Shakespeare and Provenance

One of the more fascinating entries in the introductory material for the Riverside Edition is the discussion on the historical provenance of the plays. Simply put, it is not possible to definitively determine that all the text in each of his plays is actually written by Shakespeare. I’m not talking about the whole “Shakespeare never existed” controversy (the generally discredited idea that someone else entirely wrote his plays and that his name was a front), but rather about the authenticity of each line of text within each play. Check it out:

Nineteen of his plays were published, early on, in so-called quarto format (FYI: this “quarto” term is used often when discussing original Shakespearean text. It is simply a printing method whereby four pages are printed on each side of a large sheet of paper and then the paper is folded twice in perpendicular planes, to make each single page). Of these nineteen, there are “good” quartos and “bad” quartos. “Good” means that they were printed from an authoritative manuscript, usually Shakespeare’s so-called “foul papers” (these were his original, handwritten versions). There are twelve of these “good” quartos. The remaining seven are called “bad” quartos. These are much more interesting, at least from the perspective of provenance.

For brevity’s sake, suffice it to say that the “bad” quartos lack “textual authority.” They were not copied from the source, but rather are thought to have been generated from memory, by an actor some time after a performance, most likely to sell to an unscrupulous printer (kind of like the 17th century’s equivalent of the guy in the movie theater filming the newly-released, blockbuster movie with his camcorder to burn on a DVD and sell on a Times Square street corner). The text of these nine “bad” quartos seems at times very error prone, suffering from garbled speeches, amateur and unmetered verse, missing scenes, actors’ expletives, and other such “memorially contaminated” imperfections.

So, Shakespeare wrote thirty-eight plays (so some say, but that’s a topic for another day), nineteen of which come from these “good” and “bad” quartos. What about the rest? Enter the First Folio (folio is another printer’s term, this time meaning half of what a quarto is, i.e., two pages printed to a single sheet of paper, folded only once to make each page). This First Folio was the first complete, collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Put together by his theater buddies seven years after his death, it is the first full volume of all the plays (actually, only thirty six…but again, don’t worry about the numbers for now). This First Folio is the famous version dedicated “To the great Variety of Readers” by this early group of editors and publishers.

With this book alone, the number of Shakespeare plays available to us nearly doubles, but not by sheer magic; the eighteen plays that first appear in the First Folio are at times culled together from such disparate sources so as to make the “bad” quartos look like direct facsimiles. “Scribal copies” and “prompt-books” often served as the source material (along with anything else they could find), making what some consider to be an end result at least marginally divorced from the original (just to complete the story, additional folios were published in 1632 (Second Folio), 1663/4 (Third Folio) and 1685 (Fourth Folio), but these never “solidified” the official record, rather, they were mostly just modernizations of the text taken directly from the previous folio). The First Folio was the standard, yet, as with the quartos, this standard was not immutable in origin but rather the opposite, malleable and changed, adapted from a wide variety of influence and source.

Fast forward four centuries, during which a whole host of subsequent versions and editions emerge, each with its own bias and emendation, created by a veritable army of writers, poets, editors, and Shakespeare enthusiasts. Some you know (like Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Alice Walker), and some of them (like Edward Capell and Lewis Theobald) you probably don’t. All of them, however, contributed to the “factual and true” text in their own unique, sometimes-intensely-insightful, and sometimes-terribly-misguided ways to make a reality out of what could be called an “illusion” of authorship.

So, who knows what we’ve been reading all these years (actually, I’m being overly facetious here to make my point, obviously it’s not like the whole canon is somehow fraudulent…and, in the plays I’ve read, any emendation, however small, is clearly marked and thoroughly considered). However, this problem, oddly (or not) does not bother me at all. I have no problem referring to these works as “Shakespeare” (whatever that may mean) mainly because I actually don’t care if these plays were all written by one man four hundred years ago. They’re still unarguably great, regardless of provenance, right? All this discussion and discourse only makes it more interesting. In any event, Shakespeare would surely be laughing at all this scholarly hoo-ha (interestingly, there is no evidence that he ever made any effort to personally publish and thereby preserve a single one of his plays, so what is that telling you?).

Background Bullet Points

So, the Riverside Edition intro has been consumed. Lots of info. Here are some random, interesting (at least I though) bullet points:

• Shakespeare wrote his plays right around 400 years ago, from around 1590 to 1613, although there is some debate as to the exact dates.
• Fun Fact: A reasonably lengthy work of “Basic English” employs about 850 words. Shakespeare drew upon no less than 21,000 words.
• Shakespeare was born the same year as Galileo and died the same year as Cervantes.
• The Elizabethan age was really a golden age of theater. It peaked while Shakespeare was writing his plays, with half a dozen functioning theaters in London during this time (in addition to many “traveling shows” performed throughout England). On the other side of the 17th century, the number of theaters was less than half that (two).
• A Shakespearean Comedy averages eighteen characters, a Tragedy twenty-seven, and a History thirty-five.

Some Background

Before beginning to read the actual plays in earnest, I thought I should take in a bit of background material first. Luckily, it appears that the Riverside Edition is perfect for this, containing a good bit of succinct yet definitive background material (including cool pictures!). At first glance, it looks to contain plenty of historical context, general literary criticism, notes on language and style, and so forth. Everything you would expect, and then some, but not too much. Not wanting to go overboard on the background stuff (as you can imagine, there’s quite a bit of ancillary material floating around out there after more than four centuries; the library had almost an entire shelf devoted to it, easily outnumbering the stuff on-shelf actually written by Shakespeare), the Riverside introduction will have to do.

Finding the “Right” Edition

So, as you may imagine, there are quite a few editions of the Shakespeare plays to choose from, so I’m going to have to make a decision, first off, on which edition(s) to read. After a bit of research, I’m going to use The Riverside Edition as a primary source. It seems to be very well regarded and is amply footnoted and annotated…which I will definitely need. That being said, I did check out from my local library a different version of The Taming of the Shrew, just for kicks: the Yale University Press’ Annotated Shakespeare, which in addition to having all the required annotations, comes in a miniaturized, lightweight form, a nice feature when compared to the gigantic Riverside tome. Portability is good, so I’ll probably use these as well (added bonus: the library seemed to have most of the plays from the Yale Press so I’m good).

Oh yeah, one final note on order: I’m going to read these by genre (Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, then the Romances), more or less chronologically. Seems like the right call (and that's how Riverside has them organized).

And Begin...

So here’s the plan: Over the next few months (years?) I plan on reading every Shakespeare play and blogging about the experience. I have read most of the "popular" ones already, but that was long, long ago, so I'm thinking a Shakespeare re-boot is in order. My plan is to move as quickly as I can, not rushing but not tarrying about either. Having done this kind of thing before, I'm sure that these posts will be all over the place. And I can't vouch for quality either. Oh well. Seeing as I don’t expect much (anything?) by way of an audience, this blog is as much for me as anyone. Think of it as a one-man reading club.