The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0257 Monday, 5 May 2008
[1] From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 02 May 2008 13:11:08 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 19.0250 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
[2] From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 3 May 2008 11:52:05 +0100
Subj: Re: SHK 19.0250 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 02 May 2008 13:11:08 -0400
Subject: 19.0250 Roundtable Digest: Shakespeare's Intentions
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0250 Roundtable Digest: Shakespeare's Intentions
At the end of his very thoughtful and thought-provoking introduction to
the question of authorial intention in textual issues, John Drakakis
seems to invite SHAKSPERians to suggest canonical passages which
exemplify or illuminate the issue:
>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.
There is one in particular (which I have mentioned here before but which
did not on those occasions excite responses) which I think epitomizes
the question on several levels. In Act I, scene ii, of The Taming of the
Shrew, Petruchio bids Grumio to knock at Baptista's door and Grumio
misunderstands or pretends to misunderstand the demand, resulting in his
being beaten. Grumio's reaction is given in most editions as "Help,
masters, help! My master is mad." The folio, however, has the line as
"Helpe mistris helpe, my master is mad." The emendation of "mistris" to
"masters" was first made by Lewis Theobald, presumably as there are no
female characters on stage who Grumio might be addressing, and his
revision has generally been followed since (the Werstine-Mowat Folger
edition and the the Bate-Rasmussen "RSC" edition, which makes a point of
following F1 almost religiously, are notable exceptions). Theobald's
emendation is neither particularly funny nor thematic; in fact, it
strikes me as rather awkward, with the repetition of "master" serving no
poetic function. Nor does the emendation seem compelled by a likely
misreading of the MS.
However, there is a way in which we can understand the F1 line which
does no violence to the absence a female characters on the main stage
and which heightens the comedy and, at the same time, serves a thematic
function. If Grumio is addressing himself to the page in the Sly frame,
who is present either aloft or at the side of the stage dressed as a
lady, the line is an hilariously funny meta-theatrical dropping to the
fourth wall. It also serves to remind the audience that they are
watching a play within a play, not to be taken seriously on its own
level. I don't want to over argue the point, but a moment such as this
mitigates the harshness of the catastrophe perceived by modern
audiences, especially if the Sly epilogue in "A Shrew" was originally
part of the text.
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 3 May 2008 11:52:05 +0100
Subject: 19.0250 Roundtable Digest: Shakespeare's Intentions
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0250 Roundtable Digest: Shakespeare's Intentions
John Drakakis is quite right to argue that notions of intention are
complexly invoked in acts of editing, but in trying to show this I think
his Roundtable posting actually understates the problems.
Drakakis praises Claire McEachern's Arden3 Much Ado About Nothing, at
the point at which it reads "The original SPs throughout this scene,
which denote actors' (or intended actors') names, betray the marks of
the play's composition, and perhaps [that] the copy-text that served as
the basis for Q was a promptbook used in the theatre [(] and hence
puzzled over by the [a] compositor [)] ." (p. 278)
(The square brackets indicate bits of McEachern left out of the
quotation by Drakakis; the final 'the' is his too.)
Drakakis writes of this that:
>McEachern's footnote is exemplary in
>that it directs our attention to a number
>of possible explanations.
Well, only if the "number" is one: the explanation that the names come
from the promptbook. (She is not suggesting, as I think Drakakis might
be misreading, that the puzzling compositors introduced the actors' names.)
Earlier in her introduction (p. 129) McEachern argued precisely the
opposite from the same evidence, citing favourably F. P. Wilson's
dismissal of the argument that the use of actors' names indicates
promptbook copy for a printing and supporting Wilson's assertion that it
must indicate authorial copy. Wilson was writing in 1942, well before
Greg's famous disquisition on the topic in The Shakespeare First Folio
(1955). It's a particular weakness of McEachern's edition (picked up in
reviews) that she's nowhere near up-to-date on textual criticism. Greg's
account of the phenomenon is more subtle than he is usually given credit
for, and makes the distinction between actors' names standing in for
characters' names and actors' names supplementing characters' names
(that is, where both appear).
At the other end of the chain of transmission, Drakakis again misses
some key distinctions.
He writes about
>. . . another play published in quarto in 1600 by
>James Roberts, not Valentine Simmes, _The
>Merchant of Venice_ . . .
This quarto will presumably be the basis for Drakakis's Arden3 edition,
so the above statement reflects either important new knowledge (lightly
glanced at), or Drakakis has misunderstood the conditions of textual
production in the period, for the quarto title-page and the Stationers'
Register entries concur: the publisher was Thomas Heyes.
This is germane to Drakakis's attempt to sophisticate our notions of
intentionality, for the roles of bookseller, printer, and publisher were
often played by the same men in various combinations within the
Stationers' Company, and we need to be clear about who was doing what in
each edition.
Thus, when Drakakis writes that
>. . . if indeed, the instability occurred at the
>level of *composition*, then this seriously
>complicates the business of agency and intention
and that
>. . . we need to revise radically our sense of
>what writerly "creativity" involved . . .
we should all agree, but insist that the complexities go deeper than the
trivial case of actors' names in speech prefixes.
With the printing of plays, two key areas of difficulty with 'intention'
surely are:
* The dramatist intends some others, the performers, to complete the
meaning of the script by performing it.
* Those writing for publication might well intend the printshop to
complete the meaning by altering the accidentals (the punctuation and
other matters not directly concerned with the choice of words), and so
might leave the manuscript relatively incomplete in this regard.
A recognition of the first of these underlies the shift detectable in
the Penguin and Oxford Shakespeare editions (and belatedly in the
Arden's Third series) towards stage-centered editing. Assertion of the
second point by Philip Gaskell in his _A New Introduction to
Bibliography_ (1972) caused quite a stir. Whereas Greg's concern (in
"The rationale of copy-text") was to get as close as possible to what
would have stood in the author's manuscript if only we had it (and hence
the authority of accidentals and of substantives had to be treated
separately because each might be best represented in a different
printing), Gaskell's retort was that we might very well know what would
have been in the manuscript and consider it not fit to print.
The points of contention here are quite subtle, and I'm afraid it's a
vulgarization of the whole debate for Drakakis to write:
>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."
At least, it is vulgar to leave it there and not pursue the real point
of interest here, which is the idea of a split in authority. (If
anything, Drakakis's account makes Greg sound like R. B. McKerrow, whose
'best text' approach to editing Greg was, in this very essay, dissenting
from.)
Let me give a concrete example of how this bears on intentionality. I no
longer bother to put into my SHAKSPER posts the usual MLA-style
typescript representation of an em-line dash (which is two hyphens with
no space either side) because for some reason Hardy Cook replaces them
with single hyphens, and to my eye this makes the kinds of sentence
constructions I favour rather hard to read. Thus I now rephrase
sentences to suit my anticipation of what will happen on the way to
publication. Indeed, I don't only rephrase the already-written, I
compose in anticipation of this limitation. Who, then, 'intends' my
alternative accidentals? Hardy is the root cause of them, but he may
well have a good (mechanical) reason. But are they mine nonetheless?
Gabriel Egan
[Editor's Note: See my explanation that follows. I have not included it
here because the explanation does not properly belong in the Roundtable
thread. -HMC]
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