Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local Texts

Abstract

M AJOR CHANGES ARE AFOOT. DURING THE LAST TEN YEARS, there has been among Shakespeareans a growing discomfort with the time-honored editorial practice by which variant early texts are ranked hierarchically on the basis of their fidelity to a presumed Shakespeare original. According to that practice, at least as it is reflected in standard twentieth-century editions, the texts that rank high are accorded lavish editorial attention while the texts that rank are assigned to a curious limbo in which they can be mined for individual readings but are assumed to be debased derivatives of Shakespeare with no claim to unity or artistic integrity. Since the pioneering work of Steven Urkowitz, Gary Taylor, and Michael Warren, Quarto texts previously regarded as low and contaminated versions of the plays are coming to be regarded as different instead of debased, as encoding distinct patterns of meaning worthy of consideration in their own right rather than as mere disfigurement of the true version.' This development is by no means unfamiliar to most readers of Shakespeare Quarterly; what perhaps deserve more emphasis are the ways in which our new attention to texts of the plays can be coordinated with a new critical interest in low, popular materials within the plays and with interpretation more generally. How can we use the new Shakespearean textual studies to open up the plays to local interpretation of a kind that has been unavailable before? And, just as important, how can our interest in customs and topography help us to analyze different early versions of a single play? My use of the term levelling is adopted from early modern folk custom, where it can refer to the temporary, carnivalesque overthrow of social hierarchy or to longer-term social reform based roughly on the carnivalesque model, as in the Leveller Party of the Civil War period in England. I use the term here to characterize a similar recent disruption of hierarchical thinking in our