Shakespeare / Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance 9781350128149, 9781350128170, 9781350128163

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Shakespeare / Text

Arden Shakespeare Intersections Published in association with the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London, this series sets the future agenda for Shakespeare research and criticism. Each edited volume examines a Shakespearean intersection that has been chosen to encourage inventive reflections, suggestions for future directions for the field, and engagements of a broad, interdisciplinary nature. Series Editors: Farah Karim-Cooper, Gordon McMullan, Lucy Munro and Sonia Massai Shakespeare / Sense: Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture Edited by Simon Smith ISBN 978-1-4742-7323-7 Shakespeare / Sex: Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality Edited by Jennifer Drouin ISBN 978-1-3501-0855-4

Shakespeare / Text Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance Edited by Claire M. L. Bourne

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Claire M. L. Bourne and contributors, 2021 Claire M. L. Bourne and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. Series design by Charlotte Daniels All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938170 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-2814-9 ePDF: 978-1-3501-2816-3 eBook: 978-1-3501-2815-6 Series: Arden Shakespeare Intersections Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Figures Notes on contributors Series preface Introduction  Claire M. L. Bourne

vii ix xvi 1

Part One  Inclusive / exclusive   1   2   3   4   5

Fair / foul  B. K. Adams Text / paratext  Hannah August Public / private  Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich Edition / translation  Régis Augustus Bars Closel Canon / apocrypha  Aleida Auld

29 50 66 84 102

Part Two  Before / after   6   7   8   9 10

Now / then  Andy Kesson Miscellany / sequence  Megan Heffernan Original / copy  Dianne Mitchell Source / adaptation  Sujata Iyengar Life / afterlife  Margaret Jane Kidnie

123 143 163 182 203

Part Three  Authorized / unauthorized 11 12 13 14 15

Book / theatre  Holger Schott Syme Text-based / concept-driven  Katherine Steele Brokaw Sense / nonsense  Rebecca L. Fall Fact / fiction  Adam G. Hooks Part / whole  Paul Salzman

223 245 264 281 299

Contents

vi

Part Four  Present / absent 16 17 18 19 20

Black / white  Miles P. Grier Extant / ephemeral  Scott A. Trudell Lost / found  Misha Teramura Paper / ink  Emma Depledge Material / digital  Zachary Lesser and Whitney Trettien

Index

319 343 360 383 402 424

Figures 3.1 The Maides Tragedie (London: Richard Higgenbotham [and Francis Constable], 1619), sig. C1r 5.1 Title page of The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the Seventh (1710 [1709]) 7.1 Samuel Daniel, Delia: Contayning certayne Sonnets; with the complaint of Rosamund (London: Simon Waterson, 1592), sig. C1r 7.2 William Shakespeare, [The Passionate Pilgrim] (London: [W. Jaggard], [1599]), sig. A3r, STC 22341.8, Folger Shakespeare Library  7.3 William Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609), sig. I1v, STC 22353, Folger Shakespeare Library 7.4 Mary Wroth’s slashed S or fermesse ($) in 8.1 ‘To his deere frend Mr Stephen Jackson’, in V.a.162, Folger Shakespeare Library 8.2 Sonnet 2 titled ‘Spes altera’, in ACC/1360/528, London Metropolitan Archives 9.1 Shakespeare-Aragon-Picasso, lithograph numbered 17.4.64.VII 11.1 PROMPT Ham 16, 72–73, Folger Shakespeare Library 12.1 Andrew Hardy as Orlando in Shakespeare in Yosemite’s production of As You Like It (2019) 12.2 The cast of Shakespeare in Yosemite’s production of As You Like It (2019) in the closing scene 15.1 James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, page from Hamlet scrapbook, GL 12/15, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 17.1 Detail from ‘Cymbeline’, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), sig. 3b1r 18.1 Title page of Loues labors lost (London: Cuthburt Burby, 1598), STC 22294 copy 1, Folger Shakespeare Library

75 105 147

151

153 156 168 172 189 231 256 257 299 348 367

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Figures

18.2 Manuscript waste used in the binding of Thomas Gataker’s Certaine Sermons (1637) and Saint Stevens Last Will and Testament (1638) 18.3 Another leaf of manuscript waste used in the same book (see 18.2) 20.1 Archaionomia, translated by William Lambarde and compiled by Laurence Nowell (London, 1568), title page, STC 15142 20.2 Archaionomia, translated by William Lambarde and compiled by Laurence Nowell (London, 1568), sigs. A1v–A2r, STC 15142, as viewed in Folger’s LUNA digital repository 20.3 Plate reproducing the title page of Archaionomia c. 1942, from Giles Dawson, ‘Authenticity and Attribution of Written Matter’, English Institute Annual (1942) 20.4 Archaionomia, translated by William Lambarde and compiled by Laurence Nowell (London, 1568), sigs. A3v–A4r, STC 15142 20.5 Default view of Mirador reader, from the Folger’s Miranda Digital Assets Platform

374 375 404

405

406 408 412

Notes on contributors Claire M. L. Bourne is Assistant Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Her teaching and research focus on early modern drama, book history, textual editing and theatre studies. She is the author of Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (2020) and has published extensively on book design and the history of reading. She is editing Henry the Sixth, Part 1, for the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series, and is collaborating with Jason Scott-Warren (University of Cambridge) on a series of projects related to the Free Library of Philadelphia’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio thought to be annotated by John Milton. B. K. Adams is an Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University, USA. Her research interests include the history of reading, the history of the book, premodern critical race theory of early modern England as well as modern editorial practices of early modern English drama. She also writes about contemporary theatrical retellings of early modern drama and history, with a forthcoming article on Othello and Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor in the journal Shakespeare. Hannah August is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. She holds a PhD from the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London and has been a Commonwealth Scholar and a Fellow of the New Zealand Federation of Graduate Women. Her monograph, Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England, will be published in 2022. Aleida Auld is a Research and Teaching Assistant and doctoral candidate at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She will defend her doctoral thesis, ‘Reconfiguring Early Modern English Poetry in the Editorial Tradition: Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton’ in May 2021. In 2017–18, she received a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation for extended research stays

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at the University of Oxford and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She currently teaches undergraduate seminars on early modern poetry and drama, and her research interests include book history, editing and the literary canon. Katherine Steele Brokaw is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Merced, USA, and produces Shakespeare in Yosemite, which offers free, annual Shakespearean performances in Yosemite National Park in celebration of Earth Day. She authored Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early English Drama (2016) and has published articles and reviews in several journals and essay collections. With Jay Zysk she co-edited Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare (2019), and she edited Macbeth for the Arden Performance Editions series (2019). Her next book, ‘Shakespeare and Community Performance in Practice’, is under contract. She acts, directs and dramaturges Shakespeare in California and beyond. Régis Augustus Bars Closel is Assistant Professor at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM), Brazil. He has held an Academic Visitorship at the Shakespeare Institute, UK and a Post-Doctoral Researcher position at Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Brazil, both generously supported by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) grants. He has translated Arden of Faversham (1588–92) and Sir Thomas More (1600; 1603–4) into Brazilian Portuguese, co-edited two books and published several articles (in Renaissance and Reformation, Palimpsestes, Shakespeare and Notes & Queries). He is currently working on a monograph about early modern politics of the land/space and drama. He was awarded the John Edward Kerry Prize from the Malone Society in 2016. Emma Depledge is Assistant Professor of English Literature, 1500–1800, at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Politics, Print and Alteration, 1642–1700 (2018) and co-editor (with Peter Kirwan) of Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640–1740 (2017) and (with John Garrison and Marissa Nicosia) of Making Milton: Print, Authorship, and Afterlives (2021). Her work has also appeared in journals such as Philological Quarterly and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, where she published an article in

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xi

which she used paper evidence to re-date a Restoration Hamlet quarto. She is currently writing a monograph exploring the relationship between mockheroic poetry and the London book trade. Rebecca L. Fall is Program Manager for the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Her current book project traces the surprising social functions of nonsense writing in early modern England against a longer history of culturally productive (and destructive) senselessness from eleventh-century France to the USA today. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the J. Leeds Barroll Prize by the Shakespeare Association of America, and her public engagement work has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellowship. Beyond the Newberry, she serves as a PreAmble Scholar at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and is editing John Taylor the ‘Water Poet’ for The Map of Early Modern London. Miles P. Grier is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York, USA. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph tentatively entitled Inkface: Othello and the Formation of White Interpretive Community, 1604–1855 and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies. Essays addressing illiteracy and commercial ineptitude as crucial markers of racial subordinates in early modern English Atlantic culture have appeared in William and Mary Quarterly and the volume Scripturalizing the Human (2015). More contemporary work on the history of racial profiling and Joni Mitchell’s blackface pimp alter ego has been published in Politics and Culture, Genders and Journal of Popular Music Studies. Megan Heffernan is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago, USA, and author of Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (2021). Her articles have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly and Modern Language Quarterly. Her current work includes co-editing a special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly on miscellanies and a monograph, ‘Resilient Books: Archival Science in an Age of Precarity’, about the institutional history of caring for rare books. Adam G. Hooks is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa, USA. He is the author of

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Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (2016). He is currently editing the Poems for the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series and has published widely on the textual histories of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. In 2016, he curated an exhibition at the University of Iowa Libraries called The Books that Made Shakespeare, which is now available as an open-access online exhibit (http://shakespeare.lib.uiowa.edu). Sujata Iyengar is Professor of English at the University of Georgia, USA, and author of Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (2005), Shakespeare’s Medical Language (2011) and many essays on early modern race, book arts, and medical humanities; editor of Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (2015); and, with the late Christy Desmet, co-founder and co-editor of the award-winning multimedia scholarly periodical Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Her current book projects are ‘Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory’ (under contract, The Arden Shakespeare) and ‘Shakespeare and the Art of the Book’, which considers Shakespearean artists’ books, fine-press books and altered books – and bookish things – as aesthetic and scholarly interventions. Andy Kesson is the lead researcher on Before Shakespeare, a project combining archival, archaeological and performance-based methodologies to think about the first thirty years of the London playhouses. That project’s early work can be consulted at beforeshakespeare.com and in the Forum section of Shakespeare Studies 45 (2017). He is the author of John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship (2013) and the co-editor (with Emma Smith) of The Elizabethan Top Ten (2013). He is currently working on the Box Office Bears project, which puts archaeozoology and ancient DNA genetics into dialogue with literary and archival documentation to study the history of animal baiting; and is working with the theatremaker Emma Frankland to stage a production of John Lyly’s Galatea embracing its queer, trans love story. Margaret Jane Kidnie is Professor of English at The University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her edition of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness was published by Arden in 2017 and her Malone Society edition of the anonymous manuscript play, The Humorous Magistrate, in 2012. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (2008), and has

Notes on Contributors

xiii

published widely on Shakespearean performance, early modern manuscripts and editorial practices. She has co-edited Shakespeare and Textual Studies (2016) and Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama (2004). She is editing Hamlet for the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series, and is co-General Editor of the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions. Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University, USA. She is the author of The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender (2016). Her essays on early modern drama and women’s texts have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and many edited collections. She is a contributing editor and a member of the advisory board for The Pulter Project, a digital edition of Hester Pulter’s poetry. Current projects include articles about the bookish Stanley women and a monograph on the history of editing and staging masques in Shakespeare. Zachary Lesser is the Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author of Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (2004) and Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (2015), both of which won the Elizabeth Dietz Award given by SEL: Studies in English Literature. A new book, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée, will appear in 2021. He is the co-creator of two digital resources for studying printed drama: DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks (with Alan B. Farmer) and Shakespeare Census (with Adam G. Hooks). With Peter Holland and Tiffany Stern, he is a general editor of the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series, in which he will edit Macbeth. Dianne Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. Her research explores the dynamic relationship between literary form and material culture, focusing on the manuscript poetry of early modern England. Her essays may be found in Studies in Philology, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, English Literary Renaissance, Modern Philology and several edited collections. She is at work on a book about the intimacies afforded by lyrics as material objects.

xiv

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Paul Salzman FAHA is Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, Australia. He has published widely on early modern women’s writing, literary history and the theory and practice of editing, including four Oxford Worlds Classics editions, and online editions of Mary Wroth’s poetry, and her play Love’s Victory. His most recent book is Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon 1825–1915 (2018). He is currently writing a book on ‘Facsimiles, Fakes, Forgeries and Editing 1720–1830’. Holger Schott Syme teaches European theatre history, early modern English drama and contemporary performance at the University of Toronto, Canada. His publications include Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare’s England: A Culture of Mediation (2012), the co-edited Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603 (2008) and essays in various edited collections and journals including Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Theatre Survey, and The Review of English Studies. For the third edition of the Norton Shakespeare, he wrote the theatrehistorical Introduction and edited Edward III and The Book of Sir Thomas More. He is currently writing a book about Shakespeare in Berlin, 1920–2020, and occasionally blogs about theatre of the past and present on dispositio.net. Misha Teramura is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. His work has appeared in such journals as ELH, Shakespeare Quarterly, Modern Philology, English Literary Renaissance and The Review of English Studies. He is currently completing a book manuscript on Shakespeare’s adaptations of Chaucer and is editing Henry IV, Part 2 for the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series. He is also a co-editor of the Lost Plays Database with Roslyn L. Knutson (emerita), David McInnis and Matthew Steggle. Whitney Trettien is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, where she writes and teaches on the history of the book, early modern women’s writing and digital humanities. She is currently completing her first book, Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork, a hybrid print/digital monograph on seventeenth-century assembled texts. She is also co-editor of Digital Sound Studies (2018) and a collaborator on several digital projects, including the digital zine thresholds and Manicule, an application for annotating and visualizing the structure of books.

Notes on Contributors

xv

Scott A. Trudell is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. His research focuses on early modern poetry, drama, music and pageantry, as well as media studies, sound studies, performance studies and gender studies. He is the author of Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England (2019), winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature; he has published in journals including PMLA, Renaissance Studies and Shakespeare Quarterly; and he is a co-principal investigator of Early Modern Songscapes, an interdisciplinary digital humanities project on the musical performance of English Renaissance poetry.

Series preface Arden Shakespeare Intersections seeks to prompt questions about the future shape of Shakespeare studies and to initiate new and innovative critical approaches. Our aim is not only to summarize and shed light on aspects of the critical field as it stands, but actively to question received critical formations and offer exciting new directions for critical analysis by addressing a series of ‘intersections’ – developing lines of thought both cognate and disparate from a key word that invites contributors to leave the tracks and find out what happens when critical formations overlap in generative ways. This innovative series of substantive collections of new essays is edited by leading and emerging scholars working at the cutting edge of the field of Shakespeare studies. The volumes will contain fifteen or so chapters by acknowledged experts in the field who have been invited to consider a given Shakespearean intersection – Shakespeare/text, say, or Shakespeare/sex, or Shakespeare/skin – and bring to bear their own particular perspective on that intersection in the context of those of others in the volume. The intersections – and thus the titles of the volume – have been chosen to encourage genuinely inventive reflections on the field created by the juxtaposition of the word ‘Shakespeare’ with the particular terms, suggestions for future directions for the field, and engagements of a broader, more intra- and/or interdisciplinary nature than is usual for ‘Shakespeare companion’ or ‘Shakespeare topics’ series. The overarching aim of Arden Shakespeare Intersections is to propose and populate alternative configurations for the field of Shakespeare criticism that move beyond the standard categories, such as gender, race, class, language, performance. This is pursued not so as to reject or denigrate the value of these valuable concepts as ways to approach the Shakespearean text, but to rethink and reinvigorate their significance for the study of Shakespeare by seeking productive new ways to bring them into play and by juxtaposing concepts that are not only usually kept separate but may well be considered either irreconcilable or irrelevant. So, for instance, the intersection

Series Preface

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Shakespeare / Space (were we to commission it) might juxtapose city/country, playhouse/street, theory/practice, centre/periphery, private/public, state/ subject, pageant stage/indoor playhouse, inside/outside, locus/plataea, global north/global south in ways that offer substantially to enlarge what we might think we mean by the study of Shakespeare and space. Such juxtapositions are designed to create productive friction, to provoke contributors to stretch boundaries, to go beyond their comfort zones, and thus – we believe – to begin to outline genuine new directions for criticism in the field of Shakespeare and early modern drama, both building on and reimagining our critical criteria. Farah Karim-Cooper, Sonia Massai, Gordon McMullan and Lucy Munro

xviii

Introduction Claire M. L. Bourne

The title of this volume – Shakespeare / Text (or, said aloud, ‘Shakespeare slash Text’) – makes several implicit claims about the relationship between ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘text’: their connection, their disjunction, their proximity, their distance, their separation, their entanglement. Here, ‘text’ is a flexible term that operates as much as a generalized concept (‘the text’; and even the state of ‘textuality’ itself) as it does as a placeholder for each of the specific material textual forms in which Shakespeare’s (and affiliated) writings persist in the historical record (‘a text’). ‘Shakespeare’ is also a flexible signifier: an historical man (someone who was born, lived, breathed and died); an author (a persona constructed by a distributed network of book trade agents via various textual practices); a textual corpus (the ever-shifting material outcomes of those textual practices); and a theatrical canon (the elastic set of plays associated with Shakespeare in a performance context). The slash ( / ) suggests equivalency or interchangeability: Shakespeare is (the) text. At the same time, the slash might propose affinity between ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘text’. Furthermore, in visually dividing the words, the glyph can make the terms read as alternatives to each other (‘Shakespeare’ or ‘text’) or convey tension between them (‘Shakespeare’ versus ‘text’). None of the configurations evoked by the slash is quite the same thing as the more familiar ‘Shakespeare and Text’. Versions of this formulation have dominated book titles in the baggy field of textual studies for the last two decades: for instance, David Scott Kastan’s Shakespeare and the Book (2000); John Jowett’s Shakespeare and Text (2007; rev. edn. 2019); Sonia Massai’s Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (2008); Andrew Murphy’s A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text (2010); Lukas Erne’s

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Shakespeare and the Book Trade (2013); Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai’s Shakespeare and Textual Studies (2016); James Purkis’s Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama (2016); and Erne’s The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies (2021). To be sure, each of these monographs and collections contributes original insight to the textual histories of Shakespeare. But many also focus explicitly on Shakespeare in order to legitimize and make commercially viable (in a modern academic publishing context) scholarship that discusses textual phenomena that were not necessarily exclusive to Shakespeare. These studies forge new histories of the book, textual production, editorial practices and play manuscripts (of which no ‘complete’ Shakespeare exemplars survive), while consolidating established ones, by reading through ‘Shakespeare’. The ‘ / ’ in the title of this book purposely activates other possibilities: of reading against – as well as obliquely alongside – ‘Shakespeare’.1 Shakespeare / Text rehearses new methods for studying the diversity of textual matter that both manifests ‘Shakespeare’ and fleetingly, but meaningfully, intersects with it. These methods – which variously combine the bibliographical, the biographical, the editorial, the book historical, the literary critical, the digital, the performance-oriented and the political – emerge out of conscious reconsiderations of, even resistance to, entrenched modes of seeing ‘the text’, or ‘text’, that tend to be treated as neutral. The book’s central aim, then, is to set new agendas for the study of ‘the Shakespearean text’ (broadly conceived) in fields such as book history, bibliography, theatre studies, editing, digital humanities and literary criticism. This collection takes as a working premise that what counts as ‘the text’, or ‘text’, varies widely among these fields, and it is, in part, this variation that the chapters gathered here illustrate and interrogate. As such, Shakespeare / Text is as much about specific texts as it is about how to approach the concept of ‘text’ in a variety of critical and practical ways. The chapters each take up a single binary that has long defined how ‘the Shakespearean text’ has been treated in scholarship, editing, performance and criticism. This focus on binaries is designed to hone the governing ‘intersection’ principle of the Arden Shakespeare Intersections series as a whole by setting twenty different perspectives on the Shakespearean ‘text’ where they cross with two seemingly opposed, irreconcilable or intransigent concepts. The paired terms have been pitted against each other (purposely or not) in the past and

Introduction

3

challenging them now carries the potential to transcend long-held ideas about textual matters as well as about matters that rely on the text. Some of the binaries examined in this collection have already been subject to scrutiny. For instance, Tiffany Stern’s work on the documents of early modern performance has eroded the powerful, enduring distinction between ‘text’ and ‘theatre’ by illuminating the implication of text technologies (such as cue scripts) in the theatrical practices of the period.2 Peter Holland and Julie Stone Peters have documented the complex feedback loop between dramatic publication and early modern performance trends.3 W. B. Worthen, too, has demonstrated the fluidity of dramatic authority in between text and theatre, page and stage.4 Miles P. Grier effectively collapses the boundary holding representation and reality apart in early modern theatrical and textual media environments and, in so doing, exposes the racist ideologies embedded in the workings of both publication mediums.5 Print and performance, he argues, both ‘set up a relationship in which blacks have no choice but to enter the public records of archive and collective memory in the conventional forms that white supremacy can imagine for them – the characters of typeface and blackface’.6 Margaret Jane Kidnie has shown how ‘authenticity’ and ‘adaptation’ are not fixed, objective descriptors but rather entirely contingent on ‘the patrolling and policing’ of what counts and does not count as ‘Shakespeare’ in any given time and place.7 To truly understand Shakespeare’s place in a particular culture, we must turn to the liminal spaces between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ (i.e. adapted) Shakespeare where inclusion and exclusion are being negotiated. Where Lukas Erne’s influential scholarship reified a division between the ‘theatrical’ and the ‘literary’ among the books of Shakespeare’s plays, Adam G. Hooks and others have shown that this distinction was a product of the late-seventeenth-century resurgence in neoclassical criticism and that all so-called ‘literary’ textual production was always inherently commercial.8 The New Bibliography and attribution studies, one of its modern inheritors, have consistently sought to identify what is ‘not Shakespeare’ in order to identify what is.9 And the lines that once divided institutional practices are increasingly blurry, too: research emerges out of teaching, for example; rare book conservation is necessitated by exposure to and use by researchers and the public; and ‘PAR’ (performance-as-research/practice-as-research) methods are thriving within theatre history.10 Matthew Kirschenbaum has

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Shakespeare / Text

argued that ‘the digital’ is always material, and historians of reading (William H. Sherman’s Used Books is perhaps the most obvious example, but see also Bruce Smith’s Phenomenal Shakespeare) have highlighted how ‘material texts’ are always digital ( F ).11 Shakespeare / Text proposes that what we take to be ‘Shakespeare’ (and/ or how ‘Shakespeare’ came to be) changes radically when the apparently dichotomous ways of making sense of ‘the text’, or ‘text’ – however comfortable and familiar they may seem and perhaps especially because they feel comfortable and familiar – break down and, in some cases, are revealed to be mutually informing or constitutive or otherwise implicated. Each chapter demonstrates the payoff of challenging received wisdom and carves out a new avenue for future scholarship. * Since it entered the textual record almost a millennium ago, the symbol we now call a ‘slash’ ( / ) has morphed into a powerful, pliant glyph. While initially it pried open space between words to accommodate the momentary silence of a breathy pause (in the same way a comma after a dependent clause does today, for instance), the slash has come to instantiate a range of possible relationships between the words and phrases it intersects. It can join them. It can divide them. It can revise a configuration between them. It can clear the way for new associations. It can allow for a dynamic linkage rather than a fixed one. The ‘ / ’ is compelling because, unlike conjunctive glyphs like the ampersand (&), which connects, and even the em dash ( — ), which signals elaboration, and unlike standalone conjunctions such as ‘and’ and ‘or’, the ambivalence of the slash creates space for re-evaluation and for displacing patterns of association – power structures – that control how the evidence should and can be interpreted. The slash is said to have emerged in twelfth-century Italy when the dictaminist Boncompagno da Signa developed a two-mark system of punctuation: a suspensivus to mark a short pause; and a planus to mark a terminal pause.12 This final pause, or stop, was noted by a virgula plana ( — ), the precursor to the dash, while the shorter pause was signalled with a virgula sursum erecta, an ‘upright virgule’ ( / ): a slash. By the fifteenth century, the second of these symbols, known otherwise as the virgula suspensiva, had been

Introduction

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widely adopted as a textual proxy for all pauses except the one that ended a sentence, displacing the more complex system of points deriving from Aristophanes’ foundational distinctions to note pauses of varying lengths.13 In premodern manuscript convention, then, the virgula suspensiva mediated the pause, the breath, that held two utterances apart from each other. At the same time, it was not strong enough to divide them definitively (the virgula plana served that function), nor to specify the nature of the connection between them. In its poetic usage, the slanted mid-line virgule invited readers to register the sameness, relatedness, difference and/or mutual implication of the textual units it helped to create. The glyph was used specifically to isolate the half-lines that characterized poetic form in English alliterative poetry and also famously appears throughout the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales to articulate verse structure.14 In England, the slanted virgule made its way into print, but only briefly, as the comma quickly assumed the role of indicating short, non-terminal pauses. Like other glyphs (such as the pilcrow [ ¶ ]) that eventually fell away once their instructional value for reading was no longer needed, the slanted virgule seems to have served a skeuomorphic function in printed texts of many genres.15 In other words, this mark eased readers who were accustomed to manuscript conventions into reading texts that had been produced using moveable type. It registers pauses in some early verse interludes, dialogues and ballads, as well as in editions of Chaucer printed by William Caxton and Richard Pynson in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.16 But by the 1540s or so, it disappears from such books and is rarely found in printed material of the later 1600s. The slash’s fading efficacy is evident in the fact that ‘ / ’ does not seem to come standard in the typefaces advertised on sixteenthcentury type specimen sheets.17 Furthermore, the mark does not show up in the printer’s case illustration in Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683), the earliest English printing manual, nor is it listed in the type-case inventory in John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1755).18 The slash is most often used today in the English vernacular as a way of conjoining two words/concepts. It can serve a connective purpose and/ or a disjunctive one, depending on the context. In other words, it reads as shorthand for and (suggesting a link between the two terms it intersects) and for or (where the terms it intersects either read as alternatives or present as

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mutually exclusive). It can also mean and/or, as in the formulation and/or.19 Because of this indeterminacy, it always simulates a pause. It asks us to engage, to figure out what it means, to actively think/rethink the association between the words and phrases on either side and even assess their adequacy for the context.20 For instance, if I told you that I had a love/hate relationship with Shakespeare, I could be saying that I love Shakespeare and hate Shakespeare at the same time. Or I could be saying that my feelings towards Shakespeare fluctuate between love and hate. ‘Love’ and ‘hate’ are alternatives at the same time as they delimit a range of emotions, meaning that the slash could stand for either and or and/or. Regardless, my use of this apparent binary to describe my emotional response to Shakespeare compels you to actively consider what each term means; how the two terms relate to each other; and how they (together) illuminate how I relate to Shakespeare. The way we read a slash can also change significantly over time, as in the case of he/she, him/her, his/hers. Hypothetically, I might have a student tell me that he/she is inspired by a certain passage in the play we are reading in class, or that he/she finds a certain passage difficult to understand. The slash in the colloquial ‘he/she’ formulation is disjunctive: it implies that my student either identifies as ‘he’ or ‘she’. Dating to the 1960s, this formulation was intended to signal gender inclusivity in response to the traditional use of masculine pronouns to refer to both men and women in legal documents and elsewhere. Of course, ‘he/she’, where the slash means or (he or she), is also exclusive in its failure to recognize that my student may identify as non-binary or gender fluid, that is, as neither ‘he’ nor ‘she’, or perhaps as both. In this case, pausing to grapple with the grammatical and conceptual work of the slash reveals that the binary, as commonly received, is inadequate. The chapters that follow are designed to make us pause in the space created by the slash: to reimagine past configurations in ways that recognize the complexities of present knowledge and to dwell in the potential of new configurations that do better justice to the materials at hand. Each contributor understands the slash, whether implicitly or explicitly, to be a substantive (intrinsic), rather than accidental (extrinsic), feature of the binary their chapter takes up. In some cases, the ‘ / ’ in chapter titles replaces an ‘&’ that has long been used to convey a stable relationship between the two terms, thereby destabilizing that relationship. In other cases, it cuts

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through conceptual barriers that have been keeping two notions, processes, descriptors, etc., distinct from each other in order to show instead their deep and mutual entanglement. This critical move recalls the use of the slash in ‘slash fiction’, a genre of fan fiction where two characters who are friends in the original text (say, Romeo & Mercutio) are rewritten to be in a much more intimate (read: usually sexual) relationship (Romeo / Mercutio).21 The slash displaces the ampersand to signal a differently complex, perhaps even volatile, intertwining that exceeds the platonic. Most broadly and urgently, the slash creates the very conditions by which connections that the broader fields of Shakespeare studies and textual studies (alone or together) have consistently resisted, ignored or failed to make – such as that between Shakespeareinflected book history and race – can be forged, explored, maintained and reconfigured.22 * Persistent in its visual presence throughout the collection, the slash functions both as a premise for and a sign of methodological inspiration. The chapters that follow are proof-of-concept pieces. They shift what counts as ‘text’ in Shakespeare studies. They rethink patterns of influence, both historical and scholarly. They challenge periodization boundaries and language barriers. They reveal assumptions and biases hard-baked into early modern texts and critical approaches to them. They demonstrate the profit of de-centring Shakespeare, even for the study of Shakespeare. They range across genres and media. Ultimately, they gift us with new language, methods and viewpoints that work with/against the sprawling, messy, infuriating and inspiring textual matter that constitutes ‘Shakespeare’. The twenty chapters are loosely organized into four sections: ‘Inclusive / exclusive’; ‘Before / after’; ‘Authorized / unauthorized’; and ‘Present / absent’. Like the chapters’ more focused binaries, these broader pairings have informed how texts by, about and proximate to ‘Shakespeare’ have been studied, written about, edited, performed and taught. Within each section, chapters offer new, sometimes unexpected, perspectives on these broader frameworks, but (in the spirit of the slash) they sometimes also resonate across the boundaries suggested by this organizational schema. Wherever possible, contributors have made these connections explicit in the notes.

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The chapters in the first section – ‘Inclusive / exclusive’ – all address questions of access. What are we trying to access by studying the texts in Shakespeare’s orbit? Who has access? Who grants access? How do the texts themselves negotiate readerly access to ‘Shakespeare’? What kinds of texts are desirable, and which are rejected? All five chapters recognize that the answers to these questions change with time and circumstances, and each is careful to account for the historical particularities of the texts at hand. B. K. Adams puts more than two decades of scholarship by Kim F. Hall and other scholars of early modern race into conversation with the persistent New Bibliographic use of the terms ‘fair’ and ‘foul’ to describe the two categories of manuscripts thought to lie behind extant printed playtexts. Adams draws a parallel between the lexicons used to encode racist hierarchies in early modern poetry, and W. W. Greg’s adoption of ‘foul’ and ‘fair’ to distinguish between, on the one hand, handwritten texts that document a playwright’s draft (sometimes incomplete and full of unseemly inky ‘blots’) and, on the other, the unsubstantiated ideal of polished scribal manuscripts that were perfect (i.e. complete) and supposedly free from error. While recent textual scholarship has illustrated the speciousness of the distinction between ‘foul papers’ and ‘fair copies’, Adams is most interested in how this lexicon was used to construct an image of Shakespeare, himself, as ‘fair’ over the course of his career and the efforts of the New Bibliographers in the early twentieth century to preserve this vision – of Shakespeare as ‘fair’, as white, as pure – in spite of a textual record defined by its gaps, blots, errors and vagaries of transmission. Adams concludes with a call to embrace new voices within the field book history, noting how the New Bibliographers’ narrative of turning ‘foul’ to ‘fair’ (and staunchly defending the ‘fair’) is inextricably linked to early modern constructions of race that endure in the insidious rhetoric of white supremacy. Ultimately, who gets to fill in the gaps, to analyse the blots, to tell the story of the Shakespearean text matters. In rethinking the dynamic between ‘text’ and ‘paratext’ in early modern playbooks, Hannah August argues for a revised understanding of paratext as a textual access point that not only guided early readers’ receptions of the text but also ‘may have helped to secure the purchase of the book’ of which both text and paratext were a part. August focuses on the ‘currency’ of Shakespeare’s name on playbook title pages, but she moves beyond Lukas Erne’s baseline

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contention that, borrowing the words of Othello publisher Thomas Walkley, ‘the Authors name is sufficient to vent his worke’. August identifies a more specific pattern in how Shakespeare’s name was used on some pre-1642 quarto title pages but not others: whenever Shakespeare’s name appeared on a playbook title page without a description of the play’s genre, the playtext inside was almost always a comedy, or featured significant comic content. In this way, Shakespeare’s name pulled double duty as an authorship inscription and a generic marker. August suggests that this strong association of Shakespeare’s name with comedy is part of a larger recognition of Shakespeare’s comic prowess, which is evident in contemporary commentary about Shakespeare that focuses heavily on comedy and in the sequencing of the comedies first in the 1623 First Folio. August teaches us to read Shakespeare’s name as a prospective playbook buyer would have read it: as inclusive of the genre of the text in hand and as a horizon of expectations for future reading. Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich’s chapter complicates notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’, especially as these terms relate to who could access particular kinds of drama and in what form. She takes up the textual remains of three contemporary performances: the quarto of Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei, published in 1606; the manuscript of a masque by John Marson performed at the Countess of Huntingdon’s Ashby estate in honour of her mother’s visit; and a wedding ‘Maske’ embedded in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, published for the first time in 1619. Kolkovich distinguishes between the exclusivity of the masque genre as a performance event and the wider access to a version of the event granted by textual circulation and potential future performance. In particular, she argues that the masque-within-the-play in The Maid’s Tragedy is troublingly ambiguous about its status as a celebratory event when exposed to readerly scrutiny in print. While the masque is published (i.e. made public) in both performance and print, its equivocal language actually obscures vital truths, especially about sexual and political consent. Similarly, the masques in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, texts that are far more reticent about performance details, exist on a continuum of public and private publication. Even though Prospero controls ‘the display’ of the masque to an exclusive audience, the private celebration cannot last. Kolkovich argues that recognizing how texts mediate masques as performance events, and how those events arbitrate access to private occasions, muddies any clear notion

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of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and gives way instead to a ‘range of publicness’ that is intimately linked to the negotiation of social and political power. Régis Augustus Bars Closel’s chapter plays with the distinction between ‘edition’ and ‘translation’ as he considers the short but rich history – and the future – of translating Shakespeare’s plays from one vernacular (English) into another (Brazilian Portuguese). Closel is concerned not only with how translators transform the playtext into a new language but also with the implications of using a single modern English edition as the base text for a translation. He contends that this practice, which has been typical of Brazilian Portuguese translations of early modern plays until very recently, freezes the play in a particular critical moment, as the preoccupations of the English editor seep into the Brazilian Portuguese translator’s handling of the text. For the play’s new readers (who often do not have a choice of editions), this forecloses access to important textual histories and the variety of critical approaches that Closel sees as vital to the identity of early modern drama. Closel draws on his own experience as a translator-editor of plays ‘that have remained in the ambiguous position of outsiders/insiders in the Shakespeare canon’ – Arden of Faversham and Sir Thomas More – to argue for a practice known as ‘prismatic translation’. This practice replaces the ‘one-to-one textual relationship between words in one source edition and in the translated text’ by carefully considering the textual histories and material features of early and subsequent editions. This approach, Closel explains, gives a whole new population of readers access to an edition in their own vernacular that also makes available the textual instability and interpretive flexibility characteristic of plays from the period. For him, then, the vernacular to be ‘translated’ into a new edition is not just linguistic, but also deeply textual. Aleida Auld comes at the question of textual access via the long-standing distinction between ‘canon’ and ‘apocrypha’. She identifies the early eighteenth century (rather than the false attributions to Shakespeare on early quarto title pages or the addition of seven plays to the second issue of the Third Folio in 1664) as a crucial moment in the formation of Shakespeare’s canon. She also shows how questions about what to include and exclude from Shakespeare’s Works centred not on the plays but rather on the poems in varying configurations. In a period where Works was synonymous with canon, the ways in which early-eighteenth-century editors and publishers created

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flexible combinations of books, together, suggest a notion of ‘canon’ in flux. Auld identifies three different kinds of canon formation (‘elective’, ‘integrated’ and ‘selective’) in textual treatments of the poems. In the ‘elective’ canon, the poems were published in a separate volume that readers could add to a multivolume edition of the plays. There was also an early editorial desire for an ‘integrated’ canon, where the poems were de facto part of The Works. Auld furthermore identifies a ‘selective’ approach to ‘Shakespearean’ writings in Charles Gildon’s citation of the plays but not the poems in his The Complete Art of Poetry (1718) and his ‘Shakepeariana’, despite his having edited the poems in 1714. Auld concludes by noting a turn in recent modern editions towards ‘inclusive, expansive and multiple’ canons, not to mention reader-determined ones, rather than the kind ‘exclusive and conclusive’ idea of works-as-plays that Gildon’s exclusion of the poems established. The second section – ‘Before / after’ – picks up one of the concerns raised in Adams’s discussion of ‘fair copies’ and ‘foul papers’, namely the desire to discover what kinds of manuscripts lie behind, or prior to, the printed texts that survive to us. Paul Werstine, Tiffany Stern and others have explained in painstaking detail just how knotty, even impossible, such inquiries can be, given the complex textual ecosystems of the playhouses, the reality of revision within playing companies’ repertories, and how little we actually know about how publishers acquired dramatic copy for publication. All the chapters in this section challenge the idea that patterns of textual influence are teleological. In destabilizing the drive to establish neat chronologies, they offer models for thinking about the relationships among texts – and sites of textual transmission – as elliptical and recursive. Andy Kesson’s meditation on ‘now’ and ‘then’ lays bare the incongruity of applying the boundaries of monarchical reigns to periodize theatrical trends. Kesson also insists that the outsized focus on Shakespeare’s career has significantly narrowed scholarly emphasis on theatrical activity to the more or less two decades when Shakespeare was on the scene. The fact that the print publication of professional plays only really took off in the early 1590s, a moment that aligns with the start of Shakespeare’s success as a playwright, has reinforced the scholarly tendency to see everything before this time as a ‘then’ – a precursor to the time that really matters. Kesson shows slippages in the way that temporal descriptors, especially ‘Elizabethan’ and ‘Jacobean’,

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are applied to describe plays of the period, arguing that this fungibility (i.e. describing a play as ‘Jacobean’ when it was written during Elizabeth’s reign and vice versa) is symptomatic of the emphasis on Shakespearean chronology. Kesson urges us to treat ‘now’ and ‘then’ as deictic markers of relative time, that is, to recognize that the habit of positioning everything ‘before’ and ‘after’ Shakespeare (shorthand here for a fixed, narrow period in time) comes at the expense of a deeper, richer understanding of the early modern theatrical landscape of which Shakespeare was just one part. Megan Heffernan is also interested in the distortion caused by isolating Shakespeare, particularly the way that the early books of Shakespeare’s lyric poetry have skewed our view of poetry compilations in the period. She reevaluates the persistent association of the terms ‘miscellany’ and ‘sequence’ with, respectively, non-authorial disorder (represented by The Passionate Pilgrim [1599]) and authorial order (represented by Shakes-peares Sonnets [1609]), especially in the editorial tradition. Through a close analysis of the page design features of sonnet books published between the 1557 debut of Richard Tottel’s hugely popular Songes and Sonettes and the publication of Shake-speares Sonnets by Thomas Thorpe a half-century later, Heffernan tracks how compilers of print and manuscript poetry experimented with textual arrangement in ways that ‘hold… traces of the multiple potential forms compiled work might take’. Heffernan argues for a more precise chronology, where design revisions to Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella in 1598 can be seen to influence the design of sonnet collections moving forward. The numbering of the poems in Shake-speares Sonnets, she suggests, adopts a form of textual arrangement initially meant to emphasize the iterability of the lyric form. Because the edition also prints the sonnets in a continuous run (rather than printing a sonnet per page as in most sonnet books of the 1590s), Shakespeare’s sonnets effectively read less like iterable wholes and more like smaller parts of a larger whole: a sequence. It was this confluence of design features which made way for the persistent description of the 154 lyrics as a sequence and thus a narrative reflection of Shakespeare’s ‘inner life’ that endures to the present. Dianne Mitchell’s chapter shows how the concepts ‘original’ and ‘copy’ collapse on each other in the context of the sonnets. Like Heffernan, she both puts pressure on the idea that the sonnets divulge something of Shakespeare’s

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biography (here, about the particularity of the poems’ male addressee) and explores the concept of iterability in relation to the 1609 Sonnets. The mode of reading the relationship between speaker and addressee she proposes is one that purposely distances the beloved ‘Friend’ from the technology of print and resituates him in the world of manuscript lyric compilations. By reading the lexicons of reproduction and exceptionality in key Shakespeare sonnets alongside scribal copies of other lyrics, some of which are repurposed to commemorate different men, Mitchell proposes that the sonnets are not actually celebrating the Friend’s originality at all. Rather, they tender the notion that ‘what really sets a good friend apart is his capacity to be, not an “original”, but rather a copy of a copy of a copy’. Mitchell calls this privileging of ‘reinscription over source’ a ‘profound act of love’ for the way it characterizes the Friend as one who can recall ‘all those friends’ of the past, present and still to be made. Time works recursively here, as the Friend’s identity is constructed through a looping back to copies already inscribed and forward to the potential of future textual iterations. Sujata Iyengar turns to the genre of twentieth-century artists’ books to trouble the boundary between ‘source’ and ‘adaptation’, which (like ‘original’ and ‘copy’) are typically held apart by chronology. She uses a collaborative book object by Pablo Picasso and poet Louis Aragon called ShakespeareAragon-Picasso (1965) as a case study to demonstrate the way that the condition of the object’s ‘bookness’ blurs the distinction between maker and reader, and between an original (Shakespeare) and a derivative piece of art (Picasso-Aragon). This codex, as Iyengar shows, is a diachronic collaboration, one that transcends a single medium and figures Picasso and Aragon as both makers and readers. Picasso’s drawings-turned-lithographs of the gravediggers and Hamlet in combination with portraits of Shakespeare himself intersect, interrupt and otherwise interact with Aragon’s text. Iyengar notes that Picasso’s choice of lithography (which requires the treatment of the substrate to repel ink except where it is required) results in ‘“multiple states” of a printing’ across copies of such a limited edition and, as such, captures the simultaneously urgent and imperceptible passage of time – never quite before and never quite after. The codex is both an adaptation of the Shakespearean text and, in depicting Shakespeare, a source. Picasso is both artist and viewer, textmaker and reader, individual artist and synchronic/diachronic collaborator.

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The Shakespeare-Picasso-Aragon codex, as its title suggests, is an ‘ensemble work’ where the temporality of inspiration and (re)creation, as well as that of inscription and reading, are elliptical. ‘Readers’, Iyengar concludes, are ‘labourers in the workshop, making art together’. Margaret Jane Kidnie’s chapter on ‘life’ and ‘afterlife’ disturbs the notion of before and after by proposing a new theory to explain the substantial differences between the 1604–5 (Q2) and 1623 (F) texts of Hamlet. The manuscript copy behind Q2 was, for a long time, seen to predate the manuscript copy used for F. In this postulation, Q2-only passages were removed, perhaps for reasons of theatrical expediency, and those omissions were ultimately reflected in the copy behind F. As for the three passages present in F but not Q2, two explanations have been proposed: these passages were cancelled in the manuscript behind Q2, or they were added subsequently by Shakespeare, the ‘revising author’. This last explanation, in particular, has helped to ossify a distinction between pre-theatrical manuscripts (‘life’) written for performance and post-theatrical manuscripts (‘afterlife’) worked up for print, or indeed for stage revival. It is a distinction that Kidnie’s chapter fundamentally destabilizes. She suggests that Q2 and F represent different versions of the play, but that the presence of some passages in one but not in the other could be a sign of provisional or occasional cancellation, not definitive subtraction or addition. This would have meant that passages that were provisionally cut for ‘particular theatrical purposes’ could be later restored, ‘whether in performance or print or both’. This suggests that the old could be made new, making it impossible to define Q2 or F as either the play’s ‘life’ or its ‘afterlife’. Chapters in the third section – ‘Authorized / unauthorized’ – confront theatrical, textual and bibliographic claims for textual legitimacy (broadly speaking) and what ‘counts’ as Shakespeare (more specifically). They illustrate how textual authority is reconfigured through physical and rhetorical interventions. Holger Schott Syme’s chapter on ‘book’ and ‘theatre’ is premised on the ‘complicated relationship’ between the two media. Scripted theatre cannot exist without some notion of the book. And yet, whether in the early modern playhouse or the modern rehearsal room, theatre has a ‘destructive attitude’ towards the books of plays: these objects are quite literally pulled apart, reordered, cut, supplemented and disaggregated to fuel theatrical performance.

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The text of the play, sometimes made up of different discrete documents and always perforated by conceptual gaps that performance promises to fill out, can never quite be the thing itself. But Syme inverts the notion that the theatre makes plays whole only by ‘consuming’ texts through performance. He demonstrates how theatre also creates new texts, a process that he calls ‘bibliogonic generation’. Syme focuses specifically on David Garrick’s controversial alterations of Hamlet to illustrate that the productive energies of book and theatre worked in both directions. Garrick emended lines and rewrote passages by hand, while quite literally cutting and pasting together various eighteenth-century editions of the play, including one that advertised itself as the text of the play as he had staged it. The result was a singular physical book that instantiated ‘his’ Hamlet. And while publishers vied to get their hands on it, this book object remained closely guarded at Drury Lane. Syme draws on this tension between book trade and theatrical production to make an important distinction between theatrical books and readerly books of plays. While ‘the theatre made … books as well as performances out of books’, the much-desired transformation of Garrick’s theatrical book into a reading text risked stripping the book of a bookish theatrical grammar. The texture of its paste-ins and the juxtaposition of Garrick’s scribal ink on the page alongside the printed text would have been lost in transmission. For Syme, it is not so much that the commodified readerly version of the performance text would have been an emaciated surrogate of the theatrical event but rather that it would have stripped away the bookishness of the book made by – and that was made to make – performance. Continuing the focus on theatre’s relationship to text, Katherine Steele Brokaw argues that the tension between ‘text-based’ and ‘concept-driven’ productions endemic to twentieth-century theatre criticism is not only an untenable distinction but has also distracted from the powerful ‘affective and social work’ that Shakespearean performance has done – and can do. She proposes a move away from assessing productions in terms of ‘textual fidelity’ (where the production is authorized by ‘mining’ the text) or ‘conceptual audacity’ (where the production is unauthorized because it obscures the text by imposing something inauthentic on top of it). Instead, she encourages an understanding of the Shakespearean text as a renewable resource, one that generates something newly resonant from something old and is itself

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regenerative. A production that borrows, no matter how selectively, from the playtext to suit a present purpose does not destroy the text. Instead, it grows the play in new, and unexpected, directions. Drawing from her own experience in the world of politically minded community theatre, Brokaw illustrates this generative effect in two 2019 productions of As You Like It, one produced by the National Theatre’s Public Acts project in Hornchurch, UK, and one staged by Brokaw’s own Shakespeare in Yosemite project in Yosemite National Park, USA. Both made performance context an indelible feature of the production. In Brokaw’s words, they were ‘root[ed] … in the time and place of performance’ with the hope of seeding visions for a more just and habitable world. Rebecca L. Fall moves us into the world of Mary Wroth’s Urania, where speech dismissed as ‘nonsense’ is as socially productive as (and indeed perhaps more than) speech assumed to make ‘sense’. Fall focuses on the troubled mad queen Antissia, whose jealous rages, ‘poeticall furies’, unbridled singing and ‘fustian poetry’ are consistently coded as nonsensical expressions even as they make semantic sense. Attempts to neutralize and even cure Antissia’s nonsensical discourse repeatedly fail, and Fall reads this failure, which persists across the printed edition of Urania, Part 1, and its manuscript continuation, as conditional for the perpetuation of the fictional social order and of narrative, Wroth’s included. ‘What we mark as nonsense’, Fall concludes, ‘is a building block of community because it offers language to discipline and a reason to keep talking’. Fall shows this dynamic – the ‘denaturalization of the perceived sense–nonsense binary’ – at work in Shakespeare, as well, especially in punning banter between fools and their interlocutors. These exchanges, such as the one between Viola and Feste in Twelfth Night where the former asks the fool if he ‘lives by his tabor’ – ‘veer … toward the edge of senselessness’ before doubling back towards sense. Fools toy with divorcing words from their meanings but always, in the end, make sense of their nonsense. Adam G. Hooks explores the fine line between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in his account of bibliographic method over the past two centuries. Some of the most hardened bibliographic facts, he shows, are, in fact, propped up by speculation, forgery and stories spun to fill holes and explain away interpretive difficulties associated with the messy textual transmission of Shakespearean texts. Hooks tells the story of how an undated fragment of a previously unknown early edition of The Passionate Pilgrim acquired by the Folger Shakespeare Library

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in the early twentieth century came to be designated as the first edition. He also recounts how John Payne Collier’s nineteenth-century forgeries in early modern documents were used to support his own editorial decisions, many of which remained editorial orthodoxy for years after. Hooks advocates for greater awareness of the way that fiction operates in bibliographic scholarship, not to eradicate it but to recognize it as a necessary function of working with materials that are, by their nature, full of mystery. Paul Salzman directs our attention to another narrative of nineteenthcentury textual unmaking and remaking in his chapter on ‘part’ and ‘whole’: the editor and rare-book dealer John Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps’s astounding effort to compile scrapbooks of Shakespeareana that could support the preparation of his Shakespeare edition. Halliwell-Phillipps cut passages relevant to Shakespeare out of early modern books that he had acquired through his involvement in the rare book trade. These included passages from early Shakespeare editions and material from Shakespeare’s source texts along with other textual matter that put Shakespeare’s writing in context. He then recombined these parts by pasting them into a series of blank books, each specific to a single work. These scrapbooks, Salzman suggests, were designed to lend authority to Halliwell-Phillipps’s editorial enterprise. Comprised of textual ‘parts/shreds/patches’, each scrapbook volume reads as a whole Shakespearean archive-in-miniature. Halliwell-Phillipps’ took apart Shakespearean texts to make a new ‘whole Shakespeare’, or at least the illusion of one. The chapters in the final section – ‘Present / absent’ – all teach us to look and listen again – to question our assumptions about what counts as textual matter, as well as the ways our biases affect (and effect) what matters, in methods of inhabiting, studying, describing and analysing what can only be described as an imperfect textual record. Instead of trying to reconstruct what does not survive to us, these chapters urge us towards new modes of experiencing what is there. What is invisible, not to mention what is conspicuously missing from discourse about the Shakespearean text, can be ever present if we change our ways of reading and listening to text. Miles P. Grier takes the ambiguous quality of Aaron’s relationship with Tamora in Titus Andronicus – and a manifestation of the supposed offspring of that relationship as a prop on stage – as the focus of his chapter on ‘black’ and ‘white’. He locates the confusion surrounding this relationship in the

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‘vexed’ dynamic between the early modern stage and its black characters, a context that editors and scholars rarely reference in their attempts to elucidate the origins and implications of the term ‘moor’. Grier suggests that the frequent figuration of sex in early modern plays as the imprinting of black ink on white paper is made literal in performance. Grier notes that interracial coupling in early modern plays is not presumed to lead to the birth a human child. Instead, texts (letters, scrolls, etc.) serve as proxies for the issue of such encounters. Even in Titus, where a ‘blackamoore childe’ (the apparent issue of Tamora and Aaron’s affair) is said to be brought onstage, Grier makes the case that the conventional use of a bundle of rags (the same material used to make paper) as a stage property to simulate the presence of the child, when the dialogue suggests that no one, not even Aaron, actually sees the baby, draws attention to what Grier calls the ‘stigma of print’ – the inability of erasing black ink (figured as a stain) from white paper. Grier argues that there is actually no child in the play, only textual materials that publish the supposed transgression: first, ‘a fatal plotted scroll’ that Aaron, in one of his first acts of the play, hands to Tamora and which prefigures the act of (textual) reproduction, or imprinting, in narrative form; and secondly, the rag-baby, which Marcus holds up at the end of the play to signal the indelibility of Aaron’s identity – a refusal to disaggregate immoral behaviour, political or sexual, from Aaron’s blackness. The vitality of early modern performance for contextualizing textual confusion recurs in Scott A. Trudell’s chapter on ‘extant’ and ‘ephemeral’, in which he proposes a new way through the methodological challenge of retrieving songs from surviving playbooks. Songs (like the larger performances they featured in) are ephemeral in the sense that they are impermanent. Song lyrics are also frequently missing from printed plays since the text of lyrics often circulated separately. While this may suggest that songs are lost, Trudell argues that this is not so. ‘What is nonextant’, he claims, ‘should not be confused with what has been lost’. Via short case studies of songs in Othello, As You Like It and Twelfth Night and a sustained analysis of the apparently spoken-notsung funeral dirge in Cymbeline, Trudell demonstrates the inadequacy of the extant / ephemeral binary by offering a third term, ‘extempore’, as a more accurate way of describing the present-absence and absent-presence of early modern theatrical songs in printed plays. In the early modern repertory, songs were

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flexible – if ‘unwieldy’ – elements of performance, requiring a particular set of skills and thus designed to be reworked based on the availability of actors to sing them. Trudell points out that the gaps songs leave in printed texts mediate this flexibility for readers, allowing them to read for performance effect rather than exclusively for content. Misha Teramura reconsiders textual loss on a sliding scale in his study of what is ‘lost’ and ‘found’. He asserts that applying such stark labels to plays – they are either ‘lost’ or they survive (i.e. they are able to be ‘found’ in some material form) side-steps the variety of evidence about early modern drama. Given the vagaries of textual transmission and the bi-modality of drama, most plays that survive in some kind of script are never fully present anyway. By the same token, plays that do not survive in script form are not entirely gone. Teramura considers the ‘lost’ play Love’s Labour’s Won; the ‘lost’ first edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost; and the ‘lacunose’ nature of surviving playtexts (where the contingencies of textual transmission and textual variance produce gaps) to show that all of Shakespeare’s plays ‘can be located somewhere on the spectrum of loss and survival’. He proposes that we should broaden our definition of what it means for a play to survive, that is, what it means to find a play given that there is no such thing as ‘pure textual presence’. A play may be found when its title turns up listed in a scribal bookseller’s catalogue once used as waste paper in a subsequent binding (as was Love’s Labour’s Won), for example. It may be found in the form of a cue script, or a backstage plot, or a passing reference in a text not directly related to the theatre at all. In order to do textual scholarship around early modern plays, and around Shakespeare, we need to practice what Teramura calls ‘the art of finding’, a process that laments not loss but rather seeks plays among an untold multiplicity of texts. Emma Depledge’s study of ‘paper’ and ‘ink’ is likewise concerned with the nature of as yet unlooked-for evidence. In particular, she discusses developing methods in bibliography that use ghostly traces of ink and the seemingly blank spaces on the pages of early modern books to re-evaluate longstanding narratives about early modern textual production and circulation. Depledge surveys instances in Shakespeare’s plays and poems where ink and paper are evoked figuratively ‘to create tension, arouse suspicion and index characters’ behaviour as moral or immoral’. The use of ink-and-paper props in performance also raises concern over the legitimacy and/or interpretability of

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handwritten documents. In the forms of bibliographic analysis that she surveys in the second half of the chapter, Depledge notes scholarly suspicion of some evidence that is immediately visible to the human eye. She calls attention to the payoff of heeding almost invisible textual idiosyncrasies such as ‘ghost’ images of title pages on the blanks of a quarto from another book it used to be bound with; pen facsimiles that either replace missing text or doctors text already there; scribal annotations washed from the margins but still recoverable through the use of light and digital image manipulation; and the watermarks in the paper that make up these books that might divulge information about dating. Both within Shakespeare’s own writing and on the pages of the books that transmit that writing, ink and paper materialize and obscure truths. In the book’s final chapter, Zachary Lesser and Whitney Trettien remind us that reading ‘digital’ texts requires a deep knowledge of ‘material’ ones. Increasing numbers of special collections libraries are digitizing their holdings for remote access, and more and more researchers are turning to digital facsimiles – especially of Shakespeare – for copy-specific research. In light of this, Lesser and Trettien caution that digital images can be deceiving due to a number of factors: image quality, interface design, shifting practices of digitizing book objects and/or incongruities between metadata and the specific copy shown in the photograph. The Shakespearean text at the centre of their inquiry is a dubious ‘William Shakespeare’ signature on the title page of one Folger Shakespeare Library copy of Archaionomia (1568). The digital image on the Folger’s LUNA digital image platform seems to suggest some kind of restoration to the title page around the signature in the top right corner. But Lesser and Trettien show that this conclusion is incorrect and that the illusion of conservation is a symptom of the way the title page was photographed. Without metadata to explain that the handling of the book’s first four pages during the imaging process differed from the way the rest of the book was eventually photographed, Lesser and Trettien needed to mobilize their bibliographic expertise to develop alternative material explanations for the apparent ‘repair’ around the signature. Due to financial and time constraints, overhauling existing cataloguing and digitizing infrastructures to harmonize metadata with the images they describe is not realistic in the near term. Instead, Lesser and Trettien propose a method of ‘media archaeology’ that works between digital facsimile and material book ‘to bring to the surface

Introduction

21

how hardware, software and industry standards condition the concept of the book and its mediations over time’. * The chapters in this collection were commissioned several years ago, in what feels like a very different time. In their descriptions of new methods, many contributors assume the possibility of access to physical collections, for example. And yet, most of these chapters were also written partly, or in full, with resources that could be mustered at home. I also write these particular words from my home in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, seven months after stay-at-home orders were first issued across America. University classes quickly shifted to remote instruction, libraries shut their doors, theatres went dark and academic conferences moved online. Although some institutions have partially reopened, the relationship between ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘text’ has changed in unexpected ways as we figure out new strategies for conducting our research, performing early modern plays and teaching in the fields of textual studies, via screens. We could add face-to-face / remote or synchronous / asynchronous or screen / stage to a developing list of binaries that are redefining how we encounter, read, use, teach, perform and study the Shakespearean text. Furthermore, the ripple effect of political action that spread across US cities and towns in response to police brutality against Black Americans this past summer has brought Shakespeare studies to a long overdue moment of reckoning. Scholars posting with the #ShakeRace and #raceB4race Twitter hashtags, as well as those publishing in more traditional venues and speaking at virtual events, have spotlighted deeply engrained biases in the broader field, as well as subfields like early modern book history, editing and bibliography that, in their silences, have assumed a false guise of political detachment. Thanks to constructive critique at a key moment in the formation of this collection, the volume includes chapters that model what it looks like when early modern critical race scholars tell histories of the material text.23 In the end, this gathering of scholarship is a product of a deeply unsettled moment – socially, politically and in terms of scholarly activity. However, it is (and has always been) designed to read as a set of beginnings. Together, the work in this volume demonstrates the potential of cutting through, of

Shakespeare / Text

22

connecting, of breaking apart, of reconfiguring and of reconsidering what we think we know about the Shakespearean text, as well as how we have come to know it and what it means to know it in the first place. The ambivalent slash permits us to inhabit this space of interpretive uncertainty – and multiplicity – as new futures of Shakespeare / text come into view.

Notes 1 Thank you to Megan Heffernan for this observation. 2 Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Stern, ed., Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 3 Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4 See especially W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 5 Miles P. Grier, ‘Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination’, in Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (London: Routledge, 2015), 193–220. 6 Ibid., 212. 7 Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘Where is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation’, in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 117; and see also Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2009), esp. 31. 8 Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Adam G. Hooks, Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). See also Jeffrey Todd Knight, ‘Economies of Scale: Shakespeare and Book History’, Literature Compass 14, no. 6 (2017): [n.p.]. 9 See, for instance, recent efforts to parcel out parts of the Henry the Sixth plays to Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and others in Gabriel Egan et al., ‘Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays by Word Adjacency’, Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2016): 232–56.

Introduction

23

10 On performance/practice-as-research, see Sarah Dustagheer, Oliver Jones and Eleanor Rycroft, eds, (Re)constructed Spaces for Early Modern Drama: Research in Practice, special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin 35, no. 2 (2017), esp. the introduction. 11 Matthew Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), esp. 25–52; and Bruce Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), esp. 132–75. 12 Keith Houston, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 147–50. My account of the glyph’s history in this ¶ is indebted to Houston. 13 Malcolm B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 307. 14 On the debate about whether these marks specifically articulated mid-line cæsura associated with native English poetry or, rather, were imposed on what some scholars have seen as Chaucer’s adaptation of the French decasyllable, see George B. Killough, ‘Punctuation and Caesura in Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 87–107; and Howell Chickering, ‘Unpunctuating Chaucer’, The Chaucer Review 25, no. 2 (1990): 96–109. 15 On the phenomenon of skeuomorphic glyphs in the first century of moveable type printing in England, see Claire M. L. Bourne, ‘Dramatic Pilcrows’, in Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 32–76. 16 For ballads, see EBBA 26266 to EBBA 26271. For Chaucer, see [Troilus & Cressyde] (Caxton, 1483), STC 5094; The Book of Fame (Caxton, 1483), STC 5087; The Canterbury Tales (Pynson, 1526), STC 5086; and The Canterbury Tales (Pynson, 1532), STC 5068. 17 For instance, see François Guyot, [Type Specimen] (Antwerp?: n.p., 1565?) (STC 7758.3 v.3 no. 6, Folger Shakespeare Library). 18 Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-works. Applied to the Art of Printing, vol. 2 (London: Joseph Moxon, 1683); and John Smith, The Printer’s Grammar (London: John Smith, 1755). 19 This formulation emerged in legal documents, specifically mercantile ones, in the mid-nineteenth century (OED and, conj.1, A1f). It has routinely been called ‘objectionable’ in grammar manuals for producing ambiguity. For instance, see William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, Elements of Style, 3rd edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 46.

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20 See the poetry of Ntozake Shange for an example of the slash being used to cut through and clear space. An account of Shange’s technique is discussed in ‘Her Pen is a Machete: The Art of Ntozake Shange’, The Scholar & Feminist Online 12, no. 3–13, no. 1 (2014), https://vimeo.com/132248175. Thank you to Kim F. Hall for drawing my attention to Shange’s innovative use of this glyph. 21 ‘Slash’, Fanlore, https://fanlore.org/wiki/Slash (last edited 20 January 2020). 22 This observation was inspired by a conversation I had with B. K. Adams about her chapter for this volume. 23 I wish to thank Ambereen Dadabhoy and Kim F. Hall, especially, for their critique and advice.

Bibliography Bourne, Claire M. L. Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Chickering, Howell. ‘Unpunctuating Chaucer’. The Chaucer Review 25, no. 2 (1990): 96–109. Dustagheer, Sarah, Oliver Jones and Eleanor Rycroft, eds. (Re)constructed Spaces for Early Modern Drama: Research in Practice. Special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin 35, no. 2 (2017). Egan, Gabriel, et al. ‘Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays by Word Adjacency’. Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2016): 232–56. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Grier, Miles P. ‘Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination’. In Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political, edited by Vincent L. Wimbush, 193–220. London: Routledge, 2015. Guyot, François. [Type Specimen]. Antwerp?: n.p., 1565? ‘Her Pen is a Machete: The Art of Ntozake Shange’. The Scholar & Feminist Online 12, no. 3–13, no.1 (2014). Available online: https://vimeo.com/132248175. Holland, Peter. The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Hooks, Adam G. Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Houston, Keith. Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.

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Kidnie, Margaret Jane. ‘Where is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation’. In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, 101–20. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2009. Killough, George B. ‘Punctuation and Caesura in Chaucer’. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 87–107. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Knight, Jeffrey Todd. ‘Economies of Scale: Shakespeare and Book History’. Literature Compass 14, no. 6 (2017): [n.p.]. Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-works. Applied to the Art of Printing, vol. 2. London: Joseph Moxon, 1683. Peters, Julie Stone. Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Sherman, William H. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. ‘Slash’. Fanlore. Available online: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Slash (last edited 20 January 2020). Smith, Bruce. Phenomenal Shakespeare. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2007. Smith, John. The Printer’s Grammar. London: John Smith, 1755. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Stern, Tiffany, ed. Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Strunk, Jr., William, and E. B. White. Elements of Style, 3rd edn. New York: Macmillan, 1982. Worthen, W. B. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Worthen, W. B. Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

26

Part One

Inclusive / exclusive

28

1

Fair / foul B. K. Adams

[I]t is unwise to draw a priori conclusions as to the unauthorized nature of whole groups of plays … [E]ach text must be fairly judged on its own evidence, and with an understanding of the typographical ideals and practices of the time. Evelyn May Albright, 19271 When asked to determine the relationship between fair / foul and their relation to the Shakespearean text, I turned to the title of this volume to consider what kinds of connections these sets of terms could have with one another. When I considered how Shakespeare / text and fair / foul operate as discrete binaries, my immediate assumption was that book history and bibliography govern their associations. Regarded in this way (that is, in the context of scholarly tradition), these two sets of terms gesture towards the thorny history of ‘fair’ and ‘foul’ papers (the supposed manuscripts behind the printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays), including the tenuous yet persistent linking of extant non-Shakespearean drama in manuscript to printed versions of Shakespearean drama. This specific narrative of fair / foul originated with W. W. Greg’s ‘discovery’ of foul (‘fowle’) papers in 1925 and was extended by A. W. Pollard’s initial rejection of the findings and J.  Dover Wilson’s subsequent acceptance and promotion of Greg’s theory.2 The fervency of Dover Wilson’s embrace of the theory made it a cornerstone in textual scholarship and editorial practices until fairly recently. But methods that assume ‘foul’ (draft) copy or ‘fair’ (polished) copy behind early editions have come under increasing scrutiny in the work of Paul Werstine and Tiffany

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Stern, among others.3 Though necessary, the discussions about the relative correctness of the terms – particularly with regard to their implementation in theatre history, book history and bibliography – unfortunately crowd out the unquestioned comfort with wider structural inequities in the field that undergird their very ideology and use. Foul papers, at least to me, have come to represent far more than Greg’s notion of, in Werstine’s paraphrase, ‘a copy representing the play more or less as the author intended it to stand, but not itself clear or tidy enough to serve as a prompt-book’.4 The labels ‘fair’ and ‘foul’ epitomize fundamentally different approaches to archive material, the consistent privileging of Shakespeare and a history of codified speculation based on imperfect archival evidence that, while compelling, ultimately overshadowed legitimate push-back by less influential scholars at the time the terms were gaining traction. In order to understand the persistent editorial dependence upon the expression ‘foul papers’ to make claims about textual legitimacy, I examine the histories and intimate connections of the terms fair / foul to each other – and ultimately to Shakespeare / text. I track their analogic reworking over time to show how they are used within book historical and bibliographical contexts to reproduce ideologies of race and gender (often imbricated) in early modern England. The goal here is to question the very assumptions that guide our interactions with early manuscript and printed playbooks and to shift the way we approach the archives that house this material. What’s at stake, then, are the very founding principles of bibliography, as well as fields like book history and critical editing that build from its findings. Indeed, a closer, more critical, examination of the terms ‘fair’ and ‘foul’ stands to illuminate Shakespeare’s cultural ascendancy and positioning as the standard by which so much textual scholarship is measured. I do not reconsider foundational scholarship to erase it; rather, by dismantling (or at least examining) the binaries and paradigms intrinsic to this body of work, I hope that scholars will be able to recognize more readily the political power of the archives as well as some of the inherent unfair structural barriers located in the field. To move forwards as bibliographers and book historians, we must collectively question such terms so that these fields may welcome and include more researchers and theories of textual history.5

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* Instead of relying upon the exact binary fair / foul, here is what happens when I reconfigure the two sets of terms – from the title of this volume and the title of this chapter – in analogic form: Shakespeare: text:: fair: foul

In other words, Shakespeare is to text as fair is to foul. This configuration, I think, disconnects the terms just enough to open up the pairings to a new sort of scrutiny. What is it about these two sets of terms that changes once the implied ‘and’ between words becomes something more akin to an ‘is to’? How exactly do the relationships among these words change? As an analogy, the primary terms (Shakespeare and fair) and secondary terms (text and foul) read as having relational connections. My particular arrangement of the terms into a function of an analogy exemplifies what James P. Blevins and Juliet Blevins have identified as illustrating a ‘systematic structural similarity independent of perceptual similarity’, which, as a result, may ‘yield novel inferences about the world’.6 Now, it is certainly possible for the analogy above to be dismissed as faulty due to preconceived notions about the terms themselves; however, I suggest that organizing them in this way allows for unexpected inferences that can challenge received wisdom about them. This new analogy encourages the following questions: How does this formation unbind these terms from traditional book history and bibliography? What changes (or does not change) about our perspective upon the arrangement of the terms in this way? What does it mean for all texts to be as ‘foul’ as Shakespeare is ‘fair’? What does it mean to consider Shakespeare – whatever that name means – in terms of fair(ness)? By troubling the binary fair / foul by relating it directly to Shakespeare / text, I am allowing myself to examine a broader definition of fair(ness) as something more than a clean presentation copy of a manuscript or a less-noticed byproduct in the history of foul papers. This new analogic grouping permits the term ‘fair’ to inherit Kim F. Hall’s meticulously researched definition of it as ‘the site of crucial delineations of cultural difference’ in early modern England.7 This inheritance immediately revolutionizes a concept that once seemed purely descriptive and uncontroversial: an intangible pleasantness, generic chasteness

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or clear handwriting. Fair(ness) becomes far more than the OED’s flat sense of ‘appearance, colour, personal qualities or attributes, etc.’.8 Extending Hall’s definition, I suggest that fairness in early modern England was an endogenous somatic marker of race and difference that was both anchored in ideals of physical beauty and fecundity circumscribed by whiteness and also maintained by economic and social mobility. As a linguistic and somatic marker of power and class structures that often passes as innocuous, or at the very least neutral, fairness was a measure against which early modern English people scrutinized and regulated racial others and also, perhaps more importantly, whiteness itself. Early modern English readers could bear witness to the implicit power of fairness in Roger Ascham’s work The Scholemaster (1570), where he implores parents of the nobility to educate their sons properly in order to maintain their rightful stations. By studying with schoolmasters in the Ascham mould, students would eventually have and maintain qualities that were full, & hable to do their office: as, a tong, not stamering, or ouer hardlie drawing forth wordes, but plaine, and redie to deliuer the meaning of the minde: a voice, not softe, weake, piping, womannishe, but audible, stronge, and manlike: a countenance, not werishe and crabbed, but faire and cumlie: a personage, not wretched and deformed, but taule and goodlie.9

The ideal young graduate under Ascham’s charge must be able-bodied, strongvoiced, ‘manlike’ and ‘faire’. Only a man who meets these criteria can represent the zenith of humanity. Noting that many university students do not fit this description, Ascham laments that families do not send their fairest sons to study, thus leaving the university with weaker men: For, if a father haue foure sonnes, three faire and well formed both mynde and bodie, the fourth, wretched, lame, and deformed, his choice shalbe, to put the worst to learning, as one good enoughe to becum a scholer[.]10

Ascham ascribes to fairness an inherent worth and lays bare the cultural anxieties about its relationship to fitness and whiteness. Ascham’s observations about ‘fair’, ‘goodlie’ and ‘well formed’ sons exemplify Hall’s observation in Things of Darkness (1995) that the rhetoric of fairness establishes social boundaries. Ascham employs fairness in a way that recalls what Hall identifies

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in texts including Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Governor (1531), that is, both through tropes of darker or malformed figures and through writers’ anxieties about the connection between fairness and their own economic or political ambitions. Through methodical studies of early modern visual art as well as multiple literary genres including sonnets, romances (such as Mary Wroth’s Urania) and travel narratives, Hall illustrates the rhetorical effect  – and affect – of fairness as well as its immense economic and social value in early modern England.11 To be described as fair as a woman or a man in early modern England was, among other things, to be the subject of sonnets, epigrams and even the object of desire in a play. However, as Hall writes, it is also to be ‘racialized in connection with the ideologies of nationhood and physical beauty’.12 According to this logic, the health of the nation, its future citizens and its prosperity are metonymically bound to a sense of racial purity in which fairness is the apotheosis of early modern English whiteness. The implication of ‘fairness’ (as a marker of moral and physical beauty) in discourses of racial purity is most prominently on display in lyric blazons. For example, Edmund Spenser captures this element efficiently in Sonnet 15 of his Amoretti (1595): For loe my loue doth in her selfe containe all this worlds riches that may farre be found, if Saphyres, loe her eies be Saphyres plaine, if Rubies, loe hir lips be Rubies sound: If Pearles, hir teeth be pearles both pure and round; if Yuorie, her forhead yuory weene; if Gold, her locks are finest gold on ground; if siluer, her faire hands are siluer sheene, But that which fairest is, but few behold, her mind adornd with vertues manifold.13

The speaker enumerates the many attributes of his beloved, tying her physical beauty to objects of great economic value indicative of a nearly unachievable whiteness. The ‘siluer sheene’ of her hands and her education in ‘vertues manifold’ further define her worth not only as requiring and yet transcending the materials obtained through exploitation, colonization, trade and enslaved people, but also implicitly against lower-class and -caste women who live, labour and are tanned by the sun. Furthermore, the subject matter and metaphors of

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the sonnet signal the impossibility for those marked as somatically different to be fair – and thus desirable for having great reproductive potential and power. In this way, a non-white/Black woman cannot add to future fair citizenry because she ‘destroys the system’, as Lynda E. Boose writes, ‘essentially swallowing it up within the signification of her body’.14 Margreta De Grazia also suggests that, within such figurative strictures of sonnet conventions, fairness is the ‘distinguishing attribute of the dominant class’.15 However, Hall necessarily adds that fairness ‘buries itself in dominant ideologies’ and subtly disguises its function as the basis for the economic and social currency of whiteness in early modern England.16 Notions of fairness contribute significantly to a history of class-based structures of supremacy by excluding those who are unable to fit inside its ever-contracting boundaries of definition, whether or not they are ethnically or racially different from white English people. Writing specifically about whiteness, Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker show that early modern English whiteness operated by excluding or including other white members (including the Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Dutch and Spanish) based on political and rhetorical circumstance – whether or not Black, Indigenous or other people of colour were explicitly a part of the general discourse.17 Fairness was aspirational yet ultimately achievable – as long as it was within reason, without disrupting elite political and social structures or physical differences that prevented social mobility from becoming a possibility in the first place. Fairness’ elastic nature, as Patricia Akhimie observes, is evident in early modern English conduct books, where discourses of cultivation, race and difference are deeply implicated.18 Just as with the cultivation of acceptable behaviour propagated by conduct books, discourses involving achievable aspects of whiteness and beauty can be traced across literary genres through references to fairness, specifically. Throughout the sixteenth century, metaphors conflating paper, skin and text abound in early modern plays and poems.19 In the misleadingly titled A sparke of friendship and warme goodwill that shewest the effect of true affection and vnfoldes the fineness of this world (1588), Thomas Churchyard dedicates to Walter Ralegh a poem about the need to construct a papermill and the economic – and social – benefits it will engender. The speaker notes how the creation of the mill will provide jobs, as well as precipitate the printing, reading and sale of books; it links the

Fair / Foul

35

production of paper to the reading of news, history and the practice of law. Churchyard contends that, through the mechanical process of making paper, men (like rags) may be transformed into clean, fair, white paper: Mans secrete faultes, and foule defects of minde, must be reformde, like ragges in Paper mill, When hammers help, hath changde his cankered kinde, and clensde the heart, from spots and former ill. A second shape, and forme full fresh and new he doth receiue, in nature grace and hiew. When Water streames hath washt him ouer quite, than man becomes, like paper faire and white.20

As the water bath evokes the act of baptism and a cleansing of the soul, the ‘rags’ of a human mind filled with ‘foule defects’ and a ‘cankered’ form are transformed into a ‘second shape’ that is ‘faire and white’, that is, able to be marked with a legible text as opposed to the ‘spots’ that characterized the rags. The ‘ragges’ were likely brought to the papermill by women (rag-pickers) whom Heidi Craig has identified as the polar opposite of fair: they worked under the duress of ‘vagrancy, poverty, beggary, thievery and, in the specification that women begged at “men’s doors”, insinuations of prostitution’.21 The ragpickers, like the rags, remained ‘secret faults’ that could not be ‘reformed’, as they were largely denied any chance of upward mobility. Full participation in cycle of the mill from rags to pulp to fairness was closed to them, though they were still at the mercy of ‘economic changes [that] effectively forced the redrawing of the taxonomic boundaries of one form of racial classification’, as Hendricks has noted.22 Because of the plight of these women and on the backs of their labour, fair paper works as a figure of salvation for others (usually men) fortunate enough to be reborn into this new, fair community. Far from the democratizing material the poem claims it could be, paper was still far more available than parchment: ‘[f]or paper still from man to man doth go / when parchment comes in few mens hands, you knowe.’23 The fair, white paper (and opportunities of whiteness) become more open – particularly to white men who controlled the discourse and thus ensured access for themselves. As I discuss below, the same is true for scholars in the early twentieth century who sought to establish clear textual genealogies from the printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays back to the one true original source, or ‘copy’.

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Just like the gems and precious metals in Spenser’s sonnet, paper is figured by Churchyard as essential to securing the role of fairness in transforming human economic and social value. The work of the papermill ensures that some of England’s denizens are able to move ever closer to the apotheosis of whiteness as fairness. This logic functions metaphorically in Shakespeare’s plays Othello and The Merchant of Venice. In Othello, as the eponymous character endures a lethal scepticism about Desdemona’s fidelity, he accuses her of wrongdoing, but first reiterates her value in terms of white paper, much like the finished product of Churchyard’s papermill: ‘Was this faire paper, this most goodly booke / Made to write whore on? – What, committed?’24 Othello laments the apparent loss of Desdemona’s paper-white fairness (her fidelity) in a ‘goodly book’ (her body), now spoiled by her supposed transgression. She decomposes, at least in Othello’s eyes, into something more like the unprocessed rags of Churchyard’s poem. In The Merchant of Venice, Jessica, quite opposite to Desdemona, evolves closer to the early modern English ideal of fair as Lorenzo recognizes a letter from her because of its fair qualities: ‘I know the hand: in faith, ’tis a fair hand; / And whiter than the paper it writ on / Is the fair hand that writ.’25 Although Jessica’s handwriting is rendered in black ink, the hand that inscribed the words is recognized as ‘fair’. As Shylock’s daughter, Jessica’s eventual conversion to Christianity and upper-caste fairness is what Akhimie identifies as ‘revolutionary in the early modern period’, since moving between what were presumed to be static identities presented a significant risk – and opportunity. She also suggests that early modern writers, including Shakespeare, keenly understood the difficulty of social repositioning, as they could readily ‘identify the subversive possibilities of mobility, as well as the manufactured obstacles that prevented aspirants from achieving such transformation’.26 Indeed, Shakespeare’s own ability to overcome the obstacles to achieve an acknowledged fairness involved more than securing a coat of arms for his family, owning property or holding shares in a theatre company – it involved facing perilous comments from self-ascribed social betters, who challenged his very presence and work in the theatre world. In an objection to Shakespeare’s burgeoning public recognition as a playwright of note, Robert Greene (or someone writing as him, as the authorship is doubtful) likens his fellow playwright to a ‘an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’, which like Aesop’s crow wears the plumage from other birds only to suffer disgrace when

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discovered.27 This disapproval is marked by attention to physical differences in which a black, prosaic bird tries to emulate the beauty and colour of others. The comment faults Shakespeare for ascending – which I would argue is similar to racial passing – into a fairness and presumed education that does not belong to him but that was starting to be publicly acknowledged at the time. Shakespeare’s audacity of being able to ‘bombast a blanke verse as the best of the[m]’ encourages less-discerning audiences to find parity between the ‘upstart’s’ work and that of other university-trained playwrights, including Greene himself. In other words, Shakespeare claims a mantle of fairness (and, by extension, whiteness) and has begun to perform an identity (one to which Greene selfishly clings), in the hopes of maintaining and improving his own social position.28 By the early 1600s, Shakespeare’s popularity and, with it, social mobility were already causing enough discomfort for him to be mocked in university plays. The First Part of the Return from Parnassus (1599), a play that survives only in manuscript, dramatizes a version of this uneasiness as Guillo, described as a gull (as well as a less-discerning reader and audience member), asks his fellow Parnassus student Ingenioso, to compose verses on his behalf. He includes Shakespeare as a possibility for imitation: Ingenioso My pen is your bounded vassal to comande, but what vayne would it please you to haue them in? Gullio Not in a vaine veine (prittie y faith): make me them in two or three diuers vayns, in Chaucers, Gowers and Spencers, and Mr Shakespeares. Marry I thinke I shall entertain those verses which run like these: Euen as the sunn with purple coloured face Had tane his laste leaue on the weeping morne, etc. O sweet Mr Shakspeare, Ile haue his picture in my study at the courte.29

Gullio’s equating of Shakespeare with the likes of Chaucer, Gower and Spenser – comedy aside – portends the playwright’s ascendancy as a beloved literary figure whose legacy would be forged and protected by the men who began to collect his plays for the First Folio of 1623. Gullio’s reference to having Shakespeare’s picture hanging in a study at court (whether the likeness

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is an etching, or a small painting, or a drawing) demonstrates the playwright’s predominance as a ‘faire’ figure who is worth memorializing in some way. In Gullio’s estimation, Shakespeare’s ‘sweet’ nature, whether configured as his visage or his verse, transforms him from an ‘upstart crow’ to Ben Jonson’s description of him in the First Folio as the ‘Sweet Swan of Auon’.30 Like fairness, sweetness is an achievable type of whiteness, but a multisensory one that invokes metaphors of not only of smell and taste, but also of sight. This identification of memorialization with fairness (and sweetness) echoes the preoccupation with reproduction in the early sonnets, especially the poem positioned first in the 1609 edition: From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauties Rose might neuer die, But as the riper should by time decease His tender heire might beare his memorie:31

When Thomas Thorpe published the sonnets in 1609, Shakespeare was a wellknown poet, playwright and theatre company shareholder who may have had a direct hand in the publishing of his work. Lukas Erne has persuasively argued that this involvement followed concerted efforts by publishers to cultivate a readership for Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Frequent buyers of books bearing Shakespeare’s name were perhaps supportive of his shifting social rank into one that afforded him some prestige and influence.32 The speaker of the first sonnet’s first words epitomizes a desire to propagate fairness endlessly, particularly if it was a status hard fought for and won through an adherence to and a careful study of discursive epistemologies of fairness that Hall has asserted ‘lie… hidden and produces itself ’.33 Without generation of fair descendants – that Ascham makes a prerequisite for success – this formal effort at racial betterment merely dissipates. At the time of his death, Shakespeare, whether with intention or not, had cultivated a literary fairness that emanated from theatre to the fair paper of his printed quartos. This vision of a ‘fair’ Shakespeare was consolidated by the hyperbolic description of him in the 1623 First Folio whereby ‘[h]is mind and hand went together and what he thought, he uttered with that easieness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in this papers’.34 As Adam Smyth notes, if John Heminge and Henry Condell are to be believed, Shakespeare’s perfection

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‘stood in contrast to the corrupting mediations of printers and publishers who brought forth earlier imperfect quarto editions of [his] plays’.35 The actors promised texts that restored Shakespeare’s writings to perfection and fairness, far beyond inevitable mistakes in transmission and translation. Such ostensibly questionable behaviours, related to the printing of Shakespeare’s plays before the folio, were adopted as central to the New Bibliographers’ manifesto to lift the obscuring veil of print and recover the authorized Shakespearean text three hundred years later. A mission of recovering a fair Shakespeare without error, through perfect manuscript (foul) papers, underpinned the history of A. W. Pollard’s contention with piratical publishers and printers in Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates (1917), his disputes with W. W. Greg about the Pavier quartos and the contentious foundations of the brand of bibliography that still undergirds textual editing and book history. The perception of Shakespeare as fair and perfect, were it not for the vagaries of textual transmission, became intrinsic not only to his very existence at the centre of the Western canon but also to the editors who elected themselves as guardians of his legacy.36 Like Heminge and Condell, who gathered together with other middle-class men to put Shakespeare’s collected works into the world, early bibliographers sought to elevate and maintain Shakespeare’s fairness through highly technical (even ‘scientific’) methods that promised to establish a clear genesis – indeed, one that could not actually exist without holograph manuscripts – for the playtexts in the quartos and folios they pored over so obsessively. Shakespeare’s fairness became their fairness. The lineage – from mind, to hand (was Hand D his?), to manuscript, to print – had to be as definite as possible. Understanding the tactics and motivations of the various compositors responsible for setting type for these early editions made it more possible to reconnect them to Shakespeare’s ur-script, to his own person, to his fair, faultless mind. This relentless mission was frequently disguised as evidence-based theories and ongoing friendly conversations among male colleagues. The consolidation of this work in a tight scholarly network may have even tamped down brilliant but subtle objections from Evelyn May Albright, an early-twentieth-century professor and bibliographer, to A. W. Pollard’s theories about book trade practices that saw publishers acquiring versions of play manuscripts by dubious means so as to capitalize on theatrical success and circumnavigate the playing companies. In Dramatic Publication in England

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1580–1640 (1927), Albright details the life cycle of early modern drama as it went from a manuscript in the theatre to a printed quarto, which she suggests were popular with readers. Of Pollard’s assertions about the shady behaviour of play publishers, she writes frankly that ‘[a] great many statements about the treatment of dramatic manuscripts are ventured upon without proof ’.37 Instead of assuming inherent conflict between theatre companies and publishers, Albright explains that companies handled manuscripts in a variety of ways and suggests that they allowed scribes to make copies of plays and share them with eager patrons. For Albright, Shakespeare’s play quartos and the 1623 folio exist within a pantheon of other texts produced at the time. Because there are no holograph manuscripts or scribal copies of Shakespeare’s plays, the possibility of their origins goes unmentioned in her analyses. She treats the evidence that does exist instead of seeking the evidence that does not. She lightly criticizes Pollard’s creative yet knotty use of ‘bibliographical data’ combined with ‘a larger superstructure of theory’ and his necessary ‘skill in presentation [which] counts for much’ to explain his understanding of the printing of play quartos in his book Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates: Mr. A.W. Pollard has recently developed a somewhat elaborate theory, based in part upon the bibliographical facts found in the texts, that certain of the manuscripts handed to the players were in Shakespeare’s autograph, and in other cases an autograph manuscript was used as a prompt copy and eventually reached the press.38

She also cites Pollard’s work on Richard II, in which he supposes that the printer Valentine Simmes embarked on a highly unusual practice of dictating a manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand to a compositor, in order to explain the errors in the text. Albright quotes Pollard directly as he uses this theory to exonerate Shakespeare for the faults in the text. To do so, Pollard rationalizes that the manuscript could not have been readily available to those setting type ‘because if it remained in existence for any length of time many people must be seriously blamed for not having made much better use of it’.39 In Pollard’s world view, both the publisher and those working in the printshop should have worked more accurately to transform the manuscript into print because they should have somehow known that Shakespeare’s plays were just that valuable and would endure.

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Perhaps out of professional courtesy or academic deference, Albright gives Pollard’s outlandish theory the benefit of doubt while marvelling at the ways a ‘modern editor labors of resorting to successive hypotheses in his effort to solve the puzzle as to the derivation of a text’.40 Albright quietly challenges the supremacy of Shakespeare-centred research on printed drama and continues to cite a variety of other works to draw compelling conclusions about the likely ways manuscripts were ultimately used and distributed in theatrical and publishing communities. She purposefully counters the narrative that New Bibliographers relied upon in their centring of Shakespeare, one that rationalized the imperfections inherent in printing and publication by resorting to blaming non-authorial agents all the while allowing Shakespeare’s manuscripts – the idea of them, anyway – to remain perfect, whether they were fair or foul copies. By decentring Shakespeare and his printed plays from the narrative of textual transmission, Albright recovered not just one, but several histories of theatrical manuscripts and their relationship to print culture. Her work was much less speculative, and she was uninterested in sustaining a narrative that aligned with the first compilers of Shakespeare’s plays. Unfortunately, Albright’s efforts were marginalized along with her commitment to understanding the incompleteness of the historical record and the unanswered questions of the archives.41 Her ability to work with the deep-rooted messiness involved in the publication of all play quartos and drama folios, not only Shakespeare’s, allowed her to challenge W. W. Greg’s dominant yet incomplete narrative. Even if Albright had chosen to take a more speculative approach to the archives in her research – in ways that Greg and others in his circle embraced – the history she recovered might still have been very different to the one her colleagues developed. She held steadfast to the facts to which she had immediate access – extant manuscripts and printed books – and yet apologizes for the statistical nature of her work. In her clear descriptions of the knowable early modern materials she examines, she accepts the discomfort of what remains unknown, implying that the origins of Shakespeare’s manuscripts might never be found. So what if the desire to provide Shakespeare’s printed works with a clear lineage – that is, to erase the doubt and unmitigated pain that Stanley Cavell associates with scepticism (what happens if, like Othello or like Leontes, we can never know) – led Pollard to his tenuous theories, and led Greg to read a note

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on a manuscript copy of John Fletcher’s play Bonduca as a template for how Shakespeare’s plays travelled from the theatre to the printing house? The note reads: the occastion. why these are wanting here. the booke where [it] by it was first Acted from is lost: and this hath been transcrib’d from the fowle papers of the Authors wch were found (fol. 23a)42

Perhaps it was the pain of the unknown that pushed the New Bibliographers to create historical beginnings and endings that simply are not available. But the bigger question is this: why is this practice permitted in some areas of scholarship, but not others? And by some scholars and not others? Why did Greg’s and Pollard’s spotty theories ossify into received wisdom? As I indicated earlier, Albright eschewed the speculative by acknowledging the lacunae that dotted her recovery of early modern English manuscript and printed plays without any anxiety over damaging the legacy of any one playwright. However, her acceptance of archival loss is not the only way to understand the problem of early modern manuscripts or the inherent gaps in the archive. Several scholars of the history of race including Saidiya Hartman have written extensively about the problem of the unknown in historical archives. Hartman chooses to employ what she calls Critical Fabulation, an inductive and creative method to both recover and make sense of the silences in the archive.43 Scholars in early modern studies including Hall, Hendricks and Imtiaz Habib have employed similar methods to understand histories of people whose presences in the past have not been saved or dutifully recorded. These scholars engage in reading multiple literary and historical narratives in order to recover the complex lived experiences of early modern Black, Indigenous and other People of Colour, beyond a note about their existence as a line in a ledger where their skin color or ethnicity is described.44 In a sense, the New Bibliographers engaged in such work, but anchored their observations in pristine technical discourse that proffered a sanitized, decontaminated version of the Shakespearean text and, ironically perhaps, obscured alternative conclusions about textual transmission. Yet, the integrity of their archival work was rarely questioned, particularly by scholars outside of their sphere of influence. In truth, most of the conversations about ‘foul’ papers, or the technical aptitude needed to edit Shakespeare’s plays, have always been held in

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decidedly ‘fair’-spaces – if we are to use the terms explored in this chapter. For decades, the libraries and universities in which researchers have interacted with these various texts or held symposia or had uneasy discussions about this work were not particularly welcoming to white women and certainly not hospitable or open to Black, Indigenous or other People of Colour interested in the field. These ‘fair’ spaces and conversations were never quite accessible to the unfair. As a result, observations about whiteness, fairness and race are just beginning to happen in bibliography and book history despite over fifty years of concentrated study on the history of race in early modern England. The specter of Shakespeare’s fair(ness), as it has been inherited from the early modern period and propagated up to our own time, needs to be exorcised and transfigured, whether in the context of the implied disinterestedness of book history and bibliography, or in the continued insistence upon Shakespeare as a metaphor for white, British, cultural imperialism. Peter Kirwan describes this phenomenon perfectly when he describes Shakespeare as shorthand for an individual, a body of texts, a standard of literary quality (the commonplace criticism ‘It’s hardly Shakespeare’), an historical period (e.g. Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage), a field of academic research (‘Shakespeare Studies’ as a synecdoche for research on early modern drama), and a marker of mood, dignity, and cultural value.45

In line with the analogy I crafted at the beginning of this chapter, Shakespeare and fair become closer cultural signifiers – perhaps even nearly synonymous – particularly if viewed through examples of early modern whiteness and through ways that New Bibliographers sought to isolate him in an ‘endeavor to salvage a true vision of Shakespeare, the man and the playwright from the vagaries of textual – and theatrical – production’, as Claire M. L. Bourne has rightly observed.46 ‘To assert that William Shakespeare was a white man is to state the obvious’, Ambereen Dadabhoy valiantly writes in ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of being (in) Shakespeare’, her contribution to the journal Postmedieval’s tenth anniversary issue. She continues, ‘[T]he fact of Shakespeare’s whiteness is indisputable. Indeed, the facts of his life, sparse as they are, allow us to know this thing about him, that he was a white English man.’47 Her observations are, of course, valid, and yet, in this chapter, I felt compelled to grapple with the genesis

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of this whiteness to rediscover when it or Shakespeare’s ‘fairness’ materialized, and how it ultimately informed the imperatives of the New Bibliography and continues to structure editorial practice, book history and textual studies more generally. Was Shakespeare white or fair (with the structural, social and political power that accompanies it) from birth? Or was this identity accrued more gradually – a result of his acting, writing and publication? Could it have happened only once his work was praised or criticized in print? The answers may likely depend on the discipline or subdiscipline of Shakespeare studies to which one belongs. As someone who works at the intersection of at least three subfields (book history, theatre history and early modern history of race), I remain unsure about the exact genesis of Shakespeare and fair(ness) because of gaps in the archives that previous scholars chose to ignore. However, I will continue to examine the spaces that exist, while approaching the archive, in Hartman’s words with ‘respect [to] the limits of what cannot be known’.48 I now understand how a longing to know and to own answers about Shakespeare, especially the (often unacknowledged) tradition of upholding the fairness of his texts (and the way its logic works within his texts), will help us rethink the textual landscape. Holding fast to an origin story or even the nomenclature of foul papers without deeper consideration is far more than a simple act of convenience. It is a tacit acceptance of the historical barriers of the archive that allowed certain scholars the latitude to construct narratives with a freedom and authority not afforded to everyone. In its current uses, the term ‘foul papers’ remains a relic of New Bibliography – indicative of an unknowable perfection granted to Shakespeare alone, whether his manuscripts were blotted with ink and imperfections, or (as Heminge and Condell so forcefully suggest) a scribal facsimile of his mind. Foul papers should instead be a reminder of the unknowable recesses of the archive that cannot be displaced by a certainty constructed by whiteness, fairness and inestimable value. Rather, foul papers (and fair ones) should encourage book historians and bibliographers to question the origins of their work; the assumptions that they make about the field and those who participate (or choose not to participate) in it; and the great possibilities that can come from being unanchored to a specific narrative in the archive. By judging texts, and the history of the field, in the ways that Evelyn May Albright bravely set forth, bibliography and book history can move in the fairest way forward.

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Notes   1 Evelyn May Albright, Dramatic Publication in England 1590–1640 (1921) (New York: Gordian Press, 1971), 5.   2 Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 12–59.   3 Werstine, Playhouse Manuscripts; and Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 20–1.   4 Werstine, Playhouse Manuscripts, 2.   5 Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). In the first chapter of his book, Masten openly questions what information white, male bibliographers and textual scholars may have hidden from their fellow scholars in the 1950s.   6 James P. Blevins and Juliet Blevins, Analogy in Grammar: Form in Acquisition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–13. Blevins and Blevins also state that in a pairing ‘there is, in principle, no limit to how internally complex the analogue or base can be’.   7 Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 177.   8 ‘fair, adj. and n.1’. OED Online. Oxford University Press (March 2021), www.oed. com/view/Entry/67704 (accessed 1 April 2021).   9 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster Or Plaine and Perfite Way of Teachyng Children, to Vnderstand, Write, and Speake, the Latin Tong but Specially Purposed for the Priuate Brynging Vp of Youth in Ientlemen and Noble Mens Houses, and Commodious also for all such, as Haue Forgot the Latin Tonge (London: [n.p.], 1570), sig. D3v (my emphasis). 10 Ibid., sig. D4r (my emphasis). 11 Hall, Things of Darkness; see also Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, ‘Race,’ & Writing in the Early Modern Period (New York: Routledge, 1994). 12 Kim F. Hall, ‘“These Bastard signs of fair”: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (New York: Routledge, 1998), 69. 13 Edmund Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion. Written Not Long since by Edmunde Spenser (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), sig. B1r (my emphasis). 14 Linda F. Boose, ‘“The Getting of a Lawful Race”: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman’, in Women, ‘Race,’ & Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 47.

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15 Margreta de Grazia, ‘The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare Survey 46 (1993): 45. 16 Hall, ‘“These Bastard signs of fair”’, 66. 17 See Hendricks and Parker, eds., Women, ‘Race’ & Writing. 18 Patricia Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1–38. 19 For more on these metaphors, see Miles P. Grier’s chapter ‘Black / white’ and Emma Depledge’s chapter ‘Paper / ink’ in this volume. 20 Thomas Churchyard, A sparke of friendship and warme goodwill that shewest the effect of true affection and vnfoldes the fineness of this world (London: [n.p.], 1588), sig. D3v. 21 Heidi Craig, ‘English Rag-Women and Early Modern Paper’, in Women’s Labour and the History of the Book, ed. Valerie Wayne (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 29–46. 22 Margo Hendricks, ‘Race: A Renaissance Category?’, in A New Companion of English Renaissance Literature and Culture, 2 vols, ed. Michael Hattaway (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 535–44. 23 Churchyard, A sparke of friendship, sig. C4r. 24 William Shakespeare, The Tragœdy of Othello, the Moore of Venice As it hath beene diuerse times acted at the Globe, and at the Black-Friers, by his Maiesties Seruants (London: Thomas Walkley, 1622), sig. K4r (my emphasis). Thanks to Miles P. Grier for access to his unpublished book manuscript in which he writes extensively about this scene. 25 William Shakespeare, The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice (London: Thomas Hayes, 1600), sig. C4v. 26 Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, 12. 27 Robert Greene, Greenes, Groats-Worth of Witte, bought with a million of repentance (London: William Wright, 1592), sig. F1v. 28 Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Smith’s work argues that language would dictate the locus of Greene’s objection to Shakespeare’s difference. 29 J. B. Leishman, ed., ‘The Return from Parnassus’, in The Three Parnassus Plays, 1598–1601 (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson LTD, 1949), ll. 1024–34. 30 Ben Jonson, ‘To the memory of my beloued, the Avthor Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us’, in Mr. William Shakepeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Edward Blount et al., 1623), sig. A5v. 31 William Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609), sig. B1r.

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32 Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 10–20. 33 Hall, ‘“These Bastard signs of fair”’, 67. 34 ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’, in Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, sig. A3r. 35 Adam Smyth, ‘Foreword’, in Alice Leonard, Error in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Error (Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillian, 2020), vii and viii. 36 Alfred W. Pollard, Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of his Text (London: Alexander Moring Limited, 1917). 37 Albright, Dramatic Publication, 291. 38 Ibid., 295. 39 Ibid., 296. 40 Ibid. 41 For a recent effort to give Albright her due, see Robert D. Hume and Judith Milhous, introduction to The Publication of Plays in London, 1660–1800: Playwrights, Publishers, and the Market (London: British Library, 2015). 42 Quoted in Werstine, Playhouse Manuscripts, 13. 43 Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008). My thinking and observations about archival materials have been greatly influenced by Hartman’s refection about working in archives to tell histories that are difficult to uncover because they have few documents associated with them. 44 See Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (London: Routledge, 2008). 45 Peter Kirwan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Dramatic Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 115. 46 Claire M. L. Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 12. 47 Ambereen Dadabhoy, ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of being (in) Shakespeare’, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 11 (2020): 228–35. 48 Hartman, ‘Venus’, 4.

Bibliography Akhimie, Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. New York London: Routledge, 2018. Albright, Evelyn May. Dramatic Publication in England 1580–1640. 1927. Reprint edn., New York: Gordian Press, 1971.

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Ascham, Roger. The Scholemaster Or Plaine and Perfite Way of Teachyng Children, to Vnderstand, Write, and Speake, the Latin Tong but Specially Purposed for the Priuate Brynging Vp of Youth in Ientlemen and Noble Mens Houses, and Commodious also for all such, as Haue Forgot the Latin Tonge. London: [n.p.], 1570. Blevins, James P., and Juliette Blevins, eds. Analogy in Grammar: Form and Acquisition. Oxford Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Bourne, Claire M. L. Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dadabhoy, Ambereen. ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (in) Shakespeare’. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 11, nos. 2–3 (2020): 228–35. de Grazia, Margreta. ‘The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’. Shakespeare Survey 46 (1993): 35–50. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Reprinted with corrections, 1995. New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2007. Greene, Robert. Greenes, Groats-VVorth of Witte. London: [n.p.], 1592. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Hall, Kim F. ‘“These Bastard signs of fair”: Literary whiteness in Shakespeare’s sonnets’. In Post-Colonial Shakespeares, edited by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, 64–83. New York: Routledge, 1998. Hartman, Saidiya. ‘Venus in Two Acts’. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. Hattaway, Michael, ed. A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. Vol 2. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Hendricks, Margo, and Patricia A. Parker, eds. Women, ‘Race,’ & Writing in the Early Modern Period. London: Routledge, 1994. Kirwan, Peter. Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Dramatic Canon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Leishman, J. B., ed. The Three Parnassus Plays. London: Ivor Nicholson &Watson LTD, 1949. Leonard, Alice. Error in Shakespeare – Shakespeare in Error. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

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Loomba, Ania, and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. New Accents. London: Routledge, 1998. Masten, Jeffrey. Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. McKerrow, R. B. An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Pollard, A. W. Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of His Text. London: Alexander Moring Limited, 1917. Shakespeare, William. The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. London: Thomas Hayes, 1600. Shakespeare, William. Shake-speares Sonnets. London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609. Shakespeare, William. The Tragœdy of Othello, the Moore of Venice. London: Thomas Walkley, 1622. Smith, Ian. Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Spenser, Edmund. Amoretti and Epithalamion. Written Not Long since by Edmunde Spenser. London: William Ponsonby, 1595. Wayne, Valerie, ed. Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Werstine, Paul. Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

2

Text / paratext Hannah August

In 2014, after a decade of increasing visibility, early modern dramatic paratexts stepped fully into the limelight with the publication of Thomas Berger and Sonia Massai’s Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642.1 This monumental, two-volume reference work assembles transcriptions of frequently discussed dramatic paratexts such as title pages, dedications, epistles to the reader and commendatory verses, as well as character lists, arguments, errata notes, printed marginalia, booksellers’ catalogues, running titles, head titles and act and scene divisions. It also features what Massai terms ‘theatrical paratexts’, such as prologues, epilogues, inductions and choruses.2 Yet in introducing their volumes, Berger and Massai point out that the collective noun under which they have organized these book parts does not have quite the same meaning as it does in its location of origin, Gérard Genette’s influential Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. The term ‘paratext’, state Berger and Massai, is ‘generally used anachronistically to describe the bibliographical make-up of early modern books because there is no counterpart in the period’.3 Others, too, have noted the anachronism and inadequacy of Genette’s taxonomic explications of what constitutes paratext when it comes to the particular conditions that influenced the production and reception of early modern playbooks.4 Such observations are valid, but in seeking more accurate ways to describe the form and function of early modern dramatic paratexts, scholarship has moved needlessly far away from Genette’s initial conception of a paratextual ‘fringe’, a ‘privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, or an influence on the public, an influence that … is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it’.5 Instead of considering how paratexts influence or guide reception of a text and create expectations for it which will be fulfilled (or dashed) in the reading,

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scholars have frequently focused on the ways that paratexts encourage the financial transaction that precedes this reading.6 This chapter argues that we should revisit Genette’s spirit if not his letter in order to ask how paratexts that may have helped to secure the purchase of a book might also have influenced the subsequent reading of the text that book contained. In doing so, I want to focus on the paratextual element that Genette lists first among those ‘verbal productions’ that ‘present’ the text.7 This is the author’s name, appearing most prominently (when it appears at all) on the title page of an early modern playbook, although it can also appear elsewhere: subscribed underneath an epistle or dedication, or eulogized within a commendatory verse, for example. In these secondary locations, it has often been analysed as part of the drive towards authorial self-actualization that scholars interested in the birth of the ‘author’ during this period have set out to map.8 Shakespeare’s pre-Restoration quarto playbooks are notoriously light on these sorts of internal paratexts: what they do exhibit, however, is an increasing rate of authorial attribution on their title pages. Given that title pages are widely understood to have a marketing function, it is not surprising that the author’s name in this external location has been interpreted as a ‘selling point’.9 This line is pushed most strongly by Lukas Erne in Shakespeare and the Book Trade (2013): analysing stationers’ false ascriptions of publications to William Shakespeare, Erne attributes their actions to a sense of the name as one ‘to make money with’, as a canny ‘advertisement strategy’, as having ‘marketable recognition value’.10 Erne is not a voice in the wilderness. David Scott Kastan describes early modern publishers recognizing ‘the commercial advantage of advertising authors on the printed title pages of plays’ and Gary Taylor observes simply that ‘[n]ames serve[d] a marketing function’.11 Returning to Shakespeare, Adam G. Hooks describes Shakespeare’s name as ‘a successful authorial brand in the bookshops of early modern London’, echoing Thomas Walkley in the epistle to the 1622 Othello quarto: ‘the Authors name is sufficient to vent his worke’.12 That the name William Shakespeare had currency amongst those who bought early modern playbooks is undoubtedly true. As Alan Farmer notes, Shakespeare’s status as ‘England’s best-selling playwright’ in print dates from the moment in 1598 when he was first named as author on a playbook title page.13 In the years before his death in 1616, twenty-eight playbooks appear with Shakespeare’s name on the title page, more than for any other

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contemporaneous playwright (either with or without title page attribution).14 Later in the period, only James Shirley could match this type of success: in the heyday of his career as a published dramatist during the Caroline period, a similar number of authorially attributed playbooks would appear, but few would be the reprinted editions that are an important indicator of a play’s popularity.15 Shakespeare’s success in this respect is clear: in the decades after his death, all but four of the plays published in quarto during his lifetime were reprinted in the same format, some multiple times, and all but one of these pre-Restoration posthumous reprints featured the author’s name on the title page.16 If the name ‘William Shakespeare’ was indeed a ‘selling point’, as evidenced not just by its appearance on the title pages of play quartos both Shakespearean and apocryphal, but also by its pride of place on the title pages of the 1623 and 1632 Folios, then what exactly was it helping to sell?17 When Foucault describes the author as ‘the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning’, the function that he gives to the author’s name is to mean something.18 When it comes to Shakespeare’s name, this meaning is typically taken to be ‘of high value’. Richard Brome, in a commendatory verse included in John Fletcher’s posthumous Monsieur Thomas (1639), notes that ‘each man can say / If Fletcher made it ’tis an exc’lent play’; likewise, when confronted with Shakespeare’s name on a playbook title page, potential purchasers are assumed to understand that ‘If Shakespeare made it, ’tis an exc’lent play’.19 Hence the temptation for stationers to misattribute various plays to William Shakespeare, or, less ostentatiously, ‘W.S.’ or ‘W.Sh.’: all functioned as paratextual claims for the plays’ superior quality.20 For something to be considered valuable is not the same as for it to signify, however. Erne quotes Mark Rose’s observation that the author’s name can serve as ‘a kind of brand name, a recognizable sign that the cultural commodity will be of a certain kind and quality’.21 But Erne himself then focuses almost exclusively on Shakespeare’s name as an index of quality, rather than on what ‘kind’ of text might be signified by the paratextual inscription of this name on a playbook title page. He does consider briefly whether the popularity of Shakespeare’s history plays in print might have influenced the paratextual elements on the title page of Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602), with its description of the play as a ‘True Chronicle Historie’ and its attribution to ‘W.S.’; Joseph Loewenstein likewise sees the misattribution of The Troublesome Reign of

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King John (1611) to ‘W.Sh.’ as an understanding of ‘William Shakespeare’ as ‘[a] name-brand for historical drama, linked and sequenced history plays, the matter of Henry, the stuff of Falstaff ’.22 In these two instances, then, the ‘kind’ of text signified by the abbreviated ‘William Shakespeare’ is a history play. This hints at the fact that early printers who sneaked Shakespeare’s name onto the title pages of non-Shakespearean publications may have viewed it not just as an indicator of quality and value, but also, in Loewenstein’s words, as ‘very nearly generic, a marker of “family resemblance” … and a source thereby of borrowed meanings’.23 Yet pinning down those meanings and the name’s generic signification for early modern readers is complicated by the celebrated generic diversity of Shakespeare’s output. Not only was he the author of two highly successful narrative poems and a collection of sonnets, but he was also a dramatist who, in addition to being famed for his history plays, was pre-eminent as a writer of both comedies and tragedies: ‘the most excellent in both kinds for the stage’, according to one early critic.24 This diverse ‘portfolio’ of works means that, at first glance, ‘William Shakespeare’ looks like a decidedly unthrifty authorfunction. Closer examination, however, reveals that the name may well have had a dominant meaning that was ‘very nearly generic’ in the eyes of early modern readers and which, while it may have influenced their decision to buy playbooks by ‘William Shakespeare’, would also have shaped their encounters with these playbooks’ content. Unpacking that meaning involves taking to heart a comment made by Genette in his discussion of the author’s name as a paratext. Genette holds that ‘the name of the author … has an effect that blends with the effects of other elements, such as the presence or absence of a genre indication’.25 In other words, no author attribution is an island; it is a piece of the paratextual continent of the title page, working in conjunction with other elements on the page.26 The presence of a genre indication, for instance, makes it difficult for the author’s name to be ‘very nearly generic’, because the clear advertisement of the play’s genre serves that purpose itself. When Shakespeare’s name appears on the title pages of early modern playbooks, it is almost always accompanied by a genre indication, at least in the case of histories and tragedies. All but two of the histories and tragedies published as pre-Restoration quartos have title pages that announce the play’s genre, even if that genre is sometimes not what we have become used

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to from the Folios’ categorizations.27 Richard II and Richard III, for instance, were repeatedly published as ‘The Tragedie of King Richard the second’ and ‘The Tragedie of King Richard the Third’, the chosen genre indication conveying the dramatic trajectory of the plays’ eponymous protagonists. (This trajectory is captured equally well by John Norton’s substitution on the title page of the 1634 Richard II quarto: ‘The Life and Death of King Richard the Second’.) The Lear quartos and the first and second quartos of Hamlet announced the plays as ‘histories’, but the noun, which had not yet calcified into a dramatic marker, was accompanied by an adjective that conveys the content of the ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ it describes: Hamlet is a ‘Tragicall Historie’; Lear is a ‘True Chronicle Historie’, its dramatic action drawn from Holinshed’s Chronicles.28 Only Troilus and Cressida is obliquely labelled merely a ‘Historie’, or in its paratextually fuller issue, a ‘Famous Historie’ – a point to which I will return. Potential readers of Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies in quarto, then, generally knew what they were getting: if they could see from the title page that the play was by Shakespeare, they could also see from the genre indication whether it was tragic or based on historical events. The case is different when it comes to comedies. Five editions of comedies that made their way into the 1623 folio were printed with Shakespeare’s name and the genre indication ‘comedie’ on their title page: both extant Love’s Labour’s Lost quartos (1598 and 1631), the first two quartos of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602 and 1619) and John Smethwick’s 1631 edition of The Taming of the Shrew. However, when it comes to the other pre-Restoration quarto editions of plays we now classify as comedies or tragicomedies, meaningful genre indications accompanying Shakespeare’s name are absent. Thomas Fisher’s Midsummer Night’s Dream quarto (1600) lacks a genre indication; so too does Andrew Wise and William Aspley’s Much Ado About Nothing, published the same year. A Midsummer Night’s Dream doesn’t acquire any different title page paratextual features when Thomas Pavier reprints it in 1619. The Merchant of Venice quartos (1600, 1619 and 1637) sport the empty label ‘excellent historie’, the elaborate plot details that qualify it defusing any expectations that the play will contain actual historical content, as opposed to being an ‘excellent story’. Richard Meighen’s 1630 edition of Merry Wives omits the genre indication that had featured on the title pages of the earlier quartos; the anonymous comedy The London Prodigal (1605), misattributed on its title page to William Shakespeare, has

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no accompanying genre indication, and neither does a less ostentatiously misattributed comedy, Thomas Middleton’s The Puritan (1607), supposedly authored by ‘W. S’.29 Nor do plays that we now designate tragicomedies: the five standalone Pericles quartos (1609 [two editions], 1611, 1630 and 1635) deploy an indication of the play’s dramatic status in the location where a genre indication might otherwise be found, offering readers ‘THE LATE, And much admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre’; The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634) declares itself to be ‘Written by the memorable Worthies of their time; {Mr. John Fletcher, and | Mr. William Shakspeare.} Gent’.30 No genre indication accompanies this announcement. Of course, multiple different agents of the book trade were involved in the preparation of these playbooks, and their publication dates span nearly four decades. Yet the pattern is stark. The absence of a genre indication to accompany Shakespeare’s name on the title pages of comedies in quarto strongly suggests his name was, in fact, ‘very nearly generic’. What it signified to these playbooks’ readers was the genre of comedy, or, more broadly, comic content. This contention is supported by allusions to Shakespeare in various contemporary ‘epitexts’, a coinage of Genette’s less frequently used in discussion of early modern paratexts, but which he defines as those paratexts outside the volume at hand which have bearing on its reception.31 Despite Francis Meres’s early identification of Shakespeare as pre-eminent when it came to both comedy and tragedy, a perusal of epitexts collected in the Shakspere AllusionBook (1909) demonstrates that this is not, in fact, the conceit that predominates over the coming decades. Outside of the folios (which, given their advertised inclusion of multiple dramatic genres, must understandably laud the catholic nature of Shakespeare’s playwriting abilities), and notwithstanding the famous description of Shakespeare as ‘rare Tragedian’, the genre with which Shakespeare’s name appears to be most often associated in verses composed after his death is comedy.32 In 1631, commenting upon the style of various poets of the age, Michael Drayton lauds Shakespeare’s ‘Comicke vaine’, which ‘[fits] the socke’ (rather than the tragic buskin).33 In 1638, James Mervyn opposes Shakespeare’s ‘mirth’ to Beaumont’s ‘weight’; in the same year, Richard West contrasts the diversionary nature of Shakespeare’s work with the more scholarly rewards of Jonson, observing that ‘Shakespeare may make griefe merry’.34 When William

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Cartwright wants to make a claim for the refinement of Fletcher’s ability as a comic playwright in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio, the point of comparison he chooses is Shakespeare’s ‘Old fashion’d wit … which made Bawdry pass for Comicall’; in George Daniel of Beswick’s 1647 manuscript encomium to Samuel Daniel, Shakespeare is once more given the epithet ‘Comicke’.35 And in 1653, when Aston Cokaine imagines the reopening of the theatres, he conceives of a moment when Learn’d Johnson [shall] reassume his Seat, … Judicious Beaumont, and th’ Ingenious Soule Of Fletcher too may move without controule. Shakespeare (most rich in Humours) entertaine The crowded Theaters with his happy veine.36

It is Shakespeare’s ‘happy veine’ that evidently makes the greatest impression on Thomas Philipot, who in his 1659 history of Kent writes of Henry IV and ‘Prince Henry his Son, and Sir John Falstaffe his make-sport, so merrily represented in Shakespear’s Comedies’.37 Philipot’s assessment of the Henry IV plays as comic chimes with Wise and Aspley’s earlier eschewal of a genre indication on the title page of their 2 Henry IV quarto (1600), which emphasizes instead that it will contain ‘the humours of sir Iohn Falstaffe, and swaggering Pistoll’. Falstaff ’s ‘humours’ and Pistol’s ‘swaggering’ will reappear on the title pages of the Merry Wives quartos, indicating that Wise and Aspley, like Philipot, see the Henry IV plays in terms of their comic content, perhaps explaining their decision not to indicate with a title page genre indication that the play is a history.38 That those preparing paratexts for Shakespeare’s plays earlier in the period might equally have understood his name to be associated predominantly with comedy is hinted at by the ordering of the genres in the title of the 1623 Folio. Potential readers and purchasers are presented with a volume entitled Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, with the comedies taking precedence in the book’s title just as they do in the ordering of the plays within. Similarly, the much-discussed preface to the second issue of Troilus and Cressida in 1609 repeatedly stresses Shakespeare’s pre-eminence as a writer of comedies, augmenting the title page’s claim that the play presents

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‘The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid’ with assertions that it is ‘passing full of the palme comicall’; that ‘[a]mongst all [Shakespeare’s comedies] there is none more witty than this’; that it is on a par with ‘the best Commedy in Terence or Plautus’.39 These claims may seem disingenuous, given the play’s actual genre, but they tap into and reinforce an understanding of Shakespeare as a playwright whose particular strength was comedy, and whose name thus connotes comic content. What this means is that when genre indications announce plays as histories or tragedies on the title pages of Shakespeare’s quarto playbooks, their effect is to manage the default expectations otherwise created by his name. When that name appears by itself, it acts as a shorthand indication of genre, implicitly conveying to the reader that what he or she is about to read is a comedy.40 To view an author’s name on a title page as ‘very nearly generic’, and thus as something other than a ‘selling point’, is to allow the paratext a different relationship with the text it precedes. This relationship has more of an impact for the reader than the purchaser. Michael Baird Saenger sings a popular tune when he asserts that ‘front matter in the early modern period [was] geared around a very specific and rather crucial act of reader-response: the purchase’, but there is a still more crucial act of reader-response that follows a purchase, and that is the reading itself.41 Plays in early modern England were read by individuals from across the social spectrum, and alongside those who handed over money for playbooks after browsing in a bookstore were others – particularly women – who sent their servants to buy them, who borrowed them from friends or who listened to them read aloud: in short, plenty of people for whom preliminary paratexts would have done something other than persuade them to buy a book.42 Given that those who bought plays were only a subset of those who actually read them, it is high time we gave more thought to the expectations and experiences of that wider group of readers. While viewing the name ‘William Shakespeare’ as an indicator of quality acts as a guarantee for a potential book-buyer that their money will not be spent in vain, viewing it as a guide to generic content or ‘kind’ creates a different set of readerly expectations. These range from assumptions about dramatic form to the anticipation of the sensory rewards offered by reading printed comedies.43 The experience of reading the text thus becomes inflected by the paratext, as expectations are met – or challenged. Readers who had accepted the claims for

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Troilus and Cressida’s comic content would have been more likely to respond with confusion or frustration as they read on than they might have done had the play been labelled a tragedy. Those for whom Shakespeare’s name suggested comedy, a genre supposedly distinguished by its depiction of love but also ‘bawdrie, … whordome and adulterie’, may have been primed to expect sexual content from a playbook that lacked a qualifying genre indication – an expectation only reinforced by the double entendre in a title such as Much Ado About Nothing, but one which may have been left unsatisfied for readers of this play in which women’s sexual activity is a chimera.44 Paratexts work in conjunction not just with one another, but – like texts – in conjunction with the wider framework of knowledge, assumptions and behaviours that contribute to the horizon of expectations any reader brings to his or her reading. In other words, there is – and was – a symbiotic relationship between paratexts and the texts on which they depend for their existence. This might in some ways seem a backward-looking observation: it is basically, after all, what Genette himself says. Yet to present paratexts separately and argue that they ‘deserve to be studied as a key body of texts in their own right’ (which they do),45 or to argue that their main mode of influence is upon a purchase (which it can sometimes be), is to obscure or neglect the multifaceted nature of this relationship and the multiple meanings that paratexts and texts derive from one another. One solution is to adopt an interpretive lens that coheres around the figure of the reader, rather than that of the consumer. Early modern playreaders were capitalist subjects just as we are, but this identity did not define the limits of their engagement with printed texts. In order to conceptualize this engagement more fully, we need to put ourselves in their shoes and use textual and historical evidence to ask what might have happened when those early readers stepped over the ‘thresholds of interpretation’.

Notes 1 Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai, eds., Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 2 Sonia Massai, ‘Shakespeare, Text and Paratext’, Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009): 3. 3 Berger and Massai, introduction to Paratexts in English Printed Drama, xi.

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  4 For a nuanced assessment of the ways in which Genette’s theories inadequately capture the early modern situation, see Helen Smith and Louise Wilson’s introduction to their edited collection, Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth, ‘Introductions’, in Book Parts, ed. Duncan and Smyth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 5–6; and David Scott Kastan, ‘The Body of the Text’, English Literary History 81, no. 2 (2014): 443–4.   5 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.   6 For instance, see the framing arguments of Michael Baird Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. chs. 2 and 3; and Peter Berek, ‘The Market for Playbooks and the Development of the Reading Public’, Philological Quarterly 91, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 151–84. The other dominant mode of interpretation when it comes to dramatic paratexts involves mining them for what they have to say about early modern dramatic authorship: for major works in this vein, see note 8.   7 Genette, Paratexts, 1.   8 See, e.g., David M. Bergeron, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570–1640 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Wayne A. Chandler, Commendatory Verse and Authorship in the English Renaissance (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003); and Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).   9 Erne, Book Trade, 105. On title pages as advertising material, see Tiffany Stern, ‘“On each Wall / And Corner Post”: Playbills, Title-pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London’, English Literary Renaissance 36, no. 1 (2006): 57–89. 10 Erne, Book Trade, 58–9. 11 Kastan, ‘The Body of the Text’, 445; Gary Taylor, ‘The Order of Persons’, in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, gen. eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 40. 12 Adam G. Hooks, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare for Sale’, Philological Quarterly 91, no. 2 (2012): 140; Thomas Walkley, ‘The Stationer to the Reader’, in William Shakespeare, The Tragœdy of Othello, The Moore of Venice (London: Thomas Walkley, 1622), sig. A2r (STC 22305).

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13 Alan B. Farmer, ‘Shakespeare as Leading Playwright in Print, 1598–1608/09’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 89. 14 The playbook tallies in this paragraph are enabled by DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, eds. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser (created 2007), http://deep.sas.upenn.edu (accessed 3 February 2020). 15 On the profitability of reprints, and possible reasons for poor reprint rates for Caroline drama, see Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, ‘Canons and Classics: Publishing Drama in Caroline England’, in Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, ed. Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 17–41. 16 The four plays not reprinted in quarto were 2 Henry IV (1600), Much Ado About Nothing (1600), Troilus and Cressida (1609) and Titus Andronicus, which reached its third (unattributed) edition in 1611 and did not reappear until it was included in the 1623 First Folio; the falsely attributed London Prodigal (1605) also saw only one edition. Shakespeare’s name was absent from the title page of Thomas Pavier’s 1619 Henry V quarto; the title page of John Smethwick’s 1623 Romeo and Juliet appeared in two states, one of which (STC 22325a) omits the author’s name. 17 For a list of plays falsely attributed to ‘William Shakespeare’ (as well as to ‘W.S.’ and ‘W.Sh.’), see Erne, Book Trade, 57. The most famous misattribution is of course of a poetic rather than a dramatic publication: William Jaggard’s 1599 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim. 18 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, trans. Joseph V. Harari, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (Harlow: Longman, 1988), 209. 19 Richard Brome, ‘In prayse of the Authour, and his following Poeme’, in John Fletcher, Monsieur Thomas (London: John Waterson, 1639), sig. A2r (STC 11071). 20 On title page misattribution to Shakespeare, see Erne, Book Trade, 56–89; and Loewenstein, Ben Jonson, 60–7. 21 Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1; quoted in Erne, Book Trade, 59. 22 Erne, Book Trade, 71; Loewenstein, Ben Jonson, 64. Full bibliographical details of the Shakespeare quartos discussed in this chapter (both apocryphal and authorial), and transcriptions of their title page paratextual features, can be accessed using DEEP. 23 Loewenstein, Ben Jonson, 64. Loewenstein also acknowledges that the name ‘William Shakespeare’ brings with it ‘borrowed value’; his discussion has moved

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to William Jaggard’s misattribution of The Passionate Pilgrim. For further discussion of the meanings carried by Shakespeare’s name as a paratextual element in early poetry publications, see note 40. 24 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London: Cuthbert Burby, 1598), sig. 2O2r (STC 17834). 25 Genette, Paratexts, 41. 26 Such is Farmer’s implicit argument in ‘Shakespeare as leading playwright’, in which he considers whether Shakespeare’s exceptional popularity may be connected with title page ‘editorial pledges’ that construct him as ‘a revising author attentive to the accuracy of the printed texts of his plays’ (90). 27 This count does not include The Whole Contention, a quarto collection which ‘was apparently intended to contain ten plays [and which] lacks a general title page’: see DEEP. The two playbooks that omitted a title page genre indication were Andrew Wise and William Aspley’s 2 Henry IV and John Norton’s 1634 Richard II. 28 ‘history, n., I1b’, OED Online (Oxford University Press, December 2019), www.oed.com/view/Entry/87324 (accessed 2 February 2020). 29 Other misattributed plays such as A Yorkshire Tragedy or 1 Sir John Oldcastle – printed as ‘The first part Of the true and honorable historie, of the life of Sir John Old-castle’ – contain an indication of their non-comedic genre within their title. 30 The Pericles title page may owe its wording to an attempt to distinguish the play from George Wilkins’s contemporaneously published prose narrative. 31 See Genette, Paratexts, 4–5. 32 Brandon S. Centerwall argues that the phrase ‘rare Tragedian’ originates with John Donne. See ‘Who Wrote William Basse’s “Elegy on Shakespeare”?: Rediscovering a Poem Lost from the Donne Canon’, Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006): 267–84. 33 Michael Drayton, ‘To my most dearely-loued friend Henry Reynolds Esquire of Poets and Poesie’, in The Battaile of Agincourt (London: William Lee, 1631), sig. V1r (STC 7191). 34 James Mervyn, ‘On M. James Shirley his Royall Master’, in James Shirley, The Royall Master (London: [n.p.], 1638), sig. B2r (STC 22454); Richard West, ‘On Mr. Ben. Iohnson’, in Ionsonus Virbius, ed. Brian Duppa (London: Henry Seile, 1638), sig. H4v (STC 14784). 35 William Cartwright, ‘Another’, in Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and Iohn Fletcher (London: Humphrey Moseley and Humphrey Robinson, 1647), sig. d2v (Wing B1581); George Daniel’s verse printed in

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C. M. Ingleby et al, eds., The Shakspere Allusion-Book, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 1:506. 36 Aston Cokaine, ‘A Præludium to Mr. Richard Bromes Playes’, in Richard Brome, Five New Playes (London: Humphrey Moseley, Richard Marriot, and Thomas Dring, 1653), sig. A2r (Wing B4870). 37 Thomas Philipot, Villare cantianum (London: [n.p.], 1659), sig. S4v (Wing P1989). 38 The title pages of all three pre-Restoration Merry Wives quartos advertise the ‘swaggering vaine of Ancient Pistoll, and Corporall Nym’; the title page of Richard Meighen’s 1630 edition also promotes (in lieu of a genre indication) ‘the humours of Sir John Falstaffe’. 39 ‘A neuer writer to an euer reader. Newes’, in William Shakespeare, The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid (London: Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, 1609), sigs. ¶2r-v (STC 22332). 40 I have thus far refrained from engaging with the likelihood that early readers of Shakespeare’s plays in quarto may well also have been readers of his poems, and that their conception of ‘Shakespeare’ may therefore have been influenced by the meanings the name accrued from these non-dramatic publications. Hooks argues that the reputation the poems built for him meant that Shakespeare’s name began to connote a certain stylistic ‘sweetness’ and an Ovidian subject matter, and that that ‘stylistic (and amorous) reputation could … extend to his plays’ (Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 76). Hooks discusses the way that Richard II, in particular, builds on the reputation Shakespeare had already developed in print (80–1), but the more obvious overlap between Shakespeare’s poems and his plays is in the genre of comedy: both are to do with love; a play like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a poem like Venus and Adonis draw equally on Ovidian source material. Even if playreaders brought to Shakespeare’s printed comedies expectations about their content derived from their reading of his poems, these expectations wouldn’t be too far from the mark. 41 Saenger, Commodification, 5. 42 As Marta Straznicky reminds us, women – who formed a key component of the play-reading demographic – were often envisaged in paratexts as ‘book handlers rather than book buyers’. See ‘Reading through the Body: Women and Printed Drama’, in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Straznicky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 59.

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43 On the formal connotations of genre indications on title pages, see Berek, ‘Genres, Early Modern Theatrical Title Pages, and the Authority of Print’, in The Book of the Play, ed. Straznicky, 159–75; on the sensory affect of playreading, see Hannah August, ‘“Tickling the senses with sinful delight”: The Pleasure of Reading Comedies in Early Modern England’, in The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660, eds. Simon Smith, Jackie Watson and Amy Kenny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 201–16. 44 This assessment of the subject matter of comedy is Philip Stubbes’s, from The Anatomie of Abuses (London: Richard Jones, 1583), sig. N4r (STC 23377). On the accuracy of Stubbes’s assessment, see August, ‘“Tickling the senses”’, 202. 45 Berger and Massai, introduction to Paratexts, xii.

Bibliography ‘A neuer writer to an euer reader. Newes’. In William Shakespeare, The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid, sigs. ¶2r-v. London: Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, 1609. August, Hannah. ‘“Tickling the senses with sinful delight”: The Pleasure of Reading Comedies in Early Modern England’. In The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660, edited by Simon Smith, Jackie Watson and Amy Kenny, 201–16. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Berek, Peter. ‘Genres, Early Modern Theatrical Title Pages, and the Authority of Print’. In The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, edited by Marta Straznicky, 159–75. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. Berek, Peter. ‘The Market for Playbooks and the Development of the Reading Public’. Philological Quarterly 91, no. 2 (2012): 151–84. Berger, Thomas L., and Sonia Massai, eds. Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Bergeron, David M. Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570–1640. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Brome, Richard. ‘In prayse of the Authour, and his following Poeme’. In John Fletcher, Monsieur Thomas, sig. A2r. London: John Waterson, 1639. Cartwright, William. ‘Another’. In Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and Iohn Fletcher, sig. d2v. London: Humphrey Moseley and Humphrey Robinson, 1647.

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Centerwall, Brandon S. ‘Who Wrote William Basse’s “Elegy on Shakespeare”?: Rediscovering a Poem Lost from the Donne Canon’. Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006): 267–84. Chandler, Wayne A. Commendatory Verse and Authorship in the English Renaissance. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. Cokaine, Aston. ‘A Præludium to Mr. Richard Bromes Playes’. In Richard Brome, Five New Playes, sig. A2r. London: Humphrey Moseley, Richard Marriot and Thomas Dring, 1653. DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks. Edited by Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser (created 2007), http://deep.sas.upenn.edu (accessed 3 February 2020). Drayton, Michael. ‘To my most dearely-loued friend Henry Reynolds Esquire of Poets and Poesie’. In The battaile of Agincourt, sig. V1r. London: William Lee, 1631. Duncan, Dennis, and Adam Smyth. ‘Introductions’. In Book Parts, edited by Duncan and Smyth, 1–9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Farmer, Alan B. ‘Shakespeare as Leading Playwright in Print, 1598–1608/09’. In Shakespeare and Textual Studies, edited by Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai, 87–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Foucault, Michel. ‘What is an Author?’, translated by Joseph V. Harari. In Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge, 197–210. Harlow: Longman, 1988. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hooks, Adam G. ‘Introduction: Shakespeare for Sale’. Philological Quarterly 91, no. 2 (2012): 139–50. Hooks, Adam G. Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Ingleby, C. M., et al., eds. The Shakspere Allusion-Book, 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1932. Kastan, David Scott. ‘The Body of the Text’. English Literary History 81, no. 2 (2014): 443–67. Loewenstein, Joseph. Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Massai, Sonia. ‘Shakespeare, Text and Paratext’. Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009): 1–11. Meres, Francis. Palladis Tamia. London: Cuthburt Burby, 1598. Mervyn, James. ‘On M. James Shirley his Royall Master’. In James Shirley, The Royall Master, sig. B2r. London: [n.p.], 1638.

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Philipot, Thomas. Villare cantianum. London: [n.p.], 1659. Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Saenger, Michael Baird. The Commodification of Textual Engagements. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Smith, Helen, and Louise Wilson, eds. Renaissance Paratexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Stern, Tiffany. ‘“On each Wall / And Corner Post”: Playbills, Title-pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London’. English Literary Renaissance 36, no. 1 (2006): 57–89. Straznicky, Marta. ‘Reading through the Body: Women and Printed Drama’. In The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, edited by Straznicky, 59–79. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. Stubbes, Philip. The Anatomie of Abuses. London: Richard Jones, 1583. Taylor, Gary. ‘The Order of Persons’. In Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, 31–79. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Walkley, Thomas. ‘The Stationer to the Reader’. In William Shakespeare, The Tragœdy of Othello, The Moore of Venice, sig. A2r. London: Thomas Walkley, 1622. West, Richard. ‘On Mr. Ben. Iohnson’. In Ionsonus Virbius, edited by Brian Duppa, sig. H4v. London: Henry Seile, 1638.

3

Public / private Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich

Onstage, John Fletcher’s play The Faithful Shepherdess was a flop, but publisher Walter Burre sought a better outcome for its printed quarto. Burre included in the prefatory material a poem by Francis Beaumont that blames the play’s theatrical failure on the ignorant ‘multitudes’ in its audience.1 This poem has much to teach us about the concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in early modern drama. In it, Beaumont identifies both performances and playtexts as ‘publicke things’ and refers to the text as the play’s ‘second publication’, following its onstage premiere. A play is made public, in other words, when presented to an audience, whether in performance or textual form. Beaumont argues that The Faithful Shepherdess was originally published in the wrong format: playgoers focused on visual and social elements, such as costumes, lighting and fellow audience members’ reactions, rather than on Fletcher’s witty language. Readers, Beaumont insists, can do better to uncover the play’s strengths: … I not dislike This second publication, which may strike Their consciences, to see the thing they scornd, To be with so much will and art adornd. Bisides one vantage more in this I see, Your censures must have the quallitie Of reading, which I am affraid is more Then halfe your shreudest judges had before.2

In claiming that a text best exhibits the author’s intentions (Fletcher’s ‘will’) and clever writing (his ‘art’), this passage both discerns and muddles a distinction between playgoers and play-readers. It distinguishes vulgar spectators from educated readers, but it also imagines spectators re-encountering the play as a

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text.3 The poem elsewhere worries that the quarto’s audience might include bad readers who cannot recite verse properly. Beaumont underscores that there were multiple ways to make a play public and many kinds of public audiences. This poem raises several questions about playtexts and play-reading, and it invites us to look anew at the notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.4 Previous scholars have tried to determine which commercial-stage plays were either public or private in performance.5 This chapter instead examines how playtexts engage publicly and perform privacy simultaneously. At the centre of my discussion is a key scene in the earliest printed quarto of The Maid’s Tragedy (1619), a public-stage play coauthored by Beaumont and Fletcher. In this scene, an embedded wedding masque incorporates elements from private entertainments, especially Ben Jonson’s earliest printed court masque, Hymenaei (1606) and John Marston’s manuscript of a household masque at Ashby (1607). These three texts reveal substantial cross-fertilization among different kinds of plays, and both their material conditions and content encode a complex interplay of public and private. By embracing such interplay, we can understand these concepts less as opposites and more as a range of fluctuating notions about rank, gender, physical spaces and political influence.

Jonson and Marston’s public/private masques (1606–7) Court masques existed at the intersection of private and public. In performance, they were exclusionary but held public interest, as they entertained audiences comprised of elite, public figures. In print, as Lauren Shohet has shown, their texts were often disseminated to broad audiences and engaged in public conversations.6 The 1606 quarto of Jonson’s Hymenaei – a masque performed in January of that same year for Francis Howard’s marriage to the Earl of Essex – represents masque texts as both more and less public than the events they document. The Hymenaei text enables those outside the court’s inner circle to access recent festivities by recording them in detailed, past-tense narration. It names the masquers, explains the meaning of costumes, describes scenery and props and evaluates the performance’s success. At the same time, Jonson’s lengthy preface identifies the text as a distorted and incomplete version of the

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performance. Descriptions cannot recover the masque’s ‘Spirit’, but so as not to ‘defraud the Reader of his Hope’, Jonson promises to give ‘briefe touches, which may leave behind some shadow of what it was’.7 Jonson assumes that the masque is already public news, and the printed text makes it (or at least aspects of it) available to a wider public eager for more information. However, Jonson also represents the Hymenaei text as ‘private’ in the sense of exclusive and erudite as he pitches it to a highly literate readership. The text includes untranslated Latin phrases and detailed marginal notes that demonstrate learnedness as they cite Homer, Ovid, Plutarch and Pliny as inspirations for certain elements of the masque. Jonson’s imagined ‘Reader’ seems to be a solitary male who studies the text privately. Anticipating Beaumont’s argument about play-reading, Jonson insists that masques are best experienced as texts. Multisensorial spectacles are ‘momentarie’ and quickly forgotten, whereas texts enable deeper, ‘lasting’ engagement with a masque’s ‘Inventions’, including its classical allusions, clever language and author’s intentions.8 For instance, the Hymenaei text includes a long epithalamion – a poem meant to be sung while leading the bride into her marital chamber – of which only an excerpt was performed. Jonson argues that masque texts function not only as public records, but also as opportunities for learned individual readers to comprehend a masque’s complexity in a private reading experience. Marston’s household masque appears especially ‘private’ in its performance venue and textual format. Elizabeth Hastings (Countess of Huntingdon) and her husband Henry commissioned Marston to write the masque for the 1607 visit of Elizabeth’s mother, Alice Egerton (Countess of Derby), to their Ashby estate in Leicestershire. It survives in one manuscript, a slim quarto bound in limp vellum, in which it appears between the texts of two outdoor pageants that welcomed Alice and bade her farewell. The text of the masque does not reveal why this particular visit prompted a grand entertainment, nor does it date the event, describe the estate or name the masquers. It therefore anticipates a narrower readership with more insider knowledge than does the Hymenaei text. The manuscript’s title underscores domesticity: ‘The honorable Lorde and Lady of Huntingdons Entertainement of theire right Noble Mother Alice: Countesse Dowager of Darby’.9 Before the title is the inscription:

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To the right Noble Ladye Alice Countess Dowager of Darby Madam If my slight Muse may sute your noble merrit My hopes are crownd, and I shall cheere my spirit But if my weake quill droopes, or seems unfitt Tis not your want of worth, but mine of witt. The servant of your Honor’d Virtues John Marston10

The title and most of the text were written by an unknown scribe. The final pageant, this dedication and corrections throughout the manuscript were written in a second hand that appears to be Marston’s own. His inscription presents the text as an intimate exchange between one author and one reader. Marston casts himself as a humble ‘servant’ to an influential patron – a term that evokes a household position and represents the text as an extension of a domestic space. As the Ashby text appears disinterested in chronicling the event for outsiders, it primes readers to understand it as privately familial. Yet the Ashby manuscript was not purely private. A manuscript was ‘published’, in Harold Love’s definition, when an ‘initiating agent’ knowingly surrendered control over its future use.11 The title and dedication announce to readers the entertainment’s occasion and patronage, although it is unclear how wide a readership Marston imagined. The manuscript’s survival as part of the Bridgewater Library – the books of Alice’s husband and son-in-law – might imply that it was a personal gift intended to remain within the family. Although there is only one known copy of the masque text, an excerpt of the opening pageant appears in a manuscript miscellany formerly owned by the eighteenth-century physician and rare materials collector Hans Sloane.12 Other evidence suggests that more copies of the entertainment circulated in the region, at least among those who participated in its performance and perhaps more widely.13 Because the Huntingdons were a prominent family who influenced local politics and literature, the Ashby masque held communal interest. Modelled after entertainments performed for monarchs, the masque and its text are both domestic and public-facing.14 A polished public style, which the Ashby manuscript mostly has, can also indicate an intent to publish (as in, make public).15 Its scribal hand’s tidiness and flourishes show careful attention to appearance, although Marston wrote

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the final section more hastily and marked up the text in several places. The manuscript additionally reveals halted efforts to record the event for those not present. For instance, the scribe writes that a certain ‘figure’ will demonstrate the decorations Alice encountered when she arrived, but the page is blank.16 A tipped-in sheet at the back provides an enigmatic list of ladies’ names with accompanying verses.17 The Ashby text is therefore descriptive and inscrutable, polished and untidy. It belongs to the category of manuscripts Love describes as ‘delicately balanced between the public and the private’.18 This balance is particularly important to the text’s representation of gender. Its performance of privacy allows for alternative values and authorities, especially those of female co-makers, and its publication makes these authorities public. In some ways, the text places men in supervisory roles. Marston introduces the entertainment as directed by his hopes, spirit, quill and wit, even as he claims submissiveness, and the text says the masque was performed at the ‘Earle of Huntingdons howse’, perhaps implying that he oversaw the event.19 Yet Alice and Elizabeth loom large in the volume, which repeatedly underscores their authority within the household and Elizabeth’s responsibility for the entertainment. The text of the opening pageant claims that Elizabeth desires only to be ‘worthy’ of her mother – a sentiment extended in the concluding pageant, which represents her as a loving daughter whom ‘hir mother graces / with all she can’.20 The Ashby manuscript represents the family as matriarchal: women rule their households while fulfilling the traditional roles of daughter and mother. If we were to understand the text only as a private document, we might interpret these women’s activities as existing in a domestic space apart from public society. The text’s intermingling of public and private, however, reveals their influences as extending beyond the household as well. The manuscript presents Alice and Elizabeth as public figures who are firmly associated with domestic roles.

The Maid’s Tragedy (1619): Beaumont and Fletcher’s public/private ‘Maske’ Like the masques on which it draws, the masque scene as printed in the first quarto of The Maid’s Tragedy (1619) plays with privacy and publicity.

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Publishers Richard Higgenbotham and Francis Constable entered the play’s title into the Stationers’ Register in April 1619, nearly a decade after the play’s initial performances and a few months after the banqueting house at Whitehall burned down.21 With the main venue for royal masques temporarily unavailable, a playtext with an inserted masque might have been a timely curiosity. Constable published an ‘augmented, and inlarged’ edition in 1622, and four more editions based on Q2 would be published by 1660.22 Following my discussion of gender in the Ashby manuscript, it is worth noting that at least two female stationers contributed to the textual history of The Maid’s Tragedy: Ursula Hawkins, who inherited her husband William’s rights but did not publish an edition herself, and Elizabeth Purslowe, who printed the fifth quarto in 1641. Their contributions are important reminders that women helped produce texts in traditionally public arenas too. Although the play was performed at court before 1619, the first quarto does not advertise a private staging. Instead, its title page highlights the play’s performance at the Blackfriars, a public playhouse sometimes marketed as a private venue.23 Neither the title page nor the first act uses the words ‘public’ or ‘private’ – a fitting absence, as neither concept fully applies. In spite of this absence, The Maid’s Tragedy is deeply concerned with the concepts of public and private, especially relating to gender and sexual relationships. The masque in its first act, which celebrates the wedding of Evadne and Amintor, is an exclusive event with controlled access. When two characters prepare for the masque by ensuring that only approved guests attend, one warns the other to guard the doors so as not to ‘let in all the world’.24 However, the play most often represents masques as public shows that hide private dissension. In the play’s first lines, one character asks another whether the upcoming masque will be ‘well’, and the second answers, ‘As well as masks can be’ because they ‘must commend, and speake in praise of the assembly, blesse the Bride and groome, in person of some god, there tied to rules of flatterie’.25 The event is in the King’s ‘charge’ – a word that denotes command as well as financial support – and therefore its ability to engage in candid dialogue is limited.26 As Shakespeare’s Henry V says, kings are not ‘private men’.27 Likewise, royal performances are not private affairs. The Maid’s Tragedy further emphasizes the public interest in and availability of masques by echoing several aspects of the Hymenaei and Ashby texts.28 At

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the beginning of The Maid’s Tragedy masque, Night praises the women at its fictional court, telling the goddess Cynthia that their ‘eies know how, / To shoote farre more and quicker rayes then thou’, and Cynthia adds that these mortals ‘appeare / Brighter then we’.29 These lines recall the female masquers in Hymenaei, whose faces are blindingly ‘dazzling’, and especially the opening of the Ashby masque, in which Cynthia expresses astonishment at the ‘Splendor’ of the ladies in the audience, who are ‘Brighter then us’ goddesses and have eyes that ‘shine more cleare then lightning’.30 At Ashby, Cynthia celebrates women’s noble minds, and in Hymenaei, women take active roles as masquers. In The Maid’s Tragedy, however, Cynthia limits her praise to physical beauty, and female characters (played by boy actors) occupy more passive roles. The fictional masque underscores women’s lack of agency in sexual relationships when it defines the wedding night – and presumably marriage – as steered by the desires and commands of the ‘lusty Bridegroome’.31 The lyrics of its second song describe secret nighttime pleasures: Hold back thy houres old night till we have done, The day will come too soone, Young Maydes will curse thee if thou steal’st away, And leav’st their losses open to the day, Stay, Stay, and hide the blushes of the Bride. Stay gentle night and with thy darknesse cover the kisses of her lover. Stay and confound her teares and her loud cryings, Her weake denials vowes and often dyings, Stay and hide all, but helpe not if she call.32

Words such as ‘cover’, ‘hide’, and ‘steal’ associate privacy with suspicious activity, and the lyrics expose a thin boundary between consensual pleasure and rape.33 Is the bride enjoying or resisting her lover? The song seems not to care. Although a reader might expect the male lover to comfort the crying woman, the song instead instructs him to ‘confound’ her tears – to defeat, confuse or put to shame. Whereas the Ashby text represents privacy as an elite privilege that enables feminine authority, The Maid’s Tragedy explores a darker side of privacy, including its dangers for women.

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By giving these lyrics the careful attention that Beaumont (in his prefatory poem to The Faithful Shepherdess) and Jonson (in the front matter of Hymenaei) argue is facilitated only by reading a play, we can understand that the fictional masque is not a straightforwardly joyous celebration. Indeed, it foreshadows the tragedy to come.34 The groom later learns that his marriage is meant to hide the corrupt King’s affair with the bride. Although Evadne initially boasts of her illicit relationship, her brother eventually persuades her to see herself as a victim and kill the King. The Evadne–Amintor match also destroys the life of Amintor’s betrothed, Aspatia (the titular ‘maid’), who commits suicide by disguising herself as her brother and taunting Amintor into killing her. Readers familiar with the plot can identify private jokes in the masque. The lyrics cited above might describe a wedding night, or its encounters might be extramarital. The song’s bride receives a visit not necessarily from the bridegroom, but from her ‘lover’. Likewise, the young maids losing their virginity might or might not be brides. As the word ‘steal’ signifies night’s departure, it foretells the stealing of Amintor’s wife by the King. This song brilliantly equivocates. It appears to honour the union of a virginal bride with her husband, but it in fact acknowledges the disunion of public appearance and private behaviour. Later in the playtext, the masque song’s language of hiding returns when Evadne reveals her affair; and Evadne repeats the masque’s light/dark imagery when she decides that nighttime is best not only for blushing brides, but also for her ‘blacke disgrace’ and her plot to king the King, which she calls her ‘blacke purpose’.35 Through this imagery, The Maid’s Tragedy underscores that its elite world is exclusionary based on skin colour as well as rank: its characters assume and privilege whiteness. The blushing bride song is anticipated and perhaps inspired by the printed, unperformed epithalamion in the Hymenaei text, which also highlights a bride’s fear: But keepe the Brides faire eyes Awake, with her owne Cries, Which are but Mayden-feares: And Kisses drie such teares.36

These lines dismiss the bride’s negative reaction but advise her husband to comfort her, in contrast to the amplified violence in The Maid’s Tragedy. Another passage in the Hymenaei epithalamion hopes that a ‘timely seede’ in

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the bride’s ‘gentle Wombe’ will produce a ‘Babe’.37 The surprising lack of fertility imagery in The Maid’s Tragedy masque insinuates that its particular union will be unproductive. More than it celebrates the potential of marital virtue, then, the fictional masque represents privacy as fostering illicit, fruitless activity. It also rewrites Ashby’s celebration of matriarchal authority into one better suited for a patriarchal system. At the same time, its allusion to such an entertainment celebrating women’s authority reveals the possibility for feminine resistance and anticipates how Evadne and Aspatia later assert their wills. Although the wedding masque is integral to the plot of The Maid’s Tragedy, the printed text separates it from the rest with a special centred header (see Figure 3.1). The word ‘Maske’ appears in letters as large as those in the book’s running title.38 Multiple spellings of the word were available in 1619, including ‘masque’, as in Hymenaei, and ‘masq’, as in the Ashby manuscript. The spelling of ‘maske’ in The Maid’s Tragedy recalls facial coverings worn to conceal identity and therefore represents the scene as a disguise, the public concealment of something private. Especially because no other scene receives a similar textual treatment, the heading marks the masque as a notable feature. The textual arrangement of the page presents the ‘Maske’ as a curiosity for those usually not allowed access to courtly entertainment and brings to mind Paul Yachnin’s theory of ‘populuxe’ theatre, in which commercial plays offer elite (private) culture to non-elite (public) consumers.39 In some ways, The Maid’s Tragedy offers a form of ‘populuxe’ theatre – one that does not venerate the court and that warns audiences about occasional drama’s function as propaganda. Yet several features of the text complicate a public/private divide. When the text begins with a list of characters titled ‘Speakers’, it invites readers to imagine a community of many voices, if not a script to read aloud. It therefore challenges a view of reading as private, as expressed by Jonson and in Thomas Middleton’s note to readers in The Roaring Girl (1611). Although Middleton imagines play-reading as a quiet, solitary activity performed ‘at home in your chambers’, other evidence shows that early modern readers shared books, read aloud and discussed what they read.40 Compared to the narration in the Hymenaei and Ashby texts, the play quarto’s silence about costumes, dancing, music, actors’ identities and audience reactions – all commonly excluded in publicstage playbooks – makes the text seem both more closed off and more open to multiple future uses.

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Figure 3.1  The ‘Maske’ in the first edition of The Maides Tragedie (London: Richard Higgenbotham [and Francis Constable], 1619), sig. C1r. G3967.3, Rare Book & Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library.

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‘[N]ow publique’: Shakespeare’s private revels Shakespeare used masques too, and The Maid’s Tragedy can serve as a productive model for understanding how his texts construct the notions of public and private. For instance, the paratexts of Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) notably emphasize the text’s publicness. Prefatory poems argue that the theatre served as a ‘triall’ for these plays but was less public than their entrance into print.41 Prefatory epistles by John Heminge and Henry Condell describe the plays’ stage histories as happening ‘before they were published’ and announce that Shakespeare’s works are ‘now publique’.42 One of these epistles, titled ‘To the great Variety of Readers’, assumes a readership with a wide range of literacies. It addresses readers ‘[f]rom the most able, to him that can but spell’.43 It also celebrates how play-reading enables unlimited study, encouraging readers to ‘[r]eade him, therefore; and againe, and againe’.44 According to this note, reading offers direct, endless access to the author and his texts far beyond his life. Two folio plays – The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest – demonstrate how Shakespeare recycled parts of actual masques and inserted into these plays fictional masques that expose the permeable boundaries of private and public. In the fourth act of The Winter’s Tale, characters enjoy a local sheep-shearing festival with rustic dancing, a ballad seller and other country merriments when a servant reports that twelve dancers are ready to perform. Although a shepherd assumes that their dance is more ‘homely foolery’, a messenger explains the show’s elite history: three of their company ‘hath danc’d before the King’.45 As the text represents the dancing satyrs as both elite and rustic, it offers little description of the dance, noting only that twelve men disguised as satyrs can leap enormous heights. More than a century ago, A. H. Thorndike suggested that this dance derives from the antimasque of satyrs in Ben Jonson’s Oberon, performed at court on 1 January 1611.46 Oberon marked Prince Henry’s debut as a principal masquer, and to signify Henry’s coming of age, its satyrs are childish mischief-makers whom Henry’s presence reforms.47 The Winter’s Tale reimagines these aggressive satyrs as harmless figures. They appear in the text just before a father reprimands his son for pursuing love privately. The play insists that the father is in the wrong, and the prince’s defiance heals a broken family and a long-time rift between two kingdoms. Its

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recycled satyrs suggest that sometimes childish mischief is needed to challenge unfair patriarchal control. If Shakespeare’s audiences were able to identify the allusion, the play’s fantasy of restored losses could have evoked the national tragedy of Henry’s premature death. But the folio text offers little more than the hint that these satyrs danced before the King; in this particular textual form, the dance becomes a joyful addition to a public festival. The folio does not announce the masque in The Tempest either. When Prospero commissions a betrothal entertainment for Miranda and Ferdinand, no character or stage direction calls the spectacle a ‘masque’, and Prospero refers to it as ‘Revels’ and an ‘insubstantiall Pageant’.48 Whereas The Maid’s Tragedy emphasizes masking and secrets, this text focuses on celebratory dancing (revels) and public display (pageantry). Yet The Tempest masque is remarkably private, as it is performed in an isolated setting for an intimate audience. It underscores how masques combine elite and popular styles by mixing formal speeches by classical goddesses with a country dance. Like Hymenaei, it abounds in fertility imagery and therefore suggests – in contrast to The Maid’s Tragedy – that the union between Miranda and Ferdinand will be fruitful and fortunate. Like the King in The Maid’s Tragedy, Prospero controls the display. He even ends it abruptly when a not-so-secret plot against his life intrudes upon the private celebration. The Tempest masque might be interpreted as a straightforward celebration of patriarchal power and elite privilege, but the play seems to argue – again, like The Maid’s Tragedy – that privacy is unsustainable. Like secrets, masques and their exclusionary politics are fleeting, and The Tempest ends with Prospero escaping the secluded island to resume a public role. The text remains silent about what happens to Caliban, the island’s colonized native, who has insisted that the island was his private property. Together with The Maid’s Tragedy, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest reveal that masques were not solely for elite audiences but also influenced all kinds of theatre in early seventeenth-century England. The use of masques in publicstage plays reveals their public availability. Recycled masque elements dismantle a clear division between ‘public’ and ‘private’. Instead of categorizing plays as one or the other, it might be more useful to establish a range of publicness. Instead of trying to pin down clear definitions of public and private in the period, we should embrace their multiple meanings. ‘Public’ could connote

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openness, availability for sale, lowliness, accessibility or orthodoxy. ‘Private’ could signify secrets, unavailability, inaccessibility, privilege, danger, exclusivity or nonconformity. Public did not necessarily mean inclusive, and private did not necessarily mean apolitical. As the masques embedded in public-stage plays simultaneously conceal and reveal, early modern theatre (and the books that stand as our witnesses to performance) sourced considerable political and social power from its negotiation of this boundary.

Notes 1 Francis Beaumont, ‘To my friend Maister Iohn Fletceher [sic], upon his faithfull Shepheardesse’, in John Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepheardesse (London: Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, [1610?]), sig. ¶3v. When I quote from early modern texts in original spelling, I expand abbreviations and regularize i/j, u/v, and vv/w. I provide play titles in modernized spelling in the main text and original spelling in the notes. 2 Beaumont, ‘To my friend’, sig. ¶3v. 3 Complaints about the vulgarity of the common reader are widespread in early modern paratexts. See, e.g., Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1–8. On discussions of play-reading in paratexts, see Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7–18. 4 In response to Jurgen Habermas’s concept of the ‘public sphere’ (in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989)), scholars have debated whether this notion applies to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For revisions of Habermas, see Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, Social/Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80, and Catharine Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century England (New York: Palgrave, 2007). Erica Longfellow offers a succinct examination of the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’, in ‘Public, Private, and the Household in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 313–34. The ‘Making Publics’ research group promotes the idea of multiple ‘publics’ in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things,

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Forms of Knowledge, ed. Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), especially 1–24.   5 See especially Sarah Dustagheer, Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 30–49; Eoin Price, ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 29–47; and Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 238.   6 Lauren Shohet, Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 81–124.   7 Ben Jonson, Hymenaei (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1606), sig. D3v.   8 Ibid., sig. A3r.   9 ‘The honorable Lorde and Lady of Huntingdons Entertainement’, Ellesmere Manuscript 34/B/9, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, fol. 2r. 10 Ibid. 11 Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1993), 39. 12 Sloane Manuscript 848, British Library, London, fols. 9r–10r. 13 James Knowles, ‘Marston, Skipwith, and The Entertainment at Ashby’, English Manuscript Studies 3 (1992): 137–92. 14 For the Ashby masque’s relationship to royal entertainments, see Mary C. Erler, ‘“Chaste Sports, Juste Prayses, & All Softe Delight”: Harefield 1602 and Ashby 1607, Two Female Entertainments’, International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre 14 (1996): 1–25. For more on the family’s private masques, see Vanessa Jean Wilkie, ‘“Such Daughters and Such a Mother”: The Countess of Derby and her Three Daughters, 1560–1647’, PhD diss. (University of California Riverside, USA, 2009), 164–95. 15 Love, Scribal Publication, 42. 16 Ellesmere Manuscript 34/B/9, fol. 2v. 17 Knowles (in ‘Marston, Skipwith, and The Entertainment at Ashby’) argues that these verses were a kind of lottery drawing performed at the same event and written by William Skipwith. I concur and analyse them in detail in ‘Performing Patronage, Crafting Alliances: Ladies’ Lotteries in English Pageantry’, in The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England, ed. Christina Luckyj and Niamh J. O’Leary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 107–25. 18 Love, Scribal Publication, 44.

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19 Ellesmere Manuscript 34/B/9, fol. 8r. 20 Ibid., fol. 5r, 14r. 21 The quarto’s variant title pages identify either Higgenbotham or Constable as publisher and Nicholas Okes as printer. A second, unidentified printer completed some of the job. See T. W. Craik’s introduction to his edition of The Maid’s Tragedy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 33–7. 22 The Maids Tragedie (London: Francis Constable, 1622). More work should be done on the significance of Q1/Q2 variants; for a preliminary discussion, see Sarah P. Sutherland, Masques in Jacobean Tragedy (New York: AMS Press, 1983), 64–5. 23 On the Blackfriars as private, see Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (London: Routledge, 1997). 24 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Maides Tragedy (London: Richard Higgenbotham [and Francis Constable], 1619), sig. B3v. 25 Ibid., sig. B1r. 26 Ibid., sig. B2r. 27 William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 4.1.234. 28 Philip J. Finkelpearl suggests the Ashby-Maid’s Tragedy connection in Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 36. 29 Maides Tragedy, sigs. C1r–C1v. 30 Hymenaei, sig. B4v and Ellesmere Manuscript 34/B/9, fols 8r–9r. 31 Maides Tragedy, sig. C2v. 32 Ibid., sigs. C2v–C3r. 33 This concept of privacy as enabling wrongdoing was common in the period. See Longfellow, ‘Public, Private’, 315. 34 Previous scholarship on The Maid’s Tragedy masque emphasizes its irony and foreshadowing. See Sutherland, Masques, 62–74; Michael Neill, ‘“The Simetry, Which Gives a Poem Grace”: Masque, Imagery, and the Fancy of The Maid’s Tragedy’, Renaissance Drama 3 (1970): 111–35; and Catherine A. Henze, ‘Unraveling Beaumont from Fletcher with Music, Misogyny, and Masque’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 44, no. 2 (2004): 379–404. Jason Denman aptly calls the masque ‘a public celebration and a private, perverse joke at the same time’ in ‘Anatomizing the Body Politic: Corporeal Rhetoric in The Maid’s Tragedy’, Philological Quarterly 84, no. 3 (2005): 318. 35 Maides Tragedy, sigs. H2r and I4v.

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36 Hymenaei, sig. D2v. 37 Ibid., sig. D3r. 38 Maides Tragedy, sig. C1r. 39 Paul Yachnin, ‘The Populuxe Theatre’, in The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 38–65. 40 Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girle (London: Thomas Archer, 1611), sig. A3r. On reading as communal, see the section on ‘Reading Communities’, in Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain, ed. Leah Knight, Micheline White and Elizabeth Sauer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 117–92. 41 Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Edward Blount et al., 1623), sig. A3r. 42 Ibid., sigs. A2v–A3r, emphasis added. 43 Ibid., sig. A3r. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., sig. Bb3v. 46 A. H. Thorndike, ‘Influence of the Court-Masques on the Drama, 1608–14’, PMLA 15 (1900): 114–20. 47 David Lindley, introduction to Oberon, The Fairy Prince, ed. Lindley, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 48 Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, sig. B2r.

Bibliography Beaumont, Francis. ‘To my friend Maister Iohn Fletceher [sic], upon his faithfull Shepheardesse’. In John Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepheardesse, sig. ¶3v. London: Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, [1610?]. Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. The Maides Tragedy. London: Richard Higgenbotham [and Francis Constable], 1619. Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. The Maids Tragedie. London: Francis Constable, 1622. Craik, T. W., ed. The Maid’s Tragedy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Dekker, Thomas, and Thomas Middleton. The Roaring Girle. London: Thomas Archer, 1611.

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Denman, Jason. ‘Anatomizing the Body Politic: Corporeal Rhetoric in The Maid’s Tragedy’. Philological Quarterly 84, no. 3 (2005): 311–31. Dustagheer, Sarah. Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Erler, Mary C. ‘“Chaste Sports, Juste Prayses, & All Softe Delight”: Harefield 1602 and Ashby 1607, Two Female Entertainments’. International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre 14 (1996): 1–25. Finkelpearl, Philip J. Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Fraser, Nancy. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’. Social/Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80. Gray, Catharine. Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century England. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989. Henze, Catherine A. ‘Unraveling Beaumont from Fletcher with Music, Misogyny, and Masque’. SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 44, no. 2 (2004): 379–404. Jonson, Ben. Hymenaei. London: Thomas Thorpe, 1606. Knight, Leah, Elizabeth Sauer and Micheline White, eds. Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Knowles, James. ‘Marston, Skipwith, and The Entertainment at Ashby’. English Manuscript Studies 3 (1992): 137–92. Kolkovich, Elizabeth Zeman. ‘Performing Patronage, Crafting Alliances: Ladies’ Lotteries in English Pageantry’. In The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England, edited by Christina Luckyj and Niamh J. O’Leary, 107–25. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Lindley, David, ed. Oberon, The Fairy Prince. In The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Longfellow, Erica. ‘Public, Private, and the Household in Early Seventeenth-Century England’. Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 313–34. Love, Harold. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Marston, John. ‘The honorable Lorde and Lady of Huntingdons Entertainement’. Ellesmere Manuscript 34/B/9, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Neill, Michael. ‘“The Simetry, Which Gives a Poem Grace”: Masque, Imagery, and the Fancy of The Maid’s Tragedy’. Renaissance Drama 3 (1970): 111–35.

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Peters, Julie Stone. Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Price, Eoin. ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015. Shakespeare, William. Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Edward Blount et al., 1623. Shohet, Lauren. Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Straznicky, Marta. Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sutherland, Sarah P. Masques in Jacobean Tragedy. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1983. Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Wilkie, Vanessa Jean. ‘“Such Daughters and Such a Mother”: The Countess of Derby and her Three Daughters, 1560–1647’. PhD dissertation. University of California Riverside, USA, 2009. Wilson, Bronwen, and Paul Yachnin, eds. Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Yachnin, Paul. ‘The Populuxe Theatre’. In The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England, edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, 38–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

4

Edition / translation Régis Augustus Bars Closel

What is the importance of modern English vernacular editions of early modern plays to a translator seeking to prepare a text of Shakespeare in a different modern vernacular? How might a translator’s choices regarding this source material (a single edition or a collage of them) affect the play’s new readership? In other words, how do the playtext’s framing ideas – and attitudes towards its authorship – change when it passes through the process of translation? This chapter on the pair of terms ‘edition’ and ‘translation’ asks these questions, exploring how Brazilian Portuguese translations of Shakespeare have revealed new insights about textual matters that have been taken up in recent English editions of the same plays: the presence of collaborative authorship, the dilemma of textual cruxes, later revisions and the existence of variant texts. All of these insights challenge received wisdom about Shakespeare for those who access his works through translation. For non-English readers, a translation indirectly gives access to another vernacular (English), the editorial practices that characterize that tradition, the history of editions and how the text has been rendered from English into their language. For these readers, the translation is the play. Working with what I call a ‘source edition’ (an edition that serves as an axis for primary consultation) shapes which textual questions a translator addresses or leaves out, whereas the absence of a specific ‘source edition’ – or indeed a plurality of them – opens up more space for the translator to make The author would like to acknowledge the generous support of Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), grant numbers [2016/06723-2] (USP, Brazil), [2011/21988-9] (UNICAMP, Brazil), [2016/23470–0] and [2012/22101-0] (Shakespeare Institute, UK), in the preparation of this research for publication.

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their own choices. I address this issue from two main perspectives. The first is how Brazilian translations of Shakespeare’s plays – especially the collaborative plays – have treated textual criticism related to the play in the edition itself and/ or through its introduction. This approach considers the editions available to different translators at the time they were working on a specific play and shows the degree to which the resulting translation is influenced by information and methods transmitted by English editions, including the state of criticism of the play as well as editorial sources and practices. Secondly, I draw on my experience of translating two plays on which Shakespeare collaborated – Sir Thomas More (1600; 1603/4) and Arden of Faversham (1588) – in order to show how the process of translation intersects with modern editorial concerns in ways that enhance rather than cloud non-English readers’ understandings of these plays’ complex textual histories, especially as they concern collaborative authorship.1 Authorship attribution techniques have evolved significantly over the past few years and can now help identify possible instances of collaboration with more confidence. In the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016), Arden of Faversham is situated as one of the opening plays of Shakespeare’s complete works, having also appeared in a different group of plays in Shakespeare & Others: Collaborative Plays (2013).2 Other examples of plays once out of but now accepted into the Shakespearean fold include Double Falsehood (2010), Sir Thomas More (2011) and Edward III (2017) in the Arden Shakespeare series. As Will Sharpe has pointed out, no other topic of scholarly interest on Shakespeare has caught hold in the mainstream media quite to the same extent as issues of ‘authorship’.3 Beginning with John Jowett’s Oxford individual edition of Timon of Athens (2004), we have witnessed the ‘collaboration turn’ in Shakespeare studies, a period where the possibility of multiple hands in a single play cannot be left unheeded or taken as controversial.4 The effort to establish authorship has continued to pre-occupy textual critics and editors. In what follows, I make the case that the boundaries of textual criticism need to be expanded from the current focus on establishing the shares of individual dramatists and their overlapping canons. Textual criticism also needs to be leveraged to improve the way in which Shakespeare is being framed into new worlds, words and contexts though translation.

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Brazilian translation practices and their textual background What distinguishes different renditions of the same play in a new language? The editions their translators have consulted. Shakespeare first reached Brazil in 1835, when indirect translations in Brazilian Portuguese were made from editions in European languages, especially French. It would take almost a century – until 1933 – for the first play to be rendered directly into Brazilian Portuguese from English. Hamlet was translated by Tristão da Cunha (1878–1942), based on a text prepared by William Aldis Wright, reprinted in 1904 (first printed in 1866) and probably grounded on the First Folio text.5 There were 217 Brazilian Portuguese translations of Shakespeare’s plays published between 1933 and August 2020, a rate of more than two per year. The sixteen times Hamlet was given a new voice in Portuguese represents more than 7 per cent of all these translations.6 However, the first translation of a specific early textual version of that play – Q1 Hamlet – appeared only in 2010. Previous translations of the play had reflected conflations of F and Q2, rather than a single text version, either F or Q2. Innovation has increased in newer editions in that translators have started to pay special attention to editorial practices underpinning the edited English texts rather than attending to the vernacular text only. (I discuss this at greater length later through Lawrence Flores Pereira’s award-winning 2015 rendition of this highly canonical play.) Not surprisingly, collaborative plays have remained the lowest priority for translators, who still prefer the most well-known works since they are seen to pose sophisticated artistic challenges and are safe bets for publishers. Besides Hamlet (summing sixteen different translations), Macbeth (thirteen), King Lear (twelve) and Othello (ten) have been taken up the most often by Brazilian translators. However, the development of collaboration and attribution studies has influenced translation practices (both directly and indirectly), redefining perceptions of authorship and thus of the texts themselves. These shifts in perception are especially evident in the editorial handling of texts now accepted as collaborative, but translators of multi-text plays, such as Hamlet, have also made use of editorial solutions from English editions in their efforts to present a version of the play to non-Englishspeaking readers.

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The Two Noble Kinsmen is a good starting point. The Fletcher–Shakespeare collaboration remained untouched by Brazilian Portuguese translators until 2016 when Elvio Funck translated and published it; Funck’s translation was then quickly followed by a new translation in 2017 by José Roberto O’Shea.7 The only way of reading this play in Portuguese before these translations was through a European Portuguese text from the 1970s.8 In both Funck and O’Shea’s translations, a co-author emerged from the footnotes for the first time to share the attribution on the book cover with William Shakespeare. The same treatment was not given to George Wilkins, when O’Shea rendered Pericles into Portuguese back in early 2010s, even though introductory information about the collaboration features in a small section dedicated to the partnership. Nearly all the twenty-first-century translations that prioritized collaboration were published between 2012 (when O’Shea’s Pericles was published) and 2017 (when the first Shakespeare–Fletcher translation was published). It is possible that this new emphasis on co-authorship – that is, highlighting Fletcher’s name instead of discussing collaboration in the introduction as in the partnership with Wilkins  – is due to the growing influence of collaboration studies on modern editions in English. While the publication of two translations of The Two Noble Kinsmen within a couple of months of each other suggests a growing interest in Shakespeare’s collaborative work, the collaboration-turn did not affect every translation project equally. The differences are especially evident in the approaches to Pericles. Funck’s text, published in late 2019, mentions Wilkins in a footnote at the beginning of 2.4 while O’Shea’s earlier 2012 edition notes the collaboration and the hand of Wilkins more fully.9 The dates of these editions challenge the assumption that a newer translation would necessarily reflect the growing interest in collaborative authorship in textual criticism. Following Giorgio Melchiori’s New Cambridge Shakespeare (NCS) edition, Funck claimed Shakespeare as the author in the cover of his translation of Edward III (2010), and this remained the sole translation of the play for some time. However, Funck’s translations are inconsistent in the naming of collaborators: The Two Noble Kinsmen acknowledges Fletcher, but neither Funck’s Henry VIII nor his Pericles names the co-author.10 Perhaps surprisingly, Funck’s translation of Edward III in 2010 fully credits the play to Shakespeare, although it discusses briefly that the play might not

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be by his hand.11 Funck’s choice to attribute it solely to Shakespeare is notable since, as far as we know, Shakespeare is not the largest hand in the play. The option to credit Shakespeare may also be a result of the considerable difference when it comes to selling a book by an anonymous writer versus one by Shakespeare. What is also surprising is that this translation appeared before most large collections and publishers adopted the play in their canons. But Funck’s attribution makes more sense when we consider that he used and was inspired by Giorgio Melchiori’s NCS edition of the play for critical background. After all, Melchiori edited Edward III as a Shakespeare play. Funck clearly used this edition to support his choice to name a single author. By contrast, O’Shea’s translations of collaborative plays, which rely on a collage of modern editions, dedicate much more space to collaboration, in keeping with the collaborationturn in modern editorial practice, which largely post-dates Melchiori’s efforts for the NCS series. Funck and O’Shea have different practices in the ways they consult editions, as their projects are made for different purposes: O’Shea’s translation project focuses on less-translated plays while Funck is translating all plays attributed to Shakespeare. One of O’Shea’s forthcoming translations is of Timon of Athens, another Shakespeare play now accepted as collaborative. Thomas Middleton’s name will also feature on the book cover. The edition of this tragic play will be innovative in its treatment of authorship as it will contain a second introduction, prepared by me, in which I take Middleton and his collaborations/revisions of Shakespeare as the central focus. This will offer a new view of the play’s textual history for readers. After all, the most common translation, prepared by Bárbara Heliodora in 2003, defines the play as a ‘draft’ in its introduction.12 This now-outdated perception of the play was standard in the late 1990s and early 2000s – before John Jowett’s definitive edition for the Oxford World Classics (2004) and the second Oxford Shakespeare (2006) and the Oxford Middleton (2007), which attributes the play partly to Middleton on the grounds of vocabulary, action and characterization. Heliodora relied on the criticism that was available to her in the preceding decades, which did not acknowledge Middleton’s role as a co-author. Editorial tradition, again, played a major role in the version of the play that Brazilian readers could access. As in his Two Noble Kinsmen, O’Shea’s new translation of Timon will put readers in contact with the topic of collaboration and consequently invite them to gain more in

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terms of the play’s textual history from the very ‘first impression’ given by the book object itself – both playwrights’ names on the book cover. Among the five well-known collaborations detailed by Brian Vickers in Shakespeare, Co-Author (2004), the co-authors of the remaining two plays, Titus Andronicus and Henry VIII, still await their day of reckoning on Brazilian bookshelves. Early Shakespeare has proven a challenge for attribution studies in terms of reaching solid conclusions. However, most readers of the Henry VI trilogy have been aware for some time that they were at least co-authored, even if the share of the contributions is not yet clear-cut.13 Although Richard III is a favourite in Brazilian theatres, the other three plays in the tetralogy remain largely unread and unperformed. They are found in the works of a few translators who have relied on what was at the time considered the ‘complete works’ of Shakespeare. The exigencies of this kind of collection allow for minimal sophisticated critical input from the translator and do not mention textual criticism. Co-authorship therefore goes unmentioned. Furthermore, recent candidates of collaboration, such as All’s Well, are too new to have had an impact on translations – yet. Middleton’s revisions of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Macbeth have not reached Brazilian Portuguese versions either.14 Shares attributed to other dramatists, such as Nashe and Marlowe, have yet to be named in translations of the plays with which those playwrights have been associated. The older the source edition behind the translation, the less likely it is for the translated edition to mention collaborative authorship. The influence of English editors’ handlings of plays’ complex textual histories on Brazilian Portuguese translations is also evident in how translators encode textual variance in their editions. When it comes to editorial principles, there are some thought-provoking solutions that have reached texts in Portuguese. Both Arden Third Series editions of King Lear (1997) and Sir Thomas More (2011) have employed superscript letters to distinguish sections of text: textual variants across early editions in the case of Lear and different authorial parts in the case of More. This technique of textual differentiation makes visible the complex textual history of the most translated play into Brazilian Portuguese: Hamlet. Lawrence Flores Pereira translated Hamlet (2015) using these mechanisms (either F or Q in the beginning and the end of a verse or a passage) to highlight variants between segments of the Folio-only or Quarto-only (i.e. Q2) text. This was a nice use of editorial strategy from an English edition to

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open a usually conflated text, which he has subsequently applied to his Lear (2020). Pereira’s translation of Hamlet was the first to highlight significant textual variants between Q2 and F.15 However, minimal textual variance, such as a unique different word in a verse, goes largely unnoted in his Hamlet. In these examples, editorial decisions made in the English vernacular editorial tradition – both regarding authorship attribution and textual variance – are influential for the translator’s choices and thus have a bearing on the kind of text that will reach Brazilian Portuguese readers. Two factors seem to be of paramount importance: the specific moment in the history of the text along with the availability of editions that validate recent criticism. In the history of the text, the translator mediates the public perception of a given play, an artistic locus that might have both cultural and scholarly impact. To illustrate this in more detail, I will now turn to my own practices as a translator of collaborative plays.

Collaboration through the prism of translation For over a decade, I have been researching playtexts that have remained in the ambiguous position of outsiders/insiders in the Shakespeare canon, translating both Sir Thomas More and Arden of Faversham into Brazilian Portuguese. In working on More, I established a method for this artistic process of re-creation that engages directly with the plurality of early modern texts. I call this approach ‘prismatic translation’, and it involves two key principles.16 The first is a focus on the material condition of the playtext by considering its physical instantiations as cultural artefacts that encode specific writing and printing practices. The second is an insistence on the history of the playtext by attending to the variation found both in early modern and modern editions. Prismatic translation widens the scope of what counts as a source edition, opening the possibilities found in the earliest printed edition (or editions) or extended through the stages of its transmission. Rather than a one-to-one textual relationship between words in a single source edition and in the translated text, the process of prismatic translation accounts for most of the  possible combinations of editorial options, highlighting the instability of the play’s textual origins. In this way, textual variation is not domesticated for the sake of

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aesthetics, since glossing over variation creates a false impression of a ‘finished product’ rather than a text that was constantly remade to answer the cultural demands of different historical moments. In order to represent the play’s deep textual history, the translation reserves a lot of space in the margins and footnotes to accommodate information that acknowledges textual changes over time. In this way, it looks very much like a scholarly edition, such as The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. The act, and therefore product, of prismatic translation exposes our current state of knowledge concerning a specific play. Even if the amount of information varies from one play to another, my translations are designed explicitly to represent a specific point in time like a photograph, exposing what happens when a playtext with a complex textual history passes into a new language. In other words, they paint a larger picture for students, teachers and theatre practitioners who might use the translated text. Unlike past translations that used single source texts, a layered history of the text emerges in a different vernacular. To illustrate how this works, I offer examples of my work with two plays that have very different material conditions and histories. My translation of Sir Thomas More was partly a vehicle to discuss authorship, collaboration, canon and apocrypha, and the importance of textual studies.17 More is a collaborative play written by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle (1600), with additions by other dramatists (1603–4), namely Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker and Shakespeare.18 A theatrical copyist known in the scholarly tradition as Hand C supervised the process. The manuscript also features notes and marks for revision by Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney. The play therefore survives as a multi-authored, annotated and censored manuscript. The range and the impact of this composition made this play an appealing and complex object for translation. The manuscript is thought to have been created in two stages: the Original Text, set by Munday and Chettle, and the later Additions. Tilney is responsible for the censorship marks found in the earlier leaves, while the later leaves have internal revision made by Hand C, Chettle or one of the other dramatists. Throughout the text, we find dramatists fixing and recreating scenes for the sake of censorship approval and dramaturgical tune-ups. Shakespeare does both. He recreates a long sequence of crowd-control that the censor demanded to be removed as it could prompt xenophobia and civil

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uproar.19 In his other addition, according to some scholars, Shakespeare fixes a problem of theatrical necessities – creating time for an actor to get ready – by introducing a soliloquy in the beginning of the scene.20 Everyone involved in the preparation of the manuscript has done something similar, by adjusting, recreating and composing parts of specific scenes. During the process of translating the play, I referred to nearly all printed editions of Sir Thomas More, from 1844 to 2013, as well as to an Italian version of the play. This process allowed me to follow the evolution of textual criticism around the play – from a nearly inscrutable manuscript to the complex, varied and surprisingly coherent scholarly editions we have today. When taken as a singular source for the translation, every one of these texts would yield a different result and especially a different authorial and textual perspective of the play, mainly because the translation would establish a connection with a particular past moment and state of criticism. While I relied mostly on Jowett’s Arden edition (2011), the text behind my translation is different from any that have come before, especially since I incorporated a solution to a Latin textual crux, recovering a lost verse as a result of my deep engagement with textual matters while translating.21 In my translation, the whole group of dramatists is credited with authorship, through a long sequence of names and functions. This list includes the copyist and the censor as agents that left marks in the text. Throughout the initial credits page, everyone finds their place and a brief history of the play’s textual transmission is represented in chronological order, ending with the translator who is currently handing the baton to the reader:

Composta por Anthony Munday e Henry Chettle Censurada por Edmund Tilney Revisada por Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood e William Shakespeare Preparada por Mão C Tradução, notas e introdução por Régis Augustus Bars Closel

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I also highlighted several instances of variation and the processes that probably led to that variation. Censorship and internal revision (the elimination of words and verses) in the manuscript were underlined in my edition. Variation on editorial tradition, such as conjectural readings for damaged parts of the document, were added in brackets and their alternative possibilities appeared in footnotes. The option for one conjectural reading over another followed no specific rule, since (1) some variants in English resulted in the same word in Portuguese; or (2) in some cases, the omission of assumptions (that is, conjecture) seemed a preferable solution. The example below represents a censored, damaged part of the manuscript that some editors tried conjecturally to restore. In this specific case, I explained that I followed A. F. Hopkinson’s (1902) solution (endorsed by the 2005 RSC edition), offered the reader John Shirley’s editorial conjecturing (1938) and mentioned that Jowett and others had left these as blank lines. In the last part, I note that censorship might have led to the removal of the two lost verses:

Um número de artesãos ≤se levanta≥ ≤Com armas e avisa vingar os males≥.N Note: Leitura de Hopkinson, seguida pela edição da RSC (2005). Leitura de Shirley: ‘are out / Inflamed to kill the hated aliens’; Jowett e diversos outros editores deixam essas duas lacunas em branco. (JOWETT, 2011, p. 167, n. 76). Sequência censurada por Tilney. A censura deve ter atingido também os versos que faltam (76–77). (STM, 3.76–7, my translation)

Furthermore, I took advantage of the margins to indicate particularities about the manuscript. For instance, in the example below, the text highlights censored text through underlining and a marginal annotation by Tilney (here depicted by the right-hand [T]). Tilney’s remark ordering the dramatists to ‘Mend this’ (fol. 5a) is offered in Portuguese. In this sequence, the Court authorities are discussing the explosive social environment with which the play starts:

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Não gosto da testa franzida do povo. Meus olhos atentos nunca encontraram T: Arrume isto Um semblante de dor mais abalado (STM, 3.4–6, my translation)

5

The upper margins of the page in my edition are also used to show the alternation from one hand to another, indicating a transition from one part of the manuscript (and its author) to another. The examples below are from the multi-authored sixth scene. Initially, the text starts on the part of Addition 222 by Hand C, then the text changes to Shakespeare’s part of Addition 2. By the 161st line, the text returns to the original text by Munday:

[Mão C (Adição II) / Shakespeare (Adição II)] […] Se vocês o procurarem. [Shakespeare (Adição II) / Munday (Original)] TODOS Nós nos entregamos e desejamos o perdão de sua alteza. (STM, 6.161–2, my translation)

Regarding passages that have two versions, both in the original text and in an addition, I opted for the latter, and the earlier was placed in an appendix – they followed the same formatting practices as the main text. My introduction includes a section called ‘How to use this translation’, which explains every important point of the criticism that lies behind the prismatic approach as well as how to read the textual encoding. Arden of Faversham, which survives only in print, does not feature the textual complexities found in the More manuscript. The main focal points for a prismatic translation of this particular play are the presence of two authorial styles; oscillation between verse and prose; movement; stage directions; and some variant words in early or modern editions. In the translation I am currently preparing, I have credited the play to Anonymous23 (sc.1–3; 10– epilogue) and Shakespeare (sc.4–9), as the first has a larger share of the whole. Prismatic translation was necessary right from the beginning, since the title of

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the play contains some variation in its earlier documents. I chose The Tragedy of Arden of Faversham but, in doing so, used the plural form of the ‘of Arden’ (‘dos Arden’). It highlights a reading in which there are two characters (Alice and Thomas) sharing the same surname, so that the word ‘tragedy’ that usually refers to a single character comes to apply to both characters (as a couple, a family and a household) who share the tragic episodes within the land of the abbey of Faversham:24

Escrita por Dramaturgo Anônimo Em colaboração com William Shakespeare Escrita em Final do ano 1588 Publicada nos anos 1592, 1599 e 1633 Traduzida por Régis Augustus Bars Closel

As in More, several editions have guided me through the history of the text, following recent criticism on Shakespearean authorship. I used the same editing strategies employed in my previous translation to open up possibilities, bearing in mind variation and movement, as well as telling apart the shares of authorship. In the example below, at the beginning of the fourth scene, I split the authors in a similar way to More. However, my specific approach here considers that the division might not be as clear-cut as it is in More, where different handwriting in the manuscript reveals different agencies. Instead of a solid slash/stroke, I employed the colon to signal an unclear boundary between authorial shares as the porous appearance of the symbol connects rather than separates them:

Cena IV, Um quarto na casa de Franklin em Aldersgate [Anônimo: Shakespeare] Arden e Franklin entram agora. (Arden, 4.0, my translation)

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Textual variance in Arden is found across its three early quarto editions (1592, 1599 and 1633). I checked every point against the variations in the English vernacular and how different editions have dealt with them. Throughout the translated text, there are footnotes that point to such variance, but sometimes variance in English would generate the same word in Portuguese. I also consulted the early vernacular editions and later edited texts down to the minutest points of variation: punctuation. Below, there is an example where a conjunction changes and, in the other, there is variance between a colon and a full stop. In both of these examples, I preferred the Q1 reading:

Onden há um coração que morre ao vê-la triste N: Q1: ‘where’ (onde); Q3: ‘when’ (quando). (Arden, 8.65, my translation) E busquei fazer meu ninho nas nuvens,n N: Q1: vírgula; Q3: ponto final. (Arden, 8.16, my translation)

In both plays, prismatic translation has required the merging of textual criticism and content – the history of the text and that of the play (plot). The relationship between the two resonates with students when I use my texts in the classroom. By using a multi-layered text, for instance, students can have access to different hands designing characters such as Black Will, who is both a prose-talker and a verse-speaker depending on who has written the scene he is in. This is a difference that rarely goes unnoticed by students since the text encodes who is thought to have written what. The division also clarifies how the play is split into the domestic emotive arena (Shakespeare) and the external economic environment (Anonymous). In other words, prismatic translation results in playtexts that signpost important information about the interconnectedness of different styles of authorship and textual variation with literary and theatrical aspects of the play, such as character development. * The translator is definitely a kind of a gatekeeper, one who can choose what passes through the portal of a new language to be included in the new vernacular. The role of the source edition(s) in this selection process is

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fundamental not only as it provides the essential information about the play but also because it points to textual features that enhance both the process of translation and the experience of reading. These translations of collaborative plays lay out the material condition and the history of the text, emphasising dispersion, collaboration and other textual alternatives. Instead of claiming a non-existent stability, it opens up possibilities. The early twenty-first century saw the acknowledgement of multilayered texts at the authorial level. The breadth of this ‘collaboration-turn’ in Shakespeare studies is not restricted to attribution studies or editing practices. The focus on collaboration also spreads silently through the pages of different critical accounts of drama from the period. However, when it is made visible, our awareness of the authorial, textual and interpretative possibilities of a play expands to new levels, affecting analysis and the act of disseminating it to new worlds and readers. Bringing Sir Thomas More and Arden of Faversham to Brazilian Portuguese speakers makes it possible for those new readers to access more information about these plays’ material and textual conditions and may encourage similar questions in other texts, such as King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, as well as other collaborative plays. As in the play, the translation represents a collaborative work that brings together the translator and generations of scholars – reaching hands and dramatists who worked on a play that took centuries to cross the ocean. As an edition, the translation will live on its own after it reaches print. As an edition, it will demand updates at some point. As an edition, it is part of the history of the text. As an edition, the translation is the vernacular. As an edition, it is the play.

Notes 1 For the most recently discussed cases of collaboration, see Gabriel Egan and Gary Taylor, eds., The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), and on attribution, see Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Style, Computers and Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 2 Arden of Faversham and The Spanish Tragedy appeared without the derogative term ‘apocrypha’ for the first time in this collection.

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  3 Will Sharpe, ‘Framing Shakespeare’s Collaborative Authorship’, Shakespeare Survey 67 (2014): 30.   4 In using this date, I am considering plays that have long connections with Shakespeare through early printed collections rather than individual editions of collaborative plays, such as Edward III by Giorgio Melchiori (New Cambridge Shakespeare; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) or even Sir Thomas More (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), edited by both Melchiori and Vittorio Gabrieli. Almost simultaneously with Timon, the second edition Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) put George Peele’s name on the text of Titus.   5 These dates derive from the database Escolha Seu Shakespeare (‘Pick up your Shakespeare’), www.dbd.puc-rio.br/shakespeare/.   6 Tracking down the source of this Hamlet edition is based on personal information shared by the family of the translator. I thank Márcia A. P. Martins for sharing research material and confirming these translation numbers.   7 Elvio Funck translated most of Shakespearean plays, including Edward III, Henry VIII and Pericles (Porto Alegre: Movimento, 2010, 2017, 2019). José Roberto O’Shea opted for plays that have not been the focus of the last generation of translators, such as Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens and The Merry Wives of Windsor (São Paulo: Illuminuras, 2002, 2007, 2012). The latter two are forthcoming.   8 Shakespeare and Fletcher, Os Dois Parentes Nobres, trans. Énio Ramalho (Porto: Lello & Irmão, 1974).   9 William Shakespeare, Pericles, trans. Elvio Funck (Porto Alegre: Movimento, 2019), 78n78; William Shakespeare, Pericles, trans. Jose Roberto O’Shea (São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras, 2012), 33–8. 10 Funck, in a private conversation, mentioned that Fletcher’s name would appear on a reprint of his forthcoming translation of Henry VIII. 11 William Shakespeare, Eduardo III, trans.; Elvio Funck (Porto Alegre: Movimento, 2010), 7–9. 12 Bárbara Heliodora translated the thirty-six Folio plays, Pericles, and Edward III. None of her published works acknowledges collaboration as she relied on an older generation of editions as sources. 13 For a recent notable attempt at attribution, see Gabriel Egan et al., ‘Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays by Word Adjacency’, Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2016): 232–56. 14 See Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, ‘Many Hands – A New Shakespeare Collaboration?’, The Times Literary Supplement (19 April 2012), 13–15.

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for the initial proposition and the chapters dedicated to the topic in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion. The introduction in the prose translation of Measure for Measure by Beatriz Viégas-Faria (Porto Alegre: L&PM, 2012), 13–14, signed by Ivo Barroso, acknowledges Middleton negatively as a ‘ghost’ haunting the text as well as the one who is responsible for the ‘almost immoral’ comic parts present in the play. Barroso follows not a specific edition, but a scholarly work by Gary Taylor and John Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and an account of adaption by Charles Gildon in 1699. 15 The application of this editorial resource can improve textual awareness not only of Hamlet texts but also of Shakespearean texts that have more than one version (i.e. King Lear or Romeo and Juliet) and contain relevant material for the reader or practitioners involved with preparing the play for the stage. Moreover, it refreshes the view of the importance of non-Folio texts. 16 On the topic of ‘prismatic translation’, see Matthew Reynolds, ed., Prismatic Translation (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2019). The Oxford Comparative Criticism & Translation (OCCT) conference in 2015 on that topic, chaired by Reynolds, was a source of inspiration for my ideas about translating early modern plays and my discussion of ‘prismatic translation’ in this chapter. 17 Régis Augustus Bars Closel, Sir Thomas More: Estudo e Tradução (Campinas: Unicamp, 2016). 18 John Jowett, ed., Sir Thomas More, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London, Bloomsbury, 2011), 1–28. 19 The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore, Harley MS 7368, British Library, Add. II, fols. 8–9. 20 MS Harley 7368, Add. III, fol. 11b. James Mardock and Eric Rasmussen, ‘What Does Textual Evidence Reveal about the Author?’, in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 113. 21 See Régis Augustus Bars Closel, ‘The Marginal Latin Tag in the Manuscript of Sir Thomas More’, Notes & Queries 61, no. 2 (2013): 257–260. I suggest that one Latin verse ‘et tu Erasmus an Diabolus’ (MS Harley 7368, Add. IV (C), fol. 13a) had a missing Latin tag that precedes it by saying ‘Aut tu es Morus aut nullum’. My translation incorporated this editorial solution. 22 I follow the standard names for the text parts, as they appear in Jowett edition. 23 Recent criticism discusses possibilities concerning who this anonymous author was. See the New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion and MacDonald P. Jackson, Determining Shakespeare’s Canon: Arden of Faversham and a Lover’s Complaint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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24 See Closel, ‘De quem é esta tragédia? Traduzindo Arden de Faversham’, Revista Letras, Santa Maria, Especial no. 2 (2020): 179–99; or its English version, ‘Whose Tragedy is this?: Translating Arden of Faversham’ (forthcoming in Cahiers Élisabéthains) in which I discuss this issue in detail.

Bibliography Anonymous and William Shakespeare. Arden de Faversham, translated by Régis Augustus Bars Closel. Forthcoming. Bate, Jonathan, and Eric Rasmussen, eds. William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2013. Bourus, Terri, Gabriel Egan, John Jowett and Gary Taylor, eds. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Closel, Régis Augustus Bars. ‘The Marginal Latin Tag in the Manuscript of Sir Thomas More’. Notes & Queries 61, no. 2 (2013): 257–60. Closel, Régis Augustus Bars. ‘Sir Thomas More: Estudo e Tradução’. PhD thesis. Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, 2016. Closel, Régis Augustus Bars. ‘De quem é esta tragédia? Traduzindo Arden de Faversham’. Revista Letras, Santa Maria, Especial no. 2 (2020): 179–99. Craig, Hugh, and Brett Greatley-Hirsch. Style, Computers and Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Egan, Gabriel, et al. ‘Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays by Word Adjacency’. Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2016): 232–56. Egan, Gabriel, and Gary Taylor, eds. The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Escolha Seu Shakespeare (Pick up your Shakespeare). Brazilian Portuguese translation database. Prepared by Márcia A. P. Martins. PUC-Rio. Available online: www.dbd. puc-rio.br/shakespeare/? (accessed 14 August 2020). Hope, Jonathan. The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-linguistic Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Jackson, MacDonald P. Determining Shakespeare’s Canon: Arden of Faversham and a Lover’s Complaint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Lavagnino, John, and Gary Taylor, eds. Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Maguire, Laurie, and Emma Smith. ‘Many Hands – A New Shakespeare Collaboration?’. The Times Literary Supplement. 19 April 2012, 13–15.

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Mardock, James, and Eric Rasmussen. ‘What Does Textual Evidence Reveal about the Author?’. In Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, 111–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Reynolds, Matthew, ed. Prismatic Translation. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2019. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Edited by R. A. Foakes. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Shakespeare, William. Timon de Atenas. Translated by Bárbara Heliodora. Rio de Janeiro: Lacerda, 2003. Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens. Edited by John Jowett. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Shakespeare, William. Eduardo IIII. Translated by Elvio Funck. Porto Alegre: Movimento, 2010. Shakespeare, William. O primeiro Hamlet in-quarto de 1603. Translated by José Roberto O’Shea. São Paulo: Hedra, 2010. Shakespeare, William. Sir Thomas More. Edited by John Jowett. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2011. Shakespeare, William. Medida por Medida. Translated by Beatriz Viégas-Faria. Porto Alegre: L&PM, 2012. Shakespeare, William. Péricles, Príncipe de Tiro. Translated by José Roberto O’Shea. São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras, 2012. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Translated by Lawrence Flores Pereira. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2015. Shakespeare, William. Os Dois Nobres Parentes. Translated by Elvio Funck. Porto Alegre: Movimento, 2016. Shakespeare, William, and John Fletcher. Os Dois Parentes Nobres. Translated by Énio Ramalho. Porto: Lello & Irmão Editores, 1974. Shakespeare, William, and John Fletcher. Os Dois Primos Nobres. Translated by José Roberto O’Shea. São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras, 2016. Sharpe, Will. ‘Framing Shakespeare’s Collaborative Authorship’. Shakespeare Survey 67 (2014): 29–43. Taylor, Gary. ‘Empirical Middleton: Macbeth, Adaptation, and Microauthorship’. Shakespeare Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2014): 239–72. Vickers, Brian. Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Wells, Stanley, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery, eds. Complete Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

5

Canon / apocrypha Aleida Auld

Every edition of Shakespeare’s works imprints a canon: an implicitly authorized collection of texts that are believed to have been written by Shakespeare in whole or in part, or that relate to his authorship in substantial ways. Yet the canon changes – across time, across editions and even, sometimes, within editions. On my desk lies a case in point, a copy of the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare published in 1997, according to the copyright page. It contains ‘A Funeral Elegy’, described in the preliminaries as one of the ‘major additions’ to the volume and ‘a poem recently claimed for Shakespeare by Donald W. Foster’.1 The attribution within the volume, though, questions that assertion with the heading: ‘A Funeral Elegy / by W.S. / (a poem recently suggested to be by Shakespeare; see, however, p. 1895)’.2 Then, in the introduction to the poem, J. J. M. Tobin, one of the Riverside Shakespeare’s general editors, states unequivocally that ‘A Funeral Elegy’ was in fact not by Shakespeare but rather by John Ford, citing Foster’s acceptance of these findings in a New York Times article published in June 2002.3 In the preliminaries, half-title and introduction of the edition are thus a range of positions that complicate and ultimately overturn the initial claim of Shakespeare’s authorship entirely. Thanks to the printer’s key, a string of numbers on the copyright page of the collection that identifies both the issue and print date, it is possible to determine that the copy on my desk belongs to the fourth issue of the revised Riverside Shakespeare, and records both the initial excitement of this addition to Shakespeare’s canon in 1997, as well as the decisive rejection of it by the time this issue came out in 2003.4 It is a palimpsest of canons.

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In stopping short of thoroughly updating the edition, the editors of the revised Riverside Shakespeare produced a volume that preserves different layers of canon construction and deconstruction at the turn of the twenty-first century. Recent scholarship has attended to such developments over time. Notably, Peter Kirwan in Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha (2015) has examined the changing relationship of Shakespeare’s plays to canon / apocrypha, and Jeremy Lopez in Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama (2014) has studied the Shakespeare bias within the canon of early modern plays.5 In this chapter, I share their approach to editions as material productions of a canon, but I turn my attention to Shakespeare’s poems in the early eighteenth century, prior to the age of Enlightenment and Edmond Malone’s landmark Shakespeare edition in 1790, that is, before editions of Shakespeare’s poems were presented with a modern editorial apparatus.6 The poems in this earlier period, I argue, do not fit squarely into Shakespeare’s ‘canon’ or ‘apocrypha’, but were instead variously and sometimes contradictorily treated by publishers, editors and book-buyers in what I call elective, integrated and selective canons. By considering how these agents related the poems that Shakespeare wrote, or might have written, to his corpus of dramatic works, I will suggest that the concepts canon / apocrypha were not mutually exclusive but rather contested and overlapping categories that throw into relief comparable dynamics of canon formation at the start of the twenty-first century.

Elective canon By ‘elective’ canon, I mean the option in the early eighteenth century to purchase a separate edition of the poems to complement an edition of Shakespeare’s dramatic works, or to purchase an issue of the works which included both the plays and poems. The fact that the poems were optional to Shakespeare’s Works at that time goes back to the First Folio of 1623, when John Heminge and Henry Condell prepared a collection of Shakespeare’s plays that did not include the Sonnets or narrative poems, perhaps for copyright reasons in the case of the latter.7 Seventeen years later, John Benson published Shakespeare’s Poems (1640), a sort of ‘second edition’ of Shake-speares Sonnets (1609). Benson (or an anonymous editor) rearranged and titled Shakespeare’s

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fourteen-line sonnets, sometimes combining them into longer poems of up to seventy lines. He also dropped eight sonnets from the original 154-poem sequence, interspersed throughout poems from The Passionate Pilgrim (1612), and added a few other items like ‘Let the bird of loudest lay’ (often called ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’).8 The First (or Second) Folio and Benson’s Poems arguably began a trend in which a publication of Shakespeare’s plays was followed by a complementary publication of his poems.9 However, it would not have been self-evident for book-buyers to match these editions published years apart and in different formats. In the early eighteenth century, the elective canon became more evident and accessible thanks to the explicit pairing of editions of the plays and poems. Jacob Tonson I (‘the elder’) published a collection of Shakespeare’s plays, entitled The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; in Six Volumes, on 6 June 1709, and two editions of the poems quickly followed.10 Bernard Lintott, possibly working with an anonymous editor, published A Collection of Poems on 14 July 1709.11 Lintott’s edition included Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ (i.e. the first fifteen poems in the 1599 collection by that title) and ‘Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musick’ (i.e. the last five poems in the 1599 collection, which there follow an inner title page). About six weeks after that, on 3 September 1709, Edmund Curll and Egbert Sanger, working with editor Charles Gildon, published The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the Seventh12 (see Figure 5.1). It included Venus & Adonis, Tarquin & Lucrece and His Miscellany Poems (i.e. Benson’s Poems, also known as the Benson sonnets). Then, in late February 1711, Lintott published The Second Volume of Mr. Wm Shakespear’s Poems, containing the 1609 Sonnets, which was soon after presented with a reissue of volume one under the title, A Collection of Poems, In Two Volumes; Being all the Miscellanies of Mr. William Shakespeare.13 Faced with several options, book-buyers could decide whether their version of Shakespeare’s Works included his poems, and if so, which version. It seems that they tended to choose the Curll/Sanger/Gildon edition, which was presented as the titular seventh volume of the six-volume Works published by Tonson, and even matched the latter’s type, paper and sizes.14 An edition of the plays involving the Tonson family, followed by an edition of Gildon’s version of the poems, were also published in London in 1714, 1725 and 1728.15 Lintott’s Collection, in contrast, never reached a second edition.

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Figure 5.1  Title page of The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the Seventh (1710 [1709]), a collection of the poems edited by Charles Gildon to accompany The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; in Six Volumes (1709), a collection of the plays edited by Nicholas Rowe. G.4021.2.7, Rare Books & Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library.

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The editions in 1714 and 1728 represent a slightly different version of the elective canon, this time pre-made by publishers. Jacob Tonson I and later his nephew, Jacob II, appear to have collaborated directly with publishers of the Gildon version of the poems.16 Variant issues with cancel title pages enabled readers to buy the 1714 Works in eight volumes with the plays only, or in nine volumes with the plays and poems.17 The title page to volume one of the nine-volume issue mentioned both Rowe’s account of Shakespeare life and Gildon’s paratexts, and the imprint stated ‘Printed for J. Tonson, E. Curll, J. Pemberton, and K. Sanger’, suggesting that Tonson himself was involved in promoting and selling the plays and poems together.18 Similarly, for the 1728 Works, readers could choose among three issues: an eight-volume set featuring the thirty-six plays of the First Folio (volumes 1–8); a nine-volume set that included the seven plays added to the Third Folio in 1664 (volume 9); or a ten-volume set that included the poems (volume 10).19 Modifications to the volume of the poems in particular helped to unify these issues of the dramatic and poetic Works. The 1714 edition featured two new engravings for the narrative poems – depictions of Adonis’ departure and Tarquin’s assault – by Flemish artisan Michael Van der Gucht, who had produced the portrait frontispiece to the 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s dramatic Works.20 The engravings seem to have been linked to the Tonsons and/or other publishers of the plays, given that they appear again in the collaborative issue in 1728, but not in the editions of the plays and poems in 1725, for which there was no collaborative issue.21 Moreover, critical allusions to Tonson I – such as the dig at those ‘who are for undervaluing what they have no Share in’ – were removed from two of Gildon’s paratextual essays.22 These changes made the volumes of the poems fit better visually and substantially with the volumes of the plays. Contrary to what has been stated by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen, the poems did not merely occupy marginal or supplementary volumes in this period.23 Instead, the various issues and editions of the plays and poems represent an elective canon that was premade by collaborating publishers in 1714 and 1728, and offered by distinct publishers in 1709 and 1725. In any case, the plays and poems had different editors. Ultimately, it was up to book-buyers to decide whether or not their version of Shakespeare’s Works included his poems.

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Integrated canon By ‘integrated’ canon, I refer to a unified edition – not just issue – of the plays and poems, and to the conception of Shakespeare’s ‘works’ as plays and poems – not just plays. The first such Shakespeare edition was The Works of Shakespear in eight volumes by George Grierson and George Ewing in Dublin in 1726, rather than the editions by George Steevens, John Bell or Malone in the second half of the eighteenth century.24 A prospectus for the Dublin edition, which survives in a copy of the first volume at the Folger Shakespeare Library (PR2752 1726 copy 2), announces the ‘Works of shakespear’ to be printed ‘in eight Volumes, each Volume containing five Plays’.25 Although the poems are nowhere mentioned, simple maths suggests that the publishers were already planning to include them. Alexander Pope’s edition (its model) contained thirty-six plays, which could be spread across seven volumes if each volume included (about) five plays as promised. This means that the final eighth volume announced by the prospectus was likely reserved for the poems. After the project had come to fruition, an advertisement detailed its contents: ‘All the Dramatick Works and Poems of Mr. William Shakespear, in Eight Volumes, Collated and Corrected from the former Edditions, by Mr. Pope’.26 The evidence thus suggests that Grierson and Ewing integrated the poems early on into the design of the Dublin edition, rather than printing them separately and issuing them together, as other publishers had done. In London at this time, there was no comparable unified edition, but two editors used other strategies for integrating the plays and poems. Charles Gildon’s paratexts in the 1709 poetic Works included ‘An Essay on the Art, Rise and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome and England’ (67 pages), ‘Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear’ (188 pages), and ‘Remarks on The Poems of Shakespear’ (20 pages), which together offered what Paul D. Cannan has called ‘the first criticism of Shakespeare’s entire canon’.27 Gildon included additional paratexts that applied to both the plays and the poems: a glossary of obscure Shakespeare words, including some unique to the poems like the noun ‘Blenches’ and the adjective ‘Bevel’; and ‘References to the Classic Authors, &c.’, which lists topics in the writings of Shakespeare and classical authors, mainly from the plays but also ‘Time’ and ‘Opportunity’ from ‘Tarquin and Lucrece’ (as Lucrece was then called).28 Gildon’s editorial work thus served as a reference guide for readers of Shakespeare’s oeuvre.

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The second person to integrate the plays and poems conceptually and practically was Lewis Theobald, editor of the 1733 dramatic Works. Over the course of several decades, Theobald showed interest in the poems, and in the plays and poems together. Scholars often note that The Cave of Poverty, a Poem: Written in Imitation of Shakespeare (1715) conveys Theobald’s unusual admiration for the narrative poems.29 What is more striking is that Theobald drew inspiration from Shakespeare’s integrated oeuvre, that is, from both the narrative poems and the plays. Theobald borrowed word compounds from Lucrece (‘fiery-pointed sun’, ‘tear-distained eye’), Lear (‘tender-hefted’) and Hamlet (‘wonder-wounded’); and rare words from Lucrece (‘copesmate’), Lear (‘gallow’) and Othello (‘agnize’). He also adopted the sestet of Venus (with the rhyme scheme ABABCC) and creatively redeployed elements from the narrative poems, such as the digression on a hare (‘the dew-bedabbled wretch’ in Venus, and ‘the Dew-bedabled Lev’ret’ in The Cave) and ekphrasis (‘A thousand lamentable objects there’ in Lucrece, and ‘A Thousand Lamentable Objects grace’ in The Cave).30 In both substance and form, then, Shakespeare’s integrated canon underlies Theobald’s Cave. Theobald also planned to bring out an edition of the poems to accompany his 1733 edition of the dramatic Works. In a letter to literary critic John Jortin published in Miscellaneous Observations Upon Authors in September 1732, Theobald proposed fifteen emendations to nine different poems, including Venus, Tarquin and Lucrece and a number of Benson sonnets.31 Then in his preface to the 1733 Works, Theobald announced his intention to edit the poems, and in the Grub-street Journal on 6 June 1734, he described the edition as ready to print. He also commented on the edition in his correspondence with William Warburton throughout 1734 and 1735.32 As late as 21 April 1737, in a letter to John Russell, the fourth Duke of Bedford and a subscriber to the 1733 Works, Theobald held out hope for the project and solicited a subscription ‘to that Supplement I am now hastening to publish; wch: will both compleat your Grace’s Setts, & all the Works of this great Poet’.33 Although Theobald’s edition of the poems never materialized, we may speculate that he might have included remarks on both versions of the Sonnets, since he owned and annotated the 1711 two-volume octavo edition published by Lintott (based on the 1609 Sonnets), and the 1725 royal quarto edition by George Sewell (based on the Benson sonnets).34 Like earlier editions, Theobald’s intended edition would

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have given book-buyers the choice to add the poems to Shakespeare’s Works or not. Unlike earlier editions, however, the plays and poems would have had the same editor. By aiming to ‘compleat’ his edition, Theobald conceptualized an integrated canon of the plays and poems. Within his edition of the plays, moreover, Theobald took unprecedented steps to integrate the canon when he became the first editor to refer to and quote the poems in his footnotes to Shakespeare’s plays. These notes reflect his innovations in the technique of parallel reading, which juxtaposed similar passages (for example, in terms of grammar and vocabulary) in order to bolster or challenge his interpretation of a passage. I have found twenty-four references to the poems across fifteen plays that provide support for Theobald’s decision to (1) remove emendations/restore original readings; (2) introduce emendations; and (3) gloss words and provide background information on Shakespeare or the text. For example, Theobald glosses ‘passion’ as a verb in The Tempest with support from a passage in Venus and Adonis, and he emends ‘Unthread’ to ‘Untread’ in King John on the basis of another passage in Venus.35 Warburton follows Theobald by referring to the poems in the editorial apparatus of his 1747 edition, and some of their notes are carried over into Samuel Johnson’s 1765 edition.36 This step toward integrating the poems into editions of the plays began just as the trend in publishing an edition of the plays followed by an edition of the poems broke down. Precisely when the poems seem least relevant to the canon, with no new collections of Shakespeare’s poems published between 1729 and 1770, they are brought into the editorial apparatus and hermeneutic sphere of the plays. In this context, the stark division between canon / apocrypha – that is, what counts and what does not count as a Shakespearean work – does not adequately capture the paradox that the poems were both increasingly integrated into and excluded from Shakespeare’s works in the mid-eighteenth century.

Selective canon Theobald was never able to edit the poems, but he engaged with them across different time periods. For Gildon, the opposite seems true: he was able to edit the poems, but he segregated and diminished them otherwise. He thus

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constructed a ‘selective’ canon, by which I mean that he elevated part of Shakespeare’s corpus above, and to the exclusion of, the rest. He is a prime example of two contradictory impulses, which were to integrate Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and to engage with the plays while neglecting the poems. The evidence suggests that Gildon’s admiration for Shakespeare’s poems – expressed in his edition of the 1709 poetic Works – was transitory, disingenuous or contingent. Before and after editing Shakespeare’s poems, Gildon repeatedly passed over opportunities to praise them or present an integrated version of the canon. For instance, when revising Gerard Langbaine’s An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), published as The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (1699), Gildon shortened Langbaine’s paragraph-long description of the poems (plus a long excerpt from John Suckling’s imitation of Shakespeare’s Lucrece) to three short lines: ‘Our Author writ little else, we find in print only two small pieces of Poetry publish’d by Mr. Quarles, viz. Venus and Adonis, 8vo. 1602. and The Rape of Lucrece, 8vo. 1655.’37 Then in 1709, Gildon edited Shakespeare’s poems, including the Benson sonnets or ‘Miscellaneous Poems’, which he described as ‘generally Epigrams, and those perfect in their kind’, in a discussion spanning several pages.38 Three years later, Gildon contributed to and almost certainly wrote the section on the ‘epigram’ in A Grammar of the English Tongue (1712).39 Even though Gildon lifted passages from his comments on the subject in Shakespeare’s Works (1709) and mentioned other English writers, he did not bring up Shakespeare.40 Despite probably having revised the poems for the 1714 edition, Gildon again failed to reference them in The Complete Art of Poetry (1718).41 This publication has three key parts: in volume one, a series of dialogues of poetic criticism similar to John Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), and a collection of ‘Select Moral Reflections, Topicks, Similies, and Descriptions from Shakespear’ called ‘Shakespeariana’; in volume two, a 468-page commonplace collection with thematic headings arranged from ‘Abbot’ to ‘Zones’, under which are selections from the plays and poems of dozens of authors. Shakespeare’s poems do not figure in volume one’s discussion of the epigram as an ancient genre and of the epigrammatic mode in the poetry of Petrarch (1304–74), Abraham Cowley (1618–67), Suckling (c. 1609–c. 1641) and Edmund Waller (1606–87).42 Nor are they part of the commonplace collection of volume two, which features (by my count) sixty-nine dramatic passages attributed to Shakespeare. These

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passages are all copied from Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (1702; enlarged 1718), which does not include Shakespeare’s poems.43 The difference is that Gildon, who had edited the poems in 1709 and perhaps again in 1714, had all the more reason to include them in the Complete Art. Gildon’s decision not to include the poems is most flagrant, though, in his compilation of ‘Shakespeariana’, the first instance of this word recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary.44 The -(i)ana suffix came into English from French and was used to denote the sayings of ancient and, by extension, modern authors, including ‘Scaligeriana’ for Joseph Scaliger and ‘Baconiana’ for Francis Bacon.45 Significantly, Gildon mined the plays and not the poems for ‘Shakespeariana’. The 155 quotations are listed under headings and grouped by play according to the arrangement in volumes one to seven of the 1714 Works. These same quotations are often quoted or referred to in Gildon’s ‘Remarks on the Plays’ (in the 1709 and 1714 Works), which overlaps with the ‘References to the Classic Authors, &c.’ (1709 Works only). So although Gildon built upon his work as editor of the poems to compile ‘Shakespeariana’, he did not include them therein. Gildon and his collection of ‘Shakespeariana’ thus present a selective canon that elevated the plays at the expense of the poems in the early eighteenth century.

Updated and revised: Present-day poetic canons I began this chapter by suggesting that the inconsistencies in an early twenty-first-century issue of a late twentieth-century edition of Shakespeare’s works can provide a springboard for the study of historical canon formation. I would now like to take these historical modes of canon formation – ‘elective’, ‘integrated’ and ‘selective’ – and demonstrate their relevance to editions today. This is the heyday of elective canons, since readers may choose among variant texts and various formats in print and digital editions. A good example of this multiplicity of options is the third edition of the Norton Shakespeare (2016), which is available in a single volume, or in ‘Early Plays and Poems’ (volume one) and the ‘Later Plays’ (volume two) for individual or joint purchase. It also offers multiple texts for fifteen plays, including four different versions of Hamlet – in the print edition, a version combining the

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Second Quarto and Folio, and the First Quarto text; and additionally in the digital edition, separate texts of the Second Quarto and Folio.46 With editions centred around single texts rather than titles, with options for original and modern spelling versions, in addition to a variety of formats and a plethora of supplementary online material, canons appear to be more elective now than ever before. The integrated canon, in turn, follows a number of models, like listing the contents by genre and placing the poems at the back of the volume, following the tradition established by Malone; or listing the poems at the front and ordering the rest chronologically; or interspersing the poems throughout the plays chronologically by composition date in one volume, and chronologically by publication date in another volume.47 Finally, a selective canon persists with series like The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays/The Sonnets and The Necessary Shakespeare, both of which offer a selection of plays plus the Sonnets, but not the poems.48 Apart from these, there is an ‘attributed’ canon, which is not new in name but is new in function in our times. With the materialist turn and the New Textualism, we are now concerned not only with what Shakespeare wrote, but also with what ‘Shakespeare’ wrote. For instance, Colin Burrow included The Passionate Pilgrim among the principal texts in his edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Sonnets and Poems (2002), noting, ‘It is unlikely to contain any works by Shakespeare apart from those which are attributed to him elsewhere, but it does give some indication of the kinds of works which could be sold as his at the height of his fame as a poet.’49 Burrow’s decision reflects new emphasis on an attributed canon, which gives us a sense of how ‘Shakespeare’ was constructed as an author, and how his name was appropriated and deployed in his own time and beyond. Following this line of thought, recent editions have had different ways of valorizing texts attributed to Shakespeare that undermine any clean distinction between canon / apocrypha, and that even challenge the notion of a ‘Shakespeare apocrypha’ in the first place. In the case of The New Oxford Shakespeare, these attributed poems are integrated with the other texts; in The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, ‘Poems and inscriptions with contemporary or early attributions to Shakespeare’ and ‘Poems with modern attributions to Shakespeare’ appear among Shakespeare’s poems in the table of contents, but are separated off by an internal title page (but not appendix) labelled ‘Attributed

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Poems’.50 Both the Longman Annotated English Poets and Burrow’s Oxford World’s Classics edition (with the exception of The Passionate Pilgrim in the case of the latter) give attributed poems a different status in an appendix.51 We thus care about what Shakespeare wrote, as well as what he is said to have written but most likely or almost certainly did not. The attributed canons in present-day editions of Shakespeare’s poems and works reveal that we tend toward inclusive, expansive and multiple canons, rather than toward exclusive and conclusive ones. The dubia and spuria – the apocrypha of former times – have been absorbed into the canon of ‘Shakespeare’ in ours.

Notes   1 G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, eds., The Riverside Shakespeare, rev. edn. [4th issue], 2 vols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997 [2003]), vii.   2 Ibid., 1893.   3 Ibid., 1895.   4 I would like to thank Abbie Weinberg and Sarah Hovde at the Folger Shakespeare Library for responding to my queries about this publication.   5 Peter Kirwan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Dramatic Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Jeremy Lopez, Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).   6 Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).   7 Colin Burrow, ‘Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems’, Proceedings of the British Academy 97 (1998): 17.   8 See Megan Heffernan, ‘Turning Sonnets into Poems: Textual Affect and John Benson’s Metaphysical Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2013): 71–98.   9 de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, 166–7; and Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3, 5. 10 This date and those below are based on advertisements. See Daily Courant, issue 2376, 6 June 1709. 11 The Post Man and the Historical Account, issue 1759, 12–14 July 1709. 12 The Tatler, issue 63, 1–3 September 1709. 13 The Post Boy, issue 2464, 24–7 February 1711; issue 2466, 1–3 March 1711.

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14 Don-John Dugas, Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print 1660–1740 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 161; Robert B. Hamm, Jr, ‘Rowe’s Shakespear (1709) and the Tonson House Style’, College Literature 31, no. 3 (2004): 192. 15 The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the Ninth (London: E. Curll, K. Sanger and J. Pemberton, 1714); George Sewell, ed., The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. The Seventh Volume (London: A. Bettesworth et al., 1725); George Sewell, ed., The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. The Tenth Volume (London: J. and J. Knapton et al., 1728). 16 On the Tonson publishing house during this period, see Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 57–79. 17 Ibid., 312–13. 18 Paul D. Cannan argues that Curll and Sanger must have independently bought some of Tonson’s stock and reissued it with the poems as complete sets; Colin Burrow thinks some sort of arrangement may have been made between Tonson and Curll and Sanger by 1714. Paul D. Cannan, ‘The 1709/11 Editions of Shakespeare’s Poems’, in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640–1740, ed. Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 182–3; and Burrow, ‘Life and Work’, 19. 19 Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 314–15. 20 T. S. R. Boase, ‘Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Plays in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 10 (1947): 86, 87–8; and Stuart Sillars, The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 35–6. 21 Perhaps because the edition of the plays, printed on royal paper quarto, was already ‘staggeringly expensive’ (Dugas, Marketing the Bard, 195). 22 Compare Charles Gildon, ed., The Works of Mr. William Shakespear: Volume the Seventh (London: Edmund Curll and Egbert Sanger, 17[09]), i–ii, 446, and Works (1714), i–ii, 392. The implication of the comment in the earlier edition is that Tonson did not give the poems the praise they deserved because he did not own them, and so could not profit from their sale. 23 See Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds., Shakespeare’s Poems, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Thomson Learning, 2007), 519. 24 The Works of Shakespear, 8 vols (Dublin: George Grierson and George Ewing, 1726). Cheney, National Poet-Playwright, 5, locates the first integrated editions in the second half of the century.

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25 I would like to thank Faith Acker for consulting the Folger’s copy on my behalf. 26 ‘Books Printed and Sold by George Grierson’, in Abbot Vertot, The History of the Revolution in Sweden (Dublin: George Grierson, 1727). 27 Cannan, ‘The 1709/11 Editions’, 171. See also Cannan, ‘Early Shakespeare Criticism, Charles Gildon, and the Making of Shakespeare the Playwright-Poet’, Modern Philology 102, no. 1 (2004): 35–55. 28 For ‘Blenches’ and ‘Bevel’, see David and Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words, www.shakespeareswords.com (accessed 17 July 2020). 29 Lewis Theobald, The Cave of Poverty, A Poem (London: Jonas Browne, 1715). See Brean Hammond, ‘Shakespeare Discoveries and Forgeries’, in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 83. 30 Thomas R. Lounsbury, The Text of Shakespeare (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 185; Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1938), 459; Venus l. 703, Lucrece l. 1373, quoted from Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, eds., Shakespeare’s Poems; The Cave 32, 5. 31 [John Jortin], Miscellaneous Observations upon Authors, Ancient and Modern, 2 vols (London: Tho. Wotton, 1731–2), vol. 2, 242–50. 32 Lewis Theobald, ed., The Works of Shakespeare: In Seven Volumes (London: A. Bettesworth et al., 1733), vol. 1, xliv. For the announcement on 6 June 1734, and the letters between Theobald and Warburton, see Rollins, ed., New Variorum, 461. 33 Quoted in Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 177n. 34 A Catalogue of the Library of Lewis Theobald, Esq. Deceas’d (1744), ‘Shakespeare’s Poems with MSS. Notes, by Mr. Theobald’, item 562, under ‘Octavo’s, &c.’; and ‘Shakespear’s Poems, the 7th Volume, with a Number of Mr. Theobald’s MSS. Notes particularly a large Addition to the Explanation of Shakespear’s old Words’, item 141, under ‘Quarto’s’. The former item now belongs to the Folger Shakespeare Library (PR2841.A12a copy 2 Sh.Col.). 35 Theobald, ed., Works, vol. 1, 64; vol. 3, 245. See also vol. 1, 57 (three references), 83, 172, 261, 365; vol. 2, 66, 231; vol. 3, 235, 242, 517; vol. 5, 272, 287, 288, 338; vol. 6, 152, 182, 324, 400; vol. 7, 245, 353. 36 William Warburton, ed., The Works of Shakespear in Eight Volumes (London: J. and P. Knapton et al., 1747), vol. 1, 294–5, 419; vol. 6, 365, 542; vol. 7, 238; and Samuel Johnson, ed., The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes

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(London: J. and R. Tonson et al., 1765), vol. 1, 337; vol. 2, 59, 498–9; vol. 6, 405–6; vol. 7, 267. 37 Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford: George West and Henry Clements, 1691), 467–8; [Charles Gildon], The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (London: Tho. Leigh and William Turner, 1699), 129. 38 Gildon, ed., Works (1709), 457. 39 Astrid Buschmann-Göbels, ‘Bellum Grammaticale (1712) – A Battle of Books and a Battle for the Market’, in Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar-Writing in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 82–5. 40 Compare Gildon, ed., Works (1709), 462–3; and, A Grammar of the English Tongue, 2nd edn. (London: John Brightland, 1712), 138–40. 41 On the revisions to the Works (1714), see Rollins, ed., New Variorum, 382. 42 Charles Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry. In Six Parts, 2 vols (London: Charles Rivington, 1718), vol. 1, 149. 43 Edward Bysshe, The Art of English Poetry, 2 vols (London: O. L[l]oyd et al., 1718); A. Dwight Culler, ‘Edward Bysshe and the Poet’s Handbook’, PMLA 63, no. 3 (1948): 858–85. All of the Shakespeare passages in Gildon’s Complete Art are also attributed to Shakespeare in Bysshe’s Art, with one exception (‘Nature herself start back when thou wert born’). 44 ‘Shakespeariana n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press (December 2020), www.oed.com/view/Entry/177324 (accessed 11 July 2020). 45 ‘ana, suffix and n.’, ‘-iana, suffix’, Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com (accessed 11 July 2020). 46 Stephen Greenblatt et al., eds., The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016). 47 For the first case, see G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, eds., The Riverside Shakespeare, rev. edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997); David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, updated 4th edn. (New York: Longman, 1997); Edmond Malone, ed., The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, 10 vols (London: Rivington and Sons et al., 1790). For the second case, see Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan, eds., The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, rev. edn. (London: Methuen Drama, 2011). For the third case, see Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan, eds., The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus

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and Gabriel Egan, eds., The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Critical Reference Edition, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 48 Stephen Greenblatt et al., eds., The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays / The Sonnets, 3rd edn. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016); David Bevington, ed., The Necessary Shakespeare, 4th edn. (Boston: Pearson Education, 2014). 49 Colin Burrow, ed., The Complete Sonnets and Poems, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 82. 50 ‘Poems attributed to Shakespeare in seventeenth-century miscellanies’ in The New Oxford Shakespeare, under ‘Posthumous Copy texts’ in the Critical Reference Edition (vol. 1, ix) and integrated amongst the plays in the Modern Critical Edition (viii); Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, eds., Shakespeare’s Poems, viii, 429. 51 Appendix, ‘Poems posthumously attributed to Shakespeare’, in Cathy Shrank and Raphael Lyne, eds., The Complete Poems of Shakespeare, Longman Annotated English Poets (London: Routledge, 2018), 735; and appendix, ‘Poems Attributed to Shakespeare in the Seventeenth Century’ in Burrow, ed., Complete Sonnets, 719.

Bibliography A Grammar of the English Tongue, 2nd edn. London: John Brightland, 1712. Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, updated 4th edn. New York: Longman, 1997. Bevington, David, ed. The Necessary Shakespeare, 4th edn. Boston: Pearson Education, 2014. Boase, T. S. R. ‘Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Plays in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 10 (1947): 83–108. ‘Books Printed and Sold by George Grierson’. In Abbot Vertot, The History of the Revolution in Sweden. Dublin: George Grierson, 1727. Burrow, Colin. ‘Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems’. Proceedings of the British Academy 97 (1998): 15–50. Burrow, Colin, ed. The Complete Sonnets and Poems, Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Buschmann-Göbels, Astrid. ‘Bellum Grammaticale (1712) – A Battle of Books and a Battle for the Market’. In Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar-Writing in

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Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 81–100. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. Bysshe, Edward. The Art of English Poetry, 2 vols. London: O. L[l]oyd et al., 1718. Cannan, Paul D. ‘Early Shakespeare Criticism, Charles Gildon, and the Making of Shakespeare the Playwright-Poet’. Modern Philology 102, no. 1 (2004): 35–55. Cannan, Paul D. ‘The 1709/11 Editions of Shakespeare’s Poems’. In Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640–1740, edited by Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan, 171–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Cheney, Patrick. Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Crystal, David, and Ben Crystal. Shakespeare’s Words, www.shakespeareswords.com (accessed 17 July 2020). Culler, A. Dwight. ‘Edward Bysshe and the Poet’s Handbook’. PMLA 63, no. 3 (1948): 858–85. Daily Courant, issue 2376 (6 June 1709). de Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Dugas, Don-John. Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print 1660–1740. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Duncan-Jones, Katherine, and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds. Shakespeare’s Poems, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Thomson Learning, 2007. Evans, G. Blakemore, and J. J. M. Tobin, eds. The Riverside Shakespeare, rev. edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Evans G. Blakemore, and J. J. M. Tobin, eds. The Riverside Shakespeare, rev. edn. [4th issue], 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997 [2003]. Gildon, Charles, ed. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear: Volume the Seventh. London: Edmund Curll and Egbert Sanger, 17[09]. [Gildon, Charles.] The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets. London: Tho. Leigh and William Turner, 1699. Gildon, Charles. The Complete Art of Poetry. In Six Parts, 2 vols. London: Charles Rivington, 1718. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisam Maus and Gordon Mcmullan, eds. The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus and Gordon McMullan, eds. The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays/The Sonnets, 3rd edn. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.

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Hamm, Jr, Robert B. ‘Rowe’s Shakespear (1709) and the Tonson House Style’. College Literature 31, no. 3 (2004): 179–205. Hammond, Brean. ‘Shakespeare Discoveries and Forgeries’. In Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, 78–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Heffernan, Megan. ‘Turning Sonnets into Poems: Textual Affect and John Benson’s Metaphysical Shakespeare’. Shakespeare Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2013): 71–98. Johnson, Samuel, ed. The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes. London: J. and R. Tonson et al., 1765. Jortin, John. Miscellaneous Observations upon Authors, Ancient and Modern, 2 vols. London: Tho. Wotton, 1731–32. Kirwan, Peter. Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Dramatic Canon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Langbaine, Gerard. An Account of the English Dramatick Poets. Oxford: George West and Henry Clements, 1691. Lopez, Jeremy. Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Lounsbury, Thomas R. The Text of Shakespeare. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906. Malone, Edmond, ed. The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, 10 vols. London: Rivington and Sons et al., 1790. Murphy, Andrew. Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Proudfoot, Richard, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan, eds. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, rev edn. London: Methuen Drama, 2011. Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1938. Seary, Peter. Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Sewell, George, ed. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. The Seventh Volume. London: A. Bettesworth et al., 1725. Sewell, George, ed. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. The Tenth Volume. London: J. and J. Knapton et al., 1728. Shrank, Cathy, and Raphael Lyne, eds. The Complete Poems of Shakespeare, Longman Annotated English Poets. London: Routledge, 2018. Sillars, Stuart. The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

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Taylor, Gary, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan, eds. The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Taylor, Gary, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan, eds. The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Critical Reference Edition, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. The Post Boy, issue 2464 (24–7 February 1711). The Post Boy, issue 2466 (1–3 March 1711). The Post Man and the Historical Account, issue 1759 (12–14 July 1709). The Tatler, issue 63 (1–3 September 1709). The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the Ninth. London: E. Curll, K. Sanger and J. Pemberton, 1714. The Works of Shakespear, 8 vols. Dublin: George Grierson and George Ewing, 1726. Theobald, Lewis. The Cave of Poverty, A Poem. London: Jonas Browne, 1715. Theobald, Lewis, ed. The Works of Shakespeare: In Seven Volumes, vol. 1. London: A. Bettesworth et al., 1733. Warburton, William, ed. The Works of Shakespear in Eight Volumes. London: J. and P. Knapton et al., 1747.

Part Two

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6

Now / then Andy Kesson

I am writing this sentence right now, and you are reading it right now, but it wouldn’t be right to suggest our nows are happening at the same time; in order for your now to be now, my now needs to be then. This chapter asks how the two timeframes of now and then slip over each other, how temporal divisions are imposed on historical process and how chronologies both large and small can often, and often inadvertently, remap, enlarge and downplay the content, contexts and implications of the cultural activities we study. In a volume called Shakespeare / Text, it is important to note that the plays, playhouses and playing culture that Shakespeare knew then are now the subject of study in fields such as theatre history and literary studies, and this chapter asks how the relative, shifting terms with which we register time trouble the theatre history that took place then and how it is being reconstructed now. Both perceptions of time and the haphazard accidents of Shakespeare’s career are implicated in the survival of certain kinds of texts that organize the way playhouses and time period are seen to relate to each other. The London playhouses are unusual as literary (and indeed theatrical) phenomena in that they were open for a comparatively short and apparently well-defined amount of time. It is deceptively difficult to date the emergence of the playhouse as an architectural model very precisely, and this chapter will question traditional dating, but conventional narratives have dated their emergence from the Theatre in 1576 to the closure of playhouses by Parliament in 1642.1 This means that, according to received wisdom, the lifespan of such structures as a mainstay of commercial performance and dramatic output is I would like to thank Anouska Lester for her comments on this chapter.

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a little under half a century, making the playhouses themselves and the plays performed therein appear unusually circumscribed by historical terminal points. The playhouses therefore seem to be part and parcel of a much more manageable and definable field of study compared, for example, to the novel, which has a history several centuries long, one that is still ongoing and lacks a clear start date, even a mythical one. It is important to say that the history of theatre or of drama is not identical to the history of playhouses (or, theatres), and that the relative clarity of the overall received history of the latter has come to shape, often unhelpfully, the history of the former. But the apparent cohesion and specificity of the half-century in which London playhouses have been thought to be operational have encouraged equally specific, if not always explicit and coherent, demarcations of time in the way the histories of these spaces have been told. The period of the so-called ‘purpose-built playhouses’ has become, as it were, a particular nexus of time in theatre historiography. Scholars often divide theatrical history into chunks of time, so that it has become conventional to speak of early and late phases in the lifespan of the London playhouses. But when is it ‘early’? When is it ‘late’? When is it in between? And how do we know? Scholars speak too of early and late periods for writers, but does the ‘early’ in ‘early Shakespeare’ mean the same thing – in terms of either time or value judgement – as ‘early Marlowe’, ‘early Kyd’, or ‘early Webster’? When were playhouses a new feature of the London cultural scene, and when (if ever) did they become an accepted, commonplace part of that scene? This chapter asks what kinds of apparently neutral periodic divisions exist within the lifespan of London’s early modern playhouses and, in so doing, seeks to unpack the ideological claims silently made by the binary of then and now, old and new, early and late. It pays particular attention to the sixteenth century, remembering that using centuries as ‘a unit for organizing time’ is itself a form of historical thinking that did not become common until the seventeenth century or later.2 In other words, this chapter takes the time to dwell with(in?) these prescribed units of time, considering both their length (i.e. what events they encompass) as well as their import for how we process the textual and other material evidence of the theatre scene.3 Given this book’s interest in Shakespeare and text, it is worth noting that ‘Shakespearean’, too, can function as both temporal descriptor and value judgement, meaning variously something by Shakespeare, contemporary to Shakespeare or as good

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or complex as Shakespeare’s work. ‘Text’ is also a fraught term when thinking about the plays and playing culture of Shakespeare’s period. Theatre history is mediated through various kinds of texts, from printed plays to archival records connected to sewer records, vestry minutes or legal action. Printed plays are an especially contentious site from which to think about theatre, given that a very small proportion of plays written for performance were printed in this period; that plays were usually printed some time after original performance; and that print and performance are very different kinds of mediation and representation of theatrical intent. Theatre is a cultural art form in which text is only one, and sometimes very minor, aspect, and it is no accident that recent archaeological digs, and the objects they have unearthed, have started to change scholarly understanding of theatrical history. Shakespeare / text and now / then therefore play across one another in complex ways that this chapter endeavours to illuminate. * In one of my first university jobs, there was much discussion in staff meetings about historical periods and the time in which students should encounter them. Departmental teaching was largely organized into time periods, and this meant having to make decisions about the order in which students studied portions of literary time known as ‘Early Modern Literature’, ‘Eighteenth-Century Literature’ and ‘Nineteenth-Century Literature’. Being three such chunks of time, these courses did not map easily across an academic year divided into two teaching terms. This forced the conversation into the conceptually confusing question of whether it mattered more that the eighteenth century followed the early modern period or preceded the nineteenth century, an odd effect of that particular logic being that it sometimes felt as though the eighteenth century could only follow the period before it or precede the one after it, and it somehow couldn’t quite do both. I always enjoyed how such conversations revealed the importance of historical time and periodization in dictating how we think about literature, whilst also revealing their basic contingence, negotiability and a tendency to confuse and distort. A little bit like the computer game Tetris, the eighteenth century was shuffled round into various shapes in order to fit the various temporal timelines at the bottom of the screen, mutable until it either settled neatly

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into place amongst the other time periods, or clunked inconveniently on top of them, out of shape and out of time. The first surviving play likely to have been performed in a London playhouse is Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, which was onstage before 1582 and in print by 1584. This play stands out from almost all extant plays performed in playhouses in the 1580s in seeming to be entirely contemporary in its focus: unlike the classical historical-mythical worlds of The Arraignment of Paris, Campaspe, Endymion, or The Wounds of Civil War, or the focus on more recent but often just as mythical history in The Famous Victories of Henry V, Tamburlaine or Alphonsus, King of Aragon, the titular three ladies appear to be ‘of London’ in something like the here and now. The play has a remarkable prologue which lists the various things the play will not show (a technique picked up in the later plays that we now associate with Marlowe): ‘[We] search not Plutos pensiue pit’; ‘[We doe not] shew of warlike fight’.4 The verbs throughout this prologue are in the present tense: the play is happening now, even as the prologue prefaces, delays and postpones it. In the final reference to what the play will not include, the intimately deictic word ‘heere’ refers to the stage or to the playing space more generally, and the prologue then invites the audience to speculate on – and be prepared to wait and find out – the play’s subject matter, moving finally out of the present tense and into the future perfect and imperative voices: We play not heere the Gardiners part, to plant, to set and sowe: You maruell then what stuffe we haue to furnish out our showe. Your patience yet we craue a while, till we haue trimd our stall: Then young and olde come and behold our wares, and buy them all.

Over two-thirds of this prologue constitute a sort of negative resumé of what the play will not involve, and it ends by thinking of the playing space as a shop or market stall across which the play’s actual contents will be set out. Perhaps curiously, though, it seems to ask for the audience to go through that process, that is, to watch the play, and only then to ‘come and behold our wares, and buy them all’. This seems to relocate both the act of spectatorship and the act of payment to the end of the play, contrary to most understandings of audience reception and early modern theatre business practice. It also thinks of the play’s contents in terms of separate narrative events, fictional setting

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and kinds of character, itemizing the things that, confusingly, will not be in the play (‘warlike fight’, ‘pensiue pit’, ‘the milke maide with her paile’), whilst also hoping the audience will accept these various things as a kind of totality. They are at once itemized ‘wares’ and constitute an ‘all’ that the company hopes the audience will purchase together. For this prologue, the play is something that happens ‘heere’ and in the present (now), as well as something that will happen in the immediate future; but that future seems to be comprehensible and open to spectatorship and remuneration only once finished and in the past (then). My experiences of colleagues discussing pedagogy and historical time feel relatively recent and are certainly in the present of how I think about teaching, research and periodization now. On the other hand, The Three Ladies of London was written by and for some bodies who seem non-negotiably dead, occupying an irretrievable ‘then’ in the historical past. And yet the play survives in textual form to ask us once again when performance happens, situating itself in a here and now which is nevertheless defined in terms of what is absent, what is about to happen and how the audience might feel about it. As I quote the play, it is in the here and now of my own compositional process of writing this chapter, a present which will then be in the past as you come to read it, the prologue quotation now in the new present that you have brought about. Its games of then and now, in other words, are newly playing across our own temporal moments – and diachronic interactions – as reader and writer. Likewise, discussions around when students should encounter certain time periods are less conversations about suitable entry points to time as they are revealing of the often political clashes in the way that the past is conceived and carved up in the present. As Brian Cummings and James Simpson warn, ‘Many periodic terms across English literary history embed ideological claims within apparently neutral periodic divisions.’5 Cummings and Simpson suggest that ‘the deepest periodic division in history has been between the medieval and the early modern’.6 What is perhaps less often noted is how that division and the terms that underpin it change radically depending on the disciplinary perspective and kinds of primary (usually textual) material involved. When scholars talk about English ‘medieval theatre’, they employ a term that refers to many centuries and multiple locations; when scholars discuss ‘early modern theatre’, that phrase often turns out to refer to an artform

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produced from London for which only two decades, the 1590s and 1600s, typically fall within regular purview. Despite a long history of discussion and disagreement about what the term ‘early modern’ means, its exceptionally specific (indeed constrained) meaning in much scholarship on English theatre, despite being effectively challenged, often goes unremarked. Shakespeare has acted as both an explicit and silent centre of gravity for much of this work, and it is no accident that these key focal decades overlap with his career. But that career is also divided by the reigns of two different monarchs, and therefore by the transition from Elizabeth to James, Tudor to Stuart, female to male, single and childless to married and with family, all of which introduce further complicated binaries into the way Shakespeare and early modern theatre is conceived. This is a Russian-doll-Venn-diagram mash-up of a methodological nightmare, in which already contingent terms appealing to large, extensive periods of time – the early modern – are applied to a relatively short-lived cultural institution, the London playhouse, which is then further limited to the roughly two-decade coherence of Shakespeare’s career, itself bisected by a change in the ruling monarch. These binaries are relatively neat in historical terms, but historiographically, the binary between Elizabethan and Jacobean has been complicated by the tendency for one ‘apparently neutral’ temporal designator to become a term commonly used to describe the other. Until recently, it was commonplace for plays written and performed in the early modern playhouses, even long after Elizabeth’s death, to be described as ‘Elizabethan’; in recent years, the term ‘Jacobean’ has started to be used in the same way, describing plays written before and after James’s English reign. This means that we have a binary between Elizabethan and Jacobean which has a tendency to collapse in on itself in ways that require examination. It also means that these two terms, either taken together or with one used to stand for both, can also be read as synonyms for ‘early modern’ and therefore conceived of against an earlier and apparently different period called ‘medieval’. Again, many of these problems seem specific to drama: prose fiction rarely gets defined in terms of the monarch on the throne at the time of its conception or publication, and whilst poetry does sometimes get defined as Elizabethan or Jacobean, those terms are usually more expansive than the very specific 1590s and 1600s viewpoint from which drama is often treated.7

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As units of time, the two monarchs’ reigns are really quite different in ways perhaps not recognized when they are employed as descriptors in scholarly discourse. James ruled England for just under half the years Elizabeth ruled. This means that relatively common ways of dividing up the literature of their reigns which look symmetrical on the surface have in fact very different historical meanings: the ‘late Elizabethan’ period usually associated with the playhouses is a much larger span of time than the ‘early Jacobean’ period usually associated with the second half of Shakespeare’s career. In addition, all of these terms are only meaningful in hindsight. Given the young Queen Elizabeth’s prolonged bouts of illness, the earliest years of her reign may have felt like a late Elizabethan period to her contemporaries. In much the same way, British theatre historians working during the reign of Elizabeth II might one day be described as Elizabethans, though that isn’t usually how they define themselves in public. Likewise, scholars have a tendency to describe anything theatrical that happens in England from 1580 onwards, or even from the mid-1570s, as ‘late’ Elizabethan, but in fact a statistician would want to point out that 1580 is closer to the start of Elizabeth’s reign than to its end. The difference is only by one year, so this observation is in many ways more than usually pedantic, but it does point us towards the niceties and pitfalls of carving up time in this way. It also prompts the crucial question of what is at stake when things are described as late Elizabethan, since this label clearly has nothing to do with historical time. If a central point in Elizabeth’s reign is so often claimed in terms of its lateness, this points towards an inherent bias in scholarship, a gravitational pull towards a period that is familiar because it is when Shakespeare happened to be writing, and it buys into the teleological idea that something late is therefore better than something early: more mature, fully-formed, sophisticated. This is crucial for historicizing the London playhouses as a cultural phenomenon: so often described as late Elizabethan and late Tudor, they are mid- and possibly early Elizabethan, and might therefore be thought of as mid-Tudor, too. Meanwhile the ‘early’ Jacobean depends very much on which country matters to you as you get your stopwatch out. Although scholars often emphasize how long Elizabeth’s reign lasted, James was a monarch for even longer, and his Scottish reign overlapped with the majority of hers in England. 1603, the date when most literary scholars think the Jacobean period started, in fact occurred

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almost two-thirds of the way into James’s Scottish reign. So often thought of as consecutive, the Jacobean and Elizabethan periods ran alongside each other for almost forty years; when James wrote a sonnet to Elizabeth in 1585, he created a kind of literature that was Elizabethan and Jacobean in terms of author, recipient and time period.8 The willingness to speak of a Jacobean period as a post-1603 time is itself an example of the ideological narrowness, the uncritical Anglocentrism, that comes into play in these conversations. Because James’s English rule lasted a little over two decades, it less readily divides up into meaningful sections of early, late, and (presumably, but less often invoked) middle: sometime in the second half of the 1600s, and only a few years after his English accession, the mid-point of James’s English reign had already begun. For some historians and art historians, the very idea of naming periods of time via a sovereign looks like a strange, even a potentially bad habit, defining widespread cultural activity only in terms of its most elite and powerful contemporary. It implies that we know which countries and which of their social constituents matter, and which do not: just as France did not have a Victorian period, so the Jacobean period signifies differently depending on the national vantage from which it is viewed. By employing these terms as repeatedly and definitively as they do, literary scholars may be actively, if inadvertently, heading off opportunities for cross-pollination among their sub-fields and others, which is especially a shame in the case of the very multimedia, interdisciplinary and, still only partly historicized, playhouses. Periodization is therefore not just ideological; it is potentially invidious to cross-disciplinary collaboration, and prevents scholars seeing how their objects of study reach well beyond their own scholarly preoccupations. The ability for terms of periodization that appear to be simply and neutrally historical to function as aesthetic or generic value judgements may explain the curious slippages in time that can occur in excellent scholarship on early modern theatre. As Mark Bayer states at the beginning of Theatre, Community and Civic Engagement in Jacobean England (2011): ‘My argument in this book is that the London theatre of the Tudor and Stuart era was an important community institution.’9 If so, why the title reference to only one small part of just one of these two eras? Or, to put the question another way, if ‘Jacobean’ does not signify a time period in this book’s title, to what does it

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refer? Likewise, Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper describe their edited collection, Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse (2014), as a study of ‘the late Jacobean and early Caroline periods’, a claim repeated on the dust jacket.10 If this were so, it would again raise questions about the period designator in the book’s title, but in fact the book focuses almost entirely on the early English Jacobean period, ignoring the end of James’s reign and providing only one chapter (out of thirteen) with a sustained focus on the Caroline period. In other words, almost none of the book concerns the time periods signaled both in the introduction or on the dust jacket. The book is partly about the Second Blackfriars playhouse, which contributors repeatedly describe as Jacobean, and whilst it is certainly true that it was in use through the English Jacobean period, it nevertheless opened before and closed after this period. The Second Blackfriars was built in the mid-1590s and took advantage of the recent suppression of the boy companies, fusing together two earlier playhouse forms associated with the 1570s: outdoor spaces like the Theatre and indoor ones like the First Blackfriars (hence the unusual size of this new indoor space). The Second Blackfriars is itself an example of just how Elizabethan ‘Jacobean’ playing spaces can be, and the use of the term here articulates how these apparently historical labels have little to do with time and everything to do with aesthetic and ideological preconceptions. Likewise, the way that the terms ‘Elizabethan’ and ‘Jacobean’ are deployed across theatre history scholarship demonstrates that they are no longer historical (or theatre-historical) terms: they are instead genre markers, evoking something about the content of a play or playhouse’s story or style. In reference to theatre, these apparently temporal, monarchical terms are really markers of what kind of play they describe: when someone describes a play as ‘Elizabethan’, they very often mean that it is merry, comic and happy, whereas calling a play ‘Jacobean’ typically designates it as dark, satirical and bitter.11 As Pascale Aebischer has shown, ‘Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Webster and Ford’ have come to seem (as Derek Jarman wrote of Marlowe’s Edward II) ‘Jacobean, sexy, and violent.’12 Aebischer, in turn, suggests that Jarman’s cinematic work influenced scholarly understanding of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including the Oxford Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (2007) and its view of Middleton’s ‘chiaroscuro contrasts, shocking style, dark realism and anachronistic sensibility’.13 Both cinema and scholarship

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understand ‘Jacobean’ to mean, in Aebischer’s words, ‘transgressive, violent and sexually dissident – and modern’.14 As Susan Bennett puts it, ‘Jacobean’ equals ‘(moral) decay, excess and violence – deficiencies we also find in our contemporary moment and for which this past can apparently give expression and meaning.’15 For contemporary cinema-makers and scholars, the Jacobean signifies ‘the defiance of norms’, ‘alternative cultural memory’, ‘difference’, and ‘a conflicted and dialectical relationship with Shakespeare’.16 Julianne Pidduck shows that this definition of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in turn redefines Shakespeare himself, who has become strongly aligned in this way of thinking with the ‘Elizabethan heritage industry’, whilst his exact contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, born in the same year and dead a decade before James became King of England, leapfrogs into a kind of conceptual Jacobean era.17 As we have seen, the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean labels are often synonyms for Shakespeare’s earlier and later career. And in part because of Shakespeare, these sovereign-specific labels are really saying something about culture and aesthetics more than they are about time: the late Elizabethan is, in some scholarly cultural imaginaries, a time of ‘merrie Englande’: dancing, marriage, drink, regular blank verse and exciting sexual irregularity. As John Dover Wilson put it at the start of his career, it is the time of the rising Shakespeare sun.18 The early Jacobean, on the other hand, is dark, corrupt, violent, negatively sexual, characterized by jagged verse rhythms and even more jagged stage action. This may also help to explain the curious place of Marlowe’s work in current scholarship and theatre productions, an Elizabethan who epitomizes much of what we mean by ‘Jacobean’. Then and now, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, are redistributed across each other in increasingly complex, distorting ways. * If time periods impose unwarranted and often unintended interpretations on historical fields, then the playhouses themselves pose different temporal problems. Like humans looking for romance, playhouses are difficult to date, and dating them is quite a bit harder than is usually assumed. Theatre history has assigned particular dates to individual playhouses, so that the playhouse in Newington Butts, south of London, is dated to 1576, the Curtain playhouse north of London to 1577 and so on. As I have argued elsewhere, the solidity

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of those dates is questionable: in almost every case, the historical record mentions playhouses once they are already open, and often already notorious, which means that such documentation does not allow us to assign dates to a playhouse’s actual opening.19 As we have already seen in this chapter, time does funny things in scholarly discourse, and in much theatre history the date at which a playhouse is first mentioned tends to harden into the date in which it must have opened: textual record comes to represent historical time. Playhouses have also been defined in various ways, meaning that particular kinds of long-term playing spaces, especially the large, polygonal buildings usually called amphitheatres, have been privileged at the expense of other regularly used playing spaces in the City of London. Once all such spaces offering long-term playing venues are accepted as part of the playhouse story, the dates of these spaces themselves start to tell different stories. We know of eleven playhouses open by 1590, but crucially we only know opening dates for two of these spaces: the Theatre and the Rose.20 Once we take this evidential lack of knowledge seriously, it radically destabilizes the usual narratives of theatre history. The Theatre has generally been taken as London’s first playhouse, its opening date of 1576 in turn taken as the beginning of the early modern purpose-built playhouse as a concept.21 But if we factor in the playhouses whose opening dates are in question, and build into our field of analysis all regular playing spaces, the Theatre shifts from being the first such playhouse to being somewhere between the fourth to the ninth playhouse to open in London – and the sheer amount of uncertainty built into that observation is itself a good indicator of how little the documentary evidence allows us to plot the timeline for individual playhouses. Put simply, we do not know when the first London playhouse was built, but the cumulative evidence of the eleven early playhouses that we do know of tells us that 1576 is not where we should be looking. Instead, this evidence points us towards the mid-1560s as a key moment in playhouse experimentation on the site of the Red Lion, with a further nine playhouses first mentioned from 1575 to 1579 as already demonstrating a level of notoriety by that point. Rather than seeking a point of origin in the 1576 Theatre, or even the Red Lion where construction is recorded as underway in 1567, we might more safely assert that surviving documentation points to an increase in London commercial playing spaces of all kinds at some point during the 1560s and 1570s. Such surviving

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documentation points also to how much is lost: playhouses are first mentioned across a range of public and private, official and entertainment-based texts, and in testifying to the playhouses’ already formed notoriety, these texts underline the loss of other kinds of textual and oral traces of the early lives of the playhouses. Historical texts also drive scholarly conversation: it may seem self-evident that more documentation produces greater scholarly engagement, but it means, for example, that the well-documented financial difficulties at the Theatre have made this playhouse far more visible in modern scholarship than The Curtain, which has not left records of such financial difficulty. Scholars therefore tend to treat the Theatre as the more important and successful of the two playhouses, which is perhaps an odd reading of a long history of financial problems. Loss and partial witnessing also inflect the history of the publication of plays performed in these spaces: I suggested above that The Three Ladies of London is the earliest surviving play that is likely to have been performed in a playhouse, but it is not printed until 1584, and it is one of only five such plays that are printed in the 1580s, a decade which probably saw hundreds of new plays onstage. There is therefore a significant lag between the opening of the playhouses (whenever that is imagined to be) and the witnessing of playhouse performance in the form of surviving scripts and texts. Indeed, being printed is a comparatively unusual outcome for a play onstage.22 Claire M. L. Bourne has recently stressed ‘the active – and necessary – creativity involved in the tricky business of making plays into books and books into plays’, and warned against ‘the entrenched critical cycle of privileging performance over print, or print over performance’.23 Texts lead disparate lives across the bodies and agencies of actors, audiences, writers, printers, publishers and readers, but scholarly understanding of performance onstage is necessarily built on which plays get printed in books, and how, and when. Evidence from printed plays directs scholarly attention to the 1590s; evidence about playhouses, most of it in manuscript rather than print, instead points towards the 1560s and especially the 1570s. In other words, different textual choices dictate different historical emphases. Even then, we need to take account of work by Mary Erler and David Kathman which shows that ‘commercially supported’ drama happened across London prior to these decades, including long-term commercial performance

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at inns as early as the 1540s.24 Greg Walker has drawn on work by Janette Dillon to recently remind us that what he describes at John Rastell’s ‘purposebuilt stage’ was opened ‘possibly as early as 1524’.25 This means that the evidence points us towards four key stages in the sixteenth century witnessing theatrical commercialization: the 1520s, the 1540s, the 1560s–70s and then the growth in printing playhouse plays from the 1590s. It is important to stress that the evidence does not inform us whether we should be thinking of these moments as glimpses of a continuous and connected theatrical tradition, whose continuity has been hidden by archival loss, or of discontinuous and disconnected experiments in which successive generations tried – once again – to invent the London playhouse. The then and the now are further muddled together here. Instead of interrogating this problem, scholarship has been inclined to ignore it because of the then-and-now, medieval-and-early-modern, earlyand-late-Tudor ways in which literary history is divided up. There is, in the historiographical reflex of early modern theatre history, a tendency to turn away from the middle of the sixteenth century. As Seth Lerer puts it, the ‘fracturing of the literary past has led, in turn, to a fractalization of the histories that write it’, pointing to ‘the English 1550s’ as ‘[p]erhaps the most enigmatic, and hence most inviting, of such spots of literary time’, the spot being in this case ‘the terra incognita of the in-between’.26 In the case of the playhouses, a movement to build long-term playing spaces in and around London that is usually identified with the Theatre in 1576 and the formation of the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594 instead needs to be associated with much earlier patterns of entrepreneurial activity. What scholars have grown used to thinking of as a late Elizabethan cultural development is instead either an early Elizabethan, mid-Tudor phenomenon or even something strongly contemporary with the early English Reformation. This means that, far from being the first London playhouse, the Theatre opened at a time when the city already hosted a commercial playhouse scene: ‘Before the 1570s’, in Mary Erler’s words, ‘London had in place not only a lively theatrical community, but a commercially supported one.’27 Jacqueline Jenkins and Julie Sanders have called on scholars ‘to disregard any simplistic notion that before 1576, when the Theatre was constructed in London’s Shoreditch, there was a wholly other performance tradition in England’.28 Indeed, the Theatre’s

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distinctive business model, name and location are much better understood from that crucial context: the Theatre was the first playhouse to give itself a name rather than simply an address (the Curtain playhouse, for example, is on Curtain Road), and in so doing, was asserting its conceptual difference from playhouses that very much already existed. And yet the firstness of the Theatre and 1576 has persisted, partly because of the Theatre’s role in Shakespeare’s early career. As we have seen, scholarship seems pulled inexorably towards the period when Shakespeare was active as a writer, and the evidence poses crucial questions about methodology and research expertise, since the playhouses appear to have opened in a time period with which the majority of theatre scholars are comparatively unfamiliar. As with playhouses, so with playwrights: writers’ careers have often been organized into discrete phases of early, mid-career and late. Shakespeare is the paradigmatic figure here, and work for the recent New Oxford Shakespeare has driven edited collections by Rory Loughnane and Andrew Power on both Late Shakespeare (2013) and Early Shakespeare (2020) that turn on the important idea that the margins of Shakespeare’s career have been repeatedly read via its middle phase.29 But rather than dwell with this idea, I would prefer to ask what the terms ‘early’ and ‘late’ mean when applied to a career the size and shape of Shakespeare’s as compared to some of his contemporaries. In Andrew Bozio’s recent Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage (2020), for example, Dido, Queen of Carthage is repeatedly described as amongst ‘Marlowe’s earliest dramatic works’.30 Bozio describes his work as ‘aiming to move beyond questions of chronology’, and rightly cites Martin Wiggins’s excellent article, ‘When did Marlowe write Dido, Queen of Carthage?’, which asks the pertinent question in its title. Bozio also quotes Eoin Price noting that ‘the date and authorship of Dido are contested’.31 Wiggins and Price make it much harder to think of Dido as early, and in his British Drama: A Catalogue, Wiggins ends up (tentatively) placing Dido as Marlowe’s fourth play, of seven, which makes it a mid- tipping over into late-career play. All of this seems to make it more striking that Dido nevertheless sticks stubbornly in the scholarly imagination as definitely, self-evidently early, as a play that needs that adjective in order to make some kind of (chrono)logical sense. But maths aside, what does it mean to describe works that feature in an especially short (and uncertain) literary career such as Marlowe’s as either early or late? Is the ‘early’ in early Marlowe

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the same kind of earliness as in early Shakespeare? And if early Shakespeare coincides with early, mid and late Marlowe, what does that do to the meaning of these adjectives, and what do they say about theatrical and literary history? As we have seen, Marlowe’s work fits the Jacobean model of theatre better than the Elizabethan; perhaps the compulsory epithet of ‘early’ attaches to Dido because that play conforms to the Elizabethan better than the rest of Marlowe’s work. * In John Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon, Iphicles excitedly says, ‘Time hath been my friend’. Perhaps the lesson of early modern theatre historiography is that time is rarely a historian’s friend and can distort as much as it can clarify or organize. The theatre of this period has been periodized in highly ideological ways, the playhouses have been dated to fit pre-existing scholarly assumptions about literary priorities, and playwriting careers have been divided up into phases that seem initially clear-cut but are surprisingly hard to pin down. At the start of this chapter, I suggested that Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London is our first surviving play to have been probably performed in a London playhouse. This play survives in two separate editions, but also in the form of an eye-witness report by Stephen Gosson. This report was published as part of Gosson’s Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582) and tells us about a scene in which two of the three ladies swap their opinions of plays and playgoing.32 Crucially, this scene, which Gosson singles out as if most striking, does not feature in either of the two printed versions of the play. Even as we get a snapshot of early 1580s dramaturgy in the form of the playtexts and eye-witness reports of The Three Ladies of London, so we see these snapshots snapping and shooting past each other in their failure to conform. ‘We play not heere the Gardiners part’, Wilson’s prologue to Three Ladies apparently said, and told its audience that ‘[y]ou maruell then what stuffe we haue to furnish out our showe’.33 Despite promising the audience that with patience they would be able to ‘come and behold our wares, and buy them all’, neither the print editions nor Gosson’s audience report quite allow us to behold all of this play. Even as we witness some kind of first in the form of a surviving play from the London playhouses, so we see its stuff and wares slip between our fingers. But careful engagement with the bits of them that can be identified now

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allows new histories of the London playhouses to come into view, histories that demonstrate the overlap between medieval and early modern, Tudor and Stuart, early and later, and then and now.

Notes   1 This chapter queries the first of these dates, 1576. For an important caveat about the apparent finality of 1642, see Rachel Willie, Staging the Revolution Drama: Reinvention and History, 1642–72 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).   2 Margreta de Grazia, ‘Anachronism’, in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 21, citing Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 9, and Daniel S. Milo, Trahit Le Temps (Histoire) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991), 68–70.   3 See MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), www.mola.org.uk for pre- and post-excavation reports, and Julian Bowsher, ‘Twenty Years On: The Archaeology of Shakespeare’s London Playhouses’, Shakespeare 7, no. 4 (2011): 452–66, for an overview of archaeological work up to 2010.   4 Robert Wilson, A right excellent and famous comœdy called the three ladies of London (London: [n.p.], 1584), sig. A2r. This page in Huntington Library copy of this edition digitized in the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database is torn, affecting the legibility of these lines.   5 Brian Cummings and James Simpson, ‘Introduction’, in Cultural Reformations, 3.   6 Ibid.   7 See, for example, Lynn Enterline, ed., Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play (London: Arden, 2019); and Clive Bloom, ed., Jacobean Poetry and Prose: Rhetoric, Representation and the Popular Imagination (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988).   8 Susan Doran, Elizabeth I and Her Circle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 103.   9 Mark Bayer, Theatre, Community and Civic Engagement in Jacobean England (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 2 10 Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘Introduction’, in Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, ed. Gurr and Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 11.

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11 For two recent engagements with the politics of ‘merry’ England, see Harriet Phillips, Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510–1613: Merry Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Greg Walker, John Heywood: Comedy and Survival in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), esp. 107–12. 12 Pascale Aebischer, Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2. 13 Ibid., 3. 14 Ibid., 3–4. 15 Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 82. 16 Aebischer, Screening Early Modern Drama, 4. 17 Julianne Pidduck, ‘Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love: Screening the Elizabethans’, in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), 130. 18 John Dover Wilson, John Lyly (Cambridge: Macmillan and Bowes, 1905), 9 and 138–9. 19 Andy Kesson, ‘Playhouses, Plays, and Theater History: Rethinking the 1580s’, in ‘Drama of the 1580s’, ed. Kesson, a special issue Forum in Shakespeare Studies 45 (2017): 30. 20 The other playhouses, in order of their first appearance in the historical record, are the Red Lion (building works in 1567 recorded in documents the following year), the Bell Savage and St Paul’s (first mentioned in 1575), the Newington Butts playhouse and the Bell (first mentioned in 1576), the First Blackfriars (leased in 1576 but not confirmed as a space for playing until 1581), the Curtain (first mentioned in 1577), the Bull (first mentioned in 1578) and the Cross Keys (first mentioned in 1579). 21 C. W. Wallace, First London Theatre (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1913); Herbert Berry, The First Public Playhouse: The Theatre in Shoreditch, 1576–1598 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979); Gabriel Egan, ‘The Theatre in Shoreditch, 1576–1599’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 172. 22 Aaron T. Pratt, ‘Printed Playbooks, Performance, and the 1580s Lag’, in ‘Forum: Drama of the 1580s’, ed. Kesson, Shakespeare Studies, 53; Kesson, ‘Playhouses, Plays, and Theater History’, 38. 23 Claire M. L. Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 4 and 31.

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24 Mary Erler, ‘London Commercial Theatre 1500–1576’, in Editing, Performance, Texts, ed. Jacqueline Jenkins and Julie Sanders (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 94; and David Kathman, ‘The Rise of Commercial Playing in 1540s London’, Early Theatre 12, no. 1 (2009): 15–38. See also Lawrence Manley, ‘Why Did London Inns Function as Theatres?’, Huntington Library Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2008): 181–97. 25 Greg Walker, John Heywood, 83 and 109, drawing on Janette Dillon, ‘John Rastell’s stage’, Medieval English Theatre 18 (1996): 15–45; and Dillon, ‘John Rastell v Henry Walton’, Leeds Studies in English 28 (1997): 57–75. See also Maura Giles-Watson, ‘John Rastell’s London Stage: Reconstructing Repertory and Collaborative Practice’, Early Theatre 16 (2013): 171–84. 26 Seth Lerer, ‘Literary Histories’, in Cultural Reformations, 76. 27 Erler, ‘London Commercial’, 94. 28 Jenkins and Sanders, ‘Introduction: New Practices’, in Editing, Performance, Texts, 3. 29 Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Andrew J. Power and Rory Loughnane, eds., Late Shakespeare, 1608–1613 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Loughnane and Power, eds., Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 30 Andrew Bozio, Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 95. 31 Bozio, Thinking through Place, 69n17; Martin Wiggins, ‘When did Marlowe Write Dido, Queen of Carthage?’, Review of English Studies 59, no. 241 (2008): 521–41; Eoin Price, ‘Marlowe in Miniature: Dido, Queen of Carthage and the Children of the Chapel Repertory’, in Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade, ed. Kirk Melnikoff and Roslyn L. Knutson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 42. 32 Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in fiue actions prouing that they are not to be suffred in a Christian common weale (London: Thomas Gosson, 1582), sigs. D1v–D2r. 33 Wilson, [T]he three ladies of London, sig. A2r.

Bibliography Aebischer, Pascale. Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Bennett, Susan. Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge, 1996.

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Berry, Herbert. The First Public Playhouse: The Theatre in Shoreditch, 1576–1598. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979. Bloom, Clive, ed. Jacobean Poetry and Prose: Rhetoric, Representation and the Popular Imagination. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988. Bourne, Claire M. L. Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Bowsher, Julian. ‘Twenty Years On: The Archaeology of Shakespeare’s London Playhouses’. Shakespeare 7, no. 4 (2011): 452–66. Bozio, Andrew. Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Cummings, Brian, and James Simpson. ‘Introduction’. In Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, edited by Cummings and Simpson, 1–9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. de Grazia, Margreta. ‘Anachronism’. In Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, edited by Brian Cummings and James Simpson, 13–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Dillon, Janette. ‘John Rastell’s Stage’. Medieval English Theatre 18 (1996): 15–45. Dillon, Janette. ‘John Rastell v Henry Walton’. Leeds Studies in English 28 (1997): 57–75. Egan, Gabriel. ‘The Theatre in Shoreditch, 1576–1599’. In The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, edited by Richard Dutton, 168–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Enterline, Lynn, ed. Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Erler, Mary. ‘London Commercial Theatre 1500–1576’. In Editing, Performance, Texts, edited by Jacqueline Jenkins and Julie Sanders, 93–106. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Giles-Watson, Maura. ‘John Rastell’s London Stage: Reconstructing Repertory and Collaborative Practice’. Early Theatre 16 (2013): 171–84. Gosson, Stephen. Playes confuted in fiue actions prouing that they are not to be suffred in a Christian common weale. London: Thomas Gosson, 1582. Gurr, Andrew, and Farah Karim-Cooper. ‘Introduction’. In Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, edited by Gurr and Karim-Cooper, 1–12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Jenkins, Jacqueline, and Julie Sanders. ‘Introduction: New Practices’. In Editing, Performance, Texts, edited by Jacqueline Jenkins and Julie Sanders, 1–9. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Kathman, David. ‘The Rise of Commercial Playing in 1540s London’. Early Theatre 12, no. 1 (2009): 15–38.

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Kesson, Andy. ‘Playhouses, Plays, and Theater History: Rethinking the 1580s’. In ‘Forum: Drama of the 1580s’, edited by Andy Kesson. Shakespeare Studies 45 (2017): 19–39. Lerer, Seth. ‘Literary Histories’. In Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, edited by Brian Cummings and James Simpson, 75–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Loughnane, Rory, and Andrew J. Power, eds. Late Shakespeare, 1608–1613. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Loughnane, Rory, and Andrew J. Power, eds. Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Manley, Lawrence. ‘Why Did London Inns Function as Theatres?’. Huntington Library Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2008): 181–97. McMullan, Gordon. Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Milo, Daniel S. Trahit Le Temps (Histoire). Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991. Phillips, Harriet. Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510–1613: Merry Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pidduck, Julianne. ‘Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love: Screening the Elizabethans’. In Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, edited by Ginette Vincendeau, 130–5. London: BFI Publishing, 2001. Pratt, Aaron T. ‘Printed Playbooks, Performance, and the 1580s Lag’. In ‘Forum: Drama of the 1580s’, edited by Andy Kesson. Shakespeare Studies 45 (2017): 51–59. Price, Eoin. ‘Marlowe in Miniature: Dido, Queen of Carthage and the Children of the Chapel Repertory’. In Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade, edited by Kirk Melnikoff and Roslyn L. Knutson, 41–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Walker, Greg. John Heywood: Comedy and Survival in Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Wallace, C. W. First London Theatre. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1913. Wiggins, Martin. ‘When did Marlowe Write Dido, Queen of Carthage?’. Review of English Studies 59, no. 241 (2008): 521–41. Wilcox, Donald J. The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Willie, Rachel. Staging the Revolution Drama: Reinvention and History, 1642–72. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Wilson, Robert. A right excellent and famous comœdy called the three ladies of London. London: [n.p.], 1584.

7

Miscellany / sequence Megan Heffernan

Editors have long argued over the proper forms and formats for Shakespeare’s lyric poetry. In 1710, Charles Gildon bemoaned the disarray of Shakespeare’s work in ‘a Book lately publish’d containing only some few of his Poems confusedly put together’.1 This recent publication was Bernard Lintott’s A Collection of Poems (1709), which followed the order and organization of The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), omitting poem titles, headings and other organizational features that could connect the gathered lyrics. Gildon found the resulting arrangement an unpleasant ‘medly of Shakespear’s thrown into a Heap without any Distinction’ and concluded that Lintott had ‘ridiculously blended together in one preposterous Mixture’ poems on ‘several and different Subjects’. In his own edition, Gildon followed Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent. (1640), the volume by which Shakespeare’s poetry had been known to readers for the previous seventy years. This mid-seventeenth-century refashioning of the 1609 quarto of Shake-speares Sonnets collapsed individual lyrics into longer poems and added titles that summarized the contents of those new forms, like ‘The false beleefe’ or ‘Fast and loose’.2 In this editorial sparring over a suitable organization, it is striking that Lintott and Gildon were both appealing to source texts that we now treat as miscellanies, that is, compilations that obscure Shakespeare’s agency by mixing together the work of multiple poets and compilers. Margreta de Grazia has traced the process through which both The Passionate Pilgrim and Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent were deemed inauthentic by Edmond Malone at the end of the eighteenth century.3 Prioritizing closeness to the author, Malone took the ‘writing in the first person’ within

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Shake-speares Sonnets as interchangeable with ‘the name to which the work was attributed on the title-page’, believing that the lyrics offered ‘unmediated access to Shakespeare’s inner self ’.4 This identification of Shakespeare with the speaker of the 1609 Sonnets would become canonical for generations of editors. As recently as the 1990s, Katherine Duncan-Jones argued for an expansive authorial self-expression in her edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the Arden Shakespeare Third Series, finding that ‘the 1609 Quarto printing reflects the minutiae, as well as the substance, of a copy manuscript certainly authorized, and perhaps also penned, by Shakespeare himself ’.5 In her account of authorship, the logic of poetic sequence is the surest sign of Shakespeare’s control over his printed text. While Duncan-Jones admits that it may be impossible to ‘discover how early some individual sonnets or versions of sonnets were composed’, she claims on the basis of internal and external evidence that Shakespeare repeatedly experimented with the order poems might take: ‘[T]here is good reason to believe that the whole sequence as published in 1609 was put into its final shape after 1603, and possibly quite close to its printing.’6 As conceptual and material forms of poetic gathering, miscellany and sequence stand at opposing ends of a spectrum of authorial textuality. Where The Passionate Pilgrim has been taken as a ‘piratical and mediocre’ miscellany that distorts the connections between lyrics – not to mention between the lyrics and the hands that penned them – Shake-speares Sonnets is usually accepted as a sequence set by the poet himself.7 But these classifications of textual genre are profoundly retrospective. Neither word was used as a designation of genre by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith have shown that the ‘English noun “miscellany,” only gradually’, across the seventeenth century, ‘came to refer not only to the miscellaneous parts or contents of a volume, but also to the volume itself ’.8 Ben Jonson’s framing of his poetry is a case in point. Even with his performative authorship, including a deep investment in classical paradigms for collected writing, he resorted to metaphors to describe the motley variety of his writing in Under-Woods, which was published posthumously in his second folio in 1640. ‘Ancients’, he explained ‘call’d that kind of body Sylva’, or woods, ‘in which there were workes of divers nature, and matter congested; as the multitude call Timber-trees, promiscuously growing’, so he ‘entitle[d] these lesser Poems, of later growth,

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by this of Vnder-wood, out of the Analogie they hold to the Forrest’.9 By the same token, the ‘term “sonnet sequence” was’, as Christopher Warley puts it, ‘thought up by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1880’, following romantic ideals of poetic subjectivity.10 Across the centuries, the emerging genre categories for books of gathered poems began to treat poetic order and sequence – as well as the absence of such design within miscellanies – as the sign of an authorial control – or lack thereof – over the material text, even though that agency was not yet established in early modern England. When editors from Gildon to Duncan-Jones situated Shakespeare’s compiled poetry on one end or the other of this spectrum of organization – as either a miscellany or a sequence – they were reading early modern print through a subsequent literary history that occluded earlier textual practices. To apply ideals of order and arrangement to a moment before those ways of understanding books were fully articulated is to presume that the material and conceptual relations between poems exist outside of history. It is to imagine the compilation as static and stable across time. Textual arrangement might be better considered as a snapshot – the representation of a moment suspended in time – that holds traces of the multiple potential forms compiled work might take. In the case of lyric poetry, retrospective terms like miscellany and sequence neglect the multiple ways in which organization was an active process. A compilation that now seems disorderly or out of sequence often reflects how early modern poets and compilers were engaged – often in ways we do not fully understand now – with the material form of gathered lyrics. This chapter considers the history of compiling sonnets around the turn of the seventeenth century in order to rethink modern ideals of textual organization that too easily default to notions of non-authorial mixture or authorial sequence. I find new evidence for how to understand Shakespeare’s printed lyrics in the shifting approaches to textual design that followed the 1598 revisions to Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. Reading The Passionate Pilgrim and Shake-speares Sonnets through this more precise chronology, which includes the holograph manuscript of Sidney’s niece, Lady Mary Wroth, Countess of Pembroke, we can begin to approach Shakespeare’s printed lyrics as dynamic responses to practices of compiling poetry that were constantly evolving in early modern England.

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* Sonnet compilations occupy a unique position in the history of printing English lyrics. More than other types of compiled texts, gathered sonnets demonstrate the complex intersection of poetic form and material organization. Following the posthumous publication of Philip Sidney’s Syr P. S. His Astrophel and Stella (1591), there was a furious rush of printed sonnets in England, with nineteen distinct titles by poets including Samuel Daniel, Henry Constable, Edmund Spenser and others appearing in seven years.11 Many of these compilations ran into multiple editions. The 1590s ‘sonnet vogue’ was ‘driven by print industry standards’, a set of design conventions standardized by Daniel’s Delia (1592).12 Sonnets were printed in small formats, at first in quarto and then increasingly in octavo. Due to both the constraints of these small formats and the consistent length of the fourteen-line poems – a regularity that was unprecedented in the history of printing English lyrics – professional compilers were able to develop an innovative mise-en-page. Publishers and printers set pages symmetrically, each with one or two sonnets and ornamented with floral borders along the top or bottom and occasionally the sides (see Figure 7.1). With pages all filled with a single kind of poem, the regular design of compiled sonnets supported a novel poetics of formal and material iteration. Neither progressive sequences nor disjointed miscellanies, these books treated sonnets as items in a repetitive series, capitalizing on the thwarted and stalled erotics that is basic to Petrarchan poetry. This nexus of poetic and textual framing was accomplished with a new kind of poem heading. Since Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes (1557), books of English poems typically included lengthy narrative titles, like, ‘The lover having enjoyed his love, humbly thanketh the god of love: and avowing his hart onley to her faithfully promiseth utterly to forsake all other.’13 The compilers of printed sonnets rejected this heavyhanded apparatus in favour of a more elegant approach to poetic organization. Rather than verbally predicting the scenario of the poem to follow, sonnet books supplied a numeral and a designation of genre, like ‘Sonnet II’ in Daniel’s Delia (1592), ‘Amour. 2’ in Michael Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour (1594) or ‘Canzon. 2’ in the anonymous Zepheria (1594). These numbered headings promoted an attention to the repetition of form and content.14 While editors following Malone treated sonnet numbers as the markers of a continuous and evolving

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Figure 7.1  With its decorative border and single lyric per page, Samuel Daniel’s Delia was conventional in terms of layout for early sonnet books. Delia: Contayning certayne Sonnets; with the complaint of Rosamund (London: Simon Waterson, 1592), sig. C1r. Pforz 241, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

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subjectivity, for early modern writers and readers, they instead showcased an impressive poetic skill: the ability to master the formal constraints of the quatorzain over and over again. The result of this display of talent was not a forward progress of consciousness or scenario but rather a repetitive affective stutter that expressed the poet’s unrequited desire. The fashion for English printed sonnet books was driven, at both its origin and its conclusion, by Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. First published in 1591 without the approval of Sidney’s powerful family, his sonnets went through three quarto editions by 1597.15 These were precisely the years in which small format sonnet books dominated the market for English printed poetry. In 1598, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, corrected her brother’s lyrics and included them in a folio of his collected writing, which bore the title of his longest work, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1598).16 Besides fixing verbal errors, Pembroke changed the material arrangement of Astrophel and Stella. Where the quartos had organized Sidney’s lyrics by genre, separating the sonnets and the songs, she integrated all the poems into a single run, treating the more formally diverse songs as a counter-perspective to events voiced in the repetitive sonnets. In these revisions, the 1598 edition further developed the print conventions that had so far characterized the brief fashion for sonnets. The quartos of Astrophel and Stella did not use any kind of headings for the sonnets, but Pembroke’s reordering in the folio introduced a new system of numbering. Arabic numerals – without the designation of genre – were used as headings for the sonnets, while the songs were titled with ordinal numbers and a reference to the kind of poem, like ‘Seventh song’.17 Additionally, the new folio format changed the relationship between poetic form and page layout that had been so pronounced in printed sonnets up to this point. Instead of just one or two of the regular quatorzains per page, the larger format allowed poems to be set more closely. Not all the pages were symmetrical because the irregular songs interrupted that material iteration. Finally, Sidney’s lyric poems appeared at the end of a large volume devoted entirely to his work, as merely one component of an authorial corpus that encompassed multiple different kinds of writing. These revisions to Astrophel and Stella changed the future of printed sonnets by disaggregating poetic form, material organization and the textual genre of the compilation. Following 1598 there were no books that met all the

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conventions of sonnets published prior to The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Where sonnet compilations had so far been published exclusively in small formats that filled entire (if slight) volumes, they began to be incorporated as components of larger collections, particularly in the case of reprint editions that continued into the seventeenth century. Michael Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour (1594) was republished multiple times, first within his Englands Heroicall Epistles (1599, 1600, 1602) and then within his Poems (1605, 1608, 1610, 1613, 1616, 1619 and 1630). Equally, the confluence of design features – numbered headings, ornamental borders and symmetrical pages – was no longer expected; in fact, it could not be expected in volumes that included a greater diversity of lyric forms. Two volumes of Alexander Craig’s poetry very clearly demonstrate this shift. The Poeticall Essayes of Alexander Craige Scotobritane (1604) contains multiple subgroupings of lyrics distinguished with individual headings: for instance, a run of three ‘Sonet[s] to His Maisetie’ and four more ‘To the Queens Most Excellent Maiestie’.18 These sonnets were separated with arabic numerals, like the revised Sidney folio, and ornamental borders appeared only between subsections, not between individual sonnets. The pages were not symmetrical. But in The Amorose Songes, Sonets, and Elegies: of M. Alexander Craige, Scoto-Britane (1606), sonnets were printed individually, one to a page, with ornamental borders at the head and the foot of each. Instead of numbers, each sonnet was introduced with an address to the goddess it was praising: ‘To Idea’, ‘To Pandora’, ‘To Penelope’.19 In the distinct approaches to arranging the lyrics in the two Craig volumes, we can see how the earlier confluence of conventions for printing sonnets was pried apart, leaving some books with symmetrical pages and others with numbered poems. It was this division of features that had first appeared together in printed sonnet books that would make it possible, at least retrospectively, to read compiled poems as either a disjointed miscellany or a sequence with a deliberate arrangement. In the case of the miscellaneous mixture, there was no expressed relationship between the diverse gathered poems, while the numbered sequence projected a necessary order for the discrete sonnets. The same split of formatting – between the symmetrical pages and the numbered headings – characterized Shakespeare’s printed lyrics. In 1599, William Jaggard published The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of twenty poems, only five of which are

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now identified as Shakespeare’s. Jaggard went to great lengths to affiliate this book with Shakespeare. Beyond a title-page attribution, the first two poems are early versions of the sonnets that begin ‘When my love swears she is made of truth’ and ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair’, which would appear as numbers 138 and 144 in Shake-speares Sonnets20 (see Figure 7.2). The third poem is, amazingly, a sonnet excerpted from Love’s Labour’s Lost, which had been published with Shakespeare’s name on the title page in 1598 (and possibly in a now-lost earlier quarto).21 Two more poems also lifted from the play appear later in the slight book. Jaggard’s financial motives for producing a ‘Shakespearean’ volume are clear – The Passionate Pilgrim went through three editions by 1612.22 But the design conventions through which he achieved this success are slightly more complicated. The volume’s affinities to sonnets published after the 1598 revisions to Astrophel and Stella have not been fully explored. Pages in The Passionate Pilgrim were set with ample white space around each poem and with ornamental borders along the top and bottom, visually echoing the design trends in recent books of sonnets. Observing these similarities, Erin A. McCarthy has argued that the book should be ‘understood as a sonnet sequence attributed to William Shakespeare’ in which ‘Jaggard clearly made an effort to align The Passionate Pilgrim bibliographically with a genre for which there was continued demand’.23 McCarthy’s attention to the multiple features that coalesce to constitute a print genre is savvy. But given the changes to how sonnets were published after the Sidney folio, we need to refine the chronology of these innovations slightly. While The Passionate Pilgrim did use ornamental borders and set just one poem per page, it did not include numbered headings, as sonnet books had done before 1598. Like Craig’s The Amorose Songes, Sonets, and Elegies, this setting picks up just half of the confluence of design features that had defined the earlier fashion for small format sonnet books. It clearly situates The Passionate Pilgrim as a response to the revisions to Astrophel and Stella in the 1598 folio. This fine-grained chronology matters because it was the lack of headings that would prompt later readings of The Passionate Pilgrim as a miscellany. Without textual features to explain the connections between poems, the book could be read in any order, thwarting a retrospective desire to discover Shakespeare’s authorial compiling.24

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Figure 7.2  Symmetrical page layout with ornamental borders in William Shakespeare, [The Passionate Pilgrim] (London: [W. Jaggard], [1599]), sig. A3r, Folger STC 22341.8. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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A decade later, Shake-speares Sonnets deployed the other set of features that had devolved from the once-conventional design of sonnet books. Thomas Thorpe published the compilation of 154 sonnets, plus the verse narrative of a bereft young woman entitled ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ in 1609. It is well known that Shake-speares Sonnets deviated significantly from the material organization of the 1590s books it was supposedly following. The dedication came not from the poet, but from Thorpe. The poet’s name was showcased on the title page and in the running titles, where pseudonyms for the lover and beloved had appeared in earlier compilations. Poems were laid out asymmetrically across the breaks between pages, and there were no ornamental borders (see Figure 7.3). For all these reasons, Shake-speares Sonnets has most often been identified as a response to Sidney’s quartos. In his Oxford edition, Colin Burrow offers the conventional view that the 1609 Sonnets ‘would have sent off a set of conflicting signals to its early readers’, and that ‘the only other printed sonnet sequence to share all the features displayed by Thorpe’s Quarto was the 1591 edition of Sir P. S. His Astrophel and Stella’.25 While it makes sense that Thorpe would have Sidney in sight as a model, to propose that he was following the first Astrophel and Stella quarto is to neglect profound changes in mise-en-page over nearly two decades of publishing sonnets. Shake-speares Sonnets did not, in fact, share all of its features with the 1591 Sidney edition. Most notably, Thorpe introduced numbered headings – simple arabic numerals without a designation of genre – above each poem, where the Astrophel and Stella quartos had left the sonnets without any framing devices. With numbers as headings, Thorpe was more closely following the 1598 revisions to Sidney’s sonnets. Like The Poeticall Essayes of Alexander Craige Scotobritane, which numbered poems but did not set them symmetrically, Shake-speares Sonnets reflects the split of print conventions that had at first developed together in printed sonnet books. Thorpe’s heading style has become so hard-baked into how we read sonnets, and Shakespeare’s sonnets, in particular, that we have neglected the numbering as historically specific evidence of compiling for print. The headings that have allowed editors since Malone to approach the sonnets as a sequence – as a material and poetic progress that expresses the poet’s own subjectivity – were originally an emerging tool of organization that could sponsor multiple different modes of reading. In early modern

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Figure 7.3  Asymmetrical pages with numbered headings in William Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609), sig. I1v, Folger STC 22353. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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England, the organization of gathered poems holds traces of the influence of multiple different compilers: poets, certainly, but also the scribes who copied manuscripts, the publishers and printers who made printed books, and even the communities of readers who received and modified gathered texts. These multiple, overlapping agencies do not necessarily make any single compilation of poems miscellaneous, nor do they coordinate or cohere neatly into an orderly sequence. Rather, they speak to how compiling for print was an active process that negotiated the interface between poetic and material forms; between an idealized erotics and a practical craft; and between the meanings that coalesced in the interplay between individual poems and the broader field of interpretation proposed by larger volumes. * The work of Mary Wroth, another sonneteer writing in the wake of the revised Astrophel and Stella, offers a model for how to think about Shakespeare’s compiled poetry without resorting to the anachronisms of miscellany and sequence. Unlike the work of Shakespeare, and indeed that of other poets whose sonnets were printed in the 1590s, Wroth’s sonnets survive in a manuscript copied in her own hand. Now held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the compilation offers a stunning glimpse of a writing practice that was actively engaged with the poetic effects of organization.26 The manuscript was begun as early as 1604 and completed prior to the 1621 print publication of The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, a folio containing the first part of Wroth’s prose romance as well as her lyric poetry. It is a clean copy of 117 sonnets and songs, 103 of which would be published in the 1621 folio as Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Nine further poems from the manuscript were spliced into the fiction of the prose romance, while six were never printed. While Wroth recognized and took advantage of the meanings created by organizing discrete lyrics, she did not approach her compiled work as an overarching sequence, but rather as sets of formally and thematically interrelated clusters. Between manuscript and print, she went through multiple rounds of revision, from correcting individual spellings to adjusting the order of the sonnets. In the first modern edition of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus to attend to both sources, Ilona Bell has argued that Wroth’s sonnets ought to be understood ‘not as a collection of poems written for the reading public but as

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individual poems or groups of poems written for a private lyric audience and assembled later’.27 In the ‘bowdlerized, printed’ sonnets, Wroth’s motive was likely ‘to veil but not entirely undo her radical challenge to literary and social convention’.28 Even before the publication of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, this play with textual design within the private manuscript deployed the conventions first developed for printed sonnets. Wroth copied each quatorzain on a separate page, supplying numbered headings for each. She introduced most poems with Arabic numerals, like ‘.18.’ for a sonnet, though she also occasionally added designations of genre, like ‘Song 3’.29 There are multiple points in the manuscript where the numbering starts over, creating several distinct runs of sonnets, and many poems were shuffled into new positions in the printed edition. The adjustments between manuscript and print open a window onto a process of poetic arrangement, whereby we can glean how Wroth experimented with the material and social affordances of the distinct media. Wroth’s sense of how to organize her work was clearly evolving. At times, she seemed uncertain about where a poem ought to be, so she hedged her bets by slipping the symbol of the slashed S or fermesse ($) into the heading (see Figure 7.4). This flourish also appeared at the conclusion of most of the sonnets and songs in the volume. Quite strikingly, Wroth used two fermesses to frame the opening title ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’ and four around the signature of her pseudonym Pamphilia.30 In these uses, the symbol was drawing on associations of scribal intimacy and discretion, as well as affiliations with the Sidney family.31 Wroth’s aunt, Mary Sidney, signed her name with a fermesse in letters from the early seventeenth century.32 Beyond the cultural connotations of the fermesse, it also had a structural effect within the organization of the manuscript. The unusual appearance of the fermesse in Wroth’s sonnet headings has been treated as an expression of the relationships between the gathered poems. Because it frequently appears between thematic ruptures, Heather Dubrow reads the symbol as a device that divides poems from one another: ‘the most recurrent and most revealing function’ across the manuscript ‘is the signaling of closure at the termination of a poem or group’.33 Rebecca L. Fall has proposed the opposite function for the same feature, finding that the ‘symbol’s functional

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Figure 7.4  Wroth’s slashed S or fermesse ($) as a placeholder for a numbered sonnet heading. V.a.104, f. 55r, Folger Shakespeare Library. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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ambiguities’ in Wroth’s manuscript work to ‘trouble[e] the notion of poetic enclosure entirely: the fermesse concludes, but also connects’ sonnets, and thus ‘troubles poetic and sequential bounds’.34 Learning from both accounts – of Wroth’s investment in articulating both closure and connection between poems – I would add that we might benefit from recognizing how remarkable it was for a manuscript compiler to deploy a symbol that allowed her to play simultaneously with multiple approaches to textual arrangement. Her use of the fermesse capitalized on an ambiguity that was basic to the experience of writing and reading compiled sonnets, which ‘do not set out to narrate or recount a story’ but ‘are artfully dramatized moments in time’.35 Interrupting the continuous run of numbered headings, which modern readers yearn to take sequentially, the fermesse introduces a temporal pause and a material gap in the manuscript’s arrangement. It conveys an openness in which we can see Wroth using the technologies of textual organization to consider the effects of the multiple potential connections among her gathered poems. It was this very openness that made the fermesse such a clever response to the example set by printed sonnets. If late sixteenth-century sonnet publications were not yet sequences, they did transform how material organization might respond to poetic form and content. By replacing narrative titles with abstract numbers – that is, by omitting lengthy editorial descriptions of poetic contents and contexts – printed sonnet books related poems directly to one another. Numbered headings made it possible for readers to imagine a lyric scenario that exceeded the limits of the single poem. This desire to discern a network of relations between and among sonnets would be hard to shed. When Wroth slipped the fermesse into her headings, it was an overdetermined symbol that both filled the space of missing numbers and simultaneously called attention to the absent information that should be conveyed – that is, that readers expected to be conveyed – by those features. It captured the sense that sonnets ought to be headed with a number, even if Wroth did not yet know what number to give them because she had yet to place them definitively within the structure of her compilation. Wroth’s manuscript holds several lessons for how to understand Shake-speares Sonnets and The Passionate Pilgrim once we move beyond the retrospective, modern ideals of authorial organization implied by the textual

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genres of the miscellany and the sequence. Wroth’s multiple clutches of sonnets, which would be streamlined in the printed Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, show how poets were attuned to the meanings produced at the points of connection between lyrics, to the significance sustained by material arrangement. At the same time, Wroth was not committed to an overarching structure, instead preferring to let distinct runs of sonnets clamorously jostle one another. Perhaps most significantly, her ingenious use of the fermesse makes clear that the arrangement of poems could evolve and was always subject to change. Material organization was the expression of an instant of compiling that could be revised at a later date. To name one collection of lyrics a sequence and another a miscellany is to posit an unrealistic fixity on the network of relations between poems, which was consistently unfolding in moments of textual making and remaking in response to historically embedded practices of production and use.

Notes 1 William Shakespeare, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the Seventh (London: Edmund Curll and Egbert Sanger, [1710]), 449. For an account of the role Gildon’s and Lintott’s editions of Shakespeare’s poetry played in canon formation, see Aleida Auld’s chapter ‘Canon / apocrypha’ in this volume. 2 William Shakespeare, Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent. (London: John Benson, 1640), sigs. B1v and B2r. See also William Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609). On how this edition updated Shakespeare’s poetry to meet new fashions in literary publication in 1640, see Megan Heffernan, ‘Turning Sonnets into Poems: Textual Affect and John Benson’s Metaphysical Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2013): 71–98. 3 Malone’s critique – ‘The Genuine Poems of the Same Author’ – was published in William Shakespeare, Supplement to the Edition of Shakspeare’s Plays Published in 1778 by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, in Two Volumes (London: C. Bathurst et al., 1780). 4 Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 152 and 154.

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  5 William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (Walton-on-Thames, UK: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), xiii. This view is not uncontested. For a survey of editorial approaches, see William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 91–6.   6 Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997), xiv. Duncan-Jones argues from the example of other poets that Shakespeare was responsible for this ordering: ‘[W]ith so much evidence available that other, better-documented sonneteers continually rewrote and reordered their work, it becomes a near-certainty that Shakespeare must have done so too’ (3 and 15).   7 Ibid., 3.   8 Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, ‘Introduction: The Emergence of the English Miscellany’, in Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England, ed. Eckhardt and Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 1–2.   9 Ben Jonson, The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, 2. vols (London: Richard Meighen [and Thomas Walkley], 1640), 2:sig. Z1v. 10 Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 19. 11 For a list of these sonnet books, see Megan Heffernan, Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 143–5. 12 Marcy North, ‘The Sonnets and Book History’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Malden: Blackwell, 2010), 204. On Daniel’s influential example for published sonnets, see Erin A. McCarthy, Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 60. 13 Paul Marquis, ed., Richard Tottel’s ‘Songes and Sonettes’: The Elizabethan Version (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007), 184. 14 For a more detailed account of how numbered headings stressed iteration of form and content, see Heffernan, Making the Miscellany, 142–56. 15 Syr P. S. His Astrophel and Stella was published twice by Thomas Newman in 1591 and once by Matthew Lownes, probably in 1597. 16 Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London: William Ponsonby, 1598). 17 Ibid., sig. Aaa2r. 18 Alexander Craig, The Poeticall Essayes of Alexander Craige Scotobritane (London: William White, 1604), sigs. A4r and D1v.

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19 Alexander Craig, The Amorose Songes, Sonets, and Elegies: of M. Alexander Craige, Scoto-Britane (London: William White, 1606), sigs. C2v, C3r and C3v. 20 Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, 341, 342. 21 See Misha Teramura’s chapter ‘Lost / found’ in this volume for more on the ‘lost’ textual history of Love’s Labour’s Lost. 22 See Adam G. Hooks’s chapter ‘Fact / fiction’ in this volume for an account of the slippery publication history of The Passionate Pilgrim. 23 McCarthy, Doubtful Readers, 58, 59. 24 Indeed, pages in the book were, very unusually, printed only on the recto, perhaps to facilitate cutting poems out of the sheets. Thanks to Adam G. Hooks for this insight into a potential explanation for the blank versos. 25 Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, 97. 26 Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.104. 27 Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in Manuscript and Print, ed. Ilona Bell and Steven W. May (Toronto; Tempe: Iter Press and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017), 45. For an argument about the privacy inherent to Worth’s poetry, see Jeffrey Masten, ‘“Shall I Turne Blabb?”: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 67–87. 28 Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, 2 and 4. 29 Ibid., 93 and 94. 30 Ibid., 73 and 183. 31 Heather Wolfe, ‘A Letter from Queen Anne to Buckingham Locked with Silk Embroidery Floss’, in The Collation: A Gathering of Scholarship from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Available online: https://collation.folger.edu/2013/01/aletter-from-queen-anne-to-buckingham-locked-with-silk-embroidery-floss/ (accessed 25 February 2021). 32 Heather Dubrow, ‘“And Thus Leave Off ”: Reevaluating Mary Wroth’s Folger Manuscript, V.a.104’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 22 (2003): 275. 33 Ibid., 277. 34 Rebecca L. Fall, ‘Pamphilia Unbound: Digital Re-Visions of Mary Wroth’s Folger Manuscript, V.a.104’, in Re-Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Katherine R. Larson, Naomi J. Miller and Andrew Strycharski (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 197–8. 35 Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, 13.

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Bibliography Craig, Alexander. The Poeticall Essayes of Alexander Craige Scotobritane. London: William White, 1604. Craig, Alexander. The Amorose Songes, Sonets, and Elegies: of M. Alexander Craige, Scoto-Britane. London: William White, 1606. de Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Dubrow, Heather. ‘“And Thus Leave Off ”: Reevaluating Mary Wroth’s Folger Manuscript, V.a.104’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 22 (2003): 273–91. Eckhardt, Joshua, and Daniel Starza Smith. ‘Introduction: The Emergence of the English Miscellany’. In Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England, edited by Eckhardt and Smith, 1–15. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Fall, Rebecca L. ‘Pamphilia Unbound: Digital Re-Visions of Mary Wroth’s Folger Manuscript, V.a.104’. In Re-Reading Mary Wroth, edited by Katherine R. Larson, Naomi J. Miller and Andrew Strycharski, 193–207. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Heffernan, Megan. ‘Turning Sonnets into Poems: Textual Affect and John Benson’s Metaphysical Shakespeare’. Shakespeare Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2013): 71–98. Heffernan, Megan. Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Malone, Edmond. ‘The Genuine Poems of the Same Author’. In Supplement to the Edition of Shakspeare’s Plays Published in 1778 by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, in Two Volumes. London: C. Bathurst et al., 1780. Marquis, Paul, ed. Richard Tottel’s ‘Songes and Sonettes’: The Elizabethan Version. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007. Masten, Jeffrey. ‘“Shall I Turne Blabb?”: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets’. In Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, edited by Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller, 67–87. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. McCarthy, Erin A. Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. North, Marcy. ‘The Sonnets and Book History’. In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited by Michael Schoenfeldt, 204–21. Malden: Blackwell, 2010. Shakespeare, William. Shake-speares Sonnets. London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609. Shakespeare, William. Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent. London: John Benson, 1640.

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Shakespeare, William. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the Seventh. London: Edmund Curll and Egbert Sanger, [1710]. Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. Walton-on-Thames, UK: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Sidney, Philip. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. London: William Ponsonby, 1598. Wolfe, Heather. ‘A Letter from Queen Anne to Buckingham Locked with Silk Embroidery Floss’. The Collation: A Gathering of Scholarship from the Folger Shakespeare Library (blog), 8 January 2013. Available online: https://collation. folger.edu/2013/01/a-letter-from-queen-anne-to-buckingham-locked-with-silkembroidery-floss/ (accessed 25 February 2021). Wroth, Mary. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in Manuscript and Print. Edited by Ilona Bell and Steven W. May. Toronto; Tempe: Iter Press and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017.

8

Original / copy Dianne Mitchell

Never has printer’s copy been more desirable than in Shakespeare’s maleaddressed sonnets. By ‘printer’s copy’, I mean not the historic document(s) behind Thomas Thorpe’s 1609 quarto of Shake-speares Sonnets: a lost ‘original’ whose absent presence continues to shape our readings of the enigmatic pamphlet that is Q. Rather, I mean Shakespeare’s addressee himself. For if the Sonnets hail this unnamed figure as love, as friend, as Muse, his most valuable quality is arguably his capacity to serve as a ‘patterne’ for subsequent iterations (19.12, 98.12).1 Repeatedly elided by various templates ripe for the machinery of reproduction, he is portrayed as an ephemeral original from whom an endless series of future-proof impressions might be made.2 Indeed, so reproducible does the Friend prove that his various copies, human and textual, threaten (in true printing-house fashion) to supersede him.3 To uncouple the Sonnets’ Friend from the technology of the printed text – the only form, not coincidentally, in which we know the Sonnets as a collection – might thus seem to read against type. Yet, this chapter will do exactly that by asking what it would mean to align the Friend with a rather different kind of poetic ‘copy’: the transcript or manuscript copy, typically found in personalized lyric compilations or ‘verse miscellanies’.4 Characterized by the serial nature of their production, manuscript copies of lyrics have a famously oblique relationship to ‘originals’ (whether authors’ holographs or printed poems). Instead, they witness versions of earlier texts at several removes.5 The manuscript copy thus encodes in its neatly penned or hastily This chapter benefited enormously from the insights of Sharon Harris. I am also grateful for the generous assistance of Faith Acker, David Weiss, Andrew Keener and Claire M. L. Bourne.

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scrawled characters not a singular pattern but rather the blurrier memory of an extended sequence of copies.6 Its form registers innumerable reinscriptions. By reading the Friend as such a transcript, I argue that the Sonnets value their subject not only as prized ‘coppy’ in Sonnet 11’s sense of an original (‘Thou shouldest print more, not let that coppy die’) but rather as a loved reiteration (14).7 Besides offering a potent counternarrative to the Sonnets’ sinister investment in the swift, mechanized print reproduction of their addressee, the Sonnets’ equal interest in the recursive capacity of their beloved subject can help us see the poems’ terms of intimacy anew. For if professed disparities in age, rank, wealth and affection often work against the Sonnets’ repeated language of friendship, where can this amity finally be said to reside?8 The most compelling place to look, I propose, is those sites where the Friend comes into being ‘by succession’ (2.12).9 Tracing the Sonnets’ history as a series of reiterative manuscript artifacts, I locate Shakespeare’s poems in the company of other lyric copies addressed to friends – poems declaring that what really sets a good friend apart is his capacity to be, not an ‘original’, but rather a copy of a copy of a copy.

Patterns to succeeding men Thy bosome is indeared with all hearts, Which I by lacking have supposed dead, And there raignes Love and all Loves loving parts, And all those friends which I thought buried. How many a holy and obsequious teare Hath deare religious love stolne from mine eye, As interest of the dead, which now appeare, But things remov’d that hidden in there lie. Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the tropheis of my lovers gon, Who all their parts of me to thee did give, That due of many, now is thine alone. Their images I lov’d, I view in thee, And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.10

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Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31 makes a series of radical claims about its addressee. It avers that the poet’s love for his Friend is inextricable from his love for former friends; that these friends’ shares in the poet’s love are transferable to the addressee upon their deaths; that in his unnamed Friend the poet finds not only the ‘images’ (13) of all of his past friends but also, via a complex sharing of desire among the living and the dead, himself.11 The monosyllable ‘all’ is repeated seven times (and thrice in the final line), subtly mutating with each inscription. By the poem’s final, gabbling declaration, ‘And thou (all they) hast all the all of me’ (14), its effect is a startlingly reiterative vision of friendship. A true friend, this sonnet suggests, is the friend most able to retrieve the forms of ‘all those friends’ (4) as well. Sonnet 31’s celebration of the Friend as an ample storehouse for ‘things remov’d’ (8) sits uneasily with his more familiar presentation as a singular object of desire. To be ‘singular’ is, of course, to be extraordinary, distinguished above the rest, ‘like none’ (53.14).12 But in early modern England, singularity also denoted the quality of being single: that is, quite literally one of a kind. Here, then, is the terrible paradox of the male-addressed sonnets: in their compulsion to multiply the Friend beyond the risk of his destruction, they eliminate the uniqueness said to make him so appealing in the first place. If the Sonnets love the Friend because he is ‘more lovely’ (18.2) than anything in the human or natural world, they also demand that he submit to a series of procreative and poetic mechanisms which will, like the repeated action of platen on inked type against paper, ensure his accurate duplication for the benefit of future admirers.13 Friendship, according to this logic, means giving oneself up in favour of duplicates. What Sonnet 31 promises is a way out of redundancy. By hailing its addressee as the embodiment of the poet’s former friends, the poem exposes the secret the Sonnets can’t quite keep: the Friend was never an ‘original’. Rather, he has always been a copy, beloved precisely because his bosom – his very DNA – bears witness to an earlier string of ‘lovers gon’ (10). Sonnet 31’s radical vision of the Friend as all friends is thus a vision of reproduction without a singular template. Rather than measuring the distance between its object of desire and a more distant prototype, the poem celebrates its Friend’s status as an amalgam of past friends who are themselves copies (of one another, of the poet himself).

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The result is a kind of feedback loop, in which everyone is said to be desired precisely because everyone is a reiteration of everyone else.14 If this seems like a puzzling model for friendship, it may speak less to Sonnet 31’s intricate repetitions than to our own critical desire for Shakespearean ‘originals’. Grappling with ‘true originall copies’ that feel neither original nor, in many cases, true, we should hardly be surprised that the Sonnets’ ‘true’ Friend has become yet another Shakespearean artefact whose presence critics have sought to discern among less perfect remediations.15 Yet, early moderns do not seem to have fully shared our sense that reproduction diminishes value. Rather, I’d like to propose that the Sonnets’ preference for one particular mode of reiteration – succession – signals their author’s participation in a literary culture that valued both texts and friends as copies. We can glimpse this culture by looking for the Sonnets not as inked impressions in Q, but as transcriptions in the manuscripts of poems compiled during the decades after Q’s publication. On an early page of a notebook now held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a fluent hand has inscribed a verse under the heading ‘A Sonnet’.16 The poem is anonymous but instantly recognizable from its opening line (‘Noe longer mourne for me when I am dead’) as the sole extant transcript of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71. Despite the Sonnets’ obvious interest in reiteration, seventeenth-century manuscript witnesses of Shakespeare’s lyrics are rare.17 This fact, combined with Shakespeare’s outsized reputation, has tended to give the neighbouring contents of lyric collections like the Folger’s the status of ‘context’ for prized Shakespearean transcripts rather than that of interpretive partners in their own right.18 The result is an occlusion of the Sonnets’ radical un-exemplarity in handwritten form. In the case of Folger MS V.a.162, we have missed the way ‘A Sonnet’ upholds an ideal of friendship made explicit elsewhere in the manuscript – including in a poem transcribed on the opposite side of the very same leaf. What happens when we read this collection for its other poem to a male friend? To begin answering this question, let’s look at the neglected lyric in full (see Figure 8.1): To his deere frend Mr Stephen Jackson Brother for so I call thee; not because

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thou wast my fathers or my mothers sonn not consanguinity, nor wedlock lawes could such a kindred twixt us begunn we are not of one blood nor yet name neither nor sworne in brotherhood with alewifes quarts we never were so much as drunke together twas not such sleight acquitance join’d our hearts but a long knowledg with much triall did it (which are to chuse a frend the best directions) and though wee lov’d both well, at first both hid it till twas discovered by a like affections since which thou has overgone me far in shewing the office of a frend: do so and spare not (for heere’s a memorandum for what’s owing) but knowe for all thy kind respect I care not unless thou’lt shew how I may service do thee then I will sweare I am beholding to thee.19

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Frank where ‘A Sonnet’ is coy, abundant where its opposite neighbour is withholding, this poem to the now-forgotten Stephen Jackson nonetheless shares the Sonnets’ interest in a masculine bond so strong it exceeds ties of blood or obligation. Like Montaigne’s famous description, in ‘On Friendship’, of his desire for his own beloved ‘Stephen’, the lyric celebrates the miracle of ‘like affections’: a kind of emotional mirroring that renders the friend ‘another self ’.20 But there is a second, equally powerful form of replication at work in this poem. Searching for additional manuscript copies in the Folger’s Union First Line Index, I discovered that this lyric represents an almost word-forword transcription of a 1613 printed epigram, George Wither’s ‘To his deare friend Maister Thomas Cranley’.21 Whether copied directly from Wither’s Abuses, Stript and Whipt by the Folger compiler or, more likely, by an earlier collector whose lyrics were eventually passed on to (and perhaps renamed by) the creator(s) of Folger MS V.a.162, the poem to ‘Stephen Jackson’ reveals a wonderfully circuitous model of desire. For if Stephen Jackson is figured as his unnamed friend’s emotional double, it is in fact the love of an earlier duo – Wither and Cranley – that offers a pattern to succeeding men.

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Figure 8.1  ‘To his deere frend Mr Stephen Jackson’, from MS V.a.162, Folger Shakespeare Library. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Is it an accident of textual transmission that ‘To his deere frend Mr Stephen Jackson’ shares a writing surface with ‘A Sonnet’, a poem that expressly advocates the careless discarding of men’s names? Sonnet 71’s famous injunction – ‘if you read this line, remember not, / The hand that writ it’ (5–6) – is often understood as an ironic plea for recollection.22 Yet, the anonymity that Sonnet 71 professes to endorse feels more sincere when understood as a quality that

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will (paradoxically) ensure the poem’s survival.23 When the sonnet’s speaker instructs the ‘you’ who will ‘looke upon this verse’ (9) to ‘not so much as my poore name reherse’ (11), he anticipates a reader just like the Folger compiler: a reader, that is, attuned to the reiterative affordances of a lyric emptied of its historic personnel. The poem that will become ‘A Sonnet’ sustains itself precisely by making itself available to any friendship pair. What Shakespeare proffers is less a memorial than a recursive artefact, a ‘future copy’. As a conjoined duo, then, ‘A Sonnet’ and ‘To his deere frend Mr Stephen Jackson’ inscribe an affective relation that refuses to inhere in a single body or text. The intimacy that suffuses ‘A Sonnet’ is always already attaching to a new object of desire; what seems exemplary in Cranley proves to be a template, at a distance of some four decades and unknown numbers of transcripts, for Stephen Jackson. In fact, Stephen Jackson emerges from Folger MS V.a.162 as something of a collation. A few leaves further on, a second poem addressed ‘To his worthy frende Steph: Jackson’ turns out to be a close transcription of Samuel Pick’s ‘To his singular good friend Mr Thomas Mousley’.24 So forceful is friendship’s impulse to repeat that even ‘singularity’ is drawn into its ‘patterne’. Mousley’s ‘machless worth’ (7) becomes yet another reiterable trope as the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of ‘A Sonnet’ join Wither, Pick, Cranley, Mousley, Jackson and Jackson’s anonymous praiser to form a succession of friends who are, like ‘all those friends’ of Sonnet 31, interchangeable, their shared qualities impossible to locate in a single individual. Manuscript collections like Folger MS V.a.162 help us see how readily the reproducibility of the self that lies at the core of Renaissance friendship theory may be transformed into a new kind of duplication: the friend’s ability to take on the shapes of past friends. Shakespeare’s Sonnets have always known this. As if prophesying our vexed efforts to glimpse the original texts behind the copies we now possess, they present a subject whose ripeness for future impressions is undermined by the poems’ reluctance to assign him a singular origin. Consider Sonnet 3, a poem that is all about the pleasures of remediation. Tellingly, the poem begins with a glance in the mirror. ‘Looke in thy glasse and tell the face thou vewest, / Now is the time that face should forme an other’ (1–2), the poet commands, his couplet replete with the possibilities of serial replication.25 First, the addressee is compelled to repeat (‘tell’) (1) to himself the very words the poet has just inscribed (or perhaps

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reinscribed for circulation among private friends). But this injunction to ‘forme an other’ (2) has, of course, already been carried out in the very act of looking in the glass. In the context of this reflective surface, the poet’s subsequent insistence that the friend ‘renew’ (3) his features by carelessly choosing ‘some mother’ (4) seems like an unnecessary safeguard rather than an assurance of succession. For a poem so seemingly concerned with the Friend’s future, then, Sonnet 3 lingers curiously over his past. In line 10, the hypothetical mother of the Friend’s children abruptly gives way to a vision of the addressee’s own mother – a woman who may ‘[call] backe the lovely Aprill of her prime’ (10) precisely because the Friend is himself a ‘glasse’ (9) for his mother’s youth. The feminine rhymes of the poem’s opening couplet, already a marker of textual excess, prefigure this doubling on doubling by anticipating the mirror’s connection with the female body of the addressee’s parent. What seems like a paean to the Friend’s androgynous and ephemeral loveliness proves a veritable hall of mirrors, revealing not the fleetingness of the beloved’s beauty but his prior existence in several forms – including one gendered female. For in spite of its casual misogyny, Sonnet 3 gestures to women’s participation in the recursive ‘lines’ of early modern friendship.26 When Katherine Philips reworks John Donne’s friendship tropes into her epistles27 or, more obliquely, when Elizabeth Welden inscribes her name on the vellum cover of Folger MS V.a.162, these women literally write themselves into the affective histories to which lyric copies contribute. Sonnet 3, crucially, can only reproduce its subject because of a distant female-authored copy-text. The Friend carries with him the ‘character’ of that maternal source, vexing the Sonnets’ celebrated status as ‘man-to-man talk about making more men’.28 I hope that others will pursue Sonnet 3’s implications for the Renaissance ideal of friendship as an intimacy coded exclusively masculine.29 For now, though, I’ll note a potential complication in my reading of Sonnet 3. Namely, the proposed relation between the Friend and his mother jars with the nearexactness of new friend to old that I have been tracing in manuscript copies of copies like ‘To his deere frend Mr Stephen Jackson’. Can the perfect friend be said to emerge via the copy that is not quite a copy? If, as I’ve argued, the Friend is valued as a reiteration of past friends, what happens when he is not quite ‘all they’ (31.14), but partly something else? The rest of the chapter will

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take up these questions, beginning with a version of what is far-and-away Shakespeare’s most-repeated sonnet.

Your picture by reflex Spes Altera When fortie winteres shall beseige thy brow And trench deepe furrowes in that lovely feild Thy youthes faire liverie, soe accompted now Shall bee like rotten weeds of no worth held Then being asked where all thy beauty lyes, Wher’s all the Luster of thy youthfull dayes? To say within these hollow sunken Eyes, Were an old eaten trueth and worthless prayse. O how much better were thy beautyes use If thou couldst say this pretty Child of mine Saves my accompt, and makes my old excuse, Making his beauty by succession thine This were to bee new borne when thou art old, And see thy blood warme when thou feelst it Cold.30

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Thumbing through another mid-seventeenth-century manuscript of lyrics, this time at the London Metropolitan Archives, I stumbled across a poem that looks, at first glance, like a copy of Shakespeare’s haunting Sonnet 2 (see Figure 8.2). As one lingers over its neatly inscribed lines, however, a few oddities begin to emerge. First, there is the commonplace-y title, ‘Spes Altera’, likely a reference to the ‘second hope’ that is a child.31 Then there is line 2’s perplexing ‘trench deepe furrowes in that lovely feild’, a variation on Q’s ‘digge deep trenches in thy beauties field’.32 Likewise, in line 6, ‘Wher’s all the Luster of thy youthfull days’ sounds almost, but not quite, like Q’s ‘Where all the treasure of thy lusty daies’ (note lusty’s metamorphosis into ‘luster’). And in line 8, the phrase ‘old eaten trueth and worthless prayse’ distorts Q’s more familiar (and more rapacious) expression ‘all-eating shame, and thriftlesse praise’. How should we understand these variations, which appear (with further alterations besides) in nearly all of the dozen other extant witnesses to Sonnet 2?33 In his groundbreaking study of manuscript copies of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,

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Figure 8.2  Sonnet 2 titled ‘Spes altera’, in ACC/1360/528, London Metropolitan Archives. Reproduced with permission of the Carver Family.

Gary Taylor concludes that Shakespeare must have revised the poem, generating competing versions of Sonnet 2 whose ‘descendants’ we now reckon with today.34 Faced with inexactness, in other words, Taylor’s solution is to multiply the number of Shakespeare’s ‘originals’ to two. Yet, is it fair to say that a variant copy is no copy at all? What about Sonnet 71, a poem that advocates precisely for inexact reiteration by urging its ‘you’ to leave out authorial ascription?35 If we may call ‘A Sonnet’ a copy of Sonnet 71 (just as Shakespeare refers to both

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children and lyrics – creations that bear an imperfect resemblance to a loved youth – as ‘copies’ of his Friend), where do we draw the line between faithful reiterations and those duplicates so divergent as to demand a new point of origin?36 What Taylor’s equation leaves out, I want to suggest, is love. Generating a series of stemmata whose straight lines direct us seamlessly from an origin – A – to a later iteration – B – Taylor leaves little room for the shaping force of the emotionally charged processes by which poems like Shakespeare’s Sonnets were traded and transcribed.37 For the discrete exchanges embodied in each extant iteration of a poem signal more than mindless replication. Rather, they point to the ways in which manuscript compilation also represented conversation. As friends shared poems, they shuttled between them a series of images and tropes that could be easily adapted to suit a group’s or individual’s preferred style – of lyric, but also of desire.38 In the process, they offered a notion of the ‘copy’ defined less by the closeness with which a poem matched an ‘original’ than by its capacity to carry in its bones a familiar pattern – one that might be refashioned, alluded to, revised. Fittingly, such a model is in keeping with the ambiguity of the Latin title ‘Spes altera’, whose ‘hope’ is both ‘another’ and, inevitably, ‘other’. It is with this fluid and social sense of reiteration in mind that I would like to explore another poem transcribed into the same manuscript at the London Metropolitan Archives: a friendship lyric attributed to the Oxford poet John Deane. This lyric has never been read alongside the Sonnets (or even ‘read’ in the critical sense). Yet, in its preference for embedding and echoing material from the 1609 quarto whose Sonnet 2 both is and is not ‘Spes Altera’, the poem may conceivably be termed a ‘copy’ of Shakespeare’s male-addressed sonnets. Particularly compelling for my purposes is the poem’s interest in the reiterative potential of its addressee. In its myriad depictions of reproduction with a difference – images that mirror its own processes of creation – Deane’s lyric to a former New College, Oxford, classmate offers valuable evidence that early modern readers were attuned to, and sought to emulate, the Sonnets’ love of its Friend as a dynamic copy:39 To Mr. Edward Fowkes As from the bottome of a troubled well Those little speres of wind and water swell,

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So from the depth of my unquiet thought. You may suppose these ayerie bubbles brought. And as these glassie orbes wherein you place Your eye, shew pretty babies of your face, So may these too deliver to your hart Your picture by reflex and life impart From that in mine, for my hart’s but the frame That holds your picture and adores the same. Nor yet is this Idolatry a sinne For god himselfe our soules doe worship in The picture of his attributes, and may Honour his Creatures in the same, since they His Copies are, and sure there are but few That come so neere th’originall as you But this as all men ought, so any may Honour gods immage set in liveing Clay But as you have prerogative, to bee, So have I to love more. And now may see A picture lookes alike on all. and yet Pigmalions love did on his mold begett To his conceipt a breath therein; much more When my love finds an answer. I am sure Since you are picture of a deitye To all, you are a dyete to mee. And as to god all payment of our debt Is but acknowledging how it is greate, So since receipts, expences doe surmount, I must make payment of mine with accompt. Doe you but beare with him that cannot paye The interest shall increase t’another daye.40

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Glimpses of Shakespeare’s Sonnets surface and resurface in a poem that is all about replication. The opening lines offer a complex interplay of figures in which ‘these ayerie bubbles’ (4) and ‘these too’ (7) stand in for the lines of the poem itself, ‘deliver[ed]’ (7) into the hands of its addressee as well as, more metaphorically, into this reader’s heart. Deane compares the poem to ‘glassie orbes’ (5) which offer a whimsical ‘reflex’ (8) (reflection) of the viewer by turning his face into ‘pretty babies’ (6).41 Yet the orbs seem to reflect, too, a

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‘picture’ (10) of Fowkes himself, one that resides in the ‘frame’ of its author’s ‘hart’ (9). What this poem affords its addressee is less a mirror than a series of multiplied images deriving not only from ‘life’ (8) but from a pre-existing copy in Deane’s possession. If Deane’s bubbles, orbs and framed reflections bend and refract their addressee into an altered, if recognizable shape, so too is Deane’s depiction of friendship a ‘reflex’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24. In this sonnet, the poet describes his ‘eye’ as a ‘painter’ who ‘hath steeld / Thy beauties forme in table of my heart’ (1–2), his own body serving as ‘the frame wherein ti’s held’ (3).42 The point of this metaphor, which seems to represent, in wildly circuitous fashion, the stereotypical experience of gazing into a beloved’s eyes, is that his Friend’s ‘true Image’ (6) may be found not in the world for all to see but in his own ‘bosomes shop’ (7).43 Yet, like the ‘mirroring’ Sonnet 3 (another model for Deane), Sonnet 24 traffics in queered reproductions. The Friend’s picture, installed in the poet’s ‘brest’ (11), can only be accessed via the poet’s reflection in the eyes of the Friend himself. To see oneself pictured in someone’s eyes was to ‘look babies’ in their eyes.44 Shakespeare’s unvocalized joke about reproduction finds expression in Deane’s phrase ‘shew pretty babies of your face’ (6) – an instance of an echo without an original sound. Variant reiterations of Fowkes – and of Shakespeare’s Sonnets – multiply as Deane defends his image-worship or ‘Idolatry’ (11) of his addressee in a style reminiscent of Sonnet 105 (‘Let not my love be cal’d Idolatrie’) (1).45 Deane diverges from his model’s argument by cannily proposing that one may lawfully worship God in ‘His Copies’ (15), or the creatures made in his ‘immage’ (18). Fowkes is thus flatteringly presented as a ‘picture’ (25) or reproduction so skillful that it ‘comes … neere th’originall’ (16): that is, God. Yet, it is not God’s love but rather Deane’s that gives this image, like a miraculously animated icon, the power to respond. Imagining himself as the mythical sculptor Pygmalion, Deane suggests that the intensity of his love will cause his lyric iteration of his friend to out-do Pygmalion’s first ‘conceipt’ (23), an ivory girl, which merely ‘breath[ed]’ (23) in response to the artist’s desire. In his reflection of Fowkes, by contrast, Deane’s ‘love’ will ‘[find] an answer’ (24) in an equal upwelling of desire. What Deane’s lyric undertakes, I am suggesting, is a refashioning of Shakespeare’s addressee in Edward Fowkes’s image. Refracting the Sonnets’

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tropes of imperfect replication among a Caroline coterie of universityeducated friends, this poem offers a reincarnation of the Friend whom we, like Shakespeare’s speaker, ‘by lacking have supposed dead’ (31.2). Yet, to see Fowkes as a substitute for the Friend is to misread the reiterative relation Deane’s poem inscribes. For in contrast to the human or lyric reproductions described in the Sonnets, the copy that is Deane’s vision of Fowkes is not designed to outlast his poetic model. Instead, like the very lyric transcripts that supply them – copies that witness verses at several removes – Deane’s and Shakespeare’s Friends co-exist, becoming successive iterations within a living ‘patterne’ that stretches back (the Sonnets propose) to ‘some antique booke’ (59.7).46 To read Shakespeare’s Friend as valuable printer’s ‘coppy’ is thus to glimpse only part of his appeal. Instead, this chapter has argued, there is little that is ‘original’ about Shakespeare’s addressee. Locating the Friend within a manuscript tradition that privileges reinscription over source – even as it risks altering or distorting that source’s precise form – we find in his myriad reiterations not a wish for a more lasting duplicate but rather a profound act of love. The Friend, then, is most himself – most a friend – as a copy of ‘all those friends’ (31.4): past ‘lovers’, present sharers of lyrics and future addressees whose names have not yet been written.

Notes 1 William Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets. Never before Imprinted (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609), sigs. C1r and G1r. Subsequent quotations from Shakespeare will be taken from this edition unless otherwise noted. I silently modernize i/j and u/v and provide parenthetical references to sonnet and line numbers (where applicable) for ease of reference. 2 Aaron Kunin, ‘Shakespeare’s Preservation Fantasy’, PMLA 124, no. 1 (2009): 96. On the conflation of printed impressions and children as future-proof ‘copies’, see Margreta de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes’, in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 34–5. 3 On human generation as an explicit metaphor for the printed copy, see Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Margaret Cavendish, Scribe’, GLQ 10, no. 3 (2004): 444.

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  4 On the term miscellany’s imperfect relation to the ‘multiple, overlapping agencies’ that gathered, copied and produced early modern lyric texts, see Megan Heffernan’s chapter ‘Miscellany / sequence’ in this volume.   5 The successive nature of manuscript lyrics is described by Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 80 and 346; and Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 135–59.   6 Obviously, not all printed texts derive from authorial ‘originals’. In making a material distinction between manuscript copies and printer’s copy, I highlight the fundamental difference between the single shared source that lies behind multiple printed impressions and the numerous copy-texts behind a single lyric transcript.   7 Shakespeare, Sonnets, sig. B3r.   8 Melissa E. Sanchez, Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 82–3.   9 Shakespeare, Sonnets, sig. B1r. 10 Shakespeare, Sonnets, sigs. C3r–v (31). 11 On this sonnet as a masterful rejection of the dyad, see John S. Garrison, Friendship and Queer Theory in the Renaissance: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern England (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 70. 12 Shakespeare, Sonnets, sig. D4r. 13 Ibid., sig. B4v. 14 See Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), xi, on the way queer temporalities like those of Sonnet 31 ‘fold subjects into structures of belonging and duration’. 15 William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (London: William Jaggard, Edward Blount, et al., 1623) is subtitled ‘Published according to the True Originall Copies’. 16 Folger MS V.a.162, fol. 12v. In my manuscript transcriptions, I silently modernize i/j and u/v. 17 Peter Beale, Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, https://celm-ms.org.uk/ authors/shakespearewilliam.html (accessed 17 September 2020). Only twentyfive complete or nearly complete transcripts of sonnets by Shakespeare are known.

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18 See Marotti, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Malden; Oxford; Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell, 2007), 195; and Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2003), 174–5. 19 Folger MS V.a.162, fol. 12r. 20 Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 32–6; and Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amitie: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2–4. On sworn brotherhoods, see Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), ch. 1. 21 George Wither, Abuses Stript, and Whipt (London: Francis Burton, 1613), sigs. X6v–X7r. See the Union First Line Index of English Verse, http://firstlines.folger. edu (accessed 19 March 2020). 22 Shakespeare, Sonnets, sig. E3v. 23 Marcy North, ‘Rehearsing the Absent Name: Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets Through Anonymity’, in The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert J. Griffin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 30–1. 24 Folger MS V.a.162, fol. 21v; Samuel Pick, Festum Voluptatis, or The Banquet of Pleasure (London: Bernard Langford, 1639), sigs. Bv–B2r. 25 Shakespeare, Sonnets, sig. B1v. 26 On women’s contested place in histories of friendship, see Penelope Anderson, ‘The Absent Female Friend: Recent Studies in Early Modern Women’s Friendship’, Literature Compass 7, no. 4 (2010): 243–53. 27 See Cedric Brown, Friendship and its Discourses in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 209. 28 Masten, Textual Intercourse, 45. 29 Sanchez reminds us that friendship was, in fact, ‘a bond between specifically white men’. See Sanchez, Queer Faith, 71. 30 London Metropolitan Archives MS ACC/1360/528, fol. 28v. 31 Bruce Smith, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the History of Sexuality’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Malden; Oxford; Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell, 2002), 10. 32 Shakespeare, Sonnets, sig. B1r.

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33 Beale, CELM. 34 Gary Taylor, ‘Some Manuscripts of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 68, no. 1 (1985): 239–40. On the debate around the ‘variant’ Sonnet 2’s provenance, see Jane Kingsley-Smith, The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 58–9. 35 North, ‘Absent Name’, 28–9. 36 Matthew Zarnowiecki argues that Shakespeare’s Sonnets expressly desire mutation. See Fair Copies: Reproducing the English Lyric from Tottel to Shakespeare (Toronto; Buffalo; London: Toronto University Press, 2014), 130–48. 37 See Faith D. Acker, First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1590–1790 (New York and London: Routledge, 2021), 54; and Smith, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, 7. 38 On ‘group style’, see Jeff Dolven, Senses of Style: Poetry Before Interpretation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 100. 39 Alumni Oxonienses 1500–1714, ed. Joseph Foster, 389; 523. Available online: www.british-history.ac.uk/alumni-oxon/1500-1714 (accessed 1 April 2020). 40 LMA MS ACC/1360/528, fols. 43r–v. The poem concludes with a postscript greeting other New College classmates, suggesting it originated as a letter-poem to Fowkes. 41 ‘reflex, n.’ OED Online, Oxford University Press (March 2021), www.oed.com/ view/Entry/160937 (accessed 21 April 2021). 42 Shakespeare, Sonnets, sig. C1v. 43 Ibid., sig. C2r. 44 ‘baby, n. and adj.’ OED Online, Oxford University Press (March 2021), www.oed. com/view/Entry/14250 (accessed 21 April 2021). 45 Shakespeare, Sonnets, sig. G2v. 46 Ibid., sig. E1r.

Bibliography Acker, Faith D. First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1590–1790. New York and London: Routledge, 2020. Anderson, Penelope. ‘The Absent Female Friend: Recent Studies in Early Modern Women’s Friendship’. Literature Compass 7, no. 4 (2010): 243–53. Beale, Peter, ed. Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts. Available online: https:// celm-ms.org.uk (accessed 17 September 2020). Bray, Alan. The Friend. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2003.

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Brown, Cedric. Friendship and its Discourses in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. de Grazia, Margreta. ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes’. In Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, edited by Douglas A. Brooks, 29–58. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005. Dolven, Jeff. Senses of Style: Poetry Before Interpretation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.162. Foster, Joseph, ed. Alumni Oxonienses 1500–1714. Available online: www.britishhistory.ac.uk/alumni-oxon/1500–1714 (accessed 1 April 2020). Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Garrison, John S. Friendship and Queer Theory in the Renaissance: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern England. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. Goldberg, Jonathan. ‘Margaret Cavendish, Scribe’. GLQ 10, no. 3 (2004): 433–52. Kingsley-Smith, Jane. The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Kunin, Aaron. ‘Shakespeare’s Preservation Fantasy’. PMLA 124, no. 1 (2009): 92–106. London Metropolitan Archives, MS ACC/1360/528. Love, Harold. The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth Century England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Marotti, Arthur. Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Marotti, Arthur. ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England’. In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited by Michael Schoenfeldt, 185–203. Malden; Oxford; Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell, 2007. Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. North, Marcy. ‘Rehearsing the Absent Name: Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets Through Anonymity’. In The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, edited by Robert J. Griffin, 19–38. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pick, Samuel. Festum Voluptatis, or The Banquet of Pleasure. London: Bernard Langford, 1639. Roberts, Sasha. Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2003. Sanchez, Melissa E. Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition. New York: New York University Press, 2019.

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Shakespeare, William. Shake-speares Sonnets. London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609. Shakespeare, William. Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. London: William Jaggard, Edward Blount et al., 1623. Shannon, Laurie. Sovereign Amitie: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Smith, Bruce. ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the History of Sexuality’. In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 4–26. Malden; Oxford; Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell, 2002. Taylor, Gary. ‘Some Manuscripts of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 68, no. 1 (1985): 210–46. Wither, George. Abuses Stript, and Whipt. London: Francis Burton, 1613. Zarnowiecki, Matthew. Fair Copies: Reproducing the English Lyric from Tottel to Shakespeare. Toronto; Buffalo; London: Toronto University Press, 2014.

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Source / adaptation Sujata Iyengar

This chapter investigates the collaborative book by Picasso and his erstwhile friend, the Surrealist poet and communist Louis Aragon, Shakespeare-AragonPicasso (1965), as a livre d’artiste, or artists’ book. More specifically, I consider this codex to be what book historian and curator Yves Peyré has termed a livre de dialogue, a conversation in book form between two artists working in different media.1 Rather than discuss the relationship between Aragon’s short story and Picasso’s lithographs, however, I will use close analysis of the material form of this book to consider Shakespearean artists’ books as adaptations, even as I demonstrate that taking artists’ books seriously as aesthetic and critical interventions into Shakespearean hermeneutics allows critics, readers, viewers and creators to break down the assumed binary of source / adaptation. Informed by recent conversations within Shakespeare and adaptation studies, I consider reading as an embodied, distributed and creative process. I investigate Picasso and Aragon’s volume in light of the way this codex highlights particular features or metaphors of bookness: the book’s heft and weight and sheer physical presence; its careful acknowledgement of the atelier, the printer, the binder; Picasso’s own attention to the ouvriers or workers in the printshop; and the codex’s ability to instigate a dialogue or collaborative performance among artist, reader, viewer, artisan and publisher.2 I conclude that analysing artists’ books in this manner can allow Shakespeareans to acknowledge more fully both the role of a reading ‘assemblage’ – a kind of distributed reader-function – to accompany the familiar category of Foucault’s author-function. Just as we cannot helpfully distinguish between Shakespeare as an ontological or essential entity and ‘Shakespeare’ as a set of culturally mediated texts, performances, folklore and historical records (in other words,

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as an author-function), so we cannot usefully distinguish among putative source, so-called adaptation and multiple receptions. The study of Shakespeare and adaptation has long left behind what critics call ‘the fidelity discourse’, which ‘prioritized the analysis of works in relation to an imagined, static Shakespearean text or to an idealized Platonic performance’.3 Rather, critics such as Linda Hutcheon, Marianne Novy, Margaret Jane Kidnie, Julie Sanders, Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, Alexa Alice Joubin, Ayanna Thompson, Judy Celine Ick, Poonam Trivedi and Paromita Chakravarti, Douglas Lanier, Stephen O’Neill and Joyce Green MacDonald have redefined Shakespearean adaptation or appropriation as ‘the deployment of Shakespeare in the service of creativity, originality, historicity, media innovation, formal experimentation, and cultural authority (for both conservative and progressive ends)’, without the need to remain ‘faithful’ to a historically prior version of Shakespearean text or performance.4 I am particularly invested in exploring new avenues laid out in recent work by Louise Geddes and Valerie Fazel, the late Christy Desmet, Laurie Osborne, Jason Demeter and Miriam Jacobson, on, respectively, the late-capitalist breakdown among ‘consumer’, ‘user’ and ‘creator’; object-oriented ontologies and vital materialisms that investigate the ways Shakespearean objects seem to take on lives of their own; transmedia Shakespeare and visual cultures; authors’ changing engagement with Shakespeare across genre and time; and the collaborative creative process of a book design team.5 Such scrutiny suggests that a text’s status as adaptation emerges through the reader-function, a dialogue or collaborative performance among reader, viewer, artisan and publisher, and through what Claes Schaar has termed ‘infracontexts’, structural analogies that readers and viewers enrich with their own lived historical and literary experiences – and, I suggest, with each experience of ‘bookness’, each engagement with this Shakespearean object (in this case, a codex) in space.6

Bookness and the livre d’artiste Bookness refers to the quiddity or essence of books as material objects that engage phenomenologically, in a sensory way, with human beings. I derive what I call the qualities of bookness from the scholarship and reflection of

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Garrett Stewart, Alberto Manguel, Robert Darnton, Leah Price, Maryanne Wolf, Richard Lanham and others working within book history, textual studies and literacy, including theorists of the digital medium such as Janet Murray and Sherry Turkle.7 The qualities of bookness include integrity, whether conceptual or physical; navigability; visual impression; handiness; hardiness; crispness; authority; privacy; and craftedness. In other words, a codex as most of us have imagined it for four hundred years has many of the following attributes: it is complete, sequential yet episodic (a series of chapters or essays or scenes broken into discrete units such as pages), portable, lasting, clear, powerful, desirable, immersive and made gorgeous by human hands. Where some art historians locate the artistry of a book in the heart and mind of the artist – within its conception – I locate the quiddity of bookness and of Shakespearean artists’ books in a collaborative performance that can take place both during the crafting of the book through artisanal processes and during the experiential encounter with the book by a reader. At the same time, I am taking advantage of work already conducted by book artists and scholars of modernism, particularly by those who have produced and studied livres d’artiste, or artists’ books. Johanna Drucker distinguishes as artists’ books artworks in which the artist’s intent is to experiment with the very form of the codex or book-form, rather than merely to reproduce his or her art. (In this chapter I will be using the word ‘text’ to evoke the entire material form of the book, whatever form that book takes, whether codex, scroll, single leaves in a box, sculptured paper or more radical forms.) Drucker excludes from the category of ‘artists’ books’ Futurist or high Modernist ‘little magazines’ or books that merely experiment with layout or typography unless they can also be shown to experiment with the codex form and to ‘interrogate’ what makes a book a book.8 Anne Moeglin-Delcroix similarly defines the artists’ book as ‘a book that is a work in itself and not just a means of transmitting a pre-existing work’, although Moeglin-Delcroix requires such a work to remain recognizably a book and to follow bookish or book-like patterns of sequence and organization: ‘a set of pages, a priori identical, and arranged in a certain order’.9 Moreover, she adds, ‘the book form is something other than a convenient receptacle, a container indifferent to the content’; the book form must ‘establish … a mutual dependence between the structure of the book and the subject of the book’.10

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Elza Adamowicz offers a helpful taxonomy of the French phrase livre d’artiste (literally, ‘artist’s book’), which can encompass: the livre illustré or lavish, illustrated book, most closely associated with the nineteenth century, in which the text takes precedence over the images; the livre du peintre in which the reverse is true and the text, she suggests, is more akin to a ‘libretto’; following Peyré, the livre de dialogue, in which visual art and text engage in a conversation and mutually inform each other’s expression; the artists’ book or so-called ‘democratic multiple’ (the inexpensive, revolutionary, self-published samizdat or ’zines of the 1960s and the innovative, mass-market printings of book artists in the 1970s); and the livre-objet or book object, the sculptural book, which Adamowicz calls the ‘limit case’ for the book or codex.11 At the same time, Drucker and Clive Philpott dismiss the fine press edition or luxury edition as, in Philpott’s phrase, ‘intentionally scarce commodities that deny the potential of the printing process, and serve to elicit high prices from individual and institutional collectors’, and Philpott and Moeglin-Delcroix express skepticism over the current vogue for unique ‘sculptural books’ or one-of-akind books for similar reasons.12 Like Drucker, Philpott and Moeglin-Delcroix prefer the ‘democratic multiple’ popularized by the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and consider book art as potentially part of the historical process through which art becomes accessible to more people (from the wall-paintings in a Roman villa or an English country house to the galleries in a museum to Walter Benjamin’s ‘mechanical reproduction’ for plebeian purchase to André Malraux’s imagined ‘museum without walls’). Scholarship surrounding artists’ books (for example, in the Journal of Artists’ Books) questions whether to exclude fine press editions, digital objects and commercial bookworks from consideration as artists’ books because they seem to originate from a reproductive, rather than a creative, impulse. W. J. Strachan, for example, strictly defines the livre d’artiste as having original visual artwork from an artist who collaborates with publisher, author and specialized printer; a limited print run; a superior paper; and release unbound, to allow collectors or artists to individualize their bindings.13 Philpott argued in 2012 that ‘artist [sic] books, as opposed to “digital books,” are understood to be properly experienced by the hand as well as the eye’, and that digital works can offer only ‘a limited awareness’, a ‘travesty’ or surrogate for the artists’ book proper.14 For me, an artists’ book is a book made by an artist that pays

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attention to books as material objects with specific affordances or physical characteristics that interact with human readers, bodies and senses, as well as with the text that makes up what we usually call the content of the book. By this logic, digital objects may potentially evoke a kinesthetic or haptic aspect of bookness and the space, in three dimensions, of the screen. Artists’ books engage with the capabilities of the form and the space that that form occupies in the world, a form that the electronic publishing revolution, and diminished print runs, have forced even those of us who identify as book readers rather than book artists to ponder. Moreover, ‘in an era of electronic textuality … even mass-produced commodities may accrue … what Walter Benjamin famously called “aura,” the unique and precious glow of rarity, and become Art’.15 Artisanal processes may, moreover, occur at any point during a codex’s lifespan. Thus I include T. J. Cobden-Sanderson’s and Emery Walker’s Doves Press Hamlet, conceived as a ‘Book Beautiful’ or ‘Ideal Book’; Margot Ecke’s The Tragedy of Ophelia, a unique altered book rebound and reimagined from a hardcover middle-brow Shakespeare edition from the 1950s; the votive candle-holder decorated with pages from an old Folger edition of Romeo and Juliet and sold on the online craft marketplace etsy.com; and digital objects we have yet to encounter and that convert text into code as crafted, collaborative, performative, Shakespearean artists’ books.16

Gravediggers in stone Accounts of the genesis of Picasso’s Shakespeare drawings, and their ultimate placement in the Shakespeare-Aragon-Picasso volume, vary. Popular websites suggest that Picasso undertook the sketches at the urging of the collector Roland Penrose, but I have (as yet) been unable to confirm these anecdotes, nor the claim that Picasso dashed off the drawings on a napkin, that each sketch was completed in less than five minutes, and other lore. The artist’s friend and trusted biographer, John Richardson, writes, ‘Louis Aragon and Pierre Daix had arranged for [Picasso] to celebrate the bard’s four-hundredth anniversary by doing portrait drawings of him for the Communist journal Lettres Français.’17 Memory Holloway further describes a series of ‘drawings … in April 1964 to commemorate the playwright’s 400th birthday[, which] showed a balding

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Shakespeare with Hamlet and a skull in the company of the grave diggers’ and recounts that Picasso later drew additional portraits of Shakespeare to accompany ‘a special book edition of the drawings along with a text by Louis Aragon at a reduced price to subscribers of [Lettres Françaises. … ] Picasso completed the volume with a special lithograph of Shakespeare and a cover on which he wrote “Shakespeare, Aragon and Picasso”’.18 Miguel Orocozo adds that the run included 125 editions de luxe and 25 additional hors commerce copies that included ‘an original lithograph for the frontispiece … made on a report paper that Picasso dates and signs, passed to stone … printed on a large Arches vellum paper (48.5 by 32.6 cm) despite the fact that the drawing only occupies a quarter of it’.19 Since I will be considering the processual qualities of lithography extensively, let me quote this summary of the procedure, from Richard Benson’s encyclopedic The Printed Picture: Lithographic printing is done from the smooth surface of a piece of limestone. The artist draws directly on the stone, using a crayon … of beeswax and dark pigment (to give visibility). After the drawing is done the stone is treated with a weak acid called ‘etch’ … [that] doesn’t alter the height of the [stone] surface [unlike in intaglio printing] but rather induces a chemical change, leaving the surface – where it isn’t covered by the crayon – in a state that will hold a continuous film of water when wetted. The crayon is then removed with a solvent, but the limestone under the drawing retains the crayon’s ability to repel water … Once etched and cleaned, the stone is carefully worked up with ink and water to stabilize the printing image. Repelled in its turn by the damp areas of the stone, the ink adheres only to the area of the drawing. Repeated applications of ink and water allow the stone surface to print many copies.20

The colophon on my French copy indicates that 2,000 copies of the limited, commercial edition were printed (presumably in addition to the 150 luxury editions with the signed and dated frontispiece). The work was undertaken under the direction of Charles Feld and completed in the third trimester of 1965 at the Paris Union presses. The lithographic reproductions of Picasso’s drawings were pulled in the workshop of the Imprimerie Moderne du Lion, and the original lithography was executed by the Mourlot Brothers, Bernard and Fernand, to whose account of Picasso in the workshop we will return. The

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binding is by Bonnet-Madin. My copy, like all the others, has been inscribed on the cover in thick black ink ‘SHAKESPEARE / [device] / Aragon / PiCASSO’. Booksellers’ catalogues and contemporary accounts contradict each other, with some sources attributing all three scrawls to Picasso, others maintaining that Picasso and Aragon each signed his own name. My edition is number 411. It was not very expensive, and in fact the American edition, published in New York by Harry Abrams in association with Cercle d’Art, was limited to a thousand copies and currently costs about twice what the French is worth. My copy was in perfect condition when I obtained it, but since I have not been using it on a cradle – and the book is large, unwieldy and heavy (an ‘elephant folio’, 12.5 by 19 inches) – the binding is starting to come apart. The codex in its entirety comprises an introduction, ‘Shakespeare, Hamlet, and Us’, by Louis Aragon, Aragon’s short story ‘Murmure’, and (inserted within the story, in a bright red slipcover bound as an insert with the rest of the text and identified in black marker ‘X-Portraits/Shakespeare’) Picasso’s lithographs. Aragon’s ‘Murmure’ (‘Murmur’ in Frechtman’s English translation) is both the name of the woman whose presence the writer is trying to summon to mind and the murmur of the sea, the forest, wartime and memory itself. The stream-of-consciousness dream-narrative circles in a quasi-Proustian way around the lost places of the writer’s youth – the Odéon cinema, the city of Vienna – and turns to these locations, and more specific, domestic spaces such as the bedroom, the closet, the clothes hanging up in the closet and so on to trigger memories of specific details and to build an airy memory-palace within the edifice of the story and of the book. The refrain, ‘All Denmark surrounds us’, like the motif of the Odéon cinema or the streets of Vienna, appears and reappears. Real life, remembered life and fictional life coalesce in this imaginary Denmark where Hamlet is both youthful and ‘fat, and scant of breath’ and where the historical King Christian and Queen Caroline Matilda rather than Shakespeare’s royal family inhabit Elsinore. Picasso’s drawings interrupt Aragon’s story at a moment of pain-filled reflection, the agony, even, of ‘all who shudder at the border of dream and waking’, with ‘all the world’s pain … be it of the flesh or of the mind’.21 The lithographs are deceptively simple, witty and repetitive, generated from drawings made with ‘India ink on paper’, according to Richardson, or ‘pencil and ink on paper’, according to Orocozo. The Hamlet sequence is framed by

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portraits of Shakespeare (17.4.64.1) and then a group of three (18.4.64.1–3), that are ‘signed’ with Picasso’s signature stamp (see Figure 9.1). Each image is matched on its facing page by rows of salmon-pink horizontal graphic designs – scribbles, doodles, graffiti, scratches, scrawls – that hint at signature or legibility without ever being legible. The sequence faces Hamlet against a large, thoughtful and occasionally angry-looking Shakespeare. Hamlet’s jaunty fencing foil and feathered hat recall the late Picasso’s Mosqueteros (‘musketeer series’) and the ‘musketeer’ of late Picasso mythology, an assertive, virile, swashbuckling character that Picasso claimed to have originally derived from Shakespeare, drawn to the latter’s ‘love of magic and metaphorphosis, … bawdiness, baroque wit, and genius at conjuring visions out of words’.22 This Hamlet-musketeer gazes at Yorick’s skull, first looking down pensively at the gravediggers at his feet (17.4.64.2), then directly at the skull (17.4.64.3), as the gravediggers watch him, then holding the skull at arm’s length and addressing it, while the gravediggers continue digging Ophelia’s grave. The gravediggers

Figure 9.1  Shakespeare-Aragon-Picasso, lithograph numbered 17.4.64.VII © 2020 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image taken by the author.

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descend into the grave, abandoning Hamlet temporarily, then surface again. In 17.4.64.6, the gravediggers bear a shovel and stand in the grave, but one of them bears a tool that looks like death’s scythe; their faces visually echo the skull that Hamlet holds. The dashed-off quality, the lightness, the repetition, make the images humorous, whimsical, and yet over all gazes Shakespeare, mysteriously, sometimes threateningly. The Picasso Shakespeare drawings have long been considered part of the thrown-off detritus of a long and by-then-decadent career – occasional, frivolous, commercial, even. Richardson dismisses them in a biting paragraph as ‘fatuous texts, and scrappy illustrations … made to seem the more scrappy by being mounted in a separate scarlet portfolio’ and the book itself as a ‘portentous collaboration’ with a ‘feeble story’ and a ‘Shakespeare [who] could just as well be Montaigne – or Bacon’.23 And yet over the past twenty-five years, critics (and the art market) have begun to appreciate Picasso’s late work. David Hockney, an admirer of the late work long before it became fashionable, comments about Picasso’s experiments with lithography, engraving and modern print techniques that the artist regarded the growing dominance of some of these techniques and their political uses – notably photography  – sceptically, as an art that seemed perniciously documentary, fore-closed. Hockney recounts that Picasso countered this authoritarian tendency in massproduced art by turning for inspiration to non-Western printing techniques and non-codex ‘books’, such as Chinese woodblock printing on scrolls. Scrolls, suggested Picasso, could make viewers ‘see another way’, just as Cubism had done, because they invite a reader to wait to unroll the scroll in order for the entire image to appear thereby incorporating the passage of time into the experience of visual art.24 This interest in creating art in three or even four dimensions – length, breadth and space/time – is what, I would suggest, makes the book more than a mere container for Picasso’s art; the book is an integral part of the artwork itself (or makes the art more than a mere ornament to the codex and into an integral part of the bookwork itself). Picasso’s later-life interest in time and mortality dovetails with the artist’s well-documented lithographic ‘experiment[s] … with crayon, pen, wash, transfer paper and paper cut-outs’ so that he could use this sensitive form to create, retain and reproduce ‘multiple states’ of a printing.25 These many impressions, argues Irving Lavin, ‘tell a story – an epic narrative that recounts

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the life history of a work of art’.26 The lithographs act – almost as a stop-motion animation – to create in Picasso’s drawings from the ‘gravediggers’ scene’ in Hamlet a sense of both the urgency of time’s passing and its imperceptibility, even as they wittily and whimsically question Shakespeare’s supposed imperviousness to time. In her important feminist analysis, Karen Kleinfelder concurs that the late Picasso is concerned, even obsessed, with the passage of time and with the attempt to show artmaking as a process in order to highlight art’s creation over time, a pointed contrast, we might add, to the implied temporal fixity of the terms ‘source’ and ‘adaptation’.27 Kleinfelder suggests that Picasso breaks away from the authoritarian ‘gaze’ attributed to Western art by Norman Bryson and that implies a fixed viewpoint and a single source of authority. Where, however, Bryson locates the ‘glance’, a decentred, non-linear mode of looking, within non-Western art (much as Picasso commented on Chinese woodblock printing), Kleinfelder observes that there is no need to resort to Orientalizing tropes in order to find multiple or conflicting sources of authority in visual art, even in the Western tradition. Such an oscillation between ‘gaze’ and ‘glance’, stasis and motion, exists, she argues, even in classical Western art such as Titian’s Rape of Europa (1562), ‘in which all form is in flux and traces of the brush are not masked’.28 Kleinfelder suggests that Picasso’s emphasis on series of drawings, etchings, engravings, lithographs and on particular subjects (notably Artist and Model, though we can also include Suite 347 and even the mid-period Bull series) magnify process over product and thus glance over gaze: When focus shifts from product to process, we no longer can gain perspective by fixing our gaze on a vanishing point embedded in the fictive depths of the imagery; the vanishing point is instead perpetually projected forward, perhaps in the next image, or the next after that. Since the vanishing point is always elsewhere, there can be no pausing in the viewing process.29

The form of the foliated codex, I suggest, permits a similar process of viewing that comprises glances punctuated by gazes as we pause over particular images. The incremental differences from one drawing to the next, as Hamlet looks at Yorick, Shakespeare looks at Hamlet, and the gravediggers pop up and down with the motion of their shovels, encourage a reader to move backwards and

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forwards through time and space (by turning pages and moving forwards or backwards within the codex). ‘How much of Shakespeare Picasso had read is unclear, but he had certainly seen productions of the plays’, writes Richardson.30 If so, Shakespeare, then, informs Picasso’s drawings much more in the sense of Schaar’s ‘infracontext’ or what we might call colloquially ‘inspiration’ than as a ‘source’ that he ‘adapts’. The oscillation between glance and gaze, I suggest, elicits a reading that is a performance and a book that is a theatre; re-creates the memory of historic or real stage performances of the gravediggers’ scene; and yet, paradoxically, uses the static structure and heavy weight of the elephant folio to freeze the timedependent and ephemeral performances of both reading and watching. Kleinfelder similarly re-evaluates Picasso’s later work not only in terms of technique but also in terms of its content, suggesting the importance of its ongoing, obsessive theme of Artist and Model – the former, usually male and clothed, ‘personif[ying] culture through his activity of making art’, and the latter, usually female and nude, ‘cast as the very embodiment of nature’.31 The artist himself as pictured by Picasso oscillates between the pretentious commercial artist pictured (with palette, brush and live model, none of which Picasso regularly used) and the ‘Little Man’ of Picasso’s personal mythopoeia, the plaintive reincarnation, generation after generation, of the painter driven to make art compulsively, for its own sake. ‘What is being represented is the activity of representing’, experiments for which, Kleinfelder argues, prints, etchings and engravings proved crucial to Picasso’s artistic development.32 Gertrude Stein comments on Picasso’s not using a model in his early career, which is what, she suggests, allowed him to move into pure abstraction.33 Kleinfelder characterizes his return to a model later in life as the movement from reflection to self-reflexivity and of the art’s and the artist’s ongoing oscillation between ‘percept and concept’ (which I think she’s using in Gilles Deleuze’s sense rather than William James’s). For William James, concept is roughly equal to idea, imagination, abstraction, and percept is roughly equivalent to sense-perception, feeling, stream of consciousness: ‘[P]ercepts are continuous and concepts are discrete.’34 For Deleuze, it is the job of art to ‘split […] perceptual processing, forbidding the move to conceptual ordering’.35 Both understandings of percept and concept seem relevant to Picasso’s use

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of incremental changes in his Shakespeare/Hamlet engravings. In the Hamlet drawings we see through time and space the process of moving from reflection to self-reflexivity (or, to quote one of Kleinfelder’s touchstones, between a Barthesian ‘writerly’ text and a ‘readerly’ text). The engravings of Shakespeare alone develop into Shakespeare with Hamlet and the gravediggers, artist and model in the same image in the ‘self-reflexivity’ that leads both to contemplate each other – along with the skull. Moreover, Picasso is creating through the Hamlet/Shakespeare dyad an origin-story of author and work, author and character, akin to the story of Artist and Model analysed so well by Kleinfelder. And like Picasso’s artist, Shakespeare is both the tortured ‘Little Man’ reincarnated vainly to make art because he can’t do anything else, and the pathetic, impotent, balding, purblind ‘Old Man’ who can look at the model but can no longer make love to her, the long-dead playwright watching his ghostly characters on future stages quizzically and powerlessly.36 The Old Man becomes in the Artist and Model images progressively more hunched, his eyes peering and bespectacled, just as some of the Shakespeare images seem to be wearing a monocle or even spectacles (17.4.64.4–6). The artist is both painter and model, just as Shakespeare is both the Old Man and the swashbuckling ‘musketeer’ Hamlet. The adaptation is the source; the source, the adaptation. Timothy Burgard suggests that Picasso appropriated other visual artists’ techniques, content, style and individual works, and characters from literature and popular culture to fulfill a ‘magical’ belief in the transfer of power from one artist to another through the act of appropriation as remaking or reincarnation.37 Aragon notices this self-reflexivity within the Shakespeare drawings, commenting in ‘Shakespeare, Hamlet, and Us’: ‘It seems to me that Picasso’s [Hamlet] is Shakespeare himself ’ (and, by extension, Picasso).38 But Picasso’s pictured painter and Picasso himself work, dress, love, talk and paint differently; Kleinfelder suggests that ‘[t]heir shared identity rests … on both the fictitious painter and his maker being characterized as artists at work, engaged in the process of creating images … in Picasso’s representations, the artist, despite any affectations to the contrary, is always at base a working craftsman’.39 The vanishing and reappearing gravediggers add to the author/ character or painter/model dyad the necessary ensemble of the theatre or the workshop, the troupe or the printshop workers.

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Jaime Sabartés commented in 1949 on Picasso’s interest in lithography as part of the latter’s well-known appetite for new formal and intellectual innovations, but also describes the importance that Picasso gave to the workers in the studio/atelier. Initially ‘anguished’ at the thought that they might not fulfil Picasso’s intention, and anticipating his arrival with the trepidation ‘of the public when the bull enters the arena’, the printers quickly learned that not only had Picasso pondered deeply the effects he wanted to achieve through the process of lithography but also that among them Picasso saw himself as part of an ensemble or team, ‘a man like any other, frank and simple, who treated [the printers] as his equals’.40 ‘[J]ust another worker’, Picasso distinguished himself by his ‘love of the work’.41 I dwell on this aspect of Picasso’s personality because I want to suggest that the Shakespeare and Hamlet lithographs through both medium and content claim the status of ensemble work and claim for seemingly solitary creating, reading and viewing the status of the collaborative ‘text’ performed onstage. In this way, this livre de dialogue or exemplar of ‘modernism without boundaries’, as the introduction describes it, becomes an ensemble book, a theatre rather than a library, the page a stage, and its readers labourers in the workshop, making art together.

Notes 1 Pablo Picasso and Louis Aragon, Picasso-Aragon-Shakespeare (Paris: Cercle d’Art, 1965); Shakespeare, by Aragon and Pablo Picasso, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York/Paris: Harry Abrams/Cercle d’Art, n.d. [1965]); Yves Peyré, Peinture et Poésie: Le dialogue par le livre (1874–2000) (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 2 Louis Aragon, ‘Murmur’, trans. Bernard Frechtman, in Shakespeare, by Aragon and Pablo Picasso, 21–125, discontinuous; Aragon, ‘Shakespeare, Hamlet, and Us’, trans. Bernard Frechtman, in Shakespeare, by Aragon and Pablo Picasso, n.p. [7–15]. A few scholars have proffered brief interpretations of the dialogue between Aragon’s short story, ‘Murmure’, and Picasso’s drawings. See Shamik Bandopadhyay, ‘Picasso, Aragon, Hamlet’, Ebang Mushayera 8, no. 4 (2002): 198–9; A. Stroganov, ‘Picasso’s Shakespearean Suite’, Literaturnaya Gruzia (Tbilisi) 10 (1980): 211–20; and Hans Henning, ‘Pablo Picassos Zeichnungen zur Totengraberszene des Hamlet’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 110 (1974): 60–1. I have

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been unable to track down Bandopadhyay’s article through interlibrary loan, and consult it, however. 3 Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare Appropriation in Inter/ National Contexts’, in The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Appropriation eds. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson (New York: Routledge, 2020), 2. 4 Ibid., 2; Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006, rev. edn. 2013); Marianne Novy, ed., Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2009); Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006, rev. edn. 2016); Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (New York: Polity, 2007); Alexa Alice Joubin, ‘Global Shakespeares as Methodology’, Shakespeare 9 (2013): 273–90; Ayanna Thompson, ed., Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4, no. 1, Special Issue, ‘Shakespeare and Actors of Color’ (2008). Available online: https://openjournals. libs.uga.edu/borrowers/issue/view/210 (accessed 22 February 2021); Judy Celine Ick, ‘The Augmentation of the Indies: An Archipelagic Approach to Asian and Global Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: Critical Encounters, Cultural Geographies, and the Politics of Travel, ed. Bi-qi [Beatrice] Lei, Judy Celine Ick and Poonam Trivedi (London: Routledge, 2017), 19–36; Poonam Trivedi and Paromita Chakravarti, ed., Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: ‘Local Habitations’ (London: Routledge, 2018); Douglas Lanier, ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value’, in Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin (eds.), Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 21–40; Stephen O’Neill, Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Joyce Green MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World (London: Palgrave, 2020). This list is by no means exhaustive, and scholars new to this field may wish to consult the brief overview offered by Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, ‘Adaptation, Appropriation, or What You Will’, Adaptation 11, no. 1 (2015): 10–19 to seek out further reading. 5 Valerie F. Fazel and Louise Geddes, eds., The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture (London: Routledge, 2017); Christy Desmet, ‘Alien Shakespeares 2.0’, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 35 (2017). Available online: https://doi.org/10.4000/ shakespeare.3877 (accessed 22 February 2021); Laurie Osborne, ‘Teaching Global Shakespeare: Visual Culture Projects in Action’, in The Routledge Handbook to

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Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, 227–39; Jason Demeter, ‘“To Appropriate These White Centuries”: James Baldwin’s Race-Conscious Shakespeare’, in The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, 59–68; Miriam Jacobson, ‘The Sandman as Shakespearean Appropriation’, in The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, 431–41.   6 Claes Schaar, ‘The full voic’d quire below’: Vertical Context Systems in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Lund, Sweden: Gleerup, 1982). I acknowledge the work of the late Barbara Mowat and of Allison Meyer Machlis in suggesting the application of Schaar’s work to Shakespearean intertexts; see Barbara A. Mowat, ‘Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed: Texts and Infracontexts of The Winter’s Tale 4.3’, Shakespeare Studies 22 (1994): 58–76, and Allison Machlis Meyer, ‘Multiple Histories: Cultural Memory and Anne Boleyn in Actes and Monuments and Henry VIII’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9, no. 2 (2015). Available online: https://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/borrowers/ article/view/2439 (accessed 22 February 2021).   7 See Garrett Stewart, Bookwork: Medium to Concept to Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1996); Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009); Leah Price, with Seth Lerer, eds., ‘The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature’, PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006); Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper, 2008); Richard Lanham, The Economics of Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Janet Murray, Inventing the Medium (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 2nd edn. (Boston: MIT Press, 2005).   8 Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary, 1995, rev. edn. 2005).   9 Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Esthéthique du livre d’artiste (Paris: Jean-Michel Place/ Bibliothèque Nationale, 1997), 51 (my translation). 10 Ibid., 55 (my translation). 11 Elza Adamowicz, ‘The livre d’artiste in Twentieth-Century France’, French Studies 63, no. 2 (2009): 189–98. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knp061 (accessed 22 February 2021). 12 Clive Philpott, Booktrek (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2013), 149. 13 W. J. Strachan, ‘Livre d’artiste’, in Oxford Art Online [Grove Art Online], 2003. Available online: https://doi-org.proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu/10.1093/

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gao/9781884446054.article.T051448 (accessed 31 January 2019); his discussion in The Artist and the Book in France: The 20th Century Livre d’Artiste (New York: Wittenborn, 1969), however, is notably looser, and it is that broader definition, and Adamowicz’s schema, that I follow here. 14 Clive Philpott, ‘Backwards and Forwards with Artist Books’, Transforming Artist Books, Tate Gallery (2012). Available online: www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/ transforming-artist-books/workshop-reflections/backwards-and-forwards-withartist-books (accessed 12 February 2019). 15 Sujata Iyengar, ‘Upcycling Shakespeare’, in Outerspeares, ed. Daniel Fischlin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 362. 16 For a reading of the Doves Press Hamlet as an artist’s book, see Sujata Iyengar, ‘Intermediating the Book Beautiful’, Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2016): 481–502; for a reading of Ecke’s altered book and the upcycling of massmarket editions by crafters in the online marketplace, see Iyengar, ‘Upcycling Shakespeare’, for the case that software coding can be considered artisanal labour or craft, see Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) and Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2010). 17 John Richardson, ‘Great Late Picasso’, in Mosqueteros (New York: Gagosian, 2009), 19. 18 Memory Holloway, Making Time: Picasso’s Suite 347 (New York: Lang, 2006), 105. 19 Miguel Orocozo, Picasso, Lithographer and Activist, trans. and rev. edn. of Picasso litógrafo y militante (WorldCat No. 952991448) (Málaga: Picasso Foundation, 2016). Available online: www.academia.edu/36544351/Picasso_lithographer_ and_activist (accessed 12 February 2019), 395. 20 Richard Benson, The Printed Picture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 50. 21 Picasso and Aragon, Picasso-Aragon-Shakespeare; Shakespeare, by Aragon and Pablo Picasso, trans. Bernard Frechtman, n.p., insert, ‘X-portraits’. 22 Richardson, ‘Great Late’, 19. 23 John Richardson, ‘Picasso at 85’, New York Review of Books (6 April 1967): 27. 24 David Hockney, ‘Picasso: Important Paintings of the 1960s’, lecture, introduction Mimi Poser (3 April 1984). Available online: www.guggenheim. org/audio/track/picasso-important-paintings-of-the-1960s-by-davidhockney-1984 (accessed 22 February 2021). Transcript: https://www. guggenheim.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/9009139_01_9009140_01Picasso-Paintings-of-the-1960s.pdf

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25 William S. Lieberman, ‘Picasso: His Graphic Art’, The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 19, no. 2 (1952): 4–5. 26 Irving Lavin, ‘Picasso’s Bull(s): Art History in Reverse’, Art in America 81, no. 3 (1993): 79. 27 I am most grateful to my colleague Janice Simon for suggesting that I read Kleinfelder’s book. 28 Karen Kleinfelder, The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 98. 29 Ibid., 98–9. 30 John Richardson, Picasso: Mosqueteros (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2009), 19. 31 Kleinfelder, The Artist, 35. 32 Ibid., 67. 33 Gertrude Stein, Picasso (London: Batsford, 1938; repr. New York: Dover, 1984), 1. 34 William James, Some Problems in Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1911), 48. 35 Daniel Smith and John Protevi, ‘Gilles Deleuze’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2018). Available online: https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/deleuze/ (accessed 22 February 2021). 36 On Picasso’s fear of impotence, see Kleinfelder, The Artist, esp. ch. 3, and Timothy Anglin Burgard, ‘Picasso and Appropriation’, Art Bulletin 73, no. 3 (1991): 479–94. 37 Burgard, ‘Picasso’. 38 Aragon, ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare – Aragon – Picasso, trans. Frechtman, n.p. [14]. 39 Kleinfelder, The Artist, 36 (original emphasis). 40 Jaime Sabartés, ‘Introduction’, in Picasso Lithographe I (1949), trans. from Spanish to French by Geneviève Laporte, in Fernand Mourlot, Picasso, lithographe, 4 vols (Monte Carlo: André Sauret, 1949–64), 1: 7 (my translation). 41 Ibid., 1: 7.

Bibliography Adamowicz, Elza. ‘The livre d’artiste in Twentieth-Century France’. French Studies 63, no. 2 (2009): 189–98 Aragon, Louis. ‘Murmur’, translated by Bernard Frechtman. In Shakespeare, by Aragon and Pablo Picasso, 21–125, discontinuous. New York/Paris: Harry Abrams/ Cercle d’Art, n.d. [1965].

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Aragon, Louis. ‘Shakespeare, Hamlet, and Us’, translated by Bernard Frechtman. In Shakespeare, by Aragon and Pablo Picasso, n.p. [7–15]. New York/Paris: Harry Abrams/Cercle d’Art, n.d. [1965]). Bandopadhyay, Shamik. ‘Picasso, Aragon, Hamlet’. Ebang Mushayera 8, no. 4 (2002): 198–99. Benson, Richard. The Printed Picture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008. Burgard, Timothy Anglin. ‘Picasso and Appropriation’. Art Bulletin 73, no. 3 (1991): 479–94. Cartelli, Thomas, and Katherine Rowe. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen. New York: Polity, 2007. Crawford, Matthew. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin, 2010. Darnton, Robert. The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009. Demeter, Jason. ‘“To Appropriate These White Centuries”: James Baldwin’s RaceConscious Shakespeare’. In The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson, 59–68. New York: Routledge, 2020. Desmet, Christy. ‘Alien Shakespeares 2.0’. Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 35 (2017). Available online: https://doi.org/10.4000/shakespeare.3877 (accessed 22 February 2021). Desmet, Christy, and Sujata Iyengar. ‘Adaptation, Appropriation, or What You Will’. Adaptation 11, no. 1 (2015): 10–19. Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary, 1995, rev. edn. 2005. Fazel, Valerie F., and Louise Geddes, eds. The Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture. London: Routledge, 2017. Hans Henning. ‘Pablo Picassos Zeichnungen zur Totengraberszene des Hamlet’. Shakespeare Jahrbuch 110 (1974): 60–1. Hockney, David. ‘Picasso: Important Paintings of the 1960s’. Lecture (3 April 1984). Available online: www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/picassoimportant-paintings-of-the-1960s-by-david-hockney-1984 (accessed 22 February 2021). Transcript: www.guggenheim.org/wp-content/uploa ds/2018/08/9009139_01_9009140_01-Picasso-Paintings-of-the-1960s.pdf (accessed 22 February 2021). Holloway, Memory. Making Time: Picasso’s Suite 347. New York: Lang, 2006. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006, rev. edn. 2013.

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Ick, Judy Celine. ‘The Augmentation of the Indies: An Archipelagic Approach to Asian and Global Shakespeare’. In Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: Critical Encounters, Cultural Geographies, and the Politics of Travel, edited by Bi-qi [Beatrice] Lei, Judy Celine Ick and Poonam Trivedi, 19–36. London: Routledge, 2017. Iyengar, Sujata. ‘Upcycling Shakespeare’. In Outerspeares, edited by Daniel Fischlin, 347–71. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Iyengar, Sujata. ‘Intermediating the Book Beautiful’. Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2016): 481–50. Iyengar, Sujata, and Miriam Jacobson. ‘Introduction: Shakespeare Appropriation in Inter/ National Contexts’. In The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Appropriation, 1–11. New York: Routledge, 2020. Jacobson, Miriam. ‘The Sandman as Shakespearean Appropriation’. In The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson, 431–41. New York: Routledge, 2020. James, William. Some Problems in Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1911. Joubin, Alexa Alice. ‘Global Shakespeares as Methodology’. Shakespeare 9 (2013): 273–90. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2009. Kleinfelder, Karen. The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Lanham, Richard. The Economics of Attention. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Lanier, Douglas. ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value’. In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, edited by Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin, 21–40. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Lavin, Irving. ‘Picasso’s Bull(s): Art History in Reverse’. Art in America 81, no. 3 (1993): 76–93. Lieberman, William S. ‘Picasso: His Graphic Art’. The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 19, no. 2 (1952): 3–17. MacDonald, Joyce Green. Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World. London: Palgrave, 2020. Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Penguin, 1996. Meyer, Allison Machlis. ‘Multiple Histories: Cultural Memory and Anne Boleyn in Actes and Monuments and Henry VIII’. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9, no. 2 (2015). Available online: https://

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openjournals.libs.uga.edu/borrowers/article/view/2439 (accessed 22 February 2021). Moeglin-Delcroix, Anne. Esthéthique du livre d’artiste. Paris: Jean-Michel Place/ Bibliothèque Nationale, 1997. Mowat, Barbara A. ‘Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed: Texts and Infracontexts of The Winter’s Tale 4.3’. Shakespeare Studies 22 (1994): 58–76. Murray, Janet. Inventing the Medium. Boston: MIT Press, 2011. Novy, Marianne, ed. Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. O’Neill, Stephen. Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Orocozo, Miguel. Picasso, Lithographer and Activist, translated and revised edition of Picasso litógrafo y militante (WorldCat No. 952991448). Málaga: Picasso Foundation, 2016. Available online: https://www.academia.edu/36544351/ Picasso_lithographer_and_activist (accessed 22 February 2021). Osborne, Laurie. ‘Teaching Global Shakespeare: Visual Culture Projects in Action’. In The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson, 227–39. New York: Routledge, 2020. Peyré, Yves. Peinture et Poésie: Le dialogue par le livre (1874–2000). Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Philpott, Clive. ‘Backwards and Forwards with Artist Books’. Transforming Artist Books, Tate Gallery (2012). Available online: www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/ transforming-artist-books/workshop-reflections/backwards-and-forwards-withartist-books (accessed 22 February 2021). Philpott, Clive. Booktrek. Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2013. Picasso, Pablo, and Louis Aragon, Picasso-Aragon-Shakespeare. Paris: Cercle d’Art, 1965. Price, Leah, with Seth Lerer, eds. ‘The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature’. PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006). Richardson, John. ‘Picasso at 85’. New York Review of Books (6 April 1967): 25–8. Richardson, John. ‘Great Late Picasso’. In Mosqueteros, 15–35. New York: Gagosian, 2009. Richardson, John. Picasso: Mosqueteros. New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2009. Sabartés, Jaime. ‘Introduction’. In Picasso Lithographe I (1949), translated from Spanish to French by Geneviève Laporte. In Fernand Mourlot, Picasso, lithographe, 4 vols. Monte Carlo: André Sauret, 1949–64.

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Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006, rev. edn. 2016. Schaar, Claes. ‘The full voic’d quire below’: Vertical Context Systems in ‘Paradise Lost’. Lund, Sweden: Gleerup, 1982. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Shakespeare, by Aragon and Pablo Picasso, translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York/Paris: Harry Abrams/Cercle d’Art, n.d. [1965]. Smith, Daniel, and John Protevi. ‘Gilles Deleuze’. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2018). Available online: https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/deleuze/ (accessed 22 February 2021). Stein, Gertrude. Picasso. London: Batsford, 1938; reprinted New York: Dover, 1984. Stewart, Garrett. Bookwork: Medium to Concept to Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Strachan, W. J. The Artist and the Book in France: The 20th Century Livre d’Artiste. New York: Wittenborn, 1969. Strachan, W. J. ‘Livre d’artiste’. In Oxford Art Online [Grove Art Online], 2003. Available online: https://doi-org.proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu/10.1093/ gao/9781884446054.article.T051448 (accessed 22 February 2021). Stroganov, A. ‘Picasso’s Shakespearean Suite’. Literaturnaya Gruzia (Tbilisi) 10 (1980): 211–20. Thompson, Ayanna, ed. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4, no. 1. Special Issue, ‘Shakespeare and Actors of Color’ (2008). Available online: https://openjournals.libs.uga.edu/borrowers/issue/view/210 (accessed 22 February 2021). Trivedi, Poonam, and Paromita Chakravarti, eds. Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: ‘Local Habitations’. London: Routledge, 2018. Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 2nd edn. Boston: MIT Press, 2005. Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper, 2008.

10

Life / afterlife Margaret Jane Kidnie

In a short essay published in 1930, W. W. Greg unpicks one piece of J. Dover Wilson’s account of the origins of Q1 Hamlet as published in The Library twelve years earlier. Wilson argues that evidence of some of the contributions made to this text by a pirating actor he calls ‘Voltemar’ can be found in Q1’s tendency to repeat within a short span single phrases or lines. The material between these verbal ‘repetition brackets’, according to Wilson, represents Voltemar’s best efforts to insert passages from Shakespeare’s play as it was performed onstage around 1600 into the manuscript copy he was attempting to doctor for print publication.1 The lines that Wilson quotes in full and that Greg considers ‘perhaps the most striking example’ of the phenomenon fall at Hamlet’s first greeting of Horatio: Ham. I am very glad to see you, good euen sirs: *But what is your affaire in Elsenoure? Weele teach you to drinke deepe ere you depart. Hor. A trowant disposition, my good Lord. Ham. Nor shall you make mee truster Of your owne report against your selfe: Sir, I know you are no trowant: *But what is your affaire in Elsenoure? Hor. My good Lord, I came to see your fathers funerall.2

Wilson concludes that the material between the lines marked here with asterisks were added by Voltemar into a text that moved directly from ‘Weele teach you to drinke deepe ere you depart’ to Horatio’s comment on the funeral. Greg notes that such repetition brackets twice turn up in The Honest Man’s Fortune as printed in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio. Here, however,

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one can compare the printed version against a surviving manuscript playbook. The comparison is instructive: instead of finding a textual insertion at the relevant points, one instead confronts at the first of the passages a marginal mark of cancellation. Greg supposes that there was likewise a cut at this point in a different manuscript that served as printer’s copy for the folio, and that it extended to include the words immediately following the cancellation, which the adjuster reproduced ‘in the margin at the head of the cut to serve as a link’. The printers, however, who ignored this theatrical cancellation, also kept the marginal insertion, so producing repetition brackets in the folio text. Although the second passage is not similarly cut in the surviving manuscript, Greg thinks it likely that cancellations in a prior playbook account for both examples of repetition brackets in the printed text. ‘It would appear, therefore’, Greg concludes, ‘that the “repetition-bracket” may be brought about in two diametrically opposite ways, and may point either to addition or to subtraction’.3 There are no repetition brackets in the 1604–5 and 1623 editions of Hamlet (Q2 and F, respectively), but evidence of a theatrical manuscript playbook behind Q2 suggests that Greg’s exchange with Wilson – especially his caution to tread carefully when distinguishing insertions from cuts – remains pertinent to textual analysis of these later texts.4 The dating of the manuscripts behind Q2 and F is uncertain. Wilson suspects that Q2 was printed from Shakespeare’s autograph, a view that has proven influential, but acknowledges that ‘we can postulate nothing for certain’ about this copy; seventy years later, the Arden Shakespeare Third Series editors confirm that even the assumption that the Q2 copy predates the copy behind F lacks ‘hard evidence’.5 The usual position, however, is that the many, sometimes lengthy, Q2-only passages were at some point deliberately removed from the play, rather than added to it. G. R. Hibbard, for example, argues that these Q2-only passages are cuts that improve the play’s pace, ‘removing from the text matter that can fairly be described in the Prince’s own words as “caviare to the general”’.6 The interpretive position is implicitly reinforced by practical considerations. It makes intuitive sense that someone making creative adjustments to a play with a line count well over 3,400 lines – whether Shakespeare, or someone else – would cut rather than add material since such a play might already seem to warrant theatrical abridgement for public-theatre performance.7

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The three substantial passages introduced in F, only one of which might be characterized as refreshing a topical allusion, are therefore somewhat out of the ordinary.8 Long supposed omissions from Q2 (this was the position of Wilson and the Arden Second Series editor, Harold Jenkins, for example), these passages have since been interpreted as purposeful additions to that version of the play. They especially assume importance within the conceptual framework of Shakespeare as a revising author, since they help to define a now-familiar opposition between the play’s pre-theatrical life and its posttheatrical afterlife.9 I want to revisit these three F-only passages, in the spirit of Greg’s question of plus or minus, from the perspective of potential playhouse revision of the copy that lies either immediately or at a remove behind Q2. My suggestion will be that Q2 and F represent different versions of Hamlet, but that the possibility of provisional or occasional cancellation of lines of text in the underlying theatrical manuscripts destabilizes the very concepts of ‘life’ and ‘afterlife’.

Hamlet, revision and textual versions Evidence for the view that Q2 and F represent ‘slightly different work[s] of art’ is perhaps strongest in the play’s final act.10 In F, Hamlet and Horatio share an exchange just prior to Osric’s entrance into the play in which the Prince regrets his outburst at Ophelia’s grave and resolves to apologize to her brother Laertes: Hor. Why, what a King is this? Ham. Does it not, thinkst thee, stand me now vpon He that hath kil’d my King, and whor’d my Mother, Popt in betweene th’election and my hopes, Throwne out his Angle for my proper life, And with such coozenage; is’t not perfect conscience, To quit him with this arme? And is’t not to be damn’d To let this Canker of our nature come In further euill. Hor. It must be shortly knowne to him from England What is the issue of the businesse there. Ham. It will be short,

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The interim’s mine, and a mans life’s no more Then to say one: but I am very sorry good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot my selfe; For by the image of my Cause, I see The Portraiture of his; Ile count his fauours: But sure the brauery of his griefe did put me Into a Towring passion. Hor. Peace, who comes heere? Enter young Osricke. (marke. Osr. Your Lordship is right welcome back to Den-

Q2 prints a much shorter version of this dialogue in which Hamlet only manages to detail Claudius’ injustices before being interrupted five lines into his first speech by Osric (the entrance direction for Osric, who is initially identified only as ‘a Courtier’, falls immediately after ‘is’t not perfect conscience’).11 Hamlet’s apology to Laertes is instead prompted in Q2 by means of an anonymous lord who enters about eight lines after the interview with Osric. After confirming that the prince will duel Laertes, this lord tells Hamlet that the Queen ‘desires you to vse some gentle entertainment to Laertes, before you fall to play’.12 Gary Taylor and Paul Werstine independently argue that these texts deal differently with the consequences of Hamlet’s behaviour at Ophelia’s grave; in F, Hamlet expresses remorse for how he treated Laertes, while in Q2, he is guided to an apology by his mother who explicitly instructs him to smooth things over.13 The interpretive impact of these version-specific variants in 5.2 is amplified, moreover, as Werstine illustrates, when understood alongside passages that either appear, or fail to appear, elsewhere in Q2 and F. The distinctive handling of 5.2 in Q2 and F thus shapes appreciably different treatments of character, particularly as they bear on the play’s portrayal of Hamlet and Laertes. Taylor concludes that editorial conflation leaves the anonymous lord seeming ‘a wholly superfluous intrusion upon the dramatic progress of the play’s final scene’.14 For Taylor, the perception of repetition guides the perception of (authorial) revision: his view is that Q2’s sequence with the lord was cut, and so fails to appear in the manuscript behind F, precisely in order to expand and develop Hamlet’s dialogue with Horatio earlier in the scene. Werstine,

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who points to the fragility of interpretive arguments that discern a distinctive ‘aesthetic design’ behind textual differences between Q2 and F, comments merely that the inclusion of both of these passages in a single text (or performance) ‘doubles up Hamlet’s motives for the apology to Laertes before the fencing match, and leaves readers and theatre-goers unsure as to how much Hamlet’s apology arises from his sympathy with Laertes, how much from a desire to satisfy Gertrude’.15 The uncertainty produced by the inclusion of both passages, as Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor note, is by no means necessarily undesirable – it’s just a different effect from the one constructed in either Q2 or F.16 Rather than find only confused purpose in passages that multiply motivations for Hamlet’s apology, one might take the view, for example, that the deaths to follow are powerfully shaped by the perception of a growing consonance, even bond, between mother and son. Or one might argue that the anonymous lord’s seemingly needless errand, prompting in the Prince a distinct sense of unease, serves primarily to betray the anxiety of a usurping King, forced to orchestrate through intermediaries this final stage of his plot to murder the Prince.17 One might well prefer a version that includes just one of these passages. Cuts to a play, whether effected by an author, bookkeeper or through some combination of effort, by merit of the fact that they are selective, imply an aesthetic sensibility: playhouse cancellations are both occasional and practical and determinedly literary. But the claim, on purely aesthetic grounds, that these two passages could not have coincided in manuscript and so potentially in performance seems especially persuasive only if one comes to the question already immersed in a paradigm of (Shakespearean) revision as it took strong hold in the 1980s – a decade that saw the shattering of models of editorial conflation.18 And while the uncertain and contested provenance of the short first quarto (Q1) provides an impenetrably ambiguous perspective on the other two surviving texts of Hamlet, that earliest-printed edition includes a fragment of each of these passages separately printed in Q2 and F: Q1 Hamlet both regrets ‘That to Leartes I forgot my selfe’, and is warned that ‘the king, and her maiesty, / With the rest of the best iudgement in the Court, / Are comming downe’.19 The evidence of Q1, qualified though it is, at the very least complicates any suggestion that these F-only and Q2-only passages in 5.2 always were, and must necessarily be understood as, textual alternatives.

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Manuscript cancellations Playbook cancellations, as Greg’s discussion of The Honest Man’s Fortune implies, often have an occasional quality to them. They are distinct from other kinds of cuts found in theatrical playbooks in that the text marked for omission remains clearly legible; typically, a passage marked for cancellation is signalled by means of a vertical line in the left margin. Such annotation ‘brackets’ a passage, marking it as provisionally excluded from a projected performance but still textually available for purposes of subsequent stagings and/or textual transmission, whether in the form of transcription or print publication.20 The likelihood then that a duplicated stage direction in Q2 (5.2.262) points to a bookkeeper’s hand in the underlying copy returns us to the print evidence and to Greg’s early question of plus or minus. Was the longer exchange between Hamlet and Horatio added to the play to accommodate a revised vision that survives in F? Or was it instead cancelled in the manuscript behind Q2, remaining available for purposes of transcription, performance and (as it turned out) print publication in the manuscript retained by the playhouse in 1604? (If scribal copy was sent to James Roberts in 1604, the decision to omit a cancelled passage may have been taken, of course, at an earlier point in the text’s transmission, the Q2 compositors setting everything in their copy.) The fact that the longer version of the dialogue with Horatio eventually appears in print in a text from which the interview with the lord is cut is a circumstance that might just as easily be explained as play revision through playhouse/ authorial abridgement as playhouse/authorial insertion, for the same reasons made visible by Taylor’s and Werstine’s interpretive analyses: either of these passages might be cancelled in place of the other over the course of twenty years of performance without compromising the essential preparation for the action that will follow. Two other substantial F-only passages are both found in 2.2. The first of these is the thirty-three line prose exchange between Hamlet and his school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in which Hamlet likens Denmark to a prison; the second, is the topical allusion to the boy players who ‘crye out on the top of question; and are most tyrannically clap’t for’t’.21 Editors making the case for omission often mention Wilson’s suggestion that censorship or

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tact might have prompted a decision to leave out the prison reference (James I was married to Anne of Denmark).22 Hibbard, by contrast, presents the case for revision through addition by challenging the Arden Second Series editor’s dating of the second of the two F-only passages in this scene. Jenkins squares a composition date of 1599–1600 for what he calls the ‘essential Hamlet’ with an F-only topical allusion that cannot be persuasively dated before 1601 by supposing that this reference in F to the boy actors was added somewhat later. For some unclear reason, however, this addition was also then left out of the Q2 printing. Hibbard cuts through what he sees as an overly complicated narrative, insisting that neither passage was in Q2’s version of 2.2, a scene that he believes ‘makes good sense as it stands’.23 One notes, however, that there is no dating issue around the ‘prison’ exchange, and no reason to assume, as Hibbard seems to imply, that transmission of both F-only passages in this scene was determined by the same considerations. Unlike Jenkins, I am not concerned either to demonstrate that these passages in 2.2 must have been inadvertently left out of the text as Shakespeare first wrote it, or to recover an ‘authorial’ life as understood as separate from a ‘theatrical’ afterlife. Instead, I want to prise open models of revision (possibly, but not necessarily, in the author’s hand) and assumptions about pre-theatrical and post-theatrical texts as they currently apply to Q2/F Hamlet. There is a perhaps coincidental point of structural comparison between the first of these passages in 2.2 and the Q1 passage quoted above whose ‘repetition brackets’ first attracted Wilson’s attention. To return briefly to that earlier dialogue, Horatio’s arrival to Elsinore prompts Hamlet three times in all three texts to ask the purpose of Horatio’s visit. The third of these questions in Q1, as Wilson noticed, is a verbatim repetition of the second question. In Q2/F, the first two, rather than second two, questions show close resemblances without, however, actually repeating. With his second question in these later-printed texts Hamlet’s tone shifts from a casual inquiry about Horatio’s travels – ‘And what make you from Wittenberg Horatio?’ – to a rather more pressing curiosity about his friend’s absence from the university – ‘But what in faith make you from Wittenberg?’.24 Horatio jokingly replies, ‘A truant disposition good my Lord’, an explanation Hamlet refuses to accept. Hamlet’s third overture to his friend is pointed – ‘But what is your affaire in Elsonoure?’ – with Horatio’s

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mention of the funeral then prompting bitter jokes about the timing of the marriage. Horatio’s justification of his presence in Elsinore is only pushed out of view with his startling news of the sighting of Hamlet’s father’s ghost. This same pattern of questioning is repeated in F upon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s arrival at Elsinore. After an enthusiastic welcome, Hamlet asks them, ‘What’s the newes?’ (Q2: ‘What newes?’).25 Their bantering reply is countered and dismissed by Hamlet, who questions them a second time ‘more in particular’: ‘what haue you my good friends, deserued at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to Prison hither?’. This prompts an extended exercise of wits that Hamlet, with the claim that he ‘cannot reason’, eventually abandons. Hamlet’s third inquiry into the purpose of their visit – ‘What make you at Elsonower?’ (invariant Q2) – is not much different from his final probing of Horatio. If one reads F, both sets of school friends are subject to similar interrogations, each of them being asked three times why they have come to Elsinore. The difference in 2.2 is that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have no satisfactory reply, no sensational news, and unlike Horatio, they were sent for by the King and Queen. Greg defers discussion of Wilson’s argument that passages were added by a reporter to the Q1 copy and he likewise expresses no interest in pursuing hypothetical cancellations in it, commenting merely that it ‘seems possible to regard [these ‘repetition-brackets’ in Q1] as quite likely results of memorial reconstruction’.26 The F-only ‘prison’ exchange with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that turns up in 2.2, however, is especially intriguing if one considers that a playbook might lie behind Q2: the omission of this stretch of F-only text efficiently thins lines from a long scene without compromising the plot. Without the passage as printed in F, Hamlet’s greeting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern moves from the Prince’s dismissive response to their ‘news’ that ‘the worlds growne honest’ to his direct question about the purpose of their visit: ‘what make you at Elsonoure?’. As with so many of the Q2-only passages that are not printed in F, one would be unlikely to suspect that there had ever been extra material here without the evidence of a variant text.27 Again, one returns to Greg’s question of plus or minus: did this passage find its way only into F because it was added late, or was it cancelled in a copy that lies either directly or indirectly behind Q2? Those who want to argue that it

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was part of a larger process of revision have to contend with the same balance of probabilities that, as I showed earlier, influences prevailing assumptions that the copy behind Q2 is prior to that behind F. This passage demonstrates the kind of competitive wordplay that characterizes young male relationships elsewhere in Shakespeare’s drama (and moments earlier in the friends’ witticisms about Fortune’s favours), but it is undoubtedly expendable – even Hamlet seems to tire of it by the end. Why then would an author add this long passage to an already long play? The relationship of Q1 to Q2 and F remains uncertain, but one notes that far from following F in providing an enlarged version of the episode, Q1 reproduces a text that is less expansive even than the one printed in Q2, moving directly from a two-line welcome to Elsinore to Hamlet’s demand whether his friends were not ‘sent for’.28 It therefore seems not impossible that this F-only passage represents a theatrical cancellation that remained available for potential future use in whatever manuscript(s) the King’s Men retained for their own purposes in 1604. At the very least, the evidence seems less conclusive than arguments in Hamlet studies for revision through addition between Q2 and F perhaps imply.29 The material in F about the boy actors later in the same scene – somewhat paradoxically since these twenty-five lines so clearly seem to allude to topical events in Shakespeare’s London – presents its own peculiar challenges in terms of interpreting the life and subsequent afterlife of Hamlet. Rosencrantz tells Hamlet that ‘the Tragedians of the City’ are coming to Elsinore; when Hamlet asks why they tour, he explains that ‘their Inhibition comes by the meanes of the late Innouation’.30 This passage is invariant Q2/F, and in both texts, Hamlet goes on to ask if the players are as esteemed as they were when he was in the city. Rosencrantz’s answer in the negative prompts Hamlet in Q2 to reflect on the fickleness of public opinion, applying the instance of the players to Claudius’ newfound popularity since being crowned King. F, however, provides more detail about city theatres before it then turns to Claudius, ascribing the tragedians’ declining fortunes to ‘an ayrie of Children, little Yases’, who are ‘now the fashion’.31 A great deal remains uncertain about this stretch of text, including when it was written, how it relates to the comparable sections of text printed in Q2 and Q1 and even precisely how its seeming allusions to the contemporary

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London theatre scene might be interpreted. Not only have the ‘Inhibition’ and ‘late Innouation’ resisted firm identification, but the so-called 1601 ‘War of the Theatres’, a former staple of theatre history that once served to gloss the friends’ gossip about tensions between the boy actors and the adult companies, has emerged as something more like ‘an exchange of insults’ among dramatists than a ‘commercial war’ between companies.32 Unable to pin down to which events this scene might allude, editors’ efforts to date Hamlet by means of it are at best provisional. The Arden Third Series and New Oxford Shakespeare editors – the former noting that the only certain external evidence of dating is provided by the Stationers’ Register (1602) and the title page of Q1 (1603), and the latter opting for an especially late date of composition of the canonical play (1601–4) – remain open to the possibility that the ‘little eyases’ passage might have been included in the copy behind Q2.33 Roslyn L. Knutson instead argues that between about 1599 and 1609 three distinct explanations were provided for the players’ decision to leave the metropolis, each version offering an especially timely allusion to thencurrent events in London. In Q1, Gilderstone cites the boy actors as a ‘noveltie’ that draws from the adult company their ‘principall publike audience’.34 This allusion, likely to the Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars (formed 1600, and associated with the Chamberlain’s Men through their playhouse, leased to them by Richard Burbage), eventually becomes dated, and so the reference to the boys is dropped and the explanation for the tragedians’ tour is changed to ‘their inhibition’, which ‘comes by the meanes of the late innouasion’.35 Knutson, following J. Monck Mason, interprets this speech, first printed in Q2, as an allusion to the closure of the theatres at the time of Elizabeth I’s death, a ban that stayed in effect for a year due to plague (and consideration of which continued to ‘inhibit’ the London season off and on through 1605–7), and the 1603 accession of James I.36 Finally, around 1606–9, Q2’s topical allusion is supplemented for a second revival by lines that again refer to the boys at Blackfriars, whose offending behaviour in the four years from 1604, according to Knutson, ‘set off alarms of industry-wide restraints and provoked a warning voice within the profession’.37 F prints this latest version of the exchange. Knutson acknowledges that her interpretation of a shifting metatheatrical allusion as printed in the three Hamlet texts is a revisionist ‘narrative’ that prioritizes ‘political and commercial’ motivations for repeated

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company rewriting; her suggestive and important analysis, however, raises as a distinct possibility the dating of the ‘little eyases’ passage to a period after the publication of Q2.38 The uncertainty of the distinction between the life and afterlife of Hamlet in Shakespeare’s lifetime is acute in this metatheatrical passage. If the entire sequence, including the extended allusion to the children’s company or companies, dates from around 1601, it might have seemed increasingly ripe for trimming after 1603, so resulting in the exclusion from Q2 of material that was eventually printed in F. Such a cancellation might seem especially appealing if the company could count on their audiences to apply the surviving reference to ‘the late innouasion’ resulting in the players’ ‘inhibition’, not to circumstances dating from the turn of the century, but to major recent events of 1603–4. The passage’s very topicality, however, provides clear motivation for the insertion of new writing into an already long play. If Hamlet was not written around 1600, but instead as late as 1603–4, then at the time of Q2’s publication the allusion to the boy actors might instead represent, as Knutson argues, this scene’s as-yet-unwritten afterlife. Where one might lean towards understanding the other two F-only passages as potential cancellations rather than new writing, accounts of the provenance of this third passage must seem at this distance especially speculative.

Theatrical manuscripts and performance length Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, textual scholars and editors tended to rely on a set of supposed markers to discern if the copy underlying a printed play was authorial or theatrical. Muddles such as false starts, ‘ghost’ characters, and permissive, missing or petitory stage directions would rule out theatrical copy because such a document (what Greg called a play’s ‘foul papers’) was considered inadequate for use by a bookkeeper. Q2 Hamlet seemed quite clearly to fall into that category, as Jenkins, for one, demonstrates.39 When scholars began to explore and embrace the concept of socialized texts and forms of collaborative theatrical revision in the 1980s, the evidence of a playbook somewhere behind Q2 was therefore fairly readily discounted.40 More recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that such characteristics

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are by no means inconsistent with the evidence of surviving playhouse manuscripts.41 This, in turn, allows one to bring renewed focus to Q2’s doubled stage direction in the final scene and to the circumstances that might lead to the inclusion of a bookkeeper’s hand in the underlying manuscript. If one holds at bay the misleading category of ‘foul papers’ in order to reconsider in light of playhouse annotation the various passages found either only in Q2 or only in F, then the possibility, even likelihood, of at least two of the three F-only passages discussed here representing cancellations from a long play, rather than new insertions into it, shifts firmly into view.42 Q2 and F remain ‘slightly different work[s] of art’, as revisionist scholarship has long argued. Rather than stemming from a singular creative event, however, this literary effect can be understood as the outcome of a flexible and provisional process of piecemeal script development undertaken over a period of time by playhouse personnel, perhaps, but not necessarily, including Shakespeare. The length of a play in print, long raised as an objection to the proposition that either Q2 or F might represent theatrical texts, does not, at least in this case, therefore necessarily map onto the ‘performance length’ of an underlying playhouse manuscript.43 We know very little about how a manuscript marked with playhouse cancellations would be cast off in a printing-house; those decisions might well be influenced in the moment by the publisher, the circumstances of publication and the particular ‘look’ of individual cancellations within a manuscript. But the signifying gap between a play in print and a manuscript playbook containing marks of cancellation is potentially immense: what looks like a very long play in print may have been significantly shorter in performance if compositors mostly ignored any cancellations they saw in their copy. To put this a different way, the potential evidence of theatrical streamlining that is visible through collation of Q2 and F may not represent all of the marks of cancellation that were once present in the manuscript that lies at whatever remove behind Q2.44 The life / afterlife binary, which a theory of (authorial) revision tries to stabilize as a distinction between pre-theatrical and post-theatrical texts, becomes something more fluid in the context of playhouse manuscripts. From this perspective, passages cut from the text for particular theatrical purposes have the potential to recur and even supplant other passages that

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had previously passed, whether in performance or print or both, as the play’s ‘life’. Playhouse manuscripts enabled decisions for theatrical professionals who prepared and used them, without necessarily disabling subsequent alternative choices. When it comes to printed documents that can only partially capture the complexities of an underlying manuscript copy, it may well be the case that sometimes what is old is new again.

Notes 1 J. Dover Wilson, ‘The Copy for “Hamlet,” 1603’, The Library, 3rd series, 9 (1918): 217–47. 2 As quoted in W. W. Greg, ‘A Question of Plus or Minus’, Review of English Studies 6, no. 23 (1930): 300. 3 Ibid., 304; compare The Honest mans Fortune, in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (London: Humphrey Moseley and Humphrey Robinson, 1647), sigs. 5T2r–v, and The Honest Man’s Fortune, ed. Grace Ioppolo, Malone Society Reprints 176 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), lines 257–82 and 342–73. 4 The evidence of a theatrical playbook behind Q2 – a doubled stage direction in 5.2 (sig. N4v) – was first noticed by Wilson, The Manuscript of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Problems of Its Transmission, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), I:23–4, 32–3, and is not thrown into doubt by the work of Paul Werstine (see esp. Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 233). John Jowett is the most recent editor to confirm that there is ‘limited but telling’ evidence of a bookkeeper’s hand in the Q2 copy (ed. Hamlet, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Critical Reference Edition, ed. Gary Taylor et al., 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1:1117, 19.242n.). 5 Wilson, Manuscript, I:89–93, esp. 92; Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, eds., Hamlet (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 483. For an argument that Q2 post-dates F, see David Ward, ‘The King and “Hamlet”’, Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 280–302. 6 G. R. Hibbard, ed., Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 108. 7 I do not address here the process by which Q2/F Hamlet arrived at lengths in excess of 3,400 lines, about which there are competing theories. Richard Dutton

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argues that the Chamberlain’s Men performed a short version of Hamlet until the regnal change in 1603 when Shakespeare revised and augmented the play explicitly for court performance; he assumes that this revised Hamlet, in an abridged form, thereafter supplanted that earlier version in the public theatres (Shakespeare, Court Dramatist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 130, 230–45). James J. Marino, resisting the view that Hamlet ‘was substantially revised only once in its long history’, instead argues that Hamlet was subject to ‘continuing incremental revisions’ (Owning William Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 79, 84 and 89–90). Both of these positions, in their very different ways, challenge Lukas Erne’s now-familiar argument that Shakespeare wrote plays too long for performance expressly for print publication (Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)).   8 These passages are gathered as Appendix I in Thompson and Taylor, eds., Hamlet.   9 The sea change in opinion about these passages is marked between Jenkins’s 1982 edition, which insists that revision in Hamlet amounts to ‘no more than the insertion of topicalities’ (ed., Hamlet, 5), and Hibbard’s 1987 edition, which states that these ‘additions’ are described as such ‘because this seems the obvious answer to the question of why they appear in F only’ (ed., Hamlet, 110). 10 Gary Taylor, ‘Hamlet’, in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, gen. eds., Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, 1987 (New York: Norton, 1997), 400. 11 Hamlet (London: Nicholas Ling, 1604/5), sig. N2r. Hereafter Q2 Hamlet. 12 Q2 Hamlet, sigs. N3r–N3v. 13 Taylor, ‘Hamlet’, 400; Paul Werstine, ‘The Textual Mystery of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 1 (1988): 1–26. 14 Taylor, ‘Hamlet’, 400. 15 Werstine, ‘Textual Mystery’, 4. 16 Thompson and Taylor, eds., Hamlet, 498n1. 17 These insights are indebted to discussions with Peter Luscombe and Hannah Zamora, former graduate students. 18 The landmark publications on Shakespeare and revision in this decade centred on King Lear: see Michael Warren, ‘Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar’, in Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), 95–107; and Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

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19 Hamlet (London: Nicholas Ling, 1603), sigs. I2r–I2v. Hereafter Q1 Hamlet. 20 For illustrative examples of cancellations in playhouse manuscripts along with discussion of their sometimes ‘ragged edges’, the difficulties attributing them to particular theatrical agents and their potential to generate confusion in a printing-house, see Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘Playhouse Markings and the Revision of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2021, for 2020), forthcoming. 21 ‘Hamlet’, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Edward Blount, et al., 1623), sig. oo3v. Hereafter F Hamlet. 22 Wilson, Manuscript, I:97–8; Jowett attributes the suggestion to Jenkins (ed., Hamlet, 1:1118), who mentions it, however, without much conviction (ed., Hamlet, 44–5, 2.2.239–69LN). 23 Hibbard, ed., Hamlet, 111. 24 Q2 Hamlet, sig. C1v; compare F Hamlet, sig. nn5v–6r. 25 F Hamlet, sig. oo3v; Q2 Hamlet sig. F1v. 26 Greg, ‘Question’, 300. 27 Jenkins thinks the repeated ‘but’ is a tell-tale sign of an omission (ed., Hamlet, 44–5); Hibbard points out, however, that the repetition of ‘but’ at the head of successive clauses finds parallels elsewhere in the play, as does Hamlet’s abrupt conversational leap (ed., Hamlet, 111). 28 Q1 Hamlet, sig. E2v. 29 The claim that Q1 Hamlet is indebted specifically to F is central to the argument that F ‘represents a more theatrical text than Q2’ (see Taylor, ‘Hamlet’, 400); that characterization of the play’s transmission is troubled, however, by Q1 passages that show a correspondence to passages found only in Q2. Hibbard, rethinking the accuracy of his earlier claim that Q1 Hamlet is an abridgement specifically of F, describes Q1’s memory of the anonymous lord’s message in 5.2, for example, as an ‘unmistakable trace’ in Q1 of the Q2 reading. He cites three more in ‘The Chronology of the Three Substantive Texts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet’, in The Hamlet First Published (Q1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities, ed. Thomas Clayton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 79–89, esp. 82; compare Hibbard, ed. Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 88. 30 F Hamlet, sig. oo3v; compare Q2 Hamlet, sigs. F2r–F2v. 31 F Hamlet, sigs. oo3v–oo4r. 32 Rosyln L. Knutson provides an account of the evolution of this piece of theatre history in ‘Falconer to the Little Eyases: A New Date and Commercial Agenda for the “Little Eyases” Passage in Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 46, no. 1 (1995): 24–7.

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33 Thompson and Taylor, eds., Hamlet, 59; Jowett, ed., Hamlet, 1:1115, 1118; see also Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane, whose timeline for composition differs somewhat from Jowett’s (‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works’, in Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, eds. The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 446–7 and 542–8). 34 Q1 Hamlet, sig. E3r. 35 Q2 Hamlet, sig. F2v; compare F, sigs. oo3v–oo4r. 36 Knutson, ‘Falconer’, 14–20. 37 Ibid., 23. 38 Ibid., 28. Knutson persuasively argues that the passage about an ‘Inhibition’ associated with ‘the late Innouation’ (included in both Q2 and F) constitutes a late addition to the Q2 manuscript, but this analysis in part depends on believing that Q1 accurately transmits an early state of the text. 39 Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, 37–42. 40 Hibbard, ed., Hamlet, 98–9; Taylor, ‘Hamlet’, 399. 41 William B. Long’s work in this area has proven ground-breaking (see, for example, ‘“Precious Few”: English Manuscript Playbooks’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 414–33). See also Werstine, Playhouse Manuscripts, and James Purkis, Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration, and Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 42 Werstine, who notes that many Q2/F variants, ‘resist inclusion in … an aesthetic design’, concludes that although authorial revision is a possibility, it is ‘just as likely’ that each of these printed texts originated in ‘a non-authorial theatrical adaptation (hence the major variants) that had been copied one or more times by scribes (hence the numerous minor variants, to which the typesetters would have added)’ (‘Textual Mystery’, 2n5, 24–5). 43 Andrew Gurr, who considers two hours the usual running-time for a publictheatre performance in early modern London, suggests that censor-approved ‘maximal’ scripts could have been shortened, as necessary, to accommodate company needs (‘Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare v. the Globe’, Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999): 68–87). For a sustained exploration of the view that Q2 and F are both of an unsuitable length for performance, see, for example, Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, esp. 172; Dutton qualifies that they are too long for public stage performance (Shakespeare, 242 and 244).

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44 Jenkins, building on Wilson’s analysis, discusses two part-lines left out of Q2, which he attributes to cancellations in the underlying manuscript (ed. Hamlet, 43); see also Kidnie, ‘Playhouse’.

Bibliography Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. Comedies and Tragedies. London: Humphrey Moseley and Humphrey Robinson, 1647. Dutton, Richard. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Greg, W. W. ‘A Question of Plus or Minus’. Review of English Studies 6, no. 23 (1930): 300–4. Hibbard, G. R., ed. Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. The Honest Man’s Fortune. Edited by Grace Ioppolo. Malone Society Reprints 176. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Jowett, John, ed. Hamlet. In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Critical Reference Edition. General eds. Gary Taylor et al. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. ‘Playhouse Markings and the Revision of Hamlet’. Shakespeare Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2021, for 2020). Forthcoming. Knutson, Rosyln L. ‘Falconer to the Little Eyases: A New Date and Commercial Agenda for the “Little Eyases” Passage in Hamlet’. Shakespeare Quarterly 46, no. 1 (1995): 1–31. Long, William B. ‘“Precious Few”: English Manuscript Playbooks’. In A Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan, 414–33. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Marino, James J. Owning William Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Purkis, James. Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration, and Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Rasmussen, Eric. ‘The Revision of Scripts’. In A New History of Early English Drama, edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, 441–60. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Taylor, Gary. ‘Hamlet’. In William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, 396–420. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

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Taylor, Gary, and Rory Loughnane. ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works’. The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, edited by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, 417–602. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Taylor, Gary, and Michael Warren, eds. The Division of the Kingdoms. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Thompson, Ann, and Neil Taylor, eds. Hamlet. London: Thomson Learning, 2006. Ward, David. ‘The King and “Hamlet”’. Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1992): 280–302. Warren, Michael. ‘Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar’. In Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature, edited by David Bevington and Jay L. Halio, 95–107. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978. Werstine, Paul. ‘The Textual Mystery of Hamlet’. Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 1 (1988): 1–26. Werstine, Paul. Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Wilson, J. Dover. ‘The Copy for “Hamlet,” 1603’. The Library, 3rd series, 9 (1918): 217–47. Wilson, J. Dover. The Manuscript of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Problems of Its Transmission. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932. G

Part Three

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11

Book / theatre Holger Schott Syme

Books and the theatre have a complicated relationship. As texts, books are mere fodder for the theatre’s performative drives: ‘raw material’ at best, as W. B. Worthen has argued, borrowing a phrase from Brecht, or maybe ‘a kind of catalyst, burned off in the act of performing’.1 The theatre disintegrates books in a more literal sense as well, though: nowadays, editions are photocopied, taken apart, ring-bound; or transformed into typed-up copy on a screen, printed out and stapled together – either way, disaggregated and reassembled, in different form; cut; rearranged, with words, characters and scenes removed, replaced, shuffled, amalgamated. The playtext, especially the Shakespearean text, is never anything but multiply mediated in the rehearsal room. And this is not a modern phenomenon: for as long as there have been books of Shakespeare’s plays, theatre professionals have taken them apart, interleaved their printed pages with blank ones, crossed out lines and stage directions, inserted new text in their stead. One way of thinking about the theatre’s destructive attitude to the book as physical object might be as a form of nostalgia, a pull towards the play’s performative point of origin, some afternoon at the Theatre, the Curtain or the Globe. As Tiffany Stern has shown, what underpinned that point of origin was not a book, not even a unified text, but an array of ‘documents of performance’: scenarios, arguments, prologues, epilogues, ‘interim entertainments’, songs, masques, scrolls, backstage plots and, perhaps most centrally, actors’ parts.2 To the extent that a single book of the play existed at all, it was the volume kept backstage by the book-holder or prompter, but, as Stern argues, there is no reason to believe that this book contained all the textual or documentary items involved in the performance. Performance, we might say, did not so

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much ‘burn off ’ a written catalyst as bring together and unify something that in textual form was never more than disaggregated to begin with: it provided the play a local habitation the theatrical book did not. The eighteenth century saw the emergence of the textual editor as a central new figure in the life of Shakespeare’s texts, but this development did not displace the theatre’s integrative function. In turning to two key biblio-theatrical episodes from the 1730s and 1770s, I want to consider a counterintuitive correlative to the notion that performances make plays whole: the idea that the theatre does not simply ‘consume’ texts and disaggregate books, it also makes them. Written materials – pages, rolls, sides, books – pass through the theatrical process and aid in the creation of performance, but that same process also, at every turn, yields, exfoliates, leaves behind new forms of text. The familiar claim from hundreds of early modern title pages, that a piece of drama is being printed ‘as it was played’ thus registers not (just) the paradox captured in Stephen Orgel’s aphoristic ‘if the play is a book, it’s not play’,3 but a surprising, if abiding, truth: the theatre is not simply a place where writing becomes action. It is also a site of textual, even bibliogonic, generation. * During Shakespeare’s lifetime, almost half his dramatic writings existed as ‘books’ only for the book-holder, the Master of the Revels, and Shakespeare himself. Still: by 1616, a total of forty-five editions of plays now attributed to Shakespeare had been published, and once the First Folio appeared in 1623, all his plays but The Two Noble Kinsmen had a textual identity and were available, at least in principle, to actors and audiences independently of performance. But far from halting the theatre’s textual production – or rather, establishing a clear division between drama and performance – the Folio and its successor editions through to Edmond Malone’s in 1790 merely reproduced snapshots of the text at a particular moment, artificially arresting the theatrical process of continual revision and change. That process, however, continued unabated, and may even have been fuelled by the existence of collected editions. In the hands of the prompters of professional theatres, most famously the Smock Alley playhouse in late-seventeenth-century Dublin, the Folios’ texts were regularly cut by hundreds of lines, had speeches rewritten, words replaced,

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dialogue reassigned, scenes eliminated.4 Turning printed volumes (back) into promptbooks, the theatre created its own palimpsestic textual objects. That many of Shakespeare’s plays returned after the Restoration in radically altered form as free adaptations (though still frequently treated as ‘Shakespeare’) is well known. This has led scholars to distinguish between ‘adaptations’ and plays performed ‘unaltered’,5 suggesting that a subset of the Shakespearean repertoire had achieved a new kind of textual stability, predictability and authority by the eighteenth century – that the Hamlet, say, or the Othello, or the Julius Caesar edited by Rowe (1709), Pope (1725), Theobald (1733), Hanmer (1744), Warburton (1747), Johnson (1765), Capell (1768) or Steevens (1773) was essentially the same as that performed at Drury Lane or Covent Garden. At the same time, the continued stage dominance of Nahum Tate’s King Lear or Colley Cibber’s Richard III opened up a growing divide between other parts of the repertoire and the editorial tradition.6 This neat distinction, however, downplays the theatrical instability of even the most canonical of Shakespeare’s texts in the eighteenth century. As textual scholarship grew more informed and self-reflective, and as the interactions between scholars, the theatres and the book trade became more complex, a gulf began to gape between Shakespeare-as-theatre and Shakespeare-as-book – or rather, between the theatre and certain kinds of books. Consider Hamlet. Unlike most of the plays included in the various complete works editions published by Jacob Tonson and his heirs and associates (the common denominator to the entire roll call of editors in the previous paragraph), Hamlet’s printed form followed, for almost two hundred years, two separate trajectories. In its identity as a work – part of an oeuvre – the play was essentially the Folio text, enriched from Rowe onwards with morsels of Q2 (notably the first Fortinbras scene), but theoretically harkening back to the phantasmagorical ‘true original copy’. In its identity as a stand-alone piece of drama and a single-play volume, though, Hamlet always derived from the second quarto – and at least as of 1676, from explicitly theatrical origins. After 1676, buying Hamlet (as opposed to buying ‘Shakespeare’) meant buying a product of the theatre: first, the play ‘As it is now Acted at his Highness the Duke of York’s Theatre’; then, after 1695, ‘as it is now Acted at the Theatre Royal, by Their Majesties servants’; after 1703, ‘As it is now Acted by Her Majesties Servants’; then again, after 1718 and with further revisions

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by the actor Robert Wilks and the poet John Hughes, ‘As it is now acted by his Majesty’s Servants’.7 Into the nineteenth century, virtually all standalone Hamlets printed in London proclaimed their origins in the theatre, though some versions asserted the theatre’s authority to shape the text more vigorously than others. Since the first Restoration quarto of 1676, Hamlet editions included a notice that, to keep performances to a manageable length, ‘such places as might be least prejudicial to the Plot or Sense, are left out upon the Stage’, but merely marked those passages with marginal inverted commas.8 Other eighteenth-century Hamlets, less careful not to ‘wrong the incomparable Author’, dispensed with such passages altogether. These include the 1763 printing advertised ‘As it is now acted At the Theatres Royal, in Drury Lane, and Covent-Garden’, which excludes the by-then-customary note about marked-out stage omissions and reproduces only the lines actors spoke at David Garrick’s Drury Lane, resulting in a text about thirty pages shorter than earlier versions.9 However, no matter how assiduous they are about including and identifying passages irrelevant to the theatre, all post-1676 Hamlets also feature hundreds of unacknowledged verbal edits and interventions.10 During the eighteenth century, the multi-volume editions in which Hamlet was enshrined – priced between £1 7s. (for the second edition of Rowe) and £6 15s. (for the fourth edition of Malone) – moved further and further away from the living theatre. The Hamlet selling for a shilling, on the other hand, never left the stage behind, and the cheaper and more widely distributed the book got, the more strongly that connection held.11 When Robert Walker decided to print his own edition of Merry Wives of Windsor in 1734, thus challenging Tonson and associates’ Shakespeare copyright in 1734 and launching a yearlong stunt of printing one Shakespeare play per week for a penny a sheet (about 4 pence per play on average), Tonson quickly responded, in predictable fashion. He issued yet another Hamlet, more affordable than ever at a wholesale price of 1.5 pence – and announced the parallel publication of his own singletext Merry Wives, undercutting Walker’s price by a penny and offering a book printed ‘more Correctly’ than his rival’s ‘hasty, uncorrect Performances’.12 Within months, tens of thousands of copies flooded the market, making Shakespeare’s plays more widely and cheaply available than ever before.13 For my argument, though, the key aspect of Tonson’s and Walker’s battle lies elsewhere than in this expanded access to the plays. In one of the later

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afterwords both printers regularly appended to their Shakespeare booklets, Tonson sneers at Walker’s literary ignorance, noting that he ‘has since printed Tate’s King Lear instead of Shakespear’s, and in that and Hamlet has omitted almost one half of the Genuine Editions printed by Tonson and Proprietors. The World will therefore judge how likely they are to have a compleat Collection of Shakespear’s Plays from the said R. Walker.’14 The charge was accurate, not just concerning King Lear (as scholars have noted) but also (as, it seems, they have not) with regard to Hamlet: Walker’s text did indeed leave out all those passages marked as unspoken in the Wilks-Hughes version from which he printed his edition, including instances where the inverted commas mark only short phrases or half-lines. For example, Wilks-Hughes’s Hor. Well, ‘ sit we down, And’ let us hear Bernardo speak of this.

becomes, in Walker’s text, Hor. Well, let us hear Bernardo speak of this.15

Walker’s edition very carefully reproduced only those words that still mattered in the theatre. This commitment to an accurate reflection of current theatrical practice extended to the paratexts as well.16 Whereas Tonson’s 1734 Hamlet (as well as all subsequent reprints of the Wilks-Hughes text, down to 1757) offered a Dramatis Personae with the same cast as this version’s first iteration from 1718, Walker deleted the completely outdated cast list in favour of a simple list of characters. From the perspective of a theatre-conscious publisher in 1734, that move was overdue: several of the actors in Tonson’s list were dead (Wilks himself and Barton Booth), while some of the bit players had grown into stars (Lacy Ryan, James Quin).17 Given the sheer number of famous actors in the original cast list, its inaccuracy must have been glaringly obvious by 1734 to any reader interested in the stage. Like the First Folio, Tonson’s Hamlet offered a snapshot of a theatrical ‘now’ that had fossilized in its printed form. By contrast, Walker pursued a rigorously contemporary agenda sharply focused on modern stage practice. Where the pace of theatrical change was likely to exceed the relative permanence of print, he made no effort to pretend otherwise (which is why none of his editions feature cast lists at all). The text, however, was governed by the stage: unspoken lines had no theatrical warrant

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and could be deleted. Thus Tonson’s notion of a ‘Genuine Edition’ was not only disingenuous (he himself merely reprinted the old Wilks-Hughes text rather than one of the non-theatrical versions in his copyright); it was also simply irrelevant for Walker’s project. The best Hamlet was not the text with the strongest scholarly credentials, but rather the one most directly connected to the stage. By the same token, the charge that Walker had printed the wrong King Lear was almost incomprehensible. Walker responded with a list of ‘Tonson’s Omissions and Blunders in the Tragedy of King Lear which render the same useless and unintelligible’. Chief among those is the title: ‘The Life and Death of King Lear’, when every theatregoer knows that ‘in the Play as it has been acted for near 50 Years last past (tho’ Tonson’s spurious Edition kills him on the Stage) King Lear at the Conclusion of the Play remains alive’. It is Tonson who, in following Rowe’s Folio-based text, has used ‘an erroneous Edition’ precisely because textual right and wrong ought to be determined by current theatrical practice: ‘[T]here is not one Scene in the whole as Acted at the Theatre, neither has it the same beginning or ending.’ Walker knows that the modern Lear is Tate’s ‘revival’, but since onstage, that version is the only King Lear, Shakespeare’s text needs to follow suit – or risk reading as little more than ‘maim’d Scraps’.18 Walker’s determination to cast the contemporary theatre (rather than the author or his manuscripts) as the true origin for ‘genuine editions’ of plays could never be fully realized, since many of the titles he was printing had not been staged at all since the Restoration, not even in heavily adapted forms. Offering Antony and Cleopatra ‘as acted’ was simply false advertising for Walker’s unacknowledged reprint of Rowe’s text. Similarly, his Macbeth (‘As it is Acted at the Theatres’), notwithstanding protestations about the ‘innumerable Omissions and Blunders’ in Tonson’s text, is a direct reprint of the latter’s Pope edition, footnotes and all, and lacks most of the lines and scenes added by Davenant that remained popular on the eighteenth-century stage.19 What is very clear, though, is that Walker did not routinely follow the easy route of simply setting his duodecimos from one of Tonson’s Works editions; where copy with strong theatrical connections existed, Walker deliberately sought it out. Thus his Measure for Measure ignores Rowe and instead faithfully reprints Tonson’s 1722 single-text ‘as acted’ edition. As with his Hamlet, Walker took care to remove the outdated theatrical information from the 1722 original (since, by 1733, Measure for Measure was no longer being performed ‘at the

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Theatre-Royal in Lincoln Inn’s Fields’ but rather at Covent Garden); unlike in his Hamlet, he printed (but marked) passages identified for theatrical omission in Tonson’s text.20 Tonson’s counter-edition in this case takes a stand for the study: not only does it reprint Theobald’s still fairly hot-off-the-press version of the text, it also includes a prefatory note from William Chetwood, ‘Prompter to His Majesty’s Company of Comedians at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane’. Not only are Tonson’s texts better edited; Walker’s, says the well-respected prompter, do not even have the theatrical warrant he claims for them. Nobody, Chetwood writes, ‘ever had, directly, or indirectly, from me any such Copy or Copies; neither would I be accessary, on any Account, to the imposing on the Publick such useless, pirated and maimed Editions, as are published by the said R. Walker’.21 A voice of the theatre speaking out against Walker like this clearly stung – and it went to the heart of his project. He responded to the ‘absurd and impartinent’ statement with vigor: he never claimed to have ‘made use of any Copy obtained from’ Chetwood, nor would he have had any use for the prompter’s ‘Marks of Exits, Entrances, Properties, &c.’. The text authorized by the theatre is a desideratum; reproducing a promptbook, however, is not. More importantly, the claim that Walker is not selling the text as spoken onstage is easily falsified: ‘this is a Falsehood that almost every Reader is able to discover, who, without doubt, can judge of this as well as the Prompter, the CandleSnuffer, or any other Servant of the House’, presumably by taking the book to the theatre and comparing its words to the actors’.22 Walker’s editions thus insist on both their theatrical warrant and their detachability from that source: they owe their existence to the stage, but they also point away from the theatre and its personnel, to the (post-theatrical) reader. * The Tonson-Walker dispute turned on divergent notions about what printed plays are, and whence their specific textual authority derives – but the dispute was one among printers. Although the debate implicated the theatre, it took place entirely in the realm of the book. The theatre, meanwhile, carried on regardless, making its own texts out of those books. There is no better example of that text-producing activity than David Garrick’s notorious 1772 version of Hamlet, an ‘alteration’ that may have restored a significant number of lines

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and phrases cut or rewritten since Betterton, but also eliminated nearly all of Act 5, including the gravediggers and Yorick’s skull. In producing his highly idiosyncratic script, Garrick began by abandoning the text he had spoken since 1742 – the version we encountered above in the 1763 printing that omitted all the unspoken lines. To start fresh, Garrick instead went back to the 1718 Wilks-Hughes text, inserting his notes and cuts by hand into a 1747 reprint but ignoring the recommended stage omissions with their inverted commas.23 Looking at the volume, his interventions at first appear comparatively gentle. He imposes his own five-act structure on the text, with a first break after 1.2, and makes some significant cuts, especially to Claudius’ and Hamlet’s parts, but whole scenes seem intended to be played as written: 2.1 is entirely uncut; in 2.2, the text remains unscathed until Hamlet enters the scene, at which point Garrick removes most of the text Wilks and Hughes had imported from the Folio.24 But until 4.1, this is a rather superficial treatment, marking nothing but deleted lines. Once past the closet scene, Garrick becomes a wholly different editor.25 Suddenly, he is altering the text on the level of the word, shifting some entrances and exits, and drawing on Johnson’s 1765 edition for a number of emendations.26 On occasion, the printed text is displaced by slips of paper with manuscript rewrites. Thus, Fortinbras remains absent in 4.4 (as he had been in Betterton’s and Wilks-Hughes’s versions), but the noise of his army is heard: ‘Scene a Wood. Trumpets & Drums at a distance. Enter Hamlet & Rosencrans meeting Guildenstern’. The lines about Fortinbras’ Polish exploits are now spoken by Guildenstern, and then, unusually, Hamlet gets to speak his last soliloquy – even though it ends with lines Garrick dashed off in the margin: ‘My thoughts be bloody all! The hour is come – / I’ll fly my Keepers – sweep to my revenge.’27 Garrick’s volume thus combines the printed record of a previous stage version with text drawn from the scholarly editorial tradition and with his own handwritten pages, but the document becomes more layered still as it goes on. Starting with Laertes’ reappearance in Denmark, Garrick pastes printed passages of the text into his copy to allow him to reshuffle chunks of dialogue: thus the exchange between Claudius and Laertes that normally follows Ophelia’s exit is inserted, in printed form, before her entrance, followed by a manuscript stage direction: ‘as they are going they see Ophelia’28 (see Figure 11.1). From there, a series of paste-ins completely takes over from the

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Figure 11.1  Text cut from the 1767 edition pasted into the 1747 edition for use in Garrick’s Hamlet production of 1772. PROMPT Ham 16, 72-73, Folger Shakespeare Library. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

book itself, transporting the play, via three printed insertions, from Ophelia’s exit to lines drawn from Laertes’ words by her grave (‘Oh treble woe / Fall ten times double on that cursed head’). And from there, two manuscript leaves collaging some Shakespearean lines and Garrick’s own inventions complete the script: Hamlet storms in; Claudius admonishes him that ‘you have trampled on Allegiance, / And now shall feel my Wrath; Hamlet, sweeping to his revenge with gusto, stabs him (‘First feel mine!’), and then runs onto Laertes’ sword; Fortinbras never shows up; Gertrude and Ophelia are abandoned to an uncertain fate offstage; and Horatio and Laertes reconcile to clean up the mess. The holograph pages make Garrick’s presence unmistakable, but he was there in the printed insertions already: those slips of printed material were clipped not from another copy of the Wilks-Hughes text, but from a 1767 reissue of Garrick’s first Hamlet – the 1763 edition with its many deletions that we encountered above.29

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And the reshuffling of printed material in the assembly of an acting text did not stop there. A second working script associated with Garrick’s 1772 Hamlet survives in the Folger collection, although it has been almost completely ignored by scholars.30 The annotating hand seems to be that of William Hopkins, then the Drury Lane prompter, who marked up the text with the very exits and entrances Walker thought so uninteresting: the pages are littered with ‘PS’ and ‘OP’ notations (‘prompt side’ and ‘opposite prompt’, or ‘stage left’ and ‘stage right’ in modern North American parlance). This Hamlet is cut much more extensively in the scenes preceding Act 4 than Garrick’s lightly workedover copy was, bringing the text into closer alignment with the versions to which eighteenth-century audiences were accustomed while still retaining more of some scenes than was common (especially in Act 1). But if the volume represents a version chronologically closer to what was actually staged in 1772 than Garrick’s own annotated copy, the printed text it alters was decades older than that copy: Hopkins wrote his annotations not in the 1718 Wilks-Hughes text or Garrick’s 1763 edition but the last reprint of the old Betterton text – a quarto from 1703. The format of the book may in fact have been the deciding factor, since the 1703 volume has larger pages and more generous margins than the later duodecimos. In other words, from the prompter’s perspective, paper as much as the playscript was crucial theatrical raw material. Even though Hopkins as a consequence was working from a text featuring more frequent Restoration rephrasing than the copy Garrick used, his annotations throughout display the close attention on the level of the word that Garrick only began to pay in Act 4. On dozens of occasions, Hopkins turned to Pope’s edition (not Johnson’s, curiously) to remove Restoration alterations and correct the text. As a result of this textual labour, some of the glaring non-Shakespearean readings that had survived in the lightly annotated pages of Garrick’s copy disappeared. Hamlet now told the players to ‘speak the speech’ ‘trippingly’ (not ‘smoothly’ as Garrick’s Wilks-Hughes text had it); and whereas every post-King’s-Men edition of Hamlet, including Garrick’s earlier iteration, spoke of ‘the healthful face of resolution’, Hopkins’s annotations restore, for the first time, the ‘native hue of resolution’.31 What kind of book did Drury Lane produce, then, as Garrick prepared his 1772 take on Hamlet? A fairly wild amalgam of at least five different printed versions of the play – a 1703 reprint of Betterton’s edit; a 1747 reprint of the

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Wilks-Hughes revision of that edit; a 1767 reissue of the 1763 Garrick text; Pope’s 1725 edition; and Johnson’s 1765 edition – pasted together with pages written by Garrick and then copied onto new sheets, again interleaved, by Hopkins. Editorially, this textual hybrid allowed theatrical tradition, scholarly labour and theatrical innovation to coexist, often in haphazard ways. For example, in 4.5, Garrick was pedantic enough to change the Wilks-Hughes alteration ‘Let come what will, I’ll be reveng’d’ back to the original (which Betterton had retained!) ‘Let come what comes; only I’ll be reveng’d’; and a few lines further down, to change Claudius’ ‘relieve them with my blood’ back to the Shakespearean ‘repast’ (which Hopkins ignored, letting Betterton’s ‘relieve’ stand). Simultaneously, though, in between those two alterations, Garrick left untouched ‘Will you in Revenge of your / Dear Father’s Death, destroy both Friend and Foe’, the anodyne Restoration summary of Shakespeare’s rather more colourful ‘If you desire to know the certainty / Of your dear father, is’t writ in your revenge / That swoopstake you will draw both friend and foe, / Winner and loser’ (4.5.139–42). Fussy attention to single words and random negligence sit side by side with a readiness to delete or radically remodel entire scenes: the very same page also contains the first of Garrick’s printed paste-ins.32 The Drury Lane palimpsest never became a published book. The company guarded it like a trade secret, refusing to even let outsiders see it – presumably because Garrick’s staged version, always advertised as ‘Hamlet (With Alterations)’, was an exceptionally valuable commercial property.33 In its absence, other texts stood in as substitutes. There was Tate Wilkinson’s Hamlet with Alterations, which he prepared for provincial performances in 1773, having been denied a copy of Garrick’s ‘corrections’, and published twenty years later.34 Garrick’s old 1763 version, the source of those clipped paste-ins, also reappeared, in John Bell’s famous multi-volume Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, As they are now performed at the Theatres Royal in London (first in volume 3 in 1773, and thereafter as a single-volume text in 1777 and beyond). This much grander successor to Robert Walker’s project provided ‘acting editions’ supposedly authorized by the two patent companies and came equipped with an apparatus of mordant commentary by Francis Gentleman – a remarkable hybrid of the increasingly annotation-encrusted scholarly editions and the old ‘as acted’ quartos and duodecimos.35

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Unlike Walker, Bell explicitly linked the authority of his edition to an association with prompters, though in the case of his Hamlet, that claim may have been counterfactual. Despite its connections to Garrick’s first generation of edits, the volume’s title page describes it as ‘performed at the TheatreRoyal, Covent-Garden. Regulated from the Prompt-Book, with permission of the Managers, by Mr. Younger, Prompter’.36 Even as neither the text nor the company highlighted on the title page was quite that of the most visible theatrical Hamlet in 1773, that absent version and its famous alterations positively haunt Gentleman’s footnotes, which repeatedly foreground the gap between what Garrick is doing and what the printed text offers. Having dedicated the entire enterprise to Garrick, ‘the best illustrator of, and the best living comment on, Shakespeare, that ever has appeared’; and having argued, in their ‘Advertisement’, that the theatres ‘especially of late, have been generally right in their omissions’, thus protecting their author from himself in downplaying ‘scenes and passages highly derogatory to his incomparable general merit’; and having promised to provide with their edition, an ideal ‘companion to the theatre’ especially for such readers who habitually ‘take books to the theatre’, Bell and Gentleman found themselves in the awkward position of having to print a text that hardly matched those goals and promises.37 As a stopgap measure, Gentleman’s notes report, for instance, that Garrick’s ‘late alteration of the play has judiciously shortened’ the ‘too long’ Act 1 printed in Bell’s edition. Elsewhere, he comments that Garrick includes the ‘How all occasions’ soliloquy ‘not censurably’ because in his version, it works – whereas in the version Bell prints, it is ‘a very unessential scene, unworthy the closet and stage’, and therefore not even included in a footnote (unlike some other passages cut from the 1763 copytext).38 Act 5 in particular – that is to say, the very ‘catastrophe’ Garrick remodelled so completely – ‘is by no means so good as the three first’; a ‘very reprehensible’ scene; and the ‘worst part’ of the play. But without access to the reformed Drury Lane text, Bell and Gentleman have no choice but to print Shakespeare’s own inferior version.39 Audiences attending shows with book in hand was more than John Bell’s wishful fantasy. A contemporaneous letter supplies us with ‘a vivid picture of the audience’ at a performance of Addison’s Cato at Covent Garden: ‘half the house holding books of the play in their hands as if they were at a lecture in oratory’.40 Garrick was well aware that the theatrical experience of his Hamlet

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might prove ‘confounding’ to audiences familiar with the printed text. He says as much in a 1776 letter to Mme Necker, then visiting London and about to see his production: the copy of the play you have got from the Bookseller will mislead You without some direction from Me – the first Act which is very long in the original is by me divided into two Acts – the 3.d Act, as I Act it, is the 2.d in the Original – the 3d in the original is the 4th in Mine, and ends with the famous Scene between Hamlet and his Mother – and the 5.th Act in my Alteration, consists of the 4th & 5th of the original with some small alterations, and the omission of some Scenes, particularly the Gravediggers – all I could wish is, that Mrs. Necker would look over & consider the Scenes of Hamlet only – She will be confounded if she Endeavors to study ye whole, as there is so short a time before it is play’d.41

In an environment where the theatre still freely turned Shakespeare’s works into books of its own, the simultaneous, and increasing, circulation of Shakespeare editions (perhaps especially alternate ‘theatre editions’) set up a competition between texts, rather than simply between text and performance, and made special instructions, and preparatory study, necessary if confusion was to be avoided. In the case of Hamlet, though, the situation for an English audience clearly differed from that of the French visitor, if the German aphorist and physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s account is to be trusted. Lichtenberg saw Garrick play the role multiple times the year before Mme Necker’s visit, and was struck by the audience’s profound familiarity with at least parts of the text, in particular their quasi-devotional reception of ‘the famous monologue’, ‘To be or not to be’: a large part of the assembly [Versammlung] not only knows it by heart like the Lord’s Prayer, but as it were listens to the speaking of it like the Lord’s Prayer, not, of course, with the lofty notions that go with our hallowed prayer, but with a sensation of ceremony and solemnity that is impossible to convey to anyone who does not know England first-hand. Shakespeare is not famous in this island, but holy.42

On the one hand, then, Hamlet, for this audience, seems to have been a deeply internalized text: the audience is off book as much as the players.

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But Lichtenberg’s response also registers the bookish life of the ‘famous monologue’. He notes that ‘some propose’ that in the speech’s fourth line, ‘against a sea of troubles’ ought to be altered to ‘against assailing troubles’, since ‘one cannot take arms against a sea’. Yet, ‘Mr Garrick says “against a sea of troubles” regardless. I only give you Garrick’s voice, leaving unexamined what authorities he may have on his side.’43 Given the liberal cuts to the play and the complete refashioning of the fifth act, it may seem odd that Lichtenberg thinks Garrick might need any authority but his own to do with Shakespeare whatever he deems necessary. But the moment registers the same complex, even contradictory, negotiation of theatrical, authorial and editorial power that the physical make-up of both Garrick’s and Hopkins’s books also illustrate. The same speech that can function as a secular sacred text can also be subject to textual interrogation and emendation. What is more, its ‘hallowed’ quality does not extend to the full play, the ‘variety’ of which could be described as ‘often impertinent, and always languishing on the stage’ by as eminent an editor as George Steevens – in a letter to Garrick applauding his planned alterations.44 Yet that same Steevens, writing pseudonymously in the St James’s Chronicle, seems to insist that whether something lives or languishes on the stage cannot be the basis for proper judgment: ‘I have been deceived often by the Power of Action’, he concedes, and refuses to give my Opinion upon the Merit of the Alteration till I have seen its Effects and considered the Whole with its Restorations, Omissions, Divisions, Transpositions, Connections, and Additions in my Closet, should the Alterations be ever published.45

Before Garrick’s version can really be critically assessed, that is, it needs to be available as a book.46 However, becoming the kind of object one can study in one’s closet, in private, non-confounding contemplation is precisely the destination Garrick refused his Hamlet. Emily Hodgson Anderson has recently argued that Garrick’s displacement of the play’s most iconically contemplative moment, the confrontation with Yorick’s skull, in favour of a scene of his own making can be read as the replacement of a monumental logic of commemoration – a Folio logic, perhaps – with an understanding of ‘the playscript as dynamic – something whose afterlife rests in the promise that it can be rewritten’.47 In this light, Garrick seems to locate the life of the

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play precisely in the distance between the dynamic nature of the theatrical book and the static nature of the book an audience member might bring to the theatre. Rewriting, engaging new acts of textual production, is part of the theatrical process; but the moment those theatrical books turn into copies of the play one may buy from a bookseller, they risk losing the name of action. * The desire to bring Garrick’s alteration from stage to closet – as a monument to the ‘most imprudent thing’ he ever did or as a document of redemption, revealing the great ‘restorations’ alongside the radical cuts – continues into our own time.48 From the early nineteenth century on, it sent scholars on an antiquarian chase for those elusive theatrical books, difficult to preserve let alone to make sense of. James Boswell the younger included a transcript of Garrick’s rewritten final act in his 1821 edition of Shakespeare’s works, as evidence of the pernicious effect of the ‘French criticism’ that led the actor to believe he was ‘doing the publick a service in so grossly sophisticating one of [Shakespeare’s] noblest plays’. Boswell had access to a copy ‘printed in 4to. in 1703’ with the ‘supposed corrections’ entered in it, which may or may not be the copy now in the Folger.49 A few years later, James Boaden, in his biography of John Philip Kemble, included an account of coming across Garrick’s own copy of the alterations in Kemble’s library; this, too, was a copy of the 1703 quarto, which, for Boaden, recorded not only Garrick’s failure of ‘taste and judgment’, but also the ‘unpardonable liberties taken by another great actor, Mr. Betterton’.50 By 1865, one of those marked-up quartos had passed through the hands of Benjamin Webster – ironically, the first theatre maker ever known to have staged a Shakespeare play without cutting anything – via a Kennington Road bookseller to Percy Fitzgerald, who recognized William Hopkins’s hand in the annotations and identified the volume as a prompt book. Fitzgerald, too, transcribed and published the final act, and since it corresponds verbatim to the version Boswell printed, this may have been the same book; but he includes a copy of Claudius’ ‘when sorrows come, they come not single spies’ speech, and it does not correspond to either of the Folger versions.51 Finally, in 1934, George Winchester Stone discovered that the Folger had Garrick’s own working copy in its collection, read it (surprisingly) as a monument to textual respect, and published a transcript, convinced that the only reason Garrick’s

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theatrical labour had been so maligned was that ‘the Alteration was never printed, and had never been seen in its true form by any of the commentators’.52 That ‘true form’ was then reproduced in The Plays of David Garrick in 1981.53 In a sense, the volume Stone found was in fact ‘true’ to Garrick’s alterations. It is a record of process in action: another snapshot. Exactly what it represents is difficult to grasp: it is a book-like thing of theatrical origins and for theatrical purposes, a transitional object of sorts, the kind of book that gets made and unmade in the theatrical process, not as an end-product but as a necessary in-between along the way from playtext to performance. But neither it nor any of the other documents we have – transcripts, incomplete promptbooks – are exactly the Drury Lane book itself. None of them quite capture, or even attempt to capture, the play ‘as it was acted’. Then again, no book could: because as misleading as the books booksellers sell may be with regard to the performance one is about to encounter, the books the theatre makes are just as confounding when one encounters them apart from the performance for which they were made. Bibliogonic and bibliophagic, the theatre made (and makes) books as well as performances out of books; more precisely, its bookmaking serves to produce material – somewhat predigested rather than raw, perhaps – for performance, but not for readers. In that sense, Walker was right about Chetwood and his ilk: readers need books, not promptbooks, to (re)experience, as readers, the play ‘as it is acted’.

Notes 1 W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 23–4. 2 Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 3 Stephen Orgel, ‘What Is an Editor?’, Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996): 23. 4 See G. Blakemore Evans, ed., Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century, 8 vols (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1960–96). Available online: http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/ (accessed 28 February 2021); and Jean-Christophe Mayer, ‘Annotating and Transcribing for the Theatre: Shakespeare’s Early Modern Reader-Revisers at Work’, in Shakespeare and Textual

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Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 163–76.   5 See Robert D. Hume, ‘Before the Bard: “Shakespeare” in Early EighteenthCentury London’, ELH 64 (1997): 60.   6 See Marcus Walsh, ‘Editing and Publishing Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 21–40.   7 ESTC R17530; R35173; T51530; T35952. Early printed texts referenced only briefly will be cited by ESTC number. On the importance of these performance texts for the editorial tradition, see Barbara Mowat, ‘The Form of Hamlet’s Fortunes’, Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 97–126.   8 ESTC R17530, sig. A2r. For a rich analysis of this edition, see Claire M. L. Bourne, ‘Dramatic Typography and the Restoration Quartos of Hamlet’, in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640–1740, ed. Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 153–70. See also Michael Dobson, ‘Cutting, Interruption, and the End of Hamlet’, New Theatre Quarterly 32 (2016): 269–75.   9 ESTC T35951, and T35952 (e.g.), 4, for the familiar note. 10 These revisions were ascribed to Davenant by Hazelton Spencer in 1923, a theory that ‘has not been substantially reinvestigated since’ but is regularly treated as quasi-factual in the scholarly literature (Peter Holland, ‘Theatre Editions’, in Kidnie and Massai, eds., Shakespeare and Textual Studies, 235). 11 See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 700–4, for print runs and prices. 12 ESTC T164338, 108. On the dispute, see Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 107–10. 13 See Don-John Dugas, Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660–1740 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 221 and 232; and St Clair, Reading Nation, 699, who cites print runs of 10,000 copies for Tonson’s duodecimos. 14 ESTC T54140 (All’s Well That Ends Well), 84. 15 ESTC T164338 (Tonson), 6; T54098 (Walker), 4. 16 The shorter text would have resulted in a slightly cheaper book, but, as my argument will demonstrate, it is unlikely that saving a sheet of paper was Walker’s primary motivation.

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17 See Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93). 18 ESTC T54114 (The Puritan), unpaginated leaf following page 59. 19 ESTC T54110 (Antony and Cleopatra); T54104 (Macbeth). Walker did manage to include two of Davenant’s songs in an appendix, though Tonson may have beaten him to the punch in this: the title page of his edition of Macbeth (ESTC T54706) proudly announced ‘To which are added, All the Original Songs. Never Printed in any of the former Editions’, a claim for ‘originality’ starkly at odds with Tonson’s statements in his other advertisements. 20 ESTC T54108 (Walker); T62203 (Tonson 1722); Charles Beecher Hogan, Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1701–1800: A Record of Performance in London, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952–57), 1:304. 21 ESTC T54715, sig. A2r. 22 ESTC T54110 (Antony and Cleopatra), 95. On the debate carried out in these advertisements and prefaces, see Robert B. Hamm, Jr., ‘Walker v. Tonson in the Court of Public Opinion’, Huntington Library Quarterly 75 (2012): 95–112. 23 Folger Shakespeare Library PROMPT Ham 16. 24 References to the modern text and scene divisions in Hamlet are to the Arden Shakespeare Third Series text, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006). 25 The volume may well record multiple different engagements: the edits to the scenes preceding 4.1 might not have been part of the 1772 revisions, or might have been a preliminary first effort. Vanessa Cunningham has persuasively argued that Garrick’s cuts do not seem to represent the final state of the text (see Shakespeare and Garrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 142–4). 26 See George Winchester Stone, Jr., ‘Garrick’s Long Lost Alteration of Hamlet’, PMLA 49 (1934): 900. 27 Folger PROMPT Ham 16, 68. 28 Ibid., 72–3. 29 Stone, ‘Garrick’s Alteration’, 916. As Jeffrey Lawson Laurence Johnson has shown, there are in fact two layers of holograph insertions: Garrick wrote one version of the ending and then added a further piece of paper with revisions. See ‘Sweeping up Shakespeare’s “Rubbish”: Garrick’s Condensation of Acts IV & V of Hamlet’, Eighteenth-Century Life 8, no. 3 (1983): 22–3.

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30 Folger Shakespeare Library PROMPT Ham 1. The volume is listed in Charles H. Shattuck, The Shakespeare Promptbooks: A Descriptive Catalogue (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 92, but only vaguely identified (‘probably deriving from the Garrick book after 1773’). To my knowledge, G. Blakemore Evans is the only scholar who, in his collation notes on the Smock Alley Hamlet promptbook, has recognized the significance of this book (see http://bsuva.org/ bsuva/promptbook/ShaHamP.html#n22 [accessed 28 February 2021]). 31 Folger PROMPT Ham 1, 39 and 36. Part of the reason this volume has been ignored is that it seems to be unfinished: annotations end with Ophelia’s last exit (62). But, as Evans has suggested, the volume probably once contained a manuscript copy of the final scene which has since been lost. With that in place, the book would be a far more finished acting text than Garrick’s copy. 32 Folger PROMPT Ham 16, 72. 33 On the popularity of the 1772 Hamlet, see Stone, ‘Garrick’s Alteration’, 904–5. 34 See Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 5: 1765–1774 (London: Routledge, 1979), 504–10. 35 On Bell’s Shakespeare, and Gentleman’s commentary in particular, see Holland, ‘Theatre Edition’, 240–4; and Laurie E. Osborne, ‘The Texts of Twelfth Night’, ELH 57 (1990): 37–61. 36 ESTC N474724, vol. 3, 139. 37 ESTC N474724, vol. 1, iv, 5–8. Stuart Sillars correctly notes that, as a rule, ‘Bell’s volumes … make no specific references to the productions whose texts they print’ (‘Seeing, Studying, Performing: Bell’s Edition of Shakespeare and Performative Reading’, Performance Research 10 (2005): 21). It is therefore doubly noteworthy that in the case of Hamlet, Gentleman repeatedly references the production whose text wasn’t printed. 38 ESTC N474724, vol. 3, 162, 197. 39 ESTC N474724, vol. 3, 217, 220. 40 Valerie Fairbrass, ‘“What Printers Ink does each Week for the Theatres”: Printing for the Theatre in the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries’, Publishing History 67 (2010): 42. 41 Folger Shakespeare Library Y.c.2600 (212). 42 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wolfgang Promies, 6 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1972), 3:341 (translation mine). 43 Lichtenberg, Schriften, 3:342. Lichtenberg appears to have Hanmer’s 1744 edition in mind. 44 Vickers, Critical Heritage, 456.

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45 Reprinted in ibid., 476 and 478. 46 It seems that Steevens eventually did get to read Garrick’s version in some format, since a set of notes in his hand survive among Garrick’s papers. Despite Steevens’s insistence on considering the text in isolation from its performance, some of his notes highlight instances where the cut text differs from what he has heard Garrick speak onstage. See James Boaden, ed., The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), 1:453–4; and cf. Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick, 160–1. 47 Emily Hodgson Anderson, Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 66. 48 Letter from David Garrick to Sir William Young, 10 January 1773, in David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 2:845–6. 49 James Boswell, ed., The plays and poems of William Shakspeare, 21 vols (London: F. C. and J. Rivington [et al.], 1821), 2:691–94. 50 James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble (Philadelphia: Robert H. Small, 1825), 65. 51 Percy Fitzgerald, ‘“Hamlet,” with Alterations’, The Theatre (1 May 1886): 255. 52 Stone, ‘Garrick’s Alteration’, 892. 53 Fredrick Louis Bergmann and Harry William Pedicord, eds., The Plays of David Garrick, 7 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980–2), 4:241–324.

Bibliography Anderson, Emily Hodgson. Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Bergmann, Fredrick Louis, and Harry William Pedicord, eds. The Plays of David Garrick, 7 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980-82. Boaden, James. Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble. Philadelphia: Robert H. Small, 1825. Boaden, James, ed. The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831. Bourne, Claire M. L. ‘Dramatic Typography and the Restoration Quartos of Hamlet’. In Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640–1740, edited by Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan, 153–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

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Cunningham, Vanessa. Shakespeare and Garrick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Dobson, Michael. ‘Cutting, Interruption, and the End of Hamlet’. New Theatre Quarterly 32 (2016): 269–75. Dugas, Don-John. Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660–1740. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Evans, G. Blakemore, ed. Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century. 8 vols. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1960–96. Available online: http://bsuva.org/bsuva/promptbook/ (accessed 28 February 2021). Fairbrass, Valerie. ‘‘What Printers Ink Does each Week for the Theatres’: Printing for the Theatre in the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries’. Publishing History 67 (2010): 39–63. Fitzgerald, Percy. ‘“Hamlet,” with Alterations’. The Theatre (1 May 1886): 252–6. Hamm, Jr., Robert B. ‘Walker v. Tonson in the Court of Public Opinion’. Huntington Library Quarterly 75 (2012): 95–112. Highfill, Jr., Philip H., Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, eds. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93. Hogan, Charles Beecher. Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1701–1800: A Record of Performance in London, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952–7. Holland, Peter. ‘Theatre Editions’. In Shakespeare and Textual Studies, edited by Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai, 233–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Hume, Robert D. ‘Before the Bard: “Shakespeare” in Early Eighteenth-Century London’. English Literary History 64 (1997): 41–75. Johnson, Jeffrey Lawson Laurence. ‘Sweeping up Shakespeare’s “Rubbish”: Garrick’s Condensation of Acts IV & V of Hamlet’. Eighteenth-Century Life 8, no. 3 (1983): 14–25. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Schriften und Briefe. Edited by Wolfgang Promies, 6 vols. Munich: Hanser, 1972. Little, David M., and George M. Kahrl, eds. The Letters of David Garrick, 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Mayer, Jean-Christophe. ‘Annotating and Transcribing for the Theatre: Shakespeare’s Early Modern Reader-Revisers at Work’. In Shakespeare and Textual Studies, edited by Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai, 163–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Mowat, Barbara. ‘The Form of Hamlet’s Fortunes’. Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 97–126.

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Murphy, Andrew. Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Orgel, Stephen. ‘What is an Editor?’ Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996): 23–9. Osborne, Laurie E. ‘The Texts of Twelfth Night’. English Literary History 57 (1990): 37–61. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Thomson Learning, 2006. Shattuck, Charles H. The Shakespeare Promptbooks: A Descriptive Catalogue. Urbana, IL, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1965. Sillars, Stuart. ‘Seeing, Studying, Performing: Bell’s Edition of Shakespeare and Performative Reading’. Performance Research 10 (2005): 18–27. St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Stone, Jr., George Winchester. ‘Garrick’s Long Lost Alteration of Hamlet’. PMLA 49 (1934): 890–921. Vickers, Brian, ed. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 5: 1765–1774. London: Routledge, 1979. Walsh, Marcus. ‘Editing and Publishing Shakespeare’. In Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, 21–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Worthen, W. B. Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

12

Text-based / concept-driven Katherine Steele Brokaw

One of my fondest memories of being in a theatre, August 2019: I am in tears as Indian drummers from London’s Dhol Academy join over one hundred community cast members for the musical finale of the National Theatre’s Public Acts production of As You Like It, produced with and at Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch. The stage fills with performers who represent the diversity of London in all its beauty and strength: immigrants, children and teenagers, elderly adults, people in wheelchairs. As the drummers surround the audience and the cast raise their voices, they repeat the chorus – written by New York singer-composer Shaina Taub1 – that articulates the mantra of this community-based theatre project: At our bravest and weakest Our worst and our best Still I will love Still I will love.

Remembering this extra-textual theatrical moment while I’m sheltering in place due to the pandemic in June 2020, at a time when the future of the Public Acts programme and indeed all theatrical endeavour is uncertain, I am again overcome. When Shakespearean theatre returns to live stages, this is the kind of theatre I want to see. Public Acts, the National Theatre’s community theatre programme based on Public Works at New York’s Public Theater, ‘shows why theatre matters’, writes project researcher Helen Nicholson.2 But for Shakespearean theatre to matter in the twenty-first century, critics, scholars and practitioners need different ways to measure its cultural worth beyond valuing authoritative notions like

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textual fidelity or directorial concept. The ways productions contextualize themselves in their community and world – and the creative energies of an entire cast and production team – are as or more crucial to theatrical meaningmaking in today’s world.3 This chapter argues that twentieth-century critics and directors codified a false binary between ‘text-based’ and ‘concept-driven’ productions that has long done a disservice to the affective and social work performed on a Shakespearean stage. The Public Acts As You Like It was not, in Stephen Purcell’s words, ‘astonishingly moving’ and ‘brimming with hope and kindness’ because of its adherence to Shakespeare’s words or its sophisticated concept: its power came from context, from the production’s thoughtful embeddedness in its community.4 In what follows, I lay out a history of influential AngloAmerican conceptions of Shakespearean performance texts,5 and then analyse manifestations and rejections of these attitudes in 2019 productions of As You Like It: at the Royal Shakespeare Company; at Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch via Public Acts; and by Shakespeare in Yosemite (California), a production on which I collaborated. Instead of evaluating and analysing a Shakespearean performance in terms of its textual fidelity or conceptual audacity, I propose that the effectiveness of twenty-first-century Shakespearean theatre is best understood according to the way it responds to the context in which it is produced. A focus on the way producers of Shakespeare adapt the texts to root them in their present moment also alerts us to the way textual adaptation and theatrical creativity are crucial to the sustainability of Shakespearean theatre itself.

Texts versus concepts: A brief history Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, directors, actors, reviewers and audiences have often self-divided into two broad camps, those who say they value ‘textual fidelity’, and those who prefer the directorial innovation of a ‘concept-driven’ production. However, ‘text-based’ productions are informed by all sorts of ‘imposed’ ideas: ideas about verse speaking, Folio punctuation and original practices, for example. Productions deemed ‘conceptual’ are not un-textual, but rather they are often more honest about

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their interpretive, adaptive uses of Shakespeare’s text to create new works of art. To begin with, then, ‘textual fidelity’ vs ‘concept’ is a false binary. Nonetheless, the notion that there is an opposition between texts and concepts (or ideas) is perpetuated in, for example, Royal Shakespeare Company director Gregory Doran’s programme note for his 2018 Troilus and Cressida. Paying tribute to the recently deceased John Barton, Doran said that his production was about ‘guiding actors to mine the text for indications of character embedded within, rather than imposing ideas upon it’.6 Doran’s antonymic ‘mine’ and ‘impose’ are often used in such statements: the implication is that Shakespearean texts are full of precious gems that theatre artists ‘mine’ out of the rocks in which they are embedded, but that overzealous artists cover up those gems by ‘imposing’ ideas on top of them. These verbs are echoed by scholars of Shakespearean theatre: describing director Peter Hall, Peter Holland says that ‘his work has been characterized by a consistent sense of the obligation to mine the text rather than impose on it’.7 The recent positive associations with mining Shakespearean texts have come a long way since John Dryden said of Troilus and Cressida that he was rewriting it in an attempt ‘to remove that heap of Rubbish, under which many excellent thoughts lay bury’d’.8 Indeed, some of today’s theatre makers and scholars think of Shakespeare’s texts as perfect, in danger of being made into rubbish by burying the words in ideas. Critics and audiences often replicate these value judgements, praising productions they see as text-based for preserving the ‘sanctity of the line’,9 whereas conceptual productions are seen to be ‘mucking about with Shakespeare’:10 the language of poetic purity versus theatrical dirtiness is not uncommon. But theatrical concepts are not (necessarily) dirty, the Shakespearean ‘text’ (whatever that is taken to mean) is not inherently pure, and the notion that productions are more textual and pure or less textual and dirty (or funky, if we are to put it in a more positive light) is reductive and not helpfully descriptive of what happens in rehearsal rooms and performances spaces. It has been twenty-two years since W. B. Worthen rightly argued that Shakespearean productions should be valued by their productive meanings rather than their proximity to notions of textual fidelity, or authorized ‘Shakespearean’ meaning.11 Worthen located Shakespearean performance at the centre of both literary and theatrical traditions and explained how

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twentieth-century institutionalized voices like academics, newspaper critics and RSC and National Theatre (London) directors tended to invoke surprisingly literary valuations of stable texts and an intending author; many still do. He warned that continuing to overvalue the literary and textual would ‘impoverish … the work of our own performances, and the work of the plays in our making of the world’.12 In the intervening years, the recently burgeoning fields of global, digital, adaptive and amateur Shakespeare and the continued proliferation of performances that fall into these categories have led many critics and practitioners to start valuing promiscuous creativity over textual purity. However, Doran’s recent remarks deriding concepts in favour of textual mining are of a piece with, for example, newspaper reviewer Michael Billington’s complaints in 2018 that Rufus Norris’s bleakly futuristic Macbeth at the National Theatre ‘shows scant regard for the poetry’ because actors are ‘subordinated to [an] idea … ’. Billington concluded that the production ‘squeezes the play into a rigid concept and in the process sacrifices its … mysterious poetry’.13 His judgements here are typical of attitudes that value Shakespeare’s text (‘poetry’) over the ideas and concepts the plays can inspire. The notion that concepts come at the expense of poetry implies that the most important creative work has been done in the long past, by Shakespeare, rather than during the production process by the director and her team of actors and designers. The word concept is from the Latin conceptum, the root from which English also gets the word ‘conceived’; to have a concept is to give birth to a new notion. Those sceptical of overly conceptual productions disparage the directorial mind spawning extraneous ideas without regard for the source of such inspiration: the text.14 Academic attitudes towards performance text have too often mirrored the journalistic ones of reviewers like Billington. Margaret Jane Kidnie argues that the academic valuing of ‘textual clues’ by scholars like R. A. Foakes, who said that ‘the less a production depends on the text … the less it has to do with Shakespeare’, overvalue ‘Shakespeare’s original’ and fail to account for how current cultural circumstances are always changing the way any ‘textual clue’ is deciphered in the first place.15 Such attitudes not only ignore their own context, but also undermine creativity and devalue cultural inclusivity. Journalists like Billington and academics like Foakes have perpetuated ideas

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about the virtues of textual accuracy that are rooted in the rhetoric and, to a lesser extent, the methods of influential directors whose values have become mainstream. In particular, Anglo-American directors of major professional companies have had an outsized worldwide influence; the work being done outside professional British and North American companies and in grassroots settings has generally been less influential on mainstream and academic thought. At the risk of oversimplification, I filter influential directors from the Anglo-American tradition into four categories: textual, conceptual, hybrid and community directors. These categories are based on the way these directors have talked about their work and influenced later thought. From William Poel’s late-nineteenth-century rejection of over-produced Victorian theatre in favour of paying attention to the particularities of the earliest Shakespearean texts to Doran’s more recent embrace of textual potential, textual directors also include a series of English scholar-artists, all of whom were educated at Cambridge by literary critic F. R. Leavis:16 Peter Hall, John Barton and Trevor Nunn.17 These directors’ commitments to excavating texts for meaning have defined the RSC house style, and while in practice they all made cuts and alterations to texts for performance, in theory they have advocated for cutting as little as possible from what’s printed in the Folio before putting it on stage.18 Directors more commonly praised or derided for their concepts include Peter Brook with his gestural and mythic emphases; Tyrone Guthrie with his fast-paced, heavily adapted and modernized productions; Canadian Robert LePage with his actively interventionist and freely adapted French- and English-language Shakespeare; and American Julie Taymor with her stylized, totemic productions for stage and screen.19 To take just one of these as an example of the creativity behind and resistance to ‘conceptual’ Shakespeare: LePage directs from the post-colonial context of French Quebec and has used Shakespeare as a creative springboard from which to irreverently jump on European sacred literary cows. Reactions to LePage’s 1992 Dream distill what distrust in concept can sound like: critics said the production ‘did not do justice to Shakespeare’s text’ and ‘threw mud at a classic’ (that language of dirtiness again).20 The creativity of LePage and others has also been praised and emulated, but it’s clear that directors continue to be scorned for imposing too many ideas and that the policing of Shakespearean textual purity endures.

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Terry Hands and Declan Donnellan can stand as examples of hybrid directors whose work and rhetoric acknowledges the importance of texts to their process as well as the need for conceptual decision-making that might result in some cutting and rewriting.21 Hands’s word-mining to uncover thematic concerns before restructuring the play and Donnellan’s focus on story and movement over textual accuracy split the difference between textual and conceptual. However, Barton and Nunn developed all sorts of concepts about Shakespeare’s plays while directing them, and Brook and Taymor didn’t exactly ignore the texts in their famous Dream and Titus productions; all directors are, in fact, hybrid in their methods. The primary factor in these categories is in how these directors talk about their work, and how that rhetoric influences other directors as well as critics and audiences. And the problem, as I see it, is that textual fidelity and directorial ideas have become the two primary ways Shakespearean performance gets approached and talked about. As Kidnie explains, ‘spectators evaluate particular performance choices’ based on how these choices correspond to ‘ideas of the play already held by viewers’; these ideas have formed a sort of cultural consensus that has been shaped by influential directors and critics who have reified the text / concept binary.22 But my fourth directorial category, the community director, works with their production team to create theatre out of the context in which they work: the artistic process decentres both the imposing director and the mineable text. Into this category I place Joan Littlewood, who founded the Theatre Workshop in 1945 and directed revolutionary, place-based theatre in London’s East End, as well as Joseph Papp, who founded the Public Theater in New York in 1954 and defined a populist Shakespeare that began the USA’s ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ tradition, one that now spans nearly fifty states.23 They are relatively famous examples of a phenomenon that extends to thousands of community directors who are making Shakespeare speak to their time and place all over the world, and have been doing so for centuries in classrooms, parks, prisons and regional theatres. Such directors often put their performance contexts and intended audiences – rather than text or concept – at the centre of their creative processes, thus privileging the community for which they perform and, by extension, the social and political implications of that performance. That is, rather than worrying about mining texts or imposing ideas, these productions are focused on rooting themselves

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in their communities, and they often do so in a way that centres the ideas and experiences of the whole production team and cast, rather than those thought to belong to Shakespeare or to an all-too-often white and male director. As a way of exploring the powerful legacies of this grassroots, community-based method of making theatre, I will now turn to recent productions of the same play, all presented in the UK and USA in 2019.

As You Like It at the RSC (Stratford, UK) In 2019, As You Like It played in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, directed by Kimberley Sykes. Sykes was hailed for her 2017 RSC production of Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, but her As You Like It revealed an inhibiting deference to the rhetoric of text-first directing that defines the RSC.24 There were things to admire about the production, particularly Lucy Phelps’s intelligent and energetic Rosalind and deaf actor Charlotte Arrowsmith’s genuinely innovative Audrey. But the production merely illustrated a few ideas mined from Shakespeare’s text, rather than grounding itself in a particular world, our own or otherwise. In the opening court scenes, place was unspecific: the actors wore generic Western modern dress, and a nationalistic anthem to Duke Frederick before the wrestling match indicated some sort of authoritarian society, but not so authoritarian as to be bothered by Touchstone running around court in a sparkle shirt and skin-tight plaid trousers. The initial set’s primary feature was an Astro-turf circle centre stage, which Rosalind ripped up after Frederick pronounced her banishment. This action revealed that the characters knew they were in the theatre, a fake world where fake grass can be struck like a set piece. This world was a stage. Indeed, the transition to Arden confirmed that the conceptual organizing principle came from the text’s most famous line: ‘all the world’s a stage’. The changeover was properly meta-theatrical: actors brought costume racks on stage while the Duke Frederick actor slipped into his raggedy fur coat to become Senior. A stage manager’s voice bellowed on high: ‘places for “all the world’s a stage”’, and the minimal court backdrop disappeared to reveal the RST’s brick back wall.

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It was the only such moment of its kind, though occasionally costume racks reappeared so that the audience could witness another costume change. Right before the interval, Orlando clicked his fingers to cue the appearance of a disco ball, and Celia called for a spotlight when telling Rosalind about spying Orlando in the woods. As the Act 5 wedding began, a giant puppet with an arboreal and gender-neutral head and arms filled the stage, and Rosalindin-a-dress emerged out of the puppet’s mouth. Hymen’s marriage words were voiced by Amiens, visible behind the puppet, while other foresters operated its limbs. While theatrically spectacular, the puppet’s origins and reason for being were unclear. If this Arden was anything, it was a theatre of some kind, though there was no sense of why the stage might matter to the world. The production’s other notable feature was its casting of a female Jaques and a Silvia (rather than Silvius). Given the production’s conscious metatheatricality, one might expect either Jaques or Duke Senior to take on a director-like role, but the identities of both remained opaque. Silvia was made female in an attempt to solve the problem of Silvius’ male entitlement and inability to take Phoebe’s ‘no’s for an answer, but making this offensively persistent character female does not make the behaviour seem less threatening. Furthermore, forcing Phoebe into a lesbian relationship at the play’s conclusion doesn’t exactly celebrate queer love. Gender-swapping may seem a savvy and safe concept to bring to this play, mined as it is from both the comedy’s plot and Elizabethan theatre practice. A Silvia and a revision of Rosalind’s epilogue to make it gender neutral responded to #MeToo and current conversations about the problems of gender binaries, but the production accommodated these conversations more than it contributed to them. Changing gender pronouns was the production’s primary and most obvious textual emendation, and the lack of cutting made this AYLI a numbing two hours and forty minutes long plus interval, and suggested an almost fearful reverence for the text that interfered with the production’s ability to tell its story. As written, AYLI isn’t a perfect play in dramaturgical terms, and while Sykes sensibly moved all the court scenes to the top and cut the tedious ‘quip modest’ stuff, her reticence to, e.g., get rid of extraneous lines in Rosalind’s speeches resulted in many moments lacking the theatrical punch they could have had with a leaner script (and this is not for lack of effort and skill on Phelps’s part).

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To my mind, this production took the rhetoric of several RSC directors about mining the text too seriously: it held onto the text itself and its central textbased concepts firmly, and yet was unmoored by not rooting the play’s action or its ideas in the context of a time, place and community that matters.

Public Acts As You Like It (Hornchurch, UK) Community is at the centre of the National Theatre’s Public Acts project, which partners with eight (non-theatrical) London-based community organizations that work with underserved populations.25 It is based on a model from the Public Theater’s Public Works (and before that, by Cornerstone Theater in California); Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop is a clear antecedent, as is Papp’s founding spirit at the Public. In this model, the theatre spends months partnering with local community groups in mutually beneficial workshops, and participants can then sign up to be in the big production. The cast is joined by five professional actors in the final weeks of rehearsal, but in this production, many featured roles – including star turns by the women who played Celia, Phoebe and Silvia – were community actors. This 2019 AYLI – the European premiere of Laurie Woolery and Shaina Taub’s musical adaptation for Public Works, directed by Douglas Rintoul – owed its power and success not to textual fidelity or to a brilliant directorial concept, but rather to the way the production focused on the lived experiences of its cast and the context of the world they and their audiences inhabited in 2019. It was heavily adapted – full of new songs that clarified the production’s purpose and the play’s ideas, and responsive to the creative energies of the entire cast, not just the director’s concepts. In both New York and London, the show was a professional-amateur collaboration. And its success was a testament to the fact that theatre critics of all theatre would do well, in the words of Helen Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling, to ‘reposition the cultural value of amateur theatre by attending to … the crafts of making theatre and the affective intensity of performance, recognizing that both require collaboration, commitment, and expertise’.26 It is worth mentioning that the RSC itself recognizes the cultural value of amateur theatre through their Open Stages project, but while that project features RSC artists lending their expertise to

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amateur drama companies in the UK, the RSC might in turn profit by learning from the community-centred work many such companies are already doing. In the case of the Public Acts AYLI, attending to collaboration, commitment and affective intensity illuminates the production’s value far better than would an analysis of its textual choices or its concepts, though much could be said about those things, too. When I attended a rehearsal of the show, I saw firsthand the fiercely inclusive, big-hearted collaboration between community and professional artists: teenagers and elderly cast members practised their choreography together on the sidelines, small children played games with non-related cast members, original art and writing from the cast decorated the rehearsal room walls. Beth Hinton-Leaver, the professional playing Jaques, said that she had learned more from this production than any other she’s worked on, including practices she would like to take to other strictly professional gigs: ‘We clap and thank each other for sharing their talent. Why don’t the pros do that?’27 Like the RSC production, this version centred on ‘all the world’s a stage’ and featured gender-swapped roles, but both ideas were thoughtfully rooted in the time and place of 2019 London. Instead of ‘mining’ the text for its ideas, Public Acts project director and National Theatre Associate Artist Emily Lim describes the process of ‘smashing through’ Shakespeare’s cultural status to ‘celebrate the story we found’.28 They did so together, and with attention to the stories – the contexts – that cast members brought to the rehearsal room. Rather than mining the text for Shakespearean gems, then, the Public Acts team found preciousness in the experiences of the traditionally marginalized, and valued and amplified their stories in order to better collectively tell their own version of As You Like It. The production began with a writerly Jaques (Hinton-Lever) singing ‘All the world’s a stage / Everybody’s in the show’; it ended, after the exuberant community wedding I described at the outset, with Hinton-Lever alone next to a younger version of Jaques, a six-year-old in an identical costume: the older wished the younger would ‘live to see a better version of the play’. The production emphasized, then, that playing your part meant doing something with the part you were given to make the world better for the next generation. That our actions on this worldly stage should be in service of creating a better community was evident throughout, and especially in songs like the allcompany ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, with its adapted lyrics imploring, ‘I will

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not be free / Until we all are free’. In a moment unique to the Hornchurch production, company member Mequant Assefa, a recent UK immigrant from Ethiopia, sang an original, untranslated song in his native Amharic: he had written it for the rehearsal room, as a gift to his fellow castmates (‘and comates in exile’) and the cast found it essential to the show. The moment, in the middle of an Arden sequence, was unexpected and, in terms of the textually sanctioned Shakespearean plot, extraneous. And yet, it was one of the most memorable moments of the show, making profound and salient AYLI’s themes of exile and hospitality. Whereas the RSC’s coupling of Silvia and Phoebe felt coercive, this production’s casting of a female actor as Silvia meant, in Purcell’s words, that Phoebe came across as a lesbian struggling with her sexuality and that her marriage to Silvia resonated as a happy celebration of her true self.29 (Also, Audrey was regendered as Andy, and his romance with Touchstone was lightly reworked to be one of mutual admiration.) The ‘all the world’s a stage’ metaphor as well as AYLI’s gender play were explicitly addressed as Orlando and Rosalind wondered what it meant to play the role of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. ‘I’m the man I am supposed to be’, sang Orlando to Oliver, and in her first scene Rosalind asked the audience, ‘If you have no role to play, then who would you be?’ Throughout the show and until she changed out of her Ganymede disguise, she often wondered aloud what it meant to wear a costume and play a role. Thus while the RSC production ‘mined’ the text’s most famous line to merely illustrate metatheatricality with its backstage-onstage aesthetics, the Public Acts production took that central idea and rooted it in urgent social and political conversations. ‘All the world’s a stage’, in this production, became a relevant way to think through how we all play our assigned gender and other roles and who plays what part in creating a community where, to borrow words from the Shakespearean-inspired ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, ‘All are welcome here’.

As You Like It in Yosemite Local and global contexts were central to the collaborative development of the 2019 AYLI for Shakespeare in Yosemite, an annual festival that I co-founded

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with Paul Prescott30. Shakespeare in Yosemite is inspired by Papp and the American cultural tradition of Shakespeare in the Park and is committed to putting on free Shakespeare in America’s most famous and spectacular national park around the time of Earth Day and Shakespeare’s birthday in April every year. Our productions use Shakespeare to speak to issues like the climate crisis, forest fires and human dependence on and destruction of the natural world. Our heavily adapted ninety-minute AYLI made Duke Frederick into an energy company CEO who usurped and banished his sister for wanting to move the company towards renewables. Arden was populated by Silvius the firefighter, Audrey the Park Ranger (played by a real-life Yosemite ranger) and Phoebe the climber, as well as a forest scientist who drew the audience’s attention to climate research – conducted primarily by my University of California Merced science colleagues in Yosemite – summarized on sheets of paper and hanging on trees around the venue. The majority non-white and female cast featured professional actor Lisa Wolpe doubling as a male Frederick and female Jaques (played as a ‘traveller’ concerned for the environmental havoc she’s witnessed), along with several of my UC Merced students and skilled amateur actors from the Merced community (See Figure 12.1).

Figure 12.1  Andrew Hardy as Orlando with his poetry in Shakespeare in Yosemite’s production of As You Like It (2019). Photo Credit: Shawn Overton.

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The ethos of our production responds to Littlewood if it responds to any twentieth-century British director: ‘[I]f Shakespeare has any significance today a production of his work must not be regarded as a historical reproduction, but as an instrument still sharp enough to provoke thought, to extend man’s awareness of his problems, to strengthen his belief in his kind.’31 Our AYLI used about 70 per cent of Shakespeare’s text, often lightly adapted. It was about Yosemite National Park in 2019 and the environmental and political challenges it faces. Furthermore, it was created for the people to whom this particular ‘Arden’ matters: some of whom are local and Californian and/or American Indian, and some of whom are nature-lovers from around the world. Moreover, as our production attempted to emphasize, Ardens like Yosemite are full of the trees that sustain life on earth, cleaning the air all creatures breathe and mitigating the climate crisis by acting as carbon sinks (that is, trees’ natural photosynthesis captures and sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere). The play’s final moment featured the entire cast singing ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ in English and Spanish while holding up protest signs with slogans quoting placards seen in recent youth climate marches (see Figure 12.2). Shakespeare didn’t write ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ or conduct research in the

Figure 12.2  The cast of Shakespeare in Yosemite’s production of As You Like It (2019) in the closing scene. Photo credit: Shawn Overton.

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Sierra Nevadas or visit Yosemite, but our team collaborated with Shakespeare’s text, more recent songwriters, scientists and the performance venue itself in order to create a new work of art for the very particular context in which it was performed. I don’t make any claims to the quality of our production, but I will say that having a clearly defined context – a sense of where we were performing and with and for whom and why – contributed heavily to the show’s artistic and social vision in ways that the theatrical team found helpful and invigorating and that, according to our audience feedback, was the most appreciated aspect of the production.

Thoughts on context While the word ‘context’ could almost be a portmanteau of concept and text, its real roots are even more helpful: from the Latin contexere, ‘to weave’. To contextualize something is to weave it into place; to contextualize Shakespearean production is to assign the play’s fictional world a coherent time and place, and also to create a work of art that roots itself in the time and place of performance. Productions like the Public Acts AYLI acknowledge that creative work is responsive to cultural context; they don’t celebrate solitary geniuses for conceiving of new ideas or adhere to rules about textual purity or fidelity. Indeed, the primary advantages of this long-dead white guy’s texts are that they are (1) out of copyright and therefore legally open to any and all adaptation; and (2) interpretively capacious enough that the texts can inspire a multitude of meanings. A focus on context knowingly utilizes and appreciates these benefits. Focusing on context means asking different questions when creating and analysing Shakespearean theatre. Directors and critics have tended to focus on how questions, and those relate to text and concept: how much text will be used, and how will it be revised or translated, and how close is it to ‘Shakespeare’ and can we hear the poetry? How is the play being ‘done’, and how are political or aesthetic or historic concepts being brought to bear on the production? Paying attention to context will lead theatre makers and consumers to also consider a few why questions: why perform AYLI in 2019, and why perform Shakespeare

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at all? Why put this play on in Stratford or East London or California? Why with this cast, and why for these audiences? Why does it matter? My final why question leads me to suggest that, along with context, purpose might be a useful word for theatre-makers and observers. I don’t want to belabour the point that the world is metaphorically and literally on fire: political, social, health and ecological crises present a number of existential threats to the human race. Shakespeare’s primary advantage lies not in his Englishness or poetic brilliance, it seems to me, but rather in the ways that his plays allow us to think globally and collaborate creatively. If theatre makers (and academics for that matter) are not doing something that might matter even a little bit – something that might actually have some purpose in helping performers and audiences think through one of these most pressing of issues – then why are they doing it? To return to the metaphor of mining: theatre artists can ‘mine’ Shakespearean texts without damaging them, being as extractive and selective as they want. The plays will carry on and on as long as there are humans to read extant versions of them and as long as there are extant versions to read. In this way, Shakespeare is a renewable cultural resource. But most mining is destructive: the earth’s resources we extract are not coming back.32 Instead of thinking of Shakespearean theatrical creativity in terms of mining texts, then, I think we should drop this metaphor and think of productions as potentially regenerative. At its best, Shakespearean theatre replants new trees from the seeds of old texts, growing new imaginative worlds – Ardens and otherwise – that just might help us breathe in new ideas about the time and place in which we are rooted.

Notes 1 The day I was writing these sentences, I learned that Shaina Taub had just been arrested in New York during a #blacklivesmatter protest, which I would like to record for posterity, and to add further urgency to the notion that theatre and its artists are embedded in their context. 2 Helen Nicholson, ‘As You Like It: Reflections on Year Two of Public Acts’, in National Theatre Magazine 14 (2019).

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  3 For a similar argument, see Andy Lavender, Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement (London: Routledge, 2016), 3 and passim.   4 Stephen Purcell, ‘Shakespearean Performances in England, 2019’, Shakespeare Survey 73 (2020): 220.   5 The vast number of non-English productions that have long been staged around the world are unfortunately outside of the scope of this chapter and have long been problematically excluded from performance scholarship that overvalues textual fidelity.   6 Gregory Doran, ‘Programme Note’, for Troilus and Cressida at the Royal Shakespeare Company (Stratford-on-Avon, 2018), n.p.   7 Peter Holland, ‘Peter Hall’, in The Routledge Directors Companion to Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge, 2013), 141.   8 John Dryden, ‘Preface to Troilus and Cressida’, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 8, ed. Maximillian E. Novak, Alan Roper, George R. Guffey and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 226.   9 A phrase often used by director Peter Hall and quoted or paraphrased by audiences and critics. 10 More on this phrase here, for example: ‘Even unkind cuts cannot wither Shakespeare’, The Guardian (15 March 2007), www.theguardian.com/stage/ theatreblog/2007/mar/15/evenunkindcutscannotwither (accessed 15 May 2020). 11 W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997), 38. 12 Ibid., 191. 13 Michael Billington, ‘Macbeth Review: Rufus Norris’s brutal take misses the poetry’, The Guardian (7 March 2018), emphasis mine. 14 It is worth noting that contemporary playwrights have also railed against ‘director’s theatre’, with David Hare in 2017 proclaiming of British theatre that ‘all that directorial stuff that we’ve managed to keep over on the continent is now coming over and beginning to infect our theatre’. See Dalya Alberge, ‘David Hare: Classic British Drama is “Being Infected” by Radical European Staging’, The Guardian (27 January 2017). 15 Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘Textual Clues and Performance Choices’, in Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, ed. Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 7; R. A. Foakes, ‘Performance Theory and Textual Theory: A Retort Courteous’, Shakespeare 2, no. 1 (2006): 52. 16 Leavis talked of English literature, particularly poetry and novels, as part of a ‘great tradition’, advocated for rigorous close reading, and valued Shakespearean

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poetry but was sceptical of the theatre. He was nonetheless hugely influential on the careers of these three very influential directors. 17 See summative entries on the ideas and careers of Poel, Hall and Nunn in John Russell Brown, ed., The Routledge Companion to Director’s Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2008), and on Poel and Granville Barker in Cary Mazer, Great Shakespeareans, vol. 15 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). See also Stuart HamptonReeves, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Hall (London: Bloomsbury, 2019) on Hall; and Russell Jackson, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Trevor Nunn (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) on Nunn. 18 See for example Colin Chambers, Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company (London: Routledge, 2004); John Barton, Playing Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 2011); and Peter Hall, Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players (London: Theatre Communications Group, 2003). Barton is somewhat exceptional here in that, while he famously advocated for verse speaking and text mining, he also wrote several hundred new lines for his heavily adapted War of the Roses. 19 See entries on all four of these directors in Brown, Routledge Companion; the entries on Brook and LePage in Peter Holland and Adrian Poole, eds., Great Shakespeareans, vol. 17 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); and on Guthrie in Mazer, Great Shakespeareans. 20 Quoted in Karen Fricker, ‘Robert LePage’, in The Routledge Companion to Director’s Shakespeare, 241–2. 21 See entries on Hands and Donnellan in Brown, Routledge Companion. See also Declan Donnellan, The Actor and the Target (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006). 22 Kidnie, ‘Textual Clues’, 10. 23 William Wolfgang compiled data on the number of local Shakespeare companies for his recently defended PhD at the University of Warwick; as of 2021 he had found 320 active companies, 125 of which are amateur/grassroots groups. 24 I don’t have space to discuss this here, but in the past, there have of course been many artistically successful and socially important RSC productions that haven’t shied away from developing coherent and contextualized concepts, whether or not the director referred to them as such. 25 More at the National Theatre website, www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/about-thenational-theatre/our-national-work/public-acts (accessed 15 May 2020). 26 Helen Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling, The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 8. 27 Beth Hinton-Lever, interview with the author, 2019.

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28 Emily Lim, interview with the author, 2018. 29 Purcell, ‘Shakespearean Performances’, 220. 30 Shakespeare in Yosemite is co-sponsored by our home institutions, University of Warwick and University of California, Merced as well as the US National Park Service: more at yosemiteshakes.ucmerced.edu (accessed 22 February 2021). Pictures of this production can be found here: https://blueroadphotography4346. zenfolio.com/yosemiteshakes2019 (accessed 22 February 2021). 31 Quoted in Lesley Wade Soule, ‘Joan Littlewood’, in The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, 262. We would now prefer gender neutral nouns and pronouns, but understand Littlewood is referring to humankind. 32 Prescott and I make this point elsewhere (‘Applied Shakespeare in Yosemite National Park’, Critical Survey 31, no. 4 [2019]: 17).

Bibliography Alberge, Dalya. ‘David Hare: Classic British Drama is “Being Infected” by Radical European Staging’. The Guardian (29 January 2017). Available online: www. theguardian.com/stage/2017/jan/29/david-hare-classic-british-drama-infectedradical-european-staging (accessed 15 May 2020). Barton, John. Playing Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 2011. Billington, Michael. ‘Macbeth Review: Rufus Norris’s brutal take misses the poetry’. The Guardian (7 March 2018). Available online: www.theguardian.com/ stage/2018/mar/07/macbeth-review-national-theatre-rufus-norris-rory-kinnearanne-marie-duff (accessed 15 May 2020). Brokaw, Katherine Steele, and Paul Prescott. ‘Applied Shakespeare in Yosemite National Park’, Critical Survey 31, no. 4 (2019): 15–28. Brown, John Russell, ed. The Routledge Companion to Director’s Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 2008. Chambers, Colin. Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company. London: Routledge, 2004. Donnellan, Declan. The Actor and the Target. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006. Doran, Greg. ‘Programme Note’, for Troilus and Cressida at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Stratford-on-Avon, 2018. Dryden, John. ‘Preface to Troilus and Cressida’. In The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13, edited by Maximillian E. Novak, Alan Roper, George R. Guffey and Vinton A. Dearing, 220–8. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

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Foakes, R. A. ‘Performance Theory and Textual Theory: A Retort Courteous’. Shakespeare 2, no. 1 (2006): 47–58. Fricker, Karen. ‘Robert LePage’. In The Routledge Companion to Director’s Shakespeare, edited by John Russell Brown, 233–50. London: Routledge, 2008. Hall, Peter. Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players. London: Theatre Communications Group, 2003. Hampton-Reeves, Stuart. Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Hall. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Holland, Peter. ‘Peter Hall’. In The Routledge Directors Companion to Shakespeare, edited by John Russell Brown, 140–59. London: Routledge, 2013. Holland, Peter, and Adrian Poole, eds. Great Shakespeareans, vol. 17. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Hinton-Lever, Beth. Interview with the author. 2019. Jackson, Russell. Shakespeare in the Theatre: Trevor Nunn. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. ‘Textual Clues and Performance Choices’. In Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, edited by Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme, 1–13. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Lavender, Andy. Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement. London: Routledge, 2016. Lim, Emily. Interview with the author. 2019. Mazer, Cary. Great Shakespeareans, vol. 15. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Nicholson, Helen. ‘As You Like It: Reflections on Year Two of Public Acts’. In National Theatre Magazine 14 (2019). Available online: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/content/ membersmagazine-14 (accessed 15 May 2020). Nicholson, Helen, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling. The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Purcell, Stephen. ‘Shakespearean Performances in England, 2019’. Shakespeare Survey 73 (2020): 203–22. Soule, Lesley Wade. ‘Joan Littlewood’. In The Routledge Companion to Director’s Shakespeare, edited by John Russell Brown, 251–68. London: Routledge, 2013. Worthen, W. B. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

13

Sense / nonsense Rebecca L. Fall

‘Butt heere wee have longe stayd; and therfor wee must a while leave this Court in all hapines and content’, remarks the anonymous narrator of Mary Wroth’s mammoth prose romance early in its manuscript continuation, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (‘U2’), which until its publication in 1999 existed only in a unique holograph manuscript at the Newberry Library.1 Rodomandro, king of Tartaria, has just entertained the Urania’s chief heroine Pamphilia with an elaborate masque, and the whole court is ‘hap[py] and content’. They are, perhaps, too ‘content’ – orderly courts do not make for interesting storylines – and so, the narrator insists, ‘wee must … a little accompany’ some of the romance’s other characters, notably the mad queen Antissia and her unhappy husband Dolorindus, king of Negroponte.2 Antissia has been trouble for some time. In the printed first part of Urania (‘U1’ [1621]), she alienated friends with her jealous rages, and even arranged the (foiled) murder of the romance’s central hero, Amphilanthus.3 In the Second Part, Antissia’s madness is less violent but equally disturbing to her peers. She now suffers from delusions of literary grandeur and so-called ‘poeticall furies’ so severe that they have begun to threaten the stability of her country.4 In one episode on a ship sailing to the island of St Maura, she sings and dances and ‘rattle[s] up fustian poetry’ so bad it nearly drives Dolorindus mad, too. ‘Thus’, the narrator sighs, ‘they sailed still on, Antissia singing (as she called itt) this tedious ditty, onely noiseworthy butt noe way senceble … therfor nott much meritting prising’. Antissia’s ‘tedious ditty’ is an erotic song drawing on oceanic metaphors for desire: ‘Come lusty gamesters of the sea’, it begins, ‘Billowes, waves, and winds, / Like to most

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lovers make your plea / Say love all combinds’. ‘I singe this to you’, Antissia tells her miserable husband when he chastises her lyric ‘immodestie’, ‘to shew you my love in verce as well as prose’. The queen wants to express herself sexually ‘in verce’, and the result is not only indecorous, according to the narrator’s judgment, but nonsensical, too: ‘fustian poetry’ that is ‘noe way senceble’.5 Hermeneutically speaking, ‘Come lusty gamesters’ makes perfect sense. In general, Antissia’s speech throughout U2 is semantically coherent. Yet the narrator, the romance’s primary nobles and the Negropontian queen herself repeatedly dismiss her language as a ‘mist of noe sence’, or describe it as ‘fustian’, a word for absurd, over-the-top speech that was often used as a synonym for nonsense in early modern England.6 But why? Why should the text mark this interpretable language as nonsensical? And nonsense or no, why spend so much time with seemingly worthless, pointless speech – ‘fustion taulke’ that ‘merit[s]’ no ‘prising’?7 The text pivots repeatedly to Antissia’s ‘frivelous discourse’, insisting we ‘must’ turn away from a ‘Court in all hapines and content’ to discuss her alleged nonsense.8 Why does this cramped manuscript devote so many precious pages and so much ink to meditating on expression that is ‘onely noiseworthy butt noe way senceble’? In focusing on meaningful discourse that is nevertheless marked as nonsense, this chapter explores how ‘sense’ and ‘nonsense’ come to be designated in the early modern English imagination not as oppositional, but as overlapping, carefully negotiated and essentially social processes. This phenomenon is not limited to Wroth’s romance; it emerges regularly in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury English writing. In the final act of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, the ‘rude mechanicals’ famously stage a disastrous play for the newly married nobles at Theseus and Hippolyta’s palace.9 Peter Quince offers a prologue: If we offend, it is with our good will. That you should think: we come not to offend But with good will. To show our simple skill, That is the true beginning of our end. Consider then, we come but in despite. We do not come, as minding to content you, Our true intent is.

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Baffled and amused by this silly speech, the noble audience breaks into mockery. ‘This fellow doth not stand upon points’, Theseus scoffs, alluding to Quince’s failure to punctuate his speech properly, which has muddled its sense. ‘He hath rid his prologue like a rough colt: he knows not the stop’, Leander concurs. ‘Indeed, he hath played on this prologue like a child on a recorder –, a sound, but not in government’, Hippolyta adds before Theseus concludes, ‘His speech was like a tangled chain –, nothing impaired, but all disordered’.10 Quince has missed the point, they agree, both literally (misplacing his punctuation) and figuratively (confounding the purpose of his prologue: to explain the mechanicals’ artistic objectives). Despite Quince’s comically confused delivery, his ‘true intent’ is clear. He aims to ‘content’ the nobles, or please them. Yet Midsummer’s nobles treat his language as mere ‘sound’, lacking ‘content’ of a different kind – discursive significance. They make no effort to interpret his clumsy speech, instead weaving their own ‘tangled chain’ of evaluative language, testing and revising various figurations to describe how precisely Quince’s ‘content’ has failed. In other words, they treat his speech as nonsensical, even if they do not explicitly mark it as such.11 In the process, the nobles bond over witty barbs and assert their own discursive authority as judges of verbal ‘government’. The scene thereby suggests that evaluating discursive ‘content’ may function to establish community ties and reinforce social hierarchies. While Midsummer gestures broadly toward the sociality of sense and nonsense, however, Wroth’s romance examines it in more depth, offering a powerful lens for understanding how early modern English writers approached the relationship between discursive meaning and (elite) community. Sensemaking – and nonsensicalism – is central to her romance’s social world. Throughout U2, ‘sense’ is commonly determined and collectively framed by a network of cultural and political tastemakers, namely the romance’s nobility and omniscient narrator. Both the narrator and primary characters return again and again to Antissia’s perceived nonsense, framing and reframing their accounts of it, indicating that their measures of ‘sense’ remain in flux, subject to negotiation and revaluation. The narrative and its noble characters work tirelessly to make sense of Antissia’s nonsense. By ‘make sense’, I do not mean simply that they try to understand what she is saying; rather, they endeavour

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to recuperate her disorderly fustian discourse – to create sense by disciplining her language into semantically and affectively meaningful ‘content’. Yet this disciplinary sense-making process never fully succeeds. Antissia’s nonsense resists recuperation, and her peers’ repeated attempts to bring it into line with socially acceptable discourse inevitably fail. This cycle of attempted but ultimately unsuccessful discipline suggests that sense in Wroth’s text is contingent on a perpetually incomplete process of discursive regulation. In other words, sense is not a fixed point, but an ongoing action that must be made and remade by ‘common’ accord. According to Susan Stewart, this regulatory process – a collective framing – is a fundamental mechanism of community: ‘social life’, she writes, is ‘a textual phenomenon … emergent in members’ interpretive activities’.12 We refer to these ‘interpretive activities’ in the aggregate as ‘common sense’. Common sense, then, is the basic operation of community (or ‘social life’) in that it represents the ‘assumed’ ‘consensus’ in any given moment of an intersubjective network of ever-shifting, always-‘emergent’ meanings and values.13 Put more simply, the boundaries of community are defined by what ‘sense’ its members hold in common, which is subject to constant change and renegotiation. Stewart’s understanding of common sense corresponds closely with the highly social, perpetually unsuccessful sense-making process in U2, which not only regulates discursive meaning, but also proves essential to the production of community in the text. Wroth’s romance offers a vivid representation of how at least one writer – one who was highly conversant in the era’s prevailing social and poetic philosophies – envisioned the functional entanglements of sense, nonsense and sociality. Therefore, I first aim in this chapter to examine how U2 construes sense as a disciplinary social process. Second, I show that the romance proposes such nonsense to be productive of – even foundational to – the advancement of community not despite but because of its stubborn senselessness. Finally, I explain the social utility of the romance’s unsuccessful attempts to recuperate Antissia’s ‘fustion taulke’, putting it into conversation with more canonical moments of confusion and obscurity in Shakespeare’s plays to illuminate the close relationship between nonsense and social life across early modern English literature more broadly.14

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Framing Antissia’s nonsense Antissia remains one of the most abused, unfortunate and ultimately resilient characters in either part of Wroth’s Urania.15 In U1, she is sent away from home, kidnapped by a trusted servant, abducted by pirates, sold into slavery and sexually assaulted before falling desperately in love with Amphilanthus. During the seven years she spends as paramour to the pathologically unfaithful emperor, she is driven mad with jealousy, eventually enlisting her future husband Dolorindus to assassinate Amphilanthus. When the plot fails, Antissia surrenders to despair and self-loathing. She gives her blessing to Amphilanthus’ true love Pamphilia, exiles herself from noble society and marries Dolorindus. Throughout both parts of Urania, Antissia struggles with what we would recognize as mental illness, cycling between periods of energetic and unpredictable ‘frenzies’ followed by intense bouts of guilt and depression.16 To occupy her mind during a depressive period in U2, she turns to writing poetry. Unfortunately, these literary pursuits trigger another bout of ‘frantick tricks’, this time ‘poeticall’ in nature.17 To her husband and noble peers, Antissia’s ‘poeticall furies’ register as dangerously nonsensical, so Dolorindus takes her to St Maura, where he plans to throw her off a high cliff into the ocean to palliate this new frenzy.18 In U1, several characters take this ‘Sappho’s Leap’ to unencumber themselves of inconvenient erotic attachments, but nothing in the text suggests it might cure madness, ‘poeticall’ or otherwise.19 Still, Dolorindus is desperate, so he sets sail for the island. En route, a tempest blows their ship ashore at Delos, where the ‘sage’ Melissea devises an alternate treatment based on sensory deprivation.20 She lowers an unconscious Antissia into a pitch-black cave to be suspended over water for twenty-four hours. Antissia wakes from the treatment calm and ‘consious to her self ’ once more.21 Wracked with guilt over her recent ‘frekes and follys’, the queen takes a magic elixir that promises to wipe her memory. For a time, it seems to work, and Antissia’s ‘senceles’ speech comes under control.22 Unfortunately, ‘content’ of any kind is short-lived, for immediately after leaving the island, Antissia is kidnapped and sexually tortured by a giant before ultimately beginning to backslide into ‘frivelous discourse’ again.23 Throughout, Antissia’s story lays bare the precariousness – and functional

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entanglements – of psychosocial ‘content’ (that is, contentment) and discursive ‘content’ (semantically meaningful verbal matter) in the social world of Wroth’s romance. The Second Part of Urania rehearses all of this, but only in fits and starts, tellings and retellings that overlap and elaborate on one another. First, Pamphilia’s brother Rosindy relates part of the story, followed later by Antissia’s nephew Antissius. Next, the narrator returns to the tale. Much later, Antissia herself reports the whole account from start to finish, revealing not only that she remembers every detail of her ‘senceles’ ordeal despite the ‘Leathe drink’ that was supposed to make her forget, but also that she still feels compelled ‘now and then’ to revert to nonsensical form.24 Through these repeated failures of semantic, affective and formal ‘content’, Wroth advances a theory of elite sociality predicated upon the perpetually unsuccessful recuperation of what the community marks as nonsensical.

Nonsense and its discontents Rosindy initially introduces Antissia’s fustian predicament early in U2. The principal nobles have met for a reunion, including Pamphilia, Amphilanthus, Urania, Pamphilia’s brother Rosindy and Antissia’s nephew Antissius, along with their lovers. As is typical when they are not fighting battles or wandering into mysterious enchantments, we discover the nobles lounging in an orchard gossiping and reminiscing about ‘olde passed times’. Rosindy recently reconnected with Antissia, he reports, after washing up on her shore following a characteristic Uranian shipwreck: ‘For lately I was by chance throwne on Negropont, going up that sea to vissite Antissius, butt poore overJoy’d lady, in what a posture did I finde her in! I protest next to that phantisy they call poeticall furies.’25 According to Rosindy’s report, Antissia’s discourse is overblown and out of bounds. When she greets him, she speaks in ludicrously complicated, overly poetic terms: What weather of misfortune butt faire gaile of good luck hath filled the sailes of hapines to bring your barck to harbour on this shore? Eaolus and Boreus

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especially gave place, and gentle Zephirus did breathe the blessed blast that conducted this Argesea wher the golden fleece remains in the renowne of this most fortunate rare starrs aprochment heere.26

The queen draws out her expression using grandiose alliteration, piling prepositional phrases and stacking metaphors (‘weather of misfortune’, ‘faire gaile of good luck’, ‘sailes of hapines’) until the point of her speech – offering welcome to an unexpected guest – risks getting lost in the shuffle of language. These over-the-top ‘poeticall’ terms, combined with Antissia’s meandering syntax and superfluous figuration, puff out her speech and derail her semantic objective. This is precisely how ‘fustian’ nonsense typically functions: it bombasts language until the point is no longer clear, or its complexity threatens to overshadow the text’s communicative purpose. As John Hoskyns pronounces in his nonsensical ‘Fustian Oration’, improvised at a Christmas party in the late 1590s, ‘in troopes of Tropes, and Centuries of Sentences [you] muster yor meaning … soe by the frothy volubility of yor wordes the Prince is perswaded to depose hymselfe from his regall state and dignity to followe yor counsell wth all contradictione and reluctation’.27 Just as Hoskyns uses ‘frothy volubility’ to ‘depose’ sense-making authorities in favour of ‘contradiction and reluctation’, so does Antissia’s language confuse and discomfit Rosindy with its fustian superfluity. That the queen’s windy speech is semantically comprehensible yet undeniably fustian in style suggests that ‘sence’ in the romance is not determined according to any pre-established standard.28 Rather, it must be negotiated by the attentive noble collective, who measure it as much according to social decorum as semantic cogency. Indeed, throughout U2, Antissia’s ‘raging, raving, extravagent discoursive language’ seems to demand negotiation, repetition and commentary precisely because it is so over-the-top and confusing.29 In a manner unusual in either part of the romance, for instance, Rosindy’s audience constantly interrupts him as he relates his encounter with Antissia. Conversations in Urania typically proceed in orderly fashion; audiences respect monologic ‘discourses’, allowing speakers to hold forth at length even when they are boring, baffling or ridiculous. Listeners rarely interrupt anyone, let alone a dignified hero like Rosindy, whose words command extra respect given that ‘hee [is] ever the most reserv’d in speach of any’.30 Yet Rosindy’s noble audience interrupts

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repeatedly as he recalls Antissia’s speech. As soon as he begins to describe it – ‘her speech savoured som thing to mee … of som poetrie, though olde, sickly stuff, as if poetry were fallen into a consumption’ – Antissius interjects to complain that his aunt is ‘as strange a mad peece of woemans flesh as ever came into Negroponte’.31 In describing the fustian queen as a fragment (a ‘peece’ of ‘flesh’), Antissius also interrupts and formally fragments Rosindy’s narrative. This recurs throughout the scene: Rosindy’s description of Antissia prompts the other nobles to fracture his discourse with uncharacteristic and conspicuous interruptions. As Rosindy recounts Antissia’s windy greeting, for instance, Urania abruptly breaks in: ‘Butt what food did she give you ore comfort after your neere suffering shipwrack?’ Discomfited by the ‘empty blasts of senceles discourse’ Rosindy is relating, Urania disrupts his story to ask about something more ‘fixed’ and comprehensible – his material conditions. Unable to correct Antissia’s ‘fustion taulke’, Urania cuts off discussion: ‘Ther is even enough’, she interjects irritably, ‘unles better fixed stuff ’.32 As Stewart observes of nonsense in general, Antissia’s fustian speech – even second-hand – ‘wastes our time’, distracting the flow of language and wrecking the discursive patterns of these otherwise eloquent, rhetorically disciplined nobles.33 Wasteful though the queen’s overblown language may seem, it nevertheless proves highly productive in both narrative and social terms. Community in Urania is always imbricated with some form of rhetorical regulation. Accordingly, both Antissia’s tale and her ‘senceles discourse’ formally require a number of interruptive reiterations to get its disorderliness under control.34 Rosindy’s incessantly interrupted report is only one of several times the romance returns to Antissia’s fustian ‘frenzies’. We also hear about her outrageous discourse from Antissius, the omniscient narrator, and, eventually, Antissia herself. None of these retellings are accidental or incidental. Rosindy, Antissius and Antissia all recount their versions by request, suggesting that the queen’s nonsensicalism is discursively desirable despite the low value the nobles ascribe to it. Similarly, the narrator frames her version as structurally necessary: ‘Butt heere wee have longe stayd; therfor wee must a while leave this Court in all hapines and content, and a little accompany some of the other knights.’35

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Despite how often U2 marks Antissia’s fustian language as tedious and wasteful, ‘content’ – that is, contentment as well as disciplined semantic matter – proves much more precarious than nonsense in both narrative and discursive terms. The 1621 First Part famously breaks off mid-sentence, abruptly ending with a conjunction: ‘Pamphilia is the Queene of all content; Amphilanthus joying worthily in her; And[.]’36 While most scholars (aptly) attribute this abrupt termination to the Sidneian romance tradition – assuming that Wroth is following the example of her uncle Philip Sidney, whose New Arcadia ended mid-sentence due to its author’s untimely death37 – Wroth’s decision to fracture her narrative at a moment of ‘content’ is significant in other ways, too. Pamphilia is ‘Queene of all content’, and ‘content’ represents a kind of discursive stagnation in Wroth’s romance world. The narrator, after all, insists on the necessity of interrupting the story with Antissia’s fustian discourse when the other noble characters are ‘content’: ‘[W]ee must … leave this Court in … content.’ A ‘Court’ in ‘content’, it seems, has nothing to say. It is a community whose discourse is so orderly that it ceases to function. ‘Content’ brings ‘silence’, and the Urania requires some kind of discursive trouble or affective conflict to move forward not just with plot action, but also with language to carry it.38 This narrative and interpersonal productivity helps explain why Antissia’s nonsensicalism is so resistant to regulation. Her discourse undergoes a constant and apparently unending process of recuperation. Struggling through a depressive swing at the beginning of U2, Antissia first tries to treat herself by occupying her mind: ‘her foule consience brought a retirednes to her … soe she fell to studdy and gott a tutor’. This promptly backfires, for the tutor is insane, and his lessons only ‘make her as mad as him self ’.39 Antissia’s initial bid to make social sense through poetic ‘studdy’ and rhetorical self-regulation only makes things worse. Further efforts to treat the queen’s nonsense likewise fail. First, a storm foils Dolorindus’ plan to cure (or kill) his wife by throwing her off ‘Sappho’s Leap’, and the couple lands instead on Delos. There, Melissea offers the treatment involving physical confinement, sensory deprivation and memory suppression. Although this strict method of discursive and social regulation initially seems to work, its effect is only temporary. Antissia soon gains back the memory of her ‘passed follyes’, recalling them perfectly to the queen of Bulgaria: ‘I was

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possest with poetticall raptures, and fixions able to turne a world of such like woemens heads into the mist of noe sence’, she explains, later admitting, ‘I have now and then a good minde to entertaine my olde whimsies againe’.40 Time after time, Antissia’s community works to discipline her discourse, to make sense of it, and time after time their efforts fail. Antissia’s ‘mist of noe sence’ is remarkable in its resistance to control and its ability to produce narrative (if not affective) ‘content’, both for the characters within the fiction and for Wroth’s readers. I contend that this repetition of curative failures is essential for her community. In particular, it is a necessary process of ‘social life’ in U2 – a process that, for all the nobles’ battles, erotic entanglements and political dealings, is founded in language. While Antissia’s nonsensicalism may threaten the ‘content’ of her country and community, it remains socially productive for her noble peers. It gives them something to talk about, thereby strengthening their social bonds with each other. More significantly, it affords them a discourse that is never fully ‘senceble’ to discipline over and over again.

Beyond Shakespearean sense In telling – and retelling – the story of Antissia’s fustian dis-‘content’ in U2, Wroth denaturalizes the perceived binary between sense and nonsense. Antissia’s discourse may be ‘noisfull’ and it may be ‘frivelous’. It may be rhetorically overblown, out of bounds for someone of her station and gender, out of tune with the text’s more typical patterns of speech and communication. It may, for these reasons, make ‘noe sence’ in the realm of Urania. Nevertheless, it does for the most part make semantic sense. This suggests that Wroth was writing across multiple levels of ‘common sense’. From Antissia to her fellow characters, the omniscient narrator, and even the romance’s readers: all are potential interpreters who can (and do) make different judgments about what constitutes sense and what doesn’t according to their given spheres of understanding. Wroth thus stages a vast network of interpretive negotiation that extends across the wide world of her romance landscape as well as the material texts that transmit it through time and space. We as modern readers are implicated in this interpretive network as

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we confront the text. The case of Antissia’s fustian specifically asks us to make sense of the romance’s processes of making sense. As we read, it demands we consider: is she talking nonsense, and if so, what does ‘sense’ mean in this world? Where does it begin and where does it end? Who gets to decide? In drawing our attention to these sense-making processes, Wroth lays bare the artificiality and social-constructedness of ‘sense’, for in trying to understand where Antissia and her nonsense stand, we must determine what ‘sense’ we do or do not hold in common with the romance’s characters, drawing comparisons and identifying points of contrast. As Stewart writes some three-and-a-half centuries after Wroth: ‘Common sense, which throughout everyday life is assumed to be something natural, given, and universal and thereby characteristic of a pervasive world view, becomes, when juxtaposed through nonsense with alternative conceptions of order, an only partial reality, an ideology.’41 Wroth illuminates the ‘partial reality’ of not only her fiction’s meaning, but the reader’s conception of what is meaningful and sensical, too. Of course, Wroth is not alone in questioning the boundary between sense and nonsense. Writers across the early modern period, in England and elsewhere, emphasized the negotiability of sense – and the disciplinary process of sense-making. Shakespeare, so often held as the canonical ideal of poetic meaningfulness, toyed constantly with the overlap between sense and nonsense, staging powerful moments of semantic negotiation. Midway through Twelfth Night, Feste and the disguised Viola have an uproarious chat about the value of language. The scene opens with a basic pun: ‘Dost thou live by thy tabor?’ Viola-as-Cesario inquires. ‘No, sir’, the fool answers, ‘I live by the church’. The joke is a groaner. Viola asks what profession Feste lives ‘by’, but the fool takes the question literally, responding as if his interlocutor has asked about the location of his home: ‘I do live by the church, for I live at my house, and my house doth stand by the church.’ Feste’s impertinence delights Viola and ignites a rousing semantic contest. She offers Feste another set of potential puns: ‘So thou mayst say the king lies by a beggar if a beggar dwell near him, or the church stands by thy tabor if thy tabor stand by the church.’ In response, Feste launches a volley of wits with Viola that primarily concerns the flexibility of semantic logic. ‘To see this age!’ Feste exclaims. ‘A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit: how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward.’42

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This conversation flirts with nonsense by deliberately unmooring words from their meanings. The fool continually defers the point of the conversation, beginning with his answer to Viola’s initial question: ‘Dost thou live by thy tabor?’ Viola takes his deliberately misleading response (‘I live by the church’) literally and asks if he is ‘a churchman’. Feste obligingly explicates the mechanics of his obvious pun: ‘No … my house doth stand by the church’.43 In so doing, he lays bare the work that underlies his punning deferral of Viola’s conversational point, which is to ask Feste his profession. He continues to expose the laborious process of discursive foolery throughout the scene, patiently explaining what is funny about his punning language. ‘They that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton’, Viola observes. ‘I would therefore my sister had no name, sir’, Feste replies. ‘Why, man?’ asks Viola, prompting the fool to explain, ‘[H]er name’s a word, and to dally with that word might make my sister wanton.’44 Methodically, Feste interprets his own ‘seeming’ nonsense for Viola, explaining the point of each pun while also using those puns to divert the point of the conversation by offering what would be a series of senseless non sequiturs, were it not for his belaboured (if amusing) explanatory notes. The scene works simultaneously to delineate and blur the boundaries of sense and nonsense by repeatedly veering to the edge of senselessness only to pull back each time. In interpreting his own puns, which approximate nonsense until he glosses them, Feste plays both sides. He could leave his logic unexplained, thereby venturing fully into the territory of the nonsensical. Instead, he asserts linguistic control by articulating precisely why each pun is meaningful. He makes sense of his own nonsense. Twelfth Night thus toys with nonsense but declines to abandon meaning altogether. Instead, it plays in the borderlands between sense and nonsense. Like Antissia (and Quince at the end of Midsummer), Feste does not usually speak ‘proper nonsense’ as such; in general, his language is semantically interpretable.45 But he also brings the possibility of nonsense into the realm of the sensical, even if he returns at the last moment to the purview of intelligibility. In the process, Feste exposes the desire that nonsense incites prior to offering the reassurance of stable meaning. Before he explains them, it seems that Feste’s puns just might be meaningless wordplay. In revealing how easily the desire for confusion might creep into logic, he illustrates

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how common nonsense actually is. It always lurks nearby, just under our noses. ‘Frivelous’ interlocutors like Antissia and Feste demonstrate as much by showing that sense is something we actively have to make – a pun we must explain, a clarifying question we need to ask, a gloss we have to construct – to recuperate meaning from the brink of unreason. They show that language, communication and interpretation are only, in the end, what we collectively make of them, for we are always already playing in the wilds of nonsense. But if Shakespeare denaturalizes the perceived binary between sense and nonsense, Wroth goes a step further. She not only demonstrates that making sense is a highly social disciplinary process, but also uses that process to advance a theory of community predicated upon its failure. In Urania, the unrecuperability of nonsense – or what is marked as nonsense – is socially productive, and indeed imperative to sustaining community by moving it forward. Wroth’s conceptions of sense and nonsense in the romance are, like Antissia herself, always shifting and impossible to pin down with any precision. As Antissia admits, she has been ‘ever best pleased within motion’.46 By disrupting her work’s narrative ‘content’ and repeatedly turning to scenes of failed sense-making, Wroth injects a form of narrative motion into the Urania, which serves to consolidate bonds among the romance’s noble community and advance their stories. What we mark as nonsense is a building block of community because it offers language to discipline and a reason to keep talking. This tracks with Shakespeare, too. Antissia’s constantly moving, strikingly persistent nonsensicalism recalls another madwoman’s confusions: Ophelia, whose ‘half sense … doth move / [her] hearers to collection’. Like Antissia, Ophelia’s ‘unshaped’ speech creates a kind of social motion that bonds her listeners into community, moving them ‘to collection’.47 Wroth’s work thus does more than corroborate Shakespeare’s denaturalization of the perceived sense-nonsense binary. It also helps us understand what is so powerful about speech marked as ‘senceles’.48 The very unproductivity of nonsense inspires and sustains social connection by instilling a futile desire to make sense and discipline the incomprehensible into ‘content’.

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Notes   1 Mary Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania [‘U2’], ed. Josephine A. Roberts, Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), 49.   2 Ibid.   3 Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania [‘U1’, 1621], ed. Roberts (Tempe: ACMRS, 2005).   4 U2, 51.   5 Ibid., 49–51.   6 Ibid., 251, 49. Literally a type of coarse fabric, ‘fustian’ came to refer to bombastic, obscure language in the early sixteenth century. The term most often describes excessively scholarly jargon, but can also refer semantic absurdity in general, and ‘[m]any seventeenth-century writers would use the terms “nonsense” and “fustian” almost interchangeably’ (Noel Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense (London: Fontana, 1998), 30). See also Hugh Roberts, ‘Comparative Nonsense: French Galimatias and English Fustian’, Renaissance Studies 30, no. 1 (2016).   7 U2, 35, 50.   8 Ibid., 35, 49.   9 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 3.2.9. 10 Ibid., 5.1.108–25 11 At least one early modern reader did claim Quince’s prologue for the nonsense tradition. The absurd prefatory epistle ‘To Nobody’ in John Taylor’s Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes from No Place (London: Printed by N[icholas] O[akes], 1700 [i.e. 1622]) revises his speech: ‘If we offend, it is with our good will, we came with no intent, but to offend, and shew our simple skill’ (sig. A4v). 12 Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 48. 13 Ibid., 49. 14 U2, 35. 15 Scholars typically examine Antissia as an erotic and authorial rival (‘Anti-‘) to Pamphilia, Wroth’s own avatar in this roman à clef. On Mary Fitton, Antissia’s real-life inspiration, see Roberts, ‘Critical Introduction’ to U1, lxxxi–lxxxiv. On how Pamphilia and Antissia frame the gender politics of white supremacist coloniality, see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 177–210. On

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Wroth’s interpretive obscurity and Pamphilia and Antissia’s rivalry, see Sarah Rodgers, ‘Embedded Poetry and Coterie Readers in Mary Wroth’s Urania’, Studies in Philology 111, no. 3 (2014): 478–80; and Ilona Bell, ‘“A too curious secrecie”: Wroth’s Pastoral Song and Urania’, Sidney Journal 31, no. 3 (2013): 33–5. 16 U2, 34. 17 Ibid., 52, 33. Few scholars to date have deeply examined Antissia’s ‘frivelous’ expression in U2. Clare R. Kinney, ‘“Beleeve this butt a fiction”: Female Authorship, Narrative Undoing, and the Limits of Romance in The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania’, Spenser Studies 17 (2003), is a rare articlelength study on the topic. 18 U2, 51. 19 Per Roberts, ‘Santa Maura, also known as Leucadia, is an actual place, from late antiquity identified as the precipice from which the poet Sappho supposedly hurled herself to death’ (‘Critical Introduction’, in U1, xxvii). 20 U2, 51. 21 Ibid., 53. 22 Ibid., 34–5. 23 Ibid., 53, 35. 24 Ibid., 35, 53, 255. 25 Ibid., 32–3. 26 Ibid., 34. 27 British Library MS Add. 25303, fol. 184v. 28 U2, 53. 29 Ibid., 41. 30 Ibid., 32. 31 Ibid., 34. 32 Ibid., 35. 33 Stewart, Nonsense, 5. 34 U2, 35. 35 U2, 49 (emphasis added). 36 U1, 661. 37 On the endings of Urania and Arcadia, see Jennifer Lee Carrell, ‘A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance’, SEL 34, no. 1 (1994): 101. 38 U2, 32. 39 U2, 40–41. 40 Ibid., 53; 251, 255.

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41 Stewart, Nonsense, 49–50. 42 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 3.1.1–13. In describing one of the building blocks of semantic logic (syntax, or ‘[a] sentence’) as ‘cheverel’, Feste further emphasizes its flexibility: cheverel is ‘kid-leather’, ‘[n]oted for its pliancy and capability of being stretched’ (OED, ‘cheverel’, n.1). 43 Twelfth Night, 3.1.1–7. 44 Ibid., 3.1.14–19. 45 Despite mostly making sense, Feste does offer a handful of purely nonsensical lines in the play. See Adam Zucker, ‘Twelfth Night and the Philology of Nonsense’, Renaissance Studies 30, no. 1 (2016): 92; and Rebecca L. Fall, ‘“The Best Fooling”: Every Man Out of His Humour, Twelfth Night, and Early Modern English Nonsense Games’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, ed. Anna Barton and James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2021). 46 U2, 251. 47 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 4.5.7–9, my emphasis. 48 U2, 35.

Bibliography Bell, Ilona. ‘“A too curious secrecie”: Wroth’s Pastoral Song and Urania’. Sidney Journal 31, no. 3 (2013): 23–50. Carrell, Jennifer Lee. ‘A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance’. Studies in English Literature 34, no. 1 (1994): 79–107. Fall, Rebecca L. ‘“The Best Fooling”: Every Man Out of His Humour, Twelfth Night, and Early Modern English Nonsense Games’. In The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, edited by Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Kinney, Clare R. ‘“Beleeve this butt a fiction”: Female Authorship, Narrative Undoing, and the Limits of Romance in The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania’. Spenser Studies 17 (2003): 239–50. Malcolm, Noel. The Origins of English Nonsense. London: Fontana, 1998. Roberts, Hugh. ‘Comparative Nonsense: French Galimatias and English Fustian’. Renaissance Studies 30, no. 1 (2016): 102–19.

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Rodgers, Sarah. ‘Embedded Poetry and Coterie Readers in Mary Wroth’s Urania’. Studies in Philology 111, no. 3 (2014): 470–85. Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. Edited by Keir Elam. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. Stewart, Susan. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Taylor, John. Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes from No Place. London: Printed by N[icholas] O[akes], 1700 [i.e. 1622]. EEBO STC (2nd edn.) 23795. Wroth, Mary. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania [1621]. Edited by Josephine A. Roberts. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Wroth, Mary. The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Edited by Josephine A. Roberts, Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999. Zucker, Adam. ‘Twelfth Night and the Philology of Nonsense’. Renaissance Studies 30, no. 1 (2016): 88–101.

14

Fact / fiction Adam G. Hooks

It all started innocently enough – a sealed letter, a mysterious visitor to a midtown Manhattan museum – but it ended in murder. Along the way, there was a theft of a precious Shakespearean relic, and its eventual recovery; the discovery of an even more valuable rarity; and a shocking revelation about Shakespeare’s final days. Fortunately, a private investigator was on the case, aided by a retired actor and amateur sleuth. A protective case in the museum had been broken, and one of only three extant copies in the world of The Passionate Pilgrime – printed and published by William Jaggard for the first time in 1599 and attributed to Shakespeare on the title page – was missing. In its place, however, the beneficent thief had left a volume of even greater value: the sole surviving copy of the second edition of the slim book of poetry. As the actor, who grasped the gravity of the situation immediately, exclaimed: ‘[U]ntil a few moments ago the entire bibliophilic world thought there was no copy of the 1606 Jaggard extant!’1 The last great bibliographic mystery in Shakespeare studies had been solved. This narrative is, of course, a cleverly constructed fiction from the golden age of the classic detective story, conjured up by a master of the genre.2 Yet it is instructive for the ways in which the desiderata of the detective and the academic converge. In 1933, when the last of the Drury Lane mysteries was published, mainstream Shakespeare scholars thought that there was indeed a missing edition of The Passionate Pilgrime, based on the title page of the surviving copies of the 1612 reprint that proclaimed it to be ‘The third Edition’.3 Lacking any proof, scholars speculated that the missing second edition was published in 1606, since the title appeared in an inventory dated that year.4 Speculation slowly hardened into definite fact, sanctioned by the preeminent

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Shakespearean authority of the time, Sidney Lee.5 In the absence of hard evidence, the presence of a series of clues – a title page, an inventory – licensed a form of scholarly wish-fulfillment in which the final missing Shakespearean publication could be postulated (and located) if only in the realm of fantasy and fiction. After all, both scholars and detectives are ‘agents of a desire to recover lost originals’.6 It is a desire that dates at least as far back as William Jaggard in 1599, who purported to make Shakespeare’s ‘sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends, &c.’7 public by publishing The Passionate Pilgrime – in 1599, in 1612 and seemingly at one other unknown, but endlessly conjectured, date. Shakespeare, as materialized in such a book, becomes the object of multiple bibliophilic desires – ‘a token or fetish or relic’ whose existence and disposition is crucial to bring about the solution to a mystery, whether in the world of detective fiction or in Shakespearean scholarship.8 Indeed, in committing a murder to preserve, rather than to possess, such a relic (in the case of Drury Lane, the eponymous actor/sleuth of the novel thus saves a holograph letter in which Shakespeare discloses a secret about the cause of his own death), the detective is ‘simply if drastically performing the curatorial function more often assigned to librarians – or priests’.9 The artefact is transformed into a fetishized reification of Shakespeare’s authority. What was lost can now be found. The factual and the fictional are always already inextricably intertwined. The mode of the detective story can perhaps provide a gloss – intellectual, ethical and methodological – on bibliographical practice, since it makes explicit what is often only implied in scholarship: that evidence and events are ‘emplotted in value-laden narratives’ that depend upon and, in turn, reproduce the cultural, biographical and textual authority of Shakespeare.10 Such stories explicitly acknowledge their status as fictions – fictions, as Rebecca Bushnell has put it, that ‘negotiat[e] among historical facts, their own fantasies, and what scholars know and believe about Shakespeare’.11 What scholars think they know and believe about Shakespeare – and, in fact, our very conception of what constitutes evidence, textual or otherwise – has been profoundly shaped by shifting definitions of authority and authenticity. The ways in which evidence is defined, discovered, interpreted and incorporated into narratives of Shakespearean textual scholarship both guide and limit our current practices. To understand the conjunction or juxtaposition or collocation of ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘text’ requires an unravelling of the connections between fact and fiction

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within historicist scholarship (where narratives harden into ‘facts’) as well as close attention to what ostensibly fictional narratives can teach us about our own desires as scholars. Simply put, various loci of data – events, records, etc. – have been assembled, interpreted, created, even fabricated, in order to produce compelling textual narratives. In what follows, I argue for a more self-aware form of bibliography, one that emphasizes the fundamentally imaginative and interpretive nature of textual scholarship. This approach offers a counter-narrative to the orthodoxy instituted by the New Bibliography, with its focus on ‘facts’ and its teleological trajectory toward certainty. The New Bibliographers – especially W. W. Greg, who was himself captivated by detective stories – sought to define textual scholarship as a scientific enterprise that could, and would, solve bibliographical mysteries once and for all. Yet this seemingly systematic mode of inquiry was deeply indebted to – and indeed took the form of – compelling (if not quite conclusive) narratives that delimited and redefined the very ‘facts’ on which they were based. This academic drama thus takes place in three acts, focusing first on the unravelling of the real-life mystery of The Passionate Pilgrime; second, on one of the most influential and notorious textual detectives of them all (John Payne Collier); and finally, on a fictional forgery (or is it?) that refracts the intellectual and commercial desires that drive our yearnings for and ideas of Shakespearean texts. By revising the standard accounts of these three bibliographical mysteries, the stories told here propose a new way forward in Shakespearean textual studies which demonstrates the fundamentally fictional nature of the ostensibly factual narratives that scholars create.

Bibliographical investigations Just a few years after the fictional Drury Lane discovered the fictional 1606 edition of The Passionate Pilgrime, the solution to the mystery of the missing Shakespeare edition played out in no less dramatic fashion in real life. This time the story featured an array of bibliographical detectives employed by the recently opened Folger Shakespeare Library, which had acquired a valuable sammelband of poetry in which was found a fragment of what appeared to be a hitherto unknown octavo edition of The Passionate Pilgrime.12 Three

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distinct editions were thus accounted for. But the fragment lacked several leaves, including the title page, so it was unclear whether it was published before or after the extant 1599 edition. What was the sequence of publication? The answer to this question would be determined by the order of events in this emerging narrative, not to mention an implicit editorial fixation on the processes of textual transmission. Based on an exhaustive textual collation, Hyder Rollins, the editor of the Poems in the Variorum Shakespeare (published under the aegis of the Folger by its director, J. Q. Adams) gave the fragment the label ‘O2’ – that is, the second edition – when his Variorum volume was published in 1938. Rollins based his conjecture on the textual variation found in the fragment, which seemed to him characteristic of an error-prone reprint. He had made this determination as early as 1935, whilst examining photostats provided by the Folger – although the intensive detective work carried out by the Folger staff, and an urgent series of letters between Rollins and Adams, continued until just before publication of the Variorum Poems.13 In 1937, when reviewing the proofs for his edition, Rollins pleaded for a final determination on the nature of the fragment – could it perhaps predate the complete 1599 edition?14 In the meantime, Adams had decided to produce a facsimile of the Folger copy of The Passionate Pilgrime (the fragment was interleaved with a likewise incomplete copy of the 1599 edition) prefaced by a scholarly introduction that would furnish a solution to the mystery of the sammelband. As Adams wrote to Rollins a few weeks later: Dr. [E. E.] Willoughby, Dr. [Giles] Dawson, Dr. [James] McManaway and I have been putting in an enormous amount of work on the Folger fragment of the Passionate Pilgrim, and have made some very startling discoveries. So exhaustive has been this work, and so important the conclusions arrived at, that I think the Introduction to the proposed facsimile should be written here in collaboration.15

Rollins’ initial judgement that the copy was a reprint was contradicted in 1939, when the Folger published the facsimile with an introduction by the director of the library, Adams himself, in which Adams argued that the fragment was actually a lost first edition.16 Adams claimed that the extant 1599 edition was a ‘mere reproduction’ of the (partially lost) fragmentary ‘first edition’, based in part on the lack of page signatures in the fragment, and the insertion of a

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second title page in the ‘second edition’ that was missing from the ‘first’.17 This claim conveniently made the Folger’s copy the last first edition of a Shakespeare work ever to be discovered, and thus a jewel of the new library’s collection. The scholarly stakes were as lofty (if not as lethal) as they were for Drury Lane, and the critical skills and deductive methods used were not dissimilar. Clues were accumulated, evidence was interpreted, a narrative was created – one that would eventually harden into proof. The fictional became factual in a manner befitting the shared desires of the scholar and the sleuth. The lost relic had been found. (For the record: based on a first-hand examination of the artefact, the self-aware bibliographical detective writing this sentence would not venture any firm conclusions about the nature of the fragment at this time.) The golden age of the detective story coincided with a similarly triumphant era in Shakespearean textual studies. One of the first – and, as it was perennially proclaimed, the greatest – accomplishments of the New Bibliography was the exposure of another Shakespearean venture engaged in by William Jaggard two decades after The Passionate Pilgrime: the false dates on a series of play quartos that, through forensic analysis, were determined to have been published all at the same time in 1619. This discovery, made by W. W. Greg and confirmed by others, was (and still is) hailed as a triumph of new, seemingly scientifically rigorous, bibliographical methods. Through an analysis of the watermarks in the quartos, Greg determined that they were all printed from the same stock of paper; later, William Neidig utilized forensic technologies (overlaying images of the title pages) to show that they were set from standing type.18 The discovery that the various dates on the title pages were false – that is, that the quartos had all been printed by Jaggard in 1619 – became the signature moment in the establishment of what would become known as the ‘New Bibliography’ and the orthodoxy it represents. Mysteries could indeed be solved once and for all. This event, however, was perhaps the fatal flaw in the New Bibliography’s methodology; indeed, the conclusions concerning the Quartos of 1619 continue to be revised.19 The fact that this bibliographical determination was based on the exposure of a perceived, or alleged, fraud – the false dates obscuring the ‘fact’ that the quartos constituted a collection of Shakespeare’s works, predating the fetishized First Folio by several years – profoundly shaped the motivation, direction and conclusions of this brand of bibliographical scholarship for decades. It gave these bookish sleuths a sense

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of optimism that drove their obsession with Shakespeare’s texts, and thus their concomitant desire to establish a set of fixed bibliographical principles and methods that could be considered ‘scientific’ and thus above reproach. Above all (even though they might not have admitted it), it gave them a compelling narrative with a colourful cast of characters, especially William Jaggard, the focus of The Passionate Pilgrime investigation at the Folger three decades later. The ‘Quartos of 1619’ episode is worthy of being considered alongside the most discriminating discoveries of any detective novel. But the falselydated quartos gave the New Bibliographers false confidence – the sense that bibliographical investigations would, with enough detective work, arrive at a satisfyingly (if surprisingly) coherent solution. No wonder, then, that W. W. Greg loved mystery novels, particularly those with a Shakespearean focus, which he would ‘read again and again’, submitting them ‘to the same kind of scrutiny he gave to the variants in the first quarto of King Lear’.20 His favourites included Hamlet, Revenge! written by Michael Innes (the pseudonym of the Shakespearean scholar J. I. M. Stewart), and the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers. (Personal recollections of Greg describe him in terms similar to a detective: he ‘searched for understanding of people as well as problems’, and his ‘shrewd perception’ and ‘alertness to undercurrents of feeling’ was demonstrable.21) Greg’s engagement with formulaic genres – the bibliographical description, the critical edition and detective fiction – suggests his desire to discover lost originals; indeed, one wishes that Greg had learned more lessons from the mystery novels that so engrossed him, particularly their self-conscious reflexivity and attention to the various ways in which Shakespeare’s authority had been constructed. Greg seems to have taken the factual nature of bibliographical evidence for granted, even if he insisted on the contingency of possible solutions to bibliographical problems. By extension, the New Bibliographers by and large failed to recognize that the factual evidence they ‘discovered’ was inevitably incorporated into (and even constituted by) the narrative accounts that they produced. Indeed, these narratives were beholden to a preconceived (and uncritical) notion of textual authenticity and authority. Likewise, Adams knew how to use gaps in the available artefact (a missing title page, an interleaved fragment) to tell a story that could not be disproven (because it could not be proven in the first place) – a story with a manifest material benefit to the Folger Shakespeare Library. Whether or not

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bibliographers – past, present or future – are self-aware of the evidentiary narratives they produce, the factual is always indebted to and incorporated within the fictional.

Filling in the blanks In 1841, John Payne Collier produced a prospectus for a new edition of Shakespeare’s Works, in which he declared that ‘fixing the true reading of Shakespeare’ is ‘the most sacred part of the duty of an Editor’.22 For Collier, this ‘sacred duty’ (or, as he elsewhere called it, this ‘plodding diligence’23) included the search for manuscript sources for Shakespeare’s texts. However, as Collier stated: ‘[I]t is a remarkable fact, that not a single written fragment of any of the Plays of Shakespeare has come down to us, with the exception of a few passages in some unprinted poetical miscellanies.’24 Collier’s desire as an editor was to find Shakespeare’s lost original or, failing that, to get as close as possible to the hand of Shakespeare. In the search for lost and previously unknown sources – beyond the printed quartos of the plays – he turned by necessity to the contemporary culture of manuscripts. The description of ‘unprinted poetical miscellanies’ given here is essentially accurate (even if the term ‘miscellany’ is no longer ideologically viable, since Collier himself was the one who applied that term to such manuscripts).25 It was ‘very much the custom’ to keep such notebooks, and in his words, the lists of ‘anecdotes, observations, or passages’ nicely summarize the diverse assemblage of materials included in such manuscripts. Collier’s frustration at the lack of Shakespearean manuscripts is typical of an editor – but it is also typical of his inclination for exaggeration and self-promotion. As we know now, Shakespeare was quite popular as a source for commonplacing in early modern manuscripts and, especially, in printed early modern commonplace books26 – but printed books could not deliver the aura of authenticity that Collier so desperately desired to discover. Nonetheless, Collier continued by describing just such a manuscript in his possession: One of these, forming rather a rare exception to the general rule, is now before me, and it contains extracts from several of our great dramatist’s productions for the stage, anterior to the year 1600, but none afterwards,

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although the dates interspersed in the volume (of some 500 closely written pages) extend from about 1590 to the breaking out of the civil wars.27

The volume Collier somewhat loosely described here is now in the Folger (MS V.a.339).28 The once-blank book consists of 583 pages, all but two of which are now almost completely filled with writing. The first owner filled approximately half the pages in the 1630s, dividing the book into about six sections, leaving plenty of space in between. The second owner, who left a few dates in the 1640s, followed the organizational pattern of the previous owner, adding material in each section. At least, that is what we think we know about this volume, based on the standard methodologies of bibliographical description and responsible detective work. By the time Collier acquired the volume, there were 163 blank pages left – although they did not stay blank for long. The manuscript includes copies of six poems from The Passionate Pilgrime, and Collier used two of these copies as sources for variant readings in his edition of Shakespeare – a practice continued by the poems’ twenty-first century editors. Collier also used the manuscript as evidence that Shakespeare had indeed written all six of the poems copied in the manuscript (which we now believe, pace the title page attribution, that he did not), since the initials ‘W.S.’ were opportunely appended to the doubtful poems in the manuscript. As Collier wrote in his prospectus, ‘I have some new evidence of his right’ to be considered the author of the poems in The Passionate Pilgrime – a ‘right’ that would fix the true authority of Shakespeare to the poems, a matter just as (if not more) important than the text.29 As it turns out, the initials had been inserted by Collier himself, thereby making the editorial labour of recovering and ‘fixing the true reading of Shakespeare’ that much easier. What was lost could conveniently be ‘found’. Collier’s concern as an editor was to exploit a kind of evidence hitherto neglected by previous editors: ‘unprinted poetical miscellanies’, as he termed them, that is, manuscript transcriptions of the poems that, by virtue of being ‘unprinted’, could claim a degree of authenticity unavailable to their printed counterparts. Collier did misinterpret and manipulate the evidence, though, by attempting to attribute the variants to Shakespeare himself. However, the variants are not authorial, but instead show the variable ways in which texts could circulate among – and be transformed by – readers (a good thirty

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years after the poems were first published, no less). Nevertheless, the basic idea of using variants in manuscript copies to edit Shakespeare’s texts was, in a way, appropriate – and, indeed, a few years later Collier would recognize and capitalize on the perceived authority of the manuscript (as a legitimate collection compiled by seventeenth-century readers) to authenticate a rather different enterprise he had embarked on. The purpose of the early compilers’ repurposed extracts may be unavailable to us, but the purpose to which Collier subsequently put the book is altogether more ascertainable. His act of repurposing was more consequential than, and in some ways wholly opposed to, the use of the manuscript to discover the odd Shakespearean attribution or variant. It is the textual alterations he claimed to discover in another book for which he is primarily known today – a copy of the Second Folio heavily annotated by one ‘Thomas Perkins’, the so-called ‘Old Corrector’, who turned out to be none other than Collier himself. The ‘Perkins Folio’30 is one of the most famous forgeries in Shakespearean literary history, but Collier’s additions to the decidedly smaller, and seemingly less consequential manuscript miscellany were, in their way, far more substantial and audacious, considering both the creative and technical labour involved, as well as the larger project of which they were a part. On the 163 pages that Collier found to be conveniently blank in the volume, he copied eighty-three ballads which he claimed were transcribed by a seventeenth-century owner, but which were actually composed and written in by the great forger himself during a relatively brief span in the 1840s. Collier was fascinated by (and often defended) old popular ballads – both genuine and counterfeit – throughout his life. This was, in fact, the second manuscript in which he had inserted forged ballads. (The first, now known as the ‘Protectorate Manuscript’, was a small copy of the Eikon Basilike, where Collier similarly used the blank pages to copy down some thirty ballads.31) But he also produced a commendable edition of selections from the Roxburghe collection of ballads, complete with a historical introduction, and was a founding member of the Percy Society. Named after the pioneer of ballad studies in the eighteenth century, Bishop Thomas Percy, the Society aimed to publish ‘Ancient Ballads, Songs, Plays, minor pieces of Poetry, and Popular Literature, or works illustrative of the above-mentioned subjects’, aims which, as Collier explicitly stated, ‘answer my purpose exactly’.32 Collier’s biographers,

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Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman, even go as far as to say that his ‘lifelong sympathy lay more with the wide range of early English poetry and drama than with Shakespeare’s uncontested but sometimes tiresome supremacy within it’.33 It was Collier’s purpose, then, to make this popular literature accessible to a wider audience, and to forge – in all the senses of that term – a suitable history for that literature. Collier argued that ballads, along with ‘popular poetry and prose, plays, tracts, voyages, travels, and lighter literature’, were ‘invaluable, because they contain the most curious and authentic record of the state and progress of letters during several reigns’.34 Collier’s discovery of transcribed ballads was all the more valuable because so few ballads had survived. He went on to argue that ‘had such productions remained to us, and had we possessed no other sources of knowledge, it would not have been difficult to have compiled, from them only, a more accurate and faithful narrative, in many respects, than has been furnished by the most painstaking and conscientious of our chronologers’.35 What once had been the most visible and accessible forms of popular print – that is, broadside ballads and pamphlets – had all but disappeared, due to their very accessibility, and hence ephemerality. And the remaining exemplars were hidden, as the private possessions of wealthy collectors. (That very inaccessibility, not coincidentally, provided much of the appeal and opportunity to forge them.) By redefining systems of value, Collier’s focus was not on the financially lucrative Shakespeare market, but rather on producing an ‘accurate and faithful narrative’ of Shakespearean history in context. In other words, he defined a new area of inquiry. Collier’s ballads provided a window onto Shakespeare’s time that mere ‘chronologers’ could not. Collier thus set out to publish the ballads he had recovered – not as a freestanding volume, but instead as illustrative material included in two volumes of Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers’ Company. This was the first systematic attempt to publish entries from the registers, which now constitute one of the most important sources for textual scholarship. Collier had been allowed to consult the registers in person, as few scholars had previously. (The entries pertaining to Shakespeare, for example, had already been cited by George Steevens, who, Collier complained, had put his initials next to each entry that interested him; Collier, of course, did not hesitate to insert his own scattered, and relatively minor, interpolations

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into the registers.36) The Stationers’ Register – the ledger books in which members of the Stationers’ Company recorded their rights to copy, amongst other business – is now considered to be one of the most crucial reference sources for the study of the early modern book trade and early modern print culture, although they are known primarily through the transcripts of Edward Arber. Collier disregarded medical, scientific and religious texts, since they were already well known from extant editions; Arber, however, did praise Collier’s earlier efforts, calling him the ‘Nestor of all living Restorers of our Old Literature to modern thought’.37 Once again, as with the consultation of manuscript variants, Collier was on the cutting edge of scholarship, for he recognized that entries in the register preserved evidence of printed texts that had otherwise disappeared.38 Collier was not satisfied with the ‘dryness of the details’, as he put it, and so he went about resurrecting the ballads that had been lost. He used the titles of ballads entered in the register as inspiration for the ballads he composed and inserted into the manuscript notebook. Collier composed all eighty-three of the ballads he inserted into the manuscript, although about seventeen of them were based on some extant source which Collier had access to. This ensured, as he was quick to point out, the authenticity of the rest (which, of course, were pure invention, based on nothing more than the bare title found in the register, and Collier’s own, at times indiscreet, imagination). Collier thus insisted that all of the transcribed ballads he discovered in the manuscript had once been printed – and in a sense, they very likely were (since they had all been entered in the register), just not in the versions that Collier presented. But, of course, how would we know otherwise? Collier thus brilliantly capitalized on the convoluted transmission of ballads, which are combinations of text and tune that traverse among manuscript, print and various forms of oral delivery. He claimed that these ballads had been printed and were then (supposedly) transcribed in manuscript in the seventeenth century, the printed versions having conveniently disappeared. It is not an implausible chain of events, and Collier further relied on the authenticity of the seventeenth-century miscellany (with its secretary hand and heterogeneous collection of material) to authenticate his forgeries. (The handwriting he used, however, is another matter entirely, at least to trained paleographers with a more attuned sense of historical accuracy and investigation.)

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The plan was ingenious, for what Collier created was a fictional history of popular fictions that was not only plausible, but also not, in fact, entirely fictional. In doing so, he overlooked the circulation of popular texts evident in the genuinely seventeenth-century portion of his manuscript, in part because of the preeminence of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century and his own investment in that preeminence, as an editor. In this way, he proved the need for the proper history of ‘popular literature’ that he set out to provide. And Collier’s venture did succeed. Some of the forged ballads he published were in turn republished by contemporary ballad experts, and some of those ballads have had a remarkably long life. My purpose here is not to exculpate Collier, but if we look beyond the act of forgery itself, we can see the purpose that forgery was intended to fulfill. It is another act of textual repurposing – of reading, or misreading, the cycles of circulation in which the texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries existed. Fact produces fiction, which in turn produces fact.

Authentic forgery What can fiction teach us about facts? Collier believed that an act of skilful forgery could transform the ways in which we understand and conceptualize the past by focusing on the documentary basis, and the embodied nature, of popular ballads. In this model, authenticity – of authorship, and of authority – and forgery are mutually constitutive. Collier is thus an attractive avatar for modern and post-modern Shakespearean scholarship, due to his self-awareness and penchant for literary experimentation and archival investigation. A similarly self-conscious experiment in Shakespearean textual metafiction – one laced with a combination of actual and fictitious research – is The Tragedy of Arthur, a ‘lost’ play by Shakespeare written by the novelist Arthur Phillips and published by Random House in 2011.39 The novel (or is it?) takes the form of a full-length play written in Shakespearean language (replete with critical apparatus and glosses) prefaced by an introduction that, itself, takes the form of a memoir written by someone named Arthur Phillips. (Collier would, no doubt, be proud.) The book thus embodies the perennial hope of the scholar, and the perennial trope of mystery novels, by presenting a holy grail of sorts: the

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recovery of a genuine Shakespearean relic. If one cannot find such a relic – if such a thing does not and cannot exist in reality, save for the re-creation of a play Shakespeare could (or should?) have written – then we have much to learn from a fantasy that fulfills our desire to restore a lost original. The book’s ‘introduction’ outlines the lives of Arthur Phillips – who has been contracted to write the preface – and his father, a skilful if petty forger who has been convicted of fraud and incarcerated multiple times. It is filled with deliberate demonstrations of the author’s research (whether Shakespeare, learning from Holinshed; the narrator, following the trail of the lost play as a kind of detective; or Phillips the novelist, who conducted significant investigations into current trends in Shakespeare scholarship). Invocations of bibliographical facts hint at the unearthed play quarto’s authenticity: ‘His name was right there on the title-page’, as with The Passionate Pilgrime; yet there were ‘cases of printers using his name to sell books he hadn’t written’ – also much like The Passionate Pilgrime.40 The characters (or is that consultants?) of real Shakespeareans litter the pages, reenacting the familiar detective story archetypes of scholars who are interested in the cultural value of the play, and more mercenary forces (in this case, a publishing house) invested in the very real financial capital to be gleaned from the venture of publishing such a discovery. The manipulation and transformation of various kinds of currency and authority are negotiated in and through an elaborate and convoluted literary game. The materials and methods of the purported forger, who boasts of creating something new and beautiful to add to the world; of the narrator, who is forced to authenticate the play despite his despair at its incontrovertible (or is it?) status as a forgery; and even of the anti-Stratfordian project of the narrator’s sister differ perhaps only in degree, rather than in kind, from mainstream Shakespearean scholarship: a ‘beautiful hybrid of historical research, literary interpretation, parody, and outright fiction’.41 It is a fitting description of the novel itself, and (with the exception of parody) a suitable standard for the research both within and which informed the novel. In addition, in its persistent self-reflexivity, the fictional narrative is perhaps more honest in revealing its motivations than is normal (or often thought possible) within critical narratives produced within Shakespearean textual studies. The narrator repeatedly and persistently invokes (the problems of) his personal history: ‘All

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I can say is that the truth of the play requires understanding the truth of my life.’42 It is a comment that both admits the desires and motivations of any scholar while at the same time casting doubt on the very idea of truth as it is (or can be) instantiated in the analysis of a material artefact. ‘No argument of authenticity is ever enough to prove what cannot be proven.’43 Is the play authentic? Of course not. Then again, what is authenticity when ideas of originality, authority and authorship, and property are so insistently interrogated? One recent scholar – in reality, rather than in the fiction – has suggested that the power of the novel lies in its capacity to ‘question the role that stories – particularly those by Shakespeare – play in constructing our own lives, both in the event and in memory’. Thus, in its combination of contemporary fiction and memoir, intersecting with Shakespeare, ‘one can never be sure what is true’.44 What is true? And what is the truth that is hidden in the slash in Shakespeare / Text? It is that ‘fact’ always depends upon, and is composed and constituted of, fiction – elaborate narratives produced and promulgated by scholars in order to (uncoincidentally) authorize their own (our own, my own) stories. To conclude with a formulaic genre / sentence: this bibliographer is invested in an interpretive and imaginative mode of scholarship, one that recognizes and embraces the fictional aspects of what we collectively deem the ‘factual’. Whether that is the classic detective novel, factually based fictional forgeries or an exercise in novelistic memoir, we have much to learn – and to gain – from attending to the implication of fiction in the ways we present the facts on which Shakespearean textual studies is built.

Notes 1 Barnaby Ross, Drury Lane’s Last Case: The Tragedy of 1599 (New York: Viking, 1933), 83. 2 The named author of the Drury Lane mysteries, ‘Barnaby Ross’, was a pseudonym used by the duo who usually wrote and published under the name ‘Ellery Queen’. 3 William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrime (London: William Jaggard, 1612). 4 See Hyder E. Rollins, A Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938), 528.

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  5 As Rollins notes, by the time Lee published his biography of Shakespeare in 1916, Lee’s earlier speculation had become the declarative statement that ‘Jaggard issued a second edition … in 1606, but no copy survives’ (quoted in Rollins, Variorum, 528).   6 Susan Baker, ‘Comic Material: Shakespeare in the Classic Detective Story’, in Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare’s Plays, ed. Francis Teague (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), 173.   7 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London: Cuthburt Burby, 1598), sigs. Oo1v–Oo2r.   8 Baker, ‘Comic Material’, 171.   9 Susan Baker, ‘Shakespearean Authority in the Classic Detective Story’, Shakespeare Quarterly 46, no. 4 (1995): 432. 10 Baker, ‘Shakespearean Authority’, 425. 11 Rebecca Bushnell, ‘Shakespeare Found and Lost’, in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 34. 12 Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22342 Bd.w. STC 22341.8. 13 Variorum Files, Folger Archives, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. In a letter to Giles E. Dawson dated 15 December 1935, Rollins notes: ‘I have collated every word, letter, and point, and the collation suggests to me a second edition—or at least a reprint. The abundant misprints are unlike a first edition, even from Jaggard’s shop …. I think it safe for me to refer to your unique leaves as belonging to the second octavo.’ 14 In a letter to Adams dated 6 December 1937, Rollins remarks: ‘The proofs of the P.P. Appendix will have to go back by the end of the week, and if, by any chance, he [E. E. Willoughby, the Chief Bibliographer at the Folger] thinks the fragment is earlier than the 1599 text, I’d like to qualify my remarks.’ 15 18 January 1938. 16 J. Q. Adams, ed., The Passionate Pilgrim (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939). 17 Ibid., xxii. ‘Evidence that quires A and C [of the fragment] represent the true first edition is so voluminous, varied in kind, and conclusive, that it seems desirable not to sacrifice this Introduction to a labored marshalling of that evidence’ (xxi). Despite the confidence expressed by Adams, it is impossible to ascertain whether the fragment is a (lost) ‘first’ edition. 18 W. W. Greg, ‘On Certain False Dates in Shakespearian Quartos’, The Library, 2nd series, 9 (1908): 113–31; 381–409. William Neidig, ‘The Shakespeare Quartos of 1619’, Modern Philology 8 (1910): 145–63. For a contemporary account of the

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entire episode, see Alfred W. Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos: A Study in the Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Plays 1594–1685 (London: Methuen, 1909). 19 See my own Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 112–24; and Zachary Lesser, Ghosts, Holes, Rips, and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Long Durée (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). 20 F. P. Wilson, ‘Sir Walter Wilson Greg’, Proceedings of the British Academy 45 (1959): 331. See also Baker, ‘Shakespearean Authority’, 424; and Marjorie Garber, ‘A Tale of Three Hamlets or Repetition and Revenge’, Shakespeare Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2010): 51–3. 21 Muriel St. Clare Byrne, ‘Walter Wilson Greg: 9 July 1875–4 March 1959’, The Library, 5th series, no. 14 (1959): 166. 22 John Payne Collier, Reasons for a New Edition of Shakespeare’s Works (London: Whittaker & Co., 1841). I quote from the second, revised edition published in 1842 (5–6). 23 Ibid., 8. 24 Ibid., 6. 25 For more on miscellany as an anachronistic term, see Megan Heffernan’s chapter ‘Miscellany / sequence’ in this volume. 26 See Laura Estill, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts (Lanham: University of Delaware Press, 2015), esp. ch. 6. 27 Collier, Reasons, 7. 28 Giles E. Dawson offers a description and analysis of the manuscript in ‘John Payne Collier’s Great Forgery’, Studies in Bibliography 24 (1971): 1–26. I draw here on Dawson’s work and my own examination of the manuscript. 29 Collier, Reasons, 34. 30 The volume is now in the Huntington Library, shelfmark 56316. 31 The critical literature on Collier is massive, but on this point see, among others, Franklin Dickey, ‘The Old Man at Work: Forgeries in the Stationers’ Registers’, Shakespeare Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1960): 39–47. 32 Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 2:318. 33 Ibid., 2:379. 34 Collier, Extracts from the Registers of The Stationers’ Company (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1848), vi. 35 Ibid., ix.

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36 See Dickey, ‘The Old Man at Work’. 37 Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Register of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D., 5 vols (London: Privately Printed, 1875–94), 1:30. 38 For more on this idea, see the contributions to this volume by Misha Teramura (‘Lost / found’) and Scott Trudell (‘Extant / ephemeral’). 39 Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2011). For a book-historical contextualization of the novel, see Ingo Berensmeyer, ‘The Forger’s Shakespeare Library: Authorship, Book History, and The Tragedy of Arthur’, AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 43, no. 218 (2018): 125–40. 40 Phillips, Tragedy, 143, 149. 41 Ibid., 64. 42 Ibid., 35. 43 Ibid., 185. 44 Bushnell, ‘Shakespeare Found and Lost’, 41–2.

Bibliography Adams, J. Q., ed. The Passionate Pilgrim. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939. Arber, Edward, ed. A Transcript of the Register of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D., 5 vols. London: Privately Printed, 1875–94. Baker, Susan. ‘Comic Material: Shakespeare in the Classic Detective Story’. In Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare’s Plays, edited by Francis Teague, 180–8. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. Baker, Susan. ‘Shakespearean Authority in the Classic Detective Story’. Shakespeare Quarterly 46, no. 4 (1995): 424–48. Berensmeyer, Ingo. ‘The Forger’s Shakespeare Library: Authorship, Book History, and The Tragedy of Arthur’. AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 43, no. 218 (2018): 125–40. Bushnell, Rebecca. ‘Shakespeare Found and Lost’. In Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, edited by Andrew James Hartley, 33–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Byrne, Muriel St. Clare. ‘Walter Wilson Greg: 9 July 1875–4 March 1959’. The Library, 5th series, no. 14 (1959): 166–71. Collier, John Payne. Reasons for a New Edition of Shakespeare’s Works. London: Whittaker & Co., 1841.

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Collier, John Payne. Extracts from the Registers of The Stationers’ Company. London: The Shakespeare Society, 1848. Dawson, Giles E. ‘John Payne Collier’s Great Forgery’. Studies in Bibliography 24 (1971): 1–26. Dickey, Franklin. ‘The Old Man at Work: Forgeries in the Stationers’ Registers’. Shakespeare Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1960): 39–47. Estill, Laura. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts. Lanham: University of Delaware Press, 2015. Freeman, Arthur, and Janet Ing Freeman. John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Garber, Marjorie. ‘A Tale of Three Hamlets or Repetition and Revenge’. Shakespeare Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2010): 28–55. Greg, W. W. ‘On Certain False Dates in Shakespearian Quartos’. The Library, 2nd series, 9 (1908): 113–31. Hooks, Adam G. Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Lesser, Zachary. Ghosts, Holes, Rips, and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Long Durée. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Meres, Francis. Palladis Tamia. London: Cuthburt Burby, 1598. Neidig, William. ‘The Shakespeare Quartos of 1619’. Modern Philology 8 (1910): 145–63. Phillips, Arthur. The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2011. Pollard, Alfred W. Shakespeare Folios and Quartos: A Study in the Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Plays 1594–1685. London: Methuen, 1909. Rollins, Hyder E. A Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938. Ross, Barnaby. Drury Lane’s Last Case: The Tragedy of 1599. New York: Viking, 1933. Shakespeare, William. The Passionate Pilgrime. London: William Jaggard, 1612. Variorum Files, Folger Archives, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Wilson, F. P. ‘Sir Walter Wilson Greg’. Proceedings of the British Academy 45 (1959): 307–74.

15

Part / whole Paul Salzman

I want to begin with a part of Hamlet:

Figure 15.1  James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, page from Hamlet scrapbook, GL 12/15, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Reproduced with the permission of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

I want to thank Zachary Lesser for saving me from an embarrassing error, and Claire M. L. Bourne for her meticulous editing and generous suggestions.

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This speech of Hamlet’s is cut out of a Shakespeare Second Folio and it has been pasted into a scrapbook. The man wielding the scissors was the great nineteenth-century Shakespeare biographer, editor and rare-book dealer James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. In this chapter I will explore what it means to cut up Shakespeare’s texts, literally as well as metaphorically, and what relationships there might be between the parts that have been cut up, and the apparent wholes from which they have been cut. Thanks to the pioneering work of Tiffany Stern, we are used to the idea that early modern plays were made up of parts, often separable, as opposed to being fixed and entire.1 In Stern’s vivid phrase, an early modern play was in fact ‘a collection of scattered papers’.2 Similarly, a number of scholars have explored the way that early modern books and manuscripts were always in a state of deconstruction and reconstruction, through readerly activities like commonplacing and through the processes of transmission.3 Here, I want to trace the theoretical and practical consequences of an afterlife of holes rather than wholes for early modern texts in general and for Shakespeare in particular. Taking the dichotomy part / whole in its broadest sense, I want to begin by asking what exactly is a ‘whole’ Shakespeare play, and what is apart from it / a part of it. The most obviously detachable part of an early modern play was a Part – an actor’s part, or cue script.4 The Part is a paradoxically located section of a play, because it is created out of the play but, in the early modern theatre, existed independently of the play, even though it made sense only when the Parts were reassembled through the process of production.5 In the early modern theatre (and indeed through to the eighteenth century), actors were not handed the entire text of the play in which they were to perform, but rather a roll of paper with their part (or parts if they were doubling or tripling minor roles) and very brief cues to signal when they were to speak.6 If, as Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey argue, an early modern play was an assemblage, then the actors’ Parts were in themselves like miniature plays focused on a single character’s perspective. The idea of a ‘whole’ play being distributed over a series of parts can also be related to the way in which plays like Shakespeare’s were reproduced in print. I don’t have the space here to rehearse the complex and sophisticated debates over the initial publication of Shakespeare’s plays, but I do want to note how, from the earliest quartos onwards, their publication involved an oscillation

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between compilation and fragmentation, between idealized and localized texts, and between parts and wholes.7 So editors once asked, of the plays that appeared early on in a number of versions, which part of the whole Hamlet, King Lear, King Henry VI, etc., was each quarto version? This question, which might be said to have exercised editors from Edmond Malone in the late eighteenth century through to Randall McLeod in the twentieth, morphed in recent years into the idea that each textual part was in fact a whole, and needed to be read and edited accordingly.8 The parts that could be put together to produce a whole ‘Shakespeare’ were, famously, first assembled in 1623 and published as Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the true original Copies. But from the beginning, the parts that made up this whole collected works volume were never stable or fixed.9 For example, some copies of the First Folio contained Troilus and Cressida and some did not. During the seventeenth century, successive editions of the folio shifted in various directions, most notably when the publishers of the Third Folio edition of 1663/4 added to the second issue of the book seven plays, which by the eighteenth century were removed again as not being by Shakespeare.10 Sonia Massai has explained how the method of bringing Shakespeare into print in the seventeenth century can be seen as a form of editing, with publishers involved in the process of preparing and re-preparing plays for publication, with the various parts of playtexts being emended, reassembled, expanded and contracted.11 In particular, Massai argues that the later folios, especially the Fourth Folio of 1685, are evidence of a conscious process that can be termed editing.12 The Fourth Folio continued the trend of consolidating parts of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, expanded now by an extra seven plays, into a single volume. This format was changed dramatically in the eighteenth century, as the single volume was broken up into multiple volumes: the Shakespearean corpus was published in parts. So, for example, Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition was published in six volumes, as was Alexander Pope’s in 1725; Louis Theobald’s in 1733 was in seven volumes; Samuel Johnson’s in eight (first published in 1765 and expanded to ten in the George Steevens/Johnson edition of 1773); Edward Capell’s in ten (1768); and Malone’s in ten in 1790.13 Margreta de Grazia, in her ground-breaking study of the implications of the eighteenth-century editorial development towards the Malone edition, argues that the quest for authentic texts was inextricably linked

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to the projection of a singular author, Shakespeare, as an ‘autonomous self ’.14 The multiplying components of this kind of collected edition were united under the increasingly monolithic authorial presence of the ever-more consolidated ‘Shakespeare’. Under the revisions supervised by James Boswell for the 1821 edition, Malone’s 1790 edition became enormously influential for much of the nineteenth century, picking up the soubriquet ‘Variorum’ because it included the prefaces and selected emendations of prior editors. Despite the influence of this one edition, the nineteenth century also saw increasing competition between Shakespeare editions, and between their editors. There were two trends in Shakespeare editing that are directly relevant to the theme of this chapter: on the one hand, increasing monumentalization, as exemplified by the 1821 Variorum edition, and on the other hand, an antiquarian desire to find and edit, or reproduce, small, often ephemeral early modern texts, as well as everything that might in any way be associated with Shakespeare. The figure who most exemplified this antiquarian industry of archival delving and fragmented publication was James Orchard HalliwellPhillipps.15 While the Malone-Boswell Variorum edition of Shakespeare remained popular throughout the nineteenth century, joined in the 1840s by the equally popular versions of Charles Knight’s cheap and readily accessible illustrated edition, by mid-century there were three editors vying for the prize of most authoritative edition of Shakespeare. We might call this trio the tortoise, the cheater and the hare.16 The methodical Alexander Dyce is the tortoise, carefully editing his way through the dramatic canon before producing a worthy though rather dull edition of Shakespeare in 1857. John Payne Collier marred forever his reputation as a scholar through a series of forgeries, most notably in this context, forged, purportedly contemporary annotations on a Second Folio, which supplied allegedly ‘authentic’ emendations that Collier incorporated into his 1855 edition of Shakespeare.17 Dyce and Collier’s younger, hungrier, rival editor, James Orchard Halliwell, was clearly a hare in other realms: he published his first book at the age of sixteen and became an acknowledged authority on early mathematical books and manuscripts before he turned twenty-one. Because of his relatively modest background, Halliwell was, even as a teenager, a kind of amateur dealer in rare books and manuscripts, a practice which intersected completely with his later antiquarian pursuits.18 This is important

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because Halliwell’s commercial dealings involve a similar process of cutting and pasting, of dis-assembling and reconstruction, to his research methods and to the creation of his Shakespeare edition. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, early modern printed books, in general, and those by Shakespeare, in particular, had become prized items, not just by antiquarians, but also by collectors, rich and not so rich, who were supplied by a flourishing market of book dealers.19 Halliwell participated in this growing trade in three ways. Throughout his long career he published bibliographical material and editions of often obscure (and usually short or extracted) early modern texts in very limited print runs, where the small size of the print run pushed up the price of the book. He was involved in the increasing market for facsimiles (reproductions of whole books or parts of them by a variety of means, as outlined below), especially of works by Shakespeare. And thirdly, he engaged in the buying and selling of early modern books, again with an emphasis on Shakespeare. In the mid-nineteenth century, the buying and selling of early modern books, especially those in demand, often involved a process referred to in the book trade as ‘perfecting’.20 Collectors tended to demand the best possible copy of an early book, and such a demand was hard to reconcile with the rough life that many books had led over time. Pages might be lost, deliberately torn out, stained, marked, faded, eaten by insects or ripped. There were three ways in which these pages could be restored, or made ‘perfect’: they could be replaced by a hand-traced/drawn facsimile; by a type facsimile (i.e. one printed anew from typeface that either looked like the original typeface, or was a replica of it, or in some cases was a remnant of original type that remained in stock); or by an original page from a different copy of the book. The third option we might call the cut and paste option, where a part could be removed from one book to make another whole. In his role as book dealer, Halliwell used all three methods, but the one that he seems most engaged in, and that perhaps raises modern scholarly eyebrows the most, however common it was in the book trade (and indeed is still practised there), was, for example, cutting out a page from one Shakespeare Folio in order to make another Folio more perfect and thereby more valuable. Because of his insatiable hunt for Shakespearean material, which resulted in his substantial, frequently revised and enduring biography of Shakespeare, Halliwell had more duplicates available for repurposing than most book dealers.21 I turn

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now to a good example of this whole process, which involved his purchase and resale of one particular First Folio.22 In 1867, Halliwell bought a copy of the 1623 Folio from the estate of George Smith for the fairly high sum (then) of £410. Two years later, Halliwell sold the Folio to Frederick Ouvry at what for Halliwell was an unusual loss, rather than profit: the price was £350. Halliwell admitted to Ouvry that, while this was an excellent copy, it had pages with rustholes. He therefore offered Ouvry the option of having those pages replaced with pages Halliwell could cut from ‘six imperfect copies’ he had in his possession.23 As we will see, Halliwell saw the process of cutting out parts of books as fundamental to his process of research as well as useful for his activities as a book dealer. Halliwell offered Ouvry the repair: ‘[Y]ou will be welcome to duplicates of these few leaves from my imperfect copies – they could be flattened and slipped in as duplicates without altering the book.’24 However, Halliwell went on to suggest that a perfected folio was not such a good idea: ‘[I]t would be a pity to do so, the defects being insignificant, & the operation one which would impair the integrity of the volume.’ Halliwell clearly felt ambivalent about the pasting/ tipping/placing side of this process but appears to have been untroubled by the cutting/extracting/slicing side. He had expressed his disquiet at the idea of perfecting in the preface to Early Editions of Shakespeare (1857): ‘For many years it has been the fashion to form perfect copies from imperfect fragments, and as in some cases different editions of the same play correspond exactly in catchwords, signatures, and head-lines, deception has been practised in the sale of copies presumed to be perfect.’25 As a part-time book dealer, Halliwell was conscious of the value of a book’s integrity, in an acknowledgement of the ideal purchase for someone with scholarly aspirations, but at the same time he was sensitive to the demands of the market for perfected books and, as we have seen in this example, was willing to accede to them in order to clinch a sale. This hesitation about the depredations inflicted by perfecting was not matched by Halliwell’s approach to his research. Throughout his long career, Halliwell created scrapbooks and what we might call ‘archive books’ by cutting relevant passages out of other textual objects. On occasion, he would also copy out by hand passages, notably entries from parish registers. The parts cut out included extracts from newspapers, catalogue entries and most alarming for modern scholars, passages from early modern books, including Shakespeare

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quartos and folios. The bit of Hamlet illustrated at the beginning of this chapter is just one example. There is a vivid description of Halliwell at work late in his life which underlines his process of cutting out parts of books: ‘Every afternoon his habit is to look over a score of books, cut out of each the fractions he can use, and throw the rest as refuse into his mammoth waste-basket.’26 I believe that Halliwell’s practice can be placed into three distinct but interlinked contexts: commonplacing, archiving and scrapbooking. All three involve a complex nexus between extracting and compiling: removing parts of a text in a variety of ways and reassembling them to create a new whole. As I have noted above, Renaissance commonplacing has been the subject of detailed and influential scholarship in recent years, ranging from case studies of how individuals organized their reading and concomitant ideas, through to the popularity in the seventeenth century of both manuscript and printed commonplace books as repositories of knowledge, as well as of memorable ideas and expressions. Practitioners ranged from noted intellectuals like Gabriel Harvey, whose meticulous process was the subject of a groundbreaking article by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, through to readers who marked up and copied out material in a much less ordered fashion, and who also had, by the seventeenth century, compiled material for printed commonplace books for other readers to buy.27 Commonplacing has generally been seen as involving copying out, rather than cutting out, passages of note. However, recent work on the material nature of reading and writing in the early modern period has considered the degree to which cutting out parts of books and rearranging them can also be connected to commonplacing and the notion of ‘writing’ as like a palimpsest, rather than being linear. This work was pioneered by Juliet Fleming, who has more recently, along with Adam Smyth and William H. Sherman, edited a series of essays on the idea of the Renaissance ‘collage’, including the process of cutting up and reconstructing books and manuscripts.28 These scholars have offered a highly suggestive, revisionist account of how reading and writing functioned in the early modern period, focusing on the process of extracting, reworking and reshaping. In Fleming’s evocative description, ‘[E]arly modern readers cut as they read, and read by cutting, printed books.’29 This process included the way that readers responded to Shakespeare, especially after the publication of the first and subsequent folio collections of his

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works, and involved the marking and annotating that has, again, been the subject of recent scholarly interest fuelled by the material turn in early modern studies. This expanded understanding of ‘reading’ also involved commonplacing, anthologizing and extracting, activities that increased in intensity from the late seventeenth century through to the present day.30 Halliwell was not unusual amongst nineteenth-century editors in his process of compiling extracts from his reading that were relevant to his editing, but the sheer quantity of what he compiled and what he published dwarfed even the most indefatigable of Victorian editors (and it was an age of indefatigable editing). Partly to make money, and particularly as a reflection of his genuinely wide-ranging and intense research focus, Halliwell published a huge range of anthologies, extracts, factual material related to early modern literature in general and to Shakespeare in particular, as well as full editions and editions of individual texts.31 Much of this project was itself a kind of commonplacing, as Halliwell allowed those who bought his usually very limited printed editions access to his gleanings. Halliwell’s process of extracting textual moments, quotations, source material of various kinds and reassembling those parts so that they could feed into his editorial and biographical labours over Shakespeare (and other early modern writers) can be seen as archiving through scrapbooking. As Alan Galey points out, ‘[T]he archive has replaced the library as the dominant metaphor for cultural memory.’32 Halliwell’s process was a form of what Galey has termed ‘the study of Shakespeare’s textual remains’.33 While scrapbooking can take on decorative forms, recent important theoretical work has shown how, in the nineteenth century, it was an information ordering method, most notably described by Ellen Garvey as a process whereby readers ‘adapted to the proliferation of print by cutting it up and saving it, reorganizing it, putting their own stamp on it, and sometimes recirculating it’.34 This describes Halliwell’s methodology perfectly, as does Garvey’s suggestive phrase for it: ‘performing archivalness’.35 The fragment thereby becomes part of a new, differently ordered yet nevertheless coherent whole. This scrapbooking process by Halliwell resulted in an enormous number of bespoke volumes now dispersed among the University of Edinburgh Library, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Special Collections at University College, London and the Library of Congress. The most relevant to my discussion here are the 128 scrapbooks

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associated with Halliwell’s massive, illustrated Shakespeare edition, published between 1853 and 1865.36 While the text of the edition is fairly standard for the time, the massive archive of scrapbooks associated with it can be seen as a kind of shadow edition: a set of fragments, bits and pieces, cut from primary Shakespeare texts as well as from an enormous range of illustrative early modern material. For every play in the edition there is a parallel set of scrapbooks, handsomely bound and, I think, clearly intended for readers, not just for Halliwell’s own eyes. His edition, then, is both entire and fragmented. Take Hamlet as an example. The scrap of Hamlet cut from the Second Folio illustrated at the beginning of this chapter sits as one of many textual scraps within the twelve bound volumes devoted to the play. As Halliwell worked through textual variants for the edition, he cut out illustrative pieces principally from a fourth quarto (1622) as well as the Second Folio. There is at times a kind of obsessive circling around certain cruxes as the scraps accumulate. But the volumes also contain numerous scraps from an enormous range of early modern books which illustrate the use of words or phrases from the play: many of these don’t appear as annotations in the edition, but rather are built up in the Hamlet scrapbooks as a kind of fragmented, silent commentary on, say, ‘miching mallecho’, or ‘bodkin’ (which produces an almost endless series of contemporary cut-and-pasted examples for such an apparently banal word). At a slight stretch, this aspect of Halliwell’s practice could be seen as a paradigm for the textual oscillations associated with Shakespeare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The last part of this chapter cannot recap all the intricacies of Shakespeare editing over the last hundred years, but one area that stands out is the constant shifting between a desire to have a whole, undivided ‘Shakespeare’ (such as the Arden Second Series Hamlet edited by Harold Jenkins in 1982), and what we might call an ‘exploded view’ of Shakespeare and of the texts associated with his name (such as the Arden Third Series ‘three text’ Hamlet edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor in 2006).37 John Jowett has explored the anxieties over the disintegration of the works associated with the undivided figure of Shakespeare as author, noting what we might call the return of the repressed: recent studies of attribution and collaboration have again turned a ‘whole’ Shakespeare into an assemblage of parts, a number of them not actually written by him.38 There remains considerable tension between the two poles of ‘Shakespeare’: in parts, or

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assumed whole. On the one hand, ever more sophisticated methodologies of attribution studies are breaking plays back into fragments and assigning them to particular authors, while on the other hand theatre scholars see collaboration as the status quo for the construction of early modern plays, which are treated as whole and performable in each iteration, however much those iterations are always in a state of flux.39 Halliwell was able, in a way, to have his cake and eat it too: he produced a monumental edition of the whole of Shakespeare, and at the same time carefully assembled his elaborate scrapbooks of parts/shreds/patches. As Zachary Lesser has shown in his extraordinary account of the uncanny nature of the discovery of the first Hamlet quarto in the nineteenth century, that play in particular challenges notions of how we can define a ‘whole’ play.40 The living theatre has always had a less reverential approach to Shakespeare, and again Hamlet is an exemplary instance, where the very iconic nature of the play allows for it to be taken apart radically over and over again.41 The most relevant instance for my purposes is Charles Marowitz’s Hamlet, a product of the experimental theatre of the 1960s, notably the moment of the Theatre of Cruelty. Marowitz described his cut up and repurposed version of Hamlet as a collage, noting that the fact that everyone ‘knows’ Hamlet, even those who have not read or seen it, allows for a scrapbook script.42 But it is worth pointing out that this is not a random cutting up, as was the case with Dadaist poetry, but rather Marowitz’s revisioning of the play, in a way that any director might, but through cutting the script into fragments and reassembling it in order to convey a new interpretation.43 So this is really in the end a perfect example of the process whereby each text, whether assembled by an editor, or a casual reader, or a director, is a new collection of parts derived from a whole that has never really existed.

Notes 1 See Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and for a recent collection of essays mostly devoted to this topic, see Tiffany Stern, ed., Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 2 Stern, Documents, 3.

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  3 For a succinct general account see Adam Smyth, ‘Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen Traits’, in Women and Writing, c. 1340–1650: The Domestication of Print Culture, ed. Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman (York: York Medieval Press, 2010), 90–110; and for the specific example of Shakespeare, see Laura Estill, ‘Commonplacing Readers’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 149–62; and Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2008): 371–420.   4 I use capitalization to distinguish the material text containing the actor’s lines and cues (‘Part’) from the role the actor played (‘part’).   5 For a brief account, see Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London: Routledge, 2004), 123–36; for considerably more detail and theoretical speculation, see Stern and Simon Palfrey, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and see also Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61–72.   6 Again, see Stern and Palfrey, Shakespeare in Parts, 14, for a photo of the manuscript part of Orlando from Greene’s play Orlando Furioso. By the eighteenth century, parts were written into books, rather than rolls.   7 See in particular Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).   8 For a good, if somewhat controversial, summary, see Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); two of Randall McLeod’s numerous radical interventions on this question are: ‘UN Editing Shak-speare’, Sub-stance 33, no. 4 (1982): 26–55, and as Random Cloud, ‘The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1982): 421–31.   9 For the classic accounts see W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), and Charleton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). For the most recent scholarship, see Eric Rasmussen and Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: A Descriptive Catalogue (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and most succinctly and entertainingly, Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 10 The plays are: Pericles, The London Prodigal, Thomas Lord Cromwell, The History of Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan, A Yorkshire Tragedy and The Tragedy of Locrine.

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They remained in the fourth folio of 1685 and in Rowe’s 1709 edition, but were removed by the 1725 Pope edition and the 1733 Theobald edition. 11 Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 12 Ibid., ch. 6. 13 For useful accounts, see Colin Franklin, Shakespeare Domesticated: The Eighteenth-Century Editions (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1991); and Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). See also Aleida Auld’s chapter ‘Canon / apocrypha’ in this volume. 14 Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Representation of Authority and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 10 and passim. 15 James’s name was James Orchard Halliwell until 1872, when he took on the name of his estranged father-in-law, Phillipps, under the terms of his wife’s grandfather’s will. For detailed biographical information, see Marvin Spevack, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (Delaware and London: Oak Knoll Press and Shepheard Walwyn, 2001). 16 For a detailed discussion of John Payne Collier, Alexander Dyce and Halliwell’s editions, see my Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 1825–1915 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), chs. 2 and 3; for a suggestive account of the implications of Collier’s activities for a new approach to bibliography, see Adam G. Hooks’s chapter ‘Fact / fiction’ in this volume; and for a highly original, indeed revolutionary, analysis of a test case that undoes teleological accounts of editing, see Zachary Lesser, Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespeare Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 17 Collier’s activities are exhaustively covered in Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004); for the so-called Perkins Folio forgeries see the discussion in Part 8 and Part 10. 18 See Spevack, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, 12–20. Spevack also covers Halliwell’s almost proven theft of a number of manuscripts from Trinity College, Cambridge, which he later sold, see ch. 4. 19 For a comprehensive and sophisticated account of this process, see David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory 1600–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 20 On perfecting Shakespeare, see the excellent account in Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, ch. 5. See also David McKitterick, Old Books, New Technologies: The

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Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books Since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 4. 21 James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of a Life of Shakespeare (1881–1887). 22 This copy is number 196 in Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: A New Worldwide Census (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); full bibliographical details are in Rasmussen and West, Descriptive Catalogue, 785–9. 23 See my account in Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 71–2; see also Freeman and Freeman, 2:913. 24 Halliwell correspondence (letters to Authors), University of Edinburgh Library, 142/11, quoted from Freeman and Freeman, 2:913. 25 James Orchard Halliwell, Early Editions of Shakespeare (Privately Printed, 1857), preface. 26 J. D. B., ‘Hollingbury Copse and its Shaksperiana’, Book-Lore 1 (December 1884–May 1885), 139; I have discussed this aspect of Halliwell’s working habits at greater length in Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 72–80. 27 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past & Present 129 (1990): 30–78; see more generally Adam Smyth, ‘Profit and delight’: Printed Miscellanies in England 1640–1682 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); and Michelle O’Callaghan, Crafting Poetry Anthologies and Cultures of Recreation in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 28 Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Juliet Fleming, Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016); Juliet Fleming, Adam Smyth and William Sherman, eds., The Renaissance Collage: Toward a New History of Reading, special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, no. 3 (2015). 29 Fleming et al., JMEMS, 446. For a detailed account of the practice and its implications, with case studies, see Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and for a particularly perceptive account of the Little Gidding process of ‘hacking’ and ‘publication’, and the implications for a revised, historicist interpretation, see Whitney Trettien, ‘Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies’, PMLA 133 (2018): 1135–51. 30 On marking in general, see William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Books in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008);

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on Shakespeare in particular see the pioneering work of Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, ch. 2. 31 For a complete bibliography, or at least as complete as any bibliography of Halliwell’s work can aspire to be, see Marvin Spevack, James Orchard HalliwellPhillipps: A Classified Bibliography (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1997). 32 Alan Galey, The Shakespearean Archive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1. 33 Ibid., 2. 34 Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing With Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 10. 35 Ibid., 20. 36 These scrapbooks are held at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library, GL 12 (128 volumes). 37 An exploded view shows the component parts of an object separated from each other but in a diagrammatic fashion that shows how they might be assembled. I owe the formulation to the wonderful novel of that title by Carrie Tiffany (Melbourne: Text, 2019). 38 John Jowett, ‘’Disintegration, 1924’, Shakespeare 10 (2014): 171–87; and see Lesser, Hamlet After Q1, ch. 4. 39 Jowett takes on some of the suggestive, sophisticated ideas about collaboration in Jeffrey Masten’s Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The state of play in authorship studies is perhaps most neutrally summed up in Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, eds., The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), while the most moderate and convincing individual contribution is, in my view, Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 40 Lesser, Hamlet After Q1, chs. 1 and 4. 41 See Holger Schott Syme’s chapter ‘Book / theatre’ in this volume for an extended case study of this phenomenon. 42 Charles Marowitz, The Marowitz Hamlet (London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1968), 12; I have to note here that Marowitz’s introduction, while illuminating, has some throwaway misogynistic remarks, one of which is quite disturbing. 43 Marowitz cuts up the script, the narrative and time scheme, and also reassigns speeches to different characters.

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Bibliography B., J. D. ‘Hollingbury Copse and its Shaksperiana’, Book-Lore 1 (December 1884–May 1885): 138–41. Cloud, Random. ‘The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos’. Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1982): 421–31. Craig, Hugh, and Brett Greatley-Hirsch. Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. de Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Representation of Authority and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Estill, Laura. ‘Commonplacing Readers’. In Shakespeare and Textual Studies, edited by Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai, 149–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Fleming, Juliet. Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Fleming, Juliet. Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016. Fleming, Juliet, Adam Smyth and William Sherman, eds. The Renaissance Collage: Toward a New History of Reading, special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45, no. 3 (2015). Franklin, Colin. Shakespeare Domesticated: The Eighteenth-Century Editions. Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1991. Freeman, Arthur, and Janet Ing Freeman. John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine. ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’. Past & Present 129 (1990): 30–78. Greg, W. W. The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard. Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1881–7. Halliwell, James Orchard. Early Editions of Shakespeare. Privately Printed, 1857. Hinman, Charleton. The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Jarvis, Simon. Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

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Lesser, Zachary. Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespeare Text. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Lesser, Zachary, and Peter Stallybrass. ‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays’. Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2008): 371–420. Marowitz, Charles. The Marowitz Hamlet. London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1968. Massai, Sonia. Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. McKitterick, David. The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory 1600–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. McLeod, Randall. ‘UN Editing Shak-speare’. Sub-stance 33, no. 4 (1982): 26–55. O’Callaghan, Michelle. Crafting Poetry Anthologies and Cultures of Recreation in Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Rasmussen, Eric, and Anthony James West. The Shakespeare First Folio: A Descriptive Catalogue. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Roberts, Sasha. Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Salzman, Paul. Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, 1825–1915. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Sherman, William H. Used Books: Marking Books in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Smith, Emma. Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Smyth, Adam. ‘Profit and delight’: Printed Miscellanies in England 1640–1682. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Smyth, Adam. ‘Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen Traits’. In Women and Writing, c. 1340–1650: The Domestication of Print Culture, edited by Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman, 90–110. York: York Medieval Press, 2010. Spevack, Marvin. James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: A Classified Bibliography. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1997. Spevack, Marvin. James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. Delaware and London: Oak Knoll Press and Shepheard Walwyn, 2001. Stern, Tiffany. Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Stern, Tiffany. Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page. London: Routledge, 2004. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Stern, Tiffany, ed. Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Stern, Tiffany, and Simon Palfrey. Shakespeare in Parts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Taylor, Gary, and Gabriel Egan, eds. The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Tiffany, Carrie. Exploded View. Melbourne: Text, 2019. Trettien, Whitney. ‘Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies’. PMLA 133 (2018): 1135–51. West, Anthony James. The Shakespeare First Folio: A New Worldwide Census. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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16

Black / white Miles P. Grier

Black and white enough: The sexual scene Published in London’s Daily Universal Register in 1785, a story of a naval officer who divorced his wife concludes with a pun that transforms the plain palette of print into something obscene: The Captain of a guardship, at this time in commission, is said to have lately charged his lady with infidelity, and the suspected gallant is a negro servant. – They have in consequence agreed secretly to a separation, without the formality of writings; as the husband says there has already been black and white enough on the subject!1

Using italics to relay the captain’s disgusted racialized reading of divorce papers, the Register employs what Toni Morrison once called a ‘nigger joke: the kind white folks tell when the mill closes down and they’re looking for a little comfort somewhere’.2 What consolation can a cuckold and his judges among the newspaper’s implied white readership take in equating state documents with the copulation of an Afro-European pair? At first, the answer would seem: precious little. The wry quip ‘black and white enough’ potentially multiplies the representations of interracial infidelity. In the world the joke conjures, any paper inscribed or imprinted with black ink – and every single character of such a text – restages the tableau of the negro servant atop the captain’s wife. Yet, this conceit also offers a compensatory power: equating the cuckolding with its reduction to writing enables the captain to raze the adulterous scene from his mind and the archive at once, simply by suppressing publication. Through the racialized pun, the captain and journal readers get to objectify and control the text of their public reputation.

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It would be easy for an historian to dismiss this short article as apocrypha. After all, the sea captain and his wife – if they were ever more than fictions – collude to deprive the archive of further evidence. Yet, if we turn our attention from attempting to substantiate the historical fact of this interracial affair and toward the trope of the page as its emblem and product, we find a remarkable prehistory.3 The trail of the sea captain, his lady and her negro servant goes cold after July 1785, but the trail of the figuration the captain employs heats up as we search the theatre and poetry of the previous two centuries. Although one could stop at Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness or Lust’s Dominion (variously attributed to Thomas Dekker, Christopher Marlowe and others), our search here ends with Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy Titus Andronicus, which was probably first performed in 1592, solemnly displays what the sea captain strives to bury in a joke. The play ends with Marcus, the surviving brother who replaces the doomed patriarch of the play’s title, holding aloft the product of the adulterous union between Rome’s pale Gothic Queen Tamora and a blackamoor named Aaron.4 Not only his dead brother’s surrogate, Marcus also serves as the public’s elected representative, a tribune. In this office, he makes the misbegotten child the scapegoat for the recent cascade of violence: dismemberment, rape, murder and honour killing. Marcus instructs onlookers onstage and in the audience to ‘behold the child: / Of this was Tamora delivered, / the issue of an irreligious Moor, / Chief architect and plotter of these woes’.5 Although one could read these lines as convicting Aaron, the ambiguous grammar also suggests that the issue of his union with Tamora is ‘chief architect and plotter’ of the tragedy. If we recall that this child is first introduced as a page bearing a moorish parent’s black ‘stamp’ and ‘seal’, we begin to glimpse a connection between the suppressed pages of the sea captain’s divorce and this genderless child who is flourished at the end of Titus.6 By the end of this chapter, I will have presented an argument that the patriarchal state that Marcus represents can neither abide with nor live without the page, a technology deployed to regulate gendered honour and to reproduce a patrilineal order. To reach that end, I will follow the trail from the suppressed divorce proceedings back to the stamped child brandished at the close of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. This pursuit requires close attention to a figure that I

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have referred to elsewhere as ‘inkface’: a conceit that black complexion and ink share physical properties such as transferability and indelibility and the cultural property of meaningfulness.7 Inkface names the place where expert hermeneutics and folk techniques for reading people collide, making ‘white’ a designation for potentially sophisticated readers and ‘black’ the term for peoples reduced to reading matter. Racial characterization – an importation of human bodies into a signifying system employed to reproduce particular social hierarchies – finds its animating force here, in a project that predates legal or scientific racism. Its origins are hidden from our view because it did not appear in an official announcement but was introduced through a medium as fundamental and seemingly neutral as our supreme character system: the black and white page.

Ink as conceit in science and poetry The scientific literature of early modernity has been invoked as the ultimate archive of whatever ideas about human difference existed in the period.8 Yet the theatre does not simply echo what was current in natural history, the precursor of biology. The terms that cultural historians of science use to denote competing theories of physical difference – geohumoralism, monogenesis and polygenesis – never appear in the plays. In fact, whatever the theatre depicted was enabled and constrained by performance conventions, such as vizards and paint. Indeed, complexion onstage has the performative possibilities and metaphorical associations of the material used to realize it. However, both the scientific and dramatic imagination elaborate metaphors borrowed from what might be called an ‘ink culture’ of writing, print, graffiti and tattoos to envision the origin and properties of racial blackness. For example, in 1578 the chronicler George Best forwarded a biological argument that blackness was an inherited infection and not a product of the sun’s heat. Best relies upon on imagery from ink culture to speculate that blackness is a ‘blot’ passed from the ‘first inhabita[n]ts of that Countrey’ to successive generations.9 Nearly fifty years later, the author of another travel narrative, Samuel Purchas, asked whether the infected seed of the parent ‘imprint[s]’ itself upon the child.10

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Scholars have made Purchas’s question famous in ritual citations: ‘Some ascribe [dark complexion] (as Herodotus) to the blacknesse of the Parents Sperme or Seed; And how made they the search to know the colour thereof, which if it hath (a thing by others denied) by what reason should it imprint this colour on the skinne?’11 While most scholars who analyse Purchas are concerned with the contest between climatic and genetic theories for variations in complexion, it is important not to overlook that his account hinges on blackness as an impression. Purchas questions how ancient authorities could have known that the seed of Africans was black. Without the microscope, there would have been no way to observe the individual spermatozoon. And an observer should know that no semen is black, regardless of the hue of the ejaculator. (Then again, would it not be unseemly for a respectable man of science to know the colour of semen from every human population?) This invisible blackness is transformed into a visible hue through the auspices of a figurative act: imprinting. Somehow, something as small as a spermatozoon is imagined as capable of imparting to the skin an enveloping, elastic blackness. When Purchas asks whether ‘hot impressions in the Aire’ produce blackness, he is considering an entirely different mechanism. Here, the air is an external heat that darkens the skin instead of blackness being imparted through generation, present in the reproductive material of both parents, but more particularly the father. In either case, however, Purchas’s process of thinking blackness presumes that an originally white surface receives an altering tincture. Metaphors of printing and impression are essential to that imagination, a language that Purchas, in 1626, could have drawn as easily from Best’s travel narrative as from the blackface plays that were popular London fare in the decades that separated their publications. Best and Purchas were not the only writers outside theatre who found that ink culture offered them ready metaphors for explaining their theories of the origin and transmission of blackness. During the interregnum, John Cleveland employed inkface in his poem, ‘A Fair Nimph Scorning a Black Boy Courting Her’ (1647).12 Cleveland’s rhymed couplets feature a game of verbal wit between a gleaming nymph and her dark-skinned pursuer in which she rejects his suggestions that they are as well suited as numerous black and white pairings in the material world. After the boy proposes that their intertwined limbs would form a delightful, checkered pattern, the scornful nymph offers a

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counter-image: ‘Thy ink, my paper, make me guess / Our Nuptial bed will make a presse, / And in our sports, if any came, / They’ll read a wanton epigram.’13 As in the sea captain’s ‘black and white enough’, the overlay of ink on paper becomes the emblem of the coupling of dark and fair. Moreover, the nymph predicts that this figurative page would produce illicit reading material for a scandal-hungry public: ‘a wanton epigram’ that anticipates the ‘formality of writings’ that the sea captain and his wife forgo.14 Feminist scholars such as Virginia Mason Vaughan, Margreta de Grazia, Wendy Wall and Eve Rachele Sanders have drawn our attention to components of this inkface complex.15 Vaughan discusses the dramatic bed trick in which a white lover makes plans for an illicit affair only to find a blackamoor unexpectedly waiting in the bed.16 De Grazia describes the theory of maternal imprint, in which the womb is imagined as the bed of a printing press and the child’s body bears the imprint of either its father’s seed or of whatever the mother might have seen or imagined at the moment of conception.17 Wall and Sanders discuss metaphorical uses of the page as the emblem of a woman’s sexual history, blank during virginity and overwritten by sexual experiences.18 I would like to extend this feminist project by observing that only one creature in early modern culture was made for role-playing in these patriarchal scenarios: the painted stage blackamoor, who could actually transfer blackness to a lover. What the aforementioned newspaper article and poem could only posit, blackface performance could realize. When we search for the origins of the literary conceit associated with the sea captain and Cleveland’s fair nymph, we find ourselves in early modern theatres. There, a scene of sexual amalgamation becomes one for the books.19

How many children had Shakespeare’s interracial couples?20 There is a strong connection in Shakespeare’s plays between the prospect of a painted black moor and stage business featuring paper and metaphors of reading.21 Where one expects to witness a sexual scene or even the children born from such an encounter, one gets text instead. The affordances of stage make-up and the figurative language of inkface materialize a precursor of the comforting nigger joke Morrison theorized. In the world of this joke,

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the page is indeed ‘black and white enough’ – the stand-in for scenes of interracial copulation and for the offspring of such sex. These scenes dramatize a patriarchal dream that the metaphorical page would prove adequate to the crucial tasks of surveilling wives’ chastity and determining children’s paternity. It is remarkable how often interracial couplings produce pages instead of children in the Shakespearean canon. The historical Cleopatra was a mother of four children with the Roman rulers Julius Caesar and Mark Antony—none of whom appears on stage. Lest we confuse her with the historical woman from Macedonia, Shakespeare’s Egyptian queen conjures the image of Antony absorbing her black make-up. When he leaves her, departing Egypt for his wife Fulvia’s funeral, Cleopatra denies him a kiss. ‘Seek you no color for your going’, she deadpans, in a line that implies that kisses will transfer the boy actress’s make-up to Antony – an effect that is peculiar to blackface performance. The next scene opens with Octavius Caesar and Lepidus in Rome holding a letter from abroad that Cleveland might have called a ‘wanton epigram’. Antony’s character – his reputation – is recorded in the written characters, which detail his drunken revels and erotic escapades with Cleopatra. Octavius insists that Lepidus can find in the content ‘[a] man who is th’ abstract of all faults’.22 Reading the form of the letter and not its textual content, Lepidus responds in a way that again suggests the danger of colour transfer during intimate contact: ‘I must not think there are / Evils enough to darken all his goodness.’23 Given this framing in which the inscribed page repeats the interracial sexual act, it should not surprise us that, in Antony’s absence, a lovesick Cleopatra demands her servant Charmian bring her ink and paper. The medium allows her to relive their sexual encounter, which she does in ceaseless letters – letters that serve a purpose opposite to biological reproduction: ‘Get me ink and paper. He shall have every day a several greeting, / Or I’ll unpeople Egypt.’24 In Antony and Cleopatra, the page is the emblem of the non-reproductive sexual event.25 It is pornographic in the explicitness of its lettered message and in its ominous form. Consequently, Antony and Cleopatra’s sexual exploits spawn what rival Caesar scorns as ‘all the unlawful issue that their lust / … hath made between them’.26 The pun on issue replaces their three historical children with incalculable circulating pages in which Antony’s tainted character can be read. Pages replace interracial progeny elsewhere in the Shakespearean canon, too. In The Merchant of Venice, the Prince of Morocco departs his fruitless

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quest to obtain the fair heiress Portia with nothing but a scroll in hand. He has, after all, harboured the (wanton) desire for her that drives the black boy to the nymph in Cleveland’s poem. He has promised never to wed – and, therefore, to produce no (legitimate) heirs – should he fail in the game of chance that could win him Portia. What else could his consolation in defeat be but a scroll found in the eye of a carrion skull? The inscribed page will have to serve as ‘black and white enough’ for him in the absence of the act or descendants he desires.27 I could argue that The Tempest analogizes Prospero’s books and his daughter Miranda as objects that he must protect from falling into the hands of the (painted) Algerian Caliban. I could discuss the fact that the dreaded and anticipated bedroom scene in Othello withholds interracial consummation, substituting not only murder but also four inscribed pages (three found in Roderigo’s pocket, and the page invoked when Othello dictates his suicide note to the Venetian Senate). For the sake of space, however, I would like to turn to an outlier example, that is, the first time Shakespeare engaged in inkface and the only time he represented interracial offspring onstage: Titus Andronicus, a play that provides a hidden transcript of nonexpert early modern racial thought.

An impossible delivery There is no way to put this but baldly: there is no opportunity for Tamora, the new Empress of Rome, to conceive of or deliver a child in Titus Andronicus. The ‘child’ she delivers is a page – a scroll to be precise – handed to her by a blackamoor in the first act and returned to him in the fourth. The child here is the textual icon of paternal impression on the motherly womb made monstrous in its mediation through blackface theatre. When Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy opens, the aged soldier Titus Andronicus has returned victorious from battles against Tamora’s people to a succession crisis at home: the elder and younger sons of Rome’s previous emperor have each rallied factions to their side. The people’s tribune, Titus’ brother Marcus, offers the conquering Titus the imperial robe. Declining this honour, Titus nominates the deceased emperor’s eldest son Saturninus. Then, to secure favour in the new regime, Titus offers Saturninus captives,

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including Tamora’s warrior sons and the mysterious, silent moor Aaron. The new emperor responds in kind: ‘Titus, to advance / Thy name and honourable family / Lavinia I will make my empress, / Rome’s royal mistress.’28 While consenting to this gentleman’s agreement, Saturninus privately desires Tamora. As he looks over his new captive, he marvels: ‘A goodly lady, trust me, of the hue / That I would choose were I to choose anew.’29 Within a few moments, he makes precisely that choice when it is discovered that Lavinia is already betrothed to his younger brother, Bassianus. I recapitulate this early scene to establish that Tamora cannot be pregnant at the play’s opening. Given the economy of honour in which these elite Roman men operate, it is inconceivable that Saturninus would ever relinquish his claim to Lavinia for a foreign queen whom he knew to be pregnant with another man’s child. At the very least, she must not be visibly pregnant in the first scene. How, then, does a nurse deliver Tamora’s child to the play’s lone moor, Aaron, in the fourth act? Is the play’s action of significant duration for both conception and a viable pregnancy? Surprising answers to these questions can be found in the colours associated with both Aaron and Tamora. As Francesca Royster established in a pathbreaking essay, ‘If Aaron is coded black, Tamora is represented as hyperwhite … In the racial thinking of the time, the adulterous liaison between Aaron and Tamora that produces an illegitimate baby appears as a kind of enhanced miscegenation, ultrablack crossed with ultrawhite.’30 The crossing Royster observes could be construed as the imprinting imagined by Samuel Purchas. I would even go so far as to argue that, in fact, there is no child – the only issue of Aaron and Tamora’s tupping is a page, a stamped missive that was always already the emblematic fruit of black pressed against white.31 The page is the only means by which the Roman Emperor’s wife Tamora can conceive (of) a child with Aaron. Theatre historian Sara B. T. Thiel considers the play representative of ‘gestational erasure’ in early modern plays before Elizabeth’s death in 1603. She writes that ‘Shakespeare indicates in neither stage directions nor the spoken text that Tamora is pregnant.’32 If the famous Peacham drawing of Titus Andronicus is accurate at least in its depiction of early modern costuming, Tamora’s first appearance onstage is a contradiction: a woman decked in royal robes and a diadem reduced to one member of a train of war captives.33 As a prisoner of war, she has become a pawn in what

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anthropologist Gayle Rubin famously calls ‘the traffic in women’ – an erotic object that men exchange to secure relationships between themselves.34 She reaches a nadir when she kneels in the street, unsuccessfully begging Titus Andronicus not to sacrifice one of her sons to the gods. Within moments, she transcends this helpless and degraded state, as she metamorphoses from helpless woman captive to the dominatrix of Rome. Her ascent to power and pursuit of revenge would not be possible if she appeared pregnant at the outset. She need not, of course, be a virgin. A queen taken captive with her bellicose sons (and not a daughter in sight) might seem marriageable despite her sexual experience. She is, after all, fertile and has already proven herself one of the ‘fair faced breeders of our clime’.35 An emperor in need of warrior sons in an internally riven Rome might well choose a woman with a record of ‘[b]ring[ing] forth men-children only’, in the words of Macbeth.36 Indeed, Tamora’s capacity to produce male children may explain the critical impulse to say that she and Aaron have had a son.37 Another reason that Tamora cannot be pregnant with Aaron’s child at the outset is that there is no dramatic or spoken evidence that they have begun an affair. I have already mentioned that Aaron stands silent and apart in the first scene. When the audience finally hears the play’s lone moor speak of Tamora, he is arguably preoccupied with social advancement and pecuniary gain, as much as – or even more than – sexual gratification. ‘I will be bright’, he muses, ‘and shine in pearl and gold / To wait upon this new-made empress.’38 At this moment, he is committing himself to her service. He expresses no sexual desire for her. Although most theatrical productions present Aaron as a lascivious moor, an ambiguity in his grammar in this early moment makes his will unclear. Aaron instructs himself to ‘arm thy heart and fit thy thoughts / To … mount her pitch whom thou in triumph long / Hath prisoner held, fettered in amourous chains.’39 Although the Arden Third Series edition lists Aaron in the dramatis personae as ‘a Moor in the service of Tamora, her lover’, the ambivalent grammar of his speech suggests that it is she who ‘hath [been] prisoner held’. She is positioned as his subject when Aaron describes her (and not himself) as ‘faster bound’ to his ‘charming eyes / than is Prometheus tied to Caucasus’.40 The dynamics of subjection in Aaron’s description of his relationship to Tamora are remarkably flat and reversible, a sort of trompe l’oeil in which the black and white aspects

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of the printed page vie for the viewer’s focus. As with an inscribed page, one can hardly assign black or white to the foreground: sexual agency in Aaron and Tamora’s relationship remains reversible. In fact, just after suggesting that Tamora is his love slave, Aaron flips the hierarchy again, referring to himself as wearing ‘slavish weeds’ – clothing that identifies him with a most extreme form of subjection. Scholar Ian Smith offers the clearest insight into this tangle, noting that hierarchies of race, rank and servitude inhered in and depended upon clothing as a signifier.41 Aaron’s emphasis on servile attire refers to more than whatever cloth he wears, since the emphasis on ‘shin[ing] in pearl and gold’ seems to promise the negation of the slavish significance of his ‘black’ face, which Morocco in The Merchant of Venice will describe as the sun’s livery – the mantle of a servant.42 The language of livery constructs the socially ambitious stage moor as one who seeks to cover the coating of blackness with an overlay of white cloth or jewels (the aforementioned pearls or Morocco’s attempt to cover his ‘mislike[d]’ complexion with a white robe).43 Aaron famously later says that ‘coal-black is better than another hue / In that it scorns to bear another hue’, a declaration that contradicts his first wish that he would indeed bear, upon his black body, the shimmering hues of gold and pearl.44 In the world of Titus, sometimes the black moor can bear white and gold as removable hues. Yet, when a white person acquires blackness, it is indelible. As Aaron continues in his famous paean to blackness, ‘For all the water in the ocean / Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white, / Although she lave them hourly in the flood.’45 It is futile to try to assign a coherent racial logic to Titus. Yet, one does notice that, even if the play’s racial logic is internally inconsistent, it tends towards anti-blackness.46 The moor can cover blackness with white mantles but, as Aaron later says, blackness appears as a stain that cannot be washed away. As in Cleveland’s poem and the sea captain’s pun, the inked page represents the scene of Aaron and Tamora’s interracial copulation. Tamora, true to Aaron’s description, is enamored – even her name might be heard as an amalgam of predictive puns: Tamora’s love (amour) contains its object (a moor); and the first two syllables of her name suggest that she is destined to moor, a lewd variation on the nautical verb.47 When Tamora and Aaron appear together again, she is entreating him to clear up his ‘sad’ (black, melancholic) countenance and engage in ‘pastimes’ that will leave them

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‘wreathed in [each] other’s arms’.48 As Royster perceptively comments, Aaron ‘disclaims all interest in sexuality’, and speaks to Tamora only of vengeful plots against Titus’ children.49 Given that she appears to be trying to convince Aaron to engage in an act that satisfies her desires, and not his, it is reasonable to assume she is still attempting to persuade him to commence an affair. Yet, if their affair has not proceeded beyond amorous glances, even at this moment, there is no other onstage action or dialogue to denote consummation before the delivery of the child. The two are never onstage together again. Nor does it seem that enough time elapses between the enactment of Aaron’s plots against Titus’ children for a viable child to be brought to term. The play does not adhere to the classical unities of place and time, yet the revenge plots suggest an urgency incompatible with the passage of weeks, let alone months. Despite the practical impossibility of a birth, Bassianus and Lavinia come to foresee an adulterous liaison. Before Aaron flees Tamora’s company following her attempt to seduce him, he leaves her with ‘a fatal, plotted scroll’ that is designed to incriminate Titus’ sons in Bassianus’ murder and Lavinia’s rape. Lavinia and Bassianus encounter Tamora alone and see the page in her hand – and, perhaps, even a trace of the painted Aaron’s make-up.50 Whichever overlay of black on white they see, they begin their teasing prophecies. Bassianus augurs, ‘Believe me, Queen, your swart Cimmerian / Doth make your honor of his body’s hue / Spotted, detested, and abominable.’51 With his emphasis on black spots, Bassianus assesses Tamora’s skin and the page in her hands by doing what Wendy Wall calls ‘reading for the blot’.52 This cultural metaphor, she demonstrates, figured women’s honour – their chastity – as a blank page. Unsanctioned sexual experience mars this page with a figurative black text that spells out the woman’s character: harlot, jade, minx, coquette, whore, bawd. The moor is the only role that the drama of the time imagined as transferring a telltale, legible mark of dishonour. A Cassio could arouse suspicion, but as Othello notes of this (comparatively) unpainted player: ‘I found not Cassio’s kisses on her lips.’53 And when Leonato wants to conjure the imagery for a deflowered daughter in Much Ado about Nothing, he says that Hero has ‘fallen / Into a pit of ink’.54 These observations make sense of the eventual delivery of what is announced as Aaron and Tamora’s child.55 A nurse intrudes upon a conversation between a moorish prisoner of war and the two sons of Rome’s Gothic queen, Tamora.

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According to the stage directions in the 1594 quarto, she enters ‘with a blackamoore childe’ – the delivery to which I have already alluded.56 For readers, the designation ‘blackamoore childe’ makes a simple and direct reference to a Black African infant. Yet, the behaviour of all of those onstage suggests that the bundle the nurse bore in the earliest performances was not recognizable as an infant. The object in her arms is clearly not visible to anyone onstage – much less to an audience farther away. In fact, this obscured object becomes the subject of dialogue that seems to anticipate vaudevillian repartée. The dialogue in question is an extended exercise in evasion, and such avoidance indicates the absence a stage prop that would directly convey ‘blackamoore childe’. Aaron asks: ‘[W]hat dost thou wrap and fumble in thy armes?’ These lines indicate that the nurse’s parcel is doubly obscured, by the swaddling and by her limbs. Eschewing a direct answer to the most direct of questions, she replies that she bears ‘that which I would hide from heauens eye, / Our Empresse shame and stately Romes disgrace, / Shee is deliuered’. Aaron exploits the ambiguity in this passive construction, asking ‘[t]o whome’ Tamora has been delivered. He could not ask this question if the figure of a child were visible to him. He would ask ‘of what’ has she been delivered. Though she intends to clarify the prior answer, the Nurse corrects Aaron with a euphemism that maintains the ambiguity: ‘I meane she is brought a bed’. Aaron responds with a wish that God grant Tamora rest and asks what God has sent the bedridden Queen. The Nurse answers that God has sent the Queen ‘a diuell’ – an epithet which need not refer to the object in her arms. After Aaron takes joy in the idea of Tamora as the mother of a devil, the Nurse refutes him by unveiling the child to onlookers onstage and in the audience: A Ioyles, dismall, blacke, and sorowfull issue, Here is the babe as loathsome as a toade, Amongst the faire fast breeders of our clime, The Empresse sends it thee, thy stampe, thy seale, And bids thee christen it with thy daggers point.

We might imagine that, as in Julie Taymor’s celebrated 1999 film, the Nurse unwraps and presents a living black baby.57 Yet, despite the definitive language ‘[h]ere is the babe’, the Nurse cannot express the presence of this product of black and white coupling without the inhuman language of the

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page. ‘[S]tampe’ and ‘seale’ both conjure the writing table, and I would argue that ‘issue’ serves here as a hinge, equating the fruits of the womb with those of the print matrix.58 Although the OED holds that in the sixteenth century ‘issue’ referred only to offspring and not to publications, the accouterments of the page are all over this child.59 It emerges marked by Aaron’s stamp and seal of black complexion, and Tamora envisions a future in which the child will bear a point, a fatal puncture that she gives the same name as a mark of punctuation. As Bruce Smith reminds us, early modern terms for punctuation such as prick, point and punctum refer to the physicality of the impression or ‘opening’ in the paper made by the nib of the pen.60 It would appear that the nurse’s performative declaration – ‘[h]ere is the babe’ – makes a child of an object that would otherwise remain a text. In an essay that deserves more attention, performance scholar Philip Kolin observed that ‘the child … is like the books wrapped in Lucius’ arms in Scene One and the bundle of weapons and verses in Scene Two, an embedded text to be read by the characters on stage and the audience’.61 I want now to extend Kolin’s insight to propose that, under early modern performance conditions, the ‘blackamoore childe’ was not merely like the books but was made of (and made into) reading material. No child more fully embodied this conceit than the progeny of a blackamoor and a white consort. As we consider this proposition, it is important to remember that dolls or bundled rags were often used to represent infants in early modern performance. Theatre historian Megan Snell notes that the word ‘infant’ is derived from the Latin ‘unable to speak’ – a state which ‘facilitates the use of a prop’ where a speaking child would otherwise be ‘represented by players onstage’.62 Shakespeare seems to convey an awareness of this etymology in having all of the cries of the child of Aaron and Tamora reported by a Gothic soldier.63 The Shakespearean infant is not a person but an unspeaking prop comprised of a bundle of rags, the same raw materials that make the white page.64 Titus Andronicus is not the only play in which Shakespeare experiments with the child as text(ile). In The Winter’s Tale, a Shepherd happens upon the lost child Perdita and falls into the same linguistic constellation as the Nurse does in the earlier tragedy: ‘[W]hat have we here? Mercy on’s, a bairn! A very pretty bairn! A boy or a child I wonder? … [T]hough I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape. This has been some stair-work,

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some trunk-work, some behind-door-work.’65 That the Shepherd engages with the object according to the protocols of reading lends further credibility to the idea that ‘what [we] have … here’ is a text or at least textile – a bundle of rags and not a doll. The inhumanity of the textual infant is evident in the fact that it does not even have a sex. The Shepherd’s utterance constitutes the presence of a child through synecdoche, in much the same way that brat, the Welsh word for the cloth used to wrap a baby, becomes a name for the child itself.66 After confessing his illiteracy, the Shepherd insists that even he can assess the signifying rags before him: it is the illegitimate offspring, he believes, of a servant woman and a nobleman, produced in a clandestine location. In The Winter’s Tale, a male shepherd fails to divine the rank of a child’s mother from ‘reading’ the child, while in Titus Andronicus a female Nurse assuredly identifies Aaron’s paternity through his imprint on a black ‘child’. Aaron’s blackness produces a masculine imprint that is indelible and unmistakable. Maternity, like the early modern boy actor’s face, is white and, therefore, as inscrutable as a blank page. In early modern English theatre, the white and black paints that produce European women and moorish outsiders, respectively, endow these complexions with the properties and connotations of paper and ink. Suddenly it is clear: Tamora is not pregnant at the outset of the play. Her relationship with Aaron has never been consummated. There is no indication that nine months have passed from her capture to this delivery. What has passed, however, is a ‘fatal plotted scroll’ from Aaron to Tamora, in their only direct interaction in the script.67 The scroll, of course, serves primarily as a forgery, framing Titus’ sons for the murder of the Emperor’s brother. However, it is also the emblem and issue of the intimate contact between Aaron and Tamora. When the play ends, Tamora (like the other defiled woman, Lavinia) has been murdered by Titus. Yet, Aaron and the prop-child survive. Ink supplies the problematics of honour: is it an integral aspect of the body or can it be acquired? Whether innate or obtainable, can it be lost? Does it have a recognizable form, like a script or a typeface? Or are all attempts to assess character as if it were an alphanumeric unit doomed to fail because the ineffability and immateriality of human qualities? These are the questions that Titus Andronicus begs when the tribune Marcus holds the progeny of black and white aloft, commanding the Roman polity to ‘[b]ehold the child’.

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With this gesture, the play at last returns the purloined scroll to one of the sons of Rome who depends upon the page as spectacle and mnemonic. Unlike the sea captain and his wife, with whom I began this chapter, the Romans do not suppress the plotted page but elevate this mute technology of surveillance and publicity as the site where racialized rank, gendered honour, sexual acts and disputed progeny converge. It is our job, finally, not to look away. Behold the child? Behold the page, a confounding locus of social reproduction in a world mediated by black and white – a medium that the society that bequeathed it to us could neither destroy nor bear to contemplate.

Notes 1 The Daily Universal Register 177 (London, England: Thursday, 21 July 1785): 2. Italics in original. 2 Toni Morrison, Sula, repr. edn. (New York: Vintage, 2004). 3 Literary scholars cannot assume that the presence of interracial couples in early modern England, documented by historians such as Miranda Kauffman, determined how playwrights conceived, performers portrayed or audiences judged such relationships. I will argue that interracial couples in plays of the period are not real people transferred to the stage but theatrical constructions, whose appearance and significance is rooted in the materials and conventions of the medium. See Kauffman, ‘“Making the Beast with Two Backs”: Interracial Relationships in Renaissance England’, Literature Compass 12, no. 1 (2015): 1–16. 4 Some editors have a Gothic soldier holding the child. For my purposes, what matters most is that this progeny of black and white is raised on high as a banner and a warning. On the matter of who holds the child, see Andrew Sofer, ‘“Take up the Bodies”: Shakespeare’s Body Parts, Babies, and Corpses’, Theatre Symposium 18, no. 1 (2010): 138. 5 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (New York: Routledge, 1995), 5.3.118–121 6 Titus Andronicus, 4.2.71. That this child has no specified gender points to future inquiries for early modernists to pursue at the intersection of critical race theory and trans studies. On ungendering as an aspect of the racialization of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, see Hortense Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67. On the need to

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make race central in the historical and theoretical pursuits of the emerging field of early modern trans studies, see Simone Chess, Colby Gordon and Will Fisher, ‘Introduction: Early Modern Trans Studies’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (2019): 4.   7 Miles P. Grier, ‘Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination’, in Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Routledge, 2015), 193–220. See also Inkface: Othello and the Formation of White Interpretive Community, 1604–1855 (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming).   8 Anthony Fletcher, review of ‘Kim E. [sic] Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England’, Journal of Family History 22, no. 2 (1997): 232–3; Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).   9 George Best, A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discouerie … of Martin Frobisher (London: Henry Bynneman, 1578), sig. f3v. 10 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage (London: Henrie Featherstone, 1626), sig. Qqq4r. 11 Purchas, Pilgrimage, sig. Qqq4r. 12 Elliott H. Tokson introduced this poem as a specimen of early modern racial prejudice in ‘The Image of the Negro in Four Seventeenth-Century Love Poems’, Modern Language Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1969): 508–22. Kim F. Hall includes it among a spate of love poems with a black and white heterosexual pair (Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 269–74). Hall’s book is the classic text on discourses of fairness in early modern England. See also B. K. Adams’s chapter ‘Fair / foul’ in this volume. 13 John Cleveland, The Character of a London-Diurnall: With Severall Select Poems (London: [n.p.]: 1647). 14 In unleashing black skin as a sign of corruption so powerful as to warp marriage into adultery, Cleveland may have drawn inspiration from his memory of depictions of stage moors before Parliament attempted to end all theatrical performance in 1642. Attention to the transferable element of black character would offer more foundation for what some consider an insupportable leap in Stephen Greenblatt’s interpretation of Othello – the moment in which he claims that Othello could be induced to suspect Cassio precisely because the ardour in the lawful marriage of Othello and Desdemona had already overflowed into sinful lust (Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 233).

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15 See Emma Depledge’s essay ‘Paper / ink’ in this volume for more on the intersection of gender, race and textual metaphor. 16 Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 74–92. 17 Margreta de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. Terence Hawkes, vol. 2, New Accents (London: Routledge, 1996), 65–96. 18 Wendy Wall, ‘Reading for the Blot: Textual Desire in Early Modern English Literature’, in Reading and Writing in Shakespeare, ed. David Moore Bergeron (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 131–59; and Eve Rachele Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 19 Tavia Nyong’o argues that the term ‘amalgamation’ – akin to alchemy – better suits Eurocentric understanding of cross-racial sex before the late nineteenthcentury than does ‘miscegenation’, a term from the discourse of cellular biology (The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 74ff). 20 L. C. Knights, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism (1933)’, in Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New York: George W. Stewart, 1947), 15–54. 21 I take Anthony Gerard Barthelemy’s observation that ‘moor’ could refer to ‘almost anyone who was not Christian, European or Jewish’ in Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), x. However, Dympna Callaghan notes that the use of black stage paint transcended the various ethnicities (Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2000), 78). 22 Antony and Cleopatra, 1.4.9. Antony and Cleopatra both occupy a genderindeterminate space, in which she is not ‘more manly’ than he, and he is not ‘more womanly’ than she. I expand upon this flattening of gender and agency in my discussion below of Aaron and Tamora in Titus Andronicus. 23 Antony and Cleopatra, 1.4.10–11. 24 Ibid., 1.5.80–1. 25 On sodomy as the early modern legal category for all acts of nonreproductive sex, see Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

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26 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Thomson Learning, 1995), 3.6.7–8. 27 See Kim F. Hall, ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in “The Merchant of Venice”’, Renaissance Drama 23 (1992): 87–111. 28 Titus Andronicus, 1.1.242–5. 29 Ibid., 1.1.265–6. 30 Francesca T. Royster, ‘White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2000): 432. 31 On the specific sex acts connoted by tupping and their racial implications, see Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 214ff. 32 Sara B. T. Thiel, ‘“Cushion Come Forth”: Materializing Pregnancy on the Stuart Stage’, in Stage Matters: Props, Bodies and Space in Shakespearean Performance, ed. Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018), 144. 33 Thomas Postlewait, ‘Eyewitnesses to History: Visual Evidence for Theater in Early Modern England’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, ed. Richard Dutton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 575–606. 34 Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women’, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. 35 Titus Andronicus, 4.2.70. 36 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 1.7.73. 37 Shakespeare plays with the idea of the warrior’s mother again in the later Roman tragedy Coriolanus. Coriolanus’ mother suggests that ‘valiantness’ is ‘sucked’ from the mother during nursing. See Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 91–108. 38 Titus Andronicus, 1.1.518–19. 39 Ibid., 2.1.511–14. 40 Ibid., 2.1.515–16. 41 Ian Smith, ‘White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage’, Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 33–68; and ‘Othello’s Black Handkerchief ’, Shakespeare Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2013): 1–25. 42 See Ian Smith, ‘The Textile Black Body: Race and “Shadowed Livery” in The Merchant of Venice’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender,

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Sexuality, and Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 290–315. 43 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011), 2.1.1. 44 Titus Andronicus, 4.2.101–2. 45 Ibid., 4.2.103–5. 46 Some read Aaron’s speech as prefiguring the Black Power discourses of the age of anticolonial struggle. While actors can certainly inflect the part that way, there is no doubt that the scripts passed down to us treat Aaron more as scapegoat than as hero. In other words, Shakespeare did not imagine the recuperative work that black actors and audiences might do. See Miles P. Grier, ‘Are Shakespeare’s Plays Racially Progressive? The Answer is in Our Hands’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, ed. Ayanna Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 237–53. 47 My investigation of Tamora’s name was inspired by Patricia Parker, ‘Shakespeare’s Sound Government: Sounds Defects, Polyglot Sounds, and Sounding Out’, Oral Tradition 24, no. 2 (2009): 369. 48 Titus Andronicus, 2.2.25–6. 49 Royster, ‘White-Limed Walls’, 445–6. On black men as victims of sexual violence, see Thomas A. Foster, ‘The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3 (2011): 445–64; David Sterling Brown, ‘The “Sonic Color Line”: Shakespeare and the Canonization of Sexual Violence Against Black Men’, The Sundial (16 July 2020), https://medium.com/ the-sundial-acmrs/the-sonic-color-line-shakespeare-and-the-canonization-ofsexual-violence-against-black-men-cb166dca9af8 (accessed 2 August 2020). Although I find David Brown’s suggestion that Aaron might be understood as a victim of sexual violence tantalizing, Aaron does, in fact, boast to Tamora’s sons in the fourth act, ‘Villain, I have done thy mother’ (4.2.78). Thus, the play presents Aaron as simultaneously the unwilling subject of Tamora’s advances and as sexual aggressor. My invocation of the trompe l’oeil is meant to capture this reversible quality. The classic discussion of Aaron as scapegoat for rapes he has not committed is, of course, Arthur L. Little, Jr., Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), ch. 1. 50 On the ‘transference’ of Aaron’s make-up, see Morwenna Carr, ‘Material / Blackness: Race and Its Material Reconstructions on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage’, Early Theatre 20, no. 1 (2017): 84–5.

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338 51 Titus Andronicus, 2.2.72–4.

52 Wendy Wall, ‘Reading for the Blot: Textual Desire in Early Modern English Literature’, in Reading and Writing in Shakespeare, ed. David M. Bergeron (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 131–59. 53 William Shakespeare, Othello, rev. edn. E. A. J. Honigmann and Ayanna Thompson, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 3.3.344. 54 William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, ed. Claire McEachern, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 4.1.139–40. 55 This child has an unstable status for scholars, playwrights and editors. Frances Teague lists it as ‘Aaron’s baby’, erasing Tamora’s maternity and perhaps unconsciously adhering to a one-drop rule in which a child bears the racial designation of its black parent (Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1991), 180). Ravenscroft’s 1687 adaptation lists ‘a blackamoor child’ in the dramatis personae with other actors, though it is almost inconceivable that an African infant was brought onstage instead of a prop (Titus Andronicus, or, The Rape of Lavinia Acted at the Theatre Royall: A Tragedy, Alter’d from Mr. Shakespears Works [London: John Hindmarsh, 1687]). Jonathan Bate’s Arden Third Series edition omits the child from the character list but retains the editorial stage direction calling for a child (4.2.51SD). 56 The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus (London: John Danter, 1594), sig. G2v. 57 Taymor draws little attention to the scroll passed from Aaron to Tamora, but the black infant does come wrapped in newspaper, rendering it black and white and ready to be read. 58 de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes’. 59 Americanists will recall that in 1691 the legislature of colonial Virginia referred to biracial children as ‘that abominable mixture and spurious issue’. We would do well to ask whether Shakespeare and the legislators draw upon a shared racial imaginary, informed by the affordances of ink culture. See William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 (Philadelphia: R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823), 3:86. 60 Bruce Smith, ‘Prickly Characters’, in Reading and Writing in Shakespeare, ed. David M. Bergeron (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 27. 61 Philip C. Kolin, ‘Performing Texts in Titus Andronicus’, in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2016), 211.

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62 Megan Snell, ‘Shakespeare’s Babies: “Things to Come at Large”’, in Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance, ed. Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky (London: Routledge, 2019), 79. 63 Titus Andronicus, 5.1.24–33. 64 Heidi Craig, ‘English Rag-Women and Early Modern Paper Production’, in Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Wayne (New York: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020), 29–46. 65 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 3.3.68–73. 66 Snell, ‘Shakespeare’s Babies’, 89n5. The Gothic soldier reports having heard Aaron call the child mere swaddling, a ‘brat’ (Titus Andronicus, 5.2.28). 67 The OED informs us that ‘plot’ had the sense of mark, spot or stain (plot, n.2). I thank B. K. Adams for this note.

Bibliography Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard. Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Best, George. A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discouerie … of Martin Frobisher. London: Henry Bynneman, 1578. Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Brown, David Sterling. ‘The “Sonic Color Line”: Shakespeare and the Canonization of Sexual Violence Against Black Men’. The Sundial (16 July 2020). Available online: https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/the-sonic-color-line-shakespeare-andthe-canonization-of-sexual-violence-against-black-men-cb166dca9af8 (accessed 2 August 2020). Callaghan, Dympna. Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage. New York: Routledge, 2000. Chess, Simone, Colby Gordon and Will Fisher. ‘Introduction: Early Modern Trans Studies’. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (2019): 1–25. Cleveland, John. The Character of a London-Diurnall: With Severall Select Poems. London: [n.p.]: 1647. de Grazia, Margreta. ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes’. In Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2, edited by Terence Hawkes, 65–96. London: Routledge, 1996.

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Fischer, Kirsten. Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Fletcher, Anthony. Review of ‘Kim E. [sic] Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England’. Journal of Family History 22, no. 2 (1997): 232–3. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Foster, Thomas A. ‘The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery’. Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3 (2011): 445–64. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Grier, Miles P. ‘Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination’. In Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political, edited by Vincent L. Wimbush, 193–220. New York: Routledge, 2015. Grier, Miles P. ‘Are Shakespeare’s Plays Racially Progressive? The Answer is in Our Hands’. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Edited by Ayanna Thompson, 237–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Grier, Miles P. Inkface: Othello and the Formation of White Interpretive Community, 1604–1855. University of Virginia Press, forthcoming. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Hall, Kim F. ‘“These Bastard Signs of Fair”: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’. In Post-Colonial Shakespeares, edited by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, 64–83. New York: Routledge, 1998. Kaufmann, Miranda. ‘“Making the Beast with Two Backs”: Interracial Relationships in Renaissance England’. Literature Compass 12, no. 1 (2015): 1–16. Knights, L. C. ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism (1933)’. In Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century, 15–54. New York: George W. Stewart, 1947. Kolin, Philip C. ‘Performing Texts in Titus Andronicus’. In Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, edited by Philip C. Kolin, 249–60. New York: Routledge, 2016. Little, Jr., Arthur L. Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Masten, Jeffrey. Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Morrison, Toni. Sula. Reprint edn. New York: Vintage, 2004. Nyong’o, Tavia. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

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Parker, Patricia. ‘Shakespeare’s Sound Government: Sound Defects, Polyglot Sounds, and Sounding Out’. Oral Tradition 24, no. 2 (2009): 359–72. Postlewait, Thomas. ‘Eyewitnesses to History: Visual Evidence for Theater in Early Modern England’. In The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, edited by Richard Dutton, 575–606. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Purchas, Samuel. Purchas his pilgrimage. London: Henrie Featherstone, 1626. Ravenscroft, Edward. Titus Andronicus, or, The Rape of Lavinia Acted at the Theatre Royall: A Tragedy, Alter’d from Mr. Shakespears Works. London: John Hindmarsh, 1687. Royster, Francesca T. ‘White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’. Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2000): 432–45 Rubin, Gayle. ‘The Traffic in Women’. In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Sanders, Eve Rachele. Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Shakespeare, William. The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus. London: John Danter, 1594. Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Edited by Jonathan Bate. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. New York: Routledge, 1995. Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. Edited by John Wilders. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Thomson Learning, 1995. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by John Drakakis. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing. Edited by Claire McEachern. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. Shakespeare, William. Othello. Rev. edn. Edited by E. A. J. Honigmann and Ayanna Thompson. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. Smith, Bruce. ‘Prickly Characters’. In Reading and Writing in Shakespeare, edited by David M. Bergeron, 25–44. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996. Smith, Ian. ‘Othello’s Black Handkerchief ’. Shakespeare Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2013): 1–25. Smith, Ian. ‘The Textile Black Body: Race and “Shadowed Livery” in The Merchant of Venice’. In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, edited by Valerie Traub, 290–315. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

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Smith, Ian. ‘White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage’. Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 33–68. Spillers, Hortense J. ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’. Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81. Snell, Megan. ‘Shakespeare’s Babies: “Things to Come at Large”’. In Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance, edited by Brett Gamboa and Lawrence Switzky, 79–90. London: Routledge, 2019. Teague, Frances. Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties. Cranbury: Bucknell University Press, 1991. The Daily Universal Register 177. London, England. Thursday, 21 July 1785: 2. Thiel, Sara B. T. ‘“Cushion Come Forth”: Materializing Pregnancy on the Stuart Stage’. In Stage Matters: Props, Bodies and Space in Shakespearean Performance, edited by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight, 143–58. Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018. Tokson, Elliott. ‘The Image of the Negro in Four Seventeenth-Century Love Poems’. Modern Language Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1969): 508–22. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Wall, Wendy. ‘Reading for the Blot: Textual Desire in Early Modern English Literature’. In Reading and Writing in Shakespeare, edited by David Moore Bergeron, 131–59. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

17

Extant / ephemeral Scott A. Trudell

When Desdemona borrows – or perhaps the right word is appropriates – the song of her mother’s maid Barbary, she tells us that it is an ‘old thing’, a song that ‘[w]ill not go from my mind’.1 We are given to imagine that the song is adapted from a previous series of performances and strongly associated with a previous performer. It calls up not only Barbary’s singing voice but her gestures; as Desdemona puts it, ‘I have much to do / But to go hang my head all at one side / And sing it like poor Barbary.’2 Desdemona speaks with a hint of condescension toward Barbary, a domestic servant whose name was associated with North Africa. Yet the song also registers shared trauma; Barbary ‘died singing’ it after she was forsaken by a lover who ‘proved mad’.3 And it affirms gender bonds; Desdemona sings it in the play’s only scene in which female characters are alone together, and Emilia subsequently performs it after Desdemona’s death, in solidarity with her and as an act of protest. In other words, the song becomes a kind of refrain that persists across multiple characters and temporal moments, shaped to suit changing circumstances and agendas. It is fitting, therefore, that the flyleaf of New York Public Library Drexel MS 4183, a manuscript dating roughly from the 1540s, contains a fragment of musical notation with underlaid lyrics that conclude ‘as I am all ye shall be / Therefore come after and dance with me / For all a green willow is my garland.’4 The words are not quite the same, and the melody is likely different,

My thanks to Claire M. L. Bourne, Matthew Harrison, Megan Heffernan, Lucía Martínez Valdivia and Thomas Ward for their feedback on this chapter.

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too, but this ‘snatch’ of song may well be the ‘old thing’ we encounter in Act 4, Scene 3 of Othello.5 What we now call the ‘Willow Song’ is conspicuously absent from the first surviving edition of the play – the 1622 quarto – and this was not uncommon: song lyrics are often missing from playtexts, in part because (as Tiffany Stern has shown) songs tended to be rehearsed separately from the rest of a given play, so they did not always find their way into the full manuscript used to set the edition.6 Yet the Willow Song does appear in the 1623 folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays and in several manuscript sources, including British Library Additional Manuscript 15117, the best-known version of the melody. That is, the Willow Song exists in a range of versions, some preceding and some postdating the earliest performances of Othello. Shakespeare was probably influenced by one or more of these versions, and he and his playing company influenced how the song was subsequently recorded and remembered. The Willow Song is therefore neither entirely absent from, nor entirely present in – and not exactly before, nor exactly after – the play in which it features. There is a spectrum of possibility involved in where it comes from, how it changes over time and how it is heard – all of which makes it emblematic of Shakespearean song more broadly. Of the seventy songs listed in Peter Seng’s The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare, fewer than two dozen can be securely linked to specific tunes.7 Of these two dozen, not a single one survives in an arrangement specific to the theatre or with a definitive sense of its pitch, vocal timbre or accompaniment onstage. As Ross Duffin has shown, however, conjectural versions can be reconstructed for all seventy songs, plus seventy-odd additional song fragments or references to specific tunes.8 What is more, many Shakespearean songs were ballads that would have been immediately recognized by audiences – so widely known that it would have been unnecessary to write them down. We might say, therefore, that Shakespearean songs are neither extant nor ephemeral but extempore, literally ‘out of the time’, a term for performances that arise in-the-moment but also change, adapt and persist over time.9 Songs are both within and beyond temporal reach – subject to shifting conditions of repertory performance and rarely surviving in ‘original’ form, but surfacing nevertheless in broadsides, music manuscripts, printed songbooks and other media.

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In what follows, my primary focus is on Cymbeline, a play in which musical performance is contingent and uncertain. By looking at Cymbeline’s musical gaps – especially its funeral song ‘Fear no more the heat o’th’ sun’, which Arviragus and Guiderius claim to speak, not sing – I show that what is nonextant should not be confused with what has been lost.10 Songs are among the more unwieldy elements of theatrical production, subject to the influence not only of playwrights but of composers, vocalists and instrumentalists. But this is a difference of degree, not of kind, from the broader textual instability of early modern drama. It is no more adequate to consign songs to ephemerality than it is to assume that stab-stitched quartos were destined for oblivion.11 When we listen more closely, we can begin to hear a certain recalcitrance in songs that remerges where and when we might not expect. Shakespearean songs have a tendency to produce temporal gaps, offering opportunities for improvisation, revision and dynamic response to shifting circumstances. These gaps bring the past into the present, invite adaptation in the future, and intrigue, surprise or disturb audiences with untimely sentiments and ideas. * Before we come to Cymbeline, let us remain for a moment with the idea that a song can be an ‘old thing’ – that is, a musical source or precedent for another song or lyric poem. Desdemona uses this term to describe a type of recycling – performing a previously existing song, perhaps with some alterations in lyric, melody, rhythm or tonality. A different type of example, one that is instructive for our purposes, occurs in As You Like It, when Jaques becomes enamoured with Amiens’s singing voice. Jaques cannot get enough: he insists that Amiens ‘warble’ more and more, opining, ‘I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs.’12 Then, in a moment of imaginative listening, Jaques tells him, ‘I’ll give you a verse to this note that I made yesterday in despite of my invention’, and Amiens goes on to perform the new lyric that Jaques has supplied.13 By ‘a verse to this note’, Jaques does not mean a wholly new poem or song. Instead, he means that he has written a contrafactum, or new song lyrics to replace the existing ones. The term is from medieval Latin; initially it meant adopting a secular tune to fit a devotional text, with the idea that writing ‘counterfeits’, ‘opposes’, or as Gavin Alexander puts it, ‘displace[s] the words with

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which the tune is found’.14 Musicologists most often apply the term contrafactum to medieval and Renaissance European sacred music, preferring the term ‘parody’ to describe the wider practice of borrowing previously existing musical material.15 But contrafacta need not be limited to a specific historical or stylistic context. We might use the term to describe any poem suited to the melody of an existing song, whether implicitly or explicitly, from ballads written to fit the tune of ‘Greensleeves’ to Philip Sidney’s sonnets ‘To the tune of Non credo gia che piu infelice amante’ and other Continental songs.16 In this sense, contrafacta are ubiquitous, appearing across languages and literary traditions – everywhere that a song precedes and shapes a poem’s rhythmic and metrical identity. Contrafacta involve a hybrid practice of recollecting sound and setting it into motion. And music routinely lurks in the background of poems that are not strictly contrafacta – as the trace of a cadence, for instance, or the skeleton of a verse form detached from its musical roots. Yet a poem’s musical backbone is not always readily detectable, especially if one is not looking for it. Contrafacta commonly appear with no indication of the tunes to which they are written, and their melodic and rhythmic structures are often obscure to even the welltrained eye. Indeed, contrafacta are perfectly conformable to manuscript and printed transmission and therefore easily mistaken for poems with no musical influence. But none of this entails a clean separation from music because even unnoticed contrafacta create latent musical possibilities – proclivities to musical adaptation. Jaques’s contrafactum for Amiens is telling in this regard because it is intended specifically for audition, for the pleasure of hearing it in a warbling voice. Nor can a poet necessarily direct or control the reemergence of a contrafactum’s tune: Jaques himself jokes that he wrote the verses ‘in despite of my invention’, that is, against his own creative impulses, as though the tune has a life of its own, beyond authorial purview or design. Contrafacta thus offer us an example of melody controlling or even commandeering verse, though often subtly or under the surface. We might say that contrafacta are subject to a kind of musical passing – disguised in bibliographic circulation, beneath the musical radar, but with a tune always waiting for an occasion to return. Recognizing the potential for contrafacta to emerge at any moment helps attune us to the latency of music in Shakespeare’s plays. Music has the capacity to return while also giving the gnawing sense that it has been there all along. In Othello, Desdemona adopts the ‘old thing’ of Barbary’s song to suit her own

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purposes, and Emilia takes up the Willow Song in turn. In As You Like It, Amiens’s existing tune becomes a vehicle that Jaques uses to create a new lyric and then indulge in its performance. And in Act 4 of Cymbeline, Arviragus and Guiderius return to a funeral song from long ago to grieve for their newfound companion Fidele. They propose to ‘sing [Fidele] to th’ ground / As once to our mother: use like note and words, / Save that Euriphile must be Fidele.’17 Fittingly, this repurposing of the dirge is couched within a narrative filled with substitution, switching and extemporizing. As a reminder, we arrive at Arviragus and Guiderius’ dirge after Imogen has disguised herself as the boy Fidele in order to seek out her husband Posthumus, who has arranged to have her murdered in Wales. Passing as Fidele, Imogen meets Arviragus and Guiderius, who are her long-lost brothers, though none of them knows this. The brothers were kidnapped as infants by the courtier Belarius (whom they believe to be their father) and their nurse Euriphile (whom they believe to have been their mother), and they believe themselves to be the Welsh rustics Cadwal and Polydore. Imogen drinks a potion that makes her temporarily appear to be dead, and Arviragus and Guiderius lay her to rest next to Euriphile’s grave. Cymbeline’s funeral song or ‘dirge’, as it is often called, has been set to music by composers ranging from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Stephen Sondheim.18 But no period musical setting is extant, and the 1623 folio playtext goes out of its way to stipulate that the song is not sung. Arviragus hints at a reason for this when he says that ‘our voices / Have got the mannish crack’, that is, that the brothers’ prepubescent male voices have broken, so they can no longer produce the mellifluous upper-range sound that was so coveted during the period, in the children’s and adult companies alike.19 Nevertheless, Arviragus resolves to sing: ‘[L]et us, Polydore, though now our voices / Have got the mannish crack, sing him to th’ ground.’20 That is, they determine to ‘speak’ the song not because their voices have broken but because Guiderius is too weepy, or as he puts it, ‘I cannot sing. I’ll weep, and word it with thee, / For notes of sorrow out of tune are worse / Than priests and fanes that lie.’21 Arviragus agrees, responding, ‘We’ll speak it then’, which articulates a clear distinction between ‘speaking’ and ‘singing’ a song.22 He reaffirms this when he announces: ‘We’ll say our song’ before they begin.23 The result is a stirring lyric beginning, ‘Fear no more the heat o’th’ sun’, a song that could be sung but, at the performers’ discretion, is not (see Figure 17.1).24

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Figure 17.1  The funeral song from Cymbeline, as printed in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), sig. 3b1r. STC 22273 Fo. 1 no. 68, Folger Shakespeare Library. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Arviragus’ allusion to the post-pubescent voices of boy actor-singers provides a vivid illustration of some of the personnel concerns that contributed to the textual instability of early modern drama. We might recall a similar moment in Twelfth Night, when Duke Orsino asks of Viola/Cesario: Give me some music. Now, good morrow, friends. Now good Cesario, but that piece of song,

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That old and antic song we heard last night … Come, but once verse.25

This comes as no surprise because Viola, who (like Imogen) is a female protagonist disguised as a male page, has earlier announced her intention to please the duke with her sweet singing voice: I’ll serve this duke. Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him. It may be worth thy pains, for I can sing And speak to him in many sorts of music, That will allow me very worth his service.26

According to the 1623 folio text in which Twelfth Night survives, however, it is Feste, the play’s musical clown, who proceeds to sing ‘Come away, come away death’ for Orsino. Feste just happens to be ‘about the house’, even though he is Olivia’s jester and should presumably be in her household.27 As Tiffany Stern has suggested, this is most likely because, at some point between 1601, when Twelfth Night was first performed, and 1623, when it was first printed, the boy actor’s voice broke.28 That is, the virtuosic actor who first played Viola/Cesario could no longer hit the notes, and the play was still in repertory, so the King’s Men introduced a revision to suit their personnel needs, and this change was calcified in the text of the play that was sent to the printer. The dirge scene in Cymbeline shares key features with this example from Twelfth Night. Both plays survive only in the 1623 folio, which means that more than a decade of repertory history inheres in the earliest surviving playtext (Cymbeline was first performed c. 1610; Twelfth Night c. 1601). Gary Taylor has suggested of Arviragus and Guiderius’ allusions to their changing voices: ‘If anything in the canon is a theatrical interpolation due to exigencies of casting, these lines are a chief candidate. Quite apart from their evidence excusing of a bad voice, they are contradicted by the [heading] “SONG”.’29 The ‘song’ heading seems to me something of a red herring; as Martin Butler has observed, it might easily have been added by Ralph Crane or another scribe well after the initial performances of the play.30 But Taylor’s main point remains: we are witnessing a moment of instability in the playtext. Stern, likewise, suggests that this scene as presented in the First Folio is the result of ‘layered’ and ‘hasty revisions that turn a song to be sung by two people into a song to be sung by one person and

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spoken by the other, and finally into a song that is to be spoken by both’.31 This scenario is plausible, though conjectural; for Stern, it serves as one example among many of the dynamic, even haphazard history of assembling playtexts from repertory performance practices. Other scholars interpret this scene entirely differently. Roger Warren has suggested that the dirge is ‘spoken, not sung’ ‘to draw attention to the words of this celebration of Innogen … so that there may be no risk of anything detracting from their hypnotic impact’.32 Keverne Smith has argued that Shakespeare steps back from a musical performance of the dirge in order to avoid evoking the Catholic tradition of an intercessory song for the dead.33 And Seth Lerer has argued that the spoken dirge is a performance of failure, a recognition that beautiful singing is no longer possible in the new world of irony and complexity that Lerer sees in Shakespearean tragicomedy: ‘These words are said because the singing voice is broken … Cymbeline’s lyric stage is played along an arc of misperformance.’34 What Stern imagines as a series of ‘hasty revisions’, that is, Lerer understands as part of the play’s deliberately complex and sophisticated sensibility. And what Taylor sees as clear evidence of the impact of theatrical ‘exigencies’, Warren understands as a finely crafted, ‘hypnotic’ theatrical effect.35 These are starkly opposed scholarly perspectives, yet I would suggest that they share a key assumption, namely that ‘Fear no more’ was originally intended to be performed in one particular way. Scholars have maintained either that the lyric was initially designed to be spoken, or that it was initially designed to be performed to music – that it was one or the other, spoken or sung. What this assumption overlooks is the opportunistic quality of song in the early modern commercial theatre – its built-in adaptability to circumstance and occasion. The fact is that Shakespeare himself may not have known how exactly a song would be incorporated into a given theatrical performance. It is possible that Shakespeare intended the dirge to have a particular musical effect, at the new Blackfriars, for instance, a space that would have evoked the musical children’s companies that had previously performed there.36 Yet Shakespeare and his company would have known that the song would be heard quite differently in the soundscapes of the Globe or the Jacobean court, the other likely venues for the first performances of Cymbeline. Variability in performance conditions was the rule, and there is no reason to expect a

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single, uniform intention behind a musical performance onstage. All of this helps to explain why ‘Fear no more’ is imagined as suitable for singing or speaking – why Arviragus and Guiderius deliberate before choosing their mode of delivery. The dirge is framed as a kind of module capable of shifting to suit a given occasion. And ‘Fear no more’ is untimely in more than one sense. Not only is it adapted from a musical performance for Euriphile’s funeral and then (at least in the folio text) performed without its accompanying notes. It also elegizes someone who is not dead, and who is not the starving page boy she appears to be. The dirge is spoken by princes who do not know their own identities, about a princess, their sister, who does not in fact enjoy the ‘quiet consummation’ that the lyric imagines.37 What is more, the rhetorical impact of the song – its serene evocation of peace and rest that continues to be used in funeral services to this day – is entirely inappropriate for the present situation in the plot. Although the scene amounts to a resurrection or rebirth of sorts, Imogen has many worldly tasks to come; she has much left to fear from the frowns of the great, including her father; this is not a moment of rest or respite in the play; and her grave (which is not in fact a grave) is anything but renowned. Even the dirge’s concerns about tyranny and slander are unfitting sentiments to be expressed by Arviragus and Guiderius, who have no experience of court; J. K. Barret has suggested that the dirge feels as though it was written by Belarius, the courtier who abducted and raised the boys.38 We might even say that the dirge’s untimeliness has contributed to the tendency to remove it from its context within Cymbeline, which may explain why, for instance, several students who studied the play at West Los Angeles Community College had the words ‘Fear no more’ tattooed on their bodies.39 The dirge’s untimeliness produces a sense of confusion about what has been lost – an inability to place the source of sadness and lost connection. That is, the song makes us feel the contingency of the present moment in Cymbeline, and this connects to the play’s general sense of temporal dislocation and confusion. After all, this is a play full of temporal shifts – a mish-mash of ancient Britain, mythical Wales, classical Rome and sixteenth-century Italy, populated by displaced characters including the aptly named ‘Posthumus’, who is removed in both time and place from his home and origin. Music is part of how Cymbeline’s untimeliness is demarcated, including its invocations

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of ‘Solemn music’ that precede the funeral dirge in Act 4 and then the Leonati dream sequence and descent of Jupiter in Act 5.40 We hear ‘solemn music’, first, from Belarius’ ‘ingenious instrument’ (an enigmatic term possibly indicating a wind-harp or a musical automaton), which has not sounded for many years.41 And in Act 5, ‘solemn music’ again evokes the past, this time accompanying apparitions of Posthumus’ lost family.42 The dirge itself is thus only one of Cymbeline’s many temporal ‘gap[s]’, a term I derive from Imogen’s expression of eagerness to set out for a tryst with Posthumus, where the journey to Wales is a ‘gap / That we shall make in time, from our hencegoing / And our return’.43 To describe a song as a ‘gap’ is to place it on a continuum between extant and ephemeral – neither entirely lost nor entirely recoverable. Period music for ‘Fear no more’ is absent from the textual record, and the surviving folio text stipulates that the dirge is not sung. But the lyric itself survives; Arviragus and Guiderius imagine it as performable (though unsung); and it was frequently set to music in subsequent repertory history. We lack a firm sense of the melody, rhythm or tonality of the song as performed in the play’s earliest productions, but, then again, the same could be said of songs for which period musical settings do survive. A setting of the song ‘Hark, hark, the lark’ from Act 2 of Cymbeline, for example, can be found in a seventeenth-century manuscript version that has been tentatively attributed to Robert Johnson, a composer for the King’s Men.44 But this musical source postdates the play by two decades, lacks an attribution, and is missing two lines.45 What is more, even if this setting of ‘Hark, hark, the lark’ is by Johnson, and even if it does bear some relation to what was performed in early productions of Cymbeline, the manuscript songbook in which it appears was designed for a different musical context.46 The fact is that no Shakespearean song is original or definitive, in the sense that there is little reason to think that any given song was performed uniformly or consistently over the five-decade repertory history of Lord Chamberlain’s Men and King’s Men. Songs were subject to change and revision due to shifting theatrical sites; alteration by dramatists, composers and performers; and inconsistent availability of individual actors, vocalists, composers and instrumentalists. And, needless to say, they were not alone: in early modern drama and performance culture, fragmentation and instability were the coin of the realm.47

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* Insofar as songs are ‘gaps’ – breaks or disruptions in time that respond dynamically to changing circumstances – they are also extempore, or ‘out of time’. Extempore performance suggests a lack of premeditation or preparation, similar to what we now call ‘improvisation’. Yet it was only in the late eighteenth century that a word was wanted for spontaneously or ineffably ‘improvised’ performance.48 During the early modern period, by contrast, there was little expectation for performances to be scripted or notated in the first place, and therefore no need for a term to describe the alternative. An extempore performance would inevitably have fleeting or ‘ephemeral’ qualities, but this was not understood to preclude the possibility for ‘extant’ persistence in writing. For example, witness the first instance of the word extempore cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, namely a scene in Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1552) in which Ralph’s servant Dobinet complains of his master: Of songs and ballads also he is a maker, … Yea, and extempore will he ditties compose – Foolish Marsyas ne’er made the like, I suppose. Yet must we sing them; as good stuff, I undertake, As for such a penman is well fitting to make.49

Ralph’s ‘ditties’ may be composed in-the-moment, but they are also written, notated or otherwise made available for his servants to perform, his extempore compositional habit in no way contradicting his role as a ‘penman’. Extempore thus offers an alternative to the modern extant / ephemeral binary, which can be misleading not just for song but for all early modern performance and, for that matter, material culture itself. It is possible that a surviving lyric, piece of musical notation or textual witness is ‘extant’, corresponding quite closely to a given historical event or material reality – that a clear indication of melody, rhythm and tonality survives, or that a textual witness is not so wormeaten, water-damaged or incomplete as to depart radically from what was read at the time. Alternatively, it is possible that a given song or text has been entirely lost, with no indication of an attempt to preserve it and no possibility of reconstructing it. I have been outlining a third possibility, one of partial or incomplete persistence across time, in which a series of possibilities were activated or experienced in different and changing ways. Cymbeline’s dirge

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serves as a suggestive example of this phenomenon, wearing its untimeliness on its sleeve. It was partly, though not entirely, unscripted, making it one of many moments in which a playwright ceded some degree of influence or control to vocalists, actors, instrumentalists and audiences. Cymbeline’s dirge was likely spoken and sung, adapted to the different theatres and occasions of its initial performances. In this way, the dirge reminds us that ‘extant’ and ‘ephemeral’ are extreme ends of a spectrum. Songs tend not to answer to either extreme, so they help us recognize the rich area in between. As invitations to extempore performance, they signal the openness of Shakespearean texts to possibility and surprise.

Notes   1 William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 4.3.27 and 29. Justin P. Shaw has argued that Desdemona’s song constitutes a ‘theft of happiness’ predicated on erasing Barbary (‘“A Song of Willow”: Barbary’s Blues and the Theft of Happiness in Early Modern England’ (lecture, ‘RaceB4Race: Appropriations’, Arizona State University, January 2020)).   2 Othello, 4.3.29–31.   3 Ibid., 4.3.28 and 25.   4 F. W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 50.   5 Gertrude uses the term ‘snatches’ to describe Ophelia’s song fragments in Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, rev. edn., The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 4.7.175.   6 See Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 120–73.   7 Peter Seng, The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare: A Critical History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).   8 Ross Duffin, ed., Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004).   9 OED, s.v. ‘extempore, adv., adj., and n.’ 10 For a sustained consideration of textual presence and loss, see Misha Teramura’s chapter ‘Lost / found’ in this volume.

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11 On the collectability and endurance of stab-stitched play quartos, see Aaron T. Pratt, ‘Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early Modern Playbooks as Literature’, The Library, 7th series, 16, no. 3 (2015): 304–28. 12 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 2.5.32, 10–11. 13 Ibid., 2.5.41–2. 14 Gavin Alexander, ‘On the Reuse of Poetic Form: The Ghost in the Shell’, in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 134. 15 Robert Falck and Martin Picker, ‘Contrafactum’, Grove Music Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ (accessed 3 March 2021). 16 Philip Sidney, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 136. On Sidney’s contrafacta in Certain Sonnets and Astrophil and Stella, see John Stevens, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and “Versified Music”: Melodies for Courtly Songs’, in The Well Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance, ed. John Caldwell, Edward Olleson and Susan Wollenberg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 153–69; Gavin Alexander, ‘The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum: Robert Sidney’s “French Tune” Identified’, Music & Letters 84, no. 3 (2003): 378–402; and Scott Trudell, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 28, 62–3. My use of the term contrafactum is informed by Alexander, ‘On the Reuse’. 17 Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. Valerie Wayne, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 4.2.235–7. Unless otherwise noted, I quote from this edition. 18 See A Shakespeare Music Catalogue, vol. 1, ed. Bryan N. S. Gooch and David Thatcher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 249–58. Vaughan Williams’s arrangement dates to c. 1895; Sondheim’s setting comes in his musical The Frogs, which was written in 1974 and adapted for Broadway in 2004. For an overview of Cymbeline’s music and its performance history, see Cymbeline, ed. Wayne, 402–6. 19 Cymbeline, 4.2.234–5. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 4.2.239–41. 22 Ibid., 4.2.241. 23 Ibid., 4.2.253. 24 Ibid., 4.2.257.

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25 Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, ed. Kier Elam, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Cengage Learning, 2008), 2.4.1–3 and 7. 26 Ibid., 1.2.52–6. 27 Ibid., 2.4.12–13. 28 See Stern, Documents of Performance, 148. 29 Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, ed. Taylor and Stanley Wells (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), note to Cymbeline 4.2.239–44. 30 Cymbeline, ed. Martin Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 249. 31 Stern, Documents of Performance, 146. 32 Cymbeline, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 274. 33 Keverne Smith, ‘To Sing or to Say: Dirges, Cymbeline, and the Reformers’, The Shakespeare Newsletter 61, no. 2 (2011): 63–6. 34 Seth Lerer, Shakespeare’s Lyric Stage: Myth, Music and Poetry in the Last Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 170. 35 I am also influenced by Thomas Ward’s hitherto unpublished work on the dirge scene, ‘Spoken Song and Untimely Performance in Cymbeline 4.2’, delivered at the 2013 Shakespeare Association of America conference. 36 On the ways in which the King’s Men would have been cognizant of the musical history of the new Blackfriars Theatre, see Tiffany Stern, ‘“A Ruinous Monastery”: The Second Blackfriars Playhouse as a Place of Nostalgia’, in Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, ed. Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 97–114. 37 Cymbeline, 4.2.279. 38 J. K. Barret, Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 156–8. 39 See Katherine Boutry, ‘Creativity Studies and Shakespeare at the Urban Community College’, in Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity, ed. Sharon O’Dair and Timothy Francisco (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019), 139–40. 40 Cymbeline, 4.2.185SD, 5.4.29SD. ‘Solemn music’ came to describe supernatural scene-setting in the context of the Jacobean masque, and it appears in two other late Shakespeare plays with visionary and spectacular associations, accompanying Queen Katherine’s dream vision in Henry VIII and Ariel’s enchantment of Prospero’s enemies in The Tempest. See Shakespeare and John Fletcher, King

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Henry VIII (All Is True), ed. Gordon McMullan, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Thomson Learning, 2000), 4.2.80SD; and Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999), 3.3.17SD and 5.1.57SD. 41 Guiderius tells us that it has not been heard ‘Since death of my dear’st mother’ (4.2.189). In the theatre, the sound effect would likely have been produced by recorders, strings or even an organ. 42 Tellingly, the spectacle that follows is in fourteeners, an archaic verse form that underscores the past-ness of the dream vision. 43 Cymbeline, 3.2.62–3. 44 Bodleian, MS Don. c. 57, f. 78. On the song and its inconclusive attribution to Johnson, see Willa McClung Evans, ‘Shakespeare’s ‘Harke Harke Ye Larke’, PMLA 60, no. 1 (1945): 95–101; Robert Johnson, Ayres, Songs, and Dialogues, ed. Ian Spink (London: Stainer & Bell, 1961), 73; and John H. Long, Shakespeare’s Use of Music, vol. 2, ‘The Final Comedies’ (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1961), 53. 45 The lines missing from the manuscript songbook but present in the 1623 folio are ‘His steeds to water at those springs / On chaliced flowers that lies’ (Cymbeline, 2.3.22–3). As is common in musical settings, repetition is indicated for select words and phrases, including five repetitions of the initial word, ‘Harke’. 46 Bodleian, MS Don. c. 57, c. 1640s–1660s, features a mixture of theatrical and non-theatrical songs by a variety of poets and composers including Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew and Henry Lawes. 47 My thanks to Theodore Leinwand for conversation on this topic. On the ways in which an early modern play ‘was not a static, self-contained verbal artifact, but an occasion for spontaneous social exchange’, see Richard Preiss, Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 7. 48 OED, s.v. ‘improvise, v.’ Note also that ‘live’ does not come to denote a performance event experienced at the moment of its occurrence until the early twentieth century, well after the advent of recorded sound; see OED, s.v. ‘live, adj.1, n., and adv.’, 10. 49 Nicholas Udall, ‘Roister Doister’, in Elizabethan Plays, ed. Arthur H. Nethercot, Charles R. Baskervill and Virgil B. Heltzel (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), II.i.27, 29–32, my emphasis.

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Bibliography A Shakespeare Music Catalogue, vol. 1. Edited by Bryan N. S. Gooch and David Thatcher. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Alexander, Gavin. ‘The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum: Robert Sidney’s “French Tune” Identified’. Music & Letters 84, no. 3 (2003): 378–402. Alexander, Gavin. ‘On the Reuse of Poetic Form: The Ghost in the Shell’. In The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, edited by Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, 123–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Barret, J. K. Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Boutry, Katherine. ‘Creativity Studies and Shakespeare at the Urban Community College’. In Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity, edited by Sharon O’Dair and Timothy Francisco, 121–42. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019. Duffin, Ross, ed. Shakespeare’s Songbook. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004. Evans, Willa McClung. ‘Shakespeare’s ‘Harke Harke Ye Larke’. PMLA 60, no. 1 (1945): 95–101. Falck, Robert, and Martin Picker. ‘Contrafactum’. Grove Music Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Available online: www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ (accessed 3 March 2021). Fletcher, John, and William Shakespeare. King Henry VIII (All Is True). Edited by Gordon McMullan. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Thomson Learning, 2000. Johnson, Robert. Ayres, Songs, and Dialogues. Edited by Ian Spink. London: Stainer & Bell, 1961. Lerer, Seth. Shakespeare’s Lyric Stage: Myth, Music and Poetry in the Last Plays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Long, John H. Shakespeare’s Use of Music, vol. 2, ‘The Final Comedies’. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1961. Pratt, Aaron T. ‘Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early Modern Playbooks as Literature’. The Library, 7th series, 16, no. 3 (2015): 304–28. Preiss, Richard. Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Seng, Peter. The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare: A Critical History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. Edited by Roger Warren. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999.

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Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. Edited by Martin Butler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Edited by Juliet Dusinberre, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Thomson Learning, 2006. Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Edited by Kier Elam. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Cengage Learning, 2008. Shakespeare, William. Othello. Edited by E. A. J. Honigmann. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Rev. edn. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Shakespeare, William. Cymbeline. Edited by Valerie Wayne. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Shaw, Justin P. ‘“A Song of Willow”: Barbary’s Blues and the Theft of Happiness in Early Modern England’. Lecture presented at ‘RaceB4Race: Appropriations’. Arizona State University, January 2020. Sidney, Philip. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Edited by William A. Ringler, Jr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Smith, Keverne. ‘To Sing or to Say: Dirges, Cymbeline, and the Reformers’. The ShakespeareNewsletter 61, no. 2 (2011): 63–6. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Stern, Tiffany. ‘“A Ruinous Monastery”: The Second Blackfriars Playhouse as a Place of Nostalgia’. In Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, 97–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Sternfeld, F. W. Music in Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. Stevens, John. ‘Sir Philip Sidney and “Versified Music”: Melodies for Courtly Songs’. In The Well Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance, edited by John Caldwell, Edward Olleson and Susan Wollenberg, 153–69. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Taylor, Gary. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Edited by Taylor and Stanley Wells. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Trudell, Scott. Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Udall, Nicholas. ‘Roister Doister’. In Elizabethan Plays, edited by Arthur H. Nethercot, Charles R. Baskervill and Virgil B. Heltzel. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.

18

Lost / found Misha Teramura

Prelude: When the text is lost and won In the scholarly imagination, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623) seems a kind of miracle of textual preservation. As every Shakespearean knows, half of the plays included in the First Folio were appearing in print for the first time: had the volume not been published, so the story goes, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest and many more would be lost to oblivion. Indeed, in early modern English literature, stories of textual survival can always be told alongside stories of textual loss. In November 1623, just as the printing of the First Folio was being completed, Ben Jonson suffered one such catastrophic loss when an accidental fire in his home consumed some of his unpublished manuscripts. The poem that he wrote to lament the loss – titled, in one witness, ‘An Execratione vppon Vulcan by Ben: Johnson occasioned by the burninge of his Deske of writinges’ – enumerates the works destroyed in the fire: a poetic narrative of his journey to Scotland, a commentary on Horace’s Ars Poetica, a translation of John Barclay’s Latin romance Argenis, fragments of a play in progress, and more.1 Jonson undertook to rewrite some of the works that had perished. Others remained casualties of the flames, permanently lost. While Jonson may have been an unfortunate exception to witness the loss of his writings firsthand, the fate of his incinerated works was far from rare. Perhaps no realm of early modern English literature was as prone to loss over

I am grateful to Claire M. L. Bourne for her valuable comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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time as drama. Of the approximately 3,000 plays that scholars estimate must have been written for performance on the commercial stage from 1567 to 1642, less than a fifth survive today.2 This loss is unsurprising given the vulnerability of the playhouses in which the manuscripts of these plays were preserved. When the Cockpit was ransacked in 1617 and the Fortune burned down in 1621, contemporaries specifically mentioned the playbooks that had perished within.3 Even apart from such disasters, theatres could be leaky archives: the King’s Men lost track of the licensed playbook for The Winter’s Tale by 1623, that of The Honest Man’s Fortune by 1625 and that of Bonduca around the same time.4 Nor did the later custodians and collectors of plays fare much better. Notoriously, John Warburton (1682–1758) claimed to have collected fifty-six early modern dramatic manuscripts, all but three of which met an inglorious fate: ‘[T]hrough my own carelessness and the Ignora[n]ce of my S[ervant] in whose hands I had lodgd them they was unluckely burnd or put under Pye bottoms.’5 In the words of Elizabeth Bishop: ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master.’6 This reality of textual loss was noticed even by the playwrights themselves. Thomas Heywood, claiming in 1633 to have authored or co-authored 220 plays, explained that, if these plays ‘are not exposed vnto the world in Volumes, to beare the title of Workes, (as others) one reason is, That many of them by shifting and change of Companies, haue beene negligently lost.’7 However, if Heywood had in mind Ben Jonson’s Workes (1616), such an ostensibly complete publication was no guarantee of full textual survival: in 1618–19, Jonson himself told William Drummond that ‘half of his comedies were not in print’.8 While Bartholomew Fair and The Devil Is an Ass would be published in folio in 1631, Jonson’s comic Hot Anger Soon Cold, historical Robert II, King of Scots and Richard Crookback, and tragic Page of Plymouth, along with the infamous Isle of Dogs, no longer survive. As with Jonson’s Workes, so too was Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies an incomplete project of textual preservation. Not only does the First Folio omit two extant plays in which Shakespeare is now universally believed to have had a hand – Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen – but the book is also haunted by the absence of plays that Shakespeare is believed to have written and that were never published in any form. The most famous example is The History of Cardenio, attributed to Shakespeare and John Fletcher when Humphrey Moseley entered the play in the Stationers’ Register in 1653: Moseley never printed this play and the

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manuscript copy in Moseley’s possession, along with any other manuscript copy, has been lost. If the concept of loss implies an opposite, we might intuitively think of the concept of possession: for something to be ‘lost’ one must first ‘have’ it. The terminology of literary history might seem to accept this binary in opposing ‘lost’ texts to those that are ‘extant’, that is, texts that we ‘have’ today. And yet the category of ‘extant’ is perhaps more helpfully illuminated by opposing the concept of losing to the concept of finding, less in the sense of the recovery of something that has been lost than in the broader sense of the way one accesses something (for example, ‘you’ll find the library around the corner’). When we say that a play is ‘extant’, we mean that the text of that play can be ‘found’ in the historical evidence, and this concept of finding draws our attention to the specific material objects on which the claim of textual survival is predicated – how can we claim to ‘have’ works of literature? However, the complex nature of the historical evidence often forces us to recognize the slipperiness of these textual categories: as tempting as it might be to operate with a binary opposition between ‘extant’ and ‘lost’ – present and absent, alive and dead – the two categories often prove impossible to disentangle. Consider the example of Cardenio. When The Oxford Shakespeare was published in 1986, the editors provided readers with a ‘short account’ of Cardenio between the texts of The Tempest and All Is True, a kind of tombstone that canonized its status as a textually ‘lost’ play in distinction to the ‘extant’ plays surrounding it. And yet, as the Oxford editors were well aware, Cardenio’s status as a ‘lost’ play is complicated by the existence of Double Falsehood, the play published by Lewis Theobald in 1728, purportedly ‘revised and adapted’ from a Shakespearean original. If some traces of the original play can be shown to survive, can the play really be said to be wholly ‘lost’? After three decades of scholarship pursuing this question, the editors of The New Oxford Shakespeare (2016) made a different decision, providing readers with ‘Fragments of The History of Cardenio’, a comprehensive attempt to separate the Shakespearean and Fletcherian wheat from the Theobaldian chaff. The resulting gallery of textual pieces, ranging from nearly complete scenes to Sapphic slivers, serves as a visually striking testament to the complexities of textual survival. In this respect, the case of Cardenio illuminates a broader theoretical issue concerning ‘lost’ plays: many early modern plays that are not preserved in at least one

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complete textual witness may be partially ‘found’ in fragments of dialogue, descriptions of plots, backstage documents and other myriad traces.9 However, the same ambiguity that attends plays we might categorize as ‘lost’ also attends those we regularly classify as ‘extant’, as becomes immediately clear when we attend to questions of how, exactly, we ‘find’ those plays. For example, the First Folio might be held up as a monument of textual preservation and yet, as scholars are well aware, despite Heminge and Condell’s claim that the plays were ‘cur’d, and perfect of their limbes’ and ‘absolute in their numbers’, the scripts the First Folio contains do not always represent the fullest texts that survive. To take just one famous example, although the Folio text of Hamlet includes about 70 lines not present in the 1604–5 Quarto (Q2), it lacks approximately 230 lines found in the earlier text. Early modern books are always haunted by the possibility of their incompleteness: even Q2 Hamlet, while advertising its textual superiority to Q1, nevertheless acknowledges its own imperfection, ‘Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was’.10 Such examples demonstrate that even if a print witness to a play survives, there is no guarantee that it represents the fullest text that was written or performed, or even that it fully reproduces the manuscript copy that made its way to the print shop.11 Every textual witness is always potentially incomplete, a large fragment of a lost whole. To think of any given play as either ‘lost’ or ‘found’ belies the complexities of the evidence about early modern drama: loss and survival do not represent binary opposites but rather a spectrum of possibilities – not a breach but an expansion. The present chapter considers three related case studies that explore these nuances by examining the textual implications of three forms of loss: the lost play Love’s Labour’s Won; the lost first edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost; and the ubiquitous potential for smaller-scale instances of loss inherent in the process of textual transmission.

The lost work: Love’s Labour’s Won In 1598, Francis Meres praised Shakespeare as a comic playwright, citing in particular ‘his Ge[n]tleme[n] of Verona, his Errors, his Loue labors lost, his Loue labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, & his Merchant of Venice’.12

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One of the earliest commentators to confront the questions raised by that mysterious title was Bishop Thomas Percy.13 As Percy wrote in a 1764 letter to Richard Farmer: I observe that Meres quotes a play of Shakespear’s (under the Title of Love’s Labors wonne) which does not at present appear. Perhaps it is some play that we have now under another title: It might have been given very aptly to All’s well that ends well: and indeed to other plays.14

Percy’s vague gesture to All’s Well as a candidate for identification with Love’s Labour’s Won was adopted by Farmer in his Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), and soon after, a theory began to gain support that Meres was referring to an earlier version of All’s Well under a different title. By 1876, F. G. Fleay could write that the title was ‘generally, and no doubt rightly, considered to have been the nucleus of All’s Well that Ends Well’, although that play was not the only possibility. In 1796, Richard Hole had proposed The Winter’s Tale, and Fleay himself would soon prefer Much Ado About Nothing as a candidate. By 1930, E. K. Chambers had to contend with arguments identifying the title with Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado, All’s Well, The Tempest and The Taming of the Shrew, of which the last struck him as the only plausible option.15 The nature of the debate changed in 1953 when the London bookdealer Solomon Pottesman noticed two paper leaves in the binding of a copy of Thomas Gataker’s Certaine Sermons (1637) bound together with Saint Stevens Last Will and Testament (1638).16 The leaves apparently originated from the business records of a bookseller based in southwest England, one of which contained a list of titles apparently representing printed books that were in the bookseller’s stock in August 1603. Under the heading ‘[inte]rludes & tragedyes’ are listed sixteen play titles, including ‘marchant of vennis’, ‘taming of a shrew’, ‘loves labor lost’ and ‘loves labor won’. The discovery seemed not only to vindicate Meres’s claim that there was a play known as Love’s Labour’s Won, but also provided evidence that this play was in print. However, when the findings were published by T. W. Baldwin, scholars continued to explain away the possibility of the complete loss of an entire play. G. K. Hunter proposed that the list did not represent a bookseller’s stock but rather a list of desired items: he may have simply assumed there was a Won to go with Lost or

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perhaps he adduced its existence from reading Meres.17 R. C. Bald, conceding that a play called Love’s Labour’s Won existed, nevertheless proposed that this play was not, in fact, authored by Shakespeare, but rather a different playwright hoping to capitalize on the success of Love’s Labour’s Lost.18 And of course, the existence of an earlier quarto could not disprove the longstanding theory that this was simply an alternative title for an otherwise extant play by Shakespeare: Baldwin himself favoured the old theory that it was an early version of All’s Well. The basis of such critical attempts to identify Love’s Labour’s Won with an extant play was the awareness that early modern plays could be known under different titles, in the way that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII was apparently first performed as All Is True. Theatre historians like Chambers could adduce several other relevant Shakespearean examples, such as ‘The Hotspur’ and ‘Benedicte and Betteris’ that the King’s Men performed at court in 1613, generally assumed to represent 1 Henry IV and Much Ado, respectively.19 In these and other cases, the identification between the unfamiliar title and the extant text remains conjecture, a symptom of what John Astington has diagnosed as the scholarly disposition to ‘lump’ together disparate evidence.20 Epistemologically, we might be tempted to think of Love’s Labour’s Won as a kind of Schrödinger’s cat: since we cannot know one way or the other, the play is simultaneously both alive and dead, both lost and found. Psychologically, however, we might also recognize that the very scholarly desire to ‘lump’ together pieces of evidence fulfills a consolatory function, an attempt to minimize the scale of loss. Indeed, if the critical legacy of Love’s Labour’s Won serves to illustrate one thing, it is a certain scholarly unwillingness to confront the possibility that an entire play by Shakespeare has been lost, and with it, the implication that our grasp of Shakespeare’s oeuvre will always be incomplete. (If a play might be known to be lost, how many more Shakespearean works are unknown to be lost?) Of course, attempts to identify Love’s Labour’s Won with an extant play require scholars to downplay the inconvenient fact that the ending of Love’s Labour’s Lost anticipates a sequel. In the play’s final scene, the consummation of the wooing plot is derailed by the sudden news that the King of France has died: the Princess and her attendant ladies decide to postpone their courtship for a year and a day. ‘Then’, the Princess instructs her suitor, ‘at the expiration of the

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year, / Come challenge me, challenge me by these deserts, / And, by this virgin palm now kissing thine, / I will be thine.’21 As Roslyn L. Knutson observes, Shakespeare’s decision to write a romantic comedy in two parts may have been inspired by the two-part serial plays performed by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose, where the two instalments were performed on sequential days.22 Certainly the romantic narrative of Love’s Labour’s Lost feels incomplete without its comic resolution, an imperfect cadence, yearning for its consummation in another play. Yet, for the modern reader, in the textual absence of this sequel, the play’s final note of mourning seems to grieve proleptically and prophetically for its lost second part. While the ‘lumping’ scholars who would dispel the possibility of loss strive to avoid such grief, as the two following case studies remind us, the very nature of Shakespearean textual scholarship is fundamentally elegiac, a process of coping with losses that cannot be easily ignored.

The lost edition: The 1597 Love’s Labour’s Lost Loss comes in different varieties. While everyone would agree that the play Love’s Labour’s Lost is extant, this claim is complicated by the title page of the earliest surviving quarto (Q1) (see Figure 18.1). As with Meres’s allusion to ‘Loue labours wonne’, publisher Cuthbert Burby’s claim that Q1 was ‘[n]ewly corrected and augmented’ implies an absent text – namely, an earlier edition of the same play. While such a statement might be dismissed as a publisher’s ploy, corroborating external evidence can be found in the library catalogue of Edward, second Viscount Conway: among the list of English plays held at Conway’s Irish estate Brookhill House, we find an entry for ‘Loves Labours Lost by W: Sha: 1597’.23 No copy of this 1597 ‘Q0’ is known to be extant today. This Lost is lost. The loss of whole editions of early modern printed books is a well-known phenomenon. As students of drama are well aware, the extremely low survival rates of many early Shakespearean texts witness how easily an edition might be lost: the first editions of Venus and Adonis (1593), Titus Andronicus (1594) and The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York (1595) survive in a single copy each, while the earliest quarto of 1 Henry IV (1598) and an early octavo of The Passionate Pilgrim (1599?) survive only as incomplete fragments.24 Judging

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Figure 18.1  Title page of the earliest surviving quarto of Loues labors lost (London: Cuthburt Burby, 1598), STC 22294 copy 1, Folger Shakespeare Library. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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from the evidence of title pages, early quarto editions of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness have apparently been lost entirely. One striking example of edition loss can be seen in Thomas Deloney’s prose narrative Jack of Newbury: despite being entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1597, the earliest surviving text is the eighth edition of 1619.25 In the case of Love’s Labour’s Lost, we might be tempted by the possible consolation in the fact that Q1 describes itself as ‘corrected and augmented’: if this is true, Q0 was a textually defective text and its loss, therefore, not worth lamenting.26 And yet, even a defective Q0 might have offered invaluable textual and theatrical evidence. An instructive parallel can be found in Q2 Romeo and Juliet, which Burby published in 1599, a year after Love’s Labour’s Lost, in an edition that similarly advertised itself as ‘Newly corrected, augmented, and amended’. In the case of Romeo, Burby’s claim is demonstrably accurate: Q1, printed in 1597 by John Danter and Edward Allde, is significantly shorter and more textually problematic than Burby’s Q2. However, even the twentieth-century bibliographers who disparaged Q1 Romeo as a ‘bad quarto’ were forced to acknowledge its evidentiary value, not least in its rich details about staging.27 When Romeo and his friends depart from the ball and Capulet tries to detain them (‘Nay gentlemen prepare not to be gone’), only Q1 provides the stage direction ‘They whisper in his eare’.28 After the unconscious Juliet is discovered by her family, where Q2 simply calls for the characters to exit the stage, Q1 offers: ‘They all but the Nurse goe foorth, casting Rosemary on her and shutting the Curtens.’29 One of the most consequential discrepancies between the two texts occurs after Romeo has killed Tybalt and receives word from the Nurse of Juliet’s distress. Q2’s Romeo laments, ‘Oh tell me Frier, tell me, / In what vile part of this Anatomie / Doth my name lodge? Tell me that I may sacke / The hatefull mansion’, to which Friar Laurence responds, ‘Hold thy desperate hand: / Art thou a man? thy forme cries out thou art: / Thy teares are womanish … Vnseemely woman in a seeming man.’30 Q2’s representation of the scene suggests that Romeo is dissuaded from self-harm by Friar Laurence’s misogynistic rhetoric. However, Q1 offers a very different embodiment of the moment: after Romeo’s speech, ‘He offers to stab himself, and Nurse snatches the dagger away.’31 Q1’s staging, in which the Nurse physically saves Romeo from himself, significantly

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affects the gender dynamics of the scene; Friar Laurence’s misogynistic speech here is not an urgent appeal to save Romeo’s life but rather his own rhetorical attempt to reassert the conventional language of patriarchy and thereby to erase the Nurse’s courageous and consequential intervention. Even if Q1 Love’s Labour’s Lost reproduced the dramatic dialogue of the play in its entirety, it may be that the lost Q0 resembled Q1 Romeo and Juliet in providing details of staging that would have enriched, nuanced and even undermined the play’s spoken language. At the very least, it would have clarified some historical questions. Consider Q1’s claim that the play was ‘presented before her Highnes this last Christmas’. Was this claim accurate on the 1598 title page, or was the claim simply copied verbatim from the earlier edition, thereby referring to an earlier Christmas season?32 Or consider our historical narratives about the development of Shakespeare’s reputation in the English book trade. Based on the extant evidence, Q1 Love’s Labour’s Lost can be grouped with three other editions printed in the same year that identified Shakespeare as the playwright on their title pages. As Lukas Erne writes, ‘it is no exaggeration to say that in one sense, “Shakespeare,” author of dramatic texts, was born in the space of two or three years at the end of the sixteenth century’, and that ‘it was in 1598 that things suddenly changed’.33 However, in the absence of Q0, we do not know whether Shakespeare’s name was added to the title page of Q1 in 1598 or whether, as the entry ‘Loves Labours Lost by W: Sha: 1597’ might imply, it had appeared on Q0 as well. Perhaps the lost first edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost had the distinction of being the first published play to declare Shakespeare as its author.34

The lost words: Textual uncertainties in Love’s Labour’s Lost To imagine a binary opposition between ‘lost’ and ‘found’ requires us to imagine a category of pure textual presence. However, if this ideal of textual survival can be defined as unimpeded access to an author’s textual intention, then it remains doubtful how many early modern works might be said to ‘survive’ intact at all. Indeed, the claim made by the title page of Q1 Love’s Labour’s Lost – that the publication provided not just a fuller text (‘augmented’) but also a more accurate one (‘corrected’) – raises the spectre of lostness on

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another scale: textual corruption.35 The very nature of textual reproduction, whether in the world of manuscript or in the realm of print, almost always entailed the risk of textual errancy. As textual scholars know well, any given early modern book is liable to be rife with typographic errors, omissions and misrepresentations introduced in the process of printing it. Sometimes these were detected and emended, as when printers corrected erroneous sheets or provided lists of errata. More often than not, however, such textual ‘faults’ were allowed to stand, much to the frustration of some authors. Thomas Heywood, for example, excoriated William Jaggard for the ‘infinite faults escaped in my booke of Britaines Troy, by the negligence of the Printer, as the misquotations, mistaking of sillables, misplacing halfe lines, coining of strange and neuer heard of words’.36 Such accidental vandalism entailed the erosion of the author’s text, each instance of textual corruption introducing a kind of lacuna into an otherwise extant work: like the holes in the Colosseum, pockets of loss riddle early modern texts. Q1 Love’s Labour’s Lost is one such lacunose text. Despite the exquisitely produced quarto’s claim that it presents a ‘corrected’ text, editors have rather discovered that it ‘abounds in gross errors’.37 While some of these printshop errors are easily detected and corrected by modern readers (such as Q1’s ‘publibue’ [sig. A3v] for ‘publique’), others prove more opaque. In Q1, Nathaniel reads out a poem composed by Berowne, to which Holofernes replies: ‘You finde not the apostraphas, and so misse the accent. Let me superuise the cangenct.’38 Whether the compositor retrieved the wrong types or else misread his copy, the nonsensical word ‘cangenct’ presents a textual mystery. In such cases, editors offer emendations to propose possible solutions for what Shakespeare intended (for example, Theobald’s ‘canzonet’ for ‘cangenct’).39 And yet, such textual reconstructions always rest on a foundation of uncertainty. The authoritative text of authorial presence remains the elusive object of tentative speculation. Such uncertainty when dealing with specific readings can be said to stem from an even larger absence in Shakespearean textual studies: Shakespeare’s autograph manuscripts. As early as 1709, Nicholas Rowe sadly registered the editorial implications of this loss: ‘I must not pretend to have restor’d this Work to the Exactness of the Author’s Original Manuscripts: Those are lost, or, at least, are gone beyond any Inquiry I could make; so that there was

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nothing left, but to compare the several Editions, and give the true Reading as well as I could from thence.’40 Rowe’s desire to retrieve the site of authorial inscription as a solution to the problem of textual uncertainty was shared by the practitioners of the New Bibliography, whose desire ‘to strip the veil of print’ (in Fredson Bowers’s provocatively gendered conceit) was essentially a project to reconstruct the lost manuscript copies that had entered the print shop.41 Of course, the veil of print proves impossible to strip away entirely. Consider the moment when Holofernes instructs Nathaniel how the pageant of the Nine Worthies will be cast, as printed in q1: Peda. Iosua, your selfe, my selfe, and this gallant Gentleman Iudas Machabeus; this Swaine (because of his great lim or ioynt) shall passe Pompey the great, the Page Hercules.42

Since the eighteenth century, editors have recognized the discrepancy between this passage and the final casting of the pageant, in which Nathaniel plays Alexander, Don Armado (the gallant gentleman) plays Hector and Holofernes himself plays Judas Maccabeus. Most problematically, the stipulation ‘my selfe, and this gallant Gentleman Iudas Machabeus’ impossibly casts two actors in the same role. The passage demands emendation. But how? Rowe, in his 1709 edition, simply omitted ‘myself and’, a solution accepted by H. R. Woudhuysen in his Arden Third Series edition, although this results in the inaccurate casting of Armado.43 Edward Capell’s emendation to ‘myself or this gallant gentleman’ matches the final pageant, although Holofernes’ uncertainty about Judas Maccabeus would contrast his decisive casting of the other parts.44 It could be, as Richard Proudfoot suggested, that the compositor was confused by marginal or interlined text in the manuscript copy and accidentally neglected the word ‘Hector’, a theory accepted in The Oxford Shakespeare.45 Such solutions attribute the faulty text to the compositor, who has misrepresented his manuscript copy in print. Other editors, however, have suggested that the fault may lie not with the compositor but with Shakespeare’s manuscript itself. John Dover Wilson represented the text as ‘Joshua yourself, myself –, and this gallant gentleman, Judas Maccabæus’, on the assumption that Shakespeare had second thoughts for the part assigned to Holofernes, crossed out the role in the manuscript and then

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simply forgot to complete it.46 In the new Norton Shakespeare, Jane KingsleySmith also uses a dash after ‘myself ’, offering a different conjecture about the manuscript: ‘The simplest explanation is that Shakespeare left a space for Holofernes’ part and planned to come back to it later but never did.’47 For Wilson and Kingsley-Smith, the authorial manuscript itself may have been left unfinished: the lost document of editorial desire was always already lacunose. A larger-scale version of the same problem can be found in what editors describe as the ‘Katharine-Rosaline tangle’ in Act 2. After centuries of editors struggled to make narrative sense of Q1’s inconsistency concerning which woman Berowne pursues, John Kerrigan proposed the possibility that Q1’s confusion may accurately represent an inconsistency in the manuscript copy, stemming from Shakespeare’s own indecision while composing the play. To accept this theory, then, is to accept the possibility that even the lost editorial desideratum – the author’s manuscript – represented a version of the play that was itself not quite fully realized, never entirely textually ‘present’ in the first place.

Coda: The art of finding To acknowledge that each early modern literary work, including Shakespeare’s plays, can be located somewhere on the spectrum of loss and survival has implications in two directions. On the one hand, recognizing how early modern plays are haunted by the possibility of textual loss, from misrepresented words to details of staging, allows us to appreciate that no work can be said to be fully ‘extant’. On the other hand, the same ambiguity also allows us to broaden our perspective of what counts as a text. Consider the backstage plot of 2 The Seven Deadly Sins, likely performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men around 1597, or Simon Forman’s plot summary of a play about Richard II that he saw at the Globe on 30 April 1611.48 Although neither document provides direct traces of scripted language, both provide detailed evidence of narrative structures by which we might ‘read’ these plays through a glass darkly. Such surviving traces of literary works may not resemble texts that we are accustomed to reading, and yet we might nevertheless choose to treat them as potential objects of close reading and analysis.

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If such a position might allow us to ‘find’ lost works at a theoretical level, we need not give up hope of finding lost works more literally. We are familiar with stories of miraculous trouvailles, such as Sir Henry Bunbury’s chance discovery of Q1 Hamlet in his Suffolk manor house in 1823 or the 1904 discovery of Q1 Titus Andronicus by Petrus Johannes Krafft, a post-office clerk in Malmö, Sweden.49 Works that might seem to have been lost can turn up when one least expects it. Massinger’s Believe as You List had been listed among the plays assumed to have been destroyed by John Warburton’s cook, but in 1844 Massinger’s autograph manuscript ended up being discovered by chance ‘in a vast mass of rubbish […] previous to its intended destruction’.50 As Martin Wiggins has discussed, textual recovery of hitherto lost works of early modern English drama are regularly made, such as the 1997 discovery of Ben Jonson’s 1609 Entertainment at Britain’s Burse, located in the National Archives by James Knowles.51 We might reasonably expect further textual treasures to be lying in wait in the uncatalogued collections of county record offices and manor houses, antiquarian bookshops or masses of rubbish. Or we might even be holding them in our hands without realizing it. When Soloman Pottesman discovered the 1603 Love’s Labour’s Won bookseller’s list, he did so purely by a stroke of bibliographic luck: the manuscript leaf, which had been inserted by the binder at the book’s back hinge to protect the text block from chafing, became visible only because the pastedown had happened to come detached, thereby revealing the list of Shakespearean titles52 (see Figures 18.2 and 18.3). However, what seems like miraculous serendipity in fact reflects a wider reality. As Adam Smyth writes: Printed books frequently contained fragments of older texts in the boards (often constructed from pieces of paper pressed together), in the backing strips along the spine, in the hinges joining book to board, in pastedowns (leaves glued to the inside of the board over the top of the hinges and wood), or as flyleaves (extra leaves between the board and the text), or as free end leaves (conjugate with pastedowns).53

Early modern bindings have been proven to be treasure troves of fragments of older texts, some of which survive in no other form. John Payne Collier discovered the only six extant leaves of the play Albion Knight (c. 1566) in the binding of ‘an old book’, and as Tamara Atkin observes, fragments of

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Figure 18.2  Archival photograph of manuscript waste used in the binding of Thomas Gataker’s Certaine Sermons (1637) and Saint Stevens Last Will and Testament (1638). Pre-1650 MS 153, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

seven further otherwise-unknown sixteenth-century printed playbooks have been similarly retrieved from bindings.54 Nor are these fragments exclusively print: in 1988, a manuscript leaf containing a comic tavern scene imitating Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV was found in a sixteenth-century copy of Homer’s Odyssey.55 Such scattered limbs can even become whole bodies: although no copy of William Basse’s poetic elegy Great Brittaines sunnes-set (1613) survives intact, the entire book can be reconstructed from fragments that were used as waste paper.56 While nineteenth-century librarians were content to retrieve such fragments of manuscript and printed pages physically, the broadening accessibility of technologies such as macro X-ray fluorescence scanning has begun to allow researchers the opportunity to glimpse the hidden archive preserved in early modern bindings without damaging physical books.57 From pages of unsold copies, to marked-up proof sheets, to manuscripts that had served their

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Figure 18.3  Archival photograph of a bookseller’s list from c. 1603 used as waste in the binding of the same book. The list names a number of plays including ‘loves labor lost’ and ‘loves labor won’. Pre-1650 MS 153, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

function as printer’s copies, the range of textual materials that such research could uncover is potentially massive: each bound book might be a modest library of paper waste, a miniature Oxyrhynchus. Could it be that, in the binding of ‘an old book’, some leaves of the published Love’s Labour’s Won, Q0 of Love’s Labour’s Lost or Shakespeare’s autograph manuscript are waiting to be found? And yet, as is the case with all early modern literature, to find a text at a literal level must be accompanied by a theoretical awareness that the ‘found’ is always already, to some extent and to varying degrees, lost. Textual scholarship, whether or not it articulates its aims with this terminology, operates with an assumption of this loss. Even if most early modern literary works can never be fully ‘found’, the scholarly project is to approach asymptotically the destination of pure textual presence: this final destination maybe be impossible but the process matters. Textual scholarship is the art of finding.

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Notes   1 Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 367–70; British Library, MS Stowe 962, fol. 238r (CELM JnB 239).   2 David McInnis and Matthew Steggle, ‘Introduction: Nothing Will Come of Nothing? Or, What Can We Learn from Plays that Don’t Exist?’, in Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, ed. McInnis and Steggle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1.   3 Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry and William Ingram, eds., English Professional Theatre 1530–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 546, 628.   4 N. W. Bawcutt, ed., The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 142 and 160; John Fletcher, Bonduca, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Malone Society, 1951), 90.   5 W. W. Greg, ‘The Bakings of Betsy’, The Library, 3rd series, 7 (1911): 232.   6 Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 178.   7 Thomas Heywood, The English Traveller (London: n.p., 1633), sig. A3r.   8 Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (London: Penguin, 1988), 471.   9 These records are compiled and discussed on the Lost Plays Database (LPD), ed. Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis, Matthew Steggle and Misha Teramura, https://lostplays.folger.edu (accessed 26 February 2021). 10 The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke (London: Nicholas Ling, 1604), sig. A1r (emphasis mine). 11 See Scott A. Trudell’s chapter ‘Extant / ephemeral’ in this volume on the complex status of songs and early modern performance more broadly. See also Margaret Jane Kidnie’s chapter ‘Life / afterlife’ for more on the textual history of Hamlet. 12 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London: Cuthburt Burby, 1598), fol. 282r. 13 For a summary of the critical debate, see G. Harold Metz, ‘Wonne Is “Lost, Quite Lost”’, Modern Language Studies 16 (1986): 3–12. 14 Thomas Percy, The Percy Letters, Volume II: The Correspondence of Thomas Percy & Richard Farmer, ed. Cleanth Brooks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1946), 68. 15 E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 1:272–3. 16 The fragments are now preserved at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, Rare Book & Manuscript Library as Pre-1650 MS 153. For a

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transcription, see T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere’s ‘Love’s Labor’s Won’: New Evidence from the Account Books of an Elizabethan Bookseller (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), supplemented in Misha Teramura, ‘The “Indecipherable” Line of the Love’s Labour’s Won Bookseller’s List’, Notes & Queries 66 (2019): 441–4. 17 G. K. Hunter, review of Shakespere’s ‘Love’s Labor’s Won’ by T.W. Baldwin, Review of English Studies 10 (1959): 412–13. 18 R. C. Bald, review of Shakespere’s ‘Love’s Labor’s Won’ by T.W. Baldwin, Modern Philology 55 (1958): 278. 19 Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:343. 20 John Astington, ‘Lumpers and Splitters’, in Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, 84–102. 21 H. R. Woudhuysen, ed., Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 5.2.798–801. 22 Roslyn L. Knutson, ‘Love’s Labor’s Won in Repertory’, Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 11 (1985): 51 and 54. 23 Armagh Robinson Library, P001209872, fol. 267v. See Arthur Freeman and Paul Grinke, ‘Four New Shakespeare Quartos? Viscount Conway’s Lost English Plays’, TLS (5 April 2002): 17–18. 24 Shakespeare Census, ed. Adam G. Hooks and Zachary Lesser, www. shakespearecensus.org (accessed 26 February 2021). See Hooks’s chapter ‘Fact / fiction’ in this volume for more on dating the fragment of The Passionate Pilgrim. 25 Thomas Deloney, The Pleasant History of Iohn Winchcomb, in his younger yeares called Iack of Newberie … Now the eight time Imprinted, corrected, and inlarged (London: n.p., 1619). 26 For a sceptical account of Q1’s claims of textual improvement, see Paul Werstine, ‘The Editorial Usefulness of Printing House and Compositor Studies’, in PlayTexts in Old Spelling, ed. G. B. Shand and Raymond C. Shady (New York: AMS Press, 1984), 35–64. 27 Jill L. Levenson, ed., Romeo and Juliet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 67. 28 An Excellent conceited Tragedie Of Romeo and Iuliet (London: n.p., 1597), sig. C4r. 29 The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet (London: Cuthburt Burby, 1599), sig. K3r; An Excellent conceited Tragedie, sig. I2v. 30 The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, sig. H1r. 31 An Excellent conceited Tragedie, sig. G1v.

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32 Woudhuysen, ed., Love’s Labour’s Lost, 304. 33 Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 87, 82. 34 Alternatively, it may have identified the author as ‘W. S.’, perhaps, as Greg suggested, explaining why Edward Archer’s 1656 list of plays attributes Love’s Labour’s Lost to ‘Will. Sampson’ (BEPD 2:998). Besides Q1 Love’s Labour’s Lost, the other 1598 quartos naming Shakespeare as author are Q2 Richard III and Q2 and Q3 Richard II. 35 On textual corruption as a form of lostness, see Misha Teramura, ‘Shakespeare’s Ruined Quires’, in Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis and Matthew Steggle (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 23–40. 36 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London: n.p., 1612), sig. G4r. 37 Stanley Wells, et al., The Oxford Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 270. On the quarto’s elaborate presentation of drama in print, see Claire M. L. Bourne, ‘Typography After Performance’, in Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Tiffany Stern (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 193–215. 38 Loues labors lost (London: Cuthburt Burby, 1598), sig. E1v. 39 Woudhuysen, ed., Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.2.120n. 40 Nicholas Rowe, ed., The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, 1 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709), sigs. A2r–v. 41 Fredson Bowers, On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Library, 1955), 87. On Bowers, see Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 47. See B. K. Adams’s chapter ‘Fair / foul’ in this volume for more on how the language used by the New Bibliographers to describe Shakespearean manuscripts has perpetuated racist tropes of the early modern period. 42 Loues labors lost, sig. G1r. 43 Rowe, ed., Works, 437; Woudhuysen, ed., Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.1.118. 44 Edward Capell, ed., Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 10 vols (London: J. and R. Tonson, 1767–8), 2: sig. U7v. 45 Wells, Textual Companion, 274. 46 John Dover Wilson, ed., Love’s Labour’s Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 61–2, 168.

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47 Jane Kingsley-Smith, ed., Love’s Labor’s Lost, in The Norton Shakespeare: Third Edition, Digital Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2016), Folio Textual Comment 10. 48 Dulwich College, MSS 19; and Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 208, fol. 201r–v. See Knutson, ‘The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins’ and ‘Richard the 2’, LPD. 49 On Bunbury’s discovery and its implications, see Zachary Lesser, Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). On Krafft, see Anna Swärdh, ‘The 1904 Discovery of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus First Quarto in Sweden’, The Library, 7th series, 17 (2016): 424–45. See Hooks’s chapter ‘Fact / fiction’ in this volume for more on scholars’ handling of Shakespearean ‘discoveries’. 50 T. Crofton Croker, ed., Believe as You List (London: The Percy Society, 1849), viii. 51 Martin Wiggins, ‘Where to Find Lost Plays’, in Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, 255–81. 52 Baldwin, New Evidence, 3–4. 53 Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 143. 54 Tamara Atkin, Reading Drama in Tudor England (London: Routledge, 2018), 196. 55 David McInnis, ‘Play of Thieves and a Gullible Tapster’, LPD. 56 Smyth, Material Texts, 78–9. 57 See, for example, Jorien R. Duivenvoorden, Anna Käyhkö, Erik Kwakkel and Joris Dik, ‘Hidden Library: Visualizing Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts in Early-Modern Bookbindings with Mobile Macro-XRF Scanner’, Heritage Science 5, no. 6 (2017).

Bibliography Astington, John. ‘Lumpers and Splitters’. In Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, edited by McInnis and Steggle, 84–102. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Atkin, Tamara. Reading Drama in Tudor England. London: Routledge, 2018. Bald, R. C. Review of Shakespere’s ‘Love’s Labor’s Won’ by T.W. Baldwin. Modern Philology 55 (1958): 278. Baldwin, T. W. Shakspere’s ‘Love’s Labor’s Won’: New Evidence from the Account Books of an Elizabethan Bookseller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957.

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Bawcutt, N. W., ed. The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Berry, Herbert, Glynne Wickham and William Ingram, eds. English Professional Theatre 1530–1660. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927–1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984. Bourne, Claire M. L. ‘Typography After Performance’. In Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England, edited by Tiffany Stern, 193–215. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Bowers, Fredson. On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Library, 1955. Capell, Edward, ed. Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 10 vols. London: J. and R. Tonson, 1767–68. Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1930. Croker, T. Crofton, ed. Believe as You List. London: The Percy Society, 1849. Deloney, Thomas. The Pleasant History of Iohn Winchcomb, in his younger yeares called Iack of Newberie … Now the eight time Imprinted, corrected, and inlarged. London: n.p., 1619. Donaldson, Ian. Ben Jonson: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Duivenvoorden, Jorien R., Anna Käyhkö, Erik Kwakkel and Joris Dik. ‘Hidden Library: Visualizing Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts in Early-Modern Bookbindings with Mobile Macro-XRF Scanner’. Heritage Science 5, no. 6 (2017). Egan, Gabriel. The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Fletcher, John. Bonduca. Edited by W. W. Greg. Oxford: Malone Society, 1951. Freeman, Arthur, and Paul Grinke. ‘Four New Shakespeare Quartos? Viscount Conway’s Lost English Plays’. TLS (5 April2002): 17–18. Greg, W. W. ‘The Bakings of Betsy’. The Library, 3rd series, 7 (1911): 225–59. Heywood, Thomas. An Apology for Actors. London: n.p., 1612. Heywood, Thomas. The English Traveller. London: n.p., 1633. Hunter, G. K. Review of Shakespere’s ‘Love’s Labor’s Won’ by T.W. Baldwin. Review of English Studies 10 (1959): 412–13. Jonson, Ben. The Complete Poems. Edited by George Parfitt. London: Penguin, 1988. Kingsley-Smith, Jane, ed. Love’s Labor’s Lost. In The Norton Shakespeare: Third Edition, Digital Edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus and Gordon McMullan. New York: Norton, 2016.

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Knutson, Roslyn L. ‘Love’s Labor’s Won in Repertory’. Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 11 (1985): 45–57. Lesser, Zachary. Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Lost Plays Database (LPD). Edited by Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis, Matthew Steggle and Misha Teramura. Available online: https://lostplays.folger.edu (accessed 26 February 2021). McInnis, David, and Matthew Steggle. ‘Introduction: Nothing Will Come of Nothing? Or, What Can we Learn from Plays that Don’t Exist?’. In Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, edited by McInnis and Steggle, 1–14. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Meres, Francis. Palladis Tamia. London: Cuthburt Burby, 1598. Metz, G. Harold. ‘Wonne Is “Lost, Quite Lost”’. Modern Language Studies 16 (1986): 3–12. Percy, Thomas. The Percy Letters; Volume II: The Correspondence of Thomas Percy & Richard Farmer. Edited by Cleanth Brooks. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1946. Rowe, Nicholas, ed. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, vol. 1. London: Jacob Tonson, 1709. Shakespeare Census. Edited by Adam G. Hooks and Zachary Lesser. Available online: www.shakespearecensus.org (accessed 26 February 2021). Shakespeare, William. An Excellent conceited Tragedie Of Romeo and Iuliet. London: n.p., 1597. Shakespeare, William. Loues labors lost. London: Cuthburt Burby, 1598. Shakespeare, William. The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet. London: Cuthburt Burby, 1599. Shakespeare, William. The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. London: Nicholas Ling, 1604. Smyth, Adam. Material Texts in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Swärdh, Anna. ‘The 1904 Discovery of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus First Quarto in Sweden’, The Library, 7th series, 17 (2016): 424–45. Teramura, Misha. ‘The “Indecipherable” Line of the Love’s Labour’s Won Bookseller’s List’. Notes & Queries 66 (2019): 441–4. Teramura, Misha. ‘Shakespeare’s Ruined Quires’. In Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time, edited by Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis and Matthew Steggle, 23–40. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

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Wells, Stanley, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery. The Oxford Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Werstine, Paul. ‘The Editorial Usefulness of Printing House and Compositor Studies’. In Play-Texts in Old Spelling, edited by G. B. Shand and Raymond C. Shady, 35–64. New York: AMS Press, 1984. Wilson, John Dover, ed. Love’s Labour’s Lost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923. Woudhuysen, H. R., ed. Love’s Labour’s Lost. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury, 1998.

19

Paper / ink Emma Depledge

This chapter begins with textual analysis and ends with analytical bibliography to explore what paper and ink – the primary materials used to produce Shakespeare’s poems and plays in both manuscript and print – can teach us about Shakespeare’s texts and their early reception. Paper and ink often take on metaphorical significance in Shakespeare’s works. For example, Othello describes Desdemona as ‘fair paper’ (as opposed to ‘foul paper’), asking if such a ‘goodly book’ was ‘made to write “whore” upon’.1 Similarly, Leontes of The Winter’s Tale deems Florizel’s mother faithful because she accurately ‘print[ed]’ his ‘Royal father off ’ when she conceived him, thus punning on the paper size/quality, ‘Royal’, whilst alluding to commonplace links between printing and parenting.2 At the heart of both metaphors are concerns over honesty, legitimacy and reliable copying. It is perhaps ironic, then, that in recent years new methods of studying paper and ink have enabled researchers to expose seemingly ‘goodly’, legitimate print editions of Shakespeare’s texts as piracies and forgeries. The first things that usually come to mind when we think of Shakespeare, paper and ink are the printed books in which his plays and poems circulated among readers, but early modern theatres were also heavily reliant on textual documents – scribal ones. In order to stage a performance, companies needed access to the text of the play, be it as individual ‘parts’ – the lines accorded to different actors, plus their cues to speak those lines3 – as well as a manuscript of the full play, known as the ‘approved book’. As Tiffany Stern has reminded us, performance was often ‘described as a literalized book’ and the prompter was ‘also called the “book holder” (and, occasionally “book keeper”), because he held the manuscript “book” of the play in his hands throughout the

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production and guided and corrected actors against it’.4 We also know from contemporary accounts that forthcoming productions were advertised via paper hung on posts or walls (playbills); that books and broadside ballads were sold within the theatres; and that additional documents of performance, such as arguments that offered literate audiences an overview of the play to be performed, likely circulated independently from playbooks in much the same way that play synopses and programmes do in theatres today.5 We might also speculate that the food produce sold in theatres came wrapped in recycled paper, and that the same kind of paper served a less savoury purpose on occasions when toilet facilities were made available to actors or patrons.6 Paper was everywhere in the early modern theatre industry. The theatre capitalized on a range of different paper products, and theatre-goers would, by extension, have frequently encountered paper within the yard. Of course, paper and ink also functioned as stage properties, including letters to be read aloud, such as Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia, which Polonius reads to the King and Queen. This case demonstrates how staged papers could be used either to convey or else – as in the case of Polonius’ reading of the letter  – to undermine the authority of their authors.7 Papers could also be staged to provide helpful cues or speeches for actors under pressure to learn lines for a whole repertory of plays. References to paper and ink abound in dialogue, as do allusions to the practice of writing, reading and even perfuming letters.8 Cleopatra tells Charmain to fetch her ‘ink and Paper’; Pericles bids Nestor to bring him ‘spices, ink and paper’; Young master Rash in Measure for Measure wants ‘a commodity of Brown paper’; and in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Princess of France makes mocking reference to the King’s failure to respect correct writing etiquette in which one ought not to cram ‘a sheet of paper’, or write ‘o’ both sides the leaf, margent and all’.9 These papers served both the fictional world of the plays and the actors who performed in them, and not only as props, but also as methods of visual characterization. As Alan Stewart notes, ‘papers’ appear more often than any other object ‘except costumes and “prosthetic” props such as swords, crowns, handkerchiefs, beards, and hairpieces’.10 Indeed, paper often acts as a proxy for characters’ voices; the circulation of paper establishes interpersonal connections between characters; and the staged or narrated act of putting ink to paper is used to comment on, or else to gesture towards characters’ inner conflicts.

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The distinction between the white of paper and the black of ink was frequently used to suggest ‘good’ and ‘bad’ female conduct as well as to construct racial opposition, where whiteness (or ‘fairness’) signalled purity and blackness marked corruption.11 In The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo recognizes Jessica’s handwriting, stating that hers is ‘a fair hand’ that is ‘whiter than the paper it writ on’; Troilus claims that, in comparison to Cressida’s hand, ‘all whites are ink’; and the ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets frequently refer to ink as a marker of darkness and therefore illicit desire.12 As Kim F. Hall has noted, ‘[D]escriptions of dark and light, rather than being mere indications of Elizabethan beauty standards or markers of moral categories, became in the early modern period the conduit through which the English began to formulate the notions of “self ” and “other” so well known in Anglo-American discourse.’13 Such consistent references to paper and ink, Hall argues, reify ‘a hierarchy of black and white [which] perpetuates racism’.14 References to ‘fair paper’ and the ‘stain’ of ink take this hierarchy as a given to express misogynist anxieties about female sexual purity, as when Hero, falsely accused of adultery, is described as having fallen ‘into a pit of ink’ from which ‘the wide sea / Hath drops too few to wash her clean again.’15 The (material) qualities of paper and ink and the contents of the texts that these materials help to transmit are often equated in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. It is in this conflation where a pervasive anxiety about the reliability of the written word comes into sharp focus. In this chapter, I first explore the relationship between paper, ink and the Shakespearean text via textual allusions to paper and ink within Shakespeare’s plays and poems. I here argue that Shakespeare’s texts convey a sense of anxiety about the reliability of the visible, written word, as if it might conceal or obscure truths. In the second half of the chapter, I explore the inverse phenomenon by considering the bibliographic truths uncovered by scholars attending to that which really is hidden on and in the paper onto which the plays were printed. Paying attention to ostensibly invisible forms of inscription has the potential to revise our understanding of the material forms in which Shakespeare’s texts first circulated. Indeed, the way paper and ink interact can alert us to early readerly engagement with Shakespeare’s plays and poems; help us to identify shrewd marketing techniques, such as false dating and clandestine publishing projects; enable us to reconstruct multi-text books

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that have since been disbound; and even allow us to contemplate collected editions of Shakespeare’s plays that predate the 1623 First Folio.

Paper and the written word Paper and ink are frequently evoked to comment on the limited power of the written or printed word. One of the most powerful examples comes when Shakespeare describes Lucrece in an act of writing that both provides – and threatens to deprive her of – the opportunity to tell her own story: her rape by Tarquin. She asks her maid to bring her ‘paper, ink, and pen’ and then realizes that she already has them to hand (‘save that labor, for I have them here’), suggesting that she is accustomed to writing and that she both is and is not equipped for the task.16 Writing to Collatine, she contemplates which details to include and which to omit, striving to retain control over her own narrative lest he, the speaker tells us, ‘should hold it her own gross abuse / Ere she with blood had stained her stained excuse.’17 The truth of Lucrece’s rape is shown to be dependent less on consent in the moment of its happening and more on subsequent inscription, reading and representation, as indicated by the poem’s constant puns on the supposed ‘stain’ of rape and the material qualities of ink on paper. We are told that Lucrece determines that to shun the ‘blot’ of suspicion ‘she would not blot the letter / With words till action might become them better.’18 The passage contains several competing narratives: Shakespeare’s retelling of a classical tale, the speaker’s commentary, Lucrece’s attempts to author(ize) her own story via a letter and the hypothetical misreadings of her body and letter which cause her such anxiety. In addition to contrasting the relative power of action and speech, the passage also conveys Lucrece’s fear about the ability of the written word (black ink) to convey truth and preserve reputation (unstained paper). Paradoxically, Lucrece must ‘stain’ the paper to remain ‘unstained’. She hovers ‘o’er the paper with her quill’, but ‘[w]hat wit sets down is blotted straight with will’, suggesting a hesitancy that recognizes that ink is desired (it is the means by which she can tell her story) but that the act of inscription risks ‘blotting’ the page and thus her self-authored narrative.19 Earlier, she speaks of her brow as being ‘charactered’ – that is, inscribed by either handwriting or inked pieces of type – and compares herself to a printed

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book in which her ‘sweet chastity’s decay’ will be read and ‘quot[ed]’.20 Here, the material realities of writing and Lucrece’s concerns about how her body and her letter will be read (her attempts not to blot either her paper or her reputation) suggest the supposedly decipherable, yet incommunicable nature of rape and the ways in which accounts of (and by) rape victims remain endlessly open to scrutiny, misreading and retelling. This same association between female characters and their handwriting (an original meaning of the word ‘character’) appears in many of Shakespeare’s plays. Whilst sleepwalking, Lady Macbeth is said to ‘take forth paper, fold it, write upon’t, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed’, but we never get to read or hear this ‘document in madness’.21 It is as if Shakespeare deliberately teases us, using the metatheatrical frame – through which we watch the Doctor and Gentlewoman as they observe Lady Macbeth with her paper and ink – in order to both pique and frustrate our intrigue about the letter’s contents and, by extension, the unknowable contents of an unravelling human mind. A more light-hearted battle between writing and female composure emerges in Much Ado, where an amorous Beatrice is said to ‘be up twenty times a night … ’til she have writ a sheet of paper’, before tearing it because it causes her to see ‘Benedick and Beatrice between the sheet’.22 The obvious pun on sheets of paper and bedsheets belies her suppressed sexual desire for Benedict (we never get to read or hear what she has written) whilst enabling the audience to contemplate their inevitable, yet unstageable, sexual union. As Jonas Barish states, ‘Shakespeare places a quite extraordinary reliance on writings in his plays … whether in documents we actually see or those we only hear about  … so that graphic communication becomes as natural and inevitable and indispensable a part of the verbal medium as its vocal counterpart.’23 The tendency both to show scenes of writing and conceal the contents of that writing is most commonly found in episodes of female inscription that expose male anxieties about rumours, reputation and the perceived unknowability of what women are thinking. Letters abound in Shakespeare, but paper also played more diverse roles on the early modern stage. These, too, reflect concerns about the stability, reliability and interpretability of the written word. Paper appeared in shapes as varied as crowns and ring coverings; as individual sheets of poetry pinned to trees in the Forest of Arden; as bills that are posted, snatched and torn; or

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else as material books.24 As Nina da Vinci Nichols has argued, paper frequently ‘performs as a theatrical device’ in Shakespeare, sometimes advancing the plot and other times creating tension within the scene.25 Indeed, Margaret’s use of a paper crown to taunt York in Henry VI, Part 3 ought to be seen as a metatheatrical device. She addresses him as if he were a mere actor for hire (‘thou woud’st be fee’d, I see, to make me sport’)26 and presents him as an ex tempore player-king, allowed to wear only an ephemeral, replica crown – and one made out of perishable material at that – without ever embodying the role Henry has promised him. It has also been suggested that the crown she places on York’s head may have been constructed onstage by folding the ‘legal pact [Margaret] somehow has been holding’ into a paper hat of sorts.27 If so, the ‘paper crown’ would probably have resembled a crumpled halo at best. However, this act of onstage paper recycling nonetheless would have had the effect of collapsing the conceptual distance between oaths, official documents and the material forms in which they circulate. As with the example of Gloucester’s bill, torn down by the Bishop of Winchester in Henry VI, Part 1, the abuse and (re)use of paper meant to represent legal documents emphasizes how pliable the laws, promises, charges and rights of succession inscribed therein could be, particularly during the Wars of the Roses.28 Books were another important paper prop in the theatre. Shakespeare’s plays call for physical copies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Bible, prayer books, table-books and a ‘small packet of Greek and Latin books’, to name but a few.29 Again, there tends to be a concern about the ability of these written texts to unambiguously convey meaning. Characters are frequently seen reading, be it the vague ‘words, words, words’ Hamlet peruses, or the (unknown) book carefully chosen in an attempt to make Ophelia appear more pious – or occupied – when Polonius stages her for the encounter with Hamlet. As with letters, both the books’ contents and their material form take on symbolic significance, even if their titles and contents remain unspecified. In some cases, the contents of the books in question are critical. For example, Imogen tells her lady to ‘fold down the leaf ’ of her book to mark her place, thus allowing for Iachimo’s observation: ‘She hath been reading late / The tale of Tereus.’30 It is an intertextual reference designed to plant the threat of rape in the reader/ audience’s mind: ‘[H]ere the leaf ’s turn’d down / Where Philomel gave up’.31 In

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perhaps the most striking use of a book-prop, Lavinia, having been offered the ‘choice of all [Titus’] library’, busily ‘turns the leaves’ of Ovid’s Metamorphoses until she arrives at ‘the tragic tale of Philomel [and] of Tereus’ treason and his rape’.32 Unable to speak, with her ‘[hands cut off and her tongue cut out]’,33 the printed leaves allow Lavinia to communicate her rape but, as with the example of Lucrece, her recourse to indirect communication via paper ultimately leaves her at the mercy of male ‘interpret[ations]’, readings (and retellings) of the story she intends to communicate.34

Shakespeare and the materiality of ink In several instances, Shakespeare shows a keen awareness of ink’s material properties. When the speaker of Sonnet 111 entertains the idea of drinking ink ‘like a willing patient’, he says he will drink ‘the potions of easel’ – a vinegar-like substance used to dilute ink – in an attempt to dilute his own love.35 A counterexample is found in Cymbeline, when Posthumus tells Imogen to write to him in Rome so that he can ‘drink the words [she] sends’ with his eyes, presumably to indulge his love for her, even ‘though ink be made of gall’. The reference here is to the primary ingredient used to make ink and the fact that it will be sweet, but also bitter (like gall, or bile), to be connected to her through writing alone.36 Iron-gall ink, the kind of ink used for handwriting, came into use in the early medieval period and was made from a ‘mixture of oak-galls and copperas, and iron sulphate, and gum arabic used as a binding agent’.37 Printer’s ink was instead oil-based as it needed to be tacky in order to adhere to pieces of type as they bit into dampened paper on the printing press. Writing ink could be purchased or made at home and could be diluted to the user’s preference using vinegar and other thinning agents.38 Ink’s prevalence in early modern homes is attested to by surviving receipts for both ‘ink’ and for ‘stuffe to make ynkee’ and by the numerous recipes recorded in advice and conduct books; as James Daybell notes, learning to write and learning to make ink went hand in hand, and it is likely that Shakespeare made his own ink, a supposition supported by the fact that ink does not feature as an expense (for any playwright) in Philip Henslowe’s ‘diary’, that is, in the accounts that Henslowe kept of his

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business managing theatrical commerce in the 1590s.39 As with the figurative conflation of paper sheets and bed sheets, puns on the bitterness of gall or bile and oak-galls appear several times in Shakespeare’s works. For example, in Twelfth Night, Sir Toby hopes that Sir Andrew has ‘gall enough in [his] ink’ to ‘taunt’ Malvolio, and bids him use ‘as many lies as will lie in [his] sheet of paper, although the sheet were big enough for the bed of Ware in England’.40 Once again, there is no gap at all between the material object and the content it produces or transmits. Paper, ink and the accoutrements associated with writing are shown as having the potential to physically injure in the same way that written words could cause harm. For example, inkhorns – ‘portable vessels used to carry writing-ink’ – are also equated with physical punishment for pedantry in Henry VI, Part 2.41 When the Cade rebellion have Emmanuel hanged because he can read and write, they specify that he should be hanged ‘with his pen and ink-horn about his neck’.42 These objects are the implements that symbolize the clerk’s literacy (that is, the things which figuratively cause his death), but there is also a nod here to the material rope that joined pens to inkwells. Is he to be hanged whilst the pen and inkhorn remain around his neck in addition to the noose, or is the rope linking pen and ink to be used as a noose? Either way, the allusion to the material inkhorn appears to provide an ironic reversal of the neck verse in which one might save their neck (from the hangman’s noose) by displaying an ability to read and write Latin (and thus claim the benefit of clergy), whilst signalling the fact that, by the late sixteenth century, inkhorns had become by-words for pedantry – specifically for the ostentatious use of Latin and Greek words. At several moments, paper and ink are described as weapons. In Much Ado Benedick speaks of ‘paper bullets of the brain’, whilst in King Lear Albany threatens to physically smother Goneril with paper whilst simultaneously implying that the letter’s contents will silence her through exposure: ‘Shut your mouth, dame, / Or with this paper shall I stop it.’43 The homograph in his order  – ‘[N]o tearing, lady!’ – also allows for either performative tears of regret, or an attempt to rip the paper to destroy the evidence against her. This link between the threatening form and contents of paper is particularly evident in Cymbeline, when Pisanio reads Leonatus’ letter asking him to kill Imogen. Pisanio exclaims:

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O damn’d paper! Black as the ink that’s on thee! Senseless bauble. Art thou a feodary for this act, and look’st So virgin-like without?44

As Valerie Wayne notes, feodary means ‘a feudal tenant’, but ‘Shakespeare, by false association with Latin Foedus, uses it in the sense of “accomplice”’.45 Pisanio thus personifies the letter as a homicidal accomplice disguised as an innocent ‘virgin’ (again, a clear reference to the light colour of writing paper). This is continued in 3.4 when Pisanio asks, ‘[W]hat shall I need to draw my sword? The paper / Hath cut her throat already’, thus merging the inked death wish with paper’s ability to nick human skin.46 Alternate threats are conveyed when characters are themselves likened to paper, as when Henry V asks his men ‘[W]hat see you in those papers that you lose / So much complexion?’ before he exclaims, ‘Look ye, how they change! / Their cheeks are paper … what read you there / That hath so cowarded and chased your blood / Out of appearance?’47 Likewise, in The Merchant of Venice, Portia speaks of the contents of ‘yon same paper … stealing the colour from Bassanio’s cheek’ to render him as white as paper; and the letter that informs Bassiano that all of Antonio’s ventures have failed is described as ‘the body of [his] friend, / And every word in it a gaping wound, / Issuing life blood’, as if Antonio were made of paper to be opened up and exposed to ruin by the impress of a quill and ink.48 These comparisons go beyond basic personification, aligning characters and the frailty of their bodies or reputations with the ephemerality, or the blanching, of paper and the perceived indelible stain of ink. I have thus far suggested that Shakespeare’s plays and poems show a keen awareness of the materiality and signifying power of paper and ink; and that Shakespeare uses this knowledge (and its connotations) to create tension, arouse suspicion and index characters’ behaviour as moral or immoral within his fictional worlds. The use of paper and ink as props as well as their evocation to describe bodies and behaviours in certain dramatic scenarios consistently raise concerns over the legitimacy of written documents. In the final section of this chapter I wish to turn away from concerns over the reliability of the written word and towards secrets contained within and revealed by the actual paper and ink used to produce material copies of Shakespeare’s texts: the very legitimacy of the Shakespearean text itself.

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‘In black ink my love may still shine bright’49 A desire, especially among book collectors, for what are known as ‘clean’ copies of books has meant that traces of use and marginalia have been bleached or else cut from the leaves of early editions of Shakespeare.50 The heyday of these forms of erasure was the nineteenth century, when Shakespeare editions were also frequently removed from composite volumes and rebound singly.51 As Jeffrey Todd Knight has argued, these later practices, fuelled by a view of Shakespeare’s plays and poems as being of especial cultural value, destroyed much important information about the ways in which Shakespeare books were used, collected, preserved and organized in private libraries by early readers.52 Despite the washing and breaking of books, the material qualities of early modern paper and ink, coupled with the methods of material bibliography, enable us to see beyond what is evident to the naked eye. Early paper is neither glossy nor smooth. It is textured and may even be said to have its own topography; one side retains the indentations of the mould in which it was produced and the other side is smoother due to the piece of felt onto which it was pressed when it left the mould.53 The indentations of pen marks sometimes sink deep into the paper, meaning that we can play with light and photography techniques to see seemingly unseen marginalia long after the ink has been washed away. Words bleached from paper can also be made visible by looking at individual leaves under ultraviolet light.54 Equally, although many sammelbände have been dismantled, scholars such as Knight have been able to identify copies of books originally bound together by observing how the rich oil of printer’s ink has transferred between copies of books that were originally bound next to each other. These transfers, usually ‘ghostly’ images of title-page text or dates found on the end leaves of distinct playbooks once bound and pressed together, are thought to come from ‘the oil in ink or its acidity relative to a facing leaf ’.55 Similarly, Zachary Lesser has observed damage to paper and distinctions between printer’s ink and writing ink to note how dates have been scraped from the title pages of individual copies of playbooks and replaced with falsified facsimile dates, suggesting that the old lives of disbound volumes and the traces of clever forgeries are always haunting books in their new forms: they continue to come to light thanks to the peculiar material qualities of early paper and ink.56

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Some of the most exciting discoveries related to Shakespeare’s early reception have been made through examination of the paper on which his plays were printed. Every sheet of what is known as (handmade) laid paper is unique, meaning that ‘it is possible to assess the likelihood that two sheets were made from the same paper mould or pair of moulds by examining watermarks’ along with the rest of the mould frame, both of which become visible as lighter patterns in the paper when examined with a light sheet.57 By measuring the watermark position as well as the chainlines and wirelines transferred from the mould into the paper, bibliographers can produce measurements that come close to DNA fingerprints for individual stocks of paper. These measurements can then be used to date publications as moulds had an average lifespan of twelve months and watermarks only six months.58 Paper evidence can also be used to identify the stationers who financed individual publications because publishers furnished printers with paper and, as it was an expensive and perishable commodity, they used it up quickly.59 Paper evidence enabled the bibliographer W. W. Greg to demonstrate that, despite bearing dates of 1600, 1608 and 1619, the group of ten quarto plays known as the Pavier Quartos contained the same paper stocks and were thus all produced in 1619.60 This observation about falsified dates and the cunning tactics of seventeenth-century stationers was an important revelation for literary scholars as the quartos were originally thought to be mere remainders, which suggested that Shakespeare’s plays failed to sell. Greg’s evidence, coupled with Knight’s (more recent) use of ghost images to show that certain of the quartos were originally bound together, has enabled scholars to instead speculate about the likelihood that the publishers made a concerted effort to produce a single-volume collection of Shakespeare plays before the First Folio of 1623. Any such project would be indicative of Shakespeare’s early rise to cultural prominence. Lesser’s new book about the long histories of these quartos offers yet more discoveries about them, with evidence of more Pavier ‘ghosts’, as well as indications of what stab-stitch holes (or a lack thereof) and rips in the title pages of the paper on which these plays were printed can tell us about different stationers’ roles in their production and the ways in which they were originally offered for sale.61 The methodologies and discoveries of the New Bibliography and subsequent generations of textual scholarship attest to the instability – even

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inscrutability – of textual artefacts made from paper and ink in early modern England. The representations of paper and ink in Shakespeare’s texts illustrate how important paper, ink and written communication, more generally, were to characters and to characterization. The plays, poems and physical books discussed in this chapter suggest that paper and ink have a paradoxical quality: they are both present and absent, they illuminate and deface, they permit access to characters’ inner feelings and to the past while simultaneously obscuring them. There was, in the early modern period, already an apparent wariness about material texts and the reliability of their contents, as well as the impact that their material presence – figuratively or literally – could have onstage or off. I hope the select examples discussed in this chapter have demonstrated a need to read ink and paper differently, both in the textual artefacts left to us and, by extension, in the plays and poems those objects transmit. If we ‘attend to the invisible’, as Knight suggests we should, then twenty-first-century scholars can uncover a wealth of new information about the ways in which Shakespeare’s texts circulated across history whilst also exposing the power dynamics at play when marginalized and silenced characters turn to paper and ink to tell their own stories in plays and poems that frequently stifle their voices.

Notes 1 Othello, in The Arden Shakespeare (Complete Works), rev. edn, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, David Scott Kastan and R. H. Woudhuysan (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 4.1.72–3. Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent references to Shakespeare’s plays and poems are taken from this edition of the Complete Works. See B. K. Adams’s chapter ‘Fair / foul’ in this volume for more on the history and politics of these terms in Shakespeare studies. 2 Othello, 5.1.124. On the sizes, quality and prices of paper, see James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practice of Letter Writing, 1512–1635 (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 34. Also see Douglas A. Brooks, Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2005). 3 Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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  4 Tiffany Stern, introduction to Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 25–6. James Marino notes that, for the post-1660 period, it is likely that booksellers furnished playhouses with playbooks rather than the other way around (Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and their Intellectual Property (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 410).   5 Tiffany Stern, ‘“On each Wall / And Corner Post”: Playbills, Title-pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London’, English Literary Renaissance 36 (2006): 57–85; and ‘Shakespeare the Ballad Monger?’, in Rethinking Theatrical Documents, 316–28; and Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).   6 See Tiffany Stern, ‘Shakespeare the Ballad Monger’, 370; and ‘“Fill thy Purse with Money”: Shareholders, Shakespeare and Theatrical Finance’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 150 (2014): 65–78. On paper recycling and the uses of ‘waste paper’, see the address to ‘The Draper Monsieur Pages of the Court’ in Thomas Nashe’s 1594 The Unfortunate Traveller (The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane (London: Penguin, 1985), 253); and Heidi Craig, ‘English Rag-Women and Early Modern Paper Production’, in Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Wayne (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 29–46; on toilet facilities in early modern theatres, see John H. Astington, ‘Going at the Theatre: Toilet Facilities in the Early Playhouses’, Theatre Notebook 66 (2012): 98–105.   7 See Claire M. L. Bourne on the potential ambiguity between what Hamlet writes and what Polonius says and how this letter was presented typographically in early print editions (‘Dramatic Typography and the Restoration Quartos of Hamlet’, in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640–1740, ed. Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 153–70).   8 For an example of the latter, see The Taming of the Shrew: ‘Take your paper too, / And let me have them very well perfum’d’ (1.2.148–9).   9 Antony and Cleopatra, 1.4.68, 79; Pericles, 3.1.65; Measure for Measure, 3.1.65; and Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.7–8. 10 Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 300. 11 See Miles P. Grier’s related analysis of what he terms ‘inkface’ in his chapter ‘Black / white’ in this volume. 12 The Merchant of Venice, 2.4.12–14; and Troilus and Cressida, 1.1.55–6. See Mitchell M. Harris, ‘The Expense of Ink and Wastes of Shame: Poetic Generation,

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Black Ink, and Material Waste in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in The Materiality of Colour: The Production, Circulation and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800, ed. Andrea Feeser et al. (London: Routledge, 2016), 65–80. 13 Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 2. 14 Ibid., 266. 15 Much Ado about Nothing, 4.1.139–40. 16 Lucrece, 1289–90. 17 Ibid., 1315–16. 18 Ibid., 1322–3, emphasis mine. 19 Ibid., 1297–9. 20 Ibid., 807–12. 21 Macbeth, 4.3.5–8. 22 Much Ado, 2.3.139–46. 23 Jonas Barish, ‘“Soft, Here Follows Prose”: Shakespeare’s Stage Documents’, in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama: Essays for G. K. Hunter, ed. Murray Biggs et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 32–48, 47. 24 For the ring covering, see All’s Well That Ends Well, 5.3.101–17. 25 Nina da Vinci Nichols, ‘The Paper Trail to the Throne’, in Henry VI: Critical Essays, ed. Thomas A. Pendleton (London: Routledge, 2001), 97. 26 Henry VI, Part 3, 1.4.92. 27 This suggestion was made by John Cutts in The Shattered Glass: A Dramatic Pattern in Shakespeare’s Early Plays (Wayne State University Press, 1968), as cited in da Vinci Nichols, ‘The Paper Trail’, 107. 28 For more on the significance and use of paper in the Henry VI plays, see da Vinci Nichols, ‘The Paper Trail’. The paper crown has a basis in historical sources, with the head of Richard of York said to have been displayed along with the paper crown at the Micklegate Bar entrance to the city of York. See John Cannon and Anne Hargreaves, The Kings and Queens of Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 236. 29 Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson count 130 examples of books called for in stage directions to plays from 1580 to 1642 (A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34–5). Also see Sarah Wall-Randell’s calculations – based on data taken from Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson’s British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) – in ‘What is a Staged Book? Books as “Actors” in the Early Modern English Theatre’, in Rethinking Theatrical Documents, 219–20.

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30 See also the reference to Brutus’ bedtime reading ‘is not the leaf turn’d down / Where I left reading? Here it is, I think’ in Julius Caesar, 4.3.272–3. 31 Cymbeline, 3.2.44–6. 32 Titus, 4.1.47–8. On books in Shakespeare’s plays, see Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Wall-Randell, ‘What is a Staged Book?’, 218. 33 Titus, 2.3.1.SD. 34 At 3.2.36, Titus announces, ‘I can interpret all her martyred sighs’. Also note Titus and Saturninus’ later failure to accurately remember the story of Virginia’s rape in which she was killed by her father to prevent her rape rather than to kill any perceived ‘shame’ associated with the rape. 35 Sonnet 111, 9–10. 36 In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Antony Dull struggles to understand things because he ‘hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; / he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink’ (4.2.24–6). 37 Daybell, The Material Letter, 38. 38 An allusion to the need to dilute ink is found in Two Gentlemen of Verona: ‘Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears / Moist it again, and frame some feeling line / That may discover such integrity’ (3.2.74–6). Here, the (emotional) content of the writing is yet again aligned with the material form of the ink. 39 Daybell, The Material Letter, 69. 40 Twelfth Night, 3.2.47–8 and 3.2.45–7. Shakespeare’s characters do not only write in ink. For example, Titus urges Tamora to ‘witness’ the ‘wretched stump’ he has used to ‘set down’ his ‘bloody lines’ (5.2.22 and 5.2.14) and handless Lavinia is told to follow Marcus’ example and use a staff to write in a sandy plot ‘without the help of any hand at all’ (4.1.71). 41 ‘Ink-horn’, n.1. OED Online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com/view/ Entry/96130 (accessed 1 March 2021). 42 Henry VI, Part 2, 4.2.106. 43 Much Ado, 2.3.243; King Lear, 5.3.185–8. 44 Cymbeline, 3.2.19–22. 45 Cymbeline, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, ed. Valerie Wayne (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 238n28. 46 Cymbeline, 3.4.32–3. 47 Henry V, 2.2.72–6. 48 The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.242–3 and 263–5. 49 Sonnet 65, 14.

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50 See Jeffrey Todd Knight, ‘Shakespeare and the Collection: Reading Beyond Readers’ Marks’, in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Sonia Massai and Margaret Jane Kidnie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 177–95. Where leaves have not been washed, observation of marginalia and handwriting analysis have allowed for fascinating finds, such as Claire M. L. Bourne and Jason Scott-Warren’s discovery that the annotator of a Free Library of Philadelphia copy of a Shakespeare folio was none other than John Milton. See Jason ScottWarren, ‘Milton’s Shakespeare?’, Centre for Material Texts (blog), 9 September 2019, www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=5751 (accessed 1 March 2021). 51 Monique Hulvey, ‘Not So Marginal: Manuscript Annotations in the Folger Incunabula’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 92, no. 2 (1998): 161. 52 Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 53 See Sarah Werner, ‘Blanking Out’, Early Printed Fun (blog), 23 March 2020, https://sarahwerner.substack.com/p/blanking-out (accessed 1 March 2021). 54 This is the case for a washed leaf of a Boston Public Library copy of Richard II (1615) where the removed ink has been rendered visible again: ‘Character Lists in Manuscript’, Folgerpedia, https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Character_lists_in_ manuscript (accessed 1 March 2021); and Emma Depledge and Marissa Nicosia, ‘Handwritten Character Lists at the Folger Shakespeare Library’, Marginal Notes (blog), 28 June 2016, https://marissanicosia.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/ handwritten-character-lists-at-the-folger-shakespeare-library/ (accessed 1 March 2021). 55 Knight, Bound to Read, 151. 56 Zachary Lesser, ‘Ghost, Holes and Rips: The Pavier Quartos Reexamined’, lecture at The Yale Program in the History of the Book, Yale University (1 May 2017). Available online: www.listennotes.com/podcasts/yale-program-in/zachary-lesserghosts-holes-mPLzkSivqC6/ (accessed 1 March 2021). 57 Emma Depledge, ‘False Dating: The Case of the “1676” Hamlet Quartos’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 112 (2018): 186. 58 See Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 63; for a prime example of this kind of scholarship in practice, see R. Carter Hailey, ‘The Dating Game: New Evidence for the Dates of Q4 Romeo and Juliet and Q4 Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 58.3 (2007): 367–87. 59 See Hailey, ‘Dating Game’, 372; 374. 60 W. W. Greg, ‘On Certain False Dates in Shakespeare Quartos’, The Library, 2nd series, 9 (1908): 113–31. For a helpful overview of the early history of the Pavier

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Quartos and the discoveries of material bibliography, see R. Carter Hailey, ‘The Shakespearian Pavier Quartos Revisited’, Studies in Bibliography 57 (2005/6): 151–95; and Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch. 4. 61 Zachary Lesser, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). On stab-stitching, see Aaron T. Pratt, ‘Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature’, The Library, 7th series, 16, no. 3 (2015): 304–28.

Bibliography Astington, John H. ‘Going at the Theatre: Toilet Facilities in the Early Playhouses’. Theatre Notebook 66 (2012): 98–105. Barish, Jonas. ‘“Soft, Here Follows Prose”: Shakespeare’s Stage Documents’. In The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama: Essays for G. K. Hunter, edited by Murray Biggs, Inga-Stina Ewbank and Eugene M. Waith, 32–49. Edinburgh; Edinburgh University Press, 1991. Bourne, Claire M. L. ‘Dramatic Typography and the Restoration Quartos of Hamlet’. In Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640–1740, edited by Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan, 153–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Brooks, Douglas A. Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 2005. Cannon, John, and Anne Hargreaves. The Kings and Queens of Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Craig, Heidi. ‘English Rag-Women and Early Modern Paper Production’. In Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, edited by Valerie Wayne, 29–46. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Cutts, John. The Shattered Glass: A Dramatic Pattern in Shakespeare’s Early Plays. Wayne State University Press, 1968. Daybell, James. The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practice of Letter Writing, 1512–1635. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Depledge, Emma. ‘False Dating: The Case of the “1676” Hamlet Quartos’. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 112 (2018): 183–99. Depledge, Emma, and Marissa Nicosia. ‘Handwritten Character Lists at the Folger Shakespeare Library’. Marginal Notes (blog). 28 June 2016. Available

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online: https://marissanicosia.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/handwrittencharacter-lists-at-the-folger-shakespeare-library/ (accessed 1 March 2021). Dessen, Alan, and Leslie Thomson. A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Greg, W. W. ‘On Certain False Dates in Shakespeare Quartos’. The Library, 2nd series, 9 (1908): 113–31. Hailey, R. Carter. ‘The Shakespearian Pavier Quartos Revisited’. Studies in Bibliography 57 (2005/6): 151–95. Hailey, R. Carter. ‘The Dating Game: New Evidence for the Dates of Q4 Romeo and Juliet and Q4 Hamlet’. Shakespeare Quarterly 58.3 (2007): 367–87. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Harris, Mitchell M. ‘The Expense of Ink and Wastes of Shame: Poetic Generation, Black Ink, and Material Waste in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’. In The Materiality of Colour: The Production, Circulation and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800, edited by Andrea Feeser, Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, 65–80. London: Routledge, 2016. Hulvey, Monique. ‘Not So Marginal: Manuscript Annotations in the Folger Incunabula’. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 92, no. 2 (1998): 159–76. Knight, Jeffrey Todd. ‘Shakespeare and the Collection: Reading Beyond Readers’ Marks’. In Shakespeare and Textual Studies, edited by Sonia Massai and Margaret Jane Kidnie, 177–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Lesser, Zachary. ‘Ghost, Holes and Rips: The Pavier Quartos Reexamined’. Lecture at The Yale Program in the History of the Book, Yale University. 1 May 2017. Available online: www.listennotes.com/podcasts/yale-program-in/zachary-lesserghosts-holes-mPLzkSivqC6/ (accessed 1 March 2021). Lesser, Zachary. Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Marino, James. Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and their Intellectual Property. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Massai, Sonia. Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works. Edited by J. B. Steane. London: Penguin, 1985.

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Nichols, Nina da Vinci. ‘The Paper Trail to the Throne’. In Henry VI: Critical Essays, edited by Thomas A. Pendleton, 97–112. London: Routledge, 2001. Palfrey, Simon, and Tiffany Stern. Shakespeare in Parts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pratt, Aaron T. ‘Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature’. The Library, 7th series, 16, no. 3 (2015): 304–28. Scott-Warren, Jason. ‘Milton’s Shakespeare?’ Cambridge Centre for Material Texts (blog). 9 September 2019. Available online: www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=5751 (accessed 1 March 2021). Scott, Charlotte. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Stern, Tiffany. ‘“On each Wall / And Corner Post”: Playbills, Title-pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London’. English Literary Renaissance 36 (2006): 57–85. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Stern, Tiffany. ‘“Fill thy Purse with Money”: Shareholders, Shakespeare and Theatrical Finance’. Shakespeare Jahrbuch 150 (2014): 65–78. Stern, Tiffany. Introduction. In Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England, edited by Tiffany Stern, 1–13. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Stern, Tiffany. ‘Shakespeare the Ballad Monger?’. In Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England, edited by Tiffany Stern, 316–28. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Stewart, Alan. Shakespeare’s Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wall-Randell, Sarah. ‘What is a Staged Book? Books as “Actors” in the Early Modern English Theatre’. In Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England, edited by Tiffany Stern, 128–51. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Wayne, Valerie, ed. Cymbeline, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. Werner, Sarah. ‘Blanking Out’. Early Printed Fun (blog). 23 March 2020. Available online: https://sarahwerner.substack.com/p/blanking-out (accessed 1 March 2021).

20

Material / digital Zachary Lesser and Whitney Trettien

What is the relationship between the physical textual object (book, manuscript, broadside or any other kind of material text) and its digital facsimile? For early modern studies, as for many other fields, the question has become pressing. Digital reproductions are central to our work as scholars and teachers: they serve as teaching proxies at institutions without special collections, supplant print editions or physical copies in our research and form the backbone of digital repositories like English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) and the British Library’s Shakespeare in Quarto. Many scholars have cautioned against treating digital images as surrogates for the original, citing the loss of texture, size, smell, colour and context.1 With the proliferation of more and higherresolution reproductions online, however, subtle but interesting variations between copies at different institutions have become more visible, ironically helping foment copy-specific work in book history and thus spurring on the digitization of even more material. For instance, of the 1,841 extant copies of Shakespeare quartos listed in the Shakespeare Census at the time of writing, a total of 531 have digital facsimiles, far more than are available in Early English Books Online (EEBO), which typically only provides a single exemplar of each edition.2 These facsimiles allow scholars to compare, for example, copies of the second quarto of Hamlet (1604/5) found at the Folger Shakespeare Library, on which an early reader claimed that Shakespeare ‘was the first who to shun ye paines of continuall rhym[in]g Invented that kinde of writing which we call blanck verse’ (SC 30), with the copy at Wroclaw University in Poland, which an early seventeenth-century reader bound up with copies of John Lyly’s Euphues (1597), Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1604) and Robert Greene’s Menaphon

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(1605) – all important sources for Shakespeare (SC 36). Ten of the sixteen surviving copies of Troilus and Cressida (1609) are currently available in digital facsimile, enabling easy comparison of books as far apart geographically as Geneva, where the Martin Bodmer Foundation copy has been only slightly trimmed if at all, with outer margins that appear strikingly outsized to modern readers (SC 1545); New Haven, where the Elizabethan Club copy uniquely binds together both of the variant versions of the title leaf and the additional address to the reader (SC 1546); and London, where the British Library copy includes a note by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, who recalls that he ‘cut [it] out … from a volume of tracts collected & bound at the period’ (SC 1547).3 Especially for early modernists interested in bibliography and the materiality of the text, therefore, the relationship between the physical artefact and its digital facsimile is worth considering anew. In this chapter, we argue for a more nuanced understanding of that relationship, one that treats the digital facsimile both as a textual object in its own right and as one with a unique and important link to its physical doppelganger. To model this way of thinking, we examine in detail the digital facsimile of an important book with a (possible) connection to Shakespeare: a copy of William Lambard and Laurence Nowell’s Archaionomia (1568) now at the Folger.4 A compilation of early laws, Archaionomia is notable for being one of the earliest books printed with an Old English fount of type; but it is the writing on this copy that is particularly important: the signature of ‘Wm Shakspere’ at the top right of the title page. This signature has been much discussed since its discovery in 1938. Here we do not seek to adjudicate whether it is authentic, although its presence (real or forged) has had a defining influence on the imaging of this copy of Archaionomia.5 Our investigation began with a curious aspect of that imaging. Examining the facsimile on the Folger’s LUNA digital image platform for another project, Lesser was struck by the different appearance of the title page recto and verso (see Figures 20.1 and 20.2). He tweeted: ‘the top margin of this leaf both has and has not been repaired. On the title page (A1r), the top margin is expertly repaired (though you can see the repair line if you zoom in). On A1v, the top margin has not been repaired. Schroedinger’s repair!’ Lesser hypothesized that ‘the photography was done at two different times’, with the verso (unrepaired) imaged first and the title page later, after conservation.

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Figure 20.1  Archaionomia, translated by William Lambarde and compiled by Laurence Nowell (London, 1568), title page, STC 15142. V.a.230, Folger Shakespeare Library. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Figure 20.2  Archaionomia, translated by William Lambarde and compiled by Laurence Nowell (London, 1568), sigs. A1v–A2r, STC 15142, as viewed in Folger’s LUNA digital repository. V.a.230, Folger Shakespeare Library.

While it might seem odd to photograph a book out of sequence, ‘Shakespeare’s signature is clearer on A1v’ than on the title page itself, where it is obscured by the printer’s ornamental border.6 On the verso, the ink used to write the signature bleeds through clearly against a neutral background, and the image can then be flipped horizontally to give the best view of ‘Wm Shakspere’, as Giles Dawson did in his 1942 article that sought to prove the inscription’s authenticity (see Figure 20.3).7 This unusual aspect of the book – the increased legibility of the signature – suggested a reason why the verso of the title page might, atypically, have been photographed before the recto. In fact, Lesser was wrong. Working too quickly, as one does on Twitter, he had been led to his incorrect conclusion by two unconscious factors. First, he had just completed a book on the so-called Pavier Quartos that included, among the most important bibliographic evidence, numerous instances in which the imprint date on copies of these editions had apparently been torn away, only to be expertly repaired in the nineteenth century, with the date restored in pen facsimile. He was, in other words, primed to look for such paper repairs, and therefore he thought he was looking at one in this case. Second, and relatedly, the book had likely been photographed under glass with only a single page or opening visible per image. This set-up, ingrained in federal standards for special collections digital imaging, presses out the small folds,

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Figure 20.3  Plate reproducing the title page of Archaionomia c. 1942, from Giles Dawson, ‘Authenticity and Attribution of Written Matter’, English Institute Annual (1942).

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tears and warping commonly found in very old books, prioritizing readable text over the leaf ’s texture.8 It also causes tattered pages like A1r to appear flatter in facsimile than they would in person, prompting Lesser to see a single leaf in what was actually an image composed of (parts of) multiple leaves. When the two of us examined the high-resolution image more carefully together, the error became clear. What appears to be a repair is in fact the edges of another leaf pressed tightly behind A1. Letters from the underlying leaf can be seen through small tears in A1: in Lambarde’s last name, and just to the left of the date line in the imprint. Assuming, naturally enough, that this underlying leaf was A2, we began hunting on A2r for those telltale letters. But we soon discovered we were wrong yet again: the letters never quite aligned properly, nor did the decaying edges of the underlying leaf on the title page match the very straight, apparently repaired edges of A2. Only after we realized that we needed to shift from imagining the digital images as a ‘book’ – that is, as replicating the codex form with leaves in proper sequence – were we able to figure out what these images were showing us. The book had been photographed disbound, in gatherings, but the leaves retained their conjugacy (the folds deriving from the quarto format of the book). The leaf ‘behind’ the title page in the LUNA image was in fact its conjugate, A4: its decayed edges match perfectly (see especially the stub of paper sticking out from the bottom edge), and the letters poking through holes in the title page likewise align, with portions of the ‘tr’ of tria seen through ‘Lambardo’ and what is most likely the ‘u’ of autumo in the hole next to the imprint date (see Figure 20.4). The LUNA title page image, therefore, shows that this leaf was set apart from the rest of the book, photographed on its own with only its conjugate leaf (which could hardly be separated) accompanying it. The rest of the book, however, was shot ‘as a book’, even though it remained (and still remains) in gatherings, unbound, with no stitching keeping the conjugate leaves in proper order. These conjugate leaves, in other words, were gathered as if they were to be sewn into a bound book, and the leaves were turned to create an image of each page opening in sequence. Where the opening included two gatherings, for instance at A4v–B1r, multiple gatherings must have been arranged ‘bookwise’ on the imaging table. Note that, due to the unusual method of imaging the title page, if the title page had been turned to create the next opening

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Figure 20.4  Archaionomia, translated by William Lambarde and compiled by Laurence Nowell (London, 1568), sigs. A3v–A4r, STC 15142. V.a.230, Folger Shakespeare Library. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

for imaging, the result would not have been the correct A1v–A2r, but rather A1v–A4r. Hence, the title leaf must have been handled twice, in two different ways: first the recto was photographed only with its conjugate A4 hiding nearly completely behind it, and then it was repositioned properly in its gathering, turned to its verso, and imaged alongside A2r in what has now become the second image in the LUNA sequence. The LUNA images thus present a kind of conflated facsimile, since A1r is an image of something just slightly, but importantly, different from what we see in the image A1v–A2r. What the title page image shows us is not part of a book but rather two leaves disassembled from the book, in an arrangement that they were never meant to occupy in the physical copy. It is evident, then, that we had brought to this puzzle a set of assumptions about how digital facsimiles model a material text. We had assumed that the book would be digitized cover to cover, roughly as we might have viewed it in the reading room; that each image would present a single page or

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opening, no more or less; and that these images would proceed through the book consecutively, following the sequence of pages. In short, we expected the facsimile to mirror the physical book in structure and appearance. The Folger imaging team stoked these expectations by staging the disbound leaves in ways that perform ‘bookishness’ – and this despite the fact that, from the perspective of those interested in the material artefact, it could well have been more useful to have high-resolution photographs of each loose bifolium. It was only when we mentally decoupled the digital image from the material text, treating both as separate artefacts, that we understood why the photographs seemed incongruous. As this example shows, the urge to conflate the material text and its digital reproduction remains alive in practice, if not in theory. It does so not because scholars are too negligent to heed frequent warnings nor because digitization labs are too lazy to imagine other ways of photographing artefacts, but rather because imaging protocols condition what is possible. They do so through the influence of hardware, where the material formats of book cradles and screens give literal shape to photographic facsimiles, as well as through the software and interfaces that display pages in relation to each other and to a broader collection. Metadata standards, too, push readers to see digital facsimiles as surrogates for the original. The uneven genealogies of the emergence of these formats and protocols over the last century, while critical to our field, remain largely unknown among early modernists. And the work that has been done in media studies tends to focus on the development of audiovisual technologies like film and television rather than books. By disentangling even a small part of these histories, we can begin to understand how technology has enabled, and in fact increasingly enables, bookishness. Consider EEBO, the platform most familiar to early modernists and still a driving force in digital book history. As is well known, EEBO began as Early English Books, a series of microfilm reels published by University Microfilms, Incorporated (UMI), and sold to libraries as a rare books collection in a box, supplementing – and in many cases substituting for – their own collections.9 As the service grew, libraries began purchasing microfilm readers to be used on-site. Because a wide array of materials were imaged in the earliest days of archival microphotography – not just early English printed books – these reading machines needed to accommodate multiple formats. Most prominent

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were unbound newspapers, which were the first materials to be photographed for preservation, in 1935, using a camera designed to photograph flat rows of cancelled cheques for banks.10 It was only after R. H. Draeger invented a special camera, book cradle and plate glass cover that companies like UMI could begin safely photographing more dimensional rare books and other bound materials.11 The priority of broadsheets to early microfilm spurred the development of the typically rectangular, portrait-oriented reading screen familiar to microfilm and microfiche users today: a portal roughly the size of a newspaper page and therefore large enough for the reader to peer at, pan across and zoom in on a chunk of projected content. The microfilm reader’s aspect ratio is unique among contemporary screen technologies. Its development follows none of the trends in entertainment systems, and its origins in library technology exists largely outside the scope of the audiovisual media histories told by Erkki Huhtamo, Lev Manovich and Sean Cubitt, among others.12 The same cannot be said of the screens on which most of us examine facsimiles of Shakespeare and other early modern books. The computer monitor has multiple, overlapping points of origin, including the circular display used for military radar and the perfectly paper-sized screen of the early 1970s Xerox Alto (the first computer designed around a graphical user interface).13 Nonetheless, as microcomputers began entering homes and offices, their monitors quickly landed on an aspect ratio of 4:3, the same as an analogue television, and in fact TVs served as multipurpose screens for gaming consoles and computers in many 1980s households. As personal computers and eventually laptops became more ubiquitous – and a more common source for entertainment – the format of their screens changed in response to changes in film, television (the rise first of ‘letterboxing’ and then of high-definition TV) and video games, gradually stretching to 16:9, where it sits now.14 It was in this media ecology that the microfilm reels of Early English Books were digitized as Early English Books Online in 1998. While computer screens widened largely in response to shifts in entertainment delivery, the horizontal format also perfectly fit the opening of a book, especially one photographed on 16 millimetre film, which has roughly the same aspect ratio as a standard early modern octavo opening (1.33:1, or 16:12). This useful coincidence of hardware, paired with the standard set by EEBO, subtly nudged archival software toward the more ‘bookish’ presentation we see today in, for instance,

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the British Library’s Turning the Pages or the Internet Archive’s BookReader interfaces. Thus the web-based platforms imagined as an improvement over fidgety microfilm readers have actually locked facsimiles into a more rigid format that privileges the shape and operation of a standard Western codex over all others. The Folger’s new Miranda Digital Asset platform, built using Mirador to replace LUNA, contributes to and even exacerbates this trend toward bookish presentation at the level of interface. For instance, on LUNA, the default view in response to a search query is a grid of thumbnails presented according to the sequence of their digital image file name. These file names roughly correspond to the order in which the photographs were taken. When the user clicks a thumbnail, that image expands and the search results contract into a widget that scrolls horizontally, as if the reader is paging back and forth within a codex. While the interface suggests one is navigating a facsimile book, in fact all search results appear in this widget. If an image from another book altogether is hit by the search for some reason, it will appear just like all the other results. Whereas familiar platforms like Internet Archive or HathiTrust package images from the same book together as a discrete object at the level of metadata and directory structures, the Folger’s instance of LUNA does not, and the design of the Folger’s platform merely gestures at these relations through the progressive sequencing of the digital file names, visible in the left panel. By contrast, Miranda is designed to integrate the catalogue and images under one platform, and the software bundles images into individual books and links them to a standard library MARC record. Miranda thus brings the Folger collection closer to the bookishness of the interface used for the Internet Archive or HathiTrust. Searching ‘Archaionomia’ in Miranda, for instance, returns a series of catalogue entries for many early editions held at the Folger; restricting the date range narrows the results to the seven copies of the 1568 edition and one digital resource; clicking on V.a.230 opens a more detailed catalogue entry with a link to ‘Open in Mirador’ – language that, lacking a direct object, conflates the physical copy described in the record with its digital facsimile. Unlike LUNA, Mirador then defaults to presenting the digital images not as thumbnails but in what it calls its ‘bookView’, a two-up display of book openings akin to the BookReader, further pushing the reader to see the images immediately as belonging to a discrete codex (see Figure 20.5).

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Figure 20.5  Default view of Mirador reader, from the Folger’s Miranda Digital Assets Platform.

These conflations of material object and digital facsimile continue at the level of metadata. On LUNA, the left panel contains a patchwork of ‘Media Information’ related, in variously convoluted ways, to the image (see Figure 20.2). Listed there are source metadata, which describe elements of the book being copied digitally, including Source Call Number, Source Creator, Source Title and Source Created or Published (‘1568’). Mixed in with this information about the physical item are Image Details (‘title page’) and Physical Description (‘A1r’), metadata that capture the relationship between the image and the book as an object – although, as we have seen, the facsimile in this case actually shows more than just A1r. And there are two elements describing the image itself as a file: Digital Image File Name (‘53314’) and Digital Image Type (‘FSL Collection’). These last two non-descriptive attributes, however, serve mainly as administrative pointers that help organize and situate the file within the database and have no meaning to the average user. The user is offered no metadata about the image itself as an object – describing the camera set-up, for instance, or indicating the time the photograph was taken – despite their potential utility. The confusion present in LUNA’s metadata is not exclusive to the Folger but is, in fact, baked into long-standing, contested and still-evolving federal and international standards for special collections imaging. As early as 1962, the proliferation of microform reproductions, like UMI’s Early English Books

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reels, forced libraries to confront the status of the facsimile in their catalogues. Is it a new object needing a unique record, or should its presence merely annotate an existing record for the original item? While the first edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, published in 1967, favoured cataloguing reproductions as and with the original item (the ‘facsimile theory’), subsequent revisions recommended a reversal toward an ‘item-in-hand’ approach that treated each reproduction as a new item (the ‘edition theory’). This shift caused a rift within the cataloguing community.15 Some libraries adopted the new standards, while those, like the Library of Congress, that dealt with large numbers of microform reproductions, continued to follow the older (and quicker) standard. While a wide range of approaches exist today, the idea of the image as a surrogate for an original, rather than a collection item in its own right, continues to hold sway in community-authored and aggregated standards and best practices, like the Digital Public Library of America’s Metadata Application Profile. These standards in turn condition user expectations by encouraging scholars to see the digital image as a substitute for the material object. Below the top section of ‘Media Information’, LUNA includes the full Hamnet Catalog Record, which mostly concerns the physical book, but not this particular copy. Rather, like the catalogue record from which LUNA pulls the information for this section, this metadata treats another kind of ‘virtual’ object: the edition. The Physical Description, for example, collates the book: ‘[19], 140, [3] leaves: map (woodcut); 4o’. But the copy of Archaionomia with the supposed Shakespeare signature in fact lacks the map. Likewise, the Notes field deals with the entire edition, informing the user of the register of signatures, of the fact that the ‘First word of title [is] in Greek characters’, that the book includes an index and so forth. The Citations to the digital English Short-Title Catalogue and the print Short-Title Catalogue (STC) are also at the level of the edition, not the copy, referring to a virtual bibliographical entity not a physical object. For the most part, then, what is described here is an ideal copy, the book as bibliographers imagine it was intended to come off the press. When the LUNA metadata does deal with the particular physical object in the Associated Name (i.e. provenance) field, it does so through another kind of conflation, including information on all the copies held at the Folger, not just the one to which this digital image pertains. In this way, users are

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led to believe that Edward Gwynn or Humphrey Dyson once owned the copy associated with Shakespeare, although neither did – they owned one of the other copies in the Folger’s collection. In fact, only the Folger Holdings Notes, which replicates the catalogue ‘Item note’, deals with this specific copy of Archaionomia: ‘Imperfect: wanting D4 (map); t.p. and last leaves frayed. Provenance: contains a signature purported to be that of William Shakespeare ’. We thus see in the LUNA sidebar a combination of material (physical copy), digital (images of the physical copy) and virtual (ideal copy) that thoroughly blurs the boundaries among them.16 This confusion in metadata protocols and their implementation is compounded by the labour conditions and practices of libraries. The digital facsimile of V.a.230 contains 164 images; given that libraries already have a backlog of objects and archives needing description, cataloguing each of these images as a separate item is laughably impracticable.17 Copy cataloguing – that is, copying a bibliographic record for a new acquisition from a database like WorldCat – and batch processing with collections management software are already the norm for handling physical items, and most likely the reason why the Hamnet record attached to this image conflates the Folger’s seven copies of STC 15142. Software like LUNA extends these time-saving practices to digital repositories by generating metadata for new digital assets from existing catalogue records.18 In fact, the only extra field required by LUNA is an asemic placeholder – in the Folger’s case, the Digital Image File Name – that links groups of images to related data records. Unfortunately, the process of linking and uploading these photos strips them of the information most relevant to understanding them as material objects in themselves, namely the Exif (exchangeable image file format) metadata. These ancillary tags are automatically generated every time a digital camera takes a photograph: they include details on the time and location of the photo, its colour profile, dimensions and the type of camera used to shoot it. Clearly this metadata could have helped to confirm our bibliographic hypotheses about the digital images of signature A of this copy of Archaionomia. Nor do digital repositories as they currently exist incorporate any of the wide array of human-generated metadata that clusters around digital files: the emails or social media posts about it, the articles that publish it. Even as other webbased platforms have moved toward social tagging and easily repurposable

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metadata formats, like those developed as part of the semantic web, special collections metadata remains tethered to print-based catalogues like the STC and the limited software that has been built to process them. In this case, human-generated metadata was more readily available, thanks to the intense interest in anything to do with Shakespeare, especially at the Folger Shakespeare Library. In a detailed email, curator Heather Wolfe confirmed that A1.4 had not been conserved as had the other leaves, ‘because of the question about the signature’s authenticity’. In this conservation, the rest of the book was ‘leafcast’ (in-filled with Japanese paper), and additional paper repairs were adhered with wheat starch paste.19 These repairs show up on the digital facsimile as highly regular, grey edges surrounding the tattered margins of the original paper. Leaves A1.4 were exempted from this treatment out of concern not to interfere with any evidence that might enable the authentication (or not) of the signature. Wolfe also concurred with our inference that the conjugate leaves had been ‘imaged alone for the tp image, and then reintegrated for the openings’.20 Of course, memory can be faulty, and even automatically generated metadata can be erroneous, manipulated or falsified. While metadata offers important information about digital images, it should not be treated as infallible, whether it seems to confirm or refute the conclusions of bibliographic analysis. The relationship between digital bibliographical evidence and metadata mirrors the important debate in physical bibliography sparked by D. F. McKenzie’s classic article ‘Printers of the Mind’. McKenzie criticized overly dogmatic bibliographers who insisted that only the physical evidence of books themselves was reliable, not ‘secondary’ sources. He used the archival records of the University of Cambridge printing house to ‘construct detailed production charts for the books printed’. He thereby overturned numerous assumptions that bibliographers had made about the production process, based on inferences from the physical books: ‘[T]he patterns which emerge seem to me to be of such an unpredictable complexity, even for a small printing shop, that no amount of inference from what we think of as bibliographical evidence could ever have led to their reconstruction.’21 In response, G. Thomas Tanselle argued that McKenzie drew too stark a boundary between supposedly ‘internal’ and ‘external’ evidence, between what we could also call bibliographical evidence and metadata: ‘If a pattern

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is “entirely internal” (that is, unsupported by information in a document external to the book under consideration), is it necessarily false or unworthy of serious consideration by historians?’22 McKenzie ‘makes the mistake of equating printers’ and publishers’ records with “primary evidence,” ignoring the primacy of the far more plentiful products of the printing process itself and suggesting that such records are less ambiguous and more reliable as sources’.23 Rather, Tanselle argues, ‘printed matter is itself an archive containing primary evidence’, just like the records of the Cambridge University Press or Exif data. Both categories of evidence must be assessed, and neither can be taken at face value or in isolation; the bibliographic evidence of a textual object may falsify documentary records or metadata just as easily as the reverse. In the case of Archaionomia, the bibliographic evidence suggested something odd about the images that is denied by the metadata embedded in LUNA and by the way the interface stages the relationship between facsimile and codex. It was only through bibliographic analysis of the photographs – comparing the changes in resolution and colour, looking for and matching telltale letters or overlaying leaf edges – that we began to piece together the solution and so unravel the concepts of bookishness and surrogacy that tangle together the material book and its digital facsimile at the level of metadata, interface and hardware. Following Tanselle’s correction to McKenzie, then, we do not argue that our now ubiquitous digital facsimiles need greatly enhanced metadata because such metadata is inherently more reliable. Rather, we need more metadata that treats digital objects as textual objects in themselves precisely because, as Tanselle argues, we need to work dialectically between the textual object and any associated documentary records that may exist. This is especially important for digital facsimiles of Shakespeare’s books. These books have been lithographed, photographed, scanned and copied in various other ways over the centuries to generate facsimiles, and we therefore have more information about their conditions at discrete moments in history than we do with most books. But the mythmaking that surrounds Shakespeare makes sorting through this information all the more complex. At the same time, digital facsimiles present a new category of evidence not considered by either McKenzie or Tanselle. Neither primary nor secondary evidence, neither internal nor external to the history of print, these images bear a special relationship to their physical counterparts. On the one hand,

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they serve as documentary evidence of how the physical book existed at a single moment in time, as well as how it was imagined as part of a broader collection. In this sense, they are part of the ‘metadata’, broadly conceived, that surround and virtualize the physical copy. Yet they are also objects that participate in the history of the book in their own right, speaking volumes about the history of cataloguing, how the codex has been modelled (or counterfeited) digitally and the weight granted to certain annotations or nontextual aspects of the book (endpapers, binding and so forth) over the course of its life. As both documentary evidence and object, the LUNA digital facsimile of Archaionomia joins the many other images circulating of this book, from the plates in Dawson’s original 1942 article (which attest to the damage done to the title leaf since then), to the microfilm copy that the Folger made around 1956, to the spectral images taken by the Lazarus project in 2012 in an effort to prove the Shakespeare signature’s authenticity.24 Though fascinating as a textual object in itself, we focus on the Archaionomia facsimile as paradigmatic, not exceptional, in the Shakespeare archive. It is hardly the only Shakespeare-related digital object that requires this more nuanced bibliographic approach. The Internet Archive is full of early modern playbooks in which the verso of a real digitized flyleaf has been replaced with a digital ex libris page made to look close in colour and texture to laid paper. Many page images also appear to have been cropped, scrubbed or colour corrected without any indication in the metadata. Nor are these manipulations new. As Alan Galey has shown, new media technologies have always been used to alter Shakespeare’s books, going back to experiments with lithographic reproductions in the nineteenth century.25 Platforms like the Internet Archive’s BookReader, which are designed to make the digital facsimile look and function as much like a physical codex as possible, naturalize and obscure these manipulations, urging us to treat them too simply as surrogates for the original artefact. However, as we have emphasized, doing so inevitably leads to misunderstandings, as the rigidly bookish platform conflicts with Shakespeare’s manipulated materials. A simple example of this may be seen in the Bodmer’s digitized copy of Thomas Walkley’s 1622 quarto of Othello. In keeping with current standards, the book was photographed from cover to cover, with shots of the spine and fore-edge, a great advantage over earlier generations of scanning that ignored

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‘extra-textual’ material like the binding and endpapers and usually began with the title page. Because the imaging of the Bodmer Othello does not begin with the title page, it does not adhere strictly to a sequence of rectos and versos that together form openings; however, the ‘bookView’ of Mirador, the platform where they are hosted, does. As a result, viewing the digitized book as a book results not in openings but in disarticulated leaves, recto to the left of verso. This view of the book is in tension with the expectations set up by the platform, leading to some (perhaps salutary) disorientation. Other books, like a burned folio of Shakespeare’s plays at the University of Pennsylvania, demand entirely new imaging techniques that do not fit the virtual codex model that Mirador and many other platforms use. What is needed is a bibliographic approach to the digital facsimile that acknowledges both its independence from and its close, functional relationship to the material text that it aims to reproduce. Such an approach will require that librarians, scholars, imaging teams and digital specialists work together to generate a richer archive of metadata and interfaces that do not merely attempt to mimic the physical object’s appearance. Given the constraints of time and money, and given how deeply entrenched existing cataloguing and digitizing infrastructures are, such a wholesale reconfiguration of the imaging of material texts and their digital re-presentation is unlikely in the near term. In the meantime, book historians will need to engage with media archaeology to bring to the surface how hardware, software and industry standards condition the concept of the book and its mediations over time. Doing so will enable a bibliographic investigation into digital facsimiles that is both broader (considering the larger ecosystems of facsimiles that we work with, their histories and the software platforms in which we encounter them) and deeper (engaging in detail with particular case studies) than the form has generally been thought to justify. Working back and forth between the digital facsimile and the material book can illuminate both ends of the spectrum. Our analysis of the digital images of the Archaionomia copy, for instance, reveals how the physical copy has been handled at the Folger, which highlights the overwhelming importance accorded to leaf A1 (the title page) in this copy. The conjugate leaves A1.4 have been considered almost a separate item in the Folger collection, a result of their potential link to Shakespeare’s hand: not only were they digitized apart from

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the rest of the book so that the title leaf, both recto and verso, could be precisely imaged, but these conjugate leaves were also left untouched in 2004 when Folger conservator Frank Mowery repaired and treated all the other leaves in the book. This copy of Archaionomia, we might say, functions primarily as a vehicle for its title leaf; it has likely never been read for any scholarly purpose other than an investigation into the supposedly Shakespearean signature, and its history of curation, conservation and digitization both responds to and further entrenches that single-minded inquiry. Only when we approached the digital copy as a textual object in its own right, rather than as a bookish facsimile, could we properly see the evidence it offered toward understanding its own production. In turn, our analysis of the LUNA images on their own terms reflected light back onto Folger V.a.230, the material text that these images purport to copy. As we have shown, the digital facsimile does not simply ‘reproduce’ the physical book: it functions to assemble the book, combining images of conjugate leaves in ways they never existed simultaneously in the physical world. Nonetheless, despite these efforts to make the digital facsimile readable as a transparent window onto the material text, it preserves evidence of the radically different handling of leaf A1 compared to the rest of the leaves, as bibliographical theory teaches us it inevitably will. The increasing digitization of special collections, combined with restrictions on travel due to global pandemics and climate change, ensure that scholars will rely on digital facsimiles more and more in the future. If we treat them both as independent material texts and as representations of a physical book, the image files that we work with habitually and often unreflectively can tell us not only about themselves but about the early printed books they both do, and do not, copy.

Notes 1 See Johanna Drucker, ‘The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-Space’, in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), http://www.philobiblon.com/drucker/ (accessed 1 March 2021); Bonnie Mak, ‘Archaeology of a Digitization’, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 65, no. 8 (2014): 1515–26;

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Diana Kichuk, ‘Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO)’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 22, no. 3 (2007): 291–303.   2 ‘About’, Shakespeare Census, ed. Adam G. Hooks and Zachary Lesser, created 2018, www.shakespearecensus.org/about (accessed 22 April 2020). Copies are referred to parenthetically by their SC numbers.   3 See ‘Part / whole’ by Paul Salzman in this volume for more on HalliwellPhillipps’s activities.   4 Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.230.   5 When published, Carl T. Berkhout’s ‘The Case of the Seventh Signature in the Folger Shakespeare Library’ will become the definitive investigation of this signature. We are grateful to him for sharing his article with us in draft form.   6 @ZacharyLesser, thread beginning ‘Strange digitization artifact of the week’, Twitter, 9 February 2020, 11.57 am, https://twitter.com/ZacharyLesser/ status/1226550674923626499 (accessed 22 April 2020).   7 Giles Dawson, ‘Authenticity and Attribution of Written Matter’, English Institute Annual (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), Plate II (b).   8 Federal Agency Digital Guidelines Initiative, Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials: Creation of Raster Image Files (September 2016), www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/FADGI%20Federal%20%20 Agencies%20Digital%20Guidelines%20Initiative-2016%20Final_rev1.pdf (accessed 1 March 2021).   9 Eugene Power, Edition of One: The Autobiography of Eugene B. Power, Founder of University Microfilms, with Robert Anderson (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Inc.), 16; Zachary Lesser, ‘Xeroxing the Renaissance: The Material Text of Early Modern Studies’, Shakespeare Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2019): 3–31. 10 Power, Edition of One, 23–4. 11 Ibid., 25; see also Paul Wilson, ‘Historical Perspective on the Use of Microfilm in Libraries and Archives’, in Preservation Microfilming: Does it Have a Future?: Proceedings of the First National Conference of the National Preservation Office, at the State Library of South Australia (National Library of Australia, 1995): 46–57; and Rebecca Lemov, ‘The Storage of the Very, Very Small’, in Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2015): 70–94. 12 See The Screen Media Reader: Culture, Theory, Practice, ed. Stephen Monteiro (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), esp. Erkki Huhtamo, ‘Screenology; or, Media Archaeology of the Screen’, 77–124, and Lev Manovich, ‘A Screen’s Genealogy’,

Material / Digital

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125–32; Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Print to Pixels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 13 Manovich, ‘A Screen’s Genealogy’, 127; and Matthew Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 122–4. 14 Most Hollywood films use an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, whereas the 16:9 (or 1.7:1) of computer monitors is identical to that of HDTV. 15 Richard J. Urban, ‘The 1:1 Principle in the Age of Linked Data’, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (Austin, TX: October 2014), https://dcpapers.dublincore.org/pubs/article/view/3707 (accessed 1 March 2021). 16 Miranda changes the display of the metadata somewhat but does not fundamentally differ from LUNA. 17 For an illuminating case study in how one library managed an archival digitization project, see Katherine M. Crowe and Elizabeth S. Meagher, ‘Metadata Best Practices for University Archives Images’, Journal of Library Metadata 15, no. 2 (2015): 79–101. 18 Junli Diaz and Mirtha A. Hernández, ‘Transferring Cataloguing Legacies into Descriptive Metadata Creation in Digital Projects: Cataloguers’ Perspective’, Journal of Library Metadata 14, no. 2 (2014): 130–45. 19 Heather Wolfe, email to the authors, 19 March 2020. 20 Heather Wolfe, email to the authors, 20 March 2020. 21 D. F. McKenzie, ‘Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices’, Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969): 7. 22 G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology’, Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991): 91. 23 G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘The Work of D. F. McKenzie’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 9 (2004): 515. 24 On the importance of comparing multiple photographic surrogates for the same volume, see Berkhout’s forthcoming essay. On the Lazarus project, see Roger L. Easton, Jr., ‘Spectral Imaging of Shakespeare’s “Seventh Signature”’, The Collation [blog], 29 March 2012, https://collation.folger.edu/2012/03/spectral-imaging-ofshakespeares-seventh-signature/ (accessed 5 May 2020). 25 Alan Galey, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

422

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Bibliography Crowe, Katherine M., and Elizabeth S. Meagher. ‘Metadata Best Practices for University Archives Images’. Journal of Library Metadata 15, no. 2 (2015): 79–101. Cubitt, Sean. The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Print to Pixels. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Dawson, Giles. ‘Authenticity and Attribution of Written Matter’. In English Institute Annual, 77–100. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943. Diaz, Junli, and Mirtha A. Hernández. ‘Transferring Cataloguing Legacies into Descriptive Metadata Creation in Digital Projects: Cataloguers’ Perspective’. Journal of Library Metadata 14, no. 2 (2014): 130–45. Drucker, Johanna. ‘The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-Space’. In A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman [online]. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Easton, Jr., Roger L. ‘Spectral Imaging of Shakespeare’s “Seventh Signature”’. The Collation (blog). 29 March 2012. Available online: https://collation.folger. edu/2012/03/spectral-imaging-of-shakespeares-seventh-signature/ (accessed 1 March 2021). Federal Agency Digital Guidelines Initiative. Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials: Creation of Raster Image Files. September 2016. Available online: www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/FADGI%20 Federal%20%20Agencies%20Digital%20Guidelines%20Initiative-2016%20Final_ rev1.pdf (accessed 1 March 2021). Galey, Alan. The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Huhtamo, Erkki, ‘Screenology; or, Media Archaeology of the Screen’. In The Screen Media Reader: Culture, Theory, Practice, edited by Stephen Monteiro, 77–124. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Kichuk, Diana. ‘Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO)’. Literary and Linguistic Computing 22, no. 3 (2007): 291–303. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Lemov, Rebecca. ‘The Storage of the Very, Very Small’. In Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity, 70–94. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Lesser, Zachary. ‘Xeroxing the Renaissance: The Material Text of Early Modern Studies’. Shakespeare Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2019): 3–31. Mak, Bonnie. ‘Archaeology of a Digitization’. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 65, no. 8 (2014): 1515–26.

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Manovich, Lev. ‘A Screen’s Genealogy’. In The Screen Media Reader: Culture, Theory, Practice, edited by Stephen Monteiro, 125–32. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. McKenzie, D. F. ‘Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices’. Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969): 1–75. Power, Eugene, with Robert Anderson. Edition of One: The Autobiography of Eugene B. Power, Founder of University Microfilms. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Inc. Shakespeare Census. Edited by Adam G. Hooks and Zachary Lesser. Created 2018. Available online: www.shakespearecensus.org/about (accessed 22 April 2020). Tanselle, G. Thomas. ‘Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology’. Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991): 83–143. Tanselle, G. Thomas. ‘The Work of D. F. McKenzie’. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 9 (2004): 511–21. Urban, Richard J. ‘The 1:1 Principle in the Age of Linked Data’. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications. Austin, TX, October 2014. Available online: https://dcpapers.dublincore.org/pubs/article/ view/3707 (accessed 1 March 2021). Wilson, Paul. ‘Historical Perspective on the Use of Microfilm in Libraries and Archives’. In Preservation Microfilming: Does it Have a Future?: Proceedings of the First National Conference of the National Preservation Office, at the State Library of South Australia, 46–57. National Library of Australia, 1995.

Index Compiled by Molly G. Yarn The title of every work discussed in the text has both its own entry and a subheading under its author’s name, if known. If specific iterations of a title (including manuscripts, published books, and performances) are discussed in the text, each iteration is detailed under the title’s main heading, and the date of creation, publication or performance is given, if known. Due to the difficulty of dating many early modern works, if a title is referred to generically in the text, without reference to a specific copy or edition, no date is given in its entry. The names of publishers, printers, stationers and editors working prior to the twentieth century are labeled by their job titles in order to identify and distinguish them from cited twentieth-and twenty-first-century scholars and editors. Actors, directors and translators of any period are similarly labeled. Page numbers appearing in italic type refer to pages that contain illustrations. actors amateur performers 245–6, 250–1, 253–8 (see also community theatre) boy actors 209, 211–13, 347–50 (see also children’s companies) masquers 70, 72, 76–7 see also individual names; playing companies; theatrical practices actor’s parts. See cue scripts Adamowicz, Elza 185 Adams, J. Q. 284–5, 286, 295 n.14, 295 n.17 adaptations 3, 13–14, 182–94, 224–38, 247, 253–9 adaptation studies 183 additions (textual) 203–5, 208–9, 216 n.9, 218 n.38. See also revisions Admiral’s Men, the (playing company) 366 Aebischer, Pascale 131–2 agency 72, 143–5, 327–8 Akhimie, Patricia 34, 36 Albion Knight (c. 1566) 373 Albright, Evelyn May 29, 39–41, 44 Alexander, Gavin 345–6 Allde, Edward (printer) 368

All is True. See Henry VIII All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare) 89, 364–5 Amoretti (Spenser) 33–4, 36 Amorose Songes, Sonets, and Elegies: of M. Alexander Craige, Scoto-Britane, The (Craig, 1606) 149, 150 Anderson, Emily Hodgson 236 Anne of Denmark (Queen of Scotland, England and Ireland) 209 annotations, handwritten. See marginalia annotations, printed. See editorial apparatuses Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 324, 384, 335 n.22 Walker edition (1734) 228 apocrypha 97 n.2, 102–13. See also Shakespeare: disputed works appropriation. See adaptations; adaptation studies Aragon, Louis Shakespeare-Aragon-Picasso (1965) 13, 182, 186–88, 193 Arcadia, The (Sidney) New Arcadia (1590 edition) 272

Index The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1598) 145, 148–9 Archaionomia (Lambarde and Nowell, 1568) 20–1 physical Folger copy 403–6, 404, 406, 407, 408, 414–15, 418–19 digital facsimile 403–9, 405, 412, 413–15, 416, 417, 418–19 (see also LUNA) see also digitized books; digital facsimiles archives and archiving 17, 30, 41–2, 281–94, 302, 304, 306–7, 402–19 archival loss and absence 41–2, 132–5, 281–94, 319–20, 361–75. See also desire: scholarly; lost texts; manuscripts: non-extant Arden of Faversham 10, 97 n.2 early quartos (1592, 1599, 1633) 94–6 Closel translation (Brazilian Portuguese) 90, 94–6 in New Oxford Shakespeare (2016) 85 in Shakespeare & Others: Collaborative Plays (2013) 85 Arrowsmith, Charlotte (actor) 251 artists’ books (livre d’artiste) 13, 182–94 As You Like It (Shakespeare) Public Acts, National Theatre (2019) 16, 245–6, 253–5, 258 Shakespeare in Yosemite (2019) 16, 246, 255–8, 256, 257 songs 18, 254–5, 257–8, 345–7 RSC (2019) 246, 251–53, 254, 255 Ascham, Roger Scholemaster, The (1570) 32–3, 38 Ashby masque (Marston, 1607 manuscript) 9, 67–72, 79 n.17 Aspley, William (publisher) 54, 56 Assefa, Mequant (actor) 255 Astington, John 365 Astrophel and Stella (Sidney) 12 in Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (Sidney/Herbert, 1598) 145, 148–9, 150 early quarto editions (1591–7) 148 Syr. P. S. His Astrophel and Stella (1591) 145, 146, 148, 152 attribution studies 3, 84–97, 112–13, 307–8. See also collaboration studies audiences 9, 66–78, 126–7, 212–13, 234–7,

425

246–59, 266, 270–8, 330–1, 344–5, 384 authenticity 3, 15, 281–94, 301–2, 403, 405, 415. See also forgery authority 14, 30, 223–38, 246–51, 264–76, 281–94, 299–308 babies and children 170, 171–5, 336 n.37 black and interracial 320–33, 333 n.4, 333 n.6, 338 n.55, 338 n.57, 338 n.59 (see also blackness: in early modern performance) see also children’s companies; reproduction; women: pregnancy and motherhood backstage plots 19, 223, 372. See also documents of performance Bald, R. C. 365 Baldwin, T. W. 364–5 ballads 289–92, 344, 384 Barish, Jonas 387 Barret, J. K. 351 Barton, John (actor) 247, 249, 250, 261 n.18 Basse, William Great Brittaines sunnes-set (1613) 374 Bayer, Mark 130 Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher Comedies and Tragedies (1647 folio) 56, 203–4 Maid’s Tragedy, The (1619 quarto) 9, 67, 70–8, 80 n.21, 80 n.34 Honest Man’s Fortune, The (with Field, 1613/47) 203–4, 208, 361 see also Beaumont, Francis; Fletcher, John Beaumont, Francis 55, 56, 66–67, 68, 73. See also Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher Believe as You List (Massinger, 1631? manuscript) 373 Bell, Ilona 154–5 Bell, John (editor) 233–4 Benjamin, Walter 185, 186 Bennett, Susan 132 Benson, John (publisher) 103–4, 143 Benson, Richard 187 Berger, Thomas 50 Best, George 321–2. See also blackness: in early modern science

426

Index

Betterton, Thomas (actor) 229–30, 232–3, 237 bibliography field 2, 21, 29–44, 45 n.5 methods 16–17, 19–21, 281–94, 374–5, 383, 385, 392–4, 402–19 see also editorial practices; New Bibliography Billington, Michael 248 binding waste 364, 373–5, 374, 375 Blackfriars (playhouse) First (1576–84) 71, 131, 139 n.20 Second (1596–1655) 131, 212, 350 blackness, racial in early modern performance 17–18, 320–33, 333 n.3, 334 n.14, 335 n.21, 337 n.46, 338 n.55, 338 n.57 (see also costumes; cosmetics; properties) in early modern science 321–2 in language and metaphor 29–44, 73, 319–33, 334 n.14, 335 n.19, 338 n.59, 339 n.67, 385 see also babies and children: black and interracial; race; whiteness Blevins, James P. and Juliet 31, 45 n.6 Boaden, James 237 Boke named the Governor, The (Elyot, 1531) 33 Bonduca (Fletcher) c. 1630 manuscript 41–2 lost playhouse manuscript 361 bookbindings 187–8, 364, 373–5, 374, 375. See also binding waste book design 143–58, 182–94 book-holders (pre-1700) 207–8, 213–15, 215 n.4, 223, 224, 383–4. See also prompters (post-1700) bookkeepers. See book-holders bookmaking 182–94, 223–38, 299–308. See also printing booksellers early modern 19, 50, 364–5, 373, 395 n.4 eighteenth-century 235, 237, 238 nineteenth-century 237, 302–4 see also rare books: dealers booksellers’ lists 50, 364–5, 373 Boose, Lynda E. 34

Boswell, James [the younger] (editor) 237, 302 Bourne, Claire M. L. 43, 134, 398 n.50 boy actors 209, 211–13, 347–50 Bozio, Andrew 136 Brome, Richard 52 Brook, Peter (director) 249, 250 Bryson, Norman 191 Burbage, Richard (actor) 212 Burby, Cuthbert (publisher) 366–8 Burgard, Timothy 193 Burre, Walter (publisher) 66 Burrow, Colin 112, 114 n.18, 152 Bushnell, Rebecca 282 Butler, Martin 349 cancellations authorial 204–5 theatrical 207–9, 211–15, 219 n.44 see also revision canon formation 10–11, 102–13 Cannan, Paul D. 107, 114 n.18 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) Caxton edition 5 (see also Caxton, William) Ellesmere manuscript 5 Hengwrt manuscript 5 Pynson edition 5 (see also Pynson, Richard) Capell, Edward (editor) 225, 301, 371 Cardenio (Shakespeare and Fletcher) 361–3. See also Double Falsehood Cartwright, William 55–6 cast lists 227–8, 327. See also Dramatis Personae; paratexts Cavell, Stanley 41 Caxton, William (printer) 5 censorship 91–4, 208–9. See also Master of the Revels; Sir Thomas More Chamberlain’s Men, the (playing company) 135, 212, 215 n.7, 352, 372 Chambers, E. K. 364, 365 Chaucer, Geoffrey 37 Canterbury Tales, The 5 Chettle, Henry Sir Thomas More (1600/1603–4) 10, 85, 90–7 Chetwood, William (prompter) 229, 238

Index children’s companies 131, 209, 211–13, 347, 350. See also boy actors chronology 11–12, 123–38. See also periodization Churchyard, Thomas A sparke of friendship … (1588) 34–6 circulation, textual 9, 18–19, 134, 292, 346, 384 in manuscript 68–70, 154–5, 163–76, 292 in print 67–8, 74, 76–8, 154–5, 235, 173 class. See social hierarchies Cleveland, John ‘A Fair Nimph Scorning a Black Boy Courting Her’ (1647) 322–3, 334 n.14 climate change 256–9, 419 Closel, Régis Augustus Bars (translator) 84–97. See also Arden of Faversham; Sir Thomas More; Timon of Athens Cockpit, the (playhouse) 361 Cokaine, Aston 56 collaboration 13–14, 84–97, 130, 182–94, 253–9, 307–8 collaboration studies 84–97, 99 n.15, 307–8. See also attribution studies collation. See under editorial practices collage 302–8. See also reading: process and practice; scrapbooks collected editions 102–13, 301–2. See also Shakespeare: collected works and collected poems collectors. See under rare books Collier, John Payne (editor) 17, 283, 302, 373 forgeries 283, 287–94, 332 (see also forgery) commonplace books 110–11, 287, 305. See also compilations; scrapbooks commonplacing 300, 305–8 common sense 266–7, 273–4, 276. See also community; language; semantics community 16, 246, 253, 265–7, 271–3, 276. See also common sense; language; semantics; social hierarchies community theatre 16, 245–6, 250–9. See also actors: amateur performers

427

compilation, practice of 145–6, 305–8 compilations, verse (objects) 13, 69, 143–58, 163–76, 168, 173, 177 n.6, 287–92. See also commonplace books; manuscripts: verse compilations compilers 145, 154, 157–8, 167–9, 287–8, 289 composers 347, 352, 353, 355 n.18 compositors 39, 40, 208, 214, 218 n.42, 370–2. See also printing; printing houses conduct books 34, 389 conflation. See under editorial practices conjecture. See under editorial practices Constable, Francis (publisher) 71, 80 n.21 Constable, Henry (author) 146 contrafacta 345–6. See also songs and music copies, figurative 163–76, 177 n.6. See also printer’s copies; reproduction Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 336 n.37 cosmetics 321, 323–5, 328–9, 332, 335 n.21. See also blackness: in early modern performance costumes 326–8. See also blackness: in early modern performance Countess of Huntingdon. See Hastings, Elizabeth Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, The (Wroth, 1621 folio) 16, 154–8, 264–5, 268–9, 272. See also Urania; Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, The (Sidney/Herbert, 1598) 145, 148–9 Covent Garden (theatre) 225, 234 Craig, Alexander The Amorose Sones, Sonets, and Elegies … (1606) 149, 150 The Poeticall Essayes … (1604) 149, 152 Craig, Heidi 35 critical race theory 21, 333 n.6. See also race critics, theatre 15, 246, 247–50, 253, 258–9 cruxes, textual 84, 92, 307, 370–2. See also editorial practices; variants cue scripts (pre-1700) 19, 300, 309 n.6, 383. See also performance texts; playbooks (printed, pre-1700);

428

Index

playhouse manuscripts (pre-1700); promptbooks (post-1700); working scripts (post-1700) Cummings, Brian 127 Curll, Edmund and Egbert Sanger (publishers) 104, 105, 114 n.18 Curtain, the (playhouse) 132, 134, 136, 139 n.20 Cymbeline (Shakespeare) 18, 347–54, 357 n.42, 388–9, 390–1. See also ‘Fear no more … ’ da Cunha, Tristão (translator) 86. See also Hamlet Dadabhoy, Ambereen 43 Daniel, George [of Beswick] 56 Daniel, Samuel 56 Delia (1592) 146, 147 Danter, John (printer) 368 Davenant, William (actor) 228, 239 n.10, 240 n.19 Dawson, Giles 295 n.13, 404–5, 406, 417 Daybell, James 389–90 Deane, John ‘To Mr Edward Fowkes’ 173–6 dedications 50, 69, 152. See also paratexts; prefaces and prefatory addresses de Grazia, Margreta 34, 143, 301–2 Dekker, Thomas Sir Thomas More (1600/1603–4) 10, 85, 90–7 Deleuze, Gilles 192–3 Delia (Daniel, 1592) 146, 147 Demeter, Jason 183 Depledge, Emma 19–20, 383–94 design. See book design; page design desire existential 157, 275–6 scholarly 41–2, 166, 237–8, 281–94, 365–6, 371 (see also archival loss) sexual and emotional 33, 72, 148, 165, 167, 169–73, 264–5, 325–9, 385 Desmet, Christy 183 detective novels 281–3, 286, 294 Devereux, Robert (Earl of Essex) 67 Dido, Queen of Carthage (Marlowe) 136–7 RSC, dir. Kimberley Sykes (2017) 251 digital editions 111–12 digital facsimiles 20–1, 402–19. See also

digital platforms and repositories; imaging digital platforms and repositories 20–21, 167, 402–19, 421 n.16. See also LUNA; Miranda digitized books 20–1, 185–6, 402–19. See also digital platforms and repositories; imaging Dillon, Janette 135 directors, theatre 246–53, 258–9, 260 n.14, 308. See also individual names documents of performance (early modern) 223–4, 362–3, 372, 383–4. See also backstage plots; cue scripts; playhouse manuscripts Donne, John 170 Donnellan, Declan (director) 250 Doran, Gregory (director) 248, 249 Troilus and Cressida (RSC, 2018) 247 Double Falsehood (Theobald, 1727) 362 Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (2010) 85 see also Cardenio Dramatis Personae 227–8, 327. See also cast lists; paratexts Drayton, Michael 55 Englands Heroicall Epistles (1599– 1602) 149 Ideas Mirrour (1594) 146, 149 Poems (1605–30) 149 Drucker, Johanna 184, 185 Drury Lane (theatre) 225, 226, 232–3, 237–8. See also Garrick, David; Hamlet: Drury Lane working script Dryden, John 110, 247 Dubrow, Heather 155 Duffin, Ross 344 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 106, 144, 145, 159 n.6 Dutton, Richard 215 n.7, 218 n.43 Dyce, Alexander (editor) 302 Earl of Essex. See Devereux, Robert Ecke, Margot Tragedy of Ophelia, The (2009) 186 (see also artists’ books) Eckhardt, Joshua 144 editorial apparatuses 68, 103, 107, 109, 111–13, 143–58, 233–4, 292–3.

Index See also footnotes; page design; paratexts; title pages; titles editorial practices 2, 42–4, 99 n.15, 143– 58, 203–15, 223–38, 301–2, 307–8 attribution 84–5, 112–13, 307–8 collation 169, 214, 284, 295 n.13 conflation 86, 206–7 conjecture 92–3, 284, 344, 370–2 emendation 108–9, 230, 236, 288–9, 301–2, 370–2 see also bibliography; cruxes; translation; variants editors 17, 143–58, 203–15, 362, 370–2 eighteenth-century 10–11, 102–11, 143–4, 224–36, 287–91 nineteenth-century 300–2, 306 twentieth- and twenty-first-century 39, 41, 84–97, 102–3 see also individual names; translators Edward III Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (2017) 85 New Cambridge Shakespeare (1998) 87–8 Funck translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 2010) 87–8 Egerton, Alice (Countess of Derby) 68–70 Elizabeth I (Queen of England) 128–30, 131–2, 212–13. See also periodization Elyot, Thomas Boke named the Governor, The (1531) 33 emendation. See under editorial practices Englands Heroicall Epistles (Drayton, 1599–1602 editions) 149 Entertainment at Britain’s Burse (Jonson, 1609) 373. See also masques Entertainment of the Dowager-Countess of Darby, The. See Ashby masque epigrams 110, 167, 323 epithalamions 68, 73–4 Erler, Mary 134, 135 Erne, Lukas 3, 8, 38, 51, 52, 215 n.7 Ewing, George (publisher) 107 ‘An Execratione vppon Vulcan’ (Jonson, 1623) 360 extempore performance 353–4, 357 n.48

429

facsimiles 303, 409–11, 412–13, 417. See also digital facsimiles; imaging ‘fair papers’ 29–44, 383 in language and metaphor 31–9, 322–3, 383 (see also race; social hierarchies; women and womanhood) ‘A Fair Nimph Scorning a Black Boy Courting Her’ (Cleveland, 1647) 322–3, 334 n.14 Faithful Shepherdess, The (Fletcher) c. 1610 quarto 66–7 (see also Burre, Walter) Fall, Rebecca L. 155–7 Farmer, Alan B. 51, 61 n.26 Farmer, Richard 364 Fazel, Valerie 183 ‘Fear no more the heat o’th’ sun’ 345, 347–54 in 1623 folio 347, 348, 349–50, 351, 352, 357 n.45 musical settings 347, 350–4, 355 n.18 see also Cymbeline; songs and music Feld, Charles (printer) 187 fermesse ($) 155–8, 156 Field, Nathan Honest Man’s Fortune, The (with Beaumont and Fletcher, 1613/47) 203–4, 208, 361 First Part of the Return from Parnassus, The (1599) 37–8 Fisher, Thomas (publisher) 54 Fitzgerald, Percy 237 Fleay, F. G. 364 Fleming, Juliet 305–6 Fletcher, John 56, 203–4 Bonduca (c. 1630) 42, 361 Cardenio (with Shakespeare) 361–3 Faithful Shepherdess, The (c. 1610) 66 Henry VIII (with Shakespeare) 87 Monsieur Thomas (1639) 52 Two Noble Kinsmen, The (with Shakespeare) 55, 87, 361 see also Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher Foakes, R. A. 248–9 Folger Shakespeare Library 16–17, 20, 107 Archaionomia (1568) 402–19, 404, 405, 406, 408 (see also LUNA)

430

Index

Drury Lane Hamlet promptbook 232–3, 237 MS V.a.162 (manuscript compilation) 166–73, 168 Passionate Pilgrime fragment (O1) 283–7 Wroth’s sonnets (autograph manuscript) 154–8 fools and foolery 274–6, 279 n.42, 349. See also puns footnotes 91, 109, 233–4. See also editorial apparatuses; paratexts Ford, John 131 ‘A Funeral Elegy’ 102 forgery 283, 287–94, 332, 383 falsified title pages 392, 393, 405 (see also Pavier Quartos) see also Collier, John Payne Forman, Simon 372 Fortune, the (playhouse) 361 Foster, Donald W. 102 Foucault, Michel 52, 182–3 ‘foul papers’ 29–44, 213–14, 383 in language and metaphor 31–9, 322–3, 383 (see also race; social hierarchies; women and womanhood) Freeman, Arthur and Janet Ing 289–90 ‘the Friend’ 13, 163–76. See also sonnets (Shakespeare) Funck, Elvio (translator) 87–8, 98 n.7, 98 n.10. See also Edward III; King Henry VIII; Two Noble Kinsmen; Pericles ‘A Funeral Elegy’ 102 Galey, Alan 306 Garrick, David 15, 226, 229–38 1742 Hamlet performance text, printed edition (1763) 226, 230–1, 232, 233, 234 1772 Hamlet performance text 15, 229–38, 240 n.25 working script of 1772 Hamlet 15, 229–31, 231, 237–8, 240 n.25, 240 n.29, 241 n.31, 242 n.46 see also Drury Lane Garvey, Ellen 306 Geddes, Louise 183

gender 6, 30, 32, 66–78, 253–6, 319–33, 335 n.22, 383–94. See also men and masculinity; sexual orientation; women and womanhood Genette, Gérard 50–1, 53, 55, 58 genre 9–10, 52–8, 128–32, 144, 350 Gentleman, Francis (editor) 233–4, 241 n.37 Gildon, Charles (editor) 11, 99 n.14, 104, 109–111, 143, 145 Complete Art of Poetry, The (1718) 110–11 Grammar of the English Tongue, A (1712) 110 Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets, The (1699) 110 paratexts to Shakespeare’s poems 106–7, 111 Globe, the (playhouse) 350, 372 glyphs. See fermesse; pilcrow; punctuation; slash Gosson, Stephen Plays Confuted in Five Acts (1582) 137 Gower, John 37 Grafton, Anthony 305 Great Brittaines sunnes-set (Basse, 1613) 374 Greene, Robert 36, 46 n.28 Greg, W. W. 8, 29–30, 39–42, 203–5, 208, 210–11, 213–14, 283, 285–7, 393. See also bibliography; New Bibliography Grier, Miles P. 3 Grierson, George (publisher) 107 Gurr, Andrew 131, 218 n.43 Guthrie, Tyrone (director) 249 Habib, Imtiaz 42 Hall, Kim F. 8, 31–4, 42, 334 n.12, 385 Hall, Peter (director) 247, 249 Halliwell-Phillipps, John Orchard (editor) 17, 299–308, 299, 310 n.15, 310 n.18, 403. See also scrapbooks Hamlet (Shakespeare) 354 n.5, 384, 388 1603 quarto (Q1) 54, 86, 203–4, 207, 209–12, 217 n.29, 218 n.38, 308, 363, 373 1604–5 quarto (Q2) 14, 54, 204–15, 215 n.4, 215 n.7, 217 n.29, 218 n.38,

Index 218 n.42, 219 n.44, 225, 363, 402–3 (see also Roberts, John; variants) 1623 First Folio (F1) 14, 203–15, 215 n.7, 217 n.29, 218 n.38, 218 n.42, 224–5, 363 (see also Heminge, John and Henry Condell; variants) 1632 Second Folio (F2) 300, 307 Arden Shakespeare, Second Series 205, 209, 213, 216 n.9, 217 n.27, 219 n.44, 307 Arden Shakespeare, Third Series 204, 207, 212, 307 in artists’ books 182–94 in Bell’s editions (1773/8) 233–4, 241 n.37 Betterton text (1703 reprint) 230, 232–3 da Cunha translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 1933) 86 Drury Lane working script of 1772 Garrick performance text 232–3, 237–8, 241 n.31 on the eighteenth-century London stage 225–8, 230–8 in eighteenth-century printed editions 225–7, 229–38, 239 n.10 Garrick’s 1742 performance text, print edition (1763) 226, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234 Garrick’s 1772 performance text 15, 229–38, 240 n.25 Garrick’s working script of 1772 production 229–31, 231, 237–8, 240 n.25, 240 n.29, 241 n.31, 242 n.46 in Halliwell-Phillipps scrapbooks 299–300, 299, 307–8 in Hanmer edition (1744) 241 n.43 Hibbard edition (1987) 216 n.9, 217 n.27 hypothetical manuscripts behind Q2 and F1 203–5, 207, 208, 210–15, 215 n.4, 218 n.38, 218 n.42, 219 n.44 Marowitz Hamlet, The (1968) 308, 312 n.42, 312 n.43 in New Oxford Shakespeare (2016) 212 in Norton Shakespeare, third edition (2016) 111–12 O’Shea translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 2010) 86

431

Pereira translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 2015) 86, 89–90 in Picasso lithographs 186–7, 188–94, 189 (see also Shakespeare-PicassoAragon) Tonson edition (1734) 226–8 in Tragedy of Ophelia, The (Ecke, 2009) 186 (see also artists’ books) Walker edition (1734) 227–9, 239 n.16 Wilkinson’s Hamlet with Alterations (1773) 233 Wilks–Hughes editions (eighteenth century) 225–6, 227–8, 230, 231, 232, 234 Wright text (1904 reprint) 86 Hands, Terry (director) 250 handwriting 291, 385, 386–7, 389. See also writing Hartman, Saidiya 42, 44 Harvey, Gabriel 305 Hastings, Elizabeth (Countess of Huntingdon) 68–70 Hastings, Henry (Earl of Huntingdon) 68–70 Hawkins, Ursula (stationer) 71 Hawkins, William (stationer) 71 Heliodora, Bárbara (translator) 88, 98 n.12. See also Timon of Athens Heminge, John and Henry Condell (actors and editors) 38, 39, 44, 76, 103, 363 Hendricks, Margo 34–5, 42 Henry, Prince of Wales 76–7 Henry IV Part 1 (Shakespeare) 365, 366, 374 Henry IV Part 2 (Shakespeare) 1600 quarto 56, 60 n.16, 61 n.27 (see also Aspley, William; Wise, Andrew) Henry V (Shakespeare) 391 1619 quarto 60 n.16 (see also Pavier, Thomas) Henry VI Part 1 (Shakespeare) 89, 388 Henry VI Part 2 (Shakespeare) 89, 390, 396 n.28 Henry VI Part 3 (Shakespeare) 89, 388 Henry VIII, or All is True (Shakespeare and Fletcher) 89, 356 n.40 Funck translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 2017) 87, 98 n.10 alternative title 365

432 Herbert, Mary Sidney (Countess of Pembroke) 155 The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (with Sidney, 1598) 145, 148–9 Heywood, Thomas 361 Sir Thomas More (1600/1603–4) 10, 85, 90–7 A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) 368 Hibbard, G. R. 204, 209, 216 n.9, 217 n.27 Higgenbotham, Richard (publisher) 71, 80 n.21 Hinton-Lever, Beth (actor) 254 Hockney, David 190 Holdsworth, Nadine 253 Holland, Peter 3, 247 Holloway, Memory 186–7 Honest Man’s Fortune, The (Beaumont, Fletcher, Field) in 1647 folio 203–4, 208 playhouse manuscript (c. 1613?) 203–4, 208, 361 Hooks, Adam G. 3, 51 Hopkinson, A. F. 93 Hopkins, William (prompter) 232–3, 236, 237 Howard, Francis (Countess of Essex) 67 Hughes, John (editor) 225–6, 227–8, 230, 231, 232, 234 Hunter, G. K. 364–5 Hymenaei (Jonson, 1606) 9, 67–8, 71–4, 77–8. See also masques Ideas Mirrour (Drayton, 1594) 146, 149 imaging 403–10, 412–19. See also facsimiles; digital facsimiles; lithography ink 18, 19–20, 383–94 as metaphor 319–26, 323–24, 329, 331–3, 385–7 see also printing; writing insertions (textual). See additions Iyengar, Sujata 13–14, 182–94 Jacobson, Miriam 183 Jaggard, William (publisher) 60 n.17, 149–50, 281–2, 285–6, 295 n.5, 295 n.13

Index James VI/I (King of Scotland, England and Ireland) 128–32, 209, 212–13. See also periodization James, William, 192–3 Jardine, Lisa 305 Jarman, Derek 131–2 Jenkins, Harold 205, 209, 213, 216 n.9, 217 n.27, 219 n.44, 307 Jenkins, Jacqueline 135 Johnson, Robert (composer) 352 Johnson, Samuel (editor) 109, 225, 230, 232, 233, 301 Jonson, Ben 38, 55, 56, 131 1616 Workes 361 1631 unfinished Workes volume 361 1640 Workes 144 burned manuscripts 360 Entertainment at Britain’s Burse (1609) 373 ‘An Execratione vppon Vulcan … ’ (1623) 360 Hymenaei (1606) 9, 67–8, 71–4, 77–8 lost plays 361 Masque of Blackness 320 Oberon (1611) 76–7 Under–Woods 144–5 Jowett, John 85, 88, 92, 215 n.4, 307 Karim-Cooper, Farah 131 Kastan, David Scott 51 Kathman, David 134 Kerrigan, John 372 Kidnie, Margaret Jane 2, 3, 248, 250 King Lear (Shakespeare) 86, 390 1608 quarto 54 1619 quarto 54 Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (1997) 89 Pereira translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 2020) 89–90 Tate’s adaptation (1681) 225, 227 Tonson edition (1734) 227–8 Walker edition (1734) 227–8 Kingsley-Smith, Jane 372 King’s Men, the (playing company) 211, 349–51, 352, 361, 365 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 3–4 Kirwan, Peter 43, 103 Kleinfelder, Karen 191–3

Index Knight, Charles (editor) 302 Knight, Jeffrey Todd 392–4 Knutson, Roslyn L. 212–13, 366 Kolin, Philip 331 Kyd, Thomas The Spanish Tragedy (1592?) 97 n.2, 368 Lambarde, William Archaionomia (with Nowell, 1568) 20–1, 403–7, 413–19 Lane, Drury (fictional detective) 281–2, 283, 285, 294 n.2 language 264–76, 277 n.6, 279 n.42. See also common sense; community; puns; semantics Lavin, Irving 190–1 Leavis, F. R. 249, 260 n.16 Lee, Sidney 281–2, 295 n.5 LePage, Robert (director) A Midsummer Night’s Dream production (1992) 249–50 Lerer, Seth 135, 350 Lesser, Zachary 308, 392, 393 libraries and special collections 20, 43, 69, 194, 237, 264, 306, 343–4, 362, 366, 374–5, 388–9, 392 digitization work 20, 402–19 (see also digitized books; digital platforms) see also Folger Shakespeare Library Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 235–6, 241 n.43 Lim, Emily 254 Lintott, Bernard (publisher) 104, 143 lithography 13, 187, 189, 190–1, 194, 416, 417. See also imaging; ShakespeareAragon-Picasso Littlewood, Joan (director) 250, 253, 257 livre de dialogue 182, 185, 190–4. See also artists’ books; Shakespeare-AragonPicasso Loewenstein, Joseph 52–3 London Metropolitan Archives 171–6 London Prodigal, The 1605 quarto 54–5, 60 n.16 in editions of Shakespeare 309 n.10 Lopez, Jeremy 103 lost texts 14, 19, 144, 150, 163, 203–15, 281–94, 295 n.5, 343–54, 360–75.

433

See also archival loss; desire: scholarly; manuscripts: non-extant Loughnane, Rory 136 Love, Harold 69–70 ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ (1609) 152 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare) 364–6, 384 1598 quarto (Q1) 54, 150, 366–72, 367 (see also Burby, Cuthbert) 1631 quarto 54 Arden Shakespeare, Third Series edition (1998) 371 ‘lost’ first edition (Q0) 19, 150, 363, 366–9 in Norton Shakespeare, third edition (2016) 372 printer’s copy 370–2 in Rowe edition (1709) 371 Love’s Labour’s Won (Shakespeare) 19, 363–6 LUNA digital image platform (Folger) 20– 1, 403–19, 405, 421 n.16. See also Archaionomia; digital platforms; Folger; Miranda Lust’s Dominion 320 Lyly, John Woman in the Moon, The 137 lyric blazons 33 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 387 Brazilian Portuguese translations 86, 89 Norris production (National Theatre, 2018) 248 in Pope edition (1725) 240 n.19 Walker edition (1734) 228, 240 n.19 Maid’s Tragedy, The (Beaumont and Fletcher) 9, 80 n.34 1619 quarto 67, 70–8, 75, 80 n.21 (see also Higgenbotham, Richard; Constable, Francis) 1622 quarto 71 (see also Constable, Francis) 1641 quarto 71 (see also Purslowe, Elizabeth) see also masques Malone, Edmund (editor) 103, 112, 143–4, 237, 301–2 Malraux, André 185 manuscripts

434

Index

autograph 8, 16, 39–41, 68–70, 91–4, 144, 145, 154–8, 156, 177 n.6, 204, 264, 370–2, 373 non-extant 14, 144, 163, 203–15, 360–75 (see also archival loss; lost texts) playhouse 40–1, 42, 91–4, 203–15, 218 n.42, 218 n.43, 361–2, 383–4 (see also documents of performance) scribal 5, 8, 37, 40, 69–70, 91–4, 208, 383–4 songs and lyrics 289–91, 343–4, 357 n.46 verse compilations 13, 163–76, 168, 173, 177 n.6, 287–92 (see also compilations; poems in manuscript) marginalia, handwritten by owners and users 392, 398 n.50, 402, 403, 417 by scribes and authors 91–3, 289, 302 by theatre makers 203–4, 208, 214, 230–2, 237 see also paratexts Marino, James J. 215 n.7, 395 n.4 Marlowe, Christopher 89, 131–2 Dido, Queen of Carthage 136–7, 251 Marowitz, Charles (director) Marowitz Hamlet, The 308, 312 n.42, 312 n.43 Marston, John Ashby masque (manuscript, 1607) 9, 67–72, 79 n.17 Mason, J. Monck 212 Masque of Blackness (Jonson) 320. See also masques; race masques 9, 66–78, 223, 264, 320, 356 n.40 Massai, Sonia 50, 301 Massinger, Philip Believe as You List (1631? manuscript) 373 Master of the Revels 91, 218 n.43, 224. See also Tilney, Edmund; censorship McCarthy, Erin A. 150 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) 89, 98 n.14, 384 Tonson edition (1722) 228 Tonson edition (1734) 228–9 Walker edition (1734) 228–9 Mechanick Exercises (Moxon, 1683) 5

Meighen, Richard (publisher) 54, 62 n.38 memorial reconstruction 203, 210 men and masculinity 163–76 patriarchy and misogyny 73–4, 76–7, 268–9, 319–33, 385–9, 397 n.34 (see also sexual violence) race 32–3, 34–5, 178 n.29, 319–33 (see also blackness; race; whiteness) see also gender; reproduction; sex; women and womanhood Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare) 36, 324–5, 328, 385, 391 quarto title pages 54 Meres, Francis 55, 363–5 Merry Wives of Windsor, The (Shakespeare) 1630 quarto 54, 56, 62 n.38 (see also Meighen, Richard) quarto title pages 54, 56, 62 n.38 Walker edition (1734) 226 Mervyn, James 55 Middleton, Thomas 99 n.14, 131 Oxford Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (2007) 131–2 Roaring Girl, The (1611) 74 Timon of Athens (with Shakespeare) 85, 88–9 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) 265–6, 277 n.11, 364 1600 quarto 54 (see also Fisher, Thomas) 1619 quarto 54 (see also Pavier, Thomas) LePage production (1992) 249–50 Milling, Jane 253 Miranda (Folger digital platform) 411–12, 412 miscellanies 12, 143–58. See also compilations; sonnet sequences Moeglin-Delcroix, Anne 184, 185 Monsieur Thomas (Fletcher, 1639) 52 Montaigne, Michel de ‘On Friendship’ 167 Moseley, Humphrey (publisher) 361–2 Moxon, Joseph Mechanick Exercises (1683) 5 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare) 58, 329, 364, 385, 387, 390

Index 1600 quarto 54, 60 n.16 (see also Wise, Andrew; Aspley, William) Munday, Anthony Sir Thomas More (1600/1603–4) 10, 85, 90–7 ‘Murmure’ (Aragon, 1965) 188. See also Shakespeare-Picasso-Aragon music. See songs and music mystery novels. See detective novels National Theatre, London (NT) 248 Public Acts 245–6, 253–5, 258 New Bibliography, the 3, 8, 29–31, 39–44, 283, 285–7, 371, 393–4. See also bibliography; Greg, W. W.; Pollard, A. W. Newington Butts (playhouse) 132, 139 n.20 Nicholson, Helen 245, 253 Norris, Rufus (director) Macbeth (National Theatre, 2018) 248 Norton, John (printer) 54 Nowell, Laurence Archaionomia (with Lambarde, 1568) 20–1, 403–7, 413–19 Nunn, Trevor (director) 249, 250 Oberon (Jonson, 1611) 76–7. See also masques Okes, Nicholas (printer) 80 n.21 organization of information 305–7 (see also collage; reading: process and practice; scrapbooks; commonplacing) of texts 145–58 (see also compilations; miscellanies; page design) Orocozo, Miguel 187 Osborne, Laurie 183 O’Shea, José Roberto (translator) 87, 98 n.7. See also Pericles; Timon of Athens; Two Noble Kinsmen Othello (Shakespeare) 18, 325, 329, 334 n.14, 383 1622 quarto 51, 344, 417–18 (see also Walkley, Thomas) in 1623 folio 344 Bodmer Library copy of quarto 417–18 Brazilian Portuguese translations 86 see also ‘The Willow Song’

435

page design 12, 93–4, 146–58, 147, 151, 153, 232 Palfrey, Simon 300 Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (Wroth) 277 n.15 in 1621 Urania folio 154–8 in autograph manuscript (at Newberry) 154–8, 156 in modern edition (2017) 154–5 paper 19–20, 114 n.21, 185, 232, 383–94 as metaphor 34–6, 319–26, 328–33, 383, 385–7, 391 as stage props 384, 386–9, 396 n.28 see also rags and rag-pickers; watermarks papermaking 34–6, 331, 393. See also rags and rag-pickers; watermarks Papp, Joseph (director) 250, 253 paratexts 8, 50–8, 59 n.6, 76, 94, 106–7, 111, 143, 284 in digitized books 402–19 in Tonson-Walker dispute 226–9 see also cast lists; dedications; Dramatis Personae; editorial apparatuses; footnotes; marginalia; page design; prefaces and prefatory addresses; title pages; titles Parker, Patricia 34 Passionate Pilgrim, The (Shakespeare) fragmentary edition (undated) 16–17, 281–7, 293, 295 n.5, 295 n.13, 295 n.14, 295 n.17, 366 1599 edition 12, 60 n.17, 143, 144, 145, 149–50, 151, 157–8, 160 n.24, 281–2, 284–5 (see also Jaggard, William) 1612 edition 281–2 in Benson’s Poems 103–4 in manuscript compilation (Folger V.a.339) 288–9 in eighteenth-century editions 103–4, 143 in twenty-first-century editions 112–13 ‘Pavier Quartos’ (1619) 39, 54, 60 n.16, 393, 405 Pavier, Thomas (publisher) 54, 60 n.16. See also ‘Pavier Quartos’ Peacham drawing 326–7 pedagogy. See teaching

436

Index

Percy, Bishop Thomas 364 Pereira, Lawrence Flores (translator) 86, 89–90. See also Hamlet; King Lear perfecting 303–4, 392. See also rare books performance texts 15, 16, 67–70, 203–15, 223–38, 246–58, 343–54. See also cue scripts (pre-1700); playbooks (printed, pre-1700); playhouse manuscripts (pre-1700); promptbooks (post-1700); working scripts (post-1700) performances. See theatrical productions Pericles (Shakespeare and Wilkins) 309 n.10, 384 absence from 1623 folio 361 Funck translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 2019) 87 O’Shea translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 2012) 87 quarto title pages 55, 61 n.30 periodization 11–12, 123–38 Peyré, Yves 182, 185 Peters, Julie Stone 3 Phelps, Lucy (actor) 251, 252 Philipot, Thomas 56 Philips, Katherine 170 Phillips, Arthur Tragedy of Arthur, The (2011) 292–4 Philpott, Clive 185 ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ 104 Picasso, Pablo experiments with printing techniques 187, 189, 190–1, 194 (see also lithography) Shakespeare-Aragon-Picasso (1965) 13–14, 182, 186–94, 189 Pick, Samuel ‘To his singular good friend Mr Thomas Mousley’ 169 Pidduck, Julianne 132 pilcrow (¶) 5 playbooks (printed, pre-1700) 8–11, 18–19, 30, 50–8, 66–78, 134–5, 203–15, 299–301, 343–54, 360–75, 384, 392–3, 395 n.4. See also playhouse manuscripts playhouse manuscripts (pre-1700) 40–1, 42, 91–4, 203–15, 218 n.42, 218 n.43, 361–2, 383–4. See also cue

scripts (pre-1700); book-holders; documents of performance; performance texts; playbooks (printed, pre-1700); promptbooks (post-1700); revision; workings scripts (post-1700) playhouses 11, 123–7, 131, 132–6, 139 n.20, 212–13, 361. See also individual names playing companies 11, 131, 208–9, 211–15. See also individual names; children’s companies Plays Confuted in Five Acts (Gosson, 1582) 137 Poel, William 249 Poems (Drayton, 1605–30 editions) 149 poems in manuscript Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (Wroth, in Newberry manuscript) 154–8, 156 Passionate Pilgrim, The (in Folger V.a.339) 288–9 ‘A Sonnet’ (in Folger MS V.a.162) 166–9, 172–3 ‘Spes Altera’ (in London Metropolitan Archives) 171–3, 172 ‘To his deare friend Maister Thomas Cranley’ (Wither) 167 ‘To his deere frend Mr Stephen Jackson’ (in Folger MS V.a.162) 166–71, 168 ‘To his singular good friend Mr Thomas Mousley’ (Pick, in Folger MS V.a.162) 169 ‘To Mr Edward Fowkes’ (Deane, in London Metropolitan Archives) 173–6 poems (Shakespeare) 102–13, 143–5, 281–94 in eighteenth-century editions 103–11 in twenty-first-century editions 111–13 Variorum edition (1938) 284 see also individual titles; Passionate Pilgrim; sonnets (Shakespeare) Poeticall Essayes of Alexander Craige Scotobritane, The (Craig, 1604) 149, 152 poetic form 146–58, 169–70, 357 n.42 Pollard, A. W. 29, 39–41. See also New Bibliography

Index Pope, Alexander (editor) 107, 225, 228, 232, 233, 301 Pottesman, Solomon 364, 373 Power, Andrew 136 prefaces and prefatory addresses 50–1, 66–9, 73, 76, 229, 293. See also dedications; paratexts Prescott, Paul 255–6 Price, Eoin 136 printers early modern 5, 38–41, 51–8, 80 n.21, 154, 204, 208, 293, 370–2 eighteenth-century 226–9 twentieth-century 182, 193–4 see also individual names; compositors; publishers; stationers printer’s copies 163, 176, 177 n.6, 204, 362, 363, 371–2, 374–5 Printed Grammar, The (Smith, 1755) 5 printing 5, 185, 187, 190–1, 389, 392–3 as source of textual error 38–41, 218 n.42, 295 n.13, 370–2 as metaphor 18, 163–5, 319–33, 383 see also ink; paper; reproduction printing houses 38–42, 90, 146, 182, 214, 370–2, 392–3, 415–16. See also compositors; printers; printing; stationers printshop. See printing house prompters (post-1700) 223–5, 229, 232–3, 234, 236, 237, 238. See also bookholders (pre-1700) promptbooks (post-1700) 224–5, 229, 232–4, 237–8. See also cue scripts (pre-1700); performance texts; playhouse manuscripts (pre-1700); working scripts (post-1700) properties, stage 17–18, 19–20, 323–6, 329–33, 338 n.55, 384, 386–89, 395 n.8, 396 n.29 Proudfoot, Richard 371 provenance 413–15 Public Acts (National Theatre) 245–6, 253–5, 258 Public Theater, the (New York) 245, 250, 253 publishers and publishing early modern 11, 39–40, 51–8, 154, 214, 393

437

eighteenth-century 10–11, 102–13, 225–9 twentieth- and twenty-first-century 65, 88 see also individual names; compositors; printers; stationers punctuation 96, 266, 331 as editorial shorthand 89–90, 93–5, 155–8, 156 see also fermesse; pilcrow; slash puns 274–6, 319, 328. See also fools and foolery; language; semantics Purcell, Stephen 246 Purchas, Samuel 321–2, 326. See also blackness: in early modern science Puritan, The (Middleton) 1607 quarto 55 in editions of Shakespeare 309 n.10 Pynson, Richard (printer) 5 race 3, 8, 21, 29–44, 259 n.1, 319–33, 333 n.6, 335 n.19, 337 n.46, 354 n.1 in early modern performance 17–18, 320–33, 333 n.3, 334 n.14, 335 n.21, 337 n.46, 338 n.55, 338 n.57 (see also costumes; cosmetics; properties) in language and metaphor 29–44, 73, 277 n.15, 319–33, 334 n.14, 339 n.67, 385 see also babies and children: black and interracial; blackness; whiteness rags and rag-pickers 35, 331–3. See also paper; papermaking Ralegh, Walter 34 Ralph Roister Doister (Udall, 1552) 353 rape. See sexual violence Rape of Lucrece, The (Shakespeare) 386–7, 389 in eighteenth-century editions 104, 107 rare books collectors 69, 185, 186, 290, 303–4, 361, 392 conservation 3, 403, 407, 415, 418–19 dealers 17, 302–4 see also perfecting Rastell, John (printer and theatre maker) 135 readers 14, 62 n.40, 62 n.42, 66–9, 78 n.3, 74, 137, 154, 157, 224, 234–7, 238

438

Index

non–English readers 84–97 (see also translation) reading 4, 5, 14, 20, 34–5, 76, 388 experience 57–8, 67, 68, 74, 96–7, 152–4, 182–6, 192, 194, 238 metaphor 320–5, 329–33, 386–7 process and practice 17, 152–3, 182–3, 223–24, 299, 300, 305–7, 384, 402–19 (see also commonplacing; collage; scrapbooks) Red Lion, the (playhouse) 133, 139 n.20 repertories 11, 349–50, 352. See also playing companies repetition brackets 203–4, 209–10. See also revision reproduction biological 38, 73–4, 171–5, 320–32 (see also babies and children) metaphorical 13, 18, 163–76, 323–5, 329–33 (see also under printing) textual 163–76, 186, 284–5, 303, 370 (see also printing; facsimiles; imaging; lithography) revision 11, 91, 93, 148, 203–15 authorial 154–8, 159 n.6, 203–15, 215 n.7, 218 n.42, 171–3 playhouse 11, 203–15, 218 n.42, 224, 345, 349–50 see also cancellations; insertions; repetition brackets Richard II (Shakespeare) 1597 quarto 40 (see also Simmes, Valentine) 1634 quarto 54, 61 n.27 (see also Norton, John) quarto title pages 54 Richard III (Shakespeare) in Brazil 89 quarto title pages 54 Richardson, John 186, 190, 192 Rintoul, Douglas (director) 253 As You Like It (Public Acts, 2019) 16, 245–6, 253–5, 258 Roberts, John (printer) 208 Rollins, Hyder 284–5, 295 n.5, 295 n.13, 295 n.14 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 97 1597 quarto (Q1) 368–9 (see also Allde, Edward; Danter, John)

1599 quarto (Q2) 368–9 (see also Burby, Cuthbert) 1623 quarto (Q4) 60 n.16 (see also Smethwick, John) Rose, the (playhouse) 133, 366 Rose, Mark 52 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 145 Rowe, Nicholas (editor) 225, 228, 301, 370–1 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 249, 261 n.24 Open Stages project 253–4 recent productions 246–8, 251–53, 254, 255 Royster, Francesca 326, 329 Rubin, Gayle 326–7 Sabartés, Jaime 194 sammelbände 283, 392, 402–3 Sanders, Julie 135 Schaar, Claes 183, 192 Scholemaster, The (Ascham, 1570) 32–3 Scott-Warren, Jason 398 n.50 scrapbooks 299, 300, 304–8. See also collage; commonplace books; Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard scribes 40, 69–70, 91, 154, 218 n.42, 349. See also manuscripts: scribal; marginalia: by scribes and authors; writing Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, The (Wroth, U2, manuscript) 16, 264–76. See also Urania semantics 264–76, 279 n.42. See also common sense; community; language; puns Seng, Peter 344 sequences. See sonnet sequences 2 The Seven Deadly Sins (c. 1597) 372 sex 71–4, 319–20, 322–9, 332–3, 335 n.19 metaphors for 165, 319–33, 383 (see also under printing) see also desire; men and masculinity; reproduction; women and womanhood sexual orientation 252, 255 sexual violence 72–3, 80 n.33, 268, 329, 337 n.49, 386–7, 388–9, 397 n.34

Index Shakespeare-Aragon-Picasso (1965) 13–14, 183, 186–94, 189 ‘Shakespeare’ as signifier 1–4, 9 authorial identity 62 n.40, 112–13, 182–3, 225, 301–2, 307–8, 369 economic value 51–8 (see also title pages: authorial attribution) cultural power 43–4, 254–5, 124–5, 282–3, 292–4 Shakespeare in Yosemite 246, 255–8, 256, 257 Shakes-peares Sonnets (1609) 12–13, 38, 103–4, 150, 157–8, 163–76 design and organization 143–5, 152–4, 153 (see also organization; page design) see also sonnets (Shakespeare); Thorpe, Thomas Shakespeare, William 12–13, 36–8, 143–4, 303 collected works. See individual play/poem entries for references to texts in specific editions 1623 First Folio (F/F1) 9, 37–40, 52, 56, 86, 103–4, 224–5, 301, 304, 360–1, 363, 393, 398 n.50 1632 Second Folio (F2) 52, 56, 104, 289 1663/4 Third Folio (F3) 301, 309 n.10 1685 Fourth Folio (F4) 301, 309 n.10 Bell editions (1773) 233–4 Boswell-Malone edition (1821) 237, 302 Capell edition (1768) 225, 301, 371 Collier edition (1855) 288, 302 Dublin edition (Grierson/Ewing, 1726) 107 Dyce edition (1857) 302 Halliwell-Phillipps illustrated Shakespeare edition (1853–65) 306–7 Hanmer edition (1744) 241 n.43 Johnson edition (1765) 109, 225, 230, 232, 233, 301 Knight illustrated editions (1840s) 302 Malone edition (1790) 103, 301–2 New Oxford Shakespeare, The (2016) 112 Norton Shakespeare, third edition (2016) 111–12 Oxford Shakespeare, second edition (2006) 88

439

Pavier Quartos (1619) 393, 405 Pope edition (1725) 107, 114 n.21, 225, 228, 232, 233, 301, 309 n.10 Riverside Shakespeare, second edition, fourth issue (2003) 102–3 Rowe edition (Tonson, 1709) 104, 225, 228, 301, 309 n.10 RSC edition (2005) 93 Steevens-Johnson edition (1773) 225, 301 Theobald edition (1733) 108–9, 225, 229, 301, 309 n.10 Warburton edition (1747) 108–9 Whole Contention, The (1619) 61 n.27 collected poems: Benson’s Poems (1640) 103–4, 143 Burrow edition (2002) 112, 152 Curl/Sanger/Gildon edition (1709) 104, 105, 110, 114 n.22 Curl/Sanger/Gildon edition (1714) 104, 106, 114 n.22 Curl/Sanger/Gildon edition (1725) 104, 106 Curl/Sanger/Gildon edition (1728) 104, 106 Lintott edition (1709) 104, 143 Lintott edition (1711) 104, 108 Passionate Pilgrim, The (fragment) 16–17, 281–7, 293, 366 Passionate Pilgrim, The (1599) 143, 144, 145, 149–50, 151, 157–8, 160 n.24, 281–2, 284–5 Passionate Pilgrim, The (1612) 281–2 Sewell edition (1725) 108 Shakes-peares Sonnets (1609) 12–13, 38, 103–4, 143, 144–5, 150, 152–4, 153, 157–8, 163–76 Variorum edition (1938) 284 plays: All’s Well That Ends Well 89, 364–5 Antony and Cleopatra 228, 324, 335 n.22, 384 As You Like It 16, 18, 245–6, 251–8, 345–7 Cardenio (with Fletcher) 361–3 Coriolanus 336 n.37 Cymbeline 18, 345, 347–54, 355 n.18, 357 n.41, 357 n.42, 357 n.45, 388–9, 389, 390–1

440

Index

Hamlet 14, 15, 54, 86, 89–90, 111–12, 186–94, 203–15, 215 n.4, 215 n.7, 216 n.9, 217 n.27, 217 n.29, 218 n.38, 218 n.42, 219 n.44, 224–38, 231, 239 n.10, 240 n.25, 240 n.29, 241 n.31, 241 n.37, 241 n.43, 242 n.46, 299, 300, 307–8, 354 n.5, 363, 373, 402–3 Henry IV Part 1 365, 366, 374 Henry IV Part 2 56, 60 n.16, 61 n.27 Henry V 60 n.16, 391 Henry VI Part 1 89, 388 Henry VI Part 2 89, 390 Henry VI Part 3 89, 388 Henry VIII, or All is True (with Fletcher) 87, 89, 98 n.10, 356 n.40, 365 King Lear 54, 86, 89–90, 225, 227–8, 390 Love’s Labour’s Lost 19, 54, 150, 364–72, 367, 384 Love’s Labour’s Won 19, 363–6 Macbeth 86, 89, 228, 240 n.19, 248, 387 Measure for Measure 89, 228–9, 384 Merchant of Venice, The 36, 54, 324–5, 328, 385, 391 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 54, 56, 62 n.38, 226 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 54, 249–50, 265–6, 277 n.11, 364 Much Ado About Nothing 54, 58, 60 n.16, 329, 364, 385, 387, 390 Othello 18, 36, 51, 86, 325, 329, 334 n.14, 343–4, 354 n.1, 383, 417–18 Pericles (with Wilkins) 55, 61 n.30, 87, 309 n.10, 361, 384 Richard II 40, 54, 62 n.40 Richard III 54, 89 Romeo and Juliet 60 n.16, 97, 368–9 Taming of the Shrew, The 54, 364 Tempest, The 9, 76–7, 325, 356 n.40, 364 Timon of Athens (with Middleton) 85, 88–9 Titus Andronicus 17–18, 89, 320–21, 325–33, 333 n.3, 333 n.6, 337 n.46, 337 n.49, 338 n.55, 338 n.57, 366, 373, 388–9, 397 n.34 Troilus and Cressida 54, 56–8, 60 n.16, 301, 385, 403

Twelfth Night 16, 18, 274–6, 279 n.42, 348–9, 364, 390 Two Noble Kinsmen, The (with Fletcher) 55, 87, 361 Winter’s Tale, The 9, 76–7, 331–2, 361, 364, 383 poems: ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ 152 ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ 104 Rape of Lucrece, The 104, 107, 286–7, 389 sonnets 13–14, 38, 103–4, 143–5, 150, 152–4, 157–8, 163–76, 159 n.6, 177 n.17, 194, 385, 389 Venus and Adonis 104, 366 disputed works: ‘A Funeral Elegy’ 102 Arden of Faversham 10, 85, 90, 94–7, 97 n.2 Double Falsehood 85, 362 Edward III 85, 87–8 Passionate Pilgrim, The 12, 16–17, 104, 112–13, 143–5, 149–50, 157–8, 281–7, 288, 293, 295 n.5, 295 n.13, 295 n.14, 295 n.17, 366 Sir Thomas More 10, 85, 89, 90–7 see also London Prodigal; Sir John Oldcastle; Puritan; Thomas Lord Cromwell; Tragedy of Locrine; Yorkshire Tragedy Sharpe, Will 85 Shaw, Justin P. 354 n.1 Sherman, William H. 4, 305 Shirley, James 52 Shohet, Lauren 67 Sidney, Mary. See Herbert, Mary Sidney Sidney, Philip Astrophel and Stella 12, 145, 146, 148, 152 Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, The (with Herbert, 1598) 145, 148–9, 150 New Arcadia (1590) 272 Sillars, Stuart 241 n.37 Simmes, Valentine (printer) 40 Simpson, James 127 Sir John Oldcastle 61 n.29, 309 n.10 Sir Thomas More 10, 85, 90–7 Arden Shakespeare, Third Series edition (2011) 85, 89

Index Closel translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 2016) 90–7 manuscript (1600/1603–4) 91–4 in RSC edition (2005) 93 Skipwith, William 79 n.17 slash (/) 1, 4–7, 95–6 Smethwick, John (publisher) 54, 60 n.16 Smith, Bruce 4 Smith, Daniel Starza 144 Smith, John Printed Grammar, The (1755) 5 Smith, Keverne 350 Smock Alley (theatre) 224–5 Smyth, Adam 38, 305, 373 social hierarchies enforcement of 265–76, 320–1, 325–8 mobility within 32, 34–8, 327–8 see also community; race; gender songs and music 18–19, 73–4, 240 n.19, 343–54, 354 n.1, 354 n.5, 356 n.40, 357 n.46. See also As You Like It; contrafacta; Cymbeline; ‘Fear no more … ’; Othello; Twelfth Night; ‘The Willow Song’ Songs and Sonettes (Tottel, 1557) 12, 146 ‘A Sonnet’ (in Folger MS V.a.162) 166–9, 172–3 sonnet books (printed, pre-1700) 12, 143–58, 146, 151, 153 (see also organization; page design; sonnet sequences) sonnet sequences 12, 143–58. See also organization; miscellanies; sonnet books sonnets (Shakespeare) 12–13, 143–4, 159 n.6, 163–76, 177 n.17, 385 Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (1997) 144 in eighteenth-century editions 194 Sonnet 2 171–3 (see also ‘Spes Altera’) Sonnet 3 169–70, 175 Sonnet 11 164 Sonnet 24 175 Sonnet 31 164–6 Sonnet 71 166–9, 172–3 (see also ‘A Sonnet’) Sonnet 105 175 Sonnet 111 389 see also Shakespeare: collected poems;

441

‘the Friend’; Shake-speares Sonnets sonnets (Wroth). See Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd, 1592?) 97 n.2, 368 A sparke of friendship and warme goodwill … (Churchyard, 1588) 34–6 Spenser, Edmund 37, 146 Amoretti (1595) 33–4, 36 ‘Spes Altera’ 171–3, 172 stage directions 77, 205–6, 208, 213–14, 215 n.4, 229–30, 326–7, 330, 368–9, 396 n.29 stationers 51–2, 71, 291, 393. See also publishers: early modern; printers: early modern; booksellers: early modern Stationers’ Company 291 Stationers’ Register 71, 212, 290–1, 361, 368 Steevens, George (editor) 107, 225, 236, 242 n.46, 290, 301 Stein, Gertrude 192 Stern, Tiffany 3, 29–30, 300, 344, 349–50 Stewart, Alan 382 Stewart, Susan 267, 274 Stone, George Winchester 237–8 Strachan, W. J. 185 Sykes, Kimberley (director) As You Like It (RSC, 2019) 246, 251–53, 254, 255 Dido, Queen of Carthage (RSC, 2017) 251 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare) 364 1631 quarto 54 (see also Smethwick, John) Tarquin and Lucrece (Shakespeare). See The Rape of Lucrece Tate, Nahum adaptation of King Lear (1681) 225, 227 Taub, Shaina 245, 253, 259 n.1 Taylor, Gary 51, 171–3, 206–7, 208, 349–50 Taylor, Neil 204, 207, 212, 307 Taymor, Julie (director) 249, 250 Titus Andronicus film (1993) 330, 338 n.57

442

Index

teaching 3, 21, 91, 96, 125–7, 402 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 9, 325, 356 n.40, 364 masque in 1623 folio 76–7 Theatre, the (playhouse) 123, 131, 133, 134, 135–6 theatre makers 223–38, 245–59. See also actors; book-holders; directors; prompters Theatre Workshop, the 250, 253 theatrical practices 66–78, 123–38, 203–15, 218 n.43, 223–38, 245–59, 319–33, 344–54, 383–4. See also blackness: in early modern performance; cosmetics; costumes; documents of performance; playhouse manuscripts (pre-1700); playhouses; playing companies; promptbooks (post-1700); properties, repertories; revision; songs and music; theatre makers; working texts (post-1700) theatrical productions 15–16, 67–70, 74, 223–38, 245–59, 256, 257, 260 n.5. See also under individual play entries; performance texts; theatrical practices Theobald, Lewis (author and editor) 108–9, 225, 229, 301 The Cave of Poverty, a Poem: Written in Imitation of Shakespeare (1715) 108 Double Falsehood (1727) 362 Thiel, Sara B. T. 326 Thomas Lord Cromwell 1602 quarto 52 in editions of Shakespeare 309 n.10 Thompson, Ann 204, 207, 212, 307 Thorndike, A. H. 76 Thorpe, Thomas (publisher) 12, 38, 163 Three Ladies of London, The (Wilson, 1582/4) 126–7, 134, 137, 138 n.4 Tilney, Edmund (Master of the Revels) Sir Thomas More 10, 85, 90–7 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare and Middleton) Heliodora translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 2003) 88 O’Shea/Closel translation (Brazilian Portuguese, forthcoming) 88–9

in Oxford Middleton (2007) 88 in Oxford Shakespeare, second edition (2006) 88 Oxford Worlds Classics edition (2004) 85, 88 title pages 61 n.30, 80 n.21, 105, 281, 365–8, 367, 392 Archaionomia (Folger) 20, 403–8, 404, 406, 415, 418–19 authorial attribution 8–9, 10, 60 n.16, 92, 95, 144, 150, 152, 288, 293, 369 dates 212, 284–5, 392, 393, 405 (see also ‘Pavier Quartos’) performance and genre associations 8–9, 51–8, 61 n.27, 71, 75, 225–6, 234 titles 61 n.29, 143, 228 alternative (plays) 364–5 narrative (poems) 146, 149, 157 numbered headings (poems) 146, 148–9, 150, 152, 155–7, 156 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 17–18, 60 n.16, 89, 388–9, 397 n.34, 397 n.40 1594 quarto 330, 366, 373 Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (1995) 327, 338 n.55 and race 319–33, 333 n.3, 333 n.6, 337 n.46, 337 n.49, 338 n.55, 338 n.57, 338 n.59 Ravenscroft adaptation (1687) 338 n. 55 Taymor film (1999) 330, 338 n.57 ‘To his deare friend Maister Thomas Cranley’ (Wither) in Abuses, Stript and Whipt (Wither, 1613) 167 in Folger MS V.a.162 167 ‘To his deere frend Mr Stephen Jackson’ (in Folger MS V.a.162) 166–71, 168 ‘To his singular good friend Mr Thomas Mousley’ (Pick, in Folger MS V.a.162) 169 ‘To Mr Edward Fowkes’ (Deane) 173–6 Tobin, J. J. M. 102 Tonson, Jacob [I] (publisher) 104, 106, 114 n.18, 114 n.22, 225–9 Tonson, Jacob [II] (publisher) 106 Tottel, Richard Songs and Sonettes (1557) 12, 146

Index Tragedy of Arthur, The (Phillips, 2011) 292–4 Tragedy of Locrine, The 309 n.10 Tragedy of Ophelia, The (Ecke, 2009) 186. See also artists’ books. translation and translations 84–97. See also under play titles translators 84–97. See also individual names travel narratives 33, 321–2 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) 385 1609 quarto, second state 54, 56–8, 60 n.16 in 1623 first folio 301 digital facsimiles of quartos 403 Doran production (RSC, 2018) 247 Troublesome Reign of King John, The (1611 quarto) 51–2 True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, The (1595) 366 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 16, 18, 274–6, 279 n.42, 364, 390 songs 348–9 Two Noble Kinsman, The (Shakespeare and Fletcher) 1634 quarto 55 absence from 1623 folio 361 Funck translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 2016) 87 O’Shea translation (Brazilian Portuguese, 2017) 87 typography. See page design Urania (Wroth) 33, 264–76, 277 n.15 The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, Part 1 (U1, 1621 printed folio) 16, 154, 264–5, 268–9, 272 The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (U2, manuscript) 16, 264–76 Van der Gucht, Michael 106 variants 84, 89–97, 106, 111, 172–5, 284, 288–9, 307, 403 Q2/F1 Hamlet 204–15, 215 n.7, 216 n.9, 217 n.27, 218 n.42, 219 n.44 see also cruxes, textual; editorial practices; revision

443

Vaughan, Virginia Mason 323 Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare) 1593 quarto 366 in eighteenth-century editions 104 verse compilations. See compilations Vickers, Brian 89 Walker, Greg 135 Walker, Robert (publisher) 225–9, 239 n.16, 240 n.19 Walkley, Thomas (publisher) 9, 51 Wall, Wendy 323, 329 Warburton, John 361 Warburton, William (editor) 108, 109 Warley, Christopher 145 Warren, Roger 350 watermarks 20, 285, 393. See also paper; papermaking Wayne, Valerie 391 Webster, Benjamin (actor) 237 Welden, Elizabeth 170 Werstine, Paul 29–30, 206–7, 208, 215 n.4, 218 n.42 West, Richard 55 whiteness, racial 29–44, 73, 178 n.29, 319–33, 335 n.19, 385. See also blackness; race Whole Contention, The (Shakespeare, 1619) 61 n.27 Wiggins, Martin 136, 373 Wilkins, George Pericles (with Shakespeare) 55, 87, 309 n.10, 361, 384 Wilkinson, Tate (actor) 233 Wilks, Robert (editor) 225–6, 227–8, 230, 231, 232, 234 ‘The Willow Song’ (in Othello) 346–7, 354 n.1 in 1622 quarto 344 in 1623 folio 344 in manuscript sources 343–4 see also Othello; songs and music Wilson, J. Dover 29, 132, 203–5, 208–9, 210, 215 n.4, 371–2 Wilson, Robert Three Ladies of London, The (1582/4) 126–7, 134, 137, 138 n.4

444 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare) 9, 331–2, 364, 383 in 1623 folio 76–7 licensed playhouse manuscript 361 Wise, Andrew (publisher) 54, 56 Wither, George Abuses, Stript and Whipt (1613) 167 ‘To his deare friend Maister Thomas Cranley’ 167 Wolpe, Lisa (actor) 256 Woman in the Moon, The (Lyly) 137 Woman Killed with Kindness (Heywood, 1607) 368 women and womanhood 62 n.42, 66–78, 264–76, 343 patriarchy and oppression 35–6, 72–4, 77, 319–33, 383–94 (see also sexual violence) pregnancy and motherhood 170, 323–7, 329–33 336 n.37 (see also babies and children; reproduction) race 33–6, 319–33, 385 (see also blackness; race; whiteness)

Index see also desire; gender; men and masculinity; sex Woolery, Laurie 253 working scripts (post-1700) 223–38, 231, 309 n.6. See also performance texts; playhouse manuscripts (pre-1700); promptbooks (post-1700) Worthen, W. B. 3, 223 Woudhuysen, H. R. 106 Wright, William Aldis (editor) 86 writing 305, 384, 386–7, 394 materials and tools 389–91, 397 n.40 (see also ink, paper) see also handwriting; scribes Wroth, Mary Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 145, 154–8, 156, 277 n.15 Urania (Parts 1 and 2) 16, 33, 154, 262–76, 277 n.15 Yachnin, Paul 74 Yorkshire Tragedy, A 61 n.29, 309 n.10 Yosemite National Park 255–8 Zepheria (1594) 146

445

446