Shakespeare and Response, Part One

In the summer of 2011, at the age of sixty-two, I set out to read all of Shakespeare. Of the thirty-eight plays now assigned to him, I had read or seen all but ten. Some, like Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest, I knew quite well and had taught a number of times. Others, like Troilus and Cressida and Love's Labour's Lost, were only vague memories from classes taken as an undergraduate at Yale and a graduate student at Berkeley. I had a few favorite Shakespeare critics—Maynard Mack, Stanley Cavell, Stephen Booth, Edward Tayler—but I had done no systematic study of a secondary literature so vast that few living persons could hope to read all of it. I did know that Shakespeare studies had taken an "historical turn" in the closing decades of the twentieth century, that context was now taken to be an unignorable part of any interpretation of his work, and that the genius presiding over this shift in perspective was Stephen Greenblatt.

As luck would have it, I had inherited from my colleague Sandy Mack a copy of Greenblatt's 1997 The Norton Shakespeare. At 3420 pages, this formidable volume contains all of Shakespeare's known writings, including the sonnets and narrative poems he chose to publish during his lifetime. Greenblatt and his companion editors—Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus—provide the reader with a General Introduction to Shakespeare's world and art, as well as beautifully crafted introductions to each of the plays. The volume also contains the major documents, usually mere scraps of poetry or prose, attesting to the fact that Shakespeare actually lived and wrote in Elizabethan and Jacobean London, as well as a brilliant essay on "The Shakespearean Stage" by Andrew Gurr. As my colleague Ted Leinwand says about the Norton, "It's a beast."

Others might say it's a monster—and for two reasons. The first has to do with the status of Shakespeare's texts; the second, with how to read them.

Shakespeare's plays have come down to us in a somewhat vexed condition and in what might be called little and big versions. The little versions were the various quartos (in a quarto, each sheet of paper is folded twice, making four leaves or eight pages front and back) mostly published during Shakespeare's lifetime and in which eighteen of his plays eventually appeared. The big version was the 1623 First Folio (folio sheets are folded only once, making two leaves or four pages front and back), edited by two of Shakespeare's friends. The First Folio added to the canon eighteen never-before-published plays, divided each play into five acts, and grouped the plays into comedies, histories, and tragedies. Only two plays not included in the Folio, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, would later be added to the canon. As the Norton editors conclude, "the first collection of Shakespeare's plays was not, as far as we know, the product of the playwright's own design."

So how to resolve the anomalies and uncertainties and downright contradictions in a textual record that has left us, for instance, with two quite different versions of King Lear? As to why this discrepancy might matter, we need only to consider the last speech in the play, in which we are urged to "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." In the quarto version, the line is assigned to Albany; in the folio, to Edgar. Which of these versions is "the promised end" of the play remains a matter of considerable debate.

The Norton editors made the decision to base their text of the plays on the 1986 Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Assuming that Shakespeare's art is "thoroughly dependent on the craft of go-betweens" and that as an active playwright he worked in a profoundly collaborative setting, the Oxford editors therefore chose to prefer the promptbook version of a play "to copy based on the author's own draft." In a second "radical" move, they...