The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “It’s kind of nice to think so,” she mused, although characteristically she demurred at anything that might sound like a countervailing certainty about her position.

  Still she has not been shy in bringing a female if not explicitly feminist perspective to editing Shakespeare and particularly Hamlet.

  At first, she told me, she resisted being drawn into the textual-editing labyrinth. “I did my Ph.D. with Richard Proudfoot,” she said. “He encouraged me to edit a relatively obscure apocryphal text, which I refused to do, working instead on Shakespeare’s use of Chaucer. Several years later, I got into editing when I was invited to do The Taming of the Shrew for the New Cambridge Shakespeare. I discovered I enjoyed editing.” She had begun editing the Arden Cymbeline when Arden invited her to become a general editor, along with Proudfoot and Columbia’s David Scott Kastan—a position of considerable influence in the world of Shakespeare studies.

  Her rapid ascent, she told me, may in part have been a response to her critique of the male-dominated textual-editing establishment. “I had noticed how few women were involved in editing, and how they always did the same ‘easy’ Folio-only comedies,” she said. “And I’d given a couple of conference papers on the topic, pointing out the absence of female editors of the major ‘difficult’ tragedies, so I more or less talked myself into editing Hamlet—Othello and Lear having already been assigned to senior male editors.”

  Thompson’s assertiveness has caused some grumbling among some “senior male editors.” But the groundbreaking step she’s taking in deconflating Hamlet should not be interpreted as an outgrowth of the gender wars. She has worked closely with male Shakespeare scholars; she made her Hamlet-text decision in collaboration with a colleague, Neil Taylor, whom she brought in as her coeditor on Hamlet. (She has also coedited a book, Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor, with her husband, John O. Thompson, a film scholar.)

  For two years after receiving her Hamlet assignment in 1993, Thompson immersed herself in the play’s textual problems. She came to the conclusion—as she told her fellow editors at Arden in a heated confrontation—that it would be a mistake to do another conflated version of Hamlet. “Harold Jenkins had already done that very well,” she said. “I would not have wanted to edit Hamlet if I had to do that. I would not have felt it was worth doing.”

  Her colleagues—and executives at Routledge, the publishing house that owned the Arden imprint at the time—had some practical concerns. The three-text version she proposed—the 1603, 1604 and 1623 Hamlets—would be at least a thousand pages long, making it hard to sell to the college market as a single volume.

  Oxford’s Stanley Wells once called for editors of courage to “take the risk” and divide Hamlet the way he and Gary Taylor had divided Lear—something they had avoided in their Hamlet. Such multi-text editions, Wells said, had the potential to “open up the most illuminating discussion of Shakespeare’s creative processes since the plays were first reprinted.” But Wells expressed concern to me, more recently, that a proliferation of Hamlets might be “confusing to the general reader.”

  Still, Thompson made it clear to the other two general editors of the Arden imprint at the time that she wasn’t going to do it in the traditional way even if it came to forcing a showdown with the publisher. Which it did.

  She felt strongly that a century of bibliographical scholarship had corroded the foundation, the rationale for trying to confect a single Lost Archetype of Hamlet from the found objects of the three imperfect Hamlet texts we have. Conflated texts might well be presenting a Hamlet that Shakespeare never wrote and the Globe never staged. (Even the Bad Quarto had a stronger claim than the conflated text in that respect: a claim to have actually been staged in Shakespeare’s lifetime for better or worse.)

  But unlike the other anti-conflationist Hamlet editors, Thompson doesn’t necessarily endorse the Folio edition as the superior nonconflated text; she doesn’t feel the case that it’s closer to Shakespeare’s “final intentions” has been proven. Nor on the other hand does she feel the partisans of the 1604 Good Quarto have proved their case that Q2 (as this version is called, since the Bad Quarto, Q1, was published a year earlier) is the purer expression of Shakespeare as dramatic poet (rather than poetic dramatist) before its “debasement” in the playhouse by theater managers and actors who—some believe—simplified and dumbed it down to cut it for time.

  The wintry afternoon I spoke to Ann Thompson in London she’d just come back from a sojourn at the Folger, and said she was less than a year away from completion of a draft of the edition she and Neil Taylor had been working on for some five years. (In fact it would take five more years.) And she said she was perfectly prepared to produce an edition that didn’t claim to explain with any surety the relationship between the three Hamlet texts.

  In particular, and most controversially, she says the evidence was not sufficient to characterize with certainty the black sheep 1603 Bad Quarto.

  “I don’t think either those like Eric Sams who attack the ‘memorial reconstruction’ theory of Q1 and argue it’s an early draft, or those like Harold Jenkins who defend ‘memorial reconstruction’ and disparage the Bad Quarto, have proven their case. It’s possible to conjecture it’s some form of both—perhaps a bad reconstruction of an early draft—but the evidence is not strong enough to do more than speculate.”

  But if the evidence is not there, the text should be there, in any scrupulous scholarly edition of Hamlet, she believes. “It does seem likely this [the Bad Quarto] was a Hamlet performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime, whatever his actual relation to it, and it plays a role”—as we’ve seen with Harold Jenkins, a ghostly triangulation role—in conjectures about enigmas in the two longer texts.

  It all seemed logical and defensible to me, but to the prospective publisher of the edition it still seemed impractical and uneconomical.

  “There was a resistance to publishing not so much more than one text, but more than one volume,” Thompson recalled. Oxford has published a two-text Lear, but in the context of a three-thousand-page Complete Works edition. (Subsequently they’ve issued a separate Quarto volume edited by Stanley Wells.) Same with the American Norton edition and its three-text Lear, also a relatively small part of a huge volume. But the economics of academic publishing are predicated on “course adoptions”—getting professors of literature, for instance, to assign the Arden over an Oxford, Cambridge, Signet, Penguin or Folger single-volume edition of Hamlet. Harold Jenkins’s second Arden Hamlet was a voluminous six hundred pages for a single conflated text. Everything about a three-text Hamlet would be inflated at a cost that would restrict it to the graduate rather than the undergraduate student market. The showdown came in the summer of 1995.

  “We had a meeting that went on all day with the publisher and the other general editors who were initially against it. And it was tough going. There was a lot of resistance. Arden had decided to do the two other plays where there was a similar dispute—Lear and Othello—Quarto and Folio in single-volume conflated editions. But I would not have wanted to edit Hamlet if one had to do that. I wouldn’t have felt it was worth doing. What we’re doing is completely different from what other people have done and it affords an opportunity to discover new things and discuss the play in different ways. But yeah, there was resistance.”

  What carried the day was Ms. Thompson’s ingenious proposal for packaging the plays in two volumes. There would be a first volume consisting of an extensively footnoted version of the Good Quarto text preceded by the traditional Arden scholarly apparatus of textual and thematic commentary, and performance history that would cover all three Hamlet texts. A volume that could be a stand-alone for undergraduate course adoption. But it would be published simultaneously with a second volume containing the Bad Quarto and Folio versions (with annotations of their unique words and passages), the two volumes designed more for advanced students and scholars.

  Ann Thompson overcame internal resistance at Arden. But the two-volume, t
hree-text Hamlet will not appear without carping from outsiders. “They say they’re not choosing one text over the other,” Gary Taylor told me, “but choosing Q2 for the single volume, isn’t that an implicit endorsement?” And, Taylor argues, including the 1603 Bad Quarto, whatever the rationale, gives unjustified prominence to what he disparages forthrightly as “a bad text.” Including it, he says, amounts to “unediting.”

  It will be controversial, it may well be attacked for the wrong reasons, as a product of deconstructive theory rather than scrupulous bibliographic research. Still there is no doubt, as Ann Thompson said, that they are “doing something completely different.” Something that will dismay those who long for the certainty (or the illusion) of one true Hamlet. It will offer a new way of reading and experiencing an old play that has become an ossified compendium of famous quotations to many. A version that requires the reader to engage actively with the texts, to make choices, to try to investigate it, not as some granitic cultural monument, but one that has to be constructed—not deconstructed—by the reader, director, player. Of course actors and directors always have taken the liberty of cutting, of deciding what had to be left in and out for reasons of time and pacing. But now readers must decide what they want, what alternative, which branch in the garden of forking paths to take.

  Ann Thompson says she sees it work this way teaching Hamlet to undergraduates: “I use the two texts and their differences to get them arguing about alternative readings, which causes them to think more deeply about Hamlet. It’s not more confusing, it’s exciting to them.”

  Her fierce commitment to restoring the distinct identities of the three early texts of Hamlet, their lost integrity and individuality, is impressive. I asked her if she felt an affinity with the first woman to attempt to divide Hamlet, the Victorian prodigy Teena Rochfort-Smith, whose tragic death I’d become fascinated with.

  “Teena Rochfort-Smith, yes!” she said. “You know, I’ve just published a paper on her in the new issue of Shakespeare Quarterly.” Not that surprising, it’s a tragedy spawned by a tragedy, not a Hamlet tragedy so much as an exemplary Hamlet editor’s tragedy.

  Teena Rochfort-Smith was a young woman adopted professionally and romantically in the early 1880s by F. J. Furnivall, an original sponsor of the Oxford English Dictionary, a Victorian gentleman who had a penchant as well for sponsoring “young ladies’ rowing clubs” and becoming involved with the young ladies. Furnivall was director of the New Shakspere Society, a group dedicated to restoring Shakespeare’s texts to their “original purity.” As such, he fostered the ambition of a prodigiously gifted young woman, Teena Rochfort-Smith, then only twenty-one, to produce “the four-text Hamlet in Parallel Columns.” An insanely complicated task, a kind of Grand Dis-Unification of conflated Hamlets that offered a comparative vista of the three original Hamlet texts and a fourth, conflated one.

  It was, as Ann Thompson put it, “a wonderfully complicated manuscript page that used four different colors of ink and three different forms of underlining as well as numerous signs and symbols, six varieties of type and a formidable battery of asterisks, daggers, and other indicators, to signal the variation in the four parallel texts.” She looked through her files and retrieved a photocopy of the sample of the work Teena Rochfort-Smith had published before she perished. Just the “instructions for reading” with which Rochfort-Smith preceded her four-text version “dizzy the arithmetic of memory,” as Hamlet put it. One sample from her guide to reading the Folio column’s typographical signals:

  BLACK LETTER, where F1 differs from Q2. When this difference (if of word, and not of letter only) agrees with Q1, a dagger is added. Differently spelt words are shown thus: F1 do, Q2 doE. Thus F1 is collated with Q2, but not with Q1, except where F1 differs from Q2 and agrees with Q1.

  If following the instructions is difficult, imagine the intensity of concentration, the destabilizing multiple four-part focus that each line, each word of Hamlet required for the young woman trying to construct it. It’s a project that might have consumed much of her life if she had lived. But in fact her life was consumed in a far more brief and terrible fashion: Teena Rochfort-Smith was burned to death when she set fire to her dress, apparently while she was burning some letters with a candle. Like Ophelia, who in effect killed herself for Hamlet, drowned by the weight of her garments, Rochfort-Smith was killed by her clothes, ignited by text.

  Ann Thompson maintains her death was most likely an accident, one that had nothing to do with her Hamlet editing project. But there’s no doubt such an accident could have been the product of strain and distraction.

  I had a sense that part of Ann Thompson’s special interest in the story of Teena Rochfort-Smith—the fact that she took time out from a crushing deadline schedule for her Hamlet edition to research and write a substantial scholarly article on the brief life and doomed project of the unfortunate young Hamlet editor—derived from a kind of identification with her predecessor.

  But when I pressed Ann Thompson a little further she just demurred and allowed, laconically, “It’s a very sad story.”

  SHAKESPEARE IN REWRITE:

  SECRETS OF THE ENFOLDED HAMLET

  At this point the reader might be forgiven if it has not become apparent which Hamlet one should read, what Hamlet we talk about when we talk about Hamlet.

  If the new Arden three-text, divided Hamlet will do anything, it will make it dramatically clear that to read a Hamlet is to make a choice between Hamlets, that there is no longer a default Hamlet so to speak. There is a Quarto Hamlet, a Folio Hamlet, and scores of conflated Hamlets each with claims to be the more poetical, the more theatrical, or the more inclusive. There is a highly regarded “synoptic edition” of the two texts edited by Jesús Tronch-Pérez. And for those who want to triangulate those Hamlet texts with a putative predecessor, the Bad Quarto, there are two versions of a three-text Hamlet: the Arden, which will print the three texts in succession (over two volumes), and two editions that print them in parallel columns across the page.

  But for those who want to catch what the Revisers believe are glimpses of Shakespeare at work, Shakespeare making changes, to my mind Bernice Kliman’s Enfolded Hamlet best dramatizes the variants.

  The origins of Bernice Kliman’s Enfolded Hamlet can be found in the MLA’s Hamlet Variorum project, the new version of the ultimate illuminated Hamlet text, the volume that surrounds the text of Hamlet with a vast inky penumbra of exegesis that sums up four centuries of Hamlet commentary and disputation by poets, scholars and madmen on virtually every phrase in the text: the Hamlet di tutti Hamlets.

  The term “variorum”—short for the Latin “cum notis variorum” (with notes of various persons)—is the scholarly rubric for an edition of a classic work that attempts to record not just all the variations and suggested emendations in the text or texts of the work in question, but to cite and quote what every significant scholar and editor and littérateur has said about every single enigma, every problematic moment, every “site of contestation” as the academics like to say today, that has ever prompted comment.

  The most recent Hamlet Variorum, the 1877 New Variorum edition edited by H. H. Furness (one of those prodigiously erudite and energetic Victorian polymaths), is an amazing volume. A veritable grimoire of quaint and curious Hamlet lore, it takes some nine hundred pages in two volumes of minuscule type to do the job. Seven-page-long footnotes are not uncommon and often quite wonderful. (Long out of print, the 1877 edition has been reprinted in an affordable Dover Press facsimile.) It’s an important document in intellectual history in its chronicle of the evolution of thinking about perhaps the most emblematic work of English-speaking culture, the evolution of the fantasies, longings, visions and delusions projected upon Hamlet as well. And it reveals something of the world-historical relevance Hamlet has taken on beyond the English-speaking realm.

  There’s a chilling instance of this in the dedicatory page of the Furness Hamlet Variorum. Furness had included voluminous excerpts from
the prodigious outpouring of German Hamlet scholarship in the century before the Variorum was published. Hamlet was, after all, in a very important respect, a German intellectual: he was educated at Wittenberg in the era of Luther’s Reformation. A version of Hamlet (Der Bestrafte Brudermord—The Fratricide Punished) played Germany as early as 1605.

  The outpouring of German commentary was, in part, initiated by Goethe’s rhapsodies about Hamlet. His novel Wilhelm Meister—about a young German who succumbs to what became known in Germany as “Hamletism,” a veritable frenzy of Hamlet fever—inspired one commentator to say that “Germany is Hamlet.” By “Germany is Hamlet” he meant in its romanticism, its feverish intellectualism, its moody dividedness both spiritual and geopolitical. This was before the triumphalism of the German victory in the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War, which created the modern united and militarized German empire. Furness’s 1877 Variorum reflects the seismic shift in German national character in the following dedication:

  TO THE GERMAN SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY OF WEIMAR, REPRESENTATIVE OF A PEOPLE WHOSE RECENT HISTORY PROVED ONCE AND FOR ALL ‘GERMANY IS NOT HAMLET,’ THESE VOLUMES ARE DEDICATED.

  Furness must have regarded this as a harmless bit of witty tribute. But looked upon from what we know of subsequent German history, it’s possible to observe that if “Hamletism” was the disease, the cure was worse. It’s possible to wonder darkly just how much the shift in German character was a conscious redefining itself against Hamlet’s character. Critics who focus censoriously on Hamlet’s indecisiveness as a character flaw might meditate on the consequences of over-decisiveness. Whether the vice of “thinking too precisely” on a subject is worse than the vice of not thinking precisely at all, and whether it was a good thing that Germany became “Not Hamlet.”

  But once past that chilling dedication, the Furness Variorum is a thrilling testament to the enduring power of Hamlet and Hamlet enigmas to engage the intellect and imagination, to the seductive lure of the textual and thematic labyrinth of the play. To plunge into one of the Furness Variorum’s multipage, tiny-type footnote compendiums of commentary is to lose oneself in the pleasures of the penumbral Hamlet, the extratextual Hamlet. Just to take one example, there is the mystery of the “dozen or sixteen lines.”