Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (review)

Books that decisively change how Shakespeare's works are read and edited are rare. In 1986 the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare declared their intention of attempting to print "a text presenting the play as it appeared when performed by the company of which Shakespeare was principal shareholder."¹ When they wrote those words, the Oxford editors probably dared not hope that within a couple of decades the views they expressed would more or less become orthodoxy. Shakespeare is now widely regarded as a "man of the theatre" who had little or no concern for how his works were printed or read, and whose printed texts are often regarded as institutionally produced scores for performance.² This is the paradigm that Lukas Erne seeks to overturn in this excellent and scrupulously researched book. Its arguments have a hard edge and are invariably based on a detailed understanding of complex data about the early modern stage. Its thesis is one with which all Shakespeareans will want to engage, even if not everyone will agree with all of his arguments.

Erne sees Shakespeare as a "literary dramatist" who composed plays both for the stage and the page. He notes that from 1594 onward, a year after Shakespeare's first sally into print with Venus and Adonis, printers began to specify the names of authors on title pages of printed plays even if those authors were not gentlemen. This implies an emergent market for named authors, which Erne suggests Shakespeare exploited. His association with the Lord Chamberlain's Men in the period 1594-1600 shows a pattern of publication consistent enough to be described as the manifestation of a policy, whereby new plays were printed after a delay of about two years. In the two-year interim, Erne hypothesizes, plays may have been sold or presented in manuscript to noblemen.³ This apparent publication policy provides, Erne argues, strong circumstantial evidence that neither Shakespeare nor his company were in principle opposed to, or uninterested in, the print medium.

After 1600 Erne notes that the pattern of a two-year delay before publication breaks down, and he tentatively ascribes this change to an aim on Shakespeare's part to construct a volume of his collected works to rival the Jonson folio. Erne is rightly cautious in advancing this claim: "Few writers beside him would have been in a better position to contemplate the possibility of an ambitious collected edition of their writings" (111). It is an arresting thought but one that seems not obviously compatible with the uneven textual origins of the materials assembled in the First Folio and the evident effort required from Heminge and Condell to gather those materials.

A central foundation of Erne's argument that Shakespeare was a "literary" dramatist is the belief that plays were always performed within a two-hour period on the public stage. The concomitant of this belief—for which he provides strong evidence from surviving theatrical manuscripts—is that any play over 2,300 lines was not performed in full in the public playhouses. From this it follows that playwrights who exceeded this length by a significant margin must have had an audience in mind which was not that of the public stage (and it is a striking fact that Shakespeare and Jonson wrote three quarters of all surviving plays over 3,000 lines). This in turn leads Erne to argue that the "bad" quartos (notably Q1 Hamlet, Q1 Henry V, and Q1 Romeo) are the closest we can come to the form in which Shakespeare's plays were performed on the early modern stage. Here again he is cautious not to overstate his case, but his discussion tends to imply that the "bad" quartos were the outcome of the collaborative process described by Humphrey Moseley in the preface to the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio: "the Actours omitted some Scenes and Passages (with the Authour's consent) as occasion led them" (quoted in Erne, 149). As Erne confesses, however, the "bad" quartos are...