Notes on The Disintegration of Shakespeare

From the work of Stanley Wells, I now turn the clock back to E. K. Chambers' 12 May 1924 lecture "The Disintegration of Shakespeare." I am, of course, reading a printed copy of the lecture he read, but without much indication who he read this to, who published the lecture, when they published it, where it was published, or any of the like information that would be useful in tracking it down as a source. All I can really offer is that Mary Baldwin College owns a copy.

Chambers, you may or may not know, is the man behind The Elizabethan Stage, which is an excellent go to source for just about anything related to... well... the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage. Fancy that.

The tradition of ascribing the works of Shakespeare to someone other than Shakespeare can be traced back to Edward Ravenscroft, who printed a post-Restoration adaptation of Titus Andronicus in 1687. He claimed that he had heard from "some anciently conversant with the stage" that Shakespeare had adapted the play from a pre-existing one (3).

If one looks hard enough at statistics and individual stylistic elements, a great number of potential originators, emenders, and contributors, or separate authors can be named as having either a partial or complete hand in the works of Shakespeare. The ascriptions of these stylistic markers have not, however, been consistent among scholars, who can rarely do better than make weak arguments for non-Stratfordian ascriptions of authorship (3-7).

Proponents of multiple authors, emenders, etc have had a tendency to defend themselves as being the preserves of Shakespeare rather than detractors. They tend to ascribe the "chaff" to authors whom they perceive as being of a lesser stature, and thus the choicest bits that remain of the plays are ascribed to Shakespeare.  These scholars, however, display their own biases towards material, and seem to forget that the cannon of Shakespeare can only be determined by the extant body of work ascribed to him. There is no other concrete basis for determining which works belong to Shakespeare and which do not. (7-8). I can't help but think of something Roslyn Knutson said to me in an email: "did you ever notice how Shakespeare is never found to have made a worse revision."

"I come to accept Shakespeare, not to praise him" (8).

Taken as a whole, the canon of Shakespeare's work reveals an author who was open to experimentation and even imitation. If some of Shakespeare's lines feel like Marlowe's or Greene's, it could very plausibly be because Shakespeare experimented with writing in their styles as part of his own development as a writer. Likewise, we need neither pretend that these experiments were always pleasing, nor that Shakespeare wrote every line at the height of his own creative genius (8 - 9).

While some will dismiss certain lays or passages from Shakespeare's canon based on metrical or stylistic variation that does not conform to a projected development curve, these scholars ignore the fact that the development of one in their craft very rarely can be plotted along a perfectly smooth growth curve. General trends in improvement can still be seen across the plays, but specific variations from those trends do not invalidate the overall progression of the man's mastery of his craft, and those lines/passages/plays should not be dismissed as being "inauthentic" simply because they do not conform to an ideal statistical regularity (9 - 10).

It is likewise impossible to ascribe certain uses of words within Shakespeare's works to other authors because we cannot clearly establish a clear vocabulary for other authors. Even if it were possible to do so, it is just as plausible that Shakespeare borrowed words he heard frequently and incorporated into his own work as it is that someone else added them after being brought in to do a "punch-up" of Shakespeare's scripts (11 - 12). Let us not forget that Shakespeare was primarily an actor in a company that operated on a repertory system that would put most modern theatres to shame. He came into contact with the works, and the words of other writers on a daily basis, and needed to have a clever ear for their meanings and pronunciations in order to function in his primary trade. Most of the plays of the period are now lost, and thus it is impossible to say exactly where Shakespeare's expansive vocabulary comes from, but it is possible, probable even, that his regular contact with the work of the most active poets of his generation contributed to his own work.

The Folio cannot be considered a complete record of which plays were written by Shakespeare because, for whatever reason, Heminges and Condell omitted at least nine plays from the Folio that had been previously published under the name (or initials) of Shakespeare (13 - 14).

Pollard proposes that the Thomas Moore manuscript was submitted to the Master of the Revels as it is, but this is unlikely because it exists in a sloppy state. If the Master of the Revels had to concern himself with deciphering foul papers and piecing together how a playwright may have intended a scene to read, he would have never been able to make it through the quantity of plays that would have had to pass through his office (16 - 17). I am once aain reminded of William Proctor Williams' assessment that printers would have insisted on fair copy for type setting because they were in the business of printing books and not of attempting to decipher foul papers. The Revels office would have been interested in its own administrative efficiency over the inconvenience to playing companies of having to have fair copy prepared. Just as printing hourses today insist on "manuscript" submissions in particular file formats for ease of their own house practices.

Henslowe's diary chronicles a process of revision that seems to favor the addition of new material to established plays rather than of re-writing old scenes of new ones. This trend seems to be confirmed by Sir Henry Herbert's notes (19 - 20).

Analysis

Chambers takes a fairly conservative position at the dawn of the era of seeing the canon of Shakespeare's works as being the products of a process that may have included revision and multiple authors. I take for granted that a play text is a living document because, whether intentional or not, and whether subtly or not, the play text is almost always altered in performance. Whether the extant copies of the plays we have derive from deliberate or accidental emendations in performance, the original text as penned by the playwright, or a text later penned by the playwright (or another playwright) that take these changes into account is unknown. Chambers argues that we ought, in the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary, regard the plays we know as Shakespeare's as having been written by Shakespeare, and I agree with him in principle, but I cannot ignore my knowledge of modern theatrical practice.

Still, it is worth considering his calculations from Henslowe's diary. It comes as perfectly logical that the records of most play revision indicate older plays being updated with new scenes. "Newly revised and expanded" can be a money-making tag on any written work. It is perhaps worth considering that, if Shakespeare did revise his plays, it may have been toward this end, which is supported by the evidence of the addition of the fly scene in Titus Andronicus.

Where this all comes to bear on Merry Devil: the play seems to have undergone little alteration across its six quartos. If the extant copy was cut, for whatever reason, why not include some of those scenes that were cut? Unless they were lost. Why not add new scenes, or have the old ones re-written? The answer can only be that the play, even without the additional scenes described in The Life and Death of The Merry Devil of Edmonton, sold well enough without needing to pay for further work to be done on it. If plays were revived in performance when they were re-printed, this may indicate that the published text of Merry Devil could stand alone in performance on the stage of the Globe.

Tickling Your Catastrophe

2 Henry IV's "I'll tickle your catastrophe" is one of the great Shakespearean insults, or is it? I don't know how I've been staring at this text for so long without making the connection, but Smug, in what I've dubbed scene 5, makes a remark about the wind 'O it tickles our catastrope.' And who is the source of the more well known "I'll tickle your catastrophe?" None other than the great Sir John Falstaff. That would be scanned.

One of the arguments I've been making is that some of the great clown characters of the King's Men come together in Merry Devil, and I've been casting Merry Devil's Sir John as an incarnation of Falstaff. But maybe that isn't so. Or maybe the roles these men played were more fluid than Tiffany Stern and other modern scholars have come to believe. We all know the story of William Kempe, the principle clown of the company, being replaced by Robert Armin, and thus the change in clown types in new plays, but Armin would have been expected to play Kempe's roles. Or would he? Is it possible that someone else better suited to those roles would have filled them in? Certainly Merry Devil requires a greater comic range than the reductive assignment of the company clown will allow. Just like a modern actor must be versatile in their range, so must an early modern one.

In any case, perhaps this is a pointer to Shakespeare's hand in Merry Devil. Or it could be a pointer to someone else's hand in 2 Henry IV. Or it could be that the tickling of catastrophes was such a common catch phrase that everyone was using it. 2 Henry IV was written between 1596 and 1599, a good 4 - 7 years prior to Merry Devil, so it is perhaps possible that we're seeing an actor re-inserting a favorite phrase, but even if this is the case, and Shakespeare is responsible for the invention of "tickle your catastrophe" we could be seeing Stern's culture of the commonplace book at work.

Three distinct possibilities emerge:

1. Shakespeare originated the line, and re-used it in Merry Devil.
2. Shakespeare originated the line, and someone else used it in Merry Devil.
3. Shakespeare did not originate the line.

Thus we must allow one of the following: either Shakespeare has contributed to the authorship of Merry Devil, or someone else contributed to the authorship of 2 Henry IV.  Pause and consider.

The Advantage of Multiple Authors

One of the things that we confront in Merry Devil is its extreme genre bending. There's something here for everyone. We have clowns, tragedy, romantic comedy, real character growth and development, situation comedy, wizards, devils, and a mildly crazy guy with a shot gun. While rehearsing one of the scenes this morning, it occurred to me that having multiple authors might just make the play that much more interesting.

Certainly having multiple authors makes the play easier to write. Or quicker, at least. It's hard enough to bang out a scene, let alone write one in verse, and having someone to write the second scene would certainly help us get a finished product together more quickly. No imagine this hypothetical two scene play that myself and my equally hypothetical friend write: I want to write a tragedy, and he wants to write a comedy. I envision a doe-eyed heroin who is pure in every way imaginable, and he's thinking of her as a crafty wench who doesn't need to wait for someone else to save her. And because we only have enough time for very basic re-writes and edits, both versions of the character make their way onto the page, and thus to the stage.

What we get is a play that transcends either genre that we started off writing for, and that features a character of greater depth and scope than either I or my friend would have written individually. Naturally, our writing is guided by a central plot, but tragedies and comedies have separate conventions of language and style. The resulting play combines those conventions, maybe not in the same scene, but within the same play and plot, and the result is a play that doesn't conform to either genre. Whether this means its a mess that the audience can't make sense of or is a synergy of styles more entertaining than either one would be alone is left for the audience to judge.

Merry Devil's Staging Conditions

Not too long ago, I got to sit in on a staging conditions workshop at the American Shakespeare Center, and as it just so happened, I was in the midst of my most recent collation of Merry Devil at the time. It immediately occurred to me just how often the characters in that play refer to each other by name or relation to one another, as if to help the audience keep track of who's who, and who's related to who. I read this as an author's acknowledgement that the audience might be having a hard time keeping track of what's going on (the author, or more likely authors clearly were).

I'm trying to meditate on why that might be. The most obvious answers to me both relate to my theories of disguise play and multiple authorship that I've discussed before, which means I want to keep looking. Disguise play struck me as being a function of the characters who wear disguises, and while this revelation may support that theory, it comes after the fact. When an answer presents itself as being obvious, that usually means it needs a more dutiful interrogation. 

This convention could just be the result of sloppy writing, after all. Maybe the device doesn't work, even when implementing the disguise play that I'll be employing in the production. Ultimately I won't know how audiences respond to it until after the production is over and done with, and even if I can determine their reactions to that specific devise, this would be a 21st century audience, so I still won't know how the constant name and relationship dropping would have worked 400 years ago. 

Perhaps this is one of those moments where I simply need to make a choice, unburdened by some abstract notion of the truth. When we say we are re-creating Shakespeare's original staging conditions or using his original staging practices, we inevitably have to guess. None of us were there, after all. 

As I get closer to finishing my critical text and start thinking of branching it off into a performance text, I'm having to decide what to keep and what to cut. While for a play this short I'm not cutting so much for length as I am for incompleteness -- that is, in order to preserve the sense of what is going on -- something tells me that these identifies need to stay put. Although, perhaps, as an experiment, I should try reading them and seeing if I can follow along. On second thought, I think I'm probably too familiar with the play by now.

Is anyone out there in Internet land interested in a little experiment?