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?).