The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “That I shall not regret”: in other words, in his gentle, understated way, he hoped to die rather than see his Hamlet superseded.

  In a sense he was wrong to say that it will be “anti-Jenkins.” The co-editor of the new Arden Hamlet, Ann Thompson, whom I met the following day, had nothing but respectful things to say to me about Jenkins; her admiration, I believe, was genuine for Jenkins’s Sisyphean labor. Her stance, the stance of the Hamlet she is splitting in the new Arden, is not anti-Jenkins or pro-Taylor so much as skepticism about conflation.

  But Jenkins was convinced on the basis of a casual aside Ms. Thompson had made in a lecture in regard to Ophelia’s virginity that she had it in for him on feminist grounds, and that her Arden would be “anti-Jenkins.” (Jenkins had intimated it was especially sad Ophelia died a virgin; Ann Thompson suggested that was a peculiarly male editor’s response.)

  However accurate his apprehension was, Harold Jenkins got his wish. He died less than a year after I spoke to him. His remarks to me were his last attempt to defend the crumbling edifice of a century-long editorial tradition, the “scientific bibliography” which had done so much to clarify what was and what wasn’t Shakespearean in the Shakespearean canon. And to rescue Shakespeare’s true intention from textual error.

  THE HAMLET TRANCE

  It was reading Jenkins’s Hamlet, and perhaps a prior affection for Nabokov’s Pale Fire (though Jenkins was far more tragically rational than Nabokov’s mad annotator Kinbote), that inaugurated my abiding admiration for textual scholars and editors. Reading Jenkins’s Hamlet edition one undertakes a kind of odyssey through the oceans of the past four centuries of previous commentators on Hamlet. And talking to Jenkins in person, one begins to get a sense of the almost monastic, even priestlike vocation editing Shakespeare, editing Hamlet in particular, becomes: that pressure, the responsibility for the transmission of a sacred text of the culture.

  Jenkins’s predecessor at Edinburgh, the legendary Hamlet scholar J. Dover Wilson, was particularly influential on directors and actors. It was he who convinced John Gielgud that Hamlet overhears Ophelia being instructed by Polonius to draw him out—and that this explains his sudden “get thee to a nunnery” railing at Ophelia and women in general. (One of Harold Jenkins’s departures from his predecessor, Wilson, was to cast doubt on the long-held belief that a “nunnery” would have had a double meaning as brothel at the time Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. So many ironic readings of that line would be—if Jenkins is correct—retroactively imposed, non-Shakespearean, strictly speaking.)

  I once came across a serious, if somewhat obsessive scholarly paper, asserting that there was “an unbroken chain of Hamlets” that stretched from the original who played the part, Richard Burbage, to Laurence Olivier. An argument that each successor to Burbage had seen a Hamlet who’d seen a Hamlet who’d seen a Hamlet who’d seen, ultimately, Burbage’s original Hamlet.

  You could probably establish a similar apostolic succession for the editors of Hamlet beginning with Heminge and Condell, the colleagues who first chose which plays to include in the Folio, the first Complete Works edition of Shakespeare, to the grand literary pontiffs who edited Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, to the age of obsessed gentlemen scholars such as Lewis Theobald and Edmond Malone, to the exacting scholar mandarins who were Jenkins’s twentieth-century predecessors—inventors of “scientific bibliography,” men like W. W. Greg, A. W. Pollard and J. Dover Wilson.

  Talking to Jenkins, I had a sense of speaking to the last leaf on an ancient tree, the last defender of the dream of the Lost Archetype. He’d told me of an encounter with Dover Wilson, and how Wilson kept prodding him to bring Jenkins’s thirty-year-long march through Hamlet texts to a close: “Publish at last!” Wilson told Jenkins. “Prove me wrong!” Look upon it as “a splendid adventure.”

  Jenkins said it was a splendid adventure but he seemed a bit more delicate and thin-skinned sort than Dover Wilson, someone for whom it was, at times, a harrowing—and in the end, to some extent, disappointing—adventure.

  As Gary Taylor (who professes much genuine respect for Jenkins’s scholarly achievements) put it, “If Jenkins had not been so exacting and published sooner, its reception would have been very different from the one it got when it came out in the eighties.” By then some saw it as obsolete—not least in rejecting the Reviser hypothesis that was conquering scholarly convocations the very moment Jenkins’s anti-Reviser edition came out. There’s a haunting phrase Gary Taylor used to refer to the inability of a couple of Jenkins’s predecessors to complete editions of plays they’d devoted their lives to: “the sorrows of McKerrow and Walker.” The more the new “scientific bibliography” allowed them to delve into the nuances of typographical minutiae, the further completion receded from them, the deeper the “sorrows.”

  The sorrows of the poet John Berryman began with his career in literature as a Shakespeare scholar; he began editing an edition of King Lear in the late 1930s; worked on it the rest of his life; even after he became an acclaimed poet with The Dream Songs one of the sorrows that afflicted him until his suicide in the 1970s was the accumulated frustration of the textual problems of Lear that he’d continued to work on without success.* The universally respected Lear-text scholar Peter Blayney has abandoned the long-awaited second volume of his promised two-volume study of the Lear texts.

  Textual scholarship tends to become at the very least a consuming passion, sometimes a life-consuming obsession. It happened to Dover Wilson. While he commended it as a “splendid adventure” to Jenkins, Dover Wilson’s description of the sudden onset of his Hamlet obsession sounds like the onset of a lifelong fever.

  For Dover Wilson it began when he was an obscure bureaucrat in the World War I British Bureau of Munitions, traveling on a slow train to the Midlands to settle a labor dispute at an ammunition plant. He found himself passing the time reading the October 1917 issue of a periodical called the Modern Language Review, and fell into a kind of spell, a Hamlet trance.

  “A spell which changed the whole tenor of my existence and still dominates it,” he wrote in a letter to W. W. Greg, one of the other giants of twentieth-century Shakespeare editing—and the man responsible for the spell. It was Greg’s piece in the Modern Language Review which precipitated it. A piece entitled, aptly enough, “Hamlet’s Hallucination,” a piece that made the eccentric argument that the Ghost was a figment of Hamlet’s paranoid imagination, a hallucination engendered in his vulnerable and distracted mind by reading the play The Murder of Gonzago, the one he uses to “catch the conscience of the King.”

  “For sheer audacity, close knit reasoning and specious paralogism,” Dover Wilson wrote in his letter to its author, Greg, “it was unique in the history of Shakespeare criticism.” Yet, from the moment he read it on the train and began to grapple with Greg’s “hallucination,” he fell into a Hamlet-spell himself: he found himself “in a state of considerable excitement … filled with some sort of insanity for weeks afterward” (my italics). Hamlet madness.*

  The weeks turned into years, decades, a lifetime pursuing elusive Hamlet questions. Dover Wilson’s attempt to resolve the enigma of Hamlet’s madness (feigned? real? both at the same, or different times?) turned into a kind of madness itself: Hamlet Editor Syndrome you might call it. He began by attempting to plumb the depths of the problem of the dumb show, the silent prelude to The Murder of Gonzago.

  He spent the next two years researching a four-part series of scholarly polemics on dumb-show questions. But disputing the Ghost-as-hallucination theory left him troubled by the nature of the Ghost’s “reality” as it might be perceived by Shakespeare and his audience: Was the Ghost truly Hamlet’s father, or “a spirit damned” tempting Hamlet to the un-Christian act of revenge, as some have argued? “I began to take a course of reading in Elizabethan spiritualism,” Dover Wilson tells us. And then it’s ten more years before he’s ready to publish his conclusions. And he begins to get the feeling
that “the digression threatened to last a lifetime … the further I went in my investigations, the more the country seemed to open up,” he says, choosing (consciously?) a rather curious locution for a Hamlet scholar who must be familiar with Hamlet’s obscene pun on “country matters” in the dumb-show sequence. Implicitly trying to penetrate Hamlet’s inner mysteries becomes a “country matter” in the sense that it’s like trying to penetrate “the secret parts of fortune”—to penetrate to a forbidden and unreachable realm, the “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”

  It is at this point, lost in the labyrinth of Hamlet thematic problems, that Dover Wilson turns to the problem of—the ongoing centuries-old war over—Hamlet texts. Maybe the answer, some answer, to the maddening questions left by Hamlet can be found there. It doesn’t take him long to decide that “the textual criticism of Hamlet was as unsatisfactory as the esthetic, and that until the textual problems were solved [by him, of course] there could be no security for dramatic interpretation.”

  In other words, one couldn’t even enter the inner temple of thematic interpretation until one had mortified the flesh intellectually in the thorny encounter with the thicket of textual problems that guard the entrance to the question of meaning.

  So Dover Wilson spent the next decade preparing his landmark work, The Texts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which was published in 1934. It was in that monumental two-volume work that Wilson, using the newly developed principles of “scientific bibliography,” proved to just about everyone’s satisfaction—at the time—that the Good Quarto of 1604 was a text printed from Shakespeare’s handwritten manuscript. Still, two decades later, by the time Harold Jenkins embarked on his three-decade-long task of producing a new Arden edition of Hamlet, very little else in Hamlet studies had been settled to anyone’s satisfaction.

  Consider the fact that Jenkins requires a six-page-long footnote (in a two-hundred-page section of “Longer Notes” that follows his already heavily footnoted Hamlet text) just to touch on the continuing controversies over the meaning, significance and placement of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy. (In the 1603 “Bad Quarto” the “To be or not to be” soliloquy comes earlier, suggesting to some that this is how it was played on stage.)

  Harold Jenkins’s Hamlet is known for its leviathan-like bulk, six hundred pages, of which the first two hundred are commentary, the second two hundred heavily footnoted text, and the final two hundred, the Longer Notes, Jenkins’s structural innovation, footnotes that have grown beyond the footnote form to mega-footnotes.

  Jenkins’s edition is known for the depth of its textual excavations, but as Jenkins reminded me more than once in the course of our conversation, he has made a contribution to the thematic debate as well.

  “I don’t think people have appreciated that,” he told me. “I don’t think they appreciated the way I brought out the duality of Hamlet’s role: he is an avenger of a murder but he is also a murderer sought by an avenger, by Laertes.”

  Jenkins was among the first to stress, in this regard, the duality of Pyrrhus, the bloody slaughterer of Priam in the bombastic poem Hamlet asks the First Player to recite. Many have found the moment Pyrrhus hesitates before slaughtering old King Priam a foreshadowing of Hamlet’s hesitation over killing Claudius. But as the murderer of old King Priam, Pyrrhus is also an emblem of Claudius as the murderer of old King Hamlet. Jenkins deepens the multiple resonances of Pyrrhus by pointing out that he is also (like Hamlet and Laertes) an avenging son—the son of Achilles—avenging the murder of his father by Priam’s son, Paris.

  THE “PRECIOUS INSTANCE”

  Laertes figures in Jenkins’s approach to a lesser-known textual enigma, one that illustrates both his characteristic loving attentiveness to the language of Hamlet, and the adamancy of his opposition to the new revisionist view of Shakespeare, to a Shakespeare who, at the very least, revised Hamlet. It’s an example, as well, of the way different choices in textual dilemmas give us subtly different Hamlets.

  It’s a moment in act 4 when Laertes storms into the throne room at Elsinore raging at Claudius over the death of his father, Polonius, and—in mid-rant—encounters his sister Ophelia. Sees her grief-addled madness for the first time.

  Laertes reacts with a speech that starts out as stentorian posturing:

  O heat, dry up my brains! tears seven times salt

  Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye!

  And concludes with a bitter

  O heavens, is’t possible a young maid’s wits

  Should be as mortal as an old man’s life?

  At which point—in the Quarto—Ophelia interrupts with her song of grief: “They bore him barefac’d on the bier …”

  But in the Folio edition, before Ophelia breaks into song, Laertes goes on to add:

  Nature is fine in love and where ’tis fine

  It sends some precious instance of itself after

  The thing it loves.

  It is a passage whose ethereal delicacy, almost spiritual tendresse, is deeply moving. “Nature is fine in love” … and “precious instance of itself”—the phrases are lovely and loving in a hushed way. It represents an abrupt shift from the bloody-minded rant Laertes had begun with. It’s almost as if the passage begins with the kind of rhetoric one finds in Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, Titus Andronicus (“O tears dry up my brain”), or in the stagy Pyrrhus speech Hamlet requests from the Players. And then shifts with almost no transition to lines that sound as if they’re from one of Shakespeare’s Late Romances, in the reconciliatory mode of The Winter’s Tale with its evocation of “great creating Nature”: “Nature is fine in love …”

  It is almost as if, with the addition of those lines about a “precious instance,” we see a Laertes transformed by the heartbreaking, flower-strewing delicacy of his sister Ophelia’s grief. A Laertes transported to a mode of thought beyond revenge, one rich and strange in that elegiac, almost musical way of the Late Romances when they speak of nature, love, grief and forgiveness. One could go further and extrapolate a change not just in Laertes, but in Shakespeare himself: between the poet who composed Laertes’s rant and the one who made the conjectured addition of these elegiac lines. A change in his sensibility. A change in “Shakespearean” tone and register.

  But were they an addition/revision? The “precious instance” passage is itself a particularly salient instance of the whole debate over whether Shakespeare revised Hamlet. Recall the numbers: the most obvious difference between the Quarto and the Folio is that some 230 lines in the Quarto have been cut from the Folio. But the more problematic difference is that some 70 lines have been added to the Folio. Cuts are far easier to explain or explain away than additions. Anyone can make a cut, and (to be fair to editors) a cut can be made more or less skillfully, with just deletion marks. But composing an addition, composing an addition that sounds and reads as “Shakespearean” as the “precious instance” passage seems to, is different.

  It’s more difficult for those who refuse to believe Shakespeare revised Hamlet to explain the addition of a passage like the “precious instance” lines because the passage certainly suggests that Shakespeare went back to the Laertes speech at a later stage of his evolution and added something more contemplative, more elegiac, more evocative of the mood of the Late Romances, plays he wrote nearly a decade after Hamlet.

  Precedent for this was suggested to me a few days after my talk with Jenkins by Richard Proudfoot, one of Jenkins’s colleagues, formerly one of the three general editors of the Arden Shakespeare, and a specialist in questions of Shakespearean apocrypha—plays sometimes dubiously ascribed to Shakespeare. It’s a specialty that requires Proudfoot to be attuned to questions of what is and isn’t “Shakespearean.”

  Proudfoot pointed out to me a somewhat anomalous passage in Henry VI, Part 2, one of the very earliest plays attributed to Shakespeare, a passage that Proudfoot suggests may well have been added, “precious instance” fashion, by a more mature Shakespeare r
eturning to improve upon his earliest work. It’s a passage in which a character known as “Young Clifford” comes upon the body of his father slain in battle and starts speaking in a somewhat stilted early-Shakespearean mode.

  “I’ll see if I can do the switch for you,” Proudfoot tells me, searching for his edition of Henry VI, Part 2, and he flips it open to the fifth act and begins to read the bombastic lines, “O war, thou son of Hell …”

  “So far early Shakespeare,” Proudfoot says, “But then he shifts to ‘O, let the vile world end,/And the premised flames of the last day/Knit earth and heaven together!… Wast thou ordain’d, dear father,/To lose thy youth in peace, and to achieve/The silver livery of advised age … thus/To die in ruffian battle?’

  “It’s a different voice,” Proudfoot insists. “And after a while he modulates back into the insult stuff, but it’s irresistible once you’ve seen it.”

  “A different voice”: it sounds right, but it also sounds inevitably like a highly subjective judgment. Still, the shift is even more pronounced in the “precious instance” passage. From ruffian bombast to the silver livery of reflectiveness.

  Jenkins will have none of it. He, too, finds beauty in the “precious instance” passage but not revision. Even though it appears only in the Folio, he likes it so much, he seems to have wanted to rescue it for his Quarto-based conflated edition, so he adopted what some might call a far-fetched hypothesis: he argues that the “precious instance” lines were there from the beginning in Shakespeare’s “foul papers,” his original manuscript for the Quarto, but mistakenly omitted by a transcriber or by the printing-shop compositor who set the Quarto into type. Mistakenly omitted because the passage might have been added in a margin on the Quarto manuscript and overlooked by the typesetter. Or there may have been an incidental line on the Quarto manuscript next to the “precious instance” passage that might have been mistaken for a deletion mark. But it’s not a revision added later to the Folio, Jenkins insists.