The Distribution and Ordering of Speeches and Shakespearean Revision

Abstract

The Distribution and Ordering of Speeches and Shakespearean Revision Matt Vadnais Sometime in 1599, the Lord Chamberlain's Men opened the Globe with what very well might have been a performance of Shakespeare's recently finished Henry V. Even if we assume that the roughly 3,000 Londoners who first filled Shakespeare's most famous theater did indeed see the final installment of his second tetralogy of history plays, we cannot be sure of what exactly they saw and heard. Like many of Shakespeare's plays, Henry V was printed in two, very different forms that complicate our understanding of how the play was originally written and/or played.1 The relationship between the 1600 quarto printing of THE CHRONICLE History of Henry the fift and the nearly-twice-as-long version printed twenty-three years later in the First Folio was understood by early readers in a relatively straightforward fashion. Critics including Alexander Pope have suggested that the shorter, less poetically accomplished Q1 text was written previous to the 1599 performance, and that at some point between the show's hypothetical opening of the Globe and Shakespeare's death in 1616 it was revised into the extended, polished form printed in the First Folio. However, this chronologically straightforward explanation was for the most part abandoned at the turn of the twentieth century as critics began to take more seriously the "diurese stolne, and surreptitious copies" denounced by Heminges and Condell in their introduction to the 1623 Folio (A3r). Thanks to the work of the loosely united group of critics referred to as the New Bibliographers, a critical narrative emerged in which the Folio text was understood to have been imperfectly derived—via piracy, memorial reconstruction, or some other unauthorized method—from an authorial copy of the text written prior to the opening of the Globe.2 [End Page 657] In the century since A.W. Pollard first introduced the idea of a "bad quarto," critical opinion has gradually re-evaluated the historical value of Shakespeare's early quartos. In the last two decades, critics have moved increasingly close to a consensus that Q1 best represents the play with which the Lord Chamberlain's Men hypothetically opened the Globe. However, in opposition to early readers, the most recent position simultaneously holds that the longer Folio printing best represents the play as it was written.3 As early as 1953, Leo J. Suschko suggested that the shorter Q1 text represented a performance version of the longer, literary Folio (42). The idea that the texts were both "good" but differed in purpose would languish for a few decades in the wake of the New Bibliographical certainty that Q1 Henry V was set from "a bad, or reported, text much abbreviated, often inaccurate and unmetrical, and published, we may be certain, without the authority and consent of the author or his Company" (Cairncross 68). Gradually, however, Suschko's schema found support from critics ranging from Andrew Gurr to Lukas Erne. Like Suschko before them, both critics have argued that, despite the performative value of Q1, the play Henry V was written in a form best represented by F, a text "of a length which actors found impossible to reconcile with the requirements of performance" (Erne 192). Such a schema constitutes a compromise that, when applied to Shakespeare's work as a whole, neatly cleaves the corpus of plays printed as variant texts in half, designating the longer Folio texts as the province of what Lukas Erne calls a "literary Shakespeare," while protecting the shorter texts as imperfect but vital proxies for the ephemeral "Shakespeare in performance" (20). Even as Lesser and Stallybrass argue convincingly that the categories of "literary" and "performative" are far from mutually exclusive and Janette Dillon cautions against "[a] model that puts playhouse and author on either side of text and demands commitment to the first at the price of total rejection of the second," the compromise that allows equal but different value to be ascribed to both "minimal"/ performance texts and their "maximal"/authorial cousins has enjoyed remarkable endurance and served to organize critical thinking regarding how these texts were written and performed (74). Central to this compromise is...