August 18, 2008
The works of William Shakespeare illustrate the paradox of all dramatic literature: plays are created to be spoken on stage yet they are preserved and most frequently encountered as written works. The printed word allowed Shakespeare, the leading Elizabethan playwright, to become Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language.
This summer, The Boston Public Library, in partnership with the University of Massachusetts Boston, is presenting “All the World’s a Page: 400 Years of Shakespeare in Print,” an exhibition that explores the importance of books to the creation and transmission of Shakespeare’s works. The exhibition examines how our understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare is largely dependent on books in which his works have been published, edited, altered, annotated, translated, and illustrated in the centuries since his death. The exhibition also showcases the books that were most vital to the education and inspiration of Shakespeare in creating his plays and poems.
Scott Maisano, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston and curator of the exhibition, said, “Historically, I think, Shakespeare has reached wider audiences through the printing of his plays in books than he has through the performances of those plays in the theater.” “If we include translations, comic books, text books, and children’s books, song books, and scholarly books, then we begin to see how malleable and adaptable Shakespeare has been on the page too.” (Read the complete interview with Professor Maisano)
“All the World’s a Page” is the culmination of a graduate course in Shakespeare presented by the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The class was held in the Boston Public Library’s Rare Book and Manuscripts Room. Along with learning about Shakespeare in print, students is the class had the opportunity to help curate the exhibition.
The exhibition presents more than two dozen items from the library’s holdings including the Barton Collection of Shakespeariana, one of the great Shakespeare collections in the world. On display are folios, quartos and duodecimos, small, elegant editions of Shakespeare’s poems from the 17th century. Along with these early printed works are a variety of Shakespeare-related books and manuscripts from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
The exhibition begins with the First Folio of 1623, which has been called the most important book in the history of English literature. Without the First Folio, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays including Julius Caesar, Macbeth and The Tempest would have been lost forever. The First Folio also includes the Droeshout Portrait (shown in the illustration on this page) which has become the most famous and iconic image of the Bard.
“All the World’s a Page” also features some of the early quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays, published during his lifetime. While these early editions preserved Shakespeare’s works, they also present the problem of what should be considered authentic Shakespeare. The early quarto editions of King Lear and Hamlet, for example, differ significantly from the First Folio’s versions of those same plays.
Another volume, the 1600 quarto of Much Ado About Nothing, gives us a glimpse of Shakespeare’s first draft of the play. Some of the speech prefixes in the margins occasionally substitute the name of one of Shakespeare’s actors, “Kemp,” for the name of the fictional character Dogberry that William Kempe portrayed.
Although some of the quartos are considered corrupt or “bad” version of Shakespeare’s plays, Maisano says they help illustrate the demand for printed editions of his dramatic works from the time they were first written. “There wouldn’t be a market for “pirated” plays-there wouldn’t be any such thing as “memorial reconstructions” or “bad quartos” said Maisano, “if people didn’t enjoy reading Shakespeare.”
While Shakespeare’s contemporaries preserved his works, subsequent generations helped transform Shakespeare into the world’s most famous writer. Earlier editors such as Nicholas Rowe, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobold and Edmond Malone began the tradition of correcting, annotating and conflating Shakespeare’s plays. Pope’s multi-volume edition is shown along the latest editorial efforts to publish an authentic version of Shakespeare such as the two-volume Arden edition of Hamlet.
David Garrick, the famous 18th century Shakespearean actor, went so far as to cut the first three acts out of his production of The Winter’s Tale. Yet, in a prologue on display in the exhibition, Garrick stated that removing the three acts was, “To lose no drop of that immortal man.”
Despite some of the more cringe-worthy excesses, Maisano says the editing and re-editing of Shakespeare’s works is part of our ongoing dialogue with the plays. “Just as every performance of Shakespeare on the stage differs from the one before it-even if the performance is by the same company, using the same actors, delivering the same lines-so, too, does each new printing of, say, King Lear or Hamlet add some new dimension and offer some fresh perspective on the work.”
The exhibition also shows how visual artists have envisioned Shakespeare and his works. At the beginning of the 18th century, many editions of Shakespeare’s collected works began containing illustrations of key scenes from each of the plays. By the end of the century, English print publisher Alderman John Boydell gathered 167 paintings of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays by some of the best artists in 18th century England, including Benjamin West, Henry Fuseli, and Joshua Reynolds. The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery was a failure in England but was well received in the young American nation, which was hungry for culture.
Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition even tried to change our perception of Shakespeare’s appearance by substituting the Bard’s likeness with a portrait of King James I. The switch was an attempt to make the author appear more like the prospective buyers for Pope’s six-volume edition.
A final section of the exhibition features the books that Shakespeare would have had in his own library, including the 1560 Geneva Bible, Holinshed’s Chronicles and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Also on display is the 1620 English translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the possible source of Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio.
While not diminishing the importance of theatrical performance, Professor Maisano says, “I want visitors to come away with a sense that Shakespeare’s plays “perform” just as well on the page as they do on the stage.” “Ultimately, I hope the exhibit raises as many questions as it answers. In other words, I hope visitors go home, pull out their own Shakespeare books, and try to figure out what’s unique about them.”
“All the World’s a Page” is on display in the Boston Public Library’s Rare Books Exhibition Room on the 3rd Floor of the McKim Building in Copley Square through September 30.
Web Resources:
Complete Interview with Professor Maisano
One Comment
Working right down the street, I went to visit the exhibit twice. The books themselves are very nice, although I was disappointed to discover no guide or curator of any sort, just a single librarian who quite frankly was working on a different project and had no knowledge of the Shakespeare at all. When I pointed out a mistake in their listings, she shrugged it off.
http://www.shakespearegeek.com