Shakespeare

by Bill Bryson

  The plays are categorized as Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s last works, is presented first, probably because of its relative newness. Timon of Athens is an unfinished draft (or a finished play that suffers from “extraordinary incoherencies,” in the words of Stanley Wells). Pericles doesn’t appear at all—and wouldn’t be included in a folio edition for another forty years, possibly because it was a collaboration. For the same reason, probably, Heminges and Condell excluded The Two Noble Kinsmen and The True History of Cardenio; this is more than a little unfortunate because the latter is now lost.

  They nearly left out Troilus and Cressida, but then at the last minute stuck it in. No one knows what exactly provoked the dithering. They unsentimentally tidied up the titles of the history plays, burdening them with dully descriptive labels that robbed them of their romance. In Shakespeare’s day there was no Henry VI, Part 2, but rather The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, while Henry VI, Part 3 was The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry the Sixth—“more interesting, more informative, more grandiloquent,” in the words of Gary Taylor.

  Despite the various quirks and inconsistencies, and to their eternal credit, Heminges and Condell really did take the trouble, at least much of the time, to produce the most complete and accurate versions they could. Richard II, for instance, was printed mostly from a reliable quarto, but with an additional 151 good lines carefully salvaged from other, poorer quarto editions and a promptbook, and much the same kind of care was taken with others in the volume.

  “On some texts they went to huge trouble,” says Stanley Wells. “Troilus and Cressida averages eighteen changes per page—an enormous number. On other texts they were much less discriminating.”

  Why they were so inconsistent—fastidious here, casual there—is yet another question no one can answer. Why Shakespeare didn’t have the plays published in his lifetime is a question not easily answered either. It is often pointed out that in his time a playwright’s work belonged to the company, not to the playwright, and therefore was not the latter’s to exploit. That is indubitably so, but Shakespeare’s close relationships with his fellows surely would have ensured that his wishes would be met had he desired to leave a faithful record of his work, particularly when so much of it existed only in spurious editions. Yet nothing we possess indicates that Shakespeare took any particular interest in his work once it was performed.

  This is puzzling because there is reason to believe (or at least to suspect) that some of his plays may have been written to be read as well as performed. Four in particular—Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Richard III, and Coriolanus— were unnaturally long at 3,200 lines or more, and were probably seldom if ever performed at those lengths. The suspicion is that the extra text was left as a kind of bonus for those with greater leisure to take it in at home. Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster, in a preface to his The Duchess of Malfi, noted that he had left in much original, unperformed material for the benefit of his reading public. Perhaps Shakespeare was doing likewise.

  It is not quite true that the First Folio is the definitive version for each text. Some quartos, including bad ones, may incorporate later improvements and refinements, or, more rarely, may offer readable text where the Folio version is doubtful or vague. Even the poorest quarto can provide a useful basis of comparison between varying versions of the same text. G. Blakemore Evans cites a line from King Lear that is rendered in different early editions of the play as “My Foole usurps my body,” “My foote usurps my body,” and “My foote usurps my head” (and in fact really makes sense only as “A fool usurps my bed”). Quartos also tend to incorporate more generous stage directions, which can be very helpful to scholars and directors alike.

  Sometimes there are such differences between quarto and folio editions of plays that it is impossible to know how to resolve them or to guess which version Shakespeare might ultimately have favored. The most notorious example of this is Hamlet, which exists in three versions: a “bad” 1603 quarto of 2,200 lines, a much better 1604 quarto of 3,800 lines, and the 1623 folio version of 3,570 lines. There are reasons to believe that of the three the “bad” first quarto may actually most closely represent the play as performed. It is certainly brisker than the other versions. Moreover, as Ann Thompson of King’s College in London points out, it places Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in a different, better place, where suicidal musing seems more apt and rational.

  Even more comprehensively problematic is King Lear, for which the quarto edition has three hundred lines and an entire scene not found in the First Folio, while the latter has one hundred or so lines not found in the quarto. The two versions assign speeches to different characters, altering the nature of three central roles—Albany, Edgar, and Kent—and the quarto offers a materially different ending. Such are the differences that the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare included both versions in the complete works on the grounds that they are not so much two versions of the same play as two different plays. Othello likewise differs in more than one hundred lines between quarto and First Folio, but, even more important, has hundreds of different words in the two versions, suggesting extensive later revision.

  Nobody knows how many First Folios were printed. Most estimates put the number at about a thousand, but this is really just a guess. Peter W. M. Blayney, the preeminent authority on the First Folio, thinks it was rather less than a thousand. “The fact that the book was reprinted after only nine years,” Blayney has written, “suggests a relatively small edition—probably no more than 750 copies, and perhaps fewer.” Of these, all or part of three hundred First Folios survive—an extraordinary proportion.

  The great repository of First Folios today is a modest building on a pleasant street a couple of blocks from the Capitol in Washington, D.C.—the Folger Shakespeare Library. It is named for Henry Clay Folger, who was president of Standard Oil (and, more distantly, a member of the Folgers coffee family), and who began collecting First Folios early in the twentieth century, when they could often be snapped up comparatively cheaply from hard-up aristocrats and struggling institutions.

  As sometimes happens with serious collectors, Folger became increasingly expansive as time went on, and began collecting works not just by or about Shakespeare, but by or about people who liked Shakespeare, so that the collection includes not only much priceless Shakespearean material but also some unexpected curiosities: a manuscript by Thomas de Quincey on how to make porridge, for instance. Folger didn’t live to see the library that bears his name. Two weeks after laying the foundation stone in 1930, he died of a sudden heart attack.

  The collection today consists of 350,000 books and other items, but the core is the First Folios. The Folger owns more of them than any other institution in the world—though surprisingly, no one can say exactly how many.

  “It is not actually easy to say what is a First Folio and what isn’t, because most Folios are no longer entirely original and few are entirely complete,” Georgianna Ziegler, one of the curators, told me when I visited in the summer of 2005. “Beginning in the late eighteenth century it became common practice to fill out incomplete or broken volumes by inserting pages taken from other volumes, sometimes to quite a radical extent. Copy sixty-six of our collection is roughly 60 percent cannibalized from other volumes. Three of our ‘fragment’ First Folios are actually more complete than that.”

  “What we normally say,” added her colleague Rachel Doggett, “is that we have approximately one-third of the surviving First Folios.”

  It is customarily written that the Folger has seventy-nine complete First Folios and parts of several others, though in fact only thirteen of the seventy-nine “complete” copies really are complete. Peter Blayney, however, believes the Folger can reasonably claim to possess eighty-two complete copies. It really is largely a matter of semantics.

  Ziegler and Doggett took me to a secure windowless basement room where t
he rarest and most important of the volumes in the Folger collections are kept. The room was chilly, brightly lit, and rather antiseptic. Had I been blindfolded I might have guessed that it was a room where autopsies were conducted. Instead it was filled with rows of modern shelving containing a vast quantity of very old books. The First Folios lay on their sides on twelve shallow shelves along the back wall. Each book is about eighteen by fourteen inches, roughly the size of an Encyclopædia Britannica volume.

  It is worth devoting a moment to considering how books were put together in the early days of movable type. Think of a standard greeting card in which one sheet of paper card is folded in half to make four separate surfaces—front, inside left, inside right, and back. Slip two more folded cards into the first and you have a booklet of twelve pages, or what is known as a quire—roughly half the length of a play or about the amount of text that a printing workshop would work on at any time. The complication from the printer’s point of view is that in order to have the pages run consecutively when slotted together, they must be printed mostly out of sequence. The outer sheet of a quire, for instance, will have pages 1 and 2 on the left-hand leaf but pages 11 and 12 on the right-hand side. Only the innermost two pages of a quire (pages 6 and 7) will actually appear and be printed consecutively. All the others have at least one nonsequential page for a neighbor.

  What this meant in producing a book was that it was necessary to work out in advance which text would appear on each of twelve pages. The process was known as casting off, and when it went wrong, as it commonly did, compositors had to make adjustments to get their lines and pages to end in the right places. Sometimes it was a matter of introducing a contraction here and there—using “ye” instead of “the,” for example—but sometimes more desperate expedients became necessary. On occasion whole lines were dropped.

  With the First Folio, production was spread among three different shops, each employing teams of compositors of varying deftness, experience, and commitment, which naturally resulted in differences from one volume to another. If an error was noticed when a page was being printed, as often happened, it would be corrected at that point in the run. A series of corrections would therefore introduce a number of discrepancies between almost any two volumes. Printers in Shakespeare’s day (and, come to that, long after) were notoriously headstrong and opinionated, and rarely hesitated to introduce improvements as they saw fit. It is known from extant manuscripts that when the publisher Richard Field published a volume by the poet John Harrington, his compositors introduced more than a thousand changes to the spelling and phrasing.

  In addition to all the intentional alterations made during the course of production, there were many minute differences in wear and quality between different pieces of type, especially if taken from different typecases. Realizing all this, in the 1950s Charlton Hinman made a microscopic examination of fifty-five Folger folios using a special magnifier that he built himself. The result was The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963), one of the most extraordinary pieces of literary detection of the last century.

  By carefully studying and collating individual printers’ preferences as well as microscopic flaws on certain letters through each of the fifty-five volumes, Hinman was able to work out which compositors did which work. Eventually he identified nine separate hands—whom he labeled A, B, C, D, and so on—at work on the First Folio.

  Although nine hands contributed, their workload was decidedly unequal; B alone was responsible for nearly half the published text. By chance one of the compositors may have been a John Shakespeare, who trained with Jaggard the previous decade. If so, his connection to the enterprise was entirely coincidental; he had no known relationship to William Shakespeare. Ironically the compositor whose identity can most confidently be surmised—a young man from Hursley in Hampshire named John Leason, who was known to Hinman as Hand E—was the worst by far. He was the apprentice—and not a very promising one, it would appear from the quality of his work.

  Among much else Hinman determined that no two volumes of the First Folio were exactly the same. “The idea that every single volume would be different from every other was unexpected, and obviously you would need a lot of volumes to make that determination,” said Rachel Doggett with a look of real satisfaction. “So Folger’s obsession with collecting Folios turned out to be quite a valuable thing for scholarship.”

  “What is slightly surprising,” Ziegler said, “is that all the fuss is about a book that wasn’t actually very well made.” To demonstrate her point she laid open on a table one of the First Folios and placed beside it a copy of Ben Jonson’s own complete works. The difference in quality was striking. In the Shakespeare First Folio, the inking was conspicuously poor; many passages were faint or very slightly smeared.

  “The paper is handmade,” she added, “but of no more than middling quality.” Jonson’s book in comparison was a model of stylish care. It was beautifully laid out, with decorative drop capitals and printer’s ornaments, and it incorporated many useful details such as the dates of first performances, which were lacking from the Shakespeare volume.

  At the time of Shakespeare’s death few would have supposed that one day he would be thought the greatest of English playwrights. Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Ben Jonson were all more popular and esteemed. The First Folio contained just four poetic eulogies—a starkly modest number. When the now obscure William Cartwright died in 1643, five dozen admirers jostled to offer memorial poems. “Such are the vagaries of reputation,” sighs Schoenbaum in his Documentary Life.

  This shouldn’t come entirely as a surprise. Ages are generally pretty incompetent at judging their own worth. How many people now would vote to bestow Nobel Prizes for Literature on Pearl Buck, Henrik Pontoppidan, Rudolf Eucken, Selma Lagerlöf, or many others whose fame could barely make it to the end of their own century?

  In any case Shakespeare didn’t altogether delight Restoration sensibilities, and his plays were heavily adapted when they were performed at all. Just four decades after his death, Samuel Pepys thought Romeo and Juliet “the worst that ever I heard in my life”—until, that is, he saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he thought “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.” Most observers were more admiring than that, but on the whole they preferred the intricate plotting and thrilling twists of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy, A King and No King, and others that are now largely forgotten except by scholars.

  Shakespeare never entirely dropped out of esteem—as the publication of Second, Third, and Fourth Folios clearly attests—but neither was he reverenced as he is today. After his death some of his plays weren’t performed again for a very long time. As You Like It was not revived until the eighteenth century. Troilus and Cressida had to wait until 1898 to be staged again, in Germany, though John Dryden in the meanwhile helpfully gave the world a completely reworked version. Dryden took this step because, he explained, much of Shakespeare was ungrammatical, some of it coarse, and the whole of it “so pester’d with Figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure.” Nearly everyone agreed that Dryden’s version, subtitled “Truth Found Too Late,” was a vast improvement. “You found it dirt but you have made it gold,” gushed the poet Richard Duke.

  The poems, too, went out of fashion. The sonnets “were pretty well forgotten for over a century and a half,” according to W. H. Auden, and Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were likewise overlooked until rediscovered by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his fellow Romantics in the early 1800s.

  Such was Shakespeare’s faltering status that as time passed the world began to lose track of what exactly he had written. The Third Folio, published forty years after the first, included six plays that Shakespeare didn’t in fact write—A Yorkshire Tragedy, The London Prodigal, Locrine, Sir John Oldcastle, Thomas Lord Cromwell, and The Puritan Widow—though it did finally make room for Pericles, for which scholars and theatergoers have been gratef
ul ever since. Other collections of his plays contained still other works—The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Mucedorus, Iphis and Ianthe, and The Birth of Merlin. It would take nearly two hundred years to resolve the problem of authorship generally, and in detail it isn’t settled yet.

  Almost a century elapsed between William Shakespeare’s death and the first even slight attempts at biography, by which time much detail of his life was gone for good. The first stab at a life story came in 1709, when Nicholas Rowe, Britain’s poet laureate and a dramatist in his own right, provided a forty-page background sketch as part of the introduction to a new six-volume set of Shakespeare’s complete works. Most of it was drawn from legend and hearsay, and a very large part of that was incorrect. Rowe gave Shakespeare three daughters rather than two, and credited him with the authorship of a single long poem, Venus and Adonis, apparently knowing nothing of The Rape of Lucrece. It is to Rowe that we are indebted for the attractive but specious story of Shakespeare’s having been caught poaching deer at Charlecote. According to the later scholar Edmond Malone, of the eleven facts asserted about Shakespeare’s life by Rowe, eight were incorrect.

  Nor was Shakespeare always terribly well served by those who strove to restore his reputation. The poet Alexander Pope, extending the tradition begun by Dryden, produced a handsome set of Shakespeare’s works in 1723, but freely reworked any material he didn’t like, which was a good deal of it. He discarded passages he thought unworthy (insisting that they were the creations of actors, not Shakespeare himself), replaced archaic words that he didn’t understand with modern words he did, threw out nearly all puns and other forms of wordplay, and constantly altered phrasing and meter to suit his own unyieldingly discerning tastes. Where, for instance, Shakespeare wrote about taking arms against a sea of troubles, he changed sea to siege to avoid a mixed metaphor.