The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  To lose (or add) thirty-five of Hamlet’s most self-lacerating lines—about “thinking too precisely,” the end point of his introspection, a self-consciousness about self-consciousness—is not inconsiderable. It eliminates a dimension of Hamlet’s—and Hamlet’s—complexity. In all, there are some 230 lines in the Quarto that are absent from the Folio, including sixteen sustained passages, and some 70 lines in the Folio that are absent from the Quarto. Some of Hamlet’s most famous lines and phrases—that entire final soliloquy, “the pales and forts of reason,” “the mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye,” “the sheeted dead that did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets,” “stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,” “the vicious mole of nature,” “the monster custom,” “the engineer hoist with his own petard,” “Denmark’s a prison” and “nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”—are in one, but not the other, version of Hamlet. To choose the Quarto, for instance, is to gain “the pales and forts of reason,” but to lose the Folio’s “Denmark’s a prison.”

  But the catalog of those dropped and added lines does not include—or begin to capture—the subtle and distinctive effect of the hundreds of one- and two-word variations within lines that are present in both versions. For instance, does Hamlet accuse his mother of questioning with “an idle tongue” or “a wicked tongue”? The difference is more than a typo.

  Further complicating matters is the existence of a third, highly problematic, much argued over, Hamlet text, the so-called Bad Quarto. It’s been dubbed “Bad” because it appears to be a truncated and garbled version of the play—a sort of seventeenth-century bootleg edition. It first appeared in 1603, a year before the Good Quarto. While the Good Quarto has some 3,700 lines, the Bad Quarto has just 2,200 lines, many of them sounding like bad imitations of Shakespeare. The “To be or not to be” soliloquy, for instance, begins

  To be or not to be; ay, there’s the point

  To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay all.

  No, to sleep, to dream; ay marry there it goes …

  Many scholars, including Jenkins, believe that the Bad Quarto is a “memorial reconstruction,” composed not from any Shakespearean manuscript, but from a recollection of a performance of Hamlet, perhaps done with the help of one or more bit players. The likeliest suspect, some say, is the actor who played Marcellus (the soldier who sees the Ghost with Horatio and Hamlet)—since the Bad Quarto is allegedly more faithful to the longer Hamlet texts in the scenes in which Marcellus is on stage. But recently, other scholars have tried to make the case that the Bad Quarto was not so much bad as very early—Shakespeare’s youthful first draft, perhaps even a version of the “ur-Hamlet” itself, the lost predecessor play there are reports of in 1589, 1594 and 1596 but often attributed to Thomas Kyd, not Shakespeare. And, alas, there is almost no hard evidence remaining to support any side of the question.

  Still the Bad Quarto has its uses: to some scholars it can sometimes suggest an alternative to variants in the other two. Harold Jenkins resolved the conflicting versions of Laertes’s speech by triangulating the two “good” texts with the “bad” one. In the 1604 Good Quarto, Laertes declares defiantly of Hamlet, “I shall live and tell him to this teeth/‘Thus didst thou.’ ” In the 1623 Folio it’s “Thus didest thou”—which merely corrects the iambic pentameter by making “didst” two syllables. The Bad Quarto is off on its own, with “thus he dies.” Jenkins thinks that they’re all wrong, and that the correct line is “Thus diest thou.” That the Bad Quarto may be a reconstruction of something heard (in a performance of Hamlet) and reconstructed from memory serves Jenkins’s case. If the line is one heard (or slightly misheard), he argues, it’s more likely one remembers “Thus diest thou” as “Thus he dies,” rather than as “Thus didest” or “Thus didst.”

  Jenkins believes Shakespeare actually wrote “Thus diest thou” for Laertes (a stronger imprecation than “Thus didst thou”—not just an indictment, but a death sentence), but that, because e and d are often confused in Elizabethan handwriting, a transcriber of Shakespeare’s manuscript or a print shop compositor misread Shakespeare’s “diest” as “didst.”

  Jenkins insists it’s not just a matter of Jenkins liking “diest” better or thinking Shakespeare ought to have written “diest,” but of Jenkins restoring Shakespeare’s “original intentions.”

  But the didest/diest question is important in another respect, Jenkins believes. It is a reproof to, if not refutation of, the new belief that Shakespeare revised Hamlet. If Shakespeare had been looking over what most scholars regard as the earlier 1604 Good Quarto version of Hamlet, and had seen “Thus didst thou” printed there when he knew he wanted “Thus diest thou,” he wouldn’t have merely changed “didst” to “didest” in the Folio, he would have changed it to “diest.” But he didn’t.

  “No,” Jenkins told me, if Shakespeare had been going over the earlier version to revise it, “Shakespeare would have known that ‘didst’ was an error for ‘diest’ ”—and made the change Jenkins made on his behalf.

  Sometimes the art of Hamlet editing comes down to that: “Shakespeare would have known,” the attempt to read Shakespeare’s mind. And so, inevitably, different theories of the variations in the Hamlet texts envision not just different Hamlets but different Shakespeares, different notions of what is Shakespearean.

  Differences, in particular, in the way he approached his dramatic art. There was the Shakespeare characterized by his colleagues as a playwright who never blotted a line—raced through a manuscript for the theater without looking back or revising (although Ben Jonson cattily responded, “would he had blotted a thousand”).

  Harold Jenkins puts a more reverential spin on this view by calling Shakespeare “the supreme poet who saw no call to revise Hamlet” or any of his other works.

  Then there is the Shakespeare of the Oxford University Press editors who see him as a man of the stage rather than a man of the page, one who was happy to cut and rewrite to make his lines more effective on stage. It’s not his “original intentions” that count, the Oxford editors argue, but his “final intentions” for the acting version. And there is still another Shakespeare—that of Lukas Erne, author of an influential recent study, Shakespeare as a Literary Artist, who concedes that Shakespeare may well have revised for the stage for the convenience of the theater managers’ time constraints, but that doesn’t mean these revisions represented his final intentions. Erne believes Shakespeare’s truest, literary intentions were expressed rather in the longer, more wordy Good Quarto version.

  All these variant Shakespeare personae are blended into a blur in conflated versions, the new Arden Hamlet editors Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor argue. By disentangling the linguistic DNA of the texts, they argue, the reader gets to experience not just the different versions of Hamlet each text may represent, but the different Shakespeares they represent as well: the different stages of his thinking process perhaps, his second thoughts, or the differing purposes—stage or page—of each variant.

  The new Arden Hamlet represents the latest in what Barbara Mowat of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and a Hamlet editor in her own right (she and textual scholar Paul Werstine are editing the Folger Shakespeare edition), described to me as a series of “paradigm shifts” in the approach to the problem created by the existence of more than one version of several of Shakespeare’s plays—including Lear, Othello, Troilus and Cressida and Romeo and Juliet in addition to Hamlet.

  The initial paradigm was established by Shakespeare’s first editors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, two of the participants in Shakespeare’s theater company, who put together the 1623 Folio, which contains thirty-six plays. Heminge and Condell condemned the previously published single-play Quarto editions of the plays as “stolen … surreptitious … maimed and deformed.”

  Needless to say, there was some commercial self-interest at work in their defining their edition as the authentic one, and in the late eighteenth century, this paradigm was overturned when
scholars discovered that Heminge and Condell had relied on—lifted, really—the texts of many of these allegedly “maimed and deformed” Quartos for use in their Folios. This prompted a return to the Quartos—on grounds they were closer to Shakespeare’s “original intentions.”

  Then in the early twentieth century, Mowat continued, a newer paradigm emerged that divided the Quartos themselves into “Good” and “Bad” and restored some respect to certain of the Folio versions. And launched an entire generation of the best and brightest Shakespearean scholars into the vast, exacting and exhausting quest of “scientific bibliography,” the effort to decide which variant of word or phrase in the Quarto and Folio versions represented the reading from the imagined “Lost Archetype,” the purported “Shakespearean” original.

  Often this involved a mind-numbing focus on the work of the compositors in the printing houses that produced the earliest texts of Shakespeare’s plays. For one thing it was important to discover which of the variations between two versions of a play might be due to compositors’ errors (as Jenkins argues in the “didst”/“diest” case) and which due to Shakespeare’s own revisions.

  So in an effort to lift the “veil of print,” Shakespearean textual scholars abandoned the playhouses for the printing houses for nearly a century. In the printing houses they discovered (or created) an entire shadow cast of characters for Shakespeare’s plays: certain variations were “scientifically” determined to be the result of Compositor E’s inexperience or Compositor B’s scrupulousness in correcting Compositor C’s errors. The results were then “conflated” into hybrid Quarto-Folio combinations. In the past century, in the case of Hamlet, particularly in Jenkins’s edition, preference was usually given to the longer 1604 Quarto.

  And then in the 1980s, a group of scholars—among them Michael Warren at Berkeley, Steven Urkowitz at City College, Gary Taylor at Oxford and the independent scholar Eric Sams—began insisting on a new paradigm that would privilege the Folio versions as Shakespeare’s “final intention,” his revision for the stage. Their Shakespeare, the man of the theater, was attacked by scholars such as Harold Bloom and Harry Berger (and later, Lukas Erne) who insisted Shakespeare’s plays are better read as poetry than seen as drama, that he is a man of the page rather than the stage, a dramatic poet rather than a poetic dramatist.

  The new model of Shakespeare the “Reviser” faction imagines is distant from the devil-may-care figure of tradition (and Shakespeare in Love) who dashed off scripts before rushing off to the tavern, or to write his next play. In the new vision, Shakespeare is a rather more serious and self-conscious artist, a serial reviser of his great works. The Reviser faction argues that examining the changes from Quarto to Folio versions of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, among others, we can get a unique glimpse into Shakespeare’s mind at work, rethinking and reconsidering his greatest achievements.

  What’s significant about the new three-text Arden, Mowat believes, is that it may represent the emergence of a new-new paradigm. A very Hamlet-like paradigm, a refusal to choose or decide between alternatives, one that gives respect to each of the different versions because four centuries of paradigm shifts have still left Shakespeare’s “intentions,” original or final, theatrical or literary, veiled beyond recovery with any degree of certainty.

  Barbara Mowat even believes that the key axiom of the Revisers’ School—that the Folio version of Hamlet is Shakespeare’s revision of the Quarto for the theater—may lack foundation because it can’t be proved for certain that the Folio version wasn’t written first (and published later), in which case the Quarto would represent Shakespeare’s later revision and expansion of Hamlet.

  These unresolved conflicts leave a real problem for actors and directors. Consider the question of Hamlet’s last words. As the play comes to an end, Hamlet’s been stuck by a poisoned sword in his duel with Laertes. Dying, he tells Horatio he’s had a terrifying vision. “O, I could tell you—” he begins. Did he have a glimpse of the afterlife? But there’s no time and it’s too awful, so instead he begs Horatio to tell the story behind the pile of bodies in the throne room, and gives the approaching Norwegian prince, Fortinbras, his “dying voice,” his nod for the succession to the throne of Denmark.

  And then he concludes: “The rest is silence.” And so it is—at least in the Good Quarto.

  But in the Folio, the line is written thus:

  “… The rest is silence. O, o, o, o.”

  We don’t know for certain whether Shakespeare himself added these hammy-looking “O-groans”—as they’re known in the literature (the term was coined by the scholar Maurice Charney)—or whether they were the interpolation of some actor who wanted to prolong his dying scene. How do we decide? The stakes are not inconsiderable: the last words of perhaps the most influential character in Western literature. Unfortunately, there’s no direct evidence, no manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand, no reminiscence by Richard Burbage, the actor who first played Hamlet, of conferring with the playwright, no witness to Shakespeare inking in the O-groans.

  G. R. Hibbard, the Oxford University Press editor, who argues that the Folio version is a text closer to Shakespeare’s final intentions as “a man of the theater,” still balks at the unsophisticated-looking O-groans in the Folio, and substitutes a stage direction he composed: “He gives a long sigh and dies”—words Shakespeare never wrote.

  Suppose, however, that Shakespeare wanted Hamlet to utter those final four O’s? After all, he gives four O-groans to King Lear in the 1608 Quarto. If Shakespeare favored four final O-groans for Lear in 1608, why deny them to Hamlet?

  It’s also true that actors have played the O-groans beautifully in the past (although most leave them out). They can be transmuted from hollow-looking O’s on the page to a tragic aria of grief, each O registering a deeper apprehension of death and terror: in a way, Hamlet’s final, wordless, four-syllable soliloquy of grief. (In his 1999 Hamlet at the reconstructed Globe in London, Mark Rylance played them that way.) The addition of O-groans could reflect the way Shakespeare changed as a dramatic artist, even if some don’t approve of the change.

  They can also be seen as a final embodiment of the play’s tragic irony. Hamlet decrees “the rest is silence” but instead of silence, those final four O’s are torn from him by a sorrow and pain beyond his conscious command. Just as his attempt to stage-manage his revenge was subverted by the “divinity that shapes [his] ends,” by Fate, here it costs him his control over his last utterances.

  So, to groan or not to groan? The O-groans, like the other thematic variants, are like a Rorschach: theories projected on those inky O’s reflect the Theorists’ vision of who they think Hamlet (and Shakespeare) should be.

  THE PALACE COUP

  When I met with Gary Taylor down in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he’s now director of the University of Alabama’s Strode Center for Renaissance Studies, he had a chilling phrase to describe the behind-the-scenes triumph of the Revisers, one that has left Harold Jenkins’s Hamlet edition looking obsolescent to some: palace coup.

  “It’s like there’s been a palace coup,” he told me in the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop in a Tuscaloosa strip mall, “but the rest of the country hasn’t found out about it yet. And I think that maybe the new Arden, the three-text Hamlet will have the effect of making the rest of the world awake to the fact that the coup has happened.”

  It’s unlikely anyone in the Krispy Kreme is aware they are in the presence of one of the chief plotters of the palace coup, the one whose efforts have led Lear to be divided and Hamlet subdivided. When Gary Taylor, who edited the Oxford Complete Works versions of both Hamlet and Lear, says the rest of the country hasn’t found out about the palace coup in the realm of Shakespeare studies, what he means is that most well-educated general readers aren’t yet aware there are two Lears—and now they will be told, in effect, by the new Arden edition that there are three Hamlets. That they’ve been reading the wrong Hamlet their entire life; they’ve been reading a Hamlet Shakespea
re never wrote or staged in his entire life. Two Lears! Three Hamlets? Could it be? What to make of it?

  Palace coup: it has a Hamlet-like ring to it. Hamlet itself, of course, is a play about a palace coup the rest of the country doesn’t learn about until it’s too late, the one Claudius executed when he murdered Hamlet’s father and seized the throne at Elsinore. In fact, a more appropriate analogous figure to Gary Taylor might be not Claudius, but Fortinbras. Unlike Claudius, hoist with his own petard, Fortinbras, who has been executing maneuvers, marching all over the outskirts of Elsinore throughout the play, walks in to take command when the parties within the palace have slaughtered each other. He’s a winner. And unlike the Machiavellian bedroom intriguer Claudius, he is a military man, and Gary Taylor, scholarly wunderkind, is nothing if not a martial spirit. Military images and talk of tactics, strategies, flanking attacks and the like crop up in his conversation when he speaks of his campaign to divide Lear and Hamlet.

  Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he’s an army brat; his father was an air force officer and he grew up on military bases in the South. It sounds like he’s studied the campaigns of Caesar and, in fact, his campaign to divide Lear and Hamlet may leave a more lasting mark than Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul: it is in no small part due to Gary Taylor’s crusade that all Hamlet will soon be divided into three parts.

  It’s a sleepy summer Sunday in July and the Krispy Kreme seems an incongruous setting for a discussion of an assault on the citadels of Shakespearean orthodoxy. Gary Taylor presents a somewhat incongruous-looking figure for a Shakespearean scholar as well. He has the long hair, T-shirt and drawl of a roadie for a seventies southern rock band—Lynyrd Skynyrd say, before the tragic air crash. Listening to him discuss Shakespearean revisionism in this slow backwater of the Old Confederacy (home of the legendary Dreamland Barbecue shack), one could hardly imagine the havoc he has wrought in the august precincts of Renaissance scholarship until you begin to think of his resemblance to that striking cover picture of seventies icon Richard Brautigan, looking dandyish in an antiquated gray battle tunic posing for the cover of A Confederate General from Big Sur. Gary Taylor is a Confederate general from Oxford University Press, you might say, one who’s come close to succeeding in dividing the Union of Shakespeare texts. An act of secession, one might say, as the 1604 Quarto withdraws from its entangled conflation with the Folio version like two strands of a chromosome separating.