The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  The Hand D section of the play manuscript (it was never, so far as we know, printed) is one of the least known, most intriguing potential additions to the Shakespeare canon. Few had paid much attention to the Sir Thomas More manuscript until 1871, when a scholar, Richard Simpson, made an argument that the manuscript consisted of several distinctive handwriting styles, which he denoted Hands A, B, C, D, etc. And that Hand D was the actual handwriting of William Shakespeare.

  It seemed to be a collaborative work by people associated with a theatrical company contemporary with Shakespeare’s. A play that may never have been staged because it ran into trouble with the censors, involving as it did touchy questions of Catholic and Protestant conflict and civil unrest by the poor. Indeed the manuscript (now in the British Library) bears the literal “hand” of the official censors.

  One passage that apparently caused difficulty with the censors was from More’s earlier career when he was high sheriff of London and quelled an anti-immigrant mob riot that had defied the lord mayor. Censors were always touchy about scenes of riot and rebellion. And this scene, written in what is known as Hand D, seems, according to Simpson, to have been a late, rewritten response to the censors’ objections. And Simpson believed 147 lines of it bore the marks of Shakespeare in handwriting, spelling and theme. Later, others would suggest a 21-line soliloquy by Thomas More in Hand C might also be a Shakespearean contribution, transcribed by a theatrical scribe (“C”).

  Fifty years later, in 1923, a then-famous Shakespeare textual scholar, A. W. Pollard, published a collection of essays by himself and other eminent scholars that solidified Simpson’s Shakespearean claim. And some seventy years after that, in 1989, another collection of scholarly essays appeared, Shakespeare and “Sir Thomas More”: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearian Interest, edited by T. H. Howard-Hill, most of which took it as settled that the Hand D scene was Shakespeare’s work—and most that it was his own handwriting.

  The latter is a particularly exciting conjecture, because the Hand D portion of the manuscript is replete with lines crossed out, and substitutions superscripted, words deleted and altered. It’s almost as if we were catching Shakespeare in the act. Catching him at work, rewriting and rethinking, changing his mind: Shakespeare in currente calamo as the scholarly term has it, in the heat of the moment, in the very act of creation.

  But suddenly in 2002, just as the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare was declaring Hand D “no longer apocryphal,” in other words indubitably “Shakespearean,” suddenly—in currente calamo, one might say—two formidable challenges to the attribution of Hand D emerged. First and most thoroughgoing came from Paul Werstine, a Canadian-based scholar who had earned a reputation as one of the most stringently skeptical analysts of the assumptions of textual scholarship. Werstine’s attack appeared in an issue of Florilegium, the Canadian journal of medieval studies. Although first published in 1999 it only came to my attention when I came across a thread in the free-for-all Shakespeare electronic bulletin board, alt.humanities.lit.shakespeare, which—compared to, say, the more carefully moderated SHAKSPER scholars’ list—is more like the World Wrestling Federation. There out of the blue was a subject line, “Werstine on Pollard (75 posts),” which brought the Werstine attack to my attention.

  I’d already seen another attack on Hand D by Katherine Duncan-Jones, a rising star in Shakespeare studies who had edited the new Arden edition of the Sonnets, and in her unusual biographical study Ungentle Shakespeare opened a fascinating window into the internecine interchanges between Shakespeare and his contemporary rivals and collaborators in the “War of the Theaters.” In the introduction to Ungentle Shakespeare she had expressed strong doubt about the case for Hand D.

  To me these attacks on Hand D were far more “seismic” than Foster’s Elegy retraction, because I never bought Foster’s claim in the first place. But from the very first I felt that in Hand D, especially in one extended speech by Thomas More, one could hear the “authorial voice” of Shakespeare. And that in the Hand C soliloquy, one could find images that were far more telling thematic “fingerprints” of Shakespeare than any of the “stylometric” statistical “fingerprints” that led Don Foster astray. Could I have been intuitively right about the Elegy, but intuitively wrong about Hand D? Wrong about my sense of what is “Shakespearean”? Hand D might be a more stringent test of the validity of literary judgment in deciding what was “Shakespearean.”

  Let’s begin with Werstine’s attack on A. W. Pollard, long the most influential advocate for Hand D and one of the founding giants of the so-called New Bibliography that dominated twentieth-century Shakespearean textual scholarship. A movement whose arguments Werstine has devoted his life to dismantling—not deconstructing, but more literally taking apart. Deconstructionists argue that all speech is ultimately incoherent. Werstine argued that Pollard and his colleagues were coherent but wrong, in an old-fashioned way.

  In any case Werstine finds a curious, hidden agenda behind Pollard’s Hand D arguments that I had been unaware of. That an argument has an agenda doesn’t disqualify it out of hand, but Werstine thought it (mis)guided Pollard’s own hand in the Hand D question.

  Werstine points out that there was, in the early twentieth century, a very vigorous and “very successful resistance movement against the ‘anti-Stratfordians’ [those who refused to believe Shakespeare, the “Stratford man,” wrote Shakespeare] that was led by A. W. Pollard.” Werstine notes that in Pollard’s tone-setting Preface to his 1923 book that virtually canonized Hand D, one of the values Pollard ascribed to the demonstration that Hand D was “Shakespearean” was the ability to argue that “if Shakespeare wrote these three pages, the discrepant theories which unite in regarding the ‘Stratford man’[i.e., Shakespeare] as a mere mask concealing the activity of some noble lord (a 17th Earl of Oxford, a 6th Earl of Derby or a Viscount St. Albans [Francis Bacon]) come crashing to the ground.”

  Crashing to the ground, in part at least, because one of the arguments the anti-Stratfordians use is the absence of virtually any sample of Shakespeare’s handwriting. The only undisputed samples of Shakespeare’s handwriting that survive are those signatures, none of his dramatic or poetic writing. Until Hand D. Hand D would flesh out his existence as a playwright.

  Werstine is emphatically not an anti-Stratfordian. He is coeditor of the Folger Library edition of Shakespeare and he believes that the works he edited were written by “the Stratford man.” However, one of the arguments he makes in the Florilegium paper (“Shakespeare, More or Less: A. W. Pollard and Twentieth Century Shakespeare Editing”) is that Pollard was swayed by his campaign against the anti-Stratfordians to favor arguments that the hand-(writing) of Hand D matched the handwriting in the six signatures, as well as matching certain idiosyncratic spellings in the printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays.

  This is more than a tempest in a teapot, Werstine demonstrates: it’s a tempest in The Tempest. Because, as he articulates the stakes in his paper, the enshrinement of Hand D in the Shakespeare canon means that it is being used as a referent in decisions about doubtful passages in other Shakespeare plays. In a small but important way Hand D is rewriting Shakespeare. Or as Werstine puts it: “What [we decide] Shakespeare wrote is being determined by how Hand D may have shaped the letters comprising what Shakespeare wrote.”

  There was something refreshingly down-to-earth about Paul Werstine that stood out among the nobs of Shakespeare studies gathered amidst the riches, both physical and intellectual, of the Folger Library, where I first ran into him in a group of textual scholars at an MLA reception—among them Barbara Mowat, editor of Shakespeare Quarterly (and Werstine’s coeditor on the Folger Library edition of Shakespeare), and Richard Knowles, editor of the MLA’s King Lear Variorum edition.

  Werstine stood out because he reminded me more of investigative reporters I knew than most textual scholars. In fact he reminded me, physically, of a somewhat younger version of Seymour Hersh. Same black glasses hiding intense eyes, sligh
tly disheveled look, skeptical angle of the head—really he was almost a dead ringer for Sy Hersh. And in a similar way he was renowned and feared in his field for a Sy Hershian take-no-prisoners investigative skepticism: his belief that elaborate edifices of textual theory were essentially cover-ups for ignorance. He is much admired (and I suspect, like Hersh, feared) but he also has his critics such as the equally admired textual specialist Ed Pechter. Pechter has called Werstine a “textual nihilist.”

  I wonder if some of the aura of the ink-stained wretch (and I mean this as a compliment) came from the fact that Werstine’s original specialty was the study of the ink-stained compositors in the type shops that produced Shakespeare’s printed texts.

  It was when Werstine turned from the type shops to the project of the New Bibliography, the textual studies tendency that dominated the twentieth century, that his investigative skepticism came into play. The New Bibliography hoped to work back from the printed texts in the type shops to find, beneath “the veil of print,” the true hand of Shakespeare himself, the hand found in the lost manuscripts, the hand that would reveal which variations in two or more printed versions of the same play were printer’s errors and which were Shakespeare’s own reconsiderations, rethinking, rewriting, currente calamo.

  Werstine’s skepticism was a fierce weapon, Ockham’s razor with a very sharp edge. Our conversation at the Folger reception, for instance, featured a fascinating (to me anyway) exchange about the so-called Bad Quarto (“Q1,” 1603) of Hamlet, the truncated, garbled (but first published) printed text of Hamlet that preceded by a year the far fuller and more “Shakespearean” Good Quarto version, and the Folio version which wasn’t published until seven years after Shakespeare’s death in 1623.

  Up until Werstine came along there were two main theories to explain the relationship of the Bad Quarto to the other two Hamlets. After Werstine (in a famous journal article) finished with them, there were no theories left standing.

  Werstine had undermined the evidence the New Bibliographers used to prove the Bad Quarto was a “memorial reconstruction”—that is, cobbled together from memory by some actors who’d played parts in Hamlet, but who lacked a playhouse script perhaps because they were traveling in the provinces during the plague. An entire novelistic narrative of these imaginary wandering players, the putative memorial reconstructors, had been constructed with virtually no convincing evidence or historical corroboration, as Werstine (among others, including Eric Sams) had shown.

  Then Werstine took on the new substitute explanation for the Bad Quarto by some of the so-called revisionists of the 1980s who argued that the Bad Quarto was not bad so much as early—Shakespeare’s first draft, perhaps even a version of the lost ur-Hamlet, subsequently revised successively to produce the Good Quarto and then the Folio. Werstine made a powerful argument that this too was an evidence-challenged fantasy.

  But, I asked Werstine, once you’ve demolished both explanations for the origin of the Bad Quarto, you’ve removed any explanation of how it got to be. And yet it does exist; it got there somehow. To which he said, essentially, “that’s not my problem.” It’s not his problem, nonetheless it was a problem. But in a way he was not utterly disqualifying either solution, he was just demolishing the existing evidence for them. A fine distinction but an important one. I don’t think Hand D came up in this discussion at the Folger but of course I was fascinated when I saw that he wanted to cast it too into the all-devouring black hole of his bottomless textual skepticism, his “textual nihilism” as Edward Pechter calls it.

  And the Hand D controversy is at least as important in its own way as the Bad Quarto or the Elegy controversy in raising the question: Can we define and detect the “Shakespearean” and how? Here might be a good place to quote the key passages from Hand D (and the Hand C soliloquy) which had been widely accepted as “Shakespearean” before Werstine’s attack. Still are, in fact.

  The 147-line scene in question is particularly provocative politically because, if it’s Shakespeare, it raises the question of Shakespeare’s attitude toward authority, toward order and hierarchy, and in doing so invokes one of Shakespeare’s signature images: violent self-devouring bestiality as—absent external restraint—the true nature of human nature.

  Here’s the situation: In 1517 during Thomas More’s tenure as high sheriff of London a riot broke out among native (and nativist) London tradesmen and apprentices, a riot against foreigners, an anti-immigrant riot. To some degree, in that many of the immigrants were Italian or “swarthy,” a race riot. The immigrants were accused of offering goods and services so cheaply they were ruining native merchants (it might be seen as one of the earliest anti-globalization riots).

  There was a comic but sinister element to the riot, at least as depicted in Hand D: the “parsnip” allegation. The mob, often depicted in Shakespeare as filled with ignorant fools, blames the foreigners for spreading the plague, because the foreigners allegedly introduced the practice of eating root vegetables such as parsnips, which, one member of the mob says, “grow in dung [and thus] have infected us, and it is our infection will make the city shake [from a plague of palsy], which partly comes through the eating of parsnips.”

  It’s clownish, but it echoes the allegations of “poisoning the wells” and causing plague which were a frequent excuse for murderous pogroms against Jews throughout medieval Europe. The suggestion that mob stupidity has its cruel and sinister side, one that turns on the weak and innocent, can be found just about anywhere a crowd is found in canonical Shakespeare.

  And yet in the opening scenes of the play, as G. Blakemore Evans’s edition of Hand D points out, in the non–Hand D scenes, the sympathy is with the immigrant-bashing nativist poor. One of the things that stands out about Hand D is the apparent reversal and the sympathy shown for the immigrants.

  In any case in the Hand D scene several high figures in the realm, including the lord mayor, fail to quiet the riot, until at last the crowd allows that it will hear from Thomas More, primarily because he came from humble origins like them. More then begins by asking the anti-immigrant crowd, What if we gave you what you asked for: the expulsion of foreigners? Here’s how he conjures up the consequences for the mob:

  Grant them removed and grant that this your noise

  Hath chid down all the majesty of England,

  Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

  Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage

  Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,

  And that you sit as kings in your desires,

  Authority quite silenc’d by your brawl,

  And you in ruff of your opinions cloth’d,

  What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught

  How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

  How [order] should be quell’d …

  Okay then, More is saying, having painted a sorrowful picture of the victims of the mob’s wrath, “babies at their backs, with their poor luggage/Plodding to th’ ports …”, if that’s what you want, here are the consequences:

  … and by this pattern

  Not one of you should live an aged man,

  For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

  With self-same hand, self reasons, and self right,

  Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

  Would feed on one another.

  It was this passage, those last two lines in particular, that struck me immediately, intuitively as right—as having the unmistakable ring of Shakespeare’s “authorial voice.” This is true despite the fact that I’d first read the Hand D passage when I was in the midst of my polemical crusade against the Elegy’s bogus attribution to Shakespeare, which made me even more predisposed to be doubtful of “Shakespearean” claims. But Hand D was suggestive in several ways.

  First the “wretched strangers” passage with its echoes of those lines in Lear about the fugitive Edgar being watched for at “ports and coasts.”

&nb
sp; Then that image of the mob sitting as “kings in your desires”: a critique of the mob, of unchecked narcissistic desire—and implicitly, almost subversively, of kingship—in a way that echoes the “hollow crown” soliloquy in Richard II.

  Then that little flourish, that nice riff on “ruff” and “ruffians”—“in ruff of your opinions cloth’d” followed by “other ruffians,” luxurious ruffs and roughnecks conflated—suggests the tossed-off metaphoric facility we find in what we know is “Shakespearean” dramatic verse.

  SELF-DEVOURING

  And finally, most suggestively, there is the thematic attitude toward authority, order and hierarchy in Hand D. Not one that derives from Divine Right, but a different attitude toward authority found in canonical Shakespeare. One that doesn’t favor order for order’s sake, for tradition’s sake, for the sake of preserving the privileges of the privileged class. That’s all ruff. It’s rather an attitude that favors authority because it is often the only thing that protects the weak from the strong, restrains the unleashed tyranny of appetite, of self-devouring human nature—restrains the rough beast within human nature.

  But more than anything it was the specific image the Hand D author used to embody that theme: an image of a future in which—if the mob had its way—a future mob would turn on this mob and “With self-same hand, self reasons, and self right,/Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes/Would feed on one another.”

  This image of self as self-devourer was at the heart of the thematic case made for Hand D, a case first made back in 1931 by a scholar named R. W. Chambers, when he compared it to a similar image, the locus classicus of self-devouring in canonical Shakespeare, the image that appears in the famous speech on “degree” Ulysses makes in Troilus and Cressida. This passage in Ulysses’ speech in particular:

  Take but degree away, untune that string,