vague about the reasons for the imputed hatred, but suggests it might have something to do with a “very Perry Mason–like moment,” the moment when the rebels, the Beraters of the Lost Archetype, you might say, had their first victory. He depicts it as a dramatic capitulation by the Old Order. The scene of the confrontation was a seminar room at a Shakespeare Association of America convocation in 1980. In his contrarian study of bardolatry though the ages, Re-Inventing Shakespeare, Taylor describes the moment when he and three other heretics (not including Peter Blayney, who wasn’t present) argued the case for separating the texts of King Lear into an early and a later, revised, draft rather than conflating the texts as centuries of editors had done:

  The chairman of the seminar, G. B. Evans of Harvard, editor of the Riverside edition, asks three respected senior scholars to comment on the work of these upstart revisionists: Hunter from Yale, Wells from Oxford and … George Walton Williams from Duke. Both Wells and Williams announce their conversions to the revisionist cause. So does another participant, Thomas Clayton, of the University of Minnesota. Hunter, champion of an orthodoxy that has lasted for centuries, finds himself suddenly surrounded and embattled.

  “Surrounded and embattled”: yes. It’s war, after all. “The revisionist position,” Taylor goes on, heady with martial triumph, “immediately acquires the intellectual glamour that David achieved by slaying Goliath. Its new academic credibility results from a classic moment of theatrical recognition … the revisionists recognized their own strength.…”

  Taylor implies Peter Blayney’s absence from this primal blooding-by-combat, this transformative battlefield victory, is the reason Blayney “hates me.” In any case, the Perry Mason moment was but the first of a number of dramatic victories for t
he Revisers/Dividers of Lear. The decision of Stanley Wells to accede to Gary Taylor’s urging and print not one but two King Lears in the 1986 Oxford Complete Works edition had the most impact. The 1997 decision to print not two but three King Lears in the American Norton edition—the Quarto and Folio adopted from the Oxford edition plus a third traditional, conflated edition—had a further somewhat confusing but consolidating effect on the division of Lear.

  The shock, the veritable earthquake reverberations (within the profession, anyway) caused by the Oxford division of Lear cracked the foundation of several other two-text plays previously conflated together. Othello, Henry V, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet began to be looked upon as candidates for disentangling, as instances of Shakespearean revision. But there was always trepidation about Hamlet.

  “I thought we should have divided Hamlet in the Oxford edition,” Taylor tells me, but strategy prevailed over tactics: “To have done an edition that divided both Hamlet and Lear would have undercut the credibility the Oxford name conferred on the division of Lear, made it seem the product of a more radical revolution. So I didn’t press it with Stanley.”

  Stanley Wells himself, writing in 1991, five years after The Oxford Shakespeare split Lear, spoke of the notion of splitting Hamlet with some of the same trepidation early twentieth-century scientists spoke of splitting the atom: “Someday in the future editors will have the courage to do for Hamlet what we did with Lear.”