Folio Text Research Articles

The Quarto and Folio texts of 2 Henry VI a reconsideration

The precise relationship between the Quarto and Folio textss of 2 Henry VI remains a matter of dispute This article re-examines the evidence for the Quarto as a ‘reported’ text, enquires, if it is, precisely what it maight be reporting, and asks what the consequences are for a modern editior

The Othello Quarto and the "Foul-Paper" Hypothesis

OTHELLO REMAINS A TEXTUAL MYSTERY, and a large part of the problem is that a commonly accepted hypothesis stands on questionable grounds. The hypothesis concerns the 1622 quarto (hereafter Q1), which differs from the 1623 Folio text (F) on thousands of points, some adding up to major variations, many adding up to nothing beyond their own punctiliousness. Eventually the tiny marks of difference may become the crucial material for solving the overall puzzle, but for the moment I am concerned with the major differences and with the prevailing account of Q1 which seeks to explain them.

Digital Archives and Sibyline Fragments: The Tempest and the End of Books

Digital Archives and Sibylline Fragments: The Tempest and the End of Books Peter S. Donaldson Introduction In these pages I trace how Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books reads The Tempest anachronistically, as a play about the end of books and the advent of electronic forms. Greenaway finds The Tempest relevant to this shift because, as he puts it, we are living in the early years of “the second Gutenberg Revolution,”1 in which the ambitions of the Renaissance magus with his magic books are being realized, in part, through digital technologies. Prospero’s Books is an anticipatory or proleptic allegory of the digital future, figuring destruction of libraries and their rebirth as “magically” enhanced electronic books. It is set in the past, and extrapolates from the several passages in the play in which Prospero’s books are mentioned the story of twenty four wonderworking books through which Prospero achieves his magic; yet, by calling attention to the digital special effects by which these books have been created on screen—digital painting and photoprocessing applications, computer animation, multiple screen overlays—Greenaway suggests that the magically enhanced codex volume is as much a part of our future as our past. And perhaps that is so: the “expanded book” CD-ROM is one form that moves in this direction (though it is not a book), experiments with ink that reconfigures itself in response to computer instruction, and with “hot” links embedded in ink on paper may move us futher in the direction of such a future, retaining something like the form of the book but amplifying its powers. Like Prospero’s Books, this essay itself exists in a transitional form (networked hypertext with linked images and brief video citations), and like Prospero’s Books it imagines future forms and depends on them. It is relatively linear in its form and bounded in its contours, presenting a small number of textual and visual citations. Yet it asks its readers to imagine that they are exploring a path, one particular path, through an immense networked digital archive. Such an archive would include the complete film Prospero’s Books—as well as all other Shakespearean film adaptations, linked to relevant lines of text; which would include all extant copies and page fragments of the Folio text of The Tempest, and an extensive library of commentary; which would be linked as well to extensive collections of anatomical illustrations from the Renaissance forward, and to texts and images that illustrate the motif of the “end of the book” in the late twentieth century. With such an archive in place,2 the role of the critic or interpreter would be at least a double one. One task would be to create a bounded exploratory hypertext, a “collection within a collection,” by specifying a number of linked resources relevant to the subject. The other task would be the marking of a path through that mini-archive, by choosing and commenting upon examples, as I do here. In such an environment, one could follow my path or break off to explore one of the text and image collections of which it is contructed. To borrow, at third hand, a phrase of Wittgenstein’s, interpetive hypertext would allow for “travel over a wide field of thought, criss-cross in every direction.”3 An essay within a digital archive—such a form might expand the resources that can serve as context for an interpretation, extend them to include several media, and create marked and unmarked paths to traverse. Such a form might also foster a documentary tendency, a style of interpretation in which the critic’s work always includes comprehensive access to the work discussed, to its sources, and to digital records—text, film, image—of the historical and material evidence relevant to the work under discussion. These digital documents might illustrate the rich and complex traditions from which an artist like Peter Greenaway (whose films are themselves encyclopedic and archival) draws his material. But their function would not be limited to illustration. The hypertextual and documentary aspects of such an essay would, perhaps, converge insofar as documents—virtual or material—always tell their own stories, or incite us to tell...

‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’: The Theory of Authorial Revision between the Quarto and Folio Texts of King Lear

‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’: The Theory of Authorial Revision between the Quarto and Folio Texts of King Lear

An Outward Show: Music for Shakespeare on the London Stage, 1660-1830 by Randy L. Neighbarger

REVIEWS Randy L. Neighbarger. An Outward Show: Music for Shakespeare on the London Stage, 1660-1830. Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance, 27. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Pp. xxii + 318. $49.95. Randy Neighbarger's An Outward Show is a useful factual resource for scholars interested in the music performed in productions and adaptations of Shakespeare's plays from the Restoration to the early Victorian period. The body of the text is a chronological, narrative history of Shakespeare productions which employed music whether as songs, as interludes between acts, or in operatic adaptations. The book outlines changes in musical styles and conventions between 1660 and 1830 and discusses how these trends affected the incorporation of music into Shakespeare productions. Some musical scores are reproduced , and the textual apparatus includes a number of useful charts and lists which assemble much of the available information on music associated with Shakespeare productions. While many of Shakespeare's plays require music in production, the early printed quarto and folio texts do not include much specific information about what was played. Characters in plays of all genres sing songs or call for music, and there are numerous cues for instrumental music in the lines of the plays. For example, The Tempest associates music with magic at many points, and in The Winter's Tale Paulina calls for music just before the statue comes to life. While traditional tunes are known for some of the songs included in Shakespeare's plays, no scores for the music played during the first productions of Shakespeare plays are known to exist. While Neighbarger's focus is theatrical music from 1660 to 1830, he opens with a brief discussion of what was known at the Restoration about the music of early Shakespeare productions. When, in 1660, two London theaters opened after eighteen years during which theatrical productions had been officially proscribed, many of the plays of the Jacobean and Caroline periods were revived and adapted. However, these revivals took place in a new context since early seventeenth-century theatrical and musical conventions were no longer familiar to performers and audiences. Also, some of the courtiers who supported the London theaters had spent the interregnum in France, where they had been introduced to continental conventions of theatrical and musical performance. Neighbarger discusses the interaction of English and European musical influences in theatrical productions of the Restoration and traces changing fashions in the way music was used. He notes that in the late seventeenth century songs were 394 Reviews395 sometimes omitted from the plays themselves, although musical interludes were often played between the acts. By the early eighteenth century , music was more central to the performance of Shakespeare, and operatic adaptations of some of the plays began to be performed. Neighbarger , tracing a complex history of operatic Shakespeare production from the early eighteenth century to the 1830's, discusses various forms of Italianate opera, English ballad opera, and comic opera with a focus on the musical scores. During this period there were few productions of Shakespeare's plays which were not adapted or revised, and these operatic productions are significant in the stage history of Shakespeare. Aside from operatic Shakespeare music, Neighbarger's other main interest in this work is the extensive body of non-operatic vocal musical settings composed for the songs in Shakespeare plays as well as for other lyric passages such as sonnets. Popular lyric pieces from Shakespeare's plays were performed not only in stage productions but as afterpieces, in concerts and in the home. Neighbarger pays close attention to the works of the prolific composer Thomas Arne the younger, whose music for Drury Lane Theatre's Shakespeare productions in the 1740's had a strong influence for the following fifty years. Some of Henry Bishop's compositions and adaptations from the early nineteenth century are also still known. The publication of simplified scores of some of this music helped make some tunes by Ame, Bishop, and other contemporary composers so familiar that they became accepted as "traditional" in later performances of the plays. The extensive apparatus of An Outward Show, like the body of the text, contains a large amount of factual information. The...

Framing the Taming: Metatheatrical Awareness of Female Impersonation in 'The Taming of the Shrew'

Kate's speech of submission at the end of The Taming of the Shrew raises problems for producers and critics who want to dissociate Shakespeare from normative Elizabethan views about the subordination of married women to their husbands. Some modern directors have devised stage business for subverting Kate's declaration of submissiveness, occasionally using it to grant her subtle or not-so-subtle powers of manipulation and control. Although much of the critical debate over the play has centred on whether the ending subverts or reinforces patriarchal attitudes, Linda Woodbridge concludes a brief survey of feminist efforts to recuperate the play and its ending with the sceptical observation that 'I see little evidence that he was ahead of his time in his attitudes toward women'.1 Other critics whose work is no less historically based than Woodbridge's find reason to argue that the play is more problematic than conventional. As Michael Hattaway asserts, 'there can be no authoritative reading.'2 Some directors and critics have tried to solve the problem by enclosing the submission of Kate in some kind of frame, thereby hoping to find an ironic perspective which undercuts the wife-taming, or at least qualifies it. In the Folio text, the Induction provides such a perspective, but unfortunately it disappears after the first act. Some directors, following Pope, adopt the ending from The Taming of A Shrew, the so-called 'bad' quarto published in 1594. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor have recently buttressed the authority of this ending by suggesting that it may reflect 'Shakespeare's final text [...] more fully than the Folio does' or else may be a 'paraphrase or imitation' of an earlier Shakespearian text behind the Folio version.3

Naming Names in "All's Well That Ends Well"

N EDITING SHAKESPEARE, AN APPARENTLY TECHNICAL QUESTION will often open out into a larger area of theory or interpretation. The case at hand begins but does not end with speech prefixes. The Oxford Shakespeare offers to its editors this guideline on speech prefixes: general, personal names are to generic ones... [,] but exceptions may be allowed.' The general rule sounds conducive to a welcome precision, avoiding any confusion about who is speaking. But were all personal names equally preferred by Shakespeare? If the text of the play that is supposed to be closest to his hand suggests rather that some names are central to the character while others are casual afterthoughts tacked onto a conception that is essentially generic and functional-tacked on in order to answer a local, practical need and abandoned when it is past-is there not some distortion in treating all names the same? Whether they appear twenty times in the text or only once? Whether they are underlined by comment and wordplay or just mentioned in passing? This distinction seems to me to operate with special force in All's Well That Ends Well, separating names of considerable structural significance and mythic resonance like Helen and Diana from those of Dumaine, Reynaldo, and Lavatch, which are introduced late and quickly dropped once they have served their immediate purpose. The editors of the Oxford Complete Works, adhering to their own principle, give us in All's Well the headings First/Second Lord Dumaine rather than the Folio's First/Second Lord, Reynaldo rather than the Folio's Steward, Lavatch rather than the Folio's Clown. In this they depart from the practice of most recent editors, who often list some or all of these names in the dramatis personae but tend to retain for the repeated speech headings the generic designations used consistently in the Folio text. And, for this play at least, I think this is the wiser practice. It is better to leave these prefixes as indicated throughout the Folio All's Well-Steward, Clown, and Lords-than to key all their entries and speech headings to those nonce names.

Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio by Jennifer Brady and W.H. Herendeen

Since he is quite appropriately frank about himself, let me add that one of my warmest memories of Joe Gold goes back to a learned conference at which, instead of purveying official Lit Crit, he held a roomful spellbound and breathless by reading Dickens to us aloud. Much the same kind of pleasure and illumination is to be had from this book, as many readers (and astonished browsers, one hopes) have no doubt discovered for themselves. Spread the word. M i c h a e l H O E N Y A N S K Y / Brock University Jennifer Brady and W.H. Herendeen, Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991). 221. $35.00 (U.S.) This collection of essays claims to offer a radical redefinition of Jonson’s art as fluid, his range and ordering of texts in the 1616 Folio contingent, marginal, and interdependent. In the attempt to counter “the more static, abstracted view of individual works that critics have generally held” (Intro­ duction, 14), the editors of this new critical volume have selected essays that reexamine the Folio as historical text, physical monument, literary/generic experiment, social signifier, and mid-career milestone. The common concern of the volume is its reassessment of Jonson’s classicism as a vital and inde­ pendent neoclassicism that comments more on the fluctuating early-modern values of Renaissance England than on idealizations of ancient Rome. The first pair of essays deal with aspects of the physical text. Kevin J. Donovan questions the authority of the Folio texts of individual works, and argues vigorously and convincingly for a reevaluation of quarto texts as authoritative for certain plays and masques. In disputing the preeminence of the Folio texts in Herford and Simpson’s 11-volume Ben Jonson, and in effect calling for a new and definitive edition of Jonson that takes recent bibliographic opinion into account (to which I can only add “Hear, hear!” ), Donovan clarifies the real and unique importance of the 1616 Folio: not as a monument to Jonson’s proofreading skills, but as a deliberate selection of works that invite reinterpretation of the meaning and reputation of liter­ ary/dramatic texts and their writers. W.H. Herendeen sets the pace in the second essay for such a reinterpretation by recognizing that the dedications of individual works in the Folio pay off past debts, rather than scrounge for new or continued patronage. He represents Jonsonian dedications as pro­ gressive declarations of the authority and independence of the poet himself, pointing to the fact that no dedication appears with the masques in the final 238 segment of the volume, nor at the head of the entire Folio itself, a clear sign that Jonson considered all debts paid in full, and all credit for the works his volume contains accruing to the artist alone. The next two essays focus on the drama from quasi-political perspectives. Katherine Maus describes the “satiric and ideal economies” Jonson creates in the Folio, arguing that the insatiable competitiveness among Jonson’s have and have-not materialists in the reductive world of his plays should not obscure the alternative transcendent economy of shared abundance Jonson celebrates in the poetry and masques. Maus is dazzling in her survey of supply and demand in the comedies, but in finally identifying Jonson with a Roman stoicism that finds merit only in hard-won results, she loses her economic balance to fall in with Edmund Wilson’s morose “anal-retentive” Jonson whose “costive” labour alone stamps his artistic production as gen­ uine. William Blissett’s discussion of the “Romanity” of three of the nine plays in the Folio (Poetaster, Sejanus, Catiline) takes a different tack in considering how far a classical education in Roman history, language, and literature permeates the Renaissance and modern consciousness. Blissett perhaps over-Romanizes by declaring that Jonson showed no similar interest in British history. What of the lost Robert II, those unidentified tragedies for which Francis Meres praised him, or indeed the increasingly explicit Englishness of the other six plays in the Folio? Of the two essays on the poetry, only Stella Revard continues the de­ bate on...

The Merry Wives of Windsor, Q1: Provincial Touring and Adapted Texts

RECENT STUDIES OF SOME OF SHAKESPEARE'S bad or dubious quartos have renewed interest in their authority in transmission of text. Gary Taylor, example, in his edition of Henry V, sees quarto version of that play as the result of a reconstruction by memory of play as performed-as performed, moreover, in a severely abridged and adapted text, such as might have been used by a troupe of actors touring provinces. The probable theatrical origin of this text, though transmitted by memory, makes Q an historical document of far more authority than hypotheses of any twentieth-century scholar. This view of Quarto causes Taylor to introduce some significant variants into his edition of play. Like quarto version of Henry V, quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) has also been thought to be an abridged and adapted play.2 It is about half as long as folio text (1,624 lines to 2,729),3 and it contains several intriguing omissions and transpositions. W. W. Greg, whose examination of this text in his 1910 edition established theory of memorial reconstruction, with actor who played Host as probable culprit, some years later noticed signs of abridgment and concluded that heavy cutting and excision of two boys' parts suggest deliberate adaptation.4 Still later he surmised that Quarto, though a reported text, was intended for acting, presumably in country. .. .5 William Green, too, argues that this text represents an unauthorized version of play reconstructed by memory a provincial acting troupe.6 And William Bracy and Robert Burkhart maintain that text has been deliberately adapted, probably from an authoritative manuscript.7 The provincial acting hypothesis is, of course, not new. In 1919 Pollard and

Reconsidering the Relationship of Quarto and Folio Texts of Richard III

Previous articleNext article No AccessOriginal ArticleReconsidering the Relationship of Quarto and Folio Texts of Richard IIISTEVEN URKOWITZSTEVEN URKOWITZHOFSTRA UNIVERSITY Search for more articles by this author HOFSTRA UNIVERSITYPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by English Literary Renaissance Volume 16, Number 3Autumn 1986 Published in association with the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.1986.tb00917.x Views: 15Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

"This Son of Yorke": Textual and Literary Criticism Again

PERHAPS IT IS TIME AGAIN TO PUT IN A WORD IN FAVOR of the exercise of literary judgment in coping with textual problems and in making editorial decisions, though G. Thomas Tanselle's lucid and persuasive essay on the need to combine literary and textual criticism appeared not so long ago that it should already have passed out of memory. ' Still, the questions with which Tanselle grappled are complicated even further when a scholarly editor undertakes to produce a modern reading edition of an early work, for the decisions made for an old-spelling edition must sometimes be re-thought for a modernized edition., I am persuaded that Tanselle's principles apply in both cases, but in that of a modernized edition the scale may have to be tipped even further in the direction of critical judgment. What I have in mind here is the problem of words which are both substantive variants and spelling variants in early modern English. I plan to argue a specific case, namely that it is impossible, in a modernized edition, to know what to do with all the sons and suns in the texts of Richard III on the basis of pure textual principles, and, moreover, that without resort to literary principles the decisions reached for an old-spelling edition will not only mislead the reader of a modernized text but will misrepresent Shakespeare as well. The example I propose to set forth is a complicated one because the textual history of Richard III is itself complex. Nevertheless, while acknowledging that various details are still debatable, we can say that the prevailing view of the textual transmission, in outline form, is that summarized by G. Blakemore Evans in The Riverside Shakespeare.2 According to Evans, the six quartos which preceded the Folio text of 1623 were printed in a simple series, each descending from the immediately preceding edition. Fl printed partly from Q3 and partly from Q6, the copy of Q6 having been corrected against an independent manuscript, which Evans thinks was possibly Shakespeare's 'foul papers', but in any case almost certainly not a manuscript with theatrical connections. The upshot of this state of affairs is that Fl must be the copy-text for the whole play except for III.i.1-158 and V.iii.48 to the end, which portions were set from Q3; for those parts, Qi is the copy-text, since Q3 is essentially nothing but a twice-removed reprint of Q1. The texts of editorial concern, then, are Qi, Q6, and Fl. Thus much is widely agreed upon, and it shall suffice for my purposes here.

Shakespeare's Anonymous Editors: Scribe and Compositor in the Folio Text of 2 Henry IV. Eleanor Prosser

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsShakespeare's Anonymous Editors: Scribe and Compositor in the Folio Text of 2 Henry IV. Eleanor Prosser Paul WerstinePaul Werstine Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 81, Number 4May, 1984 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/391332 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright 1984 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Shakespeare's Supposed Revision of King Lear

In recent years, a number of scholars, most notably Michael Warren,' Steven Urkowitz,2 and Gary Taylor,3 have pioneered a radically new approach to the textual problems of King Lear, one with important and far-reaching implications for the editing of Shakespeare. Their central argument is that the Quarto text (Qi, 1608, and its derivative Q2, 1619) and the Folio text constitute two different versions of the play, the Folio version being a deliberate and careful revision by Shakespeare himself of his earlier version of the play as represented by the Quarto. All the differences between Quarto and Folio, except for obvious compositorial errors, are therefore seen as authorial in origin and as contributing to significant changes in characterization and dramaturgy between the two versions. Some leading scholars, in particular Philip Edwards4 and Richard Knowles,5 have not been convinced by this argument, and have expressed a number of strong reservations about the evidence adduced to support it. But the relatively few dissenting voices have been drowned out by the chorus of enthusiastic assent made up of such

Reviews

Old and Middle English Words for ‘Disgrace’ and ‘Dishonour’. By Ingegerd Lohmander. Gothenburg Studies in English 49. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1981. 228 pp. Skr. 80. The Buke of the Sevyne Sagis. Edited by C. C. van Buu‐Ren‐Veenenbos. Leiden University Thesis: Krips Repro Mep‐pel. 1982. ix + 463 pp. (Also published at Leiden by Brill as Vol. XX, Germanic and Anglistic Studies of the University of Leiden, 1982. Price Hfl. 75,—). William Dunbar. [by] Ian Simpson Ross. Leiden: E. J. Brill 1981. xiv + 284 pp. Price H.fl. 52,—. Young Thomas Hardy. With Revisions, Penguin 1978, 368 pp. and The Older Hardy. With revisions, Penguin 1980, 325 pp., £ 1.75 and £ 1.50 respectively. By Robert Gittings; The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Vol. Two, 1893–1901. Edited by R. L. Purdy and M. Millgate, Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1980, 309 pp. Price £ 17.50. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. By Walter J. Ong. New Accents Series. London & New York: Me‐thuen. 1982. xi + 201 pp. Price £ 7.95 hb., £ 3.50 pb. Literacy and Social Development in the West. Edited by Harvey J. Graff. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 3. Cambridge, New York & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1982. ix + 340 pp. Price £ 6.50 pb. Small Books and Pleasant Histories. Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth‐Century England. By Margaret Spuf‐ford. London: Methuen. 1981. xxi + 275 pp. Price £ 14.95. Books and their Readers in Eighteenth‐Century England. Edited by Isabel Rivers. Leicester: Leicester University Press. 1982. xi + 267 pp. Price £ 15.00. Shakespeare's Anonymous Editors. Scribe and Compositor in the Folio Text of 2 Henry IV. By Eleanor Prosser. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981. xiv + 219 pp. Price $ 18.50. Martin Marprelate, Gentleman. Master Job Throkmorton laid open in his colors. By Leland H. Carlson. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1981. xxii + 445 pp. Price $ 25.00. The Critical Reception of American Literature in the Netherlands 1824–1900. A Documentary Conspectus from Contemporary Periodicals. By J. G. Riewald & J. Barker. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1982. 349 pp. Price: 70 Dutch guilders. Chaucer and Menippean Satire. By F. Anne Payne. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. 1981. xii + 290 pp. Price: 22.50 US dollars. The Theme of Government in ‘Piers Plowman’. By Anna P. Baldwin. (Piers Plowman Studies I). Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer Ltd. (D. S. Brewer). 1981. vi + 107 pp. £ 15.00. Shakespeare and the Romance Ending. By R. S. White. Newcastle upon Tyne. 1981. [viii] + 139 pp. Price £ 2.50. (Available from the author at The School of English, The University, Newcastle upon Tyne.) John Bunyan. Some Gospel‐Truths Opened. A Vindication of Some Gospel‐Truths Opened. A Few Sighs from Hell. Edited by T. L. Underwood, with the assistance of Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press. 1980. lvi + 402 pp. + illus. Price £ 25.00. John Bunyan. The Poems. Edited by Graham Midgley. Oxford: Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press. 1980. lxii + 345 pp. + illus. Price £ 20.00. The Pilgrim's Progess: Critical and Historical Views. Edited by Vincent Newey. Liverpool English Texts and Studies, [18]. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 1980. xiii + 302 pp. Price £ 12.00. A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500. Ed. J. B. Severs and A. E. Hartung. Volume vi. New Haven: The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. 1980. x + 452 (1743–2194) pp. Price not given.

Shakespeare’s Anonymous Editors: Scribe and Compositor in the Folio Text of “2 Henry IV” (by Eleanor Prosser)

Journal Article Shakespeare’s Anonymous Editors: Scribe and Compositor in the Folio Text of “2 Henry IV” (by Eleanor Prosser) Get access Elizabethan Grotesque. By Neil Rhodes. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge … Kegan Paul, 1980. Pp. xiv + 207. $30.00. Steven Urkowitz Steven Urkowitz Johan Gerritsen has published works on textual, analytical, and enumerative bibliography, Dutch archaeology, and the English language and its influence on Dutch, and is editor of The Honest Man’s Fortune. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 33, Issue 1, Spring 1982, Pages 117–118, https://doi.org/10.2307/2870353 Published: 01 April 1982

THE COPY FOR THE FOLIO TEXT OF LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST

THE COPY FOR THE FOLIO TEXT OF LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST Get access STANLEY WELLS STANLEY WELLS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXIII, Issue 130, May 1982, Pages 137–147, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXIII.130.137 Published: 01 May 1982

Renaissance Drama, n.s. 10 ed. by Leonard Barkan

286 Comparative Drama his naivete about life, Hamlet . . . fails to experience the classical enlightenment of the tragic hero that Oedipus exemplifies with the expunging of his outer physical eye and the opening of his intellectual eye, and that Aristotle designates the moral climax in a narrative of thought” (p. 195). The problem of naivete is, I think, more with the critic than with Hamlet. The conclusion about the film I find no more enlightening: “it specializes in cultivating the conjunctive, as opposed to the disjunctive, forces that prevail in the universe of relativity among inescapably related individuals” (p. 203). In the last essay Homan explores “five general theories on the possibility of translating Shakespeare’s plays to a primarily visual medium such as the cinema” (p. 207). Without rehearsing the theories, I can report that they range along a scale from impossible to possible— all of which is followed curiously by a “Coda” which says in effect that movies “prove unsuitable for the expansive nature of Shakespeare’s plays” (p. 235). It is unfortunate that in this essay, published several years earlier, Homan did not revise to take account of Jack Jorgens’ Shakespeare on Film (1977). One factual error: Homan cites Hamlet’s “too too solid flesh” as being from Q1 (p. 221), but, of course, this reading is from the Folio text. The disappointment that I feel about this book as a whole is itself perhaps more than words can witness. DAVID M. BERGERON University of Kansas Renaissance Drama, n.s. 10. Ed. by Leonard Barkan. Evanston: North­ western University Press, 1979. Pp. 216. $22.95. Comedy is the subject of this volume, with which Renaissance Drama enters its twenty-fifth year of publication. Two of the essays of the varied collection examine plays of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is represented twice again in comparisons with Marlowe and Jonson, respectively. Jonson and Massinger are next with two articles for each. Chapman and a forgotten sixteenth-century Italian writer, Bernardo Accolti, have single essays devoted to them. That on Accolti by Howard Cole is by no means the least significant, and it is certainly one of the most fascinating because of the intimate picture it provides of the life and times of an author once celebrated as único Aretino, the unique man from Arezzo. Cole argues persuasively that Accolti’s comedy Virginia is not a negligible analogue to Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, since it anticipates the Shakespearean qualities of a problem play; it is “witty, ironic, skeptical, and sometimes even cynical in its handling of fairy-tale motifs and virtue-story conventions.” Even Shakespeare’s nontraditional dramatization of the old tale had something of a tradition. Several essays challenge or modify the standard interpretations of particular comedies, most successfully perhaps Michael Neill’s “Mas­ singer’s Patriarchy: The Social Vision of A New Way to Pay Old Debts.” Reviews 287 Without denying loose ends in Massinger’s city comedy, Neill shows that its social criticism is more inclusive than that of a Jonsonian satire of the extortionate arriviste Sir Giles Overreach; rather, it conveys quite generally the pangs of the Jacobean transition to a capitalist, cash-nexus society. While Massinger, like Shakespeare, took “a fundamentally con­ servative attitude” toward this process, the play also points up through Overreach “the nightmare projection of the emergent capitalism, . . . the new social order whose perfection Marx was to describe.” It should be said that Shakespeare’s conservatism, just as his attitudes in general, is subject to doubt; but Neill’s claim for Massinger’s gains persuasiveness by the parallels to tracts of the time he quotes. Challenging though less convincing appears to me Lee Bliss’s reinterpretation of Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears as conforming to Chapman’s usually gentle Christian humanism rather than being a cynical, disillusioned piece. Bliss seems to me to make too much of the non-prominent servant Lycus by declar­ ing him to be the spokesman for the moral norm the play is alleged to propagate. Tharsalio’s cynical perspective is surely more congruous with the drama’s topsy-turvy world than Lycus’s benevolent normalcy. Chap­ man was not so benign a moralist that...

Shakespeare in Switzerland

There were few new Shakespeare productions in Switzerland in 1978. A lively Romeo and Juliet was staged at the St. Gallen Town Theatre. And the Lucerne Town Theatre, one of the few theatres that still seem to make it their policy to produce at least one Shakespeare play per season, opened with Measure for Measure at the end of March. It was The Taming of the Shrew at the Zurich Schauspielhaus that attracted most attention, not only for the quality of its acting, but also for its interpretation of the play. Shakespeare's comedy has proven curiously attractive in the last few years: Shakespeare Quarterly reviewed no fewer than six productions in 1977. The play presents a challenge to societies in which the emancipation of woman is an important issue. There seem to be three answers to the question of how The Taming of the Shrew should be acted today: Katherine's submission at the end of the play may be acted as full of irony; or Katherine may be depicted as a human being wantonly destroyed by Petruchio, as in Michael Bogdanov's 1978 Stratford-upon-Avon production; or the play may be acted as a farce, its significance as a model for behavior thereby denied. Where the distance between the world of the play and that of the audience is stressed, the Induction plays an important role, turning the comedy of Petruchio and Katherine into a play within a play. Often Christopher Sly is active as a naively critical spectator during the whole performance, even though the Folio text does not give him anything to say after the very beginning of the play. In his new version of The Taming of the Shrew (published in pamphlet-form by the theatre) Gerhard Klingenberg made full use of Sly. He introduced most of the Sly passages from the anonymous The Taming of A Shrew (a procedure that looks more justified from the point of view of textual criticism today than it did a few years ago), and he added seven short dialogues of his own. On the other hand, he cut many long speeches and reinforced the verbal reactions of the figures to each other-without, however, tampering with the general character of the play. In order to present the play within the play convincingly, the stage was designed as the hall of an English mansion with heavy beams varnished black, in which the stage of a traveling group of actors was put up-an impressive arrangement, but unfortunately one that restricted the freedom of movement of the actors.

Compositors B, C, and D, and the First Folio Text of Love's Labour's Lost

Compositors B, C, and D, and the First Folio Text of Love's Labour's Lost

Act-End Notations in Some Elizabethan Plays

The First Folio (Fl) text of Twelfth Night, the earliest extant version, is apparently very accurate. As J. Dover Wilson observed, it contains very few verbal cruxes, ... is furnished with stage-directions and punctuation which are on the whole both adequate and competent, and gives no serious trouble either with the arrangement of its verse or . . . in the distribution of its speeches.' Because of the good quality of the text and because some stage directions seemed to him of playhouse origin, Wilson believed the printer's copy for F1 Twelfth Night was theatrical prompt-book or a transcript therefrom, an opinion which Greg shared and which has been the consensus of modern editors.2 I think this conclusion is dubious for several reasons, one of which is the presence of a finis after each of the acts of F1 Twelfth Night but the third, where its omission appears to have been inadvertent. The practice of indicating the ends of acts is very unusual in the folio, except, of course, for the finis following the fifth act and applying to the entire play. F1 Love's Labour's Lost has Finis Actus Primus (Through Line Number 488), but in that instance the notation looks as though it had been added [by Compositor C] merely to fill up space at the foot of a column.3 It does not appear in Q 1598, the F1 printer's copy, which, according to Greg, derives from authorial papers. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, Compositor C again set a single internal finis, this time not as a filler, for the notation shares a line (394) with the stage direction concluding the first act, but evidently in response to copy, a transcript by Ralph Crane.4 As far as Twelfth Night is concerned, we can thus be sure that the finis's did not originate in the printing house; Compositor B, who was entirely responsible for Twelfth Night, never set them elsewhere in the folio, and the exceptional nature of the two occurrences in Love's Labour's Lost and Two Gentlemen of Verona precludes the possibility of their introduction by an editor.5 They must, therefore, have been carried over from the copy provided for Fl.