The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  These are the lines Hamlet privily asks the chief Player to insert into The Murder of Gonzago, the better to “catch the conscience of the King.” It is the moment when Hamlet himself becomes playwright, and naturally we’d like to know which lines of the hundred or so that we get to hear of Gonzago are supposed to have been written by Hamlet himself. Unfortunately the answer’s not obvious and has sparked centuries of debate. It’s not an insignificant controversy when you consider that Hamlet is a rather prolific writer in Hamlet. He writes (and we hear parts of) three letters in the play, one to Ophelia, one to the King, one to Horatio, and then there are those “dozen or sixteen lines,” whatever they are. Alas, at the end of eight pages of Variorum commentary it’s still a controversy that goes unresolved, as it does today. Hamlet has proven quite productive of—but also quite resistant to—definitive, reductive or overly schematized solutions.

  The Enfolded Hamlet was Bernice Kliman’s invention for the new New Variorum Hamlet. More than a century after Furness’s Variorum, the Modern Language Association, the umbrella organization of literary scholars, began commissioning new variorum versions of Shakespeare’s major plays. And in 1990 the assignment to lead a Hamlet Variorum team was given to Ms. Kliman.

  Ten years later, when I first met her, she and her team of three coeditors (Eric Rasmussen, Hardin Aasand and Nick Clary) were still several years from completing their task of sorting through and knitting together four centuries of Hamlet dispute and commentary, but they have made already two breakthroughs that are likely to transform the way Hamlet is transmitted to the unfolding future.

  There was, first, the breakthrough into the digital realm. If the last Variorum took nine hundred pages for three centuries of commentary, the hard-copy version of the new one will certainly exceed a thousand, reaching a point of unwieldiness and inaccessibility that might require a curtailing of the wonderful digressive penumbral quality of a Hamlet Variorum. Making a Web-based electronic version correlated with the hardcover, on the other hand, will allow expansion in space and time—more expansive individual entries in the cyberspace version and additive extension in time, theoretically into the infinite future of Hamlet commentary.

  And at the heart of all that—or so it seemed back then (plans are still in flux)—will be a version of Bernice Kliman’s Enfolded Hamlet, a hybrid Hamlet text she designed herself, one that was first published in a special edition of The Shakespeare Newsletter in 1996. It is now also available on the Web in a somewhat different form (www.hamletworks.org) and in 2004 was published in amended hardback form. It’s an ingenious design solution initially meant to create a template for the Variorum, one that displays and contrasts the two primary Hamlet texts simultaneously to the eye, rather than sequentially or in parallel. And in doing so may offer a window, a portal that tantalizes with glimpses of what appears to be Shakespeare at work, Shakespeare revising himself, Shakespeare in the act of creation.

  Bernice Kliman came to the problem of the Hamlet Variorum as something of an outsider. She had founded and edited the Shakespeare on Film quarterly; she teaches at Long Island’s Nassau Community College; she had written a scholarly paper on the theatricality of Olivier’s filmed Hamlet. But what she lacked in experience and elite institutional affiliation, she made up in enthusiasm and ingenuity.

  Particularly ingenuity. Her Enfolded Hamlet solved a problem that had defeated previous editors of multiple-text Hamlets for generations: How do you represent the variant texts and variant words visually in a way that permits comparison?

  The solution of traditional conflated editions such as Harold Jenkins’s second Arden Hamlet was to present a mix-and-match inclusive text and note the additions, omissions and variants in the tiny-type “collation” section beneath the text, a section sandwiched between the lines of the play and the footnotes. (Graduate students have been known to call this “the band of terror.”)

  Ann Thompson’s new Arden edition presents the three texts one after the other in the pages of two volumes. Bernice Kliman herself produced a three-text parallel-column Hamlet in the early nineties with a collaborator, Paul Bertram, as a study for the Variorum. Teena Rochfort-Smith died in the midst of attempting a four-column parallel edition (the three texts plus a conflation). But none of these methods captures the texture of the Hamlet variations (or revisions) in their context the way The Enfolded Hamlet does. In sequential Hamlets, one has to shift back and forth hundreds of pages, from Quarto to Folio; in conflated Hamlets, one’s eyes have to shift up and down the page from text to collations; in parallel Hamlets, one shifts back and forth from column to column, a process that soon induces nystagmus if not nausea.

  But The Enfolded Hamlet does something the other arrays of Hamlets don’t: it juxtaposes the alternatives face-to-face so to speak—and thereby dramatizes the subtle shifts, the single word and phrase alterations between the two major texts. And it does so in a way that makes a more persuasive case than any single academic treatise has for me that we are watching Shakespeare at work, Shakespeare hovering over the text of Hamlet like a ghost, and fine-tuning it.

  In designing The Enfolded Hamlet it was not her intention to give support to either side of the Shakespeare-as-Reviser hypothesis, Bernice Kliman told me when I visited her at her home on Long Island’s North Shore.

  In her sunlit office which serves as the headquarters for the Variorum task force, she makes it clear repeatedly that she has no investment in proving or disproving either side of any of the controversies that swirl around the Hamlet texts. Rather than striving to reduce them to a single Right Answer, Male Answer Syndrome style, she celebrates the proliferation of Hamlet arguments.

  And one could with some caution conjecture that there is something conversely feminine about The Enfolded Hamlet, beyond the name itself: the “enfolding” is in effect a twining, a braiding, and interleaving of the two primary texts. In this regard it’s probably no accident that the example Bernice Kliman uses in the introduction to the first published version of The Enfolded Hamlet is a passage involving Ophelia, whose signature gesture is the braiding together of the stems and vines of flowers and herbs.

  There is, it might also be noted, something Ophelia-like about Ms. Kliman, who is one of those rare academics who has not lost a kind of innocent celebratory joy in the literature she studies. Ophelia-like in that she is a weaver and binder of leaves even if they be the leaves of old Hamlet texts and commentaries. And Ophelia-like in the kind of pure Romantic joy she takes in Hamlet: she loves Hamlet the way Ophelia loved Hamlet. But it’s a generous rather than jealous love: she loves the fierce way others have loved Hamlet, the way Hamlet has been enhanced, elaborated, illuminated, fought over by commentators over the centuries. “I love the infighting and the backbiting and the multiplicity of possibilities you find over the centuries,” she tells me. And she sees the Variorum she now presides over not just as a reading experience:

  “The variations and the variant interpretations are important not just for scholars,” she tells me, “but for actors and for directors. They offer a range of ways to play the lines, they expand the possibilities implicit in the ambiguities of the text.”

  Here’s the Ophelia-related passage she uses to illustrate the way The Enfolded Hamlet works. A passage that counterposes the play’s sententious old courtier Polonius (talk about Male Answer Syndrome) and his daughter Ophelia, a spirited soul striving to break free from her father’s strictures.

  In the first act, Polonius warns his daughter against any further contact of any kind with Hamlet. In the Quarto this is rendered

  … From this time

  Be something scanter of your maiden presence …

  While in the Folio it’s

  … For this time daughter

  Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence.

  Reading most editions of Hamlet in sequence, parallel or up and down the page, the differences might escape notice of the nonspecialist.

  Here is how both texts and their differenc
es are rendered simultaneously in The Enfolded Hamlet:

  … {From} this time

  Be {something} scanter of your maiden presence.

  And here is how Ms. Kliman explains how to read the initially confusing-looking braiding of the two texts:

  “To unfold Q2 [the Good Quarto] read all the words with no brackets and the words within curly brackets. To unfold F1 [the First Folio version] read all the words with no brackets and the words in pointed brackets.”

  And here is how Ms. Kliman comments on the shifts visible in the Enfolded version: “F1 is milder because the command ‘For this time …’ is more provisional than ‘From this time …’ and because adding ‘daughter’ has a softening effect.…”

  Her other introductory example is more famous and even more telling:

  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

  Than are dreamt of in {your} philosophy.

  The Folio version, “our philosophy” as opposed to “your philosophy,” sharpens Hamlet’s sense of bewilderment. He’s not telling Horatio how clueless he (Horatio) is from the point of view of a more knowing philosopher. He’s rather saying he, Hamlet, is just as clueless; it baffles the resources of his philosophy as well, implicitly baffles human comprehension itself. (And yet, can we be sure the removal of the “y” was the work of Shakespeare’s deliberation or the accidental or purposeful work of a scribe, compositor or editor?)

  It takes a little getting used to, reading the different brackets, but after a while they take on the minimalist elegance of the solution to a difficult chess problem. Ms. Kliman had designed it to serve as the template for the Variorum, the text to which the footnotes of commentary would be keyed; it solved the problem of displaying and arraying the two texts and the comments on them in an easy-to-read way.

  But it does something more. Once you get used to it, it offers an utterly new way to read Hamlet. One that allows the two texts to call each other into question and thereby causes a kind of attentiveness to the choices made (whether by Shakespeare or not we cannot know for sure) to words and passages otherwise often glossed over—but which Shakespeare (or someone) seemed to worry over. In a way reading The Enfolded Hamlet or the Variorum, or any of the multiple-text versions for that matter, is almost like attending a Hamlet rehearsal, Shakespeare himself as well as his commentators trying out alternative readings. No one knows in fact whether Shakespeare took any kind of director-like role in the staging of his plays. But it’s possible to imagine one is seeing him rehearsing alternative phrasings in the theater of his mind.

  Another way of looking at the penumbra of Hamlet variations is to use a Heisenbergian metaphor: as a wave-array of possible variations and interpretations of a single word or phrase, a wave-array of possibilities a reader can entertain that doesn’t have to be “collapsed” into singularity until an actor makes a choice of one in performance.

  MADNESS, LUST AND ANGELS

  And The Enfolded Hamlet is perhaps the best way, the best textual stage to see certain of these variants acted out, in particular the ones that Shakespeare himself may have played with in moving between the Quarto and the Folio.

  It’s true you can get a feeling for certain striking thematic differences between the Quarto and Folio in other editorial designs for Hamlet. G. R. Hibbard’s single-volume Folio-based edition of Hamlet in the Oxford series (produced under the guidelines laid down by Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells) does something striking with the long- and medium-length passages that appear in the Quarto but are omitted from Oxford’s Folio-based text: it groups them together in an appendix where, cumulatively, one could say they tell a story. A story about a level of madness beyond madness, a level of madness that can be found in one Hamlet but is lost or has been deliberately cut from the other. A level of madness that “breaks down the pales and forts of reason” (a passage omitted from the Folio), a level of madness that “puts toys of desperation … into every brain” (omitted from the Folio). A level of madness that “dizz[ies] the arithmetic of memory” (omitted from the Folio). A level of madness that is unprecedented in life as well as in art: Hamlet declares that his mother’s choice of Claudius over her first husband, the murdered King Hamlet, is an utterly fathomless mystery—a choice beyond any madness ever seen before:

  “Madness would not err/Nor sense to ecstasy was ne’er so thralled,” as he says.

  In other words, never in the history of madness was madness like this witnessed. That’s madness. Or it was until, for some reason, it was omitted from the Folio, as were the other passages I’ve cited evoking this extraordinary level of madness. In a play that is in some sense about the varieties of madness—true madness, feigned madness, love madness, melancholy madness, revenge madness, the madness of the abyss—the absence or presence of that higher level of madness—bottomless madness one might say, unbearable madness—makes the Hamlet with, and the Hamlet without, that level of madness subtly different works of art.

  It’s hard to deny the apparent thematic relatedness of these cuts—or additions. Of course there is one problem which few of the Reviser enthusiasts wish to face. It came up in my conversation with Barbara Mowat of the Folger. I told her that I’d admired the exegesis of the Hamlet variations by Oxford’s John Jones in Shakespeare at Work and Ms. Mowat, a formidable scholar, replied a bit tartly, “Well, he must be very sure that the Quarto preceded the Folio and not the other way around.” She points out that as editor of Shakespeare Quarterly she published an essay by one scholar who argued the heretical case that the 1623 Folio version, although published last, was written first, or at least before the 1604 Quarto. If so, these madness passages would have been added to the Quarto to increase the level of madness, rather than removed to tone it down. But whichever it was, it seems there was a guiding artistic intelligence behind many of the correlated cuts and additions.

  I feel that reading Hibbard’s Quarto-only appendix made me think more deeply about what had become a convention—“the madness of Hamlet.” Most commentary has focused on when and where the madness is feigned and when real. Hibbard’s appendix had me thinking about madness in Hamlet in a new way, thinking about degrees of madness and what they might mean.

  But for the most part, in the same way that “Nature is fine in love,” The Enfolded Hamlet suggests that Shakespeare is fine (or fine-grained) in rewrite, focused not only on large thematic alterations but on fine-tuning at the single word and phrase level.

  Two examples from the very first scene of Hamlet: Up on the battlements of Elsinore the shivering sentinels who have seen the Ghost before, and their skeptical friends Horatio and Marcellus, suddenly glimpse the chilling apparition.

  “Speak to it, Horatio,” says Marcellus in the Quarto.

  “Question it, Horatio,” he says in the Folio.

  “{Speak to} it, Horatio” is the way it’s rendered in The Enfolded Hamlet. Someone—if not Shakespeare, then who?—sought to sharpen “speak to it” to “question it,” a double-edged sharpening that carries with it the sense of “question its existence” as well.

  Later in that scene, after the Ghost has disappeared with the coming of dawn, Marcellus speaks of “that season … Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated” when, in the Quarto, “they say no spirit dare stir.” But in the Folio, it’s “no spirit can walk.” (In the Bad Quarto, there’s a confusing amalgam of “dare stir” and “can walk”: “dare walk.”) Seeing “dare stir” and “can walk” juxtaposed in the Enfolded version invites further reflection: it appears that someone sought to change the balance between the holy and unholy. In the Quarto the unholy is far more fearfully inhibited by the holy: it does not dare stir. In the Folio it is instead merely mildly disabled: no spirit can walk. Someone cared enough to make this slight but significant alteration.

  Are we seeing Shakespeare’s hand fine-tuning his greatest creation in these alterations? It’s hard to imagine some theatrical manager—the usual culprit invoked by those w
ho dispute the Shakespeare Reviser hypothesis—taking time to make this kind of change. One can easily imagine such a person cutting whole lines and passages for time and pace but not as easily altering individual words for subtle thematic effects.

  Even more persuasive evidence for Shakespearean revision can be found in the apparently correlated changes made in the language Hamlet uses to chastise his mother in the so-called closet scene. One is easy to see in the Enfolded version. When his mother chides Hamlet that “You answer with an idle tongue,” he replies, “Goe, goe, you question with {a wicked} tongue.”

  A gentler Hamlet in the Folio sees his mother as “idle” rather than “wicked.” An even more decisive gentling can be found enfolded a bit later.

  Gertrude asks Hamlet, “Have you forgot me?”

  “No,” says Hamlet, he has not forgotten who she is. “You are the Queene, your husband’s brother’s wife.”

  In the Quarto he goes on to say, “And would it were not so, you are my mother.”

  In other words, he wants to disclaim utterly his maternal connection with her, because of her hasty marriage to Claudius (her “husband’s brother”).

  A slap in the face which is transformed in the Folio into a wistful caress: “But would you were not so. You are my mother.”

  The change from a comma in the Quarto to a period between “so” and “You” in the Folio shifts things utterly. Now he’s not disclaiming her but frankly and directly claiming her: “You are my mother,” rather than “would it were not so, you are my mother.” Now it is “would it were not so you are connected to Claudius,” but you are still my mother.