Shaking Up
Shakespeare
by T.L. Hubeart
Jr.
Copyright
1985-2007 by T.L. Hubeart Jr.
Many of
Shakespeare's plays were only preserved for posterity through the efforts of
his theatrical colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell, who in 1623 published
the famous "First Folio"
of the Bard's dramatic works.  Unfortunately, printing in the early seventeenth century
was still done very inaccurately, with no great pains devoted to proofreading
pages as they came off the press. Our sole source for many of the plays is
marred by errors, not all of them easy to fix or even to detect.[1]
In other plays, quartos of individual dramas of Shakespeare published
during his lifetime are invaluable, but often the texts they exhibit are not
easily rectified, or reconciled with that of the Folio. The task of
correcting the errors in the old texts first fell into the hands of five men
who, for the first half of the eighteenth century, truly succeeded in
"shaking up Shakespeare."
For nearly after Shakespeare's death the botched texts of the quartos and
folio and their reprints were the only Shakespeare in print. However, with
the advent of higher standards for printing of texts, these were seen to be
sadly inadequate. Nicholas Rowe, a poet and author of
popular sentimental dramas, first approached the duty of editing the Bard.
His edition of the plays appeared in 1709.[2]
It is easy to charge Rowe with negligence in his duty. Although he
attended to many necessities (such as compiling dramatis personae lists,
demarcating acts and scenes, correcting obvious misprints, making speech
prefixes consistent), he worked almost totally from the Fourth Folio of 1685,
the third reprinting of the 1623 volume.[3] Since the Fourth Folio was printed
from the Third Folio (1664), and the Third from the Second (1632),[4] Rowe's
source contained sixty years of accumulated error. But in his defense, it
must be said that he seems to have had no conception of the extent of
corruption in the received text, or of the magnitude of his task.
The first editor to understand the gravity of the situation, and to
attempt to rectify it, was the great poet Alexander
Pope.[5] He was the first to truly collate the original quarto
printings of the plays with the First Folio, setting a good example for those
who followed.[6] He also threw out of the Shakespearean canon six spurious
plays which had been inserted into the Third Folio by unscrupulous
publishers.[7]
But the 1725 edition he produced of the playwright was, as Dr. Samuel
Johnson said, "a work which Pope seems to have thought unworthy of his
abilities."[8] He was not diligent in consulting the old texts, basing
much of his edition on Rowe's. He emended arbitrarily, and much of his
critical method was purely subjective; one of his more tasteless innovations
was to remove passages he considered spurious from the main text of his
edition.[9] As Pope put it:
. . . The Alterations or Additions which Shakespear
himself made, are taken notice of as they occur. Some suspected passages
which are excessively bad, (and which seem Interpolations by being so
inserted that one can intirely omit them without any chasm, or deficience in
the context) are degraded to the bottom of the page; with an Asterisk
referring to the places of their insertion. . . . [10]
One authority has counted some 1,560 lines of Shakespeare that Pope
downgraded to footnote status, not counting those lines that he simply
omitted without mention.[11] Pope's "juggling" the words of
Shakespeare's verse has been much condemned by later editors. Although some
of the adjustments he made remain with us today, and are obviously necessary
due to the carelessness of the printing of the early folios and quartos, Pope
had a tendency to take things too far--to make sure that every line of
Shakespeare's verse was in as flawless and smooth an iambic pentameter as his
own.[12]
Even when he had something constructive to offer, Pope's handling of it
sometimes diminished its value. One notable example is his discovery that the
name of Censorinus had been left out of a speech in Coriolanus
(II.iii.238).[13] Pope found the name by referring to Shakespeare's source
for the play, Plutarch's Lives, but the interpolated line he
supplied to provide this name in his text of Shakespeare was awkward and
stylistically jarring:
And Censorinus, darling of the people . .
. . [14]
The third of Shakespeare's editors, Lewis Theobald, was a
pedant and minor dramatist who made a splash in the literary world with his
book Shakespeare Restored (1728), an expose of the faults Theobald
saw in Pope's edition. This book has been called Theobald’s
“successful bid to nominate himself as the man best equipped to replace
Pope’s edition”[15]—done with such rank insincerity in its
praise of Pope’s merits that the poet’s anger at its argument is
understandable.[16] For example, in his “Introduction,” Theobald
professes:
I HAVE so great an Esteem for Mr. Pope, and
so high an Opinion of his Genius and Excellencies, that I beg to be excused
from the least Intention of derogating from his Merits, in this attempt to
restore the true Reading of SHAKESPEARE. Tho’ I confess a Veneration,
almost rising to Idolatry, for the Writings of this inimitable Poet, I would
be very loth even to do him Justice at the Expence of that
other Gentleman’s Character. But, I am persuaded, I shall stand as
free from such a Charge in the Execution of this Design, as, I am
sure, I am in the Intention of it; for I am assuming a Task here,
which this learned Editor seems purposely (I was going to say, with
too nice a Scruple) to have declined.[17]
One of Pope’s biographers has noted that Theobald’s book
“is the first genuinely critical treatment of the text [of Shakespeare]
and it contains some brilliant particulars; but as a whole it makes tedious
reading.”[18] After Pope, in his usual slashing manner, counterattacked
by making his assailant the hero of his new poem The Dunciad (a work
that is anything but "tedious reading"), Theobald came out
with his own edition of Shakespeare, published in 1733.[19]
Although his collation of the old texts was more thorough than Pope's, and
his editing has received some distinguished praise in our own day,[20] it was
not so much better than Pope’s that Dr. Johnson could refrain from
commenting, "A man so anxiously scrupulous might have been expected to
do more, but what little he did was commonly right."[21] Much space in
his edition was wasted in criticism of Pope; Theobald could not help remarking,
for example, that, although Pope's correction in Coriolanus was
needed, neither Pope nor Shakespeare evidently knew that there were no
censors in Rome at the time in which the play is supposedly set.[22]
Theobald's Elizabethan studies, although Pope blasted them as "all
such reading as was never read,"[23] allowed this editor to make
many needed corrections, but he often went astray as well, especially by
leaving uncorrected errors that found their way into his text from the later
folios, Rowe, and Pope.
One notorious example of such errors occurs in King Lear, where
in the final scene Kent tells Albany,“I have a journey, sir,
shortly to go./My master calls me; I must not say no”
(V.iii.322-3). Here Kent is indicating his desire soon to follow his master
Lear in death, but the Second Folio of 1632 actually inserted the ridiculous
stage direction “Dyes” after these lines, through a
misunderstanding of Shakespeare’s intention. And Kent continued to
expire at the end of Lear in the Third and Fourth Folios, and in the
editions of Rowe, Pope, and Theobald (as well as in some later texts). So
prevalent was the misunderstanding here that Charles Jennens (better known as
the librettist who compiled the text for Handel’s Messiah), in
the notes to his own edition of Lear published in 1770, still felt
obliged to defend the omission of the spurious stage direction![24]
Theobald was followed by Sir Thomas Hanmer, a baronet who
spent his retirement enjoying his hobby of "improving"
Shakespeare.[25] His 1744 edition employed what he considered the best of the
editorial work done by Pope and Theobald, mixed with his own ridiculous
innovations, no indication being given as to what belonged to each editor and
what to Shakespeare.[26] Also, he followed Pope's dangerous precedent of
pruning out of the text portions he considered unworthy.[27] This was
Hanmer's idea of "a true and correct edition of Shakespeare's
works"![28]
William Warburton's version of the playwright followed in
1747. The fatal flaw of his work was Warburton's positive madness for
emendations of the most tasteless kind. The phrase "'tis present
death" in 1 Henry VI (III.iv.39) becomes in Warburton the
impossible "i' th' presence 't's death," while in the Moor's great
"pomp and circumstance" speech in Othello, the "ear-piercing
fife" (III.iii.352) is transformed into "the fear-spersing
fife."[29] F.E. Halliday writes of Warburton that there was
"scarcely a line that failed to inspire his brain with some fanciful
improvement."[30] Even Dr. Johnson, who had been befriended as a young
man by Warburton and was beholden to him,[31] had to allow that this editor
had too much of a rage for change.[32] As a matter of fact, Warburton had
contributed several of his better conjectures to Theobald’s edition,
while his own edition published the remainder, so that it has been stated
that “Warburton’s reputation as an editor would be greater
if he had never published a text of his own.”[33]
Shakespeare had been truly "shaken up" by 1750. The early
printers of his texts had botched them through ignorance, but this generation
of editors marred the texts through knowledge. It took the labors of Samuel
Johnson, and especially of Edmund Capell and Edmund Malone later in the
century,[34] to rebuild the shambles in which their predecessors had left
many portions of the plays.
(Written Spring 1985 with additions in
1996 and 2005)
Notes
[1] "Preface" in Howard Staunton,
ed., The Complete Illustrated Shakespeare, (NY: Park Lane, 1979
[rpt. of 1860 ed.]), pp. xvii-xviii.
[2] F.E. Halliday, The Cult of
Shakespeare, (NY: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957), p. 44.
[4] Staunton, p. xix. See also
“General Introduction” in Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor, et
al., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (NY: Norton, 1997
[reprint of Oxford University Press ed., 1987]), p. 53 (which summarizes that
“The later folios occasionally, by guesswork, correct the text, but
more often they corrupt it, and these corruptions often survived unnoticed
well into the eighteenth century”).
[5] For which he is given credit by Dr.
Samuel Johnson; see his preface to his edition of Shakespeare in Arthur
Sherbo, ed., Johnson on Shakespeare, Vol. 7 of the Yale Edition
of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale UP, 1968), p. 94. This
preface is also reprinted in Donald Greene, ed., Samuel Johnson: The
Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), where the passage
on Pope begins on p. 443. (Subsequent references to Sherbo will be followed
in parentheses by the page number of the equivalent passage in Greene.)
For another favorable-on-the-whole view of Pope, see “General
Introduction” in Wells & Taylor, p. 54.
[6] Halliday, p. 45. It is true, however,
that Rowe did retrieve about half of the quarto passages from Hamlet that did
not appear in the folios; see Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life
(NY: Norton, 1985), p. 424.
[7] Sherbo, p. 94 (Greene, p. 443); Mack,
p. 425. He also, however, discarded Pericles, which Malone later
readmitted to the canon.
[8] Sherbo, p. 94 (Greene, p. 443).
[10] Alexander Pope, "Preface to the
Works of Shakespear," in Aubrey Williams, ed., Poetry and Prose of
Alexander Pope, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 471.
[13] Line numberings of Shakespeare in this
paper follow the Pelican Shakespeare (Alfred Harbage, gen. ed.; 1
vol. ed., Baltimore, Penguin, 1969).
[14] Emphasis added. Pope's emendation
appears in most pre-20th-century editions of Shakespeare, such as Staunton's
(op. cit.), from which it is here quoted. Also see Horace Howard Furness,
ed., The Tragedie of Coriolanus, in theNew Variorum Edition of
Shakespeare (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1928), p. 275.
[15] “General Introduction” in
Wells & Taylor, p. 54.
[16] Pope’s biographer Maynard Mack
goes so far as to call it “a book designed to gall, embarrass, and
humiliate [Pope] by every stratagem [Theobald] can devise” (Mack, p.
431).
[20] For example, by the editors of the
recent Complete Oxford Shakespeare: “Nevertheless, though Pope
wrote the more permanent and memorable polemic, he lost the argument:
Theobald was the better scholar, and indeed remains one of the finest editors
of the last three centuries” (--“General Introduction” in
Wells & Taylor, p. 54). Indeed, G. Blakemore Evans asserts that
“Theobald may fairly be considered the first of Shakespeare’s
major editors,” with a broad acquaintance with Elizabethan literature
“and a scholarly perspective foreign to Rowe and Pope”
(“Shakespeare’s Text,” in The Riverside Shakespeare,
2nd ed. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997], p. 61).
[21] Sherbo, p. 96 (Greene, p. 444).
[23] Herbert Davis, ed., Pope: Poetical
Works, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966), p. 729 (in Appendix C, "The
Dunciad, Text of First Edition, 1728," book 1, line 156); also in John
Butt, ed., The Poems of Alexander Pope, A One-Volume Edition of the
Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963), p.
363 ("The Dunciad Variorum," book 1, line 166).
[24] The information in this paragraph
comes from Horace Howard Furness, King Lear: The New Variorum
Edition (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000 [rpt. of 1908 ed.]), p. 349n.
(“How unexpectedly and awkwardly would he die,” says Jennens of
Kent, “after saying only, he had a journey shortly to go, and
without bidding farewell, or discovering any symptoms of
death” [emphasis as in Furness].)
[26] Sherbo, pp. 97-8 (Greene, p. 445):
“But,” writes Johnson, “by inserting his emendations,
whether invented or borrowed, into the page, without any notice of varying
copies, he has appropriated the labour of his predecessors, and made his own
edition of little authority.”
[32] Sherbo, p. 98 (Greene, pp. 445-6):
“His notes,” Johnson admits, “exhibit sometimes perverse
interpretations, and sometimes improbable conjectures; he at one time gives
the author more profundity of meaning than the sentence admits, and at
another discovers absurdities where the sense is plain to every other
reader.”
[33] “General Introduction” in
Wells & Taylor, p. 54. (It seems to me that Wells and Taylor must have
meant to refer to his “reputation as a Shakespeare scholar”
rather than as “an editor,” since if Warburton had not
produced his own Shakespeare, it is hard to see how he could have been
classified in the latter category!)
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Nicholas
Rowe
Alexander Pope
Lewis Theobald
Sir Thomas Hamner
William Warburton
These five 18th
century editors started the process of making the text of Shakespeare
presentable to a wider audience...and, in doing so, often rewrote him
according to their own whims or mistaken notions of "correcting"
his text.
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