Shakespeare in Shorthand: The Textual Mystery of "King Lear." (review)

Adele Davidson has written a detailed and densely argued book in which she seeks to show that John Willis's shorthand system, initially published in The Art of Stenographie (1602) was employed in the production of the copy for the first quarto (Q) of King Lear (1608). This outline cannot do justice to the breadth and intricacy of the arguments in her book, which is divided into two parts.

In an introductory section, she surveys some of the play's textual history and the use that has been made of shorthand to shed light on it. Three chapters on the "new writing technologies" (106) that emerged at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries suggest what an extraordinary advance they represent. Their development coincided more or less with the publication of those abbreviated or suspected play texts that are still known generally as "bad quartos," and indeed some of the printers and publishers of books about shorthand were also involved in the production of plays. Henry Chettle plays a significant part in this, and Davidson notes the frequent appearance of Cambridge University in the story. She looks at sermons said to have been reproduced or taken from shorthand and she notes some similarities between the language used by authors and publishers of these appropriated works and how writers and publishers—including Heminges and Condell—described stolen and surreptitiously published plays. Although she examines other shorthand systems, such as Timothy Bright's Characterie (1588) and Peter Bales's New Brachygraphie (1600), it is Willis's Stenographie that most interests her. She calls it "a consummate achievement of the Elizabethan era" (98), "the first true modern shorthand" (66), being both flexible and systematic. The evidence of the manuscripts of such practitioners as the lexicographer Edmund Castell and William Clarke, who recorded the 1647 Putney debates, suggests that a "legible and intelligible shorthand" (72) developed during the seventeenth century, one that built on the systems of John Willis, the unrelated Edmund Willis (1618), and Thomas Shelton (circa 1626).

The first part of Davidson's book is something in the way of a patchwork, drawing everybody with an interest in shorthand and the theater together. John Willis's shorthand system is described in some detail; its main principles are set out and then discussed with illustrations from the original edition of 1602. The system is too complicated to explain in detail here, but it pays more attention to consonants than to vowels, prefers the beginnings only or both the beginnings and the endings of words to their middles, and reduces polysyllabic words to separate groups of monosyllabic elements. Some groups of letters are treated as identical (c, k, and q; s, t, and soft c) while others (redundant or silent letters; aspirated h, w, and y) are omitted where possible. initial letters of a word are omitted if they match the letters ending the previous word. repeated words and phrases, rhyme words, punctuation, and so on are also skipped.

In the first two chapters of the second part of the book, Davidson turns to textual variants and unusual formations in the first quarto of Lear, seeking to explain how these might have arisen from the use of Willis's system. In a third chapter, she looks at some major cruxes and examines the relationship between the two quartos (Q1, Q2) and the First Folio (F). Her wide-ranging discussion encompasses some six hundred distinctive or anomalous Q and F forms. Some, such as "a dogge, so bade in office," may be mentioned and discussed five or six times (140, 155, 170, 188, 197, 222-23) under various headings. Many others may be mentioned only once and discussed at some length, or appear in a catchall list, such as the one in which it is asked whether some sixty-seven pairs of Q / F variants "are more likely to represent authorial revision or artifacts created...