And I’m not alone; many scholars continue to wrestle with these questions. So I decided to wrestle with their wrestling and see if I could come closer to a conjecture of my own than I had before.
THE GAME IS STILL ON
So how do we evaluate the two versions of Lear if neither we nor the specialists can be sure which version of the last words is more “Shakespearean”? Or, rather, when claims to what is more “Shakespearean” turn out to be, necessarily, subjective.
Two years after publishing a report on the Hamlet-text revision controversy in The New Yorker I returned to the world of textual scholars to see if I could at least find more clarity on the questions raised by the two-Lear problem. Whether the ongoing war over the Lear texts between the Revisers and the believers in a “Lost Archetype” was moving toward a resolution of at least one question: Lear’s last words. In the hopes of giving readers the last word on Lear’s last words.
I found the landscape had changed dramatically.
Up until the late nineties, the world of Shakespearean scholarship was “swimming with promise,” as John Jones, the former Oxford professor of poetry, exclaimed in his 1995 study of “Shakespearean” revisions in Shakespeare at Work.
“Swimming with promise”? Because the Shakespeare-as-reviser thesis had triumphed—“the game was up,” Jones declared. Gary Taylor’s “palace coup” had been an unqualified success. And dividing the texts of Hamlet and Lear had bequeathed us a powerful new tool for reading Shakespeare’s great works in greater depth. In stereo one might say, holding both versions in mind at the same time, the dual focus deepening each alternate choice the way a chord deepens each individual note, or a rhyme chimes.
But it was a method that depended on the assumption that the major variations between the texts were, in fact, made by Shakespeare himself.
A method that made the claim that a close reading of “Shakespeare’s own changes” from one version to another would tell us more about the author’s understanding of, and intention for, his work. And that despite the strictures of the so-called intentional fallacy—that a work’s meaning should not depend on what we intuit or divine about the author’s intention—nonetheless, such evidence, if it is trustworthy, should not be summarily dismissed or ignored.
And in 1995, for John Jones, the only question left in the revision controversy was whether one calls the Folio text of Hamlet “a revision,” and whether one called the two texts of Lear not a revision but two different versions.
But in fact the game was not really up and over as John Jones optimistically reported. The game was still on. I had registered the opposition case to the Revisers in my magazine piece, which was published in 2002, but it had seemed to me at the time that the Revisers had indeed, as Gary Taylor put it, executed a successful “palace coup” at least within academia and in Shakespeare publishing, since more and more publishers began offering two Lears in different arrays, and Arden was de-conflating Hamlet. The Lost Archetype school seemed to have lost.
But Jones wrote “the game was up” before the powerful counterattack on the revisionist hypothesis made itself felt.
The game was on because influential figures such as Frank Kermode in the United Kingdom and David Bevington and Richard Knowles (editor of the MLA’s Lear Variorum) among others in the United States raised difficult questions about the rush to judgment over Shakespearean revision.
None more difficult than this question: How can we be sure that the major changes, the ones with thematic and esthetic implications, were the work of Shakespeare’s own hand, and not that of some theater manager, compositor or journeyman company playwright adapting Shakespeare’s version for the stage? Was there an infallible, nonsubjective way of knowing what was a Shakespearean revision and what was not?
If we can conjecture an actor (not Shakespeare) adding O-groans to Hamlet’s last words (as many do), why can’t we conjecture an actor or playwright altering Lear’s last words sometime between the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 Folio, published seven years after Shakespeare’s death?
And even assuming the changes were in Shakespeare’s own hand, how can we be sure that the Folio changes were his preferred literary refinements, his thematic rethinking, his sculpting and clarifying of plot and character—as the Revisers tend to assume? Or whether instead some changes represented the exigencies of stage production, the need to cut because of time limitations, additions that might be designed to pander to a theater audience’s easily distracted attention rather than a reader’s close relationship to a text.
The renewed assertions by some scholars, in particular Lukas Erne (in Shakespeare as a Literary Artist, 2002), that Shakespeare thought of himself as a “literary artist,” that he considered his longer playscripts to be his truest, fullest realization of the work—rather than the shorter Folio versions regarded by many as cut for the stage—undermine the largely faith-based case made by most of the revisionists that because the Folio versions were stage-oriented they must represent Shakespeare’s “final intentions” rather than, say, his final compromises.
The game was on because a persuasive review article (in The Shakespeare Newsletter) on a new anthology about the controversy (Lear from Study to Stage, edited by James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten) by Thomas Pendleton suggested the battle had swung back against the Revisers. That among textual scholars the burden of proof was now on the Revisers to demonstrate why we should believe that any given Q to F variant represented “Shakespeare’s considered second thoughts”—as the technical term of art coined by textual mandarin T. Howard-Hill had it—rather than a host of other possible causes.
“Of course there were changes,” Richard Knowles, the Lear Variorum editor, and leader of the resistance to the Revisers, told me over the phone. “The question is, did Shakespeare make the changes”—and did he make the changes to change the meaning he intended for the play or to make it move more swiftly, take less time on stage because the company demanded he do so? Is there any way of knowing whether the “Shakespearean” changes can be identified with enough certainty to make the case that he willingly re-envisioned both or either Hamlet or Lear?
The response from those who are determined to draw firm conclusions from the textual variants has been, largely: well, the changes seem Shakespearean and they can be wrenched into some conceptual correlation to tell a different story from the putative first version—a different, “more Shakespearean” story we’re told—so the new account of the play must have Shakespeare as its source. An argument that can seem circular.
John Jones for instance contends Hamlet is improved by having just one, not two, “delay soliloquies,” so the Folio does the right thing, the Shakespearean thing, in cutting the thirty-five-line “How all occasions do inform against me” fourth-act soliloquy.
Here are those cut lines:
How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus’d. Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’ event—
A thought which quarter’d hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward—I do not know
Why yet I live to say, “This thing’s to do,”
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
&nbs
p; Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts to be bloody, or be nothing worth!
I don’t believe they should be cut. Look at how much further they take us into Hamlet’s thought process (and what else is Hamlet about if it is not about that?). I believe having two delay soliloquies is what makes Hamlet Hamlet (and Hamlet Hamlet) rather than a more streamlined, no-delay Hamlet and Hamlet.
In 1599, James Shapiro follows Jones in arguing for the cut; arguing that the elimination of Hamlet’s last soliloquy was Shakespeare’s choice, although neither Jones nor Shapiro provides any evidence why we must believe it was Shakespeare’s own deliberate choice, rather than, say, a theatrical manager’s cut that got incorporated into the source of the Folio text version.
Shapiro tells us that the thirty-five-line final soliloquy belongs in Hamlet “only if we want to see the play as dark and existential.” (Hamlet “dark and existential”? Who could possibly want that? Let’s have a Hamlet who becomes an action-film hero!)
Instead Shapiro reads Shakespeare’s mind to divine that “In allowing his writing to take him where it would in his first draft Shakespeare had created his greatest protagonist, but the trajectory of Hamlet’s soliloquies had left the resolution of the play incoherent and broken too radically from the conventions of the revenge plot that had to sweep both protagonist and play to a satisfying conclusion. Shakespeare now had to choose between the integrity of his character and his plot and he chose plot. Hamlet’s climactic soliloquy had to be cut.” (Italics mine.)
In other words Shakespeare took his “greatest protagonist” and chose deliberately to make him less “great” in order to provide something more conventional. That’s our Shakespeare—always taking the easy way out. (If it was Shakespeare.)
Note the assumption that ambiguity must mean “incoheren[ce].” Note the assumption by Shapiro that Shakespeare himself would have seen things Shapiro’s way: that his original draft was “incoherent” and that he had to make a choice between “the integrity of his character and his plot.” That Shakespeare preferred conventional revenge-plot simplification to anything too “dark and existential.”
Note the way all these pronouncements are based on the shaky assumption that the cut is “Shakespearean” in origin, although a case could be made that removing unresolved ambiguities diminishes not just what makes Hamlet Hamlet, but what makes Hamlet Shakespearean as opposed to a more conventional contemporary’s work.
This preference for simplifed, some might say dumbed-down versions of Shakespeare can be found in arguments over Lear as well. A particularly analogous example is the argument that the elimination of Lear’s third-act mad-scene mock trial of his daughters in the Folio version makes for similarly more clear-cut and direct action, less “digression.” While some might argue that one reason we value Shakespeare is for his digressive excessiveness, that he would not be Shakespeare if we eliminated the alleged digressiveness in Hamlet and Lear. That, in fact, it is Lear’s madness, the degree of Lear’s madness exemplified in the scene in which he puts his invisible daughters on an invisible witness stand, that is the very height of Shakespearean inventiveness, the loss of which diminishes the character and the play for the sake of more direct action, the way the loss of Hamlet’s last soliloquy does.
The kind of thinking exemplified in Shapiro’s analysis is the subject of a scathing critique by the textual and theoretical scholar Edward Pechter in an issue of the journal Textual Practice. Pechter laments that in preferring the direct-action, no-digression version of Shakespeare, “Shakespeareans have given way to a diminished version of literary art which emphasizes the value of directness over digressiveness without any foundation but their own taste.”
So the question of Lear’s last words is at the heart of a Gordian knot of snarling academic argument perhaps because in this case the stakes are genuinely high. I spent a year at least focused, if not totally, then persistently on the issue. It became a kind of quest: What should we make of the two versions of Lear’s last words? What can the question tell us about two Lears?
AN EMBLEM OF THE APOCALYPSE
The close of Lear you may recall has been characterized by Stephen Booth as “the most terrifying five minutes in literature.”
The terrifying five minutes begin with one of those moments of raised then dashed expectations that recur throughout the play. Cordelia has come at the head of an army to rescue her dispossessed father; she and Lear have been captured and imprisoned. Then the tide shifts once more and the forces allied with Cordelia take charge again. Their new ally, the Duke of Albany, remembers too late—“Great thing of us forgot!”—to send an officer to free Lear and Cordelia from their death sentence.
Many have been struck by the farcical crudeness of that line: “Great thing of us forgot!” It really is a line from a Monty Python sketch, to use an anachronism, and yet it precipitates one of the most profound moments of tragedy in literature. A deliberate juxtaposition? A way of heightening the Beckett-like absurdity? One can’t help wondering what was going on in Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote “Great thing of us forgot!”—and if he then looked over the play and let it stand. Perhaps he liked the conspicuous irrelevance of its tone. Or perhaps he never looked back at it at all. But I digress.
In fact the messenger Albany sends arrives too late. They hang Cordelia. Something we learn only when Lear enters carrying her dead or near-dead body, literally howling with grief.
“She’s dead as earth,” he says in both versions as he sets her body down and calls out for a mirror. One he can hold up to his daughter’s lips in a desperate effort to see, “If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,/Why then she lives.”
The tragic spectacle evokes from Kent and Edgar this shocked and sorrowful exchange, which alludes to more than merely the sight of Lear bending over the dead body of Cordelia. Makes it an emblem of the apocalypse.
KENT: Is this the promis’d end?
EDGAR: Or image of that horror?
So Lear has called out for a mirror (or reflective “stone”) but there’s a puzzling shift in his next speech, when, instead of a mirror, he seems to be holding up a feather to Cordelia’s lips to see if there’s any breath to stir the feather. Has a mirror not been forthcoming and a feather (perhaps from his or another’s costume) been found and substituted? (How to play the mirror-and-feather moment is a question debated by scholars and directors for centuries.)
In any case, after holding the feather up to Cordelia’s lips, Lear suddenly exclaims:
This feather stirs, she lives. If it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows …
The teasing moment of apparent redemption doesn’t last more than an instant before Lear seems to have lost hope:
I might have sav’d her, now she’s gone for ever!
Then the next moment he seems to imagine he hears her alive and uttering something:
Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little. Ha!
What is’t thou say’st? Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low …
Like Lear we, the audience, are jolted back and forth between hope and despair.
But then Lear seems to lose interest, or give up the delusion that she lives. He talks to his long-lost loyal retainer, Kent; a messenger arrives to announce the villainous Edmund’s death
; Edgar and Albany and Kent converse, tying up loose ends of the plot. Then suddenly Lear breaks into the play again, does something that catches their attention once more as he cries out in his very last utterance in the play:
And my poor fool is hang’d. No, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? O thou wilt come no more,
Never, never, never.
Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.
O, o, o, o …
[and after a brief interval] Break, heart, I prithee break.
Again these are his last utterances in the earliest of the two Lear texts, the Quarto first published in 1608. But in the Folio version of 1623, the last two lines above—“O, o, o, o … Break, heart, I prithee break”—are omitted. (Actually the “Break, heart …” line is assigned to Kent after he sees Lear and Cordelia dead.) The four O-groans just like those added to Folio Hamlet’s dying words are cut from Folio Lear’s—perhaps someone was conscious of the potential repetition in the two tragedies. And there are now five “nevers”: “Never, never, never, never, never.” An order of magnitude difference from three “nevers.” (Try saying first three, then five.) And the following two lines, two lines that are, to some, the most powerful in Shakespeare, are added:
Do you see this? Look on her! Look her lips,
Look there, look there.
(He dies.)
TWO VISIONS OF “LOOK THERE”
“Look there,” indeed. Almost an echo of Hamlet’s opening line, “Who’s there?”, with its evocation of a deeper mystery than the name of a sentry—the mystery of who’s out there, who’s the moving spirit or being out there in the cosmos? “Look there, look there” may be the greatest mystery of Lear, one of the greatest in all Shakespeare, and at the very heart of the controversy over who “Shakespeare the Writer” was, as well.
The Shakespeare Wars Page 17