Notes on "Shakespeare and the New Bibliography" - Chapter 4

While printed books inherently provide evidence of printshop practices, since there is no extant dramatic manuscript used for printed copy, bibliographers that wish to reconstruct the kind of manuscript a play was printed from have to rely on circumstantial evidence. This includes the information contained in stage directions, textual corruption, and mislineation (50).

Scientific advances in the 20th century have enabled bibliographic work that was impossible in earlier eras. New and improved photographic techniques have enabled photo-facsimiles of printed books and manuscripts, and new and improved scientific instruments have enabled researchers with access to the original documents to discover more about them than would otherwise be knowable (50).

cf Maunde Thompson Shakespeare's Handwriting. 1916.

cf W. W. Greg Henslowe Papers. 1916.

cf W. W. Greg Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses (1931).

"The confusion of the More manuscript would have made it useless for prompting" (57). Gurr and Stern have elsewhere noted that prompting is an anachronistic term, and Wilson's sense of the duties of a "prompter" in the period may be a bit skewed.

"Prompt-books differ very much among themselves" (58). Amen. Wilson goes on to discuss the divers ways in which a prompt-book acquired annotation for use in the playhouse on page 59.

"In one respect, and in only one, prompt-books are alike: they are all in folio" (60).

The only extant part from an early modern play that has survived is is for Orlando in Greene's Orlando Furioso. This part contains evidence of errors and omissions that appear to have been corrected by the owner of he part, probably Alleyn (60).

"The part of the actor who played the title-role in 'Duk Moraud' survives in a fourteenth-century hand on a margin of an Assize Roll for Norfolk and Suffolk of the second half of the thirteenth century in the Bodleian Library; we have also the part of God from a late text of a miracle play (c. 1570-80) which gives one or two stage-directions" (60).

c.f. J.Q. Adams Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas.

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as portion of forty-two lines was called a 'length'" (60, footnote). Wilson cites the OED.

It is unlikely that most, if any, of the King's Men's playbooks were burned in the Globe fire of 1621, as Sir Henry Wotton wrote three days after the fire that 'nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks.' While the Fortune plays did lose their books and wardrobe when that playhouse burned, the Fortune burned at midnight, and the Globe during the middle of a performance, and it is probable that, if anything of value was stored at the Globe, the actors would have rescued it (61 - 62). Of course, if you believe Gurr, the Globe was perfunctory to the operation of the Kings Men by this time, and so it is plausible that they stored their more valuable materials at the Blackfriars.

"The most serious defect in a text supplied by a man like Crane would not lie in its 'general imperfections' but in its general perfection. In tidying up his copy and clearing away obscurities he might sometimes misinterpret the intention of his author and obliterate all chances of recovering his original" (64).

Summary

Extant dramatic documents from early modern London are rare, but they give us valuable glimpses into playhouse practice, which can help us understand how some of the plays came to print. Of particular interest is Wilson's acknowledgement that Crane, as a professional scribe, would have perfected the copy he was working from. As scientific advances in the early 20th century enabled new kinds of bibliographic work, we might also consider the types of advances 21st century has made in determining the future of bibliographic studies.

Notes on Prefatory Material and Notes to Nicola Bennett 2000 edition of The Merry Devil of Edmonton

The London Globe produced a workshop reading of The Merry Devil in 1998/1999, and Nicola Bennett's 2000 edition is one of the results of that work. Bennett's is one of the most important editions of Merry Devil for me to use as a point of comparison because it is so recent. The preparation of such an edition little more than a decade ago would hardly suggest a new edition as necessary unless it suffered from scholarly defect, was produced under a different editorial rationale, or some combination thereof. Given the resources available to Bennet (which are, according to her acknowledgments, vastly superior to mine), it would seem improbable that she has suffered from a lack of materials. To the contrary, the available resources of the Globe may have worked against her in preparing this edition.

In "A Note from the Coordinator," Sonia Ritter describes the Globe cast playing darkness without resorting to torches as props, but in such a way that is inconsistent with American Shakespeare Center techniques for playing darkness. Ritter explains "having established lack of light to see, playing out to the audience clarified thought: playing to nowhere i particular denoted confusion" (vii). The American Shakespeare Center, by contrast, explores the convention of actors trying to see other characters in a dark scene, but either failing (keeping their eyes unfocussed, or by fixing their eyes on some other point where they think their addressee is standing), or using their other senses, most especially their hearing, to help them identify the location of a speaker. The relative intimacy of the Blackfriars may account for this difference, but our performance space in Philadelphia was even more intimate than the Blackfriars, which is a condition the King's Men were likely to have found themselves in when touring their original production.

Ritter also describes some of the missing scenes being filled in by the actors in the workshop, and notes "Dumb shows were, after all, prevalent in this era." That may be true, and certainly there is evidence available to suggest that actors commonly improvised (i.e. Hamlet's injunction to the players), and that comic scenes were sometimes simply excised from printed text's (Jones' introduction to Tamburlaine), but the scene described in The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton is more intricate than simple pantomime would allow. There must have been some textual material to accompany the misadventure of Smug on the sign of the George, if for no other reason than Smug, like the rest of the clowns in Merry Devil, is rarely content to be silent for long.

Standing in testimony against the Globe's construction of this text is the cast list of the workshop itself. 17 individual cast members are listed for a play in which the concluding scene calls for 11. While 17 would certainly not be outside of the number of players available to the King's Men, according to Stern's formulation, it is unlikely that hired men would have accompanied the sharer's on tour. The number of actors available for the Globe's workshop allowed them to use more bodies on stage than is likely the King's Men would have had available.

Bennett is correct in her agreement with Greg that Abrams takes the scene describing the sign business in the Life and Death pamphlet too literally (85). Yet the importance of the pamphlet in determining the course of the scene is still plain: either the pamphlet predates the play, and thus the play was likely inspired by the pamphlet, or the precise opposite of this. For our production, the most theatrically convenient way of staging the presence of the sign was to leave it off stage, which seemed appropriate to our touring needs, and satisfies nearly all of the requirements of the cut text printed in 1608.

Analysis

Bennett has got a lot right with her 2000 edition of Merry Devil, but I still have some issues with this edition. The resources available to the Globe in creating this text are more expansive than the cut version of the text printed in 1608 seems to indicate. Ultimately, the Globe workshop never had to solve some of the textual problems present in the text. Apart from the fact that they did not mount a full production, they had more resources available than the King's Men would have had on tour, and their doubling ignores some of the comic possibilities suggested by the text.

Bennet, Nicola Ed. The Merry Devil of Edmonton. New York. Globe Education and Theatre Arts Books/Routledge. 2000.

Ritter, Sonia. "A Note from the Coordinator." The Merry Devil of Edmonton. Nicola Bennet, Ed. New York. Globe Education and Theatre Arts Books/Routledge. 2000.

On whose authority?

We don't know who wrote The Merry Devil, as I've previously pointed out, which raises the question, on whose authority do we authorize a text? This same question, of course, can be turned to the plays of William Shakespeare himself. The theatricians of Renaissance London didn't know or care about our post-enlightenment concept of the author, that solitary genius motivated by the divine spark to create "art." They cared about putting on a good show, defined as one which would make money.

If Mr. Henslowe buys a play and decides it needs some fixing, great. He'll probably hire someone to do it. He did it with Dr. Faustus, afterall (and documented the transaction), and there's no reason to think that the Chamberlain's/King's Men didn't do exactly the same thing. Remember, Shakespeare produced about two plays a year, and the playhouses (when not closed due to plague) liked to perform 6 days a week. They performed many more plays than Shakespeare could have possibly written. Merry Devil was one of them.

So here's the thing; if one of the reasons that Shakespeare's plays are so good (as Gary Taylor would argue) is that they were the product of the best playwright working with the best players; in other words, if the company revised Shakespeare's plays while performing them (as is not uncommonly done today), they would have most assuredly done so with another playwright. Like whomever wrote Merry Devil.

So when this play is finally published in quarto format in 1608, how did they "authorize" it? In other words, how did they establish it as a piece of work worth paying money to own? Dr. Menzer directed me to look at the title page, so lets see what that says....

 

The line I want to draw your attention to is the one that reads "As it hath been sundry times acted, by his Majesties Servants, at the Globe, on the bank-side." The authority this play is claiming is not that it was written by a specific individual, but first that it was performed "sundry times" (and plays that suck don't get sundry performances), second that it was performed by the servants of the king, and third that it was performed in their large, public theatre. In other words, both the audience and the king are implicitly referenced as the authorizing authorities for this publication. 

I'm finding that there are two primary types of editions of a text that I'm likely to work with: documentary editions, which seek to re-create the specific instance of a specific text (like the first quarto, completely disregarding anything that might have happened in the five subsequent quartos). That type of edition is authorized by the fact that it is a preservation of the way the text once looked, no more no less.

The critical edition is the one we're more familiar with. That's the kind where, in an ideal world, an editor has examined all possible editions of a text and based on sound logical judgment creates an accessible version replete with foot and end notes for the modern reader. The authority of this type of text derives from it's having compared and contrasted several different printings.

When I started this project, I was aiming towards the latter edition, and to some degree, that's still the trajectory that I'm following, but creating a text for performance is a little bit different than a text for study. To be sure, the performance text usually derives from the critical text (at least in my productions), which requires an appeal to another sort of authority: my experience as a director.

Here's the rub: I trust myself more as a director than I do as a scholar. My performance text of this play will therefore speak with more authority to me than my critical text will. That just gives me more of an incentive to make sure that I've looked at as many editions of this text as possible, and that my judgment in making emendations is very, very sound.

That said, I've just finished going over my transcription of Q1 with a fine tooth comb, and notating it liberally where something even seemed a little bit odd to me. Next, I'll be moving on to a line by line comparison between my Q1 transcription and, you guessed it, the second quarto (Q2) of 1612. I read somewhere that Q2 and Q3 were little more than reprints of Q1; if so, that may be even more reason to go over them with a fine tooth comb as well: what better way to make sure I have missed, or misinterpreted, anything from my Q1 transcription?