Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and their Intellectual Property (review)

Why do we have three versions of Hamlet, published between 1603 and 1623? Why is one of these versions radically different from — and much shorter than — the other two? Why do several other of Shakespeare’s plays appear in equally variant versions? These questions have puzzled Shakespeare scholars ever since there have been Shakespeare scholars to be puzzled. In the last century, the New Bibliographers — who developed many of the standard theories and techniques of modern editing — thought they had found a solution. The shortest variant texts were, they proposed, “memorially reconstructed” by bit-part actors, then issued by rogue “pirate” publishers.

By the end of century, however, this consensus was being challenged and various scholars have, since then, stepped in to offer fresh theories about the origins of the variant texts. Thus, Lukas Erne, for instance, has argued that Shakespeare produced long texts, intended for a reading audience, in the expectation that the theater company would reduce them to the appropriate length for performance. The shortest variant texts therefore, in Erne’s view, give us something like a window into what the stage versions — as opposed to the printed page versions — of the plays might have looked like. More recently, Lene B. Petersen, drawing on folk literature theory, has argued for seeing a process of drift towards a Zielform across the range of textual instances of a given play, which is to say, “the persistent movement of the transmitted text towards a condensed and patterned core version” (2010, 131). The short texts are thus like the foreshortened, standardized versions of folk tales which evolve over time.

James J. Marino’s Owning William Shakespeare is the latest contribution to this debate. His rich and thought-provoking book offers fresh insight into the question of the origin and meaning of the variant texts and it represents a very useful contribution to scholarship in this area. Marino’s primary aim here is to place the published texts in their theatrical context. The foundational moment, for Marino, is the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s theatre company in 1594. This was the company which ultimately became the King’s Men and to which Shakespeare belonged, as actor, dramatist and shareholder. Marino makes a relatively simple, but far-reaching point about the Lord Chamberlain’s Men: textually, the company did not commence ab ovo, performing plays generated specifically for them from the very beginning. Instead, they initially performed a collection of miscellaneous texts, acquired from various sources under various circumstances. Marino argues that the company then proceeded to make these plays their own — thereby securing them from the claims of rival companies — by modifying (and generally improving) the texts. As he puts it in a rather neat formulation: “The sow’s rights to her lost ear never expire, but her title to silk purses is more complicated” [41]).

Marino notes a particularly close connection between this process and the deployment of the authorial name “William Shakespeare”: “the company”, he argues, increasingly used “Shakespeare’s authorship as a signifier of possession. Shakespeare’s name functions, especially in the early attributions, to cement the company’s claims upon plays which they inherited in 1594 or which dealt with an easily duplicated historical subject” (42). There is a neat symmetry to all of this since, as Marino notes that “the most glaring and puzzling textual multiplicity associated with Shakespeare’s plays comes in the works that existed both before and after the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594” (31). So: the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s attempts to secure their pre-1594 texts, through the reworkings undertaken by their principal dramatist, may serve to explain the origins of the significant variations in a range of that dramatist’s early output.

Marino gives some useful examples of how he sees the process of reworking functioning. Specifically in relation to the Shrew plays...