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Bad Habits, ‘Bad’ Quartos, and the Myth of Origin in the Editing of Shakespeare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Andrew Spong
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Abstract

This article is the latest contribution to a continuing debate on the editing of Shakespeare in relation to new conceptions of authorship and authority and to the developing contribution of performance studies. Introduced by Brian Parker in NTQ24 (1990), it has subsequently drawn submissions from Stanley Wells in NTQ26 (1991), Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey in NTQ 34 (1992) and, most recently, Alan Posener in NTQ39 (1994). Here, Andrew Spong challenges criticisms which Holderness and Loughrey's ‘Shakespearean Originals’ project has received, and suggests that the sort of methodological and theoretical fallacies which its editors have been accused of displaying can be no less readily evidenced from the positions adopted by their critics. Andrew Spong is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Textual and Contextual Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. His research interests include the challenge of historical materialism to postmodernism and the sociology of the Elizabethan theatre.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 45 , February 1996 , pp. 65 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

Notes and References

1. Marx, Karl, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction’, Early Writings, ed. Colletti, L., trans. Livingstone, R., Benton, G. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 246Google Scholar.

2. Representative anthologies of the sort of work produced in the 1980s would include Drakakis, John, ed., Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Longman, 1992)Google Scholar; Holderness, Graham, ed., Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Macmillan, 1992)Google Scholar; and Waller, Gary, ed., Shakespeare's Comedies (London: Longman, 1991)Google Scholar.

3. Shakespeare, William, The Comedy of Errors, ed. Dorsch, T. S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. vGoogle Scholar.

4. Theodore B. Leinwand's ‘Negotiation and New Historicism’ and Levin's, Richard ‘The Poetics and Politics of Bardicide’, PMLA, CV, No. 3 (05 1990), p. 477–89Google Scholar, 491–504 are representative of the sort of criticism levelled against ‘new’ critical strategies, as are Levin's, ‘Unthinkable Thoughts in the New Historicizing of English Renaissance Drama’, NLH, XXI, No. 3 (1990), p. 433–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the numerous exchanges which have taken place in the letters pages of, amongst others, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. Vickers's, BrianAppropriating Shakespeare (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar attempts to present a comprehensive counterblast to deconstruction, new historicism, psychoanalysis, feminist, and Marxist re-readings of Shakespeare, but unfortunately is prone to doing exactly the same to, for instance, Derrida as he claims Derrida does to literature: to reduce a large and difficult body of writing to a series of banal slogans and Christmas-cracker mottoes.

5. See Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 121–27Google Scholar.

6. Posener, Alan, ‘‘Materialism’, Dialectics, and Editing Shakespeare’, NTQ, X, No. 39 (08 1994), p. 263CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Ibid., p. 263. Grace Tiffany's account of Posener's article in the ‘Review of Periodicals’ in The Shakespeare Newsletter (Fall 1994), p. 59, takes delight in recounting how the paper ‘amusingly blasts’ Holderness and Loughrey's piece, rehearsing Posener's disagreements without contributing to the argument herself, whilst revelling in the fact, as she perceives it, that ‘he catches the authors in a shocking mistranslation’ of Platter (see below), an error subsequently repeated to ‘dangerous’ effect. The release of the nerve gas sarin in a Japanese subway is dangerous; the reflections of a late sixteenth-century German tourist, regardless of how they are cited, are not. This periodical review of a periodical article challenging a periodical article illustrates perfectly the teleological mania which grips a discipline obsessed with accounting for the unaccountable: the (always already) elusive figure of ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘his’ equally equivocal and unstable texts.

8. Ibid., p. 263.

9. For a comprehensive account of the ‘myth of origin’, see Holderness, G., Potter, N., Shakespeare: the Play of History (London: Macmillan, 1988)Google Scholar.

10. A good example is Arrend van Buchell's copy of Johannes de Witt's sketch of the interior of the Swan Theatre, the replicated status of which makes any interpretation of the features of the theatre it might be imagined to depict particularly untrustworthy. Of course, the absence of the Shakespearean ‘other’ is the spur to this investigation in the first place, and as such is inseparable from it. As Derrida notes in his analysis of Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages, ‘There is no ethics without the presence of the other but also, and consequently, without absence, dissimulation, detour, différence, writing’. See his Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

11. K., Chambers E., The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), p. 365Google Scholar; Holderness, Graham, AND Loughrey, Bryan, ‘Text and Stage: Shakespeare, Bibliography, and Performance Studies’, NTQ, IX, No. 34 (12 1992), p. 181Google Scholar.

12. Posener, Alan, op. cit., p. 263.

13. Confusion over the identities of the theatres appeared to be quite common from such cartographic evidence as we possess. In the 1593 edition of John Norden's Speculum Britaniae, the Rose is labelled ‘The play howse’. No other label was required as there were no other theatres on Bankside. By the 1600 edition, however, the Globe is portrayed beneath the Rose, which is wrongly labelled ‘The starre’ (possibly due to the emblem of a rose on the playhouse's flag being mistaken from a distance for a star). Similarly, in Wenceslas Hollar's Long View of London (engraved in 1644 from much earlier sketches), the labels of ‘The Globe’ and the ‘Beere bayting h.’ have been accidentally reversed.

14. Quoted from Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), p. 419Google Scholar. John Stow's The Annales of England, from the First Inhabitation, first published in 1592, had run to five substantially revised editions by 1631. This perpetual revision by Stow and those who continued to amend the work after his death reflects the fluid nature of historiography in the early modern period. Furthermore, this constituted only one of Stow's versions of English history: his A Survay of London had generated five editions by 1633, whilst his A Summarie of the English Chronicles, first published in 1565, had appeared in thirteen separate editions by 1618.

15. Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign’, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Levin, C. (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), p. 162Google Scholar.

16. Quoted in Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), p. 422Google Scholar. Posener is of course in good company in eliding the history of the first Globe with that of the second: the International Shakespeare Globe Centre, currently ‘reconstructing’ the (third?) Globe on Bankside, has gone a step further in its most recent promotional pamphlet, ‘Shakespeare's Globe: See History Being Recreated as The Globe Rises Again!’ by promising visitors to the site a chance to ‘see how a team of scholars, archaeologists, and architects discovered what the old Globe was really like’. Furthermore, the University of Reading is attempting to ensure that the history of the ‘third’ Globe is fully documented through the endeavours of two post-doctoral fellows who will ‘use a laptop computer for recording [the activities at the I.S.G.C.] on the spot’, and ‘a video camera for supplementary evidence about the visual elements and stage movement’.

17. Posener, Alan, op. cit., p. 266.

18. Lenin, V. I., Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Notes Concerning a Reactionary Philosophy, ed. A. Trachtenberg, trans. D. Kvitko (London: M. Lawrence, n.d.) [Collected Works, Vol. XIII], p. 37, 74. Lenin considers further senses of idealism on p. 34, of materialism on p. 8, 22, and 26, and of positivism on p. 5, 95, and 136.

19. Shakespeare, William, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, eds. Holderness, Graham, Loughrey, Brian (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheat-sheaf, 1992), p. 9Google Scholar.

20. This statement originally appeared in the MLA Newsletter, XXVII, No. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 4–5, but, ironically, went on to be disseminated via electronic mail.

21. Chambers, E. K., William Shakespeare: a Study of Facts and Problems, Vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 130Google Scholar.

22. There have been several attempts to explain the financial basis of the early modern theatrical enterprise from a variety of ideological perspectives. Manley's, LawrenceLiterature and Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) is the most recentGoogle Scholar.

23. Shakespeare, William, The First Quarto of King Lear, ed. Halio, Jay L. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, ‘The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Early Quartos’)Google Scholar; Shakespeare, William, Henry V, ed. Craik, T. W. (London: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar, ‘The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series’. The latter includes a complete facsimile of Q1, The Cronicle History of Henry the fift (1600). ‘Shakespearean Originals’ published The Cronicle Historie of Henry the Fift, ed. G. Holderness and B. Loughrey, in 1993, and M. William Shakespeare: His true Chronicle Historie of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters, ed. G. Holderness, in 1995.

24. Dillon, Janette, ‘Is There a Performance in This Text?’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XLV, No. 1 (1994), p. 85Google Scholar.

25. There are a growing number of Internet sites providing on-line access to information on Shakespeare studies. For instance, visual and textual information detailing the progress of the International Shakespeare Globe Centre's Globe reconstruction can be found at http://www.rrz.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/englisch/shakespeare/engl/indxe.html. MIT's hypertext version of Shakespeare's works can be accessed from http://the-tech.mit.edu/shakespeare/works.html, whilst the Shakespeare Database of Westfalische Wilhelms Universiteit is located at http://ves101.uni-muenster.

26. Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Nanterre, Here, Now’, Political Writings, ed. Readings, B., trans. Readings, B., Geiman, K. P. (London: University College London Press, 1993), p. 57Google Scholar.