Quarto Text Research Articles

Listening to First Quartos: The Women of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V

ABSTRACT The so-called ‘bad’ quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays have long been treated as superfluous. However, recent debates suggest that these publications are not corrupt but may instead be Shakespeare’s early drafts, opening up a conversation about how to treat the textual disparities between the early quartos and the 1623 folio. This article examines two variant texts in light of this assessment. The early quartos of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) and Henry V (1600) offer moments where female characters display an agency that is silenced and controlled in the more canonical texts of the folio, suggesting that, as he revised the plays, Shakespeare moved to restrict women’s behaviour. For example, the titular Merry Wives design and orchestrate the final masque in the quarto text of that play, while they cede artistic control to their husbands in the later folio version. So too, in Henry V, Katherine’s final scene in the quarto gives her the opportunity to speak more and to assert an equality with Henry in a passage unique to that text. Attention to the gender dynamics of revision demonstrates that, to understand the full range of feminist potential within Shakespeare’s canon, scholars must explore his plays’ textual variation.

Transeditions: Shakespeare’s two french english lessons

Editions translate. Translations edit. Although these principles apply to all editions and translations, they are particularly conspicuous in some transeditions, like Jerome’s Latin Bible, or Shakespeare’s Henry V. Shakespeare’s play survives in two very different versions: a quarto text published in 1600 (The Chronicle History of Henry the fift) and the posthumous 1623 folio Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (The Life of Henry the Fift). Both texts contain a comic scene in which a French princess, with the help of her French attendant, begins to learn English. But of the 697 words of this scene in The Life, only three appear together in the same order in the same speech in The Chronicle History. Nevertheless, in both texts the scene dramatizes translation—and mistranslation. Both Katherine and Alice make comic mistakes; but both texts also contain other mistakes that cannot be plausibly attributed to the characters, seeming instead to have been introduced by compositors in the printing house or by copyists preparing the manuscripts those compositors were given. Can we distinguish the deliberate mistranslations from the accidental ones? Abridgement from expansion? Shakespeare’s own mistakes in French from the mistakes made by those who transmitted his texts? If so, how?

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.

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.

Whose Hamlet Mocks the Warm Clown?

Whose Hamlet Mocks the Warm Clown?

Searching for Thomas Nashe in Dido, Queen of Carthage

Abstract The title page of the 1594 Quarto text of Dido, Queen of Carthage assigns the play to two authors: Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe. Some scholars, such as J. P. Collier, F. G. Fleay, Alexander Grosart, Tucker Brooke, and Thomas Merriam, have argued that Marlowe and Nashe co-authored the play, or that Nashe added significant material to Marlowe’s text. This article assesses the internal evidence for Nashe’s hand in the play by examining its prosody, vocabulary, phraseology, rhyming habits, and stage directions in comparison to works ascribed to Nashe and Marlowe. The article also explores different modes of collaboration, such as the possibility that Nashe helped to plot, revise, or edit the play.

Relative Pronouns as Predicatives: Evidence from Shakespearean English

ABSTRACTIn his Modern English Grammar, Otto Jespersen declared that the relative pronoun who cannot be used as a predicative. He further stated that which is the correct form for the function. To support this argument, he provides evidence from texts of the middle nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To date, the use of predicative relatives before the eighteenth century has received little attention and no research on this topic has been conducted for Early Modern English. To fill this gap, this article focuses on the use of predicative relatives in Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, revealing that which had been established as the ordinary form of the predicative relative in Shakespeare’s English. Although there exists one exceptional case of using whom in Cymbeline, by collating folio and quarto texts and looking into revisions of eighteenth century adaptations, it is concluded that Jespersen’s argument applies to Early Modern English as well.

Drama in the margins – academic text and political context in Matthew Gwinne's Nero: Nova Tragædia (1603) and Ben Jonson's Sejanus (1603/5)

AbstractWhile recent scholarship has recognized the attractions of Matthew Gwinne's chronicle history Nero (1603), its major drawback – an uncritical over‐dependence on the historical sources – has attracted the charge that the play is dramatically incoherent, ultimately a mere ‘academic exercise’. At first glance this approach might be confirmed in Gwinne's pedantic inclusion of scholarly side‐notes which add little to a play‐text already containing the whole historical record. But through a comparative reading with the quarto text of Jonson's Sejanus (first performed 1603; published with Latin side‐notes, 1605) I will argue that both authors use the interpretative potential of ‘text’ and ‘margin’ to reflect not just on the tyranny of princes but also the obedience of citizens, and more specifically the right conduct of a constituency made up, precisely, of the intended cast and audience of Nero, those closest to monarchical power, the counsellors. After sketching the controlling, pre‐emptive and fragmenting policy of margination in Sejanus in the service of a politically defensive use of the ancient historical record, as Jonson relies upon the authenticity of Tacitus to bolster the integrity of his own play, I contrast Gwinne's own practice in Act IV of Nero, which centres on the aftermath of Agrippina's murder and Nero's decision to exile his wife Octavia. Through the margins, Gwinne opens up contradictions in the historical record and invites complicating reflection and contested interpretation of Nero's reign, above all in his interrogation of the conduct of the tutor‐philosopher Seneca. By framing Seneca's role in government through ancient and modern texts that reflect on the politics and ethics of service under tyranny (above all John of Salisbury's Policraticus (1159) and Savile's The Ende of Nero (1591)), I argue that Gwinne's ‘Tacitist’ Nero goes far beyond mere homiletic instruction.

“Nothing almost sees miracles / But misery”: Lucretian Philosophy and Ascetic Experience in King Lear

Often hailed by critics as Shakespeare's darkest drama, King Lear sometimes seems to be an exploration into extreme nihilism. Marxist critic Jan Kott epitomizes this reading when claiming that, There is except the earth, where man goes on his journey from the cradle to the grave. The theme of King Lear is an enquiry into the existence or non-existence of Heaven and Hell. (1) Truly, denials and negations echo throughout the quarto text from Lear's first dismissal of Cordelia to her new dowry of to his final cry of no, no life? (5.3.281). (2) Yet to brand each negation as a form of despairing nihilism overlooks the unique situations and connotations of the various forms of that appear in the text, and the development of their meaning. As Edward W. Taylor observes, King Lear's language communicates more than a quibbling connection between 'no' and 'know,' between negation and knowledge. (3) Originally, the character Lear operates only on the level of the cruel earth or natural world, believing in a materialistic view of and something as merely physical states arising from predictable physical causes, as he threatens Cordelia that nothing will come of nothing, and that she and her disinheritance come of her ingratitude just as oaks come from acorns (1.1.90). By endorsing this view of classical philosophy, evidenced from the Pre-Socratics through Epicureanism and Stoicism, Lear has excluded the supernatural from his experience. Before he is capable of perceiving miracles of light, Lear must encounter the nihilism of his elder daughters' causeless cruelty, facing the diabolical on his ascetical journey, and, in so doing, approaching a fuller realization of the nature of nothing. Only then can he glimpse the celestial and perceive the ability of both good and evil, ingratitude and grace to arise without cause to invade his straightforward world--a world that, he discovers, is neither straightforward nor his. The manifold negations do not deny meaning but rather strip away illusion, causing Lear to see better himself, nature, and the supernatural dimensions (1.1.153). Criticism of the play has typically alternated between two poles of interpretation. To borrow Sean Lawrence's terms, the atheist and pessimistic interpretation such as that offered by Kott uses Kent's cry that All's cheerless, dark and deadly as a description of the entire play (5.3.266). (4) On the other hand, the optimistic Christian interpretation concentrates on the aspect of hope and resurrection that the drama provides--sometimes at the cost of minimizing the very real torment the characters experience, such as when A. C. Bradley famously interprets Lear as killed by an agony, not of pain but of ecstasy. (5) Contrasting and uniting these two poles, the Christian mystical experience of personal ascetical struggle and the via negativa provides a means through which the essential strengths of both the pessimistic secular and optimistic religious interpretations may be harmonized. Blinded to right reason by his naturalistic assumptions, Lear plunges deep into a darkness that exposes his ignorance not only of the diabolical and celestial, but even the natural realm itself. The sheer physical brutality of evil strips Lear of his materialist misconceptions and becomes the occasion for his ultimate cure. In order to understand the subsequent miracles--which, like Creation, proceed ex nihilo--Lear must first descend into the void of nothingness that he had evoked so lightly and experience for himself the negation of all he had assumed. To learn through a two-fold negation has been a venerable path for saints, sinners, and mystics for centuries: first is the negation involved in the ascetical path by which the stripping of one's sins and the world's distractions reveal God more fully. Second is what is known as the via negativa, by which one learns to know God more intellectually by saying what he is not rather than by what he is. …

Countercanonizing Romantic Hamlets: Dr Who’s Lowbrow Hamlet And Its Contradictory Nature

It was in the 19th century that critics and intellectuals were busy constructing hierarchy about what kind of Hamlet was good and which one was bad. The example of good one was Wanderer above the Sea of Fog in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting the message of which conveyed Kantian self-reflection, expressed through the wanderer’s gazings into the murkiness of the sea of fog. Since then romantic Hamlets Coleridge, Young Werther, Kemble, Kean, Irving, Olivier, Branagh have made a similar climb perching upon the psychic ramparts of Elsinore. But the pendulum suddenly swang the other way as RSC took us on another speculative voyage catering for younger tastes attracted to Hamlet by the popularity of Tennant’s Doctor Who. Though high and low binary is out of date now RSC deliberately entered into the world of lowbrow Shakespeare by choosing quarto text, neoclassical revenge tragedy concept, method acting, and postmodern design concept, all of which could be justified in its own way. No recent stage production/film has attracted the excitement and nearly unanimous critical praise as Tennant’s Hamlet but the result was another manifestation of the contradictory nature of Shakespeare both institutionally marginal and symbolically central.

XVIII * Bibliography and Textual Criticism

The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (PBSA 101[2007]) running true to form, contains some fascinating and important contributions. Lynette Hunter's ‘Adaptation and/or Revision in Early Quartos of Romeo and Juliet’ (PBSA 101:i[2007] 5–54) contains a thorough investigation of ‘the interrelationship between the [four] quarto texts’ (p. 7) of Romeo and Juliet. In doing so, Hunter provides a most informative account of previous textual and editorial scholarship. Her focus is theatrical practice, and she concludes ‘The relationship between Q1 and Q2 Romeo and Juliet does not require “solving,” nor can it be “solved” by thinking about theatre practice, but the impact of the theatre may provide a further site for talking about the cultural materiality of the text’ (p. 54). YWES readers hardly need reminding that Jane Millgate has produced extremely important work in the field of Sir Walter Scott scholarship and early nineteenth-century publishing history. Indeed, her Union Catalogue of Walter Scott Correspondence may be found on the National Library of Scotland website: www.nls.uk/catalogues/resources/scott/index.html. This most generous of scholars has provided yet another important addition to our knowledge of Scott's relationships with his publishers. Her ‘The Name of the Author: Additional Light on the Publication of Ivanhoe and the Scott–Constable Relationship’ (PBSA 101:i[2007] 55–62) draws upon publishing agreements found in the Pierpont Morgan and the National Library of Scotland to illuminate the relationship between Scott and his publisher Archibald Constable.

Wherefore Verona in The Two Gentlemen of Verona ?

greatest variety in the titles of Shakespeare's plays can be found in the comedies: one, for example, is a complete sentence, All's Well That Ends Well; one indicates the genre, Comedy of Errors. Unlike the histories, named for the ruling sovereign, and the tragedies, named for the principal character, the comedies never have the proper name of a character in the one exception would be Cymbeline, but the Folio groups this play with the tragedies. Pericles, another potential exception, the Folio does not even include. Three of the comedies indicate location in their titles: Merchant of Venice, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Typically, the titles of histories and tragedies do not specify location, with the notable exception of Timon of Athens. Thomas Berger has ruminated on Shakespeare's titles, making astute observations about the changing titles from quarto texts to the Folio, especially the histories. As Berger succinctly states, matter. Titles matter a lot. (1) But we have to ask: these titles matter to whom, and how? We have no way of knowing, of course, how or what Shakespeare thought about his plays' titles. Berger also observes, have fewer 'problems' with the titles of Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, it is not because the problems are fewer or absent; if anything, the problems are apparent, more complex. (2) Building on this less apparent dimension of Two Gentlemen of Verona, this essay contends that the play has an inappropriate title, based on a faulty location. If we think about the matter, we have to admit that we do not know where the plays' titles come from. We can assume that Shakespeare created the titles, but we cannot be certain. Considering that roughly half the plays had not appeared in quarto format in Shakespeare's lifetime, we might have even reason to be confident about the titles that end up in the Folio. That is, Shakespeare presumably would have had no involvement in the construction of the Folio, unless he left plans behind. Rather, the editors of the Folio, probably John Heminge and Henry Condell, might well have been the ones who made the decisions about titles; they certainly participated directly in gathering the texts for inclusion, as they tell us. They may also have decided to arrange the plays by genre. (3) If we turn to the popular Tom Stoppard-Marc Norman film Shakespeare in Love for illumination, we can learn something about the possibly arbitrary nature of title decisions, remembering that this film is a fiction about fiction-making. Early on, Henslowe tries to reassure Fennyman, one of his financial backers, that he will be getting a new play from Will Shakespeare. Henslowe describes this play thus: a crowd-tickler--mistaken identities, a shipwreck, a pirate king, a bit with a dog, and love triumphant Fennyman asks, What's the title? and Henslowe replies, and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter. Fennyman says succinctly, Good title. (4) In the conversation between Shakespeare and Marlowe, Shakespeare praises Doctor Faustus and even quotes from it. But Marlowe says, I have a new one nearly done, and better. Massacre at Paris. (5) And Shakespeare responds, Good title. He then reveals the title of the play that he is writing: Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter, at which he sighs despondently. (6) Much later, as Shakespeare discusses the play with Edward Alleyn, Alleyn blurts out, The title won't do; then he adds, and Juliet--just a suggestion,' To which the grateful Shakespeare responds, Thank you, Ned. (7) It's been Romeo and Juliet ever since. think that in their witty and informed way, Stoppard and Norman have probably come close to the mark about how plays may get their titles. One can easily imagine such exchanges, without being able to document them, in the rough-and-tumble theater world. Two Gentlemen of Verona: good title; that is, it sounds precise. …

Anything for a Quiet Life, IV.ii.1-44: The Hazards of Collaboration

ANYTHING FOR A QUIET LIFE was published in a Quarto of 1662 as ‘Written by Tho. Middleton, Gent.’ But H. Dugdale Sykes's contention in 1921 that Webster had collaborated on it was endorsed by F. L. Lucas, who included the comedy in his edition of Webster's works.1 In their independent studies of the Middleton canon, David J. Lake and MacD. P. Jackson provided detailed evidence of collaboration between the two playwrights and were in substantial agreement in identifying their respective shares.2 They relied on distinctive authorial patterns in the use of such linguistic minutiae as colloquial contractions, affirmative particles, expletives, rare spellings, and connectives. Lake divided the play as follows: None of Lake's data, however, cover IV.ii.1–44, nor did Sykes or Lucas cite any Webster parallels with these lines, and other considerations strongly suggest that, as attributionist E. H. C. Oliphant and Middleton scholar R. H. Barker believed, Middleton was responsible for the dialogue between Knaves-bee and his wife that opens IV.ii, as well as for the rest of the scene.3 The issue may seem trivial, but correct determination of the author of IV.ii.1–44 helps explain some curious anomalies in the Quarto text of the play at the juncture between Lucas's IV.i and IV.ii. Collaborations often exhibit failures of ‘continuity’, and Anything for a Quiet Life exemplifies this phenomenon. 1 H. Dugdale Sykes, ‘A Webster–Middleton Play: Anything for a Quiet Life’, N&Q, 12th series, ix (1921), 181–3, 202–4, 225–6, 300; reprinted in Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama (London, 1924), 159–72; F. L. Lucas (ed.), The Complete Works of John Webster (London, 1927), IV, 66–8. William Power documented reactions to Sykes's case in ‘Double, Double’, N&Q, cciv (1959), 4–8. 2 David J. Lake, The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays (Cambridge, 1975), 175–84; MacD. P. Jackson, Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare (Salzburg, 1979), 142–4. Charles R. Forker, Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster (Carbondale, Illinois, 1986), 145–6, 549, summarizes subsequent opinion. 3 E. H. C. Oliphant, ‘Anything for a Quiet Life’, N&Q, 12th series, x (1922), 11, Richard Hindry Barker, Thomas Middleton (New York and London, 1958), 191–2.

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...

Stage Directions in 'Hamlet': New Essays and New Directions by Hardin L. Aasand (review)

MLRy 99.4, 2004 1031 throughout most of the twentieth century, 'disintegration' is rejected out of hand as somehow unworthy of the sacred name of Shakespeare: this is the position argued in virtually all the standard editions of Shakespeare until the Oxford Shakespeare of 1988. And in the final phase, dating largely from the 1970s, such scholars as MacDonald Jackson, David Lake, Cyrus Hoy, and Jonathan Hope, using sophisticated statistical analysis, have confirmed or refined the hypotheses of the firstgroup, citing linguistic evidence which can be shown to be quantifiable and objective. Here again one can quarrel with some of the details. There is, for example, a tendency to underestimate the extent to which the criteria of such early critics as Fleay were subjective and evaluative?'good' passages are by Shakespeare, those the critic considers weaker are by Hand B (H. J.Oliver, in the Arden edition of Timon ofAthens, calls this'treating a play like a plum pudding and giving Shakespeare only the plums'). In the discussion of Pericles, more attention might have been paid to the instability of the text, the problems inherent in drawing firm conclusions from a notoriously corrupt Quarto text, with linguistic detail which is as likely to derive from the printer as from the author or authors. But this is a very impressive study, even if some of its conclusions might have been stated in terms of probability rather than certainty. King's College London Warren Chernaik Stage Directions in 'Hamlet': New Essays and New Directions. Ed. by Hardin L. Aasand. Cranbury NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associ? ated University Presses. 2003. 234 pp. ?34- ISBN 0-8386-3946-1. W. W. Greg once noted that play wrights such as Shakespeare did not usually give stage directions, but leftthat part ofthe work blank to be filled out by the requirements and mechanics of performance. But this is not true of textual editors, who almost without exception supply stage directions in brackets and, in some cases, change those in the original or rearrange or rewrite them for clarity or effect. Conversely, Linda Mcjannet has recently argued, in The Voice ofElizabethan Stage Directions (Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999), that to do so mufBes the decisions, authenticity, and authority of the original works. Hardin L. Aasand's pioneering collection of essays examines the difficulties the presence or absence of stage directions makes, both in recovering and editing Renaissance English playscripts and in subsequent performances on stage and in film. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, coeditors of the projected Arden 3 edition of Hamlet, forinstance, note the direction about the Ghost at 1. 1. 130-31; printed in the margin of Q2 is 'It spreads | his armes'; in the 1676 Quarto this reads, 'He spreads his arms\ Other changes are more serious. Qi reads 'Enter Ophelia distracted,playing on a lute and her hair down singing\ but this is changed in the more authoritative Q2 to 'Enter Ophelia'. Was her entrance without any distinction or prop ?June Schlueter and James P. Lusardi note that scenes from the arrival of Laertes in iv. 5 until Gertrude's report on Ophelia's death announce all entries with noise offstage. But what causes the noise? Is it always, as it is once, the rabble rising in favour of Laertes' rebellion against Claudius? When Gertrude gives her eulogy, whom does she address? In Qi she tells Claudius; in Q2 she speaks directly to Laertes: what is at stake is her pri? mary allegiance. Entrances and exits pose other problems. Pamela Mason points to the entrance of Laertes in the final duelling scene?coming in last in Q2, perhaps hanging back, perhaps forattention, but entering just behind Claudius and Gertrude in the Folio. George Walton Williams worries about exits that are unannounced but clearly must take place, either because of subsequent dialogue or re-entry. David G Brailow is concerned with the exit of the Ghost in 1. 2. No text specifies when or 1032 Reviews how, although references later on referto 'fading' and to 'vanishing'. Mason speaks for many of the contributors: 'Editors like consistency. The danger is that we risk sacrificing something of the...

:The Taming of a Shrew (1594)

The anonymous comedy, The Taming of a Shrew, was printed by Peter Short in 1594, and is presumed to have been performed before that date. In his Introduction, Stephen Miller analyses the printing of the quarto and relates it to previous studies of Shakespeare quartos also printed by Short. He gives an account of the controversy surrounding the relation of A Shrew to the text of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, first printed in the First Folio of 1623, and supplies a table of scene-by-scene correspondences between the two texts. He lists known verbal borrowings in A Shrew from the plays of Marlowe and other sources and outlines his theory of the character and origins of the text. Through-line-numbers for the quarto text have been established for the first time in this edition.

‘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

The Chimera of Amalgamation

One of the features of the growth of playing in London in the late 1580s shows itself in the size of casts needed for some of the new plays composed around 1590. The history plays in particular laid exceptional demands on the numbers in the companies playing in London. Presumably this was one result of the foothold for performing to large audiences that the new amphitheatres had given the players. But it raises many questions about the organization of the companies. Did they enlarge the companies for the occasion with hired men, using casual if stagestruck labour hanging around the playhouses, or did they take on extra sharers? There is no evidence that this happened. The number of sharers in the leading companies, apart from the uniquely-large Queen's Men, who were allotted twelve players in 1583 but split into two in about 1590, when most of the companies had eight or ten players. Which came first, the larger companies or the larger plays? Did different companies join forces to stage them? Did they, after performance in London, take these large plays on tour? The conventional assumption about that, based largely on the evidence of the ‘bad’ and shortened quarto texts of the early plays, is that the ‘large’ plays were cut down to the ‘bad’ quarto size to allow the plays to be taken on tour. So were the large plays written only for London audiences? The writing of plays for large casts was a short-lived phenomenon, starting at the end of the 1580s and dying by 1594. What changed the conditions in that year? I believe we can address these questions most sharply by considering one of theatre history's more intriguing chimeras, the so-called ‘amalgamated company’ that is thought to have occupied Henslowe's Rose through the early 1590s.

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...

Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local Texts

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