Making Shakespeare Notes: Chapter Seven

Rules of punctuation and spelling were highly variable in early modern printed texts. In the "Shakespeare" portions of the Thomas Moore manuscript, the author has punctuated, capitalized, and spelled words, sometimes within the same line, seemingly at random (138).

It was common practice for scribes and printers to add punctuation (and perhaps capitalization) according to their own tastes. It is unlikely that punctuation that has come down to us is original, and there are examples where the words may remain the same, but the sense of a line is altered by the punctuation (139).

From the evidence of the Thomas Moore manuscript, it seems as if Shakespeare in some cases wrote lines first, and then parceled them out to characters later. This might account for the confusion of the name of Pistol's wife in Henry V, and of the names of the Nurse's and Romeo's serving men in Romeo and Juliet (141-142).

It may be possible to discern the source of a printed copy by looking at descriptions of entrances. An authorial stage direction is more likely to provide an entrance for the character and scene, such as "enter gentleman on the walls of Rome," whereas a prompter will be more likely to write in terms of practical stage direction/architecture: "enter above." Texts that come from prompters also tends toward specificity in numbers; whereas an author may specify "lords and attendants," a prompter, who like any good stage manager would know who is available when, would be more likely to specify how many lords and attendants can enter at the given moment (144).

Prompters were responsible for editing play texts as required by the Master of Revels, such as removing swearing from the play, and then submitting those changes for official approval (144-145).

"Any Shakespeare text that can be traced to a prompter's book has already been repeatedly mediated by other hands" (145). Meditate on this: If the extant Merry Devil text has come from a copy that was cut for touring, it very likely comes to us from a copy of the touring prompter's book.

Since revenues from touring plays when the London theatres were closed were less than home performances, non-sharer members would not tour, and the plays would be altered to accommodate a smaller cast. Lines might be dropped, or characters might be amalgamated into one. Also, country audiences were not as sophisticated as city audiences, and thus the plays were cut to a shorter running time than they would have enjoyed in the London playhouse (145-146).

Since playwrights incorporated timely events and jokes into their plays, a very popular play, which might run for over a year, would need regular revising in order to keep the material fresh (146).

It is likely that many of the texts do not come to us in the form in which they had enjoyed life in performance at the time they were printed. Foul paper, one off, or otherwise deprecated versions of texts, would not have been discarded due to the cost of paper, but would have been kept in the company's reserves in case something had happened to the book then in use. The company could afford to send these archived copies, no longer necessary for the performance of the play, to the printer for publication where they may have been more reticent to part with a more practically useful text for that purpose (146-147).

Since print is easier to read than manuscript, a printed text, even if it was outdated, might find its way back into use by the company. A printed quarto could be augmented with manuscript emendations to reflect the play as it then existed in the company's repertory. This is what appears to have happened in the case of Romeo and Juliet, as the Folio text tends to closely follow the spelling and punctuation of the good quarto, but presents several changes over that text (147).

The realities of printing house practices also affect the plays that come down to us. Just as even good typists will make typos, even a good compositor will occasionally choose the wrong letter. Since compositors had to work quickly, like their modern touch-typist counter parts, they had to rely on their sense of touch and their knowledge of where certain letters were to lay them out quickly. Letters that felt similar and which were arranged in close proximity in the type case, could easily be confused (150 - 152).

Photo of type case layout from Tiffany Stern's Making Shakespeare. The website she has credited is no longer in service.

 It is also possible that decisions about spelling and punctuation would have been made to reflect the quantities of type available vs. those used heavily in the text. The speech prefix of "Bastard" for "Edmund" in King Lear may be a function of the heavy use of magiscule italic Es in the text, and thus the decision to refer to the character as "Bastard" may be nothing more than the printer's way of preserving E for other uses (Enter, Exit,  and Edgar) (153).

Compositors were expected to edit the texts they were given to make them legible to their readers, but in the process of so doing may have altered the sense of the lines by mis-interpreting the playhouse text (154).

It is also possible that disfigured or poorly inked (or over inked) pieces of type have altered the sense of the texts. A damaged f resembles a long s, and this is why Ferdinand exults at having "So rare a wondred Father, and a wise" instead of "So rare a wondred Father, and a wife" (154-155).

SUMMARY:

The plays from early modern London that come down to us are many times removed from the hands of the men who wrote them. While it may be possible to spot some trends behind "the veil of print," the hand of the author is not one of them. Who wrote Shakespeare? is an irrelevant question. Who edited him is much more useful for the purposes of determining how the play may have been performed, and how the texts that we have might best be presented.

Making Shakespeare Notes: Chapter Three

Apparently, the Prologue was the first Chapter, and the first chapter is chapter two, and so on, so technically last time I was writing about chapter two, and this time I'm making notes on chapter three. I'll just put that in my confused locker and move along.

Heminges and Condell, when they praised Shakespeare for never revising his work, were giving him customary praise for the time. Thomas Randolph, a less well known playwright, was similarly praised by his peers (34).

"The one piece of continuous handwriting that is thought to be Shakespeare's is actually full of crossed words, rewriting and overwriting" (35).

Hand D of The Book of Thomas Moore, whether it is Shakespeare's or not, provides valuable insight into the nature of collaboration. His text, which includes only a crowd scene and a soliloquy, is inconsistent with the rest of the play, and demonstrates a lack of knowledge of the play as a whole. Very little knowledge of a play was required for collaboration (36).

From the Thomas Moore manuscript, we see Shakespeare re-using the "Friends, Romans, Countryman" rhetorical device from Julius Caesar in the form of "friends, masters, countrymen." This is not an isolated example, as Hamlet's "words, words, words" re-appears as Troilus' "words, words, mere words..." Shakespeare clearly re-used linguistic structures that he liked (38).

Berowne's justification for being forsworn is an example of Shakespeare deciding to rework a passage while he was writing it. The complete passage as it has come down to us is highly repetitive, which is indicative that the typesetter did not note a marginal indication to strike one set of the lines, and although it is impossible to tell which ones do not belong, it is almost certain that one of them should not be present in the text (39).

Romeo's description of "the grey eyed morn" in Romeo and Juliet is later repeated by Friar Laurence with subtle changes to the description. There changes make it unlikely that the repeated passage is the result of print-house error, and further implies that the characters are here acting as vehicles for verse passages; the speaker obviously didn't matter to the playwright so much as that the lines were spoken (39-40).

Shakespeare's tendency to recycle phrases and rhetorical devices across his plays suggests an author who thinks in individual passages of text without regard for the cohesion of the whole (42).

"A culture that works with commonplace books has a habit of thinking in snippets, in pieces of removable text" (42). Consider the works of Shakespeare not as long, cohesive works of brilliants, but as snippets of language, recycled rhetorical devices, and borrowed plot points. Consider that Shakespeare was not the first author, he was the first remixer.

Ben Jonson marked pieces of his plays in his Collected Works off in quotation marks, presumably to highlight his best writing and concepts. He breaks his plays back down into the component passages from which they are fashioned (45).

Stern defines bad quartos: bottom of page 46.

Heminge's and Condell chose to avoid both the demeaning term "plays" for the Folio, but likewise wanted to avoid the seemingly haughty term "works" (for which choice Ben Jonson was derided in 1616). Thus the choice to publish the Folio as "Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, histories and tragedies," while escaping both the demeaning and pretentious terms necessitated his plays be divided into these genres (48).

An early text of Henry V predicts success for Essex's enterprise in Ireland, but later texts were amended after Essex failed (or after it became clear that he would fail). Even if Essex had succeeded, the passage would have had to have been amended to reflect the past-tense of his victory. Shakespeare must have written the passage knowing he was going to change it, but it was more important that the play reflect the timeliness of the events in his world (51).

Revisions to Julius Caesar, Henry V, Richard II, and 1 Henry IV are only apparent to us because of external factors that alert us to them. It is unknown how many other revisions were made to Shakespeare's plays, with or without his knowledge or consent (52).

Shakespeare demonstrably revised his plays, even if he did so unwillingly, but he also ha a tendency to be willing to strike the lines for which he is now best remembered. Further, it seems clear that his fellow company members were not opposed to revising his plays after his death, as in the case of Macbeth. Revision was a regular feature of early modern playwriting, and Shakespeare was no exception (61).

Summary:

Shakespeare's texts were fluid. Since he wrote about his times and incorporated contemporary events into his writing, he wrote his plays anticipating that he would need to revise them. Further, the law and royal favor forced him to revise his plays from time to time so they could be performed. Since a revised and expanded text was a selling point for playbooks, it is likewise improbable that Shakespeare felt that he needed to conceal his revisions form the practice of his playwriting. Heminges and Condell, in praising Shakespeare for never having needed to revise his works, were applying a formula of praise that was widely known at the time, and we ought not to read anything more into it than that. Revision was the rule, and not the exception, and even in cases where there is only one text (good, bad, or ugly), there are often hints that a previous version of the text existed.