Bradley, Greg, Folger: Great Shakespeareans Volume IX 9781472554857, 9780826446114

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Series Editors’ Preface

What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This series is designed to explore those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on cultures local, national and international is a neverending task, as we continually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each culture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important figures in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is therefore not restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and commentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson) but our list deliberately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville, Joyce), poets (Keats, Eliot, Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett, Césaire) and composers (Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impossible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been profound, like Marx and Freud. Deciding who to include has been less difficult than deciding who to exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclusion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous regrets over some outstanding figures who ended up just outside this project. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may find our choices too Anglophone, insufficiently global. Others may complain of the lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed to establish a new canon, nor are our volumes intended to be encyclopedic in scope. The series is not entitled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ nor is it ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope, be seen as negotiating

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and occupying a space mid-way along the spectrum of inclusivity and arbitrariness. Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of Shakespeare on their particular figure and of their figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as providing a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider context within which her/his work might be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case and, at times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasping a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays influenced Dryden’s own practice. To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopedia would include nor the standard article length of academic journals and Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans per volume – and as few as two in the case of volume 10 – our contributors have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and a section of further reading. We hope the volumes will appeal to those who already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean and to those trying to find a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our appreciation of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures, and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has meant. Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

Notes on Contributors

Michael Bristol is Greenshields Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at McGill University in Montréal, Québec. Much of his work has been concerned with situating Shakespeare’s works in the social context of their production and reception. He is the author of several books on Shakespeare’s theatre, including Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (Methuen, 1985); Shakespeare’s America / America’s Shakespeare (Routledge, 1990), and Big-Time Shakespeare (Routledge, 1996). His most recent publication is Shakespeare and Moral Agency (Continuum, 2010), a volume of essays focused on the philosophical context of the plays. Since his retirement he has tried, with limited success, to become a flâneur. Cary DiPietro teaches Shakespeare and non-Shakespearean drama, as well as courses in narrative and twentieth-century literature, at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He is the author of Shakespeare and Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which explores the interactions between two cultural moments, Shakespeare’s and that of the early twentieth century. Recent work includes articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, and the journal Shakespeare, and a chapter on Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw in Shakespeare and the Irish Writer (Eds. Janet Clare and Stephen O’Neill, University College Dublin Press, 2010). Andrew Murphy is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (University Press of Kentucky, 1999), Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Shakespeare for the People: Working-class Readers, 1800–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and his edited volumes include The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality (Manchester University Press, 2000) and A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text (Blackwell, 2007).

Introduction Cary DiPietro

Every age recasts Shakespeare in its own image. More than a century of professional criticism has made this observation axiomatic. The romanticist aspiration to achieve some kind of unmediated access to the real Shakespeare, the genius behind the plays and poems, or, for that matter, to the plays as he actually wrote and performed them, has long since given way to the rational scepticism of academic inquiry. Even if at the heart of that inquiry a desire for the authentic Shakespeare often remains – in the belief, for example, that through bibliographic examination we might reconstruct an authorial text from the various early printed texts that have descended to us, or that we can seek to understand the material conditions of life in the Elizabethan period to know what absent historical records do not tell us directly about Shakespeare or the conditions of performance in his theatre – we know well in our own critical paradigm that such authenticity is a chimera. Rather than a knowable entity, Shakespeare is a cultural palimpsest; when we scratch away the surface of the text, we read another written by ourselves. Following the common convention, I use ‘Shakespeare’ here to refer primarily to a set of texts that conventionally – though, in some cases, not un-problematically – bear his name, but ‘Shakespeare’ also encompasses a range of interrelated practices, the things that we do with the texts, from performing and criticizing them to adapting, parodying, painting, even, as Michael Bristol discusses in his chapter on Henry Clay Folger, simply buying them. If we might be inclined to see in the material object of the text some kind of real existence – think of the Complete Works sitting on your shelf, some 37 plays, narrative poems and sonnets all gathered together, regularized, edited, and neatly packaged – the texts that we use had no existence in Shakespeare’s lifetime in the forms by which we recognize them now. ‘Shakespeare’, as distinct from the writer born in 1564 about whom we know so little, is not a fixed, stable thing-in-the-world, but rather

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a process of transformation of the values and ideas shared by communities of text over time, and only ever captured fleetingly, like a photograph, in the things which descend to us as the material evidence of book-making, editing, performance, essay writing, and so on. Moreover, when we look back through history – in this volume, to the lives and work of A. C. Bradley, W. W. Greg and Folger – it’s hard not to see in that gradual transformation something like an evolutionary process culminating in the Shakespeare of our present time. Evolution is a fitting trope. Darwin published On the Origin of Species in November 1859, when Bradley was 8 and Folger was 2, and though we think of all three of these Shakespeareans as primarily twentieth-century figures, nineteenth-century evolutionary theory in particular, and empirical scientism more generally, had a profound influence in all spheres of twentieth-century academic discourse. Of particular import was Darwin’s rejection of historical positivism. Working against the grain of religious and popular Idealist narratives of human development, Darwin posited, through his theory of natural selection, a process by which organisms develop from primitive origins into ever more sophisticated forms, but not according to some predestined design nor towards a particular endpoint or goal. In a similar manner, Shakespeare evolves from the nineteenth century to the twentieth into ever more sophisticated forms through a gradual accretion of critical paradigms, methodologies and institutional practices. We can think of this accretion in more concrete terms relevant to the chapters of this volume: the establishment and growth of university English departments; the professional organization of English as a discipline, with Shakespeare firmly ensconced in its canon of study; the multiplication of forms of textual analysis, whether in the paradigm of literary criticism (to which Bradley belongs), bibliography (Greg), or performance history; and the campaigns to establish both private and national institutions designed to preserve and promulgate Anglo-American heritage, including, in England, the national and repertory theatre campaigns culminating in the National and Royal Shakespeare Theatres in the 1960s, and, in America, the privately endowed Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library. If, from our global-intercultural-pluralistic point of view, we view such developments with necessary suspicion, our rational scepticism has its origins in the scientific and social discourses of the nineteenth century. The period of history spanning the three chapters of this volume is punctuated by great books, by those works that transformed paradigms and generated new disciplines – On the Origin of Species, Capital, Essays and Reviews, The Interpretation of Dreams, to name but a few. History is always to some

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extent textual, but in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, before the proliferation of photographic technology and, later, film, the printed word enjoyed a near hegemony in the dissemination of ideas and arguments. The democratization of education in England and America through a series of educational and social reforms, coupled with the easy availability of inexpensive printed media, ensured that such ideas would be disseminated across unprecedentedly diverse social groups and across great distances. We see this diversity in the proliferation of inexpensive print editions of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, as Andrew Murphy has chronicled elsewhere,1 as well as of illustrated, abridged, and even expurgated editions. Bowdler’s 1818 Family Shakespeare, for example, expurgated of all scenes, speeches and words ‘that can give pain to the most chaste, or offence to the most religious of readers’, is not only an instance of the progressive, modernizing forces that transform such cultural objects as Shakespeare to reflect and affirm the values of their own community, the volume is also evidence of the democratizing but ultimately delegitimizing power of the capitalist market.2 The hegemony of the book therefore necessitated the institutions and practices that would guarantee its cultural legitimacy and supremacy – and among these were the university and, in the case of Shakespeare and other English writers, the new discipline of English criticism. All three of the chapters contained in this volume are preoccupied with books, with the books these Shakespeareans produced – sometimes prolifically, as Murphy showcases in his discussion of Greg – and with books which shaped them as people and writers, not to mention the ways by which they engaged with Shakespeare’s books. It is indeed difficult not to read this period in terms of canons of great books – and, by that token, the systems of knowledge and power in which they participate – by mapping out the connections between them, for example, between Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, as I attempt to do in my own chapter.3 Sometimes these connections are made in what we might call an ‘intertextual’ arena – not directly influencing or alluding to one another, but engaged in an ensemble ballet of textual culture – but more often than not, those relationships are remarkably, sometimes stunningly, linear.4 But more important than the books themselves are the systems of value associated with those books, and with Shakespeare’s books in particular. As noted above, the book is not merely an inert material object, but is shaped by the work that is required to produce it, and the uses to which it is put are never neutral. When we think, for example, about Folger buying and importing to America an unprecedented collection of

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early printed books, Folios of Shakespeare in particular, and as a result, inflating the economic value of those books exponentially, all with the goal of eventually endowing a library in Washington next to the Library of Congress, those values come sharply into view: economic value, high cultural value, national value, educational value, and the list goes on. The evolution of Shakespeare is very much the evolution of the book, or, more properly, of the systems of value associated with it. Bradley, Folger and Greg are, by any other measure, very disparate figures. Bradley was a career academic who lived most of his life and produced most of his work in the nineteenth century in England and Scotland. Folger, CEO of Standard Oil, was an American philanthropist and Shakespeare enthusiast, but not an academic. Greg was an English bibliographer, but for most of his life, a private scholar living off an income generated by his stake in The Economist. The three are separated by a generation, and by circumstances of upbringing, politics, careers, interests, as well as geography. Even the conventional markers of period we use to describe historical eras do not uniformly apply to them. Greg is no more a Victorian than Bradley is a modernist. This is why I’ve employed the trope, however imperfectly, of evolution, because it allows us to situate them in terms of a continuum marked by ‘mutations’ and by developments outward from a central point of origin into increasingly complex paradigms. What does unite these figures, however, is the book, and the ways that they served to shape our approaches to Shakespeare’s texts in particular. Bradley and Greg both forged methods of close textual analysis, albeit very different ones. Bradley was among the first professional academic practitioners of literary criticism of Shakespeare and is certainly the best known among that generation; Greg was the most prolific and arguably the most authoritative scholar of the New Bibliography. Folger, by comparison, amassed an unprecedented private collection of early printed books and later endowed a scholarly library which made possible the kind of close comparison of early printed texts practiced by the New Bibliography. To speak of their shared influence on the profession would be inaccurate. The profession would not exist in the form that it does without these three figures. They are the not-so-missing links in a historical evolution of textual practices leading to the professional academic study of Shakespeare today. Academic professionalization serves the legitimizing function required by modernization, as a result of the relentlessly diversifying, democratizing and otherwise delegitimizing forward movement of modernity. The process is that described above in the example of nineteenth-century editions of Shakespeare. That the first widely marketed ‘scholarly’ editions of

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Shakespeare appeared in the nineteenth century is of little surprise. They provided the promise of an authoritative and stable ideal against which the perpetual innovation and diversification of the Shakespeare book market could be anchored, even while those scholarly editions were themselves subject, and remain so today, to the same logic of the market – witness the never-ending supply of new, ever more authoritative, editions.5 This is to emphasize the capitalist pretext of modernization, the constant revolutionizing of production described by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.6 The dynamic tension between the forces of the market and the culturally legitimizing institutions and practices they necessitate are no less applicable to the book market than they are to the professional discipline of English, both of which are, to a significant degree, coterminous economies of production. As has often been noted, professionalization is a characteristic feature of modernity, and is a fundamentally economic process by which, typically, groups secure their monopoly to a delimited set of skills and knowledge in demand, usually through a system of education and credentialing.7 As I discuss below, there is a relatively linear, though by no means exclusive, causal relationship, more pronounced in England than in America, between the transformations in social organization of systems of class and hereditary privilege brought on by the Industrial Revolution, and the university reforms of the nineteenth century that led to the expansion of the curriculum and the eventual professionalization of new disciplines from the natural sciences to the humanities.8 In the case of English as a professional discipline, the creation of university departments and English programs in America and England from the late-nineteenth century on answered the need in each case for a curriculum of English study, and the training of teachers to teach it to a newly enfranchised middle class. The new discipline of English study promoted the civic and humanistic values inherited from the liberal tradition of cultural education, a justification for the supply and demand economy of the new university. The subsequent pressures placed upon higher education and English departments in particular as a result of the market forces of capitalism are well documented.9 They include the adoption of increasingly empirical and rationalist discourses and methodologies, and the simultaneous rejection of the Romanticist interests of nineteenth-century literary appreciation and aesthetics. English became more disciplined, in more than one sense of that word, by creating increasingly specialized forms of disciplinary knowledge and establishing norms and methodologies akin to those used in the sciences. The movement from Romanticist literary appreciation to professional discipline of English is

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characterized in my own chapter by the antipathy between Bradley and a later generation of professional English critics represented by F. R. Leavis and L. C. Knights. This is a necessarily simplistic summary of a complex genealogy, and it culminates in a rather bleak view of a discipline seemingly or wilfully blind to the instrumental rationality that compels it forward. The means to professionalization have become increasingly demanding and difficult. If new scholars can survive the gruelling teaching and examination requirements of graduate school – a system which guarantees the self-perpetuation of the higher education market, training specialists to teach other specialists – not to mention the now exorbitant costs of tuition and maintenance, they are then required by the terms of their employment constantly to adapt and innovate the discipline, and to produce an endless stream of print scholarship for an academic market. In this view, the works of Shakespeare are reduced to so much commodity value, emptied out of their other cultural and idealistic values – for example, their power to amuse, to entertain, or to teach us about ourselves. Of course, this narrative is neither neutral nor incontestable, and my purpose is not to proselytize. The point is to think about where Bradley, Folger and Greg are situated in relation to one another and to an institutional discipline that has benefited directly from their contributions. For all of their differences, and the generational and geographical distances between them, all three bridge, for want of a better distinction, the nineteenth-century Shakespeare and the twentieth. If, on the one hand, they each in their own way institute some means for the study of Shakespeare in a professional paradigm, on the other hand, we also inherit from them strains of nineteenth-century positivism, and this is where all three differ from, if not openly contest, a Darwinian view of history evacuated of divine meaning or positivist belief system. In the case of Bradley, his is a more genuine historical positivism rooted in Hegelian Idealism and shared by his contemporaries at Oxford in the 1860s. Perhaps more than the other two, Bradley’s idealism reflects more immediately the values of literary criticism inherited from Matthew Arnold of a humanizing culture. As I discuss below, as much as professional criticism has moved on – in many cases, by openly rejecting Bradley’s character analysis – the persistence of the discipline of English is due in no small part to the kind of liberal humanist idealism shared by Bradley and his early contemporaries. Folger’s is a similar faith in the social utility of Shakespeare. His considerable personal wealth allowed him to purchase – one might even say hoard – Folios of Shakespeare for his gentleman’s

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private reading room, but it was accomplished over half a lifetime and motivated by a desire to nurture what Bristol calls the ‘spiritual culture of life’.10 Folger’s capitalism was also tempered by a nineteenth-century belief in liberal philanthropy. Sitting in the stately reading room of the Folger Shakespeare Library, it’s hard not to be impressed by the magnanimity of his vision and the munificence of his bequest. Greg’s is a faith in the new science of bibliography to arrive at a textual ideal which most closely approximates to an authorial original. As Murphy notes below, even though the basic premises and textual idealism of the New Bibliography have since been called into question, the principles of textual editing since Greg remain fundamentally unchanged.11 Of the three, Greg provides the clearest example of a positive, continuing influence on the discipline. All three of these men worked outside of the professional academy as we know it, Bradley by virtue of historical chronology, and Greg and Folger by their own career paths. Nevertheless, each fundamentally altered the way we look at Shakespeare’s books by engaging with, rethinking, and re-forming the values we assign to them, and especially in the cases of Folger and Greg, in very material ways. We necessarily inherit from them some of the idealism of their vision. We would have to be too hardened and cynical to entirely abandon it. Their idealism is built into Shakespeare’s genetic code. This claim seems perverse, unless we think of Shakespeare as a set of textual values in perpetual flux – constantly mutating and expanding outward into increasingly sophisticated formations. Each of the chapters that follows builds a case for the inclusion of their respective subjects in a canon of Great Shakespeareans. ‘Greatness’ is, of course, a relative term, a marker of value ostensibly at odds with the professional ethos of critical detachment. To speak of their greatness is to reassert the canonicity of great books and achievements in a historically positivist way. But if we think in terms of the evolution of English as a discipline, looking back to the origin of this particular species, we might recall the idealism at its foundation in which we inevitably share. Such allowances made, we might then forgive ourselves for feeling some dignified veneration, perhaps even a little open admiration, when reading the great books – or enjoying a great collection of books and the legacy of bequest – of our evolutionary predecessors.

Chapter 1

A. C. Bradley (26 March 1851–2 September 1935) Cary DiPietro

A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy was first published by Macmillan in London in 1904. At more than four hundred pages, this substantial volume contained essays on what were according to Bradley the four great plays from Shakespeare’s ‘tragic period’, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, combined with two further introductory chapters on the substance of tragedy and Shakespeare’s construction of tragedy. The essays were based on a series of lectures Bradley delivered at Oxford University when he was appointed to a five-year term as Professor of Poetry from 1901, and were then lengthened and revised into what is arguably the most significant volume of Shakespeare criticism ever written. This is no mere hyperbole. The numbers support the claim. At the time of Bradley’s death in 1935 the volume had been reissued no less than 20 times between London and New York. Before copyright expired on Bradley’s works in 2005, Shakespearean Tragedy had been reissued or reprinted by Macmillan and what is now Palgrave Macmillan, as well as by Penguin and Penguin Classics, by Meridian in so-called ‘mass market paperbacks’, and by a number of other publishers and their subsidiaries, no fewer than a hundred times by my count, and probably innumerably more. Since 2005, the volume has appeared in numerous online texts such as the Project Gutenburg edition, while early Macmillan editions can be read online as e-books. There are translations of the whole and parts of the book in German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. A Google search for ‘A. C. Bradley Shakespearean Tragedy’ produces more than 67,000 results. A similar search for ‘William Shakespeare Hamlet’ produces 137,000, a little more than double the results for Bradley’s Shakespeare criticism. A Boolean search for ‘Shakespeare and Tragedy’ finds Shakespearean Tragedy in the top five results. Of course, search results are indiscriminate and can be manipulated, so they do not tell us anything statistically reliable about

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Bradley’s continued popularity or the marketability of his writing today. Nevertheless, more than a hundred years since its first publication, Shakespearean Tragedy remains ubiquitous and Bradley’s name, to some degree, is synonymous with analysis of the genre that he would have us believe is Shakespeare’s greatest. The claim for the superlative significance of Shakespearean Tragedy remains arguable, however, because Bradley’s style of criticism was out of fashion almost as soon as it first appeared. To be sure, most of the early reviews were laudatory. Writing in The Academy, R. Y. Tyrrell, classical scholar and Professor of Greek at the University of Dublin, acknowledged that the volume was ‘popular in aim’, and such was its strength: ‘This is the kind of book that all lovers of Shakespeare, erudite and unscholarly alike, stand in need of and will receive’ (11 March 1905). A week later, Tyrrell would claim in a second review in the same weekly: ‘In our opinion a book like that which is before us is not much less essential for the complete comprehension of Shakespeare’s tragedies than an atlas is for the fruitful study of geography’ (The Academy 18 March 1905). In a not dissimilar vein, Henry Jones praised the simplicity and forthrightness of Bradley’s style: Bradley, he argued, aimed at being simply and merely a medium for the poet’s mind. He has sought to be impersonal, transparent – not with the transparency of a passive medium, but with that of a mind which has experienced in itself and lived over again the life and experience of the dramatist.1 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Jones was a contemporary of Bradley’s and a colleague in Philosophy at Glasgow between 1889 and 1900. We are told that he was a ‘valued reader of manuscripts for Macmillan publishers’ at the time he wrote his review of Shakespearean Tragedy, so it is reasonable to surmise the he may have read Bradley’s manuscript when it was first submitted to Macmillan for publication2 and he would have recommended it on the basis of both its academic and commercial viability. Not unlike Jones, other reviewers had difficulty containing their hyperbole. This was not the scholarship of a stuffy Oxford professor, a transcription of dryly recited undergraduate lectures, but a work of singular importance precisely because of the public and popular nature of print publication. John Cann Bailey, a London socialite and literary enthusiast writing for the usually conservative Times Literary Supplement, claimed that ‘Mr. Bradley had hardly begun his lectures before the echo of his voice made itself heard beyond the academic boundaries’ (10 February 1905).

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C. H. Herford, Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester, qualified his own praise in The Modern Language Review – though it sounded like ‘journalistic hyperbole’ – as ‘merely an attempt to define and explain the impression which [Shakespearean Tragedy] will we think produce upon any open mind at all inured to the Shaksperean [sic] controversies of the past’.3 Here was a volume that put to rest many of the controversies of Shakespeare criticism of the previous century. The TLS review was almost embarrassingly unguarded in its praise: ‘One may well doubt whether in the whole field of English literary criticism anything has been written in the last twenty years more luminous, more masterly, more penetrating to the very centre of its subject.’ Although these reviewers predicted the immediate and long-term popularity of Bradley’s book through the twentieth century, there is something parochial and old-fashioned, quaintly nineteenth-century even in 1904, about the assumptions they bring about Shakespeare to a review of Shakespeare criticism. Herford feels that Bradley is, like Shakespeare, ‘myriad-minded’, invoking Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s praise of Shakespeare in Biographia Literaria; Bradley’s success as a critic results from an imaginative intuition in combination with practical sagacity and a synthetic and constructive intellect. Tyrrell tells us that Bradley understands the attitude of Shakespeare’s mind, and that his ‘common-sense’ criticism is tempered with the spirit of sympathetic appreciation. Bradley, these reviewers suggest, is intellectually and philosophically connected to the man Shakespeare, to the peculiar nature of Shakespeare’s mind and to the lives of the characters he wrote about. The praise comes from men who, like Bradley, were educated at England’s ancient universities in the 1870s and 1880s and whose literary sensibilities included Victorian commonplaces about Shakespeare’s biography and the high literary style of his ‘poetry’. When Bailey describes the ‘essential lines of Shakespeare’s achievement as a tragic poet’, he typifies the style of the Victorian essayist praising Shakespeare in a manner that George Bernard Shaw derisively labelled ‘bardolatry’.4 Indeed, the same could be said of Bradley’s own writing. As early as April of 1905, the detractors were already beginning to voice their dissent. In a second column in the TLS, Arthur Bingham Walkley criticized Bradley for confusing the difference between real people and dramatic personages, who, he argued, were a mere projection and function of the dramatist’s mind who ‘can utter nothing, think nothing, be nothing outside of the range of the dramatist’s own nature and mental vision’ (7 April 1905). Walkley was a literary critic and, importantly, a theatre reviewer for The Star, The Speaker, and, from 1900, The Times. Although a

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contemporary of Bradley’s at Balliol College in the early 1870s, Walkley was less inclined to philosophical speculation than to practical dramaturgy and theatre review. Thus, although he praised Shakespearean Tragedy for its close attention to the text, he found fault with Bradley’s extrapolation of character beyond the text: ‘What is outside the text?’, he asks of Hamlet, [Bradley] says (by implication) a set of real lives, which have to be divined and reasoned about as we might reason about Napoleon or our second cousins or any other actual person. We say, Shakespeare’s dramatic needs of the moment, artistic peculiarities, and available theatrical materials. This would become a familiar refrain. In 1933, L. C. Knights published a lecture, the title of which, How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?, parodied the style of character-oriented criticism practiced not only by Bradley, but by many of his nineteenth-century predecessors and some of his contemporaries.5 The issue of Macbeth’s children was addressed by Bradley in a lengthy endnote, though even he admitted that the question was ‘quite immaterial’.6 Read alone, the note provides a judicious consideration of Shakespeare’s development of his source material in Holinshed’s chronicle history of the Scottish monarchy, the play’s thematic concerns with hereditary monarchy and legitimacy, Macbeth’s lack of heirs, and the recurring motif of children in the speeches of the Macbeths. But Knights was reading in the context of the one hundred or so pages of notes appended to the main text (A to EE – and the notes have further footnotes), and the issue was what he described as one of the ‘current irrelevancies in Shakespeare criticism’, among others ‘such as the solemn discussion of the double time in Othello, or Bradley’s famous question “Where was Hamlet at the time of his father’s murder?” ’.7 The question of the title, according to Knights, had been posed to him by F. R. Leavis, another formidable critic of Shakespearean Tragedy, when poking fun at Bradley’s pedantry. But even as early as 1905, book reviewers such as ‘J. C. C.’ were complaining of ‘those irritating superfluities, aggravated it may be added by the unnecessary diffuseness with which they are discussed’ (Westminster Gazette).8 Bradley, in a letter to Gilbert Murray, his colleague in Glasgow and long-time friend, identified this review writer as acerbic critic John Churton Collins, yet another contemporary at Balliol in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and, like Bradley, an advocate of the academic study of English literature. Murray wrote in the Westminster Gazette the following week that he thought ‘Shakespearean Tragedy one of the most illuminating books’ he had ever read.9

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As many have since noted, the reception of Bradley’s criticism has oscillated almost since its initial publication between these two extremes: on the one side, devotees or ‘Bradleyites’ such as Murray, and on the other, detractors who would brand his ‘pseudo-critical investigation’ of character psychology with the pejorative label of ‘character criticism’,10 from Knights and Leavis to E. E. Stoll and J. M. Robertson.11 As we will see, this oscillation of opinion between popular fascination and professional ridicule has much to do with the changing nature of literary critical writing between the nineteenth century and twentieth. Shakespearean Tragedy occurs at a pivotal moment in the institutional transformation of British education, spanning from the educational reforms of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the subsequent widening of public education throughout Britain to formerly excluded groups, and the university reform movement, to the increasing professionalization of literary critical studies in the emerging and growing university English departments and programs of English study in the twentieth century. On the one hand, Shakespearean Tragedy fits harmoniously with the philosophical idealism of educational reform in the nineteenth century, and so it would be taken up as a model of cultural education for newly enfranchised groups and a set text of English literary study, as much as it remains a first stop for many undergraduates today. On the other hand, character criticism would become anathema to the increasingly professional discourse of literary studies articulated by Knights and those who followed after him. And, for the most part, so it remains today. As contemporary scholarly readers informed by decades of cultural theory and anthropological historicism, we tend to approach Bradley’s criticism with the scepticism, sometimes even condescension, we reserve for those familiar essayists of the nineteenth century who informed Bradley’s style, Coleridge among them. So, in what sense is Bradley a great Shakespearean? Had he not produced Shakespearean Tragedy in 1904, he would very likely not be remembered for his interest in Shakespeare. A further volume of lectures from his Oxford tenure, aptly titled Oxford Lectures on Poetry, published in 1909 was received well, but did not reach the heights of hyperbole with which Shakespearean Tragedy was acclaimed. Though it contained four essays on Shakespeare as well as an essay on Hegel’s theory of tragedy, it was comprised in the main of essays on poetry and Romantic poets including Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley. He published a further series of lectures towards the end of his life, A Miscellany in 1929; and a final collection of lectures on Ideals of Religion delivered at Glasgow in 1907 was published posthumously in 1940. In the absence of Shakespearean Tragedy, these

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collections might have garnered enough attention to afford Bradley a small legacy as one of the last of the Victorian essayists, perhaps one out of touch with his time. It seems more likely that he would be remembered as one of the minor British Idealists of the late-nineteenth century who dabbled in literary appreciation and aesthetics in later life. Bradley’s claim to greatness as a Shakespearean rests almost solely on the publication of a book whose popular, commercial success sits uneasily alongside the often vociferous critical censure that it has stirred. A case for the historical importance of Shakespearean Tragedy is fairly easy to build, and so what I want to consider in this chapter is how the success of the volume can be explained, at least in part, by the role Bradley played in educational and university reform, alongside his Balliol contemporaries. Though not singlehandedly, Bradley’s criticism propelled the professionalization of literary criticism in the twentieth century even while it rather quickly became excluded from its practices. That exclusion can, in turn, be explained by the turn of literary criticism from the Victorian themes that characterize Bradley’s writing: the nineteenth-century preoccupation with literary biography and Romantic belief in the nature of creative imagination and genius; Anglo-American interest in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury German philosophy and especially aesthetics prior to the First World War – in Bradley’s case, in Hegel and theories of tragedy; and interest in discussing and representing in art the complexity and idiosyncrasy of human character, in combination and often in conflict with increasingly secular and scientistic discourses about human behaviour and psychology (think Darwin and Freud). But to treat Shakespearean Tragedy as a historical curiosity and strictly a product of its time is to ignore the continued appeal of Bradley’s writing to contemporary readers, even if you or I may not be among them. Few contemporary readers will pick up Shakespearean Tragedy to understand the legacy of late Victorian culture through the twentieth century. Rather, they read Bradley to understand Shakespeare. Moreover, they turn to Bradley often, perhaps more often than they turn to more contemporary criticism. I would not want to argue the innate value of Shakespearean Tragedy as a means to understanding Shakespeare’s plays, but we could make a strong case for its continued relevance to a wide spectrum of readers as evidenced by its ubiquity in inexpensive print and digital media. How do we reconcile its popular success with its critical censure? What place does Shakespeare Tragedy deserve in the canon of great Shakespeare criticism? For that matter, what is criticism? What I will also argue in this chapter, then, is that Bradley’s one book and its continued popularity remains a challenge to

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the very idea of criticism – what it means to study and write about works of literature – and to the very notion of a professional discipline of English criticism because the book exemplifies the idealist aspirations which provided the impetus and the foundation upon which criticism was built, and which remain conspicuously embedded in its practices today. To understand this, we need to understand Bradley in his time.

Early Life Andrew Cecil was born in Clapham, Surrey, to the Reverend Charles Bradley (1789–1871) and his second wife, Emma Linton, in 1851. Charles Bradley was an evangelical preacher known well throughout Britain for his published sermons. He produced a number of these between 1818 and 1853. Not unlike his son after him, Charles Bradley was a prodigious and popular writer with absolute convictions. The evangelicals were Protestant reformers in the Church of England from the late-eighteenth century who preached the importance of personal conversion to Christ and the authority of the Bible as the word of God. Although religiously austere and fuelled in part by dissatisfaction with the established Church, evangelicals such as Charles Bradley and his earlier contemporaries sought important social, especially educational, reforms in England through the earlynineteenth century. The movement to abolish English slavery, for example, which culminated in the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, was led in the main by English evangelicals such as William Wilberforce and the so-called Clapham Sect. It was in Clapham at St James Chapel where Charles Bradley spent much of his career proselytizing, and it was the legacy of Clapham into which A. C. Bradley was born. Charles Bradley not only preached and wrote prodigiously, but he also fathered an exceptionally large family. He had 12 children by his first wife, who died in 1831, and a further 9 by his second wife, of whom A. C. Bradley was the last. The age difference between A. C. Bradley and his oldest half-siblings was more than 30 years. Moreover, his father was 62 when he was born and died when he was merely 20. His elder half-brother was George Granville Bradley (1821–1903), master of University College, Oxford, and Dean of Westminster from 1881. His brother-in-law was Sir George Grove (1820–1900), a musicologist and the author of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. There must have been a great sense of the former accomplishment of his father and an earlier generation of half-siblings in the Bradley-Linton household, and there must have been

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considerable expectation on the younger siblings in the family to follow in the well-worn family path through Oxford University and on. Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924), his elder full brother by five years and educated at University College while George Granville Bradley was master, became an important philosopher in the British Idealist tradition. When A. C. Bradley was still at Balliol, F. H. Bradley was preparing his first work of Ethical Studies (1876) and would later write and become known for his work on metaphysics. The Bradleys both were and were not a typical Victorian family – not typical given the size of the family, not to mention the sheer output of published volumes they produced. Their productivity in letters and collected accomplishments speaks to the strongly Protestant work ethic and intellectual culture of the Bradley home over several decades, which must have influenced the young A. C. Bradley. What he learned from his father in particular was the skill of close textual reading and interpretation. The Bradleys were typical, though, in the sense that they reflected a nineteenth-century middle class and a set of values that challenged the parochialism of an English society built on titles and privilege. Indeed, the emergence of the very language of class in the early-nineteenth century indicates a change in the character of social divisions brought on by the Industrial Revolution and the development of political democracy through this period. The ‘middle class’ with which the Bradleys might have identified both described the increasingly affluent and educated but untitled segment of society in early industrial England while it also became a discursive means of circumventing and contesting the complexities of traditional rank and privilege.12 Charles Bradley’s parents moved from Yorkshire in the north to settle in Essex near London, and Charles himself married young and built his career as a vicar, an occupation that suited an intelligent, hard-working young man without title or income. The Bradleys rose from humble roots in the north to become a family with one of the most impressive intellectual legacies in nineteenthcentury England. We know little of A. C. Bradley’s early life. He entered Cheltenham College in 1864 when he was 13 and won an exhibition (scholarship) to Balliol College in 1868. It was probably expected that both Francis and the younger Andrew would follow the same path through Oxford into the clergy. He followed instead his brother’s interest in continental philosophy. Although their idealism was still a species of the evangelicalism espoused by the older generation of his family, both Francis and Andrew rejected the religious fervour and authoritarianism of their father, exchanging it for the

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reasoned Platonic dialogue of the university tutorial. Notwithstanding the interest in philosophy he shared with his older brother, a greater influence on A. C. Bradley’s intellectual development was played by those he met at Balliol in the early 1870s. These included such literature and classics contemporaries such as John Addington Symonds and Evelyn Abbott, and philosophy contemporaries such as Bernard Bosanquet, Edward Caird, and R. L. Nettleship. Bradley gained a first in Greats (literae humaniores) – a course studying Greek and Latin but also including classical philosophy and history – as did eventual Prime Minister Herbert Asquith in the same year, and both were elected probationary fellows at Balliol in 1874.

Balliol College and University Reform In the period prior to Bradley’s time at Oxford, the universities and especially Oxford and Cambridge were under exceptional pressure to reform. When Charles Bradley entered St Edmund Hall in Oxford, the ancient universities were primarily conservative, ecclesiastical institutions; their tutors were themselves ordained ministers and the colleges training grounds for clerical or legal careers. Charles Bradley was ordained without ever obtaining a degree because he had achieved the end to which his time at Oxford was but a means. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, there was increasing external pressure from a growing middle class made wealthy by industrial expansion, and especially from pragmatic utilitarians, who wanted to reposition and reorganize the universities as national institutions dedicated to the social and economic development of England, the model for which were the flourishing universities of Germany.13 Colleges such as Balliol, by comparison, were private corporations increasingly resented as bastions of privilege and conservatism, and at the turn of the nineteenth century, not particularly healthy ones, with diminishing ancient endowments and properties.14 Opposition to the status quo was also amplified by religious Dissenters. Reformers wanted the universities to widen their curriculum to include new subjects such as the sciences, to abolish the religious requirements for entrance, and to open up the appointment of teaching positions to competition. The precedents for fully national universities had been set in 1836 when University College and King’s College were granted a charter as the University of London to award degrees; these would provide the model for the provincial universities such as Liverpool and Birmingham established later in the century.15

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The atmosphere at Oxford in the mid-nineteenth century was characterized by ongoing institutional conflicts, many of these motivated by religious reform. The Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s – led by the Tractarians seeking to ‘Romanize’ the Church of England by the reinsertion of liturgical and theological tenets of Roman Catholicism – was still fresh in the memory of many of Bradley’s tutors. By the time he entered Balliol, however, university reform was shifting away from religious partisanship, though the tension between high and low church Anglicans had not fully dissipated, and towards academic professionalization. On the one side were the colleges represented by the residential fellows and teaching tutors who undertook their pastoral role as stewards of the moral and intellectual development of their students. The college curriculum emphasized breadth of learning through a ‘liberal’ education comprised primarily of the classics, ancient languages and history. Tutors were appointed from the residential fellows, who took orders and a vow of celibacy while in residence, to teach all or most subjects in the curriculum and to play an active role in college life and administration. On the other side was a growing professoriate who, unlike the college fellows, practiced more specialized forms of knowledge and whose main occupation was research rather than teaching. This latter group was given impetus by the two Royal Commissions established in the early 1850s to report on Oxford and Cambridge. The changes that were instituted at Balliol following the Oxford commission included the abolition of the obligation for all college fellows to take orders, the abolition of oaths on admission, and a significant widening of scholarships and exhibitions.16 That Balliol was able to excel through this period is due in no small part to the energy and dedication of its master from 1870, Benjamin Jowett. Jowett, who went up to Balliol as an undergraduate in 1835 and who was elected a fellow in 1838 before he had taken his degree, was a Broad Church liberal and, in his younger days, an advocate of university reform. He had come, like so many of his contemporaries, from an evangelical background, and so he shared with the younger Bradley who studied under him the value of hard work and a strong belief in the need to cultivate a personal moral system through reflection and reason. His reputation as a liberal theologian and reformer was set in 1855 with a volume of commentary on the Pauline epistles and then furthered in 1860 with his contribution to the notorious volume Essays and Reviews, a collection of seven essays that drew variously on German biblical scholarship to challenge the authority of the bible.17 Rejecting the literalism of evangelical interpretation, Jowett argued in his essay that the bible should be interpreted like any other book, subject

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to the reason of interpretation and the methods of contextual and stylistic analysis applied to classical texts.18 These two publications combined almost caused his expulsion from Oxford. Jowett was opposed, in particular, by one of the most ardent of the Oxford Movement reformers, Edward Pusey, who led a series of unsuccessful legal and ecclesiastical proceedings against Jowett and other writers at Oxford.19 But by 1870, following nearly two decades of reform initiated by the Royal Commission, the climate at Oxford had so shifted from the doctrinal disputes of the first half of the century that Jowett was able to win enough support among the fellows to become master of the college. The strength of Jowett and of Balliol graduates in this period is often attributed to the keen personal interest he took in the encouragement and cultivation of individual students.20 Although he was not an enthusiastic advocate of the academic model, and even became a more conservative defender of the collegiate system later in his career, he was himself a published writer of considerable repute, having translated a number of Greek texts by Aristotle and Plato, among others.21 Jowett played a key role while still only a fellow in developing measures to attract to Balliol students from the whole population of England, including the establishment of a new set of exhibitions and a statute allowing students to stay in less expensive town lodgings rather than within the college itself. Under Jowett as master, Balliol was among the first to take in Jewish students after the University Tests Act of 1871. In the 1880s, he oversaw the much-needed refurbishment of the college buildings, including the building of new residences and a laboratory for the growing curriculum in science. Jowett must have left a considerable impression on Bradley as an undergraduate, at least insofar as he cultivated tolerance and critical reason in the culture of Balliol and instilled in his students respect for the social value of a liberal education. Bradley’s own eventual role as a teacher and advocate of educational reform must be due in some part to the model offered by Jowett.

British Idealism The tutor who influenced Bradley’s intellectual and philosophical interests most directly, however, was Thomas Hill Green. Green is typically characterized as the first professional philosopher in England and one of the leading figures in the British Idealist movement.22 Among his contemporaries in the movement at Oxford, some of them pupils, were Caird, Bosanquet, and, of course, as noted earlier, F. H. Bradley. Idealism was attractive to

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many English intellectuals in the mid-nineteenth century, disillusioned as they were by the religious conflicts and anxieties of the previous decades, especially at Oxford. Idealism offered a liberal alternative to the austerity of evangelicalism and the reactionary conservatism of the high-church reformers.23 Bradley was himself a product of such evangelicalism; what he first found in Jowett was an encouraging and liberal-minded adviser who was closer to him in age than his father, and a mentor who was critical of doctrinal belief in the absolute truth of the bible. So too had Green descended from an evangelical background, and though he was among the first generation of college fellows at Balliol not to have taken orders, his system of philosophy, however Idealist, was deeply spiritual, even theistic, expressing a strongly Protestant and highly individuated morality.24 What Green rejected – taking his cue from Jowett – was the divine authority of the bible, choosing instead to advocate belief in the universal immanence of God in humanity. Biblical authority had come under increasing attack, first, as noted above, by the school of criticism practiced in Germany and articulated in England by writers such as Jowett in Essays and Reviews, and, secondly, by sophisticated theories of science and anthropology, in particular in the nineteenth century, discourses of evolution. Evolutionary theory – circulating in various forms through the nineteenth century and culminating in Darwin’s 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species – had entirely overturned the biblical story of human history as a fall from the perfection of creation, replacing it instead with a narrative of perpetual improvement and refinement by a process of natural selection. The antagonism between science and religion about the age of the world and the nature of human creation would have been especially amplified in the climate of university reform through the 1860s following the publication of Darwin’s book and others of its kind such as Charles Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), especially over the issue of the expansion of science in the college curriculum. Indeed, so profound was the challenge of evolutionary theory and science more generally to religious orthodoxy that the debate continues today, no less over the question of the teaching of evolution in schools. British Idealism offered a means of navigating a path between these extremes. The development and articulation of Idealist philosophy at Oxford was indebted to its German antecedents, especially the Absolute Idealism of Hegel, who described in terms not dissimilar to those of evolutionary theory the development of historical consciousness into increasingly complex forms. It was probably Jowett who, having in fact

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studied the philosophy of Kant and Hegel during a period of study in Germany in the mid-1840s, introduced Green and his contemporaries to Hegel when they were his students (Jowett was not himself an advocate of such systems of thought, preferring instead rational scepticism).25 The Idealists at Oxford espoused a variety of nuanced understandings of Absolute Idealism, but they all identified with certain common themes; in particular, they univocally rejected the individualist ideology of earlier philosophers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, embracing instead a belief in the fundamentally social and moral character of humanity, and they adopted from Hegel an understanding of the spiritual unity of Being. Hegel in particular offered a means of reconciling religious belief with the new scientific view of the world, unquestioning faith in the truth of the bible as the word of God replaced with a system of philosophical reason. It should be noted that Green, among other of his contemporaries, rejected the dialectical structure of the Hegelian narrative of historical development. But where evolutionary theory and other emerging scientific hypotheses offered a view of human evolution as a series of natural phenomena evacuated of divine meaning, Idealism offered an alternative that both embraced the scientific narrative of human development but substituted the principle of natural selection with a belief in the spiritual unity of existence.26

Bradley the Philosopher As we’ll see, Bradley’s reading of Shakespeare and literature more generally was undeniably shaped by the intellectual exchanges he shared with Green and their mutual concerns with questions of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Indeed, Bradley, under Green’s tuition, thought of himself principally as a philosopher, and it was perhaps merely the practical exigency of his later teaching work in literature that brought him to apply his philosophical perspective to Shakespeare, a perspective formed and conditioned by his experience at Balliol in the 1870s. Green was not unlike Jowett insofar as the strength of his convictions made a powerful impression on the undergraduates under his tuition. He possessed a strong social and civic ethos, and he was one of the few college tutors to become actively involved in local politics in Oxford, putting his philosophical system into practice beyond the hermetic walls of the college. He was a member of the Oxford Liberal Association and was elected to Oxford Town Council in the mid-1870s. He also actively supported the Reform League, to extend

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the franchise, and the National Education League, to widen education to include the working poor. Before being elected a tutor in 1866, he worked on the Taunton Commission on education, travelling throughout England to report on schools. He was also known for his support of the temperance movement, his strict sobriety recalling the zeal and asceticism of his evangelical upbringing; it’s said that no alcohol was served at meetings in college at which he was in attendance out of deference to his beliefs. This strong sense of moral and social character, both in thought and in action, he would have communicated to the students under his tuition. Most importantly, Green cultivated in his students the notion that they were themselves philosophers, and that their task was to go out from Balliol to put their vocation into practice.27 This would lead to considerable tension and occasionally open conflict between Green and Jowett, especially through the 1870s during Bradley’s tenure at Balliol. By this point Jowett was keen to prevent disciplinary specialization in favour of the collegiate liberal education model. Bradley’s first major work of published scholarship was a posthumous edition of Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics in 1884 (published one year after Green’s unfortunate death in 1883 at the age of 46, from a case of blood poisoning), for which Bradley wrote a brief introduction. In the essays and lectures published in the Prolegomena, Green was particularly critical of scientific empiricism and naturalism; he disdained the idea that knowledge on its own had any intrinsic value, arguing instead that knowledge of the world presumes a knower and is therefore never neutral or objective but is predetermined by value judgements.28 This was Green’s argument, effectively a modification of Hegel, for the eternal consciousness.29 There are two important strains of Green’s thinking that derive from this epistemological starting-point which feed directly into Bradley’s writing. The first is that morality is a rational, purposive act and that the motive for moral action is always an idealized version of the future self.30 This conception of the self as realizable perfection borrows clearly from Hegel the teleological view that sees God’s perfection realized in the process of history. It’s this sense of the immanence of God’s perfection in humanity that partly explains the interconnectedness if not inseparability of Green’s arguments about epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. The second important strain is that, while morality is finally a process of self-realization, the true good is ultimately a common good: thus, he writes in the Prolegomena that, ‘the perfection of human character – a perfection of individuals which is also that of society, and of society which is also that of individuals – is for man the only object of absolute or intrinsic value’.31 This argument for the

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fundamentally social and moral nature of the self was an idea he shared with F. H. Bradley, who gave it greater treatment in his Ethical Studies of the same period. Green’s argument for individual moral realization, while it reflects his very particular version of Idealism, resonates with a familiar theme of Victorian culture in its emphasis on character, and it’s through this intellectual lens that Bradley’s character-focused criticism of Shakespeare comes into view. The sense of character promoted in the Prolegomena edited by Bradley derived at least initially from Hegel and the German tradition of Bildung – a complex idiom that defies simple translation but involves for Hegel the spiritual unity and development of the individual – though Green diverged from Hegel in his emphasis on the interconnectedness of individual moral development and civic duty, and on the state as an instrument of moral order.32 When Bradley returned to Oxford in 1901 to lecture, he must have recalled his conversations with Green on these topics because it was to Hegel’s philosophy and Hegel’s interest in moral and spiritual character that he turned. As we shall see, Bradley’s reading of Hegel’s theory of tragedy shapes, among other interests, his lectures on Shakespeare in a very immediate way. But Bradley’s lectures on both Hegel and Shakespeare inevitably recall Green’s own ‘character criticism’ from that earlier period of Bradley’s life. Shakespeare’s tragic heroes are, for Bradley, not predetermined by Catholic or Protestant beliefs circulating in Shakespeare’s time or, for that matter, those circulating in his own; rather, they are men who reflect on their choices and who, because they exist in a tragic universe, fail to carry out their moral, civic and political duties. If Shakespearean Tragedy can be faulted for failing to acknowledge Shakespeare’s dramatic needs of the moment and for attributing to his characters real lives beyond the text, such reading of character is also integral to Bradley’s profoundly philosophical and Idealist approach to ethics and politics, the individual and the state. Shakespearean Tragedy is less a misreading or over-reading of Shakespeare than it is a reading of human character through the lens of Idealist philosophy. Not only would Green’s tutelage influence Bradley’s intellectual development at Balliol and shape, to some extent, his reading of Shakespeare, his role as Bradley’s mentor would directly impact Bradley’s early career, arguably leading him from philosophy to literature. The tension between Green and Jowett at Balliol put strains on Bradley’s position as a tutor, and it may have been the conflict with Jowett that led to Bradley’s first appointment outside of Oxford, a professorship at University College, Liverpool.33 There were, in fact, two chairs open to him at the time, one in literature

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and history, and one in philosophy and political economy, and though Bradley felt himself more suited to the latter, he was appointed in 1881 to the chair in literature (the requirement to lecture on history was eventually dropped). Green advised him to take up the position, and Bradley thus embarked on a career path that led him away from his primary interest in philosophy. We see his dual interests in philosophy and literature developing in tandem in his scholarship through the 1880s and 1890s: he worked on a translation of the German Idealist Hermann Lotze published in 1884, the third volume of a series initiated by Green before his death, and he edited, with G. R. Benson, Nettleship’s Philosophical Lectures and Remains in 1897; but he also published lectures on poetry and gave a special address to the Literary and Philosophical Association on ‘The Nature of Tragedy with Special Reference to Shakespeare’ in 1889. Then, later in the same year, Bradley moved to an appointment in literature at Glasgow University, joining his Balliol contemporary Caird and his eventual friend, Gilbert Murray. His inaugural address was delivered on the topic of Poetry and Life, a title whose combination of literary appreciation and philosophical life-reflection anticipated the blend of the same in Shakespearean Tragedy. Perhaps more importantly, beyond the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford, Bradley found himself in the institutional product of mid-nineteenthcentury university reform. Bradley was, in fact, among the first of a new generation of professionally employed university educators and scholars making a permanent career of their work. Most fellows and tutors at Oxford in the nineteenth century saw their tenure at the University as a stepping stone to other careers – in law, politics, or the Church – or their fellowships supplemented other employment or interests, such as in the case of Green. Those few who remained, such as Jowett, viewed their work as a pastoral mission and dedicated themselves, by a vow of celibacy no less, to life in college. Like Jowett, Bradley never married, and he dedicated himself wholly to the demands of teaching at Liverpool and Glasgow, perhaps following the model offered by Jowett. But Bradley also viewed teaching work as a kind of drudgery, the stresses of which led him to ‘retire’ early in 1900 at the age of 49 to lead a literary life.34 Then, in 1901, he received his Oxford appointment. As committed as he was to the principle of liberal education, Bradley’s career was marked increasingly by professional scholarship and by the titles and awards that would serve to heighten the professional status of liberal disciplines such as literature and philosophy, bringing him back to Oxford as a distinguished professor. In addition to a complex philosophical system of thought, what lies behind Shakespearean Tragedy in 1904, then, is a professional mission that combines the ethos of liberal

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education with an emerging discourse, not fully articulated by Bradley, of professional scholarship.

Shakespearean Tragedy In a moment that perfectly epitomizes the often peculiar style of Shakespearean Tragedy, Bradley prefaces his third lecture on Hamlet with a discussion of Shakespeare’s tragic period. He writes, Before we come today to Hamlet, the first of our four tragedies, a few remarks must be made on their probable place in Shakespeare’s literary career. But I shall say no more than seems necessary for our restricted purpose, and, therefore, for the most part shall merely be stating widely accepted results of investigation, without going into the evidence on which they rest. (ST 79) The notion that we are arriving with Bradley ‘today’ – at a given time, in a given place – at our discussion of Hamlet is to remind us of the original place and purpose of these lectures at Oxford: delivered in a hall filled with attentive, studious undergraduates, or so we might suppose. The strategy is, of course, both rhetorical and fallacious. The lectures took Bradley as long as three or more years to bring to publication, depending on when a given lecture was first delivered. In the preface to the first edition, dedicated to his students, Bradley explains that the lectures were derived from teaching materials delivered at Liverpool, Glasgow and Oxford and that he has ‘for the most part preserved the lecture form’ (ST vii), indicating that the convention is occasionally dropped. In the later 1909 companion volume of lectures, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, Bradley tells us very openly in the preface that most of the lectures contained therein, in bringing them to book, ‘have been enlarged, and all have been revised’.35 There is no reason to presume that the same is not true of the lectures in Shakespearean Tragedy, especially given not only the evidence everywhere that they have been meticulously crafted and polished, but also their considerable length; one would have difficulty reading through his discussion of one of the plays in one sitting, let alone listening to one recited orally. Nevertheless, we are addressed throughout the lectures as ‘hearers’ and are invited to share with him such as ‘we find’ and ‘we see’ in our reading of Shakespeare in a false present. Indeed, the rhetorical illusion of temporality exerts a constant pressure on the writing. Bradley is continually reminding us that he does not have

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time to develop a point, to move his argument in a particular direction, or to provide a detailed example. So when in his first lecture on ‘The Substance of Tragedy’ we arrive at that point where we might expect him to develop his understanding of Hegel and how that shapes his reading of Shakespeare, Bradley tells us that Hegel’s view of the ‘tragic conflict is not only unfamiliar to English readers and difficult to expound shortly’ but applies ‘only imperfectly to the works of Shakespeare’ (ST 16). The slippage between hearer and reader notwithstanding, Bradley tells us that he will confine himself to a more general sense of conflict, while a footnote added to a later edition directs us to his essay on Hegel in Oxford Lectures on Poetry. So too in the above example of the opening remarks to the Hamlet lecture, there is a sense of ‘restricted purpose’, that only so much can be accomplished during the limited time of a lecture; but, should we be concerned, there are ‘widely accepted results of investigation’ derived from ‘evidence’ that substantiate the discussion. Whose results? What evidence? These questions are not answered. Instead, a very long footnote explicitly addresses the readers, advising them that some may want, for the purposes of this book, ‘to have by them a list of Shakespeare’s plays, arranged in periods’ (ST 79, n. 1), which the footnote then goes on to provide. There is, as a result, a sense of ‘double time’ throughout Shakespearean Tragedy, to borrow a trope he uses to explain in a note the duration of the action in Othello, one that destabilizes the identity of the book as a unitary work. The main body of the lectures is written in a quasi-narrative structure that compels us to imagine, or imagine ourselves as, the original auditors at Oxford; the prefatory material, footnotes and additional endnotes address the reader, providing supplementary information and argument. The false division allows Bradley to exercise certain freedoms in his analysis. When he is required to explain an important exception to the pattern he is establishing – for example, that the ‘love-tragedies’ Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra controvert the argument that the tragic story is concerned primarily with one person, the ‘hero’ – he may, ‘for the sake of brevity, ignore it’ (ST 7). If an argument requires by his own admission a more detailed exposition, he will invoke the limitations of his medium and decline to ‘pursue the subject further’ (ST 67). Or, as we’ve seen above, he may ask the reader to accept on faith a body of undisclosed evidence. The notes occasionally provide what the lectures self-consciously omit, though not in the examples noted above. More commonly, they provide, as so many have noted, very extraneous material – and much of it material whose relevance is not always obvious. As readers, we are often challenged

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to remember the line of argument as we are led through a digression in the notes. While it might seem that Bradley employs the double time to provide opportunities for short cuts and lengthy digressions, I would argue that the incongruities of Shakespearean Tragedy – which challenge the unity and integrity of the book – are the result of a writer trying to accommodate, perhaps reflexively, two poorly differentiated purposes. In the lectures proper, Bradley writes with a sense of fidelity to their original purpose. He is the university professor of poetry, the lectures a distillation of his scholarship. We are invited as auditors to share with him in this process of understanding. But the lectures are not dialogic like the tutorial; rather, they are univocal. We occasionally encounter the questions or objections of hypothetical auditors. When discussing Shakespeare’s construction of tragedy, for example, Bradley considers whether it will have occurred to some of his hearers whether he has ‘not used the words “art” and “device” and “expedient” and “method” too boldly’, but he then assures us by offering ‘a few more points, chiefly of construction, which are not too technical for a lecture’ (ST 68). Or he will attribute to his hearers conjectural objections, as, for example, when he is noting Hamlet’s tendency to repeat himself: ‘You will say: “There is nothing individual here. Everybody repeats words thus . . .” ’ (ST 148). Interruptions such as this provide rhetorical power to his arguments, straw men easily knocked down, and so the reader is compelled by example to acquiesce to his professional opinion. In the prefatory material and notes, by comparison, we find Bradley positioning his lectures for the ‘unscholarly lover of Shakespeare’ (ST 2). In the Introduction, he explains that the object of the lectures is ‘dramatic appreciation’ which he contrasts with the focused studies of the Shakespeare scholar. He invites us to ‘increase our appreciation and enjoyment of these works as dramas’ (ST 2) and that to do so we will require a ‘vivid and intent imagination’. The lectures offer to complete and enrich our imaginative reading with the products of scholarly analysis and comparison. In this manner, Bradley invokes a similar professional authority, but his assumed reader is an armchair enthusiast, a high-minded but unscholarly reader seeking to enhance his or her appreciation of the preeminent high cultural object of early Edwardian England. The lectures themselves demonstrate the tension between an ethos of liberal education and the professional mission of scholarship, especially in those moments where Bradley constructs fictitious dialogue with his audience; they offer a distillation of his scholarship through the rhetorical illusion of exchange between teacher and student. But when combined with the additional

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material in the notes addressed to the reader, the professional, scholarly identity of the lectures is mitigated by their translation to printed form and by an implicit appeal to a public market for books about Shakespeare. The incongruities of the book are thus produced by the competition between the scholarly value and what we might call the public or popular value of Shakespeare, though, as we’ll see, the pairing of those values is not necessarily inconsistent with Bradley’s view of education. The extension of cultural knowledge and learning from the lecture hall to a broader public has an important social function. Nevertheless, the more popular aspect of his writing – by which I mean his tendency to eschew scholarly conventions of writing in favour of unscholarly alternatives – creates difficulties for the contemporary scholarly reader. First and perhaps most obvious among these is his methodology, not so much his focus on character, but his disavowal of conventional methodological rigour. Bradley explains early in his brief Introduction that he is unconcerned with textual issues, sources, diction, versification, biographical and historical context, and conventions of theatre and performance – effectively, all the concerns of an emergent professional scholarship. In fact, this opening disavowal is misleading because he habitually calls upon such kinds of knowledge, although not in any systematic fashion. Bradley wants us to believe the lectures are a bridge between scholarly writing and appreciation, and so he asks us instead to ‘imagine’ and ‘suppose’. Suppose you were to describe the plot of Hamlet to someone who was ignorant of the play: ‘Would he not say: “What a sensational story! Why, here are some eight violent deaths, not to speak of adultery, a ghost, a mad woman, and a fight in a grave!” ’ (ST 89). In moments of invented situation such as this, Bradley becomes something closer to a novelist. Moreover, as noted earlier, he not infrequently asks his readers to accept the fullness of his scholarship without demonstrating it. Even though literary criticism had not yet fully developed into a conventionalized set of practices, there were numerous precedents for the methodological presentation of data and analysis, even in the field of Shakespeare. One thinks of Sidney Lee (1859–1926) – yet another Balliol graduate – and his 1898 A Life of William Shakespeare.36 Lee’s is a monumental work of historical biography, widely recognized as the standard life of Shakespeare in its time, and by Bradley, no less, in his lecture on ‘Shakespeare the Man’ (OLP 312). Bradley praises Lee for the scope of his knowledge and the narrow focus of his discussion. Indeed, what we find in Lee’s style – here, and in other work of the period, including his Catalogue of Shakespeareana (1899) and A Census of Extant Copies of the First Folio (1902), a companion piece to his facsimile

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edition of the Chatsworth First Folio (1902) – is an assimilation of early scientific methods such as data collection, observation, analysis, conclusion and systematic presentation of results.37 Lee’s empiricism and scrupulous attention to detail became the benchmark for later biographical and historical scholarship. Consider, for example, the work of contemporary theatre historian E. K. Chambers (1866–1954) – Oxford, but Corpus Christi College, not Balliol – in particular, his two-volume study of The Medieval Stage published in 1903, another work of unprecedented documentary evidence and analysis. Neither Lee nor Chambers held university posts, and neither really engaged in the kind of close textual reading such as we find in Shakespearean Tragedy, but their scholarship nevertheless typified the new professional virtues in literary studies of critical detachment and systematic analysis. Bradley’s style, by comparison, is wholly Bradley’s, though it recalls the genre of the familiar essay popular through the nineteenth century. The archetype is Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), whose 1817 Biographia Literaria is a similar distillation of German metaphysics – Kant and Schelling – combined with literary appreciation. Essays by Coleridge and his contemporary William Hazlitt (1778–1830) were still in frequent reprint in the late-nineteenth century; for example, Coleridge’s Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton – recorded in short hand by John Payne Collier and reconstructed decades later for an 1856 collection in a peculiar mode of second-hand reportage – must have come to Bradley’s attention when he was a student at Balliol because of the sensation and controversy the volume created. The Romantics on Shakespeare are the writers that Bradley engages with most in Shakespearean Tragedy, Coleridge and Hazlitt among them, but also including writers such as Charles Lamb (1775–1834), the slightly earlier Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) and the more contemporary Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909), another Balliol student of a decade prior to Bradley. These essayists provide the arguments that Bradley counters, modifies and updates throughout his own book, and the impression the presence of these writers creates is something like a return to Bradley’s undergraduate days at an earlier Oxford. These are the Greats of Shakespeare commentary and Bradley demonstrates through the facade of oral presentation an easy familiarity with them. More importantly, his style borrows from them the Romantic conventions of essay writing; unlike the depersonalized essay of twentieth-century professional criticism, Bradley’s lectures are infused with a strong sense of personal encounter and imaginative engagement with Shakespeare.

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The result of this familiar style is that Shakespearean Tragedy imposes upon its readers the expectation that they will share in Bradley’s impressions and assumptions, and this is where the modern reader, certainly this one, has perhaps the greatest difficulty. Consider, for example, when Bradley discusses the outcome of tragic action, namely, when characters in the plays attempt to act but the result is an outcome entirely the opposite of the intended action – Othello attempting to execute solemn justice but butchering innocence instead, Lady Macbeth offering to dash out the brains of her own child but being ‘hounded to death by the smell of a stranger’s blood’ (ST 28). These impress upon us, Bradley argues, ‘the blindness and helplessness of man’ (ST 28). Well, no. I would argue the outcome is the result of Shakespeare’s carefully crafted situational irony, and I would deny that Lady Macbeth and Othello share a common humanity, whether as characters in their respective plays or as representatives of a more universal human nature; but Bradley’s rhetorical strategy is not to persuade the reader otherwise, but to assume his reader shares quite naturally in his view. In fact, Bradley often denies outright the disputability of some of his most debatable premises. ‘No unsophisticated mind, fresh from the reading’ of Shakespeare would accept an otherwise plausible theory (ST 95). Bradley’s claims will be accepted ‘by any reader who is in touch with Shakespeare’s mind and can observe his own’ (ST 26). In moments such as these, Bradley fails to hold up for scrutiny the supposed universality of his own very personal impressions and beliefs. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his discussion of moral evil. Evil is everywhere in Shakespearean Tragedy because it is, for Bradley, the negative principle of the tragic world. Thus, in his first lecture on ‘The Substance of Tragedy’, he writes, ‘Evil exhibits itself everywhere as something negative, barren, weakening, destructive, a principle of death. It isolates, disunites, and tends to annihilate not only its opposite but itself’ (ST 33). Or, when opening the discussion in his second lecture on Othello, he claims that ‘Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the character of Iago’ (ST 207). Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, and Oswald are the evil beings of King Lear, ‘the tragedy in which evil is shown in the greatest abundance; and the evil characters are peculiarly repellent from their hard savagery, and because so little good is mingled with their evil’ (ST 303). Macbeth commits himself to a course of evil in a world populated by malevolent evil forces and influences. The singularity and vehemence with which Bradley pronounces upon the negative and unfortunate consequences evil has for Shakespeare’s tragic heroes recalls the sermonizing figure of his evangelical father, interpreting the book and preaching its

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moral lessons and virtues to us.38 Even without the knowledge of biographical context, the style recalls for contemporary readers the highly wrought prose and the occasionally platitudinous tenor of the Romantic essayist.39 The voice that we hear in Shakespearean Tragedy is, by turns, resolute, emphatic, reflective, enthusiastic, even agitated, but never dull or monotonous. In his character criticism, Bradley constructs for himself a sense of character that rivals his Romantic predecessors. This is, of course, also the beauty of his writing. When Bradley describes, for example, the development of Shakespeare’s rhetorical style from Hamlet to Antony and Cleopatra, we are treated to a delightful instance of his own prose poetry. The change in versification from the early to late tragedies, he argues, is accompanied by a similar change in diction and construction. After Hamlet the style, in the more emotional passages, is heightened. It becomes grander, sometimes wilder, sometimes more swelling, even tumid. It is also more concentrated, rapid, and varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical. (ST 88) Notice how in this passage he moves from a complete, fluid sentence into short, unparallel clauses. The impression of increased rapidity and irregularity produced by the grammatical construction and frequent punctuation mirror the effect that Bradley describes. When he notes at the conclusion of this paragraph – so wonderfully – that the ‘more pervading effect of beauty gives place to what may almost be called explosions of sublimity and pathos’ (ST 88), he could be describing his own style. So, too, are we arrested in our reading when Bradley’s beautifully crafted prose is interrupted by what we might call explosions of profoundly pathetic exposition. Bradley thus channels into his scholarship the vitality and energy of Romantic appreciation, if not a Coleridgean adoration of Shakespeare. Bradley writes at the cusp of a transition between nineteenth-century Romantic appreciation and twentieth-century literary criticism, in some moments looking back and in others looking forward. It would be a mistake to dismiss Bradley as merely a Romantic essayist, though, or, as many have done, a character critic, or to undervalue what Shakespearean Tragedy contributes to literary criticism in the twentieth century.40 Bradley develops his analysis methodically using sound inductive reasoning, whereby he compares plays, identifies a number of facts about their construction – the order of the action, the conflict and the development of character are the structural components of each play’s discussion – and from these establishes

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observable patterns and repetitions. What becomes the object of discussion is the way that individual plays deviate from the tragic form that unites them (OLP 89). Fundamental similarity, therefore, provides the rationale for the choice of the four plays under discussion in the volume to the exclusion of others (the love-tragedies or the Roman plays), rather than their chronological proximity or innate greatness (though Bradley does, following his understanding of Hegel, class them as Shakespeare’s truest or purest tragedies). In the discussion of individual plays, he presents his arguments and provides short illustrative examples of textual quotation to demonstrate and support them, a method readily familiar to students today. In his discussion of Cordelia’s ‘dumbness of love’, for example, he describes how her ‘tender emotion, and especially a love for the person to whom she has to speak, makes her dumb’. Her love, as she says, is more ponderous than her tongue: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth. This expressive word ‘heave’ is repeated in the passage which describes her reception of Kent’s letter: Faith, once or twice she heaved the name of ‘Father’ Pantingly forth, as if it press’d her heart: two or three more broken ejaculations escape her lips, and she ‘starts’ away ‘to deal with grief alone’. The same trait reappears with an ineffable beauty in the stifled repetitions with which she attempts to answer her father in the moment of his restoration. (ST 318–19) If Bradley might be accused of describing the plot and characters in sweeping brush strokes, his textual focus and pattern of argument nevertheless lay the groundwork for the method of close-reading that would be defined most explicitly by Cleanth Brooks and his contemporaries in the school of American New Criticism, and practiced in England by the Scrutiny critics F. R. Leavis, Muriel Bradbrook and, Bradley’s greatest detractor, L. C. Knights.41

How many children had Lady Macbeth? The significance of Knights’ essay as a refutation of Bradley in particular has perhaps been overstated. He only spends a couple of pages critiquing

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Shakespearean Tragedy, in addition to the oblique allusion in the essay’s satiric title. Bradley is, nonetheless, the ‘most illustrious example’ of certain critical presuppositions; ‘and of these’, Knights explains, ‘the most fruitful of irrelevancies is the assumption that Shakespeare was pre-eminently a great “creator of character” ’.42 Knights positions Bradley’s book as the culmination of a 200-year history of character criticism, beginning with Thomas Rymer in the late-seventeenth century, and it’s against this history that he makes the case for his own treatment of the plays as dramatic poems: ‘A play of Shakespeare’s is a precise particular experience’, he explains, ‘a poem – and precision and particularity are exactly what is lacking in the greater part of Shakespeare criticism’.43 Knights thus presents a case for his own method of textual criticism – one, it should be noted, that seems now as equally quaint as Bradley’s – and, to make that case rhetorically convincing, Knights generalizes the diverse history of Shakespeare criticism and demonizes Bradley as its exemplar. To be sure, there are moments when Knights’ acerbic criticism is shrewd, for example, when he argues ironically that ‘Macbeth is a statement of evil. I use the word “statement” (unsatisfactory as it is) in order to stress those qualities that are “nondramatic”, if drama is defined according to the canons of William Archer or Dr. Bradley’.44 He’s most critical of what he calls the ‘detective interest’ Bradley exercises in his extensive notes, an interest that supersedes critical interest. But the notes are merely a ‘logical corollary to the main portions of the book’.45 From the lectures, he calls into question the extrapolations of character that form some of Bradley’s main concerns, such as what Macbeth’s customary character is like, that is, when he’s not plotting the murder of kings, or whether Hamlet was at home or at Wittenberg at the time of his father’s death. Some of his criticism is misleading, though. In the above example from Hamlet, for instance, the issue of Hamlet’s whereabouts is for Bradley a tertiary consideration. Bradley’s main concern is to establish whether Hamlet is, vis-à-vis Goethe and the Romantic view of his character, melancholic and disinclined to action. The question thus becomes: what was Hamlet like before his father’s death, when he was not suffering under the weight of his grief and the moral repulsion over his mother’s incest? His answer is that Hamlet is naturally an athletic, decisive and noble young man, ‘generous, and free from all contriving’, as Claudius describes him in Act IV, highly intellectual and, when placed in critical circumstances, showing ‘a sensitive and almost painful anxiety to do right’ (ST 82). Although he engages in a kind of character speculation that is anathema to Knights, Bradley never veers from the evidence offered by the text, and his

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purpose is closer to Knights’ than the latter allows. What we find, in fact, is Bradley countering the Romantic idealization of Hamlet’s character, as he does in his later discussion of Schlegel and Coleridge, the latter of whom, Bradley argues, sees in Hamlet a reflection of himself, ‘a man in certain respects like Coleridge himself, on one side a man of genius, on the other side, the side of will, deplorably weak, always procrastinating and avoiding unpleasant duties, and often reproaching himself in vain’ (ST 107). But Knights trivializes Bradley’s argument in order to strengthen his own. This is most symptomatic when Knights argues that Bradley’s assumption throughout the book is that ‘the most profitable discussion of Shakespeare’s tragedies is in terms of the characters of which they are composed’. He then goes on to quote the key explanation from ‘The Substance of Tragedy’: The centre of the tragedy[, therefore,] may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing in action . . . What we [do] feel strongly, as a tragedy advances to its close, is that the calamities and catastrophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main source of these deeds is character. The dictum that, with Shakespeare, ‘character is destiny’ is no doubt an exaggeration . . . but it is the exaggeration of a vital truth.46 What Knights omits in the first ellipsis is Bradley’s observation that, while Shakespeare’s main concern lay in character, to ‘say that it lay in mere character, or was a psychological interest, would be a great mistake, for he was dramatic to the tips of his fingers’ (ST 12). This is a minor though concrete example of the way critics such as Knights have simplified Bradley’s argument about character in order to vilify it to suit their own purposes.47

Hegel and Tragedy More importantly though, Knights overlooks the connection here to Hegel and to the theory of tragedy that underpins ‘character criticism’; and, as noted above, it’s a reading of Hegel through the lens of Green’s Idealism. Bradley’s understanding of Hegel’s theory of tragedy is given fuller development in a later lecture in Oxford Lectures on Poetry, though it’s dated there 1901 (all the lectures in the later volume are dated to reflect their original composition or delivery).48 ‘Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy’ probably formed part of a series of lectures in 1901 when Bradley first took

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up his temporary post at Oxford – again, perhaps reminded by his return to Oxford of his student days with Green – which probably included ‘The Substance of Tragedy’ and other preliminary lectures that appear in Shakespearean Tragedy. It may be that, in collecting the lectures into the first book, he felt it was unnecessary or inappropriate to include a more academic examination of Hegel. Even in that examination, we find Bradley disavowing scholarly language; his is a ‘sketch’ of Hegel’s theory in the Aesthetik, ‘torn’ from the rest of Hegel’s philosophy and exhibited ‘as far as possible in the language of ordinary literature’ (OLP 69). Nevertheless, Bradley’s footnote to this apology shows just how wide his reading of Hegel is, and how his argument has been extracted from precise selections. The argument developed here is more or less identical, both in development and premise, to that of ‘The Substance of Tragedy’ in Shakespearean Tragedy, and, indeed, the former provides a much fuller understanding of the relationship between his character criticism and his version of Idealism. The relationship to Hegel also helps to explain, if only partly, what seems to later critics such as Knights to be Bradley’s pedantry. Remembering that the most significant of his scholarship prior to this period involved the editing of volumes of philosophy (Green’s and Nettleship’s), what we find are elements of philosophical method to the argument, especially when he begins by proposing a set of general propositions and then particularizes them step by step, building from one claim to the next more particularized claim. Indeed, in his discussion of Hegel in particular, there are clearly patterns of Hegelian dialecticism; it may be that Bradley, following Hegel’s argument, inadvertently adopted a dialectical pattern into his own discussion. Bradley will, thus, typically propose one or a set of more abstract or generalized claims about the nature of tragedy. He will then move to a negation of that claim by demonstrating how it does not always apply in a particular instance. He will then particularize the claim into a more concrete argument or instance. This is the Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. So, for example, Bradley begins the essay by observing that tragedy is a story of suffering, as most people would find obvious. The objection comes from Hegel who, Bradley suggests, would note that mere suffering is not tragic, but only the suffering that comes from a special kind of action: ‘Pity for mere misfortune, like fear of it, is not tragic pity or fear’ (OLP 70). Rather, tragic pity is due to the ‘spectacle of the conflict and its attendant suffering’ and these do not appeal merely to our sensibilities or sense of self-preservation, ‘but also to our deeper mind or spirit’ (OLP 71), and in this manner, he reformulates his original

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assertion. Quite wonderfully, Hegel is written into the argument as a rhetorical device, the figure who provides the antithesis or counterpoint in a dialectical argument. The deeper mind or spirit to which Bradley refers in the above quotation is the key trope of his argument in his essay on Hegel, what he calls, following Hegel, geist, and which he translates to ‘spirit’ or the ‘spiritual’. Importantly, the tragic hero’s conflict is not merely mental or psychological, but is of a transcendental nature, a conflict of the spirit itself: ‘It is a conflict’, he explains, ‘between powers that rule the world of man’s will and action – his “ethical” substance’ (OLP 71). Bradley characterizes what he calls the ethical substance of the hero as a combination of the hero’s will to act ethically and to realize the good in himself, and to realize a good for society; recalling Green’s Idealism, ‘the perfection of human character – a perfection of individuals which is also that of society, and of society which is also that of individuals – is for man the only object of absolute or intrinsic value’. Thus, for Bradley, the ‘family and the state, the bond of parent and child, of brother and sister, of husband and wife, of citizen and ruler, or citizen and citizen’, combined with internalized values such as love, honour, or devotion to a cause are the spiritual forces or powers exhibited in tragic action (OLP 71). Although he doesn’t use the expression, Bradley implicitly evokes a version of Hegel’s eternal consciousness by characterizing this spirit both as internal and felt, but also as external or of higher powers that motivate, compel and govern human action in the tragic world: they form ‘the substance of man, and are common to all civilised men, and are acknowledged as powers rightly claiming human allegiance’ (OLP 71). This spirit, for Bradley, is not a religious spirit per se, not Hegel’s God, but it is a divine spirit, an ethical substance, and it is immanent in humanity and works through it. The tragic conflict is therefore a conflict between the ethical substance and its negation or antithesis, and that negation, perhaps for want of a better word, is the ‘evil’ everywhere present in Shakespeare’s tragic universe. The prominence Bradley gives to evil in Shakespearean Tragedy as an external force that acts upon and against the hero is therefore more properly explained by his desire to recast the theory of tragedy popularized by Aristotle in the Poetics, in which the conflict was seen to result from an error caused by ignorance or some excess in the behaviour of the hero, his hamartia. In ‘The Substance of Tragedy’, Bradley refers to hamartia indirectly by calling it the ‘tragic trait’ (ST 21), and he shows clearly his understanding of Aristotle by describing its presence in all of Shakespeare’s tragedies. However, the tragic effect, what Aristotle identifies

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as the emotions of pity and fear evoked by pathos, are caused for Bradley not by the error or mistake itself, but by our sense of the waste of the spirit in the hero. Thus, in one of his most Idealist moments in Shakespeare Tragedy, he explains, Everywhere, from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this mystery, because the greatness of soul which it exhibits oppressed, conflict[ed] and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. (ST 23) What distinguishes the tragic heroes from all others is that their suffering is exceptional, as they are themselves of exceptional character, usually men of high estate. Shakespeare gives us no mere interest in individual character, but rather shows us how ‘characteristic’ deeds issuing in action result in tragedy. This is the part of Shakespearean Tragedy quoted and partly misrepresented by Knights. The tragic effect is produced not so much by our sense of the defeat of good by evil, but by our sense of the loss of good, the failure of the individual to realize the good immanent in himself. The conflict with evil as a negation of the ethical substance is an external conflict. It’s a cause of the tragedy but it’s distinguished from what Bradley calls the tragic effect. Iago, for example, is the evil that works on Othello, but there is nothing tragic in Iago’s character at the end of the play. Othello, by comparison, is moved to act by an excessive moral repulsion towards Desdemona’s supposed infidelity and betrayal, a normally good characteristic, but here excessive, unforgiving and blind to Iago’s manipulation. The internal conflict is one of good opposed to itself. If Macbeth were purely evil, bent on murder and despotism, there would be no tragic effect at the conclusion of the play, but it’s because all of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, Macbeth included, have within them certain kinds of good that we are moved by their tragedies. For Macbeth, it is the good that comes from his bravery and skill in war, his devotion to his wife, and his rhetorical power. In the Hegel essay, Bradley adds to Macbeth ‘a conscience so vivid that his deed is to him beforehand a thing of terror, and, once done, condemns him to that torture of the mind on which he lies in restless ecstasy’ (OLP 87). We see the internal conflict of conscience in his soliloquies. In a parallel moment in Shakespearean Tragedy, Bradley describes Macbeth’s conscience

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as ‘so terrifying in its warnings and so maddening in its reproaches that the spectacle of inward torment compels a horrified sympathy and awe which balance, at the least, the desire for the hero’s ruin’ (ST 22). Bradley spends considerable time in the companion lecture on Hegel discussing and comparing the differences between classical and modern tragedy, the latter not limited to Shakespeare, though it’s clear from parallel moments such as those above that the lecture developed in tandem to the Shakespeare lectures and that they are meant to complement or supplement one another. The problem Bradley has in appropriating Hegel’s theory is that the division between classical and modern tragedy is Hegel’s and reflects Hegel’s preference for the classical.49 In Greek drama – for Hegel, Antigone is the perfect exemplar – the characters are more obviously attached to their ethical powers. Antigone, disobeying the edict not to bury her murdered brother, loses her life because of her absolute assertion of the family over the state. Creon, the ruler who issued the edict, sees his own lands in ruin for violating the sanctity of the family. The catastrophe is that ‘neither the right of the family nor that of the state is denied; what is denied is the absoluteness of the claim of each’ (OLP 74). Modern tragedies, especially those of Shakespeare, attach more weight to the personality of the hero. The distinctive feature of modern art is the prominence given to individual subjectivity. Bradley thus modifies his definition of tragedy from Hegel to argue that the tragic fact in Shakespeare is a ‘self-division and intestinal warfare of the ethical substance, not so much the war of good with evil as the war of good with good’ (OLP 71). As in Greek tragedy, the conflict results from the exclusivity of claims coming into conflict with competing claims, but in modern tragedy, especially Shakespeare’s, this conflict is internalized.

From Hegel to Shakespeare This internalization of the tragic conflict is most obvious in Hamlet, and we can see how Bradley’s first lecture on that play develops upon his Hegelian formula. The lecture is, like the later ones, occasionally frustrating because of its dialectical structure and what seem to be, to modern readers, his tangents and digressions. But the argument comes into clearer view when we dissect it according to its dialecticism. Bradley thus begins the lecture with a general proposition or premise, that the whole story of Hamlet ‘turns upon the peculiar character of the hero’ (ST 89). Hamlet with Hamlet left out would be absurd because the events of the play are otherwise

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sensational and horrible and, moreover, no other figure in the play matches the tragic proportions of the title character; the ‘remaining characters could not yield a Shakespearean tragedy at all’ (ST 90). In dialectical fashion, the lecture moves forward by considering all the ‘defects’ of Hamlet’s character that might be used to explain the cause of his tragedy, in other words, to explain Hamlet in Aristotelian terms. Indeed, the bulk of the lecture is devoted to systematically knocking down plausible theories about Hamlet’s character, and this is why the argument feels frustratingly digressive. And, since Bradley is turning, for the most part, to nineteenthcentury criticism as his dialectical counterpoint, he must necessarily turn to the question that dominated most criticism about the play up to this point, the cause of Hamlet’s delay. He begins by rejecting outright the argument that Hamlet is unintelligible because mad and therefore rendering the question unanswerable. This, he argues, is a misimpression; what we see in Hamlet is Shakespeare expressing the mysteriousness of life itself – in fact, as it appeared to him, expressed directly through Hamlet – which needs to be distinguished from the unintelligible psychology of his character. Hamlet appeals powerfully to our sense of the mystery of life, but so does every good tragedy; and it does so not because the hero is an enigma to us, but because, having a fair understanding of him, we feel how strange it is that strength and weakness should be so mingled in one soul. (ST 94) Again, Bradley’s elegant rhetorical style complements the metaphysical poetry he reads in Hamlet. He then turns to three classes of theory about Hamlet’s delay. The first is that Hamlet delays because of external difficulties, such as, for example, that he is never in a position to bring Claudius to public justice, and that his only proof of Claudius’ crime is ‘a ghost-story!’ (ST 94). Bradley raises other possible external difficulties, but summarily dismisses them for lacking in textual evidence; so, for example, Hamlet never expresses his desire to bring Claudius to public justice, and he always assumes he can obey the ghost (‘Sith I have cause and will and strength and means to do it’, Hamlet, Act IV, Sc iv). Bradley criticizes what he is so often accused of doing by others, that is, extrapolating action and character beyond the evidence of the text. Assuming that Hamlet’s conflict is therefore internal and not external, Bradley considers the second class of claim, that Hamlet’s delay results from one element of his character in isolation, such as his conscience or a moral scruple. Hamlet does possess a ‘most moral nature’ and suffers from an

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anxiety to do right, but the argument that his conscience prevents him from, for example, murdering Claudius when he has the opportunity in Act III (‘Now I might do it pat, now he is praying’), is not supported by the text. Here, again, Bradley urges us to exercise precise attention to the text. The following two classes of theory find their articulation in the pre-eminent writers in the Romantic tradition. The first, the Romantic sentimental view, belongs to the German writer Goethe who, in his novel The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister (1795–1796) – typically regarded as the progenitor of the German Bildungsroman or novel of identity formation – characterizes Hamlet as, like Wilhelm Meister, lacking ‘the strength of nerve which forms a hero’ (ST 101).50 This view, Bradley argues, is ‘grossly unjust to Hamlet, and turns tragedy into mere pathos’ (ST 103), though it’s also too kind to Hamlet because it ignores the ‘hardness and cynicism’ that become part of his character in this moment of crisis. The next and final class of theory belongs to both Schlegel, a German poet and translator of Shakespeare whose views were well known to nineteenth-century critics, and Coleridge, both of whom view Hamlet as having a reflective or excessively speculative habit of mind – alluding to his later soliloquy – ‘of thinking too precisely on the event’. This last, by degrees in combination with the sentimental view of Hamlet, is for Bradley the most widely received view of Hamlet’s character and therefore it is imperative for him to incorporate it into his dialectical argument. The difficulty Bradley has with the Romantic view of Hamlet is its self-reflexivity. The Romantics, and especially Coleridge, as noted above, see in Hamlet merely a reflection of themselves; Coleridge’s Hamlet bears an uncanny resemblance to Coleridge. Bradley thus particularizes his opening proposition that the play turns upon the character of the hero by systematically considering the earlier positions that form his dialectical counterpoint, and only then can he articulate his own qualification of that proposition about Hamlet’s character. Importantly, that qualification follows from a rejection of the Romanticist emphasis on the expression of individuality – the Romantic hero who, at odds with the world around him, is forced to turn his gaze inward, peering at himself, like Coleridge, with a paralyzing self-reflexivity – to emphasize instead a higher social and moral ideal. According to Bradley, Hamlet is tragic because Hamlet suffers from excessive goodness. He has an acutely sensitive nature, and when put under an exceptional strain, he is therefore prone to melancholy. He has an ‘exquisite’ moral sensibility, an ‘unbounded delight and faith in everything good and beautiful’ (ST 111). Add to his temperament and sensibility his intellectual genius. His philosophy, Bradley argues, is like Shakespeare’s own, ‘the immediate product of

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a wondering and meditating mind’ (ST 114). The tragedy results from the excessiveness of these qualities and the exclusivity of the claims of his good character upon him. His moral sensibility and genius ‘become his enemies’ (ST 120). For instance, Bradley describes the effect of the revelation upon Hamlet’s character of his mother’s incest as revealed through his first soliloquy (‘O that this too, too solid flesh would melt’) thus: A nature morally blunter would have felt even so dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things in one. (ST 119) In keeping with his Hegelian premise, the tragic effect is produced for us by our sense of the waste of good. Hamlet’s tragedy is expressed as a selfdivision or intestinal conflict within the hero, but it reflects a division or disunity of the spirit: ‘Hamlet brings home to us at once the sense of the soul’s infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring’ (ST 128). Each of the subsequent lectures on the three remaining tragedies proposes a similar argument. Othello, though no one would deny that he acts with ‘unjustifiable precipitance and violence’ (ST 191), is Shakespeare’s most noble construction; ‘his sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs’, Bradley argues, ‘in most readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other hero in Shakespeare’ (ST 191). Unlike Hamlet, Othello’s nature tends outward and he is free from Hamlet’s introspective habit. He is also easily excited. Like Hamlet, however, he suffers from an excess of his good qualities. He’s full of vehement passion, his trust is absolute and hesitation is impossible to him: ‘If stirred to indignation, as “in Aleppo once”, he answers with one lightening stroke’ (ST 191). Bradley thus agrees with Othello’s own assessment of his error in his final soliloquy, when he asks that he be remembered not as ‘one easily jealous but, being wrought / Perplexed in the extreme’. While Othello evokes, more than any other tragedy, our sense of pathos and is therefore one of Shakespeare’s most compelling dramas, King Lear, by comparison, as a dramatic creation is not a great play. However, the tragedy comes into clearer view when compared with Prometheus Bound or The Divine Comedy, ‘with the greatest symphonies of Beethoven and the statues in the Medici chapel’ (ST 244). Bradley is remembered in particular for criticizing the play as ‘too huge for the stage’ (ST 247). However, this is

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also the play’s greatness, the play itself a Dantesque allegory: ‘the immense scope of the work; the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains; the interpenetration of sublime imagination, piercing pathos, and humour almost as moving as the pathos’ (ST 247). All of these show us, Bradley argues, ‘the half-realized suggestions of vast universal powers working in the world of individual fates and passions’ (ST 247). The play is thus Shakespeare’s greatest work, though not his best play. Recalling his companion essay on Hegel and the discussion of Greek tragedy, Bradley argues that the play shows us something universal, ‘a conflict not so much of particular persons as the powers of good and evil in the world’ (ST 262). Macbeth is the most difficult to explain of the four tragedies in terms of Hegel’s theory of tragedy because the play appears on the surface to be merely a conflict of good versus evil, the evil heightened by the supernatural elements. It is Shakespeare’s darkest and most atmospheric play, and in his lectures in Shakespearean Tragedy, Bradley spends considerable space describing in his own prose poetry the brooding atmosphere. That atmosphere is not one of unrelieved blackness; the impression of black night through which the action develops is ‘broken by flashes of light and colour, sometimes vivid and even glaring. They are the lights and colours of the thunderstorm in the first scene; of the dagger hanging before Macbeth’s eyes and glittering alone in the midnight air’ (ST 334–5), and so on. The flashes of light and colour become a metaphor for Macbeth’s character who stands out from this murky background. In his Hegel essay, Bradley addresses the problem of Macbeth directly, arguing, as noted earlier, that Macbeth’s is not a moral greatness, but a greatness of character nonetheless. In fact, in discussing Hegel’s theory of tragedy, Bradley expresses his ‘regret’ that Hegel used such words as ‘right’, ‘justified’ and ‘justice’ because they mislead us into associating the good of the hero with quotidian morality and juridical notions of right and wrong. In the case of Macbeth, we admire his imagination, his determination and his conscience, and the tragic effect depends upon our feeling that the elements in the man’s nature are so inextricably blended that the good in him, that which we admire, instead of simply opposing evil, reinforces it. Macbeth’s imagination deters him from the murder, but it also makes the vision of the crown irresistibly bright. (OLP 89) In the corresponding, though much fuller explanations in Shakespearean Tragedy, Bradley describes Macbeth’s sensitive and violent imagination, the intensity and ‘enormity of his purpose’ (ST 358), and the ‘perpetual agony

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of restlessness’ brought on by his consciousness of guilt (ST 360). Even at the end of the play, when Macbeth has succumbed to the ‘frenzy of his last fight for life’ and is brooding on the futility of the future – ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day’ – even then, he retains the appeal of the tragic hero. ‘In the very depths’, Bradley argues, ‘a gleam of his native love of goodness, and with it a touch of tragic grandeur, rests upon him’ (ST 365). There is through all of the lectures this continuous thread of idealism, a running argument about the metaphysical nature of tragedy formed some thirty years prior at an earlier Oxford. Yet there is so much more. As he moves through the plays, Bradley becomes our guide, carefully explicating the development of the action from one moment to the next, showing us the themes and symphonic arrangements of Shakespeare’s art, and, of course, reimagining the characters in his own lyrical prose. The popular appeal of Bradley’s Shakespeare to students and enthusiasts is easy to understand. He connects these characters to us, as modern readers and playgoers, persuading us to their majesty and nobility, idealizing their humanity and showcasing their poetry.51 If, on the one hand, Bradley can be faulted for having a fanciful imagination, for digressing occasionally from his argument into unnecessary qualification, and for extrapolating the characters beyond the text, treating them as if they were real people, he also provides, on the other hand, a compelling argument about why we read and appreciate Shakespeare today.

Biographical Criticism Sigmund Freud’s first major work of psychoanalytic theory, Die Traumdeutung, first appeared in Germany in 1900. Freud, already in his mid-40s – he was five years younger than Bradley – had been collaborating through the 1890s with Joseph Breuer on a method for the treatment of hysteria, which was thought to be a set of psychosomatic disorders rooted in childhood trauma, and he published his first major work with Breuer in 1895, Studien über Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria). In Die Tramdeutung, he put the case forward for his own method of psychoanalytic treatment, a method which involved the systematic analysis of dreams and their symbolism. The work is better known to English readers as The Interpretation of Dreams, first translated by James Strachey and published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1913. The book is premised on a concept that would become more or less synonymous with Freud’s psychoanalytic method, the unconscious,

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even though he was not rightly the originator of the term. In the book, Freud also begins to articulate a theory about infantile sexuality as the basic material of human psychology, what would come to be known as the Oedipus complex. The name derives from the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (one play of a trilogy of Theban plays including Antigone) which Freud uses to explain the complex. The play is about the inevitability of destiny. Oedipus is unable to escape the future that is predicted for him by the oracle that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. Through a series of revelations over the course of the play, Oedipus is shown to have long since committed these acts: murdering his biological father Laius and sleeping with his mother Jocasta (Antigone is one of their daughters), who had secretly abandoned Oedipus as a baby after she had heard of the prediction. Distraught by the revelation, Jocasta hangs herself; Oedipus blinds himself with the pins of her dress, and the play ends with the chorus reminding us to wait to ‘see life’s ending ere thou count one mortal blest’.52 The lesson about the indifference of destiny to human suffering notwithstanding, the importance Freud attaches to the play for psychoanalysis is that it shows us a destiny that might have been our own: ‘It may be that we are destined’, Freud argues, ‘to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers’.53 The play becomes an exemplification of the infantile sexual desire – developed from those first inklings of pleasure we derive in the oral stage from the mother’s breast and the jealousy we feel towards the father as a rival for the mother’s affection – which is pushed down or repressed into our unconscious, but revealed to us indirectly through the horrifying spectacle of the drama. However much the field of psychology has moved forward in the 100 years since The Interpretation of Dreams was first published, Freud’s argument in this work remains rich and compelling; it is, like Shakespearean Tragedy, a monument of late Victorian culture. Freud is, like Bradley, a figure who stands on the threshold of a new disciplinary practice, and is perhaps more obviously than Bradley one of its chief authors (the man who gave us ‘penis envy’ and ‘anal retention’). The interest of Freud’s theory lies for us not in his contribution to medicine, however, but in the way that he deploys a classical tragedy to explain human character in terms of universal qualities or conditions. Freud notes that Jocasta tries to comfort Oedipus at one point by explaining that many men dream of sleeping with their mothers, which Freud holds up as evidence that the play is itself rooted in ancient dream content. ‘The story of Oedipus is the reaction of the imagination to these typical two dreams’ of sleeping with the mother and killing the

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father, Freud argues, and ‘just as these dreams, when dreamt by adults, are accompanied by feelings of repulsion, so too the legend must include horror and self-punishment’.54 In other words, we are compelled by the play’s enactment of our own repressed desires. Freud reads the play in a way that establishes a kind of equivalency between stories and what he identifies as typical dreams – the dreams that all of us will have had at some point in our lives – both of which can be interpreted, if not coextensively, for their latent or hidden psychical content. Textual interpretation provides the logical corollary to dream interpretation. As is well known, Freud continues his discussion of the Oedipus complex in The Interpretation of Dreams by turning to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The passage is short, appearing as a footnote in the original German text, which was then expanded and incorporated into the main text of the 1913 translation. What we find, nevertheless, is a remarkable similarity between Freud’s and Bradley’s arguments about Hamlet. Freud’s point of departure is the question that habitually preoccupied nineteenth-century essayists about Hamlet’s delay. He addresses Goethe’s assessment of Hamlet, employing the same quotation from the play as Bradley to characterize Goethe’s sentimental Hamlet as ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’.55 He then invokes what Bradley calls the Schlegel-Coleridge Hamlet – a Hamlet of ‘morbid, irresolute character’.56 And Freud even calls upon some of the same defences that Bradley uses, for example, by noting that Hamlet is not wholly incapable of action, such as when he stabs Polonius in his mother’s chamber. But where, for Bradley, the answer to the question of Hamlet’s delay is found in Hamlet’s excessive moral sensibility and genius, the answer for Freud is rooted in Hamlet’s unconscious. As in Oedipus Rex, we are presented with a similar, though not parallel, incest when we learn that King Claudius has killed his brother and married Gertrude. Hamlet should take revenge on Claudius, but he is unable to do so because, as Freud argues, Hamlet is overcome with feelings of inhibition and remorse. The problem, he suggests, is that Claudius in killing Hamlet’s father and sleeping with Hamlet’s mother shows him his own repressed desires; thus, the loathing which should drive Hamlet ‘on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish’.57 Freud may have consulted Shakespearean Tragedy between 1904 and 1913, when the revised comments on Hamlet appeared in the English translation of The Interpretation of Dreams, but the connection is probably less direct. That connection is rooted in the exchanges of Romanticism between England and Germany in the nineteenth century. Freud’s Shakespeare is

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Goethe’s Shakespeare, and the Shakespeare of the German translations of Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck. Bradley’s Shakespeare is shaped by an inwardlooking German aestheticism – Hegel and, to a lesser extent, Kant – as well as by English Romanticism. When he argues, for example, that the whole tragedy of Macbeth is sublime (ST 332), he clearly has in mind Edmund Burke’s 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and the Romantic gothic novel. Both Freud and Bradley emphasize the interiority of fictional characters, imagining, in the case of Hamlet, his psychology prior to the opening of the play, and both writers read the play to uncover what it represses. Bradley even evokes Hamlet’s unconscious in an uncannily Freudian language, twinning it with destiny no less, when he argues that at the time when Hamlet learns his duty from the ghost, ‘the time which his fate chooses’ (119), Hamlet vows to ‘give his life to the duty of revenge; and the rest of the story exhibits his vain efforts to fulfil this duty, his unconscious self-excuses and unavailing self-reproaches, and the tragic results of his delay’ (120). But both Freud and Bradley also call attention to the imagination and creative power of the writer, reading in Shakespeare’s ‘poetry’, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth, ‘a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’.58 Bradley does so in a more obviously Romantic way. In the Introduction to Shakespearean Tragedy, he instructs his reader to learn to apprehend the actions and personages of the dramatic characters ‘so that they may assume in our imaginations a shape a little less unlike the shape they wore in the imagination of their creator’ (19). Wilfully oblivious to the collaborative medium of performance in the theatre, Bradley assumes a linear pathway between Shakespeare and his readers, treating the plays as though they were novels.59 Freud argues in a similar fashion that ‘it can of course only be the poet’s mind which confronts us in Hamlet’.60 Freud, like Bradley, treats the play as if it were a gateway to Shakespeare’s mind, reading its overly determined structure as a mirror of Shakespeare’s interiority, though he disrupts the Romantic idealization of the imagination by putting the meaningful content beyond the writer’s conscious control. By using two tragedies, among other narratives, to explain psychoanalytic concepts and, in turn, using those concepts to explain their appeal to us, Freud writes what is arguably the first pseudo-scientific theory of art.61 Both Freud and Bradley were writing in a period of almost feverish interest in biographical lore and speculation. Freud mentions his own debt to a biography by the Danish writer Georg Brandes, written in 1895 and translated into English in an 1898 edition, from which Freud extracted details about the period of Shakespeare’s composition of the play, noting in

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particular the death of his son Hamnet not long before the play was written. Brandes’ volume was one among many works of biographical interest in Shakespeare over a period that spanned the late-nineteenth century into the early-twentieth, and which included a genre of literary criticism that blended readings of the plays with details of Shakespeare’s own life, seeking to discover within them the secret or key to the man Shakespeare. In England, titles such as Shakespeare’s True Life (1896) and The Shakespeare Enigma (1903) advertised the truths about Shakespeare they had discovered, the mysteries uncovered and solved.62 The first model for this genre was Edward Dowden’s immensely popular 1875 volume, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, in which he proposes to ‘connect the study of Shakespeare’s work with an inquiry after the personality of the writer’ and to observe ‘in its several stages the growth of his intellect and character from youth to full maturity’.63 Sidney Lee’s biography of 1898, fastidious in its attention to detail and conservative in its approach, was partly a response to the wild speculation of nineteenth-century biography and biographical criticism. Also in 1898, the London socialite Frank Harris published a series of popular articles about ‘The Man Shakespeare’ in The Saturday Review, of which he was both owner and editor at the time. The articles were collected and expanded into a 1909 volume, The Man Shakespeare and his Tragic Life Story.64 The volume typified what was by this point a recognizable genre of popular biography and provided a counterpoint to Lee’s academism. Key to its popularity was a scandalous theory of Shakespeare’s sex life. Harris reads all of Shakespeare’s writing as an allegorical biography of Shakespeare’s sexual misfortunes: the first, being wooed and then scorned by his shrewish wife Anne Hathaway, was allegorized in Venus and Adonis, and the second, his unfortunate affair with a mistress, the so-called Dark Lady of the Sonnets, provided the material for female characters in his later plays. Not unlike Freud’s theories of the unconscious and libido in the same period, Harris’ articles were titillating and subversive, but whereas Freud sought to domesticate desire by directing it into the academic language of nineteenth-century sex theory and psychology – and in so doing insert himself into the medical establishment – Harris achieved more immediate, though short-lived, popularity by exploiting the public interest in Shakespeare’s illicit romances.65 George Bernard Shaw praised the volume for defying Victorian sensibilities: ‘There is a precise realism and an unsmiling, measured, determined sincerity which gives a strange dignity to the work of one whose fixed practice and ungovernable impulse is to kick conventional dignity wherever he sees it’, wrote Shaw.66

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Victorian Shakespeare and Sexual Dissidence Desire is a key trope linking the Romanticist literary imagination with sexual discourse, the Romantic valorization of Shakespeare’s creative genius turning inevitably to romance, to questions of love and undisclosed sexual attractions and how these provide material for writing. Shakespeare’s sonnets are a central site of this exchange in the late-nineteenth century. The centerpiece of Harris’s argument is a theory about the identities of the dedicatee of the 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ‘Mr. W. H.’, commonly thought to be the young male addressee of the first 126 sonnets, and the Dark Lady, supposedly the addressee of most of the remaining sonnets. Though he claims to have invented it, Harris was following earlier nineteenth-century writers by proposing William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and Mary Fitton, who was known to have had an affair with Herbert in the late 1590s, a theory also promoted by Shaw in his play The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Oscar Wilde was a friend of Harris. In 1916, Harris wrote an unauthorized biography of Wilde called Life and Confessions, yet another sexual exposé. Harris describes there the controversy that surrounded a work of biographical fiction, ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, which Wilde wrote and published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1889. The story explores through a layered narrative the supposed relationship between Shakespeare and a young male actor, Willie Hughes, celebrated in the sonnets in the language of male Platonic love. The story became a key piece of evidence in Wilde’s trials in 1895, bringing to public attention the question of whether Shakespeare was merely expressing admiration in the conventionalized Petrarchan language of love and devotion, or whether the sonnets read biographically revealed his same-sex desire for some unknown youth. Through writers such as Wilde and Harris, Shakespeare becomes a vehicle for the expression of sexual dissidence and for the articulation, in the case of Wilde, albeit in suggestively figurative terms, of same-sex desire, especially in a period prior to the widespread use of the term ‘homosexual’ as a marker of psychological identity.67 In the early 1900s, Freud’s role in the articulation of the language and character of homosexuality was important, though in England, discrete. The Interpretation of Dreams links a theory of sexual development to literature and Romanticist tropes of interiority to construct its narrative of the Oedipal romance. That romance establishes heterosexual sexual development as normative, that is, the ideal; Freud characterizes homosexuality as an ‘inversion’ of otherwise ‘normal’ sexual development, the young male subject’s failure to disengage his desire

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for his mother, or the female subject’s desire to acquire a penis, both indicative of their inversion. Before Freud’s work was translated into English, theories of sexual development and homosexuality were articulated in an emergent body of sexological studies. The pioneer of nineteenth-century sex studies was the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, whose 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis first employed the notion of ‘inversion’ to describe homosexuality.68 The book was translated into English in the 1890s and advertised as a ‘medico-legal’ study with ‘especial reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct’, and was thus an important work in the pathologizing of what was then the criminal activity of same-sex sexual activity. In England, Havelock Ellis produced a number of works through the 1890s in both German and English, including a book on Sexual Inversion (in German in 1896, in English in 1897), co-authored with the writer and poet John Addington Symonds.69 Symonds was one of the most outspoken advocates of homosexual emancipation in late Victorian England. Symonds, ten years Bradley’s senior, matriculated at Balliol College in 1858 and was tutored in classics by Benjamin Jowett. He gained a First in Greats in 1862 and was elected to an open fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, in the same year, but was ousted shortly thereafter following a scandal involving a young male chorister. In 1883, he wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics, the first argument in English for what he described as the ‘Uranian’ love practised by the Greeks, and, in 1892, he proposed to Havelock Ellis a book on sexual inversion, on which they first collaborated but which Ellis completed after Symonds’ death in 1893. Symonds also wrote extensively on European and English Renaissance art, including essays on the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. He published a sensational volume in 1878 that showed Michelangelo’s poems had been altered to mask the fact that they were addressed to a young man.70 In this way, Symonds employed readings of Renaissance literature as a means of challenging conventional ideas about sex. Symonds’ early career paralleled that of his Oxford contemporary, Walter Pater, a student at Queen’s College from 1858 and Fellow at Brasenose College from 1864. Pater, like Symonds, wrote numerous works on the Italian and English Renaissance to much the same effect. Bradley would have been well aware of the controversy of Symonds and Pater, especially the latter’s reputation as an aesthete and ‘dandy’. In 1874, letters signed by Pater ‘yours lovingly’ to a Balliol undergraduate were passed to Jowett, who then warned Pater not to apply for university posts.71 Symonds spent much of his life in self-exile in Europe and many of his writings were censored. The first printing of the 1897 English version of

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Sexual Inversion was bought up by his friend Horatio Brown before it could be sold publicly to avoid scandal, and the subsequent volume published as Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol. I. Sexual Inversion under Ellis’s name was expurgated of much of Symonds’ material, and even this was suppressed as an ‘obscene’ work.72 The danger of humiliation, public condemnation or, worse, prosecution and punishment, made it necessary for such aesthetes as Pater and Wilde to conceal their unorthodox sexuality through coded literary terms in their writing and criticism. The indirect language of aestheticism became a means of articulating more positively what the sexological studies of German and English psychologists were describing negatively as the pathological disorder of sexual inversion.73 Such coded ambiguity was still dangerous and could even work against those aesthetes who employed it, as the trials of Wilde evidenced. Platonism, and Platonic love, in particular – characterized as an intimate but non-sexual homosocial attachment – served the purpose of both sublimating and codifying samesex sexual attraction, and examples in the Renaissance were everywhere to be found and deployed. In the case of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Platonic love was the device by which Shakespeare’s relationship to the young male addressee could be desexualized, while, for aesthetes such as Wilde, it was the means to express a subversive homoeroticism.

Shakespeare’s Platonism The idea of Shakespeare’s Platonism was developed in a much earlier work by Richard Simpson in 1868, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Simpson describes Shakespeare’s ‘love philosophy’ in the sonnets in the Platonic language of intellectual appreciation of beauty: ‘love is the passion for the beautiful, or rather, as Plato says, for begetting and creating in the beautiful’, he argues. ‘Love is an act of the mind, excited and solicited by a beautiful object, and having for its object the production of beauty in, and by means of, the old, existing beauty.’74 Far from a nineteenthcentury aesthete, though, Simpson was a Catholic convert and theological writer, writing in the heart of low-church evangelicalism in Clapham in the 1850s and 1860s, while Bradley was growing up there. Turning to literary writing later in his life, Simpson was one of the first to promote the argument that Shakespeare was a recusant Catholic. Simpson’s arguments were revived in 1899 by Henry Bowden, who published posthumously a work based on Simpson’s unpublished notebooks.75 Bowden argues there that Shakespeare’s Catholic teaching was fully worked out in the sonnets.

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Drawing on Simpson’s argument that the sonnets are an allegorical expression of Shakespeare’s philosophy of love, Bowden reads the ‘battle of life’ experienced in Shakespeare’s soul as ‘fought between true and intellectual [versus] false and sensual love’.76 Bowden also positions the argument for Shakespeare’s Catholicism by contrasting it with two predominant views: the first, that Shakespeare ‘proves himself the representative of the positive practical view of life inaugurated by the Reformation’ is represented for him by Dowden in his biographical reading of Shakespeare; the second, that Shakespeare writes a secular drama under the influence of a ‘heathenising Renaissance’, is typified by Edward Caird.77 Both Dowden and Caird were key intellectual influences on Bradley’s writing. Dowden was for Bradley the most important of contemporary or near contemporary commentators on Shakespeare, whose views Bradley felt were closest to his own. In a footnote in Shakespearean Tragedy to one of his King Lear lectures, Bradley recalls the influence that Dowden’s Shakepere had on him earlier in his life, and he suggests that ‘anyone entering on the study of Shakespeare, and unable or unwilling to read much criticism, would do best to take Prof. Dowden for his guide’ (ST 330). In his own book, Dowden provides a wholly expurgated view of the sonnets, declining in a footnote to engage in the contemporary controversy. Instead, he provides a few pages of the most oblique hagiography, describing the Shakespeare who is revealed in the sonnets as ‘capable of measureless personal devotion’ and as ‘tenderly sensitive’ and forgiving.78 Dowden’s influence on Bradley is unmistakable: his high estimation of Shakespeare’s intellect and sensitivity are matched by Bradley’s in Shakespearean Tragedy. While both writers cultivate a Romanticist ‘appreciation’ of imagination and genius, however, Bradley’s system of philosophy is more fully worked out, as we’ve seen, through British Idealism. Caird was a contemporary of Symonds, having gone up to Balliol in 1860, nearly a decade before Bradley’s arrival. Caird formed a close bond at Balliol with T. H. Green, and he was one of the key intellectual forces with Green and F. H. Bradley in the revival of Hegel and Idealism. Caird also published in 1883 an influential study of Hegel which Bradley would almost certainly have consulted. In 1893, after a long stint as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow – where he worked alongside Bradley for about four years – he was elected Master at Balliol to succeed Jowett, and he remained there until 1907, spanning the period of Bradley’s return to Oxford in 1901. In 1896, Caird produced a brief article of biographical criticism of Shakespeare for The Contemporary Review.79 The Catholic commentator, Bowden, takes particular issue with what are clearly the Hegelian implications of Caird’s

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reading, in particular, his argument that ‘as moderns, we are all fighting under the banner of a free spirit’.80 Bowden refutes his Idealist narrative by drawing an analogy with Darwinian evolution as a narrative of progressive improvement. So too, argues Bowden, Caird reads Shakespeare’s characters in terms of how each must ‘from certain beginnings arrive at its final issue’. Thus Shakespeare’s tragedies present ‘not the operation of free will or a decision of human choice, but the pure evolution of a catastrophe’.81 Bowden’s could be a critique of Shakespearean Tragedy. It could even, when we consider its implicit argument against a universalizing and scientific explanation of human behaviour, be a critique of Freud. Both Bowden and Caird were minor writers on the subject of Shakespeare, but they present a conversation in which we find Bradley engaging by association; indeed, it’s hard not to imagine Bradley having shared with Caird in private conversations his ideas about Shakespeare and vice versa, during the period of Bradley’s Shakespeare and Hegel lectures. More importantly, though, what this larger and rather astonishing intersection of literary, religious, scientific and sexual discourses demonstrates is that, for any writer in the period, to write on Shakespeare or to speculate about Shakespeare’s biography or personality is necessarily to engage in the highly charged politics of religious and sexual dissent in late Victorian England. Shakespearean Tragedy does so by developing a Hegelian reading of the four tragedies, though Bradley limits his discussion of Shakespeare the man to the hagiographic praise for imagination and genius learned from Dowden. But Bradley’s biographical interest in Shakespeare as a man underpins his reading of the plays, and it’s developed in a fuller essay in Oxford Lectures on Poetry, ‘Shakespeare the Man’, dated 1904.

Shakespeare the Man Bradley begins the lecture by making the case for biographical criticism, confessing that he cannot so easily resign the wish to find the man in his writings, and to form some idea of the disposition, the likes and dislikes, the character and attitude towards life, of the human being who seems to us to have understood best our common human nature. (OLP 311–12) Since our knowledge of Shakespeare’s biography is so limited, though, he argues that we cannot help but turn to his literary writings to develop

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an idea of the writer. Although ‘we soon reach the limits of reasonable certainty’, nevertheless, the idea is ‘more distinct than is often supposed’, and thus Bradley evokes the familiar justification for biographical criticism. As might be expected, central to his investigation are the sonnets. Here, Bradley turns to Sidney Lee’s 1898 biography and to what Bradley calls the excitement generated by Lee’s discussion of the sonnets. As noted earlier, Lee’s is a remarkably conservative biographical reading of the sonnets, written partly to quell the lore and speculation of nineteenthcentury sonnet theories. In the sonnets, Lee argues, Shakespeare merely adapts or imitates Renaissance conceits and the literary conventions of the sonneteer and, read in this light, ‘the autobiographic element in his sonnets, although it may not be dismissed altogether, is seen to shrink to slender proportions’, he argues.82 That Lee is aware of the subversive aestheticism of nineteenth-century writers such as Symonds and Wilde is clear. Lee is remarkably coy: he never explicitly notes that the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man, and he certainly never addresses the language of love and devotion that Shakespeare uses there – most notably, in Sonnet 20, the centrepiece of Wilde’s ‘Willie Hughes’ theory. Moreover, Lee only considers the possibility of a biographical reading of the sonnets in terms of the Dark Lady, which he ‘relegates to the ranks of the creatures of [Shakespeare’s] fancy’.83 Bradley praises Lee for his close contextual analysis, which shows how Shakespeare borrows and develops upon the commonplaces of Renaissance sonnet writing. He rejects, however, Lee’s argument that the sonnets are entirely fictional and reveal nothing of Shakespeare the man except that, quoting Lee, ‘at one time in his career Shakespeare disdained no weapon of flattery in an endeavour to monopolize the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank’ (OLP 313). Rather, Bradley argues that the fiction Lee proposes is incomplete and unsatisfactory, that Shakespeare would not write a story of relationships only to leave so many details left out and so many questions unanswered; therefore, the sonnets, though to some degree fictional, must have their source in autobiography. But even if Lee were correct, the sonnets would still tell us something about their author; Shakespeare could not write more than 150 lyrical poems ‘expressive of those simulated emotions without disclosing something of himself’ (OLP 313). This is the justification Bradley uses to read all of Shakespeare’s works biographically. He appeals to those readers who believe ‘the most dramatic of writers must reveal in his writings something of himself’ but that we can expect a reasonable certainty of our impressions of Shakespeare only within

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certain limits (OLP 316), and so Bradley continually calls attention to the fact that these are his very personal impressions of Shakespeare. The lecture is, for the most part, an unremarkable example in the genre of biographical criticism, taking most of its cues from Dowden and lacking in the lurid speculations and suggestions of the more immoderate examples of the period, such as Frank Harris’ Saturday Review articles. Bradley tells us that Shakespeare was ‘not only sweet-tempered but modest and unassuming’ (OLP 319), that he was not presumptuous or self-important. Recalling his characterization of Hamlet in Shakespearean Tragedy, Bradley suggests that some of Shakespeare’s writings ‘point to a strain of deep reflection and quasi-metaphysical imagination’ (OLP 321), but that Shakespeare was not given to melancholy and did not have a brooding disposition. Some of the more mundane observations he makes are that Shakespeare had a love of music and nature, but that he ‘did not care for dogs’ (OLP 336). Shakespeare possessed a ‘gentle, open and free nature’ (OLP 345) – echoing Ben Jonson’s elegiac praise in the First Folio – but he had an aversion to servility and flattery (OLP 346). On the question of religion, Bradley concludes that Shakespeare’s plays were secular, and that, though he voiced through his characters Christian commonplaces, Shakespeare was himself more or less ambivalent about the doctrinal disputes between Catholicism and Protestantism in his day. However, though he was not a religious man, Shakespeare had a serious sense of conscience (OLP 352). Philosophic, but not melancholic; a conscientious idealist, but not dogmatically religious; essentially a good, well-meaning individual with human limitations – Bradley’s Shakespeare begins to sound remarkably modern, remarkably like one of Bradley’s Idealist contemporaries, if not remarkably like Bradley himself. On the important question of Shakespeare’s attitude towards love, we find Bradley deploying the Platonic argument of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, idealizing the intellectual, homosocial bond between men over and above the heteronormative romantic love between men and women. Shakespeare, he argues, like any poet inclined towards love, treated romance romantically, tragically and humorously. Bradley argues that, in his plays, Shakespeare tends to focus on the ‘unreality’ of romantic love, as for example in the case of Romeo, or even Hamlet. Shakespeare develops in the lover’s heart a sense of the unreal, which must have been drawn from his own experience (OLP 326). Bradley contrasts the unreal idealism of romantic love in the plays with what must be the real experiences with the Dark Lady reflected in the sonnets. The state of mind Bradley finds

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expressed there is ‘half-hearted, often prosaic, and never worthy of the name passion’: It is uneasy, dissatisfied, distempered, the state of mind of a man who despises his ‘passion’ and its object and himself, but, standing far above it, still has not resolution to end it, and only pains us by his gross and joyless jests. (OLP 328) In the sonnets addressed to the noble youth, by comparison, the language is ‘high-flown’ and the feelings are expressed with ‘intensity’ (OLP 330). Returning to the argument made by Lee that the sonnets are conventional expressions of devotion, Bradley contends, by comparison, that they show Shakespeare was ‘exceedingly sensitive to the charm of beauty, and that his love for his friend was, at least at one time, a feeling amounting almost to adoration, and so intense as to be absorbing’ (OLP 333). In a decidedly Wildean turn, Bradley admits in an almost confessional tone that, most of us, I suppose, love any human being, of either sex and of any age, the better for being beautiful, and are not the least ashamed of the fact. It is further the case that men who are beginning, like the writer of the sonnets, to feel tired and old, are apt to feel an increased and special pleasure in the beauty of the young. If we remember, in addition, what some critics appear constantly to forget, that Shakespeare was a particularly poetical being, we shall hardly be surprised that the beginning of this friendship seems to have been something like falling in love . . . . (OLP 333) What does it mean to be a ‘poetical being’ in the Renaissance? More importantly, what does it mean to evoke, in the age of Wilde and Pater, aestheticism as a defence of the homosocial bond and adoration of male beauty articulated in the sonnets? Even more importantly, what does it mean when a lifelong university bachelor evokes such a defence in Oxford, the centre of much ideological and social dissidence in late Victorian England as well as the home to much of its scandal? To answer these questions would be to engage in the kind of biographical speculation that Bradley ventures in his lecture, and we would need to make all the same qualifications he does about producing judgments from impressions, about constructing from the point of view of our own contemporary interests an idea of the man we want to see. Nevertheless, the temptation to psychologize Bradley from his writings, even to psycho-analyse him in Freudian

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fashion, is great. What do the omissions in his writing tell us about his undisclosed desires? Given the scant biographical knowledge we have of him, how can we read the criticism he has left us in order to reveal the likes and dislikes, the pains, the joys, the disappointments and so on, of the man behind the writer? What do his lectures repress? At the conclusion of ‘Shakespeare the Man’, Bradley considers the question of which Shakespeare character reveals the most about his personality. The answer is unsurprising. It’s Hamlet. This is actually Harris’ argument in The Man Shakespeare and in the 1898 Saturday Review articles on which the book was based. Bradley acknowledges Harris’ articles in two separate footnotes, the first of which is clearly defensive: ‘A good many of Mr. Harris’s views I cannot share, and I had arrived at almost all the ideas expressed in the lecture (except some on the Sonnets question) before reading his papers’ (OLP 315). Harris’ Shakespeare is, like Harris was himself, a highly sexed womanizer, and in his biography of Wilde, he emphatically denied what he understood to be Wilde’s theory of Shakespeare’s sexual inversion indirectly expressed in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’. Is this where Bradley’s ideas on the sonnets differ? The acknowledgement of Harris in the footnote was probably inserted for the 1909 publication of the Oxford Lectures because Harris, in a Vanity Fair column in 1907, had complained that Bradley ‘took almost my very words on the subject of Shakespeare’s personality and Hamlet’.84 The omission of Harris from the lecture proper was probably also due to Bradley’s sense that the Saturday Review articles were not reasonably scholarly enough to include in an academic lecture. Bradley’s elevation of Hamlet as the ideal expression of Shakespeare the man – ‘Shakespeare put his own soul into this creation’ (OLP 357), he concludes – also reminds us of the connection made by Freud, even though Bradley had probably not come into contact with Freud’s argument before 1909. Freud’s reading of Hamlet was brought back to England by the first English practitioner of psychoanalysis, Ernest Jones, and further developed in an essay for the American Journal of Psychology in the subsequent year 1910. The essay was then expanded in stages over a number of years, culminating in the 1949 full-length study Hamlet and Oedipus. While Bradley’s character criticism was soon overshadowed by the new criticism of Knights and his contemporaries, psychoanalysis became a formidable school of literary criticism in the twentieth century. In 1938, following Germany’s occupation of Austria, Jones was instrumental in bringing Freud and his psychoanalytic circle to England. While psychoanalysis flourished in England and America, especially following formal recognition by the British Medical Association in 1930, German aestheticism fell understandably out of fashion.

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Bradley himself was extremely disheartened by the First World War with Germany, and he produced little scholarship after its conclusion. His 1929 A Miscellany is comprised of lectures and essays composed mainly between the 1909 Oxford Lectures on Poetry and the start of the war in 1914. The one essay in the volume to address German philosophy, Bradley’s Adamson Lecture of 1909, says remarkably little about Kant, Hegel or Schopenhauer; instead, Bradley spends most of the lecture valorizing English poets. ‘Our poetry’, he writes, ‘is one of our national glories’, and England’s relatively inferior philosophical tradition reflects ‘that massive common-sense in which we are superior to the volatile Greeks and the dreamy Germans’.85 Declining health and a disposition towards hypochondria were no doubt contributing factors to his diminished scholarship, but Bradley’s criticism and Bradley himself seem to have been caught up in the rejection of British Idealism in the aftermath of the war. Historical positivism, of the kind Bradley admires in Hegel and other German philosophers and which he describes as ‘that enthusiastic faith in man’s progress towards perfect goodness and happiness’, was a harder sell in the post-war environment of literary modernism. Following his tenure in Oxford, Bradley lived with his sister in London, and died there following an illness in 1935. G. K. Hunter tells us that he was oppressed by a sense of failure late in life, and that melancholy and ill health are the themes that characterize his correspondence in this period.86 If I were inclined to biographical criticism, I would see in Bradley something of the tragic figure he describes in Shakespearean Tragedy, someone resembling Hamlet perhaps. Here was a man with strong convictions and beliefs, an idealist, but whose idealism sometimes blinded him to the realities of his world. He had a capacious intellect and a philosophic disposition. He was especially sensitive to the beauty around him, especially to the beauty of the dramatic works of Shakespeare. He was also a romantic, but his idea of love was unreal and was never fulfilled in a permanent relationship. Instead, he valued the intellectual bonds he shared with his Oxford and Glasgow contemporaries. T. H. Green was his Horatio. But his story is finally a tragic one, a hero of a former age whose idealism, however admirable, was lost to the scepticism and cynicism of the twentieth century. L. C. Knights was his Fortinbras.

Bradley’s Legacy Even while Shakespearean Tragedy continued to be reprinted through Bradley’s later life, his critical fortunes took a pronounced turn in the years

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just before and after his death in 1935. L. C. Knights was one of his most formidable critics, publishing his essay – which, as we’ve noted, was targeted at least in part against Bradley and his style of ‘character criticism’ – in 1933. In 1937, F. R. Leavis published a much more damning essay on the Bradleian Othello in the sixth volume of Scrutiny.87 The title of Leavis’ essay – ‘Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero: or the Sentimentalist’s Othello’ – following the precedent set by Knights, ridiculed Bradley’s reading of the play in Shakespearean Tragedy. His was an ironic jest at the expense of Bradley’s ‘sentimental’ argument that the tragedy shows ‘the undoing of the noble Moor by the devilish cunning of Iago’. Writing of Bradley’s lecture in Shakespearean Tragedy, Leavis notes that ‘Othello we are to see as a nearly faultless hero whose strength and virtue are turned against him’.88 Leavis’ criticism is considerably more pointed and derisive than that of Knights. There is almost something embarrassing about the personal dimension of his attack. Taking issue with Bradley’s ‘character-analysis’, for example, Leavis disparages Bradley for treating the play like ‘a psychological novel written in dramatic form and draped in poetry’, an approach that may have worked had Bradley made it ‘consistently and with moderate intelligence’ (p. 259). Bradley’s is ‘as extraordinary a history of triumphant sentimental perversity as literary history can show’ (p. 262). Bradley himself is a ‘potent and mischievous influence’ (p. 260). Leavis took particular aim at what he saw to be the similarity between Bradley and that earlier Romantic essayist, Coleridge. Much of Bradley’s second lecture on Othello is concerned with Coleridge’s well-known characterization of Iago’s ‘motiveless malignity’. Bradley, by comparison, argues that Coleridge’s is a ‘misleading phrase’ (ST 209) because Iago is one of Shakespeare’s most wonderful and subtle characters, one with very remarkable powers both of intellect and of will. Iago’s insight, within certain limits, into human nature; his ingenuity and address in working upon it; his quickness and versatility in dealing with sudden difficulties and unforeseen opportunities, have probably no parallel among dramatic characters. (ST 218) Bradley’s high estimation of Iago’s ‘intellectual superiority’ made this lecture for Leavis ‘more extravagant in misdirected scrupulosity than any of the others; it is, with a concentration of Bradley’s comical solemnity, completely wrongheaded – grossly and palpably false to the evidence it offers to weigh’.89 Leavis argues instead that ‘Bradley’s Othello is Othello’s’; that is, Othello has a romantic, sentimental view of himself, and this is partly the cause of his undoing. In other words, Leavis counters Bradley’s

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argument with an alternative psychological profile of the play’s main characters, with some extra attention given to their ‘dramatic function’. The irony notwithstanding, the argument of the essay is really not all that important. The essays in Scrutiny served the purpose of articulating a particular kind of theme-based literary criticism, an early hermeneutics – Leavis lavishes praise in the Othello essay on G. Wilson Knight’s ‘spatial’ readings in The Wheel of Fire – and the towering figure of Bradley and the style of criticism he represented was the Bastille that needed to be stormed. Knights was the founding editor in 1932 of the quarterly Scrutiny, a literary review which almost single-handedly established English criticism in the 1930s as a discipline of critical and methodological rigour. Leavis became senior editor of Scrutiny after two issues. Both were associated with English at Cambridge. Knights was a student and later research fellow; Leavis, Knights’ senior by more than a decade, was a teaching fellow at Downing College and a probationary lecturer in the official University English faculty until 1932. Both Knights and Leavis worked to some extent against the conservative culture of the university to professionalize English literature as a discipline, and this was the role that Scrutiny and the so-called Scrutiny critics (sometimes ‘Leavisites’) would play in the development of the field. Indeed, both Knights and Leavis felt themselves to be outsiders to the university system, at least during the first and most dynamic years of Scrutiny, Leavis because he was not appointed a permanent member of the English faculty until nearly his retirement, and Knights because of his working-class upbringing. Knights was a parttime teacher when he published Scrutiny from the home of his parents; How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?, a lecture delivered at King’s College, London, was published at this time by The Minority Press, which Leavis encouraged his pupil, Gordon Fraser, to start up.90 Both Knights and Leavis targeted Bradley not merely for his particular views on Shakespeare, but for the criticism and the establishment that by the 1930s he represented, and this may be why they seem so vituperative and personal. Bradley was, like the Chairs established in the new field of English studies – at Oxford, occupied by Sir Walter Raleigh from 1904, and at Cambridge, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch from 1912 – insufficiently disciplined, in more than one sense of that word. Bradley’s legacy for professional criticism has since been defined as much, if not more, by his critical detractors such as Knights and Leavis, among others, than by his own writing. What value, then, does a work such as Shakespearean Tragedy have for professional criticism today? Critics occasionally speak of a return of Bradley and character-oriented criticism to critical

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favour.91 But in the ‘cultural turn’ since the 1980s and the advent of sophisticated, theoretically informed and often interdisciplinary critical schools – deconstructionism, semiotics, cultural materialism, new historicism, numerous forms of feminism and queer theory, postcolonialism, and so on – the trajectory of professionalization begun by the generation of the Scrutiny and American New Critics has only become that much more pronounced. A genuine return to Bradley, even a return to the formalism of the 1930s, seems impossible, especially since poststructuralism has problematized the very notion of literary criticism as a discrete practice.92 In this critical landscape, what value does Bradley have for us now? One way to answer this question is to think about how we construe ‘value’ in terms of our critical practices and the objects we study. That is, how and why do we assign value to certain cultural objects such as the works of Shakespeare by writing or, paradoxically, ‘criticizing’ them? And why, to return to the question with which we began, should we characterize Bradley as a particularly ‘great’ example of that criticism?

Arnold and English Criticism The story of English criticism since the nineteenth century has been told many times.93 That story begins somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century and includes a number of social forces and historical events too diverse to encapsulate here, though some very particular factors have already been discussed above: the educational reforms of the late-nineteenth century which extended education to previously excluded groups; the simultaneous reform of the universities, especially the incorporation of the natural sciences into the university curriculum; and, at the other end of the spectrum, the ethos of liberal education cultivated by men such as Benjamin Jowett. But Oxford, in particular, and Balliol College no less, played a very particular role in the history of criticism, one that helps to explain Bradley’s place later in it. The linking figure is Matthew Arnold. Arnold was a poet, literary critic and social reformer best remembered in his own life for his sensational views on religious reform. He was critical in particular of biblical literalism. Yet another Balliol student, Arnold won an exhibition in 1841. Benjamin Jowett was completing an MA as a fellow of Balliol at this time and was appointed a teaching tutor in 1842, and so he would have played a formative influence on Arnold’s education. Arnold, like Jowett, was disillusioned with the atmosphere of strife and partisanship during the religious disputes of the Oxford Movement, thus leading him to reject

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religious orthodoxy in favour of his own idiosyncratic spiritualism. Arnold’s father, the school teacher Thomas Arnold, had had similar difficulties while at Oxford, especially with the Thirty-Nine Articles, but he finally took orders before becoming headmaster of Rugby School in 1827. T. H. Green was at Rugby school, whose reputation Arnold senior revived during his tenure there. Rugby became a model for nineteenth-century educational reform in which the younger Arnold would play a key role. He served as a schools inspector from 1851, travelling through the country to survey the state of the educational system; he worked from 1865 on the Taunton Commission, as did Green, and Arnold’s writings on education, especially his 1868 Schools and Universities on the Continent – the result of his travels through France and Germany – played a role in the broader social reform that would eventually see the Education Act of 1870, which attempted to standardize elementary education and provide universal education to all school-age children in England. Arnold’s reputation as a religious reformer and his influence as a national schools inspector were at their height in the 1860s and 1870s, when Bradley was himself a student and eventually fellow at Balliol. In 1857, Arnold was elected as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, for which he was required to deliver three lectures a year. Importantly, he was the first to deliver his lectures in English, as opposed to the customary Latin. It was during his two five-year terms at Oxford that Arnold delivered the lectures that would form the basis of a number of essays about culture and criticism published through the 1860s and 1870s. As has been noted many times, Arnold’s cultural criticism would provide the cornerstone of professional literary criticism from the time of Bradley on, both defining the value of the English literary canon as a cultural object and arguing for the necessity of criticism as an instrument of social order. The most resonant of the epigrammatic phrases that have come to stand in for Arnold’s argument, that culture is ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’, occurs in the preface to the 1869 volume, Culture and Anarchy, a series of essays written and revised over a number of years. The sentence from which the quotation derives is worth quoting in full: The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we know follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following

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them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.94 The style of Arnold’s writing here and elsewhere is belletristic, reflecting the conventions of the nineteenth-century familiar essay and the rhetorical manner of especially French writers whose influence on Arnold’s writing was a source of derision for some of his detractors.95 There is also in Arnold’s use of the term ‘culture’ an inheritance of the German tradition of Bildung, to mean in one sense education or development of character.96 The term ‘culture’ has several distinct meanings in use from the nineteenth century, but Arnold’s use of the term is closest to its root in the Latin complex cultura, which includes in the various forms the root takes the cultivation, ‘tending to or improving of land, minds, persons’, but which also includes ‘the results or means of that action: the tended garden, care given to one’s body, mind, or home, the particular style of dress or ornamentation that evidences the careful cultivation of fashion’.97 In the essay, Arnold describes his version of culture as both an action, a ‘study and pursuit of perfection’ – an ideal that includes both ‘sweetness’ (to mean moral righteousness) and ‘light’ (to mean intellectual power and truth) – but also a product, perfection realized in the best of a society’s art, poetry, philosophy, history and so on.98 Arnold, however, himself a poet, privileges poetry – in an older sense, to mean creative writing generally – above other fields of cultural expression because ‘culture is of like spirit with poetry’.99 The dominant idea of both, he argues, is beauty and the perfection of human nature. The characterization of Arnold as a belletrist is, however, somewhat misleading, especially in the implied association of Arnold with his later Victorian contemporaries, such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, more properly aesthetes in the sense of seeking to cultivate an appreciation for belles-lettres ostensibly for their own sake. Whereas Pater and Wilde employed their aestheticism and dandyism to conceal a more subversive and very often ironic resistance to conventional Victorian mores in a language of transcendence, beauty and sublimity, Arnold, by comparison, was more openly critical of contemporary society. The subtitle of Culture and Anarchy reminds us that this was Arnold’s essay in social and political criticism: ‘culture’ is deployed by Arnold as an intervention and a response to the social changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution: in particular, the ever-increasing mechanization of industry and production, the increasing materialism of daily life, and the instrumental rationality of nineteenthcentury scientism. I would argue, in fact, that Arnold’s definition of ‘culture’ descends in part from European Romanticism, in particular, from

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the German philosopher and literary critic Johann Gottfried Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91) in which Herder disengages ‘culture’ from its associations with ‘cultivation’ and ‘civilization’ to replace it with an alternative idea of human progress and development.100 Arnoldian culture thus becomes a progressive, civilizing agent of society. It should come as no surprise that Culture and Anarchy, as well as the earlier Essays in Criticism (1865), popularized the English usage of ‘Philistine’, a term Arnold employed in particular to describe the antithesis of his high culture, ‘the bad civilization of the English middle-class’.101 Arnold was a thoroughly liberal thinker, opposed to English parochialism and an advocate of democratic reform, most obviously, of education, but given his opposition to utilitarianism and religious dissent, combined with his promotion of English high culture, Arnold is occasionally accused of a reactionary conservatism. There is, nevertheless, a proto-Fabian social utopianism in Culture and Anarchy that, despite his idealism, marks Arnold out from lateVictorian aesthetes. We can see the continuity of Arnold’s thinking in his definition of ‘criticism’ in the companion essays that form Essays in Criticism, the language of which at some points reproduces word for word his definition of culture; for example, when he writes, ‘I am bound by my own definition of [criticism]: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world’.102 Arnold’s version of criticism thus comes to embody the same contradictions of his culture. On the one hand, Arnoldian criticism is ‘disinterested’, to mean unconcerned with the political or social, especially the historical and biographical contexts of literature’s creative moment. Criticism seeks to discern the spiritual and transcendental aspects of literature, idealizing such abstractions as truth and beauty while alienating literature from the tedious distractions of daily social life.103 On the other hand, despite this Romanticist emphasis on the aesthetic, Arnold also insisted upon the social importance of culture, and in particular, on the role of the state as a steward of cultural education.104 In this manner, Arnoldian criticism paired an esoteric concern for the aesthetic with a mission of social improvement. To be sure, the relationship between Arnold’s writing on culture and criticism in the mid- to late-nineteenth century and the professionalization of literary criticism in the twentieth century are diffuse and difficult to quantify. The genealogy involves identifiable currents of influence through figures such as T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis, both of whom would embrace aspects of Arnold’s criticism such as his disinterestedness and his Hellenizing of English literary tradition, even while they remained

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critical of Arnold’s more Romanticist tendencies. But it’s also Arnold’s involvement in educational reform through the same period of his criticism, his earlier career as a schools inspector and his ongoing participation in the campaign to widen public access to a systematized state education system, combined with his claim to the social importance of literary criticism, that link him indirectly to the eventual incorporation of literary criticism in the university. The first Chairs in English were established in Oxford and Cambridge in the early-twentieth century, though the main impetuses driving the expansion of English studies were social reforms tied to groups enfranchised in education as a result of educational reform. These changes included the growth of a female student body at the recently established women’s colleges Newnham and Girton at Cambridge, as well as the simultaneous growth of technical and instructional colleges whose programs of mechanical training were complemented by liberal studies instruction represented mainly by English.105 These developments in education were entirely consistent with the humanizing ‘culture’ of Arnold’s social utopianism. As noted above, F. R. Leavis and the Scrutiny critics of the 1930s, whose middle-class origins and marginalized status at Cambridge made them nonconformist, were highly suspicious of the belletrism of those first Chairs in English, Raleigh, Quiller-Couch, and Bradley, among them.106 The example of Leavis and the Leavisites is, indeed, an important one because it identifies the point of origin of a dialectical tension between criticism’s professionalist and generalist missions. On the one hand, Leavis perpetuated aspects of Arnold’s cultural criticism – prominently, in Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930) and Culture and Environment (1933), two works that developed upon an Arnoldian sense of ‘culture’ – by arguing that the discerning of art and literature depends upon a minority of critics who act as stewards of human achievement and tradition. A university education therefore fulfills a humanist mission; the ‘educated man’ is for Leavis ‘the man of humane culture who is equipped to be intelligent and responsible about the problems of contemporary civilization’.107 Moreover, Leavis positioned this critical project in Herderian fashion as a reaction to the industrialization, mechanization and massification brought on by modern capitalism. In short, literary criticism could serve a higher social purpose as a civilizing agent of the masses. On the other hand, Leavis and his contemporaries responded negatively to Arnold’s universalizing abstractions about poetry, and instituted methods of critical, close-reading analysis precisely because they needed to liberate criticism from the belletrism of an older school of quasi-academic literary appreciation. The study of English

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literature has subsequently continued to oscillate by varying degrees between its generalist, humanizing impulse and a growing professionalist orthodoxy of critical detachment.

Bradley’s Criticism Where does Bradley fit into this narrative? The popularity of Shakespearean Tragedy is an obviously key factor in the role Bradley would play in the development of criticism. Before the 1930s, his name was more or less synonymous with the new discipline of English studies for which he wrote. An oft-quoted comic verse written for Punch in 1926 gives evidence of the ubiquity of Bradley’s lectures: I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s ghost Sat for a Civil Service post; The English paper for the year Had several questions on King Lear Which Shakespeare answered very badly Because he hadn’t read his Bradley.108 Arnold’s vision had been realized: the examination to enter the Civil Service now included English as one of its key components, though the punch line of the verse indicates that what was really required was a knowledge of Bradley. But Bradley played a more immediate and very practical role in promoting English in the university. Unlike the other Chairs in English at Oxford and Cambridge at the turn of the century, Bradley brought very practical experience of teaching English. His experience at Liverpool, in particular, would have helped him to understand the more utilitarian needs of English teaching beyond the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford. Liverpool was a new university with a much broader teaching mandate, catering to the population of an industrial city. Given his very specialized training in philosophy under Green, it seems more likely that his subsequent teaching experience motivates the appeal in Shakespearean Tragedy to popular dramatic appreciation. Prior to Oxford, Bradley seems to have been aware, like Arnold, of the need to make the case for the study of English. He delivered a lecture in Liverpool in 1883 which would be published in 1884 as The Study of Poetry. He also delivered an address to the Teachers’ Guild at Liverpool and to the Glasgow Association of Teachers in 1891 about The Teaching of English

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Literature. The themes of these two lectures were repeated for Bradley’s inaugural lecture in Oxford in 1901, ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’, a lecture which begins by recalling Arnold’s earlier lectures at Oxford and his ‘age-long warfare with the Philistine’ (OLP 3). One of Bradley’s colleagues at Oxford, Ernest de Selincourt, recalls the effect Bradley’s lectures had of raising the profile of English studies in the still newly established School of English: Professor Bradley came to our aid; with the special object of helping the English School he voluntarily extended the scope of his office, and by delivering those lectures upon Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the like of which had not been heard since the days of Coleridge, he convinced a somewhat incredulous University that English poetry was worthy of a place among academic studies.109 Bradley was not by nature a polemicist, preferring instead philosophical dialogue, and his writing lacked the urgency and breadth of Arnold’s advocacy of English and social reform. What he shares with Arnold, however, especially as evidenced in his inaugural lecture, is a view of English poetry as an abstract ideal, intrinsically and universally valuable.110 Poetry is what he calls an analogue of life; that is, we understand life through our understanding of poetry not because the poetry reflects particular circumstances or events, but rather abstract universal truths. ‘Thus’, he argues, ‘one main reason why poetry has value for us is that it presents to us in its own way something which we meet in another form in nature or life’ (OLP 7). Bradley’s approach to poetry is thus a species of Arnold’s ‘disinterestedness’ insofar as poetry is connected to life indirectly or ‘underground’ (OLP 6). Beyond the arguments he made in his lectures and elsewhere for the study of English, Bradley worked very practically to help establish the teaching of English by lecturing to such societies as the Association Promoting the Education of Women and the Workers’ Educational Association, and in 1906, Bradley helped to establish the English Association. G. K. Hunter tells us that Bradley ‘laboured tirelessly to establish the study of English literature in schools and universities as a democratically accessible basic element in education’.111 Arnold was not a philosopher like his contemporaries and inheritors at Balliol, but he clearly shared in the cultivation of an ethos of liberal education that would be taken up by Bradley before and after his own return to Oxford, and, in particular, he imparted to Bradley, if only indirectly – perhaps through the shared memory of Arnold at Oxford recalled by Bradley in his inaugural lecture – a belief in the social value of

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literature to cultivate and enrich contemporary English civilization. And it’s an ethos shared later by Bradley’s detractors such as Knights and Leavis. Writing in the same volume of Scrutiny as Leavis’ essay on Bradley’s Othello, Knights would intone a very Arnoldian appeal to cultural education: ‘The belief that universities founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, he argues, ‘exist primarily to provide the more obviously utilitarian forms of knowledge (with, of course, English, History and languages thrown in for the benefit of prospective teachers) is one that has to be strenuously combated’.112 The question of Bradley’s legacy is really a question of the value of English literature for us today, whether as studied in a professional discipline or as a socially valuable cultural object. Bradley’s lectures no longer have the kind of critical sway they once had in the early-twentieth century because the professional discourse of English criticism has largely abandoned the social utility of literature argument made by Arnold in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the meaning of ‘culture’ itself has shifted in professional criticism as a result of the influence of sociological and especially anthropological studies of cultural objects. Literary criticism today is empirical, historical, and detached – it reflects, in other words, the values of a professional academy dominated by the sciences and social sciences. It may be, moreover, as many now argue, that to hold Shakespeare’s works up as exemplars of universal, humanist ideals in an age of global intercultural communication is no longer tenable. The kinds of value we – in an Anglo-American tradition – ascribe to Shakespeare’s works are necessarily not the same as the values of Shakespeare enthusiasts in, say, China or India. And we should bear in mind, of course, that both Arnold and Bradley were writing at the height of British Empire. I’ve limited this discussion of Bradley’s lectures to a predominantly English context, but we need to remember that any kind of invocation of a national or ‘universal’ culture of English or European art for the benefit of society or civilization is necessarily a function of colonial discourse. There is simply not enough room to discuss that here, except to note the consequences of the First World War on Bradley’s positivist idealism. And yet, English criticism as we know it would not persist – as it has done and continues to do – without an implicit belief in the value of a liberal humanism, the idea that through dialogue, the exchange of ideas, and a belief in our shared humanity, we can make the world a better place. This is what Shakespearean Tragedy is essentially about, and I would argue further that this may be the key to its continued popularity, especially beyond the academy. Bradley’s idealism is at the very core of his lectures. The book

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holds up the belief that Shakespeare’s plays remain relevant to us today because they reflect universal human values and experiences. Aware as we are of the wide-ranging social and political implications of studying Shakespeare, and aware of the historical difference that separates our time from his, we continue to value these works and to derive pleasure from their reading and performance, no less in the global culture of the twenty-first century. Shakespeare is thriving around the world, and the fate of Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy seems inextricably bound up with that phenomenon. The future of Bradley’s legacy therefore depends not upon his theory of tragedy nor upon his particular readings of the plays, but upon the value we ascribe to the study of literature and upon our belief, whether explicit or assumed, in its power to shape and reflect our ideals.

Chapter 2

W. W. Greg (9 July 1875–4 March 1959) Andrew Murphy

Few would dispute the right of Walter Wilson Greg to be considered a ‘Great Shakespearean’. He was the author of several important works on the dramatist, including Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor 1602 (1910), The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text (1942) and The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (1955). In addition to this, he created resources which greatly facilitated research into the history of early modern drama and publishing, such as his four volume A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (1940–1959), his edition of the diary of the Renaissance theatre owner Philip Henslowe (Henslowe’s Diary, 1904–1908) and his Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1576 to 1602 – from Register B (1930). Greg was also instrumental in founding the Malone Society, a scholarly association dedicated to making texts of the earliest English plays – including Shakespeare’s – available in accurate, well prepared editions. Greg is now best known among Shakespeareans for his work on the history of the transmission of the text and on theories of editing. Working in close conjunction with scholars such as R. B. McKerrow, A. W. Pollard and John Dover Wilson – who, together, became known as the ‘New Bibliographers’ – he contributed to the evolution of a set of hypotheses regarding the plays which dominated Shakespeare editing for almost the entire twentieth century. It was only as the century drew to a close that the basic premises of the New Bibliography were called into question, though many of the central ideas of the movement have persisted, even in the wake of such interrogation. A towering figure in the landscape of Shakespeare studies in the twentieth century, Greg’s influence continues to be felt to the present day.

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Biographical Background Greg was born in London in 1875 at the family home, Park Lodge, on Wimbledon Common. The family name may have been an attenuated version of ‘Macgregor’, and Greg himself claimed distant roots in the Scottish village of Ochiltree, in Ayrshire.1 Greg’s father, William Rathbone Greg, ran Hudcar Mill in Bury, a family business which he was ultimately unable to keep afloat. For a time William Greg supported his family by writing for a range of journals but, in 1856, he accepted a civil service post, ultimately becoming Comptroller of the Stationery Office. He continued writing and was the author of numerous books, including Political Problems for our Age and Country (1870), Enigmas of Life (1872) and Mistaken Aims and Attainable Ideals of the Working Classes (1876). William Greg’s politics were reformist and progressive, though he became rather disillusioned with the model of expanding democracy as he grew older (an attitude which, as we shall see, his son may possibly have shared).2 William Greg’s first wife, Lucy, died in 1873, having suffered serious mental illness for many years. Greg married Julia Wilson in the following year and Walter was their only child (William Greg had two sons and two daughters by his first marriage). Julia was the daughter of James Wilson, who had founded The Economist in 1843 – it is from him that Walter Wilson Greg gained his middle name. Greg’s first name honoured Walter Bagehot, his uncle, who had served as editor of The Economist. William Greg died when his son was just 6 years old. His widow struggled to cope with the expense of the large family home at Park Lodge and the property was let out, with mother and son spending the next seven years mostly living abroad. Greg himself gives a flavour of their life during this time: It was in the autumn of 1882 that we went to Switzerland and settled at an hotel above Montreux on the Lake of Geneva. In the spring we moved up to Les Avants, among fields of wild narcissus, and later started by carriage on a tour up the Rhone valley, stopping at Vernayaz and Brig, and over the Simplon to the Italian Lakes. After a few days at Stresa on Maggiore we settled for a month at Monte Generoso above Como, where nightly we were treated to the spectacle of a thunderstorm beneath us.3 Greg would later describe himself, tongue-in-cheek, as a ‘Member of the Idle Rich Class’.4 He was, of course, far from idle throughout his life (he was

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at work in his study on the night before he died), but his itinerant childhood certainly seems to have had its own particular privileged charms. Greg learned French and German while living on the Continent and he would later gain a proficiency in Italian. In the summer of 1888, he was sent to a preparatory school at Wixenford, near Wokingham. From there he went on to Harrow. Some of his Harrow school reports have survived and F. P. Wilson aptly observes that ‘If the form-master was being just who accused him of insufficient attention to detail, then the child was no father to the man’.5 In addition to his academic studies (he discovered that he had ‘some aptitude for geometry’) at Harrow, Greg played football, ‘successfully avoided’ cricket and ‘fenced, sometimes with Winston Churchill’.6 From his public school he went on to Trinity College Cambridge, reading for the Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos. Greg’s career at Trinity was, however, undistinguished. He himself concluded, later in life, that ‘After the constraints and repressions of school the freedom of university life, I fear, went to my head, and growing self-confidence bred a perhaps overweening attitude to the world’.7 In 1897, Greg failed to take honours at Cambridge and was awarded an ‘ordinary’ degree. Some years later, he applied (successfully) for the Doctor of Letters at Cambridge (submitting his work on the Henslowe papers as his thesis) and he admitted that the application was motivated by a desire ‘to wipe out the disgrace of my first degree’.8 Because he had failed to take honours, Greg was debarred from passing on to studying Moral Sciences, which included Political Economy – a course which was to have served as formal preparation for his taking over a central role at The Economist, the title being still, at that time, a family property. Greg did, in fact, stay on at Cambridge to study economics informally for a year, to be followed by a summer spent working as a bank clerk at Kirkby Lonsdale and Lancaster. However, he never did, in the end, take up a post at The Economist, though he did become a trustee, serving in that capacity until the title was sold in 1928. Greg remained a life-long reader of the journal; writing of his routine up to the end of his life, Muriel St Clare Byrne notes that ‘The Literary Supplement and The Economist were opened and dealt with immediately they arrived’.9

Non-academic Writings Though he never worked directly for The Economist, Greg contributed to the journal for much of his life – usually letters, but occasionally short articles as well. These contributions give a flavour both of his range of interests outside of literature and, to some extent at least, of his politics. At one point

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we find Greg writing about ‘The Price of Sugar’, at another he takes up the topic of ‘Motor Reform’, observing that no relaxation of the speed limit appears admissible, since any vehicle going at 20, or even 15, miles an hour becomes, as a rule, a nuisance – unless, indeed, upon a track confined to motors. There may be special cases when higher speed would do no harm, but ‘hard cases make bad law’.10 In terms of his political attitudes, Greg is sometimes seen as being very much of his time and at least one critic has suggested that a retrogressively traditionalist outlook and politics colour the work of Greg and his close colleagues. Thus Laurie E. Maguire argues that What to Greg were timeless, factual verities appear now as personal predilections rooted in considerations of class and nation. Sentimental, lateVictorian, land-owning imperialism influences much New Bibliographic analysis, leading to conclusions which are as out-moded as the historical circumstances which created them.11 Presenting Greg in this way does something of an injustice to the core complexity of his political and social attitudes. Certainly, Greg appears every bit the independently wealthy, conservative member of the establishment class when he tells us in his autobiographical memoir that he enrolled as a special constable and drove a car ‘for Scotland Yard during the general strike of May 1926’.12 But a scan through his letters in The Economist and elsewhere provides a rather more nuanced view of his political attitudes. In a lengthy letter addressed to the editor in December 1908, Greg writes that he notices ‘with pleasure that your remarks last week are far more favourable to the principle of Female Suffrage than any I remember previously to have seen in the Economist’.13 He then goes on to discuss the topic of militancy, both in relation to the suffrage issue and more generally. Greg notes that militancy has been ‘the common accompaniment of agitations for social and political emancipation’ and that it has been used by ‘those who have frightened successive Administrations into putting their house in order’. He observes that ‘were I to find myself subject to the social disabilities to which women are subject, I should not hesitate to adopt methods far more drastic than any which have hitherto characterized the present controversy’. Furthermore, for a man who dedicated so much of his life to trying to impose order on the chaotic documentary inheritance of Shakespeare’s theatre, the following may seem like a surprising assertion:

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Disorder is not a disease, but a symptom. Order is an excellent thing, but it is not the highest good, and to desire that order should be maintained when any considerable section of the community is smarting under an intolerable sense of injustice, is certainly not to desire the welfare of the State. Greg observes in another letter to The Economist, published in the following year, that the editor has ‘more than once been good enough to insert letters of mine which you probably thought wildly socialistic’.14 There is certainly a twinkle in the eye here, but Greg continued to express views that we may consider to be surprising, given his background and social location. For example, throughout the First World War, he persistently registered his opposition to a narrowly-conceived jingoistic nationalism, observing in one letter to the Times Literary Supplement that ‘It appears to me, so far as I am able to judge, that many ordinarily sober and reasonable people are for the moment possessed with a spirit of timorous hatred that saps in them all power of rational thought’.15 By 1919, a certain sense of political disillusionment would seem to have set in, as Greg considers a railway strike provoked by the postwar Conservative-Liberal coalition government. He locates blame for the situation neither with the union nor with the government, but rather with ‘the nation at large, in its capacity of electorate under a new and wide franchise’, who he says, using uncharacteristically harsh language, ‘in a fit of drunken self-conceit, placed the present government in power’. He continues that if the electorate ‘regrets, as it appears to, its former folly, that may be counted as a sign of grace; but surely it has little claim to sympathy in its crapulous repentance’.16 If Greg’s comments here indicate a certain scepticism regarding the value of a democracy whose franchise had, by this point, been very widely expanded, then this may signal a clear filiation between his own political attitudes and those of his father, a reformist who became somewhat disillusioned with the fruits of reform. The point I would wish to stress, however, is that Greg’s politics were much more fluid and considered than the biographical narrative of Harrow, Cambridge, private wealth and a life of independent scholarship has sometimes been taken to suggest. I would further wish to argue that a similar fluidity and complexity can be found in Greg’s work on Shakespeare – and his bibliographical work more generally – where he was much less wedded to fixed positions than has often been suggested in many critiques of the New Bibliography. Political journalism was, however, never more than a peripheral interest of Greg’s. His real focus in life – extending back as far as his time at Trinity – was literature. His first published piece was a poem, ‘A Farewell: Zurich,

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September 18th, 1896’, which appeared in The Spectator. Other poems followed (including a slim volume, Verses by W. W. G., published in 1901), together with a handful of short stories. By 1902, the creative muse would seem to have deserted Greg, as he published no more poems or stories beyond this year. In truth, however, it is hard to feel that she ever really whispered to him with much real conviction or force. The concluding lines of his first published poem are fairly typical of his style: Ice and fell Fade into cloud, – adieu. I have drunk in Fresh life, fresh love of life, upon your snows, Have caught the music of each wind that blows, And felt once more the deep inspiring spell That thrills the breast, and stirs the soul within.17 While the short stories contain some moments of real engagement, there is a tendency for the writing to become clotted with clichés, as in the following passage from ‘Which Things –’, published in The Cambridge Review in 1900: Fresh blades of grass and timid spring flowers, pushed upwards through the soil, the fresh green of bursting buds was on the hedges, and a green haze seemed to hang over the object of her quest. The birds sang from the bushes and in the gray blue of the sky. It was one of those wonderful afternoons of Spring, soft and balmy, when the air seems full of halfconscious life and the heart is big with hope.18

Early Work and Reviews While still at Trinity, Greg developed an interest in pastoral drama. He delivered a paper on the topic at the university English Society (which he had been instrumental in establishing) and later developed this talk into an essay published in the Cornhill Magazine (1899). Greg notes that he learned two things from writing this essay: first, that to understand the English pastoral drama it was necessary to have some more or less extensive knowledge of the history of European pastoralism in general; secondly, that there was no critical work from which such knowledge could be obtained.19 It is entirely typical of Greg that, registering this lack of a necessary resource, he should set about providing it himself. The resulting book, Pastoral

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Poetry and Pastoral Drama, was rejected by Oxford University Press, but was published by A. H. Bullen, at Greg’s own expense. Of Shakespeare, Greg observes in his text that he rarely ‘showed any inclination to connect himself even remotely with pastoral tradition’. He notes that, while the shepherd scenes in The Winter’s Tale find their origins in Greene’s romance of Pandosto, ‘they owe nothing of their treatment to pastoral tradition, nothing to convention, nothing to aught save life as it mirrored itself in the magic glass of the poet’s imagination’.20 Greg himself thought poorly of the book and felt it demonstrated that ‘he had no gift for writing literary history’.21 It did, however, remain the standard work on the topic for some years. A formative influence on Greg at this time was Ronald Brunlees McKerrow, whom he had known ‘on the rifle-range at Harrow’ and with whom he became reacquainted during their second year at Trinity.22 McKerrow was older than Greg and had studied engineering at King’s College London, before joining the family business. However, coming into his inheritance, he abandoned engineering and entered Trinity to take up the study of literature. Greg credited him with ‘a quicker brain and a readier power of assimilation’ than himself. Theirs was, Greg observed, a companionship ‘that fashioned the whole of my later life’ and during their college days they discussed literature into the small hours of the morning, including ‘projects for editing Elizabethan drama and the textual methods to be used’. In time, the pair also made friends with A. W. Pollard (who was to become Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum) and these three scholars, together, in time, with the younger John Dover Wilson, would dominate textual studies – especially in the fields of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature – for much of the twentieth century. After studying at Trinity, McKerrow quickly involved himself in a significant editorial project, as he began work on a text of the complete works of Thomas Nashe for Bullen. When the first volume appeared, in 1904, Greg reviewed it. Writing of McKerrow’s ‘Note on the treatment of the text adopted in this edition’, he observed that while it will probably appear to some readers as pedantic and involved . . . we most sincerely recommend it to the careful consideration of all intending editors as by far the most complete and able investigation into textual method with which we are acquainted.23 Over the course of his life, Greg published a total of more than two hundred reviews and he developed a reputation as a severe and exacting

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critic. John Dover Wilson characterized him as serving up one editor ‘as a Thyestean repast to readers of the Modern Language Review’.24 It is worth noting, however, that, though often harsh, Greg was generally scrupulously fair and he frequently attempted to find something that he could praise, even in work that clearly failed to meet the standards that he was seeking to establish. Again and again in his reviews Greg stressed the need for accuracy in scholarly work and he also repeatedly called on editors to think through intelligently the likely early transmission history of the text they were presenting. Greg’s early review of Frederick Boas’ Works of Thomas Kyd set the tone for much of what was to follow over the next half century. He begins by commenting on the physical make up of the book, noting that ‘the boards are much too flimsy for a book of the size and weight of the present’, then goes on to complain that ‘the paper is decidedly thin . . . you cannot get six hundred pages into an inch and a quarter without a considerable sacrifice of durability, while rough edges are particularly liable to tear’.25 Boas is then taken to task for inaccuracies in his work. Greg is particularly shocked by the ‘glaring and startling variations’ between the title page facsimiles included in the edition and Boas’ transcriptions of them, errors which amount to ‘an utter indifference to accuracy’.26 He concludes his review by observing that ‘If the Clarendon Press wishes a reputation for scientific scholarship to attach to its English publications, it must insist upon a distinctly higher standard of accuracy from its editors’.27 One of Greg’s most damning early reviews was a piece on J. Churton Collins’ edition of the plays and poems of Robert Greene – a review so savage that the ‘Syndics of the Cambridge University Press are said to have hesitated before venturing to print it’.28 Collins himself gave something of a hostage to fortune by observing in the introduction to his edition that he had ‘determined to spare no pains to make it, so far at least as the text was concerned, a final one’.29 Greg hammers away at Collins, noting that his ‘style is frequently careless to the point of obscurity’ and that he ‘habitually and avowedly disregards the work of other critics, except for an occasional sneer’, before coming on to examine Collins’ claim that his edition might be considered to offer a final text.30 ‘It is impossible to pretend’, Greg observes, ‘that it is even moderately satisfactory’. He goes on to note that ‘There is, indeed, no evidence whatever that the editor has himself consulted a single one of the original editions’.31 His final, damning, conclusion is that ‘Professor Collins’ reprint of Greene’s plays will serve until a better is produced, but to put forward careless and superficial work of this kind as a final edition is a gross insult to English scholarship’.32

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Greg remained a stern critic to the last. Close to the end of his life, in 1956, he published a review of Fredson Bowers’ On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists. Bowers had done more than anyone to advance the cause of the New Bibliography on the American side of the Atlantic and Greg both respected his work and liked him as a person, describing him in a letter to David Nichol Smith as ‘a very nice fellow’.33 This did not, however, spare Bowers from being called to task for ‘pretentious writing’ which, Greg observes, ‘may impress a bewildered audience [but] will not help serious readers to treat Professor Bowers with the seriousness he deserves’. Greg notes that ‘The subject-matter of Professor Bowers’ lectures is often difficult enough without being wrapped in a fog of verbiage’.34

Creation of Scholarly Resources In addition to calling editors and textual theorists to task, Greg undertook primary research of his own from the very beginning of his career. In 1900 he offered the preliminary first fruits of what would become a life-long project. This was A List of English Plays Written Before 1643 and Printed Before 1700, which appeared under the imprint of the Bibliographical Society. Initially, Greg had submitted a one-line finding-list to the council of the society, but it was ‘suggested that the list should be enlarged so as to give full and accurate transcripts of all titles’.35 This work was undertaken in conjunction with H. R. Plomer. In an introductory note included in the volume, A. W. Pollard indicated that Greg had hinted ‘of one day producing a full bibliography of the English drama up to the closing of the theatres during the Civil War’.36 The work hinted at appeared as A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, in a total of four volumes, published in 1940 (dated 1939), 1951, 1957 and 1959, with the final volume appearing shortly after Greg’s death.37 Greg opened his final set of acknowledgements by describing himself as one who ‘has been sixty years on [the] job’.38 F. P. Wilson justly observed of the Bibliography in its year of publication that it ‘can never be superseded, though it will be corrected and supplemented’.39 For Shakespeareans, the Bibliography made it possible to assemble a thorough and detailed account of the early editions of the plays and to see those plays within the greater context of published drama in the early modern period.40 A flavour of the extent of the information provided can be gained from the entry in the main volume of the Bibliography, on The Merry Wives of Windsor. The entry runs to two pages and Greg provides a transcription of the material relevant to the play that is included in the Stationers’ Register;

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a transcription of the title pages, half titles and running titles of the 1602, 1619 and 1630 editions; and collations for each text, together with details of catchwords. He also provides information on the text of the play as it was included in each of the four seventeenth-century folio editions of the complete plays. The entry for the First Folio text gives some flavour of the amount of information that Greg manages to include in economically brief compass. It reads, in part: HT] [ornament] | THE | Merry Wiues of Windſor. || RT] The Merry Wiues of Wind ſor. in Catalogue] The Merry Wiues of Wind ſor W. Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 1623, 2°: sigs. D2-E6v, pp. 39–60. Double columns. Text headed ‘Actus primus, Scena prima’ with HT and initial, D2. Catchwords: D-E, Cai. I, E3–4, (ho-)neſt FINIS. Five acts and scenes in verse and prose (the latter greatly predominating). SR 1630 Jan. 29. Tr. (A.) Johnson to (R.) Meighen: The Merry Wives of Winsor.41 A great deal of information is provided in this short entry. We learn, among other things, that the opening page of the play included an ornament and that the dialogue began with an ornamental capital letter; that the text ran from signatures (numbers used to help in the assembly of the finished book) D2 to the verso side of E6; that the catchwords (words at the bottom of the page indicating the first word of the next page) used between quires (individual bound segments of the book) where ‘Cai. I’ and ‘nest’ (the end of the word ‘honest’); that ownership of the play was officially transferred from A. Johnson to R. Meighen in January of 1630 – two years before the second folio edition of the plays was published. Some (but by no means all) of the information provided in the entry can be gathered easily enough in our own time using computer databases such as Early English Books Online (EEBO). But it is important to bear in mind that Greg compiled his Bibliography before even the Short Title Catalogue (STC) microfilm collection of early texts was available to scholars. Most of the volumes logged in the Bibliography were physically examined by Greg, though he did rely on American correspondents for editions which survived only in collections on the other side of the Atlantic, where Henry Clay Folger and others had, of course, built up formidable libraries (Greg himself never visited North America). The Bibliography of the English Printed Drama is representative of one very important strand of the work which Greg carried forward throughout his

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life. When he began his career as a scholar there were very few substantial and reliable resources of any kind available to early modern literary researchers. To take just one simple example, in 1902 we find Greg noting with satisfaction that The ‘New English Dictionary’, which has occupied the labours of an army of scholars for close on half a century, is now advancing towards a successful completion, more than half being already published, while the remainder of the material is in various stages of preparation.42 The ‘New English Dictionary’ is, of course, what we now know more familiarly as the Oxford English Dictionary – an absolutely fundamental research resource for scholarship in English – and it is striking that, when Greg was starting his work, only half of it had been brought to print. In addition to the lack of basic resources, we might also note that much of the scholarly material that was available in this early period was far from being entirely satisfactory. In the nineteenth century, scholarly work on Shakespeare (and on Renaissance literature more generally) had been carried forward, for the most part, by a collection of colourful and eccentric gentleman-amateurs. Principal among these was John Payne Collier (1789– 1883). Collier was a scholar of real substance who, particularly in such works as his History of English Dramatic Poetry and Annals of the Stage (first edition published in 1831), significantly advanced knowledge of the theatre of Shakespeare’s time by drawing on a wealth of manuscript materials held at the British Museum (now the British Library), the State Papers Office and the Alleyn and Henslowe collections at Dulwich College. While his work was in many respects admirable, it was vitiated by an almost pathological tendency on Collier’s part to tamper with the historical record. Repeatedly he cited materials that simply did not exist and he regularly changed the manuscript documents themselves by forging alterations and creating entirely spurious entries.43 As it happens, Greg adopted a very even-handed attitude to Collier, seeing value in his work, while, of course, deploring his forgeries. He condemned Collier’s ‘strange tangle of dishonest fabrication’, but argued that whatever the blot it leaves upon his character, whatever suspicion it necessarily throws, not only over his own work, but over all documents that passed through his hands, it cannot affect the vast knowledge of which he stood possessed, nor the respect which that knowledge, and his very real services to the study of English letters, claim from us of right.44

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Greg offered this opinion of Collier in the first volume of a project which saw him bring to print an edition of the diary of Philip Henslowe (c. 1555– 1616), together with a volume of supplementary materials and one of commentary (1904, 1907, 1908). Collier had published selections from the diary under the auspices of the Shakespeare Society in 1845, but his work, as ever, was not to be trusted, and so, by the early years of the new century, a proper edition was long overdue. The diary itself is a collection of ‘miscellaneous accounts and memoranda’ in which Henslowe registered (among other things) details relating to the running of the Rose and the Fortune theatres, both of which he controlled.45 In producing a more reliable, extended edition of the diary Greg made available to scholars a resource which provides one of the richest compilations of information on the Renaissance theatrical world – an anthology of materials that has served ever since as the bedrock of much research on early modern theatrical practice.46 Greg had been asked to undertake the Henslowe project by the publisher A. H. Bullen. At around the same time he was also approached by the librarian of Trinity College Cambridge, William Aldis Wright. Wright had been co-editor of the most eminent nineteenth-century edition of Shakespeare, issued jointly by Macmillan publishing and Cambridge University Press in nine volumes between 1863 and 1866. He invited Greg to prepare a catalogue of the important collection of early Shakespeare editions which had been left to Trinity by the eighteenth-century editor and scholar, Edward Capell.47 The Capell collection is one of the best in the United Kingdom and Greg’s catalogue of the books appeared in 1903.48 The catalogue made it easier for scholars fully to appreciate the strength of Trinity’s holdings in early Shakespeare texts. From the very earliest years of his career, then, we can see that one of the central contributions Greg made to scholarship was that he put into public circulation key resources for research. He continued doing this all through his life. In 1925, he began publishing a series of volumes of English Literary Autographs, 1550–1650 (1925, 1928, 1932 – third volume and supplement). In these volumes, Greg provides samples and transliterations of the handwriting of early modern dramatists, poets, prose writers and scholars, making it easier for editors and researchers working on these authors to think through issues such as what kind of copy may lie behind their printed works. In 1930, Greg published Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1576 to 1602, which he co-edited with Eleanore Boswell. The Stationers’ Company were made responsible for regulating the printing trade in England in 1557 and their records provide a wealth of information regarding what books

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were registered for publication in Shakespeare’s time (and also how the trade generally conducted its business). A transcript of the registers for the period 1554–1640 was published in five volumes by Edward Arber from 1875 to 1894, but for some unknown reason Arber had been denied access to certain of the Company’s materials covering this period, most notably the decrees and ordinances included in a volume identified as ‘Register B’. Through the offices of the Bibliographical Society, Greg was able to secure photostatic copies of the Register and of related materials. With characteristic humility, he observes in his introduction to the volume which resulted from his study of the documents that The object of the present undertaking is . . . to provide material for a future historian of the Company and its members, and to arrange the exhibits in orderly fashion. My own part for the moment is that of a humble showman.49 In 1931 Greg published what Alice Walker describes as ‘the two magnificent volumes of Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses’.50 John Dover Wilson coupled this work with Edmund Chambers’ William Shakespeare (2 volumes, 1930) and observed that, taken together, these texts ‘placed for the first time in an editor’s hands nearly all the essential material, whether in documentary or theoretical form, needful for his task’.51 Greg continued producing resources that would be of enduring value for scholars right up to the very end of his life. During the Second World War, a conversation with F. P. Wilson led Greg to make a detailed study of the Stationers’ Register and associated documents. Within a couple of years he had, as he notes with typical self-deprecating humour, ‘accumulated material that filled close on a thousand pages of the appropriate foolscap’.52 The immediate outcome of this study was the series of Lyell Lectures, delivered at Oxford in 1955. But he continued to work with the material for the rest of his life. The base text for his study was Arber’s Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers. Arber had incorporated into his primary text a mass of illustrative matter, but this material was neither arranged chronologically nor was it indexed, and so it was extremely difficult for scholars to make use of it. Greg produced a chronological calendar of the interpolated documents, supplementing it with a calendar of relevant material available from other sources, such as the Burghley papers and the State Papers Domestic. He imagined a completed project which would be styled a Companion to Arber and he was still busily at work on this text on the evening of the 3rd of March, 1959, just hours before he died. After Greg’s

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death, the work was completed by I. G. Philip and C. C. Blagden and A Companion to Arber: Being a calendar of documents in Edward Arber’s ‘Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554–1640’ with text and calendar of supplementary documents appeared posthumously under Greg’s name in 1967.53

The Malone Society Greg’s work of providing resources for other scholars has lived on after his death in other ways as well, most notably through the efforts of the Malone Society. In the 20 October 1906 issue of The Spectator, Greg published the following notice: It is possible that some of your readers may be interested in the Malone Society, which has been founded for the purpose of making accessible materials for the study of the early English drama. The publications of the Society, which will be issued to members only, will consist chiefly of accurate reprints of the original editions of old plays, mostly Tudor, and of documents illustrative of the history of the drama and the stage. The subscription rate was set at one guinea and the society ‘hoped that it may be possible to issue each year one play (or its equivalent) for every twenty-five members’.54 Greg was identified as honorary secretary; the other committee members were F. S. Boas, E. K. Chambers, R. B. McKerrow and A. W. Pollard. International support was offered by Alois Brandl (Berlin), G. B. Churchill (Amherst) and Edward Dowden (Trinity College Dublin), among others. Greg observed of the society that ‘most of the burden fell on my shoulders as General Editor’ and, writing of the Malone publications in 1945, F. C. Francis noted that Greg’s ‘interpretation of the duties of General Editor has been so generous that there is scarcely a volume in the whole series which does not bear signs of his work’.55 At that point almost 80 individual plays had been published, including The Life of Sir John Oldcastle (1600) and The Tragedy of Locrine (1595) from among the Shakespeare apocrypha. Other materials also appeared under the auspices of the society, such as edited texts of dramatic records drawn from various sources, including the City of London (1908), the Lansdowne manuscripts (1909) and the Privy Council Register (1911). In the same year that the Privy Council material appeared, Greg edited The Book of Sir Thomas More for the society.

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He subsequently felt it necessary to ‘apologize for having in the introductory note [to the More volume] departed from the severely impersonal tone usual in the Society’s publications, and for introducing a certain amount of controversial matter’.56 The edition was highly significant in that, as we shall see, the manuscript was thought to contain some pages in Shakespeare’s own handwriting, though the matter was (and to some extent remains) contentious. (I will return to this issue below.) The Malone Society continues to issue plays on an annual basis and, at the time of writing, more than 170 volumes have been published.57

Scientific Bibliography So far, I have largely been tracking the manner in which Greg worked, throughout his career, to provide resources which would facilitate the research of other scholars. It should be noted, however, that he also had a strong interest in carrying out investigative bibliographic work – work which involved the close examination of books as material objects. Repeatedly throughout his life Greg was keen to stress that investigative bibliography could be conducted along what he considered to be properly scientific lines. Laurie E. Maguire has noted that ‘In the course of his career Greg compared bibliography to science some ninety-five times; these remarks are mostly concentrated in public lectures where the rhetorical impact could be appreciated to the full’.58 We get a nice sense of Greg’s scientific mindset at work in a pair of disputes between himself and Samuel Tannenbaum, regarding suspected forgeries in historical documents. Tannenbaum was an American-based physician and psychotherapist who was also a keen amateur Shakespearean. In one of his publications, he argued that John Payne Collier had committed a forgery – the introduction of the words ‘Mess T. Goodal’ – in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More. Greg demurred, maintaining that the insertion could not be a forgery, since the words were written in the same ink as the clearly authentic lines of text to which they were attached. In responding to Tannenbaum, Greg begins by explaining how he had initially arrived at this conclusion: I did not employ a tintometer and I question its value. I had not then examined the ink through a microscope. What I did was to make a careful scrutiny in a good light through an ordinary pocket lense – a Steinheil X13 is my usual companion – and that scrutiny quite satisfied me.59

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He then goes on to detail the investigation he has carried out since learning of Tannenbaum’s argument: ‘I have re-examined the writing repeatedly through different lenses. I have also brought to bear on it a pocket microscope, using a range of magnification of 50 to 150 diameters, with the result of considerably strengthening my previous conviction.’ But he has gone further than this in his analysis: ‘through the kindness of the Keeper of Manuscripts and in company with several members of his staff, [I studied] the writing by means of the “ultra-violet” lamp. No difference could be detected between [the two inks]’. Finally, he notes: ‘I have only been able to apply one chemical test. At my request the Keeper consented to touch up a small portion of each writing with ammonium sulphide. The reactions were identical so far as could be perceived’.60 For Greg, here, the application of scientific principles and methods to the problem at hand leads to a wholly decisive outcome.61 In another dispute with Tannenbaum Greg indicated that, sometimes, technology needs to be set aside and the naked eye, coupled with a good knowledge of the materiality of the physical book, needs to be deployed. Again the issue was forgery – this time in the revels accounts for 1604–1605 and 1611–1612. In identifying supposed forgeries in these documents, Tannenbaum relied on an examination of photographic enlargements of the originals, arguing that an analysis of such reproductions is not only equal to, but was, in fact, ‘even superior, to the study of the original’.62 As in the case of J. Churton Collins’ claim to have provided a final text of his author, Tannenbaum had given a hostage to fortune here. With regard to one of the entries that he proposed was false, Tannenbaum argued that, in a section of Book A of the accounts, a forger (possibly, as ever, Collier) had added the name of a dramatist in one section of the document and then erased it both by rubbing and by using chemicals. He backed up his claim by noting that ‘a photograph by transmitted light shows the paper at this spot to be almost as translucent as tissue paper, as a result of the severe rubbing’. He concludes that such a thorough erasure, so evidently calculated to obliterate all traces of the matter written, in a document in which it would have been sufficient to cross out the objectionable name, especially as the names of the dramatists were of no consequence, is almost per se conclusive evidence of forgery.63 Greg, having consulted the original document, comes to a completely different conclusion:

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The lighter marks that show in the facsimile are in two instances slight irregularities in the wire-marks [of the paper], in the rest minute wormholes, the light through which has slightly fogged the plate and produced the appearance of continuous lines or patches! This group of worm-holes occurs in similar configuration and corresponding position in all the other leaves of the book. Greg ends his analysis by noting that ‘The photographs in which Dr. Tannenbaum has such touching faith have here let him down badly’.64 Greg’s method of approach, then, is predicated on a scientific mindset, backed up by a well-grounded knowledge of the materiality of the physical book.

Material Shakespeare We find Greg applying his acute bibliographic eye to a Shakespearean problem in a two-part essay published in 1908. The study would become foundational to the New Bibliographic approach to Shakespeare’s text. At the centre of his analysis is a group of early quarto editions of some of the plays. The group consists of nine printed texts (running to a total of ten individual plays), with title pages indicating a range of dates, publishers and printers. The attenuated, or ‘bad quarto’ (see below), texts of 2 and 3 Henry VI are reproduced together under the single title The whole contention between the two famous houses of York and Lancaster, with an undated title page and the imprint ‘Printed at London for T. P’, ‘T. P.’ being the publisher, Thomas Pavier. Other attenuated texts are also included in the group: Henry V (dated 1608, ‘for T. P.’), Merry Wives of Windsor (1619, ‘for Arthur Johnson’) and Pericles (1619, ‘for T. P.’).65 The set also includes two of the apocryphal plays: 1 Sir John Oldcastle (1600, ‘for T. P.’) and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1619, ‘for T. P.’). The collection is rounded out with editions of King Lear (1608, ‘for Nathaniel Butter’), Merchant of Venice (1600, ‘by J. Roberts’) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600, ‘By Iames Roberts’). The earliest dated plays here had always presented something of a puzzle to Shakespeare scholars, as, in most cases, there was another matching edition in their advertised year of publication: 1 Sir John Oldcastle (‘for Thomas Pavier’), Merchant of Venice (‘by I. R. for Thomas Heyes’), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (‘for Thomas Fisher’) and King Lear (‘for Nathaniel Butter’). It was relatively unusual for Renaissance plays to be sufficiently popular to warrant two editions in the very same year, so these matching

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pairs of editions were always something of an oddity. In addition, specifically in the case of King Lear, scholars had long puzzled over which of the two editions dated 1608 had appeared first. A. W. Pollard reported a curious fact about this group of texts in an article published in The Academy in 1906. Some years earlier a German collector had asked him to look at a volume in which these nine texts had been bound together. Pollard had then come across another volume which contained the same selection of quarto editions. Prompted by this coincidence, Pollard began to look for other examples of the same collection of editions being brought together as a set. The Capell collection had them, bound in two volumes; all of the plays were held by the British Museum, though bound separately; and there was evidence of a bound set in America, though it had been destroyed in a fire in 1895. Why was it that this diverse collection of texts, with dates ranging over two decades was repeatedly brought together as a group? Pollard tentatively suggested that the plays with the earliest dates ‘belonged to unsold stock, and that the news of the forthcoming folio of 1623 caused them to be thrown on the market as what we now call a “remainder” ’.66 They were then, he suggested, brought together with the texts published in 1619, to create sets of selected Shakespeare plays. Greg examined the texts in close detail and offered a completely different explanation of the situation. He noticed various peculiarities in the texts, which seemed both to bind them together (so to speak) as a group, and to call into question the validity of some of the publication dates. For example: some of the title pages included a device with the text ‘Post Tenebras Lux’ and Greg noted that, while it is found on one title-page dated 1600 and purporting to be printed by Roberts, [it] is not otherwise known between 1594 and 1605, and does not occur in any other book bearing Roberts’ name, and, moreover, . . . the impression on the title-page dated 1600 shows the block in a more damaged condition than other impressions dated 1605 and 1617. Greg also noticed that ‘certain large numerals appearing in the imprints are not elsewhere found before 1610’ and that a device bearing the text ‘Heb Ddieu’, which appears on title pages dated 1600 and 1608, ‘is not otherwise known between 1596 and 1610, and does not occur in any other book bearing Roberts’ name’.67 All of this evidence is suggestive, but not wholly conclusive and, in fact, Greg’s reading of the significance of the damage to the ‘Post Tenebras Lux’

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device turned out to be incorrect.68 But Greg had another line of argument to offer. He looked closely at the paper used in the different texts included in the set, specifically examining the watermarks, which help to distinguish papers produced by different manufacturers. He made a striking discovery: ‘though a number of distinct water-marks were found, they occurred quite indifferently in the various portions of the volume, so that there was no play, or group of plays, which did not contain at least one watermark found elsewhere’.69 This suggests that combinations of elements of a single mixed stock of paper turned up in plays supposedly produced by different printers at dates ranging from 1600 to 1619. Greg questions the likelihood of this happening. To believe that it is possible that editions from such a range of dates could have been printed from the same mixture of different lots of paper, he notes: We shall have to assume that in 1600 Roberts had a job stock of paper containing a number of different makes, and that he used it to print editions of three plays that year . . . that Jaggard, [who inherited Roberts’ business,] having occasion to print two plays for different publishers in 1608, happened to use for the purpose some of this same job lot of paper; that in 1619, Pavier . . . commissioned Jaggard to print five other plays . . . and that Jaggard once more happened to lay his hand on this very same stock of mixed papers. Greg concedes that ‘This is, no doubt, abstractly conceivable’ but he concludes that ‘if anyone is prepared to believe that it actually happened, great indeed is his faith’.70 Greg’s conclusion, then, was that the plays were all produced by the same printer in the same year – William Jaggard, in 1619. The repetition of ‘T. P.’ on so many of the title pages pointed to Thomas Pavier as the publisher who had commissioned the entire set. Greg notes that it is ‘not difficult to guess, though very difficult to prove, what Pavier’s motives may have been’.71 Something – perhaps Shakespeare’s death in 1616 – seems to have prompted him to attempt a collection of selected plays. That Pavier, initially at least, intended the texts to be offered together would appear to be indicated by the fact that the two Contention plays and Pericles all have continuous signatures (the combinations of letters and numbers included at the bottom of certain pages in a printed text to serve as an aid to binding). It is possible that Pavier may have been warned off producing the collection, with the result that, as he proceeded, he provided the individual texts with title pages, so that they could be sold separately.72 Because he did

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not own the publishing rights to some of the texts, he may thus, as a result, have placed, as Greg puts it, ‘old dates on the title-pages that it might appear that he was merely selling off the remainders of editions printed years before for other publishers’.73 It is, however, difficult to map a wholly logical narrative on to these events.74 Traditionalist scholars were slow to accept Greg’s arguments, not least because his analysis served radically to alter the status of the texts under discussion. In The Athenæum, Sidney Lee suggested that Greg’s hypothesis was unconvincing, in part because he could not offer a complete explanation of Pavier’s motives. Greg responded: I maintain in the case of Pavier, what I have elsewhere maintained in that of Collier, that it is impossible to convict a man of fraud on the ground that the temptation thereto was obvious and strong; equally that it is impossible to acquit him in the face of clear evidence because the motive is not apparent. The case must be argued on the basis of direct evidence, and on that alone. I hold that in the present case the evidence is conclusive.75 Greg’s argument regarding the date and printing of the plays received compelling support two years later, when an American, William J. Neidig, produced a set of precisely calibrated photographs of the title pages of the various texts and noticed that certain of the printed elements on the pages could be mapped onto each other, producing an exact match. So, taking the example of two texts supposedly printed two decades apart, the 1600 Merchant of Venice and the 1619 Pericles, a comparison of the title pages reveals that the line ‘Written by W. Shakespeare’, the ‘Heb Ddieu’ device and the ‘Printed’ of the imprint all appear in exactly the same location on the page in each text. Neidig explains this ‘coincidence’ as follows: The compositor of these two quartos . . . used a single setting of type for the printing of his title-pages except in the upper portions. After the first title-page was printed, this economical compositor simply ‘fatted’ the entire lower half of the page and made it do duty for the second – made a ‘pick-up’ of it, or ‘lifted’ it, in order to avoid the labor of resetting the type and quads of which it was constructed.76 Remembering the debates surrounding the Pavier quartos in his presidential address delivered to the Bibliographical Society in March of 1932, Greg noted that Neidig had ‘put the matter beyond doubt and was able

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to convince the most sceptical’.77 In the wake of this work, bibliography – characterized in Greg’s address as ‘the science of the transmission of literary documents’ – had, he asserted, ‘come into its own’.78 Greg himself scored other successes of the same kind – bibliographical problems convincingly solved by the application of intelligent and well-informed analysis. A striking example is the case of the play The Elder Brother, published in two editions in 1637, and attributed to John Fletcher. A question arises as to which of these editions was the first one printed. Greg solved the problem by noting that, in the lines though you dare not fight Yourself, or fright a foolish officer, young Eustace Can do it to a hair in one edition a space before the word ‘young’ has worked up and made a mark above the line. This caught the attention of the observant, but extraordinarily dense compositor of the other quarto, and he actually printed ‘’young’ [i.e. including an apostrophe before the word ‘young’]!79 F. P. Wilson commented on Greg’s solving of this problem that ‘The economy of the proof shows the workman’s confidence in his tools’.80

New Approaches to Shakespeare Good and bad quartos Greg’s work on the Pavier quartos offered genuinely new information about these early texts and it radically changed the way in which this clutch of editions was regarded within the Shakespearean scholarly community. Greg and his colleagues pressed forward with further work that altered the landscape of Shakespeare studies in an equally dramatic fashion. A key text here, as Greg himself repeatedly acknowledged, was A. W. Pollard’s Shakespeare Folios and Quartos: A Study in the Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Plays. Greg and Pollard had been in particularly close communication when this book was being written and, in his preface to the text, Pollard notes that ‘In some sections of this study Mr Greg and I have been fellow-hunters, communicating our results to each other at every stage, so that our respective responsibilities for them have become hopelessly entangled’.81

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Greg hailed the book as ‘by far the most systematic and critical work that had yet appeared on the subject and one that marked the opening of a new era in Shakespearian studies’ and he observed of Pollard that ‘once his innate conservatism has been overcome, [he] proves himself one of the most revolutionary of bomb-throwers’.82 To see why Greg thought Pollard’s book so important, we must understand that he repeatedly stressed, throughout his career, that the cornerstone of what he conceived of as scientific bibliography was the attention that it paid to the history of the transmission of the text: ‘Bibliography’, Greg writes, ‘is the study of the material transmission of literary and other documents; its ultimate aim is to solve the problems of origin, history, and text’, and, again: ‘At the root of all literary criticism lies the question of transmission, and it is bibliography that enables us to deal with the problem’.83 The most important question the bibliographer can ask, Greg argues, is ‘What was the nature of the copy that the printer had before him when setting up the text?’ and he felt that this question had ‘proved a curiously powerful solvent to traditional modes of thought’.84 One of the central arguments that Pollard makes in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos has to do, precisely, with the question of textual transmission. The first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works, the First Folio (F1) of 1623 includes a prefatory address ‘To the great Variety of Readers’, signed by John Heminges and Henry Condell, acting colleagues of Shakespeare’s in the King’s Men theatre company, who effectively served as his literary executors. The claims that Heminges and Condell make for F1 include the following: where (before) you were abus’d with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors, that expos’d them: euen those, are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest absolute in their numbers, as he conceiued the[m]. Heminges and Condell’s preface amounts to a piece of unabashed puffery – elsewhere they instruct the reader ‘what euer you do, Buy’.85 Their claim to be providing a collected text which is better than the individual editions that had previously been available was traditionally seen as simply an extension of their sales pitch. Scholars since Edmond Malone (who published a ground-breaking edition of Shakespeare’s works in 1790) had taken a jaundiced view of Heminges and Condell’s claim because Malone had demonstrated that some of the F1 texts were themselves actually printed

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directly from earlier quarto editions, and not from manuscript sources. So it appeared as if Heminges and Condell were, for commercial purposes, cynically condemning some of the very texts they had used in compiling the F1 volume, in order to promote their own wares. For this reason, a certain cloud of suspicion hung over the entire F1 enterprise. In Shakespeare’s Folios and Quartos Pollard challenged this view. He divided the pre-1623 quartos into two distinct groups: those which provided a longer text and those which provided a significantly attenuated text, offering what amounted to a rather garbled version of their longer counterparts. Pollard argued that the attenuated texts, which he styled the ‘bad quartos’, were ‘entered in the Stationers’ Registers either irregularly or not at all’ and that the longer texts, styled the ‘good’ quartos, were, for the most part, properly registered.86 In Pollard’s view, then, a suspicion of piracy or underhand dealing thus attached itself to the bad quartos. He further noted that none of the ‘bad quartos’ was reproduced in F1. On the basis of these findings, Pollard suggested that the traditional reading of Heminges and Condell’s ‘diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies’ needed to be revised. Their reference to ‘diverse . . . copies’ here meant not ‘various’ texts, but rather ‘some’ texts, so that Heminges and Condell’s condemnation was aimed at a strictly limited group of previous editions – those identified by Pollard as the bad quartos. The address ‘To the great Variety of Readers’ was thus not duplicitous, but rather was strictly factual: Heminges and Condell were signalling that the bad quarto texts had been excluded from F1 and that only good texts – whether their source was print or manuscript – were included in the volume. Pollard’s argument that the bad texts had not been regularly entered in the Stationers’ Register, while the good texts, for the most part, had been, turned out not to be correct. As Greg later noted Pollard was misled on the one hand by the exceptional regularity with which Shakespearian texts as a whole [by contrast with other play texts] were entered, and on the other by the imperfect analysis of the texts themselves that was available when he wrote.87 Nevertheless, Pollard’s division of the quartos into the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ was widely taken up by scholars and his reinterpretation of Heminges and Condell’s preface had a profound impact. As Margreta de Grazia has noted, ‘No passage in Shakespeare’s plays was ever interpreted to greater consequence. Pollard’s reading at once redeemed the integrity of the Folio’s texts and of its editors’.88

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Memorial reconstruction A year after Pollard proposed the division between good and bad quartos Greg began mapping out a possible explanation for how the attenuated texts had come into being. He published an edition of the 1602 bad quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor with Clarendon Press and, in his introduction, he attempted to puzzle out the lineage of this attenuated text. Greg rejected the suggestion, popular in the nineteenth century, that the short text might be an earlier draft that had then been expanded into the longer version included in the First Folio. He also rejected the theory, advanced by P. A. Daniel, that the text might have resulted from imperfect shorthand transcription. To account for the differences between the short and long versions of the play, Greg proposed three interlocking operations which, together, had produced two very different texts: (i) the garbling, by a reporter, of the play as actually performed on the stage; (ii) the cutting and possible rewriting of the text for acting purposes by a stage adapter; and (iii) the working over, by an authorized reviser, of the original text (underlying the quarto) and the production of a new version (substantially represented by the folio text).89 The element of Greg’s analysis here that particularly caught the eye of other scholars was his suggestion that primary responsibility for the production of the short quarto text may have lain with a reporter, who produced a garbled version of the play as it was actually performed on stage. Who might have produced this report? H. C. Hart had noticed, in his 1904 Arden edition of the play, that the Host’s part in the quarto more closely matched its equivalent in the Folio than did the speeches of any other character. Greg expanded on this insight and observed that we find speech after speech of this single character reported with almost verbal accuracy, while in the case of any other character we may select we find, by the side of passages which appear tolerably correct, others which are corrupted, perverted or cut.90 Furthermore, Greg noted that: Not only do we find the Host’s part alone usually in more or less verbal agreement in the two versions, not only do we find the versions springing into substantial agreement when he enters and relapsing into paraphrase when he quits the stage, but when he disappears for good and all at the

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end of the fourth act (and the actor very likely went home or to the tavern) we find what remains of the play in a more miserably garbled condition than any previous portion.91 The core of Greg’s theory concerning the short quarto was, then, that it had been constructed from memory by the actor playing the part of the Host, who ‘produced, as a result of a week or two’s labour with a not very ready pen, a rough reconstruction of the play’.92 Characteristically, Greg put his theory to the test by attempting a similar feat of memory himself. Having been to see George Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island about a half a dozen times, he set himself the task of attempting to reproduce from memory a passage in Act IV occupying about six pages in the printed text of the play. He collated his reconstruction with Shaw’s text and he concludes: I think it will compare favourably with any scene of the quarto which can reasonably be paralleled with it in extent. John Bull’s Other Island is considerably longer than the full text of the Merry Wives, and I had no previous experience whatever in the art of dramatic piracy.93 Greg’s theory of ‘memorial reconstruction’, as it became known, was picked up by a number of other critics and was quickly extended to encompass the entire range of the bad quartos. John Dover Wilson, for example, identified the actor who had played the part of Voltemar/Voltemand as the one primarily responsible for creating the short quarto text of Hamlet.94 By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, then, Pollard and Greg between them appeared to have assisted Shakespeare scholars in taking the first significant steps along the road of making sense of the transmission history of the plays. The ‘bad quartos’ had been separated out from the rest of the texts and a narrative of their provenance had been evolved. The F1 texts themselves had been certified as being fundamentally trustworthy. The next task was to begin the business of determining what source texts lay behind the F1 plays and their good quarto counterparts.

Hand D in Sir Thomas More A year after Greg published his Merry Wives volume, his Malone society edition of The Book of Sir Thomas More appeared in print. As we have already seen Greg himself note, he felt the text might be seen as being a touch controversial, in part because of his analysis of issues surrounding that

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‘peculiar muddy yellow’ handwriting of ‘Hand D’, to be found on folios 8a, 8b and 9a of the manuscript. In 1871, Richard Simpson had suggested in Notes and Queries that these pages might be in Shakespeare’s hand. In his edition of More, Greg seemed unwilling to arrive at a definite conclusion. Considering the thematic content of the Hand D segment – a mob scene in which More seeks to quell the crowd – Greg concluded that ‘it seems to me an eminently reasonable view that would assign this passage to the writer who, I believe, foisted certain of the Jack Cade scenes into the second part of Henry VI’ (a curiously ambiguous formulation, we may feel, since it is not clear whether Greg believes that it was Shakespeare himself who did the ‘foisting’). Greg acknowledged ‘the undoubted literary merit of D’s additions’, but observed that ‘I cannot myself regard them with the admiration they have aroused in some critics’.95 A more positive assessment of the evidence was offered five years later when Edward Maunde Thompson, the retired director and principal librarian at the British Museum (and former keeper of manuscripts there) published a volume entitled Shakespeare’s Hand. Thompson systematically compared the writing of the Hand D pages with a small collection of surviving Shakespeare signatures. He admitted that arriving at a firm conclusion as to the relationship between the two sets of handwriting was difficult, comparing the task to ‘that of attempting to identify a face in the dark by the dim light of a lucifer match’. Nevertheless, he felt, notwithstanding the difficulties, we venture to think that sufficient close resemblances have been detected to bring the two handwritings together and to identify them as coming from one and the same hand. Personally we feel confident that in this addition to the play of Sir Thomas More we have indeed the handwriting of William Shakespeare.96 Thompson, in his book, acknowledged ‘obligations to my old friend and sometime colleague Mr. Alfred William Pollard, whose wide knowledge of Shakespearian bibliography and literature is so willingly imparted to those who seek his help’.97 In 1923, Pollard produced his own book on Shakespeare’s Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, an edited volume which included essays by both Thompson and Greg. Greg remained cautious, observing cagily that ‘D may perhaps be the hand of Shakespeare himself’.98 Pollard, however, offered the reader a much higher degree of certainty: It is here contended that the writing of the three pages is compatible with a development into the hand seen in Shakespeare’s considerably later

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extant signatures and explains misprints in his text; that the spelling of the three pages can all be paralleled from the text of the best editions of single plays printed in Shakespeare’s life, and that the temper and even the phrasing of the three pages in the two crucial points involved, the attitude to authority and the attitude to the crowd, agree with and render more intelligible passages in much later plays.99 As well as summarizing his conclusions as editor of the volume, Pollard here points to the greater textual and bibliographical significance of the identification of Hand D with Shakespeare. If Hand D is indeed Shakespeare’s then, potentially, the writing provides a clue to what we might perhaps term ‘fingerprint’ spellings and easily misread idiosyncratic letter formations which may have persisted into the printed texts of the plays. Such clues would aid an editor in the task of trying to determine what kind of copy lies behind a particular early edition. A concrete example of what Pollard is pointing to here is provided in the case of 2 Henry IV. In More, the writer of Hand D spells the word ‘silence’ as ‘scilens’. Even in the Renaissance, when there were no standardized spelling conventions, this is quite unusual. A compositor would generally tend to ‘normalize’ such a spelling, bringing it within the range of more typical early modern variations. However, in 2 Henry IV, Shakespeare has a character actually called (in the modernized form) ‘Silence’, and we find that his name is rendered as ‘Scilens’ in the 1600 quarto edition of the play. Presumably a compositor would have been much more wary of changing the name of a character than he would have been of changing the spelling of a word in the normal flow of the manuscript, so we appear to be witnessing here the carrying forward of a manuscript spelling into the printed text. The implications of this should be clear: if the writer of Hand D is Shakespeare and if, as seems likely, the ‘scilens’ spelling is uniquely Shakespearean – or, at least, unique to Shakespeare among Renaissance dramatists, which is really all that matters – then the repetition of the spelling in the quarto edition strongly suggests that the compositor was working from Shakespeare’s own papers. Or, as Greg puts it, commenting on the issue: ‘There can be no reasonable doubt that the form comes from Shakespeare’s own pen’.100 Foul papers and prompt-books The More material continues the process that we have been tracking whereby scholars were apparently able to find more and more ways of gaining insight

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into the important issue of determining exactly what source texts lay behind the printed editions of Shakespeare’s plays. In the mid-1920s, Greg was giving attention to the various different kinds of manuscripts that might have circulated in the Renaissance period. In a 1925 article, he discusses the case of Bonduca, a play from the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, a manuscript copy of which is held in the British Library collection. The text ‘is bound in a contemporary gilt vellum wrapper, is very carefully written, shows none of the usual stigmas of the prompt copy, and is without doubt a transcript made for a private collector’.101 A note included in the text itself by the transcriber explains that ‘the Booke where by it was first Acted from is lost: and this hath beene transcribed from the fowle papers of the Authors wch were found’.102 Intriguingly, this text reproduced from the ‘fowle papers’ differs from that included in the 1647 folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays. Greg suggests that ‘the authors may have prepared their own fair copy, subjecting the play to revision in the process’ – this would then likely become the basis of the acting script and would ultimately have served as the basis of the 1647 printed text, thus explaining the differences between the two editions. But then Greg registers the fact that such a scenario raises an interesting question: ‘how are we to account for the presence of the rough draft in the playhouse?’ The answer, Greg proposes, could be that the company may have required authors to hand over their ‘fowle papers’ along with the fair copy, either as a safeguard against . . . double sales . . . or merely to meet such an eventuality as here actually occurred.103 Greg identifies two primary types of manuscript here: ‘foul papers’, which he proposes the author may have been required to hand over to the theatre company, to preserve the company’s exclusive control of the text (and as a kind of archival back up), and a final fair copy, possibly revised from the original, which might have served as a working text in the theatre. Greg’s general hypothesis was built upon by R. B. McKerrow, in a pair of articles published in 1931 and 1935. McKerrow’s objective was to think through how it might be possible to identify the nature of the underlying manuscript from features exhibited in the printed text. McKerrow noticed that printers seemed to make more mistakes in reproducing play texts than they did in printing other books. He suggested that the explanation for this was a very simple one, namely, that in the case of plays the printer very often did not get anything like so clean a copy to work from as he did in the

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case of other books; he did not in fact get a fair-copy at all, but as a general rule, the author’s original from which the fair copy had been prepared.104 In other words, following Greg’s proposal that the theatre company may have held the author’s foul papers as well as a copy of the play (possibly the author’s fair copy) which served as the working theatrical text, McKerrow suggested that it was the foul papers that were likely to have been sent to the printer when a play was published. He further argues that there is a compelling logic for this, since the theatre company would likely have been reluctant to hand over the theatrical script to the printer for this – bearing, as it usually would, the licenser’s signature – was their authority for acting the play, which they might still wish to do at a future date; and further, it contained prompter’s notes which might then be useful to them.105 The implications of the scenario sketched out jointly by Greg and McKerrow should be clear. Where editors once despaired over the quality of the texts reproduced in the printed editions, often suggesting that they had been adulterated by interpolations made by actors and theatrical functionaries, McKerrow, building on Greg’s work, was here suggesting that, in some cases at least, the text lying behind the printed edition was likely to be the author’s own foul papers. If this were indeed the case, then the printed texts would, in fact, be more authentically located than anyone had ever suspected. McKerrow’s second article sought to advance the matter even further. The essay was modestly entitled ‘A Suggestion Regarding Shakespeare’s Manuscripts’ and McKerrow’s ‘suggestion’ would have far-reaching consequences. The thrust of his argument was to envisage what distinguishing features might serve to separate foul papers from theatrical scripts. He paid particular attention to the issue of naming. An author, he suggested, might not always be consistent in deploying character names. At least in his first draft, McKerrow proposes, an author might at times follow the practice of the novelist rather than of the person writing a play for the Press, distinguishing his characters just as and when they needed to be distinguished (as in The Comedy of Errors), calling them by their functions (Goldsmith, not Angelo; Father, not Capulet) or their

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peculiarities (Braggart or Pedant, not Armado or Holophernes) just when those functions or peculiarities happened to be uppermost in his mind, knowing perfectly well that the most cursory indications were quite sufficient for his purpose and not troubling himself about any formal consistency. By contrast, the Renaissance equivalent of what would later be called a prompter or book-keeper would need a higher degree of clarity, in order to be able to ensure the smooth running of the production. The prompter would need to know exactly what a character’s name was and would need the character to have a coherent identifier throughout the text, so that, for example, cues for entrances could be smoothly executed. Thus, McKerrow concluded: Simply, I think, that a play in which the names are irregular was printed from the author’s original MS., and that one in which they are regular and uniform is more likely to have been printed from some sort of fair copy, perhaps made by a professional scribe.106 McKerrow’s suggestion was subsequently built upon by other scholars, who proposed additional ways in which traces of the underlying manuscript might be detected in printed texts, such as, for example, believing that prompt-copy stage directions would be likely to be rather telegraphic and orientated towards practicalities, while authorial stage directions would be likely to be more descriptive. Between them, then, Greg, Pollard and McKerrow retrieved the F1 texts from the traditional view that they were unreliable; quarantined the ‘bad quartos’ from the rest of the early printed texts; offered an explanation for how the attenuated texts had come about; proposed ways in which Hand D (assumed now to be Shakespeare’s) offered clues to the manuscript sources underlying the printed editions; suggested two fundamental kinds of manuscript to be found among the theatre companies’ papers – authorial foul papers and prompt books – and offered strategies for determining which category of manuscript was likely to lie behind any given early printed play text. These theories were never intended simply to serve as an end in themselves, however; rather, the expectation was that they would, taken together, offer ways of conducting the business of editing Shakespeare’s plays along new lines, within the parameters of a properly scientifically-driven bibliographic approach.

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Editing and the New Bibliography The editorial tradition Greg was consistently dismissive of the pre-twentieth century editors of Shakespeare. In a dispute in the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement in 1922, regarding a crux in Act V of Hamlet, he observed of his opponent, Henry Cunningham, that his proposed approach would amount to a ‘return to the methods which rendered largely nugatory all the learning and industry that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries devoted to textual problems, and which will lead any future followers to flounder in the same morass’. The problem with the work of these editors, Greg argued, was that they attempted to assess the status of variants between different editions of the same text without first establishing the relationship between those editions. In Greg’s view ‘to attempt textual reconstruction without first analysing the evidence in the light of that relationship is [a] childish waste of time’.107 The keystone Shakespeare edition of the nineteenth century was William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s multivolume Cambridge text of 1863–1866. This edition survived into the twentieth century as a standard text, particularly in its highly popular one-volume ‘Globe’ version, first issued in 1864.108 The lion’s share of the work on the edition had been undertaken by Wright and, as we have seen, it was he who had asked Greg to compile a catalogue of the Capell collection at Trinity College, Cambridge, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Greg held Wright in high regard: in a letter to David Nichol Smith he observed that he ‘had great veneration as well as affection for the old man, and I owed him a lot’.109 In 1922, Greg acknowledged that the Cambridge Shakespeare ‘has permanent value as representing the textual methods and labours of the nineteenth century’.110 But he was also, of course, highly critical of those same textual methods. In an essay entitled ‘The Function of Bibliography in Literary Criticism’, Greg noted a shortcoming in the editors’ handling of King Lear which he took to be emblematic of a more general failing in their work. Clark and Wright had struggled to make sense of the order of the two Lear editions which are dated 1608 on their title pages – conventionally distinguished from each other as the ‘Pied Bull’ and ‘N. Butter’ editions. Of course, as we have seen, Greg had established that one of these texts (the ‘N. Butter’ edition) had actually been printed by William Jaggard for Thomas Pavier in 1619, but that work was far off in

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the future when the Cambridge Shakespeare was being prepared. Greg notes that After advancing an excellent argument in favour of the ‘Pied Bull’ as the earlier, they adopted a non-commital attitude, concluding that ‘The question . . . is very difficult to decide, and at most is one rather of bibliographical curiosity than of critical importance.’ One can feel Greg’s exasperation at the thought that so fundamental a question as that of which of the two texts had been the first published amounts, for the Cambridge editors, to nothing more than a ‘bibliographical curiosity’. He observes: I know of no better example of the tendency of editors to treat readings as counters in a guessing game, irrespective of the authority of their source. The question had previously been debated on quite inconclusive literary grounds; on the other hand, the evidence put forward by the Cambridge editors was bibliographical, the implication of a correction made in the course of printing.111 Greg is dismayed that, having actually done some good bibliographical groundwork, the editors choose not to engage fully with the implications of their own findings. Dover Wilson’s New Cambridge edition From the perspective of Greg and his New Bibliographic colleagues, the work that they were doing had the potential to make it possible for scholars to produce better editions of Shakespeare – editions that would not be blighted by what they saw as the shortcomings of all previously published texts. The first person to venture an edition along such new lines was John Dover Wilson. Wilson was effectively the fourth member of the core group of New Bibliographers, after Greg, McKerrow and Pollard. Though, early in his career, he had served as a Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths’ College in London, Wilson moved away from literary studies when, in 1912, he accepted a post as Inspector with the Board of Education, subsequently becoming Professor of Education at King’s College, London.112 His interest in Shakespeare was, however, rekindled during the course of a train journey from Leeds to Sunderland in November 1917. After ploughing through

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some official correspondence relating to his inspectorship, Wilson turned to read Greg’s essay ‘Hamlet’s Hallucination’, which had just been published in the Modern Language Review. He was, he later wrote, ‘overwhelmed’ by it. In a dedicatory letter included in his What Happens in ‘Hamlet’ (1935), Wilson jokingly offered the book to Greg as ‘a trifling retaliation for the spell you put upon me (without asking my permission) eighteen years ago, a spell which changed the whole tenor of my existence, and still dominates it in part’.113 In 1919, Arthur Quiller-Couch, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge – better known as ‘Q’ – was invited by the university press to undertake a new edition of Shakespeare. Wilson was identified as a likely co-editor. He had been chosen in large part because of a series of contributions he and Pollard had jointly made to the Times Literary Supplement in 1919, on the topic of the bad quartos. Q had little expertise, and even less interest, in textual matters, so this was to be Wilson’s department. To begin with, Wilson regarded the edition as little more than a ‘digression’ but it was, he notes, a digression ‘deliberately accepted as an aid to the elucidation of Hamlet’.114 Within a few years, Q was obliged to drop out of the project, owing to failing eyesight, and Wilson assumed full responsibility for the series. The ‘digression’ was to occupy almost five decades of his life, with the last volume of the edition finally appearing in print in 1966, just three years before Wilson’s death (at the age of 88). When he had first been approached about the project, Wilson wrote to A. W. Pollard and sought his advice. Pollard replied: ‘I don’t think you will ever produce a standard text of Shakespeare’. He did feel, however, that Wilson ‘ought to be able to produce a provisional text which will be better than anything existing’.115 Looking back at the commencement of the edition almost a dozen years after he had started, Wilson noted that it had been ‘delightfully thrilling, alluringly adventurous, but also – for those committed to the production of forty volumes – terribly dangerous!’ The danger essentially lay in the fact that the edition was being initiated at precisely the point when the findings of the New Bibliography were serving radically to reconfigure the whole business of Shakespeare editing. As Wilson himself noted: We were about to put forth upon an uncharted ocean with a set of brandnew instruments, which had never been used for such a voyage before or, indeed, for editorial seamanship of any kind. Until the edition was well

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under way it was impossible to tell how these instruments would work, whether the voyage would be one of real discovery or of shipwreck.116 The first text of the new edition – The Tempest – appeared in 1921. Greg welcomed it in a review published in the following year, observing that ‘It may be said at once that, judged by their first volume, the new Cambridge editors have achieved a considerable measure of success in a pioneer task of no ordinary difficulty’.117 He also offered detailed, searching criticism of many of the edition’s particular readings, noting, for instance, that, in some places, ‘failure of analysis combines with other causes to invalidate some of their conjectures’. He concludes his critique by observing that I have confined myself to matters bearing on the new textual principles employed, and if I have appeared rather to criticize the use made of them, this is mainly because it seemed that in questioning lay the best chance of assisting future work. Greg rounds out his review by indicating that if the edition was ‘not itself definitive for the new criticism – that is not to be looked for at the moment – [it] will at least be recognized in the future as having pointed the way’.118 Wilson certainly deserves praise as, effectively, the first person to bring to print a complete edition of Shakespeare which was motivated very largely by the theories evolved within the New Bibliographic movement. In editorial terms, he was a pathbreaker, but he was also something of a maverick. His work was much respected by his fellow scholars, including Greg, but there was always a certain uneasiness in their response to it. In Greg’s case, this often took the form of a gently teasing tone in commenting on Wilson, as when he observes, in 1919, that ‘Mr Pollard has found in Mr Dover Wilson a disciple of whom he has every reason to be proud, even if he may have some reason to be just a little afraid’.119 Or, more famously, when he observes of Wilson in ‘The Present Position of Bibliography’ that Reading him I am constantly reminded of a story in the papers a few years ago. A company of French soldiers were tethering a captive balloon in a high wind, when the monster got out of hand. The men were swept off their feet. Some let go and were dashed to the ground, others held on and were carried away. Even so, under the fascination of Professor Wilson’s ingenuity, I am ever in doubt whether to let go and risk a nasty fall, or to cling desperately and be borne I know not whither.120

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The problem with much of Wilson’s work was that he tended to evolve large-scale hypotheses out of relatively small-scale evidence. Greg observed of one piece of Wilson’s that As set forth in Mr Dover Wilson’s fascinating pages his exposition must appear all but absolutely convincing; but having weighed his arguments, turn again to the text and read the scene as Shakespeare has written it, and, alas, how the slender supports of his fairy fabric disappear!121 McKerrow’s Oxford Shakespeare R. B. McKerrow shared Greg’s reservation concerning Wilson. While noting that ‘one can’t ignore’ Wilson’s work, he observes that ‘In most cases it seems to me that his superstructure is much too big for his facts’.122 McKerrow offered this opinion in a letter to Oxford University Press, for whom he had (in 1929) himself begun work towards producing a new edition of Shakespeare. The project had a troubled history: the new edition had initially been mooted by Walter Raleigh in 1904, the year in which he was appointed as the first professor of English literature at Oxford. Like Quiller-Couch, Raleigh needed a textual scholar to assist him and he chose David Nichol Smith, with whom he had worked at the University of Glasgow. The unhappy consequences of this partnership were mapped out by Smith in an exchange of correspondence with Greg in 1940. Smith was appointed to the Goldsmiths’ Readership at Oxford in 1908. In a letter to Greg he observes that he ‘came to Oxford expecting that Shakespeare was to be my main work for the next dozen years or more, not altogether happy in the prospect but buoyed up by youthful ambition and the recognition of a great opportunity’.123 As he began working through the text, however, he found that Raleigh had little tolerance for the intricacies of complex bibliographical issues: ‘problems arose in legions . . . . Whenever I presented him with a problem he never seemed to me quite to see it, and if I presented him with more than one he soon grew weary’. At the press itself, Smith found that ‘nobody . . . was prepared to worry out problems from the beginning’. The situation was compounded by the fact that Smith was carrying out his work just at the point when the shift in textual thinking prompted by the work of Greg and his colleagues was getting underway, so that traditional textual certainties were becoming unfixed. In his letter to Greg, Smith indicates that he followed this work with a great sense of anticipation as it appeared: ‘I learned what was being done in London. I remember the excitement with which I read your articles in The Library on “False dates

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in Shakespearian Quartos” and in the following year Pollard’s Folios and Quartos’. Raleigh, however, had no interest in such matters and, in time, Smith came to feel that he ‘had been knocking [his] head against a stone wall’. He turned to other projects and the Shakespeare text gradually slipped away. The edition was, he writes, ‘no longer for me. It had been a mill-stone, and it gradually dropped from my neck’. The edition was, as we have seen, in due course, revived by Oxford, under the editorship of R. B. McKerrow. In a note to the press in December 1929, he mapped out his general plan for the edition: Follow as closely as reasonably possible one early text. Emendations only admitted into text when this is obviously corrupt and the emendations can be, to some extent, at least justified. Nothing admitted merely because it seems an improvement. Collations of all early texts, including in some cases Restoration quartos (as possibly embodying stage tradition), but no editor’s readings except in places of real difficulties. Eighteenth-century editors’ stage-directions, scene divisions and indications of locality, to be given in footnotes only, not in text.124 McKerrow planned several innovations for the text: the plays were to be presented in chronological order of composition (as best this could be determined); original spelling and (within certain limits) original punctuation were to be retained; where two good early texts existed the possibility of printing them in parallel would be explored; and texts of the attenuated quartos were to be included at the end of the edition. By 1937, work on the edition had progressed sufficiently that the press were experimenting with setting some of the first texts McKerrow had worked on into type. His health was, however, beginning to fail and, in January 1940, his wife sent a telegram to the press to inform them that McKerrow had died. Oxford tried to keep the project afloat by asking Alice Walker, who had been assisting McKerrow, to take over as editor and they sought to draw Greg in as part of an advisory panel who might help her. Writing to Greg in the early days of the Second World War, Kenneth Sisam was rather gloomy, both about the war itself and about his feeling that a great period of Shakespeare scholarship was coming to an end: We had set our hearts on bringing out this edition of Shakespeare as a kind of monument to what must be reckoned a great age of Shakespearean scholarship, especially in matters of text. But we cannot blind our eyes to

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the fact that the great age is passing . . . and the new generation don’t seem to be of quite the same calibre.125 Greg was rather less gloomy in his assessment, at least of the scholarly situation: In a way I take a more hopeful view than you. If scholarship survives at all, I think the work of our generation may bear fruit & that the lines of advance we have seen laid down may be carried on to greater purpose by younger men. He readily agreed to serve as an advisor – ‘I shall be not only pleased but proud to be of any assistance I can’ – but, in fact, the edition simply ran deeper and deeper into the sand as the years went by.126 The only element of McKerrow’s edition to be published was his volume Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare: A Study in Editorial Method, which appeared in 1939. McKerrow noted that Editors, while often very conscious of the imperfections in the work of their predecessors, appear for the most part to have regarded their task as the solution of a series of hardly related problems, each of which could be dealt with separately as it arose, and to have troubled themselves very little about laying down any general principles for their own guidance or securing any uniformity in the treatment of their author’s writings as a whole.127 In the Prolegomena, McKerrow codified the rules that he was aiming to follow in producing his text and offered his readers what essentially amounted to the first concerted attempt to map out a coherent set of strategies for editing Shakespeare along New Bibliographic lines. In 1942, Greg published The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text, based on the Clark Lectures (named in honour of William George Clark, co-editor of the 1860s Cambridge edition of Shakespeare) which he delivered at Trinity College Cambridge in 1939. In an introductory section to the volume, supplementary to the lectures themselves, Greg worked his way systematically through the rules which McKerrow mapped out in the Prolegomena, modifying and refining them. If we return to Dover Wilson’s seafaring metaphor, we can say that McKerrow and Greg’s volumes, taken together, provide an essential set of navigational guidelines, helping scholars to plot an editorial course on New Bibliographic principles.

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The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare proved to be a successful volume, appearing in a second edition in 1951, with a third edition following in 1954. In the next year, Greg published The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History. The project started life as an introduction to a planned facsimile of F1. In the event, the facsimile scheme fell through and the introduction grew into a free standing 500-page text. Greg modestly observed of the book that it ‘makes no pretence to originality’ and that all he has tried to do is to set out the evidence and summarize on each point under discussion the view now generally held by scholars, or, if there is no commonly accepted opinion, the view that seems in best accord with the evidence.128 In fact, the volume brings together a great wealth of information on the history of the F1 collection, issues of copyright, and editorial principles and problems, in addition to providing a detailed account of each individual play, mapping the early publication history and speculating on the source texts which may lie behind the earliest editions. Though some of Greg’s work on F1 has been superseded by Charlton Hinman’s monumental The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (2 vols, 1963; based on an exhaustive analysis of more than seventy copies of F1 held at the Folger Shakespeare Library) and other studies, The Shakespeare First Folio nevertheless remains a valuable source of information for scholars, more than fifty years after its first appearance. The Riverside Shakespeare and other editions The work of Greg and the other New Bibliographers was massively influential in the general field of Shakespeare editing. No edition of note published from the 1920s through to the end of the twentieth century remained untouched by the work of the New Bibliographers. To take just a single example: G. Blakemore Evans’ Riverside Shakespeare, first published in 1974, became the dominant single-volume text in the American academic student market and served for many scholars in North America as the standard text for referencing quotations from the plays included in their work. In his introductory section on ‘Shakespeare’s Text’, Evans observes that an important question for editors to ask themselves is ‘What was the source, or sources, of the manuscripts from which Shakespeare’s plays were set up by the printer[?]’ He notes that ‘Until about sixty years ago no one seems to

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have given much serious consideration to this question’.129 In discussing the issue, he registers that two different kinds of manuscript sources may lie behind the printed texts: foul papers and prompt copy. He goes on to detail the division between the good and bad quartos, noting that ‘According to the most widely accepted theory, what lies behind a “bad” quarto text is a manuscript based on “memorial reconstruction.” ’130 Evans includes the Hand D segment of Sir Thomas More in his edition, on the grounds that the passages ‘are now generally accepted as the work of Shakespeare.’131 Evans’ deployment of New Bibliographic materials is replicated in edition after edition throughout the twentieth century, and discussion of underlying manuscripts, foul papers, prompt copy, bad quartos and memorial reconstruction became staple elements of the introductory sections of almost all editions. The fundamental building blocks of New Bibliographic theory thus came to serve as the foundation of virtually all texts of Shakespeare, so that the hypotheses offered by the New Bibliographers ceased even to be thought of as hypotheses and assumed the status of established facts. Greg’s own influence in editorial matters extended beyond the field of Shakespeare studies. In 1950, Fredson Bowers published an essay of Greg’s, entitled ‘The Rationale of Copy-Text’, in the American journal Studies in Bibliography. Greg’s essay was written in response to an editorial orthodoxy (rooted in McKerrow’s Prolegomena) which assumed that an editor must identify a single source text to serve as the basis of a new edition. The logic of this position suggested that, when an edition later than the earliest authoritative edition contained revisions which were thought to be the work of the author, the assumption was that the later edition should serve as the copy-text for all textual purposes. Greg argued against this view, proposing that a text could be thought of as being made up of two essential components: ‘accidentals’, ‘such in general as spelling, punctuation, worddivision, and the like’ and ‘substantives’, being ‘readings of the text . . . that affect the author’s meaning or the essence of his expression’.132 Bowers usefully summarizes Greg’s argument in relation to these two aspects of the text as follows: Greg advocated the division of authority between the accidentals and the substantives of a text. The copy-text would be that earliest edition in closest relation to the lost manuscript from which it was set since it alone would contain, on the whole, the most authoritative accidental texture. However, by the free exercise of his editorial judgement the editor would add to or substitute in this accidental texture any substantive readings from another authoritative edition that he took to be more authoritative

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than those in the copy-text edition, thereby creating an eclectic text that reproduced the highest degree of authority in both respect of accidentals and substantives.133 Bowers himself was guided by Greg’s principle in the editions he produced of Thomas Dekker (1953–1961) and of Walt Whitman (1955). Greg’s thinking on these issues was also incorporated into the guidelines drawn up for the Center for Editions of American Authors and its successor body, the Committee for Scholarly Editions. As Joseph Rosenblum has noted, ‘The first three hundred volumes published under the auspices of these organizations relied on Greg’s principles’.134 Greg’s editorial theories thus had an influence far beyond the immediate world of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature.

Challenges to the New Bibliography For more than two decades after Greg’s death, the position of the New Bibliography seemed unassailable. However, as the twentieth century drew to a close, the situation began to change. The emergence of poststructuralism as a potent theoretical strand within literary studies began to unsettle traditional notions of authorship and textuality. The aim of the New Bibliographers had always been to establish what Greg characterizes in The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare as the text as ‘we may suppose . . . it would have stood in a fair copy, made by the author himself, of the work as he finally intended it’.135 The New Bibliographic project can be said, thus, to have been solidly author-centric. But, in a highly influential essay, the French theorist and cultural critic Michel Foucault posed a question that was provocatively destabilizing to such views. ‘What is an author?’ Foucault asked and, in answer to his own question, he asserted that an author was no more than ‘a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of meaning’.136 The author, in other words, far from being the unique point of origin of a text, was, in this view, actually no more than a cultural construct whereby meaning is constrained and controlled. The effect of the rise of poststructuralism generally was thus to decentre the author as the ultimate source and guarantor of meaning. In the light of these developments, the author-centred mindset of the New Bibliography began, for some critics, to seem outmoded.

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One textual scholar, Jerome J. McGann, sought to offer a new direction to the editorial project by proposing that what scholars needed to attend to was the ‘social’ rather than the strictly ‘authorial’ text. In his seminal Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, McGann argued that ‘Authority is a social nexus, not a personal possession’ and that ‘literary works are not produced without arrangements of some sort’.137 The text must always, from McGann’s perspective, be seen in the context of the greater web of arrangements that are necessary to bring it within the public domain, rather than being regarded as the sole product of the author, working in isolation. The influence of these proposals can be seen in one late-twentieth-century edition of Shakespeare’s works: the Oxford text, co-edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (with John Jowett and William Montgomery), published in 1986. The Oxford editors announced that, in editing the plays, where they had been faced with a choice between a version of a text considered to be founded on authorial foul papers and a version thought to be based on prompt copy, they had chosen to reproduce the latter, on the grounds that this was likely to be closer to the text that Shakespeare’s company had presented to their contemporary audience – in other words, it was, in McGann’s terms, the more ‘social’ text of the two. We might say that what was in essence happening with the Oxford edition here was that the editors were turning New Bibliographic strategies back on themselves: Wells and Taylor drew on the work of Greg and his colleagues to establish distinctions between foul papers and prompt books, but then, where they had a choice, they reversed the orthodox New Bibliographic position by opting for texts based on the prompt copy rather than a source tied more directly to the author. There is a sense in which we might say that reversing the polarity of the New Bibliographic position did not actually call the fundamentals of the approach into question: the Oxford editors were simply deploying New Bibliographic methods to redirected ends. As the century drew to a close, however, some of the actual fundamental building blocks of the approach began increasingly to be called into question. The distinction between foul papers and prompt books – and even the very concept of these two distinct categories of manuscripts – is very much a case in point. In a series of articles, Paul Werstine noted that the idea of a stable binary terminology coherently distinguishing foul papers and prompt books was a modern invention, unsupported by evidence from the Renaissance period. As he observes: Greg’s terms ‘foul papers’ and ‘prompt-books’ have been shown not to be rooted in early modern theatrical culture in anything like the sense he

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accorded them. Since in that culture, ‘foul papers’ were sometimes so called because they were incomplete, the term is not at all suited to Greg’s notion of a complete authorial manuscript. Greg himself knew that that culture did not use the term ‘prompt-book’; indeed its use is not recorded until the nineteenth century. Yet Greg argued that in the early modern theatre the term ‘book’ was reserved only for the kind of manuscript that he called a ‘prompt-book’; such was not the case, with the result that Greg’s crucial distinction between ‘foul papers’ and ‘prompt-books’ loses any claim to historical validity.138 Beyond questioning Greg’s anachronous deployment of the terms ‘foul papers’ and ‘prompt-book’, Werstine has also noted that the surviving Renaissance theatrical manuscripts are far more diverse and more complexly constituted than the New Bibliographers allowed. In Werstine’s view, the simple tests proposed by McKerrow and others for distinguishing different categories of manuscript from each other simply do not work when applied to these manuscripts because the evidence is conflicting. He notes that in the dozens of play manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there are no complete manuscripts in single authorial hands that bear out the features of Greg’s foul papers, and no theatrical manuscripts survive in the perfectly disambiguated state that, for Greg, must have marked every promptbook.139 At the same time as the categories of foul papers and prompt books – and the tests that might distinguish between them – were being interrogated, other aspects of the New Bibliographic approach were also being called into question. Critics such as Randall McLeod criticized the division of the quartos into the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, arguing that the attenuated quartos had a value and interest as texts in their own right, which was lost sight of when quasi-moralistic labels were applied to them.140 The question of the origins of the attenuated texts was also re-examined, with Laurie Maguire and others questioning whether Greg’s narrative of ‘memorial reconstruction’ really was valid. Maguire analysed a total of 41 Renaissance plays traditionally held to have been reconstituted memorially by actors and she arrived at the conclusion that only one of them (Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris) can be said, with anything approaching certainty, to have been produced by a memorial process. Of the Shakespearean ‘bad quartos’, The Merry Wives of Windsor – the text on which Greg based his theory – is the only play which Maguire concludes is ‘probably’ memorially reconstructed.141

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Greg’s Own View of His Work By the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, many of the fundamental elements of the editorial approach to Shakespeare that had been established by Greg and his colleagues were being called seriously into question. It is important to register, however, that, while many twentiethcentury editors may have treated the hypotheses of the New Bibliographers as if they were established facts, Greg himself always adopted a much more cautious approach when advancing his ideas. Again and again, we find him adding caveats to his conclusions and warning of reservations that he harboured in offering a particular line of argument. Thus, for example, in Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements (1923), he observes of the attenuated quartos that ‘the first general result that follows from the investigation is that not all shortened versions have the same origin or history, and that we should look with suspicion on any theory that claims to be universally applicable’ – a warning ignored by many who made use of his theory of ‘memorial reconstruction’.142 Likewise, writing of the use of the analysis of stage directions to distinguish between foul papers and prompt books, he observes that critics have not always been sufficiently discriminating in the use they have made of them. They have been all too ready to argue that a prompter will write curt orders to the actors and property men, whereas an author’s directions will take a more descriptive and literary form. This a priori distinction is only partly borne out by examination of the manuscripts and may on occasion prove misleading.143 Greg also registers that the evidence available in this area is conflicting and may ultimately be unreliable: ‘what with the author’s addiction to stage terminology and the book-keeper’s tolerance of literary and picturesque language, the great mass of stage-directions are of very little assistance in distinguishing between foul papers and prompt-copy’.144 Greg even warned that scholars might be in danger of placing too much faith not just in the hypotheses of the New Bibliography, but also in its supposedly scientific foundations. Looking back on the proof that had been offered that the Pavier quartos were all published together in 1619, he observes, in ‘Bibliography – A Retrospect’: The sceptics were silenced and the victory of the ‘bibliographical method’ was complete – almost too complete, for it led in some quarters to a belief

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that all or nearly all textual problems could be solved by an appeal to bibliography, and that any evidence or argument that could be represented as bibliographical was impregnable.145 Greg sounds a general note of caution in his seminal Editorial Problem in Shakespeare too, where he begins by urging that the reader should ‘kindly bear in mind the tentative nature of all opinions expressed in this volume’ and concludes the lectures contained in the book by observing that, while the deductions he has arrived at regarding Shakespeare’s texts ‘rest on a reasonable basis and are not mere guesses in the void’, still, ‘I know them to be exceedingly fallible, and I should be sorry if you took them for anything more solid than they are’.146 We might also note here that, while New Bibliography became the orthodoxy against which some textual theorists and critics took aim at the end of the twentieth century, Greg often showed himself capable of seeing beyond what have been identified in recent years as the narrow confines of that approach. The following passage, from his 1932 lecture ‘Bibliography – an Apologia’, is rather striking in this regard: We have . . . to recognize that a text is not a fixed and formal thing, that needs only to be purged of the imperfections of transmission and restored once and for all to its pristine purity, but a living organism which in its descent through the ages, while it departs more and more from the form impressed upon it by its original author, exerts, through its imperfections as much as through its perfections, its own influence upon its surroundings. At each stage of its descent a literary work is in some sense a new creation, something still more different from what it was when it came from the author’s hand. Moreover, it will differ likewise from place to place.147 Here we find Greg sounding curiously modern – even ‘postmodern’, we might say – as he argues for seeing the text as a mobile, rather than a fixed, entity, which shifts over time and within different contexts. There is a sense here, too, of a recognition that incarnations of the text bearing inscriptions whose source may not necessarily be traceable back to the author may well have their own force and validity. It would, of course, be pressing the passage too hard to suggest that it demonstrates that Greg was, in some way, a poststructuralist avant la lettre, so to speak. But there is certainly a sense here that Greg was neither so hidebound nor so timebound as critics often suggest.

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Conclusion W. W. Greg was a cautious scholar who, generally speaking, avoided claiming too much for the hypotheses that he offered in his work. Some of the theories that he and the other New Bibliographers advanced have not, in the long run, stood the test of time. Greg himself lived long enough to see some of his views challenged, and we occasionally witness a flash of regret on his part that the high optimism of the earliest days of the New Bibliography could not be fully sustained. In 1959 (the year of his death), for example, we find him asking ‘Is it that our hopes of being able to infer from the features of a printed text the nature of the manuscript that serves as copy are fated to vanish like a dream?’148 However, the fundamental questions that the New Bibliographers prompted editors and other scholars to ask – particularly about the relationships among early editions and about the likely nature of the source texts of such editions – have proved to be enduringly valuable, even if they have turned out to be questions which it may not be possible to answer with as high degree of certainty as the New Bibliographers once hoped.149 Beyond this, Greg and his colleagues offered textual scholars a model for carrying out bibliographic work in a systematic and technically sophisticated manner. The approach may not be quite as fully ‘scientific’ as Greg would have wished to believe, but it is undeniable that it made some genuine advances in knowledge possible. It is, for example, hard to imagine that Charlton Hinman would have been able to carry out his extraordinarily detailed material analysis of F1, using collating machinery which made the differences between individual copies of the text easily visible to the examiner, had it not been for the example set by Greg, with his Steinheil X13 and his determination to bring a scientific mindset to textual problems. Paul Werstine has also usefully noted of the New Bibliographers that they ‘left us an invaluable research method by which their own claims continue to be tested’. Werstine is right: some of the best criticism of the New Bibliography has come precisely from scholars grounded in and deploying its methods (Werstine is himself, of course, a prime example of this). Werstine has also drawn attention to the fact that Greg and his colleagues produced a range of pathbreaking resources, such as the Bibliography of the English Printed Drama, ‘that have provided the basis for so much later research’.150 Shakespeare studies have been irreversibly shaped by the work of these scholars, who radically changed the way in which scholarship was carried out during the course of the twentieth century and beyond. Half a century

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after his death, Greg’s best work continues to be of fundamental importance in the field of Shakespeare studies.151 . . . success enough for me, Gazing upon my work at curfew bell, If facing one stern critic fearlessly, I hear him slowly murmur, ‘It is well’.152

Chapter 3

Henry Clay Folger, Jr. (18 June 1857–11 June 1930) Michael D. Bristol

Henry Clay Folger was not a textual scholar like W. W. Greg. He was not an influential literary critic like A. C. Bradley; his one brief critical essay, on The Merchant of Venice, was never accepted for publication. Although he enjoyed attending dramatic performances with his wife, Emily Jordan Folger, he never did any creative work in theatrical production. Folger’s only contribution to Shakespeare studies is a brief article on the Vincent Folio, a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio that he describes as ‘the most precious book in the world’.1 Without any significant record of achievement in the fields of scholarship or the arts, Folger’s ‘greatness’ as a ‘Shakespearean’ isn’t so easy to recognize. His importance for the larger enterprise of Shakespeare scholarship has therefore been, for the most part, taken for granted. And yet Henry Clay Folger was a true visionary; the founder of an institution that has made possible all the many branches of Shakespeare scholarship in their modern form, including textual editing, theatre history, historical research and literary criticism. Despite his importance in the history of American industry and culture, very little is known about Henry Clay Folger. There is no full-length biography and little has been written about his character or his accomplishments. In part this reflects his private and discrete personality. He and his wife lived together in Brooklyn very modestly, mostly in rented houses, and they generally avoided any kind of publicity. The present chapter has as its primary aim making the details of Folger’s claim to be a great Shakespearean better known, primarily to the people who benefit directly from the library he created. It is not intended to serve as a complete biography, though some of the details of Folger’s life are obviously central to understanding what his Shakespeare project is all about. Instead, I will try to show how Folger imagined his library as a gift for the American people and how that sense of a gift fits within the context of

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certain notions of the public good that were important at the end of the nineteenth century and through the first decades of the twentieth. One way to tell Folger’s story would be to portray him as a kind of ‘robber baron’ on a limited scale. After all, Folger’s time was the Gilded Age, a time when men like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Vanderbilt dominated their industries and amassed huge personal fortunes. His working life was entirely carried out in the service of the Standard Oil Company. His own personal project was a largely successful endeavour to ‘corner the market’ in Shakespeare First Folios and other related rare books. He was a member of a powerful ‘old boys network’. And so on. And so forth. But this would be, in the end, facile and predictable. You already know this story – I’ve just told it. ‘If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument’, as Emerson would say.2 Folger was one of the many men – and women – who built the America that actually exists, with its large corporations, its market economy and its privately endowed colleges, museums and hospitals. The America we have is the America of Rockefeller and Ford, not the America of Jefferson, based on prosperous, independent subsistence farms, and certainly not the America of Thoreau, based on a minimalist economy and great investment in spiritual growth. Folger and his library are an interesting part of the story of what actually exists in the world. There is another reason, however, for resisting the temptation to write about Folger in the spirit of a critical exposé. The Folger Shakespeare Library is Henry Clay Folger’s creation. It is a hallowed institution, and by this I mean that it is dedicated to the labour of the spirit. To portray its creator as a conniving, cigar-smoking, capitalist scoundrel would be more than a bit churlish, to say the least, especially for the present writer, who has certainly benefited greatly from having access to Folger’s rare book collection. It would also be a highly inaccurate way to describe what Folger really had in mind as he accumulated his collection and carefully stored the books in crates. Folger was a capitalist, and the creation of his library would have been inconceivable without the modes of accumulation typical of unregulated market economies. But The Folger Shakespeare Library is not about capital, nor even cultural capital; it is about wealth, a rather different matter. Folger did not, of course, have to use his money to collect books and build a library. He could have used his money to build San Simeon and entertain movie stars in his swimming pool. The gift he bestowed on Shakespeare scholars was a labour of gratitude, a re-distribution of the incomparably larger gift of Shakespeare’s works to his own community.3 The present account consists of four distinct sections, like the movements of a string quartet. I look first at Folger’s family background and his

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education at Amherst College to suggest something about the formation of his character. A second section looks at Folger’s role as president of Standard Oil and his understanding of the petroleum industry within the broader context of American philanthropy during the Gilded Age. I then focus more specifically on the plan of Folger’s remarkable collection, with particular emphasis on the acquisition of multiple copies of the First Folio. I also consider Folger’s own more immediate engagement with Shakespeare through a discussion of his unpublished essay on The Merchant of Venice. The final section considers the building of the library and the social experience of doing research in the reading room.

Family and Friendship The best part of waking up is Folger’s in your cup. To most Americans, Folger’s is, literally, a household word, even in households that prefer other brands. The Folger Shakespeare Library, by contrast, is something most people have never even heard of and, when its existence is mentioned, they understandably think it must have something to do with coffee. Even scholars who work at The Folger Library think the money comes from coffee, and I’ve often had occasion on my visits to the institution to clear up this misapprehension. The coffee business was founded in 1860 by Henry Clay Folger’s uncle, James Athearn Folger. James was a ‘49-er’, one of those intrepid souls who set out from New England with his older brothers Henry Clay Sr. and Edward to seek their fortune in the California Gold Rush. He stayed in San Francisco, where there was good money to be made, instead of heading out to the gold fields, working at various occupations until he had enough capital to start his own business. The J. A. Folger Coffee Company is still a going concern, though it has changed its name to Folger’s Coffee. James’ great-grandson, Peter Folger, eventually sold the company to Procter and Gamble in 1963, though the family continues to operate the business. In a tragic footnote to this story, James Folger’s great-great-granddaughter, Abigail (Gibbie) Folger, was one of the victims in the multiple murders committed by Charles Manson and his followers in August of 1969. James’ older brother, Henry Clay Folger, eventually went back east where he married Eliza Clark, with whom he had several children, including Henry Clay Folger Jr., the subject of this chapter. James Folger and Henry Clay Folger Sr. and Jr. were all members of an old and very large American family. The founding father of this extensive lineage was a man named Peter Folger, a native of Norwich, England, who,

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in 1635 or thereabouts, emigrated to New England with his father on a ship called The Abigail. While on board ship he met and fell in love with Mary Morrill, who eventually became the founding mother of the Folger dynasty. She was a maidservant indentured to Hugh Peters, a well-known minister in Salem, Massachusetts. Folger worked for nine years to raise the sum of 20 pounds to purchase Mary’s indentures, a bit longer than Jacob labouring for his Uncle Laban for the sake of his beloved Rachel. The couple married in 1644. It is said that Peter Folger described his purchase of Mary’s indentures as ‘the best appropriation of money he had ever made’. Mary’s opinion of this arrangement has not been recorded. It’s a touching story, really. You can easily imagine how it would look in a Hollywood movie, the kind of historical saga that would have been popular around 1950. If there is a darker side to this story of buying and selling of a woman’s freedom it does not enter into the family’s own narrative. Peter and Mary had nine children who survived infancy, starting a dynasty that has included a number of prominent Americans, mostly in the fields of science, industry and politics. In 1640, Peter Folger moved to Martha’s Vineyard, where he worked as a surveyor. He also took part in a mission to the native community run by a Puritan minister named Thomas Mayhew and his son, also Thomas. Folger learned the Algonquian language and because he was also well versed in scripture he became both a schoolmaster and minister to the Vineyard Indians. A few years later the mission was extended to Nantucket. Peter Folger prospered in his role as surveyor and also as liaison with the Indians in the region, eventually becoming a ‘half-share’ proprietor of the colony. He enjoyed the trust of the colonists as well as the respect of Indians, and he often was called upon to negotiate peaceful settlements in conflicts over the use of land. But this was not in any larger sense a peaceful co-existence. Violence between Puritans and Indians broke out in 1675 in a series of events known as King Philip’s War. The colonists growing population was occupying more and more territory. The Indians were declining through European-borne disease and the destruction of their traditional resources. The conflict, which spread throughout New England, lasted more than a year, with heavy casualties on both sides. In the end, Metacomet, known to the colonists as King Philip, was killed and his wife and son were sold into slavery. Today we would no doubt describe what happened as a resistance to colonization that ultimately failed. Peter Folger saw these events in a slightly different way, which he made public in a pamphlet that appeared in 1676 called A Looking-Glass for the Times, or The Former Spirit of New England

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Revived in This Generation. While he conceded that the Indian attacks were reprehensible, he insisted that the Puritans should bear responsibility for the full extent of the violence on both sides. The war was ‘the hand of God’, divine punishment visited upon the Puritans for ‘the sin of persecution’ and ‘crualty [sic] to brethren’ both red and white. Peter Folger’s story entails any number of characteristic themes in the collective narrative of American life. He married for love, although his marriage was also a good investment. He prospered, but not too ostentatiously, by means of his thrift, diligence, initiative, and by acquiring skills that were needed by his fellow citizens. He benefited from the colonization of the New World, but found ways to protest when he thought things had gone too far. He took an active role in the political life of the Nantucket colony, siding with other ‘half-share men’ and with the Indians in opposing the attempts by the original proprietors to reserve future distributions of land for themselves and their descendants all, along with all decisions about governance. The political resistance to this initiative was carried out through litigation, town meetings and petitions to the governor. In the end the half-share men were successful in securing their franchise and also in addressing Indian grievances about grazing rights. The best known of all Peter Folger’s numerous descendants is his grandson, Benjamin Franklin, whose mother was Folger’s youngest daughter, Abiah. In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin speaks admiringly of his grandfather, who he claims was ‘in favour of Liberty of Conscience, and in behalf of the Baptists, Quakers, and other Sectaries, that had been under Persecution’.4 Many of Peter Folger’s descendants were active in the whaling industry, and their importance is duly noted in Moby Dick. They have something better than royal blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and harpooners – all kith and kin to noble Benjamin . . . .5 Franklin’s first cousin, Timothy Folger, was captain of a whaling vessel who used his knowledge to create the first navigational chart of the Gulf Stream. Another cousin, Walter Folger, served in Congress from 1817. A man of many talents, he was a lawyer, a physician and the inventor of an astronomical clock. Other notable descendants of Peter Folger would have been roughly contemporary with Henry Clay Folger Sr. and Jr. Ezra Cornell made his fortune in the newly emerging telegraph industry as an associate of Samuel Morse. He later devoted his considerable wealth to various

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philanthropies, including Cornell University. Phebe Ann Coffin Hannaford was the first woman ordained as a minister in New England. She was active in promoting women’s suffrage and was the author of several books, including an early history of women, Daughters of America (1882). Lucretia Coffin Mott was an abolitionist as well as an important figure in the nineteenth-century movement for women’s rights. Maria Mitchell was an astronomer, discoverer of a comet that still bears her name, and an advocate of college education for women. The Folgers have a strong family tradition of acquiring and retaining wealth. But along with this is a longterm association with a politics of fairness, tolerance and certain forms of social activism. Even poor Gibbie Folger, the coffee heiress, worked as a volunteer social worker and was active in the civil rights movement until the time of her murder. Henry Clay Folger Jr. was born in New York City on June 18, 1857, the oldest of eight children. As a boy he assumed the responsibilities typical of the first child in a family, helping his mother take care of his younger brothers and sisters. His father, Henry Clay Folger Sr., owned a wholesale millinery company, which provided for his large family without making him particularly wealthy. Folger attended Adelphi Academy, a private high school founded in 1863, mainly for the sons of middle-class families in Brooklyn. The school expanded rapidly over its first years, financed by a committee of Brooklyn citizens led by Charles Pratt. Pratt was convinced of the value of an educated labour force and, along with his support of Adelphi Academy, he was also the founder of Pratt Institute. Adelphi also enjoyed public support from Horace Greeley and from Henry Ward Beecher. In his address at the laying of the cornerstone for the new building in 1867, Beecher declared that ‘no man can give any reason why a woman should not be educated as well as, and in the same respect which, a man is educated’. During the time Henry Clay Folger was a student at Adelphi Academy there were girls enrolled in all of its departments. One of Folger’s classmates there was Charles Millard Pratt, the son of Charles Pratt, who became a lifelong friend and, apart from his wife, Emily Jordan Folger, his closest associate. After graduating from Adelphi Academy, Folger entered Amherst College in the fall of 1875. He was able to do this only with financial support from private sources, notably from Charles Pratt Sr. At Amherst he joined the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a primarily literary society devoted to the cultivation of a ‘philosophical spirit’ in its members. To judge from the letters he sent home to his mother during his first year at college, Folger thoroughly enjoyed himself at Amherst.

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Amherst, Nov. 21 My dear Mother:I thought when I wrote to you last Sunday that I would have abundant time during these holidays to write, but I find now that my time will be as completely occupied as ever but in an entirely different manner. This morning the expressman deposited in front of the house an immense box having the appearance of a coffin, and, on opening it, we found that its appearance had not belied it, for it contained a slaughtered turkey. He was for Davis, as were also a pie, some dates, oranges and lemons, jelly and sundry articles not eatable. ‘G. R.’ received three cakes, four pies, a glass of jelly, and, to make the package balance some crackers were thrown in. This was the contents of one box. Another had already been received, which contained besides my cake, a boiled tongue, two pies, some wine jelly and crackers. Hagen also was not forgotten, and his box held another turkey, two cakes, two jars of preserves, a bottle of ‘chow-chow’ a box of candy, a box of English crackers, etc. etc. Can you now guess my occupation for the next two or three days? For fear you couldn’t and I’d lose my joke, I’ll tell. Gormandizing. . . . .’ Your aff. Son, Henry6 It’s exactly the sort of reassuring letter any mother would be happy to receive from a son who has just left home to attend college far away. He has friends, he’s in good health, he has been enjoying the home-made treats she has sent to him. Most important, he’s happy and he’s still her affectionate son. He did have a few complaints. The weather was cold, the streets were muddy, his brothers and sisters didn’t reply to all the letters he sent to them. But, despite these distractions, he did find time to apply himself to his studies. Dec. 12, 1875 . . . Last Tuesday we had an examination in Latin, something I have dreaded all the long term, but am now over-joyed that I have passed so well and it is all over. ‘De Amicitia’ is excellent latin, and contains many fine passages and ideas, but if ever I was sick of anything I was of that; having studied, on an average three hours four days out of the week on it. . . . Today at Church we had Prof. Tyler to preach and I feel tonight as if I hadn’t been to Church at all. He has a remarkable delivery, a regular nasal drawl, and reads his sermons off as he does his lectures, paying no

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regard for period or other marks of punctuation. This afternoon Gold, one of our Society men, came around and we finished the watermelon rind. I think it has lasted exceedingly well. We used it at all our spreads, besides tasting it now and then between times.7 Ever the dutiful son, he makes a point of thanking his mother for the pickled watermelon rind she sent. Although he doesn’t provide much detail about his academic interests, the reference to Cicero says a great deal about what he must have been learning. And the cryptic mention of Professor Tyler’s odd style of lecturing hints more broadly at the kind of intellectual and social environment Amherst would have made available to him. Nowadays if a college student has even heard of Cicero, she or he is most likely to be thinking of the town in Illinois which served as the headquarters for Al Capone’s criminal empire. But Marcus Tullius Cicero’s De Amicitia was for hundreds of years a fundamental element in the intellectual equipment of educated men throughout Europe and North America. Henry Clay Folger was part of this venerable tradition. In his letter, Folger confides to his mother that he is thoroughly sick of studying for the exam, though he concedes the work has ‘many fine passages and ideas’. He also tells her that he studied hard and passed the examination very well. What he doesn’t say in his letter is how well Cicero’s articulation of the virtue of friendship was consistent with his own self-understanding and how much he was to benefit by his ability to combine the conscientious practice of friendship with building trust in his business relationships. The restrained conviviality of home-made pies and pickled watermelon rind are obviously part of what friendship is all about, but there is a deeper sense of the virtue elaborated in De Amicitia that helps to bring out the complexity of Folger’s personality. I don’t necessarily think Folger was directly influenced by reading Cicero or that he set out to live up to the classical ideals of virtue set forth in his essay. But there is a kind of obvious resonance with Cicero’s delineation of friendship and the affectionate respect Folger enjoyed with his closest associates. De Amicitia is a dialogue between Gaius Laelius ‘the wise’ and his two sons-in-law, Gaius Fannius and Quintus Mucius Scaevola, the augur. Laelius explains that friendship can exist only on the condition that men who are drawn to each other are virtuous. ‘Friendship is an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection, and I am inclined to think that, with the exception of wisdom, no better thing has been given to man by the immortal gods.’8 A bond of affection between virtuous men really does sound like a divine gift, but the situation is in fact

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more complicated. The crux of Cicero’s philosophic drama has to do with the ‘advantages’ that flow from friendship. The oftener, therefore, I reflect on friendship the more it seems to me that consideration should be given to the question, whether the longing for friendship is felt on account of weakness and want, so that by the giving and receiving of favours one may get from another and in turn repay what he is unable to procure of himself; or, although this mutual interchange is really inseparable from friendship, whether there is not another cause, older, more beautiful, and emanating more directly from Nature herself. For it is love (amor), from which the word ‘friendship’ (amicitia) is derived, that leads to the establishing of goodwill. For while it is true that advantages are frequently obtained even from those who, under a pretence of friendship, are courted and honoured to suit the occasion; yet in friendship there is nothing false, nothing pretended; whatever there is is genuine and comes of its own accord. Wherefore it seems to me that friendship springs rather from nature than from need, and from an inclination of the soul joined with a feeling of love rather than from calculation of how much profit the friendship is likely to afford.9 Cicero’s claim that friendship is a feeling of love rather than a calculation of profit may seem more than a bit disingenuous. The virtue that’s being talked about here is not always easy to distinguish from class loyalty and partisan affiliation. And, it’s clear in any case that the friendships being described are also networks of political alliances that help to maintain a certain power structure. But this probably does not reflect the way Henry Clay Folger would have read De Amicitia in his first year at Amherst College. Folger would certainly profit greatly from his friendships with Charles Pratt and John D. Rockefeller, among many others, but this in itself would not be incompatible with the virtuous ideal described by Cicero. Friendship necessarily involves considerable give and take; the crucial question for Cicero is whether or not profit figures as a motive in these exchanges. As long as the advantages of a friendship are not also a motive for that friendship, the ideal is not compromised. But a more honest account would simply acknowledge that friendship is a mixed and contradictory affair. No one really gives with a pure heart but this wouldn’t diminish the significance of friendship as a virtue. In any case, Folger’s actual motives in maintaining strong friendships may have developed out of real gratitude for the generosity shown him by Charles Pratt père et fils. Charles Pratt Sr. was a patron and benefactor, helping to pay for Folger’s college education along

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with that of his own son, Charles Millard Pratt. Charlie Pratt was instrumental in providing Folger with the opportunity to accept a position with the Standard Oil Company, where he eventually rose to the position of CEO. And it was through the Pratts that Folger first met Emily Jordan, to whom he was married in 1885. The Pratts were also important role models for the practice of philanthropy, a social and public analogue of personal friendship that will be discussed in more detail in a later section of this chapter. The advantages of friendship were considerable and very real, but even so, the friendships were undoubtedly verum et voluntarium (true and voluntary). Folger was liberal with the currency of friendship. His social correspondence faithfully acknowledges gifts and hospitality as well as remembering birthdays and wedding anniversaries. I thank you for your wonderful letter of congratulation on my birthday. It brings to mind our old church covenant, to put the best construction on each other’s words and actions. Surely you have done this, in a most delightful way. I prize your letter as a most sincere expression of a tried and true friend, not only, but as an unusually fine piece of real exquisite English.10 Folger played a pretty good game of golf, an element of his friendship that Rockefeller appreciated as much as the thoughtful and beautiful letters he received. And he had a reputation for sending thoughtful and unusual Christmas gifts to his colleagues. Were the Rockefellers and the Pratts his friends or just his business associates? There is not much doubt that Folger’s magnanimity helped him to maintain certain notable advantages in American society, but strategic calculation and the desire for profit are not really adequate as an account of his larger aspirations. The broader significance of friendship in the formation of Folger’s character requires more extensive consideration of his cultural context, beginning with his years at Amherst. Amherst College was founded in 1821 with a mission of training ‘indigent young men’ for Christian ministry. Its primary aim was the preservation of the strict beliefs of reform Christianity observed by the early Puritans, which had eroded in the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of early nineteenth-century Boston. But in the years following the Civil War this orientation was evolving in a number of important ways, due largely to the Reverend Julius H. Seelye, who was chosen to be President of Amherst in 1877. Seelye was a complex figure. He was trained in theology at Halle and Berlin. In 1853 he became pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church in

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Schenectady, New York, a position he held until he was appointed Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Amherst in 1858, a year after Henry Clay Folger Jr. was born. Seelye visited India in 1872, where he lectured to ‘Educated Hindus’ on the truth of Christianity.11 Seelye thought that the truth of reform Christianity was immutable, and that it is grasped only through a kind of intuition.12 He acknowledged the role of the university in the promotion of research, but he considered the aim of a college – most notably Amherst College – to be enlargement of character. Teaching was to focus on general culture and self-discipline: ‘For education is wholly a personal work. It s not gained by books, nor by instruction alone, nor by anything in place of the living inspiration of the living teacher.’13 In the ‘Amherst System’ as it was developed by Seelye, education was witnessing, mentoring, the creation of role models, or, in other words, a highly articulated species of friendship. Seelye was elected as Member of Congress in the Tenth District of Massachusetts for one term, 1874–1876. He was profoundly disillusioned with his experience of politics in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, and particularly with the widespread corruption and degradation of public morality in both the House and the Senate. His concern with social ethics did not, however, lead him to a retrenchment of religious fundamentalism. Instead, he committed himself to a more innovative development of Amherst’s curriculum and its teaching staff. The library was reorganized by Melville Dewey. The two key academic appointments were John Mason Tyler and Charles Edward Garman. John Tyler, the same ‘Professor Tyler’ whose peculiar lecturing style Folger described for his mother, was an instructor in biology who brought a new approach to science to the students of Amherst.14 He taught Darwin’s theory of evolution, adapted to the religious context predominant at Amherst. ‘We take for granted the probable truth of the theory of evolution as stated by Mr. Darwin, and that it applies to man as really as to any lower animal.’15 Tyler understood his task to be the discussion of how and in what way the ‘probable truth of the theory of evolution’ could be reconciled with the truth of biblical teaching. The thought of Charles Edward Garman is not well known, in large part because, as a matter of principle, he did not publish his writing.16 Like Thoreau or even Gandhi, he took a dim view of the modern nation state based on coercion and the monopoly of violence as the primary means for maintaining social order. He believed that the basic conditions of political legitimation could not be solved through an arrogance of power; the state should not become part of the problem it is trying to solve.17 He also opposed the materialistic and acquisitive character of a rapidly expanding

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industrial economy and in this his thinking resembles that of Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), whose lifetime, by an odd coincidence, almost exactly matches that of Henry Clay Folger (1857–1930). Garman, like Thoreau, believed that the frantic pursuit of economic gain was just a life of quiet desperation, inconsistent with anything like genuine self-realization.18 Self-realization is the ultimate impulse of self; not merely to exist, but to exist in the fullness of one’s power, in the completeness of life which is the perfection of (1) self consciousness, (2) self-direction and control and, (3) self-appreciation or valuation. This alone is personality. . . . How one abhors conceit or melancholia (which destroys the true valuation)! How this age worships money, not because it gets pretty things, but because it gives the possessor so much power, i.e., enables him to realize his will without hindrance, so increases one’s importance when used rightly, and thus increases valuation!19 Garman taught that righteousness, rather than strategic advantage or power, represented a man’s true motives and his deeper aspiration. The principle of stewardship, or service, was at the centre of his philosophy. He wanted his students to achieve self-realization by using their God-given talents to expand the wealth and the well-being of their fellow citizens. Unlike Julius Seelye, whose focus was on the ‘inner voice’ of faith, Garman focused on action, urging his students to resist the addictive forces of commercialism. Garman’s idea of self-realization in the service of others has its most obvious source in the Gospels, but it also converges in an interesting way with Karl Marx’s picture of the life of un-alienated labour to be achieved in a fully realized communist society.20 In the early spring of Folger’s senior year, Ralph Waldo Emerson was invited to Amherst to deliver his lecture on ‘The Superlative or Mental Temperance’. Emerson had lectured to Amherst students on two earlier occasions, each time at the invitation of the students. In 1855 then President Stearns expressed his alarm over the first of these visits: ‘I should esteem it a calamity . . . if . . . the College should receive a poise towards the transcendental atheism of the age . . . ’21 By 1879 things had changed considerably. Emerson lectured in College Hall, where he was introduced very graciously by no less a figure than Julius H. Seelye himself. Evidently Seelye wasn’t made anxious by the possibility of ‘transcendental atheism’ since he must have seen in Emerson’s thought something that resonated with his own more traditional Christianity. ‘The Superlative’ is a lecture that acknowledges the ‘low platform’ on which temperance in the form

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of abstinence from meat and drink is preached, but its real theme is ‘the conservatism of the entire energies of the body, the mind, and the soul’.22 The argument of the lecture is a critique of the superlative in its grammatical sense, those habits of rhetorical inflation that weaken a man’s speech and diminish his character. ‘The first valuable power in a reasonable mind, one would say, was the power of plain statement.’23 Folger credits Emerson with inspiring his lifelong interest in Shakespeare, but the lecture itself actually inspired a powerful interest in the writings of Emerson. The fascination with Shakespeare came later, as a consequence of reading the text of Emerson’s 1864 lecture on the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. I will consider Emerson’s account of Shakespeare later in this discussion. At this point, however, I want to concentrate on the way Emerson’s philosophy articulated and resonated with Henry Clay Folger’s character. Folger was clearly impressed with what he heard in College Hall during that evening in March of 1879. He preserved the ticket stub, which still exists as part of the Folger collection. But I’m not sure if inspiration is exactly the right word to describe what happened. Folger was already a ‘transcendental atheist’ if that is the right expression. He was certainly highly receptive to Emerson’s tuition, but the basic intuition about who he was and how he would live was already there, nurtured in his family background and in his earlier years at Amherst college. Folger owned copies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series and of Essays: Second Series, both published in Boston by Houghton Osgood and Company in 1880. These volumes are held in the Folger Archive. Inside the cover of Series One Folger has pasted in a copy in his own handwriting of a lengthy extract from James Russell Lowell’s essay on Thoreau: The Puritanism of the past found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the rarest creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare; but the Puritanism that cannot die, found its voice in Emerson. We said that the Transcendental Movement was the Protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and an escape from forms and creeds which compressed rather than expressed it. In its motives, its preaching and its results, it differed radically from the doctrine of Carlyle. The Scotchman, with all his genius, and his humor gigantesque as that of Rabelais has grown shriller and shriller with years, degenerating sometimes into a common scold. The teaching of Emerson tended much more exclusively to self-culture and the independent development of the individual man. Both Carlyle and Emerson were disciples of Goethe, but Emerson in a far truer sense; and while the one, from his bias toward the eccentric, has degenerated more and more into mannerism, the other

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has clarified steadily toward perfection of style – exquisite fineness of material, unobtrusive lowness of tone and simplicity of fashion, the most high-bred garb of expression.24 The quotation from Lowell suggests how seriously Folger considered Emerson’s ideas and how they may have contributed to his own selfunderstanding. Folger was himself a person concerned with ‘self-culture and . . . independent development’. He owed a great deal of his success in life to the generosity of his many friends. But Henry Clay Folger was not a ‘friendly guy’ much given to informality, openness, or breezy familiarity. On the contrary, he was typically reserved, even with the people who knew him well. Apart from very close friends like Charlie Pratt, he was never addressed as ‘Henry’ but always as ‘Mr. Folger’. To see how this ‘friendship without friendliness’ actually worked, it is helpful to consider Emerson’s view of the subject. Emerson’s essay on ‘Friendship’ makes for an interesting contrast with Cicero’s De Amicitia. Like Cicero, he recognizes that friendship must entail a kind of reciprocity that leads to mutual advantage. But where Cicero saw nothing much wrong with give and take or the formation of strategic alliances as long as it was not the motivation for friendship, Emerson takes a much sterner view. We chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighbourhood; it watches with the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find the god under this disguise of a subtler, yet, on the other hand, we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity, and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.25 For Emerson the two indispensable elements of friendship are truth and tenderness. Friendship is rare, and considerations of mutual benefit really cannot be entertained in the encounter of self with other. For Cicero, friendship is pre-eminently a social virtue. Paradoxically, for Emerson friendship is grounded in the radical solitude of personhood. ‘In strict science all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. . . . I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on your wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine.’26 There is something tragic in a way about this account; a true friend is someone who acknowledges and trusts your aloneness. And the best way to express

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friendship is not through socializing or conviviality or the exchange of gifts, but rather through keeping your distance and respecting boundaries. Cicero thought the crucial element in friendship was the love of another man’s virtue. Emerson considered the absolute ground of friendship to be self-reliance, a notion that has more than a little in common with Aristotle’s conception of philautia or self-love. Emerson has no patience with the idea of virtue as self-restraint and social conformity. He considered this sort of behaviour an apology or a penance. ‘I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.’ At the same time, however, the concept of self-reliance recaptures the more robust classical sense of virtus as self-respect or strength of character. Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him.27 Emerson’s idea of self-reliance evidently had a significant impact on Friedrich Nietzsche, most evident perhaps in the idea of the ‘noble man . . . who lives in trust and openness with himself’.28 It also had an impact of a rather different sort on the life and character of Henry Clay Folger. Folger’s genius, to adopt Emerson’s usage – or his nobility if you prefer to think of it that way – is complex and contradictory. There are really two Henry Clay Folgers and therefore two different stories. Folger was a ‘self-made man’ who amassed a considerable fortune as an executive of the Standard Oil Company. But Folger was also an intellectual, a scholar devoted to the gifts of the spirit and specifically to the pursuit of ‘the true text of Shakespeare’. Folger was able to integrate or reconcile these two contradictory elements of his personality through the sustained practice of philanthropy, a kind of socialized and impersonal analogue of friendship. But philanthropy is not a simple matter; one simply cannot be friends with everyone. Wealth can’t just be given away. It has to be preserved and shaped into a durable institution.29

American Philanthropy and The Gospel of Wealth Some time in December of 1920 Helen Hadley, the wife of one Arthur Hadley, wrote to Folger asking for advice and suggestions of men she could approach on behalf of The Pratt Fund, an initiative to increase the salary endowment fund for Vassar College. The fund was also designed as a way to

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honour Folger’s close friend Charlie Pratt, who was an important benefactor of Vassar. Folger replied to Mrs. Hadley on 22 December. My advice on the Vassar fund will be of little help; I have to give it without having had any experience . . . Emily and I will of course wish to contribute, but she is already pledged to make her contribution through her Class, and my contribution will be so small that you would do well to get it later, after the other friends have been approached. As a matter of fact, our Shakespeare undertaking is so insistent that we have no funds left to use in other directions. To start the work as soon after the first of the year as possible seems desirable, as men of means are much more systematic in arranging their benevolences than is generally supposed; that the early part of the year is a good time to approach them. I have every confidence that the plan can be carried out successfully.30 Folger is gracious, but he is also reserved, pointing out as he so often did in these exchanges that his available resources were exclusively committed to his Shakespeare project. Wealthy men, he points out, are ‘systematic in arranging their benevolences’. Philanthropy is not an impulsive act of generosity, giving away your cloak to a poor man on the street. The allocation of wealth to benefit others has to have more specific goals. At the time Folger wrote this letter to Mrs. Hadley he was the president of the Standard Oil Company of New York. He rose to this eminent position largely because he was systematic in preserving wealth, specifically John D. Rockefeller’s wealth. The Standard Oil Company was founded by Rockefeller and his associates in Ohio in 1870. Other companies engaged in refining, transporting and marketing petroleum were acquired and in 1882 these were integrated as the Standard Oil Trust. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, designed to eliminate monopolies, brought about the dissolution of the Trust in 1892. In New Jersey, however, it was legal for a corporation to own stock in other companies. Rockefeller exploited this provision by making Standard Oil Company of New Jersey the holding company for his other manifold interests. Many years of litigation ensued and in May 1911 the United States Supreme Court held that Standard Oil Company of New Jersey must be dissolved into its constituent companies. Rockefeller emerged from this as principal owner of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now Exxon) and Standard Oil Company of New York (Mobil Oil), retaining shares in most of the remaining firms.

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Henry Clay Folger played a central role in the final stages of this dispute, and he was successful in preventing any significant financial losses for Rockefeller and the other majority interests in Standard Oil business operation. The final ‘break-up’ of Standard Oil was a largely technical and inconclusive affair. Instead of one centralized holding company retaining direct control of its many subsidiaries, there were now some thirty or more ‘independent’ companies with overlapping and interlocking ownership groups. The employees of the new Standard Oil Companies were no better off after the anti-trust decision, but the litigation was never about the economic welfare of Rockefeller’s refinery workers, clerks and truckdrivers. The theory of breaking up monopolies is to assure that competition will lead to better products at lower prices for consumers. But one of the key objections to Rockefeller was that he kept prices low, preventing other businessmen from engaging in petroleum production and sales. In fact Rockefeller was fond of describing himself as someone who provided ‘the poor man’s light’ by selling kerosene at very low cost to the public. At the end of it all Rockefeller was able to retire completely in 1911 to Hot Springs, Virginia, where he was able to relax, play golf and keep up his correspondence with his friends. Folger knew his business. In March of 1891 he was offered a sum of $30.00 to prepare an article of some 2500 words on ‘petroleum’ for a new edition of The Chambers Encyclopedia. Less than a month later, the publishers of the Encyclopedia acknowledged receipt of the entry. He begins the discussion with a historical overview of the uses of petroleum, which he traces back to the oldest civilizations in Nineveh and Babylon, where ‘asphaltic mortar’ was used for ‘walls and buildings’. There are references to petroleum in Old Testament scripture and in many classical writers, including Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Plutarch, Aristotle and Josephus. The North American Indians also made use of naturally occurring petroleum springs. The entry mentions the important scientific work of Benjamin Silliman on the chemistry of petroleum. And he then suggests that ‘the growth of the America industry, which has given the world what can be fairly termed the people’s light, has been within the last half of the 19th century’.31 The article then goes on to chart the annual production of petroleum in the America. There were two things Folger did not know about the long-term business prospects for the Standard Oil Company, however. He could not have known that the kerosene lamp was about to become obsolete with the introduction of electrical lighting, and that the market for the main product of the Standard Oil Company would entirely collapse, following the fate of whale oil. But he also could not have anticipated the invention of the automobile, which would create a much

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larger and more diverse market for petroleum products, assuring an even greater return for Rockefeller and for the business executives who worked for him. One of the problems Rockefeller had to face was what to do with all that money. In this he was not alone; Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Leland Stanford Jr. were among the many others who had similar issues to confront. Let’s face it, there are existential limits on how much luxury a person can enjoy. You can own more than one house, but you can only live in one place at a time. But let’s do the math. If you had one billion dollars in cash right now, you wouldn’t even have to invest it to be very comfortable for a very long time. If you kept the money in a wallsafe, in cash, and you could manage to spend ten million dollars every year, the money would last about a hundred years. If you were inclined to be more frugal, limiting your spending to just one million dollars a year, or roughly $2,750.00 dollars every day, your money would last for 1,000 years, but you would be dead long before you got to enjoy what it could buy. You would have to leave it for your children or anyway find some way to give it away. Now this might seem like the sort of problem you wouldn’t mind having but, even so, great wealth is not without its difficulties and its own distinctive kind of obligations. Well, John D. Rockefeller did not keep his money in an old sock under his mattress. He did not have a big money bin like Scrooge McDuck. The situation he faced was much more complicated. There were expenses and investments to maintain, along with risks of various kinds, including the perhaps remote possibility that he might lose his businesses. The anti-trust litigation was a constant worry, as he confided in a letter to Folger in the spring of 1909. I agree with you that our hope for permanent success is in giving the public the best quality of goods and the most reasonable prices, and I hope we will not allow others to come in and take our business away from us.32 There were also matters of conscience. ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break in and steal’ (Matthew 6:19). There are numerous admonitions of this kind in the gospels, and it does seem that Rockefeller knew his scripture: Dear Mr. Folger: I thank you for your most beautiful letter of the 7th on the occasion of my eighty-sixth birthday.

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The good of which you speak, that you receive in our association, comes back to me from you in full measure, pressed down, and running over. Our days of celebration were very delightful. I am full of gratitude and hope and cheer. With kindest regards and every best wish for you and your dear ones, Sincerely Yours. John D. Rockefeller33 The reference to something given in full measure, pressed down and running over comes from the more practical side of the gospels, Jesus’ advice on the conduct of living. ‘Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again’ (Luke 6:38). In referring to this passage, Rockefeller is specifically talking about Folger’s kindness and his expression of concern, but there is a deeper intuition here about the spiritual rewards of philanthropy as a solution to the problem of very large accumulation of capital. It is not really all that clear what you should do if you have more money than you know what to do with. Proverbially, you can’t take it with you. But you can try somehow to transform money into deeper, more satisfying modes of self-actualization along the lines suggested by thinkers like Charles Garman or Ralph Waldo Emerson. He fails to make his place good in the world, unless he not only pays his debt, but also adds something to the common wealth. Nor can he do justice to his genius, without making some larger demand on the world than a bare subsistence. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.34 Emerson here takes issue with any and all forms of asceticism, whether religious or philosophical. He is particularly concerned to reject the social and economic minimalism of Henry David Thoreau. ‘. . . will a man content himself with a hut and a handful of dried pease?’35 This is more than a bit unfair to Thoreau, who was critical of industrialization, technology and the mindless pursuit of capital, but who was not, in the end, any more opposed to genuine wealth than Emerson himself. The question both men addressed was basically how to understand what really might constitute human flourishing. Emerson’s lecture on ‘Wealth’ scandalized any number of people even before it was published as an essay in The Conduct of Life. His Aunt Mary Moody Emerson wrote to express her considerable outrage and dismay

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in a letter of February, 1851. ‘Wealth my dear Waldo, how could you . . . how – under what illusions, could you lecture of its advantages’. 36 Thoreau was depressed at the spectacle of his friends and neighbours frantically pursuing capital while actually living lives of quiet desperation. But Emerson was not, in fact, talking about how much fun it would be to get a lot of money or defending the notion of greed as a new kind of virtue. His concern was to provide a better sense of what really constituted wealth or thriving. What he had in mind was the archaic sense of ‘wealth’ as a condition of ‘weal’ or well-being. He did not think that money would buy happiness, but he liked the idea of thrift, again in its archaic sense, of flourishing, vigour or even virtue. As his essay unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the real meaning of wealth lies in its capacity to enrich and empower others. Emerson understood what Thoreau meant about men living lives of quiet desperation and he recognized that the pursuit of economic gain could actually leave a man deeply impoverished. But he could also see a way that acquiring wealth could truly enrich its possessor, in ‘full measure, pressed down and running over’. Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends. They should own who can administer; not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor: and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization. The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men on thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by the opulent, can be enjoyed by all. For example, the providing to each man the means and apparatus of science, and of the arts. There are many articles good for occasional use, which few men are able to own. Every man wishes to see the ring of Saturn, the satellites and belts of Jupiter and Mars; the mountains and craters in the moon: yet how few can buy a telescope! and of those, scarcely one would like the trouble of keeping it in order, and exhibiting it. So of electrical and chemical apparatus, and many the like things. Every man may have occasion to consult books which he does not care to possess, such as cyclopaedias, dictionaries, tables, charts, maps, and public documents: pictures also of birds, beasts, fishes, shells, trees, flowers, whose names he desires to know.37

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The argument here is that the accumulation of great wealth necessarily implies a redistribution or circulation of benefits to the general use. Wealth is to be administered, not hoarded and concealed. And the broader aim of such administration will necessarily be a kind of spiritual growth achieved through libraries and universities. In the second half of the essay Emerson provides a basic outline of the pragmatics of wealth. There are two points that must have been important for Henry Clay Folger as his plans for a Shakespeare Memorial Library were developed over the course of his life. To begin with, a man’s expenditures must reflect his character. Every man has his own particular genius, and wealth should be invested to acquire the ‘tools and equipment’ that enable him to develop his talents. ‘Do your work, respecting the excellence of the work, and not its acceptableness.’ But it is not quite sufficient simply to devote your resources to your genuine passion. The real significance of wealth is not accumulation but expenditure. But this means precisely that ‘men of means . . . are systematic in arranging their benevolences’. Emerson is emphatic on this point. There must be system in the economies. Saving and unexpensiveness will not keep the most pathetic family from ruin, nor will bigger incomes make free spending safe. The secret of success lies never in the amount of money, but in the relation of income to outgo; as if, after expense has been fixed at a certain point, then new and steady rills of income, though never so small, being added, wealth begins. But in ordinary, as means increase, spending increases faster, so that, large incomes, in England and elsewhere, are found not to help matters;--the eating quality of debt does not relax its voracity. When the cholera is in the potato, what is the use of planting larger crops? In England, the richest country in the universe, I was assured by shrewd observers, that great lords and ladies had no more guineas to give away than other people; that liberality with money is as rare, and as immediately famous a virtue as it is here.38 The decline of the European aristocracy through profligacy, ostentation and general lack of proper fiscal administration is a kind of cautionary tale for Emerson. It will have an even more immediate impact on Folger’s ability to carry out his own plans. The key point is in avoiding deficits. Paradoxically, wealth actually increases through expenditure, but only on the condition that the spending secures some kind of permanent gain for society.

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By the time people start talking about it, the bad thing has already happened. This is more or less what Hegel had in mind when he famously wrote ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk’.39 Andrew Carnegie’s formulation of this idea is more blunt: ‘It is a waste of time to criticize the inevitable.’40 Carnegie’s influential essay on ‘Wealth’, was published in the North American Review for June, 1889. The article begins with a frank acknowledgement of the very inequalities that were so alarming to thinkers like Thoreau and Mary Moody Emerson. The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. The conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionized, within the past few hundred years . . . The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us to-day measures the change which has come with civilization.41 The basic premise of Carnegie’s argument is, however, that notwithstanding the increasing economic distance between rich and poor, everyone is in fact better off than they would have been in earlier societies. ‘Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor.’42 There is certainly room for a philosophical debate over Carnegie’s description of the traditional societies of North America or the feudal societies of Europe as ‘universal squalor’. Carnegie was certainly right in his claim that the problem of his own age was the distribution of wealth. Carnegie’s essay was originally entitled ‘Wealth’ but it has been better known under the alternative title of ‘The Gospel of Wealth’. The essay owes more than its original title to Emerson. But the concluding reference to the ‘true gospel of wealth’ may be a reference to the now mostly forgotten work of Russell Conwell, a Baptist minister from Philadelphia, who became extremely wealthy not by organizing the production of steel or of petroleum, but simply by presenting a lecture, ‘Acres of Diamonds’, that encouraged people to use their own ingenuity to take advantage of opportunities that could be found ‘right in their own backyard’. He preached that the acquisition of wealth was guided by divine providence, acting to assure that resources would flow to men and women who would use it for beneficial purposes. Russell Conwell practised what he preached; he was himself the founder and the first president of Temple University, created to enable poor men to train for the ministry. His work is similar to that of Horatio Alger and so many subsequent generations of self-help advocates, whose ideas really preach a gospel of success through individual

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enterprise. Carnegie had no real problems with encouraging economic success; his own story was not unlike a typical Horatio Alger tale. But his essay on wealth is a more serious effort to propose a systematic social policy for solving the problem of economic inequality. Unlike Emerson, Carnegie didn’t much like the idea of socialism. Emerson himself actually had only moderate enthusiasm for its general aims, though not for its actual practice. Both men believed that government should not meddle in the affairs of business. And they also believed that there was little to recommend the idea of redistributing wealth in the form of high wages. People don’t know how to spend money wisely and high wages just lead to undisciplined consumption: a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery, or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and, with the rapid wealth, come rapid claims: which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly dissipated.43 Emerson’s notion here is adopted by Carnegie in his own consideration of how the large surplus of wealth should best be administered. The traditional European practice of preserving wealth through direct inheritance is rejected precisely on the grounds suggested by Emerson, that the sons and grandsons who receive large estates as a birthright have ‘served no apprenticeship to wealth’. Carnegie was particularly opposed to the custom of primogeniture. In monarchical countries, the estates and the greatest portion of the wealth are left to the first son, that the vanity of the parent may be gratified by the thought that his name and title are to descend to succeeding generations unimpaired. The condition of this class in Europe to-day teaches the futility of such hopes or ambitions. The successors have become impoverished through their follies or from the fall in the value of land.44 Carnegie certainly did not think that rich men should leave their children unprovided, but he thought the way to do this was to see that they got a decent education that would allow them to earn a livelihood. But he does not see why anyone should want to leave a great fortune to their children. Such a general policy would not be in the best interest of the family or of society in general. Carnegie concludes that direct inheritance is motivated not by a concern for the welfare of children, but by ‘family pride’.

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Carnegie is equally sceptical of the practice of leaving wealth for public use through a man’s last will and testament. But here a man would have to be satisfied with the idea that he is of no use to society until after his death. The idea here is that everyone is going to die, and you receive no credit for holding on to your assets as if you thought you might be able to take it with you. ‘There is no grace’ in gifts of this kind and ‘such bequests seem so generally to lack the blessing’. One way for the state to counter-act the withholding of wealth from the public good is through heavy estate taxes. ‘By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.’ The ‘death duties’ should be graduated, so that moderate sums are exempt, but rates increase steeply on large fortunes. Carnegie quotes approvingly from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: ‘The other half / Comes to the privy coffer of the state’.45 This really is a political expedient, since if you know that half your money is going to be seized by the government when you die, you might well prefer to give some of that money away to something you care about, something that expresses your own genius. The payoff to Carnegie’s argument, then, amounts to a real politics of wealth. Men of means should be ‘systematic . . . in arranging their benevolences’ by creating social institutions that enhance the lives of all the members of the society and provide genuine opportunities for selfrealization to everyone. When this is done on a sufficiently generous scale, it will make the possibility of communism seem far less desirable. We might even go so far as to take another instance, that of Mr. Tilden’s bequest of five millions of dollars for a free library in the city of New York, but in referring to this one cannot help saying involuntarily, how much better if Mr. Tilden had devoted the last years of his own life to the proper administration of this immense sum; in which case neither legal contest nor any other cause of delay could have interfered with his aims. But let us assume that Mr. Tilden’s millions finally become the means of giving to this city a noble public library, where the treasures of the world contained in books will be open to all forever, without money and without price. Considering the good of that part of the race which congregates in and around Manhattan Island, would its permanent benefit have been better promoted had these millions been allowed to circulate in small sums through the hands of the masses? Even the most strenuous advocate of Communism must entertain a doubt upon this subject. Most of those who think will probably entertain no doubt whatever.46

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The focus here on the New York Public Library might be an echo of Emerson’s similar recommendation that wealth should be devoted to the creation of all sorts of edifying institutions, ‘Vaticans and Louvres . . . Philadelphia Academies of Natural History, Bodleian, Ambrosian, royal, Congressional Libraries’.47 And of course the endowment of libraries is one of the principal reasons Andrew Carnegie is remembered to this day in cities and towns all over the America. There are more than 2,500 such libraries around the country, some of them housed in architecturally beautiful structures. The idea here was that the libraries would serve as a kind of ‘people’s university’, another way of providing the ‘poor man’s light’. This program seems an exemplary case of philanthropy as a kind of ‘universal friendship’. And it seems hard to challenge the idea that the libraries provide a genuine benefit to the larger community, which is quite easy to appreciate if you happen to live somewhere like the Canadian province of Québec, which has no such tradition. What was the significance of libraries in Andrew Carnegie’s scheme of things? He was not the only man of means to provide funding for public libraries. Samuel Tilden’s role in the creation of the New York Public Library has already been mentioned. Walter Loomis Newberry intended to leave half of his estate to found a public library in Chicago after the death of his wife and his daughters. By the time his wife died in 1885, however, there was already a public library in that city and so the trustees decided to establish a private, non-circulating reference library for the humanities and social sciences. Henry Huntington established a similar institution in San Marino, California, part research library, part art gallery and part botanical garden. For Carnegie this focus was partly instrumental. A well-educated labour force was a fundamental element in developing a strong capitalist economy. Similar motives prompted Charles Pratt in the creation of the Pratt Institute. But libraries, unlike technical schools and vocational colleges, are profoundly different in spirit from the disciplinary institutions of society. A library provides for the circulation of wealth in the form of books, but this is something quite unlike the circulation of capital. The essence of the library is the experience of gift increase.48 The circulation of capital returns a profit to the investor, just as the sale of a commodity returns a profit to the merchant. Gifts, on the other hand, do not earn profit for an individual though they may entail obligations of gratitude. When someone borrows a copy of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice from the local public library they expect to be enriched by reading it. But the spirit of the gift is not consumed in the experience; it survives to be enjoyed by other readers. Libraries, more than any other type of public institution, embody the forms

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of serial reciprocity and gift increase. They exist for the common good, though not necessarily for the common profit. In this sense libraries embody or provide a model for what is in effect the antithesis of capitalism, namely the gift community in which resources are shared, nobody owns anything, and the purpose of exchange is to bind the members together ‘in harmonious relationship’. This is supposed to be the underlying ethos of an academic community, and it finds one kind of embodiment in the reading room of The Folger Library. It is tempting to view Carnegie’s ‘philanthropy’ as a kind of personal self-aggrandizement or else as a way for him to ease his conscience for benefiting from the exploitation of his workers. A friend of mine, a graduate of Temple University who is also a labour historian, thinks it’s all rubbish and that he should have paid his employees higher wages instead of fighting with the unions. And there is no use denying that Carnegie was a ruthless capitalist who also had a way of articulating a robust defence of his own practice. But there is another way to look at this. Carnegie presents a picture of the good life that is fully compatible with views expressed by Emerson and Thoreau. Is it really true that people are better off with a high disposable income that they use to buy various consumer products and to finance big houses in isolated suburban communities? Can there not be an alternative based on much more modest household incomes enhanced by well-endowed public amenities in the form of libraries, parks, botanical gardens, affordable medical care and so on and so forth? Maybe we would not have so much television and not so many choices in the supermarket, but there might be lots of interesting things to read and more time to play our musical instruments. Nathan Rothschild, the first Jew to sit in the British House of Lords and roughly the contemporary of John D. Rockefeller, had a senior clerk named Carl Ferdinand Meyer, who was a wealthy man in his own right. In 1909 Meyer contributed the sum of £70,000 to the Shakespeare National Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. At about this time Henry Clay Folger was busy overseeing the legal defence of the Standard Oil Company in the United States Supreme Court against charges of unfair monopoly. Folger, like Sir Carl, was a wealthy man in his own right, but he was certainly no Rothschild and he was no Carnegie or Rockefeller either. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford literally had more money than they could possible disburse in their own lifetime, and they accordingly set about creating public trusts or foundations to administer their assets after they died. Folger had a rather different kind of problem. He knew that he only had one shot at creating a significant philanthropic

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project and that there was a real chance his resources would not be sufficient to carry it out. In order to accomplish his goal he had to stay focused, he had to be ‘systematic . . . in arranging his benevolences’. The basic strategy he followed is laid out very clearly in Carnegie’s essay and it basically says ‘keep your overhead low’. . . . set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community--the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren.49 Folger certainly adhered to the advice of ‘unostentatious living’, living in a modest home in Brooklyn and resisting for a long time the urging of Charlie Pratt to build a summer home on ‘the gold coast’ in Glen Cove, Long Island where Charlie and his brothers and sisters all had large establishments. As we know from his letters to his mother, Folger had a taste for pickled watermelon rind and he was not averse to ‘gormandizing’. But really, personal ostentation was not the way for him to express his genius. However, there was an additional element besides his self-restraint in the systematic way he pursued his own philanthropic project. In his letter to Mrs. Arthur Hadley, Folger refers to his ‘Shakespeare undertaking’ as ‘insistent’ in its demands on his resources. This was almost certainly an honest assessment of the limits of his own ability to contribute funds to other worthy causes. In 1920 Folger was not only President of Standard Oil of New York, he was also one of the founding partners of Magnolia Oil Company of Texas, so there was little doubt that he could afford to spend money on projects like Mrs. Hadley’s Charles Pratt Fund. Or so it would seem. In reality Folger understood not only the risks of his own position, but also the real costs associated with his long term project. Although he was generally able to acquire the rare books and other material associated with Shakespeare at reasonable prices, still the market for such artefacts was increasing. There was also the considerable overhead associated with book collecting, including travel expenses along with the compensation of various agents he employed to enter bids and negotiate proposals with the owners. Finally, he had to reserve funds both for the construction of a library to house the collection as well as a sufficient

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endowment to defray the operating costs of the institution. He knew he would have just about enough money to carry this off, as long as nothing went terribly wrong, but he would not be able to divide his resources to provide support for other initiatives. One of the more interesting examples of Folger’s extremely toughminded focus on his own project involves the minister of the Central Congregational Church in Brooklyn, Samuel Parkes Cadman. Folger was a parishioner and also a trustee of the church and he corresponded regularly with Cadman, even though they must have met face to face innumerable times. Cadman was an interesting man in many ways. He was an early supporter of the ecumenical movement and a vocal opponent of racism and anti-Semitism. In later years he would protest against the firing by the Nazis of the theologian Karl Barth for his opposition to their regime. And he would call for a boycott of the 1936 Olympics to protest the official anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Germany. In 1923, however, all this was far in the future. Cadman’s project at the time was the creation of the first ‘radio ministry’, an undertaking that would enable him to broadcast his sermons to millions of people across the country. Given his views, this might not have been such a bad idea, but when he approached Folger with a request for financial support, Folger refused. There is nothing in the letter to suggest that he disapproved of the content of Cadman’s sermons. Nor is there any implication that the idea of a radio ministry bothered him either. The sole ground for his refusal was, again, that all of his resources were committed to ‘the Shakespeare undertaking’. The Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library was never a sure thing. Andrew Carnegie could build Carnegie Hall and endow the Carnegie Technical Institute with enough left over to build several thousand small public libraries. John D. Rockefeller had enough money to make the University of Chicago a major international institution with enough left over to support research in medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities and international relations. Folger had enough money to build a world-class collection of Shakespeariana and to arrange for the construction of a building in Washington, D.C. to house the library. He drafted his will in 1927, naming his wife Emily as his executor and leaving the bulk of his estate to the Trustees of Amherst College to be administered for the benefit of the Shakespeare Memorial Library. But then the bad thing happened. In October of 1929 the stock market crashed and Folger’s liquid assets were significantly reduced. The collection was still intact, but the amounts remaining in the estate to provide operating funds were insufficient. In spite of the fiscal crisis, The Folger Library was dedicated on 23 April

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1932. The plans were carried out in part through the generosity of Emily Jordan Folger, who used part of her own legacy from her husband to help support the project. Folger’s legacy was just barely enough to get his library built, if you think of a legacy in terms of its cash equivalent. But the Library became a reality because of the larger endowment of Henry Clay Folger’s genius, to use Emerson’s vocabulary. He made his investment not only in books, but also in friendships and it was the real wealth embodied in those commitments that enabled the completion of his Shakespeare undertaking. Walter Benjamin has said ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’.50 There is no doubt that the great American Philanthropists, not excluding Henry Clay Folger Jr., were capable of at least some forms of barbarism themselves. On 30 August 1912, The New York Times reported the following item. Charging conspiracy to destroy the business of the Pierce-Fordyce Oil Association of Texas, the Federal Grand Jury of the Northern District of Texas late to-day returned an indictment against the Standard Oil Company of New York, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, the Magnolia Petroleum Company of Texas, and these individuals: Calvin N. Paine of Titusville, Penn.; John D. Archbold and Henry C. Folger, Jr. of New York; John Sealin of Galveston, A. C. Ebie of Dallas, E. R. Brown of Corsican, Texas, and W. S. Teagle of Plainfield, N. J.51 The specific charges included restraint of trade, unlawful conspiracy and violation of the anti-trust laws. This prosecution began only a few months after the Standard Oil Trust was supposedly dissolved. Destruction and violation are central to the vocabulary of barbarism, though it is a bit hard to imagine Henry Clay Folger attacking his competitors ‘with his brandished steel, which smoked with bloody execution’. But then Folger didn’t have to resort to such vulgarity; the violence, if that’s what it was, would only have been symbolic and metaphorical. Benjamin’s point is not that far from the argument set out by Andrew Carnegie in The Gospel of Wealth. The argument is that a document of civilization – let’s say a First Folio by Shakespeare – is at the same time a document of barbarism. The crucial idea here is contradiction, the two things – civilization and barbarism – just go together, you don’t get the one without the other. Carnegie maintained that the very inequality that was created by his massive accumulation of wealth was actually a good thing, much to be preferred to the condition of ‘universal squalor’. Folger gave

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his own account of this paradox in an essay on The Merchant of Venice, which I will discuss in the next section. For Benjamin, as for Theodor Adorno and more recently W. G. Sebald, the scope of this complicity was vast and profoundly depressing. But the spirit of American philanthropy in the Gilded Age was somehow to make good on the damage caused by exploiting labour and capital. The universities and galleries and libraries established by the redistribution of privately held wealth are motivated by an idea of gift increase, ‘full measure, pressed down, and running over’. These endowments create a gift community in the form of islands entirely surrounded by the exigencies of a market economy. There is no way to resolve the equation; you just have to embrace the contradiction.

The True Text of Shakespeare ‘Shakespeare must be the foundation of every library of English.’52 This statement, which appears in a letter to John D. Rockefeller, written in 1895, articulates Henry Clay Folger’s vocation, his own sense of his true calling. But how did Folger come to discover that Shakespeare was his daimo-n, his destiny if you will, or the deepest expression of his own character? Why is Shakespeare foundational for the English library, rather than Chaucer let’s say, or Milton? Folger did not study Shakespeare at Amherst; nobody did that in 1879 when Folger graduated. Shakespeare did not figure in the university curriculum anywhere and his works were still not considered essential to a proper education. Folger himself credits Ralph Waldo Emerson with first inspiring his interest in Shakespeare, and in fact his remark about the ‘foundation of every library of English’ echoes a passage from Emerson’s lecture known as ‘Remarks at the celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Shakespeare by the Saturday Club at the Revere House, Boston, 1864’: ‘We are all content to let Shakespeare speak for himself. His fame is settled on the foundations of the moral and intellectual world.’53 Emerson was certainly an important influence on Folger’s thinking, and specifically his thinking about Shakespeare. The crucial notion was the idea of a larger humanity somehow represented in and through Shakespeare’s genius. ‘Shakespeare taught us that the little world of the heart is vaster, deeper and richer than the spaces of astronomy.’54 In Representative Men, Emerson wrote that ‘Shakespeare wrote the text of modern life’,55 an idea that I believe Folger must have taken absolutely literally. Emerson then goes on to claim that ‘Shakespeare’s principal merit may be conveyed in saying

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that he of all men best understands the English language, and can say what he will’.56 This would account for the claim that Shakespeare is foundational for the English library. Stanley Cavell, commenting on this passage, suggests that we need to recognize the ‘implication that the rest of us are in various states of ignorance of our language and are unable to say what we will, as if we are all to some extent aphasic’.57 Cavell, not surprisingly, finds in Emerson’s account of this relationship between Shakespeare’s works and the language in which it is composed the potentiality for an emancipation from ‘melancholia, idolatry, entrapment in the views of others, and blindness to the existence of others’.58 Cavell wants us not just to study Shakespeare or to learn how to read his works in their historical context, he wants us to be impressed by Shakespeare. What he means, in the first instance, is that Shakespeare ought to produce a deep effect on the mind or the feelings. Henry Clay Folger Jr. represents an exemplary case of this disposition. Folger was certainly impressed by Shakespeare, and he eventually became a far better Shakespeare scholar than Emerson would ever be. But although Emerson may have been responsible for initially triggering Henry Clay Folger’s lifelong fascination with Shakespeare, it would be a mistake to overlook another constitutive influence that reinforced this initial focus. Emily Clara Jordan, Folger’s wife and his closest companion, provided invaluable scholarly rigour and intellectual support for the execution of their Shakespeare project. Emily Jordan spent her early childhood in Washington, D. C. where her father was a cabinet official in the administrations of Presidents Lincoln and Johnson. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College in 1879, thanks to the financial assistance of an older sister, Mary Jordan, who subsequently had a long career as a professor at Smith College.59 Vassar College is itself a notable instance of American philanthropy. Its founder, Matthew Vassar, made his fortune as the owner of a brewery in Poughkeepsie, New York.60 And so you see, to old V.C. Our love shall never fail. Full well we know that all we owe To Matthew Vassar’s ale. Vassar, who did not think highly of the business of brewing beer, was encouraged by his niece, Lydia Booth, and by Milo Jewett, a local clergyman, to establish a college for young ladies. The college was founded in 1861, with Jewett acting as its first president. It was John H. Raymond, however, who

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led the college from 1865 until 1878, established Vassar’s curriculum and appointed its first professors. Raymond favoured a liberal education for women based on the same classical curriculum that prevailed in men’s colleges. The original curriculum also included the study of scientific principles, mathematics and modern languages. In order to add luster to its faculty, Raymond hired Maria Mitchell, a distinguished astronomer and advocate of women’s rights who was also a distant cousin to Henry Clay Folger. In addition to teaching them astronomy, Mitchell introduced her students to many of the more prominent advocates of rights for women. And she encouraged them to view themselves as independent thinkers with skills and intelligence fully equal to those of men. The original catalogue for Vassar College contains no mention of a course on Shakespeare. Who would have taught it? It does, however, include English composition, Literary History in both English and French, and extensive study of Latin Literature, along with a surprising amount of science. The study of religion is conspicuous by its absence, but then women were not destined for careers in the ministry. Emily Jordan was chosen as president of her class. She excelled in English composition, French and astronomy, in which she obtained the highest possible grade.61 Maria Mitchell would have challenged her not only to make accurate observations with the telescope, but also to develop her own talents and to pursue a life of intellectual independence. Emily Jordan was also strong in botany, chemistry, math and English criticism. Her literary interests were also cultivated through her participation in one of Vassar’s literary societies, which were encouraged by the college as a way for women to learn from each other. She participated in debates, attended dances and took a particular interest in theatrical performances. Emily Jordan was a well-educated, independent woman with strong interests in the study of literature. From 1879 until 1885 she worked as an instructor for the Nassau Institute in Brooklyn, a school for young ladies, where she taught a range of courses in both science and literature. Lily Pratt, who was the sister of Charles Pratt, first introduced her to Folger. Henry was someone who would appreciate Emily’s aspirations and her drive towards self-realization. Lucretia Coffin Mott, Phebe Ann Coffin Hannaford and Maria Mitchell, all women in his own family, were pioneers in their respective fields. And he had been educated with young women at the Adelphi School before attending Amherst. The clincher must have been their mutual interest in Shakespeare. The couple were married on 6 October 1885, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. As a present for his bride, Henry purchased a copy of a recently published photo-facsimile of the First Folio,

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for which he paid the sum of $1.25 in hard cash. They were never to have any children, and building their collection became the sole object of their devotion. It’s not clear whether they were unable to have children or just decided to remain childless. Their private lives were kept private. But as a couple they certainly enjoyed the activity of book collecting and they seem to have been very happy together: Sept. 21, 1919 Sea Moor – Glen Cove From Charles Millard Pratt How time does fly & how many changing conditions face us! I find much comfort in thinking of you & Emily and the steady unchanging philosophy of life which each of you has never varied since I first knew you. Whatever your disappointments in life may have been, the world of humans has found it most difficult to discover them, so sanely and contentedly you have lived. Most of us don’t know how to meet a spell of illness without rebelling but you have learned some how or other to do this patiently and wisely.62 It’s next to impossible to know what Pratt might be referring to as ‘your disappointments in life’ though one might guess that it could be about the absence of children. What he admires about them is the sanity and contentment they exhibit in their relations with each other. But he also takes note of their discretion, they way they keep their own counsel even when they face personal difficulties. In a way the reference to disappointments seems indiscrete, but then Charlie Pratt was Henry’s oldest friend. During the early years of their marriage they worked together on building their collection, though at this stage, before they had means available for significant acquisition, most of the work consisted of studying sales catalogues and carrying out research. In 1894 Emily wrote to Horace Howard Furness, editor of The New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare and also himself a collector of early editions of Shakespeare. Furness was himself a crucially important figure in the evolution of modern professional Shakespeare scholarship. His plan for a New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare developed out of his association with the Philadelphia Shakespeare Society.63 The first volume, an edition of Romeo and Juliet, appeared in 1871. Immediately after its publication, Furness’ father-in-law, Evans Rogers, died, leaving a large estate to Kate Rogers Furness. Furness was able to retire from his law practice and devote his time to Shakespeare scholarship. A portion of the inheritance was used to collect a large library of early Shakespeare editions, which made the task of editing subsequent Variorum

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texts much easier. The collection was eventually donated to the University of Pennsylvania and as The Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library it was dedicated on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death on 23 April 1932, the same day as the official opening of The Folger Library. Emerson, in his lecture of 1864, had said that Shakespeare’s ‘mind has a superiority such that the universities should read lectures on him . . .’64 It was Furness, more than any other single person, who made Emerson’s proposal a reality. He encouraged the academic study of Shakespeare and he was instrumental in establishing a Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Folger certainly admired Furness’ accomplishments as an editor. Furness had preceded Folger as a collector of Shakespeariana and it was Furness who was to achieve recognition as an important scholarly authority in the field. But although Folger’s collection was destined to surpass Furness’, he nonetheless acknowledged Furness’ prior authority. ‘The Keen pleasure which the writer continuously enjoys from his use of your Variorum edition of Shakespeare is his excuse for sending you this note . . .’65 The letter also contains a tactfully worded correction of one of Furness’ assertions as to the source for The Merchant of Venice. Furness’ Variorum edition included textual variants from all of the early editions of Shakespeare’s plays, along with emendations from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts. Gradually he became convinced that although the First Folio had been very carelessly printed, it was nevertheless the one indispensable resource for any modern editor of Shakespeare’s works. The later Folios, basically reprints of the First, introduced new errors without providing any reliable corrections. As for the early Quartos printed during Shakespeare’s lifetime, they were too varied as a group to provide a strongly principled basis to be used as a reliable for textual authority in modern editing. The First Folio was thus privileged if only by default. Emily Folger initially approached Furness with a plan for the study of Shakespeare’s textual history, intended to help her husband with his collection. Furness replied favourably to this request, sending along a list of scholarly works for her to consult. Her official academic supervisor at Vassar, Professor Elmer Wentworth, agreed to accept her work, done primarily under the de facto supervision of Furness, as satisfying the requirements for the MA. Her degree, mostly completed in absentia, was awarded in 1896. Emily Jordan Folger’s thesis was called ‘The True Text of Shakespeare’. Her basic argument is this: Shakespeare’s ‘works’ as most people read them are really the artifact of editors and scholars, whose activity in emending, correcting and altering the early editions takes us farther and farther from the ‘true text’. The task of editors should not be to beautify or to improve

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what Shakespeare wrote, but simply to provide readers with the ‘true text’ of his work. Mrs. Folger believed that the First Folio was the closest of all editions to this ‘true text’, although it too was subject to corruption and therefore required editorial correction by comparison with other early editions. Mrs. Folger had realized, moreover, that the various copies of the First Folio showed important textual variants and she conjectured that the presses would occasionally be stopped to allow printers’ corrections to be made during the run of this edition. It is because of this basic insight, I believe, that the Folgers determined to build their collection around multiple copies of the First Folio. The result of this determination is the collection’s great eccentricity and certainly its greatest achievement from the point of view of scholarly research, namely the amassing of no fewer than 79 copies of the First Folio, including several of the finest individual examples of this volume in the world. Emily Folger’s arguments no longer represent the view taken by contemporary textual scholars, who would be profoundly sceptical of any claim to have identified the ‘true text’ of Shakespeare. The situation for editors is not particularly auspicious. All the early editions, and especially the Quartos, ‘show errors too obvious to have escaped the eye of a proofreading author’.66 This has led to increasing frustration among editors, since any attempt to correct the situation can only lead to what Stanley Cavell refers to as an ‘editorially repossessed’ text for Shakespeare’s works.67 Viewed in practical terms, however, Emily Folger’s arguments are not so bad. The First Folio certainly provides an important textual token for all of Shakespeare’s works, and in fact it is the only early edition for 16 plays, including Macbeth, among others. It may have been naïve to call it ‘the true text of Shakespeare’ but there is no doubt whatsoever that it remains indispensable for textual scholarship, even of the most sceptical kind. There is a certain pathos in the way this resource has been used by contemporary textual scholars to cast doubt on the very existence of anything that might be called ‘Shakespeare’s Works’ and also to question his status as an author. One can only imagine what the Folgers would have made of these projects, though it seems doubtful that they would have been persuaded by some of the more iconoclastic views of Shakespeare’s text. True text or not, the Folger’s large collection of copies of the First Folio have led to some important scholarly discoveries. These have come about partly due to the invention of a technical device by Professor Charlton Hinman for studying variations in the individual imprints. Hinman had worked in Naval Intelligence during the Second World War analysing aerial photographs. His collator used an arrangement of mirrors and lights to

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compare the different impressions, a technique that enabled him to work out a probable order for the printing of the various copies. The device has been important for scholars working on the early history of printing. It has also led to discoveries of a more literary kind. In Act IV of The Tempest, after he has seen Prospero’s masque, Ferdinand exclaims, Let me live here, ever. So rare a wondered father and a wise Makes this place paradise. (Tempest, Act IV, Sc i) There has always been some uncertainty about these lines, since they seem to omit Miranda, Ferdinand’s young wife from the paradise, and to make his father-in-law the sole reason for his visions of bliss. As implausible as this reading seems, it has been the accepted one for many years, and much has been written by way of justification of this oddly patriarchal vision of paradise. In 1978, however, Jeanne Roberts published an article in which she concluded, establishing beyond doubt, that the correct reading of the line is indeed ‘wife’. In two copies of the First Folio held by The Folger Library there are clear examples of ‘wife’; other ‘f’s’ with outlines less clear because of damage to the crossbar appear in three additional copies of the Folio. Roberts concluded that the letter began as an ‘f’ and broke in the process of printing, to appear in subsequent copies as long ‘s’, an obsolete typographical character that is no longer in use, probably because it looks so much like an ‘f’. Roberts’ inference seems the only logical possibility. There is no way that one can imagine a long ‘s’ somehow acquiring the crossbar that belongs to the letter ‘f’. So Ferdinand really did get a wife along with a ‘wondered’ father. In his discussion of Roberts’ discovery Stephen Orgel points out that scholarly research is never quite purely objective and neutral in its concerns; discoveries are always motivated in important ways. ‘We find only what we are looking for or are willing to see. Obviously it is a reading whose time has come’.68 Orgel suggests here that this reading can only ‘become visible’ within a certain intellectual climate or ideological formation and in this case he implies that the recent emergence of feminist criticism is what motivated Jeanne Roberts to make her discovery. Fine and good, except that further research by Peter Blayney on the copies examined by Jeanne Roberts demonstrate that her conclusions were wrong and that the correct reading really should be ‘wise’.69 Blayney, who used an electron microscope to study the evidence, argues that the ‘f’ is not a legitimate press variant and that the ‘damaged crossbar’ discovered by Roberts was probably something

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else. Personally I prefer ‘wife’ on ideological and sentimental grounds, but who am I to argue with Peter Blayney or with his experience as a student of typography? Furthermore, I have to concede that ‘wise’ actually sounds better, a consideration that one can assume had real importance for Shakespeare. Valerie Wayne, reflecting on Blayney’s research, is not convinced the question is settled once and for all even if ‘wise’ is the correct reading in the Folio Text.70 What remains unsettled is whether or not ‘wise’ should count as one of those ‘errors too obvious to have escaped the eye of a proofreading author’ mentioned by G. E. Bentley, assuming anyone still believes in a proofreading author.71 Still, Wayne’s point re-affirms Orgels’s suggestion that physical evidence is just physical evidence and that there is always a role for editorial judgment in such doubtful cases. In any case, credit for setting up the conditions for the possibility of this extremely minute examination of the various copies of the First Folio really belongs to another woman -- and a wife -- who did so much to make this kind of research possible. Emily Jordan Folger believed in the true text of Shakespeare and her work in gathering together an entire extended family of 79 Folios and their sibling texts provided the material basis that made the research of someone like Jeanne Roberts possible. The slow and painstaking task of building the Folger collection was done by Henry and Emily working together as a team. As a young married couple they scarcely had the means to even imagine owning 79 First Folios, but they nevertheless began a collection of rare books and Shakespeariana, beginning with the purchase of a copy of the Fourth Folio of 1685 for the price of $107.50. This was of course a reprint of a reprint of a reprint, with some brand new mistakes and with the text of Pericles and six spurious plays now grouped as Shakespeare’s apocrypha. It was pretty far from the true text, but still something of a coup for the young collectors. Over the next several decades the Shakespeare project occupied considerable time and energy in the couple’s life despite what must have been considerable demands on Folger in his capacity as an executive and eventually as president of Standard Oil. In all they would make a total of 11 bookcollecting trips to Europe, focusing on early editions of Shakespeare’s plays and on texts closely connected to his work, with particular attention to Shakespeare’s source materials. By 1895 Folger, working with his wife, had amassed his own ‘library of Elizabethan literature of several thousand volumes’.72 In the letter of 13 March to John D. Rockefeller, quoted at the beginning of this section, he is mainly concerned not with adding to his own collection, but with

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recommending to Rockefeller the purchase of the entire Halliwell-Phillipps collection of ‘Shakespearean Rarities’. He lists a number of important items in the collection, including early portraits of Shakespeare, documents pertaining to the poet’s life, and ‘authentic personal relics of Shakespeare’, including a number of deeds. There are also approximately one hundred rare books including early editions of the plays. His suggestion is that the entire collection be purchased for the ‘Chicago University’ (sic), an institution that had already received a generous endowment from Rockefeller. Folger points out that the acquisition of such a collection will add greatly to the reputation of the University. He then adds an additional, very businesslike incentive to the proposal. His idea is that the collection be reproduced by photo-lithographic processes and published as ‘The Rockefeller Reprints of Shakespearean Rarities’. There would be a large market for these reprints, and thus ‘a large profit to go towards reducing the first cost’. Folger then tells Rockefeller that if he had the means at hand he would not hesitate, as a business man, to buy the collection himself. The collection was eventually sold to a private collector; some time later it was then subsequently purchased by The Folger Library, where it still resides.73 As Folger’s own resources grew, he began to add increasingly valuable items to his own library. In pursuing the items he wanted, Folger took advantage of two highly effective financial tools. He maintained reserves of cash, which allowed him to offer an attractive price for the items he wanted for his collection. It’s worth pointing out that he never considered borrowing funds to enable him to purchase the Halliwell-Phillipps collection, even though, as he says, he would have expected to profit from the acquisition. It’s hard to imagine Folger ever borrowing money against such an uncertain hope of gain. But when he did have funds at his disposal he used telegraph communication to instruct his agents and to move quickly to close a deal. The firm of Henry Sotheran & Co., Booksellers to the King, were instrumental in many of Folger’s important acquisitions. They assisted him in the negotiations for two of his most notable purchases, the Vincent Folio and the First Quarto of Titus Andronicus, an extremely rare volume that exists in only one copy. Folger was often in a position to make a preemptive bid for these materials. Sotheran and other agents would telegraph information to him when valuable items became available and Folger would cable back with authorization to make an advance cash offer to the seller. These offers were often sufficiently generous so that the seller would be encouraged to avoid the hazards of the auction in favour of a direct sale. Sotheran was instrumental in Folger’s acquisition of the Vincent Folio, a copy of the First Folio that he describes as ‘the most precious book in the

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world’. Folger’s article on this volume, ‘A Unique First Folio’, was published in Outlook, 23 November 1907. The article begins with a reference to the death of Hamnet Shakespeare in 1596, an event that ‘rudely checked the bard’s supreme ambition – to found a line of gentlefolk’. Folger then presents a detailed narrative of Shakespeare’s application to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms. An early application in 1595 is not confirmed. Three years later he applies a second time. ‘Shakespeare is fast becoming a man of means, with many friends, one of whom, the Earl of Essex, is chief of the Heralds’ College, and another, the scholarly Camden.’74 Folger was himself ‘fast becoming a man of means, with many friends’, and his sympathies are entirely on the side of Shakespeare’s claim. The motto for the proposed coat of arms was to be ‘ “Non sanz droict” which all the world most willing now grants’. Shakespeare’s application was supported by Camden but opposed by Ralphe Brooke whom Folger describes as a low-life and a scoundrel. Brooke attacked Camden’s scholarship in a pamphlet published in 1596 called ‘A Discoverie of Certaine Errours in . . . Britannia’. He also attacked William Jaggard, Camden’s publisher and the eventual publisher of the First Folio. Brooke’s mischief was eventually challenged by the Windsor Herald, Augustine Vincent, who published his defence of Camden in 1619. The publisher, again, was William Jaggard. Camden was vindicated, and as a consequence his earlier approval of Shakespeare’s application for a coat of arms was confirmed. In appreciation for Vincent’s effort, Jaggard presented him with a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, bound in rich full calf, and stamping on its cover the Herald’s arms – a bear, holding in his left paw a banner, and in his right a squire’s helmet, surmounted with a crest of a bear’s head, standing on a scroll with the motto Vincenti Augusta. The volume was eventually rediscovered in 1891 by Mr. Railton, a member of the Sotheran firm. Mr Railton had been sent, in the spring of 1891, to Sudbrooke Holme, in Lincoln, to weed out the worthless items and prepare a catalogue of the others in the library of Coningsby C. Sibthorp, of Carwick Hall. To use his own words, ‘having finished work in the library, I was taken to the coachhouse, in which was a large case of books. On the top of the case, outside, were stacked a great number of folios, covered with dust. These were passed to me by an assistant who lived on the estate. On throwing down a volume which was tied tightly around with cord, he remarked, “That is no

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good, sir, it is only old poetry.” I unloosened the sting, opened the book, and, at a glance saw what a treasure was found!’75 What Railton had found was an uncut copy of the First Folio, in its original binding, with the inscription from Jaggard to Augustine Vincent. After it had been studied at the British Museum, the Sotheran firm negotiated the purchase for Folger. The whole affair sounds like part of a novel by A. S. Byatt or Colm Tobin or even Henry James, another contemporary of Folger’s, but of course it is something that really did happen. It’s an interesting story and Folger tells it well. His scholarship is impressive as is his obvious admiration for Shakespeare and all of his associates. The Vincent Folio was one of the Folgers’ more important acquisitions but it was the purchase of the unique copy of the first Quarto of Titus Andronicus that attracted the most public attention. Although there are records to suggest that such a volume had been printed, the actual existence of any surviving copy was in doubt until January of 1905. The discovery of a copy in Sweden was first reported on 11 January. Folger immediately cabled Sotheran, instructing them to send an agent to Sweden to negotiate the purchase. Sotheran cabled Folger to ask how much he would be willing to pay, and he named a figure of £2,000, roughly $10,000 at the existing exchange rates. He evidently would have offered more, but felt this was the highest he would be able to go. Sotheran responded with instructions that the cash would be required immediately, expressing some doubt that the bid would be enough. The next day the deal went down, and Folger cabled his £2,000. It is pretty clear that the seller, a postal clerk, might have gotten more for the book, but the swift and decisive actions by Sotheran and Folger were an effective recipe for success in this transaction. The purchase of Titus Andronicus was much more highly publicized than most of Folger’s other acquisitions. There is a story that Rockefeller got wind of the transaction, and that he teased Folger during a round of golf for spending $10,000.00 for just one book. Folger, who had already been rebuffed by Rockefeller about the importance of the Halliwell-Phillipps collection, evidently realized that he would not be able to explain his obsession with Shakespeare to John D. But the importance of the Titus Quarto was certainly recognized by scholars, including Folger’s nephew, Professor Samuel Burdett Hemingway of Yale: Dear Uncle Henry, I am to do Titus Andronicus in the Yale Shakespeare Series – sometime – and I can’t find any collation of your first Quarto – Pollard ‘conjectures’ about stage directions in the First Quarto, but that is all. If it has been

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done, can you tell me where to find it; and if it hasn’t, would you be willing to let us do it, when where and how as you elect?’76 Folger’s reply is, as always, a polite but firm refusal: My Dear Sam: Replying to your letter of the 22nd. I do not recall that there has been any collation of the ‘Titus Andronicus’, 1594. There are five or six books in our Shakespeare collection which are pre-eminent, and which I have great hopes of myself editing and distributing as soon as we can find a permanent home for the library. The ‘Titus’ should be the first item. I have therefore hesitated to have it described, even partially, by someone else, although have been urged many times to permit this. I think we had better stand to our plan, at least for the present. But I am glad to assure you that if anybody is to have access to the volume, you will be the first.77 Folger probably could not have agreed to Hemingway’s request even if he had wanted to, since the volume was stored somewhere in a warehouse, along with all the other rare books in what was now a very large collection. The Quarto attracted a considerable amount of attention from other interested parties. Some time in the autumn of 1923 a certain Mr. C. R. Haines wrote to Folger asking for information about the volume, and requesting that he be allowed to inspect it. Folger’s reply is courteous, but finally unhelpful: Dear Sir: Replying to your valued favor of December 3rd. I am sorry to have to report that as my collecting of Shakespeariana grew I found it necessary, as fast as the material reached me, to pack it up in cases and put it in warehouses for safety and storage, as I have no other place suitable for it. I do not recall the letter purchased from R H. Gray, to which you refer, but it undoubtedly is placed away with other material, and therefore inaccessible. The Titus Andronicus did not have, as I recall it, any alterations or marking. I have never been able to prepare a catalogue of my Shakespeariana, but hope to have this done in the near future, and will take great pleasure in sending you a copy when printed. Yours very truly, Henry C. Folger, Jr.78

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It’s reasonable to assume that people were not very happy with this kind of response to their requests for access to materials with significant intellectual importance. No doubt people complained about this, but their frustration did not attract much public attention. And if they wrote to Folger to express their dissatisfaction he evidently did not keep the letters. Georgianna Ziegler explains the situation by pointing out that for all intents and purposes access to volumes in the collection was impossible: The problem, of course, was that Mr. Folger needed to engage in business to raise the money to continue his collecting and his and Emily’s idea of building a major research library, rather than a private collection such as Furness’s. When other scholars applied to Mr. Folger for information on some of his books, he had to tell them that the books were mostly stored in packing crates around the country and would not really be accessible until the library was built.79 Folger’s plans for the establishment of a research library had not yet been made public, so it would not have been unreasonable for scholars and other interested parties to think the worst. But the idea that he was accumulating these assets as a form of capital investment was in fact unfair, as was the suggestion that he wasn’t interested in what was actually inside the books he so carefully stored in those crates. Folger did eventually acquire a reputation for eccentricity as the result of his mania for accumulating multiple copies of the First Folio. While most serious book collectors try to acquire one example of a title that fits into the basic framework of their personal library, Folger pursued so many copies of the Folio that Horace Howard Furness referred to him as ‘Forty Folio Folger’.80 In 1914 at the Amherst Commencement where both Folger and William Howard Taft received honorary degrees, he told the former President that his total had reached 44. Taft’s response was ‘Then I must call you Forty-Four Folio Folger’. But not everyone took kindly to this apparently inexplicable behaviour on Folger’s part. Earlier he had become involved in something of a scandal involving his attempt to acquire a copy of the Folio that had originally been purchased by the Bodleian Library directly from the press of William and Isaac Jaggard. The story of the Bodleian copy of the First Folio is told in considerable detail and with great élan by Robert M. Smith; the following is a condensed version of his account.81 The Bodleian copy was sold to an Oxford bookseller in 1664, but it was then rediscovered in the family library of Mr. W. G. Turbutt of Derbyshire. Mr. Turbutt, himself an Oxford man, immediately took the

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volume to E. W. B. Nicholson, the Bodley’s Librarian, suggesting that it should be returned to the Bodleian if an agreement could be reached on an appropriate selling price. When news of Turbutt’s discovery was first made public in The Athenaeum, a widely read literary and scientific publication, Henry Clay Folger cabled his London representative to open negotiations with the Bodleian with a view to purchasing the volume for his own collection. When he learned that the Bodleian was somewhat hesitant to make the acquisition for themselves, he cabled an offer directly to Mr. Turbutt for £3,000.00, or roughly $15,000.00 U.S. This was an unprecedented sum for any kind of rare book in 1906, and Turbutt, though he really wanted Oxford to have the first option, clearly understood that he was being offered serious money. Folger gave him a month to make his decision. A few days later he learned that the Bodleian, though it was not in a position to match Folger’s offer, was trying to raise the money to purchase the volume for its own collection. E. W. B. Nicholson published an appeal for funds in The Times of London: Unless it can be recovered there will be an indelible blot on our scutcheon . . . That after two and a half centuries we should have the extraordinary chance of recovering this volume, and should lose it because a single American can spare more money than all Oxford’s sons or friends who have been helping us, is a bitter prospect. It is the more bitter because the abnormal value put on this copy by our competitor rests on knowledge ultimately derived from our own staff and our own registers. But from so cruel a jibe of fortune this appeal may perhaps yet save us.82 Folger had already acquired a large number of First Folios, mostly from private libraries in England, but the Bodleian copy created an international incident. Edward Gosse, writing in The Times, was outraged by the sheer size of the anonymous millionaire’s offer. ‘Does he offer this prodigious sum that he may add a treasure to his personal collection, or that he may sell again at a profit?’ And in their column ‘Topics of the Week’ The New York Times reported that the librarian of the Bodleian had been forced to match this ‘prodigious offer’ made by a ‘reprehensible American millionaire’.83 Evidently it was the Bodleian librarian who thought this, not The New York Times columnist, who simply reported on British reaction. Well, it was never in doubt. Within a month the £3,000.00 had been raised, thanks in part to the efforts of two Canadians then resident in London, the distinguished physician Sir William Osler and Donald Smith, First Baron Strathcona. Osler, who was praised by Nicholson for his ‘enthusiastic efforts’, was himself a book collector, whose library of early

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medical treatises is now housed at McGill University. Strathcona contributed £500, to put the campaign over the top, though he had a large enough fortune to outbid Folger all on his own if he had been so inclined. Folger’s agents reported back that ‘with Lord Strathcona in reserve the Bodleian was bound to win’. His own response to his defeat was that ‘we never really had any chance, even at the highest possible price, owing to its being considered a national matter’. British national pride was certainly an issue in this affair, but it’s a little bit hard to see exactly what was so ‘reprehensible’ about Folger’s conduct. In the game of book collecting, objects are bought and sold, usually, but not always, going to the highest bidder. Some items are sold in public auction, but there is no rule in force that would prevent a strictly private sale. Folger did not get the Turbutt Folio, but he could console himself with the Vincent Folio, arguably a finer volume that its owner was willing to sell with no thought of keeping it in English hands. The Bodleian raised the money it needed to keep its own copy. Arguably Turbutt himself was the biggest winner. He held out long enough to allow his university to purchase a book he had no interest in keeping and he was the recipient of a ‘prodigious sum’ of money. The identity of the ‘reprehensible millionaire’ was not made public in the Turbutt Folio affair, since Folger was always careful to insist on confidentiality in his book collecting ventures. Edward Gosse’s suspicion that the anonymous American millionaire was merely speculating in rare books with the idea of reselling at a profit was simply untrue. The suggestion that he only wanted to ‘add a treasure to his personal collection’ was also more than a bit unfair. Folger was, in fact, genuinely interested in Shakespeare’s works, and he was well informed as to their larger significance. On 31 May 1926 Samuel Parkes Cadman, the pastor of the Central Congregational Church in Brooklyn, sent a letter to Folger, who was one of his parishioners. Cadman wrote to Folger almost on a daily basis, and Folger was generally pretty courteous in his replies. Cadman’s note for May 26 reads as follows: My Dear Henry, Do you think Shakespeare was an agnostic? I have been asked many questions about his religious views. I should be very grateful for your judgement. Folger replied on June 7: Answering your question, Do I think Shakespeare was an agnostic?, I have never seen anything in print claiming that for him, although the experts in every line of life and thought insist that he belonged to their fraternity.

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. . . I am glad you have asked me the question, as it has given me a chance to glance through my catalogue to see what we have on the subject. What follows is a bibliography consisting of well over thirty books. Cadman wrote back on June 10: Thank you so much for this splendid answer to my question, and one which I know is authoritative. Folger’s note is hardly any kind of an answer at all, let alone an authoritative one. Was Shakespeare an agnostic? ‘There have been books written to prove that he was a Freemason, and the last that I have seen is one by a barber proving Shakespeare was an expert in the sartorial art.’84 Basically I think Folger got it right. Shakespeare is a barber when on land and a sailor when at sea, an agnostic who is also adept at the sartorial art. Emerson’s way of putting this was to commend Shakespeare for his ‘innocency’. What a great heart of equity is he! How good and sound and inviolable his innocency, that is never to seek, and never wrong, but speaks the pure heart of humanity on each occasion. He dwarfs all writers without a solitary exception. No egotism.85 Keats referred to this quality in Shakespeare’s writing as ‘negative capability’.86 The comment about the barber and his sartorial art is pretty great, although he probably should have said ‘tonsorial art’. Folger was a busy man and part of what he was saying to Cadman suggests that he didn’t have time for dumb questions. But the more important point here is that even dumb questions, if that was what this was, have answers and the way to find things out is to see what other people have to say, in other words, to read and do research. His answer to Cadman’s inquiry was authoritative only in the sense that it makes reference to a large list of authors. The titles on Folger’s list include the following: J. Bell, Biblical and Shakespeare Characters Compared (1894), C. Ellis, The Christ in Shakespeare? (1897), H. S. Bowden , Religion of Shakespeare (1899), J. M Robertson, Religion of Shakespeare (1887), K. Rolfe, Real Religion of Shakespeare (1872). Most of these and similar works were written by clergymen who drew on Shakespeare’s stories to help illustrate their sermons. The list also includes Elizabeth Griffith’s The Morality of Shakespeare Drama (sic) 1775 and H. F. Goodson, Shakespeare’s

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Religious and Moral Sentiments (1874). There is no mention of the work of A. C. Bradley, but Folger does include an important book by Richard Moulton, The Moral System of Shakespeare (1903). Moulton was a professor of literature and also a biblical scholar whose criticism is clearly aligned with the tradition represented by Bradley. Shakespeare’s works represent the ‘experimental side to the philosophy of human life . . . a vast body of creative observations’.87 What’s most impressive about Richard Moulton’s discussion of Shakespeare’s works is the panoramic scope of his concerns. His idea was to situate literary criticism within the framework of scientific inquiry, including not only physical science, but also philosophy, ethics and psychology. To get some idea of what Henry Clay Folger Jr. thought about all this, it is very helpful to look at his brief, unpublished essay on The Merchant of Venice.88 The essay was submitted to both The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers, two general interest publications with a wide readership. Folger received polite rejections from both magazines and then evidently gave up on having his own ideas about Shakespeare published. An essay on Shakespeare by the Chairman of the Board of a major American corporation might have had its own intrinsic interest, but evidently the editors didn’t think so. But the essay gives some idea of Folger’s answer to the kind of question Samuel Parkes Cadman asked and it also provides a sense of his voice as a writer. Folger’s essay is a typescript of seven pages, written on sheets of personal stationery roughly 9’ x 5’. The title is ‘Shylock’s Bond from the Merchant’s Standpoint’. This is apparently intended to refer directly to the character of Antonio, but there is also a sense here that the title is self-reflexive. The ‘Merchant’s Standpoint’ can also refer to Folger’s own point of view as a businessman. What interests Folger through the essay is not the precise temper of Antonio’s friendship with Bassanio, or his Christian faith, or his melancholia but rather the deplorable lack of business acumen. Antonio’s sadness, an enigma to himself, is clearly to us but the drawning (sic) consciousness of incompetence. That he blundered even in ordinary affairs he shows by advising Bassanio to part with his wife’s ring – sure proof that Antonio is a bachelor. In fact, what a common place husband he would have made! Shakespeare was too sensitive to inflict him on any woman. Then his wealth must have been an inheritance, – he never acquired it himself. Indeed, we fear he but holds it now in pawn for the next encounter with Shylock or some other trader equally shrewd. Antonio had best look to all his bonds.

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As we know from his correspondence and from other sources, Folger was extremely prudent about his own money and even more careful as the fiduciary of Standard Oil’s shareholders. He understood risk and he understood profit. Even more striking here are the comments about Antonio as a ‘common place’ husband. The blunder of ‘advising Bassanio to part with his wife’s ring’ demonstrates Antonio’s failure to grasp the nature of promises, the meaning of intimacy, and finally the larger significance of gift increase, supposedly so important in the context of Christian belief and practice. It’s clear that Folger has no sympathy for Antonio, who on this account has no one to blame but himself for his perilous situation. He has no predisposition to identify with Antonio as a Christian and indeed he views the Christians in the play as uniformly profligate. Lorenzo stole the Jew’s daughter. The daughter filched her father’s treasures. This precious pair of prodigals will soon need to ‘guild’ themselves anew. And the ease with which Bassanio presses upon the Doctor the three thousand ducats he never owned, should serve as a hint of his limitless capacity at disabling estates. In fact the crowd of spenders, in contrast with Shylock the sole producer, almost elbow one another off the stage – Launcelot, the ‘huge feeder’ who ‘sleeps by day / More than the wilde-cat’; Bassanio, wasting ‘his borrowed purse’; Gratiano, whose ‘reasons are two grains of wheate hid in two bushels of chaffe, dependent for even his marital future upon his companion’s luck’, wild Lorenzo, squandering the Jew’s hoard; and his wicked Jessica, thoughtlessly valuing her mother’s betrothal ring at the price of a monkey. We stand aghast at the score heaped up for Portia through the mismanagement of the house in her brief absence! And not only prodigal are all the Christians, but ill-bred – barring, perhaps, pedantic Portia. Sir Henry Irving was more than half right in calling Shylock ‘the only gentleman of the play’. The only character Folger admires is Shylock, the sole producer and the only gentleman of the play. This identification is not, however, based on some sense of justice for the historical persecution of the Jews. Shylock doesn’t deserve our sympathy because he is the victim of intolerance, but rather because he is the only figure in the play who takes responsibility for his actions and for his character.

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The most original insight in Folger’s discussion is his assessment of the terms of Antonio’s bond with Shylock. It is next to impossible to find any commentator willing to concede any legitimacy to Shylock’s insistence on the pound of flesh as Antonio’s collateral for the loan of 3,000 ducats. But Folger isn’t so sure the terms would have been so incomprehensible to Shakespeare’s audience. As to the validity of the obligation we may in these times have our doubts, but not so in the days of refined cruelty familiar to Shakespeare. Then felonies were punished by branding the hand that stole and ears were shorn to discourage eavesdropping where royalty conferred. Antonio is given every chance by both Duke and Doctor to defend his case, but he never once hints that the bond is other than valid, or that, if the Jew will not accept a substitute, the penalty must be paid. It is Antonio himself who says: ‘The Duke cannot deny the course of law’. Folger was himself trained in the law, and he certainly understood litigation even though he never practiced as an attorney. He was also a historical scholar, as we know from his essay on the Vincent Folio, which includes an identical reference to the barbarism and cruelty of early modern society. But his central point is that Antonio does not challenge the legality of the agreement he has made. The idea here is that moral agents have to accept responsibility for all their decisions, the unwise and unlucky ones as well as those that turn out for the best. ‘Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.’ In the Sermon on the Mount, Christians are enjoined to pray for forgiveness, but this is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Divine mercy is shown to those who are themselves merciful. This has such an obvious application to Shylock that it’s easy to miss its applicability to the Christians in the play who confiscate his wealth and impose forced conversion upon him, two characteristic penalties exacted by the Inquisition. Folger doesn’t see it in quite that way, but he quietly rejects the Christian triumphalism that has been characteristic of so many readings of this difficult play. Shylock, crushed by the law that should have supported him, was certainly equal to the task of cutting the pound of flesh, paying the penalty, and making the play a Hebrew tragedy. But Shakespeare had fallen in love with his Portia, and the vision of her troubled brow and brimming eyes, decide the fate of the play. It ends a Christian comedy.

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What Folger suggests here is that Shylock displays greater moral courage than Shakespeare in determining the outcome of the story. His commitment to the principles of bond and covenant lead inexorably to disaster, but he refuses to cop out. The powerfully latent ‘Hebrew Tragedy’, if it were fully enacted, would be unbearable, but it is the more powerful story and it continues to overwhelm the contrived artifice of ‘a Christian comedy’. By ‘falling in love with Portia’ Shakespeare has taken the easy way out. It would be a mistake to underestimate the intellectual sophistication of this modest essay. Folger does not read the play with any predisposition to approve of the Christian characters just because he is ‘on their side’. He finds them ‘ill-bred’, extravagant and dishonest. He respects Shylock for his integrity, but not because he thinks of him as the victim of persecution. And he understands the larger ethical principles at play in the opposition of Jew and Christian. Folger appreciates the notion of covenant – the Hebrew word is ‘b’rit ’– that governs Shylock’s actions. A covenant presupposes agents capable of entering into agreements with each other and respecting both the terms and the persons so implicated. This clearly appeals to Folger, who is in some sense more ‘Jewish’ than he is ‘Christian’ in his discussion of the play. But he also appreciates the idea of gift increase, ‘full measure, pressed down, and running over’, that defines the Christian disposition according to scripture. But this does not mean, for Folger, that wealth can be squandered and promises broken. Folger doesn’t see Christians, he just sees a ‘crowd of spenders’. Antonio and his cronies are Christians in name only. It’s not easy to say if Folger was a Christian himself or a ‘transcendental atheist’. But it is clear from this essay that his thinking is an exemplary instance of self-reliance.

A Gentleman’s Private Library Libraries are known to have existed in ancient India and throughout Mesopotamia, though none of the great institutions of antiquity have survived to the present time. The Great Library at Alexandria was a systematic collection of books assembled from all over the world to enable scholars to understand the many different societies ruled by the Ptolemys of Ancient Egypt. ‘Biblioteke’, the ancient Greek word for library, primarily refers to a collection of books. But a library is also a building where books are housed, and a system for the organization of knowledge. Additionally, a library has to provide access to books and a means for their circulation. This function presupposes a network of scholars and archivists; it also

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pre-supposes a system of patronage to provide the resources for building a collection of books. A library, then, is necessarily part of a structure of privilege and power, a way to sustain monopolies of knowledge. Paradoxically, however, libraries are also institutions based on the principle of gift increase. And because the library provides random access to the sources of knowledge it contains, it provides conditions for the possibility of new discoveries. The British Library was a great monument to British imperial power in the nineteenth century, but Karl Marx famously wrote Das Kapital at a desk in its reading room. New types of library organization developed in England and in North America in the eighteenth century in connection with the historical emergence of new modes of social consciousness and new forms of economic organization.89 In America libraries were created as institutions to promote mass literacy and popular education. An Anglican clergyman, Thomas Bray, proposed a scheme for establishing a library in every parish in England and America to help in the promotion of ‘Christian knowledge’.90 In 1731, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Clay Folger’s distant cousin, took an active role in the foundation of the Library Company of Philadelphia, a non-profit research institution that is still in existence. Borrowing privileges were free, but members were required to pay a subscription in order to provide resources for book purchases. Franklin convinced some of his close associates that they should each contribute funds to purchase books that none of them would be able to afford individually. The shareholders agreed to provide substantial initial contribution to be supplemented by an annual membership fee. The plan was a hybrid of venture capitalism and intellectual socialism, but the point of making the investment was to provide a more reliable basis of knowledge for the various forms of public deliberation in which the members intended to engage. American democracy had not yet come into existence at the time the Library Company was created, but the idea of informed public discussion was already a well understood social practice. For what it’s worth, very similar motives led to the acquisition of materials that would later become the Furness Memorial Shakespeare Library. By 1920, Henry Clay Folger and Emily Jordan Folger had a significant biblioteke, a large collection of books, mostly early editions of Shakespeare’s works along with other Shakespeariana. All the other features of a library were, however, conspicuously lacking. As the books were acquired they were stored in crates in a New York warehouse, where even the Folgers did not have access to them. Folger’s correspondence contains many inquiries and requests for permission to examine the various editions, all of which he

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courteously rejected. At times jokes would be made about ‘Forty Folio Folger’ and he was criticized for selfishly hoarding valuable scholarly resources. The complaint was that the books were not available to scholars, and even the Folgers themselves showed no interest in studying or enjoying them. But this apparently Scrooge-like behaviour was deceptive. Folger’s concern with Shakespeare was motivated by real scholarly interests, not just by a desire to accumulate a large collection. And he did not view his books as a lucrative investment to be held for later resale. As his collection increased in size and importance, Folger began to shift his activity towards the larger purpose of transforming his biblioteke into a library that would be established as a public trust. There is an interesting irony in all this, since Folger had been at one time indicted for conspiracy to act in restraint of trade, and he was of course an active opponent of anti-trust legislation. Nevertheless, he persisted in the belief that there were forms of consolidation and integration that would enable institutions – like Standard Oil or the telephone company – to operate in the public interest with great efficiency. A trust could even be a way to expand the scope and power of American democracy. The primary motive driving Folger’s pursuit of so many copies of the First Folio and other rare books was, in my view, an altogether sincere admiration for Shakespeare’s works. The Folgers also appreciated rare books for their intrinsic interest as aesthetic objects, even though they didn’t get to spend much time enjoying these unique possessions. But there is another way to look at what the collection actually accomplished in historical terms. By acquiring these materials, Folger helped to make America a leading centre of cultural authority. Many copies of the early editions were held in private collections, mostly on the estates of wealthy British families. The books were not always appreciated or properly cared for, and it was often difficult for scholars to find a convenient way to study them. American scholars in particular would have to bear the considerable expense of a transatlantic crossing, and then would have to depend on the generosity of individual private owners for the privilege of studying the early texts. In many cases, moreover, the actual existence of a particular volume only became known when a private collection was sold and book dealers published their catalogues with the hope of re-selling various items to other private collectors. What Folger accomplished by pursuing his own private interest in Shakespeare was a concentration and rationalization of resources that is in general characteristic of all capitalist enterprise. At the same time it made possible a democratization of privately held intellectual and cultural value by ‘liberating’ rare books from the anarchy of the old

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proprietary holdings. But of course the ‘liberation’ of rare books for the purpose of a more democratic circulation of cultural resources would not have been the most obvious way to describe Folger’s intentions. With a large collection of rare books packed away in a warehouse, his project looked more like something carried out by John D. Rockefeller when he bought up all the small oil companies that hoped to compete for his business. The Folger Library was never conceived as a ‘people’s university’ along the lines suggested in the Carnegie Foundation projects. In some ways it has more in common with the Royal Library of Alexandria, collecting materials based on their antiquity rather than on their intellectual currency, and restricting access to scholars with the proper sort of qualifications. The social transformation of scholarship implied in the creation of The Folger Library is only a democratization relative to the situation that had existed previously. It is true that once the collection was set up as a proper library, a scholar would no longer be obligated to the noblesse oblige of owners of ‘great houses’. Status and social connections became less important than professional qualifications in achieving access to the material. But Folger’s plan for his library was rather different from the ideas of Andrew Carnegie. The collection was not envisioned as a resource for mass education along the lines of the local public library. It would instead be a private research institution that would reflect the convergent interests of wealthy private collectors and professional scholars. What distinguishes The Folger Library from sister institutions such as the Huntington Library and the Newberry Library is the intellectual coherence of its overall plan. Henry Huntington was an astute bibliophile, but he had no appreciation for the scholars who might be interested in actually reading his books. Scholars, he once remarked, were people who were easily satisfied with a ‘flood of cheap books’. Henry Folger, by contrast, was himself an accomplished scholar whose interest in collecting books had a rigorous and highly specialized focus. The Huntington Library is certainly a valuable collection, though its holdings are in some ways rather hit-andmiss, with enormous strengths in some areas and significant gaps in others. Libraries are inextricably tied to the formation of historical consciousness; each is the condition for the possibility of the other. The Folger Library was initially conceived as a comprehensive archive of resources for textual scholarship. But Folger also appreciated the larger importance of studying Shakespeare in its historical context. The collection of Shakespeariana assembled by Henry Clay and Emily Jordan Folger was without doubt a significant accumulation of intellectual and cultural wealth. The Folgers’ collection of early editions of the plays, especially the numerous copies

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of the First Folio, guaranteed that it would become a major centre for specialized Shakespeare study. As the foundational logic of the plan has been developed over time, moreover, the library has become the leading institution for the study of early modern society and culture. In his will, Henry Clay Folger makes provision for specific bequests to members of his extended family, but the remainder of his estate is set up as a trust for the purpose of establishing and maintaining The Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library. Emily Jordan Folger is named as executor. The Trustees of Amherst College were appointed as trustees of the new foundation and this arrangement persists to this day. At the time the will was written the initial stages of the actual project were already under way. The execution of this phase of the plan was pursued by Folger with the same single-minded efficiency that characterized his acquisition of rare books. After considering a number of alternatives, Folger had decided that he wanted his library situated in an American city where it could be available for the cultural and spiritual enrichment of the American people. The location Folger had in mind was a parcel of land on East Capitol Street in Washington, D. C., close to the Capitol Building and the Library of Congress and across the street from the Supreme Court. Folger began buying up individual properties along the street as early as 1919, working through agents and surrogates in order to avoid publicity. The strategy was adopted in order to keep the prices low, and by the time the will was drafted Folger owned all of the properties along East Capitol Street, known as Grant Row, the present location of the Library. At this point, a serious obstacle appeared. Towards the end of 1927 the Library Committee of the House of Representatives announced plans to acquire certain parcels of land for the purpose of expanding the Library of Congress. These new buildings were to occupy the land intended as the site of the Shakespeare Library. On 19 January 1928, Folger wrote to Dr. Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress, outlining his own plans. Recently there was a brief mention in the Washington Post of a movement for Congress to make it possible for the Library to secure the two squares directly to the East across 2nd Street. I would like to now confide to you that after working on it for some eight or nine years I have acquired the Grant Row property on East Capitol Street, which, you will recall, is directly East of the Library, owning the entire front on East Capitol Street between 2nd and 3rd Streets, going back to the alleyway in the middle of that square. Upon this I had hoped to build a structure which would

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harmonize with the Library and would be the home of my collection of Shakespeariana at least for some time in the future. This newspaper mention raises in my mind the question as to whether it would be safe to do this. I know I can tell you in confidence, which I am sure you will not misunderstand nor mis-use, that I have been able to collect a library of Shakesperiana (sic) finer than anything that has ever been acquired. This is better known in England than here, and considerable pressure has been put upon me at different times to give it a permanent home at Stratford-on-Avon, in England. But my ambition has been to help make the United States a center for literary study and progress.91 Folger was still actively pursuing rare books, a field where his interest was by now well known. But as he continually pointed out in his correspondence, he did not have unlimited resources, so that spending a lot of money on real estate would limit his ability to acquire new items for his collection. The Library of Congress, on the other hand, was a government institution that would have been able to acquire the land at its own price through a simple act of Congress. It was therefore imperative that Folger act quickly and decisively. Putnam was unaware of any plans that Henry Clay Folger may have had for the location of the library, but he certainly understood the significance of the collection itself. He dropped everything on receiving the letter of 19 January, which he characterized in a telegram (today’s equivalent would be an e-mail) to Folger as having ‘extraordinary interest and supreme importance’. In a follow-up to this telegram Putnam elaborated his response as follows: Your letter of yesterday opens a prospect more thrilling (I am frank to say) not merely for the National Capital, but for the cultural interests of this country, than anything that has happened for Washington since the establishment of the Freer Gallery. And any governmental project involving the two squares to the rear of the Library would assuredly be subordinated to yours (for the utilization of the northern strip which you control). With your intention made definite, the governmental undertaking (as respects the remainder of the area) would then become complementary and auxiliary to yours. Indeed, were your structure in existence, the government should acquire the remainder of the area (to Pennsylvania Avenue) in order to assure it a dignified background.92

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The alacrity of Putnam’s response and the absolute sense of conviction that the Folger collection is in the national interest led him to ask if Folger would permit him to discuss the project with Congressman Robert Luce of Massachusetts, who was then chairman of the House Committee on the Library. Robert Luce was born in Auburn, Maine, in 1862. He was educated in the public schools in Maine and eventually graduated from Harvard in 1882. He served in Congress from 1919 until 1940. Luce was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution; he would later introduce a bill mandating the U. S. Commission of Fine Arts to review architectural plans for building in the area of the National Capitol. His direct involvement with the plans for The Folger Library would have been valuable experience for the drafting of this legislation. The bill for the acquisition of properties along east of 2nd Street was amended, leaving the Grant Row properties in Folger’s possession, and assigning the remaining land for annexes to the Library of Congress. In a letter to Folger of 19 April 1928, Luce reported that he anticipated no opposition from any of his colleagues, and in due course the amended bill was passed. Luce’s letter confirms the opinion expressed by Putnam of the cultural importance of The Folger Library for the nation: You may be glad to know that the announcement of your project has been received here with the heartiest expressions of gratification. Congress is particularly proud and jealous of its library and in all matters either directly or indirectly relating thereto shows a sympathy both admirable and surprising. Such a structure as you contemplate and such a gift to the scholarship of the nation make all of us who have any share in their acknowledgment grateful for the opportunity. Furthermore, we are particularly pleased because your project promises still further adornment of the surroundings of the Capitol and betokens impetus to the progress towards creating here what in time will be the most beautiful Capital [sic] in the world.93 The Folger building, which is situated in close proximity to the Supreme Court and to the Library of Congress, is certainly very much in keeping with the architectural dignity of its surroundings. Folger himself had initially thought of building something in a Tudor Revival style, which would express the library’s central focus on Elizabethan literature and culture. He was, however, talked out of this idea by his architect, Paul Philippe Cret, who persuaded him that a Greek Revival structure would be more suitable.

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The outcome of the Grant Row affair suggests something about the scope of Folger’s political influence. The Amherst connection was certainly important, since at the time it would have included Harlan Fiske Stone, a Supreme Court Justice, and Calvin Coolidge, who was nearing the end of his second term as president of the America. His connections with John D. Rockefeller and his standing as Chairman of the Board of Standard Oil were also well known. But to explain the location of The Folger only in terms of its founders’ network of powerful associations would be much too cynical. Some credit has to be given to the strategic intelligence demonstrated in Folger’s references to other possible sites for the library, ‘where he would receive a warm welcome’. But credit must be given to Herbert Putnam and to Robert Luce for recognizing the value of Folger’s library project as an addition to the resources of the National Capitol. It is hard to imagine a similar response to a project devoted to Shakespeare and Elizabethan literature in today’s overwrought political environment. In strictly geographical terms, The Folger Library is very close to the centre of political power in America, that is, if you think the Federal Government is really the centre of political power. If you look at a street map of Washington, D. C., you can see The Folger Library adjoins the Library of Congress to the south, and is diagonally across from the Supreme Court to the north. The Capitol Building is just a few blocks to the west. The geographical symbolism of the Folger’s position is more fully elaborated in a speech given by William Slade, the interim director of the library, in a speech he gave at Folger’s funeral. Slade begins with a quotation from Ashley Thorndike’s lecture on Shakespeare in America, delivered as the Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy 1927. Thorndike, a Professor of English at Columbia University, was the author of several books on Elizabethan literature, including Shakespeare’s Theater (1916). His sense of Shakespeare’s place in America is summarized in the observation that ‘Washington, Lincoln, Shakespeare . . . are the three whom Americans universally worship’.94 Slade then goes on to explain exactly how this trinity is positioned physically and spiritually in America: a line drawn from the site of the Folger Shakespeare Memorial through the Capitol building and extended onward, will all but touch the monument to Washington and the memorial to Lincoln – the two Americans whose light also spreads across the world. The amount of deviation of the extended line will, in fact, be only great enough to indicate the alteration from the older order which finds its summation in the name of Washington, for more than half his lifetime an English subject, albeit an

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English colonial, and which again finds its summation in the name of Lincoln.95 The idea that Shakespeare constitutes a crucial link or point of mediation within what is now conceived as a historically unified Anglo-American culture is an important element in circulation within the discourse of Shakespeare criticism since about the time of the First World War. The positioning of The Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library, in Slade’s view, objectifies the social and cultural continuity between the two societies. This sense of belonging to a shared tradition is thematized by Slade in the identification of Shakespeare with the great Elizabethan explorers, who represent America’s entrepreneurial spirit and with Richard Hooker, who represents the rule of law. The obvious Shakespeare text for all of this is, of course, The Tempest, a play that Slade reads as expressive of the two great American ideals of union or reconciliation and freedom.96 Some of Slade’s ideas are taken from an earlier discussion of Shakespeare by Charles Mills Gayley’s Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America. Gayley’s argument has something in common with the tradition of social Darwinism and it also reflects the idea of a unified racial and cultural destiny that would privilege something like a WASP ascendancy in the politics of ‘liberty’ in America.97 Slade is not quite so direct in his articulation of this philosophy, but there is still an obvious national and ethnic chauvinism implicit in his remarks, even though his focus is on institutions and cultural traditions rather than race. Whether this spirit expressed by Slade, Thorndike, and Gayley honestly reflects Folger’s own view of his project is not altogether clear. Somehow this self-congratulatory Anglo-American triumphalism seems a bit out of tune with Folger’s own transcendental atheism. Henry Clay Folger died in 1930, about a year before the building that he helped to plan and design was dedicated. In 1931 the library building was completed and its finances were settled. Stanley King, president of Amherst, along with the Trustees of Amherst College assumed responsibility for the direction of the library. It quickly became apparent, however, that there were to be some important differences of opinion between King and the trustees on the one hand and Mrs. Folger on the other over just who would have authority for the actual management and administration of the library. In his account of the library’s first year of operation, King indicates his dissatisfaction with William Slade, who he felt was not properly qualified for the day-to-day work of running a library.98 Slade was Chief Bibliographer to the Library of Congress, and also author of a sonnet on The National Library.99 King pressed Mrs. Folger to give greater authority to the director

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of research, Joseph Quincy Adams, but Mrs. Folger, who was evidently very loyal to Slade, resisted. As far as King was concerned, Mrs. Folger really didn’t grasp the problems of running an institution like The Folger, and her personal loyalty to Slade only made matters worse. Finally, after a year or so of negotiations, Mrs. Folger capitulated and agreed to the appointment of Joseph Quincy Adams as director of the library with full authority for its overall policy and administration. Adams, a descendant of the famous Massachusetts political dynasty, was a distinguished Shakespeare scholar who taught at Cornell before assuming his post at The Folger Library. His achievements as director of The Folger Library are remarkable. The Folgers already had amassed a considerable library of materials directly related to Shakespeare and his works. The expansion of the library’s holdings during Adams’ tenure as director, however, built up a collection of a much higher order of magnitude. In 1937 Adams learned that the collection of Sir Leicester Harmsworth was about to come into the market. This was then the largest privately held collection of early English printed books in the world, and Adams recommended to the Folger Trustees that an offer to purchase the collection be submitted to the Harmsworth estate. The financial negotiations were conducted by Stanley King, who was helped in his efforts by the family’s pressing need for cash. Although the Folger bid was relatively low, they were in a position to close very quickly and this assured the success of the project. The acquisition of the Harmsworth collection is more or less typical of the pattern of American purchase of rare books, paintings and other cultural capital from declining European estates. This purchase, however, was fundamental in transforming the Folger from a valuable but highly specialized collection into a world-class research library. Adams was primarily concerned with building the Folger’s collection and assuring that funds be held in reserve for that purpose. He was less concerned with the development of reader services. But a reading room was a central part of Paul Philippe Cret’s design for the building. Henry Clay Folger wanted the reading room to be designed and furnished like ‘a gentleman’s private library’. He made these provisions so that scholars would feel more comfortable as they pursued their research in his collection of sixteenth-century books. As far as I know Folger himself did not have a private library in his own rather modest home in Brooklyn. The notion of a ‘gentleman’s private library’ undoubtedly suggests wealth and privilege, but it does not necessarily imply anything like hereditary status. Henry Clay Folger came from a long line of ‘half-share’ men, people whose standing in the world was the result of their intelligence and self-discipline.

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He certainly understood that most scholars, at least in America, are upwardly mobile children of the middle class, like J. Q. Adams and like Folger himself. For that matter most of the gentlemen Folger knew from the boardroom and the golf course had similar backgrounds. John D. Rockefeller was a gentleman in this sense, but he certainly had no claim to an aristocratic birthright. Folger’s private library was the expression of his generosity, openness, noblesse oblige; he wanted his collection to be used and to be enjoyed. Folger’s sense of what counts as a ‘gentleman’ was defined not by birth but rather by ‘breeding’. The only social qualification for access to the collection would be a broad standard of civility and learning that could be reasonably assumed of anyone with proper academic credentials. In the early years of the Library’s operation, Joseph Quincy Adams didn’t really have to concern himself very much with just who would be permitted to enjoy the amenities of the reading room. He realized that the construction of the building did not in fact make any actual provision for scholarship to be done on the premises because the ‘gentleman’s private library’ would have been basically unusable in the summer months, the only time academics could make the journey by train to Washington, D. C. During his tenure only the vaults housing the books were air-conditioned and the reading room, like the adjoining theatre, was mostly for show. And there was no proper catalogue of the library’s holdings. Adams thought his reference staff would handle most inquiries by mail. Under these circumstances it would not be necessary to adopt any kind of deliberate policy of discriminatory exclusion. And, at the time, Shakespeare scholars were themselves part of the WASP ascendancy, mostly men of Protestant background, and exclusively white, so the question could not be expected to arise. Louis Wright served as the Library’s director from 1948 after serving in a similar capacity at The Huntington Library. He was responsible for several important technical innovations that would encourage much wider use of the collection. He developed a standardized card-catalogue and he arranged for the installation of air conditioning in the reading room. Wright’s ideas about who would actually use the reading room were complex. In a memoir of his early years as a scholar he compared the group of colleagues he worked with at The Huntington to the courtiers in The Decameron, a community of wit and intelligence who found a basis for human flourishing in the midst of the plague, which, for Wright was simply The Depression. Wright liked and admired the women he worked with – Elizabeth Donno and Lily Bess Campbell are singled out for their

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scholarly accomplishments. But like most men of his generation, Wright assumed that the primary role for women at The Folger would be to work as librarians and support staff. The Library’s constituency was significantly broadened under the direction of O. B. Hardison, who was responsible for opening up the library to all qualified researchers. Hardison realized that the Library simply would not be viable without broad public support, including government funding. It had to serve a broader public than the relatively small academic community. Among the important initiatives undertaken in these years were a series of public outreach activities, including the extensive involvement of The Folger in promoting Shakespearean drama in public schools. These developments, I think, are all very much in the spirit of Folger’s original idea of a ‘gentleman’s private library’. He expected the Library to be a permanent institution in the landscape of the national capital. ‘The Shakespeare collection will be amply endowed, not only to maintain itself, but to add material as may be available or as offers from time to time’. Building and securing the collection would be the paramount concern; it had to be. Even when the Library was closed during the construction of a new reading room the books were held in reserve for future readers. Those readers would always have to be limited in number and some uniform standard adopted to determine who is actually qualified to handle what are now literally priceless artefacts. The current standard permits not only scholars with a doctoral degree, but also graduate students currently working on a dissertation. It’s hard to see how access to the Library’s collections could possibly be more inclusive. Henry Clay Folger Jr. spent most of his adult life in what is sometimes known as ‘the real world’; in other words, he worked in a commercial enterprise where his focus was on assuring that his company would be profitable. His experience as a businessman was an absolutely essential element in the creation of The Folger Library, and not just because it provided the financial resources to make book collecting possible. Building a ‘library of Shakesperiana finer than anything that has ever been acquired’ required a lot more than scholarship. It demanded toughness, attention to detail, and the kind of strategic intelligence that knows how to strike a bargain. In this sense he was fully engaged in the vita activa like ‘the old settlers of Nantucket’, those ancestors who ‘have something better than royal blood’.100 In his pursuit of Shakespeare he was as intensely driven as Ahab in his pursuit of Moby Dick, without the tragic consequences and without the destructive indifference to his friends and associates. But there is another side to Henry Clay Folger that has nothing to do with ‘the real world’.

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It seems to me that Folger’s real vocation was for a retreat into a strict form of the vita contemplativa, an experience of silence, of books, of reading that would be not really antisocial to be sure, but fundamentally non-social and unworldly. In a ‘Prayer and Discourse at Mr. Folger’s Funeral’ Samuel Parkes Cadman takes the opportunity to commemorate this aspect of Folger’s life. Mr. Folger had a passion for the spiritual culture of life. When he was a boy, evangelical religion was crashing down in ruins through sheer stupidity . . . it was therefore, a great boon for him when on New England’s fragrant hills, nurtured by his Alma Mater, Amherst, which he regarded with reverent affection, he found what he had previously desired and longed for from the time of his boyhood, the guiding light that does not fail.101 The reference to a ‘guiding light that does not fail’ is recognizably a conventional phrase, exactly the sort of thing one might expect a clergyman of any faith to say in a eulogy, regardless of how the deceased might have considered the matter. But there is something more in Cadman’s memorial address than conventional piety. Cadman carefully avoids describing Folger as a devout or an orthodox Christian. Whatever ‘guiding light’ Folger might have found at Amherst, it was certainly not the ‘sheer stupidity’ of evangelical Christianity. The religion preached by Samuel Parkes Cadman was a version of Christian faith that is in many respects nothing more than secular humanism, with its stress on tolerance and on compassion for others, regardless of sectarian affiliation. It is very clear from his essay on The Merchant of Venice that whatever the ‘spiritual culture of life’ may have meant for him it was decidedly not an uncritical and partisan identification with a religious sect or an orthodox belief system. The life of the spirit is something more like what philosophers call a life of the mind. And in that sense the discovery of ‘the guiding light that does not fail’ could well be a reference to Folger’s passionate engagement with Shakespeare. It is difficult to know exactly what sort of beliefs Folger had about religious matters, though it is obvious that he believed in the value of regular attendance at the First Congregational Church of Brooklyn. But this sense of the importance of religious observance is fully compatible with the transcendental atheism Folger would have learned from reading Emerson. It’s possible to acknowledge the value of community and the importance of respect for others without necessarily believing in the literal truth of scripture. The gentleman’s private reading

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room has been created to nurture the spiritual culture of life. There is even a sense of ‘leaving the world behind’ as one passes the security checkpoint, the sign-in at the registrar’s desk, and the symbolic but obligatory divestment of worldly goods in the form of pens and other contraband before passing through the doors. The Folger Library has its own distinctive relationship with social time. It offers a respite from those conditions of life Albert Borgman has described as ‘hyper-modernity’ – a pervasive sullenness brought on by the pitiless hyper-activity of total economic and political mobilization.102 Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Ax Helve’ presents a Québécois wood-carver who ‘knew how to make a short job long’. This is the elusive possibility that invites us in the Folger’s reading room, the prospect of unalienated labour, the chance to take the time to do something right. We like to say of things that have an enduring value that they are timeless, but of course nothing in this world is really timeless and anyway we’re too wised up to believe in timelessness. But a better way to think about the ‘gentleman’s private library’ is to recall that it is timeful, full of time, that it contains and nurtures the fullness of time. The old books recall a cloistered life where there is plenty of time to make a short job long. This is secular human time, tempus saeculorum if I have my Latin right, not eternity but anyway the time of centuries. The Brooklyn Botanical Garden is located not very far from the house where the Folgers resided for most of their lives. In 1925 a Shakespeare Garden was constructed with a special donation from Henry Clay Folger. The Shakespeare Garden is his only significant philanthropic endowment other than The Folger Library. In the tradition of Shakespeare Gardens in many parts of the world, it contains specimens of the plants mentioned in the plays and poems. The original Shakespeare Garden in Brooklyn was relocated to a more favourable location in 1979, and it now contains more than 80 varieties of plants. You can go there just to enjoy the flowers, ‘full measure, pressed down, and running over’. It doesn’t matter if you know anything about Shakespeare or if you ever once heard about Henry Clay Folger Jr. In De Amicitia, Cicero has Laelius describe the larger meaning of friendship: Wherefore friends, though absent, are at hand; though in need, yet abound; though weak, are strong; and – harder saying still – though dead, are yet alive; so great is the esteem on the part of their friends, the tender recollection and the deep longing that still attends them. These things make the death of the departed seem fortunate and the life of the survivors worthy of praise.103

Notes

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Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See especially, chapter 8. Thomas Bowdler, ‘Preface to the First Edition’, in The Family Shakespeare in One Volume, in which nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1872), vii. An earlier edition in four volumes containing 20 plays was published in 1807. See below, pp. 42–46. The term ‘intertextual’ derives from Julia Kristeva and poststructuralist semiotics, but has lost much of its force since then. I use it here in the broadest sense. See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). For a fuller development of this argument, see Cary DiPietro, ‘The Shakespeare Edition in Industrial Capitalism’, in Shakespeare Survey 59 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 147–56. See Hugh Grady’s persuasive account of the dynamics of modernization in the establishment of English as a discipline in The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), especially chapter 1. He quotes The Communist Manifesto on pp. 30–31: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them the relations of production, and with them all the relations of society . . . Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.’ Again, described by Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare, 33, who notes the work of Magali Scarfatti Larson in The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). See below, pp. 16–18. See my own discussion below, pp. 59–64. See below, pp. 174–5. See below, p. 68.

Chapter 1 1

International Journal of Ethics 16:1 (October 1905): 99.

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H. J. W. Hetherington and Rev. David Boucher, ‘Jones, Sir Henry (1852–1922)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition. Modern Language Review 1:2 (January 1906): 129. In the Preface to George Bernard Shaw, Three Plays for Puritans, in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw Collected Plays and their Prefaces [Volume II] (London: Max Reinhardt, The Bodley Head, 1971), 41. How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism (Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1933); reprinted in Explorations (New York: New York University Press, 1947), 15–54. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Second Edition (London: Macmillan and Company, 1937), 488. Hereafter cited in text as ST. Knights in a letter to John Britten (17 March 1959), quoted in John Britten, ‘A. C. Bradley and Those Children of Lady Macbeth’, Shakespeare Quarterly 12:3 (Summer 1961): 349. Quoted in Katherine Cooke, A. C. Bradley and His Influence in Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 3–4. Cooke’s is, to date, the only monograph devoted to Bradley’s life and criticism. She provides a complete bibliography of Bradley’s writing and makes considerable use of the collections at Balliol of Bradley’s letters and miscellany. Quoted in Cooke, A. C. Bradley and His Influence, 4. Knights, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’, in Explorations, 52. G. K. Hunter characterizes the critical reception in this way: ‘most references to Bradley’s book since the time of its publication have been either resentful of its influence or (alternatively) defensive about its virtues’. ‘A. C. Bradley’s “Shakespearean Tragedy” ’, in Essays and Studies 1968, ed. Simeon Potter (London: John Murray, 1968), 101. See also Cooke, A. C. Bradley and His Influence, especially p. 4. I use the term ‘middle class’ following Raymond Williams in his discussion of ‘class’ in Key Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). He locates the emergence of the use of ‘class’ at the start of the Industrial Revolution (c. lateeighteenth century), to indicate specifically the ‘increasing consciousness that social position is made rather than merely inherited’ (61), even while it retained in its multiple senses vestiges of a more traditional social ordering based on title and rank. I would not want to argue for the homogeneity or singularity of this class, except insofar as English discourse of this period perpetuated that singularity because it was a desirable antidote to the complex system of social privilege. T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London and Victoria: Croom Helm, 1982), 156. John Jones, Balliol College: A History, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 174. Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life, 159. Jones, Balliol College, 206. Benjamin Jowett, The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans: With Critical Notes and Dissertations (London: John Murray, 1855); ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’, in Essays and Reviews (London: J. W. Parker, 1860), 330–433. Peter Hinchliff and John Prest, ‘Jowett, Benjamin (1817–1893)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition

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January 2006; see also Jones, Balliol College, 206. Harvey Hill argues that the volume, though unimpressive as a collection of essays, exemplifies the culture wars during this period about the place of religion in higher education. ‘Religion and the University: The Controversy over Essays and Reviews at Oxford’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73:1 (2005): 183–207. On the enormous controversy the volume generated, see Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Reading, ed. Victor Shea and William Whitla (Charlottesvile, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2000). Harold Hartley, ‘Benjamin Jowett: An Epilogue’, in H. W. Davis, A History of Balliol College (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 200. See also Hinchliff and Prest, ‘Jowett’. Of particular note was his four-volume translation of The Dialogues of Plato: With Analyses and Introductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871). See, for example, Maria Dimova-Cookson and W. J. Mander, ‘Introduction’, T. H. Green: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Political Philosophy, ed. Maria Dimova-Cookson and W. J. Mander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6. They cite Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 140. Bernard M. G. Reardon, ‘T. H. Green as a Theologian’, in The Philosophy of T. H. Green, ed. Andrew Vincent (Aldershot, UK: Gower Publishing Company Limited, 1986), 37–38. Reardon describes the ‘evangelical moralism’ of Green’s philosophy, in ‘T. H. Green as Theologian’, 42. See also Vincent who discusses the debate about whether Green was a religious philosopher or a philosopher of religion; see the ‘Introduction’, in The Philosophy of T. H. Green, 5; and, Vincent, ‘T. H. Green and the Religion of Citizenship’, in The Philosophy of T. H. Green, 48. In their ODNB entry, Hinchliff and Prest argue that Jowett’s lectures in the 1840s were one of the few ways undergraduates could learn about Hegel. David Boucher and Andrew Vincent argue that Idealists such as Green embraced evolutionary theory; at its height British Idealism ‘critically adapted evolution to its own ends by eschewing its naturalistic form and emphasising the developing spiritual unity of existence’. British Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 3. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 17. Cited in Dimova-Cookson and Mander, T. H. Green, 6. ‘For Green, the self-conscious agent is the precondition of knowledge. The problem, as he saw it was Kant’s doctrine of the manifold independent of the agent. Kant wanted to retain the idea of a world independent of consciousness which cannot be known in itself. Following Hegel, Green argued that Kant had fallen into an unnecessary dualism. There was no need to postulate a world independent of the determinations of judgement. The ‘thing-in-itself’ did not exist for Green’. Andrew Vincent, ‘Green, Thomas Hill (1836–1882)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition; see also Andrew Vincent, The Philosophy of T. H. Green, 57. Colin Tyler discusses Green’s interpretation of Hegel’s eternal consciousness in ‘Thomas Hill Green’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/

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green/. ‘The unfolding of the eternal consciousness is the increasing manifestation of God in the world. That is, the growing unity of men’s will and reason with the will and reason of God.’ Dimova-Cookson and Mander, T. H. Green, 9. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. A. C. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), 266–267. Quoted in Dimova-Cookson and Mander, T. H. Green, 10. Vincent argues that Green’s sense of character would have been ‘perfectly laudable to the average intelligent Victorian’. ‘Introduction’, 10. See also Colin Tyler, ‘Thomas Hill Green’, especially the sections on ‘Social Theory and Conscientious Agency’ and ‘The Principles of State Action’. The evidence, however, is circumstantial. G. K. Hunter, in his ODNB entry, notes that in one of Green’s letters to Bradley at this time, Green advises Bradley to take up the appointment at Liverpool because of likely opposition by Jowett at Balliol. Green notes an earlier opportunity, when Bradley should have taken up an appointment at New College, Oxford, but which Green advised against because he did not anticipate fully Jowett’s opposition to Bradley at Balliol. ‘Bradley, Andrew Cecil (1851–1935)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn., 2005. The story of Bradley’s ‘expulsion’ from Balliol forms the narrative thread of Terence Hawkes’ account of Bradley in That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986), esp. 27–33. In a letter to Murray in 1902, Bradley recalls ‘the grind with horror’. Quoted in G. K. Hunter in his ODNB entry. A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1963), vii. Hereafter cited in text as OLP. Sir Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare, with a Bibliography of His Works, Portraits and Facsimiles (London: Macmillan and Co., 1898). It was revised in 14 editions before his death. See Cary DiPietro, ‘Lee, Sir Sidney (1859–1926)’, The Shakespeare Encyclopedia, ed. Patricia Parker (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010). At press at the time of writing. In a letter to D. Nicol Smith, Sir Walter Raleigh, the first Chair of English Literature at Oxford from 1904 (intersecting with Bradley’s tenure there), expresses his irritation with the religious strain in Bradley’s criticism: ‘he treats his texts exactly as preachers treat the bible. Twist it to get the juice out.’ Quoted in Mark Kipperman, ‘Absorbing a Revolution: Shelley Becomes a Romantic, 1889–1903’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 47:2 (September 1992): 207. Adrian Poole suggests that ‘we must allow a certain amount to the traditions of thought that enable him to use the terms good and evil with what may now seem unnerving blitheness’. ‘A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy’, Essays in Criticism 55:1 (2005): 61. See Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 40–48. Taylor frames his discussion of Bradley around the idea that his writing nudges criticism into the twentieth century. A similar argument is developed by Cooke, who notes that criticism in Bradley’s time ‘had not yet hardened into a profession’. A. C. Bradley and His Influence, 81. Cooke is quoted by Poole, ‘Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy’, 59.

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Taylor argues that the ‘vast majority of Bradley’s quotations from Shakespeare are illustrative; he very rarely attempts to investigate the way they work despite his being one of those souls unbewildered by analysis’, alluding to an earlier statement in Shakespearean Tragedy. Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century, 41. Bradley does, however, attend to diction, versification and rhetorical figures in those moments when he’s discussing Shakespeare’s style. Knights, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’, in Explorations, 15. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 17. Knights, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’, 17; in Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 12–13. Misquotation is corrected in square brackets. Cooke makes the argument that Bradley suffered through the first half of the twentieth century from such ‘poor criticism’. A. C. Bradley and His Influence, 11. Poole argues that Bradley is ‘the easiest of critics to misrepresent by selective quotation’. ‘Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy’, 59. The lecture was published in an earlier version in 1903 in The Hibbert Journal 2 (1903–1904): 662–80. Anne Paolucci argues that, though it retains more or less the same shape, the earlier version is more dogmatic and less appreciative of Hegel’s theory. ‘Bradley and Hegel on Shakespeare’, Comparative Literature 16 (1964): 212. Paolucci disputes Bradley’s understanding of Hegel, in particular, that Hegel prefers Greek to modern tragedy and that Antigone is an exemplar of the tragic form. ‘Bradley and Hegel’, 212–13. The full passage, spoken by Wilhelm Meister in conversation, reads: ‘A lovely, pure, noble and highly moral being, without the strength of mind which forms the hero, sinks beneath a load which it cannot bear and must not renounce. He views every duty as holy, but this one is too much for him. He is called upon to do what is impossible, not impossible in itself, but impossible to him. And as he turns and winds and torments himself, still advancing and retreating, ever reminded and remembering his purpose, he almost loses sight of it completely, without ever recovering his happiness.’ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister: A Novel, trans. R. Dillon Boylan (London: Bell and Daldy, 1875), 227. Poole puts the case eloquently: Bradley’s ‘scrupulous attention to the experience of reading as a matter of endlessly fluctuating thought and feeling and impression, and the injunction to read, as he puts it “with all our force” (p. 156), have given Shakespearean Tragedy its astonishing durability’. ‘Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy’, 59. Sophocles, Oedipus Trilogy, trans. Francis Storr (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1912). Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, ed. James Strachey and Alan Tyson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 365. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 366. Ibid., 367. Ibid., 367. Ibid., 368.

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From the 1800 preface of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, with other poems in two volumes (London: Biggs and Co. Bristol, 1800). Gary Taylor argues that ‘Shakespearean Tragedy itself reads like a Victorian novel. It is big, serious, moral, eloquent in a stiff sort of way, verbally polite’. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: The Hogarth Press, 1989), 230. Poole responds: ‘This is clever and silly. Shakespearean Tragedy may not have the intellectual and philosophical scope of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda but it shares enough of their virtues for Taylor’s cheap crack to fall flat’. ‘Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy’, 62. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 368. Although not an aesthetic theorist per se, Freud would go on to develop his ideas about the relationship between the unconscious and art through a number of subsequent writings. For a concise and lucid explanation, see Linda Hutcheon, ‘Freud, Sigmund’, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Second Edition, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), online edition. James Walters, Shakespeare’s True Life (London: Longmans, Green, 1896); William A. Sutton, The Shakespeare Enigma (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1903); for further examples, among many others, see also Goldwin Smith, Shakespeare: The Man. An Attempt to Find Traces of the Dramatist’s Personal Character in His Dramas (Toronto: G. N. Morang & Co., 1899); C. Marshall Smith, The Mystery and Magic of Shakespeare (1900); J. M., Shakespeare. Self-Revealed, in His ‘Sonnets’ and ‘Phoenix and Turtle’ (London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1904). Edward Dowden, Shakespere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1875), v. Frank Harris, The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story (London: Palmer, 1909). Harris published a four-volume autobiography between 1922 and 1927 which was scandalously explicit in its description of his sexual encounters, and this had the effect of tarnishing in retrospect his ‘pornographic’ Shakespeare theory. For a fuller account, see my own Shakespeare and Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Quoted in DiPietro, Shakespeare and Modernism, 49. On the role of Wilde and his trials in the construction of twentieth-century homosexuality, see Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement (London: Cassell, 1994). Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, Psychopathia Sexualis : Eine Klinisch-forensische Studie (Stuttgart: Enke, 1886); the volume was published and revised in numerous editions in German, and different German volumes appeared in English translation from 1892 in both England and America. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Das Konträre Geschlechtsgefühl, trans. Hans Kurella (Leipzig: G. H. Wigand, 1896); the English edition of 1897 was expurgated of much of Symond’s material, and appeared under Ellis’ name only as Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Volume 1: Sexual Inversion (London: University Press, 1897).

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Rictor Norton, ‘Symonds, John Addington (1840–1893)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition, May 2006. Laurel Brake, ‘Pater, Walter Horatio (1839–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition, May 2006. Norton, ‘Symonds’. This argument is made persuasively by Goran Stanivukovic, ‘Shakespeare and Homosexuality’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 46:2 (2010): 138–51. He argues that Ellis’ Sexual Inversion attempted to depathologize homosexuality, thus rescuing it from the medical profession (he cites an article by John Bancroft on the history of sexual medicine in England), and was one of a group of English ‘libero-cultural’ discourses that included the work of Symonds, Wilde, and, later in the twentieth century, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Richard Simpson, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1868), 6. Richard Wilson, ‘Introduction: A Torturing Hour: Shakespeare and the Martyrs’, Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 13. Rev. Henry Sebastian Bowden, The Religion of Shakespeare, Chiefly from the Writings of the Late Richard Simpson (London: Burns and Oates, 1899), 23. Ibid., 3 and 6. Dowden, Shakespere, 395. For a recent discussion of Dowden’s Shakespere, see Andrew Murphy, ‘Shakespeare and Chronology: Edward Dowden’s Biographical Readings’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 46:2 (2010): 130–37. Edward Caird, Some Characteristics of Shakespeare, Contemporary Review LXX (1896), 815ff. Quoted in Bowden, The Religion of Shakespeare, 383. Bowden, The Religion of Shakespeare, 384. Lee, A Life, 109. Ibid., 123. Quoted in DiPietro, Shakespeare and Modernism, 53. A. C. Bradley, ‘English Poetry and German Philosophy in the Age of Wordsworth’, in A Miscellany (London: Macmillan and Co., 1929), 111 and 112. Hunter, ODNB. For a fuller account of Bradley’s critical reception in the first half of the twentieth century, see Cooke, A. C. Bradley and His Influence, 182–221. F. R. Leavis, ‘Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Moor: or the Sentimentalist’s Othello’, Scrutiny 6 (December 1937): 260. Ibid., 259–60. Ian MacKillop, ‘Knights, Lionel Charles (1906–1997)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition, October 2009. Cooke, whose monograph on Bradley was published in 1971, discusses the idea of a return of Bradley to ‘recent’ critical favour. A. C. Bradley and His Influence, 1–12. It’s more than twenty-five years since Terry Eagleton, among others, rang the death knoll for literature and literary criticism: literary criticism, he argued in

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the 1983 Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers) could no longer justify its ‘self-limiting to certain works by an appeal to their “value” [because] criticism is part of the literary institution which constitutes these works as valuable in the first place’ (202). For some examples among many, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory; The Rise of Criticism: From The Spectator to Poststructuralism (London: Verso, 1984); D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); on the institutional development of literary criticism in America, see Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987); with specific reference to Shakespeare studies, see Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 6. Stefan Collini, ‘Arnold, Matthew (1822–1888)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition, January 2008 (emphasis in original). Baldick, 33. Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 216 and 215 (emphasis in original). Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 46. Ibid., 54. Raymond Williams describes it: ‘This application was exceptionally complicated. It was used to emphasize national and traditional cultures, including the new concept of folk-culture. It was used to attach what was seen as the “mechanical” [q.v.] character of the new civilization then emerging: both for its abstract rationalism and for the “inhumanity” of current industrial development. It was used to distinguish between “human” and “material” development.’ Key Words, 79. Neither Williams nor Bruster after him acknowledge this particular sense of ‘culture’ in Arnold’s writing, perhaps because they are both keen to identify in Arnold’s programme of criticism an undeniably belletristic main current. Quoted in Stefan Collini, ‘Introduction’, in Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xvii. Matthew Arnold, Essays by Matthew Arnold (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1914), 24. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 20. Fuller accounts can be found in both Eagleton and, especially, Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848—1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), especially chapter 1. See Baldick, Social Mission of Criticism, especially chapter 2. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 35. F. R. Leavis, ‘Why Universities?’, Scrutiny 3 (1934). Quoted in L. C. Knights, ‘The Modern Universities’, Scrutiny 6 (1937): 363. Quoted in Cooke, A. C. Bradley and His Influence, 191–92.

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Quoted in Anthony Kearney, ‘Confusing the Issue? A. C. Bradley’s Theory of Poetry and its Contexts’, Victorian Poetry 41 (2003): 245. For a fuller discussion of the lecture, see Kearney, ‘Confusing the Issue?’. Kearney notes the arguments made by Josephine Guy and Ian Small in Politics and Value in English Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Chris Baldick in Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present (London: Longman, 1996) for the role of this lecture in particular on the historical development of English studies. Hunter, in ODNB. L. C. Knights, ‘The Modern Universities’, 362.

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See Walter Wilson Greg, Biographical Notes 1877–1947 (Oxford: New Bodleian Library, 1960), 1. General details of William Greg’s career are taken from his ODNB entry; Mary B. Rose, ‘Greg, William Rathbone (1809–1881)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition, May 2006. Greg, Biographical, 1. Letter signed ‘M.I.R.C.’, The Economist, 26 August 1916, 371. F. P. Wilson, ‘Sir Walter Wilson Greg 1875–1959’, Proceedings of the British Academy 45 (1959): 308. Greg, Biographical, 3 and 4. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 9. Muriel St Clare Byrne in J.C.T.O et al., ‘Walter Wilson Greg: 9 July 1875–1874 March 1959’, Library, 5th series, 14:3 (September 1959): 167. Anonymous article, ‘Motor Reform’, The Economist, 28th September 1907, 1633. For ‘The Price of Sugar’, see The Economist, 20 February 1915, 319–20. Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 59. Greg, Biographical, 13. Anonymous letter, The Economist, 19 December 1908, 1178–1179 (first quotation), 1179 (all subsequent quotations). Letter signed ‘γ’, The Economist, 2 January 1909, 21. W. W. Greg, ‘The Spirit of Victory’, The Times Literary Supplement, 10 September 1914, 418. W. W. Greg, ‘The Ultimate Responsibility’, The Economist, 11 October 1919, 584. W. W. G., ‘A Farewell: Zurich, September 18th, 1896’, The Spectator, 17 October 1896. W. W. G., ‘Which Things –’, The Cambridge Review, 25 January 1900, 163. Walter W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama: A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration Stage in England (London: A. H. Bullen, 1906), vii. Ibid., 411. Wilson, ‘Sir Walter Wilson Greg’, 313.

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W. W. Greg, ‘Ronald Brunlees McKerrow 1872–1940’, Proceedings of the British Academy (1940): 491 (all quotations in this paragraph). W. W. G., review of Ronald B. McKerrow, The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. 1, Modern Language Quarterly 4 (1904): 153. John Dover Wilson, ‘Alfred William Pollard 1859–1944’, Proceedings of the British Academy 31 (1945): 289. W. W. Greg, review of Frederick S. Boas (ed.), The Works of Thomas Kyd, Modern Language Quarterly 4 (December 1901): 186. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 190. Wilson, ‘Sir Walter Wilson Greg’, 314. Quoted in W. W. Greg, review of J. Churton Collins (ed.), The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, Modern Language Review 1 (1905–1906): 238. Ibid., 239 and 243. Ibid., 246. Ibid., 251. Letter from W. W. Greg to David Nichol Smith, dated 2 August 1737, National Library of Scotland, ms. 19603. W. W. Greg, review of Fredson Bowers, On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists, Shakespeare Quarterly 7:1 (1956): 104. Walter Wilson Greg, A List of English Plays Written Before 1643 and Printed Before 1700 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1900 for 1899), [vii]. A. W. Pollard, in Greg, List, xi. The second volume was delayed by the Second World War, when it was difficult to gain access to the relevant materials. W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, vol. 4 (London: Oxford University Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1959), ix. Wilson, ‘Sir Walter Wilson Greg’, 328. A Census of the quartos was published by Henrietta C. Collins and A. W. Pollard in 1916. Greg was fulsome in his praise of the volume when it appeared in a second edition in 1939, observing that it is ‘indispensable to everyone who is engaged either on the editing or on any intensive study of Shakespeare’s text’; Review of English Studies 16 (April 1940): 211. W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1939 [1940]), 299. Walter W. Greg, ‘Old Plays and New Editions . . . ’, The Library, 2nd series, 3 (1902): 409–10. For a charitable – if not to say downright indulgent – account of Collier’s career, see Dewey Ganzel, Fortune and Men’s Eyes: The Career of John Payne Collier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). For a more rigorous assessment, see Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 2 vols. Walter W. Greg (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), xxxvii–xxxviii. Ibid., xiii.

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In 1961, R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert produced a new edition of the diary, which was published by Cambridge University Press, though this edition does not include all of the material to be found in the supplementary volume to Greg’s original text (Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary (London: A. H. Bullen, 1907)). Greg would also produce A Descriptive Catalogue of Early Editions of the Works of Shakespeare Preserved in the Library of Eton College (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909). Greg’s preparation of the catalogue may have contributed to his being appointed Aldis Wright’s successor as librarian at Trinity in 1907. His terms of employment were that he ‘should attend in the Library two hours a day four days a week during term’ (Greg, Biographical, 9). He gave up the post in 1913, when he married his cousin, Elizabeth Gaskell. W. W. Greg and E. Boswell (eds), Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1576 to 1602 – from Register B (London: Bibliographical Society, 1930), vi. In fact Greg did offer commentary on the materials included in the volume, in ‘The Decrees and Ordinances of the Stationers’ Company, 1576–1602’, The Library, 4th series, 8 (1928): 395–425. Alice Walker in J.C.T.O et al., ‘Walter Wilson Greg’, 160. John Dover Wilson, Milestones on the Dover Road (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 177–78. W. W. Greg, Some Aspects and Problems of London Publishing between 1550 and 1650 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), v. What amounts to a further posthumous publication of Greg’s appeared as late as 1990, when Grace Ioppolo reported on an unpublished article of Greg’s that she had discovered at the Huntington Library. Ioppolo’s ‘ “The Final Revision of Bonduca”: An Unpublished Essay by W. W. Greg’, Studies in Bibliography 43 (1990): 62–80, incorporates extended segments of Greg’s essay. W. W. Greg, ‘The Malone Society’, The Spectator, 20 October 1906, 573 (both quotations). Greg, Biographical, 10; F. C. Francis, ‘A List of Dr. Greg’s Writings’, The Library, 4th series, 26 (1945): 72. [W. W. Greg], ‘Notes on the Society’s Publications’, Malone Society’s Collections, 1 (4–5), 1911, 294. In addition to his work with the Malone Society, Greg also initiated a scheme for publishing facsimiles of Shakespeare quartos, launched in 1939 with texts of King Lear (1608, ‘Pied Bull’), Merchant of Venice (1600) and Merry Wives of Windsor (1602). The series was initially published by Sidgwick and Jackson, under the auspices of the Shakespeare Association, but Clarendon Press assumed responsibility for the texts from 1957. Charlton Hinman assisted with the later volumes and took charge of the series following Greg’s death. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts, 41. W. W. Greg, ‘ “T. Goodal” in Sir Thomas More’, PMLA 46:1 (1931): 269. Ibid., 270 (all quotations). Greg attempted to apply scientific principles to the business of bibliographic description with rather less success. In his Calculus of Variants: An Essay on Textual Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), he observed that ‘there is nothing esoteric

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or mysterious about my so-called Calculus: it aims at nothing but defining and making precise for formal use the logical rules which textual critics have always applied’ (vi). For most average readers, however, the text has proved to be virtually impenetrable. McKerrow wrote to Alice Walker of the book: ‘I hope that you have tackled Greg’s “Calculus” with success and enlightenment. I think the real trouble is that it looks as if it were intended to prove something (and the pseudo-mathematical notation is extraordinarily misleading!) where it is really meant only as a way of classifying the relationship of texts. But Greg seems to think that, if he says in an introduction that he is going to use + in the sense of minus and – in the sense of divided by, a reader will understand that 10+4–2=3 – which he won’t – or at least I won’t. One simply cannot dissociate oneself from the ordinary interpretation of well known symbols!’; quoted by Walker in J. C. T. O. et al., ‘Walter Wilson Greg’, 162. Quoted in W. W. Greg, review of Samuel A. Tannenbaum, Shakspere Forgeries in the Revels Accounts, Review of English Studies 5 (1929): 345. Quoted in ibid., 355. Ibid., 356 (both quotations). Pericles is not a ‘bad quarto’ in the sense of being an attenuated text which subsequently appeared in a longer ‘good’ version either in quarto or in the First Folio collected edition of 1623 (F1). It does, however, have the feel and quality of a shortened text and the assumption has traditionally been that, since it was excluded from F1, no full-length version of the play survived. A. W. Pollard, ‘A Literary Causerie: Shakespeare in the Remainder Market’, The Academy, 2 June 1906, 529. W. W. Greg, ‘On Certain False Dates in Shakespearian Quartos’, The Library, 2nd Series, 9 (1908): 131 (all quotations). Between the appearance of the first and second parts of the ‘False Dates’ article, A. W. Pollard pointed out to Greg that the split in the block appears in different states in a range of different books and that the extent of the splits in the wood does not seem to correlate with the date of printing. Greg noted that this ‘established the astonishing fact that the cracks in the block opened and closed and the breaks grew greater and less quite irrespective of the date of printing’. He concluded that this must mean that ‘the size of the cracks varies indirectly with the dampness of the block, and possibly . . . with the tightness of the locking’; ‘Certain False Dates’, 384–85, 385. Greg, ‘Certain False Dates’, 122. Ibid., 124–25, 125. Ibid., 397. In May of 1619, the Court of the Stationers’ Company considered a letter from the Lord Chamberlain requesting that plays from the repertoire of the King’s Men should not be printed without the consent of the company. Scholars have seen a link between this move and Pavier’s attempted collection. See Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) 36. Greg, ‘Certain False Dates’, 397. For a particularly interesting reading of the history of the Pavier quartos, see Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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W. W. Greg, ‘The Shakspeare Quartos’, The Athenæum, 30 May 1908, 670. William Neidig, ‘The Shakespeare Quartos of 1619’, Modern Philology 8 (1910): 9–10. W. W. Greg, ‘Bibliography – an Apologia’, in Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 266. Ibid., 241 and 266. Greg, ‘Certain False Dates’, 407. Wilson, ‘Sir Walter Wilson Greg’, 324. A. W. Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos: A Study in the Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Plays, 1594–1685 (London: Methuen, 1909), vi. F. P. Wilson notes that the copy of the book that Pollard gave to Greg includes the inscription ‘To W. W. Greg. All here that’s mine. A. W. P.’; ‘Sir Walter Wilson Greg’, 319. W. W. Greg, ‘The “Hamlet” texts and recent work in Shakespearian Bibliography’, Modern Language Review 14 (1919): 382 and 383. W. W. Greg, ‘The Present Position of Bibliography’, in Collected Papers, 215; Greg, ‘Apologia’, 239. Greg, ‘Ronald Brunlees McKerrow’, 508. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount, 1623), A3r (both quotations). Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 65. See also Pollard’s Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates (London: Alexander Moring, 1917). W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 40. Margreta de Grazia, ‘The Essential Shakespeare and the Material Book’, Textual Practice 2:1 (1988), 74. W. W. Greg, Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor 1602 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910), xxvi. Ibid., xxxvii. Ibid., xli. Ibid., xliii. Ibid., xxviii. See John Dover Wilson ‘The Copy for Hamlet, 1603’ and ‘The Hamlet Transcript, 1593’, The Library, 3rd series, 9 (1918): 153–85 and 217–47. W. W. Greg (ed.), Sir Thomas More (Oxford: Malone Society, 1911), xiii. Thompson, Edward Maunde, Shakespeare’s Hand (Oxford: Clarendon, 1916), 53 and 53–54. Ibid., ix (original is in italics). W. W. Greg, ‘The Handwriting of the Manuscript’, in Shakespeare’s Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, ed. A. W. Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 47. A. W. Pollard, ‘Preface’, Shakespeare’s Hand, v. Greg, Shakespeare First Folio, 148. Strictly speaking, another possibility exists: that the compositor may have been working from a scribal copy of Shakespeare’s papers, with the scribe having preserved Shakespeare’s unusual spelling (perhaps for the same reason that a compositor would have done). W. W. Greg, ‘Prompt Copies, Private Transcripts, and the “Playhouse Scrivener” ’, The Library, 4th series, 6 (1925): 151. Quoted from the facsimile image included in Greg’s article.

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Greg, ‘Prompt Copies’, 156 (final three quotations in paragraph). R. B. McKerrow, ‘The Elizabethan Printer and Dramatic Manuscripts’, The Library, 4th series, 12:3 (1931): 264. Ibid., 265. R. B. McKerrow, ‘A Suggestion Regarding Shakespeare’s Manuscripts’, Review of English Studies 11 (1935): 464 and 465. W. W. Greg, ‘Textual Criticism in “Hamlet” ’, Times Literary Supplement, 26 October 1922, 687. The Globe served as the standard reference text for Shakespeare scholars for decades. In one of his reviews, Greg, quoting from the Globe text, observed that ‘to give references to the Arden edition is sheer perversity’; W. W. Greg, review of H. de Groot, Hamlet: Its Textual History, Modern Language Review 19:2 (1924): 229 n.1. Letter from W. W. Greg to David Nichol Smith, dated 26 November 1940, National Library of Scotland, ms. 19603. W. W. Greg, review of A. Quiller-Couch and J. Dover Wilson, The Works of Shakespeare, vol. 1, The Tempest, Modern Language Review 17:2 (1922): 174. W. W. Greg, ‘The Function of Bibliography in Literary Criticism Illustrated in a Study of the Text of King Lear’, in Collected Papers, 281 (both quotations). In 1935, Wilson was appointed Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University, a post he held until he took early retirement (in order to concentrate on his Shakespeare edition) in 1945. John Dover Wilson, What Happens in ‘Hamlet’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 2. Ibid., 9. Wilson, ‘Alfred William Pollard’, 293 and 294. John Dover Wilson, ‘Thirteen Volumes of Shakespeare: A Retrospect’, Modern Language Review 25:4 (1930): 398. Greg, review of The Tempest, 174. Ibid., 186 (first quote), 190 (all subsequent quotes). Greg, ‘The “Hamlet” texts’, 385. Greg, ‘Present Position of Bibliography’, 217–18. W. W. Greg, ‘Re-enter Ghost. A Reply to Mr J. Dover Wilson’, Modern Language Review 14 (1919): 369. Letter from R. B. McKerrow to Kenneth Sisam, dated 20 May 1933, Oxford University Press archives, file reference CP/ED/000018. All quotations from Smith in this section are taken from a letter to Greg, dated 23 November 1940, National Library of Scotland, ms. acc. 3511. Letter from R. B. McKerrow to Kenneth Sisam, dated 15 December 1929, Oxford University Press archives, file reference CP/ED/000018. Letter from Kenneth Sisam to W. W. Greg, dated 22 February 1940, reference as previous endnote. Letter from W. W. Greg to Kenneth Sisam, dated 24 February 1940, reference as per endnote 120 (both quotations). I have mapped out the history of the edition (and of Dover Wilson’s New Cambridge edition) in greater detail in Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 10.

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Notes

R. B. McKerrow, Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare: A Study in Editorial Method (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), vi. W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), v. G. Blakemore Evans (textual editor), The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 28 (both quotations). Ibid., 30. Ibid., 1683. W. W. Greg, ‘The Rationale of Copy-Text’, in Collected Papers, 376. Fredson Bowers, ‘McKerrow, Greg, and “Substantive Edition” ’, The Library, 5th series, 33:2 (1978): 89. Joseph Rosenblum, ‘W. W. Greg’ in William Baker and Kenneth Womack (eds), Twentieth Century British Book Collectors and Bibliographers (Detroit: Gale, 1999), 125. W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954; originally published 1942), x (original is in italics). Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 119. Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1992; originally published Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 48. Paul Werstine, ‘Editing Shakespeare and Editing without Shakespeare: Wilson, McKerrow, Greg, Bowers, Tansell, and Copy-Text Editing’, TEXT 13 (2000): 34. Paul Werstine, ‘William Shakespeare’, in Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, ed. D. C. Greetham (New York: Modern Language Association, 1995), 267. See, in particular, Randall McLeod (writing as ‘Random Clod’), ‘The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly 4:33 (1982): 421–31. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts, 286. W. W. Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements (London: Malone Society, 1923), 5. Greg, Shakespeare First Folio, 121. Ibid., 134–35 W. W. Greg, ‘Bibliography – A Retrospect’, in The Bibliographical Society 1892– 1942: Studies in Retrospect (London: Bibliographical Society, 1945), 29. Greg, Editorial Problem, iii and 156. Greg, ‘Bibliography – An Apologia’, 259. W. W. Greg, review of Fredson Bowers (ed.), The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, vol. III, Review of English Studies 10 (1959): 415. The best recent attempts to retrieve what remains of value in the work of the New Bibliographers include John Jowett, Shakespeare and Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Grace Ioppolo, Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006). See also, more generally, Michael Hunter: Editing Early Modern Texts. An Introduction to Principles and Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Paul Werstine, ‘The Science of Editing’, in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 127 (both quotations).

Notes 151

152

191

For a complete list of Greg’s publications, see F. C. Francis’ ‘List of Dr. Greg’s Writings’ (see endnote 53), supplemented by D. F. McKenzie’s ‘The Writings of Sir Walter Greg, 1945–1959’, 5th series, 15 (1960): 42–46. Maguire offers some corrections to Francis’ list in Shakespearean Suspect Texts, 344. W. W. G., ‘For if the king like not the comedy, why then, belike, he likes it not, perdie’, in Verses by W. W. G. (Cambridge: Macmillan & Bowes, 1900 [1901]), 31.

Chapter 3 1

2

3

4

5

6

7 8

9 10

11

12

13

14

15

H. C. Folger Jr., ‘A Unique First Folio’ with photographs by George Dupont Pratt, Outlook, 23 November 1907, 87, 687–91. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self Reliance’, in Essays: First Series: The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 7 vols., 2: 32. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 40–56. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 52. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Charles Feidelson (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1964), 154. Henry Clay Folger to Eliza Jane Clark Folger (his mother), Unpublished Correspondence of Henry Clay Folger, the Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library, Washington, D. C. Further reference to these materials will be cited as HCF Correspondence. HCF Correspondence. Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De Amicitia, with an English Translation by William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), vi, 20: 131. Ibid., 131. John D. Rockefeller to Henry Clay Folger, 11 July 1928. HCF Correspondence. Julius H. Seelye, The Way, The Truth and The Life: Lectures to Educated Hindus, Delivered on His Late Visit to India. (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Company, 1873). Thomas Le Duc, Piety and Intellect at Amherst College 1865–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 48. Seelye’s annual letter to the alumni. Printed broadside, 1887. Quoted in Le Duc, Piety and Intellect at Amherst, 49. Claude Moore Fuess, Amherst: The Story of a New England College (Boston: Little, Brown and Company 1935), 238. John Mason Tyler, The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895 (Amherst, Mass.: Press of Carpenter & Morehouse, 1895), 12. Tyler’s other notable publications include: Growth and Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1907); Man in the Light of Evolution (Boston: D. Appleton, 1909).

192 16

17

18 19

20

21 22

23 24

25

26 27 28

29

30 31

32

33 34

35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42

Notes

Garman’s lectures, along with some of his correspondence, were published posthumously by his wife, encouraged by alumni who were inspired by his teaching. Letters, Lectures and Addresses of Charles Edward Garman: A Memorial Volume, Prepared with the Coöperation of the Class of 1884, Amherst College prepared and edited by Eliza Miner Garman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909). Bernard Williams, ‘Realism and Moralism in Political Theory’, in In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4ff. Le Duc, Piety and Intellect at Amherst, 116. ‘Nature and Spirit – Two letters to an Alumnus’, in Letters, Lectures and Addresses of Charles Edward Garman, 115–16. Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 43–48. Le Duc, Piety and Intellect at Amherst, 160. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Superlative or Mental Temperance’, in Lectures and Biographical Sketches (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 160. Ibid., 168. James Russell Lowell, ‘Thoreau’, in My Study Windows (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 196. The errors made by Folger in his transcription are reproduced here. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Friendship’, in Essays: First Series: The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971) 7 vols., 2: 116. Ibid., 116. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self Reliance’, in Essays: First Series, 2:37. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 24. For a comprehensive account of this topic see Robert Hamlett Bremner, American Philanthropy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). HCF Correspondence. Henry Clay Folger, ‘Petroleum’, an offprint of the entry for the Chambers Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, 1904, 5. John D. Rockefeller to Henry Clay Folger, 3 May 1909. Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Ibid. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Wealth’, in The Conduct of Life. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 7 vols., 5: 45. Emerson, ‘Wealth’, 47. The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson, ed. Nancy Craig Simpson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 559. Emerson, ‘Wealth’, 52. Ibid., 61. G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, ed. and trans. T. M. W. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 16. Andrew Carnegie, ‘Wealth’, North American Review 391 (June, 1889): 654. Carnegie, ‘Wealth’, 653. Ibid., 653.

Notes 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53

54 55

56 57

58 59

60

61

62 63

64 65

66

67 68 69

193

Emerson, ‘Wealth’, 51–52. Carnegie, ‘Wealth’, 657. Ibid., 659. Ibid., 667. Ibid., 667. Lewis Hyde, The Gift (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 37. Carnegie, ‘Wealth’, 659. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Hary Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256. New York Times, 30 August 1912. Henry Clay Folger Jr. to John D. Rockefeller, 13 March 1895. HCF Correspondence. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Remarks at the Celebration of the Birth of Shakespeare by the Saturday Club at the Revere House, Boston, 1864’, in Miscellanies: Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 12 vols., 2: 448. Ibid., 448. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1876), 201. Ibid., 20. Stanley Cavell, ‘Skepticism as Iconoclasm: The Saturation of the Shakespearean Text’, in Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century, The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996, ed. Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson and Dieter Mehl (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 241. Ibid., 241. Mary Augusta Jordan was an important figure in the history of education for women. See Susan Kates, Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885–1937 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 27–58. Information on the history of Vassar College is based on entries in The Vassar Encyclopedia, ed. Elizabeth A. Daniels, Vassar College, http://vcencyclopedia. vassar.edu/index.html. Stephen H. Grant, ‘Emily Jordan Folger’, in The Vassar Encyclopedia. Stephen Grant is currently preparing a full-length biography of Henry Clay and Emily Jordan Folger. I am personally grateful to him for sharing so much of his knowledge of the Folgers during my visit to the Folger Library in November of 2008. Charles Millard Pratt to Henry Clay Folger. HCF Correspondence. Michael Bristol, Shakespeare’s America / America’s Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1990), 65. Emerson, ‘Remarks at the Celebration of the Birth of Shakespeare’, 451. Henry Clay Folger, Letter to Horace Howard Furness, 29 September 1992. HCF Correspondence. G. E. Bentley, Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 170. See note 71. Cavell, 235. Stephen Orgel, ‘Prospero’s Wife’, in Representations 8 (1984): 13. Peter Blayney, ‘Introduction’, in The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile, eds Charlton Hinman and Peter Blayney (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), xxxi.

194 70

71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81

82 83 84 85 86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93 94

95 96 97

98

Notes

Valerie Wayne, ‘The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission’, in Textual Formations and Reformations, ed. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 184–87. G. E. Bentley. Henry Clay Folger Jr. to John D. Rockefeller, 13 March 1895. HCF Correspondence. Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives: New Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 308. Henry Clay Folger, ‘A Unique First Folio’, Outlook 87 (23 November 1907): 687. Ibid., 691. HCF Correspondence. HCF Correspondence. HCF Correspondence. Interview with Dan Gregory, ‘Devil in the Details’, Fine Books & Collections 6: 4, (July/August 2008): 27–31. Ibid., 27. Robert M. Smith, ‘Why A First Folio Shakespeare Remained in England’, Review of English Studies 15 (1939): 257–64. E. W. B. Nicholson in The Times of London, quoted in Smith, 260–61. ‘Topics of the Week’, The New York Times, 31 March 1906. HCF Correspondence. Emerson, ‘Remarks at the Celebration of the Birth of Shakespeare’, 451. John Keats, letter to Thomas Keats, Selected Letters (Oxford World’s Classics), ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 41. Richard Moulton, The Moral System of Shakespeare (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 4–5. Henry Clay Folger, Jr., ‘Shylock’s Bond from the Merchant’s Standpoint’, unpublished MS. HCF Correspondence, no date. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 177–95; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968). David R. MacDonald, The Transit of the Anglican Mind to the Maryland Colony: Thomas Bray & the Bray Libraries of Christ Church Durham Nanjemoy, Maryland 1696–1701 (Baltimore: Cloverdale Books, 2008). Henry Clay Folger, Letter to Herbert Putnam, 19 January 1928. HCF Correspondence. Herbert Putnam, Letter to Henry Clay Folger, 21 January 1928. HCF Correspondence. Robert Luce, Letter to Henry Clay Folger, 19 April 1928. HCF Correspondence. William Slade, ‘The Significance of the Folger Shakespeare Memorial: An Essay Towards an Interpretation’, in Henry Clay Folger (New Haven: Privately Printed, 1931), 41. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 54. Charles Mills Gayley, Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America (New York: Macmillan Company, 1917). Stanley King, Recollections of The Folger Shakespeare Library (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950), 34ff.

Notes 99

100

101

102

103

195

Essays Offered to Herbert Putnam by His Colleagues and Friends on His Thirtieth Anniversary as Librarian of Congress 5 April 1929, ed. William Warner Bishop and Andrew Keogh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 409. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Charles Feidelson (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1964), 154. See note 4 above. Samuel Parkes Cadman, ‘Prayer and Discourse at Mr. Folger’s Funeral’, in Henry Clay Folger, 15. Albert Borgman, Crossing the Post-Modern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 10. Cicero, De Amicitia, 134.

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Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy, edited by J. Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Boucher, David and Andrew Vincent. British Idealism and Political Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Bradley, A. C. A Miscellany. London: Macmillan and Co., 1929. —. Oxford Lectures on Poetry. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1963. —. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Second Edition. London: Macmillan and Company, 1937. Bremner, Robert Hamlett. American Philanthropy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Bringhurst, Bruce. Antitrust and the Oil Monopoly: The Standard Oil Cases, 1890–1911. New York: Greenwood Press, 1979. Bristol, Michael D. Shakespeare’s America / America’s Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1990. Carnegie, Andrew. ‘Wealth’. North American Review 148 (June 1889): 653–64. Carter, Paul. The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age. De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press, 1971. Cavell, Stanley. ‘Skepticism as Iconoclasm: The Saturation of the Shakespearean Text’. In Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century, the Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996, edited by Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson and Dieter Mehl. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. Cooke, Katherine. A. C. Bradley and His Influence in Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. This work contains a full bibliography of Bradley’s writing. Dimova-Cookson, Maria and W. J. Mander, eds. T. H. Green: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. DiPietro, Cary. Shakespeare and Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Dunn, Esther Cloudman. Shakespeare in America. New York: Macmillan, 1939. Eagleton, Terry. The Rise of Criticism: From the Spectator to Poststructuralism. London: Verso, 1984. Edwards, Rebecca. New Spirits : Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays: First Series: The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 2, edited by Alfred R. Ferguson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. —. The Conduct of Life. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 5, edited by Alfred R. Ferguson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. Folger, Henry Clay, Jr. ‘A Unique First Folio’ with photographs by George Dupont Pratt, Outlook 87 (23 November 1907): 687–91. Gibb, George Sweet and Evelyn H. Knowlton, eds. History of Standard Oil Company, 2 vols. New York: Harper and Row, 1956. Grady, Hugh. The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Green, T. H. Prolegomena to Ethics, edited by A. C. Bradley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883. Greg , W. W., ed. A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. London: Oxford University Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1939–1959. —. Henslowe’s Diary. London: A. H. Bullen, 1904. —. ‘On Certain False Dates in Shakespearian Quartos’, The Library, 2nd Series, 9 (1908):113–31 and 381–409 —. Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor 1602. Oxford: Clarendon, 1910. —. The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text. Oxford: Clarendon, 1954; originally published 1942. —. The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1955. —. Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements. London: Malone Society, 1923. Gregory, Dan. ‘Devil in the Details’. Fine Books & Collections 6 (2008): 27–31. Hawkes, Terence. That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process. London: Methuen, 1986. Heyck, T. W. The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England. London and Victoria: Croom Helm, 1982. Hunter, G. K. ‘A. C. Bradley’s “Shakespearean Tragedy” ’. In Essays and Studies 1968, edited by Simeon Potter, 101–17. London: John Murray, 1968. Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Jones, John. Balliol College: A History, Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Jowett, John. Shakespeare and Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kane, Betty Ann. The Widening Circle: The Story of the Folger Shakespeare Library and its Collections. Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976. Kearney, Anthony. ‘Confusing the Issue? A. C. Bradley’s Theory of Poetry and its Contexts’. Victorian Poetry 41 (2003): 245–57. King, Stanley. Recollections of The Folger Shakespeare Library. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950. Knights, L. C. How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism. Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1933. Le Duc, Thomas. Piety and Intellect at Amherst College 1865–1912. New York: Columbia University Press, 1946.

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Leavis, F. R. ‘Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Moor: Or the Sentimentalist’s Othello’. Shakespearean Criticism 7 (1988): 101–26. Lee, Sir Sidney. A Life of William Shakespeare, with a Bibliography of His Works, Portraits and Facsimiles. London: Macmillan and Co., 1898. Maguire, Laurie E. Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and their Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Murphy, Andrew. Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. McKerrow, R. B. ‘A Suggestion Regarding Shakespeare’s Manuscripts’. Review of English Studies 11 (1935): 459–65. —. Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare: A Study in Editorial Method. Oxford: Clarendon, 1939. Nevins, Allen. Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller 2 vols. New York: Scribner, 1953. Paolucci, Anne. ‘Bradley and Hegel on Shakespeare’. Comparative Literature 16 (1964): 211–25. Pollard, A. W. Shakespeare Folios and Quartos: A Study in the Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Plays, 1594–1685. London: Methuen, 1909. Poole, Adrian. ‘A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy’. Essays in Criticism 55 (2005): 58–70. Rosenbach, A. S. W. Henry C. Folger as a Collector. New Haven: Privately Printed, 1931. Smith, Robert M. ‘Why A First Folio Shakespeare Remained in England’. Review of English Studies 15 (1939): 257–64. Taylor, Michael. Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Vincent, Andrew, ed. The Philosophy of T. H. Green. Aldershot, UK: Gower Publishing Company Limited, 1986. Wilson, F. P. Shakespeare and the New Bibliography, revised and edited by Helen Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Wright, Louis. Collected Papers, edited by J. C. Maxwell. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966. —. The Folger Library: Two Decades of Growth. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1968.

Index

Abbott, Evelyn 16 Adams, Joseph Quincy 171–2 aestheticism and dandyism 61 German 45, 55 and homosexuality 48–9, 52, 54 Alger, Horatio 135–6 Amherst College 116, 119–26, 141, 166 Antigone (Sophocles) 37, 43 Arber, Edward 80–1 Aristotle and philautia 128 and tragedy 35–6, 38 Arnold, Mathew Arnoldian criticism 6, 59–66 Culture and Anarchy 60–2 Arnold, Thomas 60 Asquith, Herbert 16 Bailey, John Cann 9–10 Balliol College 16–18 Beecher, Henry Ward 119 Benjamin, Walter 142 Benson, G. R. 23 Bibliographical Society 76 Bildung 22, 39, 61 Blayney, Peter 149–50 Boas, Frederick 75 Works of Thomas Kyd 75 Bodleian Library 138, 155–7 Bosanquet, Bernard 16, 18 Bowden, Henry 49–51, 158 Bowdler, Thomas 3 Bowers, Fredson 76, 106–7 Bradley, Andrew Cecil character criticism 55–57 critical reception 8–13

early life and education 14–18 and Hegelianism 6, 22, 31, 33–7, 56 illness and death 56 interest in philosophy 15–16, 20–23 legacy 56–9, 64 Oxford Lectures on Poetry 12, 24–5, 33, 51, 56 ‘Shakespeare the Man’ and biographical criticism 51–3 and Catholicism 49–50, 53 and Hamlet 55 and homosexuality 47–9 and Platonism 53 and Shakespeare’s sonnets 52–4 Shakespearean Tragedy and character 32–3, 36 critical reception 8–12 discussion of ethics 29–30, 35–6 double time 24–5 and Freud 44–5 and Hegelian dialecticism 34–5, 37–8, 51 historical importance 13–14 Idealist philosophy 22, 36, 42, 66–7 professional scholarship 23–4 style 24–30 Bradley, Charles 14–16 Bradley, Francis Herbert 15, 18, 22, 50 Bradley, George Granville 14, 15 Brandes, Georg 45–6 British Idealism 18–20, 50, 56 British Library, The 78, 95 Cadman, Samuel Parkes 141, 157–9, 174 Caird, Edward 16, 50–1 capitalism 3–5, 63, 115, 163 Carnegie, Andrew 115, 131, 135–42, 165

200

Index

Cavell, Stanley 144, 148 Chambers, Edmund (E. K.) 28, 80 character criticism 10–12, 22, 30, 32–4, 55–57 Clapham Sect 14 Clark, William George 98, 104 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 10, 28, 30, 33, 39, 57 Biographia Literaria 10, 28 Collier, John Payne 28, 78–9, 82–4, 87 Collins, John Churton (“J. C. C.”) 11, 75, 83 communism 125, 137 Communist Manifesto, The (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) 5 Condell, Henry 89–90 Conwell, Russell 135 Cornell University 119, 171 Cret, Paul Philippe 168, 171 Darwin, Charles 2, 6, 13, 19, 51, 124, 170 On the Origin of Species 2, 19 de Selincourt, Ernest 65 Dowden, Edward 46, 50–1, 53, 81 Education Act (1870) 60 educational reform 2, 5–6, 12–18, 59–60, 63 Eliot, T. S. 62 Ellis, Havelock 48–9 Emerson, Ralph Waldo and friendship 125–8 and Shakespeare 125–6, 143–4, 147, 158 and wealth 132–5 empirical scientism 2, 61 English criticism Arnold 59–64 Bradley 64–67 Essays and Reviews see also Benjamin Jowett 2, 17–18, 19 Evans, G. Blakemore 105–6 evolutionism 2–4 Family Shakespeare, The (1818) 3 Folger, Henry Clay Amherst College 119–26, 141, 166

De Amicitia 120–2, 127–8, 175 and Charles Pratt (Sr.) 119, 122–3 and Charles Millard Pratt (Jr.) 119–23, 127–9, 138, 140, 146 early life and education 119–28 and Emerson 125–8 and friendship Cicero 120–2, 127–8, 175 Emerson 127–8, 143 genealogy 116–9 and John D. Rockefeller 115, 122–3, 129–32, 141, 150–3, 169 later years and death 170–1 philanthropy 128–9, 139–43, 175 Shakespeare Garden, The 175 “Shylock’s Bond from the Merchant’s Standpoint” 114–5, 159–62 Standard Oil Company, The 123, 128–31, 139–40, 142 The Merchant of Venice 159–62, 174 Turbutt Folio 155–7 Folger, Emily Clara (née Jordan) 114, 119, 123, 142, 144–50, 166 Folger, James Athearn 116 Folger, Peter 116–8 Folger Shakespeare Library, The 7, 105, 115, 116, 134, 141, 147–59, 163–73 Foucault, Michel 107 Franklin, Benjamin 118, 163 Freud, Sigmund and behaviour 13, 45–6 and Hamlet 44, 55 and homosexuality 47–8 and the Oedipus Complex 43 and Shakespearean Tragedy 44–5 The Interpretation of Dreams 2, 3, 42–4, 47 Furness, Howard 146–7, 155 Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library, The 147, 163 Garman, Chares Edward 124–5 Gayley, Charles Mills 170 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 126 and Hamlet 32, 44–5 Gosse, Edward 156–7

Index Green, Thomas Hill 18–23, 33–5, 50 Prolegomena to Ethics 21–2 Greg, Walter Wilson Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration 68, 76–8 and Fredson Bowers 106–7 creative writing 72–3, 113 early life and education 68–70 early work and reviews 73–5 The Economist 4, 69–72 later life and work 80–1 legacy 112–3 and R. B. McKerrow 95–7, 102–5 memorial reconstruction of quartos 91–2, 106, 109–10 Pavier quartos 84–8 Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama 73–4 politics 70–3 and A. W. Pollard 88–94 Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare 102–4 scholarly contributions 76–9 and Shakespeare’s quartos 84–97 and Dover Wilson 99–102 scientific bibliography 82–4, 89–97 Works of Thomas Kyd 75 Greg, William Rathbone 69 Grove, George 14 Hadley, Helen 128–9, 140 hamartia 35–6 Halliwell-Phillipps collection 151–3 Harmsworth, Leicester 171 Harris, Frank 46–7, 53, 55 Hardison, O. B. 173 Hart, H. C. 91 Hazlitt, William 28 Hegel, Friedrich Bildung 22 Hamlet 37–40 Hegelian Idealism 6, 13, 19–21 theory of tragedy 22, 25, 31, 33–7, 40–1 Heminges, John 89–90 Herder, Johann Gottfried 62–3 Herford, C. H. 10 Hinman, Charlton 105, 112, 148–9

201

historical positivism 2, 6, 56 homosexuality 47–9, 54 Huntington, Henry 138, 165 Huntington Library, The 165, 172 Idealism Absolute 19–20 Bradley, A. C. 6, 34–5, 66 British 18–20, 50, 56 Green, T. H. 22, 33, 35 Hegelian 6, 19, 50 industrialization 63, 132 Industrial Revolution 5, 15, 61 Jaggard, William 86, 98, 152–3, 155 J. C. C. (see: John Churton Collins) Johnson, Samuel 28 Jones, Ernest 55 Jowett, Benjamin 17–23, 48, 50, 59 and Essays and Reviews 17–18, 19 King, Stanley 170–1 Knight, G. Wilson 58 Knights, L. C. 11–12, 31–4, 36, 55–8, 66 How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? 11, 31–3, 58 Lamb, Charles 28 Leavis, F. R. 11–12, 57–8, 62–3 Lee, Sidney 27–8, 46, 52, 54, 87 Lowell, James Russell 126–7 Luce, Robert 168–9 Lyell, Charles 19 Macmillan Publishers 8, 9, 79 Magnolia Oil Company of Texas 140 Maguire, Laurie E. 71, 82, 109 Malone, Edmond 89 Malone Society, The 68, 81–2, 92 Marx, Karl 5, 125, 163 McLeod, Randall 109 McGann, Jerome 108 McKerrow, Ronald Brunlees 68, 74, 81, 95–7, 99, 102–5, 109 Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare 102–4 memorial reconstruction 91–2, 106, 109–10

202

Index

Meyer, Carl Ferdinand 139 Mitchell, Maria 119, 145 Moby Dick (Herman Melville) 118 Morrill, Mary 117 Moulton, Richard 159 Murray, Gilbert 11, 23 Neidig, William J. 87 Nettleship, R. L. 16, 23 Newberry, Walter Loomis 138 Newberry Library, The 138, 165 New Bibliography see also scientific bibliography 4, 7, 68, 72, 76, 84, 98–112 New Criticism 31, 59 New Cambridge Shakespeare 99–102 Nicholson, E. W. B. 156 Nietzsche, Friedrich 128 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 43–4 Orgel, Stephen 149–50 Osler, William 156 Oxford English Dictionary, The 78 Oxford Movement, The 17, 18, 59 Oxford Shakespeare, The 102–5 Pater, Walter 48–9, 54, 61 Pavier, Thomas 84, 86–8, 98, 110 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Edmund Burke) 45 Platonism 49–51 Pollard, Alfred William British Museum 74 good and bad quartos 88–91 Malone Society, The 81 material analysis 84–93, 97, 103 New Bibliography 99–102 Shakespeare Folios and Quartos 88–90 poststructuralism 107, 111 Pratt, Charles (Sr.) 119, 122–3 Pratt, Charles Millard (Jr.) 119, 122–3, 127–9, 140, 145–6 Pratt Fund, The 128–9, 140 Pratt Institute, The 119, 138 Pusey, Edward 18 Putnam, Herbert 166–9

Quiller-Coach, Arthur (“Q”) 58, 63, 100, 103–6, 109, 147–8 Raleigh, Walter 58, 63, 102–3 Railton, Alexander B. 152–3 Raymond, John H. 144–5 Riverside Shakespeare, The 105–6 Roberts, James 84–6 Roberts, Jeanne 149–50 Robertson, J. M. 12 Rockefeller, John D. and Henry Clay Folger 122–3, 150–1, 153, 169 and Shakespeare 151 Standard Oil Company 129–30 and wealth 131–2, 139, 141, 172 Romanticism English 44–5 European 61 German 44–5 and Hamlet 32–3. 39–40, 44 nineteenth-century 5, 13, 44, 30 Royal Shakespeare Theatre 2 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich 39, 44–5 scientific bibliography see also New Bibliography 82–4, 89–97 Scrutiny 31, 57, 58–9 Seelye, Julius H. 123–5 Shakespeare Garden, The 174 Shakespeare, William and Catholicism 49–50 Hamlet Bradley on 24–6 and character 11, 32, 37–40 and the Oedipus complex 44–5 hand in Sir Thomas More 92–4 King Lear and Hegel 40–41 quartos 84–5, 98 and tragedy 8, 29 Macbeth and character criticism 11, 29, 32 and Hegel 41–2, 45 How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? see also L. C. Knights 11, 31–3, 58

Index Othello and double time 11, 25 and Hegel 40 and Romanticism 57–8 as tragedy 25, 29, 36, 40 Shaw, George Bernard 10, 46–7, 92 Simpson, Richard 49–50, 93 Slade, William 169–71 Smith, David Nichol 76, 98, 102–3 Smith, Donald 156 Smith, Robert M. 155–6 Sophocles 43 Sotheran, Henry & Co. 151–3 Standard Oil Company 115, 123, 128–31, 139–40, 142 Stoll, E. E. 12 Swinburne, Algernon 28 Symonds, John Addington 16, 48–50, 52 Taft, William Howard 155 Tannenbaum, Samuel 82–4 Taunton Commission 21, 60 Thompson, Edward Maunde 93 Thoreau, Henry David 115, 124–6, 132–3, 139 Thorndike, Ashley 169–70

203

Tilden, Samuel 137–8 transcendental atheism 125–6, 170, 174 Turbutt Folio, The 155–7 Turbutt, W.G. 155–7 Tyler, John Mason 120–1, 124 Tyrrell, R. Y. 9–10 university reform 5, 12–13, 16–18, 23 University Tests Act (1871) 18 Variorum Edition 146–7 Vassar College 129, 144–5 Veblen, Thorstein 125 Vincent Folio, The 114, 151–3, 157, 161 Walkley, Arthur Bingham 10–11 Wayne, Valerie 150 Werstine, Paul 108–9, 112 Wilde, Oscar 47, 49, 52, 54–5, 61 Wilson, F. P. 69, 76, 80, 88 Wilson, John Dover 68, 74, 80, 92, 99–102, 104 Wilson, Julia 69 Wright, Louis 172–3 Wright, William Aldis 79, 98