The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Far-fetched to some, but Jenkins’s commentary on the “precious instance” passage transcends the textual issue: he’s rescued the “precious instance” passage from the disparagement of previous editors by offering a precious instance of his own tender attentiveness to Shakespeare at its best. For two centuries the passage suffered from the disapprobation of that sacred monster of the Shakespeare editing tradition, Samuel Johnson. The “precious instance” passage should be “omitted,” Johnson declared, because the lines “are obscure and affected.”

  Nonetheless, Dr. Johnson claimed to be able to decipher them: “Love (says Laertes) is the passion by which nature is most exalted and refined and as substances refined and subtilised [a term from alchemy for purifying] easily obey any impulse or follow any attractions, some part of nature so purified and refined flies off after the attracting object, after the thing that it loves.”

  This is a fascinating and rather polemical way of interpreting the “precious instance” passage. A way that seems to disparage the apparent surface sentiment or tone of the passage. Johnson emphasizes how indiscriminate the operation of the emotions is: love is like a substance that easily obeys “any” impulses, follows “any” attractions, implicitly indiscriminately, regardless of the value of the attractor. Love, in other words, is so light it’s a virtual personified airhead, easily manipulated by alchemy in the same way it was by an herbal potion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the juice of the flower “Love in Idleness” compels a person to follow the next visual “attraction” that happens to wander by.

  But Harold Jenkins sees something more, and his footnote on the passage is an implicit reproof to Dr. Johnson. Here is how Jenkins explicates the “precious instance” passage:

  “Human nature, when in love, is exquisitely sensitive and being so, it sends a precious part of itself as a token to follow the object of its love. Thus the fineness of Ophelia’s love is demonstrated when, after the loved one has gone, her mind goes too …” The precious instance then is Ophelia’s mind; she’s not an airhead but a sensitive soul, whose mind is sent by her exquisitely loving nature after the departing shade of her dead father.

  I know: it has a hint of an antiquarian air, but the passage has “the silver livery” of antiquity to it. There is here none of Dr. Johnson’s disparagement of the flightiness of human nature and love; Jenkins reads into the lines a quiet tragedy of love and grief leading to madness (a compression one might say of Hamlet itself). Although Jenkins might be mortified at the idea, his meditation on the “precious instance” passage could be read as Jenkins’s meditation on his own lifelong love of Hamlet: his exquisite sensitivity, a precious part of himself, has been transmitted in his edition “as a token to follow the object of its love.”

  In a slightly different sense a “precious instance” is an image, a reproduction of the thing beloved, almost a kind of twin (twins being precious instances of each other). And here in the “precious instance” passage one almost hears an echo of Shakespeare’s own tragic personal experience of twinship: the death of his son Hamnet, one of a pair of twins (the other a daughter, Judith). I have sought to avoid the temptations of biographical inference. But as we know, James Joyce devoted some fifty pages of Ulysses to an eccentric (but not utterly as implausible as once thought) theory about the relationship between Shakespeare’s tragic hero Hamlet and the tragic death of his son Hamnet. Joyce does not mention it, but the powerful elegiac tone of the “precious instance” passage almost suggests it might have been written or inspired by the death of Hamnet, and the “precious instance” of himself Hamnet left behind in his surviving twin, Judith.

  Such are the seductions of a single controversial textual variation and an instance of the way apparently unpoetic textual debates can illuminate the poetic language and raise suggestive questions about what lies beneath the “veil of print.”

  But Jenkins resists the seductions of this sort of speculation. Or certain of its implications anyway: while lovingly attentive to the “precious instance” passage, he denies that it is an instance of Shakespeare’s revising hand.

  “Well, of course, all of the latest people think, ‘Poor Jenkins, he’s passé.’ But I’m very skeptical about this. I’m quite sure the idea of Shakespeare as reviser has been much too readily accepted. The Folio has lots of little things which are to do with adjusting Hamlet for performance. In the Quarto when Hamlet’s on his way to see Gertrude after the play scene, Polonius says to the Queen, ‘Oh I hear him coming.’ And in the Folio, he says, ‘Mother, mother, mother.’ That’s just staging: you have someone directing who says, ‘We better hear him coming, you know.’ But you don’t really need this. But then they say, ‘Well, if it was prepared for performance, Shakespeare was a member of the company, and he was there, so of course, he must have done it!’ Well, it seems to me just as likely that Shakespeare, at the height of his imagination, he writes the play and he writes too much, and in the end it’s too long, and he knows it’s too long, and he says it’s too long, just cut it. And even if he did do the cutting, it doesn’t follow that therefore Shakespeare preferred it. There are plenty of instances of dramatists who are forced to cut, but it doesn’t follow that this is how he would have wanted it.”

  He returned to the subject again later in our conversation as he poured more tea for us.

  “As for the evidence that the Folio Hamlet is Shakespeare’s revision, I don’t think there is any real evidence. It’s quite tenuous. I think it comes back to King Lear, it all started with King Lear and then it was accepted by the Oxford people [that the two Lears were first and second drafts] and everyone was excited about it. But people just said this, and we were all waiting for the evidence. And when The Division of the Kingdoms [the book of revisionist essays on the Lear question edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren] appeared, I didn’t see they gave evidence at all. They all accepted that it was so, and I am still waiting for this to be proved. There are passages, especially one soliloquy, one speech in Lear, where there seemed to be alternate versions, and so one is taken to be a revision of the other. But you know the Folio of King Lear is a cut text. And whether or not Shakespeare cut it, they say he wanted to change the characters of Albany and Edgar. I don’t believe that for a moment. If he wanted to change the characters, would he do it by simply cutting out speeches and taking one speech and giving it to another chap? So I think a lot of the evidence depends on the transfer of speeches from one to another. But we know Shakespeare is rather casual about indicating the speaker and sometimes speech headings are misinterpreted, and then the same speech is given to somebody in the Quarto and somebody else in the Folio. Well, I think that is very, very rarely to be a case of revision.”

  Still, at the close of our conversation, he did concede at least a shadow of a doubt. It came in the context of a fanciful question I’d asked about Jenkins meeting Shakespeare. What would the editor of Hamlet, who’d given his life to deciphering the ambiguities and uncertainties that have been hidden beneath “the veil of print,” want to ask the author if he came face to face with him in the afterlife?

  “I wonder what he would think of some of my interpretations,” Jenkins mused. “I do think he would agree that the important thing, the central thing in Hamlet, is that Hamlet is both the avenger and the object of revenge.”

  “The duality?”

  “Yes, because I think the whole play is structured around that.”

  “What else would you ask Shakespeare?”

  “Well, I think I would ask him one or two things about the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. ‘Whether ’tis nobler in the mind …’ No, I feel I’ve got that right. Still, I think it’s all a little wrong. It doesn’t seem to relate to the immediate context. I’d quite like to hear his view on it,” he says with a mischievous look.

  “And, of course, his view on ghosts. Did he believe in ghosts? Did he believe in ghosts?” he repeats. “And also,” he adds, in a remarkable final concession of doubt, “I would li
ke to ask him whether he did revise it.”

  A VISIT WITH AN AVENGING ANGEL

  One begins to feel the fear and loathing Eric Sams inspired in his academic foes long before one meets him. The much feared name came up in a discussion I had with Harold Jenkins about his stance on the “ur-Hamlet,” the legendary lost “original” Hamlet, the Hamlet referred to, mocked by, a rival playwright as early as 1589, at least ten years before the Hamlet we now know was first staged at the Globe. Who wrote this lost first Hamlet? Until Sams began his assault, centuries of argument over the question had evolved into fairly stable consensus that the original Hamlet must have been written by some older, lesser revenge tragedian, most likely Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy, which bears some resemblances to Hamlet (feigned madness, for example)—and that Shakespeare took Kyd’s melodramatic plot and transformed it with his genius.

  This was Jenkins’s view, and “This is what initiated my correspondence with the notorious Eric Sams,” Jenkins told me, practically wincing at the memory. Sams (who died in 2004) was one of the rare “independent scholars” whose work changes the academic consensus from outside. Sams told me he’d been a World War II cryptologist stationed at the legendary Bletchley Park code-breaking station, home of the Enigma machine, where he said he worked with the team that cracked the Japanese code called MAGIC. In the early eighties, after establishing a formidable reputation as editor, translator and commentator on German music (Penguin published his translations of the songs of Schumann), Sams turned his attention to Shakespeare scholarship—to decrypting the enigma of Shakespeare’s MAGIC, one might say—where he soon became the scourge of consensus wisdom, academic reputations and long-established assumptions about Shakespeare’s career. Finding a forum for his views in the TLS and in a 1995 Yale University Press polemical work called The Real Shakespeare, Sams became known for his fierce limpet-like correspondence with his academic opponents and the lack of customary academic decorum in the characterization of their views, often using invective of the “fools and idiots” variety.

  In a note to me, for instance, after pointing out that Harold Bloom had recently come around to Sams’s position on the ur-Hamlet—that it was Shakespeare and not someone else who wrote the lost early version of the play by that name—Sams couldn’t resist characterizing another eminent Shakespearean (who shall remain nameless here) as “suffering from senile dementia” for failing to see the light on some point of textual dispute. Here’s a sampling from his polemics in the TLS, Hamlet Studies (edited in New Delhi, until it shut its doors in 2002, it was then the only peer-reviewed scholarly publication in the world devoted to a single work of art) and The Real Shakespeare:

  The legendary Dover Wilson, mentor of Harold Jenkins, “initiated a half-century of corruption in Hamlet scholarship”; the field suffers from “catastrophic confusion,” “baseless invention,” “asinine hypotheses,” “shameless nonsense,” “spuriously presented arguments” that are “corrupt and venal.” In sum, “the whole tragical history of twentieth century Hamlet criticism will have to be re-written” when Sams’s views demolish the conventional wisdom. My favorite is his relatively subdued but eloquently Latinate aside after one assertion: “pace, the entire profession.”

  One of the chief objects of Sams’s wrathful polemics has been Harold Jenkins and Jenkins’s conclusions about the ur-Hamlet and the Bad Quarto in Jenkins’s Arden edition. Sams is particularly exercised over Jenkins’s adoption of the theory of “memorial reconstruction” (that the Bad Quarto was produced from the bad memories of bit players trying to reconstruct, without the text before them, a performance of a Hamlet they’d played in). Sams believes that the Bad Quarto could well have been written by Shakespeare himself, an earlier draft of the play we now know; that the Bad Quarto might even be a version of the legendary lost ur-Hamlet itself, hiding in plain sight.

  It is part of Sams’s radical challenge to consensus notions of Shakespeare’s entire career as a dramatist. A challenge that has become conventional wisdom to some like biographer Peter Ackroyd. Sams believes Shakespeare was not the “late starter” who only began writing for the London stage in the 1590s, but rather someone who, as eighteenth-century tradition has it, came to London as early as 1582, and after serving as horse handler and actor at the theater, began writing the early drafts of some of his famous plays. Early drafts that are preserved in the much despised Bad Quartos, early drafts that include the ur-Hamlet, a play Sams insists Shakespeare didn’t just rewrite from another’s play but composed himself (from prose sources). Sams’s quarrel with Jenkins about the ur-Hamlet is then a quarrel about the entire trajectory of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, and the nature of the imagination that created Hamlet.

  “Sams insists the ur-Hamlet was originally by Shakespeare,” Jenkins told me, speaking of his attempts to disentangle himself from continuing a contentious correspondence with Sams on the question. “He’s the sort of person who always has the last word so you might as well let him have it at the beginning as well as the end. I don’t write to him anymore. But, of course, he will attack me in his next book. He told me that I escaped fairly well in the first one. He has, of course, in his bibliography, a star against the people whom he disagrees with. Some of us were kind of amused to share in the stars.”

  This donnish chuckle is not quite sufficient, though, to dismiss Sams from his mind.

  “Eric Sams?” says Jenkins, speaking the name as if he were holding up its possessor like a specimen in a pair of tweezers. “Well, I disbelieve most of what he says. What he wrote in the TLS [about Jenkins’s view of “memorial reconstruction”] was a complete travesty of anything I’ve thought and said, and so I had to write and say, ‘No, not at all.’ And this reopened the correspondence,” he says with a sigh as if discussing the attentions of a stalker.

  “He’s an avenging-angel type?” I asked Jenkins.

  “When he’s in his own family, I have no idea what he’s like, but he’s rather nasty in controversy and he likes to …” Jenkins rubs his hands together in an imitation of nasty glee. “ ‘Heh, heh, heh.’ There’s a certain spitefulness about it.”

  Who was this man so many in the Shakespeare scholar establishment feared and loathed?

  “I’m a civil servant,” Eric Sams likes to say by way of introducing himself. And he was a civil servant in the most literal sense of the word, a civil servant in the Department of Employment for many years, he explained over lunch at our first meeting at his club, the dignified if not posh Civil Service Club in London.

  But he’s not merely a civil servant, he’s a certain kind of civil servant, the implacable inspector-general, relentless investigator kind. The hound-of-hell kind.

  And, he adds, he’s a civil servant who believes in Ockham’s razor, the famous injunction by William of Ockham, the medieval logician, that “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” That is, one shouldn’t invent complex explanations (like “memorial reconstruction”) without due cause or evidence.

  He was a civil servant who applied his inspector-general zeal to the Shakespeare scholar bureaucracy, one who wielded Ockham’s razor like a slasher. He was in the midst of a war over the Bad Quarto when I visited him in his home in Surrey.

  Surrey, Sams reminds me, when we’d settled into his spare living room, was the home county of the village of Ockham, home to William of Ockham, clearly Sams’s intellectual hero.

  “I think there’s a kind of advantage to being a latecomer to Shakespeare studies,” Sams tells me. Sams was a vigorous seventy-three when I saw him, a compact figure whose most distinctive features were bristling dark gray eyebrows which seemed to reflect and express his fierce views on the state of Shakespearean scholarship and Hamlet editors in particular. “What I noticed immediately when I took it up was that people were just making things up! Absolutely nonstop! Beginning with Harold Jenkins! And what you use in bibliography as in science is the notion that you mustn’t make things up. Ockham’s razor.”

>   To Sams, “memorial reconstruction” multiplies entities way beyond necessity, when it requires adherents to conjure up a company of traveling players, including former bit players at the Globe, botching together a maimed version of Hamlet, the Bad Quarto, while on tour in the provinces. There is no surviving record or testimony to the existence of such an entity. In fact, Sams believes the number of entities required to explain the Bad Quarto is just one: William Shakespeare. Sams believes the Bad Quarto was not memorially reconstructed but was one of Shakespeare’s early drafts of Hamlet; perhaps, in fact, a version of the legendary long-lost ur-Hamlet.

  The ur-Hamlet: it’s the specter that haunts and stalks Hamlet editors the way the ghost of Hamlet’s father haunts Hamlet. Sams is its most powerful contemporary champion, virtually its editor in absentia. It’s a powerful and disturbing invisible presence despite the fact that all we have to attest to its existence are ghostly echoes. And echoes of ridicule at that.

  In 1589 when Shakespeare is but twenty-five, Thomas Nashe, one of the “university wits” who sneered at the more plebeian playwrights in London, is making fun in a pamphlet of a rival he derides as “English Seneca” for allegedly lifting his style from the Roman playwright’s tragic dramas. Of “English Seneca” Nashe says, “If you entreat him faire on a frostie morning he will afford whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragic speeches.” This is ten years at least before most scholars believe Shakespeare wrote the Hamlet we have. So what Hamlet is Nashe referring to in the labored Hamlets/handfuls wordplay? There is a record of a play by that name being performed in 1594. Is it the same Hamlet alluded to in 1596, when another university wit, Thomas Lodge, ridicules a Hamlet by referring to some “poor devil looking as pale as the vizard of the ghost which cries so miserably like an oyster wife at the theatre, ‘Hamlet, revenge!’ ”