XI.

Shakespeare Texts and Scholarship

So far as is known, Shakespeare had no hand in the publication of any of his plays. In any event, he did not own his plays once he had supplied the scripts to the theatrical company. Except when the plague closed the London theaters, acting companies normally did not consider it in their own interest to allow their popular plays to be printed. However, in whatever manner they reached their publishers, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays were printed during his lifetime in pamphlets (known as quartos, from the format in which they were printed), which sold for sixpence. Publishers secured these plays in various ways, some perhaps from the acting company, and some from lines taken down in shorthand during performances or reconstructed from memory by actors. The plays that reached print, therefore, had various degrees of reliability, but what is of interest is that Shakespeare seemed not to care one way or the other.

A.

The Folios

Fortunately for posterity, John Heminges and Henry Condell, friends and colleagues of Shakespeare in the Lord Chamberlain’s and King’s companies, collected 36 of the plays now accepted as Shakespeare’s and published them in a handsome folio edition in 1623. This volume preserved 18 plays that had never before been printed. Heminges and Condell promised that they were offering all the plays “cured and perfect of their limbs,” that is, purged of the errors that marred the early editions. The First Folio nevertheless contains many imperfections resulting from misreading of the manuscripts and inevitable printer’s errors, and their claim of accuracy is little more than advertising for the volume. Yet without the efforts of Heminges and Condell, 18 of the plays that we know as Shakespeare’s would not have been preserved.

The demand for Shakespeare’s works was sufficiently great to warrant the printing of the Second Folio in 1632. The Third Folio edition, printed in both 1663 and 1664, included, in its second printing, Pericles, which had been omitted from the previous editions, and six other plays that are not regarded by modern editors as Shakespeare’s. These are The London Prodigal, The History of Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan Widow, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Tragedy of Locrine. In 1685 the Fourth Folio appeared, which also included the unauthenticated plays. With each reprinting of Shakespeare’s works some corrections were made but new errors were introduced in spelling and punctuation, and the final text became more removed from the original work.

B.

18th-Century Editions

The first edition of Shakespeare’s plays with an editor’s name attached was prepared by dramatist and poet Nicholas Rowe and printed in 1709. Rowe based his six-volume edition on the Fourth Folio, with almost no comparison with other editions. He added the first biography of Shakespeare and attached a list of characters to each play. The folios had supplied such lists for only a few plays. Rowe also divided the plays into acts and scenes according to 18th-century practice.

The next edition (6 vols., 1723-1725) was prepared by English poet Alexander Pope, who did some slight comparison of texts, relegated some passages he considered inauthentic to the bottom of pages, and arbitrarily omitted others. Although he frequently rewrote Shakespeare’s lines, mainly to make the verse regular, Pope offered some valuable restorations of readings, rearranged passages as verse that were incorrectly printed as prose in the early texts, and rejected the six spurious plays that had been added to the Third Folio.

English writer Lewis Theobald’s seven-volume edition of 1733 was the earliest systematic restoration of Shakespeare’s texts. Many of Theobald’s emendations, or textual corrections, are still accepted by scholars. Among the other important 18th-century editions was that of English writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, published in eight volumes in 1765. Johnson’s edition was notable chiefly for its sensible interpretations and critical evaluations of Shakespeare as a literary artist. Also important was literary scholar Edmund Malone’s ten-volume edition published in 1790, which was the most trustworthy text printed to that time. The first American edition, published in Philadelphia in 1795 and 1796, was a reprinting of Johnson’s text.

C.

19th-Century Editions

In 1807, English editors Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler first published The Family Shakespeare. Bowdler announced that it “has been my study to exclude . . . whatever is unfit to be read aloud by a gentleman to a company of ladies” and that he had endeavored to omit “words and expressions which are of a nature as to raise a blush on the cheek of modesty.” The term bowdlerized has subsequently been applied to any text from which passages have been removed to suit notions of propriety.

Among the more scholarly Shakespeare collections of the 19th century were a handsomely illustrated edition (1838-1842) of Charles Knight and the first Cambridge edition (1863-1866), edited by W. G. Clark, J. Glover, and W. A. Wright. The one-volume reprint of the Cambridge text, known as the Globe edition, was until recently the most widely accepted text of the works ever distributed, and it was in this form that Shakespeare first became a playwright belonging to the world.

The most ambitious editions undertaken have been the various variorum editions, which collect and reprint the corrections and comments of earlier critics and editors. (The word variorum comes from the Latin phrase “cum notis variorum,” meaning “with the notes of various people.”) The First and Second variorums (1803 and 1813) were edited by Isaac Reed. The Third Variorum (21 vols., 1821) was prepared by James Boswell, son of Samuel Johnson’s biographer, and was based on Edmund Malone’s text. Like the preceding variorums, it contained a vast amount of biographical and critical matter. In 1871 American scholar H. H. Furness began the New Variorum Shakespeare, a project that has been continued to the present and is the most comprehensive of all editions of Shakespeare. The Modern Language Association of America has sponsored the New Variorum Shakespeare since 1936.

D.

20th-Century Editions

Scholars of the 20th century had the advantage not only of the exhaustive work done by editors of the past but also of new bibliographical techniques. They also had at their disposal a vast amount of information on the theatrical and printing conditions of Shakespeare’s time, on Elizabethan handwriting, and on the historical background. Furthermore, they were less hampered by the belief of many earlier editors that Shakespeare was incapable of writing in imperfect meter or of using indelicate expressions.

American scholars W. A. Neilson and George Lyman Kittredge each compiled a single-volume collection of Shakespeare’s complete works in 1936 and 1942, respectively. From the 1960s and 1970s on, many university presses and other publishers brought out their own editions of Shakespeare, including paperback editions. The best of the modern editions of individual plays are generally thought to be the Arden Shakespeare, the Oxford Shakespeare, and the New Cambridge Shakespeare editions. For the collected works, the Riverside Shakespeare and the Norton Shakespeare are arguably the best editions.

Shakespeare plays began to appear on the Internet during the 1990s. The University of Virginia has posted electronic versions of the First Folio and the Globe edition on its Web site, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/shakespeare/. Other Websites dedicated to the plays are sponsored by the University of Victoria in Canada (http://web.uvic.ca/shakespeare/) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://classics.mit.edu/Shakespeare/).

E.

The Authorship Controversy

With the exception of Homer, about whom nothing definite is known, Shakespeare is the only major writer in the world’s history whose authorship has been so widely disputed. Since the 18th century, scores of books have been written to prove that Shakespeare’s works were written by another person or persons. Dozens of candidates have been proposed, including writers such as Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, George Peele, and John Lyly; a multitude of titled men, including the earls of Rutland and Derby, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis Bacon, and the Earl of Oxford; and even Queen Elizabeth I.

The first systematic theory doubting Shakespeare’s authorship was set forth by William Henry Smith, who in 1856 published a book declaring that Sir Francis Bacon was the real author of the plays. In the same year, an American schoolteacher named Delia Bacon (no relation to Francis Bacon) wrote an article and then a book supporting Bacon’s authorship, and later she conceived the notion of the dual authorship of Sir Walter Raleigh and Bacon. For a long time, Bacon was the leading candidate of the anti-Shakespeareans, but Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is now the most popular nominee. He was first proposed by an English schoolmaster with an unfortunate last name, J. Thomas Looney, in 1920. Christopher Marlowe, whose candidacy also has been strongly advocated, was first named by American writer Wilbur Zeigler in 1892 as one of a group of possible authors of the plays.

Skepticism as to Shakespeare’s authorship has arisen for a number of reasons. Some critics have claimed that too little is known about the man from Stratford for him to be the author of these great plays. But it is important to remember that far less is known about most other writers and public men of the time. Other critics have said that what is known about Shakespeare is incompatible with the sort of man who could have written the works. Still others have argued that the lack of surviving manuscripts of the plays indicates a mystery concerning the author’s identity. In general, however, resistance to the notion that a glover’s son from Stratford wrote the plays we attribute to Shakespeare comes from a form of snobbery. We know Shakespeare did not go to university and he was not educated at court, so it has seemed to some impossible that he could have written the wonderful works ascribed to him.

The biography of Shakespeare that Rowe included with his edition of the works in 1709 may have added to the skepticism. Rowe painted a very respectable background for Shakespeare and made sweeping assumptions from the known facts. In addition, a number of traditional although unsubstantiated stories about Shakespeare, such as that of his deer poaching, came to be accepted as true, and other legends accumulated. On the basis of these, some skeptics decided that Shakespeare was an ignorant butcher’s boy from an uncultured background who could not have written anything significant, let alone great literary masterpieces that show intimate knowledge of aristocratic manners. The misconceptions about Shakespeare were compounded in the 19th century, when he acquired a reputation for vast learning and virtual omniscience.

For a more balanced evaluation of Shakespeare’s knowledge and education, it is necessary to take into account the facts of his background. His native Stratford was a prosperous market town with one of the best grammar schools in England. Shakespeare’s father held official positions, which would indicate that he must have been an ambitious man who would hardly have denied his son the free education to which he was entitled at the grammar school. Most scholars familiar with the Elizabethan age believe that the works display exactly the sort of knowledge that Shakespeare could have obtained in the Stratford grammar school.

A number of scholars have closely studied the book-learning exhibited in the works. They have concluded that even the mythological allusions, which have sometimes been cited as proof of the author’s wide classical reading, are no more numerous or obscure than those used by other writers. Moreover, these allusions come from relatively few literary sources or popular traditions. Nor is there evidence in the works of precise knowledge of the scientific and philosophical trends of the day. As most modern scholars see it, the author revealed in the works was a keenly sensitive and intelligent man whose reading was inspired by wide curiosity, but that, unlike Sir Francis Bacon, he was not a learned man of scientific bent.

The claim that the plays display Shakespeare’s intimate knowledge of the customs and manners of nobility and royalty is illusory. The plays show kings speaking in regal tones when the dramatic situation calls for emphasis on the dignity of royalty. In other scenes, however, they speak as ordinary human beings, in keeping with the emotional situation in which the action places them. In any case, Shakespeare played at court many times before Queen Elizabeth and King James and had an official position as one of James’ servants as a member of the King’s Men. It would not, therefore, have been difficult for him to become familiar with aristocratic life and manners.

The fact that Shakespeare’s manuscripts have vanished is not surprising in the light of Elizabethan practices. Very few play manuscripts from the period have survived. Plays were not considered literature, and play scripts would not have had much value, except to the acting company. In any case, once a playwright sold a script to an acting company, it was no longer the author’s property. The manuscripts in the playhouse were undoubtedly preserved for as long as they were usable, but afterward they were probably used as scrap paper. The manuscripts supplied by Heminges and Condell for the printing of the 18 previously unpublished plays in the First Folio would most likely have been returned to the acting company after the book was in print. The Second, Third, and Fourth folios are printed from the text of the First Folio, rather than from manuscripts. When Parliament ordered the closing of London’s playhouses in 1642, many companies sold their assets, including play manuscripts. In addition, many manuscripts must have perished in the great fire that swept London in 1666. Thus, it would be unusual if the manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays had survived.

Those who seek another author for Shakespeare’s works believe that distinction of birth and education is a necessary qualification for writing great literature. Yet it is the quality of imaginative genius rather than a display of learning that distinguishes the creator of these plays. The miracle is not that a man of Shakespeare’s background wrote them, but that any human imagination produced creations of such enduring power and beauty.