The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Fascinating that Shakespeare should return under tragic circumstances to a phenomenon he conjured up in comic guise: the dream beyond dreaming.

  As for the pause, since I wasn’t there, I can’t attest how delicately or pronouncedly Dame Judi employed it. I imagine a spectrum of potentialities. But the one line that exemplifies it for me in that passage is the one in which “… his rear’d arm/Crested the world.”

  The “rear’d arm”—suggesting he’s holding a spear just about to be released—is placed at the end of the line where the pause should come: it perfectly epitomizes that moment of tension and equipoise before release. A moment of poise. In fact perhaps that’s what Hall and Edelstein (in his interpretation of Hall) are getting at: a moment of poise (or rather, a poised moment) as much as a moment of pause.

  But there are further moments in that Cleopatra speech that are worth attending to in the light of the controversy over “unmodernized spelling” that is the subject of the next chapter.

  I had been reading, as will become evident, the scholar John Andrews’s unmodernized, or as some call it “original spelling,” text of Antony and Cleopatra. The lines of Cleopatra spoken by Judi Dench quoted above are rendered in the more conventionally modernized-spelling Riverside Shakespeare, a widely respected Complete Works edition used in many universities (and except where indicated the default source herein).

  The Riverside makes two departures from the unmodernized text worth noting.

  First, in the unmodernized version (essentially the Folio as printed in 1623) the line reads “the Sun and the Moon lighted … the Little o’ the earth,” implying that the glowing orbs lit the little people who populated the great globe.

  Perhaps with the Globe Theatre in mind as a punning allusion (the “wooden O,” as the stage is called in Henry V), most contemporary editors change this to “The little O, the earth,” meaning the sun and moon lit the globe or the Globe, in any case, not “the Little o’ the earth,” the little people when seen from above, as the unmodernized spelling version has it.

  It’s just the addition of a comma and capitalization of o, but it’s too clever by half I’d say, about this emendation. I’d agree with John Andrews in his note to this line in his Everyman Shakespeare edition: “not only is this change unnecessary; it obscures Cleopatra’s praise for Antony’s generosity of spirit.”

  But Andrews has an even more insistent and important dissent from another modernizing emendation in this passage. In the line as rendered by the Riverside edition, in speaking of Antony’s bounty Cleopatra says, “There was no winter in’t; an [autumn] it was/That grew the more by reaping.”

  Note the brackets the Riverside places around “autumn.” The original Folio version where the bracket now says “autumn” reads “an Antony it was,/That grew the more by reaping.”

  Why replace “Antony” with “autumn”?

  This is one of those small but resonant moments in which the debate over what is “Shakespearean” comes down to an argument over a single word in the text—and the impulse to change or “improve” it.

  “Most editions emend to autumn,” Andrews observes in his footnote. But Cleopatra’s point is that Antony’s “bounty” exceeded autumn, exceeded even that of the season proverbial for “reaping”—for its plenteous harvest. Being unique, Antony can be likened only to his own: “semblable” (III.iv.3) or “spacious mirror” (V.i.34) … “Antony/Will be himself” (I.i.42–43) in a realm that lies beyond this world’s “dreaming” … “past the size of dreaming” in the passage Judi Dench recited.

  The change from “Antony” to “autumn,” then, erases this further reference to a realm beyond imagining, that realm of the infinite and bottomless, that appears recurrently in Shakespeare’s verse.

  This was one of the things that convinced me to take seriously what I’d initially thought of as neoclassical pedantry: the “unmodernized spelling movement,” which I’ll explore in the next chapter.

  * “… Degree being vizarded,/Th’ unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.”

  Chapter Eight

  The Spell of the Shakespearean

  in “Original Spelling”

  It may seem an abrupt shift from the muse of fire to what might be called the “Muse of spelling.” But there is—I am determined to convince you—excitement to be found in pursuing what is usually called the “unmodernized spelling” argument. Or, as I prefer to call it, the “unanchored spelling” debate.

  It is, in its own way, a no less fiery disputation than that over verse-speaking. And it turned out that, not ten minutes into my conversation with John Andrews, the most persuasive modern advocate of “unmodernized spelling,” he made an allusion, if not to a Muse of fire, then to “tongues of flame.” As fusty and pedantic a preoccupation as “unmodernized spelling” might sound, it attempts something similar to Peter Hall’s pause: a return to origins to discover what has been lost by some all-too-user-friendly contemporary practices. An attempt that may be neoclassical in form, yet is Romantic in its belief that it can take us deeper inside Shakespearean language, the way it was written, the way it was heard by others, the way it was heard perhaps in Shakespeare’s own mind.

  I had initially sought to avoid the unmodernized spelling argument like a plague. From my initial, superficial knowledge of it, I didn’t see how it could be of interest to any but the most antiquarian-minded of scholars. I thought of it as analogous to the mindset of Civil War “reenactors” who are so concerned that the thread stitching the buttons on their uniforms be “authentic” or “original.”

  My first inkling that the spelling question ought to be taken more seriously was a sudden impassioned outburst from my ordinarily mild-mannered friend Jesse Sheidlower, who is the American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. We had been discussing the unexpected pleasures we both found in textual editing questions.

  “What I don’t understand,” Jesse said, “is why people don’t care more about reading Shakespeare in original spelling editions.”

  It seemed at the time such a Jesse-like obsession. I mean that as a compliment: no one cares more intelligently about words, their history, evolution and the precise linguistic coloration they have at any moment in history than Jesse. That’s his life work, and one could understand why he would care about the shades of coloration the words Shakespeare used had on Shakespeare’s palette, or palate for that matter. Still, how much difference could mere spelling make?

  In addition it seemed to me, when Jesse first brought up the spelling issue, that it was too late to care: that we were living in an age when most people already felt Shakespeare was written in a foreign language—the mandarins of British Shakespeare were warning that Shakespeare would soon seem as foreign as Chaucer’s Middle English to even the most erudite, and most people read Chaucer, if they do at all, in “translation.”

  So to insist—as Jesse did and John Andrews, editor of the Everyman editions of Shakespeare, did—that one wasn’t really ever reading Shakespeare in the original unless one read it in the original late sixteenth–early seventeenth century spelling, seemed a bit … well, unrealistic, however well intentioned.

  And besides there were arguments to be made that the original spellings we have available did not necessarily issue from Shakespeare’s hand; they were rather the original spellings of the scribes who copied over his manuscripts, or the type-shop compositors who took the manuscripts, or the scribes’ copies, and set them into type for the printed versions that are all that we have left. (Aside perhaps from Hand D, if one believes it is Shakespeare’s own handwriting.) But on the other hand, even if this is the case, it represented the spellings of those who heard the same language, heard the same sounds shaped into speech as Shakespeare.

  My interest in original spelling was initially awakened a couple of weeks after my piece on Hamlet texts appeared, when I was contacted by John Andrews, who, while polite and respectful, clearly felt that I should have addressed the unmodernized spelling ques
tion. I tried to explain how many complex issues I had to omit from the original thirty-thousand-word draft of the piece to fit it into the magazine’s ten-thousand-word limit. But I knew Andrews was a substantial figure in Shakespeare scholarship. A longtime editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, a director of academic programs at the Folger Library, he subsequently founded his own Washington-based Shakespeare Guild, which gave a highly regarded annual Gielgud Award to Shakespearean actors. The latter fact suggested Andrews brought to unmodernized spelling not the perspective of an antiquarian pedant, but of someone who also appreciated the embodiment of Shakespeare’s language in its spoken, dramatized (modern) form. And so I asked him to send me a couple of the scholarly papers he’d written on the original spelling question along with his (mostly) unmodernized Everyman edition of Hamlet, not expecting to find the subject as exciting as in fact I did.

  Exciting because what Andrews was getting at went far beyond the original way the words were printed on the page. It offered a new way of hearing them on the stage, a new way of thinking about how they were first formed on the stage of Shakespeare’s mind.

  It’s not that I’d never seen an unmodernized spelling edition before. I’d made Bernice Kliman’s original spelling Enfolded Hamlet my well-worn bible for more than a year as I sought to tease out the significant single-word and phrase differences it spotlighted in the two main Hamlet texts.

  But I found reading straight through the largely unmodernized Everyman Hamlet (a mostly Quarto version)—especially through the lens of John Andrews’s formidable arguments in his paper “Sight Reading Shakespeare’s Scores”—a new way of experiencing Hamlet.

  Consider the Everyman Hamlet version of the first-act ghost scene, which in almost every modern edition begins with Hamlet observing the cold by saying, “The air bites shrewdly,” the 1623 Folio version.

  But in the Everyman edition, based on the 1604 Second Quarto spelling, Hamlet says, “The air bites Shroudly.”

  Shroudly! Even if we take it that “Shroudly” is an alternate spelling of that quality we know now as “shrewdly” (which is itself only a conjecture, not a given, even though “shrewdly” is the version in the Folio), nonetheless, spelling shrewdly “Shroudly,” or just spelling shroudly “Shroudly,” gives the word a dimension more than temperature. Gives a more frightening resonance to Horatio’s response—“It is a nipping and an eager air”—which is often read as having erotic overtones, but which could just as well—with “Shroudly”—express the apprehension that death is nipping eagerly at our heels.

  Which is not even to mention the more explicit ghostly connotations: a shroud being the usual costume of stage ghosts. Andrews’s point is that you get all this—and “shrewdly,” in all its implications as well—when you read it, when you print it, when you pronounce it, as it once was (“Shroudly”) and you miss all that if you modernize it to “shrewdly.”

  REAMBIGUATING THE DISAMBIGUATED

  As I was reading the original spelling Hamlet I was also getting a sense from John Andrews’s scholarly papers of the larger stakes in the spelling question.

  At its deepest level Andrews’s argument is that this is not a question of Shakespearean spelling habits, but the nature of Shakespearean thought, his original way of using language to create meaning. Andrews calls the spelling of the time “unanchored.” It was a century and a half before English spelling was first regularized, “anchored” (in Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary). By “unanchored” Andrews means more slippery, free-floating, not just in word-letter formations but in meaning. It is not, to use the famous example from Hamlet, that we must make a choice between “too too sullied flesh,” “too too sallied flesh” and “too too solid flesh.” But that each spelling gives one all three overlapping colorations of the word. As did each spoken utterance of the word. And that the multiple forms of words, such as “shrewdly” and “Shroudly,” the unanchored, nonreductive variant spellings, either created or reflected a more fluid, unanchored, polysemous way of reading, hearing and thinking that found its epitome in Shakespeare’s language and thought. (Polysemous, by the way, pronounced “polissimus,” one of my favorite new locutions, means offering many potential meanings.)

  Andrews points out some telling examples in building this case. In Macbeth for instance the unmodernized spelling renders the line about the arrival of the soon-to-be-murdered sovereign “Duncan comes here To night.” As opposed to the commonly modernized version: “Duncan comes here tonight.” If “to” and “night” are not compressed, it’s more than a scheduling announcement. “Duncan comes here To night” has a deeply ominous resonance, less temporal: Night is a destination, not a time. Duncan comes here to Eternal Night.

  Even more convincing on the question of spelling and temporality and eternity is the original spelling version of perhaps the most famous speech in Macbeth:

  Instead of “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” it goes:

  To morrow and to morrow and to morrow

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

  To the last Syllable of recorded time:

  And all our yesterdays have lighted Fooles

  The way to dusty death.

  The full force of that slow creep toward Eternal Night is felt far more strongly as “To morrow and to morrow” than as “Tomorrow and tomorrow.” With “to morrow” one has to cross the gap to a morrow, morrow is both a time and a destination. With “tomorrow” one is already there.

  Andrews calls “to morrow” and “tomorrow” “not discrete words but a potential multivalent word pairing.” A pairing that, particularly when heard, would be simultaneously apprehended as “to morrow” with the emphasis on the travel (or “travail”—another multivalent word pairing in Shakespeare: travel/travail)—and “tomorrow” with its emphasis on the time of arrival.

  Other examples of multivalent pairings Andrews points out include “mettle” and “metal” and the way the witches in Macbeth were not originally spelled “Weird Sisters” as modernized editions have it, but “Weyward sisters.” I was particularly intrigued with “loose” and “lose” because to illustrate Andrews’s point he refers to what I have always believed is one of the signature passages in early Shakespeare, from The Comedy of Errors.

  One of the lost twins bemoans his fate:

  I to the world am like a drop of water,

  That in the ocean seeks another drop,

  Who, falling there to find his fellow forth

  (Unseen, inquisitive), confounds himself.

  So I, to find a mother and a brother,

  In quest of them (unhappy), ah, lose myself.

  Or as the unmodernized spelling edition has it, “ah, loose myself.”

  Lose myself, loose myself. Subtly different: “loose myself” is slightly more deliberate, more a willed loss than “lose myself.” On the other hand “lose myself” has connotations that “loose myself” doesn’t: lose my self and lose my way. Or perhaps, as Andrews conjectures, they were both present, both connotations, in Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote it, just as they are both present when we hear them spoken, rather than read them reduced to one or the other version on the page.

  Andrews emphasizes the way what we hear is essential to the unanchored senses that original spelling evokes on the page. He’s particularly good on what has been lost in the regularizing of names. The original spelling of Montague in Romeo and Juliet, or one of the spellings, was “Mountague.” Since “ague” is an ache (often in Shakespeare an ache resulting from mounting—a sexually transmitted disease) “Mountague” embeds an embittered vision of tainted love in Romeo’s last name. What’s in a name indeed.

  And more recently in an essay on the unmodernized spelling text of Merchant of Venice Andrews points out that the original spelling of the name of the strange clown modern editions call “Launcelot Gobbo” is Launcelot Iobbe. And that in Venice at that time there was a prominent church of St. Iobbe, a church dedicated to the biblical sufferer Job. I’ve always thought that
there was far more to Gobbo’s presence in the play, particularly in his initial monologue, which (for a clown) is curiously, heavily, freighted with Old and New Testament images. But that Gobbo might conceal Job in a play about a suffering Jew …!

  Andrews’s essays, introductions and annotations are filled with exciting and suggestive examples such as that. He traces the original sin of spelling modernizers and conventionalizers to “Pope and all the editors who’ve sanctioned this disambiguating modification of Shakespeare’s script.”

  “Disambiguating”—a great word for a reductive “either/or” approach to ambiguity. And in service of this point, what Andrews does with his examples and his arguments is—one might say—to re-ambiguate what Pope and the others disambiguated. To give us back the original “rapt” in Macbeth so that it can mean enraptured as well as the modernized “wrapped” we get in most editions. And to give us back “wrack” for “wreck” in The Tempest.

  And in one of his tour de force readings, to give us back the pluripotential, polysemous sense of passages in which we restore “Ay” to “I” (and to “eye”).

  There is the crucial passage in Richard II, in part of what is known as “the deposition scene.” It is the moment when rebellious Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) asks King Richard if he is ready to resign his crown to him. As Andrews points out, most modern editions render Richard’s reply as:

  Ay, no, no ay; for I must nothing be …

  Here Andrews tells us that the 1608 Quarto of Richard II, the one purportedly closer to Shakespeare’s manuscript than the 1623 Folio, reads like this: