The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  I, no; no I, for I must nothing be …

  Suddenly, read this way we realize we have come upon one of the most complex meditations on the first person, the subject I, the subjective eye, in all Shakespeare.

  This version, Andrews says, “permits each ‘I’ to indicate either ‘ay’ (as in, ‘ay, yes’) or ‘I’ (‘I’ being a normal spelling for ‘ay’ in Shakespeare’s day). Understanding ‘I’ as ‘I’ [and not ‘ay’] permits corollary word play on ‘no,’ which can be heard, at least in its first occurrence as ‘know’ [as in ‘know I’ rather than ‘no, ay’]. At the same time the second and third soundings of ‘I,’ if not the first, can also be heard as ‘eye.’ In the situation in which this speech occurs, that construction echoes a thematically pertinent exhortation from Matthew 18:9—’if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.’

  “But these are not all the meanings ‘I’ can have here,” Andrews continues. “ ‘I’ can also represent the Roman numeral for ‘1’ which will soon be diminished, as Richard explains, to ‘nothing,’ (0), zero along with the speaker’s title, his worldly possession … his life … to become ‘no thing’ or at best ‘an O-thing.’ In addition to its other dimensions, then, Richard’s response is a statement that can be formulated mathematically, and in symbols that adumbrate the binary system behind today’s computer technology: ‘1, 0, 0, 1 for 1 must 0 be.’ ”

  I’m still not sure I completely follow that last step into ones and zeroes, but I do follow Andrews’s larger point: that the ambiguity of spelling releases us to focus on sound. Thus restores, reambiguates Shakespeare’s language. The multiply spelled, ambiguous word when spoken aloud gives us the richness of the unanchored, multiple meanings of its sound.

  This eye-ear distinction is an important one to Andrews, a key reason he believes the unmodernized spelling question matters so much, and he expresses its importance in a passage that returns us once again to Bottom and his dream:

  “As the word ‘audience’ may help us to remember, people who frequented the Globe usually spoke of ‘hearing’ rather than ‘seeing’ a play. If we’re serious about analyzing and reanimating the works we know to have been composed for that magic circle [the original Globe audience] we will learn to do likewise.” When we read unmodernized spelling editions, “We’ll reacquire the capacity to listen with our eyes.” Once again that eye/ear reversal!

  Recent Shakespearean biographer Peter Ackroyd also argues the case for unmodernized spelling and uses it in all his citations, even to the point of printing the original “u” for “v” as in “loue.” Ackroyd argues “the fussing of successive printers and editors has curbed and flattened [Shakespeare’s] native sonority. Any standardization or modernization of Shakespeare’s language robs it of half its strength.” So Andrews is not alone in making this argument. Or in seeing that it is not pedantic, fussy or arcane but rather seeks to undo fussiness.

  To “listen with our eyes.” Andrews was referring to the ability when “sight-reading a Shakespearean score” in the original spelling, to hear both “I” and “ay” (and “eye”) for instance, when we read it silently. Rather than only seeing and reading “ay,” as the more modern editions have it.

  But I was fascinated by the recollection, the not-so-buried allusion in “listening with the eyes” to the delirious dreamlike synesthesia in Bottom’s recollection of his dream: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen.”

  Original spelling, Andrews seemed to be arguing, brings us closer to the original delirious synesthesia that so successfully put a spell on Shakespeare’s original audiences, the spell that unanchored spelling liberates.

  Andrews builds upon this point in the textual introduction to his Everyman editions (which he describes as “hybrids” that return as much as possible to the unmodernized versions of the plays) when he says, “Shakespeare revelled in the freedom a largely unanchored language provided.”

  Shakespeare reveled … I thought Andrews seemed to be coming close to saying something beyond original spelling, beyond polysemy (multiple potential meanings), something about the way Shakespeare thought.

  When I first spoke to Andrews over the phone I read him that line about Shakespeare reveling in the unanchored language. Did he mean Shakespeare thought differently from the way we think in our now-anchored language—is that why the original spelling question has the fascination it does? Because language affects, shapes thought as much as the reverse?

  “Yes,” he said. “You know it seems to me that what we’re gradually beginning to recover is something of the sensibility of the period, and it’s happening in a lot of different ways. In the archaeology that has gone into restoring the Globe and the Blackfriars [theaters] and a lot of the work that other scholars have done to try to recover the manners and the intellectual life of the period. But one of the things that surprises me is that there has been so little focus on the degree to which the language that we use differs, in I think rather fundamental ways, from the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. And I think it’s partly because we’re used to thinking of Shakespeare as a modern writer, because virtually every contemporary edition translates Shakespeare—and I don’t think ‘translates’ is too strong a word—into modern orthography, modern punctuation, often modern grammar.

  “It’s amazing to me,” he continued, “how much we’ve adapted Shakespeare to our time and our sense of what the language ought to be.” Adapted it, that is, without most people realizing that what they’re reading and hearing is an adaptation.

  It’s interesting to put Andrews’s complaint alongside those of the so-called purists who reject “adaptation” of Shakespeare for film, and yet read and often see and hear onstage a Shakespeare whose language is adapted, in effect, rendered in (to use Don Foster’s term) a different “linguistic fabric” entirely, more like contemporary polyester than Shakespeare’s more rough-hewn, irregularly colored linsey-woolsey.

  “And yet we don’t do that with Chaucer or Milton,” Andrews said.

  “And what’s lost, you’re saying, is what the language was like at its very origins,” I asked, “the way Shakespeare thought of the words he wrote, the way his actors thought of them as they spoke them, the way the audience heard them?”

  TONGUES OF FLAME

  And then Andrews said something that both captured the stakes in the question and raised them immeasurably:

  “There was an essay that C. S. Lewis wrote called ‘Transposition,’ ” he said. “I think it was a sermon actually delivered on a Pentecost Sunday, a celebration based on the incident in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, when all of a sudden there were tongues of fire that descended and the apostles all began speaking in different languages—the ‘speaking in tongues’ passage.

  “And Lewis was trying to account for that and what he ended up with was what I thought was a very striking analogy that has to do with translating something that is in effect three-dimensional into something that is a two-dimensional reality. What we do [in reverse] when we use perspective in painting.”

  “So Lewis was saying …”

  “What I think he was trying to do was account for the difficulty of translating a spiritual experience into ordinary language.”

  “So the analogy is that translating Shakespeare from the polysemous unanchored original spelling is in a way a ‘transposition’ from a richer to a lesser dimensionality?” I asked. “A sphere to a flat plane?”

  “I think that’s right,” he said. “For example just to take spellings, when you think of a word like ‘rack,’ there are at least two ways in which it can be spelled in Shakespeare’s time, ‘r-a-c-k’ and ‘w-r-a-c-k.’ And if you’re a member of an audience and you hear that word spoken and you don’t see it printed one way or another in a book, you don’t know how it’s spelled, so it can have more than one possibility” hanging in the insubstantial unanchored air that is the medium of sound that unites actor and audience.

  To push Andrews’s “tongues of
fire” analogy a little further than Lewis and even Andrews might have wanted (and in a slightly different direction), the “tongues of fire” that represent the dimensionality of Shakespeare that modernized editions lose could suggest as well the mystery that surrounds the “tongue of fire”—Shakespeare’s own tongue, the special dimension of linguistic genius Shakespeare possessed. Or it could suggest the “Muse of fire” he called upon in the prologue of Henry V, who began that play with the line “O for a Muse of fire … and monarchs to behold the swelling scene!” A muse to swell its stage-born flatness with a dimensionality, to effect a transposition of the narrow confines of the Globe Theatre into the spherical expansiveness of the globe, in the sense of the entire human cosmos.

  Restoring the original spelling is for Andrews a way back to more than orthographic origins, but a way—through the polyphony and polysemy unleashed by the unanchored orthography—of restoring the missing dimensionality, the source of the tongue of fire within Shakespeare’s thought itself, the bottomless dimensionality of his flickering linguistic resonances.

  Andrews cites another example of dimensionality that has been lost. “There’s a passage at the end of King Lear as Lear is dying and either Edgar or Albany (depending on the text used) says, ‘let him passe, he hates him/That would upon the rack of this tough world/Stretch him out longer.’ In every modern edition except for mine,” Andrews said, “ ‘rack’ is spelled ‘r-a-c-k’ and that’s what the image encourages us to think, because ‘stretched’ suggests the idea of the rack as instrument of torture.”

  In the unmodernized spelling however it’s “wracke,” which can also mean “wreck” or “wreckage.”

  “Which suggests a more ‘Waste Land’–like image?” I asked. “Lear stretched out over the wreck of this tough world is less a physical stretching out than a stretching out over time in this realm of ruin?” (I couldn’t help thinking about “prey” and “pray” on garbage.)

  “Yes, or rather ‘wracke’ gives you both.”

  What struck me about Andrews was his willingness to admit the contingency of some of his arguments. There is undoubtedly a certain extent to which the strongest version of his case is contingent on a strong connection between the spelling that appears in the early printed texts and Shakespeare’s own (lost) handwritten spelling. A connection impossible to make absent any surviving handwritten manuscript (aside from the conjectural Hand D). We just have no certain evidence whose spelling “wracke” is.

  But Andrews’s argument does not depend solely on a direct link. In its broadest sense, it depends more on the fact that the language shared by Shakespeare, the scribes and compositors was far more “unanchored”: pluripotentiality and polysemousness were built into it regardless of how any one word was spelled, or by whom it was spelled. Any version of “wracke” would have given you every version of wracke. Each word was a “drop in the ocean” of a different sort of sea from the one we swim in, a more fluid ocean of words.

  I raised an objection to Andrews that I had heard posed to the different but not unrelated “original punctuation” movement. The latter has had a particular appeal to American actors having trouble “sight-reading” Shakespeare’s language. It argues that, when seeking for moments of dramatic pause, forget Peter Hall’s end-stopped line structure, but rather follow religiously the punctuation to be found in the First Folio edition of the plays because the First Folio versions of the plays were the ones “prepared” for the theater or reflected the way they were performed at the theater. In any case they argue that First Folio punctuation was closer to Shakespeare’s own “final intentions” for how his lines should be read.

  But subsequent skeptical investigation of the Folio and its compositors has undermined confidence that the Folio punctuation can be reliably said to reflect Shakespeare’s wishes as opposed to the type shop compositors’ whims.

  The original spelling argument depends less on an imagined Shakespearean origin of the spelling, more on the fabric of the language he used, the potentially shifting coloration of the words with their multiple spellings and concomitant multiple meanings. Unmodernized spelling theory as adumbrated by Andrews depicts Shakespeare writing what he heard in his head rather than hearing the meaning a particular spelling dictated.

  Still Andrews displayed a commendable and rare scholarly modesty when he admitted that the evidence linking the spelling, say, of “Shroudly” in the Quarto to Shakespeare’s own hand in the original manuscript version was conjectural and that “Shroudly” could be a compositor’s choice or error.

  But Andrews did point out several examples of places where there is some suggestive indication that Shakespeare did supervise some punctuation—traces of Shakespeare’s supervisory presence.

  Andrews referred me to a hilarious passage in Midsummer Night’s Dream involving Peter Quince, the author of the comically primitive version of Pyramus and Thisby which Bottom and his fellow Mechanicals present at the wedding of the Athenian nobles in the final act of the Dream.

  Quince, as author, comes on first as a character called “Prologue,” to address the Athenian wedding feast audience with, yes, a prologue. One that becomes a comic tour de force entirely by means of punctuation. Or rather mispunctuation. Mispunctuation which expresses Peter Quince’s nervous, halting, hesitant delivery in front of such an august audience.

  Here’s how Quince’s Prologue reads in the modernized Folio version (take note of the role punctuation plays):

  If we offend, it is with our good will.

  That you should think, we come not to offend,

  But with good will. To show our simple skill

  That is the true beginning of our end.

  Consider then, we come but in despite.

  We do not come, as minding to content you,

  Our true intent is. All for your delight,

  We are not here. That you should here repent you,

  The actors are at hand; and, by their show,

  You shall know all, that you are like to know.

  My favorite part is, “All for your delight,/We are not here.” Theseus, who gets the joke, makes a comment on “pointing,” as punctuation was (and among scholars, still is) known:

  “This fellow doth not stand upon points.”

  And Lysander adds, almost as if channeling the voice of Peter Hall: “He had rid his prologue like a rough colt; he knows not the stop.”

  There is so much to love, so much surefire comic business in this halting prologue that Peter Quince has become a favorite minor part of major actors. If done right—and it’s hard to do wrong—it always gets serial bursts of sympathetic laughter, because it plays on, brings to the fore, the great fear we all feel of appearing, being observed on stage, the fear we admire actors for overcoming.

  But there’s something haunting and forlorn that struck me about the passage after my attention was drawn to it again by John Andrews:

  … All for your delight,

  We are not here.

  We are not here. It anticipates Theseus’s beautiful line about the unreality of all actors good or bad: “The best in this kind are but shadows.”

  We are not here: this self-canceling line beautifully captures the unreal world that actors on stage occupy: here but not here. To have being and not to have being. “Here” enough to express the fact they’re not here.

  And then there’s the self-referential allusion to “Good Will” as in Good Will Shakespeare: “we come not to offend,/But with Good Will.”

  One does not have to go Good Will hunting to figure out which Will the Prologue (who, it is often suggested, was played by Good Will, typecast as a playwright) is speaking of with such self-referential self-deprecation.

  And it all depends on punctuation, on “pointing,” on Good Will pointing to himself in fact. Andrews argues that this is one place of all places where we might expect that Shakespeare would have been present at some point to supervise the punctuation of those lines, in the printed text, since everything�
��selling all that great comic business—depends on getting the punctuation wrong in the right way.

  This is another one of those passages that, once I had my attention drawn to it for one reason, I found myself looking at it more closely than before, and suddenly felt the presence of Shakespeare, the imprint of “the Shakespearean.”

  After all, Peter Quince was a playwright as well as an actor, and as an actor he’s playing a playwright, actually he’s playing a part called “Prologue,” and there’s a relationship here I’d suggest between his Prologue and the figure called “Prologue” in Henry V. Both are stand-ins for the playwright, for Shakespeare, and both in their own comic and serious ways expound upon the insubstantiality of the pageant they play in. And, in some touching and moving way, the insubstantiality of the pageant we are all actors in, on the other side of the division between stage and pit. The “vast insubstantial pageant,” the “little life rounded with a dream” which that final playwright figure in Shakespeare, Prospero, finally abjures.

  Indeed Peter Quince’s comic “repent you,/The actors are at hand” (I think we’re meant to think he’d meant to say “attend you”) carries with it the echo of “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”—the New Testament invocation of the end of this insubstantial world.

  SLIPPERY, LIKE FISHES

  Andrews had a couple of other fascinating examples of what seems like Good Will’s presence, supervising his manuscripts’ printing, but let me first put Andrews himself in perspective. In a sense he represents the opposite pole of Paul Werstine’s epistemological skepticism about Shakespearean texts. Andrews is a defender of some of the optimism of the New Bibliographers: that one could conjecture a glimpse of the true face of Shakespeare beneath the veil of print. It’s a particularly interesting opposition since, like Werstine, Andrews emerged from a similar scholarly focus early in his career: the inky realm of the type shops and the murky, shadowy personae of the alphabetically denoted type-shop compositors, the elusive actors in the incomplete dramatic narrative of the printing of Shakespeare: “Compositor A,” “Compositor B,” “C,” etc. Andrews for instance is credited with identifying the particularly elusive “Compositor G,” who may have a double identity.