Folio Text Research Articles

One Book to Rule Them All: ‘The King James Version’ of Shakespeare’s Plays

ABSTRACT Renaissance clothes were piecemeal assemblages of parts. This pervasive practice is connected to early English theater, which emphasized variety rather than the (neo)classical focus on unity of time, place, action, genre, audience, and affect. Like aging costumes, aging plays could be updated by changing their parts without needing to create or buy something entirely new. Like early modern clothes and costumes, and like the earliest portraits of Shakespeare, the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623 is a heterogeneous miscellany. But for marketing purposes the Folio constructs a series of bibliographical and rhetorical uniformity-effects. The Folio celebrates ‘the great Variety of Readers' but denigrates the great variety of play-texts. Its claims to unity of authorship and condemnation of alternative printings underlie the myth of a unified one-parent canon consisting of one-version and one-date works., which misrepresents early modern composite play-production and its most successful patchwork playwright. To illustrate the complexity of the relationship between early performances and posthumous print, the essay examines in detail the Folio text of The Life of Henry the Fift, re-examining certain Folio-only passages in light of the known performance of the play by the King’s Men at Whitehall for a court audience on 7 January 1605.

Queen of Egypt and Queen of the Bey-Hive: Sophie Okonedo's Cleopatra at the National Theatre (2018)

Abstract: Combining the methods of traditional theater history with semiotics and digital cultural studies, this article focuses particularly on Simon Godwin's production of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre (2018) and on the avowed inspiration of the Nigerian-Jewish-descended British actress Sophie Okonedo by the world-famous vocalist, digital producer, and media celebrity Beyoncé Knowles-Carter (usually known simply as Beyoncé). Godwin's production carefully used a multiethnic cast and placed particular emphasis upon the relationship between Cleopatra and other women, both allies and enemies, in part by strategically reassigning Dolabella's lines to Octavia and thus creating an encounter between Cleopatra and Octavia that never happens in the Folio text. The article speculates that using allusions to Beyoncé out of context (away from the rich intertext of the film Lemonade [2016], for example, and away from transnational Black feminist debate) and to a majority-white British audience membership risked diluting Beyoncé's nuanced and politicized commentary—and, perhaps, diminished the nuanced treatment of labor and gender in Shakespeare's play. The investigation concludes, however, with a reflection upon the pros and cons—for artists and for audiences—of foregrounding digital subcultures in this way on stage and in academia.

Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe by Andrew Hiscock

Reviewed by: Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe by Andrew Hiscock Rory Loughnane Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe. By Andrew Hiscock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. x+289 pp. £75 ($99.99). ISBN 978–1–108–83018–8. Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe is another major study by Andrew Hiscock, one of our leading commentators on early modern cultural and intellectual history. This ambitious book, divided into six chapters and with an expansive Introduction and Conclusion, offers a series of case studies about the 'cultural debate concerning the status and functions of violence' (p. 2). While grounded in Shakespeare's late Elizabethan English histories in its core chapters, it is an emphatically European book, a political statement of its own right in these testing times. It looks beyond the Atlantic archipelago to mainland Europe, and in particular to the wars of religion that raged in sixteenth-century France, demonstrating that for the Elizabethan elite 'it became impossible to conceive of England's political survival without having a watchful eye beyond the borders of the kingdom' (p. 4). In his lucid and learned Introduction, Hiscock moves seamlessly from Augustine and Seneca to early modern political commentators to post-World War critics and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj Žižek, all of whom have considered the origins and outcomes of violent acts. Hiscock draws together his sources carefully, revealing how the phenomenon of violence, and its deployment as a tool for social (dis)order and nation-building, has long been and remains [End Page 242] foregrounded in cultural debate. The book helps to reveal how Shakespeare's early histories, and the early modern dramatic scene more generally, contributed to such debate about the militarization of society and helped inform cultural opinion about the status and functions of rebellion and nation-led violence. The chapters, in brief, are bookended by case studies about individuals: Chapter 1 uses the career of Sir Walter Ralegh, and his unfinished History of the World book project, to analyse broader English attitudes towards the use and justification of violence; Chapter 5 turns to Robert Devereux, his disastrous Irish campaign, and the failed rebellion of 1601 that led to his execution; Chapter 6 usefully considers European responses to the careers of Ralegh and Essex in the two centuries that followed. The core chapters, 2, 3, and 4, analyse, respectively, the three Henry VI plays, the two Henry IV plays, and Henry V. Hiscock identifies a continuity of sorts between the plays, wherein Shakespeare 'repeatedly returns attention to the disturbingly creative ways in which cultures of violence disclose the sobering realities of corruption and human failure' (p. 150). The study of Henry V in Chapter 4 leads naturally, of course, into the study of Essex's failures in Chapter 5, as the Chorus opening the play's fifth act in the Folio text alludes to Essex's efforts to quell rebellion in Ireland. Hiscock concludes the book by extending his analysis to the nineteenth century, where he demonstrates an enduring fascination in dramatic and operatic writing with narratives of violence and the late Elizabethan court. Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe marks a significant contribution to our collective understanding of how violence figured in early modern cultural debate, and how Shakespeare's creative engagement with English history in the late Elizabethan period helped to introduce and sustain such debate, albeit without any hope for resolution, in the popular forum of the theatre. Shakespeare's early history plays persistently reveal the fault-lines of violence, variously condemning and valorizing its use; indeed, as Hiscock observes, part of the entertainment of such plays was the fiction of real violence it represented. It is this tension surrounding the cultural 'appetite for violence', a phrase Hiscock repeats usefully, that helps bridge the early modern and modern worlds this study traverses. Rory Loughnane University of Kent Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Twelfth Night

Reviewed by: Twelfth Night Janis Lull Twelfth Night Presented by the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre at The University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK. 22 July–8 August 2021. Directed by Tom Robenolt. Set by Kit Mayer. Costumes by Theresa Reed. With Kellie Bernstein (Valentine), Audrey Fox (Servant), Bruce Hanson (Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Annabel Heyne (Viola), Shirley Hughes (Maria), Flyn Ludington (Olivia), Darren Napoli (Antonio), Nick Nappo (Feste), Turner Nolan (Officer/Priest), Jared Olin (Sebastian), Matthew Reckard (Sir Toby Belch), Tom Robenolt (Orsino), and Bruce Rogers (Malvolio). After a dark pandemic year, outdoor Shakespeare returned to the boreal forest with an upbeat Twelfth Night by Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre (FST). Producing Artistic Director Tom Robenolt cut the script to emphasize its festive mood and downplay its loose ends. Most notably, at least for me, Duke Orsino did not speak the line in which he offers an olive branch to Malvolio at the play’s end: “Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace” (5.1.373). This omission erased any hint that Malvolio either deserved an apology or might somehow be included in what Orsino calls the play’s “most happy wreck” (5.1.262). The Folio text of Twelfth Night gestures only fitfully at comic resolution. Jack shall have Jill, but some things go ill, even in Illyria. The text sidelines Antonio, for example. Sir Toby forcefully rejects Sir Andrew, and Malvolio exits with a vow of revenge. These things happened in this summer’s Alaskan production, too, but they didn’t seem to affect its celebra-tory tone. Where other directors might have brought a silent Malvolio back onto the stage—either to participate in the happy ending or to stand conspicuously outside it—Robenolt simply let him go. As played by Bruce Rogers, the steward threw off his oppressive propriety and reacted with explosive joy when he read the fake letter, and his dungeon scenes were touching, as he begged for ink, paper, and light. But the production had sealed his fate. Olivia (Flyn Ludington) granted that Malvolio had “been most notoriously abused,” but to my ear, she sounded more amused than angry about it (5.1.372). Ludington reserved most of her passion and her lyrical delivery for the twins, initially for a tall and appealingly androgynous Viola/Cesario, and then—with the passion kicked up a notch—for Sebastian, who more than matched her enthusiasm. Like Malvolio, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew seemed to disappear from the thoughts of the other characters as soon as they limped off the stage: out of sight, out of mind. Nor was there any mention of Sir Toby’s marrying [End Page 172] Click for larger view View full resolution Sir Toby Belch (Matt Reckard), Feste (Nick Nappo), Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Bruce Hanson), and Malvolio (Bruce Rogers) in Twelfth Night, dir. Tom Robenolt. Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre, 2021. Photo by Turner Nolan, courtesy of Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre. [End Page 173] Maria. Without such hints of unseen reconciliation, the sense of harmony at the end depended on the four lovers. For me, that sense came mainly from Viola and Sebastian—first in Olivia’s reaction to seeing the two together for the first time—“Most wonderful!” (5.1.221)—and then from the slow-motion reunion of the twins, who stepped tentatively toward each other across the gravel apron in front of the stage. The Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre’s playing space on the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s forested campus is one of those spots that evokes the wood outside of Athens where Peter Quince’s company rehearsed. In keeping with that site, the design of this production was what I’ve come to think of as Neo-Renaissance Primitive, taking advantage of the location to pare down technical effects—no lighting needed under the Midnight Sun—and concentrate on the story. Kit Mayer’s wooden set looked a bit like drawings of early English stages, but was probably closer in function to the wagons used in earlier pageant cycles. Props were few, and the instrumental music was provided by Valentine (Kellie Bernstein) and her guitar. The costumes, designed by Theresa Reed, provided the only substantial visual effects in the performance. These particular costumes...

Герцог Олбани в сопоставлении двух версий «Короля Лира» У. Шекспира

The aim of the study is to conduct a detailed comparison of the quarto and folio of “King Lear” by W. Shakespeare and to highlight the differences between two editions associated with the image of the Duke of Albany, a minor character who personifies order in the chaotic universe of “Lear” and acts as a kind of normative moral reference point. The scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that a detailed comparison of the quarto and folio texts in connection with the image of the Duke of Albany has not been carried out. As a result, it is proved that, although Albany occupies a more significant place in the quarto version, where his role is increased by 30 lines, the folio version not only cuts the role, but offers different understanding of Albany’s place in the structure of the tragedy, which also explains the fundamental difference in the ending of the play in different editions.

Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors': A New History of the Shakespearean Text by Molly G. Yarn

Reviewed by: Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors': A New History of the Shakespearean Text by Molly G. Yarn Paul Salzman Yarn, Molly G., Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors': A New History of the Shakespearean Text, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021; hardback; pp. 352; R.R.P. £29.99; ISBN 9781316518359. Early modern literary studies are experiencing an especially fruitful period, despite attacks on the humanities, and dire working conditions (or no work) for young and aspiring academics. Molly Yarn's new book is an excellent example of the kind of new, historicist, theoretically inflected research that makes this field so exciting at the moment. In this witty and thoroughly researched revaluation, Yarn offers a telling riposte to an unfortunate remark by Gary Taylor, an editor of Shakespeare's works (admittedly in 1988): 'Women may read Shakespeare, but men edit him. So, it has been from the beginning, and so it remains' (p. 15). Well, no, neither 'from the beginning' nor now, and Yarn offers some sixty-nine examples from 1800 to 1950. Those examples fit into two basic categories: the majority are women most of us, even those of us interested in the history of editing, have never heard of; the second group, in some respects the most interesting, are those who are quite well known, but have been treated as unworthy or even risible. Perhaps the most interesting example of this is Henrietta Bowdler, whose expurgated edition (later expanded by her husband Thomas) is notorious, and the idea of bowdlerization has taken on the stigma of censorship and mockery of Victorian prudishness. But Yarn places Henrietta Bowdler's edition within the tradition of what she calls domestic editions, which played an important role in [End Page 178] the increasing democratization of access to Shakespeare. At the same time, Yarn is able to counter the extraordinary misogyny implicit, and often explicit, within the fraternity of male editors, and their policing of editorial legitimacy/respectability. Yarn has an unerring ability to anticipate issues with the scope of this book, offering an illuminating, albeit brief, admission that women edited many early modern authors other than Shakespeare. In the case of this particular study, though, the focus on Shakespeare, so often an absurd process of the separation of a single author from his rich literary and cultural context, is justified because the book is an intervention into a field dominated by the editing of Shakespeare. One of the most interesting and original aspects of Yarn's study is her examination of the selected area of student editions of Shakespeare. Of course, not only women edited student editions, but Yarn's meticulous scholarship has unearthed some especially interesting examples where women took a highly original approach to this field. For example, Katherine Lee Bates was a significant poet, and Professor and later Head of English at Wellesley College. Bates edited The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and As You Like It for a student Shakespeare series. Not only did Bates prepare a thorough, collated text, but she trialled a system of textual notes which not only set out differences between quarto and folio texts but offered questions for students to consider in relation to possible editorial choices, often after setting out two different readings, and asking 'Which is better?'. Yarn reproduces a page from Bates's notes to Merchant illustrating this innovative approach to pedagogy and Shakespeare editing. Through her careful examination of a large range of student editions, Yarn is able to break down the dichotomy between the prestigious scholarly edition, and the utilitarian student edition. This runs parallel to recasting the (past) dominant paradigm of the male authoritative edition, which was previously undermined by the 'un-editing' move in the 1990s exemplified by Leah Marcus's Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton (Routledge, 1996). But here, Yarn is using a finely-honed historicist perspective to reshape our sense of how editions are created, and what their influence has been. Yarn also offers a perceptive and again revisionist account of New Bibliography through a feminist lens. Once again, while there have been a considerable number of critical accounts of New Bibliography in recent years, Yarn brings to the table her focus...

Multimedia

Multimedia

The First Quarto of Hamlet and its Performance in London, 2010–11

ABSTRACT Very little work has been done on how theatre directors employ, adapt and adopt the First Quarto of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in productions based on the “standard” Second Quarto and/or First Folio texts. This paper takes the productions at the National Theatre and the Globe Theatre directed by Nicholas Hytner and Dominic Dromgoole as case studies to explore how directors use Q1 in their texts. I examine the promptbooks of both productions for evidence of the First Quarto’s impact; I also study which editions of Hamlet the directors choose, as well as the way they talk about their texts and how newspaper critics respond. A director’s approach to and explanation of Q1 is heavily influenced by institutional background. Dromgoole, as Artistic Director of a theatre primarily dedicated to the study and performance of Shakespeare, frames Q1 within an academic discourse that increasingly saw the First Quarto as a text worthy of study. Hytner, by contrast, demonstrats much less of a desire to entertain academic trends then in vogue. The evidence suggests that directors do adopt parts of Q1 as they edit Hamlet for performance, particularly for the sake of condensing a play that could easily run for over three hours.

Q/F: The Texts of King Lear

Abstract This article argues that dictation in the printing house may account for many of the variants between the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 Folio texts of King Lear. It further argues that the ground-work for this view was established by a series of prior critical studies—including those by Chambers, Greg, Duthie, Walker, and Stone—which shared a belief that the quarto was a reported text. It also proposes that a manuscript very much like F, but without its theatrical cuts, lies behind the Quarto. A long-standing assumption that the Folio version is somehow derived from the Quarto is shown to be unsafe. The implications of this argument are that Shakespeare did not revise King Lear, and that relatively few of the variants in the Quarto can be authorial.

Visualizing textual similarity of Shakespearean suspect texts: An examination of the Henry VI plays

Abstract The relationship between Shakespeare’s First Folio and early printings, published in his lifetime, has been a matter of dispute for centuries. A computer program that I have developed visualizes the fluctuating quality of textual correspondences between Folio texts, Henry the Sixth, Part Two and Three, and texts that have been suspected as memorial reconstructions of the Folio, The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York. The memorial reconstruction hypothesis assumes increased similarity between the two texts when an alleged actor–reporter is on the stage or speaking and vice versa. The visualization of similarity between two texts, based on the Dice similarity metric, does not show a strong association between the fluctuation of similarity and actor–reporter factors, which challenges the memorial reconstruction hypothesis on statistical grounds. In addition, the distribution of line-by-line similarity scores suggests scene division is a considerable explanatory factor for fluctuating similarity, which is not inexplicable, considering the practice of collaborative writing in the early modern playhouse.

Shakespeare for the "Triers": Richard Hawkins and Q2 Othello at the Serjeants' Inn

In 1630, the Stationer Richard Hawkins began selling an edition of Shakespeare's Othello from "his shoppe in Chancery-Lane, neere Sergeants-Inne" (Othello 1630 title page). This edition, identified by modern scholars as Q2, is remarkable as the first edition to fully conflate existent quarto and folio texts of a Shakespeare play. Scholars have remarked on the process that brought Q2 into being—but the question of why a seventeenth-century publisher/bookseller would invest the time and money to create such an edition remains to be considered. This article decenters the author to reconsider Q2's place among the people and ideas of the area in which it was published and sold: the Serjeants' Inn in the heart of the Inns of Court area of London. The article examines how Hawkins fashioned the books sold in his shop to entice this local readership. Literary and textual evidence from the Quarto is then reconsidered in the light of this new readership, providing fresh insights into the construction of this unique quarto and its place in modern editorial practice. This article also highlights the extent to which individual members of the book trade in the early seventeenth century engaged with local readerships and looks at the value of second-plus editions to that market.

Marriage bed manoeuvrings: sociopolitical functions of the bed in the 1647 folio text of John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, Or The Tamer Tamed

This essay explores the use of the prop bed in the 1647 Folio text of John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, Or The Tamer Tamed (1610), and the manner in which the object becomes an emblem of female marital control. It argues that Livia’s manipulation of the bed serves as the means by which she subverts the traditional patriarchal negotiation of marriage. Informing this reading is an examination of the seemingly antithetical embrace of marriage and death in early modern culture as laid out in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer’s service of matrimony, and reinforced in visual culture in circulation at the time; indeed it is from her supposed sickbed that Livia arranges her match to the man of her choice. In doing so, Fletcher presents an onstage version of the bedtrick. Yet while the Folio presents this subversive use of the bed, it is ironically Livia’s adherence to a number of ideal components of the marriage ritual, including the signing of a contract, the observation of a kind of wedding-night bedding ceremony, and the participation of the wider family and community in the event as witnesses, which serves to secure the legitimacy of the match in the end.

The Choice of Relative Pronouns in the First Quarto and First Folio Texts of Shakespeare’s Richard III: Testing the Memorial Reconstruction Hypothesis

The present paper examines the choice of relative pronouns in the First Quarto and First Folio texts of Shakespeare’s Richard III, with the purpose of testing the adequacy of the memorial reconstruction hypothesis, which Patrick first proposed in his 1936 monograph. He notes a high proportion of corrupted readings in the Quarto, suggesting that it is a reconstruction of the Folio, created by actors relying on their inaccurate memories. On the other hand, Smidt (1964) demonstrates that the Quarto’s readings are preferable in many details, though he admits Patrick’s hypothesis, in part, in his second book (1970). Regarding the use of relative pronouns, there is a crucial difference between the two texts: the Folio uses that 13 times to introduce non-restrictive clauses, while the Quarto uses which, and these two items are never substituted the other way around. Interestingly, the Quarto’s choice accords with Shakespeare’s ordinary usage, whereas the Folio deviates from it. Thus, the memorial reconstruction hypothesis cannot explain the variants of relative pronouns. It will be posited that relative pronouns in the Quarto text may have been deliberately revised in the process of written transmission.

The “rule of three” and the “callback”: How Comic Form in The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.1 May Help To Date Its Folio Text

An analysis is undertaken of the comic techniques employed in Shakespeare's humorous portrayal of a private language lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor. This reveals that this Folio-only Scene (4.1) teases and amuses by means of subtly and rhythmically combining several differing comedic modes and tactics. This combination makes its comic construction exceedingly complex. A private language lesson is also portrayed in Scene 3.4 of Shakespeare's King Henry V. There, just as in The Merry Wives 4.1, audiences meet incongruous misidentifications of only-apparently ribald bi-lingual cognates. The Henry V tutorial scene is however much less complex in its dramatic and comedic construction than the Merry Wives scene. It is next proposed that when he later revisited similar themes Shakespeare typically improved on his former handling of those materials. Combining that with the contrasting complexity of treatment in two similar tutorial scenes suggests that at least Scene 4.1 in The Merry Wives was composed later than Henry V, which would be in 1600 or later. This “corroborates” the proposals in other independent arguments to the same effect. There is finally a brief discussion of applications of the principle whereby probabilistic inductive arguments are bolstered when there is a “consilience” between independent lines of enquiry.

Prophecy and emendation: Merlin, Chaucer, Lear’s Fool

This article traces the critical and textual reception of the Fool’s cryptic prophecy in the Folio text of King Lear. I argue that critics have overlooked the widespread early modern circulation of the speech’s main source, six lines of verse ubiquitously known as ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy.’ Reading the Fool’s prophecy as a deliberate riposte to this famous poem, I propose that William Warburton’s 1747 emendation offers the most intertextually engaged and politically subversive text of the speech.

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History by Chris Fitter

 Reviews high time to devote similarly sustained attention to it in the works of Shakespeare’s contemporaries as well. U  W I K Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History. Ed. by C F. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xiv+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Contrasting the emergent claims of a ‘new social history’ of early modern England with the viewpoint espoused by the leaders and disciples of the older New Historicist approach, Chris Fitter posits that readers of Shakespeare have been largely made ‘oblivious’ to a ‘climate of plebeian political critique and resistance’ (p. ). e agency of England’s commoners has, it is claimed, been barely recognized and little understood in Shakespeare Studies. Drawing upon the work of social and cultural historians such as Keith Wrightson and David Rollison in this ‘new school’ (some of which is almost as old as work in New Historicism, one might add), and noting some exceptions to this rejection of the commoner voice in the Shakespearian criticism of Annabel Patterson, Richard Wilson, Jeffrey S. Doty, and Fitter himself, the Introduction sets out a series of claims for how the ‘affirmations of the new social history’ could help to re-engage scholars with the underserved plebeian class (p. ). e remainder of the volume expands upon Fitter’s own fine work in Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecra in the Early Career (New York: Routledge, ), with several of the contributors offering homages of sorts in commencing their analyses (Andy Wood, Stephen Longstaffe, Jeffrey S. Doty). With eleven chapters and an Aerword—Fitter’s long and erudite Introduction is listed as the first chapter in its own right (and he also contributes a separate chapter)—the volume draws together a relatively small group of distinguished scholars. It certainly feels like a tight-knit project: the scholars more oen than not engage with each other’s previously published work. is is not a point of criticism, but rather a reflection of the fact that relatively few scholars have championed the immanent power of ‘citizens’ and ‘plebeians’, the ‘commons’ and the ‘commonwealth’ (res plebeia), and the notion of ‘popular’ (in the sense of vox populi). Annabel Patterson’s Aerword, which reflects upon the response to, and subsequent scholarship since, the publication of her influential Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, ), provides a thoughtful capstone for the project. Each of the essays in the volume serves its purposes perfectly. Peter Lake offers an expert account of the ‘relative and relational’ political agency of the commoners (‘rather than essentializing’) in readings from Richard II and Henry V. David Norbrook writes a splendidly learned and wide-ranging chapter on the plebeian politics of Coriolanus, memorably describing the play as offering a ‘caustically ironic and destabilizing vision’ (p. ). It is a testament to the overall quality of the volume that any of the chapters could be singled out for praise. at noted, MLR, .,   there are some minor points of criticism. In a volume of this kind there is, perhaps reasonably enough, little interest in matters textual or authorial. While Andy Wood and Stephen Longstaffe smartly attend to the problems introduced by the fact that there exist multiple versions of the second Henry VI play, Peter Lake and David Rollison refer only to the First Folio texts. More surprisingly, none of the contributors makes mention of any of the significant body of scholarship on the authorship question regarding the Henry VI plays. Surely it matters for any analysis of ‘Shakespeare’s Cade’ that Shakespeare may not be the primary author of this material? In  Annabel Patterson had rightly noted that the play (in both versions) offers two different rebellions, one led by Suffolk, one led by Cade (who looms large throughout the volume); might it not be of some significance that the author of one section may not be the same as the other? In a more minor quibble, the index runs to a mere two pages; this seems a disservice to such a treasure-trove of content. Overall, this is a rich and rewarding collection that merits and will surely receive serious critical...

The Distribution and Ordering of Speeches and Shakespearean Revision

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...

Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays. Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. viii+475.

<i>Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays</i>. Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. viii+475.

Shakespeare at Work: Four Kings and Two Shrews

This article examines three instances of the early Shakespeare at work on material provided by another dramatist, in plays in the repertory of the Queen's Men or Pembroke's Men: The Troublesome Reign of King John, King Leir and The Taming of a Shrew. In writing King John and King Lear for the Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare takes as his starting point a play by someone else, transforming the material. In all three cases the differences can be characterised as a move from relative simplicity to relative complexity, allowing for greater latitude in interpretation – and in productions of The Shrew, such latitude is encouraged by the instability of the Folio text.

Measure for Measure(s): Performance-testing the Adaptation Hypothesis

In early 2013 Hoosier Bard staged the first double-bill production of two versions of Measure for Measure, based on John Jowett's “genetic text” of the play in the Oxford Middleton. One version was the familiar Folio text, set in Vienna, allegedly an adaptation by Middleton in 1621. The other version was a conjectural reconstruction of the play written entirely by Shakespeare and performed by the King's Men in 1604; this version removed material attributed to Middleton, and set the play in Ferrara, Italy. The cast and crew worked on the play for eight weeks. This experiment demonstrated that some small changes identified by Jowett (“O death's a great disguiser” and the transposed third and fourth scenes) made no discernible difference. However, overall, actors and audiences found the two versions powerfully different. We consider various scholarly objections made to the adaptation hypothesis since 1994, and test them against performance and rehearsal experience and audience responses. Our illustrated analysis focuses on the trajectory of characters, with particular attention to Julietta, Mariana, Overdone, Isabella, Lucio, Escalus and the Duke. Although the Middleton adaptations constitute only 5% of the text, they affect the beginning of 50% of the play's characters. Typically of Middleton, they particularly expand and complicate female roles, and make expressive use of silent action. We provide new evidence that the play was adapted specifically for Blackfriars, and suggest that the presence of a concluding jig (in 1604, but not 1621) affects interpretation of the ending. We relate the pattern of adaptation to the physical properties of actors' parts, and the fact that all but one of the original cast was no longer performing in 1621. We also argue that interpretation of the original play and the adaptation were powerfully affected by audience assumptions about the opposed geographical sites (Ferrara and Vienna) and by major shifts in attitudes (between 1604 and 1621) toward King James, war, Catholicism, the economy, and freedom of speech. We conclude that both texts work in performance, but work differently, in ways related to the different dramaturgies of Shakespeare and Middleton.