It turns out that Andrews and Werstine had a mentor in common, Leeds Barroll, himself a colleague of Fredson Bowers, the man who coined the phrase “the veil of print.”
Andrews had been inspired to take up the study of Shakespeare as a Princeton undergraduate, but it wasn’t until doing graduate study at Vanderbilt, “when I ended up being assigned as an assistant editor for a new journal called Shakespeare Studies edited by Leeds Barroll, that I really got into the subject matter, particularly textual matters. As it turned out I did a dissertation on the typesetters and compositors who had worked on the First Folio. There had been a dissertation that had been published in the sixties by an associate of Fredson Bowers, William S. Kable, and Leeds had published that dissertation in a monograph and what Kable was doing was analyzing the spelling patterns in the Pavier Quartos.”
Ah, the Pavier Quartos.* Bear with me, ye faint of heart who might not yet have come to see the elusive, arcane allure of textual studies, in which such delicious mysteries as the Pavier Quartos thrive. One of those veils within the veil of print, the Pavier Quartos were a set of ten single-play quarto-size versions of Shakespeare’s plays that appeared in 1619, three years after his death and four years before the 1623 First Folio with its thirty-six plays.
Some of them seem to have been backdated versions of earlier Quartos. Some scholars believe they can be mined for clues to the “original Shakespeare” beneath the veil of type.
So after much microscopic study of spelling problems and—yes—a disorienting spell on the Hinman Collator (“I couldn’t take it, it made me seasick”), Andrews told me, “I ended up refuting the thesis I was going to base my thesis on [the Kable thesis, that Lear’s Compositor B was involved in the Pavier Quartos] and discovered that the Pavier Quartos were set as much by another figure who I named ‘Compositor G.’ ”
Another shadowy figure in the subterranean drama of the print shops, another nameless figure beneath the veil of print—one whom no scholar had thought to envision before.
“And it turned out at the same time that Peter Blayney who was working at Cambridge came up with the same theory.”
Blayney is a living legend among textual scholars—long considered the ne plus ultra of that elite breed, particularly when it came to Lear. His vast book about the printing of the 1608 Quarto of Lear is regarded as the last word on the idiosyncrasies of that document, and for two decades now scholars have been waiting for him to finish its counterpart, his study of the printing of the 1623 Folio version of Lear. Many hoped Blayney’s second book would clarify at last the question of whether the differences between the two Lears were the result of print-shop compositors’ idiosyncrasies or of Shakespeare’s own revisions—one of the great controversies in all Shakespeare studies (see chapter 4).
But I’d kept hearing word that Blayney had abandoned the project, that in some sense the magnitude of it had devoured him.
“People are in awe or despair about Blayney, aren’t they, about the fate of the second volume?” I asked Andrews.
“Yes,” said Andrews a bit reticently, as if he knew more than he could say.
“What have you heard?”
“Well, he’s very meticulous. It takes him a long time. But it may not be definitive. I don’t think anything is ever definitive.…”
Nothing is ever definitive … Is this the tragic epitaph for the encounter between some of the most brilliant minds in the scholarly world and the recalcitrant mysteries that lie behind the veil of print in Shakespeare studies?
I took this opportunity to ask Andrews about Hand D and found he tended to agree with me that the thematic argument that it was Shakespeare’s work was persuasive. But he also adduced a remarkable theatrical moment in support of Hand D’s Shakespearean authenticity:
“Back in 1996 I had formed an organization called the Shakespeare Guild and we had organized an award in honor of John Gielgud and we presented the award for the first time to Ian McKellen, and he accepted it—in a ceremony in May of ’96—at the Folger. And he talked about Sir John [Gielgud] and he said that if there might have been any point at which Sir John had envied Ian McKellen, it was that perhaps he [McKellen] was the first to do on stage the lines that Shakespeare had written for Sir Thomas More [from Hand D]. And what he did that night was the speech of More reproving the mob.”
“The poor expelled immigrants heading for the ports?”
“Yes, and of course he related it to his own cause [gay rights] you know, strangers … And it was powerful, and as he read it you could very readily think that only Shakespeare could have written it.”
Andrews does, however, agree with one of Paul Werstine’s critiques of the Hand D attribution: that too many conclusions can be drawn from Hand D’s lack of punctuation.
“If we concede, as I think we should, that Shakespeare must have overseen the deliberate mispunctuation of the Peter Quince Prologue in Midsummer Night’s Dream, why shouldn’t we assume that the rest of the punctuation—especially in a Quarto as good as the 1598 Dream, or the Merchant of Venice, which was published in the following year—why shouldn’t we take seriously the notion that he actually prepared a script, whether or not for publication, that was carefully pointed. I must say that the [new skeptical orthodoxy] that we can’t draw any conclusions, that we can’t draw any conclusions about Shakespeare’s punctuation and spelling from especially the good Quartos, goes too far. Now I may draw too many inferences. But I find there is a consistency, evidence of care in overseeing the manuscript, whether or not he saw it through press.”
It seemed to me that what Andrews was advancing was a neo–New Bibliography theory of a more sophisticated and limited sort than that advanced by those who thought we could remove the veil of print entirely. What Andrews is suggesting is that we can at times part the veil, get some glimpses of Shakespeare paying careful attention to the preparation of his theatrical manuscripts—unlike the now-popular image from Shakespeare in Love of someone who dashed off scripts and sent them to the playhouse and went on to the next without looking back.
I asked Andrews whether there was much of a movement to return to unmodernized spelling editions.
“To a limited extent,” he said, “the variorum editions used basically a transcription of the facsimile of the original texts. But even the [1986] Oxford original spelling edition which was, in the scholarly realm, at least a major victory for the concept of original spelling, often wasn’t—often didn’t present the original text but included editors’ emendations.”
So how did he end up producing a major edition of Shakespeare that few knew they needed, fewer had ever seen, but which changes the way one reads Shakespeare, changes the way one hears Shakespeare in one’s mind? I found reading Andrews’s original spelling Hamlet for instance a striking experience because of the way it defamiliarized the all-too-familiar text, and gave me a strange sense of coming upon the play for the first time.
It began, Andrews told me, when he was invited by the Doubleday Literary Guild imprint to do a deluxe edition of Shakespeare. “I had originally intended to do what most editors do, which is start with someone’s modernized version and add my own notes and introduction, but I decided to look back at some of the original facsimiles and again it was Midsummer Night’s Dream which caught my attention. One line in particular in the original edition. In the very first speech of Hippolyta, in which she refers to ‘the moon, like to a silver Bow/Now bent in heaven …’ Which every subsequent editor has changed to ‘the moon, like to a silver bow/New bent in heaven … ’ ”
Here was an instance he thought where the original “now” is just as good, or even better, in emphasizing imminence than the emendation to “new.”
The more he looked the more he felt that, after the Literary Guild edition (which contained some, but not many, reversions to original spelling), he wanted to produce a more thoroughly unmodernized spelling edition. In his Everyman edition he only made two minor compromises, he says: he reduced the long S’s (
the ones that are easily confused with f’s) to contemporary-looking s’s and he distinguished between the u and v letters in a way such that “love” was printed “love,” not “loue.” Andrews also retained much of the promiscuous, often irregular and arbitrary capitalization and got Everyman, the British publisher, to go along with it.
“So how did you convince Everyman to do it?” I asked Andrews.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “And I’m not sure if they’d do it over again if they had the choice,” he said laughing.
I told Andrews I wanted to get back to that line in his Everyman textual introduction in which he speaks of the way “Shakespeare revelled in the freedom a largely unanchored language provided.”
“That phrase, ‘unanchored language’: Are you implying that Shakespeare was thinking and writing in a different way than we imagine ourselves thinking and using words?”
“I think so, yes,” he said. “You know [T. S.] Eliot—I don’t think he was talking about this specifically, but Eliot talked about the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ and his sense that somehow there was a change in our relationship to language that was related to the very way we think and feel. Something that happened sometime after the time of Shakespeare and Donne. And I think that he’s speaking about the language before it became rigidified, before it became codified and ruled out multiplicity. You know I once heard Robert Fagles [the acclaimed translator of Homer] speak at Princeton, and he quoted D. H. Lawrence who said something like, ‘Before Plato told the great lie about Ideas, men went slippery like fishes and didn’t care.’ I’m not sure what exactly Lawrence was getting at but I do think Shakespeare was using language in that way, ‘slippery like fishes,’ malleable. You didn’t have any grammars, no one had codified grammar or spelling. I think for Shakespeare spelling was a trope—you could play around with the form of words just the way you could do other figurative things with words.”
This seemed important to me: spelling as a trope, Shakespeare deliberately using the unanchored multiplicity of the spelling of the time to create a cloud of potential meanings hanging in the air when the words were uttered, radiating polysemy on the page. Which makes a return to something closer to, if not assuredly identical with, the original important, a way of deepening an experience of “the Shakespearean.”
I thought of Jonathan Bate’s analogy to the Cambridge physicists and the Copenhagen model of the atom, a nucleus surrounded by a cloud of possible electron paths, none of which could be pinned down without uncertainty about their position—a cloud of unanchored meanings all potentially valid, none pinned down, though some ruled out by quantum limitations.
I tried this out on Andrews, who didn’t recoil at the metaphor from physics.
“Yes, if one approaches language with an awareness that the language as spoken and heard at that time was a richer medium than when committed to manuscript or print. You have a sound, and when you hear the ‘Ay/I’ sound, sitting in the Globe in Richard II, you don’t know how those lines should read on paper. There are multiple possibilities in the spoken language that you can’t preserve when you put it in a single written form. And so the written form is a transposition from a richer medium to a medium that is more limited.”
Transposition. It’s that tongues-of-flame trope again. The paradoxical notion that the original spelling has less to do with letters on the page than the sound in the air, freeing letters on the page to enjoy their full efflorescence, one might say, in the multiplicities of tone and coloration that the ear, the mind, afford sounds.
AT SIXES AND SEVENS
“And I think Shakespeare must have known it,” Andrews told me. “I find this over and over in the works: if there’s any possibility for it to have multiple implications, it will. For example at the end of The Tempest there’s a passage where Ariel is telling Prospero about the state of Prospero’s captive enemies and Ariel says, ‘they cannot budge till your release.’ And the way we would naturally interpret that is ‘they cannot budge till you release them.’ But it’s not very long after that that Ariel tells Prospero what he would do if he were human and then Prospero decides that he’ll forgive his captives. And I think that what happens there is that Prospero experiences ‘your release’ no longer as ‘you releasing them,’ but ‘your release,’ as in his release, a personal release, from the tyranny of his own self that allows him to forgive and release his enemies.”
Andrews’s choice of “release” as an example is a fortuitous one in the larger sense. In a peculiar way that I was becoming convinced was important, related to Peter Brook’s belief that splitting open a line of Shakespeare will release infinite energies, unmodernized spelling can release from mere lettering the polysemous radiant cloud of unanchored—but nonrandom—meaning.
What Andrews is suggesting is a deepening of the notion of close reading to close listening. That close reading isn’t close enough unless it takes into account the “trope of spelling” as Andrews puts it—the way unanchored spelling, multiple ambiguous letter combinations are only truly “released” when they are released from the page to be experienced as spoken and heard on the stage.
I asked him if he thought there was a kind of hierarchy of the most complete, the deepest way of experiencing Shakespeare.
“Are you saying that reading aloud or hearing players speak aloud from an original spelling text is going to be closer than anything else?”
“I would think so,” he said, “I think what we need is to recover the ability to hear the words as we read them, even if we’re reading them silently, and to be alert to the possibility that when we read it, a word that has one form on the page may have other possible forms when it’s embodied in sound.”
It would in addition be not without interest to get closer if possible to the way Shakespeare heard and pronounced his own words, an attempt that may not yield certainty but might often yield surprises like “Shroudly” casting a subterranean chill on “shrewdly.”
I asked Andrews why he thought more companies didn’t do Shakespeare from original spelling texts. He said he’d spoken with the conductors who design the music for the restored Globe. “They’re part of the early music movement, playing Bach on the clavichord and all that. The Globe is doing some of it musically, but I don’t think they’ve addressed the language. I remember seeing a Globe production of Henry V in which they had the traditional all-male cast, in costumes that were Elizabethan, in a staging that was Elizabethan, or as near an approximation as they could find—and then you had various characters referring to ‘the Dauphin’ as the heir to the French throne, while in the early printings of course they say ‘Dolphin.’ And if you Frenchify it you lose something.”
“You lose the subcurrent of ridicule in calling him ‘Dolphin’?”
“Yes, and there’s one place where there’s a reference to Louvre—‘the Louvre’s balls.’ And in the Folio ‘Louvre’ is spelled ‘Lover,’ so you lose the pun ‘Lover’s Balls.’ ”
Andrews’s passion for the original printing extends beyond original spelling and original punctuation to original lineation. Or perhaps it’s more fair to his point of view to say that he’s anti-tampering: that he believes one ought to adopt the Hippocratic philosophy when approaching the original printings: first do no harm, don’t tamper with irregularities and idiosyncrasies, because in doing so one risks missing what might be hidden within the apparently irrelevant irregularity. In support of original lineation he cites the way many contemporary editors rearrange two crucial lines in Richard II.
“York comes in after hearing three or four pieces of bad news at a time. And he has a long speech that is very messy metrically, and every editor tries to realign it into some pattern that would make it more regular. And then I noticed the final line, which is too long, the line that ends with ‘everything is at six and seven.’ ” In the unmodernized Folio version of Richard II this is rendered:
I should to Plashy too, but time will not permit,
All is uneven and eve
ry thing is left at six and seven.
The problem with these lines is that they depart radically from the standard ten-syllable iambic pentameter line. The last line containing “six and seven” consists of a full fourteen syllables. In the Riverside edition of Shakespeare’s complete works the editor treats the fourteen-syllable line as a mistake and rearranges the last lines like this:
I should to Plashy too,
But time will not permit. All is uneven,
And every thing is left at six and seven.
It leaves two lines regularized at ten syllables each (and almost rhyming), but Andrews noticed something when preparing the Literary Guild edition of Richard II. “In that final line with ‘every thing is left at six and seven’ if you keep the original fourteen-syllable version you find in the sixth metrical unit is the word ‘six’ and in the seventh is the word ‘seven.’ ”
Not only is it an instance of the jeweled clockwork of Shakespearean verse, not only is it another instance, he suggests, in which one imagines that Shakespeare may have overseen the printing in order to ensure that the expressive irregularity of the meter was preserved in the lineation, just as with the expressive mispunctuation of Peter Quince’s Prologue. But also, as Andrews points out, “It accounts for everything that precedes that speech.” He argues the irregularity is a deliberate expression of a disordered mind. At Yale the New Critics used to call this the fallacy of imitative form—disordered verse expressing a disordered mind. But here disorder is both expressed and captured by a higher order.
Impressed as I was by Andrews’s arguments, even more by such instances of his attentiveness to Shakespeare’s language, I was, I admit, reluctant to concede that in effect I’d been “doing it wrong” all my life, by reading Shakespeare in modern spelling editions. And yet I found myself not alone in seeing some merit in Andrews’s arguments. Peter Ackroyd’s a true believer. The OED’s Jesse Sheidlower, no inconsiderable student of language, felt impassioned on the question. It’s not for nothing that Stephen Booth and Helen Vendler both include facsimile unmodernized versions of the Sonnets in their editions. And shortly after interviewing Andrews I was visiting one of the most erudite nonacademic writers I knew, Daniel Kunitz, who writes art criticism for venues that range from Harper’s to the New Criterion. The grandson of a poet, he had studied pre-seventeenth-century poetry as a graduate student at Columbia with a legendary Shakespearean teacher, Ted Tayler; he knew his Shakespeare and he knew his metrics. He was skeptical about Peter Hall’s end-stopped line structure argument. And at first when I reviewed for him John Andrews’s arguments for unmodernized spelling editions, he was incredulous.
The Shakespeare Wars Page 35