The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1797 Tuesday, 25 October 2005
From: Gerald E. Downs <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Monday, 24 Oct 2005 03:27:09 EDT
Subject: 16.1698 A Shrew
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1698 A Shrew
Larry Weiss got less response than I expected to his questions on the
relationship between The Shrew and A Shrew.
>Is there a consensus, and, if so, for which theory? If not, how do
>the various current textual scholars line up for the various theories:
Stephen Miller represents the current scholars well enough when he opts
for Weiss's 4) A Shrew is a revision of The Shrew, b) by someone else;
but "cannot say 'who' though the sources were memorial, I feel."
The most-cited authority these days is Laurie Maguire, whose
_Shakespearean Suspect Texts_ passes judgment on questions of "Memorial
Reconstruction" as conceived by scholars of the "New Bibliography"
(Greg, Pollard, Wilson, et al). Maguire's method is fatally flawed, but
in the case of A Shrew her opinion is suggestive of a modern consensus
(even if 'consensus' still implies unanimity).
Yet Maguire says nothing directly of the relationship between The Shrew
and A Shrew because, as John Jowett notes ("After Oxford" _Shakespearean
International Yearbook_):
. . . Maguire rejected the comparative approach entirely,
and based her study on the intrinsic characteristics of the
suspected text itself 'as if no parallel text existed.' The task
of identifying intrinsic and distinctive features of memorial
transmission . . . presents unavoidable difficulties of its own.
Is it methodologically better to evaluate a text according to
an abstract conception of how it should be, rather than
according to a comparison with how elsewhere it actually
was? . . . [H]owever plausibly it is justified, the effect of
excluding comparison between variant texts is to seal off
a rich quarry of potentially significant evidence. It is not
surprising that Maguire identifies relatively few texts as
memorial reconstructions. . . . Maguire's negative results
need interpreting as 'not proven' rather than 'not memorial
reconstruction'. Her positive findings deserve treating with
considerable respect. (77)
I agree with this assessment. Shunning evidence inevitably leads to
error. Maguire is a bit too glib, "comparisons are odious", and much too
biased against the orthodox concept of MR to accept her negative
results. Ironically, her positive judgments, no matter how grudgingly
allowed, are highly probable. A Shrew passes the tests ("part MR").
Comparison with The Shrew easily confirms this but even here readers
should bear in mind Maguire's method. In her category "Omissions", she
reports of A Shrew: "Not detectable." Not detectable of course when
comparison is not allowed. A Shrew is a "bad quarto."
Stephen Miller strongly objects to the term "bad quarto" in "The Taming
of the Shrew and the Theories" (_Textual Formations and Reformations_
Laurie Maguire, ed.) It is best in my opinion not to quarrel with the
historically assigned terminology. We know what is meant: most quartos
so labeled are truly bad. I there's the point. But what do we mean by
"Memorial Reconstruction"? The general scholarly concept, as construed
by the New Bibliography, is an unlikely proposition, against which (in
most cases) I am myself hopelessly biased.
The notion is that actors (singly or with others, in the absence of
promptbooks), reconstructed plays, the manuscripts of which served
directly as printer's copy for the bad quartos. Theories arguing this
form of memorial reconstruction have been effectively attacked
(primarily by Paul Werstine). As a result, confusion rather than
consensus rules the investigation of bad quartos. Despite a suggestion
on this thread that Lukas Erne explains the genre, he instead admits:
"There is little hope . . . of recovering what specific effect various
agencies had upon the differences between the 'bad' and the 'good'
texts."(218).
Maguire notes the "paradox" that memorial reconstruction theory is
"capacious, being able to explain almost any textual problem." (6) She
lets Greg criticize himself by quoting from his Orlando: "an hypothesis
which can explain anything is as useless as one which can explain
nothing." But I think this point is misleading. Jowett replies that
"for some texts a capacious theory seems to be needed." Simplistic
explanations for texts like A Shrew are bound to be mistaken. A
hypothesis that explains everything is apt to be correct; but that is a
rare event. What Maguire must be trying to say is that a hypothesis
exceeding its limits or compounding hypotheses is not explanatory.
A theory is proved by evidence and it explains evidence. It helps if
there is enough evidence to go round without getting circular. A theory
need not explain everything, but it must accommodate all the evidence.
The trouble with MR is its incompatibility with evidence, and usually
with common sense.
The theory of memorial reconstruction began (as an alternative) when
Greg offered that explanation of Q MWW. Other plays were suggested, most
credibly the H6 knockoffs, but one of the Newest Bibliographers was most
influential in providing new avenues of explanation (albeit dead-ends)
for bad quartos. G I Duthie's 1949 _Elizabethan Shorthand_ (a book of 82
pages) "destroyed," "demolished," "exploded" the dike holding back
oceans of theories. Memorial reports, foul papers, and authorial
revisions were soon ill-conceived in a noble cause to return the stolne
and surreptitious copies to Shakespeare.
However, the shortcomings of these theories have been attacked in the
last quarter-century, most notably by Paul Werstine in the cases of
'foul papers' and memorial reconstructions. As evidence that the
criticism has been effective, one need only read recent commentary by
Melchiori in "The Continuing Importance of New Bibliography" (_In Arden:
Editing Shakespeare_ 2003):
This caused serious disarray among editors, just at the time
when new and wide-ranging editorial enterprises . . . were being
undertaken. As soon as a plausible explanation of the process
by which a play had reached the printing-house was suggested,
the editor could be accused of creating fanciful 'narratives'.
Werstine & his followers created an all-inclusive and all-purpose
negative narrative . . . . Theirs was not an alternative narrative,
but simply the negation of all previous attempts at accounting
for the state in which printed play-texts had reached us . . . (19)
Their criticism of the New Bibliographers is aimed at demolishing
the theories of their predecessors without offering anything with
which to replace them. What they most resent is that Greg's
theories, though presented as mere hypotheses, had met with
such wide acceptance. The trouble is that while the theories of
the New Bibliographers were basically constructive, those of
their critics are simply destructive, and the would-be editor is
therefore left in a kind of limbo, not knowing what to present to
readers and performers as an authentic text of a play. (24)
The word 'narrative' is getting a bit old, I agree. However, 'plausible'
does not mean 'correct,' no matter how widely an explanation may be
uncritically accepted. A good negative criticism is always good. In
these cases, the negation is earned. No one will deny that good
alternative theories are welcome when old ones are dismantled. However,
they are not necessary to the criticism, and a demand for new theory is
not argument. Why replace old, fanciful theories with new, fanciful
theories? What we should resent is too-ready creation and defense of
orthodoxies that take decades to fail.
>Perhaps there are still other explanations.
Larry Weiss mentions my favorite category. What I've been leading to is
an alternative to present-day investigations of the bad quartos that has
already been applied to A Shrew without any lingering respect these
days. The theory is nearly as old as the quartos:
(they which know it) can reasonably take a sermon, Oration,
Play, or any long speech, as they are spoken, dictated, acted,
and uttered in the instant.
This reference (cited by Adele Davidson, " 'Some by Stenography'?
Stationers, Shorthand, and the Early Shakespearean Quartos", PBSA 90,
1996) is from _The Third University of England_(1612) (in Stow's
_Annals_, 1615), by George Buc.
Master of the Revels (1610-1622), Nephew and deputy to Edmund Tilney,
author of the lost _The Art of Revels_: Is it possible that Buc knew
what he was talking about? I think it is. Testimonials like Buc's lead
my hero, B A P Van Dam, to observe:
And we wonder how it is that any critic, in the teeth of these
positive statements of the men who could know, can have the
courage to adhere confidently to a hypothesis hanging in mid
air. . . . Yet, the critics of to-day are simply satisfied with their
established and inherited disbelief in a shorthand pirate.
When Van Dam wrote in 1928, the boom had not been lowered on shorthand
transmission. Yet I suggest that even after Duthie's IED, positive
statements of men who could know are ignored, that disbelief in
shorthand transmission is largely inherited, and that the replacement
theories are hanging in mid air. For these reasons I advocate a reading
of Van Dam's 'other explanation' in "The Taming of a Shrew" (ES, X,
1928, 97-106)
Van Dam's publications are seldom cited and even more rarely discussed.
For example, in "Greene's Orlando: W W Greg Furioso" ((Textual
Formations), Michael Warren notes:
B A P Van Dam is the sole conspicuous skeptic of the early
period. He challenged Greg's work in 1929, arguing for greater
error in the transcription of the Orlando part than Greg allowed,
and assuming stenography as the method of reporting of the
quarto text. (69)
End of discussion. Yet Van Dam's review of Greg's explication of the
Orlando part and the bad quarto is well worth reading. Van Dam was a
vocal critic of the New Bibliography, though his criticism seldom got
replies. For the interested I will repeat some of Van Dam's argument. I
don't pretend to embark on a full reassessment of shorthand theory of
play transmission. But knowing the ho-hum response any mention of it
gets now, I would be happy to see the subject reopened.
Over the years some features of a supposed shorthand-derived play-text
have struck me as important. First, it is a memorial reconstruction that
is not imaginary. In an effort to overcome objections to MR, recent
scholars suggest a communal effort before a scribe. As unlikely as that
seems in any other real circumstance, that's exactly what shorthand
piracy posits. But we needn't resort only to fancy for a manuscript
showing the characteristics one would expect in such a case.
In his seminal "Narratives", Werstine notes: "For a bizarre use of the
term 'bad quarto' . . . see Harry R. Hoppe, 'John of Bordeaux: A Bad
Quarto that Never Reached Print . . .(U of Missouri Studies 21, 1946,
119-32.)
I find enough bizarre in Shakespeare scholarship not to go looking for
it, though my principle is to look up what others put down. Yet in this
case I see no reason to take Werstine's comment as criticism because
I've come to agree with Harry Hoppe's title, if not his theory of
provenance. In Greg's "Mislineation and Stenography" we find his opinion
that a stenographer
does not produce mislining directly. His shorthand report
will contain no indication of line-division at all. And it was
a longhand transcript of a report, undivided metrically and
practically unpointed, that I postulated as copy [for Q1 Lear].
Hoppe gives "a fair sample" of John of Bordeaux,
worthi soporter of the Iermaynes stat Huan of Burdiox
was myn Awnsester and at his honers do I ame my thoughtes
I prise my prince a bove my privat selfe and Cuntries Credit
mor then losse of blud, mounst all the favors from yor (etc.)
Hoppe supplies plenty of reason to call this short and corrupt play a
bad "quarto". Yet in postulating memorial reconstruction he never
considers the possibility of a shorthand report, where the play's
various features would occur much more naturally. And, naturally;
Maguire: Not MR.
Because a shorthand report is necessarily memorial, many of its features
will derive from agents outside the reporter's control. The corruptions
of the stenographer will be added to the mix, ultimately to be presented
to the hapless compositor. The process cannot help but be capacious.
Getting the method of transmission right is the first step in solving
the mysteries of the bad quartos.
Van Dam discusses much about A Shrew that is familiar, beginning with
the borrowings from Marlowe:
These very lines . . . appropriately serve Faustus to introduce
the conjuring up of a devil. In our play they are used by a
gentleman, coming home from a day's hunting, as a preface
to his orders to feed the dogs. Such grotesqueness at once
leads to the presumption either that the text is highly corrupt
or that its author is a very poor dramatist.
After a comparison of A Shrew and The Shrew focusing on the parallels
adduced by Hickson (N & Q, 1850), Van Dam gives a brief history of
opinion, ending with this judgment:
Hickson and Creizenach have proved that the ground work of
A Shrew is the primary Shrew of Shakespeare. This is the main
fact we have to reckon with. Scarcely less important is another
fact that most of the discrepancies we have mentioned are not
to be ascribed to the author but that they are recognizable or
can be explained as actors' mistakes.
Van Dam develops this theme elsewhere and applies it to A Shrew in
various ways, a few of which I will quote. No one will suppose his
article to be a complete examination, but I would like to see it lead to
new discussion. According to Van Dam:
1) Only when oral delivery dependent on memorization is a link between
the original MS and the printed issue is there occasion for a distorted
printed play. An exact presentment of a play is scarcely possible . . .
. And, of course, every actor was liable to omit, to vary, to repeat, to
transpose, and to slip in his utterance . . . (103)
2) Not only mistakes of the spoken text but also many stage-directions
provide us with convincing evidence that they were written by an utter
outsider who knew nothing of the play . . . . Here is the first
stage-direction when the play before Sly begins, Sc. III: 'Enter two
yoong Gentlemen, and a man and a boie'. Of course, the note-taker was
not yet acquainted with the names of the characters . . . . This not
knowing and not catching of a name . . . affords a simple explanation of
the impossibility that the character Valeria played both the musician's
and the father's part before Alfonso . . . . The note-taker . . .
recognizing Valeria [that is, the actor doubling Valeria and another
servant] credited Valeria with that other servant's part. (104)
3) Of late years, English scholars have tried to saddle the piracy upon
an actor who, in possession of his own authentic part, complemented the
rest of the play from memory. Their hypothesis preadmits . . . an
essential and strongly marked difference between the accuracy of the
text of one role against all the other parts, and this difference does
not exist [MR hypotheses suggesting the use of actors' written parts
have not retained much currency. Yet claims that "strongly marked"
qualitative differences in the bad quartos serve to identify the
actor-reporters have been condemned as greatly exaggerated in another
careful article by Paul Werstine, "A Century of 'Bad' Shakespeare
Quartos", SQ 50, 1999, 310-333. This critique has perhaps helped lead
others to adopt a 'communal' hypothesis] . . . On the spur of the moment
any mistake is possible, but we think it extravagant to credit an actor
with all the faults the surreptitious Quartos swarm with. On the stage
he may make many of them . . . (105)
[One might add that a report of an actual performance comprises all the
parts as played; good, bad, and inconsistent. This decided flaw in the
orthodox MR hypothesis is naturally accommodated by the added step in
transmission. Further, many close agreements between 'bad' texts and
'good' texts are accounted for by the compositors' preference for
printed copy over manuscript.]
4) The shortness of the surreptitious Quartos has given rise to the
belief that they in some way or other represent abbreviated texts for
provincial playing. This belief has no sound basis. [Long before Lukas
Erne, Van Dam asserted that all of the long plays would have been
curtailed for performance. I believe this was generally, but perhaps not
always the case. At any rate, modern scholarship is beginning to agree
that touring doesn't factor in.] (105)
5) A Shrew is a play reported by an outsider, but this does not explain
the relation between its text and Shakespeare's Shrew. It is impossible
that Pembroke's men played Shakespeare's Shrew, and that A Shrew is a
report of it. . . . . Is it conceivable that the whole play was
something like an improvisation of the actors? . . . . Could they not
have revived Shakespeare's Shrew by changing the names of the
characters, altering the plot a little, especially the courting of
Bianca, and by each actor contributing more or less extempore the
wording of his part? (106)
Van Dam's guess of a memorial reconstruction in the form of a
deliberate, improvised revival can be said to agree with Maguire's "part
MR" assessment. Van Dam adds another memorial report in the form of an
actual stage presentation transmitted by shorthand, transcription,
(adaptation?), and printing. That has the advantage of allowing
visualization of a production unspoiled by the corruptions piled on by
imperfect actors and exceedingly faulty transmission. I see no reason
why professional players could not have worked up A Shrew of their own,
and it probably would not have been too 'bad.' The real importance of
this play is not its theatrical history, but the history of its
transmission.
Gerald E. Downs
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