De-composition in Popular Elizabethan Playtexts: A Revalidation of the Multiple Versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet

Recomposition and De-composition in Playtexts and Folk Texts

When Grimm's folktales returned to the folk, they tended to become purified and in many ways have again approached the abstract style that was weakened by Wilhelm Grimm. According to the Swiss folklorist Max Lüthi (1986:110-11), a rendition of the Cinderella tale narrated by a North German farm worker "restores the sort of progression of clearly defined elements (Steigerung) that strives for clear and simple visibility and that had become effaced in Grimm's mistier, more poetical phrasing . . . in oral tradition it corrects itself."

The aim of this article is to establish some premises for comparing the transmission of playtexts of the early modern stage with the transmission of folk material. My central question is whether playtexts and ballad and tale texts "de-compose" in similar ways, and, if they do, whether we may then predict a similar "goal product" that can only be achieved through transmission. The detailed comparison of traditionalized ballads and Elizabethan playtexts is still a relatively uncharted field of inquiry, and this article thus simultaneously revisits and supplements the few observations published in this field so far.

In the quotation above, referring to the traditional folktale Cinderella, Lüthi stresses the power of oral tradition to correct, simplify, and make visible the narrative aspects that aesthetic/authorial composition complicates or obscures in a recorded text. The final product of transmission Lüthi called the Zielform,¹ meaning "goal form." He saw the notion of the Zielform as relating both to the transmission and form of folk tales and folk epic, and his research, most of which was carried out in the 1960s and 1970s, assumes that under the right auspices a given story will transform according to certain expected (and hence predictable) corrective "laws" as it evolves and multiplies into different versions. During this process the tale may be zurechterzählt, "told into shape," or possibly zerzählt, meaning "dis-told," or "told out of shape." Either way, the mutation process that a given story undergoes in tradition is seen to be positive and necessary to the formal survival of that story.

Cecil Sharp's view of the evolutionary adaptability of the traditional folk ballad was similar (1923:38):

In the evolution of species of the animal and vegetable worlds, those variations will be preserved which are of advantage to their possessors in the competition for existence. In the evolution of folk [songs] . . . the corresponding principle of selection is the taste of the community. Those . . . variations, which appeal to the community, will be perpetuated, as against those which attract the individual only.

By using examples of variant versions of traditionalized English broadside ballads alongside the multiple-text Shakespearean plays Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, I hope to illustrate how a similar selective mechanism can be detected in the transmission of early modern playtexts. I also want to illustrate how the formative importance of transmission is made apparent in such texts through the generation of certain identifiable stylo-structural features. Given that I shall be referring recurrently to the terms "transmission" and "tradition" in this article I should like clarify from the start what I mean by those terms in relation to popular stage plays. By the transmission of playtexts, I mean the long-term interaction between stage-performance and print distribution over time, in the sense described by Adam Fox (2000:5). Tradition, then, is defined as the equally time-dependent accumulation of identifiable textual witnesses (extant and lost) produced by transmission. Thus recordings of the Hamlet story in various playtexts formats (octavo, quarto, folio), along with related forms such as plots, parts, and play summaries in table books and diaries, all belong to the tradition of Hamlet, as do ballads of the kind referred to as "residuals" by Bruce R. Smith.

In "Shakespeare's Residuals," published recently in a collection of essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, Smith argues that there is a sustained relationship of cultural residuality between Elizabethan stage plays and ballads, suggesting that plays and ballads enter...