July
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 29.0245 Tuesday, 3 July 2018
From: Brett Gamboa <
Date: July 2, 2018 at 10:03:51 PM EDT
Subject: Announcement - Publication
Dear Fellow SHAKSPER Member,
I’m pleased to announce that my book, Shakespeare’s Double Plays: Dramatic Economy on the Early Modern Stage, is now available from Cambridge UP. The book may be useful for scholars and practitioners interested in Shakespeare performance, particularly questions of casting, doubling roles, dramaturgy, phenomenology, boy actors, metatheater and more. More information is available at this link:
The book is 20% off on the Cambridge site with the discount code “GAMBOA2018”. I hope you’ll consider ordering it and/or recommending it to campus libraries and theater companies near you.
Yours,
Brett Gamboa
Book Description: In the first comprehensive study of how Shakespeare designed his plays to suit his playing company, Brett Gamboa demonstrates how Shakespeare turned his limitations to creative advantage, and how doubling roles suited his unique sense of the dramatic. By attending closely to their dramaturgical structures, Gamboa analyses casting requirements for the plays Shakespeare wrote for the company between 1594 and 1610, and describes how using the embedded casting patterns can enhance their thematic and theatrical potential. Drawing on historical records, dramatic theory, and contemporary performance this innovative work questions received ideas about early modern staging and provides scholars and contemporary theatre practitioners with a valuable guide to understanding how casting can help facilitate audience engagement. Supported by an appendix of speculative doubling charts for plays, illustrations, and online resources, this is a major contribution to the understanding of Shakespeare's dramatic craft.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 29.0244 Sunday, 3 July 2018
[1] From: Larry Weiss <
Date: June 29, 2018 at 4:47:17 PM EDT
Subj: Re: SHAKSPER: Young Hamlet
[2] From: Ward Elliott <
Date: June 30, 2018 at 3:01:40 AM EDT
Subj: Hamlet Q1
[3] From: Gerald E. Downs <
Date: June 30, 2018 at 2:12:00 PM EDT
Subj: Re: Young Hamlet
[4] From: Pervez Rizvi <
Date: July 1, 2018 at 5:40:51 AM EDT
Subj: Re: SHAKSPER: Young Hamlet
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <
Date: June 29, 2018 at 4:47:17 PM EDT
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Young Hamlet
Yes, it is a typo (for “1575” read “1585”). Thanks, Pervez; I’ve asked for this to be corrected in the next printing.
In the meantime, could the correction be entered in the online edition? That hasn’t been done as of 4:45PM EDT on June 29. Whenever I find what appears to be an error in the print edition, I check it against the online edition.
Would it be possible to include a portal in the website to allow readers to note or inquire about such cases?
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Ward Elliott <
Date: June 30, 2018 at 3:01:40 AM EDT
Subject: Hamlet Q1
Re Hamlet Q1 as Young Shakespeare’s first Hamlet: I am posting a pertinent section of our 2017 Shakespeare’s Birthday letter to alumni and friends of our Claremont Shakespeare Clinic (1987-2014). Mark Hulse, of the University of Alabama, asked us to test a 3,353-word selection from Hamlet Q1 to see whether it looked more like pure, primitive Shakespeare or more like later Shakespeare badly recalled. We tested it and found four Shakespeare rejections in 29 tests, giving it a one-in-400 chance of being pure 16th-century Shakespeare could-be. The later Shakespeare badly recalled theory seems much more likely than pure, early Shakespeare. Extract with fuller discussion follows:
8. Is Q1 Hamlet pure, primitive Shakespeare or someone else’s bad recollection?
The last of our most recent discoveries responded to a question put to us in April [2017] by Shakespeare scholar Mark Hulse. It turned out to be highly pertinent to a theory tentatively advanced in the New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion (NOS AC). Was Hamlet Q1 (1603), which is loaded with differences with the canonical Q2 (1604-05) and Folio (1623) texts, a Bad Quarto, a clumsy, garbled memorial reconstruction of Q2/F1, or could it have been an earlier, more primitive draft of Hamlet by Shakespeare himself, possibly even the long-suspected, long-lost, 1580’s-vintage, might-be-Shakespeare, Ur-Hamlet right under our noses?
To be or not to be, ay, there’s the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay, all:
-- from Hamlet, Q1
Daringly, if tentatively, and with enviable nuance and command of the relevant documents, and with the approval of NOS AC’s all-star Attribution Advisory Board — Hugh Craig, Gabriel Egan, MacDonald P. Jackson, John Jowett, and Gary Taylor – Taylor and Loughnane picked “primitive Shakespeare” as more likely than “bad Quarto,” thereby permitting them to lay a claim of sorts to have uncovered the lost Ur-Hamlet, and to re-date the canonical Hamlet from Taylor’s original guess of 1600-01 (his 1987, 122) to 1602-03, reassigning all Hamlet references earlier than 1602 to the primitive Q1 version, not to the more canonical Q2 (their 2017, 542-48).
If the 1603 quarto [Q1] is simply a massively corrupted text of the 1604-5/1623 version(s), then Shakespeare must have written the canonical Hamlet before 26 July 1602. If, on the other hand, the 1603 quarto represents Shakespeare’s own first, much earlier version of the play, then the familiar, mature play of 1604-5/1623 might not have been written until late 1603, or even 1604 (Taylor and Loughnane, 2017, 544).
It took Hulse’s inquiry, which included his willingness to pick a “highly-corrupted” midsized block from Q1 and modernize its spelling for our testing, plus a look at NOS AC, for us to realize that the stakes of Q1’s authorship could be much higher than we had expected.
Our evidence, based on Hulse’s least-canonical-looking, 3,353-word Q1 sample block, let’s call it Q1HU, is that it is much more likely to be a bad quarto, misremembered and garbled by someone other than Shakespeare, than an early work purely by Shakespeare himself. If we assign it to the 16th century, as NOS AC does, it would get four early-Shakespeare rejections in 29 tests (Table 3). If 17th-century, it would get five Shakespeare rejections (not shown).
Table 3. Four Series-2 Rejections for Hamlet Q1HU in 29 tests
TestShakespeare Pre-1600 RangeQ1HU ScoreGrade Level4-912Proclitics per 1,000 lines235-561188ShDavLx BoB.342-.633.297Thisted-Efron New Words-32 to 41-147Total Shakespeare rejections0-2 in 29 tests4 in 29 testsSh. discrepancy, yrs.NMT 35 weeks30 years
Table 3. Four Shakespeare rejections for Hamlet Q1HU block in 29 Series-2 tests. The odds of more than three Shakespeare rejections in 29 Series-2 tests are about one in 400. At Shakespeare’s normal rates of writing and generating discrepancy from his own default ranges, it would take maybe five weeks to write a block as long as Q1HU, but 30 years to produce a block as full of Shakespeare discrepancies as Q1HU. Source: Sh Othvs 3K 816.xlx. For descriptions of most of the tests, see our 2004.
If Q1HU were pure Shakespeare, we would expect it to have no more than two Shakespeare rejections, just like our other 96 Shakespeare baseline blocks, 86 of which had just one or no Shakespeare rejections. With four Shakespeare rejections, it becomes a Shakespeare long shot with 30 years’ worth of Shakespeare discrepancy.
How could you challenge evidence like this? The normal parry is to cry lump and think up plausible reasons why the passage in question should be considered sui generis, and therefore not subject to Shakespeare’s normal rules: wrong date, wrong genre, wrong subject-matter, wrong rhyme scheme, author young and unformed, etc., and not suitable for comparison to a big, known, internally-consistent baseline. Or perhaps that the author in question – as has been supposed of John Davies of Hereford, incorrectly, we think—was not internally consistent, but a chameleon or a magpie with no patterns consistent enough to be worth profiling. We’ve seen the sui generis arguments early from the Oxfordians, and later, with more sophistication, from MacDonald Jackson. Such arguments don’t have to be proved, only claimed to be possible, but they do have a problem. The more convincing the demonstration that the work under scrutiny is atypical for Shakespeare and therefore shouldn’t be measured against his known works, the more nagging are the questions as to whether it could really be Shakespeare at all (our 2004, 389-96). In Q1HU’s case, none of its four breached Shakespeare profiles changed at all during Shakespeare’s active, measurable lifetime. What are the odds that all four could have changed abruptly and simultaneously offstage in Shakespeare’s mid-20s and thereafter hardened to rock-solid for the rest of his life? Not high.
A second set of discounts could be that all the returns are not in. Our Series-2 test validations are still in progress (but so far look 99% accurate for ~3,000-word miniblocks, twice as many tests and better accuracy than the ~97% accuracy well validated for our older series-1 tests; see our 1996 and 2004). We’ve only tested part of Q1 and have Mark Hulse to thank for selecting and modernizing that for our testing. Some of our tests are no doubt stronger or weaker than others. In a more perfect world, we would use Tarlinskaja’s gold-standard enclitic and proclitic counts in preference to our own bronze-standard counts -- and so on. Till she gets around to it, it’s better to have bronze-standard evidence than none at all. Further analysis and discussion, if it takes place, could refine and modify what we can see now. But we’re not likely to get to any of these birds in the bush till we get our bird in hand properly written up. Despite the best efforts of whoever wrote Q1 to imitate Shakespeare exactly, our little fragment of it tests much more like someone else’s garbled recollections of Shakespeare than like anything we know of from Shakespeare himself. In sum: our sample of Q1 Hamlet has too much Shakespeare discrepancy to be his solo work. It is more likely a corrupted memorial reconstruction than a Lost Solo Shakespeare.
References:
Elliott, W. E. Y. and R. J. Valenza (1996). “And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants.” Computers and the Humanities 30: 191-245.
Elliott, W. E. Y., and Valenza, Robert J. (2004). “Oxford by the Numbers: What are the Odds that the Earl of Oxford Could have Written Shakespeare’s Poems and Plays?” Tennessee Law Review 72:323-453. http://www.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/welliott/UTConference/Oxford_by_Numbers.pdf
Ward E.Y. Elliott
Burnet C. Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions, Emeritus
Claremont McKenna College
[3]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Gerald E. Downs <
Date: June 30, 2018 at 2:12:00 PM EDT
Subject: Re: Young Hamlet
Steve Roth introduces Q1 Hamlet, apparently as viewed by Terri Bourus:
Absent the expectations created by the F1 and Q2 versions, it’s a remarkable piece of work.
From the little I’ve noted online, I may be interested in Young Hamlet, if mostly to read the criticism of Tiffany Stern’s Q1 claims. I’ll voice my doubts before getting to the book. Steve may sum it up in that one line if Bourus exemplifies Laurie E. Maguire’s method of textual inquiry: compare texts as little as possible. I advise reading Q1 against Q2 at every spot cited (including before & after transpositions). I lately reviewed my old post on Hamlet’s ‘I lack advancement’:
Ros. Good my Lord, what is your cause of distemper, you do sure-
ly barre the doore vpon your own liberty if you deny your griefes to
your friend.
Ham. Sir I lack advancement.
Ros. How can that be, when you haue the voyce of the King him-
self for your succession in Denmarke. (Q2)
Hamlet habitually plays upon the words of his now-suspect friends. When told that ‘denying his griefs bars the door’ he responds, ‘OK, the door’s barred—I lack advancement.’ As expected, Rosencrans missed the joke (and the necessarily hidden griefs—regicides).
In Q1, the substitution ‘I want preferment’ (transposed to an earlier scene) loses both straight and punch lines. Is it likely that Shakespeare began with Q1’s usage, then developed a quibble on revision? Or is it that the players behind Q1 also missed the wordplay? (I believe Q1 is not only a memorial reconstruction by some formerly familiar with the full Q2- & F-like play but that it was then poorly acted—and reported by shorthand. I’ve noted that in comparison to Q2, the Q1 speeches for ‘Gilderstone’ & ‘Rossencraft’ are more or less randomly assigned; that happens in transcription when the stenographer attempts what he hadn’t time to record.) <
I’ve glanced at Q1’s following text—a good example of faulty scene recollection where such transpositions are induced; good because it isn’t too awful:
Ham. Why I want preferment.
Ross. I thinke not so my lord.
Ham. Yes faith, this great world you see contents me not,
No nor the spangled heauens, nor earth nor sea,
No nor Man that is so glorious a creature,
Contents not me, no nor woman too, though you laugh.
Gil. My lord, we laugh not at that.
Ham. Why did you laugh then,
When I said, Man did not content mee?
Gil. My Lord, we laughed, when you said, Man did not
Content you.
What entertainement the Players shall haue,
We boorded them on the way: they are comming to you.
Besides substitutions (discontent/distemper; contents/delights; boorded/coted), and repetitions (no nor; laugh), bad pointing and loss of ‘Lenten’ before ‘entertainment’ spoils reference to the players’ arrival. Supposing these result from a youthful Shakespeare—16? No, 25!—one must suppose the same, page after page, for more, and more obvious ‘reconstruction.’ But Q1 is known for ridiculous misremembering:
Q2: King. How fares our cosin Hamlet?
Ham. Of the Camelions dish, I eate the ayre,
Promiscram’d, you cannot feed Capons so.
(a play?
Q1: King How now son Hamlet, how fare you, shall we haue
Ham. Yfaith the Camelions dish, not capon cramm’d,
Feede a the ayre.
I father . . .
The trouble is, Q1 apology has got used to ignoring the best nonsense as if it weren’t evidence. The fallback position is that it’s a good play—therefore original. Taken from the very best, it had good reason to be good. But it’s iffy to think professional players (whoever they were) couldn’t be responsible for a passable, reprised production (despite incapability beyond poor recall— first in reconstruction, then in performance—where mistakes also betray theatrical reporting).
I would like to ask Pervez: ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ His point ties with mine; Q1 cannot well be good here and bad there without questioning its derivation. After all, Q2 partly reprinted Q1 until it became clear to the workmen that it didn’t work. (In some few instances thereafter, an alternative explanation of more near Q1/Q2 agreement is reprinting.)
Arlynda Boyer raises an issue I’ve pondered over time:
Rosenbaum pitted Tiffany Stern’s interpretation of Q1 as a text taken by note-takers versus Bourus’s interpretation and depicted their respective work as a highly personal cat fight (ah, academic misogyny).
On strongly disagreeing with a series of female scholars one might be condemned merely for wondering why their scholarship is so bad. Tiffany Stern seems to be held in repute. Yet her books and articles strike me as so much nonsense—as I’ve said. For instance, her case for Q1 Hamlet as a shorthand report inexplicably bands amateur and expert stenographers together on the project: experts where reported well; bumblers where not. And she argues that actor-error accounts for none of the botch. But artisans, who could write for hours, needed no help; they recorded what they heard. If Q1 is shorthand, as I believe, it reflects performance and other features impossible to exist in ancient text, except through expert recording and transcription.
No doubt Bourus has picked up on many of Stern’s errors. But to reject shorthand, I trust she hasn’t thought it through. It’s not a matter of who’s right; they’re both wrong. NOS policy is to support teleological supposings that Shakespeare was continuously involved with the received texts. Because its cornerstone appeal—authorial revision of King Lear post-1608—is more than vulnerable, a Q1 Hamlet ‘either/or’ keeps alternatives out of the game; if Q1 is not a memorial reconstruction, it’s authorial—no three ways about it. Professor Stern missed a case to return ‘stolen and surreptitious’ to the mix. Hers is controvertible to the max, but it’s not the case for shorthand; Bourus can’t be right about revision: yet that’s where credulity will sit.
Like Steve Roth, I missed Young Hamlet and Rosenbaum’s review. I’ll get back with particulars in a week or two.
Gerald E. Downs
[4]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Pervez Rizvi <
Date: July 1, 2018 at 5:40:51 AM EDT
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Young Hamlet
Steve Roth wrote:
Jolly finds that Q1 is far more proximate to Belleforest. (Though there is also a handful of somewhat weak correlations between Belleforest and Q2 that don’t appear in Q1)... But for Jolly, the “undoubted evidence” (so blatant she finds it “disconcerting”) supporting Q1’s greater proximity to the source, hence its composition prior to Q2, is the persistent and pervasive insistence on Hamlet’s youth spread throughout Belleforest and Q1. She finds only three similar instances in Q2...
I have not seen Jolly’s book but her Ph.D. thesis, on which the book is presumably based, is freely available online (https://tinyurl.com/y8babmh4), so I looked at it. Her argument is presented in chapter 6; the “undoubted evidence” and “disconcerting” passage from her book that Steve told us about occurs on page 131 of the thesis. She says that references to Hamlet’s youth are “pervasive” in Belleforest and Q1, and she cites five from Q1. She misses the Ghost’s reference to Hamlet’s “young blood”, so the references are slightly more pervasive than she claimed, but her point is well-made: Hamlet in Q1 is young. Where Jolly misleads her readers is in claiming that Q2 has only three references to Hamlet’s youth. As anyone can verify by consulting a text such as Bevington’s for the ISE, in Q2, Hamlet is directly called “young” by Horatio, Polonius, the Ghost, Claudius, and the Gravedigger; and he is indirectly called young by Polonius (“younger sort”, the phrase Gabriel Harvey famously echoed). The insistence on Hamlet’s being young is as strong in Q2 as in Q1 and Jolly has no warrant for claiming otherwise.
As for Hamlet’s age, all we know is that Q2 fixes it at thirty while Q1 leaves it unknown. Jolly notes correctly that Q1 says that Yorick has been dead for a dozen years. She then guesses that Hamlet was seven years old when he got piggyback rides from Yorick, and comes out with the non sequitur that this makes Hamlet nineteen, as if Yorick was required to drop dead in the same year in which he gave the piggyback rides.
My purpose is not to deny that Q1 might be more influenced than Q2 was by Belleforest, only to point out that what Jolly says is her major point, the one about Hamlet’s age, is invalid. It’s perfectly possible that Belleforest influenced Q1. Not everything in Q1 is explained by memorial reconstruction; most obviously, the scene in Q1 with Gertrude and Horatio talking about Hamlet’s return from England. Perhaps the reporter made up that scene, but it’s also possible, perhaps more likely, that it derives from his knowledge of the early Hamlet play. If that lost play was more influenced than Q2 by Belleforest, then some of that influence might have been transmitted to Q1. Some might point out that it’s simpler to just say that Q1 is the early Hamlet play. But that theory is incompatible with some of the verse in Q1. If Belleforest influenced Q1 in ways not evident in Q2, it must have done so via the early Hamlet play.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 29.0243 Sunday, 3 July 2018
From: Hardy Cook <
Date: June 29, 2018 at 1:24:26 PM EDT
Subject: Glenda Jackson to Return to Broadway in ‘King Lear’
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/theater/glenda-jackson-broadway-king-lear.html
Glenda Jackson to Return to Broadway in ‘King Lear’
By Michael Paulson
June 28, 2018
Glenda Jackson, who won a Tony Award this month for her much-lauded performance in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” will return to Broadway next spring as the title character in a new production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”
Ms. Jackson previously played Lear in a 2016 production at the Old Vic in London. The Broadway staging, produced by Scott Rudin, will be a new one, with a creative team that has not yet been named; it is scheduled to begin previews March 6 and open April 11 at an unspecified theater.
Ms. Jackson, 82, is a renowned stage and film actress who won two Oscars before taking a two-decade detour to serve in Parliament. She returned to the stage with the British Lear production.
The news was first reported in The Hollywood Reporter.