How do you see books transforming Shakespeare into the world’s most famous playwright?
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, children’s books, song books, and scholarly books, then we begin to see how malleable and adaptable Shakespeare has been on the page too.
For people who have been around the theater all their lives, I can see how books of Shakespeare’s plays might seem like odd and redundant keepsakes. In fact, a few years ago I had a conversation with someone who had a comprehensive knowledge of all of Shakespeare’s works but confessed-actually, she boasted-that she had never read Shakespeare and couldn’t understand why anyone would. “The plays,” she intoned “were meant to be performed.” She probably had very particular things to say about how they should (and shouldn’t) be performed, too. Shakespeare, this person thought, would be abashed and might even take offense if he were to discover someone paying too much attention to his “words, words, words.” These speeches could only come off properly if delivered onstage by Burbages, Barrymores, or Booths. They weren’t supposed to be picked up and read in a paperback or heard in the dialect of the reader’s imagination.
But, for me, Shakespeare has long been the stuff of both paperbacks and the imagination. I didn’t go to the theater as a kid. If someone had asked me what I thought of Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I might have given a million different responses but it never would have occurred to me to speak about costumes or casting or set designs. Until I went to college, Shakespeare was all in the language. And the language was all in books. Now, of course, I can see why this “sola scriptura” approach to Shakespeare might seem unduly pious and austere. A bit like John the Savage running home from “the feelies” to his mouse-nibbled tome of Shakespeare in Huxley’s Brave New World. And naturally I love seeing how actors and directors find the key to unlocking certain difficult passages in the texts and, in doing so, how these performances give new meaning to the plays. Still, if you hand me a reader-friendly copy of one of Shakespeare’s plays, my imagination will do the acting, directing, and unlocking all on its own.
I think that’s why there has always been such a demand for printed copies of the plays. Even during Shakespeare’s lifetime. There wouldn’t be a market for “pirated” plays-there wouldn’t be any such thing as “memorial reconstructions” or “bad quartos”-if people didn’t enjoy reading Shakespeare. Sure, some early interest came from rival acting companies wanting to stage the same material. Some interest, though, came from people who wanted to read the plays for themselves, again and again. Of course the peculiar properties of the book-its size, portability, prefaces, notes, illustrations (or lack thereof), not to mention its version of the title and text-will help determine how people read and what they’re able to come up with.
Shakespeare had little or nothing to do with publishing or printing his plays, so how did books shape his works?
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. Hamlet and Lear, Shakespeare’s two most sublime masterpieces, are also wonderful illustrations of how print has shaped Shakespeare’s works from the very beginning of his career right up to the present day.
In the case of King Lear, everything from the play’s genre to who gets to speak its final line depends on which book you are reading. The earliest printed quarto edition of the play bills it as a “Chronicle History” whereas the Folio groups it not with the other English History plays but, instead, among the “Tragedies.”
In the quarto edition, Albany delivers the final lines and thus speaks for “we that are young.” In the Folio, these same lines are reassigned to Edgar. The last lines of a Shakespearean tragedy are usually spoken by the character who will then be crowned in the place of the fallen monarch: Malcolm speaks the last fifteen lines in Macbeth and Fortinbras issues a magnanimous eulogy at the end of Hamlet. At issue in the conflicting publications of King Lear, therefore, is nothing less than the future itself: “Who will succeed Lear?”
In the case of Hamlet, the earliest printed edition-the so-called “Bad Quarto” of 1603-is only about half the length of the play as it appears in either the second quarto of 1604/5 or the First Folio of 1623. More troubling still is the fact that some of the most famous lines-including “To be or not to be, that is the question”-do not appear at all, or appear distorted to the point of unintelligibility, in the 1603 quarto. But for all its faults, the Bad Quarto has certainly influenced our understanding of Hamlet’s character. For instance, most of my students (not to mention, of course, many of one’s colleagues) tend to assume that Prince Hamlet is in his teens or, at best, his early twenties. Indeed, students often offer Hamlet’s youth as evidence for why Claudius succeeds his brother to the throne. Hamlet, they presume, isn’t of age to govern Denmark. But the graveyard scene of the Folio text makes clear how old Hamlet is: he’s 30. He is, as we say, a “non-traditional student” at Wittenberg. That’s part of what I love (and frankly prefer) about the Folio edition. But the speech that enables a reader to determine Hamlet’s age is not to be found in the First Quarto edition. Thus, the Quarto does not proscribe the possibility that Hamlet, like Romeo, might be a petulant teenager.
It’s also worth mentioning the way in which the conventional explanation for how the Bad Quarto came into existence uncannily mirrors the plotline of Hamlet itself. The first printing, most scholars believe, derived from an enterprising actor who “pirated” Shakespeare’s popular play by committing as much of it as he could to memory and reporting the lines, to the best of his recollection, to an interested publisher. Of course, the whole tragedy of Hamlet is about committing things to memory and recording them in books so that these things can then be transmitted, faithfully, to future generations. When the Ghost of Hamlet’s father returns from the grave to inform his son that he was murdered, Hamlet actually takes notes. He writes it down in a book. One might suppose that the tale itself, especially coming from a ghost, would be unforgettable. But Hamlet’s not taking any chances. Later, upon the arrival of the players at Elsinore, Hamlet informs the first player: “I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted; or, if it was, not above once; for the play, I remember, pleased not the million… but it was,” Hamlet insists, “an excellent play.” Indeed, Hamlet himself recalls “one speech in it I chiefly loved.” Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, then proceeds to quote verbatim a lengthy passage from this play: a play, remember, that has never been performed but which he has nevertheless committed to memory. How has Hamlet been able to memorize entire speeches from a play that was never performed? There are a number of possibilities. One of the best arguments I’ve ever heard came from Bonnie Stewart, an undergraduate at UMass-Boston. (I don’t know if anyone else has made this argument before… it’s certainly possible.) She suggested that Hamlet himself wrote the play. Thus Hamlet is not only an actor and director, like Shakespeare, but an aspiring playwright too. Hamlet remembers the lines of the play because he wrote them after-he’s the author. That kind of rethinking of Hamlet’s character, I would argue, is something you only get from reading (and re-reading) the play closely. Now, even if we refuse to latch onto the tantalizing possibility of Hamlet as a playwright, it’s still possible to answer the question-”how did Hamlet manage to memorize a speech that was never performed?”-in a couple of ways. First, we could observe that Hamlet has been reading a printed copy of that play (the book that he holds in his hand) since his arrival at Elsinore. Or, alternately, we could posit that Hamlet possesses something akin to a photographic memory and thus, like the actor who “pirated” Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark delivers his own “memorial reconstruction” avant la lettre.
In general, how did you select the items?
For purposes of display and presentation, as well as to give visitors a sense of the variety of reading experiences, we wanted books of all shapes and sizes: folios, quartos, octavos, duodecimos, and even an “elephant folio.” We wanted to include books of Shakespeare’s poems in addition to his plays. Naturally, we wanted to include the “big ticket items”: the First Folio, for example, and quite a few early quarto editions. Some quartos proved better than others for underscoring certain bibliographic concepts. The quarto of Much Ado about Nothing, for example, offers a nice, concise (albeit indirect) way to explain what scholars mean by Shakespeare’s “foul papers.” These were the handwritten rough drafts of Shakespeare’s plays. Alas, no such foul papers exist. But one can see a trace of Shakespeare’s first draft in the 1600 quarto of Much Ado because, there, 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. Thus we have that quarto opened to pages where the reader can see this variation, between “Kemp” and “Dogberry,” and observe for herself how the printers failed to correct Shakespeare’s own inconsistency. Finally, the exhibit includes books from every century since Shakespeare’s birth, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first.
Do all the items in the exhibition come from the Barton collection? If not, what other sources did you use?
Almost all the items in the exhibition come from the Boston Public Library’s Barton Collection, one of the greatest treasures of Shakespeareana in the world. There are a few exceptions. Part of the exhibit showcases books that Shakespeare himself read, books that fired his own dramatic imagination. These include Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Geneva Bible, and Holinshed’s Chronicles. These books did not come from the Barton collection but they belong to the Rare Books and Manuscript Room of the BPL. Finally, we’ve included some modern editions of Shakespeare-the recent two-volume Arden edition of Hamlet, for instance, and Ian Pollock’s Illustrated King Lear-to show how far the traditions of editing and illustrating Shakespeare’s works have come in the three centuries since Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of The Works.
Do you have a favorite item or items in the exhibition?
My personal favorite is the 1609 quarto of Pericles. This supposedly “bad quarto”-another “memorial reconstruction” like the 1603 Hamlet-was a best-seller in the seventeenth century. It was reprinted in 1609 (the year of its first printing) and then reprinted-again and again and again-in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. Obviously, 17th-century readers loved this play. Indeed, I think Pericles is a play that Shakespeare intended to appear on the page. And he wanted it to appear a certain way: old, suspect, and, in certain places, utterly unreadable. The play actually contains the first use of the bibliographic term “title page” in the English language. Shakespeare definitely envisioned this play in print. I won’t bore readers of The Shakespeare Post with all the details but, if they’re interested, they can read more in my article, “Shakespeare’s Dead Sea Scroll: On the Apocryphal Appearance of Pericles” in the 2007 Shakespeare Yearbook.
What do you want visitors to learn from viewing this exhibition?
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. In fact, Shakespeare’s plays have been in demand on the page just as much as they have been on demand on the stage ever since Shakespeare made a name for himself. 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. Do the books contain prefaces, glossaries, illustrations? What about a portrait of Shakespeare or a brief biography? In what ways does this editorial apparatus ‘set the stage’ for reading? How are passages that scholars and editors have squabbled over for centuries rendered on the page? Are there footnotes to acknowledge that the passage in question might have been printed differently in earlier editions? What difference do a few words make to one’s understanding and appreciation of a scene or character? Finally, are there traces-marginalia, doodles, or dogeared pages-of previous readers’ imaginative interactions with the book?
Since this exhibition is the culmination of a graduate course, did your students play any role in choosing the items?
Absolutely. All of the most interesting and obscure-in other words, the least obvious-books were chosen by the students Indeed, the students deserve to be recognized for their creative contributions. There names are: Ceylan Akturk, Neval Avci, Kristen Bennett, Trevor Doherty, Jacqueline Donnelly, Shelley Karren, Hye Su Park, and Taravat Zandieh.
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