The Shakespeare Wars Read online

  It is difficult not to think of these two alterations in conjunction and just as difficult not to see them as the thoughts of a playwright looking for a way to make the relationship between mother and son more tender and complex. Yes, either one or both could be an accident or a compositor’s whim, but the fact they are altered in the same way at least argues for intention.

  The value of noticing these particular changes is more than academic: they can be signals to the actors who play Hamlet and Gertrude to focus on calibrating the tenderness between them, as close to “notes” direct from the playwright as anything we have. The revised version suggests the same kind of tenderness the Folio version gives Laertes in the “precious instance” passage.

  The Enfolded Hamlet dramatizes what seems like another precious instance of the playwright wrestling with the nature of love. There is a wonderful moment when one can almost see Shakespeare grappling with the attempt to express a complex thought about the nature of women’s love, a moment dramatized in The Enfolded Hamlet’s rendition of a speech by the Player Queen. This comes in the midst of The Murder of Gonzago, the look-alike royal murder-plot play that Hamlet has specially asked the Players to perform in order “to catch the conscience of the King.” The play to which Hamlet has said he will add “a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines.” Where in the hundred or so lines of The Murder of Gonzago are Hamlet’s “dozen or sixteen”? Could it be in this passage in which Shakespeare attempts to evoke the nature of women’s love?

  The Player Queen is trying to tell her husband the King that she’s concerned about his health but he shouldn’t get too upset. “Discomfort you … it nothing must.”

  Why shouldn’t it bother him? Because of the nature of women’s love, she says:

  {For women feare too much, even as they love}

  {And} women’s fear and love {hold} quantitie,

  {Eyther none} in neither ought, or in extremity.…

  Harold Jenkins and others have argued that these lines represent an instance of Shakespeare changing his mind in currente calamo, as the scholars call it—“in the heat of the moment,” or more literally as the ink flowed.

  The first line, according to this conjecture, “For women feare too much, even as they love,” was Shakespeare’s first draft of the second line—“For women’s fear and love holds quantitie.”

  After trying the second version of the first line out, the argument goes, he forgot to cross out the first version and both became incorporated into the Quarto text by an unwitting typesetter reading the handwritten manuscript. In the Folio the implication is, Shakespeare left out that first attempt but continued to work on the next two lines.

  So, if we are tracking a shift from first to second try and looking at the change in the third line, we can imagine we are watching Shakespeare working out a thought about love that is almost as difficult to express as the “precious instance” passage, the one that opened “Nature is fine in love …”

  Women, he seems to be trying to say, are not “fine” in love in that sense, but fierce: They are either all or nothing. When they do love, they love more intensely than men and because they love more intensely, they fear for their love more intensely, in equal “quantitie” as the intensity of their love, to the point of extremity.

  It is, like the thought behind the “precious instance” passage, an idea that somehow hovers above these three lines like a soul preparing for incarnation in the body of a newborn child, but a bit before the child has been brought to term. The Word not quite made flesh.

  Shakespeare seems to have decided to move on without resolving the difficulty—but couldn’t quite move on. He tries another version—or if you will, portrays Hamlet (if this is part of the “dozen or sixteen lines”) trying another version just a few lines later where that thought about women’s love (or something close to it) is embodied in these further words of the Player Queen:

  “Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;/Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.”

  It’s fascinating the way so many of the Hamlet passages that suggest Shakespeare worried over most involve meditations on the extremities, the degrees of love and madness. It is in surfacing precious instances such as these that textual studies redeem the mind-numbing mental labor, the sight-destroying close focus, the combat and backbiting among Hamlet editors over the centuries.

  Bernice Kliman loves the backbiting and the combat, but she also loves rescuing obscure Hamlet explainers from obloquy and oblivion as well. When I met with her she’d just come back from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, where she’d made a discovery while burrowing into the Library’s unrivaled collection of eighteenth-century literary manuscripts and books.

  “I was able to identify the author of some extremely thoughtful Shakespearean commentary that appeared without a byline in the Gentleman’s Magazine and which turns out to have been written by George Eliot’s love and mentor, George Henry Lewes.

  “The more voices the better,” she says. She’s fascinated by Hamlet’s ability to strike so many chords however discordant, and she has made it her mission to make the new New Variorum even more inclusive than Furness’s, extending even to some of the further, wilder shores of Hamlet speculation.

  Now comes what I’d say was the second most gratifying moment in my odyssey among the textual scholars. Did I hear you say you wanted to know the first most gratifying moment? I’m glad you asked. It took place in an exchange I had in the office of Barbara Mowat of the Folger. She had just taken me down into the Folger vaults to show me their unrivaled collections of Quarto Hamlets (five of the seven in the world in addition to numerous First Folios).

  Mowat is coediting all of the plays for the Folger edition (with Paul Werstine) and has done textual scholarship at its most sophisticated. I was in awe of her expertise and grateful she’d been willing to spend a considerable time addressing my questions on the questions. Toward the end I was telling her how, even after two years of studying the Hamlet text problem and the Reviser question, I felt swayed almost too easily by the powerful polemics on both sides.

  “I’ll read one then the other and feel batted back and forth to the point where I wasn’t sure I knew what I was talking about.”

  “Oh you know what you’re talking about,” she said, apparently, to my great delight, without irony. I felt like I’d received a blessing for my outsider’s odyssey into the innermost citadels of scholarship.

  The second most gratifying moment? The upshot of my conversation with Bernice Kliman about the “lust and angels” passage in Hamlet. It’s the passage in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father tries to describe his horror and disgust at his wife Gertrude’s consorting with his murderer Claudius.

  It is here, in the “lust and angels” passage, that another important feature of The Enfolded Hamlet plays a role. It’s an “original spelling” version of Hamlet, an unmodernized Hamlet, a Hamlet that is a virtual facsimile of the way that the words were printed, read and played from when Shakespeare was alive (with certain exceptions such as the substitution of a modern s for the elongated s that looks like an f). A text closer to the one Shakespeare himself wrote and perhaps revised.

  In the “lust and angels” lines Hamlet’s ghostly father calls Claudius an “incestuous beast” who won the Queen to his lust. But the Queen shares a responsibility for this “falling-off,” the Ghost tells Hamlet bitterly. Because true virtue can’t be seduced,

  Though lewdness court it in a shape of heauen

  {So} but though to a radiant angel linct

  Will {sort} itself on a celestial bed

  And pray on garbage.

  It’s an extraordinarily violent, sexual and mystifying passage. To sort it out in an unfolded way, in the Quarto, the Ghost tells Hamlet, “lewdness”

  So but though to a radiant Angel linckt,

  Will sort itselfe in a celestiall bed

  And pray on garbage …

 
; This doesn’t quite make sense unless it’s meant to read, “If lewdness” (from the previous line) “is linked to a radiant angel, it will degrade the angel’s bed to a place of garbage,” to a “waste of shame” (to quote one of the Sonnets on lust). It’s a link made more explicit in the Folio when the Ghost says

  But lust though to a radiant Angel linct,

  Will sate itselfe in a celestiall bed

  And prey on garbage.

  Once again, we have an extreme, almost incendiary image, an image of sexuality and degradation, a marriage of heaven and hell that hovers just out of reach of complete articulation. To parse it out at its most basic level, it seems to be saying that a virtuous person, though courted by a heavenly looking seducer, will be unmoved, while a lustful person will drag down even a radiant angel to degradation. But even that’s perhaps imposing more rationality on a feverish vision of sex with angels that doesn’t quite sort (or sate) itself into easy paraphrase.

  And what about that final image: “pray on garbage.” It was here I made a suggestion about a slight omission in The Enfolded Hamlet’s enfolding—and a conjecture about what was enfolded within that omission—that Ms. Kliman felt was worth entering into her Variorum database. For centuries almost every commentator had read “pray on garbage” as “prey on garbage” because “prey” was the Folio reading and “pray” was often an old-spelling version of “prey.” The Enfolded Hamlet went with the Quarto “pray” but did not unfold this as a {pray} variation because Ms. Kliman told me it was assumed to be an incidental or accidental alternate spelling rather than an alternative meaning.

  But, I asked Ms. Kliman, why not an alternate meaning? Why not “pray,” why not an image of someone who would kneel down and pray on (a heap of) garbage? To “prey on garbage” in the predatory sense is not necessarily the obvious choice. What does it mean to “prey” on garbage? Generally, a predator preys on some lesser fleeing animal. To prey on inanimate garbage, to slaver, to scavenge like a jackal or a rat, over refuse is a graphic image, certainly, but “prey” in this predator sense is not an obvious choice over “pray”—not to the point of excluding the possibility of a religious connotation.

  A case could be made, I suggested to Ms. Kliman, that “pray” is just as coherent and perhaps more consistent than “prey.” After all, the previous lines are filled with religious references—“a shape of heaven,” a “radiant Angel,” “a celestial bed.” “Pray” would not be out of place in that celestial chain of images. In fact, it might heighten the sense of degradation by sharpening the degree and intensity of the contrast between the heavenly and the hellish. To pray on garbage is more than an image of degradation. It carries a suggestion of deliberate blasphemy, almost Satanic mockery of prayer and reverence. Harold Jenkins in fact has made the suggestion in his Hamlet edition that there is a submerged reference to Lucifer in the “radiant angel” image. Jenkins cites the line in Corinthians in which Lucifer (a name which means “light bearer”) is referred to as “an angel of light”—a radiant angel. And later, in fact, Hamlet observes that “th’Devill hath power to assume a pleasing shape”—perhaps the pleasing “shape of heaven” evoked in this passage.

  One doesn’t necessarily need to find Lucifer flickering beneath the surface of these lines to see that “pray” is, in certain respects, a more poetically resonant image than “prey.” After all, the previous images in the passage have embodied heaven-hell contrasts: virtue and lewdness, lewdness and heaven, lust and angel. Similarly, with “pray” and “garbage.” While prey and garbage lacks that contrast; they are reinforcing images of appetite and degradation rather than contrasts like virtue and lewdness.

  All of this I expounded to Bernice Kliman who went to her computer, opened up the Variorum database and, either in the spirit of inclusiveness or of humoring a guest, asked me to dictate a compressed version of this conjecture for her to input into the provisional electronic version of the Variorum. She also told me that she planned to unfold “pray” and “prey” in the revised version of the Enfolded template for the Variorum. It now appears in the hardcover version of The Enfolded Hamlet.

  I must admit to experiencing a kind of thrill at having my conjecture entered into the slipstream of the Variorum Hamlet, into the ongoing centuries-old discourse over Hamlet even by drawing attention to the significance of a variation in a single letter. I had always envied a fellow I knew, Timothy Ferris, who was involved with Carl Sagan in choosing exactly what emblems of human civilization would be inscribed on the information-bearing module to be launched into space on the Voyager deep space probe and boosted out of the solar system’s orbit on an interstellar voyage in search of an alien intelligence that might somehow respond to the symbols and tokens of human civilization. Ferris, now a professor of astrophysics at USC, had been the one to choose which one song would be put in the module to represent rock ‘n’ roll in the infinite depths of time and space (he chose Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”).

  Somehow the possibility of having my conjecture about the “angels and lust” passage inscribed in the Variorum gave me a similar feeling of satisfaction. Hamlet is, after all, the artifact of our culture most likely to continue to sail on into time, the Variorum its ever-expanding comet trail.

  The Arden declaration that all Hamlet must be divided into three parts is likely to set off a new round of Hamlet wars. But the upheaval will produce more than scholarly fratricide; it will give all of us a new lens with which to look at the play. The conflicts are not just about the texts but about what Hamlet means and who Hamlet is.

  It may inspire some readers to go deeper into the play. It is likely to excite echoes and ripples in the expanding cosmos of the Hamlet Variorum, that record of the love and madness of Hamlet scholars. Indeed, the fact that so many variant Hamlet passages involve meditations on the extremities of love and madness may apply to its exegetes: the love and madness of Hamlet scholars has deepened our sense of the play’s inexhaustible mysteries. Hamlet’s last words may be “The rest is silence.” But Hamlet continues to speak.

  O, o, o, o.

  * John Haffenden’s Berryman’s Shakespeare offers an affecting complete account.

  * All this is recounted in Wilson’s delightful, eccentrically (or ironically) titled What Happens in Hamlet.

  Epilogue

  In January 2006, as I was sending the manuscript of this book to the copy editor, I checked in with Ann Thompson and heard some remarkable news: the Arden Hamlet that she and Neil Taylor had been working on for nearly a decade, initially scheduled to appear in 2002, was at last ready to go to the printers and would receive its debut at the April 2006 Shakespeare Association of America Conference in Philadelphia, and shortly thereafter at a reception at the Globe Theatre in London.

  Shortly after that I received from Arden (now a publishing division of London’s Thomson Learning) the page proofs of the massive two-volume edition, nearly a thousand pages altogether, with prefaces and appendices. I was surprised at how faithfully the basic formal plan Ann Thompson had been arguing for since as long ago as 1995 had been followed: two separate volumes, the first containing the 1604 Good Quarto (Q2) and a long introductory essay of remarkable clarity and comprehensiveness, along with a second volume containing the earliest Quarto (Q1) printed in 1603 (the so-called Bad Quarto) followed by the Folio text (F) of the play printed in 1623. (The second volume would be a hardcover-only edition for the moment, and there have been some complaints about its price.)

  What impressed me even more was the steadfast commitment to what you might call scholarly humility in the treatment of the centuries of contentions over Hamlet’s textual identity.

  In commenting, in appendix 2, on the complexities of the theories of “transmission” (was F derived from an annotated copy of Q2, with reference to Q1, for instance, or derived from a separate annotated derivation of a transcription, with reference to an annotated copy of a theatrical “prompt-book”?) they are unafraid to say: “We do not feel that
there is any clinching evidence to render definitive any of the competing theories outlined above. The temptation to deny that we have a theory for any one text, let alone all three, is almost overwhelming. Our disposition is agnostic …”

  They take the same agnostic position on the crucial question of Shakespeare’s “intentions”: Does the Folio text represent Shakespeare’s “final intention” for Hamlet, or his “theatrical intention” but not his “literary” intention as some have argued Q2 was?

  They don’t condemn conflation out of hand as the work of the devil, but point out that the drive by past editors “to establish a final, definitive text” leads to arbitrary choices based on inadequate evidence and subjective considerations about what “belongs” and doesn’t “belong” in Hamlet.

  They have rejected conflation they say, “preferring to treat each text as an independent entity. This is not because we believe that they were, in fact, entirely independent, but because none of the evidence of possible dependence is sufficiently overwhelming or widespread to oblige us to make any specific act of conflation as a result. And these three texts are remarkably distinct entities.”

  That last statement may prove to be the most controversial, particularly when it comes to choosing the text for the first, stand-alone volume. In choosing Q2, they frankly concede they are “settl[ing] for the most probable” of the choices, rather than anything “provable.” In fact they flatly state, “None is proven (or as we imagine, finally provable) and none can be dismissed out of hand.”

  And elsewhere they state: “Nearly 400 years [after publication of the last of the three texts], there is still no consensus of what constitutes the true text of Hamlet.” If humility ever could be said to be “shocking” one must praise this as a shining instance in scholarly literature of shocking—and praiseworthy—humility. It is a recognition that before we even grapple with Hamlet’s haunting opening question—“Who’s there?”—we must admit that when it comes to the play itself we can’t even know “what’s there.”