The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0250 Friday, 2 May 2008
From: Cary DiPietro <
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Date: Thursday, 1 May 2008 11:02:24 -0400
Subject: Roundtable Digest: Shakespeare's Intentions
As we wait for potential contributors to gather their thoughts and weigh
in on the discussion, we turn in this second installment of the
Roundtable to John Drakakis writing on the topic of "Intention and
Textual Authority." I should note that this title comes not from John; I
initially asked if he would be interested in addressing the question of
how a textual editor approaches intention, particularly in relation to
the construction or reconstruction of an ideal or authoritative
"authorial" text. What follows is a much wider ranging discussion,
wonderfully so, and one that would be ill-served by the heading,
"intention and editing." What I find particularly instructive here is
how an intentional fallacy (though of a different sort than first
formulated by Wimsatt and Beardsley) is shown to be "deeply embedded" in
multiple related cultural practices, from the currently popular
"speculative" biography to criticism and, especially, textual editing.
John raises a series of questions near the end of his discussion,
questions that are not dissimilar to some of the questions I raised at
the end of the last installment, though he comes at the topic from a
slightly different angle: where John asks if "intention" has a place in
contemporary textual practice in the "aftermath of theories of
'subjectivity,'" and how or whether "intention" might be revised in the
absence of now outmoded assumptions about authorship, my own concerns
revolve around the question of what it means to "do" literary criticism,
whether it's possible to practice literary criticism proper without some
recourse to intention, and, specifically, whether literary criticism as
an institutional discipline is sustainable in the absence of those
romanticist and aestheticist assumptions that propelled the initial
professionalizing of "lit crit" in the early twentieth century. I think
John implicitly answers this question, perhaps explicitly when he turns
to Terence Hawkes and the now familiar argument for "presentism." While
I'm inclined to agree with John when he suggests that "meaning by
Shakespeare" involves, among other things, the projection of a set of
"intentions" upon "Shakespeare," the presentist argument that cultural
and historical meanings are made, rather than lying latent in the text
and uncovered by the critic, still raises problematic questions about
canonicity and disciplinary practice.
I invite SHAKSPEReans to respond to any of the questions raised in the
past two installments, or to offer other ways of thinking around
intention. The next installment will begin with a leading contribution
from Alan Dessen, writing from the perspective of a theatre historian on
the question of how or whether the dramatist's intentions were
accommodated in the Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre. I also invite
potential participants to think about, weigh in or ask questions about
the place of intention in theatrical performance, whether from a
historical or contemporary perspective.
___________________________________
"Intention and Textual Authority"
From time to time, the question of "intention" resurfaces, and, perhaps
the latest spate of recent biographies of Shakespeare that seek to
account for various details in the writer's life that have an implicitly
or explicitly causal connection with his writings, have contributed in
some ways to a return to the question. However, because of the
availability of very limited, though still un-exhausted, evidence
Shakespeare's writings are sifted as displaced or projected accounts of
actual experience, and as symptoms of the evolution of a particular
"mind" working mysteriously but not divorced from the principles of
causality. Greenblatt's answering of the question of "How Shakespeare
Became Shakespeare" is a lively, partly fictional, or perhaps
"factional" account, and it manages with characteristic panache to
persuade us to entertain a series of causal connections between actual
experience and its resurfacing in the dramatist's "art." In a chapter
whose title is tantalizingly Freudian, "Primal Scenes" he suggests a
kind of "source" for parts of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, that he
locates in a 1575 entertainment that Leicester staged for the Queen at
Kenilworth when "a twenty-four-foot-long mechanical dolphin rose up out
of the waters of the lake adjacent to the castle. On the back of the
dolphin - in whose belly was concealed a consort of wind instruments -
sat the figure of Arion, the legendary Greek musician, who sang... 'a
delectable ditty' to the queen" (46). Shakespeare refers to "Orion on a
dolphin's back" in a number of plays subsequently, but the connection
between the Kenilworth Entertainment and Shakespeare's deployment of
this striking image - certainly striking to a modern researcher sifting
through documents in an attempt to construct a plausible narrative - is
the product of the biographical imagination. Greenblatt's own narrative
is hedged around with "seems," "maybes," etc., to the point where we can
see the writer being progressively seduced by the very fiction he is in
the process of creating. We do not know if Shakespeare knew about this
particular entertainment; we do not know whether he had watched it as a
boy, we do not know if his father ever took him to see this spectacle,
we do not know what contemporaries thought about an eight mile trip from
Stratford to Kenilworth. But the adult playwright "remembered" this
experience and it provided a useful image in a number of contexts. In
other words, agency and intention combine in the moment of composition,
to the point where it is difficult to determine whether the dramatist is
engaged in an act of creation *ex nihilo* so to speak, or whether, pace
the structuralist assumptions of new historicism that we have come to
associate with Greenblatt's critical methodology, this is no more than
an example of the axis of selection intersecting with the axis of
combination, within the overarching structure of a particular system of
representation. It may be that just as we might be persuaded to think
that Shakespeare was attracted to a particular image - a process that
privileges the active agency of the writer - we might also be persuaded
to think that the image attracted Shakespeare and in ways that he was
unable to resist. In some respects, this is how the attractions of genre
operate, although this might still not account for particular departures
from generic decorum that we often attribute to a particular writer's
"style."
In a sense, Greenblatt is subscribing here to a mode of thinking that we
recognize from its general appearance in W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe
Beardsley's well-known 1946 essay "The Intentional Fallacy" where a
judgment on the efficacy of - in this case - a striking poetic image,
derives from a speculative encounter that (perhaps) made an impression
on the boy Shakespeare, that he later recalled in a series of plays. We
are being invited to observe a range of personal meanings (that in this
case are expanded into wider cultural meanings), that afford an insight
into the inner workings of the poet's imagination. There is a point
beyond which the speculation simply cannot go, and the result is that
the quest for cause vanishes into a mystery. The extraordinary success
of Greenblatt's book, and of other recent biographies of Shakespeare
testifies to an insatiable public appetite to pin down agency, intention
and intentionality: to *explain* whatever it was that prompted a writer
of Shakespeare's capacity to do what he did, "How Shakespeare Became
Shakespeare," or how the person Shakespeare became the poet Shakespeare.
Not, of course, "How Shakespeare Became *Shakespeare*."
Behind what appears to be a series of empirical and historical
statements is - and I use the words here of Wimsatt and Beardsley - "an
analytical judgment" that rests in the final analysis upon an
"intentional fallacy [that] is a romantic one." I leave aside here the
question of where this leaves a "new historicist" reading, simply
because I want to identify a tendency that even in the discourse of an
extraordinarily astute theoretically aware reader of Shakespeare's
writings as Greenblatt, the intentional fallacy is deeply embedded. I am
not seeking here to apportion blame, but rather to suggest that the
genre of biographical writing employs a series of discursive maneuvers
that, no matter how sophisticated the critical engagement of the
biographer, ultimately influences in ways that we might want to think
about more generally, a narrative strategy. Nor is the biographer free
from speculation about her or his intention. Wimsatt and Beardsley quote
with some relish (or perhaps not) E. E. Stoll's observation that "the
words of a poem . . . come out of a head not of a hat" and the same is
true of the words of the biographer. We might ask, what was the
intention of the writer Germaine Greer in her "biography" _Shakespeare's
Wife_ (2007), or of Rene Weiss's _Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography_
(2007)? What do they all mean? Of course, we tend to treat all of these
texts, up to a point in the same way that we might treat a Shakespeare
text, not as a series of what Wimsatt and Beardsley would call
"practical messages" but as contributions to a particular "art form,"
and, therefore, available to the faculty of critical judgment. The
ultimate yardstick by which we measure their "authority" derives from
the extent to which we as readers perceive their narratives to accord
with what we know of the ultimate "authority," of Shakespeare himself.
Il n'ya pas hors d'intention! Or, as Derrida might have said (though I
don't believe he ever did) "There is no outside intention."
The challenge that Wimsatt and Beardsley threw down in 1946 has, to use
one of Terence Hawkes's pregnant phrases, "had modernity thrust upon
it." They were clearly uncomfortable with the shackling of the meaning
of a public document, a poem that was in public circulation, to the
"authority" of an "author." The slogan "a poem must not mean but be"
seems to me to be one of those utterances whose opacity usually becomes
clear only when you are half way up the storming of the barricades, by
which time any form of hesitation is potentially fatal. The issue has
gone through one further transformation since the notorious "death of
the author"; if the author is dead, then s/he can have no authority that
will guarantee meaning. One of the un-exhausted strands in the recent
"presentist" debate involves the investment of the
critic/historian/cultural commentator in what the past has left, and the
ways in which meanings are "made." Again to quote Terence Hawkes: "We
make meanings by Shakespeare." And it might be added, that the meanings
we make are over-determined by our "intentions" however complex they may
be. Those who believe, mistakenly in my view, that the chapters in
Hawkes's _Shakespeare in the Present_ (2002) are little more than
idiosyncratic anecdotal "histories" of even more eccentric investors in
the reputation and authority of Shakespeare, seem to have completely
missed the point. Hawkes' careful, self-conscious, entertaining peeling
off of the layers of meaning of these narratives demonstrates the extent
to which we all (frequently at even our most guarded moments) can be
caught in the act of projection, of displacing on to Shakespeare various
attitudes, motives, yes, "intentions" that are our own. Positivist faith
in the objective status of the Shakespearean "text" has been shown in
the recent developments in textual bibliography to be shaky, if not
downright misplaced. What critics believe to be one kind of discourse,
frequently turns out to be another: what is thought to be the voice of
the poet are sometimes the signatures of the compositor.
Let me focus on textual bibliography since it is within this area of
Shakespeare Studies particularly, and of Literary Studies more
generally, that the issue of "authority" appears in its most tendentious
form. The production of texts is what underpins the enterprise of
locating meaning, and meaning here is invariably bound up with
statements and assumptions about a particular inflection of the
principle of "authority." W. W. Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text"
urges the editor to select a text that is the closest to what the
"author" is thought to have composed, on the grounds that that will be
the most "authentic." There is, of course, much to be said about what
happens to that "authenticity" in the age of mechanical (and now
electronic) reproduction that even the facsimile reproduction
challenges. We know, for example, that Charlton Hinman's monumental
facsimile of the Shakespeare _First Folio_ - even in its second edition
- is a fiction, and that no such actual book ever existed. What we tend
to forget, of course, is that, for example, the modern editorial
practice of normalizing speech-prefixes in printed dramatic texts is a
practice dictated by general editors, publishers, and possibly by the
assumptions made about the capacities of readers. So that, for example,
in a modern text of a Shakespeare play, the appeal to "authority" masks
a series of editorial interferences whose existence cannot be linked to
the writer to whose "authority" the appeal is being made as a means of
validating the editorial enterprise. The recent appearance of multiple
or parallel texts of Marlowe's _Doctor Faustus_, Shakespeare's _King
Lear_, and now _Hamlet_ is an attempt to refine the principles that
sustain the general edifice of "authority" although this does little
more than enshrine the principle of *difference* at the very source of
textual composition, still leaving open the question of "composition for
what"?
These are general questions although they cannot be answered in general
terms. Literary scholars have now come to realize, belatedly, that the
business of editing a text and the questions to which that practice
gives rise, are fundamental to everything we do as students of the
various forms of linguistic representation and of the assumptions about
language that we draw on. We are now much more self-conscious than ever
about the decisions we make as editors and about the criteria by which
we arrive at those decisions. In other words, just as we may seek to
track down, locate, and explain the agency and the intentions of the
writer whose texts we seek to re-assemble, so we are engaged in the
mobilizing of intentions of our own - in the form of pragmatic decisions
based upon a series of protocols that have been established by custom
and practice within the field of textual editing.
All this, of course, may sound like a plea for the editor's confident
and absolute control over the details of a text, where we might think of
the marks on a page in a thoroughly positivist way. But behind that
posture of positivism lies a series of assumptions about textual
composition (writing), printing practice, contemporary theories of
reading, the role of "art" in the society for which it was produced, and
the historical transformations of reception since. In short, behind what
appears to be a "scientific" practice is what Althusser would have
called "a spontaneous philosophy."
A few initial examples might help to clarify some of these issues. Let
us consider the case of "Innogen" the silent wife of the patriarch
Leonato, whose name appears in two early scenes of _Much Ado About
Nothing_ but who doesn't say a word, and who is not referred to
subsequently in the play. Virtually all editors of this play have
expunged this character from the text. The Arden 2 editor, A. R.
Humphreys erased Innogen on the grounds that she was an unrealized idea
that the dramatist failed to, or simply did not develop. This editorial
gesture, it would appear, is designed to cleanse the text of the play of
imperfections, so that the finished article is the play in its most
pristine form with the editor acting as (in this case) a male midwife to
the dramatist's momentarily faltering imagination. At this particular
moment of composition Shakespeare's "imagination" was too fertile for
its own good, and it requires the superior "authority" of the editor to
bring this imagination to heel. Humphreys also normalizes speech
prefixes, so that Dogberry is *always* "Dogberry": he is never "Andrew,"
or even more interestingly, "Will Kempe," even though these are the
marks on the page in the 1600 quarto version of the text, and Humphreys
emends the line at the end of act 5 that is there attributed to Leonato,
to the Folio reading:
"Benedick: Peace I will stop your mouth."
Let me take "Innogen" first. The editorial assumption seems to be here
that despite our perennial fulminations about the dramatic value of
silence in performance, a play-text in print should only contain a
record of those dramatic characters who actually speak. I have never
seen a production of the play in which Innogen appears onstage, although
given this particular play's commitment to various forms of gendered
silence (in particular to the silence of Hero, and the patriarchally
enforced silence of Beatrice at the end) Innogen would seem to occupy a
position of no little importance. She is, in short, "the silent woman,"
a type that appears to have fascinated more than one dramatist (and
indeed, audiences) during this period. The power of editorial tradition,
however, is great; and, even in Claire McEachern's Arden 3 edition of
the play, "Innogen" is "retired" gracefully from the fray. This example
raises some questions: (i) what is the status of the 1600 text of the
play? Where did it originate: in the theatre, or in the writer's "foul
papers"? (ii) What therefore was the status of the hypothetical
manuscript from which the compositor(s) set the play? (iii) If the
manuscript was "foul papers," then what was Shakespeare's *intention* in
writing the name "Innogen" at the head of opening scenes of the play?
(iv) Who was the actual *agent* of the inscription? This is not an
exhaustive list, but unless we explore it then the *meaning* of the name
"Innogen" remains obscure. The solution, of course, is not to eliminate
"Innogen" altogether.
The case of Dogberry is no less fascinating and has a very direct
bearing on questions of agency and intention. In act 4 scene 2 of _Much
Ado_, one of the lines attributed to Dogberry contains the speech-prefix
"Andrew" (4.2.4), and another "Kemp" (4.2.10), and another attributed to
Verges contains the speech-prefix "Couly" (4.2.70). The Arden 2 editor
simply notes the variations, but McEachern's note reads as follows:
"The original SPs throughout this scene, which denote actors' (or
intended actors') names, betray the marks of the play's composition, and
perhaps the copy-text that served as the basis for Q was a promptbook
used in the theatre and hence puzzled over by the compositor." (278, n. 1+)
McEachern's footnote is exemplary in that it directs our attention to a
number of possible explanations. Although actors' names as
speech-prefixes are not common in late sixteenth and early
seventeenth-century play-texts, they do occur; and the question is: are
they the result of the writer's own inscription at the moment of
composition, and, therefore, expressive of an *intention* or were they
inserted subsequently at a stage before the manuscript arrived at the
printing house, and are, therefore, a record of theatrical practice? I
have my doubts about how much "puzzling" compositors went in for, since
the instability of speech-prefixes in this instance is matched by an
even greater instability in another play published in quarto in 1600 by
James Roberts, not Valentine Simmes, _The Merchant of Venice_ where
Lancelet appears variously as abbreviations of that name and "Clown,"
and where Shylock occasionally appears as "Iewe."
In the case of the figure of the "clown/Andrew/Kemp/Dogberry," it is
difficult to do more than conjecture about a precise sequence of
inscription. The only actual prompt-book that I have seen, that of
Dekker's _The Welsh Ambassador_, doesn't, I seem to recall, include the
names of actors in speech-prefixes; although if that is indeed the case,
it would provide insufficient evidence to negate a practice of which the
_Much Ado_ examples offer some evidence. But, if indeed, the instability
occurred at the level of *composition*, then this seriously complicates
the business of agency and intention. Here "intention" is
over-determined by theatrical practice - that whereby a specialist actor
was assumed to occupy a particular theatrical role. In other words, we
need to revise radically our sense of what writerly "creativity"
involved, even to the point where we might be able to suggest that in
cases such as this custom and practice determined the flow of the
writer's imagination to the point where it was the knowledge of the
comic skills of Kemp and Cowley that governed what was written down.
Here agency and intention look as though they could have been separated
from each other. The need for precision at the level of inscription here
*might* have been the consequence of a knowledge that specialist
"clowns" frequently improvised. I am not sure whether this thought can
be taken forward or in what direction, although I think we should take
care when we speculate. What I am stumbling towards here is a species of
"intertextuality" that *may* have operated at the deepest level of the
business of the text's composition; either that, or that these examples
are the traces of a different kind of "intertextuality" in which all we
have is the residue of a theatrical practice that leaves its traces at a
time when the impulse to normalization was still unstable. We are
familiar with early modern texts as containing traces of compositorial
practice, and as Jerome McGann urged us some years ago, we need to take
care not to confuse linguistic and compositorial evidence when we read
them.
There is a third, more radical possibility, and one that takes us back
to a much undervalued book that Terence Hawkes published in 1975,
_Shakespeare's Talking Animals_ in which he made the case for the
Elizabethan theatre as a space for "oral" literature. Subsequently,
Bruce King, and in a very different way, Robert Weimann, have taken this
topic up. What we do not have is a detailed examination of the practices
of oral composition *as they affect* the business of playwriting. The
work of Albert Lord, James Notopoulos (in the 1930s), and later Marshall
McLuhan, all in various ways deal with questions of formulaic
composition and the practices of the "oral" poet able to improvise
within strict limits (I suppose that modern examples might be
traditional Blues singers, or jazz improvisers). If we embark on this
route, then we radically disrupt the romantic notions of "intention" and
we are then forced to rethink "agency" as well, especially since it
addresses that complex interface between the "non-literate" as a mode of
being in language in the world and the "literate." Here the work of Eric
Havelock on Plato, and Walter Ong on Ramus is important, I think. I am
also aware that this strand could very easily lead into the question of
the operations of "memory" of memorialization, of cultural memory, and
of the role of the theatre in these operations.
But let me come back down to earth to deal briefly with a third example
from _Much Ado_, that of the attribution of the line: "Peace. I will
stop your mouth." (5.4.97). This line in Q and F is attributed to
Leonato, but the Arden 2 editor follows Theobald in attributing it to
Benedick and adds the substantive stage direction (following Theobald's
"*kissing her*"):
*Bene*. Peace! I will stop your mouth [*Kisses her*.]
In an essay I wrote on the play in 1986, I mistakenly discarded the
editorial tradition, took the Theobald reading as substantive and linked
the implied gesture of Benedick to a passage on kissing in Castiglione's
_The Book of the Courtier_. I am now in the process of re-writing that
essay, and I will not make the same mistake again. McEachern correctly
attributes the line to Leonato and her edition reads:
LEONATO Peace! [*to Beatrice*] I will stop your mouth. [*Hands her to
Benedick*.]
Leonato's patriarchal power at this point in the play should give us
some pause for thought; and if the silent Innogen were also onstage at
this moment, we might be prompted to wonder what Beatrice, and, of
course, Hero are getting into! Beatrice might have a point, and Hero is
about to become another Innogen. If we extrapolated this thought
further, then we need to revise our perception of the bastard Don John
and of the social relations that this play represents. But the other
question that these variant readings raise has to do with Theobald's
editorial "intention" here in correcting (as he obviously saw it) the
textual evidence of both quarto and folio. Was he *improving*
Shakespeare's text or was he unconsciously grafting onto it a particular
model of marital relations that he thought appropriate? We could, of
course, add to this list of examples from Johnson's edition of
Shakespeare, but allow me to content myself with a general comment about
editorial tradition: that the history of Shakespeare editing seems to
have been remarkably obedient to editorial tradition and that in
instances such as that of McEachern, these traditions now need to be
re-examined and where necessary, revised. There are signs that they are
beginning to be, but there is much more work to be done.
A number of general questions flow from the issues I have tried to raise
briefly above: (1) In the aftermath of theories of "subjectivity" can we
talk seriously any more about the very kind of "intention" that in a
slightly different discursive register Wimsatt and Beardsley
problematized? (2) If we take the view that despite a kind of
common-sense "intention" involving the decision to write at all, the
choice of form, idiom, genre, the choice of means of dissemination,
etc., the writer can never be an authoritative *source* how should we
revise the concept of intention? (3) If we kill the author off, in the
Barthesian, or even the Foucauldian sense of "the author" what are the
conditions in which writing, as an event, takes place? (4) Should we not
be a lot more precise in defining the *kinds* of writing that a
Shakespearean play contains? I do not believe that the case for
Shakespeare's plays as examples of "literary" writing has been made, but
what does "theatrical" writing, or indeed "oral" writing involve, and
how relevant might these distinctions be to the matter in hand?
In these concluding remarks, I have in mind in relation to the third
question Sean Burke's book _The Death and Return of the Author_ (1992,
reprinted 1999). Of Barthes, Derrida and Foucault, Burke writes:
"They *created* oeuvres of great resonance, scope and variety. They
became more than critics: a vast body of secondary literature around
their work, one which generally has sought not to contest or deconstruct
what they say, but rather has re-enacted precisely the predominance of
source over supplement, master over disciple, primary over secondary.
They have been accorded all the privileges traditionally bestowed upon
the great author. No contemporary author can lay claim to anything
approaching the authority that their texts have enjoyed over the
critical establishment in the last twenty years or so. Indeed, were we
in search of the most flagrant abuses of critical *auteurism* in recent
times then we need look no further than the secondary literature on
Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, which is for the most part given over to
scrupulously faithful and almost timorous reconstitutions of their
thought." (178)
We would be mistaken if we thought this was a statement of someone who
is antipathetic to careful theoretical enquiry, but it is something we
need to think about when we construct that curious knot of concepts that
entwine "intention" and "authority."
I have taxed patient readers with too long an introduction, but may I
make one request: the previous "Roundtable" strands have petered off
into obscurity simply because particular contributors used the
opportunity to parade thoughtless prejudice. Perhaps on this occasion,
we might pause to think about how we might take the debate forward
without getting bogged down in entrenched positions. We have enough
material within the Shakespeare oeuvre to provide us with a variety of
examples that we can profitably discuss, and that may, I think, lead us
to conclusions that we might not have expected when we started to think
about this topic.
John Drakakis
University of Stirling
April, 2008
Works Cited
Burke, Sean. _The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and
Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida_, 2nd ed. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
Greenblatt, Stephn. _Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became
Shakespeare_. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004.
Hawkes, Terence. _Shakespeare's Talking Animals: Language and Drama in
Society_. London: E. Arnold, 1973.
---. _Shakespeare in the Present_. London: Routledge, 2002.
Shakespeare, William. _Much Ado About Nothing_, Arden 2 series. Ed. A.
R. Humphreys. London: Arden, 1981.
---. _Much Ado About Nothing_, Arden 3 series. Ed. Claire McEarchern.
London: Arden, 2005.
Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe C. Beardsley. "The Intentional Fallacy."
_Sewanee Review_ 54 (1946): 468-488. Revised and republished in _The
Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry_. U of Kentucky P, 1954. 3-18.
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