Paul Werstine Research Articles

Hand D and Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Literary Paper Trail

The biography of William Shakespeare exerts an influence on various areas of research related to Shakespeare, including textual, bibliographical, and attribution studies. A case in point is the theory that Shakespeare wrote the Hand D Additions in the Sir Thomas More manuscript. That theory is now part of received scholarship, even though many of the assumptions and arguments first published in 1923 have been challenged. The original palaeographic argument can be reappraised with reference to the criteria and procedures of the forensic document examiner. Recent scholarship relevant to an investigation of the case that the Hand D Additions are Shakespeare’s ‘foul papers’, including Paul Werstine’s Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare , provides the foundation for a brief reconsideration of that topic. Supporting arguments for the Hand D attribution, in particular those based on orthography, prove vulnerable to challenge.

Paul Werstine: Early Modern Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare.

Paul Werstine: Early Modern Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare.

PAUL WERSTINE, Early Modern Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare

THIS book is the product of Paul Werstine’s accumulative research on manuscript culture in relation to the editing of Shakespeare’s printed plays. It seeks to answer questions relating to what exactly an early modern text is, and how its meaning is created and accredited. For editors and bibliographers of printed texts, such questions are particularly difficult because the early modern book trade supported a wealth of practices that might now be considered alien: two editions might have different origins but present no discussion of their relationship; a run of copies may be corrected for perceived typos, misreads, and eyeskip as they go through the press; and incomplete and unrevised manuscripts could be—and were—stolen and rushed through print shops, sometimes to the (recorded) annoyance of the author. The issue underpinning these and other textual problems is that few manuscripts survive from the early modern period. By extension, it is often unclear what stage of the manuscript process is represented by an extant printed text. The significant textual differences in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as seen in the first quarto, which is much shorter than the text of the second quarto and the first folio, are a case in point. In instances where a manuscript does survive, it is sometimes unclear who wrote or copied it, and whether the manuscript is of an early draft, a presentation copy, or something in between. ‘Authority’ is a key word here, but it is a word riddled with debates. Understanding these manuscript debates is crucial if we are to be able to accurately explain the practices underneath, and the production of, extant printed witnesses.

PAUL WERSTINE. Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare.

PAUL WERSTINE. Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare.

Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare by Paul Werstine

Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare by Paul Werstine

XVIII * Bibliography and Textual Criticism

Last year’s survey began with a lament for the absence of Studies in Bibliography . Volume 58 ( SB 58[2007–8]) was published in September 2010. The question is, was it worth waiting for? It has eight articles, but no apology for its lateness in appearing. It opens with Richard Bucci’s ‘Mind and Textual Matter’ ( SB 58[2007–8] 1–47). Bucci’s is an extensive consideration of ‘the critical editorial approach to Anglophone literary works which arose alongside the “new bibliography” ’ (p. 4). Amongst texts and theories about them, considered are essays in Stephen Orgel’s The Authentic Shakespeare and other problems of the Early Modern Stage [2002], Paul Werstine’s writings in Shakespeare Quarterly , Text and elsewhere. Interestingly, some of Bucci’s text is concerned with responses to W.W. Greg’s ‘The Rationale of Copy-Text’ (pp. 11ff.) and McKerrow, Bowers, Tanselle, and McGann’s reactions to it, see for instance specifically p. 18 n. 25. For Bucci, there was ‘an initial lack of clarity on the part of some author-focused editors about the need to deepen the definition of their editorial goal’. Additionally, with the exception of Bowers and Tanselle, ‘few contributions to the scholarly journals published little in the way of meaningful assessments of the editions’ (p. 21). He finds, however, Hans Zeller’s ‘A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts’ ( SB 28[1975] 231–64) ‘provocative and helpful’ and also the work of the ‘learned German Jewish philologist Ernst Grumach (1902–67)’ who was the first editor of ‘the edition of Goethe’s works prepared by the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (DDR), from 1949’ (p. 22).

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Modern Problems of Editing: The Two Texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Modern Problems of Editing: The Two Texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

All in the Playwrights' Hands

IN THE ADVANCE publicity for Grace Ioppolo's latest book the Roudedge catalogue announced a volume entided Dramatic Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson , Middleton and Heywood. The change of tide is significant. The new one provides a more accurate reflection of the work's contents, for in it Ioppolo systematically attempts to place the playwright back at the very centre of studies of early modern dramatic texts. For Ioppolo, the dramatist was not only the figure who initiated the journey that a late sixteenth-century or early seventeenth-century playscript would undertake after leaving its author's pen, but also the key figure and in some cases the only figure who controlled its subsequent evolution into a text for either reading or performance. In her previous book {Revising Shakespeare , Harvard University Press, 1991) Ioppolo showed that Shakespeare and his contemporaries, prompted by practical, literary, or political considerations, routinely returned to their dramatic works to make alterations; in this new monograph she goes a stage further, arguing that governing all the processes that a playscript would undergo rehearsal, the copying of the text (both in its complete form and in its constituent actors' parts), scrutiny by the censor, realisation in print the dramatist remained the main, if not the only, locus of authority. In so arguing, Ioppolo is contradicting a body of recent scholarship that has almost attained the status of a new critical orthodoxy. Her methodology in this book in itself represents a challenge to some of the principal proponents of the 'death of the author' trend in early modern theatre studies. Throughout Dramatists and their Manuscripts she insists that her own insights derive from first-hand examination of the extant manuscripts themselves, rather than from printed transcripts, and she denounces many of the luminaries of contemporary bibliography for failing (or being intellectually incompetent) to do the same. Several prominent figures come under the lash in this regard: Douglas Brooks ( From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modem England , Cambridge University Press, 2002), Paul Werstine, Leah Marcus, and, especially, Jeffrey Masten {Textual Intercourse , Cambridge

Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance: Rethinking 'Macbeth', 'Hamlet', 'Othello', 'King Lear' by Michael L. Hays (review)

226 Reviews tude without subjecting them to the same critical questioning applied to the work of Pollard, Greg, Chambers, and other 'conservative' scholars. Erne wants to assimilate the 'Bad' Quartos to his interpretative category of short plays (theatre), as against longer versions (print), and in so doing relies on recent diatribes by Paul Werstine, Steve Urkowitz, and Laurie Maguire against Pollard and Greg's conception of these works as performing texts partly reconstructed from memory. Unfortunately, these oppositional or 'revisionist' critics wrote polemically, and their accounts of their pre? decessors' work cannot be relied on. Anyone who wants to gain an accurate impression of the distortions produced by actors' memories must go back to G I. Duthie, The (Bad3 Quarto ofHamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941), and Alfred Hart, Stolne and Surreptitious Copies: A Comparative Study of Shakespeare's Bad Quartos (Melbourne and London: Melbourne University Press in association with Oxford University Press, 1941). I remain utterly unconvinced by the arguments adduced here for these texts as reliable theatrical versions (pp. 194, 204 ff.,212 ff.). Erne summarizes 'the new orthodoxy of the 1980s', according to which the Quarto text of King Lear (3,100 lines) and the Folio (2,900 lines) are two entirely different plays (pp. 184-87), and records some ofthe critiques it has received. But he has overlooked several important essays challenging this orthodoxy, by Robert Clare, W. C. Carroll , and Richard Knowles. In other respects Erne goes along with 'the new orthodoxy of the 1980s', rather damagingly in accepting Foucault's claim that the author 'was not born but made' (p. 33)?to which the only answer can be, 'Yes, but back in Greece and Rome, and uninterruptedly through the Middle Ages and Renais? sance!' Erne himself argues that the concept of an author would 'not have applied to the text of a public stage play in 1590' (p. 40), but no valid distinction can be drawn within printed playtexts as to the 'public' or 'private' nature of the theatre in which they were firstperformed, since these categories derive from modern theatre histori? ans, and several earlier sixteenth-century plays declare their authors. In a recent book (Shakespeare, Co-author (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)) I counted more than 150 named dramatists in the period 1576-1642, while Jeffrey Knapp ('What is a Co-AuthorV, Representations, 89 (Winter 2003), 1-29) has shown that at least twentyfour English plays printed before 1600 speak of their 'author', 'poet', or 'writer' in a prologue or epilogue. The book is beautifully produced, with a sumptuous full-colour dustjacket of Sir Anthony Van Dyck's Sir John Suckling, c. 1640 (now in the Frick Collection), holding a Shakespeare Folio open at Hamlet. Some printing errors need correcting, and in a few places an editor might have produced a clearer sense, or a more economical expression. But fora scholar whose mother tongue is not English the book is a highly creditable performance which ought to have a beneficial influence on Shakespeare scholarship and criticism. London University Brian Vickers Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance: Rethinking 'Macbeth', 'Hamlet'y 'Othello', 'KingLear'. By Michael L. Hays. (Studies in Renaissance Literature, 12) Cambridge: Brewer. 2003. ix + 225pp. ?45; $75. ISBN 0-85991-788-6. Writing in 1971 in the New Companion to Shakespeare Studies (ed. by Kenneth Muir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)) on 'Shakespeare's Reading', G K. Hunter?an eminent literary critic laying down the law in an authoritative critical Companion from a major university press?confidently declared that the Bard 'had no interest in medieval romance'. 'An idiosyncratic view', as Michael Hays comments in this new book, 'which unaccountably ignores his two plays indebted to Chaucer's MLR, ioi.i, 2006 227 Troilus and Criseyde and "The Knight's Tale"' (p. 11). As the title of Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance makes clear, Hays is pursuing a very different line of thinking, and one that goes far beyond a bare acknowledgement of Chaucerian borrowings. His argument is twofold. Firstly, he claims that romance was 'the preponderant genre in fictional literature' from the onset of printing to the end of the sixteenth century. Secondly, that it is therefore a significant and hitherto neglected...

Caterwauling Cataians: The Genealogy of a Gloss

My ideas for this essay were first presented at the 1998 meeting of the Association of America in a seminar calledShakespeare and China I would like to thank the organizers of that seminar and its participants as well as others who have discussed the project with me as it evolved, especially Tom Conley and Haun Saussy for their helpful comments and their invitations to present early versions at the Harvard Renaissance Colloquium and the Stanford Appropriations Workshop. I am deeply grateful to Dan Brayton and Marion Wells for their insightful suggestions on long drafts, and to Susan Cerasano, Paul Werstine, and Sun Huizhu for encouragement at crucial stages. Thanks also to the staff at the Folger Library for cheerfully fetching so many copies of the same two plays, to the editorial staff of Quarterly for their pains and care with the manuscript, and to Middlebury College for supporting my research. 1 J : _L?: tL P *A,RS N tk / i, 1994 6 i, M 23 ,-M 2 [Zhou Junzhang, Shakespeare and the Chinese,Journal of Shaanxi Normal University 23.2 (1994)]: 91-94. Except for the epigraphs, which are quoted from The First Folio of Shakespeare, prep. Charlton Hinman, 2d ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996), all quotations of not otherwise attributed in this essay follow The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997). Translations from the Chinese are my own.

The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (review)

Journal Article Stephen Orgel. The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage. Get access The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage. By Stephen Orgel. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Illus. Pp. xx + 276. $85.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Paul Werstine Paul Werstine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 54, Issue 4, Winter 2003, Pages 461–463, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2004.0037 Published: 01 December 2003

Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, 1609–1994 by John Ripley

REVIEWS such patterns, but in the surviving archive of documents about the early modern theatre. These records show how “authorial presence” was compromised by habitual collaboration in the preparation of scripts for the stage and by equally habitual re­ vision of them by the companies, especially on the occasion of the revival of popular plays. Tromly’s readers will have to de­ cide for themselves whether to trust “patterns” or records, but readers deserve to hear the voices, suppressed in this book, of those who have studied the latter. According to G. E. Bentley, author of the seven-volume Jacobean and Caroline Stage, “al­ together the evidence suggests that it would be reasonable to guess that as many as half of the plays by professional drama­ tists in the period incorporated the writing at some date of more than one man” (Profession 199). Bentley also tells us that “re­ vision of dramatists’ manuscripts in the theatres occurred when the actors prepared the play for revival. There are a great many records of one sort or another of this common practice; even the general public seems to have taken it for granted” (Profession 237). No scholar who attends to these records would simply pre­ sume, as Tromly does, Marlowe’s unaided composition of The Jew of Malta in the form in which that play descends to us, since the only extant version of The Jew was not published until 1633, forty years after Marlowe’s death. WORKS CITED Bentley, G. E. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. 7 vols. Oxford: Claren­ don, 1941-68. ------ . The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time 15901642 . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. PAUL WERSTINE / King’s College, University of Western Ontario John Ripley. Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, 1609-1994■ Teaneck NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Very much in the vein of John Ripley’s earlier book on Julius Caesar (1980), this is an impressively complete and judicious 225 ESC 26, 2000 history of a major Shakespeare play as it has been performed on English and American stages. Beginning with a little spec­ ulative reconstruction of what might have been the conditions and modes of its original performance, the author moves into a discussion of the style and structure of the play. His astute analysis of its performative rhythm provides the basis for his subsequent account of the attempts and repeated failures of production to take the measure of this complex and sometimes uninviting play. For, in a sense, failure is Ripley’s theme. As he makes clear throughout and reiterates in his Afterword, there seems never to have been in his eyes a fully successful version of the play. All have been partial, too quick to “stabilize” what Shakespeare leaves deliberately indeterminate, too eager to pro­ vide clarity of motivation and political alignment to characters and situations that Shakespeare leaves fruitfully ambiguous. In offering a prescription for what could be done to rem­ edy this situation, Ripley perhaps asks for too much. Indeed it is probably not possible to mount a production that would answer, and thus put an end to, all professorial desire. What would be desirable, as the author outlines it, includes an un­ cut text, an artful balance of psychology and politics, and a perfect weighting of the different forces in the play. He calls as well for equal emphasis on the three “centres of interest” in the play — the patrician-plebeian conflict, the military struggle, and the mother-son relationship — and for a perceptive attunement to the structural harmonies. A salient example of the fail­ ure of producers to tune in to the careful structure, he argues, is the almost universal cutting of a “pivotal” scene (4.3) that is actually a “key aesthetic device” (336) linking the two main movements of the play. Coming from an historian of the the­ atre, such prescriptions seem a bit surprising; they sound too much like a literary wish-list, too much at odds with the his­ torian’s even-handed consideration of the flow of productions as they have negotiated the tricky terrain marked by stylistic imperatives, audience taste, actorly skill, and the demands of the text. Ripley, like most...

The Texts of 'Othello' and Shakespearian Revision

Journal Article E.A.J. Honigmann. The Texts of ‘Othello’ and Shakespearian Revision. Get access The Texts of ‘Othello’ and Shakespearian Revision. By E.A.J. Honigmann. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. xx + 187. $75.00 cloth. Paul Werstine Paul Werstine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 51, Issue 2, Summer 2000, Pages 240–244, https://doi.org/10.2307/2902140 Published: 01 July 2000

Bad Memories of Margaret? Memorial Reconstruction versus Revision in The First Part of the Contention and 2 Henry VI

TWO DEVELOPMENTS IN THE 1980s challenged editors and critics to reconsider the validity of entrenched beliefs about the historical formation and transmission of Shakespeare's plays. The King Lear controversy focused attention on the contending printed states of Lear, and one consequence of that discussion has been a more general application of its central concerns: the questions raised there have convinced some critics of the need to reappraise the relationship between other Folio plays and quarto counterparts that either had been printed anonymously or else had appeared with doubtful attributions to Shakespeare on their title pages. A separate but clearly related development harks back to E.AJ. Honigmann's earlier objections to the imprecise or misleading use of such terms as foul papers and intermediate fair copies.' Honigmann's call for greater precision in the use of bibliographic terms has since metamorphosed into an increasingly insistent proposal to reexamine not only the use of terminology but also the validity of the assumptions behind some bibliographic concepts that took root early in the twentieth century: foul papers, corrected prompt copy, good and bad quartos, and memorial reconstruction. Over the past two decades Paul Werstine, Randall McLeod, Steven Urkowitz, Laurie Maguire, and others have reminded us that although these bibliographic terms have acquired currency, they are hypothetical constructs that still have only theoretical status, however much they appear now to have passed into the realm of fact.2

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, III. Edited by LEEDS BARROLL. Associate Editor, PAUL WERSTINE. Pp. xiv+368.New York: AMS Press, 1986; also distributed by Eurospan Ltd., London. $57.50, institutions; $30, individuals. ANNE LANCASHIRE ANNE LANCASHIRE University of Toronto Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XLI, Issue 161, February 1990, Pages 113–115, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLI.161.113 Published: 01 February 1990

"Enter a Sheriffe" and the Conjuring up of Ghosts

Journal Article “Enter a Sheriffe” and the Conjuring up of Ghosts Get access Paul Werstine Paul Werstine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 38, Issue 1, Spring 1987, Pages 126–130, https://doi.org/10.2307/2870418 Published: 01 April 1987

"Urging of her Wracke" In The Comedy of Errors

Journal Article “Urging of her wracke” In The Comedy of Errors Get access Paul Werstine Paul Werstine Paul Werstine, Assistant Professor of English at King’s College in London, Ontario, has published articles on the printing of Shakespeare’s plays and has edited The Comedy of Errors for the forthcoming International Shakespeare. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 31, Issue 3, Autumn 1980, Pages 392–394, https://doi.org/10.2307/2869206 Published: 01 October 1980