Notes on Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor - Chapter 3

The quartos of Richard II, Richard III, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Much Ado printed by Andrew Wise represent ideal case studies to test the theory of McKerrow, Pollard, and Greg that Shakespeare had a direct hand in the preparation of his works for print. These texts are considered authoritative, and no publisher ever invested so heavily in printing Shakespeare's works while he was still alive. If Shakespeare worked with anyone for initial or subsequent printing of his plays, it would have been Wise (91).

Paul Werstine has demonstrated that both McKerrow's description of an 'author's original draft' and Greg's of 'foul papers' are 'a purely ideal form of printer's copy of which there are no examples among extant dramatic manuscripts' (91).

Greg and Pollard have conceived of an extremely linear path of transmission that led from the author's hand to the prompter's book to the printed form, but Gurr's argument that the written text existed in different states at different times, and served different purposes challenges this notion. Scott McMillan argues that transcriptions of performances were sometimes offered to patrons or given to printers; he supports this by noting Mosely's address to the reader in Beaumont and Fletcher's Comedies and Tragedies, which notes that "the Actours omitted some Scenes and Passages (with the Authour's consent) as occasion led them; and when private friends desir'd a Copy, they then (and justly too)transcribed what they Acted.  But now you have both All that was Acted, and all that was not" (92).

New Bibliography, generally speaking, attempts to streamline the process of print, which may cause New Bibliographers to overlook realities of print house practice: type setters were expected to faithfully reproduce the copy they were given, and paid more attention to the details of their craft than the dramatic action of the plays they were setting (94).

It is possible that an annotating reader, maybe Shakespeare or Wise himself, contributed annotations to the early printings of the Wise Quartos, such as the correction of a wrong speech prefix in Richard II (95).

Wise published Shakespeare's three best-selling quartos as his first three plays (Richard II, Richard III, 1 Henry IV); whether this was exceptional foresight or good luck, it has lead both Lukas Erne and Andrew Gurr to speculate that the Chamberlain's Men had a regular relationship with Wise, but his relationship may be stronger than either speculate; effectively making him the Chamberlain's first official publisher (95-98). 

Wise had no strong ties to the Stationer's Company, and in this way he was not unique among printers of plays during the period. Other printers, such as Thomas Millington and Richard Oliff, seem to have printed dramatic works only after coming into contact with a specific company or an agent of that company. Massai describes numerous other printers and stationers doing likewise (98-99). 

Most of the books Wise printed come from three authors: Thomas Nashe, Thomas Playfere, and William Shakespeare; all of whom were under the direct patronage of Sir George Carey, Earl of Hunsdon. It is likely that Wise had a connection with one of these three authors, and to have met the other two as a result of this connection, as patrons seldom had a personal hand in the printing of their company's works (100).

Revenues from selling a playbook for printing were small; Peter Blayney argues that companies may have sold their playbooks as a way of generating publicity for their performances. Printing playscripts was a means of advertisement (101). It sounds like I definitely need to look up this article in Shakespeare Quarterly.

"Substantive variants in speech prefixes, stage directions and dialogue in the second and third quartos of Richard II, Richard III, and 1 Henry IV suggest that they were corrected as they were repeatedly reprinted between 1598 and 1602" (102).

Emendations that require knowledge of the plot of a play are more realistically going to come from an annotating reader than a print-house typesetter (103). 

The publisher was as likely as the author to have a hand in emending manuscripts for print, and while it is possible that Shakespeare did take an interest in revising the Wise Quartos for subsequent printings, especially as his popularity was then peaking, he did so more like an annotating reader of the 16th century than as a revising author as E.A.J. Honigmann or Lukas Erne describe (105).

Summary

The Wise Quartos were both some of the earliest examples of Shakespeare's works in print, and some of the most successful. As these quartos were regularly reprinted, and as their reprints require knowledge of dramatic action, it is likely that an annotating reader had a hand in these revisions. Since the texts are considered authorial, these annotations were perhaps done either by Shakespeare himself, or with his approval, but that cannot be demonstrated, and even if it could, the annotations do not conform to New Bibliographical conceptions of an author revising their work. 

Notes on Rescripting Shakespeare - Chapter 9

Dessen has a chapter devoted to "Compressing Henry VI" and to the Taming of the Shrew, but those sound a little bit too specific in their focus to be of much interest to me at the moment, so I'm skipping over them to Chapter 9: The Editor as Rescripter.

"In the process of rescripting directors often take on the role of editors... conversely, an editor wrestling with a problematic passage or stage direction may consciously or inadvertently take on the role of a director and make choices according to a sense of how X could be, should be, or would have been staged" (209). That's particularly useful, as a central part of the argument of my developing thesis is that the role of the editor and director should be combined.

Editors need to make decisions to help clarify plays for a first time reader, but in so doing they run the risk of limiting the options available when using the text for performance (209).

cf Honigmann, E A J. Myriad-minded Shakespeare. 2nd Ed. London. 1998. esp p 187.

cf Cambridge UP's Shakespeare in Production series, esp Christine Dymkowski's 2000 edition of The Tempest and Trevor Griffiths 1996 edition of Midsummer.

As Folio Facsimiles and other "original texts" become increasingly available to theatre professionals, the role of the editor can more closely resemble "unscripting," the process of adapting a play text to more closely resemble a text designed for readers of books than for producers of plays (209 - 210).

An individual theatrical choice will not undo three centuries of theatrical tradition (211).

Signs of emendations of stage directions should not provoke the question of which choice is correct, but what is the function of the signal of the stage direction, and whom is it intended for (217).

cf Wells, Stanley. "The Editor and the Theatre: Editorial Treatment of Stage Directions." Re-editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader. Oxford. Oxford UP. 1984. p76, 68. This for Wells' justification to edit texts without resorting to editorial precedent.

cf Kidnie, Margaret Jane. "Text, Performance, and the Editors: Staging Shakespeare's Drama." Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol. 51. 2000. p 464. -- "the responsible editor of modernized editions will necessarily adopt an interventionalist approach to staging."

cf Thomson, Leslie. "Broken Brackets and 'Mended Texts: Stage Directions in the Oxford Shakespeare." Renaissance Drama. Vol. 19. 1988. 175-193.

"Once the editors assumptions about performance are encoded into the script, it becomes difficult to historicize this intervention for the reader as a matter of debate and contested interpretation" (468). (qtd. in Dessen 218).

Wells and Taylor, in their Oxford Complete Works, adopted a policy of not indicating where stage directions were editorial in nature where the action was indisputable, but the question has remained: indisputable to whom? Dessen cites the example of "they kiss" in Taming of the Shrew; by not indicating the editorial nature of the stage direction, they present an event that is not fixed in sequence by the author as being authorial (219). Yes. Agreed. This context helps clarify some questions for my presentation of the edition.

Where there is a disagreement between a clearly articulated stage direction in the Folio text and editorial tradition, as is the case with the entrance of Malvolio cross gartered, which occurs in the Folio two lines before most editors place his entrance, it is better to field test the options in a theatrical environment than it is to cut off possible directorial interpretation (221). Yes. Agreed. I want to produce an edition of Merry Devil that both enabled interpretation and provides potential solutions to problems. My edits have been conservative enough that I think I can pull it off.

Massed entrances at the tops of scenes in some of the plays have been attributed to the scribe Ralph Crane, and editors have commonly shifted these into individual entrances just before they first speak their lines. It is perhaps significant that Merry Wives is among the plays where this happens (Two Gentleman and Winters Tale being the others) (224). There are a couple of these in Merry Devil, and we had to pare back on one to allow Victoria and Rachel to change from Smug and Banks into Dorcas and Harry. Hmm....

Speaking about Titus Andronicus: "Given the range of options in the Quarto, the user of these modern editions should ask: is making such a choice - on the page, without the benefit of the trial-and-error of rehearsal - the function of the editor? Where does "editing" end and interpretation or rescripting begin? (233)

Again on Titus: "do students, critics, actors, an directors want from their editions (that are to serve as playscripts) a plausible but iffy decision that may in turn close down equally valid or theatrically interesting options of which the reader is no longer aware? For me, the most fruitful answers will arise not from editors working on the page but rather from "field-testing" the script that survives in the 1594 Quarto" (234).

Dessen continues to question the editorial practices of Wells, Honingmann, and Pafford: why is it the place of an editor, who might be a brilliant bibliographic scholar but ignorant about theatrical practice, modern or early modern, to determine what is theatrically obvious or effective? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" (234).

Analysis

Dessen really drives the point home here: editors will often make interpretive gestures in preparing their texts just as directors will in preparing their productions, but this is a role that is not necessarily best suited to the editor. Directors should be cautious about subverting literary possibilities with their own interpretations, but editors should be more so. A director risks failing to communicate something in a single production, but an editor who goes too far will limit the dramatic possibilities for many productions.