This year two radically new British editions of Shakespeare have begun to appear in print, one from Oxford University Press and the second from Cambridge University Press. Either can reasonably expect to become the standard classroom text for an entire generation to come. Since the Shakespeare our children grow up on will thus be in some respects a very different author from the one we have known, the occasion demands a look at the older editions which formed our conception of Shakespeare in this century, as well as an evaluation of the new man these fresh versions offer to future readers.
Two great editions of the 20th century have shaped critical understanding of the playwright today: the New Shakespeare (of which this year’s Cambridge is a revision), begun in 1921 by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson; and the New Arden, started in 1946 under the general editorship of Una Ellis-Fermor and not yet complete. Both were sparked by a sequence of advances in textual scholarship which furthered dramatically our knowledge of Shakespeare, establishing a more certain chronology of the plays, casting light on the provenance and nature of quarto and folio, and turning the tide against the “disintegrationists” who believed a large part of the Shakespeare canon to be the work of inferior collaborators.
It is no coincidence that each of these two monumental undertakings, the New Shakespeare and the Arden, was begun in the aftermath of world war. The common impulse is clear. Shakespeare is an author, and an institution, so synonymous with England itself that to build a new and unassailably authoritative edition of the plays could be felt to be the first labor in the necessary rebirth of the nation after the trauma of war, if not in the construction of a better world. As Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson wrote in their general introduction to the New Shakespeare in 1921, theirs was “the most auspicious time in history” for such an undertaking. But though both editions implicitly identify the state of the Shakespeare canon with the state of the British nation, they present very different conceptions of each.
The New Shakespeare was executed almost singlehandedly by John Dover Wilson (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch withdrew on completing the comedies). Dover Wilson began the series when he was forty and completed it in 1966 when he was eighty-five; he went blind on finishing the Sonnets.
Even in a tradition that includes Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope, John Dover Wilson remains one of the most redoubtable of Shakespeare’s editors, and certainly the greatest in our century. Above being a scholar, he was an educator and a nationalist—two dirty words today—who viewed the study of English literature as his country’s best defense against bolshevism, fascism, and the threat of class warfare (a threat that in England between the wars seemed very real). An authority on Russia and its struggling revolutionary factions, he had had the willful perversity to publish, in 1914, an essay proclaiming that czarism was Russia’s own peculiar version of democracy and would last a thousand years. Where his own country was concerned, however, Dover Wilson was more down-to-earth. He worked as an inspector of night schools for industrial workers in the North for over twenty years, founded an adult-education magazine in an age when such endeavors were unheard of, and served, among other public functions, on the influential Newbolt Commission which after World War I invented the study of English literature as we know it today. His career was devoted to putting into effect his conviction that higher education was an incitement not to anarchy but to patriotism, and that the loyalty and well-being of the working classes depended on their identification with a national culture.
As a young man, Dover Wilson had been taken up by the great triumvirate of English bibliographers, A.W. Pollard, R.B. McKerrow, and W.W. Greg, whose work shaped the Shakespeare canon we know today. As a result of their influence, Dover Wilson’s choice of texts is both revolutionary and accurate. His interpretations of the plays, however, are another matter: they are of a wild and stubborn subjectivity, full of colorful conjecture and special pleading. Because Dover Wilson considered Shakespeare to be, like himself, a kind of miniature of England and a lone defender of the free world against the forces of universal anarchy, it was necessary that Shakespeare be of Dover Wilson’s mind on all scores. When Shakespeare seems to him to be behaving in an un-English manner—say, in the gorily histrionic tragedy, Titus Andronicus—Dover Wilson declares the play to be not Shakespeare’s, and a joke. As Boswell said of Dr. Johnson’s conversation, if his pistol didn’t fire, he hit you over the head with it.
Dover Wilson’s analysis of Julius Caesar is an example of the chaos that can result from investing too much in another man’s like-mindedness. As an enemy of dictatorship, albeit one who had not yet seen enough to mistrust coups conducted in the name of national liberation, Dover Wilson decided that Julius Caesar was a vindication of the assassins. Shakespeare’s Caesar, he proclaims, is a loathsome and decrepit tyrant, a mere Jack Cade (the 15th-century peasant celebrated in Henry VI, Part Two for raising a rebellion that stormed London, beheading Lord Say and Seal and promising the masses all the beer they could drink and a month of Sundays). The play, he concludes, might better be entitled Caesar and Caesarism, for “such is Caesarism . . . with the equality of all in one classless mob united in reverence before a semi-divine being, whether Napoleon, Fuehrer, or General Secretary of the Communist party.” Dover Wilson’s play sounds like a fine one, but it isn’t Shakespeare’s. He has gone as far wrong as only a vision can lead one.
And yet because the vigor and almost desperate conviction of Dover Wilson’s prose are everywhere accompanied by a luminously sunny temper and a boundless spirit of optimism and adventure, he remains one of the most salutary critics of our time. He is at his soundest in Henry V, in which the historical parallels do not require so much straining.
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Henry V is the fourth and last of an immensely popular tetralogy that Shakespeare wrote in the late 1590’s. The sequence chronicles the overthrow of the unstable and effeminate Richard II by Bolingbroke, who as king in Henry IV, Parts One and Two enjoys a troubled reign over a country plagued by debts and insurrections. The Henry IV plays are best remembered for the pranks of Henry’s wayward son, Prince Hal, and his ancient and disreputable sidekick, Falstaff. In Henry V the king Prince Hal has become is an ideal Christian ruler and a great popular hero, just, austere, pious, warlike, who raises England from demoralization and anarchy to civil order, and instills in his people a spirit of abiding nationalism. The play centers around Henry’s invasion of France to recover lands rightfully his and the miraculous victory at Agincourt over an enemy far outnumbering his small and bedraggled army.
Dover Wilson’s introduction to Henry V, written in 1947 and dedicated to “Field Marshal the Viscount Wavell, ‘Star of England’ in her darkest hour,” is a paean to England and its heroes. It is also, like all Dover Wilson’s finest writing, a story of blinding personal conversion. Raised by his elders to despise Henry V as a tinny concession to popular taste, a drum-and-trumpet affair, Dover Wilson had seen a production of the play in the fall of 1914, when the nation was mobilizing for its first world war, and this had revealed to him how rousingly Shakespeare had captured an enduring national mood. One war later, the parallels seem even closer: Henry V and Churchill “come from the same national mint,” while the French in Shakespeare’s play at times seem “extraordinarily like Mussolini.”
But Dover Wilson’s peculiar talent here is not for finding historical likenesses but for cutting through the cant that has surrounded Henry V since 1817, when Hazlitt, “in a fit of republican and anti-patriotic spleen,” called the king a brute and a hypocrite. Swinburne and Yeats followed suit, and modern critics had also joined forces in denouncing Henry’s mission in France as mass murder on a patently trumped-up pretext. The only dispute was over whether Shakespeare had intended to endorse this 15th-century atrocity or, as some critics supposed, to offer an ironic expose of war’s “brilliant surface and the horrors that lie beneath.” To such oversophisticated gooses, Dover Wilson responds patiently, “The war against France is a righteous war, and seemed as much so to Shakespeare’s public as the war against the Nazis seems to us.” In rebutting the charges of imperialist aggression, moreover, Dover Wilson comes to the very heart of the play, a heart so simple that no critic before or since has spied it: Henry V’s glory lies not merely in the winning of a resounding victory but in “the defense of a narrow place against the odds,” in the bravery and fortitude of a wretched few overcoming many, a theme Dover Wilson takes back to the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Maldon.
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As the contrasting examples of Julius Caesar and Henry V suggest, Dover Wilson can be wrong, and sometimes horribly wrong, yet on the whole the reader is better off with him wrong than with many of Shakespeare’s editors right, for even at his worst he seems to be holding Shakespeare’s heart in the palm of his hand. The Shakespeare Dover Wilson gives us is everything that Shakespeare has ever seemed to be: a loyal subject, a patriot, a lover of life, a defender of authority, a skirt-chaser, and a hero-worshipper.
It should be added, though, that Dover Wilson’s vision of Shakespeare in his edition rests on still another assumption which by the time of the rival Arden edition had come to be increasingly discredited: that Shakespeare was God’s idiot, a natural genius who “knew” everything without ever having picked up a book. This long-lived myth, created with the kindest intentions by Ben Jonson, was only reluctantly abandoned, largely thanks to the efforts of T.W. Baldwin whose 1,500-page work, Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (1944), showed just what was entailed in a Tudor grammar-school education, and how profoundly Shakespeare profited from it.
Unfortunately, once critics recognized Shakespeare as an able scholar who drew his inspiration from Seneca, Ovid, and Euripides, they foisted on him a second-rate academic mentality into the bargain, and have since infested his plays with all the murky and tortuous ambiguities and self-divided irony that seem to modern eyes the essential properties of a civilized mind. Hand in hand with Shakespeare’s putative illiteracy had gone his clarity, his love of the ordinary and natural, and his great good humor. Now he became a secret but scathing critic of the very world he once seemed to be celebrating, and dramas that had given audiences pleasure as comedies were relegated to the dark realm of the “problem plays.”
Some of this development can be seen already in the New Arden edition, begun in 1946, the postwar product of a world in which everything seemed to have been cast into doubt, a world (as Una Ellis-Fermor, the general editor of the Arden, put it) of “chaos, of disjunction, of ultimate formlessness, of negation.” Its voice, in contrast to Dover Wilson’s ringing affirmations in the New Shakespeare, is the small cautious voice of those who have come back from hell, and who recognize in Shakespeare a fellow-traveler.
To Una Ellis-Fermor, Shakespeare’s final value rests in his salutary comprehension of evil. “Whenever actual experience threatens to pass endurance, there is a measure of alleviation in discovering that it has already been met and recorded,” she wrote in 1945 in The Frontiers of Drama. “The facts are not softened, but the sense of isolation which gives the facts a main part of their horror is mitigated.” In Shakespeare, “actual experience has not only been met, but resolved into form by the grandest of all human faculties, the artistic imagination.” This resolution, central to Shakespeare’s work, amounts to a kind of paradoxical dualism: “The content of his thought is an implacable assertion of chaos as the ultimate fact of being; the presence of artistic form is a deeper unconscious testimony to an order against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.”
Doubt, and a first-hand acquaintance with the worst, are the premises on which the New Arden is founded. Doubt, indeed, infects the stability of the text itself. Whereas in 1921 the editors of the New Shakespeare, full of faith in progress and enthusiasm for scholarly advances, felt confident in promising their readers an unprecedentedly authoritative edition, a pearl without flaw, twenty-five years later the New Arden tenders no such claims. As Una Ellis-Fermor states in the general introduction to the series, all that has been learned has led not to certainty but rather “into wholesome and chastened uncertainty.” The old Shakespeare has been discredited, but a new not yet risen from its ashes.
What kind of monument could be expected to rise from such scorched earth? As it happens, a considerable one. Whereas earlier editions were undertaken and dominated by one man (usually with a dummy partner) who, if he occasionally farmed out a play, still demanded that the subeditor conform to his opinions, the New Arden set the precedent for a whole generation by making each play an autonomous republic governed by an editor with sole responsibility for its condition. Miss Ellis-Fermor promised by this abdication of central authority a more complicated and erratic edition than those of the past. In fact, however, over the last forty years the New Arden Shakespeare has been of an unusually uniform consistency, characterized by clarity of outline, by common sense and moderation, by the unobtrusiveness of the editorial voice, and by a high level of scholarship.
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The New Arden’s greatest contribution to Shakespeare studies has been its insistence on historical context and its emphasis on tradition—those inherited sympathies, assumptions, and habits of learning which Shakespeare took for granted and on which he built. The New Arden was the first, too, to provide readers with those most essential delights, an appendix to each play reprinting its probable sources (whether Plutarch’s Life of Mark Anthony or Holinshed’s Chronicles) and a thorough index of cross-references. Thus when Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus speaks of diving into “the burning lake”—a confusion of Hades’s burning river Phlegethon—the editor, J.C. Maxwell, not only locates the probable source but refers to similar misusages in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and Shakespeare’s own Henry VI, Part Two. Only by understanding what Shakespeare drew from the popular imagination and shared with his contemporaries, the Arden is saying, can we understand his innovations. It is primarily as a Tudor genius and a purveyor of deeply moving and splendidly realized commonplaces—including the peculiarly Elizabethan taste for speculation about the nature of evil—that the Arden presents the playwright.1
For all its undoubted gains, however, the Arden edition also loses something that was central to Dover Wilson’s understanding of the plays: their dramatic effect upon an audience. Kenneth Muir, a veteran Shakespeare scholar and an editor of both the Arden’s King Lear and Macbeth and the new Oxford’s Troilus and Cressida, once wrote of a well-known colleague that “with all his critical insight, [he] missed something in his ideal theater of the mind that his valet might have got in the gallery of the Lyceum Theater.” Something of the same feeling arises from reading the Arden introductions.
In the Arden edition of Henry V (1955), for example, J.H. Walter delineates the Renaissance ideal of a Christian prince, with ample illustrations from Erasmus and Chelidonius, and throws at our heads Donne, Hooker, and Bernard of Clairvaux in order to prove that when the bishops say that “Consideration like an angel came/And whipp’d th’offending Adam” out of Henry, the word “consideration” signifies what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. Walter here recognizes something important: that Henry V is an intensely religious play, perhaps Shakespeare’s most religious, and that the key to Henry is his conversion and his own sense of his relation to God. It is a subject no other critic has properly addressed (since Shakespeare, an Anglican, was here writing about the Roman Catholic Church, many historians have supposed Henry V to be an anti-religious play). And yet, by the end of this learned and perceptive introduction, one has no sense of having read about a dramatic spectacle, a piece of theater; little sense, even, that the work is written largely in verse. For all Walter’s scholarship and insight, the reader knows less than Dover Wilson knew when he saw Henry V on the stage as the British nation was preparing for war.
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Whatever else they may accomplish or fail to accomplish, the two most recent editions of Shakespeare, the Oxford and the New Cambridge, do hasten the transition to a more dramatic conception of the plays.
The Oxford Shakespeare, under the general editorship of Stanley Wells,2 an academic with strong ties to the Royal Shakespeare Company, is perhaps the more aggressive in its theatricality. Its introductions and commentaries revolve around staging, complete with new and amended stage directions; the staff boasts a distinguished American musical adviser whose findings on early settings are here reproduced; and in one play, the editor even goes so far as to include an appendix listing the possible allocation of roles among the members of a company. In some ways, indeed, this edition—which so far has issued five plays and has announced twelve more in preparation—seems to have been designed more for the use of highbrow directors than for students and the common reader.
But the Oxford Shakespeare’s happiest and most significant contribution lies in its new conception of the texts themselves, a conception which amounts to an entire revision of our understanding of how Shakespeare worked.
Shakespeare’s plays have come down to us in scattered folios and quartos.3 Usually there are one basic folio and one basic quarto version of a play, sometimes exhibiting as many as 5,000 variations from one to the other, in addition to the comprehensive but no more reliable First Folio of the Complete Works, which was collected and published by Shakespeare’s friends in 1623.
All these texts bear an uneasy relation to the plays Shakespeare wrote—they are mangled, adulterated, corrupt—but the nod has traditionally gone to those editions which were believed to have been transcribed from Shakespeare’s own “foul papers” (his rough drafts). For the most part these were folios, which, though cut and garbled by hasty or overambitious scribes, were nonetheless considered to be as authoritative copies as we were likely to get. There is a large group of quartos, on the other hand, which were long deemed to be irremediably “bad”: each mysterious in provenance and ambiguously corrupt, sometimes spouting gibberish, sometimes much finer verse than the folio version. At one time these “bad” quartos were thought to be fossils of earlier plays by other dramatists which Shakespeare had later rewritten in folio.
In the early years of this century, Dover Wilson’s mentors, Greg, Pollard, and McKerrow, developed (independently of one another) the then-revolutionary theory of memorial reconstruction. The bad quartos, far from being mere precursors of more advanced Shakespearean versions, were now seen to represent the misrememberings of actors trying to reconstruct the Shakespeare play itself for a new company. Often the editor could even pin down the role in the play which the reconstructing actor had played.
Until the new Oxford edition this theory was not fully worked out; the memorial reconstructions continued to be thought unreliable, and most editors stuck with the “foul papers” as the stabler texts. Now, however, the Oxford Shakespeare has followed the theory of memorial reconstruction to its logical and beautifully inevitable conclusion.
As Shakespeare’s play was being rehearsed and performed during a season’s run—the reasoning goes—he would naturally have reworked it from his rough draft. The “bad” quartos, therefore, with their cuts and additions, embody actors’ reconstructions of later and more authoritative texts than the folios. In other words, the “corruptions,” although sometimes truly corrupt (an actor filling out a line), may sometimes actually represent Shakespeare’s own considered revisions. It is a sign of the supreme confidence of the Oxford Shakespeare’s editorial staff that they have no qualms in deciding which variations are actors’ guesses, which a typesetter’s “improvements,” and which Shakespeare’s own second thoughts (for better or worse).
This freedom with the text, which for the most part seems justified, nevertheless can bring some surprising changes. Anyone, for instance, with fond memories of the Dauphin in Henry V who writes sonnets to his horse will be startled to find that the part has been given to Bourbon. At this year’s Shakespeare Conference, Gary Taylor, a Midwesterner transplanted to England and the Oxford’s associate editor and its most radical purist, announced that henceforth Falstaff was to be known as Oldcastle (Shakespeare’s original name for him). Similarly, Ancient Pistol appears in the Oxford Henry V, edited by Taylor, as “Ensign Pistol.” (As Nigel Alexander has pointed out in a review in the London Times Literary Supplement, this last change makes a false distinction between two ranks which probably at the time were conflated, obliterating in the process the run of sexual puns throughout Henry IV, Parts One and Two on which Pistol’s character is founded.) At times, indeed, the editorial committee’s regard for what it believes Shakespeare intended, and its disregard for tradition, leads to a delusion: that by purging the text of inherited interpretations, one can reach a purer source without polluting it with one’s own modernisms.4
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Gary Taylor’s Henry V is the best example of the benefits and liabilities of the Oxford Shakespeare.
Henry V, as we have seen, is a play about courage against the odds and about war in both its glorious conception and its grueling execution. So persuasive is the play’s shining rhetoric that it makes one wish to have been there on St. Crispin’s Day, and it is an indication of the enduring power of Henry’s words before Agincourt that Churchill should have echoed them after another of England’s greatest trials, the Battle of Britain: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. . . .” As Dover Wilson wrote, the war against France is a righteous war. This is hardly to say that Shakespeare was uninterested in its full range of consequences; to the contrary, the play shows how, when a nation is at war, vineyards go untended and children unschooled, soldiers die unshriven, and old men and boys at home are jealous. But when the common soldier Williams suggests to the disguised Henry that the king must foot the bill for any malfeasances that come of this war, and answer for all the severed arms and legs at Judgment Day, Shakespeare comes down clearly on the side of individual responsibility, drawing the boundaries that define an ordinary man’s life: “Every subject’s duty is his king’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.”
For its military enthusiasm and its defense of authority Henry V quite understandably excited anti-imperialist and pacifist attention for almost two hundred years. But it was not until 1945 that some trendy genius decided Shakespeare really intended the play as a secret indictment of militarism. Gary Taylor’s interpretation of Henry V is a refinement of this now-popular position. In keeping with current critical sensibilities, he sees irony under every bed, even when ostensibly excluding the possibility of it—as when he informs us solemnly that the play’s full title, The Famous Victories of Henry V, “contains not the dwarf of a hint of irony or disapprobation,” though it “could hardly be anything but ironic in a serious modern play (like Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days . ..).” His Henry V is a deeply ambiguous and self-divided piece of work, a play whose hero is deliberately made repellent and his cause unjust.
To prove this reading, Taylor invents a crucial stage direction. When Henry hears that the French have reinforced their men and are launching another attack, he orders that his soldiers kill their prisoners of war, so that the English will not be overwhelmed in the fight to come. Gary Taylor, doing something no editor has done in 380 years, inserts a stage direction indicating that the prisoners’ throats be slit on stage. This is an innovation not borne out by the text, but it exposes what he feels to be Shakespeare’s true meaning, that “the key to this victory is Henry’s cold-blooded murder of the defenseless French prisoners.” Only a man capable of “killing” Falstaff (a/k/a Oldcastle) with coldness, he continues, could have been capable of this slaughter of the innocents, “and only a man capable of both could have become the hero-king of Agincourt.”
There are serious problems with this interpolation. Henry’s order is followed immediately by the scene in which we hear that the French, far from attacking the English army head-on, have raided their camps, stolen their luggage, and killed the truly defenseless little boys guarding it. The news raises a storm of indignation and creates a decisive turning point in the battle. This climax would be altogether quashed if twenty Frenchmen had just had their throats cut before our eyes. Such disregard for the play Shakespeare wrote suggests some of the dangers inherent in the Oxford’s enlarged vision of an editor’s duties and liberties. In this case, the innovation results in a violation of the play’s inner logic for the sake of a political point peculiar to the editor and the fashions of his time.
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A violation of another kind occurs in Taylor’s handling of the context in which Henry V was written. It is one of the unfortunate unevennesses of critical development that even as our historical awareness has deepened—and the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare are for the most part discerning in their remembrance of where Tudor sympathies and interests lay—some critics today like to place Shakespeare in proper historical context only to remove him from it, usually to make him a kind of dissident in Elizabethan society. This habit is nowhere so apparent as in Gary Taylor’s treatment of the circumstances which inspired Henry V and his interpretation of how Shakespeare reacted to them.
Henry V, Taylor writes, came into being in “a period of great national enthusiasm for an expansionist military adventure”—this was the putting down of the Irish rebellion of 1599, an event to which Shakespeare actually refers in Henry V and which roused in the English people a wave of “self-righteous indignation and chauvinistic pride.” Dismissing as “biographical fantasies” Dover Wilson’s assumption that Shakespeare, like the rest of the nation, was proud of the young and popular general (Essex) who led the action, Taylor concludes: “How Shakespeare himself regarded what seems to us now a rather unseemly and ridiculous fervor we have only the play itself to tell us.” As we have seen, Taylor has ways of making a play talk. What we must conclude from his evidence is that Shakespeare wrote Henry V in order to cash in on a popular sentiment he himself looked down upon, and that this superficial and insincere pandering to patriotism in fact disguises a moral hatchet job on the victory which it appears to celebrate. In other words, the Shakespeare of Henry V is a cynical hypocrite and a closet dissenter.
Taylor argues his case for an antiwar reading of the play on interesting grounds. Although Henry V, as a sequel to the immensely popular Henry IV, Parts One and Two, ought to have been a blockbuster, in fact it went through fewer printings than might have been expected and few contemporary allusions to it survive. To this day, revivals of Henry V generally coincide with the threat of war and times of national crisis, but to meet the demand for a patriotic rouser, Taylor maintains, directors have been obliged to crop severely the play Shakespeare wrote for just such occasions. “When patriotism wants a play,” Henry V is found “insufficiently simple and unnecessarily disturbing.”
Several objections can be entered here. Contrary to Taylor’s suggestion, Henry V has always been a great crowd pleaser. As anyone will attest who has seen on stage Henry’s courtship of the French Kate, it plays a good deal better than it reads. Although wartime stagings are obviously more memorable, Henry V has probably gone through more productions since 1945 than at any time since it was written. Nor should it come as a surprise that, in the interests of mobilizing a nation for war, the play needs a little pruning; for it is Shakespeare’s peculiar gift to argue compellingly every side of the question. Because we feel for a Macbeth or even a Richard III, however, does not mean that Shakespeare condones regicide, nor because he shows us the resentment of soldiers at having to fight, and describes war’s ill effects on the countryside, that he thinks war a sham. There is no kind of moral relativism in Henry V. That “the war against France is a righteous war” is confirmed by its outcome, as befits the providential vision of history Shakespeare inherited and made use of. Who can doubt the justice of Henry’s mission when we hear that 10,000 Frenchmen and only 29 Englishmen have died at Agincourt, and Henry, stunned, says very low, “O God, Thy arm was here/And not to us, but to Thy arm alone/Ascribe we all”?
There may be social orders which make dissidence the only way of living honorably and freely; others make protest arid, cranky, and irrelevant. Elizabethan England, for whatever reasons, was of the latter kind: the “dissidence” of a Christopher Marlowe (as in his vaunted belief that religion was only a tool to keep men in awe) is part of what renders his writing empty though magnificent. To make Shakespeare, too, a secret scoffer, to alienate him from the pride and confidence his nation enjoyed, and to read his plays as merely ironic, is to diminish their greatness, which is the greatness of affirmation.
None of this is intended to suggest that Gary Taylor’s Henry V is without value. The introduction, though in many ways skewed, contains some useful insights, his footnotes are helpful, and his way with Shakespeare’s language scrupulous: he delivers fully on his promise to recover the feel of a word, “its social and literary register, the cluster of uses or occasions of use,” even going so far as to say what a word does not mean. (The reader who uses the Oxford edition, however, should be sure to consult all the collations at the bottom of the page, where a little “not in Q, F” indicates that the editor is pulling a fast one in the name of textual purity.) Nevertheless, for all Taylor’s hard work and keen intelligence, the reader is still better off with Dover Wilson’s edition, which lets lie many interesting textual possibilities, but grasps more surely what Shakespeare was doing.
Something similar can be said of the Oxford Shakespeare as a whole.5 We must be grateful for its new theory of authorial revision, which has finally dispelled the illusion (again instilled by Ben Jonson) that Shakespeare never crossed out a word: an illusion which led scholars to ignore versions of the plays which are clearly Shakespeare’s own considered improvements. But while the Oxford editors should be commended for their rigorous and discerning scholarship, at times their choice of variants fails to confine itself to local interpretation and seeks to impose a clearly foreign meaning on the text. In such cases the Oxford version comes to have the look of a brutal restoration which, in stripping an ancient canvas of the accretions of the ages, imparts a falsely modern cast to the scene.
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The New Cambridge Shakespeare, an update of Dover Wilson which is being issued under the general editorship of Philip Brockbank (a veteran Shakespeare scholar who edited the Arden Coriolanus), offers a more traditional perception of Shakespeare. The Oxford volumes tend to be confusing and muddled in their organization of evidence and interpretation; the New Cambridge, by contrast, has recovered the lucid order of the Arden, in which dates, editions, textual conflicts, sources, and critical reception are laid out like laundry on the line. The New Cambridge has recovered, too, the Arden’s illuminating common sense, its orthodoxy, its respect for tradition and historicity.
In keeping with current trends, the New Cambridge also offers that essential addition, a sense of theater, surpassing even the Oxford in the fullness of its treatment of theatrical history. It is in fact only quite recently that Shakespeare’s editors have acknowledged the importance of stage histories, although there are few more revealing conduits to a play than an account of how directors past and present have seen fit to mount it, and few more direct tunnels to the heart of a nation and an age than what they choose to see on stage and how. It says much, for instance, that Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s version of the Fall of Troy, and a “tragedy of treachery and lechery,” went virtually unperformed for three hundred years, only to become the rage in Germany and Central Europe in the years following World War I, going through nineteen productions, mostly transvestite, in Essen, Leipzig, Budapest, Vienna, and Prague. The New Cambridge Shakespeare’s stage histories, thus far, appear to be both comprehensive and extremely perceptive.
Only three plays have yet been published in the New Cambridge edition: Norman Sanders’s superb Othello, a rather dull Romeo and Juliet edited by G. Blakemore Evans, and Ann Thompson’s The Taming of the Shrew.6 Since The Taming of the Shrew is the only play both the Oxford and the New Cambridge thus far have in common, we may close with a comparison of the two editions.
As everyone knows, the play involves a rough and quirky adventurer, Petruchio, who in his determination to marry both rich and happily, sets out to “tame” Katherine, the beautiful but foul-tempered daughter of a merchant. The main plot describes the grueling and outlandishly perverse trials by which Petruchio astonishes the girl into loving compliance. At the finale, the reformed shrew not only wins Petruchio’s wager on her obedience, but lectures the assembled wives on a woman’s duties to her husband.
What Henry V has done, historically, for disputes over foreign policy, The Taming of the Shrew has effected on the domestic front: it has raised a furor. Ann Thompson, whose New Cambridge edition of the play is all one could wish for, perceptively reveals how it has unleashed the social debates of every age: how the Left first railed against it—it made George Bernard Shaw ashamed to be a man—and then adopted it (rather as Women Against Pornography have adopted Hustler’s centerfolds), how liberals have wriggled in their seats and protested too much, and conservatives have taken to the play like a hot toddy in a cold climate.
If the meanings imposed upon The Taming of the Shrew have been many, Dr. Thompson is unusual in her candor and clear-sightedness about the play’s true bearing. Though she herself is a feminist who tells us in a postscript of her own problems with the play’s “overt endorsement of patriarchy,” she resists the temptation to have Shakespeare share her own discomfort by making him into a closet radical, as recent critics have done. Instead, she accepts that Shakespeare was “rather more comfortable in that world [of male supremacy] than we might like him to have been,” and leaves it at that. Still rarer is her understanding of the taming itself, a subject which has proved either a blind spot or a red flag to most critics and reviewers, the Oxford editor included, although audiences seem to enjoy it.
Dr. Thompson recognizes what other critics have denied: that Petruchio’s victory lies not in breaking the spirit of a headstrong girl—for Katherine, even as a shrew, is adorable—but in turning a bitterly envious creature bent on thwarting herself and humiliating others into a generous and loving wife with a playful wit and a stern sense of duty. Far from “deforming” her character, as feminist readings would have it, Petruchio has freed what one might call her creative powers; the at-once ideal and natural relations between man and wife which Kate describes in the closing scene are not the bonds of slavery but a civil contract in which each partner loves and serves the other.
As Dr. Thompson realizes, the play’s credibility depends on our conviction that, at the end, Petruchio and Katherine have an extremely happy and rewarding marriage ahead of them. By stark contrast, H.J. Oliver, the editor of Oxford’s The Taming of the Shrew, sees a play in which everyone gets a raw deal. Petruchio’s victory, “if it is a victory, is a very poor one indeed,” he writes, and Kate “loses in every sense that matters.”
How can such a divergence between two readers’ impressions be explained? I suspect the answer is that most modern critics, repelled by the idea that obedience and self-fulfillment might be one and the same thing, simply find it easier to remake the brilliant and lively girl of the last act into a zombie or a liar. Oliver conforms to this modern orthodoxy; Dr. Thompson, whatever her own feelings, declines to foist it on Shakespeare.
On the other hand, Oliver’s way with the text is more persuasive than Dr. Thompson’s. He adopts the Oxford Shakespeare’s theory of authorial revision to solve with wonderful neatness the textual problems that have beset the play: a quarto full of nonsense and misremembered plagiarisms, a folio that omits the quarto’s larger superstructure. Earlier editors supposed the folio to be Shakespeare’s rewrite of an inferior dramatist’s quarto; Oliver instead posits the notion that the quarto is an actor’s memorial reconstruction of the folio, containing Shakespeare’s later additions to the play, an actor’s stumblings, and a hired editor’s filling-in of his gaps with large chunks of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Ann Thompson, whose edition of the play came out right after the Oxford, cites Oliver’s theory, but seems to have felt shy about using it. If so, she should have overcome her scruples: in textual matters, comprehensiveness and accuracy count for more than originality.
In general, the editors of the New Cambridge Shakespeare seem leery of the enlarged editorial powers the theory of authorial revision bears with it, of its mandate to construct a radically new text from knotted and conflicting versions of the plays and to call one’s handiwork Shakespeare’s. And it is true that the Oxford Shakespeare at times exploits its editorial prerogative in order to force otherwise unwarranted interpretations upon the plays. But the New Cambridge edition makes insufficient use of the sound and illuminating theory from which these editorial abuses proceed, and thus risks rendering its scholarship prematurely dated.
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There is one last thought which the appearance of these distinguished new volumes raises. Some people question, with justice, the need for so many heavy, expensive, and drastically “new” Shakespeares as the last ten years have brought us. In England, you can buy the Complete Works in one plastic-bound volume, like the Bible, for about the price of a pair of socks. The implication is worth considering. Shakespeare should always be with us; should we not, then, simply roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball and retire with the one-volume, cut-and-dried Shakespeare that George Lyman Kittredge edited for Ginn and on which Americans of the 40’s and 50’s were raised? Do we really need these twenty- and thirty-dollar-apiece poppets, all dolled up with musical settings and textual griefs?
The answer is yes. It is not that we have got stupider than our grandfathers, as is presupposed by this year’s announcement of a Shakespeare “translated” into modern English by the eminent Elizabethan scholar A.L. Rowse—a project that proposes to do for English speakers what bilingual education would do for Hispanics, namely, immure them in costly quarantine from a culture that should be common to all. It is rather that we have progressed so far. The steady advances in scholarship that each quarter-century brings have meant that today, out of the corrupt and adulterated mincemeat of the folios and quartos which have come down to us, we have at least the possibility of receiving a clearer idea of the Julius Caesar or Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare wished to see performed than did an editor thirty or three hundred years ago.
The fact that with such advances come abundant new temptations, and specifically the temptation to use our freedom of textual choice to impose a more narrow and sectarian interpretation on the plays, is an argument not for scholarly obscurantism but for historical and literary humility. When it comes to determining Shakespeare’s meaning, no scholarly methods have proved as objective as Shakespeare himself.
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1 The most influential contemporary proponent of this view, and indeed the greatest Shakespearean commentator alive today, is the Oxford scholar, Emrys Jones, whose Origins of Shakespeare is a testimony both to the playwright's learning and to his orthodoxy.
2 The volumes published so far are: The Taming of the Shrew, edited by H.J. Oliver, 248 pp., $19.95, $6.95 paper; Henry V, edited by Gary Taylor, 330 pp., $19.95, $6.95 paper; Troilus and Cressida, edited by Kenneth Muir, 205 pp., $19.95, $6.95 paper; Titus Andronicus, edited by Eugene Waith, 226 pp., $19.95, $7.95 paper; Julius Caesar, edited by Arthur Humphreys, 253 pp., $19.95, $6.95 paper.
3 Folios, literally, are books whose sheets have been folded once, to form four pages; quartos have been folded twice to make eight.
4 Throughout the Oxford edition, the reader will find many unfamiliar words and phrases. Some of the changes are in favor of simple modernization. In Troilus and Cressida, where once Troilus feared that sexual consummation would bring with it “sounding destruction,” we now find “swooning destruction,” and in Henry V, the “scambling and unquiet time” of Henry IV's reign has become “scrambling.” Some are editorial emendations, such as every generation of editors has supplied to make sense of textual cruces or snares. Gary Taylor takes Henry V's promise further to atone for his father's sins—“More will I do/though all that I can do is nothing worth/since that my penitence comes after all/imploring pardon”—and turns it to the more limited but precise “comes after ill.” Some changes occur when either previously neglected versions are substituted for the standard text or a new scene is constructed from the strands of several variants. In Henry V, Act 4, Scene 5 (the scene in which the seemingly defeated French rally their forces for another attack), Gary Taylor, in order to make consistent his substitution of Bourbon for the Dauphin, pieces together his own version of the scene, taking a line from the folio, a line from the quarto, and emending them to his satisfaction, cutting in the process some of the more memorable phrases of each—for instance, the Dauphin's eloquent summing up of the English army's transformation from drowned rats to men of iron, “Be these the wretches that we played at dice for?”
5 Space does not permit a consideration of all the Oxford volumes that have so far come out, but I would like to single out Kenneth Muir's Troilus and Cressida. His brilliantly imaginative and just introduction restores health and balance to a play in which critics before him have seen only cynicism and dissolution.
6 Othello, 209 pp., $29.95, $6.95 paper; Romeo and Juliet, 249 pp., $29.95, $6.95 paper; The Taming of the Shrew, 190 pp., $29.95, $6.95 paper.