The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “You know,” Werstine told me, “I read your piece on Harold in The New Yorker and it reminded me of the time I met him—only once in my life and that was in 1990 at the Malone Society’s celebration of the two hundred years since Malone published his 1790 edition [of Shakespeare]. It was at Stratford-on-Avon, and I did something there [his characteristically self-effacing way of saying he gave a paper at that erudite gathering] and Harold approached me earlier, and you know in 1990 things were in ferment in textual studies—”

  “The Oxford edition with two Lears based on the principle of revision had just been published …”

  “Yes, and it had raised a huge amount of controversy and things were really unsettled and so Harold approached me to caution me that what was most important in textual studies was ‘good order.’ ”

  “Good order meaning cleansing the text of ambiguities, resolving textual cruxes one way or another, making firm choices between ‘sullied,’ ‘sallied’ and ‘solid,’ for instance?” I asked.

  “Yes, ‘good order,’ ” Werstine repeated. “He definitely wanted to communicate this to me above all else.”

  “And your project really has been to unsettle good order, right?”

  “Oh, I grant you that,” he said, “I do. I do grant you that.”

  “Your project has been to make things messy.”

  “You’re right. I have to confess,” he said, laughing.

  “I mean, you’re not against ‘good order,’ you just feel there’s not enough evidence to sustain some of these positions.”

  “Precisely. I have nothing against ‘good order.’ I just don’t think the order we’ve had stands up. I don’t think we have enough evidence.”

  I sought to trace the source of his skepticism about twentieth-century textual scholarship and discovered that he began his career pursuing the same dream as the so-called New Bibliographers: the dream of finding the true face of Shakespeare beneath “the veil of print.” Werstine wanted to study with the man who coined that phrase, Fredson Bowers, whose lifelong project was to seek to reconstruct Shakespeare’s lost handwritten manuscripts—to reconstruct his “original intentions” by working backward, so to speak, from the conflicts and idiosyncrasies in the early printed texts to the lost handwriting behind it.

  Werstine, who had grown up in western Ontario, ended up studying at the University of South Carolina with T. H. Howard-Hill, an associate of Bowers, because he’d been deeply impressed by Howard-Hill’s reconstruction of a shadowy little known figure in Shakespeare’s life: Ralph Crane. Crane was a theatrical scribe employed by Shakespeare’s company, and is known to have transcribed some of Shakespeare’s now-lost manuscripts to make them readable and accessible for the playhouse and the printing house. Crane seems to have felt the liberty to add his own touches, including his own punctuation—often a crucial interpretive function. Crane’s way of reading Shakespeare became his way of writing and, sometimes, some suggest, rewriting Shakespeare.

  “The way I got into Shakespeare was through the back door,” Werstine told me. “I got interested in the way that printing affects the texts we have and the best developed work, the leading edge of the field at the time in the early seventies was being done by T. Howard Hill and Leeds Barroll at South Carolina. My first textual essay was on the printing of the 1598 Quarto of Love’s Labor’s Lost. I looked at all the surviving copies in the British Isles, even one in Switzerland, and compared them letter by letter, punctuation mark by punctuation mark, and found some variants that hadn’t been previously recorded. I used the Hinman Collator for identifying individually distinguishable damaged type and I did that with a magnifying glass and tried to plot the way it had been printed—very blindingly meticulous research.”

  The Hinman Collator: I’d read about this notorious Shakespearean textual editing machine, a contraption of lights and mirrors and magnifying lenses that Charlton Hinman, the legendary modern editor of Shakespeare’s First Folio, used to locate the variants in the various printings of the First Folio (many changes were made during the print run resulting in many variations within copies of the First Folio) and the differences between Folio and Quarto versions of the same plays. I told Werstine about my conversation with Richard Proudfoot, specialist in Shakespearean apocrypha, in which he spoke of the experience of using the Hinman Collator, which Proudfoot described as like riding a stationary bicycle with flashing lights and mirrors.

  “Oh yeah,” Werstine said, “it is that. It’s wonderful, a very spectacular thing to look at, but it’s hard. Poor Hinman was almost blind by the end. And you get—you’re pressing your head against the headset and you get this telltale angry red band across your forehead and this incredibly glazed look from being in strobe lights for hours. You’re really quite a picture when you’re done.”

  I liked the notion of the Scarlet Letter–like red brand of textual scholars. And if it sounds a little silly, Werstine insists you could accomplish serious work with it.

  “In this work it was possible, in some cases, to come up with some very substantial dependable evidence for certain arguments about the order in which the text was printed, which of the workmen was responsible for setting type for which page. In other words there was a level of probability you could achieve in studying the printing, something that I found very satisfying.”

  One could argue over the significance of the results. When I asked him, Werstine couldn’t pinpoint any of the variants he’d discovered in his labor of love on Love’s Labor’s Lost that offered different interpretive readings of the passages involved. But on the other hand he was able to make a conjecture that might have tremendous importance: he came to believe there was a “Lost Archetype” of LLL—a lost manuscript or earlier printed version from which both the 1598 Quarto and the 1623 Folio were printed.

  In fact, a couple of months before we spoke, evidence turned up, from an auction of a seventeenth-century bookseller’s list, of a previously unknown 1597 Quarto of LLL. Not the thing itself, but a record of its existence. The significance of which helps confirm Werstine’s suspicion of a Lost Archetype, but also corroborates speculations by others (not Werstine, who has not entered this controversy) that Love’s Labor’s Lost may have originally been printed with a sequel, Love’s Labor’s Wonne, a putative now-lost Shakespearean play that is mentioned in three different contemporaneous documents, but which (if it ever existed—many argue it’s an alternative title for a play we already know by another name) has not survived.

  So Werstine found his print shop work “very satisfying,” but when he began to read more closely some of the “textual criticism or theories about the kinds of manuscripts that were supposed to lie behind the printed text,” he told me, “it didn’t seem one could achieve demonstrations of the same level of probability there at all. So you may say that my skepticism arose from that stuff.”

  “That stuff” being what he regards as generalizations unsupported by evidence. For instance the argument the New Bibliographers made that texts in which speech headings are more regularized (in which, say, “Queen” becomes more consistently “Gertrude”) were more likely texts prepared for the theater, thus more likely a later draft and thus more likely to represent Shakespeare’s alleged “final intentions” for his play as opposed to his “original intentions.” It’s a key component of the argument that the Folio versions of plays like Hamlet, Lear, and Othello—often filled with significant variations—are to be preferred to the earlier Quarto versions.

  “That stuff”—claims based on unreliable suppositions—is clearly what Werstine believes the Hand D attribution is. And one senses he believes it will matter, because of the way Hand D is being used to rewrite Shakespeare in further Indian/Judean-type editorial decisions.

  Gingerly, because I was reluctant to cross swords with a scholar who (unlike Don Foster) I actually thought could “destroy” me—in the sense that the depth of his grasp on these matters was bottomless compared to mine—I told Werstine that while I found his c
ounterarguments against the handwriting and spelling evidence for the Hand D attribution formidable, I was less impressed with his argument against the thematic evidence. His attempt to discredit R. W. Chambers’s focus on images of self-devouring—the ravenous wolf in Troilus, the ravening fishes in Hand D—with a quibble over Chambers’s use of “cannibalism” to describe the images, for instance.

  “Chambers did a splendid rhetorical job of bringing those passages into relationship,” Werstine said. “But to the point of identity? I thought his way of doing it was more like constructing the relationship between the images.”

  I persisted, again gingerly, asking him about the image of the horses devouring each other.

  Werstine knew it instantly and got the Folger edition of Macbeth, which he coedited with Barbara Mowat, and read it to me. “Duncan’s horses … Beauteous and swift … ’Tis said, they eat each other.”

  “Isn’t that meaningful?” I asked him, in relation to Hand D’s evidence of mutual devouring.

  “The thing that strikes me about the devouring images,” he replied, “is that we read Shakespeare over and over again and we see correspondences like that, but we don’t read the 350 other plays written before the closing of the theaters [by the Puritan regime] in 1642. I do, now, read a lot of those plays, they’re not as accessible, popularly.”

  “And thus passages we think are echoes of Shakespeare may be echoes of other playwrights?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s it,” he said. It’s also possible of course that the Hand D author was someone who read and mimicked Shakespeare.

  But Werstine wanted to clarify, he told me, that he doesn’t feel one could rule out Hand D as Shakespeare. He just feels the arguments for it are not decisive enough to use it as a foundation for making decisive arguments on other questions about plays we feel confident Shakespeare did write, such as Othello.

  In fact, Werstine told me that when a book of essays—edited by one of his mentors, Howard-Hill—on Hand D came out in 1989, he reviewed it rather favorably without taking issue with the attribution.

  “But then in a seminar on scholarly editing at the MLA in 1995 I heard skepticism expressed about Hand D being Shakespeare and I collected everything written about Hand D, and I saw how many people were abandoning different aspects of the evidence, but clinging to the belief in it because of what they’d call ‘cumulative evidence’ even though each aspect of the cumulative evidence had been abandoned.”

  The argument had become self-devouring! Or so he thought. I just couldn’t go that final step with him to agree that the “self-devouring” image argument had been self-devoured, so to speak.

  So was Hand D “Shakespearean”? To my mind far more probably than the “Funeral Elegy” ever was. But Werstine was a more formidable scholar than Don Foster. He was the real deal “Shakespeare super-sleuth.” I don’t feel as confident in staking my intuition as to what is and isn’t Shakespearean against his skepticism. Not as confident as I was in staking my intuition against Don Foster’s credulousness. Not confident enough in the handwriting evidence to believe it should decide the Indian/Judean matter (although I’d agree with Honigmann’s “Judean” on other grounds).

  Not confident certainly because of the self-devouring image alone. More persuaded rather because of the soliloquy (in Hand C), the one in which Sir Thomas More compares himself to a “bottom” whose thread is wound up and wound out.

  To me, to my intuition, that bottom is the hint that the Sir Thomas More fragments partake of the bottomlessness that is uniquely “Shakespearean.” But I wouldn’t claim this is more than a subjective judgment. Not that the truth is relative here: Shakespeare either wrote or didn’t write it. Some passages are “Shakespearean,” some are not. But the fragmentary historical record does not afford the certainty that lies, in the philosophers’ shorthand, “in the mind of God.” Ultimately no matter how many numbers we crunch or stylistic tics we tick off, what we call Shakespearean will at times depend on the idea of “the Shakespearean” we project upon it.

  Chapter Seven

  The Search for the Shakespearean

  in a Delicate Pause

  I don’t think i’ll ever forget the moment. sir peter hall, founder of the renowned Royal Shakespeare Company—who will certainly figure as one of the great Shakespearean directors, one of the great Shakespeareans, even in a history already four centuries long—is pounding the table in the small Greenwich Village restaurant in which we’ve been drinking and dining. He’s accompanying his pounding fist, which is rattling the silverware in precise iambic pentameter time, with a booming vocal counterpoint: “daDUM, daDUM, daDUM, daDUM, daDUM … PAUSE.”

  It is that last word, that last command—“PAUSE”—that is at the heart, that is, one might say, the heartbeat, of Peter Hall’s re-creation of Shakespeare’s language, certainly his dramatic poetry. That PAUSE, it could be said, is the foundation stone upon which he built the grand edifice, both physical and cultural, that is the Royal Shakespeare Company. The troupe he founded to play at Stratford-on-Avon in 1959 has since become an international cultural institution that has embodied Shakespeare—some of the best, most dazzling Shakespeare of the twentieth century—including of course Peter Brook’s Dream, Hall and John Barton’s Wars of the Roses, and Trevor Nunn, Adrian Noble, Terry Hands and Nicholas Hytner’s remarkable series of eye-opening productions.

  Of course to say that the PAUSE, that moment for breath, that delicate moment of hesitant stasis, that brief instant of intentional silence at the end of an iambic pentameter line, is alone responsible for these achievements is to use a bit of hyperbole as well as synecdoche (the part, the pause, standing for the whole). The whole being what Hall calls “the Poel principles,” after William Poel, who led a movement beginning in the late nineteenth century to return Shakespearean performance to its origins, to its original staging and verse-speaking styles—as much as they could be recovered or conjectured. A movement designed, at the very least, to strip away grandiose, scenery-centered stage conventions and florid, grandiloquent verse-speaking that had come, Poel believed, to obscure Shakespeare beneath a veil of kitsch. For Sir Peter the Poel principles were a way to unlock and release the power of Shakespeare’s language, the “infinite energies” Peter Brook spoke of. The source of the spell.

  For Sir Peter—who was in America to direct a New York production of Troilus and Cressida with American actors when we met—the Poel principles, which he learned at Cambridge along with his frequent collaborator (and sometimes dissenter) John Barton and Trevor Nunn, the third of the founding RSC trilogy, had their triumphant realization when, in the last half of the twentieth century, the RSC revolutionized the way Shakespeare was played and spoken. But the revolution’s victories now seem imperiled to Hall, the gains about to be lost again, and he is genuinely upset.

  “Only about fifty actors are left in the theater who really understand them,” he’d told me bitterly as he worked himself up to a table-pounding fury over lack of respect for the Poel principles—and particularly the pause.

  That pause at the end of the five-foot, ten-syllable iambic pentameter line in which almost all Shakespeare’s dramatic verse is written, the pause he insists must be observed even in cases of “enjambment” (when the clause begun in one line doesn’t end at the end of the line, but winds itself snakelike around to the middle of the next line, or the line after that). That pause must be marked by a brief intake of breath, Hall told me.

  “John Gielgud once told me that he could go three lines without a breath, but if you study his work closely you will see that he often took a small breath”—the all-important PAUSE—“at the end of each line regardless,” Sir Peter told me that evening.

  “Now you’ve got my adrenaline going,” he says as he returns to banging out the rhythm and the pause on the dinner linen. What got the adrenaline going was the sense of urgency he felt when I’d asked him about verse-speaking, about the “iambic fundamentalism” for which he’s famous. An urg
ency, almost a desperation, that the key to speaking Shakespeare, to experiencing that which is truly Shakespearean, to getting closer—deeper inside—the language, is maintaining what Hall calls “line structure”—line structure that is given structure by that pause.

  But before getting deeper into Sir Peter’s anguished rhapsodic tribute to “line structure,” to “iambic fundamentalism,” to the neoclassical purity of the “Poel principles,” I’d like to put his passions in the perspective of a broader, more multifarious, equally impassioned, sometimes table-pounding passion: the persistent search for Shakespearean origins. The persistent (if sometimes futile and inconclusive) search for the original way Shakespeare was spoken, written, played, heard. The search for the way Shakespeare himself heard the words in his head, when he wrote them, the way he heard the words as they were spoken in his Globe.

  The search for origins is a search for Shakespeare’s Shakespeare—and for whatever it was in his work that endowed it with the power to mesmerize his original audiences. What “Shakespearean” meant to Shakespeare and his audiences.

  It’s a quest that has led some to find the spellbinding power in the spelling itself: the “unmodernized spelling movement” argues that it can bring us closer not merely to the way Shakespeare spelled his words but to the way he thought. (See the following chapter.)

  If the “unmodernized spelling movement” sounds a bit antiquarian, it is, in fact, when looked at closely, with the help of unmodernized spelling advocate John Andrews, an unexpectedly exciting approach to the quest for the Shakespearean.

  And one could say that actor Steven Berkoff’s quest for the symbolic “sword of Kean” (which was presented by Lord Byron to the eighteenth-century actor Edmund Kean after Kean made Byron faint from the power of his Othello) is a quest for what Berkoff believes was the original sword-to-the-heart emotion that Shakespearean acting evoked in audiences—spellbinding, faint- and fit-inducing emotion that reaches a horrid epitome with Berkoff’s hellish re-creation of “the Original Shylock.”